Da big question news - RE:T - Raccoon City Incident mod for Dawn of War

Hello chaps,

First of some good news, I have gotten reinforced by Dale Luck who currently is working on the mod as an environmental artist. Hopefully that will speed up Raccoon City visualization a bit.

There has been some inquiries about the presence of characters in the mod so i thought i'd go ahead and shed some light on the subject (im uncertain myself). Feel free to help me out here ;)

FAQ

Question; Will there be characters in the game?

Answer; Certainly BUT with characters i am refering to unnamed (class name) one man squads with special powers, a direct parallel to DoW would of course be the Force Commander, Librarian, Sorcerer etc. etc. etc. Often you are limited to only field one of these at any time in my case its more like 1-3. Characters of this caliber currently planned for Raccoon City are;

BOWS - T103 Tyrant
RPD - Lieutenant, Captain, Inspector
UC - Supervisor, Biohazard Control Officer

Question; Will there be famous named Resident Evil Raccoon City characters in the game?

Answers; Undecided, there are a few problems; the most obvious being that these characters already have their games with their storylines and i dont want to alter that. Like suddenly Jill Valentine do not find herself running alone but with 2 squad cars, 4 police officers and half a SWAT team. That dont just make sense. This mod is about what happend in other locations around Raccoon City both pre/during the official titles.
Now some characters might work or almost work in this environment but if i throw in say Nemesis for the BOWs i feel obligated to give the other factions their funky guys too.
Another approach would be to throw in missions taking the role of that single character (such as Leon, Jill) and try to recreate a chapter from one of the many games, C&C games used to have alot of single unit commando missions, I seriously doubt i could do it justice tho.
More options; Characters could make random presence on the battlefield as NPCs, i personaly think this would be awsome. Like a manhole pops before your dudes on the street and Hunk skips accross the street, blasts a couple of zombies and dissapears into the darkness. The problem here is balance, suddlenly some evil creature super creature (which are characters) comes along and wipes out that special unit you just spent x*1000 ammo to upgrade the biggest meanest guns on and its game over.

In multiplayer i can understand people want to battle it out with the cheesy guys in a more light hearted "relic unit" way.

That pretty much sums up my thought on characters, if you have any ideas or toughts on the subject feel free to join the discussion.

Vehicles
Originaly they where to ship in Deepstriking units only and not really be avilible as a unit. This is about to change however. The RPD will now be able to field one swat van, and up too three squad cars as buildable/controlable transports. UC will be able to field up too two humvee's, of course helis will still be present as deepstrike/straffing run call ins.
These vehicles will be unarmed but able to run down zombies. They will allso be fairly immune to zombie melee attacks if they get stuck or want to block some path.
Thier area of use is however mainly transporting and upgrading/reinforce/alt. heal/alt. generate extra income areas so think of it more as a moblie base/outpost. They will allso be insanely expensive so its of importance that they are used carefully to pay off the great investment.

Thats all for now, in a week or two i shall talk about general combat.

Merry Christmas and Happy new Year everyone! (Stay away from the X-mas virus!)

Thanks!