Admirals,

BFGA2 Game Director Romain Clavier here. It’s been three days now since the release of the beta. We’re delighted to see thousands of players jumping into games and providing feedback on everything from faction balance to the campaign flow, and much more.

The Tyranid invasion and the green Krusade may seem unstoppable but do not abandon hope and praise the Emperor, for he is the salvation of mankind. Here’s what we’re currently planning to do in response to all the feedback and data we’ve received during the week.

Campaign update:

Let’s start with the two most common pieces of feedback regarding the campaign gameplay.

“I don’t like the domination mode in campaign.” Well, It will be pretty easy for us to add a game option that allows the player to remove capture zones during campaign battles in order to play with just the “extermination” win condition. We still believe that domination mode provides a better in-game experience, as it adds a tactical layer to battle as well as improving the game balance, but we understand the desire to annihilate your enemies. We’ll do our best to deliver this change for the release. If we cannot, it will be implemented with the first patch shortly after launch. We will keep you updated on this as regularly as possible.

“I feel under pressure from the urgency gauge”. Fair enough, we don’t want anyone to feel anxious surrounding their solo game experience of the grim dark future. We will be adding an option at the start of the campaign that will disable the urgency gauge. For clarity, we would advise against disabling this feature, as we think it provides incentive and pressure for pushing forward as well as offering a good representation of the critical situation in the Cadian Gate, and being part of our difficulty balancing. However, we’d rather it was your choice. It’s possible we will have this implemented by release, but more probably it will be a part of the first patch.



Skirmish:

The main feedback we’ve received here is that you all would like to be able to level up factions in Skirmish. Well, we don’t see any good arguments that go against this request. We will implement this for release! Portrait rewards will still be exclusive to ranked matches, as they’re purely cosmetic.

We’re also looking at ways to continue to improve the skirmish game in post-release content. We’ll talk more about this in the near future as we start to explain our plans regarding post launch content.

Balancing:

Well, balancing is still not perfect but it's better than ever. With thousands upon thousands of battles concluded (and with mirror matches excluded), let’s check the stats up to now:

First to talk about this data a bit. Clearly there are two major outliers in Corsairs and Tyranids, which we’ll discuss in a moment, alongside the higher-than-perfect Ork winrate. However, we’re very happy that 10 of our 12 factions are relatively well balanced, especially given we’re yet to release. Obviously, it’s currently imperfect, so here are our goals going forward.

At first we want to get everyone between 40% and 60% global winrate. Of course the closer to 50% the better, and we’ll continue tweaking beyond that, but it’s our initial aim. It’s important to note these numbers do not represent with perfect accuracy how balanced factions are. For example, some factions may perform better or worse depending on the skill level of the players, the exact fleet compositions being used, and so on. However, we’re happy to use this data alongside your continued feedback to improve things.

As mentioned, the most problematic factions are the Corsairs and Tyranids. Orks are borderline.

Therefore, you should expect in a patch on launch day:

A nerf for the Tyranids. Should be mostly based on ship point cost.

A buff for the Corsairs. Ships will be cheaper and will have access to the shroud hull attribute, which cloaks ships at the start of battle.

A very slight nerf for the Orks.

A lot of small adjustments to make the battle experience less frustrating in some cases or with some factions.

Of course, we’re still finalising the specifics here, and will keep you updated with full patch notes once the patch is ready. We hope to continue sharing matchup data with you in future, and are looking into ways to split the data by league to make sure we’re using it in the best way possible.

Multiplayer:

We have found a way to improve classification of players in the leaderboard, as it’s currently very hard to get out of Bronze league. This update is now live, so please let us know if it seems better and fairer to you (or not!)

Bug:

Ouch! A nasty bug regarding weapon stats modifiers bypassed our vigilance and is present in the beta. A few bonuses are not being applied properly. We will be fixing it for release - we’d like to do it sooner, but ensuring that our release build is as good as possible is our current priority. Post-launch, we hope to patch issues such as this (or, hopefully, more minor ones) quicker. It’s important to note this particular issue will likely have a positive impact on the game balance, also.

Thanks for all the feedback, positive and negative! Continue to help us in making the best game possible for the 24th!

Dismissed!

Ravensburg