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Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



This may have the dubious honor of being the second 40k game to interest me in the past ten years, the only other being BFGA2. And that's because big boats and big explosion and big pretty.

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Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Cannibal Llama posted:

Said it before and I'll say it again - Whacky Ork mercenary/Blood Axe companion who's always encouraging you to pick the options that will lead to violence during dialogue(and if you pick enough you gain positive influence with him)(( possibly leading to a ROMANCE?!?!)) or else this game will be bad.

Gotta gently caress the xenos to get the full RT experience.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



SirFozzie posted:

Especially an Eldar. It'd give new meaning to the phrase "Wild mon-keigh sex"

Oops All Slaanesh

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



I find 40k way easier to deal with if you treat it like a cheap summer blockbuster. It's tons of flash and explosions but at the end of the day it's the junk food of junk food sci-fi. This isn't Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or Dune or what have you. This is Michael Bay Transformers.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Bloody Hedgehog posted:

If this is your first time getting into 40k fiction, the Horus Heresy stuff might be a bit of rough start. There's a definitely great stuff in there, but it's a mix of authors, so there's some serious dogshit mixed in with the good stuff. It's also some of the most gratingly serious stuff written in 40K, to the point where it can become almost a joke how up it's own rear end it can be.

Dan Abnett is top tier WH40k fiction, so anything by him is decent. The Eisenhorn books are great place to start, and the related Ravenor/Bequin books he's written that are offshoots of Eisenhorn are shaping up to be perhaps the most important lore stuff in 40k in ages. The Night Lords books by Aaron Dembski-Bowden are also top tier, but they are an example of the super grimdark, serious stuff, so your mileage may vary. If you want something more light-hearted, the Ciaphas Cain books by Alex Stewart are fairly decent. They're nowhere near as good as Abnetts stuff, and the authors bag of literary tricks is seriously limited, but it's fun to read along with a reluctant hero who'd rather be getting drunk and slacking off than being a paragon of the Imperium.

This would be good for the OP, seeing as we'll probably have more than a few "I have no idea what 40k is aside from the GRIMDARK, why should I care about a CRPG story?" folks as this thread evolves.

Books, games, podcasts... anything that helps people get familiar with the setting, even if it isn't specifically focused on Rogue Traders. Though some RT-focused stuff would be cool too for those of us who only know the broad strokes that they were mentioned in some 3rd Ed codex we read in middle school.

The last one is me, I know the broad strokes of what Rogue Traders are, but I also haven't seriously looked at 40k anything outside BFGA2 in a decade (also Darktide because I want my fuckin Ogryn).

edit:

CommissarMega posted:

(Seriously though, I want that cathedral helmet IRL :allears:)

I did not notice the cathedral hat on the first pass.

Warmachine fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Jun 5, 2022

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



CottonWolf posted:

If you want to get a good look at how they treat technology, play Mechanicus. It’s a good game and all the characters are tech-priests (or Nekrons).

I'm sure this nomenclature is not at all confusing to outsiders.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Perestroika posted:

While we're on the topic, it might be a good idea to get into Archeotech a bit, since this game might well directly touch onto it.

Basically, during the Dark Age of Technology, humanity's level of technology was really loving good, to the point where it could genuinely rival that of older alien races. But most of that was lost during the age of strife and at the current point in time, the Imperium's degree of technological sophistication is really rather poor compared to other players in the galaxy. They mostly compensate by sheer weight of numbers and industry. However, bits and pieces of that older, superior human technology are still scattered around the galaxy, commonly known as archeotech. Those can range from simply very good guns to advanced power generators to planet-destroying superweapons.

Unsurprisingly, the Adeptus Mechanicus very much likes to gets their hands on such pieces, in part to make sure nothing terribly cursed gets into circulation, but mostly to maintain their continuing stranglehold on all technological knowledge. Nonetheless, small bits and pieces of archeotech do get out and are often a highly sought-after commodity among the Imperium's nobility. Rogue Traders in particular can often be found chasing after rumours of Archeotech finds, hoping to beat the Mechanicus search parties to the punch. That's also one of the major reasons why you occasionally find Mechanicus priests riding along with Rogue Trader crews, exchanging their technological expertise in exchange for first dibs on any archeotech finds. For the same reason, you also see former Mechanicus priests on these crews, who have left behind the Adeptus (or were forced to flee) because they chafed under the dogma.

Perhaps the pinnacle of archeotech are the Standard Template Constructs (STCs), which were the thing that once allowed humanity to spread so quickly throughout the galaxy. Basically, an STC is a combination of an automated factory and a knowledge base of all human technology. A fresh group of colonists with a STC could just throw some raw resources in one end and receive reactors, vehicles, and whatever else they might need out the other, complete with blueprints and instructions on how to maintain and reproduce them. Unfortunately, all known STCs in existence have been either destroyed or have vastly degenerated (as they often included significant AI), and the best the Imperium can hope for is recovering small fragments that include blueprints or manufacturing instructions for individual artifacts. A lot of the most common pieces of technology used in the Imperium are based on such recovered fragments.

To give an impression on just how big of a deal these things are: At one point, two imperial soldiers stumbled upon an STC blueprint for an improved combat knife. It was functionally still just a plain old knife, but it was sharper, sturdier, lighter, and cheaper to make than what the Imperium was using at the time. As a reward, both soldiers were declared heroes of the Imperium, and were each gifted an entire planet. Suffice to say, finding a complete, functional, uncorrupted STC is basically the absolute holy grail for the Mechanicus, and arguably the Imperium as a whole.

Yeah, I think the importance of the STC can't be understated. I'm thinking back 15-ish years when I was actually into this, but lots of guard equipment is basically STC-derived stuff, and is a major reason the Imperium can actually field such a large number of conventional forces. Somewhere there are STC factories churning out whatever the current pattern Lasgun is by the billions, which are then shipped off to whoever is due to receive new Lasguns this century.

Or am I misremembering just how much general equipment relies on STCs these days? Again, I don't think I've read a codex in 15 years, so I probably have some lapses.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Fat Samurai posted:

The one on the top left was exactly the one I was thinking of. If you can team up with a murderous goblin you should be able to team up with that.

If there is a disguise mechanic, and the Ork has it, I'll be disappointed if the top left is NOT what we get.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Elfface posted:

They should piss everyone off. No girl marines, but confirm that the boys no longer have genitals, because they no longer have reproductive or excretion organs. Once a week the marine coughs up a pellet.

This is my preferred solution. The Emperor did not waste precious genetic resources on creating gene-enhanced dongs.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



FishMcCool posted:

Wrong 1e Rogue Trader. In the real 1e Rogue Trader, you really wanted to be an Inquisitor:


This is just Disco Elysium by way of 40k.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:

angron, the angry one

ferrus manus, of the iron hands, with the iron hands

It's moments like these when you realize foundational lore was probably written by the equivalent of someone running a tabletop game for the first time and needing to come up with something that sounds cool but has no other context to draw from.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



CommissarMega posted:

Ahah, this reminds me of the time I played the tabletop RPG, and my RT party had to arrange a marriage between the feuding families of the crew who ran our ship's broadsides, and then provide security to the Nova Cannon's enginseers, who were worried about the growing power of the now united broadside families :allears:

wtf Owlcat please give me this game.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



LashLightning posted:

The issue is giving the replacements time to shine/develop themselves before the end-game. Swapping Space Wolf :cheers: and :black101: for Red Corsair :geno: and :effort: wouldn't be as entertaining. Plus it may be a bit tiring/weird if, effectively, a whole new game starts half-way (or however far along) through a 'regular' game should you choose to go a Chaos-corrupted route.

I would imagine any Chaos route would probably look like the Lich route from WotR.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



When it comes to Owlcat and quality, I have them in the same bucket as old Obsidian. Alpha Protocol was a great game with good story and reactivity. It also had some mind-boggling gameplay "features" and was riddled with bugs.

Owlcat stands out in that they also really seemed to like inflating numbers and as someone else said invisible off-screen wizard buffs. But I'm still going to buy the game because taken together they end up making pretty good CRPGs.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



"No you shut the gently caress up dad" but as a comic apocalypse.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Has Owlcat provided a specific release date yet? Cursory searches suggest Q3 2023, but I haven't seen anything more focused than that. I generally hold off on RPGs until release (Baldur's Gate 3 I'm looking at you, you Early Access zombie) so I'm hesitant to grab the beta in spite of how tantalizing it is.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Parallelwoody posted:

Give me ork romance.

That's just a fight. You're asking to fight orks.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Lord Koth posted:

Theoretically yes, for the most part. But then, so do Inquisitors. Practically there actually are limits - significant ones - on the authority of a Rogue Trader. Particularly weaker or newer ones. With that said, yeah there are a fair number of RTs with cruisers - even grand cruisers in exceptional cases - but was mostly just continuing the joke of why this clearly not a frigate actually is.

Yeah, in retrospect I'm not certain what I was thinking about - at least in terms generalities of Imperial ships. With that said, we're talking about a frigate or light cruiser here, neither of which have that heavily armored (6+ vs. 5+ armor, in BFG terms) bow. In terms of design - whether we're talking about making comparisons to actual ships or just going by the look in the viewer - you've also kind of got that prow lance sticking way past the bow of the ship. And while "I've got a lance on the front of my ship" is funny in terms of talking about ramming, you really don't want to actually hit someone with it.

The understanding I have is that your writs basically give you the de jure rights, but de facto you still have to play within the Imperial Bureaucracy and respect the people with actual power. A young RT might have a writ and a lot of power on paper, but in reality if they piss in a bigger fish's recaf, their ship may get 'lost in the warp' so to speak.

You need the physical power to back up your political power--you might be able to make the ones without political power kowtow, but the people who have both will absolutely clown you.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Magni posted:

Yeah, it's ironically one of the more cosmopolitan places in the whole setting once you take into account the large underclass of various mercs, technically-not--slaves gladiators, shady traders and assorted people that are present around the edges, below the games of the Kabals, Wych Cults and Haemonculus Covens. Commoragh is anarchic as all gently caress and visitors can get away with a lot of stuff* so long as nobody pulls anything that gets the Drukhari pissed off enough to actually pay attention and crack down in force.

*While also being fair game for anyone else if they don't find someone bigger to affiliate with, mind you. It's an immensely dangerous place, but in the sense that there's a shitload of people who will happily gently caress you up if you look like you're both weak enough to be hosed with and worth the effort of doing so. It's not like a death world where everything tries to kill you by default.

Reading all this, it sounds like a bit of a retread of what they did in Wrath of the Righteous for Alyushinarra (I'm not going to try and get that spelling right). Very, very few mortals get to hang around there and not become some demon's lunch/sport, and you really only get away with it because you are legitimately built different at that point, and between your growing real power and the interest of the powers-that-be, you can keep the plates spinning long enough to find your way back home.

Wrath was notably an adventure pack, but my understanding is that RT's story is mostly being cut from whole cloth, so I'm guessing the Owlcat folks looked back at that and thought why reinvent the wheel?

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



evilmiera posted:

It does and I am not going to sugarcoat that, it's Owlcats greatest failing in their games, but they usually go by pretty fast even in turn-based.

Whereas in BG3 unless you are a very optimized build trash fights can take ages mainly because stuff has too much HP or there's too many enemies.

Their Pathfinder games were OK here, because after a point you could switch into RTWP for trash fights and let your megabuffed party woodchipper the trash, and if you noticed things going south you could instantly switch back to turn-based and take things more granularly to unfuck the situation.

As someone who hasn't played the beta, it kinda sounds like RT is all tactical turn-based all the time?

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Jack Trades posted:

Larian style coop is very janky because you will constantly have different people activating different story triggers and characters will react as if it was all the same MC doing it.
It's even worse if one of the players has a special character origin because their personal narrative will be broken up depending on how many important events the other player will accidentally trigger.
It's true for both DOS2 and BG3.

Coop in the is fun if you just want to kill stuff but it sucks rear end for trying to roleplay or follow a story.

I'm also reasonably suspect that concessions for co-op limits the ability to have party members that aren't the one who initiated the conversation have agency in the conversation.

Owlcat letting the rest of the party contribute to in-conversation skill checks beyond casting a spell on you is conspicuously absent in Larian's implementation, to the point where I was grinding my teeth more than once. Like why can't my history nerd wizard chime in when my dumb as bricks paladin sees something history related?

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



CommissarMega posted:

It's good capitalism! Nbody likes Eldar, so it's safe to include them for free, but people like me would damned well pay for Ork DLC.

The real Rogue Trader is the development studio behind Rogue Trader, Owlcat.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



CommissarMega posted:

I honestly think ship combat is much better integrated into RT than the kingdom/army management stuff was in the PF games. It's just so goddamn cool to turn your ship so it can give a full-on broadside to some heretics. Seriously, if there's one thing I'd change it's so that there was some way we can choose to fight more space battles, both for salvage to trade/upgrade our ship with (since atm it's the only way to ain rep with the Navy, who sell most of the ship upgrades), and because I like it so much :allears:

You might want to consider Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 then, if you haven't already. From what you wrote, the game would very much be your thing.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



JBP posted:

I will be too busy propagating space fascism to gently caress anyone

The Emperor thanks you for your service.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



DeathSandwich posted:

Boo you gotta roll to-hit for Flamers. In Pen and paper they auto hit unless the target success an agility check to get out of the way. It gave low ballistic skill characters a way to have some ranged presence.

Kind of scraps my original character idea of a flamer commissar leader so I could dump BS for more fellowship and willpower.

That's kinda irritating, actually, even as someone who has no experience with PNP RT. "Area" weapons like flamethrowers are basically man-portable Fireball spells (or Burning Hands) from D&D, and intuitively I expect them to behave similarly, because streams of liquid fire don't headshot. It's a bit of gaming shorthand and while I know the abstraction of an RPG gives some freedom in how you calculate this, the 'intuitive' result is that even someone blindfolded would barbeque anything downrange if they don't get out of the way so long as its pointed in the right direction.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Steam please take my money :f5:

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



cuntman.net posted:

owlcat has gone to the next step with dlc where you get the dlc instead of the actual game

In the Grim Darkness of the 21st Millennium, There Is Only DLC.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



I really appreciate friendly fire. It's hilarious watching some cultist fucker dome the biggest threat in the room, making my job much easier.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Further Reading posted:

That longlas slaps!

When my trader isn't being a stereotypical commissar running up and chainswording things, she's sitting in the back picking people off with the longlas and shouting really loudly. My build is probably terribly unfocused right now, all things considered, but we'll see how that bears out. I'm not really sure what to do with my operatives just yet.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Flowing Thot posted:

Does this game remind anyone else a lot of the Obsidian game Tyranny?

Nah. Beyond "sharing the same color pallet," the themes are pretty different so far it what it is trying to explore. Tyranny was very explicit about exploring how you are a cog in the machine of the evil empire (and what happens when the cog starts thinking for itself or starts squeaking a lot as it spins). Rogue Trader is, so far, about you falling into the role of patriarch for one of the most powerful organizations in the Imperium where you'll either figure things out and become wildly, disgustingly powerful or you'll die in any of the numerous ways Warhammer can kill you. It doesn't seem to care (yet!) about your place within the Imperial Bureaucracy or what this means for you and the people around you, though I admittedly have a theory about Theodora's death that may bring the two games closer together if it turns out to be accurate.

But I don't think "game where you're

Eifert Posting posted:

She's in a committed relationship with her bolter.


I'm not really kidding, I went through the entire beta without finding an upgrade for it. There are bolters out there that do more damage but they do one fewer shot. At least the way I ran her there was no reason for her to not Always Be Brrrrt'ing.

She's definitely my trader's best bud among the team so far as a "Commissar who mellowed out a bit," with Idira being the "I tolerate you because you are useful but that tolerance is very thin" pick. I really want to find a proper Heavy Bolter to drop on her, given that she is perfectly shaped for being the lightning rod of all of those "Bring it Down" and "Finest Hour" me and Cassia can throw down.


Flowing Thot posted:

I'm surprised at how few bugs I'm having. Just a couple of visual bugs is all during my time so far maybe 5-6 hours in.

I've only run into one so far, where Argenta did that animation bug thing you could get in Kingmaker or Wrath and begins to execute the attack and then hangs in the middle of the animation preventing the game from moving forward with the chain of events. I sent it into Owlcat, but I honestly don't expect much--this is something that was super common in both of the previous CRPGs.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Darth Walrus posted:

Welp, guess I'll be a Noble Officer, then. Glad to see the most stereotypically 'Rogue Trader' option is well-regarded.

It's really "Action Economy The Class," which is always powerful in turn based games. I cannot emphasize enough how much work Argenta puts in when one or two of these action economy builds are constantly funneling free turns to her. And if for some reason you don't just want to constantly burst fire a bolter, you can for instance tell Adelard to slap the last guy threatening him in melee range, or have Idira put up buffs on a second character that turn, or let the person who was just wounded patch themselves up before their turn comes around... etc etc.

All this is garnished by the narrative resonance of being the 'leader' of the party getting to do leader things that benefit the whole group in a very general but powerful way. It's definitely my "class fantasy" as it were.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



deep dish peat moss posted:

I've been able to talk Abelard down from his fascist dogmatic stance a few times and he at least pretends to see the light of my iconoclastic revelations. Granted he's just some navy officer and not a zealous space marine or sister of battle but it seems like at least some of the companions have a bit of flexibility, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some way to corrupt companions to heretical. Space marines get corrupted all the time in the lore, right?

In older lore it could happen, but it was rare-to-unheard of, and typically happened in the usual suspects: Librarians and other psykers. With the notable exception of Grey Knights being the super special boys.

Abelard seems one of the more open and reasonable ones that isn't also straight up flirting with Chaos like Idira. My character negotiated the compromise with the strikers, but letting a psyker, let alone an unsanctioned one, just kinda do their own thing is beyond the pale. Edelgard or whatever his name was is an object enough lesson in where that can lead, even for a sanctioned psyker of sound mind.

Still dogmatic, still going to execute traitors and heretics on the spot, but only with reasonable suspicion. The lower decks need priests, not death squads. Teach them to properly worry about their feet turning into hooves if they pull on a pair of cultist boots.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Actual mechanical question: Does "burst fire" count as a ranged area attack? I'm starting to question whether it counts after assuming it did for taking that one skill with Argenta that boosts ranged area attack damage.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



SirFozzie posted:

you're going to be very upset when you do the Prison planet in act 1...

"First Oh!, and then.. (ohh........) and then ew...."

On the other hand, it gives us one of the most 40k dialogues in history. Providing prisoners 3 meals a day and no mouth punches? Clearly mad.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



I'm trying to figure out how to handle Heinrix now that I have him. I've got an idea in mind, I just have no clue how to make it work for me yet.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



deep dish peat moss posted:

The starport fights absolutely wrecked me harder than anything else so far. I just wrapped up in chapter 1 and in retrospect I don't think it's intended to be the first thing you do. It's still possible to do first but the enemies there kept blasting me behind cover and overwhelming the poo poo out of me, I was getting multiple characters downed in every fight. It's been smooth sailing ever since then.

The cover layout is weird, and the wide open spaces make it hard to position your characters behind cover to start. Plus the melee cultists can be a massive surprise and complication. When I landed, not only was the lack of clear cover making it hard to avoid weapons fire, but the fact that the brawlers are tougher and can do a shocking amount of damage lead to the first encounter having three of my crew go down. Which is made even more challenging because you can't return to the ship until you take out the AA gun, itself a difficult encounter with a particularly obnoxious sniper.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



A scene fit for a dictator.



I'm sure nothing bad is about to happen.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Darth Walrus posted:

Navigators are amongst the most visible 'accepted' abhumans in the Imperium, and are purpose-bred for a particularly dangerous and morally suspect purpose, which naturally doesn't gel well with the lunatic turboracism of the Cruellest, Most Bloody Regime Imaginable (TM). If you're not a little bit antsy around the three-eyed freak who spends her life staring into the Warp, you're letting the side down.

Honest reading between the lines of what dialogue you get and even having the perk "Unnatural Allure" in the cards, it kinda feels like Navigators are a particular kind of mutant that people are either dogmatically uneasy around or bizarrely attracted to, with no in-between.

In other news, right behind the topic of lunches served in prison, "Dumbass rogue trader makes machine spirit obey, techpriests baffled" might be my favorite scene so far.

Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



deep dish peat moss posted:

Can someone explain how to make gun-users good? My PC officer with a Rebel Sniper does well enough using the gun for supplemental damage while buffing allies, but I can't figure out how to make Argenta even half as effective as my melee/psykers. At this point she's mostly relegated to running around using medkits and throwing grenades. Burst Fire with the modified bolter is ridiculously inaccurate and hard to position for, and does piddly damage compared to other classes when it does hit. Single shots are super low damage per turn, and she doesn't bring any useful team utility to the table. The only time she shines is using her heroic. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with her

e: Also I gave Abelard a thunder hammer and now he is an absolute monster

I use her as a base of fire. You want to go all-in on her BS and get that high quickly, along with any gear that can improve her accuracy. Then you use her to burst fire into crowds of squishy things. Have your officer boost her resolve and then give her free turns. All those 11 wound minions you slaughter ratchet up your momentum, which you can then use on Abelard for hammer time. Rinse and repeat.

The key is you need her to have high BS so your shots don't wildly deviate. At that point, it's all about volume of fire. With clumped up enemies, the spread starts to work for you and misses will clip the guy standing next to your intended target, blah blah. Alternatively I bet there's a fun flamer build out there. My trader, Pasqual, and Argenta all put in some ranged weapon duty using the longlas, plasma gun, and bolter respectively, each doing somewhat different things with them.

edit: Also don't sleep on Pasqual's recoil reduction from Commune.

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Warmachine
Jan 30, 2012



Jack Trades posted:

That's unfortunate to hear.
Is there a good place to figure out what level up options are not poo poo?

I was using guides for tabletop Pathfinder when I played earlier Owlcat games but I don't know if the same would be viable for this game.

Hasn't really been enough time for the beta guides to be updated for full release, but you can probably get a feel for what other folks think are good picks from that. That's what I've done--skimmed them to see what the number fucklers who play unfair like, then keep those in mind and why those choices were picked.

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