CA should borrow a concept I've seen in Paradox games like Stellaris where the AI bonuses gradually build up to the mid game. That was a change they made also because the playerbase said the same thing about AI difficulty. Now it's a setting you can toggle at game start in Stellaris.
The two mods that have kept my campaigns fresh is the Custom Starting Units mod and the Change Start Locations mod. You can definately abuse these like cheats if your greedy but it just ruins your campaign, if used with some care, can really shake up some of the legendary lords campaigns if not all.
The fundamental issue in Warhammer 3 is the cowardly AI that refuses to fight battles against the player. A campaign full of 300 factions that do everything they can to avoid your armies and march past them to sack unwalled settlements is not fun. Nothing takes me out of the game faster than Archaon the Everchosen, champion of chaos undivided, marching away from my level 20 ice witch like a babby to raze a level 1 minor settlement I captured two turns before.
Admittedly I do this to the AI all the time. It's a perfectly sensible strategy, especially if you can't face the enemy army head-on. Having buildings that reduce campaign movement speed of armies in a region would help deal with this, though.
The Fundamental Campaign Problem is the same from Rome 2. You cant split your army. And thats a huge problem. In older TW if you see shitty 5 unit army or garrison then you can dedicate 5 troops to deal with it. And you want to kill that small shitty army with even smaller army. Thats how you get small but fun and challenging battle. In rome 2 and after you are forced to take entire 20 stack and fight those shitty battles with autoresolve and taking damage or manualy wasting your time. Thats why since Rome 2 we have all this constant autoresolve problems. Before that no one cared about autoresolve, you played most battles manualy.
I /would/ say "For the love of all things holy, Make a better autoresolve" but, the end of the game's life cycle is nearing. It is so very late in the game to finally be correcting a problem that has existed for all these years. It is amazing that they have kept this absurdly broken autoresolve for as long as they have, especially after it was revealed that ONLY armor and leadership do a dam thing.
@@Costin_GamingWhat if after all DLCs CA left some people to improve small things as battles, sieges, climate, even making resources something meanigfull instead of increasing some number so AI want to trade etc etc. Warhammer 3 has 100 lords and will be more. There will be people playing it after new titles. Why not improving things constantly to use fun and valid features in next titles.
I am not quite sure what to make of this video. Your point was to show how inverted difficulty is s problem, and I agree with that. The core points you made this video were shitty AI, bad autoresolve and that difficulty needs change. Everything you showed with Katarin was cheese after cheese after cheese, for what, why show this? To show off how you are able to abuse the AI? Most players are not doing this, a point that you proofed in this video is, that trading settlements need a rebalance. One thing i really do not agree with is: "This is the only way we can play to have fun. " Why, I have 1000 hours in WH3 most campaigns i play are on VH and legendary and i never play like this, you dont have to abuse the ai to have fun. Again, I agree with your points, i just dont get what you wanted to show off with the katarin section, if you want to cheese and abuse the AI you will always find a way to do that, no matter what CA changes. But maybe i am just dumb and dont get the point. Thanks for reading, have nice day.
I wanted to show how vast of a difference it makes to push the early game like that vs playing a campaign normally. I care about how the fundamental game mechanics work or don't. Basically I am interested in what makes the game tick. Let me give you the comparison: If you don't do this as Katarin: You end with a far weaker eco, far less supporters, at war with more factions, Kislev as a whole area decimated by Skaven, Greenskins and Chaos and you constantly fighting tooth and nail just to survive.
@Costin_Gaming i guess we just find different things enjoyable in this case. I have no problems with the second scenario you described and do not enjoy hard cheese. But we can agree that difficulty needs change
Hereis the problem, the map is massive. Past say turn 60, how big does an ai faction need to be to challenge the player? Probably 50 + settlements needed. People dont want that, thats the way warhammer 2 was and people generally did not like the slog involved of fighting a faction with 50-70 settlements. Yhere is no making the player base happy on this point. The 2nd thing is that the ai is not aggressive in any way that is really threatening. Factions with high movement range or underway might go pinball around sacking minor settlements, which super annoying, but its not really a threat to you. Ai not aggressively taking territory is the biggest issue, they actual produce plently of armies, but they wont attack unless they can dogpile you with like 4 at once. And yeah i agree autoreslove is a bit to in the player favor. Also its silly that you play the game in a ridiculous way to complain the game is to easy, have you considered just not cheesing?
The problem with the massive AI empires we had in Warhammer 2 I think is we would start a war with a faction, annihilate their standing armies and then in a few turns they'd show up with brand new recruited armies that had zero chance against you as a player. It was not a challenge, it was cheap shit. I think the AI should consolidate better: Like actually build an empire, have goals to achieve, armies it recruits in a good way and then difficulty cheats that scale with time.
@Costin_Gaming that's very vague, how does having goals make the ai stronger? What does it mean to consolidate? They already focus thier armies on one front usually, they do develop their territory. like I hear your complaints(and agree with many of them) but your suggestions don't really seem to have much to them...
Well right now the AI feels it's doing things randomly, sure it will go after certain foes but how they do it is all over the place, besides I think it's driven by aversion and strength rankings in the decision making as opposed to an actual plan besides a few key regions at the start of a campaign. Consolidate would also mean things like confederations, alliances, building provinces in a certain way. Like for instance Arbaal would be a far more dangerous foe if he build his main settlement building as mortal and started churning out massive swarms of Chosen, Wrathmongers, Chaos Knights and Minotaurs all the time: He CAN do it, he doesn't always.
If the AI had "campaign objectives" like the player it would really make things interesting. It might also complicate the AI on CAs front, but imagine if it was successful
This is wild, as new player, I'm out here losing "close victory" battles left and right. And this whole diplomacy thing you're doing, just blowing my mind. I barely interact with diplomacy because it feels like "oh give up my settlement? I'm screwed, I NEED all my settlements or the AI is going to out-earn me in economy". I'm out here in turn 200+ on a Normal Difficulty game >_
Regarding the sieges: I just played a siege as a defender (Dwarf) against chaos. I did the EXACTLY thing asyou in the video, made sure that the towers word and shooting at the most bad boys. Guess what happened? their general rushed through the door, already heavily damaged, but still able to do his, job. so he rushed through the check points ON A HOURSE while my dwarfs hada hard time following him. So while they where barely down the walls he had conquered 2 check points and with that all the defense constructions. It felt like chasing someone in a Ferrari, while I drive a bicycle! The Auto resolve would be a pyrrhic victory. Which is what I got because while chasing the leader made some of his troops damaging some of my unist. So even if the AI did not use the blind spot, it acted pretty smart for using a rather stupid stratehy to start the siege.
1200 hours across WHI to III in. And you're right. First 20 turns is rough and you often want to NOT do what they ask. For example, Skrolk and Settra. You're given a weak battle and enemy to deal with first. Meanwhile, an AI powerful lord, whose generating way better armies than you is gearing up. For Skrolk, you need to go after Gor-Rok as fast as possible and ignore your pre-assigned enemy. For Settra, the sooner you go after Manfred the better. Legend calls them 'player traps'. For settlements and fortresses, I find them easy because I siege them. I use siege equipment, I blast walls and enemies. And if I can't easily win? No worries, withdraw and you're still sieging them and they are still damaged for likely no losses to you. Siege battles are boring slogs. Knock out a tower or two. Blast walls with ranged units on it. Balst other stuff and use your archers. Win through army loss. Back to your main point. If you do survive the first 20 turns the game gets easier and easier. The only thing to kinda worry about is end game crisis. But, it's not Stellaris, so you'll do fine.
Think they do. I know for certain they watched SOME of them as in I was told about it. Dunno how much they listen, all I can say is post-ToD and OoD Dwarfs, Ogres, Empire, Khorne are exactly what I wanted. They addressed so many of my complaints I might as well have just sent them a spreadsheet!
I also think casualty replenishment is too strong in this game. Often one army gets wiped out while the other one is almost back to full the next turn. It would be better without replenishment and so units actually need to be recruited and like back in rome u endes up merging two half depleted troops into a full one.
I still merge units in an army together and recruit new ones just to skip replenishment because it would take longer if you don't skill into any replenishment. Yes, you lose experience on those units, but when you play something like Skaven, you absolutely can't care less. Happy New Year, btw
Well, after playing the game for a bit, I think what'd be great to have is "midgame scenarios". Like endgame ones, but instead of being a victory condition they'd be a general nuisance appearing on map. Those events could both make maps more unique and interesting and give player bigger challenge.
I use a mod to decrease army movement. Makes the whole game better, you won't regret it. Now you can't take 2 provinces in your first 10 turns, you actually have time to strategize and make use of game mechanics etc, the whole map is bigger while simultaneously being a more dangerous place to travel, you don't feel like any turn where you aren't fighting or recruiting is wasted
Would love to see you talking about difficulty in battles. Take the Dwarfs, for example. There isn't an army in this game that can fight the Dwarfs head-on without cheesing. CA decided that Trollhammer Irondrakes need 200 range and the ability to delete large units in 2 volleys, so you pretty much have to cheese every fight against late-game Dwarf stacks. Basically, CA keeps promoting this game showing cinematic views of two armies clashing, but in reality what you get is 20 minutes of artillery dodging, wasting the AI's ammo, before you can engage. If you don't do this, you lose.
@@Selakah that's not true, dwarves are an easy faction to deal with, even for melee factions. They are slow, easy to flank, low mass so easy to run over. Get their ranged units in melee and they are done.
"no other faction can take the dwarfs head on" I mean, assaulting a fortified position from the front is generally not advised. Go around and hit the wall of metal and beard hair in the flank. Have something engage their front line (so it isn't bracing anymore) before punching higher mass units through.
Power creep is a game killer. You ever get to the feedback loop where you're just going around auto-resolving battles because you're so powerful you can't lose?
Can't confirm that. I play on normal. I played a couple fo TW games, so I know what the game is about, I might do mistakes in regards how I play the faction. But I normaly survive the first 20 rounds with no problems what so ever. My problems come with about round 100+ Or there is a faction that runs over me because of mass or more advanced tech. Or different faction team up on me. If I stay rather small they declare war because I'm weak, if I expand my empire they declacere war because I'm a threat. I keep losing Vialles and downs, keep losing battle no matter if I paly them myself or let them Auto resolve. So in other words I have the complete opposite experience, the longer I play the same campaign the more difficulty it gets!
honestly there just two problems : AI is braindead and sieges are one of the worst things in wh3 because of the following : they make siege maps as if warhammer is the same as historical games, but aside from butt ladders and magic spam, the problem is braindead AI that doesnt know how to play the sieges. Before reworking sieges, CA has to build a new AI that knows how to fight battles. Im not expecting this to happen, but i also dont want mods to make my life miserable, so i just focus on having fun knowing every campaign i start is basically won already.
This reminds me of a Very Hard campaign i had with Imrik on Warhammer 2 and the sheer horror of the grind fest that it was : between having to rush Snikch on the East, least i get obliterated by turn 20 or something, and having to deal with the minor serpent Dwarves behind the mountain up north, that keeps jumping back and forth, only to then have to face fucking Grimgor and Queek coming from the west, with basically no access to trade and no room for expansion (not even with the four East islands)... it was a nightmare. Complete and utter Nightmare. Do you know how long it took me before i could finally get the settlement of that minor serpent dwarven faction up north, behind that damn mountain ? Turn 110. Everyone jumps around except Imrik. And it was at a time where you didn't have the option to confederate Caledor and GTFO back to Ulthuan. You were factually stuck. That shit was just brutal. I never grinded so hard in my life, in a game.
Ladders tank the AI's little chance it has at siege. If CA would return to forcing the AI to path to gates and make gaps in the wall it succeeds or dies spectacularly which is the best two outcomes imo.
I'll agree that difficulty scaling and some design decisions around that aren't great and the ai has issues, but the claim that "other strategy games" get more difficult as the game goes on is bs - a difficult late game is not typical for strategy games at all. For 4x-games like total war, snowballing from a strong early game is kind of the norm, with games trying to introduce mechanics to curtail the snowballing and/or create late game challenges - such as end game crisis or some form of taxes on large empires, both of which to exist in tw:warhammer, though neither is done particularly well. And you get similar issues in city builders, business simulation games, and if we're talking about a single map, also for your typical RTS - it's kind of difficult to balance strategy games in a way that consistently creates challenging late games while keeping the early game consequential.
More interesting starting stacks and challenges would be a good start. Some campaigns got em, a lot stripped bare rn. I miss the World War that always happened due to realm divide once Chaos was defeated in TW2, I haven't seen that happen much anymore.
Got to disagree with this, playing as Mazdamundi I've moved into southern Lustria around turn 20 to meet a khorne faction that already owns it. Every army they have is super elite and their economy appears to be a little money but 0 upkeep, that's infinite. WH3 is moving into the retard direction with the game, newer factions seem to have easy-mode economies that provide okay money, but then key resources make upkeep so low they can support loads of armies. And sieges are a mess, every map is cramped and I have difficulty deploying troops effectively. Walls and gates are super easy to destroy with artillery. The enemy ignores the walls and pulls ladders out of the asses and goes over the walls - yeah its super easy to fight someone on the walls while on a ladder apparently... Then the building defences are a weird selection, one idiotic thing is a hole in the wall is left as a gaping hole for several turns.
The amount of cheese needed to win is just sad. Doesnt matter how much skill you have unless you can cheese with some factions, i sincerely hope they remove this crap
Yeah iam a max difficulty Medieval 2 Player and never used any cheese. On VH/VH in WH3 i can still play like that, at least with the campaigns i played. But Legendary is such a slog playing normal.
I think I agree with your basic point, but you've spent the last 15 minutes of the video talking about one very specific Katarin cheese and I don't understand what it has to do with anything else you're trying to say.
@@Costin_Gaming I'm not sure it's such a great example. Sure, if you (meaning "someone") spend hours and hours with save-scumming and console commands to work out the pattern and best strategies and tricks and cheese, you can then start that campaign again and win it really easily... but... you spent hours and hours working out how to do that. That's not how most people play the game, and for those that do... why do it, if it's not what you find fun, and how on earth would CA prevent it anyway? Again, I do think your basic point is right! I do think it's a problem that almost the entire challenge of any campaign is the first 10 turns, and I do think it's a MASSIVE problem that the only way the devs know to make the game "harder" is to give the AI stat cheats (and yeah, autoresolve and sieges are broken). Agree with all of that! So I think you're onto something and have a fundamentally fair point... I just don't think spending half the video talking about how to cheese Katarin supports that argument at all. It's irrelevant.
Yeah u know, thats how it should be. Challangeing at First and afterwards you can live the Power Fantasy of an Warhammer Universe Game. After your short or long Campaign Victory (both arnt really long, most are doable in 4-8h Game Time) i dont wanna go and need to Manually Cheese Battle My Way through every single Battle on Legendary just to get a "New Challange" or such Crap. I already have proven that i can Beat way better Armys than Myself and Stacks of Enemys with my T1 Meele Bretonian Peasant Army, now i wanna reap the Benefits and demolish all who are Foolish enought to still stand in my Way. And even that still gets spiced up to a degree by Certain AI Factions and Enemy Lords because of the Player Bias. You can go to War as Dark Elfs with Cathay, and they will send you Armys to Fight you. And after a Certain Size of you, they dont only Send you 1 or 2 Armys, they send you 3,4,5 Full Stacks, including Stacked Armys. Certain Legendary Lords like Skarbrand (if he survives) alone get so Powerfull that you most other Factions cant compete with him, without the Player beeing Tactical or Cheesy. And its Fine that way, because it doesnt happen every Single Turn it simply happens every Few Turns to "break" and "refresh" the Power Fantasy. The Only Argument which should be Made as Critic is how Dumb the AI in General Works. They need to Improve their AI by a lot. The AI needs to Work with more Different Tactics, on the Map and Battlefield. It needs to do more Smart Decisions, more smart Recruitmens and so on and on and on, instead of beeing just Strong because it Cheats. Oh also, they should never ever Balance the Diffiuclty by the Messarument of Cheese a Player can use. If you use to Cheese, like the TW2 High Elf Hero Trait Stack to Make Millions of Money, than thats a Decision you made by yourself, to make your game way easiert. But Balancing for such Thing is Impossible, because if you Balance around that, you force People to use that specific Tactic, which is boring. Go around and Play the Game as Intendet, Mixed Army, no Full Doom Stack, no Full T5 Only Army, no 1 Unkillable Lord Sword of Khane Shenaningan, and no Cheese Tactics which simply break the AI (As stated the AI is Crap and needs a lot of Work and Improvments). If you do that you get a Halway Decent Challange with most Factions.
The game is easy IF you do this. If you play on legendary and don't do this to some degree you end up facing 6 different enemies, and Throt and Azhag for instance bring 4 armies each.
@Costin_Gaming I've never done any of this stuff. Didn't even know you could pull this kind of thing off. But I've never had any problems starting my campaigns (except with bretonnia in wh2). It is true that I've never played a single Kislev campaign apart from the intro one, so that might be different. To be fair, I'm not avert to cheesing. But I find the campaign cheeses too boring and prefer to cheese the battles to some extent.
I have 7000-ish hours according to steam almost none of it unmodded...but I play alot of online, and my solo play like I said is heavily modded. My primary issue with the basic game use to be... the more you move the difficulty up, the more mechanics seemed to be removed. On the flip side the lower the difficulty and there was no challenge. I have no idea if that is still the case....so I have almost zero background to even comment on videos like this... but...I will say.....there are mods to help with all this.
Can you do a campaign playthrough? You are always legendary and at turn 50 have half the damn map lol. I try legendary every time and die by turn 10. T.T I just want to be better but I don't understand. I can beat hard campaign, very hard is more difficult but I can beat it. Legendary I dont have a chance.
auto resolve is indeed crapp. But the way you, and notable, if not all legendary players play , meaing a corner camping, cheesing and abusing every aspect of a game is because : 1) AI is such crapp and balance between factions and a unit types is so huge, that in many cases a player do not have any other chance to win a battle, But then it comes to 2) 2) ego, and a nonsenses you, and few others lately talk about. you could afford, in more advanced stage of a game, to lose a battle more than few times over and still run fine , even on legendary, playing a battle "intended" or "normal " way using nonbraindead tactics . But will you ? Then say, hell that was a piece of a AI stack there. Ofc not. Either you bring more to defeat that or, in your case and in a case of legendary, where having more simply don't exist, cheese it through, again and again. Now. Do i wish to improve their AI? Sure i want. That doesn't have anything comon with first battle, or any started battle in a game. Perhaps " vs first legendary lord" encounter may have impact or war. This entire game is based on terrible mechanics - like whole force march concept ( without any restrictions like being unable to force march after battle of any kind), retreat from battle without loosing any movement on next turn, even crossing river. Siege battles - where overcheated AI encamp multiple stacks feeling safe, then stack of single lord besiege a city while picking rest of armies with main ( what fucking ridiculousnes) . Need of hurry up and no time of siege equipment building because, again, AI will sit always with stacks at least 3:1 vs mine earlier in a game. And, ofcourse, a whole autoresolve- where since some point AI becomes coward and very rarely will fight you on fair terms(field battle ) and rather play cat and mouse game untill or if they are capable of getting together those 3:1 stacks - all this because of stupid calculator and to heavy impact of lords level + unit rank. To be completely honest, i don't know what they have specificaly done since WH2, but WH3 simply don't play the same. Being it for too crowded map, or absolut dull nerf of minor factions which now lose to single lord and lost even that warming up status from WH2... I don't know.. There are so many races and factions in a game right now trashed from special recruitment rules that the game still feels emptier then it should be. Beastmen are non existent, despite a fact that in the end of WH2 cycle they have managed to make them run somehow ( morghur did it multiple times in my games with solid late game stacks ). Changeling is non existent - and even can not be confederated which is a huge let down playing Khairos. WoC are over cheated in AR, and it still don't help them much against running order tide ( if its running ) because they replacing loses with T0-1 chaff. Chorfs are capable playing with orc slaves until the late game- because of rules - not to mention that them, Tomb kings and perhaps others heavily dependant of rich recruitmen infrastructure still can't build up their cities- despite CA stated twice already they have looked in to that - TK still fill their major settlements with T3 infrastructure shit. What drives me mad is their absolut lack of any personalised cheat asigment - like dwarves for sure don't deserve same amount of cheats like other races if their autoresolve roflstomp everything arround. Same for Empire. I wouldnerf these 2 heavily, for sure.
my brother in christ have you tried just enjoying your videogame? Should devs fix speedrun glitches in your mind so that the game becomes "enjoyable" There are exploits in every game, please don't let CA see this, this is pointless. Game is fun I have 2500 hours combined lol just siege map that sucks imo
I was sitting there watching Skrag's face in the corner, imagining he was narrating the video, very eloquent for an ogre
Hahah yea
I like that you go from "please help me" at the start to "I have become death, destroyer of worlds" as the game progresses.
CA should borrow a concept I've seen in Paradox games like Stellaris where the AI bonuses gradually build up to the mid game. That was a change they made also because the playerbase said the same thing about AI difficulty. Now it's a setting you can toggle at game start in Stellaris.
You know the game is in a great state when the community is always arguing what does and dosen't count as cheesing 😂
The two mods that have kept my campaigns fresh is the Custom Starting Units mod and the Change Start Locations mod.
You can definately abuse these like cheats if your greedy but it just ruins your campaign, if used with some care, can really shake up some of the legendary lords campaigns if not all.
The fundamental issue in Warhammer 3 is the cowardly AI that refuses to fight battles against the player. A campaign full of 300 factions that do everything they can to avoid your armies and march past them to sack unwalled settlements is not fun. Nothing takes me out of the game faster than Archaon the Everchosen, champion of chaos undivided, marching away from my level 20 ice witch like a babby to raze a level 1 minor settlement I captured two turns before.
That's not my experience.
Admittedly I do this to the AI all the time. It's a perfectly sensible strategy, especially if you can't face the enemy army head-on. Having buildings that reduce campaign movement speed of armies in a region would help deal with this, though.
The Fundamental Campaign Problem is the same from Rome 2. You cant split your army. And thats a huge problem.
In older TW if you see shitty 5 unit army or garrison then you can dedicate 5 troops to deal with it. And you want to kill that small shitty army with even smaller army. Thats how you get small but fun and challenging battle. In rome 2 and after you are forced to take entire 20 stack and fight those shitty battles with autoresolve and taking damage or manualy wasting your time. Thats why since Rome 2 we have all this constant autoresolve problems. Before that no one cared about autoresolve, you played most battles manualy.
I /would/ say "For the love of all things holy, Make a better autoresolve" but, the end of the game's life cycle is nearing. It is so very late in the game to finally be correcting a problem that has existed for all these years. It is amazing that they have kept this absurdly broken autoresolve for as long as they have, especially after it was revealed that ONLY armor and leadership do a dam thing.
Perhaps but the game has at least 1 more year to it.
@@Costin_GamingWhat if after all DLCs CA left some people to improve small things as battles, sieges, climate, even making resources something meanigfull instead of increasing some number so AI want to trade etc etc. Warhammer 3 has 100 lords and will be more. There will be people playing it after new titles. Why not improving things constantly to use fun and valid features in next titles.
I am not quite sure what to make of this video.
Your point was to show how inverted difficulty is s problem, and I agree with that. The core points you made this video were shitty AI, bad autoresolve and that difficulty needs change. Everything you showed with Katarin was cheese after cheese after cheese, for what, why show this? To show off how you are able to abuse the AI?
Most players are not doing this, a point that you proofed in this video is, that trading settlements need a rebalance.
One thing i really do not agree with is: "This is the only way we can play to have fun. " Why, I have 1000 hours in WH3 most campaigns i play are on VH and legendary and i never play like this, you dont have to abuse the ai to have fun.
Again, I agree with your points, i just dont get what you wanted to show off with the katarin section, if you want to cheese and abuse the AI you will always find a way to do that, no matter what CA changes.
But maybe i am just dumb and dont get the point.
Thanks for reading, have nice day.
I wanted to show how vast of a difference it makes to push the early game like that vs playing a campaign normally. I care about how the fundamental game mechanics work or don't.
Basically I am interested in what makes the game tick.
Let me give you the comparison: If you don't do this as Katarin: You end with a far weaker eco, far less supporters, at war with more factions, Kislev as a whole area decimated by Skaven, Greenskins and Chaos and you constantly fighting tooth and nail just to survive.
@Costin_Gaming i guess we just find different things enjoyable in this case. I have no problems with the second scenario you described and do not enjoy hard cheese. But we can agree that difficulty needs change
Hereis the problem, the map is massive. Past say turn 60, how big does an ai faction need to be to challenge the player? Probably 50 + settlements needed. People dont want that, thats the way warhammer 2 was and people generally did not like the slog involved of fighting a faction with 50-70 settlements. Yhere is no making the player base happy on this point. The 2nd thing is that the ai is not aggressive in any way that is really threatening. Factions with high movement range or underway might go pinball around sacking minor settlements, which super annoying, but its not really a threat to you. Ai not aggressively taking territory is the biggest issue, they actual produce plently of armies, but they wont attack unless they can dogpile you with like 4 at once. And yeah i agree autoreslove is a bit to in the player favor. Also its silly that you play the game in a ridiculous way to complain the game is to easy, have you considered just not cheesing?
The problem with the massive AI empires we had in Warhammer 2 I think is we would start a war with a faction, annihilate their standing armies and then in a few turns they'd show up with brand new recruited armies that had zero chance against you as a player.
It was not a challenge, it was cheap shit.
I think the AI should consolidate better: Like actually build an empire, have goals to achieve, armies it recruits in a good way and then difficulty cheats that scale with time.
@Costin_Gaming that's very vague, how does having goals make the ai stronger? What does it mean to consolidate? They already focus thier armies on one front usually, they do develop their territory. like I hear your complaints(and agree with many of them) but your suggestions don't really seem to have much to them...
Well right now the AI feels it's doing things randomly, sure it will go after certain foes but how they do it is all over the place, besides I think it's driven by aversion and strength rankings in the decision making as opposed to an actual plan besides a few key regions at the start of a campaign.
Consolidate would also mean things like confederations, alliances, building provinces in a certain way. Like for instance Arbaal would be a far more dangerous foe if he build his main settlement building as mortal and started churning out massive swarms of Chosen, Wrathmongers, Chaos Knights and Minotaurs all the time: He CAN do it, he doesn't always.
@Costin_Gaming definitely agree with confederation for ai.
If the AI had "campaign objectives" like the player it would really make things interesting.
It might also complicate the AI on CAs front, but imagine if it was successful
This is wild, as new player, I'm out here losing "close victory" battles left and right. And this whole diplomacy thing you're doing, just blowing my mind. I barely interact with diplomacy because it feels like "oh give up my settlement? I'm screwed, I NEED all my settlements or the AI is going to out-earn me in economy". I'm out here in turn 200+ on a Normal Difficulty game >_
Regarding the sieges: I just played a siege as a defender (Dwarf) against chaos. I did the EXACTLY thing asyou in the video, made sure that the towers word and shooting at the most bad boys. Guess what happened? their general rushed through the door, already heavily damaged, but still able to do his, job. so he rushed through the check points ON A HOURSE while my dwarfs hada hard time following him. So while they where barely down the walls he had conquered 2 check points and with that all the defense constructions. It felt like chasing someone in a Ferrari, while I drive a bicycle!
The Auto resolve would be a pyrrhic victory. Which is what I got because while chasing the leader made some of his troops damaging some of my unist.
So even if the AI did not use the blind spot, it acted pretty smart for using a rather stupid stratehy to start the siege.
My recent Eltharion campaign was the first, that was challenging start to finish in WH3 and I loved it.
1200 hours across WHI to III in.
And you're right.
First 20 turns is rough and you often want to NOT do what they ask. For example, Skrolk and Settra. You're given a weak battle and enemy to deal with first. Meanwhile, an AI powerful lord, whose generating way better armies than you is gearing up. For Skrolk, you need to go after Gor-Rok as fast as possible and ignore your pre-assigned enemy. For Settra, the sooner you go after Manfred the better. Legend calls them 'player traps'.
For settlements and fortresses, I find them easy because I siege them. I use siege equipment, I blast walls and enemies. And if I can't easily win? No worries, withdraw and you're still sieging them and they are still damaged for likely no losses to you. Siege battles are boring slogs. Knock out a tower or two. Blast walls with ranged units on it. Balst other stuff and use your archers. Win through army loss.
Back to your main point. If you do survive the first 20 turns the game gets easier and easier. The only thing to kinda worry about is end game crisis. But, it's not Stellaris, so you'll do fine.
I sincerely hope some CA staff watch your vids. You give some good points
Think they do. I know for certain they watched SOME of them as in I was told about it.
Dunno how much they listen, all I can say is post-ToD and OoD Dwarfs, Ogres, Empire, Khorne are exactly what I wanted. They addressed so many of my complaints I might as well have just sent them a spreadsheet!
I also think casualty replenishment is too strong in this game. Often one army gets wiped out while the other one is almost back to full the next turn. It would be better without replenishment and so units actually need to be recruited and like back in rome u endes up merging two half depleted troops into a full one.
I still merge units in an army together and recruit new ones just to skip replenishment because it would take longer if you don't skill into any replenishment. Yes, you lose experience on those units, but when you play something like Skaven, you absolutely can't care less.
Happy New Year, btw
@@Nik2063 maybe in the late game, but early game its pathetic for most factions. Definitely don't want it that way for the whole campaign.
Well, after playing the game for a bit, I think what'd be great to have is "midgame scenarios". Like endgame ones, but instead of being a victory condition they'd be a general nuisance appearing on map.
Those events could both make maps more unique and interesting and give player bigger challenge.
I use a mod to decrease army movement. Makes the whole game better, you won't regret it. Now you can't take 2 provinces in your first 10 turns, you actually have time to strategize and make use of game mechanics etc, the whole map is bigger while simultaneously being a more dangerous place to travel, you don't feel like any turn where you aren't fighting or recruiting is wasted
2 provinces in 10 turns by default? You Gotta Pump Those Numbers Up, Those Are Rookie Numbers.
@@Costin_Gaming that is the mod...not the player....that was the point of his post.
Would love to see you talking about difficulty in battles. Take the Dwarfs, for example. There isn't an army in this game that can fight the Dwarfs head-on without cheesing. CA decided that Trollhammer Irondrakes need 200 range and the ability to delete large units in 2 volleys, so you pretty much have to cheese every fight against late-game Dwarf stacks. Basically, CA keeps promoting this game showing cinematic views of two armies clashing, but in reality what you get is 20 minutes of artillery dodging, wasting the AI's ammo, before you can engage. If you don't do this, you lose.
@@Selakah that's not true, dwarves are an easy faction to deal with, even for melee factions. They are slow, easy to flank, low mass so easy to run over. Get their ranged units in melee and they are done.
You're just not very good obviously. It's easy to compromise ranged units as the player.
How can you dodge artillery for 20 minutes and not have an angle to flank and smash them?
Nah, that's a skill issue. Is wasting their ammo the most "optimal" way to do it? Sure. But it's not necessary at all.
"no other faction can take the dwarfs head on"
I mean, assaulting a fortified position from the front is generally not advised. Go around and hit the wall of metal and beard hair in the flank. Have something engage their front line (so it isn't bracing anymore) before punching higher mass units through.
I love crushing the pointless battles. Try and get 1 loss, 0 losses
Power creep is a game killer.
You ever get to the feedback loop where you're just going around auto-resolving battles because you're so powerful you can't lose?
Can't confirm that. I play on normal. I played a couple fo TW games, so I know what the game is about, I might do mistakes in regards how I play the faction. But I normaly survive the first 20 rounds with no problems what so ever.
My problems come with about round 100+ Or there is a faction that runs over me because of mass or more advanced tech. Or different faction team up on me.
If I stay rather small they declare war because I'm weak, if I expand my empire they declacere war because I'm a threat. I keep losing Vialles and downs, keep losing battle no matter if I paly them myself or let them Auto resolve.
So in other words I have the complete opposite experience, the longer I play the same campaign the more difficulty it gets!
honestly there just two problems : AI is braindead and sieges are one of the worst things in wh3 because of the following : they make siege maps as if warhammer is the same as historical games, but aside from butt ladders and magic spam, the problem is braindead AI that doesnt know how to play the sieges. Before reworking sieges, CA has to build a new AI that knows how to fight battles. Im not expecting this to happen, but i also dont want mods to make my life miserable, so i just focus on having fun knowing every campaign i start is basically won already.
This reminds me of a Very Hard campaign i had with Imrik on Warhammer 2 and the sheer horror of the grind fest that it was : between having to rush Snikch on the East, least i get obliterated by turn 20 or something, and having to deal with the minor serpent Dwarves behind the mountain up north, that keeps jumping back and forth, only to then have to face fucking Grimgor and Queek coming from the west, with basically no access to trade and no room for expansion (not even with the four East islands)... it was a nightmare. Complete and utter Nightmare.
Do you know how long it took me before i could finally get the settlement of that minor serpent dwarven faction up north, behind that damn mountain ?
Turn 110.
Everyone jumps around except Imrik. And it was at a time where you didn't have the option to confederate Caledor and GTFO back to Ulthuan. You were factually stuck.
That shit was just brutal. I never grinded so hard in my life, in a game.
Warhammer needs a realm divided mechanic where if you become rank 1 then everybody goes to war with you.
It definetly doesnt need that at all..... That was the Stupidst Mechanic in Shogun 2 xD
Ladders tank the AI's little chance it has at siege. If CA would return to forcing the AI to path to gates and make gaps in the wall it succeeds or dies spectacularly which is the best two outcomes imo.
I'll agree that difficulty scaling and some design decisions around that aren't great and the ai has issues, but the claim that "other strategy games" get more difficult as the game goes on is bs - a difficult late game is not typical for strategy games at all. For 4x-games like total war, snowballing from a strong early game is kind of the norm, with games trying to introduce mechanics to curtail the snowballing and/or create late game challenges - such as end game crisis or some form of taxes on large empires, both of which to exist in tw:warhammer, though neither is done particularly well. And you get similar issues in city builders, business simulation games, and if we're talking about a single map, also for your typical RTS - it's kind of difficult to balance strategy games in a way that consistently creates challenging late games while keeping the early game consequential.
bad ai
More interesting starting stacks and challenges would be a good start. Some campaigns got em, a lot stripped bare rn. I miss the World War that always happened due to realm divide once Chaos was defeated in TW2, I haven't seen that happen much anymore.
Got to disagree with this, playing as Mazdamundi I've moved into southern Lustria around turn 20 to meet a khorne faction that already owns it. Every army they have is super elite and their economy appears to be a little money but 0 upkeep, that's infinite.
WH3 is moving into the retard direction with the game, newer factions seem to have easy-mode economies that provide okay money, but then key resources make upkeep so low they can support loads of armies.
And sieges are a mess, every map is cramped and I have difficulty deploying troops effectively. Walls and gates are super easy to destroy with artillery. The enemy ignores the walls and pulls ladders out of the asses and goes over the walls - yeah its super easy to fight someone on the walls while on a ladder apparently...
Then the building defences are a weird selection, one idiotic thing is a hole in the wall is left as a gaping hole for several turns.
Bluntly I have to say play you're playing Lizardmen
AKA the shit tier faction atm.
It always comes down to bad AI
The amount of cheese needed to win is just sad. Doesnt matter how much skill you have unless you can cheese with some factions, i sincerely hope they remove this crap
Yeah iam a max difficulty Medieval 2 Player and never used any cheese.
On VH/VH in WH3 i can still play like that, at least with the campaigns i played.
But Legendary is such a slog playing normal.
I think I agree with your basic point, but you've spent the last 15 minutes of the video talking about one very specific Katarin cheese and I don't understand what it has to do with anything else you're trying to say.
It's a showcase of how stupid broken things are. Katarin is the extreme example.
@@Costin_Gaming I'm not sure it's such a great example. Sure, if you (meaning "someone") spend hours and hours with save-scumming and console commands to work out the pattern and best strategies and tricks and cheese, you can then start that campaign again and win it really easily... but... you spent hours and hours working out how to do that. That's not how most people play the game, and for those that do... why do it, if it's not what you find fun, and how on earth would CA prevent it anyway?
Again, I do think your basic point is right! I do think it's a problem that almost the entire challenge of any campaign is the first 10 turns, and I do think it's a MASSIVE problem that the only way the devs know to make the game "harder" is to give the AI stat cheats (and yeah, autoresolve and sieges are broken). Agree with all of that! So I think you're onto something and have a fundamentally fair point... I just don't think spending half the video talking about how to cheese Katarin supports that argument at all. It's irrelevant.
Play Normal > have fun.
Yeah u know, thats how it should be. Challangeing at First and afterwards you can live the Power Fantasy of an Warhammer Universe Game.
After your short or long Campaign Victory (both arnt really long, most are doable in 4-8h Game Time) i dont wanna go and need to Manually Cheese Battle My Way through every single Battle on Legendary just to get a "New Challange" or such Crap. I already have proven that i can Beat way better Armys than Myself and Stacks of Enemys with my T1 Meele Bretonian Peasant Army, now i wanna reap the Benefits and demolish all who are Foolish enought to still stand in my Way.
And even that still gets spiced up to a degree by Certain AI Factions and Enemy Lords because of the Player Bias. You can go to War as Dark Elfs with Cathay, and they will send you Armys to Fight you. And after a Certain Size of you, they dont only Send you 1 or 2 Armys, they send you 3,4,5 Full Stacks, including Stacked Armys. Certain Legendary Lords like Skarbrand (if he survives) alone get so Powerfull that you most other Factions cant compete with him, without the Player beeing Tactical or Cheesy. And its Fine that way, because it doesnt happen every Single Turn it simply happens every Few Turns to "break" and "refresh" the Power Fantasy.
The Only Argument which should be Made as Critic is how Dumb the AI in General Works. They need to Improve their AI by a lot. The AI needs to Work with more Different Tactics, on the Map and Battlefield. It needs to do more Smart Decisions, more smart Recruitmens and so on and on and on, instead of beeing just Strong because it Cheats.
Oh also, they should never ever Balance the Diffiuclty by the Messarument of Cheese a Player can use. If you use to Cheese, like the TW2 High Elf Hero Trait Stack to Make Millions of Money, than thats a Decision you made by yourself, to make your game way easiert. But Balancing for such Thing is Impossible, because if you Balance around that, you force People to use that specific Tactic, which is boring.
Go around and Play the Game as Intendet, Mixed Army, no Full Doom Stack, no Full T5 Only Army, no 1 Unkillable Lord Sword of Khane Shenaningan, and no Cheese Tactics which simply break the AI (As stated the AI is Crap and needs a lot of Work and Improvments). If you do that you get a Halway Decent Challange with most Factions.
Do you actually need to do all these shenanigans? It sounds super boring and the game is easy already as it is that you can just play it normally..
The game is easy IF you do this.
If you play on legendary and don't do this to some degree you end up facing 6 different enemies, and Throt and Azhag for instance bring 4 armies each.
@Costin_Gaming I've never done any of this stuff. Didn't even know you could pull this kind of thing off. But I've never had any problems starting my campaigns (except with bretonnia in wh2). It is true that I've never played a single Kislev campaign apart from the intro one, so that might be different.
To be fair, I'm not avert to cheesing. But I find the campaign cheeses too boring and prefer to cheese the battles to some extent.
I have 7000-ish hours according to steam almost none of it unmodded...but I play alot of online, and my solo play like I said is heavily modded. My primary issue with the basic game use to be... the more you move the difficulty up, the more mechanics seemed to be removed. On the flip side the lower the difficulty and there was no challenge. I have no idea if that is still the case....so I have almost zero background to even comment on videos like this... but...I will say.....there are mods to help with all this.
Can you do a campaign playthrough? You are always legendary and at turn 50 have half the damn map lol. I try legendary every time and die by turn 10. T.T I just want to be better but I don't understand. I can beat hard campaign, very hard is more difficult but I can beat it. Legendary I dont have a chance.
auto resolve is indeed crapp.
But the way you, and notable, if not all legendary players play , meaing a corner camping, cheesing and abusing every aspect of a game is because :
1) AI is such crapp and balance between factions and a unit types is so huge, that in many cases a player do not have any other chance to win a battle, But then it comes to 2)
2) ego, and a nonsenses you, and few others lately talk about. you could afford, in more advanced stage of a game, to lose a battle more than few times over and still run fine , even on legendary, playing a battle "intended" or "normal " way using nonbraindead tactics .
But will you ? Then say, hell that was a piece of a AI stack there. Ofc not. Either you bring more to defeat that or, in your case and in a case of legendary, where having more simply don't exist, cheese it through, again and again.
Now. Do i wish to improve their AI? Sure i want. That doesn't have anything comon with first battle, or any started battle in a game. Perhaps " vs first legendary lord" encounter may have impact or war.
This entire game is based on terrible mechanics - like whole force march concept ( without any restrictions like being unable to force march after battle of any kind), retreat from battle without loosing any movement on next turn, even crossing river. Siege battles - where overcheated AI encamp multiple stacks feeling safe, then stack of single lord besiege a city while picking rest of armies with main ( what fucking ridiculousnes) . Need of hurry up and no time of siege equipment building because, again, AI will sit always with stacks at least 3:1 vs mine earlier in a game. And, ofcourse, a whole autoresolve- where since some point AI becomes coward and very rarely will fight you on fair terms(field battle ) and rather play cat and mouse game untill or if they are capable of getting together those 3:1 stacks - all this because of stupid calculator and to heavy impact of lords level + unit rank.
To be completely honest, i don't know what they have specificaly done since WH2, but WH3 simply don't play the same. Being it for too crowded map, or absolut dull nerf of minor factions which now lose to single lord and lost even that warming up status from WH2... I don't know.. There are so many races and factions in a game right now trashed from special recruitment rules that the game still feels emptier then it should be. Beastmen are non existent, despite a fact that in the end of WH2 cycle they have managed to make them run somehow ( morghur did it multiple times in my games with solid late game stacks ). Changeling is non existent - and even can not be confederated which is a huge let down playing Khairos. WoC are over cheated in AR, and it still don't help them much against running order tide ( if its running ) because they replacing loses with T0-1 chaff. Chorfs are capable playing with orc slaves until the late game- because of rules - not to mention that them, Tomb kings and perhaps others heavily dependant of rich recruitmen infrastructure still can't build up their cities- despite CA stated twice already they have looked in to that - TK still fill their major settlements with T3 infrastructure shit.
What drives me mad is their absolut lack of any personalised cheat asigment - like dwarves for sure don't deserve same amount of cheats like other races if their autoresolve roflstomp everything arround. Same for Empire. I wouldnerf these 2 heavily, for sure.
Campaign ai is worse then In tww2
my brother in christ have you tried just enjoying your videogame? Should devs fix speedrun glitches in your mind so that the game becomes "enjoyable" There are exploits in every game, please don't let CA see this, this is pointless. Game is fun I have 2500 hours combined lol just siege map that sucks imo
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Stop posting to /twg/