Better Camera should just be part of the game at this point imo. Or at least an option.
I keep forgetting to download it again and then invariably I have some camera issue in a fight.
I was already using the Building Progression Icons, which is a nice quality of life improvement. I just tried Faster End Turn camera and that is quite nice likewise.
Also, one I found is Robcore’s Auto Resolve Fix which simply removes the red/yellow color in the auto-resolve bar without changing anything else. This means you can safely auto-resolve when you feel confident of a wipeout, but if its close, you won’t be able to tell. Thus far, I’ve found it enhances the game a lot by making me take risks on battles.
I am sorely tempted by this, and currently not ordering it because of the “go buy the previous iteration of this game if you want the shiny new DLC”. Am I being unreasonable?
I’d say it’s a bit odd, rather than outright unreasonable. I feel Warhammer II gives you enough stuff to warrant it’s price. And if you can pick up Warhammer I for cheap (currently $20 in the sale I think) and get Mortal Empires, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me either.
For $80 you get a lot of content, like 100s of hours of game, if you enjoy it.
Talked me into it. I’m just viewing Mortal Empries as a $20 DLC
I’d go with “as a classic $20-30 expansion pack”
Though the perspective is different if you’re coming from owning Warhammer I.
Let me add to your temptation, with my screenshot-story of Vera the Bow Princess.
I’m in the early late game, playing as High Elves - Tyrion. I fire up the third to last ritual. I’ve got 3 Lord-stacks scattered about likely paths for the ritual attack forces. However, one of my ritual cities doesn’t have walls b/c I thought it was safely away from the path of attack. The good news is, my newly upgraded stack led by Vera the Bow Princess happens to be near the target city However, I forgot to take into account the intervention forces, which can be tougher than you might expect. After I end turn, I get hit by a Dark Elf Intervention led by a level 19 hero riding a Black Dragon. This intervention is pretty much A Stack quality with Black Guard of Naggarond and a mix of good quality troops. Vera has a pretty good A Stack and manages to hold off the Dark Elves with a Close Victory.
Immediately after that, I get hit by a Skaven Intervention, led by a level 19 Rat Lord dude on one of those palanquin-of-death thingies. Vera’s army is not at full strength, but if I retreat her, the Skaven will bust my unwalled ritual city and stop my ritual. So I commit Vera’s army to the fight:
Things start off pretty well, with my ranged units picking off a healthy chunk of the rats on the way to engage. However, I did not take into account the rat artillery and start taking damage from a couple of Plague Catapults. At that moment, Morlocke the Gray Seer rolls up and starts buffing the rats up and weakening my troops:
To be continued…
I send my squad of 2 Sun Dragons to go after the Plague Catapults but by the time they get there, my line is beginning to break. I did get a pretty good action shot of dragon fire though:
It’s a slugfest, with Vera shooting the hell out of stuff and trying to rally the troops. My dragons wipe out the catapults and the I swing them back around to engage Morlocke:
Morlocke goes down but those damnable Gutter Runner poison slingers are savaging my troops:
Pretty soon, I only have 4 units left on the field: two wounded dragons, a unit of Dragon Princes with only 3 dudes (out of 60) still alive, and Vera the Bow Princess with one sliver of health. A rat sword unit rallies and closes from behind on my dragons who are still trying to kill the damn Gutter Runners. Vera has been doing great work with her bow spot-fighting throughout the battle and I start to have her target the swords when I see that she’s out of arrows, and she’s almost dead. But the battle is down to bare knuckles and I’m in it to win it, so I send Vera charging into melee. Fortunately I had upgraded her with the Elven Steed:
You see those flying rats in the center-right? Yes, Vera’s charge was so potent she sent sword rats flying through the air. The sword rats break, the Gutter Runners break, and it’s time for a hellacious Pyrrhic Victory:
It was an epic fight and I won, saving my ritual, but man my poor army got savaged. Rats + poison + plague suck! I will not underestimate them again. And the crucial win was Vera, out of arrows and nearly dead, charging into melee to break the last sizable rat unit.
Great stuff.
That’s an awesome report Sharpe.
I’m not sure I have any stories so good, despite completing three Vortex campaigns. My closest was similar to yours, Tyrion High Elf campaign, the chaos invasion for the third ritual. But this time it wasn’t an army that did the work, it was one of the fortress gates that guard the inner ring of Ulthuun. I had to fight two siege defenses in a row with the same garrison. First against Chaos and then with the the depleted army against Skaven and their damn poison. I won, but not without losing the gates and having to recapture them in both battles.
That was indeed great stuff, thanks for sharing!
I’d been out of PC gaming for about 5 years and just dove back in. I went ahead and picked both Warhammer games up this weekend and almost all the DLC. I had just bought Attila a few weeks. Attila seems exponentially more interesting to me from a campaign standpoint but man is there some fun combat in Warhammer. I end up auto resolving whenever possible in Attila but with Warhammer I really look forward to the combat.
One thing that is bugging me though. I’m really enjoying playing as Beastmen and Chaos but is there an easy way I’m missing to ensure I have enough movement to encamp? Right now I’m doing little mini moves and checking the movement left.
There is a little dial by your selected leader’s portrait that when you mouseover a move will indicate what % movement you will have left afterwards. It was a quality of life addition in TW:W2 and the Mortal Empires campaign. If you are just playing a WH1 related campaign you are gonna have to eye it.
Thanks! Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing some super obvious option to actually show me the limit I can move on map and still encamp. That’d be a nice addition as either a lock to always save enough to encamp or color code move range.
Overall though I’m finding horde factions a lot more fun in this than Attila. It somehow makes more sense and also not knowing any Warhammer lore or the map it is a great way for me to roam around seeing the world. Chaos also has been my easiest start at least or any faction I’ve tried, because I was able o get Chaos Warriors extremely quickly and it just isn’t something the AI appears to be able to handle early game.
Chaos is pretty easy once you start getting the chaos heavies. It gets a little boring since it’s just wandering around and razing settlements. If you have both Warhammer games, uninstall the first and play the Mortal Empires campaign in 2. At first glance it’s exactly the same as the Grand Campaign in the first game, but the map is expanded and the second game races are present. Also there’s some nice quality of life improvements such as the aforementioned % remaining indicator on movement.
Also, if you think Chaos Warriors make Chaos easy, wait till you can field four hellcannons as a backline behind Chaos Chosen with Halberds. That army will easily beat almost anything!
You know what I’d like to see as a small DLC? A streamlined grand campaign with all of the Mortal Empires factions and Lords, but on a substantially smaller map. I love how they just threw everything into Mortal Empires but even on a decent rig with an SSD install, Mortal Empires just bogs down at turn end. I like having the massive Mortal Empires, but I’d love a smaller variant.
To give an sense of the massive size of ME, the tightest grand campaign map in the recent TW games is Shogun 2, with a mere 65 regions. Rome 2’s sprawling grand campaign has 173 regions on the map. Mortal Empires has 295 regions. In other words, ME takes the vast Rome 2 map and increases it by 70%. That huge map is split among 117 factions. That’s 10 factions per race.
A streamlined campaign with 3-4 factions per race, around 40 to 45 total factions, on a map of 80 to 100 regions, would be excellent IMO. It would still be a hefty grand campaign with tons of variety but would play substantially quicker.
Even more odd… is that it’s cramped!
The new races are kind of SOL because their positions were balanced for the larger, more spread out Vortex Campaign map. Trying to get either Dark Elf faction going in the Mortal Empires map has been almost impossible; constant rebellions, being invaded from every direction, monster doom stacks, ect. I’m lucky if i can get more than 3 or 4 other cities occupied before the Alliance of Anti-Me sends the hordes to lay waste to all my hard work.
The old races, otoh, have a completely different point of view. Now everything can be occupied by everybody; once you start the ball rolling you can really get it rolling.
Well, trying to cram 117 factions onto a single map is kinda crazy.
I’m doing a dark elf (Morathi) ME campaign right now and it hasn’t been too bad. Instead of going north or south at the start, I went east and decided that invading Ulthuan was my highest priority. While I was doing that I made friendly with the other DE races and tried to maintain the peace with Mazdamundi. Worked out pretty well. I’ve had a couple of wars with Mazdamundi but I just play defense with one army stationed to ambush his forces coming into my territory. After I beat on him like that a little he will go for peace. The DE minors have all been absorbed. Malekith got Hag Graef, but I got the rest. After a lot of fighting with Tyrion things started going my way and I’ve got all of Ulthuan as of turn 95 or so. The only remaining big decision is where to go after I mop up Alghol and annex Malekith. Do I strike further east and invade Brettonia next or go give Mazdamundi a good stomping? Tricky question.
I wish my games have gone so well; i’ve restarted multiple times but they always end up being some variant of this:
You with one city vs. your “rebel” faction that has three cities. By the time i’ve beaten them, my province is on the verge of rebellion. Sudden invasion by High Elves (full stack +) on either a port or main city. Sudden invasion by Lizards or (if they survive) New World Colonists or Varg (random Chaos) from Lustria. Every time, someone from the south attacks me. Now i’m facing 2-3 stacks on multiple fronts and my province wants to rebel ever 5 turns. Now Lothern has annexed 2/3 of their Island, are sending 3+ full stacks at me. All this time i’m barely squeaking by trying to fight off multiple stacks from multiple directions and keep my home province from rebelling. It takes me to like turn 60 before i can stabilize all these spinning plates and build up enough order / chaos buildings to keep things from going crazy - then Lothern hits me, or multiple High Elves hit me, with a massive invasion. And i have one, maybe one and a half, stacks. Ouch. Eventually somebody kills my main stack, and i’m back to square one. Probably 90% of the time i’ve played Morathi the game ends with a half-eaten stack in her main city and every other city razed or captured. It’s just numbers, i win every battle, sometimes Morathi kills hundreds per battle, but it’s 800 troops vs. 5000, with no chance to recover between battles, and eventually i lose.
I’ve not played Dark Elves, but with the other factions you don’t usually expect to be getting so many rebellions. Especially not in your capital province. Can you mouse over the public order indicator and see in the tooltip what factors are causing the instability?