|
I just finished playing a Luthor Harkon campaign and it felt like war with the Lizardmen in the interior was unavoidable. I didn't spend much time messing with anyone north of Mazdamundi except for sending a captain or two around to start vampirate fight clubs.
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 21:50
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 18:36 |
|
|
Gort posted:So do I just ignore the pirate cove mechanics or what No but when I was playing Harkon, I really didn't worry about coves until I'd teched up into the mid game and could afford to drop the 10K it costs to build them with a hero. I don't see the point of filling Lustria with coves when you're going to have to kill the owners at some point anyway just to survive. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Apr 28, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2020 00:00
|
|
|
Everything that gets stuck in melee with deckhands gets shredded by mortars. Also deckhands but who cares about them
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2020 02:16
|
|
|
Mazz posted:Yeah the one real lesson of Vampirates is embrace the gunpowder. You can throw some giant crabs or walking ships in the mix but mortars and handgunners will carry you everywhere you need to go. And the occasional queen bess. Walking ships are also walking cannon. The knockdown melee is just a nice extra, so far as I can tell.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2020 04:34
|
|
|
Mazz posted:They are actually stronger in melee than from far away because they fire on the move and continue shooting in melee. They're fast enough to run down most infantry units too, including most archers. Nothing like playing Noctilus and just Ent walking into the enemy every battle. Works really well except for when it doesn't. Yeah, but they dig grooves through formations with cannonball shots when you fire from a greater distance and get a flatter angle.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2020 05:18
|
|
|
Mazz posted:I played most of a VH Lizard Vortex campaign (cleared the top half of Lustria from Itza to the Delf border) and it solidified for me that I don’t really like melee oriented factions. I basically ended up with whole stacks of cold one knights or feral carnosaurs so I could chase everything down immediately after watching Saurus get harassed by gutter runners and corsairs for 50 turns. Non-feral stegadons wreck skirmishers of all sorts. Even if the enemy is too fast to catch, like missile cavalry or skaven skirmishers, they can't win a firefight against stegadons. Stegadon doomstacks are just good against basically everything! I also had a lot of luck using ripperdactyls to run down slingers and gutter runners. Salamanders can either catch them (although poison runners can be dicey in melee) or win a stand-up exchange of fire. These are both DLC units, but regular terradons can also do the job as long as you order them into melee then back them up with real melee (especially against gutter runners). Skaven skirmishers also completely fold to an early blessed carnosaur, but that's purely a matter of luck. Corsairs are much easier, since they're slower than skinks and large dinosaurs. Unless your entire stack is saurus and bastilodons, you should have something fast enough to pin most non-skaven skirmishers so you can beat them to death. I really like ripperdactyls and red crests for this, although again they are DLC units.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 14:14
|
|
|
Plus, Lizardmen are only heavy infantry grinders in the early game. T4 Stegadons in particular have enough range to force almost every faction to take the initiative, while doing a little bit of everything. If you like mixed armies, they're a good core for whatever specialists you want to bring.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 16:46
|
|
|
SuperKlaus posted:So, given I can't use free-LC in my current state, can I still get Lord Kroak when playing as a not-Gorrok lizard lord? I don't know if it's from a FLC, but every player-controlled Lizardman faction besides Gor-Rok gets a quest chain to unlock Kroak.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 18:13
|
|
|
StashAugustine posted:this is where TW's hilariously unrealistic command and control plays a factor, though even with stuff like field of glory (and pike&shot/sengoku jidai using the early modern rules) you can simulate that by just limiting line of sight it does feel better with warhammer fantasy battles as the source material rather than history
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 20:00
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:The idea that medieval armies featured masses of poorly armed, barely trained conscripted peasants or whatever one would associate with "rabble" is more or less pure fantasy. it's funny how this empire forces in this game with griffins and dragons and vampires get this more right than many "historical" games
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 22:40
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:These are tabletop games? Pike and Shot is a video game, albeit only in the loosest sense of "video". I don't recognize the others.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 22:43
|
|
|
AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I'm on the same boat as Norsca 
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2020 17:44
|
|
|
Comrade Blyatlov posted:is ikit claw a legendary lord? i've lost battles before but never been curb stomped like that, twice Yeah, he's the legendary lord for Skryre.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2020 05:38
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Can't you literally find nagashizzar and build a unique building there that says he's still chilling in the basement? Nagashizzar is a ruin on the ME map, and the special building there refers to Nagash's "husk" and "mortal remains". IIRC he's temporarily dead at this point, and gets woken up by Mannfred Von Carstein and Arkhan the Black working together in the End Times.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 00:21
|
|
|
Arcsquad12 posted:I honestly cannot believe that I forgot that Azhag has Nagash's helmet. nagash's helmet is a talisman crossover to boot
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 01:54
|
|
|
babypolis posted:Grimgor is cool in siege battles because you can just put him on the walls and forget about that side of the battle until you see got 300 hundred kills in the victory screen You can do this with lots of LLs if you remember to take them off their mounts before the siege. Or if you just leave them on their flying mounts.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 18:17
|
|
|
Dandywalken posted:Lore wise, aren't Skarsnik and Gorbad Ironclaw the only bigtime Warlords who actually have settled down to one locality to a degree? Kiiiiiiiinda. There are areas that are just "there be orcs here" and nobody really cares about who's leading their various factions until one of them unites the clans enough to go outside the borders. Conceptually, when you play as one of the orc lords, you're starting before their canon story, building up the base so you can make your own version of a "orcs leave the badlands and fight everyone" canon story. Relatively few of the WAAAAGH leaders settle down afterward; they all tend to die or "disappear" in obvious sequelbaity ways. Even Gorbad doesn't settle down so much as disappear and leave a bunch of orcs behind in the same place.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 19:20
|
|
|
Ammanas posted:nah i like to curate my armies having orc armies be chaotic messes of whoever bothers to show up seems in character, though
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2020 20:07
|
|
|
Vargs posted:They do still die when walls crumble, it's just very difficult to destroy a wall before the AI moves their units off it. Easiest way is that High Elf ritual [etc.] You can also manage it with Necrofexes, which just shred walls.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2020 10:51
|
|
|
Mordja posted:You know, from looking at the model alone I could never figure out what pump wagons actually do. They're very cheap shock chariots with randomized movement in WHFB. Orcs in WHFB have always had a bit of an identity crisis, for a very long time. Their defining mechanics have always been "orcs and goblins randomly fail to do what they're trying to do" without any countervailing thing that orcs are particularly good at doing. For example, they've long had an "infighting" rule that can make them waste their turn or force a charge, "stupidity" makes a unit (traditionally trolls) waste turns doing nothing, giants have completely randomized attacks and were originally an O&G unit, etc. Lots of their special units weren't particularly OP in any way but had some sort of special rule to limit them. Doom Divers had limited ammo when most artillery didn't, their shamans were even more prone to exploding, snotling war wagons have always been chariots you can't count on to get to melee, etc. This is on top of the weird mix of stats on their troops: orcs are tough, but not that tough, and their rank and file dudes are human-grade or worse at everything else. The troops are cheap - especially goblins - but their low leadership means you need to add low-level characters to any unit you want to have any staying power or else they'll turn and run, which tends to offset the cheapness. (The characters also help with infighting.) Except for editions where blocks of mediocre troops are good to have on their own merits, the main "trick" to playing orcs in any kind of serious way has always been sifting through their list for the one or two decent units and leaving the rest to the side. At times, that has been boar boyz, bigguns, iron orcs, or even just night goblin gunlines with fanatics (spinning loons, in TWW) to punish any attempt to charge. I can't remember any time that orcs and goblins have ever been a really serious competitive army, though; they've never had a thing they do better than anyone else other than sabotage themselves. GW never really figured out a way to fix that! The Gorkamorka/third edition revamp of Orks into scrap punks with dangerous but OP weapons is how they revamped Skaven in fantasy around the same time. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 19:52 on May 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 6, 2020 19:47
|
|
|
Comrade Blyatlov posted:What's the difference between broken and shattered Broken can rally and come back. Shattered can't recover, and will flee off the battlefield without stopping.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2020 20:01
|
|
|
Vargs posted:I've never really seen any artillery on any faction as a great anti-large solution. Really accurate artillery that packs all its damage into one shot can work. Carronades, luminarks, the lizardman laser on the back of a bastiodon (ark of Sotek I think?), lightning cannon, etc. The bigger problem is that all of these are really narrowly-applicable units that are sometimes totally useless and difficult to use under the best of circumstances, while massed handguns/crossbows don't have those problems and still do the job. And, sometimes, you have enemies like cygors or stegadons or necrofexes that might just straight up win a firefight with your direct-fire artillery anyway.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 04:54
|
|
|
AnEdgelord posted:Its also important to realize that you use different kinds of anti-large strategies for different kinds of large units. What works against lizardmen dinos wont necessarily work against massed Bretonnian cavalry and vice versa. Again, bullets are the exception.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 05:43
|
|
|
I mean, it's fine if orcs are kinda bad against shock cavalry. It's really more that they're kinda bad at everything, and their main gimmick - running lots of bad troops - is punished so severely by TWW2's current army structure. The other armies that run lots of chaff also have some sort of elite element that does all of the actual work. Skaven and vampirates have their guns, counts and TKs have their monsters and cav/chariots, etc. By late in the game, the elite element takes over your entire army and you run these ridiculous doomstacks made up of all vargheists or you just shoot the enemies off the board (or autoresolve because autoresolve loves guns) before they get to do anything. Orcs, in theory, need to be making value trades with their hordes of dudes, because their elites aren't supposed to be better than actual elite troops and they don't have some sort of devastating gimmick other than more mediocre 8dudes. The problem is that "more dudes" currently wrecks your economy and runs up against the 40 unit cap.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 08:39
|
|
|
Tiler Kiwi posted:But I don't think [orcs] really need a thing they're best at. Generalist factions are fine too; its never all brutal or all cunning, its brutally cunning or cunningly brutal. But to be a good generalist faction they need to have actual threatening tools in their kit like the Empire has; they have too many obvious weaknesses they can't really cope with and their campaign setup makes it all the worse. every faction needs a defining gimmick, though, and orcs' only defining gimmick in fantasy is the exact sort of randomized bullshit you identify (imo correctly) as not terribly fun and correctly dropped from TWW2. it creates an identity crisis, because the only thing remaining that orcs do well is not only a thing other factions also do well, but (as i noted in a later post) a thing other factions stop doing because of how armies are structured in this game. orcs would be better if their late game were big blocks of black orcs and that actually worked, but it wouldn't be very interesting. it also wouldn't leave much room for chaos warriors to ever be interesting again, although I guess that's not a TWW2 problem.
|
|
#
¿
May 7, 2020 09:41
|
|
|
Private Speech posted:How do people play dark elves? Specifically Malekith on Vortex. Darkspears and darkshards are your bread and butter. You'll want at least one bolt thrower, manticore, or (later) hydra or dragon for sieges, but 6-8 darkshards per 20-stack are going to be doing most of your work all game. Darkshards are incredibly cheap and incredibly effective and there's no straight upgrade over them. (Corsairs aren't anything special for you, even though you can make them early. Shades have a bunch of nice perks - they're vanguard and they fight in melee - but darkshards are cheap as heck and wreck everything except artillery. Most of your cavalry is only marginally valuable as flankers; the Repeater Crossbow Riders are the best of a bad lot.) Unlike a lot of Dark Elf factions, an early Black Ark isn't terribly useful to you; you'll be fighting most of your wars into the midgame in the middle of the continent, far away from the coasts. You can develop a more piratical playstyle with Malekith, but it's not what I'm gonna describe in this post. You start off allied with Malus Darkblade. You can't confederate with him unless you have his DLC, but you probably don't want to anyway, and you can safely ignore him all game. He'll probably end up at war with the Last Defenders (lizardmen with the blue symbol) and get wiped if you don't sail halfway across the world to help him. I don't really recommend bothering. Your first two war targets are the starter rats (Septik) and Ghrond. You can do them in either order. Septik first is the obvious choice, but Ghrond starts at war with Hellebron and will turtle up then most likely lose that war. You don't want either of those things to happen. You either need to rush down Ghrond to prevent them from turtling, or crack them with ambushes, a bait siege, or just two stacks after you clean up the rats. (You can just about afford two stacks on H economy, and one and a half on VH/Leg.) Avoid expanding to the west. In particular, raze the Altar of Ultimate Darkness; the special building you can build there is very tempting, but those settlements are difficult to manage because of the climate and basically impossible to defend. Regardless of whether you rush Ghrond or not, you'll probably want to rush a second lord (no need for an army) to colonize the Great Arena. Your starter province and Ghrond's province are incredibly lucrative, and you're going to want to maximize that. Set them as ++ for receiving slaves (it's where tax controls normally are in the UI) and set other provinces to receive zero slaves. You want to funnel slaves to your most lucrative, most developed provinces, ideally ones where you have an army hanging around swatting down rebels to get even more slaves. You're going to need a darkspear/darkshard stack in Naggarond or Ghrond, periodically smacking down these rebels, but it's only going to supercharge your economy. Now, there are three directions you can go: north, into the Norscans, south, into Alyssa (red-flag Dark Elves), or east, into Hellebron's Dark Elves. The Norscans provinces are a trap: they're Chaos corrupted to hell and gone, gigantic messes of open space that will grind down your armies with attrition, and completely indefensible since you can't build walls there. However, beating up on the Norscans is a good way to get some starting money and slaves, and you can just raze their poo poo and peace out when you're done with them. There's two separate factions of Norscans that tug of war back and forth; it's nicer to be at war with the eastern ones to help get confederations with the other Dark Elves but hardly a major priority. You can make friends with the Norscans instead, but it's basically worthless. They can't even trade. Hellebron to your east is a good confederation target, since she'll like you for beating up on Ghrond. However, if she stole part of Ghrond, you really need that to finance your future wars, and she's probably overextended anyway. Also, you can't confederate her if you don't have the DLC that unlocks her, so war may be the only option. (She's nothing special as a lord anyhow.) Har Ganeth is a nice province - four-settlement provinces always are because of how slavery works - but you already have Naggarond and Ghrond so you probably won't be focusing on it. Past Hellebron is Cekhullil (white-flag Dark Elves). You can beat up Cekhullil and take his stuff, or just leave him as a target to confederate later. He's hard to get into a confederation because he doesn't like to make treaties and doesn't like to go to war with anyone (so it's hard to get positive opinion with him by beating up his enemies). He's between you and the High Elves, which may be good or bad depending on how much you want to be at war with them. There's probably a playstyle where you just ally up with the southern Dark Elves and focus on fighting the High Elves right away at this point, but I've never tried it yet. There are a couple of factions past the mountains to the west but you can safely ignore them. The Dark Elves are a passive NPC faction, similar to Cekhullil, but their stuff isn't valuable and it's a pain to get to. The Exiles of Nehek are Tomb Kings in a worthless wasteland. You can trade with them or ignore them, whatever. Alyssa to your south is IMO the obvious expansion route. It's a two-front war, but you have a natural ally in that direction: Morathi's Dark Elves, even further south. Morathi is inclined to like you already, plus you'll have a big diplomacy bonus with her because you're beating up on Alyssa. Alyssa won't be a big threat, but the real problem is that Clan Rictus is also in the area to the east. (Rictus usually kills off Volilosh, the purple-flag Dark Elves.) Rictus may be at war with Alyssa or they may be allied, it's somewhat random. It's not helpful if they're at war, though, because they almost always plague a city around Clar Karond or Hotek's Column and that's a huge pain in the rear end for you. Rictus also likes to settle in the mountains to the west, and digging them out of those is a huge pain, due to the limited movement routes. (Don't settle the orange-level inhospitable settlements in the mountains yourself; they're worthless rebel bait.) You're almost certain to confederate Morathi, but be careful; the longer you wait, the more she corrupts all her settlements with annoying Chaos corruption, but rushing the confederation can leave you vulnerable to Rictus and push you into contact with Nagarythe, your first High Elf faction, in the southeast. Nagarythe is a real wildcard: they may get eaten by Morathi or Rictus before you even get there, or they may expand against either, making them a huge pain. They also might ally with High Elf factions on Ulthuan and drag them into your wars, or just confederate with Lothern and start the Elf-on-Elf hellwar early. Once you clean up Morathi, Alyssa, Rictus, and Nagarythe, the world is your oyster. You can go south and settle the south-southwestern plateau then fight Cylostra and/or Mazdamundi, or you can cross the ocean to the east and beat up on Ulthuan. Lokhir Fellheart will eventually offer to ally with you and can be confederated, but bear in mind that all of his jungle provinces will be worthless to you. (Plus, he tends to lose his wars down there anyway.)
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2020 03:42
|
|
|
Private Speech posted:Thanks for all the advice! That's exactly what I was looking for. Made the same decision about Malus (I do have all the DLC and tried him before, but having done multiple playthroughs there I'm just tired of it). Mostly it's just choice anxiety I guess, like how much should I care about cav, how hard to push for monsters, are shades worth it, so it's great to see all that laid out. Dark Riders with lances (with or without shields) are not really anything special. They're standard bad light cavalry, and light cav are already pretty marginal and micro-intensive. A big part of the problem is that almost all of your likely opponents early on have skirmishers that loving shred Dark Riders in melee; Marauder Horsemen, Corsairs, Sea Guard, and every High Elf on horseback will just wreck them. They're only good for running down fleeing units or Skaven skirmishers. Dark Riders with repeater crossbows are usable but extremely micro-intensive. I like them early on for normal skirmisher work, harassing ranged units and shooting melee units in the flank. They're especially good in the first quest battle for Malekith, against many blocks of Chaos Warriors. But they can't shoot on the move, so don't expect them to do well against anything fast. Cold One Riders and Cold One Chariots don't wow me. They're shock cavalry, but rampage means that they're extremely touchy and fragile. They could be good if they were melee cavalry, more like questing knights, but even then, melee cavalry is marginal. Bearing in mind that I haven't played with the DLC monsters, Dark Elf monsters are generally really good! Manticores make up for how mediocre Dark Riders and Cold Ones are. While they are prone to rampaging, they're disruptive and effective even when they're stuck in melee. You can feel good slamming them into war machines and blocks of archers, and I like to bring a couple as soon as I tech up far enough to use them. They are prone to difficulties against High Elves, though, especially when you start having to crack teched-up garrisons. Sea Guard are basically a hard counter to mid-tier monsters and High Elves will have them everywhere. Hydras are big dumb bricks of HP. I like them for disrupting enemy formations, although because of Chillwind (one of the best low-level spell nukes), you don't always actually want to do that. They're nice for holding up a big block of enemy infantry so your Darkshards can shred them. (This is a good strategy with tanky monsters and gunlines in general.) They don't do impressive damage unless you micromanage their flame breath, but the flame breath isn't so useful that you're going to be dying to do that except against enemies particularly vulnerable to magic or fire. Black dragons are dragons, with a breath that specializes in melting single targets or elites. They're shitwreckers that can be counted on to beat even their hard counters if you play them right, and you can put them in a doomstack or you can just run a few with a more balanced army. If you've played High Elves before, black dragons are a lot better than moon dragons but worse than star dragons one-on-one. Their only downside besides the expense is that they are a bit micro-intensive, especially if you want to use their breath effectively. The only monster unit that isn't useful at its tech level are harpies. They're not really capable of winning a fight against anything, and there's really no good use for them against Dark Elves, High Elves, or Norsca. They're slightly better than fell bats, but the problem is that fell bats serve a useful role in Counts armies by shutting up ranged units and pinning enemies for a cavalry charge, while you're generally solving those problems with crossbow bolts. They're marginally useful for gumming up Skaven skirmishers or shooters, but a T3 unit that is all but guaranteed to die in its first fight makes them difficult to even use. Private Speech posted:If that was about me and the shades thing I mean yeah I guess they are great if you're not trying to get it for cheap and you can make huge monostacks of them and it probably works really well. Shades are an interesting sidegrade to Darkshards. They're significantly more capable in melee combat, and stalk and vanguard are very useful abilities for getting into good positions. The problem with them is that they are (very slightly) worse at straight up shooting enemies - although this varies a bit depending on where you are with technology, redline general skills, and which random Names of Power you get - and they don't have shields. Shields are a large part of why Darkshards are so OP: they can tank most ranged units while shredding them with AP fire in return. In general, you're going to have more situations where you want to benefit from shields than you want to benefit from better melee stats. I would mark it down to a difference in taste if it weren't for the fact that Shades upkeep costs are so high. Greatsword Shades are 300 upkeep while Sisters of Avelorn are 212. They're just incredibly expensive! If you do go ahead and use shades, plain Shades are for shooting and Greatsword Shades are for shooting/melee. Dual weapon Shades are more expensive and don't seem to win any fights that normal Shades couldn't.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2020 07:12
|
|
|
Your Brain on Hugs posted:So I just started playing this as my first total war gave ever, on the vortex campaign as tyrion because I want to get to grips with things as easily as possible. I've been faffing around a lot though, and some other factions have already done their first rituals while I'm still at about 150 waystones. You can catch up, and even if you lose the race, you get a chance to knock out your competitors with a scripted event. The race is technically an illusion. Your main goal is to unite the donut island you're on, with diplomacy or by force. (If you don't have the DLC, you'll need to murder Allarielle at least.) After that, you can do whatever you like. Murdering the competition is an option, but hardly obligatory. ME is more popular than Vortex but I personally like Vortex for its clearer goals, shorter playtime, better map (yeah I said it), and the fact that it's less likely to stagnate. ME is more popular because of its bigger map, the fact that it gets all the factions into the game, and its more open-ended nature. (Plus people hate the random enemy spawns on Vortex.)
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2020 02:03
|
|
|
Chocobo posted:I'm currently steamrolling a legendary Alith Anar Vortex campaign with nothing but Lothern Sea Guards (Shields). This is not what I expected. Ranged units with shields are very good.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2020 05:03
|
|
|
Internet Explorer posted:I will say that the "second half" of these campaigns just turn into complete slogs. I feel like this is why I fall off every TW game and why I didn't play as much TWW1/TWW2 as I'd like. Maybe I just need to start playing until I feel like I've gotten my fill of a campaign and then start a new one. Yeah, this is my experience with Mortal Empires in general. Most of the scenarios are carelessly designed, and even the ones that aren't tend to end well after you've teched up to the top of the tree and exhausted any novelty in stomping around with deathstacks. Even if a map-spanning enemy were a challenge to fight, it won't ever be interesting long enough to justify the slog.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2020 15:40
|
|
|
AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:What scenarios are you talking about? All of the scenarios that require wiping massive factions that inevitably confederate their entire race off the map, for one. Especially when they're in terrain you can't practically settle. Wiping out all of the Empire factions plus the Lion's Brettonians is not a "short" campaign goal. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 04:01 on May 12, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 03:54
|
|
|
Chocobo posted:I mean, the chaos/skaven doomstacks only come when you're channeling the ritual, you only need to defend three ritual sites, and you know before you start the ritual which sites you need to defend... So what's the problem again? They spawn in random locations, which may be up to two provinces away from the ritual sites, which can be on different continents. They then immediately wreck any settlements nearby, and there's no amount of defenses you can put on a minor settlement to defend it from two high-tier stacks. Also, the ritual sites will be further apart the more successful you are. It's perfectly normal to have to defend a continent and a half, against an enemy that will require at least 2-3 stacks to handle. Look at how much territory is covered by a two-province jump from Hexoatl and Itza.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 04:40
|
|
|
Ra Ra Rasputin posted:Yeah, but if your going for the ritual victory then it really doesn't matter how many cities are razed so long as the ritual completes, all that matters is the victory screen. That's only true of the last ritual.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 05:18
|
|
|
Ra Ra Rasputin posted:I don't have the DLC but I "think" it's stuff like global events for +40 charge bonus to every faction or +20 melee attack to every unit. The events happen either way. They just have special blood-drenched dialogue boxes if you have the DLC. It's exactly as lame as it sounds.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 05:31
|
|
|
yikes! posted:Wait do the events really happen without it? The events happen regularly in my game, and I'm not paying money to get some crappy-looking blood in battles. I only know the dialogues look differently with the DLC from watching streamers.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 06:23
|
|
|
I've been playing Beastmen and they sure are something! I really like how they make you actually feel like a nomadic tribe. You need some safe territory to return to in order to tech up and recover from casualties, but it's very difficult to actually hold any territory compared to the sedentary civs. You constantly need to be expanding outward to afford anything, and while you could probably coexist with just violating their sovereignty with raiding, it will eventually annoy whoever you're bothering so much that they'll chase you off. So many mapgames try to incorporate non-sedentary civs, and this feels more right than most of those games. Unfortunately, it's really badly balanced. The early game is crushingly painful, as so many of your dudes are basically worthless early on. You have to abuse the poo poo out of vanguard and stalk on higher difficulties, and that generally means exploiting the fact that the AI is dumb as poo poo about ranged units with stalk. Doing that is micromanagement-intensive and not especially fun, and you're stuck at the unenhanced ungor/gor stage for far too long, because of how the Beastmen economy works. Beastmen units are all much more expensive than you can possibly afford with base money (which never increases) and raiding. You have to stack the poo poo out of reductions to upkeep, eventually getting up to -65% on all of your units plus more on the units you use most. The problem is that all of this upkeep reduction competes with skills that make your troops better and buildings that unlock troops that aren't ungors or gors. Because your buildings are so restricted and slow to build, it takes forever to be able to afford more than an army and a half, and even longer to start moving on to more interesting units. It's very difficult to experiment with units because there's so much commitment to try any new units. The commitment required to do anything means that a Beastman campaign is extremely vulnerable to any mistakes. You were already going to be vulnerable because you have no home territory to return to and recover. However, it's made worse by a number of factors, particularly the way Beastmen buildings work. Every army is also a settlement, but it takes longer to build the buildings in a Beastman army than it does to actually build up a settlement. If you lose a stack, you also lose all of the buildings attached to that stack, even if the lord is immortal. Contrast this with a city, where the enemy might just sack it or occupy it, allowing you to salvage some of your old buildings. It's just not fun to be that vulnerable to mistakes, especially early on when losing one of your two armies is already a devastating blow. It takes dozens of turns to properly build up the buildings for a stack, and that's just too long for something so vulnerable to a single positioning mistake. You will be vulnerable, though, because it just takes forever to build up a new army. If you just give a new army a bunch of units from an old one, it'll blow up your budget, because your new army won't have the buildings and lord skills to reduce the unit upkeep. So you need to baby your armies for many turns while you build up those buildings and skills, either eating a large expense from paying full price for higher-quality units or taking the risk that your stack of unbuffed ungors will get wiped out in one single battle, destroying not only your initial investment to recruit the lord and units but also permanently destroying any progress you made on that stack's buildings. Most armies in the game do not have to tech up every single army from scratch, starting with T1 units, but until the late game, Beastmen do. This really sensitive economy stage doesn't last forever, but that's not because it finds a good equilibrium. Once you can start tearing down your enemies' T5 settlements, that gives you so much money that you basically get to ignore the economy from that point onward. You'll never be in the green on a month-to-month basis, but that doesn't matter when razing a settlement gives you 50K gold. You have effectively infinite money at that point, so your main limiter is just how long it takes beastmen buildings to build. (Which still takes forever.) Once you do get going, the good Beastmen units are a lot of fun to use, and that makes up for a lot of the campaign-layer problems. Minotaurs are bowling balls that break through enemy lines effortlessly. (It's a little weird that they effortlessly wreck nominally "anti-large" or "charge defense" units like spearmen and halberdiers but have a lot of trouble with melee-oriented cavalry, because of how physics work in TWW2.) Cygors are giants that double as ballistas, and it's fun to wreck poo poo with them at both range and in melee. It's fun how the stacking stat buffs eventually make ungors and gors into shitwreckers that can keep up with elite infantry by almost every measure. Ranged cavalry that don't get shot on the run are odd ducks in TWW2, usually not having much of a niche, but ranged centigors are a lot of fun to use and do a surprising amount of damage if you can spare the attention to micromanage them. (Unfortunately, they're stranded on an otherwise-mediocre building line.) Unfortunately, the bad units are really bad, and there's no way to know how bad before you sink a great deal of unrecoverable resources to find out how bad. Bestigors don't have any clear reason to exist. Heavy-armored damage-dealing infantry are already marginal in TWW2, and there's really no niche for them between gors and minotaurs, especially given how expensive they are and how they don't benefit from buffs that apply to gors. (They're "elite" infantry that probably have less MA and MD than your gors, by the time you unlock them.) Likewise centigors: minotaurs are already relatively-fast charge-oriented units that wreck anti-charge units, and they aren't nearly as fragile as melee centigors. Chaos Spawn are garbage even by the already low standards of TWW2's tanky monstrous infantry, and don't have any clear role. (At least this is an accurate treatment of how they are in tabletop Warhammer.) They're too slow to keep up with your other units and make very little impact on the battle, even if you use the LL who buffs them. They're unbreakable, but that just means they always die, especially in autoresolve. Most of the small monsters like chaos hounds and harpies and razorgors aren't bad in the abstract, but they're low-tier units stranded on buildings that you'll skip in order to beeline for your better high-tech units. Chariots also suffer from this problem: it's not that they're bad, but they're competing directly with minotaurs, which serve a similar role and also benefit from micromanagement, but aren't completely useless if you don't micromanage them. Giants just suck rear end; they're worse than cygors in melee while having no ranged attacks, and they require their own building while the same building gives you caster heroes and cygors. The prevalence of bad or redundant units is a bit of a problem for an army that is already defined by what it lacks, and I always found myself gravitating back to gors, minotaurs, and cygors in every army. Bestial Rage is the most mechanic-for-the-sake-of-a-mechanic thing I've seen in this game so far. It never feels like something I can control: for example, I had a stack with relatively low rage. So I went and razed Middenheim to the ground, defeating 40 enemy units and destroying its full stack of T5 buildings, and it still didn't raise me out of the bad rage level. I never feel like I can predict what's going to give me a lot of rage, so I don't feel like I can control when brayherds spawn or avoid downtime turns where I use quell animosity (and ignore the attrition because all but one Beastmen movement stance ignores attrition. Why is attrition even a mechanic for Beastmen?) Brayherds are useless on the attack because they won't keep up with you when you move and attack, so I just end up ordering them to go harass whatever armies or poorly-defended, poorly-build settlements I can see. I never feel like rage is a significant limiting factor, nor do I ever feel like brayherds are particularly useful, and rage has never actually made me change my plans in any way. It's just sort of there. I do like the way the moon dilemmas affect the pace of your play. I liked having a building season, a fighting season, a recruiting season, and... a couple of useless seasons I didn't really ever use because they suck so bad. No reinforcement at all is probably a little too much for the building season, especially for how long you need to spend building up each army's buildings, but I eventually learned how to manage it. There's something to having your playstyle and pace dictated by the phases of the moon; I just wish it was a little more involved and interesting. I also learned that I don't actually understand how ambushes work in this game. Sometimes enemies just walked straight past my armies in ambush stance to attack stacks behind them, and my ambushing armies wouldn't even reinforce. There's no way to link armies to always reinforce each other, no UI indicator to show defensive reinforcement except when you're attacking, and very little feedback on how likely an ambush is to succeed against a given enemy. It's also very frustrating that my ambushes would frequently be negated by neutral armies passing by, or by enemy heroes that I had no way of predicting or defending against. Plus, because ambush stance is also recruiting stance, my armies would frequently be bumped out of multi-turn recruiting because their "ambush" was thwarted. I kind of wish there was just a "hidden" stance with 75% movement; switching out of encamp, moving 75% (and carefully making sure I don't go 1% over), then switching back to encamp was super tedious. Plus, ending every turn in encamp means that occasionally I'd lose turns with far-flung armies that I forgot were in a "skip turn" stance. The Mortal Empires campaign goals for Beastmen are horrible. For the short campaign, you have to wipe out every single Empire faction, as well as Loeun's Brettonian faction. If you don't rush down the Brettonians, they will eventually confederate every other Brettonian faction, including the ones in the Badlands, a continent away, and Beastmen are incredibly slow to cross large bodies of water. However, Beastmen are a lot better at fighting Empire with their early-game units than Brettonians, almost all of the story quests for Beastmen involve wandering around Empire territory, and letting the Empire entrench means that you won't get any benefit from Archaon's already-anemic invasion. (And why do all of the Archaon events treat Beastmen as someone opposed to Chaos taking over the world?) Either way, it's a huge pain to keep them from just resettling the ruins you leave behind. It's not hard to just go stomp those weak new settlements, but it is a bunch of hassle. You can let a friendly faction fill in the ruins with their own settlements, but this comes with mildly-annoying penalties for forming alliances or allowing undead to spread undead attrition, plus it requires that you attack before they get wiped out. I'm having fun with this, but it's extremely janky and I'm constantly savescumming. I can't really recommend Beastmen except as a curiosity. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 08:46 on May 12, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 07:20
|
|
|
Insurrectionist posted:What LLs actually start in Vortex southlands besides TK and that one Lizardman? The Joan of Arc Brettonian, Malus on the southern islands, and Queek. Plus there are two different factions of Lizardmen there.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 08:18
|
|
|
mitochondritom posted:Note: I am still in Total Warhammer 1 for this. Apparently Beastmen are a lot better in TWW so don't let me dissuade you.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 11:40
|
|
|
I do like the Beastman-specific lore, and did not expect it to be so focused on poo poo-wrecking blast spells. I don't really like the fact that the only caster lord is the one legendary lord, or that your only mount option is a chariot, though. It would've been nice to have doombulls or shaman lords or stronger Chaos god theming or something.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 12:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 18:36 |
|
|
Comte de Saint-Germain posted:When they gonna make Chaos have a good campaign? Been waiting a long time. I thought everyone loved Skaven
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2020 13:41
|
|