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Surprised nobody has posted this up yet. Trailer for the story looks excellent. Also quite a surprise to see Lion and the Dark Angels involved.

I'm interested to see how that links together with the current storyline - is the Lion actually back with any of his DA yet?

It's not the Lion.

The Blood Ravens simply acquired the Lion's armor and weapons as "gifts."

If they can rock Custodes and Grey Knight armor and have Dorn and Fulgrim's personal weapons... this makes perfect sense.

I'm still on the fence until we see gameplay and the AI - cause their last game was basically braindead AI that was zero fun to play against.

IF they've resolved that then it could be a fantastic game - visually it looks great

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
It's not the Lion.

The Blood Ravens simply acquired the Lion's armor and weapons as "gifts."

If they can rock Custodes and Grey Knight armor and have Dorn and Fulgrim's personal weapons... this makes perfect sense.

Somebody will make a meme mod which makes the Lion slowly lose his gear, and it magically appears on your leader character, till at the end the Lion is just charging into battle in his skivvies and the last scene of the game just pixilates his nethers.

Makes me think of the Knightmare life force tracker

Squads of Squigs?

And now I can love a Repulsor.


https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSYouqdAenQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

That’s certainly a cutscene. Looks cool, but nothing groundbreaking? Need more gameplay shots.

I guess nobody needs to breath air. That's cool.

Love the big red crash button.

Who does that Space Marines hair?

Cyrus is using Sanguinious's hairgel they stole from the Blood Angels.

Yer looks like propa dakka and propa stompin to me boyz.

(Gameplay animations and whatnot)

Blood Ravens 2nd Company looking pretty bad right now...

Admech/necron animation was nice and all, but adds nothing to what we know about DoW4. Helps new people learn a little about the factions? That’s something I guess.

 Olthannon wrote:



Yer looks like propa dakka and propa stompin to me boyz.

(Gameplay animations and whatnot)

Off all the things the animations are definitely not what get's me excited, actually at 1:01 you see that all the boys do the same animation loop, which is really stale, nvm that we don't even see reload animations? Also really artificial unit formations are on all the units and complete syncronicity.
Both are things that Iron Harvest also suffered from.
Seemingly we also don't get cover interaction.

In essence to me it looks tooo smooth clean, but like a downgraded for ease mobile game in design.

What throws me with animations is that they look "sped up". Not sure if they are just doing it for video, but there just seems to be a bit of added speed to the motions.



I can overlook it so long as they've actually built a good AI into the game. That's what let Iron Harvest down entirely - its AI was just braindead dull to play against. The only time it gave any credible threat was IF you only built one unit type (eg infantry, at which point the AI would build all mech flamers to counter); and on its staged reinforcement wave (player and AI got 2 pre-set reinforcement waves during skirmish). Otherwise the AI never secured resource points on the map; never contested them and just went from their base to your base in a line attack.

 Overread wrote:
What throws me with animations is that they look "sped up". Not sure if they are just doing it for video, but there just seems to be a bit of added speed to the motions.

Good catch actually, i rekon it is to suggest a busy look that diverts from the lackluster loop the models have.

Edit: Did a bit of testing, i reckon 0.9 times would be normal for the game.

I can overlook it so long as they've actually built a good AI into the game. That's what let Iron Harvest down entirely - its AI was just braindead dull to play against. The only time it gave any credible threat was IF you only built one unit type (eg infantry, at which point the AI would build all mech flamers to counter); and on its staged reinforcement wave (player and AI got 2 pre-set reinforcement waves during skirmish). Otherwise the AI never secured resource points on the map; never contested them and just went from their base to your base in a line attack.

I wouldn't, seeing as animations and their duration are an actual balance vector. Nevermind the lack of it suggest also a lack of certain core mechanics. Surpression for one.

As for the AI, Iron Harvest indeed was just... sad.

Agreed, Iron Harvest had a great idea and the engine did work well; but the AI was just zero fun to play against.

It's not even that it wasn't "hard" to play against, it was just dull. There was zero fun in playing against it unless you seriously hobbled yourself.

Unfortunately AI in strategy games hasn't really advanced much at all since the 90s. All you can do is make a progressively more complicated checklist and give it cheat resources to make it harder.

This is perhaps the only area I see generative LLM being potentially a useful thing. If game developers were to develop LLMs that could learn to play their game as the AI opponent they could "lock in" a version of an AI engine that could actually be challenging at different skill levels.

thats what i keep hoping for...

Starcraft 2 had some fantastic work done with their AI and I was hoping that it would have a trickle-down effect of training up staff who might move onto other projects; provide ideas and insight and in general advance the AI development in RTS.

Sadly it doesn't seem to have happened or if it has then the skills are locked into bigger firms either working on other titles and so forth.

 Overread wrote:
Starcraft 2 had some fantastic work done with their AI and I was hoping that it would have a trickle-down effect of training up staff who might move onto other projects; provide ideas and insight and in general advance the AI development in RTS.

Sadly it doesn't seem to have happened or if it has then the skills are locked into bigger firms either working on other titles and so forth.

Issue is, that around the era of AoE2 and CoH 2 AI was put on the backburner in strategy games, since you know, they focus on multiplayer and multiplayer balance.
And whilest personally i can understand it, i don't have to like it, a great exemple is AoE 3 DE that thanks to this focus on MP has had severe changes that just ... suck.

But it's cheaper to change certain units, ressources etc, than to design a competent AI.

Thing is over the last few years it feels less like it was put on a back burner and more like the entire skill set has been steadily eroded and lost. Of course this can also just be because RTS is no longer the focus of most big named developers and as such its smaller firms who just lack the resources and internal skill sets to achieve what they set out to do.

You can't really blame anybody since all gaming "AI" are just a series of IF(THAN) statements and checklists that the computer does in a specific order with specific timings. You can make those checklists and timings try and mimic real world players, but the computer is still at the end of the day going to be doing a predictable checklist, which a human can exploit.

LLMs are basically the first and only breakthrough in this field, but they still have a long way to go. LLMs still can't even play chess properly yet, which is somewhat ironic since we've had Chessbots for a very long time. But then Chessbots are still actually quite simple. They're just a checklist which just looks many hundreds or thousands of moves ahead and chooses the "best" move. Which is only possible thanks to Chess being easily quantifiable. Any other type of game is going to be far far more complicated from the perspective of a computer.

The vast majority of strategy games are also just balanced around PvP. Who cares if AOE2 AI is dumb as a box of rocks, the game is made around single player campaigns, casual games with friends vs AI, or online PvP. The AI is perfectly functional for the 2 purposes it serves.

Roadmap unveiled.




And coming September 17th.

 BrookM wrote:
Roadmap unveiled.




And coming September 17th.

I wonder how much is paid DLC or free upgrades?

If they want to nickle and dime us, I’m fine waiting for a bundle deal down the road.

wow. THis looks like nickle and diming for mobile style work.

feths sake.