Oh yeah, by “full custom” I mean map and everything. Didn’t Warden & Paunch do its thing on the Vortex map?
Yup! It was one of my favorites.
Alright, I’ll stop asking questions and am going to buy it. Thanks.
Something I’ll add in WH3’s favor: in general the various factions only get batter with subsequent updates.
Using Dwarves as an example: Wh2 introduced grudges, which basically created a penalty every time an enemy did something to you (raided your territory, attacked a city). Grudges were attached to the specific army that did the action, and the longer a grudge went unresolved the bigger the penalty got. It put you in this awkward situation of having to chase some minor stack halfway across the map because the elders were mad it raided your territory that one turn forty turns ago.
The recent WH3 patch totally reworked grudges, and they are now awesome.
- Grudges get attached to factions who do offensive things toward any dwarf faction; it’s an integer value. They get attached both to armies and to the faction’s settlements more broadly.
- The value of the grudge increases with time if not resolved.
- There is a 15-turn cycle called the “Age of Reckoning.” When an age of reckoning begins you will have a “target” of grudges to settle based on the accumulated grudges of the factions around you.
- By resolving grudges (smashing armies and cities) you make progress toward that threshold. When the age of reckoning ends you will get bonuses and penalties based on what you’ve resolved. The bonuses include access to exclusive units (so-called Grudge Settlers; which is the only way to access very good units like Trollhammer Gyrocopters). Hitting 100% will also spawn a free army of Grudge Settlers.
- Note that grudges accumulate based on other factions offending any dwarf. If (say) Ikit wipes out Belegar while you’re playing Grombindal, you can eventually make your way over there and right that particular wrong.
- There are also a set of Legendary Grudges: basically high-level objectives that when completed yield a shit ton of completed grudges (useful for the age of reckoning) as well as other bonuses. For instance, wiping out the Chaos Dwarves gives access to the underway (army teleport between major dwarf holds)
- Finally, accumulating grudges in excess of other dwarf factions’ accumulation allows you to confederate those factions. If the LL in question has been eliminated you will still be able to recruit them (and then, perhaps, go settle that grudge).
All of this is a free update; none of this requires the DLC. ANd it’s great. It’s really flavorful, it incentivizes the kind of campaign play in which Total War is at its best (don’t turtle, attack!), it helps guide your gameplay (Where should I go next? Well I’m ten turns away from the end of the latest Age of Reckoning and Sigvald over there is sitting on a pile of grudges so I guess he’s next… oh and there’s that legendary Grudge against the High Elves that needs settlin…)
You just don’t get this sort of thing if you stick with WH1 or WH2. I’m playing Malakai right now and he adds a bunch of fun (and, frankly, OP) stuff on top of this and it’s legit some of the most fun I’ve had in WH3. I’m definitely at the point where I’d normally be tired of the campaign because it’s just dumbass map painting and instead I’m plotting Grombindal’s revenge (eliminted by Malekith) and side-eying Ulthuan.
Yeah, horde faction and fast global recruitment are real QOL. Nobody wants to sit there 4 turns recruiting reinforcements.
Talk about a hot button issue for me. Hitting end turn to recruit 4 times is exactly as fun as having to find the appropriate amount of skilled fletchers and latrine builders to follow my army around and having to skip 3 turns to set up for that. Maybe just up the upkeep and recruit cost, set the recruit time to 1 and their starting hp to 20% and stop wasting my time. My newly formed armies should exist rapidly but not reach full strength for a bit, but they shouldn’t be useless. Nurgle design has it haflway there.
Is that what Nurgle does? I like that, weak reinforcements, slowly growing in strength. I’m sure that’s existed in olden games but I can’t remember which. Maybe that Lords of the Realm (1994)
As someone who only bought the base game, I think I understand some of the negativity for all the DLC content…
FWIW if you want a rapidly formed army that’s what things like mercenaries & Regiments of Renown are for. Typically I use these for “emergency” armies when I get a sudden declaration of war out of nowhere (as Kholek hit me with last night). With the Dwarf Grudge Settler units especially it’s pretty easy to have something close to a full stack conjured out of nothing within a single turn.
It’s also the case that various buildings & technologies increase both global and local recruitment capacity; by late game your main provinces can probably recruit close to ten units per turn.
Definitely doesn’t give the best impression to somebody who is starting with WH3. But it’s a weird situation where someone who just bought the base game of all three games would be missing less than one column(7 by my count) of factions. The real kicker with DLC are the lords inside of those factions and some sizeable chunks of potential unit roster. The default unit roster for Cathay was super bland to me, for example.
Yeah, from my perspective the way to approach the game is to get the base and determine if the core game loop is fun for you. If so, pick a faction you really like and get their DLC (WHEN IT’S ON SALE). Treat both WH2 and WH1 as “DLC bundles.” With almost all DLC’s, you’ll also get stuff to unlock for some other faction which in turn gives you a chance to try them out and decide if you want to invest further.
oh yeah you wanna get WH1 or WH2 for $10, July sale should be around the corner.
Only having 4 chaos races and kislev is not very representative. Kislev is not the easiest to play either.
Khorne is incredibly easy to the point you’ll be autoresolving and painting the map
Tzeentch is an interesting spell casting faction.
The flip side of this is that the Khorne strategic layer is basically unlike any other faction out there. I don’t think of them as a very good starting faction.
I listened to the 3MA podcast about the most recent expansion and it motivated me to fire up another game of this. I played one game as Cathay pretty soon after release and then moved on to other things.
I decided to play a Dwarf faction, because I’ve been listening to this podcast about the Silmarillion and feeling bad for dwarves as they seem to always get the short end of the stick (sorry). I saw there was a free-LC dwarf faction, so, why not? (This is in Immortal Empires, of course.)
And I gotta say, as much as folks complain about where the franchise has gone and the silliness of first the Vortex and then the Chaos campaigns, the fundamental formula here is so much fun. The back-and-forth between the strategic and tactical still feels compelling to me after all these years (going back to Medieval 1 in my case). And watching fantasy armies go all out on each other is a blast.
The gimmick of this faction (Ironbrow’s Expedition) is about runes and item forging. The recover-legendary-items thing is good-but-not-great IMHO; they provide some neat effects and provide some motivation to go after certain places, but it doesn’t feel spectacular. The (Dwarf-wide) forge mechanic is cool, and I do feel like I’m equipping my dudes pretty well because of it. One of the people in the 3MA podcast was complaining that they felt that every faction needing to have a gimmick/different way of playing was detracting from the game, but I think I disagree. (But I don’t play nearly as much as those folks.)
I was so caught up in getting the game started (I had to enable the free-LC, then restart the game, etc) that I forgot to set the difficulty, and I don’t even know what it’s on. But whatever it is, it’s too easy. OTOH, I think I actually prefer it this way, I don’t want to lose the game, I just want to see my little guys blow away orcs, undead, chaos, skaven, maybe even a human or elf or two. I think I might also not be that good as I tend to not get as good results as the autoresolve–though that’s situational as I think I’m getting better with practice. I also just really enjoy letting the artillery and guns blast away and while the master engineer snipes characters (I really regret the one that I leveled up in shotgun mode).
I had a couple good battles against Chaos Dwarves, in particular. I get really annoyed by cavalry, since without any of my own I have to keep bending the ends of my battle line (and pivot the missile troops). The Chaos Dwarf cavalry is pretty minimal and crappy (hobgoblin riders), and such a small fraction of their army value that I didn’t have to worry about them. I won a couple pretty-even battles against them that felt good. I was annoyed that they seem to get everything the Dwarves get, but slightly better (their base infantry have like one or two points more in a couple stats); and more variety: in addition to heavy armor and firepower/artillery, they get more war machines, beasts/demons, and magic! (Plus, crappy light troops in the aforementioned hobgoblins.) And they lose out on, what, slayers and runes? I guess you gotta sell DLC, and power inflation helps.
Anyway, I’ve reached the point where I’m the dominant power and just went to war with #2 (the vampires–but not in time to save the Empire, alas). We’ll see how much longer I go for, but I think this might be another game for me (like Stellaris) where I go back to it maybe once every year or two because I just enjoy watching stuff go.
Was that really what the episode was about, though?
Haha no, you’re right. It was one of them complaining about how they changed the game into something bad, while the other two gently tried to point out that maybe it’s not me, it’s you, and they once or twice mentioned the new dlc. I didn’t really appreciate the complaining at all, but I am happy that I gave the game another spin, so all’s well that ends well.
Yeah, I’m okay with some complaining about things, I’m also a little annoyed with where Total War has gotten itself to, although my desired solution is kind of the opposite of Rowan’s(keep leaning into the strategic variety coupled with fewer more consequential tactical battles) so I’ve really been enjoying where the Warhammer series has gone. But every time they talked about something else Rowan had to butt in with an airing of grievances to the point that they never really covered the interesting stuff with the latest expansion. It really ruined the episode.
Yup, hard agree with that. I 100% understand that folks may not like Total Warhammer any more, even if they liked or loved where it was (almost!) a decade ago. But at some point you just have to realize that it’s not the game for you anymore and let it be. And if you’re going on a podcast about it, just say your piece and then let it go–spend the rest of the time asking questions of the other people, discussing the history of the game, whatever–not complaining, that’s just no fun for anyone else. I feel like Len should have reined him in at some point, but I understand that’s a tough thing to do, really.
Here is one mechanic that I don’t understand:
I move my 2 Cathay armies towards this Snikch guy (Skaven faction) and place them adjacent to each other. I end turn, Snikch moves his armies next to mine and ambushes my smaller force. How does his moving army do that? Shouldn’t I be the ambusher?
It’s a Skaven-specific thing. They have the unique ability to ambush-on-attack. It’s super frustrating, but probably a bunch of fun to play as.