Total Warhammer?

[fret]

Well, Warhammer itself should already be pretty well balanced for MP due to its very nature, though I've never played orignal Warhammer and have extremely minimal experience with 40k so this is just an assumption. I think the question is more about whether CA's modifications to the system would break that balance.

If anyone has personal experience with tabletop Warhammer, I'd be interested to hear their opinions about what would work well and poorly with a CA version of the game.

The melee should be a good match. If you take magic out of it, Warhammer fantasy battle is a turn based Medievil total war with alien races. There are a few ranged combat units in Warhammer, but my tabletop experience contains far less ranged units than I would use in TW - and i play with the Empire who probably have the most ranged units.

There are some eccentricities of the table top game that won't convert well, one that springs to mind is cannons and mortars (used by the Empire who are the humans). In Warhammer the player guesses the distance to the target in inches, and then rolls a dice. The value on the dice is added to the guess and that is where the cannon ball lands. A further dice roll then decides how far the cannonball bounces. On each dice roll there is a chance of a misfire. I imagine all that will go and cannons will just work like cannons and trebuchets do in TW.

There are some really quirky war machines which could be very interesting.

EDIt, and the biggest inbalence in Warhammer won't exist in a virtual TW version. The biggest problem with the tabletop game is Games Workshop will re-vamp a particular race, this inevitably leads to that race being slightly improved in balence terms, and the difference between the most recently re-designed race and the race which has not been redesigned for 10 years can be quite stark. They will revamp a different race once every 12 to 18 months say, its a long process cause of the manufacturing and tooling etc. None of that will be an issue in the virtual version, they will be able to balence all races simultaneously, so in that regard the TW version should be more balenced than the table top, and you wont need to wait 10 years and spend $30 on a book for your Ogre Kingdoms army to be actually usable.

Edit 2 - I wouldnt be surprised if this game sets a new standard for paid-DLC abuse. In fact I wouldnt be surprised if they charge a full-game-sized fee for each race. GW are nice like that.