Being mounted ironically makes you vulnerable. There's a lot more anti-large than anti-infantry out there, and it makes you easy to hit for archers and artillery.
There are exceptions of course. Grymloq is extremely good.
Avatar 720 wrote: From what I could tell from TWW1, at least, Heroes and Lords on mounts tended to spend less time actually killing things, and more time ineffectually knocking them around.
(EDIT: I should mention that this only really applies to things larger than horses. A horse isn't too bad because it isn't so big it gets in its own way, and stops your own Lord being knocked around by enemy cavalry the entire game.)
I was under the impression damage was being done to the people being knocked around (not enough to kill them outright, but make them easier to kill later) and also that disrupting a unit like that would hurt their morale. Is my thinking wrong? I'm relatively new to TW, that's just what I have been assuming, I know when a I've watched dinosaurs charge in to a unit it knocks down a bunch of people and takes a chunk out of the unit health bar even though many of them stand back up again.
EDIT: I did a few tests though it seems there's a large amount of randomness involved even when you just pit 1 lord vs 1 regiment in a custom battle, but it does seem the Oldblood on a Carnosaur inflicts more damage and at a much faster rate than one on foot even vs spear armed Saurus warriors.
A large number of attacks regardless of whether the Oldblood is mounted or not are ones where the enemy troops are knocked down and get back up again (the Oldblood on foot does some sweep attacks while the Carnosaur mounted Oldblood does tail sweeps and head charges).
AllSeeingSkink wrote:How are people finding Slann?
Mazdamundi is a magical monster, but with regular Slann I'm not finding their spells all that useful. I find in my Slann based armies I need a Skink Priest attached to do most of the casting while the Slann just sits there looking pretty and building up my winds of magic.
I'm not including a skink (don't really like two casters in the same army since they drain the same pool), but the spell selection is pretty poor. I did actually get to use the anti-air spell against a high elf phoenix, but the soul quench spell seems to do very little, and they've got a few too many specialist spells.
But in general I prefer saurus + skink priest.
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Currently my campaign feels a little stalled, partly because a let myself get tied up clearing the vampires in the southlands. That's done, but my web of alliances with others is falling apart as they keep declaring stupid wars- Sudenberg declared war on the only high elf faction I wasn't at war with, and the dwarves and wood elves finally decided to have it out. So I'm clearing everyone out, not least because they kept sniping the last vampire city in a province too many times.
The war against Tiranoc still drags on, though they're slowly running out of cities (yet won't peace out), and Pestilens is down to their original city, but it has every defense building imaginable, and Skrolk is at this point, only recruiting abominations.
Happily Mazdamundi went on a rampage against Morathi and took 9 of her 11 cities, and the last two are terrible sites on the west coast.
The big thing is consolidating my armies in one direction and dealing with Malekith and Teclis.
Someone mentioned Alastar, the White Lion lord. I remember reading on /reddit that he's the result of the make-a-wish initiative.
I might have to go back, with Ulthaun no longer infighting, my allies are out of control and are claiming ever more foreign territory. The world wasn't prepared for this!
Avatar 720 wrote: From what I could tell from TWW1, at least, Heroes and Lords on mounts tended to spend less time actually killing things, and more time ineffectually knocking them around.
(EDIT: I should mention that this only really applies to things larger than horses. A horse isn't too bad because it isn't so big it gets in its own way, and stops your own Lord being knocked around by enemy cavalry the entire game.)
I was under the impression damage was being done to the people being knocked around (not enough to kill them outright, but make them easier to kill later) and also that disrupting a unit like that would hurt their morale. Is my thinking wrong? I'm relatively new to TW, that's just what I have been assuming, I know when a I've watched dinosaurs charge in to a unit it knocks down a bunch of people and takes a chunk out of the unit health bar even though many of them stand back up again.
EDIT: I did a few tests though it seems there's a large amount of randomness involved even when you just pit 1 lord vs 1 regiment in a custom battle, but it does seem the Oldblood on a Carnosaur inflicts more damage and at a much faster rate than one on foot even vs spear armed Saurus warriors.
A large number of attacks regardless of whether the Oldblood is mounted or not are ones where the enemy troops are knocked down and get back up again (the Oldblood on foot does some sweep attacks while the Carnosaur mounted Oldblood does tail sweeps and head charges).
1 on 1s aren't good indicators, because how often will you be pitting something like a Carnosaur Oldblood against a single random low-tier regiment?
What the danger is is, like, Ashiraya said, getting mobbed by any of the numerous Anti-Large units available, and not simply being able to sit there wailing on things. What tends to happen is you can charge in, but then have to immediately wade back out to avoid getting whacked by everything around it, meaning that all your Lord is really doing is disrupting. Note that's not inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that your Lord isn't actually killing much. Combine it with being a larger target for artillery and other anti-monster units, and it becomes much more of a trade-off: less raw killing power in favour of a mass disruptor that often causes Terror if your Hero/Lord didn't already.
Some Lords can do both, like Kroq'gar--dunno about generic Oldbloods on Carnies--and Karl Franz wasn't too bad when he got Buckbeak, either, but once you move more into Dragon territory, the balance shifts away from active killing, and into active disruption.
Avatar 720 wrote: From what I could tell from TWW1, at least, Heroes and Lords on mounts tended to spend less time actually killing things, and more time ineffectually knocking them around.
(EDIT: I should mention that this only really applies to things larger than horses. A horse isn't too bad because it isn't so big it gets in its own way, and stops your own Lord being knocked around by enemy cavalry the entire game.)
I was under the impression damage was being done to the people being knocked around (not enough to kill them outright, but make them easier to kill later) and also that disrupting a unit like that would hurt their morale. Is my thinking wrong? I'm relatively new to TW, that's just what I have been assuming, I know when a I've watched dinosaurs charge in to a unit it knocks down a bunch of people and takes a chunk out of the unit health bar even though many of them stand back up again.
EDIT: I did a few tests though it seems there's a large amount of randomness involved even when you just pit 1 lord vs 1 regiment in a custom battle, but it does seem the Oldblood on a Carnosaur inflicts more damage and at a much faster rate than one on foot even vs spear armed Saurus warriors.
A large number of attacks regardless of whether the Oldblood is mounted or not are ones where the enemy troops are knocked down and get back up again (the Oldblood on foot does some sweep attacks while the Carnosaur mounted Oldblood does tail sweeps and head charges).
1 on 1s aren't good indicators, because how often will you be pitting something like a Carnosaur Oldblood against a single random low-tier regiment?
What the danger is is, like, Ashiraya said, getting mobbed by any of the numerous Anti-Large units available, and not simply being able to sit there wailing on things. What tends to happen is you can charge in, but then have to immediately wade back out to avoid getting whacked by everything around it, meaning that all your Lord is really doing is disrupting. Note that's not inherently a bad thing, but it does mean that your Lord isn't actually killing much. Combine it with being a larger target for artillery and other anti-monster units, and it becomes much more of a trade-off: raw killing power in favour of a mass disruptor that often causes Terror if your Hero/Lord didn't already.
Some Lords can do both, like Kroq'gar--dunno about generic Oldbloods on Carnies--and Karl Franz wasn't too bad when he got Buckbeak, either, but once you move more into Dragon territory, the balance shifts away from active killing, and into active disruption.
The purpose of the 1v1 test was just to see if a monster mounted Lord does more damage or if he's just knocking down enemies without doing as much killing, it definitely seems like the monster mounted Lords are hitting a lot harder rather than just knocking things down, at least the ones I've tested.
But if you are just charging the Lord on a mount in somewhere he'll get swamped, a Lord on foot would be just as bad (worse even because they tend to get bogged down where as the mounted ones can usually bash their way out).
I guess I could understand if we were talking about online games where mounts are purchased so efficiency to cost ratio has to be considered, but in campaign it seems like monster mounted lords are almost always better. If you want your Lord to be a bashing machine on your front line, he'll be better at it if he's mounted (just tell him to move in formation so he doesn't advance ahead of your army and get stuck being swamped by anti-large infantry). The monster will typically also add the mobility to, if you choose, go hunting down missile troops, dealing with skirmishers, catch fleeing units, run around the flank for a flank charge, etc.
Though this conversation all started with me asking about Skinks and mounting them on Stegadons or leaving them on foot and if anyone was finding it a good idea to leave them on foot. Skinks are rather different animals to your average bashy lords that we're talking about now Leaving the Skink Chief on foot means you gain a squishy vanguard unit but at the expense of giving up a very powerful monster.
Because taking one option locks off the skill tree to the other option, it's a decision I'm finding hard to make.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Any Lizard players considered NOT mounting their skink heroes on terradons and stegadons? I've got one coming up through the ranks now and I'm considering leaving him on foot and see how he goes, maybe good for taking out war machines?
You know the sad part is that I only just now realized your name is AllSeeingSkink XD For some reason I've been calling you AllSeeingSink in my head this entire time
Some of my garrisons have skink priests on foot as part of the garrison and those work fine I guess, but honestly Stegadons are so strong I can't really pass up getting one for free even if the hero riding him might do just fine without it.The heroes. Using one of my generals for comparison, the Skink Chief in his army has an Ancient Stegadon mount and an upkeep of 444. A normal ancient Stegadon has an upkeep of 454 for the same general.
I don't bother bringing beasts much anymore. I just mount my lord and heroes on Stegadons and T-Rexes and use them cause they're cheaper, stronger, and have way better utility for the rest of the army.
Though this conversation all started with me asking about Skinks and mounting them on Stegadons or leaving them on foot and if anyone was finding it a good idea to leave them on foot. Skinks are rather different animals to your average bashy lords that we're talking about now Leaving the Skink Chief on foot means you gain a squishy vanguard unit but at the expense of giving up a very powerful monster.
Because taking one option locks off the skill tree to the other option, it's a decision I'm finding hard to make.
Truthfully a faster and more powerful monster trumps squishy all the way. I've gotten some use out of vanguard cavalry (for dark elves), but a vanguard hero is a different animal. Not the least because I've had single model units attack war machines and only manage to engage a single weapon crew, so the other three fire as if it weren't there.
The most recent weird development was confederating Mazdamundi. Which gave me several terrible Slann lords that... hadn't unlocked any spells. Mazda himself was heavily skilled in the campaign tree, and hadn't gotten any of his specials or the second tier of spells, despite being level 30. The other Slann were worse, one was level 13, had no spells, just specialized in unit buffs... for units that weren't in its army. The level 7 was similar, no spells, basically random picks.
Beat the game with both High Elfs( Tyrion) and Dark Elfs, and well I am not overly impressed so far. The gameplay is good and it looks fine and all, but I cant help the feeling that I am just playing the same game as TW1. Seeing how utterly untresting the siges are, lack of any real opposition beside the hosts of Chaos and the odd intervetion army that pops up.
But I am hoping that mods will come along and make the game more amusing, for I find myself wanting to like it a lot more than that I currenlty do.
Though this conversation all started with me asking about Skinks and mounting them on Stegadons or leaving them on foot and if anyone was finding it a good idea to leave them on foot. Skinks are rather different animals to your average bashy lords that we're talking about now Leaving the Skink Chief on foot means you gain a squishy vanguard unit but at the expense of giving up a very powerful monster.
Because taking one option locks off the skill tree to the other option, it's a decision I'm finding hard to make.
Truthfully a faster and more powerful monster trumps squishy all the way. I've gotten some use out of vanguard cavalry (for dark elves), but a vanguard hero is a different animal. Not the least because I've had single model units attack war machines and only manage to engage a single weapon crew, so the other three fire as if it weren't there.
The most recent weird development was confederating Mazdamundi. Which gave me several terrible Slann lords that... hadn't unlocked any spells. Mazda himself was heavily skilled in the campaign tree, and hadn't gotten any of his specials or the second tier of spells, despite being level 30. The other Slann were worse, one was level 13, had no spells, just specialized in unit buffs... for units that weren't in its army. The level 7 was similar, no spells, basically random picks.
I've been mostly uninterested in Slann as well but almost completed because if it don't ride a T-Rex into battle it better ride something almost as awesome XD Besides. My skink priests are rather effective in pairs once they've gotten some levels/items to boost their power reserves.
All lords and heroes as well as monsters and monstrous infantry do splash damage on their attacks. This value is considerably lower than their single-target attack power, but it adds up over time. Things like the Stegadon's charge also do splash damage.
Lords and heroes marked as 'duelist' typically have noticeably lower splash damage, however in some cases (such as Tyrion) their damage is so high they do the job anyway.
Withdrawing from a melee can also be costly. You have reduced melee defense against enemies attacking you in the back. so you can take troublesome damage just trying to disengage. This is yet another reason Kroq-Gar with his special ability is so powerful.
LordofHats wrote: My understanding is that the Tomb Kings are a well rounded horde army, with strong elite units but not really what I was thinking of. I'm thinking Huns or Scythians from Rome style, or the Mamluks from Medieval.
Ahhhh ok. I was under the impression Tomb Kings focused a lot on chariots and horsemen. Been awhile since I have read much on Fantasy though. I'm still catching up on the new 40k Fluff tbh
Light chariots and light cavalry. The Tomb Kings don't get heavy cavalry.
I'm not sure how they'll handle the light chariots. Unlike the other races, Tomb Kings run their chariots in units. And those units are small units just like the typical cavalry unit you see on the tabletop (since cavalry is too expensive to buy in a brick). But cav in TW always comes in a block. So I'm not sure how they'll treat light chariots.
Their infantry is weak, but fearless. And many of the spells cast revolve around replacing dead troops. They have tough construct infantry (basically bone golems and bone giants), flying undead vultures, and giant scorpion constructs that get buried beneath the sands before a battle starts (so they can burrow to an inconvenient location and surprise the enemy army). For ranged attacks, they have archers with typical undead aiming skills (i.e. Poor), but that aren't effected by any ranged attack modifiers (so they ignore penalties for range and partial cover). And the Screaming Skull Catapult is pretty self-descriptive.
And they have the Ark from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yes, really.
They use a primitive form of spell casting. In older editions, this meant that they didn't roll power dice, and never miscast. But that got changed in the last edition (since it was incompatible with the revised magic rules).
And as mentioned earlier, they got some giant construct beasts in the last edition.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Any Lizard players considered NOT mounting their skink heroes on terradons and stegadons? I've got one coming up through the ranks now and I'm considering leaving him on foot and see how he goes, maybe good for taking out war machines?
You know the sad part is that I only just now realized your name is AllSeeingSkink XD For some reason I've been calling you AllSeeingSink in my head this entire time
Some of my garrisons have skink priests on foot as part of the garrison and those work fine I guess, but honestly Stegadons are so strong I can't really pass up getting one for free even if the hero riding him might do just fine without it.The heroes. Using one of my generals for comparison, the Skink Chief in his army has an Ancient Stegadon mount and an upkeep of 444. A normal ancient Stegadon has an upkeep of 454 for the same general.
I don't bother bringing beasts much anymore. I just mount my lord and heroes on Stegadons and T-Rexes and use them cause they're cheaper, stronger, and have way better utility for the rest of the army.
Yeah I've been finding much the same. Carnosaurs are especially nice because I always seem to lack fast troops to hunt down archer units, Carnosaurs are much faster than Stegadons so they can fill the role. It's probably not a good idea against a human opponent, but against the AI a good tactic seems to be to charge a front line unit, most will get knocked down so you can then tell the Carnosaur to attack the missile unit behind it before the guys get back up again. If you can time it with your front line hitting the enemy front line, the unit you charged through will end up engaged with your Saurus and can't go chasing down the Carnie.
Though this conversation all started with me asking about Skinks and mounting them on Stegadons or leaving them on foot and if anyone was finding it a good idea to leave them on foot. Skinks are rather different animals to your average bashy lords that we're talking about now Leaving the Skink Chief on foot means you gain a squishy vanguard unit but at the expense of giving up a very powerful monster.
Because taking one option locks off the skill tree to the other option, it's a decision I'm finding hard to make.
Truthfully a faster and more powerful monster trumps squishy all the way. I've gotten some use out of vanguard cavalry (for dark elves), but a vanguard hero is a different animal. Not the least because I've had single model units attack war machines and only manage to engage a single weapon crew, so the other three fire as if it weren't there.
Yeah, I'm thinking Stegadons are the way to go. But I'm pretty far in to the game now and have more Skink Chiefs than I can shake a stick at, so I've put a couple on the path of the ninja rather than the path of the stompy stompy so we'll see how they turn out.
By the time they're fully upgraded the foot Skink Chiefs would have a speed in the low 60's, with the "Slippery" augment giving a temporary +24% to that, so mid 70's speed temporarily. It'll be interesting to see if he can do anything useful with it.
The most recent weird development was confederating Mazdamundi. Which gave me several terrible Slann lords that... hadn't unlocked any spells. Mazda himself was heavily skilled in the campaign tree, and hadn't gotten any of his specials or the second tier of spells, despite being level 30. The other Slann were worse, one was level 13, had no spells, just specialized in unit buffs... for units that weren't in its army. The level 7 was similar, no spells, basically random picks.
I'm just massively unimpressed with Slann in general. I love them in the table top game and want to love them here but they just feel like they aren't able to impact the battle all that much. The spell selection just doesn't seem very good. They have a decently powerful vortex as a bound spell but you have to wait quite a while after the battle starts to use it, by which time it's not as useful (unless the enemy has kept some clumped up missile troops behind their front line). Mazdamundi when he's got all his spells isn't as bad, but if you inherited him without his full compliment of spells he's not going to be great.
Played maybe another 20 turns. Shockingly i have pretty potent allies now (a strigoi ghoul king who's very potent), Lord Skrolk (clan pestilens skaven) and just recently naggaroth buddied up with me. High elves are close to completing the final ritual somehow but i should have enough money and such to send a reinforcement army i hope. We'll see how it all goes.
Other than that i'm on 10 territories which isn't a lot but my power bar goes gone up tremendously and enemies aren't really going out of their way to fight me so much as my allies. I guess that some rare good luck mixed with diplomacy i did. Also the lizardmen are doing horribly. One of the main factions was wiped out and maybe one or two small factions. Now the last Major Lizardmen faction is basically in realms with 3 of his enemies and all my allies (ghoul king undead guy, myself and lord skrolk so he's basically having his empire torn apart from every angle and besieged. That was in no small part to a confederation he managed to get.
Anyway it's late. Gotta see how the game works out tomorrow. The elves doing their final ritual is entirely possible and i dunno how the hell they managed to go from 4th ritual to 5th so quickly. Only a few smidges away from having the ability to do it.
As soon as i am able i will get all my allies to declare war on the Lothern High Elves and focus all their attentions on destroying them. Lord skrolk might be too far out of the way however as am i. As for me i have other plans. Maybe do a ritual or two and take land from our continental enemies while they give ultuan a good thumping.
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Btw ever notice how enemies don't seem to fight together in most Warhammer battles. They often exclusively fight against each other in some cases. I mean the big chaos and Nagash combo in End Times seems a bit abnormal. Normally it'd just be all the vampires with Nagash or all undead and archaeon with all his assorted chaos minions. In End Times that's when they added skaven to fight with chaos more and undead sorta sided with the good guys somewhat for a time. It was pretty case some of the alliances made.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Played maybe another 20 turns. Shockingly i have pretty potent allies now (a strigoi ghoul king who's very potent), Lord Skrolk (clan pestilens skaven) and just recently naggaroth buddied up with me. High elves are close to completing the final ritual somehow but i should have enough money and such to send a reinforcement army i hope. We'll see how it all goes.
Good luck. I had success sending interventions early on in the game, saved up the money and sent a top tier intervention against Lothern and it was great, stopped the ritual and rampaged across for several turns. Later in the game I tried doing the same when Naggaroth tried to a ritual and even the highest level intervention just got squashed like a bug.
The elves doing their final ritual is entirely possible and i dunno how the hell they managed to go from 4th ritual to 5th so quickly.
I think the ritual bar increases as they gather ritual resource then stops until they complete the ritual, any time between them being able to start the ritual and actually finishing it they could have been continuing to gather ritual resource, so when they finish they might jump forward on the ritual bar.
Tagony wrote: This is a dumb question but how do you pay to send reinforcements during a ritual? I the suggestion in game to do it, but missed how to do it.
The bar at the top of the screen which indicates ritual progress, at the end of that bar (to the right) is a button that is for sending interventions.
It seems like intervention forces only really work early on in the game, late game they aren't powerful enough to make an impact.
Ahhhh ok, thanks! As a HE player the skaven are way behind at turn 70 or so but the DE and lizards are up by me. I'm pounding through the DE but the lizards i'm going to save up and send a gift. Hopefully they do some good.
I haven't tested it, but I'm wondering if it's better to wait until they're just about to finish a ritual before sending an intervention, MAYBE if you do that they'll already be softened up by the Chaos incursions that your intervention will be successful. Just a theory.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I haven't tested it, but I'm wondering if it's better to wait until they're just about to finish a ritual before sending an intervention, MAYBE if you do that they'll already be softened up by the Chaos incursions that your intervention will be successful. Just a theory.
I generally haven't seen that work. The chaos incursions pop up in specific places for each character. In my experience the interventions pop up and siege a random secondary city, and then the AI sends out an army and crushes them with the help of the city garrison, then chases down the survivors, usually within the same turn.
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In other news, my Kroq-gar campaign is wrapping up. Only the dark elves are left- I completely control the southlands, half of Lothern, and large chunks of Lustria and Naggarond (there was a rogue army that took the eastern coast from some of minor powers and Tiranoc) Unfortunately Malekith has confederate twice, and now controls 21 cities rather than 6. Morathi is up to 3, as for some reason she's warring with one of the minor lizard powers in Lustria (who simply won't confederate, despite gifts and nonsense). At this point the game is about mustering the energy to steamroll Malekith, and getting my armies out of Lustria (from dealing with Teclis), probably stomping the New World Colonies as well as Morathi on the way North. And probably the weakest of the the three remaining lizards, just because I have to go through them anyway.
But at this point I just want to get on with it and finish the campaign- my economy is ludicrous, I've got 12 armies in the field and still make 40K a turn, because lizard tech (and buildings, unique and otherwise) act as multipliers for both income and upkeep reduction.
Yeah, my Mazdamundi campaign is wrapping up. I have 1 ritual left with enough plaques to start it. I finally got Itza to confederate just by paying them absurd amounts of money, wiped Lothern out and they were the most powerful faction (Chrace is the only HE faction still alive, for whatever reason the other ones didn't want to make peace but Chrace was never aggressive toward me).
Still haven't confederated with Kroq Gar but at this point there's no need to, he owns most of the Southlands and I own most of Lustria and Ulthuan.
Time to start the last ritual and finish it off. Previous ritual I was silly and got lured out of one of my ritual sites and almost lost it. Controlling a lot of land makes it hard to defend the ritual sites because the incursions seem to pop up where ever and if they pop up far away from any of your armies they can wreak havoc before you finally put them down or they attack an actual ritual site.
I am having slight trouble on very hard. By turn 120 the elves have 4 rituals done.
I am not sure what to do...... Took me 80+ turns to get 2 rituals done and take over most of my island. When ever I started the ritual dark elves sent a level 30 dragon rider full army to hit my core. Then 2 units of unknown skaven, 3 chaos followers, then the stupid book elves hit me.
By the time I clean them out I lose half my island and need to recap, then stupid high elves keep doing rituals. I actually sent the max distraction and the very turn I sent it they killed it of. This was their first ritual lol.
I find the max distraction is a complete waste. The game just stacks the army with monstrous creatures and siege engines and no infantry or skirmishers to protect it. It's a good threat against an undefended capital, but the AI never has an undefended capital unless you just killed it.
Ah well, just finished the last ritual with Mazdamundi.
Admittedly the game was getting a bit boring toward the end, probably because I set the difficulty too low but with the Lizardmen the way the geomantic web thingo works the more contiguous land you hold the better your economy. Once you hold most of one of the continents your economy can sustain lots of big armies and you just start playing musical chairs with the AI and it more becomes an annoyance just auto-resolving conflicts you either have no chance of winning (them attacking a garrison) or ones you have no chance of losing (recapping settlements).
Anyone have a clue when the Tomb Kings might come out? Several months I guess? I imagine if you started as Kroq-Gar it'd have a pretty big effect on the game as the Tomb Kings should be controlling quite a large swath of rather important land in nothern-fantasy-africa.
Avatar 720 wrote: Is it just me, or does the AI feel less agent spam-happy this time around?
It is, thank god. The AI used to swamp me in more agents than I could handle and all my agents ever did was kill enemy agents. Now I actually get to use them for fun gak XD
Avatar 720 wrote: Is it just me, or does the AI feel less agent spam-happy this time around?
Really? How bad were they before? Lothern and Pestilens just kept sending bloody agents around all the time trying to wound or assassinate my characters until I managed to wipe out their last settlement.
When they start sending agents at me is when I decide I really need to wipe that race off the map
It was pretty damn bad in TW:W1. The mortality rate of non-Legendary Lords was rather high, seeing as how the AI would throw hero after hero at them to kill them off. I ended up having to install a mod that stopped aggressive hero actions because it was pissing me off so much, although that had the drawback of making your own assassination missions unable to be completed unless you quit out of the game and turned the mod off every time.
On an unrelated note, I think there *might* be a bug with those sea-based treasures, given one appeared off the cost of my starting province as Kroq'Gar, I sent a random Oldblood after it, and he came back with... The Revered Spear of Tlanxla. Yes, the Unique weapon for Kroq'Gar.
So what difficulty is everybody else playing on? I'm guessing ashiraya and a couple other are on some insane difficulties (she seems to love TWW1 a lot). I'm only on hard but it seemed tough enough. Queek wasn't too easy and it didn't help i didn't know what an intervention was until high elves did their 2nd to last one.
High elves still got about 8 turns left to complete their final ritual. Still might try a last ditch intervention on them just before their ritual completes.
Oh and a very awful thing happened yesterday. I had 2 armies somewhere and i thought they were reinforcing one another. One was sieging a settlement and the other was nearby. Enemy attacks from inside settlement and i realize my other army aren't coming in as reinforcements. I fight the battle and lose but the army lives. After some pretty big losses in that army i had to remake the army. Took at least 5 or more turns just to get the guys back (had to recruit more dudes) and another 4 or so at least to move out of position and all the way back into position. Cost me a lot of time (which i'm low on) and effort to get back into fighting shape.
Anyway hopefully i can prevent high elves from doing last ritual or at least fight them off in the supposed final battle. Dark elves are fairly powerful as well but i can probably beat them in ritual speed (though i'm in no position to fight off so many armies in a final battle). High elves and dark elves are huge threats and even teclis's force is somewhat competent. The other skaven faction is also sorta powerful. Lizardmen forces are garbage now for the most part. Only the 'Last Defenders' remain and they're significantly weaker than me.
flamingkillamajig wrote: So what difficulty is everybody else playing on? I'm guessing ashiraya and a couple other are on some insane difficulties (she seems to love TWW1 a lot). I'm only on hard but it seemed tough enough. Queek wasn't too easy and it didn't help i didn't know what an intervention was until high elves did their 2nd to last one.
High elves still got about 8 turns left to complete their final ritual. Still might try a last ditch intervention on them just before their ritual completes.
Oh and a very awful thing happened yesterday. I had 2 armies somewhere and i thought they were reinforcing one another. One was sieging a settlement and the other was nearby. Enemy attacks from inside settlement and i realize my other army aren't coming in as reinforcements. I fight the battle and lose but the army lives. After some pretty big losses in that army i had to remake the army. Took at least 5 or more turns just to get the guys back (had to recruit more dudes) and another 4 or so at least to move out of position and all the way back into position. Cost me a lot of time (which i'm low on) and effort to get back into fighting shape.
Anyway hopefully i can prevent high elves from doing last ritual or at least fight them off in the supposed final battle. Dark elves are fairly powerful as well but i can probably beat them in ritual speed (though i'm in no position to fight off so many armies in a final battle). High elves and dark elves are huge threats and even teclis's force is somewhat competent. The other skaven faction is also sorta powerful. Lizardmen forces are garbage now for the most part. Only the 'Last Defenders' remain and they're significantly weaker than me.
I find anything short of hard is too easy. Hard lets me have a pleasant, but not too frustrating, game of fantasy domination.
I do however wish there was still an option for strategy map difficult and battle difficulty, as I'd like to set my battle difficulty higher. Right now the AI doesn't even attempt to counter my flanking attacks. Occasionally it flanks me, but only seemingly when it has numbers on its side, and I can just bait their flank, flank that, and in 15 minutes the entire enemy army is surrounded and I've won.
Does the AI actually get smarter about its flanks if you up the difficulty? My experience with strategy games is the AI usually doesn't get smarter, it just cheats more if you up the difficulty
flamingkillamajig wrote: So what difficulty is everybody else playing on? I'm guessing ashiraya and a couple other are on some insane difficulties (she seems to love TWW1 a lot). I'm only on hard but it seemed tough enough. Queek wasn't too easy and it didn't help i didn't know what an intervention was until high elves did their 2nd to last one.
High elves still got about 8 turns left to complete their final ritual. Still might try a last ditch intervention on them just before their ritual completes.
Oh and a very awful thing happened yesterday. I had 2 armies somewhere and i thought they were reinforcing one another. One was sieging a settlement and the other was nearby. Enemy attacks from inside settlement and i realize my other army aren't coming in as reinforcements. I fight the battle and lose but the army lives. After some pretty big losses in that army i had to remake the army. Took at least 5 or more turns just to get the guys back (had to recruit more dudes) and another 4 or so at least to move out of position and all the way back into position. Cost me a lot of time (which i'm low on) and effort to get back into fighting shape.
Anyway hopefully i can prevent high elves from doing last ritual or at least fight them off in the supposed final battle. Dark elves are fairly powerful as well but i can probably beat them in ritual speed (though i'm in no position to fight off so many armies in a final battle). High elves and dark elves are huge threats and even teclis's force is somewhat competent. The other skaven faction is also sorta powerful. Lizardmen forces are garbage now for the most part. Only the 'Last Defenders' remain and they're significantly weaker than me.
Yeah I don't know what the rules are about supporting armies. A few times I've had bad losses because an army I thought would be supporting wasn't.
One time when I was attacking I had a support army, the little yellow arrow appeared from the supporting army but when I went to attack the supporting army wasn't listed. I had enough movement left to shift the supporting slightly and try again and the 2nd time the supporting army did show up.
Agreed on A.I. cheating. Have you ever seen dawn of war 1 and how dumb the A.I. is? Often it will retreat when it outnumbers the enemy 2 to 1 or even more because for some reason it thinks the enemy army costs more or something stupid.
Anyway i played more today and holy crap i've been kicking some serious ***. Got up to 19 territories now which is still nothing in comparison to the 2 main dark elf factions and Tyrion's elf faction. Also one of my undead allies has a good army. Other than that though my settlements and everything are doing fairly well. I own probably well over a third of africa (the southlands?). It's the bottom portion.
On the topic of the high elf rituals he completed them all and my intervention failed but the final mission to stop the final ritual i won at. It was a pyrrhic victory but i'm managing to get all my guys reinforced back to full in 2-3 turns. It was a hard fought battle but my cannons took out 3 of the dragons and i probably took the brunt of the attack. I'm gonna have to make sure at least both major factions for a race are wiped out before i try the final ritual.
Deep into a Kroq-Gar playthrough, I've a feeling that they need to swap the difficulties of him and Mazdamundi. His starting position isn't terrific in terms of being able to go HAM on settlement infrastructure, but the insane -upkeep buffs he gets and his use in battle really outweighs that. Hell, being relatively out of the way means there's only 1 real avenue of attack against his core provinces.
Currently he's busy running over undead in the desert, and when that's done, I'm thinking of shipping him and the other Oldblood I have off to Ulthuan to take some revenge on the High Elves who seem to enjoy throwing stacks of Dragon Princes and Dragons at my rituals.
This is probably the smoothest game of TW:W I've played. I won't say easiest, because the ritual is still a thing, but definitely smoothest.
EDIT: The exact reverse is true of my first go at a Queek playthrough I started tonight. Around 20 turns in, Kroq-Gar declared war on me and rocked up at the ritual resource settlement on the southern coast that I'd just taken, with a full 20 stack of mainly various types of experienced Saurus, as well as his starting Kroxigors and Stegadon, plus a secondary army in tow. He hasn't even taken the third settlement in his starting province yet, and the Woodies have the ritual resource site the guards the mountain pass next to where he starts. It looks like he built up a huge army using all his various buffs and beelined straight for me. He seems happy enough to keep that resource site for now, so I'm launching an expedition to finally kill off the annoying Temple of Dawn High Elves on their sodding island so they stop sending random armies of Sea Guard at me, and maybe look at expanding off the Southlands altogether, just in case. There's no way I can take on the Lizardmen to my North, and the Elves off the Southern coast of the Southlands just sink any army I try and send there because of how auto-resolving works. With food running low, and no idea if I'll have enough time to tech to Plagueclaws and WLCs, it might be my best hope of survival.
I think Maz actually has a somewhat easier time past early game. Kroq ends up with lots of spread out territory to protect, but Max basically owns central America and can defend it well with garrisons and two half stacks against almost anything. His capital also has a really good building for the Lizardmen monsters.
Kroq though easily has the strongest early game cause he can go balls to the walls on Saurs and just laugh at his early enemies, skraven, who just don't stand a chance against him.
Ok about 1/4 of ulthuan is either destroyed or taken by dark elves/morathi. Oddly morathi is by far more powerful than malekith in this one. Malekith has even fewer territories than me now i think. I'm finishing up my 2nd ritual and killed all the various chaos armies that came at me plus the high elf intervention and any extra minor factions fighting me. I now have a 3rd army that's maybe 2/3 of max army amount. Only enemies i have are the high elf factions and any minor power that might come at me. Skrolk's army is actually possibly in danger of losing mostly because their land has been split up into 3 parts though they have a good chunk of armies so they could hold out a little. Once i get into a better position i might see if i can confederate him. He is surrounded by enemies though and that might take a ridiculous amount of time sorting through every turn.
In army power bar i'm currently in 4th with army power behind morathi, probably lothern and the ghoul king ally. My food is maxed out, public order is up, money is ok-ish but good for all the armies i have and my empire is doing well. Not sure if i should go for the 3rd ritual after the 2nd is finished or just go for killing more enemies. Waiting for certain things can be tedious though and i'm not sure if i have the armies to handle later incursions or if i should do it right away due to my empire spanning one continuous territory before i sail across the sea to claim parts of other continents.
Avatar 720 wrote: Deep into a Kroq-Gar playthrough, I've a feeling that they need to swap the difficulties of him and Mazdamundi. His starting position isn't terrific in terms of being able to go HAM on settlement infrastructure, but the insane -upkeep buffs he gets and his use in battle really outweighs that. Hell, being relatively out of the way means there's only 1 real avenue of attack against his core provinces.
Maz has the -upkeep bonus on Temple Guard which is more useful later in the game. TG and Saurus stats don't look terribly different, but TG have a big boost in armour piercing and anti large. My Maz army is made up of a big chunk of Temple Guard + support units and combined with the -25% upkeep on monster units (from Maz's upgraded capital) it's a pretty low upkeep army.
I've paired Maz with a Skink Priest. Probably not the most efficient use, but it means I can enough magic to actually make a decent dent in the outcome of a battle.
I know how good Temple Guard are; I have a large number in all my armies for that reason. My Saurus are still the backbone, though, and do a lot of heavy-lifting. Even on turn 150 I'm using the same Saurus units I had on turn 15, and they're still absolute powerhouses.
If anything, both Mazdamundi and Kroq could do with being listed Easy.
Yeah, the only trick to Kroq-Gar is early on you can set yourself up with defensive problems, just because of that mountain range.
It isn't a problem if the island elves never declare war on you, but you can easily be pulled way out of position while enemy armies rampage through parts of your territory you can't get to in under 3-4 turns of marching (and abandoning another front)
Once you consolidate and clean up, it isn't ever a problem again, as long as you plant forces ahead of time for when/if you do rituals.
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Been playing Skrolk and only belatedly realized Skaven are the only race in the entire two games that have to care about expanding too much. My food is permanently at zero, until I snipe specific cities with food supplies (and I think there is only one more in lustria). Annoying. I was thinking food was a limiter on armies, but nope. My armies barely register on my food problems, while my settlements are more than twice my incoming food. And this is with skrolk, who is gifted a lot of food cities early on. Ugh.
My DE and lizard playthroughs taught me to keep and take settlement so enemies don't move in and colonize to prolong their suffering. Skaven, ironically, don't favor grand expansion.
Avatar 720 wrote: I know how good Temple Guard are; I have a large number in all my armies for that reason. My Saurus are still the backbone, though, and do a lot of heavy-lifting. Even on turn 150 I'm using the same Saurus units I had on turn 15, and they're still absolute powerhouses.
If anything, both Mazdamundi and Kroq could do with being listed Easy.
Yeah Saurus are the backbones of a lot of my armies as well.... just not my main legendary Lord's army and that's the only place the upkeep bonus of Maz/Kroq actually applies. In all my minor armies Saurus are cheaper and faster to recruit, so when rebuilding an army that took some hits or building a new army from scratch it's usually the Saurus that get put in to service.
But in my main armies I swapped to Temple Guard pretty early on, especially on Maz because they're just better and with the upkeep bonus they cost very little to have in there. They also tend not to die, I lose Saurus units all the time, not as durable and rampage means they'll sometimes get themselves stuck with no escape, I rarely ever lose a TG unit though.
Kroq's cheap Saurus was useful early on when the economy was weak and my legendary Lord's army accounted for most of the upkeep, then Maz's cheap TG units become a bit more useful then late in the game it doesn't really make much difference because the legendary lord's army doesn't account for a huge amount of the total upkeep late in the game anyway.
Have anyone had the experience that this game really dose not respond well to mods? After adding the Radoius mods and a few cosmetic mods my game have crashed several times, and yes. I have checked if the mods are compatible with each other. Hoping there will be patches to said mods and the base game as well soon.
I honestly can't remember the last time I lost a full unit in Kroq's campaign; it might've been a valiant last-stand an early army led by some random Oldblood had against 5,000 Skaven--and almost won, because Skaven break too easily. Queek and 2 other full armies rocked up at a level 2-3 minor settlement without extra defences, with just a low-level Oldblood, 4 fresh Saurus, and 3 blessed chameleon spawnings in addition to the garrison.
I was under no illusions that I'd win, but I made the Ratmen work for it. The only thing that tipped the scales, so to speak, was a WLC and Plagueclaw one of the armies had with them. Without those, I might've even pulled out a heroic victory at the rate I was going; most of the Skaven were constantly routing, and I was slowly rolling up one of the flanks. Two lords were killed by the chameleons and terradon garrison.
The damage I dealt gave Kroq enough time to double back, lay siege to the province capital the Skaven had retreated to the regroup, be ambushed by the replenished forces of Queek et. al. and steamroll 4679 Skaven whilst taking 81 casualties.
LordofHats wrote: I think their roster could really use some mounted skink skirmishers, as skinks become functionally worthless in late game. Too squishy to stand up to strong infantry/monsters, and can't outrun cavalry which mince them. Is there any mounted skinks to use as a basis?
Skink Cold One Riders actually predate Saurus Cold One Riders in the fluff. It's testing my memory, but I think they were originally a Regiment of Renown, then they became a unique unit in a "Southlands" army list (which was a skink heavy list in one of the older Army Books) where they rode Horned Ones rather than Cold Ones (which were less buff and more intelligent versions of Cold Ones), then eventually were dropped in favour of Saurus Cold One Riders.
.
My lord of nothing, the Cold One Riders appeared in the 1997 Lizadrmen army book which I think was the first one that they were actually lizards, so the first one. Back then the metal skink cold one riders were those who were marked out for greatness by having the biggest crests and the cold ones looked a bit like the first Jurassic Park film's raptors. Later the horned one was introduced for the leader of the regiment of renown who led a bunch of cold one riders and the horned one was an extra special blessed mount. Then Saurus Cold One Riders replaced the skinks in the main book and were vaguely based around the baby Godzilla from the American 00's film. After a while regiments of renown faded and they became the only Lizardmen cavalry.
Trondheim wrote: Have anyone had the experience that this game really dose not respond well to mods? After adding the Radoius mods and a few cosmetic mods my game have crashed several times, and yes. I have checked if the mods are compatible with each other. Hoping there will be patches to said mods and the base game as well soon.
I read this, thought to myself : “Nah,been remarkably stable for me and I use radious.” Fast forward: Game promptly crashes right when I get to the first ritual.
I’ll Probably just uninstall Radious and start over, as game was fine before I installed it.
Avatar 720 wrote: I honestly can't remember the last time I lost a full unit in Kroq's campaign; it might've been a valiant last-stand an early army led by some random Oldblood had against 5,000 Skaven--and almost won, because Skaven break too easily. Queek and 2 other full armies rocked up at a level 2-3 minor settlement without extra defences, with just a low-level Oldblood, 4 fresh Saurus, and 3 blessed chameleon spawnings in addition to the garrison.
I was under no illusions that I'd win, but I made the Ratmen work for it. The only thing that tipped the scales, so to speak, was a WLC and Plagueclaw one of the armies had with them. Without those, I might've even pulled out a heroic victory at the rate I was going; most of the Skaven were constantly routing, and I was slowly rolling up one of the flanks. Two lords were killed by the chameleons and terradon garrison.
The damage I dealt gave Kroq enough time to double back, lay siege to the province capital the Skaven had retreated to the regroup, be ambushed by the replenished forces of Queek et. al. and steamroll 4679 Skaven whilst taking 81 casualties.
Clan Mors wasn't long for this world after that.
To be fair, the AI handles the skaven poorly. The menace from below particularly. They should be setting up rear charges or coming up on missile troops or warmachines. Instead it very often spawns the new unit at the back of its army, where it immediately starts dying off due to being summoned. Several times I've seen this, and if it gets into the fight at all, the summoned unit is already at half strength.
Ok so updates. Lizardmen after having confederated multiple times were killed by pretty much everybody actually. I've taken some more land in the southlands (mostly just me and my vampire buddies now) and there's only one dwarf territory remaining in the southlands and maybe one territory of sartosa.
Morathi confederated with Malekith so that she's now the main dark elf faction which is beyond bad. Just for emphasis i probably have over 30 territories and friends have various amounts. She now has 80 territories! Yes 80!!! If that wasn't enough she's doing the final ritual so i'm considering when i should betray her or if i should wait for the final battle.
Currently i'm in dire need of food and that means i've gotta attack some dwarf army. Sadly this means i need all my ducks in a line (most of my armies positioned in lustria to kill him). Which wouldn't be a problem if i didn't have to make sure morathi absolutely fails this ritual. The next couple playthroughs are gonna be tough even with my clan pestilens and undead buddies supporting me.
Oh and lothern is there too but all the other good guys are weak or dead so he's on his own and only about as strong as me now. Not to mention morathi owns the entire outer ring of ulthuan right now pretty much or it's outright destroyed.
Trondheim wrote: Have anyone had the experience that this game really dose not respond well to mods? After adding the Radoius mods and a few cosmetic mods my game have crashed several times, and yes. I have checked if the mods are compatible with each other. Hoping there will be patches to said mods and the base game as well soon.
I read this, thought to myself : “Nah,been remarkably stable for me and I use radious.” Fast forward: Game promptly crashes right when I get to the first ritual.
I’ll Probably just uninstall Radious and start over, as game was fine before I installed it.
Granted, I feel Teclis is a better character, but fighting lizard men early on is ROUGH. Spears just don't cut it against those guys. I need my Swordmasters/Phoenix Guard.
In the mean time I've got Teclis and a Light Wizard just using Nets to pin them down and dump lots of arrows on them.
HIgh elf arrows solve a lot of problems. I actually found Teclis to be easier- Tyrion's neighbors tend to be jerks, and have equivalent (or better armies). Heavy archer fire on lizards goes a long way for me, as they just have to walk into it (and happily get distracted by reavers)
Tiranoc in particular is a massive warmonger in every campaign I've played. On the other hand, the initial lizards are easy for Teclis, and after that you can go bother dwarves or skaven while you tech up.
After messing about with them, I like the high elves a lot more than the dark elves. They get their buff up front- a lot of dark elf fights, murderous prowess never happens.
I've only played a little high elves, but I feel like Lothren Sea Guard are a must for them. They're expensive to be sure, but having your front line spears be able to pepper an approaching enemy in arrows practically doubles your volume of fire for a brief moment and it's been huge for me so far.
Alternatively I've used them as second line infantry, peppering enemies with arrows and then plugging gaps or turning flanks as needed/when they're out of ammo.
It's an amazingly flexible unit. The issue is Sea Guard are freaking pricey.
Voss wrote: HIgh elf arrows solve a lot of problems. I actually found Teclis to be easier- Tyrion's neighbors tend to be jerks, and have equivalent (or better armies). Heavy archer fire on lizards goes a long way for me, as they just have to walk into it (and happily get distracted by reavers)
Tiranoc in particular is a massive warmonger in every campaign I've played. On the other hand, the initial lizards are easy for Teclis, and after that you can go bother dwarves or skaven while you tech up.
After messing about with them, I like the high elves a lot more than the dark elves. They get their buff up front- a lot of dark elf fights, murderous prowess never happens.
That worked out amazingly well for me, I forced Tiranoc out of Ulthaun but they had somehow taken a few settlements in Naggaroth and they've been amazing allies over there since.
Voss wrote: HIgh elf arrows solve a lot of problems. I actually found Teclis to be easier- Tyrion's neighbors tend to be jerks, and have equivalent (or better armies). Heavy archer fire on lizards goes a long way for me, as they just have to walk into it (and happily get distracted by reavers)
Tiranoc in particular is a massive warmonger in every campaign I've played. On the other hand, the initial lizards are easy for Teclis, and after that you can go bother dwarves or skaven while you tech up.
After messing about with them, I like the high elves a lot more than the dark elves. They get their buff up front- a lot of dark elf fights, murderous prowess never happens.
That worked out amazingly well for me, I forced Tiranoc out of Ulthaun but they had somehow taken a few settlements in Naggaroth and they've been amazing allies over there since.
Ah. For whatever reason, I can _never_ get Tiranoc to go for peace. They will fight to the bitter end every time.
On the subject of skaven food supplies i'm actually curious if i should recruit 3-4 lords and equip them with nothing but slaves for raiding duty (get 3 food each for a total of 9-12 food) and settlement settling. I realize upkeep and such goes up with every lord but slaves are insanely low upkeep and since they'd have a big army it'd probably keep their loyalty good esp. if i switch out lords every so often. Anyway we'll see if it works. Perhaps even weak settlements could be taken down with slave mass should i need to really build loyalty among warlords.
In my game morathi was doing her last ritual and like a skaven i just snuck up to one of her territories (we were currently allies) and i basically betrayed her and thankfully all my allies joined along for the ride. I gave a crap ton of money to my undead ally before i betrayed morathi and he's keeping me safe in the north. So now pretty much everybody hates Morathi and she's gone down from 80 territories to about 68 or 69. I have about 34 now so i still only have half her territory.
Queek and the other warlord that took out her ritual site defended it till she failed and they keep defending that area from a crap ton of dark elf incursions. My 2 armies and clan pestilens ally are moving up from lustria through fantasy central america cutting a swath through all the unprotected settlements morathi has. I took down a good 6 armies so far (including killing malekith) at least if not more with queek and his warlord buddy which at this point are just there as a distraction and possibly to intercept anybody coming through central america by land. Morathi just showed up with 2 other armies so it's gonna be another 3 armies coming at me all at once. Thankfully i have the abilitiy to fight armies one on one with some skills.
My 3 skavenslave armies (costing a ton of upkeep due to the lords) are almost in place to do some raiding. It took forever to do so however. Sadly Morathi and her constant chaos corruption has tainted just about everywhere i will have to raid so it's going to cause casualties while i raid but thankfully it should be safe to raid with all my forces. Sadly i'll still probably be hurting for food even with all of that going on so i may have to just raze most of the territory i win.
On a funny note morathi took probably half of ulthuan with our help if not more and is now losing a good chunk of it now that we're fighting her and if you look at the corruption rating most of ulthuan has chaos corruption all over it. Yeah so much for ulthuan being pristine. Most of it is a smoking ruin now.
The Grumpy Eldar wrote: Don't forget that autoresolve for Skaven is still broken/bugged, esp. against Lizardmen. Almost always fight the battle on land if you can.
Currently 1 Lizzardmen Lord an maybe a unit of Saurus warriors can whipe garissoned settlements plus maybe an army in autoresolve.
Yeah, auto-resolve in TW games is at its worst when it has to try and factor in armies like Skaven, especially if you have the misfortune to cross another army's path at sea. I was taking Queek on a nice boat trip when one of the High Elf factions spotted his full 20 stack army on the waves and, sensing opportunity, declared war on me, jumped about 8-9 units of Elves into a boat and promptly sank my entire army in one go. The only chance I'll get at taking out those islands is by hoping they don't have enough of an army nearby to respond. I've been forced to fight enough manual battles against a handful of Sea Guard to know that it doesn't take much to convince the game that I don't stand a chance.
Here's a reason why nobody should never believe the auto-resolve when they're Skaven (spoilered for size):
Spoiler:
True, there were only about 8 or so Saurus units total and a LOT of Skinks, but still, the point is that the auto-resolve option before the battle might as well have said "Are you f***ing mad!?"
Skaven do really well against HE compared to what auto-resolve says. I think because the AI is just stupid and auto resolve assumes you're also going to be stupid and assumes the 2 armies just charge in to each other and pound it out. I typically just autoresolve matches much above 50% chance of winning, but I've been amazed a couple of times where my Skaven won matches that autoresolve gave me almost not chance of winning.
But the AI way too often just bunches up allowing for easy AoE followed by flank charges, letting you win games against armies you really shouldn't be winning against.
The Grumpy Eldar wrote: Don't forget that autoresolve for Skaven is still broken/bugged, esp. against Lizardmen. Almost always fight the battle on land if you can.
Currently 1 Lizzardmen Lord an maybe a unit of Saurus warriors can whipe garissoned settlements plus maybe an army in autoresolve.
Yeah, auto-resolve in TW games is at its worst when it has to try and factor in armies like Skaven, especially if you have the misfortune to cross another army's path at sea. I was taking Queek on a nice boat trip when one of the High Elf factions spotted his full 20 stack army on the waves and, sensing opportunity, declared war on me, jumped about 8-9 units of Elves into a boat and promptly sank my entire army in one go. The only chance I'll get at taking out those islands is by hoping they don't have enough of an army nearby to respond. I've been forced to fight enough manual battles against a handful of Sea Guard to know that it doesn't take much to convince the game that I don't stand a chance.
Here's a reason why nobody should never believe the auto-resolve when they're Skaven (spoilered for size):
Spoiler:
True, there were only about 8 or so Saurus units total and a LOT of Skinks, but still, the point is that the auto-resolve option before the battle might as well have said "Are you f***ing mad!?"
I've found censer bearers to really hit hard though they'd probably work best in the flank much as they did on the tabletop. Course on the tabletop they were only really good for one turn and you had to charge in the flank and pray combat resolution was enough to make the enemy flee. After that if you didn't break the enemy unit you were fighting then they were absolute garbage. The fact they were only initiative 3 didn't help either and that's another reason why they absolutely had to flank. I think what most people failed to realize with skaven is most of our hard hitters on the tabletop (aside from doomwheel and abomination) were incredibly fragile and were either frenzied and/or had poor leadership (since usually strength in numbers had little to no effect with them). That's a good reason why skaven special choices sucked so hard on tabletop.
flamingkillamajig wrote: On the subject of skaven food supplies i'm actually curious if i should recruit 3-4 lords and equip them with nothing but slaves for raiding duty (get 3 food each for a total of 9-12 food) and settlement settling.
I'm not quite understanding how settlements work.
In the thing that comes up when you hover over your food, it says that settlements have a food upkeep, so does that mean if you're struggling with food you should just be razing instead of starting new settlements?
I've managed to keep my money upkeep pretty good with Queek, but struggling with food, so should I only being settling in areas that have ritual resource boosts and food boosts? Maybe only settle the major settlements and raze the minor ones?
Also it seems you can maybe raid your own lands and still get +3 food from it? It seems a bit cheesy but you could make a Slave army, raid your own lands for +3 food and when a rebellion pops up just kill it and gain even more from the food bonus from winning the battle.
Yeah. Each settlement eats food, as does each army.
So unlike everyone else, skaven have a need to raze or they get stuck with penalties unless you're constantly fighting battles (and thus getting food). And there will be times that you can't fight continually, especially when crossing to the next continent.
Personally- I find the province bonuses too good to give up (and it helps with Public Order), so a province with food resources gets kept. Additional ritual resources I don't actually worry too much about. Once you have two of them, you're right on course to the end game. (Though skaven are somewhat slower, since each city gives a resource per turn, and you can't take them all... so maybe you do need 3)
Unfortunately there isn't a way to abandon cities once you've taken them, which puts my skrolk campaign in a weird hole. And due to the lovely diplomacy system, people who occupy the razed cities will probably declare war on you sooner or later, so you've got to worried about having your good provinces exposed to sudden attacks by whatever migrants show up.
Voss wrote: Unfortunately there isn't a way to abandon cities once you've taken them
Yeah I was going to ask that next. I took a bunch of settlements as Queek which aren't really valuable to me and now they're stuck being a food drain. I guess I could just try and let them rebel, let the rebels take the cities then sweep in and take out the rebels but just raze the cities instead of occupying them again.
The best way I can see is by removing all buildings and by making choices that will lower your overall public order (maybe via food shortages?) I know in my HE campaign, there's usually an influence event that has the potential of lowering my overall public order.
Voss wrote: Unfortunately there isn't a way to abandon cities once you've taken them
Yeah I was going to ask that next. I took a bunch of settlements as Queek which aren't really valuable to me and now they're stuck being a food drain. I guess I could just try and let them rebel, let the rebels take the cities then sweep in and take out the rebels but just raze the cities instead of occupying them again.
How does one intentionally lower public order?
Raiding is the only real reliable way for skaven. I've got one town left on Teclis' little islands, but for some reason it won't go below +2 PO on its own, despite being level 1 with no buildings. I don't really want to waste an army standing on it.
You could throw a lot of money into buildings that raise corruption (which should lower public order eventually) but that is both long term and expensive.
I'm honestly debating pulling back and just rushing through successive rituals or just abandoning the campaign. It's at a weird place and I don't have much interest in fixing it. And annoyingly auto-resolve likes eating my rat ogres, which take 4 turns to replace unless I spend more turns hiking back home.
So the lines started to buckle vs morathi which wouldn't be a big deal if i had nearby settlements with proper buildings to replenish with. It took time and now morathi just completed her last ritual. I'm able to probably take her down but we'll have to see how it goes (all my armies are rebuilt now).
I am thinking of just ditching the slave armies so i can have better upkeep. It's just not worth it to constantly raid for food. I mean i could try but thanks to my stupid allies grabbing all the pastures lately it's been a real trouble for me. I suppose i could ruin their public order or something but the food issue is just a problem.
Not only that but the A.I. military coordination sucks. High elves kept attacking my undead ally preventing him from taking out the dark elf ritual in time ***** that he is. Also i've been telling the vampire guy to just ditch ulthuan and go to naggaroth (because every time he tries to help lothern they just attack and destroy a good chunk of his armies) but it's taking a year for him to respond if he even is going to.
As far as fear goes dark elves really abuse it vs skaven. It can totally tear up a line esp. with malekith. Doesn't help that in an equal numbers battle skaven will probably lose top tier fights but then maybe i just need some abominations. The dragon and hydra spam is totally a pain to face. I may need to switch out my sword and shield stormvermin with halberd ones but the big issue is that dark elves (just like on tabletop) have a crap ton of shooting.
If i had to say morathi and malekith together are too much for skaven and it's made worse in big battles where reinforcements come in at odd angles or in battle with tree-lines everywhere preventing cannons from getting shots off. If that wasn't bad enough the reinforcements come in with odd units if it's a big battle and i think it favors dark elves considerably one way or another (cannons tend to get reinforced last for instance).
Anyway my armies are pretty much back to where they need to be now and i'll see how i do tomorrow after work.
I'm thinking of abandoning my Queek campaign until they fix the auto resolve and then restart with a better understanding of food. Playing every battle, even the ones which are either absurdly easy or absurdly impossible is getting a bit tiresome. Though I am fine tuning my "flank the dumbarse AI" tactic, lol. After playing skaven for a while I'm wondering if I had underestimated the value of chameleon skinks in my lizardmen campaign by not trying hard to enough to get them behind the enemy.
Even though Skaven run at the drop of a hat, they also rally and come back in decent number. While entertaining at first it does mean some battles seem to go on forever.
How are people finding slaves? They are so cheap but also not really sure how to use them because slots in an army seem more valuable than the actual upkeep of the army. Maybe just have a 2nd army tagging along everywhere made up of nothing but slaves to use as a meat shield and to swamp walls in sieges?
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Maybe just have a 2nd army tagging along everywhere made up of nothing but slaves to use as a meat shield and to swamp walls in sieges?
Its what I did from the start, during my very first Skrolk campaign. Its pretty effective, particularly with my main army at the time was heavy Pestilens units, which never seem to runaway until they are battlefield inop.
Once the enemy gets higher tiered units its less effective, but by then you’ll ge able to afford high quality stacks on armies.
My Skrolk campaign was probably my easiest and most sucessful, it just took me some time to wrap my head around the food mechanics. For me, the key was never destroying Teclis, I’d take everything in the lower part of Lustria, the elves at 2 citadels, Spine of Sotek dwarves and other factions, but left Teclis mini empire as stomping grounds for my raiding armies. Was a decent source of food, XP, and currency until I could afford to destroy it and move on to the next raid fodder province.
Playing as Queek I managed to repel an attack from Kroq Gar, full stack of Saurus with a Stegadon and Kroxigor unit in tow. Managed to wipe them out.
Next battle I get wiped by an army of almost only Chameleons and Terradons. The little bastards just run away from my melee units and have enough missile resistance that my Night Runners aren't making anywhere near the impact they are making on my units. The Rat Ogres are fast enough to catch them, but I don't have enough to take down more than a couple of units before getting overwhelmed by blowpipe shots.
Kinda screwed myself now, might have to reload a save from just after repelling Kroq Gar and then make peace for now until I can muster some more strength.
I've cleared the southern part of the Southlands of Elves and other Skaven clans, so the only thing in my way is Kroq Gar, unfortunately Kroq has managed to become the strongest faction and has several full stacks wandering around protecting his settlements. Not really sure where to go from here, trying to attack Kroq feels like it's beyond my economy, maybe try and open a 2nd front, maybe make my way over to Lustria and hope Clan Pestilens hasn't gotten themselves wiped out.
The Grumpy Eldar wrote: Well. Started Dark Elves. Doing pretty good, 4 full stacks and still 2K income.
Just kept having a problem earlier in my campaign. Beastmen would ambush me... INSIDE of Naggarond somehow.
Beasts have 'underground' movement like skaven, dwarves and orcs. So they can jump through the mountains. And their encampment stance hides their stack.
There are about 3 beast herds in Naggarond. It's worth offing them right when they show up- I've seen them rampage over the AI, all but wiping out Clar Karond with a single stack.
Turn 2 or 3 of my Kroq Gar campaign some beastmen showed up right next to my capital. Spent a few turns chasing the buggers around before finally pinning them down and wiping them out. There's probably more herds floating around but I got a notification saying I'd wiped out a faction after killing that one.
Ashiraya wrote: Waitttttt a moment. Where are the wood elves on that map?!
If the nonfree DLC races are excluded I will be mad.
If you are asking about the shot of the map at the header of the article linked, I’d say its a shot of a campaign in progress. No Empire either, looks to be conquered by Dwarves.
36 legendary lords. Well there's eight of them in WHII, and 29 in WHI. I think they already said Norsca and Wintertooth wouldn't be in the initial release for Mortal Empires, but that leaves us with 27 plus 8, which is 35? Is there another lord we don't know about yet?
Does anyone that plays Dark Elves heavily make use of Black Arks ?
I’m kind of underwhelmed with them. If they could attack coastal cities they’d be ok, but I struggle to find a place for them. Sure when I’m sending my armies down the coasts they can give my armies some spells, but thats about it. I also find that they get wiped out pretty easily by standard armies in transports.
Granted, I haven’t bothered to fully upgrade one, because I didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze. Anyone have success or found a role for them?
LordofHats wrote: 36 legendary lords. Well there's eight of them in WHII, and 29 in WHI. I think they already said Norsca and Wintertooth wouldn't be in the initial release for Mortal Empires, but that leaves us with 27 plus 8, which is 35? Is there another lord we don't know about yet?
Did I mess up my math?
Yes check your numbers from start to finish again.
You switched the numbers of WH1 twice and your math for the first added together grouping was wrong.
Anyway my game seems to be going alright. Undead allies are starting to be more trouble than they're currently worth. The big undead faction won't attack the dark elves because they're currently not his enemies. He also either declared war or was attacked by some dwarf army in lustria which would be a massive pain if he decides to do anything while me and pestilens buddy are in central america/mexico kicking the crap out of dark elves there. We're almost to the usa part with our armies actually. As said before undead ally is at war with lothern and with all the enemies fighting lothern ulthuan is tanking spectacularly and may be destroyed in one to two more playthroughs. Reason why i'm not particularly fond of lothern getting destroyed soon is it means dark elves will be able to focus more on me and the other skaven guy instead of sailing to the other side of the world to take care of some threats and sending others to lustria or central america/mexico nearby to handle others.
I find myself making at least one or two settlements within good reach areas i settle if only so i can replenish my armies faster because of them. It's sort of a staging post of sorts. I'm planning on using the last province i conquered as a base for making new units however as soon as my armies can get that.
Clan pestilens in my game has probably 2/3 of the territories dark elves have in part because i conquered a lot of the territory for him while he was busy doing other stuff.
nels1031 wrote: Does anyone that plays Dark Elves heavily make use of Black Arks ?
I built one very late in my game, and then promptly lost it when a High Elf army sailed *out* of a besieged city (I had no idea they could do that) and attacked it in the middle of the ocean, sinking it. So I had to wait a while to build another.
IMO, they're useful for two things. The first is if you want to rampage through an area with an army, but don't want to take (and thus be bothered with trying to hold) a city. You can sack and/or raze every enemy city that you come across, and the Ark will provide you with decent replenishment for your army.
The second is that an upgrade Ark gives you a way to replenish the more valuable units in your expeditionary army without having to either sail all the way back home, or build up a conquered city to Tier 4 or 5 (which takes a while).
nels1031 wrote: Does anyone that plays Dark Elves heavily make use of Black Arks ?
I’m kind of underwhelmed with them. If they could attack coastal cities they’d be ok, but I struggle to find a place for them. Sure when I’m sending my armies down the coasts they can give my armies some spells, but thats about it. I also find that they get wiped out pretty easily by standard armies in transports.
Granted, I haven’t bothered to fully upgrade one, because I didn’t think the juice was worth the squeeze. Anyone have success or found a role for them?
I went through three before I sat the 4th in a secluded bay for a large pile of turns building it up. But mostly, I admit, for the achievement, not for any use of the black ark itself (though I found that they are the DE replenishment mechanic, since they can't encamp for whatever reason. But by the time I realized that, I had also realized it was better to take cities than raze them, since that doesn't allow other factions to backfill ruins and attack you later.
But as for being attacked, yeah. My first three were lost to the AI zooming out armies with a target lock to destroy the ark. Even in the open sea where they couldn't possibly be in sight range.
While I liked the DE armies as a whole, they've got a fair bit of trash characters and useless abilities. The numbers for murderous prowess are so high, I very rarely saw that pop, and several of the rites were meh. (I got the most use of 'exponential sorceress leveling,' since I mostly relied on (melee) lords with a sorceress buddy and not Morathi to do the heavy lifting. Dark magic is pretty good.
Playing with Tyrion. I've actually started a second game, as first time around I picked the Unifier skill, not realising it locked me out of the outrageous damage boost stuff that made Tyrion even more of a death god.
Both games Caledor and Tiranoc declared war on me. Only difference is the second time around when Tiranoc declared war it triggered a whole string of declarations of war, with almost every HE factions ending up on one of two warring camps, Franz Ferdinand style. It was so neat I would have assumed it was scripted to happen, except it didn't work that way in my first play through and I haven't heard anyone else describing anything similar happening to them. Nagarythe are the only faction remaining neutral, they like me and we've had a trade deal in place for a while but they still won't accept a non-aggression pact. They're getting eaten up by invading Dark Elves.
I've never like sieges very much, and the auto-play can't often be used for avoiding them because you will take so many more casualties than by playing them. The Flamespyre Phoenix has worked wonders at solving that problem for me - just deploy my army facing a single gate, the AI will deploy everything on the wall defending that gate, then I move the Flamespyre Phoenix to corner of the wall, and ride straight along the length of his army dropping bombs as I go. I'm not sure how this will go when higher tier infantry get used in defense later in the game, but its wrecked everything so far.
sebster wrote: Playing with Tyrion. I've actually started a second game, as first time around I picked the Unifier skill, not realising it locked me out of the outrageous damage boost stuff that made Tyrion even more of a death god.
The unifier tree is worth it. The improved campaign benefits like reduced upkeep continue to scale as your empire grows whereas the buffs to Tyrion mostly just affect his own stats.
In the long run you'll be able to start affording a new strong army entirely and not even Tyrion's incredible combat buffs can compensate for that utility.
The public order penalties also slow down conquest further.
The combat tree is not bad by any means of course. I can see it be more useful in shorter/smaller pvp campaigns for example.
I exclusively do pvp campaigns so far in TWH2 since the AI is too stupid to offer any real challenge without cheats like absurd bonuses to income and public order. Wailing on my friends is much more fun (as well as watching the colour drain from their faces when they observe Tyrion in action).
I've not got far into Tickles' campaign, but I can't deny there's something satisfying about peppering Lizardmen with bolts and arrows as they run forward, then catching 2/3 of their remaining strength mid-charge in a Net of Amyntok at point-blank range.
Teclis is a win button, and he only needs the basic troops from a tier 1 barracks to enable this. I have been very impressed with how effectively high elf spears can hold the line while archers mass kills. And this was without Net of Amyntok.
Shield of Saphery and Lifebloom extend the pain into far later into the game even for basic troops. Every time Teclis casts, which is a lot, the entire army gets a 10% damage resistance and a top up heal. I never overcast, just stack more spells, usually crows on hordes and withering on anything tough. Net isnt really necessary past braking up the initial charge. Why iobilise a target and peper it with arrows when you can stick it with spears while peppering it with arrows, while being buffed while crows are pecking at the nasties.
Teclis spellpower is so good I have developed my own strategy for him. With every other lord I imediately get the blue skills, +10% movement then four of whatever to unlock the bridging skill and then lightning strike. The single most important skill. Then I buy any upkeep reduction on the campaign skill line until I even think about taking anything else. To me the Lord's first job is to lead the army, that means logistics matter, movement matters, and th ability to attack on your own terms matters, Buffing a lord doesnt matter, if I need spells, hire a wizard, need a tough fighter, hire a hero.
In my Balthasar Gelt playthrough I did this, and was 14th level before I had anything to cast other than the starting spell, but it was worth it. His magic ability was unlocked immediately after of course.
With Teclis the options are so nice I decided to throw my approach out the window and go straight for the spells. I kicked so much arse he leveled up to get a all the spells, and a select number of magic buffs and all the blue skills I normally take by turn 50.
sebster wrote: I've never like sieges very much, and the auto-play can't often be used for avoiding them because you will take so many more casualties than by playing them.
Sometimes.
I've got a Bretonnia playthrough that I keep meaning to start back up and finish. I owned the Empire capitol (the Empire had gotten kicked out of it, and someone had left it razed, so I moved in; note that the Empire still existed in that game), and had fully built up the fortification levels on it. I had a full strength army garrisoning it, and it got attacked by two stacks of Chaos Warriors (can't remember which lords). I hit Auto-Resolve just because...
And the Chaos Warriors took zero casualties wiping out my army.
I keep meaning to go back to an earlier save from that game, but haven't ever quite gotten around to it.
I usually don't go for lightning strike (except for horde armies who badly need it to compete with fortified factions). It is often buried too deep in the tree and unit buffs are too strong to neglect.
I generally take the campaign bonuses first, especially to reduce the cost of my armies, and my style makes Lightning Battles something I use frequently (my large full stacks usually have quarter or half stacks in tow with supporting troops).
Ya, I feel like I’m hamstringing my early turns of the campaign if I’m not taking the increased movement, public order bonuses, reduced recruitment, improved replenishment and reduced upkeep skills.
You can’t see the exact numbers of how it benefits your economy, but it pays dividends in a major way. Much more so that getting a new spell, ability or making your units fight a little better. For me, the unit improvement skills are usually tertiary, preceded by the characterunique campaign skills that lockout the damage skills, then mount skills, then lastly individual skills to improve the characters combat ability.
It depends how good the campaign boosts are vs the combat boosts. -20% upkeep for saurus? Hell yes. -3% recruitment? Not so much.
I tend not to bother with public order bonuses as I don't find them to useful, I spend more time on the front foot than sitting in my own provinces. Usually public order problems pop up when I'm off away from home anyway.
I feel like my Kroq Gar campaign has tipped to the point of becoming boring. Had a bit of a tough fight taking the jungles of the southlands but in a handful of turns I managed to sweep over the last of the skaven and now suddenly my economy is awesome.
I think that what you pick skill wise depends on your difficulty. On a high difficulty you need a lot more public order money ext. but on a lower difficulty a powerful lord can just claim the map.
I generally take the campaign bonuses first, especially to reduce the cost of my armies, and my style makes Lightning Battles something I use frequently (my large full stacks usually have quarter or half stacks in tow with supporting troops).
Exactly this. There are three critical skills on most campaign lines. any movement boost, any upkeep reduction and lightning strike. AFAIK all lords get lightning strike and in the same place. It really helps to carve off individual stacks, not only because you can fight your opponents piecemeal, but also the surprise bonus, and the ability to go through post battle multiple times, which helps with recovery leveling and income. The whole is worth less than the sum of its parts and lightning strike amongst other things farms exp for your lords and armies.
As for upkeep, its the most important stat in the game. Your units become 'underpriced' which is always good in any incarnation of warhammer. Now battle skills also make your units underpriced for what they do, but those boosts are on a per unit basis, painting the lord into a corner as to how to stack their army. Upkeep reduction applies to everything and does so automatically.
As for movement range, that extra 10% really helps reach a castle in time to siege or defend, but it becomes crucial when you are with a large stack facing small (normally goblin or marauder) stacks that want to refuse battle. Without it you will be futilely chasing them, with it you can run them down.
I don't tend to buy recruitment cost reduction as its a one off payment I am happy to swallow, though for defensive lords it is worthwhile. In Warhammer 2 I need more than one defensive lord because of the ritual battles. In Warhammer 1 I would just have one to deal with events. This lord I would give recruitment cost reduction to, maxed out, and would buy units and ferry them to the front line lords if there was nothing else he needed doing at the time. This helps as some units are only available in the most built up provinces. So I might have a lord with march buff, three pips in recruit cost reduction and use him as a deliverer of steam tanks or demigryphs to my legendary lords on the frontier. This lord will also get lightning strike and upkeep reduction as and when, because he has a small army of his own on top of what he is delivering. If needs be he to will be on the front line and a new lord will be recruited for homeland defence.
Its very common for my armies to have no yellow or red at all on them. The redux for Warhammer 1 included special abilities for legendary lords from the original game, most of these kick in at level 12, which is perfect because I need the first eleven levels to get the blue campaign line up to lightning strike and three pips of upkeep reduction. Legendary lords get a lot better because of these new skills but it does mean Balthasar Gelt needs even more levels before he begins to do anything more than dribble piss from the sky with that gods awful level 1 spell Metal has.
I think that what you pick skill wise depends on your difficulty. On a high difficulty you need a lot more public order money ext. but on a lower difficulty a powerful lord can just claim the map.
I'm playing on Hard. I find if I take a province and my Lord is still in the land, a rebellion isn't a bad thing because you can just put it down immediately (due to me usually looting and occupying that's what tends to happen).
Once my Lord has left the province is when rebellions are annoying because you need to either raise another army to fight it or send one of your Lords back to kill the rebellion. At that point having any public order skills on the Lord isn't helpful because he needed to be camped in the province for it to work.
I find it more useful to put up buildings that give public order and tear them down once the public order has stabilised, and in provinces where I don't want my Lord camping for any period I only occupy rather than loot + occupy.
The couple of annoying rebellions I've had recently were due to me looting + occupying and then leaving the province while forgetting to put up public order buildings, meaning I had to drag my Lord back from his campaign wasting half a dozen turns to put down the rebellion. In a situation like that having a public order boost on the Lord doesn't really help much because he was out of the province when it hit the fan.
nels1031 wrote: Ya, I feel like I’m hamstringing my early turns of the campaign if I’m not taking the increased movement, public order bonuses, reduced recruitment, improved replenishment and reduced upkeep skills.
You can’t see the exact numbers of how it benefits your economy, but it pays dividends in a major way. Much more so that getting a new spell, ability or making your units fight a little better. For me, the unit improvement skills are usually tertiary, preceded by the character unique campaign skills that lockout the damage skills, then mount skills, then lastly individual skills to improve the characters combat ability.
CA are realising this and some yellow and red lines now include a specific unit upkeep cost reduction to make them more attractive. Because you have a faction economy as core game mechanic any logistic bonus is naturally worth more than a flat combat bonus.
You can also gain the basic yellow line character skills on a dedicated hero level character and add them to your army if you are missing anything major.
I usually grab the recruitment cost reduction only on my main lord who will end up with all the best units. 3% reduction on common troops is nothing, but once you start buying Temple Guards and monstrous creatures you start benefiting from the bonus more. Plus it saves money if after a big battle you need to buy a new half of the army.
Other than that though I skip it, because my other lords are garrisons or support armies and their units are all cheap and they get more for me out of the public order bonus.
Replenishment is pretty good imo, but not every lord gets that one. I sometimes grab ambush bonuses but I think that's a matter of play style.
So does melee attack and weapon strength upgrades transfer over to the mount or am I just wasting my skill points on those ones?
LordofHats wrote: I usually grab the recruitment cost reduction only on my main lord who will end up with all the best units. 3% reduction on common troops is nothing, but once you start buying Temple Guards and monstrous creatures you start benefiting from the bonus more. Plus it saves money if after a big battle you need to buy a new half of the army.
Other than that though I skip it, because my other lords are garrisons or support armies and their units are all cheap and they get more for me out of the public order bonus.
Replenishment is pretty good imo, but not every lord gets that one. I sometimes grab ambush bonuses but I think that's a matter of play style.
Oh yeah, when I'm looking to buy those expensive troops my Lord is usually already levelled up a bit, so they're late skills for me rather than early ones.
In my current Kroq Gar campaign I'm up to about turn 60 and Kroq is up to level 26 and I haven't bought a single Temple Guard unit yet.
But I don't really lose units quick enough to feel it's worth it.
I do like replenishment bonuses, I don't usually get them specifically on Lords unless it's a big bonus for a small investment of skill points, but I try and build buildings and take heroes that gives replenishment bonuses. I love being able to turn around after a tough fight and be ready for another one without having to sit around too long. I'm finding it more important on Hard than I was on Normal because it seems to me the AI is cheating with unrealistic unit recruitment (they lose a battle in their turn, and by my turn somehow they've already recruited a bunch more units?).
I've given in an started downloading the game despite saying I would wait till it went down in price a little.
In the meantime I am forcing myself to do a Bretonnian campaign in the first game. They feel like someone took all the aspects of an army that I hate and combined it into one. Weak infantry, lousy ranged capabilities, and so so much cavalry micromanagement. I think I may have to add some mods just to make the playthrough bearable!
Regarding skill trees, I tend to focus on making my legendary lords a beast in combat just because I like to see them cut through the enemy army but any other lord I will usually focus on improving the army itself.
LordofHats wrote: I usually grab the recruitment cost reduction only on my main lord who will end up with all the best units. 3% reduction on common troops is nothing, but once you start buying Temple Guards and monstrous creatures you start benefiting from the bonus more. Plus it saves money if after a big battle you need to buy a new half of the army.
3% is nothing, but 15% is a fair bit. Say you have a stack of ten basic troops costing 100 a turn each average, you have saving on that pauper army of 150 gold/turn with full upkeep reduction. That is quite noticable IMHO. Most armies will cost more than that, often much more. Also notice how the skill bonuses and % reductions increase as you invest points. Public order reduction and corruption mitigation got up 1,2,3 as you place points in the skill. Combat bonuses go up 2,4,9 or 3,8,15. Some skills are worth putting only a point in, some you need three for the full payoff. When you are looking at your points in a category to reach the bridging skill, you could place one point in public order and get full effectiveness then three points in recruitment reduction for a major cash discount. Doing the other way around is less points efficient.
Also in Warhammer 2 you will need multiple main stacks, more sea movement means more mobile armies, and the need to protect ritual sites and an expanding frontier. If you have an extra lord on his own picking up sea loot you will also have extra upkeep penalty, you need to mitigate that somehow. With four lords a high elf faction is running an upkeep penalty of over 20%, upkeep skills are now not a discount per se but mitigation against spiralling costs.
Other than that though I skip it, because my other lords are garrisons or support armies and their units are all cheap and they get more for me out of the public order bonus.
Replenishment is pretty good imo, but not every lord gets that one. I sometimes grab ambush bonuses but I think that's a matter of play style.
Upkeep reduction is on the second bar of blue skills, which makes it easier as three upkeep and lightning strike make up the four to unlock the capstone skill, which is normally good, and in Warhammer 2 can include yet more upkeep reduction anyway.
Public order bonus is normally in the first block, and those to me are five points of tax, including the bridging skill, to get from +10% movement to lightning strike. Dont get me wrong there are some nice benefits but the army skills and a mount can be awfully tempting, but I stick for the payoff. Public order is a good choice,and I do use it with some lords. My primary lords take attrition reduction though as they must take the fight to the enemy and are more likely to cross corrupted ground. For secondary lords corruption reduction and public rder are both worthwhile, but are situational. You cant necessarily park an army where you need the public order boost, so any bonus is incidental. With high elves the Merchant lord skill which adds to faction wide trade is more appealing as it is always in effect and again works with the factions logistics, trade boosts gain cash which is the same as a cost saving on your army. Warhammer 1 doesnt have any skills like this for lords, and not all benefit anyway.
I think the only real consideration is that it's a 3 point investment. I'd actually like it if they evened the bonus out across points (5%/5%/5% instead of 3%/?%/15%). Since you need 4 points in the tier to advance, a 5% bonus just to get up to grabbing Draft Master and the upkeep reduction would be a no brainer I think. As is if I'm only putting 4 points into that first section I'll skip recruitment cost reduction for public order.
Also in Warhammer 2 you will need multiple main stacks, more sea movement means more mobile armies, and the need to protect ritual sites and an expanding frontier. If you have an extra lord on his own picking up sea loot you will also have extra upkeep penalty, you need to mitigate that somehow. With four lords a high elf faction is running an upkeep penalty of over 20%, upkeep skills are now not a discount per se but mitigation against spiralling costs.
I've mostly gotten around this by building garrisons at strategic locations and placing my reserve armies at in centralized areas. I normally only maintain a few full stacks. In my Kroq campaign for example I'm just past turn 90, control all of southern fantasy Africa but I only maintain two full stacks and about a half dozen 3/5 stacks (mostly Skinks + Kroxigors). The only issue I've ever had is when the other AIs intervene on my rituals which is why I have a full stack near my capital (now...).
I actually find sea loot to be a must. You get so much damn money (and can pick up multi-turn economic bonuses, including reduced upkeep!) from it that the rewards massively out weight the increased upkeep cost. In comparison I've generally found treasure hunting to not really be worth it unless there's a mission reward for doing it.
Commander Cain wrote: I've given in an started downloading the game despite saying I would wait till it went down in price a little.
CA are holdouts for this game, they know it is getting fresh people into Total War and is holding its value. It is also still fresh because of its scope and variety. Warhammer 3 will be 2018 at this rate, with final DLC appearing 2019. Bundles for the entire series will arrive then, but all that will still be fresh so no heavy discounts until 2020 I think. I am not waiting that long and in all fairness CA deserve our coin on this one, they have done a fantastic job and obviously love the IP enough to want to cover as much as they possibly can.
In the meantime I am forcing myself to do a Bretonnian campaign in the first game. They feel like someone took all the aspects of an army that I hate and combined it into one. Weak infantry, lousy ranged capabilities, and so so much cavalry micromanagement. I think I may have to add some mods just to make the playthrough bearable!
At least CA added foot knights, though they call them squires so they count towards the peasant economy limiter. Yes you are forced to have a cavalry focused army, that hurts in sieges especially, and it does need more micro, but the army is fairly simple and solid. You can also squadron up units of knights to have fewer larger blocks of knights, infantry are static and can be ignored and your characters can be joined into a hero squad all doing the same thing. Normally I take a single rigid deployemt of infantry with peasant archers behind, a left wing of cavalry as one unit, a right wing of same, a hero squad and my flyers. I leave the peasants to fight on and micro the four combined units. Even for an oldster like me with crap reflexes it is then manageable. Multiplayer, no, not for me with that army. But it can work well in campaign. You need to work out how many maneuver groups you can handle at once, it will be more than you initially think if you persist.
Regarding skill trees, I tend to focus on making my legendary lords a beast in combat just because I like to see them cut through the enemy army but any other lord I will usually focus on improving the army itself.
Commander Cain wrote: I've given in and started downloading the game despite saying I would wait till it went down in price a little.
CA are holdouts for this game, they know it is getting fresh people into Total War and is holding its value. It is also still fresh because of its scope and variety. Warhammer 3 will be 2018 at this rate, with final DLC appearing 2019. Bundles for the entire series will arrive then, but all that will still be fresh so no heavy discounts until 2020 I think. I am not waiting that long and in all fairness CA deserve our coin on this one, they have done a fantastic job and obviously love the IP enough to want to cover as much as they possibly can.
Ah you say that but I got the first game free in a bundle about the same time the Wood Elves DLC was released! Either way, CA certainly earned their money this time, I have been wary ever since TW Rome II but it was not the case this time.
In the meantime I am forcing myself to do a Bretonnian campaign in the first game. They feel like someone took all the aspects of an army that I hate and combined it into one. Weak infantry, lousy ranged capabilities, and so so much cavalry micromanagement. I think I may have to add some mods just to make the playthrough bearable!
At least CA added foot knights, though they call them squires so they count towards the peasant economy limiter. Yes you are forced to have a cavalry focused army, that hurts in sieges especially, and it does need more micro, but the army is fairly simple and solid. You can also squadron up units of knights to have fewer larger blocks of knights, infantry are static and can be ignored and your characters can be joined into a hero squad all doing the same thing. Normally I take a single rigid deployemt of infantry with peasant archers behind, a left wing of cavalry as one unit, a right wing of same, a hero squad and my flyers. I leave the peasants to fight on and micro the four combined units. Even for an oldster like me with crap reflexes it is then manageable. Multiplayer, no, not for me with that army. But it can work well in campaign. You need to work out how many maneuver groups you can handle at once, it will be more than you initially think if you persist.
Yeah that's how I ended up playing them with the addition of lots of horse archers, I hate fighting against those things so it's a nice change to bug everyone else by peppering them with arrows from a distance!
Now that the game finally downloaded I went the easy route and started a Tyrion campaign and I have a feeling I am going to love it until the very end. My playstyle goes very well with the army list, lots of ranks of spearmen, a bit of artillery and a couple of cav units to flank the enemy is my go-to format. I am enjoying taunting the chaos forces that keep popping up and trying to siege my cities and gates, the poor guys don't stand a chance! (He says having only done the first ritual).
I sent Tyrion off exploring to the rest of the world so hopefully nothing happens while he is vacationing as it is quite the trip back, looking forward to fighting my first lizardmen...
I suck at horse archery. The AI can always string my cavalry along with horse archers, but mine always get caught, even if I leave them with skirmish mode on.
Frankly I use one unit of horse archers or equivalent per army, and I am careful how i use them. They are fragile and under perform compared to foot archery.
With my crap reflexes I tend to favour an infantry army with very little cavalry also. Its vey effective, and smple to play. Its a vey English way of doing war. Longbows, billmen, handful of knights in royal retainer units, hold the line maul the enemy and use cavalry to mop up. Very efficient, very lethal. It was much harder playing France.
High elves play like Medieval 2 England, Empire too after a fashion. Bretonnians play like France, don't get me wrong the French army can win well, even against longbowmen once they knew how to do so. But its a harder learning curve an one I never truly mastered.
Commander Cain wrote: I've given in an started downloading the game despite saying I would wait till it went down in price a little.
In the meantime I am forcing myself to do a Bretonnian campaign in the first game. They feel like someone took all the aspects of an army that I hate and combined it into one. Weak infantry, lousy ranged capabilities, and so so much cavalry micromanagement. I think I may have to add some mods just to make the playthrough bearable!
Regarding skill trees, I tend to focus on making my legendary lords a beast in combat just because I like to see them cut through the enemy army but any other lord I will usually focus on improving the army itself.
The only Total War I played prior to TW:W2 was a Bretonnian campaign, got to turn 100 before I quit. I just reloaded that save to give it another shot and realised just how badly I played, lol. Probably just have to start from scratch, at turn 100 I only have 1 Lord at level 15 and a few below level 10. Have too many pathetically weak armies that are costing a huge amount of upkeep.
I think when you play Bretonnians you have to aim to confederate quickly but when you do confederate, just disband the armies you inherit otherwise the upkeep will kill you and because you don't have any enemies close by initially you have to go seek out enemies to avoid becoming stagnant.
LordofHats wrote: I usually grab the recruitment cost reduction only on my main lord who will end up with all the best units. 3% reduction on common troops is nothing, but once you start buying Temple Guards and monstrous creatures you start benefiting from the bonus more. Plus it saves money if after a big battle you need to buy a new half of the army.
3% is nothing, but 15% is a fair bit. Say you have a stack of ten basic troops costing 100 a turn each average, you have saving on that pauper army of 150 gold/turn with full upkeep reduction.
For one I originally said "recruitment" not "upkeep" and for two I was partly making a point about the skill point investment.
I tend to go for the skills that help the campaign, but depending on the Lord I also like the unit buffs and things that make the Lord tankier (some Lords do great at just wading in to the enemy and having an attached spell caster to drop some AoE on his head).
It's also good to keep in mind that winning battles makes you money, skills that let me win a battle and recover in less time ready for the next battle are effectively money makers early on when you would otherwise have to retreat to lick your wounds.
Orlanth wrote: I suck at horse archery. The AI can always string my cavalry along with horse archers, but mine always get caught, even if I leave them with skirmish mode on.
Frankly I use one unit of horse archers or equivalent per army, and I am careful how i use them. They are fragile and under perform compared to foot archery.
With my crap reflexes I tend to favour an infantry army with very little cavalry also. Its vey effective, and smple to play. Its a vey English way of doing war. Longbows, billmen, handful of knights in royal retainer units, hold the line maul the enemy and use cavalry to mop up. Very efficient, very lethal. It was much harder playing France.
High elves play like Medieval 2 England, Empire too after a fashion. Bretonnians play like France, don't get me wrong the French army can win well, even against longbowmen once they knew how to do so. But its a harder learning curve an one I never truly mastered.
Never try and move them too much is the trick, the more you click on them the more they stutter step.
Orlanth wrote: I suck at horse archery. The AI can always string my cavalry along with horse archers, but mine always get caught, even if I leave them with skirmish mode on.
Frankly I use one unit of horse archers or equivalent per army, and I am careful how i use them. They are fragile and under perform compared to foot archery.
With my crap reflexes I tend to favour an infantry army with very little cavalry also. Its vey effective, and smple to play. Its a vey English way of doing war. Longbows, billmen, handful of knights in royal retainer units, hold the line maul the enemy and use cavalry to mop up. Very efficient, very lethal. It was much harder playing France.
High elves play like Medieval 2 England, Empire too after a fashion. Bretonnians play like France, don't get me wrong the French army can win well, even against longbowmen once they knew how to do so. But its a harder learning curve an one I never truly mastered.
I never really got the hang of Bretonnia (love them in the table top game, but they seem to have a very arduous campaign).
But can't they work as an infantry heavy army if you take Foot Squires, polearms for anti-large, a reliquae for leadership, a couple of paladins on foot for some punch and then a damsel or the fey throwing around buffs/debuffs/heals?
You still take knights, but only a couple of units rather than a knight heavy army.
I've just tried to start another Bretonnian campaign and the economy is killing me. Everything is so expensive while there's also not a hell of a lot of things giving me money. I seem to spend a lot of time just sitting around waiting to get enough money for a particular upgrade or to beef up my army before I can do anything.
The replenishment rate also seems terrible, also spending a lot of turns waiting for my armies to get back up to health and I can't see ways of improving the replenishment rate.
Also noticed that magic is much more powerful in Warhammer 2. My Heavens damsel feels completely useless, but a Heavens Skink Priest in Warhammer 2 can do some serious damage.
I found the Brets fairly straight forward after screwing up the initial stages the first time. First thing is farming Orc rebels from the Orc event that usually kicks off at the beginning of the game. This gives chivalry, money and experience.
Second is the long grind against Moussilon & beastmen (the latter is more of a recurring problem, while the former somehow generates several armies more or less instantly and can sustain em all on one city.
While all this is happening, working on techs for confederation is key, since actually attacking other bretonnians is bad. A takeover of Estalia is useful in here, as they're small and conquer able, and will inevitably attack you eventually.
Wood elves are probably going to be a problem- going in early while they're distracted and razing the great tree and whatever cities you can helps a lot. You don't want to let them get to the point where they start confederating and have all those stacks and super-cities pointed in the same direction.
By this point the chaos invasion has probably started, so it's useful to send out a pair of armies to hit the chaos stacks after they've wrecked a big city- you don't really want them getting to your borders.
After that you've probably got more than enough chivalry to trigger the errantry battle. I've only ever done orcs, as it's easier to get to, and somewhat easier to deal with (less armor and morale)
Composition wise, Brets are pretty straight forward- lord, sorceress, mix of 6 infantry, 4 archers, 2 trebuchets, 3 knights on either flank, or one flank and Pegasi.
Careful about WE, they could insta confederate in my save and in about 3 turns I went to face 2 armies and 2 cities to fighting 5 armies with 5 cities.
I've not tried farming the Orc raids early on, I typically take Marienburg first because it has that high value port, then squash the Orcs.
I don't think the Bretonnian campaign is particularly hard, it's just a slog because the economy is weak and you don't have a real enemy to fight early on. If you want a fight you kind of have to go find one yourself up north or start picking a fight with the various empire factions. By turn 70 or so on my current game I'd confederated all of Bretonnia, gotten enough Chivalry to start the Errantry War and now I'm in a position to start steamrolling everyone, but those first 70 turns weren't an interesting struggle like many other factions.
The Bretonnian campaign is by far the hardest with out any mods or cheating by loading previous saves.
I played it on very had and it took me at least 6 trys to win mostly due to the chivalry and end game needing to march to the top right of the map.
The best I can tell you unless you do the auto save cheat is have one elite army confederate only if someone is picking a fight with the elves to stop it or you will be involved. Then have a peasant army to save your country from beasmen.
Then send your elites to help empire use empire as a buffer for chaos once they are done take over their land and march north if you can.
The Bretonnian campaign is by far the hardest with out any mods or cheating by loading previous saves.
I played it on very had and it took me at least 6 trys to win mostly due to the chivalry and end game needing to march to the top right of the map.
The best I can tell you unless you do the auto save cheat is have one elite army confederate only if someone is picking a fight with the elves to stop it or you will be involved. Then have a peasant army to save your country from beasmen.
Then send your elites to help empire use empire as a buffer for chaos once they are done take over their land and march north if you can.
I only played on hard rather than very hard, but you don't have to march to the top right of the map (which would be a pain in the arse due to all the attrition) you can just sail around the sea to avoid the attrition, or if you set your errantry war vs the greenskins you go to the badlands instead.
There was supposed to be a beastmen invasion at some point, yeah? I might have gotten lucky with that one because as I was marching south to pick a fight with some orcs with a couple of armies when some full beastmen stacks showed up, but I was in just the right place to steamroll over them.
What did you find difficult about Chivalry? I found the game gave out Chivalry like candy, the only awkward one was due to the poor economy I often wanted to sack cities which would give -30 and lots of money, so instead you have to raze them to get +30 but no money.
Anybody else think single battle multiplayer battles are super broken in this game? I only played like 4 times but people can take just about anything and costs for units are way out of whack. Basically it turns into a ****ing monster mash. You'll see stupid stuff like 4 dragons/carnosaurs per person with characters on dragons and most mid-tier units just can't compete. It just tends to scare skaven off the field so much that you need abominations just to handle these things. Seriously they stomp through battle lines. It seems more like jurassic park when fighting lizardmen than an actual balanced list like the tabletop (or at least semi-balanced lists) and while interesting and funny that does not equal good or balanced gameplay. Basically if you don't have monsters fighting back you'll just lose. There's nothing you can do about it.
Oh and spamming net of amyntok is stupid strong. Seriously as far as spells go it's top tier good. Maybe i should see if i can spam howling warpgale but it seems to last a short time and it only works on flying units. Good vs elves but not vs anything else.
flamingkillamajig wrote: It seems more like jurassic park when fighting lizardmen than an actual balanced list like the tabletop (or at least semi-balanced lists) and while interesting and funny that does not equal good or balanced gameplay. Basically if you don't have monsters fighting back you'll just lose. There's nothing you can do about it.
I haven't played much multiplayer but looking at some youtubers playing it, it seems vs lizardmen you take poison wind globes, warp lightning and halberd stormvermin so if they go dino heavy you can take them down easier, but those units still do decently well against the lizard infantry so if they don't go jurassic park you aren't screwed.
Taking big stuff yourself vs lizardmen you have to be careful, those Carnosaurs are basically built to chew through large targets.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: There was supposed to be a beastmen invasion at some point, yeah?
The Brayherd of Chaos is supposed to show up during the Chaos invasion. But they frequently get lost before reaching anywhere important, unlike the other Chaos factions.
It doesn't help that the Beastmen unit roster starts with bottom tier units and then ends at mid tier. They get slaughtered by the autoresolver imo and never constitute a significant threat past early game unless ambushing a smaller force.
flamingkillamajig wrote: It seems more like jurassic park when fighting lizardmen than an actual balanced list like the tabletop (or at least semi-balanced lists) and while interesting and funny that does not equal good or balanced gameplay. Basically if you don't have monsters fighting back you'll just lose. There's nothing you can do about it.
I haven't played much multiplayer but looking at some youtubers playing it, it seems vs lizardmen you take poison wind globes, warp lightning and halberd stormvermin so if they go dino heavy you can take them down easier, but those units still do decently well against the lizard infantry so if they don't go jurassic park you aren't screwed.
This is especially true for Queek. If you aren't taking lots of halberd stormvermin as Queek, you're playing Queek wrong.
I had sword and shield stormvermin with poisoned wind globadiers though. The unit size was down to 40 men per unit and the big dinos just broke through most of the lines. I've fought lizardmen and handled them fairly well but he had like 4 carnosaurs in this single multiplayer battle. Basically he broke through the lines and attacked my basic globadiers right away to which they all became worthless in an instant.
I also wasn't talking about campaign but rather the single multiplayer battles which are much different as you don't have upkeep bonuses or anything like that. The unit prices are way out of whack and reward monster spamming.
Ashiraya wrote: The unifier tree is worth it. The improved campaign benefits like reduced upkeep continue to scale as your empire grows whereas the buffs to Tyrion mostly just affect his own stats.
In the long run you'll be able to start affording a new strong army entirely and not even Tyrion's incredible combat buffs can compensate for that utility.
The public order penalties also slow down conquest further.
Yeah but I'm not looking to optimise. Tyrion as a ludicrous death god who can one hit kill a bunch of enemy characters is gold. And the strategy level game is more fun when happiness and stuff like that has to be considered a little more.
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Ashiraya wrote: I usually don't go for lightning strike (except for horde armies who badly need it to compete with fortified factions). It is often buried too deep in the tree and unit buffs are too strong to neglect.
I don't go for lightning strike because it's more fun to take on multiple enemy armies at one time. Because the AI is stupid things can get to be really chaotic fun when the AI is disorganised but way more powerful.
The moment I went from liking the Total War Warhammer games to loving them was in a massed battle. Lightning strike wouldn't have mattered because I was aiding my dwarf ally who got attacked. He was got mobbed by two full stack Chaos armies, Kholek and a generic other Lord. The Dwarf army was pretty decent but the AI was stupid so he was getting mobbed. Meanwhile I was dashing to the fight with Franz and Volkmar's armies, Franz on Deathclaw went and took out his Helcannons, while Volkmar through himself in to keep the Dwarf line in the fight. Against Kholek and a pair of giants Volkmar held on as long as he could while both sides piled more troops in to a huge blob, and my missile troops and steam tanks poured fire on Kholek and the giants. Franz raced back in time to finish off the last giant, just as the chaos army mass routed. It was too late for Volkmar though.
flamingkillamajig wrote: I had sword and shield stormvermin with poisoned wind globadiers though.
...
I also wasn't talking about campaign but rather the single multiplayer battles which are much different as you don't have upkeep bonuses or anything like that. The unit prices are way out of whack and reward monster spamming.
Yeah I was talking about multi as well.
The halberds are the important part. Sword/shield stormvermin are weapon strength 25/9 regular/armour piercing, the halberds are 9/18/15 regular/armour piercing/anti-large. Lizardmen dinos are both large and have decent armour (95 for Feral and 100 for mounted Carnies) so both those things are important. Test it vs the AI, the halberd armed ones will reliably and quickly take down an Oldblood on a Carny losing less than half the regiment, the sword/shield variety might still win but the regiment will be completely destroyed in the process and it'll take a long time (meaning they'll probably just walk away before you do serious damage).
Remember Feral Carnies cost as much as a unit of Stormvermin and a unit of poison globadiers combined and a Scar vet or Oldblood Carny costs even more, so if they charge through your Stormvermin and start chowing down on the globadiers and you have to turn the stormies around to keep attacking the Carny, you haven't really lost anything money wise (as in, you should be able to make it up elsewhere on the battlefield). Keep the halberd armed stormies near the globadiers so that if they want to attack your globadiers they'll have to also fight the stormies and if they ignore the globadiers you can hit them with those armour piercing/anti large missiles.
The halberd armed stormies also aren't bad against Saurus (in case the Lizard player decides not to bring dinos), Saurus have 60 armour which places them somewhere between the unarmoured and heavily armoured troops in other armies. The shield stormies are better against skinks, but halberd or shield should be fine for dealing with the skinks.
From what I've seen, if you want to be competitive in multi you absolutely have to tailor vs the army you're playing and against Lizards that means a healthy dose of anti-large and anti-armour.
Pretty excited to have the release date for Mortal Empires! Oct 26.
I think I'll stop playing so as not to burn myself out on Total War.
Announcement:
Mortal Empires will be released and available to download on 26th October 2017! Yes, that’s just next week. Happy Tuesday-Newsday!
We're also currently planning for Blood & Gore to be released along with the Mortal Empires campaign. Don't forget, if you already own it for WH1, you will not need to buy it again for WH2.
Can’t wait until then? If you’re going to TwitchCon, we’ll be there with the Mortal Empires campaign, giving you chance to get hands on with it. Or if you can’t make that, tune in to tomorrow’s livestream at 3PM BST, which will see some CA employees taking on Old World and New World Free For All battles!
Hopefully that’s more(tal) than enough information for you…
@FKM, are you talking about the 2v2 games we played against the computer? I'm actualy almost suprised to hear that Skaven get anti-large infantry. I thought that you never brought any because you couldn't. At least it kept my Phoenix Guard units employed.
emptyhat wrote: @FKM, are you talking about the 2v2 games we played against the computer? I'm actualy almost suprised to hear that Skaven get anti-large infantry. I thought that you never brought any because you couldn't. At least it kept my Phoenix Guard units employed.
Yes i am.
We do but in TWW1 halberd infantry on fairly basic dudes generally wasn't enough for some of the monstrous infantry or large creatures (at least for empire). Which is why demigryph cavalry were often needed to finish the job.
I suppose the reason why i didn't use halberds on stormvermin is because i was afraid of saurus heavy armies (which i had fought most of the campaign). However currently in my campaign all the lizardmen have been dead a while and i'm only really fighting dark elves with their leadership de-buffs to enemies or something. Finding howling warpgale to be sorely needed against them. Perhaps i should take more wizards with ruin spells for that.
To be fair sword and shield stormvermin also get their shields which makes them a bit more durable. Course now that i'm fighting mostly elves the sword and shield route is mostly just better right now.
emptyhat wrote: @FKM, are you talking about the 2v2 games we played against the computer? I'm actualy almost suprised to hear that Skaven get anti-large infantry. I thought that you never brought any because you couldn't. At least it kept my Phoenix Guard units employed.
Skaven have a similar amount of anti-large as everyone else. All the Warhammer 2 armies have a high armour halberd armed elite infantry unit (Temple Guard, Black Guard of Naggarond, Pheonix Guard and Skaven have their Stormvermin) that are pretty much purpose built to take on Lizardmen dinos because they're both anti large and anti armour. Lizard Dinos range from 95 to 140 armour which puts them up there with the most heavily armoured units in the game. EDIT: Actually after checking Stegadons and Bastilidons at 140 are tied for being the most heavily armoured units in Warhammer 2, the next closest being the DE Dread Knights at 120.
Skaven also have their Warp Lightning cannon but I think this might be a bit of gamble against Lizards unless you plan to play defensively. Carnosaurs are fast (75 speed makes them about as fast as a heavy cav unit) and due to their large mass they can basically walk straight through infantry units and target whatever they want, so they can charge straight through and take out the warp lightning cannons early on. If you play defensively then your warp lightning cannons won't be sitting by themselves so you can protect them somewhat, but if you play offensively you risk the Carnies just walking straight through and taking them out. Stegadons aren't quite as fast but are also capable of just walking straight through enemy units.
There is an unwritten stat that relates to the unit's weight that determines how well it can either resist being knocked back or knock back other units to wade through them, Lizardmen dinos are all very heavy in that regard making them hard to pin down. I guess it makes sense, as big as a dragon might be it's still a flyer, so it can't be too heavy.
Skaven don't have any anti large cavalry like most armies do, because, well, they don't have any cavalry to begin with But they make up for it by having one of the few missile infantry anti large units in globadiers. Globadiers are absolutely deadly against Lizard monsters but because they can't fight in hand to hand they need some support.
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flamingkillamajig wrote: To be fair sword and shield stormvermin also get their shields which makes them a bit more durable. Course now that i'm fighting mostly elves the sword and shield route is mostly just better right now.
Yeah Stormies are best when you think you have a good chance of fighting large units. Granted cavalry is also large, so if you think elves might bring cavalry and/or dragons a few halberd armed stormies mixed in wouldn't hurt.
Against infantry sword/shield is obviously better, though if they bring heavy armoured infantry (white lions, swordmasters or pheonix guard) then halberds aren't terrible.
Well I have almost completed my very first campaign. They really made very hard feel like very hard. The human (elf) wave tactics of the AI left me less than impressed. Having 3-4 stacks of nothing but Black Guard(?)/Phoenix Guard plus assortment of dragons turn up every 5 turns is nothing but boring. Sadly Lizardmen autoresolve won't let a lvl 40 lord win from a lvl 10 elf lord, because balanced stacks be damned! Although the extra upkeep really presents a tough challenge when you can afford 5 stacks versus their 20 with the same amount of settlements. Absolutely crazy, but fun none the less.
Bring on the Mortal Empires! I'm fatigued of only seeing dead elves everywhere.
Its a shame they cut off so much of the Southlands and Lustria. Between Skrolk, Mazdamundi, Kroq, new Lizard/Skaven Lords, four TK lords and possibly Araby lords its going to get really cramped down there.
Will the mortal empires campaign drop the minor factions, given there's now so many major factions?
I ask in hope basically, because I'm getting really bored of the early stage confederation stage. Especially in my current game because despite other HE factions having scores over 100, and pushing 200 with me, only one has joined.
I want my next game to be on Mortal Empires, prob as Lizardmen, and I'm hoping I won't have to sink a stupid number of turns in to pressing that Confederation button every single turn.
My Kroq Gar campaign I got sick of trying to confederate with the other Lizards so I just rolled over them, taking their lands by force.
My Mazdamundi campaign I went down the confederation route and it was just a pain in the arse, took them ages before they finally confederated with me, some of them only bothered to confederate if they were about to be wiped out, so immediately after confederating I had to send armies to defend them.
sebster wrote: Will the mortal empires campaign drop the minor factions, given there's now so many major factions?
I ask in hope basically, because I'm getting really bored of the early stage confederation stage. Especially in my current game because despite other HE factions having scores over 100, and pushing 200 with me, only one has joined.
I want my next game to be on Mortal Empires, prob as Lizardmen, and I'm hoping I won't have to sink a stupid number of turns in to pressing that Confederation button every single turn.
No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
sebster wrote: Will the mortal empires campaign drop the minor factions, given there's now so many major factions?
I ask in hope basically, because I'm getting really bored of the early stage confederation stage. Especially in my current game because despite other HE factions having scores over 100, and pushing 200 with me, only one has joined.
I want my next game to be on Mortal Empires, prob as Lizardmen, and I'm hoping I won't have to sink a stupid number of turns in to pressing that Confederation button every single turn.
No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
To add, the Old World campaign map is as good as a one for one copy from game 1 by the looks of it. So most minor factions from game 1 will have survived if they haven't been displaced by legendary lords or used to give a full province starting position.
However it looks like about half of the Lizardmen minor factions will be axed due to the cut-off.
sebster wrote: Will the mortal empires campaign drop the minor factions, given there's now so many major factions?
I ask in hope basically, because I'm getting really bored of the early stage confederation stage. Especially in my current game because despite other HE factions having scores over 100, and pushing 200 with me, only one has joined.
I want my next game to be on Mortal Empires, prob as Lizardmen, and I'm hoping I won't have to sink a stupid number of turns in to pressing that Confederation button every single turn.
No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
To add, the Old World campaign map is as good as a one for one copy from game 1 by the looks of it. So most minor factions from game 1 will have survived if they haven't been displaced by legendary lords or used to give a full province starting position.
However it looks like about half of the Lizardmen minor factions will be axed due to the cut-off.
They've stated legendary lords will have the same starting position as they do in their original games. So, there shouldn't be any factions being displaced for a new starting point.
sebster wrote: Will the mortal empires campaign drop the minor factions, given there's now so many major factions?
I ask in hope basically, because I'm getting really bored of the early stage confederation stage. Especially in my current game because despite other HE factions having scores over 100, and pushing 200 with me, only one has joined.
I want my next game to be on Mortal Empires, prob as Lizardmen, and I'm hoping I won't have to sink a stupid number of turns in to pressing that Confederation button every single turn.
No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
To add, the Old World campaign map is as good as a one for one copy from game 1 by the looks of it. So most minor factions from game 1 will have survived if they haven't been displaced by legendary lords or used to give a full province starting position.
However it looks like about half of the Lizardmen minor factions will be axed due to the cut-off.
They've stated legendary lords will have the same starting position as they do in their original games. So, there shouldn't be any factions being displaced for a new starting point.
All of them though? Teclis (Turtle Isles) starts in a place that no longer exists in the combined map as it is being shown around online, same as Queek (Southern Jungles) and Skrolk (The Lost Valley).
Kroq Gar has no real lore based reason to be in the Southlands, at least from my understanding. Isn't he the leader of Hexoatl's army (ie. northern most part of Lustria)? In Warhammer 2 the reason he's in the Southlands is because Mazdamundi told him to go there (which makes it annoyingly funny when you want to confederate with him but he refuses).
It will be sad if most of Lustria and the Southlands are cut off though. I guess you don't technically *need* them though, Mazdamundi and Kroq can both start in northern Lustria.
His starting position is still on the Mortal Empire's map, and no one said he was being moved. I'm willing to buy into the "he's there cause his boss told him to be" reasoning.
Queek is supposed to be around where skarsnik and i think belegar (spelling?) are. After all the city of pillars and karak eight peaks are the same spot. Course that means it's going to be a 3-way fight at the very beginning which is pretty tough to think about. I think all forces are supposed to be lead by an important character of their given faction. So yeah it'll get rough really fast. I expect a hard start regardless.
In the case of thanquol he only has to deal with tilea which is mostly far away from any of the other major factions. Like the closest major faction is bretonnia so he's got an easy route. Would be interesting if tomb kings would fight him at some point due to combined maps.
Of course ikit claw would also have a similar start position as thanquol due to clan skryre owning the skaven capital.
Not sure where clan moulder would fit into this if it ever does. I think they were in troll country or something.
Clan Eshin is so far away either cathay or nippon which is fantasy version of japan and china so i'll don't think they'll ever make it into the game.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Clan Eshin is so far away either cathay or nippon which is fantasy version of japan and china so i'll don't think they'll ever make it into the game.
Clan Eshin learned their ninja skills in the far east, but they aren't located there anymore. They're trolling around the world like Skaven enjoy doing. I'm sure I saw them somewhere in Lustria in Kroq Gar's campaign.
flamingkillamajig wrote: Queek is supposed to be around where skarsnik and i think belegar (spelling?) are. After all the city of pillars and karak eight peaks are the same spot. Course that means it's going to be a 3-way fight at the very beginning which is pretty tough to think about. I think all forces are supposed to be lead by an important character of their given faction. So yeah it'll get rough really fast. I expect a hard start regardless.
Queek will be a nice addition to the Badlands I think. That area becomes very one dimensional given that the Green Skins usually end up confederating the whole area and then running over the Border Princes.
Not sure where clan moulder would fit into this if it ever does. I think they were in troll country or something.
At the moment their South of Kroq-Gar's position, but their area isn't on the Mortal Empire's map.
djones520 wrote: No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
Blergh. Oh well, grinding that confederation button again.
Does anyone know how the mechanics for confederation work? They have to like you, of course, and you also need to be bigger than them, but is that it? Because I've got some High Elf factions that love me, that I'm bigger than, but after 30 turns of hitting Confederate none of them will join? This seems quite different to TW Warhamemr 1, where there were hold out factions but they all seemed to get on board once Chaos turned up. I thought maybe the rituals might trigger something but that doesn't seem to be doing it either.
Queek will be a nice addition to the Badlands I think. That area becomes very one dimensional given that the Green Skins usually end up confederating the whole area and then running over the Border Princes.
My recent experience with TW1 is the greenskins get really hammered by the dwarves, even with confederations. Unless the chaos invasion detours into the mountains or the dwarf-vampire wars go really crazy, the Dwarves typically just steamroll their way south, and it gets worse for the greenskins as the campaign goes on.
But Queek gunning for Eight Peaks is pretty much perfect- though Skarsnik and Belegar both start a fair distance away, so the three way would take a while.
As far as Kroq-Gar's starting position- it made a fair amount of sense for the ritual campaign- dispatching him (and a pack of skink researchers to do the real work) to the other continent is a reasonable way of splitting the necessary work. Shifting him for the campaign wouldn't make too much sense- someone needs to fill that space (though it looks like a really easy start now with all those threats to the south gone)
I do think clipping Lustria and the Southlands was probably the best way to go. Their presence in the background is pretty minimal, and away from anything that matters.
djones520 wrote: No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
Blergh. Oh well, grinding that confederation button again.
Does anyone know how the mechanics for confederation work? They have to like you, of course, and you also need to be bigger than them, but is that it? Because I've got some High Elf factions that love me, that I'm bigger than, but after 30 turns of hitting Confederate none of them will join? This seems quite different to TW Warhamemr 1, where there were hold out factions but they all seemed to get on board once Chaos turned up. I thought maybe the rituals might trigger something but that doesn't seem to be doing it either.
Not completely. Several TW1 factions had an 'underdog' trait, which gives a bonus to confederating. [particularly Empire]. I know a couple DE factions have that same trait, but it doesn't seem to matter as much as it did in TW1.
They also seem more willing if the balance of power is particularly tipped, which means if they lose their army they're more likely to agree. But it doesn't seem to matter how powerful you are (at least it never has for me- I've held whole continents with a dozen armies and still had minor factions turn me down. And the same turn had the other major faction agree. (As Kroq-gar, tried with three surviving lizard factions in Lustria: they all refused, then tried with Mazda just for kicks: he accepted, despite having taken most of Morathi's land, and 17 total cities).
I have also heard, though, that your military alliances can somehow count against you at times. I'm not sure I understand that or even know for certain its true.
I have seen people give large cash payments (10K gold) to force an agreement, which seems absurd (because obviously that money is immediately lost to the ether).
I suspect betraying alliances or breaking truces leaves you with a penalty for a long while as well. But can't actually prove it. Diplomacy is still really shaky with too much hidden information.
I have also heard, though, that your military alliances can somehow count against you at times. I'm not sure I understand that or even know for certain its true.
I have seen people give large cash payments (10K gold) to force an agreement, which seems absurd (because obviously that money is immediately lost to the ether).
I suspect betraying alliances or breaking truces leaves you with a penalty for a long while as well. But can't actually prove it. Diplomacy is still really shaky with too much hidden information.
How the military alliance thing works is a follows. Your balance of power bar does not take everything into account. This is why when you have a few wars you might get a wave of war declarations. Relatively speaking your power bar is smaller than so many enemies combined, but that won't show. For confederating alliances help the powerbar in ways you can't see. A rank 30 power faction allied with a rank 1-3 won't confederate because its weak, no it has powerful friends. The bar never tells you this. So you end up in situations in which you're top dog and nobody wants to confederate because you allied them and save their lives. So alliances are terrible for confederating, which is really the hot garbage of alliance design. I figured this out as rank 2 Empire with a devastated 1 town Nuln. Had 300+ relations from giving them tons of money, yet I had to break my alliance for them to confederate. This is incredibly shortsighted again, because as you say your reputation is important as well. This is the hidden diplomatic penalty for breaking and backstabbing: Steadfast for honoring your treaties will give you a much higher chance than being untrustworthy. You can read your own trait in the diplomacy screen, steadfast is the best, but it basically means no allies and wars till they are wiped out, no truces. So you have to break long term alliances to confederate even though the AI will dislike you for breaking the alliance in the first place.
That's when the tons of money come in. It greases the wheels. But further stupidity in diplomacy design comes in, the amount doesn't really matter, the percentage does. If you have 100.000 almost every deal will require 10.000-20.000+. Just look at peace treaties, they ask obscene amounts if you're wealthy. If you only have 2000 they might only need a few hundred. That is why the payment window does it not in 100 or 1000 increments but in a percentage chunck of money, its what you're expected to give based on your treasury. BUT, the Lizardmen cold blooded trait in diplomacy or whatever it was called means that no amount of money will influence a decision, making confederating even more of a chore as you can't grease the wheels. Diplomacy is the worst thought out part of the game and it really shows. Sometimes you need to have hugely positive relations, no alliance and put in a bunch of lost money. Add that to the reputation and the artificial nature of the Great Power penalty and confederating is harder than just wiping everyone out. Game 1 at least eventually had the Shield of Civilization mechanic that let you confed easily because Archaon came. Game 2 has nothing like that, which is ridiculous. "Hey fellow Lizardmen, the Skaven are an inch from destroying the world by messing up the Vortex. Want to save all our lives and the Great Plan?" "Nah piss off, we have Steven here, he's all we need, its as the Old Ones predicted."
I tend to find that the more frightened a faction is the more likely it is that they will join. As the high elves I declared war on all the dark elf factions I could find and waited for them to send their ships over and your affinity with the high elves shoots up. They also have the huge benefit of being able to spend influence to boost relations super fast and drown out any negative effects you may be suffering.
Interesting stuff about the alliance mechanic, I'll have to hold off on making so many military alliances from now on I think..
I tend to find that the more frightened a faction is the more likely it is that they will join. As the high elves I declared war on all the dark elf factions I could find and waited for them to send their ships over and your affinity with the high elves shoots up. They also have the huge benefit of being able to spend influence to boost relations super fast and drown out any negative effects you may be suffering.
Interesting stuff about the alliance mechanic, I'll have to hold off on making so many military alliances from now on I think..
That's not frightened I think, the amount of war decs you make is the significant factor here it seems. They are more likely to join because Helf factions like military actions and war decs against Delves for the most part. So its not that they are scared. Its that you declare war on 10 Delf factions that individually give 10-20+ relations but combined make it skyrocket. If you hover over the relationship number in diplomacy you will see all the positive modifiers for your war decs against each individual faction+the battles. What you do is basically massively boost relations by going full out war on their favorite target/hated enemy.
Yes, the alliance mechanic really is a mess. It might make sense for the more evil factions, but 'good' factions like the Empire, Lizardmen and Helves could have really used a Bretonnia diplomacy tech option. Maybe very far down so that the Empire could still have conflict. But Helves and Lizardmen murdering their own race? Lizardmen would never and the last time Helves did the Delves came on stage. Its weird that they gave Bretonnia a decently fluffy option for confeds even though they have wars, yet the paragons of 'team race' i.e. the Lizardmen don't? Wut?
Disciple of Fate wrote: BUT, the Lizardmen cold blooded trait in diplomacy or whatever it was called means that no amount of money will influence a decision, making confederating even more of a chore as you can't grease the wheels.
Paying money definitely helps your chances of making a confederation offer with Lizardmen.
I only finally got the big Lizardmen factions to confederate with Mazdamundi when I started offering money alongside my confederation attempts. Don't know if the gifts prior to that were helping at all, but eventually I started offering big amounts of cash and it would push the confederation chance from "low" to "high", I'd back it off until it said "moderate" to avoid wasting money
It seems the Lizardmen would only confederate when they were about to be wiped out or you offered them insane amounts of money. Late game with Maz my economy was insanely good so I just bought them out. It seriously would have been easier just to take their lands by force, which is what I ended up doing with Kroq Gar Especially since there's several cities in Lustria that give you big boosts. Itza for example is a 10 slot city with 2 unique buildings, rather than trying to make peace and confederate with them this time I just walked in and took it, lol.
But it is interesting what you say about avoiding alliances. In my TWW1 campaign currently I avoided alliances with factions that weren't my race (because last time it screwed me over when they started declaring wars on each other and I had to choose sides or break alliances). But now all those factions I avoided alliances with are wanting to become my vassal states, an option that never even appeared viable in previous campaigns. I wonder if avoiding alliances made them finally cave in and become my slaves, lol.
My recent experience with TW1 is the greenskins get really hammered by the dwarves, even with confederations. Unless the chaos invasion detours into the mountains or the dwarf-vampire wars go really crazy, the Dwarves typically just steamroll their way south, and it gets worse for the greenskins as the campaign goes on.
It's the opposite for me. I usually see the Orcs just one by one run over the Dwarves, though even when it goes the other way that's still pretty one dimensional. In the end there's really only two factions in the south in TW1 and one will eventually kill the other. A third faction that will be antagonistic to both will make it more interesting to play and later in the game.
To Confederation;
Some factions seem tailor made to confederate as time goes on, namely the Bretons and the Wood Elves, who seem to be able to do it like clockwork without any real effort dedicated to the task.
For other factions I find the key is to wait until the other guy has lost a war and has no large armies. At that point they're very willing to confederate even if relations between them and you are only so-so.
Disciple of Fate wrote: BUT, the Lizardmen cold blooded trait in diplomacy or whatever it was called means that no amount of money will influence a decision, making confederating even more of a chore as you can't grease the wheels.
Paying money definitely helps your chances of making a confederation offer with Lizardmen.
I only finally got the big Lizardmen factions to confederate with Mazdamundi when I started offering money alongside my confederation attempts. Don't know if the gifts prior to that were helping at all, but eventually I started offering big amounts of cash and it would push the confederation chance from "low" to "high", I'd back it off until it said "moderate" to avoid wasting money
It seems the Lizardmen would only confederate when they were about to be wiped out or you offered them insane amounts of money. Late game with Maz my economy was insanely good so I just bought them out. It seriously would have been easier just to take their lands by force, which is what I ended up doing with Kroq Gar Especially since there's several cities in Lustria that give you big boosts. Itza for example is a 10 slot city with 2 unique buildings, rather than trying to make peace and confederate with them this time I just walked in and took it, lol.
But it is interesting what you say about avoiding alliances. In my TWW1 campaign currently I avoided alliances with factions that weren't my race (because last time it screwed me over when they started declaring wars on each other and I had to choose sides or break alliances). But now all those factions I avoided alliances with are wanting to become my vassal states, an option that never even appeared viable in previous campaigns. I wonder if avoiding alliances made them finally cave in and become my slaves, lol.
It depends, not all Lizardmen have this trait in diplomacy i believe, it states : "The immutable, alien logic of the Lizardmen means they will only consider strong, emotive states when engaging in diplomacy."
From what I understand and tested this means they won't really be swayed with money. But based on your experience that seems to be false, so it's another meaningless and confusing addition to a diplomatic mess. Although I must say that the LL seem more easily bribed than the minor factions, although this also hangs on ritual bonuses. Lizardmen diplomacy is a mess and the Tlaxtan faction just loves to back stab Mazdamundi in my experience. Its really strange that one of the most unified races lore wise has such difficulty, well unifying really. The only faction I really managed to confederate was Kroq after owning half the world and him getting absolutely crushed by Helves. The others preferred dying against the Skaven
Yes alliances are terrible, because they will embolden your friends against you. They will never become subservient as their power plus your power equals bigger than just yours in diplomacy. So they reject you because they are friends with the mighty you. The game makes your allies actually use your power against you. It basically never pays off to have allies because they drag you in unnecessary wars and will never confederate unless you hand over giants piles of money, because even if they get demolished in the field they always have your power ranking left. They're piggybacking off your own succes without ever lifting a finger. Beyond fluffy playthroughs they are utterly useless. They recklessly throw their armies around and you're better off financing your own with their lands.
My recent experience with TW1 is the greenskins get really hammered by the dwarves, even with confederations. Unless the chaos invasion detours into the mountains or the dwarf-vampire wars go really crazy, the Dwarves typically just steamroll their way south, and it gets worse for the greenskins as the campaign goes on.
It's the opposite for me. I usually see the Orcs just one by one run over the Dwarves, though even when it goes the other way that's still pretty one dimensional. In the end there's really only two factions in the south in TW1 and one will eventually kill the other. A third faction that will be antagonistic to both will make it more interesting to play and later in the game.
Orcs run over the Dwarfs? You must be one of the exceptions to the Dawitide rule. They have tried fixing the weak Orc problem for a while but Dwarfs absolutely dominate 9 times out of 10.
Some factions seem tailor made to confederate as time goes on, namely the Bretons and the Wood Elves, who seem to be able to do it like clockwork without any real effort dedicated to the task.
For other factions I find the key is to wait until the other guy has lost a war and has no large armies. At that point they're very willing to confederate even if relations between them and you are only so-so.
They are tailor made because the Brettonian tech tree basically grants them free confederations in order of distance to the capital and the Oak of Ages allows the Wood Elves to do the same. The only other AI faction that it will come naturally to is the Dwarfs really, who tend to start confederating with Barak Varr 5-10 turns in and never stop. There is a real disconnect between the races and the confederation mechanic. The Bret mechanic would serve the High Elves and Lizardmen well. The Norsca confed mechanic of defeating the faction leader would work well for Orcs and perhaps Skaven. Why they just randomly assign mechanics to it without thought is the most annoying aspect when the confed waves roll in. Game 2 really suffers from this, mainly the Helves and Delves absolutely steamroll thanks to relentless confederating. Skaven and Lizards not so much. I have no clue to the rhyme or reason behind it for game 2 as both those factions don't have a lot of enemies like Dwarfs do at the game 1 starts (Barak Varr against Orcs and Zhufbar against Vampire Counts).
If playing Empire or Brets by the time I have encountered the Greenskins or Dwarf named faction one is on the ropes and the other is one of the top three power factions with lots of territories.
Orcs run over the Dwarfs? You must be one of the exceptions to the Dawitide rule. They have tried fixing the weak Orc problem for a while but Dwarfs absolutely dominate 9 times out of 10.
I remember the opposite honestly. When the game came out lots of players complained that the Greenskins confederate and overrun the southlands very rapidly, becoming a problem for Empire and Vamp Count players cause it tended to come their way around the same time as the Chaos invasion. IDK.
They are tailor made because the Brettonian tech tree basically grants them free confederations in order of distance to the capital and the Oak of Ages allows the Wood Elves to do the same.
Yep.
For the Dwarves def on Barak Varr, though for me whether or not other Dwarf factions confederate can be really random. Agree on Confederation mechanics being random. Diplomacy in Total War has always been weak imo, a tacked on mechanic because it is expected even though most players are just going to conquer everyone anyway. Usually some of the best mods are ones that try to overhaul it with one of the best being "No Great Power Penalty" mods that completely remove that bit. Confederating as Lizardmen and Skraven is hard, and oddly so imo but I was unaware of the military alliance bit mentioned above. I'll toy with that next new game and see how it goes.
What I usually saw was that unless the orcs are very aggressive and siege the Dwarf capital by turn 30 or so (and if they're aggressive enough they'll have a waagh to make it easy), they can stop the dwarves and run rampant.
After that, the dwarf economy makes them effectively unstoppable. Sadly it tends to turn this way, as the AI gets really distracted with other orc factions.
LordofHats wrote:A third faction that will be antagonistic to both will make it more interesting to play and later in the game.
Maybe. I suspect it will be another distraction for orcs and dwarfs will just be able to be even more focused and superior, and occupy the border princes, which will make them even stronger.
djones520 wrote: No. There will be 117 factions, so I'd expect most of them to make it in.
Blergh. Oh well, grinding that confederation button again.
Does anyone know how the mechanics for confederation work? They have to like you, of course, and you also need to be bigger than them, but is that it? Because I've got some High Elf factions that love me, that I'm bigger than, but after 30 turns of hitting Confederate none of them will join? This seems quite different to TW Warhamemr 1, where there were hold out factions but they all seemed to get on board once Chaos turned up. I thought maybe the rituals might trigger something but that doesn't seem to be doing it either.
It also depends on their personality type. Some elf nations' personality types are inherently distrustworthy of other elves, and others just do not like the idea of confederation. But eventually they will agree. The more rituals you do the easier it is, usually, to get your own race to ally with you.
Playing as Kroq - decided I need to finish at least one campaign; it's playing differently enough from Maz that it's interesting. I've got the southern 1/3 of the continent sewed up, just kicked the elves off of the islands south of me. The two Bret factions and the Necrarchs pretty much have the rest of the continent and they've been going at each other hard. Looks like one of the Bret factions is about to go under so I'm considering hitting the vamps while they are still distracted. There's a small greenskin faction in the mountains just north of me that has to get cleared out too.
Economy was definitely tougher to get off the ground than it was with Maz, but I'm starting to hit my stride.
Looks like the Sotek dwarfs and the Loremasters are the main powers in Lustria so I will hold off on any adventuring. Between the Loremasters and Lothern alone the elves have 50 settlements so I'm not looking forward to that coalition.
Looking forward to Mortal Empires; hopefully they figure out a way to balance the Skaven food mechanic to make it fun - I have the same problem with them that I did with Chaos in the first game - I want to feel like a giant invincible horde sweeping everything before me, and neither delivers on that.
I think it'd be cool if the max campaign army size was based on points rather than number of slots. You could still have a max number of slots to avoid it getting overly crazy, but maybe open it up to 30 slots + points limit so if you take a bunch of elite units you can also take some cheaper units to fill out the army.
At the moment with the slot based system once your economy is solid there's no reason to take anything but the best of the best in each slot.
If it were point based there'd still be a reason late game to take units that maybe aren't the best but are cheaper.
I hope something is done to Chaos so you aren't spending turn after turn doing nothing either to finish a siege or repair after a battle. That's the biggest failing with Chaos. You have one army, and it does one thing, and it can't do anything else whilst you're sieging/waiting.
Yes, you can get more armies, but you earn so little money that that becomes prohibitive.
Yeah, they keep introducing all the fun new mechanics for evil armies, and it makes them a lot harder to play - animosity, food, horde infighting, loyalty. Loyalty and Animosity mostly work, but the other two are pretty crippling, and get worse as you scale up.
The food thing is probably my least favorite, because it has potential to be interesting, but ends up just being annoying. There should be an option to claim a territory as just a food-neutral outpost, otherwise you are leaving fallow ground for your enemies to sweep in behind your main armies and build up, since you just cannot claim all the territory. Even more annoying is there are food bonus special buildings in some areas - and you have no way of finding out in advance what areas have them without save scumming. Since you can't abandon settlements you either have to bite the bullet or raid your own territory for food until it rebels, let them win, and then raze things or do the aforementioned save scumming. It's far too time consuming.
So somehow in my Kroq play through I managed to ally with #1 power Lothern around turn 100, after 3 rituals - because all the dark elf factions declared war on me I suppose. We proceeded to carve up the Necrarch empire which was the top half of pseudo africa and now I have nowhere to expand except Lustria, so ... awkward homecoming I guess. Loremasters and Sotek Dwarfs have the whole continent sewed up; been at war with Loremasters for 80 turns so I guess it's time to go on the offensive.
I actually never had a problem with food on very hard no last saves load.
Right now I have 189 food +6
I find the key to skaven is 5 buildings in every area. The loyalty + the boost to income + the defense + any that boosts food + rat ogres locally.
Then turn all commendations to generate + 2 food then leave one army with 4 rat ogres 2 catapults with lots of clan rats and some runners if ur rich.
I own 8 areas I have 5 armies. 4 for defense with low upkeep upgraded on the lords. Then the 5th army is stroll with mass plague monk bearers 2 priests a warlock 3 cannons 2 ogres and 4 runners with poison.
Each big fight of you are clever you trick them isn't your land then get 8 death from bellow with skaven bombs.
Use the death from bellow to slow them while engineer boost sales cannons and use the bomb squad of blow up he weakness maven before they reach you
How do I turn off Dallas auto correct it is changing words like( then a)into anthem. And rewritting whole words. Again it changed rewritting into reselling.....
OgreChubbs wrote: I actually never had a problem with food on very hard no last saves load.
Right now I have 189 food +6
I find the key to skaven is 5 buildings in every area. The loyalty + the boost to income + the defense + any that boosts food + rat ogres locally.
Then turn all commendations to generate + 2 food then leave one army with 4 rat ogres 2 catapults with lots of clan rats and some runners if ur rich.
I own 8 areas I have 5 armies. 4 for defense with low upkeep upgraded on the lords. Then the 5th army is stroll with mass plague monk bearers 2 priests a warlock 3 cannons 2 ogres and 4 runners with poison.
Each big fight of you are clever you trick them isn't your land then get 8 death from bellow with skaven bombs.
Use the death from bellow to slow them while engineer boost sales cannons and use the bomb squad of blow up he weakness maven before they reach you
How do I turn off Dallas auto correct it is changing words like( then a)into anthem. And rewritting whole words. Again it changed rewritting into reselling.....
OgreChubbs wrote: I actually never had a problem with food on very hard no last saves load.
Right now I have 189 food +6
I find the key to skaven is 5 buildings in every area. The loyalty + the boost to income + the defense + any that boosts food + rat ogres locally.
Then turn all commendations to generate + 2 food then leave one army with 4 rat ogres 2 catapults with lots of clan rats and some runners if ur rich.
I own 8 areas I have 5 armies. 4 for defense with low upkeep upgraded on the lords. Then the 5th army is stroll with mass plague monk bearers 2 priests a warlock 3 cannons 2 ogres and 4 runners with poison.
Each big fight of you are clever you trick them isn't your land then get 8 death from bellow with skaven bombs.
Use the death from bellow to slow them while engineer boost sales cannons and use the bomb squad of blow up he weakness maven before they reach you
How do I turn off Dallas auto correct it is changing words like( then a)into anthem. And rewritting whole words. Again it changed rewritting into reselling.....
Wait till late game.
I already beat it with skaven both times. Once as skrolk once as queek.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I think it'd be cool if the max campaign army size was based on points rather than number of slots. You could still have a max number of slots to avoid it getting overly crazy, but maybe open it up to 30 slots + points limit so if you take a bunch of elite units you can also take some cheaper units to fill out the army.
At the moment with the slot based system once your economy is solid there's no reason to take anything but the best of the best in each slot.
If it were point based there'd still be a reason late game to take units that maybe aren't the best but are cheaper.
This is especially a problem when there's some interesting lower level stuff that gets dropped because it gets made redundant by higher level stuff. What empire player bothers with cannons when they can load up on steam tanks that give you just as much cannon killing, but are more mobile and don't need to be babysat?
In my current playthrough as High Elves I skipped over Silver Helms entirely and just waited for Dragon Princes.
This could be fixed by putting some caps on the number of high level units you can put on the field.
Probably the best way of fixing this would be capping the number of units that each military building can produce. So for instance if I build the building that lets me produce Dragon Princes, then that building will only let me build say 2 units of Dragon Princes total. I won't be able to build any more until one of the units already out in the field is destroyed or retired. As a result, to fill an army or two with huge numbers of high tier units you would need to invest in lots of level 5 cities with the correct investment chain.
This cap could be applied to low tier units as well. It would mean an empire that wanted multiple army stacks would actually have to invest in military production in lots of provinces, and not just have that one military production centre spamming units for new armies, funded by disarmed gold farms in every other province.
I agree with caps on recruitment. There shouldnt be 'army comp', as armies can occur by happenstance. I often amalgamate stacks under one leader and can end up with unusual mixes after casualties randomise available resources.
I think mid tier units should have a local recruitment cooldown, high tier units should have the same but factionwide. You should be able to go around provinces loading up on Silver Helms, at a rate of one or two each, but recruiting one Dragon Prince unit anywhere should put them on cooldown everywhere.
I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
Each to their own, it should be included as an option button.
Note not a mod, as mods become obsolete as the DLC progresses.
I'm partial to loading up on the best dudes as well, but it does get pretty boring. I miss being able to raise an army in a few turns, as opposed to sitting there for 10+ because I'm waiting 3 turns at a time for a handful of elite units. I mean, I can still make basic armies, but at the point in the game where I'm able to afford elite ones, basic ones aren't going to be up to snuff except maybe as reinforcements and overwhelming numbers, or garrison forces.
A way of toggling how you want recruitment to be handled when you start a new campaign wouldn't go amiss. That way I can still have my Ironbreaker horde if I want to, but if I want to play a campaign where I'm forced to take something more balanced--and have the enemy similarly restricted--then I can.
I’m sure its possible to mod that into the game, as Regiments of Renown have that recruitment restriction.
I think Empire:Total War had the limited recruitment of elite units(in addition to the named ones) built in as well, so as to encourage taking Line Infantry.
I use a lot of first teir stuff for raids and annoyance. Run a army of say 10 clan rats 9 slaves and a random lord.
Run into enemy held land start raiding and sacking settlements. They die..... Well if they managed to kill a keep or 2 I am more then pleased. The whole army upkeep is like 300 gold lol.
Also run a assassin around beside them to lord snipe if an army comes to deal with them.
But ya my main army is mostly elites and monks. But when I was at the last ritual I had a spare army of mass clan rats only to help fight toad man. Sadly lightning strike kills the whole two army strat.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
That's why I suggest a max points limit to armies rather than a slot cap. You could have your army of swordmasters and star dragons, it'd just be smaller than my army of savage orcs and wolf riders, but it'd mean my savage orc and wolf rider army would still be viable late game and your swordmaster and star dragon army would still have a challenge late game instead of steam rolling everything.
One of my problems with campaign mode is 90% of battles are either far too easy or far too hard so I just auto resolve them. One of my other problems is late game the low tier units become useless in battles. Adding a points cap would go some way to helping both those issues.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
That's why I suggest a max points limit to armies rather than a slot cap. You could have your army of swordmasters and star dragons, it'd just be smaller than my army of savage orcs and wolf riders, but it'd mean my savage orc and wolf rider army would still be viable late game and your swordmaster and star dragon army would still have a challenge late game instead of steam rolling everything.
One of my problems with campaign mode is 90% of battles are either far too easy or far too hard so I just auto resolve them. One of my other problems is late game the low tier units become useless in battles. Adding a points cap would go some way to helping both those issues.
This is also an interesting idea. Is there any real reason to continue capping army stacks at 20? The limitation existed at first as a technical limitation for field battles (in older Total War games you could never have more than 20 units on the field at once) but I think they solved that a few games ago and now you can command more than 1 army on the field at the same time.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
That's why I suggest a max points limit to armies rather than a slot cap. You could have your army of swordmasters and star dragons, it'd just be smaller than my army of savage orcs and wolf riders, but it'd mean my savage orc and wolf rider army would still be viable late game and your swordmaster and star dragon army would still have a challenge late game instead of steam rolling everything.
One of my problems with campaign mode is 90% of battles are either far too easy or far too hard so I just auto resolve them. One of my other problems is late game the low tier units become useless in battles. Adding a points cap would go some way to helping both those issues.
Nice idea but it would need tweaking, Upkeep reduction is already the superior skill option to go for. This would make it effectively mandatory. Basing the unit on base price, but allowing any relevant skill to reduce the burden on the limit. So an archery skill would ease the unit burden on archers greatly while a recruitment or upkeep boost would ease the burden slightly but on everything. Or simply base max army size on level with level 40 offering about 50% more than level 1, so its mostly fair.
LordofHats wrote: I also like the capping elite units idea. Would make things more interesting. The idea of having them cost a crap ton only really works up to a point. Once you're economy blows up, the cost of armies isn't much of a hindrance anymore.
Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
That's why I suggest a max points limit to armies rather than a slot cap. You could have your army of swordmasters and star dragons, it'd just be smaller than my army of savage orcs and wolf riders, but it'd mean my savage orc and wolf rider army would still be viable late game and your swordmaster and star dragon army would still have a challenge late game instead of steam rolling everything.
One of my problems with campaign mode is 90% of battles are either far too easy or far too hard so I just auto resolve them. One of my other problems is late game the low tier units become useless in battles. Adding a points cap would go some way to helping both those issues.
Nice idea but it would need tweaking, Upkeep reduction is already the superior skill option to go for. This would make it effectively mandatory. Basing the unit on base price, but allowing any relevant skill to reduce the burden on the limit. So an archery skill would ease the unit burden on archers greatly while a recruitment or upkeep boost would ease the burden slightly but on everything. Or simply base max army size on level with level 40 offering about 50% more than level 1, so its mostly fair.
It would need some tweaking because it'd be a new core mechanic.
I think the army value limit would be separate from upkeep or recruitment cost, so a reduction in upkeep wouldn't let you take a larger army, it'd just make that army cheaper to maintain. The max army size would just be based off the unit values that are currently used in multiplayer since they already put a lot of time in to balancing those. It could still have adjustments or penalties based on lord or hero skills, but I think they'd have to be balanced separately from existing upkeep/recruitment bonuses.
I don't even think it'd have to be a hard limit, maybe something you could go over but start to suffer attrition or exponentially greater upkeep. Maybe units at half strength could be worth less points so you could reinforce with fresh units to compensate for ones that are at low strength.
Just ideas, I think it's a mechanic that needs some thought but could make the mid to late game much more interesting and entertaining.
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Bobthehero wrote: Steamrolling's fun tho, if you want balanced and limited battles that's what custom battles are for
One of the biggest things I hear is how total war campaigns are only fun for the first 50 to 100 turns when things are a challenge.
Hou could still steamroll, just take 2 armies everywhere or set the difficulty to easy.
If you are not carfull chaos can wipe you out when they spawned lol.
Also when I was skaven in tww2 and doing the last ritual I was hit with 5 armies of interventions, 3 chaos warbands with giants ect and 7 armies of skaven unknown warband.......
It was not a easy fight lol.
Those darn skaven warbands, they always attack my cities with two armies and full stacks. Fortunately abominations are still stupid easy to kill otherwise I would probably never be able to scrape some victories by!
djones520 wrote: Nah, I like my armies of nothing but swordmasters and star dragons, thank you.
Which is cool. I thought it was pretty fun when Archaon came to bring the end times and I greeted him with a single stack with 3 tanks, 3 luminarks and most of the rest demigryphs. Twisted chaos monstrosities are nice and all, but I have tanks and laser guns. I'm doing something similar with High Elves now, although I'm opting for something with a little more variety, one of each dragon, some dragon princes, and a mix of Sea Guard, Sword Masters and Phoenix Guard.
I love ending up with a crazy mega-army stack like that, or even 3 of them, but it shouldn't be easy. It certainly shouldn't be achievable within the first 100 turns, but right now as soon as your first city reaches size 5 you'd have to be deliberately neutering yourself not to upgrade your main army to something obscenely impossible to kill.
Add some rules so that building those kinds of mega stacks requires an actual empire with contributions from many high level cities and you'd get three benefits. First you'd have a lot more strategy in city building, as building a single mega military province wouldn't be enough. Second you wouldn't see the megastacks until later in the game so they wouldn't get boring before the game ended. And lastly there would be a real feeling of achievement and power when you finally had the empire to support an all conquering megastack like that.
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LordofHats wrote: A good point. Maybe extend the army upkeep penalty you get for having multiple lords? Armies become more expensive the larger they become?
Or you could remove the upkeep discount entirely. Instead Lord upgrades allow you to increase your army size?
OgreChubbs wrote: If you are not carfull chaos can wipe you out when they spawned lol.
Also when I was skaven in tww2 and doing the last ritual I was hit with 5 armies of interventions, 3 chaos warbands with giants ect and 7 armies of skaven unknown warband.......
It was not a easy fight lol.
I reckon the only thing that makes those things hard is if you're playing an army that even with a full stack isn't terribly powerful. I didn't have much of a problem playing as Lizardmen because a high tier full stack of Lizardmen is quite capable of steamrolling over one ritual incursion army after the other. I'm struggling in TWW1 with Orcs vs the Chaos incursions because bringing down Kholek or Archaon's armies is difficult unless I bring 2 full stacks to the party and even then I suffer big losses so if another doomstack is wandering about it'll do me in.
The page notes that while the Vortx campaign is not in Mortal Empires, the Chaos Incursions from the first game still are. And the forces of Chaos will be coming from surprising new directions. I assume that last bit means that the New World areas will also be suffering from Chaos atta (and possibly Brettonia, as well).
Looks like a whole bunch of youtubers got early access to mortal empires, so if you search mortal empires on youtube you'll find lots of videos from the regular Total War youtubers showing the map, starting locations, etc.
Looks like the "africa" continent has been squished so it's not as long but wider, Lustria has been cropped as have parts of the Dark Elf areas. 8 and 10 slot settlements are now spread out everywhere and it looks like there's some new building options for the TWW1 races. Athel Loren now has 12 slot setllements, so I guess their mechanics as a "horde" race is much the same but with more weight on their starting settlements.
The page notes that while the Vortx campaign is not in Mortal Empires, the Chaos Incursions from the first game still are. And the forces of Chaos will be coming from surprising new directions. I assume that last bit means that the New World areas will also be suffering from Chaos atta (and possibly Brettonia, as well).
Hmm. Maybe they split them up so some hit Kislev and some hit naggarond, rather than having the doom stack just run over Kislev.
The page notes that while the Vortx campaign is not in Mortal Empires, the Chaos Incursions from the first game still are. And the forces of Chaos will be coming from surprising new directions. I assume that last bit means that the New World areas will also be suffering from Chaos atta (and possibly Brettonia, as well).
Hmm. Maybe they split them up so some hit Kislev and some hit naggarond, rather than having the doom stack just run over Kislev.
I suspect that Kislev is still going to get overrun. After all, if Kislev somehow managed to *stop* the Chaos Doom Stacks, then the other Old World nations wouldn't feel much of a challenge, would they?
But I'm guessing that there will be additional stacks turning up in various places in the New World as well.
Seems like Norsca didn't make the cut for Mortal Empires. A shame because I was wanting to test them out and was waiting for ME to do so.
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LordofHats wrote: This is also an interesting idea. Is there any real reason to continue capping army stacks at 20? The limitation existed at first as a technical limitation for field battles (in older Total War games you could never have more than 20 units on the field at once) but I think they solved that a few games ago and now you can command more than 1 army on the field at the same time.
I did some testing and found that on my computer where I've tuned the settings to get 30-40FPS in the benchmark, I get good performance with ~4400 models on the screen even with magic being thrown around. With 6000+ I start to get some slowdown. 4400 models, that's the equivalent of a full army of Clanrats vs a full army of Skinks. I tried a game with 8800 models (2v2 full armies of nothing but skinks, clanrats and magic user lords), it was still playable but some real significant slowdowns when everything was visible on screen at once.
FWIW, TWW2 does seem to handle large battles better than TWW1. They must have done some performance tweaking because both games I tuned to have roughly 30-40fps but TWW1 I get slowdowns more easily when things get too chaotic, TWW2 seems much more stable.
Automatically Appended Next Post: 2 hours to go according to Steam!
Yeah, still not out yet it seems, seems my guess was wrong. The page now says "less than an hour". Unfortunately I need to work tomorrow so I have to go to bed now, lol.
Mine's started to download now. 4.5GB download should be done in about 10 minutes, but I REALLY need to go to bed Will have to play it after work tomorrow, lol.
The page notes that while the Vortx campaign is not in Mortal Empires, the Chaos Incursions from the first game still are. And the forces of Chaos will be coming from surprising new directions. I assume that last bit means that the New World areas will also be suffering from Chaos atta (and possibly Brettonia, as well).
Hmm. Maybe they split them up so some hit Kislev and some hit naggarond, rather than having the doom stack just run over Kislev.
I suspect that Kislev is still going to get overrun. After all, if Kislev somehow managed to *stop* the Chaos Doom Stacks, then the other Old World nations wouldn't feel much of a challenge, would they?
Oh no doubt. I just got tired of seeing 4 full chaos armies work in tandem and insta-gib Kislev.
So, east coast north america has it live at this point. It installed the 'free' dlc by itself, but I see I'll have to exit and restart steam for it to reload the rest, after the big patch (4.5 Gig) downloads, and downloading the actual 'mortal empires' dlc.
Its happily burbling in 'preallocating,' thanks steam.
The page notes that while the Vortx campaign is not in Mortal Empires, the Chaos Incursions from the first game still are. And the forces of Chaos will be coming from surprising new directions. I assume that last bit means that the New World areas will also be suffering from Chaos atta (and possibly Brettonia, as well).
Hmm. Maybe they split them up so some hit Kislev and some hit naggarond, rather than having the doom stack just run over Kislev.
I suspect that Kislev is still going to get overrun. After all, if Kislev somehow managed to *stop* the Chaos Doom Stacks, then the other Old World nations wouldn't feel much of a challenge, would they?
Oh no doubt. I just got tired of seeing 4 full chaos armies work in tandem and insta-gib Kislev.
So, east coast north america has it live at this point. It installed the 'free' dlc by itself, but I see I'll have to exit and restart steam for it to reload the rest, after the big patch (4.5 Gig) downloads, and downloading the actual 'mortal empires' dlc.
Its happily burbling in 'preallocating,' thanks steam.
I didn't have to restart Steam, but yeah, after the 4.5GB download I clicked to install the DLC and another 680MB update started.
I ran into some steam issue after downloading the patch. Their sales front is messed up, which is especially annoying since the dlc is free.
Edit: Found a workaround, though. Apparently can just download it from the store page for it. Steam is weird.
Some changes to the map and starting armies. Queek's new position is interesting- Southlands in general feel really different- some of the provinces are a lot bigger due to the different ways the two campaign maps distort the geography.
He's on the edge of the TW1 and TW2 campaign maps (even though the provinces he's in aren't really there in TW2). In the mountains above the dwarves and orcs next to Krog Gar, which is near some of the orcs from TW1. Strange to get used to.
Queek now has a warp lightning cannon, nightrunners with slings and stormvermin with sword and shield starting out.
Well I hope mine is done by the time I get home, I left it up to start the DL while I'm at work. Is there any mention of unit retools? I would really like a revamped HE artillery. Those things don't hit hard at all for me.
Tagony wrote: Well I hope mine is done by the time I get home, I left it up to start the DL while I'm at work. Is there any mention of unit retools? I would really like a revamped HE artillery. Those things don't hit hard at all for me.
Really? As long as they're in the right fire mode, they tear apart targets.
But yea, they got changed according to the patch notes: fewer hp on the bolt throwers themselves. Not the crew, just the engines.
TWW1 Lords don't seem to have the same array of skills as the TWW2 ones, which is a shame. I'd hoped they would've been updated with a wider variety, but from the brief look I've had at Thorgrim, at the least, it's either unchanged or very similar. They don't even have the same level of general buffs as the New World LLs have; the most you'll see on Old World Lords are like the 10% reduction on Reiksguard and Greatswords from Karl Franz, or 10% off Longbeards and Hammerers from Thorgrim.
Compared to the New World lords which keep their 35% and 50% reductions, and probably their updated skill trees--although this I've not checked--I'm not sure how Old World armies are going to stack up. Some of the reductions were already rather substantial when everyone had them, but now most of the Lords don't, is there going to be some effect on balance?
Well I guess compared to other artillery. Normally I'll get 20 to 30 kills per bolt thrower, and really not much off of single targets (with the larger bolt). With dwarves or the empire I felt like more damage was going out.
I've noticed that the initial few hits from Multi-Shot rarely really kills anything, but by the end of the fight even a single HE bolt thrower can rack up solid number of kills; at the very least, the wider spread can really weaken units enough that by the time they hit archer range, half the unit falls over in the first volley thanks to the bolt-thrower stripping hit points.
Wait what? Are we talking the Elven ones? How is it possible to not to get well above 100+ kills in every battle with the eagle claw or repeater bol thrower?
Avatar 720 wrote: TWW1 Lords don't seem to have the same array of skills as the TWW2 ones, which is a shame. I'd hoped they would've been updated with a wider variety, but from the brief look I've had at Thorgrim, at the least, it's either unchanged or very similar. They don't even have the same level of general buffs as the New World LLs have; the most you'll see on Old World Lords are like the 10% reduction on Reiksguard and Greatswords from Karl Franz, or 10% off Longbeards and Hammerers from Thorgrim.
Compared to the New World lords which keep their 35% and 50% reductions, and probably their updated skill trees--although this I've not checked--I'm not sure how Old World armies are going to stack up. Some of the reductions were already rather substantial when everyone had them, but now most of the Lords don't, is there going to be some effect on balance?
Patch notes/update mentioned that revamped skill trees for TW1 lords will come in a patch (along with Norsca).
I hope they'll also move some of them around. I'd like to see at least a few spread out to other areas. Ghorst & Gelt in Lustria, for example, the White Dwarf elsewhere and the Slayer King back in his proper home.
New addition to the ME map: Hell Pit. On the Kislev side of the Gianthome mountains. A 10 slot city.
Objectives in ME are pretty rough. They vary slightly by faction, but controlling 8 (short) or 17 (long) of legendary lord faction capitals is pretty typical. Other stuff also complicates it- Queek wants 50%+ skaven corruption in all his territory, and 3 specific regions (including the dwarf start location)
Teclis has it pretty rough, since he's far away from most of his objectives. He's also slowed by public order penalties due to vampire and skaven corruption all around him.
Avatar 720 wrote: TWW1 Lords don't seem to have the same array of skills as the TWW2 ones, which is a shame. I'd hoped they would've been updated with a wider variety, but from the brief look I've had at Thorgrim, at the least, it's either unchanged or very similar. They don't even have the same level of general buffs as the New World LLs have; the most you'll see on Old World Lords are like the 10% reduction on Reiksguard and Greatswords from Karl Franz, or 10% off Longbeards and Hammerers from Thorgrim.
Compared to the New World lords which keep their 35% and 50% reductions, and probably their updated skill trees--although this I've not checked--I'm not sure how Old World armies are going to stack up. Some of the reductions were already rather substantial when everyone had them, but now most of the Lords don't, is there going to be some effect on balance?
Patch notes/update mentioned that revamped skill trees for TW1 lords will come in a patch (along with Norsca).
Oh.
I don't know about anyone else, but personally I wouldn't have minded waiting for that to be available to begin with. I was honestly surprised that ME appeared as soon after TWW2 general release as it has. I might just put off playing any of the old Lords until that patch.
It's a bit of a shame that the TWW1 Lords didn't get updated. But I'm still happy to play it now rather than waiting. If the campaign gets too hard because the AI can upgrade their Lords better, I'll just lower the difficulty. On higher difficulty levels the AI just cheats harder so I'm not overly concerned about having to dial the difficulty back if it is an issue, but I doubt it will be.
The only slightly annoying one is the omission of Norsca, primarily because that's who I was planning on playing first off because I haven't tried them yet. It seems odd since Norsca is still in the campaign, you just can't play them.
Automatically Appended Next Post: It does seem like ME is a bit less stable for me. I would often alt-tab out of the game during load screens or end turns when waiting for the AI, but it keeps crashing on me when I alt-tab now, not all the time but often enough to be annoying. The screen goes black and I can't open anything other than pressing ctrl+alt+delete to kill the process.
The TWW1 stuff not being updated just means I'll be first doing a Kroq'gar playthrough. I dislike the Vortex campaign so I was waiting for ME to play Lizardmen.
When they finally do the TWW1 stuff I'll go play Vlad.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: It's a bit of a shame that the TWW1 Lords didn't get updated. But I'm still happy to play it now rather than waiting. If the campaign gets too hard because the AI can upgrade their Lords better, I'll just lower the difficulty. On higher difficulty levels the AI just cheats harder so I'm not overly concerned about having to dial the difficulty back if it is an issue, but I doubt it will be.
The only slightly annoying one is the omission of Norsca, primarily because that's who I was planning on playing first off because I haven't tried them yet. It seems odd since Norsca is still in the campaign, you just can't play them.
As far as Norsca goes, it's the old version, no Wintertooth or Wulfrik. The change to the settlement system seems to mean the Varg go nuts, with nothing to keep them in check, and they take over the north dwarf realm and the colonize everything in Kislev. This is especially true playing chaos warriors- they just colonize in your wake and become a massive power. I don't think they have the new norscan units though. So no mammoths, but they might get the better marauder units, not sure.
Ah ok, that makes sense then. It seems the team working on Norsca was working separately in parallel with the team working on ME so the ME team just worked on the pre-Norsca build of TWW1.
Does seem a bit odd though, I wonder how long it would have pushed back the release if they'd included Norsca.
I wouldn't think much more than a month, since, well, all that is done. But they're making it a package deal with a bunch of other stuff:
The one exception is the Norsca Race Pack (Wulfrik the Wanderer and Throgg the Troll King). These have yet to be implemented and will become playable in a future update. The same update will also implement the 30th Anniversary Regiments of Renown, Old World Legendary Lords skill adjustments, and other changes and additions which first appeared in the Foundation Update for Total War: WARHAMMER 1.
Though that stuff is also done. Depends how well testing goes, really - both for stability and balance.
Speaking of which, I spent the day trying a few different Lords (Archaeon, Queek, Teclis and Vlad). I'm rampaging with Vlad, while they others were sluggish. The change to settlements is a huge game-changer- I've got all of Zhufbar, Barak Var and the Dwarf capital, and the cash flow helps a great deal (as does killing the dwarf faction in the early game). Kislev made a mountain redoubt out of the northern dwarf realms. Somewhat surprisingly, its turn 70 and the chaos invasion hasn't happened yet. This is pretty much the playthrough I settled on for being the most fun.
Archaon was effective, but since the chaos horde interacts with nothing, it isn't very interesting.
I overextended with Teclis and was constantly fighting with growth (high elves have a terrible growth rate, and a two city starting region doesn't help), corruption (due to his neighbors) and public order (partially due to corruption), and southern (central) lustria to the mountains is just too big to keep stamping out fires. And I don't have the funds to build a second army to take on the brutally stacked lizard cities of the interior. Plus Teclis' actual campaign goals have squat to do with Lustria.
Queek has a rough starting position, 2 city province, no food, two undead neighbors, and an orc/dwarf province in the exact opposite direction of where he wants to go. The orc realms to the north have a mountain range that's too big to underway through, and building a continuous realm runs headlong into the food problem. Just seems an exercise in frustration.
May give Skrolk a spin just to see what the early game is like for him, but so far, having a lot more fun with the Old World lords.
I've been playing as Isabella. People were saying you could confederate with Mannfred in TWW1 but he declared war on me around turn 10 and doesn't seem to show any signs of letting up. Tossing up just wiping him out or holding out to see if he can be confederated later on.
Yeah, Teclis is a grind. Constant attrition really hurts high elves; and fairly rapidly the relatively friendly Lizardmen were ground down by Pestilens who now have like 15 settlements to my five. Plus Eshin is just waiting in the wings - it took way too long for me to wipe out the Vampire Coast and take it over.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I've been playing as Isabella. People were saying you could confederate with Mannfred in TWW1 but he declared war on me around turn 10 and doesn't seem to show any signs of letting up. Tossing up just wiping him out or holding out to see if he can be confederated later on.
Oh, I just wiped him out the first couple turns (built some extra vargheists first). He moved his army out of Drakenhof, and I just took it with the bats and Vargheists, then wiped out his attritioning army. For small starting factions like that, I don't seem much point in confederating.
After that, I took the two small empire provinces to the west, then turned on Templehof and then Zhufbar. The latter unfortunately confederated with the Dwarfs with their last little town, so I was obligated to smack the Dwarfs around.
Ah. I finally found out what happens with the chaos invasion, which finally happened. Not sure where everyone is, but it produced a weird effect.
The mini-'cinematic' popped as usually, showing off some chaos armies in the usual spot in the wastes. But in the diplomatic log there are four chaos armies
Servants to Chaos, at war with Naggarond, Cult of Pleasure, Lothern and Hexoatl (and me), which are presumably in Naggarond somewhere
Puppets of Chaos, at war with Pestilens, Loremaster (and me)
Vessels of Chaos, at war with Last Defenders and Clan Mors (and me)
and then
Warriors of Chaos, led by Archaon, presumably in their usual spot. At war with Kislev, the various Empire factions, Bretonnian, the remaining Dwarfs of Clan Angrund, and... not me, as Von Carsteins.
Which is a little weird, as they're the ones I'm likely to come into contact with... unless they others are ignoring the AI and are on a direct route to me.
Meanwhile, I've got the Empire on the ropes, having just taken Nuln and Altdorf. They've got the two small towns in the Reikland left and one other somewhere, which I think is Mousillon.
Greenskins have grown out of control since I've taken out the Dwarfs. 31 settlements, and they've confederated everyone, including the Crooked Moon (Skarsnik). They're currently fighting the wood elves for no good reason, but hopefully it will keep them distracted.
Bah. Next turn, Empire Confederates with Middenland. 6 more cities. How annoying.
I had about 7 stacks appear in the sea north of Ulthuan for the Chaos invasion, just as I was mopping up the last resistance to my rule.
I'm using Radious so I don't know for sure if it affects that, but about eight turns later Archaon spawned and another 7 odd stacks appeared. And three just rolled up from the south somewhere.
It's interesting, the settlement limitations in TWW1 mostly seemed to keep the AI in check. With the more open settlements of Mortal Empires AI superpowers seem more likely to form.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I've been playing as Isabella. People were saying you could confederate with Mannfred in TWW1 but he declared war on me around turn 10 and doesn't seem to show any signs of letting up. Tossing up just wiping him out or holding out to see if he can be confederated later on.
Oh, I just wiped him out the first couple turns (built some extra vargheists first). He moved his army out of Drakenhof, and I just took it with the bats and Vargheists, then wiped out his attritioning army. For small starting factions like that, I don't seem much point in confederating.
After that, I took the two small empire provinces to the west, then turned on Templehof and then Zhufbar. The latter unfortunately confederated with the Dwarfs with their last little town, so I was obligated to smack the Dwarfs around.
I decided not to wipe him out, took Drakenhof after he declared war on me and a little bit later he asked for a peace treaty so I have left him to his own ways. Up to turn 50 now and still haven't managed to get him to confederate but he's "very friendly" and a trade partner now.
Zhufbar has been a pain in my arse since the beginning of the game. The Stunties seemed to enjoy parking armies in Zhufbar making it hard to cap, only just capped it in the past few turns. Prior to that I tried taking the minor settlements in the Zhufbar province but I just got endless uprisings which were strong enough to instantly take one of settlements back off me. I've spent far more money on the Zhufbar province than it's earned me, I'm hoping that now I have the major settlement in the province things will settle down a bit.
So is the idea with Vampires just to get your corruption high using "Spread Corruption" skills on your Vampire heros so that you don't get uprisings? Uprisings have been a real thorn in my side, I've spent half my time just wandering around the few provinces I own putting down uprisings. Normally my approach to public order is build public order buildings, but the vampire public order and corruption buildings kind of suck and require a level 2 settlement to build.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I do feel a bit like I messed up my Vampire campaign. Over extended with not enough corruption and over invested in magic. I'm not used to having almost every character being able to take magic so now I have armies with more spells than I have winds of magic to cast them.
The corruption thing kind of sneaked up on me. I was just expanding as I normally would and then I was getting rebellions, like, everywhere, before I noticed my corruption was way too low. I've spent lots of turns just running my Lords from province to province taking out rebellions while I wait for my corruption to come up so they can be self sufficient.
Thinking I might start another Lizardmen campaign. I reckon Kroq might start in a more interesting location, but I kinda prefer Maz with his magic flinging super elite Temple Guard army.
Hmm. I don't really have a problem with corruption, but I took the growth and corruption advances from research first, and usually get a corruption building at e second tier in a village (don't like them in capitals) so they are +4/+2 in adjacent provinces. Usually that means being able to run directly for an enemy town and siege it (especially with vlad), and not worry about it too much. Sometimes it means a turn or two in raiding stance, but that isn't a big deal.
As for vampire heroes, I use them as melee bruisers for Isabella. Well, and one for going to quest locations (since I needed to buy a third for vlad' quest anyway)
Kroq-Gars starting location is annoying- he's in a corner and has to deal with corruption attrition pretty quickly (and lizards don't have a raiding stance), and he has a really long slog to any campaign objectives.
Securing his initial province is really easy, but deciding what to do next is tricky. Plow up to Lahmia, or work your way across the south lands to go somewhere else?
Is Lahmia on the map? I thought it was further east than the mortal empires map went.
At the moment I'm turn 80-ish and have 5 or 6 provinces with 3 armies and spend most my time quelling rebellions. If the corruption is below 50% it seems the public order penalty is bad enough that I'll very quickly get rebellions. It's probably made worse because I hold a couple of settlements in provinces where I don't own the entire province (eg. Karaz-a-Karak) and in those ones it's really hard to build enough corruption to stop the public order going to hell. I should probably just try and take the whole province but I didn't want to start a war with those particular neighbours.
Averland also just screwed me up a bit, I started conquering them and as a last ditch effort they sent an army out to just raze my settlements I've stopped them now but they razed multiple settlements which is costing me heaps of money and lost one of them when another faction swooped in on the unoccupied razed settlement.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Is Lahmia on the map? I thought it was further east than the mortal empires map went.
Yep. If you recall Brightwater from the original TW1 map (the southernmost orc/dwarf area) there is a lake and an inlet out to the sea. South of that is Lahmia and two towns on the ME map.
Queek's starting area empties out just southwest of one of those towns (Mahrak), and south of that is the Crater of the Walking dead, which borders the Southland Jungles and Kroq-gars Kingdom of Beasts provinces.
Once the Tomb Kings come out, I'd hope that Settra will pop in Khemri, and Khalida will be near Lahmia or in the Crater. (if those two end up as the Legendary Lords, which seems logical since they lead to different playstyles)
Did they buff savage orcs? Jeebus. I am playing an MP campaign vs a Wurrzag player and I just witnessed a unit of savage orcs kill a full HP warboss in a matter of seconds. Even Grimgor was slaughtered like a sheep.
I have never seen anything like this before. It's early game too so they're just standard savage orcs without lord battle traits etc. Makes me kind of scared for when I have to face them considering my vampires lack the option of shooting them.
Don't think so. I tried Wurrzag out briefly and ran into a standard dwarf stack (mostly warriors, as this was about turn 25) and the Savages just bounced, hard. Even with multiple Feet of Gork stomping on dwarf units the savage orcs just died miserably.
Well TWW1 hasn't been updated yet, so it's easy enough to compare. In custom battle at least, new Savage Orcs have buffed HP (7290 vs 6030), slightly reduced charge bonus (26 vs 27), slightly increased physical resist (30% vs 25%) and everything else looks the same. In campaign Wurrzag confers an extra charge bonus (+25).
I feel like my performance is worse since ME was released, even just in custom battles. Not sure what's going on there.
Was he using wurzag in the battle? Wurzag has a power/ability that gives all units in his army magical attacks, which ignores armor obviously. Not to mention he gets a few spells that are good vs single combatants.
Ashiraya wrote: Magic damage doesn't ignore armor. It only ignores physical resistance.
Hm, pretty sure it did last time I looked it up, guess I'm wrong. Either way I think there was something you either missed (magic/abilities), or were just really unlucky with the RNG armor reduction. Also, what type of savage orks? Regular ones, tier 1 orks?
Ashiraya wrote: Magic damage doesn't ignore armor. It only ignores physical resistance.
Hm, pretty sure it did last time I looked it up, guess I'm wrong. Either way I think there was something you either missed (magic/abilities), or were just really unlucky with the RNG armor reduction. Also, what type of savage orks? Regular ones, tier 1 orks?
Yes, regular ones. Must have been wurrzag's charge bonus.
As for magic and armor, you can even look at spell descriptions and see that some specifically cause AP damage as well as magical damage.
Ashiraya wrote: Magic damage doesn't ignore armor. It only ignores physical resistance.
Hm, pretty sure it did last time I looked it up, guess I'm wrong. Either way I think there was something you either missed (magic/abilities), or were just really unlucky with the RNG armor reduction. Also, what type of savage orks? Regular ones, tier 1 orks?
Yes, regular ones. Must have been wurrzag's charge bonus.
As for magic and armor, you can even look at spell descriptions and see that some specifically cause AP damage as well as magical damage.
What level was Grimgor, because it seems incredibly unlikely that a single unit of savages would be able to best him, even with Wurrzag's charge bonus.
Also, any mods enabled? My barebones test showed grimgor winning handily 1v1 in a custom battle (with wurrzag sitting near the back)
Grimgor was not 1v1ing the savage orcs (the warboss was, though). His was a larger battle. I just expressed distress over how quickly Grimgor lost all his HP to savage orcs who logically should lack the AP damage to crack his iron hide. The warboss was the main point.
Grimgor was low level, do you recall how many chevrons the Savage Orcs had? I've noticed a tendency for the AI units to have very experienced units, early in the game. That could also have given them the impetus they needed.
There is a bug where units charging characters, it seems like the unit loses clipping something and so instead of just a few guys in the front getting an attack on the character, every model in the unit gets an attack, and it happens in just seconds. I've seen it pointed out with summoned units where it seems players can exploit the bug to make it happen, and while I don't know for sure if it works with regular charges I've had enough times that characters have just disintegrated after being charged, with no magic in play and no summoned units around, and so I wonder if maybe a similar bug sometimes happens with those units.
sebster wrote: There is a bug where units charging characters, it seems like the unit loses clipping something and so instead of just a few guys in the front getting an attack on the character, every model in the unit gets an attack, and it happens in just seconds. I've seen it pointed out with summoned units where it seems players can exploit the bug to make it happen, and while I don't know for sure if it works with regular charges I've had enough times that characters have just disintegrated after being charged, with no magic in play and no summoned units around, and so I wonder if maybe a similar bug sometimes happens with those units.
As far as I'm aware it's only summoned units and it's been fixed.
A youtuber I've been watching made a video of the problem. If you watch a replay it should be obvious what happened because the models are able to occupy less space than they should which lets them all be in range to attack at once.
djones520 wrote: Grimgor was low level, do you recall how many chevrons the Savage Orcs had? I've noticed a tendency for the AI units to have very experienced units, early in the game. That could also have given them the impetus they needed.
The Grimgor was the AI. The player I was facing in the campaign played Wurrzag.
So with Mortal Empires a significant nerf has been applied to wall towers. They are pretty useless versus siege towers now. Two towers can't even kill a single siege tower (it often has 30-50% health to spare) before it hits the wall. So instead of a costly assault losing 1/3-1/2 the siege towers, the enemy now has a sure way of parking top tier units against the walls. With the high tier stacks the AI deploys 50-75+ turns in it makes siege defence battles completely useless on most settlements, except provincial capitals. Anyone else having the same experience?
TBH, I found wall towers useless against siege towers already. For the most part, I just accepted that siege towers would dock--mainly because it already took at least 2 wall defences to reliably bring down a single tower, and wall defence arc of fire isn't great after the towers get about halfway to the wall--and focused on using the wall towers to mulch anything unfortunate enough to not have received a tower. Usually I'd be able to cause far more damage by targeting troops on the ground than by focusing enough of my wall defences to bring down a siege tower.
That said, I rarely ever have to fight wall defence battles. The closest I get are high-tier intervention armies--like the HE one with half its units being dragons--which rarely ever wait to build siege equipment anyway. If an enemy army my garrison can't defeat has penetrated into my settlements and spent enough time there unmolested to build a large number of siege towers, then something's already gone wrong.
I've always felt that if you're not up against a provincial capital with further wall upgrades, you're never likely to lose any siege towers nor really destroy enough of an enemy's to make any real difference.
True, but they key part for me was that two towers could still take down one siege tower before. That was an important calculation as it enabled minor settlement garrisons to occasionally fight off high tier stacks with a lot of effort. There is a significant difference between 6 Phoenix Guard/Swordmaster units docking with the wall unmolested versus 10. The towers weren't great before, but they still left a chance to even the odds a bit. Now with the heavy nerf they also barely seem to damage ground units. I feel like this has made most garrisons obsolete as they don't sport the high tier melee units required to fight of a high/top tier stack without towers. Combine this with the AI frequently being able to field twice as many armies and rebels it means most turns are now occupied running armies around your territory to put out fires, instead of calculated guesses of towers+garrison=ok chance at victory.
I'd never really rely on minor settlements with the wall upgrade to actually fight off anything that wants to take them. At best, they ward off opportunistic sackings, or delay bigger armies by forcing them to spend a few turns building equipment while I drag a response force over. I fully expect any army that has 10 Swordmasters/Phoenix Guard to ride roughshod any minor settlement, walls or not, unless you have support from an actual army. Unless the rest of the army is badly damaged spearmen or horse archers, I can't think of any minor settlement that would have a garrison I'd be confident in being able to ward off that attack; unless it had a unique building that gave it something like 4 units of Temple Guard like at least one of the Vortex Campaign Lizardmen minors did.
Personally, the reduced chance in a minor settlement beating back a determined assault is probably going to be annoying, but understandable.
I'm usually pretty good at maintaining a good defense with a minor settlement and walls. Towers do seem a bit weak now but then I could usually get them to kill 200 troops or so over the course of a battle which seems a bit excessive.
At the moment I am experimenting with placing my troops (dwarves) on the walls to use the towers and ranged units to kill as many infantry as possible until the siege equipment reaches the walls at which point I withdraw and huddle around the town center for the leadership bonus and tighter perimeter which is especially handy as dwarves have a very low unit count. Seems to be working wonders so far!
I just wish garrisons didn't come with artillery if you have walls as the things are utterly useless within the confines of a city with the possible exception of empire mortars.
I managed to take Skavenblight as the von Carstein. Might have been a waste of time/resources and having to declare war on an otherwise friendly Clan Skryre.
Skavenblight is a 10 slot city which is what tempted me in to taking it, but it seems playing as VC, 4 of them remain locked and the tax rate is pretty poor. No unique building chains either.
Probably only worth capping it if you are playing as Skaven.
I'm having a great time with Kroq'gar, though I'm using a No Chaos Incursion mod until they fix them.
Spent way too long taking out the Lizardmen faction that starts right beside you, but the final battle to take them out was amazing. Two full armies with 5 Stegodons and 5 units of Cold Ones. Basically Stegodons rammed right through their line, then the masses of Suarus moved in to the meat grinder, while the Cold Ones did Hit and Run attacks on the rear.
One of the armies recovering from that ran into a Vampie Counts army, which turned out to be my favorite battle I've had in this game. Three regiments of Saurus, two Spear Saurus and one melee Skink regiment, with 2 Stegodons, one regiment of Cold Ones and a Saurus Lord. All were half health from that huge battle, so not much was actually there. Vampires had over 10 assorted regiments of Grave Guard, Zombies, Dire Wolves, Bats, Corpse Carts, a Vampire and a Necromancer.
I figured I was going to die so I just sent the Stegodons right through the Grave Guard with the Saurus following up the rear. Cold Ones around the back again. In the end, there was just this huge mass of bloody corpses in the middle of the beach with a few dozen Lizardmen standing around covered in blood. Killed every last enemy.
My Vamp campaign is starting to get real annoying. I think my problems started right in the beginning by expanding south and west (toward Border Princes and Tilea) rather than north/west or maybe even directly south.
Dealing with the mountain ranges is a pain in the arse, as a VC it's harder to control corruption through the mountains then eventually you hit Athel Loren...
...dealing with Wood Elves as VC is a bloody nightmare, I reckon the autoresolve is doing better than me.
Meanwhile Tyrion seems to have amassed a superpower on the other side of the world and is now just sending a full stack at me on average every turn (some turns none, other turns 2 or 3).
I think expanding up in to the Empire makes a lot more sense, the way the land is laid out it's much easier to control corruption, public order and enemies wandering in to your lands.
I haven't started a Mortal Empires campaign yet, I want to finish my TW2 game first. The campaign there is a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. The vortex thing was a good idea with a terrible execution. Reaching each ritual is just a progress bar, and completing them is just camping your three best armies in three cities and waiting to see if something happens. I'm still having fun though, because I realised that rituals can wait indefinitely, if you just conquer any faction that's brave enough to start one of the last few rituals. Right now I've got mega-stacks tromping through Naggarond and the last major Lizardman empire. I still haven't run in to any skaven though, but when they start ritual 4 it should point me in their direction and that'll be the end of them. Then I guess I'll push the button and begin the camping phase to end the game.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: As far as I'm aware it's only summoned units and it's been fixed.
sebster wrote: I haven't started a Mortal Empires campaign yet, I want to finish my TW2 game first. The campaign there is a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. The vortex thing was a good idea with a terrible execution. Reaching each ritual is just a progress bar, and completing them is just camping your three best armies in three cities and waiting to see if something happens. I'm still having fun though, because I realised that rituals can wait indefinitely, if you just conquer any faction that's brave enough to start one of the last few rituals. Right now I've got mega-stacks tromping through Naggarond and the last major Lizardman empire. I still haven't run in to any skaven though, but when they start ritual 4 it should point me in their direction and that'll be the end of them. Then I guess I'll push the button and begin the camping phase to end the game.
The last ritual triggers some fixed battles doesn't it? Or is it just more attacks on the cities I have to defend for the ritual to take place, only with increasingly powerful armies?
Urgh, a Chaos incursion just showed up and I'm seeing 8 stacks sailing straight for me from the south and west. Combined with the ones coming from the north and another one coming by land in the south I'm thinking my campaign might be over. My economy can't sustain enough armies to defend against that. I'll play a few more turns and hopefully the chaos stacks turn out to be pushovers, if not it might be time to throw in the towel.
So people are saying the Chaos incursions are bugged at the moment in that they just beeline straight for the player instead of affecting the whole world? Is that true? Maybe I should have held off on my campaign until CA fixed that.
The last ritual triggers some fixed battles doesn't it? Or is it just more attacks on the cities I have to defend for the ritual to take place, only with increasingly powerful armies?
Both. It starts with a "defend cities for 20 turns" then a scripted battle.
I am on turn 120 in my empire campaign. Im at war with the Dwarves, Tyrion, various Chaos, Border Princes, Wood Elves, and random beastmen tribes. Cant get any of the civilized races to sue for peace.
Getting a little annoying, actually... Got Chaos running down the field now, and i have to keep some armies watching my backfield in brettonnia and Sylvania to make sure i dont get any tasty pieces of my lands carved off.
Wolfblade wrote: Both. It starts with a "defend cities for 20 turns" then a scripted battle.
Yuck. 20 turns of my best armies stuck in garrison. I guess I'll grind it out though...
Maybe it was just because of the lords I played, but the incursions that occur during a ritual started far enough away from my actual ritual sites that sitting garrisoned up wasn't a brilliant option because I'd lose a lot of settlements as they made their way across to my actual ritual sites.
Wolfblade wrote: Both. It starts with a "defend cities for 20 turns" then a scripted battle.
Yuck. 20 turns of my best armies stuck in garrison. I guess I'll grind it out though...
Maybe it was just because of the lords I played, but the incursions that occur during a ritual started far enough away from my actual ritual sites that sitting garrisoned up wasn't a brilliant option because I'd lose a lot of settlements as they made their way across to my actual ritual sites.
Yeah, my fist play through, I had to garrison up my capitol because everyone sent max intervention forces at it. The 5 maxed rat armies also spawned about 3-4 provinces away from my capitol and wrecked a bloody toll all the way.
My second play through I was better prepared for it, and had a few armies pre-positioned to intercept, and it was a lot easier.
Yeah my last couple of rituals were actually easier because the late game incursions spawned in the same place so I had armies positioned to hold them off. Still entertaining to beat the down but not as frantic as my earlier ritual (2nd or 3rd I think) where I had no idea where they'd be coming from and had to mobilise to stop the terrorising all my settlements.
The late game High Elf campaign in ME is starting to bog down because I am trading with a bunch of people and can see the whole world. Turns are slow. Reading a novel helps.
Right now I have Ulthuan and a few territories in the Lustria from the Loremasters confederating with me; everything from me to Naggarond is Hexoatl... they are #2 strength after me and my firm allies thanks to farming influence.
Trading with all three Bret factions who are doing surprisingly well at 5-13 settlements each; the main Dwarf faction which is #5. Empire is hanging on and trading with me; they never seemed to be able to expand against the Von Carsteins. Naggarond is the only surviving Dark Elf faction I can find, not too sure about what is happening in the Southlands except the two Vamp factions are pretty strong. Last Defenders are still around, sending some agents to investigate. Swarms of high level Chaos keep spawning and attacking me 7-8 strong. Holding them at Ulthuan fairly well, but Lustria is a scramble.
I'm about to dispatch three stacks to track down Archaon and put this thing to bed for a while. Let's see how he handles 19 star dragons and two armies of support troops.
Yeah at turn 120 the "end turn" where you watch everyone else move takes long enough to go make a cup of tea, lol. Even if you hit the fast forward it takes a while.
I'm still getting crashes occasionally when I alt-tab which is annoying because it'd be nice to do something else during loading sequences and the end turn waiting.
Hey Vampire Players, been trying to make it through a campaign in WH1 with VC or Von Carsteins. Every time I make pretty good headway in to it, Chaos comes down and wrecks me. They are pretty much the only faction I have issues with. Also, I can never get the other factions to confederate with me so I can get their legendary lords. Any tips?
Chaos is easily dealt with. I only play on Hard but it should be manageable even on higher difficulties thanks to the extreme stupidity of the AI.
Determine a settlement as your furthest northern border. IMO Bechafen is ideal.
Fortify this settlement fully as much as possible, and station a good army inside when chaos comes. Do your best to minimize other conflicts at this time (should be simple as the chaos invasion has a predictable timing).
When Chaos assaults the city, duke it out on the battlefield. Normally the best way to deal with the AI is artillery as the AI has no idea of what proper spacing is, but since vampires don't have artillery magic works just as well. Send a single super tough lord or hero forward as bait and watch enemy units bunch up around him or her. Spam magic (wind of death is great, as are vortexes) on your lord. Win the battle.
Bottlenecks inside castle gates do the job too.
Don't worry about enemy magic. The AI usually wastes all its reserves spamming buffs and healing on units right at the start of the battle, long before any fighting actually begins. (It's kind of embarrassing that the AI is this bad but it is).
Chaos is only broken in Mortal Empires, since they applied the Intervention Army logic to Chaos rather than the WH1 style Chaos Incursion, plus it has more issues on top.
Wolfblade wrote: Chaos is bugged currently, and only targets you, the devs are aware and are working upon the issue iirc though.
Is that in WH1 also? Because I don't have WH2 yet.
Ah, saw replies after the comment. Nvm on that.
I have a lot of issues with my income as well. I try to build as many income buildings as I can but it never seems to work out for me. I always end up dirt poor.
One army per region I fully own is usually my rule, with a few regions dedicated to military production and the rest for income, usually does me well but in my current run, the Brets took Marienburg before me, so that's a big load of money I don't have access to.
Yeah Chaos is totally borked in ME, can't wait for the fix. Its ok and challenging, but having to fight off 12 Chaos stacks every 30 turns plus the Dawitide with 5 armies gets kinda grindy. As Im Kroq I have to hope someone up north kills Archaon and stops the madness. The Dawitide certainly won't let me go north...
Ashiraya wrote: Chaos is easily dealt with. I only play on Hard but it should be manageable even on higher difficulties thanks to the extreme stupidity of the AI.
Determine a settlement as your furthest northern border. IMO Bechafen is ideal....
The problem I've had is that my TWW1 campaigns I didn't spread myself to the north east where the incursions come from, so I couldn't predict which path they'd take.
But yeah, if you can set up a settlement in the north east near Kislev before the incursions show up I imagine it's easier.
Fighting Kholek in open battle has been my biggest problem in TWW1. Archaon and the lesser Chaos lords are easy fights by comparison, Kholek just charges in to my front line, the amount of focus to bring him down leaves the rest of my line vulnerable or to ignore him he'll do a ton of damage.
TWW2 it's just a pain in the arse because they come from all directions. Chaos showed up in my Vamp campaign when I only had 4 armies, meanwhile they have several groups each of 4 to 6 full stacks coming from the north, the south, the south west and the west.
I am actually quite enjoying how broken Chaos is at the moment, I'm currently camped out at Zhufbar with 5 stacks headed straight for me. Desperately trying to get a gyrocopter or two so I can deal with those blasted hellcannons...
Been playing queek's campaign in mortal empires after my 'eye of the vortex' campaign really went down the drain hardcore.
I find it funny because his early campaign difficulty is on very hard. It is pretty hard though i find horde army campaigns much harder (esp. warriors of chaos). You get a public order de-buff for not owning the city of pillars (karak eight peaks) until you manage to own it and yes that's from the start. You also sit between two vampire factions filled with vampiric corruption and the left one (which i'm fighting and killing) is also in the desert. I dunno if you get double attrition for that but it seems like it. This means it can be rather slow. Also there are no pastures in sight on the map for miles so get ready to raid territories like mad for food. It's only the beginning of the campaign and i'm at like bottom tier for food and have been the whole time.
Early into the campaign i fully finished off my first greenskin opponent and was going to fight the dwarfs below me. I was a turn or so away from attacking (thank god i didn't) and then the undead faction to the left of me declares war on me. The dwarf dude ends up declaring war on him and after a long crazy while i ended up with him as a full blown ally best buddy for life and he only had one territory for the longest time. He totally protected the bottom pass to me though just by being there. Anyway now i have 2 dwarfs allies. The weaker one is the one just below my starting area and we've been wrecking the crap out of the undead to the left of us. The first undead guy has only one territory left down from dwarfing us in power bar. The other undead opponent is also getting hit significantly with some decent help from my dwarf ally. Things could get a bit hairy but if things go well i could be rolling in money very soon. The plan is if i kill this enemy army i will go into my territory and replenish troops, head back to the enemy home territory and just straight up plunder the territory and go straight back to raiding it for easy cash and food. Plundering it gives like 12k cash i think and keeps it around so i can keep raiding it no problem. As far as the vampire faction on the right goes my massively powerful dwarf ally wanted me to go to war with him so i did. He's only on 2 territories though and is spiraling the drain so i figure i can not fight the guy and never worry about him attacking me before he dies anyway.
Oh and you heard that right 2 dwarf allies to a skaven faction. I also have a savage orc faction that likes me and i think he has vampiric influence on him even though i've been killing the vampires that influence him. That's like archaeon and the empire teaming up, greenskins with dwarfs or tomb kings and nagash teaming up. In case you guys don't know it's incredibly unlikely and unfluffy for dwarfs and skaven to team up. If anything greenskins tend to fight with and against skaven for dwarf holds but usually until they inevitably betray each other.
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Oh and before i forget doing multiple armies and taking weak spams of units (not so much slaves but lots of clanrats) is actually pretty good. You just engage with equal numbers and take the extra units you have to flank and rear charge the enemy as they're held up by the other units. Then you get a full surround from it. It's quite nice. Ranged firepower also tends to help as well while the enemy is busy cutting through your hordes and taking morale damage from being hit on all sides and being fired on. Basically you see silly battle results where you outnumber the enemy 2-3 to 1 and lose about as many guys as they do by the end of it. This is even the case against vampire counts which have a lot of low level hordes themselves.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Maybe it was just because of the lords I played, but the incursions that occur during a ritual started far enough away from my actual ritual sites that sitting garrisoned up wasn't a brilliant option because I'd lose a lot of settlements as they made their way across to my actual ritual sites.
So far the chaos incursions I've faced have been pretty crappy armies. I could beat them with whatever half stack army I had around the area, inherited from a faction I'd confederated. Whereas as the mercenary forces the computer summoned were much more powerful, and needed much stronger armies in the area.
One really annoying thing is that those armies can move immediately after being summoned, and won't just go for the ritual city. They'll often go and trash a different, non-garrisoned city within range. That's a big part of the reason I've held off on the rituals, having cities trashed by spawning armies that I can't react to is bs.
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Bobthehero wrote: One army per region I fully own is usually my rule, with a few regions dedicated to military production and the rest for income, usually does me well but in my current run, the Brets took Marienburg before me, so that's a big load of money I don't have access to.
I build a single army with good enough first tier stuff very early in the game, and then just rely on that while my capital builds to tier 5. As new units become available I might upgrade part of my army, but only if I actually want to keep those troops for the duration. So I'll trade out some crossbowmen for outriders, but I won't bother with knights or reiksguard, I just wait for demigryphs.
I also try and delay building second armies as long as possible, until I can fill them with elite troops from day one. Sometimes this will mean I'll give up on a chance to expand, just because I don't want to go too far from home.
I'm also ruthless with confederated provinces early in the game. Sack their armies, tear down their military buildings.
The only place I build any unit producing buildings is my original, starting location. Every other part of my empire is pacified.
This approach leaves a lot of money, which I spend on income, morale boosts and walls for every settlement. Not necessarily in that order, priority depends on morale and proximity to the enemy.
This approach means there's almost always enough money to pay for every building upgrade when its available. My first game I bought every unit as it became available, only to replace it a few turns later, and expanded to two and three armies too soon.
This left me with a shortage of funds to upgrade settlements and build there. Which compounded my money issues, particularly as uprisings and enemy factions attacking uncalled towns only made my money issues worse.
Outriders are terrible in my experience, I would much rather have a mix of handgunners and crossbowmen. I personally keep a few Reiksguard with KF, because they're meant to be his bodyguard.
Bobthehero wrote: Outriders are terrible in my experience, I would much rather have a mix of handgunners and crossbowmen.
Outriders fill a different role, they are for kiting. I've found in general kiting units are more useful in multiplayer than campaign. The AI isn't smart enough to shut down stationary missile units like a human player will do so you can get off heaps of volleys. A smart human player will make an effort to screw up those stationary missile units so getting off volleys when you need them is harder, having something that can kite and keep firing while tying down more opposition resources is a good option.
Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Pistoliers have 360 arc and get the shots in. I try to keep Gelts outriders alive because rear shots are good, but the AI prioritises them for fire and they have to stay well away from missile troops. But they are the only outriders I have, I like variety but light cavalry are a pain for an oldster like myself to micromanage.
Light cavalry are just as good as heavy for mopping up fleeing troops though, just make sure they cant rally.
Orlanth wrote: Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Can't you just chuck them on Skirmish mode? I have noticed skirmish mode in TWW2 seems a bit more intelligent than TWW1. TWW1 they'd often wait too long before kiting away and thus end up getting trapped or surrounded, TWW2 they seem to make more of an effort to keep away (to the point you have to be more vigilant if you DO need them to move somewhere specific that you turn off skirmisher mode first).
Orlanth wrote: Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Can't you just chuck them on Skirmish mode? I have noticed skirmish mode in TWW2 seems a bit more intelligent than TWW1. TWW1 they'd often wait too long before kiting away and thus end up getting trapped or surrounded, TWW2 they seem to make more of an effort to keep away (to the point you have to be more vigilant if you DO need them to move somewhere specific that you turn off skirmisher mode first).
I think overall they just increased the range that skirmish mode forces units to try and maintain, ironicly though, skink javelins range is actually shorter than the range skirmish mode forces them to keep. Overall though it works way better than TWW1
Got about 14 territories now in my mortal empires campaign with queek. Still got 2 dwarf allies (yep dwarfs are my skaven's closest allies) and somehow my closest buddy has almost as much military power as me on one territory. With his help we finished off the necrarch brotherhood (i did the heavy lifting mostly). I think all of the not africa's undead factions hate me. Only the strigoi kingdoms pose a threat to me however and they annoyingly keep making more armies despite us killing them constantly.
I didn't really make any of the new units i can make so only one army is fairly current tier and most are running on clanrats as the mainstay unit (one is half or a third composed of slaves). I really need to update them but managing all my territories is becoming a chore esp. with the constant fighting in the west and the moving battle-line territories.
Orlanth wrote: Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Can't you just chuck them on Skirmish mode? I have noticed skirmish mode in TWW2 seems a bit more intelligent than TWW1. TWW1 they'd often wait too long before kiting away and thus end up getting trapped or surrounded, TWW2 they seem to make more of an effort to keep away (to the point you have to be more vigilant if you DO need them to move somewhere specific that you turn off skirmisher mode first).
I think overall they just increased the range that skirmish mode forces units to try and maintain, ironicly though, skink javelins range is actually shorter than the range skirmish mode forces them to keep. Overall though it works way better than TWW1
I rarely ever used Jav Skinks to know. I find Skirmishing Chameleons are really good. They need a bit of micro to make sure they haven't been pushed out of range by an enemy who started chasing them but then turned around, basically just need to make sure their target is whoever is trying to chase them. But they really just peck away at targets.
Unfortunately in campaign late game it's more about elite stacks than it is about cool tactics and efficient builds so skinks in general become a bit useless.
Orlanth wrote: Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Can't you just chuck them on Skirmish mode? I have noticed skirmish mode in TWW2 seems a bit more intelligent than TWW1. TWW1 they'd often wait too long before kiting away and thus end up getting trapped or surrounded, TWW2 they seem to make more of an effort to keep away (to the point you have to be more vigilant if you DO need them to move somewhere specific that you turn off skirmisher mode first).
I think overall they just increased the range that skirmish mode forces units to try and maintain, ironicly though, skink javelins range is actually shorter than the range skirmish mode forces them to keep. Overall though it works way better than TWW1
I rarely ever used Jav Skinks to know. I find Skirmishing Chameleons are really good. They need a bit of micro to make sure they haven't been pushed out of range by an enemy who started chasing them but then turned around, basically just need to make sure their target is whoever is trying to chase them. But they really just peck away at targets.
Unfortunately in campaign late game it's more about elite stacks than it is about cool tactics and efficient builds so skinks in general become a bit useless.
You mean like spamming 10 monsters and clicking the 'I win' button? I'm sure that's expensive to buy and maintain though.
Orlanth wrote: Outriders need to be micromanaged to lure opponents.
Can't you just chuck them on Skirmish mode? I have noticed skirmish mode in TWW2 seems a bit more intelligent than TWW1. TWW1 they'd often wait too long before kiting away and thus end up getting trapped or surrounded, TWW2 they seem to make more of an effort to keep away (to the point you have to be more vigilant if you DO need them to move somewhere specific that you turn off skirmisher mode first).
I think overall they just increased the range that skirmish mode forces units to try and maintain, ironicly though, skink javelins range is actually shorter than the range skirmish mode forces them to keep. Overall though it works way better than TWW1
I rarely ever used Jav Skinks to know. I find Skirmishing Chameleons are really good. They need a bit of micro to make sure they haven't been pushed out of range by an enemy who started chasing them but then turned around, basically just need to make sure their target is whoever is trying to chase them. But they really just peck away at targets.
Unfortunately in campaign late game it's more about elite stacks than it is about cool tactics and efficient builds so skinks in general become a bit useless.
You mean like spamming 10 monsters and clicking the 'I win' button? I'm sure that's expensive to buy and maintain though.
I'm talking when you hit the point that you can't really afford lots of low tier units in an army because a full stack is 20 units regardless of whether it's made of Temple Guard or Skinks and the TG will win games and the Skink one will just bounce off the enemy full stacks.
When the AI is rocking up with nothing but armoured troops blow darts don't really do much anymore.
Recently beat the vortex with Malekith on very hard; now doing mortal empires with Malekith on legendary, took me about 25-30 tries to setup my base and surroundings, am at the first wave of chaos around turn 150, wrecked 5/7 armies with not a scratch on my territory, fought off another 3 different single armies from teclis, lizardmen factions, the AP weapons from the dark elves is really a plus vs chaos; only real setback was losing a couple armies and their lords to the Lizardmen.
Vs hellcannon BS, you need to line up in a skirmish line, single file, laugh at their face when they miss or kills 1 guy!
Probably more a short term end to hostilities until they are in a better situation to kill each other again. It's not like they're military allies or something.
I'm somewhere over 160 turns in (perhaps 180?). My game was going well. Still might be. When the undead enemy we were fighting was on the ropes i suddenly had some of my trade routes cut. The big issue being this annoyed my dwarf buddies for some stupid reason and i lost a significant amount of income and started being in debt significantly. Just to put this in perspective went from 250 to 50 or 0 relationship with one just from trade routes being cut.
Anyway chaos came into the world and i lost a territory from them. It didn't help they were raiding my lands and really put me at negative income. Managed to kill one of the 4 armies in that sub-faction and lost queek's army taking most of it down but there's also yet another army from another chaos sub-faction at the very least. Not to mention i'm getting sieged by that vampire enemy somewhere else and my allies are basically dumb ***es right now. The vampire enemy army's attack is rather pitiful and i should be able to handle it pretty easily though.
What really miffs me about all these chaos armies is that from what i've seen they bypassed multiple territories just to come attack mine. It's incredibly stupid and frustrating. That said crooked moon mutinous gits did the same and took one of my territories as well. It's the only time they did or at least managed to hold onto it. I have plenty of defenses and walls at territories to the north, the east of my base is just an enemy getting killed by another enemy so my only real issue is to the western territories.
Chaos' first incursion wrecked me. 8 stacks his my territories, and I lost maybe a quarter of my land when all was said and done. I still hadn't fully confederated Ulthuan yet, so the 4 regions I ended up losing, other factions snagged up before I could free an army from the fight to get to them.
Dark Elves took advantage of my distraction to push back into their territory I had taken, and half my Naggaroth territory was lost as well.
That was just the first incursion... Archaon's going to suck.
Probably more a short term end to hostilities until they are in a better situation to kill each other again. It's not like they're military allies or something.
Eh. There should be _something_ in the AI behaviors that makes that not possible. I can see the AI getting all sorts of confused about it, possibly to the point of never restarting the war (which is obviously really bad for Skarsnik)
Considering I've seen the Greenskins confederate the Mutinous Gits before, it seems borked.
Who are the mutinous gits from a fluff perspective and why should other greenskins hate them so much as not to make peace treaties with them? I don't remember them in the official GW fluff so I just figured they were something like a rebellion against Skarsnik.
I always assumed Orc and Goblin politics was a very fluid thing, just following whoever is most successful at any given point in time and putting down treaties to keep yourself alive before breaking them to become the new top dog.
But yeah, definitely hoping they fix Chaos in the campaign and introduce Norsca soon. I'm playing a Wood Elf campaign at the moment just because WE economy is based on razing rather than holding settlements, so if Chaos sweeps in worst case scenario I can fall back to Athel Loren and deal with them before getting back on the razing train.
Trying to build up a bit of a buffer, playing WE in the past I've always just worked at a massive negative income and used the razing to keep positive, trying to build a bit of an anti-chaos buffer this time.
It's funny how WE play like I feel many other armies SHOULD play (Orcs for example).
Has anyone ever tried an "evil" Bretonnian game where you just ignore Chivalry and instead build crusades which loot and sack rather than being all goody goody? Was wondering if that was something that would be interesting but I can't remember the negative effects of low Chivalry.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Who are the mutinous gits from a fluff perspective and why should other greenskins hate them so much as not to make peace treaties with them? I don't remember them in the official GW fluff so I just figured they were something like a rebellion against Skarsnik.
I always assumed Orc and Goblin politics was a very fluid thing, just following whoever is most successful at any given point in time and putting down treaties to keep yourself alive before breaking them to become the new top dog.
The mutinous gits are a CA invention to get around the fact that Karak Eight Peaks is held by Belegar, Skarsnik and Queek in the lore. So now all three want to get their home back. So Skarsnik and the gits making peace is like Franz letting the Reikland rebels have Altdorf.
I've probably lost a good 4-5 territories now but i gained one from crooked moon mutinous gits which took a poorly defended territory earlier on. I smashed their forces and their held territory pretty handily. They're seemingly weak in that area.
As far as the main chaos force assaulting me i took down about 2 armies i think and 2-3 are heavily battered. The rest of my garrisoned forces are holding fairly well so that's going fairly well. One of the chaos armies also sieged and attacked one of my territories after they lost against that very territory before so i doubt they'll get it this time around.
Also strigoi kingdoms took one of the territories i was holding before after he took it from my dwarf ally which took it after i lost it and it was just a chaos ruin. All of those things happening annoyed me. I think it was the black pyramid of nagash territory. Anyway the strigoi are getting fairly strong again even though they lost an army not terribly long ago.
So anyway i'm on 10 territories now down from 14 or 15. A third of my land lost is still pretty significant and 2 territories were heavily defended too.
