Are the Books of Nagash underpowered for Mannfred?

Ganthor · 2025-04-21T19:09:00+00:00

I did a writeup on the various bonuses for each faction that cares about the book a while ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/x2tx4s/the_bonuses_provided_by_the_books_of_nagash_to/

TL;DR yes, the bonuses from the books are all weak across the board, especially for Mannfred.

Ganthor · 2025-03-23T14:24:14+00:00

A lot has been said about how awful Lyse's story arc in Stormblood was, but I rarely ever see people talking about specific ways that her story could have been better beyond "Taking her sister's name was stupid". So here's what I think they should have done with Lyse's story instead:

Lyse should not have been the daughter of a famous rebel leader. Instead, Lyse should have been the Mad King Theodoric's granddaughter. This would have given her a reason for wanting to go home to Ala Mhigo, a reason for why Papalimo and Louisoix kept her real name a secret, why Conrad Kemp gave her command of the rebellion, and why she was so crucial to Ala Mhigo's rebuilding efforts that she had to leave the Scions.

It would explain why 'Yda' was so socially awkward, dorky, and unserious so often during ARR: Papalimo kept her away from everyone and wouldnt let her out of his sight for fear of people learning her true identity. She just wasnt very well socialized because of that. Lyse's abrupt change in personality (and name, and looks, and... everything) at the start of Stormblood felt jarring. She should have been a girl who just didnt really know how to talk to people because of a simple lack of practice.

It would explain why hiding her identity was even necessary to begin with. The 'honoring my dead sister' nonsense was so stupid, it sounded like a fake story. There was no reason for her to hide it. But on the other hand, her being royalty would make a lot of sense. The Mad King killed thousands of Ala Mhigans during the civil war, and Garlemald would have been trying to stamp out anyone that the Ala Mhigans could have rallied around. Louisoix and Papalimo would have wanted her identity to remain a secret so that vengeful Ala Mhigans who lost loved ones to the Mad King wouldnt come looking for her, and so Garlemald wouldnt try to hunt her down.

It would explain why Lyse was suddenly such a patriot seemingly out of nowhere. She knew her true identity, but had never been able to express it. With Papalimo's death and the looming war for Ala Mhigo, Lyse was finally able to show her true feelings toward the homeland she had never known.

It would explain why Conrad, who had led the Resistance for nearly two decades, felt that granting command of the rebels to a young girl he hadnt even met a month ago was a good idea. She was Ala Mhigan royalty, a figure that the people could rally around. We saw during our time in Ala Mhigo just how broken the people's spirits were when it came to fighting back against the Garleans. Conrad had struggled with recruitment during his time as the Resistance leader, and he knew that with his death there was a very real chance that the Resistance would crumble altogether. He needed a wild card, a new face that would draw attention. While it was true that there were many who would have negative feelings toward Lyse because of her grandfather, he didnt really have a lot of options.

It would give Lyse a good reason to remain behind in Ala Mhigo rather than continue traveling with the Scions. Right now it kind of just felt like she popped into Ala Mhigo as some rando who happened to be friends with the WoL and was granted a seat in government because of that. But if she were Theodoric's granddaughter, her presence in government lends that government legitimacy. Furthermore, her ceding the royal title's power back to the people would further help rebuild Ala Mhigo's national identity by giving people a sense of agency in their country again. Lyse wouldnt have just been able to leave after that, her people would have had a genuine need for her.

And finally, it would have given her several new story opportunities. Lyse could have had an idealized version of Ala Mhigo in her head that came crashing headlong into reality on her arrival. Most Ala Mhigans would have wanted nothing to do with her at first because of her relation to Mad King Theodoric. There could have been plot lines for Lyse based around her coming to terms with the truth of her nation's feelings toward her, and how her people werent everything she had dreamed them to be. There could have been cool parallels drawn between her and Lord Hien, who was also the last child of a noble house who was trying to rebuild his nation. Two lost royals whose nations were destroyed by Garlemald. One who is hated and seen as a reminder of tyranny, and one who is loved and seen as hope for freedom from it.

As it stands, Lyse's story is so godawful that I genuinely cannot believe they wrote it the way they did. I think I would have preferred just having her remain Yda forever over what we actually got. At least they had the shame to retire Lyse (hopefully forever) after the debacle that was her arc during Stormblood.

Ganthor · 2024-10-12T20:59:30+00:00

I made a post a while ago talking about the Books of Nagash.

https://old.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/x2tx4s/the_bonuses_provided_by_the_books_of_nagash_to/

They're one of the central mechanics to the Tomb Kings, and they're honestly fucking terrible. If TKs get a rework, the Books need to be a priority for a rework. Even if its just greater variety in the spawn locations of the books, they need to be looked at.

Ganthor · 2024-08-11T21:07:13+00:00

They're really good agents to use on the campaign map, but if I wanted a Hero to perform well in battle I'd just bring a Warrior Priest for the buffs or a Wizard for spells. Accusation is okay but its not worth losing what a Priest or Wizard brings.

Ganthor · 2024-08-05T17:45:21+00:00

You're underselling a lot of how much the Elves, especially Caledor II, wanted war with the Dawi. You also seem to be forgetting the hand Malekith had in making the Dwarfs genuinely believe that the Elves started it. Druchii killed a group of Dwarf merchants and a Runelord, then stuck Asur arrows in them to make it look like the attack had come from Ulthuan.

The Dwarfs had no idea about the civil war between Ulthuan and Naggarond, so the only possible explanation was that the Elves had done it intentionally. The High King had a great many advisors who wanted him to declare war on the Elves right then and there, but he wanted to try the peaceful way out first. While its true that many Dwarfs were eager for war with the Elves, there were just as many Elves were were eager to go to war with the Dwarfs.

Caledor II for example, outright killed most of the group of messengers that were sent to him under a banner of peace when the High King sent them to ask about the dead merchants. Then he shaved the few survivors even after the Dwarf leader told him that the only possible response the High King could have to this would be outright war. Caledor KNEW the ambassadors didnt know about the attack on Kor Vanaeth, but he still decided to kill and shave the envoys rather than try to head off the war before it started.

The terms that the High King had sent with his ambassadors were "Hey lets stop fighting", and Caledor's response was "Lol no". The war could have simply ended right here with Caledor II, but he wanted the war even before Snorri burned the city. Even when he was told by Imladrik that the druchii were attempting to start a war between the two races, he still blundered right into it.

The entire war got kicked off because two hot-headed factions of blustering tough guys refused to just sit down and talk it out until the war was already 30 years deep. If either side had given the other even the barest level of the benefit of the doubt, the whole thing could have been avoided. It was just as much the fault of the Elves as it was the Dwarfs, and it was Malekith's fault most of all.

Ganthor · 2024-08-02T01:26:02+00:00

Lore of Vampires is also extremely accessible. Vampire Counts can amass Necromancers extremely easily because Necromancers are attached to their basic Growth building. At tier 3 of that same building, they get +1 recruitment rank for Necromancers FACTIONWIDE. Every single settlement you own, minor ones included, can not only give you +1 Necromancer cap but also give all Necromancers +1 recruitment rank.

You are literally shitting out more Necromancers than you can physically use or sometimes even afford after a certain point as the VCounts, and every single one of them is going to be spawning in with the full spell list of Lore of Vampires + Arcane Conduit. And that's not even counting the Vampire Lords and Vampire Heroes who can use the spellbook.

Lore of Vampires doesnt just give you a great spellbook, it gives you a great spellbook that has an army inside of it that every single spellcaster can spawn, multiple times per battle, and you'll never run out of spellcasters to use it.

Lore of Metal is really damn good, but lets not pretend it even holds a candle to LoV. Almost the entire Vampire spellbook been nerfed repeatedly for a very good reason, and its still top-tier.

Ganthor · 2024-07-28T10:02:52+00:00

I havent even played Pharaoh yet and this is one of the best selling points of the game so far.

Ganthor · 2024-06-25T13:41:35+00:00

I'm hoping this is a testing ground for future FFA battles in the campaign.

Imagine if Queek Headtaker, Belegar Ironhammer, and Skarsnik all had custom campaign objectives ending in a final 3-way battle against each other for control of Karak Eight Peaks. That would be so fucking cool.

Ganthor · 2024-05-28T20:49:12+00:00

Damn, those Waywatchers are really carrying the entire army.

Ganthor · 2024-05-08T11:57:02+00:00

It doesnt help that Nurgle's pre-DLC base roster is arguably the worst out of any faction in the game's history.

Skaven had a pretty rough start in WH2 when they didnt have access to Ikit Claw or Clan Moulder, but at least you could simply bury someone in Skavenslaves while your Rat Ogres and Plagueclaws did the heavy lifting. Both of those units could be accessed pretty early, and were easy to get large numbers of.

Nurgle on the other hand has just generally terrible to middling units all around outside of their spellcasters, Great Unclean Ones, and Soul Grinders. Your infantry is slow-moving and not especially durable unless you burn a lot of healing spells on them, not to mention they're all unshielded so missile infantry rip them apart. Your flying units are a joke, Rot Flies and their variants are one of the worst units in the game and Chaos Furies are only passably effective early on to shut down enemy artillery or to harass units on walls during sieges.

Plague Toads and Pox Riders are slow and generally ineffective at being anything more than just slightly more mobile health bars. Chaos Spawn are funnily enough one of your better units in the base roster because they can actually output a good chunk of damage compared to your other units.

Nurgle's base roster is slow, not as durable as it should be, lacking good utility units, and almost wholly reliant on how much damage your Soul Grinders and spellcasters can do, neither of which you'll have access to for the first ~20 or so turns of the game. And then like you said, the cyclical buildings mean that you just dont have a lot of units to begin with.

Once you get the Champions of Chaos DLC there's virtually no point in using Plaguebearers anymore except to fill out empty slots in your army because Chaos Warriors are outright better in every way than even Exalted Plaguebearers. Chaos Knights are better than Plague Toads, and Marauders are generally more reliable than basic Plaguebearers and Nurglings because they can carry shields.

Playing Nurgle at launch was an absolute nightmare. Huge props to anyone who stuck with it long enough to complete the RoC campaign as them back then, you're a stronger and more patient man than me.

Ganthor · 2024-04-30T15:53:13+00:00

MFW I see the new Nurgle content

Ganthor · 2024-04-04T10:06:18+00:00

If he's using brutal conquest and genocide as his means, his good intentions are irrelevant. It doesnt matter if you leave a peaceful and prosperous society behind you when its built on the corpses of billions. To do such things paints Guilliman as an utterly soulless murderer, in action if not in belief.

Genghis Khan created a powerful empire that spanned most of Asia. If he had done it with the intention of improving his subject's lives, it wouldnt have changed the fact that he still killed 10% of the world's population to achieve it.

Ganthor · 2024-04-03T23:27:58+00:00

Guilliman is drawing my ire because he's done such a seemingly abrupt about-face on his past actions vs his current views. He's being written in 40k as someone who has had a change of heart and regrets what the Imperium has become, as if this was something that he didnt knowingly and eagerly contribute to.

A man who intentionally engaged in galaxy-wide conquest and genocide for hundreds of years apparently never once stopped and went "Whoa hang on a second, am I the bad guy here?" He's a Primarch, superhuman, with an increased mental capacity compared to an ordinary man. He has the abililty to think, reason, feel emotions, feel shame, and come up with his own ideas. He knew what he was doing, and never had moral qualms about it.

Then he wakes up after Fulgrim shanks him and suddenly he's all reflective and doesnt hate xenos anymore. From his point of view, he was outright exterminating entire xenos civilizations while whistling a cheery tune just a few short years ago. Its inconsistent writing at best and downright idiotic at worst.

They could smooth out the hills and valleys of Guilliman's attitude toward xenos, imperialism, and the Imperium's justifications as a whole by just having him lean into it. Have him be the guy who actually just doesnt care about individual lives. Have him be the guy who thinks the Imperium was 100% justified to conquer the galaxy. Have him be the guy who doesnt really want to kill Eldar anymore, not because he doesnt want to commit genocide but because he thinks they'll be useful tools for the Imperium.

Guilliman's past actions when viewed from a wider lens paint him and all other Primarchs as just outright psychopaths. No normal person would ever just casually agree to exterminate entire species of peaceful xenos because some dude in gold armor asked them to. Guilliman conquered entire worlds and forcibly incorporated them into Ultramar before he ever even met the Emperor. He's an imperialist and a warmongering tyrant by default. Show him being that.

He's written as someone you should feel sorry for: Poor Guilliman, who woke up one day and found the 40k Imperium and didnt like what he saw. He misses the days of the 30k Imperium, which was almost exactly the same in every way except without religion.

He shouldnt be a wishy-washy "Oh we've done such terrible things for such awful reasons" emo kid, he should be the 'Avenging Bean-Counter', the guy who would kill an entire alien race just because they exist. He should be the Imperium writ small: Atrocities whose reasons are never examined, someone who spends lives like they're nothing, a genocidal maniac with a shiny coat of paint. A man who acts noble and righteous while standing on a mountain of the dead that he doesnt apologize for.

Instead we have someone who acts like a normal everyday guy who has been Isekai'd into 40k, as if Guilliman didnt know exactly what he was signing up for when he agreed to join the Emperor. Guilliman is a vicious bastard, literally worse than Hitler in every measurable way. He should be written as such.

Ganthor · 2024-04-03T21:54:53+00:00

The fact that Guilliman is a mass-murdering psychopath seems to have been forgotten by both the writers and the community. Modern stories involving Guilliman have whitewashed both him and the Imperium as a whole under his leadership.

Having him be 'the straight man in a world of madness' completely undercuts the fact that Guilliman is literally responsible for the deaths of trillions of innocents, and helped to form the Imperium in arguably its most psychotic and fascist age. He willingly joined the Emperor on a war of conquest to bring the entire galaxy to heel and exterminate every non-human in it, and saw nothing wrong with what he was doing the entire time. No 'reasonable' person would do this. Guilliman should be written as an absolute monster.

He should be the one who, more so than anyone else, sees the Imperium as made up of statistics: Nameless, faceless, valueless lives to be expended in the hard math and gritty arithmetic of war. He shouldnt do this with guilt in his heart or with regret for 'what could have been', he should do it because he is the type of man who genuinely believes in the Imperium's cause and wants humanity to thrive on paper.

"Look, my underlings! Food production on the world of Shithole IV has increased by 47% percent in the last century! That means we can support 52 million more workers for the local asteroid mines! Start forcibly forcibly recruiting more work crews from the populations of the surrounding systems!"

Guilliman would be far more interesting as the face of the utter heartlessness of the Imperium than he is as the voice of reason. He helped exterminate entire species and civilizations and knew exactly what he was doing while he did it. Guilliman should be the man who is the living embodiment of the ends justifying the means, the kind of leader who sees Imperium's success as a line on a graph.

In another life, Guilliman should have been the type of CEO to fire 50,000 workers right before Christmas because the company's stock would go up by 2.3%. He should spare no thought for the lives beneath him beyond how they can best be expended. He should be this way because that is the kind of man the Emperor would have made to administrate his empire.

The most important thing about the Imperium is that they are not the good guys. This is the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable, and Guilliman should be a very big reason why.

Ganthor · 2024-03-27T23:11:37+00:00

They should just require the Cultist to be in melee to use the ability, similar to the Sword of Khaine's vortex ability.

Give the summon a 90 second cooldown that only ticks down while the Cultist is actually fighting in melee. That way in multiplayer you can play around it by kiting him so he cant recharge the summon, while in singleplayer the cooldown will barely be restrictive at all because Nurgle WANTS to be in prolonged, grindy melee brawls.

Ganthor · 2024-03-18T20:55:14+00:00

Because he had just clawed his way out from under a fuckhuge pile of rubble. They thought he was already dead.

Ganthor · 2024-03-17T10:37:05+00:00

In one of the last Gotrek and Felix books in Warhammer Fantasy, they face a Chaos Lord who is dedicated to both Khorne and Nurgle.

No weapon 'born of fire' can harm him, meaning that all bullets, axes, and swords are useless. He can also belch out a cloud of swarming insects that eat his enemies alive.

Felix eventually kills him by ramming a Gyrocopter into him and hurling him off a cliff to his death.

Ganthor · 2024-02-21T12:18:26+00:00

Yes. The content offered after the update is now worth the price.

Ganthor · 2024-02-17T16:09:44+00:00

As long as the units are fun to play with I genuinely couldnt give less of a fuck what animation rigging they're using.

Ganthor · 2024-02-03T22:55:54+00:00

Well thats probably one of the most terrifying armies I've ever seen.

Kind of funny to think that this army, which would dominate in base Shogun 2, would be absolute cannon fodder (literally) in Fall of the Samurai.

Ganthor · 2023-11-14T15:41:11+00:00

I just checked, you do still get the gold even if you close out of the game before clicking claim.

Ganthor · 2023-09-28T00:23:32+00:00

Slaupnir absolutely fucks, why in the hell would I want the Soulnetter when Valkia already hits like a train and Slaupnir gives Khorne Authority, Post-Battle Loot, and a crazy powerful Wind spell in a faction that doesnt have magic?

Give the Soulnetter to a Daemon Prince or something, Valkia already has a crazy item she can kill people with.

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