Yeah, I long ago decided to treat these games like big sandboxes. It is the turn to turn fun that brings me in, and I don’t worry too much about min/maxing it or even really winning so much as seeing how far I can take a faction before I lose.
I started an Archaon campaign last night, despite having minimal available gaming time this week, just because I wanted to see IE. I’m playing normal/normal and autoresolving to get a feel for the campaign mechanics. I have to say it feels weird to be occupying settlments as Archaon, but the mechanics mostly make sense. I do keep getting repetitive “Path of Glory” notifications for one of my Chaos Sorcerors but I don’t see anything about it on their character panel like the help suggests. I suspect this is a bug, possibly because I haven’t bought the new DLC so I may be getting notifications for a feature I can’t use. Aside from that I’m initially pleased with the IE campaign. Turn times are reasonable, the map looks nice, etc.
Kairos’ starting position is kind of shit, to the point that the patch notes mention it.
His first fight, which is a cake walk for everyone, is actually not a complete cake walk and then the garrisons of the High Elf cities in his starting province are beefy as heck and he’ll lose an autoresolve to them. Also he can’t recruit without walking home because of the way the area is laid out.
I fired it up for a few turns and it was kind of miserable. There is another starting position that’s probably similar based on the patch notes, though I forget who it is.
Skarbrand is Skarbrand. His troops are expensive so he’s almost always going to be in the red and everyone is going to hate him. I haven’t played him since the release of 3, so I have no tips, though maybe I’ll fire him up at some point in the near future.
I do have to say that Archaon feels like he should. You spend the early game farting around in the Chaos Wastes gathering power, while the world is non-the-wiser for it. Then suddenly you show up in Kislev with multiple stacks and a legion of vassal armies and start laying waste to the world of men. Confederation would be nice, but really it already captures the feel of the End Times Threat he should be.
Oh you better believe I am summoning the hell out of some elector counts right now!
Really like the map, the performance, the graphics. All great. One thing is they could dial down the bokeh blur effect a bit. It looks cool as hell, but not when my army is all blurred out when I’m trying to select it.
When you inspect the character, do you see a third tab (there never used to be a tab there before) named Path of Glory? If not, then I suspect it must be a DLC thing.
Wish I had a bit more time right now. Playing as Teclis, and having an 88,000HP Lore of Metal HighElf mage on a dragon commanding an army and soaking damage would be nice.
Get in while you can!
Oh this is truly wonderful. I have restarted as Kyros and it was a serious struggle to get rid of the high elves and their lizard allies. And who is next to me? Teclis who seems to be winning a lot of wars. I am not at war with him yet, but I am guessing this will not be long until I am. Its like every lizard faction that discovers me instantly declares war on me.
Also some slanesih faction, whom I have no idea where they even are, have declared war on me so I am guessing at some point an army from the other side of my area I am working on, will show up some time to cause a lot of trouble.
Anyway, back to Teclis. I was planning on attacking him at some point, but I do not know if this should be sooner or later. Maybe this will be patched soon.
As far as Normal vs hard. the problem I faced in WH2 was that the real challenge was early in the game, getting established, but once you did that, Id just steam roll everyone, which isn’t that fun. This is why I like to player on hard. However things are a bit different in WH3 so I guess normal is ok for a while. I really do hate city sieges though. Ill auto resolve those every chance I get. I wonder if I am hurting myself by not learning how to do them properly in the long run.
I have an ongoing game with @ShivaX we started up on Tuesday and about 60 turns in I have to say this is absolutely fantastic so far. I’m playing as Vlad (Vampire Counts) and they are a faction I’d previously wanted to enjoy but failed to be successful with in the past. However, this time I’m doing very well with them and having a ton of fun painting the land whatever color vampire corruption is! The units are incredible now, Grave Guard are a powerful backbone, and the changes to Raise Dead make it super fun to use and build up quick and potent armies. I’ve been besieged by Dwarves and Empire and Wood Elves and all at once, but thanks to the tools at my vampiric disposal (and some help from Shiva, who is playing as Azazel just to the north of me), I’ve climbed on top and I’m taking the human lands West of me and things are moving apace.
A couple of screenshots!
I absolutely love the way the campaign map looks - the depth of field effect makes it feel even more like a vast and elaborate miniatures scene!
I took this shot of @ShivaX and I in a join-assault to take on the Wood Elf capitol. It was a really epic, and very satisfying, battle!
I’ve always disliked battling in cities in previous Total War games, which is why calls to “improve siege battles” always made me a little worried that the very thing that has happened (settlements all having unique and different map challenges) would happen. However, watching some folks play out settlement battles as I had been in the weeks leading up to IE’s beta release, I started doing these myself and I have to say, they really are fine and can be enjoyable. I still don’t want to deal with big cities with walls, though I have a few times and it’s honestly been kind of a fun and memorable. And I do still tend to auto-resolve things after sieging for a few turns, mostly because that’s easier/faster, but I don’t think you are hurting yourself by not battling it out in the settlements if it’s not of interest to you. I would urge you to give them a try though, since it sounds like (like me) you may find they are a little more fun once you’ve done them a bit more. And some map types (factions all seem to have unique settlements, which can be fun to see a few times if nothing else) are more fun/easier to navigate than others.
The important thing (in my opinion) is to get good at fighting the battles out as there will be times when the auto-resolve will give you a “close defeat” that, if you know your units and how to play well you can often over come playing better than the auto-resolve would do. Not that I’m able to pull that off, necessarily (I’d give myself a C+ in terms of manually battling things out) but there have been close battles when the AI attacked me that I was able to pull off a victory and repel the attacker, and very few things come close to that in terms of satisfaction. So if fighting the battles makes you better at fighting the battles, I’d say fight them in settlements (at least once in a while) as that will force you into good habits like micro managing units that need microing and getting used to pausing frequently to pivot your strategy as needed. Just a few random thoughts there.
I have tried them once in a while. I door poorly. I may have to force myself to do easier ones to learn how they work. The old city sieges were fine and very strait forward.
One big issue I have now is the terrible unit path finding. Like I select a few units and want to to go somewhere which involves a few turns. All the units get bunched up on the corners even though there is a wide street where they could all walk around.
Also I do not know if the game is bugged or what, but lots of times Ill try and drag-place an army where I want to be and what facing I want in a city and it just refuses to do it. The drag place thing I mean. Its like all these vacant looking areas are off limits of units and you need to find the patch to where thy are actually allowed to go. Its very frustrating.
Also another thing that has been happing in battles on occasion Ill tell a unit to attack another unit and while it initially engages the enemy unit, when I check back a bit later, its standing around no longer fighting the original unit. It may be fighting another unit instead or just standing around while the original target is still nearby.
I haven’t run into the issue of units that you send to attack deciding to stop attacking, that would be very frustrating for sure, but for the pathfinding one trick you can use is if you (I think?) shift+click to move you can set up waypoints to direct a unit to walk a path you specify. This can be useful for moving cavalry/chariot units in a wide arc around to flank something but it can also be useful for getting troops through narrow lanes/paths.
Another fun exploit. There’s a new ability to save lords. This allows an exploit to duplicate legendary lords.
Someone in the comment claims the following lords all work
Beastmen:
Taurox
Dark Elves:
Rakarth
Dwarfs:
Thorek Ironbrow
Lizardmen:
Oxyotl
Skaven:
Throt <---- Will test for duping Ghoritch
Wood Elves:
Sisters of Twilight
Drycha
tl;dw for video, the sisters of twilight are a powerful lord in battle, and have some stackable global bonuses (arrow of kurnous use increases, and diplomacy bonuses with elf/dark elfs)
Boy they weren’t kidding about the beta aspect of this. I snuck in a few more gaming hours and decided to abandon my Archaon campaign because the whole path of glory thing was irritating me. On a whim I decided to start a Normal/Normal campaign as Tyrion to see a different portion of the map. I also traditionally consider Tyrion’s campaign stupidly easy to play as the steps are traditionally:
1.) Take over Ulthuan
2.) Do whatever while getting filthy rich on trade while building the homeland into an impregnible fortress
3.) Win
I got 46 quick turns in, autoresolving all combat, and then made a human error and moved Tyrion’s very beat-up army right into range of Morathi’s full/fresh stack. It was a misclick, it happens, no big deal I thought. So I went to load the autosave from the last turn. The game crashed. Repeated testing, including rebooting the PC to clear out any lingering processes from the crash, indicated that 100% of my saves from my Tyrion campaign were corrupt and caused the game to crash on attempted load.
I really like IE but this doesn’t seem fully baked yet . . .
I don’t believe this is a common experience many people are having - sounds like a one-off bad luck type of issue. Are you running any mods?
Nope. I never had any save/load problems with my Chaos campaign. I just validated that those saves load fine. Appears to be a particular issue with something in my Tyrion campaign. I only had a few hours invested so not a big deal.
Well, being a beta my advice is to report it - could be something fixable that’s happening to that particular campaign. Might be sending them one of the save files not only fixes it for future runs, but it could be a small fix they can push out in the next day or two that let’s you keep going!
Or I could just abandon that campaign that has only a few hours in it and move on with life. Which is what I’m going to do ;-)
It’s flaky, I’m sure they will iron it out eventually. Once I think IE is in a good place I might start buying DLC again, but I want a stable and satisfying IE experience first.
Corrupt saves are the absolute worst. My only bug (I believe it’s a bug but I could just be missing something) is that Imrik gets a quest to loot/raze/occupy 6 settlements which should result in him getting to confederate Caledor. I did this relatively quickly but it never came up. I wonder though that since I had no contact with Caledor before hand that I just simply missed it. I didn’t play Imrik in Mortal Empires so I don’t know how it’s supposed to work.
So this is kind of an issue for me as well, but like @Scotch_Lufkin I rather enjoy settlement battles though I frequently autoresolve as well (just in general too though). Some maps though need some serious work and are just all kinds of annoying whereas some are fantastic.
Sometimes though the unit path finding works in your favor as the AI has as much if not more trouble with their units moving through settlements. A pretty dour situation turned into a cake walk as Kholek and his massive group of Dragon Ogres and Chaos spawn seemed to have trouble with a…tree?
Here is kind of an aerial shot of the situation. As you can see, some units made it but the bulk kind of balled up and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
When I zoomed in trying to figure out what was going on I caught a glimpse of this tree. You can see Kholek towering behind it. It may have been the culprit but the AI could just have been acting weird too.
Needless to say, his mighty force was shoot to smithereens
Was playing Tetris and got a pop up.
See, I always knew the elfs were up to no good those genociding pointy eared bastards
I just got to my endgame as well, except I’m dealing with Greenskins and they are all over the Badlands.
Luckily I killed Grimgor a few turns before hand leaving me one less group to deal with than you.
Now I had the warning turned on so I knew when Da Biggest Waaagh! was coming but I took a screenshot of their power before and after to give an idea how strong they get (my endgame slider was left at 100%)
Before:
After:
It looks like each of the Greenskin factions got 4 full stack armies of top tier units. Unlike one of the pre-release videos I saw there weren’t any armies in ambush stance so it was indeed just 4 pretty powerful armies. I don’t know what will happen as I destroy those armies but it seems quite manageable at 100% with prior warning.