Playtesting signups and release timetable

[comrade_general]

What do you mean by repeatedly allied?

I just mean in two different games, both of which i was wood elves, Altdorf allied with Orcs and Goblins in both of them.

Next time you notice them make an alliance, check the next turn to see if they are still allied, because it should be cancelled the next turn.

[Dunadd]

Ah right - ok, i see - will check

[Clockwork]

Duellists seem to be way more powerful than other comparable light melee troops. It's 50/50 whether they beat Empire Swordsmen.

[pro5281]

Great to see you guys up and running. I would have loved to be a game tester but im out of town for the next week. if you need any further testing the following week I would be happy to assist. Good feedback so far it seem though so congrats guys

[slayergr]

Duellists seem to be way more powerful than other comparable light melee troops. It's 50/50 whether they beat Empire Swordsmen.

They may look more powerfull in stats but dont forget that there are only 40 without a shield making them very vulnerable to missile fire.....also its the only light inf of the luccinese since the marines dont have the morale to withstand large fights so its the only thing that cna guard the rear of the phalanx .
I believe that the Lizardmen  need a buff.....the temple guard is only 10-14 as a stormvermin !!!!!

[slayergr]

Im playing Chaos Dwarfs with large units with so far only one bug that I saw in the Ogre kingdoms when I toggled the FOW off
They conquer one rebel settlement south of their capital and they leave a garrision but then,just out of town,their army has now stood immobile for like 5 turns now without goin for the next settlement
CDs have a good starting position and troops so I didnt even have to use cheats to pimp them up a bit.
Diplomacy is obviously still a prob and funnily there are more alliances and ceasefires each turn than in vanilla
The Dwarfs even offered me Trade rights
Theres a Tutorial on moddin Diplo,you just have to go to descr_strat,scroll down and then you can see the relations and give them values
(600=ally -600=war or maybe the other way around.
Ive played Skaven quite a lot in custom and they should,I think,definetely be cheaper and faster in combat
In all the books Ive read Skaven are lightning fast which is one of their main advantages
Plague Monks are a bit OTT,you should just give them 2 hitpoints and berserk cos they are always described as frothing,mindless and frenzied zealots and if you want to have one unit with morale boostin chant you could still use the same model and make one smaller unit of Plague Priests which chant and do magic(green fire balls?) and one large unit of Plague monks who are tough berserkers
Stormvermin animation should be replaced with fs_2handed so they dont look like they committed suicide
Giant rats are awesome!!!!!!!!!

The skaven dont need any buffs.....The plague monks offer ecxelent morale 2 hitpoints and average def making them very sustainable a cahnt and a great frigheting ability....Also the jezzails are just op! Ingredibly long range and they have the most powerful ranged attack...they can easily tear through even nurgle chaos warriors and Ironbreakers (defs 26 and 40)!!!

[comrade_general]

Diplomacy is obviously still a prob and funnily there are more alliances and ceasefires each turn than in vanilla
The Dwarfs even offered me Trade rights

That's the diplomacy script working like it should. The only way to prevent alliances is to cancel them after they are made.

Trade rights don't really affect anything.

[Talonmaster]

Its just a bit funny thats all

[Talonmaster]

Definitely agree on both price and movement speed. Wages especially for skavenslaves should probably be zero and clanrat wages low.

With faster I actually meant that their attack anims should be quicker
You can edit that quite easily in the EDU
But your idea is also good
Does anyone know how to edit a model/skeletons movement speed?

[slayergr]

Definitely agree on both price and movement speed. Wages especially for skavenslaves should probably be zero and clanrat wages low.

With faster I actually meant that their attack anims should be quicker
You can edit that quite easily in the EDU
But your idea is also good
Does anyone know how to edit a model/skeletons movement speed?

The skaven are a horde army and they should be vulnerable to missile and artillery fire...if they are fast moving you wont get any shots at them ! I strongly believe that the lizardmen need some buffs both in attack and defence...they arent the feral and tough warriors that they should be...Any other opinion on them? Also the chaos and bone giant need their priced increased.

[Dunadd]

Playing the campaign as wood-elves and i noticed that trade has been nerfed down to practically nothing, making it almost impossible to maintain garrisons and a field army once you get a bit into a campaign. I took two Brettonian cities and it was the same with them - never got trade income of much over 100 gold for any city no matter how many markets, bazaars, ports, trade caravans etc i built. Does not make for fun play in that respect. I do love all the wood elf units and all their buildings other than the nerfed trade buildings though.

Has trade been nerfed for all factions or just for wood elves? Either way, would prefer it un-nerfed.

p.s why do walking woods only have attack and charge bonus 1? I thought they were meant to be some kind of ent/treant/huorn type thing, though i havent bought any warhammer army books since 3rd edition in the late 80s.

[Jubal]

Walking woods are more like the Wood Elf walking forest spell (can't remember what it's called) - the idea is that it's a big scary forest that moves around, but that it's really a holdup/mobile terrain more than it is an attack unit.

Most provinces don't have their trade goods placed on the campaign map, which may be an issue with trade? Not sure.

EDIT: Also, Tiler, PMed you the link.

[Tiler]

I started playing a Skaven campaign.

I'm going to echo what others said: the upkeep for units is pretty wonky right now. Skavenslaves are only really good for population reduction, the 160 upkeep is pretty damn brutal. The skaven starting position is pretty painful as well due to distance penalties. I wound up just only keeping the Lustrian province and letting the other two non-capital cities revolt since the cost-benefit didnt work out in their favor. In lieu of using early skaven units, I just used merc forces. I'd imagine later game skaven armies would be mainly stormvermin rather than bothering with any of the lower tier units just due to upkeep price.

The starting skaven leader is an absolute monster, and his unit is by far the best unit in their starting roster. Its ironicially really difficult to use horde strats. as skaven just due to their crappy early economy and expensive unit maintenance, so the early battles with rebels, I was outnumbered and only won due to how great his unit was.

Also skaven generals that come with the level 3 settlement only cost 50 gold, which means you could probably make an army out of generals. Itd let you avoid having to build up any of the skaven recruitment buildings but it would be incredibly silly. Probably be annoying since you'd lose your entire unit if the warlord died and skaven generals get that -1 hp trait.

Skaven jezails are broken. Their high damage combined with their armor pen. and high accuracy results in them murdering anything and everything by themselves. Took a rebel province and two of them killed 732 rebels and the rest of my army killed... 28. And at only 100 upkeep, they're no pain to keep around. They made my entire force redundant. Maybe if they shot a lot slower?

Skaven don't get too many +happiness buildings and quite a few population boosters, so I'd imagine later in the game that revolts would be a constant problem, especially in the far flung provinces. Having that combined with cheap skavenslaves would actually work out okay, since it'd encourage players to recruit masses of units for the purpose of having them die horribly.

The flavor text is nice, and the units look good. No problems with the map so far, or any sort of glaring issues on the campaign side. I'd wonder if it'd be a better move to change some of the more far flung factions into seperate factions, just due to how big of a pain the huge distance to capital penalty is. Probably already at the limit, though.

e: You cannot recruit stormvermin! Well you can, but they all count as generals! At only 50 gold. Clanrat spears cost 150! Same upkeep too. Swords cost 100 but only have 120 upkeep. This probably should be looked at.

Had a battle against Araby. They brought 2200 men. I brought 500 rats, with 320 of them being jeezails. They lost. I'm not even that good at exploiting Total War AI: jezails are just brutal. The only thing that can touch them is cavalry, and even then, they have pretty high stats for fighting in melee.

Also speaking of stats, everything with a shield I've seen has only 1 shield defense. Not sure if that is intended. It probably contributes a lot to what makes jezails nasty: usually units get 2x bonus to their sheild defense, which doesn't amount to much. Meanwhile, armor only counts half for them due to their AP ability, and they do a very large amount of missle fire damage. Did I mention jezails are broken yet? :V

Giant rats bark! Its adorable. They're also very, very good for their cost.

[Tiler]

And that's likely the end of my Skaven campaign due to a persistent crash bug. No idea whats causing it.

Save is here: https://mega.co.nz/#!1Yw1UKgS!aox_FkG5WVnCYWLw3UwQ0WQGVZIzBcx6lpmx0dloUjY

Complete the turn in whatever way, game crash is during the turn change.

e: More specifically, during the Hordes of Chaos' turn. I watched the AI movement with toggle_fow off and it didn't really give any clues.
Also noting that faction income seems to be pretty low. It seems off when the skaven find themselves outnumbered more often than not due to income limitations.

e2: Reloaded an earlier save, was able to play past date. Seems to be a problem with RTW instead of this mod.

e3: I'm having tremendous problems with Unrest, which frequently sits 50-80% in all my provinces. I'm not sure what exactly is causing this, but this combined with the 80% distance penelty means that expansion in Lustria as skaven is a huge pain.

e4: Characters are getting a crazy amount of traits. Its very excessive. All of the ones I've seen have enough that you have to scroll down to see all of them.

e5: Completed Skaven campaign. Tried out the majority of their units as well. They're a weak faction right now due to the amount of unrest and the high upkeep of their troops; you have to station large bodies of skavenslaves in cities to keep them calm, which costs a very large amount of money. Lord help you if you capture anything bigger than a large town; the culture penalty will make things absolutely wretched. Building the "farm" chain with them is a major trap right now since the last thing you want to do is encourage growth since it just leads to very large and angry settlements. Skyre buildings are pretty awful as well since they give big bonuses to growth without much in the way of order; I could only maintain a select few and those settlements produced the bulk of my fighting force with jezails. Clanrats are pretty awful which is fitting, but their unit sizes are actually not that large. Other special building units are cool as well.

Dealing with order problems is a real unfun headache. If it was meant as a means to add difficulty, I'd rather just have the AI get free money to build doomstacks with than have to sit around for twenty turns trying to deal with boring and frustrating city management issues. I'd even spring for buildings that reduce population growth or have some sort of trade off that would make it so I don't have to deal with a sea of blue and red faces glaring up at me at the start of every turn.

On the factions I fought and AI behavior: AI never started a war with me. They were pretty easy to ally with. Did not see any braindead army compositions. I liked the faux Italian's names, but unfortunatly their roster is really, really vulnerable to jezails. I destroyed them fairly easially because of that. Their cavalry is pretty strong; I found the skaven actually can't deal with heavy cavalry that well (at least without Stormvermin); my solution was to engage them with fodder and flank them with guns, which tended to kill everyone involved, which was okay with me.

High Elves gave me problems with their Silver Helms cavalry, since they had high morale and only half of them tended to die by the time they reached my guns. Took over their island, which was very slow going since I couldn't move my armies from cities without sparking revolt, despite said cities having been exterminated down to 400 (very irritated) people.

Tomb Kings are flat out nuts. I only fought them a bit before winning, so I started a campaign as them. Mother of Mithra, they are good. Huge! units of skeletons which are basically immune to morale effects. Said skeletons are no slouches and are in fact superior to several standard infantry statwise. Units are very cheap and spammable. Stability wasn't an issue for the short amount of time I played, but I'd imagine it'd get worse as time went on since they only get 10% order bonus more than skaven and get to deal with a whole lot more buildings that lead to city growth aka never ending pain. Notable though that the two Tomb buildings can be built alongside many faction's "temples". Taking tomb cities as skaven was pretty awesome due to that. I had all my taxes on low and built any building I could, and even with maintaining two stacks I found myself with 5k or more at the end of turns I could waste on mercs. Enemies tended to break on contact due to combination of the scariness of the undead units / flaming arrows / chariots. All battles hilariously one sided. I could probably finish this campaign in less than two hours at this point and I only started an hour ago.

[Cornholio]

i got no time, hopefully someone gives them dark elves a good testing