Holy war - mission difficulty.

[w.f.schepel]

A 2 skull contract: 3 waves of 25 (!) soldiers each. I could deal with the first two, but the third was just too much of a good thing. This seems like a 3 skull contract and I shudder to think what the game considers a 3 skull kind of difficulty.

Just unlucky or am I missing something here? Or is the difficulty somewhat out of whack here?

[Cat®]

It seems to be common consensus that the holy war contracts are a little overtuned.

[suejak]

Conscript HP was just nerfed and Holy War contract payout was increased, so I don't think that consensus applies anymore.

[Caledor]

Originally posted by suejak:

Conscript HP was just nerfed and Holy War contract payout was increased, so I don't think that consensus applies anymore.

They haven't changed the numbers of the enemies. Just a bit less hitpoints. When holy war is your first crisis you can ignore it, or fight for the south.
No other crisis scales this bad.
I had an army of 18 southeners, 3 of them asassins in a one skull contract.
This is way too much.
It is not about the strengh of there troups. The numbers are the problem.

[suejak]

I took "fight the south" pre-conscript nerf and I had a blast. It gives you a choice because you can choose the easier one if you want an easier time. The only real problem in my book was compensation, and we got both that AND a conscript nerf to boot.

I did OK pre-nerf and I'm positive I'll do better post-nerf. It remains to be seen whether the community figures out how to counter mass Nimble or just keeps running anti-chosen compositions against them while ignoring stuff like poison, bleeds, Fearsome, shield-chopping, and headshots.

[Caledor]

You should stop defending everything. The last and only time i said something is too strong and needs to be changed was the alps and they got changed.
For first crisis it is way too hard. You have no reason to do any contracts.

In my first game I had the holy war as third crisis. Level two missions are still hard, but there armies are just good for looting there leaders.
In my secound game holy war was the first crisis. I started as northern raiders and was already good equipt, because i looted so many caravans. I was not able to do a one star contract.

[w.f.schepel]

Originally posted by Caledor:

You should stop defending everything. The last and only time i said something is too strong and needs to be changed was the alps and they got changed.
For first crisis it is way too hard. You have no reason to do any contracts.

In my first game I had the holy war as third crisis. Level two missions are still hard, but there armies are just good for looting there leaders.
In my secound game holy war was the first crisis. I started as northern raiders and was already good equipt, because i looted so many caravans. I was not able to do a one star contract.

The main problem in my opinion is the advertised difficulty. A 2 star contract with three waves of 21 - 25 sized armies is just not even in the same league as other crisis 2 skull contracts. I ran into into expecting a tough but feasible fight. Instead I got a series of fights that were interesting, but ultimately just not feasible without heavy losses.

[UnluckyNoob]

How many of those 25 were slaves? With manhunters start my hardest ** contract was 24(2 mortairs/2 officers/conscripts the rest) and manhunters contracts are way harder than standard ones.

I really find city states armies(except mortairs) underwhelming. Zero damage, no ranged units, poor morale, kill themselves with AoE.

Also it is unclear what prevents you from swapping brothers/equipment in between waves.

[deducter]

I play on expert combat difficulty, and my feeling is that the Holy War is tuned for very experienced players who will do stuff like swap out gear in between battle and carefully prepare for each fight. I did not have any challenges with the battles against waves of 20+ enemies even without reserves, although after 3 consecutive fights even I have to take a bit of time to recover (usually I never camp).

The southern armies are a lot like much tougher goblins. They have no burst damage whatsoever, but they can slowly grind you down. You need to very aggressively kill off their gunners and try to cause morale problems to the rest of their troops.

The payout is irrelevant and not a good justification. Since these battles are tuned for experienced players it doesn't matter if the contracts pay 100 or 10k. By the time I was doing those contracts I had 80k crowns and absolutely nothing to spend my money on anyway.

By far the hardest contract type was the "Assault the Holy Site" type where you get some allies by have to fight vs 35+ southern troops. The difficulty was that my allies got in my way and screwed up my positioning a lot. Your northern allies are basically meat shields that can hold off the enemy for 4-5 rounds. In the mean time you need to do a very significant amount of damage before they collapse. It wouldn't hurt to see your allies actually get some real elite units like Sergeants, Knights, and Zweihanders.

My opinion is to keep the Holy War contracts the same on expert level, but nerf them on veteran and beginner. Veteran should have half the numbers of expert.

[Caledor]

@deducter Combat difficult just slows scaling of the enemies. In lategame combat difficulty makes no difference.
When you have 80k crowns already you are so far lategame that it makes not a big difference. This has nothing to do with experience. Your company is just full of good equipment and veterans.
When the holy war was my third crisis I had no losses, too.

[deducter]

@Caledor It's possible to consistently reach the "day 250 veteran company" stage by the first crisis as Holy War if you are super aggressive about picking fights non-stop. This is what I mean by the difficulty is tuned for experienced players.

For example I started doing the Holy War by day 90 just by randomly attacking southern armies. I already have level 11-15 guys with lots of famed items. Note I did not fight any southern armies before this series, although I have seen the odd Twitch stream or two. The reason why streamers struggle is that they like to play very quickly and loosely, and the southern armies punish that play style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7VFkWviRkM&feature=youtu.be

[Caledor]

You don't play on EEL, right?
Also you play with the easiest origin. Gladiators.
Try with a normal origin without good starting brothers on EEL and show me your company on day 90...

[deducter]

I play on EEL random seed. I did a lot of battles in that series. If you watch the videos you can see exactly how I achieve these results, there is no mystery. If I was just lucky, the run should've ended a long time ago.

I agree the gladiators are an easy origin, but the difference between this and say the beast slayers is that I would get my first level 11 by day 60 instead of 40.

My gladiators are very good, but the rest of my guys are fine but not great. For example, my two tanks have no stars in melee defense, but they still serve effectively.

The 12-man limit of the gladiator is a problem, since I cannot swap out reserves to chain battles or further optimize my team for specific fights. For example, my thrower and spearman do not contribute enough in these fights vs the southern armies. I would much rather have some more greatsword/bardiche/duelist users.

[w.f.schepel]

Originally posted by UnluckyNoob:

How many of those 25 were slaves? With manhunters start my hardest ** contract was 24(2 mortairs/2 officers/conscripts the rest) and manhunters contracts are way harder than standard ones.

I really find city states armies(except mortairs) underwhelming. Zero damage, no ranged units, poor morale, kill themselves with AoE.

Also it is unclear what prevents you from swapping brothers/equipment in between waves.

0-5 slaves.

Also, there are only so many swaps you can make and at this point in the game I simply do not have a deep bench to replace front line troops.

As for ranged:

a mortar (once)
3-4 gunners (every fight)
5 assassins with fire bombs (once)

The mission was to defend a city from raiding troops.

[UnluckyNoob]

So your numbers are really high for a normal origin. Are you sure you don't play militia/manhunters? Or that was probably bad luck - 2 star contract with 3 star difficulty.

As for replacements, you'd better have 19-24 bros depending on your origin. Those pity early game daytalers are still good enough to hold the line in the crisis time. And they also carry additional armour sets in the case you need quick repair.

[DoomGuy]

Its just over the top, its just grind on and on over shield walled conscripts, they will just shield wall and try luck strikes, and they will get it, stuns and crits, it is 3 waves of course they will land fatal blows, or at least injury that turn your bro useless. Its just ridiculous, dont take it at your start crisis, its like undead crisis, its very hard as first crisis because i use so much to break the enemy, so stick to noble wars, still the easy of them.