So was anybody going to tell me about getting captives by killing routed enemies or..?
I guess this is the TW series in a nutshell when it comes to informing the player, but still.
Given that so many factions in TW Warhammer use captives for various campaign mechanics that can widely inform your gameplay, I was surprised to find that this doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere in the second or third game. If it is mentioned, it is faction-specific or I overlooked it.
I don't know if killing routed enemies *prior* to the battle being decided will take them captive, but I know what I'm about to find out.
Just for the context here: I started a Nurgle campaign and sniped the lord with my flies/Kugath while surrounding the ogres and breaking them. I left the gnoblars entirely alone since I wanted to capture them and figured they'd break instantly if the ogre bulls and lord were dead/routed.
They did indeed rout and I ended combat immediately, thinking some would end up as captives. I got almost no captives whatsoever, which gave me only 8 infections. Not ideal. I restarted and ran the battle again since I wanted to see how to maximize captives. This time I recruited some furies and toads since I knew I'd be chasing enemies. I performed the exact same strategy except after the gnoblars broke I blew them to pieces with spells and ran them down. 154 captives this time resulting in 77 infections.
This knowledge will change my gameplay drastically for certain factions and engagements. I have yet to unravel exactly how replenishment from captives works as well as ransoming, but I'll figure these out too and I'll then have meaningful decisions to make when fighting an army. Do I run down lords, SEMs, and high value targets? Or mulch chaff? Do I value replenishment/income or do I want to focus on weakening their forces for a follow-up fight (if necessary)? Those decisions will also depend on things like the quality of my troops and theirs. If they have a lot of chaff to capture and I have high value units that need the replenishment, that may be a better option as they'd be healthier for the follow-up fight and maybe even activate some passives (ex HE martial prowess).
But then again, if income/replenishment are based on the value of the captives, that changes everything (and makes the math a little harder).
I guess I'm just kind of rambling by this point but it's a shame I've got triple digit hours in TWWH2 and soon will have that many in 3 and am only just figuring this out. If I aggregate some info here, maybe anybody else who is curious about these mechanics may be able to find it by Googling.
**TL;DR:**
* Killing routed enemies after the battle is decided (army losses/end battle button pops up) will capture them. This affects faction-specific post-battle options. * Ransoming captives is not based on captive count or victory type. It is based on the enemy army value. Unsure if enemy army fleeing or being destroyed entirely affects the income gained here.
**The below hypotheses are based purely on multiple ARs/runs of Kugath's first fight as of right now. The results of the fight (income/exp) may be scripted in some capacity so I will need to do more tests to verify**
* Auto-resolve rewards the same income/experience on both close and decisive victories (pyrrhic/heroic untested; can you even get heroic auto-resolve?). This is true regardless of army size/composition. * Experience gain from combat is the same by auto-resolve or by manually playing on close/decisive victories (pyrrhic/heroic untested). This is true regardless of army size/composition. * Nurgle receives half as many infections as they take captives when choosing that post-battle option
When I've finished testing or if others share info, I'll edit with information about
* If you can capture routed enemies before the battle is decided * If killing an enemy that is terrified captures it (not a big deal but I'm still curious) * If replenishment is based on # of captives or gold-value of captives * May also try to reason out some calculations for faction-specific post-battle options like infections for Nurgle, Food for Skaven, etc. Are these based on number or value? How do they scale with number/value? Etc. That's a lot more involved than the above questions though.