Battlefleet Gothic: Armada Preview - E3 2015

At the Focus Home Interactive booth for E3 2015, we got a chance to get an early look at Battlefleet Gothic: Armada. This space RTS is based on an adaptation of Games Workshop’s famous tabletop game of the same name. French developers Tindalos Interactive are at the helm, and they hope to bring players into the world of strategic spaceship battles. As the team describes it, the game stages the mighty armada of the Imperial Navy’s Battlefleet Gothic against the galaxy threatening Chaos Black Crusade of Abaddon the Despoiler. During our time with the game at E3, we got to observe one such battle engagement.

Developed on Unreal Engine 4, there will be four races in the final game that can participate. The players take command of one of these battlefleets composed of the most powerful spaceships from the Imperial, Chaos, Eldar and Ork forces. In our demo, we saw a battle from the campaign which can only be played from the Imperial perspective. In single player career mode, players will be tasked with saving the galaxy sector from certain annihilation. You'll get missions from various family dynasties in the game, and your success will influence further cooperation. These factions will also interact amongst themselves.

First up was the fleet selection and customization screen, and it looked very overwhelming. The amount of options was staggering - change your ships' colors, types (cruisers, battleships), upgrade your crew and captains; everything seems to be adjustable, which is a nod to the original tabletop game. Weaponry, defense, support sub-systems, all can be tweaked. Players get a certain number of fleet points, which they spend on their starting fleet; you won't have enough resources to roll out a full army of the best cruisers. Once you've got a balanced fleet, you can now dig deeper and start setting some behaviors. Each ship can be manually adjusted to set what it does in certain situations. When to move, when to attack, how aggressive it will be, its effective range, a preference to shoot with broadside cannons, and so forth. You can also set when to disengage (at what level of health remaining) .

It was time to begin, so we observed our fleet appear on a 2D plane in space - having previously used some of the game's settings to generate our preferred background visuals. You can choose the starting points for each ship, on your corner of the grid. We also used this time to instruct a couple of smaller ships to follow and protect one of our main battlecruisers. Slowly but surely, we pointed our fleet's noses towards the enemy and began the journey. Our smaller ships reached the enemy first, and engaged. At this point, the player is free to let the AI fight it out, using the behavior settings we made earlier. Or, players can slow down time in order to use attack abilities manually and pick their targets.

The battle was playing out on a grid, but the ships and attacks were definitely very freeform. Missiles were launched, some doing very good damage, others missing completely. The combat mechanics are real-time, so you need to calculate for enemy movements when using your weapons. With the first few smaller encounters over, the larger battleships from both teams have arrived and began to engage in huge firing exchanges. One ship got unfortunately turned around and exposed its back to the enemy; it met a quick end. The demo host was using abilities such as Radio Silence to interfere in enemy communications; or Brace of Impact, to reduce the damage of incoming missiles just as they hit. We didn't get a chance to comprehend all the attacks and abilities that were being used on screen, but despite the large amount of action and explosions, the game looked very strategic and the player was always in control.

As the number of combatants dwindled, only the large ships remained on the field. It was pointed out that your ships, crews, and captains are persistent in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, so losing them means they are gone for good. In order to avoid this, the enemy was first to utilize a warp jump ability to escape the battle with its largely busted main ship. The Imperial ships attempted to do the same, however one of the main ships could not - its engine was too damaged. Players can zoom in on ships to see the battlescars and devastation caused by the fight. The ship that could not escape looked to be barely alive, with flames in the engine bay, most of its sides destroyed (thus the cannons could no longer be used as well). Sadly, it had to be left behind, and that's also where our demo concluded.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is not usually my sort of game. But by the end of the presentation, I must say I was intrigued and wanted to see more, and play it for myself. That's as good of a compliment as I can give to a game so early in development and without any time to go hands-on. Hopefully, when the final product is out in early 2016 on PC, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada will live up to its early potential.