Just got the achivement The stuff of Legend...

Vortex campaign.

That was as level under +/-10 Teclis with starting and low tier units...some spearmen, archers, seaguards and ellyrian reavers...against 3 stack of skaven ambushing me preventing my other stack to help...

I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ need to sleep now...that was painful. Skaven ambush is OP, elves are great though. love the mod so far, thx!

Queek, VH/N. Found out that if I don't tech to any kind of skaven wacky tech (poison wind globadiers/catapults/cannons), I'll die by the lizard. At the same note, killing a slaan mage priest with <10 shots from warp lightning cannon never felt better.

I've been getting wrecked as empire. Their usual ranged superiority is no longer enough, and I can't really figure out what sort of army composition works against vampire counts. I only manage to win after taking heavy losses.

I'm currently running three campaigns side-by-side; Belegar (turn 90), Mazdamundi (turn 150) and Karl Franz (turn 30). I like that Cold-Blooded is doing what Cold-Blooded is *supposed* to be doing instead of being this ranged heal ability that makes no sense, and that the 'anti-infantry' and 'anti-large' traits are not as ubiquitus and randomly applied as before.

I feel that monstrous infantry could use a HP nerf though; I know that TT-wise it 'makes sense' for a single T4 W3 krox to have as much HP as a single empire captain, but in practice Tier 3 monstrous infantry units with 8,000+ HP (which the AI gets distressingly early) are almost impossible to counter with your early-game units. Especially the vargheists, those flapping fiends. Vlad has a tendency to make all-vargheist armies (since he starts with their recruitment building) and burn the eastern Empire to the ground.

Sadly there is no consensus on mon infantry, sometimes they are too squishy and others too tough. In my experience you need to counter them asap and hard. If those counters are not available the pain is real of course, but if I survived a rain of 4 vargheists only on skinks before the temple guard arrived, I suppose they're not unkillable.

At any rate, I should be able to roll the campaign cap update later or tomorrow, so even Vlad won't be able to spam them asap.

So, I just finished a Tretch campaign (vortex) with this mod. The unit cap got introduced halfway through, but as most of my armies were already built it didn't change things terribly. If you don't mind, I'll add some thoughts, both on the core effect on skaven and the caps.
1) The Doomwheel feels a bit useless (which TT players would probably agree with, but it's not even useless in an entertaining fashion). Not only is it more expensive than a unit of rogres (which is weird considering it costs as much as 3 rogres in the TT), only available at tier 5 and takes an additional turn to recruit (blame CA and their tier system), but there's basically nothing it does that rogres don't do better. It feels like it's a unit without a niche in the Skaven roster, with HP equivalent to an on-foot hero character and a large profile that makes it really easy to hit with warmachines. It feels like I'm spending three turns and a lot of resources for a guided missile that more often than not explodes in-flight before even hitting something (again, TT-appropriate, but casualties in TT don't carry over to the next match). I mean, in TT it's T6 and 5 W, that's the reverse of an abomination (T5, 6 W) only without the regen, so why it has a third of the HP doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In my 'baseline' tretch games the Doomwheel was my MVP; with this mod on it got cornered and killed by some silver helms while I was busy checking my front lines. At least with the cap on lightning cannons I have a reason to build the tier V building, because the doomwheel isn't one.
2) Plague monk censer bearers have a bit of the same problem: Barring their charge bonus (which I assume represents the flail bonus to S in first round of combat), they basically do nothing that basic plague monks don't do better, easier and cheaper. Especially that 2-round recruitment requirement is a killer, given the skaven tendency to go through huge amount of replacement troops. The separate recruitment cap helps, but not enough. They probably need their censer aura, which would be as simple as copying it from the plague furnace (or from skrolk if you don't want a constant effect), before they get a niche. Again, at least the increased cap on plague monks gives you a reason to build the tier V building.
3) Love the stormvermin hordes. After I confererated Mors I could recruit vermin every round, so I had an army of Queek with nothing but mixed storm vermin, an engineer, and two warp-lightning guns, laughing off cav by making a giant solid box of vermin around the cannons who could shoot over the vermins' heads. Called it the te-rat-ico. Not sure how I feel about the horde building upkeep though, skaven economy is based off of every building giving you small amounts of money, not costing it. Feels a bit out-of-character and really limited my building of them, especially combined with the unit cap making other buildings (rogres and globadiers, mainly) more important.
3) Late-game, being triple-tagged by Lothern, Loremasters and Tor Elassor turned most battles into "maneuver three armies into range, ambush, auto-resolve battles". Mainly this is because of the dragons, because even with unit caps a single maxed-out dragon building gives you one of each plus dragon princes, and an army with three dragons is basically un-counterable by a single skaven army. The skaven answers to a single dragon are warp lightning cannons (with Howling Warpgale), globadiers (with Howling Warpgale) and basically hoping they'll land somewhere your halberd vermin, abominations and rogres can reach before taking off again, the first having the problems all war machines have against flying critters, the globadiers having the problem of being inaccurate, short-ranged, lobbing slow-moving projectiles and really easy to disrupt with cav (Warpgale also has a criminally short range), and counter-attacking with your own monsters forces you to rely on the AI's sense of fair play (also, the dragons have a tendency to burninate the vermin before landing). They don't really have one against multiple ones in a single army, except 'bring more Skaven armies', and I had to mod the food income to make that halfway possible to do. Skaven have the ability to keep a good econ *and* sky-high unit caps by building recruitment buildings everywhere, so that's neat, but it gets really expensive to build rogre and globadier recruitment buildings everywhere.
5) Malekith basically soloed my entire army in the final battle. Lords mounted on monsters are that powerful. Not having a monster-lord really bites for skaven, especially in quest battles where reinforcements aren't permitted. On a similar note, if the delfs or helfs beat you to the vortex you may as well restart the campaign. There is no single skaven army that can realistically beat the armies the pointy-ears bring to that battle if you have to interrupt their final ritual, even with the two allies (and their tier 1 and 2 core units) you get to distract them (helfs have one of each dragon, one of each phoenix, dragon princes and swordmasters/phoenix guard, delfs have several black dragons and malekith on seraphon, plus hydras and black guard/executioners). In TT that would be enough points to let the skaven literally cover every inch of the table in clanrats, but the game's mechanics won't let you do that.

1. Doomwheel: it was at the center of a lot of imbalance issues during testing. Eventually it was placed in the chariot hp bracket because otherwise it would single-handedly destroy armies. As it is, I just threw a couple of them on an human army and they wiped the floor with it by cycling. Sure, it's glasscannon, but it has terror and a lot of hurt in it. I'm not saying it has not a weird hp pool, but there are worse things.
It also doubles up to remind you how that thing could spontaneously implode in TT.

2. Censers will eventually have their own damage mechanics, I just got waylaid by a lot of other things.

3. All horde special buildings cost upkeep for their own mechanic. Money is a non-issue from a certain point in campaign so you should probably be grateful we didn't make the exception of making them cost Skaven food instead. :P

4. Which was a 3. again. Yes, well, big terror things were never nice to the Skaven. Realistically, the best solution to dragons is guns and big guns, and as you know Skaven are missing a couple Skryre thingies.

5. Because it's Malekith (probably level 30 I think?) on a dragon. Though the Skaven are surely the least suited for that, at least the final battle is a challenge rather than a chore. That's also why they have the best horde units. Quest battles are a best-in-slot contest if they were all hard, and there's virtually nothing balanced we can do about it without making all armies just as OP as the next.

Fair enough. I'm sure you've tested these more thoroughly than I have, but that's still my experience from playing campaign alone (on hard).

Campaign, due to its TW mechanics, means recruitment tiers with expensive buildings, time for recruitment and the 20-slot hardcap on number of regiments per army (and the upkeep penalty per additional army), and Skaven definitively hit their stride in campaign during the mid-game (tier 3-4, with vermin, rogres, plague monks and globadiers + warplightning cannon); their tier 5 units are all fairly mediocre by comparison and don't justify a 3-turn recruitment time or their upkeep for their turnover rate, their lords/heroes (especially the LLs) have nothing that compares to the dragons or carnosaurs for combat ability, and their elites (poison gutter runners, death runners and censer bearers) feel either incomplete or have too small numbers per slot to justify adding. In TT there's no limit in regiments per army, only in models per regiment. Campaign has both, so it feels a bit weird to me that HE elite infantry have more models per slot than the skaven ones (stormvermin aside: White lions/swordmasters/PG have 45 models, while censer bearers have 40, gunners have 30, globadiers have 15 and death runners have 10).

Most of the skaven elites and specialists (globadiers, eshin) actually had caps, up to 15 IIRC. So you couldn't spam them even if you wanted to. Would that have been raised in 8E? Dunno, but we left them at that size to keep them wieldable both in terms of literal size (width of a unit on the assumption of their already loose formation) and per-unit cost (you don't want to be stuck at paying 1500 for gutter runners).

Ah, and if I may, balance WILL feel weird at lower settings, no matter what. TW will always feel better balanced at Large, and perhaps Ultra. So that may also contribute.

That said, next update should also bring actual TT rules for the skaven special thingies like globes and zzzaappps and perhaps a change for the death runners.

Globadiers and gutter runners had a 15 models per regiment cap, yes (plague monks don't, so you could *technically* Horde them), but Warhammer armies have never had a cap on number of *regiments* per army, unless that was added at some point (barring the point cap on special/rare units obviously). If a skaven player wanted more globadiers, they could buy more regiments and spend up to 50% of their army's points cost on them, no problem. Meanwhile, W:TW, an army is capped at 20 regiments and each additional army increases points cost (relatively speaking) by anything from 5-15%. I'm saying that, inherently, the campaign setting rewards the greatest use of each slot in each settlement/army, and a regiment of 45 white lions (TT value, 585 points) is a much better use of a slot than a unit of 15 globadiers (TT value, 150 points), and both are tier 3 units in-game and both have the same global unit cap added by this mod.

I should perhaps add that warmachines have never had batteries in Warhammer Fantasy (that's something taken from 40K) and yet warmachine batteries are still present in-game. Not criticising, just saying that there is precedent for bending TT rules on unit sizes here. I don't think making globadier units bigger (and proportionally more expensive) is going to break battle balance (although testing could prove me wrong), and it would make skaven more viable in campaign. My computer is too old to handle ultra unit size anyway, so consider it an appeal from someone who can't afford a fancy new graphics card right now.

There was also a cap on the same special/rare choice, so much so that High Elves had a special thing about that. But enough details. There's still the other reason I gave you. Globadiers and Runners in larger units would be unwieldy and buggy (gods know the former are already enough quirky on their LOS, ironically) because of skirmish, range, los and room mechanics.


Btw, do you have a save game right before that final battle? Could be handy in checking the difficulty.
If you had other mods that added units/buildings and such, let me know.

Certainly.
https ://files.fm /u/j5vds7sj (remove the spaces for a download link)

Besides a food mod and some UI improvements, no other gameplay modifications. Played on medium unit size, hard/hard difficulty. Final battle itself isn't that big of a problem, thanks in part to those ridiculus buffs you get from controlling the vortex, but the quest battle you get if you try to block Lothern from winning (just wait two turns) is way worse. I still haven't managed to beat it.

Ah, we gave that final battle a quick shot and it was indeed pretty ridiculous. Dunno if the patch improved it.

I wasn't expecting that scripted doomstack, to be honest, and with that unit size things are indefinitely worse. You have my permission to use the slower mod. :P
Also, as a Skaven you should make sure to have as many horde units as imaginable. Confederating those other two LLs understandably put you in a tough spot, and hordes are mandatory (since money is usually a non-issue later on). Also, that many death runners in one stack surprised us, I'd have thought one would have been enough for their niche role.

Incidentally, what hardware do you have? I'm asking because I'm below recommended myself and I can run large just fine. Usually dropping shadows and reflections is enough to allow more models on the field for at least 25+ fps.

I must admit the 3 death runners were partially a role-playing choice, giving each of Tretch's characters their own 3-unit 'bodyguard'/meat shield. They work very well when you ambush (which for Tretch should be 'always when not sieging'), being able to get in a good first charge and tie down the ranged units while the rogres close the gap, and also make a decent 'siege squad' with the assassin, being able to sneak over the walls while smokebombed, open gates or assassinate whatever's on the enemy home base. Obviously not an optimal choice for a fair fight, which I tried avoiding for most of the campaign.

The low amount of hordes was partially because I forgot about hordes being 'a thing', and their additional recruitment building and 2-turn recruitment time meant I mostly just threw clanrat units to their deaths instead and hired a new stack in 1 turn. When you need to raid for food every turn (I added the food mod after confederating Pestiliens, when doing the math told me it was physically impossible to make a surplus in either food or money and a -10 factionwide morale penalty is murder for rats), taking the additional turns off to hire a bigger disposable stack that auto-resolve would remove against the rebel stacks isn't viable. Again, sub-optimal for when you're forced into 'fair' quest battles but Tretch only has one and Skrolk/Queek came with their quests already done.

I'm running an old pre-i quad core and a 700-series GeForce. I've tested tweaking the sizes a bit with later campaigns because of how this mod was balanced around it and found I *can* apparently run large/ultra without too much problems (which was weird because I seem to remember I couldn't in WH1). Which means I've apparently been complaining about something that wasn't really a problem and thus I'll just shake my fist and pretend I did it all this time because "medium size units are more tabletop-y!".

Oh, I wouldn't be judging. It's just that the engine and most mods simply rotate around ultra or even better large. Devs themselves have admitted to balancing the game for large, and I do so myself (my pal plays at ultra though, se try to get it right anyway).

And yeah, WH2 has a whole different optimization than WH1. It may be worse or better depending on your specific case.