Total War: Warhammer 2

The ritual race isn’t as important as it seems. It’s one way to victory, but you can completely neglect it and win as well. The AI slows down later versus the power of a well-run player empire. I can’t prove this, but I suspect that in order to increase the tension the AI gets bonuses towards progress of all the rituals except the final.

The huge map is a definite plus and one of the things I love about this game. In my first Tyrion playthrough I ended up owning most of Ulthuan, most of the Dark Elf territories, and had almost no presence in the southern half of the map. In the first TWW game the map would often end up feeling dead and lonely in longer games, especially with Beastmen/Chaos/Norsca razing settlements that the AI would never resettle. In this game the map is always lively and full of surprises and things to discover right to the end. I think it’s a massive improvement.

I don’t think this is happening. The thing I don’t quite understand is what criteria the AI is using to determine when to perform a ritual. They sometimes seem to take a very long time to retry a failed ritual. But other times they’ll do the ritual seemingly as soon as they can, even if they have no chance to defend it.

Overall, the AIs ritual performance seems to track with difficulty level (at least on Easy and Normal). It’s quite easy to stay ahead the entire game on Easy, whereas on Normal the AI often gets ahead early but seems to struggle to get the ritual resources for the last two rituals compared to an expansionist human player.

Totally agree with this. The map just adds so much to the game. There’s always things going on. My first Lizardman campaign, I never left Lustria, it’s like being part of a living world.

Autoresolve is still sometimes like cheating, observe how effective the AI is in the field now, you will get into surprisingly much trouble in places…except Sieges I think.

I’m finding on Normal, manual and auto resolving give me similar results on average. Certain types of battle the auto resolve seems to have an edge, others it’s a bit pessimistic.

I’m quite happy with it so far. But I didn’t like the punishing auto-resolve in earlier Total War games.

It is still underestimating Menace from Below. I don’t think I’ve ever had as many Heroic Victories as I have had with my Skaven campaign so far. To the game’s credit, I really do feel heroic afterwards.

Maybe it just uses Menace Below like the AI does… which is to say it completely wastes it every single time.

I’m sure you’re right, but it does make it very exciting to play Skaven as a human. I guess it is a minor cheat, because the poor AI has no idea how hard the coming fight is going to be for it. The AI actually does a pretty good job of responding to Menace in general, but it needs to learn to leave a guard unit for it’s artillery.

In my first Lizardmen campaign, my fellow tribes eradicated the Skaven before I got a chance to do more than clear out a few meager warrens. So, I don’t think I’ve seen the AI even try to use it on me yet.

Yeah, summons tend to stymie the AI.

As far as the AI using MfB, it just craps them out the instant the cooldown comes up. In front of things.
It’s pretty awful.

Menace From Below (and indeed, all Skaven summons) are currently bugged in that they have no collision boxes. Against an immobile and single foe, you can actually kill a hero or lord with one, because all 150 or whatever clanrats can attack them simultaneously.

It’s apparently going to be fixed in the first patch, but it’s incredibly broken and makes them far better than they are supposed to be. Between that and the fact the AI is awful at defending itself from them (which is in practicality extremely difficult due to the bug, anyways), it makes the Skaven campaign pretty trivial even on Legendary.

Hnnnnnnnngggghhhh.

Agreed.

Please don’t let the turn length make it unplayable. Please please please please pl

I have to imagine the turn lengths are going to be balls, I don’t know how they can get away from that. I’m still willing to suffer through it for something this epic, though. I’ll play the standalone campaigns from either game when I’m feeling less masochistic. :)

My SSD has improved loading times immensely but my processor is not great and so I’m afraid turn length is gonna kill me :(

Just finished my first campaign in W2 as the high elves, it was quite enjoyable. The challenge at the end of holding vortex from an invading horde of skaven was a challenge I almost lost and then I had a heroic victory in the final battle, definitely makes it unlike previous TW’s as you aren’t steam rolling your way to victory at the end.

I’m ready to do it again in fact, only question being, who next shall I play.

All in all, I like rather like this one a lot the new elements they’ve put into it and look forward to seeing what possible game play elements from this one they might consider putting into their next historical.

P.S. A merged map campaign is another thing I look forward to, this map was already huge, can’t wait to see the combined one in play.

Got my third campaign win. As Skaven (Clan Pestilens) this time, they seemed a lot harder than the Lizardmen and High Elves. There was more than a couple of moments where I thought I was in over my head. I was also a lot less clear on which units I should be fielding, with Lizardmen there seemed to be a clear best composition.

Got to say, I’m a little disappointed that the Eye of the Vortex campaign story doesn’t change much between the three races. I might give the game a rest before I try the Dark Elves, or just wait for Mortal Empires next week.

I’m very pleased they are doing the crossover campaign, but it will be taxing on time and cpu, no doubt, but maybe worth it?

Oooh, October 26th! They made good with their promise that it would be out shortly after release!

-Tom

And I have a new computer…:)