Doomstacks are a waste of resources: You're far better off focusing on cheap armies and getting as many of them. 19 Thunderbargers? How about 80 Gyrocopters, or a combo of Gyros, Thunderers, Artillery, Irondrakes. Unit Caps are pointless, because there's very little incentive to diversify armies as is, Unit Caps make that worse. Even Orion has little reason to Doomstack besides fluff: Sure he can maintain armies for free, but he still has to pay to recruit them, get the buildings to recruit them from Trees that have limited recruited slots. Personally I am strongly in favor of a lot of army variety: But shit like Gorbad, or Beastmen or Tomb Kings or Chaos Dwarves do absolutely nothing for it. Being able to recruit units fast and effectively is what adds variety: Khorne does this: Sure it's fluff since you can win just Chaos Warriors, but it's a very effective strategy to go for a lot of unit variety: The only buildings you need outside of recruitment are for Growth.
Some units like gyrocopters should defenitely be caped since chaos factions have almost no range units to deal with them. You can give your lord and heroes snipe very easily with dwarfs and 17 gyrocopters can kill any chaos army that ai build. It just makes the campaign too easy and boring, winning every fight manually with 0 casualties.
I think you misunderstand what makes a good doomsday. Until like turn 80 or so, the only good doomstacks are affordable ones. 19 elf archers is an early game doomstack. It's gotten much less effective as WH3 has gotten on, but it's still quite effective. The other benefit of doomstacking is ease of use. If you can give all your units the same command, it cuts down the micro required to be effective. I think you're also wrong about the availability of races that allow you to build something other than growth or income buildings. For the majority, you need to build your control your growth and your income before thinking about military buildings.
Khorne doesn’t have variety. It has a complete lack of challenge/adversity that facilitates it not really mattering what sort of army composition you choose. The crapstack meta is just the inverse of WH2. Whereas before doomstacks were meta because Supply Lines were too punishing, now in WH3 they either don’t exist or don’t matter because of runaway player economies. Every new army you create easily pays itself with exorbitant amounts of post-battle loot, and investing in provinces is often a trap due to the rate of income return and how quickly the AI falls off in being a threat to the player. The solution should be a more granular system that takes into account unit tier and unit count in a given army. Something like the Administration System in Pharaoh, but more in-depth and not including settlements (which should have their own anti-snowball mechanic). There should be a push and pull in both directions for army composition.
doomstacks are for manual battles that you always want an edge on. what you're talking about is for auto-resolve. both of them are for folks who don't want a challenge. real men "doomstack" tier 1 units with max veterancy...because you never let a single unit die.
I suppose kornes play style is fine if you could care less about settlement and economy building. If you make all units quickly recruitable and cheap you basically turn every faction into Korne or WOC with no incentive to build up your settlements and end the campaign at turn 30.
Doomstacks were meta in Warhammer 2 where the supply limits was insane and you could generally only afford 1 or maxium 2 armies, but in Warhammer 3 it is not as severe.
True, and very sad. Game progression is crap. Half of the roster and 70% of research tree of almost any race is useless cause you can't get it when you need it. So much time designing the units & tech goes wasted. Would be nice if CA takes a pause from "content" DLCs and reworks game progression.
This is probably what I dislike most about these games. Tier 3, 4, and 5 units are so fun to use, but by the time most factions get them you're close to if not already done with your long campaign.
Reason to doomstack: 1. More eco building 2. Focus skill point to buff that unit 3. Focus Research to buff that unit 4. In some specific case, reduce cooldown of global recruitment via more recruit building. Not every doomstack is Tier 4-5 unit
Crapstacks aren't doomstacks. Basically a Spearmen + Archer Combo or a Chaos Warrior combo is a crap stack. A doomstack is a nigh on unstoppable army: Think 19 Black Dragons.
@@Costin_Gaming A doomstack isn't a level of quality, it's a quantity that can not be dealt with. A spearman+archer combo isn't a doomstack, but five spearmen+archer combos together is a doomstack. The original doomstack is from Civ, where people move ALL their units together.... I can't find an old glossary, but I can see that the term is in common usage on Civfanatics in the year 2000; the year Total War first was published.
@@somm150 a doomstack is any army that leverages something powerful to the extreme. Grom was able to make a basically unbeatable doomstack with generic goblins. It's not about being expensive it's about being powerful. Often doomstacks are high end units because they're usually better, but that's not always the case
I usually only doomstack with my legendary lord and keep some cheaper armies around to help out. I like having a hammer to support my frontlines and push back against any stiffer opposition mid game
I personally don't like doomstacks when I play the campaign normally. I always tend to build my armies with a good variety of units, with some change and adaptations depending on the lord who is leading the army. The only time I doomstack, it's when I am over 150 turns, and I got too much money to spend on... It's there that I like to do some dumb stuff, just for the fun. But my fun is worth 1 battle with doomstacks or variety armies are always fun and challenging from the begining to the end of the campaign.
Unit caps logically force diversity since one can't spam elite units any more. I think people talking about doomstacks is a bit of hyperbole, because as you say they are usually far from optimal, but elite-stacking is the meta, and unit caps would prevent elite-stacking. Instead of an army of shades, you'd have most of your army be dark elf warriors/spears/darkshards. You could of course just use darkshards now, but shades are a clear upgrade as while darkshards are a great basic unit, shades perform that much better over multiple battles that they're worth it. Either way, it's too late for CA to apply unit caps broadly, and there's a good mod people can use. Note, I'm talking more about unit caps per army, rather than faction-wide. So you're not restricted to say 1 dragon per army, you're restricted to a certain number of special and rare units, like in tabletop. This means an army may have a couple of bolt throwers, a hydra, some shades, and the rest be darkshards and warriors or something. Also want to point out that allowing players to build armies of 16 handmaidens + 3 bolt throwers, 19 shades, 19 stegos etc lowers the difficulty of the game, as it is allows the player to min-max against an AI that can't. At least for most factions, obviously when a faction has chaos warriors as a 'standard' troop it makes things a bit easier. I'm sure caps were initially talked about with Warhammer 1, it'd be interesting to hear why they weren't applied. It is one of the basic rules of the table top game, and it makes sense in terms of balance, but perhaps they thought 19 dragons had such cool factor that it'd help the game sell more?
I mostly agree, but I'd point out that unit caps are possibly useful from the opposite perspective if you were to make the cost of high level units LOWER in exchange for making them limited. So a star dragon isn't worth a huge amount of spearmen, it's just that you have one star dragon and infinite spearmen.
@@Costin_Gaming My favourite mod, Crisis on Campaign, in WHii gave a system that's basically like how it works in Britannia, which is my favourite system. It also gives a reason to have military buildings in provinces rather than just econ.
It'd be nice to see trash stacks are more effective. The supply lines, lord costs, recruitment costs etc all disproportionately hurt factions that should be fielding large hordes of low tier units, such as skaven, greenskins, and undead factions.
I sometimes wonder if giving more factions I kind of recruitment pool style system like the Warriors of Chaos have. So like a basic military building gives like 6 max spearmen in your local pool and you replenish like 1 every 2-3 turns. That way you might have a reason to not use 1 low tier unit (Unless your willing to wait ages or have multiple military builds of them), but then you might just end up with the nurgle problem of "I can't recruit shit". TW3 is kinda a weird game. It feels like the more you learn and improve at the game, the less fun it gets because you learn how broken/undercooked and abusable a lot of the systems in the game really are.
I’d like a system that had army capacity, different units types took up more or less capacity depending, having chaff units take up less capacity, while stronger units took up more. Then you have a system that makes trash units a little less trash, and doom stacks aren’t as cheesy or broken.
There's much to be said about the feeling of power when you have a doomstack. Puts a smile on my face every time. Probably not the most cost efficient all things considered, but loading into a battle and seeing your 17 steam tanks or Rot Knights feels amazing
I see your videos in my recommended a lot - I have to say, I wish you were more concise. This video could have been 7 minutes without repetition which I'm far more likely to watch than 20 minutes. Imo whether to doomstack depends on your difficulty and the factions you are fighting and your endgame settings. Game 3 factions and factions that got game 3 expansions tend to be much scarier than earlier warhammer 2 factions. If I'm fighting high elves, I can slip by with some tier 2-3 armies. If I'm fighting Khorne or Ogres, I'm bringing the big boys. Some factions are crippled by their mechanics or rosters into having terrible armies under AI control. This used to be a problem with skaven where the AI would mass stacks of skavenslaves. This has been fixed and Skaven armies can be real mean, but now it's a problem with Chaos Dwarfs. I'd not unusual even past turn 70 to run into Chaos Dwarf AI armies that are 14-19 units of goblin/orc laborers. No doomstack needed there. I personally always play with Ultimate Endgame and all crises enabled at 200%, so I'm working toward something. The fun of it is to make optimized armies that can solo 4 endgame crisis armies at a time with little to no losses. Even without endgame crises, the changes made earlier this year that let the legendary AI raise twice as many armies does tend toward doomstacking, so I can make an army that can regularly take on 2-4 stacks at a time and win easily. It's more efficient to send 1 stack of Ice Guard/Groms at Astragoth that can solo all 8 of his armies than it is to send 3-4 crapstacks of Kossars that need to creep around each other and choke points and waste time ambush baiting to win. As a final point, certain army comps can be useful because they are weak in autoresolve. This will draw the AI into attacking you in engagements it cannot possibly win manually, because it thinks it can win automatically. The quintessential example of this is Gelt's wizard stack, which is literally invincible and probably the most powerful army that can be raised by any faction in campaign, but is terrible in autoresolve and will get a Crushing Defeat even against garrisons with 8 units. This means the AI is much more likely to attack you instead of running away, so you don't have to spend time chasing down armies and ambush baiting to get them to face you. The cowardly AI that won't fight battles and only wants to attack unwalled settlements is Warhammer 3's biggest problem imo and this sort of army can help circumvent this. Other units that tend to autoresolve poorly are cavalry, monstrous infantry, and chariots - armies of these can help draw the AI into taking battles it cannot win.
I cannot attest to other races or even the other factions but for nakai specifically stegadon doomstacks are probably the way to go. at least I am pretty sure there was not a more efficient way to use the resources there. The recruits heros at max rank stack and the pompous hero stack as well as my dreadsaurian stack those were inefficient but the stegadon stack is in my opinion the best way to run that from the midgame onwards. Granted when you have two of those the game could reasonably called over so there's that
Depends what u define as a doomstack, does it only take stacks of 1 unittyp into account or all armies that can fight multiple enemy armies in a single turn? Because I´d argue that basic cyrocopters which 1 or 2 grudge settler variants can make a decent doomstack which counters ur argument that doomstacks have to be expensive and unprectical, especially before they were nerfed. I think the big problem with the argument u make against doomstacks is that u don´t define what u consider a doomstack, when ur definition is an army of 1 hightier unittyp like dragons I´d agree that u don´t need that. When ur definition is more according to what I understand as a doomstack which is an army that can fight multiple armies at the same time or in quick succesion then I´d disagree. Since some of these armies can be highly efficient.
Yea, I came here to say this. Lots of the comments and points in the video miss this. There's just a big hate on doomstacks in this community, even though you can make doomstacks fast and efficient.
I rarely play any campaign further than 70 turns anyway. In my all warhammer 1-2-3 campaigns I believe I always dropped a campaign just around tier 5 becomes available. Those units just doesn't excite me, and how you play tactically just doesn't change from flamespyre to arcane phoenix, or silverin guard to phoenix guard, or archers to sisters. You just do the thing you did for the last 60 turns, just your units are better. That is why warriors of chaos army build up by experience is the most fun I had for some time, you actually try not to lose the army, and have a reason to fight manually.
The funniest shit about this "rant" is that, in Warhammer 1, Doomstacking wasn't even what you were supposed to aim for ASAP : it was rushing agents with "Assassinating" skills. This shit was so overpowered, it actually was what eventually triggered CA to add the pickable trait "Immortality" at level 20 in Warhammer 2 and make it automatically granted at lvl 20 in Warhammer 3 (all while immunising Lords from agents' caused permadeath since Warhammer 2.) Point i'm trying to make is that, still to this day, the most powerful units are the agents on the campaign map : assault units, assault garrison, wound and assassinate can drastically cripple the ennemy war effort with minimum investment, to the point where even lower tiers armies can take on armies/garrisons what would be otherwise impossible to defeat. Granted, there's an undeniable risk of backfire in the attempt. But when you are given the option _"push the button and have a chance at deleting between 10% up to 35% of the ennemy war potential for a modest fee",_ it turns out that a lot of us are ready to pay.
You're spot on, sadly. By the time you actually need a doomstack the campaign has been over for a long time. Now I'm gonna try the court mod, looked fun.😊
There's another big thing that makes getting a doomstack absolutely worthless for Arbaal. As the game goes on, your missions adapt to your main army's strength. If you have a doomstack of 18 wrathmongers and the legendary hero Skarr Bloodwrath in it, you aren't going to get any more missions to defeat legendary lords at all, but instead the game is spawning random armies of randomly selected faction types (Orks, Dwarfs, Empire, Elves) and scatters them mostly randomly around the world. Meaning that if you make the mistake of getting Zharr-Naggrund extremely early and get an early doomstack to raze the world in Khorne's name, you lose the one thing that makes Arbaal so fun to play, to be able teleport behind Grimgor or Nakai, take their trait and potentially snack one of a nearby lord (like Kholek or Miao Ying) before moving on to a new target. Now the game sends you to either the Empire or some end of the bloody universe location to beat someone up who doesn't even give you a nice trait as parting gift. Without a doomstack, you at least get to pick and choose whom to fight and what traits to gather, with said doomstack, well good luck having those rogue armies spawn anywhere useful.
True, but getting a doomstack early on just makes that point come way faster and put a stop to the defeat trait hunt before it can even begin. Without the doomstack you get a few pages before you empty the pool of viable challenges, with the doomstack the pool turns into a puddle and dries up almost immediately. So you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you care to get the scrumptious traits.
Tbh, when I want to have fun optimizing, I play Factorio, not TWW3. Optimizing in 3 just feels awful. Meme-ing is reasonably fun when the bugs don't kill my enjoyment, I do love Ikit's ratling gun+Poison mortar+Jezzail 'doomstack.' Very high dakka, satisfies the "pewpewpew!" and I get to focus on the meme rather than trying to actually play optimally.
Brettonia is my favorite faction and I don't use hippogryph doomstacks because its not fun, I'd rather have a diverse army with beefed up peasants. However, sometimes the AI throws at you top quality armies that seem to require doomstack to win against, AI Chaos tend to throw randomly that at you.
*proceeds to 2nd turn doom stack squigs as Gorbad with erd mentality and take over the whole region in another 5-6 turns* yes doom stacking is bad but it’s so dangerous when you have it set upbright
Optimal is a matter of opinion. If you rush around too quickly you draw more aggro from nearby factions. Sometimes the factions that should be at war don't have time to start it because you decided to go in and aggro them both. If you didn't use the auto resolve mod, you might want to bring better composition to those tough situations.
I use AR to save myself time, not to avoid battles because I can't win them. Frankly the way I see it the real question in a campaign isn't about winning battles. It's about minimizing casualties in them. Which is precisely why I use AR mods: I really hate useless shitty battles that I will win with 10-20 casualties but that would cost me hundreds in default AR. That's why I despise sieges. Oh you can win them with few casualties but doing so is absolutely shit to play. Legend did a play as Belegar taking Skavenblight not too long ago. It was the best, most genuinely smart strat. It was also him wasting over 1 hour of his life on utterly useless crap siege gameplay for a campaign purpose he knew he couldn't lose.
Doomstacks happen organically in the mid to late game... I don't think anyone sacrifices economy to rush doomstacks. You have a well thought out and delivered argument but it just doesn't ring true (especially using high elves as an example). A High Elf doomstack of Lothern Sea Guard with 4 or 5 heroes providing the Honed trait is the best overall army a generic HE lord can field. High Elves are incredibly rich so even if the player wanted to create a star dragon doomstack, arguing that it's inefficient is very hollow. With essentially free 1 turn buildings with 4 administrator lords in the province High Elves are free to doomstack and can do it very early due to how fast they can build. With the ability to save lords and heroes with desired traits the game actually seems geared toward creating doomstacks.
I'll take your Star Dragon doomstack and riase 2-4 Silverin Guard and Elven archers with that money depending on supply lines I"m dealing with. Mid and Late game are pointless grinds anyway.
@@Costin_Gaming If you aren't playing past mid game then maybe the video needs that context, unless you are engagement farming, because it's a pretty inflammatory title.
I don't doomstack, but the AI can and does. Fighting armies with little to no unit variety sucks ass, not to mention being extremely immersion-breaking. That's why I use a mod to limit AI army compositions, which is not the same as unit caps.
Sorry but you dont even define a doomstack. There's a difference between a Thunderbarge or Mammoth doomstack that can be made once your economy is at peak and you basically won the campaign if you are able to afford that, and a doomstack of Sisters of Avelorn that can be made around turn 40, or an Ice Guard doomstack which can be made between T40-50 and in Katarin's army it's cheaper than a Kossack spam. People who tend to hate on doomstacks miss this point. There are so many instances where doomstacks are waaaay more efficient than any conventional army who needs 3-4 building slots to get created, compared to a doomstack, or even crapstack which needs just one, maybe 2 buildings. This contradicts what you say at the start of the video. The game is at the state where you can play with both themed armies and same unit spams. An invisible Steam Stank or Thunderbarge doomstack is not comparable to an early game, high efficient and cost effective doomstack. There's times where themed armies are shooting yourself on the foot. Especially for noob players who can't handle the variety.
Remember dwarf meta play? 17 crossbows and 2 grudgethrowers. Every single army. Thats why you need caps. It adds choice. Choice is good. It gives you reason to use every unit.
Yeah I do, I loathed it. It got fixed by not adding caps and giving dwarfs better recruitment. Although that army would actually make a hard comeback under something like SFO caps or other mods. I am very much in favor of variety. I am not in favor of outdated solutions. Evolve, adapt, improve. I'll say this as bluntly as I can: I despise the hell out of a lot of mods in Total War for their limitations. Including things like Third Age Total War. Superb mod, lots of work, but the garrison script in it can go to hell.
@Costin_Gaming it works really well in med 2. For me med2 looks like more advanced and deep game. Without caps if unit is 0,00001% less cost effective then other there is no reason to ever use it
@@Costin_Gaming yes. They have tomb kings unit cap system. I am talking about that. And you have mercs. It forces you to use every single available unit.
They're just ... fun. IDK how you an play this game focusing on power/efficiency only all the time lol. This game is all about fun ... even on L/VH no campaigns is ''challenging'' anymore. You get like 1 or 2 fights that are challenging max per campaign ... and then it's business as usual. Nothing beats steamrolling 6 full stacks with a doomstack of 19 K'dai destroyers. Of course it's not efficient, campaign is already won for a long time y then ... it's just fun.
Well I don't play on 100% efficiency all the time myself: When playing Dwarfs I dislike making Gyrocopters ) stacks for instance and much prefer a balance army of artillery, irondrakes, thunderers and some flying units ( I prefer Gyrobombers ). The great irony of that I played a major role in popularizing the Gyrostacks: By sending Legend of Total War a Gyro doomstack and he in turn embracing that style that a lot of people coped then.
Doomstacks are useless cause CA and their blind supporters hate fun builds. They have successfully watered down every single army composition to be as boring , mind numbingly dumb as possible. Make some front liners to hold the line, kill with archers and artillery . make cavalry to harass their ranged. EVERY SINGLE LORD , EVERY SINGLE CAMPAIGN. And the stupid sheeps call it "variety" . -Well you are making something interesting there? Trying something different from this ONE formula? Too bad!!! we have put 30 more constraints and 50 more nerfs till you regress back into our very varied much innovative, mind numbingly stupid ass infantry + archer + cavalry army. -OH ! You think that's boring after first 100 hours? Well too bad ! Cause that's the only thing you are gonna make for next 2000 hours. Now give us money for next dlc where you get 3 more lords who do exact same shit.
WHAT KIND OF LUNATIC PLAY A GAME TO BE EFFICIENT???? For real, this is serious question. What kind of tism do you need so that you PLAY game for Efficiency? If you want resource management type Totalwar is not for that, and if you want realistic military battle simulation there are soo many other games that are just better and more balanced than warhammer. However, What totalwar warhammer offers is crazy magic, giant beasts and dragons, rats with machine guns, unending army of the dead, or a row of giant polar bear. I get what you are saying, yes it is very inefficient to have a doom stack. but with that logic it is inefficient to play Warhammer in the first place. you could be making money, socializing with your friends or learning new skills. But hey, i dont have any tism to understand you guys, I just thought people play this game for fun
The game encourages the player to doomstack, if you can merely spam 20 units and win any battle. My biggest problem with this is that the player then loses variety, I'd be happy if unit caps were added in, maybe where if you exceed them things get pricey. This then makes sense as it is how real economies work, this also have options to add difficulty too.
What Doomstacks are effective? I hear this stuff, what doomstack is cheap, available early on, easy to recruit exactly and worth it vs spamming 4 Tier 1-3 armies?
Chaos warriors, chosen etc. High defence and melee stats make ar think you win almost every encounter. With Tzeentch you can get them before fighting Axiotl (your only real enemy). Also Mutalith Vortex beasts as the Changeling (By turn 30 you can recruit them, while having enough money to sustain them)
@@Costin_Gaming As others have said, some factions have such OP economies/mechanics that you can just spam the top tier units very quickly. Lizards are a little tight on money, but once you can afford multiple stacks of stegladons it gets easy-mode, although the odd army causes problems. The trend seems to be making wh3 easier and faster to play, its a shame as the real fun for me is winning those oddball battles and having events be impactful, the more they buff factions the less I care about magic items etc.
@@Costin_Gaming SFO to me offers some great variety, along with balanced high powered factions. Although some abilities it offers end up dominating the game.
@@Costin_Gaming I would say the interest is there, but CA are concentrating 1st on new races and 2nd on empire/dwarves, its a pity as what other factions generally need is not another big elite monster but low level troops and more in game storyline to add variety.
The TW community is never short on bad ideas and nonsense hot takes unfortunately…unit caps being one of them. We have armies that impose arbitrary limits on units and those armies are honestly frustrating entirely because of those limits on their armies. Beastmen, Chorfs, and Tomb Kings all have strict limits on units….and that leads to the early games for all 3 of those races being largely unpopular, especially in the case of Tomb Kings. However they are also offset by the fact that in TK and BM, they have zero upkeep, and in the case of CD, their units are highly scaled up in power to offset the increased cost and effort. Trying to just impose a cap on all factions in order to force “unit variation” would actually limit unit variation as you said…most of my TK plays have depended highly on the Anubis warriors(can’t spell their name) entirely because you can quickly amass a decent number of them and they hold their own in battle. By the time you get 4-5 of each larger construct…campaign is over, which is frustrating. You just end up spamming armies of the crap units surrounding 1-2 armies of decadent units. The myth about Doom stacking in warhammer 3 is just that…a myth. In warhammer 2 you almost had to do it because of the insane supply lines costs but in warhammer 3 you don’t have that. Literally the most efficient armies that I field in the game are crap stacks of decent yet cheap units on a lord that decreases upkeep…perfect example is as high Elves where you honestly can pain the map with just basic spears and arrows armies…in fact I did it once just to prove a point. No heros, nothing but basic spearman and archers lead by a lord…and honestly after I got past turn 12 I had no issues at all. Doom stacking often is just done out of morbid curiosity about how dominant an entire army of a very powerful yet expensive unit can be. We all have made a doomstack for no other reason than to be overkill against any and all enemies. But in no way is it a smart or strategic choice for a army makeup. Yes you make one army that nobody can fuck with…but that army costs as much as 3-4 armies to operate. In almost every scenario, having 3-4 decent armies is way better than having one dominant one. Especially when you often find yourself at war from numerous different fronts at the same time.
Honestly people from Warhammer 2 need to understand the game changed a lot since then. I loved Beastmen for Warhammer 2 after rework but they are misery to play in 3.
@ in 3, both TK and BM need a little bit of attention to their unit cap and army cap situations. As both the strategy is to grudge through the early game and maybe by mid game you finally start feeling like an empire. I still enjoy both races, but I enjoy them far less than I did in 2 BM are fun for a simple campaign that doesn’t require any settlement building or economy management. But my entire problem with them is how expensive the unit cap upgrades become only after a few clicks. Soon I am looking at the situation where one more Cygore in my army pool costs more than an additional army costs…which makes no damn sense. Not sure what the perfect solution is but I have always felt that each unit cap button should either give you more bang for the buck, or should have a flat rate for each that doesn’t increase. Just 500 for a Minotaur, 200 for a Gor or whatever. After building a few powerful armies, it’s insanely expensive to build another one…so what we all do is instead of making armies better, we just pay the 1500 every turn to pop out another army of ungol spears. By the end of a BM campaign I am beyond tired of playing with basic spear infantry swarms. As TK…honestly they just need their buildings earlier. The majority of their unit cap buildings should be available a tier earlier and should grant access to more than just 1 unit. Why can Greenskins get black orcs at tier 3 and one faction get Rogue Idols at tier 3, but I have nothing that can really fight them until tier 5? And don’t even get me started on the 15 turns of hell that is the TK early game as everyone but Arkan.
Doomstacks are a waste of resources: You're far better off focusing on cheap armies and getting as many of them. 19 Thunderbargers? How about 80 Gyrocopters, or a combo of Gyros, Thunderers, Artillery, Irondrakes.
Unit Caps are pointless, because there's very little incentive to diversify armies as is, Unit Caps make that worse.
Even Orion has little reason to Doomstack besides fluff: Sure he can maintain armies for free, but he still has to pay to recruit them, get the buildings to recruit them from Trees that have limited recruited slots.
Personally I am strongly in favor of a lot of army variety: But shit like Gorbad, or Beastmen or Tomb Kings or Chaos Dwarves do absolutely nothing for it.
Being able to recruit units fast and effectively is what adds variety: Khorne does this: Sure it's fluff since you can win just Chaos Warriors, but it's a very effective strategy to go for a lot of unit variety: The only buildings you need outside of recruitment are for Growth.
Some units like gyrocopters should defenitely be caped since chaos factions have almost no range units to deal with them. You can give your lord and heroes snipe very easily with dwarfs and 17 gyrocopters can kill any chaos army that ai build. It just makes the campaign too easy and boring, winning every fight manually with 0 casualties.
I think you misunderstand what makes a good doomsday. Until like turn 80 or so, the only good doomstacks are affordable ones. 19 elf archers is an early game doomstack. It's gotten much less effective as WH3 has gotten on, but it's still quite effective. The other benefit of doomstacking is ease of use. If you can give all your units the same command, it cuts down the micro required to be effective. I think you're also wrong about the availability of races that allow you to build something other than growth or income buildings. For the majority, you need to build your control your growth and your income before thinking about military buildings.
Khorne doesn’t have variety. It has a complete lack of challenge/adversity that facilitates it not really mattering what sort of army composition you choose.
The crapstack meta is just the inverse of WH2. Whereas before doomstacks were meta because Supply Lines were too punishing, now in WH3 they either don’t exist or don’t matter because of runaway player economies. Every new army you create easily pays itself with exorbitant amounts of post-battle loot, and investing in provinces is often a trap due to the rate of income return and how quickly the AI falls off in being a threat to the player.
The solution should be a more granular system that takes into account unit tier and unit count in a given army. Something like the Administration System in Pharaoh, but more in-depth and not including settlements (which should have their own anti-snowball mechanic).
There should be a push and pull in both directions for army composition.
doomstacks are for manual battles that you always want an edge on. what you're talking about is for auto-resolve. both of them are for folks who don't want a challenge. real men "doomstack" tier 1 units with max veterancy...because you never let a single unit die.
I suppose kornes play style is fine if you could care less about settlement and economy building. If you make all units quickly recruitable and cheap you basically turn every faction into Korne or WOC with no incentive to build up your settlements and end the campaign at turn 30.
Doomstacks were meta in Warhammer 2 where the supply limits was insane and you could generally only afford 1 or maxium 2 armies, but in Warhammer 3 it is not as severe.
True, and very sad. Game progression is crap. Half of the roster and 70% of research tree of almost any race is useless cause you can't get it when you need it. So much time designing the units & tech goes wasted.
Would be nice if CA takes a pause from "content" DLCs and reworks game progression.
this
It's a relic from historical games. Back then, I remember that people wanted campaign progression in Medieval 2 to be even slower.
This is probably what I dislike most about these games. Tier 3, 4, and 5 units are so fun to use, but by the time most factions get them you're close to if not already done with your long campaign.
Reason to doomstack:
1. More eco building
2. Focus skill point to buff that unit
3. Focus Research to buff that unit
4. In some specific case, reduce cooldown of global recruitment via more recruit building.
Not every doomstack is Tier 4-5 unit
Crapstacks aren't doomstacks.
Basically a Spearmen + Archer Combo or a Chaos Warrior combo is a crap stack.
A doomstack is a nigh on unstoppable army: Think 19 Black Dragons.
@ Anything unstoppable is doomstack, not necessary tier 4-5.
@@Costin_Gaming A doomstack isn't a level of quality, it's a quantity that can not be dealt with. A spearman+archer combo isn't a doomstack, but five spearmen+archer combos together is a doomstack. The original doomstack is from Civ, where people move ALL their units together.... I can't find an old glossary, but I can see that the term is in common usage on Civfanatics in the year 2000; the year Total War first was published.
@@InternetMameluqThat’s not how the term is used in regards to Total War. A doomstack in Total War is one army of insanely high value
@@somm150 a doomstack is any army that leverages something powerful to the extreme. Grom was able to make a basically unbeatable doomstack with generic goblins. It's not about being expensive it's about being powerful. Often doomstacks are high end units because they're usually better, but that's not always the case
Take like 25 turns to build your thunderbarges doom stack, and then you'll use the army like three times
I usually only doomstack with my legendary lord and keep some cheaper armies around to help out. I like having a hammer to support my frontlines and push back against any stiffer opposition mid game
I personally don't like doomstacks when I play the campaign normally. I always tend to build my armies with a good variety of units, with some change and adaptations depending on the lord who is leading the army. The only time I doomstack, it's when I am over 150 turns, and I got too much money to spend on... It's there that I like to do some dumb stuff, just for the fun. But my fun is worth 1 battle with doomstacks or variety armies are always fun and challenging from the begining to the end of the campaign.
I personally dislike having so many armies. But I also don't doomstack.
Unit caps logically force diversity since one can't spam elite units any more. I think people talking about doomstacks is a bit of hyperbole, because as you say they are usually far from optimal, but elite-stacking is the meta, and unit caps would prevent elite-stacking. Instead of an army of shades, you'd have most of your army be dark elf warriors/spears/darkshards. You could of course just use darkshards now, but shades are a clear upgrade as while darkshards are a great basic unit, shades perform that much better over multiple battles that they're worth it.
Either way, it's too late for CA to apply unit caps broadly, and there's a good mod people can use. Note, I'm talking more about unit caps per army, rather than faction-wide. So you're not restricted to say 1 dragon per army, you're restricted to a certain number of special and rare units, like in tabletop. This means an army may have a couple of bolt throwers, a hydra, some shades, and the rest be darkshards and warriors or something.
Also want to point out that allowing players to build armies of 16 handmaidens + 3 bolt throwers, 19 shades, 19 stegos etc lowers the difficulty of the game, as it is allows the player to min-max against an AI that can't. At least for most factions, obviously when a faction has chaos warriors as a 'standard' troop it makes things a bit easier.
I'm sure caps were initially talked about with Warhammer 1, it'd be interesting to hear why they weren't applied. It is one of the basic rules of the table top game, and it makes sense in terms of balance, but perhaps they thought 19 dragons had such cool factor that it'd help the game sell more?
Hi there, Costin here, and heres another video about how much I hate everything in this game 😂
Hi there, Costin here and I'm here to be paid for pointing out flaws in the reddit logic.
I mostly agree, but I'd point out that unit caps are possibly useful from the opposite perspective if you were to make the cost of high level units LOWER in exchange for making them limited. So a star dragon isn't worth a huge amount of spearmen, it's just that you have one star dragon and infinite spearmen.
That I would agree with: Make it available but limited.
@@Costin_Gaming My favourite mod, Crisis on Campaign, in WHii gave a system that's basically like how it works in Britannia, which is my favourite system. It also gives a reason to have military buildings in provinces rather than just econ.
It'd be nice to see trash stacks are more effective. The supply lines, lord costs, recruitment costs etc all disproportionately hurt factions that should be fielding large hordes of low tier units, such as skaven, greenskins, and undead factions.
I sometimes wonder if giving more factions I kind of recruitment pool style system like the Warriors of Chaos have. So like a basic military building gives like 6 max spearmen in your local pool and you replenish like 1 every 2-3 turns. That way you might have a reason to not use 1 low tier unit (Unless your willing to wait ages or have multiple military builds of them), but then you might just end up with the nurgle problem of "I can't recruit shit".
TW3 is kinda a weird game. It feels like the more you learn and improve at the game, the less fun it gets because you learn how broken/undercooked and abusable a lot of the systems in the game really are.
Medieval Total War 2 system is the best
@@nomooonReal
I’d like a system that had army capacity, different units types took up more or less capacity depending, having chaff units take up less capacity, while stronger units took up more. Then you have a system that makes trash units a little less trash, and doom stacks aren’t as cheesy or broken.
There's much to be said about the feeling of power when you have a doomstack. Puts a smile on my face every time.
Probably not the most cost efficient all things considered, but loading into a battle and seeing your 17 steam tanks or Rot Knights feels amazing
I see your videos in my recommended a lot - I have to say, I wish you were more concise. This video could have been 7 minutes without repetition which I'm far more likely to watch than 20 minutes.
Imo whether to doomstack depends on your difficulty and the factions you are fighting and your endgame settings. Game 3 factions and factions that got game 3 expansions tend to be much scarier than earlier warhammer 2 factions. If I'm fighting high elves, I can slip by with some tier 2-3 armies. If I'm fighting Khorne or Ogres, I'm bringing the big boys.
Some factions are crippled by their mechanics or rosters into having terrible armies under AI control. This used to be a problem with skaven where the AI would mass stacks of skavenslaves. This has been fixed and Skaven armies can be real mean, but now it's a problem with Chaos Dwarfs. I'd not unusual even past turn 70 to run into Chaos Dwarf AI armies that are 14-19 units of goblin/orc laborers. No doomstack needed there.
I personally always play with Ultimate Endgame and all crises enabled at 200%, so I'm working toward something. The fun of it is to make optimized armies that can solo 4 endgame crisis armies at a time with little to no losses. Even without endgame crises, the changes made earlier this year that let the legendary AI raise twice as many armies does tend toward doomstacking, so I can make an army that can regularly take on 2-4 stacks at a time and win easily. It's more efficient to send 1 stack of Ice Guard/Groms at Astragoth that can solo all 8 of his armies than it is to send 3-4 crapstacks of Kossars that need to creep around each other and choke points and waste time ambush baiting to win.
As a final point, certain army comps can be useful because they are weak in autoresolve. This will draw the AI into attacking you in engagements it cannot possibly win manually, because it thinks it can win automatically. The quintessential example of this is Gelt's wizard stack, which is literally invincible and probably the most powerful army that can be raised by any faction in campaign, but is terrible in autoresolve and will get a Crushing Defeat even against garrisons with 8 units. This means the AI is much more likely to attack you instead of running away, so you don't have to spend time chasing down armies and ambush baiting to get them to face you.
The cowardly AI that won't fight battles and only wants to attack unwalled settlements is Warhammer 3's biggest problem imo and this sort of army can help circumvent this. Other units that tend to autoresolve poorly are cavalry, monstrous infantry, and chariots - armies of these can help draw the AI into taking battles it cannot win.
Sure doomstacks are fun but they are pricey and you have to go beyond mid game to get them
I cannot attest to other races or even the other factions but for nakai specifically stegadon doomstacks are probably the way to go. at least I am pretty sure there was not a more efficient way to use the resources there.
The recruits heros at max rank stack and the pompous hero stack as well as my dreadsaurian stack those were inefficient but the stegadon stack is in my opinion the best way to run that from the midgame onwards. Granted when you have two of those the game could reasonably called over so there's that
Depends what u define as a doomstack, does it only take stacks of 1 unittyp into account or all armies that can fight multiple enemy armies in a single turn? Because I´d argue that basic cyrocopters which 1 or 2 grudge settler variants can make a decent doomstack which counters ur argument that doomstacks have to be expensive and unprectical, especially before they were nerfed.
I think the big problem with the argument u make against doomstacks is that u don´t define what u consider a doomstack, when ur definition is an army of 1 hightier unittyp like dragons I´d agree that u don´t need that.
When ur definition is more according to what I understand as a doomstack which is an army that can fight multiple armies at the same time or in quick succesion then I´d disagree. Since some of these armies can be highly efficient.
Yea, I came here to say this. Lots of the comments and points in the video miss this. There's just a big hate on doomstacks in this community, even though you can make doomstacks fast and efficient.
I rarely play any campaign further than 70 turns anyway. In my all warhammer 1-2-3 campaigns I believe I always dropped a campaign just around tier 5 becomes available. Those units just doesn't excite me, and how you play tactically just doesn't change from flamespyre to arcane phoenix, or silverin guard to phoenix guard, or archers to sisters. You just do the thing you did for the last 60 turns, just your units are better.
That is why warriors of chaos army build up by experience is the most fun I had for some time, you actually try not to lose the army, and have a reason to fight manually.
The funniest shit about this "rant" is that, in Warhammer 1, Doomstacking wasn't even what you were supposed to aim for ASAP : it was rushing agents with "Assassinating" skills. This shit was so overpowered, it actually was what eventually triggered CA to add the pickable trait "Immortality" at level 20 in Warhammer 2 and make it automatically granted at lvl 20 in Warhammer 3 (all while immunising Lords from agents' caused permadeath since Warhammer 2.)
Point i'm trying to make is that, still to this day, the most powerful units are the agents on the campaign map : assault units, assault garrison, wound and assassinate can drastically cripple the ennemy war effort with minimum investment, to the point where even lower tiers armies can take on armies/garrisons what would be otherwise impossible to defeat.
Granted, there's an undeniable risk of backfire in the attempt. But when you are given the option _"push the button and have a chance at deleting between 10% up to 35% of the ennemy war potential for a modest fee",_ it turns out that a lot of us are ready to pay.
You're spot on, sadly. By the time you actually need a doomstack the campaign has been over for a long time.
Now I'm gonna try the court mod, looked fun.😊
There's another big thing that makes getting a doomstack absolutely worthless for Arbaal. As the game goes on, your missions adapt to your main army's strength. If you have a doomstack of 18 wrathmongers and the legendary hero Skarr Bloodwrath in it, you aren't going to get any more missions to defeat legendary lords at all, but instead the game is spawning random armies of randomly selected faction types (Orks, Dwarfs, Empire, Elves) and scatters them mostly randomly around the world. Meaning that if you make the mistake of getting Zharr-Naggrund extremely early and get an early doomstack to raze the world in Khorne's name, you lose the one thing that makes Arbaal so fun to play, to be able teleport behind Grimgor or Nakai, take their trait and potentially snack one of a nearby lord (like Kholek or Miao Ying) before moving on to a new target. Now the game sends you to either the Empire or some end of the bloody universe location to beat someone up who doesn't even give you a nice trait as parting gift. Without a doomstack, you at least get to pick and choose whom to fight and what traits to gather, with said doomstack, well good luck having those rogue armies spawn anywhere useful.
That tens to happen I find regardless of that. I never built a 18 Wrathmongers stack.
True, but getting a doomstack early on just makes that point come way faster and put a stop to the defeat trait hunt before it can even begin. Without the doomstack you get a few pages before you empty the pool of viable challenges, with the doomstack the pool turns into a puddle and dries up almost immediately. So you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you care to get the scrumptious traits.
Tbh, when I want to have fun optimizing, I play Factorio, not TWW3. Optimizing in 3 just feels awful. Meme-ing is reasonably fun when the bugs don't kill my enjoyment, I do love Ikit's ratling gun+Poison mortar+Jezzail 'doomstack.' Very high dakka, satisfies the "pewpewpew!" and I get to focus on the meme rather than trying to actually play optimally.
Yeah, the funniest factions are those which have the best variety or funniest units to use early game.
Brettonia is my favorite faction and I don't use hippogryph doomstacks because its not fun, I'd rather have a diverse army with beefed up peasants. However, sometimes the AI throws at you top quality armies that seem to require doomstack to win against, AI Chaos tend to throw randomly that at you.
*proceeds to 2nd turn doom stack squigs as Gorbad with erd mentality and take over the whole region in another 5-6 turns* yes doom stacking is bad but it’s so dangerous when you have it set upbright
Not sure I'd call spamming tier 1 units that can be recruited from any settlement a doomstack.
Doomstacks is incredibly viable with Helman Ghorst zombie spam
Optimal is a matter of opinion. If you rush around too quickly you draw more aggro from nearby factions. Sometimes the factions that should be at war don't have time to start it because you decided to go in and aggro them both.
If you didn't use the auto resolve mod, you might want to bring better composition to those tough situations.
I use AR to save myself time, not to avoid battles because I can't win them.
Frankly the way I see it the real question in a campaign isn't about winning battles. It's about minimizing casualties in them. Which is precisely why I use AR mods: I really hate useless shitty battles that I will win with 10-20 casualties but that would cost me hundreds in default AR.
That's why I despise sieges. Oh you can win them with few casualties but doing so is absolutely shit to play. Legend did a play as Belegar taking Skavenblight not too long ago. It was the best, most genuinely smart strat.
It was also him wasting over 1 hour of his life on utterly useless crap siege gameplay for a campaign purpose he knew he couldn't lose.
Doomstacks happen organically in the mid to late game... I don't think anyone sacrifices economy to rush doomstacks. You have a well thought out and delivered argument but it just doesn't ring true (especially using high elves as an example). A High Elf doomstack of Lothern Sea Guard with 4 or 5 heroes providing the Honed trait is the best overall army a generic HE lord can field. High Elves are incredibly rich so even if the player wanted to create a star dragon doomstack, arguing that it's inefficient is very hollow. With essentially free 1 turn buildings with 4 administrator lords in the province High Elves are free to doomstack and can do it very early due to how fast they can build. With the ability to save lords and heroes with desired traits the game actually seems geared toward creating doomstacks.
I'll take your Star Dragon doomstack and riase 2-4 Silverin Guard and Elven archers with that money depending on supply lines I"m dealing with.
Mid and Late game are pointless grinds anyway.
@@Costin_Gaming If you aren't playing past mid game then maybe the video needs that context, unless you are engagement farming, because it's a pretty inflammatory title.
No doomstacking? How else would I play Nakai?
I don't doomstack, but the AI can and does. Fighting armies with little to no unit variety sucks ass, not to mention being extremely immersion-breaking. That's why I use a mod to limit AI army compositions, which is not the same as unit caps.
Imagine saying sisters of avelorn are not worth recruiting lol. Quick recruiting is a concern, but the ai is really passive, you have time.
Imagine realizing that they aren't needed and are not cost effective.
@@Costin_Gamingonegeneric archers are boring, two you don't need 7 stacks of garbage when one decent army will do. Supply lines add up.
Sorry but you dont even define a doomstack. There's a difference between a Thunderbarge or Mammoth doomstack that can be made once your economy is at peak and you basically won the campaign if you are able to afford that, and a doomstack of Sisters of Avelorn that can be made around turn 40, or an Ice Guard doomstack which can be made between T40-50 and in Katarin's army it's cheaper than a Kossack spam. People who tend to hate on doomstacks miss this point. There are so many instances where doomstacks are waaaay more efficient than any conventional army who needs 3-4 building slots to get created, compared to a doomstack, or even crapstack which needs just one, maybe 2 buildings. This contradicts what you say at the start of the video.
The game is at the state where you can play with both themed armies and same unit spams. An invisible Steam Stank or Thunderbarge doomstack is not comparable to an early game, high efficient and cost effective doomstack. There's times where themed armies are shooting yourself on the foot. Especially for noob players who can't handle the variety.
Remember dwarf meta play? 17 crossbows and 2 grudgethrowers. Every single army.
Thats why you need caps. It adds choice. Choice is good.
It gives you reason to use every unit.
Yeah I do, I loathed it. It got fixed by not adding caps and giving dwarfs better recruitment.
Although that army would actually make a hard comeback under something like SFO caps or other mods.
I am very much in favor of variety. I am not in favor of outdated solutions.
Evolve, adapt, improve. I'll say this as bluntly as I can: I despise the hell out of a lot of mods in Total War for their limitations.
Including things like Third Age Total War. Superb mod, lots of work, but the garrison script in it can go to hell.
@Costin_Gaming it works really well in med 2. For me med2 looks like more advanced and deep game.
Without caps if unit is 0,00001% less cost effective then other there is no reason to ever use it
I think that speaks more about Medieval 2's inherent superiority in terms of recruitment and building systems.
@@Costin_Gaming yes. They have tomb kings unit cap system. I am talking about that. And you have mercs. It forces you to use every single available unit.
Oh, I loved the grudge crossbow doomstacks. Throw in a couple of organs in the lategame and you don't have to worry about anything. Good times.
requesting a crapstack/generics video for some factions
They're just ... fun.
IDK how you an play this game focusing on power/efficiency only all the time lol. This game is all about fun ... even on L/VH no campaigns is ''challenging'' anymore. You get like 1 or 2 fights that are challenging max per campaign ... and then it's business as usual.
Nothing beats steamrolling 6 full stacks with a doomstack of 19 K'dai destroyers. Of course it's not efficient, campaign is already won for a long time y then ... it's just fun.
Well I don't play on 100% efficiency all the time myself: When playing Dwarfs I dislike making Gyrocopters ) stacks for instance and much prefer a balance army of artillery, irondrakes, thunderers and some flying units ( I prefer Gyrobombers ).
The great irony of that I played a major role in popularizing the Gyrostacks: By sending Legend of Total War a Gyro doomstack and he in turn embracing that style that a lot of people coped then.
Crap stacking all day, 'erry day
Doomstacks are useless cause CA and their blind supporters hate fun builds. They have successfully watered down every single army composition to be as boring , mind numbingly dumb as possible. Make some front liners to hold the line, kill with archers and artillery . make cavalry to harass their ranged. EVERY SINGLE LORD , EVERY SINGLE CAMPAIGN.
And the stupid sheeps call it "variety" .
-Well you are making something interesting there? Trying something different from this ONE formula?
Too bad!!! we have put 30 more constraints and 50 more nerfs till you regress back into our very varied much innovative, mind numbingly stupid ass infantry + archer + cavalry army.
-OH ! You think that's boring after first 100 hours?
Well too bad ! Cause that's the only thing you are gonna make for next 2000 hours. Now give us money for next dlc where you get 3 more lords who do exact same shit.
WHAT KIND OF LUNATIC PLAY A GAME TO BE EFFICIENT???? For real, this is serious question. What kind of tism do you need so that you PLAY game for Efficiency? If you want resource management type Totalwar is not for that, and if you want realistic military battle simulation there are soo many other games that are just better and more balanced than warhammer. However, What totalwar warhammer offers is crazy magic, giant beasts and dragons, rats with machine guns, unending army of the dead, or a row of giant polar bear. I get what you are saying, yes it is very inefficient to have a doom stack. but with that logic it is inefficient to play Warhammer in the first place. you could be making money, socializing with your friends or learning new skills. But hey, i dont have any tism to understand you guys, I just thought people play this game for fun
Sure.
But this video was in response to a sentiment expressed that making a dragon doomstack was a bad thing.
I'm like: Who gives a shit.
The game encourages the player to doomstack, if you can merely spam 20 units and win any battle.
My biggest problem with this is that the player then loses variety, I'd be happy if unit caps were added in, maybe where if you exceed them things get pricey. This then makes sense as it is how real economies work, this also have options to add difficulty too.
What Doomstacks are effective?
I hear this stuff, what doomstack is cheap, available early on, easy to recruit exactly and worth it vs spamming 4 Tier 1-3 armies?
Chaos warriors, chosen etc. High defence and melee stats make ar think you win almost every encounter. With Tzeentch you can get them before fighting Axiotl (your only real enemy). Also Mutalith Vortex beasts as the Changeling (By turn 30 you can recruit them, while having enough money to sustain them)
@@Costin_Gaming As others have said, some factions have such OP economies/mechanics that you can just spam the top tier units very quickly. Lizards are a little tight on money, but once you can afford multiple stacks of stegladons it gets easy-mode, although the odd army causes problems.
The trend seems to be making wh3 easier and faster to play, its a shame as the real fun for me is winning those oddball battles and having events be impactful, the more they buff factions the less I care about magic items etc.
If anything SFO has led the way, Unit caps should be tied to recruitment buildings for anything that is not mainline or "entry tier"
SFO is rubbish on this like a lot of other things: Garrisons, slow pace etc.
I'm not interested in the end turn button simulator.
@@Costin_Gaming SFO to me offers some great variety, along with balanced high powered factions. Although some abilities it offers end up dominating the game.
why you disdain lizards so much?
you made 45 videos on how kislev needs reworks, and 0 on l8zards. who need a rework since game 2
I've made several videos on them. Latest 2 months ago.
Frankly the interest just isn't there.
@@Costin_Gaming I would say the interest is there, but CA are concentrating 1st on new races and 2nd on empire/dwarves, its a pity as what other factions generally need is not another big elite monster but low level troops and more in game storyline to add variety.
Great points, thanks for the video Brother! =)
The TW community is never short on bad ideas and nonsense hot takes unfortunately…unit caps being one of them. We have armies that impose arbitrary limits on units and those armies are honestly frustrating entirely because of those limits on their armies. Beastmen, Chorfs, and Tomb Kings all have strict limits on units….and that leads to the early games for all 3 of those races being largely unpopular, especially in the case of Tomb Kings. However they are also offset by the fact that in TK and BM, they have zero upkeep, and in the case of CD, their units are highly scaled up in power to offset the increased cost and effort. Trying to just impose a cap on all factions in order to force “unit variation” would actually limit unit variation as you said…most of my TK plays have depended highly on the Anubis warriors(can’t spell their name) entirely because you can quickly amass a decent number of them and they hold their own in battle. By the time you get 4-5 of each larger construct…campaign is over, which is frustrating. You just end up spamming armies of the crap units surrounding 1-2 armies of decadent units.
The myth about Doom stacking in warhammer 3 is just that…a myth. In warhammer 2 you almost had to do it because of the insane supply lines costs but in warhammer 3 you don’t have that. Literally the most efficient armies that I field in the game are crap stacks of decent yet cheap units on a lord that decreases upkeep…perfect example is as high Elves where you honestly can pain the map with just basic spears and arrows armies…in fact I did it once just to prove a point. No heros, nothing but basic spearman and archers lead by a lord…and honestly after I got past turn 12 I had no issues at all. Doom stacking often is just done out of morbid curiosity about how dominant an entire army of a very powerful yet expensive unit can be. We all have made a doomstack for no other reason than to be overkill against any and all enemies. But in no way is it a smart or strategic choice for a army makeup. Yes you make one army that nobody can fuck with…but that army costs as much as 3-4 armies to operate. In almost every scenario, having 3-4 decent armies is way better than having one dominant one. Especially when you often find yourself at war from numerous different fronts at the same time.
Honestly people from Warhammer 2 need to understand the game changed a lot since then. I loved Beastmen for Warhammer 2 after rework but they are misery to play in 3.
@ in 3, both TK and BM need a little bit of attention to their unit cap and army cap situations. As both the strategy is to grudge through the early game and maybe by mid game you finally start feeling like an empire. I still enjoy both races, but I enjoy them far less than I did in 2
BM are fun for a simple campaign that doesn’t require any settlement building or economy management. But my entire problem with them is how expensive the unit cap upgrades become only after a few clicks. Soon I am looking at the situation where one more Cygore in my army pool costs more than an additional army costs…which makes no damn sense. Not sure what the perfect solution is but I have always felt that each unit cap button should either give you more bang for the buck, or should have a flat rate for each that doesn’t increase. Just 500 for a Minotaur, 200 for a Gor or whatever. After building a few powerful armies, it’s insanely expensive to build another one…so what we all do is instead of making armies better, we just pay the 1500 every turn to pop out another army of ungol spears. By the end of a BM campaign I am beyond tired of playing with basic spear infantry swarms.
As TK…honestly they just need their buildings earlier. The majority of their unit cap buildings should be available a tier earlier and should grant access to more than just 1 unit. Why can Greenskins get black orcs at tier 3 and one faction get Rogue Idols at tier 3, but I have nothing that can really fight them until tier 5? And don’t even get me started on the 15 turns of hell that is the TK early game as everyone but Arkan.