Details on Beastmen changes by LotW.I'm hyped to play them.
-Malagor's fucking wings actually do something now besides just making him a bigger target! He can finally fly! Apparently he is the only Small-sized Single Entity Flying unit in the game, and has a default speed of like 120. Basically the perfect kiting/missile wasting/wizard helicopter. With all the stuff you can get him, he's already looking like a one man Doomstack without the Sword of Khaine.
-Beastmen do not pay for Lords, Heroes or Units, either to recruit or upkeep. The Herd buildings do cost a shit load of Favor, but they don't spend any for the primary focus of the game: combat. Which means you no longer have to hide and crap your pants and worry about Bestial Rage falling while you try to raid somewhere to replenish your forces that just got their asses handed to them, while barely being able to afford replacement units. Now, if you lose an entire herd, you just recruit a new lord next turn and spend a few turns for his army to recruit up to full. Endless herds. Most units that used to be 2 or 3 turn recruits are now 1. The only limitations are the unit recruitment caps that you have to upgrade. Any flavor of Beastman army you want to build though, go right ahead, the direct cost is completely irrelevant, and the indirect cost you can just pay with enough bloodshed. I know this is basically Tomb King unit economy, but I never played them so it's new to me.
-Moon phases no longer come with crippling penalties, they're just buffs now.
-You plant a Herdstone in a city you captured. A pre-defined part of the map around that region then becomes a "Blood Ground." All combats and kills in that Blood Ground region then generate a resource called Dread that you can spend on bonuses and upgrades on a Beastmen-specific army panel. The Blood Ground seem hard coded for how big they are and what they encompass. Think of them like....animal hunting grounds.
-Once a Herdstone is planted, a ritual starts. The more kills and shit you do in that Blood Ground, the closer the ritual gets to completion. Upon completion, any ruins in that region cannot be re-occupied by other factions until they destroy the Herdstone you planted. This is pretty huge. It means you can actually depopulate the world now rather than razing a couple cities and having the AI gobble them up as soon as you leave. Wonder if Chaos will get a mini update or....because they really need this mechanic too. There's Landmark Herdstones too, in the usual places you expect like big faction capitals that have beef with the Beefmen. But you have to plant a Herdstone there to know if it's a unique one.
-Herdstone placement is actually fairly important, beyond the Landmarks. Where you plant the Herdstone has an impact on how much Destruction (winning battles, razing cities) you can generate. The more cities and the more developed cities there are within a Herdstone's Blood Grounds, the more Destruction you can rack up. The Herdstone stores these Destruction points, and you can keep storing them beyond what's actually needed to complete the ritual. In addition to all the above stuff the ritual does upon completion, you also get "Marks of Ruination" that basically gate how many armies you can field at once and what units you're allowed to recruit. (You still need the actual building in your herd to recruit the units there as well.) All this taken together means where you drop your Herdstones matters, like a sub-tactical layer to all the normal TWH logistical considerations. Because smaller, more densely packed regions with more capitals and more armies running around makes for more potential fights in a single Herdstone's Blood Ground, and therefore more Destruction Points (and Dread) get built up faster to power up your ritual and make your whole faction stronger in a really short period of time. Pretty cool stuff all around, really adds necessary spice to Horde style gameplay.
-Herdstones aren't really cities per se. But there is a main Herdstone building you can upgrade to provide a few faction bonuses and a garrison, which gets better just like a main settlement building. And the game replaces lower tier units with higher tier ones as the garrison gets better. I imagine that change will be coming to a lot of factions. There's also slots for additional support buildings at the Herdstone, that give bonuses to stuff inside the Blood Ground. Better map movement for you, worse for the enemy, sight range, bonus Magic Reserves, all sorts of stuff.
-Momentum is the name of the game now. Beastmen get a ton of faction unlocks that are all permanent. So even if you get curb stomped, you can rise again within 5 turns more or less where you left off.....for free. And it's not like you even need to defend Herdstones that aggressively. All they're doing is spreading Chaos Corruption, they're not a real part of your economy. Killing and destroying as much as you can and gradually unlocking bonuses, while paying no upkeep for anything, is the basis of your economy now. About the only thing I'm unclear on is if a Herdstone gets destroyed, if you loose the Marks of Ruination that it was storing. That would represent a pretty significant setback to your campaign.
-Dread, which is the other faction resource alongside Favor, gets used for a bunch of stuff. You get it for winning battles, inflicting casualties, razing cities and generally fucking stuff up. How much you get per dude killed seems somewhat related to what tier they were, but it's not clear. There's lots of ways to buff how much Dread you get too.
-Legendary lords can now be instantly confederated by spending Dread once you have enough of it. They cannot be confederated by normal means.
-Increasing the # of lords and heroes you can have, # of a specific unit that can be in one army, what tier you can upgrade your Herdstones to, all done with Dread. Beastmen still have a tech tree but it's not the primary way they upgrade their stuff now.
-Legendary Lords' horde buildings remain in place even if they're killed and re-recruited.
-Multiple army-based cast abilities now. One that shatters walls, one that buffs a unit insanely before dealing them a lot of damage (great for the MULTIPLE sources of free Cygor summons now interspersed through the Beastmen army) and one that destroys enemy ammo reserves, and halves their range for the duration. Basically three Army-based casts that plugs several major weaknesses of the army (sieging and superior missile fire) and suicide squad buff for your free cast summons.
-Some pretty sick Beastmen specific gear they can buy with Favor too. Health Regen, Extra Winds of Magic, Bound Cygor Summons, Physical Resist. And they can buy as many of them as they want.
-Bestial Rage no longer generates a shit army that can screw you over in MP by revealing your position or giving the AI a visible army to swarm. Now, Bestial Rage just provides buffs and a large debuff to Growth if it bottoms out.
-Growth is only used for upgrading your Herd's main settlement building it seems. What used to be THE BIGGEST pain in the ass for Beastmen: hording growth for alllll the stupid buildings you needed to build for your unit offerings, is now almost irrelevant after several dozen turns. All Herd buildings are paid for with Favor, and that's it.
-Tech tree is now something you unlock by doing challenges, like defeating 4 different factions in combat, win 5 ambush battles, yadda yadda. And there's some nutty buffs in there as well. Immunity to Psychology for all Beastmen units, along with several bonuses. 15% Physical Resistance for all Heroes and Lords. With the numbers I'm starting to see, hitting caps on Physical Resistance for most guys you can about should be fairly easy.
-Unrelated specifically to Beastmen, but they got rid of the Auto-Resolve bar. The game now just straight up tells you what the outcome is going to be, and what units will be lost if you decide to auto-resolve. Unsure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it's nice to know who you're going to lose. On the other though, the ambiguity and the risk-taking of the old way was a big motivation to fight out battles. Now....it's just a calculation. "Do I need to fight again after this battle?" If no, auto-resolve. If yes, fight it out. The only other reason to fight out a battle is if you are grossly outnumbered but can still micro your way to victory. I think fewer reasons to play out battles isn't in the game's best interest.
LotW gives the update 10/10 and you can tell he's pretty excited about it, despite not actually liking Beastmen thematically. And I can see why. From a purely numerical perspective, Beastmen now have bonuses coming in from so many sources it's kind of crazy. Bestial Rage. Moon Phases. Herd Buildings. Tech tree. Beastmen Upgrade screen.
But I think the thing that really defines the Beastmen change is how much shit they get for free. While their Horde Settlement buildings are easily expensive as the Vampire Counts, the amount of stuff they get for no real or actual cost in an economy that doesn't run on upkeep is sorta surprising.
Legend says he's basically steamrolling on Legendary difficulty. He ranks Beastmen near the Skaven in terms of power now, eclipsing Dwarves, Orks, Empire....It almost sounds like overkill from where I'm sitting, as someone who grubbed and scrapped in the dirt playing old Beefmen despite how bad they were.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, he said the AI isn't using them anywhere near to their full potential even on Legendary difficulty. So they're massively buffed and powerful in the player's hands but only somewhat more powerful as an AI. They're not meant to topple people's campaigns, they're meant as a power fantasy for the player. And I'm down with that. Although I don't know what they bode for MP.
If I harp on what Legend is saying so much, it's because I've heard his take on pretty much every faction in the game at length now. He's almost hyper critical of a lot of things sometimes. This is probably the most excited and positive I think I've heard him about anything short of Skaven weapon teams. So I think that counts for quite a bit, when Lord Cheese himself is genuinely excited about something. We'll see if that opinion holds.
Anyways, super stoked. I think Beastmen have always been my secret favorite WHF army and it's nice to see them get their moment in the sun. Maybe it was the merciless stream of memes from the community about them, joking about them being broke and homeless, that made CA decide to go full throttle. Now they're GigaBeef, so alpha they don't even know what money is and they're gonna turn your homeland into a nature preserve.
Beastmen have always played second fiddle to Chaos in WHF. They've always been intended as really mean canon fodder, the vanguard of the Chaos invasion. Well.....now it's time for people to fear going into the dark woods again!
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Topic: Total War: Warhammer! Now with 2! And 3! (Read 512735 times)