Space Hulk: Tactics

[JasonPratt]

More like I don't have the willpower to resist all the other shiny things. ;) 

[bob48]

It would be nice to think that this game will capture the dynamics of the original board game (and its 2 expansions). The map creator sounds interesting.

[JasonPratt]

If Games Workshop would just commit to an all-out conversion from tabletop, no doubt including official paid expansions, like with Blood Bowl, I feel like there'd be a significant profit potential. Did giving us two decent and exhaustive BB adaptations with plenty of extra capabilities proper to computers, ruin their profit from tabletop BB? -- obviously they didn't think so or they wouldn't have given us a second one after the first adaptation was finally complete.

[JasonPratt]

Booted it up this evening for the first time. Looks great, love the 1st person view -- made me agree with the RPS reviewer who said someone badly needs to remake the classic Electronic Arts version from the 90s.

RPS reviewer somehow did not mention flagrant bugs other than the xenos.

Campaign tutorial mission crashes every time after reactivating the 2nd squad member. Checking the Steam discussion page was instructive.

I refunded hard.  :'( Will revisit next year sometime, see if polish has been finally done. Liked the basic implementation.

[bob48]

Thanks for that, Jason. I came very close to getting this, but now I'll wait and see how it develops.

[Jarhead0331]

I didn't experience that issue and was able to play through the tutorial without any problem. The thing that is concerning me is the genestealer AI behavior. Since the game exited beta, they have a habit of approaching corridors that are covered by terminator overwatch and then stopping...and waiting....and waiting. They will not move into the line of fire until your units approach and come much closer. This renders the primary advantage of your marines, ranged fire, nearly useless. Perhaps it's smart behavior, but it really makes the game not fun and feel unfair. This problem is made more annoying when the mission has a maximum turn limit imposed for victory.

[JasonPratt]

Perhaps it's smart behavior, but it really makes the game not fun and feel unfair. This problem is made more annoying when the mission has a maximum turn limit imposed for victory.

On this point, as in so many others ;) , the 90s FPS from Electronic Arts struck a superior balance: the GS's would sometimes wait around corners from your line of fire for a random amount of time before charging. But because you could control your shots with the mouse to some extent, you could pick them off from around the corners, too, with careful bolter fire (if you were close enough but not too close). And since there weren't turn limits (the turns being synchronized simultaneously in mostly real-time), you could sit there waiting to see who would run out of patience first, or you might need to secure this corridor quickly to move along lending assistance elsewhere (or just escape to win).

Come to think of it, I wonder if that's possible in this version. You can look around in first-person view, and presumably aim when shooting. I never got that far, remotely.

Out of curiosity, do you experience weirdly long load times? I thought the game had hung the first few times it happened (made worse by the swirly progressing-icon stopping its swirl sometimes). It takes literally as long to load a mission, or even the game in general (...why both?!) as it does for me to load up into Shadow of War. And I have a pretty moxie 70 lb Falcon Northwest, with a 1080 Titanium card, and I'm intentionally preloading a lot of textures in ShadWar! Whereas, this is freaking Space Hulk. Even if it's using the Unreal engine for gfx bling, and even if (for all I can tell) it's simply taking the Deathwing engine and cobbling a turn based game out of it, it's still only Space Hulk. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure my load times are less for Deathwing4Dead!

[Jarhead0331]

^No unusual load times for me.

[JasonPratt]

Hm. That lends weight to a specific system architecture conflict somewhere.  :nerd: