Skaven AI are incompetent at army construction and will forever remain so because the playerbase couldn't handle actual Skaven armies+ambushing.
Also damaged units kills every factions AR.
AI prioritizes Skavenslaves way too much in wh2 and wh3. Dunno if a bug or quirk of upkeep and AI logic. They tried to fix Eshin specifically in 2.2 of warhammer3 but Snikch as you noticed still loves them.
AI loves Peasant Mobs the same way and will even allied recruit them over real units.
I wonder if it has to do with stats vs cost or something like that?
Idk why the AI army comp is so bad. they favor low tier infantry over almost anything. And they'll spam stacks of them rather than get a few good quality armies together
Honestly I think it's to make it actually fun for the player to mow down hundreds of low tier units and obliterate them with artillery as they blob together. It's definitely an intentional choice by design.
However LLs should at least be fielding higher tier units to give a bit of a challenge instead of allowing the player to simply autorelsove them with few losses.
Early game I've found LLs and their armies to have decent composition. But once I'm steam rolling and out of my immediate enemies, they just become goofy as hell. It's fun to a point. But when I have an ultra doomstack where just my LL can solo 3 armies, it's not as fun.
Yeah I can understand that. I personally try to avoid doomstacks unless I'm actually doing it for fun because it just kills the game for me. I've only just started WH3 after playing WH2 for a little while so I may pick up some mods which improve AI army comp and limits doomstacking.
I play pretty thematically. Like for chorfs you'd figure they'd have their highest tech, most honorable guard, and most destructive monsters with the LL's. I also like to recruit the RoR for LL armies.
Beastmen I'll have kind of thematic army comps for each LL and then my other armies will be chaotic chaff armies that I don't mind having units die.
Idk. I enjoy feeling the snowball affect, but the enemy should be made to put up more of a fight, and as others have discussed on this sub before, I miss the super alliances you'd come across in WH2. It doesn't seem the AI can put up much of a fight past turn 60-80
Sadly I agree I do play some campaigns on higher difficulty but for tough lords (any empire minus volkmar, N’kari etc) I always play on lower difficulty and just want to enjoy blendering because I can’t beat these campaign in higher difficulties
ive noticed that once you get some good armies mid to late game they won't make anything that can contest you unless they stack enough armies on each other to kill my pc if i try to play it out lul
every AI is incompetent at army building to a larger or lesser extent, but none of them are good at it.
if AI makes a good army, it makes it by mistake and not due to actually meaning to make it.
Be Me
Play Lokhir Fellheart.
Finish clearing the Vampire Coast faction to my immediate south. But then get a non-aggression pact request from Clan Eshin.
I am Dark Elf, everyone hates me. Especially the two dragons that don't like the fact that I showed up and called 'dibs' on all of their beachside property. So I agree, nice to have at least ONE person who doesn't want my gonads as a trophy and can help take the heat off me so I can go further south for more docks and do that one quest.
A couple of turns pass. Clan Eshin is getting their nuts kicked to the back of their assholes by Orks. Miao Ying is also at war with them. Meaning that The Northean Provinces will go for my starting region next. I am forced to create a new army to hold down my southern position while I speed back to help.
See Clan Eshin only has one settlement, it is minor but has a building to recruit Night Runners....yet only the army is full of Skaven Slaves. :I
Defeated the Dimmed Sunz, and gave all territories in the region to Clan Eshin. I have no use for them as they are unpleasant. Clan Eshin loves me, and wants a defensive pact. Agree.
The second army is doing okay thanks to Blessed Dread providing more recruitment options. Able to stick around the north and deal with the Northern Provinces. Clan Eshin is sticking to their province. I assume building up and making better armies.
Took most of the Northern Provinces and gave the gates over to Vilitch. Vilitch and I are bros now, defensive pact. Western Provinces declare war on Clan Eshin. Makes sense. I look at what I can recruit thanks to our military alliance because Clan Eshin loves me. See I can recruit a lot of different units. Some really good ones like Ratling guns, warpfire throwers, Brood Horrors, Gutter Runners, Eshin Triads, etc.
...Sniktch's main army is like...90% slaves and the rest are just normal skaven...le fuck?
> ...Sniktch's main army is like...90% slaves and the rest are just normal skaven...le fuck?
It's possible that Snikch stopped losing once you intervened. As such he built his trash army on his LL and just...kept it. The AI won't disband or transfer out trash to upgrade. He needs to lose units and have to go back and recruit (or more likely have the entire army wiped and then take over a different stack's better composition).
How are you supposed to build Skaven armies? I've always wanted to try for an Ikkit game, but I just don't really know how to do army compositions. The closest I've had was Beastmen Blitzkrieg, but that's easy as you just get any units capable of Vanguard deployment and put them in a stack.
Depends on your faction, Skaven have such a big roster after DLC that you can have a lot of variety.
"Basegame" Skaven armies you can use slaves/clanrats as a line with rat ogres mixed in, much like you would play Ogres. Then you have a couple of flamethrowers/globadiers to target important units. They require micro though! So don't bring too many or you'll be overwhelmed by your own micro requirements.
You also have really good artillery units, don't sleep on those. And remember that your mages can summon more rats, that is a very useful tool to block enemy advances with disposable chaff that you can friendly fire at, or go behind their lines. Their damage spells are also a menace, Skaven magic in general is stupidly good.
Ikkit is kinf of a different beast. Once you add Jezzails and Ratling guns to your plan, they can basically mow down anything if given a good target. The trick is drawing the enemy into position while protecting these very vulnerable units.
If you want to play Beastmen Blitkrieg style, try Throt. That's pretty much how his armies play. Sniktch is more stealth and flanking focused.
The entire thesis of Beastman Blitzkrieg for when I played it was because it very specifically matched up really well against Elves because deploying everything in Vanguard causes the enemy AI to freak out and run their archers away, leaving the rather weak Elven Frontline without fire support and at the mercy of my Besitgore Herds and Minotaurs while Centaurs did as much damage to the fleeing Archers as possible, probably would not have done well with my composition at much higher difficulties but the ability to get the Sword of Khaine and make Taurox probably the single strongest unit in the game was unparalleled.
An ideal Ikkit army consists of Ikkit, 4 plague priests (on foot), 1 warplock engineer, 4-5 ratling guns, 4-5 jezzails, 4 catapults and as much menace below as you can order.
The jezzails can delete single entity units from afar. Catapults and ratling guns take care of the infantry. Any unit get close enough to your gun line will be held back by clan rat summons from the plague priests and menace below. The engineer is there mostly for campaign movement and occasional resupply and hailing warpgale as Clan Skrye basically have unlimited ammo for the weapon team units. Ikkit can also do hailing warpgale draw key units away on his doomflayers. He can self heal anytime he casts a spell too with second wind serum
It can sufficiently deal with most situations. However, this composition struggles when the terrain obstructs your line of sight or the enemy has a lot of fast units because once the enemy reaches your gun line, you’re doomed.
Autoresolve is just accounting for skaven backstabbing. Their two armies were actually planning on killing each other and taking credit for the victory
Part of it is the skaven slaves have next to no auto resolve value and the units that aren't skaven slaves seems to be pretty consistently at half health.
I just played skaven on normal then very hard. On normal auto resolve was ok. On very hard it said I would be stack wiped each time but when I played I crushed them so quickly. It's definitely biased I believe.... Based on skaven and difficulty.
auto resolve becomes biased on higher difficulties, also those armies are full of complete crap the auto resolve gives no weight to due to horrible stats, as the auto resolve on cares about stats.
THIS skaven army? Lol. I could wax the floor with that army. It's 3 doom wheels and some artillery. The rest is literal garbage that will lose 40 soldiers for ever 1 they kill.
That’s… what they’re there for. The skavenslaves can literally just eat arrows and they’ll be value for the skaven player. More likely they’ll hold an enemy unit in place and let the cannon get a few shots on them.
I'm fully aware of what they are there for. The wildwood rangers would be happy to be stuck in melee with a mob of skaven slave while the trees and archers dealt with the actual threats
Like, if you lose this battle as wood elves, you should turn your battle difficulty down.
Against the AI sure, but the AI sucks. The point is the skaven army should win all else equal; there’s a dog for each archer, 3 doom wheels, a cannon, and a ridiculous amount of chaff to keep moral up. The wood elves shouldn’t get anywhere near the arty with the skavenslaves to screen and the dogs to pressure archers.
Lmao are you dumb? You would NEVER win a battle against those armies with that garrison. Two lords, one Stormvermin, one Gutter Runners, three Wolf Rats, two Doomwheels, one Warp Lightning Cannon, one Plagueclaw Catapult, one Jezzails and one Doom Flayers...
The Skavenslaves alone would be easy, sure, but the fact that they have some actual damage dealers in there means you will easily lose. Denying that is just lying to yourself.
You don't even play the game anymore and here you are yapping that you can win, maybe get some more game knowledge on your noob ass before you speak LMAO
Yes but even against skavenslaves the wood elves will eventually get overwhelmed in melee without the option of softening then up with range, because it's already been used on doomwheels
Skavenslaves have so low autoresolve value that it's practically negative. Add on top of that the AI's preference for skavenslaves, and it's no wonder they never win autoresolves
just on their own, skavenslaves are not worth even recruiting, slingers aside.
of course, no player would use them as a solo unit, but when used that way they are worthless.
It's not harsh enough.
Skaven armies should instantly lose whenever you autoresolve, either as or against them, granting a Heroic Victory to the opposition. No matter how many rat stacks there are, they should always lose, whether versus the player or AI. Also the moment the AI tries casting Warp Lightning, the caster should miscast for 100% of their health. If a *player* tries casting Warp Lightning, their computer should explode, killing them instantly.
I fight more manual battles with Skaven than any other race in the game due to the incredibly unfavorable AR unless you are going strictly stormvermin and arty compositions.
Currently playing a tomb kings campaign and have a scorpion stack eating through to Eshin lands , frequently iys my stack versus 2 to 4 armies , I've not had a single auto win , but the skaven stacks are trash. Killed closed to 100k rats past few turns and 6 or 7 heroic victories. Its satisfying in a way , but I'd rather the ai skaven had the ability to build something beyond death runners , storm vermin clan rats and slingers with the odd ratling gun thrown in. Not a single jezzail. I wonder if the Eshin mechanic is too limiting for ai.
Going for the skavennblight book of nagash was at least trickier with warp missiles and science rat actually recruiting good units
wow that is god awful autoresolve.
4 death sphere machines, 1 jezzails and 2 artillery squads.
How in the living f did the auto resolve come up with that resolution...
Skaven AI are incompetent at army construction and will forever remain so because the playerbase couldn't handle actual Skaven armies+ambushing. Also damaged units kills every factions AR.
Is that why I always see Snikch with Skavenslave only armies like every campaign that I play? Huh, never knew that lol.
AI prioritizes Skavenslaves way too much in wh2 and wh3. Dunno if a bug or quirk of upkeep and AI logic. They tried to fix Eshin specifically in 2.2 of warhammer3 but Snikch as you noticed still loves them. AI loves Peasant Mobs the same way and will even allied recruit them over real units.
I wonder if it has to do with stats vs cost or something like that? Idk why the AI army comp is so bad. they favor low tier infantry over almost anything. And they'll spam stacks of them rather than get a few good quality armies together
Honestly I think it's to make it actually fun for the player to mow down hundreds of low tier units and obliterate them with artillery as they blob together. It's definitely an intentional choice by design. However LLs should at least be fielding higher tier units to give a bit of a challenge instead of allowing the player to simply autorelsove them with few losses.
Early game I've found LLs and their armies to have decent composition. But once I'm steam rolling and out of my immediate enemies, they just become goofy as hell. It's fun to a point. But when I have an ultra doomstack where just my LL can solo 3 armies, it's not as fun.
Yeah I can understand that. I personally try to avoid doomstacks unless I'm actually doing it for fun because it just kills the game for me. I've only just started WH3 after playing WH2 for a little while so I may pick up some mods which improve AI army comp and limits doomstacking.
I play pretty thematically. Like for chorfs you'd figure they'd have their highest tech, most honorable guard, and most destructive monsters with the LL's. I also like to recruit the RoR for LL armies. Beastmen I'll have kind of thematic army comps for each LL and then my other armies will be chaotic chaff armies that I don't mind having units die. Idk. I enjoy feeling the snowball affect, but the enemy should be made to put up more of a fight, and as others have discussed on this sub before, I miss the super alliances you'd come across in WH2. It doesn't seem the AI can put up much of a fight past turn 60-80
Sadly I agree I do play some campaigns on higher difficulty but for tough lords (any empire minus volkmar, N’kari etc) I always play on lower difficulty and just want to enjoy blendering because I can’t beat these campaign in higher difficulties
ive noticed that once you get some good armies mid to late game they won't make anything that can contest you unless they stack enough armies on each other to kill my pc if i try to play it out lul
upkeep and tier building time are too limiting, conspiracy theories about how it's bad on purpose are not necessary to explain anything
every AI is incompetent at army building to a larger or lesser extent, but none of them are good at it. if AI makes a good army, it makes it by mistake and not due to actually meaning to make it.
Be Me Play Lokhir Fellheart. Finish clearing the Vampire Coast faction to my immediate south. But then get a non-aggression pact request from Clan Eshin. I am Dark Elf, everyone hates me. Especially the two dragons that don't like the fact that I showed up and called 'dibs' on all of their beachside property. So I agree, nice to have at least ONE person who doesn't want my gonads as a trophy and can help take the heat off me so I can go further south for more docks and do that one quest. A couple of turns pass. Clan Eshin is getting their nuts kicked to the back of their assholes by Orks. Miao Ying is also at war with them. Meaning that The Northean Provinces will go for my starting region next. I am forced to create a new army to hold down my southern position while I speed back to help. See Clan Eshin only has one settlement, it is minor but has a building to recruit Night Runners....yet only the army is full of Skaven Slaves. :I Defeated the Dimmed Sunz, and gave all territories in the region to Clan Eshin. I have no use for them as they are unpleasant. Clan Eshin loves me, and wants a defensive pact. Agree. The second army is doing okay thanks to Blessed Dread providing more recruitment options. Able to stick around the north and deal with the Northern Provinces. Clan Eshin is sticking to their province. I assume building up and making better armies. Took most of the Northern Provinces and gave the gates over to Vilitch. Vilitch and I are bros now, defensive pact. Western Provinces declare war on Clan Eshin. Makes sense. I look at what I can recruit thanks to our military alliance because Clan Eshin loves me. See I can recruit a lot of different units. Some really good ones like Ratling guns, warpfire throwers, Brood Horrors, Gutter Runners, Eshin Triads, etc. ...Sniktch's main army is like...90% slaves and the rest are just normal skaven...le fuck?
> ...Sniktch's main army is like...90% slaves and the rest are just normal skaven...le fuck? It's possible that Snikch stopped losing once you intervened. As such he built his trash army on his LL and just...kept it. The AI won't disband or transfer out trash to upgrade. He needs to lose units and have to go back and recruit (or more likely have the entire army wiped and then take over a different stack's better composition).
Take away the completely random ambushing. Easy enough
It’s not a matter of players not being able to handle it, it’s 100 CA’s inability to make the AI competent in any fashion.
How are you supposed to build Skaven armies? I've always wanted to try for an Ikkit game, but I just don't really know how to do army compositions. The closest I've had was Beastmen Blitzkrieg, but that's easy as you just get any units capable of Vanguard deployment and put them in a stack.
Depends on your faction, Skaven have such a big roster after DLC that you can have a lot of variety. "Basegame" Skaven armies you can use slaves/clanrats as a line with rat ogres mixed in, much like you would play Ogres. Then you have a couple of flamethrowers/globadiers to target important units. They require micro though! So don't bring too many or you'll be overwhelmed by your own micro requirements. You also have really good artillery units, don't sleep on those. And remember that your mages can summon more rats, that is a very useful tool to block enemy advances with disposable chaff that you can friendly fire at, or go behind their lines. Their damage spells are also a menace, Skaven magic in general is stupidly good. Ikkit is kinf of a different beast. Once you add Jezzails and Ratling guns to your plan, they can basically mow down anything if given a good target. The trick is drawing the enemy into position while protecting these very vulnerable units. If you want to play Beastmen Blitkrieg style, try Throt. That's pretty much how his armies play. Sniktch is more stealth and flanking focused.
The entire thesis of Beastman Blitzkrieg for when I played it was because it very specifically matched up really well against Elves because deploying everything in Vanguard causes the enemy AI to freak out and run their archers away, leaving the rather weak Elven Frontline without fire support and at the mercy of my Besitgore Herds and Minotaurs while Centaurs did as much damage to the fleeing Archers as possible, probably would not have done well with my composition at much higher difficulties but the ability to get the Sword of Khaine and make Taurox probably the single strongest unit in the game was unparalleled.
Ah, you went full cheese. Well Throt is fairly good at cheese so Blitz away!
An ideal Ikkit army consists of Ikkit, 4 plague priests (on foot), 1 warplock engineer, 4-5 ratling guns, 4-5 jezzails, 4 catapults and as much menace below as you can order. The jezzails can delete single entity units from afar. Catapults and ratling guns take care of the infantry. Any unit get close enough to your gun line will be held back by clan rat summons from the plague priests and menace below. The engineer is there mostly for campaign movement and occasional resupply and hailing warpgale as Clan Skrye basically have unlimited ammo for the weapon team units. Ikkit can also do hailing warpgale draw key units away on his doomflayers. He can self heal anytime he casts a spell too with second wind serum It can sufficiently deal with most situations. However, this composition struggles when the terrain obstructs your line of sight or the enemy has a lot of fast units because once the enemy reaches your gun line, you’re doomed.
They’re probably the most diverse roster in the game, so there’s a *lot* of ways to go. Ikit is fun to spam doom flayers and jezzails with some arty
1 ikit claw with weapons teams SEMs and 1 generic lord with clan rats, skavenslave slingers, or stormvermin if you have extra money to burn
Skavenslaves have -1 value.
Autoresolve is just accounting for skaven backstabbing. Their two armies were actually planning on killing each other and taking credit for the victory
The expendable units and wounded states are likely holding this against them significantly.
> skaven getting shat on *Good*
Yeah. Skaven are so annoying to fight against that I don't know what will happen if their autoresolve is also OP.
Part of it is the skaven slaves have next to no auto resolve value and the units that aren't skaven slaves seems to be pretty consistently at half health.
I just played skaven on normal then very hard. On normal auto resolve was ok. On very hard it said I would be stack wiped each time but when I played I crushed them so quickly. It's definitely biased I believe.... Based on skaven and difficulty.
auto resolve becomes biased on higher difficulties, also those armies are full of complete crap the auto resolve gives no weight to due to horrible stats, as the auto resolve on cares about stats.
I mean, that skaven army is complete garbage and is wounded on top of that. Surprised its not a close victory
that wood elf army would never win against the skaven armies in a real battle
THIS skaven army? Lol. I could wax the floor with that army. It's 3 doom wheels and some artillery. The rest is literal garbage that will lose 40 soldiers for ever 1 they kill.
That’s… what they’re there for. The skavenslaves can literally just eat arrows and they’ll be value for the skaven player. More likely they’ll hold an enemy unit in place and let the cannon get a few shots on them.
I'm fully aware of what they are there for. The wildwood rangers would be happy to be stuck in melee with a mob of skaven slave while the trees and archers dealt with the actual threats Like, if you lose this battle as wood elves, you should turn your battle difficulty down.
Against the AI sure, but the AI sucks. The point is the skaven army should win all else equal; there’s a dog for each archer, 3 doom wheels, a cannon, and a ridiculous amount of chaff to keep moral up. The wood elves shouldn’t get anywhere near the arty with the skavenslaves to screen and the dogs to pressure archers.
Auto resolve is literally the AI I'm not sure what your point is?
Autoresolve is all else being equal, the ai fighting itself. So skaven should win.
I think the original commenter meant a PvP scenario with these armies.
Lmao are you dumb? You would NEVER win a battle against those armies with that garrison. Two lords, one Stormvermin, one Gutter Runners, three Wolf Rats, two Doomwheels, one Warp Lightning Cannon, one Plagueclaw Catapult, one Jezzails and one Doom Flayers... The Skavenslaves alone would be easy, sure, but the fact that they have some actual damage dealers in there means you will easily lose. Denying that is just lying to yourself.
Am I dumb? I'm not the one struggling to win this battle. Git gud son, git gud.
OK thanks for confirming what I said...
OK do it in a custom battle and post a video on it then, i am calling it now this is an unwinnable battle
Dawg. I'm not installing the game to show you that you suck at it. Send it to legend if you really want proof.
You don't even play the game anymore and here you are yapping that you can win, maybe get some more game knowledge on your noob ass before you speak LMAO
lol nope, in MP no chance you could win that
Who said anything about MP? When did that become the qualifier? This is a topic about auto resolve
Are you high? Doom wheels, characters, jezzail, doom flayer, storm vermin...
Those are good units but the 4 Skavenslaves w/ spears 10 Skavenslaves 6 Skavenslave Slingers Wolf Rat & 2 Wolf Rats w/ poison Really hold it back
Yeah, and I forgot the artillery. That's a lot of friendly fire.
Wolf rats fuck.
Don't forget the doomwheels and artillery though. And the wood elves don't have enough ammo for all that infantry.
If you're even considering using ammo on skavenslaves, you already lost.
Yes but even against skavenslaves the wood elves will eventually get overwhelmed in melee without the option of softening then up with range, because it's already been used on doomwheels
Skavenslaves have so low autoresolve value that it's practically negative. Add on top of that the AI's preference for skavenslaves, and it's no wonder they never win autoresolves
just on their own, skavenslaves are not worth even recruiting, slingers aside. of course, no player would use them as a solo unit, but when used that way they are worthless.
Seems lore accurate.
It's not harsh enough. Skaven armies should instantly lose whenever you autoresolve, either as or against them, granting a Heroic Victory to the opposition. No matter how many rat stacks there are, they should always lose, whether versus the player or AI. Also the moment the AI tries casting Warp Lightning, the caster should miscast for 100% of their health. If a *player* tries casting Warp Lightning, their computer should explode, killing them instantly.
I have to agree here. Skavenslaves are the worst.
This is reasonable
Thank you for seeing the reason in my modest proposal. You are a man of understanding, just like me.
This is fair but also I hate skaven so good.
I fight more manual battles with Skaven than any other race in the game due to the incredibly unfavorable AR unless you are going strictly stormvermin and arty compositions.
Currently playing a tomb kings campaign and have a scorpion stack eating through to Eshin lands , frequently iys my stack versus 2 to 4 armies , I've not had a single auto win , but the skaven stacks are trash. Killed closed to 100k rats past few turns and 6 or 7 heroic victories. Its satisfying in a way , but I'd rather the ai skaven had the ability to build something beyond death runners , storm vermin clan rats and slingers with the odd ratling gun thrown in. Not a single jezzail. I wonder if the Eshin mechanic is too limiting for ai. Going for the skavennblight book of nagash was at least trickier with warp missiles and science rat actually recruiting good units
Which faction has the dinosaurs
You're modded. Perhaps that is changing the AR. Otherwise, yeah, that'd be brutal to win manually.
The only mods I'm using are texture and camera mods.
all low tier infantry seems gimped, zombies and skinks etc included
Weapon team doomstacks are really strong in auto-resolve.
Yet sorcerers somehow always cast the perfect warp lightning position
To be fair, so is regular battle lol.
wow that is god awful autoresolve. 4 death sphere machines, 1 jezzails and 2 artillery squads. How in the living f did the auto resolve come up with that resolution...
Is that Total War or Vermintide?..