2031

Think in my HE campaign, my best noble was on the chariot. I used the chariot to disrupt enemy archer formations so my archers could spend their time targeting the melee units instead.

I don’t use Phoenix Guard unless I have something big to bring down. They are wasted on the frontline holding back regular chaff. No shield so vulnerable to opposition ranged fire, their melee defence is only a little better compared to regular spearmen. One or two in a stack and use them for the bigger monsters, namely protecting the archer line against cavalry moves or if a monster breaks through the front line.

When lines are thin, you’re allowing charging units to break through and pose a threat to your more vulnerable back line. I guess it depends on how close your missile troops are to the thin front line you have. When something large poses a threat to that back line, they stop firing (doing their job) and ultimately die (except maybe Lothern Sea Guard). That sets off panic stations from there as you then need to open a hole in your line to allow spearmen etc to try and bring down the charging monster/chariot/cavalry.

2032

I’m really enjoying my dwarf campaign. I’ve continued to grab more of the eastern mountains, and our fight against the black crag is starting to tilt strongly in our favor. They are down to 7 settlements from 14. We’ve ended up in war with a skaven clan that was causing order problems in my provinces and lurking in mountain ruins. Their strength ranking is abysmal, but they have a stack that has managed to ambush and gank 2 of mine, so my leader’s army is looking to settle the grudge. Chaos looks like it is ransacking cities in the north, so that will probably be the next problem.

2033

Or The Empire will just crush Chaos super anti-climatically before you get to fight them, which happened during my last Dwarf campaign unfortunately.

Dwarves are interesting because they have a pretty challenging start comparatively to when the game first released in WH1. You really get swarmed with Greenskins at the start, quite relentlessly on Very Hard. I think I was having to wipe a stack every 2 turns. But once you take Black Crag you just steamroll. Dwarves have a really incredible economy only rivaled by Dark Elves.

2034

I like Nobles on the eagle. Makes them really good at going after casters and having them available to easily rear-charge basically at-will isn’t to be discounted. Eagles are stupid fast and having a melee guy on them removes their biggest weakness (that they’re usually made out of paper mache and dreams). Usually you can find some regen item for them as well.

Also makes it easier for them to get out of Dodge if things go sideways. On foot they often get run down by lords or the like in my experience. YMMV of course.

2035

My least favorite thing about the Dwarf/Greenskin battle is how close their capitals are to each other. You usually have a furious back and forth and then one side just completely wins (pretty much always the Dwarfs at this point).

2036

Does the AI have much lower upkeep costs for armies? Last night I confederated a neighboring dwarf faction, and all the sudden I was losing 5 or 6k gold a turn. I guess it could be due to research differences, but that seemed pretty steep. I’ll have to look at what I haven’t researched yet.

2037

Remember every player in a Total War game gets a free 2500 (or thereabouts) off the top, just for being there. There’s no way a human player could support more than a couple of cards, not stacks, of units without it at the start of the game.

This is one reason why Vassilization is very useful in the historic games.

2038

Don’t forget the extra armies will also be costing you more upkeep cumulatively. So your own stacks will cost more as well as those new armies you obtained, plus the heroes you acquired.

2039

A couple of skaven ambushes sorted it out for me :)

2040

This and this.

Also the AI does generally get some sort of reduction (so that smaller factions can have an army at all among other things), but the % penalties can build on themselves and get crazy quick.

2041

Depends on the difficulty level how much, but they can plus they get tax bonuses.

2042

HE should use Handmaidens instead of Nobles, they are flatly superior. Especially if you get your hands on with the incendiary trait.

Better melee stats with the exception of armor, anti-large, troop replenishment, range unit buff aura, a goddamn root ability

2043

Not to undercut your dwarven campaign, because I’ve played a fun on recently. But the Orcs just seem awfully weak after all the latest patches. My Slayer King campaign is off to the races. But yeah those new skaven on the southeast new area – they are serious.

2044

For someone that knows the game I imagine it isn’t bad at all, but for my first campaign it was pretty hairy there at the beginning with the seemingly endless greenskins. It only got under control once I got lightning strike, and those skaven actually helped quite a bit by smashing the southern bloody spear city (or perhaps multiple). The fact that the Black Crag is in a fight with at least 4 other factions also helps.

2045

Well all I know is I overextended not suspectecting there was a new skaven faction in that southeast range and I got drop kicked. That’s a tough campaign though I just wondered why in my particular campaign the orcs seemed to be less of a threat.

For what it is worth there is a growing consensus that the orcs need a bit of a overhaul. I died by skaven. Damn their rat hides.

2046

The next DLC is High Elves vs Orcs unless some bizarre reality-altering singularity occurs, so hopefully that should help.

Right now it sounds like (and bears out in my experience) the Order factions are extremely dominant. Dwarves almost always crush Greenskins, Vampires never do anything at all (though for awhile after VCoast released the entire world was swamped in vampiric corruption), the Empire beats Chaos easily, and Ulthuan eventually unifies and destroys the Dark Elves. The Skaven seem like they are winning the SE of the Mortal Empires map from my experience.

They obviously messed with some settings, but the trouble is we just have a new set of consistently dominant factions instead of it really feeling random as it should. It’s been extremely difficult for them to get right.

2047

To everyone who wouldn’t mind answering…

With the improved turn times what would be your recommended way to play for an owner of TWW 1 and 2? I only have the free DLC for 2, but I do have the wood elves, the king and the warlord, the grim and the grave and the chaos warriors for 1.

I bounced off of the dwarves when I first tried TWW1, mostly I think because I felt I was playing whack a mole and I tend to burn out on the battles once they start feeling the same. I’ve never tried TWW2. If there is some DLC that would really help not bouncing off of it, I am not totally against getting another DLC.

So I guess I’m asking, any recommendations for a last hurrah before I decide to give up on the series? I don’t have a great history with TW in general - I’ve tried many of them, but I did like TW1 more than I usually like TW games.

2048

If you’ve never played TWW2 you might try the Vortex campaign, it’s less daunting than the Mortal Empires campaign, and while turn times are improved across the board, Vortex is still faster turns than Mortal Empires.

But if you just want to play the thing in its whole glory boot up a Mortal Empire campaign and play whatever of the 4 new races sounds most appealing to you. High Elves and Lizardmen are easier to learn than Dark Elves and particularly Skaven, though I personally find the latter two factions more enjoyable to play. But that kind of thing is entirely personal preference.

But the game is always a bit whack a mole, moreso the higher difficulty you go because the AI is going to have a bunch more armies than you due to a bunch of modifiers. And every game you’ll eventually steamroll into a position where you can’t lose, and all your armies will start looking identical with a tiny number of extremely high tier and veteran units.

But the basic gameplay loop is just build up your territory, decide where to expand, fight a bunch of battles, repeat. It doesn’t get a whole lot deeper than that unless you are kind of keeping your own narrative going in your head, which is how I get enjoyment out of strategy games for the most part.

2049

I finally killed the little rat bastard whose stack had killed a number of mine. It was poetic justice that we got him with an ambush. Now to heal up and take out their cities.

As was suggested above the Empire seems to have crushed chaos pretty well. Now there appears to be a skaven faction up north doing some damage.

2050

Yeah there is a weird new skaven faction up above kiev – and another one way west of black crag – don’t let me fool you – I die a LOT. No campaign is a walkover …. thought I tend to play normal/very hard (normal battle very hard campaign)