Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
So first off you need to restart. You are kinda screwed and even if you could somehow fight them off it would take you quite awhile and your game would most likely end in your defeat anyway. Now that you know what happens you can better prepare for it. Your expansion while the empire factions are getting wiped is a good plan but as you noticed you have no way to hold everything if you go crazy grabbing empty land, so limit yourself a bit next time. Attempt five I only grabbed Ostenmark, though they still managed to raze Bechafen at the expense of birdman and two other mangled armies.
Second, you need walls, everywhere. Build tier two defense buildings in all your small towns and also upgrade the garrisons in your large cities. This will allow your large cities to solo any single army they throw at them, and chaos will expend much of their strength on their walls so your armies can more easily kill them. Even if you lose a city (and the army defending it) the enemy should be pretty messed up afterward.
Third, you need a better economy. Everyone hates the Vampires and is unlikely to trade or even do non-aggression pacts with you without serious knowledge of how to break the diplomacy system, so you want to try to subjugate both Templehof and Swartzafen just to have someone to trade with. As an added bonus you get two allies capable of countering the Varg and Scaeling spam and anyone else running around inside your borders, leaving you mostly free to deal with Chaos. You also want to have max level vampire and necromancer buildings in your main settlements as that is where much of your income originates.
Fourth, you need to plan your armies out a little better. Skeleton spears are as good as grave guards against large opponents at much lower cost. Black knights (the inexpensive normal kind), crypt horrors, varghiests, and vargulfs are all solid at taking down chaos units while they are otherwise occupied with your infantry, with the only one costing a lot of upkeep being the vargulf. Normal grave guards are great, they can hold the line better than the great weapons kind and give plenty of time for flank and rear attacks. Plus, they have a reasonable upkeep. Even skeleton warriors are useful; they are expendable and can fulfill the same purpose for a shorter time. When you support your infantry line with crypt horrors they might even win against chaos warriors without further help.
Try five when chaos invasions showed up my empire looked like this and I wrecked their face.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=694462700
My armies looked a bit like this: (that was my best one, though ignore the black coach I was just trying it out lol its garbage)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=711515454
And I was able to maintain four of them with money to spare. My fourth one and its level one lord defeated Archaeon and destroyed chaos quite anticlimaticly elsewhere shortly after this was taken. Varg and Scaeling were eager to accept peace agreements and the suriviving human and minor dwarf factions happily fought them and ignored me for the next 150 turns while I fought three great wars to destroy the Dwarfs.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=696109243
I did have walls for all minor settlements, and put in as much as I could for larger ones as well, but the problem is that VC garrisons aren't exactly fantastic against Chaos chosen/warriors. Those guys have some 100 armor, and meanwhile a minor settlement fully upgraded has a garrison of 2 crypt ghouls (useless due to complete lack of AP damage) zombies (useless as anything else than a momentary meatshield), fell bats (Same, though at least they can also go pester any hellcannons to give your towers time to fire) from the settlement chain, then 3 black knights (One with lances), two great weapon graveguards, a crypt horror and a vargheist. The knights and horrors can't get up on the walls, leaving Kayh-oss rather free to seize them due to the lack of any competent opposition outside of the grave guards and vargheists.
Larger settlements have it a little bit better, with two cairn wraiths, four normal grave guards, three great weapons and three vargheists to get on the walls, but it's still iffy. And Nagash help you if Archaon or some other decent champion comes along, he was present on the one time I had a capital try to fight rather than just autoresolve to hand it to him and his Tzeentchian friend, and he personally hacked apart a group of crypt horrors without even taking damage as far as I could tell.
In my experience, grave guards are awful against large opponents too, for that matter, so I'm not sure if skeleton spears would really do well either. Chaos trolls are one thing, I could typically chuck my own crypt horrors and/or a hero at them to take them down, but the giants? The giants were just impossible to stop. Cairn wraiths, grave guards, crypt horrors, varghulfs, heroes.. All tossed aside while they ripped apart my infantry forces.
The aforementioned ridiculous armor of the Chaos troops is why I resorted to great weapons, cairn wraiths, varghulfs and crypt horrors a plenty. While I really want to like varghests, they feel a bit squishy. I've had some of the Skaeling marauder types with great weapons absolutely shred them when I landed the varghests behind them, and it didn't really look promising for fighting the vastly stronger Warriors of Chaos types..
I'd love to know where to find the kind of cash for that. I was trading with ol' Franz so it's not as if I was entirely on my own on the economy front either, but scraping together that kind of money just seems impossible.
VC have the ez-mode broken spell called Soul Leech. A newly recruited vampire hero can cast it. Cast it a few times - any enemy lord dead, flank the enemy, throw in a terrogeist and they run.
For beating chaos I found a cheesy trick that wether it was intentional or not, worked. I had a level 12 necromancer that was strictly focused on campaign abilities (more income, cheaper building, etc). Archaon tries to poke one of my doomstacks and the odds were severely against me. I moved Mannfred away from the Chaos doomstack, and embedded the necromancer in my army. Archaon pokes me with the exact same composition, health and everything except the odds were now overwhelmingly in my flavor. Auto resolved just to see if I did/could wreck him, and won. Cheesy I know, but it saved my campaign.
1: Deploy necromancers in a province to reduce construction costs. It helps immensly with those expensive high tier buildings.
2: Raise dead is far, far superior to global recruitment. A good raise dead pool has your entire roster avalable for immediate one turn recruitment and enough units to raise two or more full stacks in a single turn. You don't even need ANY recruitment buildings once you have good raise dead sites and can turn those building slots towards money and corruption. Your armies are also pretty expendable at that point. So what if one or two of your armies get wiped? The enemy is now seriously screwed up and you just re-raised two full stacks in two turns and are already counterattacking.
3: Giants are a pain, but surround them with spears or grave guards while hitting them with cycle charged vargulfs/vargheists and they will go down. Vampire Counts also have a certain immediately accessable spell in the lore of death to use on things like that...
4. Treat Crypt horrors like large infantry units and use them amoungst your normal infantry to back up your lines and to kill the armored enemies while your troops hold them off.
5. As to sieges, try and kite and cycle charge the enemy outside the walls with your mobile units while the towers do their work. Its much more effective than fighting on the walls.
I dunno...I always go with Lahmian on the basis that more money = more troops (and money to make more money buildings!) and that more that more troops > slightly better troops...
Either we're not playing the same game or we have different definitions of large. One stack might be doable if it's not led by a strong hero that could just carve the garrison up by himself, but two or more, it's not gonna happen against chaos warriors/chosen.
Turn 140, 12k or so. All of it sunk into maintaining my ailing armies. I control both regions of Sylvania as well as Averland, and am trading with Franz.
Where to begin? The fact that there are typically multiple lords since I'm not just dealing with a single stack? That it competes in spell points for Vanhel's Danse Macabre and Invocation of Nehek that are practically necessary to let my troops fight the Chaos powerhouse infantry on equal ground? That if I put a lord in every garrison, they'll be picked apart by 2-4 stacks of Chaos all swarming them at once? That terrorgheists are insanely expensive and if I could afford them I wouldn't be in this trouble to begin with?
True, if you just look at units it probably balances out. But it also gives growth and corruption and higher leveled heroes, which to me is more helpful than just cheaper slightly better units.