Turn-Based Tactics The Lamplighters League - turn-based tactics in pulp 1930s setting from Harebrained Schemes

[toro]

This is Mutant Year Zero/Miasma Chronicles stuff. I'm in.

Edit: It looks worse than those.

 

[J1M]

Even as far back as Fire Emblem you wanted to savescum whole missions to not lose unique class characters and stuff. I guess having a set cast of units helps with balance or some shit. As always, I blame the Japanese and their weird design paradigms.

No reason a unit falling on the battlefield has to be deleted from your save file. That's a design choice.

 

[Infinitron]

Coming October 3rd:

 

[gurugeorge]

I still don't really like the cartooney art style, but just from glimpses, it looks like the combat might be okay. If the combat is as good as, or better than Shadowrun's and if the story is told as nicely as in those games, I'll be happy.

 

[Galdred]

Even as far back as Fire Emblem you wanted to savescum whole missions to not lose unique class characters and stuff. I guess having a set cast of units helps with balance or some shit. As always, I blame the Japanese and their weird design paradigms.

No reason a unit falling on the battlefield has to be deleted from your save file. That's a design choice.

Also, an unit taken out doesn't need to be always 100% dead. Blood Bowl is one of the game that handles it best actually, by having various outcomes for a character being downed.

 

[Harthwain]

Even as far back as Fire Emblem you wanted to savescum whole missions to not lose unique class characters and stuff. I guess having a set cast of units helps with balance or some shit. As always, I blame the Japanese and their weird design paradigms.

No reason a unit falling on the battlefield has to be deleted from your save file. That's a design choice.

Also, an unit taken out doesn't need to be always 100% dead. Blood Bowl is one of the game that handles it best actually, by having various outcomes for a character being downed.

Battle Brothers also does not always kill a downed party member. Although you are going to get a permanent injury if that happens.

 

[Reinhardt]

Even as far back as Fire Emblem you wanted to savescum whole missions to not lose unique class characters and stuff. I guess having a set cast of units helps with balance or some shit. As always, I blame the Japanese and their weird design paradigms.

No reason a unit falling on the battlefield has to be deleted from your save file. That's a design choice.

Also, an unit taken out doesn't need to be always 100% dead. Blood Bowl is one of the game that handles it best actually, by having various outcomes for a character being downed.

Battle Brothers also does not always kill a downed party member. Although you are going to get a permanent injury if that happens.

and permanent injury is not always bad thing.

 

[Axioms]

Even as far back as Fire Emblem you wanted to savescum whole missions to not lose unique class characters and stuff. I guess having a set cast of units helps with balance or some shit. As always, I blame the Japanese and their weird design paradigms.

No reason a unit falling on the battlefield has to be deleted from your save file. That's a design choice.

Also, an unit taken out doesn't need to be always 100% dead. Blood Bowl is one of the game that handles it best actually, by having various outcomes for a character being downed.

Battle Brothers also does not always kill a downed party member. Although you are going to get a permanent injury if that happens.

I mean everyone in Battle Brothers starts off with no legs so...

 

[catfood]

I stopped watching at

 

[Sarathiour]

One of the things I dislike about current tactical game design is that the entire branch of tactics around treating some pieces as expendable or intentionally absorbing a hit is eliminated. Every unit has a name and is expected to make it home, usually uninjured.

I've been playing othercide recently, and the main gimmick of it is that you're expected to sacrifice your unit as some point, because of two mechanics :
- There is no healing skills or even healing between mission, every lost hp during encounter won't be recovered. The only way to to heal a unit is to sacrifice one of same or higher level.
- The most powerful abilty are the reaction one (it's basically conditional overwatch), and they don't cost AP, but HP.

 

[Infinitron]

The Auto Fire developer worked on this game: https://www.patricklipo.com/2023/06/21/the-lamplighters-league/

THE LAMPLIGHTERS LEAGUE!​

I’ve gone a bit dark over 2023 and haven’t talked a lot about Auto Fire lately. I do throw time into it as I can, but there’s been another project that has consumed my attention more and more over the past three years I’ve been on it. That is The Lamplighters League and the Tower at the End of the World, the game I’ve been working on as my day job at Harebrained Schemes, the good folks that made Battletech the recent run of Shadowrun RPG’s.

LLatTatEotW is a mouthful of a name, no? This game is a classic turn-based tactical game with a real-time infiltration component, set in an alternate 1930’s where dark occult forces are on the rise. You recruit and control a roster of agents in an attempt to rebuild a secret society that combats these sorts of threats… except they all died around World War I. Your best bet is to recruit the Best of the Worst.

This one has been really fun to work on… There’s realtime infiltration, which opens a lot of interesting presentation and play options. There’s a rich turn-based combat experience, the meat of where the game takes place with a lot of abilities and environmental elements interacting. There are tactical maps with procedural generation that plugs in content, enemies, and so on in key locations to add variety to missions… totally the stuff I groove on.

There’s a metagame experience where the campaign takes place over a series of weeks, charting the ascension of three competing houses of a shadowy cult called the Banished Court. Agents have upgrades, gear loadouts, health and sanity states that was fun to work on… and they also can accrue these tarot-like cards on their characters from a fate-sealing deck called the Undrawn Hand. Normally I don’t dig card mechanics in my RPG’s, but this one really allows for a pretty rich combination of power curve and special abilities… it makes for a huge variety in how each player experiences the game.

There is a pretty serious roster of agents you can choose from and each of them has a very unique playstyle, from sneaky snipers to dashing swordsmen to tanky displacers to mind controllers to incredibly potent support healers and so on. The teleporting agent is mad fun… All the things scratched that design itch: potent combos, overwatch actions, stress breaks, world spreadables, chaining passives… yeah! It was a total blast to work in this space.

Yeah it’ll be on Gamepass but I’ll be playing it on Steam… It’s pretty damn good on the Deck.

After a rest I’ll get back on some Auto Fire and other fun stuff.

 

[Oropay]

dark occult forces are on the rise

Then why does the game look like Fortnite? I don't see anything dark about it; more likely that it will be filled with Marvelesqe quips and Pixar expressions. Give me the Shadowrun Returns vibe and I would be happy

 

[Harthwain]

Then why does the game look like Fortnite? I don't see anything dark about it

It's cartoon dark, not real/serious dark-dark.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

A game like this in the Shadowrun setting and less cartoony graphics style would have been very high on my wish list. But this one looks like something I may get in a couple of years at a steep discount. It's not the 1930 as setting per principle but this particular implementation does not stoke my interest. The brownish color palette doesn't help either. Is anything known about the story? Is it embedded in real events, like the great depression, the prohibition, Mafia related stuff, uprisings in colonies, or anything of that sort, or is it just some fight-evil-cult story with no depth?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

. The brownish color palette doesn't help either. Is anything known about the story? Is it embedded in real events, like the great depression, the prohibition, Mafia related stuff, uprisings in colonies, or anything of that sort, or is it just some fight-evil-cult story with no depth?

Looks like it's the evil-cult with no depth.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-lamplighters-league-might-be-about-to-rip-up-the-xcom-rulebook

The Lamplighters League might be about to rip up the XCOM rulebook​

More impressions from the middle of its campaign
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

The rest of the RPS Treehouse might be fully engrossed in Baldur's Gate 3 at the moment, but the main thing that's been on my mind for the last couple of weeks is stealthy strategy games. Primarily, the exceedingly excellent Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, but also Harebrained Scheme's upcoming turn-based tactics 'em up, The Lamplighters League, a game I've been quietly looking forward to ever since it was announced earlier this year.

Specifically, I've been playing through a handful of missions from the middle of The Lamplighters League's campaign, getting to grips with its full roster of agents and their unique set of skills. It continues to be just as stylish as the opening mission I played in May, but I'm not gonna lie. I've had quite a bit of whiplash coming straight from Shadow Gambit into this, but even if I'd arrived fresh and green, I don't think even all my years of tactics playing and XCOM-liker-liking would have been enough to prepare me for just how gosh darn difficult it is.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

In its defence, there's definitely an element of being chucked into the middle of the campaign cold here, and I'm 100% lacking that familiar muscle memory that would no doubt help me see better synergies between its ten-strong cast of characters. I also can't tell you exactly which of its three difficulty modes I was playing on, as the save file that was provided to me simply comes up as 'Custom Difficulty' in the loading menu rather than the Explorer (new to tactics games), Adventurer (familiar with tactics games) or Survivor (veterans of tactics games) options you get when starting a new game from scratch.

I suspect what I've been playing has been leaning quite heavily into the Survivor end of the scale, as by default, the Custom Game Settings have their combat and metagame (that is, world map stuff) both set to Hard, so it's entirely possible I've been chucked into the real deep end here. Unfortunately, there's no way to change your difficulty setting mid-game, or revisit those custom rules you might have set for yourself, so I honestly can't say one way or the other here.

I hope what I've played is more Survivor than Adventurer, though, because if it isn't, then hoo boy, this is going to be a lot harder to love than I first anticipated. Part of that, I think, is because for a lot of my early mission attempts, I was trying to play it like an XCOM-like. For example, before you head into combat in Lamplighters, you're presented with a big world map and lots of possible mission types. Each one is associated with one of the three evil factions trying to take over the world, and completing missions will push back the dials on their particular Doomsday clocks. It's game over (potentially) when one of these clocks becomes full, and the game stresses that you can't keep all three clocks at bay forever - you'll have to make calls and decisions on what you prioritise as you race to open up its titular Tower At The End Of The World by collecting four magical keystones.

The world map shows you how you're faring against each faction's advances, and selecting a mission will show you how much it will decrease that clock's progress by (see that white band on the Nicastro and Marteau clocks). | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

So far, so XCOM. Likewise, as you may recall from my initial hands-off demo impressions back in March, Lamplighter missions are split into two sections. You begin in a real-time infiltration mode where you can get a feel for the map and where your objective is, and you can use your limited set of takedown attacks to take out a couple of straggler guards along the way if you're stealthy enough. I only had two of these per agent in this preview build, so you won't be able to stealth the whole thing. Eventually, the only option left to you will be to enter into turn-based combat.


You can use your infiltration moments to your advantage, though, splitting up your group to get them into useful positions before the action kicks off, and, hopefully, setting up the board for a quick and easy win. When I played the opening level, hunkering down behind decent cover and leaning into those years of XCOM-ing seemed to work a treat. Enemy numbers were manageable, adding a little pressure, but not too much, and so I naturally assumed that the rest of the game would follow suit.

They say to play dirty, but come on, 13 vs 3 isn't a fair fight no matter what tactics you try and take... | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

But having been roundly defeated in every mission I've tried my hand at so far, and losing all three of my agents in the process (which is quite dire in Lamplighters, as they get removed from play on death, not so much in a permadeath sense, but you'll have to fight to get them back later on in the game), I'm beginning to think those early assumptions might have been incorrect, and that I might need to unlearn some of my XCOM exercises to appreciate this better. When I started playing it more like a heist game, for example, playing defensively in combat but still actively moving forward toward my objective instead of turtling in one place, I had a bit more success. I still only managed it by the skin of my teeth, though, as the sheer number of enemies I had to fend off was, to put it lightly, frighteningly overwhelming.

The three agents you take into each mission are all very capable in their own right, but even my fast favourite trio of two-shot gunman Eddie, sneaky evasion master Lateef and healer Ana Sofia just aren't enough to effectively deal with (in one mission, at least) 14 other gun-toting goons by themselves. Fourteen! That wasn't really even an exception, either, as other missions were similarly crowded, chucking six, nine, even ten bodies at me at once in a single encounter, and who all had just as much health as my lot (if not significant 15-20 level armour ratings to boot), and who could all seemingly do twice as much damage per attack as well. In short, if I let even two or three of them get anywhere near me, it was effectively lights out, both for that initial agent, and the one I'd send in to 'stabilise' them afterwards to bring them back to life. Agents can hang on for three turns before truly carking it in The Lamplighters League, but when your enemies are so aggressively capable at wiping you out, even losing one for a single turn can be deadly to your chance of success.

Needless to say, this one didn't end well either... | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

As I said, making the effort to always be moving forward did help to a degree, but even if this is how Lamplighters should be played, I worry that taking this kind of approach also completely misses the point of it being a turn-based tactics game in the first place. If the best chance you have is to simply defend, take pot-shots and not really engaging (or at least not as much as you would in a traditional strategy game like this), then what impetus is there to try new strategies and agent combinations? It doesn't seem conducive experimentation, as there simply isn't the bandwidth to try anything.


Admittedly, a lot of your agents' abilities aren't focused on pure damage-dealing. Rather, most of the extra ones you can unlock by spending your universal pool of skill points are geared around buffs, debuffs and passives, and many of them do link up nicely with other agents in your crew, or at least can be used in tandem to help land more critical hits when you do use your attacks. There's clearly depth to be enjoyed and exploited here, but when, say, Shadow Gambit's crew can work together in pretty much any combination and still be a fun time, I feel like Lamplighters is pulling towards very specific combinations being good, while anything else is just begging to shoot you in the foot. Hence the whiplash.

God bless, you Eddie, you tried your best... | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Paradox Interactive

In short, I need to spend more time with The Lamplighters League, and especially more time with it from the beginning, and hopefully on a more agreeable difficulty setting. I'm still quietly hopeful for it ahead of its release on October 3rd, but I may also have to hold up my hands in Soulsian-like defeat if what I've played in this middle section of the campaign ends up being just another day in the office on its Adventurer setting. I want to believe there's a more approachable game in here - just like the opening mission seemed to suggest - because, hey, I'm not averse to re-training my brain and trying new things! I'll give anything a go if I know what a game expects of me. But if you go in thinking this is just another XCOM-like, you might be in for a pretty rough ride. I'll hopefully report back soon, closer to release.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-lamplighters-league-hands-on/

The Lamplighters League takes a shot at approachable turn-based tactics that won't bury you in percentage symbols​

But you might get burned by flaming mummies because your pulpy merc keeps snoozing on the job.

The first time you send femme fatale Ingrid charging through a line of goons in The Lamplighters League, you feel like a superhero. She has a backhand like a pneumatic drill, and can smack just about anything unconscious with a flick of her wrist. Wait for a few gas-masked guards to bunch together, ease her into position, and knock them down in an instant. When the fighting starts proper, the kicks will come flying too. That is, of course, if she's standing upright, and not lying down for a snooze as I often find her.

It's not her fault. On my previous mission to sabotage the enigmatic Banished Court in its evil plan to claim a magical, world-ending tower, I pushed Ingrid to her limit. With one too many bullets flying past her head and sabers swiping in her face, she had a somewhat understandable nervous breakdown. Her reward: A random draw from a magical deck of fatalistic playing cards that alternately helps and hinders your band of pulpy adventurers.

In this case, she's saddled with the semi-permanent chance to be knocked down to the ground at the start of every turn. Such clumsy footwork would be trouble at the best of times, but doubly so when it gets the better of her just as three self-reviving ancient Egyptian mummies spring out of their sarcophaguses—and then, just to lay on the hurt, start intermittently bursting into balls of fire. What luck she has.

Sneak attack​

It later occurs to me that the whole situation could probably have been avoided. Among the usual staples of the turn-based tactics genre—character-assigned action points that are spent on moving and attacking, protective cover around which you position your squad, and hit probabilities—The Lamplighters League is a stealth game. Before any turn-taking begins, you're free to roam your squad about the map in real-time, evading enemy view cones to explore alternative routes forward, discover secrets, and even the odds before things inevitably turn sour.

The Gentleman Djinn can perform silent takedowns on unsuspecting enemies if he's close enough, and Saboteurs like hardman veteran Eddie can pick locks and chuck electrifying mines about the place. You have a limited number of these specials—Eddie doesn't have bottomless pockets, after all, and I guess Ol' Djinn's arms just get tired—so you have to use them sparingly. Or forget the stealth thing altogether.

Slinking around enemy patrols is often slow going, and the environmental hazards you can use to your advantage have a certain pre-prepared quality to them. With only a few real-time abilities to call upon, the opening levels of The Lamplighters League I played didn't reach nearly the playful, immersive sim-esque heights of something like Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. At one moment, having made my way to a rooftop generator I'd been tasked with destroying, I found I had no option but to go loud, undoing much of the good stealth work I'd already put in and alerting many of the enemies I'd evaded up to that point.

When the fighting starts, it essentially resolves to shrewdly synergizing various buffs, debuffs, and special abilities to swiftly cut through overwhelming odds. When an early mission has me rescue occult assassin Célestine, who brings with her a whole bunch of poison knives and a comparative amount of brooding, I'm at first a little put off by her melee-focused skills. But then I discover she can temporarily turn opposing forces to my side and curse enemies, exacerbating their stress meters so they're likely to turn tail and flee. Pair that with Eddie's group burst attack that can flush out cowering goons from behind cover into Célestine's line of sight, and you've got a potent henchman-hitting combo.

Tactical entry​

If that sounds rather run-of-the-mill by the standards of the genre, well, that's because it is. The Lamplighters League is a grab bag of tried-and-tested ideas: XCOM's pairing of soldierly and supernatural abilities, Jagged Alliance 3's characterful mercs, and Mario + Rabbids' (curse its Nintendo exclusivity) family-friendly looks. All of them are smoothly melded together alongside cinematics that would give the animation boffins at Dreamworks a run for their money.

What sets The Lamplighters League apart is its approachability. With no knotty menu systems, and powerful but straightforward ability combos to play with, it's the sort of turn-based tactics game you can dig into without your eyes glazing over at the sight of an overwhelming number of percentage symbols. In a genre that has so often seemed confusingly dense to the uninitiated—due in part to some of developer Harebrained Schemes' own games, like tactical wargame Battletech—The Lamplighters League looks like an attempt to lower the bar of entry.

When I return to Ingrid and the flaming mummies, I turn to the Gentleman Djinn for help. He fires off a round from his pistol, dealing some damage, and I wait for the second to follow. It doesn't come. Oh, yes, that's right. He'd also suffered a nervous break in the previous mission, lumbering him with a high chance to become dazed and ineffective after each attack. When he keels over a few turns later, the mummies' second victim, Célestine offers a few mournful words: “This is how I saw men die on the streets of Montmartre”. Is it really? I'd have thought seeing rows of paramilitary henchmen punched to death before a trio of incendiary zombies arrives to burn everyone alive would be a first. It certainly is for me.

 

[Morgoth]

I'm definitely sold on the setting and tone. Gameplay though... we shall see.

 

[gurugeorge]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-lamplighters-league-hands-on/

The first time you send femme fatale Ingrid charging through a line of goons in The Lamplighters League, you feel like a superhero. She has a backhand like a pneumatic drill, and can smack just about anything unconscious with a flick of her wrist.

*le sigh*

 

[Nikanuur]

Why am I getting Torchlight I+II vibes from this one?

 

[ind33d]

nobody actually likes harebrained as a developer, right? people played the new shadowruns because they're fans of the license. how hard could it possibly be to make an isometric turn-based rpg? ubisoft could have made dragonfall and the only difference would be some dumb assassin's creed hoodie DLC

 

[Oropay]

The Shadowrun Returns trilogy and Battletech are some of my favorite games. IIRC, Dragonfall is one of Codex's top games as well. Alas, I fear Battletech may have been the final decent game from HBS. Most studios descend into mediocrity or worse after a few games

 

[Tigranes]

nobody actually likes harebrained as a developer, right? people played the new shadowruns because they're fans of the license. how hard could it possibly be to make an isometric turn-based rpg? ubisoft could have made dragonfall and the only difference would be some dumb assassin's creed hoodie DLC

Lot of people here actually thought Shadowrun (esp. Dragonfall) was a fantastic, accomplished, high quality RPG, which just goes to show that sometimes you can just tick all the boxes 7/10 and make people think it's a Godard. That said, I'm glad they're still around and putting out what could be a really fun game.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

nobody actually likes harebrained as a developer, right? people played the new shadowruns because they're fans of the license. how hard could it possibly be to make an isometric turn-based rpg? ubisoft could have made dragonfall and the only difference would be some dumb assassin's creed hoodie DLC

Lot of people here actually thought Shadowrun (esp. Dragonfall) was a fantastic, accomplished, high quality RPG, which just goes to show that sometimes you can just tick all the boxes 7/10 and make people think it's a Godard. That said, I'm glad they're still around and putting out what could be a really fun game.

Dragonfall was right game at the right time.
During era of 3's, a 7 reigns supreme.

 

[gurugeorge]

nobody actually likes harebrained as a developer, right? people played the new shadowruns because they're fans of the license. how hard could it possibly be to make an isometric turn-based rpg? ubisoft could have made dragonfall and the only difference would be some dumb assassin's creed hoodie DLC

Lot of people here actually thought Shadowrun (esp. Dragonfall) was a fantastic, accomplished, high quality RPG, which just goes to show that sometimes you can just tick all the boxes 7/10 and make people think it's a Godard. That said, I'm glad they're still around and putting out what could be a really fun game.

Dragonfall was right game at the right time.
During era of 3's, a 7 reigns supreme.

Yeah I agree, the Shadowrun games were okay, but really the best thing about them was the way the story was well told and well written - i.e. basically everything that right-hand panel. I guess some of the encounters were well-made, and the music was great too. Everything else was pretty mediocre. I don't think I even thought much about builds, it was all so simplistic, so long as you didn't waste points it was fine.

As for Battletech - I'm not sure I would call that a sterling success either really. I've never been able to finish the game, despite three attempts. I want to like it, but my interest wanes after half a dozen missions or so.