Editing Mordheim: City Of The Damned (section)

==Gameplay==
The video game basically plays like the tabletop. Pick your warband, equip them, train them, pay them, tend to their medical needs. Skirmish in the city going by Initiative. 

Movement during a character's turn is based on their allotment of movement and attack points with certain actions taking one or more of those. Each character can move a certain distance based on things like how heavy their armor is, allowing you to wander freely although you can retrace your steps to take a different route using your movement points. You can't redo your steps if you set off an environmental effect (usually walking on or by one of the Chaos growth things) or a waiting foe sees and charges you. You can perform movement actions like climbing or jumping on/off things although there is a chance of failure in which the character is unsuccessful (jumping across gaps or climbing) or takes damage if they fail. Some actions, like praying using a Rosary or shouting encouragement to a teammate also take movement points.

A large chunk of any skirmish is between gathering Wyrdstone, looting dead bodies and other sources of goods like chests and piles of rubble, and getting into position for combat. At the end of each turn characters unless they overexert themselves characters can select if they are going to go into an Ambush stance (they'll rush and made an immediate attack on the first thing they see), a Dodge stance, or a Parry stance (if they have a Shield equipped). Characters with ranged weapons can use Overwatch, which is Ambush except for using [[Dakka]] rather than [[Choppy|WAAAGHing]]. 

In combat, characters take turns bashing each other, with some having special abilities like an extra hard smash or a debuff attack. Sometimes characters can make a counter-attack. Characters can enter dodge or parry chances to mitigate damage; parry lets you gain counter-attack chances, but some units bypass parry entirely and so dodge becomes more useful here - good luck stopping that Chaos Spawn's arm when it's the width of a tree trunk and has a Chaos-scrambled brain guiding it, you puny human. Spellcasters cast spells. Pretty straightforward. 

When characters are outnumbered, they have to pass an All Alone check based on their Leadership. If they fail, they will attempt to flee and earn a free attack from everything they're in combat with until they dart in the opposite direction as controlled by the AI, attempting usually to hide in a building (although smart players can set up an ambush character nearby who will charge them and give them a whap the second they start to run). Characters who fail their All Alone but are engaged in combat from all sides and don't have a place to flee to simply lose their turn. 

The map is lost or won when one team Routs, based on having their warriors put out of commission. There are other secondary objectives per game as well, which can be as complicated as taking tokens off dead enemies or taking the idol in their cart, or just getting a set amount of wyrdstone. You really should go for these seeing as they gift 3 extra XP for every unit, when just completing the mission alone nets 2XP.

When the battle ends, the results screen will say which characters advanced. More importantly, will say who among those who were [[Meme|knocked the fuck out]] managed to make it back and with or without their gear, and whether they simply dropped dead upon returning home or if they suffered some kind of injury. Sometimes a redshirt who was gored to death by a Chaos Spawn in the skirmish can even make it back with all their gear, completely unhurt and having only gained experience points from the process.

Permanent injuries show up on a character, and can be anything from a cracked skull giving them permanent Stupidity, a lost limb, a lost eye, and so on. While it may look absolutely badass for you to have a Sister Superior with a peg-leg, a missing eye, and a permanent crazy fucking look on her face while she swings around a giant mace, the longterm injuries are usually debilitating and unless you're really attached to a warrior (or not expecting them to survive much longer) you may want to consider replacing them with a new recruit unless they are so experienced you can't bring yourself to let them go. Or keep them in emergency reserve, maybe bring them a heretic home to bludgeon to death afterwards if they sweep while you're gone. 

A story mode exists in the game, although it's fairly bare-bones and just gives you the basics of who your faction basically is. During those, you can get access to a "Dramatic Personae" which is a named hero character. Players of Mordheim will recognize favorites like [[Bertha Bestraufrung]] when they get access to these special characters (who unless you REALLY fuck up can almost solo most maps by themselves). 

Unfortunately, the game is notorious for one feature that makes it a niche game instead of one of /tg/'s recommended. Difficulty. Now while /tg/ is no stranger to hard games (in fact /tg/ loves ballbusting hard games) there is a difference between hard and broken, and Mordheim: City of the Damned is just plain broken. To give you an idea of how unforgivingly hard it is the only way to reliably win constantly, even in basic matches, is to straight up break the AI. How did the developers respond to claims that the game was simply too hard? Tell players to exploit the AI as much as possible by putting yourself into doorways to break the AI's pathfinding. No, really, not making this up.

The extreme difficulty comes from three things: 
#Slow source of income. The way to make money in the game is through Warpstone (or Wyrdstone, whatever) deliveries. This gives a delay of five days before you get any rewards from your looting, so if you need to sell Warpstone right now due to an emergency you need to wait to get your money. That's days of your warband going unpaid (which increases for each payday missed), wounds untreated (every three day your untreated wounded have a chance to die), and recruitment brought to a halt. 
#No brakes on the RNG. Any player can tell you that the dice can curse you as well was bless you, but dice tend to average out over a trend. Unfortunately computers can't replicate true randomness so computer based RNG tends to create unusually long winning streaks and long losing streaks which real life dice do not have, being truly random. Most games get around this by having an algorithm watch the dice so it can force the game to roll high if the player gets too many bad rolls but Mordheim doesn't have this, so have fun watching your gutter runner fail to climb a wall four times in a row (and yes, this is a real thing).
#Your rules are not the AI's rules. You can lose expensive heroes instantly in battle or get devastating injuries forcing you to retire a high level henchman, which encourages you to abandon an expedition if things are going badly. But the AI warband is randomly generated for that match, then deleted once the battle is over, so they suffer no consequences for dangerous play. Meaning that the AI's strategy is to be aggressive always and forever; they don't have to worry about losses after all. The AI will never concede defeat, abandon a risky situation, or even just give up, which makes your warband grind down to nothing if you play legitimately (which most new players do). Also, the AI get pretty huge bonuses to compensate their general stupidity. have fun tryign to land a two-handed weapon swing on a slippery Skaven!

Yeah...

Although you can mitigate a lot of the losses by following the these methods:
#Don't take missions with scattered random deployment on both sides as you can easily find a model getting lynched by being placed on their own next to their enemies hardest hitters.
#Respect the difficulty, Normal is fine, hard is doable, Brutal you will probably get someone taken out, Deadly some of your team will be down.
#Field 2 Leaders so you can always do missions if one is injured and if the only missions available are rubbish wait a day and get new ones.