copebot
Learned
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2020
- Messages
- 387
The base campaign is not good compared to IE. However, the new factions and new units are generally very good. There's really only one sucky faction (Chaos Undivided) but it also has some neat ideas, received some fixes since launch, and really isn't as weak as people make it out to be. Multiplayer is better than WH2. That makes it a little tough to evaluate.
Most of the new campaign mechanics for the factions are pretty balanced apart from Khorne, and even that's not necessarily that out of bounds compared to standard practice for Dark Elves or High Elves in WH2. The thing with Khorne is that there are no hard limits on how fast you can push it, you aren't constrained by normal settlement growth timelines, and you can balloon your effective faction strength beyond what your economy would otherwise be able to support with the bonus armies.
WH3 also has the siege and AI reworks which are overall good things. I was on the fence about minor settlement battles, but now that I have a better grasp of how to micro them efficiently, I like them a lot -- they make both defending and attacking way more engaging than the WH2 "put on a podcast and cheese it for an hour) experience.
Essentially, you cannot micro siege battles well by using alt drag or by painting the formations with drag right click. The way that you do it is just to position all the units you want to move down lanes with the appropriate spacing and speeds and then just normal right click. They selection will path appropriately to the area and then you can just micro each individual unit once they get close to enemies for charges. You divide up the units during deployment so that they are distributed down the lanes you want them to move, right click once on the area where you want them to fight, and then done. This works very well with a reinforcing army: you position the attacking force just out of range, wait for the reinforcement, then send the reinforcing army to the middle at the same time as you attack with the primary army. Just using the normal right click and some thoughtful pre-positioning avoids the nightmare retard pathfinding traffic jams that occur otherwise. Mixing units of different speeds across different lanes also tends to have bad results because the fast guys will get stuck on the slow guys and vice versa. It also gets a lot easier once you are familiar with all the different map types and understand how they flow.
Although the reworks are somewhat controversial, on balance I like them. The way that the deployables work is also more interesting than in 3K. The rework also effectively soft-nerfs ranged units just because it's impossible on many maps to concentrate as much ranged fire as you were able to in WH2. The fact that the AI no longer passively allows itself to be shot without withdrawing further into the settlement also makes it tougher to cheese and makes melee relatively more useful.
Single entities are also somewhat nerfed because of the wounds mechanic. On balance, cavalry is more useful overall particularly because it has a real role now in siege battles.
IE will probably be good eventually, but there will probably be lots of issues akin to the ones that ME had during its life cycle. WH2 as it is now is probably the best it's ever been apart from the ambush AI bug, and that's something you can just decide not to exploit. It took a ton of iteration to make ME good and it wouldn't be surprising if it takes a while for IE to bake.
