The well-received Blood Angels versus Tyranids turn-based strategy game launched on PC last month and, as someone who has finished the campaign and dipped their toe into skirmish mode, it’s in dire need of new factions and more variety. In a post on Steam, developer Black Lab Games said new factions are coming. In fact, this is the most common request from players. “Everybody has a favourite faction and wants to be able to deploy their preferred units on the battlefields of the 41st millennium,” Black Lab Games said. “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.” Black Lab Games said creating a faction takes a lot of work, and it wants to maintain the quality level of the base game (some of the Blood Angels models already available are great). The developer said it will show new units it’s working on soon. Also in the works is a veterancy system and a more in-depth unit management system for the campaign - both of which should add a degree of challenge and replayability. Currently in Battlesector’s campaign, it doesn’t matter whether you lose units out on the battlefield because you can easily add replacements without any cost between missions. This was a design choice, Black Lab Games said, “as we wanted the focus of gameplay to be on tactical decisions in battle, over RPG-like systems and trying to keep units alive.” But now it’s working on adding a lightweight veterancy system and an opt-in requisition actions system, so players will have more to think about between missions. Currently in the campaign, there are no stat bonuses given to units that survive missions (they get a little ribbon, but that’s an aesthetic addition only). The upcoming veterancy system adds one percent accuracy and one percent crit chance for each mission a unit survives. “This benefits units that survive, without making them disproportionately more powerful than their initiate brethren,” Black Lab Games said. Meanwhile, Requisition Actions is a new campaign difficulty setting enabled for higher difficulty campaign settings, and disabled by default for Initiate difficulty. (You can enable or disable it to suit your preference when starting a new campaign and adjust reinforcement rates.) With this system, you get a number of Requisition Actions when a mission is completed. Each unit you add to your army uses a Requisition Action. Also, most units 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 Assault Marines (the two base infinity units in the game) are only limited by the number of Requisition Actions available. This is to prevent situations where your army is depleted, but can’t add units due to cooldowns. All this sounds pretty good to me - I’m looking forward to dipping back into Battlesector’s campaign with a self-imposed Iron Man run, and I’ll certainly try out the new Requisition Actions setting. As for new factions, I’d love to see the Chaos Space Marines make an appearance. Orks would be fantastic, too. Elsewhere, Black Lab Games said it’s adding more graphics settings, including the options to change or disable shadows, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion and bloom, as well as more control over v-sync settings and framerate caps. The console versions of Battlesector are also still in the works, although there’s no release window yet. “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,” Black Lab Games.
