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Mukip posted:I disagree with the OP assessment about Empire spearmen. They seem to be only slightly worse than swordsmen against infantry and have less upkeep, which matters when running multiple stacks. They make fine chaff with tech/lord bonuses and are probably the best chaff vs Chaos in particular, given all their cavalry and large targets. Chaff that can win a melee fight is worth a slight increase in upkeep over chaff that loses faster and collapses your line. Also you are better off using Halberds vs Chaos, with their lack of ranged units and heavy armor all around. They are a solid pick against Norscans, but you'll be shooting them to death either way so it's not a big bump in effectiveness over swordsmen. That's not to say Empire Spearmen are bad, they're just rarely an optimal choice given your other options and most common enemies. I like to keep two of them around early game to guard my flanks, at least. Edit: I thought you were talking about Spearmen in general and not the shield/no shield divide. My bad!
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Jun 8, 2016 14:22
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Dwarves are easy if you get a good start, pretty much. You have to be ready to fight Grimgor very early on, and yes, grudge spirals aren't fun, on higher difficulty especially it can cause instant mass revolts everywhere, giving you more grudges and more penalties, ect. Once you're properly situated though it's pretty easy. You have the richest and most defensible cities, and while the orcs can annoy you sometimes with sudden Waaugh armies they became less and less of a match for you militarily as the game goes on. Especially if the Top Knots take over everything, as they are want to do, because while Savage Orcs are incredibly annoying their unit roster is shallow and never improves much.
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Jun 8, 2016 15:04
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FlyingCowOfDoom posted:Have they made any indication in posts/social media that they intend to fix the spell scaling? Magic damage feels pretty useless if you don't play on one of the smaller unit settings currently. For VC the only reason to really recruit a Necromancer over a Vampire currently is to turn him into a money lord through the blue line passives. There's a Reddit AMA tomorrow that will probably address that as it is on the question list. Also a facebook interview yesterday where they basically said "Yes there will be balance patches and we know about Demigryphs. We like to take our time to figure out what is causing balance issues and gathering all feedback before making measured changes, ect ect."
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Jun 8, 2016 15:11
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Conot posted:Thats only really true for magic, AFAIK. All other units get a boost to relevant stats (unit size/unit health) as unit sizes change. So the game still remains "balanced" at Ultra as it is at Normal, other then in regards to magic, as previously noted. It's a bit more nuanced than that. Hellcannons for instance, are a single model artillery unit so they get increased HP going from medium to Ultra while regular artillery gets more dudes/HP and also twice as many cannons. Monsters are in a similar situation, Giants and the like are much stronger on medium unit size even with less HP. quote:T: Do wizards for the Empire campaign feel useless to anyone else? I feel like the only time I got any good use out of mine was during a siege I managed to get both a bright and celestial wizard up on the walls. The enemy had a big fuckoff ball of light/heavy cavalry sitting at the end of the main thoroughfare that runs the length of the wall prepared to fling themselves at whoever made it to ground level first so I just started dumping AOE spells into them as soon as they came off cooldown/I had the celestial farts to do it for several minutes straight while I cleared the walls. Magic right now suffers from no scaling on higher unit sizes and also some sketchy internal balancing. (EG Searing Doom requires careful aim and can be dodged but does gently caress-all damage even when perfectly placed while Spirit Leech does massive damage from range and is completely unavoidable.) madmac fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 16:51
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drat Dirty Ape posted:Speaking of mods, it would be nice if advice-givers mentioned any mods they were using before giving advice (difficulty level is a good idea too). There can be a big difference playing the base campaigns vs campaigns with no enemy agent actions, super powered spells, settlements that can build T4 buildings, occupy any settlements regardless of race, etc etc. For what it's worth, so far I've been playing strictly vanilla Hard/VH switching from Ultra to Large unit size after the first couple days.
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Jun 8, 2016 18:33
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I've learned not to sweat public order much in this game because building walls/garrisons in every town seriously minimizes the damage that rebels can do. At the very least it gives you a lot of time to go put them down. That said, I do go growth and defense early and then public order/econ later unless I'm in dire need of money or local unit recruitment for whatever reason.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:52
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Kimsemus posted:Yeah, that's why I added it as an option -- it does homogenize some things, I use it when playing Empire, simply because I feel like the Empire's core infantry choices are severely lacking late game compared to the other factions. Radious appears to be adding a whole lot of everything in his unit mods this go around -- much of it balanced around how much you can actually afford in upkeep/costs. Having relatively weak infantry but awesome cav/artillery/heroes is kinda the whole point of being Empire though. While Radious has a history of modding this philosophy into every game it's especially out of place with Warhammer and it's intentionally asymmetrical factions.
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Jun 8, 2016 19:56
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Kimsemus posted:That's not really canonical with the tabletop at all though, the Empire had some sublime elite/heavy infantry choices that made them fun to play. Plugging that gap hardly makes them symetrical imo. I don't play TT, so I'm trying not to be to big a nerd here, but wut? To my knowledge the only infantry units from the game Empire is missing are all relatively weak/light units. Free Company, Flaggelants, Archers, and Huntsmen. What are these sublime heavy infantry units you're talking about? quote:which is honestly one of the biggest issues I have with the Dwarfs, too much of their roster is locked away behind very inflexible Tier 4 and especially Tier 5 buildings, including most of the more interesting and game changing units, so you hardly get to play with them before you finish things up I remember CA early on talking about how they gave Dwarves a more complicated building tree and econ techs to better capture the flavor of the race or whatever, but the whole thing kind of runs into a wall when you remember that Dwarves have the same number of building slots as everyone else. I guess it does give them a huge incentive to turtle a bunch and build tall, which is relatively dwarfy maybe. madmac fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jun 8, 2016 |
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Jun 8, 2016 20:01
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lilspooky posted:I know they're working on a patch, but I'm asking what their track record is for actually seeming to properly fix things based on how they handled the older games. Objectively speaking, on the plus side CA aren't particularly known for making knee jerk changes in response to criticism. They really do prefer to take their time with fixing things. OTOH, that does mean patches come out slowly and they will sometimes ignore things they don't think are big enough problems to worry about. There's also a trend for them to "fix" things in standalone expansions but not the main game, though hopefully it'll be less of an issue with Warhammer since the trilogy plan means they're stuck with supporting this game for several years. In any case, they like to bundle big patches with content updates, so I'd expect the first major patch to be announced along with some sort of FLC/DLC or whatever.
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Jun 9, 2016 02:01
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Some relevant dev comments today from Reddit:quote:Auto resolver We are aware of some of the issues present with the auto resolver. I’ve written about this in the past, but its important to note that the auto resolver is actually a very complicated thing. Under the hood it actually runs a complex simulation round by round of the battle that may take place given the unit match ups. It takes a lot of things in to account, but to prevent it from bloating up massively and becoming too long of a calculation to make (think about end turn times etc), we cant simulate everything. But crucially, we cannot simulate the actions a player might perform. For instance, while the underlying code assumes it’s a great idea to throw your big heavy tank like Giant in to the very front of an engagement so he can soak up lots of damage, a player may think this is not an optimal way to play and would instead protect their giant far more because they are more interested in the outside context of keeping that unit fresh for the next battle rather than focusing on that certain battle. All this proves very difficult to get right. quote:What is the timeframe for the next patch to Warhammer? madmac fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 15:52
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Updated the first post with more dev comments. These are coming in real time so I guess I'll do a second monster post when they are done. About Reinforcements coming in bizarre random directions: quote:This is a bug, and something we are attempting to address in Patch 1, though it is proving to be a difficult one to fix so may miss the deadline. Reinforcement direction on the campaign map should be mirrored within the battle, that is the intention. We are working on a fix, but no ETA. For a request to add "lifetime kills" stat tracking: quote:A cool idea, possibly in the future. Will add this on to the list for design consideration. Thanks! River crossings battles again. quote:See my reply above. No current plans, but if people tell us they want it enough, we can look to add it in the future Warhammer titles if it makes sense. Are there plans to include even more little event popups for every faction? People vanishing because of Skaven, Dwarfs having to choose between revenge and revenge, Gork or Mork and other small flavorful stuff like that makes the game sooo much better! Answered this on the stream already, but i'll repeat! Those little bits of Warhammer flavour that refer to a world larger than the one you currently have are very important to us, and our Lead Writer/Lore wizard Andy Hall did a great job inserting buckets of flavour in them. We absolutely intend to more of that in the future. will musket smoke be improved so it hangs like in previous total wars? Will any non hero units get unique abilitys like shield wall or phalanx? Not sure that adding smoke like in Empire makes sense in Warhammer. That game was all about line infantry gunfire gameplay, so it fit the setting. The muskets are a very small part of Warhammer and the additional VFX might hinder gameplay visibility. This is one of the many immersion vs gameplay arguments we have all the time in the office. Answered about shield wall etc above already. To be resumed after a meeting apparently. madmac fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 16:10
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Unzip and Attack posted:Except the AI can march and attack, which means the AI has a special movement option that players are not allowed access to. I have never seen this happen. What the AI does sometime do is activate march stance after attacking in order to gain a bit of extra movement, which the player can also do. I do it all the time!
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Jun 9, 2016 16:56
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Stanley Pain posted:Except you don't know where all the enemy units are, or where unguarded cities are, etc. The AI certainly does have access to some of this information. It is an entirely unproven assumption at this point that the AI is capable of attacking out of force march and directly in conflict with my own experience of watching the AI shuffling their units around specifically because they can't do this, eg Moving up an army next to you in forced march and then attacking with a closer army so that the force march army will join as reinforcements, which the player can also do and I personally use often to good effect.
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Jun 9, 2016 17:34
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Being able to move (and encamp) after sacking is basically necessary for horde gameplay to even function, so I'm not sure why you're complaining about it.quote:Razing consumes an army's movement It consumes most of your movement, and disallows attacking afterward, but if you raze a city you started your turn directly next to you will in fact have a little movement left, more if you switch to march stance afterwards.
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Jun 9, 2016 17:36
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Rakthar posted:Because it loving sucks to chase AI armies around your territory and not catch them AND have them sack your cities in the process. I don't agree that Chaos should be unplayable because you don't build walls, to be quite honest.
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Jun 9, 2016 17:39
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Rakthar posted:I don't agree that the 10 lovely neighbors around you should be able to sack your cities at will even though you have a stack trying to kill them for 'horde gameplay.' Is Chaos that important to you to make the campaign lovely for every faction? People do not enjoy chasing whack a mole Sack stacks, there has been no shortage of feedback on that. The second most popular mod is the 10% own territory movement speed mod for that reason. Outside the first few turns of a campaign this almost never happens to me, because I build walls and use agents and ambush stance when needed to trap attackers. Late game it happens occasionally but at that point having a single small city sacked is pretty much a yawn-worthy event that sets the settlement back a couple turns. Even the odd razed minor settlement doesn't merit much more than "whatever" late game.
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Jun 9, 2016 17:46
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Rakthar posted:Exactly, this guy loving loves it. Get good scrubs. Try building walls, seriously. The AI will almost never attack a walled settlement without stopping to build towers, giving you all the time in the world to react. madmac fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 17:55
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Oh hey, that CA Sam guy is answering questions again. Every race has some unique mechanics on the campaign map. Which of those was the hardest to figure out and which one was most fun. And seeing as the development and design side is already thinking about the next game. Without revealing what might be planned, what are the races you are excited to tackle the most from this perspective and which seems the biggest hurdle? Greenskin Waaaghs was probably the most challenging – there was a lot of work that went in to making them work right, especially because they act as an AI companion. It was actually a very late change in development that we made to allow you to control your Waaagh army in the battle, originally that would act as an AI ally in battle. You guys normally use history as a basis for your games. How has it been to start from a well-liked fantasy universe and build up from there. Were the confined put on your by the chosen universe similar to the restriction one would face when working from a excisting time period. And how has the team experienced the change of pace from a more historical title. Harder? Easier? More pressure? In a way, building a game from Warhammer presented much of the same start to a project as a historical title does. We start by reading a load of books and absorbing all the history with whatever time period the historical game is set in. Because Games Workshop has created over many years such a wealth of existing content with all their army books and other various lore books, this project started in very much the same way. It’s still like reading about history, just a fictional one! In some way it is actually easier because for most things there is one account of it and its correct, if we are not sure we can check with GW. With history things are often more vague, particularly the further back in history you go, you can read two accounts of something with massive differences and you have to choose which one to believe. There are quite a few new things in Total War: WARHAMMER. From Magic, unique campaign mechanics, the different approach to commanders and agents who also serve as heroes on the battlefield. Some of these obviously wouldn't fit in a more historic total War game. But have there been certain things in WARHAMMER from which you guys think you have learned valuable lessons learned that could benefit futher titles? (TLDR: WARHAMMER seems like a big departure. Was there that much difference in the approach to this game? And what might be some lessons you learned from possible looking at developing a total war with this different mindset.) There are definitely development lessons learnt on how to do things. It's been great to have the opportunity to try a lot of new things out, so we can see what the player reaction to them is. In terms of designs to carry forward in to historical titles, that remains up to the historical design team and also up to what we see the players saying online! There have been some voices that like to call-out certain changes as dumbing down. Total War being a game with 2 big parts, campaign map and battles. One obviously can't become too overbearing on the other, and you can't lose one or you lose the total war identity. Does this influence some decision in regard to streamlining some things, with the fear that a few too many things quickly turns this into a 'paradox' type game. This is a very difficult balance to strike. There are some people who want us to become more like a Paradox game, sure, there are others who want us to go in completely different directions. I think whats important is that we keep the essence that keeps total war special, and keep trying new things within that spectrum that keeps Total War, Total War, but also keeps things fresh. Not much of a deep question, but occasionally some people like to voice the opinion that battle are slightly too fast. This has varied over the different titles in the series, but they have always steered more towards a more fast, brisk experience, instead of some of the more grinding engangement seen in some mods. What are the thought on the design team on that? When you have a game like Total War, with a long history of games and a great following because of that, you do get a lot of divergent opinions. We will always take the design of the game in the direction that we think is the best, but we understand this won't be what every person wants, its hard to please everyone! We are also very happy that we have the option of modding for people who want to tweak the gameplay in different directions. There are a variety of mods out there for each Total War title, from small addition, to major changes, to straight up 'overhauls' of most of the games major systems. Does the development/design team look or experiment with some of the community made things. And do you think there are valuable lessons to be learned? We keep an eye on the mods made and those that become popular as it’s a good way of seeing the kinds of changes people want. There are absolutely lessons to be learnt, we have great respect from the mod community, some of our designers (Jack and Mitch) started in that community, so we have great respect for its ability. What is the stance of the team on the campaign map? With Total War: WARHAMMER there seems to be a move towards a slightly more streamlined campaign map experience. (probably more os a status quo. Building being more streamlines but everyone unique mechanic) What is the overal feeling with the team on how to improve the campaign map. (Guessing this is heading in a direction with warhammer trying for a more thematic experience, while the more historic ones going deeper down the managing an empire hole.) I’m most proud of the time we spent polishing the UI functionality – we’ve never had a more functional and accessible UI that helps you play the game more than what we have now. We managed to find time for a lot of small but numerous quality of life improvements throughout the UI, that as individual things may not stand out, but together significantly improve the overall game experience. This is very significant for a strategy game like Total War, where you spend a lot of time within the UI. Small thing about balance. In multiplayer you obviously need to approach something that resembles balance. But how do you guys approach the balance from a singleplayer view. Do you strife to make them all equal there? Or are there no qualms to have some races/armies that have a significant harder time of things. Balance is tough. Particularly with Warhammer, we aim to make sure that the factions have very different feels to their gameplay. This means pushing their gameplay in different areas, and naturally this can upset the balance. We do aim for every faction to have the ability to respond sufficiently to anything another faction might muster. We may balance something in singleplayer for more flavour and fun filled gameplay, but then offset that in multiplayer by changing the cost of that unit. Generally we try to keep SP and MP on the same footing though. Where would you guys say your go to for ideas and inspirations? A ton of developers play a ton of different games. But do you also venture to other forms of entertainment for ideas. Every game with a turn-based element has a lot of potential to look at modern boardgaming for example. Playing other games is a big one for sure, we play a lot of other strategy games (Paradox games particularly), but also all other genres. Warhammer is fortunate to have a massive number of great games that we can draw inspiration from; Mark of Chaos, Shadow of Horned Rat, Battlefleet Gothic, Verminitide, Warhammer online, etc. Why does Heinrich Kemmler constantly ask "Where is krell?!" Because our Lead Writer Andy Hall loves to tease everyone  I'd be really interested to know what you guys do with the community feedback because you guys are obviously really active on the forums so I imagine you get to read a lot of the stuff that crops up. So my question is how do you react to the community feedback? Does it ever impact on the decisions you make with the game going forward? (an obvious example would be the AI use of agents) Player feedback is very important to us – we have a couple of channels that we actively engage in and talk about feedback on, such as our forums and reddit, but there are a lot of other players that we read and listen to, like TWcenter or facebook and twitter. We draw all of this feedback in and compare it to our own internal feelings and that of our QA team to see whether it matches up with what we know or whether there is some stuff that surprises us. Usually we will find a mix of the two. With the stuff that we personally immediately agree with, we will usually already have some plan of action, and that confirmation from players helps drive us forward with making those changes. With the stuff that surprises us we will usually take a little longer to validate that feedback and get to and understanding of where its coming from, so that will involve us playing personally or getting QA to investigate. Usually we will come to that same conclusion and make changes, but we will not always necessarily make the changes suggested to reach the same outcome, we may look for alternative solution that solve the same problem. This stuff takes time and its why often you may not get an immediate response from us to something that is receiving a lot of momentum in the community, because we want to verify it ourselves and take time to think about the problem. Considering whether there really is a problem there and how we may go about solving it if there is one. We do not want to rush and make promises to change stuff without having those facts down and having a clear idea about what we are going to do. To those who worked on the earlier Total War titles, whats the biggest improvement in your opinion that you made this time from previously existing mechanics? Having heroes appear within Battles when embedded in armies is a big one. It really changes the role of what were previously agents in Total War. It's quite a game changer. Will replays be improved so they actually replay the battle the way it happened? One issue I have noticed with replays not replaying the battle correctly is that reinforcements doesn't appear in the same spot as they did in the actual battle. This is a bug that we are investigating. Hope to have it fixed in a patch in the near future. Since the Multiplayer is pretty bare bones at the moment, are you planning on making any additions or changes to it? There was a thread yesterday mentioning that ESL picked up the game so the competitiveness is definitely there so it's kinda a shame that you guys don't really focus on that aspect of the game too. I suppose I can say we are thinking about it. We want to gauge interest. It's something that we on the dev team would love to expand upon if the support for it is there. Having said that, some of the stuff we may want to do may not necessarily be compatible with a competitive format. We are very much open to suggestion on this stuff at the moment! What is your favourite faction? and Why? Might as well ask something you guys will answer Dwarfs. Artillery, Axes, Beards and Beer. What more can a man want. [–]Ninjahundaaagh! 6 points 8 days ago What's been the hardest design choices? Did the historical team do anything? Without being mean to them, this game is miles ahead of any previous Total War, in terms of AI, optimization and intensity and what not. Except multiplayer, hint hint. Region occupation is definitely one that was a tough decision. That is the decision to allow certain races to only occupy certain areas of the map. We have talked at length about the underlying decisions behind this, and we totally understand arguments on both sides for and against it. I think in the end, what we’ve seen and heard about the public opinion on the choice is still quite split, but there are a lot of people that like it. It’s very difficult to ever make any design decision that will appease everybody, particularly with Warhammer where we have quite a few different pockets of players playing. We have old Total War Fans, Warhammer fans, Fantasy Strategy fans, some who fit in to none of those labels. Finding something that everyone agrees with in the office is hard enough! But, I think it’s important that we make these changes and we try different stuff. We know there are some over arching flaws to our formula and things that we want to improve upon, and unless we try shaking things up and pushing for new things we wouldn’t ever progress and our games would become stale. That is not something we ever want to happen, so that’s why we try new things, even if we know that not everyone may agree with our decisions. I hope that some of the people who argued against the idea of it have actually found it to be fun to play with. It’s important that people know we do see Warhammer and our historical titles as different games within the same franchise. Some things work in one and not the other, not everything we’ve done in Warhammer will work in a historical game, and that’s totally fine. Why are there no women Legendary Lords? (Legendary Ladies?) I know the lore is pretty restrictive, but there are some women in there. Particularly for the Vampires, there are all the Lahmians, who are almost all women, and some of them are as big a deal, or even a bigger deal, than some of the current LL's. Seems a shame to have stuck with a bunch of dudes instead. Whether a character is male or female was not so much a consideration for their inclusion, rather, who would be the most appropriate for our first release. So, faction leaders, whoever is the most recognisable, etc. It's just the way things panned out rather than some deliberate decision. That's not to say there won't be female Legendary Lords in the future though People found unit cards depicting ships for all races. Were dedicated naval units something that was planned but cut during development? Yes. We had planned to have campaign navies (note, this is very different from naval battles), but cut it during development when we found that with the current land mass, navies were very unimportant and adding unnecessary complexity. TW:WH features so many more skeletons. Did this also result in more different animations overall? If yes, how did the team deal with such an increase in work load - especially since so many creatures couldn't be mo-capt. Did you just tripple the amount of your animators? Lots more animators, lots more time Does CA stand in contact with relic in any form, now that both teams are developing Games-Workshop licensed games under SEGA? We have some contact with Relic, yes. But not as much as we would like as they are in a different continent/ time zone. Might future expansions add any new content or mechanics to the main races of this installment? It almost certainly will. Chariots were originally announced as mount option for Chaos and Green Skin characters. Can you comment why they didn't make it into the game and if there's a chance for then to appear in a future update? We hit technical issues with them which we didn't have time to resolve. I do not know if they will make a return or not. Going to say "Maybe" Was the Advisor character modeled after the actor who played the Light Wizard in the pre-rendered cinematic trailer? No relation Several mechanics introduced in Attila ( and Age of charlemagne ) seem to have made it into Warhammer in some form or another. I wonder, were they developed for Attila first and then adopted by Warhammer - or were they allready designed with Warhammer in mind, and Attila was ment to be maybe some sort of testing ground. Developed for Attila and then imported in to Warhammer. However, when developing any mechanic for a single game, we do always think about the long term future of Total War, and where that mechanic may fit. What are the chances of seeing new mechanics introduced in Warhammer in future, historical titles? Very hard to say, some mechanics may work very well, some may not. Time will tell! Can you comment on Warhammer hitting sales expectations? We are very happy with current sales I asume Warhammer was designed with the goal of attracting new audiences - like Warhammer fans who haven't played any Total War games before. If thats the case, will future expansions follow the same design philosophy or developed based on the idea that the new playerbase is now familiar enough with the series' formula? Future titles are likely to build upon the same level of complexity/accessibility found in Warhammer rather than introducing too much additional complexity.
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Jun 9, 2016 19:24
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Sinteres posted:Did the raise dead bug come up in the AMA? Actually yes, the CA dude didn't seem to be aware of it. Told him to report it on the main forums as a bug.
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Jun 9, 2016 20:13
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Vargs posted:This interview stuff didn't end up giving up much interesting info but I did like this part. I hope they end up buffing Mannfred and nerfing Kemmler in the next patch. Sadly, just a formatting error, it's more like: Re: Kemmler being poo poo Or perhaps Mannfred is just too strong, comparatively? ect ect Also yeah, Hellblasters blow right now. I did some artillery testing a few days ago and they basically just lob a cluster of 9 "barely stronger than handgunner" shots. It's like 9 normal bullet impacts for 30 damage each, vs the Dwarf Organ Gun shooting 4 mini cannonballs for 50 damage that can each penetrate lines and hit multiple dudes. Also the Organ gun is cheaper and has way better range. It's everything the Hellblaster dreams of being when it grows up.
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Jun 9, 2016 23:25
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I kinda glossed over them before in my Orc review, so here's my impressions on proper Orcy Magic Goblin/Night Goblin Shaman: Goblin Shamans can be recruited as Lords and get wolves, Night Goblin Shamans are heroes and eat shrooms to reduce spell cooldowns massively. Other than they are basically the same thing. Pros: Heavy use of support effects means they are much less impacted by spell scaling problems than Orc shamans. Cons: Bit of a one-trick pony, are miserably weak and easy to kill even by Wizard standards, lovely or no mount options. Lore of the Little Waaugh Spells Oddly, like half the Goblin Shaman spells do not have overcast versions. Sneaky Stealin Your passive ability, slightly drains recharge speed for enemy spellcasters. Not useless, but not exciting either. Sneaky Stabbin Your most basic spell, and oddly decent. It's a very cheap small aoe buff that gives allies a pretty substantial +34 attack and +18% AP damage. The main downside here is that it only lasts 12 seconds and can't be overcasted, so you gotta either be really on the ball with casting this at the right time or else spam it everywhere and run out of magic after about a minute and half into the battle. It's not the best spell in town but it does make freshly recruited Gobbo Shamans pretty useful. Vindictive Glare Your basic magic missile type spell, potentially highly damaging if it doesn't whiff but difficult to aim and often only works really well when used point blank or flying, and you can't fly and die instantly in melee, so. Overcast gives more missiles. You only have two damage options as Gobbo's and this is one of them. I never use it personally, but I guess if you're desperate enough to be locked into close combat with your loving goblin hero, might as well let it rip. Gork will Fix it A very cool spell that reduces enemy charge damage and movement speed in an AOE, custom designed to blunt cavalry charges. Lasts 36 seconds, no overcast. I'm getting a theme with Goblin spells here, and it's that all of them require you to be really on the ball with casting them in the right place at the right time. It is usually not the cav charge you see coming that wrecks you after all, and if you just cast this on enemies at random they can just back off until it wears off. Realistically it's probably best used to slow and catch Cav as they're trying to run away rather than expertly blunting charges right before impact. Itchy Nuisance An AoE hex that lasts 29 seconds and reduces enemy attack and weapon damage. (-34 attack -22% damage) No overcast. Actually a drat solid debuff that's basically always useful. I'd suggest grabbing this first after Sneaky Stabbin to give you basic buff/debuff spam capability, which is 90% of what you'll be doing with Gobbo Shaman's anyways. Night Shroud The anti-ranged version of Itchy Nuisance, drops an aoe hex on enemy ranged units to reduce their accuracy and sight range for 32 seconds. Can be overcasted to increase range and aoe. A pretty unique spell that gives you a bit of relief from pesky archers. Debuffs are definitely your forte with the Little Wauugh. It does cap out at only a -20% penalty though, so it's not like you're totally shutting them down. Curse of Da Bad Moon As Vortexes go, Pac-Moon is, I think, well above average. I'm sure the damage is as poo poo as all of them right now but it does decent disruption and curses any unit that comes in contact with it for 22 seconds, reducing their melee attack, armor, and movement speed. TLDR, Gobbo Shaman pretty good at spamming middling strength aoe debuffs, pretty terrible at everything else. Orc Shamans Orc Shamans are hero only at this stage and are a bit sturdier than your average humie wizard. I mean they're still made of glass, but comparatively speaking they're a little stronger. Can be equipped with a boar mount, making them a bit tougher and faster. Pros: More aggressive in both stats and spell selection, require less babysitting in general. Cons: Most Damage Spells suck mightily right now, limited selection of buff spells to supplement. Lore of the Big Waaugh Spells Power of Da Waaugh The exact opposite of the Gobbo passive, gives your Shaman faster power recharge instead of draining enemy casters. Gaze of Mork More of a fireball type spell than Vindictive Glare, which means it's decent. Overcast gives massively improved range, which is actually pretty useless for this type of solid projectile spell. Brain Busta Probably the best damage spell you have with Orc Shaman's presently, it has a decent range and aoe and inflicts reasonable damage+knockback. It's cheap, too! Overcasting greatly increases both the range and aoe of the spell. Sneaky 'eadbut Has a sort of teardrop shaped aoe with a minimum range, I find it strangely difficult to aim properly. Does damage+knockback to affected units, Overcasting increases damage. It's not awful but the targeting is awkward and I'm not sure I fully understand it right, I end up wanting to use it like Wind of Death and I don't think it's quite the same thing. Fists of Gork Gives a single allied unit big buffs to melee attack, melee defense, and damage for 21 seconds, no overcast. It's a pretty strong buff but being single target only and not cheap limits it's use somewhat. Still, it's one of two spells that aren't raw damage so woo, utility! Ere we Go! Your other utility spell, just gives straight +58 melee attack to friendlies in an aoe for 35 seconds, no overcast. That's actually a drat good buff just on raw effect and duration, I don't really care that it only buffs attack, melee attack is huge. Foot of Gork Your incredibly disappointing ultimate spell. Looks badass, actually hits such a teeny-tiny area that the AI will casually sidestep it 80% of the time. Damage is also not fantastic given it's high cost and small aoe. Use Brainbusta instead. TLDR Orc Shamans rely on a mix of largely average damage spells and buffs, making them simple to use but not amazing. Basically all your Wizard options with Orcs are pretty meh. Not useless by any means, every army should have at least one Shaman for utility and a little extra damage but they're definitely not rocking anyone's world right now.
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Jun 10, 2016 02:55
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unwantedplatypus posted:Sneaky stabbin is actually a really good spell because it boosts AP, something the Orc roster lacks until tier V That is an interesting point, actually.
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Jun 10, 2016 03:40
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Couple more answers from the AMA on reddit. Q: What unit size was magic balanced on? A: Large unit size received the most attention in this regard. Q: Will Brettonians at least get wedge formation? It's kinda their thing in TT blah blah blah A: I honestly don't know if wedge is planned right now for any point in the future. But i'm passing the feedback on to the design team regardless. Q: Can we get auto-cast for poo poo like foe-seeker? A: Not planned, but an interesting idea. I'll pass the feedback on. Thanks! Q: RO Whyyyyyyyy? A: Primary driver to make a change was to improve the late game gameplay. Most Total War games turn in to an auto resolve slog, where nobody can match your might. Q: Request: once you start having a few lords/heroes, going through them is hard. It would be nice if the keyboard , and . would work not just to "carousel" between provinces, but also between heroes/lords. Also, it would be nice to be able to instantly see the benefit of followers you have, instead of having to mouse over them. A: Cool ideas. Passing them on to the people that matter. Thanks .Not really anything of interest other than reinforcing that you should probably play on Large until they fix magic. (Mind you I do play on large and most vortex spells still suck but hey.)
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Jun 10, 2016 13:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZIAQ818Lvc Joey vs James. Having not watched it yet, the victor is clear short of James straight throwing the match.
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Jun 10, 2016 14:34
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Estalia and Tilea are actually pretty big NPC nations without an major oppressive force keeping them down like Kislev or the Border Princes. I have to wonder what they even get up to in all the games where they don't streamroll the Bretts.
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Jun 10, 2016 16:57
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Mazz posted:The difficulty for tactical battles peaks at very hard and you can change it during a campaign in one of the Esc menus. Legendary is quite literally just very hard with higher public order and income penalties, more passive AI advantages to income and growtg, and some other awful bullshit. That they changed the achievements to work with very hard as well as legendary there's very little reason to actually subject yourself to that anymore Going off the one random CA dudes comments just before release, the modifiers for VH in tactical combat are roughly a +12% bonus to most stats, along with like +10 or +15 (I forget which) LD while the player gets -10 LD. It's really the LD bonus that's decisive, on VH the AI will fight practically to the death, making it harder to collapse flanks ect and battles being longer and grindier in general. madmac fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 18:28
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Yukitsu posted:What's been fun lately is seeing something like a Luminark of Hyesh beam coming in and two shotting my general, but whenever I take one the shot clips through whatever I'm firing at and does 0 damage. How I win sometimes with conditions like that is well beyond me. Dwarves don't get a specialized assassination agent, so the best you can manage is to make do with Thanes, who at least get the +8% bump to assassination chance midway through their campaign chain. Alternately, and I mean this literally in some cases because assassination missions suck rear end with Dwarves, you can just wipe out the target faction and you'll get a second, easier objective instead.
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Jun 10, 2016 18:47
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Stephen9001 posted:So I found this video... A good rule of thumb for TW games is that all those animations are not just an abstraction of what is happening, attack animations, projectile physics and collisions are all something that matter a great deal. On a purely technical level, the TW battle engine is kind of nuts. On another note, got around to doing some testing on Greenskin Archers finally. Conclusions: Gobbo Archers are hot garbage, their ranged damage on any target with an armor value greater than zero is pretty much irrelevant. Good against Zombies and Savage Orcs, terrible vs anything else. Arrer Boyz are comparably solid, the key advantage for them is having actually quite high (5) AP damage, so they pack a solid punch against armored targets and definitely do the most damage over time of all greenskin archers. Being decent in melee is also a plus. Night Gobbo Archers aren't any better at shooting than regular Gobbo's, but poison arrows, fanatics, and ninja-level stealth make them much better support units. It's still a trade-off vs Orc archers but they're definitely worth using.
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Jun 10, 2016 20:46
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quote:What about wolf rider archers or spider rider archers? I'd been using wolf / spider rider cav a lot early on just for the charges on archer/grudge thrower lines Spider Rider Archers have poison arrows, which greatly debuff enemy units. They're used mostly as support, to cripple units you're fighting and make them easier to pick off. Night Goblin Archers also have poison arrows though they don't do any more ranged damage than regular gobbo archers do. As for Goblin vs Orc Archers in general, I tested it and Orcs reliably do more ranged damage faster even on targets as weakly armored as skeletons. That surprised me a bit, but Orc Archers ultimately have missile damage comparable to empire crossbowmen and dwarf quarrelers despite their reduced aim while Goblin Archers have poo poo range and do 10+1 AP damage on hit, which is just miserable.
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Jun 10, 2016 21:46
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rockopete posted:So they're perfect anti-cavalry then? Due to the slowing effect of the poison, I mean. Will the poison still take effect against armored enemies like heavy cavalry, or does damage have to be dealt? One of my test involved Night Gobbo archers slowing a unit of Grave Guard to a crawl as they approached, so yeah heavy armor doesn't matter against poison.
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Jun 11, 2016 00:00
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Rakthar posted:Yeah although I'd clarify that poison does no damage to armor / through armor, just slows them down. It's a 25% penalty to most stats, not just speed. Poisoned units are garbage in melee, it's one of the reason poison hounds are so effective.
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Jun 11, 2016 00:09
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Another note on Night Goblins, it's not obvious when you're playing vs the AI, but their stalk ability means they are all literally kisho ninja from Shogun 2, they're considered concealed even when walking around on wide open snowy plains and can only be spotted within a pretty short distance, like just outside the Night Goblin archers firing range.quote:Well, I admit I was wrong. But why in the holy gently caress would they do it like that? It worked the same way in Shogun 2 and every TW game since. I'm guessing CA just wanted to simplify selecting difficulty for casual players while still giving people who knew what they were doing an out.
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Jun 11, 2016 01:37
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Flavahbeast posted:has anyone looted a Seed of Rebirth? supposedly it's a common talisman but I've only ever seen them on enemy leaders. Regen on a high level commander is pretty bonkers so it wouldn't surprise me if they made a passive regen item enemy-only I've gotten a couple Seeds of Rebirth, yeah.
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Jun 11, 2016 04:22
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Bright Wizards with their kindling passive are about as good as you can get right now for aoe damage spells. You have to use the right spell in the right situation though, Flaming Skull actually does more raw damage than Flame Tornado and inflicts a heavy morale debuff on top, it's the ideal vortex for dropping on a big pile of weak troops. Flame Tornado's thing meanwhile is that it's almost purely AP damage, so it's more effective against Dwarves and Chaos Warriors. Celestial Wizards OTOH seem awful right now. They've got like one good buff and a bunch of weak damage spells.
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Jun 12, 2016 03:35
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Raged posted:What do dwarfs have to build to get walls on settlements? My settlements are all lvl 2. The only thing I have found under defense the watch room and guard room which I have found out the hard way do not give me walls. You need a level 2 guard hall to get walls, which also requires a level 3 settlement.
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Jun 12, 2016 14:22
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I actually enjoy playing Gelt and his starting army but seriously, Searing Doom is the one spell in the game so bad that it does literally nothing.
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Jun 12, 2016 17:20
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I feel like CA somehow chickened out with area spell damage at the last minute, you can see very effective use of vortex spells even in just the streams they were doing a week prior to release (which was a slightly older build.) By comparison I've watched some of the post release ones and even the CA guys can't be bothered throwing out a vortex spell anymore except as a distraction because they do nothing now. How Death dodged that kind of general rebalancing I have no idea but it's pretty obnoxious combined with the fact that the highest damage remaining spells are also the ones that are cheap, with great range and short cooldowns that never miss and have no counter whatsoever. With Spirit Leech and Fate nerfed you'll see other spells used more but I don't agree that damage spells generally are in a good place. Purple Sun does something like 100 damage, it's embarrassing how bad it is. The absolute top-tier aoe damage spells are just barely worth using sometimes in limited circumstances. madmac fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 18:16
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All my griping aside I'm confident that the most egregious issues (eg Spirit Leech, Demigriffs) with be addressed in the first balance patch, I just wish we knew how much longer it was gonna be.
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Jun 12, 2016 18:52
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To be perfectly fair, no one really knew anything about Fate of Bjuna until that Legend of Total War guy discovered it in his Vampire playthrough less than a week before release, and spirit leech took slightly longer to get figured out. It's not really a point of pride to "discover" a balance issue through a guy who did play the game making a video about it. And really out of the two Spirit Leech is worse. Fate of Bjuna's problem is less the fact that it can kill a couple units for a bunch of magic than how easy it makes it, and spirit leech is a problem because it enables brain dead hero sniping. madmac fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 20:44
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terrorist ambulance posted:It's very annoying when your faction leader picks up traits like "harsh" and "unjust". Faction-wide public order penalty in all provinces that you cannot remove unless you don't use your legendary lord. You think that's bad, in Atilla picking up the "harsh" trait was just the first inevitable step towards becoming a torture obsessed mass murderer. Of course in that game you could at least get your King killed and replaced with someone else, having permanent negative traits is pretty BS when you're stuck with them the entire game.
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Jun 12, 2016 21:15
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