This guide is intended to be a compendium of all the essential tips and tricks that everyone will want to know immediately and not after 1000 hours of time spent playing the game. Warning - reading some of these may cause involuntary weeping at all the time you wasted suffering because of your ignorance. Suffer no more.
Ultimate Campaign Guide
Absolute Essentials You Need to Know
Speed up your gameplay
You can speed up (and slow down again) actions/movement by pressing R. You can permanently speed up actions at the start of your campaign by going to top left of your screen, clicking the "Camera" icon, and clicking "Fastest" for everything. You won't get to watch what happens as it happens, but you also won't have to wait as long to get through the End Turn calculations either. Do this right at the start of your campaign.
Notifications
At the bottom right, if you uncheck all those boxes, you can turn off all those notifications, or just the ones you do not care to see. If you do this, at the same time, you can check a box on a Hero (and maybe a settlement?) that will cause you to receive a notification that you have not used that hero that turn, so important heroes & lords will still be addressed every turn but those that you plan to park somewhere for 50 turns will not bug you every turn.
Research
If you are not researching anything, winning battles can reward you with a Follower that gives +10% to Research Rate. I also got one of these from a successful Steal Research action by a hero, so hero actions while no research is active may reward as well. I have personally confirmed this in my Ikit Claw campaign, as once I finished all research there is, I started repeatedly getting those followers after battles. So get in the habit of ceasing all research at the start of your turn, fighting all the battles and performing all the actions you need to do in your turn, hopefully gaining a bunch of +Research % Followers (do not forget to assign them to your Lords & Heroes), then Resuming research before you End Turn.
Character details page
Here you can give your Lord & Heroes all sorts of items like Weapons, Armor, Trinkets (like +20% Ward Save items), Magic Wands on Magic Casters; etc. These should be obvious, but the tips below are not as obvious, and what this guide is really here for. Pay Attention!
You can replace a lord! You can disband Lords and they will return to your recruitment pool (and stop costing you money by decreasing the Supply Lines penalty) and after 5 turns they will be available to recruit again. A lot of times this works on Immortal Generic Lords (although you probably need to disband the units in their army first before you can disband them), but sometimes disaband does not work on these Immortal Generic Lords, and it often does not work on Legendary Lords. Workaround? You replace them with another, low level lord, then disband that lord. So you have a use for the crappy low level lords that you get via confederation or that you got at the beginning of your campaign but ended up disbanding for some reason early on and never ended up leveling them.
Perfect use for this is if you your Faction Leader is Level 40 and you want to replace him with a different lord to level that lord up (while after 5 turns have your faction leader available to summon to a hotspot or have him lead a crusade at the other end of the map from where he was); or, if you had Franz conquer all of Norsca and now you want him to lead an invasion of Araby and The Southlands, but it would take 10-20 turns to get him down there leading that army, and his army isn't that great anyway, you could just replace him, then disband that whole army and have Franz recruit another one closer to the action once he becomes available again. You could even have the army recruited and ready to go using another lord then have Franz replace that lord.
Side Note: If you want a great way to get rid of all those worthless banners and followers such as scarecrow banners and +4 leadership against (insert faction) followers (or those Pigeon Pluck Pendants), here is a tip that I confirmed. If you have a Lord that you intend to disband and leave him disbanded (or just recruit him to defend a settlement where he is likely to die), you can give him the worthless banners and followers, and you could disband him while they all show the (1) icon indicating it will be 1 turn before they are added to his retinue, and if you later re-recruit him, he will have those banners and followers.
Mounts
You can select/change/remove the Lord or Hero's mount if you have given them one. Note that you can change a mount once per turn, and you can do it instantly, so if you need to dismount a Lord from his horse so he can scale the walls in a siege, you can do that right before you attack. And you can you re-mount the Lord before a field battle. Note that mounts increase the upkeep cost of your Lords & Heroes; Lizardmen Skink Priests and Skink Chiefs on Ancient Stegadons are expensive! If you do not need your Lords & Heroes on a mount, it is a good idea to remove them from their mount so that they cost you less in upkeep.
You can rename Lords & Heroes
You can sort your Lords & Heroes a number of ways, but if you take the time to figure out a good naming system, you could sort by name, and be able to first do everything with your Lords, then your Assassin heroes, then your Steal Research heroes, then your Damage Walls heroes, etc. Note that there are 2 spaces for names, so you can put Ezio in the top line and "the Assassin" or "de Assassin" or "da Hitman" in the bottom line, and their name will show as "Ezio de Assassin". You can also put their name in the top line, and put their key usage in the bottom line, such as "Damage Walls" or "Assault Garrison" so that hero is easier to find when you need that particular use. I highly recommend you come up with such a system and set it up as you recruit heroes and move along in your campaign, late game hero management can really make you hate ever having recruited heroes to begin with.
Replenishment
Lords, Heroes and Single Entity units (Giants, Doomwheels, Carnosaurs, etc) do not benefit from the Post-Battle option that immediately replenishes your forces, they only benefit from getting healed in battle by spells or items that regenerate their health before the battle ends (Life Magic spells are good example), or from the replenishment from being in your own province, settlement, or Encamp Stance (which can be further boosted by items and hero skills).
Above is very important to know if you want to do lots of fighting in enemy territory or in the ocean. Heroes and single Monsters can be awesome, but also awesome is the ability for an army of 19 units to instantly heal to full health and unit numbers after each battle as long as they do not take too much damage and choose the post-battle replenish option.
Campaign Movement Glitches
Summary - You can hold down the right mouse as you drag a line to where you want to move your army and see how much movement points it will cost you. However, if you aim to be at exactly 50% or 25% move points left and still be able to switch to a desired army stance, be advised that certain terrain can force your army to move a little further than intended, thereby using move points and causing you not to be able to change stance. It is often a good idea to "leave some in the tank" to make sure this does not happen, especially which changing your army's stance is critical. This issue can also be caused by certain followers and events that boost but glitch your movement to such a degree that you would have to leave 70%+ move points in the tank to be able to switch to Raid or Encamp stance (I confirmed this in my Ikit Claw campaign when 3 Warlock Engineers and the "Favorable Winds" event caused exactly this scenario). See below for more details.
"Holding on right mouse button as you drag lets you measure out how much movement you want to use up. With the bar on the bottom left showing the percentages. So you can use 75% of it to move towards a spot, then use the remaining 25% for ambush stance for example. If you right click somewhere, you can press space at anytime to have the character immediately stop moving. They aren't locked into completing that movement. More useful these days due to the fog of war changes and such".
"Caveat: The movement bar % is not accurate if you start getting campaign movement buffs on the army. It shows you % of unmodified movement points that you have left, but the stances require % of your modified movement points. In some extreme cases I've had it at 30%+ remaining on the bar and unable to go into ambush stance because of the number of boosts".
In support of the above Caveat, in my Ikit Claw campaign, when I had 3 Warlock Engineers with max Increase Mobility skill, Scribe on the Lord, and especially the "Favorable Winds" +25% campaign movement range Event (from ocean Treasure Hunts), I think I had to have over 70% of my remaining movement points remaining in order for my army to be change to "Raiding" or "Encampment" Stance, when without any movement boosts the army should be able to do either at 50% movement points remaining.
"Tt seems that it’s also not clear which abilities modify this and which don’t. As far as I can make out, if the general has +x% then it’s fine, whereas if they are granted a boost by a building or an embedded hero then their % movement becomes inaccurate".
"I've only ever had problems when heros have joined the army the same turn and the heroes' movement range isn't enough".
"100%. No heroes leaving or joining on that same turn. Happens to me every time I play TK cause the Necrotect never leaves, I need his healing".
"The way to avert that is by putting the army in the stance you need before the heroes join. However, what /u/paeyvn is referring to is a genuine bug that’s been in the game since the beginning. As far as I can tell, it occurs when your lord is given a movement boost by an embedded hero or local building (not by a global effect or ability of the lord themselves). Try it out with the Tomb Kings and a necrotect, and their various movement buildings, or with the Dwarves & an engineer."
Razor Standard & Banner Of Eternal Flame
Key info from an old post:
Razor Standard only applies to melee attacks. So putting it on ranged units is worthless.
Banner Of Eternal Flame's +8% Weapon Damage only applies to Melee; however, the banner's Fire Damage applies to both Melee and Ranged, and the banner gives an aura that affect multiple units, so if you put the banner on Empire Crossbowmen you could turn them into brutally efficient purgers of the Undead.
More Useful Goodies
If you capture the Galleon's Graveyard (Count Noctilus' island capital in the middle of the map in the ocean), the reward is "Immunity from storm and reef attrition." A very nice quality of life perk.
The Map
Effective communication requires understanding of what is being discussed. For those who struggled to remember the names of the continents in Warhammer 2, a quick guide:
The Old World
This is "Europe", the area inhabited by The Empire provinces including Sylvania, Bretonnia, Tilea, Estalia, Kislev.
Norsca
The northern-most and mainly frozen part of the map, where the Norscan tribes raid down from. To the far right is the Chaos Wastes where the Warrios of Chaos spawn.
The Southlands (and Araby)
This is "Africa", the continent in the Southeast of the Vortex map (and the continent that The Old World connects to on the Mortal Empires map), with the northern half part being "Araby", which is the area that would be Egypt to the Northeast (where Khemri is), Libya and Algeria to the north (Bretonnians), and Morocco and Mauritania to the west. "South Africa" would be where Kroq-Gar and Queek are, with those islands in the Southeast Corner being like Madagascar.
Lustria
This is "South America". Pretty self-explanatory, this is the continent in the Southwest of the Vortex map. There are now a bunch of Legendary Lord factions here, hence many now call this the "Lustria-bowl" due to the bloodbath.
Ulthuan
The circle-island in the Northeast of the Vortex map, with the swirling Vortex over the island in the sea at the center.
Naggaroth
This is "North America", where Malekith and the Dark Elves live in Naggarond to the north, Morathi in the area where Texas/Northern Mexico would be, with Mazdamundi in "Central America" in the connecting part between Lustria and Naggaroth. I had trouble remember the name of this area because of the similarity between the names Naggaroth and Naggarond.