new Warhammer game in the making: Tactical turn based

[Nefaro]

It's got potential. 

I get a Blood Bowl impression from it, being a boardgame port (to some extent) into 3D.

I'm just curious if the multi-player will hold up, as there doesn't look to be much single-player planned.  If they have a Blood Bowl style server set up, where you can create persistent squads and level them up as you fight others, then maybe it'll have some staying power.  But will it just be head-to-head 5-man squad matches?  Or is there some extra Meta-game in between?


Gotta admit, I'm very curious.  Because Skaven!  And Chaos!

[Great Ajax]

Bought and downloaded myself.  I'm going in!

Trey

[JasonPratt]

Not technically the same team that ported BB, but the same publishers (Focus Interactive).

But yes, rather like BB or perhaps Dungeonbowl would be a better comparison.


And we all know how much I like Blood Bowl.  >:D

[JasonPratt]

The camera is janky as hell. Doesn't help that it normally fixates on a point about two feet above any ratman's head, regardless of zooming in and out (zooming in just ends up looking up toward that invisible point with the ratman mostly obscured by the UI). The auto-cinema perspective picks the goofiest angles and then clips through all of reality to show the shot.

I don't know if that can be improved for a console-ish release, but it damn well could be improved for the PC edition (which of course is what I'm playing).


On the other hand...



...I have a ratman with two warpstone pistols.

My complaints are invalid.

[JasonPratt]

Then to demonstrate critical hits (always inflicts max damage plus double-damage bonuses, creates open wounds leading to further vulnerabilities), and out of action results (from hit points being reduced to zero, putting the piece out of the current battle and maybe giving permanent or temporary injuries or death after-battle)...

...a great horny thing runs up out of the mist and one-shots one of my skaven, before leaping away somewhere else.

Seriously? That thing could clearly win the whole battle by itself!

I didn't have the reflexes to get a screenshot (I'm starting to think I should use NVIDIA's video-capture and then pick screenshots from the video file), but you can see it off to the left in the background of this shot. (The Lovcraftian leftover clinging to the wall on the right side of the screen is decoration.)




Also I was wrong about the green circles around allies: they indicate where a piece cannot end a move, i.e. not next to an ally.

[JasonPratt]

Finally the tutorial unlocks the strategic overview, allowing me to see the whole battlefield, with all my pieces marked and all identified enemy pieces marked at confirmed or most recently seen positions. Treasures on the map are glowing, too -- I passed one earlier hanging off a cart before my ratguy flipped off a ledge (I think it's up on an earlier screenshot at that time).

The map for this battle area is impressively large; larger than this screenshot can adequately show. 4 times larger at least, maybe 5 or six.




I suspect from game descriptions on the Steam store that this map represents a particular neighborhood of Mordheim, over which teams fight for control. There are also procedurally generated areas, but I doubt this is one of them. If so, I would be even more impressed!

[JasonPratt]

My rat ogre does not give a single damn for whatever damned thing this is.




Again, I should think a rat ogre would dominate this game. It has twice as many action points as anything else on my tutorial team, twice as many attack points, and hits very much harder with those two attacks or with one mighty attack (though even the mighty attack's maximum damage doesn't do as much as two successful minimum damage regular attacks, despite costing three action points instead of two. But it might be handy for ensuring an instakill perhaps and so avoiding a counterattack.)

Seriously, there are no downsides to the rat ogre so far as I can see, unlike in, say, any other Warhammer game I've ever played (admittedly not many but let's say Blood Bowl for example).

[JasonPratt]

Despite a couple of my rats being taken out early, I concentrated my pieces on destroying the abomination thing asap, and then focused increasing numbers of my remaining pieces on individual enemies -- pretty standard tactics -- resulting in a win with still 61% of my forces intact. I wasn't able to get near enough to any warpstone fragments to pick them up, or possibly that isn't available in this tutorial (or not available in the beta code yet), or maybe the problem was that I could only get the ratog near one at the end and he doesn't have the ability to recover any.

It absolutely has potential. Worth early access price? Can't say yet; I've only played the first tutorial not a skirmish or campaign (if it's even possible to play one of the campaigns yet). I'm not unhappy yet that I got in early, but it needs quite a bit of polish, too. No zooming in and out of the battle map yet for an example I haven't mentioned.

[Tpek]

Too bad Hotseat isn't on the feature list yet (like in Blood Bowl) :(

[Nefaro]

I'll wait until they get the character progression and other stuff in. 

After watching some informational YT vid on the boardgame, it does sound like it could be reminiscent of Blood Bowl style multi-player in skirmish format.  Which is good.

Hopefully their netcode is better than that in Blood Bowl.  Dunno how many times that damn thing has gone Out of Sync in multi-player matches, sometimes dropping the game halfway through.  Great MP setup for that game, but the reliability could be questionable.  >:(  Different developers, though.. right?

[JasonPratt]

Well, the developing company is technically different, and I know the BB dev company is still going because they're not far from releasing BB2.

It is definitely not anywhere near as polished as the original release of BB was, but it's still beta (or maybe very late alpha, hard to say).

The basic tutorial was super-basic -- I saw evidence that the code for jumping up instead of down was either turned off for the tutorial or not installed yet, and other than moving and basic hits the only 'special ability' active was the 'one bigger hit' available for the Big Guys. But that might only be true about the basic tutorial, not the game as a whole currently. I have no idea if flanking or other environmental factors confer bonuses or not. I think and feel the first tutorial could have been designed a lot better.

Note that I haven't even tried to see if there's an online manual yet back at Steam.

[DennisS]

I have the cash, and I am dying to pull the trigger on this one.

Any word on when the next big update will be? As great as this game looks..it DOES appear to be a little thin on content currently.

[Gusington]

Wow thanks for all of the above Jason...this looks potentially excellent.

[JasonPratt]

Okay, having felt up to snuff tonight (or less sniffling anyway) to finish the tutorials, I'm pretty stoked about eventual campaigning in this game. I learned a lot more about how to make things work with the gamepad, though it's still a little clunky. I played a random skirmish battle with Reik mercs vs a skaven warband, and fortunately they forgot to bring a rat ogre to a true ogre fight. 

Right now, random battles between those two faction types are the only game in the game, though a Khorne chaos faction (I think, seems Khorny) and the Sisters of Signund are featured in some of the tutorial missions. There are also random monsters and individual looters who may show up on the map to get in the way -- in one of the tutorials a Nurgle daemon tried to throw its guts down with the Khorny thing on my side, and the Khorny thing helped it with that task. 

I am not sure that points of interest and the ability to pick up neighborhood loot or raid the basewagon of the other faction (or to pray while near one's own shrine on the basewagon) are in the game yet: I ran a couple of mercs over to the skaven wagon after dealing with their rearguard, but they failed their morale check at the beginning of the next round so I didn't get to see if any extra 'taking' abilities trigger. In a campaign, "out of action" players will slink off (wounded or to die) between rounds taking their weapons but leaving behind any loot they carried; I gather before this happens they can be looted of their weapons, too. Any team forced to flee the area will also keep any loot they've picked up, though whoever controls the neighborhood at the end of the fight gets to harvest all remaining loot free of hassle. This is certainly not yet active in the game system.

Is this potentially as good as Focus' Blood Bowl translation? Hard to say -- that thing is ravingly good and has had plenty of polish over several years. But my current feeling is yes, it has the potential.

Is there any reason to buy in at early access yet? No, unless you just want to support the project early. There is no 'game' yet aside from random two-faction skirmishes, which are admittedly fun but naturally feel disconnected; certainly not worth the asking price unless a major sale occurs. I do think the full game will be worth a non-sale asking price, or it has that potential anyway.

As an aside, the only serious AI bug I detected was a tendency to disengage from a fight only to re-engage the same fight immediately. I can't think of any reason tactically to do that -- a piece can change weapons while engaged. I saw this happen several times, once twice by the same piece the same round! Maybe the computer was role-playing skaven skitterishness...?

(Disengaging means spending a pair of action points to back carefully out away from melee lock without being backstabbed by everyone you're currently engaged with in those red circles in the screenies. You can also order your piece to flee, which immediately frees you from melee lock to move as you want without action cost -- but every piece whose red circle you're in gets a free hit at you! This reminds me that rear and flanking attacks per se seem non-existent, though there can be benefits to double-teaming an enemy piece as that forces a morale check every round, failing which will cause the enemy to free itself from the enfilade at the cost of free whacks against it.)

[JasonPratt]

Nothing new on Mordheim yet; just wanted to ask an ad/mod (if one reads the thread) to update the thread title to something more topically clear. Kthxbi.

Gotta say, I'm reaaaaaallllllyyy looking forward to what this game can do.

Here's Unit Lost (a British internet game review team) geeking heavily over the game while playing a random Skaven vs. Skaven skirmish. (Skavirmish?)