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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.

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.

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):

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.

For HE AI, it loves to kill off my lions of charce. The rest of the army comes out with barely a scratch and they are dunbar.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

 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.

How does one intentionally lower public order?

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.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

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.

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.

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.

Answering some questions about Mortal Empires -

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/mortal-empires-with-ian-roxburgh


One bit of information - Queek and Teclis will have different starting positions in the Mortal Empires campaign.

Waitttttt a moment. Where are the wood elves on that map?!

If the nonfree DLC races are excluded I will be mad.

 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?

Did I mess up my math?

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.

Probably somewhere around turn 330 now.

 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).

Tyrion with about 900 weapon strenght is fun to mess around with, however.