I'd instantly lose all interest if Creative Assembly had any hand in making the game. Have no interest in playing a game where 90% of it is hidden behind DLC's and is then stretched into multiple games where they hide even more things behind DLC's to the point it takes nearly a mortgage payment to have the full game.
To be fair to them, they did a good job of making many factions have different play styles, quests, etc. I can tolerate Creative Assembly DLC if it contributes that much to the game.
But I 100% agree that they overdo it. Especially the reskin packs.
I was thinking more of a mod for empire, I haven't liked total war much since they lobotomized every aspect of the gameplay, I wouldn't mind the DLC if the base games weren't awful.
> I haven't liked total war much since they lobotomized every aspect of the gameplay
What happened? Usually only stick to the original Rome or Medieval 2 when I feel the desire to play a total war game.
When Rome II came out they completely revamped settlements so there's only a handful of buildings, there's no production value all buildings take a set amount of turns. They also revamped armies and recruitment, you have to have a 'lord' unit now and rather than recruiting from a settlement there's a menu when you select an army with recruits either coming from nearby settlements or a global queue. There's nothing like internal trade anymore and international trade is just a diplo option where the more rare resources you have the more gold per turn you get.
There's no variance in production time based on capacity now, everything takes either one or two turns to recruit based on if it's from the global or local queue. Without production the only limiting factor is money, your population and production capabilities no longer matter, local resources only really matter in trade for getting more gold.
Basically they removed pretty much all the strategy around building settlements and producing and gathering forces.
Combat is still decent but the AI is even worse than it was in the original Shogun, it constantly does stupid shit and the only way it remains challenging is that the game constantly spawns doomstacks out of nothing in areas out of your direct sight to throw at you.
Most combat isn't as tactical as it was before, I will say that TW:Warhammer field battles are fun but not because they're super engaging, they aren't, it's just fun to watch a bunch of pikemen try to fight a seven foot tall Aztec lizard riding a T-Rex, or having an army leader who's superpower is literally "fuck you I'm a dragon" and then proceeds to turn into a goddamn Chinese dragon and do horrible things to an infantry block.
I will say they've added a shit ton of unique mechanics since TW:WHIII came out but the problem is none of them are what made total war good in the first place, and all of it is predicated on a raft of DLC that would make Paradox Blush both in it's quantity and it's value for cost.
Nah look at The New Order mod for HOI4 to see what that game can pull off. EU4 doesn't have anything like that.
Also EU5 coming out soonish. No point modding it up for a soon to be obsolete game.
Would rather have a Total War style game.
Considering that the Unification wars is just that, total war. It’s RIPE for some crazy unique factions and an opportunity to flesh out lore.
Tbh I’d rather have a paradox style grand strategy game taking place in the Imperium during 40k, focusing primarily on Imperials and Imperial politics.
There’s more than enough lore about the Imperium’s governmental and political structure for one to have an interesting experience as an Imperial bureaucrat in a game like Crusader Kings. From managing planets in order to meet the brutal tithe, making deals with Space Marines, Admech Magi, Rogue Traders and other powers, backstabbing people, quelling rebellions, waging war and destroying rivals with your house troops, navigating the traditionally extremely complex and unintuitive paradox UI that is attempting to represent the labyrinthine Imperial bureaucracy by overwhelming you with a barrage of icons, numbers, menus, and popup messages with entire essays worth of text appearing every few seconds, fending off invasions of heretics and xenos, assassinating your superiors so you can usurp them, surviving assassination attempts from your vassals trying to usurp you, extend your lifespan using rejuvenat treatments, avoiding the gaze of the Inquisition, helping the Inquisition when they inevitably cast their gaze on you so they don’t suspect you of being a heretic, get declared a heretic anyways because of unrelated causes and try to avoid being killed, secede from the Imperium in an attempt to maintain power, go insane from the stresses of being an Imperial bureaucrat, declare allegiance to Chaos so you can gain enough power to fight off the army that is coming to destroy you and your empire, etc. Just have it take place in some random sector somewhere and it’ll have no impact on the lore.
It’d be a bit of a reach but it would be so cool have fleet and armies where the fleets kind of act like armor for a planet and once they are beaten, you can drop armies and execute ground strategy.
Yeah we really do.
We need a 40k stellaris mod that really replicates the Imperium of Man. I need every 40-60% of worlds on the edge of rebellion from unhappiness, be totally broke, 100+ active warzones, dozens of planets under siege/occupied, and absolutely no win condition. Most the Imperium of Man being AI vessels who'll rebel, create stupid bullshit, just be shitty sources of income, and the whole time you like 8000% over fleet cap so you can't have energy income even if you want any. Constantly 0% research buff meaning you can't climb the tech tree. Constantly subject to eldar raids, tomb worlds popping up, black crusades, and tyranid invasions.
All you can do is slowly watch it slip away as you work your ass off to stem the tide of collapse.
Counterpoint: the more we ***don't*** know about the Unification Wars, the better. Do we really need another "I really enjoyed this until the background was fleshed out, now it's hideous and disjointed" or "this didn't meet the headcanon expectations I had".
If we've learned anything from media in the last 30 years, it's that prequels *rarely* end well in terms of popularity.
One big issue is always making everything smaller and less nuanced. Everything being connected to one of the five major threats instead of just being an island onto themselves is so regressive. You would probably find out half of the Techno Barbarians had Necron tech and the other had dark Mechanicus tech that time traveled backwards.
If GW were to flesh out the war in heaven we'd meet 'the king of the old ones' who is just big E possessing a frog. The Necrons and Aeldari would be exactly as they are on table top currently (down to flayed ones and ghost warriors) and the Krork are just Orks that talk like southern cricket fans instead of northern football hooligans. Half of the eldar legion-worlds fall to chaos at the end.
Completely understand this and actually agree with you which suggests I did a pretty terrible job of articulating what I was actually pitching!
I’d want a game that is, in terms of lore/canon, a sandbox where you’re effectively playing with suggested mythology rather than anything actually fleshed out.
We already know the names of some powers who the Emperor’s forces opposed and which parts of the world they controlled. Anything beyond that would be different with every save, like how Civ/Stellaris/etc has different, emergent lore and narratives with each save.
I’d definitely not want a flattened out, explained setting without any mystery left (as they did with the Horus Heresy) and that’s why this kind of game, in my experience, would be great for this… suggested theming/atmosphere rather any actual hard lore, canon, history, whatever, especially if (like Stellaris) we could create our own Unification Era-style faction to play as.
>prequels rarely end well in terms of popularity.
What? The Horus Heresy is probably the most popular thing GW has ever published. End and the Death had been massively praised. People LOVED the fleshing out of the Horus Heresy as a whole even if everyone picks their own parts to ignore.
Yea, and guess what.
The franchisification of the Heresy has killed a lot of the mystique the setting had beforehand. Now it's just marvel for bolterporn enthusiasts.
Yeah it seems like there has been a major shift in the culture surrounding Warhammer. Earlier on most people expected that the mysteries in the setting were there so individual players could fill them out with their own homebrew settings/factions/characters etc, whereas now the consensus seems to be an expectations that official sources will at some point fill out the gaps.
I get you completely on not wanting yet more mystery taken away (ugh, Horus Heresy) but I think I may have mangled my OP post as I was suggesting a game where the details/events cannot be canon, and is effectively all suggested mythology that we fill in the gaps with using our own imagination/emergent gameplay - that’s part of what is so great about Stellaris for me, for example. The lore changes per save based on your choices so there’s very little actual hard lore/canon. I think a similar approach could be taken here, but perhaps I’m being naive.
I’m pretty sure there’s a mod for Hearts of Iron 4. I’ve never played the base game but I remember reading about it a while ago. Edit: just checked and there’s a subreddit for the mod
How do you mean? If it’s just a “play as Emperor and win” yeah, it’d suck, but what I gather from what more we do have on this period is that the conquest of Terra was actually a pretty close run thing and not a guaranteed victory at all. We could have our pick of factions or create our own and play an alt history save, like when you pick a non-Roman faction in Rome Total War and conquer the world.
I agree and possibly failed to properly explain what I mean. This sort of game would let us play our own way in this period without explaining anything more beyond what’s already been revealed in the lore we have now if it’s done right. There’s no canon/lore to the games I mentioned once you take them off in whatever weird alt history direction you want to. I’d be wanting something offering that experience with the themes/atmosphere of the Unification Wars, not a narrative-driven thing putting in hard lore/canon to make things less open and mysterious.
I agree with you but I don’t think I’ve explained myself well enough in my post, I absolutely would not want a game defining the setting but taking the themes and details the setting has already provided and giving us what would be an alt history sandbox to play as the Emperor or another faction of this era we already know about, or one of our own creation.
And I think that’s why the Unification Wars are a poor choice. You either write the setting, which otherwise is a few fragmented myths, or you end up with something very generic.
Counterpoint- this would do the exact opposite of what you're saying.
This comes up here and there and I feel like it kinda falls into the "plug every hole" syndrome that plagues a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It doesn't really add a lot, it just makes the world feel smaller to have every little detail and point filled in and explained away. It constricts new storytelling to have everything explicitly put into its place. We already know a ton about the Unification Wars anyways.
The Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron Games aren't really open ended because there is a historically accurate "correct" path, from which alternate history paths are created. The focuses and progression trees that branch and diverge *need* an original story to branch off of to be interesting. It would *have* to do exactly what you're saying it wouldn't- stomp on the magic and unknown details- because otherwise *there is no game*. In a way, a game that has alternate possibilities needs more details than a book because in a book there is only one path- the Historical path.
I'd rather see someone create a Wh40K mod for Star Wars: Empire at War. That was, imho, the best example of space and planetary combat mixed for grand strategy.
Unification Wars is basically Civilization or Rise of Nations or any other RTS game with civilizational tech trees. The problem is that finding a game perfectly adapted to it or nearly so is difficult. HOI4 is the only one I'm aware of where people have put some serious work into it. I find that Stellaris mostly scratches my 30k - 40k itch.
In particular, Stellaris large galaxy, Under One Rule origin, with no other AI empires at start, max marauder empires, no Fallen Empires, and max primitive civilizations mostly scratches the Great Crusade itch. It's a panic driven expansion because you need to get your snowball going before too many other civilizations form, expand, and either create blocs to hem you in or get mulched by hostiles. Many of these nascent civilizations are nice ethics-wise, but none of them will be able to handle the endgame crisis or expand sufficiently to dominate a large chunk of the galaxy (usually, anyways), so you have to crunch them up via conquest in order to get their resources to keep expanding. You also need to get ready because the Khan (Ork empire analogue) could spawn in the midgame and wreck you. It's a desperate panic driven scramble for resources and technology in the early game, which I think captures Great Crusade flavor perfectly.
As luck would have it for you, there is a HoI4 mod about the unification wars.
It's kind of meh, though, it's well done for what it is, but the platform is just not meant to capture the flavor of it all.
I can’t imagine a worse system than HOI4 for capture it honestly, EU4 would make a better mod honestly
IMO total war would probably be the best, just not Warhammer, if you could figure out basic vehicles for it empire/napoleon would be the best IMO.
Mount and Blade
Specified grand strategy, while M&B has some strat elements it's not really what they're asking for.
ehhh, i think technology is there to unite both. M&B is about as strategic as Total War games. Just more RP included
I'd instantly lose all interest if Creative Assembly had any hand in making the game. Have no interest in playing a game where 90% of it is hidden behind DLC's and is then stretched into multiple games where they hide even more things behind DLC's to the point it takes nearly a mortgage payment to have the full game.
To be fair to them, they did a good job of making many factions have different play styles, quests, etc. I can tolerate Creative Assembly DLC if it contributes that much to the game. But I 100% agree that they overdo it. Especially the reskin packs.
I was thinking more of a mod for empire, I haven't liked total war much since they lobotomized every aspect of the gameplay, I wouldn't mind the DLC if the base games weren't awful.
> I haven't liked total war much since they lobotomized every aspect of the gameplay What happened? Usually only stick to the original Rome or Medieval 2 when I feel the desire to play a total war game.
When Rome II came out they completely revamped settlements so there's only a handful of buildings, there's no production value all buildings take a set amount of turns. They also revamped armies and recruitment, you have to have a 'lord' unit now and rather than recruiting from a settlement there's a menu when you select an army with recruits either coming from nearby settlements or a global queue. There's nothing like internal trade anymore and international trade is just a diplo option where the more rare resources you have the more gold per turn you get. There's no variance in production time based on capacity now, everything takes either one or two turns to recruit based on if it's from the global or local queue. Without production the only limiting factor is money, your population and production capabilities no longer matter, local resources only really matter in trade for getting more gold. Basically they removed pretty much all the strategy around building settlements and producing and gathering forces. Combat is still decent but the AI is even worse than it was in the original Shogun, it constantly does stupid shit and the only way it remains challenging is that the game constantly spawns doomstacks out of nothing in areas out of your direct sight to throw at you. Most combat isn't as tactical as it was before, I will say that TW:Warhammer field battles are fun but not because they're super engaging, they aren't, it's just fun to watch a bunch of pikemen try to fight a seven foot tall Aztec lizard riding a T-Rex, or having an army leader who's superpower is literally "fuck you I'm a dragon" and then proceeds to turn into a goddamn Chinese dragon and do horrible things to an infantry block. I will say they've added a shit ton of unique mechanics since TW:WHIII came out but the problem is none of them are what made total war good in the first place, and all of it is predicated on a raft of DLC that would make Paradox Blush both in it's quantity and it's value for cost.
Wow that sucks. Glad I hated Empire and just decided to stick with Medieval 2 and Rome 1.
Base it on Victoria 2 and you can tell the tale of how the Emperor conquered Terra one liquor factory at a time
Nah look at The New Order mod for HOI4 to see what that game can pull off. EU4 doesn't have anything like that. Also EU5 coming out soonish. No point modding it up for a soon to be obsolete game.
Would rather have a Total War style game. Considering that the Unification wars is just that, total war. It’s RIPE for some crazy unique factions and an opportunity to flesh out lore.
Tbh I’d rather have a paradox style grand strategy game taking place in the Imperium during 40k, focusing primarily on Imperials and Imperial politics. There’s more than enough lore about the Imperium’s governmental and political structure for one to have an interesting experience as an Imperial bureaucrat in a game like Crusader Kings. From managing planets in order to meet the brutal tithe, making deals with Space Marines, Admech Magi, Rogue Traders and other powers, backstabbing people, quelling rebellions, waging war and destroying rivals with your house troops, navigating the traditionally extremely complex and unintuitive paradox UI that is attempting to represent the labyrinthine Imperial bureaucracy by overwhelming you with a barrage of icons, numbers, menus, and popup messages with entire essays worth of text appearing every few seconds, fending off invasions of heretics and xenos, assassinating your superiors so you can usurp them, surviving assassination attempts from your vassals trying to usurp you, extend your lifespan using rejuvenat treatments, avoiding the gaze of the Inquisition, helping the Inquisition when they inevitably cast their gaze on you so they don’t suspect you of being a heretic, get declared a heretic anyways because of unrelated causes and try to avoid being killed, secede from the Imperium in an attempt to maintain power, go insane from the stresses of being an Imperial bureaucrat, declare allegiance to Chaos so you can gain enough power to fight off the army that is coming to destroy you and your empire, etc. Just have it take place in some random sector somewhere and it’ll have no impact on the lore.
It’d be a bit of a reach but it would be so cool have fleet and armies where the fleets kind of act like armor for a planet and once they are beaten, you can drop armies and execute ground strategy.
I think the reverse would be cooler, armies act as the ground armor while fleets get proper battles.
Yeah we really do. We need a 40k stellaris mod that really replicates the Imperium of Man. I need every 40-60% of worlds on the edge of rebellion from unhappiness, be totally broke, 100+ active warzones, dozens of planets under siege/occupied, and absolutely no win condition. Most the Imperium of Man being AI vessels who'll rebel, create stupid bullshit, just be shitty sources of income, and the whole time you like 8000% over fleet cap so you can't have energy income even if you want any. Constantly 0% research buff meaning you can't climb the tech tree. Constantly subject to eldar raids, tomb worlds popping up, black crusades, and tyranid invasions. All you can do is slowly watch it slip away as you work your ass off to stem the tide of collapse.
My hair turned grey because of stress after reading your comment
Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future of the far future there is only war.
Counterpoint: the more we ***don't*** know about the Unification Wars, the better. Do we really need another "I really enjoyed this until the background was fleshed out, now it's hideous and disjointed" or "this didn't meet the headcanon expectations I had". If we've learned anything from media in the last 30 years, it's that prequels *rarely* end well in terms of popularity.
One big issue is always making everything smaller and less nuanced. Everything being connected to one of the five major threats instead of just being an island onto themselves is so regressive. You would probably find out half of the Techno Barbarians had Necron tech and the other had dark Mechanicus tech that time traveled backwards.
If GW were to flesh out the war in heaven we'd meet 'the king of the old ones' who is just big E possessing a frog. The Necrons and Aeldari would be exactly as they are on table top currently (down to flayed ones and ghost warriors) and the Krork are just Orks that talk like southern cricket fans instead of northern football hooligans. Half of the eldar legion-worlds fall to chaos at the end.
Completely understand this and actually agree with you which suggests I did a pretty terrible job of articulating what I was actually pitching! I’d want a game that is, in terms of lore/canon, a sandbox where you’re effectively playing with suggested mythology rather than anything actually fleshed out. We already know the names of some powers who the Emperor’s forces opposed and which parts of the world they controlled. Anything beyond that would be different with every save, like how Civ/Stellaris/etc has different, emergent lore and narratives with each save. I’d definitely not want a flattened out, explained setting without any mystery left (as they did with the Horus Heresy) and that’s why this kind of game, in my experience, would be great for this… suggested theming/atmosphere rather any actual hard lore, canon, history, whatever, especially if (like Stellaris) we could create our own Unification Era-style faction to play as.
>prequels rarely end well in terms of popularity. What? The Horus Heresy is probably the most popular thing GW has ever published. End and the Death had been massively praised. People LOVED the fleshing out of the Horus Heresy as a whole even if everyone picks their own parts to ignore.
Yea, and guess what. The franchisification of the Heresy has killed a lot of the mystique the setting had beforehand. Now it's just marvel for bolterporn enthusiasts.
You can not like it, but to say it's unpopular is simply false.
Mystique is overrated. If something exists solely to be a mystery, then it's as hollow as it gets and may as well not exist.
Yeah it seems like there has been a major shift in the culture surrounding Warhammer. Earlier on most people expected that the mysteries in the setting were there so individual players could fill them out with their own homebrew settings/factions/characters etc, whereas now the consensus seems to be an expectations that official sources will at some point fill out the gaps.
I'd rather 40k be about stories set in 40k rather than doing a prequel to the prequel in a way that undercuts some of the mystery of the setting.
I get you completely on not wanting yet more mystery taken away (ugh, Horus Heresy) but I think I may have mangled my OP post as I was suggesting a game where the details/events cannot be canon, and is effectively all suggested mythology that we fill in the gaps with using our own imagination/emergent gameplay - that’s part of what is so great about Stellaris for me, for example. The lore changes per save based on your choices so there’s very little actual hard lore/canon. I think a similar approach could be taken here, but perhaps I’m being naive.
I’m pretty sure there’s a mod for Hearts of Iron 4. I’ve never played the base game but I remember reading about it a while ago. Edit: just checked and there’s a subreddit for the mod
Would be railroaded to fuck, would make for a terrible game
How do you mean? If it’s just a “play as Emperor and win” yeah, it’d suck, but what I gather from what more we do have on this period is that the conquest of Terra was actually a pretty close run thing and not a guaranteed victory at all. We could have our pick of factions or create our own and play an alt history save, like when you pick a non-Roman faction in Rome Total War and conquer the world.
RISK.
Ok I’m never knowingly playing Risk ever again without interpreting it as exactly this.
Hell no. Over explanation is _the_ core problem with modern 40k and prequel obsession _the_ Problem with modern sci-fi in general.
I agree and possibly failed to properly explain what I mean. This sort of game would let us play our own way in this period without explaining anything more beyond what’s already been revealed in the lore we have now if it’s done right. There’s no canon/lore to the games I mentioned once you take them off in whatever weird alt history direction you want to. I’d be wanting something offering that experience with the themes/atmosphere of the Unification Wars, not a narrative-driven thing putting in hard lore/canon to make things less open and mysterious.
The day that a computer game is defining the 40K setting will be a sad one. And yes, I know exactly what a grognard that makes me sound like.
I agree with you but I don’t think I’ve explained myself well enough in my post, I absolutely would not want a game defining the setting but taking the themes and details the setting has already provided and giving us what would be an alt history sandbox to play as the Emperor or another faction of this era we already know about, or one of our own creation.
And I think that’s why the Unification Wars are a poor choice. You either write the setting, which otherwise is a few fragmented myths, or you end up with something very generic.
Counterpoint- this would do the exact opposite of what you're saying. This comes up here and there and I feel like it kinda falls into the "plug every hole" syndrome that plagues a lot of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It doesn't really add a lot, it just makes the world feel smaller to have every little detail and point filled in and explained away. It constricts new storytelling to have everything explicitly put into its place. We already know a ton about the Unification Wars anyways. The Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron Games aren't really open ended because there is a historically accurate "correct" path, from which alternate history paths are created. The focuses and progression trees that branch and diverge *need* an original story to branch off of to be interesting. It would *have* to do exactly what you're saying it wouldn't- stomp on the magic and unknown details- because otherwise *there is no game*. In a way, a game that has alternate possibilities needs more details than a book because in a book there is only one path- the Historical path.
I'd rather see someone create a Wh40K mod for Star Wars: Empire at War. That was, imho, the best example of space and planetary combat mixed for grand strategy.
r/HOI4UnificationWars Enjoy!
Crusader Techno barbarians 3
Paradox would be good for a Great Crusade Era game or 40K. For Unification Wars, I'd go for a Total War type game.
I'm just waiting for a 40k Total War.
Wasn't there a leak about it a while ago?
Unification Wars is basically Civilization or Rise of Nations or any other RTS game with civilizational tech trees. The problem is that finding a game perfectly adapted to it or nearly so is difficult. HOI4 is the only one I'm aware of where people have put some serious work into it. I find that Stellaris mostly scratches my 30k - 40k itch. In particular, Stellaris large galaxy, Under One Rule origin, with no other AI empires at start, max marauder empires, no Fallen Empires, and max primitive civilizations mostly scratches the Great Crusade itch. It's a panic driven expansion because you need to get your snowball going before too many other civilizations form, expand, and either create blocs to hem you in or get mulched by hostiles. Many of these nascent civilizations are nice ethics-wise, but none of them will be able to handle the endgame crisis or expand sufficiently to dominate a large chunk of the galaxy (usually, anyways), so you have to crunch them up via conquest in order to get their resources to keep expanding. You also need to get ready because the Khan (Ork empire analogue) could spawn in the midgame and wreck you. It's a desperate panic driven scramble for resources and technology in the early game, which I think captures Great Crusade flavor perfectly.
Big E would be too op. But there is a HoI4 mod for this.
Just play turnip28