Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Howdy y'all,

Figured since I didn't see a thread about this game, might as well start one up myself.

A recently released Turn-based Strategy Game, focused on our lovely Cogboys facing down an awakening Necron Tomb-World, that I've been enjoying quite a bit, despite some issues I take with it.

The comparison has been made many times, however I think it's quite apt and fair to say it's similar to XCOM: EU/EW and XCOM2, with dungeon-crawling elements contained within. I have no experience with the early XCOM titles, so I can't comment on those.

An overarching mechanic through the game is Necron Awakening. It's a series of bars that fill up as you take on a mission, travel to rooms and fight in battles. The level of Necron Awakening that you finish a particular mission with, is then added to a total bar in your "overworld"/base view. Level 5 Awakening in a mission translates to 5% of the bar filling, presumably with the campaign ending at 100% or some major point occurring. A similar mechanic to XCOM 2, where you're on a timer.

For reference, it seems I'm about 30% of the way through my campaign.

Your squad consists of Tech-Priest units that can be levelled up using the game's currency/exp, Blackstone. In addition to/in lieu of techpriests, you can fill your squad for a particular mission with Troops, ranging from Servitors to Skiitarii, and presumably other more powerful units as you progress. You begin with only two Tech-priests, and gain more through the campaign. Tech-Priests that leave a mission with damage taken cost Blackstone to repair, meaning that damage taken will effectively reduce how fast you can level your units up. As well, it seems like there is no penalty besides costing Blackstone, if your Techpriests lose all health on a mission. And are unavailable for the rest of that mission
Troops on the other hand, cost a small fee to take on a given and while still useful, are less effective than Techpriests. No cost to repair them after a mission, so are fairly disposable.

In your home base, you have a number of Magos' with their own personality and interests who give missions. Selecting a mission for one particular Magos will not prevent the other one's missions from being chosen at a later time. It only progresses the chosen Magos' quest line, of sorts. New Equipment, extra blackstone and in-game bonuses are gathered through completing missions.

Once inside a mission, you guide the squad chosen through a series of rooms connection to others. The rooms have random events with text-based choices that can harm, help or hinder your chances on the mission, or over all campaign. Rooms with red holographic Necrons contain battles, while golden diamond marked rooms are Mission objective locations, that always have a battle. You can see the entire layout of the rooms you need to explore, and are never going in blind. Weigh the risks of exploring many rooms and hoping for bonuses, or taking the shortest route to the objective and keeping Necron Awakening low.

Once in a battle, you're put in to a grid-based, turn-based strategy battle screen, similar to XCOM and other turn-based strategy games. Every unit in your squad, and the enemies, are assigned an initiative order for the battle. New units arriving may shake up the order, but again you always know what unit is acting next.
Fight enemies with your abilities and weapons, try not to die. Simple objectives for the most part, like killing or using an object in environment.

A unique mechanic forces thinking ahead, planning and rationing. Cognition Points. Points collected in the mission through random events, battles and collected from the environment of a battle, or generated by priests.
Initially limited to 4 CP maximum, which can be increased through progression. These points are spent by your Techpriests to use powerful equipment, weapons, abilities, or to perform extra movements. As many extra movements as you want as long as you have the CP for it. Weapons and such are limited by having cooldowns.

______

Having gone through most* of the main mechanics of the game...

How are people feeling about this game, from the look of it or experiencing it?

The story is enjoyable, I can't comment on the VA since it's all machine speak, with text boxes to read through. Presentation, look and feel of the game are all great in my opinion.

Gameplay feels great, weapons have great oomph to them on both sides of the field. However, I've been feeling it's a little to easy thus far (could change soon) and 2/6 of the Skill Trees for Priests feel like duds, while another feels mandatory to take one point in, the Logistics one that generates CP when that Techpriest starts it's turn.

I always feel drawn to build the Priests with Logistics so I can be using high powered abilities and weapons, then going for Lex-Mechanic and Dominus, which allow for efficient use of CP, or not using them at all when using weapons/powers, and empowering your ranged weapons. And always equipping them with a melee weapon and 2 ranged weapons, one that's fairly weak/no cp cost, and other to do the real work. Some difference in my builds, is how deep I go in to those trees early.

And on top of being a little too easy (so far) and feeling no reason to experiment with other builds (melee-focus is unappealing, seems like a quick way to die, since you can often outrange the Necrons, and if melee ones get close, your other priests can support with their guns and good positioning), I would love to see cover included in the game. As it stands right now, if you're being shot at or attacked, you're going to be hit. Unless you have armor pieces that grant dodge % chance, but other than that the only way to mitigate damage is through resistance armours (reduce dmg vs Physical or Energy)

The 'cognition points to fire real weapons' really turns me off (especially since the points are farmed from necron data banks).

Plus, honestly, X-com2 really killed any enthusiasm I had for that particular combat system.

It struck me as an appealing theme/atmosphere and gameplay I'd honestly hate, so I've been avoiding it. Maybe a sale at some point.

Decided to pick it up today and give it a go, partially due to GW giving me a Steam key to upgrade the game to deluxe for free. The art style takes some getting used to, but overall the game oozes with setting and the devs get it, in that a cabal of Magos is in high orbit while the lesser ranks are down in the tombs risking life and mechadendrite to resolve the crisis.

Played through the tutorials so far and an annoying camera quirk aside, I like it. The CP's take some getting used to, but that's what servitors are for, right?

I also really like that the Magos and company converse in machine chatter whereas the Necrons use actual speech.

Voss wrote:
The 'cognition points to fire real weapons' really turns me off (especially since the points are farmed from necron data banks).

Plus, honestly, X-com2 really killed any enthusiasm I had for that particular combat system.

It struck me as an appealing theme/atmosphere and gameplay I'd honestly hate, so I've been avoiding it. Maybe a sale at some point.

Honestly cognition points become utterly trivial after just a handful of games. Every techpriest can use an advance to grab an ability that adds one CP to the pool every time they activate for a turn, each priest can harvest a CP remotely using their servo skull every couple of turns, every time an enemy attacks one of your (entirely disposable)Servitor minions you gain a CP, many weapons cost zero CP to use when their Machine Spirit is charged, and higher up in the ability trees there are advances that reduce the CP cost of certain types of weapons. My melee guy is running around with a pair of Arc Scourges & a power axe and can let rip with all of them for 5 CP, and my main ranged guy has a Volkite Culverin and Plasma Caliver and can also use both for 5 CP. My CP meter has been raised to a max of 7 due to mission rewards, and it's a rare turn that it ends up empty enough that I can't do what I want to do.

TBH my main complaint is that it's a bit on the easy side, except for the special missions against the named characters which can be ridiculously punitive by comparison. That and there's an annoying feature whereby at the end of a "dungeon" run it will always add a minimum of 3 points to the overall Awakening score, even if you managed to keep the meter under that - if I'm careful enough to keep it low, the game shouldn't be artificially inflating that number just to ensure it's not possible to do all the missions in one playthrough.

25 missions in and beat it! Bit on the short end and while some missions and exploration segments were horribly stacked against you, heaping up escalation, on the other hand some of the boss battles I utterly dreaded fighting wound up to be complete pushovers (looking at you, void admiral and final bosses)!

Though this may be due to me having a five strong team of Magii, including one with a pair of large arc cannons, which paired with the right skills and kit to enhance its damage output, tears through tightly packed enemies and single targets with contemptuous ease.

May reload the game to just before setting off on killing the final bosses and try and unlock some more kit before doing it again. If there's enough time I may also try and go for one of the two "secret" endings the game has.

Overall though, money well spent for me.

Sounds amazing. I’ll have to pick it up one of these days.

Loved the game, finally happy to see my cog boys actually accomplish their own missions instead of being a tag along to the guard or space marines.

I enjoyed it a lot, and though it can be easy at times, getting to the point where a single tech priest can nuke half the enemies on the map is just satisfying. My favorite build was a tech priest that had the ability to make his neck attack ignore CP cost, pick a canticle for 2 cp to ignore all armor for the next 6 attacks, buff his damage for two more CP, and then just one shot a necron point blank with a volkite blaster. Felt so satisfying getting all the buffs to work in harmony.

Here's a tip: shoot the concils around the map after you scan them for black stone. It lowers the neurons awakening by quite a bit!

Yeah, I found out about being able to both harvest and destroy consoles quite late in the game (probably glossed over it during the tutorial), as before I simply scanned them for points and ignored them, not finding out until later that you could also destroy them to decrease the counter.

I don't suppose you guys know what missions I need to play to get the sixth tech priest unlocked now do you?

I tried the Steam forums, but they weren't super helpful.

I'm really digging the game. It absolutely chigs on my laptop so I wish there were more graphics options but it is a gorgeous game I must say.

I really like the mystery and sense of "wonder what this button does". Making you figure out mechanics by getting in there and seeing what works, using troops as expendable test pieces anytime you see a new enemy and are trying to figure out what it does, even attempting to study the necron symbols to figure out what they do, it really adds to the game. When the tutorial said "normally you have to figure this out on your own by trial and error, but we'll help you this one time," I was estatic. I can't remember the last time time a game did that where it fit so well.

I've not had issues with it being too easy yet, but I've been getting screwed on rewards and had to make do with servitors for way longer than felt intended. To give you an idea I had had level 2 servitors until about 20-25% awakening when I finally got the vanguard alpha, and I didn't even get rangers till 30%. If I hadn't found volkite and speced into Dominus with free cognition cost for weapons as fast as I could I would've been doomed.

TBH I've never used anything but Servitors. I'd rather keep my plebs genuinely disposable and have all that tasty tasty Blackstone for upgrading my priests, even with the Secutor bonuses I was never that impressed with the performance of the "better" troop options.

As an aside - it's really bugging me that they made the Secutor the "command guy" and the Dominus the "combat specialist guy". Secutors are war-priests, Dominus are commanders, it should be the other way around.

This game isnt taxing but is very poorly optimised.

My PC runs it very slowly even though the graphics are not that involved. Yes my rig needs updating but it runs Warhammer Total War ok.

I had fun with that one, the ambience and feel is really cool. Some of the weapons + skill combos turn your magi into crazy killing machines, it's always fun to watch a group of enemies get completely annihilated all at once. Kastellan bots shake the screen with every step they take and very much feel like the oversized death engines they are

I wish there was more challenge, though. After a few missions and upgrades, the necrons couldn't keep up with my cohort at all. Even the bosses didn't last very long in front of all the firepower I had. There's no difficulty setting, so maybe I'll do another playthrough where I'll give myself a handicap to compensate...

Overall it was a good experience and considering how small the developing team was (credits show maybe 5 or 6 people + voice actors) it's pretty impressive what they managed to do. I'd love to see a sequel or dlc to that one.

If anyone's interested, this weekend I'll have a spare upgrade code handy for someone who wants to upgrade their regular version to the Deluxe / Omnissiah Edition for free.

To copy paste from the GW site, it contains the following items:

– Arc Scourge weapon: arm your Tech-Priests with this powerful weapon capable of devastating the Machine God's enemies.
– Original soundtrack: enjoy music inspired by the Adeptus Mechanicus and the 41st Millennium.
– Digital art book: View incredible art from the Warhammer 40,000 universe that inspired the game.
– Deus Ex Mechanicus: Read an eBook short story by Andy Chambers that explores an early encounter between the Adeptus Mechanicus and the alien Necrons.