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AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Moosatronic Warrior wrote:
I don't fully understand how the maths works for this game so couldn't work out which is a better counter to enemy cavalry; Horned Ones or Cold Ones with spears. How much difference does the anti-large make?

I don't know about the specific match up, but if you hover your mouse over the damage stat it'll tell you how much additional damage gets done to large targets, so you can figure out how much damage will be done vs various targets.

I don't think I ever tried that! Sounds like it will be very handy, thanks. I'll probably have to test things in custom battles as the armor piercing difference and defensive stats will also have an effect. I was hoping someone would make my life easy and say "Horned ones obviously dumbass!" lol.

Bonus vs large/infantry gives a bonus to damage (distributed between armour piercing and non armour piercing damage at the same ratio as the unit's base weapon strength) and melee attack.

Melee attack is effectively weapon skill right? As in it's how likely you are to hit. I basically know nothing about the stats in this game despite putting hundreds of hours into TWW 1.

The base chance to hit is 40%, assuming equal weapon skill. Each point of melee attack is +1%, and each point of melee defense on the target is -1%.

So a Lord with melee attack 65 attacks a swordsman with melee defense 30, he gets a 40 + 65 - 30 = 75% chance to hit.

Some other info you might find useful:

Shields only work in a 60 degree front arc, not 180 like is commonly believed.

Armour works by reducing any incoming non-AP damage by a random percentage between your full and half your full armour value. If an attack dealing no AP damage (such as Tyrion's Sunfang ability) hits a Chaos Warrior with 100 armor, the damage is reduced by 50-100%, 75% on average. Accordingly it is not possible to have armour higher than 200 (which would offer immunity to non-AP damage) and using non-AP attacks against high armour targets like steam tanks is essentially pointless. Almost all attacks deal some degree of AP damage as well, though, which ignore the armor reduction entirely and just applies the damage.

I could go on and on about how charge bonus and exhaustion works, and so on, but that would make this post very long.

Here's a couple of practical tips though:

Use siege towers if you can. Ladders have an absurdly massive vigour cost which basically gaurantees instant exhaustion.

Rear charges not only hurt morale but a unit has -75% melee defense against attacks coming from behind them. Don't get rear charged.

The J button (IIRC) automatically pulls a unit backwards, out of melee. Useful for charging in again.

Using CTRL (again, IIRC - might have been ALT) for artillery orders them to attack an area rather than a unit, which actually improves accuracy.

Start of an early playthrough with tomb kings (Settra), bit over an hour with part 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsBXxhKp06s

Intro video starts around 3:40, game starts around 8:00

 Ashiraya wrote:
The base chance to hit is 40%...

Apologies for the late reply. That is all very useful information thank you!

The attack ground with artillery sounds like it could be a nice trick with Solar Enigines on netted units.


Edit: Having looked at the stats with a better understanding of what they mean it seems that horned ones do the same damage vs large as Cold ones with spears. Then its a choice between better defense on horned ones vs their increased cost and rampage.

Remember that bonus vs X improves melee attack, not just damage.

This is particularly relevant on Lords. Kholek, with his 500+ weapon strength, doesn't really care about 30ish extra damage on top of that. But the 30ish extra melee attack makes him maul giants and treemen all day long.

So, with Tomb Kings coming tomorrow, some tips based on various videos floating around:

1) Your first (free) hero in the early turns should almost always be a Necrotect. Not only do they support the constructs (which are pretty much locked as the best units in the roster), but popping one in the army (or taking a shot at a percentage chance for other actions, like damaging walls) unlocks the rite for the character Necrotect which colonizes ruins at level 3 for 'free' (other the 4K gold for the rite itself).

Considering the slow growth rates and limited income, this is vital. It may even be worth razing cities and starting over when you can cast the rite again, if it means getting a tier 3 rather than a tier 2 city.

2) Trade goods are a big deal for tomb kings, as you need them for awakening legendary units and crafting items. Don't neglect them (and take advantage of newly spawned level 3 cities...)

3) Getting an additional army quickly is vital, and putting them out to sea is probably the best way to gain gold, with constant fighting coming a close second. Just because you don't need cash for armies doesn't mean you don't have uses for it. Rites, mortuary cult and city building all depend on lots of gold rolling in. A couple skull islands will be necessary to fund growth and power.

4) Don't neglect rank and file units. They're terrible, but they're useful to tank damage and pop the various tiers of souls, triggering regen and the free ushabti unit. You always will want some. With too few, something else is going to take the damage, and even the constructs aren't invulnerable. Disbanding and replacing them may well be quite necessary, even if it costs skill ranks.

5) Pick your dynasty research based on what you're using or plan to use in the near future. First dynasty will help the rank and file units. Combine with the red skill line on lords, and you can get them up to the point of not completely trash.

Conflicted today. Due to the shutdown, I was going to have today off. So I could play this all day.

Now i'm not, but I know I'm going to get paid. Oh the troubles of life.

 djones520 wrote:
Conflicted today. Due to the shutdown, I was going to have today off. So I could play this all day.

Now i'm not, but I know I'm going to get paid. Oh the troubles of life.

Ha! I know -exactly- how you feel.
Was thinking the same thing after I woke up.

This DLC is making realise why I abandoned Warhammer after AOS, Tomb Kings were my favourite race and they just vanished, feels great to play as them again!

If I understand correctly, Tomb Kings can raise and maintain units for free, but unit caps are tied to buildings. That's really cool, and I think its how most armies should work. Not the bit about free units and no maintenance, but the part about capping unit totals to buildings should definitely be something for all armies. It'd stop the thing where you just build a single region with Phoenix Guard, Swordmaster and Star Dragon factories and then just continually spam all those units to build one mega army after the next, while the rest of your empire just works as a gold farm.

On the flipside it cuts down their building diversity somewhat since now they do have to spam certain building types. Interestingly it makes expansion cities more important for them; they are not just a stop-gap on the way to expansion but an actual part of your army management.

With most other factions you'd retain a core of key production settlements; if you lose outer ones you could at least rebuild fresh high tier armies and move them out - whilst with Tomb Kings if you start losing settlements you start reducing the number of higher tier units you can retain.

 Overread wrote:
On the flipside it cuts down their building diversity somewhat since now they do have to spam certain building types. Interestingly it makes expansion cities more important for them; they are not just a stop-gap on the way to expansion but an actual part of your army management.

With most other factions you'd retain a core of key production settlements; if you lose outer ones you could at least rebuild fresh high tier armies and move them out - whilst with Tomb Kings if you start losing settlements you start reducing the number of higher tier units you can retain.

Expansion has other benefits besides building slots as well tied to TK mechanics. Cities and towns increase your research by 3-5%. So staying small and researching multiple dynasties will cripple your research rate if you don't expand. Gathering resources from expansion gives you more crafting options too. It makes for a very strategically offensive oriented faction. I like it so far, unit caps don't feel too restrictive because there is always some space to build an additional barracks. But like Sebster says, the factory provinces for armies make you focus the other on gold production, I always ran out of building options for gold farm provinces, here that's not a problem.

I started with Setra on normal. It's a bit too easy but still fun. I went east and south and then swept around to Arkhan. I just wiped him out and now I've sent 4 armies to Lustria to get the two books there. I'm getting involved in some bigger wars now but it doesn't batter because I have a huge empire so I can keep pumping out stacks. It's certainly an interesting campaign because you really don't care about losing units. I'm really liking the chariots too. They feel very rewarding to use. My only regret has been that I don't have any big constructs yet. I keep spending my gold on leveling up all the new settlements I get. I should probably save 3 turns and get some.

Aye I really love using the chariots as well, a unit you have to micro to get the best out of it; but so rewarding when they sweep behind the enemy lines and tear into their archers.

I think its also one of the few factions with a very early fast archer/siege hunting unit in the default line-up of purchase choices. Many other factions you have to wait a fair bit to get hold of fast moving units in order to chase archers.

Every video I watch of TK gameplay makes me excited to try them. I just hope that by the time I get around to picking up the expansion someone has managed to mod in a lore-friendly version of the Black Pyramid, instead of the weird Stargate/AoS-style floating space ship Creative Assembly went for.

 Overread wrote:
On the flipside it cuts down their building diversity somewhat since now they do have to spam certain building types. Interestingly it makes expansion cities more important for them; they are not just a stop-gap on the way to expansion but an actual part of your army management.

That's a fair point, but I never had any building diversity as it was. In my key province I had the full set of military buildings. Every other city everywhere else I had walls, buildings that gave me gold. If a specific province had a specific problem, like happiness or corruption, then I might build something to address that.

I don't know if other people did it differently, but I felt the game was always pushing me to playing this way. Building a single star dragon facility and then just spamming a constant stream of star dragons, supplemented by a stream of swordmasters and phoenix guard. It meant the late stage game got boring - I've now played with every single faction (other than Tomb Kings), but have only actually completed the game once. The early and mid-game is loads of fun, but once you have the ability to crank out high tier units only, then either you spam all powerful armies or you deliberately handicap youself.

Unit caps that increase as you expand and build more high tier cities seem the best answer to that issue. Its interesting that right now its just a way to make the Tomb Kings different, but I can see it massively improving the overall game if something similar was applied to all armies (though they would still have production costs and upkeep).

 sebster wrote:

 Overread wrote:
On the flipside it cuts down their building diversity somewhat since now they do have to spam certain building types. Interestingly it makes expansion cities more important for them; they are not just a stop-gap on the way to expansion but an actual part of your army management.

That's a fair point, but I never had any building diversity as it was. In my key province I had the full set of military buildings. Every other city everywhere else I had walls, buildings that gave me gold. If a specific province had a specific problem, like happiness or corruption, then I might build something to address that.

I don't know if other people did it differently, but I felt the game was always pushing me to playing this way. Building a single star dragon facility and then just spamming a constant stream of star dragons, supplemented by a stream of swordmasters and phoenix guard. It meant the late stage game got boring - I've now played with every single faction (other than Tomb Kings), but have only actually completed the game once. The early and mid-game is loads of fun, but once you have the ability to crank out high tier units only, then either you spam all powerful armies or you deliberately handicap youself.

Unit caps that increase as you expand and build more high tier cities seem the best answer to that issue. Its interesting that right now its just a way to make the Tomb Kings different, but I can see it massively improving the overall game if something similar was applied to all armies (though they would still have production costs and upkeep).

That's more or less how I played it, too. When the empire got large enough I'd set up training bases in more convenient locations, or if a settlement had a resource that buffed certain units enough to bother, but still not much outside the general idea of "core region surrounded by numbers of comparatively ablative money-making and roadblock regions".

Every time I've deviated from that it's been more of a struggle, but not really in a difficult way, more just an annoying one that's tolerable, but noticeably more inefficient to my playstyle.

Hard to play Vampire Counts that way since they can only recruit locally. Kind of annoying when you need to slog your whole army back to Drakenhof (or wherever your military city is) to recruit anything better than Skeletons.

VC can get a lot of surprisingly high tier units from battlefield sites. Even vargheist and varghulf.

Voss wrote:
VC can get a lot of surprisingly high tier units from battlefield sites. Even vargheist and varghulf.

I ran into this issue one of my TWW1 campaigns a while back. Streamrolled through to the VC area as Empire fairly early in the game, and suddenly they started pulling Terrorgheists and the like out of their arse from battlefield site recruitment.

Update: The base chance to hit was changed to 35% in TWH2, down from 40%, and the charge bonus duration was increased to 17 seconds (up from 15), fading linearly over its duration.

Sorry for outdated info.

So my Arkhan campaign is winding down. It's been... sorta fun?
Building up the multiple cities to build multiple expensive high tier unit buildings is... rather a pain in the pelvic bone. Especially with the nerf to ocean treasure (at least for TK- skull islands are down to 3k from 10k), and the crappiness of the low tier units really slows things down in the mid game.

Arkhan's vampire units are... eh. Hexwraiths are fine, ghouls are OK (at least better than warriors/spears, and really good at specific targets). Dogs and bats are worse versions of TK units. But the big thing is they have no bonuses whatsoever. No research, no lord traits, and hexwraiths are 1 per tier 3 building.

As a hybrid lord, getting him to point of really useful is difficult, doubly so since he has no TK buff spells, and several of the Death spells are not very useful against undead (but great against the Brets and Empire you have to deal with starting out- his start is actually pretty easy, but ramps up quickly)

The big problem is the final battle. Books aren't a problem at all, his battle for the staff of nagash (which combos absurdly well with the tomb blade) is fun, but puzzling (Settra gives the staff of nagash to...skaven?). But the final battle is a full stack (including 2 hierotitans) lead by Khatep, a pair of divided stack lead by Khalida and a liche priest with 6 necro-knights) And then a full stack lead by Settra with three sphinxes, 2 catapults and a bunch of chariots and ushabti that start at the far end of the map after you've dealt with two armies. Yeah you get a couple reinforcements in the form of bats, ghouls and crypt horrors, and a few special powers but settra's fresh army of amazing stuff stacked up after a full battle is... rough. And both times I fought settra he seemed... fairly immune to damage. And just wandered out of combat with impunity.

I just don't have much of urge to pass 20-30 turns to build up cash to raise the cap for the good stuff.

Because the other side of the TK campaign is, well, a pretty big disconnect to everything else. No one cares about what's going on in the desert and the TK don't have much reason to care about things outside it. My wars were immediate neighbors, book based, or being dragged into trivial stuff by allies of convenience, with no follow up from the enemies I was at war with. They just peaced out after awhile without actually coming to fight. I secured the desert fairly early on and just wandered around for books and the quest battles - the tomb blade wasn't far (and near a book) and the staff and final battle are right around the Black Tower and Black Pyramid.

Rogue armies with Books also behave oddly. Two never moved, and the third just wandered near the vampire coast, but they don't seem to engage or attack anyone, just wait for you to come kill them. I think some AI coding protects them from being killed off (I expected they'd be passed off to whomever killed them).


Short version: They're fine to start, and once you've built up with a LOT of money and unlocked multiple high tier buildings, they're fine. But there is a huge hill to climb to get to that point, made of upwards of 100,000 gold minimum. (Tomb scorpion building is 6K, The two Sphinxes and Titan are individual 10K buildings, plus the cost of upgrading the city tiers, multiplied by 2-3 capital cities minimum, plus the growth time.

Interesting note- killing the dwarves early on was necessary- the capital I sieged down to attrition, the village (just the garrison) I fought outright, and that was rough. Catapult, 4 crossbow units, and a map with a single landbridge guarded by warriors and miners. No way to outflank, just chop through. Rough, and I can't imagine it going well at all later on.

A chaos/dark elf rogue army showed up, and I thought about attacking them. I've never seen an almost entirely red bar on the resolution estimate before. Against another hybrid chaos army (with a book) I just... bounced. That was ~turn 50, so I had very little beyond a single titan, but I did almost nothing to that army, even fighting manually. Though a low level lord and no magic didn't help.

I bought the campaign pack but have been struggling to get in to it. I think I've already played myself out on TW.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I bought the campaign pack but have been struggling to get in to it. I think I've already played myself out on TW.

Was doing pretty well with Khalida in a mortal empires campaign. Smacked around everyone on my side of the mountains, ran over the orcs, karak zorn, and finally Queek and vassalized the Dune Kingdoms. Did her quest battle (which was fun) and... crash on the post-battle screen. May try the battle again tomorrow, but didn't feel like redoing it immediately (fun but long, and a little too easy).

Poked at Tretch in ME. Weird start position (Hotek's Column, smack in the middle of dark elf territory), and his bonuses are kind of... meh. But interesting skill tree and some great voice lines. Food is even more of a problem than it is for queek. There is one city down the coast that I can see that can actually produce food, and I'm already at zero. I hate this food mechanic so much.


The truly odd things the ME campaign seems a lot more optimized than the vortex campaign. Yeah, more factions so longer turn timer, but loading a save or going to or from battles/campaign map is a bit less beastly. I was hoping they'd improve load times with the dlc.

Been running various tests with a friend and the results are as always interesting. For some highlights: Tomb guard are about on par with stormvermin; skaven win the sword and shield fight, whereas tomb kings win the halberd fight a bit more decisively (but still slowly). Dragon princes firmly beat necropolis knights, and phoenix guard vs halberd TG is a fight the elves win without a single loss on large unit size! Biggest blowout seen in our testing so far. Durthu annihilates settra 1v1 - when on his sphinx settra can spam knockdown Durthu but he still loses by a very large margin, and even magic won't let him win.

I'm loving the Tomb King campaign structure, but man am I struggling to get my head around how Tomb Kings work in battles. I had assumed there'd be a resurrection spell in there somewhere and I'd be combining that with mass numbers to tank out enemies, but it doesn't play like that at all. There's all sorts of passive regen, but no direct regen spell that I can find anywhere. So instead I spam buffs and debuffs, to keep that regen running as much as possible. And the result isn't so much tanking the enemy as mutual attrition, where they run out of bodies before I do.

It's very different and I'm sure I'm doing it really badly right now, but maybe not? Maybe unlike other armies I'm just supposed to lose a bunch of guys in every battle and still call that a solid win?

 -Loki- wrote:
Hard to play Vampire Counts that way since they can only recruit locally. Kind of annoying when you need to slog your whole army back to Drakenhof (or wherever your military city is) to recruit anything better than Skeletons.

You don't take your best general back home to replenish a couple of elite units. You have a secondary general raise the troops back home, and march him out to your best commander to transfer the troops.

At least that's how I've done it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ashiraya wrote:
Update: The base chance to hit was changed to 35% in TWH2, down from 40%, and the charge bonus duration was increased to 17 seconds (up from 15), fading linearly over its duration.

Sorry for outdated info.

That's been really helpful, thanks. Particularly the bit about charge bonus. I was never sure exactly when I was supposed to pull my cavalry out when cycle charging, because I didn't know how long the charge bonus lasted.

 sebster wrote:
And the result isn't so much tanking the enemy as mutual attrition, where they run out of bodies before I do.

It's very different and I'm sure I'm doing it really badly right now, but maybe not? Maybe unlike other armies I'm just supposed to lose a bunch of guys in every battle and still call that a solid win?

Pretty much yes. Your baseline skeleton units exist pretty much only to pin enemies in place and die off in droves to fuel the Realm of Souls bar for your better units. If you chuck five blocks of Spearmen at the enemy and most of them die off, so what? Consolidate the survivors, disband any leftovers, and recruit the units back for free. Really everything that isn't Tomb Guard, a construct, a character, or one of the special regiments is utterly disposable.

It's actually quite impressive that the mechanics of the faction effectively require you to "roleplay" the uncaring and arrogant Tomb King that cares nothing for their servants to succeed

 sebster wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:
Hard to play Vampire Counts that way since they can only recruit locally. Kind of annoying when you need to slog your whole army back to Drakenhof (or wherever your military city is) to recruit anything better than Skeletons.

You don't take your best general back home to replenish a couple of elite units. You have a secondary general raise the troops back home, and march him out to your best commander to transfer the troops.

At least that's how I've done it.

For most factions I just have multiple armies out on crusade and the "lesser" ones become recruitment armies, using global recruitment to get high tier units as they become available. I find it takes too many turns to send an army from "home" to the front line to be useful.

Vampire Counts I just find myself building new armies and my older armies end up low tier until a battlefield resurrection lets me build up some high tier units, it can be useful to intentionally have lots of battles in the same province to build up a nice raise dead pool. Though it's not too bad if you play VC and just start off by conquering the Empire because the distances you have to travel across the Empire aren't huge, it only takes a few turns to send an army from their start location out to the rest of the Empire. If you decide to venture further afield (south in to the Badlands or across the oceans) you can end up with armies 10+ turns worth of movement away from home from very early on.

Conquering the Empire as VC makes life so much easier though, because of the need to keep vampiric corruption high venturing in to areas where you can't build quickly and expand in to adjacent provinces quickly means you'll be fighting uprisings constantly.