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Yeah. I definitely didn't like it at launch either, but it seems to have grown on the community of the years myself included. I'm honestly just guessing though. If they're making a new historical themed total war game, Empire would seem the most obvious unless they're launching something entirely new.

I'd love a Total War game set in the Three Kingdom's period of China, or maybe the post Seljuq invasion of the Abbasid Caliphate. Medeival III would be sweet too for that matter. I'll bet Feudal India would be a cool setting as well.

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah. I definitely didn't like it at launch either, but it seems to have grown on the community of the years myself included. I'm honestly just guessing though. If they're making a new historical themed total war game, Empire would seem the most obvious unless they're launching something entirely new.

I'd love a Total War game set in the Three Kingdom's period of China, or maybe the post Seljuq invasion of the Abbasid Caliphate. Medeival III would be sweet too for that matter. I'll bet Feudal India would be a cool setting as well.

Lot of talk that they'll be looking at China.

I'd seriously love a 3 kingdoms game XD Just cause Koei shovels them out every couple of years doesn't mean CA shouldn't!

Koei's pretty much the only major developer that does anything with that period.

Of course, Koei and CA are the only two major developers that do much with the Japanese Sengoku Jidai, as well.

I'd prefer a medieval Indian or African setting.

Eumerin wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
We're overdue for Empire II: Total War.

Maybe, although iirc Empire was the first Total War game that people didn't like at launch.

It was released too early. If they make it what it needs to be in today's graphics engine we'll be set.

The Bretonnians are out, and so is Isabella. I haven't had a chance to do anything with them yet, though. There was a 2GB update yesterday. And before you can use them on Steam today, you need to go to both expansions in the Steam store and select Download. This doesn't actually download anything extra, but instead apparently lets the game know that you're authorized to use them.

The front menus of the games have changed slightly. The Campaign selection layout is slightly different (the big campaign is now much more heavily emphasized now over the Beastmen and Wood Elf DLC campaigns). And when you go to the nation select screen, the DLC items that you haven't purchased yet are now hidden behind a button at the end of the list of nations. So you don't have to look at the various options that you haven't yet paid for. Isabella and Vlad are now grouped together under their own nation (since they start in Western Sylvania) instead of with the other undead lords.

Yah I had to screw with that this morning too. Took me about 10 min to actually play the Bret campaign, but then I had to go to work. I really don't know who to attack first as Bretonia because they are all castles next to me and not settlements. Prob sail out and attack something.

I have played about 100 turns of Brets and I love them. I have just finished uniting Bretonnia and I did not have to fight any of my countrymen, which was nice.

 Tagony wrote:
Yah I had to screw with that this morning too. Took me about 10 min to actually play the Bret campaign, but then I had to go to work. I really don't know who to attack first as Bretonia because they are all castles next to me and not settlements. Prob sail out and attack something.

Grind the Orcs that will spawn every other turns, gives some good early levels for your lord

Make sure you have spare lords with vows kicking around, I had my king assassinated and the replacement lord I put in the army had no vows, it bumped my upkeep to unmanageable levels, if you do not do this, the AI can basically defeat a full stack of yours by simply assassinating your lord, which is quite frustrating.

 Bobthehero wrote:

 Tagony wrote:
Yah I had to screw with that this morning too. Took me about 10 min to actually play the Bret campaign, but then I had to go to work. I really don't know who to attack first as Bretonia because they are all castles next to me and not settlements. Prob sail out and attack something.

Grind the Orcs that will spawn every other turns, gives some good early levels for your lord

Make sure you have spare lords with vows kicking around, I had my king assassinated and the replacement lord I put in the army had no vows, it bumped my upkeep to unmanageable levels, if you do not do this, the AI can basically defeat a full stack of yours by simply assassinating your lord, which is quite frustrating.

Where do they spawn? Gront zingt? Because marienburg camps that.

I think, I played with Bordeleaux and they were too far for me to kill with Mousillon as my neighboor

10 turns later and I think I have lost control.

Tried my first battle out with them. This is going to be interesting. I'm very unuse to running a cav heavy army, but the way the Peasant system is set up, you have to.

I like it so far. Will definitely continue to play it out.

I used to play the occasional Cavalry army in Rome 2, it's kinda like playing 'hide and seek' on the map, pause a lot, split your units up, charge them in the rear.

I dunno how that'd work with a heavy cavalry focused army like Bretonnians though.

The start is pretty screwed up. There's a pretty nasty event right at the start (note - if you control your entire province, then you can set a province-wide order to cut the loss in half). You *can* end it prematurely by wiping out an orc settlement. But I did the Bretonnia start, and the only nearby group of orcs is next to Marianburg, which you star out at war with. I hit the orcs early on... and got killed by Marianburg immediately afterwards. I hit Marianburg early on... and had constant revolts due to the massive Control loss from the event. Finally, I gave up and sat the event out.

The fact that you can unite Bretonnia without having to fight any of your fellow lords is a nice addition. It would have been nice to have something similar for the Empire. I wouldn't be surprised if the High Elves and Lizardmen have something similar as well.

The game tracks what your lords are doing. If you leave your lord sitting in a castle for a long period of time, then he'll get labeled a procrastinator, and receive a trait that reduces his campaign map speed and makes him more vulnerable to enemy agents. Unfortunately, that means that leaving a lord as a permanent garrison is a bad idea.

Brettonian Knight armies work generally fine. Heavy cavalry are fairly survivable although they are very dependent on fighting in good terrain and some enemies are hard for them to break though (lots of Empire Halberdiers..).

As cavalry are so expensive it does mean that you tend to have less armies than you would normally. I am probably at around turn 60-70 now and I only have 2 field armies. Louen's army filled with Grail knights and other heavy cavalry and a supporting army of peasants who make up the numbers with sieges or in bad terrain. By this stage of the game I would generally have at least 3 full field armies.

The 'nasty event' is actually really useful. The 'rebellions' are all small stacks or Orc and Goblin units who are basically there to level up your lord and provide you will lots of chivalry points and some gold. It does mean that you can't be aggressive for the first 20 turns or so but it really helps boost you early game, especially as you effectively can't loot settlements.

I have discovered that I would make a poor ruler of Bretonnia, i find the whole civalry system annoying and I certainly dont like the waiting game that Bretonnia is early on, having to just sit around and wipe out Orcs and Beastmen time and time again is somewhat tiedous when Id rather go figth the Empire or something.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

The 'nasty event' is actually really useful. The 'rebellions' are all small stacks or Orc and Goblin units who are basically there to level up your lord and provide you will lots of chivalry points and some gold. It does mean that you can't be aggressive for the first 20 turns or so but it really helps boost you early game, especially as you effectively can't loot settlements.

Yes, and no.

The one in my capitol province was indeed a group of goblins. The one that popped up in Marianberg was human. You could argue that the end result was the same. But it's still worth noting, imo.

That just means that you took Marienburg too early

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
That just means that you took Marienburg too early

Bingo.

Stay put for 20 turns. Farm the orcs. Gain levels, magic items, etc...

The Bretonnians just don't mesh well with how I play total war games XD I Like to take a sucker punch to the economy early on and build 3-4 full stacks of cheap expendable troops to bun rush down a large defensible territory but you can't really do that with the peasant system. Too many armies too early and you're sucking for money. With their larger recruitment cap and the peasant thing the goal seems to be to build armies when you need them and disband your peasants when you don't (a 8-10 stack of cavalry can run down rebels and small beast men armies).

Just not my style.

Back to building the the great Eastern Wall for me (with purging some ork scum). Still haven't tried the Wood Elves out either, but the Wood Elves and me don't seem like we'd get along from a style standpoint either XD

Well, in all fairness, the army system is perfectly designed for Bretonnia.

I can definitely understand it not being what you like though.

Yeah I don't think it's bad. I like the variety they've given armies in the game. The mechanic just makes the Bretonnian's anti-me in terms of style so it's outside my normal game strategy XD EDIT: Though you don't necessarily need armies with the Brets to conquer things with how easy it is to confederate with the other kingdoms. In 20 turns you'll be able to join yourself with 2-3 other groups.

The Crooked Moons on the other hand are disgustingly me (though I don't really like goblin's as an aesthetic). I played a normal difficulty game with them and had conquered 3 Dwarven Kingdoms and retaken 8 peaks within 30 turns.

I am finally 70 or so turns into my first campaign and loving pretty much everything about the game. I chose the dwarfs as they seemed to suit my style of sturdy infantry and plenty of ranged units (I do love shooting off a volley of bullets into the side of an orc army). I need some Gyrocopters fast though because I have spent far too long chasing a lone unit of archers around the battlefield with my stunty-legged warriors.

The last TW game I played was Rome 2 which go painfully boring pretty early on in the game because the AI was not threatening enough in the campaign, TW:W certainly keeps you on your toes as my empire is currently under attack from both Chaos and a couple of Orc waaghs that popped out of nowhere...

In fact the only thing I don't like about the game is that there are very few city fights which I excelled at in Rome 2, being able to hold a village with a couple of units of pikemen and some peltasts. It's very hard to mount a decent defense when your garrison is plucked out of the city and stuck on the bottom of a massive hill.

I may try Bretonnia next but I have a feeling it won't fit my play style. I like to hit hard and fast early in the campaign and am not very fond of cav heavy armies as there is so much micro managing needed.



Of all the DLCs, are any a must have? I like the idea of running a horde army so Chaos or Beastmen could be quite fun..

I'm not sure I've ever defended in a siege battle. Do AI do that anymore? They either just raid my territory or siege until I attack/run out of turns. Also, none of the DLC are must haves imo, they're all pretty decent though.

I had some orcs foolishly scale the walls of karak eight peaks not long ago. Their 1000 strong army disintegrated once they were in range of my guns

The vamps attacked a city of mine as well. Unfortunately I didn't realize that my walls were in pieces until they were sat on the control point so I had to mob Vlad von Carstein with everything I had in order to take him out and the army with him. Very nerve racking!

If you're only 70 turns in, then my guess is that Chaos hasn't really started rampaging yet.

Have you gotten the message about Archeon showing up? That usually happens a bit later. When that happens, it means that the north of the map (particularly the northeast of the map) is about to get hit by three full-size stacks of Chaos Warriors, plus some full-size stacks of Chaos Beastmen (the Chaos Brayherd), as well as multiple full-size stacks of Skaelings and Varg.

It's going on right now in my current Bretonnian game. And because the Empire factions were too fragmented, and the Chaos and Norsemen stacks have pretty much ignored the Vampire regions (the Chaos Warriors basically made a beeline from the Northeast corner straight to Altdorf - which I owned, btw, after finding it in ruins about turn thirty or so - meaning that they passed well north of the vampires), I suspect I might be looking at a loss this time.


Speaking of which, there's one thing that I find extremely annoying and stupid about dealing with Chaos in this game.

One of the various Chaos factions attacks a settlement, and razes it. This causes the creation of a Chaos shrine/idol/whatever it is that generates points of Chaos corruption. They problem is that because the settlement is still considered to be razed, the only way to remove the "structure" (which is what the game classifies it as) is to go in and settle the place. This means that either -

1.) You lose a good-sized chunk of your army strength (since settling a razed site requires men from the stack that's doing so) when you're probably still extremely close to the front line, or
2.) You can't, because the settlement in question is for a different race, meaning that your adjacent territory gets hit with Osmosis corruption until the one of the NPC nations of the relevant race gets around to settling it.


And if you chose Option 1, then when your army moves on, one of the kajillion stacks of Norsemen (that get replaced at full strength pretty much two turns after you wiped out the last one) is going to slip around your lines and raze the place again, turning it once again into a source of Chaos corruption.

They need a way to allow you to clear that corruption source out without requiring you to actually settle the location.

 Wolfblade wrote:
I'm not sure I've ever defended in a siege battle. Do AI do that anymore?

Generally the AI will just siege until it flips but it does sometimes attempt to scale the ramparts. If you sally you fight a field battle.

Their 1000 strong army disintegrated once they were in range of my guns

I love Dwarf garrisons XD You can stop anything short of of the Chaos Warrior three stack with them. Especially vamps actually XD The answer is that undead don't like mass crossbow fire, and the armored undead don't like mass gunfire! So the answer is a 20 stack of Quarrelers and Thunders, cause you'll still win XD

Did some poking around on the official forums. Found out a few interesting items.

1.) The entire world map is in the game right now. The developers merely limited which parts of it you can access.
2.) A release schedule was either made available or hacked (possibly by the same people that figured out the entire world map is in the game). Every release to date - both DLC and FLC - is on that calendar. Both the Bretonnians and a Free Lord (later confirmed by CA to be Isabella - it appears that if Total War hadn't won MWNL4, then she would have still been released, albeit a little later) are the third and second to last item on the calendar. The last item on the calendar is something called "The Old Friend". There's a lot of speculation about what the Old Friend might be. CA has apparently stated that there will be no more paid DLC releases for the first Warhammer game. That suggests that it will be a FLC of some sort.
3.) Total War: Warhammer made a larger profit than any of the prior Total War releases to date, apparently by a very sizable margin.
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