Ultimate Guide - Essentials for All Campaigns

This guide is intended to be a compendium of all the essential tips and tricks that everyone will want to know immediately and not after 1000 hours of time spent playing the game. Warning - reading some of these may cause involuntary weeping at all the time you wasted suffering because of your ignorance. Suffer no more.

I'M STILL UPDATING

I'm still updating this guide as I find useful info.

I hope this guide will be my magnum opus for TWW2, a compendium of all the tips you wish someone would tell you when jump into this series.

All contributions welcome and appreciated, please suggest tips you discover in the comments so I can update them here.

Multiplayer Achievements

Achievements you need another player for:
"Plaguebearer" (Defeat a CA staff member or someone else who has this achievement)
"A Taste for Glory" (Play a multiplayer campaign)

You want to do these soon before TWW3 comes out and people stop playing TWW2. "A Taste for Glory" is easy, get anyone to join you in a co-op campaign, and the achievement should pop for you.

For Plaguebearer, you need to find someone with the achievement already and they be willing to take a loss to you in a multiplayer battle.

I recommend joining Reddit and the subreddit R/TotalWar to find such people, or the Steam forums, or the Total War forums.


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Achievements you can do yourself:
"Spoiling for a Fight" (Play a multiplayer battle)
"First Among Equals" (Win 10 multiplayer battles)

For these, you can Host a match in multiplayer, but instead of adding in another player, you can add in an AI player. Which means you can set up an easy AI enemy and crush them. First battle you play and complete should pop "Spoiling for a Fight". And you just need to quickly win 10 battles against the AI to get "First Among Equals".

RESOURCES

Honga.net:
https://www.honga.net/totalwar/warhammer2/faction.php?l=en&v=warhammer2&i=


https://twwstats.com/


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=963641231

^ The Definitive Source for Legendary Lord's Quests [the requirements for each step in quest chain, note this is for TWW1 races]


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Gonna put this here for visibility:

A "PROVINCE" is made up of 1-4 "REGIONS" and each "Region" has a "Settlement", every Province has 1 Capital/Major settlement, and if it is not a single-settlement province (Wood Elves are fond of these), the rest of the settlement will be "Minor" settlement. Once you own all the regions of a Province, you can then issue a Commandment.

KEY POINT: If a Lord, Hero or Building says "in Local Region", the affect only works in the region that character or building is in; other affects can be province-wide, and others can be "factionwide". Understand and pay attention to this.

Dial of the Old Ones

Just found this video today (09/22/2021), which may be the key to solving this obnoxious puzzle, and am going to test it out and see if I can follow it in my head, saving it here so I can come back to it easily:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YgALtD-6AQ

Absolute Essentials You Need to Know!

SPEED UP YOUR GAMEPLAY!!!
You can speed up (and slow down again) actions/movement by pressing R. You can permanently speed up actions at the start of your campaign by going to top left of your screen, clicking the "CAMERA" icon, and clicking "Fastest" for everything. You won't get to watch what happens as it happens, but you also won't have to wait as long to get through the End Turn calculations either. Do this right at the start of your campaign.

NEVER SET THE BATTLE TIMER TO "UNLIMITED"!
There are nasty bugs which can cause you to not be able to kill the last of the enemy and therefore not be able to win the battle and force you to concede defeat. I saw this in Shogun 2 when the AI attacked my castle and I beat the attackers, but they had a reinforcing army, but that army would not enter the map, therefore I could not kill them to win. "60 Minute" timer maximum, if you cannot win in 60 minutes, you deserve to lose.

20 MINUTE TIMER TRICK
Conversely, if you set the battle timer to 20 minutes and are defending, as long as you can keep 1 unit that survives and does not rout until the 20 minute timer is up, you can "win" by causing a Draw even against an enemy you should absolutely lose to if you try to fight. This works best in minor settlements that do not have walls, as causing the Draw will stop the AI for a turn (they only assault once per turn in a siege) and may give you time to rush reinforcements to the settlement.

NOTIFICATIONS
At the bottom right, if you uncheck all those boxes, you can turn off all those notifications, or just the ones you do not care to see. If you do this, at the same time, you can check a box on a Hero (and maybe a settlement?) that will cause you to receive a notification that you have not used that hero that turn, so important heroes & lords will still be addressed every turn but those that you plan to park somewhere for 50 turns will not bug you every turn.


RESEARCH
If you are not researching anything, winning battles can reward you with a Follower that gives +10% to Research Rate. I also got one of these from a successful Steal Research action by a hero, so hero actions while no research is active may reward as well. I have personally confirmed this in my Ikit Claw campaign, as once I finished all research there is, I started repeatedly getting those followers after battles. So get in the habit of ceasing all research at the start of your turn, fighting all the battles and performing all the actions you need to do in your turn, hopefully gaining a bunch of +Research % Followers (do not forget to assign them to your Lords & Heroes), then Resuming research before you End Turn.


USING MAGIC PROPERLY!!!
If you hate magic and mages because you think that in order to use Burning Head or other "go straight in a line" spells, that you have to move your mage into the right position, ooh boy, you are going to love this tip. AS YOU CLICK THE ICON TO CAST THE SPELL, YOU CAN HOLD DOWN THE MOUSE AND ROTATE THE SPELL IN THE DIRECTION YOU WANT, THEN RELEASE AND THE SPELL WILL FIRE IN THAT DIRECTION.


CHARACTER DETAILS PAGE!!!

Here you can give your Lord & Heroes all sorts of items like Weapons, Armor, Trinkets (like +20% Ward Save items), Magic Wands on Magic Casters; etc. These should be obvious, but the tips below are not as obvious, and what this guide is really here for. Pay Attention!


You can REPLACE A LORD!!! You can disband Lords and they will return to your recruitment pool (and stop costing you money by decreasing the Supply Lines penalty) and after 5 turns they will be available to recruit again. A lot of times this works on Immortal Generic Lords (although you probably need to disband the units in their army first before you can disband them), but sometimes disband does not work on these Immortal Generic Lords, and it often does not work on Legendary Lords. Workaround? You replace them with another, low level lord, then disband that lord. So you have a use for the crappy low level lords that you get via confederation or that you got at the beginning of your campaign but ended up disbanding for some reason early on and never ended up leveling them.

Perfect use for this is if you your Faction Leader is Level 40 and you want to replace him with a different lord to level that lord up (while after 5 turns have your faction leader available to summon to a hotspot or have him lead a crusade at the other end of the map from where he was); or, if you had Franz conquer all of Norsca and now you want him to lead an invasion of Araby and The Southlands, but it would take 10-20 turns to get him down there leading that army, and his army isn't that great anyway, you could just replace him, then disband that whole army and have Franz recruit another one closer to the action once he becomes available again. You could even have the army recruited and ready to go using another lord then have Franz replace that lord.

SIDE NOTE - If you want a great way to get rid of all those worthless banners and followers such as scarecrow banners and +4 leadership against (insert faction) followers (or those Pigeon Pluck Pendants), here is a tip that I confirmed. If you have a Lord that you intend to disband and leave him disbanded (or just recruit him to defend a settlement where he is likely to die), you can give him the worthless banners and followers, and you could disband him while they all show the (1) icon indicating it will be 1 turn before they are added to his retinue, and if you later re-recruit him, he will have those banners and followers.


MOUNTS
You can select/change/remove the Lord or Hero's MOUNT if you have given them one. NOTE that you can change a mount once per turn, and you can do it instantly, so if you need to dismount a Lord from his horse so he can scale the walls in a siege, you can do that right before you attack. And you can you re-mount the Lord before a field battle. NOTE that mounts increase the upkeep cost of your Lords & Heroes; Lizardmen Skink Priests and Skink Chiefs on Ancient Stegadons are EXPENSIVE! If you do not need your Lords & Heroes on a mount, it is a good idea to remove them from their mount so that they cost you less in upkeep.


YOU CAN RENAME LORDS & HEROES
You can sort your Lords & Heroes a number of ways, but if you take the time to figure out a good naming system, you could sort by name, and be able to first do everything with your Lords, then your Assassin heroes, then your Steal Research heroes, then your Damage Walls heroes, etc. Note that there are 2 spaces for names, so you can put Ezio in the top line and "the Assassin" or "de Assassin" or "da Hitman" in the bottom line, and their name will show as "Ezio de Assassin". You can also put their name in the top line, and put their key usage in the bottom line, such as "Damage Walls" or "Assault Garrison" so that hero is easier to find when you need that particular use. I highly recommend you come up with such a system and set it up as you recruit heroes and move along in your campaign, late game hero management can really make you hate ever having recruited heroes to begin with.


REPLENISHMENT

Lords, Heroes and Single Entity units (Giants, Doomwheels, Carnosaurs, etc) do not benefit from the Post-Battle option that immediately replenishes your forces, they only benefit from getting healed in battle by spells or items that regenerate their health before the battle ends (Life Magic spells are good example), or from the replenishment from being in your own province, settlement, or Encamp Stance (which can be further boosted by items and hero skills).

Above is very important to know if you want to do lots of fighting in enemy territory or in the ocean. Heroes and single Monsters can be awesome, but also awesome is the ability for an army of 19 units to instantly heal to full health and unit numbers after each battle as long as they do not take too much damage and choose the post-battle replenish option.

Permanent Gotrek & Felix Trick!

I believe this only works for Order Human & Dwarf Factions like Empire, Bretonnia and Dwarves.


I recommend building a first tier tavern to get Gotrek & Felix ASAP, which is a good idea even if you only get them for the 30 turns you are supposed to have them for because they do not raise upkeep, but there is a way to get them permanently!

At the top of your screen there is a bar and on the right it displays campaign-impacting events. Keep an eye on the counter for Gotrek & Felix as it ticks down from 30 to 1.

On Turn 0 of Gotrek & Felix's stay, a cutscene will play and they will depart your faction, and it will be many many turns before you can re-recruit them. But if you reload a save at the start of that turn before the cutscene procs, the game will forget to proc that cutscene and without that cutscene they do not depart your faction, so you now get to keep them permanently!

On Legendary this is easy, Legendary saves your game at the start of the turn before any events pop, so just reload the save and mission accomplished.

On lower campaign difficulties, as soon as the AI finishes its turns, you need to spam Control + S to create an autosave. This becomes easy if hopefully a notification pops up immediately at the start of this turn, do not click it to acknowledge it yet, hit Control + S and you will create the autosave, then click to acknowledge the alert and then the cutscene should proc, and then just hit Control + L to reload your autosave, and check and see if Gotrek & Felix are still with you.


Important Note - If Gotrek gets wounded, I found that I could not re-recruit him normally once he became available again because he is not a normal lord type. But I found a work around:

You recruit a lord, then use "Replace Lord" to have Gotrek replace that lord. Boom you got him back.

Also note that this appears to not work in reverse, I had sent Gotrek across the world to discover the High Elves but then I was unable to use Replace Lord on Gotrek to replace him with a regular lord in order to disband that lord so that I could re-recruit Gotrek back home, I had to get Gotrek killed in order to accomplish this. So heads up.

Ambush Tip

A tip I just read on Reddit today (08.30.21):

If you have a Lord with no units or very few weak units in Forced March Stance within attacking range of the AI, the AI cannot resist attacking such an easy target. So this Lord in Force March is your bait lord.

Therefore, if you put a full & powerful army in front of your bait lord and place it in Ambush Stance, the AI will walk into your trap.

Play on Normal Battle Difficulty

Since starting TWW2 I played every campaign on Very Hard/Very Hard (with 1 Legendary win using Count Noctilus). But I decided to do a test when I started my Taurox Vortex campaign recently. I decided to play on Very Hard Campaign difficulty but Normal Battle difficulty.

After beating Taurox's Vortex campaign, I confirmed that Normal Battle difficulty has no impact upon achievements, if you beat a campaign on Very Hard or Legendary campaign difficulty with the battle difficulty set to Normal, you will get the achievements.

With this understanding, I recommend that you play on Normal Battle difficulty. Very Hard Battle difficulty gives the AI stupidly strong bonuses to melee stats and leadership but Ranged stats remain mostly the same, so you are incentivized to build all-ranged armies or ranged with heroes & monsters to tank or just all hero and/or monster armies.

This works fine for High Elves or Dark Elves or Wood Elves with their inexpensive and very strong ranged options that can arc fire and respond with mobility to threats, but it sucks for playing as the Vampire Counts, Empire, Dwarves, Greenskins, Tomb Kings, etc. Vampire Counts don't even have ranged units (except for the few you can get from the VonCarstein bloodline) and they don't have the best monsters in the game, their only strength is their Vampire heroes. Factions like Greenskins and Beastmen have poor ranged options and really should focus on melee which means you are in for a rough time if you play on Very Hard Battle difficulty. And factions that are good at combined arms like Empire and Dwarves only work well when your melee infantry can hold the enemy in place while your ranged units mow them down, and Very Hard Battle difficulty makes it very difficult for your melee infantry to hold. High Elves can build doomstacks of 19 Sisters of Avelorn that can faceroll the AI easily, but a 19 stack of Handgunners or Thunderers doesn't work anywhere near as well.

A full stack of Demigryph Knights should be awesomely effective, but on Very Hard Battle difficulty they will not perform anywhere near as epic-ly as they should.


Normal Battle difficulty will allow you to utilize your entire roster and have a lot more fun, so I definitely recommend playing on that battle difficulty since there isn't an achievement incentive to play Very Hard Battles.

ABANDON REGION!

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A new feature of The Twisted & The Twilight update is the ability to abandon settlements you do not want. To do this, click on the Regions' Main Settlement Building, and at the bottom of the pop-up there will be a button you click to abandon the settlement on the next turn, pretty much the same process you would do to demolish the other buildings in a region.

This feature is FANTASTIC for everyone and particularly Skaven, see my Skaven guides for more info.

You can sack a settlement for the money and occupy for army replenishment, and then abandon it when you no longer need it. However, you may want to use this tool judiciously because of the downside, read on.


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SUPER IMPORTANT!!!: As fantastic as this feature is, there are major consequences for abandoning settlements, especially many at the same time or in rapid succession. The consequences for abandoning are:

When you "Abandon Settlement", every province you own takes a

Devastation PO penalty of -5 (next turn only) and an
Uncertainty penalty of -3 (reducing by 1 per turn)
for every settlement you abandon.

So 3 settlements abandoned in a single turn generates a -15 Devastation penalty (one turn) and a -9 Uncertainty penalty (-1 per turn) in all owned provinces apart from Forts, which are immune.

All of the above is with a campaign on Hard, other difficulties may or may not have different numbers.


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On the other hand, if you are prepared for this, you could consider the Uncertainty modifier an additional upside. See the change to Public Order section below, but basically they made the change to try and curb the practice of players causing rebellions in their own provinces in order to farm the rebellions for gold and experience. This may help cause more rebellions for you to farm, but be aware, the modifiers affect EVERY province you own, so rebellions could pop up everywhere at the same time.

Public Order after T&T update

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The Twisted & The Twilight update significantly changed how public order works, and introduced the "Uncertainty" and "Desolation" modifiers in tandem with the "Abandon Settlement" mechanic.

All credit to "Humpard" for creating a Discussions post with this info:


"Public Order now provides bonuses and penalties per threshold for all factions.

The numbers are, at province Region Control -

100 to 75, a PO penalty of -12
74 to 50, a penalty of -8
49 to 25, a penalty of -4
24 to -24, zero change
-25 to -49, a PO bonus of +4
-50 to -74, a bonus of +6
-75 to -100, a bonus of +8

These are Faction in the PO popup window.

Tooltip the left-most icon (face) in the Province Effects section of the province information scroll or in the building browser for a popup. I have a province at -25 PO and it gets the +4 bonus hence why the numbers above differ from the tooltip by 1.

Where previously a province, if left alone would just keep going towards 100 or -100, now each one will trend towards a set value over time and hover around there.
So a province that is +100 PO now with an overall trend of -12 will (if nothing changes) eventually settle to around +24 without any outside action required and similarly, provinces in negative PO will try to get to -24.

As for abandoning settlements, every owned province takes a

Devastation PO penalty of -5 (next turn only) and an
Uncertainty penalty of -3 (reducing by 1 per turn)
for every settlement you abandon.

So 3 settlements abandoned in a single turn generates a -15 Devastation penalty (one turn) and a -9 Uncertainty penalty (-1 per turn) in all owned provinces apart from Forts, which are immune.

All of the above is with a campaign on Hard, other difficulties may or may not have different numbers."


Source:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/594570/discussions/0/2969524751704716455/


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SUPER IMPORTANT!!!

A previous update made a change to where, the higher the public order in your province, the greater the "Campaign Line of Sight" that your regions/province will have, and the less public order, the worse the "Fog of War" will be making it easier for enemy armies to sneak up on your settlements without warning.


Twisted & Twilight introduced further mechanics relating to public order. The higher your public order, the greater the line of sight and growth, and the more reduced the cost of building and recruiting. Examples I found on the web below:


Region Control: Low (-25 to -50)

Campaign line of sight +5% for local regions
Construction cost +2% for all buildings
Growth -10
Public order: +4
Recruitment cost +5% local armies


Region Control: Very Low (-50 to -75)

Campaign line of sight +2% for local regions
Construction cost +5% for all buildings
Growth -15
Public order: +6
Recruitment cost +2% local armies



That is all I found so far, if anyone can create a list and send to me, I will update the guide.

AUTO-RESOLVE

I ALMOST PUT THIS AS THE TOP THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!!! I see so many posters on Reddit crying about losing units to auto-resolve, when once you know this information, it makes it easy to strategize around it.

1) The Balance Bar does not represent your chance to win, it represents your projected losses! Now, if the bar is like 80-90% Yellow (in your favor), I do not believe I have ever lost when auto-resolving with such high % in my favor, it is almost a certainty that you will win. If the Balance Bar is roughly even, you may win or you may lose, but either way you will probably suffer severe losses.


2) Auto-Resolve HATES damaged units. This can work for you or against you. Let's say you have an army with a couple heroes and/or a few artillery in it. Let's say you auto-resolve a battle, you win without any units being totally destroyed, but your heroes and/or your artillery take substantial damage (this often happens to heroes in auto-resolve, the game thinks they ran out front and tanked a ton of damage).

Now let's say you do not give your units a chance to fully heal and you fight another enemy with those heroes and/or artillery in a damaged state, and you auto-resolve. There is a good chance auto-resolve will kill 1 or more of your heroes and/or artillery. Plain and simple.

And keep in mind my tip about Replenishment - Heroes and Single Entity Units do not benefit from Post-Battle Replenishment (which can under the right circumstances heal all the units in your army to full health). So let's say you create a Skaven army with Lord and just Doom-flayers and Warp Lightning Cannons in it (no Doomwheels or Heroes). You could send that army to do Treasure Hunts or fight Ocean Rogue Armies, auto-resolve the battles, choose the Post-Battle option for Replenishment, the entire army be fully healed, so that you can continue to stay at sea and not have to land to replenish.

This can work for you when fighting an AI army or garrison that has damaged units in it. How might you make sure the AI army is in such a state? Oh I don't know, perhaps by using a few of your heroes that have the "Assault Units" and "Assault Garrison" skills to soften the AI up a little before you attack with your army...


3) A Sweet Tip - Let's say you have full army of good units like Saurus Warriors but they are damaged from battle, and you go to fight a smaller, weaker army that you should be able to beat, but the Balance Bar shows 50/50 or so; even if you win, you going to lose whole units and suffer tremendous casualties.

The Tip - Combine your units so that instead of having 19 weakened units, you have let's say 14 full health units. Perhaps now the Balance Bar shows 80/20 in your favor, yes?

By the way, this is perfectly logical. Units with less troops will be weakened by further casualties faster and therefore reach the point of breaking, shattering and being run down and slaughtered sooner than a fully trooped unit even if you command them in battle, and auto-resolve knows this.

Pinning Unit Cards

If you have a Lord in a settlement or in Encamp Stance, you should have access to Global Recruitment, where you can see every unit you have the capability to recruit. At the top right of a unit card there will be a little "pin" icon, like you would use to pin a paper to a wallboard. By "pinning" the unit card, the unit's stats will stay pulled up on the left of your screen, which enables you to examine it more closely, and to hover your mouse over the icons at the bottom to see what those icons are and what they do, like "Siege Attacker" and "Strength of the Penitent". It also allows you to then hover you mouse over a different unit card which will then show you the difference between the two unit's stats, much like twwstats.com enables you to do.

AI Combat Bonuses Change the Game

WORK IN PROGRESS - I want to get a combat list I can paste into this instead of pictures, but see the Sagranda link for details about combat bonuses the AI gets.


KEY INFO

On Very Hard BATTLE difficulty, ARMOR-PIERCING RANGED Damage is KING!

On Normal BATTLE Difficulty (Note that you could play a Very Hard campaign but with Normal Battle Difficulty) your melee units should be on an equal footing with the AI's melee units, which may make units like Cavalry actually fun to use (I've only played Very Hard so far and Cavalry have almost never been fun for me to use). This also means that on Normal Battle Difficulty if you buff your melee units with Red Line Lord Skills, your melee units may become murder machines against the AI.

On Very Hard Battle Difficulty, the AI melee units become the murder machines, and you need Red Line skills just for your melee units to have somewhat close to the effectiveness they had on Normal.


I will write it again for emphasis, on Very Hard Battle Diffculty, ARMOR-PIERCING RANGED Damage is KING! Factions like High Elves (if you have the Sisters of Avalorn DLC), Skaven (particularly with The Prophet & The Warlock DLC), Vampire Coast, Dwarves and Empire have a huge advantage in this regard.


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See LegendofTotalWar's "Normal vs Very Hard" video for a perfect example of how a battle you could easy win on Normal difficulty may be impossible or at least excruciating to win on Very Hard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkWLUo0U8is

Another video until I can get this info in text:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JNEcHUd2Vg


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Credit to Sagranda on the TW forums for the work below as well:

https://forums.totalwar.com/discussion/221946/wh2-combat-and-campaign-bonuses-based-on-difficulty


Credit to -Reman on Reddit for the list below of Campaign bonuses the AI get:

"At normal, the AI gets:

50% reduction in all attrition types
4 hef influence gain per turn
"replenishment_characters: 10"
research cost reduced by 100%
slave rite cost reduced by 100%
6 ritual currency per turn
slave decline reduced by 30%
slave impact on public order reduced by 30%
agent success chance reduced by 5% (so it's actually a penalty)
building construction costs reduced by 15%
"conquest_resistance_to_occupation_mod: 40"
all recruitment costs reduced by 15%
replenishment rate increased by 4%
immunity to infighting attrition
+40 city growth per turn
+3 horde growth per turn
+4 public order
At legendary, these become:

80% reduction in all attrition types
7 hef influence gain per turn
"replenishment_characters: 16"
research cost reduced by 100%
slave rite cost reduced by 100%
12 ritual currency per turn
slave decline reduced by 60%
slave impact on public order reduced by 80%
building construction costs reduced by 30%
"conquest_resistance_to_occupation_mod: 70"
all recruitment costs reduced by 60%
replenishment rate increased by 9%
immunity to infighting attrition
+125 city growth per turn
+9 horde growth per turn
+10 public order
And at legendary they also get more bonuses:

Plague infectivity reduced by 30%
Plague lifetime reduced by 30%
Taxes increased by 60%
All unit upkeep reduced by 40%"

BEST GUIDE for GUN FORMATIONS

All Credit to the amazing Reddit user "Xciv" for this guide he made forever ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/7ufew8/a_guide_to_gun_formations_in_total_war_warhammer/

https://imgur.com/a/NnQdt#uRh1OA0


If you really want this info from this amazing guide just presented simply in this guide, comment, I'll see if I can find to duplicate his amazing efforts with my own work and present it here.

SAVE SCUMMING

If you are playing on any difficulty below Legendary, if you do something that "rolls dice" like a hero actions, treasure hunt reward, Invocation of Vaul rite, etc, that produces a result you do not like, such as a critical failure for your hero action that kills your hero or the absolute worst possible item from a treasure hunt, here is what you can do:


FIRST, you need to save before you do anything so that you have a save you can revert to (duh). Quick save is your friend (Control + S).

Certain actions reset the dice and the reward. Fighting battles, other hero actions, etc, but none of these are the best.

The best option is Failed Diplomacy. You get a result or a reward you do not like, revert to your save before that action (Control + L is quick load), then go into diplomacy, find an AI faction that hates you and will refuse any treaty or request you ask for, click on a treaty and make your demand, they reject you, go out of diplomacy, save, perform the action. If the result still sucks, revert your save, do the failed diplomacy trick again, save, try your action.

Oftentimes a Critical Failure will turn into a failure after the first time you do this, so that is basically the game telling you that the dice were not in your favor for at least a couple of throws, but even so, if you do the failed diplomacy trick enough times, you should get a good result eventually.


IMPORTANT!!!: BE AWARE of "Exhaustion" and "On Guard". If your hero assassinates or wounds an enemy hero, they will become "Exhausted", meaning their success chance will be in the toilet for a couple turns, meaning they will almost always certainly fail. MAYBE you might be able to get them to succeed using this trick, but it isn't worth it until they recover.

Also, if you perform an action against an enemy and you fail, they will probably be "On Guard", which increases their success chance for causing you to fail. So if your hero fails to "Assault Units" against an enemy, and then you save and start save scumming with other heroes trying to "Assault Units" on that army, all those other heroes now face an uphill battle because of the enemy lord being "On Guard".

GLOBAL RECRUITMENT REDUCTION

If you build 10 of the same recruitment building, global recruitment time for units produced by that building will be reduced by 1.

So if you build 10 barracks, you should be able to recruit those infantry units anywhere in 1 turn.

CAMPAIGN MOVEMENT GLITCHES

Summary - You can hold down the right mouse as you drag a line to where you want to move your army and see how much movement points it will cost you. However, if you aim to be at exactly 50% or 25% move points left and still be able to switch to a desired army stance, be advised that certain terrain can force your army to move a little further than intended, thereby using move points and causing you not to be able to change stance. It is often a good idea to "leave some in the tank" to make sure this does not happen, especially which changing your army's stance is critical. This issue can also be caused by certain followers and events that boost but glitch your movement to such a degree that you would have to leave 70%+ move points in the tank to be able to switch to Raid or Encamp stance (I confirmed this in my Ikit Claw campaign when 3 Warlock Engineers and the "Favorable Winds" event caused exactly this scenario). See below for more details.

"Holding on right mouse button as you drag lets you measure out how much movement you want to use up. With the bar on the bottom left showing the percentages. So you can use 75% of it to move towards a spot, then use the remaining 25% for ambush stance for example. If you right click somewhere, you can press space at anytime to have the character immediately stop moving. They aren't locked into completing that movement. More useful these days due to the fog of war changes and such."

"Caveat: The movement bar % is not accurate if you start getting campaign movement buffs on the army. It shows you % of unmodified movement points that you have left, but the stances require % of your modified movement points. In some extreme cases I've had it at 30%+ remaining on the bar and unable to go into ambush stance because of the number of boosts."

In support of the above Caveat, in my Ikit Claw campaign, when I had 3 Warlock Engineers with max Increase Mobility skill, Scribe on the Lord, and especially the "Favorable Winds" +25% campaign movement range Event (from ocean Treasure Hunts), I think I had to have over 70% of my remaining movement points remaining in order for my army to be change to "Raiding" or "Encampment" Stance, when without any movement boosts the army should be able to do either at 50% movement points remaining.

"it seems that it’s also not clear which abilities modify this and which don’t. As far as I can make out, if the general has +x% then it’s fine, whereas if they are granted a boost by a building or an embedded hero then their % movement becomes inaccurate."

"I've only ever had problems when heros have joined the army the same turn and the heroes' movement range isn't enough"

"100%. No heroes leaving or joining on that same turn. Happens to me every time I play TK cause the Necrotect never leaves, I need his healing."

"The way to avert that is by putting the army in the stance you need before the heroes join.

However, what /u/paeyvn is referring to is a genuine bug that’s been in the game since the beginning. As far as I can tell, it occurs when your lord is given a movement boost by an embedded hero or local building (not by a global effect or ability of the lord themselves). Try it out with the Tomb Kings and a necrotect, and their various movement buildings, or with the Dwarves & an engineer."

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/etuj2q/so_after_hunderds_of_hours_i_figured_out_pressing/

RAZOR STANDARD & BANNER OF ETERNAL FLAME

Key info from an old post:


RAZOR STANDARD only applies to melee attacks. So putting it on ranged units is worthless.


BANNER OF ETERNAL FLAME's +8% Weapon Damage only applies to Melee; however, the banner's FIRE DAMAGE applies to BOTH Melee and Ranged, and the banner gives an aura that affect multiple units, so if you put the banner on Empire Crossbowmen you could turn them into brutally efficient purgers of the Undead.

MORE USEFUL GOODIES

If you capture the Galleon's Graveyard (Count Noctilus' island capital in the middle of the map in the ocean), the reward is "Immunity from storm and reef attrition." A very nice quality of life perk.

Noctilus with his Galleon's Graveyard can be a good trade partner since he is unlikely to be destroyed, therefore he would be a reliable source of income.

However, a comment on Reddit suggested a very good point. If you capture the Galleon's Graveyard, that is an extremely defensible Major Settlement that should make it very difficult for the AI to beat you down to the point of total defeat. If you are playing on Legendary for example and you are worried that you might lose the campaign if you simply try to fight from your starting area, or you want to try something risky but do not want to lose the campaign, capturing Galleon's Graveyard is probably a great strategy.


If a NON-Immortal Lord is killed (fully dies, not just wounded), you do lose everything that was on that lord, armor, weapons, items, AND Banners and Followers...


You can hover your mouse over an army banner to see what benefits that army is providing to the region/province. Something I just noticed after 570 hours of play time...

HOW TO DETERMINE CLIMATE TYPE

Here is a tip that may make you smack your head and say "DUH!", but not knowing this caused me and at least a few other posters I have seen a great deal of frustration.

Need to know what climate type a province/region has? Hover your mouse over a region until a black text pops up, that text box has in there what climate type that region has.

This is very important for certain situations such as Bretonnia's Questing Vow where you need to win a siege battle against a Major settlement in a "Desert or Jungle" climate.

The Map

Effective communication requires understanding of what is being discussed. For those who struggled to remember the names of the continents in Warhammer 2, a quick guide:


The Old World: This is "Europe", the area inhabited by The Empire provinces including Sylvania, Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia, Kislev.

Norsca: The northern-most and mainly frozen part of the map, where the Norscan tribes raid down from. To the far right is the Chaos Wastes where the Warrios of Chaos spawn.


The Southlands (and Araby): This is "Africa", the continent in the Southeast of the Vortex map (and the continent that The Old World connects to on the Mortal Empires map), with the northern half part being "Araby", which is the area that would be Egypt to the Northeast (where Khemri is), Libya and Algeria to the north (Bretonnians), and Morocco and Mauritania to the west. "South Africa" would be where Kroq-Gar and Queek are, with those islands in the Southeast Corner being like Madagascar.

Lustria: This is "South America". Pretty self-explanatory, this is the continent in the Southwest of the Vortex map. There are now a bunch of Legendary Lord factions here, hence many now call this the "Lustria-bowl" due to the bloodbath.

Ulthuan: The circle-island in the Northeast of the Vortex map, with the swirling Vortex over the island in the sea at the center.

Naggaroth: This is "North America", where Malekith and the Dark Elves live in Naggarond to the north, Morathi in the area where Texas/Northern Mexico would be, with Mazdamundi in "Central America" in the connecting part between Lustria and Naggaroth. I had trouble remember the name of this area because of the similarity between the names Naggaroth and Naggarond.

EXTEND THE DIPLOMACY SCREEN

Credit to Reddit user "Sambience" for this tip:
https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/fjb0fb/after_1000_hours_i_found_out_you_can_extent_the/


When you go into the diplomacy screen, the diplomacy list that shows the factions is quite short and forces you to scroll a lot.

At the top left of that list, there is a little icon that you can grab and extend the diplomacy list up so you can see more of the factions at once.

A simple quality of life improvement.

CHEESE STRATEGIES

Credit to LegendofTotalWar for the Top 5 Cheeses from his video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D7RpeJTZh8



Some other cheeses:


Attacking reinforcement enemy army when they get in the map, so they rout out of the battlefield.


If you have handgunners when you siege an enemy, you can line them up right at the gate, smash it open, and then use your lord to pull a single unit at a time from inside the walls to follow you to your line of gunners. Great for decimating a defending undead force with just one lord and a few handgunners.


Use 5 agents on one town and totally obliterate the town defenses ( walls + garrison ) so even a mediocre army can take lv 5 settlements. This requires a Damge Walls hero and 4+ Assault Garrison heroes.


Hide nearly all units and only shows the units that can effectively harass the enemy. With the skaven you often can kill a half army that way and you need nearly nothing to prepare that.


If an enemy has a well-defended settlement with an army right outside next to it that would butcher your forces if you sieged the settlement but you have an excellent field army that can easily win a field battle, attack the army outside the settlement to draw out the defending army and garrison to a field battle.


Use a single lord (or your weakest army) to 'besiege' a city that the enemy has a full stack army next to, then attack their full stack army with another of your armies. Then the garrison can't reinforce, but the besieging army can reinforce your attacking army.


Send big monster (or a Lord on Foot with skills in defense and survivability) into enemy center, once the enemy commits their forces and starts wailing on it blast them with the rest of your army being artillery.


Kiting with one or two fast units so AI has to split its forces while the rest of your army hammers weak points in the enemy line.


The magic conduit cheese where you have a load of backup wizards spamming it while hiding while a powerful flying wizard blows the crap out of the enemy as you have a near limitless amount of magic.

The gyrobomber doomstack cheese where you hide your general in a bush while you gain air superiority and wipe out missile units so the enemy cant do anything then withdraw and repeat, though this is not so great against the elves and such but very effective against Lizardmen and Vampire Counts.


As Tomb King Settra, Raid The Sentinels faction in The Black Pyramid of Nagash province early in the campaign. The faction won't move unless you declare war on them and always hates you anyway.


Pull AI forces off the city walls by attacking an artillery piece at the city square with a flying unit cheese.


Use a single Lord (or as Skaven, a stack of Skavenslaves) as bait with an army in Ambush Stance right behind to bait the AI into attacking your bait so you can destroy them. Similar strategy is to have a weak settlement to bait the AI into attacking but you have an army next to it in Ambush Stance.

Your ambush can only be spotted from a distance if it is in line of site of another faction (friend, enemy, whatever). The recent patch nerfed sight lines, so you can move a solo lord forward to the edge of an enemy's movement range, and put your army in ambush just out of sight. No ambush buffs required. Especially useful against main factions, since they go first in the turn order, and thus some random other nearby faction can't detect your army.


The "Join war against..." cheese, where you can declare war on a faction without having to fight their allies, just by choosing an enemy of that particular faction (which there usually are) and offer to join war, which for some reason only puts you at war with that one faction without having to deal with their allies.


Playing as tomb kings if you can recruit new lords at level 5 get the canopic jar hoarder skill to max and disband them you will get 3 canopic per turn; do it every turn with the new lords that show up in your Lord Pool and you will have infinite canopic jars.

Siege Defense

You can stretch units out on walls such that they cover multiple towers at once. So if siege defense victory requires that you have your forces defending the town square but you still want your towers to do some damage to the enemy, you can take your crappiest large sized units and spread them along the walls to have all your towers firing, while your best troops defend the chokepoints to your victory point.

PREDICTING REBELLIONS

If you have a province where a rebellion is about to occur, where will the rebellion spawn?

Answer:

Obviously if you only own 1 settlement, the rebellion will occur in that settlement's region.

If you own the province's Capital/Major Settlement, the rebellion will always spawn in that settlement's region.

If you do not own the Capital/Major settlement but you own 2-3 minor settlements, the rebellion will occur in the most recently conquered minor settlement.

PUBLIC ORDER TIP

If you have a province that is important to hold for your strategy but has significant negative public order issues that cannot be resolved with a Public Order (PO) building and/or commandment, or you cannot waste a building slot on a PO building, here is a tip:

Recruit a Level 10 hero so that you can immediately put 3 points to max out a campaign (Blue Line) skill. then put 3 points into the Spread Public Order skill, and then give that hero every +Public Order Follower that they can equip, and park that hero in that province you need to keep happy, and it should do the trick.

Zones of Control

In one LegendofTotalWar's Youtube videos, he gives a brief example of how Zones of Control work.

One thing I remember, that I just saw in my campaign right now, is that if you have 2 armies and a settlement zone of control, you can block enemies from getting by.


This section could a lot more detail, so anything you have to add please add it in the comments and I'll update.

Galleon's Graveyard

Galleon's Graveyard (island/maelstrom in the middle of the map, Count Noctilus" starting region)

Gives you Immunity for all armies to Reef and Maelstrom attrition.

However, you can't build any buildings there, all you get is the Main Settlement building and a Port.

At Tier 4, I got 20,000 gold for sacking it as Oxyotl.

[binxmuldoon123]

Thanks for the spell aiming tip.

[i cant feel the broken]

Lightning strike skill on your generals is EXTREMELY useful

[MinMaxRex]

@Azuzu - Appreciate it!

[Asuzu]

Like, over 1k hours in the game, and some tips were totally new to me
Thank you for the effort!

[Eon]

Wow. Thanks for the guide.

[Hemaka]

Lots of the tips I had no idea about, thanks!

[No Swear]

"USING MAGIC PROPERLY!!!"
oh dear lord ;__

[CorruptDead1342]

Thanks man for answering. Catch you around

[MinMaxRex]

@CorruptDead1342 - Yes, if you disband a lord to your lord pool, they keep everything they had when they were disbanded including their level and skills.

[CorruptDead1342]

Got a question. You noted in the guide that you can disband lords to save money. If you had a leveld lord and needed to save money. When you went to re-recruit them would they keep their level? Aside from that interesting guide.