A Majestic Omen (BFG)

[Hotfoot]

It Must Be My Birthday Or Something

I would have taken a turn based game in this arena, or Necromunda, but a RTS Battlefleet Gothic? Yes please.

Expect Dauntless Light Cruisers to take up a majority of my screenshot space here.

[Lys]

There's also a Space Hulk first person shooter and a Warhammer Fantasy: Total War in the works. Frigid will get a chance to play High Elves again!

[Hotfoot]

There's also Warhammer Quest which seems to have finally released, and Mordenheim that's in development.

Now, Necromunda.....

[Josh]

Ah man, I'd really prefer a TBS or some sort of Sins of a Solar Empire style if it's going to be RTS, but I'll give it a try.

[Lys]

I hope Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is focused on commanding your fleet in battles and not on the base management stuff that I always found tedious in most RTS games. I mean, I don't mind supply line management as part of being a flag officer, because it's part of the deal at that level of command, but I hate the way most games abstract it into something that has nothing to do with how supply lines actually work. I want to command units in battle, not tell engineers where to build ore extraction facilities.

[Josh]

Abstract it Sins or even better SotS style and I'll be happier.

Hell, now that I think about it there's a lot to be said for doing something akin to the way SotS handled things.

(But not SotS II.)

[Hotfoot]

First Impressions

Looks like they're taking a Total War approach to it, so base management is not going to be a tremendous issue.

[frigidmagi]

This could be so awesome...

[Josh]

This could be so awesome...

I'm going to fight to manage my expectations, but yes, on paper it does sound very, very promising.

[Hotfoot]

It's a smaller studio, but it could work out. Of course, that said, the smaller studios seem to be turning out the better GW-related titles in many respects, so, salt and all.

[Josh]

DLed the beta today, played with it a bit. Looks promising so far.

[Josh]

Sittin' in a nebula, just lobbin' torps at heretics.

Oh hello, half the spread impacted the enemy cruiser on a blind shot?

I can live with that.

FOR THE EMPEROR!

[Josh]

Holy shit, I love this skirmish mode. Randomly generated battles plus accrued experience/upgrades for ships and crews? Hell to the yes.

Data missions fucking suck, though. I STEALS YOUR DATA WARP JUMP C-YA.

[Josh]

...Cobra destroyers+asteroid fields=slightly larger debris field.

Ah well, lessons learned.

All made up for by the TRANSPORT MURDERING capabilities of my Firestorm flotilla. Fuck you, heretics!

[Josh]

Also, I rammed the living shit out of a renegade Dauntless with my Lunar. Whee! Ramming is as simple as getting in close, cutting a path to intersect the enemy ship broadside, and then jamming your fiercely armored prow into them.

(Um, shortly thereafter my Lunar had a regrettably fatal encounter with a minefield. Stupid environmental hazards.)

[Josh]

Um. Why is my very loyal to the God-Emperor cruiser named "Pride of Erebus"?

Somebody needs to get blammed over that.

[Lys]

Um. Why is my very loyal to the God-Emperor cruiser named "Pride of Erebus"? Somebody needs to get blammed over that.

Erebus is probably the name of an Imperial planet, and in the 41st Millenium nobody knows or cares that he was worshiped as a primordial God of darkness tens of thousands of years ago.

[Cynical Cat]

Um. Why is my very loyal to the God-Emperor cruiser named "Pride of Erebus"? Somebody needs to get blammed over that.

Erebus is probably the name of an Imperial planet, and in the 41st Millenium nobody knows or cares that he was worshiped as a primordial God of darkness tens of thousands of years ago.

It's also the name of one of Word Bearer Traitor Legion's leaders.

[Josh]

Yeah, like pretty much the MOTHERFUCKER THAT IS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ENTIRE GOD DAMNED HORUS HERESY.

No wonder that stupid ship ran into a minefield.

[Josh]

I mean, most responsible besides

Spoiler: show

the Emperor for being such a shit dad.

[White Haven]

Where does Leman Russ's gullibility fall in that ranking of yours?

[Josh]

Leman was a well-meaning dupe but not an asshole on the scale of say Fulgrim.

Anywho, say hello to my leetle nova cannon...

[Josh]

So, more earnest reviewing.

Have not played MP yet, just skirmish mode. Loooooooooooove the design of skirmish mode, essentially an endless campaign of building a bigger and better fleet and performing various missions (finally beat a data mission, yay!)

Control scheme is kind of a fucking mess, camera controls are like Q,S,E something and in the same area you have command hotkeys like A,D for engine controls, which is like fucked. Some commands are global, like full burn, while others are specific to the senior ship in the selected group, like Lock On or Brace for Impact. Managing stuff like lightning strikes against the AI is a pain because they'll hit you with three on your flagship while you're furiously clicking about trying to swap between ships and individually command them for it. Firing torpedoes is likewise a nuisance and so rather than one glorious simultaneous salvo you end up with staggered waves. Chaos players are bitching because Nova Cannons are instant and have no scatter, which is game-breaking for specific missions like convoy attacks or station attacks.

(Fleet of three to five Imperial ships with nova cannons, spam them at the targets simultaneously and goodbye convoy.)

The other issue with nova spam is that the only real defense against it is to get into knife-fight range, which of course kills the Chaos advantages of range and speed.

Imperial players are likewise bitching because Chaos can spam assault boats at them from beyond anything but nova cannon/torpedo range and assault boats are king pain in ass.

Also, you won't ever see all the lovely graphics from the videos because you're going to be max zoomed out to manage your fleet, which means you'll be getting abstracted views of the battle rather than gloriously detailed closeups of heretic ships bleeding their lives into the void under the impact of His Most Holy Macro Cannons.

Finally, the beta restricts you pretty much to a windowed form that's tough on screen navigation and loses shit at the bottom for me if I maximize it, leading to the aforementioned loss of a Cobra flotilla to asteroids and a Lunar to a minefield because my FOV was too damn small. But that's just a beta issue so no sweat there.

All these things said, it's hella fun. While torps are getting panned for effectiveness, I for one love using the microjump to bop from one side of an enemy ship to another, bow-on-side, lay into them with a spread of torps and then RAM THE FUCK OUT OF THEIR HERETICAL ASSES IN OVERDRIVE.

Oh, pathing can be retarded sometimes but honestly I don't mind because it's the kind of stupid shit that actually happens in fleet actions sometimes. So you order your ships to do a thing, converge on a target or whatever, and then suddenly you realize that one light cruiser turned into another and now the second light cruiser is running full steam into the side of the first one and both of them are being beaten to shit and you just gotta laugh even as thousands of hapless pixelmans die horrible deaths crushed beneath twisted metal, roasted by fires on the decks, and spilled out into the merciless void of space.

Verdict: having fun.

[Josh]

Oh, and in terms of Lys' concerns about the RTS aspects, there's no basebuilding or anything like that at all. Victories give points, you use points to upgrade existing ships and unlock slots for new ones. I did a little of the campaign and all that you have there are worlds to conquer/secure that I guess affect your turn-to-turn build point level.

(Didn't do the campaign for long because it's not savable right now and I can't just sit and play through continuously what with work and life and stuff.)

[Josh]

Whoops, just found out torps do indeed have a minimum range and so my tactic is not as glorious as I'd like for it to be. Ah well.