Development

[icycalm]

Hello all! Battlegrounds Alpha 3.0 is now LIVE! Well, one part of it at any rate, my newest game: Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster. I chose to forge ahead with its release despite Alpha 2.0 still being in development because... well, because it was ready, really. And because it launches Cult Engine 3, which I've been hyping for years and is now finally at such an advanced state of development that it makes no sense to hold it back any longer. When the guy who does our 40k miniatures finished his work months ahead of schedule, I just couldn't contain my excitement and went ahead and put all the pieces together—setting, stages, models, rules—and the first setting for Battlemaster was complete. It's all playable right now, but I'll take a few days to explain the genesis of the game and how it will work before I open it up to interested players. Then, while that is running, I'll get back to finishing up Alpha 2.0 before resuming work on Alpha 3.0. And note that, since the centerpiece of Alpha 3.0 is Kingslayer—which runs entirely in CE3—any gaming we do in Battlemaster in the meantime, with its much simpler tactics-only mechanics, will be preparation for Kingslayer. There's no dialogue or complex dramatic scenes in Battlemaster: it's just straight-up tactics, so it's much easier to both play as a player, and run as a Game Master; in terms of mastering the interface at any rate, I am not talking about game mechanics here. We simply need to master the increased complexity of CE3, and Battlemaster is the perfect entry point, above all for GMs.

There's lots more coming in Alpha 3.0, but I am not giving away any more today! I'll be filling the table of contents below gradually, as I reveal all the features!


BATTLEGROUNDS ALPHA 3.0 FEATURES

A. Alex Kierkeggard's Battlemaster

--1. Only War

--2. Against Simulation

--3. The Final Frontier

--4. Why Gamers Don't Play Warhammer

--5. Stunthammer

B. TBA

C. TBA

D. TBA

E. TBA

F. TBA

G. TBA

H. TBA


See you on the Battlegrounds servers soon,


ALEX KIERKEGAARD
FOUNDER & CEO CULT GAMES STUDIOS

[icycalm]

1. Only War
The idea for a tactics-only game component for Battlegrounds came for me instantly when I saw the Cult Engine 3 team experimenting with a group-move feature, about three years ago it was. I knew then and there that my Battlegrounds would feature a full-fledged miniature wargame component, or as we call it in the videogame industry, a tactics mode.

Cult Engine 3 Group-move Test
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLNrGoxkX8I



But don't roleplaying games already include a heavy tactics component? Isn't Pathfinder the most complex turn-based tactics system ever?

Sure, yeah. Up to a point. But first of all, the RPG combat systems are designed for a couple dozen combatants at most. Any more than that and combat takes forever, which is why the RPG companies have been trying to introduce mass combat systems since the '80s, with varying levels of success. But these systems can't compete with the dedicated mass combat systems that the wargaming companies have been producing for decades. D&D itself was derived from that industry, and though it blew up the complexity for squad-based combat, it never quite got the handle of mass combat, let alone surpass the dedicated mass combat games.

Even more crucially, the way RPGs work, you can't just run a battle whenever you feel like it: entire sessions may pass without anyone fighting anything. So you can't just hop in the game on a Saturday because you have some free time and play a battle for a couple of hours. That's just not how RPGs work. Worse still, even if they did work this way, it would be dumb to risk the character you've been building up for months or years just for a quick thrill. Combat is serious business in RPGs, because they're supposed to simulate life. Characters don't just fight for the thrill of combat. Well, some of them do. But far from all. And even the thrill-seekers and nutjobs must rein in their impulses if they want to survive long enough to get any good at combat.

So even though my Battlegrounds, and even more my Master of Heroes mode, include a terrific amount of combat at all levels—from 1v1s all the way to armies clashing—they don't quite hit the spot for the diehard tacticians among us.

And this is where my new tactics game comes in.

It's not just a mechanical issue, you see. It's also aesthetic. Because grabbing the combat mechanics from miniature wargames is easy enough. But then in what setting do you place the combat? You can't do this on Golarion without ruining the setting. We're simulating the entire planet one day at a time, which means that months or even years may pass without wars, all the while the tacticians are chomping at the bit for some action.

So you need a new setting in which to run your full-tactics game. A setting where, ideally, there is only war...

[icycalm]

2. Against Simulation
So for three years, on and off, I tried to shove a full tactics game into Pathfinder (and/or Starfinder, D&D and so on), and kept failing to figure out a way to do it without ruining the settings. Why didn't Warhammer, and miniature wargames in general, pop into my head during this time? Well, because I simply... didn't really know much about them. People are used to me knowing everything about games, and having tried everything, and this is almost always true. But this is one exception. I have simply never tried miniature wargames, so it just didn't occur to me that they could be the solution to my problem. Even worse I've always had this idea of them in my head that they... don't take place in developed settings, that they're just drab military simulators, mostly historically-themed, and therefore fundamentally anti-artistic, which in the case of Warhammer is a ridiculous idea since its world is more developed than even those of most RPGs. To be sure, Warhammer's lore is non-interactive, it's just window-dressing, since there are no mechanics in the game with which to shape it. But that's precisely what I needed, since it was the interactive nature of the roleplaying games' worlds that kept conflicting with my desire to incorporate unlimited tactical battles into them!

Actually, I did have one experience with a tabletop wargame that colored all my perceptions of the genre: Advanced Squad Leader. I bought a box of that in the mid-'90s because they carried it at the store where I was buying my D&D stuff, and it looked mightily impressive so I just had to find out what it was about.



It was all thick binders full of rules and stacks and stacks of counters (not miniatures, so it wasn't a miniature wargame... just a plain tabletop wargame), and its tactical complexity looked like it dwarfed D&D's (2nd Edition D&D's at any rate, it was still the '90s remember).



This is how the game's current publisher describes it:

Advanced Squad Leader has set the standard in tactical combat gaming since its 1985 debut. ... No other game matches its flexibility, scope, and challenge. Players can simulate nearly any battle in any theater up to the battalion level. Maneuver 10-man squads, five-man half squads, and individual leaders and vehicles across a combination of over 75 geomorphic map boards or fight a campaign game on one of several highly detailed campaign game map sheets.

It's all very impressive, and even more impressive is Wikipedia's description:

Despite the price tag and the expensive lists of prerequisites for each new module, the game system caught on and new modules continued to be produced twenty-five years after the original release - joining Dungeons & Dragons and Star Fleet Battles as one of what were known as "The Big Three" games of the hobbyist game industry.

By "hobbyist" they mean tabletop: the top 3 high-IQ tabletop games (because regular boardgames like Scrabble are for midwits—and children, which is what midwits remain, mentally, their whole lives long). Star Fleet Battles I know nothing about, by the way, but looking it up now, it's a Star Trek ship battle game that's highly regarded. I always hated Star Trek (it just looks stupidly fake and low-budget), so I wouldn't have looked into the game even if I had come across it in the '90s. But maybe its mechanics are good and can be repurposed, for example to use with Starfinder, where ship combat has been said to be lacklustre. But now SF Second Edition is coming out, so maybe it fixes this. We'll see.

At any rate, you can see that I had a REASON for not looking too hard into tabletop wargames in the '90s: I just didn't like the look of them, even though I respected their complexity. And if you read my Wing Commander essay, you'll see me employing the same reasoning against flight sims, tank sims, and all kinds of military videogame sims. And if you read my Kick Off essay, you'll see me trashing sports sims along the same lines. I just don't like "sims" (also, The Sims, for the same reason, and Second Life, both of which deserve scathing NOT ART essays which I will some day give them). I didn't get into gaming for the drab simulation, you see, I got into it for the ART, and the simulation should only be a MEANS to that and NOT the main goal, as the fundamentally hostile to art sim crowd believes.

And that's why I think Warhammer has been such a huge success! 40K is, after all, "the most popular miniature wargame in the world", and you only need to look at one picture of it to see why no one with their head screwed on straight would prefer the desiccated wargame sims over it. And the reason 40K is more popular then the fantasy version is because, as a wise man once wrote, Science Fiction Is The Ultimate Videogame Theme. (Why does Pathfinder sell 10x more than Starfinder then? It's a long story, for another day.)

So though I marveled at the sheer complexity that greeted me on opening the ASL box, the setting was so devoid of drama (no lore to speak of, unless you think of actual history as lore) and of art (just look at the illustrations!) that I just couldn't bring myself to spend any time trying to learn it while I could be playing Dark Sun and Ravenloft and Planescape with my D&D group. Moreover, I made the purchase mere months before I was due to move to London to start college, at which point I would essentially lose all my friends and have to start a social life from scratch. I lost my entire D&D group when I moved across Europe, and as a result I wouldn't play D&D again for decades, so the idea of trying to look for people with whom to play this drab wargame instead never entered into my head again. I simply forgot about the game and the entire wargame genre... until now.

So what happened now that suddenly reminded me of that one tabletop wargame purchase I had made on a whim 30 years ago?

This is what happened:

[icycalm]

3. The Final Frontier
The above image is 4K btw, but it's nevertheless hugely zoomed out because of how many units it shows, so if you zoom in on the units, they will seem rough to you just because there's not enough resolution to resolve them further. So trust me when I say these models are NOT rough at all. In fact I dare say they're some of the most detailed Warhammer models to be seen in ANY videogame. And you don't even have to trust me, because look:



That is the level of detail of EVERY Warhammer 40,000 unit in Alex Kierkegaard's Metaverse. It's freaking unreal what Cult Games has accomplished here.

HOW did we accomplish it? Just plain hard work and ingenuity. I would explain, but it's coding stuff and you wouldn't understand. Here is the texture for example used for the above model:



Here's another zoomed-in unit:



And another:



And another:



And another:



Even more amazing than the quality of the models is that... they are painted EXACTLY like Games Workshop's reference models in their promotional materials. And when I say exactly I mean identically, down to the very brushstrokes.

How did we do this?

If there are any coders in the audience who want a hint on how we did this, I'll give you two words (a word and a number actually): 360 previews. That should get you on the right track. That and "photoscan, recolor, kitbash", because some of the models allow for customization (i.e. you can buy different gear to attach to them in order to make multiple versions of them), and that's where kitbashing comes in.

Salamanders Primaris Upgrades and Transfers $30.00
https://www.warhammer.com/en-US/shop/Sa ... rades-2020



KX139 Ta'unar Supremacy Armour Fusion Eradicator $62.00
https://www.warhammer.com/en-US/shop/KX ... Eradicator



Warlord Titan Mori Quake Cannon $175.00
https://www.warhammer.com/en-US/shop/Wa ... annon-2020



Note the prices, it's not a cheap game. But this is where Cult Games comes in.

So the quality of our miniatures is out of this world, and it HAS to be because this is... a miniature wargame. The miniatures are everything in this game. If you don't have them, you can't play. If you have them but in low quality, you aren't inspired to play. If you have some but not all, you CAN play, but you feel hamstrung. That's why I am adding 40K NOW to my metaverse. I'd seen attempts before to port the minis over, but I wasn't impressed. When I saw this latest attempt, on the other hand, I dropped everything I was doing—even paused the ongoing Master of Heroes Tutorial—to get the game set up. And btw, only Cult Games has these models. Check all other games: none of them have them. It's proprietary technology. I coded it myself.

So it's a lot of work, but the results speak for themselves, and I wouldn't be able to accomplish it without our excellent Cult Modelling team operating worldwide: dozens of people working for one goal: bringing my vision to life.

The group shot by the way DOESN'T show all the 40K units. I thought it did, when it was first shown me, but it's actually about one-third of them lmao. Warhammer 40,000 includes more than a THOUSAND unique units arranged into TWENTY-NINE unique factions, and we have more or less ALL of them, with one-third of them already ported into the engine, and more on the way.

How come there's a tactics game with over a THOUSAND freakin' units? AND 29 unique factions?!? StarCraft has THREE factions and that's considered A LOT for programmer games. How the fuck does this game have TWENTY-NINE AND RISING?!?

Well that's what happens when you develop a game for close to HALF A CENTURY. Entire generations of developers have worked on the game, then died, and handed off the baton to new generations, while the programmers can't seem to maintain their attention on a game for more than a couple of years, and can't bring themselves to devote more than a weekend to designing mechanics or lore for it. And once they've sold their game they trash it and start from scratch, since they know, after all, that their game is garbage. So what's the point in building on it? You can't build on garbage anyway, you need solid foundations. And the programmers can never seem to get that done.

If you want to see all the Warhammer 40,000 units by the way (and their spicy prices), this is where you want to look (and keep scrolling): https://www.warhammer.com/en-US/shop/warhammer-40000

Have you seen more and cooler units in any programmer game?

The secret of this game's success? No programmer was ever involved in it...

The secret of the failure to port this game to computers over decades? Only programmers have ever tried—until now. Same exact reason btw that there didn't exist a single roleplaying videogame before Cult Engine 1 was released in 2004.

You don't hate programmers enough, if you're a gamer. But you will. Oh you will, by the time I'm through with them.

So when I saw the massed hundreds of units in the group shot rendered fully in Cult Engine 3, I knew I'd found my full-tactics specialty setting and could forget about trying to shove my tactics game into the RPG settings. Here was a setting developed over decades specifically to serve as backdrop for infinite tactical battles, and I knew next to nothing about it because 1) I knew nothing about miniature wargames, and 2) It had never been ported to a videogame because programmers are retarded and instead of porting the game itself they insist on converting it into random genres like a Tetris clone or pinball or whatever the fuck.

And it made perfect sense in terms of lore too. Hell, it made perfect sense even in terms of my philosophy! For isn't Warhammer 40,000 the most far-future setting in all of gaming? Blade Runner is in the mid-2000s, Alien is in the 2100s-2200s. Traveller is 5627. You'd be hard pressed to find much beyond that. What game is set BEYOND 40,000? There's nothing! It is literally the ultimate setting, in the original meaning of ultimate: the last one. And it's also the future of mankind, as envisaged in my philosophy: the end of faggotry ("discussion"), and the start of endless war. Perfection! Game design and philosophy become one when I integrate Warhammer 40,000 into my metaverse. And it is my metaverse's final frontier.

[icycalm]

4. Why Gamers Don't Play Warhammer
You might say at this point, okay, so icy is putting Warhammer 40,000 into his metaverse. Great. But why is he renaming it to Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster though? What is he adding to it? What is he changing?

First off, understand that if all I was doing was converting 40K into a videogame, that would already be a GOTY-worthy achievement, because no one else has even attempted it, let alone succeeded in it. All the 40K programmer minigames you see on Steam ARE NOT 40K: THEY AREN'T EVEN THE SAME GENRE, let alone the same game. Exactly as with roleplaying games: there still wouldn't have been a real D&D game without Fantasy Grounds' release in 2004. Baldur's Gate III IS NOT D&D. It doesn't even have 10% of its features. It's just a tactics game with a mild exploration aspect. There's practically no roleplaying in it whatsoever.

So I am turning 40K into a videogame. That's the first thing I am doing. But that is only the beginning. What else am I doing?

First of all you need to understand how 40K, and Warhammer in general, works. It's not your regular tabletop game. It's way more demanding than any kind of game I've ever seen: tabletop and digital included. It's ABSURDLY demanding, and I only realized this recently while looking into the game in preparation for adapting it into a videogame. So check this out. First you need to understand why the stuff you buy is called "kits" and not "miniatures".

Trygon $92.00
https://www.warhammer.com/en-US/shop/Tyranid-Trygon



Wanna add a Trygon to your army? First off, $92. But that's not all. You thought all you had to do was open your wallet? Think again, pleb.





THAT'S what the $92 Trygon that you bought looks like when you open the box. It looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like the picture on the box. You paid $92 for some bits of random plastic that aren't even painted! Hell, you need to CUT THEM OFF WITH A KNIFE before they can even qualify as "bits"! And if you cut by mistake the wrong bit of plastic, THERE GOES YOUR FUCKING 92 DOLLARS AND YOUR FAKE TRYGON!

And that is only the beginning. Because once you've cut all the bits off, you now need to glue them together! Make a mistake in gluing? There goes your $92 again.

And if by some miracle you manage to assemble everything to look something like the pic, here comes the last and best part that you will DEFINITELY screw up: you now need to PAINT the damn thing, and if you can paint it like the pic, why are you not a famous artist? Is this fucking game only meant to be played by famous artists?

So the correct answer to why aren't you playing Warhammer is: "Do I look like Michelangelo to you?"

It's not that it's impossible to put together a miniature properly. It's that it's A HELL OF A LOT OF WORK, and moreover NEEDLESS, POINTLESS work that's NOT THE LEAST FUN to anyone who isn't an arts & crafts faggot. So what Games Workshop has done is gate the greatest turn-based tactics wargame ever behind an absurd demand TO BE AN ARTS & CRAFTS FAGGOT IN ORDER TO PLAY IT. This is so cosmically dumb that it rivals the programmers' sheer stupidity in spending decades converting Warhammer to EVERY GENRE UNDER THE SUN EXCEPT THE ONE IT ACTUALLY IS. I really lack the words to express the sheer amount of contempt that I feel for both camps of faggots: the programmer faggots and the arts & crafts faggots.

But their loss is my gain. It is precisely because both camps are utterly retarded that I am afforded the opportunity of taking the best work of each and fusing it together via the power of synergy into the greatest tactics game ever: Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster, in which the Warhammer 40,000 setting is the first among many settings that will be introduced.

[icycalm]

5. Stunthammer
So there won't be any arts & crafts faggotry in my game. Every unit comes already perfectly assembled and perfectly painted, something which to achieve in the tabletop version would require great talent, years of practice, and thousands of dollars. Oh sure, you can buy used armies, and you can hire people to paint your armies for you. But if you think that $92 for some grey bits of plastic is expensive, don't look up how much a perfectly painted Trygon costs. And that's just ONE unit in your army! Can you imagine having to paint the same damn miniature 300 times? I'd kill myself—no game is worth such punishment no matter how good. This isn't gaming, this is anti-gaming: it's actively preventing you from playing the damn game, by requiring you to spend entire months if not years on preparation before you can even run a single battle!

To be sure, such absurdly high barriers to entry have their advantages: Warhammer, and miniature wargames in general, are an exclusively straight White male hobby. Roleplaying is much friendlier to morons in comparison because it doesn't even require miniatures, or knowing the rules. All you need is to know a single straight White male to GM the game, and he can run the rules in his head. But in Warhammer you need to be rich, smart and talented merely to BEGIN playing. You must even be an artist!

The funniest demonstration of the above is this video I found:

Rahul and Rebecca's first game of 40k! Tyranids vs Ultramarines Warhammer beginners battle report!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbhFuJwOfoA



This is two male White Game Masters teaching the game to a brown guy and a White woman. Because god forbid the brown and the woman buy a couple of books and read them to learn the game on their own: they need the White guys to take them by the hand and make them understand. And because the White guys know their pets are stupid, they trash half the rules lol! They literally only play with half the rules! But I like this video anyway because on top of the comedy it has great production values and shows how beautiful the game is. The units are large and... look real. I have no other way to put it than this: they are some of the coolest-looking units in all of tactical gaming. So they make the battlefield come alive in a way it doesn't in any tactical videogame I've ever played despite the lack of animation. (And btw, animation is coming... more on which soon.)

Anyway, I got my racism and sexism for today out of the way, but it wasn't (wholly) gratuitous, I want the reader to understand how demanding this game is to play, and not in a good way demanding, i.e. not demanding in player engagement and skill, but in something totally unrelated: arts & crafts mastery. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this entirely new and foreign to gaming dimension actively hurts the game. And I am not just talking the prevention of playing altogether, I am talking it necessarily DUMBS DOWN the game.

Or why do you think the recommended table width is about one metre? It's because that's how far the average person can comfortably stretch to move a unit. Make it any wider than that and only NBA players would be able to play the game, or you'd need to take the table outdoors to bring a crane in! (and remember, it's an English game: you couldn't play outdoors there even if you wanted to). But this utterly butchers the battlefield size! Which has tremendous knock-on effects on the scale and scope of tactics that can be simulated! Why else do you think that Warhammer armies number in the dozens of units and not hundreds or thousands? It's not only that such armies would take forever to assemble and paint (AND cost a fortune!), but the tables simply can't hold them!





Oh sure, there was Warhammer Epic and various other attempts to increase the scale of the battles. But since the table size can't be changed, in order to add more units they had to... make them smaller. And since painting smaller minis is both tougher and less rewarding (they simply don't look as good as bigger ones), the playerbase kept preferring the normal ones, so all "Epic"-type attempts were eventually discontinued. Remember: half the playerbase at the least is arts & crafts faggots who just like to collect and paint AND DON'T EVEN PLAY THE GAME. They even hold PAINTING COMPETITIONS! That's the game many of them prefer! So of course they have a massive influence on the game's direction.

But the biggest influence is... the table's itself. Or have you never wondered why there are no... naval units? I'd like to see the arts & crafts faggots build hamster swimming pools on their tables. Or what about... underwater units? Underground? Zero-G? There's just a huge amount of cool stuff that can't be done on a table.

Even air units is a tough nut to crack, and though there is an air game in 40K with some really cool vehicles to boot, it's not as fully developed as the land game, and as a consequence Warhammer is known above all for its land battles because that's what works best on a table.





Again, as with Epic, there have been attempts to address this deficiency, from 1993's Man O' War (discontinued in 1995) to 1999's Battlefleet Gothic (discontinued in 2013).

But you can see what the problem is right away: in order to fit capital ships on a table, they must be tiny. And if they're tiny, they can't fit any units in them. And if they can't fit any units in them, they can't really interact with a ground battle. I suppose you could have ONE cap ship fly over a 40K battle and utterly obliterate it, but what would be the point? The scale of the land battles just isn't large enough to warrant adding large ships to it, so the ship game was spun off as an entire other game, thereby jettisoning the awesome land complexity on which the game built its name. But this meant that the ship battles by themselves were... boring. At least in comparison to the land game. And that's why every attempt has failed within a few years.





This on top of the difficulty inherent in trying to represent more than one layer on a table. So you can have either a land game, or a space game, or a naval game. But you can't have two full-fledged layers at the same time. Even the addition of a minor air layer to the land is problematic, because how do you hover a fighter ship above a building? The ship can't really fly, it is supported by a base, and if the base is big enough and the building small enough, it can't hover above the building! I don't know how they solve this on the tabletop, but in my Battlemaster it's not an issue, just like blending all layers together is not an issue at all, and moreover my "table" stretches to infinity, and it can accommodate infinite units, which can be zoomed in and out of to any degree desired to admire the artwork and achieve battlefield awareness. It helps by the way that Titan model sizes were added to Cult Engine 3 just over a month ago. Before that we wouldn't have been able to add precisely the largest and coolest 40K units. Now we can add them all, and that was the very last feature needed to make Warhammer fully playable in CE3.

Feature Release: Titan Sizes
https://bouncyrock.com/news/articles/fe ... itan-sizes



But probably the greatest deficiency of the tabletop that stunts the game, more than the reduced scale and scope and layers, is the terrain itself. Look up any image of any version of Warhammer played on actual tables and you'll note that the terrain is always a flat plain with some rocks and ruins thrown in. There are no mountains. No forests. No cities. There aren't even any proper buildings since how would you remove the roofs to run battles inside them, especially on multistory structures? Many units wouldn't fit in normal buildings anyway, and for many of them you'd need a freakin' cathedral to fit them. In short, there are no BUILDING INTERIORS in this game, and even the ruins are always open-air so that the players can reach inside and move the handful of units small enough to fit in them.

You want to see an exception? Here, have one.

I made a Massive Warhammer Cathedral Imperial Palace on Terra | 40k Scenery ‪@Creality3D‬ Ender-5 S1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbHuRZQZ9ig



This guy is a freakin' engineer with an entire carpentry workshop who slaved for MONTHS to make this, on top of being sponsored by multiple companies including Games Workshop, and his build STILL isn't even 1/10th as complex as what can be easily achieved in my game. Moreover, what little set complexity he managed to achieve by dedicating his life to it for months on end IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY OTHER PLAYER. If you go out right now and buy some 40K kits, you will still never play on this guy's build simply because you don't know him. And I bet even people who know him don't get to play on his set because this guy simply doesn't have time to play the game. And even IF you knew him, AND he had time to play with you... you would have to fly to his city, wherever the fuck it is lol. AND lug your army with you (in the special backpacks and carry cases they make for moving your armies lol). And all this to achieve a simple 1v1. You wouldn't even be able to play a 2v2 because it would be 2 more friends of yours flying over from other parts of the world while carrying THEIR armies... only to play on a set that's 1/10th as complex and detailed as what my set builders can pump out in like one day.

THAT'S why this guy calls himself "the king of stupidly massive scenery", because it's STUPID to put all this energy into arts & crafts faggotry when we have COMPUTERS that can render whole PLANETS today.

I mean look at this:

What hides under the surface - realistic diorama / 14 months work / Warhammer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5eBZ4FHjnI



Yeah it's beautiful, but FOURTEEN MONTHS OF WORK??? How is that a game? That's a profession! Moreover, the area is TINY. You can barely run a tiny battle there, and then you scrap the set, meaning 14 months of your life! All the while my level designers can pump out multiple such areas per day, and even link them together to form vast regions!

Plus if you bring tanks and spaceships to the battle you should be able to LEVEL these buildings! But where are the rules for building destruction? All the terrain they sell is already ruins anyway precisely to avoid having to deal with this entire dimension. But that shortchanges the people who've invested hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours to purchase, assemble and paint the bigger vehicles. What's the point of a massive vehicle of war if it can't level anything? Not to speak of constructing buildings. That hasn't even entered anyone's head yet, and would turn Warhammer into a strategy game if implemented (and I WILL implement it).


To be continued...