How to Command armies & Win battles

This is a battle tutorial for Total War Warhammer 2. It explains the basics of army command and unit battle tactics. It's a guide on how to use units properly and fight an enemy army to win in battles. It covers the topics of army & unit management, movement and combat.
You will learn how to command, group, move and order units in a battle as well as basic army battle tactics and unit counters. It's a guide on how to use units properly and how to fight an enemy AI army, but all tactics and moves can be used in multiplayer against other players.

Battle tutorial basics

Warhammer lore has made Warhammer 2 quite different then historical total war games when it
comes to battle tactics and strategies.

This is why you have to employ a bit of a different way of thinking when playing battles in
this game.

This tutorial is going to cover:
Basic unit management
unit movement
attacking and defending.

If you would rather watch then read I have your covered with this video:

For more in depth look at combat mechanics, armor types, spells and other Warhammer unique
mechanics you will have to read my next basic and advanced Warhammer 2 battle tutorials.

Army & Unit management

First thing is unit management. Because of Warhammer lore you have more to consider in this
game then just infantry, range and cavalry units.

Here you have the addition of mobile artillery, magic users and flying units.
While you can use flying units as melee and range cavalry when it comes to their battlefield movement speed and maneuverability you have to remember that melee flying units will fight down on the ground against other non-flying units while the ranged flying units are totally exposed up in the sky and very easily shot down by enemy ranged units.
While you can use flying units as cavalry units when it comes to their battlefield movement
their main combat happens down on the ground when attacking. So you need to consider them
more like a very mobile infantry unit then cavalry.

And you have to use them as such. Because you chose when they will engage you can pick their target and you should keep them as crack commando squads to attack enemy units that are out of reach of your other units.

As for mobile artillery unit they need to be guarded as their crews will be unable to fire if engaged.
Best targets these units to fire on are large numbered melee infantry units because they present the largest target especially if you are using artillery units that have low accuracy and high projectile spread.

If you have in your army more accurate types of artillery with low projectile spread then you can use them to inflict major damage to enemy high value targets like generals or lords. The additional knock down effect will put these units out of use for several seconds giving you more valuable time.

Magic users and units need to be guarded behind infantry ranks and used as a support unit to
brake open enemy formations or rout wavering units, units whole morale is just short of breaking.

With this added interplay and depth to battles managing your regular forces of infantry,
range and cavalry units becomes even harder than before.

Which is why I suggest to all players grouping your infantry lines into one solid formation
backed up by ranged and cavalry units.

Army & unit movements

Now for the second part of the tutorial, actual army and unit movements.

First thing that you should make sure is that your units are set to the default walk state,
because if you tire them out running across the map they will be unfit to do battle. This is something you can do in the main menu and make a default state for all units in all battles.


You can manually control the run speed of your units by the default R key. I also strongly recommend NOT using the default state for skirmish mode as when you have this enabled for range infantry, cavalry and flying unit they will move out of position when any enemy units is close to them regardless of the fact that you have your own units between them protecting them.
This can lead to those ranged units moving right into a battle on a flank or rear and messing up your battle lines instead of being safe behind defending units taking shots at enemies.

The guard mode I would strongly suggest using for all units as this will prevent your army being spread out to wide as they chase down enemy fleeing units instead of doing flank and back attacks on exposed enemy unit formations.

Another tip about unit movement is using queued movement commands. You can add multiple movement orders to a unit which will be executed in the order they were given. You do this by holding down the shift key while right clicking on the ground or even enemy units. This gives you the ability to give complex, long term orders to units which is especially useful for moving cavalry from behind of your formation to the flanks, and then to enemy unit’s backs.

Another way of doing this is by holding both the shift and the right mouse button and dragging your desired movement path for the unit. It will be broken up into segments by the game and the unit will execute these orders one by one.

A very important aspect of unit movement is moving groups of units in a set formation.
While you can setup formations of group units both manually and by using the option in the unit card bar that formation isn’t permanent nor obeyed by individual units once you give any move or attack orders.

To place units in formations that keep their shape even after you give new movement or attack orders you have to lock units inside group. You can do this in two ways. If you are making a new group once you have selected all units you want in that group and formation you use the control and G key. The group is then automatically assigned a number and locked in. If you want to you can always change the groups number. The second way is to create a group of units by using the control key and a number key and then hitting the G key to lock the group in the formation it is in currently.

The advantage of grouped units in a locked formation is that they will move at the same speed and keep their formation. Which prevents holes from forming in your formation as you move your army.
The down side is that if the whole group is given an attack order all units in it will converge into a single point of attack from their current position in the formation which leads to unit blobbing as it is called in Total War when a bunch of units all take up the same spot on the battlefield.
This is why it’s best to unlock the formation once you start individual unit combat.

Army & unit combat

Now for the last part of this tutorial unit combat.

As for units which have the ability to be deployed outside of the deployment area their best use is disrupting enemy army formation. This is best done with ranged units. Specifically ranged cavalry or flying units, as they can harass the enemy units the entire distance towards your army.
If the enemy general commits any units to chase down your range units he has to break up his formation and mess up his battle lines. Which is exactly what you want to achieve. An if not, you get to shot up a number of units and have your pick of the units to shot at.

While we are on this subject the best target for standard range units (bow units, gun units etc.) are physically large enemy units which are specialized in melee warfare. These present the biggest target for a ranged unit, which are themselves made up of many individual soldiers, which means they can hardly miss their mass shots against it.

But it’s not the size of the target that matters as much as the fact that it has a large heath pool and armor which is why it’s counter, the best units to kill it with, are the ranged units. This is because of their prevalent armor piercing attack trait and high damage output. Which is precisely why they have a limited amount of ammunition which you need to use wisely. When you run out of ammo you can still use these units for good effect if you can get them to enemy unit’s flank, or even better backs, to inflict major morale penalties.

Unit morale is in its self a comprehensive subject so for the purpose of this tutorial I will keep it short, but you can expect an entire second guide dedicated to this subject. But more on morale in a moment… as I need to talk about specific unit counters.

While in previous historical total war games it was very clear cut which unit is best against another unit, like Spears vs Cavalry and cavalry vs ranged units here, because of the Warhammer lore, things are a lot more complicated.

As you have units ranging from 200 zombies or skeletons to titanic single units like dragons and giants and each which lots of variants with unique abilities and statistics it’s much harder to give clear cut advice on how to deal with each types of units.

A simple tip that will put you on the right tract is to pay specific attention to the unit information cards which you can enable by pressing the I key. They show the most important traits of units in text at the top while giving you the brake down of stats of selected unit below. If you read this information it will become more clear to you which unit is useful against each, like how spearman with anti-large traits are good against large monster units. This is just one example.


Now back to morale. In essence morale is your units second health bar. And while the health bar is affected by only damage from enemy units or friendly fire the morale bar can be affected by a host of game mechanics and elements.

The most important things for you to remember about it is that it is more important than the health bar of a unit and that it’s not the same for different units. Because a unit can be at 100% health and 160/160 soldiers and still run away from the battlefield. Also, one unit can have a morale pool 10 times of another and there are even units with infinite morale called unbreakable.

The major penalties for morale are as you can expect:
Losing your general,
being attacked in the flank or back,
magical morale reducing attacks and
other friendly units routing around you.

The minor morale penalties are
being outnumbered and losing,
being hit by enemy range or magical units,
being frightened by enemy units.

When you combine all of these elements you can do several times the morale penalty then the units morale pool is. This means that you can win battles not by killing the enemy army but by routing it. But there is an additional thing to keep in mind units can be broken and shattered.

A broken unit can return to the battle after it reforms if it isn’t actively chased by an enemy unit while a shattered unit is permanently routed. Because of the naturally hectic battlefields and combat almost all battles end in a mix of killed and routed enemy units.

But as described it is possible to stack such high morale penalties as to win by routing and not killing, well a little bit of killing is required as general, lord kills, produce some of the largest morale penalties

[郭德纲砸缸]

oh

[Spector]

They help, because they dictate the battles course. What units are in front directly changes how the battle starts. Having ranged units up front means you want to skirmish first. Infantry units up front means you want a direct battle with range units as support. And cavalry and flying units up front means you want to brake the enemies formation and dive with infantry after.

[mugen]

Thanks for the guide,do starting formations matter alot?that seems to me a confusing aspect since I don't know what makes a good formation