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This page will serve as a basic how to play guide for Total War: WARHAMMER.
Basic gameplay
Campaign
- Campaign is all about providing you with money and other resources to maintain your armies and take down enemy factions. Each faction has their own, unique mechanics, so read the pop-ups carefully to avoid doing something dumb, like not staffing offices when playing Empire or ignoring loyalty when playing Skaven or Dark Elves.
- Your empire lives and dies on money. Building up infrastructure that provides a stable influx of money is a good way to keep the books balanced. One building might not do much, but a dozen spread out across the provinces?
- Heroes are special characters who do not cause diplomatic penalties for trespassing and who cannot be directly attacked, except by another hero. Use their abilities well and of course, send them scouting. Use characters with assassination (not wound) to eliminate enemy heroes, that kills them for good.
- Always deploy a hero who cuts down on recruitment or building costs in your most advanced provinces to reduce the impact on budget. Better yet, deploy an income increasing one in your most profitable provinces (upper right tab, list of provinces, then sort by income).
- Diplomacy is vital. If you can, establish trade with every single faction you can. Usually you'll have to sign a non-aggression pact first to butter the other faction up. It's a big source of income. If they keep rebuffing your attempts, see if you can't increase your trade goods' output by building new resource buildings or, uh, borrowing them from your neighbors.
- Seriously, if playing as Empire, Dwarfs, or Bretonnia, trade is a massive source of income.
- Furthermore, long-standing pacts give major bonuses to relations and can pave the way for confederation.
- Carefully consider your expansions and scout ahead. As Empire, securing Marienburg first is a bit of a challenge, but pays off down the road. Expanding north can also provide income, but puts you within striking distance of Norscan factions. Every faction has an unique strategic situation. Most of the time you're provided a lone enemy faction right in the provice to wreck and take over, so your work is cut out for you.
- To cover more ground, always get the campaign marcher skill first. It's going to come in very useful in the long run.
- Don't be afraid to use long marches. This can put two armies within striking distance of a single enemy one (or settlement). If you can give the enemy unfair fight, never back down.
- Mounts cost upkeep, and so do generals. You can swap either and "demobilize" them to save money. Quite useful in times of peace.
Battles
- Battle mode isn't about killing the most enemies, but routing them. If you can destroy enemy morale, you win as surely as if you killed them. As such, keep an eye on both sides' morale - and whenever possible, isolate and destroy enemy units piecemeal. To avoid the same happening to you, plan ahead and use Alt + Left Click to make your units move without breaking formation. Broken formations are a massive contributor to broken morale.
- An effective method to destroy the enemy, if you have cavalry units, is to engage them with your cannon fodder/tar pit (low level infantry that's cheap to replace and can take a beating for a while), then hit them with the back with a cavalry charge. Lather, rinse, repeat. If you have shock cavalry, or any sort of melee cavalry really, avoid protracted engagements. Pull your cavalry back, let them line up, then charge again.
- Flying units are excellent for intercepting enemy artillery and archers or just wreaking havoc on the enemy. Just check their stats first, Terradons (Lizardmen) are not well suited to frontal charges and melee combat with anything above an archer or already-damaged infantry. Furthermore, whenever possible, have them move in normal stance, rather than running. They won't move faster, but will tire as if they were running. A double-click forces them to ignore incoming fire and avoids the Staggered effect (basically a "Get the hell out of Altdorf" button).
- Manual artillery fire is faster. Use Insert to enter manual aiming mode when an artillery unit is selected. This takes a while to get used to, but allows you to fire beyond artillery maximum range and amplify your refire rate.