unification mode vs ultimate apoc

[Banaminati]

what is the difference between these two mods?

[fuggles2k]

In brief, UA adds higher unit caps and adds more titans and more units. Uni adds more game modes, units and a lot more races.

[Mrvecz]

Unification has more factions in total, while Apocalypse has larger individual factions (each faction has more units, upgrades etc...). Unification has more gamemodes like last stand and survival.

With Unification i feel alot of the factions become too similar to each other out of the shere quantity of them and because of that the differences between factions are not as jarring as base differences between factions.

Some factions do feel unique enough from each other, but there is simply alot more overlay and the differences become surface level once you get used to them, this can be both bad and good, because you can use the knowledge of what you already know.

I would describe it this way, in Unification, it feels like the Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines difference. Not Space Marines and Orks difference.
Familiar, but not too much, still plenty of stuff to learn and experience.

But then there are factions that will completely stump you with unique mechanics that arent just copy and paste of existing stuff, like scrap mechanics of 13th Legion or the Blood mechanic (Where you slay and kill and then ask Khorne for favours) of the World Eaters.

Space Marines probably suffer this the most of being well lore accurate of sharing arsenal between each other and their differences being minor enough, but still present. Blood Ravens, Imperial Fists, Salamanders,Dark Angels, Black Templars and Blood Angels have so much overlay with each other you could probably stump anyone watching you play by just switching paint schemes around and they wouldnt probably notice for some time until you would build some chapter specific units like Siege Troopers for Imperial fists or Deathwing Terminators for Dark Angels.

Then in the same mod, Unification can still do same factions, different armies and do it well enough. Imperial Guard regiments are the best example. Cadians (stock IG) vs Steel Legion vs Death Corps. Not only they are visually distinct, they have considerable gameplay changes too.

Like Death Corps of Krieg, instead of panicking, will charge suicidally towards enemies and become uncontrollable unless you have a commisar to wrangle them back under control. Krieg Engineers can also dig trenches as temporary heavy cover, set up tank traps and barbed wire and bunkers that can be manned and you have the most artillery units out of all Imperium factions. Compared to Cadians or Steel Legion they have superb defences, area of denial, chemical weapons, superb artillery and they have the strongest Baneblade version (lucius pattern).

Steel Legion is highly mobile and more aggresive, with weaker-ish defences it also exists as 2 factions inside of 1, either Mechanized Infantry or Tank Corps. Each with exclusive units. They can even deep strike units so they have global reach and hell even deep strike Leman Russ tanks behind enemy lines. If you take the Mechanized Infantry then Steel Legion gets access to easily the most broken infantry unit, the Stormtroopers, you can upgrade these to be infiltratable, AKA invisible and Stormtroopers have among the highest damage outputs with their hellguns that they will melt whole infantry squads within seconds. Like they have DPS you would expect from Devastators but they are invisible, can be deep striked, you can have 3 squads of them at once and they require no deployment time. Steel Legion really hammers down the aggresive playstyle from get go, their builders (Pioneers) cant even repair buildings (Trojans do and these are vehicles) and they can capture points as if they were standard infantry and you can even upgrade control points to a semi-barracks that can churn out Soldier squads to keep the pressure up.

I could probably make this post an essay worthy of universities to give both mods justice, both are good and i only talked about the Unification mod.

If i were to choose, i would use Unification mod, because it simply feels more polished and balanced, Ultimate Apocalypse is abit too overwhelming at some points and fights there can become a blurry mess really quickly. Plus Unification has actually support for the campaign with more than "it doesnt CTD if you try", hell there are even units that are exclusive to the campaign you cannot even make in the Skirmish. Though its not like the campaign changed that much...

[fuggles2k]

Uni has a campaign add on that allows you to play as daemons, Tyranids and inquisition incidentally. Very WIP as not been done before.

[Banaminati]

Originally posted by Mrvecz:

Unification has more factions in total, while Apocalypse has larger individual factions (each faction has more units, upgrades etc...). Unification has more gamemodes like last stand and survival.

With Unification i feel alot of the factions become too similar to each other out of the shere quantity of them and because of that the differences between factions are not as jarring as base differences between factions.

Some factions do feel unique enough from each other, but there is simply alot more overlay and the differences become surface level once you get used to them, this can be both bad and good, because you can use the knowledge of what you already know.

I would describe it this way, in Unification, it feels like the Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines difference. Not Space Marines and Orks difference.
Familiar, but not too much, still plenty of stuff to learn and experience.

But then there are factions that will completely stump you with unique mechanics that arent just copy and paste of existing stuff, like scrap mechanics of 13th Legion or the Blood mechanic (Where you slay and kill and then ask Khorne for favours) of the World Eaters.

Space Marines probably suffer this the most of being well lore accurate of sharing arsenal between each other and their differences being minor enough, but still present. Blood Ravens, Imperial Fists, Salamanders,Dark Angels, Black Templars and Blood Angels have so much overlay with each other you could probably stump anyone watching you play by just switching paint schemes around and they wouldnt probably notice for some time until you would build some chapter specific units like Siege Troopers for Imperial fists or Deathwing Terminators for Dark Angels.

Then in the same mod, Unification can still do same factions, different armies and do it well enough. Imperial Guard regiments are the best example. Cadians (stock IG) vs Steel Legion vs Death Corps. Not only they are visually distinct, they have considerable gameplay changes too.

Like Death Corps of Krieg, instead of panicking, will charge suicidally towards enemies and become uncontrollable unless you have a commisar to wrangle them back under control. Krieg Engineers can also dig trenches as temporary heavy cover, set up tank traps and barbed wire and bunkers that can be manned and you have the most artillery units out of all Imperium factions. Compared to Cadians or Steel Legion they have superb defences, area of denial, chemical weapons, superb artillery and they have the strongest Baneblade version (lucius pattern).

Steel Legion is highly mobile and more aggresive, with weaker-ish defences it also exists as 2 factions inside of 1, either Mechanized Infantry or Tank Corps. Each with exclusive units. They can even deep strike units so they have global reach and hell even deep strike Leman Russ tanks behind enemy lines. If you take the Mechanized Infantry then Steel Legion gets access to easily the most broken infantry unit, the Stormtroopers, you can upgrade these to be infiltratable, AKA invisible and Stormtroopers have among the highest damage outputs with their hellguns that they will melt whole infantry squads within seconds. Like they have DPS you would expect from Devastators but they are invisible, can be deep striked, you can have 3 squads of them at once and they require no deployment time. Steel Legion really hammers down the aggresive playstyle from get go, their builders (Pioneers) cant even repair buildings (Trojans do and these are vehicles) and they can capture points as if they were standard infantry and you can even upgrade control points to a semi-barracks that can churn out Soldier squads to keep the pressure up.

I could probably make this post an essay worthy of universities to give both mods justice, both are good and i only talked about the Unification mod.

If i were to choose, i would use Unification mod, because it simply feels more polished and balanced, Ultimate Apocalypse is abit too overwhelming at some points and fights there can become a blurry mess really quickly. Plus Unification has actually support for the campaign with more than "it doesnt CTD if you try", hell there are even units that are exclusive to the campaign you cannot even make in the Skirmish. Though its not like the campaign changed that much...

sweet thank you so much

[Sirgs]

Unification gives us a fully playable adeptus mechanicus faction so i know which one gets my vote

[fuggles2k]

It's being reworked, but will not be updated in time for 7.0 unfortunately.

[Gralzeim]

While I agree with most of your writeup, Mrvecs, I disagree with Imperial Fists feeling like mostly the same as vanilla Space Marines; you could make that argument for Dark Angels, Blood Angels, and Salamanders (they just have a few twists and some unique units or different stats (Salamanders are slower but beefier, for example), but the Fists play quite differently.

Like Krieg, they don't have the normal morale break mechanic, instead they fight harder while (I think) taking more damage, though unlike Krieg they remain controllable (they're Space Marines, after all). Their roster is for the most part, wholly different from vanilla Space Marines, and have several aspects that differ, such as being able to fortify buildings several times to increase their HP, while also increasing their functionality for a few buildings (the power relay (Fists get one per HQ instead of multiple generators) increases its power output, listening posts increase their requisition output, for examples). They can build low walls, they have a beefy longer ranged missile turret in addition to standard turrets, their 'capping' units, instead of scouts, are slower but shield bearing marines who can take fire for allies, they get a large number of unique vehicles, etc.

[Kronk]

ultimate apoc is more polished and balanced imo

[flame from Halo]

Originally posted by Kronk:

ultimate apoc is more polished and balanced imo

I really like Apoc, but getting CTD in about 1/4 skirmish games and constantly for certain races in campaign even with the campaign add-on [looking at you necrons] makes it really hard to say it is truly 'polished'.

As it has been stated before it does also just become a mess. If you don't quell orkz early you can end up with 200 shoota boys in your base that repopulate faster than you can kill them[This is the same for most factions but orkz are the best example]. This is especially prevalent on campaign where certain maps have the enemies start out with more resources than you, therefore getting a lead in tech. Combine that with the fact that if one person gets an end game titan it is basically over, or if they spam artillery that ranges half or all of the map [orkz/necrons].

I really like Apoc and will likely stick to it since I don't like having dozens of factions to water down the overall experience, but I would not call it polished.

[fuggles2k]

Why does the number of factions water down the overall experience?

[flame from Halo]

Originally posted by fuggles2k:

Why does the number of factions water down the overall experience?

Perhaps water down wasn't the right term, but for me personally I enjoy coming back to these old games for several dozen or maybe a hundred hours every few years. While playing all the races several times in base game and apocalypse is do-able to get the full experience of the game/mod before I grow weary it is not as reasonable to do with many more factions. This becomes much more prevalent when many of the options serve the same playstyle/purpose, as Mrvecz stated before, "i feel alot of the factions become too similar to each other".

A decent comparison is Total War Shogun 2, where you have a great deal of differing factions but many of them play the same with only faction buffs or events marking them out, meaning you get a fairly similar experience from playing one as you do half a dozen others.

[Mrvecz]

Originally posted by fuggles2k:

Why does the number of factions water down the overall experience?

Individual factions have simply less effort, attention from the dev team out of the shere fact that there is so many of them. Plus if you have so many factions, not everyone will have the same quality and some factions look ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, design wise than others...esp if you have factions that are older than the mod itself, like Steel Legion and you put them next to the Krieg, who have better voice acting, better looking models and buildings and even special mechanics.

What do you think has more effort and playtesting done
A) 10 larger factions
B) 30 smaller factions
(this isnt accurate count, but you get the idea)

In Apocalypse, all factions when you play have simply more of themselves, making their identity shine way, way more.

[fuggles2k]

In terms of more effort, definitely the extra races I'm afraid.

[flame from Halo]

Originally posted by Mrvecz:

Originally posted by fuggles2k:

Why does the number of factions water down the overall experience?

What do you think has more effort and playtesting done
A) 10 larger factions
B) 30 smaller factions
(this isnt accurate count, but you get the idea)

Are you arguing quality over quantity? It is hard to put a proper marker on which has more mod testing since they are different teams and some members have moved on, so the moddb page number may be inaccurate. Some mod team members also have more time than others to test so even a team that is smaller may have more testing done in a week as opposed to a larger team in several. [Insert Halo Reach->Halo Infinite at launch comparison]

[Gralzeim]

Originally posted by Mrvecz:

esp if you have factions that are older than the mod itself, like Steel Legion and you put them next to the Krieg

Some of the older faction mods incorporated into Unification have reworks planned, this includes Steel Legion. Blood Angels is also on the list, but I don't remember what else.

I do agree that as they currently are, they certainly do stick out compared to newer factions like Krieg or Emperor's Children.