Weekly (non) progress; Total War: Warhammer

This week is a light week....

I generally split my time between my PC, and my painting desk. After spending time with my family, I generally have 2-3 hours a night to whatever is needed. 
Total War: Warhammer is one time sink at the moment.


I'm a horrendously casual gamer, I love a good story so will often stick the game on easy, and get cracking to see the content, and the endgame, rather than gruelling through fighting the system.

I do so hate losing.

Coupled with how long I've been playing the Total War series, I figured easy would be a good place to play my favourite race, and steamroll the old world as possible. 

I was very, very wrong.

The Chaos Warrior faction in TWW is great, it starts off with your tribesmen and horses (and lots of them) before progressing to the esoteric crazies that the faction can provide, Spawn, giants, Lords of change and the fun stuff.
However, there are no real cities for the Chaos lords, only moving camps. Nothing to defend.

And I'm a very defensive player

My 2 default strategies are
- Lay siege with a great defensive army and starve the defenders out, or they charge your defensive army
- Walk very slowly in a square defensive formation while firing at the enemy.

TWW completely threw my stupid way of playing.
The AI now was actually smart enough to try and counter attack. It now throws cavalry around my flanks more comprehensively. Missile cavalry would actually charge me now. My spear wall was walked round or smashed through and my flank charges negated by turning units.

The biggest change though was the change to missile units.

Classically in TW games you could safely have your archers behind a wall of spikey things, firing over the spikey things, without penalty. Finally someone twigged that this didn't make the arrows that accurate so now line of sight for a missile unit is very key (who knew eh?).

That meant that missile units now had to be put into places of danger, exposed on the flanks or the centres, facing down the charging enemy.

1. So my spear wall is useless.
2. I have no cities.
3. My missile units have to be by themselves.
4. My backside is no longer my own any more.
5. I have 8+ major factions that all have functions and change make their own separate game play.

GOD
THIS
IS
GREAT!

Finally, a damn challenge

I lost with Chaos on easy. Potentially it was because of the initial pre-patch rate of army replenishment for Chaos was too low. Running away from three armies at once is fine.
But I'm OK with that. I learned fast.

Didn't I?

Next, some nice safe Dwarves. On Easy again, see if I can do some good.
NOPE!
You're Slow! No real Cavalry! 2 cheaper goblin Archer units can split off and pick you apart, grumbling discontented ancestors? Yep. How bout some grudges thrown in and some nasty vampiric corruption?
Won that one after a loooooooong time.

OK, OK. I think I'm ready for something a bit more relatable. Some humans...lets try Empire on normal.

Oh, oh no.

I'm doing well. But I'm respecting my human neighbours.

Oh....

My allies are dying. All my allies are dead.

I'm dead.

Ok, time to try some Orcs on Normal.
Finally we're getting somewhere. Free Waagh Armies. Cheap units (using lots of ranged units against Dwarves is a great tactic).

TWW is a fantastic game. Sega are doing great, they've taken a bold step going to the Warhammer setting and I think its paid off for me with the improvements to the whole system.