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CA's Total War: The Celtic-Han-Lizardmen alliance that never was


Corvinus85

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On 12/5/2020 at 12:38 AM, Toth said:

Oh, thanks for the tip, I didn't know heroes had that ability. Even the paladins?

Yup, all heroes can scout ruins. They just can't settle it, only Lords can do that.

8 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

The newly added Queen Ariel might give Kroak a run for his money. She is powerful.

@Toth Are you able to recruit regiments of renown with Repanse?

Does Ariel have OP damage spell like Kroak? Kroak's armorpiercing explosion spell (the blue one) is disgustingly OP.

8 hours ago, Toth said:

Oh... am I supposed to?

You made me google that and apparently in order for Bretonnians to get regiments of renown you have to register your game at a website. CA's DLC policies never fail to baffle me...

Yeah, that whole registering process is so dumb. There are really powerful regiment of renown units for some factions that are hidden behind this dumb process. You don't NEED them, but they are some nice units in there. I forget what units Bretonnia have access to as i just deleted all my old saves due to new patch. Feeling a Dino campaign coming up....

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11 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

The newly added Queen Ariel might give Kroak a run for his money. She is powerful.

@Toth Are you able to recruit regiments of renown with Repanse?

Does she start with a WE faction at turn 1?  No?  Then she's not as good as Kroak.

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12 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

Does she start with a WE faction at turn 1?  No?  Then she's not as good as Kroak.

You can get Kroak with other Lizardmen factions, but you have to do a chain of quests. Ariel becomes available fairly early.

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2 hours ago, The Winged Shadow said:

Does Ariel have OP damage spell like Kroak? Kroak's armorpiercing explosion spell (the blue one) is disgustingly OP.

No, she doesn't have that, but she does start with a whole range of spells and abilities, some from her equipment. She has more skills that help your faction and army overall than Kroak, and for a mage hero she is also useful in melee combat.

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Really enjoying the Twisted and Twilight DLC. Throt's lab is a very cool addition and update. This is also the first time I've played the game on my new PC and it's amazing how much of a difference it makes. I can now actually zoom into battle without my frame rate dropped to about 2 a minute, oh and I don't have to go and get a cup of tea in between turns because it takes so long.

What I wanted to say though was that it's actually the Drycha campaign that I'm really enjoying. The Sisters of Twilight are actually a bit dull, possibly because I don't enjoy missile heroes so much, but also because they seem quite boring thematically. Drycha is much more flavoursome however. She really hates elves, and you really can role play this campaign and it changes how you play. 

I barely used any elf units, you can recruit beasts in the same way that undead can raise dead. Combine that with an aggressive style of play that also encourages you to raze enemy settlements and just generally hate everyone, and its a campaign that genuinely feels different.

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I'm enjoying the Sisters campaign quite a lot. Removing the need to go out and conquer everything to advance your settlements and tech (leave alone recruit higher tier units...) makes a massive difference to the basic Wood Elf mechanics. Then you've got the magical forest mechanics which are fun for being different enough from the Vortex race to be a breath of fresh air while simultaneously maintaining the spirit of the Vortex campaign in general.

Plus fast travel via Deep Roots means that while you start out in Naggaroth, you still get to fight pretty much every flavour of enemy the game has to offer from a fairly early point in the campaign.

I was hoping there'd be more flavourful forest encounters, but there appear to be only 2 or 3 for every forest, and most are simply about deciding what type of enemy army you want to fight and what short-term event effect you want. The one glorious exception being the "I am Sporctacus" one, where you can free a bunch of greenskin slaves from their Dark Elf captors and after that you'll occasionally get events informing you about slave uprisings in random Dark Elf provinces, which leads to damaged buildings and decline in slaves.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm really not sure whether I like fighting Skaven or not. I really appreciate that there is some notable evolution of how the battles pan out. 20 turns or so ago their main danger was the combination of ambush attacks and the sheer mass of bodies they threw at me, turning each battle into messy attrition warfare. Now Clan Mors is only fielding endgame units. Entire armies composed of Ratling Gunners, Warpflamers and Sharpshooters. All of these units cause horrific damage if they get to line up their shots, but are such glass cannons they get completely slaughtered once my knights manage to reach them with their charge. I had some pretty amazing battles where I distracted them with my lord and just as they turned their backs towards the forest where my knights were hiding, I came rushing out in full force and Ride of the Rohirrim style slaughtered them to the last rat...

... and then there are battles where I'm just constantly bombarded with horrifically deadly spells and swarmed with so many clan rat spawns behind my artillery and archers that I'm a sitting duck too busy fending them off to actually make use of my mobility. So at the one hand difficult but doable battles where you can succeed at both avoiding losses and winning the battle through skillful maneuvering of your troops and on the other hand pure frustrating bullshit where your super experienced elite units get wiped out and you can't do anything about it. I HATE magic...

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Yeah Rats are super annoying. You just can't be defensive against them as their artillery and weapons team units are so damn powerful. You just have to ignore their melee units and rush their ranged units (story of WH2 really). Of course if you get ambushed, and you are fielding a range/artillery heavy army, then its bad day at the office. You just have to use ambush stance to hide as much as you can. End game skaven are horrible to deal with. I almost always have to make specific anti-rat armies to deal with them if they are powerful at end game. So usually that means single entity units, cavs, monster infantries etc so ambushes aren't as devastating. You either stick to your arty/range heavy army and move slowly via ambush stance to avoid getting ambushed, or make custom ambush resistant doomstack and just rush em hard.

I make it my mission early and mid game to wipe em out before they get too powerful!

I am just at the end game of my lizardmen run. Ulthuan got wrecked by dark elves, so i am moving in and stopping them from becoming too powerful. Naggarond is getting hooned by the rat/skelly alliance, so hopefully it goes well. Morathi is at my border, but i expect she will get confederated by Malekith soon. But so far my solar bastiladon stacks are kicking ass <3. Building a Ancient Salamander stack to see how that goes.

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I’ve made a decision about total war, I’m only ever going to play it on normal / normal difficulty from now on.

Why do this? Usually I play on hard / hard because at some point I decided I’m good at the game so shouldn’t be putting the regular settings on, and I liked the challenge.

However anything above normal and the game becomes distorted and a slog.

In battles hard difficultly, if only slightly, means that melee units have less value, leadership is skewed higher towards the AI. It can be a little frustrating.

Its campaign where the game becomes annoying though. Having to deal with endless doom stacks happens even on Hard. I was playing a Teclis Vortex campaign and by about turn 60 I was having to fight off Dark Elf stacks containing top tier units , and 3 of them against the only stack I could afford. The bonuses the AI get mean even on hard there is a level of cheesing you need to do to win games , and it becomes less fun.

What this difficulty also means is that you just end up having to constantly engage in battles, it gets kind of tiresome and I rarely want to fight due to the monotony. 

I restarted my Teclis campaign on normal and it’s far more enjoyable. It can be a little challenging but not so much to annoy me.

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12 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I’ve made a decision about total war, I’m only ever going to play it on normal / normal difficulty from now on.

Why do this? Usually I play on hard / hard because at some point I decided I’m good at the game so shouldn’t be putting the regular settings on, and I liked the challenge.

However anything above normal and the game becomes distorted and a slog.

In battles hard difficultly, if only slightly, means that melee units have less value, leadership is skewed higher towards the AI. It can be a little frustrating.

Its campaign where the game becomes annoying though. Having to deal with endless doom stacks happens even on Hard. I was playing a Teclis Vortex campaign and by about turn 60 I was having to fight off Dark Elf stacks containing top tier units , and 3 of them against the only stack I could afford. The bonuses the AI get mean even on hard there is a level of cheesing you need to do to win games , and it becomes less fun.

What this difficulty also means is that you just end up having to constantly engage in battles, it gets kind of tiresome and I rarely want to fight due to the monotony. 

I restarted my Teclis campaign on normal and it’s far more enjoyable. It can be a little challenging but not so much to annoy me.

I've been playing on 'hard' campaign, and 'very hard' battles. It does involve more micro-management of units and actually using some tactics.

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I find very hard battles reduces the number of tactics you can use since the cheats the AI get (particularly high leadership) on all units make it very difficult to rout/break a unit, pretty much taking that tactic out of the toolbox. Even on trash units that are SUPPOSED to be broken easily (i.e. your peasants, rats, zombies etc). They tend to fight to the death a lot, pretty much forcing you to go with MOAR DPS(!) so you can inflict the army loss penalty ASAP. Under normal circumstances you can stack negative debuffs with the archer fire+artillery fire+rear charge etc to break a unit. Not in very hard (in my experience).

But it does force you to think outside the standard melee core+ranged back+cav flank formations. Try to create some new ways to win, cheesy as it might be.

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On 12/20/2020 at 2:50 AM, The Winged Shadow said:

I make it my mission early and mid game to wipe em out before they get too powerful!

I should note that by the time of my complaint above Clan Mors was already down to two settlements and I wiped them out soon after, but given that situation they still did horrific damage to my armies and it took me long enough what with them owning half the continent...

... though I guess I'm having a far more dangerous foe right now. Best buddies Imrik and Repanse are still busy mopping up the islands south of our starting continent, but while Malekith is dangerous here, he seems to focus entirely on Ulthuan right now. Its whole northern coast and islands are now conquered and each turn they take another city. I very stupidly sent one army north thinking they might be able to throw a wrench into their invasion, but it got swarmed by three stacks even before reaching the coast of Ulthuan and when I retreated they followed up and a fourth stack came in from behind. At least I managed a 'valiant defeat', but given how Bretonnia plays, loosing a Prophetess with all vows hurts like hell as I can't replace her army with my current economy.

And yes, it's once again the fucking monsters that did me in, with four dragons just landing squarely on top of my Prophetess...

Edit: ... and I just randomly stumbled across a post saying that the warning marker saying multiple farms don't yield more stuff actually isn't aimed at the income. So... I stupidly crippled my economy by having only one farm in each region because of that misunderstanding and could have had thrice the income that I currently have...

For fuck's sake...

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I have the distinct feeling Order Tide ain't happening in my Repanse playthrough. I ended up playing quite a lot today and am now Turn 160 and things are becoming mental. I peeked a little at Lustria and much to my horror saw that it's just "ruins" now, the entire continent. Apparently the dominating last Lizardmen faction there got into trouble when they went to war with every single other faction and the Skaven completely took over their empire until only a tiny enclave on the southernmost coast remained. Similarly Teclis has been driven back to his island, Wulfric is desperately holding the line between the rats and Malekith and the Vampire coast and Kraken dude are surprisingly fine.

But the real insanity is happening at Ulthuan: Tyrion is pretty much on his last leg. He only has the area directly surrounding his capital left and can barely field a single stack. Nearly the entire outer ring of Ulthuan belongs to Malekith now, with rest belonging to two Vampire Coast factions and one Norsca one. Meanwhile the inner part is all ruins for some reason, but the glowing Chaos monuments don't look very Skaven to me.

I guess Repanse has to be the Order Tide now. Now that the Southlands have been completely pacified... well first, Sudenburg stupidly got the idea to attack Imrik, despite me being allied with both. I obviously chose to side with Imrik because Sudenburg sucks. After annihilating them and dividing up their territory we headed out into the sea with all we have to support Tyrion. And seriously, Imrik is the best ally I could possibly have! Just as I was closing in on the first Dark Elf held island the fucking dwarf pirates who declared war on me 120 turns ago and whom I destroyed 100 turns ago respawned right in front of me with a full stack. I was already preparing myself to get two of my armies thrashed in a gruelling battle... when suddenly Imrik's stack swerved out and destroyed them for me (though sacrificing his entire army in the process). Oh my god, Imrik, you are awesome!

With that Repanse was able to land her six armies in Yvresse, with 2 more going into the inner ring and 2 more going for a wider swerve to pacify the islands in the north west of Ulthuan and only one army remaining in the Southlands for the time being. I must admit, this entire operation feels very intense and holy shit I can't believe how many Dark Elf stacks are running around everywhere!

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21 minutes ago, Toth said:

I have the distinct feeling Order Tide ain't happening in my Repanse playthrough.

 

6 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Does order tide still exist in the latest version?

I think they have finally fixed the "x tide" problem and it's now pretty much a coin toss which factions will come to dominate.

(My personal impression is that if I'm playing "order", "disorder" factions dominate and vice versa, but that's probably just some kind of confirmation bias on my part)

25 minutes ago, Toth said:

Meanwhile the inner part is all ruins for some reason, but the glowing Chaos monuments don't look very Skaven to me.

Probably a result of the armies spawned from the rituals in the Vortex race.

26 minutes ago, Toth said:

Oh my god, Imrik, you are awesome!

Imrik was a cool addition to the game. I recommend trying his Mortal Empires campaign sometime, it's brutal.

 

I've been having fun checking out how the new WE and Skaven additions and now have finally managed to get a Grimgor camapaign going that I'm enjoying. Getting a really lucky confederation with Wurrzag early on (right after he'd confederated a minor orc faction he force-marched into striking distance of Grimgor with a grand total of three units) probably helped.

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Okay, I finally finished Repanse's Vortex campaign! And... the end result was kinda underwhelming? So it turns out the most chivalrous thing you can possibly do is raze tiny villages that are gangbanged by three armies. Who could have thought that? So basically in the middle of the fight for Ulthuan I finally reached 2000 chivalry 130 turns after I did my last story quest. Then I could choose which enemy I wanted to fight, Tomb Kings or Vampire Coast, chose Tomb Kings; and then Repanse randomly teleported away to the Old World (the mission said Lyonesse was under attack), beat up four hilariously weak armies with just 80 losses and then teleported back to Ulthuan with a bunch of powerful buffs.

That... that was all? The entire crusader campaign was just three missions? For a more story driven Total War this just seemed weird... but yeah, FLC character, so maybe the actual Vortex campaign is more elaborate. I now started a Teclis campaign, but it seems weird to leave in the middle of the still ongoing Ulthuan invasion: https://i.postimg.cc/Y04SK1Ft/Final-state-of-the-map.jpg

Basically the respite of my and Imrik's attacks gave Tyrion the time to muster a few more stacks and fight back. He took back the ruins in the inner part of Ulthuan, but Malekith soon counterattacked himself with a full stack,  causing something of a stalemate. Tyrion also managed to make a push at the western coast against the vampire pirates there, but at the same time the islands in the east are getting hammered by both Norsca and Sortosa, with them constantly changing ownership. Even then you can see that Eltharion has returned to Yvresse to handle it (even though I hold Tor Yvresse right now). Amusingly, in the middle of all that carnage one island rebelled against Malekith and reformed Yvresse, but because Eltharion is Tyrion's retainer it was lead by a female elf... who greeted me with Eltharion's booming deep voice. XD

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Well Bretonnia is pretty much the only warhammer 1 campaign I ever finished, due to its simplicity, but that was underehelming as well. I never went too far with Repanse as I assume it’s the same  ending. 
 

Vortex play throughs are mostly more interesting, pirates and tomb kings being a highlight. Actual vortex campaigns can be repetitive due to the nature of doing the rituals.

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10 minutes ago, Toth said:

That... that was all? The entire crusader campaign was just three missions?

The quest battles are apparently some of the more time-consuming/expensive things to add and Repanse was a free add-on to the base game. The "real" story for the Vortex campaign is the actual Vortex race with the rituals, which the four base factions participate in. So they get the rituals with the corresponding invasions plus the quest battles for their respective LLs.

And at the end of the day it's still a Total War game, not an RPG or classic C&C/Starcraft-style RTS. I simply look to the story elements for some nice flavour and to give me a goal other than world conquest.

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7 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Well Bretonnia is pretty much the only warhammer 1 campaign I ever finished, due to its simplicity, but that was underehelming as well. I never went too far with Repanse as I assume it’s the same  ending.

I'm pretty sure it is, there was absolutely nothing indicating the last mission as part of your crusade and the event marker didn't even show up on the map because it was supposedly happening in the Old World.

7 hours ago, Jon AS said:

The quest battles are apparently some of the more time-consuming/expensive things to add and Repanse was a free add-on to the base game. The "real" story for the Vortex campaign is the actual Vortex race with the rituals, which the four base factions participate in. So they get the rituals with the corresponding invasions plus the quest battles for their respective LLs.

And at the end of the day it's still a Total War game, not an RPG or classic C&C/Starcraft-style RTS. I simply look to the story elements for some nice flavour and to give me a goal other than world conquest.

I know, I know. That's what I suspected and I'm not too worried about it, just... eh... it just kinda makes it harder to move on trying out the next campaign when it very much feels like I'm abandoning my whole 'rescue the elves' operation. But I guess it is fitting to go try to prevent that entire mess from happening as Teclis.

I find it rather amusing how in his intro Tyrion's last words to him as he storms off angrily were "I'm taking care you will have a home to return to!". Shortly before Repanse got her Vortex Victory Teclis got finally wiped out by the rats who own the entirety of Lustria. I suppose when he returned to Ulthuan and found it in that shape he went with a snide "Wow, great job!".

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On 12/25/2020 at 4:51 PM, Heartofice said:

Does order tide still exist in the latest version?

It still shows up most of the time in Mortal Empires since they nerfed vc cheats again, I was unaware ordertide even was a thing in vortex given that the reason ordertide happens is because of the dwarves and empire auto resolve advantage.

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