In celebration I fought a few custom battles as the WoC. Use Kholek and some other dragon ogres to rout a force of Bretonnians and tested a dragon mounted Archaon (modded in) and 6 manticore riding Chaos Champions against a force of Greenskins, which the game generated as goblins with some giants. Turns out even on a dragon giants still kill Archaon in three hits. That seems rather off considering how they stack up in the tabletop game. I may just download that mod I saw that buffs dragons...
It's a bit strange but I noticed that a lot of heroes (EXCEPT FRANZ) become weaker on their mounts.
For example, Manfred on foot can easily solo entire armies when he's level 30 but when I have him on his undead pegasus or zombie dragon he's super squishy (though does way more damage).
Interestingly enough, some heroes actually get bonus health when mounted (a Wight King gets 50% more health on a barded undead steed).
It's a very strange system. I suspect they did it that way to balance out the massive amounts of mobility you get when you can fly. Also when you're mounted you're counted as a large unit and thus take huge damage from spears and other pokey weapons. Not to mention with a massive character model, you take way more attacks in general.
I really like having hero units being able to fly though. The mobility really is great, though you lose out on the one man fights everyone deal. Again... except Franz on Deathclaw. The Chaos heroes on manticores have the added bonus of doing poison damage on their attacks.
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Criptfeind: You can intercept them moving underground and if you manage to do it, they can't escape from the battle. But yeah, it's really good.
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I really love how gorgeous the game is. I can really understand why the devs said it takes them so much longer to design units for this game when you see this kind of end result:
Even the cities. Sure, they're almost all backdrop but have you seen the backdrops?! They're crazy! There's so much shit going on in the background. I originally thought it'd be immersion breaking if I couldn't fight in the city centers and all that and be only stuck at the walls but that has definitely not been the case. If in game I ever went "I wonder what I'm even defending?", all I had to do was turn around and just stare agape at the ridiculous backdrops. Then it'd be "yeah, you fuckers ain't taking this shit from me".
Even the basic units are so unnecessarily pretty. Have you seen the animations for the skeletons? They all jangle about like puppets. It's so freaky.
I especially love looking at guys like the Forsaken. The poor artists must have slaved for months working on their models.
I also love how they made so many variations for all the heroes and lords. You can have three Chaos sorcerers in the same army and they'd all look different and even have different voices! One guy would be wearing a hood and a mask and sounds snively. Another guy has horns coming out his head and sounds regal. You can instantly tell who is who. Their names even change depending on how you level them up or if anything happens just like how it worked in Medieval 2. I remember having a hero with the title of the Dawi-slayer because he hated dwarfs after killing hundreds of them. Or the Wight Kings with the titles of the Eternal or the Unending because you specced them out completely in defense.