I decided to forge on with Kislev (mostly to unlock Boris). Things are going well, campaign wise, though it took a lot for the Enclave (that holds Erengard) to confederate. Devotion/support is kind of... blah.
I'm not entirely sold on the army composition- its fine, but... I dunno. I like Tempest magic better than Ice, and I don't like a primary caster (especially with no melee hero. The patriarch is a really fantastic support, but he doesn't exactly beat face). For units, too many do the same thing, so army composition just settles into 'get the better ones that do X'
For Boris:
Spoiler:
holding all three great cities for 10 turns is required to get the quest battle that unlocks him. Its a little easier with the Tzarina, as she holds one at the start, and is pretty much set on the path to conquer Prague.
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Game's good overall, but I see this main campaign getting old, fast. The chaos realms are different, but I don't think they're going to remain 'fun different' for an extended period.
The big issue is I'm on the second Soul, and the game is really chugging. Between the corruption everywhere due to the rifts, and the nigh-constant blizzards in Kislev, there's so much particle crap on the campaign map that my system is just... not happy.
Also, Nurgle plagues seem so much worse than Skaven plagues. The Daemon Prince just seems to show up and any army in the region gets infected- with Skaven you could just avoid the settlement they plagued, and not worry too much.
But I'm about to dive into Nurgle's Manse and then call it a night. For whatever reason, Kugath followed me in (and around) with a broken shell of an army (all units at about 20% health). It was worth taking an extra turn to punch his face in.
Weirdest thing so far- Kraka Drak fell rather ignominiously to Nurgle Rebels. With Kugath standing outside to snap it up from them. Fast forward ~20 turns, and its now owned by Fateweaver. He transferred ownership to himself from the other side of the map. Its also at 100% Slaanesh corruption (and 50% Nurgle, though that's falling) so Control is spiraling down.
Also, you can watch a dwarf gyrocopter spin around the mountains east (?) of Zhufbar. Its a bit weird to watch one of the egg-copters zoom about.
Been playing Skarbrand exclusively so far. I just like how he's pretty straightforward.
I got about 20-40 turns in on 3 different playthroughs and kept hitting a wall. I was playing too defensively and not making use of his army generation ability when razing a settlement. About 20 turns into a playthrough this morning before work and I have almost triple the territory I had in any of my other playthroughs with a relatively healthy economy. Fun stuff.
Also, has anyone invaded Slaanesh's realm yet? It warns you that you'll be tempted every step of the way and I just laughed it off. Then the temptations started popping up and stacking up. The ones closer to the center of his realm are pretty damn... tempting. Particularly for my army and economy at the time. Still, I powered through and got the second soul.
Played through the Prologue last night. Surprisingly, the only achievement I missed was the one that asked you to fill up the army. I stopped at 19/20 units.
I then started up the Cathay campaign. But after a couple of battles, I had to shut it off for the night. Right now I have a rebel city to capture, beastmen raiding my capitol province, and two temporary missions for things that I need to do anyway, but are in the complete opposite direction from the rebels. Business as usual!
Random things - Miao Ying's banners are light grey. The banners of the Cathay rebels are white. Whoever decided that these two color schemes are a good idea for groups that start the game fighting each other needs to be subjected to some traditional Chinese punishment methods. It doesn't help that banners of units that are losing morale turn lighter.
During the Prologue, I had a few instances in which I seemingly issued orders to a unit, but the unit didn't respond.
The Advisor's bird is absent this time around. I don't know whether we saw it in the second game, but iirc we didn't have an intro sequence with the Advisor joining your faction like in this game and the first game. And the bird only really appeared in the intro sequences (and, you know, when it...). Anyway, just a minor note.
The new settlement battle is annoying. In the one that I fought, the tower at the entrance seemed overly tough. I don't know that it actually killed anything. But it survived an awful lot of punishment from my siege weapon (a sky gondola). In contrast, the barricades blocking access to the supply point controlling that tower were destroyed pretty much the moment my troops touched them. I suspect there's supposed to be something going on here that isn't clear yet.
Olthannon wrote: With the settlement battles, when you capture a zone it destroys the surrounding enemy defences. So it's probably that you came across?
I've started as Katarin after the prologue, all will fall before my icy slippers.
No, the barriers were between me and the supply point. They might have been defended by Peasant Bowmen who retreated from my advancing troops, which left the barrier undefended. I'm wondering if that's why they instantly collapsed? It's something I'll have to keep an eye on in the future.
On another note, the pre-battle load screen has been providing some very handy advice on how the Tomb King mechanics work.
It shouldn't. Barricades don't need to be manned to act as blockers (which... eh. Especially given that defenders largely treat them as if they don't exist).
It may be that the particular barricade wasn't attached to the supply point you thought it was. I'm not familiar with the Cathay maps, but sometimes the 'adjacent' build points aren't all that adjacent.
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Towers are... interesting. The magic ones are pretty impressive over the long term, but the lower level ones seem ignorable, better to focus on troops or capture points.
It may be that the particular barricade wasn't attached to the supply point you thought it was. I'm not familiar with the Cathay maps, but sometimes the 'adjacent' build points aren't all that adjacent.
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Towers are... interesting. The magic ones are pretty impressive over the long term, but the lower level ones seem ignorable, better to focus on troops or capture points.
The battle was small enough that I only captured one supply point (in the center of the settlement) before the enemy army collapsed.
I honestly can't stand the new campaing with the rifts.
They completely remove the sandbox that is supposedly total war, suck massively overall, are basically just a busywork for the sake of it, etc.
The realms themselves sound nice, until you actually suffered through nurgle and tzeentch which are just.... bad.
The race for the souls is more annoying than anything.
Tzeentch is annoying, because if someone gets ahead of you, there's nothing you can do but give up. (gates end movement, for the most part). Its a pure crapshoot.
Slaanesh has much the same problem- the fights with the lurking armies can be tough, you can't avoid them upon exiting a gate, and leave you no choice but to camp and replenish several times.
Nurgle's realm is bizarrely easy. You fight one of two armies at the entrance, march, camp, fight one of the next set of armies, get the code, head back, camp again and do the fight. It may depend on what faction you've got, but the Nurgle Realm armies drop dead to ranged and magic.
There definitely isn't anything to the campaign that I'd want to do it more than a few times. And even then probably start jumping into Slaanesh for the temptations, then 'traverse rifts' to go gank the competitors rather than win by the souls.
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Yeesh. Fair warning to anyone playing Kislev, the Confederation with the other LL happens automatically over the end turn, and can absolutely tank your economy. Evil mini-Rasputin had 5 armies and a half dozen loose heroes and my economy went from +1000 per turn to -11,000. Drained my treasury completely and set everyone to attrition status.
And now I'm fighting...uh... everything east, north and northwest of me. The Brotherhood of the Bear or whoever took over High Pass, and its ugly out there. Someone failed to put down their demon rebellions when the rifts were up.
And bloody Skrag. Bypassed Middenland and Nordland to come lay siege to Erenguard. He's at war with every single Empire faction, and he still came to say 'Hi.'
Huh? Disbanding armies reduces upkeep just fine for me.
Haven't tried ogre camps, but if the 'certain territory' is Uninhabitable Climate, that isn't a bug. The 15% malus has always been able to push the replenishment below the minimum threshold.
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Finally. Breached Tzeentch's realm and got that soul. [Other factions stand at 2 each for Khorne, Tzeentch and Slaanesh (none this round) and 1 for Goldtooth (his first, this round). Cathay was also in the realm of Tzeentch, and appeared next to the last gate I needed right before I went through. Then... teleported to a different gate. I guess they're personalized? Kugath and the Daemon Prince have been too busy sacrificing themselves against my armies (and plaguing them, which...), and Skarbrand kept himself busy this round killing his army to raze towns in Norsca and then immediately settling them. Because reasons.
And the cutscene lore dump for the 3rd soul is... weird.
Spoiler:
The chaos gods can't enter the Forge of Souls? Why? And... they can obviously send minions, since that's seriously the end goal of the campaign if you're playing one of the Daemons. So... uh... what? Get him, o chaos gods. Given his goals, seriously smite his shadowy butt again.
Also, Belakor has entire armies of Soul Grinders to send forth into the world now. You know, while he's explicitly stated to be completely alone, before he achieves any of his goals and simply waits for Ursun to die, and is waiting for the 'scavengers' (ie, the wh3 factions) to show up AT the Forge, to give him raw material to work with.
Prologue was fine, if a bit trite. First couple stages were... ok. Third stage? We've got pants on our head now, this has gone full 1980s Saturday morning cartoon
Also, one simple attrition plague has taken Boris Ursus out for 8 fricking turns!
Apparently, it seems the idiotic Denuvo DRM that SEGA loves so much in hampering performance. As usual, the paying customer gets screws whilst the pirates don't care.
Voss wrote: Huh? Disbanding armies reduces upkeep just fine for me
I've heard reports of this one elsewhere. If I remember correctly, it might be a Kislev thing.
If it is, I guess I'm absurdly lucky or its a mini-Rasputin specific thing. I've had no problems with Kislev.
The most noticeable problem (other than skipping ahead in the tutorial part of the prologue and being on a screen where the recruit lord button is unavailable when it demands you click it), is the graphics tanking at the start of turn when it auto-switches perspective from a Chaos Realm to whatever army/hero I was last on. Not sure if its the system chugging or my old graphics card, however. (I was going to upgrade this last year, but with everything the new cards never came down in price). When the chaos realms aren't active, the strain isn't nearly so bad.
For the combined game map, I hope they leave the chaos realms out. They're not terribly fun, and the map is so severely warped to fit them in. I would've rather they did a standard North oriented map, and just put the chaos realms floating separately, rather than functioning as the north pole
Voss wrote: Huh? Disbanding armies reduces upkeep just fine for me
I've heard reports of this one elsewhere. If I remember correctly, it might be a Kislev thing.
If it is, I guess I'm absurdly lucky or its a mini-Rasputin specific thing. I've had no problems with Kislev.
The most noticeable problem (other than skipping ahead in the tutorial part of the prologue and being on a screen where the recruit lord button is unavailable when it demands you click it), is the graphics tanking at the start of turn when it auto-switches perspective from a Chaos Realm to whatever army/hero I was last on. Not sure if its the system chugging or my old graphics card, however. (I was going to upgrade this last year, but with everything the new cards never came down in price). When the chaos realms aren't active, the strain isn't nearly so bad.
For the combined game map, I hope they leave the chaos realms out. They're not terribly fun, and the map is so severely warped to fit them in. I would've rather they did a standard North oriented map, and just put the chaos realms floating separately, rather than functioning as the north pole
Double check your actual gold upkeep rather than the percentage increase displayed at the top. The tooltip decreases properly, but the actual increase for multiple armies doesn't go down, and will even go up more if you re-recruit the same Lord into a new army.
Hmm. I've only ever gone by the gold upkeep, not the percentage.
When the devotion game confederated me with mini-Rasputin, I was at -11K, and disbanded stuff until I was at +1K. Disbanded armies after the other two confederations as well, and upkeep went down.
I'll take a look when I get home... I was pondering saving, disbanding everything and passing the turning to get the first two 'income achievements' (5K and 20K) anyway.
Voss wrote: Hmm. I've only ever gone by the gold upkeep, not the percentage.
When the devotion game confederated me with mini-Rasputin, I was at -11K, and disbanded stuff until I was at +1K. Disbanded armies after the other two confederations as well, and upkeep went down.
I'll take a look when I get home... I was pondering saving, disbanding everything and passing the turning to get the first two 'income achievements' (5K and 20K) anyway.
Yeah, the upkeep for individual units will go away. It's the supply line penalty for having multiple lords that doesn't properly decrement.
Voss wrote: Hmm. I've only ever gone by the gold upkeep, not the percentage.
When the devotion game confederated me with mini-Rasputin, I was at -11K, and disbanded stuff until I was at +1K. Disbanded armies after the other two confederations as well, and upkeep went down.
I'll take a look when I get home... I was pondering saving, disbanding everything and passing the turning to get the first two 'income achievements' (5K and 20K) anyway.
Yeah, the upkeep for individual units will go away. It's the supply line penalty for having multiple lords that doesn't properly decrement.
Ah. Ok, that I will check on. That sounds a lot more plausible than 'disbanding armies doesn't reduce upkeep'
Thanks
It probably has something to do with the Lord still being in your faction, just not deployed. Just like how a wounded Lord who heals back up will need to be redeployed, but is still in existence and you're paying for his upkeep. They may still not have properly implemented the disbandment of lords. I know there were similar issues in Rome 2 where you could end up with a bunch of useless generals who were sucking up your upkeep while not on the battlefield.
Hmm. The short term fix (at least for non-immortal ones) might be to re-hire and mass suicide them against... whatever. A pack of lords would have decent auto-resolve weight, and if you're stuck paying for them as is...
Also, if any one is interested- a way to reset rift spawns timers (to put them off more or less indefinitely) Fair warning: backup the files in question and be careful before editing. (in spoiler tags because the url is long and copied oddly)
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Automatically Appended Next Post: Ok, just tested things out with my Kislev game. Disbanding armies works fine. Supply lines goes up and down like it should, all the way to zero.
To the point that it tipped me over to 20K income per turn, so I got that achievement. And bought my way to a 10th alliance so got that one too.
And then borrowed an empire army, to see how that worked- which, don't recommend. Crappy unit composition, and all their movement is already gone. And the one you borrow stays wherever it is (in this case, south of Altdorf). In some cases this might be useful (taking a foothold in a far off land, for example, or personally fighting an enemy the AI is failing at), but its pretty terrible for reinforcing your own situation.
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Huzzah. Finally took Doomkeep. Both armies on that side are plagued again, but at least Prince Timmy will stop coming out to get punched in the face. One coastal settlement left and then the least impressive enemy is gone.
Finally cleared my first portal. I picked Khorne for the realm. And the first opponent I faced was... a lizardman(?) with spear-armed sauruses, supported by dragon-ogres(!?), including a shaggoth?
Okay... that was a bit of an odd combination...
The shaggoth turned out to be the easy part, as I turned Miao Yang into her dragon form, and smacked the shaggoth around.
Ok, this bothers me. All four (five with the DP) factions have military alliances with each other.
I get it, since all four are at war with all non-chaos factions they encounter, so their military actions are constantly increasing relations, but.... no. Nkari and Skarbrand and Kugath and Kairos should not be bosom buddies. They should have a hell of a malus to relations.
I just had a stack of Kurgan bypass the Dragon Gate in Cathay. One stack laid siege to the gate. A second stack then ran right past it and got into the area behind.
Eumerin wrote: I just had a stack of Kurgan bypass the Dragon Gate in Cathay. One stack laid siege to the gate. A second stack then ran right past it and got into the area behind.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, but its consistent with how sieging settlements have worked since at least TW2. Once a city is under siege, their zone of control is gone (the red zone), so they can't reinforce, and can be bypassed.
Its been a gimmick for taking out armies around an enemy city without having to fight the city garrison at all (even if you're only sieging it with a general and empty stack)
But hey, its still better than the elf gates in Ulthuann. Enemies could walk past those without sieging them at all.
I beat the campaign with Skarbrand. Was crazy lucky.
Within 10 turns, a cult building popped up at N’kari’s capital. For gaks and giggles I chose the building that teleports your faction leader. Skarbrand then proceeds to raze the capital, with a Bloodhost forming. N’kari is killed the next turn, followed by another Slaanesh settlement. Another Bloodhost army forms, rinse and repeat until I fought my way back to my starting province, razing settlements and calling up bloodhosts. Then I’d just wait for the settlements to fold into my empire due to Khorne’s campaign mechanic. Within 25 turns I had the top left portion of the map under my control and from there I built up an economy and defensive armies, while getting Skarbrand and his army levelled up.
The final battle was… interesting. Very tower defense-esque and grindy. Luckily my army was built for such an occasion.
Going to tool around with my new pet Be’lakor for a bit.
I think I’ll give Kislev a go when I feel like another campaign. I felt bad for Ursun.
Eumerin wrote: I just had a stack of Kurgan bypass the Dragon Gate in Cathay. One stack laid siege to the gate. A second stack then ran right past it and got into the area behind.
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, but its consistent with how sieging settlements have worked since at least TW2. Once a city is under siege, their zone of control is gone (the red zone), so they can't reinforce, and can be bypassed.
Its been a gimmick for taking out armies around an enemy city without having to fight the city garrison at all (even if you're only sieging it with a general and empty stack)
But hey, its still better than the elf gates in Ulthuann. Enemies could walk past those without sieging them at all.
It's not being bypassed, though. There are giant impassable walls running up to the city on each side. The AI can't get through those regardless of the status of the garrison. The AI unit must literally be running *through* the city.
I understand that part of the issue is that the engine is incapable of handling "gate"-style settlements. That's why you can besiege the things from just one side (which is also silly, but slightly less absurd than what I described above). But they need to come up with a fix for the engine that properly handles the gate situation before they release the second Three Kingdoms game that they mentioned back when they stopped work on the first one.
But hey, its still better than the elf gates in Ulthuann. Enemies could walk past those without sieging them at all.
When I first started playing TWW2 on the vortex campaign, I stopped for a few days because I was so bloody irritated that happened. The usual spawn of chaos and skaven happened during a ritual and I was like oh well I'm sure they'll be stopped by these gates that's their whole job..
Voss wrote: Ok, this bothers me. All four (five with the DP) factions have military alliances with each other.
I get it, since all four are at war with all non-chaos factions they encounter, so their military actions are constantly increasing relations, but.... no. Nkari and Skarbrand and Kugath and Kairos should not be bosom buddies. They should have a hell of a malus to relations.
Unless their gods tell them to and then they have no choice but to do as they are told
Sees closest i get is -3 and i cant improve it or add anything. If i threaten its war deck
Had the same problem with Kislev for quite a while (for the non Rasputin factions). Basically you need to set up the relationship get non aggression, trade and access, and then fight/trespass on/do hero actions against people they're at war with (and don't have any agreements with people they're fighting). Also build up your relative strength, whether by building up your own armies or picking a war coordination target where they'll get an army wrecked or take attrition (if they'll move- the AI often ignores coordination targets). The AI also seems more inclined to accept confederation when the rifts are open- it may affect a background strength/threat calculation, like the relative strength of threats against them.
Just building an empty stack can push the number to positive if you're close enough, its a very gamey system.
Also, allying other factions increases your relative strength number for confederations.
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Eumerin wrote: It's not being bypassed, though. There are giant impassable walls running up to the city on each side. The AI can't get through those regardless of the status of the garrison. The AI unit must literally be running *through* the city.
Eh. I get what you're saying, but I think you're taking a digital object too literally and also taking the physical great wall too abstractly. If the city actually blocked movement 100% of the time, pathfinding calculations would turn into a nightmare. From a realism standpoint, once you lock down the garrison, that wall is just a physical barrier that can be climbed, sapped, breached, whatever. Manning that entire stretch of wall just isn't possible. They're just not diving down to that level of detail were you see dudes with ropes or digging tunnels (or traitors opening passages, etc)
Plus, think of the gameplay consequences. If it was a full barrier, enemy armies would just stack up on each other, and those sieges would turn utterly un-winnable real fast. If they come in and run around doing other things, you've got options beyond lose the city to the chaos tide, and then deal with multiple armies in close support of each other. (because it isn't just allies who reinforce now, its all your enemies).
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nels1031 wrote: The final battle was… interesting. Very tower defense-esque and grindy. Luckily my army was built for such an occasion.
Yeah... did that this morning. Did not enjoy. Of course, I had a caster lord, for an especially long haul domination battle, 42 minutes) in the realm of chaos, not having infinite winds of magic was terrible . As a caster lord, that was awful. Did not enjoy the many, many things or the constant stream of reinforcements. I had a lot of ice witches, and their magic bows had less effect than I was hoping, thanks to all the armor on the field.
Also from a lore perspective, the whole thing really ground my gears.
Spoiler:
Lots of god dedicated and even exalted daemons and heralds following Big B in his drive to destroy the chaos gods (which also... yeah, that's a reasonable goal). But the Kislev ending was... well. Yeah. Happy Russian peasants because the queen's faith in failing was enough to bring the dead back to life because... uh... I guess it would suck to fail after all that?
Weirdest thing.. TW3 is canonically
Spoiler:
before warhammer 1. The advisor, free of his curse, toddles off with a single white raven in tow...
I had some time today and started a Legion of chaos. Customizing the Demon Prince is pretty cool.
Fooled around with a Kislev campaign as well. They seem like they have the most landmak/unique buildings in the trilogy, to the point of distraction in my opinion. Couldn’t get into the faction though. No interest in the Cathay factions at the moment. Probably just stick it out with the Legion of Chaos.
Where are people going after the initial stages of the campaign with Skarbrand? I cleared the immediate area, then headed up to take out N'Kari, but after taking him out my campaign stagnated because there was no one left to fight in the area. Once Skarbrand loses momentum it seems hard to pick it back up again.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Where are people going after the initial stages of the campaign with Skarbrand? I cleared the immediate area, then headed up to take out N'Kari, but after taking him out my campaign stagnated because there was no one left to fight in the area. Once Skarbrand loses momentum it seems hard to pick it back up again.
The most straightforward thing seems to be to ignore the settlement east of you (despite being in your initial region, and do a big circle up to Nkari, then pick up that settlement after you hack through the nurgle faction above it).
I tried it out, Skrabrand seems very killy to the point of being easy, but... I wasn't particularly invested in it. Though some of that is not wanting to deal with the campaign mechanics again.
As a lcukyincident, Nkari failed to deal with the Khorne towns in his region, so a cult popped in his capital on turn 18, so I built the 'LL teleports to that location' building, took it, and he fell to attrition and the minor khorne faction.
Also toyed with Nurgle and the Daemon Prince.
Nurgle feels awful, sorry to say. Felt stuck on crap tier units and replenishment is surprisingly awful, even with the +20% unholy manifestation (and immobility). Took the Tzeentch faction instead of going after the ogres, but took a lot of casualties. Went after Kairos when he seemed overextended, wiped out two stacks and settlements, but by the time I replenished, he had two new stacks with doom knights reinforcing his remaining two towns. I had... a couple forsaken, plague toads, a beast of nurgle and I think a single spawn that I could recruit (plus plaguebearers, the starting stuff and nurglings, obviously.) Diseases don't last long enough and failed to spread to anything that mattered.
Daemon Prince also feels awful, and just cosmetic. But he's bizarrely more reliable at doing the disease thing than Nurgle once its unlocked. Its infinite on your own armies and just... spreads. You don't have to juggle infections or anything else. The attrition plague doesn't do that much but it also stops them from healing, which is a big deal. Like Nurgle you're better off going North rather than do the settlement battle the quests tell you to do, because that kicks off the order tide. (Though that is very ineffective if you're not playing those factions... the anti-player bias is pretty hateful for those two factions).
Messed about with Greasus a bit today (huzzah for random holidays). He's fine, but really lacks access to an early caster. Ogre mechanics are interesting. Not sure about high tier units being restricted to camps, though- really have to pay attention to where you place those.. Meat production is fine as long as you're paying attention. The maze like qualities of the mountains and relative emptiness of the Dark Lands is something to keep in mind for Greasus' campaign. There are turns where you don't do much.
Sees closest i get is -3 and i cant improve it or add anything. If i threaten its war deck
I haven't managed to do it yet, either. I'm currently at war with two big Cathay factions, and also dealing with other issues (such as that aforementioned siege). But if I ever manage to resolve that, I'm going to try making threats over it.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Where are people going after the initial stages of the campaign with Skarbrand? I cleared the immediate area, then headed up to take out N'Kari, but after taking him out my campaign stagnated because there was no one left to fight in the area. Once Skarbrand loses momentum it seems hard to pick it back up again.
The most straightforward thing seems to be to ignore the settlement east of you (despite being in your initial region, and do a big circle up to Nkari, then pick up that settlement after you hack through the nurgle faction above it).
I tried it out, Skrabrand seems very killy to the point of being easy, but... I wasn't particularly invested in it. Though some of that is not wanting to deal with the campaign mechanics again.
As a lcukyincident, Nkari failed to deal with the Khorne towns in his region, so a cult popped in his capital on turn 18, so I built the 'LL teleports to that location' building, took it, and he fell to attrition and the minor khorne faction.
Yeah I think my problem was instead of doing a circle, I zig-zagged my way up and used blood host armies to take out all the adjacent settlements. That meant once I hit N'Kari there wasn't anything left in the area and I had to spend several turns walking back without anyone to fight and lost all my momentum, then when I did find someone to fight the battle was close, I lost a lot of troops and had slow replenishment and not enough money to buy replacement units.
Skarbrand seems super easy if you can just keep the momentum up, I just didn't plan far enough ahead and let him lose momentum.
It's probably also a good idea to invest in a 2nd army and head off in a different direction so if one army loses momentum the economy doesn't just die, that was at least half my problem, was playing with negative income which worked great up until there was no one to fight.
I do love the way Skarbrand can just charge straight through the enemy lines and take out the enemy general in a few swings. If they try and run away he has the mass to pull through enemy formations and the speed to chase them down.
I wonder how he'll go against some of the better duellist Lords from TWW2, given how quickly he spanked N'Kari I'd be surprised if anything can stand up to him.
I might pause the Skarbrand campaign to try Tzeentch or one of the human factions.
I wonder how he'll go against some of the better duellist Lords from TWW2, given how quickly he spanked N'Kari I'd be surprised if anything can stand up to him.
He’ll fall to the power of Skarsnik, like all the rest.
Sees closest i get is -3 and i cant improve it or add anything. If i threaten its war deck
I haven't managed to do it yet, either. I'm currently at war with two big Cathay factions, and also dealing with other issues (such as that aforementioned siege). But if I ever manage to resolve that, I'm going to try making threats over it.
I’m playing as northern Cathay. I’ve confederated most of Cathay, only two factions are left. The iron dragon and the burning nomads. I’m in the middle of the first chaos gate opening event. How I did it was rather weird and can’t say if it would work for others. I started out with the easier agreements. Then couldn’t quite confederate. There was this settlement I didn’t want, but I wanted to kill the enemy holding it. So I killed the enemy and gave the settlement to the iron dragon (as in the trade settlement function). Suddenly all of Cathay wanted to confederate with me. I mean immediately after. And if not confederate they wanted to make deals. Not sure if bug or what. Maybe giving a settlement and confederating directly after is the way to go? I play on second hardest difficulties on both campaign and battle.
Sees closest i get is -3 and i cant improve it or add anything. If i threaten its war deck
I haven't managed to do it yet, either. I'm currently at war with two big Cathay factions, and also dealing with other issues (such as that aforementioned siege). But if I ever manage to resolve that, I'm going to try making threats over it.
I’m playing as northern Cathay. I’ve confederated most of Cathay, only two factions are left. The iron dragon and the burning nomads. I’m in the middle of the first chaos gate opening event. How I did it was rather weird and can’t say if it would work for others. I started out with the easier agreements. Then couldn’t quite confederate. There was this settlement I didn’t want, but I wanted to kill the enemy holding it. So I killed the enemy and gave the settlement to the iron dragon (as in the trade settlement function). Suddenly all of Cathay wanted to confederate with me. I mean immediately after. And if not confederate they wanted to make deals. Not sure if bug or what. Maybe giving a settlement and confederating directly after is the way to go? I play on second hardest difficulties on both campaign and battle.
I have been doing similar - and although only confederated one by turn 20 its looking good. I had a +50 boost to diplomacy with each "gift" but no one offered confederation.
So I've finally managed to get some time to play. I confederated with the bear brotherhood lads extremely easily and now I've got the first Ursun's roar. To be honest I don't really care too much about the main campaigns, mortal empires is all that matters to me.
Agreed. As mentioned above, I'm in the middle of a massive war, and I got the message that the portals will open soon. I'm not sure whether I can spare an army to go poking around in one of them.
That it has to be your LL (and likely most powerful army) makes it worse. The funny thing is, the domination battles don't necessarily need a highly tuned army, but getting there often does.
Though, when I did the Realm of Slaanesh last in my Kislev campaign, none of the native armies attacked me at all. Not even the last one standing next to the portal (and my army) and I was in march stance to get there.
nels1031 wrote:Mechanically, this campaign feels much more like a chore then WH2's campaign, where you could essentially work at your own pace.
I think that's the big thing. I didn't really like the Vortex campaign either, but the pacing of gathering materials and activating events was your choice. This feels a lot more all or nothing, and you increasingly have to drop everything to control portals opening in your territory, send your lord off for however many turns and get the stupid taint traits off them when they come back. It kills the flow of the game- actually ignoring them feels freeing, but realistically you can't really afford to do that, because the AI factions don't seem to have trouble expanding and soul diving simultaneously.
Messed about with Greasus a bit today (huzzah for random holidays). He's fine, but really lacks access to an early caster. Ogre mechanics are interesting. Not sure about high tier units being restricted to camps, though- really have to pay attention to where you place those.. Meat production is fine as long as you're paying attention. The maze like qualities of the mountains and relative emptiness of the Dark Lands is something to keep in mind for Greasus' campaign. There are turns where you don't do much.
I tried to start a Greasus campaign and I wasn't feeling it. His start location is very limiting.
Messed about with Greasus a bit today (huzzah for random holidays). He's fine, but really lacks access to an early caster. Ogre mechanics are interesting. Not sure about high tier units being restricted to camps, though- really have to pay attention to where you place those.. Meat production is fine as long as you're paying attention. The maze like qualities of the mountains and relative emptiness of the Dark Lands is something to keep in mind for Greasus' campaign. There are turns where you don't do much.
I tried to start a Greasus campaign and I wasn't feeling it. His start location is very limiting.
Yep. It wouldn't be quite so bad for a faction with Underway (or whatever), but hoofing it is rough. The Maw sacrifice for +20% movement feels mandatory.
On the other hand, camps can make it very defensive, and difficult to invade.
I also don't like the distances in the Dark Lands. That'll be problematic in the future- its probably the most spread out area of the map. I'm torn between hoping for a revision of provinces on the campaign map and just not caring and hoping the IE map isn't so warped. On the campaign map that area is stretched to make the compression from NW to NE possible at the chaos wastes.
So I finally went into whackoworld to get me a soul. Only I ballsed it up pretty royally. I was busy laying siege to a capital with the Tsarina and then I had to wait a bit to get my troops back up to full and I went to go see Nurgle. Mucked about in there a little too long and basically didn't pick up a soul.
Now my first question is: has that buggered me or is it not too much of a slog to make up the difference? Because I might honestly just start afresh.
And two: I've of course got these Nurgle gifts and it says if you garrison a provincial capital or somewhere with "protective buildings" it gets rid of that but I've tried that and they are still there. Am I missing something?
For the first part, it depends. From what I've seen, some factions are more successful than others, but particularly later on, they start to fail at souls. By the time I had my 4th, for example, 1 faction had 3 (just got the 3rd the same time I got my 4th), a couple had 2 and 1 more had 1 (and 2-3 had none). Leeway will likely depend on difficulty to some degree.
A capital (maybe city) should have a percentage chance of removing the chaos realm debuffs. If you build the anti-skaven building at tier 3, that gives a +50% chance to remove the debuff. Once built, its basically 100% chance- I've never seen it fail, but it only does 1 'layer' of the debuff at a time, so you usually have to park your LL for three turns after coming back with a soul. Which... sucks.
I decided to let myself get tempted with Slaanesh, so hopefully I can catch up later on that lost soul I probably went too cheaply, +15 ranks on lords/heroes, +5 recruit rank and a slab of cash looked like it'd help more in the campaign than having a soul, lol.
There's an item from Slaanesh that gives +200 growth locally and +25 control globally. That's may be worth skipping a soul to have. Put it on a hero early and camp your settlements to level them up quicker, and you can also expand quickly without worrying about public order.
So I have a question for everyone. I’m at around turn 50, playing as Cathay. I just noticed I can not embark on water. I wanted to send an army across the water but could not find a way to do so. Ended up marching 4 turns in a big semi circle. Also seems like harbors aren’t a thing? Anyway has anyone else embarked a hero or lord on water? Did I miss something?
After taking a Legion of Chaos campaign pretty deep, I think this faction needs some work.
1. You should be able to spend favor for buffs, items, global effects etc.. I’m maxed out in all 5 favor categories and there’s no where to go with it. It just sits at 3080. Non-siege Battle results only allow you to choose favor, instead of the standard Regen/Leadership+/Ransom etc. Its really annoying when deep in enemy territory and that little sliver of regen could be all the difference.
2. The concept of the Demon Prince is awesome. Had alot of fun tooling him out, getting different looks and such. Ultimately, its not enough. The abscence of taking ancilliaries is a huge minus. Got a sweet banner after a quest reward? Cool, you can’t use it in your main characters army! Have a 5th bracer of Nurgle instead.
3. Not a fan of how a Greater demon will take the place of a normal Herald. Had a Herald who was leader of my secondary army, essentially from the first 10 turns. Level 18, customized as I needed him. Had the option to instead have a Greater Demon takeover. That sounded awesome, so I did it. Greater Demon was a level 8…
In larger scope of what needs work:
1. Alliances get crazy mid to late game. All 4 Chaos factions up north are shacked up in alliances, with a few minor demon factions thrown in, creating this super power on my doorstep that I want no part of. Its like TW: 3K’s Yuan Shao super factions all over again.
2. I’m a veteran of Total War games and I’ve never struggled to put together armies like I have with this game. In my first complete campaign, I had 2.5 stacks. Skarbrand, 2 heroes and the best Khorne units on offer. Second army was just what I could afford, nothing high tier that could stand up to another full stack outside of ambushes/sieges. The .5 stack was a “seasonal” army that I flexed up and down as needed to close rifts. I had near a quarter of the map and my economy could really only support 1 top tier army. Having similar issues in Legion of Chaos. Maybe its different for non-Chaos factions? AI certainly doesn’t have the problem, which I expect in this game series, but it feels extreme.
3. I think CA’s fixation on telling a story in their campaigns for the last two TW games has fallen flat. Its like they took the wrong lessons from the first Beastmen DLC, which had a mini campaign that no one talked about/seemed to play, or the fast forward in time Eight Princes DLC for 3K that no one really wanted/expected. ‘Aw, man! Nobody played the mini campaign/DLC campaign. Lets make them play a limited map with a story campain on rails, instead of some sort of open world strategy game sandbox! No Total War fan wants that, right!?” Needless to say, I want my world map campaign asap. Or at least mods to buff/adjust certain things
I love the game, but I may put it down for awhile.
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Nerak wrote: So I have a question for everyone. I’m at around turn 50, playing as Cathay. I just noticed I can not embark on water. I wanted to send an army across the water but could not find a way to do so. Ended up marching 4 turns in a big semi circle. Also seems like harbors aren’t a thing? Anyway has anyone else embarked a hero or lord on water? Did I miss something?
Not too familiar with Cathay’s map yet, so I don’t know where you are at, but If its a sheer cliff face on the map you can’t embark onto water unless you have a city harbor or find a shallow beach. It also might take up a turn to embark on water, once you find a spot to go out to sea. Depends on how much movement you have.
You also have to click into the water then choose the route when your army gets into the water, clicking a route over a body of water will make the pathfinding choose the land route, rather than a path through the water.
finished rift campaign, in multiplayer and solo.
Replay value: 0
Story: meh
Mechanics of rifts: bad.
Iow all my issues are with the bad campaign, so far my game has some performance issues but other than my old graphics card dieing on me it runs good and overall is good and has a lot of potential.
Nerak wrote: So I have a question for everyone. I’m at around turn 50, playing as Cathay. I just noticed I can not embark on water. I wanted to send an army across the water but could not find a way to do so. Ended up marching 4 turns in a big semi circle. Also seems like harbors aren’t a thing? Anyway has anyone else embarked a hero or lord on water? Did I miss something?
The map doesn't really have an ocean near Cathay. It just cuts off there.
There's real water around the dragon isles for the lizardmen to paddle around in, and then there is the Sea of Claws below Norsca, which is a pool of blood from all the Empire and Wood Elf armies taking attrition as they endlessly suicide bomb the Daemon Prince.
There's also the sea between Norsca and the Chaos Wastes, but that's a more peaceful path for Nkari and Skarbrand to take a moonlight boat ride as they meander south like the best friends they are.
Early on, it was getting review nombed by Chinese Steam members who were upset about how CA handled the pre-release previews in China. And I know there were some early bad reviews from people with technical issues. Other than that, I don't know.
Early on, it was getting review nombed by Chinese Steam members who were upset about how CA handled the pre-release previews in China. And I know there were some early bad reviews from people with technical issues. Other than that, I don't know.
Early on, it was getting review nombed by Chinese Steam members who were upset about how CA handled the pre-release previews in China. And I know there were some early bad reviews from people with technical issues. Other than that, I don't know.
What did they do that the Chinese didn't like?
Apparently they gave prereview copies to the 'wrong' streamers in China- relative unknowns rather than popular ones. Or at least that was the going theory of the second hand translations of third hand posts on Chinese social media on the TW forums.
But it kicked off with review bombs of TW2 in the week or two before TW3 came out, so it was clearly motivated by something other than the finished game. Mostly finished game, anyway- I have a feeling lots of people won't think this finished until Immortal Empires is live, at the very least.
CA also tends to get review bombed as of late. It started back when they added women into Rome 2; but it also happened when Norsca broke Warhammer 2 and they had to rebuild the entire faction and thus didn't release them at launch for Warhammer 2. They were upfront about it but people still got salty and the "cool" thing to do is to review bomb.
Add that and the issue with China and also the normal "it doesn't work on day 1" complaints which range from actual technical launch week issues that are typically patched out within the first week or two; to those who suddenly find out that their PC can't run the latest high end RTS game (which isn't surprising as RTS games like TW Warhammer hit systems harder than even some very visually pretty FPS or adventuring games).
So some of it is just normal new game release stuff; some is review bombing and some is the issue with past releases and somewhat of a negative culture CA has wound up with (kind of like the GW haters).
There's also those who "hate" the whole "why 3 games" thing.
And then yep some people only want the Immortal Empires map, however anyone who watched Warhammer 2 already should know that IE will be a later release not a launch week release.
Overall my impression is that the game has some launch issues and perhaps also some optimising issues. Things that I would expect CA to fix in the coming weeks. Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about the reviews and would expect them to steady out into a net positive. It's a shame that review bombing has become a thing and it walks the line between legitimate complaint and abuse.
Olthannon wrote: Review bombing only really works providing people actually give a gak about those peoples opinions. Its the same as the amazon LoTR thing.
I think a lot of folk look at the ratio of positive to negative reviews. If the bombing is really crazy it'll be obvious that the reviews are skewed because of it, but if it's something like a "positive" game gets dropped to a "mixed" game, then some folk might not notice it's been bombed and just assume it's a mediocre game and not look into it any further.
Since its pretty normal for a CA game to get review bombed and be buggy at launch most people really won't care. Its not going to hurt a Total War game's sales. Maybe some other developer, but not CA.
Amazon LOTR has some basic lore issues based just on the trailer, so I'm not sure that comparison is a good one.
I don't think the reviews will have that much of an effect on this game, fortunately. This is something that players have been anticipating since the release of the first game. The success of the first game showed that CA could do the setting properly, and guaranteed that a lot of people would get al three games. The success of the second game showed that the first was not a fluke. Mortal Empires showed that the overall plan of a massive three game interconnected campaign would work. It's at that point that the third game started to be all but guaranteed to do well. Can they still screw it up? Sure. But the track record on this specific project is very good. Further, the ability to link all three games adds an extra layer of security for CA. Even if the base game itself ends up unpopular, the success of Mortal Empires is a pretty strong suggestion that Immortal Empires will be worth the cost of the game.
Grey Templar wrote: Since its pretty normal for a CA game to get review bombed and be buggy at launch most people really won't care.
I don't think "most people" know that. I sure didn't know that and I'm probably a bigger fan of TWW2 and 3 than "most people"
Review bombing isn't going to affect the people who are intimately familiar with the franchise and have been checking forums and youtubers for weeks leading up to release, it'll affect the many people who are on the positive side of ambivalent and apathetic toward the game, and those sorts of people make up a significant chunk of sales if they get pushed far enough to hit the buy button.
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Eumerin wrote: Amazon LOTR has some basic lore issues based just on the trailer, so I'm not sure that comparison is a good one.
I don't think the reviews will have that much of an effect on this game, fortunately. This is something that players have been anticipating since the release of the first game. The success of the first game showed that CA could do the setting properly, and guaranteed that a lot of people would get al three games. The success of the second game showed that the first was not a fluke. Mortal Empires showed that the overall plan of a massive three game interconnected campaign would work. It's at that point that the third game started to be all but guaranteed to do well. Can they still screw it up? Sure. But the track record on this specific project is very good. Further, the ability to link all three games adds an extra layer of security for CA. Even if the base game itself ends up unpopular, the success of Mortal Empires is a pretty strong suggestion that Immortal Empires will be worth the cost of the game.
I reckon there's a lot of people still out there who didn't buy TWW1 or TWW2, or bought them but never played them, that might be drawn into 3.
I definitely have friends who are interested in the TW:Warhammer series but haven't bought in yet because "their guys" weren't in the game, or they were waiting for the series to complete prior to picking it up.
So can we talk about what is not in the game? I’m thinking about Ind, Kuresh, Nippon, the dragon islands and the rest of Cathay. To a much lesser extent Araby and chaos dwarves as well, though I’ll leave them aside for this post. The map cuts off where these factions are located. I assume that means dlc to introduce theese factions with expanded maps? To my knowledge CA has never done expanded map dlc before. I genuinely thought we’d see them with the Cathay skinn, similar to border princes or kislev in ttw 1. But their complete absence makes me think we’re looking at a few years before mortal empire with the whole world present comes around.
Also as a side note, wasn’t naval battles supposed to be a thing in tww 3?
Nerak wrote: So can we talk about what is not in the game? I’m thinking about Ind, Kuresh, Nippon, the dragon islands and the rest of Cathay. To a much lesser extent Araby and chaos dwarves as well, though I’ll leave them aside for this post. The map cuts off where these factions are located. I assume that means dlc to introduce theese factions with expanded maps? To my knowledge CA has never done expanded map dlc before. I genuinely thought we’d see them with the Cathay skinn, similar to border princes or kislev in ttw 1. But their complete absence makes me think we’re looking at a few years before mortal empire with the whole world present comes around.
Also as a side note, wasn’t naval battles supposed to be a thing in tww 3?
I'm kind of expecting Chaos Dwarfs, Warrior of Chaos rework, Dogs of War and not much else. Maybe an Araby, I have my doubts over Ind and Nippon.
TWW1 in the end had 9 races. TWW2 added 6 races. TWW3 already has 8 (unless you want to group the chaos factions together).
So I'm expecting 2 or 3 new races and that's about it, and I'd be surprised if one of those isn't Chaos Stunties.
Though maybe CA will continue trying to milk it, I think it depends on their agreement and relationship with GW.
When the mortal empires come around it'll likely make the map as big as necessary to fit all the races they want into it.
There is a prototype map that has been found in the game files and CA confirmed was a prototype that contains areas such as Ind and Kuresh but not Nippon.
I imagine they will do as much stuff as they can that will make them money and that GW is happy with.
The map has been changed and adjusted and in 3 kingdoms was expanded
The Chaos Dwarf land is all there and currently home ot a much larger than normal AI greenskin faction so pretty certain they will be a DLC.
Then its all up in the air - more Daemon/Cathay/Kislev characters for use, same with Neferata and/or Nagash and maybe the Red Duke - a game start vid has been found in the files
Hoping for Chaos Dwarfs, Neferata, Dogs of War, Kuresh
Mr Morden wrote: There is a prototype map that has been found in the game files and CA confirmed was a prototype that contains areas such as Ind and Kuresh but not Nippon.
Those areas were there, but they had no detail like the rest of the map, so I'm half expecting it to be a blanked out area similar the the area north of the dragon isles existed on the TWW2 map but just had a cloud over it.
But yeah, all just speculation, it could end up a few different ways.
Also don't forget the map might be originally designed to have factions that perhaps didn't make it into the final designs for the game itself or its expansions. Perhaps due to time constraints, budgeting or other factors. Don't forget for forces like Nippon and Cathay, whilst CA have a lot of resources from GW, there's so little material out there in general that they likely have to do a lot more design work to get those forces fleshed out. At least compared to armies like Orks or Empire and suchlike.
That’s some interesting info. I do get the feeling that CA wants to make the complete world of warhammer. I suppose the prototype map indicates a desire to finish the world. Makes sense for them to focus on what’s represented on the tabletop though. Quite happy about the chaos factions l. Going to the chaos realms is the highlight of the campaign for me. I’m going to make a prediction. I think in... about three years time we will see a big warhammer water dlc. The big thing in it will be the inclusion of proper naval battles. It will include Cathays water dragon and nippon. It will be the last big dlc before the Imortal empires map gets released, tying the east of Cathay through Nippon with the west of naggaroth/lustria. It will be its own campaign map. Featuring the vampire coast and the nautical themed lords. Focusing on either finding specific items or holding on to certain islands to either shut out or invite chaos. Well, it is all just speculation but it is my guess.
Immortal empires should drop before any DLC. At worst it should be a few months.
Effectively the world _is_ finished. The empty spaces of Nippon, Ind and the Warhammer_Pacific would add a whole lot of nothing. There absolutely won't be another campaign focused on age of sail adventures in a big empty ocean never covered by any warhammer products at all, featuring factions no one ever played because they never existed beyond a few token ally/mercenary units in 3rd edition (and that only applies to Nippon, and the only reason that wasn't a fairly unflattering caricature was the complete lack of detail).
All they really need to do is take the ME map, add the Dark lands, mountains of mourn, and Cathay and then add the chaos wastes above the polar regions from Naggaroth eastwards to Cathay.
I unlocked Boris and leveled the Ice Queen to 50, but dropped the campaign. Might play Kislev as Boris.
The mechanics are neat, but there's almost too many for Kislev, that to do too little. Roster feels largely fine, but the Little Grom has a funky firing arc.
Cathay feels better in general.
Game runs fine. I think almost better than Warhammer 2 which is kind odd. I hate the campaign mechanics. It's vastly more annoying than Vortex.
Voss wrote: Immortal empires should drop before any DLC. At worst it should be a few months.
Effectively the world _is_ finished. The empty spaces of Nippon, Ind and the Warhammer_Pacific would add a whole lot of nothing. There absolutely won't be another campaign focused on age of sail adventures in a big empty ocean never covered by any warhammer products at all, featuring factions no one ever played because they never existed beyond a few token ally/mercenary units in 3rd edition (and that only applies to Nippon, and the only reason that wasn't a fairly unflattering caricature was the complete lack of detail).
All they really need to do is take the ME map, add the Dark lands, mountains of mourn, and Cathay and then add the chaos wastes above the polar regions from Naggaroth eastwards to Cathay.
If its makes money there is no reason not to add content to those regions - Cathay had not much more and less than Nippon.
What's the basic tactics for playing as Tzeentch in campaign battles? I loaded up on horrors but battles seem really tough and I'm not doing much better than the autoresolve, the horrors get outranged by Cathay archers, and don't do damage fast enough to stop melee infantry walking over them.
Had a bit of luck moving units to the backline as barriers failed so they could rebuild the barrier, but it just seems like my DPS is too low relative to how quickly the opposition can drop barriers and start picking off entities.
I can resort to cheese like using Kairos to waste ammo, but I prefer not resorting to exploiting the AI.
Voss wrote: Immortal empires should drop before any DLC. At worst it should be a few months.
Effectively the world _is_ finished. The empty spaces of Nippon, Ind and the Warhammer_Pacific would add a whole lot of nothing. There absolutely won't be another campaign focused on age of sail adventures in a big empty ocean never covered by any warhammer products at all, featuring factions no one ever played because they never existed beyond a few token ally/mercenary units in 3rd edition (and that only applies to Nippon, and the only reason that wasn't a fairly unflattering caricature was the complete lack of detail).
All they really need to do is take the ME map, add the Dark lands, mountains of mourn, and Cathay and then add the chaos wastes above the polar regions from Naggaroth eastwards to Cathay.
If its makes money there is no reason not to add content to those regions - Cathay had not much more and less than Nippon.
I mean... sure? _If_ it makes money
But you're rather hand-waving the time and money investment in entire new races, art, animation, background, etc. And the rate of return on DLC, which generally sell less than the base game. Given how CA quickly dropped race packs from TW2, I doubt very much they'd consider it worthwhile. Especially with no draw beyond 'these places exist on the map,' whereas chaos dwarfs have a history, background, army list, etc, along with a standing expectation they'd get done at some point. Truthfully, I'm not particularly convinced Cathay was worth their time.
Voss wrote: Truthfully, I'm not particularly convinced Cathay was worth their time.
Surely Cathays inclusion help drive sales in China and possibly other eastern regions.
Has it? Many companies have made the mistake of trying to appeal to Asian markets and missed the mark. I don't know how many have been successful.
I don't know what it takes to make it in Asia, but it seems like Westerners often fail in that regard.
Obviously the opposite is true as well. Don’t starve by Kleis most bought skins are chinese exclusive for instance. Riot games (makers of league of legends) success in China and Korea (in particular) has been enormous. So much so that it’s more economically beneficial for them to disregard the western audience concerning design decisions. Though that data is kind of old. Of course there’s many companies that’s tried and failed to establish themselves in the East. The opposite is true as well however. I don’t claim to have information about how well Cathay has influenced sales in Asia. But this is the first time I’ve heard about a Chinese incident with CA, the review bombing and such. So assumedly it’s had some sort of impact. Or I just haven’t been in the loop for the previous Asian releases. I mean even a review bombing shows people are worked up enough to care.
Nerak wrote: So can we talk about what is not in the game? I’m thinking about Ind, Kuresh, Nippon, the dragon islands and the rest of Cathay. To a much lesser extent Araby and chaos dwarves as well, though I’ll leave them aside for this post. The map cuts off where these factions are located. I assume that means dlc to introduce theese factions with expanded maps? To my knowledge CA has never done expanded map dlc before. I genuinely thought we’d see them with the Cathay skinn, similar to border princes or kislev in ttw 1. But their complete absence makes me think we’re looking at a few years before mortal empire with the whole world present comes around.
Also as a side note, wasn’t naval battles supposed to be a thing in tww 3?
I'm kind of expecting Chaos Dwarfs, Warrior of Chaos rework, Dogs of War and not much else. Maybe an Araby, I have my doubts over Ind and Nippon.
Araby repeatedly confirmed to not ever being included, apparently. Been asked about many times over past few years, devs have been very forceful in saying there is no intention to include them. Recently there was something else that suggested Ind and Nippon were not being worked on either.
Nerak wrote: So can we talk about what is not in the game? I’m thinking about Ind, Kuresh, Nippon, the dragon islands and the rest of Cathay. To a much lesser extent Araby and chaos dwarves as well, though I’ll leave them aside for this post. The map cuts off where these factions are located. I assume that means dlc to introduce theese factions with expanded maps? To my knowledge CA has never done expanded map dlc before. I genuinely thought we’d see them with the Cathay skinn, similar to border princes or kislev in ttw 1. But their complete absence makes me think we’re looking at a few years before mortal empire with the whole world present comes around.
Also as a side note, wasn’t naval battles supposed to be a thing in tww 3?
I'm kind of expecting Chaos Dwarfs, Warrior of Chaos rework, Dogs of War and not much else. Maybe an Araby, I have my doubts over Ind and Nippon.
Araby repeatedly confirmed to not ever being included, apparently. Been asked about many times over past few years, devs have been very forceful in saying there is no intention to include them. Recently there was something else that suggested Ind and Nippon were not being worked on either.
Andy Hall said it was unlikely they would get to them.
Andy Hall wrote:"We're never gonna say never because there should always be the opportunity to bring these new races in or new nations, but you know I've seen the road map and these nations aren't on there now. There's no plans to do them in the immediate or even long-term future. We've still go so much to do with Cathay. Honestly the stuff I've seen it'll curl your toes in the best possible way. [...] People are kinda desperately hanging on for one of these other nations. [...] Don't lose any sleep, it's not happening anytime soon. Probably never, I'm afraid.
So, on principle, never say never, but yeah, no. Never.
Not even on the long term road map is pretty definitive for a finite term project like a computer game.
Wasn’t too keen on playing Ogres at first. Was worried they’d play like bigger Orcs. Turns out they might be my favorite faction so far. The use of camps is a pretty inspired mechanic, almost like an immobile Black Ark in a way. I conquered as much of the Mountains of Mourn as possible and strung out camps along the way so that as an army ventured out, it would recruit on the move from one camp circle to the next. Eventually when I had a bulletproof economy, I tore down most camps and rebuilt them near enterances to the mountains and crossroads and used them as defensive elements before expanding again.
Now that I have a grasp of the core mechanics of the campaign, it doesn’t bother me as much. The orientation of the map bothers me the most now, I think.
Probably just going to conquer Cathay as Greasus now.
Andy Hall wrote:"We're never gonna say never because there should always be the opportunity to bring these new races in or new nations, but you know I've seen the road map and these nations aren't on there now. There's no plans to do them in the immediate or even long-term future. We've still go so much to do with Cathay. Honestly the stuff I've seen it'll curl your toes in the best possible way. [...] People are kinda desperately hanging on for one of these other nations. [...] Don't lose any sleep, it's not happening anytime soon. Probably never, I'm afraid.
So, on principle, never say never, but yeah, no. Never.
Not even on the long term road map is pretty definitive for a finite term project like a computer game.
I don't know of any other company that handles bugs the way CA does, as if bug fixing will make the game explode and start from scratch and all other work is impossible while it happens. But this oversharing really doesn't help (especially with the 'we can't possibly see Denuvo as causing problems. Why would anyone think that?' section).
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Anyway, maybe the 10th of March or the 17th, if you're affected by one of the very small list of issues they're currently working on (which you probably are not).
Another fix (including gameplay balance and bugs) next month.
And then maybe after that we'll see a real timeline of oncoming content.
Well they aren't wrong - changing a tiny bit of code really can cause a ripple effect. The problem is most people have no clue about coding games on even a most basic level. Personally I think the "Oversharing" is not done enough and I always hold up Factorio's blog as a fantastic example of both providing weekly marketing releases of info and also providing a level of decent and understandable education on the coding behind the game. On how what can seem like a really simple idea to suggest can actually be a complex series of problems - some of which might be inherent in how they coded some parts of the game much earlier and now present problems to changing some newer things - - unless they go back and change big parts of the earlier code which hits other features too.
It's why suddenly oversharing coding info in one moment doesn't work because the fanbase has no underlaying concepts to draw upon so it just sounds like its making excuses. Best thing CA could do is actually talk about the code and how things work
Obviously there are ripple effects. But that's not how they're presenting the information (nor how they've framed it in the past. Where for TW2, they claimed they couldn't work on DLC while they were still working on bug fixes, which is insane). They're literally showing the code as a pile of sticks where if they hit another stick, the whole pile collapses and has to be reassembled. That's a terrible metaphor for coding- ripple effect bugs aren't that pervasive in general, and when they are, you simply revert the changes.
If they're going to talk about it this way, they're better off shutting the hell up.
I don't know of any other company that handles bugs the way CA does, as if bug fixing will make the game explode and start from scratch and all other work is impossible while it happens. But this oversharing really doesn't help (especially with the 'we can't possibly see Denuvo as causing problems. Why would anyone think that?' section).
---
Anyway, maybe the 10th of March or the 17th, if you're affected by one of the very small list of issues they're currently working on (which you probably are not).
Another fix (including gameplay balance and bugs) next month.
And then maybe after that we'll see a real timeline of oncoming content.
I kind of appreciate CA keep players in the loop. It's nothing new, they've always done blog style posts, I think it's better than them staying quiet.
Of course it's expected there'd be some marketing talk in there.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Voss wrote: Obviously there are ripple effects. But that's not how they're presenting the information (nor how they've framed it in the past. Where for TW2, they claimed they couldn't work on DLC while they were still working on bug fixes, which is insane). They're literally showing the code as a pile of sticks where if they hit another stick, the whole pile collapses and has to be reassembled. That's a terrible metaphor for coding- ripple effect bugs aren't that pervasive in general, and when they are, you simply revert the changes.
If they're going to talk about it this way, they're better off shutting the hell up.
I feel like you're taking this too personally, lol.
A game is a complicated program, stuff needs to be QA tested and even in the little crappy programs I write sometimes fixes have unforeseen consequences that I don't immediately realise.
Maybe they used a crap metaphor, but whatever, I get the point they're trying to get across. At least it's not Cyperpunk 2077.
I feel like you're taking this too personally, lol.
Not at all. I feel like they're trying to be too personable, rather than getting stuff done.
Inviting the crowd into your process is exhausting, and all people really want is a reliable timeline for the content they care about. Not meandering excuses for why it isn't happening and handwaving problems like Denuvo
As for 'marketing talk,' I'm not sure where you got that- it has nothing to do with what I said.
Not sure if I mentioned it before, but the Kislev technology tree, aside from the Ice Maiden training, is mostly hot garbage. Might be the most random scattershot tech tree in all the TW games I've played in recent memory.
Also, "unlocking" Tzar Boris is pretty lame. Fight a battle to free him and then either give him a major settlement or he leaves?
I feel like you're taking this too personally, lol.
Not at all. I feel like they're trying to be too personable, rather than getting stuff done.
I'd be surprised if the community engagement person is the same person on the ground making the changes, so making a blog post like this isn't really slowing them down from "getting stuff done".
Inviting the crowd into your process is exhausting
Exhausting for who? If you don't care, don't read it. CA have always (or at least as long as I've been playing TW games) done "developer diaries" and blog style posts.
I rarely hear whinging about developers communicating too much, usually it's whinging about developers not communicating enough
and all people really want is a reliable timeline for the content they care about.
They've said the 10th to 17th for a 1.0.2 patch, and early April for the next gameplay patch, that's probably about as reliable of a timeline you're going to get.
As for 'marketing talk,' I'm not sure where you got that- it has nothing to do with what I said.
I was talking about the "handwaving Denuvo" stuff, perhaps "marketing talk" was the wrong terminology to use.
But yeah, I don't really see the massive problem with this post from CA, maybe it's too many words but it takes all of 10 seconds to flick through the headings and find the bolded text that has their projected dates.
There's plenty of things you can be unhappy about with TWW3, this just seems like the weirdest thing to get your panties in a twist over.
The biggest issue IMO is just that most people seem to find the campaign boring, and the most interesting bit of news they could release is a timeline for mortal empires, as it seems that's what most people are wanting.
Denuvo is a massive issue, due to the toll it takes on performance alone, nvm that it is completely overpriced AND destructive as an anti piracy meassure to the point that it punishes paying customers whilest pirating players have better performance.
Not Online!!! wrote: Denuvo is a massive issue, due to the toll it takes on performance alone, nvm that it is completely overpriced AND destructive as an anti piracy meassure to the point that it punishes paying customers whilest pirating players have better performance.
Personally my performance has been a bit weird, when the game first released I had reasonably good performance (similar to what I had in TWW2) but then when I started my Cathay playthrough my performance tanked. At first I thought it might have been because Cathay itself was more graphically intensive, but I went back to a previous campaign and performance was bad there too, so I think it might have been the first patch which came out roughly the same time. When patch 2 came out (and I also updated my graphics drivers at the same time) the performance went back to what it was on release.
Dunno if Denuvo could be to blame for that.
A younger me probably wouldn't have bought the game knowing it had a crappy DRM program on it, but the current much older version of me didn't even realise it had DRM until after I'd preordered it.
On a separate note, LegendofTotalWar said he's going to stop livestreaming TWW3 content until they make the game better, either through patches or releasing mortal empires, and has given a short essay on it. His main gripe seemed to be what I mentioned a couple of posts ago, many people find the main campaign sucks and it seems Legend is on the same page.
Not Online!!! wrote: Denuvo is a massive issue, due to the toll it takes on performance alone, nvm that it is completely overpriced AND destructive as an anti piracy meassure to the point that it punishes paying customers whilest pirating players have better performance.
Personally my performance has been a bit weird, when the game first released I had reasonably good performance (similar to what I had in TWW2) but then when I started my Cathay playthrough my performance tanked. At first I thought it might have been because Cathay itself was more graphically intensive, but I went back to a previous campaign and performance was bad there too, so I think it might have been the first patch which came out roughly the same time. When patch 2 came out (and I also updated my graphics drivers at the same time) the performance went back to what it was on release.
Dunno if Denuvo could be to blame for that.
A younger me probably wouldn't have bought the game knowing it had a crappy DRM program on it, but the current much older version of me didn't even realise it had DRM until after I'd preordered it.
On a separate note, LegendofTotalWar said he's going to stop livestreaming TWW3 content until they make the game better, either through patches or releasing mortal empires, and has given a short essay on it. His main gripe seemed to be what I mentioned a couple of posts ago, many people find the main campaign sucks and it seems Legend is on the same page.
Oh the performance is anyways all over the place, my old gtx 980 nvidia and old 7core intel processor did run the game (at low graphics) better than my 2 cousins far more modern setup with better processors and graphics cards (1080 ti), atleast ingame.
Further, CA clamps actively down in the forums to the point that even PC gamer wrote about denuvo and CA's behaviour, treating any comment that demands the removal of it as spam, does highlight that it is an issue.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-impact-of-denuvo-on-total-war-warhammer-3-is-still-being-investigated/ in the past there have been games that have suffered tremendously from denuvo and its system in performance and load time, and in general (according to ca) some frames have been lost.
Now what "some frames" means , in the context of CA stating such a thing, one can only deduce, however, considering rome 2 trailers and statements and what happened at release of rome 2..... (no i don't like CA and what they did to total war.
As an aside, it has been benchmarked on multiple differing games that Denuvo does seemingly increase loading times ASWELL as frames.
Not Online!!! wrote: Denuvo is a massive issue, due to the toll it takes on performance alone, nvm that it is completely overpriced AND destructive as an anti piracy meassure to the point that it punishes paying customers whilest pirating players have better performance.
Personally my performance has been a bit weird, when the game first released I had reasonably good performance (similar to what I had in TWW2) but then when I started my Cathay playthrough my performance tanked. At first I thought it might have been because Cathay itself was more graphically intensive, but I went back to a previous campaign and performance was bad there too, so I think it might have been the first patch which came out roughly the same time. When patch 2 came out (and I also updated my graphics drivers at the same time) the performance went back to what it was on release.
Dunno if Denuvo could be to blame for that.
A younger me probably wouldn't have bought the game knowing it had a crappy DRM program on it, but the current much older version of me didn't even realise it had DRM until after I'd preordered it.
On a separate note, LegendofTotalWar said he's going to stop livestreaming TWW3 content until they make the game better, either through patches or releasing mortal empires, and has given a short essay on it. His main gripe seemed to be what I mentioned a couple of posts ago, many people find the main campaign sucks and it seems Legend is on the same page.
Oh the performance is anyways all over the place, my old gtx 980 nvidia and old 7core intel processor did run the game (at low graphics) better than my 2 cousins far more modern setup with better processors and graphics cards (1080 ti), atleast ingame.
Further, CA clamps actively down in the forums to the point that even PC gamer wrote about denuvo and CA's behaviour, treating any comment that demands the removal of it as spam, does highlight that it is an issue.
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-impact-of-denuvo-on-total-war-warhammer-3-is-still-being-investigated/ in the past there have been games that have suffered tremendously from denuvo and its system in performance and load time, and in general (according to ca) some frames have been lost.
Now what "some frames" means , in the context of CA stating such a thing, one can only deduce, however, considering rome 2 trailers and statements and what happened at release of rome 2..... (no i don't like CA and what they did to total war.
As an aside, it has been benchmarked on multiple differing games that Denuvo does seemingly increase loading times ASWELL as frames.
f.e.
Is there any way of getting TWW3 without Denuvo on it?
My understanding was TWW2 had it also, so wouldn't we expect a similar performance hit as we always had?
Even in TWW2 I always felt the load times were a bit long given that I've got the game installed on a reasonably high end SSD and everything else loads like lightning (other games I often can't read the load screen text because it's loaded before I have time to read it).
Yes, the irony is so thick you can almost walk on it.
Gog can have also keys without.
But yes, if Performance and loadtime annoy you you are better off to "Pirate" instead of being a paying customer.
Nvm that denuvo chronically get's cracked earlier than promised, but piracy bad and Big problem... (Ironic, piracy is Bad but childgambling, bs DLC, licensces instead of ownership are all good and acceptable behaviours according to the gaming industry.)
Yes, the irony is so thick you can almost walk on it.
Gog can have also keys without.
But yes, if Performance and loadtime annoy you you are better off to "Pirate" instead of being a paying customer.
Nvm that denuvo chronically get's cracked earlier than promised, but piracy bad and Big problem... (Ironic, piracy is Bad but childgambling, bs DLC, licensces instead of ownership are all good and acceptable behaviours according to the gaming industry.)
TWW3 isn't on GOG though?
Has TWW3 been cracked yet? Has anyone actually tried a cracked version to see how it compares?
Or even TWW2?
I haven't really been in the piracy game since I was a kid (prior to Steam, and prior to having enough money to actually buy games). Back in the day piracy would sometimes give you a better version of the game, but often it'd have its own problems or it wouldn't properly integrate patches and upgrades or would introduce new performance or stability issues.
Yes, the irony is so thick you can almost walk on it.
Gog can have also keys without. But yes, if Performance and loadtime annoy you you are better off to "Pirate" instead of being a paying customer. Nvm that denuvo chronically get's cracked earlier than promised, but piracy bad and Big problem... (Ironic, piracy is Bad but childgambling, bs DLC, licensces instead of ownership are all good and acceptable behaviours according to the gaming industry.)
TWW3 isn't on GOG though?
Has TWW3 been cracked yet? Has anyone actually tried a cracked version to see how it compares?
Or even TWW2?
I haven't really been in the piracy game since I was a kid (prior to Steam, and prior to having enough money to actually buy games). Back in the day piracy would sometimes give you a better version of the game, but often it'd have its own problems or it wouldn't properly integrate patches and upgrades or would introduce new performance or stability issues.
TWW2 has been cracked one day after release, despite denuvo, it was at the time the laughing stock and lead to backlash but CA is nothing if not hostile torwards its community at multiple points and still refuses after the initial Denuvo encryption to not remove it later on, as many other games do. TWW3 after a cursory glance has not been cracked yet, seemingly.
Also found some people testing the performance, and saying that yes especially loadtimes seem to significantly get lower for tww2.
Not Online!!! wrote: TWW2 has been cracked one day after release, despite denuvo, it was at the time the laughing stock and lead to backlash but CA is nothing if not hostile torwards its community at multiple points and still refuses after the initial Denuvo encryption to not remove it later on, as many other games do.
TWW3 after a cursory glance has not been cracked yet, seemingly.
Also found some people testing the performance, and saying that yes especially loadtimes seem to significantly get lower for tww2.
I seem to recall a while back someone saying although TWW2 had been cracked, it was complicated. I don't remember the specifics but it might have been certain DLC or patches not working. And it seems from googling that cracked versions don't remove denuvo, they just confuse it, so it still operates in the background. But yeah, I guess the reason I mention it is because I think there's an idea that the pirates get a better version of the game, and while that's sometimes true it's often not.
I do wonder how much CA have control over it. The publisher is SEGA and often it's the publisher that decides what DRM a game is going to have and whether it'll get removed or not. I know in other cases developers have said they didn't want to put DRM on a game but were contractually obliged by the publisher to do it.
It seems all recent versions of TW games (including all 3 Warhammer titles) have been using Denuvo, so one would think if TWW3 has performance issues caused by the DRM the earlier games might have similar issues.
Not Online!!! wrote: TWW2 has been cracked one day after release, despite denuvo, it was at the time the laughing stock and lead to backlash but CA is nothing if not hostile torwards its community at multiple points and still refuses after the initial Denuvo encryption to not remove it later on, as many other games do.
TWW3 after a cursory glance has not been cracked yet, seemingly.
Also found some people testing the performance, and saying that yes especially loadtimes seem to significantly get lower for tww2.
I seem to recall a while back someone saying although TWW2 had been cracked, it was complicated. I don't remember the specifics but it might have been certain DLC or patches not working. And it seems from googling that cracked versions don't remove denuvo, they just confuse it, so it still operates in the background. But yeah, I guess the reason I mention it is because I think there's an idea that the pirates get a better version of the game, and while that's sometimes true it's often not.
I do wonder how much CA have control over it. The publisher is SEGA and often it's the publisher that decides what DRM a game is going to have and whether it'll get removed or not. I know in other cases developers have said they didn't want to put DRM on a game but were contractually obliged by the publisher to do it.
It seems all recent versions of TW games (including all 3 Warhammer titles) have been using Denuvo, so one would think if TWW3 has performance issues caused by the DRM the earlier games might have similar issues.
I guess the loading issues of TWW2 are a good enough proof.
Maybee well due to the fact that they did not optimize it well enough and denuvos new version doing a worse number on TWW3?
Then again i had issues at the start of TWW2 until some patches in.
Whilst Legend loses his gak at the state of the game (and rightly so):
... CA have a small update, the key part of which is this:
CA wrote:Following Patch 1.0.2, we’ll talk a bit more about Update 1.1: the first major gameplay update for Total War: WARHAMMER III. This is aiming to include several bug fixes, balance tweaks, gameplay changes, and mechanical improvements to a variety of areas in the game.
Here are just a few of the areas that will see improvements in 1.1:
The Chaos Realms, negative traits, realm rewards, and rift management
Numerous balance tweaks to the Factions
Bug fixes (including the Supply Line bug)
…and much more!
Many of these changes are based on feedback from the community—with many more of your comments, critiques, and ideas being worked into our future updates. Following 1.1, we'll provide a longer-term look at what's coming in the future. It’s clear that *MANY* players are waiting to hear more about the Blood Pack, Immortal Empires, and other new content coming to the game, and we’re excited to share more about those projects once we’ve established a strong baseline for WARHAMMER III
I think I'll just ignore the game until this 1.1 hits, which I suspect is what a lot of people are doing, given the ever-dwindling player numbers.
Truthfully, I doubt 1.1 will be enough. That 'longer term look' at the future just feels bad. When IE arrives and the first DLC is on the horizon, then I'll care. As is, it can go on the shelf with the other unfinished games of 2020-2022.
Grey Templar wrote: I have to say that Leadbeltchers are very very strong, as they should be, but it does kinda feel almost unfair.
I still haven't even played an Ogre campaign. I never even finished my Skarbrand campaign and only just started Tzeentch and Cathay campaigns.
Definitely waiting on mortal empires.
Though I do hope CA do some more campaigns for the warhammer series. I quite liked the Vortex campaign in TWW2, similar campaigns that span the races from all 3 games would be cool and definitely something I'd be willing to buy DLC to try.
I also hope they improve the responsiveness of units. I find myself clicking heaps to get units out of combat otherwise they just stay there and keep fighting which is not something I noticed in TWW2.
I also hope they improve the responsiveness of units. I find myself clicking heaps to get units out of combat otherwise they just stay there and keep fighting which is not something I noticed in TWW2.
I think some of that are the changes to unit mass. It seems a lot harder to push through other models.
The other aspect is, I suspect, that individual models disengage, but enemies re-engage them and that 'deletes' the pathfinding waypoint for the move order (or recalculates it. But if a model is hemmed in by too many enemies on all sides, it will recalculate, and recalculate and recalculate and... hopeful hit some limit CA set up on pathing). If that happens to enough of the unit, the order just gets 'lost.'
Pathfinding can be super complex for a computer (as multiple node locations along the path are very helpful, but an obvious tax on computing power). It might be worth testing on different unit sizes. If more orders get lost on ultra rather than medium unit sizes, it probably is a pathfinding issue.
I also hope they improve the responsiveness of units. I find myself clicking heaps to get units out of combat otherwise they just stay there and keep fighting which is not something I noticed in TWW2.
I think some of that are the changes to unit mass. It seems a lot harder to push through other models.
The other aspect is, I suspect, that individual models disengage, but enemies re-engage them and that 'deletes' the pathfinding waypoint for the move order (or recalculates it. But if a model is hemmed in by too many enemies on all sides, it will recalculate, and recalculate and recalculate and... hopeful hit some limit CA set up on pathing). If that happens to enough of the unit, the order just gets 'lost.'
Pathfinding can be super complex for a computer (as multiple node locations along the path are very helpful, but an obvious tax on computing power). It might be worth testing on different unit sizes. If more orders get lost on ultra rather than medium unit sizes, it probably is a pathfinding issue.
Maybe that's it. It seemed like firstly the unit is very slow to response, then secondly 1 or 2 models from a unit get "stuck" and then the whole unit just re-engages instead of running away. A similar thing used to happen in TWW2 with units like Pegasus Knights, but in TWW2 it was only a handful of units where it would happen frequently, in TWW3 it seems like more often than not I have to issue a fall back order many many times before they actually do it.
I do have to say I am annoyed with how fraking narrow the lanes are in settlement battles. Total War has always had pathing issues in settlements, yet they keep making the pathways in the settlements narrower and narrower. Not to mention the ratnest maze means that flanking the settlement from multiple directions usually means your units have to wind their way across a bunch of stupid bridges and stuff to loop back and hit the defenders in the rear. Just give us some simpler settlement designs like we had in Rome 1.
Grey Templar wrote: I do have to say I am annoyed with how fraking narrow the lanes are in settlement battles. Total War has always had pathing issues in settlements, yet they keep making the pathways in the settlements narrower and narrower. Not to mention the ratnest maze means that flanking the settlement from multiple directions usually means your units have to wind their way across a bunch of stupid bridges and stuff to loop back and hit the defenders in the rear. Just give us some simpler settlement designs like we had in Rome 1.
I do think the settlements in TWW3 were not designed by someone who actually tried to play a game on them.
They're like those game tables that someone made because it looked cool rather than because it's good for gaming. It was kind of entertaining the first couple of games but it quickly grew tiring.
It's an annoying combination of being too big for the number of units you're likely to have, but also absurdly narrow choke points.
The whole game feels a bit like they didn't listen to their playtesters, or had playtesters with very narrow tastes.
Grey Templar wrote: I do have to say I am annoyed with how fraking narrow the lanes are in settlement battles. Total War has always had pathing issues in settlements, yet they keep making the pathways in the settlements narrower and narrower. Not to mention the ratnest maze means that flanking the settlement from multiple directions usually means your units have to wind their way across a bunch of stupid bridges and stuff to loop back and hit the defenders in the rear. Just give us some simpler settlement designs like we had in Rome 1.
I do think the settlements in TWW3 were not designed by someone who actually tried to play a game on them.
They're like those game tables that someone made because it looked cool rather than because it's good for gaming. It was kind of entertaining the first couple of games but it quickly grew tiring.
It's an annoying combination of being too big for the number of units you're likely to have, but also absurdly narrow choke points.
The whole game feels a bit like they didn't listen to their playtesters, or had playtesters with very narrow tastes.
the best part about settlement battles mistakes they made, was the capture zones. which range from nonsensical, to outright worthless. Ironically also crippling walling up minor cities.
In general the battlemaps are too "artistic". Huge out of place skeletons, terrain pieces, and random junky that just get in the way visually and physically. That stuff isn't going to be helping the load times either.
I seriously hope a modder can clean up the settlement maps because they are not fun the fight. Its just through your dudes down a meat grinder of an alleyway.
I don't think the settlement maps are too big, quite the opposite actually. They're too small and claustrophobic. And the issue is you can't really just auto-resolve all the settlement battles because the garrisons can get large enough to actually threaten an army with massive losses(only when you are on the receiving end though, enemy armies just steamroll your garrisons). So you're forced to manually fight battles just so your army doesn't get mauled by the garrison.
And just like in TWWH2, the main siege maps are still too small as well. Better, but you're still getting shot to pieces immediately. Where are my Medieval 2 size maps where I can deploy outside of missile range? Because who in their right mind would move their artillery within range of the enemy towers when it massively outranges them?
Another random gripe, is it just me or are there way more areas of inexplicably impassable terrain? It seems like way more frequently (compared to TWW2) I'm unable to move to a location or deploy in a location because it's been made impassable due to some terrain feature that doesn't actually look like it should be impassable.
Verticality-focused (and overly elaborate) maps in games are a level design fad that's gotten out on hand. A lot of recent RPGs have the same the same problem, and shouldn't because pathfinding and cameras can't keep up. (For me, the last year has been one of camera failures in games.)
CAs camera in particular seems to hate vertical edges. Its a 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' problem.
And outside modern traffic control tunnels and bridges in cities, I don't live in a world where vertical layers are a thing. Gently rolling hills, which you can fake quite well on a 2d map (I apparently miss Baldur's Gate). So every time these crazy maps show up, its a hit to verisimilitude.
The Realm of Chaos has been one of the most prevalent discussion points amongst the community, and we’re using this update to implement several bug fixes and gameplay tweaks that change how it fits into the mechanics of the game. This includes several key changes:
1. The strength of the negative Realm traits has been reduced by roughly ~50%.
2. Daemon Legendary Lords will no longer be burdened by the negative traits of their respective patron god.
3. Traits gained in the Realm of Chaos will now be removed when a Legendary Lord completes the survival battle within that realm.
4. When a player intercepts an AI Lord at the Forge of Souls, their souls will now be lost—forcing them to restart their collection. This should make it easier to disrupt the Souls race.
5. The “Protection” building chain can now be used to prevent rifts from spawning in the province in which they're built.
6. The rewards for gaining Souls have been improved by providing additional bonuses for a limited period of time.
These changes are intended to make the Souls race less urgent and give you the chance to approach the battlefield in different ways. We will, of course, continue to adjust the mechanics in the future, but look forward to seeing how these changes impact your experience as you jump in after 1.1.
They've not addressed the absurd auto-resolve problems (I bring two armies against a 2/3rds full Garrison = Valiant Defeat... what?).
And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.
And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.
Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.
I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics
Autoresolve is the #1 issue. We know Immortal Empires is coming. WH2 was likely their top cash cow and most popular product given the amount of support they provided for it. It would take a monumental collapse for IE to not come into fruition.
Autoresolve being tied to campaign difficulty is going to bleed into that. If it doesn't get addressed beforehand, I have no doubt that it will become a major talking point within days/weeks of IE being released because that, above all, will ruin the campaign.
I don't like the WoM cap and several other things, but AR is by far the worst. I don't see a reason to attempt a campaign over normal unless you're willing to fight every battle manually and that's an obscene grind.
Before I went on my work trip I managed a few hours of the campaign but I just couldn't get through it. I do not have much interest in the campaign, but I am more than happy to wait for the Immortal Empires campaign.
That being said I do like the way things are going in that 1.1 update, looks positive at least.
And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.
Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.
I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics
Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?
And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.
Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.
I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics
Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'a big deal.'
Its just fairly obvious that they're not going to have a toggle to turn the campaign off when you start the campaign. Do you decide to go to London then not actually go to London? If you don't want to pay the TW3 campaign, you can just exit the game.
While TW1 didn't have separate Mortal Empires map for obvious reasons, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the chaos invasion then (and we were saddled with it in TW2 ME for a long long time). In the Vortex campaign, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the Vortex campaign, nor did they ever add it. Mortal Empires is the open campaign mode for TW2, Immortal Empires will be for this one. There simply isn't any reason to expect them to do this (even aside from the fact that they're too busy fixing stuff to even put together a roadmap for where they're going, let alone disable the core mechanics of the campaign itself)
I think the frustration is that there is no reason for Immortal Empires to be a separate game mode. Yes, the map will be different, but that really shouldn't need to be the case. Just have 1 map.
It really should be as easy as you picking what the victory condition for the campaign will be at the start of the game, like every other Total War Game has ever had. Either you pick Story Campaign, conquest campaign, etc... It would have been an easy inclusion with no extra work required.
I think they're in some sort of trap where they feel like Total War Warhammer has to have some overarching story to appeal to people. Except no, it doesn't. People don't really want to play some narrative campaign. They want to play a generic campaign using factions and units from the Warhammer setting. They really want to play a sandbox campaign like you have in Rome, Shogun, or Medieval Total War, just with Warhammer factions instead of real world historical factions.
Nothing wrong with a narrative railroaded story campaign to free/kill Ursin. But the studio should realize that is not what the bulk of the player base wants. We just want a sandbox total war game with that sweet Warhammer flavor. Which is why Immortal Empires is the most popular campaign, it is the most generic campaign which is what players want. Stop putting some narrative story campaign as the primary focus.
The problem is, they put the 4 chaos realms (pantries? HQs? Doorsteps?) on the map and doing so warped the layout and broke everything else. (including the campaign's FPS).
There really isn't any fixing it, there are too many problems directly related to the assumptions & requirements they put into the base map explicitly for the campaign.
Though I would argue that yes, it does actually need to be the case that IE needs to be a separate map. There just isn't room for everybody.
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Personally, what I think they should have done (or should do in short order) is made the multiplayer scenarios functional single player campaigns (without the timer). Those are surprisingly well done.
And also import the WH1 and WH2 maps as options, with anyone who doesn't have a starting place on the map in a position to conquer a minor settlement on the edge, much like the Daemon Prince is set up to conquer Doomkeep.
Any or all of those options would get more people playing during the wait for IE.
Grey Templar is right, pretty much no one wants it.
Here, Da Modding Den on Discord, r/totalwar, other places, people are waiting for IE.
Even if you deactivated the campaign features, the current map isn't great IMO. I played Vortex a bit as new races were added in because they ignored the rituals AND the Vortex map was better for Lustria, Naggarond, and the Southlands. It was also a great change of pace from Warhammer 1 because there was an added emphasis on the oceans as well it being a brand new area, relatively speaking.
The "new" portion of WH3's campaign map is...for a lack of a better description, geographically uninteresting. It feels like half the map is the Empire/Norsca and for whatever reason they decided to lock out several older factions that are on it.
And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.
Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.
I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics
Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'a big deal.'
Its just fairly obvious that they're not going to have a toggle to turn the campaign off when you start the campaign. Do you decide to go to London then not actually go to London? If you don't want to pay the TW3 campaign, you can just exit the game.
While TW1 didn't have separate Mortal Empires map for obvious reasons, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the chaos invasion then (and we were saddled with it in TW2 ME for a long long time). In the Vortex campaign, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the Vortex campaign, nor did they ever add it. Mortal Empires is the open campaign mode for TW2, Immortal Empires will be for this one. There simply isn't any reason to expect them to do this (even aside from the fact that they're too busy fixing stuff to even put together a roadmap for where they're going, let alone disable the core mechanics of the campaign itself)
Very false anaology
Firstly you have the prologue campaign to start. Which is very good. Then just allowing you to play in the world or change the frequency of the rifts would be a huge improvement. The map is different to the IE map same as the Vortex map is different to the ME map and you can sandbox in BOTH.
Vortex was fine as you could mostly ignore it if you like and just play in the world. The Chaos Realms do not allow that. Chaos Invasion shows that they can do it. I guess they will just rely on modders as there is one that does that anyway
I like narrative campaings but forcing every replay to make you play the same campaign is very bad for retaining interest.
It didn't NEED to be different. The Chaos Realms could have been just stuck in a corner where there would otherwise be ocean. Or had them located on a second map you could transition to. Then they could have avoided the distorted map that they currently have. They could have just started with a normal map and then had the chaos floating disks off the edge somewhere, maybe in a top/bottom/left/right orientation. For the normal campaign, just have that be the starting locations for the 4 daemon factions and have a few permanent portals connecting each realm to the physical world, and a faction mechanic where they could open up temporary portals to anywhere every so often.
That would actually be less work because they'd only need to make 1 map and have a simple toggle between campaign types.
The only reason you need the IE and story campaign map to be different is if you arbitrarily choose to make the maps different. It is a decision that just adds a lot of unnecessary work. I'm honestly surprised that they didn't just take the lazy way out and make the maps the same.
Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?
Grey Templar wrote: The only reason you need the IE and story campaign map to be different is if you arbitrarily choose to make the maps different. It is a decision that just adds a lot of unnecessary work. I'm honestly surprised that they didn't just take the lazy way out and make the maps the same.
The biggest reason to have them different maps is because TWW3 is a standalone game and they want to focus down on the areas that matter for the races specific to TWW3, so all that extra territory would just be filled with unplayable races and result in the areas the player starts in feeling very small.
I dunno how much work it is for them to create campaign maps, but I totally see the logic of having different campaign maps that let you zoom in on specific regions more.
I'd like to see them have a crack at a spherical map for the mortal empires map, so that the chaos wastes doesn't end up completely massive and/or other parts of the map don't end up squished into a corner.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?
Yes. But they put it in quotes like you did. Like in the developer diary for 1.1 (and beyond):
For those of you looking for details about the combined WARHAMMER map (“Immortal Empires”), the Blood Pack, or any other DLC you’re waiting to see added to the game, I’ll note in advance that we WON’T be covering those subjects in any great depth or detail today.
Presumably it has a dumb internal name, but to the customer base, Immortal Empires is going to stick.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?
Yes. But they put it in quotes like you did. Like in the developer diary for 1.1 (and beyond):
For those of you looking for details about the combined WARHAMMER map (“Immortal Empires”), the Blood Pack, or any other DLC you’re waiting to see added to the game, I’ll note in advance that we WON’T be covering those subjects in any great depth or detail today.
Presumably it has a dumb internal name, but to the customer base, Immortal Empires is going to stick.
To be honest, I thought "Immortal empires" sounded pretty dumb, which is why I wondered if it was a CA name or just something the community came up with "Mortal Empires" sounds dynamic, like empires rising and falling, "Immortal Empires" just sounds like a pun bastardisation because Daemons are immortal and all that jazz.
Grey Templar wrote: I think its just a logical continuation from Mortal Empires to Immortal Empires without thinking more deeply about it beyond adding Im to Mortal.
I probably just overthought it, when I heard it I got 2Fast2Furious vibes from it and figured it was just a pun on Daemons being the focus of game 3 and them being immortal
Although I think the WH3 maps are generally a downgrade from WH2, I never really noticed this specific issue before, but now I've seen it I don't think I'll be able to unsee it.
I mean if he wants to see little clumps of trees dotted around he can come to Suffolk - or indeed many regions of the UK. It's freaking chock full of little tree clumps that just about survive in a farming landscape.
I guess one line of thinking is that having trees broken up like that gives you room to hide advanced deployment units in more places. Many times you have those units and I found with earlier maps that you never really felt like you could move them far from your army because they'd stand out like a sore thumb - an easy early target.
The same is kind of true when you've got big half the map is a forest. You don't actually want to go into the forest to fight because the army that's in there already has the advantage of shooting at you in advance. So the army outside the forest just sits there and waits and draws the other out. Clumps of trees forces more break up of the battlefield.
I can see logic in that approach. It likely appears odd because there's no big clumps around the edges of the map bordering it and there are the issues of perhaps too many right in the middle.
I'm guessing its less of a "we ran out of time" and rather a style of tactical map design that got rolled out over all maps instead of a selection. And honestly I see that problem in A LOT of more modern RTS games. Starcraft 2 has a VAST number of maps and yet most of the official maps are almost the same core design. A few slight differences here and there, but broadly speaking the same core design elements repeated.
Busy maps and busy campaign map is something I've had an issue with with CA before - esp on the campaign map, but that's not a W3 thing its a modern CA campaign map thing and its been that way since after perhaps Rome 3 or certainly Medieval 2. The campaign maps gained fantastic beauty and detail, but as a result the actual information they held got lost in all the detail. Warhammer games take it to a whole other level - are those griffins flying around the mountain denoting a feature or are they just pretty. I like pretty but I sometimes wish for a simple "this is the information you need" map
Eh. I definitely don't think its a 'bug.' (which the video claims several times)
I rather like it as well. Maps shouldn't be open spaces with nothing going on (and too many of the chaos wastes maps are just that- if you want variety, fight on a different terrain type)
I mean if he wants to see little clumps of trees dotted around he can come to Suffolk - or indeed many regions of the UK. It's freaking chock full of little tree clumps that just about survive in a farming landscape.
Same here. Either clumps or 'outlining' fields. In fact... this entire area is pretty picture perfect for battle maps (not least because there are several actual historic battlefields and multiple 'retired' training areas within about an hour or less)
I think it's more just an issue that they lack variety and feel like a bit of an afterthought. They've just made trees a bunch of pockmarks across the maps. WH2 didn't lack maps that had clumps of trees in the middle, but it also had maps with long strips of trees that you could use to move scouts through, or maps where trees formed corridors, or maps where one side or one corner of the map had more trees.
More thought had gone into the layout and having variety.
The only really egregious trees in WH2 was the maps that were densely covered in them, but there wasn't many of those, I recall one of the Wood Elf maps that was basically fully wooded and one of the Lizardmen maps was half wooded and they weren't great to play on.
Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.
Mr Morden wrote: Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.
Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.
Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.
Mr Morden wrote: Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.
Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.
I think it's pretty uncommon for trees to grow in well ordered circular clumps (or at most, oval shaped clumps) like that.
Overread mentioned Suffolk, but I'm scanning over google maps satellite view and there's clumps of trees that follow what I assume are property boundaries among farms and houses, but they're clearly groomed and even then they don't follow the nice circular patterns that look like someone has a "tree brush" in photoshop and just spotted them around.
That's why I say it's one of those things I probably won't be able to unsee now It's unnatural looking.
Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.
Again, I don't think the complaint is that simply WH3 has trees in the middle of the battlefield, it's the lack of thought and variety, whereas the WH2 maps look more carefully crafted. Obviously it's not a "bug" (other than the one where the trees weren't showing up in the map preview), but even just the simple thing of laying out a clump of trees so it has a more random looking outline.
You seem to have forgotten that many WH2 maps had obstacles in the middle of the map also, hills, trees, cliffs, statues, choke points, water features. If that's what you think it's about, then I think you just missed the point of the video (and I appreciate maybe the video rambled on a bit too much, the "wood elf" map for example would be one where it's logical to have many inconveniently placed forests... though I still content they should be circular clumps and should form more natural and random patterns).
I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.
The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.
It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.
Mr Morden wrote: Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.
Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.
Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.
Look - thats not the point fo the video or the reply i made.
As we both said some maps should have some trees, some have lots, some have none - just copy repeatedly posting the same round clumps onto the maps just makes it look lazy, especially since they did it much better in older games.
It seems some people aren't getting what that video is about.
Go back to the start where there's the comparison between game 2 and game 3 maps. The game 2 maps have tons of trees - some maps have vast forests covering half their surface area. The game 3 maps look like someone finished the map, then got the "tree" tool, and randomly splotched a few dots of trees around the map.
trexmeyer wrote: I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.
The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.
It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.
Yeah, when they started having specific resources in their games I thought they might eventually move to needing specific resources to create certain units, but they've never done that. Closest was Shogun 2 where it could give you discounts or buffs to units created in a Provence.
Honestly, I think if they moved to making certain units require certain resources it could make campaigns more interesting. It would actually incentivize trade for starters beyond just more money.
Make units require certain resources to create/reinforce. Have resources get stockpiled so you can save up if war cuts you off from your supply. Sadly, they've been dumbing down the economy aspects of TW games for a long time now. I know why they do it. Its to make the game accessible for the dumb dumbs who don't like having to deal with economy and just want to mash armies against each other. But I wish at least they would make it an optional thing.
Ideally, they would implement this to make resources actually matter. Make all factions have something similar to the Meat mechanic from ogres representing food and supplies for a specific army. It would regenerate when in friendly territory and in supply lines based on the supplies available.
Speaking of Meat. I really feel like it is more of a hindrance than anything in its current form. The bonuses for having a prebattle feast are kinda small. The drain for a large army is huge, winning battles gives very little, and you still have to pay gold upkeep. IMO, ogres shouldn't pay any gold upkeep, they should exclusively use meat as upkeep. Gold should only be for building construction, and maybe have an option to buy meat with gold.
trexmeyer wrote: I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.
The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.
It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.
I can appreciate your point, but I guess it's where you draw the line for simplification in a game that is still heavily focused on battles and military might over all else. In WH2 Bretonnians had their "Peasant Economy", but you could basically still pull armies out of your backside.
It would be interesting to think what such a system would look like in Warhammer, because as you say there'd be inconsistencies between races. Some races can pull troops seemingly from nowhere (like Orcs), others I imagine can mobilise their entire population to battle, others are more like traditional humans.
trexmeyer wrote: I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.
The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.
It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.
I can appreciate your point, but I guess it's where you draw the line for simplification in a game that is still heavily focused on battles and military might over all else. In WH2 Bretonnians had their "Peasant Economy", but you could basically still pull armies out of your backside.
It would be interesting to think what such a system would look like in Warhammer, because as you say there'd be inconsistencies between races. Some races can pull troops seemingly from nowhere (like Orcs), others I imagine can mobilise their entire population to battle, others are more like traditional humans.
There are some minor elements that try to portray this but it would be a very diffiicult thing to make work.
Take Vampires, my fav faction - they pay for things with "Dark Magic" but it works just like gold and you can trade with it....their economy would need to be multilayered based around the blood tax for the vampires, the need for other resources to trade with other races, and also the base food and resources to maintain the living population that serve and feed the vampires, then you would need a corpse/necromantic energy economy to raise and maintain. I am not sure the reward is there for CA to do all of this for the various factions, cool as it would be.
Total War does currently provide a variety of things for differnt people.
* You can play it as a boardgame - auto resolving the battles.
* You can play it as a vague background to the battles
* You can do a mixture of both and enjoy the camapign elements.
trexmeyer wrote: I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.
The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.
It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.
total war last had innovation and depth on the campaign map with Empire and Napoleon, in which trade, population played direct part into what was available where and when. Attila had the last siege innovations.
Put bluntly CA hasn't innovated and made the game "better more indepth" since NTW, since Attillas campaign was mostly a sidegrade from the horrific BS that is an was the province system and even then there have been some serious issues going on there. More to the point, WHTW has been an even bigger downgrade with the removal of formations, like spearwalls, shieldwalls, etc. one of the things that allowed the empire to actually stand a chance was its proffesional armies afterall that fought in formations. its actually kinda shamefull how WHFB spears actually worked like Spear regiments, whilest in WHTW thanks to the engine switch they blob wierdly.
FFS we don't even have fire by rank, / pleton fire and or loading animations for crossbows and muskets or cannons.
I've tried, I've honestly tried to play it some and it's just so bad compared to Warhammer 2.
Even if you remove the campaign and it's just a sandbox.
- Autoresolve is completely busted. It's worse then I recall it ever being in WH2 and I'm 99% sure I won a campaign as every faction (or at least reach the end term simulator part of it). There's nothing like valiant defeat being a decisive victory even when you don't min/max your performance in battle. Seriously...it was a tier 2/3 stack of Ogres /w a level 30 Slaughtermaster and 8x Leadbelchers against 12 t2/t3 Nurgle Units and I had to fight it just to get the victory.
- Singleplayer "fun" got nerfed. Traits are all weaker. Magic is considerably weaker than the 100 Winds cap suggested because all spells are about 25% or so more expensive. Why? Why nerf stuff that people can just mod out? It's not as if mods impacted Steam Achievements in WH2. If they don't in WH3 then IDK what the point is...It feels like someone from CA watched Legend cheese content for 50-100 hours straight and took it personally.
- The UI is markedly worse and generic across the board. There's already a mod out that fixes the post siege options and seriously, how hard is it to make 40-50 different graphics? Especially when you can reuse half of them for the Demon factions.
- The world map is cartoonish. It feels more like WoW: Total War than Warhammer. I know someone will say this is nitpicky, but seriously, what was wrong with Warhammer 2's graphics? I swear developers change gak just to change gak.
- The world map is...boring. I think a big part of the issue is that a good chunk of it has zero basis in pre-existing lore so "new" landmarks and areas lack background meaning for people that were fans of WHFB before TW:WH.
- The siege rework is lacking and minor settlement battles aren't fun. I don't know who thought either were good ideas. I'm not a fan of either.
TLDR:
What I personally wanted was essentially a glorified expansion pack that added new landmasses and factions.
What I got was an overdeveloped game that went in the wrong direction.
Out of all the game series I've played, this reminds me most of the dramatic shift from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm in terms of what the hell were the developers thinking.
trexmeyer wrote: TLDR:
What I personally wanted was essentially a glorified expansion pack that added new landmasses and factions.
What I got was an overdeveloped game that went in the wrong direction.
I agree with pretty much all your points and could add a whole heap more, but yeah, this sums it up pretty well. TWW3 could have changed absolutely nothing and just been a big old expansion pack and I would have been totally happy with the game.
Some minor things could have been changed, and I have some wish list items I would liked to have seen implemented. But really they could have just taken TWW2 as it stood and I would have been happy. TWW2 is already my most played single player game on Steam, and even before Mortal Empires came out I had played more Vortex than I've played Chaos Realms in TWW3.
The minor settlement battles are a real kick in the balls because they are one of the most frequently played battle types, and they turned it into a glorified tower defence game with annoyingly small choke points. But yeah, autoresolve, the UI, both the world map and individual battle maps, the pathfinding seems to have gotten worse and AI decision making when you give them an order seems worse.
If you held a gun to my head and told me I had to play another 40 hours of a total war game, I would be booting up TWW2, not TWW3.
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trexmeyer wrote: - The world map is cartoonish. It feels more like WoW: Total War than Warhammer. I know someone will say this is nitpicky, but seriously, what was wrong with Warhammer 2's graphics? I swear developers change gak just to change gak.
This was brought up by someone at some point, but yeah, they took out some of the grimness and made it more cartoony. I've heard it suggested that it was for performance reasons as there's more "SFX" on the campaign map, but it feels like a downgrade.
Lots of big fixes and changes in there. One of the most notable for the campaign is that beating an opponent attempting to win the campaign will cause that particular opponent to lose all of their souls.
Huh. Knew about most of this (especially the dumb way they didn't fix problems with the chaos realm traits, just made it matter less and winning means you win more)
But didn't expect them to actually improve the daemon prince. He might not absolutely suck now.
I knew Pendulum was overpowered, but those numbers are bonkers. I don't mean the new numbers are bad, but the sheer magnitude of the change makes it bizarre that they missed it. Especially with so many of the early-access streamers/youtubers yelling about it before release.
Very annoyed that the 'fix' for gorgers was to gut their unit size.
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Still gonna wait before picking this back up.
And I'm regretting letting the patch download. What the frell? downloading, updating & verifying took a good 20+ minutes, then it re-installed the whole 101.5 GB of the game!
And I'm regretting letting the patch download. What the frell? downloading, updating & verifying took a good 20+ minutes, then it re-installed the whole 101.5 GB of the game!
IDK why CA's patches are so bad. Worst I've ever dealt with.
Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.
Grey Templar wrote: Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.
These days it's just not that big of a deal, many people have fast internet and many people use large SSDs and can wait the few minutes it takes to update. From start to finish the patch only took 12 minutes for me. I imagine their logic is something like "Why waste a programmer's time when people can just wait a few minutes longer", maybe that's a bad way of thinking but I reckon that's their reasoning.
I wonder if they bundled some of the large files (textures, meshes) with some of the core code to make it harder for people to screw around with the files, looking at how the files are laid out most of the size of the game is held in a handful of "packs", audio packs, model packs, movie packs, terrain packs, etc. So maybe grouping the files like that forces Steam to take a slow update path.
But the bigger issue is that the load times once in game seem excessively long, cutting that down somehow would be more valuable (remove Denuvo?).
Grey Templar wrote: Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.
Elden Ring and Overwatch patch dramatically faster for me.
Edit:
Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?
Grey Templar wrote: Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.
It isn't just CA, no. Pretty much any game using Unity and small studios like Owlcat for Kingmaker and Wrath are pretty poor patch experiences.
But... of the fairly major developers (and one with a very big publisher), CA is among the worst. Both in their approach to patches and how much each patch has to overhaul.
trexmeyer wrote:Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?
Yeah. Like 40k, daemons got chopped out of their original books and turned into a separate army book (and was one of the more OP factions for parts of 7th, though not as bad as vampire counts). And it was wholly daemons.
The 'daemon' armies here are not representative of anything that was ever on the table for WFB, especially the later years (which most other factions in 1&2 are based on). For that it was either monogod or mix and match to your taste. The DP actually does a better job of reflecting the chaos daemons army book, though his unlocks keep that under too much control, imo.
They're basically the AoS armies, except any model or unit that was released since the release of AoS is missing. Because they promised they absolutely would not to do AoS stuff. Honestly in this case, that's a bad plan, because its making the armies anemic, and much of what was released for daemons in AoS fits the old world the old world perfectly fine, and the armies as a whole would operate better than. As is, they are compensating with stray standard chaos warrior units (frickin' forsaken) and marauders but with mutated right arms, and it doesn't work very well.
Grey Templar wrote: Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.
Elden Ring and Overwatch patch dramatically faster for me.
Edit:
Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?
Yes on occassion
Rifts opened in various areas of the world - some in Lustria where the Slann had to deal with them and some in places like the Southlands. There were vast daemon armies when the wings of magic blew strongly - for instance when the Warp gates blew, when the Daemons ravaged Ulthuan, when the Daemons destroyed most of the older Slann, when N'kari was freed.
If you marched your army into the Chaos Wastes you'd certainly encounter full demonic armies on the march. Demonic armies marching out of the Wastes also happened from time to time; normally following a powerful warlord and mage as they'd cut a swathe through the lands.
Which would easily mean armies that both had humans and chaos demons and demons striking out on their own without humans nearby.
Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?
They could happen. Rifts could be opened by cults. Sometimes a particular daemon prince gets a wild hair and decides to walk south. Ogre tribes on the northern slopes of the mountains of mourn often face hordes of daemon incursions, one tribe even made a yearly feast out of it. The Great Wall of Cathay was specifically built to stop daemon incursions.
They were certainly rare by all other metrics. Civilized areas mostly had to worry about beastmen, which are everywhere, who might just sometimes have a daemon or two.
Don't forget this is the same setting where, at one point in history, the existence of Skaven is widely suppressed even after they rose up and tried to take over Nuln. Even though there are records that Skaven have risen up over the generations previously in massive swarms (and been beaten back).
Demons are rare, but at the same time many events connected to them are likely hidden from the population at large. Plus rather like there are whole areas of the 40K Imperium that never see war, or only hear of it in terms of sending away troops and such - the same is true of the Old World. There will be regions where even Beastmen are more like boogy men in tall tales told around the fireside.
I must admit I find the campaign pretty dull. The chaos realms are immensely visually impressive. But as others have stated “overdeveloped” is probably the best term to describe it. I really liked the campaign in TWW 1. You just mess about untill a huge endgame threat comes. I feel like that would be so fitting for TWW 3 as well. Just have all chaos gods spawn armies in the north that marches south into various factions. Hold on as best you can. Beat it and fulfill some region specific condition to beat the campaign. It’s not all I wanted but I would have found it more enjoyable then this. Now I must sit around for so many turns being nigh untouchable waiting for the rifts to show up. Then I can press the skip button on the big final battle in my chosen realm. It just feels like a tedious mid-late game to me, involving to much waiting. I’m not really preparing for something that will challenge my faction. I’m sending one army to do one thing over and over while the rest of the faction twiddles it’s thumbs. I mean the TWW 1 campaign had problems but it was generally considered better then the Vortex of TWW 2. Why would you double down on the vortex mechanics for TTW 3?
So is anyone playing this game still?
I did prologue and then the initial campaign with cathay but I didn't even finish it. The rifts just killed it for me.
I then wanted to start as khorne and just lost all interest.
I havent picked up wither of the WH games since this dropped. Elden ring is just too good.
CA ignored all the feedback from testers and content creators, and then released a game that no one wanted. Worse, they doubled down to the point of being self-destructively stubborn with it. Even the latest patch is little more than a temporary solution, with the "bonuses" they've added just being lazy copypastas of the stuff you got in the Vortex campaign.
People wanted Mortal Empires 2: Cathayan Boogaloo, not a worse Vortex campaign. Is it any wonder that, within a day of the mod workshop going live, the second most popular mod was the "Turn off the damned Chaos Realms campaign already!" mod.
If the player base doesn't return when the new Mortal Empires comes out, I fear TWW3 is going to be taken out behind the shed and 3 Kingdom'd.
We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3. That said I figure many haven't jumped off the boat; but likely moved back to Warhammer 2 so its not a total disaster. It does reflect that CA have missed the mark and need to address that.
Heck Warhammer 2 had the whole issue with Norsca and such around its launch and they fixed that and Warhammer 2 went on to be and remain their strongest playerbase game for a LONG time
I haven't been playing the new game as I've been dumping all of my time into FF11. But I've noticed something that caught me by surprise. I've two brothers who didn't buy the new game, but since its release have started playing a *lot* of the second game in multi-player with each other.
Overread wrote: We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3.
And? That doesn't excuse the Chaos Realms campaign or the anti-fun changes that they made to the game. Or the other questionable choices (red on red on red UI!). Or the fact that they ignored all the feedback from everyone in their partner program.
I've stopped playing and the patch hasn't brought me back.
I actually don't care that much about the campaign, I like Vortex and while I wouldn't say I like Chaos Realms, I also don't dislike it enough to stop playing because of it.
It's all the other stuff that has made me stop playing the game, like units feeling less responsive to commands, the ugly UI, and I'm utterly sick of minor settlement and siege battles that make up such a massive part of the game experience.
Unless they fix those things I don't know if I'll even come back for mortal empires (well, I'll come back, but probably not spend hundreds of hours playing it and buy every DLC available like I did for TWW2).
Overread wrote: We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3. That said I figure many haven't jumped off the boat; but likely moved back to Warhammer 2 so its not a total disaster. It does reflect that CA have missed the mark and need to address that.
Heck Warhammer 2 had the whole issue with Norsca and such around its launch and they fixed that and Warhammer 2 went on to be and remain their strongest playerbase game for a LONG time
Mortal Empires came out 1 month after the release of TWW2 with the release date announced about 2 weeks after the main game released, we're at almost 2 months from the TWW3 release and still no release date has been set. Like, I know it's coming, but people were moaning over it not being available at release with TWW2 and in TWW2 it would have been out by now.
Overread wrote: We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3.
And? That doesn't excuse the Chaos Realms campaign or the anti-fun changes that they made to the game. Or the other questionable choices (red on red on red UI!). Or the fact that they ignored all the feedback from everyone in their partner program.
To be fair they did make a bunch of good changes too. Seeing the outcome of a quick battle, selling unwanted gear, toggle flying in battle and so on. That doesn’t excuse the bad changes of course, but there’s quite a few good things with the bad. The one thing I really wish for is alternative win cons. Like maybe short campaign, long campaign and rifts of chaos campaign. I know there are mods for that but still.
Overread wrote: We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3.
And? That doesn't excuse the Chaos Realms campaign or the anti-fun changes that they made to the game. Or the other questionable choices (red on red on red UI!). Or the fact that they ignored all the feedback from everyone in their partner program.
To be fair they did make a bunch of good changes too. Seeing the outcome of a quick battle, selling unwanted gear, toggle flying in battle and so on. That doesn’t excuse the bad changes of course, but there’s quite a few good things with the bad. The one thing I really wish for is alternative win cons. Like maybe short campaign, long campaign and rifts of chaos campaign. I know there are mods for that but still.
On balance I think they made more bad changes than good ones. Also, seeing the outcome of the battle was also added in TWW2 in one of the last few patches, it's not a new feature for TWW3.
There are some very good additions from Troy and ingeneral
Diplomacy: trading settlements, "make it work", outposts, being able to better cordinate with military allies.
Settlement battles: lots of people wanted them and now they have them - but I personally am not a fan of the building towers during a battle element.
Campaign: why have such a railroad campaign escapes me and why make it so long - the Prolgue campaign is excellent - mroe of these perhaps as intros to factions or instead of the quest battles would be great imo.
Autoresolve is bugged - forcing people to fight battles is not great - I enjoy battles but not every little skirmish where i bring a full stack and they have 6 units....
I did go back to TW2 to do some campaigns I had not previously done but will be coming back to it when completed the current one.
Mr Morden wrote: There are some very good additions from Troy and ingeneral
Diplomacy: trading settlements, "make it work", outposts, being able to better cordinate with military allies.
Settlement battles: lots of people wanted them and now they have them - but I personally am not a fan of the building towers during a battle element.
Campaign: why have such a railroad campaign escapes me and why make it so long - the Prolgue campaign is excellent - mroe of these perhaps as intros to factions or instead of the quest battles would be great imo.
Autoresolve is bugged - forcing people to fight battles is not great - I enjoy battles but not every little skirmish where i bring a full stack and they have 6 units....
I did go back to TW2 to do some campaigns I had not previously done but will be coming back to it when completed the current one.
I'd be interested to know how many people actually like the new minor (or even major) settlement battles, as that's probably one of my biggest gripes and why I don't have a great desire to start another TWW3 campaign.
The settlement battles in Three Kingdoms were good.
The ones in this game are not. They took a successful implementation from 3K, and bungled it. In particular, the whole "build stuff while the melee rages" implementation is utterly stupid.
Eumerin wrote: The settlement battles in Three Kingdoms were good.
The ones in this game are not. They took a successful implementation from 3K, and bungled it. In particular, the whole "build stuff while the melee rages" implementation is utterly stupid.
I've never played 3K, is that basically the same but without the tower defence element? The main two aspects I don't like are the tower defence and the choke points, but also how spread out the maps are relative to how many troops you're likely bringing in.
The battles become very formulaic.
It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it weren't for the fact campaign mode has such a high proportion of settlement battles.
There is that. Other than the 'close rift fights' and the unavoidable fights in the chaos realms, I didn't fight many open field battles in my Kislev play-through.
When I tried daemon prince, I fought a lot of faux-naval battles, simply because of the constant multi-faction swarm across the sea (of blood).
The scaling of the campaign map lends itself to the AI running away from fights until it clumps up. (or, oddly enough, death marching just a little too far into enemy terrain). Expansion is also de-incentivized to the point you shouldn't actually try to chase people down. You need your armies at home
I think my biggest issue with the minor settlement battles is the stupid narrow, twisting paths- I really want to see multiple regiments moving alongside each other into a formation, not bogging down into a muddle.
I'd also love to see a 2-D 'relief' map of the usable terrain on the settlement maps. I suspect in most cases its a couple plazas joined by a few snake trails doubling back on themselves.
I've never played 3K, is that basically the same but without the tower defence element? The main two aspects I don't like are the tower defence and the choke points, but also how spread out the maps are relative to how many troops you're likely bringing in.
There are towers, but you don't build them. They're already up - typically at the entrances to the settlements. So you don't have the silly "You destroyed my tower, but I'm going to rebuild it if you don't leave a unit babysitting the build point!" thing that they do in this game. Also, the streets are wider (based on the *extremely* limited number of settlement battles in the new game I've fought), so you have at least a little room to maneuver your units. There are also opportunities to flank a small group of enemy defenders, assuming you can take a few shots from an arrow tower covering one of the other entrances that you'll be running past.
AllSeeingSkink wrote: I'd be interested to know how many people actually like the new minor (or even major) settlement battles, as that's probably one of my biggest gripes and why I don't have a great desire to start another TWW3 campaign.
There's a lot I dislike about TWW3. I dislike most of the armies, I dislike the colour saturated chaos wastes, I dislike the campaign, I dislike the laughably bad UI. But most of all I despise the settlement battles. I hate the tower defence nature of them. I hate playing a mini-game while I'm playing a wargame. I hate the complete lack of strategy from carefully positioning your forces because everything is a narrow alley. I hate that settlement battles are the great majority of the battles.
Every time I think of giving TWW3 another go, because I loved 2 so much and I want to play with new things, I get as far as booting up Steam and then thinking: "No, I'm not going to play this, because I absolutely hate this game!"
Argive wrote: Im trying to figure what's the point of mono god demon factions.
In legions, you still have to decide one choice of corruption or other and you still need god glory to recruit units.
So you basically can play all tzeentch army but have access to blood crushers..
I tried to play as khorne but it was so one dimensional i gave up 10 turns it.
My experience: A Legion of Chaos army that chooses to go head to head with an identical army from one of the monogod factions will get worked over pretty bad, particularly mid to late game when the technology that puts monogod units on another level is in effect.
The strength of Legion of Chaos is that its got a full chest of toys to play with, whereas monogods have to stay on brand.
The factions themselves have mechanics to compensate, Khorne for instance getting "free" armies when it razes a settlement, then will populate that razed settlement somewhere down the line.
Argive wrote: Im trying to figure what's the point of mono god demon factions.
In legions, you still have to decide one choice of corruption or other and you still need god glory to recruit units.
So you basically can play all tzeentch army but have access to blood crushers..
I tried to play as khorne but it was so one dimensional i gave up 10 turns it.
The daemon prince is supposed to be the jack of all trades master of none, the monogods are the masters of what they do (Khorne - melee and aggression, Tzeentch - Magic and sneakiness, Slaanesh - Speed and seduction, Nurgle - toughness and, err, poop?).
Thought I'd share this as it was a... strange win.
Managed to ambush Queek Headtaker and then proceeded to decimate his entire army with 5 squads of Fireleech Terradons. They just clumped up together and let themselves be bombed to gak and with only 2 units of slingers, they couldn't fight back. I only took 4 casualties and they were all friendly fire from the Stegadons.
I think I'm the only one that doesn't mind the new settlement battles. I always disliked the fact that they were too easy on the other games. I did sort of hope they would be more like the minor settlement battles from Rome 2. I think the renewal of destroyed towers is my main issue, but I feel like it should be a bit of a slog to attack a fortified settlement..
I also don't mind auto resolve being dodgy because I don't really use it.
I didn't like the vortex campaign much and the reasons for that are why I don't like this new campaign much. I want to conquer territory and take over, not get smashed in the back by some random donkey-cave who spawned behind me.
Auto resolve has always been dodgy in any TW game. Warhammer ones in particular because units have a lot of special abilities floating around and the correct use of them (And the incorrect deployment of the enemy) can make huge differences in the results (as shown a few posts above).
I know CA put a lot of work into Auto Resolve ,but in the end its really only there for clear cut win/lose situations - 20stacts vs 1 etc... For most fights the game makes the assumption that you will fight the battle using the real time method
Argive wrote: Im trying to figure what's the point of mono god demon factions.
In legions, you still have to decide one choice of corruption or other and you still need god glory to recruit units.
So you basically can play all tzeentch army but have access to blood crushers..
I tried to play as khorne but it was so one dimensional i gave up 10 turns it.
The daemon prince is supposed to be the jack of all trades master of none, the monogods are the masters of what they do (Khorne - melee and aggression, Tzeentch - Magic and sneakiness, Slaanesh - Speed and seduction, Nurgle - toughness and, err, poop?).
Argive wrote: Im trying to figure what's the point of mono god demon factions.
In legions, you still have to decide one choice of corruption or other and you still need god glory to recruit units.
So you basically can play all tzeentch army but have access to blood crushers..
I tried to play as khorne but it was so one dimensional i gave up 10 turns it.
The daemon prince is supposed to be the jack of all trades master of none, the monogods are the masters of what they do (Khorne - melee and aggression, Tzeentch - Magic and sneakiness, Slaanesh - Speed and seduction, Nurgle - toughness and, err, poop?).
I mean from an ingame mechanics perspective.
Can you get demon princes in monogod armies ?
No daemon princes.
I'm probably not the best one to answer because I haven't played with the daemon prince yet. But on campaign you get...
Khorne - massive campaign movement buffs for winning battles, and the ability to spawn new "bloodhost" armies after defeating a settlement, meaning you can play very aggressively in campaign, sweeping across the map razing everything. It's very easy (if not the best way) to run with negative income because you advance so quickly that armies pay for themselves by winning battles.
Slaanesh - Haven't played them, they have their seduction mechanics but I don't know if they're worth anything.
Tzeentch - Have their manipulation mechanics that let you force other factions to do things that weaken their positions (like giving up settlements, getting in unfavourable wars, etc).
Nurgle - Haven't played them, but they have their plagues, the "regrowth" mechanism around how buildings work, and recruit from a pool.
In battles, I think all of them get extra buffs for their main daemon units that keep them relevant later into the game, and also I think the daemon prince doesn't get access to the mortal units than the monogod factions have? Or maybe he does? I dunno. Apparently the legendary lord greater daemons are also more effective on the battlefield than the daemon prince.
Argive wrote: Im trying to figure what's the point of mono god demon factions.
In legions, you still have to decide one choice of corruption or other and you still need god glory to recruit units.
So you basically can play all tzeentch army but have access to blood crushers..
I tried to play as khorne but it was so one dimensional i gave up 10 turns it.
The daemon prince is supposed to be the jack of all trades master of none, the monogods are the masters of what they do (Khorne - melee and aggression, Tzeentch - Magic and sneakiness, Slaanesh - Speed and seduction, Nurgle - toughness and, err, poop?).
I mean from an ingame mechanics perspective.
Can you get demon princes in monogod armies ?
No daemon princes.
I'm probably not the best one to answer because I haven't played with the daemon prince yet. But on campaign you get...
Khorne - massive campaign movement buffs for winning battles, and the ability to spawn new "bloodhost" armies after defeating a settlement, meaning you can play very aggressively in campaign, sweeping across the map razing everything. It's very easy (if not the best way) to run with negative income because you advance so quickly that armies pay for themselves by winning battles.
Slaanesh - Haven't played them, they have their seduction mechanics but I don't know if they're worth anything.
Tzeentch - Have their manipulation mechanics that let you force other factions to do things that weaken their positions (like giving up settlements, getting in unfavourable wars, etc).
Nurgle - Haven't played them, but they have their plagues, the "regrowth" mechanism around how buildings work, and recruit from a pool.
In battles, I think all of them get extra buffs for their main daemon units that keep them relevant later into the game, and also I think the daemon prince doesn't get access to the mortal units than the monogod factions have? Or maybe he does? I dunno. Apparently the legendary lord greater daemons are also more effective on the battlefield than the daemon prince.
I think they do. I seen some tzeench knights for sure in my recruit buildings but not sure about other.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
It seems to ignore your army abilities (like summoning extra units) as it seems exceptionally bad when you have a small army where those abilities can swing a battle. I've had "valiant defeats" where in reality there's barely any losses because the summoned units do half the damage before the main army gets stuck in.
It does feel worse than TWW2 to me, because I'd autoresolve quite a lot of small "trivial" battles in TWW2 and occasionally a big battle where I could see it was going to take a very long time to fight manually, whereas now I feel like I can barely autoresolve anything. Maybe the autoresolve hasn't changed but the way armies work has changed enough to make it a problem, either way it's a problem (unless you really love fighting every single skirmish that SHOULD be trivially easy).
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
It seems to ignore your army abilities (like summoning extra units) as it seems exceptionally bad when you have a small army where those abilities can swing a battle. I've had "valiant defeats" where in reality there's barely any losses because the summoned units do half the damage before the main army gets stuck in.
It does feel worse than TWW2 to me, because I'd autoresolve quite a lot of small "trivial" battles in TWW2 and occasionally a big battle where I could see it was going to take a very long time to fight manually, whereas now I feel like I can barely autoresolve anything. Maybe the autoresolve hasn't changed but the way armies work has changed enough to make it a problem, either way it's a problem (unless you really love fighting every single skirmish that SHOULD be trivially easy).
I agree with this sentiment.
However, im not sure its entirely a bad thing.
a TW game at its core is about the RTS battle in my view.
Sometimes it feels like im not even fighting any battles. Because I can juts one click and done.
I would like to ask a question about legion of chaos, someone mentioned the heralds become demon lords. Is that in terms of once you unlock the relvant demon lord ?
The only way to do that is if you get locked into one type of glory from looking at the tech tree ?
Im finding the heralds relaly underwhelming as a lord choice :(
Its annoying that you get so many demon prince parts but only get one demon prince..
This is the first time I've actually picked up the game on release, for the others I've always waited until the sale and usually by then everything is right as rain. I assume that when the mortal empires stuff comes out things will be reasonably sorted..?
In the meantime I've gone back to playing some TWW2
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
It seems to ignore your army abilities (like summoning extra units) as it seems exceptionally bad when you have a small army where those abilities can swing a battle. I've had "valiant defeats" where in reality there's barely any losses because the summoned units do half the damage before the main army gets stuck in.
It does feel worse than TWW2 to me, because I'd autoresolve quite a lot of small "trivial" battles in TWW2 and occasionally a big battle where I could see it was going to take a very long time to fight manually, whereas now I feel like I can barely autoresolve anything. Maybe the autoresolve hasn't changed but the way armies work has changed enough to make it a problem, either way it's a problem (unless you really love fighting every single skirmish that SHOULD be trivially easy).
I agree with this sentiment.
However, im not sure its entirely a bad thing.
a TW game at its core is about the RTS battle in my view.
Sometimes it feels like im not even fighting any battles. Because I can juts one click and done.
I would like to ask a question about legion of chaos, someone mentioned the heralds become demon lords. Is that in terms of once you unlock the relvant demon lord ?
The only way to do that is if you get locked into one type of glory from looking at the tech tree ?
Im finding the heralds relaly underwhelming as a lord choice :(
Its annoying that you get so many demon prince parts but only get one demon prince..
Heralds have the option of being transformed into exalted greater daemons if you can get them to level 15 in the monogod factions, I assume it's the same for the legions of chaos faction.
Regarding the autoresolve thing, I think TWW2 struck a good balance. If the autoresolve wasn't going to lose any units, chances are it'd be a dead easy battle and you aren't missing anything by skipping it (and just pay the penalty of losing more troops than if you'd done it manually). If the autoresolve told you that were you going to lose a unit or two, you'd fight it manually. This is especially true of small battles with unimportant armies, you might still fight easy battles if you want to keep the army pristine for another upcoming battle, but it was an option, now autoresolve decimates or flat out loses some really easy battle so you're forced to fight even the uninteresting ones.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
It seems to ignore your army abilities (like summoning extra units) as it seems exceptionally bad when you have a small army where those abilities can swing a battle. I've had "valiant defeats" where in reality there's barely any losses because the summoned units do half the damage before the main army gets stuck in.
It does feel worse than TWW2 to me, because I'd autoresolve quite a lot of small "trivial" battles in TWW2 and occasionally a big battle where I could see it was going to take a very long time to fight manually, whereas now I feel like I can barely autoresolve anything. Maybe the autoresolve hasn't changed but the way armies work has changed enough to make it a problem, either way it's a problem (unless you really love fighting every single skirmish that SHOULD be trivially easy).
I agree with this sentiment.
However, im not sure its entirely a bad thing.
a TW game at its core is about the RTS battle in my view.
Sometimes it feels like im not even fighting any battles. Because I can juts one click and done.
I would like to ask a question about legion of chaos, someone mentioned the heralds become demon lords. Is that in terms of once you unlock the relvant demon lord ?
The only way to do that is if you get locked into one type of glory from looking at the tech tree ?
Im finding the heralds relaly underwhelming as a lord choice :(
Its annoying that you get so many demon prince parts but only get one demon prince..
Heralds have the option of being transformed into exalted greater daemons if you can get them to level 15 in the monogod factions, I assume it's the same for the legions of chaos faction.
Regarding the autoresolve thing, I think TWW2 struck a good balance. If the autoresolve wasn't going to lose any units, chances are it'd be a dead easy battle and you aren't missing anything by skipping it (and just pay the penalty of losing more troops than if you'd done it manually). If the autoresolve told you that were you going to lose a unit or two, you'd fight it manually. This is especially true of small battles with unimportant armies, you might still fight easy battles if you want to keep the army pristine for another upcoming battle, but it was an option, now autoresolve decimates or flat out loses some really easy battle so you're forced to fight even the uninteresting ones.
Can anyone confirm if its the same for chaos legions?
Yeh I hear ya.
Tzeenches firestorm is my new fav spell though I haven't tested many of the others.
The slanesh whip spell seems very good at thrashing infantry in terms of cost v damage.
Pendulum was broken, I'm not sure if it's been fixed now but it was doing insane damage. Tzeentch's Firestorm is good, as is the Infernal Gateway. I haven't really delved into the other lores.
Auto resolve is very bad at the moment - I quite enjoy fighitng battles but being forced to do so when its a foregone conclusion again and again is not fun
H.B.M.C. wrote: Not that seeing the outcome matters anymore as auto-resolve is so incredibly in favour of the AI that it's simply not worth doing.
What's that? You brought 1.5 stacks of troops vs 10 enemy units in a garrison? Valient defeat for you!
They had a full stack, and you have two? Crushing defeat for you!
Well, you can game the autoresolve. Its more that the autoresolve is stacked in favor of simple numbers, and this has always been the case.
I'm pretty sure the way autoresolve works is it just puts DPS vs the durability of the unit. I'm sure it doesn't take any special abilities or morale into account. Which is why elite units get trashed so much because they're fighting unbreakable trash that just grinds down their hit points.
And since the AI pretty much only makes huge stacks of trashy units they're completely unfair in autoresolve.
Rome 2 you could abuse the autoresolve by going for the cheapest units with decent damage output and durability and just spamming them like crazy and Im sure you can do the same here.
It seems to ignore your army abilities (like summoning extra units) as it seems exceptionally bad when you have a small army where those abilities can swing a battle. I've had "valiant defeats" where in reality there's barely any losses because the summoned units do half the damage before the main army gets stuck in.
It does feel worse than TWW2 to me, because I'd autoresolve quite a lot of small "trivial" battles in TWW2 and occasionally a big battle where I could see it was going to take a very long time to fight manually, whereas now I feel like I can barely autoresolve anything. Maybe the autoresolve hasn't changed but the way armies work has changed enough to make it a problem, either way it's a problem (unless you really love fighting every single skirmish that SHOULD be trivially easy).
I agree with this sentiment.
However, im not sure its entirely a bad thing.
a TW game at its core is about the RTS battle in my view.
Sometimes it feels like im not even fighting any battles. Because I can juts one click and done.
I would like to ask a question about legion of chaos, someone mentioned the heralds become demon lords. Is that in terms of once you unlock the relvant demon lord ?
The only way to do that is if you get locked into one type of glory from looking at the tech tree ?
Im finding the heralds relaly underwhelming as a lord choice :(
Its annoying that you get so many demon prince parts but only get one demon prince..
Heralds have the option of being transformed into exalted greater daemons if you can get them to level 15 in the monogod factions, I assume it's the same for the legions of chaos faction.
Regarding the autoresolve thing, I think TWW2 struck a good balance. If the autoresolve wasn't going to lose any units, chances are it'd be a dead easy battle and you aren't missing anything by skipping it (and just pay the penalty of losing more troops than if you'd done it manually). If the autoresolve told you that were you going to lose a unit or two, you'd fight it manually. This is especially true of small battles with unimportant armies, you might still fight easy battles if you want to keep the army pristine for another upcoming battle, but it was an option, now autoresolve decimates or flat out loses some really easy battle so you're forced to fight even the uninteresting ones.
I can confirm transformation happens. It was level 16 for my tzeenchy herald. I maxed out my undivided glory so not sure if he would have "evolved" if I did not have the corresponding exalted greater demon unlocked.
Im not being funny but some of these spell combinations seem disgusting on paper. Im looking forward to sending my exalded bloodthirster into front ranks while healing and buffing him with nurgle magic
Yeah, in all Total War games I like fighting some 1 sided slaughters, but I don't like having to fight every. single. one.
I shouldn't have to waste 10 minutes to manually fight some minor settlement battle that I'll take basically no casualties in because autoresolve will result in half my army dying. It's boring.
Argive wrote: I can confirm transformation happens. It was level 16 for my tzeenchy herald. I maxed out my undivided glory so not sure if he would have "evolved" if I did not have the corresponding exalted greater demon unlocked.
Im not being funny but some of these spell combinations seem disgusting on paper. Im looking forward to sending my exalded bloodthirster into front ranks while healing and buffing him with nurgle magic
There are some nice synergies that can come out of the legion of chaos vs monogod faction, though I don't know if they outweigh the benefits of playing monogod.
If you like the idea of an exalted bloodthirster being healed by a nurgle caster, Skarbrand is an absolute beast once he gets up to a high enough level to unlock the gorefeast ability (heal in combat). At that point he doesn't need a healer and will end up at his healing cap if you leave him in battle long enough. He also hits like a freight train, he'd have to be the best dualist in the TWW3 and I imagine he would be in TWW2 also. His damage level is so high and very high melee attack means he just takes huge chunks out of the health bar of other lords / heroes, even fighting against N'Kari I just charged through the Slaanesh front line and beat him down very quickly. His only weaknesses are his size means he's susceptible to missile attacks and he does such a large amount of damage per attack that it's wasted on regular infantry units, you want him fighting monstrous infantry or cavalry or single entities to make use of the damage he can do in a single attack.
Argive wrote: I can confirm transformation happens. It was level 16 for my tzeenchy herald. I maxed out my undivided glory so not sure if he would have "evolved" if I did not have the corresponding exalted greater demon unlocked.
Im not being funny but some of these spell combinations seem disgusting on paper. Im looking forward to sending my exalded bloodthirster into front ranks while healing and buffing him with nurgle magic
There are some nice synergies that can come out of the legion of chaos vs monogod faction, though I don't know if they outweigh the benefits of playing monogod.
If you like the idea of an exalted bloodthirster being healed by a nurgle caster, Skarbrand is an absolute beast once he gets up to a high enough level to unlock the gorefeast ability (heal in combat). At that point he doesn't need a healer and will end up at his healing cap if you leave him in battle long enough. He also hits like a freight train, he'd have to be the best dualist in the TWW3 and I imagine he would be in TWW2 also. His damage level is so high and very high melee attack means he just takes huge chunks out of the health bar of other lords / heroes, even fighting against N'Kari I just charged through the Slaanesh front line and beat him down very quickly. His only weaknesses are his size means he's susceptible to missile attacks and he does such a large amount of damage per attack that it's wasted on regular infantry units, you want him fighting monstrous infantry or cavalry or single entities to make use of the damage he can do in a single attack.
Not really sure! I didn't play much with the HE in TWW2. I'd say in TWW2 I also didn't spend much time on duellist type lords, it's only with Skarbrand I've found it really useful because he has the mass and speed to pull through enemy formations to get to enemy characters, take them our quickly, then get out again before he takes too much damage (or once he's squished the enemy damage dealers he can often just stand there in the middle of the enemy army healing himself faster than they can hurt him).
He's not like Vlad who could just walk in, blob up the enemies around him, then lay down some spells to wipe them out in a matter of seconds, BUT he's excellent and sniping the enemy damage dealers before they can do any real damage.
This is in campaign mind you, I don't play online, no idea what he's like in online play.
Not everyone wants to fight the most common battle type in the game: Tedious minor settlement battles.
First person that makes a mod so that you need at least Level 2 defences before you go from "field battle" to "minor settlement battle" will be a saviour.
I've never been big on mods, in many games I find when I start modding it just kills my enjoyment of the game. I think it destroys the childlike wonder or something like that.
TWW2, after playing for hundreds of hours, I only had 3 mods, skill point respec, loreful great power, and a less painful lizardmen diplomacy system.
But if someone comes up with some good mods for minor settlement battles I think I'll have to get them for TWW3, as they really drain a lot of fun out of the game currently.
I want to know who in was in the meeting where it was decided...
"We need to decide what to do for minor settlement battles, these are what players will be doing the most in campaigns, so what do Total War fans really like?"
"Open battles? Careful manoeuvring? Taking massive armies through a tower defence minigames in cramped corridors?"
"I have a short attention span, so lets just do the last one"
I've never been big on mods, in many games I find when I start modding it just kills my enjoyment of the game. I think it destroys the childlike wonder or something like that.
TWW2, after playing for hundreds of hours, I only had 3 mods, skill point respec, loreful great power, and a less painful lizardmen diplomacy system.
But if someone comes up with some good mods for minor settlement battles I think I'll have to get them for TWW3, as they really drain a lot of fun out of the game currently.
I want to know who in was in the meeting where it was decided...
"We need to decide what to do for minor settlement battles, these are what players will be doing the most in campaigns, so what do Total War fans really like?"
"Open battles? Careful manoeuvring? Taking massive armies through a tower defence minigames in cramped corridors?"
"I have a short attention span, so lets just do the last one"
There were map mods for TWW2 for sure, as I had at least one installed. It made quite a few settlements unique. Somewhat buggy at times but a good deal of them were excellent. Certainly better than this new tower system.
I've never been big on mods, in many games I find when I start modding it just kills my enjoyment of the game. I think it destroys the childlike wonder or something like that.
I'm pushing 2500 hours in WH2 and that's only because of mods. Sans mods, I've hit snowball on probably 75% of lords.
First, you have graphical mods which have no impact on the gameplay, but fix some...questionable designs and add variety. Unlike the TES scene, not all graphics mods are focused on making the in game females sexy. You've got really good ones for Bretonnia and The Empire that add to unit diversity.
Gameplay mods vary wildly from being incredibly weak to absolutely broken.
Off the top of my head
- Mixu's stuff is usually well-balanced and tends toward being weaker. The really good ones are two LL packs (one adds all the Elector Counts and Bretonnia Lords) and the Table Top Lord/Hero pack, which gives you more lord/hero diversity. I don't think anything in it is OP and some things are fairly weak (Marienburg).
- We'z Speshul adds a good chunk of variety, but nothing about it is broken. If anything the LL options are average.
- Southern Realms by Cataph is good and can get OP in the hands of the player, but it's nothing crazy for the AI.
- Tomb Kings Extended is broken beyond belief in the player's hands IMO, but the author disagrees.
I've never been big on mods, in many games I find when I start modding it just kills my enjoyment of the game. I think it destroys the childlike wonder or something like that.
I'm pushing 2500 hours in WH2 and that's only because of mods. Sans mods, I've hit snowball on probably 75% of lords.
First, you have graphical mods which have no impact on the gameplay, but fix some...questionable designs and add variety. Unlike the TES scene, not all graphics mods are focused on making the in game females sexy. You've got really good ones for Bretonnia and The Empire that add to unit diversity.
Gameplay mods vary wildly from being incredibly weak to absolutely broken.
Off the top of my head
- Mixu's stuff is usually well-balanced and tends toward being weaker. The really good ones are two LL packs (one adds all the Elector Counts and Bretonnia Lords) and the Table Top Lord/Hero pack, which gives you more lord/hero diversity. I don't think anything in it is OP and some things are fairly weak (Marienburg).
- We'z Speshul adds a good chunk of variety, but nothing about it is broken. If anything the LL options are average.
- Southern Realms by Cataph is good and can get OP in the hands of the player, but it's nothing crazy for the AI.
- Tomb Kings Extended is broken beyond belief in the player's hands IMO, but the author disagrees.
I understand where you're coming from, but yeah, I just have no great interest in modding games. In the past when I've gotten into modding, I end up spending more time modding than I do playing and eventually it just kills the enjoyment for me. Past examples are GTA4, I got really into modding it for like a month... ended up just spending hours trawling through mods, downloading one, loading up the game, deciding I don't like it or it needs something else and closing the game. Or Assetto Corsa, spent a while tracking down, downloading and installing a bunch of modded cars, tracks and graphical mods, by the time I got the game up and running the way I liked I barely ever played it. Or TES, similar story, spent a bunch of time getting Oblivion the way I liked it before immediately never playing it again, lol. It probably doesn't help that for the past decade or so my gaming time is only a hour here and an hour there.
I think once I start modding a game, the modding becomes the game and then I start becoming very critical of little details that I might have just ignored and it becomes harder to enjoy the actual game itself. The only mods I've bothered with in TWW2 are ones where something was very plainly an issue and out of curiosity I checked if a mod existed to fix that one specific issue (like "wouldn't it be nice if I could respec this lord I just confederated with because the AI spent the skill points like a fool?" or "geeze it sure is stupidly difficult to confederate these moronic lizardmen factions").
It's a specific type of person who enjoys modding, and I'm not it. I also don't particularly get into the "make your own character and create your own adventure!" games like Skyrim or Fallout, much preferring to step into the shoes of Geralt in The Witcher 3 and following well crafted stories specifically written for that character.
But yeah that's all a bit of a tangent, minor settlement battles are such a downer for me currently that if CA don't fix it then I'll have to turn to mods or else I may just bench the game permanently. So hopefully someone makes a nice pack that doesn't leave me moaning about how they approached it, lol.
We've heard from many of you that you'd like to know more about what's coming to Total War: WARHAMMER III in 2022.
We're excited to say that we'll be sharing our roadmap for the year ahead this coming Friday. More news soon!
"We're happy to announce that everyone's favourite mechanic - the Rifts that take you to the Chaos Realms - will be expanding! Now one will appear next to every settlement, rather than one per region, and they'll appear once every 10 turns, rather than every 30! We have decreased the corruption they spread by 2.3% to compensate however.
Additionally, in the Realm of Slaanesh, you no longer get rewards for going home early, but to compensate you will instantly lose any negative traits you may have gained. For the Realm of Khorne, any weapons you gather can only be used during the very next battle, and you can't take them out of the realm once you're done, but they're more powerful than they were before! We have also added 30 more possible gates to the Realm of Tzeentch to increase the mayhem of the Changer of Way's maze, and quadrupled attrition in the Realm of Nurgle to really represent what it would be like to be lost in the Plaguefather's endless rotting gardens.
Finally, we've cancelled Immortal Empires, because we know just how much everyone loves the Realms of Chaos campaign and how completely and utterly flawless it is, so we're going all in with that rather than a big sandbox mode that no one will play!
That's all we have for now, but we'll be back 4 months from now with all the details of the first (and final!) major DLC for Total Warhammer 3: Skaven vs Lizardmen! We can't wait!"
Yes I know the purpose behind the update - goody for those people foolish enough to install the EGS on their system - but c'mon, adding advertisements for a game that's haemorrhaging players in the game that they're going back to?
It proves that CA know what's happening, but not why it's happening.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yes I know the purpose behind the update - goody for those people foolish enough to install the EGS on their system - but c'mon, adding advertisements for a game that's haemorrhaging players in the game that they're going back to?
If you've already bought the game, then you're not CA's target for the ads.
Also, the road map will be posted tomorrow. Hopefully we'll get an idea of when the Immortal Empires campaign will drop. If it's coming soon, then players who have avoided buying the third game will likely start to consider getting it.
Patches for the Warhammer (and CA games in general) are always on the big side. And yeah this wasn't just to add the ad for Warhammer 3; it was also to add the compatibility for Epic Game Store. Which no matter your views on it, is somewhere CA is selling and adding compatibility and not splitting the multiplayer community over two (or more) stores is an overall good thing.
I have heard that apparently the chat feature has been removed from inside the game though. MP isn't something I keep up with but apparently something major happened in the Shogun 2 game that has cased CA to start removing the feature from their games. Of course many people already use Discord and other similar services so its not a total disaster.
No (real) word on DLC either, they got drafted into emergency bugfixing, so the entire DLC timetable is borked, and they have nothing to announce. Oh, wait there is a small lord pack hiding in Q3. 4 'champions.'
Some RoRs will trickle out, and...maybe Immortal Empires will be out and stable by the end of the year, I guess.
A few fixes to towers, autoresolve and a bunch of stuff (monster duels, ranged combat) that shouldn't have been janked in the first place, because it was working fine in TW2.
----
tl;dr: check back next year unless you want to beta test IE.
Poor show all around, CA. Howls of derisive laughter, Bruce.
Well, TWW2 had Mortal Empires out about a month after the main game released alongside the blood pack. We're now 2.5 months out from the TWW3 release, and get an announcement that it'll be another 2 to 5 months before the BETA comes out.
Poor effort CA, I never regretted my preorder or TWW2 but you're making me regret my preorder of TWW3.
At this point I think they should have just held off releasing the game for a few more months to sort out the blatantly obvious issues and make sure Mortal Empires was ready to release soon after the main game.
My initial impression was 'just OK,' then wandered down to 'poor' as I wrapped up my first campaign, and now the road map has me officially at 'what the hell?' levels of disappointment.
May simply uninstall it and move something else over to the SSD.
And very little else (video game wise) is coming out this year to distract me. I guess its back to Battletech for a bit longer.
Personally I think they need two Immortal Empires maps. One with every faction and one with just one of every racial group. Because its going to be one insanely big map and bigger than anything CA has done before. Considering how chock full of detail modern campaign maps are it wouldn't surprise me if they are hitting technical limits and problems getting it to run smoothly on modern systems and with all the content.
Not to mentoin considering how to make it practical. Current Mortal Empires is already insanely huge; adding at least 1/3rd more is a lot more map if they think that many people might never actually finish it all.
check back next year unless you want to beta test IE.
Pretty much. I was definitely expecting a faster launch on Immortal Empires.
Yeah, unfortunately WH2 set incorrect expectations (and CA did nothing to dispel them)- I was definitely expecting a faster turn-around. What they bungled with 2 (Norsca) didn't matter nearly so much.
An interesting stat is there's currently more people on Steam playing TWW2 than there is playing TWW3.
Also if you look at the player history, TWW2 has had a pretty consistent player base since launch. TWW3 had a much much stronger launch but it's died.
Of course TWW2 is more developed at the end of its life with more playable races + the ME map and that would go a long way to explaining it. But I don't think it's ever a good look when there's more people playing the old game than the new one.
Far as I'm aware no other CA game has EVER maintained the playerbase as much as Warhammer 2 - its almost an enigma unto itself. Even Three Kingdoms, which had a huge following of sales in the east, hasn't maintained the playerbase.
I'm sure as W3 polishes up and gets its own immortal empires and all it might well replace 2 - it just might take longer than we expected and hoped.
Overread wrote: Far as I'm aware no other CA game has EVER maintained the playerbase as much as Warhammer 2 - its almost an enigma unto itself. Even Three Kingdoms, which had a huge following of sales in the east, hasn't maintained the playerbase.
I'm sure as W3 polishes up and gets its own immortal empires and all it might well replace 2 - it just might take longer than we expected and hoped.
Yeah - W3 needed to be as good or better than W2 and its not....there are some nice additions - like the Diplomacy upgrade but quite a few steps back.
Its still miles ahead of some other poor releases recently.
Overread wrote: Far as I'm aware no other CA game has EVER maintained the playerbase as much as Warhammer 2 - its almost an enigma unto itself. Even Three Kingdoms, which had a huge following of sales in the east, hasn't maintained the playerbase.
I'm sure as W3 polishes up and gets its own immortal empires and all it might well replace 2 - it just might take longer than we expected and hoped.
I worry that if it takes too long people will drop off and forget about it and CA won't give it the love that they gave TWW2, but it is a weird fanbase.
I think so long as Immortal Empires doesn't destroy the game with unplayability or such, we will see a huge move to it when it comes out. It's just a huge portion of the playerbase wants all the races and variety and choice and such and currently W3 is just its own campaign.
We kind of saw the same thing with W2 along with a lot of "where is my norsca" as they took 6 months or so to rebuild them from the ground up
Overread wrote: Even Three Kingdoms, which had a huge following of sales in the east, hasn't maintained the playerbase.
3K (as a Tomb Kings fan, I don't like calling it TK :p ) unfortunately ended up having issues that weren't immediately apparent. Compounding this, some of the later DLC packs apparently broke earlier narrative content. And CA made no apparent moves to resolve this problem.
I suspect that's part of the reason why CA abandoned the game (which afaik they've never done before; they've always salvaged at least something out of games that had gone disastrous).
Having said that, 3K did have some good innovations. It greatly improved the diplomacy system. And settlement battles were a welcome addition that played much better than the mess they are in TWW3.
At the same time experimenting is how you find new great things too.
I figure one weakness is that the RTS scene is so empty right now. So when about the only major RTS developer actually making a new RTS is developing they are kind of left out on their own with innovation and innovation risk.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Total War games aren't Real Time Strategy games.
The entire combat phase is Real Time Strategy and is arguably more strategic than many "true RTS games" as you've got to consider formations, facings and more.
TW games have always been a blend of RTS and TBS, and whilst you can use auto-resolve to play an entirely TBS game, its not really ideal nor the intended way to play the game. Unlike, say, Knights of Honour where I'd argue auto battling is more viable as an approach; though it still suffers the same problems as TW games with auto resolve, but not quite as harshly since the unit rosters and game structure are vastly simpler (and way way way more so than the TW games).
What we'd consider the traditional RTS in the from of a Red Alert game has been a format dead in the water for ages. Starcraft 2 is the only big name in those waters. Meanwhile there have been a few tries from smaller studios, but they tend to make a small blip and then vanish. We get the odd solid one like the Battlefleet Gothic games now and then, but even they don't get the medium to long term support to really polish up to top level.
You are right that, amazingly, 4x style strategy games have bloomed. I think its in part because the Civilization game series has been going so long and has kept up a strong following. I think had Westwood survived and had EA not totally messed up that series of games with Tiberium Sun 4 and then abandoned it, it might have acted as a draw to keep the genre going more so. But yes 4X games have survived and Paradox have done really well with their hybrids which run real time and combine elements of traditional rts and tbs. Though I'd argue most of them feel much more like a turn based game in structure and style, just with a "rolling turn" system. A bit like the active-battle system that Final Fantasy games had for years. Stellaris is the only one that really feels more Real-Time and that's, to me, because its fleets are managed real time and fight out real time whilst in the other games its more a symbol of an army that fights out.
Olthannon wrote: It's not a surprise. What game has come out recently that has actually been finished/polished.
I'll come back to it later when the crevasses have been ironed out.
Elden Ring. I'd say even CP2077 on PC came out in a better state. At least it wasn't clearly inferior to the previous game in the series.
Sadly, my lack of interest due to the poor previews of WH3 have been vindicated. This game has been mismanaged to an unbelievable degree. I can't think of a comparison that I've played.
Olthannon wrote: It's not a surprise. What game has come out recently that has actually been finished/polished.
I'll come back to it later when the crevasses have been ironed out.
Elden Ring. I'd say even CP2077 on PC came out in a better state. At least it wasn't clearly inferior to the previous game in the series.
Sadly, my lack of interest due to the poor previews of WH3 have been vindicated. This game has been mismanaged to an unbelievable degree. I can't think of a comparison that I've played.
Cyberpunk? Yeah as you say only on Pc - the playstation version which was misold in the millions simply did not work - in addition the devs and marketing people lied for months on end and concealed its flaws at every ooportunity
Totally different level of unplayability to Total War - its playable - has major flaws but it does not crash every five mins.
Olthannon wrote: It's not a surprise. What game has come out recently that has actually been finished/polished.
I'll come back to it later when the crevasses have been ironed out.
Elden Ring. I'd say even CP2077 on PC came out in a better state. At least it wasn't clearly inferior to the previous game in the series.
Sadly, my lack of interest due to the poor previews of WH3 have been vindicated. This game has been mismanaged to an unbelievable degree. I can't think of a comparison that I've played.
Cyberpunk? Yeah as you say only on Pc - the playstation version which was misold in the millions simply did not work - in addition the devs and marketing people lied for months on end and concealed its flaws at every ooportunity
Totally different level of unplayability to Total War - its playable - has major flaws but it does not crash every five mins.
Yes, I would certainly disagree that cyberpunk on release is worse than TWW3. TWW3 is a playable, fine game. It's just the gameplay a lot of people dislike. Once immortal empires is out I wouldn't care about things like autoresolve or the sieges, those things are non-issues.
Olthannon wrote: TWW3 is a playable, fine game. It's just the gameplay a lot of people dislike. Once immortal empires is out I wouldn't care about things like autoresolve or the sieges, those things are non-issues.
Sticking with the franchise, I feel like Rome 2 had a more disastrous launch then Warham3, its just that time heals all wounds and we forget the pain.
Also lets not forget one reason Warhammer 3 has "issues" is because its a fast continuation of Warhammer 2 and some of the issues are simply "its different" or "its not got Immortal Empires".
With War 2 also being one of the biggest selling (though I think 3 Kingdoms outsold it) and biggest active played games CA has ever made.
Autoresolve is overtuned and scales to campaign difficulty.
Player bias is even higher than in WH2.
Game actually crashes consistently. WH2 crashed maybe a half dozen times in 2500~ hours.
UI is markedly worse.
Map layout is bland, especially in comparison to the lore rich ME map.
Campaign level graphics changed for no reason. Additional unnecessary SFX added.
Lazy and broken skill design. Heroes don't even have 49 options. Many skills flat out don't work.
The abomination that is Daniel's side/down grades and overall campaign mechanics.
Overread wrote: Also lets not forget one reason Warhammer 3 has "issues" is because its a fast continuation of Warhammer 2 and some of the issues are simply "its different" or "its not got Immortal Empires".
I'm going to disagree on that. The primary complaints are -
1.) Poor settlement battles implementation
2.) A campaign that encourages players to turtle up
3.) Screwed up auto-resolve
Settlement battles worked fine in Three Kingdoms, so the problem is how they implemented them in this game specifically.
The problem with the campaign is a pretty clear design flaw with it. The whole point of a game like this is for players to grow their empire, and not wait behind their walls.
The auto-resolve problem is bad weighting somewhere in the number crunching, probably.
According to the various youtubers the issue of the Realm of Chaos campaign was raised by all of them.
There are definate improvements to areas like Diplomacy which was in Troy and I think 3K ( I did not play that one)
Alot of people wanted Minor Settlement Battles but why they wanted to make them into a mini-game with tower building I am not sure.
The new autoresolve means that you have to fight more battles but they are often the wrong battles - so full stacks against 5 units and you take no damage.
I actually quite like Vortex - and you can tackle it your own pace - many people dislike that yiu can;t do this in the Chaos Realms.
I still wonder why modders get so many of these things right compared to the devs?
Mr Morden wrote: According to the various youtubers the issue of the Realm of Chaos campaign was raised by all of them.
I think a lot of issues were raised by YTers but it was too late to fix them. The issue with flying units being unable to land is one I saw a few times before the game even came out, and the snow issue also, but it was only a month or so prior to release.
I actually don't mind the Vortex, even after ME came out I've played a couple of Vortex campaigns.
But also, I don't really hate Realm of Chaos either, it's all the other things, particularly unit responsiveness (which CA say they're addressing in the May update, but also say "it will be a long-term project", meaning it's probably not actually going to be fixed) and the minor settlement tower defence minigame, the hideous UI and other little things that add up to be a big thing.
This is probably one case where delaying the game a few extra months would have helped.
But a lot of their 'fixes' have just been changing values, or implementing rewards that are carbon copies of the rewards from the Vortex campaign.
In their roadmap they talk about, for example, one of their big sign-posted changes will be a change to Tzeentch and Slaanesh casualty replenishment rates. This is changing a few values, not some massive overhaul of a game mechanic. Why do we have to wait months for them to change something modders could do overnight?
I have been very down on the TWW modding scene, even since the first game, as I generally see a lot of mods that aren't about adding or fixing things but are more about "CA did this wrong. This is how it should be based upon my personal views on Warhammer!", but with everything happening with TWW3, and seeing how many fixes the modding community are making to really obvious issues, I'm starting to view this more as I viewed Skyrim modding: An absolute necessity!
I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.
What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.
Henry wrote: I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.
What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.
No.
It won't, atleast never mechanically, considering how CA is stagnant on that front since ever.
And yes, getting 3 Kingdomed is a full on possibility for WHTW 3.
The Three Kingdoms abandonment was unusual. In the past, they've always attempted to save their games. A good example of that is the fiasco of the Rome 2 launch. But CA stuck with the game. It's possible that Three Kingdoms represents a change in policy. But I think it's more likely that some of the experimental stuff in the game was causing problems they couldn't fix.
TWW3 is the final game in a very profitable series. I can't imagine CA going the 3K route instead of the Rome 2 route. It's possible, but I would be surprised if they did.
Henry wrote: I've no doubt that given time this will be a great game. The sad thing is that right now it's a piss poor game and I can't encourage anyone to buy it. Looking at the roadmap I'm probably not going to try to play it again until next year.
What worries me is that the declining number of players is enough for CA to go full 3Kingdoms and abandon the game before it is fixed.
I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?
Thing is I'm looking forward to it being a fantastic game further down the line, there are some aspects of it that I really do enjoy. I just think it wasn't finished when it was released.
Eumerin wrote: The Three Kingdoms abandonment was unusual. In the past, they've always attempted to save their games. A good example of that is the fiasco of the Rome 2 launch. But CA stuck with the game. It's possible that Three Kingdoms represents a change in policy. But I think it's more likely that some of the experimental stuff in the game was causing problems they couldn't fix.
TWW3 is the final game in a very profitable series. I can't imagine CA going the 3K route instead of the Rome 2 route. It's possible, but I would be surprised if they did.
It was not. Indeed it is more the norm than CA fixing their games, considering ETW to this day still has some sever AI bugs that have been resolved in etw2, sorry NTW.
I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?
That's kind of what I'm getting at. TWW2 was the first game I've ever played where I bought new content as it came out, the game was that good to me and the team earned the trust. But 3 isn't worth playing, so I'll hold off DLC until the base game is fun to play. Until then how many people are like me and won't buy any DLC?
I think it will depend on the sales of the first DLC?
That's kind of what I'm getting at. TWW2 was the first game I've ever played where I bought new content as it came out, the game was that good to me and the team earned the trust. But 3 isn't worth playing, so I'll hold off DLC until the base game is fun to play. Until then how many people are like me and won't buy any DLC?
Kind of a non-issue. The road map has exactly one... a small lord pack with 4 'champions.' Somewhere vaguely in Q3 along with the IE beta and a rework of Warriors of Chaos. And the blood pack.
But this is _all_ in update 2.0, and there is almost no way that quarter estimate won't slip into Q4 or even 2023. And then planned improvements to make IE functional in 2.1 will be pushed even further.
Until IE is released and polished, there really isn't any reason to buy DLC, but they aren't really offering any reasons or anything to buy, either. If Chaos Dwarfs were on the map for this year and ignored the main campaign the way Tomb Kings ignored the Vortex, I'd probably go for it. But they're not even in the cards yet, and Immortal Empires is still a hollow promise.
I can't help but think there's an echo chamber in CA that leads them to weird decisions.
Like, if TWW3 had just been an expansion to TWW2... literally take the same game and the same map and expand it a little bit further north and then expand the east across the mountains to Cathay then added in the same races into the game... I feel most people would have been reasonably happy with that. Yeah, maybe the end turn would have gotten a bit longer, but I think most people would be fine with that.
Instead they went down the road of creating a campaign that it seems very few people care about to the detriment of the campaign people actually do want. I get that they want TWW3 to feel like a game in and of itself the same way as TWW2 with the vortex, but the vortex was always the sideshow to the mortal empires experience (and I say that as someone who actually doesn't mind the vortex campaign).
Maybe they'll prove me wrong and the new mortal empires will be awesome on a spherical map with proper proportions and whatnot, but I doubt it.
You should. The map is (for me at least) hands down the worst aspect of the game. And it affects so much.
Putting the Realms of Chaos on the mortal map was just dumb. Putting true north between the realms of Khorne and Nurgle just warped _everything_. Caravans from Cathay travel 'south' to the Empire, still through the ogre kingdoms, because obviously west is south on that edge of the map (that's how badly its distorted). The Empire is just... a directionless squash.
Regions are warped, shrunk and stretched to function against their natural layout. In familiar areas of the map (like the Empire and Norsca), my brain actively fights against the presentation of geography- its just that wrong. In unfamiliar areas (like Cathay, which was never really mapped) it feels like a realm of chaos in its own right- nothing makes sense, and nothing links up to a recognizable geography, because important features like the coastline are off the edge of the map.
What's even worse, is Kislev was very obviously designed from a gameplay perspective, and is more or less the 'heart' of the map. So it kind of gets a pass from the scale warping, and is instead scaled on gameplay concerns- specifically that major or important towns are all exactly more than a single turn of travel time apart. So its on a very different scale than the rest of the map, which causes the scale warp elsewhere to be even more exaggerated.
It is incredibly terrible design, to the point that I'm somewhat incredulous that it made it into the final game.
It is incredibly terrible design, to the point that I'm somewhat incredulous that it made it into the final game.
You just described 50-75% of the new content. The only new thing they added that I actually miss when playing WH2 are the new options to merge or destroy items.
Its also at 100% Slaanesh corruption (and 50% Nurgle, though that's falling) so Control is spiraling down.
I probably went too cheaply, +15 ranks on lords/heroes, +5 recruit rank and a slab of cash looked like it'd help more in the campaign than having a soul, 
