Chaos is a rubbish army, but hellcannon sure are fun to use, also in the hands of the AI the gorebeast chariot is devastating, but fo me it requires too much micro to work.
Oh yeah, I finished the campaign with the Dwarfs, just a few turns after that post. I was in fact very close to get the ‘long goal victory’, only needed to resettle 3 ruins and reconquer another settlement, though I needed a few extra turns because there was a triple army from Norsca in the way to the North.
In any case, what I was thinking now was playing Vampire Counts. I always liked undead in fantasy games. The thing is, I don’t know if play it already, or play another game for a pair of weeks as ‘palate cleanser’ and then come back to TW.
I also would like to try Greenskins as I’m attracted to the big variety of units they have, though I will do it much later, after the Dwarf campaign which was about using dwarfs and fighting greenskins everyday, I don’t want again a campaign focused on greenskins and dwarfs, even if the roles would invert this time.
Congrats on your first win. Vampires are beyond a doubt my favorite campaign faction. In multiplayer they are quite powerful but extremely unforgiving to even minor errors. You’ll spend most of the game fighting Empire forces as Vampires, and it’s completely possible to go an entire campaign without a battle against Greenskins. Probably have a few skirmishes with the dwarves just because they kind of start off up in your business, though.
In in the end I started already the VC campaign, and in fact I played a lot of hours. Some notes:
-I took the mage instead of Manfred. The idea was to abuse his -15% reduction cost in Raise Dead (which is accumulative with another -7% trait you win after raising undead a few times and another -15% from one of the end skill trees). In fact for most of the campaign I’ve been raising dead, not using recruitment buildings. I have a pair of big battle points where in fact I can recruit some end-game units.
-I did a very good early game, I rushed and in just a few turns I defeated the two rival VC and had the 3 entire provinces.
-I’ve been using, and in good effect, armies composed of 3/4 cheap skellies/zombies and 1/4 of cavalry/monsters. In a way these cheap armies were needed because my economy sucked (har har suck, vampires)
-The exception are the sieges, which with this kind of army they are horrible. Cheap units are melted in the tough fight for the walls and cavalry can’t flank. In fact I had one battle which I played directly and had 3 full armies vs 1 army + garrison in a city with upgraded walls and damn, I was utterly defeated. In fact I won that one by using the autobattle system, which clearly isn’t accurate and let me win by sheer number of forces.
-In the mid game I found problems with lack of vampiric population, and therefore of public order. This slowed me greatly, the campaign would have gone in another direction without this problem. In fact I suppose VC are balanced because of that, they would be easy-peasy otherwise.
-In this campaign I barely played direct battles. Not by conscious choice, but because the battles happened to be mainly one sided affairs (not interesting then) or sieges (boring grind) or both. Mostly, I have been the aggressor and did ‘blitzkrieg’ on small nations, reaching their settlement and siege them before they could answer.
-Without a special long-term plan, I just attacked what it seemed my weakest neighbor, once at a time. This kind of strategy let me expand to the North, and then to the West, and then finally to the central Imperial provinces. Which it may have been a mistake. Because before I could take the Empire the Chaos horde appeared, and who is the dude at the North, taking all the brunt of their attacks, without no allies? Yep, that’s me.
-My current status (lol):
I don’t know if I should retreat and wait until they make the mistake of dividing up their armies, or try to hold in the city siege. I could even try to retreat to the South, sacking everything, and with that extra money hire even more armies (I have 5 right now) to finally beat Chaos.
Hrm, I’d retreat south for now and let them bash their head against the other AI and split their forces a bit. As for the problems with public order, their (relatively) weak economy and public order problems are the only things slowing them down from winning by turn 60 or so. Once you can get a Mortis Engine sieges are trivial, the AoE drain they do works on walls and through walls, and the AI doesn’t even attempt to stop them (a human player will focus everything on destroying a Mortis Engine asap if they have any clue what they are doing). You might need the Grim and the Grave DLC for Mortis Engines and Corpse Carts tho, don’t recall exactly what units it adds.
It was much easier than I was expecting. The main chaos invasion has been stopped in just 3 turns.
It was a simple thing: just use autobattle in the two big main battles. Which actually felt like cheating a bit.
Battles calculated by the game will never give accurate results, but imo it should be biased in favor of the enemy, so the player will limit himself in its use only for 3 to 1 battles, for example.
Autoabattles, while in other circumstances it seems to produce fair results, in this case it didn’t seem to take in account the particular weaknesses and strengths of both Chaos and VC. It also seems to give you more advantage by having superior numbers (they separated two armies from the rest, I attacked him with 5 stacks!) even if in a real battle you can’t use that many units at the same time. The rest enter by reinforcements, but by having so many units the map was even bigger than usual, so when reinforcements entered in the map they were in a remote corner, and as I was attacking I had to go to the opposite corner where they were waiting in a defensive formation. and obviously they enter drip by drip, as one of my units are eliminated. I know all that because I saved the game and replayed it that part playing the battle to see how it was. I could win too, but having way too more casualties.
That’s another thing, in autobattles casualties are usually spread units in all your units, so if you attack with a big number of them, the damage is thin and can be recovered fully in one turn resting, as VC they automatically recover some undead units too after each battle. In real tactical battles even if you are careful you can’t produce the same results and some units suffer much more heavy casualties.
PD: two units of bats nullified the infernal cannons, it’s really nice to having flying units for that.
Not to pop your dream there, but to pop it, autobattle is totally messed up, if you autoresolve a full stack of enemies you are basically cheating, the results are just totally wrong.
It’s weird they allow it, but I guess it is optional
Each TW has had the balance on autoresolve set differently. While I tend to fight all major engagements I’ve no qualms whatsoever in auto’ing where I have overwhelming odds (a typical example being I’ve just curb stomped an army yet a few managed to flee the battle before I could finish them off, so when the battle ended and we pop back out to strategic map they wander off a short distance, at which point I move my army on top of them again and auto-resolve them out of existence).
Yes, but sometimes they are wrong to one side, and others times to the opposite side!
The strange thing to me is the lack of consistency. Just today I had a battle where the auto system had around 50% more casualties than me, I did it better through an intelligent use of cavalry, monsters and fliers in the key moments. So it played ‘worse’, in comparison with a human. In my previous experience, it was the other way around: the auto system favored me greatly.
I think in all the TWs the one thing that really is open to abuse players have to resist unless they want to unbalance the campaign in their favor is multiple stack auto-resolve. Sheer numerical advantage, even of not particularly great quality units, will auto out in your favor every time.
It’s why in TW forums one of the recurring threads is about house rules. The other 9 out of 10 threads is an argument about which is the best TW, haha.
Obviously it’s your game and you should play any way you find fun, but in my mind if you auto-resolve a battle you can’t win yourself, you’re cheating. That being said you are playing a single player campaign so do whatever amuses you. Auto-resolving the climatic final battle seems kind of counter-intuitive to what I find fun about Total War games, which certainly isn’t the campaign strategy, but is the huge battles.
Apparently CA sort of acknowledges this, they made a campaign victory condition nod towards it with some of the races in Warhammer. Take the Bretonnia campaign I just finished, in order to win the campaign you have to fight the final battle yourself with no reserves.
[quote=“TurinTur, post:1325, topic:76263”]
-The exception are the sieges, which with this kind of army they are horrible. Cheap units are melted in the tough fight for the walls and cavalry can’t flank. In fact I had one battle which I played directly and had 3 full armies vs 1 army + garrison in a city with upgraded walls and damn, I was utterly defeated. In fact I won that one by using the autobattle system, which clearly isn’t accurate and let me win by sheer number of forces.
[/quote]Vamps are actually pretty easy to win sieges against AI.
Just use vampires heros + lords + Varghulf to bust down the gates and have a brawl in the chokepoint. No wall ranged fire (or any ranged fire since they get blocked by friendlies). Your heros have built in life leech (assuming level 2+) and Invocation of Neheck for the Varghulfs. Also a nice big enemy ball for AOE spells (WINDS OF DEATH is murderous)
Also flying units can perma cycle charge everything off the walls, but be careful charging them into the blob at the gates since they might get caught and can’t fly back out, but get the timing right and the entire gateblob breaks.
Well, VC campaign finished in 181 turns. Much more than the dwarf campaign. The difference is that the dwarf campaign was basically 1. fight the orks, 2. help stop chaos, 3. finish the leftover orks at the South border. The VC campaign has been:
- Eliminate the other Vampire Counts rivals.
- Eliminate a few human kingdoms.
- Start fighting the Empire.
- Stop that, and eliminate chaos invasion by my own.
- Continue fighting the Empire.
- Stop that, because I need to deal first with the Northern chaos barbarians which are being a pain in the ass.
- Finally finish the Empire.
Looks like owners of the base game are getting one more complete race/faction before Warhammer 2 takes the full spotlight.
We’ve hit on something we think is a pretty good opportunity to add some more content to the game, so there will be a new Race Pack released later in the year, before WARHAMMER II is released.
(for reference)
And some additional info (including price - which may or may not cost cash money, but since Wood Elves and Beastmen do, it’s probably a safe bet - a new, full race is a pretty big deal so charging for it seems like a smart move for them):
No, it’s not Kislev (sorry!), but the New Content team have got some rather unique gameplay mechanics for this new Race, and it will come with a small update to the main game and a Free-LC drop. This particular Free-LC will benefit not only main game owners, but also DLC owners too this time.
EDIT - Rich, an editor at PCGamesN, has his own theory on what race this could be:
So there’s a new race and it will land alongside some free content. As for those unique mechanics, I was chatting to our resident Warhammer expert, Rich, and he says it could be the Dogs of War, from the fifth edition of the tabletop game. These are a ragtag army of Estalian and Tilean mercenaries, so they would play like no other, being a mix of different races.
I read that as a new race (probably one you have to pay for) plus an associated free DLC.
Do they explicitly say this new race is going to be free???
EDIT - You know what? I see what you mean, and you might be right. There is some free-LC coming, and the race isn’t necessarily also that, too. Maybe they will put it out like an $18 race such as Wood Elves and Beastmen then. Probably best to assume that. I’ll edit my previous post, just in case.
Yeah, that’s pretty standard for Creative Assembly. They will give away a small bit of free something or other when they release a paid DLC faction/race pack.
Personally I think Norsca is more likely than Dogs of War. But it’ll be one of those two almost certainly. I kinda want Norsca just because they are pretty influential on the campaign and their battles are so tedious (all they field are chariots and skirmishers) that its generally just less annoying to auto-resolve, which I don’t love.
Plus, they’d probably come with War Mammoths and maybe Werewolves. So, there’s that.
Kind of an excellent article talking about what the impending release of Warhammer 2 will do to the original game. I almost called it the “base” game, as if Warhammer was some sort of vanilla release and the sequel a giant expansion, because in many ways it does feel like that.
PCGN’s Rich spoke with Total War: Warhammer II lead writer Andy Hall about how the game is being tweaked going forward to ensure the individual setpieces from this game work in tandem with the original game.
As an example:
…major settlements in the province. “Previously in Warhammer 1 they had six slots to put buildings in, but now we’ve increased that to eight.”
Similarly, dragons are now able to breathe fire, so changes will be made to ensure all of the dragons in Warhammer 1 will also be able to breathe fire.