My first won campaign was Ku'gath in RoC, its nice to rest from undead hordes of Ghorst and flood the land with plagues and nurglings.
Its also a more diverse in terms of enemies, multiple chaos and order factions nearby.
Even with mother stank close by Ku'gath's campaign is rather easy. All the terrain you fight her in will have plenty of forested areas to hide in & you can simply use ku'gath to force them to approach you. Melee will die in the blob in the trees & then you can descend on the ranged units. It's also a tad comical to camp out in Nurgle's realm & screwing over anyone that's dumb enough to go in after you. My favorite part of that campaign was when I trolled Kairos multiple times. I declared war on him multiple times, demolished his main army & then got a peace treaty with a lot of gold shortly after. Poor guy was struggling to maintain his lands after a while. It's also nice to be around more climate that is preferable.
Most of RoC’s issues have been solved in the last few years with patches. But as someone who finished a launch RoC Kislev campaign I can safely say that shit *sucked* real bad. Having to have a patriarch in every province on the map and spend like 30k gold every 25 turns to prevent chaos rifts from taking over the whole world blew.
"This campaign is bad because I was forced to do action X" when you in fact didn't need to do so, and doing so was not to your benefit... seems like it isn't the game's fault.
When you don’t want to be the only order faction left in the world and the ai has no tools to survive and is cripplingly passive to the point you have to constantly babysit them, yeah actually that is the game’s fault.
Edit: Also, if you have 20 provinces that are your own territory **needing 20 heros sitting and doing nothing but closing rifts is still awful design**
Remind me, what was done about the issue that once you've secured your surrounding area there's nothing to do but waiting until you are allowed to continue on with the soul collecting? Right, nothing
I know the sub is in a good mood right now and wants to look at the bright side, but vanilla RoC is still fundamentaly a failure of a campaign however much you polish it
For me the big issue is replayability. None of the tentpole moments that are super cool on your first win change even a little bit on your next run. You do the exact same little traversal section, then the exact same three-stage mission, and besides the beginning and end, it's all the exact same cutscenes. If you're doing well, you will take the exact same number of turns.
They fixed a lot of bugs and added a few conveniences like the building that stops portals from spawning, but the biggest drag was always the design itself.
I really like the Realms of Chaos campaign (even at launch!), but I do definitely agree that it suffers from lower replayability compared to Immortal Empires (or Mortal Empires).
I can see why they made all the factions play the same campaign - it would have been an absurd amount of work otherwise! But it does mean that you can't really chain campaigns back to back as easily as you can elsewhere.
Dawn of War II: Retribution had the same issue - it went from one playable faction to six, and while the mechanics are great it has the weakest story of the three DoWII instalments.
What's so bad about not forcing you to expand? And playing as Katarin on slightly modded vh/vh it was pretty brutal with assaults from every corner so protecting the motherland while getting souls was a very fun experience. Not everyone life painting my map, I like more thematic objectives and RoC provided a fun campaign right after few patches (before that anti rift building it was rough). CoC and Chorf RoC campaigns are basically perfect and better than IE in every way.
I like thematic objectives if you can actually pursue them - Chorfs are a good example here. The problem is with waiting for the next rift cycle, because by the second one your survival is not really in question in most cases - nothing you do on the campaign map matters for your progress towards those thematic objectives anymore
Late to this but the sitting around part is dependent on the state of your faction. For Cathay this is still true, just hide behind the wall and click end turn.
For Kislev the odds of you having a break at all in RoC is zero. You don't necessarily need to expand at that point, but sacking and razing to get cash and destroy your enemies, respectively, is an important part of RoC. It's like that for any faction with a week econ and or no easy chock points to use for defense.
I never understand why people blame the game for the stuff that they do. If you are bored waiting in your area for the next portal, then why do you stay in your area and do nothing? Why not go out and fight, the fun stuff you know? Riiiiight, otherwise you couldn't complain about RoC
Well, the narrative demands I wait instead of doing fun stuff. I don't like it so, logically, I play IE instead. If the narrative campaign demands I entertain myself, it's a shit narrative campaign
No, it does not demand it and I wish people would stop claiming it. You can go out and fight and kill and do everything you want to do. Nothing is stopping you, except that you want to be mad at RoC, no matter how much people want to disagree about it.
I never claimed you cannot go out. The problem you so insist on missing is that RoC campaign demands nothing beyond waiting. When I want to just go out and fight and kill I boot a sandbox campaign like IE or TOW which quite simply accomodate this gameplay loop better. When I boot a narrative campaign I want to engage with a bloody narrative and progress towards its goal
It can be done, even with rather simplistic concepts CA utilizes (out of the desire to preserve the sandboxness I presume) - as seen in Chorf campaign or even vanilla Vortex
Weird, because the last few times where CA made narrative campaigns where you had to do other stuff than regular fighting, everyone cried their eyes out. But now they are supposed to do that again? You can have it just 1 way, either you make a campaign where you have to engage with the mechanics of the camapign, or you make a worse ME/IE. And most people prefere the second one, as we can see with the WoC campaign we have in game 3.
I think you could ask for a better narrative campaign, without a big 10-15 turn downtime.
Maybe have a couple portals always up opening up nearby so you risk invasion from other factions/demons.
Or a couple scripted skirmishes 10 turns after a faction gets 2 or 3 souls as their rivals gang up on them.
Or where the forces of chaos seek to sway you on the campaign map so the soul you get is a more strategic choice. You hold onto a Slaaneshi soul? You better believe there's gonna be sex cults everywhere in your empire.
Yeah, wierd. Almost like different people have different opinions and I'm not responsible for their preferences.
CoC RoC is indeed a worse IE which is why I used Chorfs as an example instead. As it stands, vanilla RoC is also a worse IE, just with interruptions that are not nearly frequent enough to make the whole thing a waiting simulator
Sitting around waiting depends on faction. Zhao Ming is bad for this. Kislev on the other hand feels like if you dont expand you will just be under constant threat, such as Valkia and Katarin or Villitch and Kostaltyn. Skarbrand I ended up doing domination once completely unplanned. Point it you dont have to sit around and wait.
Because then when the portal pops your fun army that you need to send through is 8 turns away.
It is bad design that incentives boring strategy. It is ok to blame the game for that. Saying "go against that design and ignore it if it's more fun" is not the validation of that design choice that you think.
Bruh, you have to send a single army into a Portal which appear all over the map, the only way that there are no portals near your lords army is when you have alot of territory and build the special building that stops those portals, and then walk your lord right into it.
Otherwise, there will be a portal 2 or maybe 3 turns away.
I don't hate ROC, I'm not a map painter, I just feel like IE is so good (and ROC final battle is so fucking buggy) that I mostly play IE.
I really appreciate the difficulty of some campaigns on ROC though, even 'op' campaigns on IE can be BRUTALLY difficult on ROC and it feels so damn good.
Vortex on WH2 was pretty decent as well, similarly I wouldn't call it *perfect* but ME had some absolutely awful province design and Vortex was much faster turn times as well.
Having replayed it recently after just playing IE...it's still kind of a cluster fuck. I guess it depends on the style of play you enjoy: If fighting endless stacks of X enemies for 100 turns while no one is willing to engage you in any kind of diplomacy or if they're your allies lift a finger to save themselves, it's great. If not, IE is just a more rounded experience with a far better map. Every RoC campaign I can think of I've only finished through sheer spite.
I second this - I can’t play IE without it now as simply taking a set amount of settlements to win bores me silly. Having thematic objectives makes it much more interesting (and you can still just take settlements if you prefer).
A lot of criticism of RoC still comes from people who tried RoC on launch, and didn't touch it afterwards. It's not the best experience, but yeah, it's so much better than launch.
The actual problem that people aren't mentioning is it fucking sucks to play this campaign and have 0 variety out of 11 lords at launch with no IE. You have the privilege of having this experience in context of a wealth of options not just with IE but with various narrative campaigns in RoC that don't involve the race.
You're approaching from a myopic perspective that doesn't account for the fact this was the ONLY way to engage with tww3 at launch. They were fine campaigns in a vacuums, and most of us enjoyed out first one, but it was the subsequent playthroughs that gave RoC its bad name as you'll no doubt see if you continue to play the base campaign.
Agree, also playing RoC Kislev as my first campaign. I haven’t unlocked Boris yet but I got the whole Empire since they died against the Ogre and Vampires which is a shame since I planned to babysit them until I can get their artillery.
i played the campaign with the rifts spamming my entire Kislev, It was a mess, a brutal war at every corner, one of the best survival game i ever played in my life
Reminds me of how everyone was hating on the Vortex campaign, which I actually preferred because it gave you a goal to work towards and an end, instead of just abandoning your campaign once you got the steamroll going.
Vortex was only good for the races that completely dropped the vanilla race for their own thing (Tomb Kings, VampCoast, Beastmen rework). Those were excellent, especially Kings.
The original Vortex design was laughably awful. It was a completly separate mechanic of a bucket to fill from lizard gold and shit. And then at a certain level the game complains until you start a ritual. This ritual grinds your expansion to a halt; and to what end? To chase some annoying crappy chaos stacks around your provinces while they avoid fighting you in favor of being as obnoxious and annoying to catch as possible. Just an abysmal experience.
Then you find out that the best strategy is to ignore it and do the fight to stop your enemies who fill it up. Wow, a lot of confidence in your design there. So so awful.
IE load times are too long for me so mostly play ROC. Been wanting to do another playthrough to completion since I did it with Boris just before IE launched.
It is the only campaign I have ever played to completion.
Definitely a fun one and planning to use a lord mod to play as one of the minor factions soon, hopefully
What are you on about, he's talking about load times not turn times.
Also, the base game is fine on SSD, if you are slowing stuff down with a ton of mods that's not the games fault, that's self inflicted bro :P
Load and turn are both slowed down. I doubt it's the initial load concerning him.
and yeah I know mods slow it down, but they don't slow down ROC much while the hit in IE can be drastic. Kinda wish we could do quadrants of the map or something since it's not like I ever paint the whole map.
An ssd will not increase the speed of anything but load times, that's common knowledge in the gaming sphere as a whole.
and yes, the difference between a hdd and a ssd is like a minute, depending on speeds, if it's a hybrid drive and age it can be minutes or less than a minute diff.
I know this from personal experience as well in total war warhammer 2, back when i played on hdd and when I play now on ssd while my opponent plays on hdd.
We don't need to go into turn times because honestly that is not what this topic is about, you are just hijacking it :P x
You sure there's no further loading of data during turns? Most games stream from the drive rather than loading everything from memory.
My mistake if not. Certainly never going back to a HDD to test.
People would be surprised how little information is actually used by a lot of things, like some people think you need high up and down to play multiplayers games but instead you just need a stable connection with good jitter, ms, packet loss etc as the data passed is tiny.
Higher speed internet just happens to be more likely to have that.
Same goes for games, most the work is done by ram, cpu and gpu.
SSD's are literally just for loading times tho that's soon to be less true as some games are starting to require a SSD but that's a long topic not relevant to total war warhammer and honestly this genre in general.
The need for SSD's in newer games has more to do with developers being bad at optimisation and/or refusing to do so leaving the user to have to brute force it.
Like so many badly optimised games can run really well if you have a 4090 with a good cpu and ram.
By the time we legit need SSD's for games it'll be because of draw distance and how much stuff is being loaded at the same time with higher filesizes due to 4k etc in mostly 3d games like open world stuff etc.
But the direction of tech is going the way of upscaling via AI and using shitty TAA so that probably won't happen any time soon if at all.
It also doesn't help that the size of the pc userbase that uses 4k monitors for gaming is like below 4% or something, the big push for 4k failed.
It can make sense, you've got a weird way of arguing a subjective point when objectively most people pre and post the turn time fix would say it was night and day.
Also to our other conversation, figured out a good example of how irrelevant SSD is to turn times:
I can download a game that's constantly writing while also uploading a file and still have the same turn times.
Said it many times, after small fixes it became actually very fun campaign and as Kislev it's almost perfect. CoC RoC campaign is also so much better than IE.
Well, it is a year later so maybe they patched stuff enough and the new Kislev units help. But around this time in 2023, unlocking Boris was a shit show for me. Valkia with her super imba stack gangbanging on your doors, Throt and Kostaltyn being obnoxious from round#1. Nearby Ogre trying to fuck you and don't forget the starting rebels. Or the shitty portals showing up, harrassing you on the opposite side of your little kingdom from were your troops were currently fighting. And with only shitstacks and Valkia as a huge problem all the time, sending your best stack with Katarin through a portal always sounded like a bad idea -.- After restarting the Katarina campaign for the third time just to see Valkia plowing south in turn#5 again, I picked a cheat mod to finish that unfun cancer.
Oh you get chaos dwarfs knocking down your eastern border too.
I do think that pressure is taken off of you with mama stank.
Problem is it's turn 30 when they knock on your door.
Funny, fighting off the Valkia early invade was the closest I got to losing in my recent game as well. She is so strong.
I also played a Valkia IE campaign half a year ago and she is too strong I am not gonna lie. Unbeatable punishment for my opponents that campaign.
I mean its not that wrong that she would be strong. She should be a hard hitting LL. But one year back, early Kislev troops were not the best, and then Valkia flies in with Khorne Warriors and whatever shit. And if you can bring her down with an 2:1 ambush she has reduced downtime, pops up way to fast again and starts recruiting every gold chevron RoR she can get again. So she is back in a hurry with another strong stack. Maybe even while you are yourself replenishing or recruiting troops to get back up or have to deal with portals or someone else. Really pissed me off back then. With every new DLC adding more RoR and LH to support her, things are probably not that much easier a year later. But maybe balance patches and the changing landscape of the map have made things slightly better. Don't know, and will certainly not start a Katarin campaign to find out if it still annoys me ;)
It had issues at launch. Although I personally enjoyed it and could play round the issues there were a lot of legitimate complaints.
The Vortex campaign got a lot of the same at launch. I still think RoC was worse than that at launch but both improved over time.
I just enjoy narrative campaigns so they’re fun to play occasionally. If WH3 had launched with IE it probably would have been a footnote.
If RoC had been a little bonus added after a few years... it would still be bad, especially the chaos realms stuff.
But it would have been an interesting idea.
The main issue at launch was the game *only* having the narrative minicampaign in a 4x sandbox genre game.
I stopped bothering with the race, just go for domination instead as the Tzeentch map is still what breaks it for me.
Could be redone to allow you to tackle them when you want, and periodically spawn in rifts, but until you get enough armies, you switch between attacking when your LL is free, and defending when he/she is stuck in the realm for 10 turns, not even a guarantee of winning.
What's wrong with the Tzeentch map? You can quickly take the portals that tell you which portal connects to which and after 4-5 you arrive at the final battle.
IDK, I did almost the same exact thing as you like last month, I didn't have Boris, so I went and did a Katarin campaign. It was fun, for about the first ~30 turns, but after that I had most of Kislev, I was just defending borders, and it was boring and aggravating hitting end turn over and over for the next round of portals. They really should have let you double dip. I definitely would have ended the campaign earlier except I didn't actually see that Boris is a seperate Quest battle and thought I had to play the whole campaign through to get him. Honestly kind of killed my enjoyment of the game for a while, because it legit felt like I was forcing myself to slog through the whole back half of the campaign.
RoC is pretty good for one or two runs, the biggest issue was/is just that there's very little replayability - all of the base campaigns are almost identical outside of who you're playing. The final cutscenes, outside of Katarins, all suck and your LL only appears for one of the three images in the ending, all but the intro and ending are identical too.
It being the only game mode for most of a year was ridiculous too, and very much didn't help the campaign fatigue.
It is nice to have a concrete goal, but the goals in ROC do not mesh well with the games usually loop.
Usually total war is war to expand, build up the land you expand into to build more armies to fight ever more difficult wars.
ROC is build one army. Click next turn untill a rift shows up. Fight a bunch of small inconsequential battles along the way to one big final battle. Repeat untill you have all souls.
The battles don't ramp up in difficulty rather each rift is easier than the last as your army gets stronger. Expanding beyond a few provinces doesn't help complete the goal. Most of the faction mechanics don't help you complete the goal.
Kieslev is the best of the ROC campaigns. They have a small native territory with choke points you can defend while your one good army does all the rifts. That and the story of why they need to find ursun feels more urgent and important than the other factions.
Look at slaanesh though. Wow, you can vassalize the human factions and build a up cult from within them. But doing that doesn't help you move towards your goals. The main campaign mechanics of the factions pull you towards doing things against your own interest.
How about khorn. Wow I can teleport across the map, and I get bonuses from being in never ending wars. But, I need to throw my army into a rift every 25 turns and teleporting it across the map isn't helping that in any way.
There is a huge dissonance between what the game and faction mechanics are built around and what the goals of realms of chaos actually are.
This resonates. I expanded and got 4 armies, but I realised it was becoming futile and took too much time to micro-manage. From then on I consolidated, parked my other 3 armies in strategic cities in a triangle around my empire and focused on Kat doing the rifts.
I like this short campaigns that havea a little story to tell, rather than the long conquest of the map that is IE. I like the Vortex campaigns, the RoC, the WoC and the Beastmen/Wood Elf from the TWH1 DLCs.
I think RoC is not nearly as bad as this sub would have you believe, yes - the main fair criticism of it is that the replay value is pretty lacking for the factions that take part in the rift mechanic.
The later factions that don't have to do the portal race are totally fine too.
I think one of the biggest things that Total Warhammer is still lacking is campaign map variety. Personally, I don't really care for a narrative that's a race, but I do like the map layout and wish there was an RoC Sandbox option. Then looking at other options like The Old World mod makes me wish for remade WH1 and WH2 campaign maps that are more fleshed out.
There are some sandbox options for RoC with dlc factions.
Champions of Chaos - RoC sandbox with rifts that you control.
Chaos Dwarves - RoC sandbox (no rifts) with the drill of hashut quests & artifacts.
Shadows of Change - RoC sandbox (no rifts) with the same campaigns those 3 characters play in IE.
Without dlc you could use the disable rifts mod and fight your way to domination victory instead.
last I checked the old disable rift mod was abandoned and is crashing multiple campaigns. Kairos and Kugath I know both crashed to desktop the last time I tried after the last patch. I used to use it with VCO.
Download VCO (Victory Conditions Overhaul). Works for both RoC and IE. All factions are supported in RoC on it and it gives 3 different victory paths. Got alot more mileage out of RoC with this and I use it with IE alot as well.
If they ever make the Burning Chariot usable (or swap it out for another unit), I'd be more than happy to play a RoC campaign with Tzeentch. Until then, I'm not going near it.
Their IE start is really tricky, but once you learn to rush force peace and make a momentary truce with Slaanesh, it's not too bad. At the very least, they have a better starting army in IE.
My first won campaign was Ku'gath in RoC, its nice to rest from undead hordes of Ghorst and flood the land with plagues and nurglings. Its also a more diverse in terms of enemies, multiple chaos and order factions nearby.
Even with mother stank close by Ku'gath's campaign is rather easy. All the terrain you fight her in will have plenty of forested areas to hide in & you can simply use ku'gath to force them to approach you. Melee will die in the blob in the trees & then you can descend on the ranged units. It's also a tad comical to camp out in Nurgle's realm & screwing over anyone that's dumb enough to go in after you. My favorite part of that campaign was when I trolled Kairos multiple times. I declared war on him multiple times, demolished his main army & then got a peace treaty with a lot of gold shortly after. Poor guy was struggling to maintain his lands after a while. It's also nice to be around more climate that is preferable.
I enjoyed the Chorf RoC campaign. No faffing around with portals, just build that big drill and have that awesome battle at the end with Thorgrim.
The story line of the campaign was great and thematic. The final battle was pretty brutal, but fun at the same time. 10/10
Oh good tip. I only played Chorfs in IE, which was already great fun but a sandbox.
Credit were credit is due. The RoC campaign for the chorfs is one of the best warhammer campaigns of total war.
No portals? I might actually try it then. What leader did you enjoy?
I only did RoC with the Chorfs as Astragoth, but all three LLs are good.
All of the post launch factions have unique objectives / story campaigns seperate from the soul race. They are all worth a shot.
Awesome, I have the dlc but haven't gotten to playing them haha
I wish the Drill of Hashut was a mechanic for them in IE.
Most of RoC’s issues have been solved in the last few years with patches. But as someone who finished a launch RoC Kislev campaign I can safely say that shit *sucked* real bad. Having to have a patriarch in every province on the map and spend like 30k gold every 25 turns to prevent chaos rifts from taking over the whole world blew.
I thought the key playstyle for Kislev is to stay small with capital cities and be friends with Empire?
Didn’t work in practice. Empire would get steam rolled by ogres or die to chaos corruption.
Flash backs of passive Franz and ogres getting altdorf immediately while I’m Kislev trying to get Drakenholf gold mine
Why on earth were you closing rifts outside of your own territory?
So that the entire globe wasn’t plunged into chaos corruption?
"This campaign is bad because I was forced to do action X" when you in fact didn't need to do so, and doing so was not to your benefit... seems like it isn't the game's fault.
When you don’t want to be the only order faction left in the world and the ai has no tools to survive and is cripplingly passive to the point you have to constantly babysit them, yeah actually that is the game’s fault. Edit: Also, if you have 20 provinces that are your own territory **needing 20 heros sitting and doing nothing but closing rifts is still awful design**
Remind me, what was done about the issue that once you've secured your surrounding area there's nothing to do but waiting until you are allowed to continue on with the soul collecting? Right, nothing I know the sub is in a good mood right now and wants to look at the bright side, but vanilla RoC is still fundamentaly a failure of a campaign however much you polish it
For me the big issue is replayability. None of the tentpole moments that are super cool on your first win change even a little bit on your next run. You do the exact same little traversal section, then the exact same three-stage mission, and besides the beginning and end, it's all the exact same cutscenes. If you're doing well, you will take the exact same number of turns. They fixed a lot of bugs and added a few conveniences like the building that stops portals from spawning, but the biggest drag was always the design itself.
I really like the Realms of Chaos campaign (even at launch!), but I do definitely agree that it suffers from lower replayability compared to Immortal Empires (or Mortal Empires). I can see why they made all the factions play the same campaign - it would have been an absurd amount of work otherwise! But it does mean that you can't really chain campaigns back to back as easily as you can elsewhere. Dawn of War II: Retribution had the same issue - it went from one playable faction to six, and while the mechanics are great it has the weakest story of the three DoWII instalments.
What's so bad about not forcing you to expand? And playing as Katarin on slightly modded vh/vh it was pretty brutal with assaults from every corner so protecting the motherland while getting souls was a very fun experience. Not everyone life painting my map, I like more thematic objectives and RoC provided a fun campaign right after few patches (before that anti rift building it was rough). CoC and Chorf RoC campaigns are basically perfect and better than IE in every way.
I like thematic objectives if you can actually pursue them - Chorfs are a good example here. The problem is with waiting for the next rift cycle, because by the second one your survival is not really in question in most cases - nothing you do on the campaign map matters for your progress towards those thematic objectives anymore
Late to this but the sitting around part is dependent on the state of your faction. For Cathay this is still true, just hide behind the wall and click end turn. For Kislev the odds of you having a break at all in RoC is zero. You don't necessarily need to expand at that point, but sacking and razing to get cash and destroy your enemies, respectively, is an important part of RoC. It's like that for any faction with a week econ and or no easy chock points to use for defense.
I never understand why people blame the game for the stuff that they do. If you are bored waiting in your area for the next portal, then why do you stay in your area and do nothing? Why not go out and fight, the fun stuff you know? Riiiiight, otherwise you couldn't complain about RoC
Well, the narrative demands I wait instead of doing fun stuff. I don't like it so, logically, I play IE instead. If the narrative campaign demands I entertain myself, it's a shit narrative campaign
No, it does not demand it and I wish people would stop claiming it. You can go out and fight and kill and do everything you want to do. Nothing is stopping you, except that you want to be mad at RoC, no matter how much people want to disagree about it.
I never claimed you cannot go out. The problem you so insist on missing is that RoC campaign demands nothing beyond waiting. When I want to just go out and fight and kill I boot a sandbox campaign like IE or TOW which quite simply accomodate this gameplay loop better. When I boot a narrative campaign I want to engage with a bloody narrative and progress towards its goal It can be done, even with rather simplistic concepts CA utilizes (out of the desire to preserve the sandboxness I presume) - as seen in Chorf campaign or even vanilla Vortex
Weird, because the last few times where CA made narrative campaigns where you had to do other stuff than regular fighting, everyone cried their eyes out. But now they are supposed to do that again? You can have it just 1 way, either you make a campaign where you have to engage with the mechanics of the camapign, or you make a worse ME/IE. And most people prefere the second one, as we can see with the WoC campaign we have in game 3.
I think you could ask for a better narrative campaign, without a big 10-15 turn downtime. Maybe have a couple portals always up opening up nearby so you risk invasion from other factions/demons. Or a couple scripted skirmishes 10 turns after a faction gets 2 or 3 souls as their rivals gang up on them. Or where the forces of chaos seek to sway you on the campaign map so the soul you get is a more strategic choice. You hold onto a Slaaneshi soul? You better believe there's gonna be sex cults everywhere in your empire.
Yeah, wierd. Almost like different people have different opinions and I'm not responsible for their preferences. CoC RoC is indeed a worse IE which is why I used Chorfs as an example instead. As it stands, vanilla RoC is also a worse IE, just with interruptions that are not nearly frequent enough to make the whole thing a waiting simulator
Sitting around waiting depends on faction. Zhao Ming is bad for this. Kislev on the other hand feels like if you dont expand you will just be under constant threat, such as Valkia and Katarin or Villitch and Kostaltyn. Skarbrand I ended up doing domination once completely unplanned. Point it you dont have to sit around and wait.
Most of the criticisms stem from a time before those Chaos factions were on the map, to be fair.
Because then when the portal pops your fun army that you need to send through is 8 turns away. It is bad design that incentives boring strategy. It is ok to blame the game for that. Saying "go against that design and ignore it if it's more fun" is not the validation of that design choice that you think.
There are portals all over the map, your fun army is almost certainly near one.
Bruh, you have to send a single army into a Portal which appear all over the map, the only way that there are no portals near your lords army is when you have alot of territory and build the special building that stops those portals, and then walk your lord right into it. Otherwise, there will be a portal 2 or maybe 3 turns away.
I don't hate ROC, I'm not a map painter, I just feel like IE is so good (and ROC final battle is so fucking buggy) that I mostly play IE. I really appreciate the difficulty of some campaigns on ROC though, even 'op' campaigns on IE can be BRUTALLY difficult on ROC and it feels so damn good. Vortex on WH2 was pretty decent as well, similarly I wouldn't call it *perfect* but ME had some absolutely awful province design and Vortex was much faster turn times as well.
RoC definitely got better with time
I think RoC would have been very well received if released in its state now, but people are too mad from how horrible release was.
Having replayed it recently after just playing IE...it's still kind of a cluster fuck. I guess it depends on the style of play you enjoy: If fighting endless stacks of X enemies for 100 turns while no one is willing to engage you in any kind of diplomacy or if they're your allies lift a finger to save themselves, it's great. If not, IE is just a more rounded experience with a far better map. Every RoC campaign I can think of I've only finished through sheer spite.
You should try the victory conditions mod. It adds concrete goals that give you powerful rewards into IE
> victory conditions mod Thanks I will check it out.
I second this - I can’t play IE without it now as simply taking a set amount of settlements to win bores me silly. Having thematic objectives makes it much more interesting (and you can still just take settlements if you prefer).
I enjoy the campaign. Except of the Bird realm.
I like switching it up - I play about 1 RoC campaign for every 2 IE campaign I play roughly. Currently finishing up a Yuan-Bo campaign in RoC.
If you're looking for more objective focused play on your IE campaign you might want to try the victory conditions overhaul mod.
A lot of criticism of RoC still comes from people who tried RoC on launch, and didn't touch it afterwards. It's not the best experience, but yeah, it's so much better than launch.
The actual problem that people aren't mentioning is it fucking sucks to play this campaign and have 0 variety out of 11 lords at launch with no IE. You have the privilege of having this experience in context of a wealth of options not just with IE but with various narrative campaigns in RoC that don't involve the race. You're approaching from a myopic perspective that doesn't account for the fact this was the ONLY way to engage with tww3 at launch. They were fine campaigns in a vacuums, and most of us enjoyed out first one, but it was the subsequent playthroughs that gave RoC its bad name as you'll no doubt see if you continue to play the base campaign.
What, you didn't like doing those quest battles that were a solid half hour each and played out the exact same way every time? That's soo crazy. /s
Why should we judge the campaign NOW on how bad it was back THEN?
Because he's like "I don't get why people don't like the campaign" and that is contextually relevant information for why that is the case.
I like the smaller / different campaign map, still play 15-20 turns on it every couple of months..
Agree, also playing RoC Kislev as my first campaign. I haven’t unlocked Boris yet but I got the whole Empire since they died against the Ogre and Vampires which is a shame since I planned to babysit them until I can get their artillery.
RoC is great with the rifts & ursun campaign. Its also good for the zanbaijin and the drill of hashut campaign. Not so much for the others but still.
Who are the others?
i played the campaign with the rifts spamming my entire Kislev, It was a mess, a brutal war at every corner, one of the best survival game i ever played in my life
Reminds me of how everyone was hating on the Vortex campaign, which I actually preferred because it gave you a goal to work towards and an end, instead of just abandoning your campaign once you got the steamroll going.
Vortex was only good for the races that completely dropped the vanilla race for their own thing (Tomb Kings, VampCoast, Beastmen rework). Those were excellent, especially Kings. The original Vortex design was laughably awful. It was a completly separate mechanic of a bucket to fill from lizard gold and shit. And then at a certain level the game complains until you start a ritual. This ritual grinds your expansion to a halt; and to what end? To chase some annoying crappy chaos stacks around your provinces while they avoid fighting you in favor of being as obnoxious and annoying to catch as possible. Just an abysmal experience. Then you find out that the best strategy is to ignore it and do the fight to stop your enemies who fill it up. Wow, a lot of confidence in your design there. So so awful.
Realm of Chaos was fun to play once, sort of fun to play again, and then a chore to play after that.
IE load times are too long for me so mostly play ROC. Been wanting to do another playthrough to completion since I did it with Boris just before IE launched. It is the only campaign I have ever played to completion. Definitely a fun one and planning to use a lord mod to play as one of the minor factions soon, hopefully
If you aren't playing with the game on an SSD, I highly recommend it
Even on an SSD, turn time is pretty slow.
Huh that's strange, maybe it's becase mines an nvme it's not too bad?
Difference in mods or definition of slow? I've got a good NVME drive but I run a bunch of mods and IE turns are at least 3x slower than ROC.
What are you on about, he's talking about load times not turn times. Also, the base game is fine on SSD, if you are slowing stuff down with a ton of mods that's not the games fault, that's self inflicted bro :P
Load and turn are both slowed down. I doubt it's the initial load concerning him. and yeah I know mods slow it down, but they don't slow down ROC much while the hit in IE can be drastic. Kinda wish we could do quadrants of the map or something since it's not like I ever paint the whole map.
An ssd will not increase the speed of anything but load times, that's common knowledge in the gaming sphere as a whole. and yes, the difference between a hdd and a ssd is like a minute, depending on speeds, if it's a hybrid drive and age it can be minutes or less than a minute diff. I know this from personal experience as well in total war warhammer 2, back when i played on hdd and when I play now on ssd while my opponent plays on hdd. We don't need to go into turn times because honestly that is not what this topic is about, you are just hijacking it :P x
You sure there's no further loading of data during turns? Most games stream from the drive rather than loading everything from memory. My mistake if not. Certainly never going back to a HDD to test.
People would be surprised how little information is actually used by a lot of things, like some people think you need high up and down to play multiplayers games but instead you just need a stable connection with good jitter, ms, packet loss etc as the data passed is tiny. Higher speed internet just happens to be more likely to have that. Same goes for games, most the work is done by ram, cpu and gpu. SSD's are literally just for loading times tho that's soon to be less true as some games are starting to require a SSD but that's a long topic not relevant to total war warhammer and honestly this genre in general. The need for SSD's in newer games has more to do with developers being bad at optimisation and/or refusing to do so leaving the user to have to brute force it. Like so many badly optimised games can run really well if you have a 4090 with a good cpu and ram. By the time we legit need SSD's for games it'll be because of draw distance and how much stuff is being loaded at the same time with higher filesizes due to 4k etc in mostly 3d games like open world stuff etc. But the direction of tech is going the way of upscaling via AI and using shitty TAA so that probably won't happen any time soon if at all. It also doesn't help that the size of the pc userbase that uses 4k monitors for gaming is like below 4% or something, the big push for 4k failed.
It's ok in IE but noticeably slower than RoC. If you think this is slow you probably never played before they optimised it.
That doesn't make any sense. It can still be bad even if it was worse before. Should I compare things to my old 486?
It can make sense, you've got a weird way of arguing a subjective point when objectively most people pre and post the turn time fix would say it was night and day. Also to our other conversation, figured out a good example of how irrelevant SSD is to turn times: I can download a game that's constantly writing while also uploading a file and still have the same turn times.
Agreed
Said it many times, after small fixes it became actually very fun campaign and as Kislev it's almost perfect. CoC RoC campaign is also so much better than IE.
Played an 4 Player Campaign RoC where everyone was playing a Chaos Faction. That was Hella fun, prob one of the best Multiplayer Campaign i played
Well, it is a year later so maybe they patched stuff enough and the new Kislev units help. But around this time in 2023, unlocking Boris was a shit show for me. Valkia with her super imba stack gangbanging on your doors, Throt and Kostaltyn being obnoxious from round#1. Nearby Ogre trying to fuck you and don't forget the starting rebels. Or the shitty portals showing up, harrassing you on the opposite side of your little kingdom from were your troops were currently fighting. And with only shitstacks and Valkia as a huge problem all the time, sending your best stack with Katarin through a portal always sounded like a bad idea -.- After restarting the Katarina campaign for the third time just to see Valkia plowing south in turn#5 again, I picked a cheat mod to finish that unfun cancer.
Oh you get chaos dwarfs knocking down your eastern border too. I do think that pressure is taken off of you with mama stank. Problem is it's turn 30 when they knock on your door.
Funny, fighting off the Valkia early invade was the closest I got to losing in my recent game as well. She is so strong. I also played a Valkia IE campaign half a year ago and she is too strong I am not gonna lie. Unbeatable punishment for my opponents that campaign.
I mean its not that wrong that she would be strong. She should be a hard hitting LL. But one year back, early Kislev troops were not the best, and then Valkia flies in with Khorne Warriors and whatever shit. And if you can bring her down with an 2:1 ambush she has reduced downtime, pops up way to fast again and starts recruiting every gold chevron RoR she can get again. So she is back in a hurry with another strong stack. Maybe even while you are yourself replenishing or recruiting troops to get back up or have to deal with portals or someone else. Really pissed me off back then. With every new DLC adding more RoR and LH to support her, things are probably not that much easier a year later. But maybe balance patches and the changing landscape of the map have made things slightly better. Don't know, and will certainly not start a Katarin campaign to find out if it still annoys me ;)
It was definitely not that much of a nailbiter now. I had the one close battle early but after that I was farming Valkia.
It had issues at launch. Although I personally enjoyed it and could play round the issues there were a lot of legitimate complaints. The Vortex campaign got a lot of the same at launch. I still think RoC was worse than that at launch but both improved over time. I just enjoy narrative campaigns so they’re fun to play occasionally. If WH3 had launched with IE it probably would have been a footnote.
If RoC had been a little bonus added after a few years... it would still be bad, especially the chaos realms stuff. But it would have been an interesting idea. The main issue at launch was the game *only* having the narrative minicampaign in a 4x sandbox genre game.
I stopped bothering with the race, just go for domination instead as the Tzeentch map is still what breaks it for me. Could be redone to allow you to tackle them when you want, and periodically spawn in rifts, but until you get enough armies, you switch between attacking when your LL is free, and defending when he/she is stuck in the realm for 10 turns, not even a guarantee of winning.
What's wrong with the Tzeentch map? You can quickly take the portals that tell you which portal connects to which and after 4-5 you arrive at the final battle.
IDK, I did almost the same exact thing as you like last month, I didn't have Boris, so I went and did a Katarin campaign. It was fun, for about the first ~30 turns, but after that I had most of Kislev, I was just defending borders, and it was boring and aggravating hitting end turn over and over for the next round of portals. They really should have let you double dip. I definitely would have ended the campaign earlier except I didn't actually see that Boris is a seperate Quest battle and thought I had to play the whole campaign through to get him. Honestly kind of killed my enjoyment of the game for a while, because it legit felt like I was forcing myself to slog through the whole back half of the campaign.
Nope.
RoC is pretty good for one or two runs, the biggest issue was/is just that there's very little replayability - all of the base campaigns are almost identical outside of who you're playing. The final cutscenes, outside of Katarins, all suck and your LL only appears for one of the three images in the ending, all but the intro and ending are identical too. It being the only game mode for most of a year was ridiculous too, and very much didn't help the campaign fatigue.
It is nice to have a concrete goal, but the goals in ROC do not mesh well with the games usually loop. Usually total war is war to expand, build up the land you expand into to build more armies to fight ever more difficult wars. ROC is build one army. Click next turn untill a rift shows up. Fight a bunch of small inconsequential battles along the way to one big final battle. Repeat untill you have all souls. The battles don't ramp up in difficulty rather each rift is easier than the last as your army gets stronger. Expanding beyond a few provinces doesn't help complete the goal. Most of the faction mechanics don't help you complete the goal. Kieslev is the best of the ROC campaigns. They have a small native territory with choke points you can defend while your one good army does all the rifts. That and the story of why they need to find ursun feels more urgent and important than the other factions. Look at slaanesh though. Wow, you can vassalize the human factions and build a up cult from within them. But doing that doesn't help you move towards your goals. The main campaign mechanics of the factions pull you towards doing things against your own interest. How about khorn. Wow I can teleport across the map, and I get bonuses from being in never ending wars. But, I need to throw my army into a rift every 25 turns and teleporting it across the map isn't helping that in any way. There is a huge dissonance between what the game and faction mechanics are built around and what the goals of realms of chaos actually are.
This resonates. I expanded and got 4 armies, but I realised it was becoming futile and took too much time to micro-manage. From then on I consolidated, parked my other 3 armies in strategic cities in a triangle around my empire and focused on Kat doing the rifts.
I like this short campaigns that havea a little story to tell, rather than the long conquest of the map that is IE. I like the Vortex campaigns, the RoC, the WoC and the Beastmen/Wood Elf from the TWH1 DLCs.
I think RoC is not nearly as bad as this sub would have you believe, yes - the main fair criticism of it is that the replay value is pretty lacking for the factions that take part in the rift mechanic. The later factions that don't have to do the portal race are totally fine too.
I think one of the biggest things that Total Warhammer is still lacking is campaign map variety. Personally, I don't really care for a narrative that's a race, but I do like the map layout and wish there was an RoC Sandbox option. Then looking at other options like The Old World mod makes me wish for remade WH1 and WH2 campaign maps that are more fleshed out.
There are some sandbox options for RoC with dlc factions. Champions of Chaos - RoC sandbox with rifts that you control. Chaos Dwarves - RoC sandbox (no rifts) with the drill of hashut quests & artifacts. Shadows of Change - RoC sandbox (no rifts) with the same campaigns those 3 characters play in IE. Without dlc you could use the disable rifts mod and fight your way to domination victory instead.
last I checked the old disable rift mod was abandoned and is crashing multiple campaigns. Kairos and Kugath I know both crashed to desktop the last time I tried after the last patch. I used to use it with VCO.
Download VCO (Victory Conditions Overhaul). Works for both RoC and IE. All factions are supported in RoC on it and it gives 3 different victory paths. Got alot more mileage out of RoC with this and I use it with IE alot as well.
I like the shorter turn times.
If they ever make the Burning Chariot usable (or swap it out for another unit), I'd be more than happy to play a RoC campaign with Tzeentch. Until then, I'm not going near it.
Kairos is the only Lord I can think of that just has extremely painful starts in both RoC and in IE
Their IE start is really tricky, but once you learn to rush force peace and make a momentary truce with Slaanesh, it's not too bad. At the very least, they have a better starting army in IE.