Total War: Warhammer 2

Lots of UI improvements, numerical movement %, unit size on cards, end-turn camera settings, agents list their actions, less agent micromanagement (campaign effects are passive, no more deploy-move-redeploy micro). TWW2 does perform worse though.

I also knew about the ME campaign (hard to not know with all the marketing they did!), but I doubt I will ever play it. I don’t want a twice as long slog of a campaign, with even longer waiting times between turns.

I booted up ME the other day to start a campaign, but I must have spent four or five minutes trying to decide what one of the hundreds of lords to choose before giving up and quitting. Just having 4 lords to start with back in WH1 was one of the best design decisions CA have made.

I’m enjoying WH1 still. It’s satisfying enough for me. Eventually I will grab WH2, but only when it’s on one of those super deluxe full package sales and I say ‘oh, go on then’. Until then, I’ve plenty of WH1 challenges left.

Speaking of which, the chaos campaign is probably the dullest I’ve attempted. They just don’t have a very interesting roster. Even Norsca had a more interesting one.

Even Norsca!?? Norsca have a great line up!

Norsca/Chaos just don’t excite me in Total War. Loved them in bloodbowl thought, but that’s because they get to scare and MURDER the opposing team.

The only TW1 DLC that surprised me was wood elves. I thought I’d hate them. I hate micro. I hate elfs. I hate them in my D&D party, I hate them when they have grand fashion parties and don’t invite me. Anyway, I do not hate them in Total warhammer.

The best part about Chaos is manually aiming the Hellcannon.

Maybe my favorite memory in Warhammer so far was an online battle where i got two Hellcannons vs Dwarfs on a very open map, got some of the ranged horsies for cover, and then placed them on opposite ends of the map. I kept one hidden, so that after the Dwarves ran over to cannon one (eating manually aimed hits the whole time), they discovered another cannon blasting away on the far side of the map. I can only imagine how frustrating that was!

Chaos is fun to use because you have to get into the strange mindset of using them, which, admittedly is hard to do because their units are frustratingly limited and one dimensional. They’re a bit weird, not like the Beastment which tend to be much more of a charge-forward type, and very dependent upon a few special units and abilities that put them over the top.

Many or most of the ME campaign starting positions’ difficulty are almost entirely diplomatic. Get in a spot where you’re attacked on multiple fronts, and it’s hard to make progress. Get a game where this doesn’t happen, and you can survive and push out. Like much of Total War often the most important thing is who your neighbors are distracted by.

I find the initial Morathi campaign in Mortal Empires almost unwinnable. Whether i’m stuck in my initial lands or not entire depends upon the High Elves and whether they decide to invade because it’s only 1-3 turns by ship from Ulthuan (sp?) to Morathi’s area. And if you do get diplo-ganged by the HE it’s nearly impossible to survive, since the AI had the might of an entire island against you, and the AI is quite adept at using Silver Shields to charge Bleakswords et al to break your lines and get to your crossbows - imo the DE are much weaker than HE in early / mid game, and low tier DE cav is pretty crap by comparison, and Shades are functionally the same as Darkshards but with less missile resist - a bad choice vs HE most of the time.

It’s not until you get those giant AOE attacks like Pit of Shades can you easily beat HE armies. But you can’t rely on crossbows vs HE as DE until you get some better front line holding troops. I like a 4-6 Hydras and like 10 Darkshards; does the job pretty well. By that point the high tier HE stuff isn’t near the threat.

I finally survived the initial Morathi campaign by allowing my initial DE scrub opponent to live; she made 1+ stacks for 50+ turns, more than i could have and it let me run interference with the lizards to the south until i finally got enough momentum to take the lizards and the HE on. That meant i shared my starting province with her for a long time, but it was definitely worth it.

Greetings all. Late game waiting or load times in general get to the heart of a dilemma for me. I have had dreamy thoughts of someday really digging into TW:WH(1, 2, and 3). However my PC is just frustratingly not up to the task. Even early game has long loads and I have to drop settings to have decent performance. Battle load times are 2 to 6 minutes even on a skirmish battle. As such I am aiming at a new PC to finally enjoy this game along with others such as modern shooters or PC VR.

So I wanted to post (cross post actually assuming that is not a no no) here to get some input on what is needed to enjoy TW:W at max settings with good load times. I have been asking for PC build advice over here:

My current specs are there, but in short I have an aging 1TB HDD, Nvidia 760, and i5 3570 @3.4

I’ve picked up most of the franchise on sales, I just don’t last very long at playing it as it is such a dissappointing slog on my PC.

I recently picked up an i7 w/ 1080 GTX for around $700, so i’d look around on ebay (imo) and find a good deal that way.

The most important thing about Total War since, oh, Attila, is putting it on an SSD. Basically nothing else matters by comparison aside from that, since you can turn down graphics.

There’s also an upper limit on graphics, since even at 4k with highest settings you’re only likely to get around 60+ FPS on only the highest end cards. And that’s not particularly important in Total War - 2560x1440 or whatever is perfectly serviceable.

So unlike most games literally the only thing if you’re building a “Total War” rig i would insist on is a big enough SSD for these games to sit on. Remember they are by far some of the largest PC games in size, each one around 30-40 GB at this point.

Past that, you can’t go wrong with the old i7, 16gb, best graphics card you can afford, kind of advice. Having a super fast i7 helps with the turn times, but not near as much as with the load times using an SSD.

I disagree, the best part about Chaos is having the finest heavy infantry in the game. Chosen eat anything head-to-head. Chaos has the best infantry, decently strong cavalry, fantastic artillery, and okay fliers. The only thing missing is archers but the arty can cover that gap and force people to engage up close.

I enjoy the occasional Chaos campaign as a change of pace but it is kind of boring. There’s no real diplomacy, no building an empire, and the corner start is sort of limiting for what directions one can go. It’s just siege battle after siege battle. Which they are good at, but gets repetitive.

Am I remembering right that TW Warhammer 2 has more interesting terrain in the battles than TWW1? Did they ever do anything to make the terrain in the first more varied?

Wow, you’re PC is better than mine! I get load times that are annoying but manageable. 2-6 minutes to load a battle would drive me insane.

Yes, they are more interesting and varied in Warhammer 2, I do not believe they made any changes to Warhammer 1 since the sequel came out.

It has gotten so bad that I actually time load times with a stop watch. The last time I checked WH:TW I had to drop the settings for frame rate. Battle loads on just a skirmish were 2 to 6 minutes. If I loaded the same skirmish settings, the time dropped a lot to like 40 seconds. This was still a “long” time in the way it felt and relied on what I assume was assets still loaded in memory. Another issue is my video card is it is not one of the ones with extra VRAM. I play W40K Gladius a lot, and I’ve timed that game out to about 3 minutes to get to the main screen. My drive is not just HDD, but a slow one from way back.

I know SSD is my main issue with TW. I also have my sights on games like Anthem and a VR capable rig too. I just don’t want to miss the mark on having a solid Warhammer experience. I really do envision a gaming “staycation” someday centered on digging into that game.

Oh I misread your message, I have an okay SSD. I think my cold load into the Mortal Empires campaign is about 90s.

Although you can definitely improve your experience, some games are just slow loaders. I think the Total Wars are and also the Frostbite games like Anthem. My Anthem load time was 40s from a high end SSD…

If you get a Samsung 970 Evo, a CPU in the 8600 - 9700 range from Intel and a 2060 from Nvidia, you’ll think the future has arrived :) Tweak according to budget / desired screen resolution and you’re good.

Rather than “best” let me clarify that to be “most fun.” ;)

But i’m not enamored at all with Chaos infantry - they only shine against chaff (at which they’re nigh immortal). I remember trying to chew through some standard Chosen with some beat up Dreadspears. Not a fun experience. But Chaos infantry are slow, and mobility with Chaos kind of sucks (although poison warhounds are the best skirmish flanker in the game). I almost skip the infantry most of the time. AI is canny about focusing the “right” unit and Chaos infantry always disappoint me with their performance. But then even Black Guard disappoint me - heck, even when they’re in a city gate choke point Black Guard only get 20-30 kills, which is crazy. They tend to get focused down hard by ranged as well.

Chaos usually doesn’t work for me. Against hyper mobile forces like High Elves or (gasp) Wood Elves, Chaos can be downright gimped until you get enough speciality units. But the AI will come to you if you have Hellcannon, and then you can flank with poison warhounds and er… uh… those half human tentacle guys. Whatever they are. AND Hellcannon are hella fun to use; really the only unit manually firing is absolutely possible. They did change Hellcannon a year or so ago to not have extended range in manual mode; you used to be able to “float” shots further than they’d normally be able to hit in manual and almost go the length of the map with them.

But Kholek plus some of his kids can uber-mosh any hero into the dirt. Sort of like Dark Elves, the early game for Chaos can suck hard - heck, when you’re playing as uh… shiny boy… um… /squints /googles Sigvald! - if you don’t advance extremely quickly as Sigvald and clear out the initial Norsca camps, within like 5 turns Sigvald will be too weak to beat Norsca troops, because gimp level Chaos units suck so hard, especially with a couple extra notches of combat difficulty.

FYI - I play TW1 on a 3570k without issue (on an SSD with a 1060 GTX). I do have mine overclocked to 4.4Ghz on stock cooling. By which I mean to say, focus on other upgrades first, if you don’t want to do it all at once. The 3570k isn’t the piece you need to swap out first.

The game is just a pig. I have an SSD m.2 NVMe, a 9700k, and a GTX 2700 video card, and while the load times and frame rates are not bad, they are still kind of sluggish for that powerful a machine.

The game is really just a pig. I’m running games like Battlefield 5 with everything maxed without a hitch. Only this game misbehaves. Again, it isn’t horrible, but I am surprised that it struggles at all with a machine like mine.

I was just playing The White Dwarf. I ventured south instead of the intuitive north. I think. We shall see. I want to look back at Strato’s AAR.

I get the feeling they kinda overloaded or stretched the warscape engine to the max?

Makes me wonder what they’ll do for 3K.