Too true. Part of really getting good at this game is just learning how to exploit the AI. The AI is computer-perfect at hit and run tactics and loves to use them. A tactic that the AI uses a lot is having an army swoop in, sack a player city, and then retreat just far enough that the player stacks can’t get there to retaliate. It’s super annoying and leads to horrendous and aggravating chases to get an AI army to engage with a player army.
The counter is to learn how to ambush and/or quickly raise disposable stacks (regiments of renown are great for this) to blunt an AI offensive before your cities get sacked down to level 1 settlements.
Yeah, just is a startling contrast to my Vampire Counts game where: a.) units don’t route, b.) I haven’t had to deal with very much artillery, c.) the neighbors haven’t been up in my shit as much.
Yeah they don’t do great against other ranged, which is always the issue I had.
I think that’s where the assassins and spawns are supposed to come in to tie them up so they can’t shoot. Or just a ton of microing one pack around while others shoot them in the back.
Agree with what others have said. My personal approach to Skaven is “don’t play them” because they require a level of micromanagement on the battlefield and in their economy that I find obnoxious. When I do play Skaven I generally drop the difficulty to easy/easy for the first part of a campaign so that I can power through initial expansion with garbage disposable troops and autoresolved battles. Then once I have access to better stuff I set the difficulty back.
Yep! I didn’t explain it well, but that’s my Skaven strategy. Power through the early game on easy where Clanrat/slave armies can actually defeat fearsome foes such as Empire Swordsmen or High Elf Spearmen in order to get to the point where I can build an army like you describe.
(1-4) of artillery (both types), machine guns, jezztails
anything else is optional. warpfire can be fun but a bit micro intensive
One change i’d add is mortars - they make sieges soooo much faster as they can easily clear walls. Sometimes I make one army focus on sieges with 4-5 mortars.
I just did a battle against some attacking dwarves with an army consisting almost entirely of gutter runners and the hit and run worked much better than I expected, combined with my grey seer just absolutely wrecking face with his warp lightning.
This game is pretty bad at explaining itself a lot of the time. Night Runners have Dodge and Gutter Runners have snare nets. The game doesn’t seem to offer any explanation of either of these. When you right-click a unit it brings up a little browser window with these traits listed, but you can’t click on them or mouse over them. Likewise a recruitable assassin says he “enables poison attacks”. Ok? How the hell is anyone supposed to know what this stuff means?
This game has always been bad at explaining itself, at least in terms of tactical mechanics. A lot of the greentext stuff in the top box of a unit card isn’t mechanical descriptors, it’s just flavor text or the devs opinions on the proper role for the unit. And sometimes it’s wrong. Unfortunately one has to learn to read the stats and know what some of the abilities do before one can take in a units strengths/weaknesses at a glance.
I don’t have a problem with the ability icons, bit then I own both games in the series and all expansions for both. I’ve been doing this a long time. I believe hovering over the icons on the bottom of the unit card will pop up a brief explanation. If you want more detail on any of them just ask in this thread. Myself and I suspect several others would.be happy to elaborate on any that seem puzzling.
Sure, but the question isn’t “what does poison do,” it’s, “what does the trait ‘enables poison attacks’ on an assassin hero do?” Does that just mean this hero has poison attacks when in battle? Does it give poison to other units? The wiki doesn’t really have this info.
Skaven have some rough starts. I got into a bad place with food and gold not really knowing what I was doing and started over with Snikch but am getting my ass handed to me by the dwarves and also a beastmen horde that decided to show up this time. Tried Ikit and it’s rough going early, too. I am not really sure what the point of undercities is. Seems like you can build them for either gold or food, since making gold takes food?
build them where you are not expanding. Donut island, or south america are good places. You can do that with engineers or with a second crap army that just goes sacking, no conquering! I normally do food because that’s in shortage with high expansion
also you don’t need to keep discoverability to 0, they can go down to 40-50 or something and have 0% risk. I think it may be 100 to discover, but heroes can get bonuses so keeping at 40 I’ve never had one be discovered.
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back to general skaven
so the cheesiest, boring thing is to keep sacking cities without conquering as this levels up your lord/hero while you wait for nice units (artillery) to be unlocked.
