Total War: Warhammer

It seems to have had a significant impact on the Southern Deserts in my Tiktaq'To campaign - The entire area stayed fractured between 1-3 settlement factions as no group of Tomb Kings could get the upper hand on any other. It's made for a very dynamic game so far, and news from other parts of the world indicates that the biggest dog out there is the Dwarves with 15 settlements, very different to the normal hegemonies that normally start coalescing around turn 100. Feels like a great change to me so far

230 turns in now and it's been a super interesting game. Vashnaar has taken over about half of the frozen North and become a serious contender, while the empire has been usurped by a coalition of 6 minor human factions that have about 50 settlements between them. I've confederated all other lizardmen factions except for Itza as they stayed fractured up until I hit the shores of Listeria around turn 150, and I'm now working on picking up the pieces after the shield of civilization dissolved. The dwarves held on and slowly became their usual powerhouse, but all the minor dwarfish factions are still in play and doing quite well for themselves.

The dark elves are the only real 'bad' faction left, so I'm trying to keep them alive long enough to forge the military alliances I need to meet the last province requirements for my long ME victory but it's going to be a close thing. Really hoping it doesn't degenerate into the long-winded whack-a-mole fest my Kroq-Gar campaign turned into...

It's definitely been a very different campaign to my last 5 ME runs, both with the super-fun breath of fresh air that is Tiktaq'To, and with the removal of the AI faction restrictions. Would definitely recommend to anyone that's been out of the game for a while

I thought I had clicked into the Imperator Rome thread and this message was a bit confusing until I realized where I was.

Updates today. Wonder if there will be a FLC tie in to 3k?

I finally pulled this one off the pile (first one, not Warhammer 2). I'm well into my Empire campaign and have reconquered most of my territory and temporarily beaten back Chaos. Vampires are next on my hit list. Having fun, and I expect the high variation in factions will give this one more legs for me than, say, Shogun 2.

I feel like I have a good grasp on the campaign map. My economy is strong. Corruption and public order are annoyances, but I understand the tools available to manage them. I think I've figured out the diplomatic strategy that works best for me- trade deals and non-aggression pacts, but avoid entangling alliances that will pull me into multi-front wars.

On the other hand, I feel borderline incompetent during the battles. I've never really dived deep into one particular TW game, but I'm hardly a novice; this is the 4th one I've played. Seems like in all the previous games, with relatively equal opposing forces, I would typically win the majority of the time, usually pretty convincingly. And I'd almost always do better than the auto-resolve (siege battles being the notable exception). Not the case now. It seems like the auto-resolve usually comes out ahead. I do win a good bit, but I'm getting a lot of pyrrhic and close victories. And that's against fellow Empire factions. When you start throwing in giant spiders and stuff, I feel like I do even worse. One recent battle with the Norsca in particular estimated I had a strong advantage, but I lost 3 out of 4 times (damn mammoths and werewolves!)

I feel like I must be doing something wrong here. Unfortunately, I doubt there's going to be one big "aha!" moment when I figure things out. I suspect it's a lot of small mistakes and misconceptions that add up. Or is the AI just better than previous games? Guess it's time to watch some YouTube videos.

Baring in mind this was my first Total War game is really put any effort in to, it me the game is very much a ‘counter and hard counter’ unit game - i.e. you really
Need to know what units you need to counter what the enemy is good at - or not. I think faction/faction battles are the worst because you effectively have two forces that cancel each other out - unless you can bring a superior force to the battlefield (either numbers or better units) it’s basically going to close or Pyrrhic each time.

I ended up using auto-resolve a lot. The only time I didn’t was in siege battles because I could manage that a lot better than the AI could - defending Against superior forces was actually fairly easy. At least I thought it was.

When you get the chance in battle pause, and look at all the traits the enemy units have. Its extremely important to beating individual units.
Feel free to ask us about the counters to specific units. Ie: killing the leaders of an undead army will cause the entire army to disolve.
As the empire, you use direct shot ranged weapons with gun powder. Make sure you're positioned to avoid friendly fire. If you have trouble managing that, stick to Bows as they have an arch that can go over friendly units
Werewolves are a really good unit, so no surprise with that as a headache. Just remember they're not infantry, they're "large" so you want anti-large to fight them . They're basically the Norsca version of melee cavalry-- you need to deal with them like black knights or even the Blood Knights.

Thanks for the tips. The later battles have been more favorable to me. I can't say for certain why though. I was actually a bit disappointed when Chaos hit me with their first full stack and it didn't come close to matching up to that one underrated Norscan stack of death.

On the other hand, it seems that was during the initial Chaos invasion. The fact that I just saw a cutscene implies that the real invasion is here. Will they steamroll my front lines and I'll have to fight a desperate withdrawal action, buying time with land? That would be very cool. I don't foresee them getting past my 6 armies and fully upgraded walls though.

So I was watching this video and I had a few moments where I just died inside for the death of the Warhammer MMO and how under utilized the franchise is with action rpgs.
Seriously, with all those units, including units show but not featured, how can you have an action rpg with only 4 classes? I'd much rather have an arpg with classes with not much more depth of say Paladins or Overwatch but have 20 classes. I guess some of that was what Battleborn was trying to do. And don't get me wrong, I would love a PVE mission and story based reboot of Battleborn. But the Warhammer universe would be much more cohesive and has a built in audience to attract.
And then, my god, the Warhammer mmo with expanded classes from the lizardmen, tomb kings, the cyclops buzzard race, and then improving the existing classes so that the witch elves acted more like the sisters of pain or the engineer worked more like the iron drake.

fangblackbone wrote:

I guess some of that was what Battleborn was trying to do. And don't get me wrong, I would love a PVE mission and story based reboot of Battleborn. But the Warhammer universe would be much more cohesive and has a built in audience to attract.[/youtube]

Not sure why Battleborn keeps getting lumped in with OW. It was a failed attempt at a MOBA and their pivot off of that failed even bigger as they tried to jump into the hero shooter arena.

edit: and to focus back on the OP some. I think the TW version we have is the best emulator of the board game right now. Maybe someone else may attempt and Fantasy version of Space Marine, but i feel like that it would be a mistake because these 'classes' are supposed to be backed up by massive armies.

I get what you are saying but I can't help salivate over the possibility of say a God of War style game with a Sister of Pain protagonist. Or an Uncharted with a dwarf or goblin engineer or perhaps even that character with a rifle that was carried by a large bat. You could have the bat be summonable to solve puzzles and find secrets. Or a Shadow of War with a lizardman shaman guy or skaven technology.

The Total War Warhammer series is great from a tabletop army perspective. Love them.

That said, I do miss Warhammer Online and Space Marine. Wish they added more races to Space Marine multiplayer as it really was good.

I would love to see Battlefield Warhammer with tons of vehicles, classes and races. A Mordhau with different races would be very cool as well.

A Shadow of War with those ideas you listed fangblackbone would be killer in that universe.

whispa wrote:

That said, I do miss Warhammer Online and Space Marine. Wish they added more races to Space Marine multiplayer as it really was good.

If you can withstand the clunkiness and bad performance, you may want to check out WH40k:Eternal Crusade.

ranalin wrote:
whispa wrote:

That said, I do miss Warhammer Online and Space Marine. Wish they added more races to Space Marine multiplayer as it really was good.

If you can withstand the clunkiness and bad performance, you may want to check out WH40k:Eternal Crusade.

Yeah I tried it in beta then release. It had promise but was still very janky last I played. I'll check it out again, thanks.

Eternal Crusade was definitely a missed opportunity...
FWIW the Shadowrun FPS was too!

whispa wrote:

I would love to see Battlefield Warhammer with tons of vehicles, classes and races.

I would absolutely play the crap out of that. Balancing the races though would be a nightmare.

Why do you think it would be substantially harder than balancing Warhammer Fantasy?

Yonder wrote:

Why do you think it would be substantially harder than balancing Warhammer Fantasy?

Well maybe balancing is the wrong word thing is in a game like that you’ve got to make each race very distinct - it terms of characteristics and the weaponry they all use. I could that being quite difficult without ending up in a situation where the only difference is what colour bullets each race shoots at the others. I think the Planetside 2 template would work very well actually, just trying to to get the distinctiveness to each race would be very hard. At least IMO.

Spent the weekend struggling with the opening turns for The Empire. I keep getting slammed by the Secessionists faction. I take Grunberg and then a turn later, they roll out with a 20 unit army that rolls over me. What am I doing wrong?

I’m gonna boot this up in a bit to jar my memory about what happens at the beginning of that campaign. Did you do the tutorial start or take over on your own?

OK, so I just started up the Empire campaign, and things went about the same as I remember. Franz starts with a 7 unit army. Here's how the turns went:

1. Moved SE toward the border. Then recruited 3 more units. Secessionists attacked but I beat them back.
2. Crossed border and killed the secessionist army. Then occupied Grunburg.
3. Recruited 3 local units, 3 global units and my newly available regiment of renown.
4. Recruited 3 more local units and waited for the global units to arrive.
5. Now I had a 20 unit stack and began moving toward Helmgart.
6. Attacked and captured Helmgart. Not an easy battle, because they had a 14 unit stack plus a six unit garrison, but auto-resolve produced a close victory. By now the secessionists have one town and are basically done for.

One major monkey wrench is this Crooked Moon goblin army. Sometimes they will just randomly head off and disappear into another faction's territory. Other times they will hang around and start raiding. Then you'll have to decide to either declare war and destroy them or wait until you've unified Reikland. Unfortunately, when you attack them, they have a bad habit of fleeing then coming back to hit Grunburg when it's undefended. Pinning them down and annihilating their whole army takes precious time.

I countered this by starting a 2nd army pretty quickly and using it to fight off the goblins and later beastmen that had a tendency to enter Reikland to harass me, while using Franz as my main expansion army. It's also a good idea to make peace treaties and trade agreements with bordering factions who aren't on your imminent target list.

I'd be interested to know what you're doing differently.

A couple of recruitment tips- regiments of renown recruit instantly, and you can combine both local and global recruitment to really beef your army up quickly.

gewy wrote:

OK, so I just started up the Empire campaign, and things went about the same as I remember. Franz starts with a 7 unit army. Here's how the turns went:

1. Moved SE toward the border. Then recruited 3 more units. Secessionists attacked but I beat them back.
2. Crossed border and killed the secessionist army. Then occupied Grunburg.
3. Recruited 3 local units, 3 global units and my newly available regiment of renown.
4. Recruited 3 more local units and waited for the global units to arrive.
5. Now I had a 20 unit stack and began moving toward Helmgart.
6. Attacked and captured Helmgart. Not an easy battle, because they had a 14 unit stack plus a six unit garrison, but auto-resolve produced a close victory. By now the secessionists have one town and are basically done for.

One major monkey wrench is this Crooked Moon goblin army. Sometimes they will just randomly head off and disappear into another faction's territory. Other times they will hang around and start raiding. Then you'll have to decide to either declare war and destroy them or wait until you've unified Reikland. Unfortunately, when you attack them, they have a bad habit of fleeing then coming back to hit Grunburg when it's undefended. Pinning them down and annihilating their whole army takes precious time.

I countered this by starting a 2nd army pretty quickly and using it to fight off the goblins and later beastmen that had a tendency to enter Reikland to harass me, while using Franz as my main expansion army. It's also a good idea to make peace treaties and trade agreements with bordering factions who aren't on your imminent target list.

I'd be interested to know what you're doing differently.

A couple of recruitment tips- regiments of renown recruit instantly, and you can combine both local and global recruitment to really beef your army up quickly.

Thanks. I think I was starting a second army too soon and avoiding the extra cost of global recruitment. I'm also doing the Battle of Bloodpine Woods too early. For whatever reason, I'm not seeing the regiments of renown (could just be missing it) and was under the mistaken believe that my armies capped out at 10 units. I'll try again and see what I'm missing.

I think the Regiments of Renown are part of a free DLC. Perhaps you haven’t downloaded it? Also they become individually available as your highest rank lord gains levels. So that’s another factor. The button to get them is to the right of the general recruiting button.

Bloodpine can definitely wait.

Yeah, I hold off on quest battles until I'm at peace, and I've got a fully stocked army. You can also teleport armies to the battle-quest location, if you haven't noticed that yet.

I might be on WH2 hiatus thanks to 3 Kingdoms, but I'm happy to see when I return there will be fresh DLC goodness waiting.

Brian f*cking Blessed. Beautiful.

So much content coming over the next month. It's insane!

BoogtehWoog wrote:

So much content coming over the next month. It's insane!

Yeah, they are on a roll and so excited for what else they have lined up for Warhammer 2 and eventually 3.