I finished my Kairos legendary campaign yesterday. The hotfix they released actually improved my performance a bit, but is was still playable before that.
Kairos himself is a fun lord to play with, but his starting position is not the easiest. You basically have to fight Miao Ying if you completely capture your first ptovince. My impression is, that Miao Ying gets a shitton of buffs, that Zhao Ming does not. She could spam 4 to 5 full stacks with just one Settlement or one Grand-Bastion-Gate. After I wiped her faction out and Zhao Ming took over more or less the rest of Cathay, he in total fielded 4 full stacks. I believe there always was a hidden buff mechanic for "your rival faction", think Greenskins when playing dwarves.
The campaign is fine, but like everyone else says, the real game starts with the Immortal Empires campaign and I say that as someone who liked the vortex race enough to finish it 4 times. Why don't we get any faction wide buffs after completing one realm of chaos? Like replenishment for beating Nurgles Realm for example, something Kairos needs the most because his replenishment is atrocious. The new battle maps are great, suvival battles are meh and everyone who truly believes that wh2 sieges were better suffers from Stockholm-Syndrome.
Even though Kairos has the least amount of units in the game I still had fun with them, but you really need some units that hold the line, so the outpost system was very useful. At least you got everything you need, except artillery. In battles I wondered why my troops suddenly stopped here and there and finally realised, that guard mode is active on default for every unit. Generally speaking though, there is a problem with units ignoring commands and disengaging units is a nightmare and worse than it was in wh2. Tzeenchs Horrors also block their line of sight way to easily compard to other ranged infantry.
One big negative were Kairos's mechanics. I only used the teleport stance once, to test it. That you cannot use it in your starting province is stupid, you could say that it is done so you can not teleport over the bastion, but in Cathay you can use teleport and still won't be able to teleport over the bastion into the chaos wastes. I only used a couple of changing of ways mechanics, namely stealing settlements, halting a faction and reveal shroud of a faction. The rest were way to expensive to use most of the time. I gave some settlementa to Khorne-factions and got a nice buffer to Zaho Ming and good relations with them. The cults are useless for Tzeench, you have: create grimores, create more grimoires if the winds of magic are strong in the province, generate gold if the winds of magic are strong (not sure about that one) in the province or jack the winds in the province up to tempestuous and destroy the building in the process. What is the benefit of having tempestuous winds of magic in a region? I mean if you channel your mana-pool to 100 you have no real benefit right? At least I never noticed any. The tech tree was also lackluster.
All in all I have fun and like it so far and that is coming form someone who was rather burned out on wh2, especially because most campaigns degenerated into a skaven grind. So enjoy your time until we again get to fight mainly skaven in Immortal Empires.
