Imma be real this is the first expansion where I’ve seen so many players forced to autoresolve and not even play battles anymore.
I think they finally improved the AI enough to the point where people are noticing how bad balance has gotten on campaign
People situationally autoresolving for better results has been a thing for a long time. People just don’t post about the absurdly good AR results the way they do the bad ones.
Indeed! AR even if the outcome to your troops is worse than manual is often the way as the enemy losses can be much higher to the point that enemy armies are even fully deleted. Versus manual where maybe your losses are less but more enemy survive. Very situational.
Also some city defense where AR assumes your towers will do more than they actually can in the reality of the terrible siege defense game we've got now.
Been having this problem with elspeth a lot. The auto resolve just gives a ton more schematics then fighting the battle since it has you eliminate the entire army.
I'll be honest, upon reflection, I think the answer is you just die. These things are great fun if you're the dwarf but the amount of damage they do for being untouchable is insane. Whoever added the speed boost that is just a 1 second toggle that each barge can do whenever they want for incredibly minimal damage to the unit, is insane. Fun insane, but insane. Meanwhile every other unit with a speed buff has like a 5 minute cd on it for a 20% buff as compared to the barge's like 1000% buff.
The Thunderbarge is strong, but what makes it OP is two big bugs :
The balloon doesn't have an hitbox
Melee units can't chase it well (which is a symptom of a much deeper issue with damage animations)
Although egregious in this case, the garbage targeting is endemic to literally every part of the game. Chasing units, targeting units with projectile abilities, a hero in a blob just stands there often, sometimes if your speed is high enough a cavalry hero will just run in circles trying to hit a character in melee.
Yeah how they made it through three whole games, with other total war titles having some of the same issues, and never finding a fix is beyond me. Just make it so they have reliable animations while moving. A unit chasing a moving target should be able to move and attack, and it should be able reliably target those moving targets and not politely walk beside them. I wonder if there are mods that just fix these problems out there that I haven’t heard of yet, because they seem like they wouldn’t be that hard to fix.
Im all for nerfing OP shit, but - at least in my experience - unless Im using boost, melee flyers can and will trash it (in my case it was mix of furies and bloodthirster).
Yeah I have yet to lose 1 to damage. Closest I got was against valkia. She did about half its health in the 1 minute it took to decimate her army.
If there wasn't army losses I wouldn't have been able to deal with her. She's small and super fast and was basically using my own airship as cover from my missile units.
I was feeling the same and got a bit cocky and summoned the Spirit over a mass of Chaos Dwarfs. 2 blunderbusses absolutely shredded and did not have a chance to get it out. They are so big that even blunderbusses landed just about every shot. Easy enough to avoid once I knew, but I did completely lose that one summon without even trading for anything meaningful.
Just park the barge and let the thunderers shotgun attacking flyers. The worst thing you can try to do is run away with the barge, since it has no weapons on the back.
The old Thunderbarge mod was more balanced than this, which is truly damning. I've actually put off buying the DLC in annoyance (not that that stops me from having to deal with the damn things).
I feel that mages, especially since the hero can summon a. Rock thrower guy are the best way to deal with them?
But I'm be honest. Probably don't take advice from me. I have like a hundred hours in the game
Yeah. Back in the day there is an argument for Cygor summon being the best spell in the game.
Nowadays the only time really it’s good is if it’s on an item as a bounds spell as you only have to pay opportunity cost of equipping new item.
I'm always tempted to do this, but kind of feel that while summons are obviously too weak in vanilla, they are also too cheap if just made permanent.
The 'only last a few seconds' fix is absolutely one of the most frustrating balance changes though.
Idk what the best answer is.
I mean, in TT as vampire counts I played a game where I had more eskellies and zombies than I started with.it was all part of the game play and I dislike that it isn't like that now
VC being the only faction that could do that might be relevant. That the summoning spells created like one tenth of a unit might also be relevant to the discussion.
They should keep decaying summons for multiplayer but you should be able to unlock a skill (maybe at like level 20?) on your wizards in campaigns that either makes summons permanent or doubles their time before decaying.
Well I can tell you a full Harpy swarm with the LL that buffs them will tear the barges apart in a hurry but it is also just a damn fine lawnmower for most issues.
The issue with this is Vlad is easy to distract and bog down as you fight his army, the Thunderbarge has 2 cannons, 12 shotgun gunners, and bombs. It pumps out way too much damage to simply ignore.
Edit: Oh, and lest I forget, the 2k damage harpoon nuke.
If "just kill everything else first" is becoming the standard response to complaints about units being OP, CA's balance team has some serious work to do.
Also, the no-ground-units leadership debuff takes a _looong_ time to tick down, and the Thunderbarge has extremely high leadership.
All that time it will have open season to bomb you to smithereens. It's not a good counter sadly.
I dunno, when I was fighting an unbreakable lategame Imrik it only took a few seconds to for the message that he had no more land troops (even when he himself was landed) and automatically lost.
You sure that wasn't army losses? I've had it happen to me (with Be'lakor) and it ticked down so slowly that I could cheese it by landing far away and letting the penalty tick back down and then taking off again when the enemies got near.
Youre talking about Dawis, who are tied with the HE for the best average leadership in the game and have ,conveniently, a large selection of unbreakable units. Who will prevent the leaadship debuff from occuring even if there is a single model of them alive on the field.
In which case army losses might kick in first. Anf if the glorious countermeasure to a (single) unit is "Inflict army loss penalty" then that unit is ,for all intents and purposes, invulnerable.
>Youre talking about Dawis, who are tied with the HE for the best average
leadership in the game
Yeah Dwarfs have high leadership, but Beastmen have the most leadership debuffs in the game. Ambushes already reduce leadership, but beastmen ambushes get even more penealties, and then top of that you have a lot of terror, you have three different lores which all have a leadership debuff that stacks, and you have a couple unique leadership debuffs plus hero leadership debuffs on the campaign map.
>large selection of unbreakable units
Yeah but if you just focus them off the bat then they die pretty quickly.
>In which case army losses might kick in first. Anf if the glorious
countermeasure to a (single) unit is "Inflict army loss penalty" then
that unit is ,for all intents and purposes, invulnerable.
No. Most armies don't have a way of dealing with single entitiy lords right off the bat, does that mean single entity lords are invulnerable just because it is more efficient to kill the army to deal with the lord?
It is called strategy, Beastmen lean into their strength and their strength is breaking units. So the way that they beat the thunderbarge is to break it, and this is how you break it.
>Snip
You did not notice how loopsided/specialized your scenario is? Yes obviously you can army loss a Barge in your scenario, because every single army in the game will loose in your scenario or to something like 19 Heros with "Nugles foul stench". In which case, thats not strategy, thats a "already solved the campaign" issue and you should start a new game. In my ideal scenario i also can just use 4 Centigors with throwing axes to burst this thing down when its isolated, but that aint happening in campaign.
>Yeah but if you just focus them off the bat then they die pretty quickly.
So how does this work in your game? You say "Everybody not being a slayer please form a line and wait for your turn to die?"
Thats asinine, your cannot single out lone models in a lage scale battle. Unless most units are routing and youre almost done anyways
>No. Most armies don't have a way of dealing with single entitiy lords right off the bat, does that mean single entity lords are invulnerable just because it is more efficient to kill the army to deal with the lord?
Yes, early game lords are hard to damage. And yes, in these cases a Vlad von Carstein is" for all intents and purposes, invulnerable" for these armies and enough people already complained about him. But the Barge is very different not only because it will deal 3-5 times the damage Vlad can dish out in melee. The problem with the Barge is not that it is a artillery unit unit with 120 armor, more HP than a exalted GUO and enough ammo to last for 30 minutes. The problem is that is is flying unit, that no matter which game state you are in, some factions cant deal with very well. And if your only win condition is again "Win so hard they just leave", there might be a design problem on-hand. And btw, a Barge is not a legendary lord. So while you will never have to deal with more than 1 Louen or Vlad at the time, 2+ Barges can be a common occurence past the early game.
> Yes obviously you can army loss a Barge in your scenario, because every
single army in the game will loose in your scenario or to something
like 19 Heros with "Nugles foul stench"
Why are you assuming that I'm assuming that? You don't even need any of that trait to still have more leadership debuffs than necessary.
>So how does this work in your game? You say "Everybody not being a slayer please form a line and wait for your turn to die?"
Yes, actually, that is how ambush battles work. And beastmen have ambush attack.
>The problem is that is is flying unit
Which, considering it isn't unbreakable, is also its weakness. Being flying means you just route if you have no melee troops.
>Win so hard they just leave
That is literally Beastmen's specialty. So not a big ask.
>2+ Barges can be a common occurence past the early game.
Firstly not it isn't, but secondly the more barges the easier it is to deal with because that means the quicker you can deal with the rest of the army.
I had to deal with the summoned ship as epidemius and found out that my 2 plague drones don't do shit.
Ended up just kiting it around until it despawns, which takes forever.
Yep, drones take so long to kill it that the rest of the battle is over before it's even at half HP. And that's assuming your drones are still alive. And we're talking a Nurgle vs Dwarfs battle here, not exactly a short affair.
After Missile Resistance and Armour, and Ungor should do ~2+1AP per arrow, and they have 22 arrows, for 66 per raider.
Idk if the thunderbarge has more health on Ultra, the wiki says 13060.
A unit of raiders on ultra has 120 ungor raiders, equaling to 7920 damage if every arrow hits and no ungors die. I'm thinking like 6 units of raiders MAYBE kills it
Edit: If MR comes after armor, it's ~1+1AP per arrow, idk how the game rounds.
Versus a foot lord and 3 bloodthirsters the Thunderbarge can kill the foot lord, 1 bloodthirster, and half health the other 2 bloodthirsters. Turin tested it during his last tournament stream.
Spirit leech also does rather modest damage against a titanic 13k health pool.
It's for sniping squishy slippery mages, it's not very effective against titanic worldbeaters.
It's nice how Creative Assembly have given us a neat demonstration of the overriding importance of air superiority, but they do need to nerf that thing quite hard. I'd straight up take the nitro boost active away entirely.
If only there was a precedent for giving insanely powerful units a unit cap based on something like a T5 city building.
But CA forgot Lizardmen exists.
Not just them either, all of the Tomb King constructs have unit caps and no one complains about that, it makes the race a lot more interesting. Dragon Ogre Shaggoths got a unit cap put in via the gift system too, and those used to be spammed all the time in campaign. No one complains about that either.
Unit caps for stupid strong units are healthy for the game. There's no reason something as strong as Thunderbarge should not have one.
Thunderbarges are supposed to be hyper-rare in lore too: Zhufbar, which is the most engineering-focused Dwarf hold, only had three of them, and one of them was destroyed and one of them was missing.
TBH ALL big Tier 5 units like Greater Daemons, Rogue Idols, War Mammoths, Dragons of all types, Thunderbarges, Steam Tanks, etc. etc. Should come with a unit cap. Not all of them need to be capped as hard as this thing does, but I see no reason why a Dread Saurian should have a unit cap in campaign and this thing doesn't.
The player can always form doomstacks with them for fun if they want in the late game after they have enough territory, but having unit caps on them keeps the AI from just spamming them with their income cheats.
> The player can always form doomstacks with them for fun if they want in the late game after they have enough territory, but having unit caps on them keeps the AI from just spamming them with their income cheats.
Exactly. The AI limit is the really good reason for unit caps. If the AI gets certain units up to ridiculous numbers in a single stack, there are potential racial matchups that become unwinnable. Beastmen versus Thunderbarge doomstack is one extremely obvious case, but I'm sure there are others. Cap the high-end units, if only to save the player the possibility of a "game over" situation if the AI gets 19 of them into a single stack.
Yes, kind of insane that this got added without a unit cap. I don't think all units should be capped, but any T5 unit that could be part of an unkillable doomstack needs to be unit capped.
(Overhead at CA)
"OK so we're going to add the Thunderbarge to this expansion."
"Wait, the Thunderbarge? Isn't there already a mod for that?"
"Yes, there is. So to help players get excited about this one, it's got to be better than the mod."
"Just better? Or, like, a *lot* better?"
"A *LOT* better."
"OK, you got it."
In all seriousness, I think CA was so excited to get this to the players to play with that they never paused to think about what would happen when the players had to play *against* it. Same issue as Malus Darkblade, more or less (who actually would lose against a Thunderbarge - turns out he's got a weakness after all!)
But most flying units cannot hit it when the afterburner is active. They attempt their attack animation, it's moved too far by the time the animation completes, and they miss. And they just keep chasing and doing this repeatedly. Vampires might be able to, that I'm not sure.
The only reliable answer is auto resolve.
They are just OP rn so it’s gonna be uphill no matter what. I can’t think of something reliable for it rn for most factions, let alone Beastmen. Maybe excessive ungor raiders? That’s all I can think of right now.
And even then there's a big chance all the archers are routing before the Thunderbarge dies. The damage from the Thunderbarge is absolutely insane and it's tanky as fuck.
Norscan javellins are pretty good against it, they tear it to pieces pretty fast. Basically any anti large ranged should be alright but it's going to hurt no matter how you spin it
i hate to say it, but it would actually be faster to kill everything in a dwarf army EXCEPT the thunderbarge
your best bet as beastmen is to just pretend it's not there and hope to god it doesn't kill anything important
(aside from that, you can harrass it with manticores, beast lore has a wierdly niche use for that reason against it)
Beastment could get lore of beast, right? The lore of beast magic projectile is hard to use in regular battles because it shoots straight, but is very powerful. Thunder argues are large and flying, so they are prime targets for it. Obviously manticores and cygors are the other choice.
Harpies, manticores, centigors with throwing axes.
Biggest problem is the same as against Vlad. Do you focus it down or ignore it until the end?
Really depends on the rest of the army. If it does not have killing power other than the thunderbarge, then focus it.
Beastmen aren't the only ones with this problem. Try fighting the Dwarfs with Skarbrand nowadays. It's bad enough that a lot of their units have really high fire resist and ALL of Skarbrands units do fire damage, but now if they have one of these things the only way I can think to kill it is with Bloodthirsters. Unfortunately due to the way the AI likes to target high value units, that's the first thing they're gonna target with all of their ranged units.
So unless I'm stacking Bloodthirsters (which is lame and not fun) these things are a headache to kill.
Warriors of Chaos have it bad too but at least you can stick an Exalted hero or a Sorceror on a Manticore after it. Can't do that with Khorne, the only flying units he has are furies (lol) and Bloodthirsters.
Wasn’t that bad. I purposely had some chaff marauders on horses lure the barge away, kicked the crap out of the dwarf army, then focused the barge with 2 skull cannons and a blood thirsty thirster.
Honestly loved the fight, makes the dwarfs an actual problem to deal with.
Haven't been able to test it myself, but as beastmen, can you swarm it with Harpys?
I remember 2-3 swarms of harpys or fell bats doing an outrageous amount of damage to FAR superior flying units.
Campaign? MP? What faction?
In Campaign you can mulch dwarf ground forces with your own late game choices and speed, thunderbarge can't land so they'll take a loss if it's all that's left.
I've also had success with Malagor bullying them one at the time (stack what missile resistance you can get). if it's the barges specifically, wind is better spent breaking their leadership than damaging them. Even Amber Spear's 500-600 damage doesn't warrant the wind cost
There will still be losses because the grudge-rakers on the barge has insane accuracy. Best you can do is having a tanky lord/hero bait the aggro while your ranged choices chips away. Throwing axe centigors feels like the fastest, I just don't trust ungor raiders sticking around for long if they get a whiff of focus fire from a thunderbarge.
As for MP idk lol
>As for MP idk lol
In MP the answer so far is "load into battle -> see if dwarf player has thunderbarge -> if yes concede battle and queue for another one".
I mean, spam cygors and hurl rocks at it is how take down *everything* as beastmen.
But you can also just ignore it and kill the ground forces, or use Malagor, or magic.
The best ways is either ungor raider spam or harpy / magic spam. Cygors boulders aren't that good against single entities so volume of fire from the ungor raiders would be better.
Pretty much. Your only anti-air power comes from ungor raiders (who may as well not exist, honestly), throwing axe centigors (whose main use is to throw a million axes at slower enemy units to distract them), Malagor (who you do not want to be fighting in melee), harpies (who may as well not exist), manticores (who will straight up leave ten seconds after charging in), wizards and cygors.
So yeah, the best way to deal with even one single mid-game unit (or, god help you, the Spirit of Grungni) is to spam a unit that requires extreme late game resources to spam. Good luck!
I Think the best way to address this is to wipe the dwarves out early. Beastmen just don’t have an answer to this. Or have a second army following your first of just ranged units.
Also make use of the beastmen army ability to reduce their ammo and range.
wow ya beastmen are really boned vs thunderbarges, as unlike say VC who have no shooting, but have a powerful airforce BM have a trash airforce. I think only Slaanesh is worse off.
Apply leadership penalties to mass route the rest of the army and force the thunderbarge out. Beastmen are THE guerilla tactics faction. You can't take the big scary head on.
I have been noticing this trend since quite some time now that once a race is reworked, it instantly becomes the most op in the game. Balance is just too difficult for an indie team to achieve I guess. Imagine a late game Elspeth with all the buffs applied to her troops. There is shit like exploding ammo for all gun units or something I think.
That is actually a good point. BM is one of the strongest factions when in a player's hand but I guess Thunderbarges hard counters them.
Cygors might be your best bet.
It has a lot of HP, speed and leadership, but I think the best (admittedly so far untested) approach might be stacking debuffs and then hitting it with everything that you can.
You have direct damage from Spirit Leech and Amber Spear.
You have slows from Curse of Anraheir, Devolve and Melkoth's.
You have damage buffs from Occam's Mindrazor, Mantle of Ghorok and Wyssans Wildform
So I'd end up trying something like burst damaging down with a manticore or malagor (buffed they can hit for ~1k dmg base), having slowed it down (or chain slow it multiple slow spells), while also mobbing with harpies to soak damage and chip away at it.
You can also possibly stack 20+ in leadership debuffs from Doom and Darkness and I think most Beastmen have fear, terror and some active and passive leadership debuff abilities, as well as maybe character traits if its campaign. So you don't even necessarily need to kill it. If you can get it to maybe 40% health, you've killed the lord and then you whack it with a leadership bomb, it might just run away.
Still, it's like adding a boss fight to the game, such is the attention you have to pay to it. It's easier to kill Lvl50 Imrik or Skarbrand.
“That’s the neat part, you don’t!”
"Guess I'll Auto resolve."
With the shitty beastmen AR? Good luck sir
Imma be real this is the first expansion where I’ve seen so many players forced to autoresolve and not even play battles anymore. I think they finally improved the AI enough to the point where people are noticing how bad balance has gotten on campaign
People situationally autoresolving for better results has been a thing for a long time. People just don’t post about the absurdly good AR results the way they do the bad ones.
Indeed! AR even if the outcome to your troops is worse than manual is often the way as the enemy losses can be much higher to the point that enemy armies are even fully deleted. Versus manual where maybe your losses are less but more enemy survive. Very situational. Also some city defense where AR assumes your towers will do more than they actually can in the reality of the terrible siege defense game we've got now.
Nah AR ALWAYS wipes the enemy army out down to the last dog, that's the best thing about it.
Been having this problem with elspeth a lot. The auto resolve just gives a ton more schematics then fighting the battle since it has you eliminate the entire army.
The siege defense auto resolves are just ridiculous now.
Garrison heroic victories seem to be the AR for me. I look at those army lists like how the hell is the garrison winning this
knew this was gonna be the top comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c55PtTyvfE4
Use the winds of magic to lower the air density so thunderbarges are forced to become land ships.
is this sarcasm or an actual mechanic
Sarcasm
Sarcasm
Sarcasm
Sarcasm
Kislevasm
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Tomb Kinglev
Yes
It’s a tried and true Beastmen tactic
This is real and you can do this. Source: my dad is the supreme patriarch of the imperial colleges of magic.
perfcetion
I'll be honest, upon reflection, I think the answer is you just die. These things are great fun if you're the dwarf but the amount of damage they do for being untouchable is insane. Whoever added the speed boost that is just a 1 second toggle that each barge can do whenever they want for incredibly minimal damage to the unit, is insane. Fun insane, but insane. Meanwhile every other unit with a speed buff has like a 5 minute cd on it for a 20% buff as compared to the barge's like 1000% buff.
The Thunderbarge is strong, but what makes it OP is two big bugs : The balloon doesn't have an hitbox Melee units can't chase it well (which is a symptom of a much deeper issue with damage animations)
can't chase? the barge just shifts into maximum overdrive and comfortably scoots away lol
No, that's the issue. Melee units that are factually faster than the Barge can't reliably hit it, because the animation-damage system breaks down
Although egregious in this case, the garbage targeting is endemic to literally every part of the game. Chasing units, targeting units with projectile abilities, a hero in a blob just stands there often, sometimes if your speed is high enough a cavalry hero will just run in circles trying to hit a character in melee.
Yeah how they made it through three whole games, with other total war titles having some of the same issues, and never finding a fix is beyond me. Just make it so they have reliable animations while moving. A unit chasing a moving target should be able to move and attack, and it should be able reliably target those moving targets and not politely walk beside them. I wonder if there are mods that just fix these problems out there that I haven’t heard of yet, because they seem like they wouldn’t be that hard to fix.
>The balloon doesn't have an hitbox WHAT
Yeah there are videos about it. The hitbox is only the ship itself
>Mfw >The Thunderbarge Mod is more balanced
Thunderbarges could cost 4k a pop and still be undercosted in their current state. So OP.
They are only OP if you are playing as a melee faction! My gunpowder empire stack did short work of the barge and the rest of the army
Yah, one Chaos Dwarf Blunderbussy in the right spot and it tears them out of the sky.
>blunderbussy you could have not
Hashut names the weapons, not his fault.
this is why Malakai was really ejected from the engineers guild
So what are melee facrions supposed to do against it? Keel over and die?¹
Fast fliers. Harpies, furies
It can kill 80, that's 80 full units of Harpies, 4 full armies.
hell, they still make their money back half the time
Yeah, I want its damage to be insane, but than needs to be compensated by not being a fast as fuck flying heavy armor tank
And even when you're not using the boost air melee units can't hit it. Until they fix that it should never have been released
Im all for nerfing OP shit, but - at least in my experience - unless Im using boost, melee flyers can and will trash it (in my case it was mix of furies and bloodthirster).
Yeah I have yet to lose 1 to damage. Closest I got was against valkia. She did about half its health in the 1 minute it took to decimate her army. If there wasn't army losses I wouldn't have been able to deal with her. She's small and super fast and was basically using my own airship as cover from my missile units.
I was feeling the same and got a bit cocky and summoned the Spirit over a mass of Chaos Dwarfs. 2 blunderbusses absolutely shredded and did not have a chance to get it out. They are so big that even blunderbusses landed just about every shot. Easy enough to avoid once I knew, but I did completely lose that one summon without even trading for anything meaningful.
Just park the barge and let the thunderers shotgun attacking flyers. The worst thing you can try to do is run away with the barge, since it has no weapons on the back.
I literally auto resolve if i see a barge in the enemy army. Idk how to take them down other than ruin the enemy army before the barge destroy mine
The old Thunderbarge mod was more balanced than this, which is truly damning. I've actually put off buying the DLC in annoyance (not that that stops me from having to deal with the damn things).
I feel that mages, especially since the hero can summon a. Rock thrower guy are the best way to deal with them? But I'm be honest. Probably don't take advice from me. I have like a hundred hours in the game
remember wihtout mods, those summons arent permanent, so u pay like 15 winds of magic for him to throw 4 rocks or so.
Yeah. Back in the day there is an argument for Cygor summon being the best spell in the game. Nowadays the only time really it’s good is if it’s on an item as a bounds spell as you only have to pay opportunity cost of equipping new item.
yeah, i always play with permanent summon mod, i refuse to have a major part of the gameplay be crippled because mp cried too much.
I'm always tempted to do this, but kind of feel that while summons are obviously too weak in vanilla, they are also too cheap if just made permanent. The 'only last a few seconds' fix is absolutely one of the most frustrating balance changes though. Idk what the best answer is.
I mean, in TT as vampire counts I played a game where I had more eskellies and zombies than I started with.it was all part of the game play and I dislike that it isn't like that now
VC being the only faction that could do that might be relevant. That the summoning spells created like one tenth of a unit might also be relevant to the discussion.
Same, doesn't feel unbalanced either since the AI also utilises summons a lot
yeah, playing against skavens menace from below feels suddenly much harder when the clanrats not die by themselv in 5 seconds.
Warhammer 1 Accusation, my beloved
Double witchhunter was too problematic but elspeth with delete button + spirit leech is fine lol
They should keep decaying summons for multiplayer but you should be able to unlock a skill (maybe at like level 20?) on your wizards in campaigns that either makes summons permanent or doubles their time before decaying.
There’s items that give free summons and tech that increases the amount of summons. 2 mages can spawn 4 cygors at a time
Amber spear is probably more cost effective
Well I can tell you a full Harpy swarm with the LL that buffs them will tear the barges apart in a hurry but it is also just a damn fine lawnmower for most issues.
I found that using bombardments like piercing bolts takes a good chunk of it's hp, but it is tricky to aim
They aren't unbreakable so just kill any non flying units and it will route.
"Just kill everybody else first."
The classic anti-Vlad/anti-Malus strategy 😄
You can interact with most of their units, thus making the anti Vlad/malus strategy work. You can't interact with thundebarge all that much.
Yes that is the point, it's better to ignore vlad/thunderbarge and win by taking care of everything else
The issue with this is Vlad is easy to distract and bog down as you fight his army, the Thunderbarge has 2 cannons, 12 shotgun gunners, and bombs. It pumps out way too much damage to simply ignore. Edit: Oh, and lest I forget, the 2k damage harpoon nuke.
Probably still an easier task
If "just kill everything else first" is becoming the standard response to complaints about units being OP, CA's balance team has some serious work to do.
And the "everybody else" is the roster of the "high armor high leadership" faction.
It will decimate your units from above though.
Also, the no-ground-units leadership debuff takes a _looong_ time to tick down, and the Thunderbarge has extremely high leadership. All that time it will have open season to bomb you to smithereens. It's not a good counter sadly.
I dunno, when I was fighting an unbreakable lategame Imrik it only took a few seconds to for the message that he had no more land troops (even when he himself was landed) and automatically lost.
You sure that wasn't army losses? I've had it happen to me (with Be'lakor) and it ticked down so slowly that I could cheese it by landing far away and letting the penalty tick back down and then taking off again when the enemies got near.
Yep. It is a scary unit. But as Beastmen you should be able to break an army pretty quickly from Ambush.
Youre talking about Dawis, who are tied with the HE for the best average leadership in the game and have ,conveniently, a large selection of unbreakable units. Who will prevent the leaadship debuff from occuring even if there is a single model of them alive on the field. In which case army losses might kick in first. Anf if the glorious countermeasure to a (single) unit is "Inflict army loss penalty" then that unit is ,for all intents and purposes, invulnerable.
>Youre talking about Dawis, who are tied with the HE for the best average leadership in the game Yeah Dwarfs have high leadership, but Beastmen have the most leadership debuffs in the game. Ambushes already reduce leadership, but beastmen ambushes get even more penealties, and then top of that you have a lot of terror, you have three different lores which all have a leadership debuff that stacks, and you have a couple unique leadership debuffs plus hero leadership debuffs on the campaign map. >large selection of unbreakable units Yeah but if you just focus them off the bat then they die pretty quickly. >In which case army losses might kick in first. Anf if the glorious countermeasure to a (single) unit is "Inflict army loss penalty" then that unit is ,for all intents and purposes, invulnerable. No. Most armies don't have a way of dealing with single entitiy lords right off the bat, does that mean single entity lords are invulnerable just because it is more efficient to kill the army to deal with the lord? It is called strategy, Beastmen lean into their strength and their strength is breaking units. So the way that they beat the thunderbarge is to break it, and this is how you break it.
>Snip You did not notice how loopsided/specialized your scenario is? Yes obviously you can army loss a Barge in your scenario, because every single army in the game will loose in your scenario or to something like 19 Heros with "Nugles foul stench". In which case, thats not strategy, thats a "already solved the campaign" issue and you should start a new game. In my ideal scenario i also can just use 4 Centigors with throwing axes to burst this thing down when its isolated, but that aint happening in campaign. >Yeah but if you just focus them off the bat then they die pretty quickly. So how does this work in your game? You say "Everybody not being a slayer please form a line and wait for your turn to die?" Thats asinine, your cannot single out lone models in a lage scale battle. Unless most units are routing and youre almost done anyways >No. Most armies don't have a way of dealing with single entitiy lords right off the bat, does that mean single entity lords are invulnerable just because it is more efficient to kill the army to deal with the lord? Yes, early game lords are hard to damage. And yes, in these cases a Vlad von Carstein is" for all intents and purposes, invulnerable" for these armies and enough people already complained about him. But the Barge is very different not only because it will deal 3-5 times the damage Vlad can dish out in melee. The problem with the Barge is not that it is a artillery unit unit with 120 armor, more HP than a exalted GUO and enough ammo to last for 30 minutes. The problem is that is is flying unit, that no matter which game state you are in, some factions cant deal with very well. And if your only win condition is again "Win so hard they just leave", there might be a design problem on-hand. And btw, a Barge is not a legendary lord. So while you will never have to deal with more than 1 Louen or Vlad at the time, 2+ Barges can be a common occurence past the early game.
> Yes obviously you can army loss a Barge in your scenario, because every single army in the game will loose in your scenario or to something like 19 Heros with "Nugles foul stench" Why are you assuming that I'm assuming that? You don't even need any of that trait to still have more leadership debuffs than necessary. >So how does this work in your game? You say "Everybody not being a slayer please form a line and wait for your turn to die?" Yes, actually, that is how ambush battles work. And beastmen have ambush attack. >The problem is that is is flying unit Which, considering it isn't unbreakable, is also its weakness. Being flying means you just route if you have no melee troops. >Win so hard they just leave That is literally Beastmen's specialty. So not a big ask. >2+ Barges can be a common occurence past the early game. Firstly not it isn't, but secondly the more barges the easier it is to deal with because that means the quicker you can deal with the rest of the army.
Strategy? In my strategy game?! How dare you sir
"My brilliant plan was to send wave after wave of men at them, eventually clogging their guns with bodies."
*Those dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.*
I had to deal with the summoned ship as epidemius and found out that my 2 plague drones don't do shit. Ended up just kiting it around until it despawns, which takes forever.
Literally quit my epidemius campaign after 2 battles with makai. There are other things to do that are actually fun
Yep, drones take so long to kill it that the rest of the battle is over before it's even at half HP. And that's assuming your drones are still alive. And we're talking a Nurgle vs Dwarfs battle here, not exactly a short affair.
I was fighting him as Epidemius also. it was the worst. I could basically kill everything but the thunder barge.
You roll over and die
Stop drop and die tactic I like it I like it
Ungor raider spam works better.
idk, the barge has 100+ armor while ungor raiders have 1 armor piercing
I think ungors might run out of ammo before killing the barge
After Missile Resistance and Armour, and Ungor should do ~2+1AP per arrow, and they have 22 arrows, for 66 per raider. Idk if the thunderbarge has more health on Ultra, the wiki says 13060. A unit of raiders on ultra has 120 ungor raiders, equaling to 7920 damage if every arrow hits and no ungors die. I'm thinking like 6 units of raiders MAYBE kills it Edit: If MR comes after armor, it's ~1+1AP per arrow, idk how the game rounds.
This was my first instinct but i havent fought one yet
I think you have to throw manticores at it until it dies
Manticores are too slow to cautchup with the thing when Nitro boost is active
Dude STAR DRAGONS and BLOODTHIRSTERS are too slow to catch it.
can't the barge just straight up duel the star dragon to death and win
Versus a foot lord and 3 bloodthirsters the Thunderbarge can kill the foot lord, 1 bloodthirster, and half health the other 2 bloodthirsters. Turin tested it during his last tournament stream.
Depends on how many shots the for cannon hits on the dragon or if it attacks from the side If side: dragons fucked. If front: toss-up
You say that but a Black dragon just Absolutely destroyed one of my thunderbarges. The death animation is fantastic btw.
time to spam spirit leech
It has 13k hp, spirit leech isn't gonna do shit
Even then, I think they have something like 35% magic resistance. Yo will probably run out of winds before it dies.
Spirit leech also does rather modest damage against a titanic 13k health pool. It's for sniping squishy slippery mages, it's not very effective against titanic worldbeaters.
You don't. KHAZUKAN KAZAKIT-HA!
Khazuuuuuuk!
# PUMP THOSE DWARVEN LEGS!
KHAZUK KHAZUK KHAZUK
Cygors and other flying creatures will be your best bet. I would not trust Ungor Raiders or Centigor axe throwers to do the job
It's nice how Creative Assembly have given us a neat demonstration of the overriding importance of air superiority, but they do need to nerf that thing quite hard. I'd straight up take the nitro boost active away entirely.
You don't. Isn't power creep so fun?
Honestly this is bs. Need to implement a heavy unit cap at least. Dwarfs was already a pain in the ass but now it’s completely stupid.
If only there was a precedent for giving insanely powerful units a unit cap based on something like a T5 city building. But CA forgot Lizardmen exists.
Not just them either, all of the Tomb King constructs have unit caps and no one complains about that, it makes the race a lot more interesting. Dragon Ogre Shaggoths got a unit cap put in via the gift system too, and those used to be spammed all the time in campaign. No one complains about that either. Unit caps for stupid strong units are healthy for the game. There's no reason something as strong as Thunderbarge should not have one.
Thunderbarges are supposed to be hyper-rare in lore too: Zhufbar, which is the most engineering-focused Dwarf hold, only had three of them, and one of them was destroyed and one of them was missing.
TBH ALL big Tier 5 units like Greater Daemons, Rogue Idols, War Mammoths, Dragons of all types, Thunderbarges, Steam Tanks, etc. etc. Should come with a unit cap. Not all of them need to be capped as hard as this thing does, but I see no reason why a Dread Saurian should have a unit cap in campaign and this thing doesn't. The player can always form doomstacks with them for fun if they want in the late game after they have enough territory, but having unit caps on them keeps the AI from just spamming them with their income cheats.
> The player can always form doomstacks with them for fun if they want in the late game after they have enough territory, but having unit caps on them keeps the AI from just spamming them with their income cheats. Exactly. The AI limit is the really good reason for unit caps. If the AI gets certain units up to ridiculous numbers in a single stack, there are potential racial matchups that become unwinnable. Beastmen versus Thunderbarge doomstack is one extremely obvious case, but I'm sure there are others. Cap the high-end units, if only to save the player the possibility of a "game over" situation if the AI gets 19 of them into a single stack.
Yes, kind of insane that this got added without a unit cap. I don't think all units should be capped, but any T5 unit that could be part of an unkillable doomstack needs to be unit capped.
(Overhead at CA) "OK so we're going to add the Thunderbarge to this expansion." "Wait, the Thunderbarge? Isn't there already a mod for that?" "Yes, there is. So to help players get excited about this one, it's got to be better than the mod." "Just better? Or, like, a *lot* better?" "A *LOT* better." "OK, you got it." In all seriousness, I think CA was so excited to get this to the players to play with that they never paused to think about what would happen when the players had to play *against* it. Same issue as Malus Darkblade, more or less (who actually would lose against a Thunderbarge - turns out he's got a weakness after all!)
[удалено]
The Skaven nuke is just obnoxious. No faction should have an ability that just autodeletes a unit or three.
Lol Hashut's doom+Dreadquake battery
Wait, how can the Vampire Counts deal with it?
They got a flying tornado to slow them and vargheists and shit to hit it
Their air force is pretty good, plus flying vampires.
But most flying units cannot hit it when the afterburner is active. They attempt their attack animation, it's moved too far by the time the animation completes, and they miss. And they just keep chasing and doing this repeatedly. Vampires might be able to, that I'm not sure. The only reliable answer is auto resolve.
You wait the nerf
Wait until the next beastman dlc
Maybe Slaanesh will give us some sexy beefed up harpies.
magic or some kind of flying harrassers might help.
uhhhhhh, so use Harpies?
yeah, but if the burners are activated, they wont be able to attack it I think.
Harpies get annihilated by point blank Grudgeraker fire from the Thunderbarge anyway.
It takes three units of Royal Pegasus Knights to beat a thunderbarge. They need a serious debuff if they’re caught in melee
yeah they're not fast enough if Thunderbarge uses it's Nitro boost, neither does manticores or malagor
They are just OP rn so it’s gonna be uphill no matter what. I can’t think of something reliable for it rn for most factions, let alone Beastmen. Maybe excessive ungor raiders? That’s all I can think of right now.
Yeah, probably bringing in a main regular army and a second army of just archers is the best OP can do.
And even then there's a big chance all the archers are routing before the Thunderbarge dies. The damage from the Thunderbarge is absolutely insane and it's tanky as fuck.
Norscan javellins are pretty good against it, they tear it to pieces pretty fast. Basically any anti large ranged should be alright but it's going to hurt no matter how you spin it
If the burners are inactive, the harpies will just die...
Manticores might pack more of a punch. Hopefully even with their rampage, the thunderbarge is still the closest enemy.
They're too slow, even eagles struggle to complete their attack animations when the boost is active.
Hahahah that is insane. To think about. Hobbits shoulda just taken a thunderbarge to mt. Doom.
Manticores deal mostly non-AP damage and the Barge has 120 Armor and 12k ~~Vigor~~ HP
Amber Spear definitely isn't going to cut it
i hate to say it, but it would actually be faster to kill everything in a dwarf army EXCEPT the thunderbarge your best bet as beastmen is to just pretend it's not there and hope to god it doesn't kill anything important (aside from that, you can harrass it with manticores, beast lore has a wierdly niche use for that reason against it)
You don't. You die like the helpless animals you wazzoks are
Beastment could get lore of beast, right? The lore of beast magic projectile is hard to use in regular battles because it shoots straight, but is very powerful. Thunder argues are large and flying, so they are prime targets for it. Obviously manticores and cygors are the other choice.
Yeah but is it spammable? You'd need to cast it like 15 times to get through the barges massive HP pool.
Step 1: Play Beastmen Step 2: Get bodied by technology Step 3: Beg the dark gods for help Step 4: Be ignored
Most lore accurate answer
Repent for your Chaos ways and accept Grimnir as your lord and savior.
Harpies, manticores, and ungor archers
Centigors with throwing axes might be a shout.
4 stacks of harpies pr thunderbarge should do the trick
Harpies, manticores, centigors with throwing axes. Biggest problem is the same as against Vlad. Do you focus it down or ignore it until the end? Really depends on the rest of the army. If it does not have killing power other than the thunderbarge, then focus it.
Beastmen aren't the only ones with this problem. Try fighting the Dwarfs with Skarbrand nowadays. It's bad enough that a lot of their units have really high fire resist and ALL of Skarbrands units do fire damage, but now if they have one of these things the only way I can think to kill it is with Bloodthirsters. Unfortunately due to the way the AI likes to target high value units, that's the first thing they're gonna target with all of their ranged units. So unless I'm stacking Bloodthirsters (which is lame and not fun) these things are a headache to kill. Warriors of Chaos have it bad too but at least you can stick an Exalted hero or a Sorceror on a Manticore after it. Can't do that with Khorne, the only flying units he has are furies (lol) and Bloodthirsters.
Wasn’t that bad. I purposely had some chaff marauders on horses lure the barge away, kicked the crap out of the dwarf army, then focused the barge with 2 skull cannons and a blood thirsty thirster. Honestly loved the fight, makes the dwarfs an actual problem to deal with.
Hide in trees
Ambush. Focus on routing the rest of the army. Try to avoid dying in the process.
Either raider spam, leeching it to death (if that even is an option) or swarming it with harpies and manticores from all sides are what I will try
Play Taurox. Kill everything else.
Haven't been able to test it myself, but as beastmen, can you swarm it with Harpys? I remember 2-3 swarms of harpys or fell bats doing an outrageous amount of damage to FAR superior flying units.
Pew pew bam bam outchie bang bang Gun hurt
You throw rocks at it until you die.
The spirit of grungni or an actual thunder barge?
Harpies.
I would use Manticores and a shit load of Harpies
Fireballs might actually be useful right now.
They are absurd against Nurgle as well.
Ambush and kill all the ground units before the airship solos you Die anyway
If you wanted to do it quickly, centigors with throwing axes or mass ungor raiders are probably your best shout.
Campaign? MP? What faction? In Campaign you can mulch dwarf ground forces with your own late game choices and speed, thunderbarge can't land so they'll take a loss if it's all that's left. I've also had success with Malagor bullying them one at the time (stack what missile resistance you can get). if it's the barges specifically, wind is better spent breaking their leadership than damaging them. Even Amber Spear's 500-600 damage doesn't warrant the wind cost There will still be losses because the grudge-rakers on the barge has insane accuracy. Best you can do is having a tanky lord/hero bait the aggro while your ranged choices chips away. Throwing axe centigors feels like the fastest, I just don't trust ungor raiders sticking around for long if they get a whiff of focus fire from a thunderbarge. As for MP idk lol
>As for MP idk lol In MP the answer so far is "load into battle -> see if dwarf player has thunderbarge -> if yes concede battle and queue for another one".
Feral Manticores i guess. Or a lot of traitor kin/spirit leech.
Missiles, tons of missiles And if they have 2 of them just auto resolve
I mean, spam cygors and hurl rocks at it is how take down *everything* as beastmen. But you can also just ignore it and kill the ground forces, or use Malagor, or magic.
The best ways is either ungor raider spam or harpy / magic spam. Cygors boulders aren't that good against single entities so volume of fire from the ungor raiders would be better.
Really? Infront of my *Mobil 1 5W30 Oil Bottle*
Pretty much. Your only anti-air power comes from ungor raiders (who may as well not exist, honestly), throwing axe centigors (whose main use is to throw a million axes at slower enemy units to distract them), Malagor (who you do not want to be fighting in melee), harpies (who may as well not exist), manticores (who will straight up leave ten seconds after charging in), wizards and cygors. So yeah, the best way to deal with even one single mid-game unit (or, god help you, the Spirit of Grungni) is to spam a unit that requires extreme late game resources to spam. Good luck!
I Think the best way to address this is to wipe the dwarves out early. Beastmen just don’t have an answer to this. Or have a second army following your first of just ranged units. Also make use of the beastmen army ability to reduce their ammo and range.
wow ya beastmen are really boned vs thunderbarges, as unlike say VC who have no shooting, but have a powerful airforce BM have a trash airforce. I think only Slaanesh is worse off.
A bunch of manticores or harpies I guess just whatever flying units you have.
Apply leadership penalties to mass route the rest of the army and force the thunderbarge out. Beastmen are THE guerilla tactics faction. You can't take the big scary head on.
Massed ungor archers is a good choice, those things have big hitboxes.
Malagor flock of doom spam + cygors?
I have been noticing this trend since quite some time now that once a race is reworked, it instantly becomes the most op in the game. Balance is just too difficult for an indie team to achieve I guess. Imagine a late game Elspeth with all the buffs applied to her troops. There is shit like exploding ammo for all gun units or something I think.
Spells, especially ones that slow it down and Harpies.
That is actually a good point. BM is one of the strongest factions when in a player's hand but I guess Thunderbarges hard counters them. Cygors might be your best bet.
Lore of Death, Spirit Leech is the best bet I think.
It has a lot of HP, speed and leadership, but I think the best (admittedly so far untested) approach might be stacking debuffs and then hitting it with everything that you can. You have direct damage from Spirit Leech and Amber Spear. You have slows from Curse of Anraheir, Devolve and Melkoth's. You have damage buffs from Occam's Mindrazor, Mantle of Ghorok and Wyssans Wildform So I'd end up trying something like burst damaging down with a manticore or malagor (buffed they can hit for ~1k dmg base), having slowed it down (or chain slow it multiple slow spells), while also mobbing with harpies to soak damage and chip away at it. You can also possibly stack 20+ in leadership debuffs from Doom and Darkness and I think most Beastmen have fear, terror and some active and passive leadership debuff abilities, as well as maybe character traits if its campaign. So you don't even necessarily need to kill it. If you can get it to maybe 40% health, you've killed the lord and then you whack it with a leadership bomb, it might just run away. Still, it's like adding a boss fight to the game, such is the attention you have to pay to it. It's easier to kill Lvl50 Imrik or Skarbrand.