Warhammer: Magic & Creatures vs Total War Armies

[SinerAthin]

I think Magic will fit quite well in Total War.

A lot of the abilities that we have in Rome and Attila already feel like magical effects you just turn on.

But perhaps what I'm more interested in is if there'll be any room for counter-magic gameplay in Warhammer. It's cool to blast armies, but sometimes I think it'd been advantageous to use the power of your magi to screen your advancing infantry from enemy magical spells instead in the case of a siege for instance.

spells combined with counter spells is something I feel could make a much more deeper and complex magical system.

I can also think of perhaps a category of tactical but non-harmful spells, like creating magical fog to hide your unit movement, which I feel could be cool and add yet a third dimension to any magical system.

[jtfjtfjtf]

I think Magic will fit quite well in Total War.

A lot of the abilities that we have in Rome and Attila already feel like magical effects you just turn on.

But perhaps what I'm more interested in is if there'll be any room for counter-magic gameplay in Warhammer. It's cool to blast armies, but sometimes I think it'd been advantageous to use the power of your magi to screen your advancing infantry from enemy magical spells instead in the case of a siege for instance.

spells combined with counter spells is something I feel could make a much more deeper and complex magical system.

In the tabletop game for every spell cast the opponent can try to dispel it. You get a higher chance if you have a wizard. So it's definitely something they can try to be creative with in the Total War game.

[KiKiweaky]

Have any of you ever played King Arthur the role playing wargame, or the second one? They implemented magic with large units pretty well in that and had flying units and some huge monsters too.

No magic backfires though which would be sweet. Imagine trying to cast a spell and your wizard ends up turning into a chaos spawn and slaughtering his body guards haha.

[The Despondent Mind]

Well in the mod Call of Warhammer for MTW2 the magical units and monsters sort of work, they can be game breaking sometimes but you can manage them. My point is that if the modders can make it sort of work with an game not meant for that, I guess the developers should do it better.

Then again it's CA.

[Caradrayan]

I wanted to chime in here with some perspective. Personally, I thought Warhammer: Dark Omen was a great game, (and Shadow of the Horned Rat before it) Both of those games implemented basically a straight port of mages from the tabletop ruleset of the time. These were the days when the system was based on a deck of cards. every round, 15 seconds or so, you got -1 to +3 magic points. Spells cost 1-3 points and you could save up to 8 points I think. So, magic was unreliable in that you might not have the mana to cast the spell you want when you want it. They did not implement miscasts. This was important for those games because you only got 1 or 2 mages to play with for the whole game and if they died they were gone. In Warhammer: Total War, presumably you will get to recruit mages. If your mage dies to a miscast, it will suck, but you can hire another one. Another factor that speaks to from those games is that when you first got the mage, he wasn't *that* useful. it was only after training them up over the course of a few battles that they got their most powerful spells, the ones that melted whole units and could dominate a battle. In the tabletop, more powerful spells are more likely to miscast. That risk vrs reward meta-game sounds great to me. Let experienced mages get spells that can destroy half an army personally, and let the break be that if you try to do that every battle, the mage will self destruct eventually.

[HigoChumbo]

In the tabletop, more powerful spells are more likely to miscast. That risk vrs reward meta-game sounds great to me. Let experienced mages get spells that can destroy half an army personally, and let the break be that if you try to do that every battle, the mage will self destruct eventually.

Well, I can say you are not alone here, although I fear the "casual audiences will not like/understand that" argument will be heard every day at CA's headquarters and will most likely be a strong driving force of their development proccess, so I would not hope for much.

That said, I think "half an army" is probably too much (unless some specific conditions with a counterplay are met, such as a mage having a very strong area attack and the enemy making a huge blob asking for them to be blown into oblivion). Battles are already too short. In the tabletop game, blowing "half an army" probably means 15-30 soldiers, and you still have your powerful heros and creatures to turn the tide after that, but in TW we are speaking of hundreds if not thousands of men. I certainly want TW:WH to be more individualistic, with a stronger focus on unique, powerful units, but I still want it to retain its grand scale, I'd not like to see a couple of champions dueling each other for 5 minutes in the middle of a battlefield surrounded by nothing but lowly soldier corpses.

[Markas]

Man I loved Dark Omen back in the day. For those unfamiliar with it here's a let's play-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gURdHzE0DJ8

The Winds of magic system was good as well, there were eight orbs that could be filled, they started off with only one lit up and every 30 second turn you got between -1 to +3 orbs filled. The mages had spells that cost 1-3 orbs.

[Påsan]

I doubt Mages will be that powerful. They are not on the tabletop at any rate. The artillery in Fall of the Samurai was pretty damn devastating so about that level at the most. Besides mages is not only for throwing fire balls, they can buff own units as well.

[WAR monger]

I doubt Mages will be that powerful. They are not on the tabletop at any rate. The artillery in Fall of the Samurai was pretty damn devastating so about that level at the most. Besides mages is not only for throwing fire balls, they can buff own units as well.

They aren't?

And guys, I don't understand why you were arguing with anyone like xjlxking anyway. It doesn't look like he knows too much about Warhammer, fantasy or interesting games in general.

[Påsan]

They aren't?
v
And guys, I don't understand why you were arguing with anyone like xjlxking anyway. It doesn't look like he knows too much about Warhammer, fantasy or interesting games in general.

They rarely wipe whole units by themselves. Now CA could very well make them OP because they are cool and new and flashy aka fire balls in Rome, but the natural place for them is as support units.

[Evan MF]

Chance/randomness that is built into the game mechanics in the form of RNG detracts from the strategy and skill aspect of the game. If the game wants to be taken seriously as a competitive strategy and not a sandbox fantasy fling with dragons, wizardry and all manner of other bells and whistles, then the only 'chance' involved should be player-invoked; that is the player having imperfect knowledge or imperfect experience when making a strategic decision and thus making an informed guess as to what to do, in doing so, allowing him to improve his skills with time and experience and thus optimise his strategic approach.

There is nothing more frustrating as a gamer than having bipolar tools at your disposal, where the likelihood of casting a spell, say, can result in huge gains or huge losses on the basis of a coin flip, with no pertinence at all to your ability or your situation. It's why games like Hearthstone can vary in enjoyment so vastly from match to match and why even at the professional 'e-sport' level a lot of players don't have much better than 50% win ratios, because the a lot of the game's tools have a heavy RNG influence and are in a sense rigged to produce these results.

I would not want to see spells done in such a way in Total War: Warhammer, even if that's the way it's done in the tabletop gameplay, it will just take so much agency away from players and move the strategic emphasis away from unit manoeuvring tactics, which is the core of Total War battles in my opinion.

[HigoChumbo]

If the game wants to be taken seriously as a competitive strategy and not a sandbox fantasy fling with dragons, wizardry and all manner of other bells and whistles

Since when has TW been taken as a serious competitive strategy game anyways? It's always been way more single-player focused, and single player loves those bells and whistles more than perfect balancing.

Chance/randomness that is built into the game mechanics in the form of RNG detracts from the strategy and skill aspect of the game.

It does not detract from strategy and skill. It just makes it different, adds a new layer.

You could be the most skilled military commander on the planet and strategize as much as you wanted... if you decided not to take into account the chance/randomness that it might rain during your campaing, you would most likely be screwed.

There is nothing more frustrating as a gamer than having bipolar tools at your disposal

Tell that to Napoleon.

where the likelihood of casting a spell, say, can result in huge gains or huge losses on the basis of a coin flip, with no pertinence at all to your ability or your situation

There is an entire city built in the middle of the desert moving millions of dollars every year whose very existence proves that people actually like that. Gambling can be thrilling. Unpredictability is thrilling. Having everything perfectly under control can be boring. It's not something you would spam every battle, it's something you could use as a last resort perfectly knowing that it might very well turn against you but letting you choose if you actually have no better option than to gamble or face a sure defeat and therefore the risk is worth taking.

It's why games like Hearthstone can vary in enjoyment so vastly from match to match and why even at the professional 'e-sport' level a lot of players don't have much better than 50% win ratios, because the a lot of the game's tools have a heavy RNG influence and are in a sense rigged to produce these results.

And still it's one of the most successful and played games in the past few years and arguably the best game Blizzard has released since The Burning Crusade.

By the way, I don't really give a damn about TW being an e-sport or not. If they manage to balance it as an afterthought, thats ok, but if the single player experience is going to be harmed by the insistence on milimetrical balancing, making the final result to fall short of epicness and immersion, then they can shove balancing up Tywin Lannister's bunghole.

As far as they do it in a way that does not detract from unit manouvering, then I see nothing wrong with it. It might be a very interesting addition.

[Son of Horus]

Attila is supposedly one of the most balanced games because it has such limited and similar rosters to one another.

People are complaining about the lack of variation. Go figure.

In regards to the casting a spell and it going wrong/working, well, the game has always been about RNG. You can do things to influence those odds - such as by having better units, more advantageous placement/charges, better generals with better bonuses, and so on and so forth. The first game I played - M2TW had that. I lost 5 kings and heirs in as many turns thanks to a high level assassin that was killing them off (it was a HRE assassin, and because of that, still one of the reasons why I don't like playing the HRE!) before on one turn he failed, and was made visible - I then had an assassin of my own attack him. I had a 39% chance of success. I gambled.

And I lost. My best Assassin was dead, as was 4 generations of my family tree leaving one of my weakest generals as King - although thankfully now on the other side of the map, trying to kill the Moors. I'd eventually lose Capital to HRE attacks made against the armies I had assembled there to defend against their attacks - with my armies breaking thanks to the lowered morale. If I'd had a better Assassin, or my generals had better Personal Security traits, the HRE assassin would likely have been killed or unsuccessful, and the HRE would have been killed by myself rather than the Hungarian/Venetian alliance.

In Warhammer, the ability to be more powerful at casting spells is dependent on your level; from 1-5. Each level allows a character to know 1 spell, and also makes them easier to cast. If the player wishes, when casting that spell, a wizard may choose (if the spell allows) to cast a more powerful version of it - the downside to this is that it becomes more difficult to cast. The higher the level, the less a Wizard needs to draw on the winds of chaos themselves (this game mechanic representing the more powerful casters being able to draw that power out of the aethyr with more ease and safety than a less accomplished wizard). Considering as well that in game, there is only so much magic available to cast in the winds of magic, someone drawing on all of the available power to cast a super fire ball might leave their side bereft of other magics which may otherwise have been more useful - such as by enchanting the weapons of their units or by healing those wounded so far. Until the winds of magic blow strong again, this can leave an army becalmed - and considering the nature of some foes as being weak only to magic, such as ethereal wraiths (an undead unit) or in the old versions of daemons, this could leave you at a hefty disadvantage.

The actual blowing up of a character casting a spell is thankfully rare - but drawing on the fickle and dangerous winds of magic straight from the chaos wastes and tainted with madness and damned prophecy, those who take more and more power from the winds themselves risk more than just their lives, but their souls. At the same time, some wizards may see this is a price worth paying - either for personal gain, actively welcoming the chaos gods into a faustian pact that only favours Chaos, or in an attempt to sacrifice themselves to save the rest of their allies.

In game terms - this means that the more dice you use to power your spell, the more likely it is to go off - sometimes with such power that it can't be stopped (or dispelled). In such events though, the residual magic left over pulses through the wizard, and may result in death or mutation. A more powerful mage (in theory) doesn't have to use as much of the winds of chaos, so has less chance of being susceptible to corruption. The only thing is that the core rules don't actually support this way of thinking (each level of magic adds +1 to the roll, while a dice adds between 1 and 6, but only on a the roll of a 6 does the chance of causing an Irresistible Force/Miscast spell increase/occur.

There is no real difference between a Wizard casting their spell and an assassin attempting to kill an enemy - the difference is that a Wizard can choose to try and draw more power in effort to cast a more powerful spell - more powerful wizard have less need to draw on that power - and so it's a matter of risk over reward - either risk having the fireball trigger on yourself rather than the enemy if you're found wanting, or just ensure that you survive by casting weaker spells.

I just hope that more effort goes into the spells - allowing some form of "mutagen" or seperating spell path which allows you to craft spells - for example - one upgrade path lets you cast 1 fireball, and then a bigger fireball, or another lets you cast multiple fireballs, while another turns it into a flamethrower effect etc. Admittedly that is not in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle Game rules right now, but it's a staple of the genre.

[Markas]

Isn't one of the criticism of the End Times ruleset that magic is really OP? I saw a game and the purple sun of whatumadutha wiped out nearly a whole regiment.

The actual blowing up of a character casting a spell is thankfully rare - but drawing on the fickle and dangerous winds of magic straight from the chaos wastes and tainted with madness and damned prophecy, those who take more and more power from the winds themselves risk more than just their lives, but their souls. At the same time, some wizards may see this is a price worth paying - either for personal gain, actively welcoming the chaos gods into a faustian pact that only favours Chaos, or in an attempt to sacrifice themselves to save the rest of their allies.

In the games I saw on youtube a magic user getting killed/seriously wounded casting seemed to be 1 in 3 games, often costing the game if they were the Lord. When it goes wrong it really goes wrong.

In game terms - this means that the more dice you use to power your spell, the more likely it is to go off - sometimes with such power that it can't be stopped (or dispelled). In such events though, the residual magic left over pulses through the wizard, and may result in death or mutation. A more powerful mage (in theory) doesn't have to use as much of the winds of chaos, so has less chance of being susceptible to corruption. The only thing is that the core rules don't actually support this way of thinking (each level of magic adds +1 to the roll, while a dice adds between 1 and 6, but only on a the roll of a 6 does the chance of causing an Irresistible Force/Miscast spell increase/occur.

Good to know, most of the magic system still baffles me. The battle report series I watched went by so quickly in the magic phase I didn't know what caused a miscast at all.

I just hope that more effort goes into the spells - allowing some form of "mutagen" or seperating spell path which allows you to craft spells - for example - one upgrade path lets you cast 1 fireball, and then a bigger fireball, or another lets you cast multiple fireballs, while another turns it into a flamethrower effect etc. Admittedly that is not in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle Game rules right now, but it's a staple of the genre.

I found the fundamentals of the Winds of Magic system in Dark Omen to be quite workable as a basis. Too much micro I think would sideline magic in the bigger battles.

[Son of Horus]

Being fair, it's been one of the criticisms of 7th and 8th edition at large. The End Times rulebook just kind of turned all the dials up to ridiculous, and what little balance there was just went flying out the window. Being fair, the exploits have been there for a while - at the dawn of 8th edition, you could only throw up to 6 dice at a spell, because rolling a double automatically caused an Irressistible Force. Skaven had a spell which just instantly killed whatever it touched without any other rolls of the dice IIRC - but in addition to that, there is an item which allows any double to count as an IF, and for them to also roll an additional dice more than normal. So, if you do the maths, that's 6 possible results from 7 dice, where any double causes an Irressistible Force and cannot be stopped on a spell which instantly kills whatever it touches.

That works, right? Needless to say, friendly games and tournaments alike quickly cottoned on and banned it, but the End Times ruleset is just to allow you to have fun using whatever models you like, really - it is quite good for a newcomer to get into, because now, they no longer need to spend hundreds and hundreds of pounds on getting an army, then ages painting it just so that they can play with their centrepiece Griffon or Dragon or Daemon whatever you like, they can just say "I'm using this model, and this model and this model, this is my 1500pts army, lets fight". Which is quite a good sales pitch - as not only were big scary creatures historically (gaming-wise) notoriously susceptible to getting shot by cannons leaving your once proud griffon to look more like strawberry jam, but required at least another 1600pts of army to play - which at anywhere between 4-10pts for some basic models, was really limiting to getting your favourite model on the table (by which point they were dead in the first turn as well, so you might as well have not taken him, and just taken another 400pts of army.

In regards to how Winds of Magic work, I'd probably find it something along the lines of a trait like Zeal, Authority and Cunning - each turn, there's a random Winds of Magic event (which could be influenced by other factors, such as the strength of the Chaos Faction, or buildings/monuments in particular settlements/regions of the map), which increases or decreases a Wizard characters ability to cast magic spells - the higher this value, the more likely it is that they can cast a spell, and the more likely that any spell they cast is more powerful (say base 40% chance to cast a spell, each +1 magic causes +5% chance to cast spell, and +5% to the variables of the spells, whether it's range, damage, strength of buff/debuff etc). If there's an enemy wizard on the field, they could have an ability called dispel which works like a stance - rather than casting spells they are countering an enemies - which reduces the enemies magic skill by the magic skill of the user - hence in smaller battles, it might be better to just have your powerful caster sit in dispel mode and prevent the enemies from casting, while your unbuffed units kill the enemy, but in more desperate battles, when you're forced to empower your puny human halberdiers with magic weapons and to force their bodies to become as strong as an Ogre just so that you can take down the Black Orc "Immortulz" that form Grimgor's bodyguard.

I can't really see the spells being much different from abilities as they are now, with the exception of a few targeted ones like a fireball you can tell the caster to shoot at rather than just relying on autoaim or having said fireballs working as a shooting attack.

[Dodanodo]

As someone who does not play Warhammer or really knew anything about it before watching all of Arch's lore video's and 1 or 2 LP's on youtube, I don't know allot about how Magic works in Warhammer fantasy. However, based on what I do know and what I think I would like and what I think the average TW player could atleast grow to like I would like to make the following suggestion as a template. Bare in mind, I don't now any of the spells used in Table Top warhammer so I have no idea whether the examples of spells I give are in the Warhammer universe or not, but bare with me here.

What I would like is that a basic mage has several abilities, preferably customizable, and that those spells could range across differant types:

first, a passive aura. This could be anything from a morale boost, increased attack/defense for nearby units (the standard sort of thing we already know), to some form of wardsave aura. Like in an area around the mage every unit gets like a shield sort of thing, that will stop the first projectile that would hit it, from an arrow to a cannonball or even a fireball. then lets say the shield for the individual unit takes 1 minute to regenerate after being hit. This would provide some of your units with some basic protection against artillery and magic, but will not survive a barrage or consistent fire, and is barely effective against normal archery fire and useless in melee. This allows CA to balance artillery and magic to be both powerful yet counterable. It prevents magic from becoming the go to answer to every big enemy army, but still allows it to be big and over the top ones in a while, without feeling completely imbalanced. Higher level mages could of course have a stronger effect of any of these things, like stopping more projectiles or lowering recharge time. Really, you could do lot's of fun stuff with just an aura, like giving your units flaming weapons or something, all fun stuff, just so long as they stay close to your mage. It's really no less balanced then your general abilities are nowadays. The aura should be passive to prevent a clickfest, and keep maneuvering and putting the right units in the right place the main strategic element of the game.

Secondly, a mage could have an automatic spell cast. It could function as a (relatively) shortrange artillery piece, throwing fireballs of a similar size we are already used to from Rome II's artillery. It would not have to be a fireball of course. Lightning bolts for example could function as dedicated Anti-air, being instantly at the target. However, not having a large area of effect nor firing in an arc could make it not so useful against ground forces. Again, I suggest this an auto-attack option to keep micro low and to prevent you from having to individually target flying units with your cursor every time you cast a spell, which can be annoying and distracting, especially if you are also in a complicated maneuver on the ground. I'm sure there are more imaginative ways to implement this than fireballs and lightning bolts, but I can't think of anything right now.

Thirdly, there are the activated ability spells. Now these can be really diverse. I'd like these to be mostly supporting spells, like healing damaged soldiers, creating a rain cloud over a part of the battle area, preventing the use of fire-based weaponry to your enemy unless he maneuvers around it (or helping units that are on fire). This could really help a faction like the woodelves who have many units vulnerable to fire. But you can also think of things like spawning a marsh to slow down enemy troop movement, changing the direction of the wind during a sea battle to be in your favor. I also liked an earlier suggestion made in this thread of creating a fogbank to temporarily disguise your units. those sort of support spells are the ones I'm honestly looking forward to the most. Nothing permanent or gamebreaking, just something your opponent can and sometimes has to work around to make battles more interesting and fun. They are ways to switch up the gameplay we've had since Shogun 1 in a meaningful way, with out being gamebreaking or overpowered. You can also add in a sort of counterspell if you're afraid they would be too unbalanced, but that should like take up a slot that could otherwise have been a more offensive spell, so as to force the player to really think about what spells they wanna have during the battle, keep it strategic if you will.

And lastly there should be those 'last resort' spells (or as I like to call them: The "you feellin' lucky, Punk?" spells). These should be rare but powerful spells, that have a reasonable chance of backfiring, but can really save your but in dire circumstances. One obvious example is a giant fireball/meteorite/[insert random explosive thing here] that will blow up multiple units of standard infantry or heavily damage more elite units, sending them through the air and breaking their formation. But another is a vampire specific spell that would temporarily block out the sun, giving your vampire units a huge boost or all undead units a decent boost (or both), but having the adverse chance of backfiring and intensifying the sun, weakening your army (or just your vampires) and probably making you lose the battle. A fun idea would be to give every faction one specific elite spell like this, just to add to their uniqueness and keep these pretty rare. I'm all for adding risk to magic, I would just like magic to play a prominent role on the battlefield and honestly I don't want to have to worry about killing my mage with every spell I cast. With the big ones it's fun though and it helps to keep them balanced, prevents someone from spamming them and such.

I apologize for the wall of text, but I had a couple of ideas and I just had to write them down. I look forward to discussing them with you all.

[Henchman#24]

I think the problem with making spells and their effectiveness based on campaign events kind of presents problems for multiplayer balance. Also, making the mechanics behind them too complicated presents other sorts of problems. I think you either need to keep it to a simple support spells are just regular abilities, regular attacks are about as effective as a high tier archer unit and pose no risk, and major spells, like calling a giant fireball out of the sky have a base 30% chance to backfire horribly with a decreasing probability based on unit experience.

[HigoChumbo]

They can always make single and multiplayer rules different. Total War has always been first and foremost about singleplayer, and the concept would in my opinion greatly suffer if the single player component was designed with multiplayer balance in mind.

Calling a Fireball is not really so differente from shooting a catapult. Yes, it's powerful, but its not precise, and has a long idle period between shots. Simimilar rules could be applied. I'm all in for backfiring magic though.

[Henchman#24]

I suppose so, but the multiplayer community has always been pretty active since Rome. I'm not opposed to making the rules governing single and multiplayer different (I mean, they have to be at a certain point) but I do think multiplayer should be given a good amount of consideration.

[IrishBlood]

In terms of magic users/wizards/sorcerers etc in the warhammer world, you guys should know that there is no such thing as a 'catch all' wizard who can perform any spell he wants.

The vast majority of magic users go with a school of magic and stick with it for their entire lives and rarely try anything else outside their comfort zone. This is because magic is INCREDIBLY hard to handle. Some people have more magical proficiency (most have none what so ever) than others, while the vast majority tend to be good at a particular type of magic.

For this reason in the Empire there are Bright wizards (fire), Celestial mages (storms, lightening etc) mages that can bend and shape metal with their mind etc. This way it would be quite easy for CA to implement specific magic units that perform a certain task; fireballs, buffs etc, rather than having one unit for each faction that does it all through spells.

Fair enough, chaos factions and elves etc may have wizards and the lack that can perform vastly varied and different kinds of spells, but even then they are usually in line with the kind of gods they work with and you rarely see them adopting the spells and types of magic used by other races.

I believe that certain magical creatures and sorcerers should be EXTREMELY OP to the point that they can only be defeated by VERY clever tactics, overwhelming numbers, superior technology (cannons and the like) or by your own magical heros and creatures. This will make the game far more epic. If Warhammer Total War will be anything like Call of Warhammer then it should really be done this way because the battles I fought in that mod were by far more epic then any I fought in any other Total war game!