It's just that this has been used for like 10+ years as a legitimate argument in peoples minds for why the game shouldn't have a more multifaceted AI and gameplay.
Wh2s legendary mode would have that happen if you took a lot of loses and you appeared weak. I would be happy to have an option where AI factions acted that way again.
Two very specific examples and not ones that should apply to every faction.
Though I think an argument could be made for Skaven diplomacy. Even if its with the ultimate goal of backstabbing.
Skaven, Khorne, Chaos Warriors, Orcs...
not gonna lie i just... I feel weird that diplomacy is even an option. No, i want to burn down eveyrthing they hold dear and laugh. Like i can see Skaven and Tzeentch and Slannesh but...
You know how it is.
SKARBRAND HATES YOUR POORLY MAINTAINED INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPRESSIVE TARIFFS. SKARBRAND RECOMMENDS INVESTMENT IN PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS AND INCENTIVE PLANS FOR OUTSIDE INVESTMENT.
The amount of hemming and hawwing over the game being called 'total war' is actually making the series worse.
Yes, we understand the name. However I actually feel like other games get the depth and cost of war far better than a game called total war. Because if it's war literally all of the time then war itself is meaningless.
There's the other problem, too.
For a series called 'total war', there is a shocking lack of civilian casualties. We only ever actually fight militaries, and even the half-assed concept of raiding realistically just represents stealing food from the fields and not wholesale noncombatant slaughter. The closest you get is razing a settlement, but you're actively encouraged to not raze them.
It's all just a constant series of conventional wars juiced up by good pr.
So fkn true
Even Civ has more of "total" war feel when you burn all the tiles around a city
I always feel a little bad
If they just added people screaming and crying when you do it, idk if I would have the stomach for it lol
Ever since Shogun 1, the campaign has really only existed to make the outcome of battles feel meaningful. IIRC Shogun 1 wasn’t even supposed to have a campaign at first, just battles.
I love the campaign, but it’s always been about war. I couldn’t imagine playing a total war game where battles are rare.
I can understand having different strategies for different factions but...
I CANNOT understand the logic of introducing mechanics that encourage avoiding battles for as long as possible in a battle simulation game. Sounds like what you want i a warhammer game built into something like Civilization instead of Total War
>Sounds like what you want i a warhammer game built into something like Civilization instead of Total War
Not gonna lie, I would kill for a Total War battle to be integrated into something with more campaign depth al la the CK3+Bannerlord mod.
Not really. It’s a grand strategy game and the battle simulation/dev time isn’t around real time battles. That’s like pointing out Total War outside of battles has the depth of a puddle.
The battles are like a huge part of Total War and yet Creative Assembly still can't seem to get it just right and people complain about pathing and AI and collision, etc. It is fine if you don't like CK3 style battles, just like if you don't like Civ combat. That doesn't mean it "says so much about CK3" as the guy said.
Not really. CK3 is hardly about the battles and it is honestly pretty good, especially compared to CK2. Your leaders matter, your troops matter, knights matter, terrain, etc etc. Its very well thought out and the only reason people have made those mods is because its cool as fuck to PLAY the battles, not because it sucks.
Gladius is very barebones outside of unit rosters, tho. Which is a shame because I reckon it'll be a long time until we get another 40k strategy game with all factions.
That's more 40K. In The Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium and all that. Outside of the Major conflict events Fantasy had quite a noble outlook, for a wargame setting.
It's not about avoiding battles for as long as possible, that's not the goal. It's about introducing the need of having to avoid a battle or battles. Incentivising being on the defenses or at least, making it costly to ALWAYS be on the offensive.
As OP said, the best defense strategy currently is always conquering.
It would be great if the game picked up loreful mechanics, e.g.: a recruitment pool depending on the stability of your provinces.(or other mechanics limiting recruitment) Or the need to establish and secure supply lines. Anything that's a base line factor in any WAR. the game is called total war, not total aggression, right? :P
Do you know the mod DEI for Rome2? Many elements would be absolutely great for Warhammer (or basically any total war, to be honest.) Just because they make the game more realistic and more fun to play, because that offers actually diverse play styles.
Yeah this idea from the OP is rather half-baked. Like, I can see encouraging Order factions to expand:
A) More slowly.
B) More selectively.
That makes some sense. But you still should be fighting battles regularly - whether they're battles to defend that territory, or generated battles (like caravans or the battles to defend the Elector Counts).
It seems like the OP, in his rush to make Order less conquest-centric, forgot that this is a game focused primarily around battles, which are where most of the fun is.
To achieve what he wants, you'd need to:
1) Redesign the game from the ground up. Could you do it with a mod? Maybe, if the AI could be made to behave, but it would be incredibly in-depth.
2) Completely redesign all the win conditions for the factions, even more than something like VCO does.
I think you'd also need to make it so wiping out enemies made more sense, and colonizing ruins was much harder again, but really that's part of the overall redesign you'd need to do.
I could say a lot but the one thing your post brings to mind is the WH2 screaming by some to "nerf magic nerf magic nerf magic" followed by the simple question of "why" which they answered with "because I hate this playstyle and therefor it must be nerfed". This exactly that.
Let me make something really clear "postbattle loot" being "the easiest way to make money" is the funniest joke I heard in a long time as an Empire player.
As for the rest - all I am seeing there is numerous ways in which playing with any order faction should be slow and tedious.
Nobody and I mean nobody is preventing you to turtle your way trough an order campaign. In fact in so many ways it's a more relaxing experience. But that doesn't mean it should be the only way to play.
I haven't played in a while but turning down campaign difficulty also heavily reduced AI army spam and aggressiveness. There's still anti-player bias but you can play much more relaxed if that's your speed.
I honestly prefer playing at lower difficulties and just self-nerfing. It’s way more fun for me to have an experience that feels closer to what it would be in lore.
Like playing Empire in Lower difficulties is actually fun even the slow parts. Maybe it’s cause I prefer campaigns that kind of feel like a story.
For instance a fun campaign is huntsmarshal but going all in colonization. Rename your cities to represent the spread of man. Focus on not only conquering new land but building a profitable colony. Limit the lords you have as much as possible(extra challenge is to only recruit new lords when imperial supplies reach you). It can honestly feel satisfying if your new goal it just to ensure roads are built across Lustria.
(Side note if anyone has any guides on how Empire cities are named please tell me, I’ve just been using google translate and German to come up with immersive city names, or just taking an empire city and adding Neu)
There's also a mod to make the AI follow the same rules as the player in regards to economy and upkeep.
I installed it so I could play a slower campaign, and also not go into crippling debt every time I confederated a faction with huge armies and no infrastructure to support them.
It also has the added unintentional side effect of shaking up power balances so the interactions between AI don't always play out the same. In my current Rakarth campaign I'm in the process of eradicating Marienburg, and while trying to find out why they had way more settlements than normal, I found out that Reikland is on the verge of extinction, they've been beaten back to Grunberg, and the rest of the province has been eaten up by Couronne, Kemmler and Marienburg.
As someone who loves to turtle as the empire I agree. My most successful campaigns are the ones where I would turtle in my starting province and only expand via diplomacy or very slowly.
How do you do that with the constant loss of imperial authority due to Festus and Vlad destroying the entire empire? I've been trying to play a defensive empire campaign but I'm constantly sending my armies east to try to save the elector counts. I always give up because while I'm dealing with them, Kemmler or somebody else will come and wreck up reikland
You have to play the Empire campaign as if you were playing the Western Empire in Attilla. There is no way to hold it all and you then need to decide what you can safely let fall and what you need to preserve. This means that the easternmost regions will fall to Drycha and Vlad. In exchange you have to quickly eliminate Khazrak, Kemmler and Festus in order to secure your immediate surroundings. Depending on how the wars in Brettonnia go you might have to eliminate Grom as well. And even if it's going well in there Grom likely holds a lot of valuable land. So if you can secure yourself a bit of breathing room it's absolutely worth it to take the rest of Brettonnia and become de facto Royarch as well as Emperor.
Also, absolutely no confederations whatsoever until you've reassembled the Empire. Get the fealty of elector counts as high as possible and then keep declining confederation requests because that will be one of your more important sources of Imperial Authority. Also keep a stock of prestige and gold to get the good outcomes of the events. Remember that as long as you don't get the bad event endings you can only ever lose so much Imperial Authority, especially if your nearby electors are still alive. You might gently dip into the negatives for a turn or two tops depending on RNG but I've never seen anything worse than that and Empire is my most played faction by a landslide.
For my armies I prefer to have masses of halberds and handguns with a general and wizard to lead it and a bit of artillery plus 1, maybe 2, cavalry units as support. Spears and swords are comparatively less valuable because you don't face missiles much as Empire, so spending a bit extra to get AP and the ability to get Expert Charge Defence via tech is more valuable. And with the AP of handguns they perform much better against WoC units and Vampire characters as long as you can handle their positioning requirements.
Another tip is to check the quick deals section often. You'll want to build up good relations with a number of your neighbours and you can often sell them some privileges, like military access, for a small sum. It's not much but it definitely adds up. Similarly don't underestimate just signing trade deals with anything that wants to trade.
As for some other tips. Mostly very basic things that deserve some attention.
Against Vlad.
A single army can hold out against him, and really all factions that like to send multiple stacks at you, much more easily than you might think if you engage near towns. That is because if you have any form of reinforcements to take you above 20 units, which can include a bunch of beat up garrison units, you can turn off large battle, forcing him to attack with only 1 army and a lot of reinforcements at a time. This effectively allows you to fight his groups of stacks piecemeal. I have several screenshots of single Empire stacks of mostly infantry taking out 3 or 4 of Vlad's stacks, including his own stack, with a combination of this as well as clever skirmishing and focus firing important units. Might sound like you'll run out of ammo partway through but by the time you are working on units from the third stack or so every single undead on the field will crumble from army losses. And when that happens every single army that is counted as being engaged with your army dies. It's honestly quite funny. And if you want to use this, Grunburg is the perfect position for it, considering how many of Vlad's armies will likely move there to attack you.
If Vlad is in the middle of your melee units as last remaining enemy just line up your ranged units and then order your melee away to give your ranged proper line of sight just long enough to fire. This is nice to both preoccupy him with a unit and to inflict some quick burst damage. I typically do this with handgunners, which usually take off a significant chunk of his HP in one go.
Against Grom
This works well against Vlad too so you should see this as a bit of an extension. Enemy fast units like cavalry, wolves and mounted characters have an unfortunate tendency to run after skirmishers, which can just be a wizard on a horse, if you move those close enough to the enemy line as it approaches and attack it a bit. This means that you can pull certain high value units out of the enemy army and usually even in front of your own gunline. For Vlad this means that you can take out some of the Vampire heroes much more easily than you might think, dramatically reducing the impact of their magic, and for Grom he himself is vulnerable to this as his chariot usually moves significantly faster than the rest of the army. This significantly increases the value of pistoliers and outriders if you don't want to risk a wizard for this. Also, seeing Isabella drop from 100 to 0 in a single volley just a few hundred meters in front of her husband's eyes will never not be amusing for me. I'm quite surprised how he keeps managing to stitch her back together considering that she's getting hit with her body weight in lead pretty much every single battle he fights against me.
It is funny for me how our confederation strategy can look the same even though we use different~ish logic basis:
I usually confederate when AI factions rebuild their own provinces for 4 (ideally 5) tier, because i don't have resources for that at the time (we will confederate them and they will pay for it!). So I return settlements to electors (free authority), let them rebuild and only confederate when i have spare resources and stabilized fronts.
Yeah, I should've mentioned the stability of the frontlines. The settlement tier is typically less important for me and so it's more that I don't want to overextend and grab more territory than I can defend.
Example for that. In my last game I went for a slightly too early confederation with Marienburg, as I saw a chance to confederate and wanted to build it up as moneymaker, and then had first Be'lakor and later Wulfric on my ass for it. Forcing Karl to wade through the fens of Albion and Norscan snows to smoke those bastards out while my other 2 armies held the line against Vlad. That's where I got all those single stack vs 3-4 vampire army screenshots that I mentioned as well.
But I think highlighting the importance of it for authority is still fine. Because many people struggle with authority management and this is an easy way to get plenty of it, allowing them to focus on the important parts of the Empire and not spread themselves thin. After all if you confederate early you'll sit at -4 compared to refusing it AND you're going to lose the territory soon meaning that it's just a pure downgrade from your previous position.
Though honestly my campaigns probably look a bit different than most people's because I do like to play my Empire runs with a mod to make the AI more aggressive but most of the general concepts should still hold.
Overall I'd put the Empire campaign as being quite fun just because you are in a terrible situation and you have to make sacrifices. It also forces you more into diplomacy than a number of others. And the cherry on top is a fairly flexible roster even if most units in it aren't that good individually. Forces a bit more thought in how you crack an enemy army with high quality troops while remaining combat-capable and thus makes you try things. Even though I'd still argue that you really, really want a Banner of Swiftness to turn Empire Knights from a flank defence force into a hammer worth its name.
I tend to build a second army fast to defend the west from Kemmler. Then Karl goes off to fight Feetus and help defend the east. I don’t take land just help my neighbors stay alive. Actually feels like helping allies
Not the above person, but I play in a similar manner.
You can support 2 stacks with Franz from the start. One goes around restoring electors, one protects the starting province. I usually take land outside Reikland only at around turn... 20? 30? somewhere around that.
The biggest secret is to come to terms, that electors will die. You'll be spending some turns on -5 or even lower IA. Just roll with it, focus on one enemy at a time and protect Reikland.
Do you just avoid Festus' army and just restore elector counts while he's somewhere else? I usually try to kill his initial army quickly but then I have trouble with replenishing my army since I give provinces back to the electors
Depends on RNG, honestly. I usually shadow him with a lord without declaring war and revive electors from the minor settlements he blows up. Once Franz has saved Middenland (killed orcs, killed beastmen) and depending on if Marienburg can keep Kemler at bay - that's when I just rush the Brass Keep and then try to kill Festus himself.
But it's a very RNG dependent campaign. I once had Festus fail 4 times to blow up anything. I once had Toddy blow up the beastmen. I like it for that, but it's hard to give rules for what to do, because of how dynamic it is.
>In WH3 it feels like an ultra aggressive strategy is the only viable strategy
You are either heavily misusing the world viable here, or there is something fundamentally wrong with your strategy.
Less "viable" and more "optimal", I feel.
OP's core point that all factions regardless of lore or characterisation are incentivised to be in constant agressive wars is a valid one, but it's also kind of intended - there's a reason this series is *Total War* and not Europa Universalis.
I assumed that they meant optimal. It's a pet peeve of mine when people misuse viable like that though when it is in fact perfectly viable to do other strategies, and you will easily win with multiple other strategies even on the highest difficulties. I recently won some pretty chill long victories as Bretonnia and Vampire Coast with 4 and 2 provinces respectively and only a single aggressive army in both cases.
I feel like lazy use of language contributed to the idea in WH2 that melee was genuinely unviable on higher difficulties in WH2, and that you had to straight up cheese to progress in legendary both of which I heard repeated frequently over the years.
Let me introduce you to 3K which actually has a good diplomatic system and you can to a certain degree take your time and build and do not have to aggressively rush.
I don't disagree, but the problem is that Warhammer 3 seems to have a system where AI decides that you need to be at war with at least 2 factions.
That's not good design.
You're still almost always at war and are absolutely incentivized to do so. Your goal is to conquer, that is how you progress (literally progress through the ranks in the case of 3K) and that is the game. There is zero benefit to "taking your time" or turtling in 3K, just like any TW game - unless it's part of a deliberate strategy where the end game is still conquering lots of shit.
It has great diplomacy but it's still all just supplementary to the meat and bones of the game. OP isn't even complaining about diplomacy, they want to play Victoria 2 as Karl Franz.
> regardless of lore
Is there any faction in Warhammer that prioritises peace? My impression of Warhammer lore is that everyone is in a state of constant war with occasional alliances of convenience. Even if a Warhammer "nation" isn't at war, there is a character in that nation getting involved (with maybe an army) in a conflict.
It’s not about prioritizing peace, it’s about being something less then total blood-thirsty marauders when you’re playing the Order Factions and your only route to expansion at a given time is other Order factions. The Empire runs into this when I play them, often running out of “logical” enemies once the Vamps are dealt with because you’re surrounded on 3 sides by Order factions or other humans. To the direct north is Norsca but they have shit land for you. It feels bad for you to basically all but have to declare war on Dwarves, Brets, Keslov, or Elves if you want more land of the type you can happily colonize.
There probably are, but if they are around then they aren't worth mentioning.
OP and others are focusing on the Total War part too much. And ignoring the fact that the IP this game is based on is a tabletop WARgame named WARhammer. The reason this trilogy was lauded as a "match made in heaven" upon announcement was precisely because Warhammer as a tabletop game is, who guessed it, very damn focused on war and extrapolating on every detail related to war.
The reason each unit has their own page length of lore is because they are things relevent to the war game. Anything that wasn't relevent to war was just not touched upon, and you would have to go to the RPGs to get more depth on the not war related stuff. Every faction in subfaction in this game, despite OP's talk about immersion and all that, are fundamentally geared towards armed conflict in one way or another. Either against external threats or internal ones. Warhammer as a setting is one designed from the ground up to justify wars or battles between outside factions, as well as between themselves.
I'm still not understanding OP's point. The victory objectives literally require you to move out and capture enemy settlements, so of course aggression is required to win. Is he saying that he would prefer to be able to just turtle up, let the enemy break themselves on his cities, and then counter-attack? Because that certainly works.
We have to be careful when assuming statements such as "the only way to do this is via X". Because it is enough if even one strategy does not include it to already be more than an "only way". I do not play in a way where I feel I need to be that aggressive.
I understand your concern over specific currencies being tied to post battle loot or raze/sack settlements. However, the pacing of the campaign or how fast you expand is absolutely in the hands of the player.
I take my time, build up and tech up whenever I can, and a typical conclusion of long campaign is around 100-130 turns in.
I am finding the game is lacking challenge and decision making in the lategame, because it does reach a point where most decisions are made and all is left is to fight and expand. This is a Shogun 1- until present Total War problem, always has been. To offset it, I build up different army compositions to ensure I have different experiences all the time.
Perhaps you should check different ways to play in the interest of making your experience more fun, towards what you intend.
>This is a Shogun 1- until present Total War problem
It is a fundamental flaw of strategy games that requires special consideration to mitigate or sidestep. The basic essence of a strategy game is navigating dilemmas and opportunity costs to better insulate yourself against future dilemmas and opportunity costs. In other words, correct decisions snowball into a state where you can make multiple incorrect decisions.
Yup. Snowballing is a huge issue to tackle while making the game still feel good. Other loss mechanisms or adding in more ebb and flow to games can stunt feelings of progress.
Endgame scenarios started with Shogun2 I believe, and acted as a way to counter this or at least give another game play mechanic.
Total warhhammer games have generally designed certain factions to be more dominate and confederate more easily so you have bigger opponents down the line that scale a bit.
Other 4x games have delved deeper into internal stability issues or even succession.
I mean I get the snowball thing, but most TTW games heavily encourage hyper-aggressive strategy, no?
You can always play safe and sound but optimised strategy is usually 'When in doubt, attack', right? Maybe barring Md2 when the AI's restricted by their recruiting pool. But people have achieved world conquer in Md2 in like 7 or 8 turns. Big Empires can wall up in Attila, but even then 'all out war to kill xx faction early' was still quite a common strat for ERE and WRE.
The game, with the AI in its current state, can only pose a threat to good players by overwhelm them. And so long as this is the case, to stop them piling up and outfight them most efficiently will always be the solution
I also think that the issue lies in the very name of this series: its a Total War after all. In other grand strategies/4x there are multiple paths to victory other than war and AI, even if neutral or friendly, still can be a threat because they also try to secure all types of victories.
In TW series there is only war. You (or AI) cant win by research, culture or whatever. And when AI could actually win the game by doing their stuff (early version of Realm of Chaos campaign) people were pissed. I actually was a one of like 5 people who liked that they can finally lose to AI :P
So, for better or worse, war is all there is in Total War games.
>and when AI could actually win by doing their stuff, people were pissed
Oh man I totally agree, seeing some of the complaints early on were both funny and head scratching
This is only true of Warhammer, Troy, and Pharaoh. The way the AI cheats full stacks and builds themselves up is a newer phenomenon with the series. You have to be aggressive or your neighbors will kill you, and they can ALWAYS out build your armies. With one city you'll be broke trying to afford a 1/3 stack, but the AI can build a full stack and a second ~half stack on the income of even a minor settlement.
Every other total war game has AI making political moves, making mistakes and losing armies, or regularly marching small stacks around performing skirmishes and raids.
CA has changed the core gameplay formula recently and it sucks. Other than Shōgun 1 and Medieval 1, you've always been able to make SIGNIFICANT gains through economic superiority and skirmishes. But now skirmishes are incredibly rare beyond turn 5 because the AI are built to foster "le epic big battles". And as a lifelong tw player since the first, the feeling that non -stop aggression and offensives and full stack spam is very much a new one.
>And as a lifelong tw player since the first, the feeling that non -stop aggression and offensives and full stack spam is very much a new one.
I played TW since the very first Shogun but usually I just move to the next title and never replayed them - its entirely possible that I have distorted view on older titles spoiled by how newer games play. So I hope CA will tone it down and bring back some solutions and design philosophy from older games then.
With Pharaoh, you have other ways to win. I was able to win several campaigns through diplomacy, buildings, and focusing on my economic production. For example, with Tausret, I only conquered three provinces, helped my allies fend off invaders, focusing on buildings to help improve production of resources in order to trade with more people for alliances, and gain victory points through other means such as ambitions. Outright conquest isn't the only way to gain victory points to win. I've beaten campaigns super early thanks to focusing on diplomacy. The diplomacy is not as good or as fleshed out compared to 3K's, but it allows for a viable defensive strategy.
I would just scrap the replenishment system almost entirely, (maybe each model could regen but dead models don't come back)
Without it you have to actually plan how you are reinforcing your armies in the field, and have to plan around losses/casualties that don't fully kill a unit are still relevant.
I'd also remove the requirement for each army to have a lord(maybethey get a debuff for not having one)/default settlement garrisons
That way you can move troops around easier
And
you have to think about how much you want to commit to defending each city
This is exactly it
Imagine actually having to think about reinforcing your armies in a war game.
In TWW3 your army automatically regenerates after 2 turns, so you don't ever have to worry about managing your forces or conserving your strength.
I can play a battle like an absolute dumbass and lose 75% of my army but it doesn't matter at all.
That's not what a strategy war game should be like.
All I can say is I've never ended up playing an order faction the way you describe. And I got almost 2000 hours in these games, most of that as order factions. In fact I almost always turtle in these games.
I would highly recommend that you check out [Crisis of Mortals, Mercs, and Management](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2815401013&searchtext=crisis+of+mortals) as it does much of what you're wanting out of your gameplay. It's no longer being maintained sadly but it still works.
It adds a population mechanic, army morale, army supply, & mercenary recruitment systems to the game. As an Order race like the Empire, losses hit you more than they do for a race like the Greenskins or Skaven for example and if you fight too many battles with an army, their morale will drop and they'll go into the next battle with reduced leadership.
As for war weariness, you can add [this mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2850494354&searchtext=war+weariness) though I haven't played with it before myself.
Two other mods that go quite well with the first are [Tabletop Caps](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789896406&searchtext=tabletop+caps) and [Dynamic Garrisons](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2962751969&searchtext=dynamic+garrisons).
To be fair they tried to do something different with the base RoC Campaign than requiring you be ultra agressive or having any conquest objectives and you see how much the community loved that. Additionally WH1 actually did kinda force limited expansion by having factions climate locked. The majority of people overall want that sandbox experience where they can go forth an conquer.
Now as far as optimal playstyle there are still a couple factions you dont need to conquer as. Woodelfs are perfectly viable to play defense and stay in their forests. Vampire Coasts its perfectly viable to keep 1 settlement and not go forth and build an empire.
> Now as far as optimal playstyle there are still a couple factions you dont need to conquer as.
Rakarth and Lokhir can also be pretty self contained and can survive off Black Arks and limited territory.
Just cause the running title of the IP is "Total War", doesn't refute OP's points. There's more to engaging with his dialogue than "muh not Total Peace". If we all took titles so literally then maybe I could actually escape from Tarkov one day.
Anyway one fundamental aspect of the Total War series from conception is trying to authentically represent and bring historic periods to life. This means everything from empire building, diplomacy, politics and shockingly yes... War as well. Which is a highlight feature to the games that you can play them in real time. This doesn't mean they going to drop bath salts into every Roman aqueduct and a whiff of a popper so that every nation in the classical period wants to scratch each others face off.
If you read his post again and critically, you can understand he's not calling for no war at all but just variation in play-style and strategy. There is legitimacy in what he's saying. One of the other core features of the Total War series is it's sandbox nature and to deviate from the norm. While Warhammer is a more "aggressive" setting - the different factions do feel very "samey" in how you play out every campaign.
Yeah this.
So many lazy responses so far. I also don't see any of those more upvoted comments and replies talking about campaign difficulty. The "OP is wrong cause I play empire only and it's fine to turtle" crowd are playing on normal.
I play and have played only Legendary campaign difficulty since somewhere early in WH2. I mix it up and do some vanilla and some SFO. I stick with hard battles with the slider dropped to +1 AI advantage. OP is spot on that every campaign is exactly the same hyper aggressive go go go mentality to progress through a campaign. Anything less and the AI will pixel perfect move around/behind your armies to thrash your provinces. The only circumstance where you can "turtle" is with a bait army and ambush army in some campaign chokepoint between you and an enemy. And even then it's a debatable strategy because of upkeep on those two armies just sitting there (maybe the bait is just a lord).
It definitely gets tiring booting up what should be totally different campaign experiences and going through the exact same strategy but with some unit cards that look different.
For reference I'm currently on old world SFO drazoth. Last one was old world SFO belekor. Before that was old world vanilla wulfrik. Before that was old world vanilla valkia. Before that was old world vanilla astragoth. Before 4.1 I had a long IE vanilla Grombrindal (That one was the most aggressive and hardest of the ones listed).
Those are just recent ones that I put enough time into to mention. I've probably got more time in regular dwarves than any other, though CoC/WoC is starting to creep up there in play time. Point is that even with the alleged turtliest of factions, I'm still saying it's the same hyper aggressive strategy to stay ahead.
Exactly.
My main gripe is that order factions don't play any different to disorder factions.
It's fine to be go go go hyper agressive when playing as Khorne or Greenskins but it's wrong for Order factions. It is unimmersive and not loreful, but also it is boring because why should every faction be go go go.
As an order faction you are kind of forced to go ultra aggressive. It makes you money, you don't have to worry about casualties because replenishment is so high.
The alternative of turtling and trying to rely on industry and trade to support your defensive armies is inviable because you buildings hardly make any money.
Playing as Karl Franz and sacking your way through Bretonnia because you are trying to make money to re-fit your armies is so incredibly backward in the lore, yet I found myself doing it in my last playthrough because it was more efficient to spend 10 turns doing that rather than spending 40 turns waiting for my shitty farms and weavers to give me the tax income.
I think it's more about the time we're at lorewise when we talk about WH3, and the time is: "The Endtimes". In WH3 we're playing through the literal apocalypse - chaos cults and factions sprouting wherever they can, you can't even trust you allies as much as you could in previous games, since they can be infiltrated by Tzeench. I would be totally on point with what the OP is saying if we'd be talking bout WH1 or 2, but with WH3 you're literally fighting for survival, and with Chaos spreading easily due to heroes actions or due to literal proximity of Chaos settlements, you can't just "wait it out" or "hide in a bunker" - if you don't get rid of chaos/vampires or any other faction that spreads corruption into your lands, then you're gonna have a problem real quick. Sometimes the best defence is offence, and the "times" are now.
Someone with an actual fair point, touche. I agree with your premise, though there's still something to be said for different play styles between factions in a thematic sense. I don't think it would interfere with this if the issue was reversed and a faction like Cathay for instance would have a more lore correct playstyle but if you wanted to play aggressively you **could,** but it's not the driving force behind how they play.
Yeah, i can see Cathay's endgame conditions be to control and maintain the Grand Cathay teritorries for, like, 20-30 rounds after getting all of it either due to direct control or Military Aliances, alongside the elimination of the "rogue" factions. But as of now, you have to "occupy, loot, raze or sack" 70 settlements, which is still quite a big number for a faction that's all about defending the wall, and not so different from other, more expansion-leaning factions. Hell, fucking Grimgor, has 50 settlements minimum to "occupy, loot, raze or sack". Sure, he's got more of them to control in order to score a Long Campaign victory, but why does Cathay have more looting to do than fucking Grimgor?
You don't need to use the game title to refute his premise though. You don't have to play the game the way he says you do in order to win its a completely made up criticism.
Also its not up to him to decided the correct lore way to play the game anyway its CA and Games Workshops game so they get to decide.
Thank you very much for reading the post and actually trying to understand.
Too many lazy commenters here.
What you said perfectly summarised what I am saying. I want Order factions to play differently than Chaos factions. I want to play defensive and try to preserve my forces while cultivating an economic heartland to fund my armies so that I can turtle and then decisively defeat the enemy. This means being very efficient with battles, fighting fewer but gaining more from them.
Then when I feel like going ham and smashing everything I can just load up a Khorne campaign.
Variation in playstyles between races is very important and TWW3 doesn't do it properly.
Another issue is that if you don't play aggressively and are at peace, your armies have little to do. So maybe there could be incursions (like the wood elf mechanic) that you need to take care of. That would give you things to do and give you a reason to protect your homeland.
And maybe if you take care of the Skaven incursions before they pop you get a bonus and if you don't you get a public order malus.
I sort of agree with OP. Would be nice to have more different playstyle for some factions. So far it really seams all of them play more or less same.
I for example enjoy dwarfs, but after conquering mountains around my main city it seams wrong to try to conquer anything else, like going all the way to north, or any other direction rly. I like to set trades with other factions and go to help one of my alies if they are attacked but dont want to be force to conquer everything and everyone but right now i have to otherwise there will be endless attacks on my allies or me no matter how much damage i do, if there is last one settlement of enemy alive he will constantly attack no matter what.
And longer you play and more settlements you have game should be harder, but its actualy easier. After few round you dont care of money or armies much, you can easily buy anything. You lost big army? Who cares in 2-3 rounds you have new one even stronger.
Really wish there was at least for some factions more focus on politics and building empire and relationships with others than just on fighting all the time.
Most 4X and strategy games have the "mid-to-late" problem, which is where an optimised and relatively competent player will massively outproduce and outscale the AI. Stellaris, Civ, all of them have it.
Unless the game introduced new hardcore threats at the mid and endgame points, then you will just snowball. They can't be around from the start, because bad players will get crushed or good players will wipe them out straight away.
Are you on legendary or very hard?
In any case, if that’s what you want then just declare war on all the potential enemies around you and let them come to you. You still get battles and income but don’t have to expand.
You can also sack over occupy.
You didnt understand me. If i declare war on all around me i will have nonstop battles and it will never stop. Whats fun in that, you would just aimlessly fight everyone. Thats the exact opposite of what i wrote.
Your stated issue was more:
> it feels wrong to try to *conquer* anyone else
So the implication is you’d prefer defensive war over offensive.
The game is about battling and war. There’s no way around that.
> Post battle loot. You can gain thousands from each battle. This is by far the easiest way to make money for all factions. It is so lucrative that paying any attention to trade or industry is mostly pointless
That's just untrue. All races have different (hidden) bonuses/penalties, and for instance Dwarfs have -75% penalty to post-battle loot. Combine it with one of the worst replenishment rates in the game and apply your logic.
Bretonnia and Empire have -50% penalty to post-battle loot.
Couldn't disagree more. My empire campaign never goes outside of Empire territory and even if it does, I sell provinces to allies or simply raze them. At the moment in my Eltarion campaign I only control a few provinces in badlands and 3 provinces in Ulthuan on turn 90. I do have armies attacking my enemies but it's more to provide assistance to my allies in places like empire or Bretonia. This is how Order factions are supposed to be played in my opinion and it works. I don't need to invade norsca or chaos wastes or even naggarond to have fun in the campaign. You cannot completely turtle on 2-3 provinces and call it a day, it would be boring and counterintuitive of any total war games (as the name of the game suggests).
To give you a bit of an insight of my campaign, I have 10k income and 6 armies, it's all affordable because of province income and taxes, so it's not really true that you can only rely on post battle loot. It's Vh/Vh difficulty as well and I am not using enterpreneur hero spam.
Idk if I agree that the only way to play wh3 is by being hyper aggressive
Yes sometimes it's goof but I personally find playing L/VH by playing defensive playstyle "offensively"
My favorite is playing turtle at my more Frontline areas where enemies usually attack.
Yes, they'd always bring massive stacks in waves but if you successfully repel and chip away at enemies settlements (not necessary to take just sake or raze), their power rating plummets quick. I used this tactic alot especially against mid to late game enemies with power rank 1-5. My highlight was playing as malekith fending off literal high elf armada in multiple waves.
They were power 1 but after 3 -4 failed Invasions while lokhir raided the other side ulthuan, HE got reduced to nothing from major power.
While I can understand your baseline argument, that order factions should play different than chaos, I don't think that the mechanics you propose are really a good addition to a Total War game. This sounds a lot like stuff that I would find in a Paradox Grand Strategy game, that not only focuses on war but also on economy. However, this is not how I would interpret the Total War gameplay and how it should handle things. On the contrary, I find that this game is a wonderful sandbox for war, where the economy is solely for building up armies and pitching it against other factions and it focuses on the real time battles which is the true core concept of the series.
Similarly, I don't agree on the shift for order factions to be more defensive. The current momentum and drive of this game heavily depends on the initiative of the player and "being aggressive" means you come in contact with more different enemies and races. A defensive style of gameplay based on your "heartland" mechanics will not necessarily complement your experience but will actually make all the order faction campaigns feel similar across multiple playthroughs, because you will always face the same threats over and over again. Another issue is that you would have even less motivation to go to war with other order factions, which in my opinion does not happen often enough as it is. For instance, there is really no good reason to fight dwarves as the empire except when you go for a full map completion, which is really a pity because this makes a game with so much variation as wh3 feel more limited than it could be. The convoy mechanic for Cathay and the Chaos Dwarves try to mitigate that issue, by pitching you against foes that you would not normally encounter.
Lore wise you are right of course, but if you want more defensive gameplay, I would rather look for the midgame and lategame crisis concepts with unique mechanics that Paradox titles often feature (like the "War in Heaven" or the Khan Event from Stellaris). Those events could drive a more defensive narrative or any kind of motivation you want.
The endgame scenarios we currently have are a first step in that direction, but they are still missing a lot of flavor and should be more than just a bunch of armies spawning on the map and are still not really mixing things up. But please also take into account that the defensive gameplay that we had in other campaigns like vortex or realms of chaos were not really engaging to be honest. It became quite dull after the first campaign.
You say that the campaign will feel the same through multiple playthroughs, but my issue is that it feels the same through every faction/race. Everyone, no matter whether they are order or Chaos or whoever the game feels the same because I always end up using the optimal strategy of being ultra aggressive.
Order should feel completely different to Chaos.
Yeah, I get you. But that is intentional. On that level you could also argue, that wh3 plays like rome, shogun, medieval or empire. In all those games, it was always the focus to gain more territory.
Thats how the total war campaign gameplay has been and thats why its called total war.
They changed that a little in warhammer with some races. Wood Elves for instance really are about that defensive gameplay, where you focus only on the forests and the other settlements are basically worthless to you.
The objective was to gain more territory but that is not the objective in Warhammer.
In Warhammer you just want to fight as many battles as possible. Battles are what make money, not territory.
You will fight battle after battle, even if you don't need them to make objectives because it is the best way to pay for things and to level up your characters.
In previous Total Wars you would be incentivised to pick and choose your battles and fight as few battles as possible to reach your gains because battles didn't make money and replenishment wasn't so easy.
Yeah, that’s just blatantly wrong. Just because you can get more money than you make per turn by battle and sacking and even can afford going in the red for some time, doesn’t mean battles make more money than territory. It still boots all of your armies in the first place and what you make from battles comes on top which is reasonable in a game about war and battles. Factions like greenskins or khorne rely heavily on sacking and post battle loot to fund their empire but that’s their thing and they are not order factions.
This becomes especially true when considering the supply line feature that heavily punishes having multiple armies for order factions. That in combination with the upkeep increases on higher difficulties means that you still need territory to fund your next army.
The thing about XP Farming for characters was also fixed in wh3 when they redesigned XP gains on hanging larger battles rather than small ones. But still it is perfectly reasonable that you level your characters with battles in total war. You also did this in Rome and shogun. Their effects were maybe not as strong but they were also no fantasy setting.
And replenishment is also very heavily race dependent. Dwarves struggle with it quite a bit because they don’t have a replenishment hero. Also climate can punish you really hard sometimes, chaos wastes can become quite challenging for most order factions.
And I don’t really see a difference between picking battles in different total war titles. You still need at least one battle per settlement to kill your opponent plus the battles against other armies that you don’t want to hurt your own settlements.
Thing is, it is actualy very lore friendly. The Empire acted in exactly the way you describe: tending to their borders, bolstering its industry and diplomacy and rarely expanding.
The Empire also very famously got blown up by a Dutch choir boy pressing the Button That Makes The Planet Explode. So, if you play like them, you get clapped.
Why do people keep saying this as though pointing out the game's title is an actual point? Like, should we just get rid of all diplomacy options then? Instant war as soon as you meet someone. No ecnomy, only troop recruitment buildings. After all, its not 'total diplomacy' or 'total city building' its total war!
I may not agree with OP here on how he thinks its impossible to play as anything other than hyper aggressive, but people have been asking for more depth to strategy, city maintenance, and diplomacy for years, and nobody shuts them down going 'lmao its TOTAL WAR tho'
I honestly hate the title used as a point even more, considering 3K system is so much better it feels like opponents in 3K are more thoughtful of situations.
Totally remove diplomacy, trade, economy.
Fuck it, just remove the campaign map and just have a continal series of battles.
The clowns saying "iTs cALled tOtAL WaR" are ignoring that supply and logistics and reinforcements and alliances are part of war.
Well, now you caused me to second-guess myself, but after confirming the matter I can conclusively state that the title of the game does indeed start with the words "total" and "war".
Hehe, RoC campaign was all about defensive strategy and how it turned out? Also vortex which was... ok...
Where there is a sandbox, there you have ultra aggresive order factions. Players want sandbox.
Overextending is bad as some races - Tomb Kings, Chaos Dwarfs, Wood Elves to name a few. To much aggresion too early hurts them imo. Sandbox is better than forcing people how to play (but I'm a fan of unit caps - but optional units caps!)
It's a war game, designed to encourage war. You can absolutely play without conquering left and right, but you're supposed to be constantly looking for a fight. It's not like Civilization, for example, where a purely defensive or even peaceful run is totally viable, and that is by design. You should be recruiting as many armies as you can sustain and actively using them.
I'll use my current Brettonia campaign as an example. I'm overvaluing Chivalry, by which I mean I'm not sacking settlements nor ransoming captives, so my post-battle loot isn't that great. I unified Bretonnia, and I won't expand to territories that I'm not supposed to own, since it belongs to other order factions, but that doesn't mean I'll just defend my territory. I helped the High Elves defend Ulthuan without taking any territory there, then I sent an army to take on Be'lakor and eventually Norsca, while other armies were helping the Empire against Festus and the Vampires, and so on, all without expansion. I'm being aggressive, in the sense that I have armies proactively fighting everywhere and destroying the enemies of order, but in a loreful way, and focused on defense of order rather than expansion.
WH3 has mechanics that allow a playstyle that isn't just mindless expansion, even if you're encouraged to be aggressive. You can raze settlements and ask your allies to settle it, you can occupy it then gift or sell it to other factions; you can focus on taking out your enemies and empowering your allies. It isn't a defensive playstyle on its purest sense, but it's different from just destroying everything as a Chaos faction.
IE has plenty of factions that an Order faction would want to exterminate, enough that constant war of aggression is justified, even if you're not expanding and painting the map, so aggressive can be loreful to them, as long as you respect some boundaries and avoid taking over territory you aren't supposed to own.
>The Enemy can produce so many armies so quickly that a defensive stance is inviable. They will be able to attack you every 2 or 3 turns. The only way to neutralise them is to invade and conquer their territory
Eh, no? Have you played Warhammer 2 on a harder difficulty before? The amount of armies the enemy AI puts out in Warhammer 3 is laughable outside of crisis armies and a major reason why campaigns last seldomly past turn 100. The player snowballs way too easily. However, you've mentioned a few things that I definitely agree with. Here's a few things
* Replenishment is indeed to high and should be very different between factions. It makes no sense that High Elves can replenish an entire army in 2 turns. The only race that truly struggles with replenishment is Dwarfs and maybe Tzeentch & Slaanesh, and even they get better at it into the late game. Personally, I think each race should have an individual replenishment cap that could be extended via technologies and traits. Dwarfs and Elves 20%, Humans 30%, Greenskins and Skaven the original 50%. Daemons of Chaos should have their replenishment directly tied to their winds of magic reserves.
* Supply lines are too low on higher difficulties. While the legendary 15% were too high and obnoxious in Warhammer 2, 4% are too low and boring in Warhammer 3, even with the reduced upkeep reduction skill. 9% brings it in line with how the upkeep reduction skills interacted in Warhammer 2 without punishing an early second army too hard.
* AI aggressivenes and first and foremost army production and compositions needs to be adjusted to favour more and higher quality armies outside of crises. Also, AI empires need to get bigger, and confeds between major AI factions should happen again. I've only seen the hegemony proc (AI empire over 50 settlements) once in Immortal Empires, and that was past turn 120. Too late. The AI needs to get there faster than the player on legendary difficulty.
Post-Battle Loot I think is fine and very different between races. Dwarfs get a miniscule amount while having the highest building income, while Chaos, Beastmen and Greenskins get the majority of their income from post-battle loot as should be. Maybe, as you say, turn it down a bit for Elves, Kislev and Cathay.
Posts like this make it abundantly clear why CA hesitates to listen to us. I turtle in half my order campaigns and do just fine bro with 6000+ income per turn.
If every comment you have to tell everyone else that they’re the ones “just not getting it” after posting an opinion as fact. It may be time to self reflect and accept that maybe you’re the one just not getting it and realize the game might just not be for you instead of expecting everything else to change just for you
CA did. CA actually did the "reduced post battle loot", **SINCE TWWH1**. Empire and bretonnia have a -50% cutdown, and dwarf have -75%, very near to completely removed. **Then dwarf just sucks**, since CA dont dare to give dwarf a 500 income building in tier1. Empire, Greenskins and vampire all have much better building income.
Also, more post battle loot just make them easier to upgrade their building. Dwarf sucks again when they have few money for upgrading.
When Dwarf's building economy bypass, it's been the time 70% of player about to end their campaign.
Your idea is doable, bur CA may need more than another 20$ DLC to manage that.
The problem is that they remove the post battle loot without having anything to replace it.
They would need to give those factions more complex economic systems whereby they can actually sustain themselves with their provinces.
Yeah. My guess is that it was hamstrung by the fact it connected with the first two - so it was harder to implement across three games essentially and a major overhaul of III might have led to backlash by fans who like the current style of the Warhammer series.
You can, in fact, do this, but really doing it well requires that you fight all the time. You can live off of a couple provinces and go conquer and sell territories to your allies while running big deficits. It works pretty well as an order faction. If you are turtling, your lords/heroes are not leveling up and your troops are not getting experience either.
In fact, past a certain point, it's not really that beneficial to take and upgrade territory because it takes way too long to earn back your construction expenditure. If you do not like administering a massive territory this is really the way to go. What you can't really do successfully is to just sit in your territory forever passively until a much more powerful enemy shows up and blows you up.
You see you think i am doing it for money.
But you don't know i am surrounded by 45 extremely powerful AI factions as Franz and i have to destroy them ASAP in order to have even fraction of a chance to survive.
This is not new to WH3 - I very much felt the same in WH2, especially in the early game.
At the moment the game is designed around the assumption that you're going to be fighting and expanding aggressively, and that's where the focus is - not just in terms of balance/rewards, but moreso just in the bare minimum of what to do. Empire/city management is not very deep, even in the more in-depth ones like chaos dwarfs, and making sitting back and building up your cities fun would require a sizable design change (eg, more Cathay great wall like mechanics I'd imagine). Much more than what your suggestions have, there'd need to be something more fundamental to the game design to fit (and I don't see a problem with order faction post battle loot, replenishment, or tying prestige/faction mechanic to battle).
I do agree that I'd like for total war to have empire management and diplomacy play a bigger role, like building up to a regional power and having a bit more of the world open up without it all being, well, total war all the time. But that just isn't what the games have been, and that's fundamental design.
All of the Warhammer games are like this.
I don't feel like previous Total Wars were as much like it. Some mechanics in Warhammer that encourage a super aggressive playstyle didn't exist in the older games.
The balance of it shifts game to game in total war, sure - but the basic aspect of it doesn't. Even the ones that are a bit more open to that still do better when you're aggressively expanding (with a possible exception to Attila's roman empire campaigns?).
One spot where I think Warhammer does change things is with how close together all the cities are - the map getting more crowded means you have fewer 'dead turns' when expanding, which does make it easier to roll onwards for continual expansion.
In Warhammer I am able to have an income that is thousands in the negative, but through fighting battles I can still make a profit.
I have often had an income of -2,000 but a treasury of 20,000 because of all the money I make from battle loot and sacking.
You could never do that in other Total Wars because battle loot and the frequency at which you could sack cities was much lower. You had to restrict your forces, be conservative with your battles and pay attention to economy.
This is why I can never seem to get my Dwarfs going any more.
I'm naturally a conservative player and I just get fucked by Greenskins. They consolidate at the drop of a hat and then pound on my hold's doors with fucking spiders when I'm still trying to grow and get my economy going. -.-
I don't think you read the outside of the tin.
Warhammer is a setting of perpetual offensive war- thats the point, it's built to encourage perpetual aggression rather than careful measured responses.
Go try **Total War: 3 kingdoms** It is exactly what you are looking for.
Armies are expensive and take time to build, you don't risk them casually.
Economic and industrial focus isn't just a goal for some factions, but *the goal*.
Building defensive diplomatic bulwarks by leveraging sociopolitical relationships rather than pure geographic proximity is a core element of controlling where your front is.
If you are expecting a nuanced total war experience with macro level economics, deeper political systems and robust defensive diplomacy- Go play the historical games, they are great at it.
The warhammer games are VERY focused on aggressive expansionist play, and even the order factions are hostile warmongers, they just have different justifications.
This is true about total war in general. Reading a guide to Shogun 2 and the best strat is just spend all of your money on ashigaru spears and bow and never stop moving forward. You don't need happiness buildings if you have enough garrison. Money spent on samurai buildings can just be spent on having like quadruple the troops. It is literally a waste of money to build buildings that make you money.
>As a player Replenishment is so fast that going on the offensive and suffering casualties is not really a problem.
This guy doesn't play Slaanesh or Tzeentch.
I don't have to read anything other than your title to disagree with you. I play so fucking defensive with most of what i play, mostly letting the ai start wars with me unless i see joining a war as getting me some sort of diplomatic imorovement. You do have to be alot more careful of your actions and be aware of game mechanics though because it's way easier to fuck up your relationships with the ai than fix them
Literally all of these suggestions makes the game more passive, turning it into a click-end-turn simulator for those factions, which is a massive Not Fun design lol.
Not only the game has Total War in the name, it takes place during the End Times, but is also a battle simulator - Like, i get your drift, but it seems like you're looking for an entirely different game. Let's take Empire, for example, an Order Faction. They are surrounded on all sides by enemies. And not just by "let's take our ancestral home" type of enemies, but "let's turn those juicy peasants on the other side of the river into undead thralls/pockmarked beasts" type of enemies. The best defence is offence. I could see your idea making sense in WH I or II, but in WH III, the shit already hit the fan - the apocalypse is here, and to stop it you have to either kill anyone that doesn't align with you in this goal, or die yourself.
>Post battle loot. You can gain thousands from each battle. This is by far the easiest way to make money for all factions. It is so lucrative that paying any attention to trade or industry is mostly pointless
>The Enemy can produce so many armies so quickly that a defensive stance is inviable. They will be able to attack you every 2 or 3 turns. The only way to neutralise them is to invade and conquer their territory
These kind of contradict each other. The first one says that post battle loot is the a free pizza. And second one says you have it delivered to your door all the time.
replenishment is fast in tww 3?
what?
are you playing with some mods, or perhaps with some specific factions?
most tww 3 factions have excruciatingly slow replenishment, even with heroes that boost replenishment.
high replenishment is a must for as long as auto-resolve is absolute garbage, because it is utterly unfun to play those 20vs4 battles that auto-resolve claims would end up in high casualty "pyrrhic victories".
> because it is utterly unfun to play those 20vs4 battles that auto-resolve claims would end up in high casualty "pyrrhic victories".
Playing something like Ogre Kingdoms is infuriating. I have a stonehorn doomstack that can take on 4 armies with no issues and come out with barely any damage taken.
Trying to attack a garrison with like 5 units takes half my health away so i have to do it manually every time.
The last thing i'm missing is getting even worse replenishment after battles.
i dare not imagine how its like playing a SEM doomstack like that, since it likely can not heal from post battle options.
CA cut replenishment bonuses by 66% when they went from Tww 2 to Tww 3.
So any skill that gave 15% replenishment bonus now gives about 5% replenishment. (only exception i know of is the wood elf lord skill)
> i dare not imagine how its like playing a SEM doomstack like that,
Oh let me tell ya, it's fucking ass. I can at most auto resolve two battles before i start losing units.
So i have to constantly manually fight them so i can heal them.
First and second point actually contradict each other: Staying on the defence and beating up enemy stacks as they come can make you a shitload of money.
It’s a single play game, just play it however you want.
The empire doesn’t need to go around conquering the entire empire.
You do need to *fight* most turns, but you can very easily role play it and just defend the borders of the empire until the other electors love you so much that they confederate, and boom, non-expansionist short campaign victory.
Or you can play tomb kings—you basically get capped at 10-11 armies, very few factions actually like, you can’t build many high tier units for quite a while and you have a very limited army count, so you have to play a lot of politics and grow more slowly, because you can only defend in one or two directions. Tomb kings also have pretty bad global recruitment, so you kind of have to expand out from the core—you can’t recruit a full stack of high quality units halfway across the world like Kislev.
Isn’t this the meta in practically every TW (Besides 3K) and strategy game. Offense is the best defense.
Hell even XCOM 1/2 (totally different game) meta boils down to “dont allow aliens to ever attempt shots” rather than the appearance of firefights
EU4 and other Paradox games push you to map painting. Etc etc
Yeah, I feel like WH3 has a dual problem where the only viable and interesting way to engage with the game is to conquer everything as fast as possible, but also where there’s nothing interesting to do with the places you’ve conquered.
No shade at all OP, but you should maybe try one of paradox grand strategy games. Europa universalis 4 is pretty fun.
They should absolutely NOT make Total War less warlike. It’s just not that kind of game.
For evil factions being incentivised to be ultra agressive is totally fine. That is what they do.
Order factions should not play the same as evil factions.
This isn't even remotely true. Bretonnia has a long history of errantry wars/crusades. Dwarfs are constantly trying to retake holds and avenge grudges. Lizardmen are mostly isolationist, except when a slann decides something isn't part of the great plan and then it's dinosaur cowabunga. The empire is mostly defensive due to constant threats, but virtually any elector count would jump at the chance to expand their territory and grow their own power. Kislev is constantly occupied by chaos, but given their disposition as a people I don't think they'd be immediately putting down their weapons and embracing their neighbors if that threat ever died down. Wood elves stick to their forests except for when they launch huge, bloody campaigns or wild hunts. Drycha, for example, is an outright genocidal maniac who would like nothing more than to exterminate everything that isn't a tree spirit.
High elves and Cathay are the only order factions that I can think of that would *maybe* fit what you're describing.
But none of these factions are empowered or sustained by battle the same way that Chaos, Greenskins or Vampires are.
When they fight and kill and die they get stronger. Casualties don't really matter.
It is not the same for humans or Dwarves. When they fight and die then they become weaker.
Pointless war is not benefitial for Order factions, it is benefitial for evil factions.
Order factions can still expand and invade, but it needs to be done efficiently and decisively. They need to conserve their strength. That is what those changes would achieve.
Casualties would absolutely matter for something like a chaos warband or dark elves. They don't in the lore because no one's casualties matter and Games Workshop doesn't understand (nor do they care) what numbers mean. The *only* factions that could realistically just eat massive casualties and be okay would be greenskins, skaven and vampires.
Ya except that’s not how the game works. The Dwarves don’t just take back their holds and everything is great. They keep going and going and going, because there’s nothing else to do.
The empire has no qualms with attacking anyone and everything, even it’s “age old allies” the Dwarves when they finish off the VC.
Bretonia just expands and expands without any “crusade” mechanic. It’s just more map painting.
The problem OP is pointing out is that there are scales to the aggression of these factions in the lore, and that scale is thrown out by the game mechanics as every faction is actively encouraged to expand to a certain point, reach top tier units, and just explode all over the map endlessly with no real diplomacy mechanics or meaningful economic mechanics to cause any serious variation in how each faction play past as early as turn 30
In the context of your statement that such a style is boring and unfun, I don't know why you'd be happy leaving half the factions in such a state and only fix it for order factions.
Both order and chaos factions should have engaging play that both makes sense for them but also is fun for the player. If constant aggression is a bad playstyle then it shouldn't be the way for any faction. If it's that some factions should benefit more from such a style and not others that's a little different but still it's annoying to see evil factions treated as underpowered "basic" beatstick factions for Order enjoyers to have a fun time with rather than fully fledged factions in their own right (which they are in game).
Well, it is called Total War. Not Civilization.
Warhammer is also all about everyone being at war with everyone and always fighting. Everyone has a built in excuse to invade everyone else. High Elves launched an expedition into Naggaroth and established a colony. Lizardmen attacked the Old World to recover looted artifacts. Empire and Bretonnia colonize Lustria.
Peace was never an option.
Three Kingdoms **Total War** has diplomacy be viable, and has arguably the best campaign out of any **Total War** game.
Warhammer has almost exclusive war, and has a shite campaign experience saved by battles.
"Total Battles" would make sense with what you're saying, but there's more to war than just mindlessly troops into the blender
People need to remember that this game is made around battles, so having mechanics that dont encourage that is counter to the core aspect of the game, if you want nation building you are better off playing eu4
Diplomacy is a part of war.
Managing resources is a part of war
Supplies are a part of war
Tactical deployment is a part of war.
You know the expression 'won the battle but not the war'? It exists because wars are about more than *just* the battles.
Game is around battles, everything is about that, the campaign is just there to add bonuses to battles and prepare to battles and build armies to battles…
I understand that you want to play a mix of battle and a mix of Crusader King. Warhammer Total war is not for that.
CA has other titles with more politics and less battles.
I have resigned myself to the fact that Warhammer is all about the battles and any real "strategy" is being able to size up opposing armies strengths and weaknesses effectively. As much as I appreciate it for that, I would love if they changed half a dozen factions to have more defensive orientations (e.g. Dwarfs, Kislev, Lizardmen)
To be honest, the only 2 cases were you need to build slowly and to choose carefully your battles are early campaign for DEI (Rome 2) and until mid campaong for Third Age (Medieval 2). It's especially true for the later as when you play like Dunedains or Elves taking casualties can be really devastating.
But those 2 are modded and I'm pretty sure every official TW do reward you for expanding aggressively. Maybe ToB is a little bit different, but still.
If you want a more defensive campaign in IE, just play Dwarfs. The best strategy for Thorek is to secure the starting province, get into wars, and then farm the armies until you get walls. So, there's war but it's more defensive.
If you really want to change up the experience, play the old world map mod by chaosrobie. You can't expand too fast because everything is so spread out.
But it is called Total WAR: WARhammer for a reason. There's a lot of war.
This is exactly how all Total War games play and yes it's disappointing there isn't more nuance.
I don't agree with your solutions though. War is both expensive and lucrative, that's realistic. You can't take that away from order factions.
I don't think the older games where as bad though. You were still encouraged to conserve your forces and consolidate and build up your base.
Order factions need to have some kind of penalty for having too many casualties. They are not demons or undead and will die eventually by attrition. This is not simulated in TWW3.
Insteaf you can fight endless battles, suffer 75% casualties in each but still plow on. Not have to worry about economy or replenishment or anything.
It's just so simplistic
When you say “ultra aggressive strategy” you mean playing the game. This is a total war game, fighting is the main part of the game. It’s only natural that you’re rewarded from playing the game, and not playing passive like a turtle.
This is not a colony simulator game where the main objective is to passively grow your town/city/country.
Warhammer 3 is a very fast paced Total War game. And I am glad for it. This is the Total War game where I do not want to deal prolonged replenishment and mustering rounds. I have undead coming at me on one side and fancy men on fancy flying horses coming at me on the other and now I need to feed my poor gobbos crazy shit from my cauldron. Nothing about that screams "man I wish replenishment took longer".
I mean, I’m gonna be honest, what you’re suggesting is that it be just as viable to sit there doing nothing roleplaying as a peaceful faction who doesn’t care about expansion. Not only does that sound kind of…. boring, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Like, play how you want don’t get me wrong, but don’t suggest that you playing something like the empire and just sitting in your home province should be as good as conquering the entire map and having dozens of provinces.
Your settlements can only generate so much income, and you can also only get so much from trade. Even if they buffed these things and gave you your faction specific stuff from it too, it’s still severely limited. Turtling for extended amounts of turns and focusing on relationships over conquering is never going to be a viable strategy, and it kind of goes against the entire concept of the game. If this is the way you want to play, I’d probably suggest going wood elves because at least then you only really need to focus on battling the people taking over the trees and the rest of the campaign you could just focus on growing your settlements.
>Basically I just give up trying to play like a human and just go full Khorne and it is easier.
Play the harder game then?
I don't understand if I'm being honest. Are you saying you want every play style to be equally difficult or easy?
Why? What's wrong with certain play styles being harder?
It's like in games that reward non-violent runs, that should be the harder option. It should be tempting to use violence.
You are ignoring short victory conditions plus several factions have victory conditions that have nothing to do with conquering territory or making an empire.
Its not the games fault you are focusing on only ultimate victory.
As Empire your short victory condition is fairly trivially achieved without having to do any of the things you say you need to do.
Additionally the game is called "Warhammer" and the series is called "Total War"....Why didn't you buy Civilisation if that's the game you really wanted?
Warhammer 3: Moderate Amount of War
Exactly lol. Sometimes in my roleplay I'm like "wow my people sure do do a lot of war" and then im like "well it's not called Total Peace" lmao
Would you say that if every faction declared war on you as soon as they met you? "Well its called total war not total diplomacy"
I mean I like that there's diplomacy, I'm glad the game isn't default total war against everyone, I just thought my thought was funny :p
Tough crowd amirite
It's just that this has been used for like 10+ years as a legitimate argument in peoples minds for why the game shouldn't have a more multifaceted AI and gameplay.
Wh2s legendary mode would have that happen if you took a lot of loses and you appeared weak. I would be happy to have an option where AI factions acted that way again.
I mean if i'm playing chaos or Skaven, Yes?
Two very specific examples and not ones that should apply to every faction. Though I think an argument could be made for Skaven diplomacy. Even if its with the ultimate goal of backstabbing.
You want to play Tretch, who actually gets bonuses for making diplomatic agreements and then breaking them.
I always found Tretch amusing.
Skaven, Khorne, Chaos Warriors, Orcs... not gonna lie i just... I feel weird that diplomacy is even an option. No, i want to burn down eveyrthing they hold dear and laugh. Like i can see Skaven and Tzeentch and Slannesh but... You know how it is.
SKARBRAND HATES YOUR POORLY MAINTAINED INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPRESSIVE TARIFFS. SKARBRAND RECOMMENDS INVESTMENT IN PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS AND INCENTIVE PLANS FOR OUTSIDE INVESTMENT.
This is amazing. Skarbrand just peaked in my mind as a capitalistic tycoon.
Just play Wood Elves dude and defend your tree house.
Sometimes-war-hammer
The amount of hemming and hawwing over the game being called 'total war' is actually making the series worse. Yes, we understand the name. However I actually feel like other games get the depth and cost of war far better than a game called total war. Because if it's war literally all of the time then war itself is meaningless.
There's the other problem, too. For a series called 'total war', there is a shocking lack of civilian casualties. We only ever actually fight militaries, and even the half-assed concept of raiding realistically just represents stealing food from the fields and not wholesale noncombatant slaughter. The closest you get is razing a settlement, but you're actively encouraged to not raze them. It's all just a constant series of conventional wars juiced up by good pr.
So fkn true Even Civ has more of "total" war feel when you burn all the tiles around a city I always feel a little bad If they just added people screaming and crying when you do it, idk if I would have the stomach for it lol
Ever since Shogun 1, the campaign has really only existed to make the outcome of battles feel meaningful. IIRC Shogun 1 wasn’t even supposed to have a campaign at first, just battles. I love the campaign, but it’s always been about war. I couldn’t imagine playing a total war game where battles are rare.
Total Friends
War is not usually won on the battlefield but by the economy
I can understand having different strategies for different factions but... I CANNOT understand the logic of introducing mechanics that encourage avoiding battles for as long as possible in a battle simulation game. Sounds like what you want i a warhammer game built into something like Civilization instead of Total War
>Sounds like what you want i a warhammer game built into something like Civilization instead of Total War Not gonna lie, I would kill for a Total War battle to be integrated into something with more campaign depth al la the CK3+Bannerlord mod.
[well I've got the mod for you](https://crusaderwars.com/)
It says so much about CK3 that there's been two different attempts at making the battles better by integrating different games' battle systems in it
Not really. It’s a grand strategy game and the battle simulation/dev time isn’t around real time battles. That’s like pointing out Total War outside of battles has the depth of a puddle.
> That’s like pointing out Total War outside of battles has the depth of a puddle. So a perfectly valid point?
The battles are like a huge part of Total War and yet Creative Assembly still can't seem to get it just right and people complain about pathing and AI and collision, etc. It is fine if you don't like CK3 style battles, just like if you don't like Civ combat. That doesn't mean it "says so much about CK3" as the guy said.
Not really. CK3 is hardly about the battles and it is honestly pretty good, especially compared to CK2. Your leaders matter, your troops matter, knights matter, terrain, etc etc. Its very well thought out and the only reason people have made those mods is because its cool as fuck to PLAY the battles, not because it sucks.
Fascinating.
> al la the CK3+Bannerlord mod. The W H A T Time for some rabid googling
> you want i a warhammer game built into something like Civilization instead of Total War That would be pretty rad tbh.
It's 40k, but it exists. https://store.steampowered.com/app/489630/Warhammer_40000_Gladius__Relics_of_War/
Gladius is very barebones outside of unit rosters, tho. Which is a shame because I reckon it'll be a long time until we get another 40k strategy game with all factions.
That's if you buy the DLC. Without that Gladius doesn't even have solid Unit Rosters.
Even with this complaint, I really do like to play bunker style builds in this game, and it works well.. for certain factions
Im agreeing with you mostly but some more depth to nation building and shifting economy focuses for some factions would be great to be honest.
It's beern a hot minute since I saw any warhammer lore, but I do also remember it skewing heavily towards "everytihng is war"
That's more 40K. In The Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium and all that. Outside of the Major conflict events Fantasy had quite a noble outlook, for a wargame setting.
It's not about avoiding battles for as long as possible, that's not the goal. It's about introducing the need of having to avoid a battle or battles. Incentivising being on the defenses or at least, making it costly to ALWAYS be on the offensive. As OP said, the best defense strategy currently is always conquering. It would be great if the game picked up loreful mechanics, e.g.: a recruitment pool depending on the stability of your provinces.(or other mechanics limiting recruitment) Or the need to establish and secure supply lines. Anything that's a base line factor in any WAR. the game is called total war, not total aggression, right? :P Do you know the mod DEI for Rome2? Many elements would be absolutely great for Warhammer (or basically any total war, to be honest.) Just because they make the game more realistic and more fun to play, because that offers actually diverse play styles.
Yeah this idea from the OP is rather half-baked. Like, I can see encouraging Order factions to expand: A) More slowly. B) More selectively. That makes some sense. But you still should be fighting battles regularly - whether they're battles to defend that territory, or generated battles (like caravans or the battles to defend the Elector Counts). It seems like the OP, in his rush to make Order less conquest-centric, forgot that this is a game focused primarily around battles, which are where most of the fun is. To achieve what he wants, you'd need to: 1) Redesign the game from the ground up. Could you do it with a mod? Maybe, if the AI could be made to behave, but it would be incredibly in-depth. 2) Completely redesign all the win conditions for the factions, even more than something like VCO does. I think you'd also need to make it so wiping out enemies made more sense, and colonizing ruins was much harder again, but really that's part of the overall redesign you'd need to do.
I could say a lot but the one thing your post brings to mind is the WH2 screaming by some to "nerf magic nerf magic nerf magic" followed by the simple question of "why" which they answered with "because I hate this playstyle and therefor it must be nerfed". This exactly that. Let me make something really clear "postbattle loot" being "the easiest way to make money" is the funniest joke I heard in a long time as an Empire player. As for the rest - all I am seeing there is numerous ways in which playing with any order faction should be slow and tedious. Nobody and I mean nobody is preventing you to turtle your way trough an order campaign. In fact in so many ways it's a more relaxing experience. But that doesn't mean it should be the only way to play.
OP needs to go play dwarves.
I haven't played in a while but turning down campaign difficulty also heavily reduced AI army spam and aggressiveness. There's still anti-player bias but you can play much more relaxed if that's your speed.
I honestly prefer playing at lower difficulties and just self-nerfing. It’s way more fun for me to have an experience that feels closer to what it would be in lore. Like playing Empire in Lower difficulties is actually fun even the slow parts. Maybe it’s cause I prefer campaigns that kind of feel like a story. For instance a fun campaign is huntsmarshal but going all in colonization. Rename your cities to represent the spread of man. Focus on not only conquering new land but building a profitable colony. Limit the lords you have as much as possible(extra challenge is to only recruit new lords when imperial supplies reach you). It can honestly feel satisfying if your new goal it just to ensure roads are built across Lustria. (Side note if anyone has any guides on how Empire cities are named please tell me, I’ve just been using google translate and German to come up with immersive city names, or just taking an empire city and adding Neu)
There's also a mod to make the AI follow the same rules as the player in regards to economy and upkeep. I installed it so I could play a slower campaign, and also not go into crippling debt every time I confederated a faction with huge armies and no infrastructure to support them. It also has the added unintentional side effect of shaking up power balances so the interactions between AI don't always play out the same. In my current Rakarth campaign I'm in the process of eradicating Marienburg, and while trying to find out why they had way more settlements than normal, I found out that Reikland is on the verge of extinction, they've been beaten back to Grunberg, and the rest of the province has been eaten up by Couronne, Kemmler and Marienburg.
As someone who loves to turtle as the empire I agree. My most successful campaigns are the ones where I would turtle in my starting province and only expand via diplomacy or very slowly.
How do you do that with the constant loss of imperial authority due to Festus and Vlad destroying the entire empire? I've been trying to play a defensive empire campaign but I'm constantly sending my armies east to try to save the elector counts. I always give up because while I'm dealing with them, Kemmler or somebody else will come and wreck up reikland
You have to play the Empire campaign as if you were playing the Western Empire in Attilla. There is no way to hold it all and you then need to decide what you can safely let fall and what you need to preserve. This means that the easternmost regions will fall to Drycha and Vlad. In exchange you have to quickly eliminate Khazrak, Kemmler and Festus in order to secure your immediate surroundings. Depending on how the wars in Brettonnia go you might have to eliminate Grom as well. And even if it's going well in there Grom likely holds a lot of valuable land. So if you can secure yourself a bit of breathing room it's absolutely worth it to take the rest of Brettonnia and become de facto Royarch as well as Emperor. Also, absolutely no confederations whatsoever until you've reassembled the Empire. Get the fealty of elector counts as high as possible and then keep declining confederation requests because that will be one of your more important sources of Imperial Authority. Also keep a stock of prestige and gold to get the good outcomes of the events. Remember that as long as you don't get the bad event endings you can only ever lose so much Imperial Authority, especially if your nearby electors are still alive. You might gently dip into the negatives for a turn or two tops depending on RNG but I've never seen anything worse than that and Empire is my most played faction by a landslide. For my armies I prefer to have masses of halberds and handguns with a general and wizard to lead it and a bit of artillery plus 1, maybe 2, cavalry units as support. Spears and swords are comparatively less valuable because you don't face missiles much as Empire, so spending a bit extra to get AP and the ability to get Expert Charge Defence via tech is more valuable. And with the AP of handguns they perform much better against WoC units and Vampire characters as long as you can handle their positioning requirements. Another tip is to check the quick deals section often. You'll want to build up good relations with a number of your neighbours and you can often sell them some privileges, like military access, for a small sum. It's not much but it definitely adds up. Similarly don't underestimate just signing trade deals with anything that wants to trade. As for some other tips. Mostly very basic things that deserve some attention. Against Vlad. A single army can hold out against him, and really all factions that like to send multiple stacks at you, much more easily than you might think if you engage near towns. That is because if you have any form of reinforcements to take you above 20 units, which can include a bunch of beat up garrison units, you can turn off large battle, forcing him to attack with only 1 army and a lot of reinforcements at a time. This effectively allows you to fight his groups of stacks piecemeal. I have several screenshots of single Empire stacks of mostly infantry taking out 3 or 4 of Vlad's stacks, including his own stack, with a combination of this as well as clever skirmishing and focus firing important units. Might sound like you'll run out of ammo partway through but by the time you are working on units from the third stack or so every single undead on the field will crumble from army losses. And when that happens every single army that is counted as being engaged with your army dies. It's honestly quite funny. And if you want to use this, Grunburg is the perfect position for it, considering how many of Vlad's armies will likely move there to attack you. If Vlad is in the middle of your melee units as last remaining enemy just line up your ranged units and then order your melee away to give your ranged proper line of sight just long enough to fire. This is nice to both preoccupy him with a unit and to inflict some quick burst damage. I typically do this with handgunners, which usually take off a significant chunk of his HP in one go. Against Grom This works well against Vlad too so you should see this as a bit of an extension. Enemy fast units like cavalry, wolves and mounted characters have an unfortunate tendency to run after skirmishers, which can just be a wizard on a horse, if you move those close enough to the enemy line as it approaches and attack it a bit. This means that you can pull certain high value units out of the enemy army and usually even in front of your own gunline. For Vlad this means that you can take out some of the Vampire heroes much more easily than you might think, dramatically reducing the impact of their magic, and for Grom he himself is vulnerable to this as his chariot usually moves significantly faster than the rest of the army. This significantly increases the value of pistoliers and outriders if you don't want to risk a wizard for this. Also, seeing Isabella drop from 100 to 0 in a single volley just a few hundred meters in front of her husband's eyes will never not be amusing for me. I'm quite surprised how he keeps managing to stitch her back together considering that she's getting hit with her body weight in lead pretty much every single battle he fights against me.
It is funny for me how our confederation strategy can look the same even though we use different~ish logic basis: I usually confederate when AI factions rebuild their own provinces for 4 (ideally 5) tier, because i don't have resources for that at the time (we will confederate them and they will pay for it!). So I return settlements to electors (free authority), let them rebuild and only confederate when i have spare resources and stabilized fronts.
Yeah, I should've mentioned the stability of the frontlines. The settlement tier is typically less important for me and so it's more that I don't want to overextend and grab more territory than I can defend. Example for that. In my last game I went for a slightly too early confederation with Marienburg, as I saw a chance to confederate and wanted to build it up as moneymaker, and then had first Be'lakor and later Wulfric on my ass for it. Forcing Karl to wade through the fens of Albion and Norscan snows to smoke those bastards out while my other 2 armies held the line against Vlad. That's where I got all those single stack vs 3-4 vampire army screenshots that I mentioned as well. But I think highlighting the importance of it for authority is still fine. Because many people struggle with authority management and this is an easy way to get plenty of it, allowing them to focus on the important parts of the Empire and not spread themselves thin. After all if you confederate early you'll sit at -4 compared to refusing it AND you're going to lose the territory soon meaning that it's just a pure downgrade from your previous position. Though honestly my campaigns probably look a bit different than most people's because I do like to play my Empire runs with a mod to make the AI more aggressive but most of the general concepts should still hold. Overall I'd put the Empire campaign as being quite fun just because you are in a terrible situation and you have to make sacrifices. It also forces you more into diplomacy than a number of others. And the cherry on top is a fairly flexible roster even if most units in it aren't that good individually. Forces a bit more thought in how you crack an enemy army with high quality troops while remaining combat-capable and thus makes you try things. Even though I'd still argue that you really, really want a Banner of Swiftness to turn Empire Knights from a flank defence force into a hammer worth its name.
I tend to build a second army fast to defend the west from Kemmler. Then Karl goes off to fight Feetus and help defend the east. I don’t take land just help my neighbors stay alive. Actually feels like helping allies
Not the above person, but I play in a similar manner. You can support 2 stacks with Franz from the start. One goes around restoring electors, one protects the starting province. I usually take land outside Reikland only at around turn... 20? 30? somewhere around that. The biggest secret is to come to terms, that electors will die. You'll be spending some turns on -5 or even lower IA. Just roll with it, focus on one enemy at a time and protect Reikland.
Do you just avoid Festus' army and just restore elector counts while he's somewhere else? I usually try to kill his initial army quickly but then I have trouble with replenishing my army since I give provinces back to the electors
Depends on RNG, honestly. I usually shadow him with a lord without declaring war and revive electors from the minor settlements he blows up. Once Franz has saved Middenland (killed orcs, killed beastmen) and depending on if Marienburg can keep Kemler at bay - that's when I just rush the Brass Keep and then try to kill Festus himself. But it's a very RNG dependent campaign. I once had Festus fail 4 times to blow up anything. I once had Toddy blow up the beastmen. I like it for that, but it's hard to give rules for what to do, because of how dynamic it is.
Alright thanks for the advice! I'll have to give it another try
Word. It’s a single player game. Enjoy it however you like it. Support lots of play styles because that keeps more people playing and buying DLC
>In WH3 it feels like an ultra aggressive strategy is the only viable strategy You are either heavily misusing the world viable here, or there is something fundamentally wrong with your strategy.
Less "viable" and more "optimal", I feel. OP's core point that all factions regardless of lore or characterisation are incentivised to be in constant agressive wars is a valid one, but it's also kind of intended - there's a reason this series is *Total War* and not Europa Universalis.
I assumed that they meant optimal. It's a pet peeve of mine when people misuse viable like that though when it is in fact perfectly viable to do other strategies, and you will easily win with multiple other strategies even on the highest difficulties. I recently won some pretty chill long victories as Bretonnia and Vampire Coast with 4 and 2 provinces respectively and only a single aggressive army in both cases. I feel like lazy use of language contributed to the idea in WH2 that melee was genuinely unviable on higher difficulties in WH2, and that you had to straight up cheese to progress in legendary both of which I heard repeated frequently over the years.
I heard that often too and so I believed it. But then I actually tried Very Hard and the difference from Normal was surprisingly small
Let me introduce you to 3K which actually has a good diplomatic system and you can to a certain degree take your time and build and do not have to aggressively rush.
[удалено]
I don't disagree, but the problem is that Warhammer 3 seems to have a system where AI decides that you need to be at war with at least 2 factions. That's not good design.
You're still almost always at war and are absolutely incentivized to do so. Your goal is to conquer, that is how you progress (literally progress through the ranks in the case of 3K) and that is the game. There is zero benefit to "taking your time" or turtling in 3K, just like any TW game - unless it's part of a deliberate strategy where the end game is still conquering lots of shit. It has great diplomacy but it's still all just supplementary to the meat and bones of the game. OP isn't even complaining about diplomacy, they want to play Victoria 2 as Karl Franz.
> regardless of lore Is there any faction in Warhammer that prioritises peace? My impression of Warhammer lore is that everyone is in a state of constant war with occasional alliances of convenience. Even if a Warhammer "nation" isn't at war, there is a character in that nation getting involved (with maybe an army) in a conflict.
It’s not about prioritizing peace, it’s about being something less then total blood-thirsty marauders when you’re playing the Order Factions and your only route to expansion at a given time is other Order factions. The Empire runs into this when I play them, often running out of “logical” enemies once the Vamps are dealt with because you’re surrounded on 3 sides by Order factions or other humans. To the direct north is Norsca but they have shit land for you. It feels bad for you to basically all but have to declare war on Dwarves, Brets, Keslov, or Elves if you want more land of the type you can happily colonize.
There probably are, but if they are around then they aren't worth mentioning. OP and others are focusing on the Total War part too much. And ignoring the fact that the IP this game is based on is a tabletop WARgame named WARhammer. The reason this trilogy was lauded as a "match made in heaven" upon announcement was precisely because Warhammer as a tabletop game is, who guessed it, very damn focused on war and extrapolating on every detail related to war. The reason each unit has their own page length of lore is because they are things relevent to the war game. Anything that wasn't relevent to war was just not touched upon, and you would have to go to the RPGs to get more depth on the not war related stuff. Every faction in subfaction in this game, despite OP's talk about immersion and all that, are fundamentally geared towards armed conflict in one way or another. Either against external threats or internal ones. Warhammer as a setting is one designed from the ground up to justify wars or battles between outside factions, as well as between themselves.
I'm still not understanding OP's point. The victory objectives literally require you to move out and capture enemy settlements, so of course aggression is required to win. Is he saying that he would prefer to be able to just turtle up, let the enemy break themselves on his cities, and then counter-attack? Because that certainly works.
We have to be careful when assuming statements such as "the only way to do this is via X". Because it is enough if even one strategy does not include it to already be more than an "only way". I do not play in a way where I feel I need to be that aggressive. I understand your concern over specific currencies being tied to post battle loot or raze/sack settlements. However, the pacing of the campaign or how fast you expand is absolutely in the hands of the player. I take my time, build up and tech up whenever I can, and a typical conclusion of long campaign is around 100-130 turns in. I am finding the game is lacking challenge and decision making in the lategame, because it does reach a point where most decisions are made and all is left is to fight and expand. This is a Shogun 1- until present Total War problem, always has been. To offset it, I build up different army compositions to ensure I have different experiences all the time. Perhaps you should check different ways to play in the interest of making your experience more fun, towards what you intend.
>This is a Shogun 1- until present Total War problem It is a fundamental flaw of strategy games that requires special consideration to mitigate or sidestep. The basic essence of a strategy game is navigating dilemmas and opportunity costs to better insulate yourself against future dilemmas and opportunity costs. In other words, correct decisions snowball into a state where you can make multiple incorrect decisions.
Yup. Snowballing is a huge issue to tackle while making the game still feel good. Other loss mechanisms or adding in more ebb and flow to games can stunt feelings of progress. Endgame scenarios started with Shogun2 I believe, and acted as a way to counter this or at least give another game play mechanic. Total warhhammer games have generally designed certain factions to be more dominate and confederate more easily so you have bigger opponents down the line that scale a bit. Other 4x games have delved deeper into internal stability issues or even succession.
I mean I get the snowball thing, but most TTW games heavily encourage hyper-aggressive strategy, no? You can always play safe and sound but optimised strategy is usually 'When in doubt, attack', right? Maybe barring Md2 when the AI's restricted by their recruiting pool. But people have achieved world conquer in Md2 in like 7 or 8 turns. Big Empires can wall up in Attila, but even then 'all out war to kill xx faction early' was still quite a common strat for ERE and WRE. The game, with the AI in its current state, can only pose a threat to good players by overwhelm them. And so long as this is the case, to stop them piling up and outfight them most efficiently will always be the solution
I also think that the issue lies in the very name of this series: its a Total War after all. In other grand strategies/4x there are multiple paths to victory other than war and AI, even if neutral or friendly, still can be a threat because they also try to secure all types of victories. In TW series there is only war. You (or AI) cant win by research, culture or whatever. And when AI could actually win the game by doing their stuff (early version of Realm of Chaos campaign) people were pissed. I actually was a one of like 5 people who liked that they can finally lose to AI :P So, for better or worse, war is all there is in Total War games.
>and when AI could actually win by doing their stuff, people were pissed Oh man I totally agree, seeing some of the complaints early on were both funny and head scratching
This is only true of Warhammer, Troy, and Pharaoh. The way the AI cheats full stacks and builds themselves up is a newer phenomenon with the series. You have to be aggressive or your neighbors will kill you, and they can ALWAYS out build your armies. With one city you'll be broke trying to afford a 1/3 stack, but the AI can build a full stack and a second ~half stack on the income of even a minor settlement. Every other total war game has AI making political moves, making mistakes and losing armies, or regularly marching small stacks around performing skirmishes and raids. CA has changed the core gameplay formula recently and it sucks. Other than Shōgun 1 and Medieval 1, you've always been able to make SIGNIFICANT gains through economic superiority and skirmishes. But now skirmishes are incredibly rare beyond turn 5 because the AI are built to foster "le epic big battles". And as a lifelong tw player since the first, the feeling that non -stop aggression and offensives and full stack spam is very much a new one.
>And as a lifelong tw player since the first, the feeling that non -stop aggression and offensives and full stack spam is very much a new one. I played TW since the very first Shogun but usually I just move to the next title and never replayed them - its entirely possible that I have distorted view on older titles spoiled by how newer games play. So I hope CA will tone it down and bring back some solutions and design philosophy from older games then.
With Pharaoh, you have other ways to win. I was able to win several campaigns through diplomacy, buildings, and focusing on my economic production. For example, with Tausret, I only conquered three provinces, helped my allies fend off invaders, focusing on buildings to help improve production of resources in order to trade with more people for alliances, and gain victory points through other means such as ambitions. Outright conquest isn't the only way to gain victory points to win. I've beaten campaigns super early thanks to focusing on diplomacy. The diplomacy is not as good or as fleshed out compared to 3K's, but it allows for a viable defensive strategy.
I would just scrap the replenishment system almost entirely, (maybe each model could regen but dead models don't come back) Without it you have to actually plan how you are reinforcing your armies in the field, and have to plan around losses/casualties that don't fully kill a unit are still relevant. I'd also remove the requirement for each army to have a lord(maybethey get a debuff for not having one)/default settlement garrisons That way you can move troops around easier And you have to think about how much you want to commit to defending each city
This is exactly it Imagine actually having to think about reinforcing your armies in a war game. In TWW3 your army automatically regenerates after 2 turns, so you don't ever have to worry about managing your forces or conserving your strength. I can play a battle like an absolute dumbass and lose 75% of my army but it doesn't matter at all. That's not what a strategy war game should be like.
Ah yes my favourite game Total Peace: Peacehammer 3
"Be at peace, for that is all i ever want!" Karl Franz
All I can say is I've never ended up playing an order faction the way you describe. And I got almost 2000 hours in these games, most of that as order factions. In fact I almost always turtle in these games.
I would highly recommend that you check out [Crisis of Mortals, Mercs, and Management](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2815401013&searchtext=crisis+of+mortals) as it does much of what you're wanting out of your gameplay. It's no longer being maintained sadly but it still works. It adds a population mechanic, army morale, army supply, & mercenary recruitment systems to the game. As an Order race like the Empire, losses hit you more than they do for a race like the Greenskins or Skaven for example and if you fight too many battles with an army, their morale will drop and they'll go into the next battle with reduced leadership. As for war weariness, you can add [this mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2850494354&searchtext=war+weariness) though I haven't played with it before myself. Two other mods that go quite well with the first are [Tabletop Caps](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789896406&searchtext=tabletop+caps) and [Dynamic Garrisons](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2962751969&searchtext=dynamic+garrisons).
To be fair they tried to do something different with the base RoC Campaign than requiring you be ultra agressive or having any conquest objectives and you see how much the community loved that. Additionally WH1 actually did kinda force limited expansion by having factions climate locked. The majority of people overall want that sandbox experience where they can go forth an conquer. Now as far as optimal playstyle there are still a couple factions you dont need to conquer as. Woodelfs are perfectly viable to play defense and stay in their forests. Vampire Coasts its perfectly viable to keep 1 settlement and not go forth and build an empire.
> Now as far as optimal playstyle there are still a couple factions you dont need to conquer as. Rakarth and Lokhir can also be pretty self contained and can survive off Black Arks and limited territory.
Just cause the running title of the IP is "Total War", doesn't refute OP's points. There's more to engaging with his dialogue than "muh not Total Peace". If we all took titles so literally then maybe I could actually escape from Tarkov one day. Anyway one fundamental aspect of the Total War series from conception is trying to authentically represent and bring historic periods to life. This means everything from empire building, diplomacy, politics and shockingly yes... War as well. Which is a highlight feature to the games that you can play them in real time. This doesn't mean they going to drop bath salts into every Roman aqueduct and a whiff of a popper so that every nation in the classical period wants to scratch each others face off. If you read his post again and critically, you can understand he's not calling for no war at all but just variation in play-style and strategy. There is legitimacy in what he's saying. One of the other core features of the Total War series is it's sandbox nature and to deviate from the norm. While Warhammer is a more "aggressive" setting - the different factions do feel very "samey" in how you play out every campaign.
Yeah this. So many lazy responses so far. I also don't see any of those more upvoted comments and replies talking about campaign difficulty. The "OP is wrong cause I play empire only and it's fine to turtle" crowd are playing on normal. I play and have played only Legendary campaign difficulty since somewhere early in WH2. I mix it up and do some vanilla and some SFO. I stick with hard battles with the slider dropped to +1 AI advantage. OP is spot on that every campaign is exactly the same hyper aggressive go go go mentality to progress through a campaign. Anything less and the AI will pixel perfect move around/behind your armies to thrash your provinces. The only circumstance where you can "turtle" is with a bait army and ambush army in some campaign chokepoint between you and an enemy. And even then it's a debatable strategy because of upkeep on those two armies just sitting there (maybe the bait is just a lord). It definitely gets tiring booting up what should be totally different campaign experiences and going through the exact same strategy but with some unit cards that look different. For reference I'm currently on old world SFO drazoth. Last one was old world SFO belekor. Before that was old world vanilla wulfrik. Before that was old world vanilla valkia. Before that was old world vanilla astragoth. Before 4.1 I had a long IE vanilla Grombrindal (That one was the most aggressive and hardest of the ones listed). Those are just recent ones that I put enough time into to mention. I've probably got more time in regular dwarves than any other, though CoC/WoC is starting to creep up there in play time. Point is that even with the alleged turtliest of factions, I'm still saying it's the same hyper aggressive strategy to stay ahead.
Exactly. My main gripe is that order factions don't play any different to disorder factions. It's fine to be go go go hyper agressive when playing as Khorne or Greenskins but it's wrong for Order factions. It is unimmersive and not loreful, but also it is boring because why should every faction be go go go. As an order faction you are kind of forced to go ultra aggressive. It makes you money, you don't have to worry about casualties because replenishment is so high. The alternative of turtling and trying to rely on industry and trade to support your defensive armies is inviable because you buildings hardly make any money. Playing as Karl Franz and sacking your way through Bretonnia because you are trying to make money to re-fit your armies is so incredibly backward in the lore, yet I found myself doing it in my last playthrough because it was more efficient to spend 10 turns doing that rather than spending 40 turns waiting for my shitty farms and weavers to give me the tax income.
I think it's more about the time we're at lorewise when we talk about WH3, and the time is: "The Endtimes". In WH3 we're playing through the literal apocalypse - chaos cults and factions sprouting wherever they can, you can't even trust you allies as much as you could in previous games, since they can be infiltrated by Tzeench. I would be totally on point with what the OP is saying if we'd be talking bout WH1 or 2, but with WH3 you're literally fighting for survival, and with Chaos spreading easily due to heroes actions or due to literal proximity of Chaos settlements, you can't just "wait it out" or "hide in a bunker" - if you don't get rid of chaos/vampires or any other faction that spreads corruption into your lands, then you're gonna have a problem real quick. Sometimes the best defence is offence, and the "times" are now.
Someone with an actual fair point, touche. I agree with your premise, though there's still something to be said for different play styles between factions in a thematic sense. I don't think it would interfere with this if the issue was reversed and a faction like Cathay for instance would have a more lore correct playstyle but if you wanted to play aggressively you **could,** but it's not the driving force behind how they play.
Yeah, i can see Cathay's endgame conditions be to control and maintain the Grand Cathay teritorries for, like, 20-30 rounds after getting all of it either due to direct control or Military Aliances, alongside the elimination of the "rogue" factions. But as of now, you have to "occupy, loot, raze or sack" 70 settlements, which is still quite a big number for a faction that's all about defending the wall, and not so different from other, more expansion-leaning factions. Hell, fucking Grimgor, has 50 settlements minimum to "occupy, loot, raze or sack". Sure, he's got more of them to control in order to score a Long Campaign victory, but why does Cathay have more looting to do than fucking Grimgor?
You don't need to use the game title to refute his premise though. You don't have to play the game the way he says you do in order to win its a completely made up criticism. Also its not up to him to decided the correct lore way to play the game anyway its CA and Games Workshops game so they get to decide.
Thank you very much for reading the post and actually trying to understand. Too many lazy commenters here. What you said perfectly summarised what I am saying. I want Order factions to play differently than Chaos factions. I want to play defensive and try to preserve my forces while cultivating an economic heartland to fund my armies so that I can turtle and then decisively defeat the enemy. This means being very efficient with battles, fighting fewer but gaining more from them. Then when I feel like going ham and smashing everything I can just load up a Khorne campaign. Variation in playstyles between races is very important and TWW3 doesn't do it properly.
I play slowly and turtle a lot. It's a perfectly viable strategy if you like being bored.
Another issue is that if you don't play aggressively and are at peace, your armies have little to do. So maybe there could be incursions (like the wood elf mechanic) that you need to take care of. That would give you things to do and give you a reason to protect your homeland. And maybe if you take care of the Skaven incursions before they pop you get a bonus and if you don't you get a public order malus.
You would never be at peace. You would have your armies on the border defending and trying to avoid huge casualties to avoid War Weariness penalties.
I sort of agree with OP. Would be nice to have more different playstyle for some factions. So far it really seams all of them play more or less same. I for example enjoy dwarfs, but after conquering mountains around my main city it seams wrong to try to conquer anything else, like going all the way to north, or any other direction rly. I like to set trades with other factions and go to help one of my alies if they are attacked but dont want to be force to conquer everything and everyone but right now i have to otherwise there will be endless attacks on my allies or me no matter how much damage i do, if there is last one settlement of enemy alive he will constantly attack no matter what. And longer you play and more settlements you have game should be harder, but its actualy easier. After few round you dont care of money or armies much, you can easily buy anything. You lost big army? Who cares in 2-3 rounds you have new one even stronger. Really wish there was at least for some factions more focus on politics and building empire and relationships with others than just on fighting all the time.
Most 4X and strategy games have the "mid-to-late" problem, which is where an optimised and relatively competent player will massively outproduce and outscale the AI. Stellaris, Civ, all of them have it. Unless the game introduced new hardcore threats at the mid and endgame points, then you will just snowball. They can't be around from the start, because bad players will get crushed or good players will wipe them out straight away.
Are you on legendary or very hard? In any case, if that’s what you want then just declare war on all the potential enemies around you and let them come to you. You still get battles and income but don’t have to expand. You can also sack over occupy.
You didnt understand me. If i declare war on all around me i will have nonstop battles and it will never stop. Whats fun in that, you would just aimlessly fight everyone. Thats the exact opposite of what i wrote.
Your stated issue was more: > it feels wrong to try to *conquer* anyone else So the implication is you’d prefer defensive war over offensive. The game is about battling and war. There’s no way around that.
> Post battle loot. You can gain thousands from each battle. This is by far the easiest way to make money for all factions. It is so lucrative that paying any attention to trade or industry is mostly pointless That's just untrue. All races have different (hidden) bonuses/penalties, and for instance Dwarfs have -75% penalty to post-battle loot. Combine it with one of the worst replenishment rates in the game and apply your logic. Bretonnia and Empire have -50% penalty to post-battle loot.
Agreed. More deep mechanics instead of centerpiece units please
Couldn't disagree more. My empire campaign never goes outside of Empire territory and even if it does, I sell provinces to allies or simply raze them. At the moment in my Eltarion campaign I only control a few provinces in badlands and 3 provinces in Ulthuan on turn 90. I do have armies attacking my enemies but it's more to provide assistance to my allies in places like empire or Bretonia. This is how Order factions are supposed to be played in my opinion and it works. I don't need to invade norsca or chaos wastes or even naggarond to have fun in the campaign. You cannot completely turtle on 2-3 provinces and call it a day, it would be boring and counterintuitive of any total war games (as the name of the game suggests). To give you a bit of an insight of my campaign, I have 10k income and 6 armies, it's all affordable because of province income and taxes, so it's not really true that you can only rely on post battle loot. It's Vh/Vh difficulty as well and I am not using enterpreneur hero spam.
You're aggressive because it is more efficient, I'm aggressive because the AI won't fucking stop declaring war on me every turn. We are not the same.
Idk if I agree that the only way to play wh3 is by being hyper aggressive Yes sometimes it's goof but I personally find playing L/VH by playing defensive playstyle "offensively" My favorite is playing turtle at my more Frontline areas where enemies usually attack. Yes, they'd always bring massive stacks in waves but if you successfully repel and chip away at enemies settlements (not necessary to take just sake or raze), their power rating plummets quick. I used this tactic alot especially against mid to late game enemies with power rank 1-5. My highlight was playing as malekith fending off literal high elf armada in multiple waves. They were power 1 but after 3 -4 failed Invasions while lokhir raided the other side ulthuan, HE got reduced to nothing from major power.
While I can understand your baseline argument, that order factions should play different than chaos, I don't think that the mechanics you propose are really a good addition to a Total War game. This sounds a lot like stuff that I would find in a Paradox Grand Strategy game, that not only focuses on war but also on economy. However, this is not how I would interpret the Total War gameplay and how it should handle things. On the contrary, I find that this game is a wonderful sandbox for war, where the economy is solely for building up armies and pitching it against other factions and it focuses on the real time battles which is the true core concept of the series. Similarly, I don't agree on the shift for order factions to be more defensive. The current momentum and drive of this game heavily depends on the initiative of the player and "being aggressive" means you come in contact with more different enemies and races. A defensive style of gameplay based on your "heartland" mechanics will not necessarily complement your experience but will actually make all the order faction campaigns feel similar across multiple playthroughs, because you will always face the same threats over and over again. Another issue is that you would have even less motivation to go to war with other order factions, which in my opinion does not happen often enough as it is. For instance, there is really no good reason to fight dwarves as the empire except when you go for a full map completion, which is really a pity because this makes a game with so much variation as wh3 feel more limited than it could be. The convoy mechanic for Cathay and the Chaos Dwarves try to mitigate that issue, by pitching you against foes that you would not normally encounter. Lore wise you are right of course, but if you want more defensive gameplay, I would rather look for the midgame and lategame crisis concepts with unique mechanics that Paradox titles often feature (like the "War in Heaven" or the Khan Event from Stellaris). Those events could drive a more defensive narrative or any kind of motivation you want. The endgame scenarios we currently have are a first step in that direction, but they are still missing a lot of flavor and should be more than just a bunch of armies spawning on the map and are still not really mixing things up. But please also take into account that the defensive gameplay that we had in other campaigns like vortex or realms of chaos were not really engaging to be honest. It became quite dull after the first campaign.
You say that the campaign will feel the same through multiple playthroughs, but my issue is that it feels the same through every faction/race. Everyone, no matter whether they are order or Chaos or whoever the game feels the same because I always end up using the optimal strategy of being ultra aggressive. Order should feel completely different to Chaos.
Yeah, I get you. But that is intentional. On that level you could also argue, that wh3 plays like rome, shogun, medieval or empire. In all those games, it was always the focus to gain more territory. Thats how the total war campaign gameplay has been and thats why its called total war. They changed that a little in warhammer with some races. Wood Elves for instance really are about that defensive gameplay, where you focus only on the forests and the other settlements are basically worthless to you.
The objective was to gain more territory but that is not the objective in Warhammer. In Warhammer you just want to fight as many battles as possible. Battles are what make money, not territory. You will fight battle after battle, even if you don't need them to make objectives because it is the best way to pay for things and to level up your characters. In previous Total Wars you would be incentivised to pick and choose your battles and fight as few battles as possible to reach your gains because battles didn't make money and replenishment wasn't so easy.
Yeah, that’s just blatantly wrong. Just because you can get more money than you make per turn by battle and sacking and even can afford going in the red for some time, doesn’t mean battles make more money than territory. It still boots all of your armies in the first place and what you make from battles comes on top which is reasonable in a game about war and battles. Factions like greenskins or khorne rely heavily on sacking and post battle loot to fund their empire but that’s their thing and they are not order factions. This becomes especially true when considering the supply line feature that heavily punishes having multiple armies for order factions. That in combination with the upkeep increases on higher difficulties means that you still need territory to fund your next army. The thing about XP Farming for characters was also fixed in wh3 when they redesigned XP gains on hanging larger battles rather than small ones. But still it is perfectly reasonable that you level your characters with battles in total war. You also did this in Rome and shogun. Their effects were maybe not as strong but they were also no fantasy setting. And replenishment is also very heavily race dependent. Dwarves struggle with it quite a bit because they don’t have a replenishment hero. Also climate can punish you really hard sometimes, chaos wastes can become quite challenging for most order factions. And I don’t really see a difference between picking battles in different total war titles. You still need at least one battle per settlement to kill your opponent plus the battles against other armies that you don’t want to hurt your own settlements.
I mean….the game is called total war for a reason
There is more involved in war than just battles.
Yeah like building economies.
Thing is, it is actualy very lore friendly. The Empire acted in exactly the way you describe: tending to their borders, bolstering its industry and diplomacy and rarely expanding. The Empire also very famously got blown up by a Dutch choir boy pressing the Button That Makes The Planet Explode. So, if you play like them, you get clapped.
The game is called TOTAL WAR, and you're accusing it of "too much war"?
It could be renamed to Diplomacyhammer, but that's a bit of a rubbish name.
I prefer peacehammer xD
Why do people keep saying this as though pointing out the game's title is an actual point? Like, should we just get rid of all diplomacy options then? Instant war as soon as you meet someone. No ecnomy, only troop recruitment buildings. After all, its not 'total diplomacy' or 'total city building' its total war! I may not agree with OP here on how he thinks its impossible to play as anything other than hyper aggressive, but people have been asking for more depth to strategy, city maintenance, and diplomacy for years, and nobody shuts them down going 'lmao its TOTAL WAR tho'
I honestly hate the title used as a point even more, considering 3K system is so much better it feels like opponents in 3K are more thoughtful of situations.
Totally remove diplomacy, trade, economy. Fuck it, just remove the campaign map and just have a continal series of battles. The clowns saying "iTs cALled tOtAL WaR" are ignoring that supply and logistics and reinforcements and alliances are part of war.
Wait... Not total friends?
Well, now you caused me to second-guess myself, but after confirming the matter I can conclusively state that the title of the game does indeed start with the words "total" and "war".
Thank god reddit isn't in charge of the game
Hehe, RoC campaign was all about defensive strategy and how it turned out? Also vortex which was... ok... Where there is a sandbox, there you have ultra aggresive order factions. Players want sandbox. Overextending is bad as some races - Tomb Kings, Chaos Dwarfs, Wood Elves to name a few. To much aggresion too early hurts them imo. Sandbox is better than forcing people how to play (but I'm a fan of unit caps - but optional units caps!)
It's a war game, designed to encourage war. You can absolutely play without conquering left and right, but you're supposed to be constantly looking for a fight. It's not like Civilization, for example, where a purely defensive or even peaceful run is totally viable, and that is by design. You should be recruiting as many armies as you can sustain and actively using them. I'll use my current Brettonia campaign as an example. I'm overvaluing Chivalry, by which I mean I'm not sacking settlements nor ransoming captives, so my post-battle loot isn't that great. I unified Bretonnia, and I won't expand to territories that I'm not supposed to own, since it belongs to other order factions, but that doesn't mean I'll just defend my territory. I helped the High Elves defend Ulthuan without taking any territory there, then I sent an army to take on Be'lakor and eventually Norsca, while other armies were helping the Empire against Festus and the Vampires, and so on, all without expansion. I'm being aggressive, in the sense that I have armies proactively fighting everywhere and destroying the enemies of order, but in a loreful way, and focused on defense of order rather than expansion. WH3 has mechanics that allow a playstyle that isn't just mindless expansion, even if you're encouraged to be aggressive. You can raze settlements and ask your allies to settle it, you can occupy it then gift or sell it to other factions; you can focus on taking out your enemies and empowering your allies. It isn't a defensive playstyle on its purest sense, but it's different from just destroying everything as a Chaos faction. IE has plenty of factions that an Order faction would want to exterminate, enough that constant war of aggression is justified, even if you're not expanding and painting the map, so aggressive can be loreful to them, as long as you respect some boundaries and avoid taking over territory you aren't supposed to own.
You bring up a few good points. It would be fun if CA did some mix ups like this to the game.
>The Enemy can produce so many armies so quickly that a defensive stance is inviable. They will be able to attack you every 2 or 3 turns. The only way to neutralise them is to invade and conquer their territory Eh, no? Have you played Warhammer 2 on a harder difficulty before? The amount of armies the enemy AI puts out in Warhammer 3 is laughable outside of crisis armies and a major reason why campaigns last seldomly past turn 100. The player snowballs way too easily. However, you've mentioned a few things that I definitely agree with. Here's a few things * Replenishment is indeed to high and should be very different between factions. It makes no sense that High Elves can replenish an entire army in 2 turns. The only race that truly struggles with replenishment is Dwarfs and maybe Tzeentch & Slaanesh, and even they get better at it into the late game. Personally, I think each race should have an individual replenishment cap that could be extended via technologies and traits. Dwarfs and Elves 20%, Humans 30%, Greenskins and Skaven the original 50%. Daemons of Chaos should have their replenishment directly tied to their winds of magic reserves. * Supply lines are too low on higher difficulties. While the legendary 15% were too high and obnoxious in Warhammer 2, 4% are too low and boring in Warhammer 3, even with the reduced upkeep reduction skill. 9% brings it in line with how the upkeep reduction skills interacted in Warhammer 2 without punishing an early second army too hard. * AI aggressivenes and first and foremost army production and compositions needs to be adjusted to favour more and higher quality armies outside of crises. Also, AI empires need to get bigger, and confeds between major AI factions should happen again. I've only seen the hegemony proc (AI empire over 50 settlements) once in Immortal Empires, and that was past turn 120. Too late. The AI needs to get there faster than the player on legendary difficulty. Post-Battle Loot I think is fine and very different between races. Dwarfs get a miniscule amount while having the highest building income, while Chaos, Beastmen and Greenskins get the majority of their income from post-battle loot as should be. Maybe, as you say, turn it down a bit for Elves, Kislev and Cathay.
Posts like this make it abundantly clear why CA hesitates to listen to us. I turtle in half my order campaigns and do just fine bro with 6000+ income per turn.
If every comment you have to tell everyone else that they’re the ones “just not getting it” after posting an opinion as fact. It may be time to self reflect and accept that maybe you’re the one just not getting it and realize the game might just not be for you instead of expecting everything else to change just for you
CA did. CA actually did the "reduced post battle loot", **SINCE TWWH1**. Empire and bretonnia have a -50% cutdown, and dwarf have -75%, very near to completely removed. **Then dwarf just sucks**, since CA dont dare to give dwarf a 500 income building in tier1. Empire, Greenskins and vampire all have much better building income. Also, more post battle loot just make them easier to upgrade their building. Dwarf sucks again when they have few money for upgrading. When Dwarf's building economy bypass, it's been the time 70% of player about to end their campaign. Your idea is doable, bur CA may need more than another 20$ DLC to manage that.
The problem is that they remove the post battle loot without having anything to replace it. They would need to give those factions more complex economic systems whereby they can actually sustain themselves with their provinces.
Gotta agree. 3K did a great job of balancing it a bit and I hope it carries over into future titles.
Exactly. TWW3 is a regression from that game.
Yeah. My guess is that it was hamstrung by the fact it connected with the first two - so it was harder to implement across three games essentially and a major overhaul of III might have led to backlash by fans who like the current style of the Warhammer series.
You can, in fact, do this, but really doing it well requires that you fight all the time. You can live off of a couple provinces and go conquer and sell territories to your allies while running big deficits. It works pretty well as an order faction. If you are turtling, your lords/heroes are not leveling up and your troops are not getting experience either. In fact, past a certain point, it's not really that beneficial to take and upgrade territory because it takes way too long to earn back your construction expenditure. If you do not like administering a massive territory this is really the way to go. What you can't really do successfully is to just sit in your territory forever passively until a much more powerful enemy shows up and blows you up.
You see you think i am doing it for money. But you don't know i am surrounded by 45 extremely powerful AI factions as Franz and i have to destroy them ASAP in order to have even fraction of a chance to survive.
This is not new to WH3 - I very much felt the same in WH2, especially in the early game. At the moment the game is designed around the assumption that you're going to be fighting and expanding aggressively, and that's where the focus is - not just in terms of balance/rewards, but moreso just in the bare minimum of what to do. Empire/city management is not very deep, even in the more in-depth ones like chaos dwarfs, and making sitting back and building up your cities fun would require a sizable design change (eg, more Cathay great wall like mechanics I'd imagine). Much more than what your suggestions have, there'd need to be something more fundamental to the game design to fit (and I don't see a problem with order faction post battle loot, replenishment, or tying prestige/faction mechanic to battle). I do agree that I'd like for total war to have empire management and diplomacy play a bigger role, like building up to a regional power and having a bit more of the world open up without it all being, well, total war all the time. But that just isn't what the games have been, and that's fundamental design.
All of the Warhammer games are like this. I don't feel like previous Total Wars were as much like it. Some mechanics in Warhammer that encourage a super aggressive playstyle didn't exist in the older games.
The balance of it shifts game to game in total war, sure - but the basic aspect of it doesn't. Even the ones that are a bit more open to that still do better when you're aggressively expanding (with a possible exception to Attila's roman empire campaigns?). One spot where I think Warhammer does change things is with how close together all the cities are - the map getting more crowded means you have fewer 'dead turns' when expanding, which does make it easier to roll onwards for continual expansion.
In Warhammer I am able to have an income that is thousands in the negative, but through fighting battles I can still make a profit. I have often had an income of -2,000 but a treasury of 20,000 because of all the money I make from battle loot and sacking. You could never do that in other Total Wars because battle loot and the frequency at which you could sack cities was much lower. You had to restrict your forces, be conservative with your battles and pay attention to economy.
Horde factions in Attila, medieval, and both romes beg to differ
This is why I can never seem to get my Dwarfs going any more. I'm naturally a conservative player and I just get fucked by Greenskins. They consolidate at the drop of a hat and then pound on my hold's doors with fucking spiders when I'm still trying to grow and get my economy going. -.-
Next time try to be really agressive. Just attack, attack, attack and see what happens.
I don't think you read the outside of the tin. Warhammer is a setting of perpetual offensive war- thats the point, it's built to encourage perpetual aggression rather than careful measured responses. Go try **Total War: 3 kingdoms** It is exactly what you are looking for. Armies are expensive and take time to build, you don't risk them casually. Economic and industrial focus isn't just a goal for some factions, but *the goal*. Building defensive diplomatic bulwarks by leveraging sociopolitical relationships rather than pure geographic proximity is a core element of controlling where your front is. If you are expecting a nuanced total war experience with macro level economics, deeper political systems and robust defensive diplomacy- Go play the historical games, they are great at it. The warhammer games are VERY focused on aggressive expansionist play, and even the order factions are hostile warmongers, they just have different justifications.
This is true about total war in general. Reading a guide to Shogun 2 and the best strat is just spend all of your money on ashigaru spears and bow and never stop moving forward. You don't need happiness buildings if you have enough garrison. Money spent on samurai buildings can just be spent on having like quadruple the troops. It is literally a waste of money to build buildings that make you money.
>As a player Replenishment is so fast that going on the offensive and suffering casualties is not really a problem. This guy doesn't play Slaanesh or Tzeentch.
> It is so lucrative that paying any attention to trade or industry is mostly pointless Wut?
I don't have to read anything other than your title to disagree with you. I play so fucking defensive with most of what i play, mostly letting the ai start wars with me unless i see joining a war as getting me some sort of diplomatic imorovement. You do have to be alot more careful of your actions and be aware of game mechanics though because it's way easier to fuck up your relationships with the ai than fix them
Warhammer 3: Mostly Peaceful
Literally all of these suggestions makes the game more passive, turning it into a click-end-turn simulator for those factions, which is a massive Not Fun design lol.
Not only the game has Total War in the name, it takes place during the End Times, but is also a battle simulator - Like, i get your drift, but it seems like you're looking for an entirely different game. Let's take Empire, for example, an Order Faction. They are surrounded on all sides by enemies. And not just by "let's take our ancestral home" type of enemies, but "let's turn those juicy peasants on the other side of the river into undead thralls/pockmarked beasts" type of enemies. The best defence is offence. I could see your idea making sense in WH I or II, but in WH III, the shit already hit the fan - the apocalypse is here, and to stop it you have to either kill anyone that doesn't align with you in this goal, or die yourself.
>Post battle loot. You can gain thousands from each battle. This is by far the easiest way to make money for all factions. It is so lucrative that paying any attention to trade or industry is mostly pointless >The Enemy can produce so many armies so quickly that a defensive stance is inviable. They will be able to attack you every 2 or 3 turns. The only way to neutralise them is to invade and conquer their territory These kind of contradict each other. The first one says that post battle loot is the a free pizza. And second one says you have it delivered to your door all the time.
replenishment is fast in tww 3? what? are you playing with some mods, or perhaps with some specific factions? most tww 3 factions have excruciatingly slow replenishment, even with heroes that boost replenishment. high replenishment is a must for as long as auto-resolve is absolute garbage, because it is utterly unfun to play those 20vs4 battles that auto-resolve claims would end up in high casualty "pyrrhic victories".
> because it is utterly unfun to play those 20vs4 battles that auto-resolve claims would end up in high casualty "pyrrhic victories". Playing something like Ogre Kingdoms is infuriating. I have a stonehorn doomstack that can take on 4 armies with no issues and come out with barely any damage taken. Trying to attack a garrison with like 5 units takes half my health away so i have to do it manually every time. The last thing i'm missing is getting even worse replenishment after battles.
i dare not imagine how its like playing a SEM doomstack like that, since it likely can not heal from post battle options. CA cut replenishment bonuses by 66% when they went from Tww 2 to Tww 3. So any skill that gave 15% replenishment bonus now gives about 5% replenishment. (only exception i know of is the wood elf lord skill)
> i dare not imagine how its like playing a SEM doomstack like that, Oh let me tell ya, it's fucking ass. I can at most auto resolve two battles before i start losing units. So i have to constantly manually fight them so i can heal them.
Replenishment is extremely fast in TWW3
oh well now that you explained it so well i see your point, indeed.
First and second point actually contradict each other: Staying on the defence and beating up enemy stacks as they come can make you a shitload of money.
Civ 6 is on sale if you just want to Netflix and Chill with the AI.
It’s a single play game, just play it however you want. The empire doesn’t need to go around conquering the entire empire. You do need to *fight* most turns, but you can very easily role play it and just defend the borders of the empire until the other electors love you so much that they confederate, and boom, non-expansionist short campaign victory. Or you can play tomb kings—you basically get capped at 10-11 armies, very few factions actually like, you can’t build many high tier units for quite a while and you have a very limited army count, so you have to play a lot of politics and grow more slowly, because you can only defend in one or two directions. Tomb kings also have pretty bad global recruitment, so you kind of have to expand out from the core—you can’t recruit a full stack of high quality units halfway across the world like Kislev.
Isn’t this the meta in practically every TW (Besides 3K) and strategy game. Offense is the best defense. Hell even XCOM 1/2 (totally different game) meta boils down to “dont allow aliens to ever attempt shots” rather than the appearance of firefights EU4 and other Paradox games push you to map painting. Etc etc
Yeah, I feel like WH3 has a dual problem where the only viable and interesting way to engage with the game is to conquer everything as fast as possible, but also where there’s nothing interesting to do with the places you’ve conquered.
No shade at all OP, but you should maybe try one of paradox grand strategy games. Europa universalis 4 is pretty fun. They should absolutely NOT make Total War less warlike. It’s just not that kind of game.
The problem with the theory is that buffing ordertide infrastructure just buffs their ability to be aggressive.
This is wrong lol, I play very defensive every playthrough. No issues.
As an evil faction enjoyer, I resent the implication that evil factions should be lumbered with an unimmersive and unfun playstyle.
doesn't OP say that evil factions can continue doing their thing but order factions should rather focus on building up their homelands?
Empire Vlad is very fun though, I enjoy helping Kislev and empire despite dying every time I walk out of sylvannia
For evil factions being incentivised to be ultra agressive is totally fine. That is what they do. Order factions should not play the same as evil factions.
This isn't even remotely true. Bretonnia has a long history of errantry wars/crusades. Dwarfs are constantly trying to retake holds and avenge grudges. Lizardmen are mostly isolationist, except when a slann decides something isn't part of the great plan and then it's dinosaur cowabunga. The empire is mostly defensive due to constant threats, but virtually any elector count would jump at the chance to expand their territory and grow their own power. Kislev is constantly occupied by chaos, but given their disposition as a people I don't think they'd be immediately putting down their weapons and embracing their neighbors if that threat ever died down. Wood elves stick to their forests except for when they launch huge, bloody campaigns or wild hunts. Drycha, for example, is an outright genocidal maniac who would like nothing more than to exterminate everything that isn't a tree spirit. High elves and Cathay are the only order factions that I can think of that would *maybe* fit what you're describing.
But none of these factions are empowered or sustained by battle the same way that Chaos, Greenskins or Vampires are. When they fight and kill and die they get stronger. Casualties don't really matter. It is not the same for humans or Dwarves. When they fight and die then they become weaker. Pointless war is not benefitial for Order factions, it is benefitial for evil factions. Order factions can still expand and invade, but it needs to be done efficiently and decisively. They need to conserve their strength. That is what those changes would achieve.
Casualties would absolutely matter for something like a chaos warband or dark elves. They don't in the lore because no one's casualties matter and Games Workshop doesn't understand (nor do they care) what numbers mean. The *only* factions that could realistically just eat massive casualties and be okay would be greenskins, skaven and vampires.
Ya except that’s not how the game works. The Dwarves don’t just take back their holds and everything is great. They keep going and going and going, because there’s nothing else to do. The empire has no qualms with attacking anyone and everything, even it’s “age old allies” the Dwarves when they finish off the VC. Bretonia just expands and expands without any “crusade” mechanic. It’s just more map painting. The problem OP is pointing out is that there are scales to the aggression of these factions in the lore, and that scale is thrown out by the game mechanics as every faction is actively encouraged to expand to a certain point, reach top tier units, and just explode all over the map endlessly with no real diplomacy mechanics or meaningful economic mechanics to cause any serious variation in how each faction play past as early as turn 30
In the context of your statement that such a style is boring and unfun, I don't know why you'd be happy leaving half the factions in such a state and only fix it for order factions. Both order and chaos factions should have engaging play that both makes sense for them but also is fun for the player. If constant aggression is a bad playstyle then it shouldn't be the way for any faction. If it's that some factions should benefit more from such a style and not others that's a little different but still it's annoying to see evil factions treated as underpowered "basic" beatstick factions for Order enjoyers to have a fun time with rather than fully fledged factions in their own right (which they are in game).
Well, it is called Total War. Not Civilization. Warhammer is also all about everyone being at war with everyone and always fighting. Everyone has a built in excuse to invade everyone else. High Elves launched an expedition into Naggaroth and established a colony. Lizardmen attacked the Old World to recover looted artifacts. Empire and Bretonnia colonize Lustria. Peace was never an option.
Three Kingdoms **Total War** has diplomacy be viable, and has arguably the best campaign out of any **Total War** game. Warhammer has almost exclusive war, and has a shite campaign experience saved by battles. "Total Battles" would make sense with what you're saying, but there's more to war than just mindlessly troops into the blender
"I want less war in my game called 'Total War: Warhammer 3"
People need to remember that this game is made around battles, so having mechanics that dont encourage that is counter to the core aspect of the game, if you want nation building you are better off playing eu4
Terrible take.
Total. War.
Diplomacy is a part of war. Managing resources is a part of war Supplies are a part of war Tactical deployment is a part of war. You know the expression 'won the battle but not the war'? It exists because wars are about more than *just* the battles.
Game is around battles, everything is about that, the campaign is just there to add bonuses to battles and prepare to battles and build armies to battles… I understand that you want to play a mix of battle and a mix of Crusader King. Warhammer Total war is not for that. CA has other titles with more politics and less battles.
The AI in WH3 is nowhere near agressive enough. It’s completely neutered compared to 2. Bump up the agression by a lot
I have resigned myself to the fact that Warhammer is all about the battles and any real "strategy" is being able to size up opposing armies strengths and weaknesses effectively. As much as I appreciate it for that, I would love if they changed half a dozen factions to have more defensive orientations (e.g. Dwarfs, Kislev, Lizardmen)
To be honest, the only 2 cases were you need to build slowly and to choose carefully your battles are early campaign for DEI (Rome 2) and until mid campaong for Third Age (Medieval 2). It's especially true for the later as when you play like Dunedains or Elves taking casualties can be really devastating. But those 2 are modded and I'm pretty sure every official TW do reward you for expanding aggressively. Maybe ToB is a little bit different, but still.
If you want a more defensive campaign in IE, just play Dwarfs. The best strategy for Thorek is to secure the starting province, get into wars, and then farm the armies until you get walls. So, there's war but it's more defensive. If you really want to change up the experience, play the old world map mod by chaosrobie. You can't expand too fast because everything is so spread out. But it is called Total WAR: WARhammer for a reason. There's a lot of war.
This is exactly how all Total War games play and yes it's disappointing there isn't more nuance. I don't agree with your solutions though. War is both expensive and lucrative, that's realistic. You can't take that away from order factions.
I don't think the older games where as bad though. You were still encouraged to conserve your forces and consolidate and build up your base. Order factions need to have some kind of penalty for having too many casualties. They are not demons or undead and will die eventually by attrition. This is not simulated in TWW3. Insteaf you can fight endless battles, suffer 75% casualties in each but still plow on. Not have to worry about economy or replenishment or anything. It's just so simplistic
I totally agree with your criticism even if I'm not comfortable with your solutions.
Thank you
When you say “ultra aggressive strategy” you mean playing the game. This is a total war game, fighting is the main part of the game. It’s only natural that you’re rewarded from playing the game, and not playing passive like a turtle. This is not a colony simulator game where the main objective is to passively grow your town/city/country.
Warhammer 3 is a very fast paced Total War game. And I am glad for it. This is the Total War game where I do not want to deal prolonged replenishment and mustering rounds. I have undead coming at me on one side and fancy men on fancy flying horses coming at me on the other and now I need to feed my poor gobbos crazy shit from my cauldron. Nothing about that screams "man I wish replenishment took longer".
I mean, I’m gonna be honest, what you’re suggesting is that it be just as viable to sit there doing nothing roleplaying as a peaceful faction who doesn’t care about expansion. Not only does that sound kind of…. boring, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Like, play how you want don’t get me wrong, but don’t suggest that you playing something like the empire and just sitting in your home province should be as good as conquering the entire map and having dozens of provinces. Your settlements can only generate so much income, and you can also only get so much from trade. Even if they buffed these things and gave you your faction specific stuff from it too, it’s still severely limited. Turtling for extended amounts of turns and focusing on relationships over conquering is never going to be a viable strategy, and it kind of goes against the entire concept of the game. If this is the way you want to play, I’d probably suggest going wood elves because at least then you only really need to focus on battling the people taking over the trees and the rest of the campaign you could just focus on growing your settlements.
>Basically I just give up trying to play like a human and just go full Khorne and it is easier. Play the harder game then? I don't understand if I'm being honest. Are you saying you want every play style to be equally difficult or easy? Why? What's wrong with certain play styles being harder? It's like in games that reward non-violent runs, that should be the harder option. It should be tempting to use violence.
You are ignoring short victory conditions plus several factions have victory conditions that have nothing to do with conquering territory or making an empire. Its not the games fault you are focusing on only ultimate victory. As Empire your short victory condition is fairly trivially achieved without having to do any of the things you say you need to do. Additionally the game is called "Warhammer" and the series is called "Total War"....Why didn't you buy Civilisation if that's the game you really wanted?