So I've been playing this for a while now, I started the Vampire campaign and I'm strength rank 1. I guess that means I'm doing ok. I haven't lost a battle were I'm on even footing in terms of power but I don't actually know really what I'm doing. I figured there has to be some Total War veterans here so I'm wondering, how is the battle system constructed in general? Are there hardcounters or is it just the bigger number tends to win? Do I gain anything from trying to circle units around for a surround? I realize a specific unit has specific strengths, but I can't tell in a battle if it makes a difference.

Even though I'm winning the battle I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. I basically try to get every single unit to engage but often it ends up being a relatively small front line attacking with a ton of guys standing behind doing (seemingly) nothing. Is the entire formation treated as a single entity or does it take every single soldier/zombie/whatever into account?

I am by no means a Total War expert but I've been dabbling in the series long enough to think I have some answers to some of your questions. The core rock-paper-scissors counter system of Total War has always been that Ranged Units beat Infantry units (as long as they keep their distance), Cavalry Units beat Ranged units, Spearmen beat Cavalry Units and Infantry Units beat Spearmen. Spearmen are a hard counter to cavalry units, as are cavalry units to ranged but ranged units often only soften up infantry units to allow other infantry units to gain an advantage.

Flanking matters a lot which is mostly what cavalry are for since they are way faster. Often a good strategy is to pin an infantry unit down with another infantry unity and then hit them from the side with heavy cavalry. Surrounding them with other infantry units can also help because getting flanked decreases their morale faster. Often in Total War your not trying to outright slaughter every unit your trying to lower their morale bar until they run. Having a lord or a hero nearby gives a leadership bonus which reduces the speed that morale declines, losing a lord can have a huge effect on morale. Individual soldiers do really matter that much, you can almost think of them as a status indicator for the unit's health. By holding down the right mouse button can you drag the formation to adjust the shape of the unit to decide if you want to cover more ground but be more susceptible to cavalry attacks.

Now the thing with Total War Warhammer is that a lot of these rules get shaken up quite a bit. So the Dwarfs don't have cavalry units but to make up for this their expensive units are a lot tougher. They can still use infantry to flank but they are slow and you can't chase anything. Their main ranged unit, the Quarrelers, are interesting because unlike other ranged units they are shielded and are a decent infantry unit in a pinch. There is a little button on the lower left of the unit portrait that opens a description for each unit and this shows a bunch of benefits and flaws which is useful.

Since you are playing the Vampire Counts I don't think your units actually have morale, your front-line infantry units are cheap and weak but you have some strong elite units and very early flying units which allow you to easily flank.I think you have some fear bonuses to make it easier to drain your opponent's morale.

The thing with Total War is that its more of a simulation based approach to battle than say Starcraft where you are giving direct orders to a unit to move and attack. In Total War you are giving that unit a goal but they may be blocked from that goal because they are being pinned down, their morale might be breaking, they might be winded. The Total War combat can be a bit unruly, its more about overall battlefield strategy than individual battles. You don't want to commit all your units to one skirmish because they all can't physically reach the opponent and ranged units attempting to fire at an opponent that is locked in combat with your unit will result in friendly fire against your unit.

Don't worry too much if it feels like your steadily winning fights even if you don't feel like your doing too much commanding. It is really obvious when your doing something wrong and things start going south so if your units are not dead or scattered your doing all right.

@cybexx: My fodder units don't seem to have morale per sé, but they do have "binding" which seem to do the same thing mechanically. The only reason I've seen binding go down drastically is when the commanding lord dies which has only happened when I tried fighting an overwhelming force just to see what happened.

On paper everything you say seem obvious, though in battle I feel like I can't do much once a unit is engaging the enemy. Nevermind the fact all units become a massive clusterfuck, but I have a hard time moving units around. I've tried doing some fancy flanking maneuvers with my mounted cavalry, but I can't tell if it makes a difference or not. I guess if the game tells me I had a "decisive victory" I should just soldier on regardless of my feelings about the fight.

Yeah I think binding only deteriorates when the lord falls or the battle is on non-corrupt ground. Morale deteriorates when a unit takes losses, they take a flanking attack or are hit by an effect like fear.

You can tell if the flanking maneuver worked if there is a sudden drop in the unit's morale. If their flag starts flashing white they are about to run. But yeah it can feel like a clusterfuck a lot of the time.

@plasmaduck: I am no Total War expert myself, but I have played a lot of them (Both Shogun, both Rome and Empire). I think I only beat a campaign in the first Shogun though, as I had more patience and time with one game back then. Mostly because I couldn't afford that many games.
Anyway, Cybexx' post is great. I am playing as the Dwarves and have tried to use the same tactics I eventually learned in the other games, although a bit modified as I don't have any fast troops yet. Lacking cavalry is tough when the enemy has several Goblin archer platoons. I have won every battle where I am either the superior force or we are roughly equal. But I have also won a few where I am quite outnumbered. Some of that is luck, like the enemy having next to no archers, but some of it is strategy.

Having archers soften up the charging enemy, trying to flank with you infantry or cavalry if you have it once the enemy is locked into battle, make sure your infantry don't follow faster archery troops too far etc. Once your troops are engaged in melee combat it's not easy to move them about. Better to position them in a way you are comfortable with before the actual fighting starts. Because fighting is a clusterfuck.

If you are not sure what you are doing or if what you are doing is "right", I'd do some skirmish battles. Not sure how they work in Warhammer, but I saw the option. I used to play around with that, test out various army compositions, tactics and formations.

@plasmaduck: Flanking makes a huge difference if you're doing it right, you can get singular shock cavalry units to take out over 6-7 times their unit count just by charging and disengaging correctly. Also with your cavalry sometimes it's not always the best option to be attacking with them. You can beat armies that well outnumber you if you properly peel half of the oppositions army away with Cavalry, and even better set up some missile units to be plinking away at the units in Skirmish mode while your cavalry is baiting them around.

As for making certain maneuvers easier try using Shift + Right Click Drag, you can draw a path for the units you have selected to follow it allows for easier automatic flanking. Oh yea and press P to pause the game and issue commands if you're a bit overwhelmed with selecting and commanding in real time.

Generally regardless of faction you want a few units on each flank (being cavalry, hard-hitting lightly armored units, or regular infantry) to guard your flanks. If they don't get engaged by the enemy cavalry you can then circle around and hit the enemy flanks with them to deal major damage to their units and their morale. As Vampire Counts, you will probably have the more numerous and expendable skeleton units bog down enemy melee units long enough for your more expensive units to come around the flank to deal the death blow. The Vampire Counts also don't have any ranged units, so you might also want to embed some hero units like vampires or banshees into your armies to help out.

Most enemy units can't really withstand multiple charges to their rear and will start running or get wiped out. Then you can take those units that are now freed up and roll over the enemy flanks to victory. It also helps to drag each of your units to cover as much area as possible so that more of the unit can engage with the enemy rather than having them clumped up where only a few in the front ranks can fight.

Once you start getting a stronger economy you can afford units that can outright win most melees by themselves without any assistance from other flanking units, but until then the 'hammer and anvil' tactics are going to be your bread and butter for winning harder battles. There will come a point where the harder-to-kill Chaos doomstacks or Empire doomstacks will come to fight you in the mid-game, and you need to either have units with higher experience ranks or superior tactics to fight those tougher battles.

So I played a five hour grind session of 2v2 skirmishes with a couple of friends, with two who're about as inept as me and one who's a fucking savant at strategy games (top 8 master in Starcraft 2 WoL). We played so many games, shifting teams every time. I swear that was the best multiplayer experience I've had since we LAN'ed up and played UT and Painkiller. I learned so much, the value of cavalry, the hardiness of dwarves, the effectiveness of artillery hidden behind 10K of meatshield, the strength of single-target spells and surgical strikes against ill-prepared lords, and how insanely badass Chosen of Chaos are (and how much I hate Pegasus knights). I also learned that 40K worth of dwarven gyros and chaos hellcannons get utterly destroyed by 40k worth of dragon ogres and gobbo doom divers.

Man we had the most epic battle on a dwarven story-map, with 2x dwarf VS chaos/vampire, the closest fight I've ever seen in a strategy game. Holy crap the work those chaos knights did. If it weren't for that one group of Irondrakes catching my buddies chaos knights in a bad position when setting up a crucial flank, we would've won... Shiet, the damage my hexwraiths did to our enemies artillery line...

All the while we were in a group skype call, shouting tactical information between eachother. Like "the central line is about to crumble! My lord is on the way!", "OH MY FUCKING GOD I've got pegasi chasing me!!!" or "What in the actual fucking fuck are you doing?! Get your damn thunderes into position!".

Yeah we might not have been the most eloquent field commanders in the world, but holy fuck we had fun. And I learned a ton, so much that I started the vampire and dwarven campaigns on hard, both are going great!

@plasmaduck: The dwarven gyros are pretty terrible at this time as the ai on them is mostly broken, and even if you constantly micro them to fire more often, their damage output is pretty underwhelming. If you haven't used the ironbreakers yet, I highly recommend them asap as they're so good and fun to watch. They can also throw their explosive charges over units in front of them, so you can have thunderers up front and ironbreakers right behind them to have a literal line of awesome explosions vaporize charging enemy units.

Glad you're having fun with the battle system. If you haven't tried out the Empire campaign, I highly recommend it as it feels completely different. Not only do you have new units, but diplomacy is much more important with so many quarreling human factions, and lots of unexpected things happen. Plus having some actual cavalry feels really nice after playing through a long campaign of dwarves, who although awesomely in their own way don't exactly have any exciting units to micro.

@halcyontwilight: Yeah my savant friend said he prefers Empire, since they're incredibly versatile. I've always hated them though, ever since I started the tabletop hobby 10 years ago, simply because I thought they looked so frumpy and silly. Maybe there's some merit to order, chivalry and all that jazz. Right now I'm having a blast with the Dwarves though, and I feel an urge to retry the Chaos campaign now that I know the strengths of their lategame units. Man, as someone with little experience of Total War but a long standing interest in Warhammer, this game is just fantastic.

While it hardly matters for simply playing the campaign vs AI, Empire is actually quite broken in the current version of the game.