Total War: Warhammer 2

Yea, I love love love this game but I’ll tell you the main things it fails at is having no siege diversity (outside of a handful of forts) and that god-awful “help” browser. I only ever click it on accident, and even that gets me grumpy about it.

Always. It forces the enemy to engage and does insane amounts of damage.
For races like Skaven it’s almost the only way they can kill a lot of things.
For say, the Dwarfs, it’s the only way you can force a fight and if the enemy has it and you don’t you’re pretty well screwed since they’ll just sit there bombarding you while you very, very slowly walk towards them.

I find artillery basically mandatory for many factions. Artillery always serves to make enemies close in as others have noted but it also has the important “siege” attribute that lets an army assault a walled city immediately instead of having to wait until siege towers or rams are built. Big monsters and a few lords also have this trait so artillery is optional in my mind if those lords/monsters are in the army.

Even with access to “siege” units, I’ll always put artillery in Dwarf, Vampire Coast, Empire, and Skaven armies. Because it’s just so good.

Artillery is also a ton of fun. (Though admittedly the bolt thrower is probably the least fun of all the artillery pieces.)

I finished the Lizardmen ME campaign (short). It was a little anticlimactic as I was just futzing around with these six-stacks of Chaos that would repeatedly spawn off the coast while I tried to simultaneously occupy all the required territories, and I had to wait for the Empire, Bretonnia, and Dwarfs to get Archaon. At least Chaos managed to clear the High Elves out from my continent because Lothern was not interested in a military alliance and that war would have been a big PITA.

I looked at the long campaign victory conditions, saw that it was too capture seven more capitals… yeah, nope.

Next I’m thinking the Bretonnia vortex campaign (how’s that?) or the Empire or Vampire Counts ME campaign. Or maybe I’ll try out EU4 that I just got for a dollar…

Select artillery, press insert. Pause liberally. 100 points to griffindor if you can snipe the leader.

I had a lot of fun with the Bretonnia Vortex campaign personally. Though in fairness I hadn’t played them at all since game 1 and they’ve been updated a few times since so a lot of it felt kind of new to me.

What does insert do??

Well that’s my situation too. (Not having played them since 1.)

… But that’s also my situation for the Empire, and I couldn’t resist their troop diversity, so I started one as Gelt. I like (I think!) the new imperial mechanics, but I feel a little hemmed in by people I don’t want to fight (Dwarfs, elector counts). Hopefully I can take out the vampires and that will allow me to confederate my annoying neighbor…

It lets you aim and fire one artillery piece (not a whole squad) in first-person, and the tracking munitions (Doom Diver and Hellcannon) can be manually flown into targets.

Empire is super boring after the new Imperial Authority mechanics. Basically you have to just wait until random events give you enough authority to annex the minor Empire provinces and unify the Empire. Since you are, as you noted, otherwise mostly hemmed in by races that you can have peace and trade with, it means that you need to do a lot of crusading in foreign lands for fun and profit. You do get to crush the Vampire Counts and possibly annex some Greenskin lands if they have the mountains around Vampire Counts lands. You can also go south and forcibly annex Border Princes/Tilea/Estalia which will likely be in Vampirate or Skaven hands.

Then you have a huge army handy with Archaon shows up and crush him quickly for the campaign victory. It’s a bit anticlimactic but fun.

To be fair the ending has always been anticlimactic, because you’re always really powerful by the time chaos shows up/the vortex gets going, and you can’t really do 4v4 battles.

The best ending so far, for me, was the Bretonnia quest where they sent you galavanting off to a set battle.

so, steam sale and i picked this up.

And…just like the last time, i bounced so fucking hard off the interface that I didn’t even get to the game.

Free DLC? Yes, sure!

Login…uh, ok., But like, i’m on steam and that’s…nevermind, ok…

Enable! Yes!

Wait, log in to steam? But i’m in steam. Ok, enable…but it, just doesn’t work…or something. Ah, forget it, let’s just play a game!

Oh, i’ve DLC and heroes? Let’s click…oh. ya.

This is a AAA title and developer isn’t it? Have I missed something basic, or is this like the most ass-backward steam integration ever?

Yeah the DLC thing is a bit counter-intuitive. I think it is more a Steam thing with free DLC as opposed to Sega/CA.

Right click the game, go to Propeties, then DLC tab. Then click the box next to the DLC you want to install.

Agreed, the weird Free DLC thing is easily the worst and most counter-intuitive part of the game.

How can free content be the worst?

The UI for getting it installed is horribad.

I don’t recall running into any problems, and I don’t really think free stuff can ever be the worst thing about a game - even if it’s a challenge to obtain - but mostly I was just being facetious. :)

I’ve played plenty of warhammer 2 and think it’s silly CA wants me to bounce out to their website and link it back to steam in order to get free DLC.

If they want to put free stuff in their game, go ahead, or not, I’m fine either way. But to say we can’t call out the process as a bit silly if that’s how we feel about it seems a stretch.

I can most certainly feel that way if I want to, and making it free doesn’t change anything about how I feel about it.

P.S. I also find their front end loader silly as it’s sole purpose is advertising DLC.

Right, there’s no reason this stuff can’t just be released as free updates and call it a free DLC. It’s because they want it to show up as DLC on Steam at the price of free that makes it cumbersome, along with wanting some engagement on their website or something? It’s been a while since I had to do it, so the details are foggy. It was a confusing mess of a process, though.