Total War: Warhammer

Atomicvideohead wrote:

Man I wish we had 4 player MP campaign. Mess up your man/dwarf alliance with some angry werewolves, or banshees.

I wish! I don't really get why we cannot have more players in campaign. So what if turns take forever? Buddies can buddy for a long time!

Yess.....buddies.

BoogtehWoog wrote:

His unparalleled tactical acumen

I mean, so far I've held off an equivalent army (barely) while my heavy cavalry rampaged through their backlines, and sat in a circle outside a city waiting for everyone inside to starve to death.

Yonder wrote:

I mean, so far I've held off an equivalent army (barely) while my heavy cavalry rampaged through their backlines, and sat in a circle outside a city waiting for everyone inside to starve to death.

Yonder should write "The Art of Warhammer."

I keep trying with a Chaos Campaign and keep failing. It is my white whale. I think it's the hardest faction/ campaign in the game. And there's no co-op options for them really, to use as a learning crutch.

In my WE single player game Chaos allied with Norsca, is that not an option when you play as Chaos?

As a player your relationship with norsca....is complicated. Basically, if you want Norsca, as a vassal, you have to beat them into submission. Kill the leader, and you can vassalize them. But why would you? They basically do the same thing they'd do allied to you as to neutral. AS for MP, I mean a more true co -op game, where each player is the same faction, with different legendary lords. That horde mechanic, plus the natural animosity everyone has to you (even norsca, pre beating), just means you're on a razors edge. Sure you have hard hitting units, but if you screw up, or a enough armies swarm you, you meat. You've got nothing to fall back on. That coupled with the fact that keeping a city razed is nigh impossible it seems. It feels like an eternal whacka mole.

The Everbuddy Yonder was a total beast in our game last night. I'm pretty wary of handling sieges because I've not really done them before and I had my army sieging Mount Gunbad. It just had a garrison, but it was a very beefy garrison. Anyway, I gave the reins to Yonder to handle the battle with the sole exception of me controlling a gyrocopter (lol) and he just destroyed them. There were barely any losses on our side and no units were lost entirely. I was thoroughly impressed by his daring-do and his status as the Everbuddy was confirmed.

It was actually a lot more straightforward than I'm used to. In my WE campaign sieges were always some of my hardest fighting. Until the region around the gate is captured my fairly heavy cavalry contingent can only sit outside the gate and get peppered by ballistas, My even larger ranged contingent isn't useless, but is far less effective firing up on to the walls, and can't do that once battle is formed. Meanwhile my infantry isn't quite as geared towards an assault on the walls.

With Boogtehwoogs dwarves all that was different, the warriors just marched off of the tower and pretty handily took the walls. She packs a heavy ranged contingent as well, and they suffered even more due to their crossbows' lower arc than bows, but the Warriors were so beastly it didn't matter. And then once the flamethrowers got inside the city? Oh man they just massacred everything, they may be my new favorite unit.

I will say that I did miss the "cavalry rampages through the city" event which is the final stage of a WE siege.

Boogtehwoogs praise aside, the Empire is certainly looking less impressive than the Dwarfs at this moment, she's probably captured 4x the territory I have, and has a much stronger economy and more, larger, armies on the field. I'm sitting outside yet another well-defended city I'm not confident about being able to take, slowly letting them starve to death, and I'm thinking that my slow progress is going to be a big issue for us later.

I have found that many times it's easier to just let the computer do run the siege fight for you, rather than spend the few extra turns for complete starvation. It worked for me, I ended up using that route several times as I suck at siege fights but couldn't wait the last 5 turns for starvation to win the day for me. Generally I would auto-resolve a fight one or two turns after the army stationed in the city started to loose strength and moral.

Yeah, that's what I did for the first siege, I don't actually wait for them to starve to death, just get too weak to properly lift their swords so I can murder them more easily. Not sure if that's better actually...

I find sieging a lot easier easier than being besieged. Across Beastmen in WH1 and Skaven, TK, and Lizardmen in WH2, I haven't found an army yet that can't just storm the walls and take them regardless of the amount of fire coming at them. This also seems to work against me as I've yet to work out a satisfactory city defence strategy with any race.

This game has taught me the importance of picking your moment, and the subtleties of each race have helped highlight when and where to commit to a fight, and when to let the enemy come to you. I've won some pretty hopeless battles by holding just long enough to exhaust the enemy and counterattack hard enough to break them, and I think I'm finally beginning to understand the importance of formation and division which has allowed me to split solid double stacks of enemies into 3 or 4 separate fronts with careful use of drawing and driving wedges through infantry or cavalry on the countercharge.

Or you bring a dozen giant dinosaurs to the party. Works against just about anything except Phoenix Guard and Necrosphinxes in my experience

Interesting - I’ve always been too scared not to attack within 3-4 rounds (however long it takes to get towers and a ram built). This is especially true of Skaven given they are equally starving the longer a siege goes on.

I've got one word for you with the Skaven jd: Artillery. Take 4 Plagueclaws and a couple of warp lightning cannons, aim the cannons at any active towers and the catapults at whatever's manning the walls (for extra sauce take a plague priest and plague-bomb the other side of the gate too). Once you're out of ammo you can generally stroll in and mop up whatever's left with whatever army composition you'd like. I actually found Skaven to be the easiest siege army once I worked out how ridiculous their catapults are.

Hmmm, is there a siege MP battle map? We could practice this stuff. Also it'd be hilarious to do warriors of chaos, or beastmen as defenders of a siege.

DC Malleus wrote:

I've got one word for you with the Skaven jd: Artillery. Take 4 Plagueclaws and a couple of warp lightning cannons, aim the cannons at any active towers and the catapults at whatever's manning the walls (for extra sauce take a plague priest and plague-bomb the other side of the gate too). Once you're out of ammo you can generally stroll in and mop up whatever's left with whatever army composition you'd like. I actually found Skaven to be the easiest siege army once I worked out how ridiculous their catapults are.

Nice! I’m playing Clan Rictus so I just saved up enough to start building plagueclaws. I will prioritize building those.

Yonder the Everbuddy and I are snowballing nicely now in our campaign. I've almost wiped out all Greenskin factions. There's 6 settlements to take, but they will all fall very quickly to my armies. And then we're going to concentrate on the Vampires, but he is already mopping them up. He's majorly expanded from his initial position with this game being one of quick expansion for him. I think next game we get in I'll have conquered all of the Southeast and that he will have almost all of the Vampire territory, if not all of it. I plan on bolstering his forces with an army of mine soon, but right now my hands are a little tied with rebellions and destroying all the Greenskins.

Really wish they could have released the new faction 10 days earlier.... I'm in the mood for some vampires right about now!

So the thing that I feared would happen happened in my Kroq-Gar campaign, and the world literally degenerated into almost total factional war about five turns after the Dwarfs squashed Archaeon and the shield (or thin veneer as I now think of it) of civilisation came down. The Empire turned around and declared war on literally everybody, the cascading effect of which ended up straining and finally breaking every military alliance I had developed over the course of maybe an additional ten turns.

I was one condition away from victory damn it. I figured at this stage I would have to go and claim by force all the territory I had formerly controlled by proxy, so went about pacifying the Guardians of Itza and Mazdamundi as I was already there and their stubborn refusal to confederate before the game lived up to its name had really irritated me. Itza were squashed in short order and Mazda was pushed up into the deserts and mountains formerly owned by the Dark Elves, who had now diminished to a very minor power in the Northwest corner of the map thanks to the extraordinarily adventurous Wood Elves. Simultaneously, I had wallowed through Karak Zorn and taken the fight to Khemri, one of my oldest allies. At this point I was now at war with, you guessed it, everyone, with Tyrion pulling the diplomatic strings through the last remaining set of military alliances across the Dwarfs and Mazda. Ol' Thorgrim had already pushed Settra out of the Badlands and seemed occupied with the Empire, so I relied on my residual goodwill with them preventing any heavy pushes further as I established a presence in the desert.

I am now fighting two of the three remaining major powers on two totally separate fronts with five armies a piece. The dwarfs have started skirmishing along the desert border, and I do not enjoy fighting those top-tier armour-piercing midgets with my dinosaurs. Similarly, the High Elves have an intense fascination with Skeggi, launching 2-4 stacks at it periodically. I thought Phoenix Guard were my only problem there, but all the AP arrows flying in my direction in every fight have meant I'm turning more and more to magic to solve my issues. Banishment is an absolute monster of a spell when it goes where you want it too, and overcasting Wind Blast can shred 2-3 units of infantry if you get the right angle. The shortcomings of the Lizardmen are starting to make themselves felt, with very limited options against AP ranged being the most significant against my two major foes.

I'm still mopping up Khemri, but that's almost a formality at this stage, and while Mazda still goes for the Fallen Gates at every opportunity, he's just a source of XP at this stage. I've got six armies on each continent and budget for perhaps another two more each at this stage, so I'm currently formulating a plan to blitzkrieg Mazda and the Wood Elf outposts up north before pushing on Ulthuan and securing the New World for good. Then it'll be the long, slow meat grinder of the dwarves and their damn underway.

For those Empire players out there: Ghal Maraz.

BoogtehWoog and I had another session last night. Her progress has unfortunately stalled a bit, her very rapid expansion had led to a very large but disordered territory, and she spent a lot of time playing wackamole against rebel armies that popped up here and there. That said there has been definite consolidation along with a bit of expansion, well, actually more than a bit at the end when she confederated with the Dwarven territory to her north. Unfortunately the confederation malus will probably give her another spate of rebels, but she's still moving along, even if it's slower than her initial blitzkrieg.

My Empire had a second strong session in a row. I was able to destroy two large Vampire Count armies that came to assist the beleaguered Templehofs (well, sort of, they are both at war with me but not allied with each other. Which is lucky, otherwise I would have run into much larger and unwinnable fights). Their first army was very tough for this stage of the game, with 4 regiments of renown and a Vargulf which succeeded in destroying a couple of my units (fortunately less valuable ones). The second army they sent was no slouch, it had a sizable contingent of Grave Guards, for example, but I was able to defeat it with no permanent losses.

Between that fighting, an army of Templehofs, and the very large Castle Templehof garrison my troops had their work cut out for them, but by the end of the night I had wiped out the Templehof faction. In our next game I hope to conquer the Vampire Counts and the small and weak von Carstein settlement, uniting the two Sylvanian provinces under my rule.

Economically I'm definitely starting to get my feet under me, but I haven't yet gotten either making the more expensive later tier (or honestly even middle-tier, I've yet to recruit cavalry or even anything that uses gunpowder) units, or even the buildings they require. Soon though, soon.

Huh, Templehof's still around? The VC factions usually steam roll those guys first to solidify their provinces.

Hmm, in my WE game I got to the Vampires a lot later (probably after turn 70?) and Templehof was still around. One of them had definitely eaten von Carstein though. It probably depends on whether the Counts end up at war with their neighbouring Dwarfs and fight uselessly against them.

TempleHof was still around but Vlad the Dad was dead? No way. Vlad's one of those LL like kholeck, that can kinda mow down armies by himself. Weird. Weird.

Man it was Peter von Strickland that was the beast. Boogtehwoog and I were just amazed at this guy roaming around the battlefield unperturbed by anything. He wrecked my LL and went almost untouched until he finally got far enough from a scrum that my gunmen could line up and send him down with several volleys.

Although a lot of that is my fault. Since my armies are mostly low-tier units I only had two units with armor piercing, and the halberdiers got bogged down on their way to him, leaving only the gunmen to respond to his 90 armor.

And with me gradually consolidating my hold upon things, we are poised to launch a final offensive into Vampire territory. I have two armies just waiting to take the fight to them with one in Zhufbar and another in Karag Dromar. Vlad von Carstein broke his army against mine at Zhufbar earlier and tucked tail and ran home right after. Yonder has two armies to the North and West of the VC and I have mine in the South and East. They are going to be squashed. Then we have to decide where we'll go next.

I still have to pacify a few Greenskins settlements in the far South with Galbaraz, Deff Gorge, Kradtommen, and another settlement I cannot remember the name of needing my axe. After that, I will likely start declaring wars against any Dwarfs that won't bend the knee to me. Likely starting with Ungrim Ironfist and then heading West to help Yonder with any rivals that might appear from the South and West.

Who's buying the Vampire Coast this week? Should we hold another GWJ fight club, as to put that army through its paces, get a grip on some strategies to use it or fight it?

I probably will! But I don't know if I'd do battles. I might attempt it at some point! So keep me in mind, Atomic

I'm going to try and hold off until I've finished this Krok ME campaign... When Queen & Crone dropped I was in the middle of my Skrolk run and it introduced some weirdness to my saves. Nothing gamebreaking, but some provinces flipped and Avelorn got taken away from me as Arielle popped into existence, and I think the sword of Khaine ended up with a random Dark Elf lord floating around in the ocean. This current game is a little too precarious and has gone on too long for me to lose any provinces down around the Vampire Coast without warning :p

I'm buying it. I've been watching Lionheart's lets play of it so far and it looks great! Lots of interesting new mechanics to play with.