Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[Wassersäufer]

View attachment 27393

WTF are these stacks

There is gonna be some vile screaming while he is pleasuring your portal.

 

[Fedora Master]

Those are random spawns in the Southern Chaos Wastes.

As far as I know, those ridiculous stacks are an unintended side effect from Oxyotl's visions of the old ones.

So because this one asshole exists everyone gets to deal with random chaos stacks? Fun.

I think it only happens when the player is Oxyotl. I think Fedora Master is playing as Oxyotl?

Its not a mission for Oxy that you can activate, it seems the game just randomly decides to spawn these stacks from the random mission pool way too early. It's not even hard to fight them because all they do is sit in your province and raid.

 

[Average Manatee]

Spoiler

Turn 61, finished off Tyrion. My strength is vastly ahead of any AI at this point. Income is great, making about 60k gross, 25k net off of 62 settlements. Have 6 land armies and 2 black ark armies. Currently wasting time planning to turn on Malekith and Hellebron and try one of the confederation tricks.

I think Malus's objective might be bugged, it says control 10 provinces but I'm pretty sure I got it way before that. Once you get it its pretty OP to spam every turn since it clears all of your corruption, gives all settlements +100 growth, and improves everyone's loyalty (which leads to good events where you take items from them in exchange for loyalty).

Decided I might as well try and see what maximizing slaves can do. There is a 3rd level at 10k slaves, -7% construction cost -20% construction time -3 control. One thing I have noted is that revolts don't seem to reduce your slave amounts anymore so you can farm them for slaves. From what I've seen settlements with level 3 or ideally 4 walls can autoresolve rebels just fine so this should be an easy way to farm income and slaves. 10k slaves actually isn't that much considering my buildings burn about 1k per turn.

 

[Lacrymas]

General thoughts about Azazel's campaign on the RoC map - Cathay has too much freedom to do what it wants and they just mass produce armies and confederate each other, so it's kind of tedious eliminating them. Your vassals/allies/dominees are essentially useless. They just run around like headless chickens back and forth between the two sides of the Great Bastion and get killed. The game is over the moment you get Pit of Shades, just like it's over when you get Infernal Gateway as Tzeentch. There's 0 reason to use any spell other than these absolutely busted AoE damage ones. I routinely get 1k+ kills with Pit of Shades spam alone. You'd think Mirror Shards in the lore of Slaanesh would also be useful, but you'd be wrong. The cast time is extremely prohibitive and the AI dodges it effortlessly. The AI doesn't even try to dodge Pit of Shades for some reason, it actively blobs into it before it goes off so it's more convenient for you. Sieges are getting more and more drab, each map bigger and more pointless than the next, but at least I can fly around with my heroes now, casting spells and decimating army after army with minimal losses. If I were to name a single thing that has the most negative impact on gameplay, that would be that AoE damage spells are broken and trivialize any battle, especially against this mindbogglingly dumb AI.

P.S. fighting against Cathay is as boring as playing them.

 

[Agame]

Sieges are getting more and more drab, each map bigger and more pointless than the next

I love that CAs response to people complaining about sieges in WH1/2 was to make EVERY BATTLE you fight in the campaign a siege battle, haha get rekt you whinging plebs!

And yea I was fine with how sieges were previously, fast and simple to get through, and only for major cities. No idea why this has been such a big deal for people, it was inevitable CA would fuck it up if they tried to make it more complex. Having to fight siege battles for every single settlement now is absolute cancer.

The only good siege system CA have ever done was Shogun 2. Which also happens to be the last good game they produced.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Nearly finished with download

I was planning to play Vlad.... but then I imagine how sucks early game minor siege will be with VC. Blech.

 

[Maculo]

Malus is a fucking beast. Even on Very Hard, the surrounding daemon armies don't have the tier units or magic to deal with him. Malus, a sorcerous, and a cheap army will last you a long time.

No way Black Arks are not bugged though.

 

[Fedora Master]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2853727364

And so it begins

 

[Lacrymas]

Sieges are getting more and more drab, each map bigger and more pointless than the next

I love that CAs response to people complaining about sieges in WH1/2 was to make EVERY BATTLE you fight in the campaign a siege battle, haha get rekt you whinging plebs!

And yea I was fine with how sieges were previously, fast and simple to get through, and only for major cities. No idea why this has been such a big deal for people, it was inevitable CA would fuck it up if they tried to make it more complex. Having to fight siege battles for every single settlement now is absolute cancer.

The only good siege system CA have ever done was Shogun 2. Which also happens to be the last good game they produced.

The problem is that they design sieges in a vacuum. They don't take into account how the game actually plays, so the sieges ended up vestigial at best. The gigantic maps assume routine use of bigger armies on both sides that simply doesn't happen. I have no idea what they were thinking with the tower minigame. And even if the maps and mechanics were somehow coherent, it is all trivialized and negated by magic. I've heard the phrase "the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing", but this is taking it to the next level. Here's my recommendation for a quick band-aid until they can redesign the whole system - make it so you need a garrison building to have a garrison, that way the AI would need at least a few turns to make it happen; or make it so you need a building for it to be a siege battle, otherwise it's a field one.

 

[Jaedar]

I was planning to play Vlad.... but then I imagine how sucks early game minor siege will be with VC. Blech.

I played some 10 turns of Isabella yesterday. Sieges are actually pretty easy with VC, because you can get vargulfs and graveguards in decent numbers pretty early on, and they will cleave through most garrisons, and the flyers you start with are good against turrets. And you get the vampire building in T1, and level 8 vampires get flying mounts which are also great for wrecking defenders.

Also everyone in your main army gets vanguard deployment, so you start right next to the walls. I haven't really started fighting the empire yet though (Azag and Zhufbar are keeping me on the defensive), so possible my opinion will change.

Also all cathay convoys seem to stop right next to Drakenhof and they're easy to kill and will give some 20k gold for defeating them.

Sieges/settlements with slaanesh were way way way more tedious.

siege battle, otherwise it's a field one.

Yeah, I think it would be cool if settlements were field battles until you got t3 garrison, and capitals were settlements until you built building for walls. Or something like that.

 

[Fedora Master]

Well, those turbo stacks you get with Oxyotl have one great feature: You can instantly level up a fresh lord to level 8 or so with them.

Thanks AR!

 

[zapotec]

Why heroic victory with low casualties?

 

[Lacrymas]

Why heroic victory with low casualties?

Because auto-resolve is fucked. It will say decisive victory with low casualties, but it's a trap, it will leave all your units at half hp.

 

[Fedora Master]

Report on my Oxyotl campaign on VH/H: Actually very enjoyable. The weird doomstacks that spawn in your starting provinces are less of a problem than they seem, since they don't really do anything. Apart from that, as I said, you can go anywhere you want and settle there too. His faction absolutely doesn't care, even Wood Elf forests are a-okay. I decided to finish off the Southern Pole, which amounts to three provinces. Once you're done the southern half of the globe will most likely be in the hands of Order factions so you're safe from attack pretty much. It's certainly fun to play World Police! I decided to help the Empire out against Festus and just gave them back their towns so I could ally them instead. You can totally get your own Order doomstack consisting of High Elf archers, Lizardmen monsters and Empire artillery! Building up little enclaves all over the world is super easy too with the reduced building time edict. I can't say if this Order Tide happens with other factions but it certainly makes for a very different campaign experience.

Oh and for the new random "disaster" event - I didn't notice any of it because it was the Wood Elves going hog wild.

Spoiler

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Okay starting my VC campaign now. Hard/Hard because I am a wussie.

Mod willbe QoL stuff like camera and stuff + Tabletop Cap

 

[Average Manatee]

Why heroic victory with low casualties?

Because auto-resolve is fucked. It will say decisive victory with low casualties, but it's a trap, it will leave all your units at half hp.

Must be a problem with it overly favoring ranged armies. My shades take cities with <100 casualties. Heck, my shielded darkshards do so too.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Average Manatee]

Just discovered that there is an auto-construction checkbox at the top right of the building screen for provinces. Has this always been there? Makes things a lot simpler when big.

 

[Fedora Master]

I hate to say it but the Immortal Empires campaign is fine. It may even be good with a patch or two.

 

[Lacrymas]

If only the gameplay was good too. One can dream.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Franz campaign is belisarius putting out fires all over the fucking place.

Got dragged into bretonnia by Kemmler and Grom and now i'm having horse shaggers and wood elves mass declaring war on me in a spiral from hell because I stuck around for too long. I''ve had enough and about ready to mobilise and scorch earth the whole lot of 'em. Bastards.

 

[Average Manatee]

OwO what is this insanely overpowered buff that Volkmar can get?

Spoiler

(Empire can easily recruit rank 8 infantry so your halberdiers will get like 50 MA/75 MD)

Also this (Volkmar himself gets -50% cooldown to battle prayers so this makes these completely free AoE buffs/debuffs insanely spammable)

Spoiler

That's really convenient even if it doesn't do much to enemies on harder difficulties (though it usually slows them down since they'll adopt anti-attrition stances).

Spoiler

nice

Spoiler

Of course its random where the books spawn but you can afford to send out a stack for a 10 turns to fight a roaming army by 50 turns in. Also you start in the desert which is full of undead with vulnerability to your spammable prayers, it's like playing Repanse except all your lords are nuke bots.

 

[SmartCheetah]

I've played 30 turns as Valkia and 40 turns as Skarbrand on hardest difficulties. Valkia can be a beast and is pretty fun to play with. I like the unit upgrading mechanics - it just makes sense. Fighting against Dark Elves can be pretty tough tho' and I think later on I will face some serious problems.

Skarbrand... I've started three times because how fucked you can be if you overextend and go too deep into the enemy territory. His mechanics just tell you to go in, but getting cut off can basicly mean you're out of money and suffer major casualties every turn(or disband parts of your army). At my 2nd try I've got gang banged by three factions at the same time while I was at least 3 turns away from home :c I feel like you need to play it really safe and focus on neighbouring provinces (so you can come back fast if there is a need for it) early game.

 

[Matalarata]

Playing as Acheron on VH/VH and I must say I'm impressed by the changes in the gameplay. Subjugating and vassals actually... work? As intended?!? No random DoW on any of them, turn 35 and I have 8 vassals, giving me +80% research, 200 souls per turn and ~2400 gold (varies). The north is singing Kum ba yah, I even have some skavens under me, although their corruption deletes mine and makes it hard to control them (they still provide passive bonuses so, who cares). Best part is I have a dozen or so of chaff armies I can fire and forget with 10 points off allegiance.
They even react and attack rebellions targeting other vassals, if they happen to pass by!

The new recruitment mechanics are pretty fun, you can stack an ungodly amount of bonuses on aspiring champions, you must basically research the full tech tree to have it all but with Acheron bonuses I think it's pretty doable. Even just giving them poison, barrier, stride, frenzy and a couple of the capstone techs (say, regeneration + sword of Khorne) should be easily doable by turn ~75 or so (math pulled my Exalted ass).

Edit: don't forget to disable research before attacking for those sweet, sweet students on level up! You need 200% research speed to shove of one turn from the techs requiring 3 turns and two turns for those requiring 6.

 

[Average Manatee]

I've played 30 turns as Valkia and 40 turns as Skarbrand on hardest difficulties. Valkia can be a beast and is pretty fun to play with. I like the unit upgrading mechanics - it just makes sense. Fighting against Dark Elves can be pretty tough tho' and I think later on I will face some serious problems.

Skarbrand... I've started three times because how fucked you can be if you overextend and go too deep into the enemy territory. His mechanics just tell you to go in, but getting cut off can basicly mean you're out of money and suffer major casualties every turn(or disband parts of your army). At my 2nd try I've got gang banged by three factions at the same time while I was at least 3 turns away from home :c I feel like you need to play it really safe and focus on neighbouring provinces (so you can come back fast if there is a need for it) early game.

Really wish Skarbrand at least (possibly all chaos factions) got the same unit upgrade mechanics. He's such a momentum based character and running back to your starting settlement to spend 5 turns recruiting better stuff sucks. Early game you probably want to get Chaos Warriors w/ dual weapons ASAP and try to bloat your army strength enough to get non-aggression pacts and dissuade people from declaring on you.

I think they've generally lowered the base amount you get from sacking/looting settlements, at least my dark elf black arks were only pulling in around 10k cash from max level settlements rather than 30k+.

Playing as Acheron on VH/VH and I must say I'm impressed by the changes in the gameplay. Subjugating and vassals actually... work? As intended?!? No random DoW on any of them, turn 35 and I have 8 vassals, giving me +80% research, 200 souls per turn and ~2400 gold (varies). The north is singing Kum ba yah, I even have some skavens under me, although their corruption deletes mine and makes it hard to control them (they still provide passive bonuses so, who cares). Best part is I have a dozen or so of chaff armies I can fire and forget with 10 points off allegiance.
They even react and attack rebellions targeting other vassals, if they happen to pass by!

I've noticed that this can also screw you. I had a trade agreement with one of Be'lakor's norscan vassals and despite waiting 10 turns before attacking Be'lakor himself I suffered the fully dishonoraburu penalty for attacking him and breaking that trade agreement, despite getting no warning about this. I wonder if your vassal making NAPs/trade agreements with your rivals even if you don't would actually make you safe from getting declared.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Is it just me or are loading times ruthlessly shit?