I've 'mastered' skraag but he has a TON of bugs in SFO (They fixed the worst one) and even if you plan on playing against other people in campaign expect to lose cuz they arn't terribly competitive. I did enjoy playing skraag tho, goldtooths just awful.

Anyway my start with skraag is (works on legendary/very hard):
Turn 1- kill army below you then occupy settlement below you then recruit another lord and starting building the mili structure you recruit the sabertusks from. Recruit nothing because then the army that comes to you turn 2 won't want to fight you. Also start researching towards the +20 growth in enemy territory.
Turn 2- Fight army, auto resolve what's left of said army then go to the furthest western border witht he next settlemtn and recruit 3 ogres(I perfer ironfists since you just need something to hold a line while your sabers do the real dps.)
Turn 3 - auto resolve settlemtn and recruit 3x saberthingies with the lord you had recruited and take the world eater big name on skraag.
Turn 4+ - Force march back to the first settlement you took with him next turn and use your other lord to recruit 3 more sabers. Turn after move both skraag and other lord furthest east while still being in your territory adjacent to the reimaining province city recruit another saber another ironfist and then a gobbo unit or w/e. Turn after an army will attack you, beat it and kill a smuch of it as possible then either auto resolve or player battle the city fight. If any army does not attack you simply siege the city, they'll sally forth end of turn and then auto resolve what's left the turn after. Immediately this turn declare peace with border princes and take all their gold. Turn after trade them your western most region you took on turn 3 for the rest of their gold.
Turn++ At this point you can literally do whatever because that's as good a start as you're going to get but you sholuld just pick a direciton, i usually go north since ogres are strong against empire and just kill off and trade away territory to other wealthy factions. Once you've amasssed about 60k gold is where you clench your butt and hang on for dear life. Find a faction with territory you'll eventually want, plop down a camp in enemy territory hopefully somewhat close to the territory you'll eventually want, at this point try to have skraag and 2x other lords set them all to raiding stance(it gives +10 camp growth in region) and you should be hitting 50-60 growth per turn, whenever you suspect armies around you set skraag to ambush and just murder them one at a time. If you can set your camp in an area with 80+ ambush chance even better. Anyway within 20-30 turns you should be able to hit t5, should have skraaglepuss with a strong army at least and have been able to recruit a decent garrison to leave your camp with and now you can play like a normal warhammer faction. All this should be doable by turn 40-50.

Also avoid being lured by contracts, even if you get fat growth early you wont have the gold to do anything with it and you'll just be stuck there. As skraag anyway, goldtooths less poor. Oh also feel free to trade away the regeions in your starting province to the highest bidder, you don't need that area and you'll waste gold building it up.

this the best guide for a awful faction i've ever seen, reminds me of the utter insanity people used to do to make norsca and chaos warriors viable but like this goes multiples levels beyond since those factions were ♥♥♥♥♥♥, not difficult to understand.

Ty i'll try all this as soon as i get some time to play again

Originally posted by Aranea of Andariel:

this the best guide for a awful faction i've ever seen, reminds me of the utter insanity people used to do to make norsca and chaos warriors viable but like this goes multiples levels beyond since those factions were ♥♥♥♥♥♥, not difficult to understand.

Ty i'll try all this as soon as i get some time to play again

Hahah thanks man <3, if you run into any trouble can run a start and take some pics for each of the turns since that wall of words can get kinda confusing. But yeah I don't think I've ever struggled with finding the optimal start of a faction more than that of figuring out skraag. Must've restarted with him like 50 times trying to get him competitive.

put ogres inside gnoblars or hobgoblins
1 hobgoblin and 1 ogre bull will do more for you than 2 ogre bulls
same goes for slaanesh
don't just make a hellscourge frontline as an anvil, put spawn or fiends inside them and always keep a daemonnete or two alongside them

Originally posted by Balzaphon:

put ogres inside gnoblars or hobgoblins
1 hobgoblin and 1 ogre bull will do more for you than 2 ogre bulls
same goes for slaanesh
don't just make a hellscourge frontline as an anvil, put spawn or fiends inside them and always keep a daemonnete or two alongside them

with ogres i've been doing that already, problems with the ogres is not having access to anything interesting, having a weak economy, having poor campaign mechanics in general, and fighting dwarves early in skrag campaign just fills me with pain.

Now the problems i have with slaanesh is the army being extra useless on sieges, and having terrible autoresolve in general so i can't skip those whatever i do. since they are so vulnerable to grinding in combat and ranged fire sieges are especially hard on them imo.

and the mechanics just don't feel great on the world map plus they also feel very poor (vassal income in this game is just sad) also so yea idk what to do about them.

in a normal field battle i don't have many problems with their armies.

Yea I wouldn't sweat it too much with ogres, even though they're kinda charming in a weird way and I have fun playing skrag it is by far the weakest faction I've ever played. Pretty much everything sucks and your units feel super off compared to other factions, like a distinct lack of killiness across most of the roster that even with using the +15 MA maw offering it's perpetually blegh.

Honestly feel like a rework to the contract system where it prioritizes mission generation that's both relatively nearby and from allies, guarantees at least 1 growth mission and prob like triple+ the gold reward would make them play alot better but seems like something only CA could fix. That and maybe more sources of replenishment.

Also sorry to spam the thread but wanna add these tips cuz they're pretty important to skrag not suckin in campaign.

-Always set up your camps in range of each other because then their garrisons get the army abilities given by certain camp structures.
-Have Gorger Onslaught skill on skraag maxed by the time you start recruiting your big boy army, even though it got nerfed down from 100% that 50% is still pretty much mandatory for your early gold sustain.
-Faction territory you're not at war with (though assume having no diplo with as well though I havn't tested this) still counts for the +20 growth research activation. Gives you some time to build up your camp before you have to go to war with said faction.
-Even though it's not that common and you'll likely have to sift through alot of ogre tyrants(try not to do this when you're in the amassing gold stage of the game), always use tyrants that have the unbreakable big name for gnablors, that stuff wins games, especially against human players. Also gnoblar trappers pretty much straight up better than regular gnoblars.
-If you're following my early game start, the second you take akendorf trade it to the empire guy above you for 3-4k then use your other army to immediately take it back and also trade matorca to purple dwarves for 3-4k, 2-3 turns later you can sell them akendorf for another 3-4k. Vlad and Franz have deep pockets if you need factions to trade territory to.
-Swap out world swallower for ever famished on skrag once your first camp goes down.
-If taking a city from AI early you can put all your ogres on one side and all your stealthed sabers and gorgers on the other, AI will deploy on the side of your visible forces, then just blow up wall/gate and rush victory point with stealthed units.

Originally posted by Ghilgamesch:

Also sorry to spam the thread but wanna add these tips cuz they're pretty important to skrag not suckin in campaign.

-Always set up your camps in range of each other because then their garrisons get the army abilities given by certain camp structures.
-Have Gorger Onslaught skill on skraag maxed by the time you start recruiting your big boy army, even though it got nerfed down from 100% that 50% is still pretty much mandatory for your early gold sustain.
-Faction territory you're not at war with (though assume having no diplo with as well though I havn't tested this) still counts for the +20 growth research activation. Gives you some time to build up your camp before you have to go to war with said faction.
-Even though it's not that common and you'll likely have to sift through alot of ogre tyrants(try not to do this when you're in the amassing gold stage of the game), always use tyrants that have the unbreakable big name for gnablors, that stuff wins games, especially against human players. Also gnoblar trappers pretty much straight up better than regular gnoblars.
-If you're following my early game start, the second you take akendorf trade it to the empire guy above you for 3-4k then use your other army to immediately take it back and also trade matorca to purple dwarves for 3-4k, 2-3 turns later you can sell them akendorf for another 3-4k. Vlad and Franz have deep pockets if you need factions to trade territory to.
-Swap out world swallower for ever famished on skrag once your first camp goes down.
-If taking a city from AI early you can put all your ogres on one side and all your stealthed sabers and gorgers on the other, AI will deploy on the side of your visible forces, then just blow up wall/gate and rush victory point with stealthed units.

i don't mind extra hints you can spam as much as you want haha, the idea of keeping camps in range of one another i never had, really like that.

I'm a week away from getting to my holidays then i'll try everything that was said here, not sure i want to go to akendorf but i might give it a go.

Playing around with this mod; just had an event where the skaven assassinated a camp leader which disbanded the whole camp, all the buildings and garrison. Thankfully I had just taken all the "good" troops out before it happened, but it accounted for 60% of my empire.

On one hand cool, I like unexpected setbacks, but ouch! I don't play ogres often...is this vulnerability specific to Grimhammer or ogres in vanilla? Didn't have this happen the few times I've played them vanilla.

Originally posted by Father Ribs:

Playing around with this mod; just had an event where the skaven assassinated a camp leader which disbanded the whole camp, all the buildings and garrison. Thankfully I had just taken all the "good" troops out before it happened, but it accounted for 60% of my empire.

On one hand cool, I like unexpected setbacks, but ouch! I don't play ogres often...is this vulnerability specific to Grimhammer or ogres in vanilla? Didn't have this happen the few times I've played them vanilla.

Rofl omg that can happen lol? Is that an ogre specific event? I wonder if that means people playing alith anar can just snipe your camps, better avoid that match up.

Originally posted by Ghilgamesch:

Rofl omg that can happen lol? Is that an ogre specific event? I wonder if that means people playing alith anar can just snipe your camps, better avoid that match up.

That's what I was thinking; if you can snipe one lord with an agent, the penalty is ridiculous. Maybe go down one level in camp size as things "settle down" to the next camp master, but I don't think the whole camp is going to wander off into the mountains.