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Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus - now with Heretek expansion

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Speaking of: If you press Space in the mission selection screen, you get a hidden character that gives you missions, and eventually a secret boss. Has anyone played this arc to the end to discover what's that about?
Yes. You get a secret boss. As I recall, all the missions from him are of the same type too, where you first get "move everyone to this area" then "kill everything".

It's a c'tan shard.

Oh, and Heretek gear is OP and can be used by non-Xenarites, lolz.
Is it? iirc the axes and mechandrites are pretty lame. The only op heretek gear I remember was the aoe slowdown gun (similar to immortal).
 

Latelistener

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The other side of presentation is music and this shit is really good. A lot of 40k games go with "epic" music, which is pretty stale and generic, outside of the menu themes I have a really hard time recalling any Dawn of War songs. I can't remember Space Marine's music at all. Did it even have music? I'm actually not sure. But, Mechanicus' mixture of techno, organs, and chanting goes really well together and fits with the factions being presented.
The setting gave the composer the necessary freedom to produce what he did. I too think it's great, but what if the game was a "standard" WH game about Space Marines or other such thing? Electronic music in such a game is a heresy for fans, so most likely we would have ended up with another generic epic orchestral soundtrack.
 
Vatnik Wumao
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Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I finished this today. Played on very hard, roughly the first 1/3 is great, it gets a little easy after that, the last two tombs I just rushed as fast as possible because with 5 techpriests at level ~20 there's nothing that can touch you anymore, I didn't even unlock the last techpriest because what's the point. The secret boss and the last two regular bosses are a joke, the architect especially, he didn't even attack me once, wtf was that. I think the base idea and the rules this game has are super solid, maybe it just wasn't play-tested enough or they got too many complaints from the testers based on the first few missions?
You have a global countdown that progresses depending on how you do in specific missions based on the awaking meter during missions that you have to balance against collecting blackstone and how aggressive/risky you want to play in battles, all good stuff. Also a very nice selection of weapons and gear for the techpriests, but here's where the problems start, once you unlock enough to put something into every slot and have 4 priests it starts to snowball, the necrons just don't have enough firepower to kill you anymore when each of your guys can shoot twice, attack in melee, heal, put up a refractor field and collect cognition in one turn. And they also have abilities. And canticles. Basically, even if something goes wrong there's always a fail-safe and the ai is not smart enough to concentrate fire and kill a single techpriests in one go. If anyone in 40k should be overloaded with OP bullshit it's the Mechanicus, but it makes for a really boring experience once you hit a certain point. This game would benefit a lot from a mod like Long War for the new XCOM, not to make it longer, just to buff some enemies a little (Flayed Ones do basically no damage to anyone) and re-balance some of the most OP stuff you get. Even weapons and gear aside, the abilities you get from leveling up include heal everyone for 1 cognition every 3 turns, repeatable canticles for 2 cognition, and refill the cognition bar for free. And you get multiple of these on all techpriests.

Is it? iirc the axes and mechandrites are pretty lame. The only op heretek gear I remember was the aoe slowdown gun (similar to immortal).
Is the gauss gamma pistol from the DLC (single target 4-6 damage ignores armor)? I used that one a lot on priests that were not purely focused on physical/energy, other Xenarite tech I got was kinda shit. The slowdown gun was alright too, but I didn't use it much.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
You can tailor the difficulty how you want it, so if you think it was too easy play with the difficulty settings. If you think the canticles are too op, disable them. If you think movement is too free, make it more expensive. If you think AoE weapons are too op, disable them. If you think the enemies have too low hp, increase it, etc. There are some options I don't understand as well, like that "you can only equip technology once per tech priest". What does that mean? I can equip one technology on one priest only, or I can't have a priest with 2 of the same tech?

They are also still patching this game, perhaps due to MandaloreGaming's glowing praise of it bringing in new players, so if they have a forum you might be able to convince them to add more difficulty options in the future.
 
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Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Sure, but I went in blind, played on the highest difficulty and it wasn't really difficult past the first 2-3 tombs. You can set custom options like turning off canticles or aoe weapons, which would make it more difficult, but these are a huge part of the game, I don't think it's too much to ask to have some challenge without drastic changes like that, if I set it to the highest difficulty I'd much rather have the game be unfairly hard and force you to abuse things like aoe and cognition/canticles combos in order to beat it than a self-imposed "don't use these (so many) things because they break the game". It's still a pretty good game, but they dropped the ball with how many tools they give to the player compared to the enemy in the later part of the game.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
You can limit the amount of canticles as well, not outright disable. Also buff the enemy HP by like 200% and see if you can steamroll them. The only thing you can't really do is buff enemy damage, but the same thing can be done by reducing the hp of your tech priests. The amount of extra fights per tomb also add to the difficulty by forcing you to use limited resources. You can also make it so you can only use a skill once per fight. I'm pretty sure you can find a combination of difficulty settings where you don't feel overpowered anymore. It's one of the most customizable difficulty settings I've ever seen.

If you want to use all of your available abilities, I'd buff the enemies' hp by 200%, lower your HP by like 25%, and have more fights per tomb.
 
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Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
If I replay it I'm going to make use of these, but still, I shouldn't have to fine-tune the difficulty after I've beaten the game and know what's wrong with it, the devs should have done it before the game was even out. Seriously, did none of the testers say "hey, those abilities you get at the end of a perk tree may be little too good, and completely fucking broken once you get more than 1 on each techpriest"? And how is that going to help the architect boss who sits in the middle of the room and gets shot to death without moving? How is that going to help the last boss who goes by himself against my whole squad and can barely break through refractor fields? Compare that to the second boss who switches positions with his vanguard and keeps summoning new troops, or the flayed one lord who spams flayed ones and snipers and heals himself when you kill the flayed ones. Neither of them is unbeatable, but I was at least taking damage and loosing troops and forced to think how to spend my cognition and moves, the final stretch was mostly a faceroll. That's just shoddy work on the dev's part. I still hope they make a sequel or get another turn-based 40k game to make, they nailed the atmosphere and aesthetics, the music is great, the design behind the game's systems themselves I liked a lot, but it strikes me as rushed or poorly tested in the second half.

Also I just remembered, the hereteks collect cognition on their turns, but it fills the player's cognition bar :M
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Eh, I'm fine with being able to tune difficulty. It's better than not being able to do that and the entire experience being in the hand of devs. We know devs usually don't have access to good playtesters, so it's whatever. I'm 6 missions in and I'm already feeling overpowered, so I might restart and tune everything now that I'm more aware of what's up. What is kinda weird is how ranged necrons eat attacks of opportunity every time. They kill themselves if you have 2-3 troops around them. I'd have maybe made it so some of the necrons have a pushback ability and they complement each other.
 

Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What is kinda weird is how ranged necrons eat attacks of opportunity every time. They kill themselves if you have 2-3 troops around them. I'd have maybe made it so some of the necrons have a pushback ability and they complement each other.
They do that, yeah, the ai is not very smart, sadly. Even without pushback sometimes they should just not move or attack in melee instead of die and give you cognition. Sometimes it surprises you and targets a low hp techpriest or a skitarri instead of a servitor, but that's rare. Destroyers get stuck and waste their turns. Crypteks heal the blackstone consoles instead of reanimating unit. If you have the perk that gives you cognition when you get hit you can also run your techpriest into melee and back on purpose and collect a bunch of points in exchange for some "damage absorbed" or low damage from warriors and immortals.
 

jac8awol

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Feb 2, 2018
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408
Been considering getting this for a while but early reviews I read said it was way too easy. That's a massive deal breaker for me. Now I see you guys saying it's still that way. Got to agree with Dr Skellie here that putting the difficulty setting on highest is the developer's responsibility, not the player. If a player fails again and again and has to tune some settings down, that I can understand. But to try and fine tune something upwards, that just takes so much fun out of the experience, and can only really be done after the fact anyway.
 

Lacrymas

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Pathfinder: Wrath
Uhm, no, you are being unreasonable. The devs gave us enough diverse difficulty options to cater to basically anyone, don't be an ass and get it. It's a good game.
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Been considering getting this for a while but early reviews I read said it was way too easy. That's a massive deal breaker for me. Now I see you guys saying it's still that way. Got to agree with Dr Skellie here that putting the difficulty setting on highest is the developer's responsibility, not the player. If a player fails again and again and has to tune some settings down, that I can understand. But to try and fine tune something upwards, that just takes so much fun out of the experience, and can only really be done after the fact anyway.
Uhm, no, you are being unreasonable. The devs gave us enough diverse difficulty options to cater to basically anyone, don't be an ass and get it. It's a good game.
The hardest difficulty is a bit easy. And on your first time, it is hard to effectively customize since you don't know what the balance issues are.

Therefore, I have made this attempt, which is based on the 'very hard' difficulty, and which includes what I hope to be minimal changes (esp to things that might reduce fun) but still provide a good challenge. If you like really difficult games you may consider increasing awake level per tomb room, and extra enemy unit modifier, but I think the following should provide a reasonably hard first playthrough.
6AC1E653BE4497ECCB11299C2F414B45889C9330


The changes are doubled cost to 'sprint', inability to stack tech on same unit (double cognition mechandrite is way too strong, as are the +damage tech) and reduced money income. This should prevent a lot of the truly broken things, and keep the power curve lower.
 

Lacrymas

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Sep 23, 2015
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Pathfinder: Wrath
Yeap, the difficulty is customizable enough to deliver the session on the rack you so desperately crave. It's bad praxis to not buy such games because of weird criticism that is easily fixed. Since the recent boom of popularity of this game, they might be working on a second one, who knows. I checked their website but it's literally only their logo and links to their social media, and they haven't posted news on there as well, sooo.
 

Dr Skeleton

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Joined
Nov 9, 2014
Messages
811
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't regret buying the game one bit btw, it's pretty good, as far as 40k games go, this is easily one of the best in the last ~10 years if that even means anything. I'm still going to grumble about the difficulty, because "difficulty setting = we upped the enemy hp and numbers, figure out the rest for yourself" is crappy design, but it doesn't ruin the game.

Looking at the custom difficulty options now:

Awaking level counters seemed right. I finished the game at ~80%, but there were still a lot of missions I didn't do. Maybe it's too easy to finish at 0-2 in late game missions, but that's the result of the overall battle difficulty taking a nosedive, not the counters themselves, if the fights were more difficult, it wouldn't be a problem.

Techpriest hp is actually not that high and the game would be a lot harder without refactor fields and overabundance of healing, so I wouldn't touch this one.

Extra enemy units: might work well, but wouldn't that also net you more blackstone? Maybe combined with the revenue modifier?

Enemy hp: is already bloated at +50%, many of them should do more damage. And I know I just wrote techpriest hp is not that high, but there's also armor and refactor fields to consider.

Number of extra fights: can often be avoided, give you blackstone and always lower the awaking after you beat them, but might burn out your resources and kill troops, so not sure, but I'd leave it as it is.

CP movement: yes, this is a big one. Paying a few points to move freely (and often collect a lot more cognition in the process) is very strong, so this should probably be at least at 2. Or maybe something like 2+1 for each extra move already taken if that was an option.

Discipline method: not sure what that does. You can't take perks from different trees until you get all from one?

Single use skill: probably a good idea to check this, some of the skills are super broken. I'd rather have less broken skills, but this might work. Does it work globally or for each techpriest?

Tech only once per techpriest: Sure, I don’t think this changes that much though, there's plenty of good tech to use.

Available weapons: pure melee would be miserable, and no aoe only slightly less miserable.

Starting blackstone: seems really difficult to start any lower at very hard, starting difficulty is not the issue.

Blackstone modifier: this is also pretty big, might work well with increased enemy numbers. Could make the early game a lot harder though.
 

Lacrymas

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Sep 23, 2015
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Pathfinder: Wrath
If refractor shields + necrons doing too little damage is the issue, you can limit skill use to 1 per fight (not sure if it's per priest) and lower the hp of priests. But yeah, increasing necron damage not being an option seems like an oversight.
 

lightbane

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Dec 27, 2008
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Jeez, the Heretek expansion is really shit. Not only the enemy Heretek Techpriests are insanely OP and way more dangerous than anything except Lychguards, they'll rape you if you don't have AOE weapons since they start with the anti-targeting buff and spam the 100% dodge ability. Heretek servitors are also quite hax, but less so at least.
Worse, the Canotek Spyder now freezes my game whenever it moves, so I have to kill it quickly before it can act.
Lastly, when does the final "secret" mission appear (the one after doing "The Sixth Seal")? Your apprentice mentions being ready with the translation, but I'm at 50% Global Awakening and nothing is happening. Is it related to doing the mission with the Xenarite-friendly advisor that mentions a Tesseract Key (aka the first Magos of the list)?

EDIT: I can't progress because the Spyders are bugged and freeze the game. I decided to check Youtube to see who's the hidden boss and everything else. It was... A bit disappointing. Also, I didn't notice how SLOW the game moves without Cheat Engine.
 
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Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Lastly, when does the final "secret" mission appear (the one after doing "The Sixth Seal")? Your apprentice mentions being ready with the translation, but I'm at 50% Global Awakening and nothing is happening. Is it related to doing the mission with the Xenarite-friendly advisor that mentions a Tesseract Key (aka the first Magos of the list)?
Iiirc you get one secret mission for every 10% awakening and the final mission is at 80%.

Jeez, the Heretek expansion is really shit.
It's not great. The new weapons and character class are nice, but the heretek missions themselves are very bad.
 
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I started a new playthrough on Very Hard and this is actually pretty hard, feels like more like how the base difficulty should have been.
 

Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The start is difficult on very hard (roughly the first two tombs, but it probably depends on what mission rewards you unlock first). Gets a lot easier after you level up a bit and get more techpriests.
 
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Ok yeah having played some more and leveled up, it turns out the game's still way too easy, it just delays the point of snowballing. I'm not sure what the ideal solution would have been but I think there's too much in the way of progress. I mean yeah it's cool to see your techpriests get more and more gear equipped, but ultimately having such a wide range of power and a largely nonlinear mission selection probably made balance impossible. I think it would have been better if you either didn't gain very much compared to how you start out so the game continues to play simple but with lots of caution and conservation of resources required, or (preferred) you start out with lots of gear, slots, abilities, and troops, and the challenges you face can be boosted up on the assumption that you're well equipped.

One size fits all just doesn't work when there's such a huge degree of variation in terms of what the player can bring to the table.
 
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Limit the usage of powers to only once per battle?

I don't think that it would help much, unless this also includes mechadendrites and claws, and even then, it would just promote having more of them. I think these are some of the main issues:

Health regeneration is far too abundant. I'm currently rolling with curatio claws and healing mechadendrites on every non-frontline techpriest; my frontline guy still carries a curatio claw. Whatever damage the enemy inflicts is easily healed up. It's an iffy line to walk though because if you don't heal promptly, you'll probably lose your guy pretty fast, so maybe it's largely a product of having lots of healing and low health pools. Might be fixed by making your units be somewhat tougher and having more health, but healing abilities drastically reduced, so you wouldn't be in danger of dying in a couple turns of not healed, but at the same time if you repeatedly let your guys get hurt, they will die, and if you're sloppy you will still get worn down through the mission. As it is, not only is it easy to keep my guys at full health, but I actually spend most of the time with two or three healing devices available and nobody to use them on.

Cognition points are an interesting mechanic, but too powerful. On the one hand any weapon that's not a peashooter (and peashooters start to become useless midway through the game) consumes lots of cognition points. So you build to be able to use it. The recover-all-CP skull upgrade, scanners, the fill-CP-bar ability, the weapon cost reduction ability, etc. Now you're at the point where you can use your weapons most of the time and deal with CP costs, but if you have to have a dude run around and go anywhere on the map, you can do that, because the relative CP costs of movement are low. I would lean towards making CP harder to get, but reducing weapon CP costs. Or make CP harder to get, keep weapon CP costs the same, but make the high CP cost weapons stronger.

The arc weapon you get for whatever-edition is really powerful. You can use it on a melee guy and retain your bonus and absolutely destroy anything in melee. But that makes me think of a broader issue: by and large, your guys can do anything. My main gun dudes haven't even maxed the dominus tree, I maxed out Lexmechanic instead to pay for weapon costs. And dipped Explorator for them so they can ignore attack of opportunity. And dipped all kinds of other stuff to get the best equipment and so on. My Secutor has no weapons, he has a Cog Occultaris and stays untargetable the entire match and is loaded to the brim with healing gear so he just runs around standing near large CP points, healing troops, and buffing troops while being invincible. (I haven't tried Tech-Auxilium yet but I suspect its finisher ability is actually even more broken than Lexmechanic since it'd let you mostly-fill CP every couple turns instead of totally-fill CP every five turns). And that makes me think, you know... maybe classes should have been more rigid and nonflexible. Maybe you should have had to pick one, or MAYBE two classes, per techpriest, and you can only level up those. So your ranged guys can't each be able to max out the CP bar and run past melee enemies with impunity, for example. And restrict gear. Healing stuff for Enginseer only. Heavy ranged stuff for Dominus. Xenarite weapons for Xenarite. Melee for Secutor. Maybe exotic weapons for Auxilium. And a couple basics that everyone can use. Etc. I haven't checked custom difficulty settings so maybe there are some class restriction options already available, probably helps if so.

But I feel like overall, having each techpriest have specific roles and not being able to turn them into generic do-everything guys or cherrypick broken combinations would help with balance a lot, and maybe make gameplay more interesting. Sure, it'd reduce customization, but I think it would enhance the actual gameplay, including gameplay elements that are there already like attacks of opportunity, that contribute a lot to having a more active feeling battlefield where you have to be careful of what's going on, and then get bypassed by "lol I dipped Explorator I can escape melee at no cost".

I dunno, the game is way too easy to break. I think after my current playthrough I'm going to try a Troops focused game using only one or two techpriests (ie, the ones I start out with) and the rest of my team being Troops only. I suspect it'll still be pretty broken but maybe it'll make things more interesting.

Edit: actually I think the most OP build would be a team of Tech-Auxiliums spamming that machine spirit canticle to use boosted damage, no CP cost arc weapons every single turn. I haven't tried this yet but I will at some point.

Edit 2: having acquired another techpriest in my current playthrough I decided to set him up as Tech-Auxilium. The extra canticles thing didn't really blow my hair back, but I haven't tried a whole squad of them. Moreover, I haven't thought much about what sort of canticles might go from mediocre to broken when able to use them repeatedly.

More significantly I tried out having multiple Sector techpriests with a skitarii gunline (4 or 5 skitarii, preferably high level Vanguard). It is very powerful. Each time you fire off the "all troops attack this target", if you've placed your troops carefully, whatever you targeted will usually die. If you have three or four techpriests with that skill, and a bunch of Vanguards, that's a lot of damage you're dishing out in addition to their base damage (which is also substantial in numbers). So I do think I'll be thinking about the possibilities of generally ignoring Tech-priest weaponry and maxing out their ability to support and boost troops.
 
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lightbane

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Funnily enough, the fact that techpriests are OP is somewhat fitting with canon. They have OP archeotech weaponry after all.
 

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