My tendency to pick the nerdiest characters or factions and my love of support roles often leaves my front line a bit sparse. Take this mid-game fight in AoW4, where my lynchpin for holding off the enemy turned out to be one starter unit.
Granted, I set up that dwarf faction as tough nuts to crack (order / materium) thus ten armour on a first-tier mook (before shield wall) ranks fairly impressive and I sank plenty of healing and other support into keeping it alive, but I still had to move it into cover for range defense. Slight problem: said cover was on fire. The little bastards held out just long enough for my higher-tier units to turn the tide (doing respectable retaliation damage in the meantime) but finally succumbed... to the burn DoT. Requiescat in pace, noble yet crispy defenders of the faith.
I found myself on the opposite end of this retaliatory lynchpin conundrum just this morning.
I thought I'd hit an unbeatable Rogue Trader fight last night when a forgefiend kool-aid-manned at me through a wall and effortlessly wiped my party. This being my first fight after learning how to warp, I half believed I'd stumbled into a high-level zone by mistake. My first instinct had been to whittle its beefy HP down with blade dances and wow, did that ever not work! Only after getting my ass handed to me did I deign to read its ability description about retaliating every time you poke it. Luckily, when it comes to maximizing damage per hit, I built my dancers to benefit from each others' bleed procs and my three operators can shred armor and stack their bonus for a well-timed sniper shot. My second crack at the encounter brought flawless victory (and apparently chalked up some achievement for doing 100+ damage in a single hit) with I believe just five attacks on the boss, using the time it took to stack debuffs to mop up its adds instead.
It took me longer to figure out how I'd killed it than to actually kill it. DoT once again played a role. A "forge fiend" sounds mechanical enough, but does not take damage from Pasqal's machine spirit banishment... but like machines it also does not register bleed DoT... so haemorrhage does not involve bleeding, but is instead a regular damage proc on next turn start, which does not count as "over time" (?) ... except I also managed to do 3x8 points of "direct" damage from "where it hurts" dependent on a nonexistent effect on something that doesn't bleed because my custom blade dancer Cain's sword and executioner abilities instantly procced off the DoT that never happened...
... umm... huh?!
Bugs? Exploits? Easter eggs? Am I bleeding it so hard the blood's traveling faster than light? Rogue Trader picked up those lovely nested tooltips I so praised in Age of Wonders, Old World and others of the new generation of strategy games, but even with a novella-length stack of mechanics explanations, I'm having a much worse time tracking down relevant info within them. Of course, it doesn't help that Warhammer itself has a reputation for convoluted mechanics including infinitely regressing* counter-counters, but knowing the breed of beast you were adapting, maybe you should've put just a smidge more effort into clearly communicating that information! One of AoW4's best features is that I so rarely find myself wondering wtf just happened. Make my failures painfully clear! Come on, Owlcat, you've come so damn close to greatness.
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* Weregeek featured a more apt example referencing Warhammer and ultra-rippy penetration-ignoring-ignoring penetration but damned if I can find it now.
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