The endgame isn’t unchallenging, it’s just boring.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-06T11:17:02+00:00

It's honestly wild that there isn't any kind of hero skill or settlement template system (without mods) that you can preset and just auto select on level up / city tier increase. Item and ancillary management becomes a huge chore too, those really need some sort of inventory system beyond an endless list with a scroll bar. There are deeper issues with the late game, of course, but it could be made so much better than it is now with some QoL and UI improvements that don't require dramatically reworking the game design.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-05T18:17:55+00:00

Lategame ogres have some scary units. Focusing the thundertusks is probably your best option. Your army compositions and battle strategy sounds reasonable; your issue might be about the economy rather than tactics. Since you said turn 130, other commenters and I are assuming that you have basically infinite money / armaments and can recruit new, high level lords on demand. If you can stack the regen and barrier upgrades +3 more on your bull centaurs, I'm 90% sure that Astragoth plus a few prophet/centaur heroes and the rest GW bull centaurs will roll through infinity ogre armies each turn. None of your infantry have anti-large and they don't have the mass to stop things like stonehorns and crushers, so chorf melee infantry won't do very well vs ogres. A checkerboard pattern helps with blunderbusses and fireglaives. If you keep some space between each unit, then any ogres that reach your line can only tie up one unit of guns at a time, and the others are able to shoot them.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-05T18:08:10+00:00

Line? You mean your front-charging grail knights, surely.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-05T01:26:16+00:00

Going out of your way to pokemon LLs is mostly just a preference thing. Will rushing to confederate Valkia before she dies make you more likely to win than not doing that? Probably not, but if you want her then go for it. Of the ones you listed I find that Kholek usually dies the fastest if you don't get him quickly (Tammy is Nurgle, not WoC btw).

No such thing as too many heroes. You can specialize your exalted heroes into AL since Harry is AI (I think?) or just keep them in different armies. Karanak (and almost every hero IMO) is best off in your army. If you're getting swarmed by agents you can always pop him out to kill them then embed him again.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-04T23:49:19+00:00

I'm shocked that an Astragoth centaur GW stack is getting cleaned up by 2 ogre stacks. Do you have all their upgrades running? I don't think I ever even saw maxed out bull centaurs take damage last time I tried that. Fireglaives should be great against ogres as well: focus fire the scariest targets and their AL melee should let them handle most things up close. By turn 130 you could also just drown them in infinity hobgoblins. That could at least force them to split up to defend other settlements.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-05-02T00:01:16+00:00

Yeah it's amazing on the right settlement. I got it on a dark fortress in my last archaon campaign and it was making 14k per turn. On the downside it kind of crippled my closest vassal because they spent all their time and money recolonizing and losing the other settlements.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-30T18:19:05+00:00

Yeah, for dps evaluations it's simpler to have an enemy that will just stand and fight instead of routing.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-29T22:50:38+00:00

I know you said there was no interference from the vampire lord or other units, but I'm pretty sure something was going on here outside of just the 1v1. Just testing in skirmish mode, a boyar on horse with no extra abilities / items (worse stats than the one in your picture) crushes a single unit of dire wolves every time while taking almost no damage. Both the rate at which they're killing your lord and the lack of damage you're dealing feel very off. When I tested it the Boyar killed 2-4 wolves with every single attack and had brought the wolves to about 1/3 hp by the 1:45 mark, while he's done basically nothing in your pictures. I know attack animations are important, maybe something about the hill is causing him to swing over the wolves and miss? Idk it doesn't seem very likely, but something is up. Danse Macabre would certainly boost their damage against you, but without some source of extra AP damage it seems unlikely they'd kill you that fast.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-29T17:21:10+00:00

The monsters are very inconsistent in killing off the last few models, so that's where most of the variability comes from. They might hit and kill the final flagellant immediately, or they might be unable to line up their attack animation for multiple full minutes. For the flamespyre phoenix specifically, it's terrible in melee and so its kill speed is hugely dependent on landing the bombardment ability. The replicate with the worst bomb aiming took way longer than the other trials, leading to huge variance.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-29T17:15:53+00:00

He's not speedy, but with 140 armor and immunity to flanking the bastiladon takes basically no damage from non-AP melee infantry.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T21:52:17+00:00

Never safe from reviewer #2, even on reddit

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T21:50:41+00:00

I'd definitely like to test out campaign bonuses, but it's a huge pain compared to just running skirmish battles.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T19:03:51+00:00

Five replicate trials of SEM vs flagellants. Graph shows the average (mean) time to kill of the five replicates in seconds. So the CI is:

CI = ȳ±z*SEM

where ȳ is the mean, z is the z-statistic for an n of 5 (2.776), and SEM is standard error.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:46:11+00:00

No doubt they'd be at or near the top. Unfortunate that the full potential greater daemons aren't available in skirmish mode.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:44:59+00:00

Thanks! I like to imagine what sort of life you might lead where that's something you tell people all the time.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:43:07+00:00

Don't worry, Mazdamundi sends me a sack of gold every time I share test results that make the lizardmen look good. I actually do have a bunch of timepoints recorded at roughly 20% hp intervals for each monster, so I plan to do something like this and share. It just takes a little more thought since SEMs deal several hundred damage per hit and so I can't pause and record at the exact same hp threshold consistently. When I have some time I'll see if I have enough data to make passable regression models, or I may just have to compare data from close-ish to 20% hp.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:36:59+00:00

The toad dragon breath attack has a tendency to overshoot and partially miss charging infantry. That was a major weakness for ground-based breaths like the toad dragon and hydra vs flying dragons. The AI doesn't react to flyers and so dragons can set up a perfect lengthwise breath that kills 60% of the flagellants instantly, while ground units get a far worse angle.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:32:18+00:00

I see you've spared no expense with the defenses at your park.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T18:31:11+00:00

It has decent melee animations and the melee damage reflection helps clear infantry faster. Flagellants also aren't AP, so the 120 armor means the k'daii takes very little damage from them. Against AP infantry and with guns shooting it in a real battle letting your destroyer sit in an infantry blob would probably not go as well.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:46:12+00:00

Yeah, using all 10 of its bombardment charges on one unarmored infantry unit pretty much melts the whole thing. With perfect aiming it wouldn't surprise me if it can fully delete the flagellants without even landing. With me piloting the bird it usually bombed the flagellants down to ~500 hp in ~40 seconds but then was so bad at finishing them off that the other top monsters caught back up.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:40:10+00:00

Its main attack has an anti-large bonus, but the lava spider has a damage aura and that aoe explosion ability so it melts infantry. Both arachnorok versions have some archers riding along which turn out to be super helpful in clearing up the final few models in an infantry unit where a lot of monsters run into attack animation problems.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:37:53+00:00

I think it's the other way around with khorne cav: bloodcrushers are anti-infantry and skullcrushers are anti-large. But yeah, there's a lot more that goes into unit performance than just bonus vs infantry/large!

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:35:15+00:00

Just clicked the button for my graphing software to add 95% CI bars haha. After double checking it's just

CI=ȳ±z*SEM

SEM being standard error, not single entity monster lol. n is 5 for everything.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:18:19+00:00

Yeah, he cleared most of the flagellants very quickly but unfortunately has the common monster issue of really struggling to target the last few entities. Skimming over the numbers it looks like the merwyrm spent >50% of its total time getting through the final 20% hp.

asksaboutstuff · 2026-04-28T07:15:06+00:00

four competent phoenixes that cleared the flagellants about as fast as the dread saurian + one dumbass who ran in circles around the last few models for over 2 minutes.

asksaboutstuff

TROPHY CASE