Hello!

As Arbaal is the only piece of all the Khorne's new additions that hasn't be fully revealed yet. I was wondering how the forumites would picture his unique mechanics.

Arbaal is FLC, so it probably won't be as flashy as the cape of skulls but it could still be something interesting nonetheless, especially since we're talking about the 100th legendary lord!

I'm a Total War player first and foremost, not a lore guy, so I cannot give my two cents here. I heard some of you guys talking about him losing his campaign or turning into a spawn as soon as he would loose a battle.

As I said, I cannot really participate but hopefully, this will open an interesting conversation. Looking forward to read your ideas.

Some sort of negative mechanic for losing a battle would be fun. But i dont know of CA will go the whole hog.

some negative effects when you lose and retreat, bossily a bar to fill up similar to Epidemius. 

Arbaal's campaigns are always in iron man mode and the moment you lose with him you lose the campaign and your save file is deleted.

That's the only way to depict his frankly rather stupid gimmick  in an accurate way.

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
Arbaal's campaigns are always in iron man mode and the moment you lose with him you lose the campaign and your save file is deleted.

That would be a meaningless feature. How often do you lose battles with your main army?

Some variation of sad and underwhelming, with a bad touch of character's theme.

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SerPus#7395 wrote:

hat would be a meaningless feature. How often do you lose battles with your main army?

Guess one more nail in the coffin' of the "Undefeated" since that's true for all player characters then.

But should CA ever wake up and remember that games without stakes are boring, this might actually be a more meaningful downside.

something I’ve pondered that’s probably unlikely but would represent his character well is making him a sort of legacy character. So whoever has been blessed with the Hound and Destroyer of Khorne is ‘Arbaal’.

Then you have a campaign mechanism where if any lord loses or flees in a battle then they get turned into a spawn (or bloodbeast perhaps). This includes Arbaal himself, mechanically making him ‘wounded’.

Finally you have a mechanism where if Arbaal is ‘wounded’ then next time a mortal lord wins a battle they can get promoted to Arbaal.

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Lord_Zarkov#7252 wrote:

something I’ve pondered that’s probably unlikely but would represent his character well is making him a sort of legacy character. So whoever has been blessed with the Hound and Destroyer of Khorne is ‘Arbaal’.

Then you have a campaign mechanism where if any lord loses or flees in a battle then they get turned into a spawn (or bloodbeast perhaps). This includes Arbaal himself, mechanically making him ‘wounded’.

Finally you have a mechanism where if Arbaal is ‘wounded’ then next time a mortal lord wins a battle they can get promoted to Arbaal.

Uhh I wouldn’t like that all. Would completely kill Arbaal as an actual character and just make him this generic gimmick. 

Maybe they will do something like Sun Ce's mechanic from three kingdoms who had a 'reckless luck' bar which he had to fill out by making constant achievements like conquering important places, dueling other commanders. Should the bar ever drop to zero he dies.

Not sure if I would want that nessicarily, I think I'm more interested in where they might decide to start him.

I don`t think Khorne would spawnfy such a fun tool  for a single loss, he might have strong factional debuffs from losing battles, I am more interested how his skill line will he differ from skarbrand and skulltaker.

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Lord_Zarkov#7252 wrote:

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dogoska#1535 wrote:

I don`t think Khorne would spawnfy such a fun tool  for a single loss, he might have strong factional debuffs from losing battles, I am more interested how his skill line will he differ from skarbrand and skulltaker.

that was his gimmick in TT. If he ever fled he turned into a chaos spawn

I think it’s a bit loose in terms of what that would look like in the context of a campaign. In the lore, Arbaal did participate in the battle of Praag which Chaos ultimately lost but Arbaal didn’t get spawnified.

So he can take part in a losing battle and survive as long as he wasn’t running away I guess? Guess Khorne distinguishes between a tactical retreat and losing/fleeing.

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Passthechips#4366 wrote:

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Lord_Zarkov#7252 wrote:

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dogoska#1535 wrote:

I don`t think Khorne would spawnfy such a fun tool  for a single loss, he might have strong factional debuffs from losing battles, I am more interested how his skill line will he differ from skarbrand and skulltaker.

that was his gimmick in TT. If he ever fled he turned into a chaos spawn

I think it’s a bit loose in terms of what that would look like in the context of a campaign. In the lore, Arbaal did participate in the battle of Praag which Chaos ultimately lost but Arbaal didn’t get spawnified.

So he can take part in a losing battle and survive as long as he wasn’t running away I guess? Guess Khorne distinguishes between a tactical retreat and losing/fleeing.

Maybe he will be unbreakble

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dogoska#1535 wrote:

I don`t think Khorne would spawnfy such a fun tool  for a single loss, he might have strong factional debuffs from losing battles, I am more interested how his skill line will he differ from skarbrand and skulltaker.

Khorne isn't very consistent with how he treats his followers. If Arbaal ever loses, he becomes a chaos spawn, if Skaar loses, he gets brought back, but a little less sane, if Valkia loses, she just gets brought back the exact same as before.

Maybe you get some small permanent bonuses each time you defeat a lord and take a settlement the first time with Arbaal, but when you get defeated, you lose all of the bonuses and have to start over with the bonuses. The bonuses you get can either just affect Arbaal and his army, be factionwide, or a bit of both. You shouldn’t be able to farm the same lord (not just LLs, but any lord) or the same settlement over and over. 

Each time you get a bonus, you build onto those bonuses after defeating each lord or taking each settlement (occupying, sacking, razing, etc.) for the first time. It should only matter with Arbaal; other lords in your faction won’t contribute to the bonuses by winning, but they won’t reset the bonuses or otherwise detract from them by losing, either. 

If Arbaal is ever defeated, the bonuses are reset back to 0 and you have to start over with building up the bonuses. However, if you do get defeated, then you can defeat the same lords and take the same settlements you’ve taken before in order to build up the bonuses this time around. 

This might be trickier for CA to implement, but in order to get around save scumming, it affects the previous save files in the campaign, too. So if you lose in an Arbaal campaign, the previous save files also have their bonuses reset to 0. That way, you can’t just reload an earlier save file after losing just to avoid losing in the earlier save file and get around the consequences of losing. The earlier save files shouldn’t be deleted just because Arbaal loses a battle, but the bonuses in them should be reset back to 0, too.

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erhartm91#4908 wrote:

Maybe you get some small permanent bonuses each time you defeat a lord and take a settlement the first time with Arbaal, but when you get defeated, you lose all of the bonuses and have to start over with the bonuses. The bonuses you get can either just affect Arbaal and his army, be factionwide, or a bit of both. You shouldn’t be able to farm the same lord (not just LLs, but any lord) or the same settlement over and over. 

Each time you get a bonus, you build onto those bonuses after defeating each lord or taking each settlement (occupying, sacking, razing, etc.) for the first time. It should only matter with Arbaal; other lords in your faction won’t contribute to the bonuses by winning, but they won’t reset the bonuses or otherwise detract from them by losing, either. 

If Arbaal is ever defeated, the bonuses are reset back to 0 and you have to start over with building up the bonuses. However, if you do get defeated, then you can defeat the same lords and take the same settlements you’ve taken before in order to build up the bonuses this time around. 

This might be trickier for CA to implement, but in order to get around save scumming, it affects the previous save files in the campaign, too. So if you lose in an Arbaal campaign, the previous save files also have their bonuses reset to 0. That way, you can’t just reload an earlier save file after losing just to avoid losing in the earlier save file and get around the consequences of losing. The earlier save files shouldn’t be deleted just because Arbaal loses a battle, but the bonuses in them should be reset back to 0, too.

Something like this minus the anti save scumming deal is what I expect, stacking buffs for each victory. It would be nice if defeat imparted a meaningful malus but I don't see CA doing it. 

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erhartm91#4908 wrote:

Maybe you get some small permanent bonuses each time you defeat a lord and take a settlement the first time with Arbaal, but when you get defeated, you lose all of the bonuses and have to start over with the bonuses. The bonuses you get can either just affect Arbaal and his army, be factionwide, or a bit of both. You shouldn’t be able to farm the same lord (not just LLs, but any lord) or the same settlement over and over. 

Each time you get a bonus, you build onto those bonuses after defeating each lord or taking each settlement (occupying, sacking, razing, etc.) for the first time. It should only matter with Arbaal; other lords in your faction won’t contribute to the bonuses by winning, but they won’t reset the bonuses or otherwise detract from them by losing, either. 

If Arbaal is ever defeated, the bonuses are reset back to 0 and you have to start over with building up the bonuses. However, if you do get defeated, then you can defeat the same lords and take the same settlements you’ve taken before in order to build up the bonuses this time around. 

This might be trickier for CA to implement, but in order to get around save scumming, it affects the previous save files in the campaign, too. So if you lose in an Arbaal campaign, the previous save files also have their bonuses reset to 0. That way, you can’t just reload an earlier save file after losing just to avoid losing in the earlier save file and get around the consequences of losing. The earlier save files shouldn’t be deleted just because Arbaal loses a battle, but the bonuses in them should be reset back to 0, too.

Seem to be in line with epidemius where his campaing mechanic is more passive rather than active. Hopefully the bonuses are different enough from skarbrand maximum damage blender and skull stacking from skulltaker.

Him turning chaos spawn would be nice, not only because it's loreful, but also because playing as a chaos spawn would something very new lol. I can just imagine playing a campaign like that tbh.

As for the actual features, I am not sure, but probably all the stuff resembling the lore.