I Regret Purchasing TW2: The AI Dogpiling Is Ridiculous Now

[Titler]

Total Warhammer 1 was bad for dogpiling; The artificial difficulty of setting all the NPC factions to go for you once you started to become strong was frustrating, but after some practice, I was able to at least consistently beat it on Normal. And it felt sort of good to burn the entire map in the end after running up and down it firefighting the AI before then.

I purchased TW2 in the Steam Winter sale, and was really looking forward to playing it across a much, much larger world... there seemed to be a lot of quality of life changes too which in the first few turns I was genuinely glad to see...

I have put 29 hours, and 130 turns into this last attempt to play the campaign, and I've just quit with disgust when the No.1 faction, a fellow Greenskin, and a faction I'd been allied with and at 160+ reputation with ALL GAME SINCE TURN 1 immediately attacked me the moment I started to finally win the wars I'd been fighting since the beginning.

Firstly, the sheer number of factions on the map means that you can't possibly keep any of your boundaries safe from an angry enemy, because someone is bound to have a racial animosity you can't get around via diplomacy. This gets worse the wider you expand of course, as larger boundaries mean more shared borders, but...

Obedience now seems almost impossible to manage, as the AI knows how to raid properly in TW2 it seems, and you can't possibly stop all of them at once, which means as well as stealing your gold, they spawn Rebels, who ALWAYS go for your cities too, so now you're fighting entirely new factions you can't use Diplomacy with at all. Of course, if you raid them in return, the Rebels spawned in their lands go for you as well.

Diplomacy itself seems broken now; I've NEVER seen an NPC stop fighting, or take a peace treaty unless they were down to absolutely no armies left, at which point you might as well remove them. And with the Khemri and similar, that doesn't seem to be possible because they've got completely free armies? That was a nasty shock to discover. Meanwhile despite not breaking any treaties, and just fighting defensive wars, my reputation slowly decays, both in Trustworthiness overall (I have no idea how?), and with each faction specifically: That I can at least see, apparently just existing and trying to stay alive means that with the spider web of treaties between the AI, all leaning towards going for you, you annoy someone you've never met by defending from someone else... ultimately making each turn progressively more impossible.

That might have worked in TW1 as the map seemed finely balanced by the appearance of Chaos, which up-ended the global order...

But what normally then occurs, Chaos destroying the North and the NPCs switching to fighting them (and offering peace to each other and you) didn't seem to happen at all? I never even saw Chaos despite fighting around the Empire for 100 turns. I think they got killed within a few turns of arriving, which is just bizarre and breaks the balance of the map further.

In my game, as Goblins, I'd expanded south by about turn 30-ish to the Khemri, then found myself in a war I couldn't stop with them, whilst the Elves kept burning one of my starter cities, 3 human factions attacked me in the North, and the Crooked Moon Rebels kept cutting my line south by running past my Ork ally (he was friendly with them) and taking cities between myself and the Khemri.

I then spent 100 turns moving south to force back the Khemri, take back the cities I needed to hold the province (and give me breathing space from Rebels), running North to fight off the humans, taking the city back from the Elves, and repeat... I kept fighting on because I was just about holding my ground, usually by costing them more troops by manually fighting most battles. Without Chaos to destroy the Empire, I had to try it myself, and as I say, just as I was finally shoving them back and starting to take control of that area when... I got dogpiled by my closest ally because I'd passed the arbitrary percentage of the map under my control, and I just quit out in disgust.

Now admittedly, I was playing as Goblins, which is a hard start. And I could in theory drop the Campaign map down to easier settings, as I noticed there's separate settings for the two types of gameplay now too (which is a good thing), but it's hard to feel like I want too when the gameplay seems so miserable, unless you're a Gork tier manipulator of the flaws of the AI.

Unless I'm missing something...? Does anyone have any tips that would mitigate against what seems to me to be a completely unworkable global map now?

[algame]

Your playing as Skarsnik? He is SUPPOSED to be a hard campaign. And its great that some of the Lords have more challenging starts. Thats the reason this game is so replayable.

Try playing as Empire or Dwarves if you want a more comfortable progression into the game.

Also I have never experienced myself or heard of the AI specifically 'dogpiling' onto a human player as it would do in Shogun 2.

[Kaaz]

Cull some of your enemies before heading elsewhere, if you ended up down in khemri turn 30 id say you bit off more than you could chew

[Galactic Origins]

Are you DoW everyone in sight? What is your diplo reputation? Dogpiling only happens when your dip rip and strength are not great. If you do not finish off old enemies they will hit you later after you move armies away from their territories. Learn how to go a little slower, it is not a speed race. Learn how the game diplomacy works and do not let your diplomacy reputation fall low or you will be in a heap of trouble.

I conquer much territory but I choose wisely my enemies and keep my ratings high. I have not been dogpiled on unless my Strength and especially diplomatic reputation fall. It must be over aggression on your part. Try conquering slower.

[Lenny]

Also If you want to keep yourself a bit safer, go north. The Empire will never be your friend, and their territory is in a sweet strategic place. You can have the fortress passes and your mountain facing south, and humans are a bit easier for goblins to take down aswell.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Titler:

Obedience now seems almost impossible to manage, as the AI knows how to raid properly in TW2 it seems, and you can't possibly stop all of them at once, which means as well as stealing your gold, they spawn Rebels, who ALWAYS go for your cities too, so now you're fighting entirely new factions you can't use Diplomacy with at all.

Public order is totally managable, just learn how to do it. All factions have 1 or 2 buildings that are focused on corruption and/or public order. It is usually enough if you build it in major settlement to keep whole province at 100% PO (sometimes extra smaller buildings are necessary if you settle in bad climate or playing on higher difficulty). Why do you allow enemy armies to raid you? You should be protecting your borders.

Of course, if you raid them in return, the Rebels spawned in their lands go for you as well.

This is not true. They go to war with the faction that spawned them and attack their nearby settlement after raiding a little and getting few reinforcements.

Rebels are usually easy to deal with by just using instant army (lord + few rors) and garrison (you are building walls in all minor settlements, right?).

Meanwhile despite not breaking any treaties, and just fighting defensive wars, my reputation slowly decays, both in Trustworthiness overall (I have no idea how?)

This is also not true and does not happen. Trustworthiness only drops when you break treaties. Attack someone after you stopped any treaty with them (for example, trading) but without waiting for 10 turns after that, for example. Or choose one side in a war between two of your allies while breaking treaty with another.

I got dogpiled by my closest ally because I'd passed the arbitrary percentage of the map under my control

This happens when your trushworthiness is low. If they can't trust you they prefer to break alliance first before you do it, so working as intended.

Now admittedly, I was playing as Goblins, which is a hard start.

Hard start does not matter in your example, you were long past start already. Hard start affects initial puzzle (usually one enemy army and settlement) which you solve in the first few turns and initial political situation around you. You solved the start, but it's your decisions and mistakes that made you fail the campaign eventually. Expanding far south without protecting and consolidating your northern part, wasting turns to run south and north all the time, allowing enemies to raid you, lowering your diplomacy trustworthiness, etc. If you have an enemy nearby, destroy it first before going past it and increasing the amount of enemies that you border with.

[Hurricane]

Wtf is tw2????????

[IntrepidH]

Forces of order are in a really strong state this patch so if you just got the game and booted up one of the hardest to play factions on a hard difficulty you got exactly what you signed up for

Even grimgor is gonna have a hard time this patch since when you finally deal with dwarfs you get to look forward to a strong empire and those damn elves and bretonnia and once they deal with norsca they’ll come for ya

[Lenny]

Originally posted by archmag:

Originally posted by Titler:

Obedience now seems almost impossible to manage, as the AI knows how to raid properly in TW2 it seems, and you can't possibly stop all of them at once, which means as well as stealing your gold, they spawn Rebels, who ALWAYS go for your cities too, so now you're fighting entirely new factions you can't use Diplomacy with at all.

Public order is totally managable, just learn how to do it. All factions have 1 or 2 buildings that are focused on corruption and/or public order. It is usually enough if you build it in major settlement to keep whole province at 100% PO (sometimes extra smaller buildings are necessary if you settle in bad climate or playing on higher difficulty). Why do you allow enemy armies to raid you? You should be protecting your borders.

Of course, if you raid them in return, the Rebels spawned in their lands go for you as well.

This is not true. They go to war with the faction that spawned them and attack their nearby settlement after raiding a little and getting few reinforcements.

Rebels are usually easy to deal with by just using instant army (lord + few rors) and garrison (you are building walls in all minor settlements, right?).

Meanwhile despite not breaking any treaties, and just fighting defensive wars, my reputation slowly decays, both in Trustworthiness overall (I have no idea how?)

This is also not true and does not happen. Trustworthiness only drops when you break treaties. Attack someone after you stopped any treaty with them (for example, trading) but without waiting for 10 turns after that, for example. Or choose one side in a war between two of your allies while breaking treaty with another.

I got dogpiled by my closest ally because I'd passed the arbitrary percentage of the map under my control

This happens when your trushworthiness is low. If they can't trust you they prefer to break alliance first before you do it, so working as intended.

Now admittedly, I was playing as Goblins, which is a hard start.

Hard start does not matter in your example, you were long past start already. Hard start affects initial puzzle (usually one enemy army and settlement) which you solve in the first few turns and initial political situation around you. You solved the start, but it's your decisions and mistakes that made you fail the campaign eventually. Expanding far south without protecting and consolidating your northern part, wasting turns to run south and north all the time, allowing enemies to raid you, lowering your diplomacy trustworthiness, etc. If you have an enemy nearby, destroy it first before going past it and increasing the amount of enemies that you border with.

Very nice post. Just like to clarify one thing: do not make unnessecary diplomatic agreements, ever.

A military alliance means that you are now best friends and you will back them up no matter what stupid muff they do. And as we all know, you do not make two best friends unless they are also very good friends. Because they will go to war and hate you for not supporting them and ruin your reputation. Just like in real life

Defencive alliance means their problems are now yours, wich is not very useful. Stick to non-aggression and trade. Once you forge an alliance, you give up your control over who you go to war with, wich is bad if you have a bunch of non-aggression pacts.

[Chillum]

Never ally unless going for confed. And with the annoyance of confed I prefer to run the recruit defeated LL mod. Stick to NAP and Trade.

I'd wait on the greenskins until their much needed, and hopefully soon, quality of life patch to bring them up to speed with the twwh2 factions.

As for raiding and then the rebels going for you. Ive never seen this, if a rebel spawns it goes to the capital of that province. Did you own the capital and were raiding a minor region that belonged to someone else?

[Decomposed]

I agree. Sign only NAPs and expand slowly, making sure you never have more than 2 enemies at the same time.

[Lenny]

Originally posted by Chillum:

As for raiding and then the rebels going for you. Ive never seen this, if a rebel spawns it goes to the capital of that province. Did you own the capital and were raiding a minor region that belonged to someone else?

I have actually seen this lots of times. Rebels will attack anyone who is very close/about to attack the city they want, wich is super-useful when you're Angrund and being swamped by Gits. Greenskin infighting saves my stunty a$$.

[Hazmy]

I am fairly new to Total War Warhammer II myself with only 177 hours myself, but I have won a VH Campaign and another Legendary Campaign, currently doing another Legendary one.

I don't cheese, I love roleplaying and I don't use lighting strike either or any exploity tactic / strategies.

I haven't tried Greenskins or Goblins yet, but I would say it is normal that so many of the Old World factions want to kill you, after all you are a monster. Remember the game also has racist diplomacy programmed, so they WILL WANT TO kill you for being a Goblin.

1. - You have to deal with Vampires, Empire, Bretonnia, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Kislev, Norsca, Tomb Kings, Skaven.... honestly none of them like greenskins at all so it is only natural that Greenskin campaign will be HARD.

2. - Large empires are hard to manage, but that is realistic, the larger it is, the more potential fronts you have to fight aswell and that is not easy. Especially if you are a race that is disliked by other and you don't have proper allies ( Proper allies have reliable traits, yes personality traits matter on the AI you negotiate with, there are Scemers and backstabbers aswell )

The Roman Empire was huge and they were attacked on almost every front aswell. Ask them how hard it must have been.....oh wait...they lost their campaign aswell.

3. - Raiding is the result of having bad relation with a neighbouring faction + not having proper defenses or a small army nearby. If they continue to raid you that means you should deal with that faction with either becoming friends or conquer them. It is possible to have neighbours who respect you, you need to choose your allies well. Again not with Greenskins.

4. - As mentioned I play on Legendary, and it has the notorious reputation that diplomacy on Legendary doesn't matter, I couldn't disagree more, It matters even more.

Diplomacy in this game is not perfect, but it's nowhere as broken as people say it is. You have to nurture and handle your relations with care. Look almost every turn what is happening, what traties are being made, gift gold to your haters, make treaties with your friends and your friends friend. Declare wars on minor nations others are warring....break treaties with weak factions that your potential ally hates... these are ALL things that can help you get and keep your allies. Take your time to see what they like, treat the AI as a person.

I even managed to make a Peace Treaty after I lost to the AI, by carefully pleasing him with diplomatic decisions made against his enemies ( break treaties etc. )

Reliability is KING. You must never lose it or the AI will hate you, no one likes a backstabbing tyrant. This means you have to respect treaties. If you have a defense or military alliance you have to help your friends no matter what. You agreed to it.

If you want to go to war, and you have treaties, you have to break them and wait for the 10 turns of preparation time before declaring war. Breaking any of this will kill your reliability.

I could write an essay as a reply, but what I want to say is, don't give up, stay open-minded and instead of calling the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ be patient, ask for help - look up streamers youtubers whatever you fancy and PLAY.

90% of what you said is non-sense. But that's not bad, you are just inexperienced and if you want you can and will learn why those things happened to you.

Just don't make the mistake most people do, which is make up something to blame instead of accepting that you made errors ( even if you don't know what ).

[[N63] chrisragnar]

Id play some of the updated factions instead of the old ported ones tbh.

[archmag]

Originally posted by Lenny:

Originally posted by Chillum:

As for raiding and then the rebels going for you. Ive never seen this, if a rebel spawns it goes to the capital of that province. Did you own the capital and were raiding a minor region that belonged to someone else?

I have actually seen this lots of times. Rebels will attack anyone who is very close/about to attack the city they want, wich is super-useful when you're Angrund and being swamped by Gits. Greenskin infighting saves my stunty a$$. :lunar2019piginablanket:

Yeah, but they don't go after another faction's settlements. They attack the settlement in a region where they spawned and maybe some armies that are also in that region.

They don't go for the capital. I played legendary The Blessed Dread campaign (don't remember which one it was Vortex or ME) where you start by owning minor settlement (you can easily capture a second one too), while Skaven own major one and dump your PO a lot. Rebels that spawn in that province always spawn near the most developed settlement that you own when you reach -100 PO. If you only own two minor settlements a weak army spawns near the first minor settlement. If you captured major settlement, stronger army spawns near the major settlement. The army that spawned near the minor settlement prepares and attacks minor settlement it does not go to attack skaven's major settlement (skaven's lord helped few times in defending my minor settlement by defeating those rebels so they are at war, but still rebels don't go for their settlement if they spawned for me).

[Nate]

Originally posted by algame:

Your playing as Skarsnik? He is SUPPOSED to be a hard campaign. And its great that some of the Lords have more challenging starts. Thats the reason this game is so replayable.

Try playing as Empire or Dwarves if you want a more comfortable progression into the game.

Also I have never experienced myself or heard of the AI specifically 'dogpiling' onto a human player as it would do in Shogun 2.

the ai coded to target the player, if you mod it so the ai doesn't treat you as a player the game is much more interesting as it won't kill itsself by suiciding it's armies into you for no reason