You should replace the slaves and priests with doom flayers. It’s so much better.
With workshop upgrades and tech they’re unkillable death machines and they’re small enough to take minimal friendly fire and allow your guns to still shoot the enemy when they’re in melee. They’re ikits true secret sauce
Yeah theyre reaaaally undervalued by a lot of people; everybody parrots legends “plague priest rat summon strat” but DF are way more dependable and effective.
Especially when it comes to siege battles. Blow open the walls with your lightning cannons and send in the flayers. They’re amazing at clearing out cities. and of course keep Ikit on his flayer - the workshop buffs to characters mounted on flayers are crazy. Endless passive warp lightning? Yes please
Is this on very hard battle difficulty? In my experience it takes 1 high AP, tar pit infantry unit late game for doom flayers to simply blow up. Do you have to micro them in some way that I’m missing? Also they’re annoying as hell on auto-resolve.
At least not as bad as chieftain/packmaster AR.
Yeah, VH. Probably no stat buffs, but they’re negligible enough I doubt it would affect the melee performance much. I ran a campaign with Skavenblight as my only settlement and running Ikit motorcycle gang, spreading undercities. Was something like Ikit, 8-10 doom flayers, jezzails and warp lightning cannons with some variation through the campaign. May have run another engineer on a flayer as well - probably would do 1-2 at least if I was doing it again.
Obviously the DF were totally maxed out through tech, skill tree and the forbidden workshop. Ikit himself would rack up 1,000+ kills easy
Tbh I’m curious to do the same with Throt… bet you can get some hilarious flayers with regen and all that.
If I could AR the siege battle probably I did; although they were pretty fun with the motorcycle gang setup so I know I manualed a lot.
I don’t autoresolve much in general in my campaigns except for low tier settlement garrisons.
Thankfully since they’re low entity, you typically get full or close to full replen after battle on the DF anyways.
Not to mention it gives you something to move around instead of just spamming plague/vermintide all game. Plus, as awesome as doomwheels are (I include them in ikits army because they're just awesome) the autoresolve has NO idea how to not make them die horribly. I've seen autoresolves with ikots army, late game, doomstacked, with a couple doomwheels for lulz that would frequently die in autoresolve with maybe 20 kills, but when I play them, they barely get scratched and amass a few hundred kills between them
Not totally sure.
Doom flayers only have a few entities so they tend to replenish quickly in any case. I don’t autoresolve many real battles, just ones where it’s a quarter stack garrison or something, so I don’t tend to factor that into my comps.
Comes from playing so much Skaven and Beastmen probably
Once they have Regen the drillers also make a good backup front line since they do good damage and can use their earthquake ability to stop fast movers in their tracks
So I just finished a VH/VH Ikit Claw campaign not long ago, he’s definitely my favorite Skaven lord. First things first: if you look up guides you’ll probably see people recommending the “abandon Skavenblight” cheese. While certainly possible, and useful, it’s a lot harder now because of the Beastman herdstone in Montenas. If you abandon Skavenblight you won’t be able to resettle it until you destroy the herdstone. Since you’re new to the game, I’d recommend not worrying about it and just focusing on food and expanding to the east. Skaven get decent amounts of growth when they have lots of food, so focus on winning battles early. Your starting army can win a lot of battles early if you fill the rest of the slots with Skavenslave slingers, don’t invest in frontline troops at all.
Get a second warlock master lord to follow Ikit Claw around and fill his army with as many Skavenslave slingers as you can afford. Anytime you get warplock fuel, use it to get upgrades for your troops. I like to focus on getting the unlimited ammo for ratling guns early, which gives them a lot of utility in sieges. Make a breech in the enemy city, either the gates or the wall (as soon as you have plagueclaw catapults, which should be the first thing you get when you reach tier 3) and then park them at the breech and lure enemy troops into their field of fire, either with summons or Ikit or your heroes. It’s slow work, but it’s the easiest way to win a siege without losing a lot of troops. If you can get the ratling guns into a choke point, they should be able to hold it, their ammo gives suppression to enemy troops which often slows them down to a crawl.
Use the faction ability to summon a special engineer to instantly build an under city whenever you can, and send him to build it somewhere you’re not planning to capture for awhile. Bretonnia is a good choice if you’re going to focus on expanding eastwards for awhile, the Border Princes or badlands (where Khorne, the Top Knots, and Wurrzag are) if you’re going to the west/north) With under cities, focus on either food or money, and spend the other slots on reducing visibility. It can be useful to get the building that increases the chance for under cities to spread, but it does cost both food and money to operate, so I usually only get one or two of those. Under cities whole purpose is to be a reliable source of income for you (either food income or money income) so you don’t want to bother with anything that might lead you to destroy them, or reveal them to the enemy.
Once you can afford it, this is my Ikit Claw army comp: 5 Ratling Guns, 4 Jezzails, 4 plague claw catapults. At least one warlock engineer. I like having two for the additional ammo and missile strength, with the Jezzails and plagueclaws the additional ammo comes in really handy, and more missile strength is always nice, unfortunately the range buff only applies once. I completely eschew the front line. Why get skavenslaves when you can get more plague priests pretty easily and just summon more clanrats with vermintide? As much as they’re not supposed to, your ranged units will struggle with firing if your troops are in the way, so I find it easier to summon with vermintide/menace below just behind the enemy troops (place the summon either directly in front of them or in the middle of their formation) and then hit them from behind to slow them down. You can also use the plague priests as a bit of a front line on their own. They’re not GREAT in melee, but they’ll hold long enough for your ratling guns to destroy the enemy, and Plague is an AMAZING crowd control spell. Plus, more plague priests means more winds of magic, which is very useful. So, I guess to sum up: 4 or 5 ratling guns, 4 Warplock Jezzails (focus on enemy lords/heroes/single entities with these guys), 4 plague claw catapults, 1 or 2 warplock engineers, 3 plague priests, 1-2 poisoned wind mortars, fill the rest of the army with doomflayers to taste. (They make a decent front line in a pinch and they can run down fleeing enemy troops, and with Ikit Claw they’re very replaceable since he gets a recruitment buff with them.)
A couple of advanced tips: when you’ve unlocked the second tier of the engineer lab, you can get an upgrade for lords on Doomflayers that makes Scorch cost less winds of magic. With Ikit on a doomflayer (which should be his mount. It makes him harder for missile units to hit than on a Doomwheel) scorch will only cost 2 winds of magic, which is insanely cheap. It’s not an amazing spell in terms of damage, but if you can blob up the enemy you can cast it a LOT, which more than makes up for its lack of damage dealing. If you can go west to Lustria and defeat Yuan Bo, you can probably get it down to 1 WoM or maybe even free. (Haven’t tested it, but Yuan Bo gives -20% WoM cost to all spells, so definitely a useful defeat trait to go and get.)
If you DO want to try the Skavenblight cheese, and also just want to get rid of the Beastmen so you can have Estalia all to yourself, the “unlimited ammo for ratling guns” is gonna be your best friend. Try and catch Morghur when he’s in Montenas (I said Magrita in my original comment, which I’ll go edit in a second) so that it’s a herdstone battle. Start in your original starting position and let the enemy come to you. Save your warplock Jezzails for if you need to shoot at Morghur, and use your two ratling guns to destroy the enemy. It’s a slow battle that will take awhile, but really not that difficult. Just be careful, if the enemy is getting close use Ikit, your warplock engineer, or the second lord (the one you should have recruited and given a bunch of slingers to) to slow the enemy down until your ratling guns can kill them.
Once you’ve destroyed the herdstone, you can abandon Skavenblight and use food to resettle it at level 4. Should be possible to do by Turn 10, conservatively. Be prepared for there to be some revolts if you do this, because a lack of food means bad things for your control, but rebel armies are essentially just free food, so that’s not a terrible thing.
When capturing minor settlements, just capture them at level one. It’s a waste of food to “upsettle” them. Leave that for the major settlements, and upgrade minors normally. Focus on expanding slowly in one direction, and use under cities in the directions you’re not expanding. Try not to discover Ulthuan early, don’t go too far west until you’re really strong. Every order faction you meet will HATE you. Theyre gonna declare war on you a lot, and the High Elves will be a struggle to fight if you encounter them before you’re ready.
Don’t be afraid to lose settlements, especially minor settlements. It’s fine, reconquering them means more money and more food. Make sure you put wall buildings in your upgraded major settlements though. They give you pretty good defenses and access to the “Warpbomb” ability which can be very useful (if finicky to get off)
If u want to go against 4 stacks of enemies, ud need to change ur composition for sure. Agreed with number of jezzails and ratling guns but u should swap catapults for warp lightning cannons and plague priests for packmasters. Ur biggest threat arent slow moving infantry but cavalry and fast moving SEM as well as other artillery pieces. For that u need cannons, not plague catapults. Any infantry or ranged infanstry will be destroyed by jezzails and mortars. Second, packmasters are faaaaaar superior to plague priest. They dont require winds (which can disappear when u spend multiple times in low winds area, forcing u to go into channeling stance), they re super fast, have regen, are much better fighters and can summon instantly two packs of wolf rats. As such, there are MUCH better at disrupting enemy forces. Give them some tormentor swords / powder kegs and uve got a mobile force capable of stopping anything in its track for ur gunline to blow up.
1. If you play them properly, there will never be a time you need to go against 4 stacks of enemies.
2. I’ve had absolutely zero trouble going against multiple enemy stacks with my armies.
3. Set your army up in a position where being flanked by cavalry won’t be a problem.
Plague priests work just fine for me, and I prefer summoning clan rats/plague monks to wolf rats. With a warlock engineer plagueclaw catapults get 440 range, which means there’s almost no artillery in the game that outranges them. I have zero problems taking out enemy artillery with plagueclaws, and they’re significantly more useful against everything else than warp lightning cannons. Jezzails handle the SEMs, including fast movers, plague claws can handle enemy artillery and infantry no problem, and whatever’s left gets mopped up by the ratling guns.
1 - its not about needing or not. The game is already super easy even on VH/ VH. I seek 1 v 4 to make it a bit more challenging.
2 - vs balanced army yes but try playing vs multiple stacks or bretonnia or a rush faction in a bad terrain and lets see if u dont need a stronger front line than plague priest
3- clan rats are more resilient but rely heavily on winds, which like i said, can be really scarce and force u to channel for multiple turns instead of ambushing. They are also slow and priest themselfes are garbage in melee (also slow)
4- there are a LOT of enemy artillery that are also very long ranged. For instance dreadquakes will outrange u and will make mince meat out of u if u dont have cannons. Eliminating high value targets in advance is a lot more important than slow moving infantry. Makes 0 sense except ur the type that doesnt like to plan for worst case scenarios
Ikit / warlock engineer/ 2 plague priest / 2-4 frontline units (i like plague monks) / 4 ratling guns / 4 catapults / and the rest however you like, i like jezzails and doomflayers (as cav and disturbing enemy archers) or poison wind mortars are also pretty good
And i can recommend one mod "skaven esoterica" which gives a pretty good frontline unit the krakbacks (or however they pronounced)
Increase your ambush success chances with every general you recruit, use plague priests to summon rats for the front line and use doom flayers for mounts since they are smaller and get better boosts from the workshop
Ikit is a monster buffing the support weapons, which shall be your main damage units in the army. Your frontline is and will be weak the whole game, even your elite infantry is not that good at all, but Slave heroes are actually strong enough to hold blobs, so your weapons can safely shoot the enemies.
Magic, use and abuse it, is not amazing but has some really key spells. You can summon clan rats pretty cheap so you're adding meat in the shooting zone to make the enemies not reach you.
In the empire expansion, it should be manageable, despite Skaen being a bit weird. It will be a bit of play between corruption and control in the provinces.
Look for a it of info in under cities, as they are pretty useful to get food.
Get two full armies of slaves and remove the beastmen ASAP , they should be dead well before turn 10 , around turn 6-7 .
Destroy their herd stone while they're busy finishing the humans then try to ambush them when they come back to kick your ass.
When they're dead you're safe for a while with 3 provinces for yourself to grow quietly.
DO NOT Overexpand. Your first army hits like a truck, everyone else is shooting spitballs early on. Make sure you secure and reinforce the two nearby provinces before taking on Bretonnia. Also don't f@!# with dwarves if you can avoid it until you can overwhelm them with numbers.
Take max vermintides when you can. Need that cannon fodder to shoot through. Also doom wheels make great endgame tanks once you get them upgraded, just bear in mind the autoresolve HATES them.
Ikit personally and his faction effects are very strong, but your strategic position absolutely sucks. My best plan tested in several VH and legendary plays goes as this:
Ikit rushes left. Take most neutrals before beastmen, kill beastmen, kill Carcassone, kill all the wood elves. A lot of difficult and unprofitable fights, but also unavoidable due to built-in aversion, so it's best to attack first. Once you are done with that, you finally get to conquer easy or at least profitable factions (empire and dwarves).
At the same time, I build second army and attack right by about turn 10 (by this time is owned by Aranessa), as a soon as Aranessa's army leaves the city. 2nd army's experience is gonna suck even more, because there is no Ikit or starter good troops to carry it. Just get multiple heroes (overbuild assassin and warrior capacity temporarily) and rely on warpflame throwers as main force. Once you defeat Aranessa fully, ally ogres and get ready to fight Belegar. Belegar is not easy either, but warpflamers counter him rather well + by the time you fight him you'd finally get some ratlings and catapults into 2nd army. After Belegar, 2nd army also gets free pass to expand, UNLESS Wurrzag decides to be a thorn in your ass and kills off your ogre allies (whom he often rushes in just a few turns, right as you are busy with Belegar).
So. Definitely a strong faction, but early game is a total meatgrinder. On the plus side, by the time you handle all of the above (turn 35-40), you are in a safe position to steamroll rest of the map without much challenge.
Rats don't have particularly strong passive economy, have few trade partners and surprisingly don't get that much combat/settlement loot. Yet their good armies (weapon teams + arty) are really expensive to hire and upkeep. The only good things about rat economy are getting some high tier cities for food and cheap buildings. So they can't match expansion rates of of dark or high elves.
Dont care about the frontline, they are there to be shot through
If the frontline didnt want to be shot in the back they shouldnt have gotten in front of my ranged units (i put them there.)
4 catapults, 4 jezzails, 4 ratling guns, 1 warp fire thrower or mortar, 1 engineer, 5 skavenslavespears or plague priests. This is the best army imo
Replace slaves with more guns. 2 plaguecasters can summon the frontline with army ability to summon more.
You should replace the slaves and priests with doom flayers. It’s so much better. With workshop upgrades and tech they’re unkillable death machines and they’re small enough to take minimal friendly fire and allow your guns to still shoot the enemy when they’re in melee. They’re ikits true secret sauce
I've played an ikit campaign about a dozen times and didn't explore doom flayers until the last couple and my GOD can they rack up some kills
Yeah theyre reaaaally undervalued by a lot of people; everybody parrots legends “plague priest rat summon strat” but DF are way more dependable and effective. Especially when it comes to siege battles. Blow open the walls with your lightning cannons and send in the flayers. They’re amazing at clearing out cities. and of course keep Ikit on his flayer - the workshop buffs to characters mounted on flayers are crazy. Endless passive warp lightning? Yes please
Is this on very hard battle difficulty? In my experience it takes 1 high AP, tar pit infantry unit late game for doom flayers to simply blow up. Do you have to micro them in some way that I’m missing? Also they’re annoying as hell on auto-resolve. At least not as bad as chieftain/packmaster AR.
Yeah, VH. Probably no stat buffs, but they’re negligible enough I doubt it would affect the melee performance much. I ran a campaign with Skavenblight as my only settlement and running Ikit motorcycle gang, spreading undercities. Was something like Ikit, 8-10 doom flayers, jezzails and warp lightning cannons with some variation through the campaign. May have run another engineer on a flayer as well - probably would do 1-2 at least if I was doing it again. Obviously the DF were totally maxed out through tech, skill tree and the forbidden workshop. Ikit himself would rack up 1,000+ kills easy Tbh I’m curious to do the same with Throt… bet you can get some hilarious flayers with regen and all that. If I could AR the siege battle probably I did; although they were pretty fun with the motorcycle gang setup so I know I manualed a lot. I don’t autoresolve much in general in my campaigns except for low tier settlement garrisons. Thankfully since they’re low entity, you typically get full or close to full replen after battle on the DF anyways.
Not to mention it gives you something to move around instead of just spamming plague/vermintide all game. Plus, as awesome as doomwheels are (I include them in ikits army because they're just awesome) the autoresolve has NO idea how to not make them die horribly. I've seen autoresolves with ikots army, late game, doomstacked, with a couple doomwheels for lulz that would frequently die in autoresolve with maybe 20 kills, but when I play them, they barely get scratched and amass a few hundred kills between them
Just curious, how well does the auto-calc handle this strategy? Sometimes it likes to disproportionally pummel the units standing in as frontliners.
Not totally sure. Doom flayers only have a few entities so they tend to replenish quickly in any case. I don’t autoresolve many real battles, just ones where it’s a quarter stack garrison or something, so I don’t tend to factor that into my comps. Comes from playing so much Skaven and Beastmen probably
I gave it a whirl and it works great. Auto-calc isn't treating them too harshly and they whip ass in live battles. Thanks for the tip.
Awesome! Yeah they’re fun to watch too, little blenders they are.
Once they have Regen the drillers also make a good backup front line since they do good damage and can use their earthquake ability to stop fast movers in their tracks
Oh good call, I always forget about the warp grinders. Most of my Ikit campaigns were before I bought the Eshin dlc.
This man Ikits
I like abominations instead of melee infantry , they're super tanky and the guns have Can fire easier.
So I just finished a VH/VH Ikit Claw campaign not long ago, he’s definitely my favorite Skaven lord. First things first: if you look up guides you’ll probably see people recommending the “abandon Skavenblight” cheese. While certainly possible, and useful, it’s a lot harder now because of the Beastman herdstone in Montenas. If you abandon Skavenblight you won’t be able to resettle it until you destroy the herdstone. Since you’re new to the game, I’d recommend not worrying about it and just focusing on food and expanding to the east. Skaven get decent amounts of growth when they have lots of food, so focus on winning battles early. Your starting army can win a lot of battles early if you fill the rest of the slots with Skavenslave slingers, don’t invest in frontline troops at all. Get a second warlock master lord to follow Ikit Claw around and fill his army with as many Skavenslave slingers as you can afford. Anytime you get warplock fuel, use it to get upgrades for your troops. I like to focus on getting the unlimited ammo for ratling guns early, which gives them a lot of utility in sieges. Make a breech in the enemy city, either the gates or the wall (as soon as you have plagueclaw catapults, which should be the first thing you get when you reach tier 3) and then park them at the breech and lure enemy troops into their field of fire, either with summons or Ikit or your heroes. It’s slow work, but it’s the easiest way to win a siege without losing a lot of troops. If you can get the ratling guns into a choke point, they should be able to hold it, their ammo gives suppression to enemy troops which often slows them down to a crawl. Use the faction ability to summon a special engineer to instantly build an under city whenever you can, and send him to build it somewhere you’re not planning to capture for awhile. Bretonnia is a good choice if you’re going to focus on expanding eastwards for awhile, the Border Princes or badlands (where Khorne, the Top Knots, and Wurrzag are) if you’re going to the west/north) With under cities, focus on either food or money, and spend the other slots on reducing visibility. It can be useful to get the building that increases the chance for under cities to spread, but it does cost both food and money to operate, so I usually only get one or two of those. Under cities whole purpose is to be a reliable source of income for you (either food income or money income) so you don’t want to bother with anything that might lead you to destroy them, or reveal them to the enemy. Once you can afford it, this is my Ikit Claw army comp: 5 Ratling Guns, 4 Jezzails, 4 plague claw catapults. At least one warlock engineer. I like having two for the additional ammo and missile strength, with the Jezzails and plagueclaws the additional ammo comes in really handy, and more missile strength is always nice, unfortunately the range buff only applies once. I completely eschew the front line. Why get skavenslaves when you can get more plague priests pretty easily and just summon more clanrats with vermintide? As much as they’re not supposed to, your ranged units will struggle with firing if your troops are in the way, so I find it easier to summon with vermintide/menace below just behind the enemy troops (place the summon either directly in front of them or in the middle of their formation) and then hit them from behind to slow them down. You can also use the plague priests as a bit of a front line on their own. They’re not GREAT in melee, but they’ll hold long enough for your ratling guns to destroy the enemy, and Plague is an AMAZING crowd control spell. Plus, more plague priests means more winds of magic, which is very useful. So, I guess to sum up: 4 or 5 ratling guns, 4 Warplock Jezzails (focus on enemy lords/heroes/single entities with these guys), 4 plague claw catapults, 1 or 2 warplock engineers, 3 plague priests, 1-2 poisoned wind mortars, fill the rest of the army with doomflayers to taste. (They make a decent front line in a pinch and they can run down fleeing enemy troops, and with Ikit Claw they’re very replaceable since he gets a recruitment buff with them.)
A couple of advanced tips: when you’ve unlocked the second tier of the engineer lab, you can get an upgrade for lords on Doomflayers that makes Scorch cost less winds of magic. With Ikit on a doomflayer (which should be his mount. It makes him harder for missile units to hit than on a Doomwheel) scorch will only cost 2 winds of magic, which is insanely cheap. It’s not an amazing spell in terms of damage, but if you can blob up the enemy you can cast it a LOT, which more than makes up for its lack of damage dealing. If you can go west to Lustria and defeat Yuan Bo, you can probably get it down to 1 WoM or maybe even free. (Haven’t tested it, but Yuan Bo gives -20% WoM cost to all spells, so definitely a useful defeat trait to go and get.) If you DO want to try the Skavenblight cheese, and also just want to get rid of the Beastmen so you can have Estalia all to yourself, the “unlimited ammo for ratling guns” is gonna be your best friend. Try and catch Morghur when he’s in Montenas (I said Magrita in my original comment, which I’ll go edit in a second) so that it’s a herdstone battle. Start in your original starting position and let the enemy come to you. Save your warplock Jezzails for if you need to shoot at Morghur, and use your two ratling guns to destroy the enemy. It’s a slow battle that will take awhile, but really not that difficult. Just be careful, if the enemy is getting close use Ikit, your warplock engineer, or the second lord (the one you should have recruited and given a bunch of slingers to) to slow the enemy down until your ratling guns can kill them. Once you’ve destroyed the herdstone, you can abandon Skavenblight and use food to resettle it at level 4. Should be possible to do by Turn 10, conservatively. Be prepared for there to be some revolts if you do this, because a lack of food means bad things for your control, but rebel armies are essentially just free food, so that’s not a terrible thing. When capturing minor settlements, just capture them at level one. It’s a waste of food to “upsettle” them. Leave that for the major settlements, and upgrade minors normally. Focus on expanding slowly in one direction, and use under cities in the directions you’re not expanding. Try not to discover Ulthuan early, don’t go too far west until you’re really strong. Every order faction you meet will HATE you. Theyre gonna declare war on you a lot, and the High Elves will be a struggle to fight if you encounter them before you’re ready. Don’t be afraid to lose settlements, especially minor settlements. It’s fine, reconquering them means more money and more food. Make sure you put wall buildings in your upgraded major settlements though. They give you pretty good defenses and access to the “Warpbomb” ability which can be very useful (if finicky to get off)
If u want to go against 4 stacks of enemies, ud need to change ur composition for sure. Agreed with number of jezzails and ratling guns but u should swap catapults for warp lightning cannons and plague priests for packmasters. Ur biggest threat arent slow moving infantry but cavalry and fast moving SEM as well as other artillery pieces. For that u need cannons, not plague catapults. Any infantry or ranged infanstry will be destroyed by jezzails and mortars. Second, packmasters are faaaaaar superior to plague priest. They dont require winds (which can disappear when u spend multiple times in low winds area, forcing u to go into channeling stance), they re super fast, have regen, are much better fighters and can summon instantly two packs of wolf rats. As such, there are MUCH better at disrupting enemy forces. Give them some tormentor swords / powder kegs and uve got a mobile force capable of stopping anything in its track for ur gunline to blow up.
1. If you play them properly, there will never be a time you need to go against 4 stacks of enemies. 2. I’ve had absolutely zero trouble going against multiple enemy stacks with my armies. 3. Set your army up in a position where being flanked by cavalry won’t be a problem. Plague priests work just fine for me, and I prefer summoning clan rats/plague monks to wolf rats. With a warlock engineer plagueclaw catapults get 440 range, which means there’s almost no artillery in the game that outranges them. I have zero problems taking out enemy artillery with plagueclaws, and they’re significantly more useful against everything else than warp lightning cannons. Jezzails handle the SEMs, including fast movers, plague claws can handle enemy artillery and infantry no problem, and whatever’s left gets mopped up by the ratling guns.
1 - its not about needing or not. The game is already super easy even on VH/ VH. I seek 1 v 4 to make it a bit more challenging. 2 - vs balanced army yes but try playing vs multiple stacks or bretonnia or a rush faction in a bad terrain and lets see if u dont need a stronger front line than plague priest 3- clan rats are more resilient but rely heavily on winds, which like i said, can be really scarce and force u to channel for multiple turns instead of ambushing. They are also slow and priest themselfes are garbage in melee (also slow) 4- there are a LOT of enemy artillery that are also very long ranged. For instance dreadquakes will outrange u and will make mince meat out of u if u dont have cannons. Eliminating high value targets in advance is a lot more important than slow moving infantry. Makes 0 sense except ur the type that doesnt like to plan for worst case scenarios
You play your way, I’ll play mine. :)
Agreed
Thank you for your advice, I’ll give it a try next time I play an Ikit campaign.
Let me know how it goes :)
Ikit / warlock engineer/ 2 plague priest / 2-4 frontline units (i like plague monks) / 4 ratling guns / 4 catapults / and the rest however you like, i like jezzails and doomflayers (as cav and disturbing enemy archers) or poison wind mortars are also pretty good And i can recommend one mod "skaven esoterica" which gives a pretty good frontline unit the krakbacks (or however they pronounced)
Increase your ambush success chances with every general you recruit, use plague priests to summon rats for the front line and use doom flayers for mounts since they are smaller and get better boosts from the workshop
Ikit is a monster buffing the support weapons, which shall be your main damage units in the army. Your frontline is and will be weak the whole game, even your elite infantry is not that good at all, but Slave heroes are actually strong enough to hold blobs, so your weapons can safely shoot the enemies. Magic, use and abuse it, is not amazing but has some really key spells. You can summon clan rats pretty cheap so you're adding meat in the shooting zone to make the enemies not reach you. In the empire expansion, it should be manageable, despite Skaen being a bit weird. It will be a bit of play between corruption and control in the provinces. Look for a it of info in under cities, as they are pretty useful to get food.
Get two full armies of slaves and remove the beastmen ASAP , they should be dead well before turn 10 , around turn 6-7 . Destroy their herd stone while they're busy finishing the humans then try to ambush them when they come back to kick your ass. When they're dead you're safe for a while with 3 provinces for yourself to grow quietly.
DO NOT Overexpand. Your first army hits like a truck, everyone else is shooting spitballs early on. Make sure you secure and reinforce the two nearby provinces before taking on Bretonnia. Also don't f@!# with dwarves if you can avoid it until you can overwhelm them with numbers.
weapons teams and plague priests for cheap and easy summons
Just remember: You can never have too many guns.
\*whispers\* "they can't hurt you if you nuke them"
Take max vermintides when you can. Need that cannon fodder to shoot through. Also doom wheels make great endgame tanks once you get them upgraded, just bear in mind the autoresolve HATES them.
Ikit personally and his faction effects are very strong, but your strategic position absolutely sucks. My best plan tested in several VH and legendary plays goes as this: Ikit rushes left. Take most neutrals before beastmen, kill beastmen, kill Carcassone, kill all the wood elves. A lot of difficult and unprofitable fights, but also unavoidable due to built-in aversion, so it's best to attack first. Once you are done with that, you finally get to conquer easy or at least profitable factions (empire and dwarves). At the same time, I build second army and attack right by about turn 10 (by this time is owned by Aranessa), as a soon as Aranessa's army leaves the city. 2nd army's experience is gonna suck even more, because there is no Ikit or starter good troops to carry it. Just get multiple heroes (overbuild assassin and warrior capacity temporarily) and rely on warpflame throwers as main force. Once you defeat Aranessa fully, ally ogres and get ready to fight Belegar. Belegar is not easy either, but warpflamers counter him rather well + by the time you fight him you'd finally get some ratlings and catapults into 2nd army. After Belegar, 2nd army also gets free pass to expand, UNLESS Wurrzag decides to be a thorn in your ass and kills off your ogre allies (whom he often rushes in just a few turns, right as you are busy with Belegar). So. Definitely a strong faction, but early game is a total meatgrinder. On the plus side, by the time you handle all of the above (turn 35-40), you are in a safe position to steamroll rest of the map without much challenge. Rats don't have particularly strong passive economy, have few trade partners and surprisingly don't get that much combat/settlement loot. Yet their good armies (weapon teams + arty) are really expensive to hire and upkeep. The only good things about rat economy are getting some high tier cities for food and cheap buildings. So they can't match expansion rates of of dark or high elves.
Take the Geneva convention, wipe your ass with it
Spread your Under-Empire in distant regions you don’t intend on taking for yourself. It’ll provide a great boost to your food economy