It’s even more of a whack-a-mole situation if you’re not a dwarf/greenskin/woodelf yourself. But it’s so satisfying if you manage to get them into an underworld/woodpath interception. :-D
As far as I know, there are only two faction campaigns, one for beastmen and one for wood elves. And even if there are several starting sides for the wood elves, they are all the same faction, so I think not that much of a difference.
On a side for others… When is a norsca campaign over? When you defeat all the monstrous champions? Or when you kill off the chaos invasion? Or when you KKnD the whole world?
Well I’ve been playing my 2nd attempt to get into TW: Warhammer. I was enjoying myself quite a bit up until about turn 50, when the battles get too large. I know that I’m in the minority, but I like it when each side has <= 10 units. I was thinking of trying a mod to keep army sizes down, but it looks like that will screw up the designed encounters that are part of quests.
I’m curious…
I’m playing as the Dwarfs and have regained control of my starting province, then part of 1 to the north and part of 2 to the south. Black Crag is pretty well defended. Is it a viable strategy to just let it be for the time being and suck up smaller Greenskin settlements to reduce their income, build up my income, and wait until I get more advanced buildings in my main settlement? Maybe if I concentrate on some more smaller battles I can squeeze some more fun out of it before I throw in the towel.
I love the campaign map, the flavor of the units, and the general idea of the game. Unfortunately I just don’t care for the battles in Total War games much.
It’s been a bit since I’ve played but during battles there is a unobtrusive button you can click (I hope im not remembering this wrong) in the lower left hand corner called something like “unit details”. When you hover over units on the battlefield with it toggled on, the detailed unit stat card ought to come up.
I recommend pausing regularly if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed, as you can issue orders while paused on every difficulty except legendary. The game isn’t so difficult that it requires particularly great micromanagement skills, as long as you optimize your army composition to the best of your ability.
One fun thing you can do, if you enjoy the battles with small unit counts, is to do custom battles from the main menu with the smallest amount of funds. I was doing that and having fun, as everyone is forced to make tough choices about army composition and it’s a really fun little skirmish battle. Give it a try and I recommend trying every race out as it helps to know your enemy when you’ve walked a mile in their shoes so to speak (playing as the Orcs, for example, gives you a health appreciation for the units that are awesome and the units that are just fodder and that leads to knowing the difference when you face off against them).
I feel the same to some extent. What I do is put my units into groups (CTRL+num) and just control at the group level most of the time. So instead of 20 (or more) units, I have a couple of heroes, a group of cavalry and two groups of infantry to control (for example).
This makes the game more about finding the right unit composition for beating a particular opponent, which I really enjoy.
Oh another battle control tip, if you hold ALT when you click to move, you can move the units a group in formation.
I never thought of that. Sounds like a good idea at least to check out the units.
I have been doing some of that, and it definitely helps. I’m not good at preventing the battlefield from becoming a blob - so then the unit grouping tends to go out the window :-)
Do people generally group some infantry with ranged units, or do you find it’s easier to control them separately?
Don’t know what anyone else is doing on that score, but I group whatever constitutes a front line as one group and ranged units as another. I leave cav by itself on each side typically and special units plus heroes also by themselves. While I realize there are a lot of specialized things going on in warhammer (what with the magic and wide variety of specialized units), I still work to narrow down how much I have to deal with by grouping them in much the same way I have in every historical before it.
So initially I’ve only really got a couple of big grouped units I have to mess with.
It all still gets a bit fiddly once everyone gets engaged so I take to periodically pausing so I can inspect how units are doing, and especially where I can flank or rear charge someone with either cav or unit that makes a good counter.
I’ve got a question for those who played as the Dwarfs - I know @Scotch_Lufkin has.
I think I got myself into trouble by expanding south a little too quickly. I mentioned above that I took my initial province fairly fast, then took a settlement directly to the north (that has a gold mine). I then sent my army to the settlement directly south that is kind of in a mountain pass. I then took a small settlement west of Black Crag, right on the edge of the mountains. I think this was somewhere around turn 50. None of these were tough to take.
Some faction came and pilllaged in that southern province, so I got a grudge. Then a large Greenskin army with a level 17 leader come towards my southern settlement. I had to get my main army out of there and the enemy took that southern settlement - so I got another grudge. I had some grudge to kill 3 undead armies too which I had for a while. These grudges started to affect my public order, so I just rushed an army up north to kill 3 undead armies.
I think I also made a mistake in using growth to upgrade a minor settlement in my initial province because it slowed down my main settlement’s growth. I didn’t realize how the growth worked when I did that.
So my question is, did I head south too early which caused me to get those grudges? Would I have been OK if I used growth to get more advanced buildings in my main settlement so maybe I could have taken on that Greenskin army?
Well, I will just chime in a word on growth- there is no one way to use your growth as the dwarfs. If you grow your small settlements you can upgrade their defenses, which works a treat against raider stacks but is still useless against full armies. If you grow Karaz-a-Karak, you can upgrade your troops. Dwarf rank and file are extremely solid, though, so you need to think about what exact purpose you have for upgrading. I actually rather like defending my settlements while patiently expanding slowly. I also support my Dwarfen allies to the west, who usually come under heavy assault.
When I take an Orkish settlement I ask myself, okay, do I have the capacity to defend and grow this place? What are the nearby hordes like? If I don’t like the answer, I sack to get the capital for a second army, and raze it next turn.
I didn’t have any trouble defending my original province or the 2 settlements I took immediately to the north and south, so I probably should have stopped there. Then maybe I wouldn’t have drawn the attention of the Greenskins. Since my problem was the big advanced army and not raiders, maybe I would have been better off getting some advanced troops because his size 20 stack obliterated mine. Staying more north could maybe have prevented getting 3 grudges too, which caused trouble. It didn’t help that I also got 2 events that impacted public order in a bad way.
Another thing you can do is play the campaign coop. If you play coop anytime you get into a battle you’d an hand your coop partner half of your troops to control. So if you split things evenly, you’d never have to control more than 10 troops at a time.
I found playing coop a lot of fun. One thing to be aware of though is that the coop campaign has different victory conditions than the non-coop campaign. It’s been a while since I played, but IIRC the coop victory condition is that you and your partner control a certain number of providences.
I’m looking at getting Warhammer 2 despite never really getting too into a TW game. I have TW:W 1 but the pacing seemed too frantic or something.
The main thing that bugged me was load times though. It seemed that loading battles took forever. Even right clicking a unit to call up the encylopepdia is annoyingly delayed. I tried again tonight and this still persists. I know my rig isn’t top of the line, but is this game just SSD dependant? I have not timed it, but a custom game with small battle size feels like a good 3 to 5 minutes to load. Once it loads, I get good frame rate on high to ultra settings. Is this normal? Is TW:W2 any better?
As much as I love the game, if I were reviewing it I would add an asterisk to the recommendation: This game is not recommended if you do not have an SSD or the patience of a saint.
@robc04 Did you try autoresolving battles when they were 60%+ in your favor? That can reduce the pain of big battles quite a lot. As on dwarves. I made more or less the same I think. I’m not that patient to just take a settlement, sit on it until fully upgraded then move on… If that means I lose a half built up settlement here or there, I just swallow it and go forth. A lot of time I just build up economy (stuff that gives income), some recruitment buildings and nothing else. In that dwarven campaign my first two armies both had only basic dwarven warriors and quarrerels (and the beginning special units). Also had public order problems for a while for those lost settlement / lost battles grudges. The “defeat lord X in battle” grudges and missions are the worst… Settlements can’t run away from you, lords can. :-/
Thanks for the suggestion, which seems like it would help quite a bit. I don’t really play much online though. If I do its turn based stuff with async turns.
It may be SSD dependent. I have it on a SSD and haven’t found load times to be a problem - a slight (maybe .5 second delay) when right clicking on a unit. Battles have a delay but nothing that I found hard to deal with.
I’ve been playing out battles if they are somewhat close, or I’m the underdog, or if there are new unit types involved that I haven’t seen yet.
Consider running an SSD external Steam drive if you want the benefits of SSD without the headache of installing a new drive (though, to be fair, this depends entirely on how easy it is to crack open your computer and how comfortable you are installing things) but ONLY if you have USB 3.0 or USB-C.
