Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Bohrain]

Bought the game on sale, been having a blast. Actually finished a campaign after 130 hours, did the Malus Memeblade one. Got to say that my enjoyment of the game doubled when I used the "no walls" mod that removes them from non-race capitals and instead makes the wall and recruitment buildings give more defending units. Gives some neat variety to enemy compositions too since the settlements usually have siege units so cavalry becomes a bit more worthwhile. Still haven't bothered to ramp up the difficulty, from what I've heard it's a double edged sword since while things like public order may as well not exist on normal difficulty, playing on the hardest difficulties incentivizes too much cheese with ranged units and spellcasters.

 

[copebot]

Bought the game on sale, been having a blast. Actually finished a campaign after 130 hours, did the Malus Memeblade one. Got to say that my enjoyment of the game doubled when I used the "no walls" mod that removes them from non-race capitals and instead makes the wall and recruitment buildings give more defending units. Gives some neat variety to enemy compositions too since the settlements usually have siege units so cavalry becomes a bit more worthwhile. Still haven't bothered to ramp up the difficulty, from what I've heard it's a double edged sword since while things like public order may as well not exist on normal difficulty, playing on the hardest difficulties incentivizes too much cheese with ranged units and spellcasters.

I have played a bunch of campaigns on legendary / VH to completion, but I now play on either Very Hard or Legendary campaign difficulty with normal battle difficulty. Battle difficulty is what really changes what types of units you can field. There's nothing really wrong with Normal battle difficulty and it just makes it so that cavalry and infantry have a role instead of just being useless. In WH2 it does not change AI behavior. It just gives the AI bonuses to melee attack/defense and leadership.

A little while ago they changed public order so it's not all that relevant on legendary either. They made it so that PO has multiple effects depending on its level for all races. It is a lot harder for anything to revolt now even on legendary. This made it harder to force/farm revolts but it also made it so that public order in general is less of an issue than it used to be.

 

[thesheeep]

attle difficulty is what really changes what types of units you can field. There's nothing really wrong with Normal battle difficulty and it just makes it so that cavalry and infantry have a role instead of just being useless.

That's actually true.
On VH/Legendary (is there even a difference other than being unable to pause?) you are basically forced into meme armies and doomstacks to compete with an enemy who will just outnumber you several times over (they have more units and their units are much better).

Which is a damn shame as this basically trains people in all kinds of strategies that are mostly useless against human enemies (or against the AI if that ever manages to get capable).

I also do not consider being able to beat VH/Legendary battles in mid-late campaign as a sign of a good player.
Good at what? Spamming Necrofex Colossus and bundling them up in battle?

Of course, the problem with Normal battle difficulty is the terrible AI.
So in the end, you get to choose between two evils with the difficulty.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah, after playing Total Warhammer again I think I actually prefer Shogun 2's battle system.
A lot of units feel more useful there, including cavalry, because even on the higher difficulties the AI will break if you flank it. In Total Warhammer the AI takes fucking forever to break on VH, even if you surround and flank charge them constantly. There's just not as many tactics available as in the earlier games; it just boils down to "lol magic goes boom" and "lol monsters go rawr". So basically its 8th ed WHFB.

In particular I hate using cavalry, because they are very micro intensive for such little gain and are too fragile, whereas the AI can micro them effectively and on higher difficulties they get some absurd stat buffs, meaning that unlike your cavalry they can actually deal damage and survive.

 

[copebot]

There is no legendary battle difficulty: it's campaign only. Being unable to pause is just "Battle Realism" checked which disables the minimap, the ability to pause and issue commands, get access to enemy unit cards in battle, view the balance of power bar in-game, and restricts your camera somewhat.

IMO while normal battle is a little bit easier than VH, the main difference is that a lot of abilities keyed to melee stat differentials and leadership actually do something rather than being useless. It doesn't really feel all that different but it does make cavalry in general and infantry more usable than otherwise. A lot of buff/debuff spells become cool and useful in normal battle difficulty (which is what MP is balanced around) that are useless in campaign. On VH battle, there is also not much of a reason to try to crumple a flank or to rout units in general. You just empty the enemy HP bar until the army losses penalty kicks in.

Legendary campaign is nice because it makes the enemy produce tons of stacks all the time to fight in the field. VH is like it but a little toned down, which I find good for learning a faction. Legendary also forces ironman saving, but I just play that way normally anyway. I think normal/hard campaign wind up being boring in WH2 because it means you will barely fight many field battles: practically the whole campaign will be sieges. Legendary does make the enemy economies supercharged and more aggressive, but if that doesn't bother you and you just see it as an excuse for fighting tons of field battles against the AI then it's not so bad. If a player's reaction to it is "WTF, how can Grimgor have 5 stacks off of one minor settlement?" and not "looks like the are 5 more stacks of grobi to slaughter, khazakan khazakit-ha!" then the difficulty isn't for that player. The other thing the high difficulties force you to learn is how the map works and where the chokepoints are. Things like river crossings and mountain passes make it easier to hold off huge numbers of the enemy AI thanks to our friend ambush stance.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I mostly agree, but I really dislike the supply line and PO penalties on VH and Legendary. It feels way too punishing, especially when the game gives you so many legendary lords and lord types to play with.
Like, the Vampire Counts can give you about 7 legendary lord types, but you'll never be able to field them all because of Supply lines, unless you fill them all with garbage. That's just not fun.

Its why I think Hard campagin and Hard battle is the most "balanced", as you don't suffer such absurd penalties, and on hard battle you can still use proper tactics while experiencing a something of a challenge.

 

[Average Manatee]

Its why I think Hard campagin and Hard battle is the most "balanced", as you don't suffer such absurd penalties, and on hard battle you can still use proper tactics while experiencing a something of a challenge.

Yeah, I think the AI needs hard/hard buffs to make a "fair" game. Otherwise players with rank 9 units and lords with matching red line skills just butcher rank 1 units that have 15 less MA/MD/leadership.

The real problem with difficulty in WH2 is that difficulty modifiers affect all the wrong stats. The way MA/MD works means that small changes massively alter the odds (a 10 point swing on both causes a 30%/30% hit rate to go to 20%/40%, so the enemy effectively has a 100% buff). If you are one of the factions that can actually stack massive melee bonuses then your melee still lawnmows AI units (Wurrzag is a good example) because you get past the breakpoint where AI's buffs are stronger than yours and go back to butchering them. Of course, these modifiers mean nothing for ranged units or magic, so ranged and magic is the best. And leadership buffs just make units literally fight to the death (ironically the best way to deliver morale shocks to buffed leadership units is massed ranged and artillery fire rather than cavalry charges because massed ranged fire just deals more damage and both have an additional leadership penalty). A better way to do it would be to keep MA/MD/LD the same (or at least much smaller buffs) and instead buff AI health bars. This would hurt the player's odds in all situations fairly equally.

On VH/Legendary (is there even a difference other than being unable to pause?)

There's some strategic map changes. I think you get a bit more public order penalties, slightly higher supply lines penalty, and slightly higher base unit upkeep.

Yeah, after playing Total Warhammer again I think I actually prefer Shogun 2's battle system.
A lot of units feel more useful there, including cavalry, because even on the higher difficulties the AI will break if you flank it. In Total Warhammer the AI takes fucking forever to break on VH, even if you surround and flank charge them constantly. There's just not as many tactics available than in the earlier games; it just boils down to "lol magic goes boom" and "lol monsters go rawr". So basically its 8th ed WHFB.

In particular I hate using cavalry, because they are very micro intensive for such little gain and are too fragile, whereas the AI can micro them effectively and on higher difficulties they get some absurd stat buffs, meaning that unlike your cavalry they can actually deal damage and survive.

Shogun 2 and Three Kingdoms definitely have the best balanced combined arms feel from what I've played.

 

[underground nymph]

The main pros of legendary for me is that it forces you to use as many game mechanics as available to you. Ambushing stance is a must if you want to grind many enemy doom-stacks. Diplomacy is a must for every faction that wants to survive, and I’m not talking just about alliances per se, you must guide your ally carefully (well to a degree that is possible) for it to survive. High elves diplomacy mechanic is actually quite a tool on legendary, allowed me to unite Ulthuan. First and only legendary campaign I’ve actually finished with military victory. Other campaign though being successful ended up being too tedious.

 

[underground nymph]

Thing is very hard battles just require more skill and micro. No point in complaining they are useless. In coop we managed to overcome almost unbreakable armies by HUGE amount of micro. Those were actually the best battles I’ve ever experienced. If you’re allowed to concentrate only on one/two types of units, you get most of them. That’s so fucking fun to hit’n’run using death runners, while your buddy s trying to hold the line. Actually this is where skavens poor morale plays out as a good feature as they often return in battle and you can regroup them and strike again.

but yeah, for single player hard is enough.

 

[Average Manatee]

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-warhammer-ii-the-rakarth-update/

Some big buffs for Dark Elves (don't think they needed them, but damn, Hellebron looks nice and Lokhir Black Arks get a nice pump). I'm not sure if "replenish slowly in enemy territory" means that you can also add your + replenishment bonuses to that, if so that's an amazing ability for Hellebron. Shame that Malus still gets nothing. Skaven look to be getting a bunch of big nerfs, especially in that Skaven can't ambush units besieging settlements or encamped much. Nice change for fighting skaven, no longer a 100% necessity to always move around in ambush stance yourself.

 

[Bohrain]

Assuming Beastmen get reworked in the next DLC, what kind of campaign mechanics would make them more viable (for the lack of a better word) and fun in campaign? Obviously some way of either holding or preventing enemy from getting territory since the whackamole bullshit, but overall the horde mechanics only feel appropriate when they complement typical settlement building like in the case of vampire coast and the druchi. Hard to see similar thing with beastmen since the concept of longstanding settlements kinda goes against their idea.

 

[Agame]

Assuming Beastmen get reworked in the next DLC, what kind of campaign mechanics would make them more viable (for the lack of a better word) and fun in campaign? Obviously some way of either holding or preventing enemy from getting territory since the whackamole bullshit, but overall the horde mechanics only feel appropriate when they complement typical settlement building like in the case of vampire coast and the druchi. Hard to see similar thing with beastmen since the concept of longstanding settlements kinda goes against their idea.

Horde gameplay for WoC and BoC needs to be reworked from the ground up, its total garbage atm, or at least give them Vamp Coast pseudo horde. My fear if they do BeastMans in this DLC is they will only get a half assed rework of horde campaign, and then WH:III gets the proper horde rework with demons/ogres. But at this stage who knows, CA seem to like throwing curve balls with DLC so maybe it will not even be BM?

 

[Agame]

And regarding difficulty I have always been in the Harder campaign/normal difficulty battles camp. I have always hated being in situation where my knights are getting beaten up by peasants, you know, muh immershun and stuff. Just recently I shifted to hard battle difficulty for Warhammer, as the game is just to easy now that I have been playing it so long. In any case its much easier to justify stat boosts in a fantasy setting than in a historical TW so feels fine.

 

[Fedora Master]

Lokhir’s starting Black Ark is now a bespoke special agent type

• It has the following special benefits:
  • Unique innate trait for its Admiral, Kraken’s Claw, which provides increased base Black Ark growth
  • Unique two-level landmark building, Tower of the Blessed Dread, which grants the Blessed Dread increased movement and additional bonuses to nearby armies
• The variant model previously applied to all Black Arks in Lokhir’s faction will now just be applied to this one. As before, the Ark’s appearance will change as its main building tree is upgraded.

• Drycha has calmed down a bit and will now scream less frequently on the campaign map

 

[Jugashvili]

Yeah, after playing Total Warhammer again I think I actually prefer Shogun 2's battle system.
A lot of units feel more useful there, including cavalry, because even on the higher difficulties the AI will break if you flank it. In Total Warhammer the AI takes fucking forever to break on VH, even if you surround and flank charge them constantly. There's just not as many tactics available as in the earlier games; it just boils down to "lol magic goes boom" and "lol monsters go rawr". So basically its 8th ed WHFB.

In particular I hate using cavalry, because they are very micro intensive for such little gain and are too fragile, whereas the AI can micro them effectively and on higher difficulties they get some absurd stat buffs, meaning that unlike your cavalry they can actually deal damage and survive.

Yes, though Shogun already suffered from one of the main issues of modern Total War games -- fast-moving infantry and running by default. It strips games of what should be one of their main tactical layers by making deployment almost meaningless. However, at least in Shogun 2 you were rewarded for having some semblance of a battle line, whereas in WH:TW battle lines have become a liability, if anything, due to "magic go boom", and battles often devolve into a series of scattered 1v1 duels between individual units where players are looking for "good trades" for their units' "value". This is especially bad in multiplayer and results in a mentality that is more similar to that of RTS games than real time tactics, and yet they delude themselves into thinking that "unit variety" and "counters" translates into "deep tactics". Tactical games are about armies operating as a cohesive whole and being more than the sum of their parts, not a series of "trades".

 

[Raghar]

Yeah, after playing Total Warhammer again I think I actually prefer Shogun 2's battle system.
A lot of units feel more useful there, including cavalry, because even on the higher difficulties the AI will break if you flank it. In Total Warhammer the AI takes fucking forever to break on VH, even if you surround and flank charge them constantly. There's just not as many tactics available as in the earlier games; it just boils down to "lol magic goes boom" and "lol monsters go rawr". So basically its 8th ed WHFB.

In particular I hate using cavalry, because they are very micro intensive for such little gain and are too fragile, whereas the AI can micro them effectively and on higher difficulties they get some absurd stat buffs, meaning that unlike your cavalry they can actually deal damage and survive.

Yes, though Shogun already suffered from one of the main issues of modern Total War games -- fast-moving infantry and running by default. It strips games of what should be one of their main tactical layers by making deployment almost meaningless. However, at least in Shogun 2 you were rewarded for having some semblance of a battle line, whereas in WH:TW battle lines have become a liability, if anything, due to "magic go boom", and battles often devolve into a series of scattered 1v1 duels between individual units where players are looking for "good trades" for their units' "value". This is especially bad in multiplayer and results in a mentality that is more similar to that of RTS games than real time tactics, and yet they delude themselves into thinking that "unit variety" and "counters" translates into "deep tactics". Tactical games are about armies operating as a cohesive whole and being more than the sum of their parts, not a series of "trades".

In Shogun 2, an unit could cause chain rout, thus random unit breaking was an issue. In WH2 only peasants breaking morale, goblins, and skavenslaves should be irrelevant. The rest should still cause massive problems with moral of other units.
Also WH2 armies have cannons. Shogun 2 fights were mostly without field artillery.

But, WH2 seems was optimized for MP, units have durability, and it's no longer an unit of arkebuze ashigaru that were evaporated by a rear attack of dai katana samurais. Half unit gone on contact, the rest of the unit running for theirs lives, and accurate fire, or reloading is no longer and option.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm liking Rakarth's start. Albion has some nice buildings with good income so it can make money with slaves without needing to be a size 4 province, the south port has a free fort and extra garrison, and being an island plays well into Dark Elves' sea dominance with Black Arks. An early quest battle gives a free dark ark too, so you can have 2 building up their strength almost immediately. Got 3 feral mammoths and 2 giant wolf units early on, been kicking ass with them. The convocation of hunters is basically free to spam so you can build up a nice menagerie of monsters, then hire them instantly like Regiments of Renown as an emergency defense force. His -10% upkeep for monsters isn't great on its own, but combined with Black Arks who can already get up to -89% upkeep that's actually a fairly nice savings for the future when I have a bunch of black arks running around with war hydras.

EDIT: Just confederated Karond Kar. This definitely got a lot more complex. Was probably a bad idea to accept confed before I had some strong black arks to cover the sea. Now split between Marienburg, Albion, and the Broken Lands.

 

[Jugashvili]

In Shogun 2, an unit could cause chain rout, thus random unit breaking was an issue. In WH2 only peasants breaking morale, goblins, and skavenslaves should be irrelevant. The rest should still cause massive problems with moral of other units.
Also WH2 armies have cannons. Shogun 2 fights were mostly without field artillery.

But, WH2 seems was optimized for MP, units have durability, and it's no longer an unit of arkebuze ashigaru that were evaporated by a rear attack of dai katana samurais. Half unit gone on contact, the rest of the unit running for theirs lives, and accurate fire, or reloading is no longer and option.

I completely agree with you re: morale checks. It seems as if morale checks have become much more of an exact science and more of a question of grinding it down due to overall factors such as "army losses" rather than attempting to spark a panic.

However, one of the things I believe WH:TW got right was the use of more abstracted statistics for units, including durability or "hitpoints". For most of its history, the Total War series used a "bottom-up" approach to design, which is intuitive to laymen but ultimately very easy to get wrong. This is because bottom-up designs rely very heavily on a number of starting presuppositions and, if these presuppositions are even slightly wrong, they snowball and produced very skewed results as you scale the game up. For instance, in a Vietnam war game, you could try to model the accuracy of an infantry rifle based on its performance in a firing range and end up with both sides obliterating each other with seemingly laser-guided small arms fire. Likewise, you could try to model a theoretical accuracy based on actual ammunition expenditure vs. hits scored in combat situations, but you'd end up modelling M16s as weapons that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Neither solution is satisfactory.

The antidote to this problem is top-down design in which you create a system that strives to replicate the results of combat on a large scale rather than attempting to achieve that by building from the ground up. The resulting game is slightly more abstract, but interestingly more grounded as it can bypass the illusion of a "unit" of 120 little archers shooting 120 little arrows that fly through the air and either hit or miss the little models in another "unit", as if what is represented in-game couldn't possibly represent anything more than the number of models portrayed on-screen standing in the exact way they are modelled. This allows you to bypass the distortions in ground scale and unit scale caused by the game's limitations, as Total War "units" are not realistic representations of historical battle formations. Interestingly, even autistic mods like NTW3 fall into this error by allowing general sniping, ignoring the fact that the general's "model" is a much, much bigger target than he would be in true scale.

The strangest part of this is that they chose to do this with Warhammer Total War, considering that WHFB had a bottom-up design, being entirely based on stat lines for individual models. Go figure.

TL;DR: Design on a per-unit basis is superior to design on a per-model basis when it comes to producing a realistic war game, but this system would have been best used in a historical setting

 

[razvedchiki]

damn joseph nails it like its 1945 again.

 

[copebot]

Chain routing is possible in WH2, it's just not common.

You will see Shogun/M2 style chain routing if you are fighting Brettonian peasants (L36) or clan rats (L45). Are you ever going to get a similar result against High Elf spearmen (L70)? No way. The flat maluses from non-health sources of leadership damage are not going to make elf infantry rout. Most units in WH2 have pretty high leadership apart from some factions. Generals and heroes also have leadership boosting auras that push those numbers even higher. Most leadership penalties not related to the health malus are static: things like the "stronger enemies nearby" malus, "attacked in the rear" malus, fatigue malus, and so on. In campaign, then you add veterancy (scaling leadership bonus), technology (fixed bonus), lord skills (fixed bonus), and other miscellaneous factors like lord/hero followers, landmarks, world events, and other things.

Here is a reddit compilation of the leadership modifiers: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/7q9p2y/compiling_leadership_modifiers/

This is the more accurate and complete compilation, but is less readable because it just has the variables from the game files: https://twwstats.com/kv/morale?right=1678833570709893302

The scaling health damage leadership penalties are listed under total_casualties_peanalty which is what it stabilizes at. There's also recent_casualties_peanalty which is right after the unit takes damage.

Because of this, even a unit of High Elf spearmen (L70) is unlikely to rout until dead if near a general. If outside the general, it can be:

Half-dead: -16
Attacked in the rear: -16
Exhausted: -6
Losing Significantly in Combat: -8
Both Flanks Exposed: -6
Stronger Enemies Nearby: -8? I think?
Total: -60

All these together would make it close to routing: a half-dead tier 1 unit. To properly rout it you would need to do more damage or kill the general. Now, obviously, you can do this a lot more easily to swordsmen (L60) or to the aforementioned clan rats. However the leadership values are just so high that you're just unlikely to be able to get routs going before the units are near dead. Shock routs are just unlikely against many factions unless you do tons of damage on impact. When you have a battlefield full of higher tier units all with more L90, routs are just not going to happen even when the unit has lots of damage on it. One way to address this might be to just change the health modifier to be proportional. This would make it so that on an L90 unit, when it was 50% damaged, instead of it being a bitch-ass -16 penalty, it'd be a -45 penalty, which would be a whole lot more significant.

The other thing that makes it less common is something indirect related to how the pathfinding works. Charging causes a lot of leadership damage. It is hard to cycle charge units that aren't single entities in WH2 because the pathfinding forces units that are close to one another into combat. Overriding this automation requires that you spam move orders because there is no "Force Move" hotkey like in some other games. Your infantry or cavalry unit will keep playing melee combat animations and override your move orders which makes it harder to do lots of cycle charges. The slower and lower mass the unit, the more spam clicks you have to do to override the automation. This greatly weakens a lot of units that would be far stronger, especially because Charge Bonus is actually quite a lot stronger for multi model units than it is for most single entities.

The difficulty of forcing routs also messes with the balance of cavalry/chariots, because one of the strengths of that unit type is that you always get your maximum charge bonus against a routing target.

 

[Average Manatee]

You CAN shock individual units. The leadership values are probably inflated because of all the other stuff you can stack

Being shot by anything ranged but not artillery: -5
Being shot by artillery: -10
Fear: -8
Doom & Darkness spell: -16
One of the various auras: -8
Terror: I'm not actually sure how it works, but I think it temporarily routs anything that is below 25 or 30 leadership

With all of this, you can rout large amounts of low-tier units basically on a whim.

The big thing missing that would help the game is some kind of unit cohesion penalty. When half the unit is sent flying it should have a leadership penalty if it can't reform up quickly.

 

[copebot]

You CAN shock individual units. The leadership values are probably inflated because of all the other stuff you can stack

Being shot by anything ranged but not artillery: -5
Being shot by artillery: -10
Fear: -8
Doom & Darkness spell: -16
One of the various auras: -8
Terror: I'm not actually sure how it works, but I think it temporarily routs anything that is below 25 or 30 leadership

With all of this, you can rout large amounts of low-tier units basically on a whim.

The big thing missing that would help the game is some kind of unit cohesion penalty. When half the unit is sent flying it should have a leadership penalty if it can't reform up quickly.

Terror causes a temporary rout state for 12 seconds if the unit leadership is low enough. I think the threshold is set at the per unit level but I could be wrong. After terror is applied the unit is immune to terror for 60 seconds. If leadership gets depleted during the terror period, they'll rout after terror is over. There are lots of issues with the knockdown mechanics because they give the models like 99% damage resistance when they're in the animation. It's one of those things that is there for cinematic presentation reasons that cause game balance issues. It's not realistic, either, but that's neither here nor there.

 

[Fedora Master]

Perfectly normal...
This is H/H and yet units hold like rocks against morale shock.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

View attachment 18578

Perfectly normal...
This is H/H and yet units hold like rocks against morale shock.

That happens a lot on VH and its the most annoying thing. 0 Morale bar and the fuckers still hold.

 

[Fedora Master]

I get the feeling something is off with morale this patch specifically. Same with damage.