Editing Total War: Warhammer/Tactics (section)

==Basics==
In many ways, Warhammer plays like your standard Total War game. It features real time battles with an army of roughly 20 units max on each side. There will be at least two armies on the field and whoever is able to completely shatter the other side first wins.

'''Campaign Vs multiplayer'''-  the balance between the two is basically entirely different, in campaign weaker/cheaper units often become obsolete and replaced by entirely elite armies or even just spamming the most powerful units you can recruit in one army (i.e. Doomstacking), where as in multiplayer cost efficiency and number of bodies is often king, You commonly have only a few elite units supported by cheaper troops (much more like the OG Tabletop in fact). The best units, spell's, and strategies are different for each as well. The AI is of course usually dumber than the average player but is also capable of annoyingly fast micro sometimes, so how hard the AI is to fight depends a lot on what faction your fighting and the army comp. Also, despite 90% of the player base either not playing multiplayer or having played less than 10 matches ever, Multiplayer is often used to balance single player, this pisses off the single players and there is much complaining back and forth. why they don't just use separately balanced rosters for multiplayer is beyond me. 

'''Difficulty setting''': the difficulty of campaign and battle has some weird uneven effects on game balance, notoriously difficulty greatly buffs melee stats and leadership for the AI and makes it react faster than humans to spells (since the AI instantly sees all markers) but doesn't make them any more resilient to missiles or artillery. Meaning melee heavy factions are much more impacted by difficulty than ranged focused ones. This doesn't mean you cant win of course but many high difficulty play styles are based around spamming powerful AP ranged units or artillery to do the killing for you. Alternatively Doomstacking your factions strongest monster while abusing vortex spells (while units blob around your monsters) or healing is another go to strategy. On the campaign difficulty side you take big public order penalties which is much more punishing for some factions than others. that's not to say you shouldn't try the higher difficulties but be aware of the changes in balance as a result. Enemy units  will be extremely unlikely to rout on the highest difficulty for example so don't rely on mass routs. 

'''Auto resolve'''- the much hated "I don't feel like taking 20 min manually fighting everything" button has very wonky balance.  basically certain unit types dominate it. Artillery and missile units are treated as getting to shoot their full ammo in calculations so the most important stats are Ammunition, missile strength, and missile AP. For melee units high health, armor, and charge bonus seem to perform the best. Single entities, chariots, and light cavalry tend to do terribly in auto resolve, and will take tons of damage. Order of unit preference for an auto resolve army is high strength artillery, high strength missiles, and then tough high armor and health melee infantry or Heavy Cav. If you use mostly missile units  and few frontline units then the melee units will take all the casualties while the missiles take none, so you can sometimes use cheap frontline units as disposable screens and re-recruit them after each fight. Some factions lack good artillery, ranged units, or heavily armored infantry so are much worse in auto resolve. Poor tomb kings and Slaanesh will really feel the pain i.e. auto resolve is hugely important even if you don't use it yourself, because auto resolve is how every AI vs AI fight is handled so factions that do well in auto resolve tend to do VERY well in campaign, whereas factions that auto resolve poorly usually get wiped out fast. though it depends who their neighbors are of course. 

Each army has it's own collection of Infantry, Missile troops, Cavalry, Artillery and Monsters to play with, each offering a different play style. For instance, Dwarfs offer a defensive solitary play style focused around heavily armored infantry and strong missiles where as the Beastmen are an aggressive hit and run faction designed to get in, hit the enemy and break leadership, then get away before the enemy can counterattack. The asymmetrical play style of the factions is a massive part of the appeal.

The battle maps also play a huge role in how battle play out. Some maps are heavily forested, meaning missile heavy armies may struggle due to increased cover for the enemy. On the flip side, some maps have a lot of water, debuffing units unless they have the aquatic trait. It is smart to take a look at your terrains before you plan how you're gonna win.

If you play ranked multiplayer, there will be a limit to how many of a certain kind of unit you can bring, mainly to stop you from missile kiting your enemies to death with a mass horse archer spam. As such, focusing on what you might need for the match up is key.