2946

Played an Empire campaign, after completing Clan Angrund.

It’s… really not good. I can see what they’re trying to do and really like that (basically, play around with the core Holy Roman Empire conceit), but it really, really doesn’t work at all. Particularly annoying, because I don’t really think they’d have to do much to make it work a lot better:

  • More ways to spend imperial prestige - e.g., maybe make it the currency to buy state troops (rather than having them “refresh”)
  • Allow the player to intercede in any war involving imperial states by spending prestige (and gaining better relations as a result)
  • Give the player/Emperor permanent rights to travel through any imperial domains.
  • There should be a deterministic system for increasing imperial authority, rather than having to hope for luck. Since one doesn’t want to fall into negative, the current system just drags out the thing horribly - because the only sure way of gaining IA is to refuse confederation and wait 20 more turns. At the end, I was at 50K IA and just waiting for the game to allow me to finish.

As it is, even carrying out the constant “buy mercenaries to defend X” can result in worsening relations, and in my game at least before Chaos arrived, I had a ton of imperial states who hated my guts, while having 10 loyalty. It made absolutely no sense at all.

Since they all hated me, getting any kind of military access was out of the question, so helping to prevent them being conquered always required marching into their lands without permission, making them even more pissed off. Even better, returning a lost city to them would… also piss them off, because now I’m trespasssing in their lands as I leave.

Good ideas. Awful execution.

Also, one aspect of Mortal Empires that is no fun, is when you have to chase down a lone Chaos army at the other end of the world because the AI is incapable - or uninterested - in finishing it off.

Hoping they fix some of these things in TWH3.

2947

Did you understand why they hated you? Were you allied to someone they all hated? You can spend prestige to improve those relations, that’s what you spend it on. And if you have a bunch of places at loyalty 10 you will be amassing imperial authority very quickly. You just don’t accept the first few confederation requests.

I feel like you were missing something fundamental if you somehow had horrible relations with them all, which really reduces their loyalty as well.

I do agree the reinforcing armies thing is kind of janky, but outside of that the system is actually really well liked on reddit at least.

Were you declaring war on any of them? That’s a terrible mistake and will make your campaign significantly more difficult.

I dunno, I’ve never experienced the relations problems you are describing and I’ve played that campaign at least twice since the rework, though not for months.

2948

I have tried the Empire a couple of times and bounced off pretty hard. Might try it again but as you note, the whole thing is wonky.

I’m in the middle of a Vampire Counts campaign at the moment. Wiped out Reikland and and Karl Franz early, and rolled the north, only to lose it temporarily to the Chaos invasion. Once that was defeated, I was able to turn my attention to the remnants of the Empire and their Bretonnian lackeys, joined by some piddly stuntiies. I am not sure I like the Vamps that much, though. Their troops are mostly meh, and not very interesting. Most of them suck against heavy armored heroes/lords, except for their Lords and Heroes. The whole thing comes down to making skeletons and zombies basically free, and then filling in some quality for offense but relying on magic and Lord-fu. I’m making like 15k a turn so fielding a bunch of stacks and only fighting with three armies or so against one is feasible, if boring.

2949

Well, they kind of hate each other, so it’s pretty hard to make them like you. And - at least on VH (might be different on other difficulty levels… not sure), there is no way you can build up the Empire without making them pissed off, because every “level” of power you increase gives you a malus, topping out at, IIRC, at -60. I could spend a ton of prestige to cancel that out temporarily, but that would mean not having prestige available for events, which is far more important.

The other thing, of course, is that doing anything to help them, will frequently result in you being forced to trespass, which pisses them off - so any benefits you gain from defeating their enemies will tend to be offset by having trespassed. And you almost have to help them - whether they like it or not - since the alternative is losing IA, which is much worse.

Nope. There is absolutely no consequences to having poor relationship with them, whatsoever. High loyalty gives a small relations bonus (and I assume low loyalty the opposite), but how they feel about you has no impact on loyalty - it is entirely controlled by the events + how you deal with recovered cities (where again - returning a city to someone you have no military access will mean you’re trespassing next round which is just absurd).

They also can’t declare war with you (outside of an event due to low loyalty) from what I could see and you can pretty much control that, as long as you’re not throwing prestige away. So… since loyalty is really the only thing that matters, there’s really no point in wasting prestige on relations. Much better to save it up for handling events, and - eventually - gain the big 10K prestige event (I assume a once-only event, since it never triggered again) which gives you 4 IA or permanent bonuses.

Exploited one elector war to take over Wissenland, but no one liked them anyway - and definitely not a mistake. But other than that, I allowed things to go their course and kept the peace between the electors (who would try to go to war “by event” completely out of sync with their actual relations as well).

As far as I can see, the big problem here is just that they’ve essentially created two relationship mechanics - the normal one, and the “Empire Loyalty” one, with no significant connection between the two. And since the normal relationship mechanic is heavily biased against the player - at least on VH - you very easily end up with a situation where everyone is very loyal, but apparently hates your guts.

2950

I mean, popping open the game for one second shows me that High Relations gives a Fealty bonus and Low Relations gives a malus. But I completely believe you experienced something sucky that I didn’t. I also believe it has to do with all these relationship maluses you are seeing from trespassing. It might be something as simple as I got trade agreements/NAP/access treaties rolling earlier and had better RNG about which cities needing aid already being ones I had pacts with.

But I also believe there are two options for aiding the distressed cities, a gold option and a prestige option. If one of these sends a force aligned with you and another sends mercenaries that aren’t flagged as your forces, I simply may have made the opposite choice which didn’t incur the trespassing penalties by sending in flagged forces without an access pact. This is a big IF and I haven’t played recently enough to say definitively.

But if that’s the case (which I kind of suspect) that is indeed very silly and needs to be fixed. But you can see how someone who didn’t run into that trespassing thing would think “whatever, the system isn’t super complicated but it works fine” whereas your experience was “wtf is going on with my relations?”.

2951

You’re right, the UI shows that it can give a bonus or malus. In practice during 170 turns, I didn’t see it happen once. So either the threshold is so high/low as to be irrelevant unless you do something really stupid (most likely, I suspect), or it’s not working as it should.

And even if that worked, it still doesn’t change the absurdity of Elector Counts having 10 fealty, but refusing to trade or even sign non-agression pacts or give the Emperor military access (never mind alliances, since those don’t even exist in the new system).

To be fair, the mechanism might have been possible to trigger during the final turns during the - fairly short - chaos war where I did have massive positive relations, but I wouldn’t have noticed at that point as I was already at 10 loyalty with all remaining electors and just waiting for the 20 turns to tick down so that I could confederate with positive authority.

2952

FLC Confirmed as Rakarth for the DE.
CA sent an email to whatever email you have with Total War Access.

First video I found about it:

March 18th is his release and generally FLC’s come with DLC’s which is interesting. That’s less than a week away, but since we haven’t heard anything about DLC apparently this one is just going solo, I guess?

2953

A DLC drop next week would be pretty shocking. They usually let the youtubers hype it for at least a week ahead of time. I’d be surprised if they changed that behavior, it seems to work for everyone involved. I don’t know if releasing him so soon is to hold us off because the DLC won’t be until April or later or if it means the DLC is quite imminent.

Speaking of which I’m dying of curiosity to know what the factions will be. Bringing the Dark Elves up to 6 LL’s like the other game 2 core factions as an FLC makes it feel a lot more likely it will be Beastmen vs another game 1 faction DLC. Vampire Counts or Dwarves.

Beastmen is seeming almost destined at this point, the best piece of evidence is that the next issue of White Dwarf is giving away the original Beastmen DLC and the timing on that is about as suspect as when GW showed a bunch of Kislev models a week or two before Kislev was announced.

Plenty of people don’t think they’ll do two game one factions in a game 2 DLC but honestly as long as they add them to the Vortex map I don’t think it should be a problem. There isn’t precedent for it but there wasn’t precedent of them updating game 1 races in game 2 until the Empire vs Lizard DLC. And the game 1 factions simply need content updates more than the game 2 factions do.

Well, it’s fun to speculate at least. Answers right around the corner.

edit: Cool pic, I guess Rakarth gets access to a bunch of feral units from various factions. Neat.

1920×1080

2954

Oh brother.

2955

Put my Vamp campaign on hiatus; I think it’s a guaranteed win but after 200+ turns I’m bored with their units and battle gameplay. Trying Greenskins now, which I’ve not done before. Much more interesting units.

2956
2957

So I jumped (fell? caromed?) back into this one thanks to… I don’t know, just needed some fantasy battle spectacle I guess. I played through a bunch of smaller (vortex) campaigns in quick succession: the new Wood Elf one, and both Eltharion and Grom. I really like the smaller campaign structure they have for a lot of the DLC lords. The special little mechanics they add (e.g. the warden’s prison, and Grom’s cauldron) are fun distractions and slightly guide how you play the games, but I don’t feel like we’re getting into Goat Simulator Total War (to paraphrase Tom’s recent dig at Civ 6).

I then fired up the Imrik campaign, and it turns out his vortex campaign is just the normal High Elf vortex campaign but starting in east Africa with dragons instead. So I went for the Mortal Empires version (I don’t really like the diplomacy penalties that come with the standard Vortex campaigns) and now we’re starting in Iran/Pakistan with dragons (i.e. almost all the way to the bottom right). It’s a little bit of a gimme when they take the top tier high elf units (dragons and dragon princes) and give them to you right off the bat (together with a relatively easy way to get more) but it has been great fun going through some little dwarfs, then skaven, then dark elves, and then a whole lot of orcs. Like a lot.

It turns out that the great Dwarf-Empire alliance completely failed, and the dwarfs got almost entirely swallowed up by Grimgor and the Empire by the vampires. I managed to save only Belegar Ironhammer of the dwarf LLs, and I never even saw Karl Franz and the Golden Order lives in exile in a single province south of the border princes. I wrapped up the orcs and made the possibly ill-advised decision to take on Clan Mors to secure my southern flank while starting on the numbers-1-and-2 allied Sylvania/von Carstein duo to try to save Averland, which was somehow holding on.

This lead to a pretty sweet spectacle of a battle where I raced to the defense of Averheim, under siege by two and a half vampire armies, and fought a battle with the garrison on my side to wipe them out. (There were a lot of blood knights.)

Fortunately undead tend to melt when exposed to dragonfire, but they seem to keep getting up again. (Seriously, somehow I can defeat von Carstein’s entire army–they all vanish–and then somehow he’s back with a couple units after the battle. Thematic, yes, but it’s not how I understand the rules of the game.)

At least the rest of the high elves have more or less go the west under control. And the Bretonnians (also top-3 strength rank) have gotten in on the vampires, too, so maybe the tide is turning. But now a bunch of the lizardmen factions have declared war on me for reasons unknown. Maybe they don’t like my longtime tomb king ally. The plot thickens…

2958

I don’t think I’ve seen Vampires expand outside their starting area since Drycha got added so that’s pretty neat. I wouldn’t mind killing some vampires. But the meta of which factions tend to do well on the campaign map changes every patch.

Skaven (outside Lustria) and High Elves seem like the big factions most games to me. Greenskins tend to beat the Dwarves more often than not.

I’m not really complaining mind you, the nature of the game and it being zero-sum means even with RNG every patch some factions are more prominent than others in campaign. We had a period where it was a Dwarf tide and before that Vampires conquered everything and before that it was Wood Elves running amok. But I’m definitely ready for the campaign meta to shift.

2959

Vamps get raise dead as a recruiting mechanism. At the very least, they can usually recruit unlimited basic zombies and skeletons instantly. If they are near the site of a big battle, which show up on the strategic map as sort of piles of bodies/loot/flags with a sort of glow or sparkle, they can recruit even high-tier units instantly, though usually only one or two of the top end troops and somewhat more of the mid and lower level troops.

Common practice for vamp lords is to put points into buffing skels and zombs so they are fairly decent, and filling up your armies with mostly this sort of fodder and a few high-tier heavy hitters. You rely on your lords’ combat prowess (which is substantial, spells and melee both) and your ability to recreate a stack instantly after even a near-total wipe to grind down the enemies. In the campaign I was playing with them, I’d run three or four armies to gang up on someone, win a Pyrrhic victory, and replace the losses. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The vamps though have a near total dearth of missile units, other than a handful of Sylvanian archers and gunners that one of the Bloodlines gives you. And to me their units are boring overall.

2960

Vampire units that were totally annihilated in combat sometime spontaneously come back to life after combat at low strength. It’s always been part of the Vampire Count mechanics, but human players don’t see it as often because they tend to pick fights where someone mops the floor with them. It does help out the AI though because a full stack that gets wiped might just be back as a quarter stack with a new lord the next turn.

2961

The vampires don’t have a problem with power level really, Terrorgheists and stacks of Vampires are amongst the nastiest doomstacks in the game. In MP I’m pretty sure the top tier factions right now are Wood Elves, Vampire Counts, Skaven, and Greenskins. But I can see how people find them boring.

I also like Varghulfs. I think they are super cute. And maybe the best advertisement in the game for how good Endless Vigor is. Put one of those banners on one and they are twice as good. They fatigue so fast normally.

2962

I didn’t realize there were perfect vigor banners. Is that only for a specific faction?

2963

Now you’ve got me second guessing myself because I do use a mod that changes a lot of banners to not be terrible now that I think of it. Banner of Swiftness gives some movement speed and endless vigor. It’s probably the mod now that I think of it haha.

2964

I’ve been trying a ME Morathi campaign and… turn 86 and I have 6 settlements, which included the 4 in my starting province. ME Morathi is really hard because her lands are only 1-2 turns away from Ulthuan, so the HE make her port cities their primary target in wars. Vortex Morathi is several turns away on a much more stretched out map.

Morathi is hard and entirely up to RNG. For about 60 turns I was at war with all of Ulthuan (ie every High Elf faction) and whom were not at war with anyone else but me, and so spend most of the game fighting off endless stacks. If I do invade and manage to sack or raze a town, immediately I’m surrounded by 4 full stacks the next turn. I’ve finally managed to scrape together a high end stack and a low end stack, and I’m actually pretty well off economically, but it’s just glacial paced stuff. If I move a defensive stack out of a border city (with tier 3 walls of course) immediately I’m swarmed by multiple HE stacks there.

Meanwhile Malekith more or less owns everything. In fighting off the HE for so long he’s been able to expand without difficulty. He is finally is at war with the HE just a few turns ago and hopefully that will relieve some pressure.

2965

Thank you, I didn’t know this was a thing. It’s been a while since I really spent any time fighting vampires. It feels a bit “unfair” in that I can’t necessarily stack-wipe them by chasing down all the routing units, but OTOH it’s not like I can ever really pull that off with an army that actually flees, except in very specific circumstances.

Will they still come back if they’ve marched / already retreated / are in a settlement? I assume not because otherwise that would be actually unfair.