I know people are a bit annoyed about the long disclaimer. I would have put a time stamp but I really needed people to hear that as much as they might not like it. I've done this kind of video before without disclaimers and it's made the videos efforts go completely to waste due to the bad faith actors straw manning the arguments. So far the disclaimer has worked quite well. There has been no post on reddit and the conversation has been pretty civil. Some people are disagreeing and that's completely fine. I have removed a few comments that were arguing against points I didn't make but that's fine if it's contained here. In future I don't think I'll need to do a long disclaimer and since this video is doing very well I probably will make another critique. Let me know in the replies here if there's a total war system that really pisses you off and you want me to dismantle it.
The only thing that triggers my autism is when you upgrade a settlement to tier 2, it will sometimes move the building in slot 1 to slot 2, and maybe even again to slot 3 when upgraded again. I usually build the same buildings in the same slots in multiple towns/cities, and it bothers me when one town has the buildings in different spots. Annoying bug that has been around forever.
It feels like the only people who can be angry about it are those who don't understand a game design at all. Disclaimer was too long, yeah, but the message is more significant for it being undermined by people focusing on unimportant stuff.
No doubt, I get it, your last video about the TWW3 discussion showcased so much intellectual dishonesty and bad arguments from the community. Total shit show out here.
All good. My biggest issue right now would be that vassals or sometimes even military allies (at least for one of their armies) should have it their top priority to fulfill my war coordination target, whatever that might be. Doesn't matter if it means death or attrition for that army. Or that once it got damaged, the army will retreat, heal up but then go straight back to fulfilling the mission.
@@MrAH2010 "The Black Planet [Birmingham] has almost no visible light and due to that no one wants to go there. The population has become both linguistically and culturally isolated." It could indeed be much worse.
I do agree on tier 0 units dominating most early campaigns. I usually entitely skip tier 1 units too and then start recruiting from tier 2 and 3 for most of the game from midgame onwards. I think the RoRs are supposed to be the "mercenary" equivalent in twwh3, filling out the ranks. Problem is RoRs (and similarly recruited units, like blessed spawnings or elector count units or ogre mercenariea) are way more valuable as emergency units due to how instant recruitment works. + why get RoRs to pad out the depleted ranks when you can just recruit tier 0 units in newly conquered settlements anyways.
uhhhh rors arent atleast supposed to be filler units they are supposed to be just better units that have made a name (yeah sometimes they arent worth it but usually they are decently better to sometimes op) effectivly yeah they can be used as a critikal fast army
@scrollexdestiny quick to recruit on demand units that you can get while out on campaign sounds an aweful lot like mercenaries to me (atleast mechanically)
They're supposed to work like veterans, elite versions of regular units, but most of the time they aren't worth it and like you said, they're basically mercenaries to fill gaps when you need a few extra units quickly. The RoR system is really disappointing honestly. It should have been made similar to Shogun 2 Avatar Veteran units but CA lacked the skill or effort to implement a system with an army painter like that
Yeah, HElves are the best example, there's no reason to not just go Archers + Spearmen for a big chunk of the early game until you get Silverin Guards (and even those are optional) and Sisters...
@@scrollexdestiny What something is suppose to be in lore, and how it actually ends up being in gameplay can differ. They're suppose to be the best of their thing, but the reality is they're mechanically just mercs you hire in a pinch.
if you have the ability to not soil yourself when someone has a different opinion to you the video starts at 6:30. I don't blame Legend for starting his videos that discuss specific features with a large disclaimer that can essentially boil down to "don't be intellectually dishonest and try to understand other viewpoints"; his detractors have consistently shown there is no depth to which they will not sink. But it is a bit annoying to listen to as a functioning human who can have a disagreement with someone and not instantly try and ruin their day. Not that I disagree with anything legend suggested as a change it is a really good idea that he proposed to have more unit choices from the base settlement building.
@@paddya3304 Mostly reddit being reddit. Anyone who ever voiced even an ounce of criticism will invariably get unjustly dismissed or attacked by the worst reddit mobs.
@@paddya3304 I think that Legend gets it a bit worse because according to some he plays the game 'wrong'. He plays hyper optimal, with a lot of things like only 1 unit type in 6 different armies or 1 wizard getting 20k gold value turn 20. I have seen many say that this personally affects them because CA will then code the AI to try (and fail) to counter these hyper optimal play-styles. So it is seen as Legend 'ruining' the game for others. Which is insane. So as a result anything legend says is taken as a personal slight.
It's why I always have a soft spot for campaigns that have alternative recruitment methods. Rakarth, Markus Wulfheart, Throt, Nurgle etc are much more interesting and dynamic campaigns because of unit availability. The most recent new factions are outstanding for starting variety with Tamurkhan and Malakai and hopefully the next DLC continues that trend.
Agreed (this was one of the big reasons I like Nurgle); in addition, it favours races that can play well around chaff units, like Vampires with their super-skeleton endless armies etc (I also like VC, and this may be part of why).
I think this might be why some of the campaigns I had the most fun trying as a new player were horde factions. Nakai and Beastmen might not have normal territory control or anything, but playing whack-a-mole with rival factions retaking settlements was a lot more fun than trying to figure out where to stuff all my essential buildings so that my armies can properly defend. Hordes get basically infinite building slots, too, so finances and tempo are the only opportunity cost to think about
Don't forget the vampire counts, you don't even need to invest in military buildings outside of for hero recruitment. The buff to raise dead was a great change for them.
I love the Tamurkhan campaign because it feels like you are actually rallying a vast horde behind you as you march south, growing in power and influence with every victory until you become and endgame crisis tier threat with four doomstacks moving around as a single, unified, world ending host.
it's a good joke, because it's kinda true; when i first played the game i didn't know anything and fell for a lot of the traps so i thought the game was kinda challenging becasuse it set me up for failure. but the more i learned the game the worse it got. kinda the opposite of what you want from a video game.
What bothers me the most is that once a city is fully developed it often becomes useless since it is at the center of your Empire. Sure I can build a new army there with all the big powerful punchers I want but then it takes 5 or 6 turns to get it t the frontline where I ACTUALLY need it. And with the AI having little to no restrictions on their army building. (Looking at you skarsnik and your 4 stacks of Skulkers and Nightgoblins). Its hard to match some of the other races fighting power. Especialyl in early game but Lategame too. The amount of times I wanted to scream cause I Conquered the northern Worlds Edge Mountains just to turn south towards Eight Peaks and find myself just outnumbered to hell and back by Clan Morrs is unreal. (Also Warp fire throwers are completelly unbalanced in Autoresolve so having to fight all those battles by hand is a slog.) Sorry for the ramble. I agree with Legend. Give us either nlimited buildslots or atleast all slots from the start so i can get to work on the units I need as quickly as possible. Funny enough that dwarves suffer from this a lot since there is many great buildings at tier 2 but no space to build them.
Yeah, having all your upgraded military recruitment buildings half or even a whole continent away from where you actually need troops is a real annoyance
Funnily, chaos dwarfs suffer from this the least (but still do). Late game you can take a province capital, settle it at tier V, rush build a manufactory (and other buildings as necessary) and instantly be able to start recruiting a decent army wherever you are.
I felt this problem so hard on my recent Kairos campaign. Took so long to build the recruitment buildings for anything not a chaos warrior or a horror that by the time I could recruit anything high tier, the frontline was 10 turns away. Ended up with 8 armies of pink horrors. Kairos himself is a heroic victory machine, but every other battle got super boring real fast.
I really enjoyed how some older games handle this - more developed provinces that are further away from the front line could have roads as an upgrade, or even a railroad in Fall of the Samurai (a FANTASTIC game you should play if you enjoy historical total war games). The more recent "hero general" who has to actually GO to a province to recruit units, rather than recruiting them and sending them somewhere, was probably meant to incentivize you not to have one single military province and a ton of economic ones fueling it, but I feel the logistics of the old style worked better, and gave you an opportunity to potentially ambush reinforcements (or have yours be ambushed!)
It still bothers me that all the building icons look the same no matter what tier they are. Edit: Yes, I know there are mods that fix this, I use them myself. It's just a shame that this is not something that is in base game.
@Killerkwoi13 Yep, I'm a huge fan of the mod Building Progression Icons III. You spend a significant amount of time during a campaign managing your settlements, so it's a huge shame CA hasn't implemented something like this already.
Can confirm it's in pharaoh, and its a bit worse since key economy buildings are in the settlement capital competing with the best recruitment buildings
Honestly I think the splitting of resources also makes the problem worse. I like have Wood Stone bronze ect but I never have enough building slots for them
You don't need recruitment buildings in each settlement, just a few in key province capitals in order to have good native units and your own faction good units (especially if they have some low value resource like wood or really easy to get resource like food) . The real problem is that most of the buildings are useless in some way or another and some resource types require quite a lot of buildings in order for them to become valuable (don't have enough experience but playng as Ninurta rn it really bothers me to make 3 separate buildings for bronze and waste like 14 workforce on them) while the others often don't have enough good buildings and you either have to build something you don't need or to not fill the slot entirely.
It's also worse because of the resource systems, where not all settlements can produce all resources you need. Idk what they were thinking with that one
Variety armies are hampered not only by build slots but also by the skill tree. The red army wide buffs usually apply to one unit type only which often means units from one specific building chain. Because I'm maximizing archers with my red line skills, I build mostly archers and some frontline so they do not die and cavalry, monsters etc. go unused because I don't buff them and I don't have buildings for them either.
Yeah,I was thinking, perhaps the skills should be separated by tiers of troops instead of type. Militia, professional, elite, rather than how they are now. That way you can get a broad variety of troops and not feel you're putting suboptimal troops in comparison to their lord. Plus I could see a fun transition halfway through where you have to build up a new general because you're transitioning from militia to professional troops for your primary army
@@timothym9398 Yes, that definitely sounds like it would work better than the current system. Maybe there would be an issue of millita/professional being the only real choices and elite being mostly unused, because you get access to them much later and they're expensive. But it's not necessarily a problem of the new skills, it's more becauese of the nature of WH3 being too quick and because elite units are generally awkward to field - require weird buildings, take long to recruit, require a lot of cash.
That's part of why I use the mod for more skill points per level, just to upgrade more units and incentivise a variety of unit types. It's otherwise incentivising a doomstack playstyle.
I feel like the red line would be better suited to heroes and not stack (so, like a buff applied in an area around them). That way, you can have as many heroes with different red lines as needed. Then do something more interesting as a replacement for the lord.
It realy annoys me when I Take a settlement with a port, That i cant destroy it. On some factions a port does nothing and I cant even build something usefull instead
Dont forget how the basic port doesn't have a tier 2, making it so that it exists in a weird limbo of the player not wanting to prioritize leveling the minor settlement docks
And lets not talk about how for most races docks don't even add garrison only income bonus and others it does give garrison like the High Elfs , tbh id prefer if docks were like a bonus slot ... the same with materials
Still don't know why they nerfed special ports . Erengard, Marianburg and similar settlements used to matter because they were a crazy good port. Now they are just a slightly above average economic province
CA should absolutely not listen to this, they have been milking fans with garbage systems for years. Good, well designed systems would need more money and inspiration, it's all about the bottom line. LoTW will shill warhammer no matter what, he will always come back groveling to CA so they have no incentive to change. He will always give them free advertisement.
I think people stopped the reasoned critique because Creative Assembly isn't interested in improving Total War games. They apparently make much more money off wicked DLC practices and art assets. If this weren't the case, 20-year-old games wouldn't be better than the games we have today. But they are.
@@MantisGod8815 He made his hobby into his profession. Of course he will try to preserve that. Totally understandable and legitimate. But he isn't "groveling to CA". As far as I know he even has a difficult history with them.
I really LOVED the ability to get all buildings in the long run on Rome TW or Medieval 2. Having to choose what to get at each city has some strategic meaning, but it is strictly less fun. Really hope they revert this in the future.
This is why I love Skavenblight aside from Ikşt being very fun. You can build absuper-city which fields armies all by himself,without ever facing an existencial crisis and in a very defensible position while surrounded by riches. Best part, you are free to build whatever you wanna build without sacrificing another.
At the start it is a bit more strategic, but in late game it can be quite restrictive especially if the newly captured province literally has no buildings as you need to build it one at a time. iirc I once proposed a Building Manpower Mechanic for Project renaissance since the Developer wanted each province to have access to all building. Basically a Settlement would have 100 Building Manpower at first, where if you build a building all the manpower is used, if a Building needed 200 Manpower it will take 2 Turns for the Building to be build. However you can build another building, where the Building Manpower will be split so a Settlement Building 2 Buildings will give 50 Building Manpower for each building, so that 2 Turn Building now needs 4 Turns as the manpower is split.
When you consolidate your surrounding area the build slot thing is more annoying than challenging since you basically got everything you need. Plus if you are the kind of person who are not into role playing and trying units and just want to play for efficiency then some building will never get built because you have to prioritize slots for the good buildings first.
I think they should make Tier 5 settlements have more building slots than how it is now, I actually like the strategic value the slot restrictions bring at earlier parts of the game.
On the WoC in particular: While the warband system does solve the issue of early game unit variety, it tends to result in the opposite problem in the late game, as the availability of units is just too low for the later stages of a campaign when you want to recruit more than 1 or two armies and unit quality begins to matter. It's also why the WoC AI factions completely fall apart after ~25-50 turns - once their main army dies, they can never produce another one of quality, and can't produce multiple armies near enough to support each other.
yeah... change one thing in one direction and it will most likely affect something else on the other side of the coin. On the other hand (unless we are talking about AI variety at the end of the campaign, which can be quite dull at some points) I do think this is a lesser death to take so long the player itself has more fun. But people would need to evaluate this one their own and for each case differntly.
That's why I use unit caps for all, that mod is a bless, specially fighting against AI, it's so boring fighting an army full of a single unit, they even give extra unit cap for thematic lords, like Ungrim gets additional slayer cap.
Its not tabletop caps. It is called unit caps for all. It gives a similar unit cap system that tomb kings have to all factions. Really good. But technically does not affect what legend is talking about here.
Can we talk about the uselessness of there being ports in this game? There is no navy. Its not even that great for growth or cash and later on when the settlement is grown you are stuck with a building you don't need...and its forced on you in every coastal settlement which doesn't even make sense. And oh boy do they limit minor settlements in game.
Port used to be better but then CA took a rework on the economy and they are less desirable now. I have nos issue with the minor settlement, if everything was the size of a capital you would never do anything else than siege battle and it would be tireing very quickly. It make sense than not every city is big and can reach the maximum size.
@@itachiaurion3198 I have no issue with the limitations of building slots to minor settlements, my issue is with the fact that I can't choose to remove a port -- at the cost of the movement it provides --to choose something more suitable. The minor settlement is already restricted to 3 slots, with a port you're restricted to 2. A better solution would be to remove the port building from open building slots and incorporate it into the main settlement building so you can have all 3 open slots and the port but even being able to remove it for something else would be nice as an option. Either it should be combined into viable settlements or it should be open to being deconstructed at the cost of its utility in both minor settlements and provincial capitals.
@@olafthemoose9413 It is a nice utility where you need it, but so far away from the front its useless when it comes at the cost of a limitation to your building slots. I just want to destroy them and get the slot open if nothing else.
What bothers me most is the computer knows where you are and has no fog of war. So they aim for your weakest cities and around your strongest armies. I know it's difficult to program and few games can manage it but it's egregious and there are ways to work around it yet they seem unwilling to.
It’s definitely something that’s also bothered me for quite a while once I started noticing it. I assume it’s due to the AI being unable to make an educated guess at what might be coming and scouting ahead beforehand. But it gets very annoying when it’s blatantly obvious it knows where your armies and this is also enables it to use forces March much more freely even deep with in your territory as it know when it won’t get caught.
The AI is easily exploited in other regards though, such as ambush baiting. I've lost count the amount of times Ive caught the AI sending a stack to attack a Lord with 1-2 trash units just to put the stack within range of my main stack that was hiding in ambush. If you fix the AIs vision cheats, then you also need to fix the ways the player can exploit its behavior, which I assume is very hard to do.
I totally agree. I always use increased build slots mods in my playthroughs. It is ridiculous that in vanilla I can't build all available buildings in capital.
@@JWSoul I already have to choose how to spend my limited funds and turns. Arbitrarily restricting what I can build where on top of that just feels "gamey". If I have the time and resources to build a huge super-city, I should be allowed to.
How about the excessive cost of high tier econ buildings? Except your first few settlements they're just not worth it, they'll never recoup their cost. Weird how devs have never noticed this.
Yeah. Depending on faction, I just build pretty much everything to tier 2 or 3 depending on the ROI of the faction's built economy. A few core provinces and big outside cities to produce units. High tier economic buildings often need to be built for dozens of turns to recoup their cost. Gold now is better than gold later too so it makes no sense to me.
Absolutely, I hate that the upgrades are like 2 or 3 times more expensive but only slightly more income which is fine when you have lots of settlements in late game but annoying in early game where you need to be more mindful of what you spend ur income on.
The same is true of growth buildings. For most factions, tiers 1 and 2 are all I ever buy. Tier 3 is far too expensive for a building that will be replaced the moment a settlement hits max tier.
Yep. Absolutely agree on that one. It only kinda makes sense for the factions that can get a huge bonus % to their region/province income like DE or Tzeentch.
So I have to wonder why the AI is still so dumb that it needs so many cheats. If it's going to magically be able to support three full stacks on one settlement, then why does it need to know automatically where my weakest point is and the shortest path how to get there
@jaywerner8415 oh yeah that's another thing they need to get rid of, the units needing Lords as a nanny. But since they have infinite money they can recruit heroes,
@@QueenAleenaFan Trust Me, we ALL wish they would. But ya know, their AI is too DUMB to keep its armies together and will send tiny stacks wondering back and forth if Empire Total War was anything to go by. Although, I don't think Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai had this problem. So other then their AI just being DUMB and getting made DUMBER, I have no explanation. Hell, the AI used to RETREAT from battle in Rome 1 (and still does in Rome Remastered) But doesn't do that since Empire Total War. WHY?! Why must they Grind themselves into DUST? Not like it maters since they can just Spam Armies now.
@@jaywerner8415 couldn't they hire some sort of game designer to make ai that doesn't suck? I can understand when some guy working on a project by himself can make good AI. But I feel like a corporation might be able to post a job listing or two and get a guy to come help
@@QueenAleenaFan From what iv heard the Game Engine is a absolute mess of spaghetti code (it still has code from Empire TW for god sake). And people keep getting pulled from their tasks to help on other things. But Yeah.... you would think Sega would be able to afford a few "experts". Which Is kinda why I keep screaming into a mega phone "GET A NEW ENGINE FOR F@#$ SAKE! ITS BEEN OVER 10 F#$@ING YEARS!" Sadly I figured out a LONG time ago that CA doesn't design their games around the Player experience, but their absolutely DENTED AI. It would explain alot of their Design choices.
played warriors of chaos recently and really like the upgrade mechanik. wished for that for nearly all other races. also thought of a cool way to implement trade ressources to upgrades like you get wood, you can build bronze shield has additional iron you can get silver shields or so. nice video!
Warband ultimate upgrade mod applies the 'warband upgrade' system to all races. It does make the game easier but also more fun IMO. Getting your starting unit of miners to Ironbreakers via promotions is very satisfying. It is open to exploits, especially with ranged levelling so fast compared to melee though.
Agree, im a huge fan of Warriors of Chaos faction, but once u unlock Chosen units, it get bored, u just doomstack them and autoresolve all, but with the upgrade mechanic, it really more fun coz i actually can lose! LMAO
@@aaronsegura887 Combining it with a mod like Tabletop Caps is the perfect way imo, get the better recruitment and upgrading but also something that stops you from doomstacking and want a more diverse army.
One problem with the economy buildings, is that it might cost you 1500+ gold to upgrade a money building from tier 1 to tier 2, and 2000+ to go from tier 2 to tier 3, with only a +100 gold bump each time from doing so. That means, depending on build times and other bonuses/negatives, it could take between 30 and 50 turns before you actually see a profit from investing in your economy. I've been having a good time with Dwarf factions recently, only holding on to a few really valuable provinces while selling all the other settlements I collect for huge profits, which I can then invest in the new Deeps buildings for huge profits.
@@zazoeobi But you could have paid for that unit and its upkeep for 20 additional turns if you didn't buy the financial building. You have the same units but less money.
@Nick-mp1zh I think that would be an argument if it is not basically a necessity to instantly explode and conquer everything in reach from Turn 1. Basically fighting 1 or 2 battles and all of the costs you would incur, instantly offset by the armies you deleted in that turn. Especially if you have a strong roll in the beginning, it is so much more useful to buy these economic buildings and expand more and more, making the upkeep of armies easier, as more armies = more plundered and sacked gold. If these buildings would cost even more, or you wouldn't need to expand so quickly at the beginning, those costs might be something to consider.
This isn't untrue, but at the same time you will exist for 30-50 more turns in basically all circumstances where the time to recoup your investment is relevant. By the late game, who cares really. I am sitting on 100k or more, getting a return on my 1000 gold investment in 20 vs. 30 turns is irrelevant. It's not wrong to point out, I calculate this sometimes playing the game. It's just not usually very impactful except for the turns where, if your campaign is over before the investment is repaid, it's because you've lost.
In the table top Warhammer game each faction had what were known as core units that you had to have a minimum number of, and could have as many as you wanted, then you had special and rare units that you could only have a certain number of in an army. Usually, there was quite a bit of variety among the core units with many factions having access to at least one type of cavalry, missile, and melee infantry unit. TWWH could adapt that system to the game by making all the core units available without any restriction from the beginning, and have access to special and rare units be tied to military buildings with their availability tied to the level and number of that military building that's built by the faction. So, say Swordmasters would become available once you've built the Mage building, but at the lowest level each one only gives you access to say 3-4, but the more you build and the higher you upgrade the building the more you can have. Also, in the table top game units like spearmen and spearmen with shields weren't separate units, but the shield was an upgrade option you could add if you spent the points on it. TWWH could do something similar where instead of having to disband a spearman unit in order to get the spearmen with shields it could be an upgrade where if you spend the money the unit gets upgraded. That would make it much easier for an army to upgrade as you go along, if its just a matter of spending some money to upgrade a unit to a higher tier version of it.
I don't play WH3, but i played Troy and I must say: the Amazonia recruitment system is really good for gameplay. You can only recruit the based tier 1 unit as the Amazonia; and all tier 2 units have to be upgraded from them once they reach lv.4, and tier 3 have to be upgraded from lv.5 tier 2. Not only it limit the amount of elite unit you can field, it will also require you to play around with all basic unit (as the tier 3 you want may have an underpowered tier 1, that you still need to use regularly to earn xp). And it makes getting tier 3 unit feel very rewarding, since they are not produced en masse in the peaceful heartland far away from the front, but are the ones who has been fighting with you since the beginning of the campaign, and now they have reached their final evolution after a brutal battle, slaying countless enemy to get to this point. That's also mean losing their veteran units a much harder blow than usual, since it will take half a campaign to replace them again.
This discussion reminds me of a somewhat recent mod that allows you to rerecruit a starting army at the very beginning of the campaign. Doing this removes the units from your army and then you can select any unit from your roster through a budget similar to how the skirmish budgets work outside of campaigns. Some mods can offer decent solutions to vanilla problems
Its an amazing but realy op mod. You arent limited to the money you gain from removing your army, you can actually put your units in another army and than use the reset-ability and recruit a second army immidiatly and can even use your starting money to invest even more than the gold you get from the mod. You can literaly give you a full army with some incredible units in it.
The economy system itself may be a player trap. The fastest I was able to complete a Karl Franz long victory was turn 29, and I didn't engage with the economic system at all. The amortization times are too long, and if you're planning to win the game within 30 turns through military alone, the tier 2 economic buildings do not pay off before the game ends, making them a waste of money. The Franz strategy I found, you actually powerlevel Altdorf to tier three by about turn 7 I think it was(it's for the reiksguard building, prestige goes to the free growth point). Then upgrade no other settlements AT ALL, if you include the cost of levelling up to tier 2 settlement, and the times involved, levelling up settlements is money lost before turn 30. I found the value in shield spears to be enough to keep the troop building early, it was mostly b/c Franz needed them around turn 20ish. I did attempt with selling the building, and recruiting regular spears, but keeping the building ended up better in my testing. Armies usually represent a better return on investment than buildings, and also progress you towards the campaign goal. You have to run most of the campaign in the red, but the armies can keep you afloat b/c there's no infrastructure investment to speak of. That it is significantly more optimal to not engage with the economic system at all is a bad sign imo. I think not only are you completely right about setting the player up for failure (most starts I sell a building, disband a unit, or both) but I'd take it a step farther and say that the entire building system is fundamentally broken, and CA clearly understands it less than I do, which is sad considering I don't understand it that well. I don't have an answer, and my instincts were clearly wrong on some count because I would've made economics more powerful as a balance step, and you pointed out Medieval as a better version, with less powerful econ. I'm reminded of GWM/PAM from D&D, where something is so optimal players have less choice.
That's just how you play, concerning investing into cities I play quite the opposite from you it seems. Invest enough into armies to keep upgrading the cities with growth and economy and some recruitment. A slower play I understand, I've never finished a long victory on turn 29, but I like using most of the units available to me and that requires upgrading cities.
Its not just with Empire. With most factions the tier 2 and tier 3 growth and economy buildings are very bad ROI, costing more than the tier 1 building and adding less growth and money. You are better off spending your money on more armies, going into negative income, and then sacking and occupying settlements to make money. This way you also gain income through conquest, your lords level faster, you complete quests faster, you gain items and followers, and you keep the factions around you small so you have less threats around you. Even investing in public order to prevent rebellions is a player trap, you are better off not investing in public order buildings, letting the rebellions happen, and farming them with a lord, the city garrison and maybe a few units if necessary, to gain more money and battle experience. In most of my campaigns I only build the tier 1 money and growth buildings in each settlement and only invest in upgrading the main buildings because they increase the free garrison size, and I do plan to play a bit longer than just the campaign victory conditions, I like to go to turn 80 or 100 or so before I get bored. Like you say if you only want the long campaign victory its faster to go full scorched earth, sack every settlement to tier 1 and keep it there. If it gets occupied by the AI thats not a big deal because its easy to reconquer it with how small tier 1 garrisons are. Which is another way that upgrading settlement tiers is a trap. If you invest a lot in getting a city to tier 4 or 5, it will take a lot of turns before you recoup your investment, and if the enemy occupies it during that period, it only goes down 1 tier, now you lost money and you have to use a big expensive army to fight a decently sized free upkeep garrison. The problem is that if the economy scaled better, then the game would be even more snowbally, and its already too much of a snowball. There should be much bigger penalties for large factions, both for the AI and the player. Like the corruption mechanics that older total war games had.
Doesn't the fact that both options work point towards the system actually being quite balanced? Like, Legend is advising to build only economic, you're advising to build only military, and still you're both very successful in your campaigns.
I mean we have to take into consideration that not everyone will play the game fully optimally. The economic system is not a player trap, you dont suffer or detriment yourself for interacting with it. Just because it's not optimal for you to interact with it doesn't make it a player trap.
A big player trap I've seen myself fall into for years is never building the generic structures that cap at tier 3 in major settlements (like your typical growth and standard military buildings). I always thought of it as a wasted use of a slot that can go up to tier 5. Now it may still be true into the late game, but in the early game it absolutely is not, you're still only at tiers 1-3 with your major settlements. And so I've personally seen improvements to my own campaign by building tier-3-capped buildings in my major settlements so I can speed up my pace in the early game regarding economy, growth, and military.
while that may be true for growth or economic buildings that provide value even if there are multiple of them in a province, developing a tier 3 military building in a capital province is a waste when you can easily build it in the other settlements of your province (unless you're at Skavenblight or something like that)
I definitely agree with your statement. I hate upgrading sertlements because by the time i am ready to recruit better tier 1 units, my main army is three provinces away. I feel like i play a majority of the early game with spears, archers, and magic.
Literally the High Elves campaign experience, lol. Spears, archers and magic all the way to the end. The roster has the variety but you don't really have any incentive to get inventive aside from being bored to death with spears and archers.
@@LungDrago Also, you would have to waste a lot of time bringing your main army back, slowly replacing units with new ones and then marching that same army back, all of which could take around 6-10 turns depending on how far and how many units your replacing, that just never is worth it.
Also It has always kind of struck me as odd that every time you start a total war campaign its like your faction has forgotten how to make any cool of the cool shit.
They haven't forgotten; more like haven't developed them yet. But yeah this technology/growth system looks way more reasonable in historical setting, where it's easier to imagine your country becoming more advanced over the course of what is supposed to be history essentialy.
@@Isengrim24 that only works when the later units are more technologically advanced rather than simply better trained. Usually in total war, the later units are just more elite ones and the earlier units are the more basic ones. Only exception I can think of would be Medieval II, even in historical games like Rome II it works this way. The end result being "as our society has become more advanced, we have evolved from having a population entirely consisting of peasants to a population entirely consisting of aristocrats who trained their whole life for war." It really makes absolutely no sense, your entire military shouldnt be able to be pure elites, but thats how it is.
Devs wanted you to make "meaningful choices" when developing cities, and that apparently meant "dumb down the system to the point you don't want to use it anymore".
It kinda sucks that with your example of the Empire that the archer unit is DLC only, so if someone doesn't have that they only have access to the regular spearman without any unit buildings.
@@moawik4864 Archers are also a DLC unit from Markus Wulfhart DLC, unfortunately. So as the OP said, when you don't have that DLC, you're stuck with spamming spearmen which are... uhh... suboptimal, to say the least.
In my opinion Bretonia suffers the least from this, since most of your buildings affect surrounding provinces, this means a bunch of windmills, Taverns and Grail cathedrals means that each time you take a neighbouring province, it loses corruption, has control and growth boosted Similarly, since peasant bowmen are in farms and tier 2 farms give you pox and fire arrows, the only military building you need now is either Barracks or Stables, early game maybe a barracks, otherwise straight to stable, then cathedral later to get grail guardians This means that a major settlement has the 2 military buildings you need and every minor settlement is pure eco You can shift from farms to industry later for more money late game especially when you have maxed every settlement. Similarly since you end up with knights, it means as long as you build a stables every time you capture a major settlement, you can soon recruit knights again, which means you no longer need to recruit from the capital or first few major settlements, you recruit now from the edge and slowly keep pushing
But legend! Favoring low cost, low upkeep spear militia is historically accurate! Agreeing with everything though, but it's difficult finding a good balance. Ideally things should be way more dynamic, giving ways to develop the value of whatever part of your faction.
Having recently gone back to playing Shogun 2, it’s interesting to look at how this system affects the two games differently. It’s still *usually* optimal to build economy first, but because the unit granularity is on a larger scale, and different units matter more, there’s more of an opportunity cost inherent in going all markets and only using ashigaru compared to getting a few early light cav or katana samurai. It feels like more of a legitimate strategic choice.
Shogun 2 follows perfectly that rock&paper&scissors logic, while having a strong base as a game. It turned that simplicity into strength. So you don't get multiple units of the same type on the same tier that perform vastly different (animations making a huge difference in Warhammer..) because the attention to detail when it comes to those mechanics were on another level. When you use those units against units they are supposed to fight, they feel impactful, there isn't screwed up 'momentum' system, there is no 'pushing units around'..
Having played a lot of Shogun 2, I don't think this system works there either. There is a very simple optimal castle build consisting of: Market, PO building (if needed) everywhere and then build the mil chain buildings only on settlements which have a mil related resource (wood for archers, stables for cav, iron for katana). Aditionally, for 90% of the campaign you have no reason to recruit anything outside of Bow, Spear and Katana for two reasons: 1) Building limits; 2) everything else is situational at best. I have lost count of the number of games that I won a total domination victory with nothing past ashigaru spams. Katana is amazing but it doesn't stand up against archers, and the AI can never field enough Katana to pose a serious threat against you. And, if you can't face an enemy army, just ninja spam it so it won't move.
To be fair Shogun 2 has its own issue where its VERY EASY to Optimize your Towns. Namely building Markets everywhere and if needed or for max income the Sake Den, then you build Military buildings or Temples at the Locations which have a special building that boosts those units. That being said, Their is nothing stopping you from NOT doing that and shogun 2s Unit pool "keeps it simple stupid" while you have effectively 3 different tiers of troops, each one does something different. And while Yari Ashigau are TOTALLY OP when in Yari Wall and I don't understand how the AI never figured this out, nothing is really stopping you from "gimping" yourself other then your own Economy. Like by all means make Yari Samurai with Charge Bonus, or Artillery with Better Melee attack for the LOLS. The World is literally your oyster.
One thing I find in my campaigns after Empire and Med 2 is that it draws the focus away from fighting on the field. Everything gets focused on the city and less about the terrain.
The starting disclaimer of 6 minutes got me to almost quit watching, but once the video really starts (6 minutes later lmao) this design criticism makes sense. Very good catch and analysis. Kinda makes you wonder why there are even building slots when the buildings are restricted by the settlement level too. As you said, leaving all building slots open at tier 1, you can just make tier 1 buildings. Nothing unbalanced. Leaving all building slots open is a huge change though. So just putting the tier1 units at tier1 settlement building as you recommended is a great idea. Thanks for making this video, it is game design gold.
Totally agree. I do quite a lot myself too, especially with lords which have some kind of unit theme behind them. Because " not playing the optimal way" can itself become a "player trap", because once you've convinced that you are not doing the best you could do it's no fun anymore.
I agree with you, though in this case I’d think it be better if getting better military units _was_ optimal because it is fun. Like I’ll personally get variety still because it is more fun, but it’d be better if I could do that and it was always the best decision because having less fun paths be optimal seems like a design mistake.
This is why I like playing nurgle so much, they still have that problem in the 10 or so first turn, and it’s worse actually, but the moment you have one province churning out units, being able to ship them to the frontline instantly regardless of what you are standing on feels a lot more flexible. And frankly I just like how having military production in a backline town doesn’t feel like a waste. I honestly would not mind if all factions recruitment worked in a similar way, with towns “producing” units in a real sense rather then just making them available, and them some way to reinforce frontline armies with those stockpiles
Same . The battles are the most fun part of Warhammer and having all my infantry for example dumbed down to line holders or chaff makes it so much more boring. I would rather have the AI give better armies to challenge me instead of making a lot of my units just empty numbers
@@sizzle9475 Same here as well. I play almost exclusively modded (SFO and QoL's) Very hard campaign difficulty + normal battle difficulty + SFO Very hard difficulty, I basically alter the game settings according to my taste. Much more fun this way.
@@piotrkrzeszowski8112 yes. I don't think there is that much difference in AI battle difficulty without stat boosts other than they being more aggressive.
I am a new total war player. Started this year on tww3 and I always hated the building system. Now I play with more building slots mod and I am happy. Hate to choose between growth and unit building etc.
On top of that, Settlement Garisson in M2TW don't need a building slot. You can utilize free-upkeep of militia units in City settlement. From my observations, garisson building in Later TW only benefit the AI in harder difficulty than benefit the player. Y'all know why CA made Later TW like this? it's for streamlining of AI programming, to make the game cheaper and faster. In a game genre that should give developer more time to make the game good and also give player more tools to play with instead of limiting them...
I can't think of any grand strategy game that have an AI that doesn't need those kind of gardrail before it fall apart. Paradox, Civ, CA, whatever you like the AI need it's cheat and the safety net. It's a bit sad but we can't blame CA while every single dev team in the industry stuggle with this. It's not like medieval is even remotly as hard as the newer game anyway the AI is unable to pose a threat to a player who know how a strategy game work.
@@itachiaurion3198 CA have had this garrison system since Rome 2 released 11 years ago. You telling me they couldn't make any improvements to AI in that time to have them understand how to garrison settlements properly? Same goes for the army system. They force you to have a certain number of stacks with a general just cause the AI couldn't handle individual units too well. Restricting the player instead of improving the AI. That's been CA's policy for the last 11 years.
@@itachiaurion3198 But, what i'm saying is not necessarily about AI. It's about Game Design that's so streamlined in Later TW, it would be easier to program the AI, faster and cheaper to produce, and limiting to the player. Remember, you suffer from supply line system in TWWH (player don't get benefit from it) and the AI don't have supply lines in higher difficulty...
@@addochandra4745 I do kinda agree with that even if I see why CA would do this. It's a solution to a big problem in which players want the AI to be able to parttake in the same strength-weakness game as the players, and as a result the game mechanics are made with the idea that the AI should be able to comprehend them. The only solutions for this would be to either massively develop the AI and pour in massive amounts of resources that would otherwise be allocated to another field the game could excel in, or to guardrail the AI into 'engaging' with the rules. Perhaps once AI gets good enough to tackle complex dilemmas this pitfall could be avoided, but it is a fact that the player desire for deep mechanics might collide with the player wanting a fair matchup against the game AI. Same goes for things like player bias, it's a necessary evil to have the AI feel like a legit combatant)
All the points that defend CA by saying it was necessary because AI is hard to code are illogical. The baseline used to be independent movement of units and manually building garrisons with units you recruit. When THAT is the baseline for what we had, AND it works just fine, then all points about having to ditch it are completely invalid. It's part of developing games that your expand on what you already have to make it better. When you handicap your own games with a patchwork solution like CA just so you can make money faster, you are officially neglecting any integrity you might have had.
i really like the way it's done for warriors of chaos as you pointed out. not that i want every other race to be as broken as them in terms of recruitment but having more options initially at least without crippling your economy would make the early armies a lot more fun to fight with
I' ve had the same issue but fortunately there are mods that fix this simply unlocking all buildslots and even adding more slots, so you can build (almost) every building. Which is basically what Legend said at 30:40. The only thing stooping you is your budget and city level. I prefer it much more this way. Thank you modders for fixing TW since Attila with those Hun traits and tech removing buildings!
I'm too dumb to come up with a solution, but out of Legends 2 suggested solutions, I think the 2nd one with unlimited build slots and only being restricted by time and resources and building tiers being unlocked by settlement tiers would be pretty good. I don't expect CA would even entertain the first option of having more available at tier 0, we saw what happened when the dwarves got their warriors at tier 0, they removed it super fast which was really disappointing, they coulda just made miners have an actual use cause currently they're just worse than warriors.
the dwarf warriors got cut because they are objectively the best unit you could've recruited in any scenario. them being available at tier 0 removed variety, not added to it
@@Dr.AvenVon Miners with blasting charge still fill a niche when paired with dorf warriors. The biggest issue here is that base miners are just bad. Their only redeeming quality, AP, doesn't justify not getting a warrior instead. This is also the case for every single roster in this game; some units are straight up obsoleted by same tier units, or a tier higher ones. I think the unity variety issue goes even deeper than what Legend said. Tech trees and Lord skills, too, work against having a balanced army.
I just wanted to say - Thank You for explaining it in depth. Personally some of the issues I started intuitively avoid without even noticing it, but it really gets to think when flashed out like that. And thus this video pushed me to get some mods that are going to make the game much more enjoyable!
currently this might be one of my biggest problem paralel to the speed of the game. wh3 is very fast compared to wh2, many things buil faster and many army clash faster. And while building faster should mean earlier better units, because of more clashes, i recruit less variet and more utility. i love my dwarfs but i cant keep enjoying it when game is pushing me to recruit stack of 20 dwarf warrior even after they removed them from the capital recruitement. i love my lizardmen but i cant keep up with just a hoard of skinks because it takes insaley long to recruit as lizardman. İn this pile of variety with to be 100 lords in this game, i feel optionless and it sucks so much
I 200% agree that unit variety is very limited, and getting military building most of the time is very unoptimal even on lower difficulties than legendary.
dont want to nitpick, just a respectful hint: at 15:09 you said we went from 17 swordsmen to 24 spearmen and the scales tipped in favor of the cheaper unit or the larger army. that is factually however not quite true because you would also have to take into account that you would be able to use the 2000 gold on swordsmen as well.meaning its not 17vs24 but rather 20vs24.
Interesting video Legend. I'm not really someone that has ever tried to play total war as optimally as possible so I've never really saw these as issues with the games but more as challenge to overcome within the system that's presented. I typically roleplay my campaigns however so maybe that's a big factor in why I don't "see" the issues. Also and I think this was a big point is that I see the end game as the worst part of these Warhammer games I feel like there ends up being the least amount of variety in my armies (that's when I end up optimising unintendedly), I think the early mid game is where the fun is and the most engaging but the key difference is that you play very very aggressively. I play very defensively and prefer a slow burn. If I was constantly chasing optimal play and being super aggressive then I would probably agree with you whole heartedly....... that isn't to say that you play the game wrong in fact it's far from it, the games need to better support your kind of playstyle to be more engaging. If you play like me at a glacial pace then the games are set up perfectly to support it but at your pace nope all those Dev gameplay design choices might as well be thrown out of the window. now with that said I can agree that the current system can absolutely be improved but for me all I want is more complexity and a deeper system. Less player traps is always welcome however no matter what way the cake the is sliced.
Not gona lie I would LOVE a taking your game to the next level series! Everytime you release a video like this I always find some piece of info that helps my game tremendously! I’m a casual player and don’t have time to put in the grind hours to learn all the ins and outs so my progression for getting better stalls sometimes until I see the next video of yours like this when I feel like I have another piece of the puzzle on how to be better. Love this video thank you so much!
I'm so glad you are calling this out. 99% of my campaings are just crap-spamming until I get bored and move to another campaing. By the time I got my first province to level 5 I've already moved on. I don't even remember, when was the last time I recruited a legit steam tank (not an Elector Count) or a dragon. At the end of tha day, I, basically, do not have this units in my game, only as an enemy.
@LegendofTotalWar I disagree with the solutions you had presented, one of the key aspects you had placed forth in favor of Medieval 2 and kinda overlooked at the same time is the recruitment limitations which are dictated by a mixture of capacity, buildings and building levels, and locality and made it to one of the best recruitment systems for TW. It wasn't perfect, the population wasn't impacting like it did in Rome, and there is to much availability of units from buildings, but it is such an amazing recruitment system cause it simulates at an abstract way the fact that people is one resource but another is time to get the materials up - armor and weapons were really expansive and took a long time to create this is why most armies carried the cheaper equipment. Sure buildings as I mentioned are part of the chain of reasons why TW is suffering (and I completely agree with your assessment cause it killed variety in my armies as well) but they are far from being the main cause. I would bet that your armies will still be without variety even if the building restrictions will change, what it will only end up doing is just giving you a faster reach to the spam unit you will see fit. The replenishing over time unit caps from Medieval 2 was great for encouraging keeping units alive since replenishing took away from the cap (when not bugging it) and made stacking OP armies much harder and longer process, that and the combination of locality promised no sudden OP armies will just pop to existence anywhere. If CA wants to fix WH's recruitment issue they need to bring that back and improve by at least simulating population (if not Rome style which they are against) then at least maybe copy the idea of Pharaoh's 'work force' and apply it for both buildings and recruitment hence limiting the amount of spam. Another key way to fix unit variety is actually creating variety within units beyond just a few stats - I have gave for years more than a few examples which I see people including streamers pick up - such as giving miners the ability to dig under walls and pop behind them after a delay (based on distance?) Or giving only specific units the 'ass ladders' such as Skaven ninja's(stealthy) or Spiders/monsters (fast climbing) that can climb while the rest of the units should only be limited to towers which can be destroyed. And one aspect that CA didn't play into to create variety, which they seem to finally listen and might add with the following DLC is to add variety on the campaign. I gave examples as adding a stat for units like pistoliers which the more you have allows for more vision/detection for the army (CA said something along the lines of wolf raiders will get more raid per unit) this kind of changes creates real diversity. At the moment you don't use different units cause all units can climb walls, all units can attack gates (which they shouldn't) and besides stats most of them are about the same. The problem is that this demands a lot of AI work and CA don't want to invest and people let them get away with it.
gives also alot more rp like you have that of meh units that helped you threw the game and earned themselves a name instead yeah you are legendary but that tier 2 is better than you are on lvl 9 BYEBYE
@user-yw9ys3dz7x Some warband mods are a submod for unit expansions. I am using one expansion for cathay. There should only be one or two noteworthy warband mods on steam but I don't know the name of them.
I think you make a good point about unit variety but I think your solution is a bit heavy handed (I will ignore the fact that sometimes it's just more fun to not play optimally as that is 100% personal preference but one you should totally consider!!!). I think it would be far more interesting if they made keeping those early game military buildings actually worth the economic sacrifice, then it becomes a strategic choice of "do I play greedy and go for more eco or do I play safe and recruit better units". Basically I think the real problem lies in that the difference between a tier 0 and a tier 1 unit is usually way too small, although I've certainly played factions where it felt worth it to go for a better unit early (for example cathay's jade warriors are far superior to peasant spears in my opinion). Aside from making units better what if the military building was just better? Maybe a small garrison boost? Maybe move the replenishment from the growth to the barracks? or make the barracks increase gold from battles in nearby regions/province? What if (with empire for example) it increased the prestige gains in some way? A small diplo bonus (to make early trade deals easier)? Anything really, just something to make the choice more interesting than "money building best always". If I was going to stick to your solution I would argue for making the additional units on tier 0 specific to the starting province capital that way it remains as an early game bonus only.
I have always been annoyed that the original Rome Total War still has the best city building in the whole series. I would Also Argue that the Rome Total War 2 is where the problems with the city managment really starts.
While I do agree on the point of two armies with lower grade units is generally better than one expensive army. You did fail to add in the supply lines cost as well when you were doing the math.
Tbh it's easier for those of us who have or are close to aphantasia. Actually SEEING something is the best way to visualise and thus communicate it, even if it's a simple thing it can take different people different levels of thinking to have the conclusion. Plus you don't actually divide/multiply by 10/100/1000 a lot outside of school so it's not an automatic thing to add and move decimal points anymore. Maybe I'm just lazy though 🤣
I feel like the issue of Supply Lines was overlooked. In Legends example of being able to recruit 20+ Tier 0 units as opposed to other units: You actually could not recruit that many due to the extra SL cost. Granted it may still be more tactically better to have two lesser armies vs one tougher army, but I feel the monetary advantage is less obvious. Maybe it’s better now in WH3 with the reduced SL costs vs WH2, where the costs were ridiculous.
Concerning the units take at10:00, I think that's heavily influenced by you playing legendary difficulty. On normal battle difficulty, it can be very important that your line unit beats the other line unit, which just doesn't happen on legendary
But Mr.Legend ... if we already had all the unit variety from the get-go, why would we build anything other than the same two buildings in every settlement? I'm one of those guys that will build a building because it suits a need right now, but sell it later on to either replace it or move it in a free slot in a minor settlement just because it won't go past level III and it would be a waste of buildslot in a major settlement. In fact I rarely find that I don't have enough free slots -- I'm mostly annoyed the game will keep on reminding me "I have a free build slot" and the player trap, in my opinion, is that it encourages you to spend money to fill that slot, and then you're gonna want to upgrade that building to level III of course, just to make a notification go away. The points you raise are specifically about the early game, but I would argue the problem is that you start with a measly tier I city. And quite often the game sets you up with another player trap that being the faction you're at war with. For example, I've gotten quite good results starting as Kairos and immediately sueing for peace with my pox riddled neighbours. Or, starting as Count Noctilus, the scenario wants you to go to war with the donut right away. You can simply choose not to and choose your own destiny instead.
I don't know about that. Sure, as you mentioned by the time you get to tier 3 in your home province the frontline has moved, but you probably can afford one extra general that will recruit 2 reiksguard, 2 great sword and bring them to your main army. Meanwhile Karl can keep summoning the elector counts. I personaly prefer having limited slots. Correct me if i'm wrong but in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 city building was basically a priority order. Something like mine>port>farm and upgrade city center and PO when needed. With limited building slots come choices you need to make and province specialization. As an exemple SFO does a very good job at making that part of the game more interesting.
I think the issue here is mainly about the different uses of military units, which is really prevalent in newer TW games. In the end you only ever have 3 roles for combat units: melee, ranged and cavalry. That makes it so that even with a big roster, there is always a more valuable option compared to others to fulfill each role; for instance in the empire, halberdiers are virtually the only melee infantry you'll ever need, while a few reiksgard are enough for cavalry and crossbowmen for ranged. One way AoW4 and older TW games avoided this was with unit abilities; you could have phalanx, shieldwall, whips, flaming/heavy arrows... Higher tiers not only meant better stats but also more tactical options, which is what made them valuable compared to low tier spam. Rome II does that very well, even though spam is really strong in autoresolve
Way older games adressed this was by having a much more limited roster. In Rome greeks had only 1 Hoplite type per tier. In Med you were lucky if you had 1 light and 1 heavy inf/cav that you could recruit from. In Warhammer everyone is so spoiled for choice that most of your roster can be safely ignored.
@khankhomrad8855 The reason why I took Rome II as reference is that it's a game where (some factions at least) really have a huge roster on par with WH3, and with mercenaries you could build virtually any army you wanted. But you always had an incentive to choose variety (which was synonymous for higher tiers) whenever available thanks to unit abilities which made each high tier unit distinctive and strong in a specific role. As Egypt for instance, Galatian guards were really strong as assault troops vs walls, Pikemen were immovable, Royal Peltasts were fast legionaries with more ammo, chariots could mow down chaff, charge cavalry could decimate even high tier units with a single rear charge, slingers were great when flanking while archers had long range and building/morale damage...
I've personally preferred the system that forces you into getting more constrained recruitment, but I think that it's held back because of poor balancing and in the system where you need different generals which are also very costly. If you have several provinces and each one is able to focus on specific types of production thanks to a landmark, it's fun specializing that one province to create this one unit type and accessing a new unit type may come with the need to conquer a specific province to gain that production. In Shogun 2, since the roster was simplified compared to total war, the buildings felt more comparable in value when it came to recruitment to one another while some of the buildings in total war warhammer feel very disparate in utility. Especially infantry recruitment can feel like you aren't gaining anything of worth by keeping or upgrading it, but that's more because of how many weaknesses those kinds of line holder infantry seem to have. Also, since I can't just have a cheapo stack of 4 elite archers built in a province that provides an accuracy boost, it feels much harder to consolidate together forces from many specialized provinces into one large, complete army. I don't think that it's a problem that's clear and distinct, I think it depends on what you want out of the game. For me, having a province like Nuln become a place that only produces guns and then shipping those guns to somewhere in Altdorf or to a frontline army is more interesting than making a more open and easy recruitment process or one that encourages loads of military recruitment buildings. Even in games like Medieval or Empire I preferred focusing almost entirely on economic buildings and then pushing specialized troops from a small number of specialized provinces. But for other players, I can certainly understand them wanting to just be able to get diverse armies quickly or anywhere without having to think about bizarre logistics trains to move around small groups of specialist troops.
You know what would fix this? Dogs of War DLC. A Mercenary system which would offer availability of diverse units, possibly/probably up to and including units from other factions, right from the start of the game, if in limited amounts and with a degree of unreliability.
I guess I'm in the small group that loves Atilla. I honestly liked how the building trees were very complex in the sense that making a income or food area was very different from investing in military. The sanitation mechanic was something I enjoyed because there was more to do than just build everything to tier 3 and thats it.
It would be so cool to have a mercenary system that would look like how it is in Medieval. You'd have access to units that would be available depending on the local population and maybe also of the surrounding regions, that would be more expensive than what you can recruit from your actual settlement, with a limited capacity that would replenish itself such as the warriors of chaos recruitment pool, a limited tier depending on the tier of the capital from the province and some additional cost depending on what faction the units are from. For example maybe empire units would simply cost a bit more money, while nurgle units would cost more money but also spread some nurgle corruption where your army goes. Greenskin/ogre units could reduce local growth cause you have to feed them more than humans or something, it would allow for way more variety and replayability for our campaigns. Also, we would need 2 more skills in the red line of generals : 1 that would boost all mercenary units, 1 that would boost all allied troops. And some of the already existing red line skills need to be merged. Most factions have 6 or 7 skills right there if I'm not mistaken, I believe there should be all melee infantry, all ranged units (except cav), all cav and monsters, which would make only 3 skills + the 2 new ones, for a total of 5. Requiring less skillpoints to boost units would massively help to build variety aswell. You could have some armies fully made of mercenary units and only need 1 of these skills, which would still be balanced by their additional cost, or build armies w/o any mercs or allied units and need at most 3 of them which is fine. Maybe also add a loyalty mechanic such as the one we have on Skaven, Dark elves or Vampire Coast generals, but that would be specific to each unit from the army and that could be influenced by a variety of things that would also depend on the faction they're from (fighting often for Khorne, taking captives for Slaanesh/Dark Elves, maybe add in something similar to WoC Authority aswell, ...), and also some things that would affect all of them the same way (winning/losing battles, the amount of casualties, etc).
In my opinion, you're just imposing the way you play the game onto others in order to to feel better about your personal burnout. You do not need to metagame on any difficulty in this game, including legendary. Just because something is the more optimal doesn't automatically make it the right one, or more importantly the most fun. I would imagine that most people play WH3 because of the fantasy and lore it provides not to simply play a RTS. Everything else I mostly agree with. The game needs to continue making changes and experiment with new avenues of mechanics for players.
Archers are an expansion only unit. If those are not available, ruining basic spears will not allow you to win battles. RE: more armies, they cost exponentially more due to supply lines. Good enough armies that can take a garrison+army are great. If the army is not good enough, it's efficient to make it more expensive rather than make a second army
I feel like the easiest work around for this issue is to allow the player to buy extra buildslots, maybe 2500 per slot and have buildings have unit slots depended on settlement size. E.G At tier one Settlement with T1 barracks allow the recruitment of 1 crossbow men, 4 shields/swords. Allow player to level up the settlement to tier 2 to have 2 Crossbow men, 6 T1 troops for the T1 barracks. Have barracks be upgradeable to increase unit cap as well, but only when the settlement is T2. So a T2 settlement with a T2 barrack could recruit 4 crossbow men and 8 T1 troops.
I wonder if the problem is more subtle than that, and that’s the need to min/max or optimise play. Even if CA make the changes you suggest won’t there still be an optimal play. The fact that there is only one optimal play is the problem, surely it’s about making a variety of approaches equally feasible?
My god the guy spends 10min yapping instead of talking about the subject. This is one of the best examples of: "don't click away, I will tell you what I made this video about in a few minutes". Perfect way to farm minutes on the video instead of actually giving people useful content.
Another option for Empire is to add a low tier cavalry unit, always felt they missed that. But you're right, on my last legendary Franz campigns I would either demolish the barracks right away, or build a few spears with shield before demolishing it anyway.
the shit I always do IS just spam the weakest possible units and gobble up entire regions, once I have an entire region I spam the growth buildings to maximum first in each settlement, rushing the minor settlements to lvl3 so that I can have a military building, economy building and walls while the capital building builds the uh, actually important buildings that go past T3
For your game style, when you move forward without stopping, you are fully right.I like your videos, and fully understand you. Keep up the communication and never forget, most important is that you enjoy it, we enjoy to watch when you play with a smile on. Here is my opinion, if you ever read this: For me who expnad in the begining, then farming and builing up my empire then continue to expand, so enemies got stornger and more interesting, it is not a trap. But I fully understand you, your style and why you not like global rec time over 1 turn. I tried your style and it was good but the game become easy. Like destroying everyone and expand in the first 40 turn, after that you have an empire already which is unstoppable. I think if you put some early endgame, but not on 200% but like 100% or 125%, it would not be an enemy army spanning but a fun endgame (yeah, trun 40 end game) challenge (high level heroes, maxed research) with not punchbag enemy. I believe 200% is just overspamming and AI cannot handle it well. With 1-2 race, not endtime....that can be overkill.... Wish you health and happines. Ciao
I actually like the concept of limited build slots. However, I do not like the implementation of this concept in TWW. Unlimited build slots usally mean that it is optimal to build everything and buildings become just a chore. But I agree with you that lack of unit variety is a problem. The most fun in the any game comes from making importand, meaningfull choices. If there is one optimal strategy (for example, building only economy), then it is not a choice. I think specialization of cities (or later in campagin, provinces) could lead to interesting choices. The percentage bonuses, like in Medival could be a starting point.
I have never really though about this "restriction" (as you call it this way) before. I guess it came in order to make the game either more slow paced, give balance between factions in a way or it was purely a design choise. It isn´t inherently bad as I feel you make it be, some examples I can give you are (and it will counter argument myself here) in mods like Rome 2 total war Divide et Impera, where certain provinces are more streamlined into building and working as a more specialized thing (like how Asia is meant to be an industrial centre to make industrial money, or Sikelia being a food generating province) you can build it however you want but making it specialized greatly helps economy or recruitment as a whole. The other one I'd believe to be 1212 AD in Atilla where you can almost build everything (iirc) in a province but you must wait it's development to acess all building slots and all building tiers (tied to growth and town lvl) similar to how you proposed to fix this issue. This exemples help to set a pace for the campaigns, it kinda forces the player to play for a long run, to take some time to build up an empire/kingdom and it's army. That being said, Warhammer and other games might not be the case (mostly warhammer) where the player should be incentivized to mix and build up an army from the get to, as the battles are the main sell point of this title. And limiting building slots and recruitment kinda flashes out your point. All in all, I'm here to say that for me it will really depent on what period, objective or intention of the game is, say a game about slowly creating an empire can work very well with those restrictions, but a game about holding an empire togheter (like Atilla), expanding an already powerfull empire/nation or one focuses much more on fights or being faster paced this system really does fell a bit off.
18 units of swordsmen is going to destroy 21 units of spearmen... I dont think its even close. Also, you are missing the point with the units earlier on. What you're talking about is true for the Mid game. Better to have multiple low cost armies than few big hitters. HOWEVER Especially in the early game, recruitment slots is a huge cap. In the first 10-20 turns, you need to build up a decent force as fast as possible. Recruiting 2 swordsmen per turn is better than recruiting 2 spearmen per turn. Additionally, Creating a new army is a detriment because of the Lord's own upkeep. 2nd army's lord upkeep is going to balance out the upkeep difference between the units. Also 2nd army's spearmen is going to cost more because it's a generic lord not Franz with his discounts. It's mostly not worth it. Cmon LegendOfTW... you aren't the kind of dude to make such mistakes.
The thing about unit caps is something that made playing Chaos Dwarves so refreshing and interesting. It was like rediscovering how each army having their own "identity" by necessity because how you molded your campaign and such. Hell, I even started playing with the other factions like that because of the feel, accostumed I was with the more "efficient doomstack" I forgot how fun it was to play with variety of things. Hell, I got so accostumed with it that even now that I'm playing medieval II again I'm having kind of trouble de-coupling with the cookie cutter settlement and armies to expand further.
I dont particularly enjoy the build slot and often play with mods that provide more slots for capitals. I think Mideval's system is cool but it was very clunky, I remember not really understanding it at all when I was younger, and replenishing your higher tier troops felt very punishing I didnt want to use them.
Hey, I actually like the limited build slots, it forces you to think carefully on which provinces to develop military, and which to develop economically, and when to use surplus. On that note, you still have a good idea, and it would be similar to how they changed the dawi tech trees givin you easier access to ironbrakers, artillery, and the standard dawi infantry at tier 2; before the change, dawi had to rely on quarrelers, some sort of shield, and grudge trowers for half of the campaing
To be fair 22 empire spearmen vs 17 empire swordsmen ends up as a pretty comfortable victory got the swordsman. I know that is ignoring the spearman's value from anti large but it is also ignoring the swordsman's value from having missile block.
Well don't get me wrong. But are you arguing that there is not enough variety if you go for an "efficient" playstyle? Because let's be honest with Vampire counts you can raise the dead different units, but the best way is still skeleton spam so, I don't really see the point here. What I would criticize is that you have spearmen and spearmen with shields. It's just artificial variety that doesn't do anything and should therefore be implemented like the upgrade system in rome2 for example.
While I can appreciate the frustrations of limited build slots I do feel it adds more faction identity? Chaos Dwarves having a handful of provinces you build up into these factories churning out powerful units while the broader empire pillages the land. Or normal Dwarves with the deeps playing tall and holding onto very little land comfortably in the mountains. Or Green skins really having to play wide to have a viable military and conquer as much land as possible to have armies that pair well with confederated legendary lords.
I mean I can kinda get it for strictly underground settlements, but like... are the greenskins *really* running out of physical room to build things..? They just kinda sprawl over endless expanses. I somehow find it difficult to believe that the entire western badlands cannot support whatever the orcish equivalent of a military industrial complex is, especially since said equivalent is probably more or less just a place for said orcs to hang out, sleep, and murder eachother on the regular.
Honestly the whole "Optimal" building thing is much more of an issue on higher difficulties. All of this works perfectly fine on Normal and lower difficulties as thats what everything is designed to be played around. Worrying about min-maxing is more of a Very Hard/Legendary issue as you dont really have very much room for error.
Personally, I think a lot of it comes down to restraint on optimization. It is a strategy game and I feel like part of the strategy element should be allowing people to run suboptimal strategies rather than designing the "best in slot" to be the most fun and best way to play. That said, I do agree more could be done both to make early barrack units feel more varied.
Hi Legend. I fully agree with you. And I was wondering, do you think the possibility of units being able to move on the map without a general would solve alot of these issues? Cities and their recruitment buildings could stay more relevant this way. And it maybe allows you to have different recruitment buildings in different regions, allowing for a majority of economic gain while also having recruitment options.
This is a major issue for playing on legendary. You hurt your campaign so much by not having two armies of the most basic crap available from the settlement building vs getting units from your t1 military buildings. Waiting until you have t2 buildings is even worse for your start since it puts you so far behind turn wise even with the power jump. I like the idea of full build slots available, but an alternative that I think could work, the entire roster being available but sustaining more than a few units should bankrupt the player until later buildings reduce their recruitment/upkeep costs. Also reducing turns to recruit, kind of like the knights of the blazing sun iirc. Sure you can recruit a land ship or steam tank at the start but it's going to take 5 turns and have an upkeep of 1500 gold type of idea. Gives the player options to play with instead of needing to spam crapstacks because the AI attacks your weakest and furthest settlement from your army. (Another issue all together where the AI feels like random barbarians from civ instead of following any semblance of how a race fights in warhammer.) Love the video legend and what you keep pushing for in total war. We all want the game to be better in the end and this is something that would make it so much more fun.
I disagree. My top 3 changes from Medieval 2 to TWW: 1. Units cannot exist without a lord 2. Replenishment system 3. Building slot system. I'm not gonna bother writing the wall of text as I have done in the past, it was not a rewarding experience. Just casting my vote. I hope things stay as they are and NOT move back into the medieval 2 direction.
You have an interesting idea as to how to solve the issue I think. As another idea thrown into the ring: each settlement has fewer slots, but each settlement has two tabs, an Infrastructure tab, and a Military tab. You can only build structures of the corresponding type in the corresponding tab. Improving a settlement adds one slot to each of the two tabs. This way, you'd develop evenly without giving up unit variety, while also still keeping limited build slots a consideration and making different provinces unique in terms of what they offer. Thoughts?
I completely understand you, but i do play on normal difficulty because i like to have fun and use variety from the start and feel the satisfaction of having a slight better unit, and that appllies on normal difficulty, whereas i dont have to play the optimal way but rather have fun. Nevertheless the suggestions you made are totally plausable and will better everyone experience and hence there is no valuable argument not to do it. Another point is that the way you play is to have maximum difficulty and play the absolutely best path aways, and by playing that way you may solve one problem, but sooner or later you will find another problem, and it will be repetitive no matter what, cus there's aways a optimal way, that said some changes can me made into the game to soften that.
I know people are a bit annoyed about the long disclaimer. I would have put a time stamp but I really needed people to hear that as much as they might not like it. I've done this kind of video before without disclaimers and it's made the videos efforts go completely to waste due to the bad faith actors straw manning the arguments.
So far the disclaimer has worked quite well. There has been no post on reddit and the conversation has been pretty civil. Some people are disagreeing and that's completely fine. I have removed a few comments that were arguing against points I didn't make but that's fine if it's contained here.
In future I don't think I'll need to do a long disclaimer and since this video is doing very well I probably will make another critique. Let me know in the replies here if there's a total war system that really pisses you off and you want me to dismantle it.
The only thing that triggers my autism is when you upgrade a settlement to tier 2, it will sometimes move the building in slot 1 to slot 2, and maybe even again to slot 3 when upgraded again. I usually build the same buildings in the same slots in multiple towns/cities, and it bothers me when one town has the buildings in different spots. Annoying bug that has been around forever.
It feels like the only people who can be angry about it are those who don't understand a game design at all. Disclaimer was too long, yeah, but the message is more significant for it being undermined by people focusing on unimportant stuff.
No doubt, I get it, your last video about the TWW3 discussion showcased so much intellectual dishonesty and bad arguments from the community. Total shit show out here.
All good.
My biggest issue right now would be that vassals or sometimes even military allies (at least for one of their armies) should have it their top priority to fulfill my war coordination target, whatever that might be. Doesn't matter if it means death or attrition for that army.
Or that once it got damaged, the army will retreat, heal up but then go straight back to fulfilling the mission.
It all sounds good to me man.
“With a basic, shit settlement…”
Nottingham citizens: 😭
... and it is the birthplace of Warhammer!
Could be worse, could be Birmingham
@@MrAH2010 "The Black Planet [Birmingham] has almost no visible light and due to that no one wants to go there. The population has become both linguistically and culturally isolated."
It could indeed be much worse.
As long as you take a stab proof vest, nottingham is a delightful place. Lots of nice hotels, coffee shops, parks etc.
@@MrAH2010 Or Stevenage
I do agree on tier 0 units dominating most early campaigns. I usually entitely skip tier 1 units too and then start recruiting from tier 2 and 3 for most of the game from midgame onwards.
I think the RoRs are supposed to be the "mercenary" equivalent in twwh3, filling out the ranks. Problem is RoRs (and similarly recruited units, like blessed spawnings or elector count units or ogre mercenariea) are way more valuable as emergency units due to how instant recruitment works. + why get RoRs to pad out the depleted ranks when you can just recruit tier 0 units in newly conquered settlements anyways.
uhhhh rors arent atleast supposed to be filler units
they are supposed to be just better units that have made a name
(yeah sometimes they arent worth it but usually they are decently better to sometimes op)
effectivly yeah they can be used as a critikal fast army
@scrollexdestiny quick to recruit on demand units that you can get while out on campaign sounds an aweful lot like mercenaries to me (atleast mechanically)
They're supposed to work like veterans, elite versions of regular units, but most of the time they aren't worth it and like you said, they're basically mercenaries to fill gaps when you need a few extra units quickly. The RoR system is really disappointing honestly. It should have been made similar to Shogun 2 Avatar Veteran units but CA lacked the skill or effort to implement a system with an army painter like that
Yeah, HElves are the best example, there's no reason to not just go Archers + Spearmen for a big chunk of the early game until you get Silverin Guards (and even those are optional) and Sisters...
@@scrollexdestiny What something is suppose to be in lore, and how it actually ends up being in gameplay can differ. They're suppose to be the best of their thing, but the reality is they're mechanically just mercs you hire in a pinch.
if you have the ability to not soil yourself when someone has a different opinion to you the video starts at 6:30. I don't blame Legend for starting his videos that discuss specific features with a large disclaimer that can essentially boil down to "don't be intellectually dishonest and try to understand other viewpoints"; his detractors have consistently shown there is no depth to which they will not sink. But it is a bit annoying to listen to as a functioning human who can have a disagreement with someone and not instantly try and ruin their day.
Not that I disagree with anything legend suggested as a change it is a really good idea that he proposed to have more unit choices from the base settlement building.
Is Legend specifically targetted or is that just reddit being reddit (refuge of the worst kind of fan boys and fantasists)?
@@paddya3304 Mostly reddit being reddit. Anyone who ever voiced even an ounce of criticism will invariably get unjustly dismissed or attacked by the worst reddit mobs.
@@paddya3304 I think that Legend gets it a bit worse because according to some he plays the game 'wrong'. He plays hyper optimal, with a lot of things like only 1 unit type in 6 different armies or 1 wizard getting 20k gold value turn 20.
I have seen many say that this personally affects them because CA will then code the AI to try (and fail) to counter these hyper optimal play-styles. So it is seen as Legend 'ruining' the game for others. Which is insane. So as a result anything legend says is taken as a personal slight.
You're a scholar and a gentleman!
Thank you
It's why I always have a soft spot for campaigns that have alternative recruitment methods. Rakarth, Markus Wulfheart, Throt, Nurgle etc are much more interesting and dynamic campaigns because of unit availability. The most recent new factions are outstanding for starting variety with Tamurkhan and Malakai and hopefully the next DLC continues that trend.
Agreed (this was one of the big reasons I like Nurgle); in addition, it favours races that can play well around chaff units, like Vampires with their super-skeleton endless armies etc (I also like VC, and this may be part of why).
I think this might be why some of the campaigns I had the most fun trying as a new player were horde factions. Nakai and Beastmen might not have normal territory control or anything, but playing whack-a-mole with rival factions retaking settlements was a lot more fun than trying to figure out where to stuff all my essential buildings so that my armies can properly defend. Hordes get basically infinite building slots, too, so finances and tempo are the only opportunity cost to think about
Don't forget the vampire counts, you don't even need to invest in military buildings outside of for hero recruitment. The buff to raise dead was a great change for them.
I love the Tamurkhan campaign because it feels like you are actually rallying a vast horde behind you as you march south, growing in power and influence with every victory until you become and endgame crisis tier threat with four doomstacks moving around as a single, unified, world ending host.
Nakai is one of my favourites for this exact reason
The real Total War Warhammer was the player traps we stepped into along the way.
Now I'm gonna post on reddit about how Вейн-э5б said we need MORE player traps ahahahahaha
it's a good joke, because it's kinda true; when i first played the game i didn't know anything and fell for a lot of the traps so i thought the game was kinda challenging becasuse it set me up for failure. but the more i learned the game the worse it got. kinda the opposite of what you want from a video game.
@@iopohable I wish I was joking but I'm not. This game isn't that challenging but insufferably unfair to the player.
What bothers me the most is that once a city is fully developed it often becomes useless since it is at the center of your Empire. Sure I can build a new army there with all the big powerful punchers I want but then it takes 5 or 6 turns to get it t the frontline where I ACTUALLY need it. And with the AI having little to no restrictions on their army building. (Looking at you skarsnik and your 4 stacks of Skulkers and Nightgoblins). Its hard to match some of the other races fighting power. Especialyl in early game but Lategame too. The amount of times I wanted to scream cause I Conquered the northern Worlds Edge Mountains just to turn south towards Eight Peaks and find myself just outnumbered to hell and back by Clan Morrs is unreal. (Also Warp fire throwers are completelly unbalanced in Autoresolve so having to fight all those battles by hand is a slog.)
Sorry for the ramble.
I agree with Legend. Give us either nlimited buildslots or atleast all slots from the start so i can get to work on the units I need as quickly as possible. Funny enough that dwarves suffer from this a lot since there is many great buildings at tier 2 but no space to build them.
Yeah, having all your upgraded military recruitment buildings half or even a whole continent away from where you actually need troops is a real annoyance
to be fair thats how it works in real life too (minus the AI shenanigans)
Funnily, chaos dwarfs suffer from this the least (but still do). Late game you can take a province capital, settle it at tier V, rush build a manufactory (and other buildings as necessary) and instantly be able to start recruiting a decent army wherever you are.
I felt this problem so hard on my recent Kairos campaign. Took so long to build the recruitment buildings for anything not a chaos warrior or a horror that by the time I could recruit anything high tier, the frontline was 10 turns away. Ended up with 8 armies of pink horrors. Kairos himself is a heroic victory machine, but every other battle got super boring real fast.
I really enjoyed how some older games handle this - more developed provinces that are further away from the front line could have roads as an upgrade, or even a railroad in Fall of the Samurai (a FANTASTIC game you should play if you enjoy historical total war games). The more recent "hero general" who has to actually GO to a province to recruit units, rather than recruiting them and sending them somewhere, was probably meant to incentivize you not to have one single military province and a ton of economic ones fueling it, but I feel the logistics of the old style worked better, and gave you an opportunity to potentially ambush reinforcements (or have yours be ambushed!)
It still bothers me that all the building icons look the same no matter what tier they are.
Edit: Yes, I know there are mods that fix this, I use them myself. It's just a shame that this is not something that is in base game.
There’s loads of mods to improve this but agreed the base game should have this feature where the icons are grander when you upgrade them
Building progression icons mod fixes this but yeah it's ridiculous
@Killerkwoi13 Yep, I'm a huge fan of the mod Building Progression Icons III. You spend a significant amount of time during a campaign managing your settlements, so it's a huge shame CA hasn't implemented something like this already.
@George_Rakkas Yep, one of my favorite mods. Such a small detail and yet such a big impact in my campaigns imo
I mean...some don't. But the big huge Roman Numeral in the top half of it is different atleast
Can confirm it's in pharaoh, and its a bit worse since key economy buildings are in the settlement capital competing with the best recruitment buildings
Honestly I think the splitting of resources also makes the problem worse. I like have Wood Stone bronze ect but I never have enough building slots for them
You don't need recruitment buildings in each settlement, just a few in key province capitals in order to have good native units and your own faction good units (especially if they have some low value resource like wood or really easy to get resource like food) . The real problem is that most of the buildings are useless in some way or another and some resource types require quite a lot of buildings in order for them to become valuable (don't have enough experience but playng as Ninurta rn it really bothers me to make 3 separate buildings for bronze and waste like 14 workforce on them) while the others often don't have enough good buildings and you either have to build something you don't need or to not fill the slot entirely.
It's also worse because of the resource systems, where not all settlements can produce all resources you need. Idk what they were thinking with that one
To be fair, if those two are competing with each other it is still kinda like in Medieval 2 with the city vs. castle lines.
Variety armies are hampered not only by build slots but also by the skill tree. The red army wide buffs usually apply to one unit type only which often means units from one specific building chain. Because I'm maximizing archers with my red line skills, I build mostly archers and some frontline so they do not die and cavalry, monsters etc. go unused because I don't buff them and I don't have buildings for them either.
Yeah,I was thinking, perhaps the skills should be separated by tiers of troops instead of type. Militia, professional, elite, rather than how they are now. That way you can get a broad variety of troops and not feel you're putting suboptimal troops in comparison to their lord. Plus I could see a fun transition halfway through where you have to build up a new general because you're transitioning from militia to professional troops for your primary army
@@timothym9398 Yes, that definitely sounds like it would work better than the current system. Maybe there would be an issue of millita/professional being the only real choices and elite being mostly unused, because you get access to them much later and they're expensive. But it's not necessarily a problem of the new skills, it's more becauese of the nature of WH3 being too quick and because elite units are generally awkward to field - require weird buildings, take long to recruit, require a lot of cash.
That's part of why I use the mod for more skill points per level, just to upgrade more units and incentivise a variety of unit types. It's otherwise incentivising a doomstack playstyle.
@@timothym9398 for some reason this never came to my mind, but as soon as i read your comment i was like, ofc that would be so much better.
I feel like the red line would be better suited to heroes and not stack (so, like a buff applied in an area around them). That way, you can have as many heroes with different red lines as needed. Then do something more interesting as a replacement for the lord.
It realy annoys me when I Take a settlement with a port, That i cant destroy it. On some factions a port does nothing and I cant even build something usefull instead
Reasource port settlement when playing warrior of chaos 😢
For real. Ive been so used to that i dont even think about it anymore but yeah sometimes ports are just useless.
Dont forget how the basic port doesn't have a tier 2, making it so that it exists in a weird limbo of the player not wanting to prioritize leveling the minor settlement docks
And lets not talk about how for most races docks don't even add garrison only income bonus and others it does give garrison like the High Elfs , tbh id prefer if docks were like a bonus slot ... the same with materials
Still don't know why they nerfed special ports . Erengard, Marianburg and similar settlements used to matter because they were a crazy good port. Now they are just a slightly above average economic province
Please make more videos like this. I really want Total War to be the best it can be and to do that people need to make reasoned critique.
CA should absolutely not listen to this, they have been milking fans with garbage systems for years. Good, well designed systems would need more money and inspiration, it's all about the bottom line.
LoTW will shill warhammer no matter what, he will always come back groveling to CA so they have no incentive to change. He will always give them free advertisement.
I think people stopped the reasoned critique because Creative Assembly isn't interested in improving Total War games. They apparently make much more money off wicked DLC practices and art assets. If this weren't the case, 20-year-old games wouldn't be better than the games we have today. But they are.
@@MantisGod8815 He made his hobby into his profession. Of course he will try to preserve that. Totally understandable and legitimate. But he isn't "groveling to CA". As far as I know he even has a difficult history with them.
@@shadowblaster124 yeah, what we need for better TW games is competition, new developers with new ideas.
I really LOVED the ability to get all buildings in the long run on Rome TW or Medieval 2. Having to choose what to get at each city has some strategic meaning, but it is strictly less fun. Really hope they revert this in the future.
This is why I love Skavenblight aside from Ikşt being very fun. You can build absuper-city which fields armies all by himself,without ever facing an existencial crisis and in a very defensible position while surrounded by riches. Best part, you are free to build whatever you wanna build without sacrificing another.
Doubt it, it's been so long. It makes city building so simple it's incredibly boring 😢
At the start it is a bit more strategic, but in late game it can be quite restrictive especially if the newly captured province literally has no buildings as you need to build it one at a time.
iirc I once proposed a Building Manpower Mechanic for Project renaissance since the Developer wanted each province to have access to all building.
Basically a Settlement would have 100 Building Manpower at first, where if you build a building all the manpower is used, if a Building needed 200 Manpower it will take 2 Turns for the Building to be build.
However you can build another building, where the Building Manpower will be split so a Settlement Building 2 Buildings will give 50 Building Manpower for each building, so that 2 Turn Building now needs 4 Turns as the manpower is split.
When you consolidate your surrounding area the build slot thing is more annoying than challenging since you basically got everything you need. Plus if you are the kind of person who are not into role playing and trying units and just want to play for efficiency then some building will never get built because you have to prioritize slots for the good buildings first.
I think they should make Tier 5 settlements have more building slots than how it is now, I actually like the strategic value the slot restrictions bring at earlier parts of the game.
On the WoC in particular: While the warband system does solve the issue of early game unit variety, it tends to result in the opposite problem in the late game, as the availability of units is just too low for the later stages of a campaign when you want to recruit more than 1 or two armies and unit quality begins to matter. It's also why the WoC AI factions completely fall apart after ~25-50 turns - once their main army dies, they can never produce another one of quality, and can't produce multiple armies near enough to support each other.
yeah... change one thing in one direction and it will most likely affect something else on the other side of the coin. On the other hand (unless we are talking about AI variety at the end of the campaign, which can be quite dull at some points) I do think this is a lesser death to take so long the player itself has more fun.
But people would need to evaluate this one their own and for each case differntly.
Yeah, that's why I personally hate WoC. At best you can have 2 decent armies going around fighting. Everything else is chaff.
That's why I use unit caps for all, that mod is a bless, specially fighting against AI, it's so boring fighting an army full of a single unit, they even give extra unit cap for thematic lords, like Ungrim gets additional slayer cap.
Whats it called? So many good mod suggestions from people in this comment section lol
@@philkim8297 Tabletop Caps
Mod name?
@@AS-ft8nx Tabletop Caps
Its not tabletop caps. It is called unit caps for all. It gives a similar unit cap system that tomb kings have to all factions. Really good. But technically does not affect what legend is talking about here.
Can we talk about the uselessness of there being ports in this game? There is no navy. Its not even that great for growth or cash and later on when the settlement is grown you are stuck with a building you don't need...and its forced on you in every coastal settlement which doesn't even make sense. And oh boy do they limit minor settlements in game.
Port used to be better but then CA took a rework on the economy and they are less desirable now. I have nos issue with the minor settlement, if everything was the size of a capital you would never do anything else than siege battle and it would be tireing very quickly. It make sense than not every city is big and can reach the maximum size.
@@truth6441 getting in and out of the water faster is nice upside but other than that ports are just okay eco buildings.
@@itachiaurion3198 pepperidge farm remembers the marienberg port funding entire armies on its own
@@itachiaurion3198 I have no issue with the limitations of building slots to minor settlements, my issue is with the fact that I can't choose to remove a port -- at the cost of the movement it provides --to choose something more suitable. The minor settlement is already restricted to 3 slots, with a port you're restricted to 2. A better solution would be to remove the port building from open building slots and incorporate it into the main settlement building so you can have all 3 open slots and the port but even being able to remove it for something else would be nice as an option. Either it should be combined into viable settlements or it should be open to being deconstructed at the cost of its utility in both minor settlements and provincial capitals.
@@olafthemoose9413 It is a nice utility where you need it, but so far away from the front its useless when it comes at the cost of a limitation to your building slots. I just want to destroy them and get the slot open if nothing else.
What bothers me most is the computer knows where you are and has no fog of war. So they aim for your weakest cities and around your strongest armies. I know it's difficult to program and few games can manage it but it's egregious and there are ways to work around it yet they seem unwilling to.
It’s definitely something that’s also bothered me for quite a while once I started noticing it. I assume it’s due to the AI being unable to make an educated guess at what might be coming and scouting ahead beforehand. But it gets very annoying when it’s blatantly obvious it knows where your armies and this is also enables it to use forces March much more freely even deep with in your territory as it know when it won’t get caught.
Thats why you build walls everywhere....If your weakest settlements are those you just conquered, you will actually have a proper border conflict.
The AI is easily exploited in other regards though, such as ambush baiting. I've lost count the amount of times Ive caught the AI sending a stack to attack a Lord with 1-2 trash units just to put the stack within range of my main stack that was hiding in ambush. If you fix the AIs vision cheats, then you also need to fix the ways the player can exploit its behavior, which I assume is very hard to do.
AI in Total War is very good at calculating your movement range and being annoying
This!
I totally agree. I always use increased build slots mods in my playthroughs. It is ridiculous that in vanilla I can't build all available buildings in capital.
The idea is you have to make a choice. I see this as a non issue sorry.
@@JWSoulI understand your concern but I am just greedy and want all without limitations hahah
This, I seriously miss the old building style (M2TW). Arbitrary restrictions suck.
@@JWSoul I already have to choose how to spend my limited funds and turns. Arbitrarily restricting what I can build where on top of that just feels "gamey". If I have the time and resources to build a huge super-city, I should be allowed to.
@@JWSoul 🤡
How about the excessive cost of high tier econ buildings? Except your first few settlements they're just not worth it, they'll never recoup their cost. Weird how devs have never noticed this.
why would they?
the lemmings keep spending tons of money on the dlc train.
ca will simply never improve unless people stop paying them
Yeah. Depending on faction, I just build pretty much everything to tier 2 or 3 depending on the ROI of the faction's built economy. A few core provinces and big outside cities to produce units.
High tier economic buildings often need to be built for dozens of turns to recoup their cost. Gold now is better than gold later too so it makes no sense to me.
Absolutely, I hate that the upgrades are like 2 or 3 times more expensive but only slightly more income which is fine when you have lots of settlements in late game but annoying in early game where you need to be more mindful of what you spend ur income on.
The same is true of growth buildings. For most factions, tiers 1 and 2 are all I ever buy. Tier 3 is far too expensive for a building that will be replaced the moment a settlement hits max tier.
Yep. Absolutely agree on that one. It only kinda makes sense for the factions that can get a huge bonus % to their region/province income like DE or Tzeentch.
So I have to wonder why the AI is still so dumb that it needs so many cheats. If it's going to magically be able to support three full stacks on one settlement, then why does it need to know automatically where my weakest point is and the shortest path how to get there
Probably because Armies can't send units to Scout anymore? That would be my guess.
@jaywerner8415 oh yeah that's another thing they need to get rid of, the units needing Lords as a nanny. But since they have infinite money they can recruit heroes,
@@QueenAleenaFan Trust Me, we ALL wish they would. But ya know, their AI is too DUMB to keep its armies together and will send tiny stacks wondering back and forth if Empire Total War was anything to go by. Although, I don't think Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai had this problem. So other then their AI just being DUMB and getting made DUMBER, I have no explanation.
Hell, the AI used to RETREAT from battle in Rome 1 (and still does in Rome Remastered) But doesn't do that since Empire Total War. WHY?! Why must they Grind themselves into DUST? Not like it maters since they can just Spam Armies now.
@@jaywerner8415 couldn't they hire some sort of game designer to make ai that doesn't suck? I can understand when some guy working on a project by himself can make good AI. But I feel like a corporation might be able to post a job listing or two and get a guy to come help
@@QueenAleenaFan From what iv heard the Game Engine is a absolute mess of spaghetti code (it still has code from Empire TW for god sake). And people keep getting pulled from their tasks to help on other things. But Yeah.... you would think Sega would be able to afford a few "experts". Which Is kinda why I keep screaming into a mega phone "GET A NEW ENGINE FOR F@#$ SAKE! ITS BEEN OVER 10 F#$@ING YEARS!"
Sadly I figured out a LONG time ago that CA doesn't design their games around the Player experience, but their absolutely DENTED AI. It would explain alot of their Design choices.
played warriors of chaos recently and really like the upgrade mechanik. wished for that for nearly all other races. also thought of a cool way to implement trade ressources to upgrades like you get wood, you can build bronze shield has additional iron you can get silver shields or so. nice video!
Warband ultimate upgrade mod applies the 'warband upgrade' system to all races. It does make the game easier but also more fun IMO. Getting your starting unit of miners to Ironbreakers via promotions is very satisfying. It is open to exploits, especially with ranged levelling so fast compared to melee though.
Agree, im a huge fan of Warriors of Chaos faction, but once u unlock Chosen units, it get bored, u just doomstack them and autoresolve all, but with the upgrade mechanic, it really more fun coz i actually can lose! LMAO
@@aaronsegura887 Combining it with a mod like Tabletop Caps is the perfect way imo, get the better recruitment and upgrading but also something that stops you from doomstacking and want a more diverse army.
@@prinstyrio0does the TT Caps mode affect AI?
One problem with the economy buildings, is that it might cost you 1500+ gold to upgrade a money building from tier 1 to tier 2, and 2000+ to go from tier 2 to tier 3, with only a +100 gold bump each time from doing so. That means, depending on build times and other bonuses/negatives, it could take between 30 and 50 turns before you actually see a profit from investing in your economy. I've been having a good time with Dwarf factions recently, only holding on to a few really valuable provinces while selling all the other settlements I collect for huge profits, which I can then invest in the new Deeps buildings for huge profits.
I agree with u, but i dont see it like u do, i just want my income per turn go up so i can recruit an extra unit or hero and pay the upkeep
@@zazoeobi But you could have paid for that unit and its upkeep for 20 additional turns if you didn't buy the financial building. You have the same units but less money.
@@shadowblaster124math is hard, and some people just don't like to see their income go negative.
@Nick-mp1zh I think that would be an argument if it is not basically a necessity to instantly explode and conquer everything in reach from Turn 1.
Basically fighting 1 or 2 battles and all of the costs you would incur, instantly offset by the armies you deleted in that turn.
Especially if you have a strong roll in the beginning, it is so much more useful to buy these economic buildings and expand more and more, making the upkeep of armies easier, as more armies = more plundered and sacked gold.
If these buildings would cost even more, or you wouldn't need to expand so quickly at the beginning, those costs might be something to consider.
This isn't untrue, but at the same time you will exist for 30-50 more turns in basically all circumstances where the time to recoup your investment is relevant. By the late game, who cares really. I am sitting on 100k or more, getting a return on my 1000 gold investment in 20 vs. 30 turns is irrelevant. It's not wrong to point out, I calculate this sometimes playing the game. It's just not usually very impactful except for the turns where, if your campaign is over before the investment is repaid, it's because you've lost.
In the table top Warhammer game each faction had what were known as core units that you had to have a minimum number of, and could have as many as you wanted, then you had special and rare units that you could only have a certain number of in an army. Usually, there was quite a bit of variety among the core units with many factions having access to at least one type of cavalry, missile, and melee infantry unit. TWWH could adapt that system to the game by making all the core units available without any restriction from the beginning, and have access to special and rare units be tied to military buildings with their availability tied to the level and number of that military building that's built by the faction. So, say Swordmasters would become available once you've built the Mage building, but at the lowest level each one only gives you access to say 3-4, but the more you build and the higher you upgrade the building the more you can have. Also, in the table top game units like spearmen and spearmen with shields weren't separate units, but the shield was an upgrade option you could add if you spent the points on it. TWWH could do something similar where instead of having to disband a spearman unit in order to get the spearmen with shields it could be an upgrade where if you spend the money the unit gets upgraded. That would make it much easier for an army to upgrade as you go along, if its just a matter of spending some money to upgrade a unit to a higher tier version of it.
I like this suggestion a lot!
@@freyrTV if you want to try the SFO mod does it, it also buffs units since they now have a cap and feel more impactful
This is why I play with the SFO Grimhammer mod
I don't play WH3, but i played Troy and I must say: the Amazonia recruitment system is really good for gameplay. You can only recruit the based tier 1 unit as the Amazonia; and all tier 2 units have to be upgraded from them once they reach lv.4, and tier 3 have to be upgraded from lv.5 tier 2. Not only it limit the amount of elite unit you can field, it will also require you to play around with all basic unit (as the tier 3 you want may have an underpowered tier 1, that you still need to use regularly to earn xp). And it makes getting tier 3 unit feel very rewarding, since they are not produced en masse in the peaceful heartland far away from the front, but are the ones who has been fighting with you since the beginning of the campaign, and now they have reached their final evolution after a brutal battle, slaying countless enemy to get to this point. That's also mean losing their veteran units a much harder blow than usual, since it will take half a campaign to replace them again.
@@namkl4128 The Warriors of Chaos system in WH3 is very similar to the Amazon recruitment system.
This discussion reminds me of a somewhat recent mod that allows you to rerecruit a starting army at the very beginning of the campaign. Doing this removes the units from your army and then you can select any unit from your roster through a budget similar to how the skirmish budgets work outside of campaigns. Some mods can offer decent solutions to vanilla problems
I like that mod a lot, also allows me to start with a thematic army.
What is the name of this mod?
Never seen that mod, love the idea, what's it called ? And is it compatible with SFO ?
It's called "Customize Starting Units"
Its an amazing but realy op mod. You arent limited to the money you gain from removing your army, you can actually put your units in another army and than use the reset-ability and recruit a second army immidiatly and can even use your starting money to invest even more than the gold you get from the mod. You can literaly give you a full army with some incredible units in it.
The economy system itself may be a player trap. The fastest I was able to complete a Karl Franz long victory was turn 29, and I didn't engage with the economic system at all. The amortization times are too long, and if you're planning to win the game within 30 turns through military alone, the tier 2 economic buildings do not pay off before the game ends, making them a waste of money. The Franz strategy I found, you actually powerlevel Altdorf to tier three by about turn 7 I think it was(it's for the reiksguard building, prestige goes to the free growth point). Then upgrade no other settlements AT ALL, if you include the cost of levelling up to tier 2 settlement, and the times involved, levelling up settlements is money lost before turn 30. I found the value in shield spears to be enough to keep the troop building early, it was mostly b/c Franz needed them around turn 20ish. I did attempt with selling the building, and recruiting regular spears, but keeping the building ended up better in my testing.
Armies usually represent a better return on investment than buildings, and also progress you towards the campaign goal. You have to run most of the campaign in the red, but the armies can keep you afloat b/c there's no infrastructure investment to speak of. That it is significantly more optimal to not engage with the economic system at all is a bad sign imo. I think not only are you completely right about setting the player up for failure (most starts I sell a building, disband a unit, or both) but I'd take it a step farther and say that the entire building system is fundamentally broken, and CA clearly understands it less than I do, which is sad considering I don't understand it that well. I don't have an answer, and my instincts were clearly wrong on some count because I would've made economics more powerful as a balance step, and you pointed out Medieval as a better version, with less powerful econ. I'm reminded of GWM/PAM from D&D, where something is so optimal players have less choice.
That's just how you play, concerning investing into cities I play quite the opposite from you it seems. Invest enough into armies to keep upgrading the cities with growth and economy and some recruitment. A slower play I understand, I've never finished a long victory on turn 29, but I like using most of the units available to me and that requires upgrading cities.
Its not just with Empire. With most factions the tier 2 and tier 3 growth and economy buildings are very bad ROI, costing more than the tier 1 building and adding less growth and money.
You are better off spending your money on more armies, going into negative income, and then sacking and occupying settlements to make money. This way you also gain income through conquest, your lords level faster, you complete quests faster, you gain items and followers, and you keep the factions around you small so you have less threats around you.
Even investing in public order to prevent rebellions is a player trap, you are better off not investing in public order buildings, letting the rebellions happen, and farming them with a lord, the city garrison and maybe a few units if necessary, to gain more money and battle experience.
In most of my campaigns I only build the tier 1 money and growth buildings in each settlement and only invest in upgrading the main buildings because they increase the free garrison size, and I do plan to play a bit longer than just the campaign victory conditions, I like to go to turn 80 or 100 or so before I get bored.
Like you say if you only want the long campaign victory its faster to go full scorched earth, sack every settlement to tier 1 and keep it there. If it gets occupied by the AI thats not a big deal because its easy to reconquer it with how small tier 1 garrisons are.
Which is another way that upgrading settlement tiers is a trap. If you invest a lot in getting a city to tier 4 or 5, it will take a lot of turns before you recoup your investment, and if the enemy occupies it during that period, it only goes down 1 tier, now you lost money and you have to use a big expensive army to fight a decently sized free upkeep garrison.
The problem is that if the economy scaled better, then the game would be even more snowbally, and its already too much of a snowball.
There should be much bigger penalties for large factions, both for the AI and the player. Like the corruption mechanics that older total war games had.
Doesn't the fact that both options work point towards the system actually being quite balanced? Like, Legend is advising to build only economic, you're advising to build only military, and still you're both very successful in your campaigns.
I mean we have to take into consideration that not everyone will play the game fully optimally. The economic system is not a player trap, you dont suffer or detriment yourself for interacting with it. Just because it's not optimal for you to interact with it doesn't make it a player trap.
Min max is not how most people play
A big player trap I've seen myself fall into for years is never building the generic structures that cap at tier 3 in major settlements (like your typical growth and standard military buildings). I always thought of it as a wasted use of a slot that can go up to tier 5. Now it may still be true into the late game, but in the early game it absolutely is not, you're still only at tiers 1-3 with your major settlements. And so I've personally seen improvements to my own campaign by building tier-3-capped buildings in my major settlements so I can speed up my pace in the early game regarding economy, growth, and military.
while that may be true for growth or economic buildings that provide value even if there are multiple of them in a province, developing a tier 3 military building in a capital province is a waste when you can easily build it in the other settlements of your province (unless you're at Skavenblight or something like that)
I definitely agree with your statement. I hate upgrading sertlements because by the time i am ready to recruit better tier 1 units, my main army is three provinces away. I feel like i play a majority of the early game with spears, archers, and magic.
Literally the High Elves campaign experience, lol. Spears, archers and magic all the way to the end. The roster has the variety but you don't really have any incentive to get inventive aside from being bored to death with spears and archers.
@LungDrago I stopped playing as the high elves because of this XD.
@@LungDrago Also, you would have to waste a lot of time bringing your main army back, slowly replacing units with new ones and then marching that same army back, all of which could take around 6-10 turns depending on how far and how many units your replacing, that just never is worth it.
Also It has always kind of struck me as odd that every time you start a total war campaign its like your faction has forgotten how to make any cool of the cool shit.
They haven't forgotten; more like haven't developed them yet. But yeah this technology/growth system looks way more reasonable in historical setting, where it's easier to imagine your country becoming more advanced over the course of what is supposed to be history essentialy.
@@Isengrim24 that only works when the later units are more technologically advanced rather than simply better trained. Usually in total war, the later units are just more elite ones and the earlier units are the more basic ones. Only exception I can think of would be Medieval II, even in historical games like Rome II it works this way. The end result being "as our society has become more advanced, we have evolved from having a population entirely consisting of peasants to a population entirely consisting of aristocrats who trained their whole life for war." It really makes absolutely no sense, your entire military shouldnt be able to be pure elites, but thats how it is.
Actual video starts at 6:25
Devs wanted you to make "meaningful choices" when developing cities, and that apparently meant "dumb down the system to the point you don't want to use it anymore".
It's doubtful many of them play their own game, it's easy to understand how we got to the point where we are now with that in mind.
It kinda sucks that with your example of the Empire that the archer unit is DLC only, so if someone doesn't have that they only have access to the regular spearman without any unit buildings.
It's not though? The huntsman is a DLC unit, the archer isn't.
but isnt the archer in the base game? no way thats a dlc unit
@@moawik4864 no, I don't have archers avalaible
@@moawik4864 Archers are also a DLC unit from Markus Wulfhart DLC, unfortunately. So as the OP said, when you don't have that DLC, you're stuck with spamming spearmen which are... uhh... suboptimal, to say the least.
the 2 earliest missile units (Free Company Militia and Archers) are DLC units
In my opinion Bretonia suffers the least from this, since most of your buildings affect surrounding provinces, this means a bunch of windmills, Taverns and Grail cathedrals means that each time you take a neighbouring province, it loses corruption, has control and growth boosted
Similarly, since peasant bowmen are in farms and tier 2 farms give you pox and fire arrows, the only military building you need now is either Barracks or Stables, early game maybe a barracks, otherwise straight to stable, then cathedral later to get grail guardians
This means that a major settlement has the 2 military buildings you need and every minor settlement is pure eco
You can shift from farms to industry later for more money late game especially when you have maxed every settlement.
Similarly since you end up with knights, it means as long as you build a stables every time you capture a major settlement, you can soon recruit knights again, which means you no longer need to recruit from the capital or first few major settlements, you recruit now from the edge and slowly keep pushing
But legend! Favoring low cost, low upkeep spear militia is historically accurate!
Agreeing with everything though, but it's difficult finding a good balance. Ideally things should be way more dynamic, giving ways to develop the value of whatever part of your faction.
Having recently gone back to playing Shogun 2, it’s interesting to look at how this system affects the two games differently. It’s still *usually* optimal to build economy first, but because the unit granularity is on a larger scale, and different units matter more, there’s more of an opportunity cost inherent in going all markets and only using ashigaru compared to getting a few early light cav or katana samurai. It feels like more of a legitimate strategic choice.
Shogun 2 follows perfectly that rock&paper&scissors logic, while having a strong base as a game. It turned that simplicity into strength. So you don't get multiple units of the same type on the same tier that perform vastly different (animations making a huge difference in Warhammer..) because the attention to detail when it comes to those mechanics were on another level. When you use those units against units they are supposed to fight, they feel impactful, there isn't screwed up 'momentum' system, there is no 'pushing units around'..
Having played a lot of Shogun 2, I don't think this system works there either. There is a very simple optimal castle build consisting of: Market, PO building (if needed) everywhere and then build the mil chain buildings only on settlements which have a mil related resource (wood for archers, stables for cav, iron for katana). Aditionally, for 90% of the campaign you have no reason to recruit anything outside of Bow, Spear and Katana for two reasons: 1) Building limits; 2) everything else is situational at best.
I have lost count of the number of games that I won a total domination victory with nothing past ashigaru spams. Katana is amazing but it doesn't stand up against archers, and the AI can never field enough Katana to pose a serious threat against you. And, if you can't face an enemy army, just ninja spam it so it won't move.
To be fair Shogun 2 has its own issue where its VERY EASY to Optimize your Towns. Namely building Markets everywhere and if needed or for max income the Sake Den, then you build Military buildings or Temples at the Locations which have a special building that boosts those units.
That being said, Their is nothing stopping you from NOT doing that and shogun 2s Unit pool "keeps it simple stupid" while you have effectively 3 different tiers of troops, each one does something different. And while Yari Ashigau are TOTALLY OP when in Yari Wall and I don't understand how the AI never figured this out, nothing is really stopping you from "gimping" yourself other then your own Economy.
Like by all means make Yari Samurai with Charge Bonus, or Artillery with Better Melee attack for the LOLS. The World is literally your oyster.
In S2 you do not need anything but Ashigaru anyway.
One thing I find in my campaigns after Empire and Med 2 is that it draws the focus away from fighting on the field. Everything gets focused on the city and less about the terrain.
The starting disclaimer of 6 minutes got me to almost quit watching, but once the video really starts (6 minutes later lmao) this design criticism makes sense. Very good catch and analysis.
Kinda makes you wonder why there are even building slots when the buildings are restricted by the settlement level too. As you said, leaving all building slots open at tier 1, you can just make tier 1 buildings. Nothing unbalanced. Leaving all building slots open is a huge change though. So just putting the tier1 units at tier1 settlement building as you recommended is a great idea. Thanks for making this video, it is game design gold.
Sometimes it’s fun to role play, even if it is suboptimal.
Totally agree. I do quite a lot myself too, especially with lords which have some kind of unit theme behind them. Because " not playing the optimal way" can itself become a "player trap", because once you've convinced that you are not doing the best you could do it's no fun anymore.
I agree with you, though in this case I’d think it be better if getting better military units _was_ optimal because it is fun. Like I’ll personally get variety still because it is more fun, but it’d be better if I could do that and it was always the best decision because having less fun paths be optimal seems like a design mistake.
A good quote i heard from another game "anything can be used for roleplay but that still does not mean it has to suck".
This is why I like playing nurgle so much, they still have that problem in the 10 or so first turn, and it’s worse actually, but the moment you have one province churning out units, being able to ship them to the frontline instantly regardless of what you are standing on feels a lot more flexible. And frankly I just like how having military production in a backline town doesn’t feel like a waste. I honestly would not mind if all factions recruitment worked in a similar way, with towns “producing” units in a real sense rather then just making them available, and them some way to reinforce frontline armies with those stockpiles
This is why I prefer playing very hard map difficulty with normal battle difficulty. Infantry is useless when enemies have stat boosts.
Same . The battles are the most fun part of Warhammer and having all my infantry for example dumbed down to line holders or chaff makes it so much more boring. I would rather have the AI give better armies to challenge me instead of making a lot of my units just empty numbers
@@sizzle9475 Same here as well. I play almost exclusively modded (SFO and QoL's) Very hard campaign difficulty + normal battle difficulty + SFO Very hard difficulty, I basically alter the game settings according to my taste. Much more fun this way.
Fyi if you did not know they added a setting to change the AI battle cheats and there you can set to no ai cheats for the battles
@@sizzle9475 but you have option button in game witch you can turn off stats boost on high level of difficulty battles
@@piotrkrzeszowski8112 yes. I don't think there is that much difference in AI battle difficulty without stat boosts other than they being more aggressive.
I am a new total war player. Started this year on tww3 and I always hated the building system. Now I play with more building slots mod and I am happy. Hate to choose between growth and unit building etc.
You do have to choose, it’s just that it’s a soft choice between competing need vs being limited to just one.
It is part of difficulty tho , part of strategy too
If you are not graphic and texture fanatic then it should be mandatory for you to try Medieval II or Rome I
@ I might, but the biggest draw for me is Fantasy with a lot of different races, spells, units and a big map. Exactly what immortsl empire is
@yozko4183 you would love age of wonders 4
On top of that, Settlement Garisson in M2TW don't need a building slot. You can utilize free-upkeep of militia units in City settlement. From my observations, garisson building in Later TW only benefit the AI in harder difficulty than benefit the player. Y'all know why CA made Later TW like this? it's for streamlining of AI programming, to make the game cheaper and faster. In a game genre that should give developer more time to make the game good and also give player more tools to play with instead of limiting them...
I can't think of any grand strategy game that have an AI that doesn't need those kind of gardrail before it fall apart. Paradox, Civ, CA, whatever you like the AI need it's cheat and the safety net. It's a bit sad but we can't blame CA while every single dev team in the industry stuggle with this. It's not like medieval is even remotly as hard as the newer game anyway the AI is unable to pose a threat to a player who know how a strategy game work.
@@itachiaurion3198 CA have had this garrison system since Rome 2 released 11 years ago. You telling me they couldn't make any improvements to AI in that time to have them understand how to garrison settlements properly?
Same goes for the army system. They force you to have a certain number of stacks with a general just cause the AI couldn't handle individual units too well. Restricting the player instead of improving the AI. That's been CA's policy for the last 11 years.
@@itachiaurion3198 But, what i'm saying is not necessarily about AI. It's about Game Design that's so streamlined in Later TW, it would be easier to program the AI, faster and cheaper to produce, and limiting to the player. Remember, you suffer from supply line system in TWWH (player don't get benefit from it) and the AI don't have supply lines in higher difficulty...
@@addochandra4745 I do kinda agree with that even if I see why CA would do this. It's a solution to a big problem in which players want the AI to be able to parttake in the same strength-weakness game as the players, and as a result the game mechanics are made with the idea that the AI should be able to comprehend them. The only solutions for this would be to either massively develop the AI and pour in massive amounts of resources that would otherwise be allocated to another field the game could excel in, or to guardrail the AI into 'engaging' with the rules. Perhaps once AI gets good enough to tackle complex dilemmas this pitfall could be avoided, but it is a fact that the player desire for deep mechanics might collide with the player wanting a fair matchup against the game AI. Same goes for things like player bias, it's a necessary evil to have the AI feel like a legit combatant)
All the points that defend CA by saying it was necessary because AI is hard to code are illogical. The baseline used to be independent movement of units and manually building garrisons with units you recruit. When THAT is the baseline for what we had, AND it works just fine, then all points about having to ditch it are completely invalid. It's part of developing games that your expand on what you already have to make it better. When you handicap your own games with a patchwork solution like CA just so you can make money faster, you are officially neglecting any integrity you might have had.
i really like the way it's done for warriors of chaos as you pointed out. not that i want every other race to be as broken as them in terms of recruitment but having more options initially at least without crippling your economy would make the early armies a lot more fun to fight with
I' ve had the same issue but fortunately there are mods that fix this simply unlocking all buildslots and even adding more slots, so you can build (almost) every building. Which is basically what Legend said at 30:40. The only thing stooping you is your budget and city level. I prefer it much more this way. Thank you modders for fixing TW since Attila with those Hun traits and tech removing buildings!
I'm too dumb to come up with a solution, but out of Legends 2 suggested solutions, I think the 2nd one with unlimited build slots and only being restricted by time and resources and building tiers being unlocked by settlement tiers would be pretty good. I don't expect CA would even entertain the first option of having more available at tier 0, we saw what happened when the dwarves got their warriors at tier 0, they removed it super fast which was really disappointing, they coulda just made miners have an actual use cause currently they're just worse than warriors.
the dwarf warriors got cut because they are objectively the best unit you could've recruited in any scenario. them being available at tier 0 removed variety, not added to it
@@Dr.AvenVon Miners with blasting charge still fill a niche when paired with dorf warriors. The biggest issue here is that base miners are just bad. Their only redeeming quality, AP, doesn't justify not getting a warrior instead. This is also the case for every single roster in this game; some units are straight up obsoleted by same tier units, or a tier higher ones.
I think the unity variety issue goes even deeper than what Legend said. Tech trees and Lord skills, too, work against having a balanced army.
I just wanted to say - Thank You for explaining it in depth. Personally some of the issues I started intuitively avoid without even noticing it, but it really gets to think when flashed out like that. And thus this video pushed me to get some mods that are going to make the game much more enjoyable!
currently this might be one of my biggest problem paralel to the speed of the game. wh3 is very fast compared to wh2, many things buil faster and many army clash faster. And while building faster should mean earlier better units, because of more clashes, i recruit less variet and more utility. i love my dwarfs but i cant keep enjoying it when game is pushing me to recruit stack of 20 dwarf warrior even after they removed them from the capital recruitement. i love my lizardmen but i cant keep up with just a hoard of skinks because it takes insaley long to recruit as lizardman. İn this pile of variety with to be 100 lords in this game, i feel optionless and it sucks so much
I 200% agree that unit variety is very limited, and getting military building most of the time is very unoptimal even on lower difficulties than legendary.
dont want to nitpick, just a respectful hint: at 15:09 you said we went from 17 swordsmen to 24 spearmen and the scales tipped in favor of the cheaper unit or the larger army.
that is factually however not quite true because you would also have to take into account that you would be able to use the 2000 gold on swordsmen as well.meaning its not 17vs24 but rather 20vs24.
Interesting video Legend. I'm not really someone that has ever tried to play total war as optimally as possible so I've never really saw these as issues with the games but more as challenge to overcome within the system that's presented. I typically roleplay my campaigns however so maybe that's a big factor in why I don't "see" the issues. Also and I think this was a big point is that I see the end game as the worst part of these Warhammer games I feel like there ends up being the least amount of variety in my armies (that's when I end up optimising unintendedly), I think the early mid game is where the fun is and the most engaging but the key difference is that you play very very aggressively. I play very defensively and prefer a slow burn.
If I was constantly chasing optimal play and being super aggressive then I would probably agree with you whole heartedly....... that isn't to say that you play the game wrong in fact it's far from it, the games need to better support your kind of playstyle to be more engaging. If you play like me at a glacial pace then the games are set up perfectly to support it but at your pace nope all those Dev gameplay design choices might as well be thrown out of the window.
now with that said I can agree that the current system can absolutely be improved but for me all I want is more complexity and a deeper system. Less player traps is always welcome however no matter what way the cake the is sliced.
Not gona lie I would LOVE a taking your game to the next level series! Everytime you release a video like this I always find some piece of info that helps my game tremendously! I’m a casual player and don’t have time to put in the grind hours to learn all the ins and outs so my progression for getting better stalls sometimes until I see the next video of yours like this when I feel like I have another piece of the puzzle on how to be better. Love this video thank you so much!
I'm so glad you are calling this out. 99% of my campaings are just crap-spamming until I get bored and move to another campaing. By the time I got my first province to level 5 I've already moved on. I don't even remember, when was the last time I recruited a legit steam tank (not an Elector Count) or a dragon. At the end of tha day, I, basically, do not have this units in my game, only as an enemy.
@LegendofTotalWar I disagree with the solutions you had presented, one of the key aspects you had placed forth in favor of Medieval 2 and kinda overlooked at the same time is the recruitment limitations which are dictated by a mixture of capacity, buildings and building levels, and locality and made it to one of the best recruitment systems for TW. It wasn't perfect, the population wasn't impacting like it did in Rome, and there is to much availability of units from buildings, but it is such an amazing recruitment system cause it simulates at an abstract way the fact that people is one resource but another is time to get the materials up - armor and weapons were really expansive and took a long time to create this is why most armies carried the cheaper equipment.
Sure buildings as I mentioned are part of the chain of reasons why TW is suffering (and I completely agree with your assessment cause it killed variety in my armies as well) but they are far from being the main cause. I would bet that your armies will still be without variety even if the building restrictions will change, what it will only end up doing is just giving you a faster reach to the spam unit you will see fit.
The replenishing over time unit caps from Medieval 2 was great for encouraging keeping units alive since replenishing took away from the cap (when not bugging it) and made stacking OP armies much harder and longer process, that and the combination of locality promised no sudden OP armies will just pop to existence anywhere. If CA wants to fix WH's recruitment issue they need to bring that back and improve by at least simulating population (if not Rome style which they are against) then at least maybe copy the idea of Pharaoh's 'work force' and apply it for both buildings and recruitment hence limiting the amount of spam.
Another key way to fix unit variety is actually creating variety within units beyond just a few stats - I have gave for years more than a few examples which I see people including streamers pick up - such as giving miners the ability to dig under walls and pop behind them after a delay (based on distance?) Or giving only specific units the 'ass ladders' such as Skaven ninja's(stealthy) or Spiders/monsters (fast climbing) that can climb while the rest of the units should only be limited to towers which can be destroyed.
And one aspect that CA didn't play into to create variety, which they seem to finally listen and might add with the following DLC is to add variety on the campaign. I gave examples as adding a stat for units like pistoliers which the more you have allows for more vision/detection for the army (CA said something along the lines of wolf raiders will get more raid per unit) this kind of changes creates real diversity. At the moment you don't use different units cause all units can climb walls, all units can attack gates (which they shouldn't) and besides stats most of them are about the same.
The problem is that this demands a lot of AI work and CA don't want to invest and people let them get away with it.
This is the reason why i never play without the warband upgrade mod
I started doing that myself, too. Makes your units way more dynamic.
gives also alot more rp like
you have that of meh units that helped you threw the game and earned themselves a name instead
yeah you are legendary but that tier 2 is better than you are on lvl 9 BYEBYE
Any particular mod you recommend? I see a bunch of different ones.
@user-yw9ys3dz7x Some warband mods are a submod for unit expansions. I am using one expansion for cathay. There should only be one or two noteworthy warband mods on steam but I don't know the name of them.
I think you make a good point about unit variety but I think your solution is a bit heavy handed (I will ignore the fact that sometimes it's just more fun to not play optimally as that is 100% personal preference but one you should totally consider!!!).
I think it would be far more interesting if they made keeping those early game military buildings actually worth the economic sacrifice, then it becomes a strategic choice of "do I play greedy and go for more eco or do I play safe and recruit better units". Basically I think the real problem lies in that the difference between a tier 0 and a tier 1 unit is usually way too small, although I've certainly played factions where it felt worth it to go for a better unit early (for example cathay's jade warriors are far superior to peasant spears in my opinion). Aside from making units better what if the military building was just better? Maybe a small garrison boost? Maybe move the replenishment from the growth to the barracks? or make the barracks increase gold from battles in nearby regions/province? What if (with empire for example) it increased the prestige gains in some way? A small diplo bonus (to make early trade deals easier)? Anything really, just something to make the choice more interesting than "money building best always".
If I was going to stick to your solution I would argue for making the additional units on tier 0 specific to the starting province capital that way it remains as an early game bonus only.
I have always been annoyed that the original Rome Total War still has the best city building in the whole series. I would Also Argue that the Rome Total War 2 is where the problems with the city managment really starts.
While I do agree on the point of two armies with lower grade units is generally better than one expensive army. You did fail to add in the supply lines cost as well when you were doing the math.
I did do a little chuckle when I heard you input 1771/100 into the calculator. I mean was that really necessary haha
Tbh it's easier for those of us who have or are close to aphantasia. Actually SEEING something is the best way to visualise and thus communicate it, even if it's a simple thing it can take different people different levels of thinking to have the conclusion. Plus you don't actually divide/multiply by 10/100/1000 a lot outside of school so it's not an automatic thing to add and move decimal points anymore. Maybe I'm just lazy though 🤣
I feel like the issue of Supply Lines was overlooked. In Legends example of being able to recruit 20+ Tier 0 units as opposed to other units: You actually could not recruit that many due to the extra SL cost. Granted it may still be more tactically better to have two lesser armies vs one tougher army, but I feel the monetary advantage is less obvious. Maybe it’s better now in WH3 with the reduced SL costs vs WH2, where the costs were ridiculous.
Id like the changes legend suggested so much
I completely agree with him
Concerning the units take at10:00, I think that's heavily influenced by you playing legendary difficulty. On normal battle difficulty, it can be very important that your line unit beats the other line unit, which just doesn't happen on legendary
But Mr.Legend ... if we already had all the unit variety from the get-go, why would we build anything other than the same two buildings in every settlement? I'm one of those guys that will build a building because it suits a need right now, but sell it later on to either replace it or move it in a free slot in a minor settlement just because it won't go past level III and it would be a waste of buildslot in a major settlement.
In fact I rarely find that I don't have enough free slots -- I'm mostly annoyed the game will keep on reminding me "I have a free build slot" and the player trap, in my opinion, is that it encourages you to spend money to fill that slot, and then you're gonna want to upgrade that building to level III of course, just to make a notification go away.
The points you raise are specifically about the early game, but I would argue the problem is that you start with a measly tier I city. And quite often the game sets you up with another player trap that being the faction you're at war with. For example, I've gotten quite good results starting as Kairos and immediately sueing for peace with my pox riddled neighbours. Or, starting as Count Noctilus, the scenario wants you to go to war with the donut right away. You can simply choose not to and choose your own destiny instead.
I don't know about that.
Sure, as you mentioned by the time you get to tier 3 in your home province the frontline has moved, but you probably can afford one extra general that will recruit 2 reiksguard, 2 great sword and bring them to your main army. Meanwhile Karl can keep summoning the elector counts.
I personaly prefer having limited slots. Correct me if i'm wrong but in Rome 1 and Medieval 2 city building was basically a priority order. Something like mine>port>farm and upgrade city center and PO when needed. With limited building slots come choices you need to make and province specialization. As an exemple SFO does a very good job at making that part of the game more interesting.
I think the issue here is mainly about the different uses of military units, which is really prevalent in newer TW games. In the end you only ever have 3 roles for combat units: melee, ranged and cavalry. That makes it so that even with a big roster, there is always a more valuable option compared to others to fulfill each role; for instance in the empire, halberdiers are virtually the only melee infantry you'll ever need, while a few reiksgard are enough for cavalry and crossbowmen for ranged. One way AoW4 and older TW games avoided this was with unit abilities; you could have phalanx, shieldwall, whips, flaming/heavy arrows... Higher tiers not only meant better stats but also more tactical options, which is what made them valuable compared to low tier spam. Rome II does that very well, even though spam is really strong in autoresolve
Way older games adressed this was by having a much more limited roster. In Rome greeks had only 1 Hoplite type per tier. In Med you were lucky if you had 1 light and 1 heavy inf/cav that you could recruit from. In Warhammer everyone is so spoiled for choice that most of your roster can be safely ignored.
@khankhomrad8855 The reason why I took Rome II as reference is that it's a game where (some factions at least) really have a huge roster on par with WH3, and with mercenaries you could build virtually any army you wanted. But you always had an incentive to choose variety (which was synonymous for higher tiers) whenever available thanks to unit abilities which made each high tier unit distinctive and strong in a specific role. As Egypt for instance, Galatian guards were really strong as assault troops vs walls, Pikemen were immovable, Royal Peltasts were fast legionaries with more ammo, chariots could mow down chaff, charge cavalry could decimate even high tier units with a single rear charge, slingers were great when flanking while archers had long range and building/morale damage...
I've personally preferred the system that forces you into getting more constrained recruitment, but I think that it's held back because of poor balancing and in the system where you need different generals which are also very costly. If you have several provinces and each one is able to focus on specific types of production thanks to a landmark, it's fun specializing that one province to create this one unit type and accessing a new unit type may come with the need to conquer a specific province to gain that production.
In Shogun 2, since the roster was simplified compared to total war, the buildings felt more comparable in value when it came to recruitment to one another while some of the buildings in total war warhammer feel very disparate in utility. Especially infantry recruitment can feel like you aren't gaining anything of worth by keeping or upgrading it, but that's more because of how many weaknesses those kinds of line holder infantry seem to have. Also, since I can't just have a cheapo stack of 4 elite archers built in a province that provides an accuracy boost, it feels much harder to consolidate together forces from many specialized provinces into one large, complete army.
I don't think that it's a problem that's clear and distinct, I think it depends on what you want out of the game. For me, having a province like Nuln become a place that only produces guns and then shipping those guns to somewhere in Altdorf or to a frontline army is more interesting than making a more open and easy recruitment process or one that encourages loads of military recruitment buildings. Even in games like Medieval or Empire I preferred focusing almost entirely on economic buildings and then pushing specialized troops from a small number of specialized provinces. But for other players, I can certainly understand them wanting to just be able to get diverse armies quickly or anywhere without having to think about bizarre logistics trains to move around small groups of specialist troops.
You know what would fix this? Dogs of War DLC. A Mercenary system which would offer availability of diverse units, possibly/probably up to and including units from other factions, right from the start of the game, if in limited amounts and with a degree of unreliability.
Not for me I want to play only with my race roster
I use mod to block AI from ally recruting as well.
I guess I'm in the small group that loves Atilla. I honestly liked how the building trees were very complex in the sense that making a income or food area was very different from investing in military. The sanitation mechanic was something I enjoyed because there was more to do than just build everything to tier 3 and thats it.
For Smigmar!!!
*smegmar
As a horde player I feel bad for you city Folk XD
Imagine telling people to calm down on the internet, good on you for trying though.
It would be so cool to have a mercenary system that would look like how it is in Medieval.
You'd have access to units that would be available depending on the local population and maybe also of the surrounding regions, that would be more expensive than what you can recruit from your actual settlement, with a limited capacity that would replenish itself such as the warriors of chaos recruitment pool, a limited tier depending on the tier of the capital from the province and some additional cost depending on what faction the units are from. For example maybe empire units would simply cost a bit more money, while nurgle units would cost more money but also spread some nurgle corruption where your army goes. Greenskin/ogre units could reduce local growth cause you have to feed them more than humans or something, it would allow for way more variety and replayability for our campaigns.
Also, we would need 2 more skills in the red line of generals : 1 that would boost all mercenary units, 1 that would boost all allied troops. And some of the already existing red line skills need to be merged. Most factions have 6 or 7 skills right there if I'm not mistaken, I believe there should be all melee infantry, all ranged units (except cav), all cav and monsters, which would make only 3 skills + the 2 new ones, for a total of 5. Requiring less skillpoints to boost units would massively help to build variety aswell. You could have some armies fully made of mercenary units and only need 1 of these skills, which would still be balanced by their additional cost, or build armies w/o any mercs or allied units and need at most 3 of them which is fine.
Maybe also add a loyalty mechanic such as the one we have on Skaven, Dark elves or Vampire Coast generals, but that would be specific to each unit from the army and that could be influenced by a variety of things that would also depend on the faction they're from (fighting often for Khorne, taking captives for Slaanesh/Dark Elves, maybe add in something similar to WoC Authority aswell, ...), and also some things that would affect all of them the same way (winning/losing battles, the amount of casualties, etc).
In my opinion, you're just imposing the way you play the game onto others in order to to feel better about your personal burnout. You do not need to metagame on any difficulty in this game, including legendary. Just because something is the more optimal doesn't automatically make it the right one, or more importantly the most fun. I would imagine that most people play WH3 because of the fantasy and lore it provides not to simply play a RTS.
Everything else I mostly agree with. The game needs to continue making changes and experiment with new avenues of mechanics for players.
Archers are an expansion only unit. If those are not available, ruining basic spears will not allow you to win battles. RE: more armies, they cost exponentially more due to supply lines. Good enough armies that can take a garrison+army are great. If the army is not good enough, it's efficient to make it more expensive rather than make a second army
I feel like the easiest work around for this issue is to allow the player to buy extra buildslots, maybe 2500 per slot and have buildings have unit slots depended on settlement size. E.G At tier one Settlement with T1 barracks allow the recruitment of 1 crossbow men, 4 shields/swords. Allow player to level up the settlement to tier 2 to have 2 Crossbow men, 6 T1 troops for the T1 barracks. Have barracks be upgradeable to increase unit cap as well, but only when the settlement is T2. So a T2 settlement with a T2 barrack could recruit 4 crossbow men and 8 T1 troops.
Buying build slots isn't a bad idea. Keep growth for the tier, and slots are just a cost thing.
I wonder if the problem is more subtle than that, and that’s the need to min/max or optimise play. Even if CA make the changes you suggest won’t there still be an optimal play. The fact that there is only one optimal play is the problem, surely it’s about making a variety of approaches equally feasible?
My god the guy spends 10min yapping instead of talking about the subject. This is one of the best examples of: "don't click away, I will tell you what I made this video about in a few minutes". Perfect way to farm minutes on the video instead of actually giving people useful content.
Another option for Empire is to add a low tier cavalry unit, always felt they missed that.
But you're right, on my last legendary Franz campigns I would either demolish the barracks right away, or build a few spears with shield before demolishing it anyway.
the shit I always do IS just spam the weakest possible units and gobble up entire regions, once I have an entire region I spam the growth buildings to maximum first in each settlement, rushing the minor settlements to lvl3 so that I can have a military building, economy building and walls while the capital building builds the uh, actually important buildings that go past T3
if you dont have the dlc, you dont even have archers as a starting karl. you have melee units.
5 minutes in screaming for you to get to what you want to say!
right, took forever :0
For your game style, when you move forward without stopping, you are fully right.I like your videos, and fully understand you. Keep up the communication and never forget, most important is that you enjoy it, we enjoy to watch when you play with a smile on. Here is my opinion, if you ever read this:
For me who expnad in the begining, then farming and builing up my empire then continue to expand, so enemies got stornger and more interesting, it is not a trap. But I fully understand you, your style and why you not like global rec time over 1 turn. I tried your style and it was good but the game become easy. Like destroying everyone and expand in the first 40 turn, after that you have an empire already which is unstoppable.
I think if you put some early endgame, but not on 200% but like 100% or 125%, it would not be an enemy army spanning but a fun endgame (yeah, trun 40 end game) challenge (high level heroes, maxed research) with not punchbag enemy. I believe 200% is just overspamming and AI cannot handle it well. With 1-2 race, not endtime....that can be overkill....
Wish you health and happines. Ciao
Omg. It took 6,5 minutes of excuses to start the video
I actually like the concept of limited build slots. However, I do not like the implementation of this concept in TWW. Unlimited build slots usally mean that it is optimal to build everything and buildings become just a chore. But I agree with you that lack of unit variety is a problem.
The most fun in the any game comes from making importand, meaningfull choices. If there is one optimal strategy (for example, building only economy), then it is not a choice. I think specialization of cities (or later in campagin, provinces) could lead to interesting choices. The percentage bonuses, like in Medival could be a starting point.
Damn, can't believe Legend said that there shouldn't be any girls in the game OR girls playing the game!!!!!
I have never really though about this "restriction" (as you call it this way) before. I guess it came in order to make the game either more slow paced, give balance between factions in a way or it was purely a design choise.
It isn´t inherently bad as I feel you make it be, some examples I can give you are (and it will counter argument myself here) in mods like Rome 2 total war Divide et Impera, where certain provinces are more streamlined into building and working as a more specialized thing (like how Asia is meant to be an industrial centre to make industrial money, or Sikelia being a food generating province) you can build it however you want but making it specialized greatly helps economy or recruitment as a whole. The other one I'd believe to be 1212 AD in Atilla where you can almost build everything (iirc) in a province but you must wait it's development to acess all building slots and all building tiers (tied to growth and town lvl) similar to how you proposed to fix this issue.
This exemples help to set a pace for the campaigns, it kinda forces the player to play for a long run, to take some time to build up an empire/kingdom and it's army. That being said, Warhammer and other games might not be the case (mostly warhammer) where the player should be incentivized to mix and build up an army from the get to, as the battles are the main sell point of this title. And limiting building slots and recruitment kinda flashes out your point.
All in all, I'm here to say that for me it will really depent on what period, objective or intention of the game is, say a game about slowly creating an empire can work very well with those restrictions, but a game about holding an empire togheter (like Atilla), expanding an already powerfull empire/nation or one focuses much more on fights or being faster paced this system really does fell a bit off.
18 units of swordsmen is going to destroy 21 units of spearmen... I dont think its even close.
Also, you are missing the point with the units earlier on.
What you're talking about is true for the Mid game. Better to have multiple low cost armies than few big hitters.
HOWEVER
Especially in the early game, recruitment slots is a huge cap. In the first 10-20 turns, you need to build up a decent force as fast as possible. Recruiting 2 swordsmen per turn is better than recruiting 2 spearmen per turn.
Additionally, Creating a new army is a detriment because of the Lord's own upkeep. 2nd army's lord upkeep is going to balance out the upkeep difference between the units. Also 2nd army's spearmen is going to cost more because it's a generic lord not Franz with his discounts. It's mostly not worth it.
Cmon LegendOfTW... you aren't the kind of dude to make such mistakes.
The thing about unit caps is something that made playing Chaos Dwarves so refreshing and interesting. It was like rediscovering how each army having their own "identity" by necessity because how you molded your campaign and such. Hell, I even started playing with the other factions like that because of the feel, accostumed I was with the more "efficient doomstack" I forgot how fun it was to play with variety of things.
Hell, I got so accostumed with it that even now that I'm playing medieval II again I'm having kind of trouble de-coupling with the cookie cutter settlement and armies to expand further.
I dont particularly enjoy the build slot and often play with mods that provide more slots for capitals. I think Mideval's system is cool but it was very clunky, I remember not really understanding it at all when I was younger, and replenishing your higher tier troops felt very punishing I didnt want to use them.
Hey, I actually like the limited build slots, it forces you to think carefully on which provinces to develop military, and which to develop economically, and when to use surplus. On that note, you still have a good idea, and it would be similar to how they changed the dawi tech trees givin you easier access to ironbrakers, artillery, and the standard dawi infantry at tier 2; before the change, dawi had to rely on quarrelers, some sort of shield, and grudge trowers for half of the campaing
To be fair 22 empire spearmen vs 17 empire swordsmen ends up as a pretty comfortable victory got the swordsman. I know that is ignoring the spearman's value from anti large but it is also ignoring the swordsman's value from having missile block.
Well don't get me wrong. But are you arguing that there is not enough variety if you go for an "efficient" playstyle? Because let's be honest with Vampire counts you can raise the dead different units, but the best way is still skeleton spam so, I don't really see the point here.
What I would criticize is that you have spearmen and spearmen with shields. It's just artificial variety that doesn't do anything and should therefore be implemented like the upgrade system in rome2 for example.
Three Kingdoms had this solved, units were tide to tech not building or settlements
I’ve never understood why I have to wait till tier 5 to fill my build slots.
While I can appreciate the frustrations of limited build slots I do feel it adds more faction identity? Chaos Dwarves having a handful of provinces you build up into these factories churning out powerful units while the broader empire pillages the land. Or normal Dwarves with the deeps playing tall and holding onto very little land comfortably in the mountains. Or Green skins really having to play wide to have a viable military and conquer as much land as possible to have armies that pair well with confederated legendary lords.
I mean I can kinda get it for strictly underground settlements, but like... are the greenskins *really* running out of physical room to build things..? They just kinda sprawl over endless expanses. I somehow find it difficult to believe that the entire western badlands cannot support whatever the orcish equivalent of a military industrial complex is, especially since said equivalent is probably more or less just a place for said orcs to hang out, sleep, and murder eachother on the regular.
Honestly the whole "Optimal" building thing is much more of an issue on higher difficulties. All of this works perfectly fine on Normal and lower difficulties as thats what everything is designed to be played around.
Worrying about min-maxing is more of a Very Hard/Legendary issue as you dont really have very much room for error.
Personally, I think a lot of it comes down to restraint on optimization. It is a strategy game and I feel like part of the strategy element should be allowing people to run suboptimal strategies rather than designing the "best in slot" to be the most fun and best way to play. That said, I do agree more could be done both to make early barrack units feel more varied.
Hi Legend. I fully agree with you. And I was wondering, do you think the possibility of units being able to move on the map without a general would solve alot of these issues? Cities and their recruitment buildings could stay more relevant this way. And it maybe allows you to have different recruitment buildings in different regions, allowing for a majority of economic gain while also having recruitment options.
This is a major issue for playing on legendary. You hurt your campaign so much by not having two armies of the most basic crap available from the settlement building vs getting units from your t1 military buildings. Waiting until you have t2 buildings is even worse for your start since it puts you so far behind turn wise even with the power jump.
I like the idea of full build slots available, but an alternative that I think could work, the entire roster being available but sustaining more than a few units should bankrupt the player until later buildings reduce their recruitment/upkeep costs. Also reducing turns to recruit, kind of like the knights of the blazing sun iirc.
Sure you can recruit a land ship or steam tank at the start but it's going to take 5 turns and have an upkeep of 1500 gold type of idea. Gives the player options to play with instead of needing to spam crapstacks because the AI attacks your weakest and furthest settlement from your army. (Another issue all together where the AI feels like random barbarians from civ instead of following any semblance of how a race fights in warhammer.)
Love the video legend and what you keep pushing for in total war. We all want the game to be better in the end and this is something that would make it so much more fun.
I disagree. My top 3 changes from Medieval 2 to TWW:
1. Units cannot exist without a lord
2. Replenishment system
3. Building slot system.
I'm not gonna bother writing the wall of text as I have done in the past, it was not a rewarding experience. Just casting my vote. I hope things stay as they are and NOT move back into the medieval 2 direction.
You have an interesting idea as to how to solve the issue I think. As another idea thrown into the ring: each settlement has fewer slots, but each settlement has two tabs, an Infrastructure tab, and a Military tab. You can only build structures of the corresponding type in the corresponding tab. Improving a settlement adds one slot to each of the two tabs. This way, you'd develop evenly without giving up unit variety, while also still keeping limited build slots a consideration and making different provinces unique in terms of what they offer. Thoughts?
I completely understand you, but i do play on normal difficulty because i like to have fun and use variety from the start and feel the satisfaction of having a slight better unit, and that appllies on normal difficulty, whereas i dont have to play the optimal way but rather have fun.
Nevertheless the suggestions you made are totally plausable and will better everyone experience and hence there is no valuable argument not to do it.
Another point is that the way you play is to have maximum difficulty and play the absolutely best path aways, and by playing that way you may solve one problem, but sooner or later you will find another problem, and it will be repetitive no matter what, cus there's aways a optimal way, that said some changes can me made into the game to soften that.