Campaign:
- Focus on getting whole provinces. This makes public order easier, provides commandments, and adds more growth to get higher level buildings.
- Get level 3 walls in your minor settlements and walls in your major settlement ASAP. This generally provides your garrisons several turns to hold out before the AI assaults. Taking a settlement always reduces its level so if they take it and you take it back a level 3 goes back to level 1 and you've lost a shit ton of growth and cash investment. Not actually precisely correct for skaven since they use food but its still a good general tip and you don't have infinite food to re-colonize settlements.
- Pay attention to how to use army stances. Forced March is good for movement but you can't withdraw in battle so you are a major sitting duck during the AI turn. Ambush stance is very, very good for luring the AI's army out of a strong settlement and defeating it. The AI has some form of vision cheat and can see your armies further than you can see theirs (or something like this), but ambush stance makes you invisible and the AI never "remembers" that your army was around the previous turn so it will happily march towards your now apparently undefended settlement and trigger the ambush. Also note that you can see your movement % remaining when you take an army move on the bottom left, so a good pattern is take settlement->Use 75% of your move towards next settlement and go into ambush->hopefully ambush any AI army during AI turn->take next settlement->repeat.
- If you feel outmatched on the campaign map go into ambush next to your settlement, on the ambush you'll fight with both the garrison and your army vs. their one army.
- For your lords you generally want the blue and red line skills before yellow. Skaven don't need lightning strike since they can ambush on attack, but replenishment/upkeep/movement bonuses are still great.
- Casters are really useful and good to get early and start leveling immediately. Other heroes are good for things like movement bonuses or replenishment.
- Under no circumstances should you ever get a full military alliance with an AI except to immediately fulfill a victory condition and win the game. Otherwise they WILL draw you into retarded wars where they will not pull their weight and the enemy immediately comes for you. Defensive alliances are still kind of iffy, non-aggression pacts are ideal.
Battle:
- Pay attention to AP vs. non-AP. non-AP will suck hard vs. armored units. Spells can be AP or non-AP too. Damage type like Magical or Fire does NOT mean it ignores armor, even magical attacks will have an AP vs. non-AP split, all these mean is that the unit will ignore physical resistance which is pretty rare.
- Similarly pay attention to shields vs. ranged damage. Also angle to get a decent line of fire is important. If you can get ranged units, especially handgunners, behind an enemy engaged in melee you'll deal obscene damage.
- Monstrous units generally aren't great thrown into battle alone. Put them ontop of a regular army unit to absorb damage and ensure they aren't flanked.
- "routing" units still count for the overall balance of power and can come back if they regain morale before reaching the edge of the map. "shattered" units are gone. A quick high-charge bonus unit to chase enemies down until they are shattered is important early game. Or, for skaven, you can simply use skavenslaves since they are cheaper than whatever you are chasing away.
A unit uses 100% of its melee defense stat from the front, and I believe 50% from the back and 75% from the sides (someone correct me if I am wrong on the %). What this means is that you can do more damage from attacking the backs or sides of an enemy. Similarly, if you are units are being attacked from behind or from the side, it will take more damage.
Not sure on the numbers but keep in mind that this is applied on a per-model basis. So a unit of 160 skaven that is surrounded generally doesn't take the penalty past the first few seconds since the ones in the back will turn around to fight behind them. For the most part this mechanic is a debuff to low model count units that get surrounded (e.g. lords with 80 melee defense still get hit fairly often by decent melee units).
I never found a good use for plague monks. In my experience they are too expensive to serve as meatshields, and too squishy to do any heavy lifting. I'd rather just roll with verminos.
Generally agree but the plague monks you can summon with a plague caster are amazing. Just summon behind enemy lines and you'll get hundreds of kills, the fact that they are a glass cannon not mattering since they'll expire in a minute or so anyway.
I honestly found fatigue mostly irrelevant in battles.
After just fighting for a bit, every unit will be exhausted anyway and it won't get worse than that.
The only difference this makes is really at the very start of the battle (so the March stance advice is a good one, and also don't let your units "run" if you don't have to when advancing on the battlefield).
The one place where it does matter is in sieges, where units who climb walls lose 100% of their stamina.
