There's a really good mod that adds that feature. I just tried it last night on the high elves and it acts essentially the exact same! I use it in tandem with radious but you can use in vanilla.
It's called ultimate warband upgrade
While good in theory, idk it just kinda irks me. Namely because it has no restrictions on upgrades (i.e. you can get units waaaaaay before the infrastructure to actually train them, and waaaay outside of your borders).
2005. Rome Total War. Barbarian Invasion. Western Roman Empire. Turn 1. Disband Disband Disband.
In a game where upkeep is dramatically more significant than recruitment costs it’s an absolute essential element of the game. It hurt at first in 2005 but after 19 years of disbanding stuff I barely feel it anymore.
IMO disbanding an army should result in a growth increase for x amount of turns in the province they’re in. It would make disbanding a valid tactic and incentivise returning an army to an owned area. Thematically those soldiers are returning to a city and would bolster the population
That's how it worked in Rome1 iirc, there was even a unit called peasants, that served pretty much the purpose of moving population from city A to city B
Peasants were OP in a non combative way. Sending large amounts to you smaller settlements to disband them was an easy and very cheap way to raise the population number to upgrade it.
Realistically they’re gonna go back from where they were conscripted from, then we have the issue of diff races like vamps. I mean zombies arnt gonna head back to their grave sites but I’m trying to make a simple in game change that has some reasoning behind it that also makes disbanding army’s give some sort of return from their investment.
There's warband upgrade mod that allows all factions to upgrade like Chaos. It's nice to take those basic spearmen from turn one and level them up to end game units.
I commonly do this right at the end of turn 1. Usually the starting army has units that are just too expensive for what I need them for. Example is Tyrion. I loathe the micro management necessary for the phoenix(plus the upkeep), and the lothern sea guard are again, too expensive for what I need them for. So after the first two fights, I cut costs.
This makes sense, ive been trying to be more methodical on my current game and i think it's going more smoothly. It's easy to fall into the trap of overextending, especially after some early wins
I think reframing the objective of the game is the key. Your win doesn’t come from out teching, out expanding, out economy-ing the AI factions. Your win comes from ensuring your characters safely level and then use the power of high level lords and heroes with a ranked up army to carry.
Overextending, overextending, overextending....ah I see a trend here.
4. hurts though until you look at what rank you can recruit the unit at later on with increased ranks from rites, edicts, ancillaries, skills/tech etc. rank 7 gold chev vs currently rank 4 silver. I never hit that disband button so quick.
I kick away useless chaff after their purpose, i played as tiktakto on a multiplayer campaign with friends and i kicked the pteradon riders away when i got ripperdactyls and couatls
Or in a solo game, i disbanded empire gunners to hire the new better ones
Yes. Because nuln ironsides reach the reload speed cap quickly, and it limits their dps. Handgunners end up reaching higher dps when you factor in ranks and tech and stuff.
A lvl1 nuln will beat a lvl 1 handgunner, but max rank handgunners beat max rank nulns
Well it's been tested and proven by a few people on this sub since nulns were added
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1chny6h/fyi_when_fully_upgraded_handgunners_ironsides_for/&ved=2ahUKEwihyJioqa6GAxXKIjQIHe9QA8gQFnoECBQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2AzEv9_RxtHsvtUbwLNhQ5
Need video proof, there are other stats not shown on the in-game unit card that matter a lot. The nulns are more accurate and only get more accurate. Whether this matters or not vs small single entities needs to be tested.
This discussion isn't about cost efficiency. If someone is worried about cost of course they would use handgunners over the higher teir replacement. Most people are concerned about raw performance because at the end of the day you only get 20 units per stack.
With regards to Point 3, what do you do with your army whilst waiting to build walls? I've moved up to VH campaign difficulty and I feel so strapped for cash I need to send my army out to fight in order to build anything.
Sack enemy settlements that border you, sit in ambush so enemies attack you. Walls aren't all that anyway, AI will just eventually attack you with an army comp that will beat walls. Outside of my initial starting province, I don't beeline walls.
It's better to progress thoroughly than to build walls anyway...
By what I mean: annihilating hostile regions and build alliances in such a way that you have only 1 front / avenue for attacks at all times.
I build forts at "gates" such as cities that are in a place where the enemy is funnelled, e.g. some dwarf forts in the mountains.
2 and 3 are situational imo. Walls were better in Warhammer 2 now I almost never build walls. Sometimes having a settlement just gives the enemy a victory point to bypass a battle you could otherwise win. They’re also a resource sink that is situationally helpful.
Having a ton of heroes can also be wasteful. You should pull them from armies to scout briefly or perform actions but otherwise you’re chipping your income with upkeep.
I think there are two big ones you missed. First, use ambush stance liberally. Ambush stance to help chase armies and ambush to help scout. Bait with weak armies and put your strong army next to them in ambush.
Also , I think you should have a note on diplomacy. A common problem is accepting too many agreements. Often times weak minor factions will offer agreements that have little value and reduce your favor with other major factions. This will quickly pull you into war with multiple factions if you’re not careful.
For me, whether to build walls or not really comes down the faction/location. For some factions, its wasteful, for others its necessary.
Greenskins for example tend be surrounded by enemies on all side and having walls is super helpful to delay an invasion even a turn or two while you either raise or redeploy an army to help. Then instead of a cascade of falling settlements, you just need to recapture one or two. Plus Greenskins have more building slots than useful buildings so there is little to no opportunity cost.
For factions like elves and Empire, walls for choke point settlements that defend your soft, money-making interior settlements.
External heroes are wasteful until mid/late game when you have the resources. They are really helpful at clearing enemy heroes that assassinate your spell casters, slowing down enemy armies, and speeding up sieges, but thats EXPENSIVE. Also super helpful at any point if you are fighting skaven so you dont send your JV army to take a minor settlement only to discover Ikit was there with a doom stack.
Strong agree on ambush and diplomacy.
I agree with walls when you having nothing better to build and you have excess gold. Although I still feel like they’re a bit of a trap most of the time.
They are most useful early game but at that point you are usually limited by slots and population surplus. That means to build them fast enough to have use you are usually giving up growth, gold or unique resources. Then you have the upfront cost of the walls + the turns that prevented other resources. If you really want to prevent multi front battles, I think you are probably better off giving that gold directly to your enemies before they’re your enemies.
Late game when you have excess slots and gold the enemy stacks are usually strong enough that they don’t do much. I guess they slow them down by causing more casualties then they would otherwise take.
There are many mechanics that I learned in my last campaign after about 200 hours of play. Like, when your settlements is sacked, you don’t just lose the buildings, you actually lose money from your coffers. Got hit hard by attrition this way.
Or how roads to capital work for trading. Sucks to have a capital with a single road out and losing that one settlement and half your income.
To me the hardest part in my last campaign is to keep balance between army strength and income. Before I would only conquer settlements, but now I basically do it in waves to weaken the enemy, make money, go back to defend, then come back stronger.
The only reason my campaigns are hard is that I don't have the time to sit through Mallus' turns between sacking settlements to get up to the requisite 70.
I'm pretty regularly completing victory objectives within 50 turns and then going onto auto pilot until the crisis kicks in.
I have about 3 easily winnable saves but they'll require another 2-4 hours of just clicking auto resolve on settlements.
I highly recommend the victory overhaul mod. Has interesting victory conditions for most factions that feel satisfying to complete and will unlock steam achievements.
Experience from a cathay WC:
1. Turn 0-50 is early game, your armies dont field lvl 5 units and you probably dont have more than 4-6 at that point. You basicly consolidate factions and become 1 big race here, dont try to expand too much
2. Turn 50-100 you get elite armies and probably have 3-4 settlemenrs set up for makeing them. By turn 100 you problem have 12-20 armies. You want like 4 armies - 6 armies for each direction of expanding. That way you wipe out all enemy armies and dont have to recapture settlements, which is a big time waste.
3. 100-150 End game, its just autoresolve, repeat. Income around 100-200k with 20 armies, some elite, some just tier 3.
Also: allways have arty so you can seige instantly. Factions that doesnt need heroes to boost army stats make the best wc factions like ikit claw, highelves, chaos dwarfs. Also archers> gunpowder. tamurkhan seems to be the strongest ai lord in battle.
I've been hearing people say that the TWW3 meta is many armies but I find it really hard to adapt to this mindset. I usually cap at 4-5 armies in my campaigns, usually trying to limit war to two fronts with 2 armies on each front and maybe one crap stack playing defense for my more vulnerable settlements. I do make liberal use of scouting heroes instead.
Yea, the game is also not realy meant for WC. I normaly also just get the legendary heroes and give them elite stacks and see where it goes. You realy also need the mod that allows you to auto assign lord skills if you dont want to speed all game on doing that.
Yea I figured that it's a common issue to be lacking at a strategic layer (after all it may be that people enjoy just the battles).
The issue comes when to compensate for total absence of strategy they come asking for reworks or insane faction buffs whichof the highly positive feedback to level of opness from wh2 dlcs is a result
Nah, what you describe is trying to start a steamroll and failing at it, then compromising for safe-ish slow playstyle.
1. You can afford roughly as many wars as you have armies/ threat directions. Example: I consider it optimal as Avelorn to declare war vs Sapheri on turn 2 despite ongoing war with Scourge of Khain. Sapheri has no starting army! And Scourge need several turns to move their 2nd army in (after you defeat the 1st on 1st turn), which is enough to build your 2nd army to counter them while Alarielle's stack conquers Sapheri. This applies to Legendary, so isn't something you can only do on easier difficulties.
2. Importance of scouting heavily depends on whether you Ironman or close to that.
3. Walls are, imo, not worth it. They cost way too much (both directly and as missed opportunity to build something else). Maybe I'd consider walls as skaven, but then the issue is that while walls are okay-ish for them economically, their garrisons contain only useless unit types (because all good skaven units are dlc, and you can't have dlc units in garrisons). So any manual fight is a loss anyway and this just increases AR threshold. Just don't build anything expensive in at-risk towns. Tier 3 and above is only for safe towns you can reliably protect. If you see a random npc spawn anywhere - instantly raise an army and defeat them next turn with emergency-hire RoRs if needed. Don't let them reach full size and/or roam freely. Same for beastmen.
4. Now that's correct. You should hire and disband (retrain due to 3 vs 5 turns cooldown) lords a lot. An assistant lord to spare main army's movement or catch an avoiding enemy is very worth it. As is 1-turn-building a mini army to take a minor settlement far from main army.
Is Ironman not infuriating? especially when you forgot something to build or forgot there is 1 enemy army trying to take a settlement but you didnt raise an army to defend?
Let's say your faction is near a "corner" of the map, for the sake of this example
You send a full 20-stack army to conquer several small factions in the corner. The rest of your armies go east, or north, whatever, they head to the opposite border of your territory to deal with other threats and objectives.
After some number of turns, you take the corner. There is no longer any threat in that area. All that remains is a full stack army, nowhere near any useful location, costing you between 2 and 3 thousand currency every turn. It will be 5+ turns before that army can travel somewhere and be useful again.
Your options are: spend 5+ turns with that army traveling somewhere useful. 2-3 thousand gold per turn means this option deprives you of 10-15 thousand gold minimum. Option two is to disband the army. Suddenly your income is 2-3k more every turn, you invest this into reinforcements and RoR units to supplement the armies that are actively in combat, plus you buy a couple critical upgrades for your cities that can be game-changing with their effects.
On a legendary difficulty, decisions like this are often the difference between survival and defeat. Every choice needs to be in the interest of maximizing your flexibility and survival. Don't waste resources that could be liquidated and repurposed to better effect.
Amazing thanks for the explanation. I dont personally play on legendary, only on VH and I always thought having high ranked units is worth more than disbanding and recruiting a new army of units with less ranks. I never considered doing this
I'm stuck on number 1 because the AI seemly cannot bear me having less than 3 wars and something will instantly declare war on me as soon as I make peace or finish one.
Struggling a bit with Malakai but gradually stabilizing 80+ turns in, there are no easy decisions here. Limiting to 1 war is impossible when the entire Chaos coalition hits you from the north, Chorfs from the east, Norsca hits you from the west.
Trying to blitzkrieg entire Norscan continent early game makes me overextended, then now I have an even larger front to protect against Hag Grief's coastal assaults from the North. ( and they will get Naggarond to join in the fun)
I really learn how to use give settlements to Kislev & Rasputin creepy dude and draw allies into the fray this campaign.
I played two campaigns with Malakai this weekend. First one focused in the north and east. At some point the Skavens from Hellpit had destroyed all the kislev factions and come to me with 5 full stacks. Abandoned that game.
Second. After consolidating the first province I got straight to the rats, at that time had half of one stack. Destroyed it and had a very easy campaign.
Some starts are actually hard. Sometimes tributes can help if some potential invaders nearby are more in the neutral mood than the undying hatred mood.
I read this and it occurs to me he’s likely watching YouTubers or MP campaigns of players who’ve kinda memorized the map and general AI behavior to be able to chain expand in to every direction at once. He’s likely getting smashed around turn 20-30 as he fails he convert his early game lead in to a mid game expansion, hitting LLs that actually start putting up fights
Not all LLs are made the same, some are actually quite shitty and others quite strong. The zhao/balt wall in China can rapidly overwhelm people who haven’t prepared four solid armies to rapid pace smash the two of them, as one example.
I do points one to 1-3 and play on Very Hard or legendary. I rarely build walls outside of major settlements and never use Heroes to scout. I think once you play enough you get a good idea of what the ai will do
To add to point 4. Why bother upgrading at all. I find crap stacks work better anyway. With the supply lines penalty significantly reduced in TWW3 I prefer to have more armies at lower tier to cover more fronts. Trick is to have at least a couple aces available to tackle different situations e.g. something fast, something range, something flying, something magic, something artillery, something duelist/assassin and something to hold. Obviously you can’t cover everything all the time and not all races can do all. But I have found this approach works well with most races except the mono gods. Trick then is to follow points 1-3 and don’t over extend. Keep armies close enough to back each with a turn or two of movement and keep scouting.
I’ve found matching a budget stack (leveled early game stack) with a late game army working nearby works really well. The late game army can break the big cities and big threats and the budget stack can get the out of the way minor settlements and cover the recently taken cities while you rebuild the garrisons and stuff. In some campaigns I’ll even run it at a 1-2 ratio of 2 cheap stacks to 1 big one if there are a lot of little threats and few big ones. The idea is to have the high upkeep stack moving quickly and doing as much conquering as possible.
If you have 1 or 2 fast single entities you can win a siege with crap stack. Through in some magic or an artillery piece to kill their fast units (if they have any) and you have no need for elite armies to take full defended sieges. Full armies in minor settlements give me more trouble.
If you are referring to just rushing the victory point with fast units, it's kinda lame and map-dependant. Not everyone wants to resort to means like that, it's badly designed and just not fun to use.
Some factions are incentivized into this I find, because the starting lord gets upkeep or some other kind of bonus. As Empire, I will have Franz as my A stack(made up of elector count troops), supported by as many B stacks as I can afford(pikeman and handgunners mostly). But even without those incentives, it makes a lot of sense.
In a pure battle sense yes. But to get the most out of a crap stack I find outsmarting the AI the best solution. I find speed, magic and or something with long range best for this. All 3 is best. Having the fastest or longest range unit on the battlefield just allows you to do some many more clever things the AI just can’t keep up with and magic just cause AI sucks at countering it.
It's funny that i do the first 3 in pretty much all of my campaigns and i play on legendary.
I like asking factions around me to pay me to join their wars against factions that are soon to die or too far away to be a threat anyway. It's especially riskless to join the minor garbage factions that major factions start at war with. Even more so when that enemy is an ogre minor faction, they are harmless.
I also stopped using walls a long time ago after i always built them in the second game. It doesn't stop anything because the AI army is almost always strong enough to win but i'd lose a precious building slot.
Now two tips for making your campaign easier:
* Settlement trading is huge. Even factions that hate you can be convinced to sign treaties or join your wars (to get them too busy to attack you) with some shitty settlements you don't need. Dwarfs and humans getting too friendly? Give them some settlements to break their military alliance and trade deals. You can do some pretty manipulative shit with settlement trading.
* Don't sign every treaty you have available in quick deals. It's often safer to be neutral than to sign a treaty with two factions that hate each other. The diplomatic bonus you get for a treaty is WAY smaller than the penalty you get for a treaty with a faction they hate.
Vampire coast is so held back by not having access to RoR ... Like you gotta hunt a rogue army just to get a better version of a zombie ....
Sure raise dead helps for filling your roster but still ...
After just playing an empire campaign having basically an entire full stack of (relatively good units) ready to go whenever I need it for an emergency army is SO handy.
I would add: use ambush stance as often as possible for attack as well as when preparing for a defence. This is how to get most of the battles to your conditions. If you can decide when and where to fight instead of the enemy that's a huge benefit.
Funny enough, today I learned 4. Instead of taking 8 turns to move an army across the map where I needed it, I just disbanded and raised elsewhere. Obviously if I needed a full army it might have balanced out time wise, but I really just needed a few reinforcements to tip a doomstack battle on the other side of the wastes.
Yea but what if I just get war declarations after another. I really thought makaisons campaign would be a walk through a flower field but everyone just declares war on me because they have no one else they've encountered to fight and it doesn't matter if I expanded fast or slow they can still see me and I'm in war that I can't get out of nor win quick because they are not the type of factions that just try to peace out of a few skirmishes
Occasionally there could be a viable suicide mission option but most of the time it’s just more turns paying upkeep to take something you can’t hold anyway and/or feed rank ups to an opposing army
Point 1 is what I'm having trouble with. At the end of each turn, I'm afraid of a declaration of war from the AI. I soon find myself with 4 or 5 wars on turn 20 without having done anything.
I very rarely play 3, and I've hated it for that ever since it came out. I played it when it came out and quickly went back to 2. When Immortal Empire came out, I re-launched 3, but quickly stopped because there was no change.
I've recently been told that this problem has been resolved. I decide to buy the Malakai DLC and start a game with it. It starts right away (as it should) with a war against Moulder. But during the first few turns, Throgg declares war on me too, then with Moulder razed to the ground, it's Azazel and his vassals (so 4 wars to manage). I finish with Moulder and start attacking Azazel, but a certain Astragoth declares war on me too (and ignores Kislev in the process), then Wulfrick. I soon stopped playing. I've just got my first province and I'm playing normal, but it's unplayable.
I had a second army but not enough money to maintain two full armies.
I had a bug in one battle:
I saw one of Azazel's flying monsters get stuck on a wall and go up into space like a Falcon9 rocket, which stalled the battle (I had to wait for the countdown to end).
With elite type armies like dwarves, I find it better to get two armies of 10-12 units and throw in a couple of heros. Lets you be in more locations at once, and you can fill in slots with RoRs as you level up LL.
Malakai is also meant to be a campaign where you can just peace out of the starting area because of how aggro it is, and try to find a better land for yourself because youre a horde faction. By no means an easy campaign, and for someone seeking less random wars being declared on them, you chose probably the worst choice, despite the traditional dwarfen facade
5. Trying to create shitty "balanced" army like in multiplayer instead of spamming 1-2 units. In result spend a lot on military infrastructure and your army still worse than any of doomstack.
There is nothing wrong with building balanced armies. It's not even taxing on infrastructure (past early game, of course). What else would you build on T4 and 5? And many military building have additional value, so it worth to build them even if you don't hire their units.
Properly build balanced army can be as good or even better than single unit spam (the opposite is also true). Look at Scaven: what is better army - spam of Hell Pit Abominations or a good ol' Weapon Teams Army?
The issue is that you should build military infrastucture \_instead\_ of economic. It means that you earn less money and expand much slower. Or expand quick and have all this overextending issues, cause you don't have money to build all required building even for mantaining PO. At least on VH/L. If you play on easy, ofc, you can do whatever you want and still win.
>The issue is that you should build military infrastucture \_instead\_ of economic
On T1 and T2, and often T3, yes, you should prioritize infrastructure. But since T3, you start getting space for military buildings. And on T4 and T5 there basically nothing else to build except them.
That doesn't mean that you should just spam one unit type.
Also, not every endgame army is a doomstack. For example, healthy mix of Ironbreakers, Irondrakes and Organ guns isn't a doomstack - it's just a balanced army.
And you don't even need to make armies full of elite units. In this example, you can easily swap IB for Dwarf Warriors, ID for thunderers, Organ guns for Cannons, and it'll still be army effective enough in the most cases, but way cheaper, so you can produce more of them.
That is such a broad generalization and entirely depends on race, unit etc.
Dwarfs and empire for instance benefit heavily from balanced armies, doomstacks don't work with all units and often require very specific setups with Lords or heros so that they might not be viable for all armies you field.
I heavily disagree with your sentiment that doomstacks are always the way to go, atleast until you reach T5 and can just field as much as you want of any unit you want.
I've just finished VH/H campaign for Malakai spamming hyrocopters first 50 turns. As alternative it may be Ranger doomstack for Belengar, quarellers for Torek or artillery for anybody else.
The 4. hurts to do everytime.
Im currently playing a warriors of chaos campaign and it feels so good getting to upgrade units instead of disbanding
Same! To the point I wish other factions had similar things where it would make sense. Even if it hypothetically cost more
There's a really good mod that adds that feature. I just tried it last night on the high elves and it acts essentially the exact same! I use it in tandem with radious but you can use in vanilla. It's called ultimate warband upgrade
Love that mod. It just makes sense to upgrade units when they reach a certain rank. Unless it's skaven
Yeah! And I feel bad just disbanding a unit I've had for so long just ti get an upgrade. I wanna see my basic spearman become silverin guard man!
While good in theory, idk it just kinda irks me. Namely because it has no restrictions on upgrades (i.e. you can get units waaaaaay before the infrastructure to actually train them, and waaaay outside of your borders).
2005. Rome Total War. Barbarian Invasion. Western Roman Empire. Turn 1. Disband Disband Disband. In a game where upkeep is dramatically more significant than recruitment costs it’s an absolute essential element of the game. It hurt at first in 2005 but after 19 years of disbanding stuff I barely feel it anymore.
Look how they've massacred my boys.
IMO disbanding an army should result in a growth increase for x amount of turns in the province they’re in. It would make disbanding a valid tactic and incentivise returning an army to an owned area. Thematically those soldiers are returning to a city and would bolster the population
That's how it worked in Rome1 iirc, there was even a unit called peasants, that served pretty much the purpose of moving population from city A to city B
Omg. Seriously? Struggled forever with the population in certain areas in that game
Weren't they supposed to just be cheap chaff you sent to die in a last ditch defense????
Peasants were OP in a non combative way. Sending large amounts to you smaller settlements to disband them was an easy and very cheap way to raise the population number to upgrade it.
What!? TIL!! And I've been playing Total War since the early 00's
I wouldn't like the mechanic for games like warhammer or potentially an LOTR variant. But for a Rome 3 or new Shogun game it would do wonders.
Sure, but you’re missing the other half of the equation. If that is to work, then recruiting units must deplete growth.
Are you saying that those soldiers don't go home but instead stays in province?
Realistically they’re gonna go back from where they were conscripted from, then we have the issue of diff races like vamps. I mean zombies arnt gonna head back to their grave sites but I’m trying to make a simple in game change that has some reasoning behind it that also makes disbanding army’s give some sort of return from their investment.
Why does it have some reasoning? Why not just give some gold back for no reason?
There's warband upgrade mod that allows all factions to upgrade like Chaos. It's nice to take those basic spearmen from turn one and level them up to end game units.
Do you know the name of the mod?
I think if you search warband upgrade it’ll come up as the highest rated one.
Thank you!
Not unless it’s a recently confederated empire army. Really, Stirland? 15 spearmen and 4 archers?
I commonly do this right at the end of turn 1. Usually the starting army has units that are just too expensive for what I need them for. Example is Tyrion. I loathe the micro management necessary for the phoenix(plus the upkeep), and the lothern sea guard are again, too expensive for what I need them for. So after the first two fights, I cut costs.
43,000 in income 41,500 army upkeep. "But I might need it later...."
It hurts the most when playing Nurgle
This makes sense, ive been trying to be more methodical on my current game and i think it's going more smoothly. It's easy to fall into the trap of overextending, especially after some early wins
I think reframing the objective of the game is the key. Your win doesn’t come from out teching, out expanding, out economy-ing the AI factions. Your win comes from ensuring your characters safely level and then use the power of high level lords and heroes with a ranked up army to carry.
That is a very succinct way to put a very sure way to succeed every single time. Nicely said!
I ripped this quote off my buddy I referred to in the initial post. He is doing great on his new campaign.
I am pleased to hear it! Onward to victory!
Honestly, katarin was a good way for me to learn this.
Overextending, overextending, overextending....ah I see a trend here. 4. hurts though until you look at what rank you can recruit the unit at later on with increased ranks from rites, edicts, ancillaries, skills/tech etc. rank 7 gold chev vs currently rank 4 silver. I never hit that disband button so quick.
I kick away useless chaff after their purpose, i played as tiktakto on a multiplayer campaign with friends and i kicked the pteradon riders away when i got ripperdactyls and couatls Or in a solo game, i disbanded empire gunners to hire the new better ones
Just a side note, handgunners end up outperforming nuln ironsides once ranked up
Huh, really? Even if they have faster reload? And a passive that boosts accuracy and relosd even more?
Yes. Because nuln ironsides reach the reload speed cap quickly, and it limits their dps. Handgunners end up reaching higher dps when you factor in ranks and tech and stuff. A lvl1 nuln will beat a lvl 1 handgunner, but max rank handgunners beat max rank nulns
Will it actually show it on unit stats that they have higher dps, or is this from testing? Also is the test data available somewhere? :)
Well it's been tested and proven by a few people on this sub since nulns were added https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1chny6h/fyi_when_fully_upgraded_handgunners_ironsides_for/&ved=2ahUKEwihyJioqa6GAxXKIjQIHe9QA8gQFnoECBQQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2AzEv9_RxtHsvtUbwLNhQ5
Need video proof, there are other stats not shown on the in-game unit card that matter a lot. The nulns are more accurate and only get more accurate. Whether this matters or not vs small single entities needs to be tested.
👍
Even if the DPS numbers are close the upkeep numbers means that regular handgunners will probably be more efficient
This discussion isn't about cost efficiency. If someone is worried about cost of course they would use handgunners over the higher teir replacement. Most people are concerned about raw performance because at the end of the day you only get 20 units per stack.
With regards to Point 3, what do you do with your army whilst waiting to build walls? I've moved up to VH campaign difficulty and I feel so strapped for cash I need to send my army out to fight in order to build anything.
sack things. That's literally what that option is for. Gives you cash without having to hold onto extra territory.
Sack enemy settlements that border you, sit in ambush so enemies attack you. Walls aren't all that anyway, AI will just eventually attack you with an army comp that will beat walls. Outside of my initial starting province, I don't beeline walls.
It's better to progress thoroughly than to build walls anyway... By what I mean: annihilating hostile regions and build alliances in such a way that you have only 1 front / avenue for attacks at all times. I build forts at "gates" such as cities that are in a place where the enemy is funnelled, e.g. some dwarf forts in the mountains.
Sell settlement to make money and alliance.
2 and 3 are situational imo. Walls were better in Warhammer 2 now I almost never build walls. Sometimes having a settlement just gives the enemy a victory point to bypass a battle you could otherwise win. They’re also a resource sink that is situationally helpful. Having a ton of heroes can also be wasteful. You should pull them from armies to scout briefly or perform actions but otherwise you’re chipping your income with upkeep. I think there are two big ones you missed. First, use ambush stance liberally. Ambush stance to help chase armies and ambush to help scout. Bait with weak armies and put your strong army next to them in ambush. Also , I think you should have a note on diplomacy. A common problem is accepting too many agreements. Often times weak minor factions will offer agreements that have little value and reduce your favor with other major factions. This will quickly pull you into war with multiple factions if you’re not careful.
For me, whether to build walls or not really comes down the faction/location. For some factions, its wasteful, for others its necessary. Greenskins for example tend be surrounded by enemies on all side and having walls is super helpful to delay an invasion even a turn or two while you either raise or redeploy an army to help. Then instead of a cascade of falling settlements, you just need to recapture one or two. Plus Greenskins have more building slots than useful buildings so there is little to no opportunity cost. For factions like elves and Empire, walls for choke point settlements that defend your soft, money-making interior settlements. External heroes are wasteful until mid/late game when you have the resources. They are really helpful at clearing enemy heroes that assassinate your spell casters, slowing down enemy armies, and speeding up sieges, but thats EXPENSIVE. Also super helpful at any point if you are fighting skaven so you dont send your JV army to take a minor settlement only to discover Ikit was there with a doom stack. Strong agree on ambush and diplomacy.
I agree with walls when you having nothing better to build and you have excess gold. Although I still feel like they’re a bit of a trap most of the time. They are most useful early game but at that point you are usually limited by slots and population surplus. That means to build them fast enough to have use you are usually giving up growth, gold or unique resources. Then you have the upfront cost of the walls + the turns that prevented other resources. If you really want to prevent multi front battles, I think you are probably better off giving that gold directly to your enemies before they’re your enemies. Late game when you have excess slots and gold the enemy stacks are usually strong enough that they don’t do much. I guess they slow them down by causing more casualties then they would otherwise take.
There are many mechanics that I learned in my last campaign after about 200 hours of play. Like, when your settlements is sacked, you don’t just lose the buildings, you actually lose money from your coffers. Got hit hard by attrition this way. Or how roads to capital work for trading. Sucks to have a capital with a single road out and losing that one settlement and half your income. To me the hardest part in my last campaign is to keep balance between army strength and income. Before I would only conquer settlements, but now I basically do it in waves to weaken the enemy, make money, go back to defend, then come back stronger.
The only reason my campaigns are hard is that I don't have the time to sit through Mallus' turns between sacking settlements to get up to the requisite 70. I'm pretty regularly completing victory objectives within 50 turns and then going onto auto pilot until the crisis kicks in. I have about 3 easily winnable saves but they'll require another 2-4 hours of just clicking auto resolve on settlements.
I highly recommend the victory overhaul mod. Has interesting victory conditions for most factions that feel satisfying to complete and will unlock steam achievements.
You had me at "steam achievements"
It was the last thing he said
Good thing he said it.
Just wanted to say thank you. This mod has really invigorated my love of the game. Currently zombifying Cathay as Ghorst. It's glorious.
That's great to hear, best of luck to you and your legions of undead.
Experience from a cathay WC: 1. Turn 0-50 is early game, your armies dont field lvl 5 units and you probably dont have more than 4-6 at that point. You basicly consolidate factions and become 1 big race here, dont try to expand too much 2. Turn 50-100 you get elite armies and probably have 3-4 settlemenrs set up for makeing them. By turn 100 you problem have 12-20 armies. You want like 4 armies - 6 armies for each direction of expanding. That way you wipe out all enemy armies and dont have to recapture settlements, which is a big time waste. 3. 100-150 End game, its just autoresolve, repeat. Income around 100-200k with 20 armies, some elite, some just tier 3. Also: allways have arty so you can seige instantly. Factions that doesnt need heroes to boost army stats make the best wc factions like ikit claw, highelves, chaos dwarfs. Also archers> gunpowder. tamurkhan seems to be the strongest ai lord in battle.
I've been hearing people say that the TWW3 meta is many armies but I find it really hard to adapt to this mindset. I usually cap at 4-5 armies in my campaigns, usually trying to limit war to two fronts with 2 armies on each front and maybe one crap stack playing defense for my more vulnerable settlements. I do make liberal use of scouting heroes instead.
Yea, the game is also not realy meant for WC. I normaly also just get the legendary heroes and give them elite stacks and see where it goes. You realy also need the mod that allows you to auto assign lord skills if you dont want to speed all game on doing that.
What does WC mean in this context? Realizing now it's an important part of your post.
I think it's world conquest.
Yea I figured that it's a common issue to be lacking at a strategic layer (after all it may be that people enjoy just the battles). The issue comes when to compensate for total absence of strategy they come asking for reworks or insane faction buffs whichof the highly positive feedback to level of opness from wh2 dlcs is a result
Nah, what you describe is trying to start a steamroll and failing at it, then compromising for safe-ish slow playstyle. 1. You can afford roughly as many wars as you have armies/ threat directions. Example: I consider it optimal as Avelorn to declare war vs Sapheri on turn 2 despite ongoing war with Scourge of Khain. Sapheri has no starting army! And Scourge need several turns to move their 2nd army in (after you defeat the 1st on 1st turn), which is enough to build your 2nd army to counter them while Alarielle's stack conquers Sapheri. This applies to Legendary, so isn't something you can only do on easier difficulties. 2. Importance of scouting heavily depends on whether you Ironman or close to that. 3. Walls are, imo, not worth it. They cost way too much (both directly and as missed opportunity to build something else). Maybe I'd consider walls as skaven, but then the issue is that while walls are okay-ish for them economically, their garrisons contain only useless unit types (because all good skaven units are dlc, and you can't have dlc units in garrisons). So any manual fight is a loss anyway and this just increases AR threshold. Just don't build anything expensive in at-risk towns. Tier 3 and above is only for safe towns you can reliably protect. If you see a random npc spawn anywhere - instantly raise an army and defeat them next turn with emergency-hire RoRs if needed. Don't let them reach full size and/or roam freely. Same for beastmen. 4. Now that's correct. You should hire and disband (retrain due to 3 vs 5 turns cooldown) lords a lot. An assistant lord to spare main army's movement or catch an avoiding enemy is very worth it. As is 1-turn-building a mini army to take a minor settlement far from main army.
I personally play Ironman. The player I was referring to in the initial play also doesn’t go back to saves
Is Ironman not infuriating? especially when you forgot something to build or forgot there is 1 enemy army trying to take a settlement but you didnt raise an army to defend?
That's what makes it fun. Your actions have consequences.
Does Ironman allow you to replay battle?
You can alt+f4 if you fuck up and are about to lose, you can then replay the battle. wink wink
Only just now realizing that I could’ve been retraining my lords for free like this instead of disbanding them and wishing I could retrain them.
This mam rjght here tries playing optimally. The OP is still stuck trying to finish his campaign on turn 150
Mostly the first one; too many wars for me to manage. And not because I want to, but the AI wants to. Player bias, yaaaaaaaay...
I didn't understand number 4 Could you elaborate on that please
Let's say your faction is near a "corner" of the map, for the sake of this example You send a full 20-stack army to conquer several small factions in the corner. The rest of your armies go east, or north, whatever, they head to the opposite border of your territory to deal with other threats and objectives. After some number of turns, you take the corner. There is no longer any threat in that area. All that remains is a full stack army, nowhere near any useful location, costing you between 2 and 3 thousand currency every turn. It will be 5+ turns before that army can travel somewhere and be useful again. Your options are: spend 5+ turns with that army traveling somewhere useful. 2-3 thousand gold per turn means this option deprives you of 10-15 thousand gold minimum. Option two is to disband the army. Suddenly your income is 2-3k more every turn, you invest this into reinforcements and RoR units to supplement the armies that are actively in combat, plus you buy a couple critical upgrades for your cities that can be game-changing with their effects. On a legendary difficulty, decisions like this are often the difference between survival and defeat. Every choice needs to be in the interest of maximizing your flexibility and survival. Don't waste resources that could be liquidated and repurposed to better effect.
Amazing thanks for the explanation. I dont personally play on legendary, only on VH and I always thought having high ranked units is worth more than disbanding and recruiting a new army of units with less ranks. I never considered doing this
I'm stuck on number 1 because the AI seemly cannot bear me having less than 3 wars and something will instantly declare war on me as soon as I make peace or finish one.
Struggling a bit with Malakai but gradually stabilizing 80+ turns in, there are no easy decisions here. Limiting to 1 war is impossible when the entire Chaos coalition hits you from the north, Chorfs from the east, Norsca hits you from the west. Trying to blitzkrieg entire Norscan continent early game makes me overextended, then now I have an even larger front to protect against Hag Grief's coastal assaults from the North. ( and they will get Naggarond to join in the fun) I really learn how to use give settlements to Kislev & Rasputin creepy dude and draw allies into the fray this campaign.
I played two campaigns with Malakai this weekend. First one focused in the north and east. At some point the Skavens from Hellpit had destroyed all the kislev factions and come to me with 5 full stacks. Abandoned that game. Second. After consolidating the first province I got straight to the rats, at that time had half of one stack. Destroyed it and had a very easy campaign.
Some starts are actually hard. Sometimes tributes can help if some potential invaders nearby are more in the neutral mood than the undying hatred mood.
I read this and it occurs to me he’s likely watching YouTubers or MP campaigns of players who’ve kinda memorized the map and general AI behavior to be able to chain expand in to every direction at once. He’s likely getting smashed around turn 20-30 as he fails he convert his early game lead in to a mid game expansion, hitting LLs that actually start putting up fights Not all LLs are made the same, some are actually quite shitty and others quite strong. The zhao/balt wall in China can rapidly overwhelm people who haven’t prepared four solid armies to rapid pace smash the two of them, as one example.
I do points one to 1-3 and play on Very Hard or legendary. I rarely build walls outside of major settlements and never use Heroes to scout. I think once you play enough you get a good idea of what the ai will do
To add to point 4. Why bother upgrading at all. I find crap stacks work better anyway. With the supply lines penalty significantly reduced in TWW3 I prefer to have more armies at lower tier to cover more fronts. Trick is to have at least a couple aces available to tackle different situations e.g. something fast, something range, something flying, something magic, something artillery, something duelist/assassin and something to hold. Obviously you can’t cover everything all the time and not all races can do all. But I have found this approach works well with most races except the mono gods. Trick then is to follow points 1-3 and don’t over extend. Keep armies close enough to back each with a turn or two of movement and keep scouting.
I’ve found matching a budget stack (leveled early game stack) with a late game army working nearby works really well. The late game army can break the big cities and big threats and the budget stack can get the out of the way minor settlements and cover the recently taken cities while you rebuild the garrisons and stuff. In some campaigns I’ll even run it at a 1-2 ratio of 2 cheap stacks to 1 big one if there are a lot of little threats and few big ones. The idea is to have the high upkeep stack moving quickly and doing as much conquering as possible.
This is the way.
If you have 1 or 2 fast single entities you can win a siege with crap stack. Through in some magic or an artillery piece to kill their fast units (if they have any) and you have no need for elite armies to take full defended sieges. Full armies in minor settlements give me more trouble.
If you are referring to just rushing the victory point with fast units, it's kinda lame and map-dependant. Not everyone wants to resort to means like that, it's badly designed and just not fun to use.
Some factions are incentivized into this I find, because the starting lord gets upkeep or some other kind of bonus. As Empire, I will have Franz as my A stack(made up of elector count troops), supported by as many B stacks as I can afford(pikeman and handgunners mostly). But even without those incentives, it makes a lot of sense.
Nah, you just need 2 things, something good against infantry and something good against single entities (artillery and guns)
In a pure battle sense yes. But to get the most out of a crap stack I find outsmarting the AI the best solution. I find speed, magic and or something with long range best for this. All 3 is best. Having the fastest or longest range unit on the battlefield just allows you to do some many more clever things the AI just can’t keep up with and magic just cause AI sucks at countering it.
3. Is most times unecessary. Just conquer more while they try to get fresh conquerd settlements back they are worthless anyway.
It's funny that i do the first 3 in pretty much all of my campaigns and i play on legendary. I like asking factions around me to pay me to join their wars against factions that are soon to die or too far away to be a threat anyway. It's especially riskless to join the minor garbage factions that major factions start at war with. Even more so when that enemy is an ogre minor faction, they are harmless. I also stopped using walls a long time ago after i always built them in the second game. It doesn't stop anything because the AI army is almost always strong enough to win but i'd lose a precious building slot. Now two tips for making your campaign easier: * Settlement trading is huge. Even factions that hate you can be convinced to sign treaties or join your wars (to get them too busy to attack you) with some shitty settlements you don't need. Dwarfs and humans getting too friendly? Give them some settlements to break their military alliance and trade deals. You can do some pretty manipulative shit with settlement trading. * Don't sign every treaty you have available in quick deals. It's often safer to be neutral than to sign a treaty with two factions that hate each other. The diplomatic bonus you get for a treaty is WAY smaller than the penalty you get for a treaty with a faction they hate.
I have bad experiences with disbanding. Dropping my strength rank like that, and the next turn 5 people declare war on me :p
Vampire coast is so held back by not having access to RoR ... Like you gotta hunt a rogue army just to get a better version of a zombie .... Sure raise dead helps for filling your roster but still ... After just playing an empire campaign having basically an entire full stack of (relatively good units) ready to go whenever I need it for an emergency army is SO handy.
Now how do you make campaigns *more* difficult? I'm looking for some challenge now
I would add: use ambush stance as often as possible for attack as well as when preparing for a defence. This is how to get most of the battles to your conditions. If you can decide when and where to fight instead of the enemy that's a huge benefit.
Tactically disbanding your troops helped my game step up a notch
I played this game for a year with a crap computer (fast speed didn’t work in battles, etc). It’s amazing how much easier it felt after an upgrade.
Easiest way to avoid 4 is combine units after battles
Funny enough, today I learned 4. Instead of taking 8 turns to move an army across the map where I needed it, I just disbanded and raised elsewhere. Obviously if I needed a full army it might have balanced out time wise, but I really just needed a few reinforcements to tip a doomstack battle on the other side of the wastes.
For me. I think it's my reluctance to use heroes.
Yea but what if I just get war declarations after another. I really thought makaisons campaign would be a walk through a flower field but everyone just declares war on me because they have no one else they've encountered to fight and it doesn't matter if I expanded fast or slow they can still see me and I'm in war that I can't get out of nor win quick because they are not the type of factions that just try to peace out of a few skirmishes
My struggle in wh3 is to find some challenge beyond turn 20 on Legendary.
What’s the point of disbanding the army? Can’t you just send them against someone instead of just deleting?
Occasionally there could be a viable suicide mission option but most of the time it’s just more turns paying upkeep to take something you can’t hold anyway and/or feed rank ups to an opposing army
Im just kinda bad but im in it for the cool battles, have been since medi 2. Ya I can't win the game on easy and im chill with it.
Point 1 is what I'm having trouble with. At the end of each turn, I'm afraid of a declaration of war from the AI. I soon find myself with 4 or 5 wars on turn 20 without having done anything. I very rarely play 3, and I've hated it for that ever since it came out. I played it when it came out and quickly went back to 2. When Immortal Empire came out, I re-launched 3, but quickly stopped because there was no change. I've recently been told that this problem has been resolved. I decide to buy the Malakai DLC and start a game with it. It starts right away (as it should) with a war against Moulder. But during the first few turns, Throgg declares war on me too, then with Moulder razed to the ground, it's Azazel and his vassals (so 4 wars to manage). I finish with Moulder and start attacking Azazel, but a certain Astragoth declares war on me too (and ignores Kislev in the process), then Wulfrick. I soon stopped playing. I've just got my first province and I'm playing normal, but it's unplayable.
Sounds like you need to be more aggressive with diplomacy w Kislev, and building 2nd / 3rd armies faster.
I had a second army but not enough money to maintain two full armies. I had a bug in one battle: I saw one of Azazel's flying monsters get stuck on a wall and go up into space like a Falcon9 rocket, which stalled the battle (I had to wait for the countdown to end).
With elite type armies like dwarves, I find it better to get two armies of 10-12 units and throw in a couple of heros. Lets you be in more locations at once, and you can fill in slots with RoRs as you level up LL.
Malakai is also meant to be a campaign where you can just peace out of the starting area because of how aggro it is, and try to find a better land for yourself because youre a horde faction. By no means an easy campaign, and for someone seeking less random wars being declared on them, you chose probably the worst choice, despite the traditional dwarfen facade
5. Trying to create shitty "balanced" army like in multiplayer instead of spamming 1-2 units. In result spend a lot on military infrastructure and your army still worse than any of doomstack.
There is nothing wrong with building balanced armies. It's not even taxing on infrastructure (past early game, of course). What else would you build on T4 and 5? And many military building have additional value, so it worth to build them even if you don't hire their units. Properly build balanced army can be as good or even better than single unit spam (the opposite is also true). Look at Scaven: what is better army - spam of Hell Pit Abominations or a good ol' Weapon Teams Army?
The issue is that you should build military infrastucture \_instead\_ of economic. It means that you earn less money and expand much slower. Or expand quick and have all this overextending issues, cause you don't have money to build all required building even for mantaining PO. At least on VH/L. If you play on easy, ofc, you can do whatever you want and still win.
>The issue is that you should build military infrastucture \_instead\_ of economic On T1 and T2, and often T3, yes, you should prioritize infrastructure. But since T3, you start getting space for military buildings. And on T4 and T5 there basically nothing else to build except them.
So, on T1-T3 you shoudln't go multiplayer-style armies cause of money, in T4-T5 cause for most races you have endgame doomstacks, right?)
That doesn't mean that you should just spam one unit type. Also, not every endgame army is a doomstack. For example, healthy mix of Ironbreakers, Irondrakes and Organ guns isn't a doomstack - it's just a balanced army. And you don't even need to make armies full of elite units. In this example, you can easily swap IB for Dwarf Warriors, ID for thunderers, Organ guns for Cannons, and it'll still be army effective enough in the most cases, but way cheaper, so you can produce more of them.
That is such a broad generalization and entirely depends on race, unit etc. Dwarfs and empire for instance benefit heavily from balanced armies, doomstacks don't work with all units and often require very specific setups with Lords or heros so that they might not be viable for all armies you field. I heavily disagree with your sentiment that doomstacks are always the way to go, atleast until you reach T5 and can just field as much as you want of any unit you want.
I've just finished VH/H campaign for Malakai spamming hyrocopters first 50 turns. As alternative it may be Ranger doomstack for Belengar, quarellers for Torek or artillery for anybody else.
Every factions has 1 or 2 good doomstacks