They need to give high tier monsters way more physical resist/missile resist. Monstrous units should be countered by dedicated anti large, not just blobs of peasant archers.
@@Insandom its way too expensive for how it performs. It gets countered by low tier missile spam. Especially considering LM already have amazing large entities. Right now Dread Saurians feel too weak to justify the insane price tag.
@@Mrz-bq2yb it is a shame how bad the dread saurion is, it would kick ass if the the dread saurion got a shield to help protect it against low teir arrows
"With this airforce I'll make Zharr-Naggrund look like Dresden!" - Thorgrim before dealing with the great shame of the dawi. Also the gondola looks like something a three vikings would get lost in.
"The followers of Nurgle entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to pox-bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Barak Var, Karak Angazbar, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." - Malakai Makaisson
@@set_5341 "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind." By "Bomber" Harris during the Second World War. Referencing a biblical quote.
Same for slaanesh there not gonna better these things for the demons that much, there narrow minded to mediocre shit for the demons and that mainstream love for empire dwarfs, obv kislev
@@mandke23 Not really. nurgle got reworked and tzeentch got updates. The next DLC is gonna be slaneesh and 2 reworks so no they're not forgetting about demons, it just takes them longer. Considering how much content there is for Chaos Warriors it's ironic to say Old World stuff is favoured all the time.
On the lore side, the reason dwarfs dont build many of them isn't because they are unreiable, they aren't built in numbers because they aren't cheap, and the idea of flight for most dwarfs is something they'd consider only slightly more reasonable then an elf fetish, when a thunderbarge fails, its like the indestructible, it just explodes
Also very few dwarves even use machines or gun powder, most just use bows and crossbows as ranged weapons. Its really only the empire dwelling dawi that have accepted the new tech. Most dwarves are very much against the changes in weapons and armour being produces by empire dwarves. Even if they are strong they are untraditional, dwarves really hate change. Empire is really the only faction using blackpower at the army scale no other faction is even close to doing so.
@@alistairbolden6340 firstly, gunpowder is old enough that it's accepted in 99.9999 percent of dwarf hearts, next, dwarfs hate bows, because they didn't use them and then they met the elves, who used them and they became associated with elves, which means when they began to hate elves they hated bows and similar polearms. The dwarfs have ultimately embraced tech a decent amount, regardless of not liking it, simply because it's economic, or your the odd master engineer that wants to walk around with the firepower of a ironclad
But if you have read the gotrek and Felix books, especially beast slayer, you know that the thunderbarge is capable of a truly terrifying level of destruction. One of the characters in that book says that a single thunderbarge has the killing power of an entire army. So I would say that total war did it justice, because it seems incredibly OP, as it should be👌
Brace yourselves for an End Times level event worth of 'nam-posts: * How can you shoot snotlings? Easy, lad, ye don't lead them as much! * We've named the ship "Puff the magic fire-drake!" * The blood-suckers may command ghosts, but we have ol' "Spooky!" * Black Sabbath: Paranoid running on repeat. * "It ain't me, I ain't no brewmaster's son!" *"I love the smell of burning gobbos, smells like... settled grudges!"
I think this partially just highlights an issue with airborne melee in general: Most flying units actually need to stop before they can start an attack animation mid-air and that means catching out a unit that is hellbent on retreating is really difficult. I think slightly reducing the speed boost you get from that ability or making it more punishing (I could maybe see a mechanic where the self-damage scales pretty much indefinitely the longer you keep it going, so you start out at 20 damage per second but get an extra point of damage for every second that it's running or something like that, coupled with a cooldown period after you turn the ability off so you can't just cheese it by turning it off and on again in order to reset the damage build-up) would certainly be a good start but at the same time, there's just a more general issue at play. On the ground, if you charge a fast unit into a slower unit, you will generally disrupt the slower unit and have a chance to get some hits in. In the air, that only works if you fully surround the slower unit and have enough mass to bog it down. I think flying melee units just need a charge animation for air combat and getting charged should cancel or temporarily disrupt movement orders.
In a ''real-life'' scenario, a Bloodthirster could just cut open a hole in the balloon or grab the hull while dismantling it. It would actually make sense that the Thunderbarg will receive movement speed debuff when caught in the melee.
Or any Dragon. Or any single entity anti large flying monster. In Gotrek and Felix they coated the sails with anti fire fluid, but they were saved only by banzai charge of Dwarf with Gyro with full explosive tank.
Once again Total War NEEDS updated chase pathing/damage something. It looks straight up like the game isn't working when the flyers just chase the thungerbarge around but don't attack despite catching up.
The afterburn mode isn't the issue. The problem is that chasing units, whether flying or on the ground, struggle to hit enemies unless their speed is way higher. I'd rather not see the afterburn mode get nerfed because of a broader flaw in the mechanics.
Not saying that doesn't need a change too, but this thing getting 90 speed is ridiculous. It feels so out of place with the roster and how dwarves play. It completely removes the roles for their other flying units with that speed. I wouldn't mind if it was intended to fill the same role as them, but it's not. It's supposed to be an air fortress. Personally feel like they should just cut the speed boost altogether. If you want to give it an ability make the bombs an ability or give it a stance ability to trade mobility and for rate extra range and accuracy
Main problem seems like the afterburner ability. It makes it too fast, in the Khorne video nothing could keep up. It either needs to go down in speed or deal way way more damage to itself.
They were faster than the barge in the khorne video. The problem is aerial attack animations having no charges. Flying units have to do a complete stop and then throw out a lame swing infront of them. Because of this it has always been very easy to perma-kite enemy units in the sky, even if youre slower than them; you dont have to outrun the unit, you just have to be fast enough to move out of their range by the time they get around to swinging
I feel like it the barge would be way less oppressive if the afterburn gave only 150% speed and 75% the other stats. That should be enough for most dedicated flyers to catch up to it.
@@dtt719 right, but the furries and the bloodthirster were slightly faster than that, and my point is you dont *need* to be faster than the enemy flier, you just need to move fast enough that when they stop dead and throw out an attack, you have already moved out of the way by the time it completes, which is well below 90 speed
Why should the flying lord that you auto pick be a counter to this thing?? You are are stupid, its very expensive and so should not be countered by your basic ass lord. It should require the other side to take high AP anti lord ranged, such as cannons or hardguns. Lords already hard counter far to much in the game.
@@milkandcookiesTW I think you really made a massive mistake calling for basic flying lord choices that almost every army already abuses to be a counter to flying ranged units. I totally disagree with you, I think Lords counter far to much in the game already. If Lords could counter the Thunderbarge no one would ever take it, it would be trash. You simply needed to take a couple cannons as Khrone, and not play so poorly next time.
I'm nervous that it's gonna be "sends in three units of bats, it dies" but it looks dope and seems to function well. Send in three of these with two gyrobomber squadrons and play ride of the Valkyries
It definitely shouldn't die to bats, but they after burner speed needs to be reworked. Nothing being able to get off an attack animation feels pretty unintentional, and frustratingly unbalanced. Or maybe the after burner could be balanced by having a short duration and long cool down.
I'd say that that battle vs. Khorne justifies a rethink of close combat flying animations - units that have them need to be able to attack while on the move so that other flying enemies moving at a crawl aren't functionally unhittable.
Thunderbarges float using a combination of Dwarfen engineering and Runic inscriptions. The large, egg-shaped structure above the vessel is actually for storing enough beer to last the voyage. One could probably travel for a day straight before needing to stop for refills.
Wow. I was already thinking of putting Rune of Speed on It to have it drop some quick payloads - but is has an after burner too?? Such a cool unit. I really like the speed boosts for hefty pieces like this - they make the Chaos Dwarf trains that much more fun too.
Initial reaction: Wow that looks awesome! After watching it completely ignore any flying melee damage: Huh. That seems a pretty bonkers oversight in it's design, might want to fix that...
If you roll all the qualities of dwarfs, their resilience, peak armouring, devastating firepower and incredible accuracy into one giant behemoth and make it freaking fly, you deserve to strike fear into the hearts of not just the enemies but the enemy player, too!
As you say, balancing afterburner with a much higher DoT would work. But the real issue is that the Furies and Bloodthirster were sitting right next to its hitbox the whole time and have absolutely no moving, aerial attack animations. They have to come to a dead stop, and pull out a full swing. If they were able to do damage while within range of the Thunderbarge's hitbox, it would have gotten ganked almost immediately. Another unfortunate casualty of "flying units can't do what they're supposed to" shimmy. 😢
I’m glad I’m playing chaos dwarves right now instead of a month or so from now because the dwarves would destroy me and my military economy so quickly.
New units are often imbalanced, but the Thunderbarge feels insulting. Along with the ridiculous ammo capacity, the amount of weapons it has should have been split up between at least two variants, like the Steam Tank and Iron Daemon. Instead they just crammed it all in. Besides this feeling dumb, I can't help by think there's something cynical going on. Like they put out a total meme unit it order to garner community good will again.
Gotrek and Felix don’t even know who Thanquol is 😂 but for reals now with the Spirit of Grungni in the game the pieces are set minus Snorri Max and Thanquol.
Short of reworking how attacks in the air work, the best option might just be to put a max duration on the afterburners; using them to escape a bloodthirster is fine, but it should be to reposition and get help, not ignore it the entire match. That said, khorne might just be a big outlier. It kinda looks like massed archers will bring it down quickly
@@Freekymoho In campaign, yes, but they're capped at only 7 or 8 factionwide at the absolute max and not particularly strong. And I play multiplayer, where you cant use Sylvanian crossbows, so I'm also quite concerned about balance there, especially with facing the thunderbarge in the hands of another thinking player.
I don't think Khorne will be the only one having problems. Slaanesh, Nurgle, WoC, Norsca, Vampire Counts... Anything without good ranged fire capabilities against fliers, since your own airforce will be quite useless if it stays as it is now. Also with a good player using it, who knows how archers or ranged units with slow projectiles will even fair against it, since with constant 90 speed it can easily evade them. But i'm also a bit worried for campaign. Even if the AI is shit, like what are you going to do against late game dwarf armies with like 3-4 of those things if your flying units can't do much against even one of them, let alone several. They will just be shoot out of the sky while trying to catch them.
Great vid. On the 'Needs To Simulate Unreliability' for the Thunder Barge, that's the Skaven's whole shtick. Yet, they have no unreliability and are the sweethearts of the franchise. Don't see them finally implementing it on one unit for the Dwarves. Although, if they introduce such a mechanic, then modders can repurpose it for Skaven. That would be awesome.
@@samrester6254 Do you think that they created an entirely new engine for this game, or even made any significant changes to the previous iteration? How many mods have already been ported over from Warhammer 2 (remember the CA devs occasional helping modders out with it)? If it was possible in 2, it is possible in 3. You just have to create a custom ability, then script the ability, and apply it to the unit in the DB (oversimplified, but this is close enough). Edit: added a "they" where it belonged.
How about some actual balanced weaknesses? Like in the worst case scenario here, suiciding into two blunderbusses and a magma cannon, it still got more than 1500 value.
You can tell the massive DLC creep, the entire unit alone feels so op with its massive fire rates, on any "normal" unit or old dwarf unit the fire rate would be so much lower
I think just making the afterburners do a percentage damage like healing effects would be better balancing. Then you could still use it, but you wouldn't want to keep it on the whole time. And if the front cannons were less accurate would help.
Great video. Agree that the thunder barge appears to only need to be tweaked down a bit. I suggestion that I have is when the thunder…booster(forget the name) is turned on the barge’s dps is curtailed, like the cannons and bombs are disabled.
Looking gooood. Wonder what the modders will do with the already existing thunderbarge mod. That thing is very unique too with active broadside abilites that require you to turn for the cannons on the side to unload. Hope they will keep that and just make it a different variant.
I can only imagine the thunder barge with an airforce supporting it - holy holy. Id still like Golems to be back but under very specific conditions - you cant make em, but you can find/reactivate them. Needs specific cities, specific artifacts and some quests. BRING BACK THE GOLEMS
The reason it's OP is because air units don't get blocked like land units. A big unit on the ground, even with a lot of mass, can be blocked with cavalry and then surrounded and take a lot of damage. In the air, that doesn't really happen. Air units also don't get a speed buff when charging, so they can't catch it, even when their speed is above 90.
I'm imagining a campaign build for this. Lots of melee heroes on the ground to blob up that infantry for bombing, some brimstone gyrocopters/gyrobombers + 2 mercenary large flying units (dragons or hippogriffs or moonbirds or something alike) to defend it + some artillery to deliver damage to ranged enemies. It should be able to steamroll the campaign
Yeah I feel like you're right about the self dmg that should be way higher than this. If something tries to go melee with your thunderbarge, you should either think about preserving your barge at the cost of a huge chunk of HP or play around the fact that the enemy is going to do this and use your ground troops to shoot the hell out of whatever tries to take your barge out. A bloodthirster tries to rush your barge? Well then shoot the damn thing with 4 thunderers and 1 cannon or lose the barge is what I mean. You either go all in about keeping it alive or don't even recruit it at all.
You could break up the afterburn into two abilities with a slower version and the current damage and a second version with the current speed and increased damage. Alternativley giving the ability a start up time before the speed kicks in, or making it a acharge up ability like the norscan berserker passive, so that flyers can get in attacks before it gets away. Or CA could just fix aerial combat.
I think the issue isn't with the 90 speed itself but rather how flying units have a hard time hitting anything that's moving. The bloodthirster was able to keep up almost the entire time but all it did was sniff its ass for 5 minutes. You could give BT 30 more speed and it would still not land any hits.
I'd love a Vampire coast mod of this airship where it loses the bombs and harpoon, and instead has a bloated hold that drops "bombs" of zombie units below it. They would not be added to your army post game, but would act as any basic zombie unit in battle once they hit the ground. Letting this slow thing fly around spawning zombies slowly over time could get bad. Perhaps another take on this mechanic would just give it a regenerating aura under it in about the same radius of the bomb zone of the normal unit. This regen zone would replenish all undead armies in it. You just have an animation of dropping corpses still for flavor. I'd still like zombie pirate gunners on the deck of the ship. Maybe a single vampire as a "captain" on the ship as well.
I think Afterburner damage should ramp up over time, so the player still has the ability to use it as a quick maneuverability tool in a pinch, but leaving it on for too long is much more costly and can potentially outweigh the benefit if unregulated.
Not a theorycrafter or balance expert by any means, but one thought would be to force disable all of the Thunderbarge's attacks while afterburner is active.
@@FoogleBoogle don't pretend armor is an actually important stat in the dwarf roster, literally everything not a slayer is head to toe in armor, so everyone takes AP for them, armor is just not what is making the unit OP here, the problem is broken flying melee, and accuracy of gunners
I think what I would do for balance is: A. Increase the after burn health % dmg or make it % of max health dmg if it isn’t already. 10% sounds fair per use. B. Keep the speed as is, but give afterburn a 30-45 sec CD. The duration of the buff should be no more than 10 secs. Maybe even less. I think the idea of afterburn should be to reposition instead of endlessly kite. The health cost is thematic and gives a powerful ability a meaningful trade off. With those two changes, I think the unit is balanced even with the current dmg.
Looks like the bloodthirster cant get close enough to the barge's model to try attacking. even when he does swing his axe barge health doesn't drop despite barge having only 10 melee defence. When it isn't chasing the after burner that is.
Either doubling the self damage on the afterburn or adding a wound mechanic to it should help bring it more in line. Something like losing accuracy and/or reload speed when brought below certain health brackets. -10% to both when under 50% health and -25% to both when under 25% health for instance. But the higher afterburn self damage and the bracketing together might be too heavy handed.
Obvious issues with the afterburner speed boosts aside, I feel like the Thunderbarge itself should honestly be bigger. Haven't seen them side by side, but it honestly doesn't feel so much like a flying warship as it does a slightly bigger gyrobomber. Make it like 2 or 3 times the size, reduce the firepower of the gunners but give it more of them. As is, it's kind of in the same boat as Shaggoths, Kholek and the Dread Saurian, where they're supposed to be these monumental things, that absolutely dwarf everything else, but instead are just... kinda big. Bigger than other stuff, but not that much.
About the death animation... It looks okay but I dislike that in the end the balloon part looks intact even though it all just exploded. :] Also if you pay attention in the end of the video you can see that the front-left cannon continues to move left and right even though they're all dead inside xd like final post-death switching. :c
I'm super excited for this DLC, which is a first in a long time. In particular, as a Dwarf-lover, of course I'm LOVING the additions to their roster. They've needed a centerpiece unit for quite a while, and I think the Thunderbarge fits that bill nicely. I'm not a huge fan of the totally passive nature of it, but compared to trying to use gyrocopters it's definitely less micro. And the doomseekers have some awesome animations too. And maybe what I'm most excited for with the DLC is that SO FAR at least, nothing seems horribly overtuned (though admittedly the afterburner on the thunderbarge might need some tuning... I'll mark myself in the book lol) and no faction seems to have been beaten with the crap-stick in favor of another as CA has done so often in the past.
This is quite fascinating to give to dwarves and surprised they didn't have this sooner since game 2. But if dwarves are getting an arial uber unit, despite Empire getting a landship to help bring them up to speed with game 3 factions where more and more factions are getting large size entities, I personally feel empire could make do with light flying cavalry like gryphon riders except heavy emphasis on light, no armor, maybe have riderless variants for less, with some armor.
Looks like it could be shot down reasonably well by cannons (similar to how the magma cannon got smashed in the chaos dwarf battle ; bigger target even, so almost impossible to miss, which party makes up for the bigger health bar) ; it's probably going to be ahead of the rest of the army (or at the very least ahead from the rest of the artillery) most of the time, so easily in range for enemy arty.
lots of factions dont have artillery. and Dwarfs have cannons that are very good at sniping enemy artillery, as the Dwarf vs. Chaos dwarf battle showed. taking it down can be a very challenging task if the Thunderbarge player positions it safely near its own units
i think the solution may just be when you afterburn you can't use the big guns or fire at all or just have the afterburn damage scale with how long its turned on and have a cooldown when you turn it off
I am very excited after seeing the Dwarf rework details and footage like this. Finally the Dawi are getting some real focus and they look like they will be a ton of fun going forward!
This seems related to the issues with attacking fleeing units. If you have similar or slightly higher speed often your units just refuse to attack (especially single targets).
I think big things like Thuderbarge, dragons and giants need two things, A to be resistant to small arms fire (which can be implemented currently with 360 degree block, as that blocks only small arms fire) as its often is that low tier archers can counter lot of these units hence why giants were shit for a long time and things like these should have skin/plating so thick that its should almost ignore small arms stuff, but also big projectile stuff like cannons should have bonus dmg vs these units and if these things will be resistant to small arms then you can reduce their max hp make them much more killable by other means. And with Thunderbarge yea it should move much slower with that ability, and personally I think its dps is too much, its should be limited by the fact that it is flying unit, aka it can be equipped only with lighter guns.
afterburners should just last a set duration. like, 15 seconds or something, then a decent cool down enough to get out of dodge and back to the safety of your own lines, but not enough to ignore flyers
How about afterburn being 50 self-damage per second, but it has to be on for a minute before you can turn it off, i.e. 3000 damage a pop? That way, there could be a trade-off where the opponent tries to bait the dwarves into activating it. If they succeed, they could disengage their flyers to attack something else.
Feels like afterburn could use a 15 second duration +15 second cooldown. Or maybe the longer it's on the bigger the damage becomes? Really lean into the idea that they are pushing the engines.
Hopefully they can fix collision bugs or whatever is preventing the barge from being attacked by flyers. I love this unit and don't want it to be banned immediately
this DLC seems like a massive win for Dwarf players. so much more variety with making Slayers more interesting. Glad they didn't have to add Shard Dragons.
It should be less controllable with afterburners, like you can't turn them off for a cooldown period, and the handling is worse, and there's no brakes on it, and there's a speed debuff after it expires. Right now it doesn't feel like a zeppelin, it's too zippy and agile, even in normal mode. The firepower isn't a problem, but that maneuverability is too high.
I hope they're really careful when nerfing it, because it should still be good. Either a large increase in self damage from .3% to like 1% or decrease the speed increase. Also probably decease grudgeraker accuracy because they were sniping elites, this feel like it should be better at crowds
I need them to upgrade the tech improvement animation. Example: when you complete an upgrade it’s a sound effect of the tech you unlocked or a celebration or some picture with sound effect.
It’s a pity the spirit of grungni blew up, then again an accurate ship of that size would probably take up the whole battle map. It has to be long enough for full companies of iron breakers, slayers, crew-dwarfs and cargo, including gyrocopters, great cannons… and the cannon demon that blows it al up to all fit. And it has to all be enclosed to protect against radiation storms. I wish there’s at least a landmark where the wreck of the spirit ought to be.
Slowing afterburner to 150% or 100% and Increase damage taken to 100 - 200 seems to be the safe picks for changes. Because, let's face it, the Thunderbarge would still be pretty decent without that ability.
Love how powerful the Thunderbarge looks! ...but I feel pretty certain that the afterburner ability is gonna get nerfed, probably with an active time / cooldown like how most skills function in the game. Still, can't wait to have the TRUE DAWI AIRFORCE finally at my fingertips :D
how about the self damage of afterburner ramping up the longer you use it, and the damage increase doesn't reset if you stop it. so if you use in short bursts to reach a target or reposition it won't really damage you too much just like now, but if you try to use it to perma kite melee units, it's going to ramp up like crazy and end up killing your unit very quickly. like every 10-15 sec of total use increase the damage taken per sec. It represents the accumulated damage on the engine as you overuse it more and more, until it basically overheat so much that everything in there isstarting to fall appart very quickly.
The damage it deals is perfect. The damag it takes, now that's a problem. In general i like this i just think big powerful flyers should be able to chunk it down easily WHILE the thunderbarge deals a lot of damage. The thunderbarge will deal damage, thats what it does, the dawi are paying for it, but it should be killable while it hurts a lot.
It is very easy to kill it simply requires some AP ranged or spell casting to kill. Every faction has great options they can take to deal with it. Milk was honestly a total idiot in this video calling for Lords to be able to hard counter another unit type is extreamly unhealthy for the game. Flying Lords are already far more powerful than they need to be.
not going to lie it really would of been cool if it could like drop 4 slayers models as well, like the ones in there chilling, eating, drinking. reinforce a line or something it wont do much but would be cool. eitherway i wish undead and nurgle, and khorne daemons wouldn't have to deal with fatigue/vigor.
