Total War: WARHAMMER

You’d be surprised. But that’s gamers for you. Entitled to the hilt, I suppose. Kind of bums me out.

But I do agree CA is doing a great job supporting the game with a fine blend of free/small but meaningful/premium DLC and their patching and support has really been on point.

I played Bretonia last night for a couple hours, had a great time, loved the new mechanics unique to the race. Thought to myself, I’m pretty jazzed by the idea this was given to me for free.

I’ve been thinking of trying this out again. I started a campaign at release as the dwarves. The two main things that caused me to stop was that it felt a little too whack-a-mole-ish trying to defend my borders while still expanding and that there were a lot of battles that felt very similar to each other.

I expect that #1 may be able to be mitigated by either better play on my part or picking a different faction.My guess is that #2 is just the nature of Total War games. So if I give it another try, is there any particular faction that may help decrease the things I dislike about the game?

@robc04, in terms of number 2, don’t be shy of using autoresolve. Don’t feel as if you need to play all, or even most, of the battles.

Yeah, when I’m playing solo I tend to save the game and auto-resolve almost every fight. I think the game I won a long campaign (Dwarf faction) I probably played a dozen total fights and auto-resolved … 100 or so. That might not even be hyperbole.

Fight the earliest fights though, to get a sense for your units, and fight at least some of the easier fights to get a sense for tactics, so you know what you are doing with the tough fights or the ones the AI just will not win for you. There have been some of my favorite moments in gaming right here with TW Warhammer where I take a small garrison and actually hold out against a superior force. That shit never gets old.

OK, thanks @KevinC and @Scotch_Lufkin. I’ll try to make better use of auto resolving. I know this won’t make sense to most people, because, well - people should play games the way they get the most out of them, but I’ve always had trouble auto resolving things in games. I have trouble giving up control even when I think it may increase my enjoyment.

Maybe a good plan would be to start how Scott says - play the earliest fights then autoresolve. If I save before the autoresolve then I can always replay the battles where I feel like I could have done much better and then accept those results.

I’ve done just that. I also don’t like the big battles that involve 2-3 armies per side. I’m sure most people love the epic scale of it all, but to me it’s just too many units to manage for me to find it enjoyable (I don’t like making frequent use of pause, which would likely make it more manageable for me).

Other than that, I follow pretty much what Scott said. I play the early battles and get a feel for my units. I play battles whenever I unlock new units and want to experiment with force compositions. Other than that, I’m probably autoresolving 90% of the battles. As you say, they get really samey because, well, they’re the same. Your exact same army is going to attack a settlement garrison dozens of times over the course of a campaign.

That is also exactly how I am. I’m one of the few in Age of Wonders3 who prefer the 1 stack vs 1 stack battles over the larger encounters.

Man, I doubt I’ve autoresolved more than 10% of battles, really only doing so for battles that are extremely lopsided kill fests. Partly because I know that I can outperform the AI every single time. I just… can’t go into a battle with 2:1 odds, knowing I could take a major victory with minimal casualties, while the AI stands a decent chance of losing, and even in victory take losses that will take several turns, and lots of money, to recover from.

Which also ties in to the fact that the battles are some of my favorite parts, and that I have more hours in Total War than any series except Europa Universalis. So I guess I’m the outlier. The campaigns are mostly a battle generator for me.

When I finally get a nice lopsided battle I don’t want the AI to auto-resolve either. I want to win with the barest number of casualties - always less than what the auto-resolve would divvy out. But then I quibble about just a few units in a thousand.

I just started playing this after accidentally not cancelling my Humble Bundle subscription. Anyway I started as the Dwarves which was ok but then I realised I hate Dwarves. I would rather be killing them than leading them into battle, so I switched to the vampires and they are really cool. I am not that far into it but I love the bats, being able to raise cannon fodder zombies and skeletons from the dead, and the opening hero/lord/whatever seems more interesting with his capabilities than the dwarf on a chair.

I’m the exact same way. It’s an instance of the whole “water finds a crack” problem in game design where the game makes you choose between the most enjoyable approach (playing out a moderate number of battles to keep the overall game moving at a reasonable pace) and the optimally effective approach (spending a lot of time on repetitive easy battles to get better outcomes in terms of casualties).

The design solution that seems optimal to me would be to attach some game mechanic cost/benefit tradeoff to the auto-resolve. Maybe the ability to personally take command of your forces is a consumable item to purchase, or the ability only recharges every X turns. Or choosing to auto-resolve means your faction leader is paying more personal attention to the people at home, granting some sort of economic boost. Wonder if there are any games with a strategic/tactical split that have tried something like that.

I was thinking about something like that @Thraeg. Maybe heros have a command rating that controls how often the player could control battles, but make it limited in some way. That way you need to choose which battles are important to command yourself.

Your opinion is wrong and you should feel bad. And I believe Warhammer purists might yell at you as I think it is ‘Dwarfs’ for some reason.

I’m ordinarily a big auto-resolve hater in Total War games, but I never found Warhammer:TW’s autoresolve to be anything but generous. Oftentimes, it gives me zero-casualty victories in situations where I couldn’t reasonably expect to win with no losses myself, if only because of ranged friendly fire.

The trouble is no one much does what CA does, least not that I’m aware of. For whatever reason they seemingly own a kind of monopoly on this whole strategic map / tactical battle thing. I’m not really even sure why, but then I don’t know much of anything about how hard TW games are to make (apparently given the lack of competition maybe it’s hard, I don’t know). In any case I’ve never seen CA play with this piece of their game mechanic, at most they mess about tweaking the casualty rate from auto’ing.

Well, Friday is the big announce for Game 2 (presumably).

I’m down for Elves and Llizardmen and hopefully Skaven.

The King Arthurs also do the tactical/strategic split. I probably enjoyed them more than the Total Wars, though i haven’t played much of Warhammer.

If the factions are High and Dark Elves as well as Lizardmen and Skaven, I will be absolutely thrilled. I love every one of those factions.

Thanks for the follow up mention on those, I may have to give them a second look, I didn’t take much notice of them at the time they released because I was convinced MTW2 was likely to prove, at least for me, the better game of the two since I considered it the 2nd best of the TW series I wasn’t expecting it be surpassed.

However, always willingly to give any attempt at this game design a shot, so I think I’ll favorite these and wait for the next sale.