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 Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate is a video game set in the gothic science fiction backdrop of the Games Workshop game system Warhammer 40,000. In it, players take command of a number of squads of Ultramarines to do battle with their ancient enemies the Word Bearers, Traitor Marines, Chaos Demons, and their commander the Chaos Lord Zymra. It was released in 1998 and... What? Oh! Wrong Chaos Gate. I actually remember playing the original Chaos Gate long long ago, it was a much slower game, having the player control many more individual marines at a time per mission, not unlike its contemporary X-Com (Julian Gollop version, not Jake Solomon version). Much like X-Com Chaos Gate also has gotten remade into a much smoother more streamlined modern version where the player controls only a small number of marines, and it works on a simpler action point system rather than time units. Much like Jake Solomon's X-Com! I think it's going to pretty obvious that I'm going to draw a lot of comparisons between Chaos Gate and X-Com in this LP. There are a lot of similarities where Chaos Gate absolutely saw what worked with X-com, but I think the most interesting parts are the differences where Chaos Gate looks at things X-Com did, or players griped about, and made different design choices. Almost all of those choices they differed on I think are pretty amazing in gameplay and really insightful or smart choices in design. These choices give Chaos Gate a very unique feel and so much flavor, even though I can easily make the argument it's built on the back of, or on the skeleton of the new X-Com model. Okay, so X-Com is kind of your thing, but tell us about Chaos Gate Right! Chaos Gate is a squad based turn based strategy game. The player controls a team of four space marines on missions to combat the Nurgle threat to the sector. The game has a strategic layer consisting of a star map that the players base of operations, the Baleful Edict, can fly around to respond to plague outbreaks. Kind of like responding to abduction missions in X-Com 1. drat it! I was going to stop talking about X-Com! Each planet has it's own Plague-o-meter and successfully completing missions will help lover the plague-o-meter. If the Plague-o-meter reaches five then Bad Things happen, and if enough planets max out on Plague-o-meter then Nurgle wins and it's game over. Hey that sounds a lot like the panic meter and countries pulling out of the project in X-Com 1! drat it! Not again! It is actually hard not to notice the similarities. In Chaos Gate the player upgrades the Edict much like the base or the Avenger in X-Com, soldiers level and gain new skills in a way that makes for plenty of choice and customization but you never have enough skill points to get everything the class can offer, and managing the big crisis on the strategic map is a sort of hybrid between X-Com 1 and 2.  What's unique about Chaos Gate then? Chaos Gate takes many different approaches to fundamental mechanics than X-Com does. There is no randomness to the game. Attacks do not have chance to hit or miss. Damage is not variable or given a range. Everything about a given action is known ahead of time. The only exception off the top of my head involves units getting knocked back from explosives and not knowing precisely which tile they will land on but that is a very very minor thing. Chaos Gate operates on 3ap instead of X-Com's 2ap and doesn't have any abilities that end your turn early. Three ap with this different rule set can allow for some new and maybe obvious but non intuitive plays if you're very used to X-Com like I was. Such as moving out of cover into the open, shooting and then moving back into cover. Oh hey, cover, how does cover work when attacks aren't accuracy based? Cover provides flat damage mitigation. Doesn't that mean it's very difficult not to get shot in Chaos gate then? Exceedingly so! But that's also a difference in design. Chaos Gate does not expect you to go through missions without taking damage. It does not require you to do so either. It expects you to take damage and deal with enemy fire while you advance through obstacles to victory. In fact, that may lead into the thing I like most about it's design. Chaos Gate does not demand perfection. Get shot, lose a mission, marines may die. It will be fine. Chaos Gate has a series of cool ways to ensure even if you struggle or take a setback or two that you are not disadvantaged for long. Fallen marines can be used to give skill points to surviving marines. Critical injuries can be healed and augmented with cybernetics which give permanent passive stat boosts. Unwanted marines can be returned for the resource used to recruit new ones. Marines can pay to have their entire skill tree respeced if you feel you made a mistake when leveling them. There's probably a term for this design, but it's the opposite of 'the rich get richer'. If a player goes through the game never making a mistake, never getting wounded or losing a marine then they don't get to utilize these catch up mechanics. But they don't need to either. I really, really, appreciate design like this. It feels natural and organic, and seems to fit lore wise even though I'm not a real warhammer fan I dunno if it is or not, and it offers a really great way to not feel super screwed over because your high level marine died. In X-Com if your Colonel rank soldier dies, well that's it. He's dead, you've lost a major part of your team, there's no saving grace, and it just feels bad. Chaos Gate gives you multiple chances with the Resilience mechanic, and some value for a fallen marine, allowing you to give a small permanent boost to another marine that they otherwise couldn't get. I think it's great. Many people on the Steam forums thought it was crap because to absolutely min/max a marine you need to intentionally kill a max level soldier to use the ability to boost a living marine, and they wanted that extra boost on everyone, entirely missing the point that this is a catch up mechanic and if you aren't losing people naturally, you don't need this mechanic's help. Aside from all of that, Chaos Gate gives you a very big toolbox to problem solve in combat. Every class has a wide arrange of abilities and gear they can select from to contribute differently on the field. While I may have a particular build for each class I tend to use uniformly, there are no bad builds. Each marine has a skill grid with more options than can be selected so no one is ever going to get everything and the variations make every marine unique. Gear choices start to factor in too a little later in the game, as upgraded gear can come with unique properties, effects, or change a normal ability into something different. Typically this is more evident on the melee weapons but if you get a flamethrower that can do stun damage when they normally can't, you can start doing silly things! I almost forgot precision targeting! Critical hits are important and do way cooler things than just extra damage and really makes melee feel powerful. Oh and the stun mechanic. There's so many little cool things I'll get into in the videos!  About the LP itself Having cryogenicly frozen ourselves for roughly 38,000 years I am joined once again by my good friend Olesh who will be joining me just as soon as I get the freezer working again and he's not in danger of melting. Chaos Gate itself tries to tell a bit more story than X-Com does and regularly has story beats where the player can talk to the three main NPCs on the ship and get their view on the campaign, current events, and each other. So I will be talking to them whenever new events and dialog is available. Of note I'm skipping the tutorial mission where the previous commander of the Baleful Edict dies after killing a Bloodthirster at the end of a campaign against Khorne. This is the explanation for why we are in command and why the Edict is in such bad shape at the start of the game. My usual preference to the thread remains; don't spoil story for anyone that has not seen or played the game themselves, but any mechanical discussion is fine. Just no story or boss spoilers. Oh yeah, Chaos Gate has boss fights! They're great! They're way bigger and more involved than Alien Rulers or Chosen. Every boss has their own strategy or mechanic to understand and work through in these big arena fights and they're just awesome. Look this game is great, just scroll down and start watching. Oh did I mention how much I love how a lot of the maps have interactive things to shoot at or use to your advantage in combat? Table of Contents         
Jade Star fucked around with this message at 00:50 on May 13, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 09:57
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 A campaign against Khorne ends in victory, however the previous commander of the strike force is dead and the Baleful Edict cries out for repairs. We were headed to Titan for much needed repairs and reinforcements, but the Inquisition has charged us with an important mission; investigating a potential new plague with signs of Nurgle behind its spread. Hey folks, the first episode is just packed with cut scenes to set the stage and start telling the story. The ship isn't repaired and it's not safe to let Olesh out of his freezer yet, but we'll be seeing him by the next video. This intro into the game will be short and sparsely commented on to let the writers and voice actors do their work and I appreciate their efforts. GW tries to tell a compelling story and it feels pretty good to me, someone with only a passing familiarity with the warhammer 40k setting. There's a lot of things to talk about from game design, mechanics and gameplay, the story and lore of the setting, and so much more. I'll be talking or posting more in depth about things as we go, so if there is anything you're curious about or want discussed, post away!
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Apr 9, 2024 10:07
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 Repairs begin, the generator breathes life back into the Edict, and the freezers are functional once more. The Edict is still in poor condition but long range scanners are operational and the warp drive is functional. The inquisitor's fears about a plague seem to have merit, as two star systems report signs of outbreak. The system is vast and the Edict can not respond to every outbreak at once, we will have to make choices about when and where our efforts are best spent. Let's talk about our three main story characters Ectar, Lunete and Vakir. They represent and hold different but integral roles to the story. Ectar is sort of a fill in for the player. He's a marine, he stays on the ship and gives orders, and if it wasn't for the nature of this being a video game he probably would be the next in line to command the Edict. Or at least that is what I get from the situation. He's our zealous mission guy, and later he's going to be the source of making our war gear extra rad. Lunete maintains, repairs, and upgrades the ship. The condition of the Edict is very important not because a upgraded ship means faster travel speed, larger barracks, increased exp gain, and so on, but the Edict itself is a win/lose condition. Once the game is out of the baby zone start up events the Edict is subject to a number of events that can break facilities, cost resources, get tossed around by warp storms, fight Death Guard ships, and so on. If the Edict is destroyed, it's game over. There is no singular 'this is a game over' event either. Warp storms and chaos torpedoes may slowly wear down the hull rating or HP of the Edict over time, and if you don't have the means or time to affect repairs the game could be cut short no matter how flawlessly you win every tactical mission. Vakir is our plot driver and researcher. She has brought us the discovery of a Nurgle plague and she has tasked herself, and the Edict, with stopping it. She will also research new advancements and upgrades in the ships library over time and if given enough samples to work with. I feel the trio gives a bit of life into the game, and I appreciate the large amount of voice work done by the game and VA team. I hate reading in games, but more to it the voice brings flavor and character into it. Getting to hear the annoyance in Vakir's and Ectar's voices as they bicker about proper conduct and heresy is great. Also Vakir is Y'shtola in FF14 so that's also cool and kind of funny. Alright you maybe saw this coming buuuut.... They're just Space Bradford, Space Shen, and Super Space Vhalen. I can't fault Chaos Gate too much for this, as the trinity of soldier, engineer, scientist is kind of primordial. Each character correlates to a key aspect of game progression. Your team gets stronger and you need a guy for that. You need better equipment as the game goes on and you need a guy for that. And you need to research things for plot and/or development of your team and you need a guy for that. I am not a writer, I don't know how much could be done with the formula here, but this is one place where Chaos Gate doesn't differentiate itself from X-Com very much at all. It's not a real bad thing, but it does sort of hit the trope and stay stuck in it hard. Now, does that mean they don't have good dialog or anything? No, absolutely not. There is a lot of back and forth between Ectar and Vakir and it develops through the events of the story. Enough to make me care about what happens to them during the course and ending of the game. Jade Star fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Apr 10, 2024 |
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Apr 9, 2024 11:00
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Oh, big deal thing I forgot about in the first post and will go edit in later; DLCs. I am using only one of the two DLCs available for the game. I am using the Execution Force DLC and I am not using the Duty Eternal DLC. The Duty Eternal DLC had very mixed reviews, with some saying it just made the game harder for no benefit. It increased the number of things the player needed to juggle. The dreadnought isn't a regular member of the team and only usable on specific DLC missions. etc. So I don't own it. The execution force DLC is awesome though, as it brings in 4 unique characters to the game. The four kinds of assassins employed by the Imperial Army are available to recruit and all bring something unique and cool to every mission. It also adds a minor wrinkle to the Nurgle forces with occasional bands of baddies that can rapidly mutate mid-combat. And maybe a few new enemy types. Though I can't remember if nurglings and such were released as part of the DLC or included in the update to the main game and for free.
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Apr 9, 2024 11:08
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DTurtle posted:Also, the sound effects are a bit loud, which makes it impossible to understand what you guys are saying as soon as you do something. Yeah i caught this is post between videos 2 and 3. Game sound goes down across the board in video 3.
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Apr 9, 2024 20:54
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 Thankfully we are able to reach a second bloom mission before it is too late. This is always handy throughout the game as more missions mean more exp for marines, more requisition earned, or opportunity to spend requisition on gear (later, once Angry Space Grandpa opens up the armory for us), and can lower the amount of plague pips spread across the sector. So it's always good to do every mission you have time and manpower for. I posted this before, but I'm moving it here under the relevant video because I got the order wrong in my head and reference this specific map. One of the little things I want to talk about in this video is map design. Jake Soloman's X-Com 1 used hand crafted maps, while X-Com 2 used a procedural generation from a sort of terrain palate to create random and unique maps every time, but still flowed together with all the bits and pieces and features fitting together. Chaos Gate has hand made maps. We may see repeats during the LP but I don't usually mind or care. The interesting thing I think Chaos Gate does with these hand crafted maps is that it creates or controls a flow with many of them. With this map being short it's pretty easy to see there is a linear path to take. Move forward from the start, a courtyard, a big wall and door separating the next space which was empty this time, and then a final sort of open area. Worth noting is that there aren't invisible walls or the illusion of terrain continuing on at the edges. There are hard cliffs like the map is a battle field suspended in some celestial space for the fight. You can very much knock enemies off the edge of the map and into the abyss to kill them. I think this does two things; first it gives the whole thing a sort of majesty or epic feeling, in the literary sense. This mission wasn't just on some patch of land on a planet, it was torn from the planet and lifted up into the heavens for a grand battle to occur upon. Secondly and more to real to the gameplay experience, is that it creates a path that the map and game designers can tailor and design exactly how they wish. They don't need to worry if you approach some area from some unexpected direction, because you can't. They can know you'll be approaching from one direction and can place an enemy patrol where they wish and more or less dictate the area a fight is going to happen in. Then they can start decorating that fighting space in great detail. It leads to a tighter gameplay experience, things are planned out and smoother. Rarely do I ever have to look upon a section of the map and go 'well gently caress this place, there's no cover' or worry that in order to advance I need to move into terrain that looks like a death trap. On top of that, hand crafting the maps tends to mean they are very well decorated, in terms of aesthetics as well as function for gameplay. In the first area there are very nifty statues with enormous bases that act as a 2x2 square of high cover, but you can shoot the statue to have it come crashing down to crush enemies and destroy cover alike. There are braziers that fit the gothic imperium of man aesthetic everywhere and many of these can be shot at to poor fire and coals over nearby enemies. It's such an unexpected little bit of fun to utilize these things in Chaos Gate. Many of these things do different things and are interacted in different ways. By comparison X-Com really only ever had the red barrels where you shoot something that's not an enemy and it explodes. Truly, on a deep, logical, mechanical level the statues and fire bowls and pillars and columns might not be that much different from red barrels, but the visual and mechanical differences make them novel and fit into the environment of the game in a more seamless fashion. I think that's worth noticing and appreciating that and Chaos Gate does a great job with a lot of these little touches, more of which I will surely comment on again in the future.
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Apr 9, 2024 23:56
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Solarium posted:I love how extra a lot of the stuff in this game is. Shooting down tall pieces of terrain, massive explosions and piles of fire, marines hopping across place to place to travel farther, and my favorite is how you can frequently tear enemies into chunks. The critical hits are literally dismembering your opponents. It's incredibly extra and amazing. This was the exact sentiment of someone watching me stream it for the first time. I think it was the teleport into combat cinematic where she called it Extra. And it's true. I love it. Something about the game is visceral and makes it all feel so good.
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Apr 10, 2024 02:01
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I may misuse terminology a lot in the LP. I am not a big follower of Warhammer, but the Total War series and Chaos Gate have been super rad so they are the source of my limited knowledge of the setting/universe. Really the most in depth warhams setting I know is Bloodbowl. Do not make me go roll a BB2 LP into this LP.
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Apr 10, 2024 03:17
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Really, the most important bit of Warhammer 40k lore is that Ciaphas Cain killed the Archon King when things looked most dire for X-Com. God drat, there really is so much overlap between X-Com and Chaos Gate.
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Apr 10, 2024 04:48
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Partial cover is a flat -1 and Partial Full Cover, which is very silly, is -2. Partial Full Cover is being in full cover but the attack is coming from a sharp angle, where the shooter is almost flanking the target. There are also modifiers for range. A 10 tile range bolter suffers -1 dmg beyond half range, and -2 at long range. Given the small spread of tiles, I'm not exactly sure where the break points are, if -1 starts on tile 5 or on tile 6. And not sure where -2 starts either. But this leads into another good point of game mechanic/design to discuss! Damage and HP totals are tight and remain tight throughout the game. Our standard bolter deals 4dmg and an end game master crafted tier 3 bolter might do as much as 6. Same goes for most melee weapons, though they are a little more likely to reach to 7 dmg, but often at the expense of some utility or some other feature of the weapon. So by and large you can consider the range of 4-7 as the rule of thumb for what is considered a powerful weapon. Enemies also mostly follow this rule. The weakest cultists do 3 with an autogun. As soon as we see some real nurgle units you can expect Chaos Marines to shoot with the same 4dmg bolters we have. Something carrying a plasma cannon might do 6 and shred armor, and a melta might do 7 or 8. Damage values don't inflate very much over the course of the game and this is sort of necessary with the systems the chose to go with. With how cover works as a straight dmg modifier cover becomes less valuable as attacks become stronger. A -1 value vs a 8 dmg attack is less valuable than a 3 dmg attack. However damage per attack never gets so high as to find cover meaningless. With cover and range penalties even a 8 dmg attack can lose half of its power before hitting a target.
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Apr 11, 2024 01:13
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Range feels short for everything in the game, and I think I have a moment in the next video to expand upon the nuances and difficulties of how the range of everything works out.
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Apr 11, 2024 01:57
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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. Marine on Marine bolter fights: At some point I want to see if I can get Original Chaos Gate running and recording. Because the start of the game is marine on chaos marine bolter fights and it is a slooow process.
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Apr 13, 2024 09:42
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Solarium posted:That makes me wonder what we're doing most of the time, at least in these early missions. Cause all we're doing is killing like, maybe a dozen cultists each time we visit a planet? That seems remarkably small scale considering some of the landscapes we've seen. I guess they're just the forces propagating an existing infection, and by killing them we get rid of the source? Then I guess the only people who need to get mindwiped and sterilized would be those nearby the arenas we fight in. These starter mission are very bland with what we're doing. Kill a couple dozen cultists and maybe poxwalkers isn't really much in a grand setting. It's tutorial land though, and those missions are behind us. By the next video, which I definitely didn't delay by loving up my audio and rerecording commentary with Olesh a second time, we will start to see missions with real objectives that relate to the bloom and the objectives will change based on how bloomy a planet is, and if the bloom is trying to spread off planet.
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Apr 14, 2024 10:46
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 Vakir completes her autopsy and the discovery of something inside the poxwalker is troubling, leading us to report to the grand master of the chapter in search of aid and armaments. Discovery of a corrupt seed inside the poxwalker gives us something to look for, and target in our goal of combating a plague of Nurgle. On the subject of the video, while I try to bring up and address things discussed in the thread and that happen in the video, one thing I didn't really think about while playing or recording is Grand Master Kai. Not knowing much of the lore of the setting, Kai becomes sort of a gatekeeping grumpy space grandpa that keeps all the really cool Nurgle killing things under lock and key until we appease him. Mechanically this works fine, you acquire requisition through missions, events, dialog choices even, and Kai introduces optional challenges for every mission in Glorious Deeds. Requisition is spent on unlocking access to the different categories of armaments and upgrading the likelihood of a higher quality item. It was interesting to note in post editing that Ectar's voice line calls the first category the 'resource slot' and the tool tip it claims it grants access to servitors and grimoires as a reward at the end of battle. This is incorrect, as servitors and grimoires were awarded to us for our previous two missions, shown beforehand by checking the mission information screen before we traveled and deployed on the missions. I think this is a hold over of earlier game design that was changed near the end, presumably after getting all the VA work done and overlooked when things were changed. Another voice line says we can spend requisition to unlock and upgrade 'armor' slots. Not 'armory' slots. Slight oversight or missed line read, or did they intend for upgrades to be built right into the Knights armor? Ah nitpicking anyway. This sets us up with our last uses for requisition, more access to the armory of Titan, and then spending requisition for the rewards each mission offers based on what has been unlocked from the armory. This is where we start getting our gear upgrades. In contrast to X-Com, we never research better gear. We're not going to discover a laser or plasma bolter, but we can find master crafted gear in the armory that will offer additional bonuses over their mundane counter parts. Also just plain old war gear. Like krak grenades. You know we don't start with krak grenades? I barely know the table top and even I am pretty sure those are standard kit for marines. Other war gear items are more like ornate add-ons for our marines, like holy incense that increases max willpower, or blessed greaves that increase ranged crit chance. Or skulls. Like the medkit skull, but they do other things like scouting or being decoys. This system is very different and has its ups and downs I'd say. It's unique and normally feels pretty good while playing. You usually build up a fair bit of requisition but you never have enough for everything you want and you have to balance your spending accordingly. One effect of the system is that your rewards are random. You never know what kind of melee weapon you might get. Or ranged weapon. And this can be good or bad. A variety of spicy melee weapons to slice Nurgle up with is great and may get you cool weapons with skills/abilities you haven't tried before, and that's great. For ranged weapons though, I find it a bit more frustrating. The majority of your Knights only use storm bolters, so you may want to see a lot of bolters in the reward section. You need a few non bolters too though. A good Psicannon on your purgetors is a big deal, and cannons with added ammo, damage, armor shred, or inflict status on hits can dramatically increase the purgetors combat value. But when there are four or five kinds of ranged weapons to draw from the odds of seeing the specific kind you're looking for is low, and then you need to actually draw a weapon of the kind you want that is an upgrade you want to use. This is really only an issue for ranged weapons, though a small issue for melee, as the differences in ranged weapons are large and most of your Knights can't even use anything other than bolters. With melee weapons only a few are class specific like for the apothecary and the chaplain. Armor only comes in two flavors, power armor and terminator armor, and it's about half and half who uses which kind of armor among your Knights making armor selection more about the individual suit of armor rather than trying to get correct type like with weapons or guns. My nitpicks about rarity and probability distribution of types of items within a reward type aside, it feels neat. You get cool new things that might be chapter relics for all I know. On a deep design level the armory system may not be much more different than say X-Com, but it does feel different when everything isn't just a straight upgrade path. There's no going from ballistic rifle to laser rifle to plasma rifle as just a hard set path of progression, even though there are clear tier levels among the gear as seen by the I, II, and III markings. I suppose they have the same sort of tiers, as X-Com tiers could be considered ballistic -> laser/magnetic -> plasma, so too does Chaos Gate have a 3 tier system for equipment. However in Chaos Gate it feels different as once you are out of starter gear no upgrade is ever just 'the same thing, but with increased stats'. Everything different and will offer different stats or abilities so the armory system feels different, more varied. I can't just lay out a quick sheet of what all my Knights are going to be using because I don't know what I will find in the armory and end up using. While in X-Com that can't be said. It's a very linear upgrade path in X-Com and not at all in Chaos Gate. I am going to have to pick and choose what is really worth my requisition and what I really want to equip. Okay that was like 3 paragraphs on the mechanics of getting upgrades which wasn't where my initial thought was here, so lets get back to that. Grand Master Kai. When I first played the game I assumed he ran the whole Grey Knights Chapter. I figured he was the boss of all of us. For reasons that are clear in retrospect and will become visible later in the game, I realize that he is not. That the Grey Knights are lead by a Chapter Master (I think), and thus that probably makes Kai just super high up in the hierarchy and not at the absolute top. Does he just oversee the chapters armory? Is he the highest ranking quartermaster in the chapter? And while we're at it, why are we going to end up making quarterly reports to him? Game concession for upgrades and being judged by an NPC to let you know if you're loving up or not? Or is Kai really someone important that would normally be directing strike cruisers like the Edict around to their next tour of duty? Basically, help me out Lore Nerds.
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Apr 16, 2024 11:53
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White Coke posted:Will you be able to take more than four men on a mission? If so what's the maximum you can take? Only ever able to take four. Except during plot missions where you may be assigned a guest unit to control for plot reasons. rastilin posted:The biggest problem boils down to the fact that stuff like criticals are always going to be better for the enemy than for you. The enemy will always have endless amount of trash mobs, so it doesn't matter as much if you nail one for 4x damage or not. But you only have your small, elite and very difficult to replace team, so a critical from the mob to you is very different. Effectively I think randomness in strategy games, even if the rules are the same for both sides, works against the human player. In many games you may be right that receiving crits is far more impactful than dealing crits. In Chaos Gate crits greatly favor the player. I think that's readily apparent with the precision targeting mechanic being shown. And it will continue to get even more in the players favor if they take gear or skills that grant bonus AP on crits. All things the AI can not do or take advantage of. Randomness in games has been discussed to death. It's perception bias. Go look at the long legacy of Fire Emblem and what they've done to combat the impression their fans got of the rng being unfair. Randomness doesn't work against a player. Design does. Jade Star fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 12:22
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I think the first three are. I felt the first few maps were very familiar.
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Apr 17, 2024 02:13
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 A couple of fun new things happen in this episode. Now that we have emerged from tutorial land we are subject to random events. While traveling around the star map some events may pop up requiring us to make a choice about the situation. Sometimes they're bad, like this time with a warp storm or some shenanigans involving warp travel, which I gather is kind of unsafe but everyone travels through the warp all the time with a million ships a day because otherwise the distances are just too vast. Lore people can help me out on that. Sometimes the events are good, and it's just Ectar saying 'Today is a good day to train/meditate, let us chill'. Vakir has given us access to the Officio Assassinorum and we get one free pick of assassin. All future assassins are recruitable for requisition. There are no bad picks of assassins, and I go with Vindicare as they are my personal favorite. They are long range marksmen that ignore partial cover penalties, range penalties, and come with intrinsic precision targeting on critical hits. The ability to precision target from range, and occasionally at will, is a huge deal and what makes them my favorite. During the video I believe their worth becomes very evident with the first chaos marine encountered. It's worth knowing that assassins do not play by all the same rules as Knights. Some don't use will power. The vindicare simply has a cool down timer for all of his abilities. Assassins will not be affected by many of the otherwise universal affects that effect Knights, such as gaining AP from executions or the Chaplins squad wide abilities. Assassins don't have a skill tree, they simply level up a predetermined path. They won't get gear options as mission rewards like Knights, instead we'll have to spend requisition to unlock the three tiers of gear available to them, each purchase unlocks the tier for all 4 assassins, and then purchase the gear we want for more requisition. Because of this, it's pretty expensive to kit out an assassin, and kind of unlikely a playthrough will afford you enough time or requisition to purchase all 4 assassins and kit them out in all the best gear.
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Apr 23, 2024 01:17
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Tylana posted:Jade. Are you aware of the stupid bullshit you can do with the Psilencer's Disrupt Shot? (Though Disruptor servo-skulls do it just as well). Nothing is springing to mind other than disrupt shuts down autos and overwatch.
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Apr 23, 2024 05:56
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I feel Psionic Onslaught and removing enemy cover are much more valuable than a 4, 6 force strike, melee option. By giving a purgy a melee weapon you are devaluing the unique abilities and actions they can bring to a situation. If one wants to argue early game it doesn't matter much because Knights and gear haven't developed enough to matter, and once they have developed the decisions and evaluations change, yeah maybe. It's weird to me to think my style would be considered ranged focused. I typically let the terrain and starting distances dictate ranged vs melee. I feel my play style is very balanced. I think the big factors are range (how many AP to get in melee), number of enemies, and positioning. A long hallway with enemies at 10 tiles away? I'm not spending 3 AP to get a single melee attack on anything but the weakest cultist. Plague marines will survive at least two hits with a force strike hammer, knife me, walk away, and then shoot me. That's 12dmg dealt, best case, for taking 6 in return. Fat boys will explode in my face on a kill giving the knight Plague, or claw me if they live. And so on for enemies we haven't seen. Just in these two examples it's not worth melee unless you're sure you can kill the target, and you can do so without putting yourself in harms way for the retaliation. When I melee, I want that to be the end of the fight, not the middle of it. Enemies should not be given a chance to strike back. Essentially I have a calculation running in my head every fight; do I have enough AP to kill everything this turn, Y/N? Typically if the answer is yes, it means melee is worth it or more likely melee is the reason why I calculate a yes answer. If no, then deal damage, stay safe, and lower enemy HP so next turn the answer is yes.
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Apr 23, 2024 08:57
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 Vakir completes her studies on the first seed we recovered and comes up with a lead, however she needs more samples to draw any real conclusions about the source of these seeds. For the tactical side of things we get a new mission type. Bloom Spawn missions can be summed up as go and kill a particular target. Sometimes multiple targets. These missions usually pop up when the planet is in the mid range of bloominess. This first one we got can take a new player by surprise, a target with 12 armor looks real daunting at first. However the armor is only provided to it by the little 6 hp eyeballs around him and those can be removed very quickly with either area of effect attacks or killed instantly via precision targeting critical hits. If left unguarded you can also just surround and beat on the nurgle preacher with all four of your knights. As I make mention in the video, there's a bit of a beginners lesson to be had with this kind of mission. First is that as soon as you reveal the preacher performing the ritual you need to rush and kill him. If they complete the ritual it is very bad for you this early in the game. Think four or five demons with as much hp as your knights, two melee attacks, the ability to mutate for an AP, and one of them is a demon version of the preacher. These guys will be regular enemies in the future, but for right now they would be a very hard fight. Secondly, is that unlike the seed missions, Lunette teleports you out of there the moment the last mission target is killed. Knowing that you can calculate a winning turn and ignore any other threats in the area to preform what might otherwise be a suicide rush on the mission goal. This will become important to keep in mind once we get the Gates of Infinity stratagem.
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Apr 29, 2024 23:21
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 The next set of bloom spawns happen in short order after the completion of the previous mission. As such there is little time for any research, plot, or recovery to occur. This isn't actually such a bad thing, as more missions in a smaller time frame can mean gaining more rewards from the armory, or stockpiling more requisition points to upgrade our armory access. Short turn around on missions is the reason I wanted to recruit several knights as soon as possible though. Without the ship upgrades to speed up healing time it's almost certain our roster will be in constant flux, rotating out knights as they take injuries. Sometimes that can lead to interesting situations, like Bhask. God drat it Bhask. After you've watched the video, come back and read my thoughts on it: Which are mostly going to be my attempts to downplay my Giant Robotic Crab Syndrome, and acknowledge I could have done things in a quicker or more efficient way with special regards to the second bloom spawn but nothing was particularly threatening there. I named this episode Ebb and Flow because of how the mission went; a slow start that suddenly ramped way up, sustained a lot of baddies surrounding me and then died down to a recoverable situation where I regathered myself enough to sit and judge the final bloom spawn as easy and simple manner not needing the ace I had held onto all mission. Sometimes things are just like that, overwhelming at one point, and easily handled at another. It's important not to panic and realize that bad situations can always be dealt with. We're only just starting the LP but we're still repeating the mantra that Chaos Gate doesn't require perfection. There's always a way to deal with a situation, and even if there isn't, things are not as unforgiving as in other similar games. Damage is going to happen, but you have the tools to recover from a bad situation fairly quickly and resume your mission. Depleted as I was, or felt, once the crisis was over I was in fairly good shape. HP was restored, grenades were out, and will power was low, but that was more than enough to deal with another two patrols of enemies as long as they didn't take me by surprise. As a sort of tangent to that, holy crap Bhask. I don't think I've ever had an interceptor without the ability to teleport before. That whole mess of him being triple overwatched could have been avoided with a single willpower point and the ability to teleport. Instead I had to brainstorm how to make sure he lived and got away to safety. Arguably he could have just hit the Aegis shield and stayed put, but that would have given the cultists more time to flank, surround, and attack his position. Double also, I could have just used Gate of Infinity at the start of that turn and punched the plant, but I had wanted to save it for the second objective. It was messy, but I like how I handled it. 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.
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May 7, 2024 10:13
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Teleport also gatekeeps the entire lefthand side of the skill tree. No teleport means not getting support fire either. Or the enhanced teleport/raiden slash.
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May 7, 2024 22:30
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 As the name implies, this mission goes much smoother than last time. It is set up the same in a lot of regards too, right down to the interceptor without the ability to teleport. Perhaps the only differences are the type of bloomspawn plant that are the mission objectives and being more prepared for each enemy patrol I encounter. The first new thing being the different bloomspawn plant. I find this version much easier to deal with since it doesn't have nearly the range as the spitting plant artillery. They can be a little annoying in their own right though, especially if enemy ranged units have places to take cover and return fire at you while near the tree. The plague of flies makes ranged attacks against the tree less effective and it's attack blast will heal any nurgle units nearby. All that make it a pretty nice defensive structure for nurgle if they can force you to fight on it's terms. However if the trees guardians are melee or otherwise don't stick close to the tree then the fight can be much easier by picking off the guardians and then standing out of range of the trees blast attack and either killing it at a safe distance, or chipping away it it's health until you can safely close to melee and kill it before deal with the blast attack. As I said there wasn't really anything else that was different from last mission except the flow of battle. No getting bogged down and stuck into a protracted fight where I had to think up crazy turn orders to get out of a jam. This mission and the last are kind of polar opposites of how the same mission can go. One was just a giant cluster of problems and this one went smooth and to plan, and in about half the time spent in mission.
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May 13, 2024 00:47
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Tylana posted:... some strictly worse ones! Like +10% chance of dealing afflicitions with melee weapons. ... Why would you do this to me?
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May 14, 2024 20:23
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Negative_Earth posted:Looks like Team Jade will have to continue to look elsewhere for turn-based combat: Fix your I don't like this. Unsubscribe.
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May 15, 2024 04:57
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