Slitherine a mis en ligne ces dernières semaines plusieurs séries de captures d’écrans présentant chacune des quatre factions qui composeront initialement ce 4X prenant pour cadre le décor de Warhammer 40 000. Spécifiquement la planète Gladius Prime, isolée par des tempêtes warp et ravagée par une invasion Ork qui a entre autre réveillé des Nécrons qui dormaient pourtant tranquillement depuis de millions d’années. Un sacré coup de malchance pour la Garde impériale, mais aussi pour le chapitre de Space Marines qui s’était installé sur ce monde auparavant riche et tranquille.
Comme vous le voyez dans ces images, le jeu modélisera donc très bien les armées en présence. Le studio avait déjà signé le 4X Pandora (voir cet article) et devrait ici nous proposer comme nous l’avions vu dans notre aperçu un jeu intéressant avec un gameplay, Warhammer 40 000 oblige, très orienté sur la guerre, mais néanmoins permettant de gérer correctement les problèmes de ressources et d’expansion.
On verra rapidement ce qu’il en est car Warhammer 40 000 – Gladius – Relics of War sort normalement jeudi prochain. D’ici là pour plus d’informations sur le jeu, voyez cette page chez l’éditeur ou celle-ci sur Steam.
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Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Astra Militarum units preview
The Astra Militarum, commonly known as the Imperial Guard, is the primary fighting force of the Imperium of Man. Across a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, there must be billions of Guardsmen at least – yet even the Departmento Munitorum on Terra, which oversees this immense force, has no real idea of how many troops there are at any one time. A safe estimate is to say that there are millions of regiments.
In Warhammer 40,000: Gladius the Astra Militarum is one of the four factions you can play as. Its strengths are, of course, its huge numbers, its mighty vehicles and its fortifications.
The Astra Militarum can field inexpensive ranged infantry. They can field a lot of Guardsmen who suffer from low morale, but who cares about low morale when you can just overcome any enemy with your sheer numbers? And you can always use your Lord Commissar to remind them of their duty…
If you need more punch you can decide to send in the Heavy Weapons Squads which will pierce enemy armour with krak missile launchers, or you might want to deploy some Bullgryns: carrying shields and power mauls they are mighty melee units.
The Astra Militarum on Gladius has the assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicum. The Techpriest Enginseers can be used to found new bases as well as to repair vehicles on the field.
The Astra Militarum also makes extensive use of psykers. You can use the powers of the Wyrdvane Psykers to directly cause damage on enemy units by engulfing them with a torrent of psychic flames as well as debuff them by sapping their strength. Then there are Primaris Psykers, hero unit with an extensive array of powerful psychic powers.
But where the Astra Militarum truly shines is in its vehicles range.
First off you can use Scout Sentinels for recon duties and to support infantry.
The Leman Russ Battle Tank is the mainstay of the Imperial Guard’s armoured forces. Those tanks have won countless battles for the Imperium and will no doubt continue to do so! Make wide use of them.
Then there is the mighty Baneblade, an unmistakable icon of the Imperium’s armoured supremacy. Possessed of overwhelming firepower, exceptionally thick armour, and a roaring power-plant that allows it to surge into battle with surprising speed, the Baneblade is a truly deadly foe in any conflict.
Armoured groups give their best when they are led by a Tank Commander, a special hero unit with a great synergy with other Tank allied units by boosting their speed and damage.
The Astra Militarum also possesses devastating long range firepower. When the Imperial Guard go to war, they march to the thunderous report of batteries of Basilisks whose guns can flatten entire cities.
Should you be struck from above, fear no more, the Hydra is here! Whether faced by lightning-fast xenos fighters or daemonic, leather-winged monstrosities, the Hydra Flak Tank is ideally equipped to blow aerial foes out of the sky.
Speaking of aerial power… use your powerful Marauder Bombers to raze enemy bases to the ground from the sky. Protect them and conquer aerial superiority with the fast Thunderbolt Heavy Fighters, and make lightning strikes with your Valkyries, which are able to transport your troops anywhere on the map!
Last but not least, the Astra Militarum can erect mighty field fortifications, the Imperial Bastions, fortresses that can withstand even the most fierce of punishments!
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Space Marines units preview
With bolters blazing, the Battle-Brothers of the Adeptus Astartes crush the foes of the Imperium wherever they may be found. Each Space Marine is an elite genetically-engineered super-soldier, a mighty and fearless hero worth a hundred lesser men.
Each Space Marine is recruited into a thousand-man Chapter, before they are extensively modified, with nineteen extra organs and the crucial Chapter gene-seed. From the numerous Ultramarines and mysterious Dark Angels to the fierce Space Wolves and tormented Blood Angels, each chapter has its own traditions and style of combat.
Armed with the finest weapons the Imperium can provide, clad in suits of intimidating power armour and borne to war aboard swift and deadly fighting vehicles, they are the Imperium’s ultimate weapon. Though relatively few in number, it is the Adeptus Astartes who represents Humanity’s best hope for survival – for they are the greatest warriors the galaxy has ever known.
Infantry
Tactical Space Marines are the first line of offense of any offensive of the Adeptus Astartes. Armed with boltguns and clad in ceramite armour, you can later equip these mighty warriors with a range of grenades for increased offensive abilities. They can also be deployed from the orbit, but only once you research the Orbital Deployment technology. They are elite soldiers and they are immune to fear, and cannot be broken by morale, like all Adeptus Astartes.
Assault Space Marines come into play when you need fierce melee warriors… armed with vicious chainswords and bolt pistols, they can use their jump packs to make bounded leaps across the battlefield and make boosted flights over short distances.
When you need to take on a vehicle from a distance, Devastator Space Marines are the perfect choice. Their powerful lascannons can cut through any kind of armour.
Amid the fire and thunder of the front lines, Space Marine Captains set a peerless example to their brothers as they carve down one enemy after another. Each Captain is a skilled warrior, a veteran of hundreds of battles who has slain whole armies of foes during his celebrated career.
Terminators are indomitable warriors who undertake those missions that even their power-armoured brethren cannot. With their storm bolters and their power fists they can cut through virtually any ground opponent.
Apothecaries are corageous field-surgeons who face the full heat of battle, their nartheciums healing even grievous injuries, and their vials of combat stimms and anticoagulants quickly getting wounded brothers back into the fight.
Space Marines Librarians are powerful psykers, harnessing the potent mutation they bear as a force to defend Humanity. They can hurl blasts of force that crush their victims to paste, while others twist the flow of time itself, or revitalise their brothers with incredible surges of vitality.
Chaplains are warrior-priests who can be found wherever the fighting is thickest, inspiring their brothers to greatness with every thunderous blow and roared exhortation.
Vehicles and artillery
With their mighty power fist and blazing multi-melta and storm bolter, Dreadnoughts are armoured war engines which trample a path of destruction through any foe.
Thunderfire Cannons are colossal, quad-barrelled artillery guns that are designed to excel in a static defence role. Each is capable of firing and reloading at a punishing rate, unleashing salvo after salvo of high explosive shells, pounding the enemy into oblivion.
Scout Bikers perform an essential task for the Adeptus Astartes. Not only they are excellent scout, executing recon missions and gathering intel on enemy forces, but they are also adept at using their speed and manoeuvrability to outflank their foes.
Skimming over the battlefield at breakneck speeds, Land Speeders bank and roll with incredible agility. Able to navigate tangled urban ruins, narrow-sided canyons, and even to weave through dense forest canopies, this vehicle possesses unrivalled manoeuvrability.
When Stormraven Gunships streak into battle with their weapons blazing, heretics and xenos cower! More of a flying tank than a conventional dropship, the Stormraven is the most versatile aircraft in the arsenal of the Adeptus Astartes. Fast, manouvreable, resilient, boasting prodigious firepower and a substantial transport capacity, the Stormraven can perform many different roles.
The smaller Stormtalon Gunship is extremely fast and agile, and makes a superb air-interceptor and ground attack craft. There’s no better vehicle to reap air superiority than the Stormtalon!
And now let’s get to the tanks.
The Predator is just brutal. The battle tank’s autocannon is the bane of enemy infantry and light vehicles, making this tank your go-to choice to crush & exterminate.
The Vindicator is a short-ranged sledgehammer of a vehicle, a siege tank whose massive demolisher cannon can reduce any target to a smoking crater.
Last but not least we have the Hunter: from out of its massive turreted warhead chamber, it sends skyspear missiles thundering into the heavens. Emitting a pierce scream as it tears across the firmament, each of these sacred rounds seeks out the skyborne foes of the Emperor. Entombed in the heart of each missile, a servitor savant guides the ordnance to its foe.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Necrons units preview
An eternity ago, the Necrons forsook the frailties of flesh for deathless bodies wrought from cold metal, in their subjugation to the star-gods know as the C’tan. In their new immortal form, they took on the then-masters of the galaxy – the Old Ones – and in aeons-long battle they defeated them. In their desperation, the Old Ones seeded the galaxy with psychic races, thus awakening the horrors of the warp, and the Necrons – weakened by a simultaneous battle of liberation from the C’tan – retreated to their homeworlds.
There, falling into hibernation, they slumbered for untold time. As other races were born and drove themselves to extinction, they lay deep and undisturbed in multitudinous worlds, tended and defended in their not-sleep by their monstrous Canoptek automata.
Now, across the galaxy, they are awakening. Even here, this Crownworld’s master circuits are stirring. The Necrons – now unthinking machines, save for their few Lords and Triarchs – are arming themselves for war again. Their technology is millennia ahead of that of the galaxy’s younger races. Soon, legions of sinister, advanced war machines will pour from the tombs buried beneath the planet to conquer and enslave – nothing mortal is safe.
Infantry
Even with a glimmer of consciousness to guide them, Necron Warriors are fearsome and resilient foes. Armed with ancient energy weapons, they can scythe down their enemies with lethal volleys of gauss flayer fire, while their unyielding metal bodies repair themselves should they sustain damage.
Triarch Praetorians are the ancient law keepers of the Necron race, peerless warriors charged with the survival of the dynasties and the primacy of the ancient Necrontyr codes. They can use their rods of covenant both in melee and in ranged combat, and they can fly past obstacles with their gravity displacement packs.
Destroyer Lordsare the most maniacal of their kind. This is chiefly because they retain far more intellect than baseline Destroyers, and can bring all their fearsome intelligence to bear in their pursuit of universal oblivion.
Necron Lords, though lesser in stature and power than an Overlord or phaeron, are nonetheless formidable foes in their own right, and often march to war at the head of a vast mechanical army.
Armed with oversized gauss cannons, Heavy Destroyers send blazing energy blasts searing across the battlefield. These heavily armed adherents of the Destroyer Cults glide across scorched earth scanning for victims, the flickering light of their weapons’ energy cores echoing the cold hatred in their optics.
Canoptek Scarabs sweep across the battlefield in vast undulating swarms that devour all in their path.Crypteks bend the forces of the universe to their will, creating impossible technology and esoteric weaponry to lay waste to armies and destroy worlds.
Transcendent C’tan are all that remain of the once mighty star-gods. They are echoes of their former selves, splinters of energy that survived the Necrons’ betrayal and were trammelled in tesseract labyrinths. Even in their reduced and fettered state, Transcendent C’tan are still beings of immense power.
Vehicles
Though essentially an automated drone, a Canoptek Spyder is nonetheless a formidable foe. Its vast array of self-repair and back up systems offer substantial protection against incoming fire. In return, any enemy that strays within reach of the Canoptek Spyder will have flesh scoured from bone by a multitude of mechanical tools and pincers.
Like an enormous spider, a Triarch Stalker looms over the battlefield, its devastating weaponry directed by a high-ranking Triarch Praetorian. When a Triarch Stalker advances, it does so with a speed and surety that belies its jerking gait. Indeed, it can cover all manner of terrain with a deftness and precision seldom found in the walkers of less advanced races.
Operated by slaved Necron warriors but guided by super-complex navigation programs, Tomb Blades are contra-gravity crafts which move with a speed and agility no living pilot could hope to match.
Annihilation Barges are the Necrons’ favoured anti-infantry support platforms. At the Overlord’s command, the Annihilation Barges’ ancient repulsor sleds are coaxed back into life and the vehicles accompany the tomb world’s army to war.
Victory through overwhelming firepower is a common tenet of Necron strategic thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Doomsday Ark. Though deceptively fragile at first glance, the Doomsday Ark is a self-propelled energy cannon whose raw, unsubtle firepower is so vastly destructive that a single shot can turn the tide of a battle.
The Night Scythe is the Necrons’ favoured tool of invasion, a sickle-winged herald of woe that possesses the ability to beam Necrons directly into battle.
Doom Scythes are heralds of terror and dismay. These supersonic fighter craft range ahead of a Necron army, drawing upon their strategic datastacks to operate with virtual autonomy.
The Monolith is an ancient war monument of unimaginable destructive potential. When its massive silhouette looms over a battlefield, it will lay waste to entire armies with strobing torrents of gauss fire and the deafening crack of its particle whip.
The Obelisk hovers low over the battlefield, the somnolent hum of its gravitic repulsors sowing dread in the hearts of the foe. As it drifts into view, black lightning arcing across its glowing hull, the Obelisk presents a darkly majestic sight. Yet wonder turns swiftly to horror as the Obelisk’s weapons cycle up, glowing tesla spheres rising open to spit crawling skeins of lightning that reduce those nearby to blackened, twitching husks.
Only a race as ruthless and self-serving as the Necrons would think of unleashing a Tesseract Vault to further their ams – though each Vault is a potent weapon of war, the beings held within these floating prisons pose an almost incalculable threat.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Orks units preview
Heavily-muscled, aggressive, eight-foot-tall fungal thugs with a love of warfare, the Orks were a spacefaring peril long before the human Imperium entered the galactic scene. Spread evenly across the galaxy, for the most part they are an irritant to any other inhabitants, like lazy, belligerent neighbours. But occasionally, as a swarm of locusts, the scattered tribes and clans form into a Waaagh! – something between a crusade and a riot – and devastate entire sectors until they run out of things to fight and fall instead into internecine warfare.
Infantry
Ork Boyz are the heart and soul of any warband. They charge into battle in a great mass, crashing into the enemy like a green landslide. The average Ork Boy is mean-tempered and exceptionally tough, more than compensating for his lack of intellect with a talent for violence.
The richest and most battle-hardened nobz can become Meganobz by paying a Mek to build them a suit of mega armour. Though other Orks mock the Meganobz for wearing such armour, only the dullest would do so within earshot. Even a direct hit from a tank is unlikely to do more than knock a Meganob over, worsening his already foul temper.
An Ork Warboss is the strongest, toughest, loudest and most violent Ork in his tribe. These massive greenskins seize the lion’s share of the loot from every fight, meaning they are usually armed and armoured better than any of their followers.
Tankbustas are Orks who have become completely addicted to the thrill of destroying the armoured fighting vehicles of their foes. Their desire to hunt down and slay the biggest, most dangerous tanks they can find echoes the primal instinct of the big game hunter.
Whenever an Ork needs something building, be it a shiny new shoota or the boss’ new ride, they go straight to the Meks. Without Mekboyz, Orks would lack for light, power, transport, and even guns (they lack for sanitation regardless, but that’s another story).
Weirdboyz are the most psychically attuned of all Orks. They are capable of vomiting blasts of Warp energy that can reduce foes to molten goop in seconds.
Often referred to by other Orks as Doks, Painboyz are the greenskin equivalent of both surgeons and dentists. They are driven to perform exploratory surgery on living creatures just as Mekboyz are driven to fiddle with machinery.
Vehicles
Ork Battlewagons rumble to war on a collection of tracks, tyres and massive spiked rollers. Whether lumbering gun-fortresses, bright red speedsters or gaudy rust buckets smeared with Ork glyphs, Battlewagons are massive slabs of motorised junk built to carry big mobs of greenskins into battle.
What they lack in survivability, Warbuggies make up for in speed, numbers and dakka. They encircle the enemy in speeding squadrons, guns blazing wildly while their crew throw their heads back and howl like Madboyz.
The Killa Kans’ grot pilots put their relative skill with firearms to good use, blowing the zog out of anything unlucky enough to cross their path. Despite being hardwired into a ten-foot tall killing machine, Killa Kan pilots still retain a good degree of Gretching cowardice. As a result they still believe in safety and numbers, and have a bad habit of losing their nerve under fire.
Streaking into battle through war-scorched skies, a Dakkajet’s massive thruster leaves an oily contrail of black smoke in its wake even as its guns spit streams of bullets at the foe. Though not as nimble as the aircraft of some other races, Dakkajets are capable of an incredible turn of speed that makes them a fearsome enemy to face in aerial combat. It also helps that Orks fly like complete headcases.
Burna-bommers are the inevitable by-product of the Orks’ love for speed, fire, and the desire to combine these things while killing something. Strapped with as many incendiary bombs and rockets as is physically feasible, Burna-bommers streak low over the battlefield, raining conflagrant death down on tightly-packed enemy infantry.
Deffkoptas buzz across the battlefield, weaving through the sky on a trail of foul-smelling smoke. As they swoop low over the heads of the enemy, the fiendish Ork flying machines fire punishing salvoes of shot, rokkits and bomms into their midst.
The roar of Mek Gunz has heralded the end for many a hapless foe. Spitting out blasts of crackling energy, swatting planes out of the air or crushing their victims in fists of bright green force, these big, clanky field guns have enough dakka to stomp even the toughest target.
Squiggoths are Orkoid monstrosities, towering hulks made of little more than muscle and bad temper. They are distantly related to Squigs and have all savagery and single-mindedness of their smaller cousins, but Squiggoths can grow so large that they dwarf tanks and even buildings.
A Gorkanaut is everything an Ork aspires to be. Massive, tough, loud and destructive, its blocky silhouette looms menacingly over friend and foe alike. From its hulking, orkoid shape to the brutal weapons it wields, a Gorkanaut epitomises the unsubtle brutality of Gork and hi no-nonsense way of war. Every Gorkanaut is essentially a massively overbuilt armoured war suit bristling with dakka and packing an armoured claw the size of a Killa Kan.
