How a DAMAGE SOAK will save your army! - Total War Tactics: Warhammer 3 

*Plays as Ghorst with zombie spam armies* Snorts a line: What if my army WAS the damage soak?!

I can go weeks without so much as thinking about tww. I watch one Zerk video and I'm booting it back up for another campaign. Love it

This tactic is definitely feasible with a faction that: - has a beast with enough mass to push trough enemy lines - can give some sort of temporary protection (beware of demon factions - physical damage red will do nothing to save you from them) - and most important can effectively heal that unit Lizardman are very capable at that! But without the latter its a really bad idea. Single entities are most of the time slow to replenish and if you do that tactic once you could find yourself in a lot of trouble with your damage sponge out of commission for several terms

Whoever does the animations for the Warhammer Total War games, please do the animation for ALL games. Everywhere. Blending, weight, timing, secondary actions, all just.. Excellent. Absolutely excellent.

I could also say Ku'Gath has some potential. With his massive HP and some healing spells. Even though he is a slow boy.

Thanks for making amazing content for this game its so nice to see your videos go live !

That’s why I bring Mr Treeman. So everyone hitting him will be turning into a porcupine with all the glade guard arrows.

Really obvious that we need some unified visualization when using magic for damage/missile resistance on units or something..

Zerk, your game looks a lot better than mine. Do you use a reshade? If so which one?

It's even more effective when you actively try to evade the shots while getting there.

I am new to the game and boy was I wrong about clicking the auto button even if defeat is shown I have been. Straight slaughtering out numbered army’s now that I’m am learning new techniques and formations

*Laughs in skaven*

greate teacher thx!

Who knew throwing something big and scary into someone's army would cause them to attack it. Amusement aside, what do you do when your whole army is the damage soak... 19 zombies are not designed to attack someone and win, it's designed to attack someone's computer and have them quit in shame.

Steam tank also a good unit for this.

Love it!

Does anyone know what armor does, number wise? A throwaway tooltip is great an all but the game doesn't really provide me any way of knowing what 0 armor vs. 15 armor vs. 110 armor means. "Less physical and missile damage" is such a shitty explanation. HOW MUCH less? I don't know how impactful it is because the game doesn't give me a good resource to figure it out. Or alternatively I'm stupid and haven't see it in game.

just build mass range no need for tanks

The AA Set to TSAA doesn't look good.

Imagine sacrificing the huge balance of power of the dread saurian to keep heat off cold ones and skins

Yeah don’t do this against empire

This tactic is otherwise known by a more accurate name: DISTRACTION CARNIFEX

Zerk has independently discovered the Distraction Carnifex

Finally, I can use skarbrand like a shamwow

The risk of a damage soak is that it relies on forcing the enemy to make poor assessments of their targeting priority. The hard counter to distraction carnifex is to stay calm, think about your targets, and select effectively.

The fact that Be’Lakor's Shadow Shroud ability was hidden out of sight is remarkably on brand.

How could you not mention Gor-rok? He's basically designed from the ground up to do exactly this.

A lesson that kept getting hammered into my head was _a singing powerful unit will never win a battle on its own._ As such, I'd been keeping them in reserve as the "deciding factor" if a battle looks like it could go either way. Hadn't considered that winning battles _"on their own"_ and _"sending them in alone"_ may not be mutually inclusive. Besides, if I hold back on sending a high tier unit into battle straight away, that's a lot of gold just sitting there gathering dust.

I would have liked if you tested this with ratling guns

I saw a recent game where Tomb Kings had relativly easily routed a larger Orc army....except for Grimgor who with 165 armour rampaged around dropping heros and monsters and lords and *almost* turned the tide of the battle single handedly. He was just soaking up everything thrown at him.

I kind of like to do that with basic zombies, their ammunition is worth more than the zombie they are shooting :D

un-skaved, hehe

While Cathay doesn't need a damage soaker, they do have the RoR Terracotta Sentinel that can reflect missiles, so you can freely charge him into the enemies, ideally somewhere just in front of their missile troops.

I think the scientific term for what that Dread Saurian did is "Distraction Carnifex"

these units are very expensive, so you expect them to return that value mathematically or strategically. if the opponent has overwhelming number of ranged units, or just very strong anti large shooting, this can be straight up suicide. or they might just get screened out or surrounded by anti large units. EDIT: foot lords like sigvald are extremely strong at this tactic and at currently, is straight up unbeatable, due to their small hit box, passive healing usually .etc

I remember my last pirates campaign and repeatedly facing Gor-Rok. I finally learned to throw fodder at him and ignore him, because it was literally easier to break him with army losses than kill him.

5 or 6 vampires on foot can kill whole armies with ease. Same with nurgle, their exalted hero can heal whole groups of single entities.

Well if we're to abuse the AI targeting you'd be better off using a small single unit instead of a giant dinosaur. You won't need to support it anyway, just zig zag on the advance and once it's in melee you won't need to care anymore while the enemy units will still focus on it despite not being able to shoot or they'd shoot anyway hitting their own friendlies. If the idea is "being nice" and you just want to charge on a straight line to let the AI hit you then it makes more sense, but I don't see why not send the whole army together as it won't change the enemy aim as long as the tank unit is the first to get in range. I get the idea but it's looking half obvious half weird lol. Side question, if you used the other base tier life spell that reflects damage instead of giving phys res, would it reflect ranged physical damage as well? I'm assuming no for obvious reasons but still curious. I guess it could work with Cathay's projectile reflect tho, send the spearhead and watch their archers kill themselves.

if i ever dip my toe into multiplayer ill probably aim to do something like this first and foremost. seems like one of the simpler things to execute while i work on moving things around without the ability to pause lol

Not if your opponent has Blunderbusses.

Oh really?! Awesome! Come here Tretch…

It's actully quite easy to kill anything big in this game. The ranged have always the advantage and the bigger the unit. The better the hitrate. And no it doesn't matter how much hp because it will be eaten quite fast and usually these big creatures flee quickly.

This strategy is quit floored

These are very expensive units though. Not sure it's cost efficient even against AI and a lot of the suggestions to use foot lords to tank don't work since AI won't focus them. I'm not sure if they focus damage resistant big units on higher difficulties.

would be nice if you told us where you get this flesh to stone thing from

yall get me now ?

Valkia is a good damage soak and she does so much damage. I was playing on Normal, Normal as Katarina which was still a lot more cancerous than expected to a point where I gave up and Valkia takes no fucking damage and maybe its archers in general or Kislev only but they can't hit flying entities anymore it seems and they also seem to get blocked from shooting more on manticores. You should be able to force them to shoot because killing a few of my own men in mass arrow volley is much better than Valkia killing heroes or lords and massacring infantry. I don't remember it being like this on WH2.

Alright idea Skaven Clan Moulder Abomination with warp light night mutation. Use it to soak up damage and then mix this with breaching to get some rat dogs and Doomflayers in rat dogs for dealing with ranged and Doomflayers for hammer and anvil… anyone think it’ll work?

Cathay's Big Green Boii is an absolute dream choice, for tossing a Buff or two, onto, and sending barrelling towards the enemy to soak up, and dish out, the pain.

Finally a content creator mentions an obvious tactic. A huge chunk of the player base thinks large / slow SEM ( single entity monsters ) will die immediately with focus fire, so they're immediately useless due to this; When the fact that they soak damage for the army is indispensable.

Potentially one of the best, may I present Kohlek from warriors of Chaos, as he is not only an absolute tank but his skill tree also makes him unbreakable

Thanes 👌🏽

i call this move... the distraction carnifex.

I love Grom. Hes such a terror. And goofy.

🔥

Or you could just use a Lord/Hero they can't even hit?

Always great content Zerk. Thanks for the tips

I don't know if the units were changed in part 3, but do these tactics apply to part 2 as well?

Lads, what are Your FPS when zooming in a big blob of fighting units? Cuz im worried about my rig performance

Step one of becoming a cheese monster: Using your lord/single entities as attention soaks. In a few years we'll have legend of total war 2.0

If you have revivification crystals you don't even need the lore of life buff. ( Healing any damage that the unit takes ) But there are other similar buffs, like lore of beasts also giving phys resist, and it's available with skink priests.

Bullet sponges are usually a bad tactic (if it can't be cheesed), especially if you use single model units and especially against AI, because: A. If you use magic to boost resistances you're usually going to get more value out of using offensive magic. Taking out a lot of enemy units that pack a punch often means you don't take the damage at all and can still let your heavy bullet sponge unit wreak havoc later in the fight. B. The enemy getting ranged hits (the main source of DPS in the game, especially on higher difficulties) on your heavy units is not good. Heavy units are easy to hit and the few sources of reliable damage output the enemy may have, probably ranged units, are going to get a lot of efficient damage in. Considering ammo counts to morale, you want them to waste ammo. In fact, I'd say a bullet sponge tactic is the absolute worst option if you seek to distract the enemy with something. C. As an addition to point B, heavy units you can use as bullet sponges often contribute a lot to leadership/morale to begin with, so they are a big risk to send in alone. The most efficient tactic would be to use an individual character that is very mobile, to waste ammo/get enemy units to chase it, then send in units that can take out or pin down priority enemy units that can dish out high DPS. Then, your heavy units should mop-up as the enemy will have virtually nothing to eliminate it anymore (meaning almost free kills from that point onwards). You will also want to come out of battles with sufficient HP for additional battles to come, so just sending some bullet sponge in to take a beating may still contribute heavily to degrading your army in the long run. In ideal matches versus the AI, you should take almost no damage. Against (experienced) players I would be very wary of committing your big, heavy units to a fight too early. The longer they stay alive the more they will inevitably do for you in the battle.

Tactics health bar vs health bar never mention Tactics for this game again it's just exploiting the game cos its bad 👎

All of this is so f*cking useless in comaign on very hard & legendary!

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