I accept full guilt for any irrelevent tangents this thread may have gone on...what can I say, I relish a chance to talk to fellow 40k fanatics.

Just a few ideas:
-For necron particle whips, you could use the Vasari battleship capital's pulse beams.
-Nova Cannons, Torpedo barrages, star pulses, etc. could be triggered special abilities, but take far less antimatter and are available for free
-Tyranids need to eat planets. 'nuff said.

Please don't ask me to put my money where my mouth is, as I have no programming skill whatsoever...feel free to use or ignore these ideas as is practical.

particle whips, good idea, we hadn't thought about those, but that should work really well.

The torpedo idea is the one we've had for a long while, but it's starting to seem like it has insurmountable problems, so until the modding tools come out, torpedos will just be a missile weapon with a cool animation, the ability to bypass shields, and a longer reload time (to represent special orders not always going through).

Tyranids are a very unlikely possiblity (we're sorry) because we don't have anybody who is enough of a masochist to want to get them working (eating animations and endless ofher problems that the iron engine isn't designed for).

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww....................:( Relic wouldn't put 'nids in Dawn of War either.

Torpedoes would make a good extra-slow ROF, extra-high damage weapon that bypasses shields, but some kind of countermeasure for dealing with tin fish is pretty key to BFG gameplay mechanics (not that you have to follow those to the letter...Dawn of War had some problems emulating Eldar being effective at all). Perhaps some sort of manufacturable, kamikaze strike craft? Though that would get kind of annoying as you'd have to have multiple differant hangar types for ships that have tubes AND launch bays...

Looks great, keep up the work!

Hopefully 'nids will be in DoW 2 when it comes out next year, at least.

Hey was just wondering 'bout a status update. Where are you guys in the MOD production now?

Infidel Escort


Also big size comparison pic on the Modcraft site.

Personally I'd love to try and do some nids *flagellates self*, but model-wise the problem stems from the fact they have no pre-fixed weapons, meaning there's about 6 different configs for just their smallest ships. We could always resort to "standardizing" them though, by hacking off all 500 of their special rules.

Man, what Dawn of War did to the Eldar made me cry. I mean... they didn't even give them access to their basic trooper... the Dire Avenger... COME ON!!! Hell, I'm putting off buying Soulstorm for fear of seeing how badly they butchered the Dark Eldar (possibly the most challenging, yet insanely badass when properly executed race in the tabletop game).

That said... the models you guys are makin' for the mod look pretty sweet. How many people do you have working on this thing right now? I have no idea if it's allowable or not to steal voice-acting from other games for mods... but the game WH40K: Fire Warrior, has some cool voice acting in it, probably some of which could be applicable to ship responses when clicked and what have you. Just a thought.

wow, a BFG mod would be amazing. I wish I knew more about modding. I would help you! All I know about is the minis game itself if you need any playtesting or something.

Right now, we've got inert's awesome models and a lot of really good ideas that'll come into their own when the mod tools come out. I'm about to do the ship .entity files for the third time, so we should be able to see how the ships play, which'll be interesting.

Also, about the nids, half their weapons are close quarter tentacles and claws, so even getting that to work at all will be an excercise in masochism that'll end with a horrible looking result.

And the fact that you have to choose differant combinations of weapons for each and every hull...I may not know my way around a binary tree, but I do know my way around the basics of the Iron Engine and I know that if those silly appendages on the Jurna Fabricator's don't do anything, you modelling/animating chaps will be hard-pressed to get results out of a Tyranid bioship.

Orks should be an interesting endeavor...how do you plan on handling Roks?

err here's a suchestion or two 1. when tyranids are attacking a planet just say their bombs are tyranid assault spores and you don't have to do eating animations they could just attack with acid pods and spike/spine cannons as well as bio bombers and bio fighters metal eating bacteria would be good to.

Right, but how should we do the ships's meele weapons? It'd be very anticimactic if you finally get that cruiser with the massive claws to an enemy ship... and it just sits there, doing nothing as the other ship's hull points go down. That and converting feeder tentacles to rigid rams would not only be hard but look terrible, so nobody would be satisfied and it'd just look horrible. If we leave that stuff out, then the tyranids lose a lot of their awesomeness and might as well be a skinjob. :NOTSURE: I mean sure, we could put them in with a few predetermined models of ship and no meele weapons, but it'd still get put off till last because the ships are so compilicated.

Roks will be weird, but I'd say they should just have a really fast turn rate, and let the inertia be damned. Other than that, we're trying to make the capitol ships and cruisers (which are much larger ships of the line that can handle themselves in a fight) upgradeable.

Maybe Roks should be ships where you just send them into a grav well and they waste some infrastructure on a planet and expending themselves in the process, rather than making them an actual ship (which they by no means are).

That'd be interesting, or maybe make them mobile defense platforms? That might work, but invasion fleets tend to have tons of roks with them, so that might not be the best solution. Taking enemy infrastructure will be hard and an odd effect to think about, but it might work, although I still think that treating them like a very special ship would be the best way to do things, although they should be able to sacrifice themselves to assault a planet. Other than that and some funky movement rules I think we could deal with by making the turn rate really high and the strafe speed the same as the forward maximum, roks are treated as ships by the bfg rules, so doing the same makes sense.

Not to be antagonistic (those are some good ideas), but BFG also treats minefields as regular squadrons.

Methinks we're thinking too much about roks...

Still am not done painting. I painted some today. I'll try to get pictures up soon but I don't know if I can get a better camera...

Thanks, thrawn.

And yes, I think we are thinking too much about roks, i'd say just leave it at treating them as ships because the alternative is buildings, which have a lot of problems that might be insurmountable. Maybe if we get to make new types of entities, roks'll get upgraded, but otherwise, I'd just leave it as a ship that can move the same speed in any direction and also acts as the orks' transport.

Hey, did you realize that Roks is an anagram of Orks?

I can't believe I just noticed that...WAY too much scrabble can do crazy things to you...

Anyway. How exactly is inter-planet travel going to work? Phase lanes and warp portals are not exactly similar...

They aren't, but there are certain routes in warp space that are much more navigable than others, so they are used for all but the most desperate travel, and they are much like phase lanes, in that they connect two points, so the analogy actually works surprisingly well. It's a lot like the age of sail (something that can be said for all but the ordinance in bfg), when the seas were still dangerous and the currents still unpredictable, so people stuck to certain routes which they knew had favorable winds so they could get to their destinations safely.

However, we will be handing out some 'enhanced mobility' to races that get it in the lore, so the eldar will be able to make webway portals a la vasari and the necrons'll be able to phase between planets like the eldar can. Other than that, we're not sure.

The necrons don't even use warp portals...it's just ZING and they're off. It scares the living shit out of the Eldar and Imperium. Hell, even the 'nids use the warp! Krezzy stuff.

Is there going to be a way to factor in the Astronomican into Imperial ships?

what about the machine god have we talked about that mabey the imperials should get an amour or weapon bounus or did we agree to leave all that confusing stuff out?

Imperials have a better armor type, it does a bit better against weapons batteries because of their heavy prow armor. The bonus is wrapped around the ship though, because directional damage will be really hard to do. The battle stats and mechanics are one thing that isn't bery likely to change, because this mod is based off the tabletop game, so the stats are already laid out and (relatively) balanced, and make sense in the fluff.

The navigation differences are probably going to be glossed over with a few races getting vasari style mobility, while everybody else has to make due with phase travel that may or may not have a different speed from the average. I mean, other than Tau, the races still have to use the same type of technology, no matter how they implement it, they're still sailing the same warp currents. At best, it'll be the difference between a clipper and a fast sail frigate, which isn't much. Except for the tau, that is. They're starting to seem like a boom race that doesn't start out all that powerfully, but gets to be really deadly.

wait how big is the file going to be plus are we all added in a special thanks thing for help with insight and stuff like that?

The Tau actually have pretty terrible warp jump tech. They're sluggish even compared to an Emperor battleship. (just in terms of background/facts, not gameplay)

Yeah, that's why I excluded the tau, their jumps are about 1/5th the speed of true warp jumps, but they're safe and reliable.

The filesize is going to be what it's going to be, and don't worry, you'll get something good for your help.