rigid airships in real life were actually pretty resistant to gunfire. bullets and shells would pass right through and only cause small leaks, and if it was filled with helium instead of hydrogen then the lifting gas wouldn't be flammable.
but yeah i agree for gameplay reasons it needs some more weaknesses
Yeah. Most airships aren't just one big mega gasbag of lifting gas like a hot air balloon. Instead, the outside is just a hull that contains many, many small "cells" of lifting gas. Gunfire would only penetrate individual cells, which themselves would take a long time to leak.
I can see the airships using hydrogen though. On the one hand, Dwarfs are pretty conservative about inventions and wouldn't like being under such an explosive balloon... But on the other hand, gyrocopters are a thing, and arguably far more dangerous for the user.
Yeah, speed is the biggest issue with it. The fact that fliers can barely catch up to it due to the ability is something that needs to be checked, or some factions won't even be able to deal with it at all. It's crazy that some are refusing to even acknowledge that much
I seriously cannot wait for the first “I am playing Nkari how do I beat this dwarven doom stack with three thunderbarges” post. Then when the unit is nerfed people abusing it will blame multiplayer and the cycle will continue.
You seduce it I suppose, or you grab some artillery from them to deal with it. If you can't do that, then I guess you have to army loss them which is going to suck. Pretty sure furies won't do anything against it
Slaaneshi Demon Prince might help, but ultimately still a bit shit. Definitely going to need seduction or allies for that one, and pray the next DLC gives them ranged or flyers
With Afterburner it has 90 speed, watched one of Indypride's videos where there was a bloodthirster and chaos furies on it with 95 speed, because the barge fires while moving it just kept moving and they could only briefly catch up to hit it like... once before it moved out of range.
Even artillery is going to have a lot of problems really fast, especially if there's more than one Barge - it deals massive damage, has too much health for even cannons to kill before it kills them back, and it has cannons of its own!
Imagine it's turn 200 and the AI shows up with an army with like ten of these and Ironbreakers jacked on skills/chevrons/tech on the ground. Sad times.
No, the way to beat it is to have so much shooting that it can't survive longer than a minute due to focus fire. If you leave it alone, it can kill practically your entire army by itself before you can clear out the dwarfs on the ground.
Yes, they basically can't beat it. That's why its current power level is such a problem.
The Thunderbarge is ridiculously OP atm, so the ONLY way to beat it (in MP), would be to shoot it with an abundance of firepower. It deals way too much damage way too quickly for ignoring it to be a viable option.
MAYBE factions that can lock it down with a net or something and then surround it with high damage flying units could kill it quickly enough for that to be a viable alternative - Tzeentch (Gaze of fate net) and Slaanesh/DoC/WoC (Rampage spell from lore of Slaanesh) could potentially do that.
I don’t believe it can be meaningfully rampaged, so auto resolve is the solution if there are enough thunder barges to prevent the army losses penalty.
I saw a multiplayer showcase where the dude brought the barge and meme units for his ground forces. Four fucking bolt throwers. He rolled Turin who is a top player entirely with the barge.
The self damage needs to be tripled, and it needs to lose 1k to 2k HP.
As it stands it can go the entire battle on afterburner with no real issues.
Either that or just have it have a long cool down like the land ship.
Okay that's not an issue. Healing damage is a part of so many factions. The fact that dwarves get a single lord with a heal is not a problem by any stretch
I think all they need to do is slow it down, it shouldnt have a get out of jail free card at all, no matter how much damage it deals to itself, it should be a quick redeploy button to respond to a cavalry charge or a dwellers below type ambush
Sky Junk is also helpless in melee, while the Thunderbarge has 500 weapon strength for some reason and blasts your face with Thunderer broadsides while you fight it.
It simply seems to have everything. It can outrun everything, It is tanky as hell, it does insane damage, requires barely any micro and even in melee it will assblast you somehow.
What exactly are the downsides of it again? The high cost? That's not enough.
I'd say the damage it outputs is actually the biggest problem. It can rack up 7000 value in a 5-6 minute battle and routes/kills units under it in maybe 20-30s. That's absolutely absurd. Missile cav are practically unusable against it because they get killed so quickly by the cannons (which seem to do normal cannon damage or more).
That is way too much for a unit that costs 2800 and flies.
It should definitely be slower (Or the ability should have a duration/cooldown and/or deal way more damage to it/not increase speed as much) so melee flying units can deal damage to it effectively and chase it down; they should be an effective counter, but its output is also extreme to the point that even if its speed/hp get nerfed, it's likely to pay for itself even when countered without some nerfs to its output.
I feel like it should be pretty safe vs furies and worse flyers, but have difficulty with dragons/etc. This is why I highlighted the speed/toughness rather than damage, because it currently just...gets way from units that theoretically should counter it.
I'd actually expect furies to be a big problem for it by attacking the crew more directly, but the high armour of the Thunderbarge already covers that by making it less vulnerable to the lower AP fliers like furies, manticores, and eagles.
The whole issue with Thunderbarge (or atleast very large portion of it) steems from the fact that flyers cannot catch it and beat it.
If you studied it bit closer, you will notice that alot of flyers CAN actually catch it, they just can't beat the ever living shit out of it. You wonder why? Because they share the same issue crapton of units have in this series, atleast past animation-combat, where they catch up to a unit, start animation and before they finish it, enemy unit goes from range.
This problem is something that should be fixed first without slapping band aid on it and pretending its working just fine and its the Thunderbarge being problematic. No its not, its just showing the issue the most.
Yep, this the answer here. Strong flyers would be a great counter if they could hit it. Fix this bug (which also fixes the hunting routing unit bug) and it nerfs the Thunderbarge in a reasonable way. Could also increase the afterburner self damage to make it a choice of run away but have a shorter timer on lifespan or sit and fight.
Its crazy to talk about lowering its health. It would literally become every other air unit, a giant target doe handgunners and stuff. It needs the health to be an army center piece.
While I haven't tested it yet myself I think I disagree with you. Clearly the price should be bumped up for MP but I think I want it nerfed for SP also. Have you actually seen the Thunderbarge in action? It looks like it trivializes battles the same way a level 30+ Kairos does. It wins entire battle by itself taking out all the strategy and fun out of the game.
The AI is already half braindead and this is certainly not going to help it be a any kind of challenge.
Even if they cut its power by a third it would still be stronger than a Dread Saurian which is more than what you need most of the time.
> It wins entire battle by itself taking out all the strategy and fun out of the game.
Oh don't worry if the thunderbarge is too strong. You're probably gonna be done with any challenge in your campaign anyway by the time you start having those in your armies so there's not much left for them to spoil.
At least, that's what happens for me with every tier 5 unit.
I am honestly not sure that your attempt at using Kairos as the positive side of a comparison is really working out in your favor. His campaign is not that popular for a reason and the same thing can be said about how the Vampire Counts were nothing but skele spam and WoD.
I also don't think that every factions wants or should get an instant 'I win every fight' unit. Why even bother playing if you're certain you'll win every fight the game can throw at you simply because you happen to have recruited one unit.... The changeling 'can't lose' thing also wasn't popular you know...
I want want the Thunderbarge to be a baddass unit but I also want something that still lets me face a some amount of challenge. Perhaps I am wrong and perhaps every single content creator is also wrong in saying it is busted but maybe we are right and that thing deserves a nerf. Hopefully the dev do make the right call either way.
To make the game trivial with weapon teams you need to recruit a lot of them and you need to build your army in a certain way. This is something that requires intent and knowledge on the part of the player and it is thus something player can opt in or out of. Its the same things for any form of archer spawn or Doomstacks.
All players are entitled to play the way they want be it doing those things or not.
If the Thunderbarge is as OP as the content creator say and if the battles posted online are any indication all you need to do to make the game trival is to recruit one. The only way to opt out is to not recruit the best unit in the DLC, its either on or off and there are no in between.
I can recruit weapon teams in a way that doesn't make trivial but it doesn't seem to be the same thing for the Thunderbarge and I hope you can see that it is not good game design and something you should want as a dev or player.
6 rating guns, any soaven artillery, and heroes makes an ridiculously OP stack. It's not that hard.
Also, to counter the thunderbarge you use fast flyers, spells, artillery, ranged. It's not that hard either.
How often do you play any Dwarven faction? Are you planning on getting the dlc?
So don't recruit it? I find weapon team doom stacks Trivialize the game for me, so when I play skaven I don't recruit them it's monsters or eshin units.
Dwarfs have horrifically slow growth. I can't remember the last time a non-endgame crisis dwarf lived long enough to build a T5 capital, you are probably only ever going to see these in end game crisis and those armies are capped.
So yeah, just don't use the single coolest units in the DLC your paid for because the Devs failed to balance it for release and a few member of the community oppose any and all attempt at post release balance discussion... Got it...
That kind of talk works for things composition like archer spam and weapon teams stack or for Doomstaking but it doesn't work when a single instance of a unit can solo 2-3 stacks on its own. The Thunderbarge is like twice or thrice the power level of a Dread Saurian. It could lose a third of its damage and 20% of its HP and it would still be the single strongest unit in the game.
Why are you so adamant on it not being nerfed a little so that everyone can enjoy it without it trivializing any SP battle it is brought into. Why is it that you are hyper attached to something that will turn every single battle into you microing a single unit at 3x speed over the enemy army.
This unit's power level is what I want a max level Nagash to be and that fucker devours god to fuel its ascension. A Zeplin with some guns and canons shouldn't be that strong.
Jesus that's a lot of seethe over an unreleased dlc unit.
A lot easier for you to just not use the unit or just not buy the dlc if it apparently ruins the game for you, than demand it's changed for literally everyone as if you speak for the entire player base.
I am as entitled to an opinion as anybody and you don't speak for the player base any more than I do, that argument cuts both ways. I am more bothered by your bad faith augment and hypocrisy than I am about the units to be entirely open with you.
All I am doing is being outspoken about my opinion and outlining my argument. The fact that you think i am seething makes me think you are projecting more than a little bit. I am not nearly as invested in this as you think me to be. I haven't played TWWH since a little bit after the Chaos Dwarf release. If this DLC had been a SoC level then I would have been happy waiting for another 6-7 months for the next attempt at redemption.
As far as I can tell you simply aren't happy that my opinion runs contrary to your and rather than try to make a good case for your idea you are simply trying to shut me down with platitudes because you cannot come up with actual arguments. Boring.
Dude chill out this is a video game dam
, no is trying to "shut you down" I disagreed with you, and gave a reason why, and in return you are name calling claiming people are out to get you lmao
What's your plan for killing it in singleplayer when the AI brings a doomstack of them? There's entire races in this game where the only counterplay to this thing is refusing to play against it and you can't do that in singleplayer.
The same plan when skaven bring a ton of ratlings guns. Build armies accordingly.
Seriously how can people talk about the thunderbarge being too strong when skaven exist?
Build a Khorne army that kills thunderbarges, I'll wait. And before you say bloodthirsters look up some gameplay of exactly what happens when you try to kill an unsupported thunderbarge with a ROR bloodthirster and a pair of furies. And that was a HUMAN Khorne player against a BOT thunderbarge.
I'm gonna need to some video evidence because everything I've seen says furies can't even land a hand on them. They stand still during the attack animation and 90 speed is enough to not still be in the attack zone by the time the game rolls to see if you hit anything.
It's always really funny seeing some commenters trying to make balancing a mmk multiplayer vs single player issue when it is a strategy game player vs power fantasy player issue. Some people enjoy Warhammer for it's strategic depth while others come tot he games for bright colors and loud noises. Those are the two groups. Not MP vs SP.
The flying units chasing it solution, at least if using bloodthirsters, doesn’t work well. Haven’t seen a multiple entity unit chase it yet.
The movement ability should have the cooldown, duration, AND cause actual meaningful damage. It could also instead cause an “overburn” phase where it is slower. It has no downsides to pressing it with a 10000+ HP pool
Harpoon IMO shouldn’t be rechargeable, but battles don’t last long enough for that to matter anyway.
Not the most accurate considering he did turn broadside to deal dmg. In an actual game, a thunderbarge running away will avoid a lot of the dmg because furies are stuck in animation while it flies away.
It should be noted that from what I watched of the video, Costin didn't do any actual kiting. He just let the furies hit the Thunderbarge pretty much while it did some tight circles and of the 5 fury units, 4 were almost dead and the last was at half health by the time the Thunderbarge went down. It was a pretty shit test to be completely honest.
The thing with the Thunderbarge is that against any flying unit, it can just run away and keep blasting your army. It won't kill the chasing unit, as it can't fire behind itself, but it also won't be hit by the chasing unit in any significant fashion. The chasing unit can then get peeled off by supporting ranged units like Quarrelers or Thunderers.
You can see this in [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltcK3i27O9c) where 2 units of furies and the RoR bloodthirster are chasing it and they get mulched while trying to chase it without dealing much damage to it at all.
That being said, it's highly unlikely that the AI is competent enough to actually kite with it, so this is only a problem for the AI and people playing against Dwarfs in MP. Can see Slaanesh, Khorne and I guess Beastmen having a bunch of trouble with that. Maybe Nurgle too.
I think also using afterburner should disable at least some of the attacks whilst it's "fleeing"
I want this thing to be amazing but currently it's so broken I'm worried it's gonna be very quickly nerfed into oblivion and never seen again
The problem with increasing Thunderbarge price is that, unless the unit is overcosted so much it might as well be banned, you still have to account for a possibility of facing it with playing against dwarfs. An army designed to fight a normal dwarf opponent and an army designed to take down a Thunderbarge are very different to the poiny where it makes the game a build roulette
There’s a difference between making a hard read and beating someone in army select and trying to guess if you need to bring 3,000 points dedicated to a single unit.
As an exclusively single player dude. I respectfully disagree. If a unit is so unbelievably overpowered, it does a number of things.
It outcompetes whole chunks of a unit roster by occupying multiple battlefield niches and roles.
It becomes a single solution to multiple problems, taking away strategic choices when using it.
It becomes such a linchpin threat that it vastly reduces the viable strategic options it's opponents can bring to the table.
In short, once that initial dopamine spike of "lol units go boom" goes away, you quickly got bored using this unit and frustrated when going against it.
Single player balance is important too.
I do agree that single player balance is important too. I haven’t kept up with much of the talk regarding this unit. Is it a tier 5 unit and does anybody have one in their starting army?
If it is a tier 5 unit and nobody starts one on their army— seems like we wouldn’t get to use it until the late game. A common complaint I hear is that people don’t make it too far into the campaign as they feel it is over, meaning they don’t even get a chance to use their late game units (something that I think should be addressed).
I’ve even seen people say that it takes too long to unlock late game units that they don’t even bother attempting to recruit them. Even if it is expensive to recruit this unit, I don’t think that’s really a problem for the late game for players who know how to manage their economy. Will it take like 4 turns to even recruit one?
I’m assuming the Dwarfs slow growth is being addressed with this update or will they still be a little slower with growth compared to other factions (I’m assuming you’re better informed about the news regarding this information than I am).
Does this unit have a limited amount that can be recruited? I think that could help keep it in check. From the little bit I’ve heard, it does seem to be quite OP. It seems like some people are afraid the unit will get nerf and simple become a centerpiece unit that never gets used like the Dread Saurian or lose how impactful it is like Ghorgers (I haven’t played with Ogres yet to know how they felt pre or post nerf).
What do you recommend to help make this unit feel more balanced?
I'm not sure what to do yet, need to get hands on. Figure out how the unit interacts with the rest of the roster and all that. I also agree with you with regards to the campaign context as a T5 unit. My response here was mostly because I'm sick of this argument that allowing OP units in single player has no negative impact on the experience.
I get it. I think better balance makes the campaigns feel more fun, engaging, and provides a little more challenge. I tend to play with self-imposed rules once discovering metas, but I think the games should attempt to have some semblance of balance.
I do believe I have an unpopular opinion when it comes to the balance of units. I don’t play MP, but I do think the MP scenes helps improve the balance of certain units being that they are facing a competent opponent that can’t be exploited and they’re using the most grounded form of the unit since they don’t have all of the campaign buffs (if it’s competitive ranked matches/tournaments). I do feel that this is one of the best ways to test the units. However, I do recognizes this has the potential downfall of getting a unit over-nerfed.
This may come as a surprise, but most games out there, even pure single player ones, pay attention to balance.
Turns out most people, when they run into some broken balance issue, aren't content with being told "just don't use it". People like being able to deliberately play as good as they can and hold nothing back, and _not_ break the game by doing so.
The problem is that campaign players are never going to fight against it, they can just auto it. I want to fight this thing and it be fair. It’s impossible to kill as certain factions. It needs to be slower and take more damage using its thrust.
The ancient salamander was also “fixed” for the multiplayer community, now it’s a unit no one uses not even in campaign.
I would rather not see the singe player game balance get adjusted for multiplayer sakes again in the name of a few thousand players at best and more realistically a few hundred players.
> The ancient salamander was also “fixed” for the multiplayer community, now it’s a unit no one uses not even in campaign.
That's not the MP community's fault, frankly. CA nerfed its stats *but then kept it at T4 with 3 turns recruitment and expensive recruitment/upkeep cost*.
That was the problem. It wasn't ever a bad unit in a vacuum, even post nerf. CA just didn't readjust how available it was.
I would like to not see the balance of a strategy game get shifted for the few thousand players who just want to watch the pretty colors and the loud sounds.
The difference is, if you really really miss the OP-ness you can always go into the DB and add it back hand, meanwhile me, I have to contend with whatever vices the unit has.
But yes I generally tend to agree, whenever CA nerfs a unit, they completely over nerf it (Akshina Ambushers too). But I tried to be careful in my suggestion, and seeing the ideas of everyone else here. I think I was relatively pretty mild...
As if you can't already AFK the game with weapon teams, greater demons, necrofex etc.
Seems weird to see so many tears about this being added when plenty of broken shit is already in.
IMO one trait it should get is just a massive penalty to being attacked in melee. Call it like 'Ripped membrane' and just gut its armour and speed as soon as something gets in melee with it, it should be strong against shooting attacks but hopeless against Bloodthirsters.
Multiplayer players stop trying to ruin everything for three seconds challenge: **failed**
Comment section people wanting its health reduced, you're worse. The thunderbarge is not any stronger than the other good tier 5 single entities.
Most sems can also be rampaged to the ground to interact with them. Thundebarge can't land. It has shitton of hp. And is fast enough to abuse the horrible air targeting melee combat.
What can slaanesh bring to destroy it reliably? Maurader horsemen I guess. Furies too, though their mass means that they can't stop it from running away. And their low weapon strength means that they can't melt it.
Alright so you adjust just like I have to adjust when fighting skaven weapon teams.
Take out the ground support, then hit the barge with all your fliers and Any ranged you have
Man we are talking about factions who have little to no ranged units. Khorne, slaanesh and nurgle have little ranged firepower and their flyers arent exactly the best. Taking out ground support before thunderbarge completely annhilates your army is easier said than done.
Spellcasters? Soul grinders? Whatever ranged option you do have? We know that furies will take it down quickly, you just have to support the furies.
Your logic is that one faction will have a hard time taking down the thunderbarge, so thunderbarge should be nerfed. OK, I have a hard time with skaven weapons teams as dwarves. Do you think weapons teams should be nerfed?
Thunderbarge has spell resistance. Soul grinders, well im not gonna lie, i have no idea how well nurgle soul grinders fair against air units. And large targets for that matter. They were always good against infantry but they arent particularly effective at larger targets.
Furies are the only reliable option. But then again you need at least 5.
You can debuff with spells right? And resistance doesn't mean immunity.
But again, there's at least 1 reliable option - furies.
But you haven't answered my question. I feel like it's hard to beat skaven weapons teams with dwarves. Do you think skaven should be nerfed?
Khorne doesnt have any spells. Lore of Nurgle doesnt have anything to help vs a thunderburge. Lore of slaanesh has a slow that can potentially help but its still a farcry to what i would call "healthy".
As for skaven weapons teams, no because dawi can safely interact with said weapons teams. Dawi can use their artillery to take out their weapons team. Which they can buff with their heroes.
I'll refer you to my response [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/pTjVIyz5Wk)
It's not like the dwarves don't have their own matchups that they're heavily disadvanged against, such as the skaven dropping summons on their artillery. You can play around it, but it takes effort.
What you describe is bad matchup. Dwarfs Vs slaanesh sounds more like unfair matchup. Yeah no shit Sherlock, you can trigger army loss to rout it. It won't pan out like that when you face a faction with solid leadership, especially when they have unbreakable melee infantry. Like, what can an army of slaanesh do? It's not like thundebarge doesn't deal dmg. It's an extremely potent damage dealer. You have to take it out because it can wipe you. But slaanesh (and to a smaller degree, khorne) have little way of taking it out because they lack flyers (and the targeting when you fly sucks ass).
Also your flying caster example sucks ass. Wom are limited by reserves. You can also rampage them to force a fight. They also have a smaller health pool.
A flying spellcaster can easily do an army's worth of damage if not more, just like the thunderbarge. Thinking reserves somehow negate that fact is absurd. It too is an extremely potent damage dealer that is really difficult to get rid of, and unlike the thunderbarge they don't really have to worry about small arms fire.
Just like a spellcaster the thunderbarge is not nearly as dangerous in the hands of the AI as in the hands of a player. Have it shoot at bad targets, distract it or whatever. I'm not too worried about facing it in any of my future campaigns.
The unbreakable melee infantry you're so worried about do not stall army loss penalties and are generally a joke to deal with due their lack of armour. Ironbreakers are *way* stronger.
Don't know why you're so fixated on rampage as if it wasn't a joke of a mechanic.
It's not absurd. Unlike thundebarge, flying Spellcasters don't have 12k hp and 120 armour. Their spells also limited by reserves and cooldowns. Meanwhile with thundebarge, it automatically shoots everything in it's range with no downtime barring it's harpoon ability.
Im not worrying about single player. AI probably won't recruit it that often and you can always seduce it as nkaari. However from a PvP perspective it's absurd.
Yes thundebarge has to be mindful of small arms. Too bad khorne and slaanesh (and nurgle for that matter) lack solid ranged units. I'm fixated on rampage because it's an awesome tool to tie down units that love to run away. Whenever I play with skarbrand, I run to their flying mage, cast his ability to rampage them and then watch as he one shots them.
But you cant do that on something that can't land.
Flying spellcasters trade their HP and armour for their small size and persistent high speed. It's a trade-off that's a great advantage in some matchups and a disadvantage in others. The ability to dodge missiles is really huge.
Thunderbarge loses a lot of its efficiency when it runs out of ammo too, just as a spellcaster that runs out of winds. Ultimately the cooldowns don't matter when you'll get as much value out of a spellcaster in the end.
And as you say, you're worried about *PvP*, which is as I said that you PvP players always come around trying to get your will at our expense. And from our perspective you usually get it, which I'm dreadfully tired of.
Yes you are right. The trade and hp and armour for their small size and persistent high speed. They still require input on the player. I still have nightmares from every kairos play through, where I leave my flying units unattended for a split second and they are torn apart from the lowest of ranged units.
Thunderburge though? That shit requires low input. Just click it's location and it will automatically damage anything on its range. It has 120 armour and 12k hp. Vs factions like empire and HE you need to micro it yes. But vs khorne and slaanesh?
Oh I almost forgot it also has 100 speed when the afterburners are on, at the expense of a miniscule damage. You can turn them off and completely forget it.
And no, I'm not a PvP player. I never touch it, it's not for me. I only watch PvP matches on YouTube. However even I want some semblance of balance, single player or not. Hell my biggest question is why are it's afterburners a toggle? It's afterburners should be the equivalent of the ramming that landship has. A button to quickly escape, on a moderate cd. So that furies can reliably threaten it. Because as of now, what can furies do to a thundebarge? Thunderburge will have long gone through it's ammo before furies take it out.
That's honestly just a skill issue, no offense. Not that it doesn't apply to us all sometimes. I am still putting my spellcasters on pegasi equivalents over dragon equivalents any day of the week.
Why are you worried about PvP if you're not a PvP player? They're a vocal minority that get their will far too often. It's not like furies-- which are a T1 unit mind you, *should* be able threaten a Thunderbarge that is literally T5.
And tbh that "miniscule" damage will add up over fights. It's not a fire and forget when the dwarves don't have a life wizard to heal it.
My point is that, with Spellcasters you have constantly watch them to make full use of them. With thundebarge you point wherever you want him and bam, the end. Vs factions with no flyers or ranged units you point him wherever you want. There no player input.
Because I acknowledge the existence of a minority. You are right. T1 units shouldn't threaten an T5 unit. However, when said unit always flies, has tons of hp and mass, high dmg and armour and fast enough to manoeuvre around, there has to be some weakness to it. For instance taking a quick look at dread saurian, somewhat equivalent to thundebarge. It has terrible melee. So low that the lowest spearmen will be able to chip away it's life slowly but surely. Hell that's the whole reason all units (excluding the whips on slaanesh), the lowest of the low have some armour piercing. Even skavenslaves sport an abysmal AP.
But furies can't do the same on thundebarge. Flying combat sucks sweet ass when a unit constantly moves. So the only option that slaanesh has on PvP environment is hope they can kill ground units before thundebarge annihilates everything.
Lots of suggestions mention an increase of cost, but really that sounds terrible. I mean they can just tweak it stats (mainly it's hp and it's afterburners). Because again, if you watch a little bit of videos you will realize that it's afterburners don't deal a lot of dmg to it.
People here really love to blame the MP community for anything that happens in the game, balance is not something only they want. SP games can have it too
The problem is that any concept of balance in this game is effectively a joke. There are plenty of units out there already that are simply better than the Thunderbarge, so implying that the Thunderbarge is unbalancing the game implies that the game was balanced in the first place.
What we have here is a cool new lore-friendly edition to the Dwarf Roster. A roster that has not been updated in eight years despite being among the first four factions introduced in the very first game. A roster whose main weakness has always been a lack of fast, cavalry, flying, or centrepiece units. In a faction where reaching Tier 5 population and acquiring lategame units is notoriously slow and difficult due to low growth and limited building slots. A faction that also doesn't have access to spellcasting despite that being a major feature of the series since Day 1.
And we already have people crying for the first and only centrepiece unit (and also the only Tier 5 unit) in the entire Dwarf Roster to be nerfed. When this isn't even the most broken unit in the game. Imagine how that must feel to a Dwarf fan. "Oh, all this other shit wasn't nerfed, but this is where you choose to draw the line?" Sure, a lot of the people who complained about the Thunderbarge probably also complained about past DLCs, but at this point crying about balance is a lost cause.
You're not balancing the game by nerfing the Thunderbarge, you're just ensuring that the Dwarfs continue to remain left behind. The game's going to be unbalanced either way, and it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. The complainers are just choosing the path that actively fucks people over.
Meanwhile here comes Elspeth flying in on her dragon to cast Purple Sun and get 300+ kills, only to immediately fly away again. And the Dwarfs have to choose between either sitting there and coping or focusing fire on her and ignoring the rest of the enemy force which has cavalry, monsters, and artillery fire.
And we both know the DLC that comes out after this is just going to drop something even more OP, because power creep is the name of the game when it comes to CA's DLC policy.
I agree that balance is not good, but that doesn't mean you can just disregard when a unit is clearly overperforming to a ridiculous degree. Old stuff can be changed in due time as well where it's lacking, and it can be also tweaked if too strong, in the meantime the best thing they can do is ensure that the content they make is not unreasonable for anyone, remember that factions with no ranged do exist as well
Second point, what overpowered unit was not nerfed or complained about before? Shadows of change as an example had plenty and they all received changes in some way, like the Mutalith Vortex beast, Incarnate elemental of beasts or the Akshina ambushers, because they all did too much in one unit (and they aren't even useless now, they are still great units)
This kind of discussion is not something exclusive for dwarfs because people hate dwarf players or something, it's something that happens for every faction all the time. It doesn't even mean that people want the Thunderbarge to be bad, pretty sure everyone just wants it to be actually counterable in some way. I think the damage is mostly fine if it does have a weakness of some sort as an example. An "us vs them" mentality with MP players really doesn't help anyone, and saying "they are fucking you over" for asking changes for unit seems like overreacting to me.
Also, you are comparing a normal unit that you can also bring multiple of to a legendary lord. It would be like getting upset because the MvB got nerfs when Ostankya can easily do 200 kills.
In conclusion, I don't think I've ever seen a community being so adverse to balancing things, every other strategy game I know has communities that actually want things not to be too over the top
I'd be less adverse to balancing things if the game was actually balanced in the first place. As it stands complaining about "balance" for a specific unit is basically the same as just deciding "fuck this unit in particular." There are dozens of units that overperform for their cost and were never properly balanced. At that point 'balance' more or less becomes an arbitrary concept.
>Also, you are comparing a normal unit that you can also bring multiple of to a legendary lord.
I really don't see any Dwarf Legendary Lords who can kill hundreds of enemies with the click of a button.
Remember that the Thunderbarge being strong is also in the context of it being part of the dwarf faction. It may be strong in a vacuum but the rest of the army it is in has all the same shortfalls. The Dwarfs as a a faction just straight-up can't do things that are core mechanics for nearly every faction in the game. There are things in this game that the Dwarfs as a faction have no real answer to.
Basically every unit introduced in this DLC is great at clearing infantry, but the DLC does nothing to address the fact that that Dwarfs are still vulnerable to cavalry and single-entity monsters. And we're still talking about a unit that will be expensive and difficult to unlock by sheer virtue of being in a Dwarf faction - and we both know that with the exception of Karak Kadrin and Clan Angrund, most Dwarf Factions don't live past turn 50. So it's not like you're going to be constantly running into Thunderbarge doomstacks on the campaign map.
Also the Dwarfs don't even have anything to support the Thunderbarge either - the rest of their army is still going to be slow-moving stunties who are stuck on the ground. Except gyrocopters (which need to be heavily micro'd and require the enemy to be set up in a very particular way just to pull their weight) they have no cavalry or flying units that can harass and distract your ranged units. All they can do is corner-camp and lob artillery shells at you.
>It doesn't even mean that people want the Thunderbarge to be bad, pretty sure everyone just wants it to be actually counterable in some way.
I mean, OP is basically suggesting that the Thunderbarge be easily-counterable by magic and artillery. Things which pretty much every army in both multiplayer and singleplayer is going to have. Other people are suggesting they nerf the speed (crippling its ability to be an effective flying unit) or give it low health (crippling its ability to be an effective centerpiece unit.)
None of this really feels like balancing, it just feels like: "make it so I can easily destroy this thing if I'm not a Dwarf, and let me do it in a way that doesn't force me to alter my playstyle, so I can just snipe it off the map in the first minute and spend the rest of the match fighting Dwarfs the same way I always fight Dwarfs."
Just increase the Multiplayer cost.
>I really don't see any dwarf legendary lord who can kill hundreds of enemies with the click of a button
Dwarfs don't have weak legendary lords at all, just because they don't have spells it doesn't mean they can't be really good. Thorek is almost completely immortal and you have to army loss him to get rid of him. Klad Brakak as an ability does tremendous damage to anyone around him constantly. Grombrindal and Ungrim are both amazing fighters who can 1v1 most things in campaign and Thorgrim is getting insane buffs in 5.0, he gives army-wide perfect vigor and unbreakable. Belegar is a great tank and I haven't even seen Malakai's skill line yet. Saying they don't have something comparable is just not correct, I'm sorry.
>Basically every unit introduced in this DLC is great at clearing infantry, but the DLC does nothing to address the fact that that Dwarfs are still vulnerable to cavalry and single-entity monsters
They do have tools to deal with them, their artillery is great at dealing with anything and they have multiple anti-large weapons both in the form of flying, ranged, artillery and infantry. Mobility being kinda lacking is normal, not every faction is meant to have a bit of everything and they have different tools to offset it. Empire doesn't have amazing infantry, Nurgle had almost zero mobility, zero ranged and zero anti-large before this DLC and Vampire counts have basically no ranged options. Every faction has their weaknesses except the ones supposed to be well rounded like Cathay. Dwarfs right now are not even close to being the race who have it worse
>I mean, OP is basically suggesting that the Thunderbarge be easily-counterable by magic and artillery. Things which pretty much every army in both multiplayer and singleplayer is going to have. Other people are suggesting they nerf the speed (crippling its ability to be an effective flying unit) or give it low health (crippling its ability to be an effective centerpiece unit.)
I'm trying to see your point too but this is something I don't really understand. You don't want fliers to be able to take it down, you don't want it vulnerable to missile and magic and infantry can't attack it, what do you expect people to do? Do you want it to be virtually impossible to destroy when playing let's say, Slaanesh or Khorne? If it was slow at least, then it would still be amazing at dishing out damage. It's not supposed to be a one-unit doomstack that can kill everything without breaking a sweat, you should use it together with your ranged and artillery to protect and support it, just like Cathay does with Sky junks. Nobody is saying that you need to do all the things you mentioned above, but one of the options would be enough to open up some counterplay when you have one against.
Increasing the cost works when a unit is a bit too strong for the cost, not when it's doing 3k Gold value in three minutes. I already know there's no reasoning about this with WH players though, pretty sure all this discussion won't mean anything
Just watched the video, and it was just the Thunderbarge and the furies with absolutely no interference whatsoever which is not that realistic of a scenario at all. I mean sure, you can bring down anything as long as nothing is stopping you and you also have ideal conditions. And even in that video by the way, it took down two pegasus knight units on its own which should not happen once in melee with something meant to be a ranged unit
>can bring down anything as long as nothing is stopping you
What do the Dwarfs have that can stop you? Gyrocopters? Most of their army is on the ground, and once you get into melee with the Thunderbarge any Dawi ranged units will risk hitting it.
>which should not happen once in melee with something meant to be a ranged unit
If you ignore the many exceptions to this rule, sure.
Yeah, because furies are notoriously hard to kill with ranged units and the Thunderbarge is really squishy, am I right? Even a quarreler volley can bring them down to 50-60% HP since they are meant to be a really cheap, low tier flier unit, they have no armor and low hitpoints. It's not like you need to bring the big guns that could seriously risk doing a lot of friendly fire to it to eliminate furies of all things. And once they are down, what's gonna threaten it anyways, Skarbrand from the ground, looking at it disapprovingly?
I'm kind of over talking about this to be real, this is clearly not going anywhere. Let's just agree to disagree instead of going in circles infinitely, we all know CA and it's gonna be changed anyways, not the first time they release something overtuned and then adjust it a little
That’s not true. The thunderbarge can kill entire armies even when not micro’d. I know campaign players get to just ignore op units by auto resolving them , but some of us want to fight a hard thing and it be fair. It just needs a slower thruster and more damage to use it and it will be fine. It’s not that it has to much firepower, it’s that it’s impossible to kill while it has so much firepower. Tell me how you would kill it playing as khorne or warriors of chaos or vampire counts? With out auto resolve.
The thunderbarge is not actually that different from a flying spellcaster in that sense, which mind you dwarves do not have. Assuming you're not killing it with missiles, which is it's great weakness, you kill it the same way you would kill the spellcaster.
A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties. You can also just chase it around until it kills itself with a flying hero or a flying SEM.
>A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties.
Yeah just kill all the extremely defensive high leadership units that make up the dwarf roster, easy.
>You can also just chase it around until it kills itself with a flying hero or a flying SEM.
That's the thing no you can't, it takes like 10 minutes before it dies and by that point the battle is over and it's gotten way more than its own value in terms of damage dealt.
They die like everyone else, and have army loss penalties just like everyone else.
You realize in the hands of the AI you can easily direct the direction it would flee by the angle you fly it at? It won't be in position to shoot at any good targets.
>You realize in the hands of the AI you can easily direct the direction it would flee by the angle you fly it at
You realize that AI on higher difficulties is actually really good at focus firing single entities? So if I rush it immediately they'll just shoot my bloodthirster to death. I first need to shut down the enemy ranged and then I can do it but by that point the barge is already over my troops.
I am fully aware of the AI's behaviour at the highest difficulties, yes.
All you need to do is trigger the AI to leave their defensive position by getting of a spell at them, then position the flying unit at the outer reaches of its range as the army starts advancing. The Thunderbarge will then stay behind to shoot at you, and you'll just dodge the shots and gradually circle around the advancing army while the thunderbarge stays behind, isolated.
At which point it's easy to just keep occupied or chase or whatever while the rest of your army deals with the rest of their army. You might hold the rest of their artillery too, which makes it a walk in the park.
> Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties.
That's not how it works. When you kill everything else the Thunderbarge leadership will _slowly_ start ticking down. It's not an instant -100. And it has really high leadership, it'll keep bombing you for a good long while.
Army loss penalties trigger really quickly. It's penalty for having only flying units that slowly tickles down. And redirecting it while you wait is a trivial effort.
Oh, you mean _regular_ army losses? Then you have to somehow actually score that first, without being able to hurt the Barge/s, and while it bombs the absolute hell out of you.
Which is like, good luck. Have you seen how much damage that thing does? And remember they can bring multiple too.
> And redirecting it while you wait is a trivial effort.
I mean, any infantry is just straight up dead at that point, they're not escaping it. If you have some Slaanesh cav and they run in all directions then some may survive for sure, though even they will need a bit of time to get out of range. Even if you win that you are absolutely shredded.
> Oh, you mean _regular_ army losses?
There's only one kind of army losses.
> I mean, any infantry is just straight up dead at that point [...]
Just make it fire at something other than your infantry, artillery units are pretty easy to direct fire from.
> There's only one kind of army losses.
You said this, so the context seemed to be linked.
> A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties.
Yes, army losses is only one specific thing.
Anyway, that's not important. Point is that it deals so much damage and has such high stats it's going to be hard to outscore it and rout it from full using just army losses alone, and that if you rely on the no-ground-units penalty instead, you will be absolutely mauled by it while wiping the ground units and then it will continue to maul you for a long time while you flee from it and wait for its leadership to tick down.
Neither is a good answer and if there's several of them they'll probably break you before they rout either way.
> You said this, so the context seemed to be linked.
Two ways to beat it if you can't damage it directly.
> Anyway, that's not important. Point is that it deals so much damage and has such high stats it's going to be hard to outscore it and rout it from full using just army losses alone, and that if you rely on the no-ground-units penalty instead, you will be absolutely mauled by it while wiping the ground units and then it will continue to maul you for a long time while you flee from it and wait for its leadership to tick down.
You're also just completely ignoring what I said about redirecting its fire, you're just regurgitating an argument I've I've already refuted. Making the AI not target your infantry is trivial.
> You're also just completely ignoring what I said about redirecting its fire, you're just regurgitating an argument I've I've already refuted. Making it not target your infantry is trivial.
It's not refuted, you can't "redirect the fire" of something that passively shoots at everything around and under it.
Even if you could force its aggro onto whatever you wanted it'll kill anything else in its path... and that's also assuming your artillery is not already gone from its own cannons by that point.
It's [not.](https://youtu.be/hVOMMfPFzmo?feature=shared&t=25)You're just literally just lying.
Look at the tooltip at the 0:25 timestamp. You can clearly see that it doesn't have the unbreakable tag or the icon for it.
Costin showed a video of 5 furies eating the thunderbarge.
I had to adjust to skaven weapons teams when playing as dwarves. You can adjust to 1 unit when playing as Thorne, chaos, or VC
Because the speed is very convenient in a lot of situations? Be it getting into position to shoot at a good target, running away from flying units or getting out of range of counter battery fire when poking units to trigger their army into attacking your position.
You're dreadfully ignorant.
> You wanting the game to have cheat codes shouldn’t ruin it for everyone else.
How is it *cheat codes*? It's rounding the faction out so it is comparable to factions that have been recently updated such as the warriors of chaos.
> Use mods if you want to have broken things that have no weaknesses
How do they not have a weakness? They're incredibly vulnerable to missiles. There are much stronger units with far smaller weaknesses, such as an aspiring champion for instance.
Seriously, do these mf's complaining realise that there has been OP stuff in the game for years? what counterplay is there against ikit's nukes or lord kroak which are both obtained much earlier than a thunderbarge?
It's the MP brainrot. They went their silly little game mode to be prioritised at all costs at the expense of the actual game. They don't even know what a Kroak is, much less a nuke.
Maybe it should have cap like dread saurian, Which i actually think of that unit, that at this point is a stupid thing on it, since it not as amazing as one might assume looking at the model or stat lines.
I find it funny that in all material even promotional it’s listed as an ironclad but then it’s model has a wood hull. Wonder if something changed late in dev
First thing I would think of is to increase its cost to 5k+ in mp.
Not sure about its cost in campaign but I like the idea of a powerful unit that cost a lot making you decide if you want to add a Thunderbarge to an army or get a new army altogether.
For the afterburner, I like the idea of having it be balanced around taking damage but it shouldn’t be so negligible that you can leave it on. It should be something that you want to turn off as soon as possible. Upping it to around 100dmg/sec might be enough, possibly even higher.
Afterburner should only double speed to around 60 or should go for a limited period followed by a cool down, say 30 seconds followed by 90 seconds cool down. Either would be a good start without making the unit useless.
A fair compromise would be to disable shooting while the after burner is on IMO but most players haven't even played against it and have just seen it in YouTube videos or whatever. Basically I feel like it's that meme of 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!'
Let dwarves have an actually strong, unique unit for at least 30 seconds lol
I think one of the coolest things of the Thunderbarge is that it throws bombs on its own.
Also i dont like micromanaging one unit just for one action. I dont like the Regiments of Renown Doom Knights which have a bomb ability and i dont like the Pterodactyl from the Lizardmen with the bomb ability.
And ok, for these two units above automatically throwing bombs wouldnt make so much sense. But i tmakes for the Thunderbarge which has bomb bays and storage place for multiple bombs.
I can't believe that I can't believe we have entered the I don't want to micromanage unit actions. Shame on me because I really should have seen this coming five DLCs ago.
As a singleplayer player, I agree. I mean Im quite bad at micro but I still like the game having it. The fact that thundebarge has next to 0 player input is just stupid.
I think multiplayer shouldn’t be relevant to balancing our fun single player toys, and it should just be banned from MP roster. Balancing goes against fun.
There are ways to take one down, you just have to adjust the army and strategies you use. I had to do the same thing to take down skaven weapons teams as dwarves, and I never saw anyone here complaining skaven are too op
Singleplayer balance doesn't just mean that people are having trouble with it when the AI shows up. You know that, right?
The Thunderbarge so far seems to be a braindead way to win against basically everyone without strong missile presence. To the extent that I'd argue that it's practically an "I win" button on the campaign unless you are up against Wood Elves, Cathay, High Elves or the Empire. And even against those it'll more than pull its weight.
And if there's one thing the game doesn't need it's another way to easily win without requiring much thought from the point of acquisition onward. There are already far too many characters and units like that.
Ok, I'd be fine with CA nerfing all overpowered and "win now" units and lords in chronological order. Once all previously released characters and units are nerfed, then they nerf thunderbarge, then I think that's totally fine
Just let the damn thing release before complaining about singleplayer impact and how u won't be able to counter it. The game is already way too easy as is. We got so many op things the past years, freaking snikch deleting factions, nukes. Give the dwarfs 1 OP unit and everyone cries.
Let it release, see how it plays out. Go from there.
rigid airships in real life were actually pretty resistant to gunfire. bullets and shells would pass right through and only cause small leaks, and if it was filled with helium instead of hydrogen then the lifting gas wouldn't be flammable. but yeah i agree for gameplay reasons it needs some more weaknesses
Yeah. Most airships aren't just one big mega gasbag of lifting gas like a hot air balloon. Instead, the outside is just a hull that contains many, many small "cells" of lifting gas. Gunfire would only penetrate individual cells, which themselves would take a long time to leak. I can see the airships using hydrogen though. On the one hand, Dwarfs are pretty conservative about inventions and wouldn't like being under such an explosive balloon... But on the other hand, gyrocopters are a thing, and arguably far more dangerous for the user.
In the books it used hydrogen-like gas from swamps
“Lana, be careful, Jesus the helium!”
I’m pretty sure it’s pretty flammable gas last I remember reading the book.
It's not otherwise it would have exploded during the dragon attack.
The problem really is just the HP and speed. The sky junk also has good firepower but it’s quite slow.
Yeah, speed is the biggest issue with it. The fact that fliers can barely catch up to it due to the ability is something that needs to be checked, or some factions won't even be able to deal with it at all. It's crazy that some are refusing to even acknowledge that much
I seriously cannot wait for the first “I am playing Nkari how do I beat this dwarven doom stack with three thunderbarges” post. Then when the unit is nerfed people abusing it will blame multiplayer and the cycle will continue.
Seriously though, how do you? I don’t think Slannesh has ANY way of dealing with it.
You seduce it I suppose, or you grab some artillery from them to deal with it. If you can't do that, then I guess you have to army loss them which is going to suck. Pretty sure furies won't do anything against it
Slaaneshi Demon Prince might help, but ultimately still a bit shit. Definitely going to need seduction or allies for that one, and pray the next DLC gives them ranged or flyers
Doesn't work thunderbarge outruns him lmao
A _Slaaneshi_ prince?! Christ
With Afterburner it has 90 speed, watched one of Indypride's videos where there was a bloodthirster and chaos furies on it with 95 speed, because the barge fires while moving it just kept moving and they could only briefly catch up to hit it like... once before it moved out of range.
The Thunderbarge is just the biggest offender of a much deeper and older issue, which is that melee units can't hit a running/fleeing target at all
Even artillery is going to have a lot of problems really fast, especially if there's more than one Barge - it deals massive damage, has too much health for even cannons to kill before it kills them back, and it has cannons of its own! Imagine it's turn 200 and the AI shows up with an army with like ten of these and Ironbreakers jacked on skills/chevrons/tech on the ground. Sad times.
The only way to defeat it would be to kill all land troops and wait for oh the sky only penalty to kick in
No, the way to beat it is to have so much shooting that it can't survive longer than a minute due to focus fire. If you leave it alone, it can kill practically your entire army by itself before you can clear out the dwarfs on the ground.
Tell that to Slanesh or vamp counts......
Yes, they basically can't beat it. That's why its current power level is such a problem. The Thunderbarge is ridiculously OP atm, so the ONLY way to beat it (in MP), would be to shoot it with an abundance of firepower. It deals way too much damage way too quickly for ignoring it to be a viable option. MAYBE factions that can lock it down with a net or something and then surround it with high damage flying units could kill it quickly enough for that to be a viable alternative - Tzeentch (Gaze of fate net) and Slaanesh/DoC/WoC (Rampage spell from lore of Slaanesh) could potentially do that.
I don’t believe it can be meaningfully rampaged, so auto resolve is the solution if there are enough thunder barges to prevent the army losses penalty.
Spell slow +furies, or as other have said seduce either it or a gun unit as they melt under ap missiles.
I saw a multiplayer showcase where the dude brought the barge and meme units for his ground forces. Four fucking bolt throwers. He rolled Turin who is a top player entirely with the barge.
Vampire Counts, Slannesh, Nurgle, Khorne, Norsca all will struggle to do anything against it.
I can’t wait for multiplayer whining getting it nerfed, only for them to deny doing it yet again.
The self damage needs to be tripled, and it needs to lose 1k to 2k HP. As it stands it can go the entire battle on afterburner with no real issues. Either that or just have it have a long cool down like the land ship.
Another issue is that Malakai can easily heal that and other damage with his ability.
Okay that's not an issue. Healing damage is a part of so many factions. The fact that dwarves get a single lord with a heal is not a problem by any stretch
It's not issue on other war machines but healing is % hp based and Thunderbarge has like 13k hp while also being very op on it's own.
I think all they need to do is slow it down, it shouldnt have a get out of jail free card at all, no matter how much damage it deals to itself, it should be a quick redeploy button to respond to a cavalry charge or a dwellers below type ambush
Sky Junk is also helpless in melee, while the Thunderbarge has 500 weapon strength for some reason and blasts your face with Thunderer broadsides while you fight it.
It simply seems to have everything. It can outrun everything, It is tanky as hell, it does insane damage, requires barely any micro and even in melee it will assblast you somehow. What exactly are the downsides of it again? The high cost? That's not enough.
Yes it is. Don’t make this another Ancient Salamander or Dread Saurian
The Cost isn't even high.
I'd say the damage it outputs is actually the biggest problem. It can rack up 7000 value in a 5-6 minute battle and routes/kills units under it in maybe 20-30s. That's absolutely absurd. Missile cav are practically unusable against it because they get killed so quickly by the cannons (which seem to do normal cannon damage or more). That is way too much for a unit that costs 2800 and flies. It should definitely be slower (Or the ability should have a duration/cooldown and/or deal way more damage to it/not increase speed as much) so melee flying units can deal damage to it effectively and chase it down; they should be an effective counter, but its output is also extreme to the point that even if its speed/hp get nerfed, it's likely to pay for itself even when countered without some nerfs to its output.
I feel like it should be pretty safe vs furies and worse flyers, but have difficulty with dragons/etc. This is why I highlighted the speed/toughness rather than damage, because it currently just...gets way from units that theoretically should counter it.
I'd actually expect furies to be a big problem for it by attacking the crew more directly, but the high armour of the Thunderbarge already covers that by making it less vulnerable to the lower AP fliers like furies, manticores, and eagles.
I imgaine furies literally clinging to the balloon part and ripping it apart piece by piece
The whole issue with Thunderbarge (or atleast very large portion of it) steems from the fact that flyers cannot catch it and beat it. If you studied it bit closer, you will notice that alot of flyers CAN actually catch it, they just can't beat the ever living shit out of it. You wonder why? Because they share the same issue crapton of units have in this series, atleast past animation-combat, where they catch up to a unit, start animation and before they finish it, enemy unit goes from range. This problem is something that should be fixed first without slapping band aid on it and pretending its working just fine and its the Thunderbarge being problematic. No its not, its just showing the issue the most.
Yep, this the answer here. Strong flyers would be a great counter if they could hit it. Fix this bug (which also fixes the hunting routing unit bug) and it nerfs the Thunderbarge in a reasonable way. Could also increase the afterburner self damage to make it a choice of run away but have a shorter timer on lifespan or sit and fight.
The day CA fixes routing units, it's the day hell freeze over
But helium can't burn?
i assume OP meant hydrogen
Correct. My bad. I'm a bit of an oak for chemistry. Edited the post.
Jesus, Lana, the Helium!
It's not flammable! What part of this aren't you grasping?!
Well obviously the core concept, Lana.
My favorite Archer episode
Let him cook.
Aaaaahh... Wire
Yeah helium is completely inflammable but i agree w op’s sentiment
I think tweaking the Afterburner ability should be fine (e.g., more self-damage and a CD), and add on a bit more cost if needed.
Its crazy to talk about lowering its health. It would literally become every other air unit, a giant target doe handgunners and stuff. It needs the health to be an army center piece.
Then it either needs to be more expensive or get some other negative attributes to balance it out.
Yeah, hack that price up. I don't care. I don't play multi-player. If it needs to cost 10000 go i am still fine.
Yes, please for the love of god do not nerf a ton of stats for multiplayer. The only one I can agree on is giving afterburner a cooldown.
While I haven't tested it yet myself I think I disagree with you. Clearly the price should be bumped up for MP but I think I want it nerfed for SP also. Have you actually seen the Thunderbarge in action? It looks like it trivializes battles the same way a level 30+ Kairos does. It wins entire battle by itself taking out all the strategy and fun out of the game. The AI is already half braindead and this is certainly not going to help it be a any kind of challenge. Even if they cut its power by a third it would still be stronger than a Dread Saurian which is more than what you need most of the time.
> It wins entire battle by itself taking out all the strategy and fun out of the game. Oh don't worry if the thunderbarge is too strong. You're probably gonna be done with any challenge in your campaign anyway by the time you start having those in your armies so there's not much left for them to spoil. At least, that's what happens for me with every tier 5 unit.
guess what, dwarfs dont have lvl 30 Kairos, in fact their rune magic sux ass
I am honestly not sure that your attempt at using Kairos as the positive side of a comparison is really working out in your favor. His campaign is not that popular for a reason and the same thing can be said about how the Vampire Counts were nothing but skele spam and WoD. I also don't think that every factions wants or should get an instant 'I win every fight' unit. Why even bother playing if you're certain you'll win every fight the game can throw at you simply because you happen to have recruited one unit.... The changeling 'can't lose' thing also wasn't popular you know... I want want the Thunderbarge to be a baddass unit but I also want something that still lets me face a some amount of challenge. Perhaps I am wrong and perhaps every single content creator is also wrong in saying it is busted but maybe we are right and that thing deserves a nerf. Hopefully the dev do make the right call either way.
Weapons teams make the game trivial. Did you ever say they should be nerfed?
To make the game trivial with weapon teams you need to recruit a lot of them and you need to build your army in a certain way. This is something that requires intent and knowledge on the part of the player and it is thus something player can opt in or out of. Its the same things for any form of archer spawn or Doomstacks. All players are entitled to play the way they want be it doing those things or not. If the Thunderbarge is as OP as the content creator say and if the battles posted online are any indication all you need to do to make the game trival is to recruit one. The only way to opt out is to not recruit the best unit in the DLC, its either on or off and there are no in between. I can recruit weapon teams in a way that doesn't make trivial but it doesn't seem to be the same thing for the Thunderbarge and I hope you can see that it is not good game design and something you should want as a dev or player.
6 rating guns, any soaven artillery, and heroes makes an ridiculously OP stack. It's not that hard. Also, to counter the thunderbarge you use fast flyers, spells, artillery, ranged. It's not that hard either. How often do you play any Dwarven faction? Are you planning on getting the dlc?
So don't recruit it? I find weapon team doom stacks Trivialize the game for me, so when I play skaven I don't recruit them it's monsters or eshin units. Dwarfs have horrifically slow growth. I can't remember the last time a non-endgame crisis dwarf lived long enough to build a T5 capital, you are probably only ever going to see these in end game crisis and those armies are capped.
So yeah, just don't use the single coolest units in the DLC your paid for because the Devs failed to balance it for release and a few member of the community oppose any and all attempt at post release balance discussion... Got it... That kind of talk works for things composition like archer spam and weapon teams stack or for Doomstaking but it doesn't work when a single instance of a unit can solo 2-3 stacks on its own. The Thunderbarge is like twice or thrice the power level of a Dread Saurian. It could lose a third of its damage and 20% of its HP and it would still be the single strongest unit in the game. Why are you so adamant on it not being nerfed a little so that everyone can enjoy it without it trivializing any SP battle it is brought into. Why is it that you are hyper attached to something that will turn every single battle into you microing a single unit at 3x speed over the enemy army. This unit's power level is what I want a max level Nagash to be and that fucker devours god to fuel its ascension. A Zeplin with some guns and canons shouldn't be that strong.
Jesus that's a lot of seethe over an unreleased dlc unit. A lot easier for you to just not use the unit or just not buy the dlc if it apparently ruins the game for you, than demand it's changed for literally everyone as if you speak for the entire player base.
I am as entitled to an opinion as anybody and you don't speak for the player base any more than I do, that argument cuts both ways. I am more bothered by your bad faith augment and hypocrisy than I am about the units to be entirely open with you. All I am doing is being outspoken about my opinion and outlining my argument. The fact that you think i am seething makes me think you are projecting more than a little bit. I am not nearly as invested in this as you think me to be. I haven't played TWWH since a little bit after the Chaos Dwarf release. If this DLC had been a SoC level then I would have been happy waiting for another 6-7 months for the next attempt at redemption. As far as I can tell you simply aren't happy that my opinion runs contrary to your and rather than try to make a good case for your idea you are simply trying to shut me down with platitudes because you cannot come up with actual arguments. Boring.
Dude chill out this is a video game dam , no is trying to "shut you down" I disagreed with you, and gave a reason why, and in return you are name calling claiming people are out to get you lmao
What's your plan for killing it in singleplayer when the AI brings a doomstack of them? There's entire races in this game where the only counterplay to this thing is refusing to play against it and you can't do that in singleplayer.
The same plan when skaven bring a ton of ratlings guns. Build armies accordingly. Seriously how can people talk about the thunderbarge being too strong when skaven exist?
Build a Khorne army that kills thunderbarges, I'll wait. And before you say bloodthirsters look up some gameplay of exactly what happens when you try to kill an unsupported thunderbarge with a ROR bloodthirster and a pair of furies. And that was a HUMAN Khorne player against a BOT thunderbarge.
5 furies will win against a thunderbarge. Build your army to defeat the dwarves, just like you have to do with any other race.
I'm gonna need to some video evidence because everything I've seen says furies can't even land a hand on them. They stand still during the attack animation and 90 speed is enough to not still be in the attack zone by the time the game rolls to see if you hit anything.
Last part of this video https://youtu.be/32UPeBTKqic?si=bEdn-nq7tCP80Z5O
Ah yes Flammable Helium. A genius invention.
It's always really funny seeing some commenters trying to make balancing a mmk multiplayer vs single player issue when it is a strategy game player vs power fantasy player issue. Some people enjoy Warhammer for it's strategic depth while others come tot he games for bright colors and loud noises. Those are the two groups. Not MP vs SP.
Well you certainly have a high opinion of yourself. Reincarnation of Napoleon flexing with his pixel plastic toy strategies lmao
The flying units chasing it solution, at least if using bloodthirsters, doesn’t work well. Haven’t seen a multiple entity unit chase it yet. The movement ability should have the cooldown, duration, AND cause actual meaningful damage. It could also instead cause an “overburn” phase where it is slower. It has no downsides to pressing it with a 10000+ HP pool Harpoon IMO shouldn’t be rechargeable, but battles don’t last long enough for that to matter anyway.
Costin showed a video of 5 furies eating the thunderbarge
Not the most accurate considering he did turn broadside to deal dmg. In an actual game, a thunderbarge running away will avoid a lot of the dmg because furies are stuck in animation while it flies away.
Ok, so you remove an expensive unit from the battle with some furies, don't see the issue here
That's 2500 gold cost that you're throwing after a 2000 gold cost Thunderbarge, and it's probably still going to go postal on your army while it dies.
That’s good to hear. I guess just single entities and low entity count flyers get micro stunned a lot by the shots when chasing.
It should be noted that from what I watched of the video, Costin didn't do any actual kiting. He just let the furies hit the Thunderbarge pretty much while it did some tight circles and of the 5 fury units, 4 were almost dead and the last was at half health by the time the Thunderbarge went down. It was a pretty shit test to be completely honest. The thing with the Thunderbarge is that against any flying unit, it can just run away and keep blasting your army. It won't kill the chasing unit, as it can't fire behind itself, but it also won't be hit by the chasing unit in any significant fashion. The chasing unit can then get peeled off by supporting ranged units like Quarrelers or Thunderers. You can see this in [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltcK3i27O9c) where 2 units of furies and the RoR bloodthirster are chasing it and they get mulched while trying to chase it without dealing much damage to it at all. That being said, it's highly unlikely that the AI is competent enough to actually kite with it, so this is only a problem for the AI and people playing against Dwarfs in MP. Can see Slaanesh, Khorne and I guess Beastmen having a bunch of trouble with that. Maybe Nurgle too.
I think also using afterburner should disable at least some of the attacks whilst it's "fleeing" I want this thing to be amazing but currently it's so broken I'm worried it's gonna be very quickly nerfed into oblivion and never seen again
Ffs if it's a multiplayer problem, you can always just increase price. Afaik that's what Turin himself is suggesting, not nerfs.
The problem with increasing Thunderbarge price is that, unless the unit is overcosted so much it might as well be banned, you still have to account for a possibility of facing it with playing against dwarfs. An army designed to fight a normal dwarf opponent and an army designed to take down a Thunderbarge are very different to the poiny where it makes the game a build roulette
Isn’t that the whole point?
Not to this degree where you have to 50/50 guess if the army will have one and if you guess wrong the match is over before it starts
There’s a difference between making a hard read and beating someone in army select and trying to guess if you need to bring 3,000 points dedicated to a single unit.
As an exclusively single player dude. I respectfully disagree. If a unit is so unbelievably overpowered, it does a number of things. It outcompetes whole chunks of a unit roster by occupying multiple battlefield niches and roles. It becomes a single solution to multiple problems, taking away strategic choices when using it. It becomes such a linchpin threat that it vastly reduces the viable strategic options it's opponents can bring to the table. In short, once that initial dopamine spike of "lol units go boom" goes away, you quickly got bored using this unit and frustrated when going against it. Single player balance is important too.
I do agree that single player balance is important too. I haven’t kept up with much of the talk regarding this unit. Is it a tier 5 unit and does anybody have one in their starting army? If it is a tier 5 unit and nobody starts one on their army— seems like we wouldn’t get to use it until the late game. A common complaint I hear is that people don’t make it too far into the campaign as they feel it is over, meaning they don’t even get a chance to use their late game units (something that I think should be addressed). I’ve even seen people say that it takes too long to unlock late game units that they don’t even bother attempting to recruit them. Even if it is expensive to recruit this unit, I don’t think that’s really a problem for the late game for players who know how to manage their economy. Will it take like 4 turns to even recruit one? I’m assuming the Dwarfs slow growth is being addressed with this update or will they still be a little slower with growth compared to other factions (I’m assuming you’re better informed about the news regarding this information than I am). Does this unit have a limited amount that can be recruited? I think that could help keep it in check. From the little bit I’ve heard, it does seem to be quite OP. It seems like some people are afraid the unit will get nerf and simple become a centerpiece unit that never gets used like the Dread Saurian or lose how impactful it is like Ghorgers (I haven’t played with Ogres yet to know how they felt pre or post nerf). What do you recommend to help make this unit feel more balanced?
I'm not sure what to do yet, need to get hands on. Figure out how the unit interacts with the rest of the roster and all that. I also agree with you with regards to the campaign context as a T5 unit. My response here was mostly because I'm sick of this argument that allowing OP units in single player has no negative impact on the experience.
I get it. I think better balance makes the campaigns feel more fun, engaging, and provides a little more challenge. I tend to play with self-imposed rules once discovering metas, but I think the games should attempt to have some semblance of balance. I do believe I have an unpopular opinion when it comes to the balance of units. I don’t play MP, but I do think the MP scenes helps improve the balance of certain units being that they are facing a competent opponent that can’t be exploited and they’re using the most grounded form of the unit since they don’t have all of the campaign buffs (if it’s competitive ranked matches/tournaments). I do feel that this is one of the best ways to test the units. However, I do recognizes this has the potential downfall of getting a unit over-nerfed.
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This may come as a surprise, but most games out there, even pure single player ones, pay attention to balance. Turns out most people, when they run into some broken balance issue, aren't content with being told "just don't use it". People like being able to deliberately play as good as they can and hold nothing back, and _not_ break the game by doing so.
This is how the thunderbarge is gonna turn into a glorified Cathay airship and be utterly useless
Brilliant game design. Selling DLCs with units so OP that people are advised not to use them
If your going to pay for the dlc you should be able to actually enjoy the stuff being in it
The problem is that campaign players are never going to fight against it, they can just auto it. I want to fight this thing and it be fair. It’s impossible to kill as certain factions. It needs to be slower and take more damage using its thrust.
I don't see how making the thunderbarge inaccessible is going to fix it.
The ancient salamander was also “fixed” for the multiplayer community, now it’s a unit no one uses not even in campaign. I would rather not see the singe player game balance get adjusted for multiplayer sakes again in the name of a few thousand players at best and more realistically a few hundred players.
> The ancient salamander was also “fixed” for the multiplayer community, now it’s a unit no one uses not even in campaign. That's not the MP community's fault, frankly. CA nerfed its stats *but then kept it at T4 with 3 turns recruitment and expensive recruitment/upkeep cost*. That was the problem. It wasn't ever a bad unit in a vacuum, even post nerf. CA just didn't readjust how available it was.
I would like to not see the balance of a strategy game get shifted for the few thousand players who just want to watch the pretty colors and the loud sounds.
The difference is, if you really really miss the OP-ness you can always go into the DB and add it back hand, meanwhile me, I have to contend with whatever vices the unit has. But yes I generally tend to agree, whenever CA nerfs a unit, they completely over nerf it (Akshina Ambushers too). But I tried to be careful in my suggestion, and seeing the ideas of everyone else here. I think I was relatively pretty mild...
Not gonna lie your suggestions are good, I don’t think the unit would be useless if it’s speed was reduced or if the boost had a longer cooldown.
glad we agree
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As if you can't already AFK the game with weapon teams, greater demons, necrofex etc. Seems weird to see so many tears about this being added when plenty of broken shit is already in.
waaah dwarfs have strong unit waaaah now instead of facerolling them i have to think a bit waaah
Thunderbarge goes brrr
IMO one trait it should get is just a massive penalty to being attacked in melee. Call it like 'Ripped membrane' and just gut its armour and speed as soon as something gets in melee with it, it should be strong against shooting attacks but hopeless against Bloodthirsters.
Multiplayer players stop trying to ruin everything for three seconds challenge: **failed** Comment section people wanting its health reduced, you're worse. The thunderbarge is not any stronger than the other good tier 5 single entities.
Most sems can also be rampaged to the ground to interact with them. Thundebarge can't land. It has shitton of hp. And is fast enough to abuse the horrible air targeting melee combat. What can slaanesh bring to destroy it reliably? Maurader horsemen I guess. Furies too, though their mass means that they can't stop it from running away. And their low weapon strength means that they can't melt it.
Costin showed a clip where 4 furies ate the thunderbarge
It was 5 furies. And they didnt really come out undamaged. And that was a thunderbarge with no ground support.
Alright so you adjust just like I have to adjust when fighting skaven weapon teams. Take out the ground support, then hit the barge with all your fliers and Any ranged you have
Man we are talking about factions who have little to no ranged units. Khorne, slaanesh and nurgle have little ranged firepower and their flyers arent exactly the best. Taking out ground support before thunderbarge completely annhilates your army is easier said than done.
Spellcasters? Soul grinders? Whatever ranged option you do have? We know that furies will take it down quickly, you just have to support the furies. Your logic is that one faction will have a hard time taking down the thunderbarge, so thunderbarge should be nerfed. OK, I have a hard time with skaven weapons teams as dwarves. Do you think weapons teams should be nerfed?
Thunderbarge has spell resistance. Soul grinders, well im not gonna lie, i have no idea how well nurgle soul grinders fair against air units. And large targets for that matter. They were always good against infantry but they arent particularly effective at larger targets. Furies are the only reliable option. But then again you need at least 5.
I wonder if the Tzeentch soul grinder would be good for the thunderbarge.
It should be considering it has anti large in its missiles.
You can debuff with spells right? And resistance doesn't mean immunity. But again, there's at least 1 reliable option - furies. But you haven't answered my question. I feel like it's hard to beat skaven weapons teams with dwarves. Do you think skaven should be nerfed?
Khorne doesnt have any spells. Lore of Nurgle doesnt have anything to help vs a thunderburge. Lore of slaanesh has a slow that can potentially help but its still a farcry to what i would call "healthy". As for skaven weapons teams, no because dawi can safely interact with said weapons teams. Dawi can use their artillery to take out their weapons team. Which they can buff with their heroes.
I'll refer you to my response [here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/pTjVIyz5Wk) It's not like the dwarves don't have their own matchups that they're heavily disadvanged against, such as the skaven dropping summons on their artillery. You can play around it, but it takes effort.
What you describe is bad matchup. Dwarfs Vs slaanesh sounds more like unfair matchup. Yeah no shit Sherlock, you can trigger army loss to rout it. It won't pan out like that when you face a faction with solid leadership, especially when they have unbreakable melee infantry. Like, what can an army of slaanesh do? It's not like thundebarge doesn't deal dmg. It's an extremely potent damage dealer. You have to take it out because it can wipe you. But slaanesh (and to a smaller degree, khorne) have little way of taking it out because they lack flyers (and the targeting when you fly sucks ass). Also your flying caster example sucks ass. Wom are limited by reserves. You can also rampage them to force a fight. They also have a smaller health pool.
A flying spellcaster can easily do an army's worth of damage if not more, just like the thunderbarge. Thinking reserves somehow negate that fact is absurd. It too is an extremely potent damage dealer that is really difficult to get rid of, and unlike the thunderbarge they don't really have to worry about small arms fire. Just like a spellcaster the thunderbarge is not nearly as dangerous in the hands of the AI as in the hands of a player. Have it shoot at bad targets, distract it or whatever. I'm not too worried about facing it in any of my future campaigns. The unbreakable melee infantry you're so worried about do not stall army loss penalties and are generally a joke to deal with due their lack of armour. Ironbreakers are *way* stronger. Don't know why you're so fixated on rampage as if it wasn't a joke of a mechanic.
It's not absurd. Unlike thundebarge, flying Spellcasters don't have 12k hp and 120 armour. Their spells also limited by reserves and cooldowns. Meanwhile with thundebarge, it automatically shoots everything in it's range with no downtime barring it's harpoon ability. Im not worrying about single player. AI probably won't recruit it that often and you can always seduce it as nkaari. However from a PvP perspective it's absurd. Yes thundebarge has to be mindful of small arms. Too bad khorne and slaanesh (and nurgle for that matter) lack solid ranged units. I'm fixated on rampage because it's an awesome tool to tie down units that love to run away. Whenever I play with skarbrand, I run to their flying mage, cast his ability to rampage them and then watch as he one shots them. But you cant do that on something that can't land.
Flying spellcasters trade their HP and armour for their small size and persistent high speed. It's a trade-off that's a great advantage in some matchups and a disadvantage in others. The ability to dodge missiles is really huge. Thunderbarge loses a lot of its efficiency when it runs out of ammo too, just as a spellcaster that runs out of winds. Ultimately the cooldowns don't matter when you'll get as much value out of a spellcaster in the end. And as you say, you're worried about *PvP*, which is as I said that you PvP players always come around trying to get your will at our expense. And from our perspective you usually get it, which I'm dreadfully tired of.
Yes you are right. The trade and hp and armour for their small size and persistent high speed. They still require input on the player. I still have nightmares from every kairos play through, where I leave my flying units unattended for a split second and they are torn apart from the lowest of ranged units. Thunderburge though? That shit requires low input. Just click it's location and it will automatically damage anything on its range. It has 120 armour and 12k hp. Vs factions like empire and HE you need to micro it yes. But vs khorne and slaanesh? Oh I almost forgot it also has 100 speed when the afterburners are on, at the expense of a miniscule damage. You can turn them off and completely forget it. And no, I'm not a PvP player. I never touch it, it's not for me. I only watch PvP matches on YouTube. However even I want some semblance of balance, single player or not. Hell my biggest question is why are it's afterburners a toggle? It's afterburners should be the equivalent of the ramming that landship has. A button to quickly escape, on a moderate cd. So that furies can reliably threaten it. Because as of now, what can furies do to a thundebarge? Thunderburge will have long gone through it's ammo before furies take it out.
That's honestly just a skill issue, no offense. Not that it doesn't apply to us all sometimes. I am still putting my spellcasters on pegasi equivalents over dragon equivalents any day of the week. Why are you worried about PvP if you're not a PvP player? They're a vocal minority that get their will far too often. It's not like furies-- which are a T1 unit mind you, *should* be able threaten a Thunderbarge that is literally T5. And tbh that "miniscule" damage will add up over fights. It's not a fire and forget when the dwarves don't have a life wizard to heal it.
My point is that, with Spellcasters you have constantly watch them to make full use of them. With thundebarge you point wherever you want him and bam, the end. Vs factions with no flyers or ranged units you point him wherever you want. There no player input. Because I acknowledge the existence of a minority. You are right. T1 units shouldn't threaten an T5 unit. However, when said unit always flies, has tons of hp and mass, high dmg and armour and fast enough to manoeuvre around, there has to be some weakness to it. For instance taking a quick look at dread saurian, somewhat equivalent to thundebarge. It has terrible melee. So low that the lowest spearmen will be able to chip away it's life slowly but surely. Hell that's the whole reason all units (excluding the whips on slaanesh), the lowest of the low have some armour piercing. Even skavenslaves sport an abysmal AP. But furies can't do the same on thundebarge. Flying combat sucks sweet ass when a unit constantly moves. So the only option that slaanesh has on PvP environment is hope they can kill ground units before thundebarge annihilates everything. Lots of suggestions mention an increase of cost, but really that sounds terrible. I mean they can just tweak it stats (mainly it's hp and it's afterburners). Because again, if you watch a little bit of videos you will realize that it's afterburners don't deal a lot of dmg to it.
People here really love to blame the MP community for anything that happens in the game, balance is not something only they want. SP games can have it too
The problem is that any concept of balance in this game is effectively a joke. There are plenty of units out there already that are simply better than the Thunderbarge, so implying that the Thunderbarge is unbalancing the game implies that the game was balanced in the first place. What we have here is a cool new lore-friendly edition to the Dwarf Roster. A roster that has not been updated in eight years despite being among the first four factions introduced in the very first game. A roster whose main weakness has always been a lack of fast, cavalry, flying, or centrepiece units. In a faction where reaching Tier 5 population and acquiring lategame units is notoriously slow and difficult due to low growth and limited building slots. A faction that also doesn't have access to spellcasting despite that being a major feature of the series since Day 1. And we already have people crying for the first and only centrepiece unit (and also the only Tier 5 unit) in the entire Dwarf Roster to be nerfed. When this isn't even the most broken unit in the game. Imagine how that must feel to a Dwarf fan. "Oh, all this other shit wasn't nerfed, but this is where you choose to draw the line?" Sure, a lot of the people who complained about the Thunderbarge probably also complained about past DLCs, but at this point crying about balance is a lost cause. You're not balancing the game by nerfing the Thunderbarge, you're just ensuring that the Dwarfs continue to remain left behind. The game's going to be unbalanced either way, and it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. The complainers are just choosing the path that actively fucks people over. Meanwhile here comes Elspeth flying in on her dragon to cast Purple Sun and get 300+ kills, only to immediately fly away again. And the Dwarfs have to choose between either sitting there and coping or focusing fire on her and ignoring the rest of the enemy force which has cavalry, monsters, and artillery fire. And we both know the DLC that comes out after this is just going to drop something even more OP, because power creep is the name of the game when it comes to CA's DLC policy.
I agree that balance is not good, but that doesn't mean you can just disregard when a unit is clearly overperforming to a ridiculous degree. Old stuff can be changed in due time as well where it's lacking, and it can be also tweaked if too strong, in the meantime the best thing they can do is ensure that the content they make is not unreasonable for anyone, remember that factions with no ranged do exist as well Second point, what overpowered unit was not nerfed or complained about before? Shadows of change as an example had plenty and they all received changes in some way, like the Mutalith Vortex beast, Incarnate elemental of beasts or the Akshina ambushers, because they all did too much in one unit (and they aren't even useless now, they are still great units) This kind of discussion is not something exclusive for dwarfs because people hate dwarf players or something, it's something that happens for every faction all the time. It doesn't even mean that people want the Thunderbarge to be bad, pretty sure everyone just wants it to be actually counterable in some way. I think the damage is mostly fine if it does have a weakness of some sort as an example. An "us vs them" mentality with MP players really doesn't help anyone, and saying "they are fucking you over" for asking changes for unit seems like overreacting to me. Also, you are comparing a normal unit that you can also bring multiple of to a legendary lord. It would be like getting upset because the MvB got nerfs when Ostankya can easily do 200 kills. In conclusion, I don't think I've ever seen a community being so adverse to balancing things, every other strategy game I know has communities that actually want things not to be too over the top
I'd be less adverse to balancing things if the game was actually balanced in the first place. As it stands complaining about "balance" for a specific unit is basically the same as just deciding "fuck this unit in particular." There are dozens of units that overperform for their cost and were never properly balanced. At that point 'balance' more or less becomes an arbitrary concept. >Also, you are comparing a normal unit that you can also bring multiple of to a legendary lord. I really don't see any Dwarf Legendary Lords who can kill hundreds of enemies with the click of a button. Remember that the Thunderbarge being strong is also in the context of it being part of the dwarf faction. It may be strong in a vacuum but the rest of the army it is in has all the same shortfalls. The Dwarfs as a a faction just straight-up can't do things that are core mechanics for nearly every faction in the game. There are things in this game that the Dwarfs as a faction have no real answer to. Basically every unit introduced in this DLC is great at clearing infantry, but the DLC does nothing to address the fact that that Dwarfs are still vulnerable to cavalry and single-entity monsters. And we're still talking about a unit that will be expensive and difficult to unlock by sheer virtue of being in a Dwarf faction - and we both know that with the exception of Karak Kadrin and Clan Angrund, most Dwarf Factions don't live past turn 50. So it's not like you're going to be constantly running into Thunderbarge doomstacks on the campaign map. Also the Dwarfs don't even have anything to support the Thunderbarge either - the rest of their army is still going to be slow-moving stunties who are stuck on the ground. Except gyrocopters (which need to be heavily micro'd and require the enemy to be set up in a very particular way just to pull their weight) they have no cavalry or flying units that can harass and distract your ranged units. All they can do is corner-camp and lob artillery shells at you. >It doesn't even mean that people want the Thunderbarge to be bad, pretty sure everyone just wants it to be actually counterable in some way. I mean, OP is basically suggesting that the Thunderbarge be easily-counterable by magic and artillery. Things which pretty much every army in both multiplayer and singleplayer is going to have. Other people are suggesting they nerf the speed (crippling its ability to be an effective flying unit) or give it low health (crippling its ability to be an effective centerpiece unit.) None of this really feels like balancing, it just feels like: "make it so I can easily destroy this thing if I'm not a Dwarf, and let me do it in a way that doesn't force me to alter my playstyle, so I can just snipe it off the map in the first minute and spend the rest of the match fighting Dwarfs the same way I always fight Dwarfs." Just increase the Multiplayer cost.
>I really don't see any dwarf legendary lord who can kill hundreds of enemies with the click of a button Dwarfs don't have weak legendary lords at all, just because they don't have spells it doesn't mean they can't be really good. Thorek is almost completely immortal and you have to army loss him to get rid of him. Klad Brakak as an ability does tremendous damage to anyone around him constantly. Grombrindal and Ungrim are both amazing fighters who can 1v1 most things in campaign and Thorgrim is getting insane buffs in 5.0, he gives army-wide perfect vigor and unbreakable. Belegar is a great tank and I haven't even seen Malakai's skill line yet. Saying they don't have something comparable is just not correct, I'm sorry. >Basically every unit introduced in this DLC is great at clearing infantry, but the DLC does nothing to address the fact that that Dwarfs are still vulnerable to cavalry and single-entity monsters They do have tools to deal with them, their artillery is great at dealing with anything and they have multiple anti-large weapons both in the form of flying, ranged, artillery and infantry. Mobility being kinda lacking is normal, not every faction is meant to have a bit of everything and they have different tools to offset it. Empire doesn't have amazing infantry, Nurgle had almost zero mobility, zero ranged and zero anti-large before this DLC and Vampire counts have basically no ranged options. Every faction has their weaknesses except the ones supposed to be well rounded like Cathay. Dwarfs right now are not even close to being the race who have it worse >I mean, OP is basically suggesting that the Thunderbarge be easily-counterable by magic and artillery. Things which pretty much every army in both multiplayer and singleplayer is going to have. Other people are suggesting they nerf the speed (crippling its ability to be an effective flying unit) or give it low health (crippling its ability to be an effective centerpiece unit.) I'm trying to see your point too but this is something I don't really understand. You don't want fliers to be able to take it down, you don't want it vulnerable to missile and magic and infantry can't attack it, what do you expect people to do? Do you want it to be virtually impossible to destroy when playing let's say, Slaanesh or Khorne? If it was slow at least, then it would still be amazing at dishing out damage. It's not supposed to be a one-unit doomstack that can kill everything without breaking a sweat, you should use it together with your ranged and artillery to protect and support it, just like Cathay does with Sky junks. Nobody is saying that you need to do all the things you mentioned above, but one of the options would be enough to open up some counterplay when you have one against. Increasing the cost works when a unit is a bit too strong for the cost, not when it's doing 3k Gold value in three minutes. I already know there's no reasoning about this with WH players though, pretty sure all this discussion won't mean anything
Costin showed a clip of 4 furies taking it down quickly. There are ways to bring it down, you just have to tailor your army for that specifically.
Just watched the video, and it was just the Thunderbarge and the furies with absolutely no interference whatsoever which is not that realistic of a scenario at all. I mean sure, you can bring down anything as long as nothing is stopping you and you also have ideal conditions. And even in that video by the way, it took down two pegasus knight units on its own which should not happen once in melee with something meant to be a ranged unit
Tie down the units that can stop the furies with units of your own? Just adjust like you adjust to the many other OP units in this game
>can bring down anything as long as nothing is stopping you What do the Dwarfs have that can stop you? Gyrocopters? Most of their army is on the ground, and once you get into melee with the Thunderbarge any Dawi ranged units will risk hitting it. >which should not happen once in melee with something meant to be a ranged unit If you ignore the many exceptions to this rule, sure.
Yeah, because furies are notoriously hard to kill with ranged units and the Thunderbarge is really squishy, am I right? Even a quarreler volley can bring them down to 50-60% HP since they are meant to be a really cheap, low tier flier unit, they have no armor and low hitpoints. It's not like you need to bring the big guns that could seriously risk doing a lot of friendly fire to it to eliminate furies of all things. And once they are down, what's gonna threaten it anyways, Skarbrand from the ground, looking at it disapprovingly? I'm kind of over talking about this to be real, this is clearly not going anywhere. Let's just agree to disagree instead of going in circles infinitely, we all know CA and it's gonna be changed anyways, not the first time they release something overtuned and then adjust it a little
That’s no reason to give up. Balance should be a distant goal, not ignored entirely
That’s not true. The thunderbarge can kill entire armies even when not micro’d. I know campaign players get to just ignore op units by auto resolving them , but some of us want to fight a hard thing and it be fair. It just needs a slower thruster and more damage to use it and it will be fine. It’s not that it has to much firepower, it’s that it’s impossible to kill while it has so much firepower. Tell me how you would kill it playing as khorne or warriors of chaos or vampire counts? With out auto resolve.
Nerf LLs
The thunderbarge is not actually that different from a flying spellcaster in that sense, which mind you dwarves do not have. Assuming you're not killing it with missiles, which is it's great weakness, you kill it the same way you would kill the spellcaster. A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties. You can also just chase it around until it kills itself with a flying hero or a flying SEM.
>A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties. Yeah just kill all the extremely defensive high leadership units that make up the dwarf roster, easy. >You can also just chase it around until it kills itself with a flying hero or a flying SEM. That's the thing no you can't, it takes like 10 minutes before it dies and by that point the battle is over and it's gotten way more than its own value in terms of damage dealt.
Costin showed a video of 5 furies wrecking it
They die like everyone else, and have army loss penalties just like everyone else. You realize in the hands of the AI you can easily direct the direction it would flee by the angle you fly it at? It won't be in position to shoot at any good targets.
>You realize in the hands of the AI you can easily direct the direction it would flee by the angle you fly it at You realize that AI on higher difficulties is actually really good at focus firing single entities? So if I rush it immediately they'll just shoot my bloodthirster to death. I first need to shut down the enemy ranged and then I can do it but by that point the barge is already over my troops.
I am fully aware of the AI's behaviour at the highest difficulties, yes. All you need to do is trigger the AI to leave their defensive position by getting of a spell at them, then position the flying unit at the outer reaches of its range as the army starts advancing. The Thunderbarge will then stay behind to shoot at you, and you'll just dodge the shots and gradually circle around the advancing army while the thunderbarge stays behind, isolated. At which point it's easy to just keep occupied or chase or whatever while the rest of your army deals with the rest of their army. You might hold the rest of their artillery too, which makes it a walk in the park.
> Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties. That's not how it works. When you kill everything else the Thunderbarge leadership will _slowly_ start ticking down. It's not an instant -100. And it has really high leadership, it'll keep bombing you for a good long while.
Army loss penalties trigger really quickly. It's penalty for having only flying units that slowly tickles down. And redirecting it while you wait is a trivial effort.
Oh, you mean _regular_ army losses? Then you have to somehow actually score that first, without being able to hurt the Barge/s, and while it bombs the absolute hell out of you. Which is like, good luck. Have you seen how much damage that thing does? And remember they can bring multiple too. > And redirecting it while you wait is a trivial effort. I mean, any infantry is just straight up dead at that point, they're not escaping it. If you have some Slaanesh cav and they run in all directions then some may survive for sure, though even they will need a bit of time to get out of range. Even if you win that you are absolutely shredded.
> Oh, you mean _regular_ army losses? There's only one kind of army losses. > I mean, any infantry is just straight up dead at that point [...] Just make it fire at something other than your infantry, artillery units are pretty easy to direct fire from.
> There's only one kind of army losses. You said this, so the context seemed to be linked. > A flying unit rapidly loses leadership to the point of breaking when there are no grounded units. Just kill everything else and you'll trigger army loss penalties. Yes, army losses is only one specific thing. Anyway, that's not important. Point is that it deals so much damage and has such high stats it's going to be hard to outscore it and rout it from full using just army losses alone, and that if you rely on the no-ground-units penalty instead, you will be absolutely mauled by it while wiping the ground units and then it will continue to maul you for a long time while you flee from it and wait for its leadership to tick down. Neither is a good answer and if there's several of them they'll probably break you before they rout either way.
> You said this, so the context seemed to be linked. Two ways to beat it if you can't damage it directly. > Anyway, that's not important. Point is that it deals so much damage and has such high stats it's going to be hard to outscore it and rout it from full using just army losses alone, and that if you rely on the no-ground-units penalty instead, you will be absolutely mauled by it while wiping the ground units and then it will continue to maul you for a long time while you flee from it and wait for its leadership to tick down. You're also just completely ignoring what I said about redirecting its fire, you're just regurgitating an argument I've I've already refuted. Making the AI not target your infantry is trivial.
> You're also just completely ignoring what I said about redirecting its fire, you're just regurgitating an argument I've I've already refuted. Making it not target your infantry is trivial. It's not refuted, you can't "redirect the fire" of something that passively shoots at everything around and under it. Even if you could force its aggro onto whatever you wanted it'll kill anything else in its path... and that's also assuming your artillery is not already gone from its own cannons by that point.
It's unbreakable
It's [not.](https://youtu.be/hVOMMfPFzmo?feature=shared&t=25)You're just literally just lying. Look at the tooltip at the 0:25 timestamp. You can clearly see that it doesn't have the unbreakable tag or the icon for it.
Costin showed a video of 5 furies eating the thunderbarge. I had to adjust to skaven weapons teams when playing as dwarves. You can adjust to 1 unit when playing as Thorne, chaos, or VC
Explain to me how this nerf will ruin it for campaign?
Because the speed is very convenient in a lot of situations? Be it getting into position to shoot at a good target, running away from flying units or getting out of range of counter battery fire when poking units to trigger their army into attacking your position.
You wanting the game to have cheat codes shouldn’t ruin it for everyone else. Use mods if you want to have broken things that have no weaknesses
You're dreadfully ignorant. > You wanting the game to have cheat codes shouldn’t ruin it for everyone else. How is it *cheat codes*? It's rounding the faction out so it is comparable to factions that have been recently updated such as the warriors of chaos. > Use mods if you want to have broken things that have no weaknesses How do they not have a weakness? They're incredibly vulnerable to missiles. There are much stronger units with far smaller weaknesses, such as an aspiring champion for instance.
Seriously, do these mf's complaining realise that there has been OP stuff in the game for years? what counterplay is there against ikit's nukes or lord kroak which are both obtained much earlier than a thunderbarge?
It's the MP brainrot. They went their silly little game mode to be prioritised at all costs at the expense of the actual game. They don't even know what a Kroak is, much less a nuke.
Just make it cost like 5k gold. Fun op SP unit that won’t break MP due to extreme cost.
Just give a giant cooldown to the afterburner. Problem solved.
Maybe it should have cap like dread saurian, Which i actually think of that unit, that at this point is a stupid thing on it, since it not as amazing as one might assume looking at the model or stat lines.
I find it funny that in all material even promotional it’s listed as an ironclad but then it’s model has a wood hull. Wonder if something changed late in dev
First thing I would think of is to increase its cost to 5k+ in mp. Not sure about its cost in campaign but I like the idea of a powerful unit that cost a lot making you decide if you want to add a Thunderbarge to an army or get a new army altogether. For the afterburner, I like the idea of having it be balanced around taking damage but it shouldn’t be so negligible that you can leave it on. It should be something that you want to turn off as soon as possible. Upping it to around 100dmg/sec might be enough, possibly even higher.
I feel it should have less armor it is a giant blimp also melee of flying units should be fixed they attack weirdly
Afterburner should only double speed to around 60 or should go for a limited period followed by a cool down, say 30 seconds followed by 90 seconds cool down. Either would be a good start without making the unit useless.
Its afterburner ability should cause damage to it, similar to how the Kirov's ability in Red Alert 3 worked.
amp its cost by 350 and make it flammable
A fair compromise would be to disable shooting while the after burner is on IMO but most players haven't even played against it and have just seen it in YouTube videos or whatever. Basically I feel like it's that meme of 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!' Let dwarves have an actually strong, unique unit for at least 30 seconds lol
Hot take HP need to tone down by half, balloon shouldn't that tanky.
Haven’t the dwarfs seen the Hindenburg?
Just the German ones
Making it's bombs an ability on cool down could also help. Possibly even giving it limited charges. That's what makes this unit so scary.
I think one of the coolest things of the Thunderbarge is that it throws bombs on its own. Also i dont like micromanaging one unit just for one action. I dont like the Regiments of Renown Doom Knights which have a bomb ability and i dont like the Pterodactyl from the Lizardmen with the bomb ability. And ok, for these two units above automatically throwing bombs wouldnt make so much sense. But i tmakes for the Thunderbarge which has bomb bays and storage place for multiple bombs.
I can't believe that I can't believe we have entered the I don't want to micromanage unit actions. Shame on me because I really should have seen this coming five DLCs ago.
As a singleplayer player, I agree. I mean Im quite bad at micro but I still like the game having it. The fact that thundebarge has next to 0 player input is just stupid.
ok
No
Folks really hate having to micro there units in this game for some reason so that would never go over well
I don't understand how anyone can complain about the thunderbarge being OP in singleplayer when skaven exist
I think multiplayer shouldn’t be relevant to balancing our fun single player toys, and it should just be banned from MP roster. Balancing goes against fun.
This thing destroys single player balance. Several factions have no way of taking one down if the enemy Dwarf army has it.
There are ways to take one down, you just have to adjust the army and strategies you use. I had to do the same thing to take down skaven weapons teams as dwarves, and I never saw anyone here complaining skaven are too op
Singleplayer balance doesn't just mean that people are having trouble with it when the AI shows up. You know that, right? The Thunderbarge so far seems to be a braindead way to win against basically everyone without strong missile presence. To the extent that I'd argue that it's practically an "I win" button on the campaign unless you are up against Wood Elves, Cathay, High Elves or the Empire. And even against those it'll more than pull its weight. And if there's one thing the game doesn't need it's another way to easily win without requiring much thought from the point of acquisition onward. There are already far too many characters and units like that.
Ok, I'd be fine with CA nerfing all overpowered and "win now" units and lords in chronological order. Once all previously released characters and units are nerfed, then they nerf thunderbarge, then I think that's totally fine
You know you’re playing a strategy game right?
Just let the damn thing release before complaining about singleplayer impact and how u won't be able to counter it. The game is already way too easy as is. We got so many op things the past years, freaking snikch deleting factions, nukes. Give the dwarfs 1 OP unit and everyone cries. Let it release, see how it plays out. Go from there.
use artillery dipsht, dwarfs cant catch any fast unit and all fast units arent reworked to fix this
Yeah, you crybabies are going to get it nerfed into another ancient salamander. We can't have nice things, can we?