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Alright. I know this isn't a new discussion over social media and fan domains, but I'm having a hard time believing the last time this subject was discussed on Dakka is 2010.

So if my search ability has failed me please point me in the right direction!


That said, I'll keep this straight and to the point:


40k Total War...

1. Can it be done?

2. Will it be done?

3. When will it be done?

4. How will it be done?


Why?


My personal belief?


1. Yes

2. Potentially

3. Circa 2025 A.D. there will be an announcement.


Why? The success of both Creative Assembly and Games Workshop is not in question. War is their game.

What is the most popular wargame in the world? Warhammer 40000.

Warhammer Fantasy is already fleshed out with CA.

40k is the next logical step forward in this relationship.

It is also the next Big Thing on the brink of exploding the fandom even further than it already is with the coming release of 10th Edition Tabletop with simplified rules to reach a broader audience, and Amazon Studios taking on the rights to produce a movie and or a series.

The 40k verse is basically endless, so the threshold for content and future development is out of sight.

As for the mechanics? Well that's all up for discussion and arguably one of the biggest challenges.


So will we have it before 2030? Will we ever have it?

The Total War engine is designed to handle mass combat - blocks of troops moving in formation and the like. 40K doesn't involve that.

It's not a good fit.

Eumerin wrote:
The Total War engine is designed to handle mass combat - blocks of troops moving in formation and the like. 40K doesn't involve that.

It's not a good fit.

That's a reasonable observation of the Total War series everyone knows. That said, CA has diversified it's scope over the years, I'm not necessarily suggesting they squeeze 40k into the same mold. It may be time for another digital revolution.

40K does have regimented armies. You just have to look at Epic and at vast battle situations. Heck it does rank and file gun-lines with Tau and Imperial Guard.


I think the CA engine could be made to stagger units moving across terrain so that they might form up and look more disorderly, whilst being controlled in unit blocks.

Close combat is also a very core part of the game and honestly 40K's style of combat is very close to a medieval situation where you've got a mix of ranged and close combat going on at the same time with massive armies on both sides.

Even forces like Eldar can deploy huge armies.

The question is if it did follow a Total War like format, would it be through a single planet (which conveniently has most of the races there, like Vigilus), or reflected through a specific Segmentum/star system?

Honestly they could go either way. The Old World map is chock full of detail; they could easily do worlds linked by space lanes and then have several regions per world; or just have one convenient planet to fight over.

I'm not sure how it could work.

You could make it multi-planet-based, so each planet is a settlement like in TWW, but then you're distilling every planet to a single map.

If you make it single-planet based, then you have to come up with a contrived reason why every race from Dark Eldar to Tau are showing up on the same world at the same time.

Do you include ship combat? GW tend to parcel out their IP in distcrete units (you don't get the rights to "40k", you get the rights to "Black Reach" or "Battlfleet Gothic" or "Space Hulk"... and fleet combat is a different IP, technically, to "40k"). And how do you not include ship combat? How do you make ground combat meaningful with 40k ship combat?

And what of the scale? Are we talking Titan Legions here, or a Demi-Company of Marines?

The scope of 40k is SOOOO much bigger than Fantasy, that I'm not sure it fits with a Total War style game.

Overread wrote:40K does have regimented armies. You just have to look at Epic and at vast battle situations. Heck it does rank and file gun-lines with Tau and Imperial Guard.


I think the CA engine could be made to stagger units moving across terrain so that they might form up and look more disorderly, whilst being controlled in unit blocks.

Close combat is also a very core part of the game and honestly 40K's style of combat is very close to a medieval situation where you've got a mix of ranged and close combat going on at the same time with massive armies on both sides.

Even forces like Eldar can deploy huge armies.

Good points regarding firing lines, and staggered formation, which last I knew was still referenced as "loose formation" that has always been a feature. I have not yet played WHTW so not sure what's new as far as unit formations there.

My BT sword brethren are dying to go toe to toe with the foe for some knock-down drag-out melee.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I'm not sure how it could work.

You could make it multi-planet-based, so each planet is a settlement like in TWW, but then you're distilling every planet to a single map.

If you make it single-planet based, then you have to come up with a contrived reason why every race from Dark Eldar to Tau are showing up on the same world at the same time.

Do you include ship combat? GW tend to parcel out their IP in distcrete units (you don't get the rights to "40k", you get the rights to "Black Reach" or "Battlfleet Gothic" or "Space Hulk"... and fleet combat is a different IP, technically, to "40k"). And how do you not include ship combat? How do you make ground combat meaningful with 40k ship combat?

And what of the scale? Are we talking Titan Legions here, or a Demi-Company of Marines?

The scope of 40k is SOOOO much bigger than Fantasy, that I'm not sure it fits with a Total War style game.

I could see a single plant like Aramgeddon as a tutorial play through to the series. But I would expect some sort of storyline that picks out a particular region of the galaxy, or interconnected regions. I don't see why there should be a single map for each planet though. You could have random generated battle maps, and then a campaign map as you normally would.

This does raise the question of scope however, if you did a campaign map for a planet there would probably have to be less micromanaging which I personally think is a good thing. Pick the right leaders and let them do the work while you're out campaigning. Not really a new concept for TW.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I'm not sure how it could work.

You could make it multi-planet-based, so each planet is a settlement like in TWW, but then you're distilling every planet to a single map.

If you make it single-planet based, then you have to come up with a contrived reason why every race from Dark Eldar to Tau are showing up on the same world at the same time.

Do you include ship combat? GW tend to parcel out their IP in distcrete units (you don't get the rights to "40k", you get the rights to "Black Reach" or "Battlfleet Gothic" or "Space Hulk"... and fleet combat is a different IP, technically, to "40k"). And how do you not include ship combat? How do you make ground combat meaningful with 40k ship combat?

And what of the scale? Are we talking Titan Legions here, or a Demi-Company of Marines?

The scope of 40k is SOOOO much bigger than Fantasy, that I'm not sure it fits with a Total War style game.

In some ways I wonder if GW did parcel out the licences like that to CA; in another considering the massive scope of just making the land game and how utterly different it was to anything CA had done before; coupled to the size of many ships in the setting. I wonder if CA just didn't want the sea combat licence anyway.

Whilst CA has adapted to Warhammer TW really well, with all the fancy special effects, spells, magic, maps, the fact that every army is basically a unique set of animations and structures and also many of them don't even conform to earthly creatures. It's a huge deviation from their historical games where basically each army is using the same handful of core animations and you're just reskinning things here and there between factions; and where variation is still within bounds of normality (ergo a faction has unique animated spear throwers, its still a human model)

So I could see CA looking at just the land game and seeing it as a massive investment way above normal for them and not wanting to load that up with ships on top.

 Adeptekon wrote:

Good points regarding firing lines, and staggered formation, which last I knew was still referenced as "loose formation" that has always been a feature. I have not yet played WHTW so not sure what's new as far as unit formations there.

That wouldn't be an issue. Many units in TW already fight and move in loose formation. Its even accounted for in how they're affected by artillery and explosions.


Like Dawn of War (or Rites of War or Battlesector or Armaggedon or any of the other 40k computer games of the last couple decades), I don't think the lots of factions on the same campaign map is an issue, either.
A low number of factions has been more a cost issue (because its distinct art and animations for each and that's pricey) than 'this doesn't make sense.' GW's own campaign supplements tend to dogpile single planets with most everyone anyway, so this isn't any different.


As usual its more a matter of if GW and CA want to do it. And a new edition drop is too good an opportunity for GW not to miss.

CA doing 40K would also let them stay in the GW system that has done them a LOT of good income wise without having to either re-do Old World (far too soon for that) or reaching into Age of Sigmar.

It could be a nice main-studio project.


Then they could come back to Old World 2.0 or do Age of Sigmar


Heck they could even do Horus Heresy as a small studio release inbetween as well

I couild take or leave single player campaigns. For me it would be a joy to see multiplayer campaigns.

It would be great to see campaigns for a handful of prominent factions fighting over planets, or supremacy of sectors and subsectors, with smaller campaigns for less prominent ones such as the founding chapters or the missions of the Inquisition and orders militant.

You might be tasked to take a primative planet with just a few units of Astartes to set up a fortress monastery or keep and attempt to build out from while warring against techno barbs and building out from your base to gain recruits for the chapter.

But really all I require is some great tactical play and some good multiplayer battle maps with a variety of playable factions/chapters which you can customize and host local matches of up to 8 players, over LAN or online ladder.

They can build out the campaigns 1 by 1 overtime.

 Adeptekon wrote:
I couild take or leave single player campaigns. For me it would be a joy to see multiplayer campaigns.

It would be great to see campaigns for a handful of prominent factions fighting over planets, or supremacy of sectors and subsectors, with smaller campaigns for less prominent ones such as the founding chapters or the missions of the Inquisition and orders militant.

You might be tasked to take a primative planet with just a few units of Astartes to set up a fortress monastery or keep and attempt to build out from while warring against techno barbs and building out from your base to gain recruits for the chapter.

But really all I require is some great tactical play and some good multiplayer battle maps with a variety of playable factions/chapters which you can customize and host local matches of up to 8 players, over LAN or online ladder.

They can build out the campaigns 1 by 1 overtime.

For as much as CA yammers on about multiplayer and uses MP youtubers to push the products, they've admitted that MP consistently hovers around 5% of their player-base.
If they want successful games, what matters is the single player campaigns. A multi player focus guarantees losing money (again, _five_ percent).

Voss wrote:

 Adeptekon wrote:
I couild take or leave single player campaigns. For me it would be a joy to see multiplayer campaigns.

It would be great to see campaigns for a handful of prominent factions fighting over planets, or supremacy of sectors and subsectors, with smaller campaigns for less prominent ones such as the founding chapters or the missions of the Inquisition and orders militant.

You might be tasked to take a primative planet with just a few units of Astartes to set up a fortress monastery or keep and attempt to build out from while warring against techno barbs and building out from your base to gain recruits for the chapter.

But really all I require is some great tactical play and some good multiplayer battle maps with a variety of playable factions/chapters which you can customize and host local matches of up to 8 players, over LAN or online ladder.

They can build out the campaigns 1 by 1 overtime.

For as much as CA yammers on about multiplayer and uses MP youtubers to push the products, they've admitted that MP consistently hovers around 5% of their player-base.
If they want successful games, what matters is the single player campaigns. A multi player focus guarantees losing money (again, _five_ percent).

Yeah that's because CA while wallowing in their success following their own revolution is comfortable. They forgot the meaning of if you build it they will come. That response to mp is about as old as the community itself.

 Adeptekon wrote:

Voss wrote:

 Adeptekon wrote:
I couild take or leave single player campaigns. For me it would be a joy to see multiplayer campaigns.

It would be great to see campaigns for a handful of prominent factions fighting over planets, or supremacy of sectors and subsectors, with smaller campaigns for less prominent ones such as the founding chapters or the missions of the Inquisition and orders militant.

You might be tasked to take a primative planet with just a few units of Astartes to set up a fortress monastery or keep and attempt to build out from while warring against techno barbs and building out from your base to gain recruits for the chapter.

But really all I require is some great tactical play and some good multiplayer battle maps with a variety of playable factions/chapters which you can customize and host local matches of up to 8 players, over LAN or online ladder.

They can build out the campaigns 1 by 1 overtime.

For as much as CA yammers on about multiplayer and uses MP youtubers to push the products, they've admitted that MP consistently hovers around 5% of their player-base.
If they want successful games, what matters is the single player campaigns. A multi player focus guarantees losing money (again, _five_ percent).

Yeah that's because CA while wallowing in their success following their own revolution is comfortable. They forgot the meaning of if you build it they will come. That response to mp is about as old as the community itself.

I... have no idea what any of that means. They are clearly successful. At single player games.
That they bother supporting an MP community at all is a credit to them, given how financially dubious it is for them.

 Adeptekon wrote:
They forgot the meaning of if you build it they will come.

They are building a multiplayer game. It's called Hyenas. Have fun with that.

But seriously, CA have built new MP types into each successive TWW game. It's still not the focus, and if it's not, why should it be?

I think it would be possible. While the current total war unit controls do generally fight in fixed formations, that would not need to be the case. It would be easy enough to have more staggered formations, and they already have begun to have some cover mechanics.

I think the ideal way to run the map would be to have it be a sector sized map. Each planet being connected by hyper lanes. Each planet could consist of multiple sections, so they would be analogous to provinces in the current games and allow for multiple battlefields per planet. Then have maybe 50-60 planets total, along with some asteroid bases and such to spice it up.

They could adapt the naval combat from Empire to 40k easily enough.

The scale of Total War would even allow for super heavies and titans which i think would be cool. Basically it would be Epic in video game form.

Out of everyone, don't give it to ca and sega.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Eumerin wrote:
The Total War engine is designed to handle mass combat - blocks of troops moving in formation and the like. 40K doesn't involve that.

It's not a good fit.

I disagree, modern combat has been proven to work with things like the great war mod.

The problem isn't if it could be done, the Problem is ca has not the quality and is mechanically stagnant in their game design/wrong track since after etw.

Basically i attest them not the skill necessary to make it work mechanically, especially not in the campaign map side to make it engaging, whilest simultaniously still using in the battle side the etw engine which has severly crippled reasonable melee combat in every following tw game despite a galore of modifications to it.

Hell the last real innovation was in attila for sieges and the effects of a siege in morale... And attila was an exception.

I honestly can't think of any game that did real time mass battle for rank and file better than CA. I've played a few over the years and CA games - Total War games - have always been ahead of the others.

The only other that would get close is the Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation games. They both relied heavily on ranged weaponary and didn't have any of the close combat animations, sync kills or animations or anything near the complexity that CA achieves.

They Sup Com did introduce a lot of really neat systems - auto transports, moving formations of troops and such that made it work really well with skirmish control units operating in rank and file numbers. So that kind of control system could certainly work for a 40K style game.

The downside is both those games have dead development studios that aren't around (and if they are they've bled out their skill/staff that made those games).


So for GW to give the 40K licence to a new studio for a mass battle system; right now CA are the only ones in the business doing that to a high standard. Warhammer TW has also been 3 massive success hits and the 2nd game (3rd a bit too early to see yet) has been CA's longest and most heavily played game ever - even beating out 3Kingdoms which aimed to appease the Chinese market (and one could argue that it might have failed simply due to CA not being as powerful in that market and 3 Kingdoms having a lot more competition in that market with other series, many of which likely don't reach the Western markers).



So yeah right now CA kinda are the best.
RTS has been picking up a bit, but most of the others are more Dawn of War style - which is nothing bad at all and I'd love some larger more open maps and a Dawn of War 1 style game.

That has more to do with ca having had basically 0 competition until recently beyond the new great war western front due to the rts drought rather than CA's skills as a developer.

Even when there were many more RTS games around, CA was still ahead of others. Sure they are not perfect and I'm not saying that at all; but my impression is they've been one of the best in their style of games and have maintained that position.


Sure their AI has always needed work - heck I recall that the old Medieval 2 AI hated doing sieges and often as not would retreat and draw lines. Which is honestly actually fun when it happens a few times and is realistic in terms of attacking a city.

However every other time isn't as fun when you want to have a siege battle as a defender


Or how in Empires I once saw the AI abandon its fortress as I approached to attack even though I'd not brought any siege equipment with me (clicked the wrong button).



To date I'd say the best RTS AI is the Starcraft 2 AI. It scouts, does have a concept of using artillery and holding back; will asses your threat level and doesn't just send attack waves at set times (it will still do this in general, but it will hold back and build up more at times and then hit with a bigger force later); it will retreat from battles it can't win.

It still has predictable elements you can learn; but it is more dynamic than most and has some concepts many other AI don't have. Heck RTS side many AI are " my base - to your base straight line attack waves every X minutes on a timer" style. I've seen the AI in Sins of a Solar Empire lose whole fleets to battle stations even though they'd brought long ranged anti-battlestation ships with them because they commit to the attack with everything

To do it properly, as in aerospace, would be extremely hard. But the model would be the land/air/sea wargame sims out there, not total war.

Unless what you wanted was Dawn of War 1, but tiny. Fun, but not the total war style.

I don't think GW has ever really done sea on any front for 40K as a setting. We know there likely ARE huge sea battles on worlds with vast amounts of sea. Swarms of seasharks and huge leviathan Tyranids; flights of skimmers; huge hulking behemoth ships; twisted rusty war vessles and all from the various factions that we never really see nor hear of because; well; the game happens on land and GW never made ManOWar in Space


And cause that slot is taken mostly by Battlefleet Gothic.


so CA would only have to do the land battles again; air they could do in two parts. Flying units that hover; slow movers and then perhaps just called-in abilities for bombing runs or flighters striking the ground and such.

There are plenty of games that combine air and land (for example the imaginatively names Wargame: AirLand Battle), but you then have are you doing it total war style (some realism), or dawn of war style (everything is a submachine gun). The latter can be done but isn't really the Total war series style.

We'll just continue to patronize TaleWorlds Mount&Blade which is doing everything we've always wanted anyway. If they did 40K, I wouldn't think too much more about TW.

That said yes, Total War has always had multiplayer tactical battles. They've even had multiplayer campaign to a lessor degree (they might even right now), they just don't want to support it.

Why support something like that when you can just continue the status quo and make money doing it by shelling out single player content that will be purchased by default multiplayer or no.

They're not about revolutionizing the industry as they once were, that's what I meant. They're in a comfortable position to just churn out campaigns that cater to single player mode that appeal to an economic war sim, grand strategy gamer than overhaul the tactical battles everyone loves them for.

But even the single player campaigns really don't out shadow the sims and and strategy games already out there.

Last I check they still have some of the same issues with tactical battles that have plague the series for two decades. Please correct me if these long running known issues with AI, sieges, and unit engagement have been resolved with WHTW. I'll be impressed and happy to hear no doubt.

The multiplayer community is smaller, because it's simply not supported. The competitive players additionally need good Internet, and they have to make the time to be online and play regularly. Regular interest (which there is despite what they say) has to happen for long term support.

It's essentially a self fulfilling prophecy, CA says there's no support because there's "no market" (the age old excuse) and so multiplayer is just a backwater until they say otherwise. It's really that simple.

It is interesting though that for 25 years now? There has been a persistent multiplayer player community despite this, and a fairly decent one as compared to other franchises that come and go with no remembrance. There's no shortage of clans, independent tournaments, and battle match commentators, so pretty amazing for 5%?

Multiplayer people just prefer the challenge of another human being over the dumb ass AI that's as predictable as a newb who skipped the tutorial and did a select-all-unit charge straight up the hill directly to the center of your well positioned force for a full frontal fail.

The single player fans always assume their mode is best, and of course they're going to get the attention because that's the easiest avenue to support and develop for under the current platform CA has built up. Which is interesting because that requires them to make the AI believable, and I'm not sure it will ever best a human at the rate they're going with it.

We are in fact in the age of multiplayer gaming right now. Everything is socially driven. CA has already created a smaller scale version of tactical mp a while back called Total War Battles? (if my memory serves) it's was a pretty limited thing, and I don't even know if it's still around. Beyond that they got into mobile gaming and consoles both of which are heavily geared towards social gaming.

So they know there's a market, and of course it's free advertisement when people are logging on to play every day and encouraging their friends to join them. I mean look what drives Warhammer. Tabletop? It seems to be the tabletop right? or is it the books? Don't tell me it's the hobby.

People aren't just here to paint and complete plastic puzzles, you don't need Warhammer for that. I'm not saying it's not a respectable aspect of Warhammer but it's a side affect of the end product than the sole focus the wargame beyond those who enjoy the collecting and making dioramas which is probably a minority. Considering some people make a living as commission painters.

Now, I could certainly harp on about multiplayer campaign and all sort of big ideas, but all I'm asking for is 40000, that it has 8 player (4v4) match capability, LAN, IP, or online host, with an officially supported ladder to ensure fair play and community appreciation, while continuing to improving tactical AI and combat.

GW got it's eyes on the tabletop statistics so why doesn't CA have theirs on the virtual one?

That said yes, Total War has always had multiplayer tactical battles. They've even had multiplayer campaign to a lessor degree (they might even right now), they just don't want to support it.

They.... do though. They do MP balance passes more often they do campaign fixes. They have multiple battle modes for MP, including modes for multiple players. And yes, they have co-op and competitive campaigns for MP.

They go out of their way with MP support, despite the lack of audience.

Voss wrote:

That said yes, Total War has always had multiplayer tactical battles. They've even had multiplayer campaign to a lessor degree (they might even right now), they just don't want to support it.

They.... do though. They do MP balance passes more often they do campaign fixes. They have multiple battle modes for MP, including modes for multiple players. And yes, they have co-op and competitive campaigns for MP.

They go out of their way with MP support, despite the lack of audience.

I'll check into that and report back, to be fair applying my criticisms of old. I'll be shocked if they've brought 8 player PVP back, and as part of an official ladder, but I'm prepared to be mind blown.