Warhammer Deathwatch Tyranid Invasion

Games
1

Anyone playing this game? It is out for the iPad I am not sure if it will be on Android devices or not. There are micro transactions for card sets of Marines and weapons. I have been playing after purchasing the game for 5 dollars and have not spent anything else. You are awarded lots of weapons between missions and also obtain card packs after each campaign.

Created by Rodeo Games the people who did the Hunter & Warhammer Quest games. I am playing it a little bit each day.

The game is gorgeous especially for a turn based tactical game. The various scenarios have been different and interesting. I have gotten several buffed up marines from the card packs I have won.

Here is a review from Pocket Tactics:

http://www.pockettactics.com/sunday-almanac/sunday-almanac-deathwatch-talking-points-edition/

2

I really wanted to, but it is the first game to tell me that my iPad 3 is obsolete.

3

Will it work on an iPad Air or do I need an Air 2?

It looks cool though and I think I will snag a copy if it will run.

4

I have using an Air 2; wow probably the first time I have been ahead of the technology curve!

Thanks for pointing that out I was unaware that others might have a problem.

5

It’s fine on the original iPad Air. It does take a long, long time to load scenarios, but once they’re loaded, I haven’t noticed any problems.

6

I bought it for my iPhone 6+ and there is a game-stopping bug which hasn’t been fixed. You get into an infinite loop during the enemy’s turn and you cannot progress. This has been reported by other users but I think (hope!) Rodeo is working on it. Till then, if you’re going to iPhone it, I would advise waiting for the patch.

7

Have it on my Air 2. Have only had one crash, and haven’t met the bug Destarius notes, but I have seen reports of it. The game is pretty good. My problems with it are:

–It’s slow–moving, waiting for the xenos to do their thing, everything is slow. Not “your hardware is chugging” slow, but, well, just slow.
–The death/experience loss mechanic gets brutal fast. When a spacemarine dies, you lose all of his accumulated experience. As you have to save up thousands of experience points to unlock abilities or level up stats, you usually carry a lot of unspent points with you. One wrong move and you’re back to zero. Resign a battle and everyone counts as dead. While none of this is on the face of it overkill, if you lose a single battle or take a lot of losses in a win, you can find yourself deep into the game with zero experience and the amount you make per battle means it will be forever to recover. And starting new marines, that you get from card packs, in the middle of a campaign, is a nightmare.
–The graphics are great but you rarely see them up close unless you are constantly zooming in and out. You need to see as much as possible of the map to avoid ambushes.
–As good as the game looks, it gives you too little info. For instance, you can’t tap on the weapon icon and actually get any data on it during a match. It’s hard to tell a flame marine from a bolter marine at a glance.
–The Tyranids are boring. They’re Alien-like alien lizard things, sometimes with a gun. And they have zero character or personality. It is, indeed, another bug hunt.

That being said, it’s a slick, generally well done game for Warhammer 40K fans. Better than SpaceWolf, probably, as it’s less puzzle-like.

8

This looks very interesting, but I couldn’t find any info on a possible Android release. :-(

On the other hand, these all sound a bit rough, so maybe I’ll be happy to wait for the sequel or whatever version might make it to Android.

9

I’ve been playing it a bit. I have the original ipad air and it has very long load times, but other than that is fine.

It seems very well done, but this should have been a free game due to the encouragement of buying expensive card packs.

I’m also getting nightmares of the fallout mobile game where you can spend real money for stuff that is tied to your local game and then there are game killing bugs which will tank your game.

I can already tell that the experience grind & losing it on death is going to be a problem. Abilities can take 20,000 experience and i gain maybe 1,500 experience in a mission. That is a lot of missions to grind out and one mistake or getting unlucky can make you do it again. Oh and you can take a loss really easily (although i haven’t quite yet). There was just no reason to do this given how the game is balanced.

Honestly, if you have a pc, i’m kind of leaning towards recommending space hulk Ascension instead.

10

I have renaming my marines by function so I can remember who is supposed to do what.

11

Yeah, but then you can’t have “Cardinal Fang” as your laser gunner, can you???

12

That’s true but I can have Plasma Fangmeister :)

13

I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with Devastators so far. I suppose if/when you start running in to REALLY strong stuff they might be more useful, but non heavy weapons don’t do that much less damage and can be fire twice as much (if not more). The range is also not that great on my multi melta (i think that is what it is). In contrast, i got a pretty uber normal size melta on a tactical marine and it does crazy damage at high range. The only down side is bad accuracy, but that just had me pump the user’s accuracy.

Assault marines are kind of love & hate. If you’re using a sword (which it seems like you should be), they are pretty good at taking hits. The damage is also quite good, meaning that few things are better at clearing a bunch of enemies around them. The problem is that they can get overwhelmed pretty easily and more importantly… in most fights, you’re overwatching and fighting at range a lot. Also, if you’re using a plasma weapon and it overheats, you can’t melee. An argument can be made that if you took a tactical marine instead, you would have less reason to melee.

In any case, i only like to have one melee… and i got a priest in one of my packs. Since priest is basically a god class, he basically auto gets in.

And the most overpowered thing is… flamers. They seem to auto hit, or at least mine has never missed. They also do very high damage AND go through the target, hitting enemies behind them. I’ve killed multiple enemies in one hit many times. I’ve been tempted to take multiple flamers, but you do need some long range guys to take out the enemy ranged units too. My flamer always leads the charge and he always has way more experience than everyone else.

14

I met a tyrant guard last night. They are both strong and weak at the same time. The main issue is if one sees you at the start of their turn, they can do about 170ish damage to you across the map. As with your troops, they can use shared line of sight to hit you when you can’t see them. They can also take a lot of damage and are heavily resistant to bolter fire.

I knew there was one in the mission i was doing, so i played very cautiously, scouting it out. When i found it, i took it out from long range while always being sure to stay in cover. My grav gun tactical marine can kill it in 4 hits (from the front), but of course he didn’t make all of his hits so i had to take two turns. Again, grav gun is very high damage from very long range, so this was no problem.

The problem came in that i didn’t realize there was a second one. i was clearing out the drones rushing at me when from the other side of the map, using shared vision from the drones most likely, one popped up and took 75% of my priest’s life in one hit. It goes without saying that i immediately took cover from that new angle. However, after that it was no problem. I waited for him to get closer and then opened up. It seems that Tyrant Guards are also weak to flamers because my flame guy took half his health in a single hit. There must have been crits here though because a second shot only did 1/4 damage. After that i used a few pistol shots from my priest and a few bolter shots from a new tactical guy i wanted to train up. The amount of small arms fire it took to take that last 1/4 was impressive at the very least.

Really, with Tyrant guards, as long as i’m aware of their presence, they are less of a threat than the ranged tyranids. At least with the Tyrants, i know i they have to move, they wont damage me. I am scared to see what will happen if i try to melee one though. Maybe they don’t have melee, or maybe they will one hit my assault trooper… Not keen to find out with the death penalty in this game.

RNG has pushed me heavily towards the blood angels. Their individual units have pretty cool stuff (mostly +crit and heal on kill) but both the other chapters get powerful passive bonuses based on the number of their units in the battle. For example, ultra marines get +5% health and +5% accuracy for every ultra marine. Crazy. I wish i could switch to either one, but my cards are too Blood angel focused by far.

From the classes, weapons and enemies i’ve seen, i would want the following general setup:
-Assault marine with sword. The tank and the sweeper. When tyranids are thick around my ranged guys, i send my assault guy to clear them out.
-Priest. Heals seem very important and the class is overall very strong. While melee is not as strong as pure assault (don’t know if you can upgrade their melee weapon), it is still pretty good. Pretty good short to medium range damage.
-Tactical Marine with flamer. Short to medium range excellence
-2X Tactical Marine with grav gun. Long range sniper of death. Devastators wish they could do half this good.

The grav gun tactical marines are basically your main long range overwatchers. I don’t see any reason to use a bolter over a grav gun. Downside is you need to sink a bunch of levels into accuracy due to the horrible base accuracy.

Switching out the assault marine for a tactical marine with a flamer is very tempting. The flamer is going to be a lot more useful at killing stuff. My hope is that a very high level assault basically becomes a tank from dodge/mitigation stuff and counterattacking. Then i use him primarily to take point and to do mission stuff while my more deadly marines shoot stuff.

Edit: Tyrant guard melee is really weak, about twice as strong as normal drones. It seems like the only real danger with them is the super laser if they see you at the start of their turn. I’ve also had an assault marine with a power fist one hit kill them a couple times now, which is amusing.

Edit 2: i spoke too soon on the experience. Now i generally get around 600-800 experience per mission. 12k - 20k for a skill.

15

Just popping in to say that I wrote to Rodeo Games and they said they have a fix coming this week for the Enemy Turn bug.

However they also offered a workaround which was to repeatedly pinch zoom in out etc during the loading. This actually worked so I’m back to playing until the patch is out.

16

I managed to avoid that bug, but i did get hit with a bug where i was double charged for an upgrade. I had just over 2k exp and was buying 2k cost upgrade. I bought it and ended up with nearly -2k exp (Ie my experience was NEGATIVE). Thinking back, i should have just killed this marine and it probably would have set his exp to 0, but i didn’t think about it at the time. It would however suck if you actually had experience and lost it all like this though.

So don’t save your experience for multiple upgrades at once i guess? Not that you have any reason to do this in the first place though i suppose.

I think they heavily favor blood angel stuff in the cards. Basically 95% of anything worth a damn in any card pack i’ve bought or earned is a blood angel. I also don’t think the card you get after winning can be anything good. A shame because i still think a good team of space wolves or ultramarines is better than a good team of blood angels. However, obviously a good team of blood angels is better than a mediocre team of either other chapter. Also, since i get no team bonuses, i can take a space wolf assault marine and not worry about it.

The game is a HUGE HUGE HUGE grind now. Even in the most balls to the wall insane missions where i kill dozens of tyrant guards and flame throwers, i’m only getting what i got in a decent mission early game (1k for most, 1.5 to 2k for people who killed a ton). Most missions are 600-1000 exp. I think they get you in with the bait of decent, but low exp and then a few campaigns in you get the switch, cutting experience down to one half or even one third.

17

I like this game, but it is WAY too much CCG (BUY CARDS NOW OR YOU GET NOTHING) and the experience system is plain broken. It is just broken.

So i go on a big boss battle, kind of. I’m fighting against a carnifax, some deadly alien that even command is worried about. If a hive tyrant is equal to four drones (in my opinion), these guys are four hive tyrants. They can kill any of my guys in three hits, nearly two and they can take a TON of damage.

I see it well in advance and since it is melee, i position myself to basically get a free turn to light it up with my very big guns. The first thing i notice is that this thing can take a shit ton of damage. My flamer, which can nearly two hit a hive tyrant (with crits) does almost no damage from the front (it is running at me). My grav gunner does decent damage, but he is new so his accuracy sucks, and also it is going to take him a few turns of wailing on it with good shots to take it down. Melta gunner is out of range of course. Then my assault and priest take some pot shots with their pistols, doing minimal damage.

My priest does try to melee him, but after losing half his health in a counter attack, he goes back to melee.

Now he is on me and it is only his poor luck that means i don’t lose one of my tactical marines. This guy is left with 10% health after the enemy misses twice.

None of my guys really do any damage to him except my multi melta. Low range gun, but hecka damage. My grav gunner is mediocre because the gun has crappy accuracy and i had to give it to a new recruit. And then, my assault trooper proves his worth. In general, assault is not very good. I use his pistol more than melee, but when you need to do high damage against a single target, a power fist using space wolf assault marine pays off. I hit him with 1.2k damage on the first hit. Of course the second one misses, but it, combined with my multi melta, and the puny damage everyone else was doing, was enough to save my nearly dead brother.

If i had followed my plan to replace the assault marine with a flamer, it might have been a full wipe. Two good multi meltas could have done it i think, but with a loss or two.

So i finally finish the mission. It was very tense, but after the carnifax died, it was mostly a few drones attacking while i retreated. I got 400-600 exp. My tactical marine with 4k exp nearly died in 2 hits and i got 600 exp max. He was saving for a 5k exp skill, which would be 8.3 carnifax missions if he died by taking a third hit or getting hit by any other attack. This is fucking bullshit.

18

I got a neat assault medic.

I’m up to Act 4. The fire 9x9 square mission was were I experienced my first casualties. I realized too late the danger I was in and ended up with a full wipe.

He’s got the following powers:

heal adjacent units 5% HP each turn
Gain +1 AP for every 2 adjacent allies (so if surrounded, 6 AP)

I’ve parked him in one of the infinite missions (Act 2-1) grinding XP.

I don’t have anything particularly good atm. I have 4 Class II guys - 2 melee and 2 melta carriers. The last spot is for a heavy bolter Class I guy. I need the extra range sometimes.

I have boring available powers on the other guys - dodge, gain ap on kill, etc. The only interesting one is the ATTACK ALL power. A marine with a flamer can have some fun burning everything nearby. Note this also attacks allies.

I do not like plasma weapons. Murphy’s Law applies.

re: flamers.

Flamers have ACC 70 which is one of the highest available AFAIK (did some searching). This means ACC of 30 is not overkill, so I can safely keep leveling up ACC without fear of “waste”.

19

Oh i didnt know the attack everything power attacked allies. Good thing you said that before i took it on my marine with a grav ball that has something like range 7. That would have been useless.

20

Yes, I do not understand why that power doesn’t attack only enemies in range.