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[nenjin]

Well my second start as Archaon, up to turn 70ish, has taken a very different turn than my first.....

I consolidated the Chaos Wastes much faster this time. Still can't subjugate the Legion of Chaos. Slightly disappointed there. Just as I was thinking about going for Kholek he got wiped out by Grimgor. So I backed up a couple turns, made a beeline for him and just managed to beat Grimgor to taking the city, giving me the confederation.

So then I vassalized Grimgor, who himself was about to be wiped out by the Ogres, and that turned out to be both great and bad. Great because he wasted no time in just carving up the Ogre Territories, rebuilding himself a little fiefdom faster than any vassal I've seen. On the bad side though, it drew me into a war of the wastelands and everything has just gotten 3 orders of magnitude more annoying now. The Ogre Kingdoms declared on me and I've been busy chasing them around. Some other orcs declared war on Grimgor so add that to the pile. Then out of fucking nowhere Helman Ghorst rides up from the south and starts attacking my assets as well. Grimgor gets busy chasing Gresus around to no effect, and my army had moved northwards to try and confederate Vilitch.

Now things are starting to get more like TWH2. In the west I'm trying to confederate Sigvald and he is being an absolute bastard. Leading two of my armies on a merry chase while he a) stays out of my reach, b) razes settlements along the way and c) forced marches afterward like it costs him literally nothing to attack and raze the city. After almost a full loop of this nonsense I get a block army off on him and position two armies to get him next turn, and he manages to somehow pick the one forced march army and attack in a way I don't get reinforcements. Son of a f.........

So I reload and instead use the same army in forced march with the other army in ambush, and he goes for it like a hungry dog and gets auto-resolved to the TRASH CAN. I can't decide if I want to trait farm him for the humiliation value or just get him confederated and move on. I got other Pokemon to catch before they get snuffed out.

SPEAKING OF OTHER POKEMON. In the East I haven't been able to stomp out the ogres and secure my lands because half my attention is focused on getting to Vilitch. My hope was to get him and hopefully not piss off all of Cathy, since most of the east is already my enemy. Well, no such fucking luck. I finally got deep into his territory and thought I had him at his last fortress....no, turns out, he's got a city INSIDE THE GREAT WALL. So now I have to make war on Cathy, just so I can get inside their boundaries, just so I can finish of Vilitch, just so I can confederate him.

This is more like the TWH2 I remember. Getting annoyed with the AI finessing you down to the pixel and having more AI armies to account for than armies to cover territory. And then you add all the fucking bugs on top of it. Like the game forgetting you've vassalized a faction, the game deciding not to recognize your ruin dwell from the turn before EXCEPT for the troops it cost you, certain settlement maps making your troops and the enemy's literally disappear from sight in certain parts of it, the list goes on.

And for how many vassals I have it's weird how they all seem to vanish the minute I need them. Shit was crazy down in the Wastelands for a while, like 4 enemy armies and 5 of my vassals just duking it out like crazy. I thought that was enough to cover things and is why I started making my way north.....but then all my vassals seem to have either gotten killed or gone back to their original spawn settlements, because only my enemies remain and there's a lot of them.

None of this would be a big deal I suppose except my economy is struggling at 5 armies. I can barely break $6k and it doesn't help when settlements are getting razed left and right. Not sure what I did different in the first game except that I let more minor settlements go to vassals than before.

[nenjin]

Bit of news here.

Legend of Total War started a petition a few months ago asking CA to change how players are allowed to access the Immortal Empires campaign in Total Warhammer 3.

Anyone that's gotten into the series knows how stupid it all is, but for those that don't:

In order to play the best and most fun mode for the game, you had to own ALL the main titles. Total Warhammer 1 and the Mortal Empires DLC to play it there. TWH1 and TWH2 to play Mortal Empires in TWH2. And TWH 1, 2 and 3 to play it in the latest game. It also meant that if you wanted a DLC faction from those games, you had to buy the base game those factions were attached to as well.

Well, after 30k+ signatures and a few months, CA listened.

You can now play Immortal Empires in TWH3 just by buying TWH3. And, as a bonus, you can buy any of the previous game faction DLCs and they'll be playable in IM in TWH3. You don't need to buy the base games those faction DLCs were attached to. You also get the "Freemium" Legendary Lords that come with those DLCs, even if you don't own the base game they were released for.

You DO still have to buy the base game that introduced a main faction. Off the top of my head I don't know for sure, but let's just say you want to play, uh, Balthazar Gelt's faction in Total Warhammer 3. You'd still need to buy Total Warhammer 2 to get do that.

Still, this is a massive improvement in their pricing schema, which has to be one of the stupidest and most elaborate and convoluted ones I've seen for a game that isn't an always online live service. It doesn't really affect anyone who already bought all the BS. But it makes getting into the game and series for new players so much less onerous to figure out.

My guess is that CA finally relented because internally their own developers were like "this is nonsense trying to maintain this from a code perspective." Or maybe it's just that TWH3 is probably the last release in the series and they felt it was a good time to unify everything. Either way, it's a bit of news that seems to have no downside for once. So hurray.

[Dostoevsky]

Either way, it's a bit of news that seems to have no downside for once. So hurray.

AHEM, I came back to WH3 after a few months, got comfortably into a new campaign, and then the update broke my mod list and I am stuck in campaign withdrawal. This is terrible news.

(The WH3 version of the classic Southern Realms mod is good, by the way)

[sambojin]

It actually looks pretty good. You get 8 factions with Warhammer 3 (bretonnians are free), then you could pick up two more with a lords pack (I'd probably go the Warden and the Paunch for HE and O+G) for pretty cheap.

Then I'd probably grab the Prophet and the Warlock for Lizzies and Skaven a week or two later. Or something undead'ish for a laugh (the Grim and the Grave for VC and Empire perhaps?).

Plenty of playstyles available, for not too much cash. Sure, you're stuck with just those faction leaders and their rules/quirks to play with in the IE campaign, but they should all be different enough to have a far bit of fun with. You "sort of" get the whole army, you're just stuck with the start-off points of those lords and the buffs they give you. Those first two lord packs would give me a fair amount of starting locations as well, so I can explore the world a bit. You tend to get 4-6 lords per pack, and they've all got their differing quirks and optimum army make-up, so there's a reasonable amount of replayability included in each one bought I think. And, it's still way cheaper than most GW stuff

This kinda explains what you can get from where:
(YouTube vid, but it explains it well. At about 8:30 for the list)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 https://youtu.be/GQp2H9RRhPw

((But yeah, if I could get Alith Anur kill-the-* contract stuff, a bit of fly-boy Imrik dragon stuff with High Elves, a decent Savage Orc waaaagh from the badlands with Wurzag, and awesome knight-stomping-cooking-pot noms with Grom, that'd make WH3 a good game. So, with that one Lord pack, it turns it from "meh?" to "fuck, yes, I'd play Immortal Empires *heaps*, and maybe even buy another Lord pack down the track"))

[Jopax]

Honestly the most expensive thing to get right now is WH3. All the WH2 DLC goes on regular sales and it isn't that expensive for most of the smaller packs. WH3 is a year old and it won't get heavily discounted anytime soon I don't think.

The stuff they announced sounds cool but I think I'll be passing on the game for a while more, see what more they add because the majority of the stuff I can already play around with in WH2 so paying full price to get that in a shinier package with some new stuff on the side doesn't seem that appealing right now (the only faction that looks interesting are the updated WoC and I'd need extra DLC to play most of those :V )

[scriver]

Can I make a little rant? I don't want to be a constant negative Nancy but I have to get something off my chest

[nenjin]

Of course you can rant.

[dragdeler]

Explicitly so, spit it out!

[Mkok]

So how does Warhammer 3 immortal campaign compare to the warhammer 2 one? I was kinda dissapointed in the lack of variety in that campaign compared to medieval II. Sure, there are a lot of factions, each has their own units and stuff, but esentually it all boils down to "faction with ranged units", "faction withouth ranged units", half the time I dont even have any idea what I am fighting as those 3 battles before I wipe them out dont tell me anything. Just know its some melee infantry, or some ranged cavalry or something. And the sameness of the campaign comes from the part that you have basically the whole tech tree (which is rather small for each faction) unlocked after few hours, and there is zero incentive to not just use the best units you have available as soon as you can (plus the lack of any kind of regional units to make campaigns in different parts of the world different), in fact it is even incentivized to not use the weak units... Just so little variety compared to modded medieval II... And the map is about the same size... Is Warhammer III better or just more of the same? Or maybe some mods that add more variety?

[nenjin]

I didn't play Medieval 2 so....

TWH3 sounds by the numbers given your description though. Most of the difficulty of the campaigns is front-loaded in the early game. The AI isn't terribly smart, especially on the lower difficulties. So the beginning of the campaign is where you have to really mind your decisions because you have the fewest options to work with.

But in most THW games, there's a point beyond which you've won but there's still 4/5ths of the world to conquer. But victory is assured because you have good armies, your legendary lords are leveled and kitted out and there's very little that can stop you on the campaign map other than the occasional nasty army to fight or a strategically outnumbered situation.

TWH3 just isn't as nasty as TWH2. The AI isn't as savage, it's not as aggressive and it's not as quirky. TWH3 will even notice that you're kicking ass at your current difficulty and recommend you up it if you're not already playing on legendary.

If you're new to TWH3, you might find it challenging to start with. But it doesn't take more than a few campaigns before you get how normal difficulty is. From there it's a matter IMO of how much tedium you want to deal with in the name of being challenged.

As for events, really the only campaign events in TWH3 are the optional End Game Crises you can enable. All that does is, after a certain turn has passed, one or more factions will spawn 4 full stacks of high tier units to fight. Which can make things awkward if like, you conquered their region of the map and suddenly they respawn in their homeland and start running amok behind your lines.

Vanilla Immortal Empires is, at the end of the day, a sandbox with some really loose victory conditions for each faction. As such, it doesn't really have a satisfying flow of challenge. Based on faction and difficulty, some starts are harder, some starts are easier, but all of them eventually lead to painting the map. And there's really no events that spice up or change that reality. About the best you get is when something odd manages to happen, like a faction that typically doesn't dominate takes over. That's about as spicy as it gets.

[Mkok]

4 full stacks, heh... mongols in medieval 2 spawn like 20 full stacks of top quality units, try holding that  Seems like I will stick with medieval 2 then, I like my variety, and not starting a new campaign every few hours to not get bored.

[nenjin]

Total Warhammer 2 does have the Chaos Invasion as a standard event in the Mortal Empires campaign. That is like 16 or 20 full Chaos armies that spawn after around turn 100. Of course if you're prepared for it with strong armies and/or some cheese, you can basically slay them all where they spawn. TWH2 in some ways still feels worth playing next to TWH3.

[scriver]

I lost the passion to rant after writing that but suffice to say what I felt was that I was playing the main campaign and reached the time when portals start opening up all over and several armies just marched out everywhere over my realm and that made me go "shit" in an unfun way.

But I hadn't lost the feel to play yet so I started over, and read up a little on the mechanics, and then I got to the part I  Tzeentch's realm

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

of the battle of the Impossible fortress. Auto finishing it would give me a Heroic Victory, but I wanted to try to fight it out myself... And that fucking battle. I hated it (hey i feel my rantiness is coming back now ). I eventually gave up, decided to autosolve it instead, reloaded, and found myself back at the pre-battle screen promising me a Heroic Victory. And that just blew the wind out of me.

I mean, I'm not the best TW player, I know that, but I've usually been able to beat the story missions even if it costs me a lot (my main struggle with the games has always been economic and that certainly wasn't an issue in the Cathay Iron Dragon campaign). But Heroic Victory, for me who struggle to get Heroic Victories in TW games anymore since at least before the Warhammer series, it just felt like an insult, like they were patronising me. Ridiculous, I know, but feelings aren't rational.

I looked up tips for the battle afterwards.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Apparently the main advice is to just spawncamp the enemy spawnpoints so they can't use their range.

Yeah, no. I'm not feeling it.

Haven't really played since. Tried an Empire Immortal Campaign to clear my pallete, pondered a Kislev start. It's a shame, because I really liked Cathay and their faction features. Their position is cool, reflecting the Empire's "unite the splintered realm or fall to internal conflict and strife" theme in interesting ways. I liked their troops, even though they felt a bit short on the roster (maybe an consequence of CA having to come up with much of the actualities themselves?).

As for Kislev, they seem to have interesting mechanics too. I'm a bit hesitant about their troop tree though, I'm not a huge fan of hybrid troops, I get unsure on how to use them. Tips are appreciated.

And finally, I need to add about the Empire Immortal campaign. In WH2's Mortal Empires campaign they had, mainly imported from WH1 iirc, a structure of missions to guide you and set you up with some free money and faction resource, especially useful at the start of the campaign. For some reason they decided to not implement this for WH3. As far as I could tell from quickly testing it out, no faction seem to have their starting missions brought over. And since I'm a chronic "I have to get the best start" restarter, I'm feeling like I'm losing out on the good start. Yes, I know, irrational, new map content, new game. But I really can't start a gsme without getting the best start. It's a mental hangup. So I ended up abandoning it, thinking I would be better of playing TW2 if I wanted to play the old factions. And that's my advice on the non-story campaign in general.

Oh, and for some reason they made Immortal Empires Empire be unable to ally or confederate other imperial factions. What's up with that, that's the entire theme of their campaign?

[nenjin]

You gotta do that through the Elector Count system, no? I know it's changed from TWH2 but I don't remember how.

And frankly....Empire is fucked in TWH3. Having Festus start in your backyard, and Beastmen, Belakor just off the NW coast and the Vampires to the east is just like.....

Every time I get to the Empire in an IE campaign, regardless of who I'm playing, it's in shambles.

[scriver]

Oh, I didn't remember it that could ally and confederate through the system, I remembered it as being a bonus to relations and then you still did the common diplomacy thing, like the Bretons and Cathay do. But it makes sense it would be through the faction mechanics.