I believe on Normal/Hard it’s faster to just develop normally instead of letting it be razed and rebuilding starting building
I have a strategic question. I am playing vampire counts as Mannfred. I have gotten to the point where I have several provinces and an ok income of like 3k with 2.5 armies. I am currently at peace with everyone.
However, emperor Karl has been busy and has like 36 cities and has confederated everyone he can. To make matters worse, everyone in every direction is in some kind of chain alliance. Karl is an alliance with the blue dwarves, and the blue dwarves are in an alliance with all other dwaves including the border princes.
So pretty much if I attack anyone, it will cause a chain reaction everyone around me will declare war.
I am just passing my turns building my cities and hoping the chaos host will mix things up. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get out of this trap?
Also my armies are just raiding provinces. I thought that maybe if I build a lot of those vampire corruption buildings that maybe revolts will happen which will free up cities to be attacked without a massive war. Is this an actually viable strategy? It seems super slow if it is.
So now it’s not so much crashing at faction choice. I can choose a faction, hit start, then it just sorta ‘poofs’ away and I’m back at Steam with the big ‘PLAY’ button taunting me. Boooo!
Edit: after a couple of tries it let me start a new Bretonia game. So yay for now
Unfortunately things have progressed to a point where there’s not a straightforward way to break this stalemate. You might find it amusing to send a random army off into the unknown and try and claim a second foothold on some continent that’s more in turmoil.
Recent patches have in Mortal Empires made the old world nations seem to always blob up in the late game. Probably to make the late game more interesting.
Use diplomacy and offer to join a war, it bypasses alliances.
This. This is a key trick. Find some minor po-dunk nobody that is war with one side of the blob and send an agent to make contact (if they are so remote you don’t have diplomatic contact yet). Then ask them pretty please to join their war. Unless they hate hate hate you they will agree, and now you are in a war with just that one faction and not all their allies. Do be careful though, their allies will start to hate you as you hurt their friend, so their opinion may deteriorate to the point where they declare war on you also just for giggles.
One thing I’ve done to make myself happy is go back to playing or normal battle difficulty. It might be a hundred turns before I have high tier units but nothing is more annoying than the highest tiers of difficulty making your trash troops actually trash. When 400gold swordsman are just shaven bait and skavenslaves are killing them 2:1 because of the difficulty’ penalty, it just sucks the fun out of the early parts of a campaign.
I agree. I don’t change battle difficulty beyond either normal or hard because it just changes the strategy to focus on range attacks above all else and, as seen with Legend of Total War videos, cheesing the ai. No matter what, the ai is stupid, though admittedly good with flanking manuevers. I’ll give them some benefits on the campaign map because at least then I get some challenge in the game. But in battle, it’s a bad sort of frustration stemming from a combination of boring tactics and the ai failing to rout down to the last few models.
I find VH/H to be the sweet spot personally - Very Hard campaign means the AI will build up powerful empires capable of churning out strong armies in late game (which means you’ll have the occasional tricky situation to deal with), and Hard battles means the AI has that little edge that makes them dangerous enough to make some of the battles challenging, while still allowing one’s own melee units to be useful as something other than meat shields.
I realize I’m a bit late to the Undercity discussion but I always found the best use for them to put your first Undercity under someone you are going to end up allying like Naggarond or Norsca. Then you use the spreading building and the one that reduces factionwide construction costs by 3%. Get 10 of those up and your economy will go crazy because you can build everything trivially.
You can replace the spreading building once every adjacent region is occupied with an economic building. It’s a slow burn but definitely pays off past turn 100 if you are painting Mortal Empires. If you’re just going for short campaign victory those are usually doable in a pretty reasonable timeframe since military alliances count towards conditions and there probably isn’t really a long enough term payoff.
Ok, so I find someone who as at war with ONE of the factions I want to attack and then join their war against my target, and now I can basically declare war for free, as in the allies of my target will not get to declare war on me? Does this work with millitary alliances of my target or just defensive alliances?
I mean it’s the first time i’ve played a normal difficulty campaign in a while, but it’s fun that all the buffs i make on my crap Swordsman actually make a difference now, rather than just be a hole into which you throw skill points for no payoff. And since i tend to roleplay a bit the campaign on hard is generally still hard enough. i guess i’m just not in the mood for superhardcore right now.
That’s basically it, with that caveat that the someone you find doesn’t need to be at war with ONE side of the alliance. They can be at war with ALL of it, but you can ask to just join their war against Dwarves. Or the Empire. Or whomever else they are at war with. When you go to make a “join war” proposal you get a listing of all the wars your diplomacy target has and it’s just a checkbox list. Check all you want to join. It bypasses all alliance considerations, with the caveat that I already listed. Sooner or later their alliance partners will end up declaring war on you also because their opinion of you is nose-diving once you are at war with their ally.
Thanks. Its a dangerous game. Maybe my vampire counts playthrough will be short. I am surrounded by people that hate me. I wonder why they have not declared already.
That’s the trap for vampires, getting sandwiched between a powerful Empire and Dwarven alliance. If you research the techs that makes skeletons upkeep free you can build a really massive army very cheaply which might be a good way to keep them at bay long enough to weaken/destroy one or the other.
Any idea if the corruption strategy is viable? IE: getting enemy cities to revolt, who take over a settlement which I then snag? Or is that not really doable?
Too slow.
I’m playing an Isabella campaign right now actually
Step 1: spend a couple turns taking castle ravenloft with isabella. recruit stuffs. use the hero a bit on spy missions to hopefully get level ups + wind of death spell (AOE is useful against enemy infantry blobs)
Leave the white/purple vampires alone. I used to take them out first but now I realized they are a useful buffer.
Now pick whether to kill dwarfs, empire, or the little 2 skaven provinces near you. The skaven will probably be the easiest to do. I went for dwarf, then skaven. Fighting the red slayer king dwarf was very hard early on. Those slayers are very good at killing your low-armor skeletons and zombies.
Research towards free skeletons first thing, it allows you to fight 2 armies to 1
Since I am Isabella I try to put all the vampires on her. Later on she becomes the most powerful stack. Auto resolve is ok, but manual fighting they are godlike. Flying vampires that can cycle charge, AOE enemies, and summon troops.
One problem is the crappy stacks get a bit tedious to play, but that’s what autoresolve is for.
(Make sure you use a necromancer in each army. They can heal, summon, AOE. Save skill points on your main general to do other stuff instead.)
It can work, but it’s hard to get the AI to have revolts. Also the public order reworks makes revolts less likely in general anyway.
The corruption mechanic really only keeps your expansion slowed down in the early game but doesn’t have much practical impact later on. It is definitely not useful as an offensive tool.
My two cents the easiest Vampire Count start is as Vlad, turn 1 recruit Isabella and have her recruit 3 units, move both Vampire heroes into her stack, raise dead all possible units with Vlad in Schwartzhafen and then move him into East Sylvania and raise dead there as well. 2nd turn you attack Drakenhoff with Vlad, force-marching Isabella to reinforce. This is a trivial fight, your Blood Knights, 2 vampires, Vlad and Isabella can solo it.
Then you mop up the rest of the vampire provinces, spam the Dwarves with non-aggression and trade pact requests (they will often accept on difficulties lower than Legendary, killing all the other vampires gives you a big reputation boost). Offer money if you need to. If you can lock that down the campaign is the easiest in the game because you just move west and wipe out the Empire before the Dwarf/Empire alliance can form. Easy peesy.
This is funny
tl;dw abuses Eltharion’s interrogation chamber that earns 5% interest from enemy faction. He then gets the enemy down to 1 city, sieges it, so it can never build any more units and becomes a piggy bank.