Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[copebot]

It makes it so that swordsmen are actually competent (until they get hit by a spell). The book also impacts allied recruits, so allied recruit longbeards for example are sitting at 40 MA / 60 MD. A spearman with shield without chevrons is 30 MA / 54 MD for me at this point in the campaign without red line traits.

I'd want to see armies of Halberdiers with full redline and rank 9 to see how well they steamroll things.

They're strong. Even greatswords get strong with the trait buffed by priests.

 

[janior]

jesus how can someone fail at this game that plays itself

 

[Crispy]

Okay, I finally beat the bastard. I trapped him like a rat in a narrow ravine in which one of my struggling settlements kept getting ping-ponged back and forth between me and the chaos dwarves. I brought my 2nd-best army and camped him inside that settlement while leaving the queen in ambush mode right outside of it until Mr. Fuckface chaos dwarf Astrogoth foolishly tried to attack her. My two full armies + a small garrison from the settlement meant I could just take the automatic Decisive Victory. It took me like five turns to coordinate all that, but hopefully it'll be a springing-off point to finally regaining control of the valley I started in.

It's not easy fighting a war on several fronts at the same time.

 

[Fedora Master]

UHm since patch 3.0 Malekith just spam shades like some people here that claims to be master tacticians

Yea, it seems the AI has a hardon for Shades now. It's not as bad as the old ROCKLOBBA TRIBE or Mad Ek's Chariot Wasteland though.

 

[copebot]

UHm since patch 3.0 Malekith just spam shades like some people here that claims to be master tacticians

Yea, it seems the AI has a hardon for Shades now. It's not as bad as the old ROCKLOBBA TRIBE or Mad Ek's Chariot Wasteland though.

The toughest thing about dealing with AI shade spam is that if you don't really pay attention, they will alpha strike the shit out of a lord, hero, or special unit like irondrakes.

 

[Average Manatee]

I dreaded fighting just a few shades before because of that, running up against armies with a dozen or more of them is gonna be rough.

Hopefully the usual AI underperformance with Dark Elves still happens, would be awful to have to contend with a huge opponent of that race.

 

[copebot]

I dreaded fighting just a few shades before because of that, running up against armies with a dozen or more of them is gonna be rough.

Hopefully the usual AI underperformance with Dark Elves still happens, would be awful to have to contend with a huge opponent of that race.

The way I dealt with it on my VH Grombindal campaign some patches back was to go heavy on shielded infantry and to not try to beat them at range. If they go into melee, they have such little armor, health, and unit count that they die pretty quickly even when against a crappy unit. They can kill a clan rat in melee, but they can't kill three units of clan rats.

For other factions, any shielded cavalry wrecks them, artillery hurts them if you can spot them, they're vulnerable to all magic, and sometimes they will stop shooting because they obstruct themselves. Skirmish cavalry with long range can be pretty useful at whittling them down also (like Tiranoc chariots, handmaidens, or Ulrika).

Alternatively, a whole army of chaff infantry to support your real army is both easy to use and great for tying them down and wasting their ammunition. In the two games I've played this patch, Blessed Dread and Naggarond were both top dogs on both east and west sides of the map... fortunately, it seems like their armies are sometimes a dog's breakfast of weird combinations of units just because their roster is so big.

 

[kris]

I dreaded fighting just a few shades before because of that, running up against armies with a dozen or more of them is gonna be rough.

Hopefully the usual AI underperformance with Dark Elves still happens, would be awful to have to contend with a huge opponent of that race.

The way I dealt with it on my VH Grombindal campaign some patches back was to go heavy on shielded infantry and to not try to beat them at range. If they go into melee, they have such little armor, health, and unit count that they die pretty quickly even when against a crappy unit. They can kill a clan rat in melee, but they can't kill three units of clan rats.

I just started Grombrindal, I plan to take out Malekith early.

 

[Crispy]

Question about the original (Kislev) campaign for anyone who remembers the game before the Chaos Dwarfs DLC came out:

I've been spending the last twenty-plus turns dealing with these assholes who keep attacking me from multiple angles relentlessly. While I am finally getting the upper hand on them, the demon factions continue to grab souls, leading to fears that I'm going to simply lose the game due to that. Was Kislev like this before the DLC? I've been stuck in this valley because of them and I'm starting to think that the balance of the "normal" game was inadvertently fucked by the developers by "allowing" them even for a brand-new player.

Am I still just whining?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Question about the original (Kislev) campaign for anyone who remembers the game before the Chaos Dwarfs DLC came out:

I've been spending the last twenty-plus turns dealing with these assholes who keep attacking me from multiple angles relentlessly. While I am finally getting the upper hand on them, the demon factions continue to grab souls, leading to fears that I'm going to simply lose the game due to that. Was Kislev like this before the DLC? I've been stuck in this valley because of them and I'm starting to think that the balance of the "normal" game was inadvertently fucked by the developers by "allowing" them even for a brand-new player.

Am I still just whining?

The new player in Kislev area I would assume would be the birdie Siamese Twin guy. I played Konstantin instead of the queen tho. For me the big issue was Demon Prince guy and Clan Moulder. In general missing the first soul is kinda fine if you are not setup by Turn 30 but after that you need to have 2 armies, 1 for going soul, 1 for defense and you will want 1 or 2 Heroes walking around and close the remaining Chaos gate near your area. They spawn armies that get stronger by turn (much like rebels) so having them instantly close them at cost of gold is worth it.

 

[Average Manatee]

Not sure what your complaint is. The chaos dwarfs make it too hard? I'm sure its harder than fighting minor faction trash but experienced players can conquer all the major demon factions in like 50-70 turns or so no sweat. The main complaint that was never fixed is that there's actually not much reason to conquer anything, instead you just play defensively and always send your lord in with your doomstack of units to the chaos realms to fight randomly spawned shit all game. Eventually you get the "you win" screen after the 4th soul. Why manage a dozen armies across dozens of provinces when you can just keep spamming end turn and moving your doomstack around in the chaos realm for 80 turns?

Originally if the AI got all 4 souls they'd be able to ascend and you'd have a few turns to hit a button to teleport to them and then beat their main lord. You'd have to do this every time their lord resurrected (takes like 5 turns) until you win. That was obviously pretty bullshit so they changed it so that you only have to beat the AI lord once and then that faction loses the race forever.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

For Kislev you probably only need 2 provinces from War. 3rd one you will get from Confederation (for Konstantin it was Praag). That 3 is more than enough to win the game altho you probably will get a bunch of province (that actualy make the game harder as Chaos Rifts punish you for going wide) due to the Kislev Race thing.

 

[Crispy]

experienced players can conquer all the major demon factions in like 50-70 turns or so no sweat.

This is your incorrect assumption. Like I said, new players.

Eventually you get the "you win" screen after the 4th soul. Why manage a dozen armies across dozens of provinces when you can just keep spamming end turn and moving your doomstack around in the chaos realm for 80 turns?

Because, as a brand-new player, especially one who simply downloads this game from Game Pass because it looks interesting, you think, as you're starting out, "Okay, eventually I need to start looking in to grabbing these souls things, not sure where or how to do that, but I'll keep my eyes open." Then, after fifty turns or so, you start realizing, "Oh, shit, the demon armies are growing much faster than I thought they might and they're going after the souls themselves now, I need to get on that."

So then you finally mount an expedition into one of the gates, realize you have to fight a nasty army at each level deeper you go into the rift (or whatever), nope out, knowing that chaos dwarfs are currently raping your incredibly-important settlements, among a dozen other events going on, then come to the realization that, "Wait a minute, is it suppose to be this relentless on a brand-new player?"

Thus, my question.

 

[Crispy]

For Kislev you probably only need 2 provinces from War. 3rd one you will get from Confederation (for Konstantin it was Praag). That 3 is more than enough to win the game altho you probably will get a bunch of province (that actualy make the game harder as Chaos Rifts punish you for going wide) due to the Kislev Race thing.

I apologize, but I have no idea what any of this means. What is War? Is that the base game? What is Confederation? Is that some DLC? I know what Praag is; I have that as one of my current settlements.

 

[copebot]

Question about the original (Kislev) campaign for anyone who remembers the game before the Chaos Dwarfs DLC came out:

I've been spending the last twenty-plus turns dealing with these assholes who keep attacking me from multiple angles relentlessly. While I am finally getting the upper hand on them, the demon factions continue to grab souls, leading to fears that I'm going to simply lose the game due to that. Was Kislev like this before the DLC? I've been stuck in this valley because of them and I'm starting to think that the balance of the "normal" game was inadvertently fucked by the developers by "allowing" them even for a brand-new player.

Am I still just whining?

I “lost” (restarted because I was doing so badly) a Kislev campaign on VH at launch in part because of the supply line bug but also because it’s hard. It’s just hard until you get a grip on the faction mechanics and the geography and the way the souls race works. I have like 1k hours in Warhammer II, some large portion of that on Legendary difficulty, and have been playing games in this series since before I could legally vote or drink. My first couple Katarin campaigns still kicked my ass.

Kislev is probably the hardest campaign in the base campaign. The main challenge is the start position and the absence of strong factions to ally with. That doesn’t matter as much in IE because there are lots of strong order factions to be pals with. Your strengths are that your units are awesome and you have three super-cities in your starting region that give amazing bonuses and cash.

If you lose the souls race you get an opportunity to intercept the winner in battle. If you win the battle, you don’t lose. If they win, game is over. Rushing the souls at every opportunity is a good way to win the game faster, but the more times you go into realms the harder the campaign will be.

 

[Average Manatee]

This is your incorrect assumption. Like I said, new players.

"new players" is vague and a giant skill range. I played my first WHTW game on VH and had no issue. Meanwhile "new players" could just as easily mean an 8 year old kid who has never played a strategy game before.

Because, as a brand-new player, especially one who simply downloads this game from Game Pass because it looks interesting, you think, as you're starting out, "Okay, eventually I need to start looking in to grabbing these souls things, not sure where or how to do that, but I'll keep my eyes open." Then, after fifty turns or so, you start realizing, "Oh, shit, the demon armies are growing much faster than I thought they might and they're going after the souls themselves now, I need to get on that."

So then you finally mount an expedition into one of the gates, realize you have to fight a nasty army at each level deeper you go into the rift (or whatever), nope out, knowing that chaos dwarfs are currently raping your incredibly-important settlements, among a dozen other events going on, then come to the realization that, "Wait a minute, is it suppose to be this relentless on a brand-new player?"

Thus, my question.

Well, yes its supposed to be like that. And its annoying and awful to play, which is why the original campaign was hated. Needing to send your best lord and army to spend 2/3rds of their time walking back and forth across stupid chaos realms and fight non-aligned armies that respawn constantly would have killed the game if not for the fact that it had the momentum of 2 successful games before it.

Kislev is also one of the worst matched for the souls game because its position is very hard to defend (the point of the campaign being to defend your territory while your lord gathers souls every 20 turns).

You should really just restart on immortal empires and stop complaining about a campaign that everyone else dropped a long time ago. It's a blight on the game that they'll probably never fix and everyone involved has to politely ignore that it exists.

 

[Crispy]

copebot: Okay, now THAT was a useful and informative post. Thank you.

 

[Crispy]

You should really just restart on immortal empires and stop complaining about a campaign that everyone else dropped a long time ago.

After 100 turns? Are you insane?!?

 

[Average Manatee]

copebot: Okay, now THAT was a useful and informative post. Thank you.

???

I told you about the souls multiple times already!

You should really just restart on immortal empires and stop complaining about a campaign that everyone else dropped a long time ago.

After 100 turns? Are you insane?!?

Before you said you had 6 settlements on turn 80. That's honestly embarassingly poor. Restart on immortal empires with slightly more knowledge and skill, you'll probably have that many settlements by turn 20-30. Unless you're really stuck in this sunk-cost fallacy in order to see a 30s cinematic of still images with voiceover at the end of the campaign.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

For Kislev you probably only need 2 provinces from War. 3rd one you will get from Confederation (for Konstantin it was Praag). That 3 is more than enough to win the game altho you probably will get a bunch of province (that actualy make the game harder as Chaos Rifts punish you for going wide) due to the Kislev Race thing.

I apologize, but I have no idea what any of this means. What is War? Is that the base game? What is Confederation? Is that some DLC? I know what Praag is; I have that as one of my current settlements.

war is uh expanding through conquest? Konstantin started with 1 dingy minor settlement so he has to win his starting province. The thing with Kislev is that they only has 3 major settlements (those capital thing with 10 build slots), the rest of their cities are minor. So After consolidating 1st province you need to get the 2nd, ideally it will be the major city province near you (the province bordering empire). That's 2 province.

Confederation is making other faction within the same race to officially join you (you get all their unit, cities). It''s a diplo option. Praag started at odds with Katalina and boon with Konstantin diplomatically. Usually factions are pretty receptive to get Confederated when they are dying and Praag will be dying as AI can't handle Chaos corruption from the rifts.

 

[copebot]

copebot: Okay, now THAT was a useful and informative post. Thank you.

Another tip more relevant for the early game is that it's better to expand either to the west/NW or to the south where the empire is than it is to go east into the mountains and darklands. Your only suitable climates are mountain, grassland, and frozen. Conquering the big peninsula to the northwest where the Trollheim Mountains are is good for many reasons: the regions are all close together, Norscans are pretty weak, it allows you to wipe out the Demons of Chaos faction, and you don't have to deal with the huge pain in the ass of traversing all the mountain regions.

The more settlements that are within 1 turn of each other that are suitable climate, the better it is to conquer in that direction. Traversing mountains as a faction that does not have underway stance or something comparable is always bad until you are already steamrolling the campaign. It doesn't look like it, but there are tons of settlements on that penninsula in RoC and on IE. There are 15 settlements on the whole peninsula, of which 3 are in four settlement provinces. If you can take all the Kislev provinces and all the provinces in that peninsula, you have enough to win the game.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

On another note is that Kislev campaign is probably much harder now due to Settlement battle changes.

Due to having their core troops (Kossars and Armored Kossars) all being hybrid, Kislev is insanely powerful when doing minor settlement battle. Now that minor settlement battle default to open field it is MUCH harder to play. I can easily win or severely damage Daniel's army back then on minor settlemetn battle.

 

[Average Manatee]

On another note is that Kislev campaign is probably much harder now due to Settlement battle changes.

Due to having their core troops (Kossars and Armored Kossars) all being hybrid, Kislev is insanely powerful when doing minor settlement battle. Now that minor settlement battle default to open field it is MUCH harder to play. I can easily win or severely damage Daniel's army back then on minor settlemetn battle.

Yeah, that especially hurts with the kislev provinces that have no major settlements.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Before you said you had 6 settlements on turn 80. That's honestly embarassingly poor. Restart on immortal empires with slightly more knowledge and skill, you'll probably have that many settlements by turn 20-30. Unless you're really stuck in this sunk-cost fallacy in order to see a 30s cinematic of still images with voiceover at the end of the campaign.

ROC campaign sucks but honestly, if you are new it's probably a better starting point as they are more focused in general.

It's just that both base Kislev factions are probably the poorest faction to play in ROC if you are new. Their start pos are the hardest. If he plays Cathay or one of the Chaos guy it's probably much easier. Hell playing Boris is probably easier in ROC.

 

[Average Manatee]

Before you said you had 6 settlements on turn 80. That's honestly embarassingly poor. Restart on immortal empires with slightly more knowledge and skill, you'll probably have that many settlements by turn 20-30. Unless you're really stuck in this sunk-cost fallacy in order to see a 30s cinematic of still images with voiceover at the end of the campaign.

ROC campaign sucks but honestly, if you are new it's probably a better starting point as they are more focused in general.

It's just that both base Kislev factions are probably the poorest faction to play in ROC if you are new. Their start pos are the hardest. If he plays Cathay or one of the Chaos guy it's probably much easier. Hell playing Boris is probably easier in ROC.

Yeah I think Cathay is fine to start as and its recommended. As Kislev your starting position is just awful with a bunch of minor settlements that are way too spread out to defend well with the amount of armies you can field from the profit you get from them. Ironically enough it plays to the Catherine the Great quote on Russia "The only way to defend Russia's borders is to expand them". Either you control a lot of territory quickly and stabilize the front to a few choke points or you have to deal with being constantly sacked by full stacks that just pop in for a turn to screw you and reset your settlement growth.

Disagree that Immortal empires is worse for new players. Just not having the additional soul crap to deal with is a huge change and being able to squarely look at the map and understand that the game is about war and conquering territory and making progress on that front makes things a lot more understandable. Locking away your strongest lord for 10+ turns to do random bullshit every 20 turns is a horrible, horrible idea. Plus the whole random shit spawning constantly out of rifts, its just confusing and annoying for a player that isn't prepared. Feels like the campaign was made as an artificial challenge for players who already played WH1 and 2.