Yeah, generally for Undercities you target the biggest money-making cities on the map (Lothern, K-A-K, Altdorf, Drakenhoff) and then put the % buildings in them and conceal the crap out of them. Other undercities can be aimed towards making extra food or the like, but it’s always a bit of a balancing act since making food costs money and vice versa. Which is where the Big Money Cities come in. They throw the balance so far in one direction you can use the other stuff.
Eventually Food also stops being a real concern. And remember raiding gives food, which can help a lot in the early game before you have the food making stuff.undercities available.
Undercities are for food. Almost any other application tends to be counterproductive. I ran the math once and the break-even-time on founding and building up an undercity as a cash producer is ludicrously bad. There are a few key rich cities that can be an exception to the rule, but it’s not worth stressing over it to much.
However, being able to invest in food production can be key for Skaven. Especially early on. So that’s the only point of undercities. Well, aside from late game hilarious shenanigans involving spawning armies out of thin air or nuking cities.
My general approach to undercities is to found a few with a hero. Scatter them around. I like to play the long game and let them grow. The first undercity gets the concealment building, a food production building leveled up to max, and the building that spreads undercities. Level that one up to max also. Once that undercity starts spawning free undercities in surrounding areas, each of them gets a raiding camp and the zero-upkeep concealment building. That’s it. Each undercity contributes a few hundred a turn which is unimpressive considering the money/time/effort, but more importantly +3 food.
The last warning on undercities is that sinking money into them when you have actual provinces that could use upgrades is probably unwise. Build up your provinces and unlock cool troops and improve your domestic economy first! Only fart around with undercities when temporarily blocked on expansion or flush with cash.
The ROI on everything Skaven is pathetic until one factors in the power plant building thingy. The drawback to that of course is that it requires a high level settlment (minimum 3, ideally 5) to shine. Which would be a big drawback except a Skaven player with a good food stockpile can afford to take all capitols to level 5 right as they are conquered.
Skaven economy is really good when it gets rolling. Not quite Dwarf industry or High Elf trade levels of good, but still quite strong.
I couldn’t agree more. I finally got into Warhammer 2 in the last month or so and have completed a High Elf Tyrion (Eataine) campaign and just got done with a Lizardman Mazdamundi (Hexoatl) campaign, both in Eye of Vortex. Even within those races, the various factions have some real neat mechanics that I would want to try, like Yvresse led by Eltharion with their unique Mistwalker units and the Dungeon of Athel Tamarha, where you can imprison legendary lords.
This goes out to everyone really and its pretty flexible in terms of why you enjoy who you’ve enjoyed - whether its the unit roster, unique mechanics, starting location, or even just the voice overs lol. I’m kind of intrigued by Settra just because of the memes and his over the top dialogue. I would also add that it can be either Mortal Empires or Eye of the Vortex campaigns.
I found this video which looks at a poll done on Reddit about peoples most played or favorite factions and legendary lords. The Google doc here presents all the data covered in the video. The poll/video/document are about the Mortal Empires campaign.
To quickly summarize, the Top 5 favorite campaigns in Mortal Empires (according to the Reddit poll) are
Empire
Skaven
High Elves
Lizardmen
Dwarves
If you go to the faction’s individual slide, there is a breakdown of what legendary lord gets selected the most. For Empire, over half the campaigns are Karl Franz. For Skaven, its even more lopsided towards Ikit Claw (nearly 70% of campaigns!). High Elves has a bit more even distribution with Tyrion, Imrik and Eltharion being the top three.
Skaven have been my favorite faction in Warhammer since the 90’s, so they win.
And Ikit leans into the coolest part of Skaven to me: that they have WW1/2 technology in a Renaissance world.
That said it can get a bit easy once the ball gets rolling. Still, firing machine guns at elves and nuking their homes never really gets old.
Plus he starts in Skavenblight on ME, which is great since for so many years it was an empty spot on the map when it should have been super important.
At the end of the day I enjoy most of the factions and LL’s though. Except Tiktakto. His campaign is painful, annoying and basically unfun to me. Tons of micro for basically no advantage and then late game your gimmick basically stops working at all, so you feel weak. You’re not some magic powerhouse or riding a named carnosaur around destroying everything, you’re watching your airforce die to archers and feeling kind of lame.
Tomb Kings feel bad after the growth changes as well. You make no money and need to grow, but you can’t, so it takes forever to get to the fun construct stage. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a really good time with them at the end of the day. Heck I’m not sure I’ve ever recruited a Necrosphinx, because it just takes too damned long to get any place up to Tier 5 (and afford doing so).
Imrik is my favourite. EVERYTHING BURNS. Also pushes you towards using cav early on, which is nice.
Teclis has interesting start positions.
Tomb kings are generally interesting mechanics-wise (or were when I played them anyway), I remember the campaign for the one who starts up in the north west is an interesting start point.
Empire is fun, but mainly because Helstorm rocket batteries go BOOM. (So it’s back to fire I guess). Also pushes you towards using cav early on as well WAIT A MINUTE IS IMRIK KARL FRANZ IN A FUNNY HAT
Skaven seem amazing. Years ago I loved and played a ton of Mordheim: City of the Damned and Skaven in that game (who were Clan Eshin) were an absolute blast to play. So I’m partial to Skaven as my next playthrough, but am intimidated by the micro I’ve read (here I believe) necessary to be successful with Clan Eshin, so I’m leaning towards the popular Clan Skryre / Ikit Claw campaign.
Its too bad about Tiktakto though as I managed to confederate with him as Mazdamundi and he was quite a treat to play around with leading an army of flyers. But you are absolutely right that arrows/bullets absolutely shredded them. I had a nightmare scenario where he got trapped by a High Elf army with half a dozen Sisters of Avelorn and just scrapped out a victory.
The earlier discussion in this thread about Imrik, the Lord of Dragons got me super excited. I’ve read/seen that his Mortal Empires campaign can be difficult, but that may be only on higher difficulties which I’m not comfortable with yet. I got him on my Tyrion campaign and I teamed him up with a fire mage on a dragon and just wrecked armies.
The tomb king faction I think you are talking about are the Exiles of Nehek who I grew to absolutely love on my Mazdamundi campaign since they were my chief allies against Malekith’s Naggarond Dark Elves and then the damn rats of Clan Moulder.
I have yet to try Empire out in Warhammer 2. I loved them and played them a bunch in Warhammer 1 but have not had the pleasure of the sweet new Elector Counts mechanic that they added. I imagine it makes Karl’s “summon the elector counts” dialogue more than just window dressing.
Hmm. Way to hard to pick a favorite. Keep in mind I play a heavily modded game and only play Mortal Empires, but I’d say my favorites can at least be whittled down to the following:
Tomb Kings:
Settra (“… does not serve!”)
Khalida (weaker, but I enjoy the lore & starting conflict)
Khatep (who doesn’t love fighting dark elves and using extra lich priests?)
Skaven:
Ikit Claw (mad scientist and oodles of tech goodness)
Sniktch (ninja rats!)
Lizardmen:
Gor-Rok (starting with Lord Kroak is awesome, although technically all Lizardmen have the opportunity to eventually get him via a three-step quest)
Mazdamundi (excellent magic to pair with the brute force army)
Kroq-Gar (a much more straight-forward menace to his surroundings)
Wood Elves:
Sisters of Twilight (making hawk riders great again)
Durthu (stompy stomp stomp)
High Elves:
Alith Anar (badass elf with a chip on his shoulder)
I knew “favorite” was loaded, especially in this game where Creative Assembly have done such a great job making each faction and lord unique and fun. This is exactly what I was hoping for though, something to help whittle down the possibilities.
If you start up Warhammer 2 with all of its DLC, but have not played any of it (like me last month lol) you are presented with (just counted): 69 possible choices for Mortal Empires and 39 choices for Eye of Vortex for a grand total of 108 possible ways to start a game. Its obscene (in a good way) and simply having someone say
can be enough to break through the decision paralysis lol. I’m also glad Snikch is on your list. I believe one of the mods you use is AI General and maybe I will try that when I play Clan Eshin if the micro becomes too much (and the mod works like I hope)
Mordheim is great. I think it had issues at the beginning with it being too brutal (namely if a character went down they were usually dead or had a terrible, career ending injury) but now is pretty forgiving in that regard. I started with the Sisters of Sigmar (battle nuns) and played as the Undead (DLC) but fell in love when I played Skaven.
Your leader is an aspiring assassin and much of the game involves your Warpguard henchmen tying up the enemy while your assassin and Nightrunner heroes rip them to shreds with Weeping Blades and Warplock pistols (though the Nightrunner, built right, can essentially paralyze foes with the shuriken). When you eventually get a Rat Ogre you start tearing apart Empire Warriors and Chaos Brethren. One of the DLC is a Poison Wind Globadier which can throw healing globes as well as poison the enemy, but I never used them much because I’d end up murdering my own guys and god forbid I run into an Undead squad full of poison immune zombies.
Someone made this sweet character planner that works great on phone too so once you start getting a bit of understanding about the game mechanics you can start theory crafting an unstoppable Mordheim squad. I should also add that I played it mostly on PS4, so its great with a controller. Movement just feels so much more natural and I didn’t have a problem navigating the menus and such.
Qt3 doesn’t have much on our forums about Mordheim but if you have any further questions I’d be happy to answer them there.
I grabbed it, mostly because I fucking love Skaven. I’m still miffed that they aren’t in 40k. You can keep your tyranids; I want some fuckin’ space rats.
After starting about a billion other campaigns I’ve gone back to my original Vampire Counts one. I just love spreading vampiric corruption. And varghulfs, which I refer to as “bat ogres”. It was my first campaign so I had no idea how anything worked, so I haven’t confederated anyone, just conquered every province that declared war on me, and now I’ve got a bunch of free skeleton armies garrisoning places so they don’t rebel. I don’t know how sustainable it is but I’m closing in on turn 100 and have Altdorf in my (telescopic) sights.
Vampire Counts are ridiculously easy against the computer. But satisfying! The upkeep-free skeletons plus the bonuses from awakening ancient lords with blood kisses are a disgusting combo. They really are fun to play, but almost boringly easy past a certain point.
So I just finished up a Taurox/Beastmen Eye of the Vortex campaign on Normal/Normal and it was just too damn easy. I’m probably in the minority but there was something to playing the Beastmen back in TWW1 that made it kind of exciting and probably overly difficult, but made for a very memorable experience.
The garrisons that you have at your heardstones (your “cities”) are incredibly strong even without walls. By the time I was making Tier 5 herdstones, the AI was marching 2 armies up and still losing in autoresolve (even more if I actually played to defend). These were not armies full of junk either. Having no minor settlements out there being vulnerable with puny little garrisons is just a huge bonus. Not having walls is really not a big deal when your garrison is full of giants and minotaurs.
Of course, Taurox himself is a beast. His momentum/rampage mechanic is incredibly powerful, especially once you reach the point where you can start replenishing his movement. You can start catching enemy armies in march stance and just obliterate them AND take out all the settlements in a region in ONE turn. Its truly obscene.
I also managed to snag the Sword of Khaine away from some dumb elf just carelessly running around with it and turned Taurox into an inhuman wrecking ball. And there are zero downsides to just keeping the Sword of Khaine forever.
It did get kind of boring to play. There is basically no diplomacy, extremely limited settlement development, and not a whole lot variety to their battles. Just about every battle (save a couple memorable ones) are about getting as many of your troops vanguard deployed and then smash into the enemy before their ranged can do much of anything. Every battle was over in less than 3 minutes except a few (though this is probably the case with most factions, it just felt even quicker with a whole army of minotaurs starting 50 feet away from the enemy’s front line).
I think it might have been more exciting had I turned it up to VH campaign / Normal battle difficulty but I was not playing very efficiently (only had 1 army for the longest time and then only expanded to another as I unlocked a legendary lord to lead them) so even with the difficulty turned up I think this would still be a rather straightforward campaign.
Being able to automatically recruit legendary lords is another thing that is really amazing. No more having to butter up the Knights of Caledor or the Order of Loremasters to get amazing legendary lords. Also no more getting them after the computer has spent their skillpoints in ridiculous ways (why get every mount dammit!). Once you have the requisite dread, you can just buy one of the legendary lords you don’t have. The only downside is that they start at level 1 no matter what, so get them early.
Once I’ve played some other factions (Dark Elf, Skaven, Tomb Kings) I might come back and try out a VH Taurox campaign in Mortal Empires to see if that gives him a real challenge.
