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Henri and Repanse are wicked strong and can tangle up any non-red threat solo or tear into it together. Repanse has a great point blank aoe debuff skill. You start with one artillery so it's free morale estate to set up as far back as possible and make them come to you. The Squires and Poleaxe are higher tier so the shield peasants should meet the front line clash first and then Repanse, Henri and the higher tier guys should meet just a moment sooner. The cavalry you start with is strong stuff and should be a bit off to the side, charge in and smash 'em with the same timing as the good infantry: chaff takes brunt of enemy charge, good guys arrive very shortly after with their own charge. Brett archers have decent range and shouldn't be directly behind your front line or you'll have no time to react if there is spill over and they'll enter Skirmish dancing and stop shooting to run. Pause to manually target or deactivate fire at will with the artillery once lines meet to avoid firing into your own guys. From there it is experimentation, having Henri and Repanse and the cavalry rush and snipe the Lord once the lines meet might pay off as much as winning the front line battle with them. You can also recruit some more Errant Knights before you go in, Repanse starts with vows to avoid getting ripped off on upkeep.
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Dec 18, 2019 02:29
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I had a good Khalida Vortex start where the suggested first allies, Dark Elves, refused to play diplomacy ball but the adjacent High Elves would. Once the HE were my pals and I bullied the DE to death even the Lizardmen factions would tolerate me for awhile. The starting book wants you to go after the nearby Dwarves but you start on good terms with them too. As Tomb Kings rise in power over time by the point things fell apart I was able to win a four front war for the entire continent and wipe out every LM faction and the Dwarves with the HE holding the fourth front against the far north DE and Huntsmen. The third was that Mors sailed across the ocean to start trouble! I ended up letting the HE hold the occasional settlement mixed into my nice continental block. Trying Vampire Coast out ATM. Is there any reason for Noctilus to not gravitate towards an 18 Necrofex army? This big fellow is my new best friend.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:12
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:Is there a good up-to-date breakdown or guide or something on how to not loving suck at campaign map management? Because I can win battles but like how the gently caress are people managing more than 2 or 3 regions? Every time I go one direction to expand, because I need to, to not die and lose, three different factions attack from three different directions. So I have to run my armies back across my territory to break sieges but as soon as I get close the AI runs their armies away and even if I catch them I only get like four or five turns of peace and then they bring a doomstack back into my poo poo, and that's barely enough time to even get back to wherever I was dealing with before. Use Heroes that can Block Army to stop chases, multiple armies to box them in or have a stack waiting at the approach they'll use while your aggressors are off pushing elsewhere. You can also try Ambushing in the same expected defensive spots. Build up defensive buildings/walls as well, the AI will always approach a settlement it can see it can take based off an auto-resolve calc, even if it has to siege a few turns to do it/get the ram and towers. Note that no matter how much an army runs they can't push their settlements to new locations(aside from y'know, Hordes) so don't go to war with somebody, take one province and leave them with two while running off to snag Vortex Plot Tokens somewhere else. You gotta clear your plate. If you don't want to be bothered with owning their land it is better to raze them into the dust to get their -200 At War off the table for the rest of the campaign. Or at least force a Peace Treaty, a lot of AI will come to you with the offer if you're a big swaggering power and take so much of their land they think you're going for the finish. The AI seems very reluctant to get trust penalties and won't break NAP/Peace Treaty and go to war too fast, I'm not sure if they're bound by the 10 turn limit or not but you do get more breathing room than you'd think. But overall it is very difficult to actually fight a whirlwind multi-province/multi-front war because EVERYONE associated with your foes will get in on the action if they're nearby and a lot of closely related factions will start confederating and make the overall It takes a lot of heat off you to have some neighbors you're on good diplomatic terms with. Like at the start of every campaign now I will do Diplomacy once a turn and beat down anyone with a yellow odds or better for NAP and Trade. Having adjacent neighbors in a Military Alliance or Defensive Treaty is useful because they won't shank you at inopportune times, other enemies have to clear their land to reach you from that side and it is all free. Just be careful on what wars they try to drag you into, if the Diplomacy option specifically uses the words "Break Treaty" you'll get like -100 with them, if it doesn't you can ignore it multiple times in a row. I just had one of these because two friends wanted to fight so I had to pick one, broke treaty against the guy fighting 3-4 factions on the same land mass, he hasn't had time to declare on me yet. There was also a time I refused frequent friendship overtures from Orcs because they made my previous friends mad by existing(probably raided/sacked/took their land before I got to that part of the map) and every time the screen came up between turns I could see the Orc land shrink and my pal's land grow, so even NAP with them wouldn't be worthwhile for the hits to my strong pals. Basically you have to try to piece together a rough web of who is pals with who, who is doing what wars, the little summary under their portrait is right there, and make some friends, going 100% Kill-Fight-Death is fun but you gotta pay the toll to go down that road and pay it frequently, even when you have enough armies to hold 3 fronts it gets grating when some other jerk sails onto your coast or a rogue army spawns. Also if you get sea contact or the event where all major port owners become aware of one another, making friends on other continents pays off. I lost a lot of pressure from Clan Mors in my Vortex Khalida game because I was able to convince Settra on their home continent to be my pal. By the time I got over there the two each had 1/3 the continent and hated each other so Queek couldn't afford to send armies across the ocean in the second half of the game. Some LL and factions have innate Diplomacy bonuses, sometimes you start a specific campaign and I think it is a neat detail that some factions are already friendly presumably because of things like the Dwarves remember forever the time when the Tomb Kings were alive and did them a solid, or like how Kroq'gar gets along well with the Wood Elves he starts near. quote:It feels like every AI faction knows that they don't have to win, they just have to prevent the player from winning, so they can do whatever stupid suicidal poo poo as long as it fucks my poo poo up. Specifically for the Vortex things will always get spicier when you do Vortex rituals because of Chaos/Intervention armies, so being stuck in forever war on too many fronts is Hell. I'm also pretty sure that one of the base 4 races that does the 5 Rituals can't befriend the other 3, the option is usually grayed out for me.
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Dec 22, 2019 01:47
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I just finished my Vampire Coast campaign. Early on I realized that playing like a traditional land army and expanding across provinces was kind of a hassle, especially since the suggested High Elf continent can attack you from multiple sides and has those special gates and all. So I had Noct and his 2nd rampage to 2/3 of the Ports, Pirate Cove them up and expand my income. Getting part of the sack money and raise dead let me replenish meat shields on the fly, battlefields of renown were free candy and I left the other 1/3 and struck beneficial alliances with the invading Norscans after the full lap. As I ran off to do this on a second continent the Dark Elves loved me and I only had the Maelstrom and a 3 settlement province but I could field 3-4 full doom stacks by the end. I drafted a third army to rebuff HE armies that wanted that one province back and re-sack their stuff when they overextended and this made a 100 turn lazy victory very cozy. The VC blue line can get unit upkeep down dramatically, Gunnery Wights are an artillery nuts best friend and Noctillus can field a fist of Necrofex by games end. The only downside is that it felt like Vampiric Corruption doesn't actually affect the AI, I never saw their forces diminished. I'd build it to help with public order and because the -20% move speed debuff doomed so many HE runners, but I can't see crafting anything in Pirate Coves that isn't money presses. They're a really cool option for sacking rampage playstyle, they endure through any number of owner changes. The Officer system is super strong too and you're spoonfed events that frequently give +50% campaign move so defenders can't even catch you. Yo ho ho. 
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Dec 23, 2019 05:42
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The secret confederation penalty on Orcs is pretty bullshit, just binned a campaign when I had 3 simultaneous rebel armies encamping to mixed T3-4 20 stacks. I get it, I get it. They're Orcs. They're idiots. They start their research later than most, they're so stupid they get less excited to fight when you transfer units between armies(????), if you don't win a fight they'll self destruct and you can "fix" this by killing more of them yourself, you literally can't encamp and global recruit in your own land without raiding it. Very orky. But the god drat hidden penalty to the one beneficial orky thing to do, slap other gits into line, it's making it really hard to enjoy any start with this faction. Everybody else is free to confederate all they want(sure didn't have this issue with Brettonnia!) and my boys get depressed when my third lord passes some wolf riders off to my main stack before pausing to recruit the home defense army. Tell me I'm new and there's something I'm not seeing because this is the third time I've tried and stuck it out and whoops, didn't stare at the top of my screen for a pop-up less negative effect after some diplomacy. I guess the fourth time I'll just kill the other greenies to get their land. "Boss! Boss! We want to fight with you! Why won't you let us?!" You wouldn't understand.
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Dec 24, 2019 21:46
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Confederation seems a bum deal then. Allies at arms length it is.
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Dec 24, 2019 21:53
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Rip_Van_Winkle posted:I am a broken person so I'm trying to figure out Noctilus' campaign now. I assume running straight towards the high elves with an army comprised mostly of deckhand mobs is a bad idea, because I keep getting my rear end kicked. But it also seems like it's gonna take a long-rear end time to get anything higher tier off the ground. Should I just gently caress around until I've got a better army or is there an easier target than the high elf port city it keeps telling me to go after? Doomykins posted:Early on I realized that playing like a traditional land army and expanding across provinces was kind of a hassle, especially since the suggested High Elf continent can attack you from multiple sides and has those special gates and all. So I had Noct and his 2nd rampage to 2/3 of the Ports, Pirate Cove them up and expand my income. Getting part of the sack money and raise dead let me replenish meat shields on the fly, battlefields of renown were free candy and I left the other 1/3 and struck beneficial alliances with the invading Norscans after the full lap Cove ports and sack or raze everything between you and the next port. The game does suggest you go for the HE first but Noctilus and his secret club nobody wants to sail to and carrying his boat on his back give you a lot of leeway to run wild and coves mean you don't need to keep land to build income or wait around after the first hit and run on a city. Raise Dead lets you replenish Deckhands fast if you're making money and the earliest pulls should get you access to Gunners and Gunners(Handguns.) My easiest, cheapest anvil and valley was to have Deckhands meet the enemy melee as artillery softens them up, have Noct, his 'Fex and his starting Depth Guard get a high priority bully and kill on the front line and to have the gunners doing their thing from the sides. Deckhands aren't great but they're not trash tier and they'll fight until they die and then you can bulk raise another three per region/every few rounds and by a coincidence I usually had 3 Deckhand mobs disband on average, which was about the worst losses of a line that held until it died while the dakka poured in. Not great for chevron investment but you can always take a port and flee to the sea to bounce back to the Maelstrom, once you get Depth Guards and monsters you can take the front more seriously. Noct also gets a ton of micro fun, he starts with 3 shots a battle from cannons, can burn his winds on a squad burn magic, heals, big nukes and chaff summoning. If you build up the armory on his boat you'll get extra cannon shots. He's his own walking province. You also get huge power spikes frequently if you tough out the start on the Vortex campaign, like "Declare war on these guys and get +50% move speed for ten rounds" or "Your other Lords are rank 5? Pick a sweet bonus."
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Dec 27, 2019 02:10
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:So this is my first time taking a Brettonian faction out of the early game - are you telling me that I have to put a Farm AND a Windwill in one city if I want to be able to upgrade either? Like... I cant have a Windmill in Al Haikk and an upgraded farm in Copher? I need to have the Windmill and Farm in Copher from what I can tell. It seemed easier to keep farms or industry at tier 1 for the extra income that didn't affect pre-existing structures rather than climb the ladder for some bigger gains and when you only got 3 slots one is gonna be a garrison/wall so really you only got two.
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Dec 27, 2019 20:42
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Anything. Even charging Tomb King poo poo Skellies from three directions barely hurts them. I dont tie them up with infantry though because thats a great way to lose infantry. Like I said I am mainly doing the tie-up-entire-armies-with-lord-and-heroes-then-archer-them tactic, with the cav taking care of things on the side, except the Cav always need help. Infantry has to accept losses if they see combat, outside of a best case like just shooting them all before they reach you. If you avoid a unit disband and get a flank off they did their job. Solo units won't occupy a big 40-80 unit squad at all aside from damaging and routing it. You need a little mass to hold enemy mass. Even T0 melee like zombies, skavenslaves and peasants will force the enemy block to engage them until the rout or the crumbling. You can have a small part of your cavalry do it, you just need bodies occupying bodies, then have the majority of your guys ride into them from the side or back while they physically can't turn to brace. Once a squad is stuck in they can't easily do much unless they have a large mass advantage or can fly or something.
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Dec 29, 2019 20:16
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Deck Droppers are a decent two of, they can snipe artillery teams without being intercepted by any melee or help pick apart the edge of a front. I found them pretty welcome as part of a garrison. Makes me wonder if they'd pull weight like mass mutalisks if you had 10 squads running around together or if they'd obstruct each others shots.
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Dec 30, 2019 21:11
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There are a lot of fine touches a human player can apply that the auto-resolve will never consider. Some factions this is truly bananas like the Vampire Counts where you'll be told you should expect to lose a lot of battles that you can dominate with some superior flier, Lord/Hero and spell micro. I guess the auto-resolve assumes you are suiciding your flanking bat friends. Total War games are very intimidating as a new player, I was ten hours of messing around in before I really understood the genre as a whole and started having my first successful campaign. I was also Skaven but I wanted to be sure the Horned Rat saw me.
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Jan 3, 2020 03:25
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Is there a lot of significant differences in corpse carts or is it just "bring the most advanced you can create or the RoR/Master Necro on his mount"? Seems like a 1-2 of, although they can certainly do decent 1 on 1 or flank sniping, especially the RoR. Like park them behind the front to be safe, have them flank if you want to micro.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:29
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He's a flying big monster with a boat load of useful stats and has a free 3-per-battle nuke that hits really hard, give him a try in a battle with a back up save and I think you'll like him. If you handle his engagements well he can dumpster a lot of dudes per battle so he's like a super vargheist with terror and regeneration. He also gets biiiig armor pierce and a bonus vs large so he can eat a lot of other troublesome monsters.
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Jan 5, 2020 05:02
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On most siege maps you can bait the AI away from one of the gates or make them panic by sending an expendable squad or two to the capture point. Getting a weapons team inside the city becomes an entertaining little puzzle, especially when:quote:Right now, I just send in Ikit, his engineers, and a doomflayer and warp lightning everything, but that's not gonna work if i face non-tier 1 defenders. Ikit gets a doom wheel mount and a passive where his warp lightning spam will heal him so with some big brain micro there's very few things that can threaten him. It also works even injured so Ikit can start a siege at 20% HP and dump warp lightning on the walls to top off.
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Jan 6, 2020 23:18
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Depends on your priorities for the Lord and the offerings from the unique Lord skills and the racial/faction blue line. I usually prioritize any good blue line that makes empire upkeep significantly better and then want my Lords/Heroes to be better at combat so yellow is next. Ikit and most Skaven are hard pressed to not go down their blue line, +30% Ambush into better recruiting into Lightning Strike and huge upkeep savings is amazing. Then Ikit has a yellow that leads to either "spells boost your damage" or "spells heal you forever, no regen cap" and these are so astoundingly good if Ikit sees any combat(and he becomes a Doomwheel, so..) that you can't ignore them. From there I bumped Ikit's red line because unless you make a colossal mistake in a single battle his artillery line should survive to gold chevs and benefit immensely from the buffs. I ended up ignoring his spell line because he lends himself to spamming Warp Lightning and my spell casting style tends to be having 1-2 reliable spells per caster and using them for clutch momentum swings, usually a reliable nuke and a strong buff or debuff. Overall I follow a priority on all lords of +10% Move speed, Amazing Blue Line, Amazing Yellow Line, Amazing One-Offs, Good Blue/Lightning Strike, Good Yellows(Combat Lord), Good Spell-Casting Tree, Good Yellows, Red Line, Weak Blue(Dwarves, parts of Vamp Counts, etc), the Rest. I usually expect a lot of personal fighting from my Lords and Heroes so I consider +Melee Defense/Attack to be a big deal. Red Line also loses value later on if you're not theming that lord's army consistently, keeping high rank troops alive or don't have buildings/policies/passives to recruit at high rank, although if you reach the second group you're right next to the amazing AoE +Melee Defense buff for Rally. And not all Blue Lines are equal, Dwarves for example are a pretty dull set of early choices where I settle on +Underway Interception to foil Orcs/Skaven more often and +Untainted because eh, ME and Chaos Corruption? Compared to +30% Ambush to Skavens passive Ambush movement that's a grudgin'. A crummy price to pay for Lightning Strike but ah well.
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Jan 10, 2020 23:08
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Whats this? The Blue skills that reduce upkeep are empire-wide? I dont believe you. They're not unless you put them on every Lord.  The Skaven blue line really is too good. Though I did discover that Skaven Warlords have a truly bananas yellow two point(+20/40% local income) if you aren't as suicidal with them as most Skaven non-LL armies tend to be.
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Jan 11, 2020 01:56
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I sympathize a lot with Tyrion after trying to play ball with all the factions on Ulthuan, seeing them go to war no matter what while everybody else in the world is running at us with knives out, sigh heavily, restart and take a more aggressive and tyrannical stance while remembering this is Warhammer and inter-faction warfare is perfectly normal. Then despite friendly relations loving Alith Anar ignores their 3 hostile neighbors to sail over and kamikaze on any of my towns without walls. It's all so perfectly petty. ELVES
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Jan 11, 2020 06:16
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1x ram if you forgot an artillery or monster and they won't let you start the fight. The ram is useless otherwise imo. 1x siege towers for any stack comp that doesn't involve artillery sniping a tower and then using all my ammo on the ramparts. Ladder rush is ok for t1/chaff melee but just two towers makes a big difference.
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Jan 22, 2020 21:01
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I've been growing out of setting up ranged camps, the aggressive melee does feel great. I usually build towers if I'm doing a check for whether the AI is willing to sally out and fight on a field. If they aren't, hey, towers for my elite infantry. It helps that a slow turtle approach cracks Vortex wide open.
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Jan 22, 2020 21:19
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The ultimate Vortex life hack is ignoring rituals and shoring up your territory. Every time the AI does a ritual Chaos will eat their weak spots while you grow stronger. I've had Chaos spawn inside my lanf and ignore me without raiding or declaring to rush to the ritual caster's land.
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Jan 26, 2020 01:02
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I found Morathi's chaos mechanic to be pretty easy to handle and Slaves/Black Arks are flat upgrades vs any generic faction function of economy/global recruitment. I was getting 70-90k+ sacks on faction capitals. Combine that with Darkshards and easy confeds and the best Dark Elf LL is any of them.
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Jan 28, 2020 22:06
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ArchRanger posted:Can I get a quick rundown on how to skaven? Trying to play Ikit Claw in ME and it seems like a nightmare balancing food generation with having a large enough, strong enough army to not just get my poo poo pushed in, and balancing multiple armies early game makes the food problem worse while also having to deal with generals constantly losing loyalty. General good campaign play covers food problems, if you're positively waging war on a few enemies at a time and building an ally or two from those rare factions that can tolerate you(or after beating up a mutual enemy) then you should be naturally expanding ahead of your food consumption. Victories yield food, the +food option after battle is always good regardless of enemy army size and if you have a punching bag you can raid them long term. The under-empire helps but imo is strictly supplemental. Remember that cities consume food so it may be far better to sack, fall back and raid a helpless enemy than to finish them off. If you've got full visibility of an unguarded city then things tend to be safe. The best possible fruit is Defenders of the Lost Plan after you've wiped Nakai out, heh heh. There's also Raid + Ambush with two Stacks, one of which can be significantly weaker and be the raider. Raiding builds loyalty, remember to cycle your loot/followers to new Lords and I always put Loyalty in the start-of-turn dilemmas above almost any other option until it is 5+. They're practically guaranteed to pop up for new Lords within a turn or two. Pay close attention to recruit options. You can pull Lords that have 1-6 starting Loyalty or 5-10. If you need a specific functionality on the Lord consider the positives of the more loyal options or use a Hero to patch the hole. Need a duelist? Assassin. Need a caster? Engineer or Plague Priest.
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Jan 30, 2020 02:25
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Menace From Below summons a single clanrats unit, a slightly below average T1 infantry. Two long beards could cover your artillery line, assume every Skaven you fight will shotgun 2-6 summons out per battle because the cooldown is only 45 seconds. Sounds like you need an anti-Lord/Hero goon squad. I usually run a melee hero in most armies just for that purpose, Lord and Thane can 2v1 trouble really well. To be really thorough an elite infantry squad would be a good investment. And yeah, the spells are just, yeah, fuckin' Skaven.
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Feb 3, 2020 22:07
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tithin posted:My current rat campaign (the dude with the forbidden workshop - Ikit?) is currently in the pits, the entire known world has quite literally declared war on me and I've been barely holding the line with two armies - one of which just got wiped out. Rat Ogres are technically Skaven cavalry: they excel at flanking to deal damage, running down exposed units and benefit from a lot of micro attention, otherwise they're prone to melt if they get caught and bogged down. Skaven have melee, they just tend to be below the curve and are frankly a bit deceptive to a new player, such as T2 Clanrats not actually being an upgrade over Clanrats! Sure, the shield is nice, but you haven't actually gained anything but additional upkeep if you're fighting a big Saurus Warrior ball! The Skaven theme is to have an overwhelming offense while sending loads of chattel slaves to die. If you're not fielding mass Stormvermin than your line will fall unless you kill everything before that point. What you're looking at are in order: Skavenslaves: Technically a T0 unit. Will lose every fight and match up guaranteed. They are dirt cheap fodder meant to occupy the enemy and rout, causing most AI units to chase them for a bit. The benefits here are that this eats up a lot of time and you can fire into the mass and not care about your losses. They even have an expendable tag where their deaths only cause morale loss to other Skavenslaves! If you want to really min-max your engagements they have a spears option but that costs a little more money and they're still Skavenslaves. The odds of them holding against monstrous units, cavalry that charges them or monsters long enough to benefit from the extra hits is astoundingly low. Clanrats: T1 infantry. They are a bit below average in stats but they will actually fight the enemy and hold for a bit and can defeat peasants/zombies/skavenslaves and even other T1 infantry with good play such as outflanking and back attacks, particularly with Menace Below. Menace Below will spawn a Clanrats each time. You can properly split between swords(better damage/chance to hit) and spears(better defense, better against large, charge against large.) Spears will make a BIG difference in holding ground vs cavalry charges by negating their charge benefits. You can get these guys a research tech in campaign to make them Expendable but be careful about mixing them in with Skavenslaves if you do so, if you have 6 Slaves rout(because they WILL) then your 4 Clanrats may rout super early. Menace Below: This literally teleports a unit of infantry anywhere on the map 0-6(2-8 with Queek) times. Clanrats can't do much by themselves, if you throw this into the enemy mass you will delay them and nothing more. Summon these on top of weak-melee archers(if it has the good at melee tag or some armor/real melee stats you can still lose the engagement!), exposed artillery, to back attack an engaged unit or even behind walls during sieges as a distraction. Throw them in front of cavalry to spoil their charge on their real target. Drop them on top of a melee Lord so he isn't cleaving through your front. You can spend food or spread Skaven corruption to get more uses. This also covers Skaven spellcasters that can Summon units, which means with a Grey Seer and multiple uses of Menace you can put out 5-10+ units of infantry you didn't actually bring or pay for per battle. Clanrats with Shields: They come at T2 but these are again T1 infantry. They are the exact same stats except they get 35% chance of projectile negation. That'll make a big difference if your entire line has shields and you need to fight High Elves or Dark Elves or any other faction that'll sprinkle 4+ ranged squads in every time. If you just want a melee ball to delay the enemy at mid-field you can save money and use Clanrats. Plaguemonks, Rat Ogres, Plaguemonk Censure Bearers, Deathrunners, Hell Pit Abomination: There are various benefits to all of these guys but outside of a theme army with Skrolk they aren't fit to be a front. They're meant to be the hammer to your squishy anvil. The Abom can be used as a centerpiece of your front though he requires a bit more infrastructure than most players like. Stormvermin: T3 infantry that actually has T3 stats. Or close enough, comparatively! There's a big difference between sword and board and spears here, S&B will actually hold a line and get bronze shields again, Halberd have anti-large, dramatically better armor piercing compared to S&B and Charge Defense. They're expensive but accessible earlier than other elite infantry. Note that they're also not as elite as other elite infantry but they do a great job for a rat of making a real front. Queek can field them at -50% upkeep in his personal army. Warp-Grinders: Same issues as the DPS infantry. Shouldn't be holding the line by themselves, smaller unit cap, etc. Where they excel is that they can use innate spells(no wind cost) to greatly slow and CC the enemy. They deal fantastic armor pierce damage for their cost and become absurd with Ikit's workshop buffs. Night Runners/Gutter Runners: Although they aren't meant for holding a front these skirmishers(hit and run while Skirmish is enabled and anything tries to approach for melee) can delay an enemy front for a ridiculous length of time. As long as they have the speed advantage and ammo these guys can lead the enemy all over the map, split their attention and formation, etc. If you play Eshin you're encouraged to give this a try. Doomflayers/Doomwheels: Although these obviously benefit from hit and run tactics they're worth noting as the Skaven "front" because they cause incredible delays to the enemy. They can slam through a unit, accelerate past it and keep going, dragging 4+ angry melee impotently after them. It's totally viable to have a 19 Ranged/Ikit in his Doomwheel army because Ikit becomes practically immortal with a specific skill. Hell, I did my VH Skaven game with this army. Lords and Heroes: Skaven big shots do not slouch in melee despite their cowardly reputation as a species. Warlords can take 2-3+ units of T1-T2 comfortably in many cases, Assassins can do 1-2 or take down priority targets and even Warlock Engineers can hold against 1 squad that isn't too dangerous in an emergency. Any Lord/Hero that survives to getting a mount will become a pillar of your front, including Grey Seers on the Screaming Bell.
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Feb 6, 2020 17:08
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A Lord fight he own pet faction, a shameful Lord.
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Feb 8, 2020 04:09
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ShootaBoy posted:Managed to pick a copy of this up last night thanks to a pricing error, and I need some advice. I've been playing total war poo poo in some form or another since the original Medieval and Rome. Back then, I used to be able to play a campaign properly, managing the econ side and all that crap just fine. But at some point around Empire-Shogun 2ish, I just lost all my ability to not go broke while having enough troops to fight. So can someone point me to some kind of guide or video or something to help me not be an idiot with my gold coins? I really want to actually properly play a campaign again, and not just cheat in infinite money after the first dozen turns. The more you improve your basic play the more you can get done with a simpler army. A doomstack is very appealing but you can field more armies if you have something like Lord, Hero/Caster, dependable mid range front, mid range flank/flank guard, light cavalary, ranged, 1-2 artillery and then 4 elites, which is what my LL stack usually becomes in early to mid-range campaign games. Of course you want more and better units but you need to claim priority targets to support them. You'll get to those big bucks faster and more reliably when you can pull good gameplay wins by outflanking and picking better targets than the AI in battles with simple but dependable units. Some factions make this masterfully easier than others(Dark Elf Darkshards vs most other starter ranged, Dwarf Warriors vs most other starter infantry, etc) City building counts for a lot. It can seem very unexciting to slam down 1000 bucks for +100 gold a round but think of it more as providing positive income to support another squads upkeep. Having 4+ provinces, 12+ money buildings and synergistic followers/commandments/big buildings(depending on faction and unique location based buildings) can provide 1-2 armies right there. Pay close attention to your faction. If you're Greenskins your economy sucks, you'd better be raiding and sacking. If you're Dark Elves you need an Ark following you with +Sack built up, it's crazy what kinda dollars you can make there. Other factions may benefit more from economic buildings, some need to raid, others want to give Sack a much harder look than Occupy. Some(especially Hordes) can expect to run deficits that they outpace by raging across the land. Some factions have truly unique circumstances, like Vampire Counts can tech up to free upkeep Skeletons and keep a ridiculous amount of 20 stacks to safeguard their lands. And of course others go the other way(Hordes, Wood Elves aaaaaa, Tomb Kings.) If you're like me and want to have a defensive army that can move around to deal with the rogue armies that teleport in, rebels while you get a handle on public order or you fear a middle-weight faction might declare and try to take stuff from your exposed side, invest in building up defensive buildings so you have a good garrison, like 8+ units(so T2 or T3.) Then have a roaming Lord with a smaller army, 8-10 units. These armies can be very simple if you're only expecting simple troubles. A 10 unit Rogue Army isn't going to need 5 Dragons to drop it. Since he should be fighting to guard cities he'll get the "other half" of his army from the garrison. When you're learning in Normal/Hard you can try to have one Lord per 1-2 provinces, as you go higher in difficulty you must do more with less because of the upkeep penalty. Do not ignore diplomacy. Anyone who will trade with you and you don't plan to fight or fear their rivals is free money if they'll take the agreement. The cheapest defense is to be adjacent to a good friend who aggressors have to push through to bother you. A good neighbor can cover 1/2 of your land easily and he pays his own upkeeps! Doomykins fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Feb 9, 2020 |
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Feb 9, 2020 04:26
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Fat Samurai posted:Hmn, thanks. I though losing the battle would lose the settlement 100% of the time. Auto-resolve does silly things like assume all ranged units will fire every shot they have, assign negative value to meat shield troops, don't use spells/faction spells(Menace From Below) well, etc. So sometimes you can win something you shouldn't but mostly you manual things where your math is better than the AIs. I sure as hell can get better value from two fellbats than his two artillery.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:08
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Scott Forstall posted:a wizard that isn't often useful (maybe swap with a plague priest? was my next thought) What school and spells are you using? There's virtually no spell caster in the game that lacks the capability to be frequently useful.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:02
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Mazdamundi has a sweet heart start on Vortex because the Skaven clan near you to the North will very rarely declare war(Spineless) and get stuck fighting Dark Elves anyway. So you have Skeggi, then your choice of enemies and a ton of empty ruins to colonize as you please. When you want to barrel into Lustria as long as any of the other 5(!) Lizardmen factions are alive you can buddy up and they'll be buffers for you and your mainland is still separate from the thunder dome. Thorgrim is Hell, Grimgor will have a 20 stack down your throat every 4 turns like clockwork on Normal alone. I had to rush Gunbad with Thor's stack and repel Grimgor successfully once with half an army and a garrison anywhere in the meantime.
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Feb 12, 2020 05:16
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Max Wilco posted:So I decided to restart the High Elves campaign (again on Easy difficulty for both modes), because I decided that I expanded too fast, and was stretched too thin. The guides I glanced at online made it sound like being flush with gold is vital for HE, so I focused on getting the Straits of Lothern decked out with money-making building, and I made it to the first step of all the Tier 3-5 buildings (the ones that can only be improved in Lothern proper). That quest is optional, though it gives you an idea of how aggressive you can be, even early on. There's almost never any downside to being cautious and slow in Vortex. Save before trying them out and use mages with access to spells you like. Toss a fireball and see if you like the swing in your odds when it impacts properly(I personally hate the spell because it crashes into every individual bump in the map en route.) Use a sweet, sweet shadow AoE debuff when the fronts meet and watch your guys coast to an easy victory(this is my default preference.) The only magic you "need" is magic you get good use out of. Though obviously you'll benefit from learning how to target and time the nukes like Lord Kroak or Winds of Death. Lord Kroak alone is like 20-30% of an auto resolve bar IMO but the game won't calculate that. By default an army has a front and then something that wins the game, as there aren't many fronts that will do that at the same time they're occupied holding the line. You're High Elves so you lend yourself to a core of spear men and archers to support. Since from here everything else is down to preference you'll want to try new units as you get access to them and mostly run a balanced comp, like 1 Lord, 1 Melee Hero, 1 Caster Hero(you can skip this if the Lord can cast), 6-8 Frontline Fighters, 4-6 Ranged Support, 1-2 Artillery(you need one for easy siege access), and the rest for damage, usually. Early on you can just go for more archers, light cavalry or monsters, most Lords will start with one cool elite unit to play with. I think lightly armored archers are useless personally. If my ranged have to fight involuntarily I've usually been overpowered or made a big mistake. Why pay more gold to slightly mitigate it? On Easy/Normal/Hard if you're growing at a steady clip it'll reduce the odds a hit and run faction like Vampirates will bother you. It can be a real hassle as High Elves(because all the factions are petty twits that go to war with each other) but if you can make 1-2 good friend factions that are also strong it discourages random attackers because your Strength Ratings go up and so on in Diplomacy. The absolute best protection against random incursions is to build walls in every minor settlement. You could also try to badger the Vampirates for Non-Aggression early on but aversions make that very unlikely AND it'll make enemies of everybody they do attack. As for the actual nitty gritty of winning fights I've really enjoyed watching Zerkovich's series for new players. To summarize, lets assume you're fighting another High Elf or Dark Elf army. So you slam down 6 spearmen, they have 4 bleakswords/4 spearmen, whatever. Their front is a bit bigger. You have 6 archers, Lord/Melee Hero, a Mage, 2 artillery, starter phoenix and 2 cavalry. A really simple full stack for the early game. The rest of their army is Lord, Darkshards(armor pierce short range archers), and I dunno, something wild like an elite unit, Black Guards of Naggarond. Line your guys up nicely, march them to meet(Alt + Mouse Drag and so on.) Pause/slow motion when you're getting close and make sure your Spears either come to a halt(to brace against Large) or get attack orders(red arrows) to the enemy so they charge them. A fast but less accurate way to do this is to set your front line up, select every unit in it, hit Ctrl + a number(so Ctrl + 1, hit 1, you select them all) and hit the lock icon for that group. Then select that group and right click the enemy front. This'll save you having to individually click 6+ engagements. Stop your archers short so they can fire(longer range), have your cavalry off to the side, they should be far enough out that the AI isn't veering off to engage them, keep your Lord/MeleeH with your front, keep your Mage close but not as close as Lord/MH. Soften with nukes if you got 'em, otherwise wait for the fronts to meet. Debuff the enemy or buff spells any spearmen who has a yellow/red sword engagement on their card. Individually select your Lord and Hero, pick them a yellow or green threat front line squad to crash into once the fronts meet. All this is just simple and clean match up making. I gave you a scenario where your front is smaller, so ideally you have 6 spearmen engage 6 of the enemy front. Your Lord and MH can each solo an enemy squad, or you can let one spearman hold 2. He'll become your new priority for assistance from cavalry/phoenix/archers/spells. A variation is that you might have your Lord/MH rush the enemy Lord if they're at the front, especially if the lines are stable. Another variation is that your front is bigger: do the same(1:1 your front to theirs) and have the extra keep going around the sides. Line up formation behind the enemy(draw your triangles facing their back, take a slightly wider path than you expect) and once they're roughly there do an a-click and smash 'em. Another another variant is the enemy has cavalry, so you hopefully have a big front and can spare 1-2 spearmen who just stand on the flanks and wait patiently, facing outwards from your ranged. If the enemy cavalry doesn't advance, they're doing their job. After everybody charges into one another you have the fronts clashing. Make sure somebody is engaging and you know where those Black Guard are(or whatever the threat of the day is.) You can select your archers and have them focus fire targets of interest. They could weaken the BG before they engage or they can focus down the Darkshards 1-2 squads at a time until they rout. If all else fails, have them firing at will and standing in range to pepper stuff on the front. Pause/slo-mo and take your Phoenix and/or Cavalry, look at engagements, pick some backs to slam into. It's all about selecting small mini-battles in the greater battle and winning them. Zerk's #3 for Newbies, probably the single most important one. Cavalry do require more micro but you can always pause/slo-mo at will until you get better at it. A big note for nuance in cavalry pathing is to hold Shift and Right Click down and draw the path with your mouse. They should only stick on units that get close enough to Charge to engage so wide paths or go around units that are currently fighting. You should always watch a surgical striking unit because most of them have great offense, average or worse defense. Exceptions are if they find enemy artillery/ranged that are isolated. You don't have to watch fights they can't lose too hard, though they might chase the enemy off and follow them. Clean execution of battles will reward wildly better results than the auto-resolve suggests. From there keep steadily growing your tech tree, especially to address things your current army lacks. With High Elves you'll run into problems fighting Armor with early units inevitably, so White Lions are very necessary, who I'd set up in an army at like 4-6 Spears/2-4 Lions and have the Spears in the center and Lions on either flank to do the "run past and then eviscerate the enemy front from both ends" set up. Practical experience and clean battles makes the biggest difference early on, there's also a good series on correcting newbie mistakes oriented towards multiplayer. The information crosses over very well with the campaign and other series and encourages newbies to be proactive in battles. Even mass ranged play in campaign benefits from this as just proper target focus fire can turn a 40/60 into a laughable decisive victory for you. Doomykins fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Feb 13, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 06:42
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The only reliable spears that rats have are cheap clanrats or fielding expensive stormvermin so mass cavalry can overrun most Skaven armies easily. Wall fights are gonna suck but what else is new, at least trebuchet spam and lord/hero spam are available options.
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Feb 14, 2020 19:59
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My big brain growth technique is to have my first two stacks push with t1-t3 + starter elites until they run out of steam or have occasion to double back to hometown. Pushing low tier units and tactics as hard as possible is pretty fun.
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Feb 19, 2020 20:17
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quote:I dunno if three armies is enough to contend with all of them, but I worry about having too many armies at once. If your income is positive you don't have too many goons. It can be more positive, sure, but you can go take stuff and build that green back up. The real warning is when you actually start taking bankruptcy attrition.
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Feb 20, 2020 06:36
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The ultimate Vortex reveal is that ignore rituals and pursue military victory, your biggest enemies pursue the ritual while summoning Chaos stacks to stall their expansion so you honestly can't lose once you begin to snowball. I've seen dying enemies start a ritual. Very cozy turtle play.appropriatemetaphor posted:How do you kill fleeing enemies? My dudes just seem to follow them but don't want to attack? Use high speed units like cavalry and especially cheap, high risk units like fell bats, harpies, dog packs, etc. Having two packs of cheap runners early game is great for risk-free cleaning. Use ranged, although I'd rather make active units rout than finish off routers. Ignore them and keep in mind the high odds they'll rally and return, but since they ran off it takes them forever, they'll trickle back alone and they drain their own vigor. Not a big deal to give them some focus fire or have your line waiting to kick their rear end again. Possible tactic is to never stop chasing them until they run off the side of the map. The thing about routing units is they're very hard pressed to rally if enemies are near, so having weakened same speed infantry chase same speed routers off the side of the map can be a decent gain since you prevent the enemy rally. This can even work against full health ranged on skirmish, you just need to really outnumber the enemy with cheap infantry and have one unit for each of theirs, run them right off the map.
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Feb 20, 2020 16:47
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They're great doomstack filters and the way the anti-large works makes them accurate on those big Lords/Monsters. Cannons are like any artillery, they're either support fire or critical mass. I got experimental in my Legendary Balthasar game and had a stack with 5 cannons and one of the Dark Elf stacks had 3 Hydras and a Kharibdyss, along with the usual doomstack of full Executioners/Naggagrond/Elite Cavalry. Only a single Hydra saw the front. Cannons are a decent mixer, maybe 4/2 Hellstorm/Cannons or even 3/3, the cannons will still delete infantry.
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Feb 22, 2020 01:00
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If you can hold the rest of his army just bring an extra pair of spears and a nice 4+ of free company, handgunners or even archers/crossbows + curse of rust. Lords on Dragons are imposing, sure. They're also Large and if he's suicide rushing Gelt then meet him with a hard counter, get the Lord pick and watch those undead crumble.
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Feb 23, 2020 05:51
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If you have *any* Regiments of Renown available they recruit instantly. Particularly cheesy on some factions like Lizardmen and Empire.
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Feb 25, 2020 20:22
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I'd experiment with vanguard deploying 1-2 miners and having them catch enemy attention and flee to one side of the map, perpendicular to your main army and firing squad. If you have two then split, cause as many enemy army splits as possible, ideally without being in range of their non-artillery ranged. This can increase your uptime from your own ranged, concentrate the Cygor fire in a sacrificial unit and they can hold their own against the wolves. Basically if they're the only thing in range of the Cygors, they won't move while firing? Hopefully. What I typically do in good front line scenarios against artillery I can't answer is win the front line clash as decisively as possible. Are you having the quarrlers(great weapons) join the front? Longbeards and Thane make the front, quarrlers(GW) are the flankers? If the entire enemy army save the Cygors route there's a good chance they'll panic and break in the end too. Getting the Lord kill can clinch it, break him in melee and have every ranged available switch when he flees.
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Feb 25, 2020 20:49
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Clean ranged play, did you get the win? I think you can get earlier line of sight by having a unit hide in the woods themselves and imo it's better to have a squad of mooks meet the enemy front than your Lords/Heroes, even if they're melee heavies. Prevents the enemy from using charge bonus on them and your single models will move cleanly through masses of your own infantry to charge and engage.
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Feb 25, 2020 23:09
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quote:And yeah, I always used lords/heroes for charge breaking, my reasoning being that they get hit by only a few models and they stop the charge dead for my infantry to make clean contact with their own charge afterwards. I always thought that was optimal. Fair enough, I'm not 100% sure either way. I favor a cheaper, bulkier line because I expect casualties, so they take the shocks for all the damage dealers. You should pause a lot more often and issue orders while examining the field, it'll sharpen your micro. And don't let 11k HP get you down, a lot of average infantry has 8k total! And nothing wrong with not letting this one get away, I understand the feeling well. Doomykins fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Feb 26, 2020 |
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Feb 26, 2020 00:18
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