New Total War game: Warhammer

[thesheeep]

33% off for DLC on Steam sale? Classy, SEGA.

Well, given the humble bundle a few months ago gave the main game away for 12$ and now this... getting everything altogether for about 50$ total is acceptable, IMO.

 

[Jimmious]

33% off for DLC on Steam sale? Classy, SEGA.

Well, given the humble bundle a few months ago gave the main game away for 12$ and now this... getting everything altogether for about 50$ total is acceptable, IMO.

Still, a bit bigger DLC sale would be welcome... Especially since they will release a "new" friggin game in 2-3 months!

 

[thesheeep]

I am comfortable with the amount of milk being drained from my nipples currently.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Will you be able to play the Old World campaign with the new Warhammer II factions (Lizardmen etc.) when that gets released?

 

[A horse of course]

No. You will be able to play the Mega-Map which includes all of the Old World and most of the W2 map. As I understand it they said they're not cutting any factions from W1 in the Mega-Map but will be making noticable cuts to the Southlands and minor W2 factions.

 

[thesheeep]

So, I finally got around to give this a go.

So far, I'm not fully convinced. There is promise here, but also glaringly obvious design issues:

For one, the camera. What the heck? You cannot zoom out properly, the max zoom level is MUCH too close. Annoying.
Even more annoying is that utterly useless "tactical map", which actually zooms out more, but also rotates the camera so you get confused immediately and it is also top-down, so... no idea who came up with that nonsense. Good thing you can disable it.

Also, why can I not see my own units when they are in the forest? Not even a slight glow to make them out more easily? Okay...

On my first campaign, I started as Empire (because it has been a VERY long time since I played a TW game) - and almost immediately got annihilated by Orcs, Beastmen and the separatists attacking at the same time. lol... restarted the campaign. I don't mind that too much personally, but this is what some new players will be subjected to first. Not good for ratings, really.

Can you no longer station troops as garrisons? I'm confused.

And that is after just 2-3 hours of playing
Not sure if it will get better or worse.

 

[Great Deceiver]

For one, the camera. What the heck? You cannot zoom out properly, the max zoom level is MUCH too close. Annoying.

You can enable the debug camera which can zoom out a lot farther.

Find your preferences.script.text file. It should be in /users/username/appdata/roaming/the creative assembly/warhammer/scripts.

Change default_battle_camera_type 0 to default_battle_camera_type 2.

Enjoy. I don't know why they don't make this a regular option since a lot of people have been using it forever (including in other games).

Easy video:

 

[A horse of course]

Also, why can I not see my own units when they are in the forest? Not even a slight glow to make them out more easily? Okay...

On my first campaign, I started as Empire (because it has been a VERY long time since I played a TW game) - and almost immediately got annihilated by Orcs, Beastmen and the separatists attacking at the same time. lol... restarted the campaign. I don't mind that too much personally, but this is what some new players will be subjected to first. Not good for ratings, really.

Can you no longer station troops as garrisons? I'm confused.

And that is after just 2-3 hours of playing
Not sure if it will get better or worse.

On forests: CA are absolute dumbfucks and not only made it so that 90% of open field battles are fought on the same map, but made that one Empire map covered in impenetrable forest. Hold down space bar and click the option on the side of the screen that automatically removes leaves - oh but this only works on forested areas within a certain distance from the camera. r00fles!

On Empire: Fempire start used to be pretty mild - easy early game, mildly difficult mid-game (usually Vampires), difficult endgame (Chaos) and tedious victory grind (Norscan spam, bribing allies to not attack you for no fucking reason except arbitrary debuffs). CA wrecked this by not testing the impact of the DLC + FLC factions on campaign balance, so randomly spawning Orcs and Beastmen led by Legendary Lords will make kamikaze runs straight for your least defended settlements. If you think it's bad now, you should've seen pre-patch Wood Elves. I would personally recommend Dwarfs for a beginner, who have a more difficult start (Orcs can snowball very quickly) but will steamroll everything once the main Greenskin faction is destroyed.

Garrisons: All troops need to be led by a general. You can't just hire troops willy-nilly pal. However, most factions have "Garrison" buildings which give better fortifications and increase the number of garrison troops. Minor settlements, at max fortification level, can hold off small, low-tier armies and higher tier troops depending on your skill in real-time battles. Major settlements at max fortifications are quite difficult to take, and racial capitals get the best garrisons.

 

[rashiakas]

I really recommend to play this with some mods. AI mods are an absolute musthave at least. I also like garison mods because it both makes defending your empire easier and attacking the ai harder. Also, get increased movement range in own teritory, because without it, you will rage hard at AI stacks that always move out of your reach.

 

[Lone Wolf]

So, I finally got around to give this a go.

So far, I'm not fully convinced. There is promise here, but also glaringly obvious design issues:

For one, the camera. What the heck? You cannot zoom out properly, the max zoom level is MUCH too close. Annoying.
Even more annoying is that utterly useless "tactical map", which actually zooms out more, but also rotates the camera so you get confused immediately and it is also top-down, so... no idea who came up with that nonsense. Good thing you can disable it.

Also, why can I not see my own units when they are in the forest? Not even a slight glow to make them out more easily? Okay...

On my first campaign, I started as Empire (because it has been a VERY long time since I played a TW game) - and almost immediately got annihilated by Orcs, Beastmen and the separatists attacking at the same time. lol... restarted the campaign. I don't mind that too much personally, but this is what some new players will be subjected to first. Not good for ratings, really.

Can you no longer station troops as garrisons? I'm confused.

And that is after just 2-3 hours of playing
Not sure if it will get better or worse.

1) Get the 'Better Camera' mod.

2) Press the spacebar when you're looking at foliage.

3) Empire is the hardest of the 'normal' campaigns. Dwarves are a good way to learn.

4) As soon as you can, get the Steel Faith Overhaul and make that your new normal.

 

[Lone Wolf]

BTW, because this isn't made massively obvious:

When you set up a formation, you can formation move by selecting all units in question, holding Alt and the dragging them. And I think if you then hold Ctrl you can rotate the formation in whichever direction you like.

 

[Fedora Master]

It's always a good idea to curbstomp your nearest main enemy faction (Vampires for Empire, Orcs for Dwarfs) before they start to build up. Grimgor especially can rek half your army by himself when he gets a few levels and items.

Steel Faith is the best mod for the game, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Grimgor with his legendaries is a nightmare beyond compare.

And SFO buffs Big Uns to an awkwardly uncomfortable level for Dwarven players who are used to infantry stomping anything up to Black Orcs. The biggest compliment you can pay SFO is that it really forces factions to play to their stereotype. Dwarves must bring choppers and artillery. Irondrakes are amazing in SFO, too.

One neat Irondrake trick is to put enough space for five men abreast in between blocks of line infantry, then put Irondrakes just behind the line, facing that opening. They can rack up to ~400-500 kills if the opponent mosh-pits.

Oh, by the way, in SFO you can often look forward to 2-3 Orc stacks with 5-6 giants between them paying you a visit by Turn 50. It's happened to me two campaigns in a row as a Dwarven player. Horrible stuff. No matter what, your settlements need to be walled by that point.

 

[Fedora Master]

Oh yes, walls are extremely important since the AI recognizes them as a full stack of units (in vanilla) which deters them from attacking. The SFO AI is more likely to attack walled settlements but it's still a good idea to build them ASAP, especially since they unlock basic units for recruitment so you can quickly raise a new stack even in provinces built for making money.

 

[A horse of course]

Steel Faith is Darthmod-tier. Play the gnome in vanilla for a bit and then decide which mini-mods you want to improve gameplay. Make sure to use the mod that gives a Vlad a nose.

 

[Fedora Master]

Steel Faith is Darthmod-tier. Play the gnome in vanilla for a bit and then decide which mini-mods you want to improve gameplay. Make sure to use the mod that gives a Vlad a nose.

If it was Darth-tier it would add 200 only marginally different units, increase income by 2000% and make the AI run around with 20 full stacks each.

 

[SmartCheetah]

Could someone using this game on steam upload this(or any other working settlement map mod) mod https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=883467263 ? 8) Preferably to sendspace or somewhere. Would be really cool.

I mean, I got the access to the account with original, but don't want to play around with steam guard and stuff. You can access downloaded mods by going into %appdata%.

 

[Great Deceiver]

So I bought this during the sale and have been playing a little bit. Some points:

- There seems to be something wrong with ambient occlusion in this game (SSAO), if I enable it everything becomes shit-smeared and too dark. I'm running a GTX 1070, latest drivers. If I disable it things look OK, but still not great. Anyone else having this problem? Overall, I don't like the way the game looks (if you zoom in really close the animations and everything are fine, but from a decent distance everything is mushy and nondescript.) Maps seem dull. At least loadtimes are decent.
- I was aware that they had simplified (dumbed down) the strategic map options and that's fine, but they've also simplified battle options? There's no option to incrementally increase rank/file and only 2 preset group formations? My last TW game was Shogun 2 and Warhammer seems to have significantly less options. Am I missing something?

 

[Raghar]

Am I missing something?

Early Game and Difficulty Levels in Total War: WARHAMMER
In this devblog, campaign designer Eva Jobse will talk more about each of the factions’ early game experiences and the available difficulty levels in Total War: WARHAMMER.

When we started designing Total War: WARHAMMER, we were aiming to create the most approachable Total War game yet, while simultaneously making it the most challenging one as well. A frequently heard paradigm in the games industry is making games that are easy to learn and hard to master. While strategy games are already a genre of games that typically have quite a bit of complexity associated with it, we did strive to make Total War: WARHAMMER more intuitive to understand than its predecessors.

For this reason, we scrutinized most of the campaign systems and focused them. Veteran Total War players were quick to notice the absence of some features, such as negative building properties including squalor and sanitation problems

Perhaps you want to read this stuff.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Am I missing something?

Do you feel like you are? The strategic layer has been hammered into a complete irrelevance and source of constant annoyance with cheating AI attacking and sacking defenseless settlements. Tactical layer is greatly simplified, but still pretty satisfying, if you don't mind abusing the shit out of the horrible AI.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Am I missing something?

Early Game and Difficulty Levels in Total War: WARHAMMER
In this devblog, campaign designer Eva Jobse will talk more about each of the factions’ early game experiences and the available difficulty levels in Total War: WARHAMMER.

When we started designing Total War: WARHAMMER, we were aiming to create the most approachable Total War game yet, while simultaneously making it the most challenging one as well. A frequently heard paradigm in the games industry is making games that are easy to learn and hard to master. While strategy games are already a genre of games that typically have quite a bit of complexity associated with it, we did strive to make Total War: WARHAMMER more intuitive to understand than its predecessors.

For this reason, we scrutinized most of the campaign systems and focused them. Veteran Total War players were quick to notice the absence of some features, such as negative building properties including squalor and sanitation problems

Perhaps you want to read this stuff.

Even though it's a broad quote, he talks specifically about the strategic layer - which I was aware was simplified. I bought Warhammer mainly for the tactical combat, but I wasn't aware so many options were removed from that aspect too. Oh well.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Am I missing something?

Do you feel like you are? The strategic layer has been hammered into a complete irrelevance and source of constant annoyance with cheating AI attacking and sacking defenseless settlements. Tactical layer is greatly simplified, but still pretty satisfying, if you don't mind abusing the shit out of the horrible AI.

Even though I haven't played the more recent TW (Attila), I was never crazy about the strategic layer in these games and frankly feel that they should have maintained the simplified Shogun 1/Medieval 1 boardgame-style map. I've played quite a few Paradox grand strategy games in my time and the TW strategic layer feels insulting, so I'd happily take simplified systems if it meant less retardation and clunky shit (i.e. agent spam in Shogun 2).

I'm disappointed in the simplification of the tactical layer, as I think this series and indeed this particular game out of all should focus on the strengths of the tactical battle system, but at least it's satisfying to see the interplay between different units - there are a lot of different units here and factions feel reasonably distinct. I'm liking the game so far, was just wondering if I was missing something regarding formations, rank/file and so on. Guess not.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Oh, they only removed anything remotely interesting/satisfying from the strategy layer. All the bad stuff like agent spam or AI cheating the movement point system worse than in HoMM are in and worse than ever.

 

[Raghar]

Oh, they only removed anything remotely interesting/satisfying from the strategy layer. All the bad stuff like agent spam or AI cheating the movement point system worse than in HoMM are in and worse than ever.

And don't forget the satellite which tells AI the position of players army hiding in ambush. And bealining from the other side of map while ignoring more pressing threats.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Whenever I go back to playing TW and realizing all the little annoyances I have with it I just get very nostalgic about Myth. Why can't we have a new great Myth?