[After Action Report] Necromunda: Underhive Wars

I wanted to post about Pariah Nexus. I really did. Alas, I have spent the last two weeks barely able to walk, laid up with a leg like a rugby ball (don't develop a Baker's cyst, dear Reader, and especially don't let it rupture and fill your calf with its wicked gunge), and it's been a bit tricky to go down to Firestorm and collect my copy.

Instead, while Resting, Icing, Supporting and Elevating, I have also been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars.

For those not in the know, Necromunda: Underhive Wars is a Warhammer-skirmish-game-branded X-Com clone by Rogue Factor, a spiritual successor to the same developer's Mordheim: City of the Damned. 

I have more hours in Mordheim that it deserves (about three hundred), largely because I used to stream the game every Saturday on a now-defunct YouTube channel. Despite its quirks (and good heavens, it has quirks) I have an enormous soft spot for the game, but eventually burned out on its bloated, grindy single player experience and packed it in. 

I've had the Necromunda title on my wishlist since release and, considering it could be had along with boomer-shooter Hired Gun for a combined price of £8.67 the weekend before I was temporarily immobilised, it couldn't have been better timed.

It is, in all but two ways, a significant improvement on Mordheim. The environments are more visually distinct (they look smashing, especially the ominously lurching, half-sunken sump cruiser in the shipyard map). A greater emphasis on ranged combat and 3D movement makes the tactical experience much smoother, and there's more variety in mission types as the gangs participate in brutal blood sport events, race to scavenge resources from decrepit facilities, and get to both attack and defend each others' strongholds in equalising raids. Crucially, the gangs only bring a maximum of five fighters at a time to each mission, so encounters resolve much, much faster than the often quite flabby Mordheim experience.

The story campaign is an especially dramatic improvement, in that it: 

• exists
• isn't padded with procedurally generated filler missions to grind for XP and resources - everyone levels up as you're going along and none of the levels are a generic skirmish: they're all bespoke narratives
  
• lets you get hands-on with all three of the base game's gangs so you can get a feel for how each handles before going into skirmish mode
  
• acts as a tutorial for the complex array of skills available to your gangers 
• was at least outlined by OG Necromunda Arbitrator Andy Chambers, and features his playtest Goliath gang as campaign antagonists
  
• is fully voiced, and mostly well - apart from the two actors who seem to have been briefed to do Generic Video Game Protagonist Man and Manic Pixie Dream Girl Sidekick, Edgy Edition
• unlocks a tiny handful of extra customisation options for skirmish play, as a further incentive to play through at least once, and while they're only a few nice to haves, the gas masks and unique leader hairpieces all look good.

I did mention "all but three ways," though. Sadly, it isn't a total and complete improvement on Mordheim. It's built on the same engine and, as such, inherits its limitations. 

There's the nested mission objectives - moving to a key point or completing one goal will often reveal another mission objective or set a turn timer that you weren't expecting. So if, for instance, you suddenly discover that your heavy needs to be at the other end of the map in two rounds' time and there's no way she can get there so it's time to restart a mission you otherwise had in the bag, you might find yourself a bit... grumpy. The tenth level, the one I played five times and had sewn up in the first two, but "lost" because of silly things like extracting my gangers in the wrong order? I never want to see that again.

There's the fussy, exploitable movement system. The traps that you can see but not disarm. The interrupt effects from detonating them or suffering Overwatch fire. The tetchiness of the iconic, mutually contradictory Charge and Ambush abilities around objects on the map, which makes the counter-play they're designed for more a matter of luck than judgement.

Finally and most damningly, there's the frankly batshit AI for opposing gangs. Its foibles include:

• pathfinding, with gangers frequently running on the spot for most of their turn because they've bumped into a knee-high obstruction
• movement decisions, with gangers often running enormous loop-de-loops around the map rather than doing anything useful with their turn
• target priority, with gangers frequently passing up opportunities to seize additional mission loot or finish off foes near death (I'm not ungrateful, but knowing that my lil' guys only survived because the AI forgot to shoot at them does make the experience feel somewhat hollow)
• consumable and skill use: grenades often get flung directly onto the flinger rather than any relevant flingee, combat drugs and buff skills are used after the actions they would support, or just randomly, on a turn where the ganger doesn't do anything that benefits from them
• AI gangs don't seem to level up during operations (strings of missions in the same area of the hive, that run until all available resources have been extracted), and they certainly don't shop. This means that, especially if you have the secondary objective to steal weapons from downed enemies, they often end an operation by running around bare-fisted trying to punch out player gangers in, say, carapace armour, with a suite of sidearms mostly plucked from their own comatose bodies two shifts ago
  

It's better behaved in the story campaign, and I wonder if that's because each level has a different, precise set of instructions for what the AI gangs are supposed to do, rather than a generic set of priorities - set Overwatch, set Ambush, if injured run to nearest health dispenser, if none of these apply run around like a complete clown and obligingly stand right in the path of seemingly unstoppable PC gang leader.

All in, it's definitely not going to be infinitely replayable. I'm now able to move around without a stick, and by the weekend I think I'll be back to normal operations. In the meantime, I crashed through the story in 28 hours (should have been about 24, but those hidden objectives and unexpected turn timers...), and I've racked up about twice that in skirmish mode. 

 After all, Necromunda is traditionally about your dudes, it's the most your dudes of the classic skirmish games (at least, the ones that are playable by conventional means - I'm not counting Inquisitor because I'm not convinced those rules are anything but a shibboleth for the Blanchitsu crowd). So, let me drop some hints about my gangs...

I've tried out all three of the base game's gangs. Obviously, I started with House Escher, because they're melee-crazed drugged-up punk girls and if you set all the custom colours to the top right, you get melee-crazed drugged-up goth girls. I may have based the core trio on the thinblood coven I roleplay part of, and kept the other players up to date on how their adventures are going. 

This is why the heart and soul are gang leader and Brawler Beetlejuice, a masochistic juggernaut wielding polearms longer than she is tall and one-rounding almost every opposing ganger she can reach; Saboteur Blanke, first into the fray (to blow up barriers with homemade bombs) and first out of it (legging it at high speed with the mission salvage over her shoulders); and Servo-Tech Rich Girl, who looks harmless but chains out a frankly horrible amount of pistol shots and keeps the rest of the crew mobile with a medical drone built into her dead dad's skull.

I moved on to House Orlock, with whom I struggled a bit more. I experimented with a Heavy as gang leader here, and I think the mistake I made was to bother with the heavy weapons. There's an implicit contradiction in how the Heavy Leader works, with Aura and Order abilities encouraging you to be in the mix with a close knit wrecking ball of a crew, and the actual heavy weapons encouraging you to stay far away and high up, controlling the battlefield from extended range. 

The Orlocks are also geared very much around Overwatch as a strategy, with most of their unique skills reducing its cost and increasing its effectiveness. The problem is, you the player have no control over when Overwatch triggers - your gangers take the first pot shot they can as opponents move around them - and as such you give up the capacity to focus your fire and burst a target down, which is the approach I prefer to take with these things. Death is, after all, the ultimate debuff. I do have some cool stories about my Orlock gang - there's a sketchy script for an old-fashioned Warhammer Monthly comic strip about their first operation, which I had to write because it was writing itself - but they're my least favourite to actually play.

Finally, there are my Goliaths, the Meat Sweats, who I made not expecting to like them. I don't really find the bodybuilder aesthetic appealing and their whole "plod around getting hit" statline brings back memories of chasing Skinks with my clumsy Chaos Warrior blocks and asdlllsagh bloody lizards -

BUT this was the gang where I made the Lay-Mechanic Leader work, and I love the Lay-Mechanic. A flexible technician class which borrows the Pit Slave aesthetic from the tabletop game, the Lay-Mechanic comes with a servo-arm (that delivers an innately brutal left hook with its two custom skills), and the servo-arm comes with attachments. My favourite's the saw blade launcher... no, it's the power mace... actually, it might be the rivet cannon... The point is, Lay-Mechanics excel at swapping in different weapons for different needs, and the Goliaths excel at doing that in-game. What I wasn't expecting was the Orlocks as Shooty Gang, the Eschers as Melee Gang, and the Goliaths as Flexible Gang - they certainly prefer close quarters but they find it easier to change gears from a shooting focus in the early game.

This lineup is my most simple to date: a Deadeye sniper, a Heavy who's built to stand still and do work from a distance, and two Brawlers because I got lucky with early weapon draws and could build a couple of very strong ones.

There is... one thing about the Skirmish mode that I don't like, and that does shorten its playable time. The Infamy system, in which completing in-game achievements gives you Infamy points that you can spend on upgrades before going into an operation, may as well be called the "break the game wide open" system. Even finishing the story campaign will give you enough to start unlocking, say, a free mid-level fighter at the start of every operation, or weapons a tier or two above what the other gangs are packing. With the Goliaths I had enough Infamy built up that I could start with "legendary" Infamy rewards - top tier weaponry for everyone in my starting lineup, so I ended up going through the enemy gangs like a packet of dark chocolate Hobnobs. 

The part of me that delights in build optimisation and kicking ass really responds to that - the part of me that likes a challenge is suddenly very grateful for the Infamy option to beef up the enemy gangs' hit points, action points and move points so they can at least attempt to put up an even fight. In my last few days with the game, I'm probably going to try some of the really hard operations from the bottom of the list and see if my overlevelled gangers can handle those.

I think there's a good hundred hours in this for me, since I'm willing to forgive the AI as long as it manages to take a couple of my gangers out. After that point, the challenge will probably be gone: I'll have seen each map enough times that I'll have solved them, and all that's left will be using that knowhow to pwn n00bs on the extremely lively multiplayer scene for a game that released four years ago... a-ha. A-ha. I think not. 

When it comes to playing with other people, I prefer to do that on the tabletop, and I have done some of that despite my crippled state. If I could make it to hospital, I could make it to my monthly club meet just down the road, so I took the maximum permitted dose of m'pain meds and went off to learn about Kill Team. We'll talk about that next time.