The Tactical Squad, much like our Space Marine brethren, are not fond of losing, but sometimes we’re definitely pulling some Lamenter’s luck with the technical mishaps we deal with as a podcast. We were hoping to bring you an hour-long interview with conquest designer Brad Andres that was recorded over a month ago, but the machine spirit was weak and the interview was mangled like some horrible Tzeentchian fiend, twisted beyond all recognition into a hideous chimera of Brad, Liz, Jon and Alex’s voices. Emperor willing, we will prevail by releasing the contents of the interview as a full length-article on our website. Apologies to Brad, as he shared some great stories about his experiences in designing and developer the game as well as his history with Warhammer 40,000 universe. Let’s get right into it.
Who are you? Who do you work for? What do you do?
I’m Brad Andres. I enjoy long walks on the beach and cliches. I’m a game designer for Fantasy Flight Games and I love making games.
What was the first game you designed?
Conquest is actually my first game where I have fully worked on the design throughout the process. But, I worked on Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Invasion.
I guess Conquest is kind of your baby then?
A little bit, yeah.
Are there any game designers that you admire? Or game that you love the design of, that inspires you?
As far as games go, there are just so many out there. Too many to name right now. I get a lot of inspiration; I play boardgames all the time. I have hundreds of different games in my collection. I just played a new one this afternoon at lunch. As far as game designers go, Eric Lang is a very good friend of mine and I would call him my sensei of game design. Kevin Wilson is also a good friend of mine. He’s awesome and been really helpful, teaching me a lot of things. Richard Garfield has always been an inspiration to me as well, from when I was but a tyke. There are a lot of inspirational people out there who have helped me along my way.
Why did you want to work on Conquest?
Eric (Lang) was coming to work on a 40k LCG and I’d been a 40k fan from back in the day and I’d worked a lot with Eric playing Star Wars (The Card Game) when he was working on that and I had great time and learned a lot. And I wanted to work with Eric. Having it be Conquest was just gravy on the awesome salad. So I informed our manager at the time that I was really interested in working on it and I rushed to work ahead on my Invasion project, got a little bit ahead, found some time and everything kind of fell into place.
Did you have much experience with Warhammer 40,000 before making Conquest?
I’d played the game back in an earlier edition. I’d read a lot of the novels and was very familiar with the flavour and fluff.
You’re a bit of a lore nerd then.
To some extent. I’m sure there are listeners out there that are much more up to date than I am, but I’m always researching and part of my job is to keep researching and stay up to date on everything. I’m on Games Workshop’s website every day. I’m reading through codexes. I’ve got a big stack of them at my desk. I’ll go through the online encyclopedias. Basically as much fluff as I can get my hands on.
What’s the oldest codex you have on your desk?
Probably third edition Necrons.
Is there a novel that sticks out in your mind?
I’m a big Salamanders fan, so any of the ones that have come out recently. I’ve just finished reading the Vulkan Lives novel in the Horus Heresy series, which was ok. But I think anything that Dan Abnett writes I am a fan of.
It was you, Eric and Nate French that were all involved in the design of the core set. What does the design team look like now and what did it look like during the Warlord cycle?
It’s pretty much me, to be honest. Certainly Nate, and to a lesser extent Eric, still have stuff to say and we all work on it and look over it. But a lot of the design vision, at this point, is me based on stuff that we have talked about previously. Eric gave out a lot of ideas when we finished the core set on what he envisioned the first cycle being and proposed some other ideas for things that would make strong cycles. Nate looks over my shoulder every now and then to make sure I’m not screwing up, but a lot of it comes from me. A lot of people get this big impression that the LCG department is this big team working on everything. We have a new guy, named Danny, who is helping out a little bit on our current projects, which I wish I could say something about, but I can’t. Nate’s always there to help. “Nate, if I had a card like this, how would it affect the game?” “Really poorly” The big thing is, everyone in the department is involved with every game to some extent. We have what we call card councils, where we all sit down and we all review each other’s cards. We usually like to do that both before and after playtesting. It’s mostly me designing, but everyone is involved.
What kind of involvement does Games Workshop have in the whole production process?
Most of it is approvals. We send them a vision document outlining what a cycle is going to be about, or what a box is going to be about, including story elements we want to use. We’ll send that to them ahead of time to get approval. They have approval on all the art that we do because technically they own all of it. It’s really a back and forth communication. They need to approve everything before we can move on with the process. They are really good about communicating with us and letting us know what is going on. Keeping us in the loop.
Does that get down to specific card approvals? Or is it more general than that?
A lot is the general idea approval, but when we get down to art pieces they will come back and say “The proportions on that tank aren’t correct” and we have to get it fixed. We do because they are the people that know these things the best and we want it to be as perfect as we can get it.
What’s your relationship with the art department like?
It’s awesome. I worked with John Taillon and he does an amazing job getting the best work from the artists. We really work well together.
Why do the artists hate Astra Militarum so much? And why are they dead on every card?
That’s me, mostly. I don’t hate the Astra Militarum. It’s a been a long standing joke in a lot of GW pieces of artwork that guardsmen are the ones being crushed. There are hundreds and thousands and millions of them. If someone is being crushed, it might as well be a human. When you see a Space Marine being crushed, it’s supposed to signify this guy is really bad-ass because he is cutting a Space Marine in half.
What kind of process does a single card go through?
There are really two approaches, top down and bottom up. Top down is when I, say, want to make a Tau pathfinder, so I call the card “Tau Pathfinder” and then I try to think of abilities that fit that unit. Other times I will come up with an ability that is “When you deploy a Scout to this planet, gain a resource” and then I’ll decide I want that ability to be in Tau and that ability fits with a pathfinder. Really you can go both ways, it just depends on where we are with the set, what I want to include. Usually when I start designing something, one of the first things I will do is ask “What are our major themes? What can’t we miss if we are doing X?” For example, in the Warlord Cycle, I knew we were doing Old Zogwort and I would be a horrible person if we didn’t have a Squiggify card. So that was one of the things that, early in design, got slotted in. We were going to have a Squiggify card. I didn’t know what it was going to do yet, but that was the title and one of the first things that went up. That’s a good example of top down. Bottom up, it’s harder to think of an example because now I just recognize all the cards as what they are now. But I think Inquisitor Caius Wroth is probably a good example of bottom up design. We had that ability. We knew we wanted it in the game. Really we added the flavour on much later.
Speaking of Caius, did you find that a particularly difficult ability to balance? A lot of people have mixed feelings about it.
We had a lot of fun with Caius. We went through several different versions of him before he got to where he is. I’m actually really happen with him and I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing him slip into decks given where the meta is right now.
What’s the process for signature squads? Do you have a way you go about things?
I would say that as we move further and further into the game’s life, the signature squad card type make-up is going to loosen up. I’ve got some crazy, off-the-wall ideas that I can’t wait to start trying, but they’ve got to wait a while. But they’ve got to bake in the oven a bit longer. We’ve got to let the game grow, let it become a teenager before we get crazy and experimental. But as far as design for signature squads goes, we start off with an idea of what we want the deck to do. What does this warlord define, as far as a deck. We really try to design around that element and flesh it out, turn it into something in that pack that will make you excited to play it, that triggers you to start thinking of different deck ideas, just by looking at those nine cards. The warlord is usually the first and they form the backbone of the signature pack and how that deck is going to play. Just a couple weeks ago, we revealed Bar’zul and he’s got a crazy play pattern. He is super fun to play. I wanna get bloodied, but I don’t want to get bloodied. That tension around his bloodied state is the genesis of where his whole signature squad came from. You see that reflected in his signature unit. His signature attachment functions both on his bloodied and unbloodied sides. All of his cards play into his style. Wait until you read his story, too.
Are we going to be getting story in the next cycle? One of the big disappointments of the Warlord Cycle for me was that we didn’t get any story inserts.
Yes, we are getting stories in the Planetfall Cycle. They are written both by me and Tim Flanders. I hope everyone enjoys them. It was difficult for me. I’m not much of a writer, so I did my best. I’m pretty proud of what we are putting forth and I think everyone is going to enjoy having some story to go along with the cool new setting we have to explore.
There were two brand new warlords, lore wise, in the core set. And the announced Warlords in the Planetfall Cycle are also original. Are original characters for warlords going to be more of the norm going forward?
It’s likely to be a mix of both. All the warlords in Planetfall will be new, in terms of IP. One of the big things is that in the core set I wanted to show people that we could do both. We could do old favourites and we could do new characters. In the Warlord Cycle, I really wanted to get more of those iconic characters out there and let people play with some of their classic favourites. In Planetfall I want to show that we can do new stuff, and that is why we waited until now to start doing the story and have it be all of our own and really set a place for us in the Traxis Sector. Going forward, I would expect to see much more of a mix old and new and having them interact. Seeing the things you love and the things you’ve come to love all work together.
How excited would you be if one of your warlords got turned into a miniature?
I would be off the wall. But I have to correct Liz a little bit, there was actually a third warlord IP introduced in the core set. If you turn to the first page of the reference manual, you’ll see that we open with a quote from Broderick Worr.
Now fans are going to have to scour the manuals to see if there are any other easter eggs.
There might be some more. I can neither confirm nor deny.
During the development of the game, was there a signature squad that proved more difficult to get right, either mechanics-wise or fluff-wise?
I think the most difficult one to get right was actually Commander Shadowsun. We went through a lot of different versions of exactly what her pack was going to do. We had started with some pretty off-the-wall mechanics for Tau in general. We slowly cut those down, reshaped them and stitched them back together in weird ways. We finally got her to where I think she feels right for what we wanted to do. She was so weird. She wasn’t the last one we finalized, but she is the most crazy, off-the-wall squad.
I think she is really good. She just needs way more finesse. I think that fits both flavour and her cards. Tau are very elusive and strategic and you need to take that approach when you play a Tau deck.
At this point the game has three victory conditions. It’s rare that we see someone decking out an opponent. Is that something that is still a mechanic that is developing, or is there a mill deck that is undiscovered so far?
I would say that it is still a mechanic that is developing. It is not always the most fun or interesting mechanic, but it is definitely an mechanic that some players enjoy. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some mill cards in the future. Though I can’t really confirm or deny. Some players enjoy it and I’m sure that we’ll design cards for every player to enjoy.
Are there any cards that you would tweak, or didn’t work out how you expected? Are there any cards that were significantly changed during testing?
I’m really happy with all the cards and how they are coming out, especially through the Warlord Cycle. I know that there are some cards that rise above and some that are a little more controversial. Overall I think everything fits together well. I’m really happy with where the meta is right now. You see a lot of contention of over which who exactly is the best. You’ve seen a lot of different decks winning tournaments. In terms that cards that saw a lot of changes, I think the Rockcrete Bunker holds the record for most changes in the core set. It was very difficult to get right.
I think the biggest surprise was when the game came out and no one though the Dark Eldar were any good. Because when we were playtesting, Dark Eldar were very good. We just didn’t get it. But I think they have redeemed themselves since then. They are a lot of fun to play.
The way that the economy works in Conquest was influence by our work on Warhammer Invasion. There was a card in the core set that, economy-wise, was very problematic and tore a rift in the community for a long time. We really wanted to avoid that. It was called Warpstone Excavation and it basically free resources all the time and it had a disadvantage that turned out to be an advantage for many decks or something that they didn’t care about at all. It accelerated the game too fast and made a lot of early Invasion unbalanced. So with a lot of the economy cards in Conquest, we wanted to learn from that experience. We were a lot more restrained with how we put the economy into the game.
Late in the process we put uniqueness on all the cost reducers. We toned Promethium Mine. We want them to be something that a player can add to their deck to supplement their economy. If they feel like they want to run a deck with a lot of elites - not that you’d want to right now, but you will. You are are going to be looking for that extra little bit of economy. It’s going to be a little bit slower than you might hope, but I strongly feel it was the right decision. It also gives us room in the future to print a card in the future that might be Promethium Mine, only better. It gives us that flexibility. Promethium Mine is in the core set. It is going to be around forever. But if we want to print Promethium Mine 2.0 in a cycle and eventually it is going to rotate out, but it really establishes what the meta is going to be like for a period of time. We can adjust that. Some might think that the game got too fast, but eventually it will rotate out and the meta will shift again.
Is the game pacing out the way you planned?
I’m really happy with the game’s pace. It usually goes 4 or 5 turns, at least. You have some intense battles. A lot of close games. All my experience has been watching really great games of Conquest.
Looking at the Warlord Cycle, did you have a set of themes and mechanics in mind? Or did they evolve over time?
Going into it, we really wanted to focus on the core of the Conquest experience. That was something that Eric talked about early on when we were finishing the core set. When we were doing the first couple of expansions, we should focus on the elements that really make Conquest unique, awesome and wonderful. So the Warlord Cycle was, from day one, about the warlords. Making the coolest part of Conquest - the warlords, in my opinion - shine even brighter. We focused on designing warlords that bring something new to the table. Cards that exhaust your warlord, using warlords to pay costs. Cards that depend on the positioning of your warlords.
Was the fact that a lot of the warlords in the Warlord Cycle pose such a strong assassination threat intentional or was that something that just happened through the process of the warlords being created?
It was intentional. We avoided that mechanic in the core set. We knew players would still try and it would still happen, but there wasn’t a warlord that was designed to try to do it. But I think it’s an important part of the game and something players need to realize. The base game set a precedent that the game was about winning planets and using “intrigue” to move your warlord around. The Warlord Cycle threw in a new element and now the game was changed. That was really important.
Was the assassination focus of some warlords hard to balance for?
It went back and forth. Most of the warlords in that cycle went through an iteration or two. I don’t think the balance was too hard to find. I guess the hardest warlord to find a balance for was Aun’shi. Tau are newer to the setting. They don’t have quite as much background. Mechanically they are just very different in the tabletop game. In the lore they are very different. We wanted to maintain that difference in their cards because when you have a tabletop player that jumps over to the LCG, you want to make sure that difference comes across and they can recognize it.
Speaking of difference, Urien Rakarth‘s signature squad breaks the mold of four units and two events. How did that come about?
The first thing we designed about Urien was that he would have four events and two units. We wanted to push events a little harder with Dark Eldar, but in a different way. Not just giving them some more good events like they had in the core set. We wanted to trait some of their events and the Torture mechanic came out of that.
Do you have a favourite card from the cycle?
Probably the Rotten Plaguebearers. It is a take on one of my old, favourite Magic cards: Prodigal Sorceror. The pinging for damage and the combo with Zarathur … it just feels great.
We have Tyranids coming soon. What was the process for developing the deluxe set? They are one of the nine factions and weren’t released in the core set. Did you involve their design alongside the core set, or did they come after?
The Great Devourer was designed completely after the core set. That was intentional. We wanted Tyranids to feel different; a faction with a unique feel. Tyranids are the most different, most weird, just funky - right after Tau. We wanted develop them in a different environment, so we waited for after the Warlord Cycle was done before we started working on Tyranids, just so we could make sure they were different.
How difficult was the fact that they can’t borrow cards from other factions?.
They have been my biggest challenge working on Conquest so far. They took a lot of work to get right. We were working on Tyranids at Gen Con last year. The core set was coming out and I was already hot and heavy on Tyranids.
Were there cards from the first cycle where you thought “I want this, but for Tyranids”?
Yeah. There was a lot of that. Tyranids are their own thing and you’ll notice versions of other faction’s cards, but in their own Tyranid’y way. Because, of course, they can’t borrow those cards at any time. So they get their own versions, they own twists and takes on those cards.
When in the design process did the Synapse unit and the double dial show up?
Early on in the process, Nate and I sat down and talked about what we felt was right for Tyranids. Nate doesn’t know much about the fluff, so one thing we’ll do in our brainstorming sessions, is Nate will ask me to talk about Tyranids for a few minutes. I’ll tell him about swarms of enemies darkening the skies and he’ll latch on to that and we’ll start brainstorming ideas that will convey that feeling of the swarm to players. If you are playing Tyranids or you are facing it across the table, you should feel like you are commanding or fighting a swarm of enemies. One of our earliest thoughts was “What do you start the game with on the board? And how does that impact play psychology”. Just the fact that you look across the board and your opponent starts with twice as much stuff as you do is a big step in feeling like I am almost being overwhelmed. That’s the big hook with them.
Did that have any effect on the cost curve of Tyranids?
A little bit. You’ll notice that Tyranid warlords start with one less card and resource because, ‘lo and behold, they start with it in play. They have a very different cost curve. A lot of littler stuff, just trying to get stuff on the board. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in the position that the command phase is not going to go well for you in the first turn. But you get a few more resources, maybe another unit or two on the board and you’ll find yourself more in control. Your opponent has failed to stem the tide of Tyranids bearing down upon them.
It has been talked about, but I don’t know if we’ll be seeing it any time soon. That is a choice that is a bit outside of my pay grade.
What about draft?
I would love to do a Conquest draft. I hope we see, but I can’t speak to whether it might happen.
Are there any interesting observations that you’ve heard from players?
The best part for me has been having people come up to me and telling me how much they missed the 40k universe. They had played the tabletop game years ago and this was an opportunity for them to relive that part of their life and get back into in a way that was new and interesting.
What aspect or mechanic of the game are you most proud of?
There are so many that I like. I love the warlords and the sense of agency. I can pick my hero and customize my deck to make that hero shine. You get to live your fantasy of being that character. The planets. I spent two months just trying to get the planets right. Getting to name them and get art for them and having them be in my own sector that I was able to name and design. Even down to the token cards that we proxied up one night after abandoning a couple other mechanics. They just worked so well for simulating big battles and lots of little mooks dying. They are so many aspects of this game that I love that I could just talk and talk and talk.
At this point the squad spent a bit of time describing the spoiler for Venomthrope Polluter that was shared on this site. You can read more about that here.
Is there anything else you can tell us about Synapse units?
There is not too much I can tell you, but one of the guiding principles of the Synapse units is that they need to capture the essence of a warlord in some aspect. They needed either to either emulate a warlord’s command presence, their battle triggering ability or their ability to take other units, which is what the Venomthrope Polluter is really about. They should feel somewhere in between a really good army unit and a warlord.
With the two warlord and the five synapses, there will be a lot of different decks just matching the different synapses to each warlord.
Ten decks right out of the box. With how much they influence your play, those decks will all play differently.
The Tactical Squad would once again like to thank Brad Andres for taking the time to sit down and talk to us. We deeply regret that the audio was lost and wish it hadn’t taken so long to pull the transcript from the corrupted files.
