late to post because I've been playing the game so much. TLDR great game worth the money, not a warhammer fan but setting is actually alot of fun.
I watched mrsmartdonkey and a bit of legendoftotalwar play the game on legendary the weekend before it came out, and thought it looked way too easy but I decided to buy it anyway. I was a big fan of legendary shogun 2 campaigns, where if you start central and get ganged up you just have to start again. And legendary difficulty in rome 2 and attila has always been a cakewalk for me, so I was half expecting totalhammer to be even easier.
but then when I got the game, I tried every faction on legendary and got my ass pounded by the AI so hard. I was really happy about this, I think totalhammer might be the hardest in the series yet on legendary. Its back to shogun 2 legendary with that xcom ironman feel where if you are unlucky with other factions you might simply lose no matter what.
Although after I put in more hours I eventually figured out how to win all factions - apart from empire! I've only played legendary and I assume empire is one of the easiest factions on lower difficulty but on legendary you can't get any agreements out of your nieghbours which is how the faction is designed, and I haven't figured out how to expand yet.
So the easiest faction starts for me where surprisingly greenskins and vampire lords, I think I beat both on my 2nd attempt. If you replay enough campaigns on legendary you will realise that there is actually always alot of luck involved though as where other factions expand and who they war dec can change everything. I've had some REALLY fun campaigns so far, I could probably gush about my experiences for pages...
If you are like me and enjoy out figuring out strats to beat the game yourself consider this a spoiler warning.
Vampire lords, I wanted to get the whole "master of puppets" feel so I made the 2 nearby vampire factions my puppets, but made sure to take the whole first province for my self aswell as capital of the 2nd province. I considered vassalising nearby humans, but that wouldn't turn all the land into undead mode, so I made sure that both I and my allies expanded into nearby human lands. Alot of factions would declare war on me, such as nearby dwarves but since my both minion factions always joined me I could often sell them peace pretty quickly. Although I did raze some dwarve towns I mostly let them buy peace so I could focus expanding. I actually like the whole not settling everywhere in vanilla it can be anoying but adds to the game.
I managed to get some top level cavalry and monsters from a corpse pile which pretty much serve you forever since you can heal them inbattle. I purposely avoided death magic bjuna spell because it looked broken OP in legends videos. The thing that really makes vampires OP though is the ambush > lightning strike tree on thier generals. It cannot be overstated how good ambushes are on a faction which has no missile units. +30% is probably overpowered, and since it only needs 25% move my armies where pretty much always in ambush stance, except when raiding to stop attrition.
Choas came and absolutely swept all the humans, ignoring me. I dunno if I was just lucky but this was actually kinda disapointing because I was already doing very well, and now choas had given me so many free provinces to take in the form of ruins. I think eventually I'll replay vampires and not vassalise to make it harder, and maybe even war dec choas if they ignore me again.
So onto some negatives. Main one is I cannot record my experiences because the game performance is complete trash. The game is supposed to look and run better than attila, for me it is the opposite. This is probably because my graphics card was new enough to get lastest driver for attila, but has since been legacy'd and cannot get new driver for totalhammer. Off my head I on normallish settings rome 2 is ~60fps, attila is ~40fps, totalhammer is like ~20-30. I had to set everything to lowest so I could actually play the big multiple stack battles.
I'm at 60 hours now, still got empire to do but I think I won't put as many hours into totalhammer compared to previous total war games. The game is definitely more focused on quality than the quantity of med2/rome 2/attila in terms of factions and gamemap. We knew already warhammer would focus on having very different factions, but I don't see why they couldn't have just made multiple playable factions within each race.
I thought quest system would be the excuse, but this the "quest system" imo is barely even worth mentioning. Apart from like 1 lame battle the are mostly just like missions from all the previous total war games. All the gear makes it more RPG but otherwise I still think shogun 2 had the best generals. Having generals be so strong and only 1 unit has alot of serious gameplay implications, since they have too small hitbox for projectiles and such.
haha written so much didn't even talk about other factions. making myself stop here. grats if you read this far.
