A guide to playing Count Noctilus in Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires. Includes gameplay tips, early game suggestions, and other information.
Contents
Count Noctilus’ Starting Position
All credit goes to Malenthas !
Noctilus begins the game off the coast of the High Elf doughnut of Ulthuan, at war with two minor High Elf factions; Caledor and Tiranoc.
Your initial forces have three key units; a Necrofex Colossus, a unit of Depth Guard, and a Gunnery Wight hero.
The Gunnery Wight’s trait is random. Some of the traits he spawns with are pretty useless. Some are pretty good. My favorite is the “Master of the Black Arts” trait, which gives you four uses (no winds required) of Spirit Leach, and a -10% spell miscast chance for all spellcasters in the local region. Other decent traits include Perceptive (increased magic item drop chance) and Confident (increased leadership.) Honestly, however, I’m OCD enough that I generally just reload the game until I get the Master of the Black Arts trait on my Gunnery Wight.
Other than these three units, the rest of your army is made up of low tier chaff. Be sure to raise the dead and recruit more of these chaff units before you fight your first battle with the Caledor High Elves.
The First Few Turns
The first few turns are pretty straight forward. You begin the game at war with the High Elf Caledor faction (the generic Caledorians, not Imrik of the Knights of Caledor.)
Dispatching your foe is simple. You use the “raise dead” mechanic to recruit a bunch of extra troops and simply overwhelm them. (Auto-resolve works too.) Your Necrofex Colossus has a long range cannon that can pulverize enemy formations long before they can even get into range.
Taking down the Caledor army in your first battle is followed by a couple of relatively easy land battles for Vaul’s Anvil and Tor Sethai.
At this point in the game, I generally will give Vaul’s Anvil and Tor Sethai to the Dark Elf Cult of Excess faction. I do this because one of your major long-term threats is Tyrian’s Etain faction of High Elves. If you hold Vaul’s Anvil, adjacent to his capital at Lothern, he will usually declare war on you in short order. Giving Vaul’s Anvil and Tor Sethai to the Dark Elves postpones Tyrion’s declaration of war and also keeps the Cult of Excess alive for a lot longer. If Tyrion is distracted with the Cult of Excess, he’s less likely to declare war on you. Get a trade agreement in return for gifting these settlements. (You could get money too, but I like to allow them to keep their money, as it increases their resistance in their war against Tyrion.)
After taking out Caledor, you can continue up the coast and eradicate the Tiranoc High Elves.
Sacking settlements before occupying them gives you plenty of money.
Ship building is covered in more detail later in this guide, but in the beginning, it is important to build your main ship level to tier 2 (“Officer’s Cabin.) Then, as soon as you get it to tier 2 and have 2 population points, immediately build the Bombards slot that gives you access to mortars. Don’t upgrade anything else until you have the mortar building built. (Should be finished by turn 4.)
Mortars are a key to your success. At turn 4, when you’ve got the mortar building on your ship constructed, recruit 5 mortars into your army. Starting with turn 5, you will have enough firepower to obliterate your opponents. With five or six mortars in your army, the enemy is going to get beaten down before they can close with you. Use your chaff units to slow down the enemy’s advance and give your mortars time to do their work. For sieges, first take out the enemy towers, then beat down the enemy with a constant, punishing mortar bombardment. Finally, go in with your chaff troops and finish them off.
Capturing two more settlements (Whitepeak and Tor Anroc) finishes off the Tiranoc faction. By turn seven or eight, you should have eliminated both of these enemies.
Now, you have to decide what to do next. What sort of campaign do you want to play? You can stay and fight the High Elves in Ulthuan. You can sail the seas, establishing Pirate Coves and pillaging. Noctilus is fun because you can do pretty much anything you want in the giant Immortal Empires sandbox.
Personally, my favorite play style is roaming the seas, raiding, questing, collecting defeat traits from fighting legendary lords, and just generally being a pirate. When doing this, I will typically give Avathir, Whitepeak, and Tor Anroc to the Dark Elf Scourge of Khaine faction in return for a defensive alliance. Getting a defensive alliance with the Scourge of Khaine allows you to build an outpost in the Shrine of Khaine, which will eventually give you access to allied recruitment of Shades. Shades are a missile infantry unit that has the Stalk capability, and they make a great addition to your army.
You can also take out the High Elves and conquer Ulthuan. If the campaign goes well, you can get this done pretty early. Here’s a snapshot of the High Elf doughnut on turn 24: Chaos on the outside, with a delicious Vampirate center.
Ship Building
Ship building is the mechanic that allows you to sail the seas, untethered to a home base. You can recruit troops directly from your ship.
The very first technology that I research is the Ship’s Carpenter. This tech provides an ancillary which halves the cost of ship building when equipped. This will save you a lot of money. Transfer it between your various admirals when building ship equipment.
As mentioned above, the most important ship building slot is the one that allows you to build mortars. Once you’ve got this one, then I like to focus on the anchor line that promotes growth. The lower tier military recruitment slots provide unit recruitment that are not of any higher quality than the units you can commonly recruit with the Raise Dead mechanic, so I tend to focus on growth and the ship structure and unique lines before I bother building the recruitment slots.
Leveling Up Noctilus
Noctilus has a bunch of really good choices when it comes to leveling up.
After getting Route Marcher for the extra campaign movement range, I tend to work on getting Pit of Shades and Winds of Death as quickly as possible. These two spells are just so good at dealing with large mobs of enemies that when you have them, Noctilus becomes much more effective in battle.
His unique line is also very good, particularly Of the Von Carstien Line, which provides Noctilus with regeneration.
Technology Research
Some of my favorite technologies to research are:
Ship’s Carpenter
Cuts the cost of ship building by half. This should be the first thing you research.
Magazine
Increases ammunition for your artillery
Spell Of The Necromancer’s Apprentice
20% ward save makes Noctilus into a very tanky pirate.
Reinforced Carcasses
Physical resistance for your Necrofex Colossusi
Centuries In Command
+5 recruit rank for your Lords. Combine this with the +1 recruit rank for each Pirate’s Rest cove building you build and you can recruit Lords at very high levels.
Supernatural Regeneration
+10% Casualty replenisment
The Legendary Admirals are also important as well. I tend to wait to get the Legendary Admirals until I can recruit them at at least level 10 or so.
Noctilus Army Building and Battle Tactics
Count Noctilus’ reduction in cost for Necrofex Colossus units make it possible to create an all-Necrofex doom stack.
However, I find it most versatile to have a mix of units.
Early game, my armies tend to consist of Mortars (five or six of them) supplemented with five or six Zombie Pirate Gunnery Mobs with handguns. These handgunners have decent range and can tear up incoming enemies. The rest of the army tends to be chaff units (Zombie Pirate Deckhands Mobs) whose job is to pin down the enemy and allow the artillery and gunners to do their work.
As you progress in the game, you will want to upgrade your handgunners to Deck Gunners. Deck Gunners have better damage and range. They are quite fragile however, so be extra sure to keep them out of melee.
Depth Guard received a significant buff in the latest patch, and they are now very good high-tier infantry. When I can, I like to have three or four in my army. The pole armed variety is particularly good at dealing with monsters and other large units.
The Necrofex Colossus is a good unit. However, it is described as an “artillery monster” and this is an accurate description. It is best used as mobile artillery, fighting at range. The Necrofex is not particularly durable or “tanky” as monsters go, and if it gets pinned down in melee combat or gets focused on by missile troops, it will get damaged and killed rather quickly. I like to have other units provide a screen for my Necrofexes to keep them out of close combat.
If you get defensive alliances with Dark Elves, you will be able to recruit Shades. These are terrific units, as they are good archers, are decent in melee, and they stalk. The upgraded greatsword variants are even better. Other good Dark Elf units include the Karibdyss monster, which is very tanky. A defensive alliance with Slanesh (also easy to get) will provide access to some very good cavalry (Chaos Knights.) Noctilus does not otherwise have access to cavalry, so this can fill a gap in the army unit roster.
Here’s a typical mid/late game army:
Here’s Noctilus mid/late game: (Noctilus is so tanky and dangerous by this point that a smaller army is viable.)
Unique Vampire Coast Items
The Vampire Coast has some unique items, some of which are very powerful.
Perhaps the best non-unique sword in the game is Massa Moone’s Pride. In Warhammer 2, this was available to all factions and races. In Warhammer 3, however, it appears to be limited to the Vampire Coast.
Black Buckthorn’s Treasure Map gives vanguard deployment and a big boost to campaign movement range. It’s an Enchanted item.
A very powerful ancillary item that can be assigned to any unit in an army is the War Standard of the Corpse Surgeon. It imbues the holder with regeneration. Giving it to a large monster, like a Necrofex Colossus or Rotting Leviathan makes that unit much more durable.
Lords and Heroes
The Legendary Admirals all have access to shipbuilding and are immortal from the start.
I don’t bother recruiting other Lords except in an emergency situation where I need to quickly defend a settlement.
The Gunnery Wight and the Vampire Fleet Captains are the two most useful Heroes. The Gunnery Wight provides extra ammunition for your artillery/missile units and also provides lots of useful buffs for anything that shoots. The Vampire Fleet Captain is a versatile spell caster. I generally only recruit Captains with either the Lore of the Deeps, or the Lore of Vampires. I try to have both a Deeps and Vampire caster in each army. Very few things in the game are more satisfying than casting a well placed “Vangheist’s Revenge” spell on a densely packed enemy mob.
I don’t find the Mourngul Haunter to be necessary. Because it can stalk, it can be useful for sneaking up on enemy artillery or archers. However, I generally only use Mourngul Haunters for travelling around the map looking for buried treasure and scouting ahead of an army.
A true guide to Noctilus could essentially be distilled down to “simply survive until you can build a necrofex doomstack and faceroll the rest of the game”
Even on legendary difficulty, this guide’s amount of nuance is unnecessary for one of the easiest, most straight-forward lords in the game.
That said, nice effort post.
In Warhammer 3, it takes quite a bit longer to get to a Necrofex doomstack than it did in WH2.
(And there’s a lot you can do that’s pretty fun before you get to doomstack status.)