There is a sea lane right next to it. I’m not sure if it goes to Cathay or Warhammer Hudson Bay.
The main problem is you’re faced with powerful opponents immediately to your north and south and might really regret it if you use your limited resources to take your best army(s) and head across the Pacific.
Don’t undercut yourself like that. I played too much WH2 on Very Hard campaign difficulty. The only reason why was because of the public order malus because -8 is huge and creates a nice decision of managing that aspect of the game. Otherwise, the game can and has been, and is absolutely infuriating, and only blows out the game length and doesn’t really contribute to any high level critical thinking otherwise.
With very hard battle difficulty, that’s also bullshit and I dropped the game down to normal because otherwise it only favours range attack. And you know what’s boring about range attack? Nearly everything because it reduces viable armies down to a small section of the available roster to do well.
So don’t call yourself a weanie. Default is smart, default is the way :-)
Nice write up by the way. I never did play Lizards in WH2. Maybe WH3 is the way forward.
Thanks! I didn’t set out to write up a real AAR; that would take far more time than lazy me would want to devote to things, though several folks here do a bang up job on them.
The Lizards are one of my favorite group of factions, largely because I kind of like lizards. Used to have a pet iguana, and a monitor lizard. I sort of imagine the Warhammer ones as “what happens when pet lizards get exposed to radiation Peter Parker style.”
I’ve recently decided to try the Vampire Counts, after someone upthread suggested that they are kind of broken right now. I’d originally passed on them after seeing that they got re-worked (yet again) and so don’t quite work like TW1 or TW2 anymore. After putting in 50 turns this weekend as Helman Ghorst, I have the following observations. Or more accurately, the following list of WTFBBQ surprises:
Zombies can beat Stormvermin?!?!?!?!? With the right lord and faction bonuses (thanks Ghorst) and backing by a corpse cart, apparently yes they can. It’s not that the zombies do a ton of damage or can trade blows with Stormvermin. Far from it. They mostly just stand around and keep regenerating and refusing to die until the enemies get so exhausted (and thus so penalized) that even zombies can start to inflict damage. It’s a slow process but it works.
I’m . . . popular?!?!? I started surrounded by humans (Cathay), Ogres, Skaven, Lizardmen, High Elves (Imrik) and Nurgle. Nurgle hated me and got squished as priority one because I don’t like competing corruption. While I was doing that I was a bit worried that everyone else around me would seize the opportunity to declare war on me. Instead they all offered me trade agreements and non-aggression pacts! All the Cathay factions are my buds, all the Ogre factions tried to be my buds though I only accepted from Greasus. Heck, Queek was offering me deals while I was busy squishing Clan Rictus. Hell, I’ve got dwarfs offerings me trade deals now. After being universally hated by all neighbors in my Teclis and Kairos games it’s weird that Vampire Counts are popular. I semi suspect a bug, maybe they forgot to code in appropriate prejudice against undead?
Vampire economy is more solid than it’s ever been. They did lower the income from some of the high tier settlements and buildings, but they dropped the costs of the buildings themselves a LOT. I’m not struggling to scrape up the cash to fund settlement development for T4/T5 buildings. I’m getting pretty rich pretty fast and since Vampire Counts can raise fresh armies so fast I suspect I’m about to snowball and start crushing all my neighbors at once.
So far my Ghorst campaign has been hilariously easy compared to the other early game knife fights I’ve lived through so far. I’ll report back after I get into more of an endgame phase but right now I think Vampire Counts have a nerf incoming.
They’ll get a multiplayer nerf but I imagine they’ll stay the same in campaign. CA doesn’t really care if a handful of factions are OP as this is almost exclusively played single player. Otherwise Ikit Klaw and Sniktch would have had their faction abilities nerfed long ago.
They’ve definitely settled on being fine with some campaigns being easy and some being grueling.
Ghorst is so easy, that I selected the option to turn on every single end game crisis. However, I got bored of the city sieges since you can’t auto resolve them properly. If I manually do them, I can fish them with nearly everything at 100% health, but auto-resolve just ends up murdering half your army.
Generally I just blob with Ghorst and move the blob and grind down the enemy units. I have not fought an enemy spell caster yet, someone with good AoE damage. However once you get your zombies to have the melee health regen, you do not really need to blob them so much anymore.
I haven’t played Ghorst but i tried two Isabella/Vlad games. You can apparently make vlad into a killing machine with 100% ward save. Diplomatically thought expect to be attacked by everyone so it’s gonna be a lot of settlement battles and ambushes.
Campaign positions I liked:
The female Cathay dragon is in pretty good shape. You don’t need to fight the other Cathay factions and I was content helping them ward off the various enemies - skaven/dark elves to the east, chaos north beyond the wall, and the ogre silk road to the West. Cathay clicked once I realized they are an artillery army like the empire or dwarves. Manually controlling the rocket balloons is great fun. If there’s no enemy ranged you can just fly over the enemy and shoot rockets point blank into everything (press insert)
Ikit claw plays almost the same exact way as total war 2. I suspect because you’re always in ambush stance and the AI doesn’t know where to sack. Very smooth and easy.
Archaeon and Kholek were easy to play too. You don’t really have territory. The most annoying aspect of the AI is the constant armies coming to sack your cities and setting you back 10 turns. Conquer, occupy, give to vassal. Rinse repeat. Kholek has a fun attribute in that his stats and his actual model get larger the more vassals you get. I had fun dumping all the points into making him a single man doomstack.
I hear Malus Darkblade is another one man doomstack so i may try that one out.
Flying wood elves are easy. There’s a glitch so you can get 4 copies of the same legendary lord. Linked it above.
Chaos and Vampire count share a few traits that make them annoyance-free factions to play - They can recuperate lost units anywhere with just money. Nobody wants to wait in a city 2-3 turns to get new units back.
I just hit that same point with Ghorst. Turn about 100 or so, I’m easily #1 by power ranking and having no problem fighting Dark Elves to the east, Dwarves to the west, Lizards to the south, and Chaos to the north all at the same time. But it’s just such a grind because autoresolve ALWAYS thinks I’ll lose and so I have to laboriously fight out each battle. I finally hit a turn where I had to fight Kholek, Thorgrimm, and Kroq-gar all in the same turn, and I just realized I didn’t want to fight yet another repetitive zombie slog fight. It wasn’t fun, it had become work. So I ALT-F4’d out of that campaign.
I think IE has turned TW:WH3 into almost the game I wanted, but there are still some things to iron out. The early game, on the low difficulties I play, is just insane because of the AI aggression. It’s so hard to get a reasonable start and get to the point of the game I LIKE to play where there’s a few decently developed provinces and enough money to play builder while still having enough armies to keep the AI wolves at bay.
I would deeply love it if IE offered an “advanced start” mode where the player got like three full provinces and 2 starting stacks. I’m much more interested in fighting big wars with a big economy than in fighting for my life with low-tier troops and a shit economy.
I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve been poking around with a few different starts and it doesn’t seem uncommon to get dogpiled right out the gates. I don’t mind the occasional start like that but it seems to happen a lot.
Does the AI have an anti-player bias like some other strategy games use?
I still haven’t started the game, but is it possible to have most open field battles? That’s where I always found the most fun.
it is supposedly toned down in WH3 from WH2 but the AI is hyper aggressive.
However there is a mod someone made that completely removes it
I have not tried it, but despite the title it supposedly works
haven’t tried this either
Yes, most definitely. Some people say its toned down from WH II, but I am not so sure.
For example, I have played Tzinch 3 times. Every time the ghost lizards declare war on me. In fact nearly every faction in the game except maybe the skaven and other chaos factions will always declare war on me.
However, when I am NOT playing Tzinch, and I do run into him somehow, the AI Tzinch is always doing fine and is usually at peace with the ghost lizards and only has a few wars vs the player who is at war with nearly everyone under the sun.
Yeah. I’m willing to cut them some slack due to the Beta label and be patient until they remove it. My initial impression of TW:WH3 was quite dim, but IE upgraded it to almost as good as the predecessor game. I think I see signs that it could be better with some polish so I’m optimistic that they can get there with a few patches. I may just set it aside again and let it mature a bit more.
It sure is epic, I’ll give them credit for that. The scope of the game is pretty bonkers. The size of the map, the amount of different factions all with their unique rosters and mechanics, it’s pretty damn cool!
I think my biggest complaint about the early game dogpiling at the moment is that it’s making everything feel one-note. I played Hexoatl and was dogpiled from the north, south, and east. I eventually worked my way out of it, but fighting battle after battle after battle with T1 infantry and other basic units gets a little stale after a while.
I switched things up and tried… Calidor? It’s a HIgh Elf near the ogres, dragon-themed. Sorry if I butchered the name. Anyway, right out the gate I have three skaven factions, a couple ogre factions, and some vampires all bearing down on me. Once more, I’m surrounded by armies on all sides and feel paralyzed because if I move west, they come in from the north and east. If I move east… you get the idea. Anyway, I was trying to get a break from “you start the game and now you’re assaulted from all sides” and ended up in another one of the same.
I know not all starts are like that. It’s just that too many starts are feeling like that, for my particular tastes. I’d like a chance to make a move or two and come up with different early game strategies beyond TOTAL WAR from turn 1. And yes I see the irony. :) It’s just that every game starts out the same in those circumstances, in my experience.
What would you rather be doing, in the early game?
Oh that’s easy. Fighting one or maybe two wars tops against foes who aren’t set to maximum kamikaze aggressiveness. Expanding gracefully and building up a cool empire. Building up to the point of the game I want to play where my economy and my strategy to deploy my armies needs to synergize and I can feel the benefits of good planning. Fighting fewer and more meaningful battles while autoresolving all the tedious settlement battles. Hard to get to the point of enjoying that when it’s just madly recruiting stacks of T1 trash to hold the barricades against the zombie apocalypse re-enactors that all my neighbors turn into when they find out I’m a human player.
Given the faction’s whole thing is killing Chaos, that seems right tbh.
And remember Chaos used to start at war with everyone (barring Slaanesh). They changed it to just having massive negative relations.
The real concern for player bias was factions committing suicide trying to attack the player. Like sailing across the planet and losing their home just to attack some borderland settlement of yours. Which can still happen, but is a lot more toned down now.
Playing Daemons of Chaos in RoC really showed it off. Everything in the Empire came up to attack you while Skrag murdered their home. It was non-stop and pretty stupid.
The biggest thing now seems to be that negative relations tend to matter quite a bit. That -20 relations you ignored before? Might mean war now. And factions like Mazdamundi who start with a relations malus with basically everyone get dogpiled quite a lot. Pretty sure being in a lot of wars also affects the math, so once the dogpiling starts, it also tends to feed itself. Sure you’re stronger than Faction A, but you’re also at war with 4 other factions so they see a chance where they normally wouldn’t.
That was the earlier concern and I agree that they’ve toned that down. However I had less problem with that then the behavior we see in IE so I’d say that whatever they “fixed” is a net regression.
That might be right. I’m honestly not concerned with the mechanical drivers, I just want it to stop.
The esteemed Mr. @Tortilla covered it already it looks like. :)
I just feel like the strategic and tactical options get very samey when there’s an immediate dogpile all around. Part of it may just be me barking up the wrong franchise, it’d be nice to have some different plays available at the start. Maybe I can try bribing off an Ogre here or there and get them off my back so I can focus on this particular Skaven faction. Maybe I could even work out some sort of NAP or alliance with the stinky Dwarves since we share 37 different active wars, then we get settle our differences later. Maybe one game the Skaven attack the Dwarves instead and I can take advantage of that, instead of every game everyone coming at me.
And maybe with a little time I could do those things, but instead I end up with 4-5 separate wars to handle with one army of base-tier troops that is only allowing me to generate 16 gold a turn and I feel like I’m playing a tower defense game handling waves of enemies. I enjoy tower defense games and I do enjoy the occasional dogpile, it’d just be nice to have a little more variety than what I’m seeing right now.
I might have to give that a spin just to see if there’s a difference in feel, if it does in fact work with IE.