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Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn - yet another Warhammer game

vonAchdorf

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Sep 20, 2014
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Coming to iOS (already out) and Steam (2/8):



HexWar Games has partnered with Games Workshop® to bring you The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn™. Get ready to fight the largest tank battle in Imperial history with more tanks and more destruction than ever!

After the virus bombing by the traitorous Iron Warriors rendered the surface of Tallarn deadly to biological life, the besieged forces call upon legions of tanks - from the Leman Russ to the almighty Baneblade to bring war to their enemy. The battles begin after the devastating blow that turned the planet into an apocalyptic wasteland, amid the grim conditions the survivors faced in the aftermath.

The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn is a turn-based strategy game that recreates one of the most important events in Imperial history. Command a vast array of tanks, Dreadnoughts, Knights and Titans across the toxic landscape. Play as desperate Solar Auxilia units fighting squadrons of Iron Warrior Predators for control of vast underground bunkers.

  • 66 different units accurately recreated
  • 54 different weapons
  • Three campaigns, each of six linked missions
  • Four battle packs, each with six standalone missions
  • An eight mission tutorial campaign
  • Play all missions, other than the Tutorial, as either Imperial or Traitor forces
  • Tailor your army with custom force selection
  • Fight on the devastated surface of Tallarn or for control of the vast underground bunker system
  • 8 unique unit types
    • Aircraft
    • Flyers
    • Infantry
    • Tanks
    • Walkers
    • Super Heavy Walkers
    • Super Heavy Tanks
    • Titans
  • Future updates will add more missions and many more units

http://store.steampowered.com/app/515980
 

Galdred

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Battle mechanics
The battle mecanics are not clear to me. How does weapon strenght and armor piercing interact with the armor values of the vehicles. It seems to me that autocanons and similar weapons are better at destroying tanks as lascanons, because they have higher AP.

And when you melee a vehicle. Which armorfacing do you attack, the backarmor like in the tabletop or the armorside that you actually touch?

keith [udvikler]
The values are exactly as per 40K! So the odds of any weapon killing or inflicting damage on any unit would be just the same as on the tabletop. The combat information displays your chance of success for each combat and the panel to the top left the detail of the combat outcome. Melee is again as per the rules against the rear armour.
A videogame using 40k rules...
That was unexpected.
 
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Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
So they finally made a game using the tabletop rules but it's an iOS port nobody has heard of before it came out? Maybe it's at least better than Armageddon.
 

Galdred

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So they finally made a game using the tabletop rules but it's an iOS port nobody has heard of before it came out? Maybe it's at least better than Armageddon.
It makes sense actually: Making sure nobody would hear of it is a good way not to canibalize their miniature sales!
It is not out for iOS yet.
 

Galdred

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I gave the game a try (it is only 8.5€ atm).
The damage model(in melee or shooting) works as in the TT indeed, but the game does not really play like the TT:

The core of the game is not too bad, and you get to see Horus Heresy units you seldom see, and the game manages to be asymetric despite both sides using Imperial equipment as you are basically playing Space Marine Tanks and Dreadnoughts (traitors) vs Imperial Guard tanks (loyalists).
The Traitors have tanks that cannot win in a straight fight (Predators get stomped by Leman Russ Vanquishers), but they dominate in melee (with Dreadnoughts and Terminators).

But some things are really quite rough:

It takes forever to move:
Your leman Russ Vanquisher or Predator tanks can move 1 and shoot, or move 2 and not shoot at all.
Some units can go faster (3 for some Land Raider Variants).
Given that some units that have 12ish range, maneuvering is not always practical (you have to when playing Chaos, though, because your predators cannot penetrate the Leman Russ Vanquisher armor from the front at all).
The game is mostly about tanks, so there is very little infantry, which is a shame.
Riding a transport is not much faster, but infantry gets damaged over time when not in a transport(the atmosphere or the planet is poisonous...).
I don't think it makes for a very interesting premise: tank battles are less interesting than combined arms.
You only have a few Cataphracti Terminator units and Velitari squads.

The UI does a horrible job at giving useful information:
You have bars to indicate your armor and penetration values, instead of number that could let you know beforehand whether you can damage something or not.
No LoS preview when you move, so you'd better compute LoS by yourself before doing so, as you cannot cancel a move.
No overwatch. It is like that in the TT, but it makes little sense, especially when reinforcements that arrive on the map get to act first (so you can get attacked by an unit that was not there before, and you could not have known of unless you already played the mission).
The carryover campaign have you keep the same core of units between missions, but you cannot upgrade, replace or replenish them, and they don't get any progression, so all you can do is get them damaged or killed to make later missions harder.
It is not a problem in itself, but it more or less forces you to replay a mission or savescum until you have a perfect score, and here too, the UI gets in the way, as you cannot see which are your core troops.

TLDR:
It is enjoyable to play with Horus Herest units, but it is very hard to overlook the game issues, so like with most other game, you should wait for more polishing before buying.
The core issues probably will remain, but the UI could be improved.
 

Commissar Draco

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Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
So they finally made a game using the tabletop rules but it's an iOS port nobody has heard of before it came out? Maybe it's at least better than Armageddon.

Bought this one but it did not even started... waited 3 days for devs to fix the problem which they were not able to do while watching many more people having the same problems and devs again unable to solve it before hinting refund bottom... But from the Jew tube review its really is bare bones as turns based strategy goes build on buggy and rickety engine. Then finally conquered my inner Jew and payed additional 30 Ojro for Armageddon Complete edition and have blast. Not recommended as it is now for playing.
 

Galdred

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Wargamer.com has reviewed the game
CroppedImage1140600-SetWidth1140-20170208193246-1.jpg

REVIEW: THE HORUS HERESY: BATTLE OF TALLARN
BY MATT THROWER 13 FEB 2017 1
REVIEW: THE HORUS HERESY: BATTLE OF TALLARN
Released 08 Feb 2017
Developer: HexWar
Available from:
Steam
Direct
Reviewed on: PC

HexWar are one of the most prolific publishers of turn-based strategy around. A visit to their website reveals home-grown games spanning ancients, medieval, age of rifles and both world wars. How, one wonders, can they have spawned so many games in such diverse settings in such a short space of time? Well, as someone who's reviewed a lot of them, I can tell you the answer. They're all essentially the same game, re-skinned and given a new set of scenarios. Battle for Tallarn looks an awful lot like the sci-fi iteration of the HexWar in-house system. There's a lot of tanks so, as you might expect, the mechanics place an emphasis on facing, turret weapons and attacking weak side and rear armour. There's infantry too, who can creep into terrain inaccessible to vehicles and hitch rides on transports.

As a fun extra there are flying units, dreadnoughts and damn dirty great Titans striding over the battlefield too. Visuals aside, the game's biggest nod to 40k and its chief differentiation in the HexWar stable is that units can have multiple weapons. Some a more effective against certain types of targets than other. A Multi-Melta, for instance, will hit armour much harder than a Lascannon will. You can't always fire all your weapons: indeed they vary in range and some of them are close combat only. Between this selection and trying to maximise flank and rear attacks, Tallarn would seem to have the basis for some solid strategy.

ResizedImage820461-20170208215038-1.jpg


Unfortunately, poor design and weak scenarios leave the game a rather tired, repetitive experience. Problems begin at the beginning with the tutorial campaign. It's piecemeal in the extreme: one would hope most gamers don't need an entire scenario to teach them to move by clicking on a unit and then a target hex. It's possible to fail some of these "tutorial" problems due to capricious randomness. Playing one several times in order to win and unlock the next just so you can learn the rules is frustrating in the extreme.

Then there's the odd decision to give many of the tanks a two-hex movement range. One hex if you want to move and still fire. This results in some suspension-shattering anomalies like vehicles being no faster than infantry. But the real killer is that it kills any chance of a war of maneuver. For all the emphasis placed of outflanking the enemy, the game provides few tools to put this in to practice. By the time your flankers have inched around the sides, your main force will either have destroyed or been destroyed by the opposition.

Light tanks do exist and they do move faster, but they're also so fragile as to be useless. Their main function seems to be in fooling the weak AI in the game. In one scenario where I had to defend an objective, I won by using light tanks to lure the enemy away from the vital hex. Had they attacked my defenders instead of chasing harmless scout units over the board, I'd probably have lost. Other scenarios have almost no scenery or force variety and degenerate into random duck-shoots in the middle of the map. Playing these on "hard", where the enemy force assumes ridiculous proportions, is almost impossible.

ResizedImage820461-20170208221316-1.jpg


Later on, things do improve. Bigger units have bigger movement ranges and a bigger selection of weapons. They also tend to see action on bigger maps with different objectives. One mission, which had me defending a line of objective markers, suddenly saw the game spring to life. The AI units lunged for those markers with appropriate desperation and my defence was fraught and tense. Even then, though, it was hard to escape the feeling that my victory was more down to lucky shot rolls than decent planning.

Still, in these missions the game becomes less of a tiresome grind and more involved and challenging. Plus, there's a certain pleasure to be had from watching dirty great Reaver Titans stamping all over the enemy forces. But it's too little, too late. Randomness still dominates over strategy. For all the advertised variety of campaigns and missions, playable as either side, only a handful are worthwhile.

ResizedImage820461-20170208201845-1.jpg


Besides, even when things come together there are still various small niggles to endure. Facing, as noted, is important in the game. Yet the arrows you click on to change a unit's direction are imprecise, requiring a click bang in the middle to work. In one instance a tank I'd selected decided to reverse itself off the map before I could give it a command. The interlinking narrative of the campaigns is flat and lifeless in the extreme.

If you were hoping for better from the multiplayer implementation, you're in for more disappointment. There's no online play at all, asynchronous or otherwise. Solitaire play involves a lot of dull grind to find the minority of scenarios that are actually fun to play. HexWar's in house engine might have been acceptable for spamming out thin strategy games in the early days of iOS development. In this age, on this platform, it's not good enough: not even at a bargain price.
I agree with most of the criticism after more time spent on the game:
The glacial pace of the tanks makes maneuvering tedious, which is made worse by the fact that you have to finish all actions with one before moving to another one, and if you move only one tile and notice that you don't have LoS to anything, the second move is wasted.

That said, the reviewer forgot to point out that Wargamer is a subsidiary of Slitherine, which happens to be the company publishing a competing product (Sanctus Reach), so you should still take the review with a grain of salt.
 
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*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
909
Looks like they made this a decade ago, forgot about it and decided to release it now. :D
 

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