If you want a serious challenge and also play dwarves… try the slayer king. Wow. It is close even now. 110 turns in.
Still working on getting a handle on Tyrion… (I’m both slow to learn and have only limited gaming time)
I keep finding myself seriously limited by cash. I tried to be aggressive and go after Saphery - was able to root them out of the Dark Elf province but it becomes a stalemate. I’m limiting infrastructure spending to pay the upkeep on two armies, but my two armies aren’t enough to go after Saphery’s homeland.
I read about lucrative trade with the humans, but I can’t ever get them to agree to anything. I guess I need to spend a bunch of Influence to raise their opinion of me first?
Currently trying a different approach - after unifying Lothern I sent Tyrion and his whole army out a Caribbean cruise to fight skeletons on mysterious islands and such, spending the cash on buildings. Not sure yet how that will work out, but an awful lot seems to happen in the world while I’m enjoying the sea air, including vortex rituals (which are visually annoying as hell on the map).
Is there a better approach to maintaining cash flow?
Recruit a sacrificial explorer lord and hit the high seas. Grab the treasures on the way. Try to find good trade partners, maybe the empire and dwarfs? Warning, certain factions will consider that lone lord good bait and will declare war just to eat it. Also I haven’t tried this since the pirate vampires were added to the game. Their sea roaming may complicate things as well.
I think the rogue armies would eat it up pretty quick.
Also unless you bring along enough of an army to defeat the vampirates that guard the big payoffs it’s probably not worth it.
I did try a couple times with the lonely Lord, but his cost + upkeep vs the smaller rewards was a tossup.
I need to spend some time just figuring out where factions that might trade with me are located. I’ve played it pretty much straight up so far, so only know about locations relatively close to Lothern.
Maybe I just need to get better at fighting with a cheap army.
Empire is East. Pretend you are Atlantis/Great Britain and Empire is Germany. Oh wait, you may run into the King Arthur faction too, those are probably decent trade partners.
Essentially being able to do this with one army is basically the key to an easy campaign layer. Getting good at the battle layer pays dividends on the campaign layer.
For Tyrion in particular, you don’t need much of a frontline - I’d say 4 spears at the start is sufficient. Everything else should be an archer or artillery (maybe a cav or two). Tyrion charges forward, balls up the majority of the enemy army, and then you pew pew from a distance (put the eagle throwers on AOE). The 4 spears is just a fallback for any AI units that decide to pass by. Also this is greatly enhanced when you get your hands on a mage with any AOE spell.
You nailed it, you just need to get really good at the combat. Tyrion becomes an insane god-mode tank very quickly if you build into his combat skills and get his items. Throw in a Life or High mage and things get gross pretty quick. As someone else mentioned, you really don’t need a substantial front line.
You’ll notice the huge flaws in how the AI deals with unkillable single model units like Tyrion, because he will reach the point where you can just send him in alone into their massive blob and just use some AoE magic and archers to mops the enemies up while they hopelessly plink against Tyrion. The appropriate response to a unit like him in multiplayer is just to swamp him with one cheap unit and deal with the rest of his army first so he shatters from army losses, because his damage output isn’t particularly threatening without Sword of Khaine. But the AI is too dumb to do this.
To beat the game on the higher difficulties you are basically expected to take a town every 2 turns minimum. Use a second army filled with low upkeep stuff and just keep it garrisoned nearest the most likely points of conflict. Having armies and walls actively discourages the AI from even declaring war because the way it looks for battles is that the AI chooses battles it will win in Autoresolve. It’s incredibly hard to out auto-resolve a stack of 10 spearmen and 10 archers sitting in walled city, so the AI just won’t do it without some kind of doomstack, and you should not be facing those until you’ve united Ulthuan at which point the game is unloseable.
Edited to add: at some point you’ll upgrade that defensive army into an offensive one, and send it out, and build a new defensive army, which will then later become an offensive one, etc etc. Also, get some Nobles for the +replenishment right away, it will greatly reduce your downtime. +replenishment and +campaign movement speed are the best two campaign stats. Well, those and upkeep % reduction.
One of the greatest abuses is to ambush, because the AI then merrily goes and feeds you kills. You can ambush in a forest, or ambush next to the town (but this tends to be harder?)
I finally finished my Lothern game that I started in early January. All told, I guess I played 20-30 hours for a short campaign victory. I could have pressed through to the long victory but I wasn’t sure if my allies would abandon me after Archeon the Everchosen was defeated… I know the first game had a mechanic where diplomatic relations worsened once Chaos was defeated. I really got spoiled by how efficient the high elves played. Using Lothern Sea Guard to play ranged attack and line holders was fantastic, as I could just put them on autopilot while I used my dragons and cavalry to smash enemy artillery. The campaign was a very satisfying experience.
Instead of moving on to another game, I started a Hard campaign as the Kaz-a-Karak. Going from a highly mobile and tactically flexible faction to almost the exact opposite is quite the change. Dwarves are tougher than elves but they move very slowly and have no cavalry. I find that artillery is critical as this is the only thing that will force an opponent to come get me. Thankfully Dwarven ranged units can hold their own in melee, though not as great against cavalry or monsters. Greenskins rely on large stacks to overwhelm me but I’ve been able to take the orc faction down to one settlement. Next I’ll move on to the vampires to the north or Skaven to the east.
I wish I could like the Dwarves better but they are probably my least favorite faction. Not from a lore point, but when I play them I feel like you just box up and kinda wait for the enemy to die. They have no magic either. I mostly just feel like I’m twiddling my thumbs without much to do when I played them last.
Plus their high tier units are pretty underwhelming other than Ironbreakers. Which are insane, in all fairness.
I see where you’re coming from, but damned if it isn’t great to focus your thunderers and war machines all on one unit (or monster) and watch it disintegrate.
Dwarves need a faster way to access gyrocopters. A couple of high-speed chasers and artillery killers makes all the difference.
They kinda have a cavalry now with the slayers - at least they can neutralize the AI cavalry that ALWAYS goes for your shooters.
Do people always include artillery in your army makeup? I have used it a few times, but they generally are not part of my units.
Artillery is good at softening up troops, but it’s particularly effective in forcing the opposition to bring its troops to battle lest they get peppered to death.
I had at least one bolt thrower as the elves but it wasn’t absolutely required like, say, cavalry. When I play as the Dwarves I absolutely need it as they don’t have cavalry. As the Empire, I run a very balanced force with them so 1 or 2 units of artillery are very important (to me) for maintaining that balance (sometimes 3 if I already have 2 experienced artillery and I tech up to a luminark or other cool gun).
Playing this now. One thing I will say they definitely got wrong - stop using some homemade web browser to give additional information about things. For example, right now it literally isn’t working for me - it brings back some error and won’t load information about the unit I’m trying to get more information about.
Just give me actual tooltips in-game, so I can see what the little unit attributes actually do.
There’s an option to always show unit cards or something, get that on. I’ve never used the web browser. It sucks.
Yeah, but I want to scroll over them when I’m deciding what to build, not just during battles. I can’t see how to force them to stay up in the strategic view, so I can see what I’m actually building. (I mean I can see the unit card, but I can’t scroll over the things like “Armor Piercing” and the like to see what they actually do. Armor Piercing is pretty obvious, but other things are not. And I would like more detail in any event.
There should be a pin somewhere that will keep their card up, and is particularly useful when comparing units, because they will show the differences between stats.