Today’s Memorial Day for the States, and a considerable number of US streamers are apparently awake in the morning for marathon game sessions.
This made Twitch.TV a lot livelier and more interesting than it usually would be at my peak night time play hours.
Two hours ago, I managed to idly flip channels to see that CohhCarnage had -just- started up a Greenskin campaign… and looked totally new and unused to the whims and quirks of general Orciness.
As in, wasn’t paying attention to Obedience rating in settlements, was leaving his armies in settlements while Fightiness took a nose dive, hiring inaccurate Orc archer boyz, and so on.
Heh, dis wuz goin’ ta be gud.
Like probably a good half or more of stream watchers everywhere, who only stick around when there’s a chance to see a rage quit or some kind of conflict or drama, I decided to settle in and watch the impending train wreck.
Mind you, I also had the motivation of the other half of stream watchers everywhere, which is to learn useful tips from watching someone else play.
CohhCarnage has a lot better grasp of basic Total War battle controls than I do, for one.
So I was enjoying seeing how he grouped his units, and spread them out in formations, and managed to make them walk in straight orderly lines (completely opposite to what -I- can usually produce) and was filing away in my head “things to try out the next time I play.”
Watching him also gave me an idea of what distances archers might be able to shoot arcs over the heads of infantry at (I’d thought they were kinda useless once behind infantry, because all my prior attempts yielded Obstructed errors.)
And his opening maneuvers with micro’ed cavalry looked very useful for distracting and disrupting enemy lines, not to mention put them in perfect position for rear and flanking charges once the proper battle started.
Seeing how much income was actually possible with an orderly takeover of a single province, while maintaining a single army stack, was also fairly encouraging for my next go at starting a campaign. (As opposed to my limping mostly negative income economy for my first campaign.)
Of course, the train wreck was just a matter of time, because he was demonstrating very little racial-specific knowledge: eg. that Orc leadership values / morale absolutely suck and that Dwarf range was far superior and their melee ain’t half bad cos their morale is like a frickin’ unshakeable mountain.
Orcs have a couple advantages over Dwarves – speed, cavalry (which ties in with speed and mobility) and numbers (which in theory, means lots of movement and flanking/rear attacks are needed.)
Granted, I’m not sure I could do any better when push comes to actual shove, at the moment.
Which was why watching this play out was so frickin’ cathartic.
It was like, good, I’m not the ONLY person in the whole wide world getting owned by insufficient understanding of Total War nuances.
Especially while struggling with the vagaries that is the Orc and their piss poor morale.
This tunnel interception was the last straw for CohhCarnage. It turned into a full fledged rout, that was a total army wipe since it was in a tunnel.
Then he decided to quit this campaign and go back to the Dwarves he was used to.
Took two hours.
Highly entertaining hours.
It does make me want to start another Greenskin campaign to see if I can play out the initial opening moves with a little more grace than my first attempt though.
Maybe if I actually survive to turn 100 again, I’ll be slightly better at tactical combat and Total War battle controls by that time, and finally ready to fight Chaos.
Why I Game 