I’ve won several ME campaigns. I’m not a fan of the original Vortex campaign in general - I find it’s Chaos army spam frustrating - annoying enough to mean you need to spend many turns preparing/recovering, without adding anything interesting to the campaign. Much prefer the fairly straightforward setup of Mortal Empires.
I do enjoy the DLC races with their own non-Vortex focused storylines, though.
Need to get back and do the new Wood Elfs. Abandoned my first attempt due to running into the bug where the Queen doesn’t spawn (though I only realized this when I was almost done…grrr).
Oh man I recall running that dwarf campaign – you know the one == belegar – half your money, Until he gets to 8 peaks… but you know you can learn a lot about game effiency from that campaign. Ultimately if you are careful you can turn the tide, But yeah thats a tough campaign.
I seem to recall that was sorta a thing in the original warhammer – but wow if you want a challenge play Belegar as dwarves in me warhammer 2. Thats a serious deal.
Opps sry to be chatty i just got the greenlight to be annoying again! But anyone who knows me knows ill be being a warhammer total war pain in the ass.
Don’t worry, I’m an idiot using VC to mean both Vampire Coast and Vampire Counts in my previous post.
My Dwarf campaign was with Grombrindal. I chose him because he starts with the Irondrakes. Toasting greenskins from the start is fantastic. Place Grombrindal at the front tanking a mob while the Irondrakes go to work helps accelerate the early game battles a bit. The toughest issue I had with the Dwarves is picking which direction to go, and fending off an incursion from the other direction. North is obvious because of the Brightstone? Mine. But you sorta have to go South because that’s where the resources are, and the biggest Orcish threat. And by going south, you have the northern Orcs and maybe the Vampires will coming in. And because Orcs get access to the Underway, all those mountains aren’t an issue. So yeah, there’s a bit of defensive play initially, then try to push forward and gain enough momentum to afford a second army that can at least protect The Silver Road. I may have to try it again at some point, having improved my gameplay a lot since that time, but Dwarves just aren’t my thing. I think maybe too, I just had the wrong strategy from the start.
Belegar, I know it is hard just by the fact there’s a moment where you commit to K8P or die. I believe the general pace is compile an army, migrate and don’t look back. Heh, almost seems like a metaphor to my life right now! It’s probably the better answer to a Dwarven campaign than running with the other Dwarven lords. I have no interest in the Slayer King, I really dislike Slayers. And I’ve done enough starts with the other two Dwarven lords. I’ve never played him enough to reach that point of migration. In fact, embarrisingly enough, I lost two of his starting ghostly units in a stupid battle that I wasn’t paying much attention to. Losing those guys sucked and I stopped after.
Yeah, I think Teclis starts off surrounded by Vampire Coast and Skaven on ME. That’s not a pretty picture. I saw it one time and went “yeah, nah” and went into Vortex instead with him. His Vortex beginning is much, much better. The Tomb Kings to the south are generally friendly, the chaos incursions are annoying, but funneled through the mountains and there’s some natural enemies and sites that the AI tends to ignore, especially the island that the minor Dark Elf faction begin on. I think in that campaign, I ended up going East and destroying Settra, and that was mostly because Tyrion was losing, against Settra! And that shifted the balance and allowed Malekith to storm the northern part of Ulthuan. That island became an absolute mess.
And why is Warhammer 2 such an excellent game – though your narrative shows that truly == it is because every faction and every race etc is so different.
Lol Strat I wont be figuring out your life tomorrow night but I will be attempt a Belgar campaign on Vh VH. As an aside i will be thinking about it a bit.
Not many, but the Eshin Murder a Faction button certainly helped me get the Skaven one. I had everything else I needed, but the Dwarfs were in full Ordertide. Until they became Dwarf Rebels, then it was just a matter of mopping them up and grabbing their ex-capitol and all the other capitols they had taken over which was enough for the win. Ikit’s campaign is also feasible since it’s mostly about taking over Athel Loren iirc, which is a pain, but manageable compared to say taking out an Ordertide Empire.
I’ve actually installed a mod that makes Victory Conditions not pure hell and usually make sense since then (basically no more “take like 8 of these random faction capitols for no reason”).
I’ve also won with Harkon and the Sisters. The Sisters was actually a pretty fun campaign. I forget Harkon, but iirc it’s another non-standard campaign where you need to Do X and then you win, instead of “conquer everything for no reason and then lose interest and start a new campaign”. It’s possible my Harkon win was actually a co-op game though.
Yeah after the flurry of discussion just now, I feel like doing a Harkon ME campaign. I played him in Vortex and really enjoyed his progression to reclaiming his sanity. Plus you get a boat. Plus the Vampire Coast just ooze fun. Plus after writing about Dwarves, the Vampire Coast feel dwarven like with their emphasis on range and artillery, but with the bonus of spells and better campaign system. And I don’t care if those zombies die just so long as Queen Bess keeps on firing. Actually, one reason for upgrading my computer last year was to play VC again. My old system couldn’t render all the textures and maintain a good frame rate. So poor old Queen Bess’ projectiles were just an amorphous blob exploding on the poor units. Now I see it is an exquisite set of barrels loaded with powder.
One annoyance I have with this game is when trade goods only give the unit buffs in a given region. With dwarves for instance, I think Quarrelers get a bonus from lumber camps. So it makes sense to recruit Quarellers in that region. But to recruit, you need the army there. It just creates silly micromanagement. It’d be nice if the game had a fourth tier building available for each trade resource where it applies, and taking the capital province attached to it meant faction-wide bonus instead of the current system as-is now. So Building Levels 1-3 give the resource, and the fourth gives the bonus. When I discovered that quirk while playing as Teclis, I got annoyed at the system. I had originally assumed it would apply faction wide.
What is the easiest campaign to do? I have mostly given up because in the long run I always seem to get into a log jam and can never figure out how to win.
I have finished a few ME campaigns as the humans, high elves, and dwarves. The easiest was probably the dwarves since they don’t require a lot of micro in battle and once they get the orcs under control they can dominate their region.
You can play the Vortex campaign but ignore the rituals, and then defeat the other factions that trigger their final battle. After that it’s win by domination.
I have not messed with ME campaigns. What do we mean by “won”? I have avoided them mostly because as I understand it there is no way to win; it is just a sandbox that goes on and on and you pick a point to stop playing. Am I wrong? I know there are short and long objectives, but I was under the impression those don’t have a clean ending like a cut-scene or summary or anything. I have stuck with the Vortex ones as there are clear directions, cut-scenes, and a definite ending. I would probably try some ME if it too has a clear “win” point.
ME has short/long win conditions and they lead to a victory screen. For some factions the long victory condition leads to a long tiresome slog without much challenge, because the game isn’t that hard after a nation reaches a certain critical mass and gets absurdly rich with multiple full stacks of top-tier troops running around. So for many factions I usually do abandon prior to the victory screen. Short victories are very achievable though, and some factions have achievable long victory conditions as well.
Dwarves got a bit more challenging with the introduction of Skaven regions to the east of the old map boundary, but yes Dwarves are easy once the get rolling. They are the masters of industry with lots of gold mines so their treasury can get absurd fast. Their top-tier troops aren’t super deadly but they will get the job done against anyone in the quantities that the Dwarves can churn them out.
Generally, the long victory conditions in ME are almost never worth it - they tend to always require you to wipe out other major factions on the other side of the map. Most of the short objectives tend to be achievable within the same time limits as the Vortex campaign. My only problem with the short victory objectives is that sometimes you achieve them before the real fun starts (e.g., you get to head to war with a faction that you wouldn’t normally encounter).
