Greetings Admirals, and welcome back to the devblogs for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. Today’s topic is multiplayer and skirmish modes, giving you a look into the non-campaign offerings you’ll have access to not only come release, but as part of the first pre-order beta starting early December.

This includes ranked play, 2v2, as well as standard versus AI, across a massive variety of possible matchups, battlefields, and environments.

The base skirmish and multiplayer game is a randomly generated map with five capture points and a number of possible environmental effects. These range from those familiar to players of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, such as gas clouds and asteroid fields, as well as weirder phenomenon new to the sequel - a fleet of space titans migrating through the area that cause heavy damage to any ship they come into contact with, or pulsing solar radiation that render shields useless.

All of these settings can be customised before a skirmish game, letting you pick the point totals of fleets, which environmental effects will appear, whether to use the capture point Domination ruleset or the simpler Deathmatch mode, and so on.

In Ranked play, fleets are set to the new maximum of 1200 points, increased from the original game for larger, more action-packed battles, and environmental effects are turned off. Capture points are on, with randomised locations to make every battle different, and internal logic to ensure battles will never be unfair, but will require dynamic tactics. The same is true for 2v2 ranked, only each player fields a fleet of 600 points of their chosen faction.

For those that want to get right into the action we have pre-defined fleets across a broad spectrum of playstyles, while more advanced players can customise their own faction fleet with any combination of ships they like.

On top of all this, a number of quality of life changes have been implemented to make multiplayer and skirmish games better than ever. Balance has been improved across the board, a process that will continue through our two pre-order beta phases. We’ve also made changes to menus and ergonomics to make it faster and easier than ever to get into a battle, and multiplayer progression is rewarding in terms of cosmetics and new options for skills and fleet upgrades.

Care was taken to ensure this never feels like a power reward for playing more, but simply new options and ways to play. This progression system is only available in ranked mode, as a way to further reward those who jump into multiplayer and experiment with different fleets and strategies.

In ranked play, every battle impacts your position on the global leaderboard, filterable by faction. Hone your skills to be the best admiral in your faction!

We believe we have a complete and exciting offering for multiplayer in Armada 2, which will delight new players and series veterans alike. We can’t wait to get it into your hands officially early next year, as well as take your feedback and make changes in the upcoming pre-order betas.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 releases on Steam in January 2019. You can already pre-order for Beta Access before the release of the game, and a 10% discount! http://bit.ly/BFG2Steam

Returning Battlefleet Gothic: Armada players on Steam instead benefit from a 25% loyalty discount on their preorder of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2.