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Rob Zacny

Episode 377: Warhammer, Glorious Warhammer

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Three Moves Ahead 377:

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Warhammer, Glorious Warhammer
This week Rob, Fraser Brown, and Jonathan Bolding get together to talk about the Warhammer universe. There has been no shortage of Warhammer (both 40K and non-40K) games lately, with Games Workshop throwing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Amidst the vast swaths of mediocre to bad games, however, there are gems that accurately capture the macabre gravitas of the Warhammer universe. 

Just append WARHAMMER or WARHAMMER 40K and a (tm) to all of these: Dawn of War, Fire Warrior, Shadow of the Horned Rat, Relic, Armageddon, Vermintide, Space Hulk, Deathwing, Space Marine, Total Warhammer, Corsair, Eternal Crusade, Naval Action, Eisenhorn, Mordheim, Battlefleet: Gothic


 

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Hi I would like to recommend a Crusader Kings 2 (total?) conversion mod for Warhammer . Where you can play most races humans, elfs, skavens, dwarfs, undead, chaos, reptiles? orcs and goblins. All with theirs own culture and sometimes subcultures. I think the CK2 mixture of strategy and story building is perfect mix for Warhammer. Find out that your beloved wife is chaos worshipper fend of orcs, undead or etc. invasions. Learn magic or get maimed/dead trying

Link to forum https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/warhammer-geheimnisnacht-version-1-0.980775/

And a direct link to version 1.02 of the Geheimnisnacht mod  http://www.mediafire.com/file/gcwjp1c0isevcvv/geheimnisnacht_1.0.2.zip

 

 

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Over an hour on warhammer and not one mention of the greatest warhammer  game of them all: Blood Bowl.

 

You expressed your reservations about it in a previous podcast Rob, but I think it's worth a revisit.  There is an element of risk management to it, but you do also get absolute bs plays by the agility teams.  It's brilliantly unbalanced and is one of the few games ive played that combines a strategic, tactical and RPG element.  Has a hell of a steep learning curve and you have to be pretty Zen about the rng, but anyone can win on their day.

 

It's the best multiplayer game I've ever played, especially in one of the massive private leagues.  Open match making does have some issues but it's getting better.  

 

 

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2 hours ago, bobbybintang said:

Over an hour on warhammer and not one mention of the greatest warhammer  game of them all: Blood Bowl.  

 

Blood Bowl 2 was literally the first game mentioned. That has to count for something!

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1 hour ago, Fraser said:

 

Blood Bowl 2 was literally the first game mentioned. That has to count for something!

 

Must have missed that.  Was listening while at work.  Wasn't a criticism btw, just interesting that it doesn't fit in with the rest of the stable.  I guess it's kind of a quirky alternative warhammer universe.  Massively under rated though, but I think the initial difficulty puts people off.

 

Great podcast as always!

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The biggest appeal of Total war Warhammer over other Total War games is... Realism. Other TWs show me realistic representations of history and I know it doesn't work like that, Borodino had more than 3000 people. And they make empire management simultaniously overcomplicated and not authentic. No such problems exist when the game is about elves and demons instead of legionaires and elephants.

 

WH40K as it seen in Dawn of War still remains a greatest setting for RTS game. I think Creative Assembly became too aware of how uneasy at is so in Company of Heroes 2 it's still WH40K but there they had no obligations for Games Workshop so they've added some reflections on the setting. Hope DoW3 will be great. Still, hope is the first step to disappointment, as the good commissar said.

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Not to repeat previous conversations, forum-posts and threads, and - just for the sake of it - let's forget for a moment how SILLY it is to have ORKS IN SPACE(!) [I guess, those Warhammer creators must have watched too many episodes of The Muppet Show and PIGS IN SPACE!! (anybody old enough to remember those?)], but, I too, want to defend Relic's "SPACE MARINES!!!" game.

It was my favorite "Ork Killing Simulator" - before Monolith created "Shadow of Mordor". Space Marine was fun, because it embraced the one thing that it was meant to do: make you kill Orks as a Space Marine. Lots of them. It felt visceral. It felt great (with a gamepad). And yes, the fascist Brotherhood (or what it's called), had a Gestapo touch to it.

And NOBODY can escape the power of MARCUS STRONGUS!

It was also interesting to see the Relic RTS engine, doing a FPS game (which explains certain technical limitations, but it did the job quite well). 

Having played more Warhammer games over the years than I like to admit, I am STILL not interested in it enough, to care about who is who and what is what and lore et cetera, et cetera. For every moment I can spend reading anything about Space Orks (and the proper spelling of "ORK" vs "ORC" and how one is not the other (check out Wikipedia. It is hilarious! Seriously), I could re-read Tacitus, Livy or Seneca in Latin again. I say this not to brag, but to put this in perspective. At least, for me.

 

Carry on...

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One thing that I still find amazing in Dawn of War, is how Relic just find the right voice work for units, everything just sounds so Warhammer 40k that is amazing, in fact, one of Chaos Rising´s charms is just hearing the chaos units. On the other hand, Space Marine voices didn´t impressed me so much, the main character sound kind bland compared to ain characters in Dawn of War (except in Soul Storm).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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My goodness, Fraser, you're awfully wrong about Space Marine. Who cares if its linear? It's a lovely linear booted ork stomp. The shooting feels perfectly nice and the melee combat is gratuitously entertaining, and just complex enough to be satisfying. It's a not a great game, but it is a good one. I love how weighty Captain Bluepants feels. Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

 

There are two Warhammer games that occupied a considerable chunk of my time in the past. Bloodbowl, in its excellent and free JavaBowl version (how that never got a cease and desist I really don't know), was the first. I love Blood Bowl. You need to be a certain type of person- specifically, the sort of person who doesn't defenestrate their monitor when their best player dies from tripping over their own feet. If you love the stories that tasty spicy dice rolling can give you then you'll find a very deep, varied and skillful game behind it all.

 

I've rabbtited on about Dawn of War 2 multiplayer in this forum a few times. It will likely forever be the foremost object of my affection in multiplayer RTSs, even though I am not likely to ever play it again. I loved the scale, I loved the pace, I loved the escalation, and I loved the unit design to pieces. Valorian is exactly right about the voice work. Similar to Company of Heroes, it's thematic, entertaining, skillfully acted and very informative. 

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On 12/14/2016 at 1:52 AM, Arathain said:

My goodness, Fraser, you're awfully wrong about Space Marine. Who cares if its linear? It's a lovely linear booted ork stomp. The shooting feels perfectly nice and the melee combat is gratuitously entertaining, and just complex enough to be satisfying. It's a not a great game, but it is a good one. I love how weighty Captain Bluepants feels. Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

 

It's not the linearity on its own that's the problem. Linear is fine. No issues with that. The problem is the way it's inconsistently restrictive. One moment you're going over a wall, and the next you can't even step over what is basically a 1 foot tall rock. You get a jetpack, opening the game up, changing the format of the battles, and then it's ditched because it won't fit in a gargantuan cave you have to briefly pass through, even though you can clearly see that it does. Honestly, though, my biggest problem with it is that it's simply dreadfully dull. The combat is decent, but there's nothing beyond that. No surprises. No exploration. Dismal characters. And aside from the aforementioned jetpack bits, it's content to just plod along, doing the same crap over and over again. 

Anyway, I'm totally right. It's shite. But it's shite that a lot of people really enjoyed, and that's fine. I like a lot of garbage too. I gave Rome 2 a 7/10, after all. 

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Ahhhh Warhammer. I really enjoyed this episode thank you all, although I must admit the lip service paid to Bloodbowl (a game doing XCOM long before XCOM was even a tinkle in Julian Gallop's eye, let alone Firaxis) was a little disappointing. It is still just about the greatest game that Games Workshop ever came up with. There are, and have been quite a few great Warhammer games but other than Bloodbowl I think I've ever really played one that captures the very essence of what Warhammer is and what it means to those gamers "of a certain age". 

 

Some of that, which I think Fraser was trying to get to in some of his comments, is the Cultural Impact of Games Workshops over here in the UK. I'm an old school Warhammer player, and I mean Old school. The first Warhammer game I got involved in was Warhammer Fantasy Battle, second edition. That was purchased with my Brother, sometime in the mid1980s from Hamley's Toy shop on Regent Street of all places. Anyway, I digress - Unfortunately for my Brother I was a little too young to fully grasps the tactical and strategic nuances needed to play it at that time (when it was much more of a war game than a hero RPG with some extra units thrown in simulator that it is now) but I enjoyed it, enjoyed painting the miniatures and meant D&D never meant anything to me (and many many more legions of British geek adolescents either). That led me to Warhammer 40K: Rogue trader, Adeptus Titanicus, Epic and then to what is still GWs other best games, Necromunda and Space Hulk.  It was - and probably still is - the defacto non-computer based role playing game(s) that everyone this side of the Atlantic defaults to playing. There was a thread of social commentary running throughout all of GWs games - a very 80s one admittedly but considering current world politics is becoming much more relevant again -  that it just about still retains in 40K. I can't speak for the fantasy version any more though having not touched it in a very long time, certainly long before the Age of Sigmar reboot.

 

To me the games based in that Universe have always worked best when they have that ideal front and centre - it's something Dawn of War just about had (and DoW 2 lost)  Bloodbowl has in spades, and has always been sadly missing from the Space Hulk games. I only played the Space Marine Demo even though the actual gameplay was lacking it felt like Warhammer 40K to me.  It's something I look for specifically in GW based games, and no matter how good the gameplay mechanics are, it's never going to be a Warhammer game if it's not there. It's that reverence to the Universe that GW have created that makes a game a Warhammer game to me - the gameplay can be as solid as you like, but if it takes itself too seriously (like DoWII) then, to me at least, it isn't a Warhammer game. Otherwise it's just a game set in the Warhammer universe. 

 

I don't believe the focus on Hero units has ever served the games of GW well, board or video which was always clearly a decision based on their bottom line. Warhammer 40K and Fantasy Battle were once excellent war games that, if someone were allowed to, could be excellent strategy video games using the old rulesets (at this point I admit I've not played Total Warhammer, mostly due to my ambivalence towards Total War as a series). Most of all, I would love to see Necromunda as some sort of XCOM style strategy game with a persistent gang, tactical TBS missions to gain influence over the city slums by holding or losing territory across a strategic map. That would be quite excellent, it's a shame Mordheim hasn't really been able to carry that off at a fantasy level which is what I think it was trying to do.

 

 

Edited by Sorbicol
Proof reading & premature posting!

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On 12/15/2016 at 1:57 PM, Fraser said:

 

It's not the linearity on its own that's the problem. Linear is fine. No issues with that. The problem is the way it's inconsistently restrictive. One moment you're going over a wall, and the next you can't even step over what is basically a 1 foot tall rock. You get a jetpack, opening the game up, changing the format of the battles, and then it's ditched because it won't fit in a gargantuan cave you have to briefly pass through, even though you can clearly see that it does. Honestly, though, my biggest problem with it is that it's simply dreadfully dull. The combat is decent, but there's nothing beyond that. No surprises. No exploration. Dismal characters. And aside from the aforementioned jetpack bits, it's content to just plod along, doing the same crap over and over again. 

Anyway, I'm totally right. It's shite. But it's shite that a lot of people really enjoyed, and that's fine. I like a lot of garbage too. I gave Rome 2 a 7/10, after all. 

 

Thanks for the reply! I was being light hearted; I hope that's clear. Your criticisms are accurate. For me, the combat was decent enough to keep me entertained, and I loved the atmosphere and all around stompiness. You should be glad you didn't stick around long enough for the totally unexpected and surprising Chaos invasion, since Chaos Marines were much less fun to fight than Orks.

 

Here's to garbage games we happen to like.

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4 hours ago, Sorbicol said:

 

 

To me the games based in that Universe have always worked best when they have that ideal front and centre - it's something Dawn of War just about had (and DoW 2 lost)  Bloodbowl has in spades, and has always been sadly missing from the Space Hulk games. I only played the Space Marine Demo even though the actual gameplay was lacking it felt like Warhammer 40K to me.  It's something I look for specifically in GW based games, and no matter how good the gameplay mechanics are, it's never going to be a Warhammer game if it's not there. It's that reverence to the Universe that GW have created that makes a game a Warhammer game to me - the gameplay can be as solid as you like, but if it takes itself too seriously (like DoWII) then, to me at least, it isn't a Warhammer game. Otherwise it's just a game set in the Warhammer universe. 

 

I don't believe the focus on Hero units has ever served the games of GW well, board or video which was always clearly a decision based on their bottom line. Warhammer 40K and Fantasy Battle were once excellent war games that, if someone were allowed to, could be excellent strategy video games using the old rulesets (at this point I admit I've not played Total Warhammer, mostly due to my ambivalence towards Total War as a series). Most of all, I would love to see Necromunda as some sort of XCOM style strategy game with a persistent gang, tactical TBS missions to gain influence over the city slums by holding or losing territory across a strategic map. That would be quite excellent, it's a shame Mordheim hasn't really been able to carry that off at a fantasy level which is what I think it was trying to do.

 

 

 

 

I don't entirely understand what you mean by this, although I think I have the edges of it. There's a dialogue in the first DoW2 campaign that has stuck with me as being very Warhammer indeed. Assault Sergeant Thaddeus, the youngest squad leader of the group, complains of feeling increasingly emotionally drained and deadened after a fight, so that he only feels truly alive in combat. I paraphrase strongly but two other veteran sergeants say something like "Oh, that. Don't worry, that's just the last of your humanity being burned away." This is from Tarkus, a calm, almost robotic tactician, and Avitus, who can only really feel anger and rage. I loved that they took a moment to show just how messed up a Space Marine really is, even as the game exalts you as heroes.

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2 hours ago, Arathain said:

 

 

I don't entirely understand what you mean by this, although I think I have the edges of it. There's a dialogue in the first DoW2 campaign that has stuck with me as being very Warhammer indeed. Assault Sergeant Thaddeus, the youngest squad leader of the group, complains of feeling increasingly emotionally drained and deadened after a fight, so that he only feels truly alive in combat. I paraphrase strongly but two other veteran sergeants say something like "Oh, that. Don't worry, that's just the last of your humanity being burned away." This is from Tarkus, a calm, almost robotic tactician, and Avitus, who can only really feel anger and rage. I loved that they took a moment to show just how messed up a Space Marine really is, even as the game exalts you as heroes.

 

Sort of I think. Sorry I don't think I explained myself very well. At its core, Warhammer and 40K have always been, well, very British. Stop and think about 40K a little - the far future of humanity is phenomenally bleak with only the shining light of the all powerful Emperor holding back all the powers of darkness, while making sure all the little people know their place and get eradicated if they don't comply - oh and if they don't then the overwhelming powers of chaos will consume them. Given the time period when 40K was being created, that's an allegory for the political situation in the UK during the 1980s with Thatcher's conservative government. OK it's taking it to an absolute extreme and stretches it almost to breaking point, but that's more or less where a lot of 40K comes from. However, in spite of everything it was always with tongue firmly in cheek and a general acknowledgement that the bleakness of the 40K universe really shouldn't be taken all that seriously. 

 

My issue with DoW2 (which is an excellent game) is that it takes itself and the Space Marines far too seriously. None of the levity, or the knowing self awareness of just how ridiculous the Space Marines actually are is missing. When I played 40K back in the day the emphasis was always that the Space Marines were the elite of the elite and only when into battle when all else had failed - it was the teeming masses of humanity through the imperial guard that did the bulk of the fighting and dying so that the Emperor could survive. All that fighting and dying and sacrifice so one dude in a golden throne life support system could be kept alive, and they couldn't let die because if they did ships could not navigate the warp. It's basically taking the p**s..  All the best GW games have kept that rather irreverent tone (Although I do think that it's much easier for Bloodbowl to do that given the setting) and the worst are the ones that take them selves way too seriously. The mechanics of the game and how well they work are almost - almost - completely incidental to how good the game actually is. 

 

Warhammer to me has lost a great deal of that and it's much to it's detriment. Then again, I was playing the wargames and space hulk and bloodbowl way back in the late 80s / early 90s, so it's probably something Warhammer hasn't really had in a very long time and I'm just being overly nostalgic every time I come back to a GW based video game. 

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14 hours ago, Sorbicol said:

My issue with DoW2 (which is an excellent game) is that it takes itself and the Space Marines far too seriously. None of the levity, or the knowing self awareness of just how ridiculous the Space Marines actually are is missing. When I played 40K back in the day the emphasis was always that the Space Marines were the elite of the elite and only when into battle when all else had failed - it was the teeming masses of humanity through the imperial guard that did the bulk of the fighting and dying so that the Emperor could survive. All that fighting and dying and sacrifice so one dude in a golden throne life support system could be kept alive, and they couldn't let die because if they did ships could not navigate the warp. It's basically taking the p**s..  All the best GW games have kept that rather irreverent tone (Although I do think that it's much easier for Bloodbowl to do that given the setting) and the worst are the ones that take them selves way too seriously. The mechanics of the game and how well they work are almost - almost - completely incidental to how good the game actually is. 

 

 

Yeah, thinking now - there was a huge difference among DoW 1 and 2, and it was the humorous banter lines before some of the last battles - mostly for Gorgutz, but some even from the dialogue between the Necron Lord and Eliphas, where the first would speak to him via noises and Eliphas somehow would understand and say "that cannot be so", or the own among Eliphas and the Tau, where for some reason Eliphas tries to speak with the Tau using his power, but they just would hear static noise. Or even the sarcastic burn that Taldeer would deliver to the Space Marines.

 

Talking about Dow 2 - Retribution was a quite weak expansion, while it was the nice the idea to a throw back to the early DoW 1, the problem was that campaign itself was very linear and repetitive, once you done once you most don´t have reason to do it again.

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I was born in Northern Ireland in 1980, so I'm British enough to catch a lot of it, although my political awakenings had... a different emphasis, shall we say. Still, I remember the absurdly, deliberately over wrought 2000AD style. 

 

There's a strangeness to Warhammer. I agree that an inability to take itself seriously is core, and the only way the grimdark is even palatable. On the other hand, the thing that makes the absurdity so powerful is that, on a deep level, it does take itself seriously, at least in fleshing out the lore to a depth and breadth that is itself absurd. It's a puzzle box, and as you turn it about, you see that every part of it interlocks, and that every part is silly and serious, beautiful and ugly, all at the same time. This paragraph makes no sense because Warhammer makes no sense, but goshdarnit, it works. 

 

The humour in DoW2 comes out in full force in the multiplayer, by the way. The Orks are very funny, because that's part of their job, but there's tons of funny moments scattered throughout the voice lines for the other races.

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On 12/16/2016 at 3:39 PM, Arathain said:

 

Thanks for the reply! I was being light hearted; I hope that's clear. Your criticisms are accurate. For me, the combat was decent enough to keep me entertained, and I loved the atmosphere and all around stompiness. You should be glad you didn't stick around long enough for the totally unexpected and surprising Chaos invasion, since Chaos Marines were much less fun to fight than Orks.

 

Here's to garbage games we happen to like.

 

Sorry to necro this thread some, i've had this episode on the list for a while - but figured it was evergreen.

 

I have only known Warhammer in the video game setting.  i was wallet out in a Games Workshop one time and realized i'd never find a friend to truly play with.  

 

I've played the DoW RTS and half the expansions (winter assault is a slog) & actually mid-way thru a DoW2 campaign.  Also - I absolutely love Space Marine...the campaign is as iterated - killing orks is great & jetpack is the best part of the linear campaign.  but also game falls off when angry chaos guys show up and the ork killing ends.  

 

However! Multiplayer Space Marine is really a good time, the horde mode requires good players and coordinated loadouts on higher difficulty levels & base-game multiplayer still catches just enough people online to fill a game.  At this point people who still play are amazing at it, it is still satisfying to lumber in with heavy and full-charge plasma a point for multi-kill or fly in and out with jetpack.  It pulls in the fun weapons - range and melee - you get as Cpt Bluepants in campaign and can play with them in MP freely.

 

the dlc expansions were meh - added more maps & modes that fragmented the community so anyone still playing just goes base game.  The 3rd dlc did add the Dreadnought mode which is great - but again fragmentation killed it.

 

 

great ep, ty for a thorough dive into one of my favorite series

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I wanted to post again in this topic and bring up how great the expansions/DLC has been for this game.  Each new faction has such a great feel and the filling out of the map has made some strong,  

 

I also think that Rob should try playing the Crooked Moon Tribe to get that total war feel of using the strategic map to beat a faction economically.  I'm at a point in my campaign where I just keep raising two armies of trash level units and plopping them down to raid a province.  Combined with the goblin agents to block and attack walls I'm able to wear down the AI but rarely take them on in battle without having a WAAGH!!!.

 

It's a totally different way to play and I hope that CA is as dedicated with the next TW game.

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