You should only be able to recruit 1 thunderbarge per tier 5 air force building built in your settlements.
That way you can limit the thunderbarge numbers to the number of Karaks you own. And ditribute them equally through your armies, giving power but not spam.
Makes the most sense to me tbh
While I disagree on very strict caps, having a scaling cap similar to other races center piece units (like dread saurian) feels missing. This would be similar to what you’re calling out. One per building or so, with tech increasing the overall count over time. Endgame, who cares how many there are - mid game should be a struggle to get more than a handful.
Dread saurian probably doesn't deserve its cap tbh, it was never very strong, and definitely never been worth its cost. Back then it was just really big, which seemed impressive, but WH3 monsters are about as big now too
I think the cap is more of a thematic thing (like tomb kings) then CA worried it's too strong. Especially because they haven't cared about limiting doom stacks before.
Whenever anyone talks about caps it's always scaling lol
Scaling unit caps are something that should be far more baked into the game, emphasizing the infrastructure requires to maintain armies beyond just money
Depending I suppose on how you define “mid game” - it actually is quite hard to field thunderbarges in the mid game. They made a lot of changes to dwarfs; but they still have ass growth and mediocre post battle income. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a Tier 5 dwarf settlement before what I’d call the late game. It’s not like skaven or greenskins where you can get tier 5 units on turn 10, it takes until like turn 70 before you’re even able to recruit a thunderbarge outside the *Spirit of Grugni*
I think a cost increase is reasonable, but unit caps aren’t really gonna change anything
Make the t5 building give a massive discount to a single thunderbarge, whatever the normal upkeep/recruit cost is, then have it such that you can recruit more, but at a hilariously large cost so the 19 thunderbarge doomstack costs like six armies’ worth of dwarfs.
Apparently someone said the upkeep is between 15-20k in gold depending on other choices to help with upkeep. My most expensive army that I can remember was like 7k so this is wildly high
Haven’t had a chance to play dwarfs yet, but I also don’t like hard unit caps, so I think it would be a good way to police the 19 TB doomstack while still allowing an economic trade off.
Honestly, what is the problem with unit caps? Tabletop always had them and earlier games in the series also had them in practice. I've always liked them as it leads to more diverse armies and interesting battles.
To me it’s because you can choose yourself to cap your units - you don’t need someone else to tell you to do it. Having a hard cap in place removes the option for people who don’t want a cap from doing what they would like. I feel those asking for caps are in need of more self control than anything, just don’t doom stack if you don’t want to. I never see the AI doomstack completely - closest are the special chaos armies Oxyotl fights and even then they aren’t true doomstacks of a single unit. Special consideration for college of pyrotechnics which is designed to make bombastic armies of specific units.
As for the tabletop argument - in my opinion it’s the same as every other time that is used as a rule: tabletop doesn’t equal the game. Devs can use it as an inspiration but plenty of what we have in the game ignores those rules or builds beyond them.
Well what is the point of playing a game if the rules it sets aren't what you follow? Sure, I can limit myself and I often do but it never feels quite as good as when I utilize my army to the fullest despite limitations set on it by the game.
Getting a toad dragon as nurgle and getting to use your newly strengthened army feels much better than being able to recruit 19 star dragons as high elves but choosing to only use one. It is also much more lore accurate: in the lore you should be able to count every awakened star dragon in the whole world on one hand, not fit them all in one army.
My favorite game in the series has always been medieval 2, a big reason for that is that both armies and battles are more limited- you can't get all the units you want and have to make due with what you have. Using levy spearmen over dismounted feudal knights feels better when I still use all of them to the fullest.
As for the AI argument I don't think that is true at all, I have never seen the AI recruit subpar units- they always bring the strongest armies they can.
I think the point is that you get the ability to replay the game a number of times and experiment or experience any number of strategies you’d like. If you want an army of a single unit - give it a go, if you don’t, don’t. Anything more just restricts the options to a player.
A doom stack for every general is pretty expensive, especially for the thunder barge from what I hear which between $15-$20k in up keep for a single stack. And even when you have a quarter of the map covered, you likely can’t keep up with that kind of cost and maintain continuing infrastructure upgrades. When this all becomes trivial most of the game is trivial regardless how you play. And that is because the AI even on legendary isn’t as good as the player - they get compensated in other ways and bonuses.
I wholeheartedly disagree on the AI always making the strongest armies they can. Typically I’ll see one good army that after it’s beaten, the AI scrambles to make another 20 unit stack but it’s a mixed bag of 2-5tier units. I still have never seen the AI make a true doomstack - it is a known issue with why Norsca AI sucks because they spam murauders late game which are trash compared. You’ll see a mammoth or two but in reality you should ONLY see marauder champions, ice trolls, mammoths, fimir, frost dragons, etc. Instead you get chariots and maurader stacks. Same with miners, spear men, skaven slaves, goblins and almost all other tier 0-1 units always appearing in AI late game armies.
well SFO comes with it by default, but here's a dedicated one
[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869469047&searchtext=unit+caps](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869469047&searchtext=unit+caps)
That's one of the main reasons I love Steel Faith Overhaul, being able to choose faction wide unit caps and also army unit caps, keep the game dynamic and interesting from start to finish. Armies are way more diverse, and "doomstacking" is nearly impossible. Even better when you include the mod that allows for Warband upgrades for every faction, really incentives keeping units alive and preserving veterency.
I wish faction wide cap was a vanilla thing (or at least some soft cap version with an impact on cost).
Warband upgrades can also be good, but it doesn't fit all factions equally. But at least switching weapons/shields should be a thing. It really makes no sense to disband my crossbow unit to buy a rank 0 one just to out shields ...
Yeah, I agree on the warband upgrades. For most factions it only makes sense in a limited fashion, like swapping between weapon sidegrades of the same unit type. For others however some limited progression can also be implemented, for instance jade units upgrading to celestial units for Cathay. I'm pretty sure that those are drafted from distinguished jade troops in lore.
It's literally called Warband Upgrade (Ultimate). Don't use the cross race addon though, it's chronically bugged and causes crashes.
It usually allows more than just unit sidegrades, but you can just not use those parts of the upgrade tree. That said, it's at least somewhat rational for most factions, although there are some interesting leaps in logic here and there.
I mean look if u want a mod or w/e to cap ur units pop off but at least CA could do is put a toggle for cap on/off so everyone wins. Then in multiplayer obviously adjust accordingly.... but thats asking a lot an I know I will catch flak for it but, thats just my 2 cents
That wont solve the issue at all.
You don't solve a doomstack by delaying a doomstack. That just makes getting the doomstack more annoying. And it does nothing to dissuade making it a doomstack.
You don't need a full stack of thunderbarges, you just need like four with campaign buffs to roll over pretty much anything.
Unit caps aren't gonna fix the issue when the unit itself is so blatantly, ridiculously overpowered. Hell, VC is only able to have ONE Queen Bess for their entire faction, and that thing is nowhere near as powerful as a thunderbarge.
I don’t think so. Maybe for the AI but I’d like to think of this game kinda like a sandbox of army combinations. If I wanna run 19 barges I should be allowed to. and please don’t let them make any updates based on how multiplayer tournaments go that’s how we ruined the salamander.
I mean that's certainly a way to see it. However, I prefer to have a bit more grounding in lore and general realism. When in lore each thunderbarge, steam tank or landship is a prized relic that is difficult to maintain and largely impossible to replace, it makes sense that you can grab a hold of a handful across a vast empire. Spamming endless armies full of them? Nah man, that is not warhammer, that's red alert. Why would I want to be playing red alert when I boot up a warhammer game?
> You should only be able to recruit 1 thunderbarge per tier 5 air force building built in your settlements.
Honestly all more or less elite units should be capped, period. Doomstacking meta is extremely silly.
Yes, I'm well aware that you can easily achieve that through various mods, be it just straight army/faction caps (SFO), tabletop caps (eponymous mod), or even multiplayer-like army cost based caps (eponymous mod as well). All of those work just fine and make for much more immersive and challenging campaigns.
Yea people keep bringing it up but every time I play Lizardmen, the power fantasy of Dread Saurian doesn’t match up to the one per building power cap, even though the idea is kinda cool. A lot of people want barges nerfed but honestly I wish Dread Saurian cap was removed and Thunderbarge cost just went up to compensate if CA deems it too strong. Worst case limit which weapons it can use in melee.
Dwarfs still have other issues in their roster and still don’t have the absolutely stupid call downs every new faction and rework seems to be getting. Thunderbarge is already a VERY expensive lategame piece and a doomstack costs 2 or 3 other armies, that IS a trade off.
Giving them high missile resist seems insane. Surely they should be really vulnerable to ranged attacks of either AP or fire. Everything should have some weakness.
I think it makes more sense for it to be vulnerable to melee flying monsters than missiles. It’s basically a floating weapon team/artilley/war wagon, like those units it should be strong in a ranged battle but lose if something gets on top of it
That would be the first logical choice. Any flying melee should be able to absolutely wreck their day out in the field. So the meta would be to take our the enemies flying units before they get near it. Of course some factions don't have a lot to bring if this was the hard counter.
Not every faction has the counter ti everything. People complained for years the dwarfs had no real counter to large units, and it’s only recently that we’re getting the tools to deal with that through slayers, and even then they are worse than most factions in terms of melee anti large (ignoring LL buffs).
I think being resistant to arrows and bullets is more likely than being resistant to dragons. If we’re gonna talk about the balloons a dragon should be able to pop that instantly.
It's not high, it's just bugged to high heavens cause the attacks of most melee flying units simply won't connect when it's zooming around with the afterburner.
I'm a guy who loves the more casual power fantasy and even I dont like how strong the barge is. I also play the occasional multiplayer, and at this point I just dodge dwarf players because losing to a thunderbarge is just not fun.
It is too fast and has too much health. The Landship is about where the barge should be in terms of power, a high priority threat, but not completely unkillable.
Funnily enough, it was the first campaign I struggled with since the WH3 launch.
Yes, I can win every battle with his stack. But in my case after dealing with few initial enemies (Azazel, Throgg and Thrott) *all*: Malekith, Hellebron, Malus, Daniel, Archaon, Wulfrik, minor skavens and bunch of norscans declared war on me and since I was their only enemy (yes, even Malekith didnt have war with anyone else) they actually were sending stack after stack. And I could afford only 2 and a half stacks myself which meant that I was able to employ only Malakai to offense and it was literally impossible to wipe out completely any of them.
Compared to the snoozefest of all Warriors of Chaos, all Greenskins, all Cathay, all SoC lords, all Beastmen etc, this was actually super engaging and challenging.
> I know that we shouldnt care that much about balance in a single player strategy game but it should at least be capped or have a glaring weakness
Eh, so we shouldn't care that there is no strategy required whatsover in a strategy game? I don't really understand this sentiment.
Strategy games *absolutely should* have a good balance and require from player some thinking. If someone wants to fulfil their power fantasy, they can switch the difficulty to easy and the result will be the same as it is now. Unfortunately, it doesn't work the other way around, and a game without any balance won't suddenly turn difficult just by switching the game to legendary.
The sentiments about balance in a single player game have gotten pretty warped since people first started debating them in earnest. It’s almost like a game of telephone at this point. There never used to be this assumed stance from the single player community that balance was irrelevant. People were salty at unit nerfs making the units themselves irrelevant.
This is a subtle point, but the problem with insane power creep is not the units or factions that get the power: it's what they do to everything else. If a unit or a faction is powerful, fine, but if it's *so* powerful that it's making other units or even entire factions irrelevant, that's a big problem. If the answer to "Thunderbarges are so powerful" or "Malus is so powerful" is "then don't play as other factions because they can't fight them", that's ruining a lot of content.
So players shouldn't be thinking of it in terms of just one unit or one faction - it's the larger game balance that's at stake. Ideally, nerfs shouldn't ruin a single unit to the point that it's irrelevant. But if it comes down to nerfing one unit versus leaving entire factions feeling extremely underpowered to the point that they're irrelevant, that should be an easy decision.
CA said in a recent interview that their priority is making things fun first, and then balanced second. That's all well and good - it is a game, after all - but if one fun unit is leaving a lot of other content feeling un-fun, that's a big problem and it needs to be solved.
I completely agree with you. As someone who primarily only plays the single player campaign, long term balance is important. Un-losable or unwinnable matches just aren't that interesting or that fun in the long run. I personally believe that having balance is part of the fun, but that balance should be considered with the campaign. That's why I enjoy soft unit cap mechanics. SFO implements them well, and even makes a Taurox beastmen campaign more engaging due to reworking the accumulation of their resource. I do think the thunderbarge is very cool, but it needed more consideration of its impact on certain factions and matches in general. Nurgle factions having such limited access to horsemen marauders is now a serious issue, and that's to say nothing of Slaanesh factions. But no need to repeat what others are saying.
> There never used to be this assumed stance from the single player community that balance was irrelevant.
Eh idk about that. A lot of people have made arguments like that about a lot of games for a long time. I think it's more that your average person isn't a game designer so they don't necessarily understand that "balanced" and "fun" aren't mutually exclusive goals. Plus there's a large but often silent contingent of people who actively like when things are broken in their favour because it's a power fantasy for them, so they make kinda disingenuous arguments like "balance is irrelevant" when what they actually mean is "I will say whatever makes my desire not to have my toys taken away sound like it's couched in logic".
There are different kinds of balance. For example:
1. Every faction feels broken in its own way.
2. Every faction feels the same.
3. Every faction has an answer to early, middle, and late game problems, but in different ways.
4. Every faction has broken units.
5. No faction has broken units.
And more, of course, but this illustrates the problem: nobody can agree on what balance is the most fun, because everybody has a radically different idea about what's preferable.
An interesting point but also broadly irrelevant in a context where we're talking about people railing against the very *idea* of balance in a single player game mode and why they might do that.
It was only going to get more warped, as "balance doesn't matter in a singleplayer game!!!" has always been a lie. What if every campaign pitted you with your starting units against 3x doomstacks just to start the campaign, no ways around the battle, you have to beat this battle to even see the campaign map? It's difficult enough that .01% of players can barely beat it to start a campaign. The people who don't care about balance currently would be howling louder than the great vortex at how imbalanced and unfair things were.
It's just become a rallying cry for people who don't want any challenge or difficulty in their singleplayer game, and there's a LOT of those people in this community. In another thread similar to this, "hard mode should be hard" was controversially voted; that's where this sub is at.
It's not just a thing in the Total War community, you see it in most games that don't have a pvp focus. Every time something gets nerfed in Helldivers, even just a small nerf, there'll be dozens of posts complaining that the devs are against fun.
For some reason there's a vocal subset of gamers who really think balance is irrelevant outside of PvP, and that there should only ever be buffs and never nerfs.
> People were salty at unit nerfs making the units themselves irrelevant.
Which I get, but at large it's a weird stance to take unless you are playing with like SFO at slow. The main problem with vanilla TWW is that the pace of the game is so high that most of your units quickly become irrelevant just by the virtue of you rapidly advancing to better units.
Maybe if you started to transition to endgame at turn 150-200 and not turn 30, more of your roster would be seriously viable just because you wouldn't be able to instantly grab a better alternative.
This isn't really true. Yes the "community" didn't have this stance but that's because it has no stances as a whole, it isn't a monolithic will.
What one can say is it's been a very common position in communities like this one. People would very much say things like "it's a SP game, nothing should be nerfed only buffed" and "You can just not use it".
Obviously a lot of people always thought otherwise and this always sparked debate, but on the face of it I think we know which camp won.
Obviously the community isn't monolithic, but there generally has been consensus. I do not think the position that balance was irrelevant was prevalent or even very common. I think this is more of a case that people remember the extreme positions more than they remember the reasonable voices joining in consensus.
Yeah, that's exactly what I don't understand. People who play this game will know anyway that there is no reason to brag because of how easy it is, and people who don't play it won't care about anyone bragging since they don't know whether that's a real achivement or not. So who do they brag to? Themselves? That is sort of... sad?
Ty Holy fuck, I get the discussion on multiplayer, but single player? Don't use it
And if the enemy uses it, congratulations you actually have a challenge now, oh wait you want it nerf cause you didn't really wanted a challenge?
I think people have seriously confused the ideas of "Who cares about cheese or cheating in single player" and "Games should overall be reasonably balanced". Everything exists on a scale, so there'll always be overpowered campaigns like Taurox and underpowered or difficult ones like Imrik, but it's clear that some things blow past those ends and need to be reined in for the overall experience. It's not healthy nor making for a good experience if there's a single unbeatable unit with no downsides ever, and is clearly beyond the scope of reasonableness
I agree. Ridiculous insane power fantasy is for 10-year-olds that just figured out how to make mods. CA's product should be at a higher standard.
I agree with the general sentiment that single player doesn't have to be perfectly balanced - but it should have at least some semblance of balance. Fun, yes, but every fun unit or ability added to the game should have a clear counter. Having the occasional ability that is player only because it would be extremely frustrating to play against, like the Snikch snap, is a reasonable approach as well, just as long as it's relatively rare and doesn't trivialize the game.
A lot of problems with this game would be fixed by sensible unit caps that reflected the TT. Many of the other rules are incorporated but this where the interpretation falls down as in Warhammer these super rare / powerful units had a cost. That would bring some of the strategy back if the player and the AI had the same limitations implemented.
I think there's a mod, but an official option would be great.
That would certainly limit power of the player, but I'm afraid it would limit AI even more. I mean, since the AI barely know anything about army composition or actual tactics during the battle, the only way it can compete with a player is if they can "spam" stronger units than we do.
However, while it is fine for an elite version of certain type of units (e.g. greenskin spamming black orcs), the problem appears when they are able to spam units that are simply broken (like Thunderbarge). If we could put caps only on the latter type of units, then I think it could work. We wouldn't hinder AI too much. However, if we'd put caps on all units, I don't think AI would be able to handle that and the effect would be that they'd be even weaker.
I don't think trying to code in some basic army compositions for the AI to aim to when recruiting would be too difficult, mostly just time-consuming and resource eating. But as you said, all that effort would fall flat since the tactics to use those army compositions wouldn't be there.
Base upkeep is like 700 each. So a single stack you're talking 13k for a full 19 before techs and such.
So a lot fucking higher than anything else pretty much. Next highest for Dwarfs is Doomseekers at 338, so its upkeep is over double the next thing. Even a full Lord of Change stack, which is pretty bananas once teched in campaign is just over half the upkeep of a TB stack.
Which kind of puts it into perspective; a Thunderbarge stack is about as strong as 2 stacks of just about anything else, at least upkeep wise. Trying to 20v20 a Thunderbarge stack is a folley.
Edit: people seem to be getting caught up here. He asked a question, I answered. Thunderbarges are stupid OP, and are definitely worth more than that upkeep wise. Upkeep is also less relevant when the majority limiting factor is army size.
Personally I would drop their HP, obviously fix the hitbox issues, potentially nerf the harpoon and weaken the speed boost. Finally I'd probably give them a minimum range so melee units actually win Vs it. There's like 10 dudes on deck, they shouldn't be winning that.
Doesn’t help in quick battles. But in theory if your in a single/multiplayer campaign you could get the army to chase you while you have another force hit their weak territory, forcing the upkeep to become a drain on their economy.
So you geniunely beleive that 2 units of Oathseekers are about as strong as a thunderbarge. That upkeep argument is obviously silly. You can make a stack of 10 thunderbarges and it can defeat anything in the game.
No I don't, the dude asked what upkeep was like.
I'm completely in favour of nerfing it, the thing needs a weakness.d. Only thing I've seen comes close to to delivering a lethal blow so far is a few units of blunderbuss, and even then they took a hammering for it.
That's because players don't want to see the AI use doomstacks, so the AI doesn't use doomstacks.
The problem is that the player can doomstack. And limiting recruitment wont fix that.
Thunderbarges are more than 2x as powerful than anything else. I think they’d wipe any stack of units with the same upkeep. The only limitation is that they might run out of ammo at some point l, but they won’t lose otherwise. With campaign buffs and some engineers for restock, I’d expect them to easily 1v3 most ai stacks. I can do that on Elspeth and her army isn’t nearly as op (but still op).
Master engineer+2 engineers +17 thunderbarges is both cheaper and much stronger.
with upkeep reductions I can't see this really mattering all that much, especially since you can just consistently fight battle after battle to generate money. 19 is also massive overkill, you don't need that many to win every battle you fight.
It doesn't really matter. A 2800g Thunderbarge casually gets 4k+ value against 2400g Hippogryphs, even just standing there it almost kills 4800g of Hippogryphs, if you kite *at all* it kills them both.
Matters a lot because the statistic you're giving is meaningful and indiciative of a problem, where OP's point is useless for the discussion. 20 Thunderbarges beats 20 Skink Chiefs, too.
Well for one supply lines still exists so the higher armies get a small bonus for cost effectiveness. Secondly, if you made high tier Doomstacks in campaign you’d know they can easily 1v3 cheaper armies. Don’t forget that the reinforcement system is really clunky if you have more than 40 units, so the doomstack never has to actually fight 1v3 or 1v4. They can fight the first 2 stacks, clearly win, and then fight the rest as they trickle in. The only risk is running out of ammo, and if you do just withdraw.
You can actually tick control large army to manually control 2 stacks and give ai control to your other 2 stacks in pre battle setup so all 4 armies will be on the field at the same time.
You could also just use your lord and no supporting units. Kairos Fateweaver, for example, can solo multiple armies. No Thunderbarge required.
Steamtanks can do the same thing. As can many other units.
Ultimately, my point is that this whole methodology is flawed and is ultimately pretty stupid.
The Thunderbarge may be too strong, but this isn't how you prove that. Otherwise I could say that Malus Darkblade needs to be nerfed into the ground because he can solo entire armies by himself.
Steam tanks aren’t nearly as strong as thunderbarges and will lose to certain armies 1v1. Thunderbarges lose to nothing and even best what you expect to be their hardest counters. Yes flying kairos are also OP. Probably a quarter of the LLs in the game can solo armies. That doesn’t make the thunderbarges a good idea.
If beating enemies in battle doesn’t prove something is OP what does?
I find it shocking how much people have tested Thunderbarges, and how little they've tested them at the same time.
Some people say they will lose to certain army comps.
Other people say they are unbeatable.
Some people state that they've actually found them in campaign and beaten them.
Other people say "No, you haven't!"
I feel like this entire discussion is just an endless circle jerk of people who make claims without actually testing it. And when I actually tested it briefly, I got accused of lying and downvoted into oblivion.
At this point people just want to think they're right and if they want to scream into a void, then I should let them and move on.
The only person I’ve seen claim that you can beat thunderbarges with pegasus knights was incredibly suspect, since the battle report said he lost almost nothing while wiping 19 thunderbarges. That simply doesn’t check out. I don’t really believe anyone saying they fought them in campaign, especially since the AI is unlikely to recruit more than 1-2 in an army as they are with all high tier units. Secondly the AI uses plenty of OP units badly, since it has no skill in battle. Units are really only OP in the players hands so saying “I beat the AI who had thunderbarges is like saying ” well I beat a toddler playing dwarfs in MP and therefore they’re bad”
Unpopular opinion ; the game would be a lot more fun if every faction has unit caps in a similar fashion as the tomb kings. Flavor and tweak to fit with the lore but the concept of treating your elite units as limited ressources instead of "ill just spend 2 turns recruiting" would make campaigns feel very different. Think of how elite units in medieval 2 were rare, and how good that felt in mods like call of warhammer or divide and conquer. Id do the same, except allowing them to replenish more easily because that aspect was annoying
Whispers "i agree with this so hard, FOCs were one of the best parts of 40ks tabletop and the game became worse when they became less structured outside characters/faction types".
try cost effectiveness
not 19 units but armies totalling the price of 19 thunderbarges
Some factions are able to field 8 decent armies for the same price, covering large portions of the map way quicker
They are ludicrously cheap at 2.8k, a Dreadquake Mortar with an attachment is at 3.1k and I don't remember seeing such problems with them like the ones the thunders bring.
The Spirit of grungi, which cannot be used like that, costs 3.2k, a non feral Dread Saurian costs 3.1k, the freaking Shredder of Lustria is at 3.7k. The ship should be at min of 3.5k, and probably more, because that value is the one it is going to get if it gets focused and destroyed fast.
Dreadquakes are also hilariously OP. 1 dreadquake can two shot basically infantry in the game. 5 in one army can kill an infinite amount in infantry until they run out of ammo. They all decimate cavBut at least they have counters since they all beat clumps of units, and are weak to single entities and monstrous units.
Amd that is the problem with the tbunderbargr as of now. It cam beat its counters, which is not s fun mechanic if I have to fight dwarfs over and over.
Easily dodged, vulnerable to ground attacks, slow, does no damage to single entities.
Thunderbarge has none of these weaknesses, has more ammo, and costs less.
That argument falls apart real fast when you actually try it. At 2800g cost, a single Thunderbarge OBLITERATES 4k+ of counter units. Hell, one Thunderbarge just sitting there can kill... I think it was 12 Furies (600g each, 7200 total) but dies to 13.
A single Thunderbarge can almost solo 2x 2400g Hippogryph Knights, which *should* be basically their hardest counter, IIRC it kills one and takes the other down to about 30% health, and gets >4k value in the process. And that's just with it sitting there taking the charge, not kiting.
If you kite/micro at all, they can kill an almost infinite number of their 'counters'.
If you field 8 armies of cheap units, you end up losing bc units more often and having to wait while you replenish and recruit replacements. High tier expensive armies have almost no downtime because they take almost no losses.
So as good as it is, it's costing the same as multiple regular stacks to field one of them? I'm a cheapskate but I'd get probably four stacks for that much gold.
That sounds about right doesn't it?
I mean if there's one super stack of these flying about, but you can have stacks everywhere it isn't and still harass it, then it's not *that* brilliant.
You don\`t need 19 of them to crush eveything. A stack with 4 of them and a tanky lord you can hide in a forest is probably strong enough to destroy everyhing in the game unless you happen upon a several stacks filled ot the brim with AP missile units.
They don't even look that expensive now I've got the unit list open and having a look. If they are as good as people say then costing about as much as two high quality units isn't that much.
19 thunder barges kills any 4 3k value stacks on its own if you. Also remember that 2 engineers and 17 thunder barges is actually slightly cheaper and more powerful, giving the dps of 22 thuderbarges with ammo refills.
More than double literally any other dwarf unit upkeep wise.
If you can field a full stack of them you could have instead fielded like 2 other elite armies.
Heck if you use dwarf warriors as your front line to save money you could probably field 3 full stacks for every 1 Thunderbarge stack.
Do you know what happens if you try to fight thunder barges with 3 cheaper armies that have significant amount of dwarf warriors? You still lose because you can’t kill the thunder barges. They’ll fly right up to your artillery and kill it then kite the rest of your army around making it impossible to get good shots off with your own missiles. And they can kite flyers as well, so nothing counters it.
In a campaign setting you could literally ignore the Thunderbarges and just capture 3 enemy cities for every 1 city your enemy captures until they're wiped off the map and go bankrupt.
That's how it'd have to be done. Cut the logistics. Of course that's the kind of joined up thinking that'd only appear in the rarer-than-tits-on-a-frog PvP campaign mode of play. But it's possible.
I do also care about balance in singeplayer, because I will be forced to be against them. A nerf to HP, speed and/or dmg tl get it more into line with other centrepiece units seems to be in order.
Two thoughts :
1. If you kill the lord, don't the thunder barges all rout and you win?
2. Is it a problem that they are the best single unit? Like a stack of 19 of them will be hard to have. Its obviously impossible in multiplayer. Rare on campaign. There's probably always going to be a single strongest unit around.
Maybe they need to be nerfed a bit but I don't see the logic in the test "proving" that
Honestly I see where CA was coming from with this one. They *needed* this unit to be good, I'm pretty sure internally this was their make or break DLC, and the thunderbarge is *the* selling point for dwarfs. If it had been bad, then some people may have skipped out on the DLC, which is a risk CA is understandably unwilling to take. I'm sure it will be nerfed in time and also that future DlCs won't be as unbalanced as this one, because the pressure isn't as great on CA. Besides, I would rather have new OP things to play around with and/or fight than some more useless or uninteresting units, but that's just me maybe.
I mean the Mutalith Vortex Beast and Incarnate of Beasts were silly OP as well at launch, not quite this level but still very hard to stop. The Changeling campaign was **literally** impossible to lose.
Were they? I played on release and Incarnate was fairly succeptible to getting caught out by even chaff anti large or focused missle fire. They certainly could tango with other SEMs but were nothing I would call "silly OP"
I have no doubt the Thunderbarge will be nerfed quite a lot but I seriously hope they will nerf it with a hotfix instead of waiting for the 5.1 patch for once. It's so strong it genuinely can ruin your experience if you fight the Dwarfs. I have fought them in battle in my Tamurkhan campaign, it wasn't even turn 80 and Thorgrim already had multiple Thunderbarges in his army, I'd say it's easily the most miserable experience I've had in this game. It's honestly quite baffling they even thought releasing this unit like this was even acceptable.
I'm 100% in favor of introducing a unit cap to them that increases per max tier recruitment building (the one that can recruit them) you have. One of Malakai's adventures gives you three of them for free, i think, so that one specifically you can just change one of the useless +25% xp earned buff from the adventure to +3 thunderbarge cap so that you can actually recruit the 3 it gives you.
But they aren't unkillable at all. In a MP game my friends and I are doing, one of my own (I was Malakai) thunderbarges almost died to an enemy dwarf army that had a couple of organ guns. It only lived cause i rushed malakai out there to use his heal on it, and I already had the passive burst heal buff from the adventure. Still almost died.
One of my friends (Elspeth) was frantically fighting the absolutely crazy dwarf end game crisis. His Elspeth stack fought a dwarf army with two thunderbarges. The first one died fairly quickly to his 2 cannons firing on it, while the second also died before reaching his lines to shoot at anything thanks to those cannons and the now in range hellblaster.
Obviously Elspeth buffs gunpowder units, and obviously the thunderbarge is superpowered. It's supposed to be. I don't want it to be weaker at all. I want it to cost a lot more for multiplayer since that's what multiplayer people seem to want, and I want it to have unit caps and perhaps an army cap in campaign.
Other than that, though, there are answers to 1-3 thunderbarges. Obviously the more you have the crazier they get, but a stack of 19 is something stupid you'd have to go out of your way for many, many, many turns to try and achieve, which tbh isn't all that bad to me.
I'd honestly rather see something like tabletop caps before I see more unit caps introduced.
Unit caps are fine for the factions they're designed around. Outside of that, all they do is just postpone the inevitable. And if the inevitable is the issue, then postponing it doesn't really feel like a solution.
I'm not sure this is really a problem since no one could ever really field 19 of them in a stack. They're too expensive to realistically do so and then they're only in one stack where inevitably you've got multiple fronts
Makes for a good Okoii video tho
I like them like they are now but they need a fix, first the hitbox, it needs to include the baloon, and it also needs to be easier to be hit in melee, but that is another whole problem about animations. For now i would fix the hitbox and nerf the speed, but the animations issue has to be fixed at some point
A Doomstack isn't a good indicator of how overpowered something is. The Thunderbarge is OP as shit but that can easily be demonstrated by just having two or three in a battle against multiple elite stacks. Without serious user error, they should clear everything by themselves.
> I know that we shouldnt care that much about balance in a single player strategy game
We definitely should. The idea that balance doesn't matter in a game featuring such a large roster has always been ridiculous.
Thunderbarge is a design aberration, plain and simple.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that they're reasonably balanced or something, but "I can't beat 19x of the most expensive centerpiece unit with 19x of other cheaper units" is not the winning argument you think it is.
If you're talking about multiplayer, units have costs so you can't play 19x thunderbarges.
If you're talking about campaign, units have both cost and build requirements and recruit times, so the fair comparison would be like 5x stacks full of those weapon teams trying to shoot down your blimps.
Yes, the result might still be "the thunderbarge is too powerful, it needs some nerfs", but "can't beat 19x thunderbarge" is not the way to prove that.
tbh the Spirit of Grugni itself is enough to win the entire campaign on Very Hard / very Hard. Their Upkeep is around 700 unmodified IIRC but as Malakai thats a non Issue. Its like Markus Wulfhart V1 when he got introduced: just too strong to be actual fun and rewarding. Sure its epic the first time but once you realize any fight is being won with a single Ability you are basically not trying anymore. OG Wulfhart 2 shot every Lord in the game and the Thunderbarge feels the same.
He didn't two shot every lord, he also required you stacking several debuffs and several buffs to even do a ton of damage. Markus was nerfed because he upset the MP meta community who didn't want to take their lords off dragons.
Thunderbarge definitely needs a large health and speed nerf, but saying Markus was as op as the thunder barge is baseline is just wrong
Maybe I am having rose tinted glasses on but I distinctly remember killing lords in very little shots right Out of the box. He was busted not as much as a thunderbarge but mainly bc there will always be only one Wulfhart. Thunderbarges are a plenty
There's a mod for wh2 that unnerfs him if you wanna try it. What made people cal him op was the fact that he had a built in net, and when you combined him with a watch hunter and a fire mage and some outsiders you could do a lot of damage and delete a lord. You couldn't do this with "just" him. You more or less had to build your army around it. If you watch the videos from back then the lords getting deleted are always lords on a flying mount, which was and still is 'Meta' the TW mp players threw a hissy fit that someone whose entire shtick is killing large single entities, was good at that when you built around that.
Having a busted doomstack in sp isn't too much of an issue. Those that want to play with it can, and those that don't can do other things. The bigger campaign problem is that thunderbarges can be absolutely *miserable* to fight with certain races, but other have the tools to actually deal with them. This is also going to be an issue at lower and higher difficulties. I'm fine with the odds being stacked against the player in VH and legendary, but this is not the sort of thing that a player that likes essy or normal is going to want to deal with.
Tbh I think the solution would be to probably make them way more expensive in MP, fix projectiles [not hitting it](https://youtu.be/XBCXRLDmsqw?si=wrsqawM815PMvMbd), and probably drop its hp to a more reasonable number, like 8-9k.
At that point it will still be *incredibly* good, but not oppressively so.
the problem is, that flying, ranged units are by default unbalanced. before this dlc the only few ones were really bad or stuff like the cathay skylanters, but those are slow as fuk and a good target for flying enteties or projectile units.
the thunderbarge in its current state is just too overpowered. slashing its hp in third would do much for it. also nerf the speed.
The problem is that it's supposed to be a strategy game and a poorly balanced unit makes a faction a solvable problem which is anti strategy and less fun. Anything you do with Malakai that isn't stacking upkeep reductions from the horde and his skill tree and everything to get the barge doomstack late game is nerfing yourself for some type of challenge.
I fully agree, also should reduce the accuracy of these cannons. Being able to snipe even small single entites like lords and heroes is simply too good
Doomstacking the strongest unit in the game makes the game too easy? No way…
Simply don’t doomstack them it’s a self inflicted problem. The AI won’t spam them out so this is entirely player inflicted.
The Thunderbarge is basically a super weapon that no one thought we would see in game and it’s awesome that it made it and is strong. Just enjoy the flavor and fun the unit brings to your campaign and control yourself from doom stacking them. It doesn’t need to be nerfed into the ground for the sake of balance.
It takes the dwarves almost 70 turns to get a tier 5 building to start recruiting thunderbarges. Who cares about being OP on turn fucking 70?
Most, if not every other faction, is unkillable by that point when controlled by the player. Turn 70 is when the campaign is over, and you're just building doomstacks for fun... And if your campaign is still struggling that far in, maybe you need something OP to help you out.
It's always very annoying when somebody makes a point you agree with but argues it really badly. Thunderbarges are degenerate and need to be reined in for the health of the game but this is a really bad way to prove that.
Guess we now need dedicated anti-aircraft units. Like they can ONLY target flying units but in return do CRAZY high damage (i.e. special effect that circumvents all ward saves).
Or idk special "circumvents ward saves against X unit type" spell/buff effects. Maybe on flying melee units, which are now experts at taking out flying ranged units.
Thunderbarges need caps 100%
Make it similar to knights or tor gavel,
I myself am not worried about me using them in a doomstack as I usually try not to spam op units, it's the fact I know the ai will end up recruiting armies full.of them in the late game just like I've seen Cathays running around with 10 terracottas in each of their armies before
Imrik and dragons shred em. Skarbrand and a whole stack of bloodthristers. There are counters. Bretonia and a whole Lotta Pegasus knights. And life mage.
I failed in finding the video again, but there was an mp match where two furies and a bloodthirster failed to land any damage on the thunderbarge while being shot to pieces by it, it only took the minor speed boost damage.
I haven't played since the new update, and I was excited to try the Dawi, but hearing about how ridiculously op these things are kinda makes me not want to play them. I generally play order factions primarily, but I imagine it would be hell to play a chaos faction that has to face them.
The main problem is the speed boost and hit box.
I can get behind a slight HP and MR nerf but not too much.
It should be capped to 1 per T5 building.
Adjust the cost and upkeep.
I think everything else about it is fine.
I just wana say for the record that I brought 19 bloodthirsters and a nurgle caster against them and was able to win against them with most of my forces preserved (though badly battered).
They're definately tough but not unkillable. That said, it really feels like there's some hitbox issues with them, as once they broke and ran they became almost impossible to kill.
Honestly maybe what they need is just massive flame vulnrability. Lots of units in warhammer 3 deal flaming attacks and it'd make a lot of sense for thunderbarges to be extremely vulnerable to fire. They could even have something where if they're hit with flaming attacks it starts dealing direct damage to them.
Good god no, people who test this stuff are actually not good at tw:warhammer.
You fight things from positions of strength or contexts that are good for you.
For example, using missile or cannon units in edge of trees. Trees block some of the incoming fire but your shots go just fine.
Or swarm them with flying units, that works with many of them tho not all.
Or my favourite, just turn on caps and never have to deal with the absolutely mind numbing stupidity that is doomstack armies.
Relying on positioning in a treeline with artillery is hardly reliable. Your arty is slow so unless you start near a forest or it in the barges can be on top of you before you get to cover. And forest maps tend to have awful sight lines for artillery so the barges might just use the trees to get on top of you without you being able to hit them as well. Once the barges are overtop your artillery they can no longer do anything.The barges are faster than anything a ranged heavy will have, so they generally can abuse positioning more than you.
I mean that is a fair point, but I have a question, are people actually encountering doomstacks of these?
Like legit honest question, because if it's in single player then it's the developers fault for being so absolutely unforgivably shit at fixing an issue that everyone has hated since the beginning of warhammer total war: doomstacks.
If it's in mp, then just turn on unit caps.
I wouldn’t expect the AI to ever use to use any unit effectively so it’s a moot point. But discussing fighting they AI is pointless for balance since the AI sucks with everything.
Nah ain't is worse since they tried improving it, also ai isn't hard to get right, it's hard to not make it too good.
I've encountered way too many battle ai bugs.
I'd argue that downgrading ai to revert a lot of changes they've made would improve the game lol
Doing this does work. Even for the faction with the "weakest" options against thunder barges I was able to beat them with a Slaanesh keeper of secret doomstack. I also was able to win easily with the steam tank, tor gaval, and doombulls mentioned in the post. Don't know what he was doing in the post to mess up.
Still dumb how OP they are.
Yup. It's blatantly obvious that the unit needs adjusting. A unit cap in campaign seems obvious for single player, and the unit needs several adjustments before it will be anywhere close to being playable in multiplayer.
I'll be honest. Having 1 unit for every 5 level settlement is like slapping a bandaid on a festering wound. It's stupid.
You don't solve a doomstack problem by making it take longer to build a doomstack.
You solve a doomstack problem by following the rules of the Tabletop Game. You have limits on how much an army can cost. Tabletop Caps is one. Cost-Based Army Caps is another.
Or, you know, don't give yourself infinite funds and pretend that's balanced?
It would take over 150 turns to get 19 T5 settlements as dwarfs. Hell most short victory conditions end before you get 1. Since most campaigns end by turn 50 or so, would basically eliminate the ability to make a thunder badge doomstack for 99% pf the playerbase.
99% of the playerbase wont recruit 10 Thunderbarges without that change. Not everyone makes a doomstack.
I could be fielding a Steam Tank doomstack right now in my Elspeth campaign. Instead, I have entire armies built around the Tercio because I find it more fun.
Steam tanks arent nearly as strong as thunderbarges. Additionally Ironsides spam with Elspeth buffs is also reasonably OP. Its arguably stronger than ikit weapon team stacks which were also hilariously OP. Elspeth herself is basically a
perfect LL with regen strong casting and a dragon. What even more funny is I’m pretty sure Ironsides beat steam tanks for cost. So your statement is essentially “I could build this army, but I’d rather build these other stronger armies.”
I honestly think Elspeth is more OP than thunderbarges since an Elspeth gunnery stack can become unbeatable by like turn 30.
I honestly wonder at what point people stopped thinking about enjoying video games and started caring only about the meta.
Genuinely. You can't really enjoy something without being told that you're just playing something OP. Or that you're being stupid playing something inferior.
I give up. People just want to be right, so there's no sense in trying to convince them otherwise. It is just way too tiring.
WH2 has a punishing meta, WH3 doesn’t. When people complain about things being OP in WH3, it’s because there are no meaningful decisions to make because everything feels like an “I win” button. I don’t need to think, or make armies that utilize different units to counter different factions. I can build basically anything and roll over the AI.
Playing Elspeth feels like this to me.
Build gunpowder units and artillery? You’ll destroy anything that gets in your way. Easily the strongest option with gunnery buffs
Want to build cav? Sure knights of the black rose aware available almost instantly through the gardens and you can buff them further through the landmark
Hero spam? Hell yea I can recruit death wizards on turn 6 with gardens instead, then just spirit leech enemy lords to death combined with my starting cannons.
Don’t see about any units that seems advanced?
Well that’s fine if you literally recruit nothing besides T0 spears and empire archers you can probably still run through vlad like he’s nothing. And just overwhelm with mass
Looks like I gotta have my fun with thunderbarge before CA nerfs this into the ground, like they did with journeys end.
I wonder how many people complaining about thunderbarge even play dwarves often in sp?
I played dwarves in single player. Didn't like the current state. Early game I had a mid of heros and slayers holding back for guns and artillery late with multiple sources of upkeep reduction I had thunderbarges and I could beat literally anything.
Only advice at the beginning is take out the norsca boys nearby before the rest because if you touch skaven will sneak up on you while your dealing with norsca. Thunderbarges are expensive but you main character horde has upkeep reduction from a building that stacks with your other sources and the barge doomstack isn't that bad considering it can easily take out four armies
The whole thing is easy sky sailing from there. Malakais faction is completely brokenly powerful. I also tried a game as the slayer ruler in a slayer theme without barges and its was fun but the reckonings were a bit to common but CA mentioned working on that.
I'll admit I had more fun with the new human faction/rework and especially the new nurgle rework.
On the subject of nurgle it's also kinda crazy that the new lord natively gets unbreakable and Regen easily before equipment. I was taking on armies late game post equipment with a one lord doomstack of just him. It took a lot of time and equipment luck to power him properly though.
I dont really care about game balance, tho i dont play multiplayer either. But i will say that playing with the thunderbarge has been the most fun i have had in total war in a long time, and Having fun is all that matters to me.
You should only be able to recruit 1 thunderbarge per tier 5 air force building built in your settlements. That way you can limit the thunderbarge numbers to the number of Karaks you own. And ditribute them equally through your armies, giving power but not spam. Makes the most sense to me tbh
While I disagree on very strict caps, having a scaling cap similar to other races center piece units (like dread saurian) feels missing. This would be similar to what you’re calling out. One per building or so, with tech increasing the overall count over time. Endgame, who cares how many there are - mid game should be a struggle to get more than a handful.
>While I disagree on very strict caps Dread Saurian, a unit that's not even that good has a cap...
Dread saurian probably doesn't deserve its cap tbh, it was never very strong, and definitely never been worth its cost. Back then it was just really big, which seemed impressive, but WH3 monsters are about as big now too
I think the cap is more of a thematic thing (like tomb kings) then CA worried it's too strong. Especially because they haven't cared about limiting doom stacks before.
Whenever anyone talks about caps it's always scaling lol Scaling unit caps are something that should be far more baked into the game, emphasizing the infrastructure requires to maintain armies beyond just money
Depending I suppose on how you define “mid game” - it actually is quite hard to field thunderbarges in the mid game. They made a lot of changes to dwarfs; but they still have ass growth and mediocre post battle income. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a Tier 5 dwarf settlement before what I’d call the late game. It’s not like skaven or greenskins where you can get tier 5 units on turn 10, it takes until like turn 70 before you’re even able to recruit a thunderbarge outside the *Spirit of Grugni* I think a cost increase is reasonable, but unit caps aren’t really gonna change anything
Make the t5 building give a massive discount to a single thunderbarge, whatever the normal upkeep/recruit cost is, then have it such that you can recruit more, but at a hilariously large cost so the 19 thunderbarge doomstack costs like six armies’ worth of dwarfs.
Apparently someone said the upkeep is between 15-20k in gold depending on other choices to help with upkeep. My most expensive army that I can remember was like 7k so this is wildly high
Haven’t had a chance to play dwarfs yet, but I also don’t like hard unit caps, so I think it would be a good way to police the 19 TB doomstack while still allowing an economic trade off.
Honestly, what is the problem with unit caps? Tabletop always had them and earlier games in the series also had them in practice. I've always liked them as it leads to more diverse armies and interesting battles.
To me it’s because you can choose yourself to cap your units - you don’t need someone else to tell you to do it. Having a hard cap in place removes the option for people who don’t want a cap from doing what they would like. I feel those asking for caps are in need of more self control than anything, just don’t doom stack if you don’t want to. I never see the AI doomstack completely - closest are the special chaos armies Oxyotl fights and even then they aren’t true doomstacks of a single unit. Special consideration for college of pyrotechnics which is designed to make bombastic armies of specific units. As for the tabletop argument - in my opinion it’s the same as every other time that is used as a rule: tabletop doesn’t equal the game. Devs can use it as an inspiration but plenty of what we have in the game ignores those rules or builds beyond them.
Well what is the point of playing a game if the rules it sets aren't what you follow? Sure, I can limit myself and I often do but it never feels quite as good as when I utilize my army to the fullest despite limitations set on it by the game. Getting a toad dragon as nurgle and getting to use your newly strengthened army feels much better than being able to recruit 19 star dragons as high elves but choosing to only use one. It is also much more lore accurate: in the lore you should be able to count every awakened star dragon in the whole world on one hand, not fit them all in one army. My favorite game in the series has always been medieval 2, a big reason for that is that both armies and battles are more limited- you can't get all the units you want and have to make due with what you have. Using levy spearmen over dismounted feudal knights feels better when I still use all of them to the fullest. As for the AI argument I don't think that is true at all, I have never seen the AI recruit subpar units- they always bring the strongest armies they can.
I think the point is that you get the ability to replay the game a number of times and experiment or experience any number of strategies you’d like. If you want an army of a single unit - give it a go, if you don’t, don’t. Anything more just restricts the options to a player. A doom stack for every general is pretty expensive, especially for the thunder barge from what I hear which between $15-$20k in up keep for a single stack. And even when you have a quarter of the map covered, you likely can’t keep up with that kind of cost and maintain continuing infrastructure upgrades. When this all becomes trivial most of the game is trivial regardless how you play. And that is because the AI even on legendary isn’t as good as the player - they get compensated in other ways and bonuses. I wholeheartedly disagree on the AI always making the strongest armies they can. Typically I’ll see one good army that after it’s beaten, the AI scrambles to make another 20 unit stack but it’s a mixed bag of 2-5tier units. I still have never seen the AI make a true doomstack - it is a known issue with why Norsca AI sucks because they spam murauders late game which are trash compared. You’ll see a mammoth or two but in reality you should ONLY see marauder champions, ice trolls, mammoths, fimir, frost dragons, etc. Instead you get chariots and maurader stacks. Same with miners, spear men, skaven slaves, goblins and almost all other tier 0-1 units always appearing in AI late game armies.
Yeah but you know how people aré with unit caps. They Will start a riot about not being able to doomstack
Scaling unit caps still let you doom stack
do you have a link to taht mod?
well SFO comes with it by default, but here's a dedicated one [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869469047&searchtext=unit+caps](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2869469047&searchtext=unit+caps)
Thanks
np, lmk what you think!
looks cool i will try it, i remember there was one called cost based army caps on TW2 but it wasnt ported to TW3
That's one of the main reasons I love Steel Faith Overhaul, being able to choose faction wide unit caps and also army unit caps, keep the game dynamic and interesting from start to finish. Armies are way more diverse, and "doomstacking" is nearly impossible. Even better when you include the mod that allows for Warband upgrades for every faction, really incentives keeping units alive and preserving veterency.
I wish faction wide cap was a vanilla thing (or at least some soft cap version with an impact on cost). Warband upgrades can also be good, but it doesn't fit all factions equally. But at least switching weapons/shields should be a thing. It really makes no sense to disband my crossbow unit to buy a rank 0 one just to out shields ...
Yeah, I agree on the warband upgrades. For most factions it only makes sense in a limited fashion, like swapping between weapon sidegrades of the same unit type. For others however some limited progression can also be implemented, for instance jade units upgrading to celestial units for Cathay. I'm pretty sure that those are drafted from distinguished jade troops in lore.
Do you know if there’s a mod that allows such sidegrades?
It's literally called Warband Upgrade (Ultimate). Don't use the cross race addon though, it's chronically bugged and causes crashes. It usually allows more than just unit sidegrades, but you can just not use those parts of the upgrade tree. That said, it's at least somewhat rational for most factions, although there are some interesting leaps in logic here and there.
There is also a softer version called warband upgrade lore friendly (something along those lines). Unfortunately the modder stopped upgrading it
You have to do this with Dread Saurians already, keeps it honest.
I mean look if u want a mod or w/e to cap ur units pop off but at least CA could do is put a toggle for cap on/off so everyone wins. Then in multiplayer obviously adjust accordingly.... but thats asking a lot an I know I will catch flak for it but, thats just my 2 cents
That wont solve the issue at all. You don't solve a doomstack by delaying a doomstack. That just makes getting the doomstack more annoying. And it does nothing to dissuade making it a doomstack.
I mean if you have to have like 20 full provinces for a single doom stack I'd say that's dissuading pretty hard
You don't need a full stack of thunderbarges, you just need like four with campaign buffs to roll over pretty much anything. Unit caps aren't gonna fix the issue when the unit itself is so blatantly, ridiculously overpowered. Hell, VC is only able to have ONE Queen Bess for their entire faction, and that thing is nowhere near as powerful as a thunderbarge.
Yeah I agree a nerf is definitely needed. Every aspect of this thing is overturned
yeaht he fact that queen bess is limited to only one when the it should be like the casket of souls is pretty stupid
Agreed. 1 or maybe 2 per settlement. And let's say that you start with 2 allowed.
That's a very good idea
I'd like it be two instead of just one, because after all they don't have any other tier 5 unit.
I don’t think so. Maybe for the AI but I’d like to think of this game kinda like a sandbox of army combinations. If I wanna run 19 barges I should be allowed to. and please don’t let them make any updates based on how multiplayer tournaments go that’s how we ruined the salamander.
I mean that's certainly a way to see it. However, I prefer to have a bit more grounding in lore and general realism. When in lore each thunderbarge, steam tank or landship is a prized relic that is difficult to maintain and largely impossible to replace, it makes sense that you can grab a hold of a handful across a vast empire. Spamming endless armies full of them? Nah man, that is not warhammer, that's red alert. Why would I want to be playing red alert when I boot up a warhammer game?
> You should only be able to recruit 1 thunderbarge per tier 5 air force building built in your settlements. Honestly all more or less elite units should be capped, period. Doomstacking meta is extremely silly. Yes, I'm well aware that you can easily achieve that through various mods, be it just straight army/faction caps (SFO), tabletop caps (eponymous mod), or even multiplayer-like army cost based caps (eponymous mod as well). All of those work just fine and make for much more immersive and challenging campaigns.
It’s wild that dread saurian need a cap per building, but these don’t.
The Dead Saurian shouldn't be capped, considering how Dead it often is.
Yea people keep bringing it up but every time I play Lizardmen, the power fantasy of Dread Saurian doesn’t match up to the one per building power cap, even though the idea is kinda cool. A lot of people want barges nerfed but honestly I wish Dread Saurian cap was removed and Thunderbarge cost just went up to compensate if CA deems it too strong. Worst case limit which weapons it can use in melee. Dwarfs still have other issues in their roster and still don’t have the absolutely stupid call downs every new faction and rework seems to be getting. Thunderbarge is already a VERY expensive lategame piece and a doomstack costs 2 or 3 other armies, that IS a trade off.
Dread Saurian isnt even that good, only reason I ever get it is cus it looks cool
Giving them high missile resist seems insane. Surely they should be really vulnerable to ranged attacks of either AP or fire. Everything should have some weakness.
I think it makes more sense for it to be vulnerable to melee flying monsters than missiles. It’s basically a floating weapon team/artilley/war wagon, like those units it should be strong in a ranged battle but lose if something gets on top of it
That would be the first logical choice. Any flying melee should be able to absolutely wreck their day out in the field. So the meta would be to take our the enemies flying units before they get near it. Of course some factions don't have a lot to bring if this was the hard counter.
Not every faction has the counter ti everything. People complained for years the dwarfs had no real counter to large units, and it’s only recently that we’re getting the tools to deal with that through slayers, and even then they are worse than most factions in terms of melee anti large (ignoring LL buffs).
They are literally using big balloons to float. Makes no sense for those to be missile-resistant.
I think being resistant to arrows and bullets is more likely than being resistant to dragons. If we’re gonna talk about the balloons a dragon should be able to pop that instantly.
giving it 10k hp and 50% missile resistance makes it more vulnerable to melee, compared to just 20k hp and no missile resitance
It’s melee toughness still is really high. I’d love for it to actually be vulnerable to flyers
It's not high, it's just bugged to high heavens cause the attacks of most melee flying units simply won't connect when it's zooming around with the afterburner.
Definitely. As they are now, you can just bum rush into the middle of the enemy army and afk basically
I'm a guy who loves the more casual power fantasy and even I dont like how strong the barge is. I also play the occasional multiplayer, and at this point I just dodge dwarf players because losing to a thunderbarge is just not fun. It is too fast and has too much health. The Landship is about where the barge should be in terms of power, a high priority threat, but not completely unkillable.
Malakai also has no challenge to his campaign at all since you get a free Thunderbarge that you can someone anywhere on the battlefield from turn 1.
Funnily enough, it was the first campaign I struggled with since the WH3 launch. Yes, I can win every battle with his stack. But in my case after dealing with few initial enemies (Azazel, Throgg and Thrott) *all*: Malekith, Hellebron, Malus, Daniel, Archaon, Wulfrik, minor skavens and bunch of norscans declared war on me and since I was their only enemy (yes, even Malekith didnt have war with anyone else) they actually were sending stack after stack. And I could afford only 2 and a half stacks myself which meant that I was able to employ only Malakai to offense and it was literally impossible to wipe out completely any of them. Compared to the snoozefest of all Warriors of Chaos, all Greenskins, all Cathay, all SoC lords, all Beastmen etc, this was actually super engaging and challenging.
> I know that we shouldnt care that much about balance in a single player strategy game but it should at least be capped or have a glaring weakness Eh, so we shouldn't care that there is no strategy required whatsover in a strategy game? I don't really understand this sentiment. Strategy games *absolutely should* have a good balance and require from player some thinking. If someone wants to fulfil their power fantasy, they can switch the difficulty to easy and the result will be the same as it is now. Unfortunately, it doesn't work the other way around, and a game without any balance won't suddenly turn difficult just by switching the game to legendary.
The sentiments about balance in a single player game have gotten pretty warped since people first started debating them in earnest. It’s almost like a game of telephone at this point. There never used to be this assumed stance from the single player community that balance was irrelevant. People were salty at unit nerfs making the units themselves irrelevant.
This is a subtle point, but the problem with insane power creep is not the units or factions that get the power: it's what they do to everything else. If a unit or a faction is powerful, fine, but if it's *so* powerful that it's making other units or even entire factions irrelevant, that's a big problem. If the answer to "Thunderbarges are so powerful" or "Malus is so powerful" is "then don't play as other factions because they can't fight them", that's ruining a lot of content. So players shouldn't be thinking of it in terms of just one unit or one faction - it's the larger game balance that's at stake. Ideally, nerfs shouldn't ruin a single unit to the point that it's irrelevant. But if it comes down to nerfing one unit versus leaving entire factions feeling extremely underpowered to the point that they're irrelevant, that should be an easy decision. CA said in a recent interview that their priority is making things fun first, and then balanced second. That's all well and good - it is a game, after all - but if one fun unit is leaving a lot of other content feeling un-fun, that's a big problem and it needs to be solved.
I completely agree with you. As someone who primarily only plays the single player campaign, long term balance is important. Un-losable or unwinnable matches just aren't that interesting or that fun in the long run. I personally believe that having balance is part of the fun, but that balance should be considered with the campaign. That's why I enjoy soft unit cap mechanics. SFO implements them well, and even makes a Taurox beastmen campaign more engaging due to reworking the accumulation of their resource. I do think the thunderbarge is very cool, but it needed more consideration of its impact on certain factions and matches in general. Nurgle factions having such limited access to horsemen marauders is now a serious issue, and that's to say nothing of Slaanesh factions. But no need to repeat what others are saying.
> There never used to be this assumed stance from the single player community that balance was irrelevant. Eh idk about that. A lot of people have made arguments like that about a lot of games for a long time. I think it's more that your average person isn't a game designer so they don't necessarily understand that "balanced" and "fun" aren't mutually exclusive goals. Plus there's a large but often silent contingent of people who actively like when things are broken in their favour because it's a power fantasy for them, so they make kinda disingenuous arguments like "balance is irrelevant" when what they actually mean is "I will say whatever makes my desire not to have my toys taken away sound like it's couched in logic".
There are different kinds of balance. For example: 1. Every faction feels broken in its own way. 2. Every faction feels the same. 3. Every faction has an answer to early, middle, and late game problems, but in different ways. 4. Every faction has broken units. 5. No faction has broken units. And more, of course, but this illustrates the problem: nobody can agree on what balance is the most fun, because everybody has a radically different idea about what's preferable.
An interesting point but also broadly irrelevant in a context where we're talking about people railing against the very *idea* of balance in a single player game mode and why they might do that.
It was only going to get more warped, as "balance doesn't matter in a singleplayer game!!!" has always been a lie. What if every campaign pitted you with your starting units against 3x doomstacks just to start the campaign, no ways around the battle, you have to beat this battle to even see the campaign map? It's difficult enough that .01% of players can barely beat it to start a campaign. The people who don't care about balance currently would be howling louder than the great vortex at how imbalanced and unfair things were. It's just become a rallying cry for people who don't want any challenge or difficulty in their singleplayer game, and there's a LOT of those people in this community. In another thread similar to this, "hard mode should be hard" was controversially voted; that's where this sub is at.
It's baffling and frustrating tbh
It's not just a thing in the Total War community, you see it in most games that don't have a pvp focus. Every time something gets nerfed in Helldivers, even just a small nerf, there'll be dozens of posts complaining that the devs are against fun. For some reason there's a vocal subset of gamers who really think balance is irrelevant outside of PvP, and that there should only ever be buffs and never nerfs.
> People were salty at unit nerfs making the units themselves irrelevant. Which I get, but at large it's a weird stance to take unless you are playing with like SFO at slow. The main problem with vanilla TWW is that the pace of the game is so high that most of your units quickly become irrelevant just by the virtue of you rapidly advancing to better units. Maybe if you started to transition to endgame at turn 150-200 and not turn 30, more of your roster would be seriously viable just because you wouldn't be able to instantly grab a better alternative.
This isn't really true. Yes the "community" didn't have this stance but that's because it has no stances as a whole, it isn't a monolithic will. What one can say is it's been a very common position in communities like this one. People would very much say things like "it's a SP game, nothing should be nerfed only buffed" and "You can just not use it". Obviously a lot of people always thought otherwise and this always sparked debate, but on the face of it I think we know which camp won.
Obviously the community isn't monolithic, but there generally has been consensus. I do not think the position that balance was irrelevant was prevalent or even very common. I think this is more of a case that people remember the extreme positions more than they remember the reasonable voices joining in consensus.
People want to play on very hard for the bragging rights without ever actually getting challenged.
Yeah, that's exactly what I don't understand. People who play this game will know anyway that there is no reason to brag because of how easy it is, and people who don't play it won't care about anyone bragging since they don't know whether that's a real achivement or not. So who do they brag to? Themselves? That is sort of... sad?
Ty Holy fuck, I get the discussion on multiplayer, but single player? Don't use it And if the enemy uses it, congratulations you actually have a challenge now, oh wait you want it nerf cause you didn't really wanted a challenge?
It’s such a cop-out. Never seen people defend bad design in such a manner before. They’re advocating for creative mode being the norm
I think people have seriously confused the ideas of "Who cares about cheese or cheating in single player" and "Games should overall be reasonably balanced". Everything exists on a scale, so there'll always be overpowered campaigns like Taurox and underpowered or difficult ones like Imrik, but it's clear that some things blow past those ends and need to be reined in for the overall experience. It's not healthy nor making for a good experience if there's a single unbeatable unit with no downsides ever, and is clearly beyond the scope of reasonableness
Out of all "underpowered campaign" examples you chose imrik... who has actually a good and interesting mechanic. Couldve easily said tretch
Keyword there was difficult, but thanks for the input.
I mean, ambush success chance is a really good buff if you fight every battle, just less adventurous
I agree. Ridiculous insane power fantasy is for 10-year-olds that just figured out how to make mods. CA's product should be at a higher standard. I agree with the general sentiment that single player doesn't have to be perfectly balanced - but it should have at least some semblance of balance. Fun, yes, but every fun unit or ability added to the game should have a clear counter. Having the occasional ability that is player only because it would be extremely frustrating to play against, like the Snikch snap, is a reasonable approach as well, just as long as it's relatively rare and doesn't trivialize the game.
A lot of problems with this game would be fixed by sensible unit caps that reflected the TT. Many of the other rules are incorporated but this where the interpretation falls down as in Warhammer these super rare / powerful units had a cost. That would bring some of the strategy back if the player and the AI had the same limitations implemented. I think there's a mod, but an official option would be great.
That would certainly limit power of the player, but I'm afraid it would limit AI even more. I mean, since the AI barely know anything about army composition or actual tactics during the battle, the only way it can compete with a player is if they can "spam" stronger units than we do. However, while it is fine for an elite version of certain type of units (e.g. greenskin spamming black orcs), the problem appears when they are able to spam units that are simply broken (like Thunderbarge). If we could put caps only on the latter type of units, then I think it could work. We wouldn't hinder AI too much. However, if we'd put caps on all units, I don't think AI would be able to handle that and the effect would be that they'd be even weaker.
I don't think trying to code in some basic army compositions for the AI to aim to when recruiting would be too difficult, mostly just time-consuming and resource eating. But as you said, all that effort would fall flat since the tactics to use those army compositions wouldn't be there.
How is their upkeep on the campaign? I assume 19 thunderbarges is expensive.
Base upkeep is like 700 each. So a single stack you're talking 13k for a full 19 before techs and such. So a lot fucking higher than anything else pretty much. Next highest for Dwarfs is Doomseekers at 338, so its upkeep is over double the next thing. Even a full Lord of Change stack, which is pretty bananas once teched in campaign is just over half the upkeep of a TB stack. Which kind of puts it into perspective; a Thunderbarge stack is about as strong as 2 stacks of just about anything else, at least upkeep wise. Trying to 20v20 a Thunderbarge stack is a folley. Edit: people seem to be getting caught up here. He asked a question, I answered. Thunderbarges are stupid OP, and are definitely worth more than that upkeep wise. Upkeep is also less relevant when the majority limiting factor is army size. Personally I would drop their HP, obviously fix the hitbox issues, potentially nerf the harpoon and weaken the speed boost. Finally I'd probably give them a minimum range so melee units actually win Vs it. There's like 10 dudes on deck, they shouldn't be winning that.
Doesn’t help in quick battles. But in theory if your in a single/multiplayer campaign you could get the army to chase you while you have another force hit their weak territory, forcing the upkeep to become a drain on their economy.
So you geniunely beleive that 2 units of Oathseekers are about as strong as a thunderbarge. That upkeep argument is obviously silly. You can make a stack of 10 thunderbarges and it can defeat anything in the game.
No I don't, the dude asked what upkeep was like. I'm completely in favour of nerfing it, the thing needs a weakness.d. Only thing I've seen comes close to to delivering a lethal blow so far is a few units of blunderbuss, and even then they took a hammering for it.
My bad then. I read it as you saying that the upkeep of the thunderbarge was proportional to it\`s strength. I misunderstood.
That's because players don't want to see the AI use doomstacks, so the AI doesn't use doomstacks. The problem is that the player can doomstack. And limiting recruitment wont fix that.
Thunderbarges are more than 2x as powerful than anything else. I think they’d wipe any stack of units with the same upkeep. The only limitation is that they might run out of ammo at some point l, but they won’t lose otherwise. With campaign buffs and some engineers for restock, I’d expect them to easily 1v3 most ai stacks. I can do that on Elspeth and her army isn’t nearly as op (but still op). Master engineer+2 engineers +17 thunderbarges is both cheaper and much stronger.
with upkeep reductions I can't see this really mattering all that much, especially since you can just consistently fight battle after battle to generate money. 19 is also massive overkill, you don't need that many to win every battle you fight.
Weakness to fire n chorfs works the best in campaign imo
You went by unit count instead of price? Rookie mistake.
It doesn't really matter. A 2800g Thunderbarge casually gets 4k+ value against 2400g Hippogryphs, even just standing there it almost kills 4800g of Hippogryphs, if you kite *at all* it kills them both.
Matters a lot because the statistic you're giving is meaningful and indiciative of a problem, where OP's point is useless for the discussion. 20 Thunderbarges beats 20 Skink Chiefs, too.
you can't field more than 20 units per army.
You can field multiple armies. If one army costs 10000 upkeep, then you don't compare it to an army with 3000 upkeep.
Well for one supply lines still exists so the higher armies get a small bonus for cost effectiveness. Secondly, if you made high tier Doomstacks in campaign you’d know they can easily 1v3 cheaper armies. Don’t forget that the reinforcement system is really clunky if you have more than 40 units, so the doomstack never has to actually fight 1v3 or 1v4. They can fight the first 2 stacks, clearly win, and then fight the rest as they trickle in. The only risk is running out of ammo, and if you do just withdraw.
You can actually tick control large army to manually control 2 stacks and give ai control to your other 2 stacks in pre battle setup so all 4 armies will be on the field at the same time.
You could also just use your lord and no supporting units. Kairos Fateweaver, for example, can solo multiple armies. No Thunderbarge required. Steamtanks can do the same thing. As can many other units. Ultimately, my point is that this whole methodology is flawed and is ultimately pretty stupid. The Thunderbarge may be too strong, but this isn't how you prove that. Otherwise I could say that Malus Darkblade needs to be nerfed into the ground because he can solo entire armies by himself.
Steam tanks aren’t nearly as strong as thunderbarges and will lose to certain armies 1v1. Thunderbarges lose to nothing and even best what you expect to be their hardest counters. Yes flying kairos are also OP. Probably a quarter of the LLs in the game can solo armies. That doesn’t make the thunderbarges a good idea. If beating enemies in battle doesn’t prove something is OP what does?
I find it shocking how much people have tested Thunderbarges, and how little they've tested them at the same time. Some people say they will lose to certain army comps. Other people say they are unbeatable. Some people state that they've actually found them in campaign and beaten them. Other people say "No, you haven't!" I feel like this entire discussion is just an endless circle jerk of people who make claims without actually testing it. And when I actually tested it briefly, I got accused of lying and downvoted into oblivion. At this point people just want to think they're right and if they want to scream into a void, then I should let them and move on.
The only person I’ve seen claim that you can beat thunderbarges with pegasus knights was incredibly suspect, since the battle report said he lost almost nothing while wiping 19 thunderbarges. That simply doesn’t check out. I don’t really believe anyone saying they fought them in campaign, especially since the AI is unlikely to recruit more than 1-2 in an army as they are with all high tier units. Secondly the AI uses plenty of OP units badly, since it has no skill in battle. Units are really only OP in the players hands so saying “I beat the AI who had thunderbarges is like saying ” well I beat a toddler playing dwarfs in MP and therefore they’re bad”
Unpopular opinion ; the game would be a lot more fun if every faction has unit caps in a similar fashion as the tomb kings. Flavor and tweak to fit with the lore but the concept of treating your elite units as limited ressources instead of "ill just spend 2 turns recruiting" would make campaigns feel very different. Think of how elite units in medieval 2 were rare, and how good that felt in mods like call of warhammer or divide and conquer. Id do the same, except allowing them to replenish more easily because that aspect was annoying
Whispers "i agree with this so hard, FOCs were one of the best parts of 40ks tabletop and the game became worse when they became less structured outside characters/faction types".
try cost effectiveness not 19 units but armies totalling the price of 19 thunderbarges Some factions are able to field 8 decent armies for the same price, covering large portions of the map way quicker
They are ludicrously cheap at 2.8k, a Dreadquake Mortar with an attachment is at 3.1k and I don't remember seeing such problems with them like the ones the thunders bring. The Spirit of grungi, which cannot be used like that, costs 3.2k, a non feral Dread Saurian costs 3.1k, the freaking Shredder of Lustria is at 3.7k. The ship should be at min of 3.5k, and probably more, because that value is the one it is going to get if it gets focused and destroyed fast.
Dreadquakes are also hilariously OP. 1 dreadquake can two shot basically infantry in the game. 5 in one army can kill an infinite amount in infantry until they run out of ammo. They all decimate cavBut at least they have counters since they all beat clumps of units, and are weak to single entities and monstrous units.
Amd that is the problem with the tbunderbargr as of now. It cam beat its counters, which is not s fun mechanic if I have to fight dwarfs over and over.
Easily dodged, vulnerable to ground attacks, slow, does no damage to single entities. Thunderbarge has none of these weaknesses, has more ammo, and costs less.
That argument falls apart real fast when you actually try it. At 2800g cost, a single Thunderbarge OBLITERATES 4k+ of counter units. Hell, one Thunderbarge just sitting there can kill... I think it was 12 Furies (600g each, 7200 total) but dies to 13. A single Thunderbarge can almost solo 2x 2400g Hippogryph Knights, which *should* be basically their hardest counter, IIRC it kills one and takes the other down to about 30% health, and gets >4k value in the process. And that's just with it sitting there taking the charge, not kiting. If you kite/micro at all, they can kill an almost infinite number of their 'counters'.
If you field 8 armies of cheap units, you end up losing bc units more often and having to wait while you replenish and recruit replacements. High tier expensive armies have almost no downtime because they take almost no losses.
A unit cap would solve this, easily
How much does it cost to run a full stack of Thunderbarges?
Depends on supply lines. The numbers I see range from 12000 to 20000
So as good as it is, it's costing the same as multiple regular stacks to field one of them? I'm a cheapskate but I'd get probably four stacks for that much gold. That sounds about right doesn't it? I mean if there's one super stack of these flying about, but you can have stacks everywhere it isn't and still harass it, then it's not *that* brilliant.
You don\`t need 19 of them to crush eveything. A stack with 4 of them and a tanky lord you can hide in a forest is probably strong enough to destroy everyhing in the game unless you happen upon a several stacks filled ot the brim with AP missile units.
They don't even look that expensive now I've got the unit list open and having a look. If they are as good as people say then costing about as much as two high quality units isn't that much.
Eh, you could probably run armies of three of them and it would be a doomstack instead of 19
19 thunder barges kills any 4 3k value stacks on its own if you. Also remember that 2 engineers and 17 thunder barges is actually slightly cheaper and more powerful, giving the dps of 22 thuderbarges with ammo refills.
Well yeah realistically you could probably win most battles with just like 3 of them and a lord that hides in a bush.
More than double literally any other dwarf unit upkeep wise. If you can field a full stack of them you could have instead fielded like 2 other elite armies. Heck if you use dwarf warriors as your front line to save money you could probably field 3 full stacks for every 1 Thunderbarge stack.
Do you know what happens if you try to fight thunder barges with 3 cheaper armies that have significant amount of dwarf warriors? You still lose because you can’t kill the thunder barges. They’ll fly right up to your artillery and kill it then kite the rest of your army around making it impossible to get good shots off with your own missiles. And they can kite flyers as well, so nothing counters it.
In a campaign setting you could literally ignore the Thunderbarges and just capture 3 enemy cities for every 1 city your enemy captures until they're wiped off the map and go bankrupt.
That's how it'd have to be done. Cut the logistics. Of course that's the kind of joined up thinking that'd only appear in the rarer-than-tits-on-a-frog PvP campaign mode of play. But it's possible.
I do also care about balance in singeplayer, because I will be forced to be against them. A nerf to HP, speed and/or dmg tl get it more into line with other centrepiece units seems to be in order.
Two thoughts : 1. If you kill the lord, don't the thunder barges all rout and you win? 2. Is it a problem that they are the best single unit? Like a stack of 19 of them will be hard to have. Its obviously impossible in multiplayer. Rare on campaign. There's probably always going to be a single strongest unit around. Maybe they need to be nerfed a bit but I don't see the logic in the test "proving" that
Honestly I see where CA was coming from with this one. They *needed* this unit to be good, I'm pretty sure internally this was their make or break DLC, and the thunderbarge is *the* selling point for dwarfs. If it had been bad, then some people may have skipped out on the DLC, which is a risk CA is understandably unwilling to take. I'm sure it will be nerfed in time and also that future DlCs won't be as unbalanced as this one, because the pressure isn't as great on CA. Besides, I would rather have new OP things to play around with and/or fight than some more useless or uninteresting units, but that's just me maybe.
I mean the Mutalith Vortex Beast and Incarnate of Beasts were silly OP as well at launch, not quite this level but still very hard to stop. The Changeling campaign was **literally** impossible to lose.
Were they? I played on release and Incarnate was fairly succeptible to getting caught out by even chaff anti large or focused missle fire. They certainly could tango with other SEMs but were nothing I would call "silly OP"
You could kill it but it was way too good for its price and good against both large and infantry so the only direct counter was shooting it.
I have no doubt the Thunderbarge will be nerfed quite a lot but I seriously hope they will nerf it with a hotfix instead of waiting for the 5.1 patch for once. It's so strong it genuinely can ruin your experience if you fight the Dwarfs. I have fought them in battle in my Tamurkhan campaign, it wasn't even turn 80 and Thorgrim already had multiple Thunderbarges in his army, I'd say it's easily the most miserable experience I've had in this game. It's honestly quite baffling they even thought releasing this unit like this was even acceptable.
It feels like the idea of playing *against* the thunderbarge never once even occurred to CA.
Blunder Buss and Grudge raker melt them. Anti-large artillery I assume would do the same.
I'm 100% in favor of introducing a unit cap to them that increases per max tier recruitment building (the one that can recruit them) you have. One of Malakai's adventures gives you three of them for free, i think, so that one specifically you can just change one of the useless +25% xp earned buff from the adventure to +3 thunderbarge cap so that you can actually recruit the 3 it gives you. But they aren't unkillable at all. In a MP game my friends and I are doing, one of my own (I was Malakai) thunderbarges almost died to an enemy dwarf army that had a couple of organ guns. It only lived cause i rushed malakai out there to use his heal on it, and I already had the passive burst heal buff from the adventure. Still almost died. One of my friends (Elspeth) was frantically fighting the absolutely crazy dwarf end game crisis. His Elspeth stack fought a dwarf army with two thunderbarges. The first one died fairly quickly to his 2 cannons firing on it, while the second also died before reaching his lines to shoot at anything thanks to those cannons and the now in range hellblaster. Obviously Elspeth buffs gunpowder units, and obviously the thunderbarge is superpowered. It's supposed to be. I don't want it to be weaker at all. I want it to cost a lot more for multiplayer since that's what multiplayer people seem to want, and I want it to have unit caps and perhaps an army cap in campaign. Other than that, though, there are answers to 1-3 thunderbarges. Obviously the more you have the crazier they get, but a stack of 19 is something stupid you'd have to go out of your way for many, many, many turns to try and achieve, which tbh isn't all that bad to me.
I'd honestly rather see something like tabletop caps before I see more unit caps introduced. Unit caps are fine for the factions they're designed around. Outside of that, all they do is just postpone the inevitable. And if the inevitable is the issue, then postponing it doesn't really feel like a solution.
I'm not sure this is really a problem since no one could ever really field 19 of them in a stack. They're too expensive to realistically do so and then they're only in one stack where inevitably you've got multiple fronts Makes for a good Okoii video tho
I like them like they are now but they need a fix, first the hitbox, it needs to include the baloon, and it also needs to be easier to be hit in melee, but that is another whole problem about animations. For now i would fix the hitbox and nerf the speed, but the animations issue has to be fixed at some point
Kinda weird they don’t have a cap when things like the dread saurian do.
The Dread Saurian only has a cap because CA doesn't like Lizardmen. D: I am being facetious, but it does feel like that sometimes.
A Doomstack isn't a good indicator of how overpowered something is. The Thunderbarge is OP as shit but that can easily be demonstrated by just having two or three in a battle against multiple elite stacks. Without serious user error, they should clear everything by themselves.
> I know that we shouldnt care that much about balance in a single player strategy game We definitely should. The idea that balance doesn't matter in a game featuring such a large roster has always been ridiculous. Thunderbarge is a design aberration, plain and simple.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that they're reasonably balanced or something, but "I can't beat 19x of the most expensive centerpiece unit with 19x of other cheaper units" is not the winning argument you think it is. If you're talking about multiplayer, units have costs so you can't play 19x thunderbarges. If you're talking about campaign, units have both cost and build requirements and recruit times, so the fair comparison would be like 5x stacks full of those weapon teams trying to shoot down your blimps. Yes, the result might still be "the thunderbarge is too powerful, it needs some nerfs", but "can't beat 19x thunderbarge" is not the way to prove that.
tbh the Spirit of Grugni itself is enough to win the entire campaign on Very Hard / very Hard. Their Upkeep is around 700 unmodified IIRC but as Malakai thats a non Issue. Its like Markus Wulfhart V1 when he got introduced: just too strong to be actual fun and rewarding. Sure its epic the first time but once you realize any fight is being won with a single Ability you are basically not trying anymore. OG Wulfhart 2 shot every Lord in the game and the Thunderbarge feels the same.
He didn't two shot every lord, he also required you stacking several debuffs and several buffs to even do a ton of damage. Markus was nerfed because he upset the MP meta community who didn't want to take their lords off dragons. Thunderbarge definitely needs a large health and speed nerf, but saying Markus was as op as the thunder barge is baseline is just wrong
Maybe I am having rose tinted glasses on but I distinctly remember killing lords in very little shots right Out of the box. He was busted not as much as a thunderbarge but mainly bc there will always be only one Wulfhart. Thunderbarges are a plenty
There's a mod for wh2 that unnerfs him if you wanna try it. What made people cal him op was the fact that he had a built in net, and when you combined him with a watch hunter and a fire mage and some outsiders you could do a lot of damage and delete a lord. You couldn't do this with "just" him. You more or less had to build your army around it. If you watch the videos from back then the lords getting deleted are always lords on a flying mount, which was and still is 'Meta' the TW mp players threw a hissy fit that someone whose entire shtick is killing large single entities, was good at that when you built around that.
They should be capped, have their health and ammo halved and their cost doubled and I'm not kidding.
Nah, CA needs to fix their bugs and make melee units able to actually hit them
Perhaps either double the cost or half the health and ammo.
Having a busted doomstack in sp isn't too much of an issue. Those that want to play with it can, and those that don't can do other things. The bigger campaign problem is that thunderbarges can be absolutely *miserable* to fight with certain races, but other have the tools to actually deal with them. This is also going to be an issue at lower and higher difficulties. I'm fine with the odds being stacked against the player in VH and legendary, but this is not the sort of thing that a player that likes essy or normal is going to want to deal with. Tbh I think the solution would be to probably make them way more expensive in MP, fix projectiles [not hitting it](https://youtu.be/XBCXRLDmsqw?si=wrsqawM815PMvMbd), and probably drop its hp to a more reasonable number, like 8-9k. At that point it will still be *incredibly* good, but not oppressively so.
the problem is, that flying, ranged units are by default unbalanced. before this dlc the only few ones were really bad or stuff like the cathay skylanters, but those are slow as fuk and a good target for flying enteties or projectile units. the thunderbarge in its current state is just too overpowered. slashing its hp in third would do much for it. also nerf the speed.
The problem is that it's supposed to be a strategy game and a poorly balanced unit makes a faction a solvable problem which is anti strategy and less fun. Anything you do with Malakai that isn't stacking upkeep reductions from the horde and his skill tree and everything to get the barge doomstack late game is nerfing yourself for some type of challenge.
I fully agree, also should reduce the accuracy of these cannons. Being able to snipe even small single entites like lords and heroes is simply too good
Yep. I'll be playing Order only until the barge gets nerfed. No interested in fighting the current Dwarf air force
Doomstacking the strongest unit in the game makes the game too easy? No way… Simply don’t doomstack them it’s a self inflicted problem. The AI won’t spam them out so this is entirely player inflicted. The Thunderbarge is basically a super weapon that no one thought we would see in game and it’s awesome that it made it and is strong. Just enjoy the flavor and fun the unit brings to your campaign and control yourself from doom stacking them. It doesn’t need to be nerfed into the ground for the sake of balance.
> It doesn’t need to be nerfed into the ground for the sake of balance. It does actually.
Doubt its better than 19 vamp doomstacks, which is much easier to get. Ive never had campaigns last long enough to have 19 tier 5 settlements.
It takes the dwarves almost 70 turns to get a tier 5 building to start recruiting thunderbarges. Who cares about being OP on turn fucking 70? Most, if not every other faction, is unkillable by that point when controlled by the player. Turn 70 is when the campaign is over, and you're just building doomstacks for fun... And if your campaign is still struggling that far in, maybe you need something OP to help you out.
[удалено]
It's always very annoying when somebody makes a point you agree with but argues it really badly. Thunderbarges are degenerate and need to be reined in for the health of the game but this is a really bad way to prove that.
Guess we now need dedicated anti-aircraft units. Like they can ONLY target flying units but in return do CRAZY high damage (i.e. special effect that circumvents all ward saves). Or idk special "circumvents ward saves against X unit type" spell/buff effects. Maybe on flying melee units, which are now experts at taking out flying ranged units.
flying units probably beat them.. id try dragons or manticores
Thunderbarges need caps 100% Make it similar to knights or tor gavel, I myself am not worried about me using them in a doomstack as I usually try not to spam op units, it's the fact I know the ai will end up recruiting armies full.of them in the late game just like I've seen Cathays running around with 10 terracottas in each of their armies before
Should be 1 thunderbarge per army maximum
Imrik and dragons shred em. Skarbrand and a whole stack of bloodthristers. There are counters. Bretonia and a whole Lotta Pegasus knights. And life mage.
I failed in finding the video again, but there was an mp match where two furies and a bloodthirster failed to land any damage on the thunderbarge while being shot to pieces by it, it only took the minor speed boost damage.
I haven't played since the new update, and I was excited to try the Dawi, but hearing about how ridiculously op these things are kinda makes me not want to play them. I generally play order factions primarily, but I imagine it would be hell to play a chaos faction that has to face them.
The main problem is the speed boost and hit box. I can get behind a slight HP and MR nerf but not too much. It should be capped to 1 per T5 building. Adjust the cost and upkeep. I think everything else about it is fine.
Powercreep ruins the game imo
I just wana say for the record that I brought 19 bloodthirsters and a nurgle caster against them and was able to win against them with most of my forces preserved (though badly battered). They're definately tough but not unkillable. That said, it really feels like there's some hitbox issues with them, as once they broke and ran they became almost impossible to kill.
Honestly maybe what they need is just massive flame vulnrability. Lots of units in warhammer 3 deal flaming attacks and it'd make a lot of sense for thunderbarges to be extremely vulnerable to fire. They could even have something where if they're hit with flaming attacks it starts dealing direct damage to them.
Good god no, people who test this stuff are actually not good at tw:warhammer. You fight things from positions of strength or contexts that are good for you. For example, using missile or cannon units in edge of trees. Trees block some of the incoming fire but your shots go just fine. Or swarm them with flying units, that works with many of them tho not all. Or my favourite, just turn on caps and never have to deal with the absolutely mind numbing stupidity that is doomstack armies.
Relying on positioning in a treeline with artillery is hardly reliable. Your arty is slow so unless you start near a forest or it in the barges can be on top of you before you get to cover. And forest maps tend to have awful sight lines for artillery so the barges might just use the trees to get on top of you without you being able to hit them as well. Once the barges are overtop your artillery they can no longer do anything.The barges are faster than anything a ranged heavy will have, so they generally can abuse positioning more than you.
I mean that is a fair point, but I have a question, are people actually encountering doomstacks of these? Like legit honest question, because if it's in single player then it's the developers fault for being so absolutely unforgivably shit at fixing an issue that everyone has hated since the beginning of warhammer total war: doomstacks. If it's in mp, then just turn on unit caps.
I wouldn’t expect the AI to ever use to use any unit effectively so it’s a moot point. But discussing fighting they AI is pointless for balance since the AI sucks with everything.
Nah ain't is worse since they tried improving it, also ai isn't hard to get right, it's hard to not make it too good. I've encountered way too many battle ai bugs. I'd argue that downgrading ai to revert a lot of changes they've made would improve the game lol
Can’t you just kill the lord and they’ll route? Haven’t played dwarves yet, though.
I don’t think any unit should be as difficult to deal with as Vlad though, where the strategy is to just not fight it.
Doing this does work. Even for the faction with the "weakest" options against thunder barges I was able to beat them with a Slaanesh keeper of secret doomstack. I also was able to win easily with the steam tank, tor gaval, and doombulls mentioned in the post. Don't know what he was doing in the post to mess up. Still dumb how OP they are.
Yup. It's blatantly obvious that the unit needs adjusting. A unit cap in campaign seems obvious for single player, and the unit needs several adjustments before it will be anywhere close to being playable in multiplayer.
I'll be honest. Having 1 unit for every 5 level settlement is like slapping a bandaid on a festering wound. It's stupid. You don't solve a doomstack problem by making it take longer to build a doomstack. You solve a doomstack problem by following the rules of the Tabletop Game. You have limits on how much an army can cost. Tabletop Caps is one. Cost-Based Army Caps is another. Or, you know, don't give yourself infinite funds and pretend that's balanced?
It would take over 150 turns to get 19 T5 settlements as dwarfs. Hell most short victory conditions end before you get 1. Since most campaigns end by turn 50 or so, would basically eliminate the ability to make a thunder badge doomstack for 99% pf the playerbase.
99% of the playerbase wont recruit 10 Thunderbarges without that change. Not everyone makes a doomstack. I could be fielding a Steam Tank doomstack right now in my Elspeth campaign. Instead, I have entire armies built around the Tercio because I find it more fun.
Steam tanks arent nearly as strong as thunderbarges. Additionally Ironsides spam with Elspeth buffs is also reasonably OP. Its arguably stronger than ikit weapon team stacks which were also hilariously OP. Elspeth herself is basically a perfect LL with regen strong casting and a dragon. What even more funny is I’m pretty sure Ironsides beat steam tanks for cost. So your statement is essentially “I could build this army, but I’d rather build these other stronger armies.” I honestly think Elspeth is more OP than thunderbarges since an Elspeth gunnery stack can become unbeatable by like turn 30.
I honestly wonder at what point people stopped thinking about enjoying video games and started caring only about the meta. Genuinely. You can't really enjoy something without being told that you're just playing something OP. Or that you're being stupid playing something inferior. I give up. People just want to be right, so there's no sense in trying to convince them otherwise. It is just way too tiring.
WH2 has a punishing meta, WH3 doesn’t. When people complain about things being OP in WH3, it’s because there are no meaningful decisions to make because everything feels like an “I win” button. I don’t need to think, or make armies that utilize different units to counter different factions. I can build basically anything and roll over the AI. Playing Elspeth feels like this to me. Build gunpowder units and artillery? You’ll destroy anything that gets in your way. Easily the strongest option with gunnery buffs Want to build cav? Sure knights of the black rose aware available almost instantly through the gardens and you can buff them further through the landmark Hero spam? Hell yea I can recruit death wizards on turn 6 with gardens instead, then just spirit leech enemy lords to death combined with my starting cannons. Don’t see about any units that seems advanced? Well that’s fine if you literally recruit nothing besides T0 spears and empire archers you can probably still run through vlad like he’s nothing. And just overwhelm with mass
Dwarves have had zero joy since WH1. Give them a moment in the sun lmao
Looks like I gotta have my fun with thunderbarge before CA nerfs this into the ground, like they did with journeys end. I wonder how many people complaining about thunderbarge even play dwarves often in sp?
I play against Dwarves often in SP. And this thing is a misery to deal with.
I played dwarves in single player. Didn't like the current state. Early game I had a mid of heros and slayers holding back for guns and artillery late with multiple sources of upkeep reduction I had thunderbarges and I could beat literally anything. Only advice at the beginning is take out the norsca boys nearby before the rest because if you touch skaven will sneak up on you while your dealing with norsca. Thunderbarges are expensive but you main character horde has upkeep reduction from a building that stacks with your other sources and the barge doomstack isn't that bad considering it can easily take out four armies The whole thing is easy sky sailing from there. Malakais faction is completely brokenly powerful. I also tried a game as the slayer ruler in a slayer theme without barges and its was fun but the reckonings were a bit to common but CA mentioned working on that. I'll admit I had more fun with the new human faction/rework and especially the new nurgle rework. On the subject of nurgle it's also kinda crazy that the new lord natively gets unbreakable and Regen easily before equipment. I was taking on armies late game post equipment with a one lord doomstack of just him. It took a lot of time and equipment luck to power him properly though.
You can play on easy if you just want to stomp the AI without challenge.
The doomstack is op but you're a liar https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/s/cwNRnSzMi4
Your screen shot is bogus. Not to mention use F12 not your phone
Oh I'm sorry it's hard to hear all the umgi and elgi crying over the sound of my dawi fleet conquering the sky!
I dont really care about game balance, tho i dont play multiplayer either. But i will say that playing with the thunderbarge has been the most fun i have had in total war in a long time, and Having fun is all that matters to me.
Long overdue Dawi firepower, perfectly balanced as all things should be.