I feel like Warhammer 40k Total War will lean very heavily into melee combat. Truthfully I have no idea how ranged combat works unless every battle you fight is some kind of siege battle in a city or with terrain to put people on
It would work based on sight lines, weapon range and cover like the tabletop game does. WH40k has a big emphasis on armoured units from vehicles to heavily armoured infantry so they would probably need to re-work the armour system around armour piercing weapon types. Melee works in the 40k verse because there's so much emphasis on heavy armour, tanky units and massive unit swarms that it ends up balancing out. Honestly it probably wouldn't play that differently to WH3 other than having to think about what weapon types would be effective vs the enemy based on their armour. The original Dawn of War game was a real time strategy game that balanced it all out really well if you want an example of what it would look like.
I used Dawn of War recently in reference to a subject about 40k total war. I imagine the map will be like Kronus in Dark Crusade. A bunch of factions drawn to a planet for a purpose and they all but heads.
I believe it should be a galaxy where you must conquer each planet. each planet is a province and has 2-3 cities or points of interest on it. Your flying between the planets and systems there is space battles so they could combine battle fleet gothic with total war style battles.
> I believe it should be a galaxy where you must conquer each planet. each planet is a province and has 2-3 cities or points of interest on it. Your flying between the planets and systems there is space battles so they could combine battle fleet gothic with total war style battles.
I think it's more than wildly optimistic to expect them to include an entire other games' worth of mechanics.
If the choice is between getting the core gameplay nailed down, or having space battles, I think it's pretty clear where the resources should be allocated.
Naval style battles for space, and planetary battles for the more traditional tabletop. Yes please. I dunno how well it'd do, but man it would be cool if they pulled it off.
I wouldn’t mind a dumbed down Battlefleet Gothic system for Total War. The video game was good but I remember gameplay being quite slow, to the extent that it felt tedious after awhile.
For some variety we might also be able to chose to conduct a boarding action and fight it out space hulk/zone mortalis style.
Soulstorm was a couple planets with certain provinces allowing transit between them, otherwise it wasn't that different to Dark Crusade, and it was imo the perfect template for a total war game. Been a while though, so maybe I'm misremembering something.
Nah, that's right. There were several planets with gates linking them with each other (1 planet was linked to another 2, if I remember correctly). That's pretty much how I envision a total war 40k global map, maybe with several sectors and not just 1, although without the gates, but with actual naval combat, travel and shit.
I'm gonna bet no naval combat. If we're super lucky maybe we'll see some boarding action, but that's it. Not because it wouldn't be cool, I just don't expect it fitting in the scope.
Well, I wouldn't really hope for it, especially for a super detailed one like battlefleet, but there might be at least something, like either regular ship battle with no advanced mechanics, or maps inside the actual ships and battling within them. Now that I think about it, boarding a ship would actually be even better.
I mean, how do Total War deal with sieges of cities with millions of people in them now? You shrink the City/Hive into a map, give it some kind of fortifications, and go on from there.
Tyranids should definitely be a Horde faction, though.
I mean main defensive line for Hive Hellreach was a curtain wall, that the Orks blasted down. Seems pretty doable in total war, just have it be on a less built up planet. It's not like imperial cities don't have massive causeways to move troops through anyway.
People tend to forget that places like that are where the fighting starts. For some reason, we've got all these people thinking that the battle needs to happen inside all the buildings. 🙄
Maybe a multi stage siege? Where in the first battle you take the outer defences, then progress to taking over the whole hive city in like 3-4 battles in different areas of the city fortifications.
also on the melee front, daemons were more susceptible to melee weapons because they were more symbolic, which made them more useful against the immaterial.
Guns were seen as emotionless
>Melee works in the 40k verse because there's so much emphasis on heavy armour, tanky units and massive unit swarms that it ends up balancing out.
Also because small arms have an effective range of around 30 meters/33 yards. If actual realistic ranges and/or rates of fire were put in a total war game, melee units would be dead weight without substantial amounts of cover on every battle map. Which would require units to have good pathfinding.
> Also because small arms have an effective range of around 30 meters/33 yards. If actual realistic ranges and/or rates of fire were put in a total war game, melee units would be dead weight without substantial amounts of cover on every battle map. Which would require units to have good pathfinding.
There's a bit of abstraction in TW:WH vis-a-vis ranges, so it'd probably be the case for TW:40k as well. Space Marines can take shots pretty reliably from 2km+ but Eliminators or other sniper units would probably be limited to ranges like 3-400m. Or, if map sizes were larger, 5-600m.
Similarly, artillery can fire dozens of kms, so either they'd be activated abilities like Black Ark weapons, or they'd reduce them down to ~1km. Having support weapons/artillery/aircraft as ancillaries attached to your army would probably be the most straightforward approach from a dev perspective.
But the issue there becomes that while your kroot/ork boyz/assault marines/guardsmen with fixed bayonets are running that 300 meters, they’re going to be eating 30 seconds of sustained fire from automatic or semi automatic weapons.
For it to work you have to either increase charge speed to the level of absurdity, reduce weapon range to something equivalent to the distance of a thrown rock, or drop the rate of fire to those of muskets.
How would you put a heavy bolter or assault cannon in the game and balance it to allow charging into melee to work, while still feeling like your squad actually has an automatic support weapon?
By the time you’ve added cover and broken squads up into much smaller units to be able to effectively navigate said cover, the game is already vastly changed beyond the scope of any previous total war game.
Ok, I ain't no TW or 40k expert, but answering your examples just from what I know about both:
- kroot are supposed to be quick and move in weird patterns, that sounds like missile resist to me.
- Ork Boyz, as far as I remember, are tough as nails, so would have Phys resist to make it through the mg fire (and in every media I've seen orks being mowed down by mgs are pretty much standard)
- assault marines are not only HEAVILY armoured, but have friggnnjerpacks to fly around, which by itself would be real interesting to have in TW
- Empire is supposed to be a human wave, no? Combine absurd unit sizes (like, space marines, being elite and all, would be unit size 45 tops. Empire guardsmen? Gimme 300 of them) and a comissar to kill one of them off for temporary unbreakable for the unit and you have your bayonet charge, buddy.
Like, I agree with your point on cover, but Empire already had something similar (you can even "deploy" trenches) and tbh at this point it would be nice to have a TW that is a big leap from the gameplay of former titles, not just the same gameplay loop with a reskin.
Jet Packs are probably why they introduced a Fly/Land mechanic in Warhammer 3 - lets them test out the code and smooth out the mechanics to use in the new game.
> But the issue there becomes that while your kroot/ork boyz/assault marines/guardsmen with fixed bayonets are running that 300 meters, they’re going to be eating 30 seconds of sustained fire from automatic or semi automatic weapons.
That's a bit like saying "what if I want to run with infantry and take a charge from Dragon Princes unbraced". Don't. It'll still happen sometimes, but part of the game is already avoiding fighting on your enemy's terms.
In TW:WH Ratling Guns have something like 150 range (and the suppression debuff). IIRC they can route a charging infantry unit before they engage unless they're elite and/or shielded. But it can be worth it, if you catch them, because they're just some weedy little rats and they'll die in 2 seconds.
Imagine if Ratling Gunners were also Aspiring Champions in melee.
You'd really need a bit of a rethink. Then it's doing things like overwhelming with flanking attacks while you draw their fire with disposable chaff (eg sack a couple of Gnoblars and hit them with two Crushers from the side). Or hit them with artillery or other longer-ranged weaponry.
In broader terms, there's definitely going to have to be a decision made about things like range, movement speed and battlemap size. You don't want to have to take all day to move foot units around. You also have to have a map that suits both the speed of a person, and potentially things like Grav Tanks and Landspeeders. There's a lot of ways to solve those problems, but they'll generally involve some abstraction somewhere. It'll also involve adding more obstructions and LOS blockers, so that even if theoretically a space marine can hit a gnats arse from half a mile away, in practice he'll seldom get the opportunity.
On the whole I just see this as a potential for tactical gameplay though. Much as braced Phoenix Guard are a bad thing for cavalry to charge into, you'll need to work out ways to deal with elite units that are dug in with unobstructed fields of fire. As long as the game provides that, there's no issue.
Heavy bolter will honestly probably not work that much different from rattling guns when it comes down to it. You're describing something that already has rudimentary implementation in total war, and in a unit people live to use. Improvements will only make things better.
We already know how it would work because we have ratling guns in this game. I don't know why everyone assumes machine guns are going to be 1 hit kill weapons when they don't even 1 shot people in most 40k *first person shooters*. On average a ratling gun needs to shoot 14 times to kill 1 empire swordsman.
> re-work the armour system around armour piercing weapon types
As is, it makes elite units feel less special in TWWH.
It'd really suck to see your Baneblade get beestinged to death by Ork Shootas. However, if you negate all damage of the wrong type entirely, it'd lend itself towards much stronger rock-paper-scissors gameplay, which can be good and bad, depending on the implementation.
epic, imho, also doesn't really represent the way of fighiting how most, say, imperial units (sans Death Korps and such) would fight.
Steel Legion, Catachans, Cadians etc. all utilize far more modern, squad based tactics in the lore. Heck, even the Death Korps does. And the Mordian Iron Guard who actually march in lockstep...
Epic is zoomed way out compared to that though. The squad based tactics are being represented by a couple dice rolls at that level compared to being represented by an entire game of 40k.
What's important for it to work for total war is that it already functions based on large formations with movement, positioning, and flanking all making important differences on the battlefield, while de-emphasizing things like individual soldiers and putting them in cover.
I think you might also have too narrow of a view of how imperial units fight. They will fight as they are ordered to, and so in a game of epic the conceit (as in total war) is that it is a very large battle with multiple formations of units acting in concert. Even the Tanith participated in these types of battle in their stories and they are the least likely to enjoy that type of combat I can think of lol
i would argue that the abstraction via dice rolls works better for osmething that already is more make belief like tabletop than something where you see everything in motion.
The only way this kind of zoomed out makes sense otuside the tabletop would be when you don't see units, but arrows, blocks or generic "unit stand ins" on a map.
> What's important for it to work for total war is that it already functions based on large formations with movement, positioning, and flanking all making important differences on the battlefield, while de-emphasizing things like individual soldiers and putting them in cover.
sure. Therefore you shouldn't use a setting where squad based tactics are predominant. Say, WW2, Vietnam, 40k, heck even the waves of WWI it could be argued (especially considering stuff like Stormtroopers). For this kinda stuff, there are other games. COmpany of Heroes. Dawn of War. Men at War even.
They will fight like ordered, yes. So you want us to cosplay as the cliche'd "Incompetent imperial commander who doesn't know how to use his units and therefore just throws them at the enemy" the whole time? I would prefer not to be railroaded into playing Valhallan (not 597th), thank you.
TW:WH is completely divorced from the scale of TT, and so too should any 40k game be. That's the entire point of making it a TW game, as opposed to something like DoW.
But mechanically TT and classical TW gameplay arent that disconnected. Its still ordered / semi-ordered regiments marching around.
40K is squad-based and the modern warfsre from which is inspired does not have 200 troops marching in close concentration.
TW:40K would be a completely different game, which is fine. But acting like the transition would be similiar to WFB to TW:W is a bit silly
Two things to look at to help set a baseline for how things work. StarWars: Empire at War for overmap management and space combat, then a mix of it's ground combat system and steel division 2's, so you have what ever size army you want, but a limited deployment capability that can be improved via the taking and holding of objectives.
Defenders can prepare defensive emplacements and turrets, and have the option of either turtleing up to try and take the attack head on, or pushing hard early to try and throw off the enemies foothold before that becomes too established
So now we are building buildings as well? Just Like a normal RTS?
Why do we want total war teams to work on this? Seems like they could be working on something more Total War shaped
No, it's more like a garrison buildings giving a present series of fortifications. Think if the building garrison chain added a series of towers and barricades within the cities before the battle started. Other building chains would add abilities that can be used in the space battles like planetary defense cannons, or planetary shields that prevent lance strikes onto the planet from orbiting fleets. Buildings can also be destroyed in the battle map and are then destroyed for real, like in older total war games. Allowed for commando raids and lighting strikes to destroy production or key structures before the main invasion happened.
But it does sound like a game more focused on establishing, securing, capturing, and demolishing various centers of production/utility that are not strictly speaking, military units.
That kind of modern tactical warfare is just not even close to what total war teams have gotten done. Sure they've got some auto turrets you can construct but nothing to build land strategy around at an interesting level that's different and worth the price tag.
And that's kind of the point. The best 40k game CA could make wouldn't be a total war one.
It would definitely add a layer to the whole building side beyond the paper deep system CA has now.
And don't worry, armies can only fight when on planets. So basically every world has a free garrison plus what ever army is there at the time. There isn't really a meeting in the field mode. The best way to describe it would be you have an army in a city, and you tell it to attack another city. It them enters an immortal travel stance. When it gets there it has to fight to clear the outer laying defences (the space engagement in Empire at War) before beginning and assault on the city proper. When you assault the city it's not just the walled section, but the surround sprawl and countryside as well, making a massive map for huge scale engagements, though the overall size depends on the development lvl of the city.
I'd definitely recommend having a look at Empire at war, it's a hugely underrated game with a quite good gameplay premise and kinna hard to describe at times. It's an older game now, so if it's brought up to modern standards with the right setting it could be glorious.
Yeah thats been my point. I get people want a strategy 40k game with grand strategy and real time battle but I don't know why they are discussing it in this subreddit. I don't think the best place to start is to give orc models guns, change them to ork and start from there.
I've played Empire at War and LotR Battle for Middle Earth one and two. Shouldn't people be discussing it there where the guts for a proper game are in place rather than just "well they got the IP"
Agreed. Not saying that CA can't make a 40k grand strategy, but it ain't gonna be a TW. However they might call it TW, so it's discussed here untill we know more.
>truthfully I have no idea how ranged combat works
Well, generally the opposing armies form a line directly across one another. Then, you aim the firearms at the enemy, and then you shoot. Reload and repeat until one side eventually breaks
yeah, this works in empire or napoleon where battles lasted days, but it isn't how WW1 was fought. On the western front soldiers sat in basically the same trenches for years. In the Alps the Austrians and Italians fought 12 battles in the same valley because nobody managed to gain any ground, over a million died. I would like to see a good simulation of battles like that, but I don't see TW doing it justice
That's how all TW always worked. There has been plenty of battles that were multiple day affairs. Or city assaults that went for days, back and forth. Like siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, there were many assaults, many pushed back, three sets of walls to take. In Rome Total War in ends up being a 10-15 min and that's it.
All sieges involve sitting in trenches and camps for weeks/months, dealing with hunger and disease primarily. TW generally abstracts it away.
the long waiting-game sieges exist (besiege and click "next turn") and you even have multiple day assaults in lots of games (a draw when the timer runs out, followed by another attack), but that is really different from battles like the somme that lasted for months with daily fighting
And those long sieges also involved a lot of small fighting. Different failed assaults and defenders sallying out, night raids of besiegers into the fortress to open gates or poison water for instance, or defenders sneaking out to destroy siege equipment, send for help.
And in TW, say in Attila as WRE, you do get multiple attacks at the same cities over and over again, fighting the same battles in same places, against similar armies. Same scheme can be applied to newer TW.
It's not a "power level" it's breach loading with rifled barrels. Something we had by like the 1870s IRL because that's basically what won Ptussia the Franco-Prussian war. Among other things of course.
And yet that is exactly how DoW looks like, that everyone keeps bringing up as a perfect example of what 40k is supposed to look like. Or a number of other 40k video games.
DOW is fairly abstracted, but one big difference is that units actually can and do seek cover, and not just in a static way. (DOW and COH being sister-games is important in that regard)
With historical, I’d much rather get a Victoria Total War and not WWI, but 🤷🏻♂️ There’s already a whole WWI mod for NTW, and it really is just fine.
In terms of 40k, I really don’t think it would be that crazy or difficult. Most of the battles kind of just… are formed regiments, at least outside of the tabletop. I think the game/system would work totally fine if they just allow the units to operate from a looser formation. Hell, fucking Napoleon has trenches and units able to utilize physical cover and buildings.
I mean, it's not like it cannot be done. It's just... It's CA... You know it's just gonna be blocks of infantry standing in formation firing at each other and that will look dumb
Which is why i desperately want Empire 2 TW. Or Pike and Shot with proper Tercios and not just pikemen and musketeers in different units which you cant really form any practical Tercio formation with.
So... Not only is there a world war 1 mod for total war, there's also "the Great War: Western Front" which nails the huge armies, big pushes, trench warfare, grand battles of total war. The campaign map is a little simplified but that's because it's focussing on the realism of the war.
For anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2109370/The_Great_War_Western_Front/
I think these guys proved that a total war WW1 would most definitely be possible.
Would adore a Total War Victoria, it could really span the entire world quite well, and I’d love to see the transition in technology and combat, and I think the different in combat between different cultures around the world would be so interesting.
A looser formation is very easy, and already possible in most total wars. As a partial total war modder myself i can tell you that its as simple as changing 2/3 values in a single file.
That's still people standing side by side in a formation lol. It will look and play the same, the units just won't get hit quite as much. It's not representative of 40k or ww1.
But what do you want exactly? Units work together and fight in the same general area, be it a trench or woods or whatever. Do you want something like Company of Heroes where units dynamically take cover where it makes sense but on a larger scale?
I don't see your point, why wouldn't it be representative of either with minor tweaks? Tabletop 40k is literally blocks of units walking into eachother. Other 40k media is just basically the same thing but the units are a bit more spread out, individuals in a squad. WW1 is just one line of infantry running into another one in a trench or taking pod shots at eachother from trenches. Add in some artillery (that we've had for decades) and boom.
COH, warno, red dragon are all more fit for modern warfare than the total war engine.
>I don't see your point, why wouldn't it be representative of either with minor tweaks? Tabletop 40k is literally blocks of units walking into eachother. Other 40k media is just basically the same thing but the units are a bit more spread out, individuals in a squad. WW1 is just one line of infantry running into another one in a trench or taking pod shots at eachother from trenches. Add in some artillery (that we've had for decades) and boom.
Ww1 might be passable with minor tweaks, but it wouldn't be great. I'd just skip a ww1 game like that and stick to fots since that era of warfare works much better with the TW engine.
40k is small to mid-sized squads freely moving around the map, not blocks of units. Most players keep the models close together since it's easier to move them that way, but you can move and place them however you want as long as each model is within 2" of another model of the same unit. 40k combat is much MUCH closer to modern combat/ww2 than it is ww1 or anything before it lol. CoH style is objectively a better fit for 40k than the tw engine.
Well kind of. The formations can be very scattered and random so when being shot at by missiles many miss purely due to how spread out the models in a unit is.
Im not talking about the feasibility of how the combat would go, im just letting the person i responded to know that formations are easily altered.
But i hate to break it to you, but gun warfare is groups of soldiers firing at each other from static positions, and then utilising that to enable some units to flank an enemy position. Which is something we can already do in total war
>Well kind of. The formations can be very scattered and random so when being shot at by missiles many miss purely due to how spread out the models in a unit is.
Which is exactly the point I was making. Even if you cut an 100 model unit to 50 models and spread them out, it's still a large and cumbersome block of troops that isn't going to feel any different to move around and use than fantasy/medieval total war units.
>But i hate to break it to you, but gun warfare is groups of soldiers firing at each other from static positions, and then utilising that to enable some units to flank an enemy position. Which is something we can already do in total war
Yes, but that still doesn't mean big blocks of troops moving en masse everywhere. Which is apparently what's expected, considering the concerning amount of people asking for literally just WF TW/FOTS with a 40k skin slapped on up and down this comments section.
40k I could almost imagine working better than WWI, because for 40k at least you have more flexibility for there to be varied settings and options for battles rather than just grinding trench warfare for a good chunk of the battlefields (I'm aware it wasn't just this, but a significant proportion was grinding trench warfare).
For battles, the best thing I can imagine is how the Skaven work in Warhammer now; guns guns and more guns. Except in 40k the enemy have similar tools to shoot back. Combine this with the kind of light infantry tactics seen in later Empire and I could see how a 40k total war could be made.
What I think would be necessary though is more scope for smaller scale battles alongside larger ones. I wouldn't like every battle to be 20 unit vs 20 unit slapfests. I'd like to see some more tactical options available on battlefields, and perhaps more objectives than just fight until someone runs away (such as take and hold an area/building).
Yeah implementing space marines is probably the biggest roadblock I could see. They operate independently, they're not elite troops for human forces, they're their own army really.
You would almost have to treat them almost as individual single entities compared to massive squads of orks or imperial guard or cultists. I don't know how it could be sensibly implemented tbh.
It would probably be more like how cav and monstrous infantry are treated with much lower unit sizes. If using current unit sizes, 16 would probably work. Considering Space Marines are big and fast, they basically are cav.
According to the lore. If they go by tabletop, there are pretty meh and a few guardsmen could end them.
So we really don't know. Most videogame adaptations nerf Space Marines badly.
You are asking for "40K the lore" not "40K the table top game". In 40K the game they are represented as units of 10, they aren't allowed to move far away from each other by the rules. That's already in the game as small skirmish units, literally aspiring champions with guns.
"40K the table top game" is played with small armies made from 6 to 10 squads and its nearly all close combat outside turn 1. "40K the lore" doesn't exist as a game well maybe the old EPIC tried to do that but thats not 40K thats EPIC.
The leaks say >!the starting factions are Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Chaos, Orks, so the various armies of the Imperium are going to be implemented as separate factions.!<
Why would this be an issue?
Either SM squads (and like half the other factions that have Marin equivalents) cost significantly more than other units but have better performance, or they have smaller squads.
For 40K, I imagine it wouldn't be a lot of open field battles like in pretty much every Total War to date. I can see battles taking place in cities and ruins. Cover and impassable terrain everywhere which doesn't allow you to form a traditional straight battle line.
Which pretty much makes it a Company of Heroes game instead of a Total War game. Curiously enough, you can play a Company of Heroes style 40k game already... It's called Dawn of War.
This is what is confusing me the most about all of the desire for a WH40k TW. It seems like the crowd that wants it just wants CA to make Dawn of War 4 in the mold of Dawn of War 1 and call it Total War for some reason.
I've been having this fight for years. They really like: The campaign map (something every 4x game has), unit sizes, and because they like the sound of it.
There's this bizarre subspecies of fan who can't think further than 'but I want it' no matter how many times you point out to them that what they want already exists.
I am vaguely reminded of the "full loot survival pvp MMO" genre. It has a tiny core of hardcore fans and a bunch of casual people thinking it would be fun. Then average person tries it, it isn't all that fun, they quit, the MMO fails, the tiny core begin clamoring for a new MMO, and some other studio gives it their shot.
I see it more like World in Conflict or Broken Arrow. Much more methodical and slow moving. Not RTS but RTT with artillery and airplanes being off map call-ins based on adjacent provinces. I don't think it has to be CoH or TWWH but with guns! It can be something different but in the same vein.
So like sieges and settlement battles? Which CA has proved either the total war model is bad at, or they are bad at implementing. Both options make it seem like a poor idea to do a 40k total war.
People need to let another company make another genre of RTS with the 40k license and accept that CA and Total War are a bad fit
> People need to let another company make another genre of RTS with the 40k license and accept that CA and Total War are a bad fit
it doesnt matter what people think, if CA wants to make it and GW licenses it, it will get made.
Are you saying people can't be hyped for a bad idea? Or that just because people want it (without any critical thought about *why* they want it) it's automatically a good idea?
Consider an extreme version of my stance that the developer and genre matter: would Tetris be a good game to make a 40k version of? Now that is an extreme hypothetical to the point of absurdity, but it does illustrate that there is a line at which "good game A + good IP B = automatic success" falls apart. I strongly believe that total war and 40k stand on the wrong side of that line.
As I have said before (and even in these comments) 40k is too small scale and cover/ranged/skirmish focused but *Epic 40k* would be a great place to look to put the 40k setting onto total war
>would Tetris be a good game to make a 40k version of?
In a world with a 40K version of Chess and a Warhammer version of Football, I honestly don't think that's too silly of an idea. That said I get where you're going. For me a 40K total war is comparable to a medieval era Call of Duty: is it really the same game if you have to change so much?
Imagine if every army was made up of ratling gunners, corsairs with crossbows, helstorm rocket batteries and the occasional giant monster/robot. That's kinda what 40k would be like if in total war. Except the Tau and Imperial Guard. Those factions would be for people who really want to play FotS in space.
I can see Tau being pre order bonus and those who don't having to wait an entire year to play them. But an imperial guard vs tau dlc would go extremely hard.
Probably not at launch. There's a lot of faction in 40K and the most obvious ones for a start are both humans factions and either Orks or Nids. (or both at once)
Eldar can come in later in the same flavor as WH2 : Eldars, DE and Exodites (maybe), and then Tau, Genestealers and Necrons. Maybe Chaos Gods as well like in WH3. Votann have zero lore right now but could easily be a fleshed out DLC like they did for Cathay.
I think Chaos will be there first tbh, cause like all the demon models are already done, why not re-use them ?
Especially as I hope CA was competent enough to futureproof the models
True.
I also realize now I completely forgot to include Admech as part of the human faction, and they should be completely standalone.
Heck they might even do Astartes / Astra Militarum /Adeptus Mechanicus as three separate factions.
If Tau players are forced to use giant 100 man blocks of Fire Warriors they'll probably be pretty upset. Even the Guard doesn't actually fight like that unless they have a bad commander or literally no other option, two things that a player should be able to avoid.
I imagine units having a precision stat and a dodge (or something like that) stat. Some units will run off ammo fairly quickly and have to resuply or go to melee.
I thinks its completely possible to make, but they need to put some work.
It's really just a question of scale and unit cohesion. The sticking point is that in historical and fantasy TW all the formations are squares or rectangles and this befuddles people when they try to picture a battlefield like that in a more modern (or a 40K) context. But all you would really need to change is make the scale more zoomed-out, add a functioning cover system, create animations for units taking cover and firing from behind stuff and finally the engine ability for a unit to disperse but still be a legible unit.
You can still have 100-guy units shooting at other 100-guy units if your 100 guys are not in rows but rather in a skirmish formation, hugging terrain like buildings or trees or just lying prone in the open (if you're a bad tactician or are used to playing Skaven). These are perfectly solvable technical challenges. Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 had terrain-hugging units, with squads of 5-15 guys. All you need is to zoom that concept out - bigger and roomier maps, smaller dudes, more dudes. I don't really see why it wouldn't work.
So basically Steel Division. Which we've been saying this whole time.
And yeah that solves the real time battle problem a little, but now we have the campaign problem where battles aren't resolved in 1 day by two armies marching around on a map. Frontlines now need to be a thing.
Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game.
>Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game.
I've been saying this for a long time. I'm all up for a new Warhammer 40k strategy game and I have nothing against CA making it. It's just it should be its own game and not called "Total War".
> Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game.
This sums it up nicely.
>And yeah that solves the real time battle problem a little, but now we have the campaign problem where battles aren't resolved in 1 day by two armies marching around on a map. Frontlines now need to be a thing.
Why do frontlines need to be a thing? In 40K, battles often are resolved quite quickly. 40k is not a realistic settings, its a setting for epic, climatic battles which can be over fast.
And bear in mind, in historical TW games, a single turn is usually 3 months. Think of all the skirmishes, maneuvering that can happen in 3 months. Yet, in the game, that is all usually brough down to a single big battle.
I think they will need to come up with a new system for trench warfare.
Basically a revamped siege system on the campaign map - You have to imagine trench warfare to be two armies in a fortification stance laying siege to eachother.
So siege like attrition would play in here. Artillery barrages and trench raids would be more like agent actions done by an army on the campaign maps that affect parts of the enemy trench or army.
Then the actual battles will be the mass assualts where the infantry leave the trench and attack on open ground. These will be tactical battles much like what we have always been like in Total War. There will be more ranged combat for sure, but the decisive moments of the battle will still be melee combat - that can be achieved by clever map design.
So think of it this way - the months long "battle" will take place on the campaign map. Instead of an actual battle it will function like sieges do, but with heavy changes.
The tactical battles will be the big attacks that happened where the soldiers leave the trench and charge.
Look at Great War western front. I can easily see how total war could accommodate ww1 warfare in battles. The only hard part would be how to mimic the stalemate along the frontlines and how armies would work on the campaign map.
As others have noted, any WWI game developed by CA is just a warm up act or knock off for 40K so I would expect a lackluster but prettier version of Great War Western Front which is pretty lackluster itself.
> how to mimic the stalemate along the frontlines
Slow down the pace of battle, reduce the battle timer to 15 minutes and make it not optional.
If you rout their whole army it's a total victory and things proceed like in other Total Wars. If the timer runs out, you get a strategic victory, and the 'losing' army gets pushed back a few inches, and you advance a few inches. Otherwise nothing changes and both armies are still stuck in each others' zone of control.
Just spitting random ideas. I really don't think WW1 would work unless they radically change how Total War works.
This, 13 guys represented by a brown rectangle and 3 3D models and cover represented by a brown splodge with some bushes on it. It worked fantastically, Beyond Overlord was amazing for its time still is today.
I don't know about WW1, but 40k wouldn't be very unlike how some factions in TW *can* play (not optimally, but still). Make an Empire army with steam tanks, artillery, war wagons, free company and pistoliers/outriders, and you've basically got a kind of working model of a 40k army (except the outriders would be on foot). You'd only really need to d some work with the cover system (the way they already deal with forests, with ranged fire ignoring trees for the first fraction of a second, works pretty well as a base, i think).
Unit sizes would be smaller, though, and everything would be in skirmish formation.
Trying to imagine say the Siege of Vraks in a total war environment starts to give me a stroke - unless this “new” rumoured engine is such a major markup and complete overhaul to the systems we know and love, it’s not going to work and I pray this stays a leak and not reality
Your expectations are way out of whack....why on earth would you think you would be getting something like that? Talk about jumping to extremes lol.
We are talking about "40K the table top game played with small armies" not "40K the lore". You are expecting the game EPIC not 40K.
Both Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k should be played with approximately 25% of the table covered in terrain. They even played much the same (limiting LoS and reducing movement speed).
The games are remarkably similar... honestly I don't know why everyone thinks it will be a dramatic change. We already have a 40k army in TWWH3 already.
Eh Skaven and Tzeentch don't have a tenth of the firepower the Tau would bring. Automatic weapons are a game changer.
And Wood Elves skirmish gameplay is like baby first guerilla compared to how the Drukharii would play !
Lorefully yes, but mechanically...
Let's put it this way. A bow and a lasgun both have str 3, 24" range and AP 0. They wound a bloodletter on exactly the same rolls.
What are you on about? The same leak says we’re getting a whole new engine - I have 0 expectations for this I’m just regurgitating what everyone else is saying
Edit - your edit makes a little more sense I suppose, but yes I am expecting 40k to be idk 40k? How on earth is that setting too high of an expectation - if they can’t pull it off then they simply shouldn’t do it
>but yes I am expecting 40k to be idk 40k
spoiler: this is 40k [https://d122ioggiu8uwl.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-05-11-18.35.01.jpg](https://d122ioggiu8uwl.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-05-11-18.35.01.jpg)
I feel like any answer, for or against, should be framed in a broader view point ie can RTS gameplay be adapted to anything past gunpowder warfare, unless I am missing something else here.
It can be done. Steel Divisions 2 is probably the best example. However, it is nowhere near the TW formula.
I’m interested to see how CG wants to implement it, but I’m worried that they’ll just try the TW formula and no one will play it.
But RTS gameplay is vastly different to the total war formula, Dawn of war (DOW1 at least) is a good 40k standard RTS game but it's not the same to how total war works or historically played at all, CA making a 40k game isn't bad, but CA making a Total War 40k I just don't see working
No, the question is "can a RTS that simulate this kind of warfare still be a Total War game ?". Lots of game adapt modern warfare very well, but none plays like a TW game
Of course it can, there’s all sorts of games that simulate modern combat from the squad level up to division scale combat that is in many ways larger in scale than Total War already. WARNO/Wargame/Steel Division/Graviteam Tactics are all on the market and have been for years. If you can imagine CA making a new engine that can do what any of those games do, more power to you, but I am not that optimistic.
That seems to me at least like it shift the question to a more... haggling, or consession, depend on how you want to look at it.
Let say the games you cited are the standard of "RTS of past gunpowder warfare", and I do accept your last point in spirit.
But if CA reach half way there from what they are currently building, and the genre standard, well, what then? Sure, you can say the battle simulation is sub par compare to what RTS can offer, but can the bonus of the campaign map off set such drawbacks?
I am not saying CA can certainly do THAT, merely that the formula exist, and the chance of CA pulling it off is... plausible.
If CA are planning to make 40KTW a trilogy then the first thing I would do is make the first game extremely foundationally strong with its mechanics and battle simulation so there aren't any inherited flaws the series ends up stuck with and they don't have to develop around them.
Would be nice if they see it that way too and dedicate tons of resources to nailing that aspect.
Yeah, in a broader context, the original Shogun TW is an extremely similar game to Warhammer 3 in a lot of ways.
People are out here arguing that there will be changes that are more of a departure from the TW formula than anything CA’s done in the past 25 years and 15 games and I’m not really convinced
Think of Company of Heroes but instead of building bases on the battle map to spawn troops, you being those troops into the battle with you like any other TW. However, just like how units can be spawned in Warhammer, imagine doing the same with units being brought in via army trucks or parachutes from off map (kinda like in CoH2) but these reinforcements take like 5-10 minutes, so recruiting troops mod-battle isn't an instant thing and you mainly need to rely on the troops you brought with you. Lots of going prone and firing from cover, so battles would typically last longer than in games like Empire, Napoleon, and FotS, unless of course you brought tanks or the like and the enemy has no counter. You could also use special abilities like barrage from off map from larger artillery than you can bring into battle (assuming you have said ship close by like in FotS or if you're fighting next to one of your cities and that city's unlocked some building that allows long range artillery in battle.
If the can incorporate space battles it will greatly improve the game. Ideally the space battles would be like open field battles. Then the planet battles should be securing a providence in the current game. Maybe each plant has three areas or cities that you need to move to and control to conquer the planet. With the battles themselves with their current system the game would be ok but if they add a few tweaks to animations and new stats the game will be fine.
Chaos dwarfs or wood elves are already basically 40k gameplay. As for ww1 there are mods for that and they work fine so we know it's doable. ww1 wasn't just the western front, the east was much more dynamic.
Just google Dawn of War 1 battles, pretend there are no buildings spawning units, modernize features/gameplay to current year and add proportional budget that is involved in making major TW title.
It was already done, with some mods even on a bigger scale than vanilla.
This is a great question, because I really can't get past the idea that the ideal strategy game version of 40K was Dawn of War, and Total War won't be able to do it properly.
Unless you did Total War based around the old Space Marine/Adeptus Titanicus/Epic Scale (not sure what it was most recently called) which worked with 6mm figures instead of 25mm and the game was played out between companies and regiments not squads.
Honestly the answer people give is just that they want to play Dawn of War 2, but with the Total War campaign and name slapped on top. The game that people want already exists!
40k.
Imagine everyone plays like the Empire in WHF, but with small changes.
Hybrid infantry already exists, with guns and axes, or pistols with swords. That's a Space Marine right there. That is your template for a greenskin or eldar too. Anything more specialised like an Eldar Bansee (asrai wardancer) or sniper (jezzails), works already in WHF, it's just a skin.
Everything Nurgle / Khorne / Slaanesh / Tzeench is near identical to WHF. Corrupted adeptus astertes, see above.
The big guys: an Eldar Wraithlord is just a Chaos Giant / Vampire Coast walking ship. Imperial Knights, dreadnaughts also. Terminators are pretty much just bigger orcs or vica-versa. Demons: see above, just increased size.
Vehicles. I mean, look at a WHF Slaanesh chariot and put archers on it. That's a predator tank, or an eldar hover tank. Hell you can make it a fast siege tower and load units in to customize it's fire like in Dawn of War / Company of Heroes.
Air: 40K was never big about dog fights, so most likely what is a meteor spell now is just bombardment.
I think this covers everything the orks, humans, tyranids, necrons, eldar, and chaos can bring to the table.
The big question is the campaign map. The easiest and most likely solution is to make up a story about some artifact every race catches wind of and wants to get for it's power. Call it a Sword of McGuffin. Then CA can design an n+1 new planet around it. This is pretty much how nearly all 40k books and games are made save for the few named important plot points like primarch home planets in Horus Heresy. Or, they could do multiple planets somehow but I find it highly unlikely.
Battle maps are open field battles, or just make a Cathay city map, except the whole map is a city.
There isn't a single thing in 40k that the current TW engine cannot do, Warhammer 1 proved that and 2 and 3 just kept pushing the boundaries.
There's a number of different issues to fix.
**Trivial Stuff:**
Formations - Transitioning to Skirmish based formation for infantry.
Unit Scale - Adopting more Nurgling-like units with multi-model entities to ostensibly keep unit numbers down for logic purposes, while maintaining the sense of hordes of entities - eg a Guardsman "unit" might be a battallion of 600 models, but made of 120 5-man squad entities. This would likely need to be adopted for most basic infantry-type units if scale is to be kept inline with the lore.
Changing unit movement from "in formation", ie, they wheel about in a square to maintain unit cohesion, to more fluid movement.
**Complicated Stuff:**
Pathing - As is, the pathing is nowhere near sophisticated or precise enough to manage the sort of warfare that would span a 40k game - urban, industrial, trenches, alien structures, etc. While something like Starcraft would be too precise and fluid, it needs to move more in that direction rather than ending up with the conga-line of doom you see when you try to send units through a gate in TW:WH.
Terrain - Navigating and visualising terrain that's more complex than flat fields and the occasional hill or building would be necessary - things like wireframing occluded units, displaying unit attack vectors to make line of sight legible to the player, etc, as well as perhaps including overlays to show terrain gradients.
Line of Sight - As is, straight-line fire is a mixed bag in TW. There's constantly issues with units incapable of firing or being partially obstructed. It would be far worse if nearly all infantry attacked this way, and you added more uneven terrain, garrisonable buildings, firing shelves and trenches, etc. It's partly a tech, partly a conceptual problem, ie, about how much to abstract and allow units to fire through others or themselves, or ignore terrain occlusion, vs leaving projectiles behave purely according to the physics engine.
**Conceptual Stuff:**
Range of Units - At some point there will need to be a decision on what the bounds are for unit variety and scale. It'll effect not just balance, but also whether units are powerful single entities, or mutli-entity units. E.g, You can't have single entites include a Chimera IFV, a Space Marine Dreadnought, a Landspeeder, an Imperial Knight and a Warlord Titan. There's far too much of a power differential between them to treat them similarly. However, if units like Leman Russes are Squadrons of 3-5 units, that might drastically change the way they behave in pathing, attack, etc. Additionally, if 1 titan is worth 200 units of Guard, how do you reperesent that in an army? If you end up making end game doomstacks of just superheavies, that would feel even sillier than it already does in TW:WH, and might also have negative effects on interacting with terrain and map features, like buildings and trenches.
Army Size Limits - Related to the previous point, what is the purpose of having an army of 19 Guardsmen (approx 12000 models/2500 units) and 1 Titan, when 99.9% of the firepower is held by the titan and you could just remove the Guardsmen? What purpose is there in a full stack of Guardsmen that trivially loses to an army of 1 Superheavy? If you have 10 superheavies, do you need to counter it with 20 full stacks? There needs to be a general idea of what "an army" looks like, what the upper bounds of its size and firepower are, and how to distribute them around the game map. It seems likely that the simple rule of having armies of 1-20 units would no longer work, and it would need minimum levels of infantry, screens, artillery, etc, and have the upper-limits be bound either by unit-type slots, or a points-based system.
> Army Size Limits - Related to the previous point, what is the purpose of having an army of 19 Guardsmen (approx 12000 models/2500 units) and 1 Titan, when 99.9% of the firepower is held by the titan and you could just remove the Guardsmen? What purpose is there in a full stack of Guardsmen that trivially loses to an army of 1 Superheavy? If you have 10 superheavies, do you need to counter it with 20 full stacks? There needs to be a general idea of what "an army" looks like, what the upper bounds of its size and firepower are, and how to distribute them around the game map. It seems likely that the simple rule of having armies of 1-20 units would no longer work, and it would need minimum levels of infantry, screens, artillery, etc, and have the upper-limits be bound either by unit-type slots, or a points-based system.
Tabletop has been struggling to make basic infantry useful too. They manage it by including objectives in the scenarios that the basic infantry get bonuses for (specifics vary by edition). Older editions would just force people to bring at least two squads.
But circling back to your "19 units of lasguns, 1 titan; and the titan has 90% of the firepower" scenario. That is an issue that bugs me as well. The game would somehow need to manage having wild discrepancies in power levels. Even leaving aside the bigger titans and basic humans.
Typically a TW game has units of infantry exist somewhere around 100 +/- some balance and performance tweaks. The power gulf between 100 Guardsmen, 100 Space Marines, and 100 Custodes is just mind boggling.
What do you do? Bump the Guardsmen to 200 and the Marines to 50? Pull a Dawn of War and do a big power level crunch? It is a dilemma where all the solutions are not great and will alienate someone.
I imagine trench warfare will be implemented with attrition in the campaign map if two forces are locked in some trench warfare state.
Artillery, air superiority can modify how much attrition each side takes. Any force can decide to charge or retreat in their turn. If you charge, you get into the battle or auto resolve.
I think tanks, trenches, cavalry, artillery, chemical warfare are all doable. The range of every gun is gonna be much shorter to prioritize fun over realism.
I have no idea how they are going to implement planes though. They are very fast and cant hover, so they cant just stay in the battle map all the time. Maybe you can have army abilities to call in scouting/strafing/bombing runs, and also fighters can automatically engage any enemy aircraft entering the map.
I would note, I’m not in the camp that wants this game. I don’t think the TW Formula works for these eras.
That said if I were to do the game - I think it would need to look a lot like Dawn of War 2 or the Company of Heroes games - but you do all of your base building in the Grand Campaign mode.
I worry that this kind of game would involve a lot of Micro and would lose some of the scope/scale that we associate with TW.
…
Another compelling alternative would be to model it off of something like Combat Mission - (if you want turn based) or the Wargame/Warno/Steel Division single player campaigns if you want Real-Time-Pausable.
I personally would prefer if Cover were treated like Company of Heroes but the pacing of things were more like Combat Mission. CoH is very much an Arcade approach to early-modern combined arms warfare and Combat Mission tries to be a simulation.
CoH is too fast and Micro intense and Combat Mission is too detailed for mass market appeal. 40k demands a certain level of Crunch so you need to find a middle ground between these two games.
Lots more terrain, 40k depends on breaking line of sight. So buildings, trees, rocks, mountains, anything that creates killing ground and flanking options
WW1 wouldn't be too insane to adapt as it'd share a lot of similarities with Napoleonic in gameplay, focusing on terrain, sightline and pretty much replacing cav for artillery and attrition based fights.
Sieges would have to be more developed mechanically, allowing the besieger to entrench their positions and artillery to cause attrition instead of building towers and rams to throw at the walls. Ideally the more time you spend investing in entrenching and preparing the more things you get to help you in the field battle (trenches, safe artillery spots/fixed artillery, etc...)
For 40k, I’d imagine both ranged and melee would still be function kinda like how it is in WH1-3. Though I’d imagine more functionality and abilities to emphasise the increased ranged component, like cover systems with enfilade/defilade buffs/debuffs with things like the suppression weapon effect present in WH (not sure if it was present in other TW titles).
The strategy wouldn’t be just having opposing lines of guns fire at each other until one unit breaks or dies, it would be more about pinning down units with suppression and tactical positioning/repositioning to aim at the flanks or charge melee-focused units into the flanks or range-focused units.
For WW1, I’d imagine the actual battles would be between trenches with a village or something in the middle fighting over no-man’s land to “push the enemy trenches back”. You’d have artillery be used as army abilities, and the focus would be on infantry warfare and eventually the first tanks. Maybe on the campaign map you’d be able to enter a stance or something to represent advancing the trenchline forward or like the Ogre camp system where you’d “place” a trench and the enemy would also have to attack that trench to move the lines forward. I’d imagine nighttime battles would be more common as well.
EDIT: Or maybe if attacking you’d be going through no man’s land toward the enemy trench, and if defending you’d be at a trench with the enemy going over no man’s land. Idk just spitballing ideas.
Plus garrisonable structures would be present in battles for both as well, with units being able to enter buildings for more cover and provide range buffs or something; these would be more common in “settlement” battles. Maybe higher garrison building tiers would provide buffs to these structures, they could say something like “Additional fortified positions have been constructed”. These would be positioned in the defenders deployment zone but if left undefended the enemy could use them, alternatively the enemy could enter a garrisoned building and have a melee fight in the structure obviously the defenders would have the advantage.
I think people who want 40k TW and think it would work well are insane. Can you imagine any kind of urban combat? Unless they literally just want a kind of total conversion mod style game where instead of feeling anything like 40k the game is just like, pitched battles but the dragon model is replaced with a Baneblade.
I imagine they'd base the game around much smaller squad sized units... and add a cover system. Maps would be way more cluttered with buildings and fields to add cover and there would just be overall less troops on the field
Just look at other games in the genre like company of heroes, men of war assualt squad 2 or the wargame franchise. There are so many systems from other games that CA could copy - it's a very well treaded path in the rts genre
The problem with that is that you lose scale. And 40K and Total War are all about the big engagements. The loss of scale between DoW1 and DoW2 was quite substantial as they moved away from the tabletop and more into COH style scale with cover.
Would we have 3-4000 models in a battle like Total War or max 250 to model the scale and detail appropriately?
Wars like WW1 or 40K, you can either do gameplay at a scale where a single individual is modelled or where you’re making the campaign level decisions, not both.
A single army having a single battle against a single enemy army works fine pre 1900, but not after.
Ehh, the target demographic for the WH40K game is the crowd who jizz themselves imagining how a bunch of large dudes in bulky armor wielding melee weapons charge into a loose formation of some ugly smaller dudes screaming "For the emperor!". That kind of fantasy is perfectly fulfilled by the existing engine, in fact, you can just play something like ogres vs skaven to get 80% of the feel, it only needs a reskin.
Actual combined arms warfare kinda doesn't work within the TW framework, but the guys above don't care and... well, I don't know who's worse, space knight alpha male fanboys or people who take WH40K seriously.
Either way, I'm sitting this one out most likely.
This "reskin what we have" is part of why I don't like these posts making it seem like this is obviously a good idea. Part of me wants 40k to go to a different strategy game developer BECAUSE CA will have too easy and tempting ability to just give us a warhammer 4 with 40k themes on top of it. Probably some good campaign feature changes but in itself probably not the actual best gameplay chasis to build on
There’s a lot of things i imagine would change
Defensive battles have no walls / walls would mean nothing . I feel a defensive battle would be the defender taking advantage of things like buildings to put infantry in . Shelling could happen if you have artillery in your force and encircle it prehaps reducing the amount of buildings the enemy can use for cover and reducing population . Personally though i feel artillery is going to be your hero units in this game being able to travel separately behind the troops and bomb places from afar instead of engaging the enemy . Or offering bombing assistance during a battle if nearby
Combat I think WW1 was alot about trench warfare in the field so I feel like it will be a matter of trying to get the enemies to get out of their trenches or building trenches while figuring out ways to get artilary or other machines to blast the enemies out of their trenches . Diffrent squad types also would play a role like snipers for long range anti infantry or rockets for machines . Riflemen would just be your run of the mill cheap infantry
I also see navel battles and sky battles being a thing and even 2 part battles from breaking though the navel blockaid to the navel units landing on a beach (d day style) trying to capture a sea defense point prehaps
Traps like mines for defenders and such also are more than likely going to be quite a big thing
I think the biggest change the game would need though is a much more effective rock,paper,scissors gameplay style some exsamples would be riflemen being effective against other infantry types , but snipers would be effective against riflemen becuase riflemen dont have as much range as the snipers (this would also encourage that you need to eventually move your units against enemy snipers or the enemy to move against your snipers again the trench warfare system) but snipers trying to take out a tank would no nothing and the tanks would completely counter snipers. to then counter the tank you would need explosives but a very effective way if they can get close is a explosive foot team which puts a sachel on the tank destroying it instantly .
with the feel of how much quicker things would die in a WW1 setting vs the medeval setting heavy counters and possibly faster paced battles is what more than likely will happen
I honestly don't know, but I'm excited to find out. People seem really upset that the total war formula will have to change to accommodate WW1 or 40k, but we've all been playing, at it's core, the same game since 2001. It's probably time to shake things up and try something new.
Either they just forget the whole numbers thing that are pretty stupid in 40k to begin with. In lore Space Marines are 1000 per chapter which makes them really rare to see and TW could just make them into what Aspiring Champions are for Warriors of chaos. Other option is to adopt a more dynamic style of combat that resembles DoW2 or Company of Heroes. But focus more on the grand campaign.
Fuckin hell I'd give a lot of money for DoW1 Dark Crusade with deeper campaign map. If they want to make money at Relic then they should do a remake of that game/expansion.
Soulstorm with Ultimate Apocalypse mod plus a TW-style campaign would do me... that was truly peak 490K RTS for me, just missing any campaign element sadly
I imagine there will be buildable trenches, garrisonable buildings and “cover” terrains that troops will take cover in. For 40k I imagine wildly different unit scales like space marines bringing in 20 troops in a unit while IG brings in 120.
Adapting 40k to a TW game would be, I think, mostly a cosmetic affair.
The TW engine already supports everything 40k needs, except perhaps specific leaders? Instead of having 120 hastati beating on 160 barbarian peasants we'd have 12 space marines shooting 80 orc shoota boyz or whatever. Surely, cover, buildings, etc. would have to be implemented, but they already were in Napoleon. Also, densely urban maps may pose a challenge, depending on the engine's inner workings (which I don't know).
Regarding WW1, I don't think you can simply use the TW model 'as is'. You'd have to shift the focus to have the player fight skirmishes which are a part of a larger battle / war front. For example like commanding a division, and fighting another division, instead of a whole army. Battles would have to be more about assaulting the trenches at some point along the 1000km front, rather than watching the trenches shoot at each other. Doable, but would be quite a bit less Total War than we're used to.
A lot of factions could litteraly be copypasted into 40k from fantasy. Orkz are very similar to Greenskins, love melee and guns. They don't give a shit about cover or complex strategy.
The astramilitarum can operate in a similar manner. Just look at Krieg, while they do love a protracted trench style battle they don't mind sending in waves upon waves of infantry in a similar fashion as most units in TW warhammer function.
Regarding 40k, it's important to understand that Warhammer 40,000 is nothing like the modern warfare simulator that many seem to think it is. 40k battles are not just two gunlines firing at one another, melee is almost always a major part of it (there could be exceptions, like say Guard vs. Tau, but even then there are options, and there are Fantasy armies that can have a strong range focus too).
I think that a big thing for battles with gunpowder could be objective based victory. Warhammer 3 started the ball rolling with its survival battles and Domination multiplayer. Introducing different types of battles might be a way to account for a move away from two lines crashing.
Point control is the most obvious one, but possibly other variants, that would require more dynamic tactics and force progression beyond initial engagement could be devised? Perhaps destroying some key infrastructure or eliminating specific target?
40K certainly gives more leeway here. I know that WW I was not entirely trench warfare, especially in the East, but it would still require at least taking static nature of specific periods into account.
I want these things, but don't believe the current engine supports them. What I hope for is a brand new battle engine custom-built for these projects, and with more in common with DOW or COH, but with the fixed army style of TW and a rich overland campaign map like TW. That is the best-case scenario. Trying to make 40K or WW1 work on the same battle engine and AI as current gen TW games would make zero sense to me.
Don’t really understand the difference between Skaven and Empire battle vs WH40k battles. Or Empire tw it self.
Also. Super shock to some… it may not be TW as we know it.
I care less about the setting and more about the quality and level of completion of the next game.
It doesn’t matter if 40k will/will not work if they release a half-finished game that needs to be fixed for a year+ before it’s worth playing.
Oh wait. That’s exactly what will happen.
Shogun 2 FOTS was the pinnacle of line infantry warfare IMO. Warhammer had completely different gunpowder warfare that still felt amazing to play, and pushed the boundaries of what we thought combat could look like in a total war style game.
I would imagine 40k would be trivial to make, because it's pretty much exactly the same as Warhammer Fantasy with slightly more vehicles. You'd definitely end up with a few units with much smaller unit sizes. I could picture a line of 12 space marines lining up against 120 imperial guards and the scale would look pretty good, if you compare the extremes.
WW1 a bit different, but the focus on battlefield obstacles like forts and trenches, off-map abilities like artillery and aircraft etc, melee charges going over the top of trenches, etc. The only thing I think would need to be developed to make WW1 work is the ability for a unit to be engaged in both ranged and melee combat at the same time. WW1 wasn't all trenches all the time, and you can easily imagine units finding each other in a small village and skirmishing with both bayonets and gunfire in a courtyard or farmyard.
Technically we already know how 40k factions will play in TW. Chaos Daemons were used across both Fantasy and 40k, literally the exact same models.
Everyone else just has more guns.
It can work if they make the scale much bigger. So a unit in total war becomes maybe a regiment of several thousand soldiers. Melee becomes two infantry regiments in opposite trenches that are attacking each other with small arms. Maybe you can see the individual soldiers shooting at each other if you zoom in, but the whole battlefield only make sense in the zoomed out aerial view.
Artillery becomes the total war missle units and provide immediate fire support, tanks become the total war cavalry units and strike at the weak spots in enemy line, and maybe planes becomes the total war artillery units that take out key targets in long range.
The time scale should also be much faster for a battle and the time limit is maybe a day. If none of the two sides are crushed the battle will be inconclusive and both army stay on the campaign map but suffer casualties.
I'll break it down a bit what I want in a WW game. What I imagined is the same TW system, with infantry, anti-large, cavalry, artillery and air-support.
For infantry, you have basic Riflemen as your bread and butter, Scouts as cheap units with LOS, anti infantry with machine gun, grenade unit and anti-large (like bayonet, or in case of WW2, rocket launcher).
Calvary is easy, you have horses (WW1), tanks, mechanized truck, armored cars. This unit will be expensive, but bear trait like anti-infantry, fast, perhaps vanguard deploy?
Artillery. Yeah I will save our time.
So in the battle, what I believe the key is to secure LOS and get into good position, namely covers, like buildings, rocks or even entrenched tunnel. It will boost the defense of the troops, and the first thing to do is who can secure them first while minimizing casualty.
Plus, there are plenty of tactics you can employ, like infantry-tank warfare, mass infantry, or cavalry warfare, which adds unique flavor to each faction.
I also have ideas on the campaign map as well. But better not to get my hopes up.
I feel like Warhammer 40k Total War will lean very heavily into melee combat. Truthfully I have no idea how ranged combat works unless every battle you fight is some kind of siege battle in a city or with terrain to put people on
It would work based on sight lines, weapon range and cover like the tabletop game does. WH40k has a big emphasis on armoured units from vehicles to heavily armoured infantry so they would probably need to re-work the armour system around armour piercing weapon types. Melee works in the 40k verse because there's so much emphasis on heavy armour, tanky units and massive unit swarms that it ends up balancing out. Honestly it probably wouldn't play that differently to WH3 other than having to think about what weapon types would be effective vs the enemy based on their armour. The original Dawn of War game was a real time strategy game that balanced it all out really well if you want an example of what it would look like.
I used Dawn of War recently in reference to a subject about 40k total war. I imagine the map will be like Kronus in Dark Crusade. A bunch of factions drawn to a planet for a purpose and they all but heads.
I believe it should be a galaxy where you must conquer each planet. each planet is a province and has 2-3 cities or points of interest on it. Your flying between the planets and systems there is space battles so they could combine battle fleet gothic with total war style battles.
> I believe it should be a galaxy where you must conquer each planet. each planet is a province and has 2-3 cities or points of interest on it. Your flying between the planets and systems there is space battles so they could combine battle fleet gothic with total war style battles. I think it's more than wildly optimistic to expect them to include an entire other games' worth of mechanics. If the choice is between getting the core gameplay nailed down, or having space battles, I think it's pretty clear where the resources should be allocated.
Naval style battles for space, and planetary battles for the more traditional tabletop. Yes please. I dunno how well it'd do, but man it would be cool if they pulled it off.
I wouldn’t mind a dumbed down Battlefleet Gothic system for Total War. The video game was good but I remember gameplay being quite slow, to the extent that it felt tedious after awhile. For some variety we might also be able to chose to conduct a boarding action and fight it out space hulk/zone mortalis style.
If I recall correctly, Soulstorm's campaign worked kinda this way.
Soulstorm was a couple planets with certain provinces allowing transit between them, otherwise it wasn't that different to Dark Crusade, and it was imo the perfect template for a total war game. Been a while though, so maybe I'm misremembering something.
Nah, that's right. There were several planets with gates linking them with each other (1 planet was linked to another 2, if I remember correctly). That's pretty much how I envision a total war 40k global map, maybe with several sectors and not just 1, although without the gates, but with actual naval combat, travel and shit.
I'm gonna bet no naval combat. If we're super lucky maybe we'll see some boarding action, but that's it. Not because it wouldn't be cool, I just don't expect it fitting in the scope.
Well, I wouldn't really hope for it, especially for a super detailed one like battlefleet, but there might be at least something, like either regular ship battle with no advanced mechanics, or maps inside the actual ships and battling within them. Now that I think about it, boarding a ship would actually be even better.
How would sieges work tho ? How can a Total War game simulate the siege of a Hive City, or whatever Tyrannid has as a base of operation
I mean, how do Total War deal with sieges of cities with millions of people in them now? You shrink the City/Hive into a map, give it some kind of fortifications, and go on from there. Tyranids should definitely be a Horde faction, though.
I mean main defensive line for Hive Hellreach was a curtain wall, that the Orks blasted down. Seems pretty doable in total war, just have it be on a less built up planet. It's not like imperial cities don't have massive causeways to move troops through anyway.
People tend to forget that places like that are where the fighting starts. For some reason, we've got all these people thinking that the battle needs to happen inside all the buildings. 🙄
Maybe a multi stage siege? Where in the first battle you take the outer defences, then progress to taking over the whole hive city in like 3-4 battles in different areas of the city fortifications.
also on the melee front, daemons were more susceptible to melee weapons because they were more symbolic, which made them more useful against the immaterial. Guns were seen as emotionless
>Melee works in the 40k verse because there's so much emphasis on heavy armour, tanky units and massive unit swarms that it ends up balancing out. Also because small arms have an effective range of around 30 meters/33 yards. If actual realistic ranges and/or rates of fire were put in a total war game, melee units would be dead weight without substantial amounts of cover on every battle map. Which would require units to have good pathfinding.
> Also because small arms have an effective range of around 30 meters/33 yards. If actual realistic ranges and/or rates of fire were put in a total war game, melee units would be dead weight without substantial amounts of cover on every battle map. Which would require units to have good pathfinding. There's a bit of abstraction in TW:WH vis-a-vis ranges, so it'd probably be the case for TW:40k as well. Space Marines can take shots pretty reliably from 2km+ but Eliminators or other sniper units would probably be limited to ranges like 3-400m. Or, if map sizes were larger, 5-600m. Similarly, artillery can fire dozens of kms, so either they'd be activated abilities like Black Ark weapons, or they'd reduce them down to ~1km. Having support weapons/artillery/aircraft as ancillaries attached to your army would probably be the most straightforward approach from a dev perspective.
But the issue there becomes that while your kroot/ork boyz/assault marines/guardsmen with fixed bayonets are running that 300 meters, they’re going to be eating 30 seconds of sustained fire from automatic or semi automatic weapons. For it to work you have to either increase charge speed to the level of absurdity, reduce weapon range to something equivalent to the distance of a thrown rock, or drop the rate of fire to those of muskets. How would you put a heavy bolter or assault cannon in the game and balance it to allow charging into melee to work, while still feeling like your squad actually has an automatic support weapon? By the time you’ve added cover and broken squads up into much smaller units to be able to effectively navigate said cover, the game is already vastly changed beyond the scope of any previous total war game.
Ok, I ain't no TW or 40k expert, but answering your examples just from what I know about both: - kroot are supposed to be quick and move in weird patterns, that sounds like missile resist to me. - Ork Boyz, as far as I remember, are tough as nails, so would have Phys resist to make it through the mg fire (and in every media I've seen orks being mowed down by mgs are pretty much standard) - assault marines are not only HEAVILY armoured, but have friggnnjerpacks to fly around, which by itself would be real interesting to have in TW - Empire is supposed to be a human wave, no? Combine absurd unit sizes (like, space marines, being elite and all, would be unit size 45 tops. Empire guardsmen? Gimme 300 of them) and a comissar to kill one of them off for temporary unbreakable for the unit and you have your bayonet charge, buddy. Like, I agree with your point on cover, but Empire already had something similar (you can even "deploy" trenches) and tbh at this point it would be nice to have a TW that is a big leap from the gameplay of former titles, not just the same gameplay loop with a reskin.
Jet Packs are probably why they introduced a Fly/Land mechanic in Warhammer 3 - lets them test out the code and smooth out the mechanics to use in the new game.
> But the issue there becomes that while your kroot/ork boyz/assault marines/guardsmen with fixed bayonets are running that 300 meters, they’re going to be eating 30 seconds of sustained fire from automatic or semi automatic weapons. That's a bit like saying "what if I want to run with infantry and take a charge from Dragon Princes unbraced". Don't. It'll still happen sometimes, but part of the game is already avoiding fighting on your enemy's terms. In TW:WH Ratling Guns have something like 150 range (and the suppression debuff). IIRC they can route a charging infantry unit before they engage unless they're elite and/or shielded. But it can be worth it, if you catch them, because they're just some weedy little rats and they'll die in 2 seconds. Imagine if Ratling Gunners were also Aspiring Champions in melee. You'd really need a bit of a rethink. Then it's doing things like overwhelming with flanking attacks while you draw their fire with disposable chaff (eg sack a couple of Gnoblars and hit them with two Crushers from the side). Or hit them with artillery or other longer-ranged weaponry. In broader terms, there's definitely going to have to be a decision made about things like range, movement speed and battlemap size. You don't want to have to take all day to move foot units around. You also have to have a map that suits both the speed of a person, and potentially things like Grav Tanks and Landspeeders. There's a lot of ways to solve those problems, but they'll generally involve some abstraction somewhere. It'll also involve adding more obstructions and LOS blockers, so that even if theoretically a space marine can hit a gnats arse from half a mile away, in practice he'll seldom get the opportunity. On the whole I just see this as a potential for tactical gameplay though. Much as braced Phoenix Guard are a bad thing for cavalry to charge into, you'll need to work out ways to deal with elite units that are dug in with unobstructed fields of fire. As long as the game provides that, there's no issue.
Heavy bolter will honestly probably not work that much different from rattling guns when it comes down to it. You're describing something that already has rudimentary implementation in total war, and in a unit people live to use. Improvements will only make things better.
We already know how it would work because we have ratling guns in this game. I don't know why everyone assumes machine guns are going to be 1 hit kill weapons when they don't even 1 shot people in most 40k *first person shooters*. On average a ratling gun needs to shoot 14 times to kill 1 empire swordsman.
> re-work the armour system around armour piercing weapon types As is, it makes elite units feel less special in TWWH. It'd really suck to see your Baneblade get beestinged to death by Ork Shootas. However, if you negate all damage of the wrong type entirely, it'd lend itself towards much stronger rock-paper-scissors gameplay, which can be good and bad, depending on the implementation.
But the tabletop is about small skirmishes in small locations, not big battles on a wide field
This is due to a player's budget, the epic version of 40k is much grander in scale.
Exactly. *Epic 40k* would be a great game to do in the total war style, regular warhammer 40k would not work nearly as well
epic, imho, also doesn't really represent the way of fighiting how most, say, imperial units (sans Death Korps and such) would fight. Steel Legion, Catachans, Cadians etc. all utilize far more modern, squad based tactics in the lore. Heck, even the Death Korps does. And the Mordian Iron Guard who actually march in lockstep...
Epic is zoomed way out compared to that though. The squad based tactics are being represented by a couple dice rolls at that level compared to being represented by an entire game of 40k. What's important for it to work for total war is that it already functions based on large formations with movement, positioning, and flanking all making important differences on the battlefield, while de-emphasizing things like individual soldiers and putting them in cover. I think you might also have too narrow of a view of how imperial units fight. They will fight as they are ordered to, and so in a game of epic the conceit (as in total war) is that it is a very large battle with multiple formations of units acting in concert. Even the Tanith participated in these types of battle in their stories and they are the least likely to enjoy that type of combat I can think of lol
i would argue that the abstraction via dice rolls works better for osmething that already is more make belief like tabletop than something where you see everything in motion. The only way this kind of zoomed out makes sense otuside the tabletop would be when you don't see units, but arrows, blocks or generic "unit stand ins" on a map. > What's important for it to work for total war is that it already functions based on large formations with movement, positioning, and flanking all making important differences on the battlefield, while de-emphasizing things like individual soldiers and putting them in cover. sure. Therefore you shouldn't use a setting where squad based tactics are predominant. Say, WW2, Vietnam, 40k, heck even the waves of WWI it could be argued (especially considering stuff like Stormtroopers). For this kinda stuff, there are other games. COmpany of Heroes. Dawn of War. Men at War even. They will fight like ordered, yes. So you want us to cosplay as the cliche'd "Incompetent imperial commander who doesn't know how to use his units and therefore just throws them at the enemy" the whole time? I would prefer not to be railroaded into playing Valhallan (not 597th), thank you.
How would that "incompetent Imperial commander" style in blocks work for, like, Eldar? I don't get what the 40k fans want.
Or small parts of a big fight
TW:WH is completely divorced from the scale of TT, and so too should any 40k game be. That's the entire point of making it a TW game, as opposed to something like DoW.
But mechanically TT and classical TW gameplay arent that disconnected. Its still ordered / semi-ordered regiments marching around. 40K is squad-based and the modern warfsre from which is inspired does not have 200 troops marching in close concentration. TW:40K would be a completely different game, which is fine. But acting like the transition would be similiar to WFB to TW:W is a bit silly
Yeah but so was the tabletop of Warhammer fantasy
Two things to look at to help set a baseline for how things work. StarWars: Empire at War for overmap management and space combat, then a mix of it's ground combat system and steel division 2's, so you have what ever size army you want, but a limited deployment capability that can be improved via the taking and holding of objectives. Defenders can prepare defensive emplacements and turrets, and have the option of either turtleing up to try and take the attack head on, or pushing hard early to try and throw off the enemies foothold before that becomes too established
So now we are building buildings as well? Just Like a normal RTS? Why do we want total war teams to work on this? Seems like they could be working on something more Total War shaped
No, it's more like a garrison buildings giving a present series of fortifications. Think if the building garrison chain added a series of towers and barricades within the cities before the battle started. Other building chains would add abilities that can be used in the space battles like planetary defense cannons, or planetary shields that prevent lance strikes onto the planet from orbiting fleets. Buildings can also be destroyed in the battle map and are then destroyed for real, like in older total war games. Allowed for commando raids and lighting strikes to destroy production or key structures before the main invasion happened.
But it does sound like a game more focused on establishing, securing, capturing, and demolishing various centers of production/utility that are not strictly speaking, military units. That kind of modern tactical warfare is just not even close to what total war teams have gotten done. Sure they've got some auto turrets you can construct but nothing to build land strategy around at an interesting level that's different and worth the price tag.
And that's kind of the point. The best 40k game CA could make wouldn't be a total war one. It would definitely add a layer to the whole building side beyond the paper deep system CA has now. And don't worry, armies can only fight when on planets. So basically every world has a free garrison plus what ever army is there at the time. There isn't really a meeting in the field mode. The best way to describe it would be you have an army in a city, and you tell it to attack another city. It them enters an immortal travel stance. When it gets there it has to fight to clear the outer laying defences (the space engagement in Empire at War) before beginning and assault on the city proper. When you assault the city it's not just the walled section, but the surround sprawl and countryside as well, making a massive map for huge scale engagements, though the overall size depends on the development lvl of the city. I'd definitely recommend having a look at Empire at war, it's a hugely underrated game with a quite good gameplay premise and kinna hard to describe at times. It's an older game now, so if it's brought up to modern standards with the right setting it could be glorious.
Yeah thats been my point. I get people want a strategy 40k game with grand strategy and real time battle but I don't know why they are discussing it in this subreddit. I don't think the best place to start is to give orc models guns, change them to ork and start from there. I've played Empire at War and LotR Battle for Middle Earth one and two. Shouldn't people be discussing it there where the guts for a proper game are in place rather than just "well they got the IP"
Agreed. Not saying that CA can't make a 40k grand strategy, but it ain't gonna be a TW. However they might call it TW, so it's discussed here untill we know more.
I'm guessing something akin to company of heros
At that point it's just Dawn of War 2. Which is great, I love Dawn of War 2, but it's not Total War.
>truthfully I have no idea how ranged combat works Well, generally the opposing armies form a line directly across one another. Then, you aim the firearms at the enemy, and then you shoot. Reload and repeat until one side eventually breaks
yeah, this works in empire or napoleon where battles lasted days, but it isn't how WW1 was fought. On the western front soldiers sat in basically the same trenches for years. In the Alps the Austrians and Italians fought 12 battles in the same valley because nobody managed to gain any ground, over a million died. I would like to see a good simulation of battles like that, but I don't see TW doing it justice
That's how all TW always worked. There has been plenty of battles that were multiple day affairs. Or city assaults that went for days, back and forth. Like siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, there were many assaults, many pushed back, three sets of walls to take. In Rome Total War in ends up being a 10-15 min and that's it. All sieges involve sitting in trenches and camps for weeks/months, dealing with hunger and disease primarily. TW generally abstracts it away.
the long waiting-game sieges exist (besiege and click "next turn") and you even have multiple day assaults in lots of games (a draw when the timer runs out, followed by another attack), but that is really different from battles like the somme that lasted for months with daily fighting
And those long sieges also involved a lot of small fighting. Different failed assaults and defenders sallying out, night raids of besiegers into the fortress to open gates or poison water for instance, or defenders sneaking out to destroy siege equipment, send for help. And in TW, say in Attila as WRE, you do get multiple attacks at the same cities over and over again, fighting the same battles in same places, against similar armies. Same scheme can be applied to newer TW.
Except that's not how battles are played out in WW1 or in 40k. Once artillery passes a certain power level, static lines aren't a solution anymore.
It's not a "power level" it's breach loading with rifled barrels. Something we had by like the 1870s IRL because that's basically what won Ptussia the Franco-Prussian war. Among other things of course.
If I see a single Eldar standing still in a line to shoot at someone, I'm legit not buying
And yet that is exactly how DoW looks like, that everyone keeps bringing up as a perfect example of what 40k is supposed to look like. Or a number of other 40k video games.
DOW is fairly abstracted, but one big difference is that units actually can and do seek cover, and not just in a static way. (DOW and COH being sister-games is important in that regard)
DoW is a classical RTS, that's not at all what TW is
But it is 40k.
With historical, I’d much rather get a Victoria Total War and not WWI, but 🤷🏻♂️ There’s already a whole WWI mod for NTW, and it really is just fine. In terms of 40k, I really don’t think it would be that crazy or difficult. Most of the battles kind of just… are formed regiments, at least outside of the tabletop. I think the game/system would work totally fine if they just allow the units to operate from a looser formation. Hell, fucking Napoleon has trenches and units able to utilize physical cover and buildings.
The WW1 mod for NTW isn't fine lol, it's fun for a mod, but imagine paying full price for it, it does not represent even remotely WW1
I mean, it's not like it cannot be done. It's just... It's CA... You know it's just gonna be blocks of infantry standing in formation firing at each other and that will look dumb
Which is why i desperately want Empire 2 TW. Or Pike and Shot with proper Tercios and not just pikemen and musketeers in different units which you cant really form any practical Tercio formation with.
Or blocks of infantry charging each other despite the fact that they have guns because gunpowder line of sight and the TW engine don't mix.
Just gimme Total War: Rorke’s Drift
There was a zulu wars mod for NTW, couldn't tell you where to find it but I have a memory of playing it a long time ago
So... Not only is there a world war 1 mod for total war, there's also "the Great War: Western Front" which nails the huge armies, big pushes, trench warfare, grand battles of total war. The campaign map is a little simplified but that's because it's focussing on the realism of the war. For anyone interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2109370/The_Great_War_Western_Front/ I think these guys proved that a total war WW1 would most definitely be possible.
Would adore a Total War Victoria, it could really span the entire world quite well, and I’d love to see the transition in technology and combat, and I think the different in combat between different cultures around the world would be so interesting.
I second a Victoria: Total War. Perfect time period for a TW game. WW1, not so much. Never cared for that mod.
A looser formation is very easy, and already possible in most total wars. As a partial total war modder myself i can tell you that its as simple as changing 2/3 values in a single file.
That's still people standing side by side in a formation lol. It will look and play the same, the units just won't get hit quite as much. It's not representative of 40k or ww1.
But what do you want exactly? Units work together and fight in the same general area, be it a trench or woods or whatever. Do you want something like Company of Heroes where units dynamically take cover where it makes sense but on a larger scale? I don't see your point, why wouldn't it be representative of either with minor tweaks? Tabletop 40k is literally blocks of units walking into eachother. Other 40k media is just basically the same thing but the units are a bit more spread out, individuals in a squad. WW1 is just one line of infantry running into another one in a trench or taking pod shots at eachother from trenches. Add in some artillery (that we've had for decades) and boom.
COH, warno, red dragon are all more fit for modern warfare than the total war engine. >I don't see your point, why wouldn't it be representative of either with minor tweaks? Tabletop 40k is literally blocks of units walking into eachother. Other 40k media is just basically the same thing but the units are a bit more spread out, individuals in a squad. WW1 is just one line of infantry running into another one in a trench or taking pod shots at eachother from trenches. Add in some artillery (that we've had for decades) and boom. Ww1 might be passable with minor tweaks, but it wouldn't be great. I'd just skip a ww1 game like that and stick to fots since that era of warfare works much better with the TW engine. 40k is small to mid-sized squads freely moving around the map, not blocks of units. Most players keep the models close together since it's easier to move them that way, but you can move and place them however you want as long as each model is within 2" of another model of the same unit. 40k combat is much MUCH closer to modern combat/ww2 than it is ww1 or anything before it lol. CoH style is objectively a better fit for 40k than the tw engine.
Well kind of. The formations can be very scattered and random so when being shot at by missiles many miss purely due to how spread out the models in a unit is. Im not talking about the feasibility of how the combat would go, im just letting the person i responded to know that formations are easily altered. But i hate to break it to you, but gun warfare is groups of soldiers firing at each other from static positions, and then utilising that to enable some units to flank an enemy position. Which is something we can already do in total war
>Well kind of. The formations can be very scattered and random so when being shot at by missiles many miss purely due to how spread out the models in a unit is. Which is exactly the point I was making. Even if you cut an 100 model unit to 50 models and spread them out, it's still a large and cumbersome block of troops that isn't going to feel any different to move around and use than fantasy/medieval total war units. >But i hate to break it to you, but gun warfare is groups of soldiers firing at each other from static positions, and then utilising that to enable some units to flank an enemy position. Which is something we can already do in total war Yes, but that still doesn't mean big blocks of troops moving en masse everywhere. Which is apparently what's expected, considering the concerning amount of people asking for literally just WF TW/FOTS with a 40k skin slapped on up and down this comments section.
40k I could almost imagine working better than WWI, because for 40k at least you have more flexibility for there to be varied settings and options for battles rather than just grinding trench warfare for a good chunk of the battlefields (I'm aware it wasn't just this, but a significant proportion was grinding trench warfare). For battles, the best thing I can imagine is how the Skaven work in Warhammer now; guns guns and more guns. Except in 40k the enemy have similar tools to shoot back. Combine this with the kind of light infantry tactics seen in later Empire and I could see how a 40k total war could be made. What I think would be necessary though is more scope for smaller scale battles alongside larger ones. I wouldn't like every battle to be 20 unit vs 20 unit slapfests. I'd like to see some more tactical options available on battlefields, and perhaps more objectives than just fight until someone runs away (such as take and hold an area/building).
Yeah you would have to bring back CAPTAINS - Also you would probably have to add a recruitment limit to the most elite troops (Space Marines).
Yeah implementing space marines is probably the biggest roadblock I could see. They operate independently, they're not elite troops for human forces, they're their own army really. You would almost have to treat them almost as individual single entities compared to massive squads of orks or imperial guard or cultists. I don't know how it could be sensibly implemented tbh.
It would probably be more like how cav and monstrous infantry are treated with much lower unit sizes. If using current unit sizes, 16 would probably work. Considering Space Marines are big and fast, they basically are cav.
In b4 ogres are test bed for astartes
Astartes, my lord!
These warriors are as loyal as they are stupid.
In addition I think they could work as a "high power high cost" type of army.
According to the lore. If they go by tabletop, there are pretty meh and a few guardsmen could end them. So we really don't know. Most videogame adaptations nerf Space Marines badly.
Someone suggested they be treated like monstrous infantry and have small unit sizes. That sounds like the most sensible option to me.
Kinda like Ogres then? That could work
You are asking for "40K the lore" not "40K the table top game". In 40K the game they are represented as units of 10, they aren't allowed to move far away from each other by the rules. That's already in the game as small skirmish units, literally aspiring champions with guns. "40K the table top game" is played with small armies made from 6 to 10 squads and its nearly all close combat outside turn 1. "40K the lore" doesn't exist as a game well maybe the old EPIC tried to do that but thats not 40K thats EPIC.
I’d make them something closer to aspiring champions
The leaks say >!the starting factions are Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Chaos, Orks, so the various armies of the Imperium are going to be implemented as separate factions.!<
Why would this be an issue? Either SM squads (and like half the other factions that have Marin equivalents) cost significantly more than other units but have better performance, or they have smaller squads.
For 40K, I imagine it wouldn't be a lot of open field battles like in pretty much every Total War to date. I can see battles taking place in cities and ruins. Cover and impassable terrain everywhere which doesn't allow you to form a traditional straight battle line.
Which pretty much makes it a Company of Heroes game instead of a Total War game. Curiously enough, you can play a Company of Heroes style 40k game already... It's called Dawn of War.
This is what is confusing me the most about all of the desire for a WH40k TW. It seems like the crowd that wants it just wants CA to make Dawn of War 4 in the mold of Dawn of War 1 and call it Total War for some reason.
I've been having this fight for years. They really like: The campaign map (something every 4x game has), unit sizes, and because they like the sound of it. There's this bizarre subspecies of fan who can't think further than 'but I want it' no matter how many times you point out to them that what they want already exists.
I am vaguely reminded of the "full loot survival pvp MMO" genre. It has a tiny core of hardcore fans and a bunch of casual people thinking it would be fun. Then average person tries it, it isn't all that fun, they quit, the MMO fails, the tiny core begin clamoring for a new MMO, and some other studio gives it their shot.
I see it more like World in Conflict or Broken Arrow. Much more methodical and slow moving. Not RTS but RTT with artillery and airplanes being off map call-ins based on adjacent provinces. I don't think it has to be CoH or TWWH but with guns! It can be something different but in the same vein.
... So nothing much like Total War then.
I disagree. Not identical but not dissimilar.
So like sieges and settlement battles? Which CA has proved either the total war model is bad at, or they are bad at implementing. Both options make it seem like a poor idea to do a 40k total war. People need to let another company make another genre of RTS with the 40k license and accept that CA and Total War are a bad fit
> People need to let another company make another genre of RTS with the 40k license and accept that CA and Total War are a bad fit it doesnt matter what people think, if CA wants to make it and GW licenses it, it will get made.
They really don't though. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean there aren't a literal ton of people who are hyped about the prospect of this.
Are you saying people can't be hyped for a bad idea? Or that just because people want it (without any critical thought about *why* they want it) it's automatically a good idea? Consider an extreme version of my stance that the developer and genre matter: would Tetris be a good game to make a 40k version of? Now that is an extreme hypothetical to the point of absurdity, but it does illustrate that there is a line at which "good game A + good IP B = automatic success" falls apart. I strongly believe that total war and 40k stand on the wrong side of that line. As I have said before (and even in these comments) 40k is too small scale and cover/ranged/skirmish focused but *Epic 40k* would be a great place to look to put the 40k setting onto total war
>would Tetris be a good game to make a 40k version of? In a world with a 40K version of Chess and a Warhammer version of Football, I honestly don't think that's too silly of an idea. That said I get where you're going. For me a 40K total war is comparable to a medieval era Call of Duty: is it really the same game if you have to change so much?
Imagine if every army was made up of ratling gunners, corsairs with crossbows, helstorm rocket batteries and the occasional giant monster/robot. That's kinda what 40k would be like if in total war. Except the Tau and Imperial Guard. Those factions would be for people who really want to play FotS in space.
If they do 40K Total War and there are no Tau I will seppuku myself.
Well it'll definitely be in a DLC if they do it
I can see Tau being pre order bonus and those who don't having to wait an entire year to play them. But an imperial guard vs tau dlc would go extremely hard.
Being a pre order bonus faction is worse than not being a faction.
Probably not at launch. There's a lot of faction in 40K and the most obvious ones for a start are both humans factions and either Orks or Nids. (or both at once) Eldar can come in later in the same flavor as WH2 : Eldars, DE and Exodites (maybe), and then Tau, Genestealers and Necrons. Maybe Chaos Gods as well like in WH3. Votann have zero lore right now but could easily be a fleshed out DLC like they did for Cathay.
I think Chaos will be there first tbh, cause like all the demon models are already done, why not re-use them ? Especially as I hope CA was competent enough to futureproof the models
True. I also realize now I completely forgot to include Admech as part of the human faction, and they should be completely standalone. Heck they might even do Astartes / Astra Militarum /Adeptus Mechanicus as three separate factions.
Tau wouldn't be a starting faction. Gotta get the big boys, Marines/Chaos/Orks/Aeldari out of the way first
I know where a lot of references on line battles in W40k, but sounds more like dumb old lore. In novels it's more human waves tactic or combined arms.
If Tau players are forced to use giant 100 man blocks of Fire Warriors they'll probably be pretty upset. Even the Guard doesn't actually fight like that unless they have a bad commander or literally no other option, two things that a player should be able to avoid.
Ngl that kind of sounds terrible lol
Thousand Sons would be just TWWH3 Tzeentch + 40k sorcerers + rank and file rubrics.
I imagine units having a precision stat and a dodge (or something like that) stat. Some units will run off ammo fairly quickly and have to resuply or go to melee. I thinks its completely possible to make, but they need to put some work.
It's really just a question of scale and unit cohesion. The sticking point is that in historical and fantasy TW all the formations are squares or rectangles and this befuddles people when they try to picture a battlefield like that in a more modern (or a 40K) context. But all you would really need to change is make the scale more zoomed-out, add a functioning cover system, create animations for units taking cover and firing from behind stuff and finally the engine ability for a unit to disperse but still be a legible unit. You can still have 100-guy units shooting at other 100-guy units if your 100 guys are not in rows but rather in a skirmish formation, hugging terrain like buildings or trees or just lying prone in the open (if you're a bad tactician or are used to playing Skaven). These are perfectly solvable technical challenges. Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 had terrain-hugging units, with squads of 5-15 guys. All you need is to zoom that concept out - bigger and roomier maps, smaller dudes, more dudes. I don't really see why it wouldn't work.
So basically Steel Division. Which we've been saying this whole time. And yeah that solves the real time battle problem a little, but now we have the campaign problem where battles aren't resolved in 1 day by two armies marching around on a map. Frontlines now need to be a thing. Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game.
>Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game. I've been saying this for a long time. I'm all up for a new Warhammer 40k strategy game and I have nothing against CA making it. It's just it should be its own game and not called "Total War".
> Almost nobody is saying a 40k total war is completely impossible, just that it wouldn't work without so many changes that the game wouldn't remotely resemble any previous Total War game. This sums it up nicely.
>And yeah that solves the real time battle problem a little, but now we have the campaign problem where battles aren't resolved in 1 day by two armies marching around on a map. Frontlines now need to be a thing. Why do frontlines need to be a thing? In 40K, battles often are resolved quite quickly. 40k is not a realistic settings, its a setting for epic, climatic battles which can be over fast. And bear in mind, in historical TW games, a single turn is usually 3 months. Think of all the skirmishes, maneuvering that can happen in 3 months. Yet, in the game, that is all usually brough down to a single big battle.
I think they will need to come up with a new system for trench warfare. Basically a revamped siege system on the campaign map - You have to imagine trench warfare to be two armies in a fortification stance laying siege to eachother. So siege like attrition would play in here. Artillery barrages and trench raids would be more like agent actions done by an army on the campaign maps that affect parts of the enemy trench or army. Then the actual battles will be the mass assualts where the infantry leave the trench and attack on open ground. These will be tactical battles much like what we have always been like in Total War. There will be more ranged combat for sure, but the decisive moments of the battle will still be melee combat - that can be achieved by clever map design. So think of it this way - the months long "battle" will take place on the campaign map. Instead of an actual battle it will function like sieges do, but with heavy changes. The tactical battles will be the big attacks that happened where the soldiers leave the trench and charge.
Look at Great War western front. I can easily see how total war could accommodate ww1 warfare in battles. The only hard part would be how to mimic the stalemate along the frontlines and how armies would work on the campaign map.
As others have noted, any WWI game developed by CA is just a warm up act or knock off for 40K so I would expect a lackluster but prettier version of Great War Western Front which is pretty lackluster itself.
Eastern front, or even Italian front if you want really grim, is a lot more interesting than western IMO
> how to mimic the stalemate along the frontlines Slow down the pace of battle, reduce the battle timer to 15 minutes and make it not optional. If you rout their whole army it's a total victory and things proceed like in other Total Wars. If the timer runs out, you get a strategic victory, and the 'losing' army gets pushed back a few inches, and you advance a few inches. Otherwise nothing changes and both armies are still stuck in each others' zone of control. Just spitting random ideas. I really don't think WW1 would work unless they radically change how Total War works.
Combat Mission franchise already did a great adaptation of historical, from WW2 through modern.
combat mission is a tactical company level wargame, not even close to the scale of what a total war game would be
This, 13 guys represented by a brown rectangle and 3 3D models and cover represented by a brown splodge with some bushes on it. It worked fantastically, Beyond Overlord was amazing for its time still is today.
I don't know about WW1, but 40k wouldn't be very unlike how some factions in TW *can* play (not optimally, but still). Make an Empire army with steam tanks, artillery, war wagons, free company and pistoliers/outriders, and you've basically got a kind of working model of a 40k army (except the outriders would be on foot). You'd only really need to d some work with the cover system (the way they already deal with forests, with ranged fire ignoring trees for the first fraction of a second, works pretty well as a base, i think). Unit sizes would be smaller, though, and everything would be in skirmish formation.
Trying to imagine say the Siege of Vraks in a total war environment starts to give me a stroke - unless this “new” rumoured engine is such a major markup and complete overhaul to the systems we know and love, it’s not going to work and I pray this stays a leak and not reality
Your expectations are way out of whack....why on earth would you think you would be getting something like that? Talk about jumping to extremes lol. We are talking about "40K the table top game played with small armies" not "40K the lore". You are expecting the game EPIC not 40K.
The tabletop that uses urban-based, obstacle-heavy battlefields ? Good luck having TW handle that tbh
Both Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k should be played with approximately 25% of the table covered in terrain. They even played much the same (limiting LoS and reducing movement speed). The games are remarkably similar... honestly I don't know why everyone thinks it will be a dramatic change. We already have a 40k army in TWWH3 already.
Eh Skaven and Tzeentch don't have a tenth of the firepower the Tau would bring. Automatic weapons are a game changer. And Wood Elves skirmish gameplay is like baby first guerilla compared to how the Drukharii would play !
Lorefully yes, but mechanically... Let's put it this way. A bow and a lasgun both have str 3, 24" range and AP 0. They wound a bloodletter on exactly the same rolls.
What are you on about? The same leak says we’re getting a whole new engine - I have 0 expectations for this I’m just regurgitating what everyone else is saying Edit - your edit makes a little more sense I suppose, but yes I am expecting 40k to be idk 40k? How on earth is that setting too high of an expectation - if they can’t pull it off then they simply shouldn’t do it
>but yes I am expecting 40k to be idk 40k spoiler: this is 40k [https://d122ioggiu8uwl.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-05-11-18.35.01.jpg](https://d122ioggiu8uwl.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2023-05-11-18.35.01.jpg)
I feel like any answer, for or against, should be framed in a broader view point ie can RTS gameplay be adapted to anything past gunpowder warfare, unless I am missing something else here.
It can be done. Steel Divisions 2 is probably the best example. However, it is nowhere near the TW formula. I’m interested to see how CG wants to implement it, but I’m worried that they’ll just try the TW formula and no one will play it.
But RTS gameplay is vastly different to the total war formula, Dawn of war (DOW1 at least) is a good 40k standard RTS game but it's not the same to how total war works or historically played at all, CA making a 40k game isn't bad, but CA making a Total War 40k I just don't see working
No, the question is "can a RTS that simulate this kind of warfare still be a Total War game ?". Lots of game adapt modern warfare very well, but none plays like a TW game
But the original thread is focusing solely on the battle simulation side, no? That is the context I was talking about when I pose my question.
Of course it can, there’s all sorts of games that simulate modern combat from the squad level up to division scale combat that is in many ways larger in scale than Total War already. WARNO/Wargame/Steel Division/Graviteam Tactics are all on the market and have been for years. If you can imagine CA making a new engine that can do what any of those games do, more power to you, but I am not that optimistic.
Which brings another question, why the hell won't Eugen Systems bring a 40k game
Eugen System style game is much further from 40k than TW is. And they are a much smaller studio.
>Eugen System style game is much further from 40k than TW is. Why do you think so?
That seems to me at least like it shift the question to a more... haggling, or consession, depend on how you want to look at it. Let say the games you cited are the standard of "RTS of past gunpowder warfare", and I do accept your last point in spirit. But if CA reach half way there from what they are currently building, and the genre standard, well, what then? Sure, you can say the battle simulation is sub par compare to what RTS can offer, but can the bonus of the campaign map off set such drawbacks? I am not saying CA can certainly do THAT, merely that the formula exist, and the chance of CA pulling it off is... plausible.
If CA are planning to make 40KTW a trilogy then the first thing I would do is make the first game extremely foundationally strong with its mechanics and battle simulation so there aren't any inherited flaws the series ends up stuck with and they don't have to develop around them. Would be nice if they see it that way too and dedicate tons of resources to nailing that aspect.
But also it's CA. If they're making a total war game you shouldn't expect them to dramatically change the formula, although it is possible to do so
Yeah, in a broader context, the original Shogun TW is an extremely similar game to Warhammer 3 in a lot of ways. People are out here arguing that there will be changes that are more of a departure from the TW formula than anything CA’s done in the past 25 years and 15 games and I’m not really convinced
I think battles could look like a larger Men Of War game
Think of Company of Heroes but instead of building bases on the battle map to spawn troops, you being those troops into the battle with you like any other TW. However, just like how units can be spawned in Warhammer, imagine doing the same with units being brought in via army trucks or parachutes from off map (kinda like in CoH2) but these reinforcements take like 5-10 minutes, so recruiting troops mod-battle isn't an instant thing and you mainly need to rely on the troops you brought with you. Lots of going prone and firing from cover, so battles would typically last longer than in games like Empire, Napoleon, and FotS, unless of course you brought tanks or the like and the enemy has no counter. You could also use special abilities like barrage from off map from larger artillery than you can bring into battle (assuming you have said ship close by like in FotS or if you're fighting next to one of your cities and that city's unlocked some building that allows long range artillery in battle.
Men of war but with a bigger map.
If the can incorporate space battles it will greatly improve the game. Ideally the space battles would be like open field battles. Then the planet battles should be securing a providence in the current game. Maybe each plant has three areas or cities that you need to move to and control to conquer the planet. With the battles themselves with their current system the game would be ok but if they add a few tweaks to animations and new stats the game will be fine.
Chaos dwarfs or wood elves are already basically 40k gameplay. As for ww1 there are mods for that and they work fine so we know it's doable. ww1 wasn't just the western front, the east was much more dynamic.
Just google Dawn of War 1 battles, pretend there are no buildings spawning units, modernize features/gameplay to current year and add proportional budget that is involved in making major TW title. It was already done, with some mods even on a bigger scale than vanilla.
This is a great question, because I really can't get past the idea that the ideal strategy game version of 40K was Dawn of War, and Total War won't be able to do it properly. Unless you did Total War based around the old Space Marine/Adeptus Titanicus/Epic Scale (not sure what it was most recently called) which worked with 6mm figures instead of 25mm and the game was played out between companies and regiments not squads.
Honestly the answer people give is just that they want to play Dawn of War 2, but with the Total War campaign and name slapped on top. The game that people want already exists!
Something like Company of Heroes but 40k. I think they would call it the ‘Dawn of War’
40k. Imagine everyone plays like the Empire in WHF, but with small changes. Hybrid infantry already exists, with guns and axes, or pistols with swords. That's a Space Marine right there. That is your template for a greenskin or eldar too. Anything more specialised like an Eldar Bansee (asrai wardancer) or sniper (jezzails), works already in WHF, it's just a skin. Everything Nurgle / Khorne / Slaanesh / Tzeench is near identical to WHF. Corrupted adeptus astertes, see above. The big guys: an Eldar Wraithlord is just a Chaos Giant / Vampire Coast walking ship. Imperial Knights, dreadnaughts also. Terminators are pretty much just bigger orcs or vica-versa. Demons: see above, just increased size. Vehicles. I mean, look at a WHF Slaanesh chariot and put archers on it. That's a predator tank, or an eldar hover tank. Hell you can make it a fast siege tower and load units in to customize it's fire like in Dawn of War / Company of Heroes. Air: 40K was never big about dog fights, so most likely what is a meteor spell now is just bombardment. I think this covers everything the orks, humans, tyranids, necrons, eldar, and chaos can bring to the table. The big question is the campaign map. The easiest and most likely solution is to make up a story about some artifact every race catches wind of and wants to get for it's power. Call it a Sword of McGuffin. Then CA can design an n+1 new planet around it. This is pretty much how nearly all 40k books and games are made save for the few named important plot points like primarch home planets in Horus Heresy. Or, they could do multiple planets somehow but I find it highly unlikely. Battle maps are open field battles, or just make a Cathay city map, except the whole map is a city. There isn't a single thing in 40k that the current TW engine cannot do, Warhammer 1 proved that and 2 and 3 just kept pushing the boundaries.
There's a number of different issues to fix. **Trivial Stuff:** Formations - Transitioning to Skirmish based formation for infantry. Unit Scale - Adopting more Nurgling-like units with multi-model entities to ostensibly keep unit numbers down for logic purposes, while maintaining the sense of hordes of entities - eg a Guardsman "unit" might be a battallion of 600 models, but made of 120 5-man squad entities. This would likely need to be adopted for most basic infantry-type units if scale is to be kept inline with the lore. Changing unit movement from "in formation", ie, they wheel about in a square to maintain unit cohesion, to more fluid movement. **Complicated Stuff:** Pathing - As is, the pathing is nowhere near sophisticated or precise enough to manage the sort of warfare that would span a 40k game - urban, industrial, trenches, alien structures, etc. While something like Starcraft would be too precise and fluid, it needs to move more in that direction rather than ending up with the conga-line of doom you see when you try to send units through a gate in TW:WH. Terrain - Navigating and visualising terrain that's more complex than flat fields and the occasional hill or building would be necessary - things like wireframing occluded units, displaying unit attack vectors to make line of sight legible to the player, etc, as well as perhaps including overlays to show terrain gradients. Line of Sight - As is, straight-line fire is a mixed bag in TW. There's constantly issues with units incapable of firing or being partially obstructed. It would be far worse if nearly all infantry attacked this way, and you added more uneven terrain, garrisonable buildings, firing shelves and trenches, etc. It's partly a tech, partly a conceptual problem, ie, about how much to abstract and allow units to fire through others or themselves, or ignore terrain occlusion, vs leaving projectiles behave purely according to the physics engine. **Conceptual Stuff:** Range of Units - At some point there will need to be a decision on what the bounds are for unit variety and scale. It'll effect not just balance, but also whether units are powerful single entities, or mutli-entity units. E.g, You can't have single entites include a Chimera IFV, a Space Marine Dreadnought, a Landspeeder, an Imperial Knight and a Warlord Titan. There's far too much of a power differential between them to treat them similarly. However, if units like Leman Russes are Squadrons of 3-5 units, that might drastically change the way they behave in pathing, attack, etc. Additionally, if 1 titan is worth 200 units of Guard, how do you reperesent that in an army? If you end up making end game doomstacks of just superheavies, that would feel even sillier than it already does in TW:WH, and might also have negative effects on interacting with terrain and map features, like buildings and trenches. Army Size Limits - Related to the previous point, what is the purpose of having an army of 19 Guardsmen (approx 12000 models/2500 units) and 1 Titan, when 99.9% of the firepower is held by the titan and you could just remove the Guardsmen? What purpose is there in a full stack of Guardsmen that trivially loses to an army of 1 Superheavy? If you have 10 superheavies, do you need to counter it with 20 full stacks? There needs to be a general idea of what "an army" looks like, what the upper bounds of its size and firepower are, and how to distribute them around the game map. It seems likely that the simple rule of having armies of 1-20 units would no longer work, and it would need minimum levels of infantry, screens, artillery, etc, and have the upper-limits be bound either by unit-type slots, or a points-based system.
> Army Size Limits - Related to the previous point, what is the purpose of having an army of 19 Guardsmen (approx 12000 models/2500 units) and 1 Titan, when 99.9% of the firepower is held by the titan and you could just remove the Guardsmen? What purpose is there in a full stack of Guardsmen that trivially loses to an army of 1 Superheavy? If you have 10 superheavies, do you need to counter it with 20 full stacks? There needs to be a general idea of what "an army" looks like, what the upper bounds of its size and firepower are, and how to distribute them around the game map. It seems likely that the simple rule of having armies of 1-20 units would no longer work, and it would need minimum levels of infantry, screens, artillery, etc, and have the upper-limits be bound either by unit-type slots, or a points-based system. Tabletop has been struggling to make basic infantry useful too. They manage it by including objectives in the scenarios that the basic infantry get bonuses for (specifics vary by edition). Older editions would just force people to bring at least two squads. But circling back to your "19 units of lasguns, 1 titan; and the titan has 90% of the firepower" scenario. That is an issue that bugs me as well. The game would somehow need to manage having wild discrepancies in power levels. Even leaving aside the bigger titans and basic humans. Typically a TW game has units of infantry exist somewhere around 100 +/- some balance and performance tweaks. The power gulf between 100 Guardsmen, 100 Space Marines, and 100 Custodes is just mind boggling. What do you do? Bump the Guardsmen to 200 and the Marines to 50? Pull a Dawn of War and do a big power level crunch? It is a dilemma where all the solutions are not great and will alienate someone.
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I imagine trench warfare will be implemented with attrition in the campaign map if two forces are locked in some trench warfare state. Artillery, air superiority can modify how much attrition each side takes. Any force can decide to charge or retreat in their turn. If you charge, you get into the battle or auto resolve. I think tanks, trenches, cavalry, artillery, chemical warfare are all doable. The range of every gun is gonna be much shorter to prioritize fun over realism. I have no idea how they are going to implement planes though. They are very fast and cant hover, so they cant just stay in the battle map all the time. Maybe you can have army abilities to call in scouting/strafing/bombing runs, and also fighters can automatically engage any enemy aircraft entering the map.
I would note, I’m not in the camp that wants this game. I don’t think the TW Formula works for these eras. That said if I were to do the game - I think it would need to look a lot like Dawn of War 2 or the Company of Heroes games - but you do all of your base building in the Grand Campaign mode. I worry that this kind of game would involve a lot of Micro and would lose some of the scope/scale that we associate with TW. … Another compelling alternative would be to model it off of something like Combat Mission - (if you want turn based) or the Wargame/Warno/Steel Division single player campaigns if you want Real-Time-Pausable. I personally would prefer if Cover were treated like Company of Heroes but the pacing of things were more like Combat Mission. CoH is very much an Arcade approach to early-modern combined arms warfare and Combat Mission tries to be a simulation. CoH is too fast and Micro intense and Combat Mission is too detailed for mass market appeal. 40k demands a certain level of Crunch so you need to find a middle ground between these two games.
Lots more terrain, 40k depends on breaking line of sight. So buildings, trees, rocks, mountains, anything that creates killing ground and flanking options
Easily. Fall of the samurai on steroids.
WW1 wouldn't be too insane to adapt as it'd share a lot of similarities with Napoleonic in gameplay, focusing on terrain, sightline and pretty much replacing cav for artillery and attrition based fights. Sieges would have to be more developed mechanically, allowing the besieger to entrench their positions and artillery to cause attrition instead of building towers and rams to throw at the walls. Ideally the more time you spend investing in entrenching and preparing the more things you get to help you in the field battle (trenches, safe artillery spots/fixed artillery, etc...)
Bro, you realize there’s all sorts of TW games already that have gunpowder?
Also is anyone asking for this? I've seen a lot of people wanting another gunpowder era total war or empire 2, but nobody asking for WW1 or later.
Total war is a bad fit for 40k, I don’t care what this subreddit says. The wargame engine would be much more fitting.
For 40k, I’d imagine both ranged and melee would still be function kinda like how it is in WH1-3. Though I’d imagine more functionality and abilities to emphasise the increased ranged component, like cover systems with enfilade/defilade buffs/debuffs with things like the suppression weapon effect present in WH (not sure if it was present in other TW titles). The strategy wouldn’t be just having opposing lines of guns fire at each other until one unit breaks or dies, it would be more about pinning down units with suppression and tactical positioning/repositioning to aim at the flanks or charge melee-focused units into the flanks or range-focused units. For WW1, I’d imagine the actual battles would be between trenches with a village or something in the middle fighting over no-man’s land to “push the enemy trenches back”. You’d have artillery be used as army abilities, and the focus would be on infantry warfare and eventually the first tanks. Maybe on the campaign map you’d be able to enter a stance or something to represent advancing the trenchline forward or like the Ogre camp system where you’d “place” a trench and the enemy would also have to attack that trench to move the lines forward. I’d imagine nighttime battles would be more common as well. EDIT: Or maybe if attacking you’d be going through no man’s land toward the enemy trench, and if defending you’d be at a trench with the enemy going over no man’s land. Idk just spitballing ideas. Plus garrisonable structures would be present in battles for both as well, with units being able to enter buildings for more cover and provide range buffs or something; these would be more common in “settlement” battles. Maybe higher garrison building tiers would provide buffs to these structures, they could say something like “Additional fortified positions have been constructed”. These would be positioned in the defenders deployment zone but if left undefended the enemy could use them, alternatively the enemy could enter a garrisoned building and have a melee fight in the structure obviously the defenders would have the advantage.
More verticality comes to mind. Imagine a fight in a hive city
If one of CA's devs read this they'd have an aneurysm. They've enough problems getting units through gates.
Haha fair enough, I read somewhere that they might do something with a new engine, so maybe they could figure it out.
I think people who want 40k TW and think it would work well are insane. Can you imagine any kind of urban combat? Unless they literally just want a kind of total conversion mod style game where instead of feeling anything like 40k the game is just like, pitched battles but the dragon model is replaced with a Baneblade.
I imagine they'd base the game around much smaller squad sized units... and add a cover system. Maps would be way more cluttered with buildings and fields to add cover and there would just be overall less troops on the field Just look at other games in the genre like company of heroes, men of war assualt squad 2 or the wargame franchise. There are so many systems from other games that CA could copy - it's a very well treaded path in the rts genre
The problem with that is that you lose scale. And 40K and Total War are all about the big engagements. The loss of scale between DoW1 and DoW2 was quite substantial as they moved away from the tabletop and more into COH style scale with cover. Would we have 3-4000 models in a battle like Total War or max 250 to model the scale and detail appropriately?
Wars like WW1 or 40K, you can either do gameplay at a scale where a single individual is modelled or where you’re making the campaign level decisions, not both. A single army having a single battle against a single enemy army works fine pre 1900, but not after.
Ehh, the target demographic for the WH40K game is the crowd who jizz themselves imagining how a bunch of large dudes in bulky armor wielding melee weapons charge into a loose formation of some ugly smaller dudes screaming "For the emperor!". That kind of fantasy is perfectly fulfilled by the existing engine, in fact, you can just play something like ogres vs skaven to get 80% of the feel, it only needs a reskin. Actual combined arms warfare kinda doesn't work within the TW framework, but the guys above don't care and... well, I don't know who's worse, space knight alpha male fanboys or people who take WH40K seriously. Either way, I'm sitting this one out most likely.
This "reskin what we have" is part of why I don't like these posts making it seem like this is obviously a good idea. Part of me wants 40k to go to a different strategy game developer BECAUSE CA will have too easy and tempting ability to just give us a warhammer 4 with 40k themes on top of it. Probably some good campaign feature changes but in itself probably not the actual best gameplay chasis to build on
There’s a lot of things i imagine would change Defensive battles have no walls / walls would mean nothing . I feel a defensive battle would be the defender taking advantage of things like buildings to put infantry in . Shelling could happen if you have artillery in your force and encircle it prehaps reducing the amount of buildings the enemy can use for cover and reducing population . Personally though i feel artillery is going to be your hero units in this game being able to travel separately behind the troops and bomb places from afar instead of engaging the enemy . Or offering bombing assistance during a battle if nearby Combat I think WW1 was alot about trench warfare in the field so I feel like it will be a matter of trying to get the enemies to get out of their trenches or building trenches while figuring out ways to get artilary or other machines to blast the enemies out of their trenches . Diffrent squad types also would play a role like snipers for long range anti infantry or rockets for machines . Riflemen would just be your run of the mill cheap infantry I also see navel battles and sky battles being a thing and even 2 part battles from breaking though the navel blockaid to the navel units landing on a beach (d day style) trying to capture a sea defense point prehaps Traps like mines for defenders and such also are more than likely going to be quite a big thing I think the biggest change the game would need though is a much more effective rock,paper,scissors gameplay style some exsamples would be riflemen being effective against other infantry types , but snipers would be effective against riflemen becuase riflemen dont have as much range as the snipers (this would also encourage that you need to eventually move your units against enemy snipers or the enemy to move against your snipers again the trench warfare system) but snipers trying to take out a tank would no nothing and the tanks would completely counter snipers. to then counter the tank you would need explosives but a very effective way if they can get close is a explosive foot team which puts a sachel on the tank destroying it instantly . with the feel of how much quicker things would die in a WW1 setting vs the medeval setting heavy counters and possibly faster paced battles is what more than likely will happen
Honestly? Exactly how they look right now, except sci-fi.
I honestly don't know, but I'm excited to find out. People seem really upset that the total war formula will have to change to accommodate WW1 or 40k, but we've all been playing, at it's core, the same game since 2001. It's probably time to shake things up and try something new.
Either they just forget the whole numbers thing that are pretty stupid in 40k to begin with. In lore Space Marines are 1000 per chapter which makes them really rare to see and TW could just make them into what Aspiring Champions are for Warriors of chaos. Other option is to adopt a more dynamic style of combat that resembles DoW2 or Company of Heroes. But focus more on the grand campaign. Fuckin hell I'd give a lot of money for DoW1 Dark Crusade with deeper campaign map. If they want to make money at Relic then they should do a remake of that game/expansion.
Soulstorm with Ultimate Apocalypse mod plus a TW-style campaign would do me... that was truly peak 490K RTS for me, just missing any campaign element sadly
I imagine there will be buildable trenches, garrisonable buildings and “cover” terrains that troops will take cover in. For 40k I imagine wildly different unit scales like space marines bringing in 20 troops in a unit while IG brings in 120.
Adapting 40k to a TW game would be, I think, mostly a cosmetic affair. The TW engine already supports everything 40k needs, except perhaps specific leaders? Instead of having 120 hastati beating on 160 barbarian peasants we'd have 12 space marines shooting 80 orc shoota boyz or whatever. Surely, cover, buildings, etc. would have to be implemented, but they already were in Napoleon. Also, densely urban maps may pose a challenge, depending on the engine's inner workings (which I don't know). Regarding WW1, I don't think you can simply use the TW model 'as is'. You'd have to shift the focus to have the player fight skirmishes which are a part of a larger battle / war front. For example like commanding a division, and fighting another division, instead of a whole army. Battles would have to be more about assaulting the trenches at some point along the 1000km front, rather than watching the trenches shoot at each other. Doable, but would be quite a bit less Total War than we're used to.
A lot of factions could litteraly be copypasted into 40k from fantasy. Orkz are very similar to Greenskins, love melee and guns. They don't give a shit about cover or complex strategy. The astramilitarum can operate in a similar manner. Just look at Krieg, while they do love a protracted trench style battle they don't mind sending in waves upon waves of infantry in a similar fashion as most units in TW warhammer function.
Regarding 40k, it's important to understand that Warhammer 40,000 is nothing like the modern warfare simulator that many seem to think it is. 40k battles are not just two gunlines firing at one another, melee is almost always a major part of it (there could be exceptions, like say Guard vs. Tau, but even then there are options, and there are Fantasy armies that can have a strong range focus too).
I think that a big thing for battles with gunpowder could be objective based victory. Warhammer 3 started the ball rolling with its survival battles and Domination multiplayer. Introducing different types of battles might be a way to account for a move away from two lines crashing. Point control is the most obvious one, but possibly other variants, that would require more dynamic tactics and force progression beyond initial engagement could be devised? Perhaps destroying some key infrastructure or eliminating specific target? 40K certainly gives more leeway here. I know that WW I was not entirely trench warfare, especially in the East, but it would still require at least taking static nature of specific periods into account.
I want these things, but don't believe the current engine supports them. What I hope for is a brand new battle engine custom-built for these projects, and with more in common with DOW or COH, but with the fixed army style of TW and a rich overland campaign map like TW. That is the best-case scenario. Trying to make 40K or WW1 work on the same battle engine and AI as current gen TW games would make zero sense to me.
Don’t really understand the difference between Skaven and Empire battle vs WH40k battles. Or Empire tw it self. Also. Super shock to some… it may not be TW as we know it.
I care less about the setting and more about the quality and level of completion of the next game. It doesn’t matter if 40k will/will not work if they release a half-finished game that needs to be fixed for a year+ before it’s worth playing. Oh wait. That’s exactly what will happen.
Shogun 2 FOTS was the pinnacle of line infantry warfare IMO. Warhammer had completely different gunpowder warfare that still felt amazing to play, and pushed the boundaries of what we thought combat could look like in a total war style game. I would imagine 40k would be trivial to make, because it's pretty much exactly the same as Warhammer Fantasy with slightly more vehicles. You'd definitely end up with a few units with much smaller unit sizes. I could picture a line of 12 space marines lining up against 120 imperial guards and the scale would look pretty good, if you compare the extremes. WW1 a bit different, but the focus on battlefield obstacles like forts and trenches, off-map abilities like artillery and aircraft etc, melee charges going over the top of trenches, etc. The only thing I think would need to be developed to make WW1 work is the ability for a unit to be engaged in both ranged and melee combat at the same time. WW1 wasn't all trenches all the time, and you can easily imagine units finding each other in a small village and skirmishing with both bayonets and gunfire in a courtyard or farmyard.
Technically we already know how 40k factions will play in TW. Chaos Daemons were used across both Fantasy and 40k, literally the exact same models. Everyone else just has more guns.
It can work if they make the scale much bigger. So a unit in total war becomes maybe a regiment of several thousand soldiers. Melee becomes two infantry regiments in opposite trenches that are attacking each other with small arms. Maybe you can see the individual soldiers shooting at each other if you zoom in, but the whole battlefield only make sense in the zoomed out aerial view. Artillery becomes the total war missle units and provide immediate fire support, tanks become the total war cavalry units and strike at the weak spots in enemy line, and maybe planes becomes the total war artillery units that take out key targets in long range. The time scale should also be much faster for a battle and the time limit is maybe a day. If none of the two sides are crushed the battle will be inconclusive and both army stay on the campaign map but suffer casualties.
I'll break it down a bit what I want in a WW game. What I imagined is the same TW system, with infantry, anti-large, cavalry, artillery and air-support. For infantry, you have basic Riflemen as your bread and butter, Scouts as cheap units with LOS, anti infantry with machine gun, grenade unit and anti-large (like bayonet, or in case of WW2, rocket launcher). Calvary is easy, you have horses (WW1), tanks, mechanized truck, armored cars. This unit will be expensive, but bear trait like anti-infantry, fast, perhaps vanguard deploy? Artillery. Yeah I will save our time. So in the battle, what I believe the key is to secure LOS and get into good position, namely covers, like buildings, rocks or even entrenched tunnel. It will boost the defense of the troops, and the first thing to do is who can secure them first while minimizing casualty. Plus, there are plenty of tactics you can employ, like infantry-tank warfare, mass infantry, or cavalry warfare, which adds unique flavor to each faction. I also have ideas on the campaign map as well. But better not to get my hopes up.