The Videogame Corner: Mordheim: City of the Damned

Game: Mordheim: City of the Damned
Developer: Rogue Factor
Genre: Strategy Role-Playing game
Releases: 2015 (PC), 2016 (Playstation 4, Xbox One)

Games Workshop is, as far as I am aware, mostly known for two things: Highly expensive plastic miniatures that some people buy with almost religious fervor; and outsourcing their franchises to various videogame companies and seeing what spawns by doing so. I do have my fair share of Warhammer 40,000 stuff in my flat, but while that might be a topic for an article someday, I want to focus on one of the videogames released in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. “Mordheim: City of the Damned” is actually the videogame adaptation of a tabletop variant of Warhammer Fantasy named “Mordheim”, and focuses on small warbands fighting each other rather than huge armies standing opposite another and the game becoming a huge resource-burning affair. I like the idea of small skirimishes rather than huge battles because they allow for the role-playing component to take center stage and individual characters having actual impact rather than just being part of a thirty-man squad, but whether “Mordheim: City of the Damned” manages to capture that sentiment is for us to see in the following paragraphs; which also happens to be the day 13 article for Blaugust 2022.

“Mordheim: City of the Damned” takes place in the titular city of Mordheim. What was once a place for decadence and debauchery fell out of luck one day when a comet struck the poor district of the city and everything plummeted into chaos. Now, this could have been the end of it due to the city being a Chernobyl-esque zone infected by chaos. Why would anyone wander into it on their own volition? Well, that is where wyrdstone comes into play: Whether the meteor was made out of the material or it was spawned by the chaotic influences is anyone’s guess, but the small green shards are immensely potent catalysts for magic and therefore much sought after; and such a demand obviously fetches a pretty penny. With the interest of various factions being piqued, it was only a matter of time when the various mercenary bands will form to plunder the city for all it is worth; and they are not exactly willing to share.

The six factions you can play in “Mordheim”. Them all have their own reasons to enter the city, and the other five are certainly an obstacle to reach one’s goals.

This is where the various factions in “Mordheim” that all entered the city for their own reasons come into play. The Witch Hunters fight against anything touched by chaos, so a city fallen to their mortal enemies needs to be cleansed or purged, whatever turns out to be most efficient and this probably includes methods using fire. There are the Human Mercenaries from Reikland, which are basically in it for the money as they do not exactly care about the circumstances of the city or its newfound resource. The local order of the Sisters of Sigmar joins the fray to reclaim and restore the city both for pragmatical reasons and to prove the devotion to their god. The Cult of the Possessed are literal chaos cultists and similar to the Sisters of Sigmar they want to prove their devotion; but to a very different type of god. The Skaven, the Warhammer universe ratfolk, simply want to collect the wyrdstone to gain power and rise in their ranks. And lastly, the undead vassals under Count Vlad von Carstein see the magic potential of the wyrdstones and want to use them to create an even larger amount of undead minions for their armies.

Regardless of which faction you choose to represent, you will need to form a warband to pillage and plunder with. The warband at the start consists of one leader, one hero, and three henchmen. The leader is the strongest character in general and has a sizeable lead in stats compared to the other members of your party; but obviously comes with the drawback of also causing a major panic when they go down. The hero is your average joe but with improved stats, while the henchmen are the less fancy but solid backbone of your operations in “Mordheim”; and also the cheapest members you can find. I could go over the various stats the characters have, but I do not think that anyone is interested in two-thousand words about stats. But that being said, “Mordheim” really wants to go all out with the “difficult strategy game”-description as there are tons of stats as well as tons of factors that can influence the stats of your warband. It is very much necessary to play through the four fighting tutorials as well as the eight text-based lessons in order to understand what exactly is going on, which might turn some players off that want to jump straight into the action. And while the tutorials really do a fine job balancing between explaining the various features while trying to keep things short, you will need to play a few real rounds to get into it.

So, in order to have success in “Mordheim”, we start a campaign, create a warband to scavenge the ruins with, and try to understand the boatloads of factors and menus in the game. I would suggest not going to crazy at the start though: You will need your money, so spending it all on equipment you do not need is a bad decision. After navigating the various menus that we cannot do anything in yet, it is time for action: Start up your first skirmish, see the various risk levels, loot statistics and don’t understand any of it, and find yourself in the ruins of “Mordheim” with some yet unknown force scavenging the city at the other side of the map. Move forward, find an enemy, engage them in combat. In the first mission, I was still unaware of what all the options are and what I was meant to be doing, because fighting is not the main goal here. I did okay-ish, but soon found out that an honorable fight one-on-one can go either way since every combat action has a chance to hit and therefore also a chance to miss; and when the missing part for your character becomes bigger than the missing part for the opponent, they will cut you down.

But I am sure that anyone giving the game an hour or two will soon understand the essentials: You have blue points for movement and red points for combat-related actions, with some options like “Disengage” using both resources. During movement, a circle will show you how far you can go, while any additional action like jumping or climbing takes one more point. In combat, most attacks will take two to three points, which automatically determines how often your character will be able to swing their weapon at the opponent. On top of that, there are stances which give various bonuses: The “Ambush Stance” will allow your character to rush into battle for one attack as soon as an enemy enters the protected area, while the “Dodge Stance” will increase your dodge chance against opposing melee attacks by a certain amount. There are firearms, but they are overall less consistent in terms of hitting than melee attacks, while items and spells can round up the experience by providing bonuses that normal fighters would not have access to. There is also initiative, which determines how fast you are able to act during each turn, and moral which might send you fleeing, and various other percentiles; but like I said, the most important stuff will come to you eventually while playing.

While the city of Mordheim is vast, there will be times when space to fight in is limited; for better and for worse.

Now, the best way to fight in “Mordheim: City of the Damned”, at least in my opinion, is simply using the numbers to your advantage. This is not universally the case in videogames: In “Kenshi”, one of the first things you learn in not to gang up on an enemy because one wide sweep will hit your entire squad while your members still only attack by taking turns. However, in “Mordheim” the opponent cannot hit your other fighters unless they specifically target one of them, meaning that ganging up on one guy increases your damage output by a lot, makes any fleeing maneuver a death sentence (since the opponent takes a hit from every enemy in the fight as a parting gift), and limits the movement of the enemy so far as to make them unable to do something other than fight back. The AI might end up putting you in such a scenario if you are not careful, but I do not think that it can use the strength in numbers-approach consciously. What the game is aware of though is that too many fighters in one place make for messy fighting, so it introduces a control zone for allied fighters. If one of your characters stands in the green circle of an ally, they cannot take an action there, which limits the amount of pilling up you can do in battles. This is both a blessing and a curse really: A blessing since you can use small staircases and other terrain to your advantage knowing that the enemy is going to be bottleneck’d and can be cut down one by one; and a curse since the same blocking action can happen to you by both the enemy and your own bad placement of troops.

Now, I am aware that stochastics are unreliable by nature. If the game tells me that I have a 91% chance of hitting the enemy that obviously means that there is still a 9% chance left that I will miss. The concept is not that hard to grasp and there is plenty of randomness given in videogames, so the idea of calculating hit chances in your game that way is not that odd. However, and this is entirely subjective, I have rarely seen incredibly high chances miss as I did in “Mordheim: City of the Damned”. Some witch hunter in front of me activates the dodge stance and I might aswell fight against the air since that guy is not going to be hit anymore. Missing attacks is perfectly normal and as someone who would claim to play a lot of videogames with strategic elements I know that you have to adapt and use a different way to gain the upper hand when it happens; but “Mordheim” is incredibly frustrating in that regard. Finishing off an enemy that I ganged up upon has various strategic advantages: First off, the enemy is out of action meaning they cannot harm my party anymore. That fighter can therefore also not obstruct my way into another fight, and if I managed to kill them before all members in the battle did their action I can even take those additional resources and send them to another fight or task. Therefore, seeing three of my fighters missing the killing blow is only a little bit infuriating. And if I am to believe other players, I am not the only one witnessing this issue, with lots of people ridiculing the fact that they missed 95% three times in a row or talking about similar incidents.

Hitting in battle is not the only thing that is subject to randomness though. Every time you climb up a wall or jump down some elevation, the game makes a check to see whether your fighter succeeds; or not. If they manage to succeed the check, they will simply move up or down whatever you tasked them with; however, on failure they will crash into the floor which means that they are taking damage and still lose the action points for that maneuver. This is especially bad when climbing, since when falling down something you at least end up where you wanted to go but the climb check is still required a second time around and can obviously also fail. On top of that randomness, there are “traps” all over the city. Now, the word trap might not be the best way to describe it, but some organic chaos decoration on a wall or on the floor can spew mucus, emit gases, or simply curse you; which can be both harmful and beneficial. And as soon as spells enter the equation, you will find yourself on the balancing act between high hit chance magic projectiles and your caster eventually blowing up for using those very spells.

And that is not even the end of it. In battles, you normally have two ways of winning, or losing, the skirmish: You either defeat all members of the opposing warband and therefore win because there is no opposition to oppose you, or you manage to send them fleeing which happens when the enemy moral drops to low. Up till now, I have only ever won one battle via extermination and every other conflict by the opposing party failing their moral check. Now, you might be asking where that is a problem exactly? Well, the battlefield is littered with loot that you can use or sell for crowns, which you will need in order to pay the members of your warband, pay the medical expenses to get injured party members running again, to buy equipment and items, or even to invest into learning skills. Also, the battlefield normally has various points at which you can obtain wyrdstone, the very reason all of those parties are even battling in “Mordheim”. Now to the point: If I manage to kill two opponents more or less because I need them out of the picture before they can inflict too much harm, it is perfectly possible that the round ends, the opposing warband fails their moral check, and the mission ends without me gaining the sweet loot to its fullest. You do get a small fraction of the loot at the end of the round when winning, and it is perfectly possible to run past some chests on the way to battle and loot them while you are at it, but if you really want to get the spoils you need to get out of your way to obtain those items. And, by the way, the opposing warband is a big in numbers as yours, meaning that any member not in battle potentially tips the scales in the opponent’s favor; and that might mean your characters being taken out of action.

Bilik Slynker, who died in Mordheim keeping a blood-thirsty Witch Hunter off his leader’s tail. Godspeed, Bilik Slynker.

Continuing with the segues, being taken out of action during the fight does not necessarily need to be a bad thing; however, it also bloody can be. Some light wounds might need to heal a number of days and will cost a premium in medical fees to even get the fighter ready again, with one of my henchman rats only taking two crowns per battle that they had taken part in but asking for twelve in order to be cured. To put that into perspective, that is about what the entire party might ask for; and I still need to pay that guy his wage in order to keep him happy. And the developers of “Mordheim” were cunning enough to disable firing members of your warband if they still have to receive wages or medical treatment, so you either pay that guy to fire him or hope that he will succumb to his wounds at some stage. And all of this only applies if your character makes it out of the battle alive: One scenario for characters being taken out of action is death, so your can lose members of your warband for playing carelessly; or getting unlucky. But even without your characters straightup dying there are some nasty permanent injuries they can obtain by getting whacked too hard. One of the maladies is a skull fracture which means that your character has memory lapses and has a chance to skip their turn without doing anything except when in melee. That is absolutely terrible in a game in which I need every hand on deck to work against the ridiculous number of misses in combat by using more attacks.

The main problem I have with this mixture of lots of random elements and drawbacks like perma-death or losing the campaign via technical knock-out due to not being able to send enough wyrdstone to my employer is that there will be a point in the game at which my hands are tied and I will be losing everything that I have invested time into to a row of unfortunate circumstances. I am not immune to mistakes, absolutely not, so it is perfectly possible that I will have a sizeable part in the misfortune dealt upon me; but the looming sword of losing to chance is not a good feeling in a videogame. And while that is true for other games aswell, I feel like “Mordheim: City of the Damned” does not allow me to do enough to stack things in my favor rather than turtling and abusing some of the choices the AI makes; like shooting with a crossbow with the enemy hero while four of my ratkin are free to engage him in combat.

And I think that it is a crying shame that the randomness is stacked against me and left such a bad impression, because both the premise of the game and the design are very nice. The city itself captures the grimdark atmosphere of the Warhammer franchise brilliantly, with enough of the city still standing that your mind can fill in the blanks and imagine it how it would have been in days past, while also being corrupted enough to create an eerie and even terrifying scenario that the various characters only force themselves to endure because of the spoils and personal gain it could mean for them. Even the fact that there are customisation options for your own warbands are a good idea with personalisation being the key to creating a background for your characters and invoking a role-playing atmosphere you are invested in. It is, at least in my opinion, unfortunately dragged down by randomness in form of not hitting enemies, opponents going ham on highly-boosted dodge chances, sillyness like fear checks, or disallowing you from scavenging the area due to winning fights prematurely via the enemy warband failing their moral check. There is a difference between a game being “difficult” and a game being “arbitrary”. “Dark Souls” is mostly difficult, stuff like Death’s Door checks in “Darkest Dungeon” are arbitrary. The first thing comes down to me to improve in order to manage getting past a challenge while the second is a die roll that I had no way of influencing at all; and that is the reason why “Mordheim: City of the Damned” is unfulfilling to play for me. Still, if you are interested in giving the game a go or want to disprove what I said in this article, the game can be yours on Steam for 19.99€; which is a price that would make me wait until a sale comes around if I had to buy the game again.