Gaizokubanou

EL for me is what Stellaris is to Rowan but with much higher scoring because I did have ton of fun before realizing how oddly static the mid-late games are. TW always gets lot of stuff forgiven by me because at the end it will at the very least provide some visual spectacles.

I'm trying Empire on Legendary and it's a whole different game than what I dealt with as Orks because I can't reliably get my back against end of the world the way Orks can early on... and not getting free army every now and then is another. So I'm just pinballing around in my 2 province holding fending off endless aggression from everyone including this one dwarf faction. And I got grand total of 1 faction to trade with me :x I think dominant strategy in legendary is going to be intentionally spawning rebels and farming them. Because if you are prepared (and it's not too hard to be ready to stomp rebel stacks since they have fixed spawn points), it's probably the best source of EXP, income, items and even some advanced siege weapons (if the rebel spawn is same tech/faction group). Update: Yep, by raiding your own province you can pretty much guarantee a rebel spawn and it's just easy farming from there.

I found fightiness to be the easiest resource to manage to the point where I think it can effectively be ignored (which in fact I did on my first time playing as them to victory). So you take attrition when it gets really low but here is the kicker, at that point game gives you this button to raise fightiness so at worst you take 1 turn of attrition which can be healed up in a single turn in a town. Or just put standing armies in raiding stance to constantly raise fightiness. Dwarves are way harder IMO, their armies are slow and you are surrounded by Orks that will hit you twice as hard as any other factions cause of the Whaaaagggghhh free army mechanics.

I would say Ork is the easiest for sure. But do be careful on how tunneling works cause AI neighbors will use that a lot so you need to understand that mountain borders are not as secure as they would be for others.

I didn't expect this but this game is getting better with more playthroughs. I'm on my third campaign as Orcs on legendary and the difficulty modifier is just spewing rebels at me every turn... which is great? I get to fight more (granted most of the time I'm auto resolving) which gives me money and exp, I eat after battle for regen so rebel stomping doesn't really put my armies at risk either, then there is the free WAAAGH army deal on top of it. Orc Warboss on a wyrm is very satisfying to watch, and transforming your armies from horde of cheap boys/goblins into black orcs supported by giant spiders is very rewarding. One thing that haven't really gotten better at all is diplomacy though, it's still that broken chain that Fraser was talking about, and I really don't like what the lore-based innate modifiers doing still. I mean it is TW so I'm not expecting much and practically diplomacy got rid of lot of annoyingly aggressive AIs but something about your foes being exactly the same (even if it has no actual implication... like in Shogun 2 everyone were the same so it didn't really matter who you allied and didn't) is just such a bummer.

Razing settlements you can't take is actually pretty huge deal because it will take a while before AI reclaim it, but I believe there are mods that let you take whatever. Also... giants or giant spider?

About to beat the long campaign on very hard as Dwarf (Chaos invasion is over and there is nothing on the map that can make a dent to any of my armies) and because of lack of mounts I guess Dwarf heroes are least exciting to level up. Helicopters are funny but pistols are little lackluster? Like I rather have more crossbow than mixing it up with guns. Flamethrower seems nice but definitely require more micro than I can bother mustering most of the time (most probably cause it just doesn't fit the type of army I'm running). Late game artillery are like something between Shogun 2's and FotS, but there are lot of avenue to squeeze out extra power from those so I suppose I haven't quite experienced fully maxed out ones yet. Plus it's on very hard where I'm basically running with huge handicap vs AI's super units so maybe on normal all these stuff can really kick ass. I'm going to teak the ini file later to double body count and run normal on battle to get full taste of battle. Maybe give campaign side more buffs if such can be managed on ini settings alone cause mid to late game AI just... doesn't do anything even on very hard. Like they run completely out of gas. It's certainly lot less infuriating than watching full stacks of Samurais materializing before your eyes in Shogun 2 but I'm going to see if I can find something between the two. I wonder what the level cap is on heroes? Update: finished, grudge book is cool but predictably can get very annoying when dealing with stuff you don't like (like assassinations). Also level cap is 30.

One good thing that came out of that trailer is that it instantly brought back fond memories of me eating cheap ass local pizzas for school lunch during my second year in USA. $1.25 for slice of large cheese pizza, $0.50 for can of soda, it was good $1.75 well spent, good times.

Yesss, or just roll it into retinue and give all necessary agent functionalities to the armies.

I would say battles are perhaps the best out of all the vanilla versions of the games? All the ridiculousness that kinda marred previous games' historical theme actually adds to the ridiculousness of the Warhammer lore and ends up being a plus rather than awkward thing that needed to be ignored. General progression is good but it is very very straightforwardly gamey kinda good. It's not that kind of dynamic/random growth that you are describing that happened in Rome/Medieval 2, but it's also not kind of boring middle of nothing kind of progression generals had in say, Shogun 2. You have the control you have over your general's growth as you do in Shogun 2 (minus random retinues and items but those can be swapped around at will as well) but the actual growing is quite exciting when it comes to spells and mounts. It's really satisfying watching a leader that starts on foot go to a horse into pegasus into griffin, or goblin lord into wolf riding into spider. Even the raw stats up upgrades are much better just because your lords actually fight like elephants (in a sense that they hit multiple dudes and toss soldiers around) so even those transfer into gameplay much better. It's in a way very 'shallow' kind of fun but heck, it is fun so I'm very glad it exists. To give clear example, I had Orc's starting warchief (famous Grimgor Ironhide) specced deep into his own combat capabilities and in a full stack fight against invading chaos army, had him sit on my left flank. At the start chaos' uber cannon took a toll on my boiz (I'm so sorry but I had to) but I had my goblin chucking thing target it exclusively so I ended up taking it out in mid fight. So lines crash and my army was kind of mix of units so my center started to buckle but the black orcs to the right killed off their flanking cavalry and was holding and my warboss murdered their leader, soloed a cavalry group (again, it swings like elephants so each swing you would think a cannonball landed or something) and saved 2 big'uns that would otherwise would have been killed by the flanking cav so with them ended up flanking the middle mob that already got 2 of my center groups on the run, and along with the black orcs from right dynamically created this battle of cannae kind of flank and YEAAA that was super fun.

That pretty much kills the progression aspect of the campaign (which is what separates it from series of custom battles for me) so thanks but that bit doesn't quite work for me. I'm going to give agents more look, maybe the old stun-locking is the only remedy to this :/

What Fraser said at the end... in a way, one way it could be solved is if AI was actually 'dumber' and actually wanted to fight your armies despite poor odds. Instead we have this kind of smart AI that understand when to avoid battle and that ends up sucking lot of fun out of the campaign because the campaign movement mechanic was not designed to gamify trapping a fleeing opponent into a fight, so we have this chore of 'whack-a-mole' thing that has been plaguing TW series forever. Remember when armies could be built out of any number of units without general and how AI would constantly send these 1 units to pillage your stuff? So they fixed that by making armies require general but by implementing all these weird marching formation shinenigans now we deal with that same thing except it's an entire army that's just avoiding you :x This is all so frustrating because battle and progression is so good. Seriously I wish CA just made AI simpler and had it throw bunch of roughly half stacks of armies at you. Also retreat option from battle is so bad. It makes chasing down enemies incredibly bad Also why doesn't sacking/razing just end movement? Basically all of my biggest gripes with this game is CA, why did you design the strategy layer so that AI is always trying to avoid fighting player's army? Whyyyy

Just finished Orc on Hard (wow Orcs are super easy compared to dwarf cause of free army system) and I like the game overall but it's such an odd mix of things I really like (battle and lot of Warhammer flavor) with some baffling mechanics that actively deter battles from happening. I wouldn't even call this 'simplified/dumbed down'... rather, they split few complex systems into whole bunch of simpler system which makes things simpler (every system is simpler) and more complicated (there are more systems?) I really absolutely hate how sacking/razing a city doesn't end army's movement. It's sooooooo annoying. For a game that's meant to be all about the battles (and battles are fantastic), it's hilarious how hard it is to get in a battle against enemy army cause all they do is run a loop around your empire razing cities ffffffffffffffffffff

There is some sort of restriction on what territories you can capture (dwarf - orcs can capture each others, humans-vampire capture each other and chaos is territory-less roamer?), not sure how much stuff is there for me to capture but if it's like 1/3 to 1/2 of a map that should be fine? Update: Whoever is responsible for army stance and zoc should actually try playing the game. It's fucking awful when AI army slip past yours and... that's it, it's gone forever, basically sacking every city you own cause you can never catch up to another army that is raiding in your territory. This was also a problem in previous TW games but holy crap the fact that AI can tunnel into your territory (bypass mountains) creates this amazingly annoying whack-a-mole strategy layer movement. Battles are hella fun though.

What a good shoot bang game. I shot lot of demons and it was hella fun.

So I pre-ordered this while getting Doom. Watching a stream of it last night (total war newbies itmejp and strippin) reminded me how much Total War franchise's spectacles I missed (didn't get Atilla). So it looks like it's still using Rome 2/Atilla's province system and with hero units it looks like battles might be easier than ever if anything else.

Rob's RPS review tackled that question and from the sound of it, they put more emphasis on combat by making economy more stringent. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/19/total-war-warhammer-review/ Maybe there are undiscovered loopholes to make strategy layer more 'strategic' (like in Shogun 2, best strat was to sit on your ass for a while on low level castles and high level rice fields with magic pixel away from realm divide and let your economy grow out of control before going with realm divide) but for now the answer seems like more focus on fight with strategy layer being more bare bone to let you field just few armies.

lol I'm hoping for cIV style leaders cause those were WAY more charming and fun than CiV's.

Yeah stun lancers have an 'odd' difficulty spike. btw idk if you knew this but flashbang prevents their melee which does mitigate that spike somewhat but still I always empathize with frustrations against stun lancers. I think on commander you can have 5th squad unlocked reliably before them, but that too relies on some meta knowledge of the game. Then there is that factor of how lucky you are with the 5th dude cause anything other than grenadier/ranger is very sub par. I think I restarted all my legendary campaigns if my 5th/6th was neither cause they are just dead weight for too long (unless I get lucky item drop within first 2 missions... superior stock dropping in first mission is some crazy clutch lol). Also yeah I feel ya on the difficulty setting, not having reliable grenade kills in early missions do rack up difficulty considerably.

Maybe it is deliberate, I'm beginning to see easy late game in most strategy games as essential part of the experience and same for that here. Could be completely accidental but given the expertise of Firaxis team maybe they fully intended it. I mean if I were to design Xcom (or any strategy games really), I certainly would have made a deliberate choice to over power the players in the late game. Being overpowered within the game's context is such a good way to reward all the early decisions, a game without any of that just seem so... stressful and choir to play?

Rome 2 left me with some bad taste but even then I ended up getting some good value out of that mess... I'm very tempted to pre-ording this thing to shave few $$$ off those factions.

Today I learned how to shave off about 600mb of vram usage in the game. I'm also butthurt that in doing so, lot of this hoops I've been jumping through for map generation was completely pointless and wasteful.

Yeah I agree and it wasn't at all directed at your position in regards to employer responsibilities, even if I lean more towards itsamoose' thoughts it's more of difference in technical issues (arguing over practicality).

Actually this event just highlights some weird double standard that's been bothering me since Sacco-Biddle business, and kinda facinating to see 180 on some of the views because the word GG is involved.