Warhammer Total War: Warhammer III

[MuckMan]

Finished Greasus. The endings really are absolutely pathetic.

Ogre technology makes no fucking sense.

Especially because there is no reward whatsoever. Warhammer 3 has the feel of some early access game shortly before getting released.

 

[Wassersäufer]

At this point I'm convinced the Realm of Tzeentch is bugged and/or so untested that I can lead you into a dead end with its teleporters.

Taking a break from Total War:Ukraine, I can confirm this. Stuck in a dead end with no way to reach the correct teleporting glyph.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Played around with this before the hotfix.

Basically any non corruption based AI faction will be crushed because for some reason they are not bothering dealing with the portal. So they are being crushed by 100 corruption every 30 turn or so. Feels kinda dumb.

As people pointed out, the campaign completely outright punish playing wide as you defending wide area of the map is such a hassle for basically 0 reward. So after few provinces it's just skipping turn to get to the next rift opening. It is pretty awfully paced because you probably stop expanding starting on the 2nd portal onwards. The initial rush to get an economy and 1 stack ready in time for the first portal is fun I guess.

Outside of that it's not really fun to play and I agree that Vortex is just generally more enjoyable.

 

[Fedora Master]

I never expanded beyond the starting province as Greasus. Didn't really use camps either, just one to get units and one for the money building. On VH, mind.

 

[Lacrymas]

Since you can't bring more than one stack in the chaos realms and that's what the goals of the campaign are, there's no benefit to expanding a lot, only enough to sustain one end-game stack. Awful decision for a game such as TW.

 

[thesheeep]

Since you can't bring more than one stack in the chaos realms and that's what the goals of the campaign are, there's no benefit to expanding a lot, only enough to sustain one end-game stack. Awful decision for a game such as TW.

Not only is there no benefit, it is actively detrimental to winning as the size of your realm increases the number of fires you need to put out when the portals open and after.
In contrast to a normal campaign, you'll basically never have very good stability and will constantly have to fight small-ish rebellions everywhere (at least on Hard+ campaign).

It also puts certain factions/lords in a horrible position as they are surrounded by enemies they need to fight IN ADDITION to the portals happening.
At least diplomacy is improved to alleviate that somewhat.

But it becomes increasingly clear to me that CA either does not playtest their own games or they play completely different than any of their players.

I will also not forgive them for creating Nurglings and making them so adorable and cute that you want to hug and love and use and spread diseases with them - only to make them practically irrelevant as soon as you unlock any other unit...

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I am playing hobo Rasputin and I am doing fine with basically 3 provinces. Even then you need that because Kislev do not have major settlement as province capital (instead you have 3 1 major settlement provinces instead) so you do need that 3 (your starting, 1 other minor province, and 1 other big one) to get economy going. And it's a bloody hassle to clean up the portal every 30 turns. Granted I am playing only on Hard so you might need to confederate 1 or 2 more province using Kislev faction mechanic I guess?

 

[underground nymph]

Awful decision for a game such as TW.

I somewhat agree, though I find managing more than three armies (along with lord’s equipment and followers) extremely tedious. Late game in Vortex doesn’t scale very good when you need to endlessly clone the same army all over again to steamroll the map.

 

[underground nymph]

I will also not forgive them for creating Nurglings and making them so adorable and cute that you want to hug and love and use and spread diseases with them - only to make them practically irrelevant as soon as you unlock any other unit...

This is what annoys me the most. Why even making all those fancy streltsi when the best choice is always go with a tier v doomstack that receives the most from the lord’s bonuses? Ice guard for Catharin cots me 41 gold per turn with all possible lord’s upgrades, while streltsi around 190.

 

[Lacrymas]

You have to clone the same army because there is global recruitment. Remove that, like Troy did, and you will rely mostly on lower tier units. The economic bonuses to higher tier units are also a problem, they should always be expensive. The way it is now, however, you are actively punished for expanding beyond a few provinces and it really doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of TW's campaign gameplay.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

The way it is now, however, you are actively punished for expanding beyond a few provinces and it really doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of TW's campaign gameplay.

I'm amazed how they could make such a big design blunder, especially when it's a series with a long list of games that've been released. You'd expect that they'd know what generally works and what doesn't.

 

[thesheeep]

I will also not forgive them for creating Nurglings and making them so adorable and cute that you want to hug and love and use and spread diseases with them - only to make them practically irrelevant as soon as you unlock any other unit...

This is what annoys me the most. Why even making all those fancy streltsi when the best choice is always go with a tier v doomstack that receives the most from the lord’s bonuses? Ice guard for Catharin cots me 41 gold per turn with all possible lord’s upgrades, while streltsi around 190.

They solved this problem already with Tomb Kings - and some mods did it the same/similar way.
Just have a limitation of how many units of a given type or tier you can have either in an army or globally. Gets rid of the "only doomstacks are good" problem almost entirely.

So... I guess "mods will fix it" is the solution here.

Anyway, I think the problem here is also one of severe balance issues.
Nurglings for example are just bad - even for a low tier unit, even with all of Ku'gath's feats. If they were A LOT cheaper, it would be fine as you could then run around with a second army consisting pretty much only of nurglings - similar to what you'd do with Vampires in WH2.

That you can have only one army in the chaos realms only makes all of this worse - though I somewhat understand that for balance reasons. If you were allowed multiple armies in the chaos realms, things would end up EVEN easier than they are now.

 

[underground nymph]

You have to clone the same army because there is global recruitment.

No quite. I usually use one province as my recruitment site and then just distribute fresh armies around the map. As for the dark elves they have their swimming cities that can spit out level 9 guards of naggarond 7 per turn, so it’s even easier to spam high level armies. But anyway that wasn’t the point. Point is late game scales very poorly.

 

[Lacrymas]

If you have an advantageous position from which to send armies throughout the map, yeah. Unless you plan your entire map around not having these hubs (Troy actually has this kind of map as an unintended consequence of using that part of Earth's geography), just add restrictions, yes. That won't solve the early game problem of only having archers, but it will solve end game.

 

[underground nymph]

I will also not forgive them for creating Nurglings and making them so adorable and cute that you want to hug and love and use and spread diseases with them - only to make them practically irrelevant as soon as you unlock any other unit...

This is what annoys me the most. Why even making all those fancy streltsi when the best choice is always go with a tier v doomstack that receives the most from the lord’s bonuses? Ice guard for Catharin cots me 41 gold per turn with all possible lord’s upgrades, while streltsi around 190.

They solved this problem already with Tomb Kings - and some mods did it the same/similar way.
Just have a limitation of how many units of a given type or tier you can have either in an army or globally. Gets rid of the "only doomstacks are good" problem almost entirely.

So... I guess "mods will fix it" is the solution here.

Tomb kings was a step in right direction, though again implemented half-ass. They rarely survive early game even 1on1 (ai vs ai). The best solution would be unit caps per army. Mods that are present now are also half-ass. They implement limitations, but they don’t nerf scripted doomstacks and quest battles. They also don’t implement any lord specific rules such as for Scrolk allowing him to field plague monks doom stacks. They don’t implement tech and lord trees allowing to expand allowances. So they are not really entertaining imo.

 

[underground nymph]

The way it is now, however, you are actively punished for expanding beyond a few provinces and it really doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of TW's campaign gameplay.

I'm amazed how they could make such a big design blunder, especially when it's a series with a long list of games that've been released. You'd expect that they'd know what generally works and what doesn't.

While I am being quite critical of CA and their newest installment in the series, I would like to defend them here a little bit. They tried to fix some of the very old problems with the whole series: mid to late game slog and absence of any valid goal throughout the process (as well as an absence of any formidable challenge once you established the core of your empire). Evolution is good, trying something new is good and I hope it wouldn’t be dropped even after this disastrous launch. It’s just been made so crudely as if their team doesn’t know what it’s doing except for some vague idea pitched by management. This is the problem with aaa products as a whole. I suspect people that do them now are anything but gamers.

 

[Lacrymas]

I'm fine with experimentation, but it at least has to be in-line with the base mechanics of the game. They had to experiment with other stuff first before totally butchering the pacing. Hell, they had to steal stuff from Troy and Three Kingdoms first. Why are there no terrain types yet? That is a good way to balance some units. Chariots are very powerful in Troy, but most terrain types are terrible for them so it balances out. Why is the meta still range-heavy? They "experiment" with bullshit that doesn't address basic issues and then hope it will fix the entire game. The launch is disastrous mainly due to bugs imo. The game isn't substantially different than WH2 to warrant mass normie exodus. Most people don't notice or don't get bothered by the things discussed on forums such as this.

 

[Zeriel]

I'm fine with experimentation, but it at least has to be in-line with the base mechanics of the game. They had to experiment with other stuff first before totally butchering the pacing. Hell, they had to steal stuff from Troy and Three Kingdoms first. Why are there no terrain types yet? That is a good way to balance some units. Chariots are very powerful in Troy, but most terrain types are terrible for them so it balances out. Why is the meta still range-heavy? They "experiment" with bullshit that doesn't address basic issues and then hope it will fix the entire game. The launch is disastrous mainly due to bugs imo. The game isn't substantially different than WH2 to warrant mass normie exodus. Most people don't notice or don't get bothered by the things discussed on forums such as this.

If I was to project from my own personal tastes, I would say the problem WH3 has is factions they chose to base everything around. 4 demon factions is a lot in a vacuum, 5 is pushing it, and it's especially egregious when there's almost nothing else. If you don't wanna LARP demons destroying the world (and that is unpopular generally speaking because of how dumb End Times was for most people), then there isn't much on offer here. Then you either play ridiculously unbelievable bear faction, or fat INGERLANDS scoring sum fakken goals. Which, admittedly, is pretty based. But that's about all there is here. Oh, right, the Chinese market pandering.

It's one thing to say some exotic choices in factions is good, but when that is all you have to offer and there is not a single faction to play from the standard roster of what makes the setting what it is you run into a problem. Sure, that will superficially be solved in terms of offering a technical choice when Mortal Empires arrives, but all the production value of the game went into these new factions, if you want said production value on old factions you will never get that, you might as well just go back and play ME2.

 

[tabacila]

More datamining. Not much of a surprise tbh, but it seems that Chaos Dwarfs were originally planned for WH2. This would make sense since at least the Mortal Empires map still has a huge unused area in the Darklands. No idea how they would have fit in the Vortex though...

 

[Lord of Riva]

Finished Greasus. The endings really are absolutely pathetic.

Ogre technology makes no fucking sense.

Disappointing to hear. I'm starting to think the only campaign that I'll bother finishing on this map is a Kislev one, and only to unlock Boris.

You don't have to finish it, just win a single Quest-battle

 

[underground nymph]

The launch is disastrous mainly due to bugs imo. The game isn't substantially different than WH2 to warrant mass normie exodus. Most people don't notice or don't get bothered by the things discussed on forums such as this.

I tend to consider the current mixed reviews in Steam as a pretty good indicator that something went not quite right for it. Especially comparing to the two previous TWW games.

4 demon factions is a lot in a vacuum, 5 is pushing it, and it's especially egregious when there's almost nothing else.

This. I’m not particularly interested in anything except Kislev, while Kislev is 65% ridiculous. This (and the fact that the game is raw and buggy) is why I play Battle Brothers instead and can’t find any strong excuse to return back.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Played around with this before the hotfix.

Basically any non corruption based AI faction will be crushed because for some reason they are not bothering dealing with the portal. So they are being crushed by 100 corruption every 30 turn or so. Feels kinda dumb.

As people pointed out, the campaign completely outright punish playing wide as you defending wide area of the map is such a hassle for basically 0 reward. So after few provinces it's just skipping turn to get to the next rift opening. It is pretty awfully paced because you probably stop expanding starting on the 2nd portal onwards. The initial rush to get an economy and 1 stack ready in time for the first portal is fun I guess.

Outside of that it's not really fun to play and I agree that Vortex is just generally more enjoyable.

Yeah I painted nearly the whole map with the Legion of chaos as I found it Fun to paint the map into different Corruptions but the wierd objective design makes conquering lands pretty useless indeed.

I guess it falls into this wierd goal to make expanding troublesome and unrewarding that CA has done starting with 1, never understood why.

 

[Wassersäufer]

The map is just strangely empty right now. There is the darklands, obviously, but also the empire (overrun by skrag) and even norsca to a certain extent. Ogres are hit the hardest by this, as they pretty much have no interesting enemy nearby (unless you attack not-china). Granted, IE should fix this.

 

[Average Manatee]

More datamining. Not much of a surprise tbh, but it seems that Chaos Dwarfs were originally planned for WH2. This would make sense since at least the Mortal Empires map still has a huge unused area in the Darklands. No idea how they would have fit in the Vortex though...

I suppose we should thank that chaos dwarfs weren't here for WH3 release else they would be saddled with the awful chaos realm campaign objective. For Vortex all the additional races got much better unique objectives so hopefully they do too.

 

[baud]

More datamining. Not much of a surprise tbh, but it seems that Chaos Dwarfs were originally planned for WH2. This would make sense since at least the Mortal Empires map still has a huge unused area in the Darklands. No idea how they would have fit in the Vortex though...

On the Vortex map, I guess Chaos Dwarf could have replaced one or two of the existing Dwarf settlements (like KaraK Zorn and the area where Greybeard prospectors are), plus maybe another lord going on an expedition/exile somewhere in the New World, like CA did with Khalida, Khatep and the sisters of twilight; I think they have some kind on navy, on par technologically with the ironclads of the regular dwarfs, so them appearing on the other side of the world looking for slaves/loot wouldn't be too much of a stretch