Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

By far the strongest/easiest legendary game is as Ikit Claw. No other lord is remotely close.

- Skaven inherent ability to spawn level 4/5 settlements with food 50 turns before any other faction can grow them. You have constantly overflowing food anyway due to the number of battles you fight, both enemy and rebel.
- Multiple Engineers magnify absurd stacking bonuses to all of your ranged shit.
- Basically everything about the Ikit Workshop is OP and stacks beautifully with Engineers. Super-powered infinite ammo ratling guns with 1300 DPS per model (I think this is technically inaccurate and it doesn't take into account how long it takes the gun to fire, but its still absurd). Jezzails that have enough range to snipe enemy lords across the map as soon as battle starts. Warpfire throwers that also annihilate large units along with small.
- If anything ever looks like it might go bad, drop a nuke lol.
- Skaven Infinite money exploit once you get to 13 settlements.

Seriously just look at these stats:

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Granted, there are some other campaigns that can just be cheesed. Brettonian lords other than Repanse can basically reach their chivalry cap and end the game just by farming rebels caused by the starting public order penalty event.

 

They created a nice summary of the update:

 

No mention of the Black Orc Big Boss spotted in the streams. I guess they could release it part of the Skulls for the Skull throne thing.

 

Kek. In addition to the special dragons, Imrik apparently also receives a special trait for each dragon tamed, which include additional breath attacks on every dragon factionwide, perfect vigor, regeneration, and additional stats.

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So the various Lord packs add in new mechanics?

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basically, are any of them worth buying?

 

I wish lords focused around units that actually need serious buffs to be viable in campaign got stuff like this. e.g. Malus's cold ones.

Depends, what exactly do you mean by "new mechanics"? Basically all the lords in the (WH2) lord packs have some kind of quirk to them and add new units to their faction.

Queen and the Crone: Meh. The lord-specific stuff wasn't that strong here (probably because it was the first). Units are OKish. Alarielle is pretty hot but its an overall fairly weak one.
Prophet and Warlock: Kind of essential to fill out the Skaven roster properly IMO. Also has two very powerful, cool lords. Best lord pack.
Hunter and the Beast: Playing the Empire in the New World is pretty cool but aside from that the new units are pretty uninteresting and the lizardmen lord is really trash to play since he's a horde. Weakest pack IMO.
Shadow and the Blade: Units are decent and the Lords have cool quirks. Average.

 

I think so, particularly Tomb Kings. The rest depend on on whether you are hungry for something different or like a specific lord (Hellebron, Markus, Malus, Ikkit). Some of the lord packs offer a harder challenge (Malus) than others (Ikkit).

That is what I find so crazy about Imrik. He gives useful buffs to Dragons and Dragon Princes, particularly stat buffs to Dragon Princes. Furthermore, his abilities help cavalry charges and he receives Dragon Princes early through a landmark building. His cool items are not tied to complete RNG. Meanwhile, Malus only receives recruitment, upkeep, and vigor loss reduction for Cold Ones, which does not help on higher difficulties.

He is a better Malus.

 

Crazy how big this game is, can't imagine what it'll be like by the time Warhammer III's FLC/DLC cycle and Mortal Empires Mk. II is done.

 

Lord packs are ... well, lets say you want Sisters of Avalon, you need The Queen and the Crone to get then and this is where things get iffy since Sisters of Avalon are pretty damn good units but they arent strictly necessary as part of the HE army, then you have the Skaven that pretty much need their Weapon Teams and Jezzails so you kinda want the Prophet and Warlock even if Tehe units are kinda bad, you pretty much buy Lord packs as unit Packs because all Skaven can recruit Weapon Teams as long you have the DLC with Ikkit own unique mechanic being simply he gets to build nukes. Its not what the Lord brings but what the DLC brings in terms of units.

As for Lords specific mechanics they are exclusive to the Lord on their campaign but they dont extend to the rest of faction, the Waaagh! mechanic is for all Greenskins and the updated version will go to all of then as Grom just gets as a unique mechanic the Cauldron that is using ingredients to create food that lasts 15 rounds and provides faction-wide buffs.

 

If you want to play as a particular race it's worth it to get all associated DLCs.

 

Got the vampire coasts dlc for my ongoing lockdown needs, never was interested in them lore wise but they are stupidly fun to play I gotta admit. Trigger happy undead with lots of spooky monsters? Yeah I can dig that. Their campaign flow is also how I imagine wood elves should play: fuck you I do what I want!
Basically travelling far and fighting whoever you feel like fighting without worrying about ground expansion and just having 1-2 provinces to worry about (if even that, with noctilus I never owned anything more then my cozy maelstorm hideout).

Potion of speed update was one of the best things to happen to this game, I feel like end of turn times ain't really a problem anymore (they are lightning fast in vortex campaign and speedy enough in the grand campaign that you don't need to alt tab or wander off, just stretch a bit and bam the turn is done), the real bottleneck is now the battle load times, especially when exiting a battle and the game has to load back the campaign map.

As a rule, the lord packs tend to be optional, giving you themed units that are fun but not the core of the race (ex: warwagons and mortis corpse carts) and the lords usually have a gimmick that varies from letting you play your race in some theme more effectively (Herman Ghorst lets you emphasize zombies, volkmar lets you go crazy with flagellants so if you like those units then the lord pack would be worth it) to providing a radically different start to your usual options (skarsnik and belegar gives you more hardcore starts then other lords of their race whereas markus lets you play empire in the lands of lizards and elves).

The only main exception and "must have" if you care about skaven is indeed Prophet and the warlock. I still find it scummy because ratling guns and warp jezzails should have been part of the base skaven roster from the start, I was actually really salty when tw2 launched and they were missing, made skaven completely unplayable for me. Isn't about stats (I play with mods anyways so vanilla balance is a mystery to me) but when you think skaven, ratling guns are among the first units that will pop into your head, right after the masses of skaven infantry and doomwheels.

 

Vampire count's AI has a very strange habit of wandering around. I've heard rumors of Vlad travels, but as I was playing as Isabella VC I just saw Manfred packing his stuff and taking a trip all the way down to the badlands, just to change his mind and come back with his full depleted ost. Wtf! I thought he would stand his ground before Zufbar but no, just before that he also crossed all my territory and southern empire's just to pay a visit to can Angrund and come back. Don't think he evn fought over there.

 

there is a mod that fixes the vampire counts ai
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1746425033

 

I asked Infinitron to post this a few days ago but he objected on the grounds that it would take attention away from another Obsidian post.

 

That was fairly interesting. So Shogun (2000), Medieval (2002), Rome (2004), Medieval 2 (2006). In 2005 the company is sold to SEGA and the founder Tim Ansell leaves. Then they release Empire, Shogun 2, Rome 2 etc. Explains a lot.

 

Didn't expect to see him tear-up like that. ;; Sure puts a human face on what we just know as "crunch".

 

Turning down settings does improve battle load times and the campaign map return times a lot. Worth it IMO.

In my current Arkhan campaign I'm a bit annoyed at just how long battles can take. When you have two full stacks of skellies and the enemy has two full stacks of garbage brettonian melee and you corner camp, the AI literally takes like 10 minutes on max battle speed to slowly form up their huge fucking army and attack.

 

And then it's over in 5 minutes.

 

Corner what?

 

I guess he meant waiting for the ennemies while camping in his corner of the map (which isn't a good idea most of the time when outnumbered).

 

well its cheating, because you can use the impassable mapborders to prevent flanking. Its also nice as undead because routing enemies will leave the battlefield instantly since you are fighting at the maps border.

 

Yes, but it's the opposite isn't it : since you are in the corner the mapborders is behind you and your fleeing units don't have time to rally, they leave the battlefield immediately. Or am I missing something ?

 

Undead don't rout.

 

I never really thought of corner camping as cheating, but I guess it qualifies as abusing the AI. On higher difficulties, the AI can produce so many armies with buffed stats, it just seems practical to use every advantage. Granted, it can make battles incredibly boring.

 

It's a little bit cheesy but the fact that you can't decide where to fight is itself kind of bullshit. Since battlefields are randomized its pure luck whether you get an entirely open map or one with chokepoints/impassable terrain to use.

Aside from the routing thing, it decreases your melee surface area so your front line can hold out way longer and give the cavalry more time to continually rear-charge the enemy and archers more time to use all their ammo. And for death magic it gives more time to snipe the enemy lord with spirit leech, without that enemy lords are basically unstoppable wrecking balls.