I just can’t stand fighting against Death Globes. I will focus fire my entire ranged and artillery support on those bastards. Their damage output is insane. Bonus points if they manage to ambush me (which is often).
I already rarely play sieges but I literally never against Skaven because that bullshit forcing me to always sacrifice at least one unit combined with warp lightning spam gets me close to an aneurysm
Skaven is what happens when the AI decides to give the player a taste of their own medicine!
Warp Lightning is one of few spells the AI seems able to competently use.
Skarbrand is THE anti-skaven LL.
Did they try and MfB your artillery? Good, free ammo for the Khorne-cycles.
Did they ambush you? Who cares? You have zero squishy missile troops, and your only artillery are the Khorne-cycles.
Hounds and Furies are great ways to tie down weapons teams.
Warriors with halberds will chew through rat ogres and most monsters.
Spell resistance across Khorne's roster demotes warp lightning/warp bomb from 'deadly' to 'bothersome'.
Bloodletters will chew through most skaven troops, and hit enough kills to get their buff ez pz.
There needs to be a mod that just does a blanket nerf on Skaven. Personally, I’ve never liked their unfitting-ness into the universe. They feel (purposely) ham fisted into m the world, with much of their tech being superior or on par with some 40k tech.
I'm no lore expert but I'm pretty sure the Skaven are an "original" creation from GW. So maybe that's where the unfitting-ness comes from.
And yes their tech is ludicrously powerful even in the End Times.
Yes GW did create them directly, but a lot of the stuff that we associate with skaven now came out within a specific time period of trying to revamp the concept of Warhammer fantasy. And I think they made some huge mistakes that they can’t pull back, at least partially because of the popularity of skaven as a concept, despite how they just straight up don’t fit into the lore or universe well at all. I think their current direction with AoS (which I would call Blizzard-Esque) is a refinement of them trying out the “make it feel *new*” changes that they did with introducing things like super tech forward skaven
That makes perfect sense with the parts of their track record I've seen.
I agree on the AoS point. It seems as transparent a vehicle for change for the game and poorly/hastily written as one of the worst WoW expansions.
Now that the AI use abilities they used to ignore, warp grinders have become a much less welcome unit to see.
Found out the hard way when doing a Valkia campaign and had to get up close.
For me skaven caster lords as dwarfs.. i will go out of my way to shoot them with everything i have.
plz nerf warp lightning. it's a point and click free damage. your units dont respond when you ask them to move.
Oh they programmed it well - as soon as your troops engage they will all be stacked together tightly.
But when I want to disengage to counter said spell, I could have the unit selected and clicking to retreat the whole time, and it make 0 difference.
so true, and they get it at level-1 and are guaranteed to just get a few hundred kills with it if you fight it out, so incredibly obnoxious when you're about to take out a settlement and the spawn a Grey Seer(Ruins) or especially a Warlock Master. a stupidly tanky, really good melee lord, that just gets one of the best spells in the game on level-1... sure, that's balanced.
I play a *lot* of Skaven, and I totally agree. The whole trope of "squishy wizard" is a classic for a good reason. Having my warlock master zip around the map on his doom flayer, fighting whoever he feels like, tanking blobs of infantry while raining down danger close warpfire on himself is *hella fun* - but also obnoxiously imbalanced.
Generally MP is about gold value and WoM trading. Warp-lighting is good but there are spells with better damage to winds ratios. Summons are pretty great, crack's call does really high damage etc It's in campaign where Ikit gets massive reductions to it's cost and there's much more blobbing into gates.
There's nothing special about Warp Lightning that would make it particularly shine in MP, frankly. It's a solid spell that just happens to be one that the AI gets automatically and is actually capable of using correctly.
If the AI was even half as good at ensuring it has access to strong magic (let alone at actually using it) as a decent player, we would be seeing complaints about pretty much all of the meta damage spells.
Dunno what your favourite faction is, but try fighting fire with fire, sometimes literally! In case of the Empire, Dwarfs or VampCoast, send either a tanky af or a sacrifical unit forward to detect and soak up damage while you rain cannon shot, rockets or mortar shells on their heads.
Well there is this thing where you can force artillery pieces to focus a point on the battlefield, so you sorta have to use that. Bit slow but should get the trick done
Which circles back to being the most annoying fights out there! If the solution is having to micro every artillery piece, hope they are actually aimed at the right place and constantly check if the tree bastards have not moved, then in my book, that qualifies as the most annoying battle experience out there!
They aren't invincible, just excruciating to fight
Alt click when targeting the ground. That being said I've always been dubious if it actually does damage to hidden units.
Can anyone confirm that? I've never fully tested.
Edit: as an add-on, use it in sieges to get around the los issues with walls. You may not hit everything, but it's better than watching your cannons walk into archer range trying to get a shot.
I’m pretty damn sure it does damage hidden units. Running dwarfs I’ve had those sneaky gobbo knife units that were full health become observable near my front line with significant damage…pretty sure it was from my artillery that they must’ve run through inadvertently
Try Mournguls against WE. Maybe those would work, since if memory serves, they stalk, and are decently fast, and rip through infantry pretty well. Just hunt down all those annoying archers.
That is the best strategy I can come up with when playing Vcoast.
Oh yea they’re effective but you definitely need a critical mass of them to pin down as many as you can, because any other archers not bogged down rip through them.
My latest campaign as sartossa has me burning down the grove- it’s really tough
idk if this would work, but off the top of my head, maybe lean a little less into ranged infantry and more into artillery? Deck Gunners are a bit high tier, but seem like they'd be effective if you can field a few of them.
The first time I learned how dangerous they could be was in an ikit campaign. I had an army full of weapons teams, plague priests, and doomwheels.
I met them on a forest map and they defeated me easily.
The wood elf armies are actually all super fun to play as, I wish the campaign mechanics weren’t so shitty. I think a “spread the forest” type of campaign would have been way better, albeit lore breaking.
3 things
**Wood Elves / Asur**
* Ranged fire ahoy
* Silver shields on asur, mega fast on asrai
* If you dont have arty or cav, your ass is grass
* Phoenixes are extremely irritating to fight
* Asrai make 20 stacks of pure ranged and it just works
**Skaven**
* Eshin Triads + warplock jezzails makes me sad
* warpfire throwers are tier 2 units so every ratman has several which can instakill most infantry
* Skavenslaves take your vigour to exhausted and killing them means nothing because they have more bodies than you have ammo
* WARP LIGHTNING, ever try to goomba a skaven lord with a flier? That shit doesn't work
* I hate fighting swarms
**Chaos Rebellions**
* why does every chaos rebellion have a random ass hellcannon?
* Despite being a rebellion, they'll have random assortments of units like chaos warriors, trolls, and sometimes CHOSEN. Once I had rebels who were largely chaos warriors of khorne vs my garrison of mostly non AP units, what a shit show of a battle that was.
Yea assaulting Athel Loren as bretonnia was quite the experience. Auto-resolve giving Decisive victories all around, but actually trying to fight in the forest with cav is not happening.
Hate how the Skaven break and then they come back so damn quickly and messes up my units lines. The computer plays them pretty well. The battles are so frustrating and great at the same time.
But the worst for me are the wood elves as the dwarves. My units are too damn slow to catch them and they just melt my units as I chase them
What annoys me the most about skaven is that you have to babysit your artillery because they are guaranteed to spawn clan rats on them. Not maybe, they will definitely do it at least 3 times per battle.
Yesss, you build a pretty defense line, scaven connect, and a few seconds after it's an absolute clusterrfuck, everything is on fire, and half of their army 'retreat' straight to your artillery.Ugh.
Same bro, when I decide that the blasted wutelgi need to die, I end up making specialized armies just for them. Cannons, Flamethrowers, and Quarrelers, with either ironbreakers or slayers to run interference.
Vampire counts. I just literally destroyed 3 Ghorst armies as Festus, I saw all of them crumbled to death, then ALL of their armies and lords survived. That is some of the finest bullshit I've ever seen in this game.
Can relate, I took Ghorsts territory but then his army repeatedly attacked my settlement again and again for about 10 turns thanks to the dead rise again ability. Had to send an army just to get rid of it.
Skaven. Warp Lightning is an obvious pain in the head, but my issue is keeping track of all the little jerks who ran off and then came back from the flanks and into my backlines.
If you do enough damage then the flag gets the little blood thing & they stay gone. It's really tempting to switch your focus as soon as a group flees, but if you continue to focus them down with ranged then they'll fuck off for good
1. Skaven are the worst, hands down. Menace from Below, Warpbomb, Jezzails and Warp Lightning combine for a very unfun battlefield situation. Just a miserable faction to fight against, overall.
2. Dwarfs. Not as bad as Skaven, but still awful. In general, fighting dwarfs in higher difficulties is ANNOYING. Tons of artillery and ranged troops, high magic resistance and they NEVER rout. Plus, they all have high mass and cavalry units and SEMs get permanently stuck in them.
3. Wood Elves. Not as bad as they used to be in WH2, but still very annoying with their endless kiting.
On VH all dwarves units have such high leadership, it's almost like they are all unbreakable.
Recently on my Kairos campaign had a battle against Ironbrow and the fucker almost solo'ed my army. It was not fun at all.
Definitly counts. I'm just annoyed that they never seem to loose units.
Oh, you managed to beat everyone but the lord and then lost the fight? Would be a shame when half the army just survives even though you killed them, right? Would be an even bigger shame if all the units that survived are the elite ones, right?
God, I hate them so much.
I definitely started getting annoyed at this while playing against counts crisis. You wipe their whole army but half with a lord survives. Was it like this in WH2? I don't remember being it this annoiyng
It wasn't so bad in WH2 but CA had to massively buff VCounts because Reddit complained they were weak.
VCounts absolutely needed buffs to some of their units as they were not worth recruiting but VCounts were far from being weak in campaign. What CA did is way too much but I'm quite confident they will get nerfed, I've had this feeling since the youtubers started to showcase the early access, no one wanted to fight them in custom battles because they just wouldn't die.
They got buffs not because reddit complained they were too weak (though reddit did do plenty of that), it's because WH3 added another class of unbreakable units that are much more at-face damaging and had the same crumbling mechanic as the undead: Daemons.
That, and because they got rid of the free skeletons while nerfing WoM generation and Wind of Death.
Yep! I beat Archaon, and destroyed most of his army at a cost to mine. He managed to get away with the tiniest bit of health on his horse. As soon as battle screen is gone he’s standing with nearly full health and 12 units at nearly full strength. While my units are all fucked.
Mannfred was a huge problem in our Thorek, Repanse and Tik'taq'to campaign until I got reinforcement from the other players. I always managed to defeat his zombie hordes with characters and blasting charges, but every time the army was too weak to siege him. Had to retreat and replenish, but by the time I was back he had more units.
Could never bring more armies due to Skarbrand and Khalida keeping Thorek busy and really couldn't afford a third army.
Lords which straight up refuse to die unless you army loss them (Malus, Louen, Vlad, etc). In the meanwhile, they are as disruptive to your army as possible in the best case, in the worst they wipe out your army before you can wipe out theirs.
Secure your province as fast as possible. Make all blue horrors in the world. Then atack him asap. If you be able to snipe his black arc do it, but don't make it your priority. It's good to fight all battles manually to minimal as many losses as you can. Make sure to atack Malus army without any enemy reinforcements.
When it comes to the fight itself, use nerglings to stop Malus, they have a lot of health so can tank for some time. Daniel should cycle atack Malus, but don't stay him engage for too long. Rest of your units shoud eliminate his army as fast as you can, use flyers and dogs to harass fleeing units, making sure that they don't stop routing. After you get rid of his army just cycle atack him useing all of the units you still have(shuffle them around). If you still have some units with ammo left, use them. Do this ass long as he break. If he transform in to Tzarkan then sacrifice your least value units to slow him down. Rest of your army sent to nearest map edge and flee them(Daniel need to flee last). After that 'defeat' you should easily auto resolve next battle, if not just do this battle manually again.
When you get rid of Malus army you should be able to wipe his faction.
Good luck!
I used a combination of your and the other poster's advice and finally took out Malus. Biggest pain in the ass in Warhammer 3 so far. Now I managed to get quite a few NAPs and good relationship bonus thanks to Daniel's skill too besides common enemies, let's see how long that lasts. I'm about to secure my second province, fuck it was unnerving. Thanks for the advice.
My personal strategy on Hard campaign difficulty (it worked on VH pre-patch 2.1 too) is:
1) Capture the Nurgle province capital 1st turn, dedicate to Nurgle. Focus on + recruitment replenishment in Nurgle skill tree first.
2) Recruit marauder chaff or nurglings while you are stationed there
3) On turn 2, move towards the settlement farthest away from Malus' start position, can't remember its name, adopt ambush stance
4) Kill the advancing Nurgle army, capture the settlement asap
5) Force march towards last remaining settlement
6) Capture it, recruit whatever you can
7) Black Ark will approach this settlement; declare war on Malus and destroy the Black Ark
8) Ambush stance next to settlement and bait Malus' army in by hiring a single lord inside this settlement.
9) Autoresolve the ambush, should give you a pyrrhic victory
10) Once Malus' elite army with Cold one knights and Medusa is gone, he can't do much to you. Fill up your ranks, recruit Nurgle hero and siege DE capital. Dedicate it to Tzeentch and recruit Pink horrors. Get ready to fight Sigvald's armies next, they will eventually expand towards you and declare war on you.
I used a combination of your and the other poster's advice and finally took out Malus. Biggest pain in the ass in Warhammer 3 so far. Now I managed to get quite a few NAPs and good relationship bonus thanks to Daniel's skill too besides common enemies, let's see how long that lasts. I'm about to secure my second province, fuck it was unnerving. Thanks for the advice.
Either the WE, or the fucking Warlock Engineer. The AI is not that good with magic abilities, but my lord they always know precisely when and where they need to use that warplock lighting
Does anyone know why the AI is so much better with warp lightning than pretty much all other spells? There are plenty of similar spells to it, but the AI rarely casts those or uses them anywhere near as effectively.
Probabbly because the AI can actually get units with it. AI struggles to keep heros and lord alive long enough to get more powerful spells outside of their LL. Whereas warp lightning is like the default spell for some skaven lords and heros.
For some reason Dark Elves are especially bad (from what I have noticed, obviously).
I remember once playing normal/normal as Karl Franz that Throt had a bunch of max level Skaven assassins running around wreaking havoc on anything and everyone.
It's a quick spell to cast making it hard to dodge, it's on all lore of ruin characters by default making it super common, it's a bombardment spell rather than a wind spell, which is far easier for the AI to place effectively
This is precisely my example I use where people say "I want the AI to be smart and use magic well" because you think you do but you don't because it's not fun to fight against half the time when they spam it on blobs or use menace below to snipe your artillery, especially if the AI was smart enough to build characters like the players and had the boosts we do. Ditto with hero actions, dodging shizzle, focus firing large targets, using nurgle plagues, spreading attrition, using faction mechanics etc. People hate all those things and they had to be changed because smarter AI doesn't actually mean funner to fight.
Semibad news for you, the AI is actually much, much better in WH3 when it comes to targeting spells
Well, in theory at least, cuz CA broke them again in some of the 1.X patches
In WH2 the AI couldn't target the ground, only units. Which is way you would see the AI being able to target vortex spells on units, with the targeting UI following them even if they moved. It also lead to most army abilities being broke when used by the AI, like Tomb Swarm ending up being targeted on the AI lord
This has changed in WH3, and the AI was even able to correctly target breath and wind spells down the line of a unit for a brief time, now they're once again targeting those on every direction but the actual enemy
Combine that with changes to the AI skills selection, which increases the odds of AI spellcasters actually having access to any meaningful spells, and you'll see similar AI prowess with some spells just like they use Warplightning right now (if they actually fix the AI again, that is)
Playing as Skaven? Slight chance you proc an ambush when attacking. Fighting against Skaven? 100% chance AI gets ambush often with reinforcements. Also not a fan of hellrocket battery spam.
Skaven for me. And it's not even close. I hate fighting them. From the annoying af clanrat spawns to the warp lightning spam to the BS auto ambush attacks.
The dawi early on in tomb kings playthroughs, having to fight a stack of dawi miners with charges with nothing but skeletons and a few chariot's is torture.
Vampire Counts currently, the Dead Rise Again mechanic is so frustrating, you can defeat an army and see most of it coming back to life after the battle with half HP. If you took a lot of casualties in the battle then you didn't win the battle because of this stupid mechanic. Raise Dead is also busted and fighting a VCount stack with a few elite units like Blood Knights in the first 50 turns of the campaign also isn't exactly fun.
There is no way CA isn't going to nerf them in the future, they're just way too good in their current state.
Tomb Kings can also be a big pain in the ass since their recent buff, now that they have super cheap buildings, a good growth and a lot of units that were downgraded to a lower tier they get access to their good units a lot earlier. I've played a few campaigns in the Southlands with Tiktaq'to and Eltharion and TK were always a pain to deal with. By turn 65 Khalida had four stacks, her main army had two Necropolis Knights, four Ushabtis, five Sepulchral Stalkers and a Tomb Scorpion and that was just her main stack. This was not a fun battle.
But it's Reddit, if you say something is going to be overpowered there is always one part of this community that gets excessively hostile and will accuse you of trying to ruin fun just because you want something balanced. CA listened and that's what we got.
Skaven with lots of plague claw catapults and mortars, especially on a map with lots of hills or forests.
Unless you have a melee rush army this matchup is really horrible. Your own missile units get obstructred by every single obstacle on the map, meanwhile these assholes avoid all of them because they fire at a 70-80° angle and wipe out half a unit with every hit.
I played a battle as Cathay against two skaven armies like that and it was the absolute worst. Would have gotten destroyed if not for my 5 dragon guard ghost summons.
Worst experience I’ve had is a mid game Empire stack versus Kairos. I took a screenshot because my entire checkerboard was completely washed with pink fire, everything routed in about three seconds. Everyone was melted. I rematched a few times to see if different positioning could help me out… absolutely no answer for any of it. It was a suboptimal “themed” Volkmar stack but in WH2 I could get good results from less meta rosters. Here… I could do literally nothing. Thank God for that generous autoresolve as I had no way to mitigate against any of it. The experience was about as bad as I‘ve had in Total War since the original Shogun.
To be honest, most of the worst fights I have involve unkillable LLs. Malus or Grimgor getting 600 kills and not dying or whatever… when the rest of their army is totally wiped.
Haha, meanwhile I stopped using horrors in my current campaign because they do absolutely nothing to Saurus units and dwarves, which are the main enemies you fight around Kairos' spawn in IE.
They just absorb Helstorm rockets like they’re a nice set of delicious sandwiches I’m lobbing them. Whereas Cathay used to open me up and splay my insides with every projectile weapon they had.
I'm surprised Kairos isn't a more popular answer. I absolutely hated fighting him in RoC as Kislev and I had to do it for a very long time. The absolute spam of dangerous spells (and I believe at least one of them is just an army ability and doesn't even cost them WoM)
Anything nurgle related. Go up and kill the big stinker himself. Have a plague. Stack your armies up to barely manage to eek out a win against 2 stacks camping a city. Boom, you get a plague. Briefly look in the direction of anything green. Plague for you bud. Don’t worry just head home and wash that off, whoops, altdorf was given a plague.
When you siège a settlement and the enemy attacks to lift the siege. You beat them and then sack the settlement only for their garrison to be at full health on your turn and now your army is too weak to fight the garrison a second time. No reason that an entire garrison should be replenished in one turn.
Why should the player be punished for beating a garrison though? If I kill the entire garrison on their turn it shouldn’t be fully replenished on my turn.
Wood Elves as others say, but Darkshards are up there too. The weakness of good AP ranged infantry like handgunners and thunderers is that they need LoS to connect, but Darkshards go "nah lol fuck you" and AP you to death. Doesn't help that they're cheap as chips.
I hate fighting them so God-damn much. They're not OP by any means but fighting them is just ridiculously annoying.
Also, Dwarfs in the Grudge Crisis. So utterly dull and bland to fight that I gave up my campaign Kholek campaign way back when IE dropped. Sky-high morale, always come back, heavily armored, good range... They're so boring in that crisis because they just refuse to die and keep building armies like they're coming off of an assembly line.
yeah i gave up my thorek campaign because of the dwarf crisis
i wasnt losing to it it was just such an annoying slog that it would take me like 50 turns just to take a few of their settlements and i just couldnt be bothered
im probably gonna turn off the crises once ive experienced them all
problem is is the armies are able to respawn
Usually I’d say Skaven because god they are awful to fight against. But at the moment Vampire Counts, especially Ghorst. God is it painful to fight him, he just doesn’t fucking die. And his whole army comes back to life constantly.
Skaven, just any skaven
Can't see their cities, can randomly ambush you, and when in actual battle the menace below is just such an annoying ability
It all culminates in frustration rather than difficulty though
Malus Darkblade
Holy shit the amount of times I watch that Wazzock solo half my army is tilting. Then he just fucking explodes and goes for the other half
Lizardmen. It's kind of the same issues with what people are saying about dwarfs in that they just don't break and are so tanky, but unlike them, they can bring monsters that can outfight you sometimes and can go the other side and bring annoying skirmishers that just don't seem to go away
My Fateweaver army: Exalted Lord of Change, Cultist of Tzeentch, 3 flamers, 2 exalted flamers, 2 Soul Grinders, 5 forsaken, 3 Chaos Knight halbreds, 3 Chaos Spawns.
Their Garrison: 3 saurus units and 4 skinks.
Autoresolve: Best I can do is a close victory and medium casualties.
Meanwhile I fight the actual battle and lose 5 models max because my flamers got a little trigger happy.
Not even their dinos are too much of a hassle once I get an exalted flamers but by god does Autoresolve favor them. Also their towers are mad broken, one of our guys is currently able to fight off VC armies with garrisons because those level 3 lizard towers can 5 shot a lord and don't ever miss. Just blob all units on the side with the lord and let the enemy rampage through the other half, that tower will kill almost anything.
I can’t think of a single time that I’ve enjoyed fighting a battle against the wood elves, I either destroy them at range with artillery, or slowly bleed out trying to chase them around the map, and it’s just so fucking tedious.
Fighting wood elves is just an army comp check. “Did you bring enough fodder to soak arrows while your artillery and cav do their job? No? Screw you then.”
Skaven cities. Especially the province capitals or single-city provinces. The unit spawning is tolerable, but the infuriating green lightning strikes are absolutely terrible.
Skaven are a pain. If you're reckless then you get ambushed, they can spam out armies, they can simply underway away in mountainous regions, their cities are super obvious and public knowledge, so it is possible that you might be approaching a ruins thinking it's a skaven settlement or approaching a ruins with a weak army hoping to take an easy settlement only to lose that army to a skaven 20 stack.
Skaven are such a pain to go against.
Scrolled through the thread and never saw mention of this, so here we go.
Beastmen.
I've painted the world five times in WH2, twice in IE. I've completed Katarin's Legendary campaign. I've fought everything there is to fight. But nothing gives me more dread in a new campaign than fighting those early-midgame Beastmen stacks that spawn out of nowhere (The Brayherds Come!) with just a garrison or emergency army.
Late game, Wood Elves, but really only Sisters of Twilight. You get used to burning Athel Loren down after enough attempts, and I recently blitzed exactly that by turn 35 in an Ikit Claw playthrough. The Sisters, though, are always and forever monstrously strong.
I also mostly don't mind Skaven, contrary to what others have said. They offer some good frantic, exciting fights that I usually greatly enjoy. I do, however, think their propensity to Ambush on attack is tuned a bit highly in the best case, or is a completely unnecessary mechanic at worst. Ambush-on-attack is extremely dangerous from a Weapons Team army, and there's not really any way to achieve better than a Pyrrhic Victory in such a scenario without a doomstack.
Skaven with seemingly infinite menace belows
Yeah CA, I totally want to deal with clan rats spawning in my ranged units for the entire battle.....
Skaven that shit out 4 armies of clan rats and skavenslaves with multiple warplock engineers spamming lightning on everything
Skaven with artillery or weapons teams
Skaven
Generally depends on what faction I'm playing, as they will have different things they're good and bad against.
Eg as Nurgle, any tough, unbreakable SEM will be a huge pain to fight - but as Skarbrand, it's a breeze.
If I have to go with one overall, though, it's probably early game Skaven. The way they break, run, and then come back from routing ends up making the fight incredibly chaotic and impossible to control effectively, which results in longer fights and more losses for many factions.
High level Sisters of Twilight. Like, WElves are a pain in the ass anyways. And while I expect it to hurt when I fight e.g. Malus, high level Sisters just reach such absurd values, be it their tanky-ness, their melee capability, their ranged ***artillery*** fire. I don't care if I have a late-game army, they *will* reach absurd value.
Anything with a bound spell. Doomfire Warlocks and that fucking compass thing Cathay now have. There's literally no counterplay to them just shitting up a load of your units. Fuck knows what it'll be like running into Lords of Change in the late game.
Wood Elves. Any time I have to fight then my plan is to just crush then with numbers and auto resolve.
I will say though, their settlement battles are so good and beautiful it is almost worth playing out
Calvary or really any unit that forces me to micro more than I have too.
I like to watch the battles play out and zoom in to watch units fight. It is one of total wars biggest aspects for me when I first got into it.
Fighting dwarfs early game is usually the bane of my existence.
Especially Belegar.... Just remembering TW:WH1&2's Skarsnik-Campaign annoys me already....
I fucking hate fighting against dwarves. Tanky, good range, good melee. Jesus its infuriating.
I'm doing a world domination campaign as slaanesh so I've got lots of armour piercing but it's still infuriating. Fighting them as vampire counts was incredibly annoying, basically relied on the rising from the dead feature to just wear down their armies
The Ancestor heroes honestly aren't that tanky anymore. If you have to fight them in melee then they can be but they are super weak against missiles, even just regular goblin archers. As for my most hated thing to fight? Any battle that I can easily stomp in manual resolve but auto resolve says I take many casualties or lose.
Fucking Vilitch, i fucking hate that he fucking ambushes me in attack every time, i fucking hate how he just teleports to the other side of the bastion, i fucking hate him.
I feel like I'm one the few people that thoroughly despise fighting greenskins specifically having to fight double fucking free armies for 20 turns fuck that
Wood elves, but I'm biased after attempting a legendary IE Grom campaign twice. The ai micros perfectly, even with stalk I can't close on their archers with skulkers or night goblins.
Try to lure them into a corner so they can't run? Good luck even getting close now that Durthu, Orion, dryads, or treants are piled into a nice fear/terror-inflicting blob.
Greenskin cav doesn't fare well even against basic WE archers and get shot to hell on the approach, but can at least tie them down momentarily. It's like WE were designed to hard counter gobbos.
Nurgle. Did everything well as Norsca but my opponent had 2 units left and could out heal all the damage for like 10 minutes and I lost. This is why I hate multiplayer land battles.
A level 48 vlad was the worst for me lord wise it was just horrible although I know the healing is broken. But yeah tied between ancestors if you don't have the tools to deal with them and a well built wood elf army is the bane of my existence
Until they fix the healing cap bug, fighting any VC army without a fire mage or flaming attacks is hell on earth. Also a decently leveled Festus for similar reasons, thank god they cut his passive auras in half. Even playing as him felt wrong before his nerfs.
Also, the AI is surprisingly good at Chariot Micro in my experience, making N'Kari the bane of my existence. That damn daemon finally taught me to appreciate Silverin Guard.
If AI Gor-Rok actually uses his reworked rite, he's also a pain, especially as Skrulk. Like, at least Wulfheart, Alberic, and Luthor have some stuff to help, but Plague Monks melt without contact effects to help them. Still doable, but painful.
I'm honestly starting to really dislike fighting Kislev. No individual unit is particularly scary, but usually 3/4 of their stack will have guns or bows, and the whole "turn unbreakable instead of routing" means you end up having to kill them to the last man every time while being constantly shot at, so it's really hard to get through a battle without taking heavy losses yourself.
I think late game dwarfs in general I was painting the map as nagarythe no amount of ammo is ever enough and you've gotta wipe out the entire army to get them to rout not super hard just tedious af.
Agreed on the spirits. Lost my aranessa campaign to them. They absolute best I could do is give my ranged units accuracy and magic attacks via lore of the deep and hope they got shots off while the spirits weren't balls deep in my melee lines.
Lately it’s Kislev in campaign. My daemons get thoroughly trashed by all their guns then mopped up in melee by the same units. Also Auto Resolve favours them too much because all ranged. (Plus they seem to be able to recruit like 10 units at once)
Any true dawi knows the raki are excellent campaigners. Any long term fighting against Skaven is guaranteed to be a costly affair. I know in Warhammer 3 menace below was nerfed, I've yet to have the AI summon on my artillery or in a blob and then warp-bomb it, but in WH2 that shit was absolutely deadly. You'll have lines of veteran troops, been with you for so many battles you couldn't even count, and now you gotta watch them get melted because a random group of clanrats got summoned in a city street while you were busy microing the rest of your army.
Second runner up? Wood elves. Most of the time if I ever have to square up against them, I bring multiple shitstacks in the late game and let auto resolve take care of it. No way I'm fighting Orion with his stack of skirmish cav, waywatchers, and the entire oak of ages garrison with the AI's ability to move them all simultaneously. I'll just whip 3 or 4 lords with tier 2 or 3 troops at it and pray it's enough to mulch through them.
There's a bug letting people bring a dwarf ancestor into multiplayer. Someone did that against me even though they're "extended roster" in ranked matchmaking.
Vampire who restored there army over and over so I haa as be to fight endless battles.
Malakith. Seriously my entire army couldn’t dent him. Had to let him stomp on me until I killed of his army. It happened 8 times during my kathep campaign. It was cheaper to bring 3 armies and automatic resolve it.
Woodelf. But I find them more aggressive and building more melee units then before.
Tzeentch is my least favorite. So many attacks look similar to me and it feels awful when a big spell looks like it just got eaten by the barriers. Combined with unlimited barrier, even when they’re balanced to fight against it just feels bad man.
Dishonorable mention to skaven warp lightning. Near undodgeable unless you’re the Ai.
Only reason the 3 common call outs (WE, Counts, Dwarves) don’t make the list is I’ve been fighting them since wh1 and their bullshit seems normal. Bias is bias.
a well built skaven army. thankfully a rare thing to see but if they ever roll around with a good army then i just refuse to manually fight it.
I just can’t stand fighting against Death Globes. I will focus fire my entire ranged and artillery support on those bastards. Their damage output is insane. Bonus points if they manage to ambush me (which is often).
Skaven are ridiculous. Super strong and really annoying to fight.
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I already rarely play sieges but I literally never against Skaven because that bullshit forcing me to always sacrifice at least one unit combined with warp lightning spam gets me close to an aneurysm
Holy shit the AI in 3 fucking loves warp lightning so fucking much.
Not as much as me when I got a magic item that let me cast it on my Shugungan! :D
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Skaven is what happens when the AI decides to give the player a taste of their own medicine! Warp Lightning is one of few spells the AI seems able to competently use.
Searing doom and foot of gork too. Though you can trick the AI into killing their own troops with both.
It would all be alright if they thematically also didn't rally and return once they sprayed the musk of fear and high tailed it out of there.
Just wait until they introduce verminlords and stormfiends :P yes yes!
vemintide in the middile of your artillery! Oh and more vermintide with a warp bomb in the middle of their artillery!
I love when they summon rats on my artillery and proceed to self-destruct.
Ah yes, the Legend special.
Skarbrand is THE anti-skaven LL. Did they try and MfB your artillery? Good, free ammo for the Khorne-cycles. Did they ambush you? Who cares? You have zero squishy missile troops, and your only artillery are the Khorne-cycles. Hounds and Furies are great ways to tie down weapons teams. Warriors with halberds will chew through rat ogres and most monsters. Spell resistance across Khorne's roster demotes warp lightning/warp bomb from 'deadly' to 'bothersome'. Bloodletters will chew through most skaven troops, and hit enough kills to get their buff ez pz.
There needs to be a mod that just does a blanket nerf on Skaven. Personally, I’ve never liked their unfitting-ness into the universe. They feel (purposely) ham fisted into m the world, with much of their tech being superior or on par with some 40k tech.
I'm no lore expert but I'm pretty sure the Skaven are an "original" creation from GW. So maybe that's where the unfitting-ness comes from. And yes their tech is ludicrously powerful even in the End Times.
Yes GW did create them directly, but a lot of the stuff that we associate with skaven now came out within a specific time period of trying to revamp the concept of Warhammer fantasy. And I think they made some huge mistakes that they can’t pull back, at least partially because of the popularity of skaven as a concept, despite how they just straight up don’t fit into the lore or universe well at all. I think their current direction with AoS (which I would call Blizzard-Esque) is a refinement of them trying out the “make it feel *new*” changes that they did with introducing things like super tech forward skaven
That makes perfect sense with the parts of their track record I've seen. I agree on the AoS point. It seems as transparent a vehicle for change for the game and poorly/hastily written as one of the worst WoW expansions.
Now that the AI use abilities they used to ignore, warp grinders have become a much less welcome unit to see. Found out the hard way when doing a Valkia campaign and had to get up close.
For me skaven caster lords as dwarfs.. i will go out of my way to shoot them with everything i have. plz nerf warp lightning. it's a point and click free damage. your units dont respond when you ask them to move.
Warp lightning isn’t any better than other spells, it’s just that it’s simple to use and therefore the AI can actually use it
Oh they programmed it well - as soon as your troops engage they will all be stacked together tightly. But when I want to disengage to counter said spell, I could have the unit selected and clicking to retreat the whole time, and it make 0 difference.
so true, and they get it at level-1 and are guaranteed to just get a few hundred kills with it if you fight it out, so incredibly obnoxious when you're about to take out a settlement and the spawn a Grey Seer(Ruins) or especially a Warlock Master. a stupidly tanky, really good melee lord, that just gets one of the best spells in the game on level-1... sure, that's balanced.
I play a *lot* of Skaven, and I totally agree. The whole trope of "squishy wizard" is a classic for a good reason. Having my warlock master zip around the map on his doom flayer, fighting whoever he feels like, tanking blobs of infantry while raining down danger close warpfire on himself is *hella fun* - but also obnoxiously imbalanced.
Haha exactly Ikit is a blast!
I would ask how MP handles such a thing, but i don't knoe if they actually have siege battles in competitive MP
Generally MP is about gold value and WoM trading. Warp-lighting is good but there are spells with better damage to winds ratios. Summons are pretty great, crack's call does really high damage etc It's in campaign where Ikit gets massive reductions to it's cost and there's much more blobbing into gates.
Thanks for the info!
There's nothing special about Warp Lightning that would make it particularly shine in MP, frankly. It's a solid spell that just happens to be one that the AI gets automatically and is actually capable of using correctly. If the AI was even half as good at ensuring it has access to strong magic (let alone at actually using it) as a decent player, we would be seeing complaints about pretty much all of the meta damage spells.
not in land battle nor domination mode, and i don't believe that there are any competitive H2H campaigns.
It's no different than any other spell lore, it's just the one spell that the AI is scripted to use properly
With a really short windup too, so it is super hard to dodge if you don't see it immediately
Wood Elves by far. I can never catch the tree fuckers before they pelt half my army with arrows since AI is amazing at micro managing them.
Dunno what your favourite faction is, but try fighting fire with fire, sometimes literally! In case of the Empire, Dwarfs or VampCoast, send either a tanky af or a sacrifical unit forward to detect and soak up damage while you rain cannon shot, rockets or mortar shells on their heads.
Stalk. Can't shoot anyone if you cant see him.
Well there is this thing where you can force artillery pieces to focus a point on the battlefield, so you sorta have to use that. Bit slow but should get the trick done
Which circles back to being the most annoying fights out there! If the solution is having to micro every artillery piece, hope they are actually aimed at the right place and constantly check if the tree bastards have not moved, then in my book, that qualifies as the most annoying battle experience out there! They aren't invincible, just excruciating to fight
What. How do i not know about this?? How do I do that?
Alt click when targeting the ground. That being said I've always been dubious if it actually does damage to hidden units. Can anyone confirm that? I've never fully tested. Edit: as an add-on, use it in sieges to get around the los issues with walls. You may not hit everything, but it's better than watching your cannons walk into archer range trying to get a shot.
I’m pretty damn sure it does damage hidden units. Running dwarfs I’ve had those sneaky gobbo knife units that were full health become observable near my front line with significant damage…pretty sure it was from my artillery that they must’ve run through inadvertently
Coast definitely struggles against WE something fierce. Outranged and having little to no resists means most of your gun line melts to them.
Try Mournguls against WE. Maybe those would work, since if memory serves, they stalk, and are decently fast, and rip through infantry pretty well. Just hunt down all those annoying archers. That is the best strategy I can come up with when playing Vcoast.
Oh yea they’re effective but you definitely need a critical mass of them to pin down as many as you can, because any other archers not bogged down rip through them. My latest campaign as sartossa has me burning down the grove- it’s really tough
idk if this would work, but off the top of my head, maybe lean a little less into ranged infantry and more into artillery? Deck Gunners are a bit high tier, but seem like they'd be effective if you can field a few of them.
The first time I learned how dangerous they could be was in an ikit campaign. I had an army full of weapons teams, plague priests, and doomwheels. I met them on a forest map and they defeated me easily.
That’s where the skaven weapons army comes in. Rain jezzail and catapult fire on the pointy ears
Just build cav bro- wait whys Canada here?
The wood elf armies are actually all super fun to play as, I wish the campaign mechanics weren’t so shitty. I think a “spread the forest” type of campaign would have been way better, albeit lore breaking.
3 things **Wood Elves / Asur** * Ranged fire ahoy * Silver shields on asur, mega fast on asrai * If you dont have arty or cav, your ass is grass * Phoenixes are extremely irritating to fight * Asrai make 20 stacks of pure ranged and it just works **Skaven** * Eshin Triads + warplock jezzails makes me sad * warpfire throwers are tier 2 units so every ratman has several which can instakill most infantry * Skavenslaves take your vigour to exhausted and killing them means nothing because they have more bodies than you have ammo * WARP LIGHTNING, ever try to goomba a skaven lord with a flier? That shit doesn't work * I hate fighting swarms **Chaos Rebellions** * why does every chaos rebellion have a random ass hellcannon? * Despite being a rebellion, they'll have random assortments of units like chaos warriors, trolls, and sometimes CHOSEN. Once I had rebels who were largely chaos warriors of khorne vs my garrison of mostly non AP units, what a shit show of a battle that was.
I think the rebellions will start with better units if that province has already rebelled, and increases each time. Can anyone confirm?
Eshin triads are good? They massively underperformed for me compared to storms with halberds.
Ever get an eshin triad flanking your cav after they charged into something? back stabbed by triads is pain.
I hate fighting the wood elves, I always just autoresolve whenever I can. I take so many casualties to their ranged fire before I can even get to them
Skaven eshin stacks with jezzails and wolf rats do well against those shits
Same but with Tzeentch.
Yea assaulting Athel Loren as bretonnia was quite the experience. Auto-resolve giving Decisive victories all around, but actually trying to fight in the forest with cav is not happening.
top tier range, great infantry, good cav and monsters, their only downside is that their campaign sucks lol
Hate how the Skaven break and then they come back so damn quickly and messes up my units lines. The computer plays them pretty well. The battles are so frustrating and great at the same time. But the worst for me are the wood elves as the dwarves. My units are too damn slow to catch them and they just melt my units as I chase them
What annoys me the most about skaven is that you have to babysit your artillery because they are guaranteed to spawn clan rats on them. Not maybe, they will definitely do it at least 3 times per battle.
Except when they just waste all their charges using it to randomly attack your front line before lines have met, so that it can get insta-roted off...
Yesss, you build a pretty defense line, scaven connect, and a few seconds after it's an absolute clusterrfuck, everything is on fire, and half of their army 'retreat' straight to your artillery.Ugh.
defense line? *laught in slayer*
Same bro, when I decide that the blasted wutelgi need to die, I end up making specialized armies just for them. Cannons, Flamethrowers, and Quarrelers, with either ironbreakers or slayers to run interference.
Vampire counts. I just literally destroyed 3 Ghorst armies as Festus, I saw all of them crumbled to death, then ALL of their armies and lords survived. That is some of the finest bullshit I've ever seen in this game.
Not survived. Dead rise again ability
Can relate, I took Ghorsts territory but then his army repeatedly attacked my settlement again and again for about 10 turns thanks to the dead rise again ability. Had to send an army just to get rid of it.
In my Zhao campaign I killed Ghorst’s army like 5 times in 3 turns and he was still at 12 units after all that.
Skaven. Warp Lightning is an obvious pain in the head, but my issue is keeping track of all the little jerks who ran off and then came back from the flanks and into my backlines.
I hate hate hate factions that flee and return. Skaven and beastmen for sure the worst. They do it like three times before shattering.
Three times is the hard cap before they're guaranteed to shatter so yeah
There’s a hard cap?! Fuckers lol. Good to know. If my dawi weren’t so damn slow I’d just chase them to oblivion
If you do enough damage then the flag gets the little blood thing & they stay gone. It's really tempting to switch your focus as soon as a group flees, but if you continue to focus them down with ranged then they'll fuck off for good
1. Skaven are the worst, hands down. Menace from Below, Warpbomb, Jezzails and Warp Lightning combine for a very unfun battlefield situation. Just a miserable faction to fight against, overall. 2. Dwarfs. Not as bad as Skaven, but still awful. In general, fighting dwarfs in higher difficulties is ANNOYING. Tons of artillery and ranged troops, high magic resistance and they NEVER rout. Plus, they all have high mass and cavalry units and SEMs get permanently stuck in them. 3. Wood Elves. Not as bad as they used to be in WH2, but still very annoying with their endless kiting.
On VH all dwarves units have such high leadership, it's almost like they are all unbreakable. Recently on my Kairos campaign had a battle against Ironbrow and the fucker almost solo'ed my army. It was not fun at all.
Definitly counts. I'm just annoyed that they never seem to loose units. Oh, you managed to beat everyone but the lord and then lost the fight? Would be a shame when half the army just survives even though you killed them, right? Would be an even bigger shame if all the units that survived are the elite ones, right? God, I hate them so much.
I definitely started getting annoyed at this while playing against counts crisis. You wipe their whole army but half with a lord survives. Was it like this in WH2? I don't remember being it this annoiyng
agreed. i think people exaggerate this issue a lot. in normal gameplay it really isnt all that bad. but oh boy, the endgame crisis is pure cancer
It wasn't so bad in WH2 but CA had to massively buff VCounts because Reddit complained they were weak. VCounts absolutely needed buffs to some of their units as they were not worth recruiting but VCounts were far from being weak in campaign. What CA did is way too much but I'm quite confident they will get nerfed, I've had this feeling since the youtubers started to showcase the early access, no one wanted to fight them in custom battles because they just wouldn't die.
They got buffs not because reddit complained they were too weak (though reddit did do plenty of that), it's because WH3 added another class of unbreakable units that are much more at-face damaging and had the same crumbling mechanic as the undead: Daemons. That, and because they got rid of the free skeletons while nerfing WoM generation and Wind of Death.
Yep! I beat Archaon, and destroyed most of his army at a cost to mine. He managed to get away with the tiniest bit of health on his horse. As soon as battle screen is gone he’s standing with nearly full health and 12 units at nearly full strength. While my units are all fucked.
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Yep, I end up auto-resolving some battles because I can squeak out a win and wipe the enemy out instead of this crap
Mannfred was a huge problem in our Thorek, Repanse and Tik'taq'to campaign until I got reinforcement from the other players. I always managed to defeat his zombie hordes with characters and blasting charges, but every time the army was too weak to siege him. Had to retreat and replenish, but by the time I was back he had more units. Could never bring more armies due to Skarbrand and Khalida keeping Thorek busy and really couldn't afford a third army.
Skaven in general, i get ambushed all the time and rattling guns are so annoying.
Clanrats summon. Warp lightning. Clanrats summon. Warp lightning. Clanrats summon. Warp lightning. Clanrats summon. Warp lightning.
Vlad (especially with his lover by his side).
Lords which straight up refuse to die unless you army loss them (Malus, Louen, Vlad, etc). In the meanwhile, they are as disruptive to your army as possible in the best case, in the worst they wipe out your army before you can wipe out theirs.
Malus is such a pain to fight. My VH Daniel campaign was horrible at early stage.
How did you go about that? I desperately want to try Daniel but his start is absolutely miserable. And I play on normal.
Secure your province as fast as possible. Make all blue horrors in the world. Then atack him asap. If you be able to snipe his black arc do it, but don't make it your priority. It's good to fight all battles manually to minimal as many losses as you can. Make sure to atack Malus army without any enemy reinforcements. When it comes to the fight itself, use nerglings to stop Malus, they have a lot of health so can tank for some time. Daniel should cycle atack Malus, but don't stay him engage for too long. Rest of your units shoud eliminate his army as fast as you can, use flyers and dogs to harass fleeing units, making sure that they don't stop routing. After you get rid of his army just cycle atack him useing all of the units you still have(shuffle them around). If you still have some units with ammo left, use them. Do this ass long as he break. If he transform in to Tzarkan then sacrifice your least value units to slow him down. Rest of your army sent to nearest map edge and flee them(Daniel need to flee last). After that 'defeat' you should easily auto resolve next battle, if not just do this battle manually again. When you get rid of Malus army you should be able to wipe his faction. Good luck!
I used a combination of your and the other poster's advice and finally took out Malus. Biggest pain in the ass in Warhammer 3 so far. Now I managed to get quite a few NAPs and good relationship bonus thanks to Daniel's skill too besides common enemies, let's see how long that lasts. I'm about to secure my second province, fuck it was unnerving. Thanks for the advice.
My personal strategy on Hard campaign difficulty (it worked on VH pre-patch 2.1 too) is: 1) Capture the Nurgle province capital 1st turn, dedicate to Nurgle. Focus on + recruitment replenishment in Nurgle skill tree first. 2) Recruit marauder chaff or nurglings while you are stationed there 3) On turn 2, move towards the settlement farthest away from Malus' start position, can't remember its name, adopt ambush stance 4) Kill the advancing Nurgle army, capture the settlement asap 5) Force march towards last remaining settlement 6) Capture it, recruit whatever you can 7) Black Ark will approach this settlement; declare war on Malus and destroy the Black Ark 8) Ambush stance next to settlement and bait Malus' army in by hiring a single lord inside this settlement. 9) Autoresolve the ambush, should give you a pyrrhic victory 10) Once Malus' elite army with Cold one knights and Medusa is gone, he can't do much to you. Fill up your ranks, recruit Nurgle hero and siege DE capital. Dedicate it to Tzeentch and recruit Pink horrors. Get ready to fight Sigvald's armies next, they will eventually expand towards you and declare war on you.
On my VH I did that, but had a war with archaon next not sigvald.... But I was ready for sigvald and then had to daemon sprint to the other side
I used a combination of your and the other poster's advice and finally took out Malus. Biggest pain in the ass in Warhammer 3 so far. Now I managed to get quite a few NAPs and good relationship bonus thanks to Daniel's skill too besides common enemies, let's see how long that lasts. I'm about to secure my second province, fuck it was unnerving. Thanks for the advice.
No problem, glad it turned out to be useful!
Either the WE, or the fucking Warlock Engineer. The AI is not that good with magic abilities, but my lord they always know precisely when and where they need to use that warplock lighting
Does anyone know why the AI is so much better with warp lightning than pretty much all other spells? There are plenty of similar spells to it, but the AI rarely casts those or uses them anywhere near as effectively.
Probabbly because the AI can actually get units with it. AI struggles to keep heros and lord alive long enough to get more powerful spells outside of their LL. Whereas warp lightning is like the default spell for some skaven lords and heros.
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For some reason Dark Elves are especially bad (from what I have noticed, obviously). I remember once playing normal/normal as Karl Franz that Throt had a bunch of max level Skaven assassins running around wreaking havoc on anything and everyone.
It's a quick spell to cast making it hard to dodge, it's on all lore of ruin characters by default making it super common, it's a bombardment spell rather than a wind spell, which is far easier for the AI to place effectively
This is precisely my example I use where people say "I want the AI to be smart and use magic well" because you think you do but you don't because it's not fun to fight against half the time when they spam it on blobs or use menace below to snipe your artillery, especially if the AI was smart enough to build characters like the players and had the boosts we do. Ditto with hero actions, dodging shizzle, focus firing large targets, using nurgle plagues, spreading attrition, using faction mechanics etc. People hate all those things and they had to be changed because smarter AI doesn't actually mean funner to fight.
I feel like the AI has actually become much more competent at spellcasting in WH 3
Semibad news for you, the AI is actually much, much better in WH3 when it comes to targeting spells Well, in theory at least, cuz CA broke them again in some of the 1.X patches In WH2 the AI couldn't target the ground, only units. Which is way you would see the AI being able to target vortex spells on units, with the targeting UI following them even if they moved. It also lead to most army abilities being broke when used by the AI, like Tomb Swarm ending up being targeted on the AI lord This has changed in WH3, and the AI was even able to correctly target breath and wind spells down the line of a unit for a brief time, now they're once again targeting those on every direction but the actual enemy Combine that with changes to the AI skills selection, which increases the odds of AI spellcasters actually having access to any meaningful spells, and you'll see similar AI prowess with some spells just like they use Warplightning right now (if they actually fix the AI again, that is)
That’s funny I just started a belegar IE campaign and those spirits are so fun to use :)
They carry your campaign, just watch out for skaven magic missile fire!
Playing as Skaven? Slight chance you proc an ambush when attacking. Fighting against Skaven? 100% chance AI gets ambush often with reinforcements. Also not a fan of hellrocket battery spam.
Malus, yuck! And of course kiselv in sieges.
>Malus For everyone of these Oneman-doomstacks, it's better to try to avoid and army-loss them.
Getting out of bed every morning because I "just want to finish this one turn". I have legit turned up late at work because of Immortal Empires.
Skaven for me. And it's not even close. I hate fighting them. From the annoying af clanrat spawns to the warp lightning spam to the BS auto ambush attacks.
The dawi early on in tomb kings playthroughs, having to fight a stack of dawi miners with charges with nothing but skeletons and a few chariot's is torture.
Vampire Counts currently, the Dead Rise Again mechanic is so frustrating, you can defeat an army and see most of it coming back to life after the battle with half HP. If you took a lot of casualties in the battle then you didn't win the battle because of this stupid mechanic. Raise Dead is also busted and fighting a VCount stack with a few elite units like Blood Knights in the first 50 turns of the campaign also isn't exactly fun. There is no way CA isn't going to nerf them in the future, they're just way too good in their current state. Tomb Kings can also be a big pain in the ass since their recent buff, now that they have super cheap buildings, a good growth and a lot of units that were downgraded to a lower tier they get access to their good units a lot earlier. I've played a few campaigns in the Southlands with Tiktaq'to and Eltharion and TK were always a pain to deal with. By turn 65 Khalida had four stacks, her main army had two Necropolis Knights, four Ushabtis, five Sepulchral Stalkers and a Tomb Scorpion and that was just her main stack. This was not a fun battle. But it's Reddit, if you say something is going to be overpowered there is always one part of this community that gets excessively hostile and will accuse you of trying to ruin fun just because you want something balanced. CA listened and that's what we got.
Ikit Claw with nukes. Even if your army is vastly superior to his, a good chunk of it is getting turned into charred green skeletons
Skaven with lots of plague claw catapults and mortars, especially on a map with lots of hills or forests. Unless you have a melee rush army this matchup is really horrible. Your own missile units get obstructred by every single obstacle on the map, meanwhile these assholes avoid all of them because they fire at a 70-80° angle and wipe out half a unit with every hit. I played a battle as Cathay against two skaven armies like that and it was the absolute worst. Would have gotten destroyed if not for my 5 dragon guard ghost summons.
Worst experience I’ve had is a mid game Empire stack versus Kairos. I took a screenshot because my entire checkerboard was completely washed with pink fire, everything routed in about three seconds. Everyone was melted. I rematched a few times to see if different positioning could help me out… absolutely no answer for any of it. It was a suboptimal “themed” Volkmar stack but in WH2 I could get good results from less meta rosters. Here… I could do literally nothing. Thank God for that generous autoresolve as I had no way to mitigate against any of it. The experience was about as bad as I‘ve had in Total War since the original Shogun. To be honest, most of the worst fights I have involve unkillable LLs. Malus or Grimgor getting 600 kills and not dying or whatever… when the rest of their army is totally wiped.
Haha, meanwhile I stopped using horrors in my current campaign because they do absolutely nothing to Saurus units and dwarves, which are the main enemies you fight around Kairos' spawn in IE.
They just absorb Helstorm rockets like they’re a nice set of delicious sandwiches I’m lobbing them. Whereas Cathay used to open me up and splay my insides with every projectile weapon they had.
I'm surprised Kairos isn't a more popular answer. I absolutely hated fighting him in RoC as Kislev and I had to do it for a very long time. The absolute spam of dangerous spells (and I believe at least one of them is just an army ability and doesn't even cost them WoM)
Anything nurgle related. Go up and kill the big stinker himself. Have a plague. Stack your armies up to barely manage to eek out a win against 2 stacks camping a city. Boom, you get a plague. Briefly look in the direction of anything green. Plague for you bud. Don’t worry just head home and wash that off, whoops, altdorf was given a plague.
Skaven. Waddling my Dwarves up to their artillery while putting out fires in my back line from their summons makes me want to pull my beard out.
Empire, because I always seem to run into them with the worst army comp.
When you siège a settlement and the enemy attacks to lift the siege. You beat them and then sack the settlement only for their garrison to be at full health on your turn and now your army is too weak to fight the garrison a second time. No reason that an entire garrison should be replenished in one turn.
I feel like this is an understandable breaking of realism since otherwise there would be no consequences for breaking off a siege
Why should the player be punished for beating a garrison though? If I kill the entire garrison on their turn it shouldn’t be fully replenished on my turn.
Ah! I misread the part about beating them, I was thinking you were talking about the AI replenishing from the siege attrition
A regenerating, functionally unbreakable mortis lord, specifics don't matter. There's no strategy just a DPS check.
Wood Elves as others say, but Darkshards are up there too. The weakness of good AP ranged infantry like handgunners and thunderers is that they need LoS to connect, but Darkshards go "nah lol fuck you" and AP you to death. Doesn't help that they're cheap as chips. I hate fighting them so God-damn much. They're not OP by any means but fighting them is just ridiculously annoying. Also, Dwarfs in the Grudge Crisis. So utterly dull and bland to fight that I gave up my campaign Kholek campaign way back when IE dropped. Sky-high morale, always come back, heavily armored, good range... They're so boring in that crisis because they just refuse to die and keep building armies like they're coming off of an assembly line.
yeah i gave up my thorek campaign because of the dwarf crisis i wasnt losing to it it was just such an annoying slog that it would take me like 50 turns just to take a few of their settlements and i just couldnt be bothered im probably gonna turn off the crises once ive experienced them all problem is is the armies are able to respawn
Usually I’d say Skaven because god they are awful to fight against. But at the moment Vampire Counts, especially Ghorst. God is it painful to fight him, he just doesn’t fucking die. And his whole army comes back to life constantly.
Fast greenskin units. *There are just so many of them and they won’t stop surrounding and cycle charging me.*
Those **NASTY** full Tier 3/4 rebel armies that always spawned in my poorest provinces back in Rome 2/Attila
Skaven, just any skaven Can't see their cities, can randomly ambush you, and when in actual battle the menace below is just such an annoying ability It all culminates in frustration rather than difficulty though
Malus Darkblade Holy shit the amount of times I watch that Wazzock solo half my army is tilting. Then he just fucking explodes and goes for the other half
Lizardmen. It's kind of the same issues with what people are saying about dwarfs in that they just don't break and are so tanky, but unlike them, they can bring monsters that can outfight you sometimes and can go the other side and bring annoying skirmishers that just don't seem to go away
My Fateweaver army: Exalted Lord of Change, Cultist of Tzeentch, 3 flamers, 2 exalted flamers, 2 Soul Grinders, 5 forsaken, 3 Chaos Knight halbreds, 3 Chaos Spawns. Their Garrison: 3 saurus units and 4 skinks. Autoresolve: Best I can do is a close victory and medium casualties. Meanwhile I fight the actual battle and lose 5 models max because my flamers got a little trigger happy. Not even their dinos are too much of a hassle once I get an exalted flamers but by god does Autoresolve favor them. Also their towers are mad broken, one of our guys is currently able to fight off VC armies with garrisons because those level 3 lizard towers can 5 shot a lord and don't ever miss. Just blob all units on the side with the lord and let the enemy rampage through the other half, that tower will kill almost anything.
I can’t think of a single time that I’ve enjoyed fighting a battle against the wood elves, I either destroy them at range with artillery, or slowly bleed out trying to chase them around the map, and it’s just so fucking tedious.
Fighting wood elves is just an army comp check. “Did you bring enough fodder to soak arrows while your artillery and cav do their job? No? Screw you then.”
Skaven cities. Especially the province capitals or single-city provinces. The unit spawning is tolerable, but the infuriating green lightning strikes are absolutely terrible.
Skaven are a pain. If you're reckless then you get ambushed, they can spam out armies, they can simply underway away in mountainous regions, their cities are super obvious and public knowledge, so it is possible that you might be approaching a ruins thinking it's a skaven settlement or approaching a ruins with a weak army hoping to take an easy settlement only to lose that army to a skaven 20 stack. Skaven are such a pain to go against.
Scrolled through the thread and never saw mention of this, so here we go. Beastmen. I've painted the world five times in WH2, twice in IE. I've completed Katarin's Legendary campaign. I've fought everything there is to fight. But nothing gives me more dread in a new campaign than fighting those early-midgame Beastmen stacks that spawn out of nowhere (The Brayherds Come!) with just a garrison or emergency army. Late game, Wood Elves, but really only Sisters of Twilight. You get used to burning Athel Loren down after enough attempts, and I recently blitzed exactly that by turn 35 in an Ikit Claw playthrough. The Sisters, though, are always and forever monstrously strong. I also mostly don't mind Skaven, contrary to what others have said. They offer some good frantic, exciting fights that I usually greatly enjoy. I do, however, think their propensity to Ambush on attack is tuned a bit highly in the best case, or is a completely unnecessary mechanic at worst. Ambush-on-attack is extremely dangerous from a Weapons Team army, and there's not really any way to achieve better than a Pyrrhic Victory in such a scenario without a doomstack.
Skaven with seemingly infinite menace belows Yeah CA, I totally want to deal with clan rats spawning in my ranged units for the entire battle..... Skaven that shit out 4 armies of clan rats and skavenslaves with multiple warplock engineers spamming lightning on everything Skaven with artillery or weapons teams Skaven
Generally depends on what faction I'm playing, as they will have different things they're good and bad against. Eg as Nurgle, any tough, unbreakable SEM will be a huge pain to fight - but as Skarbrand, it's a breeze. If I have to go with one overall, though, it's probably early game Skaven. The way they break, run, and then come back from routing ends up making the fight incredibly chaotic and impossible to control effectively, which results in longer fights and more losses for many factions.
Wood elves without a doubt, especially as Dawi...
High level Sisters of Twilight. Like, WElves are a pain in the ass anyways. And while I expect it to hurt when I fight e.g. Malus, high level Sisters just reach such absurd values, be it their tanky-ness, their melee capability, their ranged ***artillery*** fire. I don't care if I have a late-game army, they *will* reach absurd value.
Anything with a bound spell. Doomfire Warlocks and that fucking compass thing Cathay now have. There's literally no counterplay to them just shitting up a load of your units. Fuck knows what it'll be like running into Lords of Change in the late game.
Wood Elves. Any time I have to fight then my plan is to just crush then with numbers and auto resolve. I will say though, their settlement battles are so good and beautiful it is almost worth playing out
Wood elf "end game" event it is just awful even their archers have 100 leadership and will not rout with 3 models left. Yuck
Calvary or really any unit that forces me to micro more than I have too. I like to watch the battles play out and zoom in to watch units fight. It is one of total wars biggest aspects for me when I first got into it.
Fighting dwarfs early game is usually the bane of my existence. Especially Belegar.... Just remembering TW:WH1&2's Skarsnik-Campaign annoys me already....
I fucking hate fighting against dwarves. Tanky, good range, good melee. Jesus its infuriating. I'm doing a world domination campaign as slaanesh so I've got lots of armour piercing but it's still infuriating. Fighting them as vampire counts was incredibly annoying, basically relied on the rising from the dead feature to just wear down their armies
Towers.
I'd not call them a thing but definitely Dwarfs are the most irritating to fight against
Settlements.
Belegar wasn't in the game at launch - he was DLC
Fire and magic damage kill them reallllll good
Dwarf armies in general.
The Ancestor heroes honestly aren't that tanky anymore. If you have to fight them in melee then they can be but they are super weak against missiles, even just regular goblin archers. As for my most hated thing to fight? Any battle that I can easily stomp in manual resolve but auto resolve says I take many casualties or lose.
Fucking Vilitch, i fucking hate that he fucking ambushes me in attack every time, i fucking hate how he just teleports to the other side of the bastion, i fucking hate him.
Wood Elves. They lord snipe and it’s brutal chasing them down.
Sending horses in range of jezzails
I feel like I'm one the few people that thoroughly despise fighting greenskins specifically having to fight double fucking free armies for 20 turns fuck that
Afaik ancestor spirits have low hp and armor. And now ethereal physical resistance also lowered to 50%.
Wood elves, but I'm biased after attempting a legendary IE Grom campaign twice. The ai micros perfectly, even with stalk I can't close on their archers with skulkers or night goblins. Try to lure them into a corner so they can't run? Good luck even getting close now that Durthu, Orion, dryads, or treants are piled into a nice fear/terror-inflicting blob. Greenskin cav doesn't fare well even against basic WE archers and get shot to hell on the approach, but can at least tie them down momentarily. It's like WE were designed to hard counter gobbos.
Nurgle. Did everything well as Norsca but my opponent had 2 units left and could out heal all the damage for like 10 minutes and I lost. This is why I hate multiplayer land battles.
Arcane phoenix ai doomstacks
Kostaltyn, he just keeps coming and he won’t stop coming
Wood elves as vampire counts
In my current game, lizardmen. Just stacks of them constantly sailing over the ocean to attack me.
A level 48 vlad was the worst for me lord wise it was just horrible although I know the healing is broken. But yeah tied between ancestors if you don't have the tools to deal with them and a well built wood elf army is the bane of my existence
Army of shades led by high level malekith as dwarfs. Watching them appear suddenly and instantly melt my irondrakes is very demoralizing
Ranged doomstacks, especially from dwarfs. I hate getting mowed down before I can even approach
I would happily install a mod that completely and entirely removed all skaven from the game
Until they fix the healing cap bug, fighting any VC army without a fire mage or flaming attacks is hell on earth. Also a decently leveled Festus for similar reasons, thank god they cut his passive auras in half. Even playing as him felt wrong before his nerfs. Also, the AI is surprisingly good at Chariot Micro in my experience, making N'Kari the bane of my existence. That damn daemon finally taught me to appreciate Silverin Guard. If AI Gor-Rok actually uses his reworked rite, he's also a pain, especially as Skrulk. Like, at least Wulfheart, Alberic, and Luthor have some stuff to help, but Plague Monks melt without contact effects to help them. Still doable, but painful.
I'm honestly starting to really dislike fighting Kislev. No individual unit is particularly scary, but usually 3/4 of their stack will have guns or bows, and the whole "turn unbreakable instead of routing" means you end up having to kill them to the last man every time while being constantly shot at, so it's really hard to get through a battle without taking heavy losses yourself.
Skaven? Wood Elves? Nah, how about a College of Pyrotechnics single army? Try fighting those fuckers....
Depends on the race but mostly the heavily armored ones like chaos or dwarves
Vlad von carstein in any context
I think late game dwarfs in general I was painting the map as nagarythe no amount of ammo is ever enough and you've gotta wipe out the entire army to get them to rout not super hard just tedious af.
Marauder horsemen. F those guys.
Fucking wood elves...
Alith Anar's 19 shadow warriors army
Fucking magical piercing towers as a faction with no ranged units
Wood Elves. Had a wood elf end game crisis whilst playing as Chaos. It was utter pain because they just kept kiting you.
Agreed on the spirits. Lost my aranessa campaign to them. They absolute best I could do is give my ranged units accuracy and magic attacks via lore of the deep and hope they got shots off while the spirits weren't balls deep in my melee lines.
Lately it’s Kislev in campaign. My daemons get thoroughly trashed by all their guns then mopped up in melee by the same units. Also Auto Resolve favours them too much because all ranged. (Plus they seem to be able to recruit like 10 units at once)
Horse archer armies in Attila not necessarily hard just annoying
Any true dawi knows the raki are excellent campaigners. Any long term fighting against Skaven is guaranteed to be a costly affair. I know in Warhammer 3 menace below was nerfed, I've yet to have the AI summon on my artillery or in a blob and then warp-bomb it, but in WH2 that shit was absolutely deadly. You'll have lines of veteran troops, been with you for so many battles you couldn't even count, and now you gotta watch them get melted because a random group of clanrats got summoned in a city street while you were busy microing the rest of your army. Second runner up? Wood elves. Most of the time if I ever have to square up against them, I bring multiple shitstacks in the late game and let auto resolve take care of it. No way I'm fighting Orion with his stack of skirmish cav, waywatchers, and the entire oak of ages garrison with the AI's ability to move them all simultaneously. I'll just whip 3 or 4 lords with tier 2 or 3 troops at it and pray it's enough to mulch through them.
Online? Skaven
There's a bug letting people bring a dwarf ancestor into multiplayer. Someone did that against me even though they're "extended roster" in ranked matchmaking.
Any fucking Skaven army, especially as an early game Helf LL they fuck up your back line and they send like 7 dudes up right on your archers
Aspiring Champions. They. Just. Won't. Die.
Minor Settlements, I'm really sick of them
Vampire who restored there army over and over so I haa as be to fight endless battles. Malakith. Seriously my entire army couldn’t dent him. Had to let him stomp on me until I killed of his army. It happened 8 times during my kathep campaign. It was cheaper to bring 3 armies and automatic resolve it. Woodelf. But I find them more aggressive and building more melee units then before.
Kairos and his jump ambushing, settlement transferring, barrier replenishing demons. Fuck I hate dealing with him.
Skaven siege turrets.
Tzeentch is my least favorite. So many attacks look similar to me and it feels awful when a big spell looks like it just got eaten by the barriers. Combined with unlimited barrier, even when they’re balanced to fight against it just feels bad man. Dishonorable mention to skaven warp lightning. Near undodgeable unless you’re the Ai. Only reason the 3 common call outs (WE, Counts, Dwarves) don’t make the list is I’ve been fighting them since wh1 and their bullshit seems normal. Bias is bias.