Which FACTION to play & learn FIRST? - Warhammer 2

total war warhammer 2 has a lot of information to learn and one of the biggest parts of that is all the factions and the differences between them and how to play them one of the most common questions i get asked is which faction should i learn first that's what i'll attempt to answer here today so if you're a new player this will hopefully help you make the decision on which faction to really sink some time into to get you properly into the game so the total war warhammer franchise currently has 15 factions playable in the game that's a lot to learn a lot to try and choose from and honestly tldr there is really no wrong answer specifically but there are certainly ones that can make things harder for learning the game overall also all factions are not created equal and some require very specific tactics and styles of play to really be effective and if you don't know how to play a faction it can be very frustrating if you keep losing but you don't really know why now for a lot of people who come into a game like this with all the faction choices i think they already kind of have a preference we all have a certain faction that we're naturally drawn to maybe you watch lord of the rings and you really like the dwarfs maybe you played through skyrim as a high off when you really like high elves maybe you've got pet rats so you want to play the skaven or perhaps you're just into necrophilia and you want to play an undead faction although you should probably go to the police station and hand yourself in most of us will have a race preference that we will gravitate toward and if you have a certain faction that you really lean strongly towards i would say play that faction because an affinity towards a certain race could help you keep going maybe when things get frustrating and you'll just overall be more into the faction so that's the first question to ask yourself do i have any faction that i'm particularly drawn to or maybe a few factions that you're thinking about and you can't decide which one well there are some deeper questions we can go to to try and make that decision firstly do you have any kind of play style preference in games do you generally play quite aggressive do you play more defensive do you prefer to be a sneaky rogue type do you like to experiment and try out some risky strategies whatever your preferred play style there's probably a faction or two that's geared towards that end the norskens greenskins vampire counts beastmen and chaos could all be considered aggressive factions they're best charging up on the enemy quickly attacking not really messing around with missiles and artillery and skirmishing just getting stuck into the enemy and closing the distance quickly but maybe you prefer more of a defensive play style using missiles and artillery taking your time wearing your opponents down and not rushing anything well the vampire coast empire dwarfs skaven and wood elves can all be pretty strong at this kind of play style and then the remaining factions high off tomb king's bretonnie and lizardmen darkhouse are kind of flexible and could do either but honestly pretty much all factions could go in the flexible category because they can all be kind of aggressive or defensive if you'd rather the empire can play aggressive if they want to so can the skaven the green skins can play defensive they've got plenty of artillery and missiles the beast men could even play defensive they've got some options too it's only maybe the vampire counts who can't play anything but aggressive because they don't have any missiles or artillery and the dwarfs who can't really play anything but defensive very well because they don't have any good fast flanking units but understand that all factions are designed for a certain thing green skins are designed to be an aggressive faction doesn't mean you always have to play them that way but that's just how they've been designed if you look at their units and their stats their strengths and their weaknesses they're an aggressive faction so take this into account when deciding who to play but realize whether you choose a defensive or aggressive faction they're all pretty flexible so if you choose to skaven you can play defensive for a bit and then you could build a more aggressive army if you want to it's not wrong or bad to do so you just have to figure out how to do it well because the green skins and skaven aggressive play styles for example are not necessarily the same one last question you could ask yourself is do i have any preference to any kind of unit do i really like monsters if i do maybe i want to play one of these monster heavy factions so i can have some fun with all the monster type units or maybe i'm into guns bows and things that explode so having a faction that has a lot of good firepower will allow me to blast my enemies to scheisse or maybe you love a good horse and cavalry is your bag well any of these factions have great cavalry that you could have a lot of fun with or maybe you like to do your enemies dirty with sneaky traps vanguard deployment and stork a little now you see me now you don't well any of these factions can have that kind of play style well so whether you're into infantry cavalry missiles or whatever every faction will either have or not have these units and some will be better than others so you can do some research to find out which one has strong units that you might enjoy using if you want to use a lot of firepower and missiles you're not going to want to play the vampire accounts if you want to hammer people with cavalry you're not going to want to play the skaven so just another thing to consider when trying to choose your faction now with all that being said are there any factions that are better or worse to learn first are there any advantages to learning from certain factions or any disadvantages to playing certain factions first well quite simply yes but it's only one faction that is really probably a bad idea to try and learn first because they play so differently from everyone else any total war warhammer veteran has probably guessed it's the dwarfs these little fellas are super tough and super easy to play because you can actually win without even playing which i've demonstrated in a video before just put them in a box don't touch anything and they will win against the ai no problem in some cases this is just because the dwarf faction is built to be sturdy as hell they have a lot of armor a lot of leadership and a lot of melee defense which makes them very tough very good endurance they'll mostly just outlast every other faction through sheer toughness which is all well and good that's what dwarfs do the trouble with this though for you trying to learn the game is that this playstyle really doesn't translate to any other faction no faction can do what the dwarfs do and quite simply their stats carry you especially in campaign where you can get buffs to their leadership and their melee defense you basically end up with an army of unbreakable units which makes the game kinda easy now the reason this is bad for you is that let's say you come in to play total war warhammer and the first faction you ever play is the dwarfs and let's say you put 50 hours into the dwarfs you'll start to learn how to play the dwarfs that's great and then you go to play some other faction for the first time you might start to find that you get absolutely smashed and hey you're not as good as you thought you were but it's because the dwarfs play so differently and are so powerful on their own that their strengths and the way you need to play them doesn't really translate to anyone else even other defensive factions can't do things the same way the dwarfs do no other faction can grind down their enemies and just outlast them the same way so when you play the dwarfs there's a lot of skills and tactics and things that you would have to do with other factions to win that you don't have to do with the dwarfs and you'll never bother doing because you won't need to so it just makes learning the other factions a little bit slower because there's a lot you don't get to do with the dwarfs you don't get to mess around in micro cavalry you don't get to learn how to use skirmish units you don't get to learn how to play aggressive and push on an enemy you don't get to learn how to flank properly there's just a lot here that you're not learning that you would be learning with other factions which can make your progress a little bit slower when learning the game so if you compare this to a well-rounded faction that has some decent infantry decent missiles decent cavalry a couple of monsters like the high elves for example there's a lot more you can learn from playing the high elves because there's a lot more tactics you can pull with all the different varieties of units dwarfs is mostly infantry pretty much every other faction has a good mix of different kinds of units and when it comes to multiplayer the dwarfs are often the newer players faction of choice because they have an easier time winning with them because those stats will carry them against another newer player who doesn't really know how to beat the dwarfs the dwarfs will probably win but not because the player played well simply because he played the dwarfs i actually have a really good example video of this which is taken from a stream where we had three different skill level players play against a slightly newer player playing the dwarfs and you can see the different approaches of a complete noob a slightly more experienced player but still quite new and a high level player and you can see the different approaches to taking on the dwarfs and how much easier it is for the dwarfs taking on the two newer players who don't really know how to beat them compared to the higher level player who does know how to beat them i'll link that video at the end of this video anyway if you want to check that out so the dwarfs may not be the best faction for you to learn first because they will carry you and deny you a lot of tactics that are used by other factions that being said if you're really into dwarfs though just play the dwarfs it's fine but understand that you're not learning everything you need in this game and when you play another faction and you suck don't be surprised but that's okay you can learn the other stuff from playing other factions but the dwarfs will make it a little bit easier for you in battle another faction that can be problematic for newer players is the empire naturally one of the more popular factions in the game the main human faction the closest thing to represent us right naturally they're very popular but the trouble with the empire is that while they have a pretty well-rounded army their infantry isn't great and it really requires a lot of support and micro-intensive action to be played properly and effectively now this of course is very difficult for newer players and they'll probably shy away from this or they'll find that their infantry is getting smashed early their front lines aren't holding on very long and they don't know why and it's probably because they're not buffing them and looking after them empire front lines really need the support of a lord or a warrior priest to help them out so without the strong infantry for the empire what do they have cavalry cavalry is one of their strongest assets they've got some fantastic cavalry some of the best in the game but a lot of cavalry can be a lot to micro for a newer player even three units could be a lot for a new player when you could have four five or six units being a good amount of cavalry so what tends to happen for these players that don't understand the empire is they resort to this having like 10 units of artillery because the empire has great artillery and that's something to take advantage of however if you spam artillery and bring like eight or ten units in an army you're probably blowing the enemy army up before it even reaches you right which is maybe fun for a battle or two and if all you want to do is win then well that's fine go for it but you're not gonna learn anything about how to play total war you're just blowing up stuff that's descending on you before it reaches you which actually means that you're not playing total war at all you're actually playing space invaders think about it it's literally what you're doing you're just shooting stuff before it gets to you and this brings you the same problem as the dwarfs if you play this way and just blow stuff up with artillery before it gets to you you learn nothing about the game that is translatable to other factions other than playing other factions with lots of good artillery and blowing everything up too but again not really getting anywhere on learning how to play actual total war so by all means play the empire and any other artillery strong faction but realize if you turn it into space invaders you're not learning anything useful about how to play the empire or any other faction so those are the main two pitfalls to watch out for i think the dwarfs will carry you and the empire is harder to play than you think one other thing that can be a slight issue which is only small to be honest is undead factions the vampire counts vampire coast and tomb kings all play a little bit differently than everyone else because they're undead which means they don't route and run away so again if you played 50 hours of the vampire accounts before you played any other faction you get used to the units never routing and always staying where you put them until you pull them away or they die this will get you very comfortable with things never routing so when you then go and play the skaven for example who like to route and run away a lot you'll be very confused and you'll feel like you're losing when in fact it's just a natural part of playing this skaven so understand the undead factions and their non-routing mechanic means they just play a little bit differently than most other factions it's not a huge difference it just means you need to be a little bit more careful with your matchups when playing undead because you can lose strong units very quickly don't be put off playing undead factions though they've got a lot of translatable skills and tactics that you have to use which will work for a whole bunch of other factions which will help you learn total war but just realize you're working with a slightly different mechanic than most other factions so now that hopefully you have some ideas on how to narrow down the choice of which faction to play it won't be so daunting as a newer player when you see this a list of endless amounts of possibilities of campaigns you could play so you can narrow down which factions you like the look of and then it's simply a case of deciding which legendary lord you want to play you can look at all the different mechanics of all the different factions honestly again there's no right or wrong answer on which campaign you should play first maybe avoid the hordes though like the beastmen and chaos nikai the wanderer because they play very differently than most of the other legendary lords but for the most part total war remains the same whichever faction you play you expand take more territory protect the territory you've got make allies improve your economy make more money get more armies take over the entire map blah blah blah pretty much every faction has those goals they just have different ways of getting there so they're not actually vastly different one thing to maybe pay a little bit of attention to is the initial challenge on any faction you can see on manfred here it's easy so he's gonna have a pretty easy start grim gore it's normal skarsnik is hard this is just going to mean that it's a little bit tougher at the start of the campaign but it will even out and be pretty much the same and you'll probably start to steamroll everybody eventually anyways that's how pretty much all campaigns end up but maybe stick to the easy or normal ones for your first campaign so you can get used to things without having too much of a challenge although of course it depends on the difficulty you choose as well and campaigns are a great way to learn factions rosters and armies as well because they introduce the units to you slowly you'll start off with just a handful of units you'll only be able to have those for a while so it gives you time to learn them before your roster expands and you'll have more on your plate to choose from so when you've found whatever faction it is that you want to learn try to pay attention to the units as you go learn what their role is within the army because that's all going to help you learn the faction when it comes to multiplayer things are a little bit more complex and really knowing your factions is very important i'd recommend to pick two or three factions that you really enjoy and try to learn those first and get the hang of them before you try learning all 15 factions at once because that is just far too much for any one human to handle a couple of important things to understand with multiplayer though factions go up and down in strength with updates and dlc for the game imagine a kind of ranking of one to fifteen some are at the top some are at the bottom for example the green skins vampire coast and tomb kings are considered some of the strongest factions right now whilst britonia the wood elves and the chaos are considered three of the worst factions right now but as of this moment in october 2020 we know that the wood elves dlc is a couple of months away and when that comes along it's likely that the wood elves will go from one of the worst to one of the best and it's really just a case of factions falling behind and not being updated like bretonnia and the chaos they're two factions that haven't been updated got any new units or any big balancing changes they're two factions that have just fallen behind with all the new big fancy stuff that all the updated factions are doing they need updates to bring them up to speed so just be aware of that as well if you go into multiplayer and you want to play bretonnia realize that you're gonna have a little bit of a harder time than somebody who decides to main the vampire coast this is just down to some factions having stronger units stronger abilities stronger magic better match-ups between factions because that's another thing to consider not all factions are equal in fighting each other some factions will have an easier or harder time depending on who they fight take bretonnia for example they'll generally have a hard time with most other factions except maybe the wood elves they can put the wood elves in the bin pretty well because they got a lot of cavalry wood elves rely on a lot of missiles so that can be a good matchup for bretonnia doesn't mean they're guaranteed a win just means they have a better chance of having advantages over the other faction but that's a whole nother story for another day i imagine if you're new to the game and watching this video you're probably not too interested in diving into multiplayer just yet although if you are you can join my discord if you like there's a link in the description if you're looking for a friendly environment to get into multiplayer with people who will help you learn and other noobs to play against then boogie on down there so there you go i think that's most of the important points i have to say on this question whenever people ask i always have to say this so now it's in a video and i could just link them to this instead happy days for the most part though as i've said a bunch of times really there is no wrong answer for which faction to learn first if you have a particular affinity i'd go with that for the most part no faction is really so terrible it's not like bretonia for example can never win anything because they're pretty bad right now they can still be made useful by a good player by all means but it perhaps does mean that for a newer player it can be harder to really get them to work because their faction just isn't that strong right now but like i say in campaign there's no real wrong answer because you're only playing with yourself so it doesn't really matter in multiplayer there are kind of some wrong answers or some tougher answers that you may not want to take on as a newer player but it all can be learned either way you can get good with britonia and you could be a good bretonnia player if you want to take the time anyway hope you've enjoyed this thanks for watching i'll see you in the future

Channel: Zerkovich

Views: 80,904

Rating: 4.9207368 out of 5

Keywords: warhammer 2, which faction to play, which faction to learn, faction guide, army guide, tutorial, tips, mp, campaign, total war

Id: fUVCyBeYX-I

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020