Warhammer: Magic & Creatures vs Total War Armies

[Collateral_dmg]

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!

Yes the battles in Call of Warhammer are truly epic sometimes, and extremely hard lol.

The magic is divided in lores, and there are a number of them (lore of death, lore of life, lore of fire etc.). And like you said, the mage uses only one lore in a battle, but yes, you could basicly say that they use them for life, because you will have a mage throughout your campaign, not like the tabletop, where you can choose diferently every time. Those are mostly human and elf spells, other races like Chaos and Orcs have their own lores, and cant use the other ones (with some exceptions sometimes, e.g. Azhag the Slaughterer (orc warboss) who can use lore of death, but is not a mage). I hope we will see all those lores in the game, and be able to use them as we see fit.

[Son of Horus]

Azhag, however, is dead. So that makes things easier.

The question is regarding units which can select multiple lores; people like Teclis or Mannfred (and it IS Mannfred von Carstein in the trailer) who have access to multiple lores. It's easy enough to class someone like Thyrus Gormann or Balthasar Gelt as they are of a particular Lore of Battle Magic, but the more powerful characters don't.

I hope as well that some of the Monsters from the Monstrous Arcanum are included as well.

[atheniandp]

I've always advocated randomness in Total War. The series has so far been too determinate. Elite units will always, without a chance otherwise, defeat weaker units. Cavalry will almost always get shredded by spears. I want to see a Total War game where as part of the deterministic variables, there is also a "luck" mechanic that can allow units to function better or worse in a given scenario.

[HigoChumbo]

Elite units will always, without a chance otherwise, defeat weaker units. Cavalry will almost always get shredded by spears.

Unless you are fighting each game's british faction. Just got my experienced tesalian heavy cavalry crushed in a melee by a bunch of briton slingers.

[Himster]

So how do you guys think we could balance this?

The advantage the Warhammer setting has over historical settings is: Warhammer is already a strategy game, a strategy game that has been balanced and refined continuously for nearly three solid decades. Historical settings are not pre-meditated to be balanced: only by total war style contrivances can a degree of balance be inserted into the historical setting. But the Warhammer setting is designed to be balanced from the get go.

[HigoChumbo]

The advantage the Warhammer setting has over historical settings is: Warhammer is already a strategy game, a strategy game that has been balanced and refined continuously for nearly three solid decades.

Well, that's not what I've read many tabletop players saying.

And many of the tabletop rules can't be just copypasted to a video-game. They have to adapt everything.



In any case I insist that I don't give a damn about milimetrical balance. I want the game to be fun, immersive, spectacular, strategical. Balance can be detrimental for all those. In fact, there is fun in asymmetry. Arguably the most fun battle I've played in my current Rome 2 campaign was one in which I managed to resist a full stack of Parthians with 4 Macedonian units, all of them melee fighters, with no cavalry support whatsoever.

[atheniandp]

In fact, there is fun in asymmetry.

Hang on, this topic is far more subtle than you're making it out to be. One of my problems with Total War is that the higher difficulty settings always unreasonably empowers computer units to compensate for poor AI. This sounds fine until you realize that if you have 2 units and the AI has 2 identical units, they will win each and every single time.

We need indeterminacy, randomness, or luck in Total War games. The Warhammer tabletop game actually incorporates this through dice rolls. In the historical settings this makes sense as well, as there are countless examples of elite troops being held back by levies and poorer quality infantry.

I'm not saying levies should destroy Praetorians each and every single time, but there should be at least a *chance* that they could.

[HigoChumbo]

Hang on, this topic is far more subtle than you're making it out to be. One of my problems with Total War is that the higher difficulty settings always unreasonably empowers computer units to compensate for poor AI. This sounds fine until you realize that if you have 2 units and the AI has 2 identical units, they will win each and every single time.

Exactly my problem in my current campaign. The game is absurdly easy in normal (I don't think it took more than 4 or 5 turns to destroy the all powerful romans, parthians, and a bit more for the seleucids due to their countless satrapies, didn't even have the need to play a single battle), but I don't want to pump up the difficulty because I hate when the only thing that changes is letting the AI cheat.

In any case, what I mean with asymmetry is not that, but the fact that you might be fighting a more powerful empire and that might force you to adapt a particular strategy, that maybe some faction can have a really strong unit that you have trouble dealing with, and balancing it would end up in a boring campaign. For instance, one thing I like about the parthians is how they forced me to change my strategies because of their mass ranged units and their mobility. I was rolfstomping throughout all of Europe with my Macedonian Pikemen Phalanx with few casualties, and as soon as I reached the middle East I had to start hiring archer mercenaries and pumping slingers because their mounted archers were destroying my pikemen.

It would be even more challenging if I had little to no chance of defeating those units with my current army, so I would be forced to avoid open battlefieds, bring the campaign to my my mountainous realm, to rely on foreign mercenaries or even to straight avoid war with them. And I think there is fun in that. It's boring that you are able to conquer everyone and everything from the very first turn of battle. In Europa Universalis it's thrilling to survive against the monster France becomes, there is no way you can 1on 1 them, and even sometimes they even crush a coalition of the other top powers in Europe (Britain, Spain, Austria, Burgundy). And that forces you to adapt very particular strategies. In Rome there is really no difference if you decide to attack the gauls or the Carthaginians save for the different units. In EU, it's suicidal to just go straight against France.

That's what I mean with asymmetry. And I mean it not only for factions and unit rosters, but also for unit types. If I have an army of mass elf archers, and I attack the Empire, and they send steam tanks against, I wouldn't care if they are completelly immune to my arrows. It would actually be fun in a way and immersive to get crushed in such a battle and being forced to pull back to the forest and having to rethink the entire strategy. Same goes with flying units. If you go to the battlefield with no counter to them, expect to be crushed.


As for the chances and the dice rolls... well I think that given a standard scenario, like a unit of peasants frontally charging a unit of praetorians... i believe praetorians should win everytime, maybe the modifiers could be how long would the peasants last, how casualties would they inflict etc, or maybe if some conditions are met, like the peasants being motivated by some particular effect (like a general action) then yes, they could be eventually be able to defeat them, but not just as a standard chance. Some requirement should be met, and that requiremente should have something to do with player actions, or campaign events (maybe those peasants just got their town destroyed and their families raped by those praetorians) or stuff like that.

[Frost, colonel]

If things are flying around I expect my missile troops to be able to fire in the air at them, flying pin cushions as it were.

[IrishBlood]

If things are flying around I expect my missile troops to be able to fire in the air at them, flying pin cushions as it were.

LOL! Clearly you are not familiar with the warhammer universe. You may indeed turn such flying creatures into pincushions, but chances are that wont kill them

For example most flying creatures could possibly be killed by lots of arrows, but the biggest baddest ones like Dragons, wyverns, hydras, undead monstrosities or demonic creations will (or at least should) be immune to such attacks and would only be taken down by YOUR badass monsters or advanced technology like cannons, helstorm rockets etc.

I also hope that they make hero units a real thing in this game. In warhammer certain heros (or villains depending on your perspective!) can literally turn the tide of battle almost single handedly and I feel this needs to be represented in game.

[DeadInTheWater]

Personally, I think they should keep it as close to the table top rules as possible (Probably won't happen though. This is what may make or break the game). If not there will have to be a new balancing system implemented which would erode the core feel. If I'am not mistaken, there has been alot of work done on fine tuning the table top rules for balance and function over the years. The max point system could be similar to the Imperium system.

Never played the actual game, but i find it mighty interesting. I don't want a Total War full conversion mod (probably what we are going to get), I want a Warhammer grand strategy game. Turn based all around. This would get rid of the sub-par battle A.I..

With recent CA efforts of late, I expect a disappointment. Not without hope however.

[HigoChumbo]

This bit in the PC gamer article caught my eye

Thankfully, the Winds of Magic that power spells are concentrated in certain areas and not others, and randomised before each battle, so that wizardly-dominance can’t be relied upon.

Does that mean that wizards will only be able to cast certain spells into specific areas of the battlefield?


edit:

"You're not going to be able to cast those big spells over and over again," Ian Roxburgh, the project lead, assured me. "When you go into a battle, there will be a limited amount of spells you'll be able to draw upon and that will vary each time. There's a semi-random element, but it's also linked to the campaign game. The further north you go, and nearer to the Chaos Wastes you are, the higher amounts of magic you'll receive, but we don't want you approaching every fight with a rotation of spells that you know you can use."

So it's just that you don't know what spells you are going to get for each battle.

[Samitte]

Does that mean that wizards will only be able to cast certain spells into specific areas of the battlefield?

That would make sense. But other things could/should potentially affect it as well. Magic in Warhammer, in case of that of the Humans and Vampire Counts (And Elves and some other races) works with the Winds of Magic. Imagine a magical version of the sirrocco, mistral, ponente etc. These winds flow across the world and unlike actual winds are attracted to certain features where they flow stronger, linger and are more easily harassed. The most logical would be to have the location of the battlefield determine what magic is more powerful and which are weaker.

Life Magic(Ghyran): This would be strongest near rivers, in lush forests, during spring and summer.
Death Magic(Shyish): Thrives near places of death, gallows, past battlefields, graveyards and during winter.
Fire Magic(Aqshy): Would be stronger in deserts and near volcanoes. But also gains strength when emotions get heated or near open flames.
Beasts Magic(Ghur): Flows strongest the further you get away from civilisation, in the hearts of jungles or deep in the mountains.
Heavens Magic(Azyr): I believe this wind is basically everywhere where the wind goes, and is hard to take a hold of.
Metal Magic(Chamon): Is attracted to metals, especially the heavier ones like gold and lead. (Which is why some wizards adorn themselves in these metals heavily)
Light Magic(Hysh): Is stronger the closer you are to the light of the sun, and thus during the day and above ground. It would be even stronger on a mountaintop.
Shadow Magic(Ulgu): Gathers in the shadows, at night, and in mist.

Ork Magic on the other hand would be stronger the more Orks there are on the battlefield and the more excited they are.

The Vampire Counts use a twisted version of the lore of Death if I recall right, which would thus still be strongest around those places.

So it's just that you don't know what spells you are going to get for each battle.

Due to the fickle nature of the Winds of Magic, in the tabletop game, you roll every turn to determine how strong the Winds flow this turn and at the start of every battle you roll and find out what spells your wizards can cast. The amount is tied to their Wizard level with them having access to 1 spell per level.

For example:

An ordinary human Battle Wizard has a wizard level of 1 or 2.

Almost all vampires have an innate ability for magic, but their power can vary immensely and some might not even have any at all (though this is old lore now)

And Dwarfs get none because of their innate resistance to magic, instead their Runesmiths are excellent at breaking enemy spells.