Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[copebot]

I was really busy over the last few months so I did not have much gaming time. It seems like some of the recent patches changed what kinds of units the major factions recruit. The minor factions are still shitty pushovers, but Malekith recruited an early game doomstack of half shades by turn 9 in my new Grombrindal campaign. By the time I wiped him out a few turns later, he was already recruiting shades with greatswords. Just brutal. I lost my irondrakes during the final siege and couldn't really do anything to save them because they got hard focused by darkshards and shades.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Who told you dorfs are the worst? They're hilarious, a solid line of steel and raking cannon fire. Top bantz as well, the wazzocks.

 

[Tyrr]

Who told you dorfs are the worst? They're hilarious, a solid line of steel and raking cannon fire. Top bantz as well, the wazzocks.

And flamethrowers. Flamethrowers on the flanks fuck shit up.

 

[Dwarvophile]

Who told you dorfs are the worst? They're hilarious, a solid line of steel and raking cannon fire. Top bantz as well, the wazzocks.

And flamethrowers. Flamethrowers on the flanks fuck shit up.

With Grombidal I don't even bother fancy flanking tactics : I put 2 flamethrowers in the center of the frontline, Grombidal just before them, let ennemy units aggro on him and just indistinctly shower the resulting blob with fire. With his bonuses, by the time Grombidal's beard starts to redden, everything around is melted.

The nice thing with Dawi is that with the proper army comp & positionning you have nothing to do, you can just sit and watch, enjoy the show like with old school TW battles.

 

[ADL]

Finally hit a reasonable price in the US ($35 on GameBillet) but it took forever to download. Took one look at Immortal Empire's map and noped right out of the game. Way too much game to be starting an hour or two before bed.

Benchmark battle averaged 111fps nearly maxed out at 4K on my system with blood enabled so I'm happy performance isn't as shoddy as I was led to believe at launch. Any DLC on sale worth grabbing?

 

[Twiglard]

Benchmark battle averaged 111fps nearly maxed out at 4K on my system with blood enabled

I think you've run the benchmark in 1080p by accident.

 

[ADL]

5800X3D cache putting in the work.

boring benchmark stuff

Ultra preset

High Preset with anisotropic increased from 8x to 16x with SSAO enabled

Following two "optimized settings" guides I found online.

If you're playing Total War, check out the 5800X3D or Intel's new processors and keep your eye on Zen 4's 3D cache models coming early next year.

 

[pickmeister]

Damn. And here I am, perfectly happy playing on 1080p, everything on Ultra with Screen Space Reflections and Shadows put on Extreme, with my FPS capped at 50, so my GPU fans don't fly off.

 

[Dwarvophile]

The keys "C" & "V" to tilt the camera up & down don't work anymore for me. Instead they just zoom in & out. Anyone with the same issue ?

EDIT : ofc I went in the options to try & change it but to no avail. rotate up&down just translate to zoom in&out

 

[Tyranicon]

Why is the AI and animations worse than Warhammer 2?

It's almost like they didn't make this kind of game for decades.

I regret paying money for this glorified DLC.

 

[copebot]

Gave an Azazel campaign a try on Legendary/Normal on the RoC map to try out the Zanbaijin campaign. By around turn 40, I vassalized Zhao Ming. I got rid of the sister in the very early game. I think you could go either aggro against Cathay like I did or vassalize more Norscans first. It's less risky, probably, to build up a power base in the wastes, but I was paranoid about facing unending waves of Chinese doomstacks, so I went for them first. There was a point right after I killed off the girl dragon in that I thought I was going to lose the campaign when I got dogpiled, but I was saved by the erratic Cathay AI when fighting in the field. They just keep shuffling their ranged units around in a confused muddle, which they don't do on siege defenses.

Vassalized Zhao Ming is no joke. Dude is spamming out Celestial Dragon Guard and artillery like he's still on the other side.

I made an early misstep by attacking and wiping out the Kurgans. It seems like they are scripted in this campaign to just spawn and then idle in the wastes doing nothing. Overall, while the gate mechanic is cool (you get to teleport around the map at set rifts which are all over the place), but IE is just a more interesting map. With IE, there's always some other asshole around the corner who might be pretty damn powerful. With ROC, once you've beaten your main nearby antagonist, the game's basically done. There aren't any big dangerous alliance blobs that can form that can make for a mid or late game challenge. The vassal mechanic makes you snowball hard.

 

[Space Satan]

Unbalanced, unrealistic, but damn satisfying

 

[copebot]

Finishing up my Azazal campaign around 104, after vassalizing Kislev even though they still had 38 settlements left. They had so many immortal heroes and lords that the accumulated Gifts just overpowered them. The AI on legendary was able to pump out tons and tons of stacks, but because of how they move them around, they were never really able to push me back. Although most of the time vassal income is pretty negligible, Kislev was worth 6k per turn at that size.

Kislev against Azazal WoC is generally a pretty easy matchup even against absurd legendary doomstacks. The only thing they really have going for them is the By Our Blood passive, which always extends things out a lot longer than it would last against something like the Empire or High Elves.

The Zanbaijin teleporter mechanic only really mattered for me at a couple points in the game: fighting Cathay, in which it enabled me to get an extra army closer to the front a lot faster, and fighting Kislev in Goromandy, in which it helped me to shift my stacks from the western part to the eastern part and back depending on where they were sending their pile of doomstacks at any given moment. It was tough for me to actually open portals in enemy territory with heroes because my campaign map heroes were always underleveled, and the mortals had tons of mega leveled heroes, even though I started fighting Kislev around turn 70.

The last battle was OK as far as survival battles go, but because it's a survival battle, there's basically no way to lose it.

 

[SmartCheetah]

After 4 or 5 tries I finally understood how to play Skarbrand and managed to finish long campaign in 80turns or so. It's actually very easy after you adapt to the Khorne faction priorities.
Blood Hosts are your bread and butter - and even if people say that you ain't forced to use them - you're missing a lot. This faction can be constantly on -2/-6k of Income and totally don't care about that fact because every raided settlement grants you 10k+ of gold. At Turn 80 I had two full stacks and two other lords with several units (that were basicly covering some of the more strategically important locations)
Generally speaking - I enjoyed it, and If I will ever finish domination campaign with any faction - that would probably be Khorne (or Beastmen Morghur)

 

[copebot]

After 4 or 5 tries I finally understood how to play Skarbrand and managed to finish long campaign in 80turns or so. It's actually very easy after you adapt to the Khorne faction priorities.
Blood Hosts are your bread and butter - and even if people say that you ain't forced to use them - you're missing a lot. This faction can be constantly on -2/-6k of Income and totally don't care about that fact because every raided settlement grants you 10k+ of gold. At Turn 80 I had two full stacks and two other lords with several units (that were basicly covering some of the more strategically important locations)
Generally speaking - I enjoyed it, and If I will ever finish domination campaign with any faction - that would probably be Khorne (or Beastmen Morghur)

They also just get better and better as the campaign goes on, but they also become less necessary. What I liked about them is that they force you to push the limits and see just how far you can go with a damaged and fucked-up stack. You use them until they are nearly dead, and then you can have them linger until their Bloodletting bonus expires.

I started a Tehenuin campaign on L/N. I had read that it was a little bugged out, but it seems like the sacrifice UI is fine. The issue is that basically all the quests involving provinces auto-complete. So, you get the quest for two provinces when you have only one, but you also get the ones for having three and 4-5 provinces as soon as they become available. The quests that require higher tier sacrifices also incorrectly increment when you use lower tier sacrifices. So, within the first 20 turns or so you have already unlocked tier 4 sacrifices and get inundated with quest reward cash. I did not really have an optimal start because I've never played him before. I rushed the elves to the east, but I should have trespassed on the lizards next door to rush Pestilens. The nice thing about all the sacrifice buffs is that you can routinely turn valiant and crushing defeats into victories. The optimal start here until they fix the bugs would probably be to rush Pestilens and do a Rite of Primeval Glory as soon as it becomes available.

I'm not sure that it was a bug or not, but my reliability tanked when the Skaven War stage of the campaign started. It wasn't related to my bumrushing of the elves. I thought elfrushing would be a good strategy, but I badly underestimated just how many stacks Pestilens could generate in the first 20 turns (spoiler: it's a lot).

 

[pickmeister]

Unbalanced, unrealistic, but damn satisfying

TLDW? Can't stand that whiny bitch.

 

[Lacrymas]

TLDW? Can't stand that whiny bitch.

Single entities, especially LLs, are op.

 

[Average Manatee]

TLDW? Can't stand that whiny bitch.

TW3 AI is stupid and will run their whole army (even its ranged units) into a blob to fight a single unit if that's all you have visible. Then you cast AoE spells (Ice magic having one of the strongest) and 90% of the enemy army is dead.

 

[pickmeister]

Thanks, bros!

 

[Tyrr]

Yes, you can cheese the AI in WH3. Like you could in WH1&2.
Legend build his entire channel around it. But I find it just boring.

 

[Lacrymas]

It really isn't about cheesing, the AI is shockingly incompetent in general and probably the worst RTS AI I've ever seen. Which is strange because Total Warhammer battles are as simple as you can get.

 

[Bohrain]

I can tolerate the AI being some variety of derpy since realistically speaking that will always be the case with this many factors. But certain units just plain not doing anything really grinds my gears. I still don't know if Ogres are underwhelming because all their units are vulnerable to anti-large or because a good number of their units have a third of their models always derping around instead of hitting things.

 

[SmartCheetah]

Little domination campaign report:
I've restarted my Skarbrand campaign yet again and this time instead of going north/west I went full blitzkrieg mode into eastern territories and south. Khalida and her territories were done in several turns, but Thorek Ironbrow was a huge problem as he was playing super defensively for a while. After I ignored him, he decided to demand 700gold from me (which I agreed upon) so he would leave me be for two more turns and... Go sucidal on an empty settlement that my territory havent auto-colonized yet. It gave me the opportunity to fuck him up with use of bloodhosts.
After that, things were rather easy - few turns of steamrolling him with bloodhosts, getting the elven enclave and finally trying my luck with first of two Lizardmen factions in the south.
This was pretty funny as I've started conquering them from the Thorek's Karak side (western side of the mountains) while they started conquering my recently established coastline north from them (btw: seems like this is the way to play Skarbrand. You've got at least two ports on this side which make pretty big amounts of money + 450income building in one of the cities on the Lizardmen's coast)

Kroq-Gar took maybe 3 minor settlements while I took 5 of his. Poor lad decided to go back and attack me with two stacks while I had 19unit Skarbrand army + slightly injured bloodhost + two following "backup" lords (I've decided to level them up this way up to level 15 - at this point they become exalted bloodthirster and a deamon prince)
After his army fell, I've just cleaned up after him and went for Tiqtaktoe. Settra was too busy waging war with someone on Arabia peninsula so he ignored me for the most part.

Current situation:
- Tiqtaqtoe has almost fallen (he has 2settlements left, barely any army) and I'm on turn ~65 or something. So basicly I've got whole south-eastern coastline under my control,
- Volkmar has two provinces and sits quietly as a mouse. He will get devoured in several turns, after whole south is mine.
- Settra decided to wage a war against me like 3-4turns ago, altough his stacks are nowhere to be seen. Looks like he is still fighting on the peninsula (4 active wars, so he might have problems with Arkhan or someone)
- Blue bird in the south just waits on the southpole. That's my number1 priority to clear after I'm done with Tiqtaqtoe.
- Northern side is either destroyed or taken by Malagor (who is currently friendly to me) and it helps a lot as I have zero problems from the north currently. It doesn't seem to be changing for a while so I'll have more time to clear Settra and whole Arabia peninsula.
- Skarbrand havent done his quest yet (I will do it after blue bird is done), one of the lords that is going to be a bloodthirster is maybe 4ranks away from that. The other lord already ascended as a deamon prince and he is marching north just to make sure Settra won't try anything funny. Skarbrand can take rest of the south by himself.
- Money wise, even with two bloodhosts active I'm still in positive income. Skarbrand army is mostly made out of chaos warriors of khorne (damn, this unit is so good for its price) and all of the renown units. After whole south is mine and I can boost my economy even further, I'll probably build more well-thought army to go fowards from there. Two other lords travel with 3-4 chaos warriors of khorne for now.

At this pace I should have whole South in my possession before turn 100. I wonder where to go next from that point? Should I clear up the elves and grab sword of Khaine? Or maybe focus on the mainland and go straight for the empire provinces? Opening several fronts is a possibility too. Having secured South makes my economy pretty invulnerable.

 

[copebot]

At this pace I should have whole South in my possession before turn 100. I wonder where to go next from that point? Should I clear up the elves and grab sword of Khaine? Or maybe focus on the mainland and go straight for the empire provinces? Opening several fronts is a possibility too. Having secured South makes my economy pretty invulnerable.

As Skarbrand, quantity of fights in succession to keep bloodletting up is more important. If you think you can take Ulthuan with less than 3 stacks, I would just send that much there and then instead just go north. There are more and denser settlements in the Empire than anywhere else on the map. I also think Dwarfs/Empire/Bretonnia are a better matchup for Khorne than elves. Dwarf armor isn't a problem for a bloodletter frontline in the same way that lots and lots of arrows are, and what can the Empire AI even do against Khorne?

 

[Cyberarmy]

Got this from reddit.

 

[Average Manatee]

At this pace I should have whole South in my possession before turn 100. I wonder where to go next from that point? Should I clear up the elves and grab sword of Khaine? Or maybe focus on the mainland and go straight for the empire provinces? Opening several fronts is a possibility too. Having secured South makes my economy pretty invulnerable.

As Skarbrand, quantity of fights in succession to keep bloodletting up is more important. If you think you can take Ulthuan with less than 3 stacks, I would just send that much there and then instead just go north. There are more and denser settlements in the Empire than anywhere else on the map. I also think Dwarfs/Empire/Bretonnia are a better matchup for Khorne than elves. Dwarf armor isn't a problem for a bloodletter frontline in the same way that lots and lots of arrows are, and what can the Empire AI even do against Khorne?

Bloodletters are super weak to arrows/crossbows and don't really have great anti-cav options in their spammable units/blood letters. So random empire shit stacks of mostly archers might be annoying to fight (sees the AI do this once in a while), and I could see Brettonnia sucking.

I think you end up countering the Vampire Counts even harder too, though. Literally can't make ranged units and I've never seen them spam cavalry much. You'll annihilate their infantry and their monsters are still pretty shit against strong infantry without micro/magic support. So that bodes well in the 50/50 chance of the Von Carsteins overrunning the empire or the red duke and whoever it was in the mountains taking over brettonia.