Any suggestions on how to beat the campaign?

[Talesin]

Yeah i can't seem to beat the campaign no matter what.
As soon as i get to act 2 you face twice the amount of units and you are screwed.

And i don't know what i could possible do different.

My biggest issue seems to be that i get stuck in combat which means i lose.
Because the enemy is not gonna break unless you get them to a 1 in discipline roll as they will always roll low, which means the other units can line up and charge me in the flank and make me lose, and since i will always roll 11 or 12 they will always run.

But there isn't any way to avoid it either since the enemy got fast units and chariots.

So what am i missing? How do you close the huge unit gap when you have limited possibilites and gold to buy units?

[Sin]

Some advice which may or may not applicable to you depending on the faction you play, but tl;dr: Minimize losses by not taking front charges as long as you can avoid it, by not engaging on the last turn and by reading enemy stat blocks should help you tremendously. I know it sounds basic, but the game isn't that deep and a lot of it is about execution and knowledge.

Here the long version, hope some of it helps.

1) Amass money early so you can buy additional units in the first two shops, doing it in act 2 to fill a gap in your armies capabilities is .. not great but if you have to you have to. The reason is that most units in this game really do need level ups to become something useful and level ups need time. First shop of act 2? You no longer have time to level that unit properly.
Money comes mostly from fights, events can give money and other very strong buffs, but they are unreliable. I prefer going for them when I am too hurt to fight or strong enough to fish for a buff or hero on a mount or simillar, but getting the reroll failed defence tests on a unit of heavy kav or something else with a lot of punch but difficulties healing is increadible. Still, the first two shops are where you get your additional units most of the time so you should try to maximize that. Elites give more money but are harder fights, not healing a unit to the max and instead taking gold also helps but you have to judge your combat effectiveness vs the greed, I can't help you there. Sadly it's a "the rich get richer" system, where the game gets easier the better you play your first 3-5 fights. If you get destroyed during any one of them than the rest of your run will be significantly harder. Destroyed means: not just your sacrificial unit got hammered. depending on the army you use you can win the first 2-3 engagements without any unit losses or if you get some than only 1-3 of your infantry block - something like that. That's by no means a requirement for a good run, but I am mentioning it to show that not having to heal your army can get you a good chunk of loot instead.

2) Flanking, flanking, flanking. Every front charge you take as victim or perpetrator is a not so great engagement.
Use fast moving units to get into the sides of enemies. You will have to manipulate the move order in order to effectively do this. If you move next to a unit (outside of its charge radius) and the unit didn't move yet (or another one able to reach you) than you just manuvered yourself into a death trap. X and Y to see your and their charge radius, memory to determin which enemy units have moved already.

3) Just because you can charge doesn't mean you should.
My go to undead tactic is to use bats to turn enemy units around while my horses are just outside of their front charge range. Next turn I get to charge but I don't do it because the AI will turn around to my bats or attempt to get into charge range with my horses. In both cases I win. They turn to the bats? I can either move them away to do something else or fly into the flanks for the coming charge phase, than rear charge with the horses which aborts enemy charges and eat them alive without getting counter attacked.
They go for the horses? My bats sacrificial rear charge (or flank charge) to abort the enemy attack while the horses wait out this turn. The turn after my rear charge the enemy unit will turn around to face the bats and my horses get the rear, warning: If you simultaniously rear and flank charge the enemy will NOT turn, that can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you attack and with what you attack.
Sometimes it is better to take the flank charge instead of waiting it out, but flanks can always counter attack. The rear can only be hit by heroes. Check the stats and your available spells to see if going into the flank will cause massive losses on you or not.
I lost quite a few engagements because I shoved a single entity monster into the rear of an enemy unit believing it to be save while a sacrificial unit went into the side just to than lose combat by way too much because the flanking unit got obliterated. Be mindful about that. (more in point 5)

4) Spears are a death trap. When charged or charging they seem fine-ish, but if they have 3 ranks after that initial turn you are in for alot of pain. Outside of charges spears will attack with 3 ranks, not 2 as the other units. Great weapons have something simillar where the first rank is hitting twice. Be accutely aware of such units on the field and try to get them from behind or at least the flanks so they don't rack up an undue amount of wounds on you. These units are also good targets for spells and ranged attacks to reduce their numbers before you engage assuming there is nothing more pressing on the field (like a cannon or knights rushing you down).

5) Sometimes it is better to just not take the flank. As pointed out before: Flank attacks can still be counter attacked and if you got a decently strong unit attacking from behind it can be worth it to hold back on the second unit just so you don't get hit at all. If the enemy doesn't break under the rear charge you can still push the second unit in from behind the turn after. This preserves the combat result and your model count.
This needs some experience to judge wether or not you need the second unit to break the enemy or not, but you can check the stat blocks to make an informed descision which will be destroyed by lucky / unlucky dice rolls :)

6) Certain enemy units are increadibly strong. Enemy artillery can inflict massive damage.
Dwarven deep guard in particular, but also berserkers will tear you to pieces, abyssal knights and their heavy armor infantry cousins are very difficult to kill or the orc warboss in his savage unit that will shredd through your wounds faster than you can formulate the amount of regret you have for charging into that mess. There are more, check the stats before you attack. Sometimes it is easier to just kite them around while you destroy the rest of the army instead of fighting a particular unit. Sometimes you have to shove a sacrificial unit into them to stop them from doing actual harm to your army and sometimes you just have to hammer them from 2-3 sides (preferably not the front) and try to break their moral, but if you can: Shoot them to death or kite them until the rest of the enemy units have broken.

7) Having sacrificial units can be worth it on certain factions. Zombies / Skeleton spears and Bats for the undead nation are prime examples, those units are there to absorb front charges or turn the enemy, not to kill the enemy (though spear units usually can inflict massive casulties). I vastly prefer these units to take damage over my knights because the knights heal 1 model per rest, the bats 2 (out of 3 max unit size until you increase it via level ups) and zombies usually end up healing 15 + in my runs. I don't care if I lust 19 zombies. I rest and they are operational again. Losing 4-5 knights? I will likely never recover that for the rest of the run while also losing alot of gold (point 1)

8) On the last turn of combat (right side moral meter claims the enemy will route this turn) it is best not to start new fights or do anything that could cause more casulties for you. The fight is over already. No flanking, no front charges, just let it end.

9) Spells. Some spells read underwhelming but so far I haven't found one that is useless, most of them are able to decide engagements on their own so try to make good use of them. Your light cav / chariot got stuck in to a dangerous melee unit and you expect it to have a difficult time winning the combat turn? Beef up its attacks, decrease the enemy armor, reroll failed wound saves ... magic can fix it all assuming you have the spells. If you only got offensive spells try to make use of them before you lock your spellcaster in combat (only exception are heroes who sit in horse units and are hybrids like the vampire knight, there buff spells are usually better but if you can make use of offensive spells, than why not. every wound taken off the enemy is good.)

10) Range.
Range feels increadibly terrible at the start. Artillery kills ...2 out of 24 models... *slow clap* archers shoot 7 times for two turns and than never again because everything is locked in combat... wow .. so ..bad.
Part of this is because range is used wrong, part of it is because ranged units (especially artillery) NEED level up to really shine.
On high elves you get to win most of act 1 with a pure range army by just walking away and shooting, but if you stand and shoot you will get locked into combat by turn 2 or 3 and that's that. If you have a mixed army try to keep one enemy unit out of melee so you have targets to shoot, that deep guard I recommended you kite around? well, why not pepper it with arrows.

I know alot of this is basic stuff, but figuring out how to make these idea happen is how you beat the AI. Buy units early, upgrades late and it should work out as long as you don't 1v1 face to face every unit you find on the field.

[Ilostmycactus]

On the first couple difficulties: Stack ranged units in one corner and then focus targets by order of priority (closest or ability to close via speed).

Artillery is ridiculously good, especially if you are given the choice to get multiples of it (you can just abandon the run before starting if you don't get a good selection). The reason it is good is the massive range, extra damage to multiwound targets (those cavalry, monsters, or enemy artillery that would normally threaten ranged armies), and ability to get really beneficial upgrades like increased shots, rerolling 1's, higher skill etc.

Boss battles only give extra money, so it's not really worth it to do the extra ones unless you are extremely confident in your army because of the damage/attrition they will likely do to yours (causing cascading difficulty later).

There are hotkeys to show friendly and enemy charge range and missile weapon attack range. Shift+X/C .Use these to gauge how far the enemy can get in the turn in order to maximize time on target and know when you should move an intercepting unit forward.

You want a really strong punchy unit more if you have less range (cavalry or monsters). Focus on giving this unit upgrades to skill, power, number of attacks, speed, missile defense. The ai is not very good at target priority so you can abuse its aggro to extend the time you have to shoot.

You can rotate units by holding shift and clicking during deployment.

Units get more expensive the more you purchase at the shop. You can probably afford the hit to economy for taking mercenary units, but feel free to ignore them early on if they aren't something that's actually useful like another ranged unit.


You can mega buff melee Lords with shop upgrades/events in order to get like 6+ attacks that force rerolls etc.

[NotForMe]

Play to your commanders Strengths? So far the easiest campaign was Necromancer due to being able to bring people back mid battles, it made "sacrificing" a unit to open them up to flanking bearable...

For the Other Dread Nation commanders, I went with the fear campaign of using bats, and wolves to flank enemies causing them to rout, due to morale mechanics.

I beat the Imperial Mage by going range specialization. the pistol light Calvary I got at start ended up being the beefiest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on the battle field, with 3 attacks each, they were unstoppable if they got a flank charge in.

And I'm sure there's some tactic for the other commanders I haven't figured out yet.

Using ranged units, and not moving them but rather having them set up in a gun alley style is a tactic to be used, unless your archers are being charged down they can get 2-4 turns off on incoming foes. If they have the range why place them near the front.
So not moving any melee units and waiting for dumb AI to charge through a hail of arrows / cannon / gun / what ever.

[alexpoobum]

i just played for the first time and won the dwarf campaign, the undead and the elf campaign on the first runs. in fact i thought the game was too easy

[Talesin]

I managed to win some campaigns finally, with alot more ease than my first few attempts, though i did notice some differences.

1) Clearly you aren't forced into elite battles every act 2. After dying to it twice i thought it would always happen in act 2, but guess its just bad luck having no path to avoid them.

2) Ranged makes such a huge difference, i went more ranged focused and had 75% of my kills from ranged. Also upgraded Dwarf cannons are redicolous.

3) The discipline tests balanced out and didn't screw me anymore, i still don't get how they never rolled above 6 on my first 2 attempts.

4) Cavalry sucks. I honestly don't get it. But they lose against everything.
Against dwarven gunline i had them charge the handgunner to stop them from destroying my infantery. Instead they got almost wiped out in melee before my infantery could reach them.
I honestly don't know how to use them since its hard to get any flanks in act 2 due to the enemy having many units, and they can't beat anything 1vs1, not even ranged units.

5) Focusing gold on buying units in act 1 also helped alot.

But mostly getting ranged starting units seems to be the most important thing because they really becomes good in act 2 like the first guy who responded said.

[shde2e]

Ranged really is the most powerful unit type. Melee specialists can remove entire units through routing, but ranged is far more reliable.

Cavalry is somewhat situational IME. They can't really fight most things straightup, but their speed means they can rush down artillery or ranged units, and have a much easier time flanking, teaming up with infantry to surround a unit, or escape/run around other units to keep them busy.

[Peter B]

Flying creatures are your friends. Fly around and aggro the rank and file from a distrance. Also a good artillery unit can soften up the harder enemies before they get to you.