The entire first paragraph is basically stating what I said but more verbose and negatively. Including the criticism I made about armies in Tzeentch realm. Slaneesh temptations are good because they are powerful and it is a legitimate choice between making your campaign position much stronger or achieving campaign victory 30 turns earlier. I.E tempo vs. efficiency which is always a legitimate dilemma.
I am not interested in "absolute player freedom" drivel, like "I can't play this campaign on my own pace like Vortex" or "I just want to blob & chill". Sure if you do want those there is going to be immortal empires, where you can blob & chill to your heart's content. You have to play with less territories yes, because you can't blob freely as that'll create more problems but you still want to expand as much as you can because that's how you get the funds to sustain more armies as your main army will be in chaos realms. I especially find, in all games, the criticism that players doesn't have absolute control and ability to interfere, delay or completely shut out all given systems of a game to be completely degenerate opinion.
All the criticisms that really come down to "I can't blob at my own pace so this is bad design" are meaningless to me. There is also something to be said about the mental state of people who lash out at any timed content with shrieking disbelief like some sort of cornered animal. It's same with people complaining about timed objectives in Kingmaker and Wrathfinder too, some of the better parts of the game is existence of proper time management.
Also you know if you just want to bloooob, you can finish the game objective and just continue your campaign. See how
Sunri is playing Cathay to 300+ turns as pseudo immortal empires.
What on earth are you smoking? Complaining that I can't blob and chill? The complaint is that this entire campaign is 'BLOB AND CHILL - THE CAMPAIGN'. It's boring with zero replayability because EVERY faction does the same damn thing every time at exactly the same turns. The entire thing is built around just building a max power LL army, and waiting for the portal spawns. None of the realms are the slightest challenge.
I actually hate painting the map as a goal, the dumb 'own X' or 'kill x' were the worst part of Mortal Empires, but this crap leaves you with nothing to do between portal spawns OTHER than paint the map, or just sit in a corner and hammer the end turn button. If you can't actually improve your LL anymore, there's nothing to do but hammer end turn.
There's zero choice at any point. The Slaanesh bribes aren't particularly powerful (possibly excepting the weapon, which IS a huge item, but if you don't have a combat LL, it's pointless, and even then its not good enough to warrant an extra 30 turns), and they don't scale. You can get similar money and XP benefits by getting the free money from the closing portal battles and just sitting in Khorne realm and farming the easy infinispawn armies for huge money and XP and using the respawning full replenish, and then you can still collect the Khorne soul piece after 13 turns of that. But at least they TRIED to do something with Slaanesh, I respect that, even though it wasn't particularly well implemented.
The problem is not 'I can't play this campaign on my own pace'. The problem is that the turn timers are incredibly slow, and there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO outside the quest portals other than dick around painting the map, but it doesn't actually get you anything to do so. In my first Khorne campaign I conquered 1/2 the world and had 8 different Exalted Bloodthirsters with full stacks wandering around out of boredom, before I was finally able to enter the final portal and win, and that was WITH about 50 turns of just hitting end turn at the end. Nobody was a threat after about turn 30. If somebody is playing 300 turns, I honestly don't know how they haven't conquered the entire world.
Vortex was a mediocre campaign, but at least it had SOME level of time crunch attached to it, that somewhat forced you to take action at a reasonable pace, and there was more than one way to approach it - you could just take small territory with good scroll gain and harass the others without actually expanding, you could take a 'conquer it all' approach and paint the map, you could strategically strike out and suppress the AI that actually happened to be getting scrolls, you weren't locked into any particular way of playing, and what you did actually affected the pace of the game.
You know what would actually be interesting?
If in order to challenge any particular Chaos god, you had to take and hold a specific point on the campaign map when the portal spawn comes up - and then hold that location while your LL is in the Chaos realm, actually forcing you to take and hold specific locations to complete the objectives.
If the quest battles were influenced by actions and choices you made in the realm and there were actual events as you progressed and you had to actually make choices that had consequences - i.e. in Khorne realm, instead of dumb infinispawn, you're confronted with like 6 different armies of different levels in the Khorne realm, required to fight 3, and the ones that you DON'T fight are the ones that spawn in the quest battle.
Or if in the Khorne realm instead of it just being a 'run around and kill X until you hit the total', each person challenges at the same time, you all fight 1 battle a turn over 5 turns and all of you are given choices of armies to fight, with tougher ones giving more blood, and only the nation with the highest blood total gets to challenge the battle for the soul (or if you aren't the highest, you may have to fight the highest total before you can challenge the Daemon Prince).
If there was anything to do with portals OTHER than autoresolve the easy close portal battle for free money and XP - like, say, the realms were actually bigger, and the only way to replenish casualties would be to go to a portal in the Realm, and a friendly army had to interact with a portal in the real world to replenish you.
If the marks were anything other than an automatic debuff, like if they started STACKING the longer you spent there, penalizing you for taking too long.
If, after you obtained a soul, you had to make a choice to enter another realm straight from this one or return to the normal world - and there was a mechanic that actually caused a big problem or battle or event if you entered the realm of a god while still having the mark from being in another realm, or there was a severe penalty for trying for a second soul and not getting out before the portals expired, like failing to get the 2nd soul meant that you lost the FIRST soul that you had, and then had to go back and get it again.
If there was a choice to trigger portals earlier, but with potential consequences such as stronger/multiple armies, portals that CAN'T be closed until they've spawned at least 1-2 armies, or if they spawned much stronger armies only in the territory of the person triggering the early portals.
All of these are potential interesting ideas that could add replayability and depth to the campaign, and they did none of them. It's lazy and low-energy, even for CA.
