They removed naval combat. Good, because naval combat sucks. The only naval combat that is fun involves cannons and ships of the line ( IIRC i played naval in Empire).
I figured out the Tyrion! At first I was worried that there were too many high elves around. The influence mechanic made me nervous that I’d have to force them into fighting each other so I could take some stuff. However, it was peaceful with the elves. I confederated 2-3 of them so far. I don’t want to confederate the rest because they are nice buffers and trading partners (2000+ income/turn).
I did make the strategic mistake of expanding south in the desert region. The 30%+ extra cost is not a huge deal, what is killer is the constant revolts. I have two armies in the desert to squash down all the rebellions.
Should have gone West and killed the dark elves first. Next time!
I’m at turn 100, own half of every continent. I’m kinda tempted to start over because I am still 2 rituals away and it’s just a slog to play these 12 heroes.
edit: also, is it just me or did they remove a bunch of the interface stuff? For example, you used to be able to select a subgroup and let the AI attack/defend a location.
First Eye of the Vortex campaign, playing as Lizardmen, complete!
I’m genuinely amazed how good this game is. It has some Total War jank, but my campaign mostly came together perfectly. It could all go wrong as I replay it with the other factions, but right now I’m really digging this game. Seems dramatically better than the first game.
I’m playing high elves, having a blast. Odd though, tried a 5k and 10k intervention, both felt like a complete waste of money, neither one did much of anything and both got wrecked in a turn or two. It felt so pointless it makes me wonder if perhaps this game mechanic doesn’t need some help. Like say letting me the player control the intervention army, cause clearly the AI has no clue how to…
It depends on what happens when they spawn. Some times they run into a well defended garrison, sometimes another faction kills them to get them, sometimes they snipe a ritual site.
The mechanic is not suppose to replace either sending your own armies to take the ritual sites or beating the opponents at the race. It’s a flip of the coin to try and slow down an enemy when you don’t want to do anything yourself.
I’ve found them most useful in the early game, the 10k one to be about a 40% chance of interrupting the first two rituals. I mostly use them against the faction that’s losing, to stop them catching up. Generally focusing on winning the race, or killing the faction that’s beating me with my own armies seems to work well.
This was early game, well, early to me anyway, I tried 5k and 10k between turn 40 and 50 and got nothing in return but a couple of quickly dead armies and an empty coffer for my trouble. For me at least, complete waste of time. The only point in the future where I’ll bother with this is when I send an army I control over to stop a ritual and then I’ll call up one of these magically appearing stacks and use them together.
Unclear to me what CA was thinking, their game design is centered around the idea that the player fights the battles. Yet here’s a game mechanic that recruits an army for you, even bothers to zoom over and show it to you, then proceeds to auto resolve it.
Loving the game, lots of fun, but this bit makes zero sense to me. This violates a core tenet of CA’s Total War game design.
I’ve seen them spawn next to an unguarded ritual site and raze it more than a few times.
It’s very luck dependent if you don’t have sight on the area. They could spawn into 3 stacks of dudes at a capital. Or they could spawn at an undefended site across the map.
It’s action over space. The map here is big. Some starting points are literally at the edge of the map. What if the AI in the lead is literally on the other side of the map from you? In practice there would be nothing you could do and people would complain that they would have to race up the Vortex ladder because how could they possibly stop an opponent on the other side of the world?
This is a fair point. It is odd they don’t give you the choice of manually fighting the battle. I auto-resolve a lot, so it hadn’t occurred to me.
I think from a strategic point of view, the mechanic makes sense. How effective it’s going to be, is going to be dependant on how well the AI is defending it’s ritual sites, and since this is the first Total War game than convinces me the AI can actually play it, the intervention armies are going to tend to be less effective than you might like.
The armies can’t be too good, they get sent against you too. The game would never progress if they were an automatic stop ritual button.
For an interesting data point, in my current High Elf (Lothern, Normal) game, I sent out a 10k intervention force against Naggarond for the second ritual. Not only did they raze one of the ritual sites and prevent the ritual completing. They went on to raze six (6!) other Naggarond settlements. And they’re still going.
But there’s nothing random going on here, this is all strategy. Naggarond had sent their main army and their black ark along the the northern edge of map, apparently attempting to take the Shrine of Khaine before I could get to it. Didn’t work out too well for them. But it’s not random.
Mine so far show up and get wrecked. I still don’t remotely track on why I shouldn’t be allowed to control them, but whatever, adaption to what’s at hand is the name of the game.
So for me at least to increase the chances of success i’m going into agent recruitment over drive in my current campaign so I have eyes on the ground where the ritual is going on. Then I can make an informed decision about dropping the bucks to do this or not (i.e if no one is home give it a go, if there’s a stack around reconsider or send a stack you control plus recruit the magic stack out of the sky).
Did none of you play orcs last game? This is a pretty clear adaption of the waaaag mechanism. Sometimes those armies murderated everything in their path and helped me immensely, sometimes they bounced off the first place they attacked and added nothing to my empire. Given that they were a free capability that I had very limited control over I was pretty happy either way, and regularly used them to distract and weaken my enemies.
Now everybody gets it, it automatically targets the strategic goal, but it has a cost. Good timing or a bit of luck and you get a big impact, otherwise no.
Yeah, I played orcs, doesn’t seem much like it to me based on how effective I’ve found the results so far. The stack that mechanism created did useful stuff for me every single time I worked to make it happen. And it wasn’t half way across the map from me either.
I guess I was just lucky with waag and unlucky with interventions.
As I said above, I’ll adapt my use of this one and see if I can improve my luck.
I have found much, much greater success with intervention forces when I time them to hit around turn 5 of the enemy ritual, right about when the chaos hordes hit. When I trigger them turn one they just die- when I wait they often take their target and rampage even further beyond into the enemy empire. Well worth it in that case.
Chalk this one up under the heading of I told you so. The AI dark elves just air dropped an intervention on me and leveled one province. While being forced to deal with that chaos took one of my 3 provinces I need to complete the current ritual. If I don’t get over their and kick them out in the next 7 turns the ritual fails. Given I’ve only got one stack in range and they have two I’m not sure how this is going to go.
If I fail I guess I’ll get to discover just what the consequences are for failing a ritual.
On a side note, I’ve noticed that the AI appears to keep at least a couple other races really close to you on completing these, I don’t know if everyone else is noticing that or not. But as a result I’ve sent off armies in the direction of two of them to start taking out part of their civilization to slow them down.
I’m really liking this feature, it’s completely different way to play a campaign from the usual paint the map. Speaking of map, damn this things big. It takes me ages to get anywhere.
