Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Maculo]

Son of a bitch, Teclis would develop so slowly without that gold. I need to play again with Choices & Consequences. That sounds wild.

 

[A horse of course]

Son of a bitch, Teclis would develop so slowly without that gold. I need to play again with Choices & Consequences. That sounds wild.

The sea battles are semi-randomized. You can either wait (and get a small reward) or actually fight the battle, which could be anything from a mediocre half-stack of Vampirates to a full stack with artillery support. I think it's a positive change overall since even the full stacks are not obscenely difficult to fight and you get a solid reward for a fun battle.

Treasure hunts are still completely worthless.

 

[FreeKaner]

I played a little bit of mortal empires as I wanted to run an Empire campaign and I see that you guys weren't joking about VC. I just conquered Marienburg and started lebensrauming Middleland and the undead are already at my eastern border with all the provinces having like 80% corruption and growing. Most empire minor factions are either dead or 1 settlement left.

And yeah, it cannot be overstated how retarded the diplomacy system in these games is. I remember when I tried playing high elves, on turn 2 the initial dark elves invasion faction invited couple of high elven factions into war against me to which they merrily agreed. I just rolled my eyes and pressed alt+f4. I also particularly like the numerical values assigned to different modifiers. Waging incessant wars against common enemies is like "eh, whatever", but accidentally crossing someone's territory on one turn without doing anything is absolute REEEEEE.

Build temples of sigmar everywhere. All of your region capitals should have sigmar temples to remove corruption, it also prevents osmosis. Also get the tech that gives untainted and make a lord arch-lector from offices, also have a witch hunter whose sole purpose is to remove corruption (get the untainted talent) and assassinating enemy heroes (to prevent them from spreading corruption). This way you can remove corruption from everywhere you go.

I had my armies stepping in Sylvania just starting removing corruption by just being present, something like 16 untainted from characters.

 

[Parabalus]

How long do your ME/Vortex campaigns take guys, turn wise?

I played a little bit of mortal empires as I wanted to run an Empire campaign and I see that you guys weren't joking about VC. I just conquered Marienburg and started lebensrauming Middleland and the undead are already at my eastern border with all the provinces having like 80% corruption and growing. Most empire minor factions are either dead or 1 settlement left.

And yeah, it cannot be overstated how retarded the diplomacy system in these games is. I remember when I tried playing high elves, on turn 2 the initial dark elves invasion faction invited couple of high elven factions into war against me to which they merrily agreed. I just rolled my eyes and pressed alt+f4. I also particularly like the numerical values assigned to different modifiers. Waging incessant wars against common enemies is like "eh, whatever", but accidentally crossing someone's territory on one turn without doing anything is absolute REEEEEE.

Build temples of sigmar everywhere. All of your region capitals should have sigmar temples to remove corruption, it also prevents osmosis. Also get the tech that gives untainted and make a lord arch-lector from offices, also have a witch hunter whose sole purpose is to remove corruption (get the untainted talent) and assassinating enemy heroes (to prevent them from spreading corruption). This way you can remove corruption from everywhere you go.

I had my armies stepping in Sylvania just starting removing corruption by just being present, something like 16 untainted from characters.

Best advice is to kill the VCs as early as possible, rush them after taking Marienburg, or before, first 30 turns.

Having dedicated characters cleaning your lands is a waste IMHO, e.g. witch hunters are rare and good in an army, until you pacify the land through buildings leaving a stack can deal with rebellions in 4-5 regions giving you good income+xp through the battles.

 

[Raghar]

Wood Elves are diametrically opposed to all Chaos creatures, and always side with "Order" races when vampires become too powerful. It's absurd for them to rampage through Northern Bretonnia, Reikland, the Vaults and the Grey Mountains to kill Dwarfs and men, but have +100 affinity with Clan Skyre and Sartosa.

WE have these simple rules.
Rule 1. Don't let anyone fuck with theirs forest, keep it at least at current borders, and foreigners OUT.
Rule 2. If foreigners are willing to not exploit their forest, diplomacy is possible.
Rule 3. Most of foreigners are dumb fuckers anyway.

Occupying any of the Dwarf/Greenskins settlements as Empire/Bretonnia/VC was impossible in Warhammer 1, if you failed to keep the Dwarfs alive and ended up fighting Greenskins, you had to inch through the badlands razing every single settlement and using encamp to restore men. It was almost like destroying Norsca but with ten times the number of settlements. In Warhammer 2 you just get various maluses for occupying the "wrong" climate, but they're still useful for staging points and reinforcements during campaigns, and if you have the money and time (usually mid/late game) it's perfectly fine to settle them permanently.

Actually, I liked that feature. It prevented AI blobbing, and AI was forced to abide to regional restrictions. In my current attempt as skaven, dwarves are in middle of Vampire Counts territory. Having settlement, and are at war with vampires. Vampires are pissed.

And yeah, it cannot be overstated how retarded the diplomacy system in these games is. I remember when I tried playing high elves, on turn 2 the initial dark elves invasion faction invited couple of high elven factions into war against me to which they merrily agreed. I just rolled my eyes and pressed alt+f4.

They are still elves, it's obvious they would ally against an opponent.

I also particularly like the numerical values assigned to different modifiers. Waging incessant wars against common enemies is like "eh, whatever", but accidentally crossing someone's territory on one turn without doing anything is absolute REEEEEE.

That's quite historically accurate. For example Poland adamantly refused idea of Russian troops reinforcing czech basin before Munch.

 

[A horse of course]

How long do your ME/Vortex campaigns take guys, turn wise?

I played a little bit of mortal empires as I wanted to run an Empire campaign and I see that you guys weren't joking about VC. I just conquered Marienburg and started lebensrauming Middleland and the undead are already at my eastern border with all the provinces having like 80% corruption and growing. Most empire minor factions are either dead or 1 settlement left.

And yeah, it cannot be overstated how retarded the diplomacy system in these games is. I remember when I tried playing high elves, on turn 2 the initial dark elves invasion faction invited couple of high elven factions into war against me to which they merrily agreed. I just rolled my eyes and pressed alt+f4. I also particularly like the numerical values assigned to different modifiers. Waging incessant wars against common enemies is like "eh, whatever", but accidentally crossing someone's territory on one turn without doing anything is absolute REEEEEE.

Build temples of sigmar everywhere. All of your region capitals should have sigmar temples to remove corruption, it also prevents osmosis. Also get the tech that gives untainted and make a lord arch-lector from offices, also have a witch hunter whose sole purpose is to remove corruption (get the untainted talent) and assassinating enemy heroes (to prevent them from spreading corruption). This way you can remove corruption from everywhere you go.

I had my armies stepping in Sylvania just starting removing corruption by just being present, something like 16 untainted from characters.

Best advice is to kill the VCs as early as possible, rush them after taking Marienburg, or before, first 30 turns.

Having dedicated characters cleaning your lands is a waste IMHO, e.g. witch hunters are rare and good in an army, until you pacify the land through buildings leaving a stack can deal with rebellions in 4-5 regions giving you good income+xp through the battles.

Playing a full ME campaign is just too boring for me. I believe the record for a "legit" (no mods, world conquest objective i.e. no special rules like Brets or Welfs) run is about 70-90 turns, whilst the average for someone expanding at a good pace, cheesing/metagaming a little bit is 150-170 turns. In reality a regular player taking their time could easily push into 200, 300+ turns.

Wood Elves are diametrically opposed to all Chaos creatures, and always side with "Order" races when vampires become too powerful. It's absurd for them to rampage through Northern Bretonnia, Reikland, the Vaults and the Grey Mountains to kill Dwarfs and men, but have +100 affinity with Clan Skyre and Sartosa.

WE have these simple rules.
Rule 1. Don't let anyone fuck with theirs forest, keep it at least at current borders, and foreigners OUT.
Rule 2. If foreigners are willing to not exploit their forest, diplomacy is possible.
Rule 3. Most of foreigners are dumb fuckers anyway.

Welfs literally sauntered into Reikland solely to save The Empire from a Beastman invasion, fluff is full of examples of them venturing outside their borders to assist Bretonnians against Necromancers, Orcs, Skaven etc. Later editions went completely fucking crazy and gave them the ability to teleport around the world just to fight randos. Even in pre-4th Edition lore where Welfs were a bit more like relatable provincial elves, they sure as well weren't on good terms with evil (Skaven and such were literally classed as "Forces of Evil") factions. To my knowledge there is nothing in the lore that has them do anything more aggressive than the odd pitched battle or large-scale chevauchee against Bretonnia for farmers breaking a few twigs or whatever. As I've said before, no Total War game has ever modelled border tensions or general skirmishing, only full-scale invasions and annihilation. Until they can, Welfs should stick to their forests and only engage in raiding and sacking during "Wild Hunt" events or something.

And yeah, it cannot be overstated how retarded the diplomacy system in these games is. I remember when I tried playing high elves, on turn 2 the initial dark elves invasion faction invited couple of high elven factions into war against me to which they merrily agreed. I just rolled my eyes and pressed alt+f4.

They are still elves, it's obvious they would ally against an opponent.

I also particularly like the numerical values assigned to different modifiers. Waging incessant wars against common enemies is like "eh, whatever", but accidentally crossing someone's territory on one turn without doing anything is absolute REEEEEE.

That's quite historically accurate. For example Poland adamantly refused idea of Russian troops reinforcing czech basin before Munch.

Outside of End Times and other crap, High Elves absolutely despise Dark Elves and would never ally with them. Aside from Dark Elf raids, warfare between various Kingdoms on Ulthuan has always been stated to be rare and very carefully contained. In contrast, the various Empire provinces, like the historical HRE, constantly engage in private wars with each other.

Your last example is in fact not historically accurate for the simple reason that the game does not model these causes and motivations - it's just slapping excuses on top of moronic AI decisions.

 

[FreeKaner]

How long do your ME/Vortex campaigns take guys, turn wise?




Best advice is to kill the VCs as early as possible, rush them after taking Marienburg, or before, first 30 turns.

Having dedicated characters cleaning your lands is a waste IMHO, e.g. witch hunters are rare and good in an army, until you pacify the land through buildings leaving a stack can deal with rebellions in 4-5 regions giving you good income+xp through the battles.

Having one on map character assassinating enemy heroes is good regardless I think. I tend to use caster and priest heroes while playing empire so I never really felt the need to use witch hunters.

Yeah the ideal is snuffing them out before they can expand but sometimes stirland and averland do particularly bad. It takes a good 5 to 10 turns to secure reikland and marienburg as well. Besides might be personal preference but I like fighting the vampires later on as well.

 

[A horse of course]

How long do your ME/Vortex campaigns take guys, turn wise?




Best advice is to kill the VCs as early as possible, rush them after taking Marienburg, or before, first 30 turns.

Having dedicated characters cleaning your lands is a waste IMHO, e.g. witch hunters are rare and good in an army, until you pacify the land through buildings leaving a stack can deal with rebellions in 4-5 regions giving you good income+xp through the battles.

Having one on map character assassinating enemy heroes is good regardless I think. I tend to use caster and priest heroes while playing empire so I never really felt the need to use witch hunters.

Yeah the ideal is snuffing them out before they can expand but sometimes stirland and averland do particularly bad. It takes a good 5 to 10 turns to secure reikland and marienburg as well. Besides might be personal preference but I like fighting the vampires later on as well.

Just for the record, if you're not on the beta patch there's currently a bug which causes negative agent chance percentages to loop round to 100% - therefore an agent can continually succeed in every single action they take over and over again until they're assassinated or merge into a parent army themselves. I mean, I'm ASSUMING it's fixed in the beta patch...

 

[Parabalus]

Outside of End Times and other crap, High Elves absolutely despise Dark Elves and would never ally with them. Aside from Dark Elf raids, warfare between various Kingdoms on Ulthuan has always been stated to be rare and very carefully contained. In contrast, the various Empire provinces, like the historical HRE, constantly engage in private wars with each other.

Your last example is in fact not historically accurate for the simple reason that the game does not model these causes and motivations - it's literally just slapping excuses on top of moronic AI decisions.

While retarded lore wise, it does make the game more interesting.

Would be dumb if you were playing e.g. dwarfs and couldn't engage in diplomacy with skaven in any way major way, this makes the campaigns more dynamic.

 

[tabacila]

The Festag Update is out of beta: https://www.totalwar.com/blog/the-festag-update.

 

[A horse of course]

Outside of End Times and other crap, High Elves absolutely despise Dark Elves and would never ally with them. Aside from Dark Elf raids, warfare between various Kingdoms on Ulthuan has always been stated to be rare and very carefully contained. In contrast, the various Empire provinces, like the historical HRE, constantly engage in private wars with each other.

Your last example is in fact not historically accurate for the simple reason that the game does not model these causes and motivations - it's literally just slapping excuses on top of moronic AI decisions.

While retarded lore wise, it does make the game more interesting.

Would be dumb if you were playing e.g. dwarfs and couldn't engage in diplomacy with skaven in any way major way, this makes the campaigns more dynamic.

I typically headcanon the dumb capeshit lore of "good" and "evil" factions and mod all their racial affinities out aside from very small bonuses within each racial grouping, but the fact remains that game balance is built around this lore and it doesn't have a sophisticated diplomatic system to model any of the cooler aspects of real geopolitics. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is lore-breaking and stupid in any strategy game that can't simulate at least some of the factors that led up to it

 

[GrainWetski]

The Festag Update is out of beta: https://www.totalwar.com/blog/the-festag-update.

I always forget this piece of turd needs the full game's space every time you update. 700mb patch, 55 gb space needed. Time to free up space yet again.

Edit: aaaaaaaaand it decided to delete my install again. Time to redownload the entire fucking thing. CA is truly the greatest developer.

 

[InspectorRumpole]

God dammit. This update ruined my Franz campaign on very hard with SFO installed. 150 turns in, and it was looking really good.

 

[tabacila]

You see? That's why they leave bugs in the game for months. They're afraid they will ruin people savegames.

 

[A horse of course]

You see? That's why they leave bugs in the game for months. They're afraid they will ruin people savegames.

They actually admitted they usually tie patches to game updates (i.e. we won't bother patching it until we have new DLC or something to market).

 

[Raghar]

Outside of End Times and other crap, High Elves absolutely despise Dark Elves and would never ally with them. Aside from Dark Elf raids, warfare between various Kingdoms on Ulthuan has always been stated to be rare and very carefully contained. In contrast, the various Empire provinces, like the historical HRE, constantly engage in private wars with each other.

Well, elves are long living race. As every long living race, they have low reproduction rates. Thus they can't hazard with theirs population by killing each other. Races with fast reproduction rates repopulate rather quickly. Goblins, or Skaven populate stuff fast. As long as completely don't obliterate each other, they would recover in few decades, even after rather rash war. Elves when they lose 1/10 of population, they need to have bit longer. It's not only growth period, it's also about teaching and skills. DE inexperienced troops would be obliterated by under par experienced HE troops, with ease. And that's what DE leadership definitely don't want.

And then there is also a hypothetical situation when DE would conquer Ulthan, but both sides would have drastic loses. Few years later, Norsca would hit from the north, Lizardmen would hit from the south. And Skaven would back stab DE when they would be weak. Even most kickass DE leaders would have problem how to survive that, especially without HE intervening to support DE. For HE it's better to keep domination on seas and let DE to have theirs illusions of grandeur about how they would conquer Ulthan. When they would become sober, they would be willing to talk.


Thus no mater what are theirs relations it's not impossible for their leadership to become nice to each other.

Empire, on the other hand can replenish its loses much easier. When we look at central european reproduction rates from year 770 - 1100, it's 6 children per family. Thus we can write it as an exponential function of tripling the population each 17+6 * 2 = 46 years. Yea they started at 14 or so, but they needed also time to grow children a bit.

Assuming they would on average take one youngest son from a family. Assuming population of empire 2 million, they can waste 7246.37681159 soldiers per anum, and they still would have significant population growth.

(Well, Warhammer 2 doesn't simulate populations, otherwise one Ninjahund, or Elich battle would significantly hit these numbers, and 12 more battles would depopulate even empire. Actually, normally they lose about 600 men on average in large 20vs20 unit battle, which sums to 7200 dead on theirs own side. HE on Ulthan can afford to lose only 300 soldiers in the same period. Skaven when they are left alone reach population limits in about 15 years. But they can funnel less capable Skaven into front lines, and do some genetic improvement of their population. Thus for Skaven losing several hundred skaven slaves in one battle, isn't necessary hurting their race.)

 

[razvedchiki]

any mod that unfucks the battles?

 

[Raghar]

any mod that unfucks the battles?

How do you want to unfuck them? I remember Darren saying modders typically only plays with engine variables, but they don't do any serious programming. If engine wasn't programmed to do that, they can't do that.
They would need something like Oblivion script extender, which was quite brutal hack. But hack like that would also be able to unlock all DLC for free, and import custom made models... Somehow there is no mod that would add DLC factions for free, or mod that would add new legendary lords.

 

[A horse of course]

autism

This is all perfectly reasonable speculation but doesn't change the fact that the game is supposedly meant to broadly follow the lore (as to your point about population, one of GW's writers famously stated "there are as many elves as the story requires" or something along those lines). Helfs/Delfs have despised each other for thousands of years and only traitors/cultists would work with their racial opponents. If something like Zboj's example occured, every single other Helf faction would unite against them and their own subjects would instantly rebel. The only way they were able to swing this in The End Times: Khaine was to have the Wood Elves and several of the most famous Helf tabletop characters be convinced to side with Malekith to prevent the end of the world, hit Tyrion with the villain bat, have Morathi openly ally with Tyrion and invade the Everqueen's realm to kidnap her, and finally turn Tyrion into a blood-crazed maniac. Then destroy both Ulthuan and Naggaroth and marry Malekith to the Everqueen. It didn't exactly go down well in the community, though I personally liked it.

In-game, you can already build special buildings in the enemy's racial capital that increase your relations with their surviving factions (though it's unlikely to make much difference since by the time you got there most of them would've confederated or hitting negative 300 relations with you) as a nod to the End Times developments. What you're asking for is the entirety of the lore to be rewritten in a more realistic and plausible manner - Helfs and Delfs would probably be more like France and England or something, greenskin mercenaries would probably be all over the Empire, western Bretonnia would be semi-industrialized etc. Which is great, but that's not what they're doing with the game, so they need to be consistent about it.

any mod that unfucks the battles?

How do you want to unfuck them? I remember Darren saying modders typically only plays with engine variables, but they don't do any serious programming. If engine wasn't programmed to do that, they can't do that.
They would need something like Oblivion script extender, which was quite brutal hack. But hack like that would also be able to unlock all DLC for free, and import custom made models... Somehow there is no mod that would add DLC factions for free, or mod that would add new legendary lords.

I'm pretty sure creamapi can unlock the DLC on a vanilla copy of the game, but that's going through steam rather than Warhammer, I guess.

 

[Lone Wolf]

or mod that would add new legendary lords.

What?

Mixu's Legendary Lords 1 + 2 add new LLs. As does Parte's (now outdated) mod.

 

[A horse of course]

It's a shame a lot of the custom LLs look like fucking clowns. Cobbling together a good-looking asset swap is hard when you have to run the game every single time you want to see your changes. I remember there were some shots of banners and various other assets imported into Warhammer with the news of some modding breakthrough, but it all quietly vanished (probably legal threats).

 

[Lone Wolf]

Basically, they can import whatever they want, but modders don't want to fuck the modding scene in the ass by bringing CA down on it.

 

[A horse of course]

Reconfirms that the next DLC is the reddit Lord pack after 3K.

Fantasy New Content Team – WARHAMMER II

It’s going to be a quiet few months from us in the Fantasy New Content Team while we scheme and plot beneath the surface. We vow to resurface soon, and when we do expect some cold-blooded and explosive content… but of course that’s after the release of the highly anticipated THREE KINGDOMS from our comrades in the Historical Team!

Our focus most recently has been the Festag Update that we put in beta in December and released to all players on Monday. You can read all about the changes here, which we recommend as it’s a pretty hefty update. If you’re encountering any issues after downloading the update, please let us know over at our support forums here.

Fantasy Team – pre-production

The Fantasy Team have been extremely busy this month. Back-to-back meetings and intense workshops have taken place, but as yet there are still no acceptable suggestions for cryptic references to include in the what the teams are working on blog post. We’ll try harder next month, but there won’t be any actual news for a while as pre-production keeps on keeping on.

 

[tabacila]

I don't think there was much surprise there. I really hoped they would have made an effort and have something done in early January, but it took them a month to move a patch branch out of beta. Oh well I guess nothing is allowed to disturb the 3K media blitz. Too bad that game still looks like the cheapest mobile crap ever (battlewise at least).

 

[InspectorRumpole]

The Total War subreddit right now (after someone made a mock up of a Cathay golem)