Introduction - Vocabulary
First and foremost, this guide contains information about Medieval Total War 2 and the Kingdoms Expansion as well as a lot of information about the world of Warhammer. To get more information about Warhammer, the game, the miniatures, the company, the world, please visit games-workshop.com
Here are some common vocabulary that is used in this guide:
- The World Map is the big map on which you can see the Warhammer world.
- The Warhammer World is sometimes referred to as the "Old World".
- A Soldier is an individual man, lizardmen, elf, skaven, dwarf, etc. or other atomic part of your army.
- A Troop or Unit is the group of Soldiers that are together. A.k.a a "Regiment" from Warhammer.
- Some troops are classified as being either Melee units or Missile units. Some are hybrid.
- You could classify each Unit in the game from "Basic" to "Elite". Elite troops are just better, cost more and cannot be built until you have the necessary infrastructure. Nothing tells you that a Unit is Elite as it is not a specific characteristic and it is not all black or white. As an example, here is the ranking of troops for the High Elves, going from the most basic to some of the most Elite: Spearmen, Archers, Lothern Sea Guard, Ellyrian Reavers, Shadow Warriors, Silver Helms, Swordmasters, ... Archmages, ..., Dragon Rider, etc.
- So if someone describes an army as being full of Elite troops, it just means that this is not your basic army. It says nothing to the experience of those troops, they could be rookies but still belong to an elite unit with better initial training, gear, abilities.
- A city is not the same as a castle but both are so similar that sometimes, a "City" can mean a "Castle". Often the term city is used to mean city and or castle. You cannot build new Cities or Castles.
- Building are what you build inside cities. Some buildings exist outside of cities but when speak about Buildings, 99% of the time, this means buildings inside cities that you can build or sell (Barracks, Paved Roads, Ports, Land Clearance).
- A Fort is a building on the map where you can station troops. It offers "Free Upkeep" for multiple troops. You cannot build new Forts.
- A Watchtower is a building on the map that you can construct at a cost of 200 gold. You cannot station troops inside a Watchtower and the only goal of those is to extend your visibility on the World Map.
- Heroes are your Commanders. Either they are leading an Army or either they are assigned as Governor of a city. A Governor leads its own Unit and other Units stationed in the city or castle he is governing. So if the city gets attacked, your Governor will be on the battlefield to fight.
- Heroes, Commanders, Lords, Governors, Faction members, Special Characters all mean the same.
- Agents are one of the following speciality: Merchant, Diplomat, Spy, Priest. Agents are not Heroes.
- An Army is comprised of at least one Unit and up to 20.
- An Army is also called a "Stack" to represent it being a "Stack of Units".
- A "Full Stack" means an Army with 20 Units with 20 Units inside. If it's got 19 units, it's almost full...
- Retraining is the same as hiring new members for your unit if it sustained losses.
- Upgrading applies when you retrain a unit and upgrades are available for it. So upgrading is done trough Retraining in your cities.
- Retraining and upgrading are done at the same time usually so they can mean the same thing.
- Religion is what your Priests help spread. Piety of your leaders is related to this and you have buildings to boost religion spread.
- Population Happiness is a concept represented by a percentage of approval for a given city.
- There is no "Empire" Happiness. There are only individual city / castle happiness.
- A city or castle that is rioting has low Happiness. I found that below 75% approval riots begin.
- A city or castle that is rioting has a little icon of fire to indicate this special status.
- Trade is the activity of your Markets, Ports and Roads. So Merchants are not part of Trade.
- Merchants are individual units placed on Special Resources on the World Map and they bring income every turn.
- Diplomats are the only units that can parley with other Units on the map. Diplomats can engage with other Diplomats, cities, forts, castles, Units of all types.
- Spies can Infiltrate enemy cities, thus revealing what buildings and Units the enemy has inside the city.
Tips And Tricks - General
More to come in this section! Stay tuned!
Tips And Tricks - Economy
Try to establish speciality cities such as: Stables specialist city, Barracks specialist city, Archery specialist city, Upgrade specialist city, Port specialist city.
Your Upgrade specialist city is the one that will build all the upgrade buildings for your army. Then, during the campaign, you can send all your troops to be trained at that one convenient spot.
As a general rule, you should do a round-robin approach to taking care of Farming, Mining, Religion, Happiness, Economy, Navy, Military, Diplomacy. Mostly, you should check each of those aspects of your game and make sure you are taking care of them in a certain way.
With regards to the previous tip, at the start of the campaign, focus much more on the economy, military, some Navy. You can wait for all the rest.
When you capture and enemy city, sell their buildings that don't provide anything to you.
When recruiting troops, retraining or constructing, sometimes, you have multiple heroes in the given city. Make sure your hero that gives rebates is the one that is governor before purchasing stuff. As an example, if I have 3 heroes in a city and the current governor gives no rebate, I would put that governor just outside the city, then add the retraining, recruiting or construction to the queue, and finally bring your governor back inside the city.
I advise you to spread your income across everything: Some trading, ports and markets, some merchants, some mining, some farming improvements, some population taxation improvements. This way your economy will be more resilient to various events.
If you look at the building browser, you will see the buildings for your empire. You should see that your elite troops need the highest level of buildings (barracks for example). By looking at the build time of those buildings and by doing the sum of all the turns required by all the buildings you need, you can figure out the earliest you can field certain unit types. For example, Dragon Princes of Caledor require a Hall of Heroism (the top Barracks building for High Elves). Building this requires 7 turns. The building just before required 6 turns. The one before that, 5 turns. So overall, at a given point in my game, before I had build those buildings, I already knew that I would not get my Dragon Princes of Caledor before (7 + 6 + 5) turns = 18 turns.
There is no way to speed up construction. So the total of turns you calculated represents the "critical path" to having those units.
You cannot spend money to speed up training or construction. So with that in mind, you should understand that it is important sometimes to focus on money (Economy) so you can purchase those buildings and units and sometimes you should focus on building the structures that prevent you from falling behind in terms of technology.
***SPOILER*** I know of 3 cities / castles that can train Dragon Riders: Lothern, Naggarond and Tor Sethai ***SPOILER***
Tips And Tricks - Battles
How to use Missile units effectively on walls - Lothern Sea Guard
Tips In battle, you can only control up to 20 units. So if your army plus reinforcements add up to 30 units, you'll control 20 and the AI will control your other 10 units.
During deployment, if you intend on killing the enemy army mostly with ranged weapons, you should Wait to have nice weather. I am not sure how this affects gameplay but from experience, I've had totally different results, on the same battlefield, with the same armies facing each other but with different weather. Nice weather, with no fog and no rain and seemingly little wind is the best for your archers.
To really be dominant in a battle, bring more troops than your opponent.
To bring more troops than your opponent, if the opponent has a Full Stack of 20 full units, you can bring Reinforcements.
I found that the AI playing my reinforcements is not great. It doesn't manage my forces well and will lost me some troops.
To get the best of your reinforcements, set them to be right next to your main army that you will control. This way, they will spawn right next to you on the map. You can take advantage of this by positioning your forces close to where they will spawn. This will help you merge your forces (somehow) and provide a unified front to the enemy.
If you select the right check box at the start of the battle, you can control your reinforcements as long as you don't control more than 20 units. As some of your controlled units die or withdraw, you will be able to control new units from your reinforcements. Still, it always better not to lose troops.
When attacking a City at night, nearby enemy reinforcements will not be able to join in the battle. You can use this if an enemy has stationed big stacks in front of their city. Just go around the back and attack at night and you can thus face only the units inside the city itself, making the battle much easier to win.
Examples of Deployment for a missile force
Another example of Deployment for a missile force
Deploying in the corner of the map, along the withdrawal line
Deploying along the withdrawal line No. 2
Tips And Tricks - Managing Your Armies
Keep your Heroes alive. If they die, reload and try something else.
Retrain your existing troops constantly.
To be as productive and quick as possible, spread your damaged units across your cities so they can all be retrained in parallel (at the same time).
Keep your units alive. It's okay to lose a few here and there but overall, your troops should stay alive, level up and be a part of your success.
You should think in advance about your military campaigns. This is up to your imagination! Campaigns involve where do you deploy your troops? Which city do you plan on conquering next? Why? Is that the best choice to attack now? How will you reinforce your front line? Are you fighting on multiple fronts at the same time? So much to think and the more planning ahead you do the better.
A critical aspect is to have supply lines. You need to bring fresh new troops to the front line and you need to heal and retrain your existing troops. The logistics of this is up to you. The following few tips should help you in that regard.
Boats are great at bringing troops a great distance away, fast! Also, a boat full of units can really mess up the plans of your opponents because you can quickly disembark deep in enemy territory and completely bypass their front line armies.
As such, I like to keep some fleets dedicated to ferrying troops and some fleets dedicated to fighting at sea. The ferries are obviously much smaller fleets, often just a single Independant Ship. Their only goal is to improve your supply capacity.
Of course, Paved Roads and Highways also improve the speed at which you can keep your front line supplied and in top shape.
I don't know the details of this but it seems that certain Heroes (maybe all of them) heal up some soldiers over time. I am not talking about casualties healed after the battle but more like troops being re-added while your Heroe is deployed far away from your cities.
As such, this has prompted me to use my Heroes more aggressively during the battles. Multiple times, for example, my High Elf elite cavalry led by Tyrion, a powerful High Elf prince, would start the battle with 31 soldiers and end up the battle with just 7 alive. But then you notice that many were healed after the battle and you are left with 13 soldiers. What I mean is that if you then end your turn, you may see that next turn, this unit is back to 21 soldiers. I cannot explain this mechanic.
Tips And Tricks - The World Map
The AI can often be "Path Blocked" during its turn. The unit that gets path blocked will not seek an alternative route during their turn. So you can mess around with the AI units by blocking their paths by placing a unit of yours where they can't be seen, yet where they also block the enemy army's path.
The previous tip about Path Blocking the AI can be a godsend for you. Sometimes, the enemy might have forces that are way too powerful for what you have on hand. But if you can identify what a particular enemy army is trying to do, and then path block it, you can make it lose precious time doing nothing for many turns, until you are ready to face it.
Here is an example of the previous trick that I applied in my campaign playing High Elves vs Dark Elves: Some Dark Elf armies were Full Stacks of Elite troops. That is 20 units, all fully healed, some with experience. Say 2x31 cold one riders plus 31 Veteran Cold One knights plus about 5 or 6 Darkshards, etc. I did not have the strenght at all to take them on. But I found out that this army was trying to get back to Naggarond (its capital) but that it had bumped into my tiny unit of damaged archers. Strangely, the enormous enemy army had not attacked my archer, just stopped right there. Also, during the enemy's turn, I could see the path that was set for the enemy army: It was instructed to travel over my small archers unit. This is normal because the Dark Elf player had no visibility of my archer unit. So he told his army to use that path to go back to Naggarond but along the way it got "Path Blocked" by my tiny archer unit. So it just stayed there, without attacking, for the rest of its turn! Delaying a dangerous army like that is essential to picking your fights.
Sometimes, think about "blitz" attacking the enemy. I mean if you are capturing one of their cities this turn, can you also send just one other unit to Siege up one of their other towns? Even if your army is pitiful (possibly just one unit), the act of make a siege on their city can seriously affect their internal trade and it can instruct some of their military units to "respond to the siege". Thus, your opponent could lose precious time chasing unimportant units around.
The best thing is that sometimes, you will have a spy in an enemy city. Then you may see an opportunity to "sneak in" a very small army behind enemy lines using a ship, siege up the city and your Spy opens the door, letting you Assault and Capture that city this turn with a very small army. Proceed to sell all buildings and maybe pull your troops out, back on the boat!
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2450556955
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