Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector News

++Thought of the Day++ There is no justice without the Emperor’s will; there is no victory without His might.



Welcome, Battle Brothers and Battle Sisters, to the latest Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector dev diary.

This one is a bit overdue, largely because we’ve really busy lately. Quite a lot is going on, so we wanted to share some of what we’ve been up to over the last couple of months.

First, for console players waiting for news about the launch of Battlesector on their preferred systems, we can say that good progress has been made. Getting Battlesector into your hands has been the main focus of the engineering team lately, and we are close to submitting the game to the respective console manufacturers for certification.

We can’t control the outcome of the certification process, so we don’t have release dates yet, but rest assured we’ll share news of release dates as soon as we can, and that every effort is being made to get the game ready for you.

As well as getting the console versions primed for release, we’ve been working on numerous balancing changes, and bug fixes. We expect to release a new patch on all PC platforms in the coming weeks with these changes. Numerous units for both the Blood Angels and Tyranids armies have had adjustments made to their stats, including special abilities and weaponry.

We have adjusted how our combat model calculates low scoring damage rolls. This will be most noticeable when attacking high armour units with low damage weapons; you should now expect to see a lot more Blocked! shots. This results in armoured units being able to fulfil their roles better as damage soaks versus low piercing weapons. We’ve also addressed a lot of bugs that players have reported to us. Full details will be in the patch notes when these changes are released.

Tyranid players know that keeping your swarms together is valuable, as the bonuses from being near a Synaptic Leader are powerful. We’ve added a quality of life feature that visualises the connections of Synaptic Leaders with Connected units. Just click on the Synaptic Leader or Connected status icon to see the range of the network.



For our multiplayer-focused players, you’ll be happy to hear that we’ve been working on adding support for tournaments. Warhammer, generally, is designed at its core to be a competitive multiplayer game. Adding tournament support is part of the work we’ll be doing in the coming months and years to build and support the multiplayer scene. (Of course, adding more factions to the game will also help grow multiplayer!) There is still work to be done, but we hope to release the first version of the tournament system before the end of the year.


Speaking of factions, we are hard at work on more units and a new faction. We are aiming to have a number of new units for the Tyrannid and Blood Angels armies available before the end of the year, and a completely new faction early next year. We’ll share more details about these closer to when they are ready.

For the Emperor and Sanguinius!
- The Black Lab Game Team

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector was last month's addition to the pile of 40K games, a thoroughly decent turn-based tactics game about space marines of the Blood Angels chapter—plus a few allies from the Sister of Battle—taking on the bio-organic alien tyranids. In a new dev diary, Black Lab Games has outlined its immediate plans for Battlesector's future...
Read more.

Thought of the Day "Do not hope for more than you are. Be content in your lot, for you serve the Emperor!"



It’s hard to believe it’s almost a month since Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector was launched!

We’ve received a lot of feedback and feature requests from you since the game was released. In this diary, we’ll talk about some of the most common requests, and what we are doing about them.

The most common request we’ve seen is for more units and factions. Everybody has a favourite faction and wants to be able to deploy their preferred units on the battlefields of the 41st millennium. The good news is that we are already hard at work on adding more factions. We always expected this game to grow and evolve over time, and adding factions is a part of that plan.

It’s important to us to maintain the quality level of the base game, and creating a faction takes a lot of work. We really look forward to being able to show you the new units we are working on soon!

Two other feature requests have come up quite a bit, and they are a veterancy system and a more in-depth unit management system in the campaign.

It’s true that in the campaign, losing units doesn’t really matter much because you can easily add replacements without cost. This was a design choice we made during development, as we wanted the focus of gameplay to be on tactical decisions in battle, over RPG-like systems and trying to keep units alive.

We are adding systems that fit with our design goals for the game, whilst providing both a lightweight Veterancy system and an opt-in Requisition Actions system that adds more decision making outside of battles.

The Veterancy system will add 1% accuracy and 1% crit chance for each mission a unit survives. This benefits units that survive, without making them disproportionately more powerful than their initiate brethren.



Requisition Actions is a new campaign difficulty setting, which is enabled for higher difficulty campaign settings, and disabled by default for Initiate difficulty. You’ll be able to enable or disable it to suit your preference when starting a new campaign and adjust reinforcement rates.

In this system, you’ll be given a number of Requisition Actions when a mission is completed. Each unit you add to your army uses a Requisition Action. Furthermore, most units will have a limit on the number of units that can be requested before each mission, and a cooldown before they can be requested again. For example, Librarians are less common units than Aggressors, so an Aggressor squad has a short cooldown, whereas a new Librarian can only be requested after a few missions.



Requests for Intercessors and Assualt Marines are only limited by the number of Requisition Actions available, to prevent scenarios where your army is depleted, but can’t add units due to cooldowns.

We’ve seen users request more control over graphics settings, so we are adding the options to change or disable shadows, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion and bloom, as well as more control over v-sync settings and frame rate caps.

And of course, we are also working on fixing the most pressing bugs that are being reported to us.

Finally, if you are a console player waiting for Battlesector to come to your favourite console, we want you to know that we are still working on console versions. Whilst we don’t have timeframes yet, we want you to know we haven’t forgotten you, and want to make sure the consoles versions are as good as we can make them before release. Thanks for your patience.


For the Emperor and Sanguinius!

The Black Lab Games team

Having a little trouble getting started in Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector? Check out these useful 8 tips for beginners from YouTuber ItalianSpartacus.

The video covers a wide array of basics including army management, how to see the details behind unit interactions, how to organize your army and more.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector is out now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295500/Warhammer_40000_Battlesector/