Since it was first released in 1983, the Warhammer Fantasy miniatures game has served as the inspiration for a number of PC games. However, none have looked as beautiful as Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, a real-time strategy game due out next month. Mark of Chaos won't feature the traditional economic aspects found in most real-time strategy games, and you won't be sending orcs to chop wood or mine stone. Instead, you'll be sending orcs, humans, elves, and dwarves to kill each other with giant swords, powerful spells, huge catapults, and much, much more.

　　Part of the appeal of the miniatures game is that you can paint your own miniatures to make them look how you like. That's something that the designers of Mark of Chaos wanted to keep, so the game has extensive customization options to let you create unique units to show off in multiplayer games. To explain, we have producer Thomas Vu of Bandai Games America.

Painting Armies

　　Producer, Namco Bandai Games America

　　Unit customization lets you create a unique look to your units and armies.

　　Customization is a relatively recent addition to the real-time strategy genre. For Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, adding customization to the game was one of the core feature requirements for our designers because of its prevalence in the miniatures game. The Warhammer miniatures game encourages players to organize their units into armies, paint them, equip them with magical items, and even modify each unit's body parts to create massive individualized armies. Mark of Chaos' development team approached customization with these features in mind and ended up with something that brings a new level of customization to the RTS genre, allowing players' armies and the battles they take part in to be truly unique.

　　Army customization was one of the first areas of the game that was designed, and the development team wanted players to have complete control over what units could compose their army. Army creation is based on a point system, where every unit has a point value allowing players to "buy" any available unit if funds are available. The development team created many different types of units, along with a wide range of unit abilities that were unique to both the army type and to each unit. For example, a player might want to create an empire army that was focused on range attackers. This army might consist of bright and jade wizard heroes who are empowered by magical attacks, along with huntsmen, handgunners, and mounted pistoliers. To complete it, a player might throw in some great cannons and a helblaster volley gun for some sieging capabilities. Another empire player may instead want to focus on a close-combat, brute-force army and would take some warrior priests and an elector count for hero units, with added flagellants, great swords, and mounted knights. A siege tower and battering ram would support the close-combat siege capabilities of this type of army.

　　Each of the four armies (empire, high elves, chaos, skaven) in Mark of Chaos are divided into three subarmies, giving the player a total of 12 subarmies. Each of these subarmies contains some unique units and characteristics. Chaos, for example, is divided by three subarmies: Khorne, Nurgle, and Undivided. An army of Khorne will have very little to do with magic since its patron god detests magic. Worshippers of Nurgle, on the other hand, love magic, especially when it has to do with spells that cause disease and plagues. These subarmies are further enhanced with mercenary armies such as dwarfs and orcs, which will allow players to customize their armies further. The empire and high elves can add dwarf units to their armies, giving them some added toughness with units such as the dwarf lord and the dwarf stone throwers. Skaven and chaos armies have orc and goblin mercenaries such as the orc warboss and goblin great shaman. Ultimately, the subarmies and the mercenaries add a huge layer of army customization, because the chaos Nurgle and orc army will play quite differently from a chaos Khorne and goblin army.

　　You can mix and match various body parts and accessories, and then paint them.

　　Every unit will be able to level up in Mark of Chaos. Regular nonhero units can be equipped with three levels of armor and three levels of weapons. Players will have control over their regiment's size. Each regiment will have the option of adding specialized units that will enhance the regiment. These specialist units include the champion, musician, and standard bearer. Heroes in particular can gain up to 40 levels. Each hero will have individualized skill trees for combat, dueling, and command skills. Each level affords the player a skill point to distribute within these skill trees, making each hero unique, even if the player has multiple instances of the hero within his army. All heroes will also be able to equip magical items for eight body locations, and each hero has inventory space for one-use items such as potions and relics. All of this army customization makes a huge difference when taking your army online to play with others. Players will be able to utilize special skills and hero combos that are unique to their specific units and equipment setups.

　　Each army in Mark of Chaos will come with default colors that are consistent with that army in the Warhammer fiction. In the unit-customization window, players will have the opportunity to customize the army color palettes to create some truly unique color schemes. Each color has a wide range of scale, including the ability to change hue, saturation, and brightness. When choosing a color for a unit, the color will automatically map across the entire army to keep the army consistent with the color scheme that the player chooses. This is to keep the armies recognizable in multiplayer. On the unit-customization window, the player will also find modification tools. Every unit will have some degree of modifiable body parts, and you can choose from up to 10 different body parts per unit. For example, if a player wanted every unit in his great swords regiment to have a mustache (or specifically didn't want every unit to have a mustache), the player has both options. Or, if the player wanted skulls hanging around the neck of his chaos warrior, this can also be done. Each unit within a regiment can potentially have a different look, giving huge amounts of variety to the look of the army. If a player wanted to do the modifications in a quick and dirty fashion, we included a randomize-slot button. After modifying an army's color and body parts, the show-army button instances the unit into a regiment so that the player can evaluate how each of the modified units look standing together next to each other. You can even choose your own banners that can be brought online to represent your army and your clan while you battle other players.

　　Heroes are much more customizable than regular units.

　　One of the goals of Mark of Chaos was to create an RTS game that gave the player an unprecedented level of customization. This was achieved through the many subarmies, mercenary units, and regiment additions, as well as the leveling system, hero-equipment system, and hero-skill system. For players that want a unique look to their army, the army-paint tool and unit-modification tool in Mark of Chaos will help them feel right at home. We hope that these features capture the fun and creativity found in the miniatures game and give Warhammer fans and RTS gamers a chance to create truly unique armies to bring to the field of battle.