So yesterday I had done a couple of turns of the Chaos campaign thinking I was going to do that, but today I decided to try my hand at Very Hard instead and didn't feel like doing it with Chaos as it sounds annoying so went Dwarfs. Finished it after playing the entire day(or well almost finished it I need to pass a bunch of turns for confederation debuff to wear off and get all the western dwarfs realms under my control).
It started really bad, there were orcs everywhere raiding me constantly and I basically had to turtle in the first province for like 10turns with grudges piling up, then I had to raise a second small army to serve as garrison to not leave stuff undefended, and I was negative on income for a few turns. Eventually got out and sacked all the orcs stuff though plus all the sweet grudge money when I killed them all, and then they starting fighting themselves cause they're dumb as hell and I eliminated Greenskins fairly early, like turn 40 or so. After that I just played passively just working on all the economy stuff. Then as I finished unifying all the southern area under my control by confederating the last dwarven clan in the area, the chaos event started, at turn 79(which is way early).
Then I found out there was still one orc stack running around the south somehow even though he didn't have a settlement in the past like 20turns and at the same time 4 marauder stacks spawned in the south. Took me a while to get there then clear all that garbage, meanwhile Archeon and friends were slowly working their way towards the south through ravaged lands(the first chaos incursion I didn't bother going and apparently no one else did either, so everything north of sylvania was in ruins).
At first I though I was ok and he was going for Mannfred first, but then he turned back with Sigvald and went for the northern dwarven fort, while the pigeon and the lizard decided they're go tickle Franz see if he was still alive. Turns out he was, he had like 4 armies over there and Britannia had 2 more, I thought they were pretty much dead since they hadn't bothered with Ostland and stuff but seems they were biding their time.
Anyway Archeon starts sieging the fort while Sigvald goes around and raze the minor settlement. Here's where it gets fun. Archeon finishes building his towers, game says I have like 20% chance to win with the garrison only on autoresolve. But it's lvl 5 with lvl 3 walls, it's not crap stuff, so I figure I'll try. Well he managed to destroy the 2 doors and one chaos giant got in for about 10seconds before dying to thousands of bullets. Rest of the army got decimated and he went running.
Seeing his buddy fail so poorly, Sigvald obviously decides he wants to show off and sieges right away after instead of waiting for Archeon to rebuild his army. Doors still open, I do the fight again. This time he gets a bunch of stuff inside, into a concave of angry stunties and a flamethrower + organ gun. He even came to check what was taking so long but the slayers made short work of him and he was sent packing.
And so 2 of the scariest armies the world has ever seen were defeated by a garrison of unknown dwarfs, while their king and slayer king were stuck in the mountains on the way. Morale of the story, if you want to siege a dwarf stronghold, you better bring both armies at the same time.
Dwarfs are pretty fun, even though they feel a bit easy. All their ranged units are also good in melee, and they're stupidly strong at range. Their melees are also super good, and you can get units that give the leadership aura thing to everyone plus every unit has high leadership, so they almost never break. They are however terrible at finishing runners off so greenskins armies can be a pain when you have to fight them 2 or 3 times each because everytime half the army escapes.
