Hello there! New Mordheim player here (GOG Giveaway).

After the harrowing experience that has been my humble beginings with this game, I feel I am ready to tell my tale and ask for directions. When I started, as every good gamer I tried to to optimize my warband and milk every encounter for what is worth it, the blowback was hard....And I deleted more than a warband simply for losing a few henchmen, thankfully I am now cured of my fear of loss and have taken a more mercenary approach to Mordheim, my warband is a company and my characters are simply disposable assets, as long as the wyrdstone flows all is good, I shall no longer be troubled by their deaths.

So my suggestion to any new player here is; don't get attached, remeber that before you spend 20 min customizing your warband (the Gods will punish you for your arrogance).

I am currently raiding with my Rank 5 Skaven warband the streets of Mordheim, and I feel fairly safe, have about 20 missions played and a couple of failed attempts. I usually play Normal and Hard missions and it's not such a big difference besides being a bit more picky when chosing my fights. I'm doing well with gold, earning between 400-700 gold worth of wyrdsone per mission, and usually have betwen 1-3 downed characters per game, funnily enough more often that not I have no out of action characters for Hard missions (probably beacuse I'm more careful).

I tend to send my Night Runners to fetch me some Treasure(speced for zoomies, they cross the map like coked up cheetas) while I move in force with the henchmen towards the closest or biggest wyrdstone cache in the map, stash my ill gotten gains and then focus on secondary objectives. Ofc no plan survives contact with the enemy, so more often than not things devolve into a brawl if my main group getts tangled up.

My question would be, is it worth it to try to max gains and pick up everything that isn't nailed down so early in the game for every match? Are secondary objectives worth pursuing? So far I have done so with good results, altrough I feel they drag missions too much (averange Normal game lasts me 30-45 mins, Hard 45-75min), how long will Brutal and Deadly even take? Are missions supposed to last that long? Is it because I'm using Skaven? Should I simply focus on routing the enemy asap? That would probably shorten my games considerably altrough it would be far less challanging....

Oh my Warband's name is The Crippled Rats (because they all have some missing bits xD)

I bought the game on GOG a few years back, played it for a while without much diligence or success, and just fired it up again a few weeks back. So far, I've been learning the game in a relatively informal and unoptimized way using small parties of 4-5 characters, reaching party level 6 with mostly level 3-5 characters. There were numerous cases of heroes and henchmen having to be fired due to injuries (the one-armed archer, the henchman with stupidity, the hero with -10% offensive skills and other penalties due to multiple wounds, plus several dead henchmen).

I just completed the first story mission (failed it miserably at Level 3 when I first tried the game), dogpiling and taking out the elite units first, then hitting the outer objectives before rushing the main hall. Damage taken was absolutely minimal until engaging the Impressive guarding the route to the final objective, which wiped out about 50% of the one character's hitpoints, while most of the party returned from the mission completely unscathed.

At this point, I'm just starting to get the "bigger strategic picture" of using cheap, fast runners to secure the Wyrdstone and other loot while the heavy hitters seek for optimal terrain to engage the enemy. I'm doing well in the "average" missions and most of the "hard" ones, but have lost several of the latter to the Skaven, in several cases in serious trouble before even being able to move all of my characters for the first time. My first or second character moves, and the enemy is sighted. The next three enemy rodents proceed to race halfway across the map and triple-team one of my troops, inflicting a critical hit before the character even gets a turn. Most of my troops can't reach the scene before I'm down 1 or 2 characters. It goes downhill from there as my increasingly outnumbered troops fail their "All Alone" tests. Last time I faced Skaven, I had two troops take critical hits on the first strike, and promptly lost them before several of my minions could even make a move.

It's never worth picking up everything as your party will autoloot the remainders at the end of a battle, between 4-7% per surviving warband member per the 4 mission difficulties normal-to-deadly

A 10 strong warband finishing a deadly mission, meaning nobody was taken out of action by running out of wounds will loot 70% of the maps resources on victory, if you picked up every single thing you actually massively wasted your time and the longer the mission the more chances you have to take an injury which usually will cost more than what you gained risking just one more wyrdstone shard

you also nab some loot from the enemy, enemy heroes tend to have better initative and strategy points so they tend to have done more looting than henchmen who have less SP and movement range to cover all that ground

Heroes consequential are high priority targets as you tend to get more wrydstone from them and the generally better magic gear they get equipped with

Best practice is to grab the nearest concentrations of resources then focus on taking fewer casualties, even a 1 HP henchman is a guaranteed percentage of victory autolooting if they survive, if they need to run away from a fight they might as well take any present opertunity to loot something more.

Missions are randomised and sometimes it just isn't possible to score both main/secondary objectives
it's better to just play another mission for a whole new batch of wyrdstone and maybe as easier setup of objectives to be completed

best to run a party of melee attackers then you'll get the inventory benefits of higher strength and the extra combat power at the same time