Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds Alpha 3.0 is now LIVE!

[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

--6. Enter the Battlemaster

--7. Battlemaster Tutorial

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).

[icycalm]

6. Enter the Battlemaster
If you ultimately look at all the different Warhammer games that Games Workshop has brought to market over the last 39 years—and there are dozens of them—it becomes clear that they've time and again tried to build a complete strategy game. We've already seen Epic 40,000, the naval Man O' War, and Battlefleet Gothic, but there's also Aeronautica Imperialis, with just flying units:



Adeptus Titanicus with just mechs:



Necromunda with complex, multilevel structures with interiors:



And Space Hulk with ship interiors:



Of course all of them at different scales, and therefore incompatible with each other.

When I learned that they even tried selling HEXES at one point, I'd had enough, and couldn't believe that I was the only person in the world who could see what they were doing: trying to piecemeally build a full strategy game but being hampered again and again by the damn tabletop!

The hex game is called Mighty Empires and was "intended to add a strategic layer to Warhammer Fantasy Battle giving rise to campaigns where the results of one battle would affect later battles".

Part strategic overlay for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, and part board game in its own right, Mighty Empires might be one of the more unusual Warhammer games. It came with beautiful hexagons building out entire continents of woods, rivers, mountains, fortresses, cities, and the rest, allowing those who had the space and inclination to play all-consuming campaigns with groups of dedicated friends. There’s still something stirring about the rows of plastic tokens representing entire fleets, armies, and monsters.

It even included simple rules for naval warfare, and when the Man O'War game was later released, it could ostensibly replace them. All that was in the early-'90s, but apart from a few expansions offered via White Dwarf magazine and a 2007 version with scaled-down rules, the concept never took off. And they never even tried a 40K version.

So 35 years ago there were already people at Games Workshop who wanted to put everything together, but they have still not managed it, and Warhammer remains a mostly land game with some airplay. Now we're hearing rumors that Battlefleet Gothic may be coming back [ > ], but what are the chances they'll print table-spanning troop carriers that land and disgorge hundreds of troops onto the battlefield? It simply can't be done on tabletop, and the just-announced Dawn of War IV [ > ], though sporting terrific animations, looks exactly like every previous Dawn of War which look exactly in terms of scale and mechanics like every Company of Heroes all the way back to 2006, and could run on a 360.

So what's the point of 6 GHz processors, 128 GB of RAM, the RTX 5090 with its own 32 GB of super-fast GDDR7 RAM, and multiterrabyte SSDs that rival RAM in speed? Today we COULD have full planets that zoom into troop carriers and Necromunda-style hive cities, all seamlessly blended, with dozens of players and thousands of units, but no one's doing it. Instead, this is the tabletop cutting-edge lol:

Magnetic Flex - The Modular Movement Tray System
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... ray-system



It's a tray that can accommodate units of varying base sizes so you can move large numbers of units quickly on the tabletop. It's basically mechanical drag-select if you're too dumb to use a computer and mouse.

Meanwhile Cult Engine 3 can add fog-of-war, line-of-sight (because on the tabletop everyone always has full visibility) and going into the battlefield blind without even knowing what units the other players are bringing (unless you've scouted them strategically), all of which are impossible on tabletop.

Meanwhile the programmers are just reskinning 2006 Company of Heroes to infinity... or giving us inane shit like FPS minigames no one asked for.

So who is dumber, the programmers or the tabletop crowd?

I don't care. I'll leave that question to psychologists, and I'll just take the tools from the former, and content from the latter, and, melding it together, build, first the greatest tactics game ever, and then the greatest strategy game.

And it all starts with Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster.

Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster Theme: Battlemaster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQD17O0R7u0

[icycalm]

7. Beyond Warhammer
But billing Battlemaster as "the ultimate tactics game" invites comparison with Master of Combat, and indeed Pathfinder itself. Aren't Pathfinder tactics deeper than Warhammer's? So let's break this down in detail to understand exactly how everything fits together, and that no part of Battlegrounds the way I have built it is redundant or superfluous.

• Roleplaying Campaigns: Battlegrounds' roleplaying campaigns feature combat from 1v1 all the way up to armies clashing controlled by rival kingdoms, so they feature the full breadth of tactics and strategy possible, and all of it of course powered by the deepest turn-based combat system ever: Pathfinder First Edition. But this combat can only be launched via roleplaying, so isn't available every day of the week. Entire sessions may pass without combat, and the players could be playing for months if not years without gaining control of an army. Moreover, when combat or war do occur, their results can be devastating on the world, and the players' characters. So it's often advisable to avoid combat altogether, and the roleplaying always holds center stage. Which makes sense, since these are roleplaying campaigns.
  
  
• Standalone Adventures: Activated via the 4X layer/Master of Heroes via the Ultimate Modularity mechanics, these adventures are shorter than the campaigns, and their results are generally less impactful on the roleplaying metaplot, with the exception of the rare higher-level ones. But they run on the exact same system, and they can feature all the same types of tactics and strategy, it's just that they are shorter and less important, and the players can explore them and experiment with them with a greater variety of lower-lever parties and characters in a more adventure-of-the-week TV series format rather than the epic-cinema-trilogy format of the campaigns.
  
  
• Master of Combat: Based primarily (but not exclusively) on Paizo's endless supply of Path/Starfinder Society Scenarios, these one-shot scenarios are also accessible via the 4X layer/Master of Heroes, and though they do feature some roleplaying, they are primarily combat-focused. And this combat is again powered by the ultimate tactical combat system that is Pathfinder First Edition. But the parties involved are mostly 4-player, so players won't be engaging in huge battles here. There is the odd capstone scenario that brings together multiple parties, but those still barely reach the typical scale seen in miniature wargames, or tactics videogames for that matter, and they will take forever to resolve because of the complexity of Pathfinder combat, which is designed for small parties. So the correct way to think about Master of Combat is as the ultimate SRPG: same sort of scale as the Japanese videogames like Fire Emblem, but on steroids due to the massively increased complexity of mechanics and environments. Regarding the metaplot, a couple of these scenarios do impact it, but the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of these have no perceptible impact, so the players can wildly experiment with characters, builds and tactics without having to worry that their consequences can bring the world down around them. Except for those that can bring the world down around them. Which will mostly be discernible by their descriptions before being activated, so that the players can come prepared.
  
  
• Arena Master: It's no longer a secret that I am preparing yet another game/mode to slot into Battlegrounds: Alex Kierkegaard's Arena Master. I've already teased this a couple times on Discord and the forum over the last year, and now it's time to unveil it. Have you ever wondered how you'd fare if you could use your Divinity: Original Sin party to fight other players' parties in versus combat? That's what my Arena Master is: versus CRPG, but of course powered once more by Pathfinder First Edition instead of whatever programmer-made garbage system the CRPGs are running, and with all the arenas plugged into the 4X layer/Master of Heroes, with dozens of arenas to unlock and fight in, and perhaps ultimately even take over and control, and all of it running in stunning Cult Engine 3 graphics.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This is one of the arenas, as a preview: a wrecked pirate hangout that can only be discovered by sailing, or I guess flying for players with the means. It's absolutely massive and features broken ground and water as hazards. So now we're finally getting to a part of Battlegrounds that's more about combat than roleplaying—indeed pure combat—as you can fight in here any day of the week, any hour of the day, against Cult Intelligence (CI) or other players if they're game, without having to worry about setting up the battle via the plot or affecting the metaplot. Though if you do well enough and take over the arena, and that bolsters your efforts on the 4X/Master of Heroes layer, then that CAN affect the metaplot at some point down the line. Plus every arena has its own plot that you unlock as you defeat foes in it, until you take it over, and that's also distantly related to the metaplot, like everything in the game. But you don't have to worry about any of this on a day-to-day basis while fighting as many PF1-powered battles as you want in these dozens of discoverable and unlockable arenas of tremendous variety, from grimy 1v1 fighting pits all the way to celestial or infernal 10v10 arenas where even the gods might take time out of their day to watch the fight.
  
  
• Battlemaster: And finally we arrive at Warhammer. No plot, no metaplot—or rather, there is a plot and a metaplot, but they aren't interactive, so have no mechanical impact—and the battles aren't mere 4v10s or whatever, but involve dozens of combatants at the least, and can scale up to thousands with dozens of players thanks to Cult Engine's online and save-load features which means battles can last for days, weeks or even months, as opposed to the tight, usually single-day schedules imposed by the tabletop (a typical Warhammer tabletop battle lasts 1-4 hours). Are the Warhammer mechanics simpler than Path/Starfinder's? Yes, but they still dwarf any tactical videogame's you've ever played, and Warhammer's increased scale thanks to the hundreds of units more than compensates for the reduced options compared to the RPG systems. And when you add in the fact that, after I am through improving the game, I will have added all the various games/layers/units released by Games Workshop into a single megagame, you really do get the ultimate mass-scale turn-based tactics game in my Battlemaster.
  
  
• Warmaster: I haven't unveiled this yet. It's coming right after Battlemaster starts running, and you should be able to guess what it is. (It's pure 4X, no roleplaying, like Civ et al.: the ultimate pure 4X game, as opposed to Master of Heroes' ultimate 4X-roleplaying.)

So what we have here is a spectrum, on one side of which we have full-on roleplaying—with the combat being merely a facilitator of the roleplaying, merely a tool of roleplaying—and on the other side full-on combat, and ultimately full-on WAR, with the plot being merely a BYPRODUCT of the combat and the war—because note that everything that happens anywhere in Alex Kierkegaard's Multiverse can affect, and probably WILL affect at some point, everything else that happens in it. So even your pure 4X wars may one day lead to dramatic consequences for the inhabitants of a peaceful, serene shire somewhere.

But my point with this lengthy analysis is to show that Cult Games plans to utterly dominate ALL the turn-based genres (and P.S. the above list still doesn't include all of them; ask me for my dating sim and dungeon management plans, or just wait for me to unveil them), while blending all of them into a single enormous metaverse, plugging each of them in the ideal region to mechanicize its theme. That's why I didn't stop with the original 4 roleplaying campaigns, and keep adding games/modes/systems/settings. I plan to completely take over the cutting-edge of all the turn-based genres over the next few months (and the real-time ones in the 2030s with Battlegrounds 2.0 [ > ]).

And btw, Warhammer 40,000 is by no means the only setting that Battlemaster will contain. All Games Workshop wargaming settings and timelines will be eventually unlocked and added (Age of Sigmar, The Horus Heresy, The Old World, et al.) plus all the best ones from other companies. Warhammer 40,000 will be the BASE of the game, the MEAT AND POTATOES of it—like Pathfinder is for the roleplaying because these are the biggest and most developed settings in their respective mechanical categories—but here are some examples of other wargame settings and systems you can expect players to unlock and explore over time.

BattleTech is coming.





Marvel: Crisis Protocol is coming.





Star Wars: Armada, Legion, Shatterpoint and X-Wing are coming.





And why not? Advanced Squad Leader is also coming (which btw, though it started out without miniatures, it does have miniatures today, and they're pretty damn cool as well, for a historical game at least).





Now you will be wondering how I'll manage to shove all these disparate settings into my multiverse, but e.g. BattleTech takes place mostly around 3100, so after Alien but before Traveller: perfect for plugging in that gap, and moreover helps explain the genesis of the giant mechs that will eventually evolve into 40K's monstrosities. Besides, BattleTech: Gothic has just been announced as an alternate universe, but it's precisely what I need to link BT to 40K, so it probably won't be alternate for us.





Then the Star Wars games take place in a galaxy far, far away, while the Marvel game is set in an alternate dimension like all the superhero stuff. Advanced Squad Leader meanwhile is set around 1950-2000, i.e. just before Terminator/Terraforming Mars and so on (Oops, gave away the Terminator surprise! My bad.) It all fits together perfectly thanks to my Franchise Fusion™ technology recently launched with Battlegrounds Alpha 2.0.

And there's even more than that coming! Check out Lunar Wars, for example, which we're currently trying to get funded on Gamefound and which, if funded, I'll hook up to Terraforming Mars to add a fully-featured tactical layer to its lunar roleplaying.

Lunar Wars Teaser
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlF7QYE ... XVyolQO3wj



In sum, there's only one way forward for fans of cutting-edge turn-based games at all scales of engagement: Cult Games and Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds.

[icycalm]

7. Battlemaster Tutorial
There's a lot more to explain about how Battlemaster works, I haven't even got into the Conquest mechanics I devised that turn Warhammer into Warhammer 2.0 like my Ultimate Edition in general turns D&D into D&D 2.0. But before I get into all of that, let's just play the tutorial mission so players can see these mechanics in practice and how powerfully they can unfold the game's world in a persistent and massively-multiplayer manner.

So first off, head to the Warhammer 40,000 setting start screen: https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... e4a7ab639a



A few things to note:

• Always hit F11 to go full-screen with your browser when navigating Battlegrounds (might be a different key for different browsers).
  
  
• Starting from this release, Battlegrounds will be optimized for 4K resolution, so you might not be seeing exactly what I want you to see. To get an approximation of it, if you're running lower resolutions, you can zoom out with your browser; for 1080p the setting is 50%. It's probably not playable but at least you can get an idea of what I intended for you to see.
  
  
• The site isn't super-fast, let's put it this way, so be patient while stuff is loading. This is a known issue with Cult Engine 1.5 that's largely rectified in Cult Engine 2. Moreover CE2 adds lots of stuff like autoplay music, animation and video, and other cool stuff. Problem is it's not ideal for the overworld part of the game yet for various reasons, and that's why we're keeping that on 1.5. But we'll be playing Alien, Blade Runner et al. in CE2, and of course Warhammer in Cult Engine 3 which is completely next-level.

Right off the bat let me just say that what you're looking at is the coolest Warhammer start screen ever. Go ahead, google image search "warhammer 40,000 start screen" and see what you come up with. It's just an endless stream of halfwit programmer designs that completely misrepresent the game. What's worse, they all have subtitles to indicate that it's not really the game: it's a programmer's interpretation of it, which is of course always a minigame because that's all that programmers can make. The only Warhammer 40,000 game you'll find without a subtitle is mine.

And to rub this point in even further, I'll proclaim a contest! Find me a Warhammer start screen (doesn't need to be 40K) ANYWHERE NEAR as cool as mine (doesn't need to be exactly as cool since that's impossible, just in the ballpark will suffice), and I'll gift you the Leviathan boxed set that launched the 10th Edition in June 2023.



It was the very first product in the line, even before the rulebook was released (rules were put online so people could play), and it's long been out of stock as it was a limited run. Fetches a lot of money nowadays, but I'll give the digital version to the winner. It contains two armies to get you started, plus the very first mission in Season 10, which will be reserved for you, and which, if you win it (and remember, you only get one shot in my Battlegrounds: no save/load or retries), you'll gain even more free units as a reward.



So, no one's gonna win this contest, it's impossible, but give it a try if you have nothing better to do, just to get an idea of how far ahead of everyone else my artistic talent is. You thought I could only write articles, right? Welcome to reality. The reality where I am also the uberartist.

My point is that I spent DAYS hunting down the three images that make up my start screen to get exactly the right range of action: from zoomed-in roleplaying (there are multiple 40K RPGs on top of the new CRPGs coming out now) to zoomed-out interstellar travel (think Battlefleet Gothic), plus close-range combat in the center of it all of course. And then I spent more time cropping and slightly rescaling the images to match my vision while preserving quality, etc. I put more thought and time in that start screen than any programmer has ever put into a whole GAME DESIGN. That's why I beat the shit out of them every single time without even really trying. They don't fucking THINK!

So I ask, wasn't all this effort—even for just the start screen—worth it for the very first and ultimate digital adaptation of the legendary Warhammer 40,000?

And of course I'll add music and animation and so on (I also need to upgrade the start button) when I move the overworld to CE2, which allows all this stuff. But if you want to hear the main theme right now, just click on PRESS START, which gets you right here: https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... mmer-40000



The theme is right at the top. Have a listen. Then scroll down and read all the lore and hype, and watch all the little videos. That's the best primer for 40K as a setting and a game as you will ever get. It would never enter the head of a programmer to do this sort of thing. You can spend months playing dozens of their 40K minigames on Steam and still not learn half of the things this page will teach you. I recon there's a good half an hour of gameplay in all that! Plenty of gameplay for everyone so you can start playing right now! And just wait until there are 400 novels on the overworld lol. People don't yet realize that Cult Games games have not only the best gameplay but also the most! But they will realize it soon enough.

When you're done with the 40K landing page, click ENTER THE 41ST MILLENNIUM and prepare to be blown away: https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... edef4eca9b



That is the 40K galaxy at 10K resolution, so your connection/computer might struggle to display it. Moreover, even if you're on a 4K display, you'll be very zoomed in. On 1080p, forget about it. It's playable, but again you must zoom out with your browser to get a sense for what's where. Don't worry, you have all the time in the world: it's an online persistent universe. It's not going anywhere. And note that all this too is gameplay that you can play today!

Let's not even get into how I obtained this map. I could write an entire tutorial on it. The biggest version of it you'll find online is 2K. There is a 4K "version" but it's just the 2K upscaled, so it's crap. So how did Cult Games obtain a 10K version?

I extracted it from the official site. I spent a full day doing this, and then another day stitching the dozens of pieces together (because of course the programmers just had to cut it up into pieces before uploading it to their site, just in case anyone with dial-up modem tried to view it).

Even Lexicanum doesn't have higher than 2K, just look for yourselves: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/File:9thEdMap.jpg

Now why was it paramount that we obtain as high-quality a map as possible? This is why: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/commen ... ifications

This map is the culmination of a multi year effort cross referencing pretty much every map in every codex, supplement, and rulebook across all 9 editions.

And that doesn't include the 400 novels, comics, programmer minigames et al. lol. You can't place even a fraction of that data on a 2K map, and I plan to put ALL of it on there. Granted, there will be more maps unlocked when zooming into particular sections, but still, there will be hundreds if not thousands of points of interest on the overall galaxy map, and there's just no space for them on the smaller-quality versions, only on the 10K version on the official site. But of course you can't add content on the official site, you can only see the 10-20 POIs that the site designers put there, because their map is not a game, it's just a map. Look for yourselves, it's next to useless: https://warhammer40000.com/the-setting

It's not even fun to scroll around it because, due to the programmers cutting it up into dozens of little pieces, the pieces keep appearing and disappearing as you scroll lol. It's just awful.

Anyway, the only cool thing about it is all the little themed icons, and don't worry, I am lifting all those off and sticking them in my game very soon.

So how do we start the action?

Look around the overworld until you find the little crossed swords icon in Segmentum Pacificus that is the only currently active point of interest, then click on it. You should be seeing something like this:



Depending on your resolution and display size, the mission text might be too small for comfort, so adjust the browser's zoom accordingly, or even better click on the "Read full article" button at the bottom, which will bring you to the full mission page: https://akbattlegrounds.net/w/multivers ... onours-40k



And here you are: you've navigated to the very start of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Well, it's Season 10 at any rate. And why are we starting at 10? I'll explain soon, but just in case you're worried, don't be: you'll get the chance to play previous seasons if you want, in a flashback cinematic style. But first you must finish the entire Season 10, and that's a couple hundred missions across several campaigns/crusades, and more.

And it all starts with Battle Honours, which is the simplest 40K mission ever. I spent ages scouring half a terrabyte of data plus countless web links to ensure that I kicked off the setting in the fastest, easiest and simplest way available, and I found it in a 54-page pamphlet distributed at Warhammer stores to new players to teach them the basics of collecting, painting and playing. There were a couple earlier versions of the pamphlet from earlier editions that were far fewer pages and didn't feature a mission. This is the 2024 version that features a mission that's so simple that the Space Marine is even out of ammo so you can't use his ranged weapon! It's literally a 5-minute mission, but we'll spend more than that getting acquainted with the engine and so on. Plus, if you win you get to keep the unit and start your 40K army with it! So there's no need to own any units; any Battlegrounds player is eligible, and all you have to do is click on "JOIN BATTLE" and start a mission thread in the brand-new Battlemaster forum stating which side you're taking: Space Marines or Tyranids. Plus, you can also register a friend to play against you (but he must also be an active Battlegrounds player). If you can't think of anyone, no worries, you'll square off against the dreaded Cult Intelligence (CI)! I won't even be online for this, CI will log into Discord on its own account and join you in the voice channel to teach you the engine and the game, and then wipe the floor with you while laughing all the way! Plus, anyone can post in the thread at any time before the battle and take the other side, in which case you won't fight CI, so you might even get to win!

Note that if a player wins, he gets first dibs on the next mission, so he can keep chaining wins to rack up unlocks and rewards (units, minigames and so on) as long as he is winning. One could potentially one-life an entire campaign this way! Competition! FOMO! You can't do that on tabletop, and you sure as hell can't do it on Steam! It's just a teaser of what my Conquest mechanics are all about (not even the coolest aspect of it). More will be explained after the tutorial mission is over. So who's game?


P.S. If you're wondering which side to pick, here's a quick primer: Space Marines are the Space Marines in Alien 38,000 years in the future, and Tyranids are the xenomorphs in Alien 38,000 years in the future (they even have acid blood, but they have also evolved biological guns that fire goo lol). You can google and YouTube them, and there is content to peruse for as many hours as you have to spend, but you really don't need any more than that for this tutorial.


The Space Marines


The Tyranids


P.P.S. Your choice doesn't lock you into a faction. It's just one unit, it means nothing. You can collect and play as many different factions as you want.