Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Fedora Master]

On VH/N - This was fun once you get over the initial hurdle of the Lustria Superbowl.
One problem though: Nakais vassal faction occupied most of the settlements I needed for the artefacts. Normally an alliance grants you them without sacking but YOU CANT ALLY THE VASSAL FACTION.

e: Very cool mod - Expands the lesser Norscan factions like Skeggi into something unique. The Mung are now a proper Steppe horde!

 

[Lacrymas]

The Vortex campaign makes some LLs playable. Markus Wolfheart is the best example that comes to mind. Nakai is always shit, but he's less shit on the Vortex map.

 

[Average Manatee]

"Noooo you can't beat legendary/VH with melee/cavalry the only way to win is ranged spam!!!!"

Trying Dark Elves with the restriction of no ranged infantry and no single entity units beyond the starting army. So far so good. Wiped out Snikch, then the orc minor faction and just took Imrik's capital on turn 29. This was the hardest battle but the cavalry did pull through.

Funny enough Legend of Total War rates them as the worst units in the dark elf roster. They actually have great stats, and most importantly get +8 MA/MD from the lord red line which is by far the best stat bonus red lines can give (Only thing better would be to also get MD/phys resist on the rank 7 bonus, not many get both of these, Empire Halberdiers is one I can think of off the top of my head). They should be able to reach around 60/60 MA/MD once at rank 9. Not sure if I should go with Har Ganeth Executioners or Black Guard, might end up doing a 33/33/33 split with the cavalry.

 

[Jaedar]

Trying Dark Elves with the restriction of no ranged infantry and no single entity units beyond the starting army. So far so good. Wiped out Snikch, then the orc minor faction and just took Imrik's capital on turn 29. This was the hardest battle but the cavalry did pull through.

Fairly impressive. Are you cycle charging your cavalry? This is the primary thing preventing me from using more than one or two cavalry per army, they tend to be very understatted without the charge bonus, but microing it gets very tedious.

 

[Lacrymas]

Cavalry got buffed recently, so that might be playing a substantial role. Losing more than half your units is a bit sus as well.

 

[Average Manatee]

Trying Dark Elves with the restriction of no ranged infantry and no single entity units beyond the starting army. So far so good. Wiped out Snikch, then the orc minor faction and just took Imrik's capital on turn 29. This was the hardest battle but the cavalry did pull through.

Fairly impressive. Are you cycle charging your cavalry? This is the primary thing preventing me from using more than one or two cavalry per army, they tend to be very understatted without the charge bonus, but microing it gets very tedious.

I'm not cycle charging much, it's mostly just getting isolated infantry and charging from both sides at the same time. Not that the cavalry can't generally do well in melee, but charging from both sides will utterly demolish units. I agree not cycle charging is generally the problem for light or shock cav but heavy cav that can get around 60/60 MA/MD and AP damage can stay in the fight.

Cavalry got buffed recently, so that might be playing a substantial role. Losing more than half your units is a bit sus as well.

What I lost was cheap trash infantry that I'll be replacing with rank 7 har ganeth executioners or black guard once I've consolidated a bit and got my income up. Also I have my replenishment pretty well maxed out and dark elves get a lot of replenishment from captured slaves.

If I can just imagine the average player playing on higher difficulties I expect they are playing the strategic game awfully and expecting to beat the AI in the tactical map even when they've made mistakes on the strategic. For example, losing half their infantry like this and then either being in enemy territory unable to replenish or getting attacked by the AI before they've recovered. The secret is to just not play the strategic map poorly. Have heroes scouting and using block army. Have your armies always engaging strong AI armies in your own territory. Stack movement bonuses so you can quickly march from the edge of your territory to the AI's cities and take them without much hassle. As long as I can beat the toughest AI armies 1v1 and mostly recover within one turn I'm fine.

I will grant though that there are a number of factions that can't just easily train units already at rank 7-9 which is in my opinion the requirement for effective melee combat with most races.

EDIT: Here's a fun trick:

Spoiler

Strong enemy at your doorstep? Just call them into your wars. AI will happily join you if they are strong enough and even slightly hate your target, and you'll get opinion bonuses with them.

Spoiler

This battle was a hard one, Kroq Gar declared war and attacked me while I was in forced march, and I didn't employ any anti-large infantry (black guard). But we pulled through and even the units that got few kills got around 1500 value worth of damage on low entity units. Unfortunately uninhabitable climate in Nehekhara means that I only have around 20% replenishment, and of course the land I'm in also got a skaven plague. I've also been lax about getting Death Hags up for their replenishment bonus when I really should have had them long ago.

 

[Lacrymas]

If those results are with good micro, the army just isn't good tbh. It seems underperforming even on its own, let alone when compared to a ranged-heavy one.

 

[Average Manatee]

That specific battle was with no anti-large vs. over half an army of large high-rank lizardmen single entity units, 3 of which were coatl's spamming their individual lightning AoE Vortexes that deal tons of AP damage to my infantry and cavalry. I was also on forced march which left all of my units tired and my cavalry's speed was like 40 or so, barely faster than infantry. Also Malus didn't have spite yet, now he does and should be able to fuck up single entities. And I didn't even have my black ark in range. Pretty much the worst battle I could face, I've never really seen a stronger single army fielded by AI.

By comparison here's Kroq-Gar with a more normal army along with a garrison. Trivially weak and auto-battled to death and the whole army regenerates next turn..

Spoiler

My black ark with black guard is inbound and 4 or so of them should trivialize this. Plus I still have some more tech to research for unit buffs. Looks like my cavalry will max out at 58 MA/65 MD. Compare to 50/46 for Questing Knights which are the best AP-damage cavalry brettonia has (not including tech/red line buffs but at rank 9).

Also I fucking hate how there's a lack of good 4-region provinces for slaves here in the east as Malus, and you miss out on -15% slave decline not having malekith/karond kar. Malekith and Morathi are absolutely stomping everyone it seems, Morathi is strength rank 1 with 39 settlements and Naggarond rank 2 with 21. At least you can stack +5% income from post battle loot for all these 2 and 3 size provinces.

Spoiler

Based Mommy Morathi genociding the high elves

 

[Average Manatee]

Here's another battle vs. kroq-gar using a lot of single entities. Note that he brought TWO dread saurians this time. Har Ganeth executioners chewed up his infantry easily and the black guard ate his single entities for lunch. Kind of funny, the black guard unit with 2 kills got 2000 damage value while the executioners with 200 kills only got 1200.

Spoiler

And here's one with a generic lord that had no magic support, pretty easy wipe. It was on a choke point too so no flanking, just throwing everything into a pure melee power meat grinder.

Spoiler

 

[Average Manatee]

Gonna wrap this campaign up because fuck the victory condition of chasing down every last of the greenskins on the map. Got really tired of pushing west through them for ~30 turns already.

End Map:

Spoiler

Settlements:

Spoiler

Big buff Malus stats:

Spoiler

Ending unit stats:

Spoiler

Black Guard

Har Ganeth Executioners

Dread Knights

Did end up managing to come out ahead 1v1ing grimgor and all the other greenskin lords whenever they showed up but it just gets so tiresome.

 

[Tyrr]

 

[Mitleser2020]

Two months ago:


https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/si45tc/legend_completes_his_throgg_playthrough_and_says/


Last days:

The Return of Warhammer 2

The Rat is Back. Ikit Claw Warhammer 2 Livestream - Vortex campaign, no less.


https://youtu.be/KY6eg8bSoHE

TW:W3 launch is so bad that one of the top single player creators re-installed what he did not expect to play ever again.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

how can this be possible? journos swore tw3 was the best thing since man invented pussy!

 

[MajorMace]

TW:W3 launch is so bad that one of the top single player creators re-installed what he did not expect to play ever again.

I mean... the dude needs to pump out content. What did he seriously expect ?

 

[Lacrymas]

TW:W3 launch is so bad that one of the top single player creators re-installed what he did not expect to play ever again.

I mean... the dude needs to pump out content. What did he seriously expect ?

That's what I was going to say. If you are a streamer, WH3 offers pitiful amounts of content, especially since the campaign is the same regardless of which faction you pick. There's also the fact Legend doesn't have the highest opinion of WH3. Once ME is out, there will be little reason to go back to WH2, though.

 

[copebot]

At this point, because of the lack of factions, WH3 is just a much smaller game than WH2 with all DLC. The big problem that becomes very apparent the longer you play campaigns is that the AI just cannot handle the portals or the corruption that the portals cause. Using the portals to teleport is pretty fun but the general problem with the portals overwhelms anything positive about them.

 

[Average Manatee]

I doubt he would care if WH3 was getting viewers. Streamers will 100% do whatever gets the most viewers. If that meant playing only Skrag, spamming 100% gorgers, and waiting in the corner to do chaos realm and win the campaign without fighting a single real AI, they'd do it every day. Streamers supposedly knew WH3 launch was going to be crappy, they just didn't bank on that affecting their viewer count so significantly that going back to WH2 would be the better option.

 

[Space Satan]

At this point, because of the lack of factions, WH3 is just a much smaller game than WH2 with all DLC. The big problem that becomes very apparent the longer you play campaigns is that the AI just cannot handle the portals or the corruption that the portals cause. Using the portals to teleport is pretty fun but the general problem with the portals overwhelms anything positive about them.

It is on par with vortex on release. WHII were pretty on same level of shittyness until mortal empires

 

[Lacrymas]

At this point, because of the lack of factions, WH3 is just a much smaller game than WH2 with all DLC. The big problem that becomes very apparent the longer you play campaigns is that the AI just cannot handle the portals or the corruption that the portals cause. Using the portals to teleport is pretty fun but the general problem with the portals overwhelms anything positive about them.

It is on par with vortex on release. WHII were pretty on same level of shittyness until mortal empires

That's what I think as well. Like I said in my big post in the WH3 thread, WH3 doesn't seem too different from WH2 to me and I'm baffled by the fact people are blaming the campaign for the exodus of players when the vortex was also unbelievably shitty and nonsensical. Even if the realms of chaos are this bad and off-putting, you can easily disable that now and get better winning conditions through a few clicks on Steam, yet there is no mass return of players.

 

[thesheeep]

yet there is no mass return of players.

Because you still cannot play a combined map.
That's what people are mostly waiting for I'd wager.

The mods for WH3 making the current campaign better doesn't really solve that issue at all.
You still have only extremely limited variety. Chaos races having only one lord, others mostly 2, Kislev 3.
I mean, just look at the rosters. It's mostly a joke, even compared to vanilla WH1 races without DLCs.

The current campaign also suffers from issues like terrible starting positions and (caused by that) terrible faction balance.
It's not only chaos realms that are bad.

WH2 Mortal Empires was out rather quickly (just a month or so after release?) - but that won't happen in WH3. We'll probably be looking at 2 more months (at least) until Immortal Empires drops.

In addition to all that, even with 1.1 there are still just so many issues left and lots of people (wisely) wait for more patches to fix stuff, independent of Immortal Empires.

What we are seeing is a game released AT LEAST 6 months too early, and people are reacting to that.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's my point - it's not only the campaign that is shit. There are numerous, numerous issues that need addressing. And yeah, it's blindingly obvious WH3 was rushed, it feels like it wasn't even playtested.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

why playtest when people preorder anyway and journos say it's perfect as it is?

 

[Fedora Master]

Im afraid the devs think their campaign is totally fine and are butthurt about its reception.

 

[thesheeep]

why playtest when people preorder anyway and journos say it's perfect as it is?

The thing is, they do indeed have a QA team.
And all the content creators I know say that they (the streamers/youtubers) told the devs the very same things that now got them shitty ratings by players.

I see only two possible scenarios:
1. QA gave the same feedback as content creators / closed beta players, but CA just downright ignored it.
2. QA just put their thumbs up their asses and gave "nah, it's all good!" feedback and CA listened to them instead of the closed beta players.

I find 1) to be extremely more likely.

Im afraid the devs think their campaign is totally fine and are butthurt about its reception.

What I wonder most is how the devs see the situation. And I don't mean the lead ones that have to put on a brave "everything is good" face publicly.
Were they as blissfully ignorant as their management or is this a situation like with Cyberpunk where the devs themselves could only watch the catastrophe unfold before their eyes while (initially) being blamed for it?
In my experience, nearly all massive fuckups are bad management, so my bet is on the latter.

 

[_V_]

There used to be a mod that boosted leadership across the board but it's out of date. Is there something similar that works with the current game version? (Ideally with SFO)
On a related note: Is there a mod that buffs leadership (and vigour) of undead without giving them "unbreakable" and "perfect vigour"?