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DTurtle posted:This looks quite interesting. The art direction is a bit "cartoony" for a Warhammer 40k game, which feels weird. I think the art direction is a small stroke of genius. Normally 40k's visual design is extremely overcomplicated and messy, which stems from the tabletop being aimed as a model assembly/painting/customization hobby first and a functional wargame second. Games Workshop is primarily in the business of selling models, after all. Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters pairs the extremely recognizable Space Marine aesthetic with similar elements of design that you might see from World of Warcraft and a Dreamworks film, to help provide characters with visual distinctness and readability. The game's visual language has a lot of recognizably modern touches, keeping the feeling of 40k style while keeping lots of bright distinct lines and colors. This makes UI elements pop, makes gameplay elements clear and readable, and generally makes the game feel more comfortable to play by reducing visual processing strain on the player. The OG Chaos Gate has a much more strict 40k aesthetic and is visually much more bland and requires the player to focus harder on understanding what they're looking at to consider the board state - something the original made still more difficult by providing the player with many more units (and enemies) to manage at once. This Chaos Gate is a dramatic improvement in pretty much all respects. On the audio side of things, the game's sound effects are great but also loud. I can say that I was in the process of revamping my audio setup and not everything had arrived by the time of the second video - this should be dramatically improved by the third video, as previously my audio was extremely quiet and had to be substantially boosted. I have a new mic now that requires less aggressive post-processing. In general terms, this is a very forgiving game. It's not necessarily easy, and the difficulty has been tightened up in a few ways since release, but Jade brings up in the OP that Chaos Gate does not demand perfection, and it's extremely true. Many other tactical games lack systems to address a failure spiral, where bad luck and mistakes can permanently set you back. Other tactical games have trap options where you can set yourself back, sometimes irrevocably, by customizing your units (via skill-ups or gear upgrades) in suboptimal ways, limiting your power. Chaos Gate gives you a lot of tools to pick between, and very few of them are bad. We'll go into this in more detail later in the LP, but overall Chaos Gate wants you to succeed and encourages you to accept imperfect and unideal situations and roll with it.
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Apr 9, 2024 19:34
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Kurieg posted:Don't they technically have two copies of the gene seed? Their original which can be recovered and a new one that gets grown out of one of their numerous implants and can be harvested prior to death so their ranks can grow? or is that a thing the grey knights explicitly don't have because they're special? Gene-seed (it's officially hyphenated) can, technically, be harvested before death, but typically isn't. Every full space marine that lives long enough (ten years or so) has a pair of implants that create a new set of gene-seed and so theoretically you can turn one dead marine into two new ones over time. The lore on this isn't particularly well thought out, as canonically the majority of aspirants do not survive the implantation process - the failure rate on new space marines simply does not match up to the "birth" rate, even assuming that every dead marine's gene-seed is recovered, so those organs implanted into aspirants have to be recyclable to a degree. Space Marines also need to tithe a certain percentage of their gene-seed back to the Mechanicus, to monitor mutations and also so Terra has stockpiles with which they can order new chapters of Space Marines to be created. Grey Knights are special in part because they have good, "pure" stockpiles of genetic material. Gene-seed is a package, basically consisting of organs, genetic material, and viruses/nanomachines that transform the aspirant's body from a normal human into a Space Marine over the course of implantation. Most chapters of Space Marines have to culture these organs in a living aspirant. A few chapters - Grey Knights being one, and Ultramarines being another - have good enough material that the organs can be grown separately and then implanted later, which is more reliable and reduces the risk of mutation/organs being wasted by an aspirant dying. Most chapters can't do this, which is the canonical explanation for why there are so many more Successor Chapters grown from the gene-seed of the Ultramarines and Dark Angels. The creation of new gene-seed is one of those things that was lost technology, which is why there's such a big deal about preserving and using even flawed and mutated gene-seed like the Space Wolves or Blood Angels possess - it's such a limited resource that they can't afford to waste what they have, and why growing more in the bodies of Space Marines is so important - even though it risks further mutation, it's the only remaining option.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:32
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CheeseThief posted:When did this stun patch drop? I beat the game back in september and I remember making heavy use of stun/excecution chains. I think it relied on a bolter that had boosted stun damage and a glaive that either had bonus AP on excecute or bonus stun damage as well, I don't think I would've handled the final mission without being able to clear pods in a single turn. Early on in 2022. It might even have been the very first actual patch, come to think of it. On release, Stun values were slightly lower across the board and also did not scale with difficulty. This meant that speccing for stun/execution chains was highly optimal - if you could execute an enemy in 4 or fewer AP, your actions were effectively free since an execution gives you a total of +4 AP to work with. Given that many enemies in the early game had 4 stun, the only challenge became figuring out how to not kill them in order to trigger the execute and refund AP. Litany of Hate gave you a slightly larger buffer to work with (+1 AP per execute, up to 3x/turn when fully upgraded), and the existence of +stun dmg gear made this easier and more efficient, as executing enemies while spending fewer than 4 AP gives you a net positive on AP spent, giving you a buffer to spend on movement/wave the flag/other abilities to keep the chain going. It was extremely strong, far stronger at clearing pods than any other strategy, and subsequent patches confirmed that trivially chaining executions was clearly not intended behavior. We won't see a Chaplain for a while, but if you slept on the Chaplain? You were missing out. I will go into this in more detail later on in the videos, and Jade and I have different opinions on specifics, but there are no bad classes and almost no completely worthless skills. Some are better than others, but nearly every selection is viable - as long as you are picking skills with intent in mind. Obviously it's possible to cripple a Grey Knight by picking a scattershot of minor boosts and skipping all of the major abilities; that's not really what we're talking about here. Instead, the bar for what constitutes "good enough to use" is shockingly low - because of the way weapons and wargear and other Grey Knights interact with your decisions on the battlescape, not everything is at it appears in a vacuum. Some things are extremely strong if you lean into them. Others, merely okay. There is a lot of variety to be had!
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Apr 12, 2024 21:12
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Mr. Vile posted:It's very funny to me how far they had to scale the grey knights back in order to have an actual game, and I know it made a specific set of people very angry when the game released. Regular space marines are already nigh-unkillable superhumans in power armour, and grey knights are even more ridiculous on top of also all being space wizards. Lorewise, I'm pretty sure nothing we've seen so far should even be capable of hurting a grey knight, never mind taking a hit from one and surviving. Most of this is wrong, some of which because it would be cooler for the setting if certain things were true and some of which is wrong because people repeat wrong things they heard or misunderstood other people say, and some of which is wrong because the lore is wrong. Here's the semi-quick rundown, because I don't really want to get too bogged down in fictional lore debate - a bolter is, lore-wise, a gyrojet firearm. This is a very sci-fi cool type of weapon (that really existed! kind of) that, instead of an explosion propelling the bullet out of the barrel, fires small rockets that propel the projectile (called microjets in real life), which itself uses the gyroscopic spin effect to stabilize itself and continue on a straight path during flight. This means that, unlike a regular firearm, gyrojet weapons don't reach their maximum speed (and thus velocity) until they finish expending all of their fuel (which isn't that much) - effectively, there's an optimal range, and less kinetic energy is applied the closer the target is. This also means that, unlike a regular firearm, gyrojet weapons don't apply most of their propulsive force to the firearm - gyrojet rockets are fired with very little recoil. As such, even though bolter rounds are larger than most conventual personal ammunition, there's little reason why human-sized bolters would be problematic - and as it turns out, bolters have been a wargear option for regular human troops at least as far back as 4th edition. Bolter rounds are .75 caliber micro rockets, or roughly equivalent to a 19mm cannon round. Certainly dangerous! (But not "fine red mist" levels, which isn't even supported by the fiction.) Gyrojet weapons, being tiny rockets, have to accelerate not only the bullet but (like any other rocket) also the fuel as it burns, which is why during testing, gyrojet weapons often didn't even break the sound barrier - they didn't get fast enough before their fuel ran out. In short, gyrojet rockets lose energy because they're carrying more mass (in the form of propellant and the rocket body) compared to a regular firearm cartridge, which just propels the bullet.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:15
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Jade Star posted:Chaplins own. You may have to know what you're doing with them now though since Litany of Hate isn't a slam dunk OP as gently caress choice. I certainly will have to show them off. Nurgle wont be able to help the first great unclean one I come across if I get a properly set up Chaplin. Tabletop rules, circa 3-5th edition 40k, that scenario worked out something like this. Squad of 10 marines, shooting at another squad of marines, not using Rapid Fire. Roll 10 d6s, a 3+ roll is a hit. Bolters are strength 4, marines are toughness 4. Each successful hit wounds on a 4+. Bolters are AP5, marines have 3+ armor save, so each successful wound gets a 3+ armor save to negate. How many kills are inflicted from a whole squad of marines shooting at another squad of marines? Marines only have a single wound, so every successful unsaved wound is a dead marine. How many shots does it take to wipe an entire 10-man tactical squad? On average, it takes nine shots for a space marine to kill another space marine. It takes an average of 90 shots to wipe out an entire 10-man tactical squad.
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Apr 13, 2024 10:30
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I'm not going to specifically refute anything here, though I disagree with some (and agree with others). My position is that Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, even on higher difficulties, is easier and more forgiving than some similar games, and it accomplishes this by giving you a variety of strong options (and very few trap options). This allows people to settle into strategies that they find comfortable, and encourages experimentation (combined with the game handing you higher level Knights with skills preassigned, to discourage homogeny). There's a lot of videos to come and a lot to show off and talk about.
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Apr 16, 2024 01:18
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Solarium posted:Still watching the video, but love learning how apparently Vakir just happened to be where the ship showed up at due to some good predictions and vague instructions by the Ordo. Imagine the awkward conversation between the Grey Knights and her as she tries to figure out who the gently caress she just wound up meeting. Prophecies (and other means of divining the future) are a thing that exist in 40k. Sometimes they're even accurate and not ironically self-defeating to pursue.
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Apr 30, 2024 04:32
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Jade Star posted:I'll use Bhask as an example for something Olesh and I have mentioned, the idea that there are no wrong builds for your knights. An interceptor without the ability to teleport is the wrong build. There are just a small handful of abilities that not taking will just ruin a knight. Now I didn't get to pick the skills when he was recruited and that brings me to another issue. I do not plan on upgrading the recruitment armory access for the rest of the game. Why? Because doing so allows for recruiting knights at a higher level, which means more prepicked skill choices are made for them and I do not want that. I would be perfectly happy with every knight coming in at level 1 if I got to assign their skill points. From this it becomes obvious there are times or circumstances when retraining a knight is necessary. Like in the case a knight comes into your roster with many points misspent. You only get 18 of them, and if the game has given you a knight with 5+ skill picks in a random or unwanted direction it may be best to retrain them. Retraining can be costly at 2 requisition, depending on how much req. you have stored up. An alternative is sending them back to Titan and gaining req. from that and waiting to recruit a new knight and hope for a better generated skill set. Early on I feel req. is too scarce and it's best just to work with what you have until you have two solid knights of each type and then use barrack space and mission rewards to fish for someone else. Don't do that too soon though, it's not worth having a lot of req but only 6-8 knights as injuries can and will happen and you may be left short handed or forced to field injured knights. To add onto this and bring up something I've talked about in the videos already in a bit more detail... Hypothetically, if, somehow, you had a shitload of requisition and nothing else to spend it on, then investing in higher level armory access would make practical sense because you can afford the opportunity cost of new recruits costing time and the retraining cost. In practice, though, you never have that much spare requisition that you can afford to spend +2 on every new recruit and across the course of the game you're better off pushing your other armory accesses up faster (for earlier access to better wargear and equipment). Wargear especially - there are 7 grenade types, 6 servo-skull types, and 11 other wargear choices. You can't be offered duplicates (or lower-ranked versions) of wargear that you already have, so buying any Tier 3 wargear that shows up, even if it's not something you want, has value in increasing the likelihood of being offered something you want in the future. This is far, far more valuable than troops showing up with more skill points that you can spend requisition on reassigning, as unless you make a habit of sacrificing knights to extract their 1/2/3 bonus skill points to assign to your Dream Team, you almost certainly are going to fill out your roster and be done hiring knights once you have the selection of classes you want, and fishing for desirable traits to fill out your roster is effectively free so long as the opportunity cost (not having enough uninjured marines to field) can be mitigated. I want to talk about this more in a dedicated video, but in general my stance of "there are no wrong builds" assumes that you are selecting skills with intention and aren't just like, randomly making decisions come level up time. Bhask is a great example because no matter how you build an Interceptor, Teleport is so good to have that I can't imagine ever purposefully not taking it.
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May 7, 2024 21:31
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Keldulas posted:... I'm going to say hold off until we do the videos talking about the classes in detail. There's context regarding the skill trees that will land better later. I don't have much negative to say about any of the classes! Despite that, I'm going to talk about Arcane Weapons because it's a really good example of a skill that I look at, that pretty much everybody immediately dismisses as bad, where I get the symbols and equations floating around my head and really consider what you could actually do with the skill if you wanted. First,it honestly costs too much for what it does casually, and it has more or less the same opportunity cost in terms of skill picks as grenade pockets, meaning it's effectively competing with something that will almost certainly be a more desirable priority. What it actually does, however, is kind of interesting even if it's extremely niche. I've said in video that Honour the Chapter is extremely good, and what makes it really good is that it lets you spend AP on one person to give AP to anyone else (Knights only). There's action economy benefits to be had as long as your willpower holds out, sure, but just in a general standpoint the option to take a single AP and put it somewhere it's more useful is fantastic. Not everyone is in a position to make great use of their AP. Justicars can ALWAYS find a good use for their AP, so long as they have willpower. It's a great tool. Arcane Weapons is not that tool, but they went to the same church on Sundays. Arcane Weapons lets you spend AP on one person who may not be in a useful position to give bonus ranged damage (based on spending ammo) to anyone else (Knights only). In other words, if the Purgator doesn't have a good shot at something that needs to die, and doesn't have an immediate use for the AP, Arcane Weapons might be the tool that lets you finish off an enemy and prevent it from getting off an attack somewhere else. Maybe. It's not really great at first glance! But what happens if you lean into it? What the gently caress do I even mean when I say "lean into it", a phrase you will hear me say repeatedly throughout the videos? Okay. So. At first glance, Arcane Weapons kind of sucks. If you have a Psycannon on your Purgator, which you probably do, it probably only has 2 ammo, and you have to spend an AP to reload it. Even if you Warp Charge it, you're getting 2 damage on someone else, for the net cost of 2 AP and 3 WP. However, it benefits from a lot of other choices you may have made. If you are running Psilencers instead, you're running on 4 ammo. Improvement. You can gain up to 2 ammo from your skill tree, and maybe you have the talent that gives you +1 ammo. Improvement. There's a wargear you can equip to increase magazine size by +1/2/3, depending on tier. There is a tier 2 Psilencer that can has more ammo and can be upgraded even further to something like 7 ammo base. Improvement. Purgators also can get access to Rapid Reload, a skill which (at base) gives you a 50% chance to instantly reload your magazine when empty. Obvious improvement. One of the upgrades to Arcane Weapons boosts crit damage on the attack, which could be nice given the use of something like Astral Aim or just a really high ranged crit chance. If you lean into it. Arcane Weapons can have up to 12, maybe even 14 ammo to work with. Being able to spend 1 AP/3 WP to be able to boost someone's ranged attack by 12-14 damage, with a bonus rider of +6-7 crit damage if a crit happens, and have a 50% chance of just reloading for free afterwards, isn't quite so bad. And you can do this at any range. Since you're using a Psilencer yourself, leaning into having a lot of ammo isn't the worst play anyways because Psilencers come with Scattershot, which also benefits from a large ammo pool and the dip into Rapid Reload. Power Armor choices can influence this as well - extra pockets for a focus crystal, or just increased focus to make your autos more reliable, or even both. Still, though, it's expensive to set up, in terms of wanting wargear and skill points (13 out of your 18), and if you lean into other, more obvious picks (Astral Aim tree, grenade pockets, the Support Fire tree), you won't be able to afford everything you might want a Purgator to have. On the other hand, it's not really far away, skill-wise, from picks you would already want, and they could still have most of the stuff you would want them to have.
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May 13, 2024 22:16
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