A small dissertation on why the Khu'gath IE campaign is bad

[iffy]

My experience was with Ultra unit size, patch 2.1.1, no mods, and normal difficulty.

The overall mechanics are incredibly inconsistent, and the difficulty curve is insane.

You start off against Lizardmen, then run into Helmen Ghorst (who just got nerfed, but still). Then you've got Cathay and Ogres.

Khugath himself does not count as a Great Unclean One, despite physically being a Greater Daemon. The cool abilities in the tech tree for GUOs require either regiments of renown (level 20+, aka not the first 15 turns).

No factionwide bonuses for _any_ units by default on turn 1.

Khugath needs to be level 12 for the nurglings regen, and has no built in regen of his own until level 7 at the earliest, with the regen spell skill line.

The _only_ plague that grants summonable units is the fourth one, and it only grants one nurgling unit on spread.

On Khugath, this plague only lasts three turns. It doesn't stack its turn duration, unlike with Festus and the experience plague, which will stack infinitely until a new plague overwrites that plague, and if you've got multiple different plagues running around, they're going to be overwriting each other all game.

Plus there's the constant remembering to cast the same plague over and over again to reinforce/provide your armies in the future.

The infection mechanic is horribly hamstrung. In the early game, you can cast a weak plague to get minor buffs. By turn 200, you're getting +500 infections a turn, and you can only infect 1 army, one settlement, and create one plague hero unit per turn (edit: you can apparently create one plague hero unit on a settlement as well, but again, why the limit?), which isn't enough. Only one army/settlement can be infected with one plague at a time (no arrays), heroes can't act as infection targets from the plague cauldron, and if a nurgle army fights that wasn't infected, it has 0% chance to create a plague, despite canonically being constantly infected all the time.

All Nurgle Daemons come in by default at half strength, forcing you to either merge units together to full strength, or deal with the fact that if any daemon unit hits 25% strength (they're already at 50%), they start taking automatic wounds damage and melt.

In order to take the first province, you have to know how to take settlements because you're going up against Lizardmen, which are no joke. YOU HAVE NO INDIVIDUAL REGEN ABILITIES UNTIL MINIMUM LEVEL 7, and the army regen requires you to take damage first, and you're just screwed if you've hit the magic regen cap on your units when the battle starts.

Your only hero units that regen automatically are the humanish looking guys that are plaguespreaders or whatever. These guys are great with warshrines and their summonables and red battle skill line.

The unique building cycle system is a sick and cruel joke. I would understand a penalty, but the sheer inability to summon units because you're not on the right turn rotation is insane, plus the 10,000 gold for the actually good buildings, that cannot rotate past a tier limit on minor settlements. There's a reason why the mechanic only applies to buildings, and not say, battle bonuses, because players would riot. Cathay has a balance mechanic, but unlike Khugath (not even Festus uses the mechanic), you can change the overall balance either by using technologies or buildings, and the penalties are relatively minor at -25%.

Edit: two different users have explained the stockpile mechanic to me, which is not explained in the game at all. The word "provides" doesn't explain it well enough, but the word "stockpile" is a better descriptor, at least when attempting to indicate to the player that basically there are summon tickets that you can pay for and the cycles stockpile tickets into a pile. There's no tooltip or popup on the buildings that explains how the building summonable units stockpiling works, and people are going to skip any tutorials, or maybe I did and the popups when I realized something wasn't working the way I thought it should've.

There are no dedicated income buildings, you cannot build walls on the minor settlements, ~~the garrisons change their troops on the same rotation (changing their defensive autoresolve strength dramatically)~~ I read this wrong, I got confused that some buildings offer only summonable units, and you are dependent on the random plagues for income/battle buffs, but again, it's either random chance or 3(edit:4) plague deployments max per turn. Good luck trying to take over the entire map with such limiting systems.

Khugath is a relatively short ranged spellcaster vs his ranged attack, and without heroes/items/greater arcane conduit (requires level 13, and you can't get nurgling regen with it at that level). This is _workable_, but you run out of magic reserves extremely quickly, and while this fine against Lizardmen/Ghorst, it's _not_ fine against Cathay or Ogres, both of which end up having 4 ranged units that will destroy your melee units even if you cornercamp with regen nurglings. By turn 70, they _will_ murderball or gang up on you and kill your army just to get the Nurgle map corruption less, and they _will_ have lightning strike or will be able to magically fight you 1v2.

I've said it before in my posts and I'll say it again - _apparently_ Gorefeast is standard issue on Khorne legendary lords, but Nurgle forbid you actually get Regeneration on _all_ Nurgle heroes, Nurgle Legendary Lords, as a level 25 unlock for normal lords, Greater Daemons, etc. Honestly giving Nurgle units Gorefeast would be an improvement over the army damage taking requirement/winds of magic using regeneration abilities.

Edit: Even the unholy manifestations are weak and require you to not move for weak buffs. Apparently Slaanesh gets both Disciple armies AND the ability to cause cult shrines to pop up? What?

[yuzhonglu]

At least he's green, smelly, and fat.

[Lamp]

Very in depth and I agree with most of it, Kugath campaign really needs some love.

The bit about the buildings cycles though, I thought that once it passes through that cycle those units are just added to your pool, hence the buildings that speed up cycles. Like it cycles through your chaos knight phase, several chaos knights are added to the pool, then the next time you get more will be next cycle. The payoff/advantage being that you can summon the units anywhere and they pile up over time. If that's not how it works then ouch.

My big peeve with his campaign has more been that it's slow, wall-less and reliant on giant lump sums of money to advance.

Also find his units underwhelming. Nurgles thing is slow, beefy monsters/chads, but for how much battlefield control they give up due to their slowness they're not nearly chadly enough. With Slaanesh's troops you're basically in control of the entire battlefield at all times, it takes like five seconds to surround the enemy entirely while dodging artillery and even arrows. Compared to this most of Nurgles battles are a painful slog- and don't even get me started on assaulting settlements as Nurgle with the garbage supply/momentum/slog system. It's as fun as taking an uncomfortable, sweaty nap.

[Ashardalon]

-the tech tree cleanone upgrades are for the units, not the lord
kugath is a lord
-nurglings spawn healthier factionwide
allowing for emergency backupspawning
-yes nurgle is severely lacking in the regeneration
you really feel how ghorst is better at being a nurgle lord then nurgle
-yes a lot of plague symptoms are mediocre
why specify the summon?
-you increase duration with symptoms and tech
-having to reapply buffs isnt really a negative and by the endgame its once every 15 turns
-one direct and one cultist to an army and one direct and one cultist to a town
4 plagues per turn is sufficient with late game plague duration once you can afford them so often
-yes the instant summon has a downside, expected it to have no downside? doesnt even have a recruit cap
lucky nurgle replenishment is good especially since you will have a replenishment/gold building in almost every town
-true early game you heal post battle, nurgle would be good to have some more regen
that doesnt make lizards hard or towns a challenge
-yep warshrines are nice
-you dont need to be on the right turn, it builds a stockpile
once in the stockpile you can summon instantly at any time anywhere
how dare nurgle have a strong interesting and thematic flavor to its buildings
-wtf are you even talking about
the garrison doesnt change, the cycle doesnt matter for garrison
are you using mods that break the game?
and yes you dont have walls you dont have the speed to use, you do have the tankiest units and the best towers
still sad that you lose the hero since that was you monstrous killer, but all garrisons are far too weak
you also have your economic buildings, good economic buildings providing those garrisons
your dedicated economic buildings also having benefits isnt a downside
-have you tried running around
why are you blobbing your entire army with double the melee units as a cathay army into their defensive line instead of walking around while they are occupied
yes plaguebearers should be slower and tankier to properly do their job, and cathay will hurt, but the fights arnt hard
kugath can also fire while moving so the range difference between spells and magic is irrelevant
-true, nurgle units should all be much slower, much tankier, perfect vigor and have some form of regen
but most of all much much slower

[Cacomistle]

I find nurgle hard too, but my reasons are far simpler.

Nurgle is poor. That's it. That's the entire reason, and something you already explained. If nurgle had like greenskins level of economy (let alone dark elves), all those things you mentioned might still be problems, but nurgle would be able to overcome those problems without much difficulty.

But to go into more detail the pay off times for your buildings are the worst of any faction and its not even close. The time to pay off on a T1 income building for most factions is like 5 or fewer turns. Nurgle gets 30-60 income from a building in a T1 settlement, so I'm not sure of their time to pay off exactly but its closer to 50 turns than 5. Alternatively you can pay 6000 gold and many turns of growth to level a settlement to T3, and then your infrastructure buildings pay off somewhere between 10-20 turns (not including the 6000 investment to upgrade a settlement to T3, or 4000 if you took it at T2), which is only mediocre instead of horrible. There's nothing remotely close to a 500 cost building that gives 250 income (something several factions approximately have, including dark elves without slaves. With slaves they get 350).


The cycle mechanics I think are bad, because it makes it so you get like 1 chosen great weapon or great uncleaned one by like turn 70, and don't get another one till like turn 90. But you don't actually need those units. That makes nurgle campaign feel worse to play, but does not really make them much weaker imo. That being said, I think either you should get your most elite units by T4 (and T4 could add more cycles for those elite units) so you can at least get something in the pool, those buildings need to cycle faster, or you should get growth faster and the buildings should be cheaper.



Personally, I think its fine for nurgle to not cap out high economically. But I think when your stuff takes like 5x as long to pay for itself as any other faction, its too much. Nurgle infrastructure buildings should be cheaper imo, which would allow nurgle to play a more defensive style with income from what are also garrison buildings, and slowly reach their late game (which even with their inability to make more than 3 plagues per turn allows them to pretty much attrition everything and put pretty insane buffs on all their stacks).

[DarkFenix]

Regarding the cycle on military buildings, you're supposed to get multiple. Of course, this loops us back to the problem of Nurgle's terrible economy. You're expected to afford multiple 10k buildings to build your late game army. Painful.

And of course Ku'gath doesn't count as a GUO. No lords count as a unit type when it comes to bonuses to that unit type. Lords are a type unto themselves.

Agreed about plagues, they generally suck. They seem very much balanced for early game, I was expecting research to buff them up to later game effectiveness. I think the duration and infection chance symptoms should be removed altogether, those bonuses being moved into the research tree. None of the choices for plagues should be boring tax choices, shouldn't be "well I'd better choose this or the plague won't do anything much".

[heh]

Originally posted by DarkFenix:

Regarding the cycle on military buildings, you're supposed to get multiple. Of course, this loops us back to the problem of Nurgle's terrible economy. You're expected to afford multiple 10k buildings to build your late game army. Painful.

And of course Ku'gath doesn't count as a GUO. No lords count as a unit type when it comes to bonuses to that unit type. Lords are a type unto themselves.

Agreed about plagues, they generally suck. They seem very much balanced for early game, I was expecting research to buff them up to later game effectiveness. I think the duration and infection chance symptoms should be removed altogether, those bonuses being moved into the research tree. None of the choices for plagues should be boring tax choices, shouldn't be "well I'd better choose this or the plague won't do anything much".

Why build the 10k buildings? Only ones you need are the ones that give soul grinders, and you barely need any of those since kugath's armies never suffer any in the early game, and by the point that's over he's already started steamrolling and can't lose.
Lizardmen are free wins with kugath since they can't do anything to blobs. Ghorst are freewins with kugath since he can't do anything to blobs. Just roll around in a big blob and spam infrastructure buildings in every build slot until there's enough money that you can't spend it fast enough by just doing that.

The plagues are mostly mediocre, but the replenishment one and the resist one are good, and the 6 turn forced attrition replenishment denial one is great on enemy doomstacks. It can even lock down enemies permanently; I had Imrik sitting with 4 stacks on my border, unwilling to move up on me because all of them were permanently plagued and unable to replenish, while I dealt with the ogres and cathay.

Kugath isn't the best 'blast out into all directions simultaneously and conquer a fourth of the map by turn 30' faction' like khorne or vamp counts, but he has no problems holding his territory and grinding down everything he comes across. Only complain of the OP's I really agree with is that the 1-per-turn limit on the three different plague activations is stupid. Plagues are already limited by infection, so I don't see the point of that limitation.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by gachi is manly:

The 10k cost each for his two high tier unit production buildings is insane. And he starts around Ogre territory where a lot of province capitals surrounding his starting province don't have walls.

The huge building cost, mediocre economy, terrible garrisons comprised of mostly nurglings, no trade, and being in an area that's hard to defend with the lack of walls makes for a rough early game. Everybody except other Daemons hates your guts too.

Oh, and plagues are lackluster compared to Nkari's gimmick. At least until mid game when you can get the 20% phys resist plague, but by mid game with most races you're fine anyways.

I enjoyed his campaign since I do like the rough starting spots, but it's pretty nuts I must admit.

I did like that it took a while to reach a ridiculous snowball in his campaign, but at the same time I really don't like the 10k cost military production and need to reach a T5 settlement before those 10k buildings even give you chosen GW or unclean ones. I could at least get a respectable number of chaos knights I guess.

Honestly I think low tier armies are better in the current state of the game. The ai doesn't know how to take direct fights, even if you give them cheats so they can actually produce strong armies. They never concentrate forces, instead preferring to split their army up and send all their forces to whatever part of your base is the least defended. The best way to beat that is spamming cheap armies to take all their undefended territory and combine with garrisons to defend yours.

So when I an build like 1 chosen GW or great unclean one across all my armies 70 turns in, its not hurting me. Chosen GW are complete overkill, but I want to build them anyways. But it feels so impossible, because its so stupidly expensive to get buildings for any significant number of them. Not even just the buildings themselves, I think the T5 settlement is like 20k.

Its one thing when a unit is just weaker than alternatives, like high elf rangers compared to archer spam. But when you have to actively cripple yourself to get a unit, which you do if you want more than 1-2 great unclean ones before turn 100, I think that's too much.

So I'd at least like to see his building costs go down especially for settlement chains and elite buildings. Honestly it would barely even affect the difficulty of the campaign, because if I wanted to just play purely optimal I'd never build a settlement past T3 anyways and I'd probably skip the elite military buildings entirely (I think you get chaos knights from them, which I do think are good, but soul grinders and to a lesser degree forsaken can deal with enemy ranged too and their building is half the cost).

[iffy]

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

-one direct and one cultist to an army and one direct and one cultist to a town
4 plagues per turn is sufficient with late game plague duration once you can afford them so often

-you dont need to be on the right turn, it builds a stockpile

how dare nurgle have a strong interesting and thematic flavor to its buildings
-wtf are you even talking about
the garrison doesnt change, the cycle doesnt matter for garrison

The phrasing used is "provides summonable units", not "stockpile". I honestly had no idea this was how it works, because it's not explained _anywhere_. If it just said +1 summonable units added to summon pool, I would get it, but it doesn't explain that on the building tree or in any popups.

Correct on the garrison. Editing the post.

The rest of your post is ignant/rude/confusing/agreeing AF, but it's steam, I get that, it's like 4chan here.

[Seven Samurott]

There is a mod that adds a light mortis engine effect and light regen/missle resist to to all his units. Just that one mod made playing him feel more competitive. You might not be into mods though.

I like the cycling mechanic because it's unique but it could use some tweaks. All of them provide income too as they cycle which really snowballs when you have a lot of them.

I kinda get the impression that CA wanted to try something unusual with his faction but didn't quite know how to balance it since it's so different from what other races do.

[Ashardalon]

Originally posted by iffy:

Originally posted by Ashardalon:

-one direct and one cultist to an army and one direct and one cultist to a town
4 plagues per turn is sufficient with late game plague duration once you can afford them so often

-you dont need to be on the right turn, it builds a stockpile

how dare nurgle have a strong interesting and thematic flavor to its buildings
-wtf are you even talking about
the garrison doesnt change, the cycle doesnt matter for garrison

The phrasing used is "provides summonable units", not "stockpile". I honestly had no idea this was how it works, because it's not explained _anywhere_. If it just said +1 summonable units added to summon pool, I would get it, but it doesn't explain that on the building tree or in any popups.

Correct on the garrison. Editing the post.

The rest of your post is ignant/rude/confusing/agreeing AF, but it's steam, I get that, it's like 4chan here.

i take every point separately
i agree with some, i partially agree with a few and disagree completely with others
i also dont waste time with being polite

kindof weird you played an entire campaign not noticing it added to the summonable reserves, especially since the storage has a cap you expand with buildings
kindof a cause for the impoliteness, im of the opinion that people should know the intricacies of a system to be in balance discussions
even if you did correctly notice that nurgle needs regeneration and durability, this did make you miss that plaguebearers have 30 speed once leveled up wich has to be adjusted if they are going to get the durability buffs they should get

[leandrombraz]

Originally posted by iffy:

... and you can only infect 1 army, one settlement, and create one plague hero unit per turn, which isn't enough.

You can create two cultists per turn: One from an army, another from a settlement.

[Ashardalon]

nurgle got hit less by the garrison nerf then other factions since its garrison comes most from scattered buildings
and along with its towers it can defend its towns very effectively
it only has one real weakness and thats monstrous infantry, monstrouscav and SEMs
but thats a general nurgle theme, lacking antilarge
one you will feel considering the close start to ogres, but feeling it and it being significant isnt the same
the lack of walls isnt a downside since to use walls you need to fall back off of them when the enemy arrives wich even with the excessive plaguebearer speed you cant do
all the lack of walls does is give you a choice wich point you defend