Just finished (lost) my first campaign as Nagash: first thoughts / review
Firstly, really enjoyed it. It was hard, it made me think, but it wasn't a completely brutal pile-on - more like a chess match of putting interlocking pieces into the right combinations to pull off cool moves. I played on VH/VH as it was described as a power fantasy, but I found that wasn't quite accurate.
The chaos end times kicked off at turn 87, in line with whatever the defaults were. By turn 117 It was obvious I'd lost the game. Archaon was just razing everything. Vampires controlled most of everything and then Archaon wiped most of that. I was only able to take out two of the invading armies, leaving him on 98% ward save (lol).
It was nice to legitimately lose a campaign because I couldn't get good enough rather than just because I got bored.
**Positives:**
(Listed above - it's a thoughtful campaign, lot of optionality, quite clever in how you can do a lot of things). I made it to Nagashizzar for the first time ever as well, never done that as anyone except Ghorst before.
**Negatives:**
It has a really slow ramp. I kind of liked that but the power curve ramped up way slower than any other faction. Even by turn 110 I was extremely limited on dark magic, making 800 a turn, and only having a max of \~10 or so on most unit types. Unlike when playing as e.g. vampire counts or vampirates (pre 9.0) I only had one doomstack - nagash - and that one never really felt as powerful as I wanted it to be.
It was basically just like 5-6 heroes, some tomb guard, some morghasts, two of those soul crate things and that's about it.
They never really felt that strong, and i couldn't work out whether I was supposed to be doing the vampirates corpse blob thing, or the vampirates gun line, or the tomb king combined arms. It's also tricky to keep track of what buildings to build where based on the armies you want.
Lastly, a lot of the legendary buildings didn't feel powerful enough and it didn't feel like there were enough economic options. Not that there necessarily should be economic options - it's a destroy the world campaign after all - but it also felt like there weren't a lot of combat options either.
A lot of the playstyles that the VC lords support (e.g. regenerating hexwraiths, zombies with 20% phys res etc) felt off the table as well - which is fine, you're supposed to get mortarchs - but since you can't get Ghorst, there's just no real good zombie blob option at all, which feels like a shame.
Also, NO SIGILS. Good god. Again I understand the intent here of having enough power scope to conquer the whole world, but it wasn't until turn 110 that I got enough sigils to get even 1-2 of the options I wanted (morghasts and the LL techs). I was a looooooooooooong way from getting to Tier 3 on the tech tree. Which again is fine but it just feels like the DLC's been scoped for a 200 turn campaign and by turn 100, not enough of your stuff has come online.
**Recommend?**
Yeah definitely. I want to play it again but not until I figure out how not to get wiped out after 110 turns of pretty intricate work getting everything set up. Some of the balance feels a little bit out of whack - I reckon that's going to be a target for the first balance patch in a couple of weeks.
In the interim I'm going to play a little palate-cleanser (Franz) and then try again. But I did genuinely really enjoy it and I want to try again and get more of the mortarchs.
Keen to hear how everyone else has been finding it!