Eternal News & Rambling

Thing is, I’ve been talking a whole lot with my friend/co-developer behind the scenes, and just as much with other Dawn of War 2 modders without actually posting literally any of these thoughts anywhere – probably because they wouldn’t make a very effective video since most of it is purely brainstorming or technical updates that don’t warrant full length videos. It’s been brought up by another dev that I should consider using YouTube Shorts or something to show some of these smaller things, and I’ve considered it – just haven’t figured out what would work yet.

Given I’m also 27 years old and have been an adult with adult responsibilities long enough to have the life force sucked out of me (as anyone approaching their 30s will tell you), I’m surprisingly out of touch with these new ‘vertical video’ things being the norm – Vine was the last time I ever really paid attention to it, and I’ve never been too keen to learn. Still, I love making stuff, and following the completion of Eternal I intend to take what I learn into creating a full indie video game using the Godot engine – so it’s something I likely cannot avoid if I ever want to capture an audience beyond existing fans of a franchise, especially when I go into literal new territory with something wholly original.

Anyway, on with Eternal.

I love the Imperial Guard, so I guess this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. I was literally introduced to 40k through the Imperial Guard via a friend back in 6th grade whose dad (and by extension him) had tons of Guard models. Of course, by extension, I was also introduced to Dawn of War through Winter Assault, which my friend had installed on his computer. But nostalgia aside, I love the Guard. I very much love the ‘grounded-ness’ so to speak of it – standard humans, regular foot soldiers and their massive vehicles standing against untold alien, mutant, and heretic horrors that can tear them apart.

To that end, the Guardsmen now have a third base structure – the Tactica Uplink. It used to be called the Company Beacon and was literally near pointless - it just produced the Master of Ordnance, a unit which I’ve since removed due to AI difficulties and the unit just not being fun compared to standard global stuff.

The Tactica Uplink serves a similar function to the Tactica Control from Dawn of War 1, in that it is responsible for upgrades to your infantry units. This includes health, range, damage, grenade unlocks, and (if you’re playing Infantry or Tempestus) a speed upgrade for the Kasrkins / Stormtroopers. It also allows you to exchange your red resource for a quick bonus of Requisition or Power at a rate of 100 red stuff for 125 power or 150 requisition - this may be rebalanced in the future. It must be built to get any wargear or leader upgrades on squads, with the exception of the Engineer’s Combat Engineer loadout (shotguns & bonus health) and Engineer Watchmaster (leader).

The TU also serves as the deployment structure for Commissars, which up until now were mostly implemented vanilla-style via an upgrade on the Guardsman, Stormtrooper, and Conscript squads individually - that is no longer the case. Commissars have a retinue of four veteran Guardsmen armed with chainswords and laspistols, and the Commissar himself is armed with a power sword and bolt pistol as standard. You can have up to three of them on the field at once.

There are three upgrades at the TU specific to the Commissar, and two wargear options that can simultaneously be applied to the Commissar himself. The TU upgrades are essentially the abilities that used to be unlocked with each type of armor on the Commissar Lord with the addition of some other stuff - one massively reduces the cooldown of the standard execute ability (and also increases the health of all Commissars), one allows the execution of enemy units (and also now increases the damage of all Commissars), and one is a very powerful but slow to recharge execution (that also makes all Commissars immune to suppression). Thanks to the global upgrades, you can now have all three applied on Commissars - happy executing!

The wargear upgrades (available at tier 3) are a melee upgrade that equips the Commissar with a power fist, and a ranged upgrade that equips the Commissar with a plasma pistol and his retinue with bolt pistols to improve ranged damage - which is where I suspect the Commissar will mostly be kept. I’ve encountered technical difficulties with allowing the retinue to have both a melee and ranged upgrade, which is why they don’t benefit from the melee upgrade - initially, I wanted them to have power swords. If I find a way to bypass this technical issue, they still will - otherwise, another alternative is to have it be either the melee or the ranged wargear upgrade, which would bypass the issue entirely.

Global abilities got entirely stripped from the IG, SM, and Eldar as we re-thought out how we wanted to implement them. In the case of the Guardsmen, they’ve now been re-implemented and are…shockingly similar to vanilla, in truth. We have a few issues with the AI using them due to a new menu system that they don’t understand being utilized to select them, which gives us room to expand upon them as the standard UI supports just 5 abilities. There are also more deployable units, and these may be further expanded in the near future. At the moment, the abilities are as follows (again, a lot of vanilla stuff at the moment, but honestly - that may be ok):

Militarum Tempestus

• 3 Conscript Squads - 400 Requisition, 50 Red
• 2 Stormtrooper Squads - 600 Requisition, 50 Power, 100 Red
• Basilisk Flare - 75 Red Resource
• Valkyrie Hellfury Strike - 150 Red
• Valkyrie Bombing Run - 500 Red

Infantry Company

• 3 Improved Conscript Squads (+1 Conscript, +Sergeant) - 400 Requisition, 50 Red
• Command Chimera - 175 Requisition, 175 Power, 50 Red
• Basilisk Flare - 75 Red Resource
• Loyal To The End - 125 Red
• Valkyrie Mine Drop - 150 Red
• Valkyrie Bombing Run - 500 Red

Armoured Company

• 3 Conscript Squads - 400 Requisition, 50 Red
• Command Leman Russ - 300 Requistion, 300 Power, 250 Red
• Basilisk Flare - 75 Red Resource
• Basilisk Creeping Barrage - 200 Red
• Valkyrie Bombing Run - 500 Red

Conscripts are actually no longer the tier 1 infantry unit produced from the HQ of the Guardsmen - they were just flat out not fun in that position, regardless of how cheap or expendable I made them. By extension, the standard Guardsman squad is now both in the HQ and the Infantry Command, DoW 1 style. This also means the only way to acquire Conscripts is through the Conscript drop abilities. Conscripts can no longer have any leaders equipped to them and purely function as-is, but are extremely cheap and quick to reinforce if they survive returning home. They’ve also been boosted to 14 men in size, and 16 men for the Infantry Company’s conscripts whose sergeant is unique and not available otherwise. Considering you start the game with 800 requisition and 50 red resource, you actually have enough to immediately deploy the three conscript drop and get some early game territory control regardless of sub-faction.

A couple changes have also occurred to the standard Guardsman squad. It no longer begins with a sergeant, reducing its starting unit count to 9 and its cost down a little to 180 requisition. Commissars can no longer be equipped to it due to them being a separate unit, and there is also no longer a pick-only-one limit on the leaders - you can have both the Sergeant and the Medic equipped simultaneously. Sergeants will buff the health of all units in the squad DoW 1 style as long as they’re alive, and of course improve the close combat potential of the squad (from dogshit to just shit, but still - fix bayonets?). Medics double the health regeneration of all units in the squad as long as they’re alive, and this is specific to the squad - they don’t affect the health regeneration of any surrounding squads.

Sir yes sir!

Perhaps more noticeable, however, is a voice & weapon change. I agree that it was a little much to have such rapid fire lasguns literally everywhere, but I do still love me some full auto laser light shows. As such, the fire rate of the standard lasgun - and ONLY the standard lasgun - has been cut in half to 5 per second, which is still more than double that of the vanilla 2 per second rate of fire. To reduce strain on ears but provide a less ‘wooshy’ feel to the lasguns, their weapon fire sound is actually from Dawn of War 1 now, which is a laid back ‘punchy’ effect that doesn’t have any prominent high frequencies or long echoes that cause muddiness and ear strain in large numbers. That will be reserved for multilasers, hotshot lasguns, and of course, hellguns. Given this, as you may have guessed already, the voice of the Guardsmen is now the Dawn of War 1 Guardsmen voice.

This only affects the standard guardsman squad and heavy weapons squad. Conscripts, engineers, and special weapons still use the standard DoW 2 guardsman voice, and Kasrkins currently use Merrick’s voice with a slight alteration to remove the “Sergeant Merrick, reporting for duty” on spawn and just play more generic voice lines.

Ready to unleash eleven barrels of hell!

One other unit change is that the Baneblade and Stormblade have been swapped. Previously, the Baneblade was the unique super-heavy tank of the Militarum Tempestus, while the Stormblade filled that role for the Armoured Company given it’s got a supremely powerful main gun that felt right with the company most focused on putting tanks on the field. But something just felt…off about doing it this way. The Baneblade is iconic, and something doesn’t feel correct about having it only appear alongside some specialist subfaction that can’t even deploy regular guardsmen (aside from the conscript drop). As such, they’ve been swapped, and the AC can now go full classic Dawn of War with a battallion of Leman Russ tanks and the Baneblade leading the charge.

In addition to this change, over on the Infantry Company, the Stormlord tank now properly acts as a transport & reinforcement tank to make it both lore accurate and have a better role gameplay-wise for that company.

OH RIGHT

I forgot to mention - those Command vehicle drops you may have noticed earlier are exactly what you’d expect, sort of.

For the Command Leman Russ, you get a tank that has more health than a max level regular Leman Russ and can upgrade its armor without any speed debuffs. It can be equipped not just with the executioner and vanquisher guns, but the demolisher one as well - and unlike a regular leman russ, these act like hero upgrades. Once purchased, you can swap between them without spending any resources for a reduced waiting time, including swapping back to the standard Battlecannon (which you’ll notice is already listed as the ‘upgrade’ the tank begins with). A couple more upgrades may be added in the form of an Eradicator gun and (potentially, not for certain - this depends on technical limitations) sponson upgrades. That Eradicator upgrade may also be allowed on the Leman Russ Demolisher the Infantry Company uses, as currently it has no upgrades.

The Chimera is more simple - same principle, more health than a max level Chimera, but it can also instantly deploy Guardsman squads every couple of minutes - at the expense of not being able to garrison regular infantry, however. It can still reinforce nearby troops.

Both Command vehicles can be garrisoned with a Commissar to improve their health, damage, and sight radius. Neither Command vehicle can gain levels.

Structurally, the Imperial Guard is just about complete. They feel roughly correct in terms of pace and have a good splattering of units and upgrades available. I’m uncertain how much I like the generic names “Infantry Company” and “Armoured Company”, but they make sense…mostly. The Commanders need more unique upgrades and there may be more techs/units added, but work on the Guard will likely slow down now so I can begin focusing on the Space Marines. It’s worth noting HelplessCelt has also been making tremendous leaps forward on the Eldar, so it shouldn’t be too long until that initial 3-faction playtest is ready (I don’t mean days, I mean it is likely still a couple months out or so - but still. Such is mod development.).

I’ve begun modifying certain maps to play better with Eternal. It’s…going to be a challenge getting permission to use some of these maps as the creator has long since moved on from the community, but my hope is to modify some of the Elite Mod’s maps as they are all supremely well made and the larger ones can be turned into Eternal-built maps relatively easily. An example below is Kasyr Lutien, first as it is in Elite right now:

As mentioned, my hope is to contact the creator of the maps if I can find a way to, and hopefully get permission to continue working on these. Aside from this, I’m also working on modifying campaign maps to work with Eternal as well, as well as “eternal-ifying” every other vanilla map by clearing out areas for bases and, when possible, enlarging the map. It’s not possible to straight up make a map bigger - I can only do so if areas of the map are considered within the ‘playable area’ but have not been used / are covered in ‘impass’, disallowing units from entering it during gameplay, which I can alter.

Nevertheless, as you can probably tell by the greatly increased number of points on the map in my edit of Kasyr Lutien (which is honestly closer to the original DoW 1 version), resources are now much more point-focused than they were in vanilla Dawn of War 2. Personally I disliked how inconsequential requisition points are in vanilla, for example - giving you anywhere from 10 to 30 requisition a minute depending on how long you’ve had the point, and god forbid you do it with allies, as this would drop as low as 5 to 15 in 3v3 matches while your HQ pumps out a massive 300 a minute.

I’ve made alterations that place resources much closer to how they were in Dawn of War 1. The HQ now produces just 120 requisition a minute and no power whatsoever. Requisition points (assuming 1v1) now begin at +36 requisition a minute when first acquired and raise to +72 over time, going to +108 with the “listening post” so to speak (the little shield I added) put on top of them. Power deposits now produce an astonishing +120 power a minute when upgraded and with all three power generators deployed, which comes out to half the income a Thermo Plasma Generator would provide in Dawn of War 1 (keeping in mind DoW 1 measured income in per 10 seconds, not per minute, so these numbers look bigger than they did in 1). There isn’t as much of a penalty for resource sharing, with it now dropping to 75% income from points with 2 players on your team and 66% with 3 players (as opposed to 66% for 2 and 50% for three in vanilla). Base plasma generators produce less power than point ones as well, coming out to +60 a minute each as they were in DoW 1. These are all pre-upgrade numbers as well - there are global req and power upgrades that raise this further.

Overall this increases the resource gain in Eternal, but this is necessary. The increased scale and the addition of techs and unlocks that all cost additional req/power create a much higher demand for resources than vanilla did, and you will need all of these additional resources to play the game without it feeling overly slow or limiting. Perhaps the biggest difference is that you can get relatively high power income almost immediately due to the fact points can be upgraded with power generators immediately and produce, as mentioned before, half the power a thermo-plasma did - I may in some way alter this to slow early-game power gain, but the outright removal of tier 1 power structure dropping would severely hamper the AI due to how they’re programmed, so that is not currently an option. Plus, to be fair, this is Dawn of War 2, not 1 - having a slightly different, faster-paced feel from that early game bonus may not be that bad of a thing.

It may sound like I’m just copying DoW 1’s homework and importing its gameplay into 2 at this point, and to some extent, that is true - I do like DoW 1. However, the fact is that in regards to map layout and resource generation, DoW 1 did it better - the emphasis on points forced you to leave your base and claim territory that you would defend to the teeth to keep your resources coming in. That concept of ‘territory’ is lost in DoW 2 when resource points are, with the exception of power generators, inconsequential to lose and difficult to fortify.

Still, I may reduce the number of power points on the map. Or reduce power gain from points a little. These resource changes are still largely experimental and you will no doubt see some imbalance in the playtest as there’s no way I’ll iron it out by then - in fact, I may not even change it at all until I get player feedback.

Space marines have a couple interesting changes too!

Firstly, while I don’t intend on adding an Ordo Malleus faction (partially to avoid competing with Elite / VotB), I have nevertheless added a Grey Knight Strike Squad to the Space Marines. They’re unique to the First Company as a tier 2 infantry.

HOWEVER. The Vanguard and Sternguard squads are no longer standard buildable squads. Instead, I want them to act as upgrades like they do in Elite - but with an alteration, that being the Tactical or Assault squad must be leveled up to at least level 3 to become one. I ran a test to see if level-based requirements were even possible and guess what - THEY ARE!

Also, Fellblade.

Bit of a work in progress porting this over from VotB (thanks to permission from both Elite/VotB that i can use their models, as you might have already guessed if you saw certain other vehicle/infantry models), but I’ve got some custom sounds and such working for it already. The Fellblade serves as a unique super-tank for the 5th Company, replacing the Land Raider and my god is it threatening seeing something this large coming towards your base…

I’ve been mixed on my own music work for Eternal for a while now. I’ve never done much orchestral stuff before, and frankly I don’t think anyone needs to (or wants to) hear some guy who’s only ever done upbeat electronic songs (in particular, overwatch inspired songs of all things) try to mimic grimdark 40k. To that end, it was always the intention to have ‘music packs’ with Eternal - sound packs that let you have a variety of music depending on what you want to hear, be that DoW 1 music, vanilla DoW 2 music, etc - I could totally create music packs from entirely different games even, and my own custom music would be just that - a replaceable music pack. Nevertheless, Eternal is designed to be fun, and to that end I’ve been thinking that I should consider re-doing my custom music as more…C&C like, I guess? Stuff I’m both used to making and that is generally more fun to listen to, but isn’t particularly ‘grimdark’. Might make it considerably more fun since music can and does massively alter the feel of a game (in my opinion) and of course it would still remain just a music pack that can easily be swapped out.

I do like the menu theme though.

(note, this is work in progress material and could also be replaced…but I do like how this has turned out so far.)

I’ll likely post more of the existing orchestral soundtrack as-is on Youtube and get some people’s opinions on it before making this decision (which right now is just the IG soundtrack anyway), but it would definitely speed up music production on my end to switch styles since it’s stuff I can already do. It would also be unique in the 40k community to have a game that isn’t all about grand orchestrals or grimdark stuff with few exceptions.

Custom voice line work should begin soon. It’s taken a while to get the hang of actually getting custom voices into Dawn of War 2 - hence my guardsman voice experiment - and it’s actually still an experiment, which has hampered custom voice work more than anything else given I have willing helpers (one of whom has an actual professional setup, and nobody is using low-quality headset mics or something like that). I even have some scripts written out - it’s the act of actually moving voices to the game that has produced more trouble than anything else. It now works in a dev environment (i.e. anyone running -dev), but I need to get it working in a finalized environment still. It is theoretically possible to just leave it in the -dev functioning mode, but that would potentially make Eternal incompatible with other mods, meaning you may not (this requires testing) be able to properly run Elite or VotB or something else you may have installed, let alone you trying to make your own mod while Eternal is installed.

Nothing much has changed. I got a little fade in/out animation working on the ‘play’ button and centered the main menu UI properly, that’s pretty much it.

Thinking about moving resources to the top center of the screen and making them larger. Dunno yet.

Obviously this is well beyond ‘first playtest’ territory, and more ‘final release’ if not beyond final release material since Eternal is currently focused just on multiplayer…but I do want to overhaul the campaign. To that end, in part thanks to some ideas I’ve had for my own game and also in part thanks to another dev brainstorming with me, I think I have a good idea for an overall goal for the campaign.

Stripping most of the story out (apologies) is the first step followed by the removal of any and all linearity involved. I may drop back to just being SM focused (or maybe IG - what a twist!) rather than all 6 factions, but the idea would be that every planet has an array of battlefields you can take on in no particular order, but with different difficulties, enemy factions, and rewards. The AI being able to take back territory may be something we can do as well, as functionality for both procedural missions and AI retaking territory actually already exists in the DoW 2 code (and was utilized in the pre-CR vanilla campaign). The final battle against Kyras would be available from the start, but would be immensely difficult - so you would need to build up your forces and level up your heroes to become strong enough to actually beat him. Someone will probably do it just with scouts and a shitload of luck, and that’s fine - it should be all about allowing the player to do whatever they want and command their force through a non-linear series of battlefields to accomplish the end goal. Even with only a single faction focus, this should serve to be considerably more replayable than the extremely linear original Retribution campaign was.

Again, literally no work whatsoever has been put into the campaign and it is not even selectable from the main menu. This is purely brainstorming for at best the full 1.0 launch if not beyond launch content since we already have enough on our plate as it is.

I have literally no idea if I’m even going to modify Last Stand. It’s an absolute pain to modify due to an extreme amount of hard-coded shit that cannot be altered.

Not for launch. Post-launch? Maybe! At launch? No chance. Just the original 6 factions, all reworked.

I think that’s it as far as brainstorming and updating goes.

God…that was long wasn’t it?