Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters (good lord that’s an unwieldy name) is a game I’m convinced I brought into existence by force of will alone. It was announced as part of a big Warhammer videogames event around this time last year, and my friends were having fun guessing what each game trailer was supposed to be before the title card flashed up. But me? I was just guessing “Chaos Gate 2!” on every single one, mostly because the idea was so absurd — who would make a semi-sequel to a shonky 40k XCOM clone from 24 years ago that barely anyone played at the time? — but also secretly because Chaos Gate is one of the two games from the late 90s glut of 40k titles that I do actually want a reboot/sequel to¹. And this meant I damn near fell off my chair when the words “CHAOS GATE” appeared at the end of the Daemonhunters teaser, like the universe had finally got tired of my constant complaining and spontaneously reshaped itself into a place where Chaos Gate 2 could exist in a futile attempt to get me to shut up, and in fact it left me questioning the nature of my reality for several days afterwards — after all, if Chaos Gate 2 was actually happening then nothing is impossible.

Fast forward a year and Chaos Gate 2 (hereafter referred to as Daemonhunters) has actually been released, and I’m somewhat torn on the reality of having my wish granted. These reboots normally have fairly binary outcomes: they either turn out to either be worthy updates of an old classic (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, Command & Conquer Remastered) or they’re mediocre cash-ins with very few ideas that are hoping to leverage the name in order to boost sales (the Syndicate FPS and the Thief reboot), but Daemonhunters is neither. In part that’s because “classic” is the last word most people would use to describe Chaos Gate and I doubt very many of them would recognise the name, either, but mostly it is because Daemonhunters opts to take nothing from the 1998 original aside from the name — it charts its own path, for better or worse. Usually it somehow manages to be both at the same time.

Ah, but if you’ve watched a video of Daemonhunters in action you’ll probably be raising an eyebrow at that last statement. Chaos Gate 1998 was the original X-COM with a 40k skin pasted over the top – it had a static, scripted campaign missions rather than a geoscape layer equivalent, but otherwise a lot of the gameplay concepts were a 1:1 match. Similarly, at first glance Daemonhunters looks exactly like modern XCOM with a modern 40k skin pasted over the top. Surely that same core concept at least provides some sort of common through-line, even if Daemonhunters didn’t continue the fine Chaos Gate tradition of crashing every time you tried to move a Predator tank?

Now that I’ve finished the campaign, though, the thing I find most fascinating about Daemonhunters is how much like XCOM it isn’t. This is a strange thing to say considering it has many of the same concepts like High/Low Cover and Overwatch, and the UI for the tactical battles is damn near identical. Your Space Marines are surprisingly agile for giants in heavy suits of power armour, leaping across gaps and clambering up walls just like the soldiers from nu-XCOM. Even the strategy layer feels like a copy-paste job at times, down to having the Engineer, Scientist and Commander characters in your base that you can go around and talk to; it’s just that instead of Vahlen you get an Inquisitor, and instead of Shen you get a Tech-Priest, and instead of Bradford you get Mr Potato Head. And even Daemonhunters itself seems convinced that it is XCOM, as it spends most of the tutorial teaching you about the importance of taking cover and Overwatch. True, at the time this was relevant information — for about two hours, after which Daemonhunters turned into something else entirely.

Daemonhunters has you taking command of an elite Grey Knights strike force tasked with stopping a daemonic plague that’s threatening to consume an entire sector of the galaxy. The Grey Knights might look like the generic Space Marine poster boys fronting just about every other 40k product², but there is one important difference: where the Space Marines are genetically-engineered superhumans, the Grey Knights are even more genetically-engineered super-duper humans. All of them have psychic powers — which is 40k-speak for “can cast magic spells” — and the entire point of the Grey Knights as an organisation is to use those powers to fight and destroy Chaos daemons, which are exactly what they sound like: hellish monstrosities summoned from an alternate dimension to corrupt and enslave humanity.

In game terms this means you fly your Grey Knights strike cruiser around the sector playing whack-a-mole with plague outbreaks, and every time you reach a star system that’s under threat you can purge the infection by deploying a squad of four Knights into a turn-based tactical battle to eliminate any Chaos forces present there. Success in the tactical battle segment will reduce the infection level of that system by one. Failure — or the far more common outcome of not being able to get to an infected system in time — raises the infection level by between one and three. Once a system’s infection rating reaches five I assume bad things happen as this is the nominal cap, with the infection spreading to neighbouring star systems if the cap is exceeded. You’ll note the word “assume” in that sentence, though — in practice the Daemonhunters strategy layer is easy enough to deal with that I never had a planet get to a level five infection rating, and in fact I don’t actually know what the lose condition for the Daemonhunters campaign is. Presumably you get a Game Over screen if too many planets are consumed by the plague, but on Standard difficulty at least this was never remotely a possibility.

This I thought was a bit of a shame, because while Daemonhunters also shares XCOM’s habit of shamelessly stealing its mechanics from popular boardgames it’s at least stolen them from a decent one; the Daemonhunters strategy layer is essentially a 1:1 copy of Pandemic with a few XCOM-y bits like research and ship upgrades thrown in on top, but for whatever reason it doesn’t choose to bring across the Infection deck that relentlessly pressures Pandemic players, instead preferring the comparatively more sedate XCOM approach of randomly spawning three missions and making the player pick which one they want to deal with. This is far easier to manage as it’s always pretty obvious what the “correct” choice is (hint: it’s the one that adds 3 infection pips to a system), and the gap between infection events is long enough that the game will end long before you get to the point of having to launch your Exterminatus torpedoes at a planet that’s beyond saving. There’s no economy to speak of here, either; you collect one currency called Servitors to upgrade your ship and another currency called Requisition to buy new Knights and equipment, but 95% of these will come from mission rewards rather than being gathered on the strategy layer and so you just spend what you’ve got when you’ve got it and otherwise don’t worry about it too much. And while Daemonhunters does have research, the vast majority of the tech tree is based around unlocking new Strategem cards — one-shot powerups that can be played during missions to give yourself an edge — instead of new guns or armour, and because you can only play 2-3 of these per mission research only ever feels like a bolt-on rather than something integral to the flow of the game.

Most of the good stuff Daemonhunters is doing happens on the tactical layer, then, which I found surprising because to start with this looked like the least interesting part of the game by a long way. Another thing Daemonhunters shares with XCOM is its inverse difficulty curve, where the game is paradoxically much harder at the beginning than it is at the end because you have a squad full of rookies who can’t do anything besides move and shoot. Because this is a 40k game there’s a much bigger emphasis on melee combat — most of your Knights are carrying some gigantic two-handed sword or halberd as their primary weapon, with a comparatively tiny machine gun stuck to their forearm — but the difference between shooting somebody and running up to them and hitting them with a basic melee attack is usually just a single point of damage. Both of them are the least effective ways to kill an enemy in the entire game, and for those first two hours they’re all you have. Enemy pod sizes are much larger compared to XCOM, with a pod marker vomiting forth 8-9 baddies once the fog of war shrouding it is removed, and unless you have some grenades left you’re forced to kill each of these enemies individually.

Thanks to this the start of the Daemonhunters campaign can feel overwhelming and drastically unfair at times, especially since yet another thing that’s been inherited from XCOM — which really shouldn’t have been, given the fiction underpinning them — is that your Knights are extremely fragile. They have a bit more resilience to hitting 0HP than an XCOM soldier does thanks to the Critical Wounds system, which functions essentially as extra lives, but I think that’s a band-aid applied to the wrong place since I never saw them get that low. The problem here is that, despite the Grey Knights ostensibly being the most elite warriors humanity has to offer, hulking giants with instantly-clotting blood, multiple backup organs in case the originals get taken out, and encased in gigantic suits of armour that can shrug off anti-tank weaponry, Daemonhunters still takes the XCOM approach to wounded soldier recovery times. What this means is that you have a Knight wearing Terminator armour — described in the fluff as “the toughest personal armour in the galaxy” — who gets shot by a Chaos cultist wielding an autogun, which is equivalent to a modern-day AK-47. The autogun takes off about 10% of the Knight’s HP. You think this is no big deal, turn the cultist into pulp with your storm bolter, and finish the mission with no further mishaps. Then the end mission screen pops up and it turns out that this one autogun hit has inflicted “light wounds” which will take a whopping 24 days to recover from. Unlike XCOM you can still send wounded Knights on missions so this isn’t a total blocker, but they’ll have an HP penalty and a higher chance of being pushed into a Critical Wounds state, so the extremely heavy implication is that you should not be doing this.

Because the penalty for being shot once is having to spend a month in the hospital, and because your starting weapons and abilities are complete garbage, and because the start of the game is the point where the odds are most stacked against you (pods with late-game enemies have just 3-4 baddies), and because the tutorial focuses on all of the wrong things, the initial impression of Daemonhunters is that it’s just a punishing, overtuned XCOM clone. I imagine this is where a lot of people will fall out of the game, unwilling to push through the initial wall of bullshit to see if there’s anything worthwhile beyond it, and that would be a shame because even at this early stage there are some hints that somebody has given a little more thought to the design of the tactical layer than the phrase “XCOM clone” implies. Despite the many, many superficial similarities, there are three immediately obvious changes Daemonhunters makes to the XCOM formula, and in my opinion they’re very much changes for the better:

1. Entirely deterministic damage. Every single ranged attack and melee attack in Daemonhunters will hit an enemy (or your Knights) 100% of the time. Both melee and ranged attack damage is affected by buffs and debuffs, while ranged attacks suffer damage dropoff outside of optimum range and they can also have their damage blocked by cover — half cover blocks half of the incoming damage, full cover blocks all of it. All of this is surfaced to you before you confirm the attack, though — you always know exactly how much damage an attack will do before it connects, allowing you to plan out your turns with much more precision.
2. Instead of the choice between running or moving + shooting that XCOM offered its squaddies, Daemonhunters gives its Knights 3 Action Points per turn which can be used to move or shoot or use a utility item. This potentially allows your four Knights to attack a total of 12 times per turn (which is one reason Daemonhunters is so gung-ho about throwing hordes of enemies at you) and the switch to Action Points in general allows you a greater degree of flexibility in how you plan your turns.
3. Overwatch has been nerfed to the point where it is almost totally useless.

This one deserves a full paragraph instead of the world’s longest bullet point, because the way Daemonhunters handles Overwatch is another thing that seems absurd when you first see it. Instead of being an abstract state where a soldier shoots at the first thing that blunders into their line of sight no matter where it is, Daemonhunters Overwatch needs to be set up over a discrete firing arc and only things that walk into the Overwatch area of effect will trigger an Overwatch attack. On its own this is not the wildest concept in the world (Phantom Doctrine did something very similar five years ago) but the nerf comes in the form of making the Overwatch firing arc so short that it’s outranged by every single ranged enemy in the game; if you set up a Knight in Overwatch they can just find a good firing position outside of your Overwatch range and shoot you in the face. This feels stupid and arbitrary to start with — why do all of my guns have the same approximate range as a water pistol? — but the more I played the game the more it made sense; Overwatch is now a very specific counter to hordes of weak melee enemies rather than the default state in which you end your turn.

No, instead of cowering behind cover with Overwatch turned on waiting for enemies to come to you — which, let’s face it, does look a bit ridiculous when it’s an 8-foot tall supersoldier doing it — Daemonhunters instead wants you to be aggressive and mobile, using those Action Points and your enhanced ability to plan out a turn to obliterate enemy groups before they get the opportunity to fire off a weak attack that very slightly scratches somebody’s armour and somehow puts them in traction for weeks. At the start of the game this is a big ask because you don’t have the tools for it, and the tutorial has emphasised all of the wrong things, tricking you into thinking that cover and Overwatch are actually going to be important. But if you stick with it through this stodgy beginning for a couple of hours you’ll find that, while the Grey Knights may be the second most boring chapter of Space Marines in existence and terrible protagonists in a narrative sense, there’s actually a good reason for why they’ve been picked to headline this game: what they also are, and what Daemonhunters communicates very effectively in its gameplay, are a collection of the biggest psychic trolls in the entire galaxy.

Consider the XCOM approach to activating a pod (XCOM-speak for “running into a patrol”) of enemies. The enemies get a free scramble move to get into impregnable cover positions, and your options from there are fairly limited; you either destroy their cover with explosives so that you can shoot them, or else you flank them for a better shot — which risks activating other pods, and which might not work anyway because your attacks always have a chance of missing. You always feel like you’re on the back foot in XCOM and you’ll almost never succeed in wiping out an enemy group before they can take a few potshots at you, because the game has its thumb on the scales to make sure that you can’t.

Now, Daemonhunters has copied quite a lot from XCOM and it also copies pod activation — which I was extremely annoyed about at first, for all that Daemonhunters does make the improvement of marking pods in the fog of war so that you’re much less likely to activate two at once; I can’t believe that it’s been a full decade since the XCOM reboot and I’m still having to manage pod activation in tactical strategy games. Anyway, just like in XCOM enemies in pods that you activate get a free scramble move to get into advantageous cover positions that make them difficult to shoot. But in Daemonhunters this doesn’t actually matter because you can just teleport some or all of your squad behind the enemy cover positions and then start beating the shit out of them with those big swords you’re carrying around.  Or you can cast a big bonus damage debuff and then get one of your guys to zip around doing teleport strikes like he’s Nightcrawler from the opening of X-Men 2. Or you can just summon a big psychic storm to instantly mulch anything weaker than a Plague Marine, and then finish off any survivors with Power Word: Brain Aneurysm.  Because your psychic abilities always hit and do guaranteed damage the problem space has moved away from the qualified risk management of XCOM towards the turn sequencing of something like Into the Breach; the enemy pod has an aggregate health of value of X, and you are trying to structure your ability use so that your squad’s total damage output for that turn is a value greater than X. And if you can do this all of the enemies will be dead before they get a chance to fire their weapons.

I’ll admit that crushing everything with brain powers is not quite how I imagined a tactical strategy game starring the Space Marines playing out, but it’s not an unwelcome outcome. As you level up your squad and unlock more abilities and equipment the battles become more and more lopsided despite the introduction of bigger, tougher enemy types, until you discover an enemy that looks like a big scary Chaos Dreadnought (I lost track of modern Warhammer 40k unit names a very long time ago) and instead of dispersing the squad and focus firing it down you instead send in one of your particularly OP Knights to 1v1 it in a melee brawl just for funsies — and it actually works. But despite the threat factor of the Chaos hordes dropping to basically zero around the halfway point of the campaign, figuring out exactly how you’re going to kill them in a single turn remains an engrossing problem for around 80% of the game; I’ve been a sucker for anything that lets me do this kind of turn sequencing for a long time now, and Daemonhunters reminded me quite pleasantly of things like Druidstone and Mechanicus.

(Well, obviously it reminded me of Mechanicus since they’re both tactical strategy games set in the Warhammer 40k universe. But we’ll get onto the less favourable fluff-related bits of that comparison in a moment; if you look past the branding I thought they both had a very similar take on deterministic outcomes and turn sequencing being the core of the game.)

That’s quite a qualified endorsement. Still, despite looking like an out-and-out XCOM clone to start with I was pleased to discover that Daemonhunters had in fact learned quite a lot from the modern crop of XCOM successors; the balancing is arguably a little too out of whack as the sequence of climactic bossfights that the campaign finished with were just as much of a one-sided joke as crushing the Level 1 Chaos Cultists was by this point, and I would say that if you are the sort of person who plays these games regularly then you should play your first campaign on Hard rather than Normal. I would also say I’d try that for my second campaign, but despite enjoying the bulk of its campaign for the gameplay I still don’t think I’ll ever boot up Daemonhunters again after I’ve finished writing this review, and the main reason for this is that Daemonhunters is a crap 40k game.

Yes, it’s time to address the elephant in the room: if we’re talking about 40k strategy games, then there’s no getting around the fact that there was a perfectly decent one released about four years ago called Mechanicus. In terms of gameplay Mechanicus was moderately good rather than awesomely great (although I understand they did actually go back and fix the worst of the wonky balancing problems I talked about in my review) and about on par with Daemonhunters; however, it was a much better 40k game for a number of reasons:

• Instead of the Blandmarines Mechanicus starred the Tech-Priests of Mars, a bunch of weird techno-zealots who start the game looking relatively human and and end it as a collection of mechanical monstrosities as you replace all of their human bits with cybernetic augmentations.
• Mechanicus correctly identified the concept of Cover as having no place in a 40k strategy game and removed it completely. Instead of taking cover you summon disposable cannon fodder troops to take the hits for you. Which is the most 40k thing a 40k videogame has ever done.
• Daemonhunters has a soundtrack that’s trying to channel 40k but which ends up sounding so generically medieval that you could paste it into any fantasy RPG released in the last twenty years and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The Mechanicus soundtrack, on the other hand, is an astounding fusion of techno, dubstep and pipe organs which perfectly encapsulates the weird mix of technology and religion that 40k (and the Mechanicus in particular) represents.
• The story underpinning Mechanicus wasn’t the best, but it was at least treated fairly disposably and the game didn’t dwell on it much outside of post-mission voiceovers, preferring instead to rely on presentation and atmosphere rather than the quality of its writing. Daemonhunters… does not do this. And it’s a big mistake.

It’s not even that the Daemonhunters story is particularly bad. It’s suffering from the handicap of being modern 40k fiction and thus naturally inferior because modern 40k fiction is obsessed with demythologising everything and making it far less cool and far more mundane by explaining it all in painstaking detail; nevertheless, they’ve got one of the better Black Library³ writers in to do the story and it’s mostly competently written by videogame standards, and especially by 40k videogame standards. The problem is that the developers seem convinced that the story is the point of the game, rather than the excuse for it happening, and have sunk a huge amount of resources into this thing to the point of having paid Andy Serkis some money to take a break from dressing up in a motion capture suit to come and shout at you every 60 in-game days. It feels like every other mission there’s a cutscene that takes forever to get to the point, with a full one-minute panning shot of your Inquisitor sitting in a chair before anyone says anything, and when they do finally talk the actual amount of information imparted is laughable, the absolute epitome of a meeting that could have been an email. (Or an in-mission voiceover, but Daemonhunters also screws those up by making them unskippable.) Mostly what you’re subjected to is the Inquisitor and the Bradford-analogue character having constant, childish arguments that very quickly became insufferable; I don’t know why they felt the need to include this stuff so often, or why it went on for so long, when the content of most of the cutscenes is yet another round of Bradford accusing the Inquisitor of heresy and the Inquisitor accusing Bradford of having a small dick⁴. There are big structural problems with the campaign — the aforementioned balancing issues, and campaign events that reminded me unpleasantly of Oregon Trail, and also there are only three mission types in the entire game — but the story is the number one reason I won’t replay it, because I don’t think I can stomach sitting through all of that again.

So, given that gameplay-wise they exist in a space that is very similar, and given that Mechanicus is much better at the actually-leveraging-the-40k-license bit, if in the future I ever get the hankering to play a tactical strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe I’m going to install Mechanicus instead of Daemonhunters every time. Daemonhunters itself is surprisingly solid, but — and this is an observation I also made about Necromunda last year — I think I would have been happier with it if it wasn’t a Warhammer 40k game starring the Grey Knights. Daemonhunters might leverage their psychic powers well but it tosses the entire rest of the concept of “being Space Marines” out of the window (you wouldn’t see any of these boys cowering behind pipes and rusty metal in case they get shot) and I think it should have instead gone for a theme that fit over its core gameplay goals a little bit better. It probably would have sold fewer copies, though, and I suppose if we have to have two of these things then it can at least be considered a success for Daemonhunters that it won’t be remembered as “the shit one”.

The post Thoughts: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Okay, guess I’m getting my annual irrational urge to play a 40K game out of the way early this year.

Battlesector is a turn-based strategy game that reminds me an awful lot of Chaos Gate. By that I don’t mean they’re the same in terms of content, although they do have quite a lot in common (fielding small Space Marine armies versus much larger enemy forces, linear single-player campaign, ability to field vehicles), but rather in terms of general game feel. Chaos Gate was an incredibly shonky game in terms of art and UI and general player experience, but which nonetheless had a decent design core to it that sustained the game into the later stages while it weathered an exponentially increasing number of bugs. Battlesector has fewer bugs, but the art and UI are definitely prime contenders for the 2022 Shonkiness Awards; balancing that out is a surprisingly thoughtful take on the combat mechanics that’s reasonably interesting to engage with and which is only ultimately undone by some baffling decisions around the balancing of the campaign missions.

Battlesector pits the Space Marines of the Blood Angels against the invading Tyranid hordes of Hive Fleet Kraken. Unusually, though, these aren’t the same Space Marines who spent large portions of their time in Dawn of War screaming “PURGE THE XENOS!” at the top of their lungs; Battlesector is only the second 40K game I’ve played that takes into account the fact that Games Workshop actually moved the timeline forwards by a millennia or two a few years ago. While progressing the story and the setting like this was sorely overdue, it was a mere side effect of the real reason they did it: so that they could release an entirely new line of Space Marine miniatures (thanks to somebody finding the Emperor’s Space Marine Cookbook) and rake in even more cash from 40K’s poster boys. Battlesector therefore stars the Primaris Space Marines, whose main distinguishing features compared to classic flavour Marines are that they are bigger¹, have even more overdesigned armour, and slightly-renamed, more conveniently-trademarkable versions of the standard 40K weapons and squad compositions.  So instead of tactical squads armed with bolters, the Primaris get Intercessors with bolt rifles; instead of devastator squads with heavy weapons, they get Hellblasters with plasma incinerators; and instead of assault squads with jump packs, bolt pistols and chainswords they get Inceptors dual-wielding assault bolters.

Now, aside from serving as ample confirmation of how creatively bankrupt Games Workshop are, I find the choice to put the Primaris front and centre interesting because the reason you make a 40K game is to hook in people like me who grew up with the 40K setting and who wouldn’t otherwise give your game a second glance if it didn’t have Space Marines and Terminators in it. But that’s precisely what Battlesector doesn’t have; the Primaris aren’t familiar things for anyone who hasn’t been following the setting closely for the last three or four years because they don’t have any presence outside of the miniatures. I feel this is why Battlesector doesn’t get as far on that 40K license as it really should, despite throwing in a few sops to the old guard like Dreadnoughts, Predators and classic Assault Marines (although I think the last are just there to highlight how rubbish they are in comparison to the Primaris equivalent and to encourage you to upgrade your army as soon as possible).  I also have a bee in my bonnet about the modern Tyranids, who have had all of the colour and character leeched out of them, and because Battlesector is set on one of the irradiated desert moons of the Blood Angels homeworld it makes the same mistake just about every other 40K game has: having really bland terrain and scenery. No matter how much tedious prose its motley cast of Astartes spout in the mission briefings (the phrase “weave and weft” comes up more than once) Battlesector is just not a good adaptation of the 40K universe — or at least not a fun one.

But enough about my issues with the modern 40K setting; what does Battlesector look like when you peel back that superficial skin and get into the guts of the mechanics? The single-player campaign is nothing fancy, a linear sequence of twenty missions in between which you upgrade your army via a selection of skill trees and customise your force composition. Mission maps are square grid-based rather than hex-based, and the basic mechanics themselves can be described as Panzer General-tier, or wargame-lite:

• Each unit has separate pools of 4+ movement points and usually just one action point, although your character units get two. Action points are used to either attack or activate a special ability, and they can be used at any point in a unit’s turn, allowing them to pop out of cover, fire their weapons, and then scuttle back in again.
• Units are composed of multiple models, and when an attack is made each model will fire the number of shots that model’s weapon allows — a unit of five Hellblasters with heavy plasma incinerators get just one shot per model, so five shots, while the dual-wielding Inceptors may only have three models in their unit but each one can rattle off 24 shots with their assault bolters, making 72 shots in total.
• While that might sound like a lot, each individual shot has a chance of missing. Shot accuracy is affected by the weapon’s optimal range, with dramatic accuracy falloff if you’re trying to fire inside or outside of that range, and any cover or blocking units that might be in the way, which the game treats more or less as the same thing. You can fire through your own units to hit a target on the other side and there won’t be any friendly fire, but you will incur a substantial penalty to accuracy.
• If a shot hits, there’s then the question of how much damage it does. This is calculated by comparing the attacking weapon’s Armour-Piercing rating against the target’s Armour rating. Weapons with a lower Armour-Piercing rating will do less damage, and if it’s too low the shot will do no damage whatsoever.
• And if a shot does damage, it might end up killing a model in the target unit. Each model in a unit has its own individual HP bar; once this is reduced to zero, it will die, reducing the number of shots it can make per attack. While a unit can keep fighting until all of its models are dead, it’s going to be much less effective if it’s suffered 80% casualties.

There’s other systems rattling around the edges of this tactical core — special abilities such as throwing frag grenades to one-shot weaker units or buffing your army’s accuracy against a high value target, and the Momentum system that grants bonus action points once a unit has racked up a sufficiently high kill count — but leveraging each of these bullet points in the right way to maximise my damage output while trying not to leave my troops exposed to counterattacks is the thing that occupied most of my thinking time in Battlesector. One surprising thing about the game is that thanks to those optimal range penalties and the weapon loadouts available to the Primaris units the Blood Angels end up being quite a short-ranged army, with the only units able to attack effectively at ranges beyond two or three tiles being the Land Speeder and the basic Intercessor tactical squads. Since you are fighting the Tyranids — who are a vast beclawed horde of alien threshing machines and the biggest, scariest close-quarters battle specialists in the setting — this results in most tactical decisions being a risk/reward judgement: is it worth sending your Inceptors leaping into optimal range for their pistol attack, but also into charge range of those two units of Hormagaunts? That big Tyrannofex will die if you can get your Sergeant to smack it with his Thunder Hammer, but you’ll have to be sure you can also clear out all of the units of supporting Genestealers before they tear him to shreds.

Deciding how and where to allocate your firepower for maximum effect, keeping the Tyranid hordes thinned out so that they can’t overwhelm you, is you the real meat of Battlesector. There’s some really good work that’s been done on unit design on the Blood Angels side, so that almost every single unit remains relevant throughout the entire length of the campaign. In the very first mission you’re handed three units of Intercessors and two units of Aggressors (short ranged tanky infantry that have cribbed a lot from Starcraft’s Firebats²), and I took the two surviving units of Intercessors and one Aggressor unit into the final campaign mission because they still had a tactical niche; the Intercessors put out reliable long range damage on unarmoured units (which is most Tyranid units) and while the Aggressors’ short-range boltstorm gauntlets really fall off in the midgame I still kept a unit around for their armour-piercing close-combat attack, which was capable of removing almost half of the health of a big tanky Tyranid. Land Speeders can both scout and snipe high value targets with their Heavy Bolters, which have reasonable armour penetration, while Dreadnoughts and Predators are somewhat interchangeable as big sacks of heavily-armoured HP that anchor your line and can lay down a fearsome hail of short-range fire. Most units have multiple weapon choices that can eventually be unlocked via the inter-mission skill tree, but I actually stuck with the default options for nearly all of them as the alternatives seemed to make them even more specialised to the point of not being useful in 90% of battlefield scenarios.

The sole exception to this were the Inceptor assault infantry, and it’s here that we start to run into some of the problems with Battlesector’s setup. Inceptors become available about six missions into the campaign; up until that point I was using bog-standard Assault Marines, who I have a real soft spot for because there’s few things more 40K than a screaming lunatic with a jetpack and a chainsaw. Assault Marines have their uses as the jump packs let them reposition quickly, but as the only real “classic” Space Marines in the Blood Angels roster I was also noticing that they were substantially weaker than the Primaris troops thanks to a lower armour stat. They also had trouble causing damage when their jump packs were on cooldown, as unless they’re jumping into combat their melee attacks get countered by any surviving units and their chainswords don’t do anywhere near enough damage to kill models before they can perform said counter. Inceptors have none of these weaknesses; they have high armour, can put out an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage with those 72-shot attacks, and they aren’t even weak to melee thanks to every unit with a pistol weapon being allowed to do a free “reaction attack” against any unit charging them from the front . The Assault Marines were rendered wholly redundant the moment I got them, which was a bit of a problem when I’d invested non-refundable skill points into upgrading them and trying to make them a bit better. It got worse once I upgraded the Inceptors with the ability to (effectively) use their jump packs every turn, and also gave them plasma pistols that let them put the hurt on even heavily-armoured targets; they ended up forming a third of my army because they’re good in pretty much every situation, which was a rare oversight for Battlesector.

There’s also a phrase in the above paragraph that points to wider problems with the campaign: “high armour”. All Primaris units, and hence the entire Blood Angels army (except Assault Marines), have high armour — much higher than the vast majority of Tyranid ranged weapons can penetrate with their measly Armour-Piercing scores. Even the Intercessors can tank four or five volleys of incoming fire before losing a model; Termagants and Gargoyles (the most common Tyranid units) can’t even hurt Aggressors and they can barely touch Inceptors. Tyranid melee attacks are a different story, but it’s extremely rare that they’ll get to use one in any significant way thanks to the existence of Overwatch; much like in XCOM, this allows you spend a unit’s action point to fire at any Tyranids who are attempting to close to melee on their turn, and then your pistol units (who you’ve put in the frontline if you have any sense) get another free reaction attack if they actually make it to melee, and there’s not really much left of any charging Tyranid unit after that. And once you get Dreadnoughts and Predators that’s about it for the Tyranids as a plausible attacking threat because there’s something in the Tyranid AI that compels them to attack your vehicles first, and they have nothing that can threaten armour in any serious way. A Broodlord managed to make it into close combat with a Predator once and knocked off half of its health, and then the return fire from the Predator’s assault cannons mulched it; until the final mission, that was as close as the Tyranids came to blowing up one of my vehicles, and in fact they only managed to kill four units total. And two of those were Assault Marines, so they don’t really count.

 (The reason the “until the final mission” rider is in there is because this is how long Battlesector waited before hitting me with sufficient big Tyranid units across a wide enough front that I couldn’t kill them all before they got to melee range. They also fielded a single unit of Hive Guard with a hitherto-unseen electric cannon that unexpectedly killed a Dreadnought; I also lost two other units to the big Tyranids, but it was the final mission of the campaign so who cares.)

It’s because of this that I almost packed in Battlesector completely five missions before the end of the campaign. I’d effectively solved the game (on Normal, anyway) and going any further would simply be a matter of box ticking, which is possibly not the best use of my time when each mission in Battlesector takes an hour plus to complete. To its credit it does do more than certain other 40K adaptations I could name to try and speed up the process of taking a turn; you can give units movement orders and even attack orders simultaneously and they’ll move and attack at the same time, and Tyranid move orders will also happen simultaneously for small groups of 2-3 units instead of making you watch as the game dripfeeds them into visual range one unit at a time. There’s also a button to increase the animation speed on the Tyranid turn, although there’s no equivalent for the Blood Angels (I found the spacebar-to-fast-forward feature to be incredibly useful in XCOM). There is still a substantial amount of waiting around because there’s just so many Tyranid units and the game will even make you wait while it moves the ones outside of visual range, but the real time sink happens on the player turn because of the amount of scutwork you have to do to compensate for Battlesector’s UI.

Again, I’m trying to be reasonably measured here. UI is tricky to do for a strategy game, especially if you don’t have a huge amount of resources to throw at the problem. I want to be somewhat understanding of the fact that Battlesector surfaces only the most basic to-hit information in its primary UI, with the accuracy bonuses and penalties relegated to an interface best described as “a big list of stuff” that you can make appear by right-clicking on a unit. But it doesn’t even go for the easy wins, like colour-coding the bonuses/penalties appropriately, and while it does surface optimal range on the battlefield (although it’ll take a few missions before you understand what you’re looking at) it does absolutely nothing to help you figure out where the best place to shoot from is. The best interface I’ve seen for this so far is the one from Wasteland 3 (of all things) which let you click on a square in movement range and would then show you every single enemy which was in range of that square and their associated to-hit probability; Mechanicus had one that was similar³ which is probably where Wasteland 3 got the idea from. There’s none of that in Battlesector, though, and there were too many missions where I found myself manually counting out a five-square distance from a target unit so that I could move my Land Speeders into a good attack position for their Heavy Bolters, or counting out movement ranges so that I could shuffle units through a firing rotation without them blocking each other.

It gets even worse for cover modifiers; I have now finished the Battlesector campaign, and I’m still not quite sure how cover works. Sometimes things are in “full cover” and I can’t shoot them but I have no idea how that’s different from partial cover; it looks exactly the same as a single piece of cover to me. Bizarrely, being adjacent to a piece of cover (or taking cover behind it, in other words) appears to block your outgoing shots just as effectively as it will incoming fire, and so you have to abuse the fact that you can move out of cover, fire, and then move back into it. My suspicion is that cover is actually based on a direct line-of-sight calculation that takes into account the number of objects present that break that line, whether they’re scenery or other units; this theory is supported by the time I moved my Land Speeders to a position that looked like it had a 100% clear field of fire but which nevertheless incurred a cover penalty, and further inspection revealed the curvature of the ground meant it partially blocked the shot. I had absolutely no way of knowing this, though, because you’re stuck with the same 45 degree camera angle throughout the game with no way of zooming down to ground level to eyeball it. Again, Steel Division has an excellent LOS tool that could have been cribbed for Battlesector, but for whatever reason there’s been no time, resources or willpower to do anything more than throw together the most basic stat summary, hide it inside a right-click interface, and then call it a day.

And then there’s that art and animation, which contributes greatly to the general shonky feeling I mentioned up top. Battlesector is far from the worst-looking game I’ve ever played, and the 3D-ness of it all means it cleans up quite nicely for screenshots, but unfortunately it’s a much uglier thing to look at in motion. There’s only so many variations of “desert” and “industrial park” that I can look at before I start to get bored; the precise number is “one” and “zero” respectively. Melee attacks have no weight or heft to them whatsoever, and for the bigger Tyranid units looks more like “awkward poke” than it does “melee attack”. Tyranid ranged attacks are some of the weakest, splattiest blobs of green snot I’ve seen in a videogame, which I suppose does match their gameplay effectiveness but isn’t a particularly exciting thing to watch unfold in front of you. Waiting for the Aggressors to waddle their way from position to position is borderline comical, and the Sergeant’s run animation looks like he’s being controlled by a QWOP player. None of this is helped by the unit barks — hearing the Dreadnought’s robotic “URRGH…”  every time it takes 1HP of damage makes it sound like it’s achieving climax during particularly busy Tyranid turns, while the Aggressors’ “ROGER THAT” is phrased more like an imperative than it is an acknowledgement — and the voice acting in general is all first-take quality, with the Sister of Battle voice actress in particular making a meal of a lot of her lines⁴ that nevertheless have ended up in the final product.

So, when you balance out the decent tactical core with the numerous aggregated shortcomings elsewhere, and adjust for the fact that it is an indie game with a limited budget despite its fancy 3D graphics, Battlesector turns out to be something quite unusual: a Warhammer 40,000 adaptation that is merely… there. Usually they provoke a quite visceral reaction in me one way or the other, but I don’t feel strongly about Battlesector at all; it has precisely none of the brutal joie de vivre that the better 40K games like Dawn of War and Mechanicus and Battlefleet Gothic possess in spades, but because it focused on the Tonka Toy Primaris marines rather than anything I’d recognise as authentically 40K this somehow didn’t matter so much. It was engaging for about two-thirds of its length so it’s immediately better than some of the utter shite that has previously graced the metaphorical pages of this blog, and you could definitely do worse if you have a tactical strategy itch that needs scratching and are willing to clamber over the UI problems to get it done. But I’m hardly about to recommend that anyone rush out and play it right now unless you really have nothing better to do.

The post Thoughts: Warhammer 40,000 – Battlesector appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 is another 18th century tall ships naval combat simulator that just so happens to be set in outer space, except this time with more factions, a few combat refinements  and a rebuilt campaign mode. But hey, isn’t that what sequels are for?

This is going to be one of those reviews where I first point you towards my review of the first Battlefleet Gothic Armada if you want to know how the combat portion of the game works in detail, since it explains all of the basic concepts and I don’t want to waste time repeating myself. Suffice to say that it has everything you’d expect from a game about combat between 18th century sailing ships — broadsides, crossing the T, boarding actions (although sadly using boarding pods instead of swinging across to the other ship on space-ropes) — except in the grim darkness of the Warhammer 40k universe. I got a little depressed at the generally poor quality of Warhammer 40k videogames recently, but Battlefleet Gothic is a shining exception to that rule for two reasons:

1. The base game was pretty good. It had some long-term problems with the campaign and certain mission types could be a slog, but the combat portion of the game was in general an admirably well-pitched game of positioning and ship micromanagement.
2. It actually understands its source material.

The second point shouldn’t be understated: Battlefleet Gothic, almost alone amongst 40k videogame adaptations, actually felt like it. The sweeping scope of the game really helps, since instead of single planets you’re dealing with entire sectors, and instead of generic Space Marines you’re commanding kilometres-long battleships with tens of thousands of crew. When you screw up, planets die, and that’s very 40k; there’s few other games that have really captured the overblown nature of the universe like Battlefleet Gothic did. Combined with a refreshingly novel theme — there aren’t all that many naval combat games with the relative accessibility of Battlefleet Gothic — and an adequately engaging game system, it was more than enough to make me feel very well disposed towards the idea of a sequel, even if I never actually finished the original game’s campaign.

BFG 2 certainly makes a bombastic first impression that fully leverages recent events in the 40k setting. After thirty years of the fluff going on and on about what might happen if Cadia fell and the forces of Chaos could escape the Eye of Terror (but nothing ever really happened that might upset the status quo) Games Workshop did something unprecedented: they actually moved the story forward by a thousand years or so. It’s now the 42nd millennium, and all of those imminent existential threats the Imperium was supposedly facing in the 41st millennium — but whose actual long-term impact was limited to the galactic equivalent of a sad trombone noise because the setting was permanently stuck in amber — are suddenly and scarily real. Cadia has fallen; in fact it falls in BFG 2’s tutorial after the Chaos big bad and (up until this point) chronic serial failure Abaddon the Despoiler finally succeeds in crashing a gigantic space station into it, shattering the planet in an awesome series of cutscenes. With Cadia’s destruction the Eye of Terror has expanded to split the galaxy in half and the forces of Chaos are now boiling out of the old Eye intent on blowing up everything they see. The only thing now holding them back are the cannon-festooned flying cathedrals of the Imperial Navy, along with their allies in the Space Marines and the Adeptus Mechanicus.

(That’s the Imperial campaign setting, anyway. There are also Necron and Tyranid campaigns available that I haven’t gotten around to trying yet.)

This is the first big change from the first game: instead of the Space Marines and Mechanicus being upgrades for your existing Imperial Navy ships that would make them better at boarding (or whatever), they’ve been given their own fleet types in BFG 2¹. Where the Navy has access to a wide range of ships that can be used to construct flexible, well-rounded fleets, both of the new factions excel in one area but have a reduced fleet roster to reflect this extreme specialisation. The Mechanicus ships have lots of long-range plasma cannon and every single one of their ships mounts a Nova Cannon artillery piece for nuking multiple enemy vessels at once, but they’re quite slow and weak up close. The Space Marines are the opposite: they have fast ships with reduced health and few guns compared to a Navy ship, but they do absolutely staggering amounts of damage in boarding actions and have access to boarding torpedoes and special teleport attacks to deliver fanatical super-soldiers straight into the heart of the enemy fleet.

Playing with three fleet types instead of one gives BFG 2 some sorely-needed variety compared to the original; like BFG 1, the sequel asks you to fight hundreds of battles over the course of a campaign, and it’s a great help that you’re not fighting with the same ships every time. That applies to the opposition, too, as the range of enemy factions you face has been expanded from the original Chaos, Ork and Eldar fleets to also include Necrons, Dark Eldar and Tyranids. Dark Eldar are effectively an Eldar palette swap with better boarders and so aren’t anything to write home about, but the Necrons and Tyranids are more interesting. The Necrons field tough, expensive ships with powerful area-of-effect attacks and an energy wave ability that can delete incoming ordnance; when fighting Necrons it’s a good idea to treat each ship as if it were one size class bigger than it actually is, because it will definitely feel like it. The Tyranids on the other hand behave like Orks on steroids: they eschew ranged weaponry almost entirely in favour of ramming attacks and the most sickeningly powerful boarding actions in the game, and unlike the Orks it’s very difficult to evade them because they have grappling tentacles and a speed boost that puts every other faction in the game to shame. Fighting Tyranids feels like the battle of attrition that it should be against a foe that has zero regard for its own ships’ survival; you know you’re going to take a lot of damage and that you’re probably going to end up losing a cruiser or two, and it’s all about doing what you can to minimise those losses.

Although the combat layer is largely untouched from BFG 1 there have still been some moderately impactful changes to the way it plays. First, most of the mission types have been ripped out of the game — no more tedious Planetary Bombardment missions or playing kiss chase with Chaos cruisers on a Data Recovery mission — in favour of just two: point control, or a straight up battle of annihilation. This is a big improvement, oddly enough, as most of the mission types in BFG 1 introduced mechanics that were not about ships fighting each other into a game where I’d like to spend my time making ships fight each other. Second is that most ship abilities that fire ordnance (fighters, torpedoes, boarding pods) now have a limited number of uses per battle, which reduces the amount of nova cannon spam and forces ships to rely on their full range of abilities and armament. And third is that all ships now have a Crew value as well as an HP bar; boarding actions and certain weapon attacks deplete the crew value, gradually reducing the ship’s efficiency until it hits zero, at which point the ship becomes an empty drifting hulk that plays no further part in the battle unless you recrew it with a boarding action of your own.

The last change is what makes the Tyranids (and to a lesser extent the Orks and Space Marines) so scary. They don’t have many guns, but then they don’t need them when a single set of boarding pods from a Tyranid battleship will completely decrew a light cruiser and cripple anything else that’s not another battleship. My first criticism of BFG 2, though, is that while I think the total amount of crew damage each ship does per boarding action is more or less correct, having it be applied immediately makes it possible to instantly kill otherwise-untouched enemy battlecruisers by firing off a bunch of Space Marine boarding abilities all at once. Boarding actions are limited-use which prevents this tactic from being totally overpowered, but it does short-circuit large portions of the game (i.e. the parts where ships shoot actual guns at each other); it would be better if the crew damage were applied over time and other ships could teleport over reinforcements to a ship that was fighting off a boarding action. As it is the ships that can do ramming, high-damage boarding actions and also fire off assault boats from their carrier decks — the Space Marines and the Imperial Navy — feel far more powerful than the Mechanicus, who have one opportunity at the start of a battle to alpha strike the grouped-up enemy forces with a mass nova cannon bombardment, and then it descends into a melee and you’re not going to get anywhere near as much out of it.

The campaign layer is where the real difference from BFG 1 lies, however, as the old BFG campaign structure has been tossed out the window entirely and replaced with something far more emergent. You start with three small fleets and a single system in the Cadian sector, which has been overrun by Chaos. There are 12-odd systems in Cadia connected by the usual linear warp paths you can find in just about any space-based 4X. You have complete vision of the entire sector, and so you plan your attack: each system can only contain three fleets on each side, all of which will join in any battle that takes place there (with additional ships replacing destroyed/withdrawn ones as reinforcements), so you avoid the systems with three Chaos fleets and focus on those which are only garrisoned by one. The first system you capture has a shipyard, which allows you to spend resources to buy frigates and light cruisers to bolster your tiny fleets. Ships are built instantly in BFG 2 and you can buy unlimited numbers of any ship from the classes you’ve unlocked (linked to your admiral’s level), with the only restrictions being upkeep costs, the total amount of ship value you’re allowed to have in a single fleet (again, linked to your admiral’s level), and the shipyard’s construction capacity, which regenerates every turn. The next stop is the Cadian system itself, which has a forge world and a bigger shipyard and lets you build up your fleets even more so that you can clear out the rest of the sector. At which point another sector unlocks and you get to do it all again, except against a different flavour of opposition with bigger ships and more story missions.

So far, so 4X. However, something you might notice on your rampage through Cadia is that the AI fleets are almost totally supine; they don’t attack you and barely try to develop their holdings, and for once this is entirely intentional because of the way the opposing AI factions in BFG 2 have been put together. By far the most interesting thing about the campaign mechanics (to me, anyway) is that they’re deliberately asymmetric; the AI doesn’t have a storyline to work through and is solely there to provide a credible, threatening opposition force instead of attempting to win the campaign, so it’s not even trying to play the same game as you. It doesn’t have to gather resources, it doesn’t have to upgrade planets, and it certainly doesn’t have to use shipyards to build ships — it’ll magic them out of thin air when it does, just like a bad Total War AI. However, this is all explained up front to the player and linked to a single, highly visible Threat level for each faction within a sector. The higher a faction’s Threat, the more latitude it will have to build new fleets, fortify its positions, and launch attacks on other systems. A faction with a Threat level of zero basically won’t do anything, which is why the Chaos fleets at Cadia are so curiously inert — it’s the system for the campaign tutorial and they hold almost all of it to start, and it wouldn’t do to have them instantly shred the player’s tiny fleets with their massively overwhelming force. A faction with a Threat level of five, on the other hand, should be stomped on before it builds up too much; a threat level that high will give it a whole bunch of free actions to mess with your plans.

A large part of the campaign is therefore about managing Threat. There’s a whole host of factors that go into it: a world inside a system might have a Necron tomb on it, passively boosting the Necron Threat in that sector unless you permanently station a fleet there. On the other hand, upgrading a planet with an Inquisitorial fortress on it will reduce the Chaos Threat level in that sector. Locking down progressively larger amounts of territory inside a sector will apply a blanket reduction in Threat across all factions. In general, once you launch into a sector you want to take the entire thing as quickly as possible to avoid getting bogged down, which leads to some interesting decisions where you balance pushing every fleet almost to the point of destruction to keep the blitzkrieg going with the need to periodically pull back to a shipyard (often in an adjacent sector) to repair and recrew your ships, since damage to both ship health and ship crew count is persistent and won’t recover all that quickly otherwise.

There’s another Threat-related reason to move quickly, though: in the bottom right of the campaign screen is an XCOM 2-style Doomsday meter. It’s nothing fancy, simply incrementing by one every turn, but every 7 turns the global Threat level across all of your sectors will increase by one. If you somehow let it increase for 28 turns on the trot you lose the game outright — this is an absurdly generous time limit and is simply there to stop you from turtling too much, but the intermittent Threat increases are fairly dangerous since they can trigger invasions and attacks in otherwise pacified sectors, forcing you to tie down valuable fleets with defence missions. There are two ways to reduce the Doomsday meter. One is to spend the Battleplans resource to decrement the meter by one, but Battleplans are valuable and quite hard to come by and buying yourself a single turn isn’t all that useful unless a single turn is all you need to sequence your fleet movements correctly. The second method, and the one you’re supposed to do, is to complete scripted Special Operation missions that advance the campaign storylines. There are multiple strands of storyline, some of which can end with the elimination of one of the enemy factions from the game, but all of the Special Operations are very tricky in comparison to the standard sector conquest battles and you’ll come out of the other side with, at best, a very battered fleet. However, in addition to being very cool story beats (Tindalos are really leveraging the newly-apocalyptic setting to create some awesomely overblown moments) and rewarding you with a decent chunk of admiral XP, completing any Special Operation resets the Doomsday clock to zero. The catch is that most of the Special Operations you’re given lie in newly revealed, yet-to-be-conquered sectors, so you’ll have to get move on in order to smash your way through to the operation system before the Doomsday clock ticks up too much.

Because the AI’s playing by a different set of rules its attacks and defences work very differently to yours. For example, when you attack a system it’s a matter of simply moving your fleets in and clicking the “Launch Battle” button, but when the AI factions launch an assault some big arrows appear indicating which fleets are attacking and which system is under attack, along with a timer telling you how long you have before the assault is launched. Most intra-system assaults give you just a single turn to prepare, but you can delay it by an additional turn by building a Minefield in that system, and spend Battleplans to delay it even further, giving you time to shuttle in defensive fleets. The AI can also launch invasions of already-pacified sectors; these aren’t launched from any specific location and can come out of nowhere as long as there’s enough Threat in the sector to generate one, but to compensate for this you’re given a full three turns to prepare — and again, this can be delayed further by Minefields and Battleplans. The AI can also build Minefields, but since your attacks don’t have a timer attached to them a Minefield in an AI-controlled system will instead lock off one of the three friendly fleet slots in that system, forcing you to attack with a reduced force.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I really like this asymmetric, boardgame-like way of controlling AI behaviour. Coding a true strategy game AI is hard, as evidenced by market leaders such as Total War and Civilization repeatedly screwing it up, and while BFG 2 is by no means as complicated as either of those games it’s still tricky to make an AI that can play by the same rules as a human player while still providing a reasonable level of challenge. Tindalos’s solution here has been, very reasonably, to not bother trying, and instead to reframe the problem so that it’s far less complicated. They’ve deliberately created a game structure that allows them to abstract complex mechanics such as economy management and shipbuilding into a comparatively simple Threat counter system, and made their job much simpler while generating much the same outcome as if they’d coded a full AI. The AI in BFG 2 does everything required of it; it builds fleets, fortifies systems and launches attacks, and in general provides more than a mere speedbump to your progress through the campaign. It’s just using free actions to do it, and while this would be annoying if Tindalos were trying to pretend it was playing the game like a human would, they’re refreshingly up front about the fact that’s it not, and have actually woven that concept into the core of what drives the campaign forward.

Still, while the AI’s asymmetric nature is a masterstroke it’s not a perfect campaign by any means. Having new sectors unlocked and new factions introduced and gradually gaining access to more ships and bigger fleets is very engaging, to be sure, and thanks to the division of your forces into multiple fleets (you can have up to 15) the composition of these multi-fleet task forces and the shuffling of fleets between attack and defence produces some meaty strategic decisions. However, it’s still a very long campaign (I’m currently 30 hours in and it feels like I’m barely halfway through) and that creates exactly the problems you’d expect. Your planet upgrades feel small, being on the scale of an additional 1% discount/boost to things, and when you’re dealing with one sector and twelve systems they certainly are small, but when you’re conquered six sectors and have well over a hundred planets under your control these upgrades all add up to the point where your break the economy; I generate 1500 resources per turn (for reference a battleship costs 500-ish) and am constantly floating at least 5000 because I’ve maxed out my fleet sizes and have run out of things to spend resources on. I am also starting to get tired of the fleet combat despite the greatly increased variety amongst both friendly and enemy forces; if anything BFG 2 asks you to fight even more battles than the first game did, and I challenge you to do anything a hundred times and have it not start to get a little bit passé. I’m genuinely a little worried that despite the really sterling work Tindalos have done with the campaign structure and story I might not make it to the end before getting distracted by the rest of the February/March glut of games.

I think, then, that Battlefleet Gothic 2 is the archetypical sequel. The core game is improved but not drastically different, and the additions mostly come in the form of more stuff that expands the range of what you can do and encounter instead of fiddling with fundamental game mechanics. The campaign is the most revolutionary part, but while it’s a definite improvement on the first game it ends up falling into the same trap: there’s just too much of it. That Tindalos have included Tyranid and Necron campaigns as well is something I now find daunting instead of pleasing; I barely have the stamina to finish one campaign, let alone three. That criticism is personal preference on my part more than anything else; I’m sure there’s people out there who relish the idea of a beefy 4X-lite campaign that’ll likely take well over a month to play through, but I’m not one of them. Which is really quite a shame, because aside from the occasional piece of ropey voice acting it’s all carried off with a surprising amount of panache, to the point that if I wanted to introduce somebody to the setting I’d probably point them towards Battlefleet Gothic 2 as something that’s representative of the best the 40k universe has to offer. It feels like it has more flavour to it than any other 40k game I’ve played, in addition to being a good game on its own merits; Battlefleet Gothic 2 does most things right, and the things it does wrong are all forgivable.

The post Thoughts: Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And so we go from a terrible Warhammer 40k video game to a really quite good one, and one which I wasn’t expecting to like anywhere near this much. Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus is a tactical squad-based strategy game somewhat in the vein of XCOM that stars the Adeptus Mechanicus and their tech-priests as they raid a Necron tomb world for technological secrets. Right off the bat I’m inclined to think favourably of Mechanicus because it’s eschewed taking the obvious route of making an XCOM-alike featuring Space Marines and instead chooses to focus on two of the 40k universe’s lesser-known factions, which is an extremely smart move because there’s something like fifteen different factions in 40k but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Warhammer video games that don’t have you either playing as the Space Marines or as a force that includes them¹. This allows developers Bulwark Studios to create something that feels very fresh when compared to the 40k adaptations I’m used to, not only in terms of atmosphere but also in terms of the amount of mechanical tinkering they do to make the squad-based gameplay something that’s appropriate to the Mechanicus and their Necron opponents.

For those who aren’t familiar with the 40k universe beyond Space Marines (and honestly, who could blame you given the one-note nature of the universe beyond the actual 40k game itself) the Adeptus Mechanicus are the Imperium’s resident organisation of techno-religious zealots. They spend a lot of time jetting about the galaxy in gigantic battleships chasing down rumours of ancient technology, and so when they get wind of a Necron tomb world that’s stirring from its slumber they show up in orbit pretty damn quickly — the Necrons are a race of hyper-advanced robot skeletons who went for a quick nap sixty million years ago and woke up to find that a lot of their planets had been colonised by humans in the interim, so they’re understandably upset and start repossessing their property with terminal force. The Mechanicus have their own standing army called the Skitarii which is doing most of the fighting on this particular tomb world and there’s plenty of references to Skitarii troops getting shredded by unfathomable robot horrors, but Mechanicus chooses instead to focus on a small strike team of tech-priests who are essentially functioning as the Mechanicus special forces. Don’t let the word “priest” fool you into thinking these guys are all peace and harmony, either, because the very nature of their religion means that the tech-priests are cyborg super-soldiers with access to the very best weapons available to humanity — including a lot of good stuff that they refuse to share with those glory-hogging jerks in the Astartes — and since they are religious zealots the Mechanicus are just as enthusiastic about xenos extermination as the Necrons are about pest control.

As with XCOM, Mechanicus is split into two parts: a squad management component where you equip and upgrade your merry band of tech-priests, and a tactical strategy component where you take those tech-priests into battle to blast some robots with your latest piece of salvaged technology. Mechanicus also has an intermediate roguelite layer where you run around a simple layout of whatever tomb you happen to be looting as part of the mission and get presented with a simple set of choose-your-own-adventure options on every node, but I’ll save that for later because I don’t think it worked out anywhere near as well as the rest of the game and would rather give it a kicking towards the end of the review. The tactical squad combat part of the game is where most of the Mechanicus flesh resides; however, I was a little surprised at some of the decisions Bulwark had made for the squad management side because it turns out squad management is pretty much all you do there. There’s no research or manufacturing in Mechanicus, and choosing which mission to do next is simplified down to picking one from a list — although it is always a genuine choice because there’s never fewer than four options available, with your decision being made based on the rewards you’ll get for it. You are shown exactly what you’ll get for completing each mission, which is usually one or two pieces of equipment or passive squad upgrades plus some money, which is used to level up your tech-priests. Equipment, once you get it, is totally free and comes in infinite quantities and you can instantly mount it onto your tech-priest’s endoskeleton just so long as they have the augmentation capacity to take it; you get an additional augmentation point each time you level up a tech-priest, but the best pieces of equipment require three points each and since each tech-priest has eleven separate equipment slots you still end up having to make some hard decisions on what exactly you’re going to strip off to free up augmentation points for that big gun you just unlocked.

The squad management part of the game consequently struck me as a little light, but I was never sad to return to the Mechanicus battleship that serves as their base of operations because it meant another five to ten minutes of adjusting tech-priest equipment loadouts and skill builds before diving back into another mission. It might be stripped down, but it gets the important bit right and ensures that core loop still works almost as well as it does in XCOM. The same could arguably be said of the tactical combat in Mechanicus, but I think that would be damning it with faint praise because the way Mechanicus takes core XCOM concepts, examines them, and then chucks them straight out the window because it thinks it doesn’t need it is actually pretty bold. Consider:

• There is no cover system in Mechanicus. There is line-of-sight, and if there’s some level geometry that’s blocking your line-of-sight to something then you can’t shoot it, but there’s nothing in the level that you can hunker down behind that’ll reduce an enemy’s chance to hit. This is because…
• There’s no chance to hit in Mechanicus either. Instead your shots will always hit their target, just so long as they’re in range and you have a clear line-of-sight to them.
• Also there’s no fog of war. This is something of a logical follow-on from the combat environments in Mechanicus being much smaller than a typical XCOM level — they’re designed to be quick 10-minute challenges rather than 30-minute slogs — but you have complete vision over all of it so that when a Necron clambers out of their tomb you’ll know about it immediately, and while there are occasional (scripted) mid-mission enemy spawns it’s very rare that you’ll be totally blindsided by an enemy pod in Mechanicus.

This all strips out a hell of a lot of the RNG we’ve become accustomed to in XCOM and makes it feel much more deterministic — they’re somewhat different games, but Mechanicus reminded me a lot of Into The Breach in places as they’re both predicated on the player having (almost) perfect information and the strategy being about sequencing your turn correctly instead of managing risk.

Now, in order to make that a challenging problem in an environment that has ostensibly been reduced to just moving and shooting Bulwark have to add something back into the formula, and their chosen solution is a rather artificial one: scattered around the various levels are Necron steles and inscriptions that grant Cognition points when a tech-priest moves next to them. The Necrons themselves also yield Cognition points when they’re downed, and each tech-priest has a floating servo skull companion that they can send off to retrieve Cognition points from afar. Cognition points are squad-wide and you can only store a limited amount at once, starting at four and rising to nine with squad upgrades, and they do not regenerate naturally; they must be acquired from the surrounding environment.

Why are Cognition points so important? Well, the fluff explanation for them is that they’re Necron technological secrets that are somehow being repurposed into tech-priest processing power, but the actual in-mission use for them is for pretty much everything that isn’t walking around, since “Cognition points” is just a fancy way of saying action points, and they’re the primary restriction on what precisely you can do with your tech-priests in a given round. As I mentioned earlier you can cram up to eleven pieces of equipment onto a tech-priest, and every piece of equipment grants them some active ability. You can mount superchargers for your weapons that grant bonus damage for a round, curatio claws that can repair damaged tech-priests, and mechadendrites that lash out at any enemies that get too close, and all of these utility equipment abilities are gated by cooldowns where you can only use them every two or three rounds.

This is just as you would expect from an XCOM-alike; however, the very interesting thing Mechanicus does is that it treats guns just like any other piece of equipment, in that equipping one grants you a “shoot” ability with that weapon with a one-turn cooldown. Equipping two guns allows you to shoot twice a round, once with each weapon. Equipping two guns and a power axe lets you shoot twice and and then run in to slice up your target with a melee attack. This would allow each tech-priest to output a truly ridiculous amount of damage every round – if most weapons’ attack abilities weren’t gated by these Cognition points. Hitting somebody with an axe? That costs a Cognition point. Immolating somebody with with a flamethrower? That’s two Cognition points. Firing the insanely powerful black hole gun you get towards the end of the game? Five Cognition points. There are a couple of pistols that don’t require Cognition points to use, but they have comparatively weedy damage and past the early game are only useful for finishing off downed Necrons. Since Cognition points are also used to activate many of the tech-priest skills they get from levelling up, and also allow them to do bonus moves on top of the free one they get every round, and are also used to summon regular Skitarii troops to the battlefield — these are disposable mooks ranging from simple Servitors to hulking battle robots that you toss towards the enemy to soak up gunfire in lieu of taking cover, which is possibly the most 40k thing a videogame has ever done —  there’s a lot of demands on this very limited resource, and so you have to take care to structure each turn so that you don’t run out of Cognition points.

These Cognition points are rather more boardgame-y than I’d like (in that the designers have come up with the bare naked mechanic of running around the battle map hoovering up action points first, and then searched for the flimsiest possible way to link it in to the theme of the game — it’s a bit stupid that a tech-priest can’t pull the trigger on his flamethrower if he’s run out of think-juice, after all), but I can’t deny that in the early and mid-game they add a hell of a lot of depth to something that might well have ended up being dangerously oversimplified. I found myself having to stop and think for a couple of minutes at the start of every round: I need three cognition points to fire this gun and kill that Necron, but I only have one right now, but if I use my base move to run past a Necron corpse I can suck up another cognition point on the way, and then spend that cognition point to do a bonus move that’ll put me adjacent to a Necron stele that grants two more, giving me the three points I need to fire. And that’s a simple example; when you start chucking in tech-priest abilities it gets even more complicated, but pleasingly so. This is why I say Mechanicus felt like Into The Breach as much as it did XCOM, as you know precisely what your available tools are and what your opposition is, and you need to come up with a set of actions that uses the former to kill the latter while trying to avoid damage to yourself.

Of course it’s no fun planning that kind of thing without a very, very good UI to help you, so it’s rather fortunate that Mechanicus’s UI is very, very good indeed. In fact it’s like somebody looked at the shitshow that is XCOM’s UI, noted down every single thing that was annoying about it, and then came up with something that rather pointedly avoids all of those incredibly obvious mistakes. Placing a move order locks the target square but requires a second click to confirm, preventing you from moving out of position by accident. Hovering the mouse over a potential movement square will bring up indicators on nearby Necrons that tell you if they’re going to be in range of any of the tech-priest’s weapons when he moves to that square. It will also bring up indicators telling you if you’re blundering into the firing arcs of any stationary turrets that happen to be nearby. It doesn’t tell you Necron movement or firing ranges, which is something of a curious omission when the rest of the game is so information rich, but this becomes pretty easy to judge after a few missions and the UI does the basic job of stopping you from wasting your Cognition points on stupid mistakes so well that Firaxis will have absolutely no excuse when they inevitably strike out for the third time with the UI for XCOM 3.

Put that all together and you have a tactical battle layer that traces some roots back to XCOM but which feels fresh and unique and makes describing Mechanicus as “XCOM, but 40k” feel like I’m doing it a disservice when it’s come up with many new ideas that I sincerely hope move this genre forward. It’s also one of the few games (after Battlefleet Gothic and Dawn of War) that actually appears to halfway understand its source material; I didn’t much care for the Adeptus Mechanicus before I played their game, but Mechanicus absolutely nails the atmosphere with the tech-priests communicating solely in binaric cant (which incidentally saves on voice acting), a soundtrack that’s very appropriate to the mix of religion and technology that the Mechanicus represent, and a truly unsettling upgrade process where your tech-priests start out looking mostly human but gradually turn into wholly unnatural machine-men as you swap out more and more of their body parts for powerful augmentations. Yes, the writing is rather suspect in places, but then I’ve yet to play a 40k game that actually had good writing so that’s just par for the course. While it doesn’t exactly have a high bar to clear, Mechanicus is that rarest of beasts: a Warhammer 40k adaptation that’s well worth playing.

For about two-thirds of its length, anyway.

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed me caveating much of my praise for Mechanicus with the phrase “early and mid-game”. This is because — somewhat predictably for something based on XCOM — Mechanicus falls apart in the late-game as your tech-priests go shooting off of the expected power curve and get launched into the stratosphere at around about the point where they can fully fill out two of their skill trees, because many of the skills haven’t been fully thought through and badly needed a few more balancing passes. To encourage the player to mix-and-match skill trees the first skill in each tree is one of the most powerful ones available, but this makes it far too easy to cherry-pick the best skills across all of the trees and create some truly overpowered techno-abominations. For example:

• The first skill in the Tech-Auxilium skill tree has a three turn cooldown, but then it needs it because it lets you fire a weapon without paying the Cognition point cost. This almost always saves you four or five Cognition points because you’re always going to use it when firing your heaviest, most destructive guns.
• The first skill in the Dominus skill tree increases the range of all weapons by four tiles. Which is fine for most of them, but it also boosts the range and/or radius of area-of-effect weapons, and if you remember your basic geometry adding four tiles onto a cone effect that usually has a range of eight tiles is more than doubling the affected area. This is insanely powerful.
• The last skill in the Tech-Auxilium skill tree lets you fire off Canticles for free. Canticles are one-shot powerups that do a lot of things, but my favourite is the one that boosts the damage of the next attack by twelve points of pure damage, effectively doubling the damage of the most powerful weapons in the game. Canticles are supposed to be balanced by only being able to use them once on a given mission (which can include up to three combat encounters), but this skill makes them reusable as many times as you want.
• The third skill in the Lexmechanic skill tree gives you a Cognition point whenever you kill an enemy, which is great when you’ve just used the previous three skills to fire off a free damage-boosted attack that’s had its area of effect increased so that it covers basically half of the map.

You can jam all of this onto a single tech-priest about two-thirds of the way through the game, which is around about the same time that you pick up the final piece of the puzzle, which is a weapon rather than a skill: the Torsion Cannon. This is the aforementioned black hole gun, which can fire through walls and which causes a giant explosion centred on whatever it hits that also passes through walls. When boosted with the range-increase skill the explosion radius is so large that the Torsion Cannon needs to be fired at maximum range to avoid catching your own tech-priests in the blast, but if you boost it with one of the free Canticles, some Energia Enhancers, and maybe one of the damage-boosting blessings as well, it will easily one-shot any Necron caught in the blast. Hell, for most of them it’s downright overkill. I had combat encounters where I took out the entire opposing force with a single shot from the Torsion Cannon before they’d even had a chance to move. Even the end boss of the game didn’t manage to do much more than clamber out of his sarcophagus before I jammed a black hole down his throat. You sometimes need to spend Cognition points lavishly on bonus moves to get your tech-priest into position to fire, but you’ll get them all back when he takes the shot because you now get Cognition points for Necron kills.

This is undeniably satisfying for the first few missions after it all comes together, but the satisfaction quite quickly gives way to boredom as combat encounters become an annoying chore. The core of the problem here is that while a lot of thought has gone into the Cognition points system and how it can add to the decision space of a squad-based strategy game, Mechanicus gives you too many tools to ignore or subvert it and once you’re able to do this it becomes exactly what it was in danger of being all along: a dead-simple cakewalk that’s had most of the strategy stripped out of it. The good news is that I think it’s a problem that can be fixed quite easily by rebalancing the worst of the offending skills — that free attack one should be at the end of a skill tree, not at the start of it, and the free Canticle skill should be replaced entirely — and some items, like the mechadendrites that let you suck up three Cognition points at a time from any Necron that’s in melee range. Because they’re so freely available it means the time cooldowns on skills and abilities just aren’t an issue as you can juice up a single tech-priest with Cognition points to run halfway across the map and kill everyone and he can replenish them as he goes; however, if you turn off that spigot just a little bit you suddenly have to start thinking tactically again and using more of the tools at your disposal, like the Skitarii troops. It’s probably going to take Bulwark a little while to get there, but there’s no reason that Mechanicus can’t have these balance issues polished away in three months’ time.

The same can’t be said of the roguelite tomb exploration layer that sits between the squad management and the tactical combat, alas. Once you pick a mission to attempt you’ll be taken to a randomised holographic representation of the tomb the mission is set in. The tomb consists of a series of rooms connected by narrow passages, and each room contains an event of some kind. Gold diamonds are rooms that you have to travel to in order to complete the mission, and you’ll always be thrown into a combat encounter when you enter one. Red Necrons are optional combat encounters you can do for additional money. Green Glyphs are the equivalent of the mystery potions in other roguelikes — you’re presented with a series of glyphs with no indication as to what they do, and have to learn over the course of the game which ones are good and which ones are bad through trial and error. That’s fine since this is a roguelite; the problem is that most of the rooms have blue diamonds on them instead, which indicates that they’re bog-standard text adventure events where you read a snippet of blurb and then pick one of three choices relating to it, but the outcomes of those choices are entirely unpredictable and don’t actually appear to have any relation to what the text said was happening in the room. Picking what appears to be the sensible choice often backfires and what appears to be the stupid choice often yields a beneficial outcome. You’re never given any hint as to what the result might be, and since each event is unique with no relation to other events that have come before or after you’re effectively choosing at random — it’s basically the glyphs again, except the glyph effects are at least constant across the entire game, whereas the text adventure bits are the equivalent of flipping a three-sided coin and hoping it comes down on the side that gives you equipment rather than the side that lets the Necrons go first in the next battle.

This struck me as an astonishing waste of what was quite a promising idea. Because it very quickly became apparent that the actual text in the event descriptions was totally irrelevant I very quickly stopped reading it, and this turned the roguelite layer from something that could have added some quite significant thematic padding around the combat encounters — which are always one of the same three types of mission, so they could sorely use it — to an annoying speedbump that I had to sit through before I could get to the good part of the game. It would have been very cool if each tomb was a proper mini text adventure with later rooms in the tomb reacting to what you’d done earlier; instead it’s a concentrated dose of painfully shallow tedium, where you end up ignoring most of the tomb (and the potential loot) and instead plot the most direct route to the objective rooms because that will at least mean it’s over quicker. The thing I really don’t understand here is that the tomb exploration isn’t a throwaway part of the game; it’s had a significant amount of effort expended on it and the writing is actually quite atmospheric (when I bothered to read it), it’s just that the actual game design part of strikes me as something that didn’t come together for whatever reason and had to be simplified down into what’s in the final game in order to make a release deadline. Again, I think the tomb exploration isn’t irretrievably bad since there’s at least the shell of a good idea in there that could work if they completely stripped out the innards, but fixing it is going to be far more work than fixing the skill trees and I’m not sure Bulwark are going to have the resources to provide that level of post-release support.

So my impression of Mechanicus was broadly very positive for the first twelve hours I was playing it; it felt fresh and new and the tomb exploration wasn’t grating too much and I hadn’t yet managed to get enough levels on my tech-priests to trivialise the game. My impression of it for the last three hours was the polar opposite since all of the game’s components turned into a boring chore. However, this was something of a self-inflicted wound for two reasons. One is that I didn’t have to break the game quite so hard as I did, it just happens to be the way I like to play games and so I guess I got exactly what I wanted, in a way. The other is that Mechanicus might have a bunch of systems that outstay their welcome, but it at least has the wit to realise that this is a danger and unlocks the final boss mission for you when the Necron Doom Timer (yes, it’s pinched the doomsday clock from XCOM 2) is only three-quarters full. That I played other missions for a couple of hours past this point when I wasn’t really having that much fun with them is entirely my fault. That means I’m going to be a bit more forgiving of Mechanicus’ flaws than I might be otherwise; it’s a good first attempt at shaking up the XCOM formula and most of the rough edges can be sanded away with a little post-release support, and while I think it’s a borderline purchase right now (although certainly worth a look if you’re into 40k) it’s definitely got a lot of potential.

The post Thoughts: Warhammer 40,000 – Mechanicus appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an 18th century tall ships naval combat simulator that just so happens to be set in outer space.

To be precise, it’s set in the increasingly-overdone Warhammer 40k universe and it’s based off of an actual board game in said universe that Games Workshop made back in the mid-90s. Unfortunately the financial mileage in selling people a mere dozen ship models was deemed unsatisfactory in favour of doubling down on the potential profits to be found in selling people two hundred tiny plastic men at £20 for five, and so the Battlefleet Gothic boardgame was discontinued after a couple of years. However, two decades later we’re living in a magical era where all Games Workshop properties that do not directly compete with the tiny plastic men business are being dusted off and licensed out as video games as the parent company desperately scrabbles for more money. They already did Blood Bowl – twice — and while Space Hulk was a bit of a bust I’m still very much looking forward to Deathwing. BattlefleetGothic is very much in the vein of the first two, however; rather than licensing the universe for a traditional video game (like Dawn of War or Vermintide), Battlefleet Gothic is an attempt to directly adapt a set of board game rules to a video game environment.

It’s a something of a credit to how well BF:G does this that I didn’t realise just how direct that adaptation was until I downloaded and read the original BFG rulebook. The core skirmish environment of Battlefleet Gothic the videogame matches up pretty well with those rules, albeit somewhat altered so that it can work as a real-time game. Said rules painstakingly replicate precisely the sort of ship-to-ship engagements that you might have witnessed during the golden age of sail, complete with broadsides, boarding actions and ramming. There’s also a tiny element of WW2-era fleet actions sprinkled in — you can get disposable escort ships whose torpedoes are the only weapons they have worth a damn, and some of the larger capital ships are configured as carriers — but probably 80% of BFG’s ruleset could be cut and pasted into a game about the Napoleonic Wars with no modification whatsoever. Fortunately the Warhammer 40k universe is intentionally quite barmily anachronistic so that it can steal gameplay ideas from all over the shop and jam them all into the same setting, and BF:G is no exception; it’s actually a little surprising at how well the concept slides into place if you’re at all familiar with the material.

The single-player campaign of Battlefleet Gothic is set during one of the numerous Black Crusades that 40k’s big bad Chaos faction makes into the Imperium of Man. The Imperium’s thing is that they’re basically a gigantic religious cult based around the figurehead of their immortal God-Emperor, and so their ships look like gigantic floating cathedrals – plenty of gothic arches and spires hanging off the sides, and each ship is fronted off by a gigantic aquila prow for ramming into things. Imperial ships have a very limited quantity of turret armament; the bulk of their firepower is to be found in their macrocannon¹ broadsides, and so they’re the faction that plays most like a set of 18th century ships of the line. Macrocannon broadsides have significant penalties to accuracy at long range, so Imperial tactics are mostly to get in good and close and try to cross the T so that both sides of the ship can bring their macrocannon batteries to bear on the enemy.

Sometimes this is precisely the wrong thing to do, though. The campaign has you playing exclusively as the Imperials, but aside from renegade Imperial ships your opposition is composed of three enemy factions who each have ships that play in distinctly different ships. Chaos ships have a lot of long-range weapons, and while their boarding capability is okay thanks to their access to daemons their ships aren’t all that robust, so they love to stand off beyond macrocannon range and plink away at your ships – and the chaos AI is pretty good at kiting you indefinitely unless you get creative. Orks are the polar opposite of Chaos; their ships have tons of HP (although not much armour), huge gun batteries that are ineffectual beyond point-blank range but deadly within it, and a high troop value that makes them resistant to boarding actions; they also get a whole bunch of special weapons like boarding torpedoes and tractor cannons that are designed to cripple or immobilise opponents so that they’ll stay still long enough to be rammed. The usual Imperial approach of closing with the enemy means certain death when facing an Ork fleet; instead it’s you that has to stand off and keep the Orks from closing you down.

The last enemy faction are the faux-elven Eldar, who are the most finicky of the Battlefleet Gothic races; their ships are incredibly fast and, unlike everyone else, have all of their weapons mounted on the prow of the ship pointing forward. Also unlike everyone else, these weapons are lances that fire huge incandescent gouts of laser energy, which in game terms translates to “Has a decent range and always hits”. The Eldar are specialised towards hit-and-run strikes, setting themselves up for attack runs and dealing obscene quantities of damage with a single alpha strike before zooming past the enemy so fast they can’t retaliate. Arguably they’re over-specialised in this area, however, as the tradeoff is that Eldar ships are made out of the outer space equivalent of canvas and balsa wood. They don’t have void shields like everyone else; instead they’ve got holofields which deflect a quantity of incoming fire proportional to the ship’s current speed. If they’re going fast they’re basically untouchable. If they ever stop, then the holofields go down and they get ripped to pieces in one or two salvos.

Thankfully BFG does hand you a few tools to slow the Eldar down. Aside from their primary weapons ships can be upgraded and configured with a whole host of abilities such as deployable fighter and bomber squadrons; a nova cannon that functions as long-range artillery; jamming fields that reduce a ship’s sensor range to almost nothing, effectively blinding it; probes that’ll detect an enemy beyond a ship’s sensor range which go some way towards countering the jamming; and a whole array of bombs that you teleport into space and which explode after a set interval. These show up as big red circles on the map that denote the blast radius of the bomb, with a smaller expanding green circle inside that indicates how much time you have to vacate the area. Once the green circle matches the red one the bomb detonates and ruins the day of anyone still caught inside; what exactly the bomb will do depends on the type of bomb, but usually it’ll either do damage, bring down shields, or deploy a stasis bubble that massively slows down anything inside it. It’s this last one that is the prime anti-Eldar tool, and many missions against them involve trying to trap them inside a web of stasis fields so that you can shoot them – or at least herd them in the direction of your guns, since the AI is annoyingly good at avoiding bomb blasts.

To be fair, it’s no better than you are. The first thing I do on seeing an enemy bomb marker show up is to engage the Tactical Cogitator, which is 40k-speak for “one quarter game speed”. This is toggled by hitting the spacebar and you can have it on for as long as you want, which is great for micromanaging stuff in the heat of the moment but which did unfortunately mean I spent entire missions with it turned on. After switching on the Cogitator, I then order any ships caught in the projected blast radius to execute a Special Maneuver to get them outside it. Special Maneuvers burn fuel and can be thought of as afterburners — and function exactly like that if you order Full Speed Ahead — but they can also be used to turn your ship far more quickly than normal,  which is great for performing a hasty U-turn and then jetting away before the bomb explodes. Each ship has a limited amount of fuel to engage in maneuvers and it recharges pretty slowly so you can’t just use them willy-nilly, but I’d say the majority of orders you give during a battle are telling your ships to use maneuvers to get them out of the way of a charging Ork cruiser, or to position your Battleship optimally so that it can bring both broadsides to bear on an enemy.  Micromanaging ship targeting is something that almost never happens; usually what you do is set a desired engagement range and preferred targets for your entire fleet, and leave the business of physically firing the broadsides down to your ship captains.

There are five classes of ship in BFG, and before deploying on each mission you get a certain number of points to spend on drafting ships into your fleet; bigger ships are more powerful, but they also come with a hefty points pricetag, so overinvesting in big ships means you won’t have enough ships to cover the map and respond to unexpected events. The smallest and cheapest ships are the destroyer and frigate-class Escorts; these are fragile and don’t have much firepower to speak of, but they are fast, nimble and good at worrying down bigger ships in groups. Most importantly Escort ships are completely free; they don’t gain experience in the same way that your other ships do, but you can take as many Escorts as you have the points to buy and it doesn’t matter if you lose them since they’re supposed to be entirely disposable, making them excellent for baiting/distracting enemies. The next class up are the Light Cruisers, which are the fastest class of capital ship and which are best used as scouts and/or teleport boarding specialists. Then there are the Cruisers, which are the workhorses of the fleet; the Battlecruisers which function as your main points of power on the map; and the Battleships, which are devastatingly powerful but also so expensive to deploy that you’re usually better off taking a Battlecruiser and Cruiser for the same points cost.

Finding a good mix of ships to take on each mission is a challenge in and of itself, especially considering the different mission objectives each mission type has. There’s about 7-8 different types, ranging from running blockades to data recovery to straight up slugfests, and you’re going to want a different fleet composition depending on which one you’re doing and which race is providing the opposition. For Cruiser Clash it’s a good idea to ignore escorts in favour of taking your biggest and heaviest ships, while for Data Recovery you want at least one Light Cruiser to chase down the enemy ship carrying the data and board it. Since each ship class has different variants that are specialised towards specific combat goals there’s also interesting decisions to be made there; when fighting the Eldar I leaned away from my damage-dealing macrocannon carriers in favour of ships with lances and fighter squadrons that stood a higher chance of crippling their engines, but against Chaos the reverse was true since I wanted to get up close to them and pour in broadside after broadside.

These are the basic building blocks of Battlefleet Gothic, then, and nearly all of them have been lifted in part or in full from the boardgame rules, which were designed to provide repeatable objective-based skirmish games between two opponents. BFG goes further than this, however; its single-player campaign is a surprisingly comprehensive stab to weld these otherwise disposable skirmish games together into something resembling a coherent, persistent experience. You’re given custodianship of several different subsectors in a turn-based campaign interface. Each system is filled with 10-15 odd star systems and each turn anywhere between 3 and 6 worlds across all your sectors will be attacked by various enemy races, forcing you to play one of the above skirmish mission as either the attacker or the defender; crucially you can only respond to three of these attacks per turn, so you have to choose where to focus your effort and let some planets fall to the enemy. Each star system has a role to play in the war effort – forge world, shipyard, something called a portal planet — and losing one either because you ignored it or because you lost the battle you fought to defend it means that you suffer a small penalty, such as ships costing 5% more to buy and upgrade. It sounds like a small amount, but if you start to lose systems en masse it starts to add up and things can easily start to spiral out of control; all you can really do is focus on protecting the systems you deem the most valuable.

Your fleet in the campaign is persistent, of course, and is purchased and upgraded with a currency called Renown that you get for winning battles and destroying enemy ships. Ships gain experience and level up with every engagement; levelling up opens up new upgrade slots for them which you then fill with new ship systems that grant active abilities and passive bonuses using Renown. Interestingly the up-front cost of buying a brand-new ship is zero; you pay to unlock a slot for them in your fleet, but once that slot is open you can fill it with whatever ship you want and it will cost you nothing. The real cost sink is in the upgrades, skills and favours you bolt on to them later – which means that while replacing a destroyed ship is free, losing one still costs you because of the amount of resources invested into it; it’s not like you can just re-upgrade the new ship either, since the upgrades are linked to the ship’s level and the only way you can increase that is by taking it on engagements. Each ship has a name, which adds to their sense of character; my Dominator-class battlecruiser, the Saviour of Schindlegeist, has been the central bulwark of my fleet for more battles than I can count, prevailing against impossible odds more than once after the rest of the fleet was forced to withdraw due to damage. The comparisons to XCOM I’ve seen are a little unusual, but they are very much appropriate; losing a ship that’s been part of your fleet for twenty or more engagements hurts.

There’s a scripted plotline running alongside the randomly-generated skirmishes, with the plot automatically moving on once you’ve played X number of turns in the campaign. Another interesting thing Battlefleet Gothic does is that it allows you to fail the plot missions it sends you on, at the cost of suffering harsher consequences later. For example, an early mission has you fighting with Chaos over an ancient warp artifact. Succeed in the mission and the artifact is placed under lock and key by the Inquisition, lessening the impact of a warp storm that blows in later. Fail, and that warp storm ensures that any ship that retreats from battle will be lost in the warp for 4-5 turns and is thus unavailable for deployment.  This is the great strength of the BFG campaign, I think; it recognises that the point is to allow the player to tell their own story, and that a story where you win all the time is fundamentally boring, so it caters to the fail state. Later on you get to make some choices that genuinely branch which way the campaign goes. It’s impressively reactive and really helps weld those otherwise unconnected skirmish missions together into more than the sum of their parts.

This stops BFG’s randomly-generated encounters from getting boring for, oooh, about sixty missions or so. Unfortunately Battlefleet Gothic still has a serious problem here, because sixty missions will only get you just over halfway through the game. The campaign asks you to take on far too many engagements; from what I’ve read going through the full campaign would require you to fight over a hundred, and I don’t think there’s any tactical battle system in the world that would survive that amount of repetition – even XCOM only asks you to deploy on about thirty missions total during the course of a campaign, for crying out loud. The AI is also a significant weakness for the campaign; Eldar excepted, it’s surprisingly good at utilising the strengths of whatever race it’s playing, but it commits the cardinal sin of being predictable and fighting each battle in the same way each time. Eventually you learn that the Orks can be baited to chase Escorts across the map while you focus them down one at a time, and that once you’ve chased them into the corner of the map Chaos ships are sitting ducks. The Eldar AI is flat-out broken, attempting to stand and fight during defence missions when that’s precisely what the Eldar shouldn’t be doing. Because the AI is predictable the battles still feel extra-repetitive, and I feel like that’s kind of a huge issue when it’s asking me to fight a hundred of them. Unfortunately the point where I got bored coincided with the campaign unlocks drying up – I’d filled up my fleet and felt it didn’t have anything new to show me, so I fell out of the campaign around turn 20.

I feel like mechanically BFG is fine – which is to be expected, considering how faithful the conversion from the boardgame rules is. It excels at providing tactical encounters between two small fleets of ships, and I think this is why the real strength of BFG is probably to be found in multiplayer against a wily human opponent; it’s definitely got the complexity and tactical breadth to make that really interesting encounter. Tindalos have made a really respectable attempt to build those tactical encounters together into a coherent single-player campaign, and they got nearly everything right – their AI works for the most part, and they made some really good decisions about how the campaign should unfold. The key issue here is a structural one, though; the campaign pacing is all wrong and stretches things out for way too long, and all the good decisions in the world can’t prevent it from turning into a slog. It’s basically the same problem I had with Xenonauts, except here I couldn’t muster up the willpower to batter my way through to the end. Unusually I don’t feel resentful towards Battlefleet Gothic because of this; it is a fine game and I enjoyed the 15 hours I played of it, and I don’t feel particularly cheated that I hit the eject button before I got to the end, but it’s definitely something to be aware of if you’re buying it with an eye to getting invested in the single-player.

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