Warhammer Total War: Warhammer 2

[Angelo85]

Currently I'm deliberating if I should get Warhammer 2. I own Warhammer 1 and the Chaos faction DLC, nothing else.

- If I purchase Warhammer 2, which DLCs (also from Warhammer 1?) are essential? I understand that they add units, heroes, stuffies. I mostly played the good guy armies, especially dwarves. In Warhammer 2 I would probably play the High Elves first. And in the both-games-in-one mode I would start with a Dwarven run.

- Which faction DLCs can you recommend?

- Which Mods do you deem essential and/or can you recommend?

 

[vonAchdorf]

I like the Tomb Kings.

 

[Drakron]

-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.

Thats not the main problem and you are not playing a Horde faction, you have settlements that are the problem with Horde factions as they have none that creates a problem as you can never fall back. Its unlikely you lose the Galleon Graveyard and you can grow economically with Pirate Coves, there are only two real Horde factions in WHII, Beastman and Chaos and Beastman are incredible hard to play because whats their Victory conditions? Destroy the Empire and Carcassonne (look at the bright side, they dont ask you to destroy the Wood Elves) that happen to be factions that can spiral out of control, you have to destroy both of then right fucking now before they start their confederacy ball and then play wack-a-elector-count to win the short campaign victory and hope the Empire doesnt respawn when you arent looking, heck long campaign means also the Dwarves but I think you better off leaving the "dying race" grabbing the settlements you blown up simply because they are better at keeping revolts in check and preventing Empire factions to respawn because of revolts.

 

[thesheeep]

you can grow economically with Pirate Coves

Not really.
You can only place a pirate cove in factions you are at peace with every 10 turns (or was it even longer?). It's extremely expensive, too.
And upgrading it is even more expensive. You can easily spend 10k on a cove, money better spent on an army that is going out to raze and conquer.
It would take an eternity for that cove to start paying for itself - and even then, that only happens in case that settlement isn't razed or destroyed by anyone. If that does happen (and it happened to me in over 70% of my coves), your entire investment is lost.

So it is a high-cost and high-risk investment, that has a way too long cooldown.

You can place pirate coves in settlements you are at war with, of course, and for free, too - but why would you ever do that vs just grabbing the entire settlement?
Since you are at war with the faction, they are a threat to you and you'll destroy them, anyway - so eventually your cove would get lost anyway.
There is no good reason to place a cove after winning a settlement fight. It's like choosing between getting all profit from a settlement vs just a bit (and that bit can easily be lost again).

In addition to all that, coves do not show up in your list of owned settlements so managing them is a finicky nightmare.
In the end, there really is no point in pirate coves vs just conquering everything.

About the Vampire Coast gameplay:
Their biggest problem is that they are a one-trick pony. Most factions allow you to play them in a variety of ways.
But Vampire Coast's only playstyle is tons of artillery + ranged behind chaff. Maybe Cylostra with a banshee + mournghoul army would be the only alternative.
Their artillery and ranged is quite good, yes.
But all of their other units are honestly pretty bad. Depth Guard was nerfed into the ground from a good tank+DPS to a barely usable DPS, which is terrible given their high tier.
Deck droppers are useless against ranged factions - which is funny given you'll mostly be fighting elves.
There's no cavalry.
It is a big problem to get your ranged infantry to actually shoot at the enemy if they don't happen to be on a hill or your frontline is crabs. There are better frontline units than crabs, but since they are spread out so far, they allow gunfire units behind them to actually do something.

Basically, Skaven can do everything VC can do - except better.

On a positive note - I don't think there's a more satisfying unit than Queen Bess. And no more satisfying spell than the Vangheist's Revenge. And the meme potential of bloated corpses is insane - at least in campaign.

I also found them fun to play, but I don't think I'll do another campaign with the pirates. Maybe with SFO.
CA really wasted some opportunity with them.

 

[valky667]

Beastman and Chaos and Beastman are incredible hard to play because whats their Victory conditions? Destroy the Empire and Carcassonne (look at the bright side, they dont ask you to destroy the Wood Elves) that happen to be factions that can spiral out of control, you have to destroy both of then right fucking now before they start their confederacy ball and then play wack-a-elector-count to win the short campaign victory and hope the Empire doesnt respawn when you arent looking, heck long campaign means also the Dwarves but I think you better off leaving the "dying race" grabbing the settlements you blown up simply because they are better at keeping revolts in check and preventing Empire factions to respawn because of revolts.

The Steam board is full of whine and mimimi for these 2 factions, finished both of them roughly half a year ago on VH and Beastmen was even my second run. They were fun as hell!
For Beastmen: most player idle around far from their goal way too long and are wondering why the fucking Empire grows so strong. You have been given 2 uber-awesome tools to prevent that shit from happening; a hidden encampment and the most devastating ambush ever.
The latter even wins against the Skaven one, which is by far by most fancied race/faction *yes-yes*. I mean you start within spitting range on an unique map, where they can't retreat, because that area is blocked...bye-bye fancy Reiksguard, Helstorm & Rockit launcherz.
If you ain't razing empire settlements at turn 10 you are doing it wrong. And by that time I slowly trained a 2nd horde already...the later ones went straight into upkeep reduction and I shifted around some units from my main horde(s).
Their low tier units are uttermost garbage, that's the only challenge: to get to Gors & Minotaurs.

Took me a bit longer than anticipated in the end, because I ignored Gelt for a few turns....

THat was before VC got strong again .. with the latest DLC Brets have a new threat and VC does some angry shit again on the map. In my Grom campaign they took over the whole Empire region and up to Kiev Kislev, with a little help on my end Didn't even noticed the Chaos invasion....and Vlad had probably the highest level I've ever seen in the hands of the AI (34 !). Grom was incredible fun as well - supreme gobbo power and even managed to turn that into a long campaign victory - nullifying pointy ears from the map is the best stuff.

(Was short victory only for Chaos & BM, though .. )

ymmv

- Which Mods do you deem essential and/or can you recommend?

I play rather barebone and the mods am using, that change some aspect: proper_combat, tabletop caps, loreful great power, loreful diplomacy & community bugfix. Else it's just QoL and gfx stuff.

(I've to start posting somewhere *cough* spent the last days reading and my acc was still active *yay*)

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

final missions were definitely not tailored for SFO and limited use for elite units in mind. i had my vampire bitch king charge the enemy, full health, still in the walking phase, and some seconds later poof, he's gone, no idea why, he went from undead to reallyreallydead in a blink.
maybe all the enemy artillery units zeroed on him and all of their shots fully hit, all at once, i wouldn't know, he just disappeared.

 

[valky667]

SFO

I've a strong phobia against major overhauls, they tend to be garbage, bugged as shit and in some/most cases fancy Order. The very exception is DeI, as some might agree, that vanilla Rome II is still 'flawed', to put it mildly.

Boys will be Boys or CTT: stupid ponsy pointy ears getting their full wardsave for their Phoenix Guard (50% or 4+) but Skaven Gutterrunner or Deathrunner are dumbed down to 8% or 16% for 'balancing reasons', while they should have 16% or 33% respective.
They even said, that they are using mostly 6th + 7th edition, but in rat's case it's obviously the mix of house rules and 8th ed....balancing my ass.

Same with the so called TT-caps mod, sure give the pointy ones the cheapest dragons, even if they are the strongest in the game and by lore - 2 point dragons / 1 point phoenix as rare units. While every other faction (read: DE, VC + VC) have to pay 3 points for theirs...
Took me 1 hour to fix that shit according my proper rule-books.
(don't get me started with the scaled ones, but move all special units from TK towards rare.)
Still a decent mod once fixed ^^

The latter in addition to 'mod recommendations' above. Ain't that bad if you never dabbled TT and don't care, but most important: it fixes the AI spam of certain units and denies the player in doing so as well. Fights are a lot more fun that way and I tend to play 90% of all battles usually to avoid losses and to rush.

 

[thesheeep]

bugged as shit and in some/most cases fancy Order.

Honestly sounds like vanilla to me
I really didn't find the major overhauls that I tried (SFO and Lucky's) very buggy - certainly not more than vanilla.
They just change everything around and offer a very different experience, basically giving you a lot more value for the money you spent on the game.

 

[Average Manatee]

Pirate coves are OK in high-value enemy capitals that are likely to never be destroyed. Places like Lothern make a good amount of money.

Of course its still way less useful than the skaven variant which can spread itself like a weed across an entire continent to make you tons of free food and money.

 

[valky667]

Honestly sounds like vanilla to me
I really didn't find the major overhauls that I tried (SFO and Lucky's) very buggy - certainly not more than vanilla.
They just change everything around and offer a very different experience, basically giving you a lot more value for the money you spent on the game.

Community bugfix does that already - but yeah, there are some aspects of the game or let's call 'em bugs, that are present for ages and haven't been touched by the developer. It's more important to give in to the whining MP community - strong that one is.
SFO adds too much 'fantasy' units - sounds weird but in case of Warhammer I'd rather have it loreful. Dismounted Reiksguard or other dismounted 'knights' ... yeah
Vanilla orcs are still a joke compared to their TT stats - thy shall outshine the empire peasants, but have much weaker stats. And it's quite obvious, that I don't necessarily like Elves, maybe even stunties...Bretonnia anyway. Had to do the pointy ears once for achievement, but oh boy that is such a boring faction. Now they've gotten even endtime shit to their roster, sure thing .. as if they weren't OP enough. Stupids

Everything to one's liking, though ^.^

 

[zapotec]

Wow New DLC will be Wood elves along with Beastmen overhaul I guess:
https://www.totalwar.com/blog/dev-blog-july-2020/

Total War: WARHAMMER II
The realm of the Wood Elves returns…

We can reveal that the next DLC for WARHAMMER II is indeed a Lord Pack, focusing on the Wood Elves, and we will also be revisiting one of the original core races from WARHAMMER II.

This Lords Pack is packed full of all of the great content that you’ve come to expect from Total War DLC, but this time we are excited to talk to you about a few additional ways we are giving a little extra back to our fans who have joined us on this journey through the Warhammer world! However, there’s a couple of things that you need to know about it, so please take a glance through the below for a bit of a breakdown

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

This Lords Pack is packed full of all of the great content that you’ve come to expect from Total War DLC

do they realise that their dlcs are worth about a week or two of a lone modder's work?

 

[Fedora Master]

This Lords Pack is packed full of all of the great content that you’ve come to expect from Total War DLC

do they realise that their dlcs are worth about a week or two of a lone modder's work?

Now, since people can add their own models. Before that not so much.

 

[Jaedar]

The realm of the Wood Elves returns…

Damn. Wood elves are annoying as all hell to deal with, them being losers who just sit in their forests all game long is great.

 

[A horse of course]

To make it "clearer" on the Welf DLC:

I think it's awesome CA are clarifying this for fantasoy players, who have trouble processing large amounts of information at one time

 

[Drakron]

The Steam board is full of whine and mimimi for these 2 factions, finished both of them roughly half a year ago on VH and Beastmen was even my second run. They were fun as hell!
For Beastmen: most player idle around far from their goal way too long and are wondering why the fucking Empire grows so strong. You have been given 2 uber-awesome tools to prevent that shit from happening; a hidden encampment and the most devastating ambush ever.

Pre or post Empire rework?

Because there is a big difference, the Empire significantly got buffed and yes, taking Karl out is key because he is the only one that can confederate into the Empire as the others seems to be unable to do so as well the new mechanic of gifting the destroyed settlement to its original owner, Carcassonne is also a problem because they can confederate with crusading factions and suddenly you have to sail south into the desert because they have one settlement left near the end of the map border.

There are other issues, I think that Beastman as well Chaos should be able to fuck up settlements so hard you could not just hire a general and resettle it, they should make it so they could not be resettled by a number of turns or being their own "minifaction" of sorts simply to give then a garrison that would stop being taken over the next turn, Nakai have a similar mechanic.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

some deprecated mod had cities razed by chaos spread corruption forever (and not just for 5 turns) and spawn armies of demons. i never had a chance to try it. i'd even settle for some "corruption is actually scary", as in a 100% corruption eating armies alive in 3-4 turns and/or severely slowing them down and removing attrition immunity from the raiding stance which is quite retarded: if my army is taking damage because terrain is hostile, no amount of running around destroying whatever i can see will feed and heal it, especially where there isn't civilization.
thinking of it, raiding should damage armies and only entrenching should heal them. this behaviour is especially idiotic while playing tomb kings: the black piramid of whatsitsname produces quite some money and can't declare war, so you just park some low level general with a trainer or two, set on raiding and rack both money and levels. forever.

 

[Delterius]

rip beast players

 

[Average Manatee]

The Steam board is full of whine and mimimi for these 2 factions, finished both of them roughly half a year ago on VH and Beastmen was even my second run. They were fun as hell!
For Beastmen: most player idle around far from their goal way too long and are wondering why the fucking Empire grows so strong. You have been given 2 uber-awesome tools to prevent that shit from happening; a hidden encampment and the most devastating ambush ever.

Pre or post Empire rework?

Because there is a big difference, the Empire significantly got buffed and yes, taking Karl out is key because he is the only one that can confederate into the Empire as the others seems to be unable to do so as well the new mechanic of gifting the destroyed settlement to its original owner, Carcassonne is also a problem because they can confederate with crusading factions and suddenly you have to sail south into the desert because they have one settlement left near the end of the map border.

There are other issues, I think that Beastman as well Chaos should be able to fuck up settlements so hard you could just hire a general and resettle it, they should make it so they could not be resettled by a number of turns or being their own "minifaction" of sorts simply to give then a garrison that would stop being taken over the next turn, Nakai have a similar mechanic.

Nakai is honestly worse than just razing the settlements. At least when you raze a settlement AI armies will then go colonize it and lose 50% of their stack. With Nakai they just kill the shitty defense forces and lose next to nothing.

Also having recently done a Beastmen game I really didn't have a huge problem keeping the good guys down. Greenskins and Vampires were basically right behind me colonizing settlement as soon as I razed them. And I didn't go after them early, I hid in a corner till I could get a full stack of minotaurs and started work on the border princes.

Bretonnia confederating Repanse was annoying bullshit though.

 

[valky667]

Pre or post Empire rework?

Because there is a big difference, the Empire significantly got buffed and yes, taking Karl out is key because he is the only one that can confederate into the Empire as the others seems to be unable to do so as well the new mechanic of gifting the destroyed settlement to its original owner, Carcassonne is also a problem because they can confederate with crusading factions and suddenly you have to sail south into the desert because they have one settlement left near the end of the map border.

Blood-Grounds, Everywhere! - Unlocked 23 Dec, 2019 @ 4:04pm

The key was like @Manatee mentioned to get a reasonable ally - back then, VC was super passive.
I did chose the superior race of rats! Clan Moulder re-settled everything faster than I could raze....similar to my Chaos campaign, also around that time. The early game was bothering the Empire as much as possible and getting up a 3rd army; Malagor (start) + nameless guy + Khazrak.
Without an ally, it would be a massive snowballing and you would probably never win the campaign, because you can't just insta-create another army - my upkeep was usually within -5 up to -15k, which could be easily negated with razing + raiding. The latter only with a decent army.

Usually went blueline for growth and got for new hordes the upkeep reduction building first, the razing boost then helped to develop them further until they could maintain themselves. Else they were within arms reach of one main army of mine.
Tried SKryre as well, but must have been unlucky, because they didn't do much at first - but helped later to settle the Bretonnia provinces. Ikit was kinda suicidal against WE ....

Also having recently done a Beastmen game I really didn't have a huge problem keeping the good guys down. Greenskins and Vampires were basically right behind me colonizing settlement as soon as I razed them. And I didn't go after them early, I hid in a corner till I could get a full stack of minotaurs and started work on the border princes.

Bretonnia confederating Repanse was annoying bullshit though.

Yeah, as I said above back then only the rats were a reliable ally - now we have Grom & super aggressive VC. the latter should manage alone, but I noticed in my Grom campaign to not ignore the Empire - VC might be on the rush, but once Karl, Gelt + Mustache Guy on a wagon *lol* gets past level 20 (and this happens sooner or later). VC gets pressured back greatly. Volkmar & melt-Gelt can be a real pain in the ass ... Franz is the lesser evil in the hands of the AI. Superior goblin Spearmen made sure of that - that cooking buffs, though! holy shit

And because they added Norsca achievements *cough* after I finished them, this is still on my to-do list. That should be fun...played them way before all the Empire etc overhauls with Trogg. But razed the whole friggin' world and obliterated any & every Order faction - so much fun. That was probably my longest campaign ever

 

[Lycra Suit]

I downloaded a mod that multiplies the size of the Chaos Invasion by 10. Manfred had significantly weakened the Empire by turn 100. Order tide still managed to beat back the invasion with minimal input from me.

What the fuck do I try next.

 

[Beggar]

All the DLC's are cracked since yesterday

 

[Olinser]

I downloaded a mod that multiplies the size of the Chaos Invasion by 10. Manfred had significantly weakened the Empire by turn 100. Order tide still managed to beat back the invasion with minimal input from me.

What the fuck do I try next.

Auto resolve mod and something that either gives them replenishment or makes them smart enough to stop and replenish. Since AI vs AI is exclusively autoresolve, even poor AI stacks do a lot of casualties to Chaos invasions, and since they never take towns they're too stupid to stop and replenish so they keep pushing forward, losing troops till they finally get beaten.

 

[Jaedar]

I downloaded a mod that multiplies the size of the Chaos Invasion by 10. Manfred had significantly weakened the Empire by turn 100. Order tide still managed to beat back the invasion with minimal input from me.

What the fuck do I try next.

Auto resolve mod and something that either gives them replenishment or makes them smart enough to stop and replenish. Since AI vs AI is exclusively autoresolve, even poor AI stacks do a lot of casualties to Chaos invasions, and since they never take towns they're too stupid to stop and replenish so they keep pushing forward, losing troops till they finally get beaten.

The autoresolve also has some issues understanding how powerful damaged units are. Once something hits 50% health, it seems to contribute almost nothing to the autoresolve score.

 

[Raghar]

BTW TW WH2 was liberated recently.