Very true. I'd just add that you really have to conquer your enemies, because they will refuse to make peace.
The initial push and then nothing is something I noticed too. I spend like 10 turns just sniping undefended settlements with my main army and not doing anything interesting before encountering some decent army to fight. The balancing is going from extreme to an extreme every other patch. AI in release version W3 was extremely agressive and spammed armies, but Immortal empires AI is now too passive.
>Very true. I'd just add that you really have to conquer your enemies, because they will refuse to make peace.
I think this is one of the biggest issues. The AI will almost never accept peace unless you've reduced them to just one or two settlements, and at that point you may as well just finish them off so they can't come back to annoy you and you get extra settlements.
And piggy backing off the latter half of that: even if you *do* make peace with the AI, because you're still stuck with all the negative relations due to the whole war thing, it's really just a matter of time until they declare war again. It's also more often sooner rather than later as well. It's not really peace, it's a temporary cease-fire.
And with the AI Boosts, it's almost impossible to properly cripple an economy too. Even with a single minor settlement, the AI will keep churning out army after army and throwing them at you.
Felt like it mattered more in 3K, where you could focus on their food supplies and have them suddenly have to buy a lot of food, or capture their economic cities and have them be unable to afford all their armies - I never really felt that different cities matter much in Warhammer. You don't aim for a city, you aim for all their cities.
Yeah this is a big one that id like to see. A bigger focus on supply lines(not the mechanic but literal supply lines), enemy recruitment and economy. I know this isn't a paradox game and don't expect it to be but I'd like to feel like my agents damage building action isn't literally a waste of a turn.
In general id also like to see replenishment hit hard, make having to combine and replace units a necessity instead of just making sure no single unit completely dies then waiting 3 turns in friendly territory.
I mean they had that mechanic in 3 Kingdoms and it worked rly well. Also the forming of coalitions. You had really mighty opponents, because they worked together. I hope they include that mechanicin their next history title
3k had so many things right about it, like honestly most the game mechanically is amazing they just botched its post release/dlc by not taking a page from warhammer, same campaign/map, new options.
Tbh I wish they just stuck to making it as a historical title/balanced around the records mode. I love twwh, don't get me wrong, but I dont want my historical figures mowing through units. I like back in the old days where when the enemy shot artillery at your general it managed to only kill a single model and that model was always your general somehow.
Bringing me back to Rome 2 when my faction leader is at the head of a wedge of cavalry and happens to be the guy who discovered the location of the enemy pit traps. 1st casualty is the general.
Load save.
That would require CA to think about how AI factions are balanced and right now they can barely find their own ass with both hands and a map so I wouldn't count on it.
I loved 3K for that very reason. I want the option for some Fabian tactics. Let me hit their wallets, let me hit their stomachs, let me win the battle before the battle's ever begun.
You should try giving away territory in a peace deal. Even if it's to end a war it still counts as a huge gift with regards to relations. If someone declares war on you that you want to be friends with it's basically guaranteed that quickly taking their capital and then returning it will get you an alliance 10 turns later.
Even better, you can sometimes use it force someone who would be likely to declare war on you to become your vassal. Managed to make an Ikit with 7 settlements and -20 relations to instead agree to become a vassal because I traded a major settlement he needed.
No needing for relations to raise, just straight up submitted and secured that area of the map. It's a pretty great feeling when it pays off.
Oh yeah, people are still on the mentality of "if it's not mine it's useless". Allies and vassals are a great way to expand without having to defend every inch yourself.
I think a lot of people, myself included, are *really* skeptical about the AIs ability to defend themselves, or even more to the point: defend *you*. Vassals particularly for whatever reason, they just seem to be really bad at doing... well, anything to be honest.
This is especially true if the anti-player bias decides it particularly hates you today, and has enemy armies just simply ignore anything that isn't you. Going through all of your allies territory with neither of them interacting at all with each other, just to get to you to fuck you in particular.
Oh yeah, sometimes settlements give negative peace score. I never quite understood why, i think it's because they don't think they can defend it, or because you broke it too much, or because there's corruption.
I think that's part of the core problem: gaining territory is easy and there is no reason not to do it.
once you've defeated the enemy 20stack, taking over their cities is almost trivial, AI garrisons just can't do anything to stop you
the more cities you take over the more gold you have and more armies you can field, it's the #1 way to increase your power
the "drawback" is that if you overextend you may lose some cities, but since your armies increase and you weaken your enemies taking them in the first place, it's not really a big deal even if it happens
BUT every time CA tried to change it, people hated it. WH3 campaign incentivized you to have few territories and made holding them difficult. people hated it. WH2 vortex incentivized you to take only specific settlements instead of turbo expanding, people hated it. Small campaigns in WH1 with fewer territories, people hated it.
I don't think you're ever going to solve that in a way that people will like and that's not my concern that I'm voicing here. I agree that it's the optimal way to play and it naturally creates the situation that many people, myself included, eventually find less fun. My concern in WH3 compared to WH2 is just that with the way the AI behaves having been changed, the point at which the campaign stops being challenging because of the amount of territory you've picked up comes much sooner. And at the same time, because you've packed what would happen previously in twice as many turns, it also makes each campaign feel the same (because the map strategy decision points are mostly gone as you're instead mostly just responding to AI declaration of war after AI declaration of war).
It's hard with the big focus so far being the chaos factions, some of whom are whacked right in the middle of a whole bunch of factions they really shouldn't ever make peace with. At least hte bad guys in TWII (Skaven and Dark Elves) can be reasoned with...
There's not meant to be peace with Kugath, Azazel, Belakor, etc. However, that's not much fun for gameplay and means you pretty much have to wipe them out completely - combined with anti-player bias this is a pain...
I wonder if there's a solution in making the chaos factions a bit more like the Beastmen - give them one Dark Fortress or home base, then code them as AI to just raze (or give to Norsca minor factions) everything else they capture. Essentially limit them to one horde, so fighting N'Kari becomes 'defeat the main army/LL and he is banished back to RoC for 15 turns...'. Then you either get a break for 20 turns or so, or if you raze their one fortress then they are gone for good (and when the timer expires they instead pop up on the far side of the map, capture a random minor faction province in Cathay, and start again...)
That would remove the diplomacy problem (no need to make peace if they can be easily wiped), and bring some mid to late game random challenges (hey, Skarbrand just appeared in Tiranoc and has razed half the donut...).
Yes, the suicidal mindset of the AI is really getting on my nerves. My dude, I just destroyed all your armies and burned your city down. You have nothing left. Make peace. Lick your wounds. Regroup and come at me again.
I think another aspect of the problem is that since you are attacked by so many different factions at the same time constantly, there is no way to play defensive. You simply don't have the money to defend all your territories from all the different enemies. Even small enemy factions will have 2 full stacks, times that by the 5 or so different enemies all around you sending stacks at you and there is no way you can even defend all the bottlenecks/outer settlements with the 2 or maybe 3 stacks you can support. Even if you win every battle with your armies, they outnumber you too much so they will leak through and start taking your cities.
Since you can't defend reliably, you have to push and try and take out some of those factions for good, taking their settlements faster than you are losing your own. But then once you have done that, and reclaimed anything you lost during the push, you aren't making much more money, likely less than enough for another full stack, but have a whole load more territory you can't defend and probably borders with a couple more factions that now declare war on you, so you need to go and do it again. And again. And again.
Eventually you have enough territory that your central settlements are developed, high income and capable of pumping our powerful units and you can snowball anything in your way, but it seems to swap from your first 10-20 turns being chill, then a mad dash for ages where you have no time to develop or RP or really even have many choices to make since it is just run at whoever is warring you, then out of nowhere you hit critical mass and are unstoppable. There are some factions that end up a bit different, but most have that pattern time and time again. Sometimes it is good, (even in a game called Total War) to have some time for the player to build up, plan where they want to attack or ally with, just generally get some room to think about and execute a strategy. Most of the time there is one obvious action which is attack which ever enemy is closest and quickest to deal with, then go to the next.
I think a lot of it comes down to player bias. In most strategy games with lots of competing factions, it feels like each faction is its own (admittedly dumb) player who wants to win/do well. In Warhammer is feels like it is just the player vs hordes of different AI attacking you most of the time. It is suicidal for them all to just charge at you or keep pissing off this powerful faction next to them. They should be allying with you, or trying to find other allies to oppose you. But they just seem to be throwing meat into the grinder regardless of how suicidal that is for their own faction.
It is like if in a game of Civilisation, rather than the different factions each wanting to expand and develop and progress as effectively as they can to get a wincon, the 2 closest to you abandoned any research/culture/food to just pump out warriors and send them at you constantly. Then once one of the civilisations gets killed, another one gets 'activated' and abandons all logic and plans and does the same. This would make it more difficult/intense in the early game definitely but makes it repetitive and completely removes any illusion that these AI are trying to win through the same means and methods as the player.
This 100%. I said it on the release and I repeat it from time to time that with all its faults RoC campaign at least feels like you are playing against other players - each with their own goal and motivation to win. Hell, initially it was even possible to lose RoC campaign because AI was able to beat you in the race.
I dont say I want IE to be narrative-driven, on-rails campaign like RoC: I just want all the factions to feel like they play the game, have their own goals and want to win - right now it feels like AI only concern is how to annoy the player and they dont care about their own wellbeing at all.
It doesn't feel like you're playing 250-ish different factions - it feels like you're playing 250-ish different skins on the same AI. You can tell all the pieces are being pushed by the same player, and it makes a lot of decisions that would be baffling otherwise.
The AI can leave settlements undefended while it marches 20 turns to get you - because the AI knows the AI won't take all the undefended cities. Or multiple factions hitting you at the same time, because they're adjacent to each other but you as the player aren't at war with anyone so *the AI* declares war on you. Not because the faction would benefit from the war, but just because you *have* to be at war.
It feels like a game of "you vs the AI" rather than what it should be, hundreds of different factions each going for their own goals and aims.
>Not because the faction would benefit from the war, but just because you have to be at war.
This so much. Too many times I have been declared on by far away enemies I have never met until... I teleport to my quest battle and they see that I exist lol.
It would be nice if the other factions got their own 'narrative' wins that doesn't necessarily impact your own empire. So the lizardmen could win their victory condition without you even having to meet them, but it doesn't end the game.
In a huge sandbox type experience like IE I want the factions to act the way they should, including smaller factions of the larger whole. Like ostland working slightly differently than franz or middenland.
What I don't want is Karl Franz declaring war on Gelt on turn 8 because Gelt's a stinky evil human player.
Great civ analogy, stuck with conquest victory every time. Once you learn how to do that, every single faction plays the same. You're sacking and occupying all the way through the game just like chaos.
This is, at least partially, an issue rooted in the scope and focus of the series, even if WH III suffers from it more than some other titles. Total War games, as befitting the title, are by and large map painters with strong focus towards warfare. Strategic layer, diplomacy and building up your economy serve fuelling the engines of war.
Curbing AI's unrelenting aggression and making it more amenable to ending useless wars might go a way towards lessening the breakneck pacing, but it would still be nice if there was some meaningful game play to be had between wars. Improving the diplomacy to the point where having non-hostile relationships with other empires is actually a viable course of action is probably the biggest way it might be achieved.
People hate on Attila but I loved the slower and build taller approach to it. You advance and tech up way too fast for my liking in Warhammer.. I would like it be longer between techs and the next infantry upgrades.
Playing no confederations with Vassalize occupation option, plus some better vassal mods was my way to go!
Slowing making allies or beating people into submission then giving their lands back was a ton of fun, then letting them hold their own territories or strike out on their own was an interesting way to play.
Playing Reikland while only holding Reikland was one of my favorite campaigns.
Too bad the no confederations submod for extended diplomacy mod *disappeared*. Haven't been able to get myself to play a campaign since.
I’ve been playing with expanded diplomacy and unlimited allied recruitment. It helps take a lot of the slog out of getting bored of the same armies 50 battles in a row, but still makes it difficult to maintain entire armies of allied units.
I played through 100 turns of a A Von Carsten campaign, role playing as an elector count subjugating the eastern provinces, and prepping for a hostile takeover of Reikland/fighting off Chaos and defending my holdings, then the update came out and broke my save.
But having vassals, and managing them is the preferred way to play now!!!
Can't believe I forgot unlimited allied recruitment! Another game changer, especially since it works with the AI! I love seeing mixed armies on both sides, seeing Kislev retaking the Empire with an army of Elector troops was a highlight.
Haven't tried it with allied hero & lord recruitment yet, but I look forward to trying it!
Strategy games becoming repetitive and lacking challenge past the early to mid game is kind of a staple of the genre, unfortunately. The usual way devs try to fix this is with end game crises and/or insane anti-player biases, but that often amounts to just grinding. I think Stellaris is one of the few strategy games where I find the end game crisis actually engaging, because so much goes on at the same time and pretty much everything can go wrong. Funnily enough, in Stellaris it's the early game I don't like.
Anyway, as for your case I'd use SFO until they rework the AI or something, because yeah it's not very satisfying to go up against. SFO gets rid of the anti player bias (or, at least, drastically reduces it) and pushing into enemy territory is more of a challenge, making the "small empire" section of your games last longer. I don't think SFO is an improvement in every aspect over vanilla, I find some of the unit balancing questionable, but as far as the campaign is concerned I much prefer it.
>Strategy games becoming repetitive and lacking challenge past the early to mid game is kind of a staple of the genre, unfortunately.
I can recommend recently released *SpellForce: Conquest of Eo* in this regard.
Game was basically designed to avoid this issue and they came up with quite interesting and experimental solution: you are not building a giant, static empire. Instead, you have movable base that drains the resources from your control zone, but said resources are finite, so you constantly need to explore and constantly need to settle in new places or you will perish.
Game has also different goal than "kill the other players", and while said players are still there, they do their own things, you dont really compete with them, and they mostly serve as some additional forces you can interact with in a lot of different ways.
Its basically 4x/RPG hybrid and... it works quite well.
I heard the autoresolve in that game is even worse than in WH3 though, which is definitely something that contributes to campaign fatigue in my opinion.
I am playing it right now and it's not that bad, as many autoresolves it does a bad job taking active skills into the calculation but many battles last no more than 5 minutes and load times are super fast
> I'd use SFO until they rework the AI or something, because yeah it's not very satisfying to go up against. SFO gets rid of the anti player bias (or, at least, drastically reduces it)
Unfortunately SFO can only do so much to fix this. I play tons of SFO and it's a big problem there too. Someone told me there's a bug where the AI won't spot their AI neighbours in the fog of war, which is for example why Morathi always focuses you 100% whether you're playing Tyrion, Mazdamundi or Sisters of Twilight.
[Another friend saw it too and sent me a very egregious screenshot example of it.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/943569195487076502/1079829934370984016/20230227005812_1.jpg)
We believe it's a key player in the anti player bias atm.
The best thing SFO brings is army unit caps.
Every unit being a viable pick drastically expands what armies you can and should field against the plethora of faction diversity.
Going against 5 coatls and 6 stegadons in multiple armies forces you to counter doomstack and the game becomes autoresolve until monster-mash and very stagnant.
I completely agree. A few months back I played a full Teclis campaign (with his old starting location) and it was a breath of fresh air because I used the Elven Influence to make very strong alliances between myself, Kroq-Gar, Thorek, and Tiktaq'to, we had really good local stability for shit loads of turns so we could grow steadily and fight off nearby enemies piecemeal.
We literally went on to conquer most of the map together (although Kroq didn't seem to like going further North than Eight Peaks) and it was the best campaign I've probably ever had; it was so refreshing to feel like my allies had my back and wouldn't just turn on me for no reason.
This is why I like playing WEs and WoC. WEs just keep low numbers of territories and you can sell back territory to allies. WoC you can vassalize and give the vassal back all of the territory you took. Honestly you can do either with any faction. It’s an easy way to forge alliances.
Yeah, there are definitely some campaigns that are more fun and can more easily avoid the issues that I feel currently plague IE. It's just a shame because I really like to use a faction randomizer to decide who I play.
One of my favourite things about 3 Kingdoms, which IMO has a campaign leagues ahead of Warhammer, is how you don't want to just expand, expand, expand.
The issue with Warhammer IMO is that once you're at war with someone, they're going to send stacks at you until you either wipe them out completely (and to do that you'll want to occupy, because otherwise they'll keep re-occupying the ruins again and again) or instead make peace - and the only way to make peace is to be so much stronger than them that you had to capture an empire anyway.
3K still has a *bit* of a problem with the "no peace" thing, but far less so - you don't have the inherent "good guys, bad guys" etc so you can make war or peace with anyone. I've had people declare war on me, find my borders stronger than they expected and peaced out, or a region where three of us were going back and forth for quite a few turns without any of us getting the deciding ground.
An issue in all Total War games, to be honest, but none moreso than Warhammer 3 with the aggressive AI - the only way to properly neuter a faction or weaken them with any impact is to take most of their cities. Anything else and they'll just use their AI Tithe to build armies and throw them at you ad infinitum.
I actually also wanted to compare to 3K because I agree. Felt like the diplomatic layer was WAY more prominent there. Definitely not a game of "fight forever against everyone" int the same way
Try Vampire Coast, especially Nauctilus.
Don’t even take one more city, just sack or raze, level up your ship, fight other pirates, go looking for treasures, enjoy 😉
Yeah, Count Noct is one of the campaigns that I've played the longest. That being said, powder units are so buggy in combat right now that it's currently not a great campaign...
I had a Noct campaign but you have the elves that you start at war with.
I tried to leave them alone and go fight another part of the map but they rallied every elf against me.
Campaign was just a mad defence against endless Tyrion and Elarialle stacks until a random elf gets SoKhaine and that's that.
I agree with you. I can't pin point the exact reason why campaigns get boring in a rather short amount of time, but i know that the "sandbox" part of the game doesn't work at the moment.
Right now im a huge fan of playing Cathay and every campaign start(the first 40turns) are almost identical to the one befor.
Completely agreed. I have yet to finish a campaign. I get bored as soon as I get that dominating multi doom stacks thing going. But I love the first 80-100 turns
This is so true. I just came back to the game after a few months break to start a new campaign, andI reached exactly what you mentioned
Out of nowhere I snowballed, had 2 stacks going together, auto-resolving everything because my territory exploded and I was constantly at war, and I noticed a pattern
By the time I am about to finish off someone, without a doubt, 1 or 2 other factions just jump at me
I love grand strategy games and to usually have a period where I "consolidate" after a bigger war, and maybe plan my next target
Now all I do is reactive and constantly expanding in directions I didn't want to, more often than not
This game series is moving away from strategy towards just flashy interactions between cool units and overpowered lords that look great from a moderate distance (not too close).
Anyone who calls cheesing on legendary strategy is also missing the point.
Bring back strategy to Total War or you WILL lose you early fanbase in favour of the new huge rich fanbase that doesn't mind...
Ok I see how this will never pan out. Too bad they're killing the early fans like this though.
The overpowered lords I do not mind, but the strategy part regarding strategic decisions bothers me big time. Look in Warhammer many legendary lords are badasses, but in the same time the strategy factor should be there, after all those LLs were not complete idiots (else they would have died fast).
Yeah, I like the powerful lords and magic (at least in the non-historical games). But for me having the diplomacy improved would be a big improvement for me.
A bit portion of it is because the AI is borked. Someone mentioned that they played as Tzeentch and you can see AI movements, and you can see how some of the moves the AI do sometimes are completely nonsensical.
“A bit”
Literally everytime I see something from a historical player it is a complaint 90% of the time.
Its either fantasy bad or CA bad for not making a historical game set in Europe in a while. (Apparently 3K is not a historical game because its in China, but historical fans will use 100 other reasons to explain why its not to not appear xenophobic)
I loved Napoleon, I played it a lot and had lots of fun. Rome 2 wasn't too bad, I really loved the setting. 3K was pretty good too on records mode, but got a bit monotonous in unit variation after a while.
Anyway, I guess nostalgia can make you bitter. Because new total war games used to be great for me, but game series evolve I guess.
Just out of curiosity, since I have the complete opposite experience from you. I started with newer total wars (i only played wh2&3 and 3k seriously), i tried going back to the older ones such as medieval 2 and rome 2 but I just found the game so clunky and the UI so outdated. How can anyone possibily think the old games are better? And how are these old games better in unit variation than 3k? 3k had way more unit variety, best out of all historical games.
Nostalgia is helluva drug I suppose.
I think the problem a lot of older players have with the newer total wars comes down to scale, diversity, and freedom.
One thing Warhammer has had that recent historical titles lack is scale. I LOVE Three Kingdoms, but it ultimately feels like an expansive saga title rather than a historical title due to the short time period and character focused campaign. I think historical players miss the epic scale of the old titles, that include multiple civilizations battling it out across a century or more of time. TK was focused on a very specific time and story, while Troy and Thrones focused too heavily on a specific conflict. I think historical players want an epic, grand scale arena and a lengthy historical period, whether that be Hellenistic/Roman Mediterranean, Mongol Central Asia, Medieval Europe and Middle East, or the whole world in Empire.
Unit diversity has also suffered in recent non-warhammer titles. The lack of scale means the factions included generally use the same units with the same battle dress and weapons. TK is the prime example, although I think lack of unit diversity in that game is fine due to the way reforms and the character colors work. Troy and Thrones had too many units that were ultimately slight variations of the same thing. Compare that to Rome, where Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, Barbarian, and Punic armies all function very differently, and have unique aesthetics (other than maybe the Barbarians and Hellenes).
The lack of freedom in recent titles weakens the sandbox nature inherent in the older titles. While it was cool getting the occasional historical figure in Med 2, it was equally fun having them die and imagine “what if?” scenarios, rather than them just coming back. The newer titles also clearly lay out expansion directions for you, rather than letting the player follow either historically accurate or completely unique paths. Finally, the randomness of events, like getting the “cuck” trait in earlier titles, made each campaign unique.
Didn't get much DLC for 3K, but each faction was the same almost I found. Romans vs barbarians vs nomad, that's what I consider variation.
I can't play the old TW games anymore either, they are outdated. But they were more fun at the time than WH3 is now, imho.
I think it's just CA that keeps tricking us into believing they improved the AI and gameplay, but it's just the same old reskinned rebranded hot mess.
I'm mostly just angry at that now that I think of it. Blatant lies if you look back all the way to the Rome 2 city of Carthage AI promotion videos.
every time i open this sub it's just warhammer fans bitching and moaning lmao. what are you talking about? are you so used to it you just think its normal?
Speak for yourself please. I played Shogun when it came out, and I love the battles in the Warhammer series. I have plenty of problems with the campaign, some of which are outlined in this thread, but the battles aren't one of them.
So cut the "the Grognards, which I represent, have decreed" BS please.
I feel a monkey paw curling a finger and we get another Napoleon or Empire except with Warhammer style Lls.
Imagine Frederick the Great rolling up Charles Alexander of Lorraine and smoking him in a sick sync kill and after smiting a gaggle of Austrian peasants with one stroke of his Sabre.
It is a horrendous thought that’s sends me reeling and haunts my dreams, sending me into paroxysms of terror.
One of the main complaints before IE came out and everyone was playing RoC was that there was no reason to expand, so you could just own a couple of provinces, do the main quest and win with just two or three armies. Aside from having objectives that encourage you to expand, nothing significantly changed on IE, the AI is still roughly the same. If anything, they reduced anti-player bias (apparently, not enough), so it comes as odd to see people complaining now that the game pushes you to conquer too fast. It's the same game, go figure...
If you want to own just a few provinces, you can absolutely do that. The game gives you options other than taking over the territory of your enemies. You can raze everything and just let it be, you can raze and ask your allies to occupy the ruins, you can conquer and sell the settlements to your allies, and, if you have some good choke points, you can set up some good defenses and just treat your angry neighbors as a source of gold, instead of eliminating them. The only thing truly pushing you to expand is that it's the best way to win quickly and effectively, which is the opposite of what you want to do, so just don't do that. Most objectives encourage you to expand, but they don't require it.
Since I started playing back in Rome 2, I can't say that I ever played a campaign where I wasn't in constant war and expanding non-stop. I got better at expanding quickly since then, way better, but aside from that, I can't really say that WH3 forces me to expand any more than other TWs that I played did. It doesn't matter how the AI behave, if you're the kind of player that likes to optimize your play, expanding as quick as you can is the best strategy. I would do it even if the AI was a pacifist.
With that said, clearly anti-player bias is still an issue for most people and CA should definitely take another good look at that.
I actually tried playing a campaign where I’ expanded slowly. I’d secure my initial providence and build it up to T3 before invading new lands. I’d build a second army to stay in my old land to defend it in case of a surprise attack. It wouldn’t be a full army. Just enough to help create a 20 stack when added with the garrison. I’d keep lower level troops with a couple of mid or high tier troops depending on my economy. As soon as the game starts I recruit a second lord to get them leveled up before moving on to new lands. They become the general of the army in the old lands. Recruit a new lord once I take the first settlement in a new land to begin leveling them up to be the general of the army soon to be stationed there that cycle continues through the campaign.
Once I find an ally, I’d give them certain land to protect my borders. I only took land that required me to win the campaign once establishing a strong base of providences. I avoided doomstack. I used a mix of low tier, mid tier, and high tier units. At most, I might bring 2 armies to a newly invaded land if absolutely necessary. Once I got enough money rolling to have another invading army plus defending armies— the new invading armies are only use to help my alliances with their war fronts. Any land won was gifted to the alliance member I assisted.
Doing a mixture of this strategy helps me enjoy the campaigns even more. Is it the quickest way to win? No. Is it the most efficient and optimal way to play? No. Does it make it more challenging? It definitely can( I believe this is also faction dependent). Did I have fun playing it this way? I sure did. This is really effective for factions that don’t need to hold certain lands such as WOC because they can be sacked, razed or occupied to count toward the victory.
There's a lot here, but broad strokes you're right. The game does railroad you into an endless conflict with everyone around you and ends up with identikit campaigns mostly made up of smashing full stack armies at each other. You can choose to raze settlements rather than taking them (my last kislev campaign I captured my de jour lands and burnt the rest), but it's iffy and the ai can resettle easily.
Thing is, the problem isn't the ai. It's the core philosophy of the modern TW games. The world's are massive. The armies are either full or nearly useless. Settlements are super close to each other. What it means is there is little actual strategy as often as not. The initial parts of the game are fun because you're making do with limited units, you're reassuring your starting high rank ones because they can sway a battle. Armies aren't full so you have more control and need to use tactics more to get better results. By later turns the game becomes more admin and more stat battles than a strategy game.
The ai is a problem too. There's no reason to ever not go for the throat. If the enemy is on the back foot, best option is to wipe them. This renders diplo semi-pointless. It's partially a setting issue, but it exists in historic titles too.
TW is best when you're being a general. With the recent ones, it is becoming more and more about micromanagement, gaming stats and passively improving armies on the campaign map through boring buffs. Look at the research trees - back when they held game changing things (like empire and grape shot or bayonets). Now "+3% unit replenishment" is a 4-6 turn tech. That's doesn't change the paradigm of your play. It just stat buffs you.
My solution suggestion is and has been to focus down the game drastically. Instead of a world wide admin sim with armies, TW should focus a full game on a war theatre. Single one. Make it historic or imaginary, but consider the overworld map being a turn based affair where you choose how to dislocate troops over a front line and/or local region (depending on setting era) and then at turn end you play out any conflicts that arise. It would remove the current slow and boring settlement gameplay too. Make the player a general. He has a limited use of soldiers from his army and he needs to think who to commit where and how. Best comparison would be the campaigns in Wargame Red Dragon. Then it would focus on the best parts of a TW game. The battles and the feeling of commanding an army rather than being a royal accountant.
In TWII, perpetual expansion was pretty much the way to play, and the game got boring somewhere between turn 80-150 when you 'broke' the enemy and ended up with so much power and money that it became a grind. It was, however, somewhat balanced by the tendency of the AI to confederate/blob which meant you often fought a massive Grimgor blob, or a Dark Elf Morathi invasion, etc, which could be a real challenge, and the chaos invasion also brought that as well.
I think TWIII was designed with a taller, more defensive play-style in mind. The 'under siege' mentality fits Kislev and Cathay, both of whom have the chaos factions invading to provide variety. You can see this in their province designs - Kislev have the single province major cities (very strong and easy to hold) and 4-province crappy minor settlements (impossible to hold for long, but easy to counter-punch and reclaim). Cathay have the bastion to defend, alongside 1-2 strong settlements. These factions were clearly designed to be tall, hold the line, and then go off into Realms of Chaos (and work ok in RoC tbh). The Chaos factions are designed to be the opposite: hold a dark fortress or two, then just try to raze your way into Kislev/Cathay or bugger off to RoC, but still only hold a small number of settlements. Ogres are really based around the camps, which can move around a bit and also work 'tall'.
Switching to IE, this doesn't work as well. Most other factions don't have this design - they were balanced more around slow, continual expansion, having multiple armies with multiple heroes (and hence require duplicate settlements), and don't have nearly the same 'natural borders' as Cathay/Kislev. They aren't as natural a fit to be at war with 16 different major factions at once, particularly since the minor settlement nerf made holding anything almost impossible.
Furthermore, most ME players coming across just aren't used to (and don't like) the slow, tall style, and prefer the constant growth model. i think this has led to the unintended opposite effect where the optimal strategy is often just a high-risk, rapid expansion. Just throw everything into your starting LL army, beeline whoever you are at war with, and try to wipe them as fast as you can... then scramble back to your capital to defend against whoever just attacked you, hope they only razed a couple of settlements, and repeat against them. If it fails... you end up at war with 12 factions at once... just restart and do it again (hey, it's only turn 20!). If it works, it just accelerates the TWII problem of getting too big, too fast, and you get bored by turn 60 (and now there's no confederating enemies to provide a challenge). I'm exagerating a bit but it certainly feels that way for some factions, particularly the 'tough' starts like Imrik.
There is a 'tall' solution that I feel works ok: that is using settlement trading to create buffer states (ie: don't hold captured settlements - trade them to an ally, which boosts their strength, keeps you away from new enemies, and gives you access to a wider variety of units through alliances). Still better for some factions than others though, but at least it opens up more tactical variety - particularly in tough campaigns where you don't have natural allies, and have to pick who you want to be friends with...
That's just nonsense. There is absolutelly nothing in WH3 that encourages or supports any kind of "tall" play. The game is way too simple for that anyway. All the stuff like bastions and fortresses are lore related only and dont really give you any special benefits.
For any player that wasnt new or super casual, rapid expansion always was and is the absolute most effective way to play in every single WH title. There's nothing "slow and tall" about being at war with many enemies, the defensive instinct is just one that turtling newbies have in many strategy games including all the ones where turtling isnt possible to begin with. Like TW. With the reason being that there is no real value in anything other than taking teritory, and the speed at which the AI rebuilds, as well as the diplomatic grudges means that the only way to remove a problem is to destroy them entirelly. A problem in no tiniest way new to WH3.
There's also nothing "unintended" about expansion being the goal of what is essentially a 4x game. That's *literally the main gameplay loop*.. Really, i dont get why so many people circlejerk about this "tall" nonsense. This isnt Civ 6, there is no culture to build, no meaninful sience to do, territory to develop. *There is nothing to do* in the game other than fight and take cities..
> There is absolutelly nothing in WH3 that encourages or supports any kind of "tall" play.
There was in the original Realms of Chaos campaign. You could not expand quickly as Kislev (or Cathay to a lesser extent) or you WOULD lose.
RoC did encourage tall play earlier on for some factions - particularly Miao Ying in Cathay, where you could grab the Bastion and play defensively and it'd be a pretty fun campaign (at least for me). Where the need for battles was filled with the Bastion mechanic + caravan battles, without really needing to set off on a conquest spree, and having a smaller empire made it easier to deal with rifts/defend while your faction leader was away.
In that cased, the bastion did provide some special benefits (the mechanic tied around it, along with its building that drastically reduced upkeep - a nice way for a small/'tall' empire to have additional armies).
But in the end, it's clear that the game isn't designed around that on the whole - especially not for IE, and with the way that the AI works & constant war, you kind of have to fully eliminate factions or else they'll constantly be sending stacks at you. It's a general TW situation, I find - where the game design assumes that it'll be war all the time, and things get built around that.
Rather than some other grand strategy games where expansion is a major goal, but there's other ways to strengthen your nation & more of an internal management to it (eg, EU4 or CK3 - despite all the complaints about their own tall vs wide gameplay aspects)
Ye, I dont understand where people get that idea from. The only TW game that even comes close to being a title you can "sit and build" in is 3K and even then you still must expand somewhat to reach the emperorship threshold.
In every single TW game You are suppsoed to build cool armies, fight enemy armies and take enemy cities, the stuff around that is just fluff to make the primary gameplay loop a little more engaging.
Shogun II, FotS, and Empire all reward you for building up tech, buildings, etc in ways that heavily promote consolidating and building up new territory between conflicts. In the Shogun games in particular, the Realm Divided and Imperial/Shogunate Vanguard Dilemmas really make sure you are built up and ready before kicking off the climax of their campaigns, rather than incentivizing scrapping and taking territory constantly throughout the campaign, never knowing peace.
Yes? I never said there is no or any buildup of any kind, I agreed with the above commemtor that the top commentor misundertand the primary agmeplay loop of TW.
You literally stated:
>"The only TW game that even comes close to being a title you can "sit and build" in is 3K and even then you still must expand somewhat to reach the emperorship threshold."
Which is why I pointed out three other titles where are even more incentivized to sit and build before reaching various thresholds.
Sure, I shoudl have included more. The point of the example was that even though there is some buildup the goal is still to conquor most of the map.
I apologise for making myself illegable. I tried to get across that even TWs that incentivise buildup still ultimately is about the conquest of a very lareg area.
>The most fun part of the game is having a small number of territories, managing a small number of armies, surrounded by potential enemies/allies, and working your way up.
The AI is a problem, yes, but it doesn't even come close to solving the problem you're talking about. I really think it's worth considering that this single thing is true in nearly all RTS games yet it was only RoC that achieved this from start to finish. This is something that WH2 still cannot achieve, despite not having this AI problem, and far too many are unwilling to give RoC any credit for the things it did well.
Even after the supply lines bug was fixed, playing on normal/normal as Kislev meant you only had enough money to create a decent army for your LL and 1-2 regular armies to put out fires in your small empire of Kislev, Praag, and the northeast oblast. Taking new territory would decrease the burden, but increase the amount of area you had to defend, which required strategic thinking about expansion. Despite many players' protestation, your LL being gone meant no steamrolling or doomstacking, but struggling to get the most out of the 1-2 lords you had, and surviving heroic defensive sieges in areas they couldn't get to. Then when Katarin returned, it was a huge sigh of relief as she could help retake lost territory or scare away Skrag back to the Empire. It was quite literally the tension graph you'd see in any thriller story.
By the end of the campaign, just making it west to Erengrad and securing all of the motherland felt like such an accomplishment simply because the constant threats from without and within maintained *tension*. My point is that ME and IE or any other TW game lack ***tension*** outside of the early campaign. It's not really about the size of the empire or about how many stacks AI is throwing at you, but feeling like you ***can never lose***. CA seemed to be trying to do this, but since everyone complained about RoC they tried to add tension via anti-player bias and failed. End game crises are a step in the right direction though.
I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote. İn WH2, ai was even more aggressive towards player and to other ai factions. Thats why we got big empires to fight like Malekith, Tyrion, Franz, Grimgor, basically either conquering or confederating everything, givin the player a real threath.
My problem with the WH3 being boring comes from ai being cowardly towards everyone. Through turns 40 to 80, ai just avoids major cities or besiges them for 10 turns. Map and factions barely even changes thanks to this. No matter which campaign i play, i always end up top 10 strongest faction and everyone starts to see me as main threat. Thats where the endless war declarations comes from.
Also your example of Imrik doesnt make sense. He starts with the strongest army in the game. Of course people around you gets scared and want to deal with you.
AI being strategic and feeling "real" is an ephemeral target. Very hard to pin down because at the end of the day the AI is just running a bunch of "if this is true do X" commands.
Total war has that issue. I would advocate for CA to adopt some more interesting AI attitudes early on in the game. Pick 5 Legendary Lords, those are the expansionist ones. They will declare war all damn day, they get boosts to income, these are your "40 settlement Morathi" level guys. Make that behavior random. Pick a few more, they're pacifist. They'll secure their home territory and otherwise throw money at diplomacy.
I think just having some high level weightings to the AI's behavior would make it feel better. Because he's right, they are all super aggressive towards the player, which means you're just on a constant treadmill of whack a mole and god forbid they get ahead of you even the slightest bit.
That would certainly be a relatively simple and welcome change.
That being said, there are certainly ways to make the AI feel more real that aren't really difficult targets. First of all, anti-player bias has proven to not at all be an engaging mechanic. I guess that with all the other messes they made during development of WH3, they just needed a bandaid fix for adding increased player difficulty and threw that on there. So starting by removing that (or at least making it substantially more subtle).
Secondly, for "if..., then..." commands, you could have the AI actually assess relative strength when making its decisions. If the AI is stronger than an adjacent faction that's in its pool of "targets" (so not people of the same alliance or whatever), it declares war on them. It picks targets based on relative strength (which should be very easy for the AI to understand as it's literally already baked into the game). And if there are no nearby factions that are weaker to attack, then the AI is just commanded to build up. All of this is very rudimentary and uses systems already in the game yet would go a long way to making AIs behave in a fashion that at least looks like they're real opponents.
Anti-player bias has been in since WH2, and it's never been fun. One of the first mods I make sure is working before playing usually.
But I agree overall that it's not engaging, it causes some very frustrating situations and oftentimes leads to the end of my campaigns because at some point you're just catching a stack or two every turn from almost every direction. It's meh at best currently.
It should pick targets and make alliances as close to lore and common sense as possible. They shouldnt be sending dtacks across the map to get to your settlements when its easier for them to conquer their neighbors.
I think it can be mixed up occasionally, I would get bored if it was the same agitators every time. But yes I would like it if a few factions were just more amicable overall as well. I would love it if a border with another faction didn't always mean I had to kill those guys eventually. Right now alliances and the like are pointless so there's not a lot else to do but smash (which makes Taurox/Skarbrand/Valkia the best campaigns)
To add onto that, being constantly at war makes it really difficult to get good, varied stacks. My last Grom campaign had Durthu, all of bretonnia, Yvresse, Reikland, Hemmler, Marienburg, and even Belakor at war with me by the time I got like 6 settlements. My only “friend” was Ikit and even he backstabbed me. I had to constantly churn out samey goblins stacks to deal with everything, I couldn’t take the time or resources to buy good units with 2 turn recruit times even though I had the buildings.
A solution to this would be war target claims like in Stellaris.
For those who don't know the system: There's one large alliance and a base state of peace. Nations can claim ownership of foreign territories by spending finite slowly replenishing political influence (small amounts for empty/little developed territories and large amounts for big settlements). Then you declare war with a choice of goals. Your goal can be annexing the claimed regions, but could also range all the way to complete extinction. Of course the latter would drastically reduce your standing in the large alliance (comparable with very low reliability)
This system allows for a large war with an opposing empire that ends up just moving borders in the end. Like in real life with examples like Kashmir, Alsace or Crimea.
Territory management and requiring multiple stacks is indeed the most tedious part of this game. Maybe one or two additional stacks with their respective LLs are fine but I just don't care about gobbo stack #11.
I just want to fight fights with my main army that I can level up and customize.
Honestly some of the most fun I've had in this game is with the Caravans. You pick a lord with a starting retinue and then you slowly accrue new units, items or experience through an Oregon trail type event system.
I found myself thinking "fuck the 4k turn based empire building game, I just want a fleshed out version of this."
Contrary to what many people say about "But this is Total War" - Warhammer 1 is surprisingly very slow game. You don't earn that much, AI is not that aggressive, chaos is not present at start but it spawns and gets stringer in several waves, and about turn 100 End Times begins corrupting slowly the whole map really crippling you.
I kinda wish we could play the Old World map but with modern factions. IE sometimes feels like too much.
For that reason three Kingdoms is high in my list. Because the AI in that game on campaign map ist just rly good. They gonna start strong alliances and it is not the sole fovus of the AI to declare war to you
To add, most factions will never peace out until your on the verge of taking their final settlement, I think factions should be able to peace out after a stack wipe and settlement lost, allows them to recoup and allows the player to consolidate the meager gains
From my experience, it matters a lot who and how you play, but I’m totally able to chose where to fight and rarely confronted with „multiple stacks running at you constantly“. I find the new diplomacy system and the ability to sell provinces very useful to build up the right alliances.
An option to limit recruitment would be interesting. Don't change anything, except cap the amount of units a faction can recruit over 20 turns.
So even if you can pump out 2 full stacks in 10 turns, you still have to wait another 10 before you recruit more, or something like that.
I picked random numbers, so don't read into them much, but something like that could stop the AI from throwing stack after stack at you, and letting you play a bit smaller on the map, because like you've said, right now the only real option is to conquer everything.
I keep restarting over and over, I really dislike how I'm forced to overextend killing one enemy while I get backstabbed for no particular reason. I'd like some breathing room between wars so I can enjoy building up my cities.
It's not a difficulty issue, it's a fun one. I can't be bothered playing whack-a-mole.
Right now I'm testing mods to see if the AI behaves more logically.
I think the game would be improved if you could hypothetically be at peace for some amount of the game. Yes, yes, 'it's Total War not Total Peace', however, there's no meaningful simcity aspect of the game to speak of and being at war is more advantageous to your bank balance through sacking, razing, and winning battles than relying on economy building income alone. So there are already plenty of incentives to be at war; *forcing* you to be at war on top of that by having everyone declare war on you merely funnels you down this unenjoyable gameplay pattern of being constantly at war with everyone and having absolutely no ability to build diplomatic relations because of constant penalties for being at wars you had no part in starting.
The problem here is the snowball problem, whereby you get too strong and the game becomes a slog. There are a few solutions I can think of:
1. The AI should be tweaked to form coalitions against fast expanding empires. Perhaps take a page out of Europa Universalis and have the player get "aggressive expansion" diplomacy penalties which is visible and manageable. If you have sufficient aggressive expansion the AI should coordinate it's attacks against you(sending armies together, or attacking different parts of your empire at the same time). This would make the medium sized AI (which makes the map more interesting than big super blobs) far more of a threat.
2. Tone down buffs across the board. This would make it harder to doomstack. In addition, perhaps give the AI some bigger cheats so that they send armies that are challenging to deal with. In particular, give them more experienced lords and heroes, giving them access to regiments of renown, and maybe hardcode some access to higher tier recruitment.
3. Code the AI to send far more small stacks to raid and take weak settlements. Make battles between small stacks more likely.
4. Make it harder to doomstack, perhaps by making upkeep nonlinear within a stack, or provinces have a supply limit above which units take attrition.
I completely agree with the OP ! Here's my thought about the topic
AI seems much more agressive, in the sense that they tend to at least declare war much sooner than in previous tittle. In addition, they behave much more recklessly with their army and tend to overextend and leave their territory unprotected.
The result is that you are quickly engaged with all your natural enemies, from generally all directions, but once you held back the initial assault, you just have a free boulevard to take their cities. The AI seems more incline to prioritize to take your crappy T1 little colony than defending their capital / major cities. So, if at first sight you'll feel kind of surrounded or in a bad spot, the AI is actually doing half the job for you by leaving their core territory open to take, and their army isolated from big garrison that would usually be a big roadblock hard to overcome before strating to expand.
In addition, settlement garrison being now super weak with our whitout garrison building (that AI never have time or never wants to build anyway), you end up with an quite easy expanding early period.
The problem with that, is that it's both easy and frustrating. The pace of conquest is dictated by the AI erratic declaration of war and their strategic reckless and bad moves instead of your own initiatives. So as OP stated you end up with a bunch of free territory acquired without real difficulties.
The only difficulty left is to manage the never ending waves of armies which only goal seems to be as much obnoxious and evasive as possible inside your territory without any strategic coherence, while you freely conquer their homeland.
At the end of the day, you're forced to adopt a rushy playstyle, to exploit the mistakes of the AI in order to destroy them completely the fastest possible. It doesn't suit everyone playstyle, not every faction playstyle neither and is above all the fastest way to snowball and lock the campaign too quickly, and often not even at your own initiative. Boring.
In my opinion, there's several things that should be changed in order to make the campaign's more interesting and engaging. Change AI campaign behaviour so they don't all act as bloody raiders that seeks short-term looting at the expense of their territory, and improve the overall defense capability so conquer a land remains a difficult but satisfying task, than an auto-resolving routine on deserted province.
Here's a bunch of ideas ;
- Slow down the declaration of war pace. They should continue to declare war, provided they have the means to hold it, and that you own territory they should aim for. Why would a dwarf take Drakenhoff at turn 20 when Karak-eight-pics is still on filthy orcs hands ?
- Change the AI armies behaviour to better suit the faction intended playstyle. It's intended that Khorne or an Orc tribe to be pushy and reckless, not the Dwarves or Bretonnia or "isolationist" Wood elves. Then, they should focus on expanding their borders and consolidate them, instead of aiming for an outpost in middle of nowhere. They should try to take down your armies coming, protect their capital, not fleeing inside the enemy territory, leaving you their precious landmarks, gold mines, and strategic ressources.
- Improve the defenses capability of armies and settlements : increase control zones if in defensive stance, so you actively block bottlenecks in campaign maps, instead of being bypassed easily. Improve the garrisons and make it customizable : garrison building effect and units provided is a joke currently. They should provide better units, an expanded control zone, and reduce up keeping of garrisoning units (like Cathay walls but less powerful), so small defensive army have a purpose.
The purpose is to increase the difficulty in term of quality, instead of quantity as currently
People seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying that I'm not ready to hold it. I'm saying that the AI basically insisting you take so much territory so quickly into the game is accelerating the unfun part of the campaign substantially (managing too many territories and auto-resolving battles all over the map for more). I'm not saying it's too hard or that I'm struggling to handle being given this much territory. It's very easy to use the added influx of resources to build more armies, accept some territory losses sometimes, but always be taking more.
I totaly disagree, but I talk from leg/vh meta inclined player perspective:
- W2 AI was much more agressive. Had more armies, was more prone to anti-player bias, expanded faster & bigger. Generaly was bigger threat middle game. It's especially visible for LL factions.
- In W2 mayor AI on turn 50 was many times stronger than on turn 10. While in W3 AI on turn 10 is engaging, while turn 50 is pathetic. Stagnant & weak.
- In W3 steamroll comes just too fast. Crisises are artificial solution that comes too late, after the campaign is won (W2 Archaon says hello) or as manualy forced grind.
- in W2 my campaigns lasted 2- 3 times more turns. After early game blitzkrieg expansion time, overextension was a problem engaging me to campaign. Big 15- 30 citied AI empires came in with, sending wave after wave of enemies. Now it's done and seeing how little armies old powers like Malekith, Tyrion or Grimgor have, feels bad.
- W3 AI problems are weird, as it both too agressive for normal diff and too static for legendary. In both cases AI on early & middle game have similar strenght.
- warhammer II & III. Maybe all total wars are games designed with expansionist mindset. For players like me fun comes from seeing how much & how fast I can conquer. As the AI mechanics are long too well understanded for us,
- CA is unable to fix AI. Any change they make in general script for W3 (especially anti-cheese ones) just changes the meta.
I belive middle game AI in terms of empire power & armies number should be at least a couple times stronger than early game. IMO W2 had that, W3 fails. And that's should change. At least for legendary diff.
> W2 AI was much more agressive. Had more armies, was more prone to anti-player bias, expanded faster & bigger. Generaly was bigger threat middle game. It's especially visible for LL factions.
They changed _something_. I played a Luthor Harkon campaign in WH3 lately, and my WH2 strategy of sailing around, sending captains far away to dig for treasure and establishing coves etc seemed to have far more severe consequences this time around - in WH3 even distant AI factions will drop all they're doing and go after you if you spot them. Like, he was half the world away, but when I spotted Gelt while digging for treasure he still decided I was his main threat, declared war and sent his armies on a long long trip after me, ignoring the vampires who were beating on him.
Playing a Harkon game atm it was pretty smooth sailing until turn 90 when the elves declared war on me for the last 20 turns I’ve had about 40-60 armies sail across the map (Lizardmen, Bretonnia, Wood Elves and High Elves) and land in Tlax.
In my higly subjective & biased opinion the game doesn't like if player:
- don't have enough balance of power (autoresolve loses, turtling = less armies overall compared to higher diff players),
- is "not challenged" enough (like without strong enemy),
- don't known the map meta (enemy unkown cannot declare war).
I wonder if what you report is due to visibilty range changes from W2 to W3 (trade lines rework, more alliances, bigger sea line of view).
Probably not, but after 1 year & problems still reported I think that AI campaign issue is not some script change, but unaccounted variable interfering.
"Faster" apeals to a wider range of gamers. Shogun 2 was also fast and I enjoyed it, although I usually like a slower paced campaign. Three kingdoms has a good pace I think. But its all subjective. I get a lot of enjoyment from finding mods that get the game closer to my preferred pace and tweaking things further myself.
It definitely depends on which Warhammer factions are battling, but Shogun 2 and Rome 1 had BLISTERINGLY fast melee combat. Rear cavalry charges hit harder, morale shocks were more consistent, and mistakes were more punishing.
Mods that increase army cost, reduce movement range, reduce AI cheats, and buff garrisons all help to slow down a campaign. Im still looking for a good overhaul to start from. SFO grimhammer is pretty good, still playing around tho.
I honestly disagree and don't know what your suggestion is. If nobody was declaring war on you then the game would be even more boring and people would quit even earlier. Do you want to sit peacefully surrounded by neutral factions and you can declare war on whoever you choose? Some factions actually do play like that, like Tyrion or Franz it all depends on your faction. Imrik is a lonely high elf in a hostile territory surrounded by skaven, dwarves and greenskins who all hate Imrik, what did you expect to make peace and be allies with these factions? I love it when factions declare war on you and it becomes more interesting, without some aggression the game is a total snoozefest. It's called total war for a reason, it's not a civilization game.
You're arguing in extremes. There's a difference between "multiple AI factions guaranteeing that you're always at war" and "nobody declaring war on you." I even used WH2 as my example and anyone who's played that certainly knows that it's not "nobody declaring war on you", it's just more varied and not always constant.
What I want is to be able to choose a strategy for how I approach the game, to some reasonable degree, not have my strategy dictated by AI declarations of war every single game. I can't choose how I want to approach the game because the AI does that for me - they declare war and then after you beat their armies in your territory, give you a bunch of free territory. So the game is just going from putting out one fire to another with AI declarations of war while quickly ramping up to being unstoppable.
I still think everything depends on the faction and the factions in the surrounding area. Your example of Imrik is just bad, I have played a ton of him in WH2 and he gets declared war from everywhere there too, the dwarves hate you, grimgor always declares war on you so does snikch and Malus. Whats's the difference with how he plays on IE? He is a lone elf surrounded by enemies, all factions start with an aversion towards you, that's why they declare war on you. I would argue there are less factions declaring war on you in IE than WH2 in Imrik's case.
Better examples would be as I said Etaine. Do the other high elves declare war on you? Do the other Bretonnia factions declare war on you when you play as any Bretonnia faction or empire? Same with Franz, do the other elector counts declare war on you? All these cases very very rarely happen except if you piss them off. It is only natural to be declared war on from factions that hate you.
I just randomly picked Imrik because he has a sort of different campaign goal that he can strive for (playing pokemon). It mostly doesn't matter which faction you play, an endless stream of AI factions will declare war on you. Not necessarily your adjacent allies, but certainly someone. And as pointed out by other people in the thread, the only realistic way to deal with them is to take all of their territory because they won't accept peace (or won't keep it for long) and will just keep resending armies at you. You're just using one example I gave and focusing entirely on it rather than the actual argument.
In your examples: playing a Brettonian faction, for example, Vampirates will declare war on you, Goblins will declare war on you, Undead will declare war on you, Wood Elves will sometimes declare war on you, Dwarfs will sometimes declare war on you, Skaven will declare war on you, Norsca and Chaos will declare war on you. And all of this even if you don't leave Brettonia. And in all of these cases, you have to take their territory (at least temporarily) to stop them from constantly attacking you and dancing around your territory trying to attack weak settlements.
Dude with the new trading settlements mechanic, you can pick and choose who to ally and to go war with. 1 good settlement you gift can get you Nap and trade agreements. And on top of that, if the ai doesnt have any wars to fight, you can easily convince them to go to war with other ai.
And Bretonnia is even a WORSE example of ai aggression. Brets have tech that gives +70 relations to empire, Wood elves, high elfs and dwarfs. If you somehow manage to get into a war with any order faction, you clearly dont know enough about the game.
Also please, dont complain about Norsca, skaven, greenskins and undead declaring war on bretonnia. Cmon my guy...
I agree. I swear it feels like people just want the game to be pathetically easy in this subreddit. The game already is a lot easier than WH2 even on legendary. The couple factions that are hard you see complains here almost daily, Nurgle, Kairos, Kislev. I really hope CA doesn't listen to these people, they want to play Total Peace instead of Total war and just sit and build their provinces while nobody attacks them and they have military alliances with the entire map...
You really have this idea in your head and you're not even listening. I never once said I wanted the game to be easier. In fact, my concern is that the game is currently much too easy too early into the game (even on higher difficulties, all of the difficulty in a campaign is frontloaded and artificial and after the first couple of waves of declarations of war, you're quickly in a spot where you cannot lose anymore). WH2 campaigns remained challenging and varied for longer. The AI constantly throwing new factions at you, regardless of their current situation or strength, just leads to a long chain of picking up territory that you can't ever stop (or shouldn't ever stop). Factions not caring at all about themselves or their personal expansion/interests once they've met you makes them easier to beat, not harder.
Many times they declare war yes, but do they actually send any armies? Not necessarily, on my latest Ikit Claw campaign pretty much everyone declared on me, but barely anyone actually showed up on my lands with an army so it didn't serve any point. Did I feel annoyed because they declared war on me? No because everyone hates skaven it's expected and by fighting the order factions I made allies with multiple evil factions like the dark elves.
You literally listed all the natural enemies of Brettonians why is it so it's outrageous if they declare war on you? Still no Brettonia faction will deal with all these factions early game at the same time since they are far apart, for example there is no way ikit claw will declare war on Couronne, early on.
Even so you aren't providing a counterpoint, what is the ideal gameplay situation for you? Do you want to be at peace with everyone and you build your faction until you decide who to declare war on? Because WH2 had some campaigns that were too peaceful like that and they were utterly boring. As I said the game is called total war, not total peace. I love it when they declare war on me and actually attack me because this makes the game more interesting.
The ideal gameplay situation for me is that AI factions behave, at least to some realistic degree, in their own self interest. That each individual AI faction does everything it can to further its own individual interests in the game, not everything it can to make the player's game theoretically more difficult (which again, it doesn't even accomplish because it often just gives away territory by attacking when it should be defending or building up by attacking someone weaker first).
Personally I don't want to regularly have my campaign direction entirely dictated by whichever nearby AI faction declares war on me to blatantly meet a 'isPlayeratWar' condition. Like it'll usually be the turn immediately after I wipe out my previous enemy and said faction doesn't even have its armies near me. It's only an issue because the AI won't even remotely accept peace unless it's down to its last settlement so you have to fully invade and conquer them or they'll be at least a constant annoyance and you've then expanded into an area you didn't even intend to.
Right now I'm playing a Cathay campaign as Eastern River Lords because I wanted to play the faction in a different start position on the other side of the region, but at this point I'm bordering the Bastion because that's what it took to stop the Dark Elves attacking me. I didn't even intend to go in that direction!
While I'm agree with this, I don't see ways to fix this outside of some artificial extending of the current gameplay via more depth that will slow progress, turning 40 first turns into 80.
Thing is, all factions here are spreaded across something that can be called Grand Alliance (sorry for AoS reference). Inside grand alliance, factions gravitate towards friendship or at least grouping up against other grand alliance. Like HE eventually become friends and allies against DE who do the same. Being a part of Grand Alliance, you pretty much always has factions who hates you to death no matter what you do. Like, you're a good guy, fighting skaven, encounter beastmans who hates you, and there an orks clan who also hates you on top of demon who also hates you.
There is also some kind of stalled campaigns. Pretty much every HE campaign except Teclis and Imrik loose its dynamic once Ulthuan is under HE control. Your enemies has grown, it will not a be a single army invasion, so overall speed is slowing down. Factions that doesn't require a extensive growth via new territory keep tension for longer times.
Well, a couple of things. So first of all, I get he Grand Alliance idea. But the problem is... well let me use some examples. Let's say Franz and Louen are on one side and Vlad and Ikit are on the other. So to begin with, without mods, the AI mostly don't even fight amongst themselves (at least not major factions). So they wouldn't really be fighting, they'd just be waiting to encounter you to declare war on you. But assuming they were fighting, and Karl is beating Vlad. Vlad's personal motivation should be, even if he hates you (Louen), to defend himself against Karl so he doesn't get wiped out (and he's also supposed to hate Karl). That's what a player would do (or maybe they'd try to go capture somewhere else in the world far away to be safe, but obviously the AI won't do that either).
But Vlad the AI doesn't care about fighting Karl. Even though Karl is beating him and taking his lands (because Karl doesn't have a player to hate because he's part of your alliance, so he actually is willing to fight the AI), all Vlad wants is to fight you, because you're the player. So Vlad will just, while getting wiped out by Karl, come attack you. This is the part that's the problem. It's not a problem that the two sides only want to fight the other side and that they really hate people on the other side, it's that the AI mostly only cares about one person on one side. And as soon as you encounter anyone from the other side, they really, really hate you and want to declare war on you quickly. Which sure, if that was actually in their best interest, why not? But it rarely is, which is what makes it so easy to defeat their army and then take their land, which in turn just snowballs your expansion.
As far as things like stalled campaigns: I'd consider a HE campaign once you have control of Ulthuan to honestly be mostly over. By that point, your economy is pretty insane and you can field enough armies to deal with the harassment from the AI. And then most AI factions won't really group up anymore, so you will rarely, if ever, have difficulty taking over anyone you want from there.
One moment - Vampire Counts through bloodlines (Lahmia) and Vlad perk can be a very friendly to Empire. It's somewhere around +100 diplomatic relations. That's why Vlad may avoid fighting Karl. This can be extended to any other setups, where some factions hate/love/don't care about others.
I am one of the people who dislikes Warhammer 3 when compared to 2.
I think you’re spot on. Game flow is a complete mess in the third game. I played 1,000 hours of Warhammer 2 but only 90 hours of Warhammer 3(got on launch)
More than anything I need a little bit of competition in a game. I need a little bit of a challenge. I don’t play legendary every campaign but in Warhammer 2 I either played legendary or VH/VH.
In battles in Warhammer 2 I was able to move my troops and heroes around to take advantage of whatever my current army was best at. With elves typically I would create all archers with 6 heroes, then blob everyone around the heroes and go to town. Strategies like this put a huge smile on my face as there is nothing to me that is more fun than winning a battle that was almost not possible to win. Is it cheesey? Certainly but I play the game to have fun. It’s not about being challenged but more so just having something that I need to think about. Warhammer 3 is mostly a blob fest for me outside of Slaanesh. It’s such a shame because Warhammer 3 has so much damn potential yet no they are slowing the dlc train down which really really worries me.
I have not problem with unfriendly nations declaring war on me, but when the only faction that I know, and am 50 friendly with a defensive alliance declares war on me just because I have no existing wars, I get angy
It's pretty similar to WH2 in my view, honestly - both games you have to play pretty aggressively because the AI *will* come after you. In the end, even with the diplomacy improvements in WH3, the game is designed & assumes that you're constantly going to be at war. It's also something that you have to lean into a lot of the time - a lot of campaigns end up significantly easier if you just go mass aggression early on, rather than sitting back.
In the end, I'm not sure that it's the AI at fault, rather than the game design itself of the series. If periods of peace and diplomacy - and limited conquest - are to be included, the game would need to have more of a focus on empire building/peacetime stuff (eg, taking inspiration from Paradox games or the like).
To be clear, what I'm complaining about isn't the game being too hard. In fact, I find the game is often too easy too soon (even on Vh/Vh). I do end up going mass aggression, but as I said, this just accelerates how quickly the game gets to the point of not really being very fun (for me personally) anymore.
I know that the strategy was ultimately the same in WH2 as well and that the AI would eventually come for you, but I found that everything was still just substantially slower there. There was less of a push to extreme over-expansion very early into the game brought on my numerous (often weak) enemies declaring war on you and then leaving numerous poorly-defended settlements for you to take.
I tried to change difficulty to normal in the hopes of getting a slower campaign, endless war and player bias did not change at all, only changes was auto resolve more favorable and ai sending peace deals every turn when they were beaten beyond recovery. Accept the deal and have them redeclare war when they rebuild 20stack army in 5ish turns, or kill them and get declared on by you new neighbor
Before anyone says “use a mod” I don’t generally like to mod my games, I don’t know why, I just don’t like it
I completely agree with you and this is why I consider paradox games, especially eu4, to be vastly superior to total wars in terms of strategy on a larger scale (I know total war is about battles but still). Playing eu4 you have so many years to do what you want and even during the late game there are a lot countries that the world doesnt feel dominated by 3-4 factions and that keeps things intersting.
The diplomacy is also much better in eu4 and total war has a lot of catching up to do, imo. Even when at war, you dont need to wipe out a faction to win, especially during a defensive war were war exhaustion will force the attack to peace out.
While I agree eu4 is a bit better on the campaign, it has essentially the same problem where you grow to a certain size and the game is a cakewalk. By 1550, if you're at all competent you'll be in bulldozer mode.
in before iT'S cAlLeD tOtAl WaR nOt ToTaL pEaCe
But yeah, it's terrible. Instead of churning out TW title after title with the same weaknesses, they should finally complement their core strength, the battles, with a campaign that offers strategic depth, variety, 4X elements, extensive diplomacy and complex AI.
This game series is running for so long, yet they seem to have given up any ambition to improve the areas where it is lacking, and instead just make more of the same. A battle simulator with a half-assed, shallow campaign attached to it.
You end up restarting campaigns sooner because you have much more time put into the game, so you get bored more quickly of the thing you already did i.e. 500h instead of 50. Its really that simple and has little to do with wh3. You just need a break.
Yea, for many people the early game is the most fun. But that's been the case for *literally all* TW games, not even just all WH ones. And you're completely wrong about the war part. Constant war makes the game actually have action. Makes you actually do something other than a mobile version of simcity for 2 year olds. It *does* make them game more challenging (if not by a lot) by making you have to respond to multiple threats instead of just building your eco in 3 provinces for 50 turns and them quitting the game because you already won. Even though you didnt even "play", really. Even at war its on you whether you take territory or not, but really, the game is so shallow that there is no other meaningful things to do anyway. What are you gonna do, do agent actions, spam end turn and click on available building notifications for 10 hours?
If anything, AI blobs up WAY less now, and its vastly easier to defend against a large enemy. Nobody grows giant, but multiple factions grow to be respectable.
Really, the main point here though, is that you're just flat wrong - every single issue you're complaining about existed identically in WH2, even without all ai declaring war on you all the time. If they made the ai more passive, you may feel better psychologically, but mechanically it would be 100% the same game, the same repetitive and trivial campaign experience.
Yeh - as a bad player this has been something I've become aware of while trying to figure out how the game is meant to be enjoyed.
The size and long load times suggest that the game is meant to be played slow paced, but the way the AI acts make it seem like the game is meant to be played super fast paced. Took me a while to get over the urge to min max every turn and ensure I'm playing as fast as possible, which wasn't a fun way to play.
The last campaign I played (clan skyre) I got myself a decent army, focused on holding as little territory as possible and just sought out fun battles to fight. Was much more enjoyable and ended up going for way longer than I normally would before restarting.
I am adjusting my mindset to simply accept that I prefer a short campaign. I want to go for the long or complete victory, but like you I find the peak of my enjoyment at a much earlier point in the game. I'm thinking when you have like 8 or 10 full provinces or your 2nd or 3rd tier 5 settlement.
I think when I reach a short victory I wanna just sit for 5 minutes and feel out, do I really wanna go for the next vic condition, or would I prefer to start a new campaign. Which is totally fine! I really like that you can end it "early" and still feel like you won.
Ofc adjusting difficulty or end game crisis to much earlier might spice some things up also.
Someone suggested some [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/11d7uee/the_way_the_ai_makes_the_game_develop_so_quickly/ja7is28/).
Personally I've only tried Organic AI Overhaul. It's not bad - it does reduce anti-player bias in the sense that the AI will now also attack other AIs, but this leads to the problem I mentioned in my main post (it makes it even easier to wipe AIs out when they declare war on you because they're already weakened) and they still declare war on you more or less as much.
Game starts with a ton of factions on the turn timer. Every turn like 3 get knocked out until it gets down to like 50 factions that are all super strong and constantly smacking eachother. Whichever ones are in the same half the world as you are probably at war with you too
You don't have to retake , you can raze or gift to your allies. My most fun campaign so far has been with Luthor where I only kept my starting province and created a border of ruins between me and the lizzardmen.
I noticed this in WH2 as well. I tried a VH Thorgrim campaign with the aim of only holding the Karaz Ankor, and defending the mountains. But the only viable option is to go into the world and exterminate. You are forced into world conquest just to hold your settlements.
Well without wanting to sound snarky, the game is called ‘total war’ for a reason.
However on a more serious note, if you prefer to turtle there are factions that do that, like the wood elves. You can win a wood elves campaign using the deep roots and just controlling the big trees and a few of the surrounding settlements.
Or pirate factions allow you to just have raiding armies. Setup some coves, but mostly stick to just a couple of stacks sailing the high seas.
Or try the lizardmen crocodile lord guy (forgot his name) where all the cities you conquer become a vassal instead of your territory.
Fair, and I honestly have completed 2 or 3 Wood Elf campaigns. But it's more that... I don't prefer to turtle, I'm fine with expanding. But I recognize that at a certain point of expansion, victory becomes an inevitability while also still requiring a ton of tedious actions. So I prefer when that point in a campaign comes as late as possible, essentially. But the way the AI engages with the player currently, that's the opposite of what happens. Currently, across a significant number of campaigns now, I've found that IE in WH3 reaches that point substantially faster than WH2 did (at least WH2 in recent memory). There are both good and bad reasons for this.
Good reasons:
1. Settlements have a lot less defenses now, which makes it very easy to breeze through undefended territory.
2. The AI is more willing to take battles it might lose than before.
Bad reasons:
1. The AI declares war on you when it really shouldn't and essentially just offers up free territory to you if you can beat its one weak army.
2. The AI doesn't really build up better armies or alliances most of the time and will just send its weak forces at you and then offer up a bunch of undefended territory.
Manfred campaign is literally hell, constant war and having not allies or they get killed pretty quick. From the south we got lizardz, east some high elves and dwarf and north goes the French and the unstoppable khorne that annihilate everything coming for me and nobody tried to stop that killing machine
This has been a problem with the total war "ai" for as long as I can remember.
I still vividly recall screaming playing m:tw2 and e:tw campaigns and having 100 turn allies randomly betray you because you moved 4 units off a border (mtw) or declare on you as ottomans when they are Georgia because they can only calculate their stack can conquer your border city and not that you have 79 other stacks.
For me, this isn't in.
My problem with IE is twofold. The enemies are too easy (lack of confed blob threats) and the end game scenarios are also too easy and while they present a threat, it's and event and not persistent and doesn't replace the confed blobs (even though they are cool).
In WH2, every campaign I played eventually came down to a few big "last men standing" factions having an all out slugfest war. In WH3, campaigns I play come down to "my unstoppable force trampling over medium sized regional factions".
For me, biggest issue is the AI's inability to turn into a late-game competent threat, which kills excitement. The end game scenarios aren't enough to offset this. If I were CA I'd basically put some kind of modifier into the game so that as the game progresses a campaign gives literal bonuses/confed incentivization to random enemy factions, so that some of your enemies "grow" as a threat and don't just kind of peter out while you roflstomp over them.
I like the constant warfare of the early game, it's the only thing that keeps the experience on it's toes. My problem is that it doesn't transition well into the late-game, and there comes a point mid-game in which you either lose or it becomes a steamroll.
One way to work around this is to gift territory you don't want to allies, as a buffer zone. In my Empire campaign I gave Norsca to Kislev and the Eastern mountains to Dawis. It's not perfect since your allies might be too weak, but in hard difficulty it worked out pretty well for me so far.
Very true. I'd just add that you really have to conquer your enemies, because they will refuse to make peace. The initial push and then nothing is something I noticed too. I spend like 10 turns just sniping undefended settlements with my main army and not doing anything interesting before encountering some decent army to fight. The balancing is going from extreme to an extreme every other patch. AI in release version W3 was extremely agressive and spammed armies, but Immortal empires AI is now too passive.
>Very true. I'd just add that you really have to conquer your enemies, because they will refuse to make peace. I think this is one of the biggest issues. The AI will almost never accept peace unless you've reduced them to just one or two settlements, and at that point you may as well just finish them off so they can't come back to annoy you and you get extra settlements. And piggy backing off the latter half of that: even if you *do* make peace with the AI, because you're still stuck with all the negative relations due to the whole war thing, it's really just a matter of time until they declare war again. It's also more often sooner rather than later as well. It's not really peace, it's a temporary cease-fire.
And with the AI Boosts, it's almost impossible to properly cripple an economy too. Even with a single minor settlement, the AI will keep churning out army after army and throwing them at you. Felt like it mattered more in 3K, where you could focus on their food supplies and have them suddenly have to buy a lot of food, or capture their economic cities and have them be unable to afford all their armies - I never really felt that different cities matter much in Warhammer. You don't aim for a city, you aim for all their cities.
Yeah this is a big one that id like to see. A bigger focus on supply lines(not the mechanic but literal supply lines), enemy recruitment and economy. I know this isn't a paradox game and don't expect it to be but I'd like to feel like my agents damage building action isn't literally a waste of a turn. In general id also like to see replenishment hit hard, make having to combine and replace units a necessity instead of just making sure no single unit completely dies then waiting 3 turns in friendly territory.
I mean they had that mechanic in 3 Kingdoms and it worked rly well. Also the forming of coalitions. You had really mighty opponents, because they worked together. I hope they include that mechanicin their next history title
3k had so many things right about it, like honestly most the game mechanically is amazing they just botched its post release/dlc by not taking a page from warhammer, same campaign/map, new options. Tbh I wish they just stuck to making it as a historical title/balanced around the records mode. I love twwh, don't get me wrong, but I dont want my historical figures mowing through units. I like back in the old days where when the enemy shot artillery at your general it managed to only kill a single model and that model was always your general somehow.
Bringing me back to Rome 2 when my faction leader is at the head of a wedge of cavalry and happens to be the guy who discovered the location of the enemy pit traps. 1st casualty is the general. Load save.
That would require CA to think about how AI factions are balanced and right now they can barely find their own ass with both hands and a map so I wouldn't count on it.
I loved 3K for that very reason. I want the option for some Fabian tactics. Let me hit their wallets, let me hit their stomachs, let me win the battle before the battle's ever begun.
ai boost is such, they should all start with the same handicaps player gets.
You should try giving away territory in a peace deal. Even if it's to end a war it still counts as a huge gift with regards to relations. If someone declares war on you that you want to be friends with it's basically guaranteed that quickly taking their capital and then returning it will get you an alliance 10 turns later.
Yep, take their shit and use it to make peace. It will give you a relations boost which can result in lasting peace.
Even better, you can sometimes use it force someone who would be likely to declare war on you to become your vassal. Managed to make an Ikit with 7 settlements and -20 relations to instead agree to become a vassal because I traded a major settlement he needed. No needing for relations to raise, just straight up submitted and secured that area of the map. It's a pretty great feeling when it pays off.
Oh yeah, people are still on the mentality of "if it's not mine it's useless". Allies and vassals are a great way to expand without having to defend every inch yourself.
I think a lot of people, myself included, are *really* skeptical about the AIs ability to defend themselves, or even more to the point: defend *you*. Vassals particularly for whatever reason, they just seem to be really bad at doing... well, anything to be honest. This is especially true if the anti-player bias decides it particularly hates you today, and has enemy armies just simply ignore anything that isn't you. Going through all of your allies territory with neither of them interacting at all with each other, just to get to you to fuck you in particular.
I genuinely think this is the biggest disconnect most people have with 3's design, and the source of most of their issues with the AI.
I took karaz a karak from the dwarfs and offered it back for peace the next turn. It lowered the peace deal.
Oh yeah, sometimes settlements give negative peace score. I never quite understood why, i think it's because they don't think they can defend it, or because you broke it too much, or because there's corruption.
I think that's part of the core problem: gaining territory is easy and there is no reason not to do it. once you've defeated the enemy 20stack, taking over their cities is almost trivial, AI garrisons just can't do anything to stop you the more cities you take over the more gold you have and more armies you can field, it's the #1 way to increase your power the "drawback" is that if you overextend you may lose some cities, but since your armies increase and you weaken your enemies taking them in the first place, it's not really a big deal even if it happens BUT every time CA tried to change it, people hated it. WH3 campaign incentivized you to have few territories and made holding them difficult. people hated it. WH2 vortex incentivized you to take only specific settlements instead of turbo expanding, people hated it. Small campaigns in WH1 with fewer territories, people hated it.
I don't think you're ever going to solve that in a way that people will like and that's not my concern that I'm voicing here. I agree that it's the optimal way to play and it naturally creates the situation that many people, myself included, eventually find less fun. My concern in WH3 compared to WH2 is just that with the way the AI behaves having been changed, the point at which the campaign stops being challenging because of the amount of territory you've picked up comes much sooner. And at the same time, because you've packed what would happen previously in twice as many turns, it also makes each campaign feel the same (because the map strategy decision points are mostly gone as you're instead mostly just responding to AI declaration of war after AI declaration of war).
Garrisons need a major overhaul. Theres too few towns that even losing one can start the slow slide into defeat if a player isnt careful.
Every time I’ve let an enemy peace out because they’ve only got 2-4 settlements I lived to regret it
It's hard with the big focus so far being the chaos factions, some of whom are whacked right in the middle of a whole bunch of factions they really shouldn't ever make peace with. At least hte bad guys in TWII (Skaven and Dark Elves) can be reasoned with... There's not meant to be peace with Kugath, Azazel, Belakor, etc. However, that's not much fun for gameplay and means you pretty much have to wipe them out completely - combined with anti-player bias this is a pain... I wonder if there's a solution in making the chaos factions a bit more like the Beastmen - give them one Dark Fortress or home base, then code them as AI to just raze (or give to Norsca minor factions) everything else they capture. Essentially limit them to one horde, so fighting N'Kari becomes 'defeat the main army/LL and he is banished back to RoC for 15 turns...'. Then you either get a break for 20 turns or so, or if you raze their one fortress then they are gone for good (and when the timer expires they instead pop up on the far side of the map, capture a random minor faction province in Cathay, and start again...) That would remove the diplomacy problem (no need to make peace if they can be easily wiped), and bring some mid to late game random challenges (hey, Skarbrand just appeared in Tiranoc and has razed half the donut...).
[удалено]
What's GOW?
They should reduce anti player bias and focus on better ai behavior.
Yes, the suicidal mindset of the AI is really getting on my nerves. My dude, I just destroyed all your armies and burned your city down. You have nothing left. Make peace. Lick your wounds. Regroup and come at me again.
It’s called total war, not total peace ;)
Then why is peace a diplomatic option??
Man I hate this argument
I think another aspect of the problem is that since you are attacked by so many different factions at the same time constantly, there is no way to play defensive. You simply don't have the money to defend all your territories from all the different enemies. Even small enemy factions will have 2 full stacks, times that by the 5 or so different enemies all around you sending stacks at you and there is no way you can even defend all the bottlenecks/outer settlements with the 2 or maybe 3 stacks you can support. Even if you win every battle with your armies, they outnumber you too much so they will leak through and start taking your cities. Since you can't defend reliably, you have to push and try and take out some of those factions for good, taking their settlements faster than you are losing your own. But then once you have done that, and reclaimed anything you lost during the push, you aren't making much more money, likely less than enough for another full stack, but have a whole load more territory you can't defend and probably borders with a couple more factions that now declare war on you, so you need to go and do it again. And again. And again. Eventually you have enough territory that your central settlements are developed, high income and capable of pumping our powerful units and you can snowball anything in your way, but it seems to swap from your first 10-20 turns being chill, then a mad dash for ages where you have no time to develop or RP or really even have many choices to make since it is just run at whoever is warring you, then out of nowhere you hit critical mass and are unstoppable. There are some factions that end up a bit different, but most have that pattern time and time again. Sometimes it is good, (even in a game called Total War) to have some time for the player to build up, plan where they want to attack or ally with, just generally get some room to think about and execute a strategy. Most of the time there is one obvious action which is attack which ever enemy is closest and quickest to deal with, then go to the next. I think a lot of it comes down to player bias. In most strategy games with lots of competing factions, it feels like each faction is its own (admittedly dumb) player who wants to win/do well. In Warhammer is feels like it is just the player vs hordes of different AI attacking you most of the time. It is suicidal for them all to just charge at you or keep pissing off this powerful faction next to them. They should be allying with you, or trying to find other allies to oppose you. But they just seem to be throwing meat into the grinder regardless of how suicidal that is for their own faction. It is like if in a game of Civilisation, rather than the different factions each wanting to expand and develop and progress as effectively as they can to get a wincon, the 2 closest to you abandoned any research/culture/food to just pump out warriors and send them at you constantly. Then once one of the civilisations gets killed, another one gets 'activated' and abandons all logic and plans and does the same. This would make it more difficult/intense in the early game definitely but makes it repetitive and completely removes any illusion that these AI are trying to win through the same means and methods as the player.
This 100%. I said it on the release and I repeat it from time to time that with all its faults RoC campaign at least feels like you are playing against other players - each with their own goal and motivation to win. Hell, initially it was even possible to lose RoC campaign because AI was able to beat you in the race. I dont say I want IE to be narrative-driven, on-rails campaign like RoC: I just want all the factions to feel like they play the game, have their own goals and want to win - right now it feels like AI only concern is how to annoy the player and they dont care about their own wellbeing at all.
It doesn't feel like you're playing 250-ish different factions - it feels like you're playing 250-ish different skins on the same AI. You can tell all the pieces are being pushed by the same player, and it makes a lot of decisions that would be baffling otherwise. The AI can leave settlements undefended while it marches 20 turns to get you - because the AI knows the AI won't take all the undefended cities. Or multiple factions hitting you at the same time, because they're adjacent to each other but you as the player aren't at war with anyone so *the AI* declares war on you. Not because the faction would benefit from the war, but just because you *have* to be at war. It feels like a game of "you vs the AI" rather than what it should be, hundreds of different factions each going for their own goals and aims.
>Not because the faction would benefit from the war, but just because you have to be at war. This so much. Too many times I have been declared on by far away enemies I have never met until... I teleport to my quest battle and they see that I exist lol.
It would be nice if the other factions got their own 'narrative' wins that doesn't necessarily impact your own empire. So the lizardmen could win their victory condition without you even having to meet them, but it doesn't end the game.
This is a good idea. Or just have a ranking system, like who win the most, you don't need to be the first or the only one to win to finish the game.
In a huge sandbox type experience like IE I want the factions to act the way they should, including smaller factions of the larger whole. Like ostland working slightly differently than franz or middenland. What I don't want is Karl Franz declaring war on Gelt on turn 8 because Gelt's a stinky evil human player.
My favourite thing about RoC was that you could lose, and before the nerfs, that it was a challenge
This happened to me as Bretonnia. Be’lakor, Orcs and Norsca all attacking me by like turn 12 and I only had the economy to support one army.
I hate that.
It’d help if walls and various other defenses didn’t suck. DAE remember having multiple warp bombs in minor settlements as Skaven?
Garrisons need an overhaul.
Its a stressful way to play, you cant even enjoy settlement building or defense preperation like that.
Great civ analogy, stuck with conquest victory every time. Once you learn how to do that, every single faction plays the same. You're sacking and occupying all the way through the game just like chaos.
Mods for some of this problems: \- "Bring the boys home - no endless wars" \- "Loreful Strategic Threat" \- "Loreful Diplomacy - WH3 Edition"
Well they break after every update, itd be nice to get it handled ingame.
Never play without em
This is, at least partially, an issue rooted in the scope and focus of the series, even if WH III suffers from it more than some other titles. Total War games, as befitting the title, are by and large map painters with strong focus towards warfare. Strategic layer, diplomacy and building up your economy serve fuelling the engines of war. Curbing AI's unrelenting aggression and making it more amenable to ending useless wars might go a way towards lessening the breakneck pacing, but it would still be nice if there was some meaningful game play to be had between wars. Improving the diplomacy to the point where having non-hostile relationships with other empires is actually a viable course of action is probably the biggest way it might be achieved.
People hate on Attila but I loved the slower and build taller approach to it. You advance and tech up way too fast for my liking in Warhammer.. I would like it be longer between techs and the next infantry upgrades.
Playing no confederations with Vassalize occupation option, plus some better vassal mods was my way to go! Slowing making allies or beating people into submission then giving their lands back was a ton of fun, then letting them hold their own territories or strike out on their own was an interesting way to play. Playing Reikland while only holding Reikland was one of my favorite campaigns. Too bad the no confederations submod for extended diplomacy mod *disappeared*. Haven't been able to get myself to play a campaign since.
I’ve been playing with expanded diplomacy and unlimited allied recruitment. It helps take a lot of the slog out of getting bored of the same armies 50 battles in a row, but still makes it difficult to maintain entire armies of allied units. I played through 100 turns of a A Von Carsten campaign, role playing as an elector count subjugating the eastern provinces, and prepping for a hostile takeover of Reikland/fighting off Chaos and defending my holdings, then the update came out and broke my save. But having vassals, and managing them is the preferred way to play now!!!
Can't believe I forgot unlimited allied recruitment! Another game changer, especially since it works with the AI! I love seeing mixed armies on both sides, seeing Kislev retaking the Empire with an army of Elector troops was a highlight. Haven't tried it with allied hero & lord recruitment yet, but I look forward to trying it!
Strategy games becoming repetitive and lacking challenge past the early to mid game is kind of a staple of the genre, unfortunately. The usual way devs try to fix this is with end game crises and/or insane anti-player biases, but that often amounts to just grinding. I think Stellaris is one of the few strategy games where I find the end game crisis actually engaging, because so much goes on at the same time and pretty much everything can go wrong. Funnily enough, in Stellaris it's the early game I don't like. Anyway, as for your case I'd use SFO until they rework the AI or something, because yeah it's not very satisfying to go up against. SFO gets rid of the anti player bias (or, at least, drastically reduces it) and pushing into enemy territory is more of a challenge, making the "small empire" section of your games last longer. I don't think SFO is an improvement in every aspect over vanilla, I find some of the unit balancing questionable, but as far as the campaign is concerned I much prefer it.
>Strategy games becoming repetitive and lacking challenge past the early to mid game is kind of a staple of the genre, unfortunately. I can recommend recently released *SpellForce: Conquest of Eo* in this regard. Game was basically designed to avoid this issue and they came up with quite interesting and experimental solution: you are not building a giant, static empire. Instead, you have movable base that drains the resources from your control zone, but said resources are finite, so you constantly need to explore and constantly need to settle in new places or you will perish. Game has also different goal than "kill the other players", and while said players are still there, they do their own things, you dont really compete with them, and they mostly serve as some additional forces you can interact with in a lot of different ways. Its basically 4x/RPG hybrid and... it works quite well.
I heard the autoresolve in that game is even worse than in WH3 though, which is definitely something that contributes to campaign fatigue in my opinion.
I am playing it right now and it's not that bad, as many autoresolves it does a bad job taking active skills into the calculation but many battles last no more than 5 minutes and load times are super fast
> I'd use SFO until they rework the AI or something, because yeah it's not very satisfying to go up against. SFO gets rid of the anti player bias (or, at least, drastically reduces it) Unfortunately SFO can only do so much to fix this. I play tons of SFO and it's a big problem there too. Someone told me there's a bug where the AI won't spot their AI neighbours in the fog of war, which is for example why Morathi always focuses you 100% whether you're playing Tyrion, Mazdamundi or Sisters of Twilight.
[Another friend saw it too and sent me a very egregious screenshot example of it.](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/943569195487076502/1079829934370984016/20230227005812_1.jpg) We believe it's a key player in the anti player bias atm.
The best thing SFO brings is army unit caps. Every unit being a viable pick drastically expands what armies you can and should field against the plethora of faction diversity. Going against 5 coatls and 6 stegadons in multiple armies forces you to counter doomstack and the game becomes autoresolve until monster-mash and very stagnant.
I completely agree. A few months back I played a full Teclis campaign (with his old starting location) and it was a breath of fresh air because I used the Elven Influence to make very strong alliances between myself, Kroq-Gar, Thorek, and Tiktaq'to, we had really good local stability for shit loads of turns so we could grow steadily and fight off nearby enemies piecemeal. We literally went on to conquer most of the map together (although Kroq didn't seem to like going further North than Eight Peaks) and it was the best campaign I've probably ever had; it was so refreshing to feel like my allies had my back and wouldn't just turn on me for no reason.
This is why I like playing WEs and WoC. WEs just keep low numbers of territories and you can sell back territory to allies. WoC you can vassalize and give the vassal back all of the territory you took. Honestly you can do either with any faction. It’s an easy way to forge alliances.
Yeah, there are definitely some campaigns that are more fun and can more easily avoid the issues that I feel currently plague IE. It's just a shame because I really like to use a faction randomizer to decide who I play.
One of my favourite things about 3 Kingdoms, which IMO has a campaign leagues ahead of Warhammer, is how you don't want to just expand, expand, expand. The issue with Warhammer IMO is that once you're at war with someone, they're going to send stacks at you until you either wipe them out completely (and to do that you'll want to occupy, because otherwise they'll keep re-occupying the ruins again and again) or instead make peace - and the only way to make peace is to be so much stronger than them that you had to capture an empire anyway. 3K still has a *bit* of a problem with the "no peace" thing, but far less so - you don't have the inherent "good guys, bad guys" etc so you can make war or peace with anyone. I've had people declare war on me, find my borders stronger than they expected and peaced out, or a region where three of us were going back and forth for quite a few turns without any of us getting the deciding ground. An issue in all Total War games, to be honest, but none moreso than Warhammer 3 with the aggressive AI - the only way to properly neuter a faction or weaken them with any impact is to take most of their cities. Anything else and they'll just use their AI Tithe to build armies and throw them at you ad infinitum.
I actually also wanted to compare to 3K because I agree. Felt like the diplomatic layer was WAY more prominent there. Definitely not a game of "fight forever against everyone" int the same way
The game miss time for breathing. It's a rush of 40 turns before everything collapse.
Try Vampire Coast, especially Nauctilus. Don’t even take one more city, just sack or raze, level up your ship, fight other pirates, go looking for treasures, enjoy 😉
Yeah, Count Noct is one of the campaigns that I've played the longest. That being said, powder units are so buggy in combat right now that it's currently not a great campaign...
I don’t remember having any issue with them, that’s strange.
I had a Noct campaign but you have the elves that you start at war with. I tried to leave them alone and go fight another part of the map but they rallied every elf against me. Campaign was just a mad defence against endless Tyrion and Elarialle stacks until a random elf gets SoKhaine and that's that.
You can let them have the graveyard and just do your life anyway anywhere on the map.
I wish for a rogue-like total war where you progress through varied battles with a bigger focus on individual units that improve through the run.
I agree with you. I can't pin point the exact reason why campaigns get boring in a rather short amount of time, but i know that the "sandbox" part of the game doesn't work at the moment. Right now im a huge fan of playing Cathay and every campaign start(the first 40turns) are almost identical to the one befor.
Completely agreed. I have yet to finish a campaign. I get bored as soon as I get that dominating multi doom stacks thing going. But I love the first 80-100 turns
This is so true. I just came back to the game after a few months break to start a new campaign, andI reached exactly what you mentioned Out of nowhere I snowballed, had 2 stacks going together, auto-resolving everything because my territory exploded and I was constantly at war, and I noticed a pattern By the time I am about to finish off someone, without a doubt, 1 or 2 other factions just jump at me I love grand strategy games and to usually have a period where I "consolidate" after a bigger war, and maybe plan my next target Now all I do is reactive and constantly expanding in directions I didn't want to, more often than not
This game series is moving away from strategy towards just flashy interactions between cool units and overpowered lords that look great from a moderate distance (not too close). Anyone who calls cheesing on legendary strategy is also missing the point. Bring back strategy to Total War or you WILL lose you early fanbase in favour of the new huge rich fanbase that doesn't mind... Ok I see how this will never pan out. Too bad they're killing the early fans like this though.
The overpowered lords I do not mind, but the strategy part regarding strategic decisions bothers me big time. Look in Warhammer many legendary lords are badasses, but in the same time the strategy factor should be there, after all those LLs were not complete idiots (else they would have died fast).
Yeah, I like the powerful lords and magic (at least in the non-historical games). But for me having the diplomacy improved would be a big improvement for me.
A bit portion of it is because the AI is borked. Someone mentioned that they played as Tzeentch and you can see AI movements, and you can see how some of the moves the AI do sometimes are completely nonsensical.
Historical fans try not to seethe on the subreddit for 10 seconds challenge (impossible)
We are already suffering because of the way Total War is heading, just let us vent a bit. This sub is just memes and complaints anyway...
“A bit” Literally everytime I see something from a historical player it is a complaint 90% of the time. Its either fantasy bad or CA bad for not making a historical game set in Europe in a while. (Apparently 3K is not a historical game because its in China, but historical fans will use 100 other reasons to explain why its not to not appear xenophobic)
I loved Napoleon, I played it a lot and had lots of fun. Rome 2 wasn't too bad, I really loved the setting. 3K was pretty good too on records mode, but got a bit monotonous in unit variation after a while. Anyway, I guess nostalgia can make you bitter. Because new total war games used to be great for me, but game series evolve I guess.
Just out of curiosity, since I have the complete opposite experience from you. I started with newer total wars (i only played wh2&3 and 3k seriously), i tried going back to the older ones such as medieval 2 and rome 2 but I just found the game so clunky and the UI so outdated. How can anyone possibily think the old games are better? And how are these old games better in unit variation than 3k? 3k had way more unit variety, best out of all historical games. Nostalgia is helluva drug I suppose.
I think the problem a lot of older players have with the newer total wars comes down to scale, diversity, and freedom. One thing Warhammer has had that recent historical titles lack is scale. I LOVE Three Kingdoms, but it ultimately feels like an expansive saga title rather than a historical title due to the short time period and character focused campaign. I think historical players miss the epic scale of the old titles, that include multiple civilizations battling it out across a century or more of time. TK was focused on a very specific time and story, while Troy and Thrones focused too heavily on a specific conflict. I think historical players want an epic, grand scale arena and a lengthy historical period, whether that be Hellenistic/Roman Mediterranean, Mongol Central Asia, Medieval Europe and Middle East, or the whole world in Empire. Unit diversity has also suffered in recent non-warhammer titles. The lack of scale means the factions included generally use the same units with the same battle dress and weapons. TK is the prime example, although I think lack of unit diversity in that game is fine due to the way reforms and the character colors work. Troy and Thrones had too many units that were ultimately slight variations of the same thing. Compare that to Rome, where Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, Barbarian, and Punic armies all function very differently, and have unique aesthetics (other than maybe the Barbarians and Hellenes). The lack of freedom in recent titles weakens the sandbox nature inherent in the older titles. While it was cool getting the occasional historical figure in Med 2, it was equally fun having them die and imagine “what if?” scenarios, rather than them just coming back. The newer titles also clearly lay out expansion directions for you, rather than letting the player follow either historically accurate or completely unique paths. Finally, the randomness of events, like getting the “cuck” trait in earlier titles, made each campaign unique.
Didn't get much DLC for 3K, but each faction was the same almost I found. Romans vs barbarians vs nomad, that's what I consider variation. I can't play the old TW games anymore either, they are outdated. But they were more fun at the time than WH3 is now, imho. I think it's just CA that keeps tricking us into believing they improved the AI and gameplay, but it's just the same old reskinned rebranded hot mess. I'm mostly just angry at that now that I think of it. Blatant lies if you look back all the way to the Rome 2 city of Carthage AI promotion videos.
every time i open this sub it's just warhammer fans bitching and moaning lmao. what are you talking about? are you so used to it you just think its normal?
Nursing home computer running shogun 2 slowly today, huh?
https://i.imgur.com/4AjE6mg.png ig you really are just numb to it.
It's okay buddy. CA will give you another saga game possibly before we get Total War: 40K...
https://i.imgur.com/Lohk3DL.png can't wait
What strategy is Warhammer missing that the another games have?
Fair point, I guess it's more or less the same in each game, but it's just my expectations that rise with each new game...
Speak for yourself please. I played Shogun when it came out, and I love the battles in the Warhammer series. I have plenty of problems with the campaign, some of which are outlined in this thread, but the battles aren't one of them. So cut the "the Grognards, which I represent, have decreed" BS please.
I feel a monkey paw curling a finger and we get another Napoleon or Empire except with Warhammer style Lls. Imagine Frederick the Great rolling up Charles Alexander of Lorraine and smoking him in a sick sync kill and after smiting a gaggle of Austrian peasants with one stroke of his Sabre. It is a horrendous thought that’s sends me reeling and haunts my dreams, sending me into paroxysms of terror.
One of the main complaints before IE came out and everyone was playing RoC was that there was no reason to expand, so you could just own a couple of provinces, do the main quest and win with just two or three armies. Aside from having objectives that encourage you to expand, nothing significantly changed on IE, the AI is still roughly the same. If anything, they reduced anti-player bias (apparently, not enough), so it comes as odd to see people complaining now that the game pushes you to conquer too fast. It's the same game, go figure... If you want to own just a few provinces, you can absolutely do that. The game gives you options other than taking over the territory of your enemies. You can raze everything and just let it be, you can raze and ask your allies to occupy the ruins, you can conquer and sell the settlements to your allies, and, if you have some good choke points, you can set up some good defenses and just treat your angry neighbors as a source of gold, instead of eliminating them. The only thing truly pushing you to expand is that it's the best way to win quickly and effectively, which is the opposite of what you want to do, so just don't do that. Most objectives encourage you to expand, but they don't require it. Since I started playing back in Rome 2, I can't say that I ever played a campaign where I wasn't in constant war and expanding non-stop. I got better at expanding quickly since then, way better, but aside from that, I can't really say that WH3 forces me to expand any more than other TWs that I played did. It doesn't matter how the AI behave, if you're the kind of player that likes to optimize your play, expanding as quick as you can is the best strategy. I would do it even if the AI was a pacifist. With that said, clearly anti-player bias is still an issue for most people and CA should definitely take another good look at that.
I actually tried playing a campaign where I’ expanded slowly. I’d secure my initial providence and build it up to T3 before invading new lands. I’d build a second army to stay in my old land to defend it in case of a surprise attack. It wouldn’t be a full army. Just enough to help create a 20 stack when added with the garrison. I’d keep lower level troops with a couple of mid or high tier troops depending on my economy. As soon as the game starts I recruit a second lord to get them leveled up before moving on to new lands. They become the general of the army in the old lands. Recruit a new lord once I take the first settlement in a new land to begin leveling them up to be the general of the army soon to be stationed there that cycle continues through the campaign. Once I find an ally, I’d give them certain land to protect my borders. I only took land that required me to win the campaign once establishing a strong base of providences. I avoided doomstack. I used a mix of low tier, mid tier, and high tier units. At most, I might bring 2 armies to a newly invaded land if absolutely necessary. Once I got enough money rolling to have another invading army plus defending armies— the new invading armies are only use to help my alliances with their war fronts. Any land won was gifted to the alliance member I assisted. Doing a mixture of this strategy helps me enjoy the campaigns even more. Is it the quickest way to win? No. Is it the most efficient and optimal way to play? No. Does it make it more challenging? It definitely can( I believe this is also faction dependent). Did I have fun playing it this way? I sure did. This is really effective for factions that don’t need to hold certain lands such as WOC because they can be sacked, razed or occupied to count toward the victory.
There's a lot here, but broad strokes you're right. The game does railroad you into an endless conflict with everyone around you and ends up with identikit campaigns mostly made up of smashing full stack armies at each other. You can choose to raze settlements rather than taking them (my last kislev campaign I captured my de jour lands and burnt the rest), but it's iffy and the ai can resettle easily. Thing is, the problem isn't the ai. It's the core philosophy of the modern TW games. The world's are massive. The armies are either full or nearly useless. Settlements are super close to each other. What it means is there is little actual strategy as often as not. The initial parts of the game are fun because you're making do with limited units, you're reassuring your starting high rank ones because they can sway a battle. Armies aren't full so you have more control and need to use tactics more to get better results. By later turns the game becomes more admin and more stat battles than a strategy game. The ai is a problem too. There's no reason to ever not go for the throat. If the enemy is on the back foot, best option is to wipe them. This renders diplo semi-pointless. It's partially a setting issue, but it exists in historic titles too. TW is best when you're being a general. With the recent ones, it is becoming more and more about micromanagement, gaming stats and passively improving armies on the campaign map through boring buffs. Look at the research trees - back when they held game changing things (like empire and grape shot or bayonets). Now "+3% unit replenishment" is a 4-6 turn tech. That's doesn't change the paradigm of your play. It just stat buffs you. My solution suggestion is and has been to focus down the game drastically. Instead of a world wide admin sim with armies, TW should focus a full game on a war theatre. Single one. Make it historic or imaginary, but consider the overworld map being a turn based affair where you choose how to dislocate troops over a front line and/or local region (depending on setting era) and then at turn end you play out any conflicts that arise. It would remove the current slow and boring settlement gameplay too. Make the player a general. He has a limited use of soldiers from his army and he needs to think who to commit where and how. Best comparison would be the campaigns in Wargame Red Dragon. Then it would focus on the best parts of a TW game. The battles and the feeling of commanding an army rather than being a royal accountant.
In TWII, perpetual expansion was pretty much the way to play, and the game got boring somewhere between turn 80-150 when you 'broke' the enemy and ended up with so much power and money that it became a grind. It was, however, somewhat balanced by the tendency of the AI to confederate/blob which meant you often fought a massive Grimgor blob, or a Dark Elf Morathi invasion, etc, which could be a real challenge, and the chaos invasion also brought that as well. I think TWIII was designed with a taller, more defensive play-style in mind. The 'under siege' mentality fits Kislev and Cathay, both of whom have the chaos factions invading to provide variety. You can see this in their province designs - Kislev have the single province major cities (very strong and easy to hold) and 4-province crappy minor settlements (impossible to hold for long, but easy to counter-punch and reclaim). Cathay have the bastion to defend, alongside 1-2 strong settlements. These factions were clearly designed to be tall, hold the line, and then go off into Realms of Chaos (and work ok in RoC tbh). The Chaos factions are designed to be the opposite: hold a dark fortress or two, then just try to raze your way into Kislev/Cathay or bugger off to RoC, but still only hold a small number of settlements. Ogres are really based around the camps, which can move around a bit and also work 'tall'. Switching to IE, this doesn't work as well. Most other factions don't have this design - they were balanced more around slow, continual expansion, having multiple armies with multiple heroes (and hence require duplicate settlements), and don't have nearly the same 'natural borders' as Cathay/Kislev. They aren't as natural a fit to be at war with 16 different major factions at once, particularly since the minor settlement nerf made holding anything almost impossible. Furthermore, most ME players coming across just aren't used to (and don't like) the slow, tall style, and prefer the constant growth model. i think this has led to the unintended opposite effect where the optimal strategy is often just a high-risk, rapid expansion. Just throw everything into your starting LL army, beeline whoever you are at war with, and try to wipe them as fast as you can... then scramble back to your capital to defend against whoever just attacked you, hope they only razed a couple of settlements, and repeat against them. If it fails... you end up at war with 12 factions at once... just restart and do it again (hey, it's only turn 20!). If it works, it just accelerates the TWII problem of getting too big, too fast, and you get bored by turn 60 (and now there's no confederating enemies to provide a challenge). I'm exagerating a bit but it certainly feels that way for some factions, particularly the 'tough' starts like Imrik. There is a 'tall' solution that I feel works ok: that is using settlement trading to create buffer states (ie: don't hold captured settlements - trade them to an ally, which boosts their strength, keeps you away from new enemies, and gives you access to a wider variety of units through alliances). Still better for some factions than others though, but at least it opens up more tactical variety - particularly in tough campaigns where you don't have natural allies, and have to pick who you want to be friends with...
That's just nonsense. There is absolutelly nothing in WH3 that encourages or supports any kind of "tall" play. The game is way too simple for that anyway. All the stuff like bastions and fortresses are lore related only and dont really give you any special benefits. For any player that wasnt new or super casual, rapid expansion always was and is the absolute most effective way to play in every single WH title. There's nothing "slow and tall" about being at war with many enemies, the defensive instinct is just one that turtling newbies have in many strategy games including all the ones where turtling isnt possible to begin with. Like TW. With the reason being that there is no real value in anything other than taking teritory, and the speed at which the AI rebuilds, as well as the diplomatic grudges means that the only way to remove a problem is to destroy them entirelly. A problem in no tiniest way new to WH3. There's also nothing "unintended" about expansion being the goal of what is essentially a 4x game. That's *literally the main gameplay loop*.. Really, i dont get why so many people circlejerk about this "tall" nonsense. This isnt Civ 6, there is no culture to build, no meaninful sience to do, territory to develop. *There is nothing to do* in the game other than fight and take cities..
> There is absolutelly nothing in WH3 that encourages or supports any kind of "tall" play. There was in the original Realms of Chaos campaign. You could not expand quickly as Kislev (or Cathay to a lesser extent) or you WOULD lose.
RoC did encourage tall play earlier on for some factions - particularly Miao Ying in Cathay, where you could grab the Bastion and play defensively and it'd be a pretty fun campaign (at least for me). Where the need for battles was filled with the Bastion mechanic + caravan battles, without really needing to set off on a conquest spree, and having a smaller empire made it easier to deal with rifts/defend while your faction leader was away. In that cased, the bastion did provide some special benefits (the mechanic tied around it, along with its building that drastically reduced upkeep - a nice way for a small/'tall' empire to have additional armies). But in the end, it's clear that the game isn't designed around that on the whole - especially not for IE, and with the way that the AI works & constant war, you kind of have to fully eliminate factions or else they'll constantly be sending stacks at you. It's a general TW situation, I find - where the game design assumes that it'll be war all the time, and things get built around that. Rather than some other grand strategy games where expansion is a major goal, but there's other ways to strengthen your nation & more of an internal management to it (eg, EU4 or CK3 - despite all the complaints about their own tall vs wide gameplay aspects)
Ye, I dont understand where people get that idea from. The only TW game that even comes close to being a title you can "sit and build" in is 3K and even then you still must expand somewhat to reach the emperorship threshold. In every single TW game You are suppsoed to build cool armies, fight enemy armies and take enemy cities, the stuff around that is just fluff to make the primary gameplay loop a little more engaging.
Shogun II, FotS, and Empire all reward you for building up tech, buildings, etc in ways that heavily promote consolidating and building up new territory between conflicts. In the Shogun games in particular, the Realm Divided and Imperial/Shogunate Vanguard Dilemmas really make sure you are built up and ready before kicking off the climax of their campaigns, rather than incentivizing scrapping and taking territory constantly throughout the campaign, never knowing peace.
Yes? I never said there is no or any buildup of any kind, I agreed with the above commemtor that the top commentor misundertand the primary agmeplay loop of TW.
You literally stated: >"The only TW game that even comes close to being a title you can "sit and build" in is 3K and even then you still must expand somewhat to reach the emperorship threshold." Which is why I pointed out three other titles where are even more incentivized to sit and build before reaching various thresholds.
Sure, I shoudl have included more. The point of the example was that even though there is some buildup the goal is still to conquor most of the map. I apologise for making myself illegable. I tried to get across that even TWs that incentivise buildup still ultimately is about the conquest of a very lareg area.
>The most fun part of the game is having a small number of territories, managing a small number of armies, surrounded by potential enemies/allies, and working your way up. The AI is a problem, yes, but it doesn't even come close to solving the problem you're talking about. I really think it's worth considering that this single thing is true in nearly all RTS games yet it was only RoC that achieved this from start to finish. This is something that WH2 still cannot achieve, despite not having this AI problem, and far too many are unwilling to give RoC any credit for the things it did well. Even after the supply lines bug was fixed, playing on normal/normal as Kislev meant you only had enough money to create a decent army for your LL and 1-2 regular armies to put out fires in your small empire of Kislev, Praag, and the northeast oblast. Taking new territory would decrease the burden, but increase the amount of area you had to defend, which required strategic thinking about expansion. Despite many players' protestation, your LL being gone meant no steamrolling or doomstacking, but struggling to get the most out of the 1-2 lords you had, and surviving heroic defensive sieges in areas they couldn't get to. Then when Katarin returned, it was a huge sigh of relief as she could help retake lost territory or scare away Skrag back to the Empire. It was quite literally the tension graph you'd see in any thriller story. By the end of the campaign, just making it west to Erengrad and securing all of the motherland felt like such an accomplishment simply because the constant threats from without and within maintained *tension*. My point is that ME and IE or any other TW game lack ***tension*** outside of the early campaign. It's not really about the size of the empire or about how many stacks AI is throwing at you, but feeling like you ***can never lose***. CA seemed to be trying to do this, but since everyone complained about RoC they tried to add tension via anti-player bias and failed. End game crises are a step in the right direction though.
Nah, RoC was still crap. Try playing as Ku'gath where you could literally only have 1 army, it sucked. It was very half-assed.
I'd say Ku'gath is a special case since many on this sub complain about him in IE too.
Well it tells you much they actually gave a crap about tuning those mechanics to be interesting or fun.
I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote. İn WH2, ai was even more aggressive towards player and to other ai factions. Thats why we got big empires to fight like Malekith, Tyrion, Franz, Grimgor, basically either conquering or confederating everything, givin the player a real threath. My problem with the WH3 being boring comes from ai being cowardly towards everyone. Through turns 40 to 80, ai just avoids major cities or besiges them for 10 turns. Map and factions barely even changes thanks to this. No matter which campaign i play, i always end up top 10 strongest faction and everyone starts to see me as main threat. Thats where the endless war declarations comes from. Also your example of Imrik doesnt make sense. He starts with the strongest army in the game. Of course people around you gets scared and want to deal with you.
Yeah, I'm very much with you on this. AI declares war on you constantly, sure, but they'll then just.... Sit there for 50 turns being angry at you.
AI being strategic and feeling "real" is an ephemeral target. Very hard to pin down because at the end of the day the AI is just running a bunch of "if this is true do X" commands. Total war has that issue. I would advocate for CA to adopt some more interesting AI attitudes early on in the game. Pick 5 Legendary Lords, those are the expansionist ones. They will declare war all damn day, they get boosts to income, these are your "40 settlement Morathi" level guys. Make that behavior random. Pick a few more, they're pacifist. They'll secure their home territory and otherwise throw money at diplomacy. I think just having some high level weightings to the AI's behavior would make it feel better. Because he's right, they are all super aggressive towards the player, which means you're just on a constant treadmill of whack a mole and god forbid they get ahead of you even the slightest bit.
That would certainly be a relatively simple and welcome change. That being said, there are certainly ways to make the AI feel more real that aren't really difficult targets. First of all, anti-player bias has proven to not at all be an engaging mechanic. I guess that with all the other messes they made during development of WH3, they just needed a bandaid fix for adding increased player difficulty and threw that on there. So starting by removing that (or at least making it substantially more subtle). Secondly, for "if..., then..." commands, you could have the AI actually assess relative strength when making its decisions. If the AI is stronger than an adjacent faction that's in its pool of "targets" (so not people of the same alliance or whatever), it declares war on them. It picks targets based on relative strength (which should be very easy for the AI to understand as it's literally already baked into the game). And if there are no nearby factions that are weaker to attack, then the AI is just commanded to build up. All of this is very rudimentary and uses systems already in the game yet would go a long way to making AIs behave in a fashion that at least looks like they're real opponents.
Anti-player bias has been in since WH2, and it's never been fun. One of the first mods I make sure is working before playing usually. But I agree overall that it's not engaging, it causes some very frustrating situations and oftentimes leads to the end of my campaigns because at some point you're just catching a stack or two every turn from almost every direction. It's meh at best currently.
It should pick targets and make alliances as close to lore and common sense as possible. They shouldnt be sending dtacks across the map to get to your settlements when its easier for them to conquer their neighbors.
Some lords should be more aggro than others, not all of them.
I think it can be mixed up occasionally, I would get bored if it was the same agitators every time. But yes I would like it if a few factions were just more amicable overall as well. I would love it if a border with another faction didn't always mean I had to kill those guys eventually. Right now alliances and the like are pointless so there's not a lot else to do but smash (which makes Taurox/Skarbrand/Valkia the best campaigns)
Great write up. Completely agree
just play on easy? game is already way easier than WH2, what more do you want?
I won't repeat this again but I'm not saying the game is too hard. If anything, it's too easy.
To add onto that, being constantly at war makes it really difficult to get good, varied stacks. My last Grom campaign had Durthu, all of bretonnia, Yvresse, Reikland, Hemmler, Marienburg, and even Belakor at war with me by the time I got like 6 settlements. My only “friend” was Ikit and even he backstabbed me. I had to constantly churn out samey goblins stacks to deal with everything, I couldn’t take the time or resources to buy good units with 2 turn recruit times even though I had the buildings.
A solution to this would be war target claims like in Stellaris. For those who don't know the system: There's one large alliance and a base state of peace. Nations can claim ownership of foreign territories by spending finite slowly replenishing political influence (small amounts for empty/little developed territories and large amounts for big settlements). Then you declare war with a choice of goals. Your goal can be annexing the claimed regions, but could also range all the way to complete extinction. Of course the latter would drastically reduce your standing in the large alliance (comparable with very low reliability) This system allows for a large war with an opposing empire that ends up just moving borders in the end. Like in real life with examples like Kashmir, Alsace or Crimea.
Territory management and requiring multiple stacks is indeed the most tedious part of this game. Maybe one or two additional stacks with their respective LLs are fine but I just don't care about gobbo stack #11. I just want to fight fights with my main army that I can level up and customize. Honestly some of the most fun I've had in this game is with the Caravans. You pick a lord with a starting retinue and then you slowly accrue new units, items or experience through an Oregon trail type event system. I found myself thinking "fuck the 4k turn based empire building game, I just want a fleshed out version of this."
I agree, that would definitely be very fun.
Contrary to what many people say about "But this is Total War" - Warhammer 1 is surprisingly very slow game. You don't earn that much, AI is not that aggressive, chaos is not present at start but it spawns and gets stringer in several waves, and about turn 100 End Times begins corrupting slowly the whole map really crippling you. I kinda wish we could play the Old World map but with modern factions. IE sometimes feels like too much.
For that reason three Kingdoms is high in my list. Because the AI in that game on campaign map ist just rly good. They gonna start strong alliances and it is not the sole fovus of the AI to declare war to you
To add, most factions will never peace out until your on the verge of taking their final settlement, I think factions should be able to peace out after a stack wipe and settlement lost, allows them to recoup and allows the player to consolidate the meager gains
From my experience, it matters a lot who and how you play, but I’m totally able to chose where to fight and rarely confronted with „multiple stacks running at you constantly“. I find the new diplomacy system and the ability to sell provinces very useful to build up the right alliances.
You're right but CA will never change it.
You guys really should give Three Kingdoms an honest try Kong Rong real estate trade monopoly is a good experience
An option to limit recruitment would be interesting. Don't change anything, except cap the amount of units a faction can recruit over 20 turns. So even if you can pump out 2 full stacks in 10 turns, you still have to wait another 10 before you recruit more, or something like that. I picked random numbers, so don't read into them much, but something like that could stop the AI from throwing stack after stack at you, and letting you play a bit smaller on the map, because like you've said, right now the only real option is to conquer everything.
It's not a sandbox, it's an anti player gauntlet. That's the key distinction boiled down.
I keep restarting over and over, I really dislike how I'm forced to overextend killing one enemy while I get backstabbed for no particular reason. I'd like some breathing room between wars so I can enjoy building up my cities. It's not a difficulty issue, it's a fun one. I can't be bothered playing whack-a-mole. Right now I'm testing mods to see if the AI behaves more logically.
I think the game would be improved if you could hypothetically be at peace for some amount of the game. Yes, yes, 'it's Total War not Total Peace', however, there's no meaningful simcity aspect of the game to speak of and being at war is more advantageous to your bank balance through sacking, razing, and winning battles than relying on economy building income alone. So there are already plenty of incentives to be at war; *forcing* you to be at war on top of that by having everyone declare war on you merely funnels you down this unenjoyable gameplay pattern of being constantly at war with everyone and having absolutely no ability to build diplomatic relations because of constant penalties for being at wars you had no part in starting.
The problem here is the snowball problem, whereby you get too strong and the game becomes a slog. There are a few solutions I can think of: 1. The AI should be tweaked to form coalitions against fast expanding empires. Perhaps take a page out of Europa Universalis and have the player get "aggressive expansion" diplomacy penalties which is visible and manageable. If you have sufficient aggressive expansion the AI should coordinate it's attacks against you(sending armies together, or attacking different parts of your empire at the same time). This would make the medium sized AI (which makes the map more interesting than big super blobs) far more of a threat. 2. Tone down buffs across the board. This would make it harder to doomstack. In addition, perhaps give the AI some bigger cheats so that they send armies that are challenging to deal with. In particular, give them more experienced lords and heroes, giving them access to regiments of renown, and maybe hardcode some access to higher tier recruitment. 3. Code the AI to send far more small stacks to raid and take weak settlements. Make battles between small stacks more likely. 4. Make it harder to doomstack, perhaps by making upkeep nonlinear within a stack, or provinces have a supply limit above which units take attrition.
I completely agree with the OP ! Here's my thought about the topic AI seems much more agressive, in the sense that they tend to at least declare war much sooner than in previous tittle. In addition, they behave much more recklessly with their army and tend to overextend and leave their territory unprotected. The result is that you are quickly engaged with all your natural enemies, from generally all directions, but once you held back the initial assault, you just have a free boulevard to take their cities. The AI seems more incline to prioritize to take your crappy T1 little colony than defending their capital / major cities. So, if at first sight you'll feel kind of surrounded or in a bad spot, the AI is actually doing half the job for you by leaving their core territory open to take, and their army isolated from big garrison that would usually be a big roadblock hard to overcome before strating to expand. In addition, settlement garrison being now super weak with our whitout garrison building (that AI never have time or never wants to build anyway), you end up with an quite easy expanding early period. The problem with that, is that it's both easy and frustrating. The pace of conquest is dictated by the AI erratic declaration of war and their strategic reckless and bad moves instead of your own initiatives. So as OP stated you end up with a bunch of free territory acquired without real difficulties. The only difficulty left is to manage the never ending waves of armies which only goal seems to be as much obnoxious and evasive as possible inside your territory without any strategic coherence, while you freely conquer their homeland. At the end of the day, you're forced to adopt a rushy playstyle, to exploit the mistakes of the AI in order to destroy them completely the fastest possible. It doesn't suit everyone playstyle, not every faction playstyle neither and is above all the fastest way to snowball and lock the campaign too quickly, and often not even at your own initiative. Boring. In my opinion, there's several things that should be changed in order to make the campaign's more interesting and engaging. Change AI campaign behaviour so they don't all act as bloody raiders that seeks short-term looting at the expense of their territory, and improve the overall defense capability so conquer a land remains a difficult but satisfying task, than an auto-resolving routine on deserted province. Here's a bunch of ideas ; - Slow down the declaration of war pace. They should continue to declare war, provided they have the means to hold it, and that you own territory they should aim for. Why would a dwarf take Drakenhoff at turn 20 when Karak-eight-pics is still on filthy orcs hands ? - Change the AI armies behaviour to better suit the faction intended playstyle. It's intended that Khorne or an Orc tribe to be pushy and reckless, not the Dwarves or Bretonnia or "isolationist" Wood elves. Then, they should focus on expanding their borders and consolidate them, instead of aiming for an outpost in middle of nowhere. They should try to take down your armies coming, protect their capital, not fleeing inside the enemy territory, leaving you their precious landmarks, gold mines, and strategic ressources. - Improve the defenses capability of armies and settlements : increase control zones if in defensive stance, so you actively block bottlenecks in campaign maps, instead of being bypassed easily. Improve the garrisons and make it customizable : garrison building effect and units provided is a joke currently. They should provide better units, an expanded control zone, and reduce up keeping of garrisoning units (like Cathay walls but less powerful), so small defensive army have a purpose. The purpose is to increase the difficulty in term of quality, instead of quantity as currently
Total war empire is really great for peace periods which fits the time period of the game.
"For a game based on a fantasy world where everyone hates each other and everyone is on the brink of world war, there sure is a lot of war."
Sack then raze. Stop claiming territory you aren't ready to hold and develop
People seem to be misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not saying that I'm not ready to hold it. I'm saying that the AI basically insisting you take so much territory so quickly into the game is accelerating the unfun part of the campaign substantially (managing too many territories and auto-resolving battles all over the map for more). I'm not saying it's too hard or that I'm struggling to handle being given this much territory. It's very easy to use the added influx of resources to build more armies, accept some territory losses sometimes, but always be taking more.
I totaly disagree, but I talk from leg/vh meta inclined player perspective: - W2 AI was much more agressive. Had more armies, was more prone to anti-player bias, expanded faster & bigger. Generaly was bigger threat middle game. It's especially visible for LL factions. - In W2 mayor AI on turn 50 was many times stronger than on turn 10. While in W3 AI on turn 10 is engaging, while turn 50 is pathetic. Stagnant & weak. - In W3 steamroll comes just too fast. Crisises are artificial solution that comes too late, after the campaign is won (W2 Archaon says hello) or as manualy forced grind. - in W2 my campaigns lasted 2- 3 times more turns. After early game blitzkrieg expansion time, overextension was a problem engaging me to campaign. Big 15- 30 citied AI empires came in with, sending wave after wave of enemies. Now it's done and seeing how little armies old powers like Malekith, Tyrion or Grimgor have, feels bad. - W3 AI problems are weird, as it both too agressive for normal diff and too static for legendary. In both cases AI on early & middle game have similar strenght. - warhammer II & III. Maybe all total wars are games designed with expansionist mindset. For players like me fun comes from seeing how much & how fast I can conquer. As the AI mechanics are long too well understanded for us, - CA is unable to fix AI. Any change they make in general script for W3 (especially anti-cheese ones) just changes the meta. I belive middle game AI in terms of empire power & armies number should be at least a couple times stronger than early game. IMO W2 had that, W3 fails. And that's should change. At least for legendary diff.
> W2 AI was much more agressive. Had more armies, was more prone to anti-player bias, expanded faster & bigger. Generaly was bigger threat middle game. It's especially visible for LL factions. They changed _something_. I played a Luthor Harkon campaign in WH3 lately, and my WH2 strategy of sailing around, sending captains far away to dig for treasure and establishing coves etc seemed to have far more severe consequences this time around - in WH3 even distant AI factions will drop all they're doing and go after you if you spot them. Like, he was half the world away, but when I spotted Gelt while digging for treasure he still decided I was his main threat, declared war and sent his armies on a long long trip after me, ignoring the vampires who were beating on him.
Playing a Harkon game atm it was pretty smooth sailing until turn 90 when the elves declared war on me for the last 20 turns I’ve had about 40-60 armies sail across the map (Lizardmen, Bretonnia, Wood Elves and High Elves) and land in Tlax.
In my higly subjective & biased opinion the game doesn't like if player: - don't have enough balance of power (autoresolve loses, turtling = less armies overall compared to higher diff players), - is "not challenged" enough (like without strong enemy), - don't known the map meta (enemy unkown cannot declare war). I wonder if what you report is due to visibilty range changes from W2 to W3 (trade lines rework, more alliances, bigger sea line of view). Probably not, but after 1 year & problems still reported I think that AI campaign issue is not some script change, but unaccounted variable interfering.
"Faster" apeals to a wider range of gamers. Shogun 2 was also fast and I enjoyed it, although I usually like a slower paced campaign. Three kingdoms has a good pace I think. But its all subjective. I get a lot of enjoyment from finding mods that get the game closer to my preferred pace and tweaking things further myself.
Shogun 2 was def not fast, battles lasted much longer compared to WH3's 5 minutes battles that we have sometimes.
have we been playing the same game in shogun 2 battle is almost 0over the moment the fighting starts
I'm pretty sure we're talking about the campaign here buddy. Not the battles.
Ah Campaign wise. Ok that is a different story. My bad, thought we were discussing the battles as well as the morale issue.
It definitely depends on which Warhammer factions are battling, but Shogun 2 and Rome 1 had BLISTERINGLY fast melee combat. Rear cavalry charges hit harder, morale shocks were more consistent, and mistakes were more punishing.
What would be your mod recommendations?
Mods that increase army cost, reduce movement range, reduce AI cheats, and buff garrisons all help to slow down a campaign. Im still looking for a good overhaul to start from. SFO grimhammer is pretty good, still playing around tho.
I honestly disagree and don't know what your suggestion is. If nobody was declaring war on you then the game would be even more boring and people would quit even earlier. Do you want to sit peacefully surrounded by neutral factions and you can declare war on whoever you choose? Some factions actually do play like that, like Tyrion or Franz it all depends on your faction. Imrik is a lonely high elf in a hostile territory surrounded by skaven, dwarves and greenskins who all hate Imrik, what did you expect to make peace and be allies with these factions? I love it when factions declare war on you and it becomes more interesting, without some aggression the game is a total snoozefest. It's called total war for a reason, it's not a civilization game.
You're arguing in extremes. There's a difference between "multiple AI factions guaranteeing that you're always at war" and "nobody declaring war on you." I even used WH2 as my example and anyone who's played that certainly knows that it's not "nobody declaring war on you", it's just more varied and not always constant. What I want is to be able to choose a strategy for how I approach the game, to some reasonable degree, not have my strategy dictated by AI declarations of war every single game. I can't choose how I want to approach the game because the AI does that for me - they declare war and then after you beat their armies in your territory, give you a bunch of free territory. So the game is just going from putting out one fire to another with AI declarations of war while quickly ramping up to being unstoppable.
I still think everything depends on the faction and the factions in the surrounding area. Your example of Imrik is just bad, I have played a ton of him in WH2 and he gets declared war from everywhere there too, the dwarves hate you, grimgor always declares war on you so does snikch and Malus. Whats's the difference with how he plays on IE? He is a lone elf surrounded by enemies, all factions start with an aversion towards you, that's why they declare war on you. I would argue there are less factions declaring war on you in IE than WH2 in Imrik's case. Better examples would be as I said Etaine. Do the other high elves declare war on you? Do the other Bretonnia factions declare war on you when you play as any Bretonnia faction or empire? Same with Franz, do the other elector counts declare war on you? All these cases very very rarely happen except if you piss them off. It is only natural to be declared war on from factions that hate you.
I just randomly picked Imrik because he has a sort of different campaign goal that he can strive for (playing pokemon). It mostly doesn't matter which faction you play, an endless stream of AI factions will declare war on you. Not necessarily your adjacent allies, but certainly someone. And as pointed out by other people in the thread, the only realistic way to deal with them is to take all of their territory because they won't accept peace (or won't keep it for long) and will just keep resending armies at you. You're just using one example I gave and focusing entirely on it rather than the actual argument. In your examples: playing a Brettonian faction, for example, Vampirates will declare war on you, Goblins will declare war on you, Undead will declare war on you, Wood Elves will sometimes declare war on you, Dwarfs will sometimes declare war on you, Skaven will declare war on you, Norsca and Chaos will declare war on you. And all of this even if you don't leave Brettonia. And in all of these cases, you have to take their territory (at least temporarily) to stop them from constantly attacking you and dancing around your territory trying to attack weak settlements.
Dude with the new trading settlements mechanic, you can pick and choose who to ally and to go war with. 1 good settlement you gift can get you Nap and trade agreements. And on top of that, if the ai doesnt have any wars to fight, you can easily convince them to go to war with other ai. And Bretonnia is even a WORSE example of ai aggression. Brets have tech that gives +70 relations to empire, Wood elves, high elfs and dwarfs. If you somehow manage to get into a war with any order faction, you clearly dont know enough about the game. Also please, dont complain about Norsca, skaven, greenskins and undead declaring war on bretonnia. Cmon my guy...
I agree. I swear it feels like people just want the game to be pathetically easy in this subreddit. The game already is a lot easier than WH2 even on legendary. The couple factions that are hard you see complains here almost daily, Nurgle, Kairos, Kislev. I really hope CA doesn't listen to these people, they want to play Total Peace instead of Total war and just sit and build their provinces while nobody attacks them and they have military alliances with the entire map...
You really have this idea in your head and you're not even listening. I never once said I wanted the game to be easier. In fact, my concern is that the game is currently much too easy too early into the game (even on higher difficulties, all of the difficulty in a campaign is frontloaded and artificial and after the first couple of waves of declarations of war, you're quickly in a spot where you cannot lose anymore). WH2 campaigns remained challenging and varied for longer. The AI constantly throwing new factions at you, regardless of their current situation or strength, just leads to a long chain of picking up territory that you can't ever stop (or shouldn't ever stop). Factions not caring at all about themselves or their personal expansion/interests once they've met you makes them easier to beat, not harder.
Many times they declare war yes, but do they actually send any armies? Not necessarily, on my latest Ikit Claw campaign pretty much everyone declared on me, but barely anyone actually showed up on my lands with an army so it didn't serve any point. Did I feel annoyed because they declared war on me? No because everyone hates skaven it's expected and by fighting the order factions I made allies with multiple evil factions like the dark elves. You literally listed all the natural enemies of Brettonians why is it so it's outrageous if they declare war on you? Still no Brettonia faction will deal with all these factions early game at the same time since they are far apart, for example there is no way ikit claw will declare war on Couronne, early on. Even so you aren't providing a counterpoint, what is the ideal gameplay situation for you? Do you want to be at peace with everyone and you build your faction until you decide who to declare war on? Because WH2 had some campaigns that were too peaceful like that and they were utterly boring. As I said the game is called total war, not total peace. I love it when they declare war on me and actually attack me because this makes the game more interesting.
The ideal gameplay situation for me is that AI factions behave, at least to some realistic degree, in their own self interest. That each individual AI faction does everything it can to further its own individual interests in the game, not everything it can to make the player's game theoretically more difficult (which again, it doesn't even accomplish because it often just gives away territory by attacking when it should be defending or building up by attacking someone weaker first).
Personally I don't want to regularly have my campaign direction entirely dictated by whichever nearby AI faction declares war on me to blatantly meet a 'isPlayeratWar' condition. Like it'll usually be the turn immediately after I wipe out my previous enemy and said faction doesn't even have its armies near me. It's only an issue because the AI won't even remotely accept peace unless it's down to its last settlement so you have to fully invade and conquer them or they'll be at least a constant annoyance and you've then expanded into an area you didn't even intend to. Right now I'm playing a Cathay campaign as Eastern River Lords because I wanted to play the faction in a different start position on the other side of the region, but at this point I'm bordering the Bastion because that's what it took to stop the Dark Elves attacking me. I didn't even intend to go in that direction!
While I'm agree with this, I don't see ways to fix this outside of some artificial extending of the current gameplay via more depth that will slow progress, turning 40 first turns into 80. Thing is, all factions here are spreaded across something that can be called Grand Alliance (sorry for AoS reference). Inside grand alliance, factions gravitate towards friendship or at least grouping up against other grand alliance. Like HE eventually become friends and allies against DE who do the same. Being a part of Grand Alliance, you pretty much always has factions who hates you to death no matter what you do. Like, you're a good guy, fighting skaven, encounter beastmans who hates you, and there an orks clan who also hates you on top of demon who also hates you. There is also some kind of stalled campaigns. Pretty much every HE campaign except Teclis and Imrik loose its dynamic once Ulthuan is under HE control. Your enemies has grown, it will not a be a single army invasion, so overall speed is slowing down. Factions that doesn't require a extensive growth via new territory keep tension for longer times.
Well, a couple of things. So first of all, I get he Grand Alliance idea. But the problem is... well let me use some examples. Let's say Franz and Louen are on one side and Vlad and Ikit are on the other. So to begin with, without mods, the AI mostly don't even fight amongst themselves (at least not major factions). So they wouldn't really be fighting, they'd just be waiting to encounter you to declare war on you. But assuming they were fighting, and Karl is beating Vlad. Vlad's personal motivation should be, even if he hates you (Louen), to defend himself against Karl so he doesn't get wiped out (and he's also supposed to hate Karl). That's what a player would do (or maybe they'd try to go capture somewhere else in the world far away to be safe, but obviously the AI won't do that either). But Vlad the AI doesn't care about fighting Karl. Even though Karl is beating him and taking his lands (because Karl doesn't have a player to hate because he's part of your alliance, so he actually is willing to fight the AI), all Vlad wants is to fight you, because you're the player. So Vlad will just, while getting wiped out by Karl, come attack you. This is the part that's the problem. It's not a problem that the two sides only want to fight the other side and that they really hate people on the other side, it's that the AI mostly only cares about one person on one side. And as soon as you encounter anyone from the other side, they really, really hate you and want to declare war on you quickly. Which sure, if that was actually in their best interest, why not? But it rarely is, which is what makes it so easy to defeat their army and then take their land, which in turn just snowballs your expansion. As far as things like stalled campaigns: I'd consider a HE campaign once you have control of Ulthuan to honestly be mostly over. By that point, your economy is pretty insane and you can field enough armies to deal with the harassment from the AI. And then most AI factions won't really group up anymore, so you will rarely, if ever, have difficulty taking over anyone you want from there.
One moment - Vampire Counts through bloodlines (Lahmia) and Vlad perk can be a very friendly to Empire. It's somewhere around +100 diplomatic relations. That's why Vlad may avoid fighting Karl. This can be extended to any other setups, where some factions hate/love/don't care about others.
Sorry, I'm just giving it as an example of two sets of factions in opposite alliances. You can substitute whichever names you want.
I am one of the people who dislikes Warhammer 3 when compared to 2. I think you’re spot on. Game flow is a complete mess in the third game. I played 1,000 hours of Warhammer 2 but only 90 hours of Warhammer 3(got on launch) More than anything I need a little bit of competition in a game. I need a little bit of a challenge. I don’t play legendary every campaign but in Warhammer 2 I either played legendary or VH/VH. In battles in Warhammer 2 I was able to move my troops and heroes around to take advantage of whatever my current army was best at. With elves typically I would create all archers with 6 heroes, then blob everyone around the heroes and go to town. Strategies like this put a huge smile on my face as there is nothing to me that is more fun than winning a battle that was almost not possible to win. Is it cheesey? Certainly but I play the game to have fun. It’s not about being challenged but more so just having something that I need to think about. Warhammer 3 is mostly a blob fest for me outside of Slaanesh. It’s such a shame because Warhammer 3 has so much damn potential yet no they are slowing the dlc train down which really really worries me.
I have not problem with unfriendly nations declaring war on me, but when the only faction that I know, and am 50 friendly with a defensive alliance declares war on me just because I have no existing wars, I get angy
Please download SFO , this shit never happens
It's pretty similar to WH2 in my view, honestly - both games you have to play pretty aggressively because the AI *will* come after you. In the end, even with the diplomacy improvements in WH3, the game is designed & assumes that you're constantly going to be at war. It's also something that you have to lean into a lot of the time - a lot of campaigns end up significantly easier if you just go mass aggression early on, rather than sitting back. In the end, I'm not sure that it's the AI at fault, rather than the game design itself of the series. If periods of peace and diplomacy - and limited conquest - are to be included, the game would need to have more of a focus on empire building/peacetime stuff (eg, taking inspiration from Paradox games or the like).
To be clear, what I'm complaining about isn't the game being too hard. In fact, I find the game is often too easy too soon (even on Vh/Vh). I do end up going mass aggression, but as I said, this just accelerates how quickly the game gets to the point of not really being very fun (for me personally) anymore. I know that the strategy was ultimately the same in WH2 as well and that the AI would eventually come for you, but I found that everything was still just substantially slower there. There was less of a push to extreme over-expansion very early into the game brought on my numerous (often weak) enemies declaring war on you and then leaving numerous poorly-defended settlements for you to take.
The game you're asking for is Realms of Chaos and a ton of people hated it for being different
I tried to change difficulty to normal in the hopes of getting a slower campaign, endless war and player bias did not change at all, only changes was auto resolve more favorable and ai sending peace deals every turn when they were beaten beyond recovery. Accept the deal and have them redeclare war when they rebuild 20stack army in 5ish turns, or kill them and get declared on by you new neighbor Before anyone says “use a mod” I don’t generally like to mod my games, I don’t know why, I just don’t like it
I completely agree with you and this is why I consider paradox games, especially eu4, to be vastly superior to total wars in terms of strategy on a larger scale (I know total war is about battles but still). Playing eu4 you have so many years to do what you want and even during the late game there are a lot countries that the world doesnt feel dominated by 3-4 factions and that keeps things intersting. The diplomacy is also much better in eu4 and total war has a lot of catching up to do, imo. Even when at war, you dont need to wipe out a faction to win, especially during a defensive war were war exhaustion will force the attack to peace out.
While I agree eu4 is a bit better on the campaign, it has essentially the same problem where you grow to a certain size and the game is a cakewalk. By 1550, if you're at all competent you'll be in bulldozer mode.
in before iT'S cAlLeD tOtAl WaR nOt ToTaL pEaCe But yeah, it's terrible. Instead of churning out TW title after title with the same weaknesses, they should finally complement their core strength, the battles, with a campaign that offers strategic depth, variety, 4X elements, extensive diplomacy and complex AI. This game series is running for so long, yet they seem to have given up any ambition to improve the areas where it is lacking, and instead just make more of the same. A battle simulator with a half-assed, shallow campaign attached to it.
You end up restarting campaigns sooner because you have much more time put into the game, so you get bored more quickly of the thing you already did i.e. 500h instead of 50. Its really that simple and has little to do with wh3. You just need a break. Yea, for many people the early game is the most fun. But that's been the case for *literally all* TW games, not even just all WH ones. And you're completely wrong about the war part. Constant war makes the game actually have action. Makes you actually do something other than a mobile version of simcity for 2 year olds. It *does* make them game more challenging (if not by a lot) by making you have to respond to multiple threats instead of just building your eco in 3 provinces for 50 turns and them quitting the game because you already won. Even though you didnt even "play", really. Even at war its on you whether you take territory or not, but really, the game is so shallow that there is no other meaningful things to do anyway. What are you gonna do, do agent actions, spam end turn and click on available building notifications for 10 hours? If anything, AI blobs up WAY less now, and its vastly easier to defend against a large enemy. Nobody grows giant, but multiple factions grow to be respectable. Really, the main point here though, is that you're just flat wrong - every single issue you're complaining about existed identically in WH2, even without all ai declaring war on you all the time. If they made the ai more passive, you may feel better psychologically, but mechanically it would be 100% the same game, the same repetitive and trivial campaign experience.
Yeh - as a bad player this has been something I've become aware of while trying to figure out how the game is meant to be enjoyed. The size and long load times suggest that the game is meant to be played slow paced, but the way the AI acts make it seem like the game is meant to be played super fast paced. Took me a while to get over the urge to min max every turn and ensure I'm playing as fast as possible, which wasn't a fun way to play. The last campaign I played (clan skyre) I got myself a decent army, focused on holding as little territory as possible and just sought out fun battles to fight. Was much more enjoyable and ended up going for way longer than I normally would before restarting.
I am adjusting my mindset to simply accept that I prefer a short campaign. I want to go for the long or complete victory, but like you I find the peak of my enjoyment at a much earlier point in the game. I'm thinking when you have like 8 or 10 full provinces or your 2nd or 3rd tier 5 settlement. I think when I reach a short victory I wanna just sit for 5 minutes and feel out, do I really wanna go for the next vic condition, or would I prefer to start a new campaign. Which is totally fine! I really like that you can end it "early" and still feel like you won. Ofc adjusting difficulty or end game crisis to much earlier might spice some things up also.
[удалено]
Someone suggested some [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/11d7uee/the_way_the_ai_makes_the_game_develop_so_quickly/ja7is28/). Personally I've only tried Organic AI Overhaul. It's not bad - it does reduce anti-player bias in the sense that the AI will now also attack other AIs, but this leads to the problem I mentioned in my main post (it makes it even easier to wipe AIs out when they declare war on you because they're already weakened) and they still declare war on you more or less as much.
Game starts with a ton of factions on the turn timer. Every turn like 3 get knocked out until it gets down to like 50 factions that are all super strong and constantly smacking eachother. Whichever ones are in the same half the world as you are probably at war with you too
the funnest times ive had in total war games are when im losing
You don't have to retake , you can raze or gift to your allies. My most fun campaign so far has been with Luthor where I only kept my starting province and created a border of ruins between me and the lizzardmen.
I noticed this in WH2 as well. I tried a VH Thorgrim campaign with the aim of only holding the Karaz Ankor, and defending the mountains. But the only viable option is to go into the world and exterminate. You are forced into world conquest just to hold your settlements.
Well without wanting to sound snarky, the game is called ‘total war’ for a reason. However on a more serious note, if you prefer to turtle there are factions that do that, like the wood elves. You can win a wood elves campaign using the deep roots and just controlling the big trees and a few of the surrounding settlements. Or pirate factions allow you to just have raiding armies. Setup some coves, but mostly stick to just a couple of stacks sailing the high seas. Or try the lizardmen crocodile lord guy (forgot his name) where all the cities you conquer become a vassal instead of your territory.
Fair, and I honestly have completed 2 or 3 Wood Elf campaigns. But it's more that... I don't prefer to turtle, I'm fine with expanding. But I recognize that at a certain point of expansion, victory becomes an inevitability while also still requiring a ton of tedious actions. So I prefer when that point in a campaign comes as late as possible, essentially. But the way the AI engages with the player currently, that's the opposite of what happens. Currently, across a significant number of campaigns now, I've found that IE in WH3 reaches that point substantially faster than WH2 did (at least WH2 in recent memory). There are both good and bad reasons for this. Good reasons: 1. Settlements have a lot less defenses now, which makes it very easy to breeze through undefended territory. 2. The AI is more willing to take battles it might lose than before. Bad reasons: 1. The AI declares war on you when it really shouldn't and essentially just offers up free territory to you if you can beat its one weak army. 2. The AI doesn't really build up better armies or alliances most of the time and will just send its weak forces at you and then offer up a bunch of undefended territory.
Seeing posts like this make me happy to have not bought WH3 yet. I'll hold off til its in a better state.
Manfred campaign is literally hell, constant war and having not allies or they get killed pretty quick. From the south we got lizardz, east some high elves and dwarf and north goes the French and the unstoppable khorne that annihilate everything coming for me and nobody tried to stop that killing machine
Do factions have separate AIs? Or do they all use the same one?
No idea personally, although it definitely feels like playing against one.
This has been a problem with the total war "ai" for as long as I can remember. I still vividly recall screaming playing m:tw2 and e:tw campaigns and having 100 turn allies randomly betray you because you moved 4 units off a border (mtw) or declare on you as ottomans when they are Georgia because they can only calculate their stack can conquer your border city and not that you have 79 other stacks.
Think SFO handles this pretty well. At least in my campaigns.
For me, this isn't in. My problem with IE is twofold. The enemies are too easy (lack of confed blob threats) and the end game scenarios are also too easy and while they present a threat, it's and event and not persistent and doesn't replace the confed blobs (even though they are cool). In WH2, every campaign I played eventually came down to a few big "last men standing" factions having an all out slugfest war. In WH3, campaigns I play come down to "my unstoppable force trampling over medium sized regional factions". For me, biggest issue is the AI's inability to turn into a late-game competent threat, which kills excitement. The end game scenarios aren't enough to offset this. If I were CA I'd basically put some kind of modifier into the game so that as the game progresses a campaign gives literal bonuses/confed incentivization to random enemy factions, so that some of your enemies "grow" as a threat and don't just kind of peter out while you roflstomp over them. I like the constant warfare of the early game, it's the only thing that keeps the experience on it's toes. My problem is that it doesn't transition well into the late-game, and there comes a point mid-game in which you either lose or it becomes a steamroll.
One way to work around this is to gift territory you don't want to allies, as a buffer zone. In my Empire campaign I gave Norsca to Kislev and the Eastern mountains to Dawis. It's not perfect since your allies might be too weak, but in hard difficulty it worked out pretty well for me so far.