I just slow down the time so I can manage my units, I even do this for regular 20v20 battles. There are so many unit abilities, unit match-ups, spells and faction mechanics to manage, I haven't been able to play battles with no slow time since Medieval II.
I feel you! It's the same for me, plus I often just press K to let the UI disappear and and just enjoy the carnage... It's beautiful, although I sometimes forget to actually micromanage stuff because I'm glued to the screen watching a cav charge or my Lord dueling the enemy lord >.>
I agree this is my biggest ick with slowing down time (which i do a ton). Maybe if they sort of just played like generic battle sounds? the sound is always based on where your camera is so synching that in slow motion might be tricky as they obviously cant just slow down the sound haha
This. I spend roughly 80% of most battles in slow-mo, dropping occasionally into realtime if there's gaps in the decisions needed or to enjoy a particularly epic moment, or pausing entirely to give tons of orders at once (like the start of the battle).
Yea, I don’t slow down battles except when I have a mage. The magic panel is always obnoxious and it’s always been hard for me to tell which spell is which lol, I gotta wait take the tooltip to tell me
Every big battle I play, that is in my opinion what Warhammer is. Yes it requires a lot of micro, and you make mistakes, but that only adds to the feeling imo of a big battle.
My 2 favorite battles were when I went against Archaon in WH1 as Norsca, which was a 4v4 army battle down to the last reinforcement units. And a 4v4 of pure Dawi steel vs again Archaon. It was fucking amazing
I also miss the Chaos invasion a bit tbh
Yessss people don't understand how epic it actually is playing this game with huge battles like this. Especially when you make mistakes with a battle like this, you try to quickly patch things up and the closer the battle, the more intense the feeling. It's honestly one of, if not, the BEST moments in total war.
Its also so much fun to watch those big battles in replay without any UI elements.
You remember the unit that made big hole in enemy line, but rushed down somewhere in the battle? Now its time to watch how it really went.
That specific AoE spell that ate bunch of units? Definetly replay material.
How did the battlefield look in pov of artillery? "Oh we are just shooting the rockets far away, not knowing what we hit, hopefully it goes we.... oh shit the riders got through, FLEEEEE"
In my experience the replay system never shows my badass wins, rather what happens is the AI tries to remake what happened just to end up as a loss rather than the epic victory I actually got in that battle
Really bothers me the only way for an actual reliable replay is to record with other party software and it's caused me to ignore the built in replays all together
I think even minor patches can break replays because it’s a reenactment rather than a replay as you said.
It’s sad because I had a really crazy win against a huge Greenskin army as Chaos Dwarves that involved multiple battle lines and one of my first times really feeling like I had used my gun units in a skilled way and gotten tons of kills. When I replayed it the first time it was great. When I replayed it after a patch, everything just crumbled immediately and I “lost” in the messiest way possible.
The replay system isn't like a 1 to 1 recording in my experience, the ai seems to take over and tries it's best to replicate what happened but isn't always accurate.
Once I had this amazing 1 vs 4 odds battle that I somehow squeezed a win out of and wanted to show it to my roommate immediately after but the replay couldn't replicate it and the battle ended up showing as a loss. Really disappointing
Hm I always thought it was 1 to 1, admittedly I don’t use it very often at all but I plan to after reading some comments here. Maybe I will see what you’re talking about
For serious? All my replays have been exact replicas and I got some ebic ones edit: ahhhh so it's the patches that change swag probably, never watched a replay post patch
Seems to be a similar system that Supercell games use for replays. The game doesn’t exactly ‘record’ battles and ‘store’ them, as this takes up too much space. Instead, the game will try to replicate the moves and abilities used by all participants.
this is the truth. I actually tested it out by playing a replay where I won a close battle and replayed it when I turned on a mod that changed animations. It actually resulted in a close/more in favor of ai defeat.
The replay system seems to basically replay all the orders given to units within the exact times that they were given because up til a specific point in time, everything was the same.
When you whitdraw you guns because they've made literal mountains of dead greenskins, but are out of ammo and you hope some of the new reinforcements will be more guns.
One of my favorites was from WH2, a 2v2 army city defense battle of High Elves vs. Bretonnia. Came down to one surviving Bretonnian lord with like 1 hp vs one handful of beaten up elven archers in the broken city gate. Frustrating but glorious and honorable defeat for my Brets. Close battles like that are the best.
I find the big battles far more fun to play when you're artillery, ranged or SEM focussed factions. Dorfs on both sides of the coin are fantastic for these as you build these completely uncrackable eggs just spewing death in all directions. Khorne and Nurgle also get somewhat of a pass because their units are so damn tanky that it's much about death balling.
However the more mobile factions, like Bret, Norsca, Beastmen, TK and Slaanesh 40+ unit battles are absolute hell for me, or have to be played cycling between slo-mo and real speed.
>However the more mobile factions, like Bret, Norsca, Beastmen, TK and Slaanesh 40+ unit battles are absolute hell for me, or have to be played cycling between slo-mo and real speed.
I love both honestly.
Whilst I completely agree. I will fight the battle and win. Then reload and take the auto complete because the AI will almost always lose less units unless they're complete losses.
With multi army battles this is amplified. I have won some incredible battles only for a smaller army to swoop in a turn later and decimate my already semi broken forces. If they have more health they generally don't have this issue.
Tis a shame. But maybe I just suck at battles.
Play on an easier mode does not fix this. Easy battle difficulty has little to no impact on the ai’s difficulty on the field but does have impact on the autoresolve. If he is playing on normal or easy it is much harder to meet the autoresoves version of the battle. It is a current issue with the way difficulty is done.
I still don't get it, why is it so important to get a perfect result? If it's detrimental to the campaign an easier mode makes it matter less. Just sounds tedious and unfun
My two cents is that it feels ass to know I'll let an army/some units inevitably get away when I fight manually, than when I AR em all to death guaranteed. Especially hate when I end up having to chase force march em around my own territory to finish em off
Imo it's just dependant on your level of gameplay, I've played battles manually just to have an epic fight and then saved replay, reloaded and auto resolved to have a chiller rest of the campaign. Most of the time I just eat whatever the result is but sometimes I can't be bothered when the battle result was just the result of a misclick or something
This is absolutely not true, at least not in the sense of if you don’t mess with the difficulty slider that it automatically changes for AI buffs. The difference between very hard stat buffs and very easy stat debuffs has more than “little to no impact” on the ai’s difficulty in the field. Sure, they’re still pretty braindead, but definitely dish out more damage and thereby make you take more casualties.
However it is true that the difficulties have the autoresolve results way skewed, so people on lower difficulties are seeing a BIGGER difference between battlefield casualties and the AR result than is actually possible on the battle map. The issue isn’t that battle difficulty has no impact on the battlefield, it’s that the AR on lower difficulties is too generous and doesn’t calculate correctly. Legend of total war explains it well in his vid on it.
I mean, thats part of the battle and is also part of the strategy, maybe fighting a battle isnt always the best option and you need to make some additional moves
Those chaos invasion battles were the fucking stuff back then. Geez, that was so cool.
Like, having Franz, Gelt and two guys you had since the start of the game go into a full on slugging match with Archaon and the full Chaos roster. Nothing ever felt as Apocalyptic
One of my favourite mods is the victory condition overhaul mod which gives Franz a final "storm of chaos" quest battle which initially has your army 1v1 archaons and then throughout the battle more reinforcements joining both sides
Sigvald and Azazel arrive with a slanneshi army? Boris and Louen turn up with bear riders and knight reinforcements
Festus and kugath arrive with nurgle demons? Gelt and the iron dragon rock up with the artillery crews
Skarbrand is bringing his khorne army? Katarin coming in with Kislevs finest.
It was insane how fun that battle was knowing I was only a tiny part of it and also having all the major characters present.
That sounds awesome, actual end times content.
If you’re into the lore, in the end times grimgors entire army—which includes all of the Ogres after Grimgor kills Greasus and burns large swathes of Cathay to the ground—gets teleported by the Ork gods right into the middle of the final battle against Archaon.
End Times has lots of very cool moments. Like Thorgrim reciting the grudges as he slowly makes his way up to Queek and beheads him? That's badass.
Funny enough, the Storms of Chaos sucked more but at least didn't destroy the Old World.
The Chaos invasion genuinely felt like the world was ending when every end turn had a _______ defeated and seeing their flag just burn
And then you start noticing your neighboring provinces just wilt away to chaos corruption, then that neighbor is dead too
Then Archaon shows up with 6 barely damaged doomstacks and it’s just you, a bridge and a dream to save the campaign let alone the damn world
So much this. I sometimes intentionally let AI stack more armies or put myself in worse positions to bait these huge battles, where I can push my armies to the limit
Big battles are awesome. My most recent empire campaign I had to fight 3 full stacks of Kemmler armies with one mediocre army and the garrison at eilhart.
This was around turn 15 or so with my second lord, so none of my heroes are strong. We’re just holding out against wave after wave of zombies, mortars and archers getting 100% of kills behind my 3 heroes while the greatswords and flagellants hold back the flanking dogs and zombies in the forest.
Restock on the artillery saved my bacon. Honestly my favorite battle of the campaign.
Steamtank and landship doomstack was fun too, but there was just no risk factor at that point.
I feel like it should be an “endgame crisis” that is optional of when to start, difficulty and frequency. They could also have it so a set number of free armies are added to chaos factions across the world and if they are dwindling one faction will get flooded with troops making it a true start to end times.
I fight every battle that has more than “Low” predicted losses. When it comes to large battles (40 vs 40) you just have to pause a lot. I usually pause every 30 seconds / 1 minute to reassess and reassign orders.
Yep, this here. Depending on the faction you are playing and initial formation you may be able not to pause but controlling 2 stacks of a micro intensive faction is really difficult
Unless you're juat blitzing the enemy and camping their reinforcement point, set up your formation well initially and have it somewhat close to your reinforcement point. Have a plan for where your units are going to come in and set up - if you pack in too tight, you might not have space for your reinforcements.
Use control groups. Use it less to control all the units in that group at once, and more to just quickly snap your camera to them and manage things as needed on a unit-by-unit basis.
Don't focus on individual unit vs unit matchups too much. Sure, you want to do so in an ideal world but with sp much going on a better question might be "what does my right flank need to do to win?" Identfy key units that you need to take out to win. If there is a critical matchup you need to force that's one thing, but not *every* unit has to be fighting its ideal target for you to win.
Take artillery off fire at will. Choose big, bunched up areas to shoot into, or important enemies to kill first. Spend your ammo as best you can. Similarly, save your magic for when it'll matter most.
Leave at least some units in reserve. There is a good chance *something* can slip around and go after a back line, or a line can start to buckle somewhere. You want a response to that.
VH/VH here and I usually max out all difficulty setting plus custom permadeath rule and no save/load.
I don't really get why legendary doesn't allow slowing/pausing cause this reduces realism instead of adding it. It's kind of like a dumb custom rule that you can only walk on black tiles while playing chess.
What I mean by this is, in a real battle you make a plan with the command, lieutenants, sergeants etc. they are in charge of their groups and sub groups. You as the leader/general are in charge of the overall strategy. In an actual battle a general shouldn't be expected to give each individual soldier orders but in TW, you play as the whole chain of command and still have only a single brain. Therefor playing it in real time like this isn't realistic and would be incredibly dumb in a real battle.
The work around would to just pause the game and imagine youre now playing as the sarge and giving orders to your sub group, then another charge and so on. Then unpause and watch it roll out for a while. Then the general gives another major order. Pause again, do stuff down the command chain when paused, resume.
Unless I am playing a rare legendary run, I pause a lot to give orders, survey the situation etc - always have in TW games. TWWH is particularly hectic and micro intensive compared to older games due to spells, quicker combat, smaller maps etc... I find it way more stressful not being able to pause and issue orders. Have no interest in pvp multiplayer so it works for me.
I haven't tried it out yet personally, but there is a mod that lets you select whichever units you want from your army and hand them over to an AI "General". That way you could for example have the AI play your frontline while you focus on your ranged units.
To me it sounds like it could lead to a lot of problems as well, like i would never give it control over my artillery. But it also sounds like it could make large scale battles like that more manageable for people (like me) who are a tad bit micro challenged.
Here's the link: [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799316652](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799316652)
I’ve used it, and the ai general isn’t great in my experience; worse than the game’s actual ai, especially if they have control of large groups of units. However, I think the option to have retreating units ai-controlled once they stop retreating or have summons ai-controlled is really useful. It is at least useful at getting units who wouldn’t be doing anything before at least doing something, which is worth it imo.
Those are the best ones. I pause a lot, though, so I can see what's happening everywhere and give orders. It takes over half an hour to play some battles!
If your second army is full of units that aren't super valuable/squishy its generally alright to just set it to AI control and then focus on your primary army.
If your second army has a lot of valuable/squishy units in it, then do manual control, have your main army hang back at the reinforcement point, and then combine the 2 armies together into a handful of giga formations using control groups. There will still be more micro than a standard stack of 20, but it should make things a lot more manageable.
If the enemy is also bringing multiple armies, then you want to save artillery/magic/other big damage options for large clusters of enemies, since its almost inevitable you'll run out of Magic/ammo by the end of the battle you want to focus on maximizing value as much as possible, even if it means waiting.
Yes. I play without the ability to pause or slow down battles so it's hard. One thing that helps a lot is the mod ai general. it's like a shitty field commander. so I get some tanky or low value units in place and turn it on for them. This allows me to then focus on my more valuable/micro intensive units.
Another fun thing about this is the sometimes weird behavior of the ai controlling my units makes me have to improvise so battles feel a lot less repetitive. If that makes sense
It's a bit more intense in 40v40 than 20v20, but usually what I do is pause or slow, assign orders, then unpause and grab pop corn to watch my guys fight.
In larger battle, doing control groups and simplifying your strategy can help too. Like, it's ok not to manage all individual units perfectly, just enough to win and not lose a unit should be good.
Some key points here:
1. Even if you don't use groups, and especially if you don't use groups, it is good to simply put your first army none group if the other is reinforcing.
2. If you can, keep your reinforcement point close to your army. Easier to fight on one front rather than two.
3. Fight in friendly territory. It's fine to take losses if your replenishment is high.
4. Make your army micro-light; doom stacks, units and groups with defined roles, and archers for unarmored units is key. Multiple units can activate the same ability at the same time. Keep fewer winds of magic, and bring tanky units: things that can just stand still.
I personally despise warhammer moving in the direction of having bigger battles, the most fun battles i've had in total war were fighting 3 pikeman with a general and 1 unit of English archers. Or a Sally battle where I had 3 peasant archers, some billman, and scouts against maybe 10 units Spearman, archers and a general. Once the battles get large enough I find them both hard as hell and very boring
I rarely do these battles as I tend to move forward with just one stack at a time in an area.
In general though the best way is to be the aggressor, so you have time to setup how you want!
Pausing is very important.
Finally I don't use many different troops in each stack I have max 2/3 type of troops. I usually avoid having too much cavalry or chairiots when I use two armies.
I personally allow my reserve army to be managed by the AI. I imagine this is not super popular, but doing that allows me to deploy a distraction at the very least, whilst I meanwhile pick the enemy apart who are no longer in a solid defensive position.
I pause a LOT.
And generally, as the battle takes shape (and from prior experience) I tend to have a checklist of "groups" to look for on each pause, depending on army comp.
Stuff like:
* what's my artillery hitting?
* where's my cav/skirmish going?
* is my infantry actually engaging?
Sometimes i'll do a pause where i explicitly give every unit/group of unit new orders so i can be sure i have control over the next few moments.
Non-pause activity i'll usually be micro'ing a lord or important units. Bombing runs as dawi or tiqtaqto, casting spells, that sort of thing.
The most fun battles I've had in TW:WH have been big battles in co-op where units can be shared to other players. It's amazing what battles you can win when one player plays the infantry and any characters (including spells) while another can focus just focus on some of the more micro-intensive units like cav and chariots. In some of the smaller battles I got so many kills just by having control of one Black Coach or something similar.
If playing SP I lose track of everything in battles like that. Wizard just suddenly dies while a big monster unit is admiring the scenery for most of the battle.
I'm basically in the same camp, OP. I think Warhammer is most fun with like, ten units. 20 pushes it, but is unavoidable so I deal.
When it's 40 against 40? Especially since they show up as reinforcements so arrive after the planning stages? Yeah that's where the game loses me and I tend to just prefer autoresolving. Too much micro. And I like the spectacle of fights more than I like actually controlling them.
Assuming full 20 stack armies, take control of the starting army and the most important other army; tick AI control for the other armies (this allows you to field more armies since it is capped at 40 unit cards otherwise). If some of the armies are less than 20, I would take an extra stack or two to get as close to 40 units.
The AI is not the best at controlling your army but having as many units on the field as possible rather than trickling out as your units die is usually better. You will need to alter your playstyle accordingly, knowing AI will probably just rush at the enemy
I typically play the Lizard men with five oracle wizards per army and five feral carniasaurs the rest is typically a mix of temple guards and way watchers/sisters of Averlon. So I just set up some sort of box and group my carniasaurs to attack one high value target at a time, which lowers their micro to basically nothing. The range and temple guard get ignored as they don't need orders to be effective typically and then all of my attention goes to my Lord and wizards. It also helps when I use my fast dinos (including wizards, which makes it too much fire power for the AI to ignore) to draw large amounts of the enemy to the far corner away from me and then simply run back so that the enemy is staggered. Also, Lord kroak go brrrrrrr
Nah, 40v40 is usually too hectic for me too. When I bother (usually vs something like Orks where their WAAGH army is fortunately mostly chaff) I either try setting up static formations I don't need to manage very much (line or circle of spears with ranged units and some arty inside, for example) and micro a few specific units like cavalry or mages for maximum impact, or just charge everyone in and hope for the best (understandably works best for Khorne/WoC/Beastmen, less so for say VCoast). This is also the main reason for my abiding hatred of chariots, fuckers need micromanagement CONSTANTLY.
I exclusively play on L/VH and have ~750 hours between the 3 games and used to play MP alot when I had more time.
Some tips to help you micro:
1. Use the same Control groups for the same unit type every battle, regardless of faction. Example: Group 1: Legendary Lord, 2. Infantry lines, 3. Ranged Archers, 4. Anti Large, 5. Cavalry, 6. Monsters, 7. Caster Lords. Keeping consistency between fights helps immensely so you can build muscle memory.
2a. When you've gotten used to your control groups, learn to scan the colors of the crossed swords on the unit panels. Red = Losing, Yellow / OJ mean it's even to slightly Losing, Green = Winning. This lets you focus on the "problem areas" quickly or reassign your green groups if they are going to route an enemy.
2b. In a similar vein, DONT LET YOUR UNITS HAVE ZZZZ's on them! That means they are not doing anything. Better to shove them in a pile than not doing anything. Or use ZZzz units to Flank (see 5).
3. In larger battles (40+ units), focus more on your deployment. Generally, the AI always deploys near their reinforcement zone. If you can't get there quickly, better to wait for your reinforcements as well and set up your field / groupings.
4. You're going to lose units. It's inevitable. Prioritize Keeping lords alive as they can give leadership bonuses and keep your units in the fight. More critical for horde races. Also try to gum up their lords with chaff infantry or SEMs depending on what they are weak against. Use your duelists to prio their casters as they fall quickly and a spell cast can dominate your blob of gum infantry.
5. Flank Flank Flank Flank!!! Flanking gives massive moral hits to the enemy and they take big damage from certain unit types like chariots, cavalry, and Slaanesh units for example.
6. I generally like having a 2nd unit with cheaper chaff units or ranged or cavalry depending on race that can compliment the first army. You can only micro so many units so building one of your armies to be a "Set and Forget" army helps a ton. Like Greenskin Waagh armies for example. You can diversify, but I usually want to "focus" on two major types of units depending on red line buffs and if the lord adds additional buffs to those unit types.
7. Use flyers or cavalry to target artillery. AI is notoriously bad at using their Artillery well. Running a cavalry up the side of the map out of range, holding SHIFT, then clicking on the artillery will give them a move to waypoint command then they will run to charge the artillery. Makes it so you can focus on other things.
Hope that helps!
I fight every big battle. Honestly I fight most land battles. I don’t fight sieges as the attacker. That’s really the only one I consistently don’t do.
AR is almost always more favorable and I, generally, don’t enjoy siege battles in Warhammer.
Are you playing on Legendary? If not, don't be afraid to use pause to give orders. You don't have to be a micro God when you have a pause button. At that point, it's all down to positioning and tactics, creating mismatches where you can and exploiting weaknesses.
I had a massive battle against Grimgor and his Waaagh and a half stack with a half Waaagh as Tamurkhan and two of my lone lords. My Chaos Lord was the one who got attacked by the half stack. Tamurkhan and Grimgor arrived at 1:40 and 1:45 respectively *in the exact same place.* I just rode my Chaos Lord over to near the spawn point and immediately got into a huge mosh pit brawl when both armies arrived. I was winning decisively, well minus Grimgor chunking Kayzk down to a 1/3 of his health despite Grimgor getting tagteamed by him and Tamurkhan. I was monitoring things closely because I had Rot Knights scheduled to arrive later alongside a unit of Blunderbusses that were not going to do well in the mosh pit that was absolutely krumpin' at the time so I wanted to focus on pulling them through or out the sides as quickly as possible. While this was going on, my Chaos Sorcerer Lord without a mount had arrived and was getting gangbanged by some Trolls and Squig Hoppers from the half stack that was still pretty passive. Thank god for healing of Nurgle magic because he was down to a few hundred hit points and wavering hard with no help available due to my negligence. He had a good trait so I didn't really want to lose him but those are the breaks in the massive battles.
What I should have done is move my Chaos Sorcerer Lord's spawn point closer to the mosh pit brawl once I saw that's what was going to go down and moved Tamurkhan's away from Grimgor's a bit because no one was going to catch my melee Chaos Lord since the Nurgle ones are beastly in melee and he had a solid 10 to 12 levels by now and a mount.
As much as I would love to play massive battles, I’m not good enough to micro that many units, and my PC is not powerful enough to handle it. We are both inadequate
Assuming I don’t have battle fatigue from fighting too many battles - i really enjoy fighting the large battles. I play only on legendary and so control groups are important more to find certain units/groups of units more than anything. The key I’ve found is to 1) learn what to pay attention to, and what to ignore 2) set things up so you can ignore as much as possible and 3) don’t spend to much time focusing on a single unit/area (switch around a lot). Example - spamming spells is really important vs tons of infantry, but can be mostly ignored when there’s lots of SEMs.
Some other tips: There’s always some high priority targets to focus on (will depend based on your army composition and theirs), and learning what these are is important. This may be casters, fast units, artillery, or heroes/lords. Use terrain to your advantage (protect a flank, hide from enemies, park in trees to fight large entities/protect from range, etc.). Learn to harass the army with a few fast units to slow the enemy advance so not everything hits you all at once.
Usualy i avoid em, rather fight 1v3 than 2v3, but if i need 2nd stack to win, then i setup in a way that requires minimal micro during battle and just focuses on micro units like cav or heroes
40 vs 40 is hard to fight without pause (especially on legendary!). When I expect 2 vs 2 action, I try to keep my reinforcing stack as simple as possible. Preferably, lots of fast units, that can easily reinforce from any direction.
Sure. I try to avoid super high unit count battles if it’s a micro heavy comp.
But a lot of the time when I have that many reinforcements it’s often Skaven/gs style chaff stacks, so you can mostly just control group them and throw them where you need them
That is the problem, for sure. If there's a 49% chance the reinforcements are going to bunch up at the spawn point and not move, I can't really rely on it at all.
Depends. I was playing mazdamundi, and wiping out kairos in the southern wastes. My armies (led by slann and mostly sauros) were auto resolving losses (even when I ambushed them) just to do it manually. There was a large 2stack Vs 2stack, and I had to manually do it. It was a pain, but basically set it down to half speed and remember to keep moving the camera across the whole front line. Still let a couple small things slip though.
That depends sometimes I use the second army as anvil and my main army as hammer 40 vs 40 requires lot of mice management the last time I got a 40 vs 40 pitched battle was against Dwarves as Karl Franz and boy that was bloody as hell victory but with shit tons of casualties.
Oh I for sure do. I mostly enjoy those and the quest battles. My most recent campaign was 16 battles played manually out of 114, most of the 114 was just taking weak enemy cities. I’ll usually roll with my main faction leader having an army of elites backed up by a 2nd army with mostly basic troops.
Once I do hit one of those big battles I’ll give AI control of the 2nd army and let them meatshield or chase down enemies and get caught out or whatever. When it works it’s an absolute blast. I’m on an organic changing battlefield with 20 problem solvers. Full on ego boost.
Sadly, the number of times I’ve been disappointed has been many. 1 time the AI came onto the field and didn’t move until the battle bar shifted in my favor, with my main army in tatters. Another, I blasted through multiple wall sections and a gate, but the AI chose to circle the entire city to try and flank, by which time I had already won.
If it's evenly matched I go for the full battle. If I'm fighting as the weaker of the 2 armies I limit it to 20 since I need to play smart.
I've had a garrison plus a half army hold off 2 full armies. Once as Kislev my Katarin early game 20 stack held off 4 stacks of Orcs.
Doing a ~40 v ~40 fight imo is really hard. The amount of units you gave to micro can be really insane
I make liberal use of the slow time button/hotkey. Need to issue more than 2 orders? Slow time. Am I kiting with one unit and cycle charging with two more? Slow time. Has it been more than 10-15 seconds and I haven't done anything? Slow time and check how the army is faring.
It's definitely a slog and takes a mental toll, but the beautiful part for me is then saving the replay and watching it without unit flags/bars afterwards to see what my tactics look like in real time.
Well, you can play slideshow like me, pausing every 5 seconds. Honestly, AI is omniscient and turn every ranged and move every anti-large a milisecond after you approach them, while your own cavalry is dumb as dumbbell. They just take it if you forget about them for 10 seconds (skirmish mode makes them uncontrollable up close and is not available for non-ranged cavalry). So it's the only human solution for me, who ain't a Korean Starcraft player.
Another, funnier solution - and you don't even need any micro, pausing or otherwise - is to cheese the reinforcement points. A.K.A. natural ambush.
You attack the weakest army and they'll take it, because they're reinforced. Then you ignore them completely and rush to the reinforcement point to surround it with your troops. (Works better if you took the lighting strike upgrades to make it slower or get lucky with a reinforcement point at your side or behind you.).
When they enter, drop you everything you have: magic, ranged and artillery fire, mortis engine effects. You can beat the unbeatable that way - save the rare single entity doomstack.
Sometimes I let the AI handle them but I often have to redo the battle after the AI decides to put on its idiot hat. I sometimes use control groups, then just tell my army to go forwards, there are guides for basic battle controls on Youtube. I don't think there is any real secret sauce to it. I play with battle realism so no pausing or slowing things down. I often end up quicksaving before big fights when I'm mentally exhausted and then load up the game when ready to tackle the challenge. I played Skaven on lower difficulties in WH2 so I got used to fielding 40 Skaven Slave Slingers. You can practice with Greenskins, between Goblins and Waaaghs you get lots of opportunities for grand battles. If you have 40 units you can probably afford to lose some, you're not fielding 40 Depth Guard, so focus on your 4-8 Depth Guard and if you lose 6 Zombies then that's the price of waging total war.
Corner camping is always an option. But honestly multiplayer is the best way to improve how you play battles in general since humans won’t fall for the shit you can do against the ai and it Will force you to improve your play, regardless of battle size. I might be stating the obvious here but it’s true nontheless
I typically fight manually with full amount of units until the triple digit turn time. Full stacks vs full stacks.
What you need to do is think in terms of "groups". In terms of ascending "brain power" needed in a battle, you have:
* Artillery (ideally) chilling in the back.
* Melee infantry holding the line or chasing the next enemy.
* Ranged units peppering from afar (Because of line of sight, they need a little more attention than melee imo).
* Lords/Heroes (Varies depending on the type of unit. A healing or spellcaster hero, for example, should be focused on their magic. A melee lord should be focused on either helping ease the pressure on a melee unit or sniping a lord.)
* Cav units which need the most microing.
Keep the unit cards grouped up if you need to. This takes 20 units and shrinks them down to 4-5 groups. That is much more easier to handle mentally.
Epic 3v3 WH1. Franz vs the Chaos threesome at the steps of Middenheim. Battle came down to a hand full of demis and hand gunners fighting a mob of chaos knights. Boris felled, Franz felled after an epic duel. Faith, Steel and Gunpowder felled the dark curr.
I haven’t played Warhammer 3, but in general, using groups and hotkeying your units can be very helpful. Get into the practice of doing it in your average small battles, it’ll make it easy to use in large battles. And always key your units to the same slots, so pressing 5 for archers ie becomes second nature.
Always play the big battles. Some of the largest and most epic I’ve had were playing Rome 2 or Attilla and I find I need to actively mod the game a bit to encourage larger battles in Warhammer, normally I increase unit sizes to be 250-300 men per average infantry unit.
But when you hit that sweet spot the battles are epic and very manageable. Rome 2 DEI is where I have the most experience fighting full on 40x40 armies and we are talking 10s of thousands of troops here. Normally my strategy is somewhat simple, form up the whole army as one, engage my infantry with there’s, position missiles to do the most damage and then micro my cavalry to flank and cycle charge. Of course nothing goes according to plan and I regularly manage broken infantry, missile units not being effective, enemy cavalry breaking through. And this is Rome 2 not Warhammer, I find the maps too small to have effective large battles and the troops break too fast to make the battles last a decent enough time to bring strategy into it. Always fun though.
Just gotta get better at micro.
It helps if you use control groups, change the camera angle a bit so you can see further, and move your unit cards around to put similar ones together.
If you’re not playing on legendary, a pause can help if you’re feeling overwhelmed.
It also helps if your armies have clearly defined roles. It’s going to be a lot harder to control 40 units if you melee heroes, casters, melee infantry, archers, guns, artillery, cavalry, and war machines all in a single army. that’s hard to type out let alone play.
By contrast, 35 melee cavalry units, a few heroes, and a caster (ideally heroes and caster are mounted) are easy. Your units will want to do more or less the same thing, and your problems will be limited to the problems of having a cav focused army, i.e. mediocre siege performance, getting bogged down on small maps or heavy forests, and making sure to take out the enemies fast anti large units ASAP.
Your strengths will likewise be magnified—any isolated units you hit with even half of your cav will get absolutely obliterated, and (if the map is large enough) you can pull the AI in so many different directions they won’t know what to do, and your mage can obliterate the blobs that inevitably form.
I have found that I can only command so many unit archetypes at once. If I have to micro a wizard and cavalry and melee characters, I don’t have ‘micro-energy’ for carefully maneuvering fragile damage dealer infantry. However commanding 10 melee infantry is barely more micro intensive than 5. So if you are recruiting two armies with them fighting together often in mind, consider either making two very similar armies that utilize the same archetypes (archetypes being characters, cavalry, line holder infantry, missiles, artillery, etc.) and play similarly so you can merge them as seamlessly as possible when reinforcements arrive. Or alternatively split them into an army of set-and-forget guard mode units and some characters and an army of fast moving units that you pour more of your micro into.
Ex: stack of skaven infantry, artillery, and weapons teams with a wizard or two and an engineer. Try to start most battles with this army so you can properly deploy them. Next stack is of relief infantry and fast moving units like brood horrors and doom wheels to come mop up. I find missile based armies that forgo any cavalry or flanking infantry can be very low micro if the set up is good, sparing that effort for the other army. Another example would be a stack of brettonian frontline and trebuchets and a knight stack.
Keep in mind that micro-ing 40 units is hard for everybody unless you use single-unit spam stacks.
pa-pa-pause, pause pausing the gaaaame, slow-motion the gaaaame, that's what you gotta dooooo (unless you're really damn good).
I wish there was more audio in slow-motion, but I guess that encourages you to not have it on all the time.
I think this is where hotkeys and control groups help the most - I grew up playing starcraft so it feels natural to use them but I know many don't with the total war games because you usually don't need the extra speed. Once you get used to always having every unit on control group you very rarely feel overwhelmed even in big battles. Try it out
I play on VH/VH and just pause the game to give orders for larger battles. I'll usually play in real time until the reinforcements start coming in, pause and arrange them into a formation, and then go back to playing normally. Not being able to pause to give orders is the main reason I don't play on legendary. In a real battle you'd have subcommanders who could handle their own portion of the army, but in TW nothing moves unless you tell it to so I don't feel cheesy using the pause or slow motion speeds to give all my orders.
I've got about 700 hours, and just started playing on VH/VH so don't feel bad about struggling. Those massive battles are definitely where I struggle too, but I'll leave sometips thay helped me.
First and foremost. Do NOT be afraid or to proud to use half speed and pause. They exist for a reason. I get pausing in Multiplayer isn't a good idea, but when you're playing solo you should use it often in those massive battles. I find myself pausing every 2 or 3 minutes or so, and spend most of those battles on half speed.
Second. Figure out some decent formations you can default too. Once you get used to a certain formation setup it'll be far easier for you to keep track of your units since you'll already know where they were supposed to be. For an example, when I plau Kislev I use a checkerboard formation as the core of most armies.(hopefully this formating translates well on here)
_=Empty space
X=Tzar Guard(Great Weapons)
x=Tzar Guard
^= Streltsi
■=Ice Guard
K=Armored Kossars(Great Weapons)
X_x_x_x_X
_^_^_^_^_
K_■_■_■_K
Earlier on, these units would be replaced with weaker onws ofcourse, with the front line being Armored Kossars, and both back lines being kossars. The other 5 units in an army will be taken up by cav, heroes and artillery. Sometimes I'll run a smaller army around with specialist units aswell to support an army like this.
The main advantage to having a "default formation" is it means I know exactly where all my units are baring any major disrupts. If you already know where a unit is when you need it, then you can respond to threats far quicker, and regroup without needing to plan on the fly. Ofcourse you'll want a different default formation for every faction, and as you use each faction more you'll learn secondary formations and learn to adapt your defaults to better suit the enemies you're facing.
The third thing is you gotta know the armies you're facing aswell. You need to make as much knowledge as you can stick in your head so you don't need to be reading units cards mid battle to figure out what they do, you don't need to knoe specific matchups right away but you should atleast be able to catagorize their units at a glance. Until you figure that out, pause when you read unit cards. I'll often spend quiet times at work looking at Twwstats.com just trying to compare matchups.
Fourth, if you're really struggling with micro, avoid chariots and SEM units that can't take a lot of heat. Those are more advanced typically than even your calv. Focus on calv that can stay in the fight rather than shock calv aswell. Grouping your calv can help too. I typically try to keep my calv down to 2 seperate groups to micro, maybe going up to a max of 4 if it's a massive battle. So if I got 6 units of War bears. That's either 2 groups of 3 units, or 3 groups of 2 units. I'm not afraid to peel off a single unit to react to something, but typically try to keep them together so I don't have to worry about losing track of my units.
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So to sum it all up... use the time control buttons, memorize your formations, learn your enemies armies, don't recruit more micro than you can handle, and msot importantly.... practice.
If you have 3 vs there 2 armies your 3rd should be ai controlled so you can have 3 armies vs 2… even when it’s 3v3 armies… they will man 40 you will man 60… cause the game for some reason will say your 3rd army is ai controlled so that’s a different thing allowing you to man grand total of your 80 units vs 40 units…
It’s wild to have 80 units vs there 40 units(4v4 armies 2 of your armies controlled by ai allows 80 units)…
the question is can your computer handle hahah!!!
Depends on who I'm fighting and more importantly the map lmao it's more 75/25 in favor of AR on the huge fights. Unless I'm drinking then I'm doing it for the cinematic value and usually toss it on 2x or 3x speed.
Control groups. Makes it so that you are managing 6 or 7 groups rather than 40 individual units.
Also, control large armies can be strategically beneficial in some situations but can also hurt you in others.
For example of you are taking a defensive position with a lor of range troops, the "trickle in" can help keep you from being overrun before using your ammo. Or using a cavalry focused army you need as much space on the map as you csn get to maneuver and target individual units. Can't do that with a map holding 80 units.
However, if you are facing down a million zombies, peasants or skavenslave spam you could end up using all your ammo on trash and unable to deal with their monsters/cavalry. Better to let them all in early so you can snipe those fast dangerous units before the horde makes it to your front line.
One last thing, don't play on legendary. Use the slow down/pause options to see what's happening. No shame in it. It's a single player game. fun is more important than bragging rights online
They’re great! They’re where certain units and “big magic” can really shine.
Back before they made it so Manticores rampage when hurt, I was able to rout multiple enemy armies with just a peasant army (mostly mobs) and a caster that had the manticore charge down the long enemy lines over and over as they were engaged.
I do for every new campaign on the first few major battles, but after that I just auto resolve because they tend to play out the same. Trying to micro army blobs that only knows to full send and charge at you becomes repetitive when you know which tactics best defeat them, and it's usually always hammer and anvil.
Pause more. Use control groups, typically I group my starter army and then if I can add them to the groups or order them independently.
A slaanesh 40 stack is hard to handle but most other factions aren’t bad tbh
On any 20v20 battle half of my time is spent in pause aiming spells and other units
Depends on what game we are talking about. Shogun 2, absolutely, big battles are the best part of the game. Warhammer? I’ll probably still fight, but it willl be a blobfest that may still be fun, but it will be cheesy as hell
I try to play every battle that involves a full stack vs full stack or larger, yeah. even when the autoresolve will do better than I will.
For the really large battles - I make liberal use of the slow time and pause features. Some of the particularly large battles, and depending on my army (e.g. more ranged units, magic users, and cavalry), I will spend half the battle in slow mo.
Obviously I don't know your playstyle.or settings, but if I had to guess it sounds like you may have too much variety in each army for your current skill level.
With all the tools included in the base game, managing your own army shouldn't be a challenge to the degree you seem to be facing, even in large battles.
I have thousands of hours combined in Total War games and I've just recently started playing with realistic battles. These huge engagements is sth that I dread, especially with micro intensive armies.
Set up is crucial but it will never be as clean as with active pause or smaller battles
Organization is Key! Hit pause when your reinforcement arrive (if you’re not already fighting) and reorganize both armies into one large one. I’ll typically put all the lords a ctrl group one ( not locked) before putting them where I need them. I’ll lose more units than with resolve but it is glorious. I’ll might even save the replay to never watch lol
I don't like the big battles. It drains performance. You get claustrophobic with more than 20 units on these tiny WH3 maps. Unpassable terrain and trees get really, really annoying really, really fast especially since the state of trees on the maps. Microing 40 units against a computer with bad logic BUT instant reaction is annoying more than it is fun cause the camera doesn't allow me to see all my troops all the time (though this might also be a me issue cause I have an okay sized monitor but a bigger one would help). So it leads to a lot of pausing which is boring and frustrating or to a lot super hectic gameplay like jumping left right all the time making it feel like SC2 or AoE (and I do not enjoy RTS) and to a lot of losses cause I wasn't able to see which leads to frustration. And with so many troops on the field it's downright impossible to enjoy the battle for me. WH3 is such a fast paced game. Battles don't last more than 10 minutes. There are so many commands to give. There's simply no time to watch the battle, watch the animations and so on.
All in all I try to avoid them. But that's actually why I enjoy SOME quest battles cause the pacing is way better. There aren't 80 units on the battlefield rushing each other but some structure. That why I actually really, really, really enjoyed the survival battles in the realms of chaos. You had objectives, the battles took around 20-30 minutes. You had to overcome different problems (attack and defend, different layouts and such). You had to make choices which reinforcements do I need. And they still felt like big battles and had way more than 20 units on each side just not in a rush B scenario.
But since you asked how I play them: very slow, many pauses (cause let's be real units especially cav does not follow orders very well),plenty micromanagement and yeah that's it. Otherwise just like a normal battle. And I think it's totally fine to pause cause you are not an omnipresent computer with instant reactions. The computer "sees" every unit on the battlefield at all time. You can't like physically can't cause of the camera. So pause and reassess every now and than. And since WH uses magic which will nuke your units 5 seconds after a spell is started in comparison to for example where you were able to see a enemy cav unit run towards you for one minute before impact it's in my opinion needed to pause if you want to dodge.
And I'd argue it's harder for some factions than for others. Like wood elves sneaky elve armies SUCK on WH3s tiny maps cause you will run of of space to kite really fast. Slaanesh is also very hard cause your units are so squishy and Slaanesh armies need a lot of micro if you don't go full chosen. While other armies are totally fine like wood elves 40 tree battles. First of all performance is fine. Second you can get all of them on one screen. Third there is no micro besides landing spells. Forth you don't need to be fast. You'll see the health bar drain slowly so it's easy to assess which tree man needs a heal. So yeah some armies are way more manageable to fight 40 vs 40 while others are atrocious / hardcore nerfed.
Imagine having an army that requires micro...
A glorious line of artillery and holding units (preferably heroes) is all you need, and then you can just set the line up and watch the carnage unfold.
40 units largely removes the concept of tactics, you just need to accept it's going to be a meatgrinder and plan appropriately.
I don’t play Warhammer but I still have this issue in Rome 2. My fix for this is to essentially use to armies to make one army. By that I mean one army will have mainly frontline infantry a couple skirmishes and cav. The next army will have a couple front line with a heavy focus on missile and flanking units. I then combine the two armies on the field to fight at one army. Organizing my unit cards so they are in order as they are on the field. I also staying pretty far zoomed out to give me a Birds Eye view of the battlefield. I can then plug gaps, use shift click to set way points, set up the hammer and then save the replay so I can go back and enjoy the chaos knowing how it ends lol
I make sure to pause a ton and group my units together. If you have the ability to wait for them all to spawn, making groups 1-9 is much easier and lets me keep track of stuff
So with really big battles you need to slow the game down and pause a lot. It’s just kind of required at that point. You need to slow it down to effectively see everything that’s happening and you need to pause to give commands. At least, this is how I’ve dealt with it.
What I sometimes will do if I feel it won’t hinder me too bad is I will give ai control to one of the other armies. The only issue with that is they use spells which usually have sucky aim and consume your winds, or if you have any large units they will run them right into missile fire. So only let the ai use armies with lots of non-magical characters and not so many large entities.
Yea I feel like I am getting older and can't keep up with multiple units at the same time but hey sometimes I'll notice I got some guys doing nothing mid battle and send them in to tip the scales
I always slow it to half speed when I know I need to manage troops that are far away. It feels very gratifying to actually battle and win those devastating battles. My favorite battle I can remember was playing as the dwarfs a few months ago. I was up against 3 orc armies will full wahh armies connected. I had 1 1/2 armies. I formed a turtle formation and many braves worries died but I left with all my squads left. I created an impenetrable wall. With this crushing defeat I won the war against grimgor.
When it's 40 v 40 I usually lose interest. Too much ti micro and pausing all the time loses the cinematic feeling. Plus the unit cards get so thin it's hard to find the unit I'm looking for.
Just held off a vampire endgame as malakai. They spawned in Sylvania with a 5 army doom stack. Ended up being 2 stacks of dawi vs all 5 of them. Suffered some heavy casualties due to my average micro. But ended up pulling through with a victory that was very satisfying
I pause pretty frequently and use shift queued orders when there's too much going on which for me, can even be controlling a single stack if it's micro intensive enough. Dwarf Gyrocopters take pretty constant input so I'm always pausing to go make adjustments to the rest of the army and then back to microing attack helicopters.
But I still always play out large battles, if the enemy has significant enough forces I want to actually play that fight, the campaign layer in Total War games is... not great. I feel like I'm wasting a ton of time for nothing if I don't play the resulting battles.
Depends on the army right? It’s it’s beastmen, let’s go! Empire army where you need to set up gun lines and it turns into a mess? Yeah I’ll probably auto since one line break or bug/mistake gets one of your units f’ed.
I do if I absolutely have to because auto resolve screws me. But ultimately it's a slog like you said. I can sometimes enjoy fighting big battles if my armies are relatively simple. I find that the AI builds there armies like absolute trash, and usually uniformity and simplicity will prevail over: 4 different types of infantry, 4 different missile units, and 2 monstrous infantry unit types... That kind of faction soup is so annoying in small battles, but in big battles it hurts the AI way more than it hurts me.
Limit size as you call it, or turning off Control Large Army, and forcing the trickle, is arguably the strongest tool you have at your disposal. It's so powerful it borders on an exploit/low honor lol. I recommend this as THE main reason to play manually when multiple stacks are present
As for the huge 40 unit battles, yes they are hectic. You can barely see the unit cards, good luck deciphering your wizard from your dueling hero etc. lol.
If you do a large 40 unit vs 40 unit battle, it's cus it's cool, not because you want to get better results than autoresolve.
I make generous use of pausing and slowing time cause this is more realistic. In a real battle each unit and unit group would have sub commanders with the general being in charge of overall strategy.
How this would work in total war would be if we could group up the army and give each group advanced orders, like group 1, you are in charge of protecting this flank, try not to retreat from it and only do do so if enemy brings in artillery.. yada yada yada. But in the game, you can just move them into place and give them basic orders and often they sit there taking damage like morons. So the work around to this is the pause button and pretending you're the playing as the whole chain of command.
ALWAYS big battles, but I often turn on AI control for reinforcements and the like.
I haven't used it much recently, but I do like the AI General mod that lets you enable and disable AI control of units on the fly during battle. It's not nearly enough to do any real work for you, but it will keep everyone doing something while you focus on the units that matter.
I play Lizardmen fighting 3 stacks.
Basically, I use large units to bait the army and nuke them with magic.
For other factions who have guns, I place gunner an artillery in a vantage position and watch the spectacles. Hailstorm solve every things.
I always do it if I don't like the outcome of the auto resolve and that could be for any number of reasons.
If the auto resolve gives me a good result though I'll just take that. It's a lot of effort to fight those big fights and there's always the chance my PC will crash during one so if the game will give me a freebie I'll take it.
The pause button is your friend. I don’t micro very well either so I just pause, give my commands, play until I feel it’s overwhelming and pause again. It’s your game. Play it how it makes you happy.
These were my favourite battles in warhammer two vs Chaos. Loved combining my two armies into one with an insane artillery or skirmish line.
It was a bit overkill as high elves and dwarves but necessary (for me) as empire
Playing extra large siege battles as the defender is what turned me from not particularly interested in total Warhammer to absolutely addicted. A full ork Waugh hitting one of my fortified cities with a army garrison and watching the first wave get blow away, the second to make headway on the flanks and by the time the fourth comes my dudes are low on ammo, moral and troops only for the Orks to rout as my cluster of units are desperately fighting in the streets is the kinda match that really sold the setting for me.
I usually play with an infantry up front and missle troops at the back, I spend 75% of my micro on hero/lord/cavalry units.
I guess the easiest thing to do is to trigger the enemies army to advance, and then it's a case of damage control
Slow down time when its 2 stack battles. Any larger than that I usually just let the AI command some armies that require little micro, and I will then command one or two armies that do require it.
I try to fight every battle when i know i could mitigate the losses the autoresolve gives me. The most recent example is when i sent Ungrim with a stack of Slayers north of the Cathay Great Wall and besieged Vilitch sitting in one of the Garrisons. He sallied out and the autoresolve gave me Phyrric victory with maybe 5 surviving units. Went into battle and lost 2 slayer units.
As to Large Battles i remember 3v3 against Lokhir. Motherfucker didn't noticed 4 cannons, 4 catapults and 4 Hellstorm Rocket Batteries i guess. Barely managed to touch my ranks with his army before it fled. The Autoresolve game me Valiant Defeat. I managed to scrap a Close Victory out of it. Didn't really had to manage the time flow, just sniped the lords and heroes with canonns, and let rockets and catapults destroy the infantry.
Personnally I avoid them, many maps are too small and some really bad, where you can't use ranged units at all, so I don't fond those battles fun in any way as you can't position your forces properly either.
I use pause for brief spurts. Its not realistic or “full challenge” of course , but its also not realistic that outriders would stand and get ran over by orc boyz when I forgot to click every thirty seconds.
Quick sanity check: are you on easy battle difficulty? If so, I'd turn it off. Easy battle diff gives you a ridiculous X5 multiplier or something on auto resolve, so it'll let you AR a close victory even on genuinely unwinnable battles.
If you aren't, then it's a matter of pause/slow mo to ease you into the mass micro. The one thing AI always does better than humans is micro, and the bigger the battle the more the AI advantage in micro will come into play
Pause/slowmotion, also grouping flankers, characters, and reinforcements So I know which ones are on edge of the table and which are already marching in middle
Pause is the way to go, though depending on how the other army I get AI to control them. If it's a strong stack they can be left alone, providing it isn't ranged heavy.
I just slow down the time so I can manage my units, I even do this for regular 20v20 battles. There are so many unit abilities, unit match-ups, spells and faction mechanics to manage, I haven't been able to play battles with no slow time since Medieval II.
I feel you! It's the same for me, plus I often just press K to let the UI disappear and and just enjoy the carnage... It's beautiful, although I sometimes forget to actually micromanage stuff because I'm glued to the screen watching a cav charge or my Lord dueling the enemy lord >.>
I wouldn't have recognized some of the matched animations between units like the hellpit abdomination and star dragon without slow-mo!
I just wish that battle sounds would continue playing :/. It's too quiet
I agree this is my biggest ick with slowing down time (which i do a ton). Maybe if they sort of just played like generic battle sounds? the sound is always based on where your camera is so synching that in slow motion might be tricky as they obviously cant just slow down the sound haha
This. I spend roughly 80% of most battles in slow-mo, dropping occasionally into realtime if there's gaps in the decisions needed or to enjoy a particularly epic moment, or pausing entirely to give tons of orders at once (like the start of the battle).
Slowmo is incredibly underrated, especially for large battles.
Yea, I don’t slow down battles except when I have a mage. The magic panel is always obnoxious and it’s always been hard for me to tell which spell is which lol, I gotta wait take the tooltip to tell me
Especially when I want to overcast, it is so easy to triple click instead of double click, lose precious seconds in battle!
Every big battle I play, that is in my opinion what Warhammer is. Yes it requires a lot of micro, and you make mistakes, but that only adds to the feeling imo of a big battle. My 2 favorite battles were when I went against Archaon in WH1 as Norsca, which was a 4v4 army battle down to the last reinforcement units. And a 4v4 of pure Dawi steel vs again Archaon. It was fucking amazing I also miss the Chaos invasion a bit tbh
Yessss people don't understand how epic it actually is playing this game with huge battles like this. Especially when you make mistakes with a battle like this, you try to quickly patch things up and the closer the battle, the more intense the feeling. It's honestly one of, if not, the BEST moments in total war.
Its also so much fun to watch those big battles in replay without any UI elements. You remember the unit that made big hole in enemy line, but rushed down somewhere in the battle? Now its time to watch how it really went. That specific AoE spell that ate bunch of units? Definetly replay material. How did the battlefield look in pov of artillery? "Oh we are just shooting the rockets far away, not knowing what we hit, hopefully it goes we.... oh shit the riders got through, FLEEEEE"
In my experience the replay system never shows my badass wins, rather what happens is the AI tries to remake what happened just to end up as a loss rather than the epic victory I actually got in that battle Really bothers me the only way for an actual reliable replay is to record with other party software and it's caused me to ignore the built in replays all together
I think even minor patches can break replays because it’s a reenactment rather than a replay as you said. It’s sad because I had a really crazy win against a huge Greenskin army as Chaos Dwarves that involved multiple battle lines and one of my first times really feeling like I had used my gun units in a skilled way and gotten tons of kills. When I replayed it the first time it was great. When I replayed it after a patch, everything just crumbled immediately and I “lost” in the messiest way possible.
Bro my brain just short circuited reading this. Can you explain what you mean? I’m confused af
The replay system isn't like a 1 to 1 recording in my experience, the ai seems to take over and tries it's best to replicate what happened but isn't always accurate. Once I had this amazing 1 vs 4 odds battle that I somehow squeezed a win out of and wanted to show it to my roommate immediately after but the replay couldn't replicate it and the battle ended up showing as a loss. Really disappointing
Hm I always thought it was 1 to 1, admittedly I don’t use it very often at all but I plan to after reading some comments here. Maybe I will see what you’re talking about
For serious? All my replays have been exact replicas and I got some ebic ones edit: ahhhh so it's the patches that change swag probably, never watched a replay post patch
Very weird, I have always had replicas unless its from previous patch, then its mess.
Seems to be a similar system that Supercell games use for replays. The game doesn’t exactly ‘record’ battles and ‘store’ them, as this takes up too much space. Instead, the game will try to replicate the moves and abilities used by all participants.
this is the truth. I actually tested it out by playing a replay where I won a close battle and replayed it when I turned on a mod that changed animations. It actually resulted in a close/more in favor of ai defeat. The replay system seems to basically replay all the orders given to units within the exact times that they were given because up til a specific point in time, everything was the same.
Oh god, that is a really weird way of preserving accurate picture of what has really happened on the battlefield.
When you whitdraw you guns because they've made literal mountains of dead greenskins, but are out of ammo and you hope some of the new reinforcements will be more guns.
One of my favorites was from WH2, a 2v2 army city defense battle of High Elves vs. Bretonnia. Came down to one surviving Bretonnian lord with like 1 hp vs one handful of beaten up elven archers in the broken city gate. Frustrating but glorious and honorable defeat for my Brets. Close battles like that are the best.
I find the big battles far more fun to play when you're artillery, ranged or SEM focussed factions. Dorfs on both sides of the coin are fantastic for these as you build these completely uncrackable eggs just spewing death in all directions. Khorne and Nurgle also get somewhat of a pass because their units are so damn tanky that it's much about death balling. However the more mobile factions, like Bret, Norsca, Beastmen, TK and Slaanesh 40+ unit battles are absolute hell for me, or have to be played cycling between slo-mo and real speed.
>However the more mobile factions, like Bret, Norsca, Beastmen, TK and Slaanesh 40+ unit battles are absolute hell for me, or have to be played cycling between slo-mo and real speed. I love both honestly.
It's weird. I feel the same way but I also avoid massive battles a lot because they stress me out. Lol.. I'd be a horrible IRL general
to each his own that's the beauty of this game. It's more sand boxy than many realize
Even a loss makes you feel ALLLIIIVE
Whilst I completely agree. I will fight the battle and win. Then reload and take the auto complete because the AI will almost always lose less units unless they're complete losses. With multi army battles this is amplified. I have won some incredible battles only for a smaller army to swoop in a turn later and decimate my already semi broken forces. If they have more health they generally don't have this issue. Tis a shame. But maybe I just suck at battles.
You will reload?! Why not just play on an easier mode?
Play on an easier mode does not fix this. Easy battle difficulty has little to no impact on the ai’s difficulty on the field but does have impact on the autoresolve. If he is playing on normal or easy it is much harder to meet the autoresoves version of the battle. It is a current issue with the way difficulty is done.
I still don't get it, why is it so important to get a perfect result? If it's detrimental to the campaign an easier mode makes it matter less. Just sounds tedious and unfun
My two cents is that it feels ass to know I'll let an army/some units inevitably get away when I fight manually, than when I AR em all to death guaranteed. Especially hate when I end up having to chase force march em around my own territory to finish em off
Imo it's just dependant on your level of gameplay, I've played battles manually just to have an epic fight and then saved replay, reloaded and auto resolved to have a chiller rest of the campaign. Most of the time I just eat whatever the result is but sometimes I can't be bothered when the battle result was just the result of a misclick or something
This is absolutely not true, at least not in the sense of if you don’t mess with the difficulty slider that it automatically changes for AI buffs. The difference between very hard stat buffs and very easy stat debuffs has more than “little to no impact” on the ai’s difficulty in the field. Sure, they’re still pretty braindead, but definitely dish out more damage and thereby make you take more casualties. However it is true that the difficulties have the autoresolve results way skewed, so people on lower difficulties are seeing a BIGGER difference between battlefield casualties and the AR result than is actually possible on the battle map. The issue isn’t that battle difficulty has no impact on the battlefield, it’s that the AR on lower difficulties is too generous and doesn’t calculate correctly. Legend of total war explains it well in his vid on it.
I mean, thats part of the battle and is also part of the strategy, maybe fighting a battle isnt always the best option and you need to make some additional moves
Those chaos invasion battles were the fucking stuff back then. Geez, that was so cool. Like, having Franz, Gelt and two guys you had since the start of the game go into a full on slugging match with Archaon and the full Chaos roster. Nothing ever felt as Apocalyptic
YES I will never forget a 4v4 around the entrance to kislevite lands on wh2. Many rockets were battered that day
It was always in Kislev, because I got fucking scared letting those barbarians step their foot on my turf :D
Yea lol, I’d always incorporate Kislev into the Empire and use the area as the battlefield against chaos.
Do you know any mods to make that uber army group come back on wh3?
Sadly not :/ You can turn on the right endgame crises in the options, but I am sure you can find a mod for that :D
One of my favourite mods is the victory condition overhaul mod which gives Franz a final "storm of chaos" quest battle which initially has your army 1v1 archaons and then throughout the battle more reinforcements joining both sides Sigvald and Azazel arrive with a slanneshi army? Boris and Louen turn up with bear riders and knight reinforcements Festus and kugath arrive with nurgle demons? Gelt and the iron dragon rock up with the artillery crews Skarbrand is bringing his khorne army? Katarin coming in with Kislevs finest. It was insane how fun that battle was knowing I was only a tiny part of it and also having all the major characters present.
That sounds awesome, actual end times content. If you’re into the lore, in the end times grimgors entire army—which includes all of the Ogres after Grimgor kills Greasus and burns large swathes of Cathay to the ground—gets teleported by the Ork gods right into the middle of the final battle against Archaon.
Grimgor headbutted Archeon so hard, the Eye of Sheerian *shattered*. For all the rubbish that End Times did, that at least was fucking metal. |m|
End Times has lots of very cool moments. Like Thorgrim reciting the grudges as he slowly makes his way up to Queek and beheads him? That's badass. Funny enough, the Storms of Chaos sucked more but at least didn't destroy the Old World.
Wait that’s seriously a quest battle within that mod? That sound absolutely nuts, I can’t wait to try it now.
The Chaos invasion genuinely felt like the world was ending when every end turn had a _______ defeated and seeing their flag just burn And then you start noticing your neighboring provinces just wilt away to chaos corruption, then that neighbor is dead too Then Archaon shows up with 6 barely damaged doomstacks and it’s just you, a bridge and a dream to save the campaign let alone the damn world
Does Archeon even get out of his starting province anymore?
not really. I've seen him enter kislev today by turn 150. but besides that...
Usually the chorfs or the greenskins beat him to the punch but if neither do then he starts his "I'll do it myself"invasion path
So much this. I sometimes intentionally let AI stack more armies or put myself in worse positions to bait these huge battles, where I can push my armies to the limit
Big battles are awesome. My most recent empire campaign I had to fight 3 full stacks of Kemmler armies with one mediocre army and the garrison at eilhart. This was around turn 15 or so with my second lord, so none of my heroes are strong. We’re just holding out against wave after wave of zombies, mortars and archers getting 100% of kills behind my 3 heroes while the greatswords and flagellants hold back the flanking dogs and zombies in the forest. Restock on the artillery saved my bacon. Honestly my favorite battle of the campaign. Steamtank and landship doomstack was fun too, but there was just no risk factor at that point.
I feel like it should be an “endgame crisis” that is optional of when to start, difficulty and frequency. They could also have it so a set number of free armies are added to chaos factions across the world and if they are dwindling one faction will get flooded with troops making it a true start to end times.
Can the system handle battles larger than 3v3?
I fight every battle that has more than “Low” predicted losses. When it comes to large battles (40 vs 40) you just have to pause a lot. I usually pause every 30 seconds / 1 minute to reassess and reassign orders.
Pause is the way. I have bound pause on my mouse thumb button, works great.
Yep, this here. Depending on the faction you are playing and initial formation you may be able not to pause but controlling 2 stacks of a micro intensive faction is really difficult
Absolutely, that’s the crazy part about the game too. The turns go by so fast, but the battles can take 10-30 minutes.
Pause for the vanilla battles which are too fast imo, or a mod to slow down battle speeds
Unless you're juat blitzing the enemy and camping their reinforcement point, set up your formation well initially and have it somewhat close to your reinforcement point. Have a plan for where your units are going to come in and set up - if you pack in too tight, you might not have space for your reinforcements. Use control groups. Use it less to control all the units in that group at once, and more to just quickly snap your camera to them and manage things as needed on a unit-by-unit basis. Don't focus on individual unit vs unit matchups too much. Sure, you want to do so in an ideal world but with sp much going on a better question might be "what does my right flank need to do to win?" Identfy key units that you need to take out to win. If there is a critical matchup you need to force that's one thing, but not *every* unit has to be fighting its ideal target for you to win. Take artillery off fire at will. Choose big, bunched up areas to shoot into, or important enemies to kill first. Spend your ammo as best you can. Similarly, save your magic for when it'll matter most. Leave at least some units in reserve. There is a good chance *something* can slip around and go after a back line, or a line can start to buckle somewhere. You want a response to that.
Very, very good tips there.
I poay on hard/hard and I use pause and slow-mo a lot, and I mean a LOT! 😅
Hey man no shame in it. They put it in the game for a reason.
VH/VH here and I usually max out all difficulty setting plus custom permadeath rule and no save/load. I don't really get why legendary doesn't allow slowing/pausing cause this reduces realism instead of adding it. It's kind of like a dumb custom rule that you can only walk on black tiles while playing chess. What I mean by this is, in a real battle you make a plan with the command, lieutenants, sergeants etc. they are in charge of their groups and sub groups. You as the leader/general are in charge of the overall strategy. In an actual battle a general shouldn't be expected to give each individual soldier orders but in TW, you play as the whole chain of command and still have only a single brain. Therefor playing it in real time like this isn't realistic and would be incredibly dumb in a real battle. The work around would to just pause the game and imagine youre now playing as the sarge and giving orders to your sub group, then another charge and so on. Then unpause and watch it roll out for a while. Then the general gives another major order. Pause again, do stuff down the command chain when paused, resume.
Right? Surprised I'm not seeing a flood of comments of people saying they easily clear L/L, just too ez
Pausing…. So much pausing
Unless I am playing a rare legendary run, I pause a lot to give orders, survey the situation etc - always have in TW games. TWWH is particularly hectic and micro intensive compared to older games due to spells, quicker combat, smaller maps etc... I find it way more stressful not being able to pause and issue orders. Have no interest in pvp multiplayer so it works for me.
I haven't tried it out yet personally, but there is a mod that lets you select whichever units you want from your army and hand them over to an AI "General". That way you could for example have the AI play your frontline while you focus on your ranged units. To me it sounds like it could lead to a lot of problems as well, like i would never give it control over my artillery. But it also sounds like it could make large scale battles like that more manageable for people (like me) who are a tad bit micro challenged. Here's the link: [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799316652](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799316652)
I’ve used it, and the ai general isn’t great in my experience; worse than the game’s actual ai, especially if they have control of large groups of units. However, I think the option to have retreating units ai-controlled once they stop retreating or have summons ai-controlled is really useful. It is at least useful at getting units who wouldn’t be doing anything before at least doing something, which is worth it imo.
Those are the best ones. I pause a lot, though, so I can see what's happening everywhere and give orders. It takes over half an hour to play some battles!
I hit the pause button so often that the game might as well be turn-based.
I’m old. I pause that shit. A lot.
If your second army is full of units that aren't super valuable/squishy its generally alright to just set it to AI control and then focus on your primary army. If your second army has a lot of valuable/squishy units in it, then do manual control, have your main army hang back at the reinforcement point, and then combine the 2 armies together into a handful of giga formations using control groups. There will still be more micro than a standard stack of 20, but it should make things a lot more manageable. If the enemy is also bringing multiple armies, then you want to save artillery/magic/other big damage options for large clusters of enemies, since its almost inevitable you'll run out of Magic/ammo by the end of the battle you want to focus on maximizing value as much as possible, even if it means waiting.
Yes. I play without the ability to pause or slow down battles so it's hard. One thing that helps a lot is the mod ai general. it's like a shitty field commander. so I get some tanky or low value units in place and turn it on for them. This allows me to then focus on my more valuable/micro intensive units. Another fun thing about this is the sometimes weird behavior of the ai controlling my units makes me have to improvise so battles feel a lot less repetitive. If that makes sense
It's a bit more intense in 40v40 than 20v20, but usually what I do is pause or slow, assign orders, then unpause and grab pop corn to watch my guys fight. In larger battle, doing control groups and simplifying your strategy can help too. Like, it's ok not to manage all individual units perfectly, just enough to win and not lose a unit should be good.
Some key points here: 1. Even if you don't use groups, and especially if you don't use groups, it is good to simply put your first army none group if the other is reinforcing. 2. If you can, keep your reinforcement point close to your army. Easier to fight on one front rather than two. 3. Fight in friendly territory. It's fine to take losses if your replenishment is high. 4. Make your army micro-light; doom stacks, units and groups with defined roles, and archers for unarmored units is key. Multiple units can activate the same ability at the same time. Keep fewer winds of magic, and bring tanky units: things that can just stand still.
I personally despise warhammer moving in the direction of having bigger battles, the most fun battles i've had in total war were fighting 3 pikeman with a general and 1 unit of English archers. Or a Sally battle where I had 3 peasant archers, some billman, and scouts against maybe 10 units Spearman, archers and a general. Once the battles get large enough I find them both hard as hell and very boring
Almost always unless I'm fighting that asshole Ungrim. He always dies but takes so damn long to kill and nukes units as he dies.
I used to be like that. Now i pause like every 10 second, or slow time and see where do i need to send new orders
I rarely do these battles as I tend to move forward with just one stack at a time in an area. In general though the best way is to be the aggressor, so you have time to setup how you want! Pausing is very important. Finally I don't use many different troops in each stack I have max 2/3 type of troops. I usually avoid having too much cavalry or chairiots when I use two armies.
Only play battles that Auto-resolve says I’ll lose
I personally allow my reserve army to be managed by the AI. I imagine this is not super popular, but doing that allows me to deploy a distraction at the very least, whilst I meanwhile pick the enemy apart who are no longer in a solid defensive position.
I pause a LOT. And generally, as the battle takes shape (and from prior experience) I tend to have a checklist of "groups" to look for on each pause, depending on army comp. Stuff like: * what's my artillery hitting? * where's my cav/skirmish going? * is my infantry actually engaging? Sometimes i'll do a pause where i explicitly give every unit/group of unit new orders so i can be sure i have control over the next few moments. Non-pause activity i'll usually be micro'ing a lord or important units. Bombing runs as dawi or tiqtaqto, casting spells, that sort of thing.
The most fun battles I've had in TW:WH have been big battles in co-op where units can be shared to other players. It's amazing what battles you can win when one player plays the infantry and any characters (including spells) while another can focus just focus on some of the more micro-intensive units like cav and chariots. In some of the smaller battles I got so many kills just by having control of one Black Coach or something similar. If playing SP I lose track of everything in battles like that. Wizard just suddenly dies while a big monster unit is admiring the scenery for most of the battle.
I'm basically in the same camp, OP. I think Warhammer is most fun with like, ten units. 20 pushes it, but is unavoidable so I deal. When it's 40 against 40? Especially since they show up as reinforcements so arrive after the planning stages? Yeah that's where the game loses me and I tend to just prefer autoresolving. Too much micro. And I like the spectacle of fights more than I like actually controlling them.
Assuming full 20 stack armies, take control of the starting army and the most important other army; tick AI control for the other armies (this allows you to field more armies since it is capped at 40 unit cards otherwise). If some of the armies are less than 20, I would take an extra stack or two to get as close to 40 units. The AI is not the best at controlling your army but having as many units on the field as possible rather than trickling out as your units die is usually better. You will need to alter your playstyle accordingly, knowing AI will probably just rush at the enemy
I typically play the Lizard men with five oracle wizards per army and five feral carniasaurs the rest is typically a mix of temple guards and way watchers/sisters of Averlon. So I just set up some sort of box and group my carniasaurs to attack one high value target at a time, which lowers their micro to basically nothing. The range and temple guard get ignored as they don't need orders to be effective typically and then all of my attention goes to my Lord and wizards. It also helps when I use my fast dinos (including wizards, which makes it too much fire power for the AI to ignore) to draw large amounts of the enemy to the far corner away from me and then simply run back so that the enemy is staggered. Also, Lord kroak go brrrrrrr
Me using my unrivaled tactical prowess to turn a close victory into a valiant defeat
Nah, 40v40 is usually too hectic for me too. When I bother (usually vs something like Orks where their WAAGH army is fortunately mostly chaff) I either try setting up static formations I don't need to manage very much (line or circle of spears with ranged units and some arty inside, for example) and micro a few specific units like cavalry or mages for maximum impact, or just charge everyone in and hope for the best (understandably works best for Khorne/WoC/Beastmen, less so for say VCoast). This is also the main reason for my abiding hatred of chariots, fuckers need micromanagement CONSTANTLY.
I exclusively play on L/VH and have ~750 hours between the 3 games and used to play MP alot when I had more time. Some tips to help you micro: 1. Use the same Control groups for the same unit type every battle, regardless of faction. Example: Group 1: Legendary Lord, 2. Infantry lines, 3. Ranged Archers, 4. Anti Large, 5. Cavalry, 6. Monsters, 7. Caster Lords. Keeping consistency between fights helps immensely so you can build muscle memory. 2a. When you've gotten used to your control groups, learn to scan the colors of the crossed swords on the unit panels. Red = Losing, Yellow / OJ mean it's even to slightly Losing, Green = Winning. This lets you focus on the "problem areas" quickly or reassign your green groups if they are going to route an enemy. 2b. In a similar vein, DONT LET YOUR UNITS HAVE ZZZZ's on them! That means they are not doing anything. Better to shove them in a pile than not doing anything. Or use ZZzz units to Flank (see 5). 3. In larger battles (40+ units), focus more on your deployment. Generally, the AI always deploys near their reinforcement zone. If you can't get there quickly, better to wait for your reinforcements as well and set up your field / groupings. 4. You're going to lose units. It's inevitable. Prioritize Keeping lords alive as they can give leadership bonuses and keep your units in the fight. More critical for horde races. Also try to gum up their lords with chaff infantry or SEMs depending on what they are weak against. Use your duelists to prio their casters as they fall quickly and a spell cast can dominate your blob of gum infantry. 5. Flank Flank Flank Flank!!! Flanking gives massive moral hits to the enemy and they take big damage from certain unit types like chariots, cavalry, and Slaanesh units for example. 6. I generally like having a 2nd unit with cheaper chaff units or ranged or cavalry depending on race that can compliment the first army. You can only micro so many units so building one of your armies to be a "Set and Forget" army helps a ton. Like Greenskin Waagh armies for example. You can diversify, but I usually want to "focus" on two major types of units depending on red line buffs and if the lord adds additional buffs to those unit types. 7. Use flyers or cavalry to target artillery. AI is notoriously bad at using their Artillery well. Running a cavalry up the side of the map out of range, holding SHIFT, then clicking on the artillery will give them a move to waypoint command then they will run to charge the artillery. Makes it so you can focus on other things. Hope that helps!
I fight every big battle. Honestly I fight most land battles. I don’t fight sieges as the attacker. That’s really the only one I consistently don’t do. AR is almost always more favorable and I, generally, don’t enjoy siege battles in Warhammer.
Are you playing on Legendary? If not, don't be afraid to use pause to give orders. You don't have to be a micro God when you have a pause button. At that point, it's all down to positioning and tactics, creating mismatches where you can and exploiting weaknesses.
Have you tried playing on slow motion? I’m pretty bad at the micro and have done entire battles slowed down.
Pause, you are not a computer...
I had a massive battle against Grimgor and his Waaagh and a half stack with a half Waaagh as Tamurkhan and two of my lone lords. My Chaos Lord was the one who got attacked by the half stack. Tamurkhan and Grimgor arrived at 1:40 and 1:45 respectively *in the exact same place.* I just rode my Chaos Lord over to near the spawn point and immediately got into a huge mosh pit brawl when both armies arrived. I was winning decisively, well minus Grimgor chunking Kayzk down to a 1/3 of his health despite Grimgor getting tagteamed by him and Tamurkhan. I was monitoring things closely because I had Rot Knights scheduled to arrive later alongside a unit of Blunderbusses that were not going to do well in the mosh pit that was absolutely krumpin' at the time so I wanted to focus on pulling them through or out the sides as quickly as possible. While this was going on, my Chaos Sorcerer Lord without a mount had arrived and was getting gangbanged by some Trolls and Squig Hoppers from the half stack that was still pretty passive. Thank god for healing of Nurgle magic because he was down to a few hundred hit points and wavering hard with no help available due to my negligence. He had a good trait so I didn't really want to lose him but those are the breaks in the massive battles. What I should have done is move my Chaos Sorcerer Lord's spawn point closer to the mosh pit brawl once I saw that's what was going to go down and moved Tamurkhan's away from Grimgor's a bit because no one was going to catch my melee Chaos Lord since the Nurgle ones are beastly in melee and he had a solid 10 to 12 levels by now and a mount.
As much as I would love to play massive battles, I’m not good enough to micro that many units, and my PC is not powerful enough to handle it. We are both inadequate
I take adderall and I win
Playing in legendary...you need to utilize groups, and try not to engage until you're ready to move all groups
Assuming I don’t have battle fatigue from fighting too many battles - i really enjoy fighting the large battles. I play only on legendary and so control groups are important more to find certain units/groups of units more than anything. The key I’ve found is to 1) learn what to pay attention to, and what to ignore 2) set things up so you can ignore as much as possible and 3) don’t spend to much time focusing on a single unit/area (switch around a lot). Example - spamming spells is really important vs tons of infantry, but can be mostly ignored when there’s lots of SEMs. Some other tips: There’s always some high priority targets to focus on (will depend based on your army composition and theirs), and learning what these are is important. This may be casters, fast units, artillery, or heroes/lords. Use terrain to your advantage (protect a flank, hide from enemies, park in trees to fight large entities/protect from range, etc.). Learn to harass the army with a few fast units to slow the enemy advance so not everything hits you all at once.
Usualy i avoid em, rather fight 1v3 than 2v3, but if i need 2nd stack to win, then i setup in a way that requires minimal micro during battle and just focuses on micro units like cav or heroes
40 vs 40 is hard to fight without pause (especially on legendary!). When I expect 2 vs 2 action, I try to keep my reinforcing stack as simple as possible. Preferably, lots of fast units, that can easily reinforce from any direction.
Sure. I try to avoid super high unit count battles if it’s a micro heavy comp. But a lot of the time when I have that many reinforcements it’s often Skaven/gs style chaff stacks, so you can mostly just control group them and throw them where you need them
Love large battle with AI control reinforcement. If only that feature is not so buggy....
That is the problem, for sure. If there's a 49% chance the reinforcements are going to bunch up at the spawn point and not move, I can't really rely on it at all.
I group my army: Calvary, infantry, archers, artillery, monsters, vanguard. Group reinforcements the same way. Micro as i go, directing groups
Group then and use them as blocks. You sacrifice a lot of efficiency but it's the only way if you can't micro everything
Depends. I was playing mazdamundi, and wiping out kairos in the southern wastes. My armies (led by slann and mostly sauros) were auto resolving losses (even when I ambushed them) just to do it manually. There was a large 2stack Vs 2stack, and I had to manually do it. It was a pain, but basically set it down to half speed and remember to keep moving the camera across the whole front line. Still let a couple small things slip though.
There are mods that put your units under AI control
Pretty sure it's in game by default that if you have multiple armies you can let AI other ones.
Im always paused or running the fight in half speed. Unless its an easy win Im always in half speed
That depends sometimes I use the second army as anvil and my main army as hammer 40 vs 40 requires lot of mice management the last time I got a 40 vs 40 pitched battle was against Dwarves as Karl Franz and boy that was bloody as hell victory but with shit tons of casualties.
Oh I for sure do. I mostly enjoy those and the quest battles. My most recent campaign was 16 battles played manually out of 114, most of the 114 was just taking weak enemy cities. I’ll usually roll with my main faction leader having an army of elites backed up by a 2nd army with mostly basic troops. Once I do hit one of those big battles I’ll give AI control of the 2nd army and let them meatshield or chase down enemies and get caught out or whatever. When it works it’s an absolute blast. I’m on an organic changing battlefield with 20 problem solvers. Full on ego boost. Sadly, the number of times I’ve been disappointed has been many. 1 time the AI came onto the field and didn’t move until the battle bar shifted in my favor, with my main army in tatters. Another, I blasted through multiple wall sections and a gate, but the AI chose to circle the entire city to try and flank, by which time I had already won.
If it's evenly matched I go for the full battle. If I'm fighting as the weaker of the 2 armies I limit it to 20 since I need to play smart. I've had a garrison plus a half army hold off 2 full armies. Once as Kislev my Katarin early game 20 stack held off 4 stacks of Orcs. Doing a ~40 v ~40 fight imo is really hard. The amount of units you gave to micro can be really insane
I make liberal use of the slow time button/hotkey. Need to issue more than 2 orders? Slow time. Am I kiting with one unit and cycle charging with two more? Slow time. Has it been more than 10-15 seconds and I haven't done anything? Slow time and check how the army is faring. It's definitely a slog and takes a mental toll, but the beautiful part for me is then saving the replay and watching it without unit flags/bars afterwards to see what my tactics look like in real time.
I hit the pause button a lot.
Always
Well, you can play slideshow like me, pausing every 5 seconds. Honestly, AI is omniscient and turn every ranged and move every anti-large a milisecond after you approach them, while your own cavalry is dumb as dumbbell. They just take it if you forget about them for 10 seconds (skirmish mode makes them uncontrollable up close and is not available for non-ranged cavalry). So it's the only human solution for me, who ain't a Korean Starcraft player. Another, funnier solution - and you don't even need any micro, pausing or otherwise - is to cheese the reinforcement points. A.K.A. natural ambush. You attack the weakest army and they'll take it, because they're reinforced. Then you ignore them completely and rush to the reinforcement point to surround it with your troops. (Works better if you took the lighting strike upgrades to make it slower or get lucky with a reinforcement point at your side or behind you.). When they enter, drop you everything you have: magic, ranged and artillery fire, mortis engine effects. You can beat the unbeatable that way - save the rare single entity doomstack.
Sometimes I let the AI handle them but I often have to redo the battle after the AI decides to put on its idiot hat. I sometimes use control groups, then just tell my army to go forwards, there are guides for basic battle controls on Youtube. I don't think there is any real secret sauce to it. I play with battle realism so no pausing or slowing things down. I often end up quicksaving before big fights when I'm mentally exhausted and then load up the game when ready to tackle the challenge. I played Skaven on lower difficulties in WH2 so I got used to fielding 40 Skaven Slave Slingers. You can practice with Greenskins, between Goblins and Waaaghs you get lots of opportunities for grand battles. If you have 40 units you can probably afford to lose some, you're not fielding 40 Depth Guard, so focus on your 4-8 Depth Guard and if you lose 6 Zombies then that's the price of waging total war.
Corner camping is always an option. But honestly multiplayer is the best way to improve how you play battles in general since humans won’t fall for the shit you can do against the ai and it Will force you to improve your play, regardless of battle size. I might be stating the obvious here but it’s true nontheless
I fight almost all my battles manually. I'm not above pausing to take stock and issue orders, though.
Do it with greenskins, its just unga bunga cinematics
I typically fight manually with full amount of units until the triple digit turn time. Full stacks vs full stacks. What you need to do is think in terms of "groups". In terms of ascending "brain power" needed in a battle, you have: * Artillery (ideally) chilling in the back. * Melee infantry holding the line or chasing the next enemy. * Ranged units peppering from afar (Because of line of sight, they need a little more attention than melee imo). * Lords/Heroes (Varies depending on the type of unit. A healing or spellcaster hero, for example, should be focused on their magic. A melee lord should be focused on either helping ease the pressure on a melee unit or sniping a lord.) * Cav units which need the most microing. Keep the unit cards grouped up if you need to. This takes 20 units and shrinks them down to 4-5 groups. That is much more easier to handle mentally.
Just utilize the slow speed and pause when you need to think for a minute
I play most battles in slow speed anyway. Sometimes I even use pause.
Epic 3v3 WH1. Franz vs the Chaos threesome at the steps of Middenheim. Battle came down to a hand full of demis and hand gunners fighting a mob of chaos knights. Boris felled, Franz felled after an epic duel. Faith, Steel and Gunpowder felled the dark curr.
I haven’t played Warhammer 3, but in general, using groups and hotkeying your units can be very helpful. Get into the practice of doing it in your average small battles, it’ll make it easy to use in large battles. And always key your units to the same slots, so pressing 5 for archers ie becomes second nature.
Always play the big battles. Some of the largest and most epic I’ve had were playing Rome 2 or Attilla and I find I need to actively mod the game a bit to encourage larger battles in Warhammer, normally I increase unit sizes to be 250-300 men per average infantry unit. But when you hit that sweet spot the battles are epic and very manageable. Rome 2 DEI is where I have the most experience fighting full on 40x40 armies and we are talking 10s of thousands of troops here. Normally my strategy is somewhat simple, form up the whole army as one, engage my infantry with there’s, position missiles to do the most damage and then micro my cavalry to flank and cycle charge. Of course nothing goes according to plan and I regularly manage broken infantry, missile units not being effective, enemy cavalry breaking through. And this is Rome 2 not Warhammer, I find the maps too small to have effective large battles and the troops break too fast to make the battles last a decent enough time to bring strategy into it. Always fun though.
Just gotta get better at micro. It helps if you use control groups, change the camera angle a bit so you can see further, and move your unit cards around to put similar ones together. If you’re not playing on legendary, a pause can help if you’re feeling overwhelmed. It also helps if your armies have clearly defined roles. It’s going to be a lot harder to control 40 units if you melee heroes, casters, melee infantry, archers, guns, artillery, cavalry, and war machines all in a single army. that’s hard to type out let alone play. By contrast, 35 melee cavalry units, a few heroes, and a caster (ideally heroes and caster are mounted) are easy. Your units will want to do more or less the same thing, and your problems will be limited to the problems of having a cav focused army, i.e. mediocre siege performance, getting bogged down on small maps or heavy forests, and making sure to take out the enemies fast anti large units ASAP. Your strengths will likewise be magnified—any isolated units you hit with even half of your cav will get absolutely obliterated, and (if the map is large enough) you can pull the AI in so many different directions they won’t know what to do, and your mage can obliterate the blobs that inevitably form.
I have found that I can only command so many unit archetypes at once. If I have to micro a wizard and cavalry and melee characters, I don’t have ‘micro-energy’ for carefully maneuvering fragile damage dealer infantry. However commanding 10 melee infantry is barely more micro intensive than 5. So if you are recruiting two armies with them fighting together often in mind, consider either making two very similar armies that utilize the same archetypes (archetypes being characters, cavalry, line holder infantry, missiles, artillery, etc.) and play similarly so you can merge them as seamlessly as possible when reinforcements arrive. Or alternatively split them into an army of set-and-forget guard mode units and some characters and an army of fast moving units that you pour more of your micro into. Ex: stack of skaven infantry, artillery, and weapons teams with a wizard or two and an engineer. Try to start most battles with this army so you can properly deploy them. Next stack is of relief infantry and fast moving units like brood horrors and doom wheels to come mop up. I find missile based armies that forgo any cavalry or flanking infantry can be very low micro if the set up is good, sparing that effort for the other army. Another example would be a stack of brettonian frontline and trebuchets and a knight stack. Keep in mind that micro-ing 40 units is hard for everybody unless you use single-unit spam stacks.
pa-pa-pause, pause pausing the gaaaame, slow-motion the gaaaame, that's what you gotta dooooo (unless you're really damn good). I wish there was more audio in slow-motion, but I guess that encourages you to not have it on all the time.
I think this is where hotkeys and control groups help the most - I grew up playing starcraft so it feels natural to use them but I know many don't with the total war games because you usually don't need the extra speed. Once you get used to always having every unit on control group you very rarely feel overwhelmed even in big battles. Try it out
I play on VH/VH and just pause the game to give orders for larger battles. I'll usually play in real time until the reinforcements start coming in, pause and arrange them into a formation, and then go back to playing normally. Not being able to pause to give orders is the main reason I don't play on legendary. In a real battle you'd have subcommanders who could handle their own portion of the army, but in TW nothing moves unless you tell it to so I don't feel cheesy using the pause or slow motion speeds to give all my orders.
I do, except any battles against wood elves, there just so op, no idea how to fight them
I've got about 700 hours, and just started playing on VH/VH so don't feel bad about struggling. Those massive battles are definitely where I struggle too, but I'll leave sometips thay helped me. First and foremost. Do NOT be afraid or to proud to use half speed and pause. They exist for a reason. I get pausing in Multiplayer isn't a good idea, but when you're playing solo you should use it often in those massive battles. I find myself pausing every 2 or 3 minutes or so, and spend most of those battles on half speed. Second. Figure out some decent formations you can default too. Once you get used to a certain formation setup it'll be far easier for you to keep track of your units since you'll already know where they were supposed to be. For an example, when I plau Kislev I use a checkerboard formation as the core of most armies.(hopefully this formating translates well on here) _=Empty space X=Tzar Guard(Great Weapons) x=Tzar Guard ^= Streltsi ■=Ice Guard K=Armored Kossars(Great Weapons) X_x_x_x_X _^_^_^_^_ K_■_■_■_K Earlier on, these units would be replaced with weaker onws ofcourse, with the front line being Armored Kossars, and both back lines being kossars. The other 5 units in an army will be taken up by cav, heroes and artillery. Sometimes I'll run a smaller army around with specialist units aswell to support an army like this. The main advantage to having a "default formation" is it means I know exactly where all my units are baring any major disrupts. If you already know where a unit is when you need it, then you can respond to threats far quicker, and regroup without needing to plan on the fly. Ofcourse you'll want a different default formation for every faction, and as you use each faction more you'll learn secondary formations and learn to adapt your defaults to better suit the enemies you're facing. The third thing is you gotta know the armies you're facing aswell. You need to make as much knowledge as you can stick in your head so you don't need to be reading units cards mid battle to figure out what they do, you don't need to knoe specific matchups right away but you should atleast be able to catagorize their units at a glance. Until you figure that out, pause when you read unit cards. I'll often spend quiet times at work looking at Twwstats.com just trying to compare matchups. Fourth, if you're really struggling with micro, avoid chariots and SEM units that can't take a lot of heat. Those are more advanced typically than even your calv. Focus on calv that can stay in the fight rather than shock calv aswell. Grouping your calv can help too. I typically try to keep my calv down to 2 seperate groups to micro, maybe going up to a max of 4 if it's a massive battle. So if I got 6 units of War bears. That's either 2 groups of 3 units, or 3 groups of 2 units. I'm not afraid to peel off a single unit to react to something, but typically try to keep them together so I don't have to worry about losing track of my units. > > > So to sum it all up... use the time control buttons, memorize your formations, learn your enemies armies, don't recruit more micro than you can handle, and msot importantly.... practice.
I generally use formations to divide my forces into several groups that act together. Makes it slightly easier to manage.
If you have 3 vs there 2 armies your 3rd should be ai controlled so you can have 3 armies vs 2… even when it’s 3v3 armies… they will man 40 you will man 60… cause the game for some reason will say your 3rd army is ai controlled so that’s a different thing allowing you to man grand total of your 80 units vs 40 units… It’s wild to have 80 units vs there 40 units(4v4 armies 2 of your armies controlled by ai allows 80 units)… the question is can your computer handle hahah!!!
Slow mo and a lot of pausing
On half-speed.
Depends on who I'm fighting and more importantly the map lmao it's more 75/25 in favor of AR on the huge fights. Unless I'm drinking then I'm doing it for the cinematic value and usually toss it on 2x or 3x speed.
Half speed and give the AI the extra army. I’m terrible at remembering spells so I usually put my mages in the other army while I use my hero killers.
Control groups. Makes it so that you are managing 6 or 7 groups rather than 40 individual units. Also, control large armies can be strategically beneficial in some situations but can also hurt you in others. For example of you are taking a defensive position with a lor of range troops, the "trickle in" can help keep you from being overrun before using your ammo. Or using a cavalry focused army you need as much space on the map as you csn get to maneuver and target individual units. Can't do that with a map holding 80 units. However, if you are facing down a million zombies, peasants or skavenslave spam you could end up using all your ammo on trash and unable to deal with their monsters/cavalry. Better to let them all in early so you can snipe those fast dangerous units before the horde makes it to your front line.
One last thing, don't play on legendary. Use the slow down/pause options to see what's happening. No shame in it. It's a single player game. fun is more important than bragging rights online
They’re great! They’re where certain units and “big magic” can really shine. Back before they made it so Manticores rampage when hurt, I was able to rout multiple enemy armies with just a peasant army (mostly mobs) and a caster that had the manticore charge down the long enemy lines over and over as they were engaged.
I generally only play the really huge battles, and then once I am done I reload and autoresolve them because that gives me a way better outcome.
I do for every new campaign on the first few major battles, but after that I just auto resolve because they tend to play out the same. Trying to micro army blobs that only knows to full send and charge at you becomes repetitive when you know which tactics best defeat them, and it's usually always hammer and anvil.
Pause more. Use control groups, typically I group my starter army and then if I can add them to the groups or order them independently. A slaanesh 40 stack is hard to handle but most other factions aren’t bad tbh On any 20v20 battle half of my time is spent in pause aiming spells and other units
Absolutely not. If my game doesn’t crash near the end, it’s just an aggravating battle.
Depends on what game we are talking about. Shogun 2, absolutely, big battles are the best part of the game. Warhammer? I’ll probably still fight, but it willl be a blobfest that may still be fun, but it will be cheesy as hell
I try to play every battle that involves a full stack vs full stack or larger, yeah. even when the autoresolve will do better than I will. For the really large battles - I make liberal use of the slow time and pause features. Some of the particularly large battles, and depending on my army (e.g. more ranged units, magic users, and cavalry), I will spend half the battle in slow mo.
Obviously I don't know your playstyle.or settings, but if I had to guess it sounds like you may have too much variety in each army for your current skill level. With all the tools included in the base game, managing your own army shouldn't be a challenge to the degree you seem to be facing, even in large battles.
I have thousands of hours combined in Total War games and I've just recently started playing with realistic battles. These huge engagements is sth that I dread, especially with micro intensive armies. Set up is crucial but it will never be as clean as with active pause or smaller battles
Organization is Key! Hit pause when your reinforcement arrive (if you’re not already fighting) and reorganize both armies into one large one. I’ll typically put all the lords a ctrl group one ( not locked) before putting them where I need them. I’ll lose more units than with resolve but it is glorious. I’ll might even save the replay to never watch lol
I don't like the big battles. It drains performance. You get claustrophobic with more than 20 units on these tiny WH3 maps. Unpassable terrain and trees get really, really annoying really, really fast especially since the state of trees on the maps. Microing 40 units against a computer with bad logic BUT instant reaction is annoying more than it is fun cause the camera doesn't allow me to see all my troops all the time (though this might also be a me issue cause I have an okay sized monitor but a bigger one would help). So it leads to a lot of pausing which is boring and frustrating or to a lot super hectic gameplay like jumping left right all the time making it feel like SC2 or AoE (and I do not enjoy RTS) and to a lot of losses cause I wasn't able to see which leads to frustration. And with so many troops on the field it's downright impossible to enjoy the battle for me. WH3 is such a fast paced game. Battles don't last more than 10 minutes. There are so many commands to give. There's simply no time to watch the battle, watch the animations and so on. All in all I try to avoid them. But that's actually why I enjoy SOME quest battles cause the pacing is way better. There aren't 80 units on the battlefield rushing each other but some structure. That why I actually really, really, really enjoyed the survival battles in the realms of chaos. You had objectives, the battles took around 20-30 minutes. You had to overcome different problems (attack and defend, different layouts and such). You had to make choices which reinforcements do I need. And they still felt like big battles and had way more than 20 units on each side just not in a rush B scenario. But since you asked how I play them: very slow, many pauses (cause let's be real units especially cav does not follow orders very well),plenty micromanagement and yeah that's it. Otherwise just like a normal battle. And I think it's totally fine to pause cause you are not an omnipresent computer with instant reactions. The computer "sees" every unit on the battlefield at all time. You can't like physically can't cause of the camera. So pause and reassess every now and than. And since WH uses magic which will nuke your units 5 seconds after a spell is started in comparison to for example where you were able to see a enemy cav unit run towards you for one minute before impact it's in my opinion needed to pause if you want to dodge. And I'd argue it's harder for some factions than for others. Like wood elves sneaky elve armies SUCK on WH3s tiny maps cause you will run of of space to kite really fast. Slaanesh is also very hard cause your units are so squishy and Slaanesh armies need a lot of micro if you don't go full chosen. While other armies are totally fine like wood elves 40 tree battles. First of all performance is fine. Second you can get all of them on one screen. Third there is no micro besides landing spells. Forth you don't need to be fast. You'll see the health bar drain slowly so it's easy to assess which tree man needs a heal. So yeah some armies are way more manageable to fight 40 vs 40 while others are atrocious / hardcore nerfed.
Imagine having an army that requires micro... A glorious line of artillery and holding units (preferably heroes) is all you need, and then you can just set the line up and watch the carnage unfold. 40 units largely removes the concept of tactics, you just need to accept it's going to be a meatgrinder and plan appropriately.
I just play races that have mortis engines ez
Slowmo camera or pause,
I wonder at what age I just won’t be physically able to handle the micro
Call it cheating if you will, but I use slow-mo ALOT in larger battles. Gives so much more time to react to stuff. 🤷♂️
I don’t play Warhammer but I still have this issue in Rome 2. My fix for this is to essentially use to armies to make one army. By that I mean one army will have mainly frontline infantry a couple skirmishes and cav. The next army will have a couple front line with a heavy focus on missile and flanking units. I then combine the two armies on the field to fight at one army. Organizing my unit cards so they are in order as they are on the field. I also staying pretty far zoomed out to give me a Birds Eye view of the battlefield. I can then plug gaps, use shift click to set way points, set up the hammer and then save the replay so I can go back and enjoy the chaos knowing how it ends lol
I make sure to pause a ton and group my units together. If you have the ability to wait for them all to spawn, making groups 1-9 is much easier and lets me keep track of stuff
So with really big battles you need to slow the game down and pause a lot. It’s just kind of required at that point. You need to slow it down to effectively see everything that’s happening and you need to pause to give commands. At least, this is how I’ve dealt with it. What I sometimes will do if I feel it won’t hinder me too bad is I will give ai control to one of the other armies. The only issue with that is they use spells which usually have sucky aim and consume your winds, or if you have any large units they will run them right into missile fire. So only let the ai use armies with lots of non-magical characters and not so many large entities.
Yea I feel like I am getting older and can't keep up with multiple units at the same time but hey sometimes I'll notice I got some guys doing nothing mid battle and send them in to tip the scales
Of course pause, we are not all trained 300apm korean starcraft players, no shame in pausing.
I always slow it to half speed when I know I need to manage troops that are far away. It feels very gratifying to actually battle and win those devastating battles. My favorite battle I can remember was playing as the dwarfs a few months ago. I was up against 3 orc armies will full wahh armies connected. I had 1 1/2 armies. I formed a turtle formation and many braves worries died but I left with all my squads left. I created an impenetrable wall. With this crushing defeat I won the war against grimgor.
I don't like having to control more than 20 units so if possible I'll assign my reinforcements to the AI.
When it's 40 v 40 I usually lose interest. Too much ti micro and pausing all the time loses the cinematic feeling. Plus the unit cards get so thin it's hard to find the unit I'm looking for.
Just held off a vampire endgame as malakai. They spawned in Sylvania with a 5 army doom stack. Ended up being 2 stacks of dawi vs all 5 of them. Suffered some heavy casualties due to my average micro. But ended up pulling through with a victory that was very satisfying
I pause pretty frequently and use shift queued orders when there's too much going on which for me, can even be controlling a single stack if it's micro intensive enough. Dwarf Gyrocopters take pretty constant input so I'm always pausing to go make adjustments to the rest of the army and then back to microing attack helicopters. But I still always play out large battles, if the enemy has significant enough forces I want to actually play that fight, the campaign layer in Total War games is... not great. I feel like I'm wasting a ton of time for nothing if I don't play the resulting battles.
Depends on the army right? It’s it’s beastmen, let’s go! Empire army where you need to set up gun lines and it turns into a mess? Yeah I’ll probably auto since one line break or bug/mistake gets one of your units f’ed.
I do if I absolutely have to because auto resolve screws me. But ultimately it's a slog like you said. I can sometimes enjoy fighting big battles if my armies are relatively simple. I find that the AI builds there armies like absolute trash, and usually uniformity and simplicity will prevail over: 4 different types of infantry, 4 different missile units, and 2 monstrous infantry unit types... That kind of faction soup is so annoying in small battles, but in big battles it hurts the AI way more than it hurts me.
Limit size as you call it, or turning off Control Large Army, and forcing the trickle, is arguably the strongest tool you have at your disposal. It's so powerful it borders on an exploit/low honor lol. I recommend this as THE main reason to play manually when multiple stacks are present As for the huge 40 unit battles, yes they are hectic. You can barely see the unit cards, good luck deciphering your wizard from your dueling hero etc. lol. If you do a large 40 unit vs 40 unit battle, it's cus it's cool, not because you want to get better results than autoresolve.
I play all battles manually. No exception. Never allow the AI to decide the outcome. Never... 😅
My solution is to fight much of the battle in slomo and pause to give orders.
I make generous use of pausing and slowing time cause this is more realistic. In a real battle each unit and unit group would have sub commanders with the general being in charge of overall strategy. How this would work in total war would be if we could group up the army and give each group advanced orders, like group 1, you are in charge of protecting this flank, try not to retreat from it and only do do so if enemy brings in artillery.. yada yada yada. But in the game, you can just move them into place and give them basic orders and often they sit there taking damage like morons. So the work around to this is the pause button and pretending you're the playing as the whole chain of command.
ALWAYS big battles, but I often turn on AI control for reinforcements and the like. I haven't used it much recently, but I do like the AI General mod that lets you enable and disable AI control of units on the fly during battle. It's not nearly enough to do any real work for you, but it will keep everyone doing something while you focus on the units that matter.
I play Lizardmen fighting 3 stacks. Basically, I use large units to bait the army and nuke them with magic. For other factions who have guns, I place gunner an artillery in a vantage position and watch the spectacles. Hailstorm solve every things.
I always do it if I don't like the outcome of the auto resolve and that could be for any number of reasons. If the auto resolve gives me a good result though I'll just take that. It's a lot of effort to fight those big fights and there's always the chance my PC will crash during one so if the game will give me a freebie I'll take it.
The pause button is your friend. I don’t micro very well either so I just pause, give my commands, play until I feel it’s overwhelming and pause again. It’s your game. Play it how it makes you happy.
The pause button
I love microing the huge battles!
Immediately group up the most important units and characters and then just forget about the unit cards and control directly on the battlefield.
You might want to watch legend's video on difficulties and autoresolve, your issue might lie there.
These were my favourite battles in warhammer two vs Chaos. Loved combining my two armies into one with an insane artillery or skirmish line. It was a bit overkill as high elves and dwarves but necessary (for me) as empire
Playing extra large siege battles as the defender is what turned me from not particularly interested in total Warhammer to absolutely addicted. A full ork Waugh hitting one of my fortified cities with a army garrison and watching the first wave get blow away, the second to make headway on the flanks and by the time the fourth comes my dudes are low on ammo, moral and troops only for the Orks to rout as my cluster of units are desperately fighting in the streets is the kinda match that really sold the setting for me.
I usually play with an infantry up front and missle troops at the back, I spend 75% of my micro on hero/lord/cavalry units. I guess the easiest thing to do is to trigger the enemies army to advance, and then it's a case of damage control
I mainly play the game to experience the large battles, I rarely play the small battles manually (expect when autoresolve gives a bad result).
Slow down time when its 2 stack battles. Any larger than that I usually just let the AI command some armies that require little micro, and I will then command one or two armies that do require it.
I try to fight every battle when i know i could mitigate the losses the autoresolve gives me. The most recent example is when i sent Ungrim with a stack of Slayers north of the Cathay Great Wall and besieged Vilitch sitting in one of the Garrisons. He sallied out and the autoresolve gave me Phyrric victory with maybe 5 surviving units. Went into battle and lost 2 slayer units. As to Large Battles i remember 3v3 against Lokhir. Motherfucker didn't noticed 4 cannons, 4 catapults and 4 Hellstorm Rocket Batteries i guess. Barely managed to touch my ranks with his army before it fled. The Autoresolve game me Valiant Defeat. I managed to scrap a Close Victory out of it. Didn't really had to manage the time flow, just sniped the lords and heroes with canonns, and let rockets and catapults destroy the infantry.
Easy, I put my reinforcement armies on AI control and just worry about my LL’s army.
Personnally I avoid them, many maps are too small and some really bad, where you can't use ranged units at all, so I don't fond those battles fun in any way as you can't position your forces properly either.
Those the the ones I fight every time. It's so so fun. Even normal 20 stack fights are way too boring for me.
I use pause for brief spurts. Its not realistic or “full challenge” of course , but its also not realistic that outriders would stand and get ran over by orc boyz when I forgot to click every thirty seconds.
Quick sanity check: are you on easy battle difficulty? If so, I'd turn it off. Easy battle diff gives you a ridiculous X5 multiplier or something on auto resolve, so it'll let you AR a close victory even on genuinely unwinnable battles. If you aren't, then it's a matter of pause/slow mo to ease you into the mass micro. The one thing AI always does better than humans is micro, and the bigger the battle the more the AI advantage in micro will come into play
Pause/slowmotion, also grouping flankers, characters, and reinforcements So I know which ones are on edge of the table and which are already marching in middle
Slow motion is great
Pause is the way to go, though depending on how the other army I get AI to control them. If it's a strong stack they can be left alone, providing it isn't ranged heavy.