Total War: Warhammer

[Zenn7]

Got this as part of the humble bundle subscription. I payed around $11.50/mo for 3 months.

So far Xcom 2 and Total War: Warhammer have been the hallmark titles. Awesome.

I'm pretty sure you can buy the game outright on humble bundle for somewhere around 8 bucks right now as well.

More like $59.99 (53.99 if you have one of the 10% off coupons for being a monthly subscriber). Think maybe you were seeing some of the DLC, some are around $8.

If you have not subscribed before and want to save a couple pennies off $12, get the Civ bundle for $1 (Civ3/Civ4 both complete) and get the 10% off for new subscribers coupon. Only works if you have never sub'd to Humble Bundle monthly before. Did that, got the sub for $10.80.

[GreenGoo]

It's true that I didn't look closely at what was for sale and I didn't realize there were so many dlc's for the game.

My apologies.

[Zenn7]

It's true that I didn't look closely at what was for sale and I didn't realize there were so many dlc's for the game.

My apologies.

It's all good, just thought I might have missed an even better deal and didn't want anyone to get too excited and then disappointed. Not that $12 isn't a great price for the game.

Err... maybe I should reserve that opinion until I get my new PC and actually play it. It'd likely run on my current PC (battles might suck, but I'm sure the strategic game will run fine). But this is my high end game to really test out the new PC and enjoy it. Waiting for the real fun.

[GreenGoo]

This is not the first time I've been careless like that and announced a price for something that wasn't accurate.

I need to pay closer attention before opening my mouth.

In any case I'm really looking forward to playing the game finally.

There seems to be a lot of dlc. That's usually a turn off for me but I don't know what they are yet.

[Blackhawk]

The $20 ones are new factions. The $8 ones are new leaders and units for existing units. The $3 one is a blood patch. Yeah, they removed blood for ratings purposes, then are selling it back for three bucks. The free ones are mostly free single units.


On the bright side, the Bretonnia DLC releases today for free. Bretonnia is a faction based on the high middle ages with a very strong Arthurian flavor. Heavily armored knights, chivalry, heraldry, quests for grails, and hordes of revolting peasants. I've been looking forward to trying this one, as I loved painting the Brettonians.

As an aside you might appreciate, when you play the Empire, you'll see Nuln and Helmgart. At the edge of the mountain range right between them is Ubersreik, where Vermintide takes place.

[Lorini]

Don't worry about the doc unless you decide you want more stuff.

[NickAragua]

Yeah, there's really no point in me buying DLC for a Total War game, since I never even finish the base games usually. The "total victory" conditions are usually set to way beyond the point where you know you're going to win. I've got a game of Rome 2 Total War sitting in limbo right now because, as the Macedonians, I've got control of Greece, Africa, Italy and Egypt. Oh, and all of the Persian area. All I have to do is capture two more regions and I'll have met the victory conditions. But how much do I really care about slogging through ten-twenty more battles that I know I'm going to win? I've got six armies full of veteran elite badass units against a bunch of scrubs that are little more than peasants. Maybe I'll fire it up tonight and just auto-resolve everything.

Anyway, the point of that rant is to illustrate that I'm unlikely to even go through the main campaign in this game for one faction, let alone feel a need to play through as a second one or play through with so many that I need extra DLC factions.

Speaking of which, what factions do people like? I'm leaning towards Dwarfs or Orks, but could be convinced to try some flavor of human as well.

[Sepiche]

Speaking of which, what factions do people like? I'm leaning towards Dwarfs or Orks, but could be convinced to try some flavor of human as well.

Dwarves have rock solid infantry to hold the line with, and excellent ranged attacks, but they are tricky in the campaign as they lack cavalry to act as a hammer or to completely rout enemy armies. Closest thing they have is gyrocopters, but those come later, and aren't as good as a nice unit of heavy knights. Great army if you can learn to adapt to their shortcomings.

Orcs have a more balanced roster, but they have lots of terrible infantry that's pretty useless except at slowing other armies down. If you stick to their better units though they can take on pretty much anything.

I noticed the Bretonnia patch was available to play last night, and I hopped in for a bit. It will definitely be a big change to the campaign map as, among other things, Bretonnia starts at war with Marianburg, and the other Bretonnian factions look to start a little stronger. Also lots of new units... questing knights, men at arms, plus they have a special ability to summon the green knight to help them occasionally. Looking forward to really digging into it tonight.

[Freyland]

Dwarves have rock solid infantry to hold the line with, and excellent ranged attacks, but they are tricky in the campaign as they lack cavalry to act as a hammer or to completely rout enemy armies. Closest thing they have is gyrocopters, but those come later, and aren't as good as a nice unit of heavy knights. Great army if you can learn to adapt to their shortcomings.

I saw what you did there...

[NickAragua]

Went and started a game of this last night. After much agonizing thought, I went with the most basic, boring approach of Empire/Franz on hard difficulty.

Pretty easy tutorial battle, where the orc "leader" didn't even make it to the battle. Instead, he ran at the nearby city wall and got stuck while an arrow tower pummeled him. I was busy fighting his other guys and forgot about him until I heard "the enemy leader flees like a coward" or something similar.

The rest of the game proceeded without a hitch. I subdued the empire secessionists in very short order (although I had to put up a second half-army to match the rebel numbers), defeated an ambush battle quest and then decided it would be a good idea to confederate with nearby buddy Talabecland. Boy, that was a mistake. My income dropped by about 2000 gold a turn, public order dropped like a rock and all other nearby human nations suddenly got pissed off, breaking non-aggression pacts left and right. The income, I fixed by disbanding about 3/4 of the "free" Talabec army I got as well my entire second half-army. The public order, I "fixed" by carefully only letting it run down to -98. Thankfully, none of the other human nations actually declared war before the confederation penalty went away.

I used the time productively though, to crush a one-territory vampire nation. That was a remarkably different fight from empire vs empire or empire vs ork - the vampires had a *lot* of flyers, which is why it's a good thing my army was about 1/3 crossbows. The zombies and ghouls and such died in very short order as did the flyers. Unfortunately, I lost my only melee cavalry unit to a loose enemy cavalry unit and enemy hero. Eventually, I'll recruit more, I imagine. I just need to save up the 4k to build a Reiksguard station.

Overall, I really like this iteration. Other than one AI hiccup in the scripted tutorial, I don't think I've seen any of the standard "stupid" AI that I've come to expect from Total War. We'll see how it does in an actual siege, though.

[GreenGoo]

Not sure who I'm going to start as. Possibly undead.

[NickAragua]

... aaand, the empire, having overextended itself fighting random one-territory vampire kingdoms in the east, gets completely gutted by three armies: two beastmen hordes and a savage ork army. And even when I got my "main army" back to the fight (after having three towns razed to the ground), they got completely routed by a force of beastmen a third their size. Possibly because I didn't have any cavalry. Guess I got a little overconfident in the basic human vs human and human vs vampire scrub fights. Should have gone balls out with Reiksguard instead of screwing around with spear infantry and other such nonsense. Time for a new game.

[Blackhawk]

The thing that really helped me was leaving the northern provinces alone until after the Chaos invasion happened, allowing them to serve as a 'buffer' in which all of the other factions fought them.

[NickAragua]

Lessons learned from failed game #1:

- "Confederating" will effectively impose a -40 penalty on public order (-8 per turn x 5 turns) and piss off every other empire faction temporarily. So, immediately post confederation, I should expect to hunker down for at least five turns (as opposed to getting into a war halfway across the world in which I have no business being involved)
- Taking over a vampire or chaos town is useless unless you a) plan to take over the whole area and b) plan to maintain your military in the area for a while. That corruption and public order penalty all but guarantees that, unless you have a strong military presence in the region, the province will get razed by the undead within a few turns of the main army heading elsewhere.
- Quit screwing around with low-tier infantry and rush for higher end stuff.
- The human player no longer has a monopoly on the ability to execute basic flanking attacks.
- Quit getting into "military alliances". The jerkoffs keep dragging me into wars I don't want and breaking my trade routes.

[Blackhawk]

I had a military leader and a single priest hero whose only purpose was to stem corruption. They had all the skills, followers, and items to bolster that. If I wanted to attack a Vampire province, I'd send the priest in and deploy him to start lowering the corruption. After I hit them, I'd move the leader in (usually with a stack of three or four of my cheapest troops) and station him in one of the towns.

Empire also taught me to never underestimate the value of sabotaging an enemy town you wanted to attack. I had one spot I needed to attack that I couldn't put a dent in with multiple stacks. I sent a couple of saboteurs in, though, and destroyed their garrison and support buildings, then was able to simply walk in and set up shop.

Oh, and as to alliances - be very, very careful with the Dwarves. Towards the end of the campaign, they asked me to join them in a war on a large faction (Wood Elves?) that I couldn't afford to fight right then. I said no. They went from adoring me one turn to breaking all alliances and treaties with me the second to declaring war the third. They don't take their Book of Grudges lightly.

[GreenGoo]

Watched some of the tutorial videos, read some info on Vampire Counts units, started new campaign as Counts.

Holy freakin' hell, they don't start you off easy (easy as in gently introduce game systems, not easy as in easy to win the fight). There were so many units, 1/2 of which were acting on their on volition, while the other half I struggled to understand what they were and what they could do and what all the symbols meant that I just lasso'd a bunch of them and right-clicked on the other side of the wall I was sieging.

Talk about overwhelming information overload. That was brutal. I was expecting a small battle, maybe 2 or 3 units + hero on my side defending/taking a bridge or something. This was a full blown assault on a fortified position.

I guess I'm saying that I found it offputting. Once I won (a close victory) due to nothing other than having more units than the other guy, I quickly shut the game down and returned to xcom2 where I understand what I'm doing, even if I don't do it well.

TOO MUCH INFO.

I'll return after more reading and/or video watching.

Also, I was surprised at the scope of the camera. I expected a more close, visceral view of the combat, but even zoomed in the individual units in each formation were tiny and hard to see.

[NickAragua]

Yeah, the tutorial battles are intended to be "awesome set pieces". I don't think you actually even retain any of the units involved. After the tutorial is over, the nonsense gets ratcheted down a bit and it becomes a pretty standard Total War game. Well, as the empire anyway. With your standard sword and crossbow scrubs fighting minotaurs and giant flesh golems. The other factions all seem to have some pretty unique units and mechanisms, though, so it may be more of a learning curve playing those.

[Blackhawk]

The Dwarves and Empire (and presumably Brettonia) are they typical Total War factions that can be played similarly to the earlier games. The others use some different mechanics.

[GreenGoo]

Yeah, the tutorial battles are intended to be "awesome set pieces". I don't think you actually even retain any of the units involved. After the tutorial is over, the nonsense gets ratcheted down a bit and it becomes a pretty standard Total War game

I assumed this, since at least 1/2 the units were automated.

That said, even the campaign map was intimidating with very little guidance as to what does what and what my initial short term objectives might be.

I do NOT like trying to learn a game as I go, so this is particularly vexing for me, whereas my son would just click on things until everything became more familiar. He'd also set it to the lowest difficulty level, immediately look for cheat codes and if none could be found, look for mods that make things overwhelmingly in favour of the player.

I was hoping due to my limited experience with the series (played the crap out of the original shogun, dabbled in Medieval) I could wing it a bit.

Ah well, I normally do a ton of reading on a strategy game before I play it anyway. No reason this one should be different, I guess.

[Blackhawk]

There are a few set-piece battles that crop up like that, where you have your own force and there is are AI reinforcements that show up. They happen from time to time in the quests.

[Lorini]

This video really helped me control battles better.

[Blackhawk]

I would recommend this entire series. He gives a configuration option for a closer camera view, although if you're not mod-adverse, there is a camera mod on the Steam Workshop that does a much better job (the debug camera can clip through the ground sometimes.)

[GreenGoo]

I would recommend this entire series. He gives a configuration option for a closer camera view, although if you're not mod-adverse, there is a camera mod on the Steam Workshop that does a much better job (the debug camera can clip through the ground sometimes.)

Yeah, I watched some of those already.

I'm completely confident I can get a handle on things and being rolling along just fine eventually. My objection was about the fact that my very first contact with the game was overly complex with too many moving parts to allow for any sort of learning experience to occur..

After perusing a few pages of a book on swimming, your first contact with actual water shouldn't be in the deep ocean during a tsunami, is all I'm saying.

[Lorini]

They assume that you've played all or at least some of the others in the Total War Series.

[GreenGoo]

They assume that you've played all or at least some of the others in the Total War Series.

They assumed correctly.

It's been awhile.

[NickAragua]

Played through a few turns of coop campaign with a friend last night. It's good fun - any time you're in a battle, you can hand off control of some of your units to your buddy (or, in the case of a 'head to head' campaign, the buddy can control the opposing force). We spent the entire game trying and failing to assault Marienburg. Between him getting his Bretonnian cavalry wiped out in brutal city street combat, the damn nearby orks coming out to wipe out reinforcement armies and my empire army being repelled by the Marienburg counterattack, we decided to call it quits after the third or fourth battle in that province.

Still, good stuff.

[GreenGoo]

Started again with the Counts. Knowing what to expect and having seen it once, the second time wasn't nearly as overwhelming. When the battle starts you only have control of 2 unites. Some w(raith/ight?) guards and and your leader. As the battle develops you gain control of more units. I believe at the end I had control over 2 units of zombies, 2 skeleton warriors, 2 w guards, 1 w**gheist, 1 fell bats and your leader.

So the game slowly grows your personal army as the battle rages on. The left and right flank are completely automated.

In my defense, the first time I tried it, I had no idea who I had control over, what all the units were, how to use siege towers (not knowing these were automated, I was fairly panicked) or the best way to siege in this game (obviously I understand basic siege tactics, but the specifics of the game and the units were still a mystery to me).

In any case, it was a calmer, more insightful battle than the last time.

On the campaign map, instead of trying to figure out what everything was, I simply followed the advisor's instructions and ignored the rest, which made things linear and easier to comprehend in bite sized chunks.

None of this really changes my initial impression, which was overwhelming for a guy that has played Total War games before and considers himself a relatively experienced strategy game player after decades of play.

But none of that matters now that I've started making some progress on the campaign map and only have a few basic units in my army.

As before, I'm really looking forward to getting into the meat of the game. I like Total War, I used to be ambivalent about the War Hammer universe (I *really* like the WH40K one though) but the 2 together has really got my attention. Reviews have all been extremely positive which have increased my excitement about playing the game.

Time to blood kiss some foo's.

[Sepiche]

Stayed home sick yesterday, so I had some time to sink into my Bretonnia game. They start out in a bit of a tough situation at war with Marienburg and with hostile orcs in the nearby mountains.

I opted to go for the orcs first to remove the threat of incursions, then built up my army a little bit my adding as many peasants as I could manage with the cap the Brets have, and a few knights errant. Then I crossed the river and took Marienburg's settlement in the badlands. I was hoping that would draw out Marienburg's army, but no luck there.

After that I returned my army to the capital and made peace with Marienburg as they had a full stack sitting in their capital and I couldn't recruit another army to help take it.. both because of the peasant cap and my income. I spent a number of turns starting to research the techs to let me confederate with the Bret factions around me. Because you get penalized for fighting other Bret factions, and because confederation doesn't have a downside for Brets, it seems like the best mid game tactic is to befriend and ally up with all the other Bret factions, and slowly gain enough power to convince them to join you.

Soon after getting the first few heraldry techs, Mousillon declared war on Lyonesse, so I joined them in their war and after a few turns that was enough of a boost to our relations, along with defeating a encroaching undead stack, that they agreed to confederate. Mousillon still had a strong garrison plus two full armies of undead, so I couldn't hope to win in a straight battle, so for many turns we had a stalemate. It finally broke after a few more turns when I was able to get Bordeleaux to confederate and that gave me enough extra peasants and money to support a small secondary army.

I stationed the smaller army near Mousillon, and that successfully baited one of Mousillon's armies out into the field. That weakened the defenses of their city so when their army headed south to try to take Bordeleaux, I sent my stacks after their capital and took it. That just left defeating the last undead stack which was pretty easy.

Now I'm just rebuilding and expanding my army to convince the last few holdouts to confederate with me. I just convinced Carcassone to join me, so once I confederate with Artois and Bastonne I'll control the vast majority of Bretonnia except for a couple of territories Estalia took from Carcassone. My plan is build up a little more and then send forces south to liberate those territories and then invade and take over Estalia.

So far the campaign is a lot of fun, and is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone in both the campaign itself and the battles. My preferred strategy is usually armies of heavy infantry, backed with a few missile weapons, and a few units of heavy knights to act as a hammer. However Bretonnia's infantry are so mediocre and limited in numbers that I've been forced to make their excellent knights the centerpiece of my army rather than the infantry. Instead of letting enemies hit my line of infantry and then flanking them with cavalry, I've started using a massed formation of knights in lance formation to charge and punch through the enemy army and follow that up with my infantry. That breaks the enemy units apart, does a lot of charge damage to them, and gives my infantry a much better chance of holding against the now scattered enemy units. Then if my knights were able to completely punch through they can wheel around and start hitting the enemy support units and flanking their infantry line. My damsel also has a lot of spells that throw enemy units around, so I tend to have her start landing spells as my knights approach to both debuff them and break their formations up.

On the campaign map the Bretonnians lose Chivalry points (which gives them stat boosts and they need it to summon the green knight) if they raid or ambush, so my preferred tactic in drawing out defensive enemies also doesn't work so well. I took the hit to my chivalry by raiding for a while, but after too long that gives your general a permanent penalty, so it is best avoided (at least with your main general).

[GreenGoo]

Why is TW:W telling me it's out of video memory on loading screens and that it is downgrading my video while running on a GTX 980 with 12 4 gigs of memory?

google tells me the min. system requirements are 1gig of video memory and the req. system requirements are 2 gigs.

edit: Loading was so long that I moved it to my ssd. It actually surprised me how much faster it was. I mean, I knew it was going to be faster, that's why I have an ssd in the first place, but it went from "this is the longest loading I've seen in years" to "that's not bad at all".

[Jag]

edit: Loading was so long that I moved it to my ssd. It actually surprised me how much faster it was. I mean, I knew it was going to be faster, that's why I have an ssd in the first place, but it went from "this is the longest loading I've seen in years" to "that's not bad at all".

Hmm, about to DL this. Was going to put in on my regular drive, but maybe I should put in on the SSD. I just don't know how much I'll play it.

How's the single player campaign? I got kind of bored with Rome II TW.

[GreenGoo]

I'm in no position to compare it to most other TW games, so I can't help, sorry. I know I think it's pretty cool, but if the battles can't keep your attention, not sure the strategy portion would.

[Blackhawk]

How's the single player campaign? I got kind of bored with Rome II TW.

I'd say the biggest thing in your favor is that the factions are completely different this time. Roman era armies were generally comparable. One might have better spearmen, or lack chariots, but they were otherwise comparable. The Empire is the vanilla medieval faction, but you've also got the Vampire Counts, the wood Elves, the Dwarves, the greenskins, Chaos, all of which are unique and play very differently. Add in wizards, Warhammer-style heroes, and flying units and games tend to be a lot less repetitive.

[GreenGoo]

Monsters alone give it some new options and they are just cool in general.

[GreenGoo]

I'm a little unsure of how to proceed. I've won some battles against a rival vampire, but skeletons and zombies versus skeletons and zombies is not the most interesting tactical fight. I fought a quest battle against an empire expeditionary force. The rival vampire decided we should have an N/A so I agreed for some reason. Now I'm just waiting for tech and growth. I don't really want to open up hostilities on another front. I should probably just break the N/A and keep pounding on him. Unfortunately the battles cause heavy attrition and rebuilding takes a few turns.

It's just the uncertainty of learning a new game and finding out how best to proceed. Still, I often get paralysis at this stage until I learn more.

[Freyland]

Opinion? Stop this game, pick a different faction to ease into, then go back to learning the VC.

You are totally correct IMHO that early undead-on-undead battles are "zombifyingly" boring. I made it to where you are, after having learned the game's nuances, and I never made it back to the VC. Yet, most if not all your upcoming battles are going to be vs the other Undead, and that's not a great way to get a first impression of this game.

Dwarves are easier to use tactically because you don't really move them much, so that's a consideration. Or, if you want to practice with a more mobile faction, go Orcs. I would suggest changing combat difficulty to "easy" if that's the route you take, if you are easily overwhelmed with unit numbers at the moment.

Im sure the VC pick up and should be exciting to play; but they just don't have any life to their campaign in the beginning.

[GreenGoo]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to try the greenskins then, just to see how they play. Empire/Bretonnia seem to be more traditional armies, so standard infantry/ranged/cavalry rock/paper/scissors tactics seem applicable, and I'd like to try something different.

I'm starting to be able to handle more units, and if I pause and/or play on slow motion it's much more manageable, so I'm willing to try the horde.

If I experiment with a couple of different armies it might give me more familiarity with the game and make me more comfortable about deciding on objectives and how to go about obtaining them.

[Zenn7]

Im sure the VC pick up and should be exciting to play; but they just don't have any life to their campaign in the beginning.

I'm sure something will come along later in the VC campaign to raise their spirts.

[Max Peck]

Im sure the VC pick up and should be exciting to play; but they just don't have any life to their campaign in the beginning.

I'm sure something will come along later in the VC campaign to raise their spirts.

[Freyland]

You laugh, but it would be a grave mistake to not heed my advice.

[NickAragua]

Speaking of the vampire counts, I just about finished crushing that cluster of vampire provinces last night. Fighting the vampires is a whole different beast than fighting other empire factions or orks or what have you. Because of the 100% or so "corruption" rating in vampire territory, your armies suffer attrition outside of town. Additionally, as I previously noted, if you take over a town, you're looking at keeping your armies there for a while - the corruption also tanks your public order.

So, this time, I mopped up my home territory and then sent my two main armies into Sylvania. We walked through the fragmented West Sylvania, stopping only long enough to sack and then occupy one of the towns as a temporary rest stop (within a few turns, it got razed to the ground by vampire "rebels"), then hit the vampire counts on East Sylvania. It was a pretty hard fight, but between our mortars and hard-bitten infantry (and my pegasus-mounted, leadership-specced general), we crushed them. I took a bit of a risk assaulting castle Drakenhof with no siege equipment other than ladders and a single mortar, but it worked out - since the bad guys refused to come out to face us, I charged my melee infantry and pegasus lord up the walls, blocking their tower, and then pelted the undead with flanking crossbow bolts and gunfire. It would have been a hard fight to take the courtyard from the three units of "red knights", but they disintegrated once we took the walls. ::

Then we turned our attention back to West Sylvania, where the Von Carstens were beefing with every surrounding Empire faction. Their army was actually pretty good, featuring several purple units (these appear to be upgraded versions of regular units). They moved a little quicker than I did, and were able to drive back Emperor Franz's main army. At that point, I attacked their last town with the secondary army and stupidly let myself get sandwiched between the enemy force and reinforcements. I don't think I've ever seen an army rout so fast. The vampires took heavy losses, though with their armies down to a few units of barely 1/3 strength. So, of course, they attack my secondary army again. We plowed through their remaining scrubs pretty easily, but they brought two general types - "Big Boss Von Carsten" and "Little Boss Von Carsten". These guys are just mowing my troops down left and right. I go from having a mostly intact army (15 or so units) to everybody routing. My melee infantry rout, my mortars rout, even the bad-ass Reiksguard rout. At least we managed to kill Little Boss. At this point, I have to revert to the old standby of kiting the leader while my crossbowmen and rifles shoot him. Except the AI isn't quite stupid enough to fall for it and keeps going after crossbowmen. My guys start running out of ammo, but, with their last few shots, my last few crossbows finally knock down Big Boss Von Carsten. My leader's dead, half his army is wiped out... but we won. All we have to do is walk into town.

Then a nearby scrub empire faction takes over the last Von Carsten city. That's ok guys. You'll just be joining my confederation soon enough anyway.

Meanwhile, the Beastmen finally show up on the opposite end of my empire with a slightly damaged army from beating up Marienberg. Guess we'll see how this goes. The good part is that "Templehof" sat out the entire campaign, and his army consists entirely of a stack of 20 skeletons and a single castle garrison, so hopefully he won't be screwing with me while I deal with the beastmen.