Warhammer Fantasy's DARKEST Video Game

an endless pilgrimage of the greedy and ambitious fighting and dying in a place now called the city of the dam morheim is a 2016 video game by Rogue factor and set within a particular slice of games workshops Warhammer fantasy world morheim isn't merely a location in the old world however it was in fact its very own separate tabletop system released in 1999 morheim differs from the main Warhammer brand by being a skirmish game rather than a war game definitions might be beneficial here mainly this is a difference of scale Warhammer fantasy is a war game you design customize and battle armies and smash them against the armies your friends build it's an old hobby that goes back very far in time generals have been playing games meant to simulate War for l literally thousands of years skirmish games on the other hand also known as manto Man games are a little bit less defined than war games they're a bit of an unofficial segment of the hobby that has nonetheless been growing more and more popular over the years they're defined if in fact they truly have a definition at all as being smaller scale than true war games you don't control formations but individual soldiers instead often this will also come with a greater degree of customization of those units as a benefit of the tighter scope but that's not necessarily a requirement for the sub genre the other big benefit here and the reason that it's been so attractive of late is that it's much cheaper to get into than the core War Games themselves you can have a skirmish War band set up at a fraction of the cost you'd be paying for a full Army MIM was released as the fantasy battle's counterpart to the popular 40K Skirmish game necromunda that came out in 1995 Games Workshop has continued to release skirmish games as side Ventures ever since with the modern 40K kill team being so popular that my friends forced me to build a team against my will one of those friends zash boox is actually working on a kill team video right now it should be out soon in fact he might have beaten me to release it I don't know yet either way go check him out if you're interested in learning more about the tabletop side of skirmish games cuz going forward we are mainly focused on the video game and the lore behind it MIM is the 2016 attempt to bring the old Skirmish game to desktops and consoles it's actually a very well-like title and Rogue Factor would go on to produce a sister game four years later about necroa which is unfortunately not nearly so beloved morheim city of the Damned is a game where you assemble a war band and Expedition into a shattered City and compete with your Rivals to seize the Forbidden Treasures within a remarkable coincidence happened in the planning of this video I had been planning for weeks that morheim would be my next video after I covered wraith and then as I was already planning this thing long before my mortime streams today's sponsor emails me a few weeks ago and says hey will we love what you do would you partner with us this April and maybe consider doing a more time video for the partnership I have never been so in tune with a sponsor that they flat out requested a video I was already working on while I was play testing the game a lot of viewers on my stream wondered about how to play MIM as a role-playing game and the answer is drenim it's exactly what you're looking for in the 5e compatible setting of drenim magic attracts Magic and the hubristic Wizards in the city of drenim had hoarded enough crystallized magic called delirium to start a chain reaction that ended with a falling star made of pure delirium colliding with the city this great magical oopsy resulted in the city being cursed to high hell you get to play as a Plucky band of treasure Hunters heading into the ruins and navigating the politics of the varying factions that each have their own vision and worldview of what to do when the city of drenim is eventually cleared of the magical Haze that envelops it it's onep part Shadow over insouth and one part more time and it's built to Purpose By Ghost Fire and the dungeon dudes themselves to fit your table as a fully realized campaign setting but this I mean this is old news track andhe's been out for a while but right now they're kickstarting a massive monster manual filled with the creepiest of crawlies to haunt the first city and let me tell you even if you wanted to try to run a MIM campaign instead of drenim you're still going to want this book The Original morheim was much more concerned with fighting other treasure Hunters instead of the roaming monsters in the city itself so the critters in this book are a treasure Trove of content to fill out whichever cursed City you decide is right for your table I really do think you guys should contribute to the kickstarter and look they partnered with me specifically to advertise that but no word of lie morheim fans should also go out and buy the other drenim books too you can even do both at once you can get the books at a discounted price as part of the kickstarter the drenim kickstarter is on its tail end by the time you're seeing this video so don't wait this thing is ending soon let me tell you this is the cursed City for you Warhammer fantasy battles is a legendary setting famous in part for being overshadowed so thoroughly by its spin-off Warhammer 40K fantasy languished for a long time and was eventually replaced and rebooted by age of Sigmar in 2015 I cover the reboot a little bit in my Tempest fall video if you would like to know more in recent years Warhammer fantasy actually regained popularity thanks to the success of the total Warhammer games by creative assembly Games Workshop has somewhat reluctantly by the looks of things been bringing back the old world in a limited sense and it may actually be possible that we'll end up seeing a new addition of morheim for the first time in 25 years fantasy and the old world aren't quite Grim dark in the way that Warhammer 40,000 is an imperial Lon conect can hope to return home to his family's goat herd in a quiet Valley when he's done fighting demons which is a big step up when you contrast it into being rendered in to Corp starch for the glory of The Golden Throne but even if it's not quite Grim dark in the same way it is nevertheless one of the great works of Dark Fantasy and you'll see a massive amount of overlap with Warhammer 40,000 in terms of how the mythology Works especially the chaos Gods there's going to be some comparisons between the two in this video uh if you're unfamiliar with Warhammer 4000 all you really need to know for all of this to make sense to you is that the warp and Chaos uh that's [Music] hell warp Stone word Stone weird Stone these little green shards of pure sorcery have many names there are similarities with how magic Works in both fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 but put psychers out of your head for now it's actually easier if we start this fresh the forces of magic are the result of the unstable and everchanging energies of chaos chaos funnels into the world through two polar gateways used by the old ones for travel into and out of the warp don't call them web boy Gates okay I'm just I'm just I'm asking you all to please turn your 40K brain off for like 5 minutes anyway in The Frigid far reaches of the north The Great webway Gate [ __ ] now I'm doing it the northern gate shatters and from then on the raw forces of chaos ooze into the world unimpeded infecting the world with demonic energies and Invaders but this doesn't work the same way it would if this happened in Warhammer 40,000 raw chaos has an incredibly hard time existing in the mortal world upon touching stable reality chaos refracts like light through a prism spraying across the world as eight distinct Winds of magic which can be individually channeled and used by Sorcerers this is dangerous but it's much less dangerous than sorcery in 40K I'm not talking about psycher powers in 40K we're talking actual honest to God's sorcery the conscious molding of raw chaos energy into magic well in fantasy Sorcerers don't have to do that chaos is diluted enough that if you know what you're doing and you maintain healthy paranoia over safe use of magic you're not inevitably going to become a pawn of the dark Gods like you would with certainty if you were wielding pure undiluted uncut chaos energy the colleges of Magi within the Empire of man no relation learned from the Elven wizard tlas how to use the winds in a safe and stable manner with good education and an abundance of safety precautions Sorcerers aren't that big of a safety risk hedge mes a bit more dangerous which is why magical education is important refracting into the Winds of magic is what happens to the overwhelming majority of chaos energy that enters the old world through the shattered gate but some small amount condenses into Crystal structures and remains pure thankfully this is rare if you ignore the moon don't ask me what the moon is made of you don't want to know these warp stones are pure unfiltered chaos energy capable of fueling works of sorcery to put all but the mightiest of Art Magi to shame extending lifespans curing the sick turning lead to gold all of these things are made possible by channeling the energies of a word Stone but these stones are evil made manifest subject to all the warp sorcery negatives you'd expect demonic possession mutation the corruption of the soul and the shattering of one's mind and even the dark manifestations of laughing gods warpstone is unlimited magical energy but its mere presence will harm and corrupt like nothing else this video is coincidentally my third about collecting magical crystals the first was free energy that was worth great expeditions to acquire the second spice things up a bit by fueling war crimes with the crystals and now we conclude our impromptu Trilogy by raising the stakes once more and making the crystals be demon uranium every faction in Warhammer fantasy has some kind of a relationship with this forbidden substance the forces of chaos welcome it the dwarves do not trust it the High Elves manufacture a safer alternative meanwhile the scaven snort the stuff I'm saying opinions are varied here but most critically to our game today is the relationship between the humans of the Empire and word Stone the relationship with this substance has evolved over time in the setting of the war game words stone is banned by the Empire and confiscated zealously by the witch Hunters of the cult of Sigmar but this prohibition is a recent development that only started a bit over a hundred years before during the Great War of chaos but that doesn't mean that Humanity always had this stuff infecting their souls since time immemorial no Humanity only became aware of wordstone on a large scale after a cataclysmic event 500 years prior in the city of MIM now the Empire of Warhammer fantasy is based on medieval Germany back when they called themselves the Holy Roman Empire which listen as an hrast and myself I am happy to see presented in fiction seriously if I had a time machine with only one charge I would probably waste it and just go back in time and punch voler in his [ __ ] nose based on Germany or not during the era of morheim the empire of man was Cur currently doing their best China impression namely shattering into countless smaller Waring States this was a period that lasted a total of 800 years and was distinctly different in the first and second halves the events that would unfold in more time were a few decades into phase 2 a time that would come to be called The Dark Times complete Imperial collapse morim got a reputation during the Civil Wars as being a pretty safe place to be safety brought people people brought wealth and wealth brought decadence and Corruption the Waring peoples of the Empire made a discovery a twin tailed Comet was soaring through the night sky and headed towards their world Sigmar the hero King who founded the Empire and then ascended to godhood was born on a night when an identical Comet soared through the sky making it a holy symbol to them so naturally everyone went to their nearest astronomer and begged them to figure out where it was going to land after crunching the numbers they all gave the same answer the comet was headed to the city of morheim now normally if you got word that an Interstellar object was going to collide with your home you would probably evacuate but that's not how this looked to the citizens of the Empire imagine if a glowing cross appeared in the skies of medieval Europe and people realized it was going to land on the city of Amsterdam that is basically what this looked like to most people in the Empire they thought Sigmar himself was going to descend onto MIM and take his rightful place as Emperor and then set the world right once more naturally hundreds of thousands of people flocked into the city of morheim in the weeks before the comet was estimated to hit there days before the coming Rapture over come with fervor and excitement the Mast hordes lost all senses of decency in the already decadent culture of morheim they partied like the world was ending and about to be reborn their rry reaching such depths of depravity that the survivors would tell of demons walking freely through the city in its final days and when the object Struck it was not the reward the revelers hoped it would be it was just a comet made entirely of word Stone the resulting Calamity was begun by the kinetic energy shattering the city followed by waves of chaos energy from the comet cursing damning and mutating the souls within the onlookers outside the city declared that the comet was sigmar's Hammer striking the city down for its hubris and greed and damning the Sinners for their decadence morheim became a shatter Place stalked by demons mutants and possessed survivors few dared to enter this broken place save for a few treasure Hunters this would change when these bold individuals returned with green magical shards warlocks and Alchemists soon discovered the power of these warp Stones they could be powerful and decisive weapons in the Civil War or they could turn enough lead to Gold to pay for unfathomable able numbers of troops mercenary War bands were sent into the city to seize as many of the Comet fragments as they could and ship them back to the Barons that funded their hellish Expeditions but they were not alone in their search for the stones for starters the warp drenched Cults of the possessed that had come to inhabit the ruins were desperate to gather these stones for their own malefic purposes not to mention the scheming ratmen who arrived to what what what what's this oh I'm I'm sorry I appear to have received a retraction there are no scaven in more time I seem to have fallen for some kind of elaborate hoax do not trust the rumors of rat creatures skullking into the ruins and dragging cartloads of warpstone and slaves into their tunnels drunken mercenaries and Trauma ridden Comet survivors are not a reliable source of information but another more verifiably Sinister faction showed up in more time as well Vlad Von carstein the infamous vampire count of Sylvania had actually just begun his Reign the same year the comet fell on morheim warpstone has always been useful to necromancers to assist in raising the dead carstein sends his own freshly raised forces into the city of the Damned to take the stones for himself Vlad wasn't yet outed as a vampire in the time period his War bands arrived in morheim in disguises and covered carriages within the crumbling walls of morheim was about the only place in the entire Empire where his dead armies could unveil themselves and show their true monstrous nature lastly two more factions of a less temporal nature triy to take the stones for themselves but we're going to have to rewind aad in order to explain them because they're somewhat tied up in a religious Schism from the Civil War the current Grand theoy basically the pope of the Church of Sigmar was well no two ways about it he was an [ __ ] I mentioned before that the 800-year succession crisis had two distinct halves well this is the guy who made the Imperial government collapse the rest of the way for the first half the conflict was apparently pretty contained there was still an imperial government even if no one could decide who was the emperor the battles were mainly internal fought between feudal Lords eventually however the electors said enough is enough let's sit down and choose an emperor I mean it's been nearly 500 years they managed to come together and choose without much of a problem thankfully they chose Margarita of marienberg to wear sigmar's crown and unite the Empire the feudal Lords all thought she was a good pick since she was still a child and they all felt they could mold her into what they needed instead the grand theognis just before he was meant to Crown Margarita said absolutely not this is so inappropriate I'm not giving the crown to a woman this created a constitutional crisis so severe that it collapsed the Imperial government the rest of the way the various elector counts all came to believe that the only way anyone was getting on that Throne was just by Conquering the Empire outright but let's refocus on the high theognis rather than the conflict he had just sparked the dude hated women so bad he had just collapsed the entire empire into centuries of fragmentation and bloodshed but he was not done yet he turned his sights on the most important enemy of all female priests the city of morheim had an important Abbey in it called The Rock Daughters of prominent noble families had been sent there for centuries to worship Sigmar and learn to serve him in battle as sisters of Sigmar they were sisters of battle I'm not going to lie to you here they were getting popular in Warhammer 40K and it was inevitable a fantasy version was going to get made they tested them out in M time but they never ended up actually reaching the war game itself but the grand theognis wasn't having it he began denouncing the very concept of women being allowed to preach the word of Sigmar still he couldn't make a play yet the sisters were too well connected with the nobility plus they were essentially folk heroes in the countryside but when more time was shattered the theoy asked the people to come together in mour one of the great cities of the Empire has fallen let's all hold hands say a prayer for the dead we're all having a difficult time excepting just how many loved ones we lost to sigmar's hammer but we all need to stand together we need to unite and focus on the Real Enemy feo see The Rock was actually on the outskirts of the city separated by a river The Rock and the sisters survived sigmar's Hammer so with this as his only evidence the theognis told everyone that they survived because they were all witches and made a deal with demons the formerly popular sisters were universally denounced and sentenced to death the witch Hunters were dispatched into the ruins of more time to purge evil sisters included the sisters of Sigmar were pretty clearly framed but they were still badass Warrior nuns so they weren't entirely out of options even if their reputation was in tatters sure the rest of the Empire claimed they were all witches and Heretics but I mean hopefully the sisters could prove their innocence by purging MIM of the evil they had been blamed for they ended up way ahead of the rest of the Empire when it came to their stance on word stone that stuff there that's demon Rock that's the devil's Pebble so they do what any reasonable and rational person would do and they declare war on the entire city and Proclaim that every last [ __ ] here to get rich on warp uranium must die and that's everybody mercenaries Undead witch Hunters Cults sisters of Sigmar and uh nobody else no sixth faction definitely not scaven other factions would end up being at to more time later that said these rules didn't come out in official moretime books they were instead distributed in magazines and none of these extra factions made it into the video game I'm not going to cover them here because based off of the ones that I've sought out and read the priority seems like it was just on making the factions playable not really to implement them into the lore of the city of the Damned the extent of the lore was Orcs are here cuz Orcs like raiding stuff dwarves are here cuz they're poor and they need money they're playable if you want them but they're not terribly well integrated into the setting the MIM setting and the Skirmish game set within is a particular snapshot of time it's set within the 300-year period where warpstone isn't illegal and the Empire is shattered in pieces eventually the Empire long divided comes together under a new emperor and a great war against chaos pushes back the tide of Darkness including a new ban on wordstone in the mop up after the war the Imperial Army decides that leaving more time intact to spit out more demons and attract more warpstone Smugglers uh would kind of be untenable M time is raised completely and the City of the Damned ends up being merely a ghastly legend by the time of the war game people are going to want to know what became of the sisters after this being that they're the only MIM specific faction and their fate was kind of tied up in and how well they did in this conflict well the answer is that it's a bit unclear if morheim was still around and cursed to be destroyed 300 years later I mean clearly they didn't win outright some Warhammer books state that the purge completely ended the sisters of Sigmar but that doesn't appear to actually be true numerous other books over the years and into the modern day reference them as still existing though with nowhere near the prominence that they previously had I'd imagine that the mtime chapter largely wiped itself out they clearly didn't win and cleanse the city and I mean one struggles to imagine how they would even still be around 300 years later when the city was cleansed I mean for one thing their moner is definitely still within the uh warp energy blast zone and that's just the start of their problems I mean how the hell would they even have been keeping their population numbers up for 300 years it's possible that some little off shoot monasteries were founded once the initial witch hunter Purge was finished and maybe just maybe these purely speculative monasteries were sending more sisters of Sigmar to serve in the ruins the woman hater in charge of the cult of Sigmar didn't maintain power for too much longer and the following theoy was much more concerned with fighting vampires nevertheless the sisters seem to have survived in some way whether it be through offshoot convents or or Exiles individually passing down their Traditions to apprentices whatever they did the baguer order survived the events in more time the Warhammer fantasy roleplaying Altdorf supplement has this to say about them the cloysters of the sisters of Sigmar in Altdorf is home to an unfortunate order of devout sigmares who once had their Convent in the now ruined city of morheim they are grudgingly allowed to exist and operate in in the capital so the sisters live on now taking the roles of paladins that the world mistrusts or rather than the Beloved folk Heroes they once were which somehow makes them cooler actually but nevertheless that's the setting we're a war band in the cursed City back in its Heyday if you're a human faction I mean I guess don't get too attached to your units cuz even if they survive to get rich I mean they're all going to die from warp energy or have their body budies get so twisted up a few years later from mutation that they'll end up growing eyeballs between their toes these are four profit Chernobyl First Responders determined to seize fragments of the Reactor Core let's not think too hard about how screwed our war bands are and let's just focus on the here and now now before we start carving off slices of the video game and passing them around the table I have an announcement roughly every year I like to throw a community event where we all gather together together and be thankful for the things that really matter namely playing MMOs together as a community also I'm not really sure why this segment turned into a Thanksgiving joke in April but uh I I I'm I guess I'm just going to commit to the bit anyway I don't usually review ttrpg MMOs on this channel because I view that as an entirely different skill set for game reviews so instead we experience them through community events as a community we already played DDO nearly 2 years ago never winter online was last year and this year I want us to crack open the old Warhammer fantasy MMO but William says my uncle groggy waking up from his turkey coma in front of the football game he's no longer watching that MMO has been offline for a decade and yes that's true but it's also true that there's a private server that is still active hop into my event Discord linked below if you're interested in joining us to experience the old world in all its Glory we're starting in June and we'll be playing the entire month and forming a nice big Guild I hope to see you guys there now pour some gravy on the like button and consider subscribing if you like reviews of all the video games related to tabletop franchises when we boot up more time an animation of black and white images on parchment plays with a narrator explaining the basics of the setting of more time I have way too much self-awareness to comment on this in any way once that's done playing we hit the loading screen which isn't something I would normally comment too much on except this time it's worth a mention the Dark Fantasy Vibes are so ridiculously plentiful that I'm certain they brought enough to share with the class some of it is just that Warhammer fantasy art style mixed with good art Direction and lighting and then the narrator greets you and you just immediately know that this game absolutely has its tone down to an art form just another day in the city of the Damned I was hooked before I even started this atmosphere and art style is consistently great throughout the entire game though with one small caveat on some maps you're going to have to turn the brightness up to see where you're going which makes the game look awful but so long as you keep the Shadows cranked as is intended more time nails that aesthetic the entire game it looks remarkable for a 2016 game now going forwards I'm going to make a lot of comparisons between more time and XCOM more time coming out in 2016 in the XCOM reboots Heyday clearly takes a lot of inspiration from that series but this comparison is done with more purpose than lazily claiming that morheim is the Dark Souls of XCOM likes I would never be so lazy in my videos I would do it in my streams this is the Pokemon Snap of of of of XCOM the people reject my message because they know it's the truth if you screenshot these these monsters then it becomes Pokemon Snap the comparisons to XCOM are specifically valuable to see the ways in which the two games differ and how those differences often stem from Mor time's tabletop routes moretime makes it clear from the start that this is a more hardcore experience than base XCOM being more akin to Iron Man mode there will be no Mission restarts no checkpoints to reload no saves coming for better odds and I don't believe that this is just an attempt to force Gamers to get good you know because morheim is the Dark Souls of morheim skirmish game is unique in that it's intended to be played in a campaign mode with your war game Circle over a span of a few months you certainly can play single matches of more time but the game is at its strongest over a long period of time this campaign mode from the table tetp is the core of how the city of the Damned video game functions the base gameplay was already there back in the 1999 version gaining War gear leveling up units injury tables Perma death even the specific types of missions you'll be playing it's all here so if MIM city of the dams campaign seems like a more hardcore version of the XCOM campaign it's because the original Skirmish game was just kind of like that you know there are no take backies in the city of the Damned because you can't reload to before your buddies scaven routed your army last Thursday you had to live with the consequences of losing a match now another interesting point of comparison hits the second we hit play these games start very differently when you begin eneme unkknown your first randomized Squad is already on Route via the sky ranger you hop right into a mission and you get blasting when you hit play in more time however you instead immediately start building your squad and customizing them this is actually more than a superficial difference between the two games this is a loadbearing disagreement in style XCOM operatives are scaled down RPG characters you get a bunch of them as blank slates they'll eventually earn a class and follow down the perk tree fores said class in time as they get more of these abilities and gather more War gear they become this team of customized miniature RPG Heroes MIM superficially resembles this but it is not the same your warband characters aren't scaled down RPG characters they're scaled up war game pieces your characters aren't blank slates but they also don't start locked off into classes either it's more like they have a starting body or a chassis that you build off of it determines your starting and your maximum stats how many actions the character can take what weapons and armor efficiencies they have and it comes with a unique perk that might affect what the piece will be good or bad at then you start giving them War gear from the list of stuff available to your faction at the merchant then finally you layer on Feats from a common list you aren't bound to classes in any way just to proficiencies the character types you choose are basically just the starting torso that you add on to as though you were a assembling a war game piece from spru to add even more complexity to this there's also different unit categories Your Leader Your Heroes henchmen and you can have an oversized impressive unit in XCOM your units start identical and they will diverge to become wildly different in morheim the opposite occurs they start out very different but as you build them they will converge into General archetypes such as Archer or tank bringing their individual strengths and weaknesses with them into the role you can have a regular henchman Warrior unit and give it an almost identical build to your mercenary ogre and they will still perform differently within the archetype you're working with and all of this is before we even hit start it goes without saying that more time is a very crunchy game your first warband will have limited options you start at rank one and will gradually gain more slots for units as well as earn more unique unit types that you couldn't recruit at level one by level five you'll have everything unlocked though and future War bands can start at this rank so you can build the team you want right from the beginning this is kind of nice to prevent you from getting overloaded but it does have a big downside in regards to new players I'll cover that later in association with the difficulty for now let's talk about the game play itself rather than the squad management now as soon as you've built a war band you've unlocked multiplayer it's a bit odd since there's no matchmaking you have to go and join someone else's matches which are few and far between in 2024 you're almost certainly going to just want to challenge a friend if you want to play online I actually did this before I tried the single player because I wanted to play on a Level Playing Field against another fresh player Jacob Crow from crows perch oh yeah just standing there staring you don't have any any guns though oh [ __ ] oh no I don't have oh no the red has guns it's all fun in games until the rat pulls out a Glock mtime is a very fun multiplayer game you and a circle of friends can do this as a campaign if you'd like starting as blank warbands and challenging each other to matches and complete all your W Stone orders that way now what we learned from our multiplayer matches is that faction balance is actually kind of a big factor here Crow struggled a lot with the scaven they're weak and fragile but wildly fast to compensate they specialize in ganking enemy stragglers and chipping away at the enemy they can wipe out units so quickly and Escape before their allies can do anything to stop it but if they get bogged down and end up in a straight Squad to Squad fight they're in trouble unless they've already picked off half the enemy War band this is all well and good for asymmetric gameplay except that scaven have an incredibly hard time against the tankier factions if you're up against a band of sisters or a melee focused mkw War band you're in for a really hard matchup honestly this is a game that could have used a final major patch and it's not just to get the balance right there's also plenty of bugs and bits of Jank that were never quite fixed like the annoyingly stiff pathing all over the Internet more warheim has the reputation of being a badly assembled mess but there are a tremendous number of diard fans who claim it as their badly assembled mess it's a cult classic like that and I can see why now let's talk campaign and battles each faction campaign is built from two acts of four story missions per act plus dozens of generic missions in between that you'll have to do in order to level up your team and gather word Stone you can send shipments of wordstone that you collect on the maps off to three different factions that will offer you differing rewards as you grind more reputation with them some of these rewards will even let you hire units from other factions which is a neat bit of complexity your primary faction however is your sponsor and they're going to periodically send you timed requests for wordstone shipments of certain sizes missing a shipment means that they send you another request for an even larger one missing four shipments at any time means your campaign is over you lose so you spend the majority of the game feeling like you're on the clock to grab as much wordstone as possible the majority of the cash you're going to get comes from these shipments so you're going to end up being broke most of the time then you'll get big dumps of cash from the shipments and be able to boost your warb band's power and gear in one big spending spree everything in mtime is going to cost you money though training feed learning spells enchanting your gear you need big dumps of money to make these Squad improvements but you've also got expenses that complicate this someone gets knocked out during a mission well their treatment ain't free plus you guys think your soldiers are here in the city of damned out of the kindness of their hearts they demand a wage for every Mission they take part in failure to pay them will result in their wages getting more expensive each day as it collects interest and eventually after 7 days they'll just leave leave the party and take all their Gear with them paying these guys and healing an injury or two each Mission isn't a huge expense though so long as you win the battle you should be able to pay everyone with just the reward money it's when you start losing that things can get bad for you m time isn't like XCOM which is generally balanced like a sort of timed RPG in that game series enemy difficulty doesn't scale to your squad level by and large it scales based on how long the game has been going on for it's possible to have an efficient Squad that's always ahead of the power curve or if your game is going badly then you'll end up behind the curve and struggle to get caught up but generally speaking game balancing is designed so that as long as your campaign isn't going too badly your troops are balanced to be strong enough to always have the edge on power levels against your enemies it's balanced so that you are more likely than not to win the missions but morheim isn't balanced like a roleplaying game it's balanced like a war game you're always going to be pitted up against enemies whose War bands are built with the same power level you've got I mean that's just good manners in a war game isn't it so morheim unlike XCOM isn't designed on the assumption that the player should have the advantage every single battle is meant to be an even match which means you're going to lose battles the game balancing adapts to this assumption if you lose a battle in XCOM sorry mates your campaign's probably over your crack squad has been wiped out to a man and you're forced to try to get back over the progression curve with whatever meager reserves you've built but in MIM the consequences are much less dire and it needs to be because you are going to lose battles your soldiers are going to get koed but unlike XCOM that doesn't mean they're dead it just means they have to roll on the injury table which does have death as a possible result but it's not that likely still it's going to happen to you now and then over a long campaign we dodged one what's the damage of my boy look how they massacred my boy this is especially pertinent early on your one advantage is that the AI isn't as smart as the player both in terms of gameplay and in terms of how they build their squads once you know what you're doing you're going to end up de facto having the edge because your units are well built well equipped and you know how to keep them working in Synergy your win percentage is going to go up over time as the game progresses out of the early game and you end up with an efficient Force to work with you'll even be able to safely attempt missions where the enemy has greater force level than you and have decent expectations of success but you see all of this combines to form a problem M time is very hostile to new players you start out as a rank one warband when you first boot the game which might mean that you don't even have decent hero units depending on which faction you pick and you need to start from here with zero game knowledge and smash your head against enemies repeatedly and try desperately to make good choices until your War band has made something of itself but you don't know the game yet so you're going to spend your money on dumb stuff you're going to lose missions and you're going to make mistakes and you're going to get your units killed and then you'll start missing shipments and then you won't make any money and then you're stuck with all your bad units and your win ratio will stay abysmal all this to say you are almost certain to fall into a rapid Doom spiral your first few games of more time all of the difficulty of this game is dumped on new players at the beginning of their first first campaign and that's going to scare a lot of people off word of advice if you're a new player you can make your first runs a lot more tolerable if you follow a few steam guides when you first start the game does get easier but when you begin completely blind the game will be at its most difficult I'll drop a guide I found into the description and that should make your life a little bit easier but for all that said once you get out of the early game and you have some game knowledge more time can be very forgiving you won't lose often and when you do it's not going to kill your run now the caveat to all of this that I just explained in regards to power scaling is the campaign missions these missions are at fixed power levels so the best practice is to go into them a little bit overleveled it's a welcome break from the difficulty of the regular missions and it's also going to give you room to breathe as you try to finish the objectives these story maps are really well done and they're a big highlight in terms of level design there aren't many of them though and so you'll end up repeating multiple times the objectives you get on these Maps can be overwhelming you're trying to accomplish a checklist of tasks which are largely about going there grabbing that thing or killing this guy over here but the list of stuff you need to do expands like you would not believe it's like when you're assigned chores and then every time you're almost done they hit you with oh and one more thing ultimately though despite tedious story missions and a truly terrifying amount of grind that you'll have to do in generic missions M time manages to be an addictive and frankly amazing game I loved every second of my play test and streaming it with the community and when I was done I just I just kept playing more time is so good I really recommend picking it up it's a video game that truly lives up to the tabletop it was adapting and it's still a name that people talk about to this very day and I'm thrilled to hear that it would be cool to see more from this game line whether it be a sequel video game or if not a skirmish game release to accompany the return to the old world would be amazing to see a big thanks once again to everyone who made it to the streams I'll be sure to give everyone the heads up next time I do a stream week and I'll start doing some smaller streams here and there from now on thanks everybody and I hope to see you next time

Channel: William SRD

Views: 108,946

Keywords:

Id: WmIda304Exk

Length: 45min 52sec (2752 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024