Psst...you guys hear about Total War Sagas?

[MengJiao]

I hear you I have to be in the mood for stuff.

  Some of the stuff is pretty fun.  I'm playing the Empire on Easy with 5 or 6 pro-Imperial mods (Gyrocopters, more damage by firearms and artillery etc.) and there are some things I find moderately charming: WitchHunters as assassins for example.  I like how "annoying" Bretonnian regions and the Dwarves all try to be on the diplomatic circuits.

  Moreover, EverReady the EverReady, Archon of Chaos, seems to have gotten some new batteries and is "Returning" so I hope tanks, artillery and rifled muskets are enough to stop all the whizz-bangs in his arsenal.  On thing is for sure: their stuff glows and pulsates more than mind does...but with enough mods all things are possible.

[Gusington]

Gyrocopters you say...

[Nefaro]

I played a game last night with some gents who were trying to get me to like the game. Check out this mess and try to figure out what is going on.

All the Undead units are attacking a single small enemy artillery unit.

Probably trying to finish off one of the last enemy units on the map, after being given the order to all dogpile it. *shrug*


Doesn't look much different than any other Total War version, in the same situation.  Except you have all the color highlights active - holding down the Space Bar to get more such information, iirc. 

I've turned most of those highlights off, in the option window for them, as I've done in previous TWs.  TW:W just has more to choose from, but you don't need any of them on.

[Destraex]

Nefaro are you saying that in previous total war games units did not keep formation in close combat either?
I agree that the more recent ones (since shogun2 and rome2) are like this. But I feel this one is even more so.
I turned on the icons with space bar which is just on the default settings, to try to figure out what was going on, because that is what it is there fore. It's supposed to make things clearer.

The whole battle was pretty much like this. Troops took any melee as an opportunity to leave their formation and use a free formation deciding to leave gaps in the line. By wrapping themselves around the enemy unit. If you order an attack the troops fall out of formation. Do you know a way to stop this and march into combat in good order?

Nefaro do you know where I can cycle through formations for groups or individual units for warhammer? So I can move forward in good order without the need for micro.

I don't think it was so easy in earlier total war games to throw so many units into the same melee at once. If you did they would sort of be blocked by the other units and had to wait.

[jomni]

Destraex , you may need this if you want to bring back TW-style formations. Take note it alters a lot of gameplay.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=834440120

I've done some reading on the topic and the micro formations were not included because they were not in the table top game ( tactics and weapons advantage abstracted by modifiers). So likewise, in TW:WH the bonuses are built-in and there are no specific shield wall or spear wall, wedge orders.  Ideally the pixel troops will actually visually perform tactics automatically but I guess they just turn into melee blobs unlike in previous titles.

For group moves, select the group then use arrow keys to set destination. Alt+arrow keys to rotate.
Also play around with guard mode and see if it helps keeping formation. I used that a lot as dwarves.

[MengJiao]

Gyrocopters you say...

  I think in the vanilla game only dwarves get the gyrocopters, but in the mess of pro-Imperial mods I'm using, the Empire also gets gyrocopters.

[Destraex]

Thanks Jomni. But because friends are kinda teaching me and want to play to VS other people. Mods that affect gameplay are not really something I can apply.

[Gusington]

I am afraid of what I will find when I begin to check out mods. I plan on playing the first game vanilla for sanity's sake.

[Nefaro]

Nefaro are you saying that in previous total war games units did not keep formation in close combat either?
I agree that the more recent ones (since shogun2 and rome2) are like this. But I feel this one is even more so.
I turned on the icons with space bar which is just on the default settings, to try to figure out what was going on, because that is what it is there fore. It's supposed to make things clearer.

The whole battle was pretty much like this. Troops took any melee as an opportunity to leave their formation and use a free formation deciding to leave gaps in the line. By wrapping themselves around the enemy unit. If you order an attack the troops fall out of formation. Do you know a way to stop this and march into combat in good order?

Nefaro do you know where I can cycle through formations for groups or individual units for warhammer? So I can move forward in good order without the need for micro.

I don't think it was so easy in earlier total war games to throw so many units into the same melee at once. If you did they would sort of be blocked by the other units and had to wait.

Yes, previous TW troops would "wrap around" like that, to varying degrees.  More so the skirmish & mob type formations.  There are obviously more of those present in TW:W, but it's not really anything new to the series.  They all tend to go that direction when there's a big multi-unit pile up in one place.  I think they eventually improved phalanx cohesion in TW: Rome 2, for a best case scenario, but that's as good as it gets.


They've added better overall army handling in recent TWs.  IIRC, you can find these special input methods listed in the Options screen somewhere.  I don't recall the name, but there's a page in the Controls (I think that's it) which specifies how to handle your army while keeping them in your single big formation.  Between commands like Ctrl+G (?) to toggle your army to hold it's current formation, and various click+drag commands to select where they are going, and whether you want the whole line to rotate when they arrive at the ordered point.  Just a little reading & remembering the commands listed there.


As for learning TW, I absolutely suggest avoiding multi-player with it.  Run the single-player campaign.  You can pause & issue orders whenever you want, in single-player, and I think the campaign layer is really what makes the TW series enjoyable.  The multi-player just looks like a hyper click-fest, with a bunch over competitive players trying to min-max their army point allotment to exploitative degrees over others.

Do single-player.  It will still be a challenge but you'll find it more enjoyable, easier to learn, and less of a click-fest with some Pause jockeying.  ;)  I never really thought of TW as a good multi-player system anyway. 


EDIT:   While doing single-player campaigns, the UI makes it easy to learn.  Nearly everything has a tooltip pop-up describing stats, and what buttons do.   :bd: 

[Destraex]

Single Player I had done. Got half way through the imperial campaign and then decided the grind was too much. I had unlocked all the units for the empire and their was not reason to keep repeating the same battles. Started a Bretonnian campaign but could not get into the groove.

Then recently a bunch of mates got it on special and we have one real expert who has been playing competitive multiplayer all along. He has been trying to get us all into the game.
For this I need some absolute values on what stats stack with what and what the final values are for attack/defence... what shields do exactly. You know, you can fumble your way through single player vs the AI, but you really have to know your stuff for multi. I don't know warhammer lore or stats well enough for that. I would need to consider whether I even wanted to learn that much about it.
As for speed and mods, with multiplayer your hands are tied with these. You have to play at the developers default speeds and without mods.

For me, the wrap around effect is huge compared to the total war games I liked in the past. Maybe the effect is the same in attila and rome. But before this I remember the wrap around being minimal, say for rome1, med 2 and empire/napoleon. These titles for me were the hey day of total war. Formations could not brawl up so much that they should not be able to be effective anymore. You could not engage with for example, all those units in the screenshot at once. It was not a simple matter of spam, but positioning. Units did not break formation or break quickly.