Crusade Details (crossposted from Discord and ingame)
A Crusade is the Imperial term for a very large-scale military campaign undertaken to conquer or retake multiple worlds or an entire sector of the galaxy. The Chaos equivalent is known as a “Black Crusade." Separate from the lore, there’s also the tabletop gameplay term “Crusade”, denoting a series of games (battles) arranged in a campaign with progression elements.
A Tacticus Crusade is a recurring live event that runs in 10 week seasons. Our intent is that for most of those weeks, it runs largely in the background powered by your regular gameplay choices - we're not adding huge amounts of new actions or battles.
Each season has three main parts:
Week 1-6
Expansion phase
Week 7-10
Domination phase
Week 10
Crescendo event
The Imperials embark on a Crusade, and Chaos and xenos factions are naturally in opposition - but to be clear, they’re not friends, they simply oppose the Imperium. “The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but it’s always a good time to wreck that other enemy.”
Every Guild reaches a decision together, and the Guild Leader picks a side (as long as the Guild is at least level 5). Then each guild member who has reached level 20 or higher picks a faction within their Guild’s side, so if your guild went with "Imperial,” all the members would be free to pick any Imperial faction. During the Crusade, many of your actions score you points (similar to HRE in this regard). All your points contribute simultaneously to your own score, your guild’s score, and your faction’s score.
Note that we will be scaling the points according to the number and strength of the players that picked a given side/faction, so that functionally, the two sides will be evenly matched.
The fun is all in the Galaxy Map. There are at this time 96 planets to fight for, and the winning side of the Crusade will be the one that controls the most planets. Guild leaders can designate a target planet, similar to choosing a target zone in Guild War. In addition to your points counting towards your own score, your guild’s score and your faction’s score, your victories in the game will count towards the capture of the planet you choose to fight for. The side with the most points at the end of each week during the Expansion phase wins the planet. Of course, there are rewards for capturing a planet :)
Every week during the Expansion phase, players will see a new set of planets made available for fighting. But once the six weeks of Expansion are over...the war for Domination begins. During the Domination phase, you may look to enemy planets adjacent to your own and try to take them…but beware of the enemy trying to take your territory. If the enemy takes your planet, and you still control a planet behind the fallen one, you may try and take it back the following week. Each time a planet changes hands, it gets harder to reconquer!
The final week of Domination is called Crescendo, and it's the week with active gameplay. We are not yet ready to talk about it, though. See you back here in 1.42 ;) Seriously, we can tell you that the Crescendo has active gameplay, similar in scope to a seasonal event. Rewards are given throughout (and of course there’s a shop for the whole mode, and new currencies called Intel, Forces, and Ordnance), but the major rewards are delivered during Crescendo.
We can discuss sub-features called Operations, and…Guild Projects, where your guild can determine, earn, and deploy (via a command available to the guild leader) a bonus allowing you and your friends to influence the Crusade. Guild Projects: Actually, literally…coming soon!
Operations: Check your Operations board, and choose a mission to which you commit specific characters. (Don’t worry, characters remain usable in all other game modes.) Rarity, rank, and faction will matter. They’ll go out and fight, and when they return, they’ll have resources and gained some XP at the same time.
Guild Projects: With either resources (Crusade-only resources mentioned above, called Intel, Forces, and Ordnance), tasks, or both, your guild can work together to unlock special actions that apply to the Crusade . We are starting with two, Orbital Bombardment (same for everyone) and Mass Reinforcements (slightly different tasks depending on the chosen side in Crusade) with more to be added in the future. You can repeat projects in a single Crusade season, but it will get more costly each time.
At the end of the season, either the Imperium wins or they’re Devastated. In addition to rewards for participating and planetary capture, there will also be a leaderboard component for both guilds and individuals, for those who like that sort of thing. We’re populating the Crusade shop with stuff like new relics (starting with one for Haarken and one for Anuphet).
As I said at the top — once you’ve chosen your planets, the main effort on your part for the first phase is done. Just play as normal! All we’ve done is give your points score some real meaning. Your community people are hoping to see some fun meta gameplay emerge on our socials, of course, but all you _have_ to do in order to be part of this galactic war is be a Tactician and play.
Watch for the patch notes next week, check out our friends Tactifuchs and Nandi to see some videos that will help you take this all in, and we’ll see you again soon with Crescendo details!
https://youtu.be/NZOJRmQiEf0 Tactifuchs
https://youtu.be/S5WlhjVxfBg Nandi