Dwarfs Campaign Need help vs Orks

[Chlodwig I.]

Can someone give me a hint?

Goblin cavalry is crushing my dwarf worriors as if they would wear no armor at all, don't ask about the ork cavalry thats even more
Slayers get crushed by the trolls and black orks which they should counter at least in tabletop
the artillery is doing almost no damage, or not enough.

the ork and gobling archers kill my two handed guys, so they are not able to realy fight, the normal warriors are a bad joke,
my crossbow men and hand gunners seem to shot with bullets made out of paper because the don't kill as many orks while the orks continue kill my warriors.


did i mention that ork cavalry is just crushing everything?


I can't remeber that I had that much problems in a TW game before on normal difficulty....

[General Brittanicus]

Can someone give me a hint?

Goblin cavalry is crushing my dwarf worriors as if they would wear no armor at all, don't ask about the ork cavalry thats even more
Slayers get crushed by the trolls and black orks which they should counter at least in tabletop
the artillery is doing almost no damage, or not enough.

the ork and gobling archers kill my two handed guys, so they are not able to realy fight, the normal warriors are a bad joke,
my crossbow men and hand gunners seem to shot with bullets made out of paper because the don't kill as many orks while the orks continue kill my warriors.


did i mention that ork cavalry is just crushing everything?


I can't remeber that I had that much problems in a TW game before on normal difficulty....

Just finished a campaign as the Dwarves using pretty much the same unit composition in all my armies until the very end. To start with I just had Lord, 9x Crossbows and 10x Dwarf Warriors. Use the warriors as the anvil and use the crossbows to kill all his more mobile units and large creatures - focus 2 or 3 crossbows on one at a time and its pretty easy to break them. Then when just his infantry left I tend to direct all crossbows at the two units on the enemy flanks - kill them and use the dwarf warriors that have been freed up to start flanking the rest of his army. Once that happens wipe out the enemy ranged with your own ranged and then just work on his infantry.

Late game I still had mostly the same army composition, but replacing warriors with longbeards or ironbreakers with the occassional use of artillery as well.

[Chlodwig I.]

My Army is most time composed
9 Range units
6-8 Archers (2-3Handgunners and 4-5Crossbow) 1-2 Catapult/Canon, 0-1 Organcanon,
11 Melee units
General + 10 Warriros (0-1 Slayer, 1-2 TwoHanded, 0-2 Miners, 5-9 Warriors/Longbeards

Still it seems impossible to do this the Orks are most time coming with 1 General, 6 Cavalry 4-6 Archers and 5-9 Warriros 0-2 Trolls

The Cavalry is flanking left and right and the trolls General, and ork warriors are massivly on the center,
its always almost impossible to counter the flanking because of their attack, reatreat attack, which fells like causing almost NO deads on ork side while they crush my dwars.
so I'm forced to use more warriors (no. of cavalry +1 on both sides) to stop the flanking which weakens the center, so often the center breaks before i routed the cavalry or
I hold the center but the cavalry is breaking through and in my back.

When i stoped the cavalry before the center is broken, then I move in my remaing troops to reenforece the center but very often the cavalry suddenly returns because they very often stop fleeing
even when they already lost 80-90% orks
I almost never see orks routing untill they have lost 75-90% of their men.

Strangely if the battle is 2 Full stacks on both sides I always win if its less than a full stack on both sides I almost loose every time or only have a Phyric Victory.

[ScottM]

Be Fair I'm finding this pretty hard aswell. I'll be honest and say I've not really played a TW game since Empire which is/was my fave game in the series so getting used to the melee troops is getting me. I seem to get to the same point in each campaign, Get the 3 areas of the Silver Road Province under Dwarf control then try and move north to take the one Orc hold there by that time Grimgor rocks up with a full stack of troops (normally Big Uns) if he doesn't turn up the Greenskins pretty much confed straight away and then get 2 Waaaaghs going and have two full stacks with them and move around the map in pairs or all together steamrolling every thing.

While I'm not asking for a blow by blow strat, like Chlodwig more like tips. What do people do for their research? I tried to split it evenly across the two trees, how do you set up the holds. Opening moves?

[Kharazas]

Well TW evolved a Little bit since Empire. Concerning the difficulty Shogun 2 was on a whole different Level. Can't comment on Rome 2 because I didn't play that much.
I started with the dwarves on hard and I've got to say that I was surprised how - let's say - hard it is. I'm still in the process of figuring out which unit works best against what and what the agents actually are for

[Archimonday]

My keys to success as the Dwarves (my fav faction so far) are these:

2 - 4 Units of Artillery - Either Cannons or Grudge Throwers, does not matter, use them to route enemy skirmishers at the rear of the enemy formation.

Quarrelers, Quarrelers, Quarrelers. - Thunderers have great armor piercing damage, but their primary problem is their limitations: I.E. they cannot be placed behind the main battle line, and still shoot, without kill massive amounts of your own troops. Quarrelers however can fire over the formations. All Skirmishers should be placed at the flanks, with Miners, to protect from enemy cavalry charges (missiles absolutely wreck orc cavalry of all kinds) and wasting a Miner unit to stop them in their tracks is as cheap and easy as it gets.

Attack, Attack, Attack. - The AI will have no problem standing back and pounding away with missiles until you are dead, so take your Lord, and All your main battle line and charge. Get close in and up-close with the orc armies as soon as possible in every battle.

Lengendary Lord - Unit Augments and Buffs are so important to the Dwarf armies. They need to be able to fight outnumbered, sometimes 3 to 1, 5 to 1, or even higher. Upgrading your Lord (in my case the high king) to utilize all the unit buffs possible, and augments I can get, my Dwarf armies are literally invincible, and it only gets better as they gain experience.

Last but not least, just keep an eye out for flanks. If you can get behind the enemy, do it. Encircling and killing the Orc War Boss will immediately cause a mass route of the entire Orc force against you, so look for him, and take him out.

[Stangler]

As others have said the key to the dwarfs are the ranged units. For me the orcs pretty much always attacked with missile cav on my flanks so I would always have at least two ranged infantry out there to deal with them. They would consistently destroy them and once they are dealt with you can turn those units towards the rest of the army. Once the orcs get some of their stronger units you may want to have some infantry in reserve to fill any gaps that they create. Orcs also use a lot of archers but they are easily countered by some focus fire from your archers.