Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[wahrk]

You really didn’t need to write that wall of text. I never claimed it had comparable depth to a historical game. I asked what faction diversity had to do with that, because you said

What's more, the "diversity" of factions on the campaign map can be a negative, as it means all factions are lacking in depth

Faction diversity and unique mechanics are the draw of Warhammer. That’s the whole point. Of course it doesn’t have the campaign depth of a historical game, because it’s based off a fantasy tabletop game that’s all about building cool armies with dragons and lizards riding dinosaurs. What did you expect? Did you really come into Warhammer wanting complex diplomatic options between coked up ratmen and zombie pirates?

 

[Space Satan]

You really are complaining about WHFB diplomacy after experiencing ROME Total War "diplomacy"?

 

[Nahel]

Yep having all the spying and loyalty stuff in Warhammer would be awesome. If it had ever worked. CA terrible AI continues to curse the series so warhammer at least provides variety in the roster. Even if diplomacy is still retarded, especially for trade agreements

 

[A horse of course]

It's called Total War not Total Peace lol

Then why does Total Warhammer have less strategic depth (no forts/encampments), less sophisticated sieges (fewer options, less variety), fewer battle types (no naval, no landings) and fewer tactical options (removed most formations, unit spacing, ammo types and deployables)? Because they didn't cut management and replace it with battle mechanics. They just keep cutting shit to save money and focus on their most easily-pleased and undemanding demo, who just want to click the shiny buttons and watch spells go boom (fantasoy players).

muh map painting

Civilization VI is still there for you.

I’m not really sure how faction diversity makes the game have less campaign depth

I explained exactly why, I'm not repeating myself to a fantasoylet.

A history game from seventeen years ago has worse diplomacy than Warhammer

I already explained why Warhammer diplomacy is worse. The entire campaign is built around railroading factions into Warsaw Pact blobbing. Historical titles suffer from snowballing, but there's usually a fair amount of dynamism in which factions make the cut and who the player should side with.

But there are hecking epic DINOSAURS fighting DRAGONS

I didn't say anything negative about the unit variety in battles - they did a pretty good job balancing lower-tier monsters and flying units, for example. What I said was that fantastical super-units render all that less meaningful since there's not much you can do about a doomstack of super-units led by a general who can solo entire armies except having your own doomstack and overpowered LL.

 

[wahrk]

Fantasoy

fantasoy players

fantasoylet

 

[thesheeep]

Yep having all the spying and loyalty stuff in Warhammer would be awesome.

What for?
Spying, ok, I can get that, so you can get army composisions, but then again, army composion is clear from the get-go from the faction you are up against (because, again, AI is dumb).
But loyalty? Especially so that the enemy could abuse it? That would be even more stuff designed to avoid fighting battles - the core of the game.

CA terrible AI continues to curse the series so warhammer at least provides variety in the roster. Even if diplomacy is still retarded, especially for trade agreements

Ain't that the truth...

For some factions, trading is just downright useless and you should never, ever build trade buildings (except if they provide something else useful).
Or maybe there are only a few factions for which trading works really well (e.g. Elves).

But trading is not the only part where diplo AI is bonkers. It's everything, really. Who declares war on you, who wants to make peace with you - it's all just random, fueled by nonsensical modifiers. The only "consistency" is that factions which hate you lore-wise are somewhat more likely to declare war on you earler, but that's about it.

Also, why the hell can you not trade settlements? This border gore is unacceptable.
Ugh, no, I'm not getting into all the complaints about diplomacy again, it would be endless

map painting

Civilization VI is still there for you.

As is EUIV and (to an extent) HoI4.
But neither of those are about real-time battles with large armies.

You are comparing apples and oranges here and do not seem to understand that an apple isn't even supposed to taste like an orange.

I didn't say anything negative about the unit variety in battles - they did a pretty good job balancing lower-tier monsters and flying units, for example. What I said was that fantastical super-units render all that less meaningful since there's not much you can do about a doomstack of super-units led by a general who can solo entire armies except having your own doomstack and overpowered LL.

You don't actually play this game much, do you?
There are a lot of ways to deal with a stack like that, one of them is to not engage it at all and let it drain the enemie's income while you raid and rampage with "normal" armies.

If your complaint is that a 10000 cost army is better than a 3000 one, then I don't really know what to tell you other than "duh!".

However, mods can actually be your answer here. Lucky's Overhaul, iirc, applies the Tomb Kings' unit limitation (can only own X of unit Y across all armies) across all factions.
That's pretty cool. Doomstack armies like what you describe are practically impossible in it.

 

[razvedchiki]

Ed123 is correct, total war games were always limited in scope of gameplay mechanics and warhammer even more so. they really did cut a lot of stuff to make those shinny unit models.

 

[Agame]

I don't think any faction has unenjoyable mechanics just for the sake of trying to be different. It's just the case that horde mechanics have been complete shit in every total war game ever which poisons two of the big evil factions. The only non-horde faction that is shit right now is Wood Elves and in that case CA is kind of bound by the lore since Wood Elves are basically supposed to sit in their tree land and be angry hippies.

Hordes worked well in Attila, but then the whole game was built around them. Honestly I was surprised they failed so hard with horde mechanics in WH. I think if WH:3 doesnt do something amazing with hordes it will leave the whole trilogy with a very sour taste. I am feeling fabulously optimistic that they will figure something out because I want this to be the best game EVAR!?

 

[AwesomeButton]

Guys, you both have a point.

When I first learned a Warhammer TW is in the works, i thought that will be a great match, because TW games are technically incapable of providing complex gameplay and challenge from the AI, which they have been struggling with practically since Shogun TW.

Their engine and their AI was made to serve for one game - limited in scope and mechanics, as the 16th century Japan conflict was itself limited in scope and strategic/tactical options. Ever since then they have been trying to shoehorn different other scenarios of wildly greater scope and greater strategic and tactical diversity into this tech that they have to work with. The resutls have been as good as the respective new scenario has been similar in scope to the first one, and as bad as the new scenario has been different from the original 16th century Japan scope. It is no wonder that the best TW game after Shogun is Medieval TW: Viking Invasion. The technology was simply not made for anything much more complex than that.

So, when Warhammer TW was announced, I felt optimistic for two reasons - first they can finally drop their pretense of making historically accurate games - because let's not lie to ourselves, after Shogun TW, historical accuracy went down the toilet. Better go all out fantasy. Second - they can finally stop forcing their technology and Ai with tacked on "historical" mechanics which the technology and AI simply cannot bear.

 

[Fedora Master]

I don't think any faction has unenjoyable mechanics just for the sake of trying to be different. It's just the case that horde mechanics have been complete shit in every total war game ever which poisons two of the big evil factions. The only non-horde faction that is shit right now is Wood Elves and in that case CA is kind of bound by the lore since Wood Elves are basically supposed to sit in their tree land and be angry hippies.

Hordes worked well in Attila, but then the whole game was built around them. Honestly I was surprised they failed so hard with horde mechanics in WH. I think if WH:3 doesnt do something amazing with hordes it will leave the whole trilogy with a very sour taste. I am feeling fabulously optimistic that they will figure something out because I want this to be the best game EVAR!?

Eh I wouldn't say they worked great, they had the same fundamental problems as they do in Wawa. Namely an AI that will cross the globe to get at you and an unsustainable pillaging economy.

 

[Galdred]

Ed123 is correct, total war games were always limited in scope of gameplay mechanics and warhammer even more so. they really did cut a lot of stuff to make those shinny unit models.

But most of that never worked. That is why I think Shogun Total War 1 was better than the latter iterations:
It didn't really try to be a strategy game. It was clear from the beginning that the strategic layer was only here to give context to the battles, but then, the series morphed overtime to a frankenstein of strategic micromanagement.
So having less mechanics that don't work on the strategic map is a plus for me.
But gutting the siege battles is a real shame, as it was one of the aspects that had become better than in STW (where siege battles were about rushing the gate and waiting for one side to be out of soldiers).

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Those games might need more depth on the campaign map to make up for what they lack in depth on the battlefield. Warhammer generally doesn't.

I don't want to deal with bribery, spies, internal policies and whatever other bullshit detracting from the core of the game. There are other games for that.
Hell, I always use the mod that entirely disables campaign hero actions so that I'm not constantly bothered by the AI trying to assassinate my armies, do useless stuff to settlements, etc. And so that I don't have to micromanage a dozen heroes on the map doing mostly useless things, either.

I want the campaign map as a backdrop with very little management beyond settlements and armies. And that's what it does.
All it would need is a diplomacy AI that isn't just lolrandom, but I guess that will never happen.

Nah. If you have a strategy layer it should do something interesting and provide entertainment other than some random nation declaring war out of blue and beelining for your least protected settlement through half the map while ignoring, and being ignored by, everything else.

What you're maybe saying is that WHTW would, possibly, be a better game if it dropped the pretense of being a strategy game and instead focused purely on tactical battles. Using the freed resources for better skills trees, unit experience models, itemization, narrative, etc.

Basically, make Dark Omen 2.

Just don't make it like Mark of Chaos, which was supposed to be like Dark Omen 2, but was fecking shite.





Please?

 

[thesheeep]

Nah. If you have a strategy layer it should do something interesting and provide entertainment other than some random nation declaring war out of blue and beelining for your least protected settlement through half the map while ignoring, and being ignored by, everything else.

What you're maybe saying is that WHTW would, possibly, be a better game if it dropped the pretense of being a strategy game and instead focused purely on tactical battles. Using the freed resources for better skills trees, unit experience models, itemization, narrative, etc.

Basically, make Dark Omen 2.

Not quite. I think a campaign map like it currently has is needed to give context to what the player is doing, goals to follow, an own agenda, a clear sense of progress and how you are doing compared to those around you and - maybe most importantly - to give the feeling of being active within a living (or unliving huehue) world. Even if all the other actors are retards, that's still better than nothing.
Otherwise, you could just go ahead and play random siege/battle scenarios.

Not that I would mind a Dark Omen-style campaign per se (could be interesting), but that would never suck me in or give me the level of immersion a proper campaign map does.

I just don't need any kind of EU4/CK2 complexity on that map as the core is still the battles.
I also fail to see why that campaign map would have to offer lots of challenge in terms of management beyond making sure you don't go broke and beyond what influences the battles themselves (unit recruitment, settlement defenses, ...).

Just to be clear, I don't think the TW:WH2 campaign map is great at that. Not at all, there are more problems than I could list right now. But it's the best we've got :/

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

If you're getting all that from the campaign map then ok. Personally, I find modern TW games weirdly schizophrenic. They pretend that the strategy layer is a big deal (much bigger than it was in the risk-like times), but at the same time it's completely devoid of anything interesting/engrossing and the retarded ai behavior tends to make the experience plain irritating. I genuinely think one could make a decent tactical rts out of current WHTW though. Provided, of course, that the numbers would be tweaked so that units don't shit their pants every 10 seconds and battles last longer than 5 minutes.

 

[Fedora Master]

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-warhammer-ii-da-nutz-n-boltz-update/

• Removed the Lord of Changes’ influence on the stance list – it should no longer play mind games and close while moused over

 

[Mazisky]

I reworked all the weather and lighting in the game to be more natural\realistic without all those weird washed-out colors and fog everywhere.

If you want to give it a try, here's a couple examples+link.

Cheers!

Spoiler

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2037195655

 

[Theodora]

Gorgeous work Mazisky.

Really glad they did something about orcs being a bit underwhelming with the tech tree, though not sure it's enough.

 

[Space Satan]

 

[Fedora Master]

Not just dragons versus dinosaurs, viking wizards riding mutated dragons fighting a frog who is Literally Hitler riding a dino.

 

[tabacila]

So apparently modders can now import not only custom models into the game, but also custom animations.

 

[Fedora Master]

Warhammer Loverslab soon

 

[TemplarGR]

I almost agree with that quote, but he forgot Godzilla, King Kong, Giant Insects, and Megazord, for more pure awesomeness.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm an idiot. i gave up my beliefs and bought it, plus some dlcs too because why not, i'm already hurting myself after all. then i launch the game and find out that a big part of the game is hidden behind even more dlcs, but its biggest part is hidden behind buying an entirely different game and dlcs for that too.
sega has seen my last money ever.

 

[A horse of course]

i'm an idiot. i gave up my beliefs and bought it, plus some dlcs too because why not, i'm already hurting myself after all. then i launch the game and find out that a big part of the game is hidden behind even more dlcs, but its biggest part is hidden behind buying an entirely different game and dlcs for that too.
sega has seen my last money ever.

I wouldn't worry about it. As this thread proves, playing fantasoy titles causes your IQ to drop below sub-saharan levels.

 

[Danikas]

So modders have to do Ca job because adding banners "would take too much work for the devs" as the reddit brainlets say.

Imagine releasing your big Warhammer game without banners.