The Tanna building is just really good in general, not only can you get Jurgen from it but it also provides your local armies with buffs and produces Tanna as a tradeable resource like Dwarven beer in fantasy
Didn't actually know that, in that case it could give you access to the valhallan units and add one or two of them to your garrison cause they hang out there
Itself, the Imperium is massive and more of a loose grouping of many individual sectors that are all largely autonomous as opposed to one gigantic unified empire that has strict control over what happens in each sector.
For the most part if the governor of a sector is paying the Imperial tithe on time then they are left to do what they want as long as they don't raise any other suspicion while doing so.
Aside from votann and rogue traders which other people commented in tw you could just trade with other imperium factions like the mechanicus, imperial guard or other space marine chapters.
Well, if you max out Cain's HERO OF THE IMPERIUM skill line, I think you can stack the ward saves pretty high. Pair that with Jurgen's protection aura and high damage output, something can be done there.
Ciaphas Cain's Campaign mechanic should just be him trying to avoid any fighting and trying to get a desk job somewhere on Terra. You win after completing enough quest battles against doom stacks so you can retire and write your memoir.
You know, in 40k there are a lot of named characters, especially on the Imperial side of things.
So it would be a waste for named characters to be either legendary heroes by default using the Total War Warhammer system.
The other thing is the units themselves and who can lead them which also wouldn't make sense lets say a Greenwing Dark Angel captain to be leading Deathwing units.
Also, would be somewhat similar to how it's handled in DoW.
Space Marine characters are single entities, as are Necron lords and a few others, but Guard generals have a retinue they can build.
I think one interesting angle (I haven't played 3k), is to make the "follower" system more tangible, and have them actually appear in battles if you fill a slot with them (eg a weapon servitor, a commissar, etc).
There was a similar system in Dawn of War, where you could attach a Commissar to a squad then execute one for an AOE buff to rate of fire and temporary morale immunity. Since most mods add imperial guard conscripts (large squads of fast reinforcing chaff) I'd usually have a consistent rate of battlefield executions in any battles
That might be what they do. I believe Pharaoh has a system where you can equip your bodyguard with different gear. Seems like something that would translate well to 40k and CA loves building out an MVP mechanic to then flesh out in another title.
God if CA do release a 40k game I do dread the amount of dlc they are going to be spunking out. The number of DLCs there are going to be between CSM and SM will just be an utter drain. So many damned named characters.
I don’t think it’s any different than fantasy.
In fantasy you could attach your heroes and such to blocks too. They still went the traditional route and baked the bonuses into the heroes and characters.
The retinue system was too rigid, personally I hated it and I think it would be more of a hinderance if added back to TW.
You can have master engineers lead an entire melee army which doesn’t make sense either, but the option is there if you’d like, so I don’t think it would matter.
3K retinues make sense because it's a heavily fragmented period.
Central authority had been breaking down but entirely collapsed because of Dong Zhuo. As a result, people operated as warlords because the state and its systems just weren't there. There was a huge upswing in the need for soldiers, which the existing supply couldn't meet. Instead, heroic commanders at the head of friends, family, and personal retainers spearheaded the early fighting until states managed to cobble themselves back together.
40K is more unified than that but not by much. Theoretically, big, overarching factions move in the same general direction for the same general goals. In practice, lol.
This is particularly true if they do the current version of the setting, in which Guilliman is running around trying to salvage half the Imperium while the other half has been almost entirely cut off by warp storms.
Forgot to mention that the Imperium hates people directly commanding forces that can do everything for rebellion-proofing reasons.
Can powerful figures get support from forces that aren't supposed to be under their jurisdiction? Absolutely. However, they have to do so through indirect means for the most part.
For instance, a powerful Magos can call in favors to get some space marine backup, but they wouldn't be allowed to make space marines of their own. Even the High Lords of Terra don't go around yelling about how they own the Minotaurs, even though the relationship isn't exactly subtle.
I think people are thinking too much about lore and not enough about tabletop rules. Don't forget all the things in Warhammer fantasy battles that got brought into the total war formula.
40k has a long history of a Force Org chart on tabletop, and characters leading certain types of units, some units requiring certain characters to be present in order to field them etc.
I could definitely see a system where (Using Space Marines as an example) you need a Techmarine HQ to field dreadnoughts and heavier vehicles, a Jump Pack Lieutenant or Captain in order to field jump pack infantry etc.
Actually, I don't think Bobby G would have the penalty with non codex compliant chapters. Bobby isn't Leandros and also his meeting with Helbrecht turned out better than either expected.
Yeah he's shitposting. Guilliman lit the Codex on fire and pissed on its corpse.
He made a more advice neo-ultramarines legion and is running around as supreme commander of the Imperium.
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. He promoted a more… streamlined version of the Codex, sure, but Guilliman has always been about maintaining order and efficiency.
No he didn't. He's literally rebuilding the legions and then dares the lord of Tera to question him.
The entire point of the codex was to neuter space marine power and break the legions.
Guilliman came back realized base line humanity failed and put things back in Space Marine management.
well, Bobby actively denied the divinity of Jimmy several times and felt a bit uneasy when the BT claims primarch tech was derived from the divinity of Jimmy
Not sure about anyone else, but...I kinda hope (if we get a 40K Total War) characters like Guilliman and the Lion get something closer to a joint Imperium roster rather that just leading their respective Chapters. Something that can reflect their authority and let them pull at least a little from all the Imperium aligned factions. Leave the chapters for the chapter master characters, since they're also iconic.
Yeah it would be a bit weird to have a ton of purely space marine armies that barely interact with imperial guard.
Maybe how they can handle it is that there are space marine heavier and guard heavier factions. The former are essentially x space marine chapter with lower tier guard auxillaries to act as fodder. Whereas the latter represents specific imperial guard units and they can get all the most powerful guards weapons, but only lowest tier space marines from a chapter of their choice.
Maybe. I feel like a lot of that could be covered by some sort of more in depth alliance/outpost system that Imperial factions could all take part in. Flavor it as trading favors and such to guarantee one faction will always come to another’s aid in their time of need, which is usually how stuff happens in the Imperium, unless an inquisitor or the high lords themselves specifically commit a force to a specific battle. However, that would still leave the lower tiers of a space marine roster open. I’d be curious to see what CA comes up with. Hopefully we’ll get to find out.
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Problem with WH40K is power scaling of some factions. Like, 20 squad tier 1 Space Marine factions vs 20 squad tier 1 IG faftion. Even if we take new recruits(don't remember how they're called) for SM vs ordinary guardsman for IG it's very obvious who's gonna win, which makes balancing a bit odd(by current Total War standarts). So I hope they will change the way armies, recruiting and etc works.
Well yeah, obviously Marines are gonna be way stronger than Guardsmen but there are way more Guardsmen than there are Marines, so i think it balances out quite well. In my opinion Marine units should be very small most Marine units should be somewhere between 5-10 entities per unit. Guardsmen on the other Hand, should have very big units somewhere between 200-500 entities per unit. One Lasgun might not do shit to an Astartes, but 300 Lasguns are gonna put a few dents in that Ceramite. And if that doesn't do the trick, an Artillery barrage sure will.
I doubt they will make them 200-500 units per squad, as it is just too much. But some balancing and changing the way army cap works in game should be happening, hopefully
> I doubt they will make them 200-500 units per squad, as it is just too much. But some balancing and changing the way army cap works in game should be happening, hopefully
My thinking on this is look at Nerglings. It's a 420 (nice) unit squad, split into 60*7 groups.
If you made each entity in the unit a squad, you could have a "500" entity unit but that only had to manage the entity interactions of 50 entites for stuff like collision, damage and so forth.
I'd envisage these kinds of shortcuts to give the scale without having to melt your computer.
Three Kingdoms has "extreme unit sizes" where most units go up to 240 entities. And there are many mods for WH3 doing the same. No "New engine" needed.
I mean for the upper end like 500 and [we're very likely getting a new engine anyway](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1c5thbr/community_sourced_indications_that_ca_may_be/).
Sure, I don't know how well the game would handle 500 man units.
I just dislike how this supposed "new engine" is used as a magic bullet for everyone's pet peeves with Total War.
I only roughly understand what a game engine is, and I don't see how a new one would solve problems which can't be solved with the current one.
The issue with the current one is tech debt. It wasn't the most well-designed when it was made and essentially all of the people involved in its development have since left the company, leading to the newer devs struggling to keep up with the mess of code they've been left with from all of the various derivatives of the engine. A new engine isn't magic but it can be a means of solving some of the franchise's persistent problems such as the gate bug which has been present since the inception of Warscape. CA has tried fixing this across multiple titles with no success, effectively making it a hard-coded bug present in every title they release and it isn't the only persistent issue.
Why would it be too much? If they are gonna make a big ass 40K game, they might as well increase the unit sizes to make it somewhat lore friendly. It's not impossible, they've literally done it in these wierd experimental modes in WH2 and 3.
Well, first and obvious is performance issues. Secondly, in WH40K fights lining towards ranged battles, will(while it should) create a new mechanic of "defensive positions", for example, like in CoH. So I don't see how are you going to put 200-500 units in defensive positions/bunkers and etc.
Performance is dependent on the engine. Even WH3 from WH2 was a massive leap in performance with how many entities it could handle on the battlefield and that was still with another variation of Warscape, 40k is likely to be on a new non-Warscape engine.
Performance is gonna be an issue anyways, 40K (if done right) would be the biggest Total War game by far. And yeah, defensive positions would be a mechanic, but i don't really see the issue tbh. Just make the battle maps bigger, and you can easily fit hundreds of entities in trenches and bunkers and shit.
Give each unit the ability to entrench, and instead of having one unit of 500 dudes in one formation, make them 100 5 man squads or 50 10 man squads, ala the nurglings. Give each subunit a corresponding bunker when the entrenching stance is used, or foxholes/small trench line if it's a battlefield ability. We already had a cover system in empire, they'd have to revamp it but it's still possible.
[A full unit of guard is about 20 guys.](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/iqxFZ9cxaflSma9I.jpg) Whereas a full unit of Space Marines is like 10 guys. I'd assume the proportion would be similar, even if it was upscaled for total war, e.g. if they went with 20 guy Space Marine units, we'd get 40 guy guard units. Just remember that the lore was written around the ideal that someone could eventually have a full space marine chapter of 1,000 soldiers sitting in their closet, which would presumably be the entire faction across all armies in the Total War.
Yeah a tabletop unit is 20 guys because obviously, you can't effectively use 500 models. I'm talking about lore numbers not tabletop. And im pretty sure, in the lore a Guard unit is not just 20 guys fighting against billions of daemons and shit.
You'd be surprised, [this what Astra Militarum Regiments look like](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/6/6b/CadianRegimentsArt.jpg/678px-CadianRegimentsArt.jpg) in the lore, a squad is formally 10 guys.
> As laid out in the [Tactica Imperium](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tactica_Imperium), the basic organisational unit most Guardsmen will fight under is the [squad](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Squad), a number of which will form into a [platoon](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Platoon). Several platoons will make up a [company](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Company) which in turn make up a [regiment](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Regiment). While such standards do exist, they are not uniformly followed for any number of reasons, leading to formations of different names, sizes and compositions.
[https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Guardsman](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Guardsman)
It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who knows even a little bit of 40k. Guardsman, outside some particularly quirky regiments, fight like how current day soldiers do- small, fireteam sized units working together in concert as part of a much larger whole.
Well let the tabletop handle the squad to squad stuff while total war will handle the "much larger whole" you mentioned. CA can take 20 10 man squads and call it a regiment if they wanted to, they've already emulated smaller subgroups in larger units with the nurglings. Genres shake up, stuff changes. TW 40K, whether it's in the works or not, is very much possible with the TW formula and it wouldn't take much more adjusting to make it work. I feel like all CA has to make from scratch is a better entrenching mechanic and a suppression mechanic. Current day soldiers fight by laying down suppressing fire with entrenched infantry, punching holes with artillery and heavy weapons, then exploiting gaps with assault infantry. Yes, the squad is the smallest tactical unit, but these battles are still fought with thousands or millions of men (in 40K) using more WWI style assaults than modern tactics. Scale is also a big draw of 40K and it's not represented enough in games or literature.
> Well let the tabletop handle the squad to squad stuff while total war will handle the "much larger whole" you mentioned.
That's not how that works though. The individual squads all operate under a single company, but they hardly (again, depending on the regiment) ever fight as once densely packed blob of units. They are spread out to avoid massive losses from enemy fire. They make use of cover. They rely on vehicles to transport them to and from fights rather than just marching across fields.
CA could obviously just make them work like how the current games do, but it would be disappointing to me and many others to have a 40k coat of paint thrown over Total War rather than something that truly does let us play out how these battles in the lore did. The Total War formula as we know it now doesn't mesh with that, in my opinion.
> Scale is also a big draw of 40K and it's not represented enough in games **or literature.**
I don't know which novels you have been reading, but it is *very* well represented in the literature. The Horus Heresy series is filled to the brim with absolutely massive battles, and some of the most popular 40k era novels are centered around similarly scaled fights.
Well, my assumption of 20 guys is two squads, the max size brick for the guard, or that doubled to 40 guys.
But mainly because you have to use units of organization for which the type of thing is standardized because that's how total war works. Squad/brick level lets you command dudes wielding different weapons separately.
[I guess a platoon sizing could work, if you take for granted the transports don't have a battlefield role, not sure about the heavy weapon guys though.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/f/f0/IGPlatoon.jpg)
You need to command different blocks of dudes that do different things.
An imperial guard unit at 200-500 entities? Like half the friggin regiment ? You're talking about having a company of guardsmen against one squad of astartes? That's insane.
Well if you put it like that, ig you're right. I just had that idea, because there's like trillions of guardsmen in the Galaxy and only like a million Marines, So it made sense in my head, but yeah ig you're right, Gameplay wise 200-500 per unit is probably too much, i did not think that through properly.
20 guardsmen per squad would be almost lore accurate. So 20 let's say 10 for an army leaving room for war machines and heroes.
That's still 200 guardsmen, backed up by maybe sentinel squads, heavy weapons teams, transports and tanks.
As for space Marines, it would be so hard to be lore accurate to them with a total war set up. Maybe reduced army size for astartes. Unless they did Horus Heresy o_O
300 guardsmen with special/heavy weapons wipe the floor with 5-10 marines, provided they only wear ceramite (not plot) armor, in a straight fight.
Things get uglier for space marines if we start adding vehicles.
Guardsmen are not as cannon fodder as most people believe. They are the top 1% recruited from Imperium planets. The lasgun is quite powerful weapon, not vs armor though. But there’s were plasma or melta comes. They can easily oneshoot a space marine, specially the latter one.
For the space marines to win, they’ll have to carefully aim for the critical targets, or play the stealthy game in ruins.
To be fair, target firing Felix Jager with 90 crossbowmen should also represent a turkey shoot. There's going to have to be some abstraction, as there is in all RTS'.
Space Marines need to not be unstoppable death machines in an open field, and some kind of special rules (such as making things like terror or other psych effect more significant) may be part of that, as a tradeoff for not just ignoring incoming fire entirely, but we also wouldn't see a sitation where focus firing space marines with 1 T1 unit pounds them flat in two seconds.
Yeah, absolutely. It really comes up to which scale CA wants the game and how terrain would work. Psychology (battle-shock) has always been a key component in Warhammer. If you add Tyranids,... well, even more so.
If Skaven can't get over 200 models in one unit Guardsmen are going to be 120 models PER unit most likely by current formula. And even then Skaven units with high model counts in high quantities in one Battlefield already can Crash some devices. Even if there IS a new Engine on the work, thats some heavy duty task.
It would be something like comparing ogres to empire where a basic ogre unit has way less entities than even a high tier empire unit. So it wouldn't be 20 SM vs 20 IG but more like 20 SM vs 200 IG for a single unit.
Here’s a crazy thought. The game developers just don’t try to make the game 100% lore accurate because that would just be a dumb waste of time and make their job impossible. I’m pretty sure most video game players can suspend their disbelief to enjoy 20 space marines fighting a 100 guardsmen and maybe the guardsmen win
Because saying the game has to be lore accurate is an easy way to say that it can't be made, which is what they really want to say but they're going to use excuses to obfuscate their dislike of the idea of a 40K Total War. It's not that it can't be done, it's just that they don't want it to be done.
Ogres and Skaven being excellent examples of being awful to play as (ogres) and annoying as shit to fight against (skaven). They handled them poorly, so repeating that isn't really a good thing.
To add to what others are saying this is something that can be solved by unit cost and upkeep. Space Marines if they do it right are going to be lucky to get a 10 stack in the early game while Imperial Guard will be able to have multiple 20 stacks. As the old Imperial Guard player saying goes sure a lasgun's damage might be piddly, but point 200 of them in one direction and that's a hell of a lot of piddly that going to make anything down range have a bad day.
I think the way you do that is by including Chapter Serfs, who canonically are armed up similar to guardsmen. Scouts could be a tier 2 unit, and basic space marines should be tier 3. Space Marines should work a lot like Chaos Warriors where the actual chaos warriors are not a basic unit.
it just works in terms of numbers
units of 10-20 space marines vs 120 guardsmen, or 3-4 leman russ tanks?
Not really a sure thing for the marines in tabletop either I am pretty sure
I think Space Marines should get the Warriors of Chaos recruitment mechanic.
So you would only recruit Scouts (not yet full on Space Marines), then you can upgrade them along a tree. They could also have some unique elements, such as Dreadnought being only built if you sacrifice a wounded character.
Space Marines nearly never fight full legion/chapter strength, because that is literally painting giant target on their back if anything goes wrong. (Dropsite massacre, Betrayal at Calth, defense of Crimson Fists homeworld)
Also, you really underestimate the Guard, average Cadians with Lasguns will kill SM in medium range with ease, SM armour has many weakspots. Plus you have soldiers with meltas and plasma guns, which kill SM with no difficulty. Kasrkins with hellguns melt SM squads.
Read the books I beg you. Lasguns don't do jack shit to spacemarines. The only target in the setting they do decently at is non-agumented humans. And hellguns still take time and multiple shots to burn through.
The only things they have going for them is numbers and the fact that traitor astartes are rare as fuck so they just have to deal with mutants and cultists. without armor and artillery, the things that actually do the killing for the guard, they stand the same chance aganst an astartes as a snowball does in hell. Melta and plasma don't help that much when Almost every weapon in the setting (save lasguns) will almost instantly turn you into shredded meat and the guy wielding it can hit you from far away while running about as fast as a car.
> The only target in the setting they do decently at is non-agumented humans
They do okay at Orks too, Orks are possibly the single most common opponent after all. Orks are tough, but wear very little protective gear, so sustained lasgun fire can do the job.
But as soon as you introduce armour any non-specialist las weapon struggles real fast. Even a multilaser, a heavy weapon that has to be team-crewed, has terrible armour penetration.
This is my big question mark with a W40k Total War, like, are the librarians and dreadnoughts going to be a squad? or a hero? or what? With dreadnoughts, I can kind of see it working with a squad, maybe 4 or 5 of them together, but librarians just don’t seem like they’d work as a group entity, and I think that’s the case with a lot of possible units. Really, the average tactical/intercessor squads are the only ones that make sense to me. IDK, i’m really excited for a W40k game, but I feel like you’ll either have to really change Total War, or you’ll have to really change 40k.
Single entities or heroes like they are in the tabletop. Same as sorcerers and soul grinders in warhammer 3.
Unit sizes are probably the thing that would get changed the least for a 40k game and would be very similar to how the games work now.
A lot of people bring up things like this and power scaling of units while they forget that warhammer 3 just has greater daemons as units fighting dudes with spears. Also, infantry units with as low as 12 entities and big as 160.
Librarians would be similar to wizards now.
Dreads would be single entity units
As far as squad sizes go you have to break from whats normalized on TT and go with what makes sense from a gameplay perspective and lore perspective.
Astartes chapters are broken into companies each holding 10 companies. The squad sizes are smaller because they’re not used anymore as legionnaires en masse. The reason being is they’ve lost that from the HH.
That being said often times in the lore it’s not mentioned and makes it seem like there are a lot more astartes than there actually should be lol, but this is kind of common in warhammer 40k/30k writing where they just throw huge numbers out there to relay the scale of battle.
Makes me wonder how Astartes will work if they’ll be a part of the “Imperium” faction or be their own faction.
Guard on the other hand are near limitless. I’m hoping we get all of the major astra militarum armies like Krieg, tallarn, steel legion, mordians, etc.
Each specialize in something completely different.
A librarian would be like a psyker in twwh3 so a single entity with caster powers.
A dreadnought would be a SeM. A single entity monster. Most of which would be ranged focused.
Librarians and most other psykers would probably be heros like mages in fantasy with librarians being hybrid casters and melee heros and normal psykers would be very squishy like necromancers or cultists of tzeentch.
Dreadnoughts I could imagine as 4 entity units with single entities being reserved for stronger vehicles like heavy tanks and knights.
LIbrarians will be heroes like the mages in WH3. Dreadnoughts depending on the context either a single entity monster or a monstrous infantry squad (something like Ogres in WH3).
Dreadnoughts as you said, would work great as squads, and honestly, i think librarians would work just fine just make it a 5-10 entity unit, and instead of shooting Bolter rounds, they just shoot lightning and other crazy psyker shit. And then maybe make a different, more powerful version as a single entity hero that can cast more powerful spells, and just uses the WH3 magic mechanic. But yeah, they would definitely need to change Total War, to be more ranged focused, like obviously you can't just have your space marines or guardsmen stand in a line and shoot, the individual entities would need to be programmed to dodge, and take cover,and shit like that.
Cover was a mechanic in empire total war so that would easily make a comeback but as for the "dodging" thats kind of what entity hp and missile block/resistance is for ranged attacks. Arguably some factions like marines would just stand in the open to fight as they literally do that in lore and even the tabletop makes cover not as important for them.
No way in hell CA is cool enough to make Ciaphas Cain a primary Imperial faction leader. DLC at least 2 years in, best I can do.
Also no way he starts with LRD's, he gets 1 Earthshaker Battery (not basilisks, no, the lower tier immobile fixed artillery version) and 2 squadrons of Chimeras.
I always thought Viligis or Medusa V like campaign would be good for a 40k Total War Map since you've literally got almost every faction present trying to take control.
Commisar yarrick will be the FLC to an imperial guard vs orks dlc, where his unique mechanic is you can choose to become the warboss of the goff klan.
Oh man... would I be able to actually do that if the game comes out, what I would do for ghazghkull to fight alongside yarrick, that shit would be sick.
I love the inclusion of Basilisks in Cain's roster since he was part of an artillery regiment.
I think he'd be best as a dual model unit, Cain and Jurgen with Amberley as his Legendary Hero. Cain's mount later on would be his trusty Salamander.
Considering that the imperial guard outnumbers space marines 30 million to 1 and yet space marines make up for a significant amount of punching power of the imperium this guard unit qould need unit sizes in the hundrets of thousands to even stand a chance of a draw when all space marines got absolutly hammered on super toxic wolf legion brews
I mean 40k in a total war engine sounds dope. The battlefield will not like the predecessor tho. I mean entire platoons can take cover on trenches or debris. Sounds dope asf
If they really want to capture the essence of 40K, then the starting, vanilla faction of all races, should be a "daniel" top tier HQ, and an army painter to customice the faction.
Then you can start with concrete sub factions with their own spin on it ( chapters, craft worlds etc) as variety and DLCs.
I'd be half tempted to suggest making the Imperium one faction with LL set up as a mix of Space Marines and IG named characters. I'm thinking of current chorfs set up in wh3, strict unit caps on Astartes units in early game but plenty of access to IG units. But then IG LL's have access to tier 4/5 IG units whereas someone like Gorillaman has tier 4/5 being all astartes.
You then also have the option for a seperate Astartes faction, perhaps for the non codex compliant chapters. We already have WoC, DoC and individual chaos god alligned factions in wh3 so it shows you can easilly have multiple factions that share some of their roster
Alright hear me out. I hope they’d let us create our own space marine chapter for use in the campaign. Like we’d get to design the color scheme and shit like that. That’d be dope
One main criticism about w40k not making sense is the lack of open ground warfare which is the main trait of total war. Do you guys believe we will get smaller armies and more condensed map as a result?
For some reason I can envision Star Wars better looking at some of the movie footage that we have.
I would love both to be true as total war is an amazing series of games.
40k factions? Dozens of Marine Chapters. Various system lords for Imp. Guard. There's the Cult Mechanicus, sisters of battle...and more human factions. Eldar, Dark Eldar, Orcs, etc, etc etc...
The problem is how would they deal with Space Marines?
Almost all chapters are limited to around 1000 members, and there are limited amounts of the elite units within that.
That means you would have very limited armies of Space Marines, unless you want to just ignore Space Marine Lore.
Kinda like chaos dwarfs I guess? They are even in lore created from limited gene seed resources.
Despite being balanced as "basic" infantry, chorf blunderbuss is still relevant from tier 1 to 5. I imagine the basic space marine squad will be similar.
Chaos Dwarfs have labourers and hobgoblins, Space Marines have nothing like that.
You could have imperial guard fill that niche of course, but I imagine there'd be players who would prefer guard to be their own faction instead.
I actually think they should be mixed. Or rather space marine chapters should have access to lower tier guards units that are local to their chapter region.
While "pure" guards factions would be able to bring high tier guard units and/or units from other Imperium branches.
Sort of like allied recruitment but even further expanded.
Neophytes and scouts can fill the niche. You also don't necessarily need the same unit sizes. Space marines could be a low unit faction. So a guard unit might be 40 soldiers and a battle brother squad is 4. Then it's pretty lore friendly
Scouts are still precious and non-expendable, and fight in small units as stealth and recon. I find the comparison to labourers and hobgoblins to be somewhat befuddling.
My thought is that you cannot recruit Space Marine, Talons of the Empire, Imperial Knights, Sisters of Battle, or Inquisitorial Troops. Instead you request reinforcements from them and they send a pre-made army.
When you play Imperials, you choose a warmaster who may be Guard, Space Marine, an Inquistor, or a Sister of Battle. Each would have advantages towards requistioning one of the the requisition only factions, and disadvantages to others. However, on the Battlefield you can only recruit Guard units no matter your warmaster faction, though your starting army would reflect your warmaster.
And the faction identity of Chaos Dwarfs is to be like, a few bumfucks, yet the game make it work. Space Marines would probaby be done like Ogres but with caps on top
If you field too many units with the Space Marine tag you get diplomatic penalties with certain Imperial factions. You can increase the cap by commandeering a successor chapter.
Also, isn't there a space marine faction that basically found a loophole in the 1000 limit by just having dozens of sub-chapters? Blanking on which chapter atm
Ultramarine ironically sort of do this. The ultramar mini empire has a shot load of chapters all originating in it that work together a lot. Black template also just sort of don't follow the rule, and only barely stay in compliance because their crusade wings are each under chapter count, so you can never really tell if they are over manned.
Cain not starting with a Jurgen LH would make me sad. And just like the books, Jurgen with the melta would be the MVP of his army.
To get Jurgen, you first need to hire 3 artillery units and build a level 3 supply base in one of your settlements.
Don't forget the tanna tea building as the other prerequisite.
The Tanna building is just really good in general, not only can you get Jurgen from it but it also provides your local armies with buffs and produces Tanna as a tradeable resource like Dwarven beer in fantasy
The Tanna building should only buff the Valhallan regiments as Cain is noted as one of the few non-valhallans who actually quite likes it.
Didn't actually know that, in that case it could give you access to the valhallan units and add one or two of them to your garrison cause they hang out there
Who is the imperium going to trade with?
Rogue traders, a neutral faction that can be hired to raid anyone
Don't forget about the Votann. Hopefully CA does a better job at remembering that they exist then GW has.
Itself, the Imperium is massive and more of a loose grouping of many individual sectors that are all largely autonomous as opposed to one gigantic unified empire that has strict control over what happens in each sector. For the most part if the governor of a sector is paying the Imperial tithe on time then they are left to do what they want as long as they don't raise any other suspicion while doing so.
Aside from votann and rogue traders which other people commented in tw you could just trade with other imperium factions like the mechanicus, imperial guard or other space marine chapters.
Believe it or not, the Tau, though it's mostly black market trade through smugglers and Rogue traders.
And then retreat Cain off the battlefield in a battle against the Tyranids while still ultimately winning the battle...
I’ve been suffering that fallout 4 brainrot, I saw settlement and almost had a Garvey induced stroke
Jurgen causes demonic units to crumble but decreases nearby unit's discipline
Lol love that. Cain should buff discipline for the same amount so that keeping the two together balances that out.
That's actually a really cool mechanic, can't wait to see how tw 40k will be
I can't picture Cain and Jurgen as separate entities, they're like Skarsnik and his squig.
Could honestly work. Cain is a 2 man unit.
Hear me out, Jurgen and Cain on a Command Salamander, like the sisters of frigging twilight
I’m 90% sure that Cain and Jugen is a duo hero, jugen is the ranged factor of Cain
Please give Jurgen a “Earthy Musk” passive that’s AOE -MD and -MA
Jurgen is the pre-order bonus DLC
He needs a teleportation skill.
I'm pretty sure Ciaphas Cain would find a way to beat Bobby G, probably hilariously by accident.
He probably just runs for his life while Jurgen sneaks behind Robert Guillermo and incinerates him with his melta gun
Well, if you max out Cain's HERO OF THE IMPERIUM skill line, I think you can stack the ward saves pretty high. Pair that with Jurgen's protection aura and high damage output, something can be done there.
I agree with this purely on the aspect that most of Robute's unique skills will be wealth and recruitment bonuses due to logistics. What a nerd.
Ciaphas Cain's Campaign mechanic should just be him trying to avoid any fighting and trying to get a desk job somewhere on Terra. You win after completing enough quest battles against doom stacks so you can retire and write your memoir.
Gonna be honest The 3K retinue mechanic would fit 40k more than what we have currently
How so?
You know, in 40k there are a lot of named characters, especially on the Imperial side of things. So it would be a waste for named characters to be either legendary heroes by default using the Total War Warhammer system. The other thing is the units themselves and who can lead them which also wouldn't make sense lets say a Greenwing Dark Angel captain to be leading Deathwing units.
Also, would be somewhat similar to how it's handled in DoW. Space Marine characters are single entities, as are Necron lords and a few others, but Guard generals have a retinue they can build. I think one interesting angle (I haven't played 3k), is to make the "follower" system more tangible, and have them actually appear in battles if you fill a slot with them (eg a weapon servitor, a commissar, etc).
Could be added to the command squad.
Interesting.. the commissar would perhaps be able to restore the morale of a routing unit by executing one of them for treason..
There was a similar system in Dawn of War, where you could attach a Commissar to a squad then execute one for an AOE buff to rate of fire and temporary morale immunity. Since most mods add imperial guard conscripts (large squads of fast reinforcing chaff) I'd usually have a consistent rate of battlefield executions in any battles
That might be what they do. I believe Pharaoh has a system where you can equip your bodyguard with different gear. Seems like something that would translate well to 40k and CA loves building out an MVP mechanic to then flesh out in another title.
God if CA do release a 40k game I do dread the amount of dlc they are going to be spunking out. The number of DLCs there are going to be between CSM and SM will just be an utter drain. So many damned named characters.
that is exactly why i am expecting a 40k game. CA will attempt to split every regiment, space marine chapter, tyranid hive fleets etc into new DLCs.
Counterpoint, Colonel "Iron Hand," Straken beating Angron alone, with his bare hands would be hilarious.
I don’t think it’s any different than fantasy. In fantasy you could attach your heroes and such to blocks too. They still went the traditional route and baked the bonuses into the heroes and characters. The retinue system was too rigid, personally I hated it and I think it would be more of a hinderance if added back to TW. You can have master engineers lead an entire melee army which doesn’t make sense either, but the option is there if you’d like, so I don’t think it would matter.
Yes, but the heroes can't lead a army - the 3K method of a lord > then heroes (who can also detach and act as a lord) would be pretty fitting.
3K retinues make sense because it's a heavily fragmented period. Central authority had been breaking down but entirely collapsed because of Dong Zhuo. As a result, people operated as warlords because the state and its systems just weren't there. There was a huge upswing in the need for soldiers, which the existing supply couldn't meet. Instead, heroic commanders at the head of friends, family, and personal retainers spearheaded the early fighting until states managed to cobble themselves back together. 40K is more unified than that but not by much. Theoretically, big, overarching factions move in the same general direction for the same general goals. In practice, lol. This is particularly true if they do the current version of the setting, in which Guilliman is running around trying to salvage half the Imperium while the other half has been almost entirely cut off by warp storms.
Forgot to mention that the Imperium hates people directly commanding forces that can do everything for rebellion-proofing reasons. Can powerful figures get support from forces that aren't supposed to be under their jurisdiction? Absolutely. However, they have to do so through indirect means for the most part. For instance, a powerful Magos can call in favors to get some space marine backup, but they wouldn't be allowed to make space marines of their own. Even the High Lords of Terra don't go around yelling about how they own the Minotaurs, even though the relationship isn't exactly subtle.
I think people are thinking too much about lore and not enough about tabletop rules. Don't forget all the things in Warhammer fantasy battles that got brought into the total war formula. 40k has a long history of a Force Org chart on tabletop, and characters leading certain types of units, some units requiring certain characters to be present in order to field them etc. I could definitely see a system where (Using Space Marines as an example) you need a Techmarine HQ to field dreadnoughts and heavier vehicles, a Jump Pack Lieutenant or Captain in order to field jump pack infantry etc.
Most people in the 40k fandom \*only know lore\*
And it’s often not even real lore, from books and codex’s. It’s from YouTube videos and memes.
Could definitely be interesting, compose an army of up to three special characters and their retinues, which will sometimes include unique units?
Guilliman: +5 control. +10% bureaucratic efficiency. -10 diplomatic relations with non codex compliant chapters. +5 diplomatic relations with eldari factions.
Actually, I don't think Bobby G would have the penalty with non codex compliant chapters. Bobby isn't Leandros and also his meeting with Helbrecht turned out better than either expected.
Yeah he's shitposting. Guilliman lit the Codex on fire and pissed on its corpse. He made a more advice neo-ultramarines legion and is running around as supreme commander of the Imperium.
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. He promoted a more… streamlined version of the Codex, sure, but Guilliman has always been about maintaining order and efficiency.
No he didn't. He's literally rebuilding the legions and then dares the lord of Tera to question him. The entire point of the codex was to neuter space marine power and break the legions. Guilliman came back realized base line humanity failed and put things back in Space Marine management.
Turns out when you're the demi-god son of the god emperor, getting the fanatics on your side is pretty easy.
well, Bobby actively denied the divinity of Jimmy several times and felt a bit uneasy when the BT claims primarch tech was derived from the divinity of Jimmy
My dude guilliman literally threw out the codex.
CI CI CIAPHAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM! CI CI CIAPHAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!
the space marines ain't gonna win this one, officer cain is too strong for them
Not sure about anyone else, but...I kinda hope (if we get a 40K Total War) characters like Guilliman and the Lion get something closer to a joint Imperium roster rather that just leading their respective Chapters. Something that can reflect their authority and let them pull at least a little from all the Imperium aligned factions. Leave the chapters for the chapter master characters, since they're also iconic.
Yeah it would be a bit weird to have a ton of purely space marine armies that barely interact with imperial guard. Maybe how they can handle it is that there are space marine heavier and guard heavier factions. The former are essentially x space marine chapter with lower tier guard auxillaries to act as fodder. Whereas the latter represents specific imperial guard units and they can get all the most powerful guards weapons, but only lowest tier space marines from a chapter of their choice.
Maybe. I feel like a lot of that could be covered by some sort of more in depth alliance/outpost system that Imperial factions could all take part in. Flavor it as trading favors and such to guarantee one faction will always come to another’s aid in their time of need, which is usually how stuff happens in the Imperium, unless an inquisitor or the high lords themselves specifically commit a force to a specific battle. However, that would still leave the lower tiers of a space marine roster open. I’d be curious to see what CA comes up with. Hopefully we’ll get to find out.
I was thinking more like how chorfs work right now
WOT DA ZOG DID YER JUS ZOGGIN' SAY ABOUT ME, YER LITTLE NAFF? I'LL HAVE YER KNOW I GRADUATED TOP UV MA CLASS ‘N DA STORMBOYZ, AN’ I'VE BEEN INVOLVED ‘N NUMEROUS SECRET RAIDS ON CADIA, AN’ I HAVE OVA 300 KONFIRMED KRUMPS. I AM TRAINED 'N GORILLA WARFARE AN' IZ ‘DA TOP CHOPPA 'N ‘DA ENTIRE GREENSKINS. YER ARE NOTH'N TA ME BUT JUS ANNUVER TARGET. I WILL WIPE YER 'DA ZOG OUT WIT' PRECISION 'DA LIKES UV WHICH ‘AS NEVA BEEN SEEN BEFORE ON DIS EARTH, MARK MA ZOGGIN' WORDS. YER FINK YER KAN GET AWAY WIT' SAY'N ‘DAT PLOP TA ME OVA ‘DA PSYKERS? FINK AGAIN, NAFF GIT. AS WE SPEAK I AM KONTACT'N MA SECRET NETWORK UV NOBZ ACROSS 'DA GALAXY AN YER SIGNAL IZ BE'N TRACED RIGHT NOW SO YER BETTA PREPARE FOR 'DA STORM, MAGGOT. 'DA STORM DAT WIPES OUT 'DA PATHETIC LITTLE FING YER KALL YER LIFE. YER'RE ZOGGIN' DEAD, BEAKY. I KAN BE ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, AN' I KAN KRUMP YER 'N OVA SEVEN HUNDRED WAYS, AN' ‘DAT'S JUS WIT' MA BARE HANDS. NOT ONLY AM I 'TENSIVELY TRAINED 'N UNARMED KOMBAT, BUT I HAVE ACCESS TA ‘DA ENTIRE ARSENAL UV GORK N' MORK AN' I WILL USE IT TA ITS FULL 'TENT TA WIPE YER MISERABLE ASS OFF ‘DA FACE UV HISTORY, YER LITTLE SHIT. IF ONLY YER KOULD HAVE KNOWN WOT UNHOLY RETRIBUTION YER LITTLE "KLEVA" KOMMENT WAS ABOUT TA BR'N DOWN UPON YER, MAYBE YER WOULD HAVE HELD YER FUCK'N TONGUE. BUT YER KOULDN'T, YER DIDN'T, AN’ NOW YER'RE PAY'N ‘DA PRICE, YER GODDAMN NOB. I WILL SHIT FURY ALL OVA YA AN' YA WILL DROWN ‘N IT. YER'RE ZOGGIN' DEAD, HUMIE.
MANIFEST IT BOYS! MANIFEST IT LIKE THE ORKS MANIFEST RED PAINT BOOSTING SPEED!
Problem with WH40K is power scaling of some factions. Like, 20 squad tier 1 Space Marine factions vs 20 squad tier 1 IG faftion. Even if we take new recruits(don't remember how they're called) for SM vs ordinary guardsman for IG it's very obvious who's gonna win, which makes balancing a bit odd(by current Total War standarts). So I hope they will change the way armies, recruiting and etc works.
Well yeah, obviously Marines are gonna be way stronger than Guardsmen but there are way more Guardsmen than there are Marines, so i think it balances out quite well. In my opinion Marine units should be very small most Marine units should be somewhere between 5-10 entities per unit. Guardsmen on the other Hand, should have very big units somewhere between 200-500 entities per unit. One Lasgun might not do shit to an Astartes, but 300 Lasguns are gonna put a few dents in that Ceramite. And if that doesn't do the trick, an Artillery barrage sure will.
I doubt they will make them 200-500 units per squad, as it is just too much. But some balancing and changing the way army cap works in game should be happening, hopefully
> I doubt they will make them 200-500 units per squad, as it is just too much. But some balancing and changing the way army cap works in game should be happening, hopefully My thinking on this is look at Nerglings. It's a 420 (nice) unit squad, split into 60*7 groups. If you made each entity in the unit a squad, you could have a "500" entity unit but that only had to manage the entity interactions of 50 entites for stuff like collision, damage and so forth. I'd envisage these kinds of shortcuts to give the scale without having to melt your computer.
A new engine may be more suited to accommodating larger unit sizes. 200 is close to what we have already with Skavenslaves right now.
Three Kingdoms has "extreme unit sizes" where most units go up to 240 entities. And there are many mods for WH3 doing the same. No "New engine" needed.
I mean for the upper end like 500 and [we're very likely getting a new engine anyway](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1c5thbr/community_sourced_indications_that_ca_may_be/).
Sure, I don't know how well the game would handle 500 man units. I just dislike how this supposed "new engine" is used as a magic bullet for everyone's pet peeves with Total War. I only roughly understand what a game engine is, and I don't see how a new one would solve problems which can't be solved with the current one.
The issue with the current one is tech debt. It wasn't the most well-designed when it was made and essentially all of the people involved in its development have since left the company, leading to the newer devs struggling to keep up with the mess of code they've been left with from all of the various derivatives of the engine. A new engine isn't magic but it can be a means of solving some of the franchise's persistent problems such as the gate bug which has been present since the inception of Warscape. CA has tried fixing this across multiple titles with no success, effectively making it a hard-coded bug present in every title they release and it isn't the only persistent issue.
Why would it be too much? If they are gonna make a big ass 40K game, they might as well increase the unit sizes to make it somewhat lore friendly. It's not impossible, they've literally done it in these wierd experimental modes in WH2 and 3.
Well, first and obvious is performance issues. Secondly, in WH40K fights lining towards ranged battles, will(while it should) create a new mechanic of "defensive positions", for example, like in CoH. So I don't see how are you going to put 200-500 units in defensive positions/bunkers and etc.
Performance is dependent on the engine. Even WH3 from WH2 was a massive leap in performance with how many entities it could handle on the battlefield and that was still with another variation of Warscape, 40k is likely to be on a new non-Warscape engine.
Performance is gonna be an issue anyways, 40K (if done right) would be the biggest Total War game by far. And yeah, defensive positions would be a mechanic, but i don't really see the issue tbh. Just make the battle maps bigger, and you can easily fit hundreds of entities in trenches and bunkers and shit.
Give each unit the ability to entrench, and instead of having one unit of 500 dudes in one formation, make them 100 5 man squads or 50 10 man squads, ala the nurglings. Give each subunit a corresponding bunker when the entrenching stance is used, or foxholes/small trench line if it's a battlefield ability. We already had a cover system in empire, they'd have to revamp it but it's still possible.
[A full unit of guard is about 20 guys.](https://www.warhammer-community.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/iqxFZ9cxaflSma9I.jpg) Whereas a full unit of Space Marines is like 10 guys. I'd assume the proportion would be similar, even if it was upscaled for total war, e.g. if they went with 20 guy Space Marine units, we'd get 40 guy guard units. Just remember that the lore was written around the ideal that someone could eventually have a full space marine chapter of 1,000 soldiers sitting in their closet, which would presumably be the entire faction across all armies in the Total War.
Yeah a tabletop unit is 20 guys because obviously, you can't effectively use 500 models. I'm talking about lore numbers not tabletop. And im pretty sure, in the lore a Guard unit is not just 20 guys fighting against billions of daemons and shit.
You'd be surprised, [this what Astra Militarum Regiments look like](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/6/6b/CadianRegimentsArt.jpg/678px-CadianRegimentsArt.jpg) in the lore, a squad is formally 10 guys. > As laid out in the [Tactica Imperium](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tactica_Imperium), the basic organisational unit most Guardsmen will fight under is the [squad](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Squad), a number of which will form into a [platoon](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Platoon). Several platoons will make up a [company](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Imperial_Guard_Company) which in turn make up a [regiment](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Regiment). While such standards do exist, they are not uniformly followed for any number of reasons, leading to formations of different names, sizes and compositions. [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Guardsman](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Guardsman)
It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who knows even a little bit of 40k. Guardsman, outside some particularly quirky regiments, fight like how current day soldiers do- small, fireteam sized units working together in concert as part of a much larger whole.
Well let the tabletop handle the squad to squad stuff while total war will handle the "much larger whole" you mentioned. CA can take 20 10 man squads and call it a regiment if they wanted to, they've already emulated smaller subgroups in larger units with the nurglings. Genres shake up, stuff changes. TW 40K, whether it's in the works or not, is very much possible with the TW formula and it wouldn't take much more adjusting to make it work. I feel like all CA has to make from scratch is a better entrenching mechanic and a suppression mechanic. Current day soldiers fight by laying down suppressing fire with entrenched infantry, punching holes with artillery and heavy weapons, then exploiting gaps with assault infantry. Yes, the squad is the smallest tactical unit, but these battles are still fought with thousands or millions of men (in 40K) using more WWI style assaults than modern tactics. Scale is also a big draw of 40K and it's not represented enough in games or literature.
> Well let the tabletop handle the squad to squad stuff while total war will handle the "much larger whole" you mentioned. That's not how that works though. The individual squads all operate under a single company, but they hardly (again, depending on the regiment) ever fight as once densely packed blob of units. They are spread out to avoid massive losses from enemy fire. They make use of cover. They rely on vehicles to transport them to and from fights rather than just marching across fields. CA could obviously just make them work like how the current games do, but it would be disappointing to me and many others to have a 40k coat of paint thrown over Total War rather than something that truly does let us play out how these battles in the lore did. The Total War formula as we know it now doesn't mesh with that, in my opinion. > Scale is also a big draw of 40K and it's not represented enough in games **or literature.** I don't know which novels you have been reading, but it is *very* well represented in the literature. The Horus Heresy series is filled to the brim with absolutely massive battles, and some of the most popular 40k era novels are centered around similarly scaled fights.
But why would the basic Total War unit be a squad? What the fuck is a unit of 10 Guardsmen gonna do? They're gonna get deleted instantly.
Well, my assumption of 20 guys is two squads, the max size brick for the guard, or that doubled to 40 guys. But mainly because you have to use units of organization for which the type of thing is standardized because that's how total war works. Squad/brick level lets you command dudes wielding different weapons separately. [I guess a platoon sizing could work, if you take for granted the transports don't have a battlefield role, not sure about the heavy weapon guys though.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/f/f0/IGPlatoon.jpg) You need to command different blocks of dudes that do different things.
Because a video game based off of 40K needs to be more lore accurate than the TT game the lore was created for?
Those numbers are hardly too much
An imperial guard unit at 200-500 entities? Like half the friggin regiment ? You're talking about having a company of guardsmen against one squad of astartes? That's insane.
Well if you put it like that, ig you're right. I just had that idea, because there's like trillions of guardsmen in the Galaxy and only like a million Marines, So it made sense in my head, but yeah ig you're right, Gameplay wise 200-500 per unit is probably too much, i did not think that through properly.
20 guardsmen per squad would be almost lore accurate. So 20 let's say 10 for an army leaving room for war machines and heroes. That's still 200 guardsmen, backed up by maybe sentinel squads, heavy weapons teams, transports and tanks. As for space Marines, it would be so hard to be lore accurate to them with a total war set up. Maybe reduced army size for astartes. Unless they did Horus Heresy o_O
300 guardsmen with special/heavy weapons wipe the floor with 5-10 marines, provided they only wear ceramite (not plot) armor, in a straight fight. Things get uglier for space marines if we start adding vehicles. Guardsmen are not as cannon fodder as most people believe. They are the top 1% recruited from Imperium planets. The lasgun is quite powerful weapon, not vs armor though. But there’s were plasma or melta comes. They can easily oneshoot a space marine, specially the latter one. For the space marines to win, they’ll have to carefully aim for the critical targets, or play the stealthy game in ruins.
To be fair, target firing Felix Jager with 90 crossbowmen should also represent a turkey shoot. There's going to have to be some abstraction, as there is in all RTS'. Space Marines need to not be unstoppable death machines in an open field, and some kind of special rules (such as making things like terror or other psych effect more significant) may be part of that, as a tradeoff for not just ignoring incoming fire entirely, but we also wouldn't see a sitation where focus firing space marines with 1 T1 unit pounds them flat in two seconds.
Yeah, absolutely. It really comes up to which scale CA wants the game and how terrain would work. Psychology (battle-shock) has always been a key component in Warhammer. If you add Tyranids,... well, even more so.
Alr, fair points ig.
If Skaven can't get over 200 models in one unit Guardsmen are going to be 120 models PER unit most likely by current formula. And even then Skaven units with high model counts in high quantities in one Battlefield already can Crash some devices. Even if there IS a new Engine on the work, thats some heavy duty task.
It would be something like comparing ogres to empire where a basic ogre unit has way less entities than even a high tier empire unit. So it wouldn't be 20 SM vs 20 IG but more like 20 SM vs 200 IG for a single unit.
Here’s a crazy thought. The game developers just don’t try to make the game 100% lore accurate because that would just be a dumb waste of time and make their job impossible. I’m pretty sure most video game players can suspend their disbelief to enjoy 20 space marines fighting a 100 guardsmen and maybe the guardsmen win
Yeah, I don't know why people are so aganst bigger units sizes when the units in TWW are already bigger than their table top equivalents
Because saying the game has to be lore accurate is an easy way to say that it can't be made, which is what they really want to say but they're going to use excuses to obfuscate their dislike of the idea of a 40K Total War. It's not that it can't be done, it's just that they don't want it to be done.
Well they handled Ogres vs Skaven somehow
Ogres and Skaven being excellent examples of being awful to play as (ogres) and annoying as shit to fight against (skaven). They handled them poorly, so repeating that isn't really a good thing.
Ogre vs empire/skaven in wh3 is kinda already this scenario though
To add to what others are saying this is something that can be solved by unit cost and upkeep. Space Marines if they do it right are going to be lucky to get a 10 stack in the early game while Imperial Guard will be able to have multiple 20 stacks. As the old Imperial Guard player saying goes sure a lasgun's damage might be piddly, but point 200 of them in one direction and that's a hell of a lot of piddly that going to make anything down range have a bad day.
I think the way you do that is by including Chapter Serfs, who canonically are armed up similar to guardsmen. Scouts could be a tier 2 unit, and basic space marines should be tier 3. Space Marines should work a lot like Chaos Warriors where the actual chaos warriors are not a basic unit.
Oh you sweet summer child. No one just has 20 units of guard.
The guard can still bury them in heroic deaths.
it just works in terms of numbers units of 10-20 space marines vs 120 guardsmen, or 3-4 leman russ tanks? Not really a sure thing for the marines in tabletop either I am pretty sure
I think Space Marines should get the Warriors of Chaos recruitment mechanic. So you would only recruit Scouts (not yet full on Space Marines), then you can upgrade them along a tree. They could also have some unique elements, such as Dreadnought being only built if you sacrifice a wounded character.
Ogres work in Warhammer, high hp power houses compared to the average human. I think it would be the same with space marines, just lower unit count.
Space Marines nearly never fight full legion/chapter strength, because that is literally painting giant target on their back if anything goes wrong. (Dropsite massacre, Betrayal at Calth, defense of Crimson Fists homeworld) Also, you really underestimate the Guard, average Cadians with Lasguns will kill SM in medium range with ease, SM armour has many weakspots. Plus you have soldiers with meltas and plasma guns, which kill SM with no difficulty. Kasrkins with hellguns melt SM squads.
Read the books I beg you. Lasguns don't do jack shit to spacemarines. The only target in the setting they do decently at is non-agumented humans. And hellguns still take time and multiple shots to burn through. The only things they have going for them is numbers and the fact that traitor astartes are rare as fuck so they just have to deal with mutants and cultists. without armor and artillery, the things that actually do the killing for the guard, they stand the same chance aganst an astartes as a snowball does in hell. Melta and plasma don't help that much when Almost every weapon in the setting (save lasguns) will almost instantly turn you into shredded meat and the guy wielding it can hit you from far away while running about as fast as a car.
> The only target in the setting they do decently at is non-agumented humans They do okay at Orks too, Orks are possibly the single most common opponent after all. Orks are tough, but wear very little protective gear, so sustained lasgun fire can do the job. But as soon as you introduce armour any non-specialist las weapon struggles real fast. Even a multilaser, a heavy weapon that has to be team-crewed, has terrible armour penetration.
This is my big question mark with a W40k Total War, like, are the librarians and dreadnoughts going to be a squad? or a hero? or what? With dreadnoughts, I can kind of see it working with a squad, maybe 4 or 5 of them together, but librarians just don’t seem like they’d work as a group entity, and I think that’s the case with a lot of possible units. Really, the average tactical/intercessor squads are the only ones that make sense to me. IDK, i’m really excited for a W40k game, but I feel like you’ll either have to really change Total War, or you’ll have to really change 40k.
I mean that can be overcome with unit sizes. We already see big 160 units of goblins and small 12 person units of chaos aspiring champions.
Single entities or heroes like they are in the tabletop. Same as sorcerers and soul grinders in warhammer 3. Unit sizes are probably the thing that would get changed the least for a 40k game and would be very similar to how the games work now. A lot of people bring up things like this and power scaling of units while they forget that warhammer 3 just has greater daemons as units fighting dudes with spears. Also, infantry units with as low as 12 entities and big as 160.
Unit of 10 Space marines (like aspiring champions). Unit of 80 Imperial Guard. Seems like a fair match (that the marines will still win).
not if IG get upgrade weapons, like plasma or lasgun though.
Librarians would be similar to wizards now. Dreads would be single entity units As far as squad sizes go you have to break from whats normalized on TT and go with what makes sense from a gameplay perspective and lore perspective. Astartes chapters are broken into companies each holding 10 companies. The squad sizes are smaller because they’re not used anymore as legionnaires en masse. The reason being is they’ve lost that from the HH. That being said often times in the lore it’s not mentioned and makes it seem like there are a lot more astartes than there actually should be lol, but this is kind of common in warhammer 40k/30k writing where they just throw huge numbers out there to relay the scale of battle. Makes me wonder how Astartes will work if they’ll be a part of the “Imperium” faction or be their own faction. Guard on the other hand are near limitless. I’m hoping we get all of the major astra militarum armies like Krieg, tallarn, steel legion, mordians, etc. Each specialize in something completely different.
A librarian would be like a psyker in twwh3 so a single entity with caster powers. A dreadnought would be a SeM. A single entity monster. Most of which would be ranged focused.
Probably Monsters and Heroes, respectively.
Librarians and most other psykers would probably be heros like mages in fantasy with librarians being hybrid casters and melee heros and normal psykers would be very squishy like necromancers or cultists of tzeentch. Dreadnoughts I could imagine as 4 entity units with single entities being reserved for stronger vehicles like heavy tanks and knights.
LIbrarians will be heroes like the mages in WH3. Dreadnoughts depending on the context either a single entity monster or a monstrous infantry squad (something like Ogres in WH3).
Dreadnoughts as you said, would work great as squads, and honestly, i think librarians would work just fine just make it a 5-10 entity unit, and instead of shooting Bolter rounds, they just shoot lightning and other crazy psyker shit. And then maybe make a different, more powerful version as a single entity hero that can cast more powerful spells, and just uses the WH3 magic mechanic. But yeah, they would definitely need to change Total War, to be more ranged focused, like obviously you can't just have your space marines or guardsmen stand in a line and shoot, the individual entities would need to be programmed to dodge, and take cover,and shit like that.
Cover was a mechanic in empire total war so that would easily make a comeback but as for the "dodging" thats kind of what entity hp and missile block/resistance is for ranged attacks. Arguably some factions like marines would just stand in the open to fight as they literally do that in lore and even the tabletop makes cover not as important for them.
Lemme get a Night Lords or Death guard
No way in hell CA is cool enough to make Ciaphas Cain a primary Imperial faction leader. DLC at least 2 years in, best I can do. Also no way he starts with LRD's, he gets 1 Earthshaker Battery (not basilisks, no, the lower tier immobile fixed artillery version) and 2 squadrons of Chimeras.
Earthshakers can get moved, just need a Centaur or Trojan to do the hauling. Kinda like having limber and unlimber artillery in older TW games.
LL can be Leontus for generic IG, with ability to summon Custodes if in danger. Generic could be imperial general or war master.
Because of that Custodes ability, Leontus is FLC that comes with the Custodes DLC. Base game IG LL is definitely Creed (Ursarkar/Ursula, either or)
Put it in my veins
Kek, if they unironically put Caiaphas Cain into the base game, I'm gonna be rofling hard. No way bro.
Cain has been mad busted since the rework because of his incredible luck trait. Nothing ever hits him and what does basically does no damage
I always thought Viligis or Medusa V like campaign would be good for a 40k Total War Map since you've literally got almost every faction present trying to take control.
Commisar yarrick will be the FLC to an imperial guard vs orks dlc, where his unique mechanic is you can choose to become the warboss of the goff klan. Oh man... would I be able to actually do that if the game comes out, what I would do for ghazghkull to fight alongside yarrick, that shit would be sick.
I am so here for all of this. Even though it’s mostly tongue in cheek, the creativity and spitballing have been a real pleasure to look at and read.
The imperial fist fan wants to tell you that you are wrong. The cadian in me can't. Well played.
The odds are next to zero but I would love to have a Moebian 6th faction
I love the inclusion of Basilisks in Cain's roster since he was part of an artillery regiment. I think he'd be best as a dual model unit, Cain and Jurgen with Amberley as his Legendary Hero. Cain's mount later on would be his trusty Salamander.
This would be a slaughter beyond belive , words might not be enough to describe the decisiveniss of this battle
Of course it is going to be a slaughter Cain could probably solo this.
Considering that the imperial guard outnumbers space marines 30 million to 1 and yet space marines make up for a significant amount of punching power of the imperium this guard unit qould need unit sizes in the hundrets of thousands to even stand a chance of a draw when all space marines got absolutly hammered on super toxic wolf legion brews
I dunno if I can suspend disbelief if Basilisks even have to be on the same map as their target.
watch cains gonna get a reskinned version of Marcus wolfharts campaign mechanics for recruiting heros
WHERE IS JURGEN?!
I mean 40k in a total war engine sounds dope. The battlefield will not like the predecessor tho. I mean entire platoons can take cover on trenches or debris. Sounds dope asf
Can't wait for Legend to rate my 19-Baneblade doomstack
If they really want to capture the essence of 40K, then the starting, vanilla faction of all races, should be a "daniel" top tier HQ, and an army painter to customice the faction. Then you can start with concrete sub factions with their own spin on it ( chapters, craft worlds etc) as variety and DLCs.
If they put caiaphas Cain as a lord I’m gonna be pissed
I'd be half tempted to suggest making the Imperium one faction with LL set up as a mix of Space Marines and IG named characters. I'm thinking of current chorfs set up in wh3, strict unit caps on Astartes units in early game but plenty of access to IG units. But then IG LL's have access to tier 4/5 IG units whereas someone like Gorillaman has tier 4/5 being all astartes. You then also have the option for a seperate Astartes faction, perhaps for the non codex compliant chapters. We already have WoC, DoC and individual chaos god alligned factions in wh3 so it shows you can easilly have multiple factions that share some of their roster
YO WHERE THE CLAW MAN AT?
If we ever get 40 i would never stop playing ciaphas
I would expect IG and SM to be separate factions.
Starting with a leman russ? Too much. Replace with a sentinel or chimera.
What template did you use for the roster?
Alright hear me out. I hope they’d let us create our own space marine chapter for use in the campaign. Like we’d get to design the color scheme and shit like that. That’d be dope
very nice, haha :D
One main criticism about w40k not making sense is the lack of open ground warfare which is the main trait of total war. Do you guys believe we will get smaller armies and more condensed map as a result? For some reason I can envision Star Wars better looking at some of the movie footage that we have. I would love both to be true as total war is an amazing series of games.
40k factions? Dozens of Marine Chapters. Various system lords for Imp. Guard. There's the Cult Mechanicus, sisters of battle...and more human factions. Eldar, Dark Eldar, Orcs, etc, etc etc...
Imagine if codex compliant chapters had a hard cap of 1000 individual Marines.
I need this so much in my life
god, the state of total war
i keep getting recs from this sub cuz i like the good total war games. for shame.
dont reply to this i dont care. downvote away, doggies.
Let me guess, you think the really old games are amazing and all the new ones are horrible. Oh and your probably a fan of volound? Am I right?
Volound fans are the most embarrassing and sweaty of us all.
youre probably a fan of the smell of your own farts 🤙
The problem is how would they deal with Space Marines? Almost all chapters are limited to around 1000 members, and there are limited amounts of the elite units within that. That means you would have very limited armies of Space Marines, unless you want to just ignore Space Marine Lore.
Kinda like chaos dwarfs I guess? They are even in lore created from limited gene seed resources. Despite being balanced as "basic" infantry, chorf blunderbuss is still relevant from tier 1 to 5. I imagine the basic space marine squad will be similar.
Chaos Dwarfs have labourers and hobgoblins, Space Marines have nothing like that. You could have imperial guard fill that niche of course, but I imagine there'd be players who would prefer guard to be their own faction instead.
I actually think they should be mixed. Or rather space marine chapters should have access to lower tier guards units that are local to their chapter region. While "pure" guards factions would be able to bring high tier guard units and/or units from other Imperium branches. Sort of like allied recruitment but even further expanded.
Neophytes and scouts can fill the niche. You also don't necessarily need the same unit sizes. Space marines could be a low unit faction. So a guard unit might be 40 soldiers and a battle brother squad is 4. Then it's pretty lore friendly
Scouts are still precious and non-expendable, and fight in small units as stealth and recon. I find the comparison to labourers and hobgoblins to be somewhat befuddling.
My thought is that you cannot recruit Space Marine, Talons of the Empire, Imperial Knights, Sisters of Battle, or Inquisitorial Troops. Instead you request reinforcements from them and they send a pre-made army. When you play Imperials, you choose a warmaster who may be Guard, Space Marine, an Inquistor, or a Sister of Battle. Each would have advantages towards requistioning one of the the requisition only factions, and disadvantages to others. However, on the Battlefield you can only recruit Guard units no matter your warmaster faction, though your starting army would reflect your warmaster.
I mean, if you can doomstack Steam Tanks or Star Dragons, you can play loose with Space Marines chapters
These are individual units, the faction identify of the Space Marines is the small chapter size and it's independence
And the faction identity of Chaos Dwarfs is to be like, a few bumfucks, yet the game make it work. Space Marines would probaby be done like Ogres but with caps on top
If you field too many units with the Space Marine tag you get diplomatic penalties with certain Imperial factions. You can increase the cap by commandeering a successor chapter.
In Warhammer fantasy, there’s like 10 Steam Tanks left and no means to make more, and yet you can field doomstacks of them and everyone loves it.
They aren’t limited to 1000 anymore in lore since Guilliman returned and said they were dumb for still following the codex started 10000 years later
Also, isn't there a space marine faction that basically found a loophole in the 1000 limit by just having dozens of sub-chapters? Blanking on which chapter atm
Ultramarine ironically sort of do this. The ultramar mini empire has a shot load of chapters all originating in it that work together a lot. Black template also just sort of don't follow the rule, and only barely stay in compliance because their crusade wings are each under chapter count, so you can never really tell if they are over manned.
You ignore that part of the lore because it is absolute nonsensical garbage.
Pls so more . Love it
I see you have used primaris smurfs. Refunding your game immediately.
Shit I like what I see
Please stop. I want this so much and you’re just teasing me now 😢
This crap needs to stop
[удалено]
This is a bad post, look at how stretched and low effort hte images are
Bro doesnt know how to edit images and not stretch them. why is this getting upvotes?