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[nenjin]

From my recent (8th ed? 9th ed? I don't remember) research GC appear more often armed with mining equipment than anything else... probably at some point in the future, I'll care enough to try and tailor the armament of GC forces to the type of planet. For now, though, they'll all have the same types of squad loadouts.

Probably? because mines and sorta-blue collar industrial work jives with how GC hide. They'll shack up in remote areas, places where they can develop unnoticed, or insinuating themselves among the poorest of Imperial Citizens least likely to be noticed when they go missing.....so maybe that informs 8th ed equipment lists to some degree.

[ndkid]

ndkid, do you intend to add all the features Duke had implemented before stopping the development of Chapter Master? I always thought it was a shame CM died so early in it's development considering what we got was already a pretty alright game. A lot of things still needed to be fleshed out, like politics, ground and space combat, etc. but you could still spend hours just hopping around cleansing words of xenos and exploring ruins that would more often than not have 1000x CSM.

Thanks for your work.

While my initial goal was to make an open source remake of Chapter Master, I found, as I started, that I had some design sensibility differences from the original. The way equipment was requisitioned, the relative anonymity of your Marines... I found myself wanting to do things a bit differently than Duke in some places. (Or, perhaps, since I don't know Duke's grand vision, it's just a matter of prioritizing pieces of functionality differently.) As a result, I suspect that, as I go, there will be more and more differences between design decisions I make and the original, while both will still continue to be strategic games about being the Chapter Master for a Space Marine Chapter in a sector of space.

The trello board is the best source for what I'm looking to add when. (Subject to change, void where prohibited, batteries not included.)

[DeepWinter]

You're doing great so far! If you ever need help writing text or dialogue just ask!

More people than you think are aware of this project!

[nenjin]

That's rather ominous

[JimboM12]

probably the spirit of duke himself

rip duke, you flew too close to the emperor but basked in his glorious light for as long as it lasted

(i dont think he's dead but its obvious his spirit was towards the end when he dropped it)

[Golym]

ndkid, do you plan to allow player customization regarding heavy weapons/special weapons limit within squads? From what I can tell you are using similar squad limitations to the ones found in Dawn of War. I saw that chapter customization as a whole is planned considering not all chapters follow the Codex Astartes. It would be interesting to play as the Black Templars and their 5k+ marines while doing your best to keep it hidden from the =I=.

[nenjin]

I'd also enjoy a chance to write for you if it comes up ndkid. I enjoyed what I did for Duke and CM in the past.

[ndkid]

ndkid, do you plan to allow player customization regarding heavy weapons/special weapons limit within squads? From what I can tell you are using similar squad limitations to the ones found in Dawn of War. I saw that chapter customization as a whole is planned considering not all chapters follow the Codex Astartes. It would be interesting to play as the Black Templars and their 5k+ marines while doing your best to keep it hidden from the =I=.

I'm basically going with original flavor Codex Astartes for now. My expectation is that, when I get to Chapter customization, I'll start thinking about the manner of non-Codex-compliance I'll program in. For now, the way those limits are stored in the game settings would be easy to modify with any SQLite editor, if one so desired

[DeepWinter]

Will it be viable to spread out your forces? The original (Likely due to it being so unpolished, not by design) seemed to make it so multiple companies were almost always needed to combat a threat without taking unnacceptable losses. Is that viable or will you need to be more dedicated in your engagements?

[ndkid]

Will it be viable to spread out your forces? The original (Likely due to it being so unpolished, not by design) seemed to make it so multiple companies were almost always needed to combat a threat without taking unacceptable losses. Is that viable or will you need to be more dedicated in your engagements?

My goal (which is very much not represented in current gameplay) is for there to be way more things going on in the sector than you can possibly deal with at once. If you undercommit forces, you increase the chance that not all your brothers come back. But if you overcommit your forces, then there are that many more problems in the sector you're not dealing with. This will likely include a mission system in addition to the pitched battle sim that's currently in the game. The idea will be that there will be relic hunts, recon, assassinations, space hulk explorations, and other sorts of special ops missions you'll be able to send forces on. And maybe, sometimes, the group you send disappears without a trace... how much larger a force do you send to find out what happened to them?

My other long-term goal is to have more examples of your forces augmenting Imperial engagements, rather than fighting as the sole unit on the field. I'm not sure yet whether I'd represent that via the mission system or the pitched battle simulator.

What's going to be interesting to balance as I go is the mortality of a Space Marine. I don't think tabletop (in which a large volume of gretchin can take out SM with peashooters) nor fiction (where every Space Marine has invulnerable plot armor until the story requires that they die in droves) provide the balance I want. In the system as implemented right now, it's far more likely for a Marine to drop due to having a leg blown off than to actually die, but that could lead to everyone in your chapter having massive bionics after a century, which doesn't quite match the setting (well, except for the Iron Hands, of course).

[nenjin]

What's going to be interesting to balance as I go is the mortality of a Space Marine. I don't think tabletop (in which a large volume of gretchin can take out SM with peashooters) nor fiction (where every Space Marine has invulnerable plot armor until the story requires that they die in droves) provide the balance I want. In the system as implemented right now, it's far more likely for a Marine to drop due to having a leg blown off than to actually die, but that could lead to everyone in your chapter having massive bionics after a century, which doesn't quite match the setting (well, except for the Iron Hands, of course).

It's actually pretty canon. After 200 or 300 years of service, an Astartes is going to have at least one kind of bionic replacement or graft. Maybe not even the flashy kind like arms, limbs or eyes, but bionic lungs, hearts, other organs....

[E. Albright]

I don't think tabletop (in which a large volume of gretchin can take out SM with peashooters) nor fiction (where every Space Marine has invulnerable plot armor until the story requires that they die in droves) provide the balance I want.

I've always been of the mind that the sharp contrast between tabletop and blurb-fluff/can-fic should be viewed as the difference between cold hard physics and Imperial propaganda...

[LordBaal]

Problem is, then Space marines would be needed to be produced by the hundreds for every chapter every year.

I remember playing DoW for the first time. Mind you it was my first contact with anything Warhammer and barely recognized the game from a tv program like a year or so before. I was hooked to the game from the very intro.

Then, after I started to dig into the lore, realized how the space marines in DoW seem like regular awesome futurist elite soldiers instead of walking tanks they are supposed to be. And found out something similar, but not so extreme on the tabletop too.

In my first campaing they died by the thousands. In fact this is what droved me to finding Chapter Master.

I always thougth the TT discrepancy is so, say, a IG player does not need to spend thousands of dollars and have thousands of models to compete against a company of SM.


Also, SM should be dedicated more to comando and special missions that protracted campaigns. Taros demostrates this beautifuly and gives, in my head, the most realistic use of SM assets.

[E. Albright]

That's ultimately the problem - GW fluff and canfic presents SMs as conducting campaigns as regular forces, not SpecOps. Unless they're literally indestructible, they'd fare even worse in pitched battles than TT makes them seem. If we want any sense of the realism grimdark implies, SMs absolutely should not be demigods (and in fairness, if you go back to the earliest stuff, they were moreso juiced-up borderline suicidal zealots than the unstoppable abominations decades of powercreep and fanservice (in the service of model sales) has turned them into). 1000 SMs vs. 10000000 orks should pretty much always end up with 0 SM and ~950000 orks at a bare minimum. 100 SMs vs. the command and control structure of 1000000 orks, OTOH...

[Golym]

And we could argue that 100 SMs would never face 1000000 orks.. Unless they are from the Lamenters chapter. Overall I think SMs would do surgical strikes while remaining somewhat demigods, maybe every deployment of a squad, company or the entire chapter could be approached in two different manners: Guns blazing or tactical mission to weaken the enemy forces and allow the IG or whoever else is fighting along to make a breakthrough.

Also, CM was actually somewhat balanced for the underdeveloped combat it has. A company of space marines could take on Heavy Orc forces during an attack but even the entire chapter would struggle against a Heavy Tyranids attack. Of course the raiding stance could easily neutralize such threats.