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

[Incendax]

I think they went overboard with l337-speak.

Scaevola doesn’t use 1337-speak.
She’s too classy for that nonsense.

 

[Balor]

She’s too classy for that nonsense.

Well, yea. 'Code speak'. Still don't didn't like it enough that I've completed much more Videx missions, who is even more obnoxious but at least readable. Better mission rewards, too. Or are they randomised?

 

[Salvo]

She’s too classy for that nonsense.

Well, yea. 'Code speak'. Still don't didn't like it enough that I've completed much more Videx missions, who is even more obnoxious but at least readable. Better mission rewards, too. Or are they randomised?

They indeed are randomized. You are not supposed to be able to complete every mission in a single playthrough and randomization, even if slight, allows multiple games to feel different from each other.

 

[baud]

Even RPS think it's too easy

Unfortunately, the undead robot phalanxes that stalk its cavernous underground tombs put up so little fight that I rarely needed to dig below the surface, ultimately leaving its wealth of tactical options underutilised and gathering dust.

Full review is below:

Spoiler

Wot I Think - Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus
Nic Rueben

23rd November 2018 / 1:00PM

Cyborg Popes vs. immortal pharaoh terminators, woop woop. As Games Workshop rent out their license to anyone who can spell ‘ork’ correctly, their slightly fashy gothic future setting occasionally turns out a real treat of a match up. Bulwark Studios’ Mechanicus is one of the most polished and atmospheric titles to use the name in years, starting with a base coat borrowed from tactics genre titans before it, and gluing on an entire sprues worth of fresh ideas.

Unfortunately, the undead robot phalanxes that stalk its cavernous underground tombs put up so little fight that I rarely needed to dig below the surface, ultimately leaving its wealth of tactical options underutilised and gathering dust.

The game begins as the Adeptus Mechanicus — spidery, technology worshipping cyborg priests — pick up a strange signal emanating from the planet Silva Tenebris. Sensing an opportunity to find an advantage in their unending holy space Brexit, they send a team of Tech Priests to investigate. What they find is the Necrons, shiny skellies with neon green gauss weapons who don’t like to stay dead.



In the tabletop game, they regenerate on a 3+, which is bollocks and completely broken and no, I’m not rage quitting, I have to be home for dinner and its nothing to do with your stupid broken Necrons. In Mechanicus, the Necron’s regeneration and awakening becomes the focus of the entire campaign, as you race to stop the cavernous network of tombs under Silva Tenebris awakening and zapping the galaxy to death.

There are three layers in all, starting with the ship control room. From here, you can upgrade and outfit your tech priests using the resources and equipment you find on missions. There are six different tech trees — or disciplines — which you can mix and match for each unit. Upgrades also earn your Priests more slots to equip weapons, armour, and gadgets.

Mechanicus has an open mission structure. There’s always at least a two or three different quests to choose from, and each specifies rewards, difficulty, and likely enemy encounters before you dive in. Your only constraint is the awakening meter displayed at the top. When it fills up, you’ll be thrown straight into Mechanicus’ final encounter, so the idea is to get your force as kitted out as possible before that happens.



Missions themselves are dual layered. An exploration map marks out your objectives. Along the way, you’ll complete CYOA-style encounters, brought to life with enjoyably hammy flavour text. These choices sometimes grant bonus resources or tactical advantages, but just as often result in your squad losing health or increasing the awareness level of the tomb, giving the Necrons initiative or combat bonuses.

It’s a novel way to break up combat encounters, and combined with a great soundtrack, lends tomb diving a palpable atmosphere of creepy menace. Guttural synths erupt into a relentless, gothic cathedral organ layered over glitchy breakbeats as soon as the fighting kicks off. Battles themselves look and sound great too, from the relentless march of the silver and green necron warriors to the sizzling bursts of energy weapons scorching across the map.

Combat is turn-based, and revolves around a resource called Cognition Points, or CP – effectively action points. Priests can move and use basic weapons for free, but require extra CP for special actions like healing or using heavy weapons. You start off with a limited pool, increasing the gauge by completing certain mission. With enough CP and the right abilities, you can have individual units perform board-sweeping combos, taking out multiple Necrons before refilling the CP gauge and passing it on to the next unit.



And this is Mechanicus’ biggest issue. Choose the right abilities early, and you can all but break the game. I’d soon kitted out my priests with enough CP generating perks and free heavy weapon shots I was able to clear out most threats before they had a chance to respond. By the halfway point, the game started playing itself.

There’s a huge and varied roster of enemy units, each with unique and interesting special abilities. In the bin they went. There’re several unlockable support units that each play a different tactical role in combat, none of which are necessary once you get a big robot with dual flamethrowers. There’s a staggering number of weapons and technology with a different firing arcs and tactical benefits, none of which I really had to pay attention to aside from occasionally checking damage numbers.

I don’t believe games need to be difficult to be enjoyable. I do believe that tactics games are reliant on a sense of danger and consequence behind decisions to make those decisions meaningful. All the options in the world become superfluous if I find an optimal way of playing I can repeat over and over until everything is dead, and I am left feeling hollow inside, a hoarder of unearned victories, a crumbling effigy to false accomplishment.



Ultimately, there’s a serious imbalance here between your own power creep and that of your Necron foes. This ends up robbing Mechanicus of both strategic satisfaction (do I really have agency when there’s very few optimal decisions?), and romantic satisfaction (it’s hard to empathise with narrative struggle if I don’t get some sense of pushback on a mechanical level).

This is also true for the risk/reward minigame in the exploration sections. The idea is that you can spend longer in the tombs in the hunt for extra rewards, but risk granting more bonuses to the Necrons in the process. I never felt like I was on the back foot enough to want to spend any more time in the tombs than necessary.

Look, Mechanicus, old mate. None of this is your fault. It’s a personal bugbear; I don’t think power fantasies and turn based tactics mix well. I need to feel at least a bit weaker than whoever I’m up against because, I mean, that’s why you need to use tactics, right? Otherwise I’m basically an observer who gets to choose the specifics of how my invincible Popebots mercilessly crush whatever hapless xenos has turned up for pyramid polishing duty that day.



And there’re so many options! So many different decisions and class specifications and guns and it all looks and sounds and reads so well! There’s some genuinely interesting thematic stuff going on too, between the Necrons cursed with techno-immortality, and the Adeptus Mechanicus who’ve given up their failing flesh in pursuit of the same thing. It’s genuinely engaging stuff, and even manages to wring some clever humour out of 40k’s famously poe-faced lore.

Even when things got super easy, I still really enjoyed ordering my beautifully animated, lovingly customised Pope bots around these maps, dripping with architectural oddity and detail as they were, and watching them dismantle their foes with fuck-off power axes.But there’s just no bite to it, and it sadly ends up undermining itself as a result. If difficulty options get patched in though, grab it in a heartbeat. It’s so close to being fantastic it hurts.

 

[Beowulf]

Even RPS think it's too easy

Unfortunately, the undead robot phalanxes that stalk its cavernous underground tombs put up so little fight that I rarely needed to dig below the surface, ultimately leaving its wealth of tactical options underutilised and gathering dust.

Did they hire someone new?

While it reads less like a full blown review, and more like a forum post of someone trying to be funny and unnecessarily verbose, it's pretty non-shite - as far as RPS goes.

 

[Frusciante]

Cool, I will just wait for a difficulty patch and then get it.

 

[exe]

Do flamers count as melee or ranged for explorator 9 buff when not equiping ranged? They can't have made a perk that wants you to only equip a single garbage axe, right? They could have really gotten more creative with melee.

Heavy phospor blaster is amazing, massive aoe. Only downside is friendly fire, the only reason I'm not putting it on everyone.

 

[Salvo]

Do flamers count as melee or ranged for explorator 9 buff when not equiping ranged? They can't have made a perk that wants you to only equip a single garbage axe, right? They could have really gotten more creative with melee.


Heavy phospor blaster is amazing, massive aoe. Only downside is friendly fire, the only reason I'm not putting it on everyone.

Equip the Infestus mechadendrites, not just the axe. Afaik you can use the Arc Scourge in melee, though flamers are ranged

 

[exe]

Can you push necrons into chasm with infestus? Their damage is useless.

 

[Salvo]

Can you push necrons into chasm with infestus? Their damage is useless.

Useless? Use power field generators, they stack. And no, enviromental interaction other than CPs and turrets isn't a thing, unfortunately.

 

[Balor]

Can you push necrons into chasm with infestus? Their damage is useless.

Useless?! Far from it, it is a damage instance to 'coup de gras' them once they are down.
But yea, unless you stack batteries their damage is meh and explorator 'megabonus' is indeed kinda wasted due to that (one axe instead of two superweapons of mass destruction? Boo).

Maybe, just maybe, if everyone's ability to use unlimited CP movement will be axed and only 10th level explorators would be allowed to run wild, axes swinging... Than it would be useful. Or at least allow one to attack twice per round or something.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/warhammer-40000-mechanicus-review/

WARHAMMER 40,000: MECHANICUS REVIEW

A few years ago, Games Workshop loosened their grip on the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and the result has been a glut of small budget games set in the grim darkness of the far future. The quality has been mixed, but every so often a game like Mechanicus comes along that uses that glut to explore a previously neglected corner of the Warhammer universe, and makes it all worthwhile.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of what Warhammer 40,000 is about, a bizarre gothic fusion of technology and religion. They are the chief scientists of the Empire, but they treat science like a religious cult, venerating tradition and dogma over invention and curiosity. Mechanicus translates this unusual faction into a turn based tactics game, and does so wonderfully, oozing character from every pore.

Mechanicus is written by Ben Counter, who has over forty Black Library (Warhammer’s official book line) novels to his name. This experience shows, and not just because the game casually drops the word “noosphere” in the opening sentence.

The story is framed by a group of high-ranking tech priests who are constantly debating each mission. They’re all wonderfully quirky characters: Scaevola has removed so much of their humanity they new speak entirely in equations, and they’re excited to recover alien technology, while the devout Videx believes ignorance is strength and anything outside the Imperial dogma must be destroyed. Meanwhile their leader, Faustinius, has quarantined their emotions and only allows themselves to feel when appropriate. They’re Mechanicus’ great strength, and I came to truly treasure their bickering between missions.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are pitted again another of 40k’s weirder factions, the Necrons: slumbering Egyptian-themed terminators from the beginning of time who despise the living. The tech priest’s mission is to explore and investigate this tomb before the Necrons fully awaken, and a constant ticking clock reminds the player of this fact. The missions themselves consist of a series of raids into tombs. You explore these room by room, with little choose-your-own adventure vignettes popping up in each. This overmap stage is Mechanicus’ weakest aspect, the choices presented in these rooms are rarely interesting, and their outcomes seem largely arbitrary, and in the end they just become filler between each fight.

Things become much more interesting in battle. There’s no such thing as cover, which makes combat fast and lethal, initially for the tech priests and then later, after a few upgrades, for the Necrons. Combat revolves around a currency called cognition, which can be earned by scanning obelisks and corpses, as well as lots of other methods, and can be spent on things like extra movement or more powerful actions.

One of my tech priests was equipped with an axe and a bunch of melee boosting equipment. He mostly spent his cognition on extra movement, sometimes racing the length of the map in order to thwack a robot in the face. Another wielded powerful energy weapons, which required me to spend cognition to fire them at all, meaning he often stood next to an obelisk to perpetually replenish the group’s cognition supply.

Another thing cognition can be used for is to summon troops. Unlike tech priests these units can’t be levelled up and customised: they get dropped on the battlefield mid-combat, and can only perform simple actions like moving and attacking. At first the only troops available are weak servitors that exist mostly to take hits for the tech priests, but later on more powerful variants are unlocked, all the way up to the enormous Kastelan robots. You can invest as heavily or as lightly into troops as you like. Personally I found myself gravitating towards ranged units like the Skitarii, who combined neatly with a support tech priest I’d built with the ability to let them fire a second time on his turn.

As you may have garnered from this, the tech priests themselves are incredibly customisable. Each one can attach various strange gizmos, robotic arms, weapons and other gear, and has six skill trees to mix and match as they see fit. I went heavily into Explorator (melee), Dominus (ranged) and Enginseer (healing), but there were plenty of other options available.

If anything, this customisation can get to be a bit too much. By the time the Necron awakening timer had hit as little as 30%, my tech priests had levelled up so much they were demolishing Necrons in one hit. This isn’t a huge problem—I was still having fun while winning, I’d just substituted trying for victory with striving for efficiency, as any true tech priest would. That, plus a love of bickering cyborgs, is what keeps me coming back to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, and what puts it above the many middling Games Workshop-based games we've seen in recent years.

THE VERDICT
81

WARHAMMER 40,000: MECHANICUS
A diet XCOM in a fascinating techno-cultist skin.

 

[exe]

So I went for the endbosses at 87% and killed them in one turn lol. 6 Techpriest, 3 Solar Atomizer, 2 Torsion, 1 Heavy Flamer. 2 guys with Lex 9. Best would probably be to just bring only Solar Atomizer, since aoe isn't needed at all. 9 CP, Machine Spirit and Ignore Armor Canticles, didn't need to use any. Vizier steals your CP, so be careful. Dunno what the Architect (15/15armor) does, died before his turn because I killed 3 beacons. Needed 5 guys to kill 3 beacons and the vizier, didn't even use all their weapons because I was saving some up for the next turn. Szaregon spawns, has only 30 HP with no armor, my last guy runs forward and 2shots him with atomizer+serpenta +4dmg. I assume he or the architect would summon necrons from the green doors.

In the ending slides both Scavoala and Videx complain at me, even though I did all of Videx missions. Do I need 90%+ awakening before he gives me his final mission? Never did a single Rho mission.

Had great fun, but don't see much replayability at the moment. Dissapointed in the almost complete lack of physical dmg weapons, literally only 4 in total (Axe, stubber, small and big flamer). Where's muh bolter and lasguns/lascannons? How can you make a WH40k game and not have some bolters and lasguns?

 

[Balor]

How can you make a WH40k game and not have some bolters and lasguns?

Kind of like an ADnD title with no almost swords... Hmm.

 

[Balor]

Dunno what the Architect (15/15armor) does, died before his turn because I killed 3 beacons.

Don't even need to kill beacons, ignore armor canticles takes care of that.

 

[lightbane]

I've been playing this a little more. I've already started to see the cracks when I realized how easy it is to accumulate Cognition points with the right abilities, but it's nevertheless fun. Also, for good and bad it's one of the few WH40k games that they don't use the overused bolters and chainswords. So far the omni-axe is a bit disappointing though, but against Necron tech, it's understandable.

I hope we will get a Rogue Trader rpg some day, if only due GW having exploited every other alternative by then.

 

[baud]

How can you make a WH40k game and not have some bolters and lasguns?

DLCs? Or as lightbane said, variety and not always using the same protags as every other WH40K games.

I hope we will get a Rogue Trader rpg some day, if only due GW having exploited every other alternative by then.

They'll just crank out sequels.

 

[new fucking guy]

How can you make a WH40k game and not have some bolters and lasguns?

Kind of like an ADnD title with no almost swords... Hmm.

This comparison makes more sense than it should. The problem is WH40k doesn't need this kind of treatment, since it thrives on cliches.

 

[Darth Roxor]

How can you make a WH40k game and not have some bolters and lasguns?

easy

 

[Galdred]

easy

It still features bolters and lasguns!
I had forgotten they had spoiled the "great reveal" on the intro screen!

 

[Balor]

This comparison makes more sense than it should. The problem is WH40k doesn't need this kind of treatment, since it thrives on cliches.

(Blasphemy, I know, but...)

 

[lightbane]

I unlocked the Heavy Phospex Blaster. I think I'm starting to notice why people say that the game is easy: That weapon, in combination with other stuff and certain abilities, rapes everything. However... THIS POWER IS SO INTOXICATING!!!!

 

[Lyre Mors]

However... THIS POWER IS SO INTOXICATING!!!!

Well, it's all downhill from there. Easy mode is now activated and the next 10-15 hours are going to be without any tension and boring because of it.

Really wish they'd fix their fucking game already.

 

[Beowulf]

Finished it recently.

Starts great, but it gets boring to the point of being tedious.
Some actions take too much time, there are too many long pauses here.
Near the end I very rarely sent servo-skulls because their slow movement was starting to make a significant % of battle duration.
Not to mention the small pauses before you can use another action.

The presentation is top-notch however, they also nailed the audio design.
There is some potential for replayability, but they need to make the game more difficult.
Hopefully they wont chose the "HP bloat" route of balancing.

 

[Lyre Mors]

Well, if anyone wants to try the rebalance patch so far, I just found out you can opt into the beta on steam. Galdred, have you tried it at all yet?

Here

PTR - patch 1.0.8
DECEMBER 10 - ALT
1.0.8
With patch 1.0.8 we are now focusing on balancing Mechanicus to have a nicer and smoother difficulty curve. We understand that change can be hard, and as such we have launched 1.0.8 exclusively (for now) on the PTR. We want to give you all enough time to explore the changes and the patch notes.

For more details on 1.0.8 or in fact any previous patch, check out our master ChangeLog[docs.google.com]

When will 1.0.8 go LIVE, and leave PTR?
It's possible it may never go live, it might merge with a future patch or go live some time in the future. We cannot say at this point, as balance is a difficult art indeed.

So was this the hidden message?
Not entirely.

So is this happening?
Sure thing! We're also not pleased, but this is just the way things are. We do have a balance patch as you already know, and hope this helps for the week delay.

What were those last two questions about?
Easter eggs

Thank you from myself and the entire Bulwark Studios team