Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[copebot]

Generally speaking how do you efficienctly deal with towers in settlements defended by a reasonably sized AI army?

For the most part, you can ignore them. In situations where you can't, you can use ranged units or artillery to kill them. The main thing is to minimize how much exposure your army has to towers. In a lot of situations, splitting the army in a siege doesn't really help you that much, especially when the other army is big. The AI is pretty good at assembling a large enough clump of forces to defeat your divided force, but they tend to be bad at dealing with a large clump across a couple of approaches -- they just feed parts of their army to you in bits and pieces. For the most part, the AI does not build higher than tier 1 towers.

My typical method for most factions is to just divide the army in two around two entrances that have lanes that lead to a single cap point. I skirmish with magic while the army fights to the first point. Generally if you capture the one point, you can chew apart their army without getting shot by towers because they will keep feeding units to you. This method works even if your army is shit and even if you are outpowered.

The other way to deal with the towers is to send a hero or other fast moving goon squad to the other side of the map to capture points and kite around parts of the enemy army. The AI will make bad decisions building towers away from your main force because you have units on the other side. You can also do something similar to the best Troy cheese and hide all your army in the forest on one side while leaving one unit on the other side visible, but only some maps have trees to use.

In walled settlements, it depends on the faction. If I can blow holes in the walls and blow up the external towers, I do that and fight near the entrance. On any demon melee faction (Slaanesh/Khorne/Nurgle/Demons of Chaos) just rushing all the walls with the whole infantry force at the same time can be quite effective, just like it was in WH2. All of the Cathay walled settlement maps have blind spot approaches where there are no external towers -- I only use those particular approaches and never use the entryways with towers.

Basically, if you capture one corner of a siege map outside the line of sight of most of the other towers attached to the other points, the AI will keep counterattacking you, giving you all the advantages of being on the defensive even though you're on the offense. The AI doesn't understand how to do defense in depth -- they just always try to plug any hole that you create rather than withdrawing.

 

[Lycra Suit]

Why haven't those fucking Russians cracked it yet.

 

[Average Manatee]

Not worth cracking yet

 

[InD_ImaginE]

It has Denuvo. You can count people cracking Denuvo with one hand. And as the crack need to be renewed every other major patch, it's not worth to crack WH3 just to play RoC

 

[Lacrymas]

An overview of the map -

I, for one, think it looks amazing. Leagues above the shitty lighting of WH2.

 

[Maculo]

This guy did a rundown of the factions, but more importantly you can see the new faction/LL effects and starting armies. Morathi and Alberic received a touch-up, which was to be expected. Morathi starts with daemonettes, and Alberic has more defensive buffs than I remember. Also, unless I missed it in WH2, CA gave each lord a variety of starting units.

Malus provides 50% upkeep reduction on all cold-one units and immunity to Chaos attrition. I am guessing his quests or objectives will center around hunting chaos.

 

[razvedchiki]

so nothing new.

 

[Maculo]

It could bad memory on my part, but I don't remember certain LL faction bonuses being that strong. Also, some of the starting armies could be considered either a buff or a nerf to the start of some LLs. For example, I remember Louen had an artillery piece or two, which helped in taking Marienburg in the early turns. Overall, CA continued a trend of smaller starting armies.

 

[Average Manatee]

There's definitely changes. Vlad/Isabella get +50% battle healing cap and Mannfred can collect books of nagash.

 

[Tyrr]

Healing cap for vampires should be removed anyway. It was added just because some people cried about it in MP.
With the new magic system magic healing is caped with the mana.

 

[Jaedar]

There's definitely changes. Vlad/Isabella get +50% battle healing cap and Mannfred can collect books of nagash.

More importantly, wind of death was nerfed (seems to deal like half damage compared to previously?), and skeletons are no longer free. Counts should play very different to before in practice, even with these fairly minor changes. Raise dead was also changed so it now depends more on corruption and buildings, and not on battlefields.

A Vlad/Isabella campaign would be pretty cool I think. Just a shame vlad doesn't get a flying mount.

 

[Average Manatee]

Healing cap for vampires should be removed anyway. It was added just because some people cried about it in MP.
With the new magic system magic healing is caped with the mana.

Units with inherent regeneration would have infinite potential HP then.

There's definitely changes. Vlad/Isabella get +50% battle healing cap and Mannfred can collect books of nagash.

More importantly, wind of death was nerfed (seems to deal like half damage compared to previously?), and skeletons are no longer free. Counts should play very different to before in practice, even with these fairly minor changes. Raise dead was also changed so it now depends more on corruption and buildings, and not on battlefields.

A Vlad/Isabella campaign would be pretty cool I think. Just a shame vlad doesn't get a flying mount.

I am looking forward to a lords/heroes only game as isabella as soon as immortal empires drops. Might be first game.

Wind of death's casting cost did get reduced by ~30% so I think it might still be useful.

 

[copebot]

An overview of the map -

I, for one, think it looks amazing. Leagues above the shitty lighting of WH2.

I don't really understand the criticisms people have of the campaign map art for WH3, even though the corruption transitions could probably be a little softer. WH2's campaign map art was quite bad -- easily worse than ancient games like Shogun 2. Tree clumps in WH2 always looked like lumps of procedurally generated aliasing rather than anything resembling foliage.

The improved lighting has done a lot for the WH1 models in-game. Even the bugs that are still present (snow brightness) are not as bad as the awful effects that were present for WH2's entire lifecycle. I wish the performance on the campaign map was better (it often drops to 40 fps for me on the map despite usually sticking between 80-120 fps in battle with a 3080 Ti and 10900K processor at 1440p), but that's more of a minor irritation.

 

[Mitleser2020]

It could bad memory on my part, but I don't remember certain LL faction bonuses being that strong. Also, some of the starting armies could be considered either a buff or a nerf to the start of some LLs. For example, I remember Louen had an artillery piece or two, which helped in taking Marienburg in the early turns. Overall, CA continued a trend of smaller starting armies.

Karl Franz got a big early game buff. His spearmen were replaced by greatswords which are cheaper than in the previous game and his crossbowmen by mortars.

Spoiler

The other LL and their WH3 faction/LL effects/starting units

 

[Ibn Sina]

Remember you don't have to pay for any DLC. you can get the base game and edit creamapi to unlock all dlcs for free.

 

[kris]

Thorgrim seems to have a much easier start now, many units, no Grimgor, better bonuses?

 

[Average Manatee]

I expect most races will be easier thanks to WH3 difficulty balancing changes, especially factions with strong melee.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[underground nymph]

Remember you don't have to pay for any DLC. you can get the base game and edit creamapi to unlock all dlcs for free.

How exactly does this work? Does it unlock RoRs and DLC units as well?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Remember you don't have to pay for any DLC. you can get the base game and edit creamapi to unlock all dlcs for free.

How exactly does this work? Does it unlock RoRs and DLC units as well?

Cream API basically just fools the game to think you have the dlcs through .dll edits. Now it require the game to have all data downloaded (as you can't fool steam shop). In case of WH games all the data is downloaded regardless if you have the DLC or not so Cream API works.

You can find detailed info and support on some Russian site

 

[Tomas]

It seems like legendary difficulty is now a piece of cake - factions just steam rolling it and the campaigns being over by turn 50 (if you know what you are doing).

 

[Maculo]

It seems like legendary difficulty is now a piece of cake - factions just steam rolling it and the campaigns being over by turn 50 (if you know what you are doing).

It helps that CA reworked all the victory conditions. The short victory is truly short now. Also, my hunch is that CA tried to offload some of the difficulty on the endgame scenarios.

The endgame scenarios are a decent start, but there is room for improvement. Aside from adding Vermintide and Ordertide, my hope is for CA (or modders) to include early and mid-game scenarios, such as mass slave rebellions for Dark Elves and secession for Empire (maybe this already done enough for Empire). There is a lot that can be done with this.

 

[Lacrymas]

There are still some arbitrary win conditions like "conquer X number of settlements" which should be done away with imo. Each faction should have victory conditions that pertain to the lore.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The endgame scenarios are a decent start, but there is room for improvement. Aside from adding Vermintide and Ordertide, my hope is for CA (or modders) to include early and mid-game scenarios, such as mass slave rebellions for Dark Elves and secession for Empire (maybe this already done enough for Empire). There is a lot that can be done with this.

There are some translated french mods that did this for WH2. The events/dilemma feature are frankly underutilized in ME. While the experience of ME should be sandboxy, having events popping randomly that can drastically change map condition is probably a fun addition that break from the usual map painting.

 

[Üstad]

Remember you don't have to pay for any DLC. you can get the base game and edit creamapi to unlock all dlcs for free.

Why even bother with buying the base games then?