Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Raghar]

Oh yea SFO. Vampires should be hard. Player who is doing them basically shows he's nearly as capable like Manfred. It's about esteem, even defeat counts.

Also they should remove 20 unit limit, and do AI that uses less than 20 units in stack. Fights would be more interesting, because they would have greater variety.

 

[Average Manatee]

I thought skeletons were pretty good in SFO? Granted they aren't completely free upkeep like in vanilla.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

they suck too. they're not thin air like zombies but they're still useless. only high tier vampire units are worth their weight, but they're bloody expensive, both to buy and to maintain. but at least you don't need buildings for them, just win a battle or two and summon them. the only upside of the vampires, the ability to recruit strong units pretty much everywhere. a shame they can't feed them tho.

 

[Average Manatee]

I checked and skeleton warriors have 29/29 with tech, a corpse cart improves that to 39/39 along with constant regeneration and lord skills improve that to 45/45. Seems pretty decent to me but I haven't played a whole game with them. Also you can throw danse macabre on them and the cavalry squishing enemies from behind.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

the cart is unfeasiable, it's slow and its aura limited, it's a wasted slot, you'd better summon some knights, those are good units but still expensive. i still have to see any noticeable effect by danse macabre, i'd rather summon another unit behind an enemy making it +100% attack for much longer than the few seconds the spell lasts. but still, the issue are the very first turns, when having to take a 1 turn break weights more than sleeping for 10 later on. i just can't muster enough firepower to deal with empire + orks + midgets who will confederate the shit out of anyone and will keep doing even with MY allies.
next attempt i'll probably try a ghouls rush.
some guy on the workshop page swears he uses bats. 0/10 worst troll ever. speaking of which, i'd probably try the norsca big troll again.

 

[BrotherFrank]

I'm on turn 160 playing a coop vamp campaign in SFO so feel can help you out (and even though I say coop, my friend playing von carnstein immediately went off on an exodus to the badlands and khemri, to I quote "reclaim the motherland" since the vampire curse came from khemri, leaving me to fight empire, brettonia and now dwarves+elves by myself). I am currently embroiled in a massive war against both a united dwarven empire stretching from athel loren to the chaos wastes and a united elf empire safe in their donut. On my side I own the empire and brettonia so have a good power base but am sandwiched between elves and dwarves and fighting on about 7 different fronts. Also dealing with chaos incursions too since that's now my problem. So yeah dealing with lots of highly armored high tier armies.

The problem is going all in on skeletons or zombies and expecting them to win in a head on battle, especially against dwarves. That ain't what they are good for, if you want frontline equivalent to other races, it's graveguard or bust. And in case you didn't know, zombies actually detract from your autoresolve strength (I don't know why it does, but it's something that became increasingly clear when deleting a zombie unit would flip the auto bar from full red to 3/4 yellow in some extreme cases), it's one big factor that forced me to ditch all zombie armies even though I like making armies of thrash work, because I was sick of having to play every one sided battle, my current army comp for ghorst who specializes in zombies is ghorst+1 banshee+7 zombies+ highest tier corpse cart with all the auras+4 hexwraiths+2crypt horrors+4 black coaches (I've learn to love them as line breakers especially in sieges). Still a pretty economic army yet fully capable of taking on even a higher tier dwarf stack 1v1 with no permanent losses. The ghosties melt like snow in hell to anything with magic damage (brettonia's grail knights fucked me over hard) but they are absolute beasts otherwise, routinely getting 300-400 kills in battles (by contrast my elite high tier with all buff zombies are lucky to get a kill count above 10) so a must have against empire or dwarves.

So yeah zombies and skeletons are there to make up the numbers and tie the enemy down in a brawl for your REAL damage units to do the work.
Also another reason why all zombie or skeleton armies are bad: 0 chasing potential. Even when you win a battle you will inflict no casualties on routing units and every enemy hero and lord will escape. This is one reason why I grew to love banshees despite their fragility as they are S tier hero/lord chasers, if they ain't on a flying mount then she will easily make sure no enemy leader leaves alive.

TLDR value of zombies and skeletons comes from how utterly disposable they are and act as the anvil for your other units. You can happily lose your entire frontline of zombies, it's no big deal, you can rez them in the same turn as if nothing happened, but expecting to use nothing but zombies and skellies against dwarves is just asking to be spanked. Some races like empire or dwarves can get away with using nothing but basic units in their army and do great, vampire counts ain't one of those.

 

[Average Manatee]

For what its worth the autoresolve bar in SFO is completely broken. I've had battles where it said the autoresolve was 80% against me and when I actually autoresolved I won with few casualties. And yeah, definitely don't expect skeletons to kill many dwarves. Dwarves require AP damage. Skeletons with high MD and constant regen should hold out for a decent amount of time though.

Vamps in SFO look interesting, I'll give them a shot. So far as Vlad the Vargheists have been terrific. Blood Knights haven't really been pulling their weight at 2x the vargheist upkeep, I guess they are strictly for assassinating large units?

EDIT: Grave guard actually have a surprisingly reasonable cost for their stats.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

thank you captains obvious! meanwhile the elephant is still in the room.

 

[34scell]

Zombies and skeletons are just meat shields. The actual damage comes from using winds of death to kill multiple units at once as they squish themselves against your lines.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I don't get the complaint. VC fodder units are just meant to hold things in place, while your killers flank and deliver the main blow. Skeletons/zombies are meant to be used as entirely disposable filler. If you want a dependable VC main line, you have to go Grave Guard.

Their elite units, meanwhile, are absolute rapists. In SFO, Vlad's starter Blood Knights can solo virtually any army in the first ~30-40 turns.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

thank you captains obvious! meanwhile the elephant is still in the room.

 

[Average Manatee]

Dunno what you are talking about. My skeletons are holding the line absurdly well along with getting decent K : D ratios. They have 46/46 MA/MD in battle which is silly OP considering they also have 17,000 HP. Granted they aren't fighting elite dwarven units but the fact that they can trade evenly vs. warriors is really impressive considering warriors have >100 armor and skeletons have awful AP damage. I imagine Grave Guard would absolutely wreck dwarves, especially with a corpse cart.

 

[Lone Wolf]

What elephant is that, friend?

 

[Average Manatee]

Turn 54, Karl Franz destroyed

Spoiler

Tips:
- Zombies are pretty useless past the very early game. Just shit stats and slow.
- Skellies great. Blob them up together so they are overlapping and spread damage evenly. Put your necromancer on a corpse cart in the middle and they are basically invincible in melee. 65 MA/60 MD for rank 9 skeletons.
- Vamp heroes are almost all fast and strong. They should have two modes: Getting together to gank enemy lords and heroes that are intruding in your skellie blob, or spread out and harassing enemy ranged units trying to shoot your blob.
- Vargheists are insanely amazing and were key to me invading strong cities. They are very good at fighting on the walls and sniping ranged units.
- Start farming blood kisses early by wounding enemy heroes. The +20% replenishment/ +4 public order and +5 vampiric corruption/+20% movement range bonuses are essential.
- Don't worry too much about public order, if you have to come back to defend once in a while that's fine. Your armies are really fast and eventually the corruption will keep things relatively stable. Even leaving regions untaxed is fine since they'll keep poisoning the surroundings. Once you get +1 vamp corruption in adjacent provinces you end up with a nice tide that starts infecting lands before you reach them.
- Diplo tip: Invite nearby AIs to join you vs. templehof while you are finishing them off. They'll get fairly significant diplomatic opinion of you, and with a small gift or offering to join them in a war they'll have a good chance of NAPing you. It didn't last forever but it seems to have stopped them all dogpiling me at once.

 

[Dwarvophile]

The Imrik campaign !!!




So, first I lost a legendary run : had just finish cleaning clan Eshin and Malus Darkblade when the green tide came knocking. Theno I start another one on normal and now I haev Rictus, Eshin, Malus and Grimgor on my back at turn 40. It's like they all made friend to come after me, I'm their only enemy, except for Grimgor who is also warring the dawis.

So the problem with Imrik is that you can't trade, money is tight so you can only have one army. A powerful one, no doubt, but running after Snikch while protecting your settlements from 3 other factions is no joke. Especially on that environment. I find this campaign harder than Skarsnik'.

 

[pakoito]

I have tried to start a campaign 3 times today, 2 with Tictactoe and 1 with the Easy Tomb Lord, and I wasn't even able to survive turn 3 wtf. My starting army cannot deal with the first enemy at my borders, and recruiting one or two aditional squads don't seem to fix it.

I suuuuck halp pls.

 

[Jaedar]

So the problem with Imrik is that you can't trade, money is tight so you can only have one army. A powerful one, no doubt, but running after Snikch while protecting your settlements from 3 other factions is no joke. Especially on that environment. I find this campaign harder than Skarsnik'.

Imrik is hard. I beat it on V.hard but it took 5 tries. The strategy I figured in the end was to go for Clan eshin and wipe them after wiping the starting dwarf enemy. Raze the dwarf settlement that isn't in your starting region, it's not worth the rebels. Eshin will have like 3 full armies, but it is 90% skavenslaves so it is not unwinnable.

After that I didn't have any big problems. Malus mostly killed himself against kroq'gar leaving me to clean up and capture all his unguarded settlements, and then it was just me against grimgor which was very grindy (them being able to burrow while you must walk sucks) but entirely doable.

If you spend some influence and bribe kroq'gar, he will accept a trade agreement. When you encounter the first dragon, it is a good time to choose influence as reward and use it all to bribe lizards. If the dwarves are still alive, they'll also accept trade after you hurt grimgor a bit for free reputation points.

 

[Olinser]

I have tried to start a campaign 3 times today, 2 with Tictactoe and 1 with the Easy Tomb Lord, and I wasn't even able to survive turn 3 wtf. My starting army cannot deal with the first enemy at my borders, and recruiting one or two aditional squads don't seem to fix it.

I suuuuck halp pls.

1 or 2 squads? Well that's problem 1. Either do a full recruit or attack, doing 1 squad is the worst of both worlds, they're getting a full recruit and you're not. So that's problem 1.

Then there's the question of WHAT you are recruiting. If you're recruiting one or two units of Skinks and then attacking, yeah you're gonna lose because Skinks are complete trash. You should be recruiting lizardmen warriors. Skink melee are total and complete trash, useful only for rear charging something already engaged, or charging low tier archers.

Even with that though if you're halfway decent at battle you SHOULD be able to win the first fight easy. What are you doing in battle? Mindlessly rushing forward and clicking on AI is going to get you roasted. The AI will pretty much always come to you. Lizardmen should meet them first, skinks should circle around and charge them from the rear, archers should fire initially, then circle and fire at something already melee engaged.

 

[Average Manatee]

The listed difficulty is pretty much bullshit, and some starting fights are really fucking hard for some reason. If its your first time playing these races try another start.

I recall tic tac toe's fight being quite brutal. Up there with Malus and Markus as the hardest turn 1s of the game

 

[Serious_Business]

Dunno what you are talking about. My skeletons are holding the line absurdly well along with getting decent K : D ratios. They have 46/46 MA/MD in battle which is silly OP considering they also have 17,000 HP. Granted they aren't fighting elite dwarven units but the fact that they can trade evenly vs. warriors is really impressive considering warriors have >100 armor and skeletons have awful AP damage. I imagine Grave Guard would absolutely wreck dwarves, especially with a corpse cart.

Pretty much, yeah. Skellies are much stronger in SFO than in vanilla : they have anti-infantry, they can do some damage ; overall infantry lines are more potent, which gives Vampos the edge they didn't have at the start. Vanilla skellies would not even get a single kill on anything. Obviously zombos are zombos in both versions. I don't know what the hell this guy was on about, just a bunch of weak complaining.

 

[Dwarvophile]

This mod "recruit defeated legendary lords" https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1736529254 is great for somebody like me who doesn't have time to try everyone of them for each factions. Might be a bit OP for the end game though...

 

[Kabas]

Tried the vampire coast(Count Noctilus) on the vortex map:
-I am starting to get why people talk so much shit about the horde mechanic, it takes awhile until it grows enough so you can actually rectruit something useful with it.
-Seems like having a well developed land colony in addition to this fleet horde is a must. Galleon's graveyard is a cool starting position but it doesn't seem it will be enough for my army needs.
-Noctilus' starting quests suggests you to take over the Caledor as your first colony, but it seems like a terrible idea. No ports, difficult terrain to defend with one army and you're going to find yourself at war with whole Ulthuan rather quickly.
-Started as Luthor Harkon instead, it's a lot more trickier starting without necrofex collossus
-Not rushing to defeat the mutineers early and complimenting my army with mortar first proved to be a wise decision. I also waited a bit to upgrade my captain's chamber on my fleet first instead of immediately getting a growth building to get an early vampire captain hero.
-An ensuring battle against the mutineers was big enough to give me scurvy dogs on my raise dead panel, these dogs made my life a lot easier in that first quest battle against the dark elves. Easy battle for Noctilus with his collossus and a bit harder for Luthor if you can't take out their bolt throwers early.
-That mist ritual that grants a vanguard deployment to a bunch of your units is rather fun, on certain maps it allows you to put a bloated corpse right in front of your enemy's face
-As luthor Harkon you have a few good places nearby to expand your main territory and a bunch good targets to do some actual piracy and plant some coves in the form of New World colonies, i find it a good idea to form a nap with the skaven so that you have a fewer fronts to worry about. (even though their ports are also a good targets for planting a bunch of pirate coves)
-I adore the fact that your heroes are using the big hermit crabs as mounts.
-Luthor is quite amazing once he gets his terrorgheist mount

While i dig the whole "vampire pirates" theme they have going for them i honestly didn't enjoy their playstyle at first - aka the core of your army are slow ass zombies with guns who are very vulnerable to archers. It was only when i got the scurvy dogs and later complimented my forces with some syreens did i find them fun to play as.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

why do you care for enemy archers when most of your army is made of gigantic artillery pieces with awesome range? you can nullify anything you deem a threat well before it might become one. you can field anti-infantry artillery, anti-large artillery and anti-everyone-and-his-dog monstrosities which can keep bombarding while they move and are absolute killers in melee if needed.

 

[Average Manatee]

-I am starting to get why people talk so much shit about the horde mechanic, it takes awhile until it grows enough so you can actually rectruit something usefull with it.

Its also weird cause every race has a differently balanced horde system. Dark Elves for example have insanely quick growth on dark arks (+5 per main building level and +5 per growth building level 1-3) along with huge automatic discounts with the main building. So they can basically create doomstacks immediately to go raid cities, like how dark elves should play. By level 3 you're getting almost 2 pops per turn and end up overflowing with support weapons and the ability to buy all heroes and bonuses to experience levels and looting ability. But then you get to hordes like Beastmen. What's that, incredibly slow growth and to get a decent discount you need a level 5 building? Welp, guess its time to disband your army, go hide in a corner and hit end turn 50 times. Vamp Pirates are kind of in-between IIRC.

 

[Kabas]

why do you care for enemy archers when most of your army is made of gigantic artillery pieces with awesome range? you can nullify anything you deem a threat well before it might become one. you can field anti-infantry artillery, anti-large artillery and anti-everyone-and-his-dog monstrosities which can keep bombarding while they move and are absolute killers in melee if needed.

Mostly my early experiences with blindly following the quests and trying to take over the Caledor as Noctilus with starting Necrofex as my only artillery piece without returning to my base or at least using a global recruitment to add some mortars against the archer spaming elves.
I should have probalby clarified(or worded it differently altogether) that it's not me saying gunnery mob with handguns are weak or something but it's just i personally didn't enjoy vampire coast focus on ranged/artillery gamestyle until i got some fast sweepers and melee monsters to compliment all their main pieces.