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Blackstone Fortresses, eh? I suppose it's too much to hope that the Necrons will make an appearance, the Gothic War being before the Necrons were revamped. A Cairn tomb ship would be a heck of a boss fight.
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Jan 23, 2017 00:07
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Veloxyll posted:Imperials are supposed to be solid at ramming, though maybe not better than Orks, considering the other disadvantages Orks have. (Slow, inaccurate, random, no high speed manuevers, insurbordinate, can't tactically accelerate - the big red button uses the full tank) Also, the Imperial Navy, Orks, and Tyranids (which I don't know if are in this game or not) are the only races in the tabletop that make a habit of ramming. Eldar and Dark Eldar ships are made of tissue paper, Tau never want to be that close to an enemy, and Necrons are certainly tough enough to do it but encourage a more conservative playstyle. Chaos and Space Marines can do it when the situation demands but don't make it standard practice.
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Jan 23, 2017 13:24
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PoptartsNinja posted:Blanks are also completely soulless, and for a while rather than dissolving them into their component atoms Necrons made Pariahs out of them. Alas, like all the other creepy mysterious aspects of the Necrons, Pariahs are no longer a thing.
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Jan 24, 2017 04:02
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Valiantman posted:Are you joking or did the Steamhead Duardin-ize 40k, too? See also the Imperial Guard, who have formally been the Astra Militarum for a year or two now.
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Jan 25, 2017 03:07
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akulanization posted:I think the ships are a few kilometers long. Which is still really loving' big, but not quite that bit. Battlefleet Gothic has always been a bit schizophrenic about size, but IIRC the basic little Imperial escorts are supposed to be one to two kilometers long, so work from there. The really big ships are the likes of Space Hulks, Hive Ships, and Cairn class Tomb Ships. Don't know if any of those three are in the game, though.
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Jan 26, 2017 01:12
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Legendary ships, eh? Terminus Est is an obvious one, flagship of Typhus the Traveler of the Death Guard, but I dunno what other legendary ships could be unless they're bringing out one of the Heresy-era Legion flagships - the Vengeful Spirit (Sons of Horus/Black Legion), Pride of the Emperor (Emperor's Children), Conqueror (World Eaters), Iron Blood (Iron Warriors), Nightfall (Night Lords), Endurance (Death Guard), Photep (Thousand Sons), Alpha (Alpha Legion), or Trisagion (Word Bearers).
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Jan 29, 2017 21:35
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The Orks do indeed have teleporters in the tabletop - or as the Orks call them, tellyportas. They're hardly reliable, but it's Orks they don't care.
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Jan 30, 2017 00:48
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DatonKallandor posted:Many of these are Gloriana Class "gently caress your fleet" monster ships. Those are way above Battleship grade. Hell the Trisagion is something that makes Gloriana class look like a wimp. Yeah, which is why I thought they might be "legendary" ships suitable as bosses after someone mentioned legendary ships being a thing. Likewise a Space Hulk, Cairn class tomb ship, or a Hive Ship. The Conqueror even comes pre-established with suitable boss fight mechanics in the form of its harpoon cannons that drag ships in close where they can be easily boarded or simply destroyed by the ship's guns. Its captain during the Heresy was also one of the few prominent women in the Imperial military, a fleet captain so aggressive and ferocious that she held the personal respect of the World Eaters in general and Kharn in particular - even Angron addressed her with some level of respect. She also shot a World Eaters captain in the face with her sidearm and lived to tell about it.
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Jan 30, 2017 02:04
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Don't know if Necrons are in this game or not, but someone in another thread noticed something very interesting in the game's intro: The crone ain't kidding about consorting with powers far greater than Abby...
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Jan 30, 2017 03:26
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Arashiofordo3 posted:The Necron C'Tan The Deceiver. Dude has a very distinctive head. IIRC, the Gothic War was also about Abby stealing or destroying the Blackstone Fortresses. The Blackstone Fortresses were made by the Eldar gods during the War in Heaven to kill the C'Tan, so it looks like the Deceiver is using Abby as a pawn to eliminate the Fortresses.
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Jan 30, 2017 13:40
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DatonKallandor posted:Unfortunately the big Necron retcon killed all the C'tan related plot threads. A shame, because Void Dragon on Mars, Deceiver doing Deceiver things and Outsider slowly waking up from his Dyson Sphere had the potential to be really cool. Certainly better than Space Tomb Kings. The Void Dragon on Mars is still a thing in one novel written after the Newcrons. The Void Dragon wasn't broken into shards like the other C'Tan, and the Emperor's prison for it is failing...
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Jan 31, 2017 03:17
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Bloody Pom posted:I eagerly await the Adeptus Mechanicus revealing that they were a Void Dragon cult all along. You joke, but this is actually pretty close to the truth. The Emperor defeated the Void Dragon on Earth during the Middle Ages (he was Saint George), and brought it to Mars and imprisoned it. You see, the Void Dragon's knowledge of material science and technology is absolute, and it inspires mad dreams in those around it that reveal some of its knowledge. The Emperor brought the Void Dragon to Mars specifically to inspire what would one day become the Adeptus Mechanicus which in turn would serve his purposes. Every ten thousand years or so, the Void Dragon attracts a new keeper and protector who inherit the book the Emperor left behind with instructions on how to keep the Void Dragon contained and safely inspiring the Mechanicus. A new keeper and guardian were drawn to the Dragon in M40, but found that the sacred book went missing during the last changing of the guard at the outbreak of the Horus Heresy...
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Jan 31, 2017 03:44
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Also, fun fact: Cadia was tainted by Chaos from the word go. It was discovered by Lorgar, the first primarch to fall to Chaos, and colonized on his orders. The Cadian Gate was where the bulk of Lorgar's legion fell to Chaos.
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Jan 31, 2017 13:34
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koolkevz666 posted:One of my favourite examples of the relationship chaos marines have with demons is from the Talon of Horus book, where the protagonist Thousand Sun Sorcerer opens a portal for him and his chaos buddies including a funny world eater marine to escape and as soon as he opens said portal both he and his mates and the soldiers back on his ship facing the other portal are immediately attacked by chaos demons. Also the bit in Deliverance Lost where a Raven Guard ship under cloak (fyi Raven Guard ships have cloaking devices) enters the Warp right next to a Word Bearer battlecruiser and the Word Bearers get dragged unprotected into the Warp in the Raven Guard's wake. The Word Bearers are all eaten by daemons before they can get their Gellar field up and running.
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Jan 31, 2017 14:49
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Mightypeon posted:This is basically why Raven Guard is the best loyalist legion. The way their cloaking devices were described as working is also kind of interesting. Normal void shields are tuned to keep stuff out but be permeable to things coming from inside so you can shoot through them. Corax and his friends in the Mechanicum managed to retune void shields to instead keep everything *in*, making them invisible to the eye and mundane sensors at the cost of offering no protection at all while in cloak mode.
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Feb 1, 2017 03:30
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Am I the only Necron fan in this thread? Trazyn is great. Nope, I'm a Necron fan but honestly preferred the old ones. The Necrons in tabletop Battlefleet Gothic, though, were infamously awful to play as and against, and if they ever appear in this game they'll need to be reworked heavily.
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Feb 1, 2017 03:41
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Perestroika posted:Pretty much, yeah. They're intentionally designed to be fundamentally overpowered. Their ships are the best at almost everything, with no meaningful weaknesses. Faster than Eldar, more resilient than Space Marines, better weapons than pretty much anybody, and even very good boarding because why the hell not. The supposed balancing factor was that they'd grant a huge amount of victory points if you did manage to destroy them. So if you'd manage to kill at least a single cruiser in exchange for losing your entire fleet you might end up coming out ahead in points and nominally count it as a win. The balancing act of the Necrons was supposed to come in in Battlefleet campaigns: where every other race might have a hundred ships available (more for Orks), the Necrons have twenty or thirty. Necron ships are powerful as all get out, but playing in a campaign mode they're frustrating to play as because every time you gently caress up or simply get unlucky you're punished severely. This feeds into the problem you talk about, that this gives no incentive for Necron players to take risks or get stuck in and instead phase out the moment they're ahead in points. PoptartsNinja posted:Wasn't the Necron Battlefleet Gothic gimmick "we chain a bunch of lances together to make a super-lance to one-shot your battleship and then leave the board immediately because that means we'll win on points"? Not exactly. What you're referring to is a unique mechanic of the Necron battery-equivalent that's actually pretty neat and would probably make it into this game in some form. You see, the Necrons don't do traditional port/broadside/etc gun batteries with defined arcs of fire. Instead they have lightning arcs, which each cover multiple arcs of fire and have a total strength that can be divided or concentrated between each arc every round as the Necrons please. Say, you have a Necron cruiser with a lightning arc with a power of 9 that covers the bow, port, and starboard arcs. You can divide the arc to fire off a power 3 shot in all three arcs, or fire a power 6 shot in your starboard arc to nail a cruiser while a power 3 shot goes forward to pick off an escort. Or you can have the ship fire a single strength 9 salvo directly ahead. Necron lances on the other hand were standard. Better than everyone's, but they worked pretty normally. Necrons did not have ordnance outside of some experimental rules, but they did have a nova wave mounted on their larger ships - a shockwave effect around the ship that didn't harm friendlies but wiped all ordnance off the board in the area of effect. It did have a cooldown, though, and IIRC Necron ships didn't have turrets forcing them to rely on nova waves and lightning arcs. If Necrons had a specific vulnerability, it was to getting overwhelmed by ordnance. On the other hand they might not care, because Necron ships were incredibly resilient and had a chance to flat-out nope any hit they suffer.
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Feb 1, 2017 13:54
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Potentially relevant to 30k/40k nerds, rules and some of the fluff have been leaked for the next 30k book which has rules for the Space Wolves, Thousand Sons, Adeptus Custodes, Sisters of Silence, and some Mechanicum weirdos no one's heard of before or cares about now. Good grief the Emperor really was keeping all the excellent poo poo for himself and the Custodes - and to a lesser extent the Sisters, who are more or less the holy mashup of the Sisters of Battle, Culexus Assassins, and Space Marines. Also, Psi-Titans.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:33
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Veloxyll posted:Are the Sisters of Silence still inexplicably lead by men? They can be (they're part of the same force as the Custodes), but they have their own leaders and their own special character - the leader of the entire order who herself can boss Custodes around. Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian, is the other named character for the force, although it's also confirmed by some of the Custodes/Sisters rules that the Big E himself will get tabletop rules.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:40
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Samovar posted:Should have been Jaghati. Or Corax. Papa Smurf, in the Heresy novels and tabletop books, is established to be a man with one weakness but it's a significant one: he has no creativity, at all. Every unique unit and special trait and ability the Ultramarines have in the 30k era isn't something Papa Smurf or his followers came up with themselves, but something another Legion or other force did first, then Papa Smurf studied and refined (he would say perfected). Corax has no such restriction and always believed that the Astartes were meant to liberate mankind, not conquer it. Or get Dorn back, his death is still ambiguous depending on which sources you look at. He's the one loyalist primarch who actually straight-up killed a traitor primarch.
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Feb 5, 2017 13:03
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, that's what makes the whole thing a tad grating. For years, the whole Ynnead thing has been teased as basically the one possible thing that might allow the Eldar to have an actual victory. Their one chance at redemption, at saving the remnants of their doomed race and all that. Often it has been talked about as the final endgame of their faction, on a similar scale as the Emperor somehow being resurrected, or Chaos actually capturing Terra, or the Orks actually getting all their poo poo together in an unified waaagh. What were you expecting, one of the lower-selling armies to save the day? GW's always been very up front about how all the fluff, all the games and books and everything, exist for the sole purpose of making the tabletop figurines sell better, and Marines are far and away the best-selling army.
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Feb 5, 2017 13:22
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V. Illych L. posted:i mean it might be interesting if the space elfs could actually not gently caress up something but that's me The farseer thing is really just Ulthwe's hat - the craftworld Eldrad is from and that featured in Dawn of War 1 and all its expansions. There are a number of other craftworlds, many of which play to different takes on the Eldar - Alaitoc is the most conservative and regimented, Iyanden is mostly dead (read: wraith constructs), Biel-Tan is extraordinarily aggressive and ruled by Aspect Warriors, and Saim-Hann is the Wild Hunt with jetbikes.
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Feb 6, 2017 04:12
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wiegieman posted:The Tau really are a hair's breadth from annihilation when it comes to the Imperium, it's just not worth the effort this millennium. If the Damocles gulf crusade hadn't diverted to kill tyrannids or if they'd caught one of the grown up sized waaaghs, there wouldn't be any Tau left. They're just lucky enough to have doctrine that works well against the tyrannids, and badly against everything else -- the Imperial Navy creams them every time they fight, because there's nothing stopping them from just cruising past the firing line and shredding them with broadsides. Yes, yet they'll never actually go away and have absurd bullshit by the bucketload on the tabletop.
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Feb 7, 2017 13:37
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my dad posted:e: ^^^ Tau have the advantage of being the only faction that has time working in their favor. They're overtaking the Imperium in some regards, and they have a sorta-maybe endgame in establishing contact with all surviving "neutral" xenos to form a pangalactic "gently caress the Imperium" alliance. No, they don't have this advantage at all. It's a significant thing in the fluff that the Tau can afford to outfit all their ships and ground forces with all the fancy kit that they do for a simple reason: their standing forces are tiny compared to every other faction. All those battlesuits and fancy toys are expensive, and the Tau are small enough that they can afford it and small enough that they can keep the supply up. Doesn't help that Tau ships are pitifully slow in the fluff - and again, they get away with it because of how absolutely tiny their empire is. The Imperial Guard doesn't use the lasgun as their standard weapon because it's the most powerful gun they could have chosen, they use it because it's the most powerful gun that's practical to equip trillions of men and women with. Space Marines got stuck with bolters at their creation because they were much cheaper and easier to manufacture in the numbers needed by the Marines than the volkite guns the Emperor originally intended for them. Something to think about for the Imperium: there are planets, plural, that are colossal factory worlds that do nothing but manufacture lasguns. There are other factory worlds that do nothing but manufacture lasgun power cells, or bolter shells, or chainswords, or any of the other weapons the Imperium uses. The men and women of the Departmento Munitorum, the Imperial agency responsible for keeping Imperial forces across the galaxy supplied with the weapons and equipment they need, probably count more people in their ranks than the Tau Empire has people, period.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:07
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my dad posted:Nope, their plasma tech is straight up more advanced than Imperial tech. The Imperium has far, far more advanced plasma tech than the Tau - the catch being that the availability of Imperial technology is exceedingly uneven and your typical Tau plasma gun is better than the typical Imperial plasma gun. But every once in a while there's an Imperial plasma gun that's much better than the best Tau plasma gun. Time only seems to work in the Tau's favor because they're so tiny that many of the problems intrinsic to the Imperium don't apply to the Tau. The Tau don't have a need for goods and tools that warrants planetary-scale industry. The Tau have never worried about fighting a war at the end of a years-long supply chain. The Tau have never had to figure out how to equip, feed, train, and deploy military forces numbering in the trillions. The Tau have never confronted Warp Storms erupting in their supply lines or in habitable systems. The Tau have never faced the full might of a Hive Fleet like Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan. The Tau never had to face half their military turning traitor. Remember that humanity in the Dark Age of Technology was capable of teleporting star systems across the galaxy, creating stars, and employing time travel as practical battlefield technology. The Tau aren't even a blip on the radar compared to what the Imperium has on hand for extreme emergencies.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:25
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my dad posted:Counterpoint: Anime. Also, your beloved Tau were literally manufactured by the Eldar as easily manipulated minions.
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Feb 8, 2017 03:30
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koolkevz666 posted:Ah my bad and I apologise I only knew of the less advanced versions of the STCs, never knew they had full database versions. IIRC, the difference is between Standard Template Constructor and Standard Template Construct.
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Feb 8, 2017 19:33
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koolkevz666 posted:One lord is an undead robot pirate. Trazyn the Infinite is a collector. A collector of the rare and priceless in his tesseract vaults, and his collection is something to behold - he's got Custodes in there. He's got most of a Craftworld. He's got a [maybe] Primarch.
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Feb 8, 2017 20:38
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Ze Pollack posted:And Trazyn knows just the nine-foot-tall undead robot monstrosity with a fleet that can block out suns and an army that uses the shattered fragments of the gods they've broken as pokemon to preserve it good and proper. Also, he woke up during the Great Crusade like a small number of other Necrons. Now most Necrons, waking up to find the newborn Imperium lead by the Emperor and the twenty primarchs, immediately said nope we're not doing this and hid or fled. Not Trazyn. Trazyn claims to have been a personal friend of a few of the primarchs, and quite possibly has the primarch Vulkan in his stasis vaults. It is plausible - Ferrus Manus' titular iron hands were necrodermis from destroying a Necron construct, and Alpharius' weapon of choice was a Necron polearm.
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Feb 8, 2017 22:25
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DatonKallandor posted:In one story the automated STC factory happened to be tampered with by the Void Dragons minions. It was endlessly churning out Necrons with Lightning Fields. Admech did not appreciate the perfection of the machine in that instance. Another one involving an STC had the STC part of a sentient Titan AI from the Dark Age, a Titan far more powerful than any current model... and the sentient Titan had made bargains with Chaos, becoming a Chaos Lord in its own right.
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Feb 9, 2017 00:56
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And more pointedly, the Reapers take a hell of a lot of inspiration from Alistair Reynolds' Inhibitors and Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers. The latter even get a direct shout-out in ME2 with the Qwib-Qwib.
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Feb 10, 2017 13:53
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Perestroika posted:And Necrons would probably just need a major conceptual overhaul and rebalancing to make them not an utter chore to play against. And a chore to play as. Trust me, the Necron player's probably not enjoying it any more than you are.
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Feb 17, 2017 03:25
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Really? I've never played the table top game. Was it as difficult playing 'Crons as people said it was playing against them? Not so much difficult as tedious. Yes, Necron ships are absurdly maneuverable, incredibly resilient, and have a host of special abilities, but playing as the Necrons, any mistakes on your part or simply getting unlucky are punished severely. Each Necron escort is worth more than many race's cruisers, so the Necron player is encouraged to play them in the most conservative and, for the other player, obnoxious way. There's no incentive for a Necron player to take risks or get stuck in because the costs are so high. What other people mentioned, that the normal way things go is the Necrons dance around the edges until the moment they've inflicted enough damage to come out ahead, isn't simply the Necron player being a dick but the way the rules are set up for the Necron player to act. Put another way, the Necrons can trade one of their escorts for three enemy cruisers and come out as a decisive defeat for the Necrons. The Necrons therefore have no reason to risk even their escorts.
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Feb 17, 2017 15:07
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The Door Frame posted:It's basically the only way they could think to nerf the unstoppable Necron threat while still having them be overpowered in combat. I remember monkeystomping my brother's Catachan IG army in the 40k tabletop, but he'd kill just enough Necrons to force me to warp out and lose. It was so frustrating to instantly lose a battle that I was clearly winning Not nerf, it's how the Necrons were designed from the ground up originally. They were conceived of, in gameplay terms, as being the super-elite army fielding small numbers of powerful soldiers but at the cost of not being able to handle losses well. I blame the bad gameplay design, and Dawn of War: Dark Crusade's extremely simplistic writing of the Necrons, for why the old Necrons got tossed in the garbage.
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Feb 17, 2017 21:45
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Disproportionation posted:While I like the idea of one faction having almost overwhelmingly powerful ships (oldschool Necrons were portrayed as being a very Borg-esque threat, particularly their tombships), I gotta agree that Necrons would need a very heavy rework to make that kind of David v Goliath setup fun, possibly more work than just rebalancing the for parity with the other factions. Here's the general lowdown on how Necron ships worked, leaving aside that they were generally better at everything than their counterparts. 1. Necron battery-equivalents have no weapon arcs. They have a set total weapon strength that they can fire each turn, and divide that total weapon strength between shots in their four arcs - or fire the whole strength in one shot. 2. Necrons have no ordnance - no torpedoes or strike craft. 3. Necron ships are absurdly maneuverable, especially their big ships relative to their size. 4. Large necron ships carry a nova wave, a point-blank shockwave that emanates from the ship and deletes all enemy torpedoes and strike craft hit no questions asked and no friendly fire. The nova wave does have a cooldown. 5. The tombship can be upgraded with a device that makes an enemy ship take a penalized leadership test or panic. 6. Necrons have extremely heavy armor and a chance to, on top of that normal armor, simply nope any hit regardless of strength. Lances bypass this armor. 7. Necrons are very powerful at boarding actions (not as strong as Tyranids, though) and their teleporation (i.e. lightning strike) hit twice every time. 8. Necrons have a different critical hit table than everyone, most effects temporarily or permanently reducing the strength of their battery-equivalents or permanently reducing the ship's leadership. 9. As Necron ships are damaged, they have to take leadership tests or phase out immediately. 10. When the Necron fleet takes a certain amount of total damage (not even necessarily destroyed ships), the entire fleet phases out no questions asked. 11. Completely undamaged Necron ships award 10% of their points to the enemy as VP, and the % goes up the more heavily the ships are damaged. Of these traits, I think points 1, 2, 4, and 6 are the most likely to make it into this game in some form should the Necrons ever be added.
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Feb 17, 2017 22:13
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paragon1 posted:So no one in the Imperium actually understands how to build these ships and their means of construction is basically preserved by centuries of inertia and habit, right? Not quite. The AdMech, by and large, genuinely are competent engineers who understand very well what they're doing. They don't like to share the good stuff with the rest of the Imperium to preserve their own power and security, and they are intensely conservative regarding new technology, but they're not morons for the most part.
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Mar 9, 2017 23:41
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CommissarMega posted:Cythereal did say 'for the most part' Also, the AdMech going gaga for Necrons and getting massacred has been significantly toned down if not completely dropped with the Necron revamp. Now there's nothing super ancient and mysterious about them and they use Warp-based technology in places. The Necrons' whole "doesn't use the Warp at all but are complete masters of material science" thing has fallen by the wayside.
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Mar 10, 2017 00:04
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White Coke posted:One of the redeeming features about the Imperium is that it's pretty tolerant of a lot of things real world fascists hate, like PoC, LGBTQIA people, and women. But this usually only appears in some of the expanded universe books. In the mainstream material it's mostly straight, white men with english accents. Something that always gives me a good giggle is that in their respective expanded universes, Warhammer 40k has more, and more positive, depictions of LGBT people than Star Trek and Star Wars combined.
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Apr 29, 2017 12:13
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Hunter Noventa posted:Ah right, been a while since I read those books. There's also been several in the Horus Heresy novels, mostly remembrancers (think state-sponsored artists, historians, and propagandists commissioned by the Imperium to record its glories and triumphs).
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Apr 29, 2017 23:35
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Dreadwroth posted:I love how humorless they portray Dorn in it, its great. Dorn being humorless is more or less canon, going by the Horus Heresy series. Rogal Dorn is very, very German.
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May 23, 2017 01:44
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