A disclaimer: I am aware of the feedback form for this game, and was initially planning on using that to submit the results of gameplay. However, that form seems oriented towards specific points of difficulty, and enough such problems came up that I would essentially be spamming the form. I didn't want to do that, so the format will be a loosely-connected collection of observations and pain points that occurred during play.

This game was played with a group of one GM and three players, including me as a player. The GM has weighed in to share their thoughts, but this post is ultimately written from a player perspective. We ran several missions, enough to see all of our selected factions in play, but only began to hit the second tier of upgrades by the time we decided we had seen enough of the game. As a result, some of the long-term progression and its effects did not come up for us, especially re the enemies.

A lack of clear rules for fight objectives immediately posed a difficulty to our group, since Rez and its foibles (see below) seemed to make a deathmatch unlosable for the player side. The group was familiar with Lancer, so we could retrofit the sitreps from that game, but questions like round timers, distance to travel, zone scores to meet, and health bars of destruction targets, all essentially had to be eyeballed and retuned based on our performance. Due to how unlikely a loss seemed to be for the players, that omission put a significant damper on things.

It was unclear if HP and Effects reset between fights. The absence had me and the GM imagine very different results - I read the absence and assumed they reset, the GM read the absence and assumed they did not. This is really important for how the mission objective selection is determined, how many fights are doable, and, thus, how many resources the players gain per enemy resource gain. We trended towards two-fight missions with attrition active (we went with the GM's interpretation), but I still don't know if that was correct or not. Equipment and Limit Break charges are explicitly talked about as carrying over between fights, but HP says nothing one way or the other.

Rez, as presented, seems to have no range or usage limit beyond the action cost. It's only written up once, in a basic action list, and never detailed elsewhere. If that's the correct read, and you can use it from across the map as many times as you like, then it seems impossible for the player side to genuinely lose by being wiped, unless the GM is very careful to leave all the players only almost dead, and then kill them all in one go before any of them get to go. The first time a player dies each mission, the GM gets an Ichor, but if that's the only threat, then long missions just soak that as a loss and take the relative profit of free curbstomps, in my eyes. Both the attrition question and the fight objective question are directly relevant to this problem, as well.

On the subject - formally, what happens when you hit 0 HP? Do any effects clear? Do you count as taking turns, and ticking down effects, and such like? Or is your turn entirely skipped? That part isn't talked about in detail, either, beyond Rez, and niche interactions like where you count as occupying if you were moved into a Void.

Provoke was a subject of a fair bit of confusion. Is it triggered by involuntary movement? Does Hasaphet's Palm on the Kushiel armor cause Provoke on both you and the target, if yes? Is it triggered by options like the Ten Thousand Year Reign Shattering Blade's passive ability auto-move, or does this have a distinction between "Slide"s and base movement that triggers Provoke? Is Provoke optional? Can Provoke from the same enemy happen multiple times in one move? (Those last two questions formed an odd combo wherein I intentionally moved back and forth to trigger an enemy's Provoke repeatedly, so as to trigger the threshold to turn my Attractors into Void Attractors.) For Kopis' Offhand Pistol, is the effect sequenced before the Provoke damage? Is the Push supposed to cancel the Provoke, and/or trigger Provoke from the attacker? If the damage is enough to kill, does the Provoke not happen? The sequencing is unclear.

Speaking of that dubious Void Attractor combo, how does placing Voids on occupied spaces work? Specifically, the Sharur power, Transient Force Projection, and etcetera. The Attractors read as though they can be placed in occupied spaces, is that just not the case? Must "a square" be an unoccupied one? If not, as-is, Voids only kill you when you move into them, should we assume that spawning one on someone does the same thing?

What type of action is the action to form/collect into a swarm, for an enemy? Support? Main? Do enemies still have the same three-action-type turn format as players, or is it different for them? We assumed it was the same, but it doesn't seem to be stated.

Identifying which enemies are the starters for a given faction and which enemies are unlocked via upgrade requires cross-referencing to figure out, there's no clear delineation provided. More broadly, that sort of "redundant information" isn't included in the enemy faction writeups when it really would be nice to have in one place.

The Fortification tag is never explained what it means in detail. Most notably, Fortifications seem to be lacking a Scale value, which implies that it's innate to the tag - but we can't see the tag's description anywhere, so we don't know how big they should be on the map. Also, some would-be-Fortifications seem to not have the Fortification tag - for instance, all of the Paracletus Fortifications (see the Stain Flower et al - which makes the Latent Pudding ("AMBROID") rather confusing).

Are Obstacles considered "targets" for things like Ambiguous Intentions and such? (If so, that would let you use them to reposition and keep moving across walls.) "Enemy" is pretty clear, so is "target" a distinct term from that?

What are the Limen ("The Stepping Stones") from Henosis for? Friendly fire doesn't exist, and they don't seem to be able to interfere with players since they can't attack. Is it just their Provoke damage and moving to get in the PCs' way?

It's unclear how Elevation functions with Exacontismos ("The Star Shooter")'s Agnosia effect if it doesn't follow up with the attack that forces the target to land. Do they just stay in midair? Is it permitted for them to stay at that elevation, and, if not, are they effectively immobilized if they can't reach the ground? Similar effects in Henosis include the clause "If the elevated unit has no means to maintain their elevation, they will begin falling at the start of their next turn." Should that be considered to be a universal rule, rather than a clause on those other abilities in specific? We couldn't find any universal falling rule.

For Ambiguous Intentions and effects like it, do you only mark the space you move into, or do you also mark all of the intervening spaces you would need to move through on a path to that end space? Actually, do you even move through intervening spaces at all, or is it something like a teleport directly to the endpoint?

The Graven Chirurgeon ("ASKLEPIOS") has an ability that lets you "Remove all target's stacks of Wound to immediately trigger and tick down one Effect on the target a number of times equal to the stacks of Wound removed or the Effect's current stacks, whichever is lower", however, many Effects don't have any effect upon ticking down or any active effects to trigger. This is particularly relevant since the Metricos' main other effect that could do anything is Bleed. However, Bleed only makes you take an extra point of damage when you get hit, and then ticks down at the end of your turn. So is this intended to turn all your Bleed stacks into damage via wounds? or does it just not do anything with Bleed.

The book seems to imply that missions involve going out into hell and exploring, however, as a tactical game, a lot of missions are going to be set up ahead of time. Are random encounters or changes in tactical missions expected? Or are sudden threats that can appear on the stratcom board (resulting from narrative forces or stratcom actions) solely intended to be a problem to be resolved in RECON.

What does and does not constitute a "special environment tile" for Kushiel's Assisted Launch? Is it any tile with a marked piece of terrain? Does that include things like Cover, or Advantageous Terrain? The term never seems to come up anywhere else, so a tile with any sort of effect marked on it was our best guess.

Beyond the confusions, we had some overarching critique as our closing thoughts:

The playerside tools do feel very disjointed in how they can be made to work together, especially in comparison to the enemy design. There doesn't seem to be much potential for buildcrafting type engagement due to a lack of clear synergies - which is fine, but it means that a lot of the options essentially can't handle so much if they can't stand on their own merits. Which is a problem, when, as we found, options like Ambiguous Intentions can spike considerably to ridiculous amounts of damage (to the point that it made the Heaven Burning Sword not feel like a great option, despite its large damage and aoe). And, alongside options very much not being built equal (which includes beyond just weapons - Transient Force Projection lets you do a full attack as a Support Action, even if it isn't parsed in a way that lets it drop a Void directly on an enemy, and that's significantly better than many Equipment options), the options between Armor, Weapon, Class, etcetera, don't really feel like they're designed in concert much, beyond the odd rather-parasitic design like Advantageous Terrain having a few options that hook into it enough to make one build for it and then nothing else uses or creates it at all. And, other than that, the closest thing to actually making a coherent "build", rather than just a set of unrelated powers, are effects that feel partially unintended or unclear if they even work, like Ambiguous Intentions and Macroprosopus letting you move copies instead of yourself or vice versa.

The enemy design is a lot more coherent, by comparison! But, the playerside experience really does not seem to match up. And, the player side has enough punch behind it (if the stronger options are taken) that the enemies don't really have time to do their thing.

Provoke seems really oppressive in how it slows down momentum, since, for a lot of chaff enemies, it's fundamentally more damage than they deal by actually doing a hit in the first place (several of them literally only dealing 1 damage at base). Its presence made a lot of fights bog down without much movement once a melee began, which was a shame.

Options like Love Without Consideration seem impossible to punch at a decent weight class, and Her Tears Form The World needing a lot of time to build up vs the weight class of anyone else. In comparison, something like Ambiguous Intentions really seems to hit incredibly above its weight, absolutely novaing boss fights in a single attack combo. That then makes options like Transient Force Projection combo incredibly hard with the good weapons, and much worse with the bad weapons.

Ultimately, Hellpiercers had enough moments where we were simply unclear on how the rules worked that we had to make our own design guesses to fill in the gaps and build the rest of it, and the ingredients we did have from the game were imbalanced enough that some options just were not worth using, while Ambiguous Intentions could nuke down an Assassination target in a single turn. It never hit a point where it seemed to cohere, is the best way I can put it. Hellpiercers has several parts that are interesting to ponder in isolation, but the whole doesn't seem to have much to recommend beyond that pondering.

Edits: Just fixing some typos thus far.

Hey, I wanted to thank you for this extensive feedback. I really appreciate you taking the time to cover so much. As the books approach, I'm working on an errata sheet to include and will be using this, as well as a number of other comments that echo several of these points, in my work. Thanks again, and I hope our next version feels a little better for you.

Nemesis

Of course!

If it's at all helpful to you, I, on sheer curiosity, did some basic number-crunching for the weapon damage output throughout the core roster. For all of the procedural uncertainty we encountered in the game, the biggest hazard to it and motivator for us to finish up was, ultimately, the sheer damage imbalance at play. (Plus, having these numbers available to present to the reader as average guidelines would help for the matter of eyeballing objective health totals, alongside the other advantages of it.) There are other parts of the game I could get into in more detail, if that would help, I especially imagine Classes and Armors have their own (more difficult to assess) imbalance points, but, this is what I prioritized:

Ten Thousand Year Reign Shattering Blade: 6-24 (15) to likely one target. The weapon action allows a multitarget attack, which can buy back the action cost of activating it, but it's inconsistent even with the Compel. The weapon action never proved useful in play for us. The free attack on killing an enemy also usually never triggered, it seems like it could work as a Swarm killer, but only before they actually go and swarm up, which they usually had ample time to (or even spawned pre-Swarmed-up, something the GM was unsure if it was kosher or not).

She Speaks The Language Of Kings: 5-23 (14) to 3 targets. The weapon action halves damage, but extends range by targeting through allies. Just for the spread damage, this is essentially triple the power of the Shattering Blade.

Sethian Externalized Annihilation Cannon: 8-33 (20.5) to likely one target. It was rare that enemies would be clumped up in a way for the pattern to mean much. It does significantly increased damage vs Swarms, usually benefitting from eschewing Breaker since 10 damage per broken Swarm segment is a fair bit less than the expected damage. This weapon seems to hit notably harder than most, and if it weren't for the extreme outliers of damage, I would pen it as presumably ahead of the curve. The weapon action seems minor, since Blazing is only 1 damage total - I could conceive of trying to use it efficiently to spread to adjacent targets, but instead I could just use the AoE to hit said adjacent targets for 20.5 damage, which is, again, ahead of the curve for most damage.

Regrettable Precaution: 6-21 (13.5) to likely one target. The weapon action can maybe extend to multiple targets, but even then I doubt more than 2. The primary value of this weapon is that it can be fired as an Aux Action, and the upgrade tree offers the ability to equip a second weapon, making it an obvious "sidearm" choice. As a direct upgrade to player power, this makes sense, except, 13.5 average damage hits roughly as hard as some of the main weapons, making it almost a doubling of the average damage output. Tripling, if Support Actions can be downgraded to Aux Actions - can they? It seemed like no on a reread, which is something we ran wrong, but we might well have missed something or had something omitted. For the purposes of this post, I will assume that isn't possible. In principle, however, this upgrade makes it the "obvious" choice to the point where I'm not sure if taking any other secondary weapon would be worthwhile once this upgrade was unlocked? I suppose the idea is to help the Hellpiercers' damage match the amount that the HALO units unlocked in the same upgrade can do, but it does seem to me like it removes one of the dimensions of buildcraft to offer such a powerful and eclipsing option. (Especially since most secondary weapons are already limited in impact just by virtue of the time taken to swap.)

Heaven Burning Sword: Assuming actions cannot be downgraded as above, 15 damage to likely 2 targets. If they can be, 25 damage to likely 3+ targets. "Saving up" and only firing every other round is fairly worthwhile in a context with several small enemies to blast with the large AoE of the big hit. However, in contexts without several small enemies that aren't Swarming, which, in our experience, was not actually that common, 15 damage to one or two targets at the cost of an Aux Action is effectively a minor action tax on top of what most weapons could already do. If the Aux Action charge is doable while holding a different weapon for your Main Action attack, charging up passively could be a more effective strategy - except swapping back and forth also consumes Aux Actions, so it would be a rotation of four rounds between each firing, which means it's likely only once per combat anyway.

Ambiguous Intentions: The math for this weapon is complicated, so I'll eschew it in full here. I can highlight that the minimum possible output, if it does not run out of targets, and rolls two 1s on 2d8 six times in a row, is 15, which is already quite respectable (in fact, it's the damage norm the weapons seem roughly written to match, for the most part). Anecdotally, in our table, when it got a big enemy to circle around and hit in full, it consistently dealt in the 50-90 range. A pillar of 400 HP to be taken out over the course of 6 rounds as an objective was, to it, a difficult but entirely surmountable obstacle. This trivially eclipses anything else on the entire list, and, in the specific instance of scattered size 1 enemies it is difficult to combo-attack, the minimum effect of the weapon is still 2d8+3 + 2d8+2 - two hits that sum to an average of 23 damage. This is quite plainly the best weapon in the game, even when compared to the HALO weapons.

Sabaoth-Class Obliteration Charges: This weapon is difficult to assess as a weapon, since its primary use case seems to be as the main support option on the list, giving healing to allies in need. (Only 2 or 4, which isn't majorly helpful, but it is nice to have.) Used as a weapon, the best it can get is 10 to likely one target, or, at the cost of a limited charge, 16 to 2-3 targets. When combod with the Haphaestus Class it comes with, it can spam the 16 value hit as needed, which is actually fairly high-value of the standard vein weapons - that puts it on par with She Speaks The Language Of Kings.

Love Without Consideration: 2 damage. If the Lingering works perfectly, 4 damage. 3 damage if it uses the weapon action instead, since Blazing only deals 1 damage. This weapon could hit the maximum possible number of targets (4 damage to two targets and then 2 damage to two targets) and it would only barely be matching the damage output of any other weapon rolling an average hit on a single target. To be honest, I have nothing I could say in this weapon's favor.

Paradigm-Shattering Cauldron: 5-15 (10) to likely one target. Breaker doesn't really help it when there are other, better weapons that can get the tag. The effect to create a Void after an attack might be helpful in a party with a large amount of forced movement, but we actually didn't find too many options that could do that consistently enough to make it worth having less damage output the rest of the time, and there are other better ways of deploying Voids anyway. I think this weapon is under the level it needs to be.

Heaven Or Hell: The math for this weapon is complicated, and, unlike Ambiguous Intentions, it did not see play at our table to discuss in detail. I think I would need to see it in action to give a proper report, but, at a glance, the following seems to be the most damage output you can get out of one hit and the free tag you get:

Hit (3, gain Juggle) - Juggle (1, gain Pressure) - Pressure (1, push them into a wall, gain Bounce) - Bounce (1 damage to the target and another, gain Knockdown) - Knockdown (flip a coin, either 5 or you take 2, gain Pressure) - repeat from Pressure.

The consistent sum total of this combo is 6 damage, plus every Knockdown coinflip giving 7 more and costing you 2 health eventually. It also requires a target nearby to both an obstacle and an enemy unit. Throw and Knockdown's inconsistent damage makes their links in the chain implausible, but without them, your damage surely can't measure up. Due to the inconsistency of this weapon, it would need to have very high spike damage on the turns it does pop off to make it worth it. As-is, I don't believe the numbers can support that happening.

Consecrated Behemoth Spines: 5-26 (15.5) to likely one target. You get a small rider in terms of 2 temporary HP, which isn't much especially with Provoke considered, but it's the standard damage plus a nice bennie. The weapon action doesn't seem terribly useful, unless it's near the end of the fight and HP indeed does not reset between fights, but as a principled sidegrade to the Ten Thousand Year Reign Shattering Blade, there isn't much to complain about.

Her Tears Formed Our World: This is another weapon it's a bit confusing to assess. If the GM plays things principled, moving characters next to you to deny your damage buildup, you deal 2d10, 2-20 (11) to one target and 1d10, 1-10 (5.5) to another. A total of 16.5 damage, distributed to the GM's call of targets, so likely really you only deal 2 damage total to eliminate two 1 HP enemies and you get some solid mobility out of the deal. Alternatively, if allowed to build up unabated, at 6d10 you can average 33 damage on likely one but maybe two targets, which isn't bad - until you remember that it took you three turns of not attacking to reach that point, so it's only three turns of attacking later (the end of round 6) that you break even, only round 7 where you're in the black in terms of damage payoff, and fights likely are already over by then. This weapon suffers from the principle that damage sooner is worth more than damage later. Like Heaven Or Hell, I would want to see it in action before writing it off entirely, but as a fiddly choice that I'm not sure even makes par, let alone rewarding its complexity, I'm not very enthused by it.

In overall assessment terms, it seems like 15 damage is the average expectation for the output of a Main Action from one PC. This, in simple terms, makes consistent AoEs like She Speaks The Language Of Kings a direct power buff - one attack on three targets, rather than one attack on just the one. In a tighter weapon economy, without Ambiguous Intentions as an apex predator, it would probably be eclipsing the others to a notable degree. Some AoEs make it easier or harder to get multihits, so that distinguishes things for them, and weapons that can't hit for 15 seem to not have much use. Regrettable Precaution becomes a near-doubling of damage output with this math, which seems to me to be a rather large spike. The Annihilation Cannon is on the high end for reasons I can't quite figure out, it seems to me to just be numerically better. None of the weapons have riders that eclipse the value of their damage output itself, except for multiattacks and Ambiguous Intentions, to my initial assessment. Which also admittedly leaves some of them feeling rather samey, as slight variations of 15 damage with a rider effect that doesn't mean too much. I get the impression that 2 healing is expected to be substantial to some degree, but, considering the damage input we received in play, it didn't prove that way, so those end up closer to ribbons. None of these weapons offer a particularly long-range choice, beyond, again, She Speaks The Language Of Kings, and even that needs an ally to get up close and personal with.

I hope this number-crunching is useful, if there's anything else that's of interest in terms of what proved imbalanced or uncertain, I'm happy to elaborate.