Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[Average Manatee]

Lots of factions can go with pure or almost pure melee focus (you usually want at least 1-2 artillery). You just need to stack the right red line buffs and techs/buildings to get them at rank 7+ out of the gate.

WH3 is a lot better for this than WH2 since AI melee buffs were decreased and supply lines are so weak.

 

[Average Manatee]

Melee working.

Melkoth's miasma was used twice on each of the pistoliers, otherwise it was all the lords hitting things. They are still low level and have almost no items except for a very useful helm of discord. There is suprisingly quite a bit of strategy to playing like this since you really want to be able to do hit and run attacks on the lords to snipe them because if you get stuck in a moshpit it's very hard to fight well and focus on the important targets. Of course once you do get pit of shades you can deal with things really easily.

You can get regular units with 60+ MA, 70+ MD, and AP damage and they'll just chew through enemies like a knife through butter.

 

[Mitleser2020]

I wonder how much CA play-tested the Yvresse campaign in Immortal Empires.
There are many changes which make it much harder than its Mortal Empires counterpart.

• only one settlement (Tor Yvresse) at the start, the second one needs to be conquered
• Marble resource was replaced by Pastures, i.e. less money
• second army is led by a traitless Princess and includes only a bunch of the most basic units, much weaker than its ME counterpart
• this weak army has to defeat a larger Greenskins faction in Ulthuan (+1 settlement)
• no fast units in the main starting armies (Lions and Phoenix are gone), though at last the presence of the LoH hero and artillery ensure that it is not weaker
• recruiting new Mistwalker units is much more difficult in the early game

During my second attempt, I did not even try to occupy any settlement in the Badlands.
It made more sense to go to nearby Southern Realms and fight their enemies, earning good defeat traits and money by selling settlement to Tilea and the Border Princes.

 

[Lacrymas]

Lots of factions can go with pure or almost pure melee focus (you usually want at least 1-2 artillery). You just need to stack the right red line buffs and techs/buildings to get them at rank 7+ out of the gate.

All demon (except Tzeentch) and WoC factions are essentially melee-only, especially Slaanesh, so it's obvious it works, but that doesn't mean it's optimal or not a slog. I honestly wouldn't inflict a no-shadow-caster Slaanesh campaign on myself ever again. When people regard a melee-only campaign (I'm assuming this means no casters?) as a "challenge run", you know melee is fucked. Not to mention some factions' dubious rosters. How would this look like with Cathay for example? 19 peasant spearmen? *shudder* Really, if any of you are doubting how unwieldy a no AoE caster melee campaign is, just give it a try for yourself and then come back with your impressions.

Melee working.

Until when, against what and on which difficulty? I'm genuinely curious if you can continue this success, so keep us updated. Single entities and lords/heroes also need a balance pass imo, but that's another issue entirely. Well, I wouldn't call an all-hero/lord armies the same as a "proper" all-melee army, so that's also something to take into consideration.

Speaking of keeping people updated, I started my IE N'Kari playthrough and 4 of the first 5 battles are sieges. The one that isn't a siege is the "tutorial" one that all factions get at the start. N'Kari seems to be doing better against the Helves than against Khorne, though, so that's good.

 

[Average Manatee]

All demon (except Tzeentch) and WoC factions are essentially melee-only, especially Slaanesh, so it's obvious it works, but that doesn't mean it's optimal or not a slog. I honestly wouldn't inflict a no-shadow-caster Slaanesh campaign on myself ever again. When people regard a melee-only campaign (I'm assuming this means no casters?) as a "challenge run", you know melee is fucked. Not to mention some factions' dubious rosters. How would this look like with Cathay for example? 19 peasant spearmen? *shudder* Really, if any of you are doubting how unwieldy a no AoE caster melee campaign is, just give it a try for yourself and then come back with your impressions.

Until when, against what and on which difficulty? I'm genuinely curious if you can continue this success, so keep us updated. Single entities and lords/heroes also need a balance pass imo, but that's another issue entirely. Well, I wouldn't call an all-hero/lord armies the same as a "proper" all-melee army, so that's also something to take into consideration.

I mean sure there's factions where you can't reasonably do full melee, or shouldn't try. But the point is that a fairly balanced build can work for almost any faction and your melee can be made to stand up well to AI melee. No ranged + no AoE caster though... ehh... I think Dwarves might be able to do it with rune magic (excluding the AoE one). Or Vampire Counts/Vampire Coast with healing? Actually anything with healing or regen might be OK, it seems to be overpowered now. Used to be units regen was 2-4 HP a second, now the minimum seems to be 0.1%, which is like 50-100 HP a second.

I'm quite certain I could go forever, it's very exploitable to farm XP on lords and get tons of OP equipment (each battle gets 3-4 drops). But it is tedious to do without magic because battles take 20:00 on the clock to finish. I *can* autoresolve most of these fights but they'll cost ~75% of my HP which puts me in danger if another enemy attacks during the same turn. Not sure if autoresolve will get significantly better once everyone is on dragons. From what I've seen you don't need magic to autoresolve so full melee armies should autoresolve pretty well IF you actually make them quality armies (See https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/total-war-warhammer-2.114482/page-137#post-7661056 for an example in WH2).

I am playing on Legendary/VH. Yeah I know I said I should play on VH/VH to avoid autosave but once I put it on turn 10 end game crisis I figured I might as well not skimp out on difficulty.

EDIT:

'ere we go. Got 20 lords going (5 separate army-groups)

I do have 2 regen items so far. One thing I've noticed is that it takes 0 time to switch around items so theoretically you could move them around constantly to fight multiple battles. Don't think I'll do that but I'll get all my best stuff for the greenskins when they show up.

 

[Space Satan]

Goddamn new diplamacy made it SO MUCH BETTER to play Empire and Lizardmen, it's not even comparable to WII

 

[Jaedar]

I wonder how much CA play-tested the Yvresse campaign in Immortal Empires.

I get the feeling they really haven't tuned the starts of the factions very much at all. So many of them just have single line placeholder intros, and what were previously quest chains to get their unique items is now just instant battles.

And well, there's nothing that says that the campaigns should have the same difficulty as they did in wh2. I think Imrik and Morathi both became a lot easier for example.

 

[Average Manatee]

Update on the greentide (collapsed in 5 turns):

- They absolutely come at you from all sides which is way harder than the normal end time event where you only need to defend the northern front.
- I think I found some kind of bug with regen/healing. For some reason once in a while when my lord ended a battle with full health but still took a ton of damage they'd appear on the campaign map as being almost dead. It happened roughly once every 3 battles to one of my 4 lords in the battle... but my two best army groups were fighting 5 battles each over the end turns and so I just started losing lords. You can hide them in the trees in their next battle and let them heal but then they've hit their heal cap for the battle and are either likely to die or your other guys are likely to die because you're keeping them out.
- I also figured out that standing near settlements is a bad idea because the AI will just rush the capture points and then you lose. lol.

It was pretty funny though. My lords all went from level 20 to level 40 over the first end turn of combat. You can see the enemy faction strength since they are normal factions just gifted a bunch of units, and I saw the meter climbing in my favor, so I knew I was making pretty good progress. I'd guess that I'd killed about ~1/3rd of the army spawns for 2 of the 5 greenskin hordes.

In the future I think I'll use a turn 50 end time/100% strength.

 

[Lacrymas]

Here's a hypothetical situation - what if the end times happen, but all the factions you have to destroy are somehow destroyed by other AI factions? Do you still win? Rofl.

As for my update on the N'Kari campaign - I destroyed 2 helf factions and decided to vassalize them to see what would happen since they had pretty big armies. They do like to beeline towards your enemies if you have any, which is great, and you get some tribute from them, but it isn't as extensive and modular like Agamemenon's vassalage from Troy (I would like to see some more interaction with your vassals btw). Vassals seem to hate you for a while and you can't even open trade with them before they stabilize their relationship with you. This system is kind of bizarre to me because I can't figure out what exactly the role of the vassals is. They function exactly like a military alliance except they pay you tribute and can't break the alliance. Like most mechanics, this seems undercooked and vestigial. N'Kari starts with a cult in Saphery, so it kind of implies they are going to be able to be dominated at one point, but they somehow got embroiled in a two-front war with Alarielle and Tyrion, so Saphery got spit-roasted by them. It was quite funny actually. Either way, I don't think I'm going to vassalize anyone else I defeat because it seems pointless and you get more money from the settlement. If I get the chance to dominate another faction, I'm going to do it, but otherwise eh. Oh, and you don't get victory credit from vassals, you have to personally occupy the settlement for it to count (or destroy it). Which is strange and the vassals hang in the air even more than they generally do. I suppose it's done like this to prevent you from dominating a faction with a lot of settlements and winning like that. But who cares? The campaign is already long enough.

Either way, I destroyed Eltharion quite fast because he was being attacked by a minor orc faction that seemed to wreck his shit and he got stuck in the minor settlement in front of Tor Yvresse, so his capital was extremely easy to take even with the wards against daemons. Then the second field battle of the campaign happened when I assaulted his last settlement. He decided to recruit a lord outside of it, so I attacked that lord to force a field battle and then surrounded the place where he was going to come in with reinforcements. I had to call a disciple army to be sure that I was going to be able to take his entire 20-unit army + the garrison, but it wasn't really needed. Then it was easy to take out the minor orc faction and I'm preparing myself to attack Tyrion.

 

[kris]

There's nothing much more to say about Azazel's campaign itself, it's as straightforward as it gets, kill everything in your path and here's the tool(s) you need. And that tool is Pit of Shades. Here's the crux of the matter - the gameplay immediately gets boring once you get one of these vortex damage spells. They fix all your problems and are an answer to every single tactical situation. The more armies they throw at you the better because it means more xp. You just wait at the spot where the reinforcements are going to come in and decimate *all* of them with 2 AoE spells, racking up thousands of kills on a single character. There isn't a 20-man army composition that can kill you because the AI is dumb, so you are either autoresolving the majority of battles that aren't sieges or slaughter army after army. Once you get such spells, Total Warhammer is just boring and has bad gameplay, there's no way around this.

They dont work well against monsters and heroes. So there are 20 unit stacks that it dont work against. You so seldom see that of course.

 

[kris]

As i guessed before playing the thorgrim are much easier now. You just need to defeat Skarsnik and you are pretty safe. I do see a red menace creeping up from the south. Grimgor also samish now, the others I tried I got tied down quite a bit.

 

[Average Manatee]

They dont work well against monsters and heroes. So there are 20 unit stacks that it dont work against. You so seldom see that of course.

Unless there are lizardmen nearby, in which case they will use their ritual that summons a doomstack of monsters and send it straight at you before turn 20.

 

[Bohrain]

Finished the Vilitch DLC campaign. Feels like I need to wait for modders to update their "more field battles" mods for IE. I wonder if CA playtested their settlement maps with small unit size since maneuvering anything in ultra consistently pops vessels in my head. You throw in two melee infantry units within a settlement corridor and they become a blob that will block any friendly and hostile unit for 2 minutes unless someone blasts them with a vortex or wind spell. WH2 campaign was completely unplayable for me without the mod that removes sieges from non-racial capitals.

 

[zapotec]

I use the "minor settlements becomes land battles" and it works perfectly

 

[underground nymph]

Is Kislev still shit?

 

[Fedora Master]

Seems like an Ordertide lead by the player is not a guarantee. As Volkmar the Old World is barely holding on between Skaven, Vampires and Chaos. Also, getting the Tomes is fuuuuuuucking slow since they're all over the place.

 

[Wassersäufer]

Kiev Kislev seems to be powerless against the onslaught of Norsca, WoC, Moulder and Azhag. In all of my games they are dead by around turn 55. Empire really needs a LL that starts in the northern/eastern part of the empire to prevent others from just steamrolling most of it.

 

[Tyrr]

Old Chaos now being on the map on turn 1, the new demon factions from WH3 & the 4 new lords from the DLC have shifted the balance it seems.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Kiev Kislev seems to be powerless against the onslaught of Norsca, WoC, Moulder and Azhag. In all of my games they are dead by around turn 55. Empire really needs a LL that starts in the northern/eastern part of the empire to prevent others from just steamrolling most of it.

Eh I dunno, in my campaign on Turn 60 ish they are Ranked 8. Probably has something to do with me killing Azhag on Turn 30ish and ignoring Kislev because Dwarf from the south and Golden Order chimping out and I have to focus there instead.

 

[Tyrr]

I prefer the evil races dominating over the old order tide. Makes the game more interesting and fits the 'End Times' theme.
There is also still infighting between the evil races, while during the order tide it was just *singing kumbaya*.

 

[Fedora Master]

I accidentally created a whole new War of Beards

 

[Wassersäufer]

Kiev Kislev seems to be powerless against the onslaught of Norsca, WoC, Moulder and Azhag. In all of my games they are dead by around turn 55. Empire really needs a LL that starts in the northern/eastern part of the empire to prevent others from just steamrolling most of it.

Eh I dunno, in my campaign on Turn 60 ish they are Ranked 8. Probably has something to do with me killing Azhag on Turn 30ish and ignoring Kislev because Dwarf from the south and Golden Order chimping out and I have to focus there instead.

Come to think of it, Ice Court did survive in my Karak Kadrin game where is moshed Azhag. He does seem to be the biggest danger for order factions there.

 

[L'ennui]

So I caved in and bought this for the alluring promise of the Immortal Empires campaign. I will presumably get my money's worth by sheer virtue of the massive amount of stuff to try.

Started as Lizardmen (Gor-Rok), pretty good so far, this faction is braindead simple. Bonked some Dark Elves on the head. Chomped on some Skaven, but then realized that the rat vermin are *everywhere* around me, so I diplomatically confederated my fellow dinowarriors to bonk them on the head right proper.

Skaven delenda est

 

[tabacila]

Kiev Kislev seems to be powerless against the onslaught of Norsca, WoC, Moulder and Azhag. In all of my games they are dead by around turn 55. Empire really needs a LL that starts in the northern/eastern part of the empire to prevent others from just steamrolling most of it.

Eh I dunno, in my campaign on Turn 60 ish they are Ranked 8. Probably has something to do with me killing Azhag on Turn 30ish and ignoring Kislev because Dwarf from the south and Golden Order chimping out and I have to focus there instead.

In one of my Reikland Campaigns Kislev managed to hang on long enough to let me clear Khazrak, Festus and Sylvannia, but they were mega weak starting from turn 40 or so. Seems like clan Moulder was the main culprit in this campaign. I saw some mentions on Reddit that Kislev factions are getting fucked over because their oblasts are marked as Norscan lands and they can't build properly there. Seems like one of the many fuckups of the IE beta.

The Empire definitely needs some LLs, especially in the east. Regular elector counts are pants on head retarded.

My hope is that the Empire has at least 3 content packs coming:

1. A religion focused DLC giving multiple options for temples/gods of the Empire and faith specific units.
Hell they could even steal the god worship mechanic from Troy. Boris and Middenland would definitely fit in here. Ulric had a few units and CA/GW can invent a few for the other gods of the Empire.

2. A magic focused DLC finally giving the generic wizard lord option to the Empire.
Best guess for a LL here is Elspeth von Draken, since she's from Nuln and Wissenland's countess is not a fighting character. Since there aren't any 'magic' units left I can think of, besides the Celestial Hurricanum, getting a LL fron Nuln would also be a great moment to bring in more of the Empire's tech side, like the Imperial Engineer and maybe the Nuln Ironsides as a Jezzail like unit. Elspeth would also work great in a Elspeth vs Tamurkhan, Empire vs Nurgle DLC.

3. A knightly orders focused DLC that brings in the Grand Master generic lord choice.
One of the electors in the east could become a LL version of the Grand Master. CA could give the Warband upgrade mechanic to the Empire so you can upgrade regular knights to different orders.

 

[thesecret1]

So is it just me being bad, or are Kislev units incredibly shit? Or am I supposed to use them as skirmishers or something? Feels like they just melt under any kind of damage. Also wtf cavalry charges seem significantly worse than in WH2?