Total War: Warhammer 2

I’m playing as Grombrindal. I am trading with both Dwarfs next to me, one not producing any income. Looking at some forum threads, the advice is to turtle until you have walls in your home province, which I do, and tech up a bit, which I’m still working on. I took one GS settlement and now I need to defend it all.

I don’t mean to imply it’s easy, I mean it’s easy compared to the other dwarfs. The other dwarfs are quite difficult because the orcs got buffed so much.

Next time I play Dwarfs I’ll use him.

I actually think a lot of the ME labels for difficulty are misleading. As wisefool was pointing out, most of the dwarves don’t really qualify as “easy” anymore, with the exception of Slayer King, who I would still call a comparatively easy start.

The Empire notably went from a simple faction to a fairly challenging one over the course of WH1, because Beastmen, Skarsnik and Norsca all got added as new threats.

They were always fairly difficult because all the Empire factions were warmongers so you’d end up in fights with like 4 people at once. They added bonuses to Franz and the like to make it easier to unify or at least be at peace eventually, but for a while there all those extra threats just got piled on top of the already rough start of fighting all the other human factions and it was pretty miserable.

My empire campaign at around 150 turns is getting dicey… let me say an old strategy game adage:

“If you are pulling back to your secondary redoubts you are probably starting to lose”

I am worried I may be losing.

BTW with all the dlcs added in there is no easy me campaign. Not one.

Ok so let me comment on Warhammer 2 ME campaign. This is not easy… on any faction. Now one thing I like about playing the empire faction (on me) is that you get 3-4 legendary lords and some great set piece quest battles. But as empire? You are in a tough place.

Just tried a nagarythe (sp) me campaign and by turn 150 the whole elven island looks like a rats nest. I mean wow. II know I am in the western wastelands but if all the other elves are gone … well…)

And all respect aside I don’t think there is ONE dwarven faction that has it easy. Even the slayer king has his hands full.

I plan on digging in again on a new avelorn campaign. She is a bit touchy feely and she has some makeup issues sure. But by gosh it isn’t easy to win a me campaign.

(esp with all dlc loaded- pirates esp)

I agree, my Dwarf campaign on hard has seen me fending off 2 or 3 attacks a turn. And I only have 4 settlements. The GS have confederated and other factions attack me too. I can barely summon more troops. I think I’ve got it under control now, but we’ll see. Thinking about an Empire run after this.

T11 and maybe anyone who knows Warhammer mythos – Is there a possibility that the ME campaign is set to fail? I mean from what I gather it sorta does… in real life – I mean in Warhammer life.

I haven’t looked at Victory conditions in a Warhammer ME campaign. I will do so and get back. But wow it gets hard fast with all the dlc factions running around. there is no “20 turn build up” you are in trouble a bunch.

I don’t know Warhammer mythos, but they’ve certainly made ME difficult for the Dwarfs, cant speak for other factions as I haven’t played any yet. I like the challenge and if I fail, it means I get to try another faction. My gripe is the annoying enemy hero actions every turn and the constant bad events in addition to the constant attacks.

I’m only playing on hard. Maybe they scaled it different than other strategy games where you really have to bump up the difficulty to get a challenge.

Well in the real game, the Old World (and it’s entire universe) were blown up.

I found Khemri to be very reasonable to play in ME.

Easy factions:

Settra (gotta micro battles thought. use the chariots to mow down enemies early, then build up the super statue archers and the sphinx monster and the other monsters.)

original VC: Hemler is kinda new, tried him yesterday. The trick with many scrub armies and autoresolve it. ~5 scrub armies can take down the wood elfs. Necromancer heroes at level 16 can get a super chariot. use blood kisses to level up the upkeep reduction for heroes/armies. Level tech towards -100% upkeep for zombies and skeletons. This means the army is maintenance free.

Isabella/Manfred/etc: they all have tricks to unify and get the other legendary heroes by turn 2 or something silly. Only tried once or twice. Manfred is particular will not die, good mage tank.

wood elfs, sure you’ll be hitting next turn 50 times before you actually play. But then you start taking stuff down. By turn ~90+ you’ll be unified and then each of your armies can take down anything out there. I like the hero that’s the tree that wields trees.

normal snooty elf Tyrion probably is easy too, but haven’t played him in a while. You’re in your own little island, nobody else is gonna come bother you.

I play on normal so ymmv.

Wisefool Ty and RH I think I will talk to you in a few minutes. Wise only one comment: On the ME campaign with all dlc they DO come get you on your island. They all do. dark elves, Nord’s, chaos, and pirates. I am playing Avelorn now and it is going well but…

Reading the comments about the Dwarves and I had to give them a another go. Started as Grombrindal. Got starting area easy enough; gyrocopter and irondrakes do a lot of heavy lifting in the early fights. I’d have Grombrindal in front tanking, and the irondrakes basically dropping fire on the greenskins that choose to engage. Easy battles.

Then comes the expansion and holy fuck. Beastmen wiped out my neighbour. Not Border Princes, the Dwarven neighbour whose name I forget. That’s how important he was. I have to my south a gangbang of Greenskins wanting to invade. I quit from there, it turns out I need to endure a number of turns building up Silver Pass before I can actually do proper expansion. This is all on Very Hard/Hard.

Yeah, Dwarves are not the easy race that the game pretends they are. It is more a war of attrition it seems against Greenskins first before being able to make an impact elsewhere in the new world.

Also, I hate you all for having me fire up the game before the Festag beta is released. And I hate this game for getting me invested in the Warhammer story and having me buy all the newly published Warhammer Chronicles books. Currently reading Tyrion and Teclis, and enjoying it.

…What a great game!

Dwarves used to be super easy.

But I heard Orcs got massively buffed somewhere along the way?

I would play this game more but my internal SSD is only 500 gb and there’s no room on there for anything else, so I’ve been using an external HDD (because they are so cheap) which works well for most games but definitely not for this one.

I do have a new internal SSD, 2TB, waiting for me in England.

Dwarven units are still strong. Think of it more as being trapped between a rock and a hard place. There are threats coming from all sides and only so much space to maneuver, even through the underways.

IIRC they made the waags appear more frequently. In autoresolve, 2 orcs AI stacks will take opposing AI dwarf cities frequently. They will eat the other dwarfs and snowball.

The vampires also got tweaked - back in the day vampires could never hold mountain settlements, for example, only sack / raze. Vampires used to leave dwarfs alone and viceversa. This adds pressure.

Vampires are strange. When AI plays them they do well strategically in AI resolve. However, they have horrible tactical AI. This has to do with the AI’s penchant for not protecting their lords. A vampire player can take out the opposing lords with their endless hordes, and likewise a player can often destroy a vampire enemy by taking out their lord.

edit: BTW there’s some new weirdness. You know how when you keep playing an ‘age of discovery’ or something fires and you discover all major port owners? It seems you only discover those in the same continent now (old world vs new world). This may be because you need a level 5 port. Not sure. I tried sending a scrub lord which quickly got eaten by those blue/black pirates (they move near the end, they are the wandering neutral pirates).

So, back in TW:W1 land, I finished up the Dwarf campaign. It really was fairly easy (sorry @Strato, I think it’s much easier not in ME) but a ton of fun. I never really got too good at dealing with cavalry but it didn’t matter all that much; turns out that even though my little guys went flying when the Chaos Knights (or chariots) smacked into them, they’d just get right back up and put an axe through their fancy armor. It was really cool to get the top-line infantry–ironbreakers that were pretty much impervious and had a little satchel charge they’d also toss out when you’re charging them, because f— you, that’s why. My slayers did seem to keep getting killed off (I guess that’s the point), though they were really nice for getting the tough jobs done. (Though once in a silly undead battle (that I should have autoresolved because I outclassed them so badly) I did have a unit of slayers out on the flank that annihilated a skeleton unit without taking a single casualty, which was cool.)

I also got my only heroic victory when I was trying to colonize the mountains between the Empire and Bretonnia and an army got caught by two undead armies. I just did the dwarfy thing and stood and shot at them and beat off the first army, and then the second, and then they went poof as undead are wont to do. (To be fair I did do a bit of fancy generalling with the slayers and the shooters and the flanks against all those stupid flying monsters.) Generally I don’t really get opportunities for heroic opportunities because I really try to win the battle before taking to the field (Sun Tzu and all that).

The Empire really got hosed by Chaos, but I eventually took care of the invasion, and things were oddly peaceful thereafter–I finished off the vampires, because they were annoying and the greenskins were long gone, so it was just me walking up north to recolonize the Gianthomes and the Empire’s AI seemingly failing to rebuild cities with minimal competition (from the remaining Norscans).

I then dove right in to a Bretonnia campaign (I have trouble playing as bad guys) and that was fun. I tried to start as the fairy lady (I forget her name) in southern France but you start at war with the Wood Elves and there’s really not a lot you can do there. So I restarted as the Lion Lion guy and generally had a pretty good time smashing things with knights. I thought the peasant economy was a nice touch but ultimately it didn’t have too much of an effect on me–if you’re loading your armies up with peasants, well, you’re gonna have a bad time. I guess you could take the approach of trying to derive all your money from industry, but even then your upkeep dollars should really be spent on knights, knights, and more knights (plus some mounted archers, to disrupt their formations).

When I finally did take it to the tree-huggers I moved in with multiple armies, and in the only real battle we fought they didn’t seem to have an answer to heavy cavalry, so, tough on them… Unfortunately I wasn’t in time to save the fairy lady–she was eliminated about 5 turns before I could get there, so I was pretty bummed that I couldn’t get that legendary lord (via confederation). I also really liked the ending to the Bretonnia campaign where you have to go fight some set-piece battle on the other side of the world. I chose the orc one because I figured it would be easier, and it was pretty cool to take my main army off on a crusade into the badlands. The battle itself was also pretty cool, but I had like 3 units each of royal pegasus and royal gryphon knights, plus Mr. Lion Lion was insanely powerful… I had the Green Knight, too, but he was just puttering around on the ground trying to look tough. I was really happy they had that for the campaign victory, because I did not feel like trudging all the way to Kislev and playing Archaon whack-a-mole.

…so then I started one as the greenskins, because now there were only bad guys left, and I chose the guy who gets death magic (… the slaughterer?) because it seemed like fun. It was actually really cool to have the death magic come in starting at level 8 and still being a melee beast (on a wyvern, too). Though I was a little unimpressed with the first set of death magic spells. I did manage to recruit the other legendary lord (Grimgor) and confederate in the third (Wurzag). Wurzag was also really cool, not least because I was greatly amused by his cackling “Wurzag da Great Green Prophet… huh huh huh huh” when I clicked on him. I was pleased to be able to get him to level >20, though one of his quests bugged out when I needed to sack 3 greenskin towns and there was only one left on the map. (Grimgor had a similar quest, but there were 0 left so the quest auto-resolved and moved to the next step without issue.) (I was also really unimpressed that Grimgor didn’t get any mounts at all–my no-name general got to a wyvern, why can’t he?)

The greenskin waagh thing really made it easy to keep to my principle of “never use one army when you could use two”–I was worried that having the waagh’s be almost always just goblins would be a problem, but it turns out that having a ton of wolf riders and wolf rider archers really does wonders for disrupting the enemy lines, and then following up with da boyz in the reinforcement army makes smashing very effective. (And autoresolve also worked in my favor, provided I could manage the part where the waaghs move after your turn.)

I was never able to defeat chaos in a fair fight, though. I had a couple 1-on-1s where they smashed my armies and then a 2-on-1 where I still lost (but closely). Chaos troops are just even smashier than black orcs, and I couldn’t really disrupt them with mounted archers when the arrows just plink off of their armor. I did manage to win Grimgor’s quest battle against chaos, but (1) half the army was marauders (weaker than regular chaos warriors), while during the invasion half the army was chosen and more (stronger than regular chaos warriors), and (2) I had two spiders, a giant, and some trolls (and half my army was black orcs). Perhaps if I brought bigger things to the invasion battles I’d have done better. In the end I defeated the invasion by getting the event that gave +5 fightiness for 6 turns (or vice versa, heh), and then getting five armies and three waaghs to surround them and do a bunch of autoresolves.

Again the empire got hosed by chaos, and again I’d say it was peaceful after the invasion, but instead I just rolled into the flatlands (or rather, tunneled, because that way I could avoid the corruption) and razed the empire’s remaining 5 towns to finish the campaign.

Overall the greenskins were a ton of fun. I really like the goblin/orc dichotomy and the fact that you can get monsters. The orc lords were fun because I’d just load them up with attack and weapon strength bonuses and they’d smash. I turned one goblin big boss hero into a battlefield assassin, and another into a campaign assassin, and that was great, too. And the Gork and Mork magic was appropriately thematic.

So, I guess this is all to say that I’ve really liked this game. I should probably, like, get a life or something now. (Really I’m just waiting for the Wood Elf DLC to go on sale because that’s the army I collected as a kid.)

Since ranged is totally unaffected with difficulty, most ranged races, and particularly dwarves are easy on any level, just buy tons of quarrelers and grudge throwers and lay waste, its far worse to play a melee based race on harder, as you will have loyalty and pure combat bonuses thrown at you.

(Oh, and to be clear, all of these are played on Normal because, well, I want to.)

@Janster what do you mean, exactly? That when you increase the difficulty level it increases enemy attack stats, but not their ranged defence (armor, I guess)?