Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[Fedora Master]

There are factions other than the Chaos Warriors that might need a new Lord or Hero...

 

[Bohrain]

I like the changes they made to bretonnia on paper at least. Good to vary the entity count since I have a hard time telling on the top of my head which ones have anti-large, which one has AP and so forth.

 

[copebot]

They didn't have the balls to do the only thing that would've mattered regarding the balance thing - making units have a yin/yang "cost" - so Cathay is neutered mechanically atm and you don't engage with their mechanics at all. The Wu Xi compass is only ever useful when set on one side (the one which gives growth and income) and caravans are not only boring but also become unwieldy once they start getting regularly attacked by more powerful armies.

The compass is just a flat buff in one direction because you would never pick any of the others, but the harmony mechanic actually makes you think about what you build and when you build it unlike every other faction. If you are fussy, you get a big buff. Also, if something unexpected happens like a lord dies or a settlement gets blown up, it has knock-on effects. Like for example a beastman herd just spawned in the jungles and besieged a settlement with one Yang market in it. I knew they were probably going to take it the following turn, so I rebalanced in anticipation to keep my buff streak going. Some of the research nodes push you +3 in one direction as well, so you have to plan for that or lose your buff.

The compass would be different if it didn't lock you in for 10 turns (a few less with the relevant tech research). But the way it is, you would never turn down the +money/growth.

 

[Elttharion]

CA broke Nakai. The Kroxigor LL cant recruit Kroxigors now.

This mode fix it

Also this one finally gives Katarin her sleigh

 

[Fedora Master]

Nakai was always a bit shit, really.

 

[copebot]

Started a Hellebron campaign to check out the DE changes on Legendary/Normal. Thinking I might start to inch up the battle difficulty on my campaigns. It seems like it's a lot easier to build tall now because the income building now generates crazy amounts of money and they ported over the Chaos Dwarf diktats. This is what every tier 3 building does now:



So, not counting the city income, technologies/traits/skills that give you +slave income, or settlement building income, a four settlement province will pump out 2800 gold.

Although they changed the slave gain balance, it seems like I still get a gargantuan amount from both post-battle and the "take slave" option. Part of that is just because legendary AI craps out tons of armies all the time, but you also get a lot from sacking and looting.

Initially, I was planning on going after Valkia, but Sigvald wound up taking the Frozen City and I was unable to make an early peace with Sporkticus. Bel'Akor also sent a stack into my territory for anti-player bias reasons that I barely managed to make a blood-soaked sacrifice to Khaine out of. So, I wound up attacking Sigvald. I took the Fortress of the Damned without too much trouble and sold it to Malus for 6k, a trade agreement, and an NAP, which also made Malekith like me a little more. Malekith isn't attacking Valkia either, probably because she is also at war with Grombindal. It took me until turn 27 to kill off Sigvald.

It's taking me a little longer to get anywhere in this campaign despite comfortably supporting three basic stacks off of one province with a hefty bank of 6k slaves and nearly 30k in the treasury. I'm even walling up my province out of paranoia that Valkia will attack me while I'm preoccupied. The tough part here will just be dealing with the dangers that come from every single direction. My plan is just going to fortify the shit out of my main 1-2 provinces and then push out to Alith Anar then Morathi and Ulthuan once the main threats are taken care of.

The Death Night mechanic is still kind of goofy. In the prepatch campaign I tried a while back, my first army did pretty well. In this one, it died to one of the wandering pirate stacks near Tor Anlec after doing nothing.

 

[Elttharion]

Wood Elfs agression is out of control, they always declare war against the order races and them either tank your diplomacy if you have treaties with them or they declare war against you because you are allied with the other factions. In my current Fay campaign Orion conquered almost all of Bretonnia and declared war on the Empire and Louen. Since I had a NAP pact with Orion (that I did in the first turn of the game) both Franz and Louen declared war on me while I was fighting the Vampirates, Beastmen and Ikit. My last Franz campaign Durthu invaded the Empire and razed every single southern Elector Count while I dealt with Festus and Vlad. Same thing with Belegar were they wiped all the minor dawi factions and declared war on me when I was dealing with the Skaven. At this point its easier to ignore diplomacy with the other order factions or genocide them since they will be your enemies either way. It doesnt help that they are an absolute pain in the ass to fight against.

They are supposed to be isolationists FFS.

Also CA said they fixed both the 0 loyalty confed bug and the Welf AI recruiting Ariel but these bugs are still in the game. The new vows for Damsels feature also doesnt work and you can recruit more than one of the new ROR, I dont think there is even a cap, just a cooldown. Nakai is bugged, etc...

This patch was a complete mess to be honest.

 

[zapotec]

It's ok it will be fixed with the next 35 euro dlc

 

[copebot]

Wood Elfs agression is out of control, they always declare war against the order races and them either tank your diplomacy if you have treaties with them or they declare war against you because you are allied with the other factions. In my current Fay campaign Orion conquered almost all of Bretonnia and declared war on the Empire and Louen. Since I had a NAP pact with Orion (that I did in the first turn of the game) both Franz and Louen declared war on me while I was fighting the Vampirates, Beastmen and Ikit. My last Franz campaign Durthu invaded the Empire and razed every single southern Elector Count while I dealt with Festus and Vlad. Same thing with Belegar were they wiped all the minor dawi factions and declared war on me when I was dealing with the Skaven. At this point its easier to ignore diplomacy with the other order factions or genocide them since they will be your enemies either way. It doesnt help that they are an absolute pain in the ass to fight against.

They are supposed to be isolationists FFS.

Also CA said they fixed both the 0 loyalty confed bug and the Welf AI recruiting Ariel but these bugs are still in the game. The new vows for Damsels feature also doesnt work and you can recruit more than one of the new ROR, I dont think there is even a cap, just a cooldown. Nakai is bugged, etc...

This patch was a complete mess to be honest.

The thing with Orion is that his faction has a glass jaw. They can field a small number of super strong armies and Orion himself is very dangerous, but once you clear them out there isn't much stopping you from burning down the forests.

With the order AI, if you can't get an enemy in common with them, the only thing you can really do is bribe them in the hopes of getting some treaties. Settlements are way better than cash, but cash does OK in a pinch. Oddly enough the only way to keep order together is when there is a really strong evil faction, like if Vlad owns half the empire or if Archaeon gets really strong. If they don't know the faction or aren't at war with them, you don't get much of a benefit from hurting the bad-guy faction. When they run out of enemies, they start attacking whomever is closest.

 

[Average Manatee]

Being at war with a bunch of chaos factions does generally make all order factions love you, even if they aren't themselves at war with the same factions. So you can just offer to join every order factions wars against every chaos faction. As long as you're doing it smartly and watching the borders it usually doesn't come back to bite you. Usually. But Wood Elves are kind of weird, sort of a neutral leaning order faction.

Orion's faction gets that -global upkeep for every faction he's at war with. I'd actually be kinda scared if he gets out of control and declares on everyone. Or if the wood elf endtime event occurs. AI cheats enough already with everything, giving them literally free armies would be pretty insane. Thankfully from what I've seen the wood elves never confederate and take over those far flung forests. I'm not even sure if they can use the teleportation stance to go from one forest to another. If they could get all that extra income from holding all the forests on the map they'd be pretty insane.

 

[Delterius]

Orion's faction gets that -global upkeep for every faction he's at war with.

is there a cap on that

 

[Average Manatee]

is there a cap on that

The cap is that he can't make every unit in all of his armies cheaper than free.

Yes you can abuse this as the player if you just declare on tons of people.

 

[kris]

is there a cap on that

The cap is that he can't make every unit in all of his armies cheaper than free.

Yes you can abuse this as the player if you just declare on tons of people.

I indeed tried this yesterday, sending away a scout to find more factions. It has a obvious drawback, being that most factions will dissappear and with them the discount and if you sit on many armies...

 

[Average Manatee]

The key is to look around and use the "offer to join war" function to declare war on more factions quicker. Granted it doesn't work forever if the ordertide starts winning but its powerful enough (and I guess you could declare on the ordertide if you want).

Also during the wild hunt event you get a temporary bonus that makes teleporting between trees have no cooldown. You can use this to seize all the trees everywhere very quickly. Or just go for the trees that don't have confederatable legendary lords I guess. From there you can be at war with a lot of factions and hunker down until you have full armies everywhere.

 

[copebot]

There will just about always be at least 20 factions, although it often bleeds down to 50-70 in the later parts of the game. Plus the pirate factions respawn so you will always have them to be at war with. By the time the lack of factions becomes an issue, you will have probably accomplished whatever you set out to do.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, wood elf doesn't even need to conquer much. Declaring on every chaos faction skyrockets your relations with order, which leads to alliances and getting the trees growing, which is your only campaign objective.

Unless you want to conquer for the sake of conquering you're pretty much better off just allying an AI and feeding them all land outside your trees. It only produces like 50 gold per turn for you otherwise, and the few settlements with resources that give campaign bonuses are pretty marginal.

 

[copebot]

I'm coming towards the later leg of my Hellebron campaign.

I think that they did not port over enough from the Chaos Dwarf system because the public order penalties are non-existent. Even with over 16,000 slaves (which you aren't going to get until the late game), the penalty is only -5 PO. When they removed the cap, they didn't add sensible penalties for high population. There is also no province-by-province labor management panel, so you don't get the runaway PO problems you do with chaos dwarfs.

This campaign has been a lot more engaging than Cathay. In the beginning, I was shut up into my starting two provinces because of incursions from Valia, Sigvald, Belakor, and associated Norscans. It took me the better part of 70 turns to get rid of them and move on to Ulthuan. The elves this patch have been doing a good job concentrating their forces, so there have been a bunch of battles with 60-80 units on the board at once. My strong stack is not in Ulthuan so it's been mostly low tier troops, but fortunately casualty replenishment is sky-high. I haven't been using shades much, but the way that they are building their elf stacks I just feel the lack of range makes DE ranged units really out-classed. Shields or not, there have been just too many sisters of avelorn to really compete at range. Witch elves, Sisters of Slaughter, corsairs, and dreadspears feel more reliable, especially in the big battles when it is hard to keep track of everything.

I think with the Death Nights, if I was starting again I would avoid triggering it until I actually brought my main armies to Ulthuan. You don't really need the bonuses and you can survive with the penalties. Then, if you save it up until later, you can trigger a bunch of them one after the other and have the AI-controlled stacks actually serve a purpose without scaling up the slave cost pointlessly.

 

[Fedora Master]

Bunch of diversity hires from CA talk about Pharaoh:

 

[Lacrymas]

We don't really have a culture of diversity hiring in Bulgaria. The CA Sofia team is CA's most competent team even if they were diversity hires anyway.

 

[Cyberarmy]

The CA Sofia team is CA's most competent team even if they were diversity hires anyway.

Yeah, Troy had some nice features and it ran without any ptoblems on my older rig.

 

[Fedora Master]

I see a brown, a soy and a wombyn, I assume incompetence.

 

[Riddler]

I see a brown, a soy and a wombyn, I assume incompetence.

That woman has a stronger jaw and more testosterone than the average codexer

 

[Gromoer]

Tribe of Levi performed rite “Wrath of Yahweh”. All Egyptian newborns have been slain. Negative population growth for Egyptian cultures for the next 8 turns.

 

[pickmeister]

Tribe of Levi performed rite “Wrath of Yahweh”. All Egyptian newborns have been slain. Negative population growth for Egyptian cultures for the next 8 turns.

Tribe of Levi now enjoys +10 food modifier in all their provinces thanks to completely unrelated Matzah event.

 

[Elttharion]

However, there was one more burning question I had about the upcoming content packs: Is one of them going to have a man-sized maggot that can control bodies?

Aldridge: “Would you like to see that?”

Let’s be honest, if you’re still reading this then you must be very passionate about this game and in that case I’m totally speaking for you here: “I think everyone would.”

Aldridge: “Well, I think you can be excited to see something like that in the future.”

Tamurkhan pretty much confirmed as the next Nurgle LL

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