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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.

I guess the game decided I needed a spare...

Yeah, TWW1 was way worse, there were times where every settlement and army I had was under "siege" by 3-4 heroes each.

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.

There is an option, in the advanced campaign settings bit, there's another slider with battle difficulty.

Oh. Yey!

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.

I am just wondering if there is a way to cheat a high elf hard campaign so I can get the achievement and not have to play the........ elves.

Are we still able to download a save file from someone else and load it on our client? Anyone know?

Dunno, you could try, they're located here...

C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\The Creative Assembly\Warhammer2\save_games

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.


---

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.

Clan Mors wasn't long for this world after that.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 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.

 nels1031 wrote:

 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.

Sorry for jinksing your game

Ok, yeah Teclis is much harder then Tyrion.

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.

 emptyhat wrote:

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.