It is a little rock paper scissors - working out what squads do most damage to what enemies.
I’ve found it best to use your heroes against the bigger units like Tyrannofex. The standard tactical Marines and assault Marines are good for the smaller nids like hormagaunts and gargoyles.
I find the Aggressors kind of useless tbh. Same with the plasma guns. For the points I’d rather have another assault.
Plasma guys have good armor penetrating rifles and range 4. They’re ideal for taking down the big guys. They also fire quite a few times, so do well against the little guys as well.
I like Aggressors to keep the enemy from my lighter armored marines.
The combination of short movement and needing to be close to attack means some turns pass where they don’t do anything. The grenades are good, but only every third turn. Because this is a model based system, being able to reduce a nids unit by 3 or 4 models each turn makes a big difference and the Aggressors don’t do that. I’ll give the plasma guys another chance against armored units.
I’ve finished chapter 2, so here are my rankings on units so far. These are just the vanilla units, as it looks like the third chapter is where you start kitting them out with upgraded weapons and stuff. Not including hero units.
S-Tier
Interceptors. These guys are gods on the battlefield. Great range with jump packs. Dish out enough damage to take down most of a small 'nids unit in one turn - or put a dent in a large one. Can take damage too - I’ve seen an interceptor take a full hit from an Exocrine artillery barrage and stand back up again.
Furiosa Dreadnoughts. These have the best melee outside your hero units. Grenade launcher is better than the Aggressors. Can soak up damage all day.
A-Tier
Intercessors (dumb name - what used to be called Tactical Marines). Probably the best bang for buck - really work best when you have a bunch of these and target lots of units to whittle them down.
Landspeeder. Great movement. Puts out lots of damage. Good to have one or two to flank, but not your mainstay.
B-Tier
C- Tier
Aggressors. Movement range too limited. Even when they are right next to a small group of 'nids, they take out 2 or 3 models tops. Same with melee. Grenades not as good as Dreadnought. Will often spend turns doing absolutely nothing when every other unit has made at least one kill.
Assault Marines. The real Suicide Squad of the game - too squishy and get wiped out almost every battle guaranteed.
Baal Predator. Way too expensive. No AP so useless against the big units.
Sisters of Battle marines. Small unit numbers, low damage output.
Ah, so that’s how the Imperium’s replacing firstborn with primaris. Poor guys.
I don’t really follow the lore so this game is where I learnt about what the primaris are and how they don’t recruit marines like they used to. To the game’s credit, this is actually dealt with a modicum of pathos where the old grizzled lieutenant laments that the old ways are dying out.
Oh man, Chapter 3 needs to be called “The Real Battlesector starts here”. You remember all those large 'nids where just one of them was the special end level boss? Yeah, here’s like 10 of them.
So this one is good? As described in the Kotaku review above, I simply have tuned out all Warhammer releases. It seems like about once a month (or less) there is a new title. There are too many and I guess I began to assume they all must be watered down as they simply can’t be of good quality when there are dozens of titles.
At least you unlocked the achievement for that!
Black Labs have done a very good job - this is nothing like the shovelware 40k games that get pushed out regularly. More factions are planned which is great.
I just grabbed this and hope to get to it in the next few days. I love the idea that you can have 2 units go at once. It’s a cool look for a turn based game.
Thanks for the feedback.
So you would not agree with this: ;)
Single player is just the same feeling mission over en over again.
Feels like a $5 mobile game
I mean to a degree that is right - each mission is the same gameplay loop of moving your troops and killing aliens. But it’s a tight and well done gameplay loop that also affords lots of different tactical variations.
It was. It said “4 hours” playtime. Just reinforcing how useless a lot of Steam reviews are.
The Steam forums are all pretty positive. There is the occasional post by someone complaining who gets jumped on.
I pretty much never read any review for a game (assuming it allows this much playtime) with under 10 hours played, and preferably 20 or 30.
The descriptions here make the combat in this sound somewhat similar to WH40K Deathwatch which I enjoyed a fair amount. The downside to Deathwatch was the mobile pay to win character advancement system based on collecting packs of cards with “Rare” items and characters. Although they made it less pay to win in the PC version (more like “grind to win” for values of grind that would turn a millwheel to dust), I didn’t care for the advancement system. But the combat was actually quite good and crunchy.
How does this compare, both in terms of combat and also character/gear advancement?
that is some nice camera work!
Jesus, so these are in-game pics that you all took in photo mode?
Dope. (I’m bringing this back)
