War preparations TW: Warhammer Guide

Before you even think about going to war with another faction, you should first prepare accordingly. You must remember about three things while doing so - stabilizing your economy, securing your own grounds, as well as preparing the army for the war.

• Stabilizing the economy
• Securing your borders
• Preparing your army
• When you should go to a war?

Stabilizing the economy

Public Order is even affected by difficulty level - easy will give you a slight boost, others will give a negative one.

While stabilizing your economy you must remember about a number of factors. The first one is the appropriate income of your country. If your income goes into a negative value you won't have problems, provided that you have a substantial reserve of gold in your treasury to function properly. If your treasury decreases to 0 and the income goes into the negative value, the country will enter bankruptcy. After a few turns in this state the amount of your troops will drastically decrease (about half of them), taxes will be increased in every city you own (which will give a huge negative modifier to public order as well), your relations with other factions will deteriorate, and you will lose the ability to recruit new troops and construct buildings. After a few turns everything will return to normal and you will be left with a semi-functional economy again.

It's extremely important to take care of the state of your treasury. There's nothing worse as a sudden bankruptcy when you are sieging an enemy castle - the amount of your troops will decrease and in the next round you will lose as the enemy will attack you with a huge advantage. If you must recruit so many troops that your income will become negative, do so only when you have a large reserve of gold in your treasury, allowing you to function in such a way for at least over a dozen of turns.

Another thing associated with the economy is keeping the public order high enough and preventing the area from getting corrupted. Public order represents the relations of the citizen living in the city to the one controlling it (in this case, you). If public order reaches -100 there will be a revolt. When that happens, a rebelling army will appear near the city the revolt happened. The army will grow in strength with each round, and sooner or later it will attack the city it spawned from. If you can't defend the city from this attack, the city will most likely be razed to the ground. The best course of action in such a situation is to get rid of the rebelling army as quickly as possible - or to prevent the rebellion from happening in the first place.

There's a number of thing factoring the public order. Those are:

• Some buildings constructed in the province;
• Lords and Heroes located within the province;
• Lords' armies stationed in a city within a province;
• Random events.

Things that lower the public order are as follows:

• An army moving around the province in the "raid" marching method;
• Increasing corruption (the only exception are the Vampires, which gain bonuses to public order when there's a high vampiric corruption, and negative ones when there's low);
• Taxes;
• Instability in the province (where there are fights and control over one of the cities shifts constantly);
• Seizing control over one of the cities (the negative factor will disappear after one turn).

Corruption is as important as public order.

You should also keep the corruption of the land you own in check. Corruption is spread by Vampire Counts (vampiric corruption) and the armies of Chaos (chaos corruption). In the case of the Vampire Counts the corruption is increased by heroes belonging to this faction, as well as a unique building that can be constructed in a city (it increases corruption in the province, as well as in any provinces adjacent to this one). When it comes to Chaos, corruption is spread by heroes, as well as by random events that happen from time to time.

Corruption can be decreased by:

• Constructing specific buildings in the cities - this decreases the corruption in the province it was constructed in;
• Researching some of the technologies;
• Recruiting and developing Heroes and / or Lords in a specific direction (by selecting abilities that influence corruption);
• By selecting an appropriate commandment in a province - only available when you have the whole province under your control.

If you can't prevent the corruption from increasing, the cities located on the corrupted land will suffer serious penalties to public order (up to -15 points!), your units will suffer attrition damage while traveling through those lands, and there can also be a rebellion. Similarly to the case when a low public order rebellion happens, in this case an army belonging to the faction which corruption increased to a high level will appear - either Vampire Counts' or a Chaos army.

Remember to leave your provinces with a positive public order (with the value as close to the 100 as possible, so that you have time to react when something unexpected happens), as well as with the lowest possible corruption level.

Securing your borders

Terrains marked as red are hostile towards your faction.

Before you depart on a war with another faction you should first secure your own ground. You can't let a situation in which most of your troops are located far on the east, and some of your previously neutral neighbors located on the west decides to declare war and opens a new front on the other side of the map. This will lead to a lot of nervous situations - not to mention the potential to lose a few settlements.

The first thing to do is to open the map of the world and check your political relations with other factions. You don't have to be allied with everyone to be safe (although it makes the matters a lot easier), as factions that have a neutral relation with you shouldn't attack you. You should, however, check how the relations will change in the upcoming turns. Even if you are on very friendly terms some of your actions may have serious consequences. Breaking an alliance, trespassing, refusing to help an ally that was attacked - those are only the few ones that can quickly change your relations with an ally. You should also think about forging alliances with your closest neighbors - having their military support should be more than enough to fend off potential aggressors that want to invade your land.

If you can't really hope for friendly relations, you can solve the problem by leaving a large (a full, 20-unit one if possible) army. This should discourage anyone from attacking you, and even if an attack happens the enemy will have huge problems to punch through your defenses. This also has another benefit - a huge army stationing in a city will give a large boost to the public order in a province.

Another method is to develop some of your settlements in a very specific way. If a settlement is located in a narrow mountain pass which is the only route from a hostile enemy, you should invest in buildings that increase the garrisoned army in that city (such as walls, and some unique buildings as well). This way the enemy will be forced to defeat a larger army, as well as bring siege equipment to get past the walls that were constructed.

Preparing your army

The last thing you should prepare before going to a war is, quite obviously, your own army. You should invest in the strongest, most technologically advanced units you can afford - this way you will have an advantage over the enemy. However, remember to refrain from focusing on a single type of unit - 19 units of heavy cavalry might be tempting, but having a well-balanced army is a lot more effective.

An absolute necessity is having two full, 20-unit armies that will be used to attack enemy settlements. While assaulting smaller settlements can be done with a single army, going against a capital of a province (especially when there's also a large army stationed there) like that is a suicide, as the enemy will have a huge advantage over you.

If you are planning on going to a war with a faction that has more than a single province, you should take at least one extra army with you. It can be used offensively, to attack smaller settlements (which will allow you assault more places at the same time), as well as to defend the ones you've already captured, and which the enemy will surely want to recapture.

When you should go to a war?

You should go to a war with a faction when diplomatic methods (which can end in assimilating a faction into your own) were futile, or when they are not profitable enough. You should remember that assimilating a faction will cause all the other ones to have a huge negative modifier towards you - it can lead some of them to break alliances (and stop trading with you, which can have disastrous effects), or even to wars.

On the other hand, you shouldn't go to a war with factions whose settlements you won't be able to capture (more on that can be found in the description of all of the factions). There's no point in fighting for the sole purpose of fighting (unless you want to fight more). You should try to keep friendly relations with the factions whose settlements you can't capture and focus on attacking those that you can.

You can't forget about the three factors described above - stabilizing your economy, securing your borders, and preparing army. Don't even think about going to a war when there are numerous enemies surrounding you, the public order of your provinces is nearing rebellion, and the corruption broke through the 50% point.