Total War: Warhammer: Totalhammer: War War War

King of Posters
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Total War has been around for a bit at this point; however, there hasn’t been much talk about Total War: Warhammer I+II, which are great! More people should play them! I’m here to talk about why!

Both games are basically made on the same engine, although there are a fair bit of improvements/tweaks made in II (tbf, there are a non-zero amount of people who prefer the first game). The main benefit of II is that it introduces a whole bunch more of playable factions and more importantly, a whole new area on the world map. Basically there are three campaign modes that you can play – The Warhammer I campaign map, the Warhammer II campaign map, and Mortal Empires, which is both of the campaign maps wodged together (you have to own both games for it to be an available option in Warhammer II).

The game itself is two layers – the first is a strategic, 4xesque layer where you build shit in the cities you control, research technology, build/move your armies, and do some amount of faction-specific decision-making. The second layer is the actual battles you fight, where up to 80 units (with each of those units having 1-to-lots actual models) fight on a giant map in a realtime-with-pause engine with loads and loads of available and hidden information influencing what goes down in your little army men killing and being killed by their little army men.

The best thing about this game is that it allows you to play something approximating Warhammer Fantasy Battles without having to purchase, assemble, paint, transport, etc. the actual figures. And the battles take like 30 minutes instead of multiple hours. Sure, you’re not going to get the authentic WFB experience, on the other hand, in terms of the actual convenience of seeing loads and loads of shouty people with polearms hiking over hills before getting scattered in all directions by a fireball, this shit is completely bananas in terms of value.

Also, they fucking got their money’s worth with the voice acting for this game. All the unique generals have their own set of lines, then every unit in the game has a set of lines as well (many of which are just incoherent yelling, which is great because nothing beats zooming into a line of dogsbodies and hearing “AAAAAAAAAGHGHH”). The best voice acting in the game is probably the Empire general Balthazar Gelt, who’s a wizard obsessed with turning stuff (including himself) into gold and wears a giant gold mask – whoever did the VA turned the camp meter up to 11 and sounds like they were recorded with a bucket over their head, it’s fantastic.

Add onto all this that the game lets you have an incredible variety in terms of what faction you choose and how the mechanics change based on that. Thinking off the top of my head, there are Empire, Bretonnia, Dwarves, Norsca, Chaos, Wood Elf, High Elf, Dark Elf, Ork/Goblin, Tomb Kings, Vampire Counts, Vampire Pirates, Lizardmen, Skaven…I think that’s it? And each of those have a number of different starting commanders, many of which have different starting spots and have different combinations of army compositions.

So, what’s wrong with the game?

Firstly, the only way that you’re really going to make it challenging, especially once you get to a reasonably stable mid-game, is by setting the difficulty high enough that the AI gets all sorts of stupid boosts and cheats to make up for the fact that it’s not as good as you at thinking on a strategic or tactical level. This always sits poorly with me because seeing the AI do something that you know damn well is impossible feels bad on a level beyond immersion. Thankfully, there is a solution of sorts to this, in that there are mods which do things like move around starting positions and make the AI far more aggressive, which makes it highly likely that you’ll be fighting on multiple fronts.

Another issue is that certain factions are just more fun to play than others. For example, The Empire lives in the same strategic home that humans play in general in GW products, Blood Bowl especially, in which they are the jack-of-all-trades. What this winds up meaning is that you have a ton of different options for army composition, which is very helpful to spec your armies for different opponents (which for the Empire is especially nice because you’re literally surrounded by a bunch of potential enemies, each of which has a counter-strategy). Once you’ve played as them, it can be a lot harder to move to playing a faction that’s much more constrained in terms of what they can do (or at least do well).

In terms of the actual battles, sieges can be incredibly fiddly, mainly because of the way the game handles unit AI in regards to walls. Getting on/off walls for either attackers or defenders can be very frustrating because units can get hung up on each other or move incredibly slowly (more likely both). Climbing walls basically slams your units for the rest of the battle and building siege weapons takes time, so most attacking siege strategies involves cheesing the defensive tower fire and then having a way to make a big hole in the wall that you can stream everybody through. Then once you get inside, you’re often dealing with streets that your large rectangular units are not designed to traverse. If you’re defending a siege, because of how hard it can be to deal with walls, it’s often a lot more effective to let the attackers in, then hit them at a choke point with some high-value units/AoE attacks. Basically if there’s a siege, there’s lots of micro that odds are, is going to go sideways at some point.

You also run into the problem where you eventually get enough doomstacks that the majority of battles turn into trivial encounters that you should really just auto-resolve to save time. And the battles really are the best bit of the game. I often just wind up stomping my way through these because it’s still fun sometimes even if it’s already a foregone conclusion.

Anyway, I’m currently playing two Mortal Empires campaigns, one as the High Elves led by Tyrion, in which the Bullshit Doughnut of Peace has fallen apart and there’s Dark Elves and Skaven all over the place and the other is a Greenskins game where I’m Grimgor, trying to figure out how to eliminate the main Dwarf stronghold as early as possible.

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Total War Three Kingdoms solved this pretty well for having different difficulty sliders for the battles and the campaign, was that a recent innovation?

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No, they have those for both Total Warhammers, the issue is that for anybody reasonably good at the game, even Very Hard/Very Hard isn’t going to be very challenging once you get past a certain point. (All Legendary does is take away your ability to pause in battles, so most people just stick with VH/VH.) By changing which factions start where and making the AI more aggressive when playing an “evil” faction, you get a lot more variance, so the game becomes more unpredictable, plus for factions like the Empire where geography is generally not your friend, you can very quickly be in a situation where you’re fighting Norsca/Orks/Vampires/Skaven/Wood Elves all at once on different fronts. Diplomacy and making concessions thereof becomes a lot more important.

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Glad to hear that after 20 years Creative Assembly still haven’t been able to figure out how to do sieges

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Total War…
Total War never changes

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For those who want a decent introduction to how Total War works, you could do a whole lot worse than this:

He does a good job breaking down the basic systems of the game, playing a single turn, which includes one battle where you get to see the basics, including positioning, casting spells, some of the rock-paper-scissors systems going on in unit-to-unit combat, and covers some of the non-obvious bits of the strategic layer as well.

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this is my favorite thread title of all time. i don’t play total war but i do watch a channel of a guy who saves peoples totally helpless totally warhammer games, i just love it when the guy gets incredulous and goes on about HOW COULD YOU PICK THESE UNITS WHAT WERE YOU THINKING. also he’s hugely successful in rescuing peoples campaigns

i have no idea if hes a racist or not

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I really like this game. How much do I like this game? Well, I was playing it in Steam Offline mode (because we are without internet for like the next three weeks, thoughts and prayers please) and the game crashed so hard that on reboot, Steam said it was Uninstalled, which required me to dig out a Wifi dongle and use my phone as a mobile hotspot so that I could get Steam to try and re-install it (and of course just instantly recognize that all the files were there and it magically reappeared without having to do a gigantic download).

Anyway, I’ve largely abandoned my Greenskins campaign as frankly. CA haven’t put a lot of work into Ork mechanics and the game is insanely difficult unless you basically completely wipe out the Dwarves immediately, which is also hard because Dwarves have so many good value starting units, whereas most Greenskin units are straight-up trash.

I’ve also started a Tomb Kings campaign, which has gone a lot better – Tomb Kings are Egyptian-style undead, with their main mechanic being that they don’t have to pay to get units/armies don’t cost anything in upkeep. The constraints they have to work with is that there are unit caps on anything except the most basic units that are based on building construction and the need to collect canoptic jars and then spend that resource to get army leaders and new army slots. So you can have just a ton of skeleton armies roaming around the desert as support troops along with your “premium” armies with the higher-tier units.

After wiping out the orks that start just north of Settra the Imperishable’s home province, I immediately got war declarations on me from two of the local Bretonnian factions to the West. Bretonnia is supposed to be the knightly, “old medieval” Western Fantasy army as opposed to the more modern Empire. They have what’s called the Peasant Economy, where you need to decide whether to keep your populace working in the fields or taking up arms. Their armies are based around expensive, powerful calvary units and then masses of peasants with spears, bows, etc.

The first major battle we fought turned out to be on a map that had two centrally-located chokepoints:

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(The black bits to the side and the hole in the middle are all impassable cliffs.)

The Bretonnians were defending from the north while the Tomb Kings attacked from the south, in a field battle the only difference between attacking/defending is that the attacker is on a timer, if the timer runs out, the defender automatically wins. Since the timer is a full hour, it almost never comes into play.

A crucial part of this battle is that I as the TK had artillery (some sort of ridiculous screaming spectral skull launcher) and the Brets did not (typically they have trebuchets). This meant that I could safely set up where I wanted and then bombard them until they decided to move up.

This is how it wound up looking:

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The Bretonnians wound up evenly splitting their forces to go through the two choke points and hurled themselves at my formation:

Central

Front line is Skeleton Spearmen, which are pretty bad (one of their unit “abilities” is ‘Meat Shield’); however, they at least have Anti-Large, which counts calvary, so if they do charge into the line, the spearman have a chance of doing some damage. Behind them in a checkerboard arrangement, are the Skeleton Warriors, whose job it will be to move into an already-engaged unit and try and attack it from the flank or the rear, which will greatly increase their effectiveness. The third line is the Skeleton Archers, who obviously will rain death on anything that moves into range, most likely meaning that they’ll soften up units charging into melee and then switch to targeting the opponent’s ranged units.

Behind them are my Lords/Casters and two units of elite Nehekhara Warriors, who aside from being better warriors, also cause fear and boost the morale of nearby units. They’re going to act as firefighters, targeting areas of the front where there are powerful enemy units and/or where our forces are threatening to break. The Lords will serve a similar purpose, only they will be primarily looking to counter the opposition Lords, with the Mages casing various area damage/regeneration spells where appropriate.

Furthest back are the artillery, with a further Skeleton Warrior unit babysitting them – ideally no enemy units should get back there; if they do, the babysitting unit can hopefully tie them up for long enough for the artillery to get to a better-protected position/I can rotate some of the central units back out to help.

Flanks

My “calvary” is off to the sides. The scare quotes are because none of them are actually calvary, the right side is chariots and the left side is carrion – giant undead vultures. My goal here is to cut off whatever cav comes through the choke points with spearmen, then try and get the chariots around the back of their blob and doing “cycle-charges” into their rear. (Effectively, this means charging the chariots into an engaged unit, then pathing them away from them, then wash, rinse, repeat.) The carrion will wait until all of their ranged units have locked onto other targets, then sweep in and eat those ranged units – while the carrion aren’t great at melee, typically bowmen suffer at it as well.

What Actually Happened

Thankfully, this Bret army was remarkably thin on cav, so it was relatively easy to pin down the knights by double-speed marching spearman to block them in once they got through the chokepoints. My skeletons and their peasants pretty much blobbed into each other, with the lines cutting off their flank to the east. The west though, stayed open, so I brought the chariots all the way around behind my lines to join the carrion in attacking the units on that side. As a result, that flank collapsed fairly rapidly and from then on, it was a matter of moving the difference-maker units from clump to clump until their entire army broke.

NEXT TIME: What if they have trebuchets? And what about Elves, anyway?

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