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

[Slurktan]

The dwarves are literally the most boring nation in the game, for strategy, mechanics, anything.  You went from the extremely basic and generic High Elves to boring ass dwarves.  Good choice!  Get the worst out of the way I suppose.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, Slurktan said:

The dwarves are literally the most boring nation in the game, for strategy, mechanics, anything.  You went from the extremely basic and generic High Elves to boring ass dwarves.  Good choice!  Get the worst out of the way I suppose.

But you get to just sit there and not move while the enemy run into your guns. It’s so relaxing to not have to interact with the game 

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Slurktan said:

The dwarves are literally the most boring nation in the game, for strategy, mechanics, anything.  You went from the extremely basic and generic High Elves to boring ass dwarves.  Good choice!  Get the worst out of the way I suppose.

Now that is one for the book!

[Toth]

On 10/19/2021 at 3:51 PM, Corvinus85 said:

After the Greenskin rework, they got much tougher to break. Unless you start at Kharaz-a-Kharak and are aggressive, it's Grimgor who will likely turn into a massive blob that you have to contend with. He tends to quickly confederate other Greenskin factions.

Funny you mention Grimgor. Almost turn 40, finally managed to take him down for good. Damn, I probably should have checked the composition of my army when I marched for Black Crag, since I had far too few crossbowmen and the city had a ludicrously good garrison, one full army, another Waaagh army spawning to defend it and a whole bunch of agents that killed two of my heroes right away. It really was a fight of attrition with their constant sallies that caused horrific losses to my front-line troops and I needed to get a second army down with more crossbowmen to finally overcome it. At the end it was just throwing sticks and stones at each other with barely 100 defenders left when I made my final attack.

Unfortunately while I was occupied with Grimgor, another orc tribe in the west had grown to 7 settlements and is, once again, completely ignoring a city of my allied dwarves directly in its path to instead march up the mountain with their stacks to sack my undefended settlements. For fuck's sake! Meanwhile in the north I hired Brian Blessed to get back the settlements that I conquered earlier and lost again to defend my home province, but only got one. The others were, again, taken by allied dwarves while I was too busy smashing their stacks. Fucking killstealers. All the worse: I noticed two of the biggest dwarven blobs are DLC factions that I'm not allowed to confederate somehow. Perfect... I feel like the whole area will turn into a super silly patchwork of various dwarf factions that I have to maneuver around (and to make it worse, being unable to get full provinces ever).

[The Winged Shadow]

Yeah, it's a rough start. You pretty much have to build walls before you leave a settlement. So the start is pretty slow, specially with their shit growth. Once you get walls, you can leave without issue. The garrison is good enough to take on one orc army, specially if you don't man the walls and hold the town centre/associated choke points.

My first dwarves playthrough was same as yours. I tried to venture out and expand quickly but kept losing ground. Slow and steady is the Dawi way unfortunately.

[Corvinus85]

I don't like cheesing the game, but sometimes you just got to do it.

In my Wood Elves playthrough, with Orion, I got involved in a war with the vampires of Mousillon. The Red Duke surprised attacked a peripheral settlement that has a small garrison. My garrison is partially made of Hawk Riders and Eagles. So what did I do? I hid my ground forces at the edges of the map, and took out the Red Duke who had a flying mount, the fool!!! Then I let the clock run out, because the stupid Vampires Counts have no range capability.  The battle ended in a draw. I've done it twice now, but I've finally been able to bring an army to relieve the town.

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

I don't like cheesing the game, but sometimes you just got to do it.

In my Wood Elves playthrough, with Orion, I got involved in a war with the vampires of Mousillon. The Red Duke surprised attacked a peripheral settlement that has a small garrison. My garrison is partially made of Hawk Riders and Eagles. So what did I do? I hid my ground forces at the edges of the map, and took out the Red Duke who had a flying mount, the fool!!! Then I let the clock run out, because the stupid Vampires Counts have no range capability.  The battle ended in a draw. I've done it twice now, but I've finally been able to bring an army to relieve the town.

Why do I suddenly have this picture in my mind of Mannfred getting pelted by eagles in the sky while his army stands on the ground watching.

"Should we help him?"
"Nah, it's fine."

[Corvinus85]

4 minutes ago, Toth said:

Why do I suddenly have this picture in my mind of Mannfred getting pelted by eagles in the sky while his army stands on the ground watching.

"Should we help him?"
"Nah, it's fine."

They do have a few flying units in their roster, but this army had none besides the commander. If a Terrorgheist or a couple of Vargheist had been in the sky, it would have been game over for my guys.

[The Anti-Targ]

11 hours ago, The Winged Shadow said:

Yeah, it's a rough start. You pretty much have to build walls before you leave a settlement. So the start is pretty slow, specially with their shit growth. Once you get walls, you can leave without issue. The garrison is good enough to take on one orc army, specially if you don't man the walls and hold the town centre/associated choke points.

My first dwarves playthrough was same as yours. I tried to venture out and expand quickly but kept losing ground. Slow and steady is the Dawi way unfortunately.

I always have at least enough units on the walls to shoot from the defence towers and soften up some units. If the AI places slow single entity monsters in the right place you can often break at least one before the army reaches the walls. And a lot of the time the AI is completely stupid in where it places cav while it is waiting for gates to be busted down and your defence towers can usually whittle down some of those units before fighting breaks out in the streets.

Does anyone here play multiplayer? I don't, multiplayer in any video game stresses me out too much for it to be fun for me. Even after winning it is more relief than elation. But I do enjoy watching multiplayer matches, so I catch a few Youtubes on the regular. 

[Heartofice]

9 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I always have at least enough units on the walls to shoot from the defence towers and soften up some units. If the AI places slow single entity monsters in the right place you can often break at least one before the army reaches the walls. And a lot of the time the AI is completely stupid in where it places cav while it is waiting for gates to be busted down and your defence towers can usually whittle down some of those units before fighting breaks out in the streets.

Does anyone here play multiplayer? I don't, multiplayer in any video game stresses me out too much for it to be fun for me. Even after winning it is more relief than elation. But I do enjoy watching multiplayer matches, so I catch a few Youtubes on the regular. 

My tactic is usually to leave a few archers on the walls to man the towers until they reach me with ladders etc, then run back and defend he middle of the settlement. It actually depends on the quality of the towers though, better quality defences are worth manning but sometimes lower tier walls do almost nothing when shooting at the enemy and I don't even bother.

There are one or two siege maps that are really difficult to defend however, the layout means that there is just very little room to create a bottleneck in one direction. I 

I've never played any total war multiplayer since maybe rome 2? Maybe earlier. Finding an opponent to play just took too long and the whole thing is about reflexes rather than anything else so I don't enjoy it

[Toth]

16 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

They do have a few flying units in their roster, but this army had none besides the commander. If a Terrorgheist or a couple of Vargheist had been in the sky, it would have been game over for my guys.

Amusingly I just ran into Manny and his spooky skeletons after I confederated with a Dwarf keep at the border to the Empire. Wow, I'm not sure whether I should be impressed by the sheer masses of troops they are fielding or amused about how useless they are (as long as their mages are still low leveled that is). So one of my armies dipped their toe across the border and got instantly swarmed by three full armies. They managed to defeat me. Barely. After I ran out of ammunition. And in the process took down almost every single unit of them except one close combat Strigoi lord whom I couldn't scratch during the entire engagement no matter what I threw at him. In the next turn my army was still at half strength, while the Vampire Counts were absolutely battered or gone. With a little luck I weakened them enough to get a pincer attack going because I'm at the same time moving another army down the mountain in the north and it seems the towns there are absolutely undefended.

Btw, they had two units of Vargheists there and somehow got the idea to just park them above my flanks without swooping down, just hanging there getting shot down by my thunderers. Sometimes the AI just... stops working it seems. But then again, I made similar observations with the Orks taking a whole lot of time announcing their flanking maneuvers with their Big 'Uns boar riders lounging about getting shot at.

[The Winged Shadow]

On 10/22/2021 at 9:53 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

I always have at least enough units on the walls to shoot from the defence towers and soften up some units. If the AI places slow single entity monsters in the right place you can often break at least one before the army reaches the walls. And a lot of the time the AI is completely stupid in where it places cav while it is waiting for gates to be busted down and your defence towers can usually whittle down some of those units before fighting breaks out in the streets.

I used to do that, but i got caught out a few times as the dwarves are slow as hell. Now I just go full lazy mode. Dwarves are just so damn good at choke point battles.

[Toth]

Sigh, I fucking HATE Skaven. Why are they dominating every game I have played so far? My Repanse playthrough - Skaven take over all of the Southlands. My Teclis playthrough - Skaven take over all of Naggaroth and plague the shit out of the Southlands. My Thorgrim playthrough - The entire east and south of the map is only Skaven everywhere. And so is everything north of the Empire, for that matter, either. At least everything around the Wood Elves there is Clan Mors now.

So I made short work of the Vampires, but am slightly annoyed at how difficult it is to drive the vampiric corruption in Sylvania down due to it being hardcoded there. Afterwards I continued wiping out the Orks in the badlands, but I watched the last remnants of them getting overrun by three different Skaven tribes that conquered everything up to Karak Eight-Peaks, as well as Imrik in the east. I think the only Orks left are the Bonerattlaz with two settlements on a mountain top that refuse to come down to do anything.

In any case, the Skaven then proceeded to gobble up the Dwarf holds in the South until this one was finally willing to confederate with me when the only thing they had left was only one puny army. One army that I used to conquer one Skaven settlement and hunker down as a distraction to divide the attention of the Clan Mors and Clan Eshin stacks that were homing in on Karak Drazh. Smashed some, but as I was carefully trying to bring the battle to Clan Eshin one of my armies was instantly swarmed by three full stacks of Clan Eshin that came from different directions and fucked me over big time as I failed to switch directions after smashing the first one and suddenly Snikch was wreaking havoc among my crossbowmen.

Sigh... this is going to be tedious... I already miss the Elves that at least seemed a good matchup. The dwarf lines instantly melt when facing weapons teams and magic and have no serious counter except bringing more crossbowmen to bear and hope they don't get thrown into disarray by menace below spams.

[Corvinus85]

I'm nearing the end of my Wood Elves playthrough. I got all the forests except the one in Lustria because I didn't have time to go there yet. I'm waiting to do the ritual at the Oak of Ages until the end, but I got rituals completed at Laurelon Forest, the Witchwood, and Oreon's Camp, with the one in the Borderlands nearly done. I confederated with Drycha, too. 

But the End Times have come, and the Warriors of Chaos are wreaking havoc. I put the Chaos invasion difficulty at very hard, so there are about 20-30 armies on the map right now, most of them in north-east, coming through Kislev, but maybe a third of them coming through northern Naggaroth. I've been kicking the crap out of Grimgor's Greenskins who had a massive empire in the south. He destroyed most of the Dwarfs. But now I've had to move armies to protect the most vulnerable of my forests. Of course, I'm not just waiting. My human allies are getting trounced, so I'm employing ambush tactics to destroy any wayward Chaos armies. I sense a large battle coming soon.

[The Winged Shadow]

16 hours ago, Toth said:

Sigh, I fucking HATE Skaven. Why are they dominating every game I have played so far? My Repanse playthrough - Skaven take over all of the Southlands. My Teclis playthrough - Skaven take over all of Naggaroth and plague the shit out of the Southlands. My Thorgrim playthrough - The entire east and south of the map is only Skaven everywhere. And so is everything north of the Empire, for that matter, either. At least everything around the Wood Elves there is Clan Mors now.

So I made short work of the Vampires, but am slightly annoyed at how difficult it is to drive the vampiric corruption in Sylvania down due to it being hardcoded there. Afterwards I continued wiping out the Orks in the badlands, but I watched the last remnants of them getting overrun by three different Skaven tribes that conquered everything up to Karak Eight-Peaks, as well as Imrik in the east. I think the only Orks left are the Bonerattlaz with two settlements on a mountain top that refuse to come down to do anything.

In any case, the Skaven then proceeded to gobble up the Dwarf holds in the South until this one was finally willing to confederate with me when the only thing they had left was only one puny army. One army that I used to conquer one Skaven settlement and hunker down as a distraction to divide the attention of the Clan Mors and Clan Eshin stacks that were homing in on Karak Drazh. Smashed some, but as I was carefully trying to bring the battle to Clan Eshin one of my armies was instantly swarmed by three full stacks of Clan Eshin that came from different directions and fucked me over big time as I failed to switch directions after smashing the first one and suddenly Snikch was wreaking havoc among my crossbowmen.

Sigh... this is going to be tedious... I already miss the Elves that at least seemed a good matchup. The dwarf lines instantly melt when facing weapons teams and magic and have no serious counter except bringing more crossbowmen to bear and hope they don't get thrown into disarray by menace below spams.

Haha yeah Skaven are annoying. The AI can be surprisingly good with the sneaky tactic for the unsuspecting players. They always try to lure you, so if you see a single army on the map, there is probably 2-3 armies somewhere close waiting of your to attack the honeypot army. (When i first started, i always fell for that trap where they leave a single lord army hanging out infront of a ruin haha).

They have a lot of trash stacks though, so are the three armies actually high quality? You definitely need to get range advantage and invest in artillery. What's your army setup? I always try to have a chopper or two to act as scout and take out their artillery. I always prioritize the catapault and weapons team first as their infantry aren't particularly scary. But if they get big, Skaven are a massive pain.

edit: regarding their domination, are you usually taking out their rivals? orcs/undeads/lizards etc?

[Heartofice]

Most Skaven armies I come up against usually go heavy on Ratling guns and warp fire throwers, and it’s quite hard to battle those with a range based army because they can outshoot you. Except maybe using hellstorm rocket batteries of course. 
 

The issue with fighting Rats is that you get bogged down fighting Skaven slaves when you really need to be trying to wipe out the actually dangerous units as quickly as possible 

[Corvinus85]

14 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Most Skaven armies I come up against usually go heavy on Ratling guns and warp fire throwers, and it’s quite hard to battle those with a range based army because they can outshoot you. Except maybe using hellstorm rocket batteries of course. 
 

The issue with fighting Rats is that you get bogged down fighting Skaven slaves when you really need to be trying to wipe out the actually dangerous units as quickly as possible 

Warp fire throwers have short range, so if you have good range units, they need to be one of the first targets. The other weapon teams don't do well in hilly terrain, so while dangerous, if possible try to make them ineffective. Wood elves and high elves will make short work of them if their archers are used properly.

In other news, the latest Total War blog, for which I don't have the link, has the Tzeentch army roster. Tzeentch has reached to the stars and stolen the Protoss shields.  All his units have this shield barrier that is basically another health bar, which quickly regenerates when out of combat. His armies are heavily based on flying units and cavalry, so it might be interesting to see how well hit and run tactics will work.

[Toth]

15 hours ago, The Winged Shadow said:

They have a lot of trash stacks though, so are the three armies actually high quality? You definitely need to get range advantage and invest in artillery. What's your army setup? I always try to have a chopper or two to act as scout and take out their artillery. I always prioritize the catapault and weapons team first as their infantry aren't particularly scary. But if they get big, Skaven are a massive pain.

My armies are quite simple because of my lack of advanced buildings. Not just because of my low growth, but also because I keep getting new armies after confederations and the expenses eat up the money I need to construct new buildings in my home province. Then again, the dwarfs don't have anything fancy anyway, so a simple stack does the job just fine... with some glaring exceptions as I found out yesterday again when I tried to nail down Snikch in a village and the bastard hid in the town center until I ran out of ammunition: https://i.imgur.com/q25g0oD.jpg

Probably will have to indeed get some gyrocopters down the line...

14 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Warp fire throwers have short range, so if you have good range units, they need to be one of the first targets. The other weapon teams don't do well in hilly terrain, so while dangerous, if possible try to make them ineffective. Wood elves and high elves will make short work of them if their archers are used properly.

Sure, the fireteams have low range and can easily picked off, but it gets tricky when the Skaven throw a stack of Ratling Guns, Warplightning Cannons, Plagueclaw Catapults and Doomwheels at you. The dwarfs seriously have no other choice but to try to bring more guns.

[The Winged Shadow]

16 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Most Skaven armies I come up against usually go heavy on Ratling guns and warp fire throwers, and it’s quite hard to battle those with a range based army because they can outshoot you. Except maybe using hellstorm rocket batteries of course. 
 

The issue with fighting Rats is that you get bogged down fighting Skaven slaves when you really need to be trying to wipe out the actually dangerous units as quickly as possible 

You wouldn't take on their weapons team (rattling and snipers) with your own gunners/rangers as they out range you. I'd use the artillery units to take out their rattling guns/snipers and rangers/gunners to take out the warpfire thrower/bombardier units. Completely ignore their melee units, or send hero/lords to tank those (and hopefully also get focused by artillery fire).

1 hour ago, Toth said:

My armies are quite simple because of my lack of advanced buildings. Not just because of my low growth, but also because I keep getting new armies after confederations and the expenses eat up the money I need to construct new buildings in my home province. Then again, the dwarfs don't have anything fancy anyway, so a simple stack does the job just fine... with some glaring exceptions as I found out yesterday again when I tried to nail down Snikch in a village and the bastard hid in the town center until I ran out of ammunition: https://i.imgur.com/q25g0oD.jpg

Probably will have to indeed get some gyrocopters down the line...

Sure, the fireteams have low range and can easily picked off, but it gets tricky when the Skaven throw a stack of Ratling Guns, Warplightning Cannons, Plagueclaw Catapults and Doomwheels at you. The dwarfs seriously have no other choice but to try to bring more guns.

Fair enough. I'd suggest prioritizing the wall on EVERY settlement. That way you can reduce the number of armies or consolidated them (depending on difficulty/upkeep increase). Don't feel pressured to develop EVERY province. Dwarves can snowball hard later on, so feel free to built tall rather than wide and prioritize profitable/safe province.

And yeah, when they out tech your army it gets rough. You can cheese a little if you go hero heavy army and let them bomb their own units! I always find it hard to deal with the doomwheels. Have to focus fire those, but you have to use some distraction tactics so they come at you in waves rather than all at once. It's difficult to deal with ALL their firepower at once as they are so damn deadly. Choppers help with that as i can use it to distract their range/artillery and deal with their warpfire thrower/bombardier/doomwheel units first.

But man do i get trapped by them alot. They are so good at keeping their armies outside the fog of war/LoS, so if you attack one of their armies, you get attacked by way more the next turn. Sneaky fuckers.

[Toth]

Well, at least it seems as far as I can tell after the first few rough battles the Skaven have not quite blobbed to the degree I thought they did, or at least I have trouble finding the last Eshin and Mors settlements. I confederated Thorek's expedition in the far south and realised that it is within some kind of deep canyon that has been taken over by Clan Mors, but the Lizardmen and Wood Elves to my right and left still exist and Khalida still has one settlement as well. In the East I'm seeing there is only a small stretch of Skaven territory in the North East between the mountains and the edge of the map. It's the south east where Eshin has the Plain of Bones and Gnoblar Country. While I was busy pushing against Mors in Blightwater I was quite stumped watching one of the minor dwarf factions send two stacks against Eshin and take the Wolf Lands. Doesn't look like I ever get to confederate this one.^^

7 hours ago, The Winged Shadow said:

But man do i get trapped by them alot. They are so good at keeping their armies outside the fog of war/LoS, so if you attack one of their armies, you get attacked by way more the next turn. Sneaky fuckers.

I feel you... know there is still one Eshin army stalking around my units because I only destroyed two of the three which caught me earlier... but... it's gone now. -.-

 

In regards to army composition I guess I'll have to aim at getting Engineers into my armies. I'm somewhat irritated at how often I run out of ammunition during a battle and their ammo replenishment ability is great. Unfortunately the one I got at the start got randomly assassinated. -.-