Why the Late Game Doesn't Work - Total War: Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ก.ย. 2024
- The Late Game of Total War: Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires just doesn't work very well.
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I'm going to say, the AI does not scale with you, and their tactics don't allow you to actually engage in the same way. Now, maybe, fi you could do Late game PvP campaign, but that takes 2 things that I don't have: friends, and patience.
Part of it, part of it is also the IE map, the front heavy difficulty benefits, and sheer focus on early aggression.
@@Costin_Gaming Aye, the map is far too easy to snowball on, as there's not enough space between settlements and you never run into slowdowns until you've already got multiple armies in play
Yup, been playing on the old world map mod and the spacing between settlements makes the campaign have way better pacing though I can only speak for the dwarf side of things
.@@IainDoherty51
theres a discord full of us that play multiplayer for that reason zPMmq9jj
There is no solution. You have some options.
But in the end it is just adding time of suffering for little no reward (like the total war "mode" at turn 1)
...
The mortal empire map has almost zero role-playing, zero adventure, zero development.
...
The map needs to implement random adventures like for weapons (in warhammer 2 you had the khaine blade)/treasure hunts/ monster hunts (like norsca but for every factions), also they should add and FAST speed paint armys, and custom skins, and personalized character building.
The problem is, the AI just do random stuff. Its like fighting a shark on Land. It have absolutly no clue what it is doing. And even in the battle it just select every unit and rush it towards you. So the fastest units reach first, the slowest last but you always have to fight just one unit after the other...
On the battlefield I do not know why they have not implemented a formation move together button so that your army all moves together and stays in formation. It seems like a no brainier but don't know how hard it would be to implement.
Make the formation in the deployment, lock them in a group then you can move them in formation@@j_rock80
This feature is implemented. But nowhere in the game will they tell you which combination of Hot Keys is responsible for it.@@j_rock80
@@j_rock80Bro just use alt drag 😂
@@Weberkooks Yeah I know that. I was saying something so all the units move at the same speed in formation.
I feel like the only way to make the game fun is to roleplay, create armies that aren’t as efficient because they are more fun. If you are min maxing and cheesing the game becomes way to easy. Which can be fun sometimes but most of the time it just becomes too easy and you steamroll the map. I think they should have multiple times where they have crisis modes maybe like turn 25 then turn 50 then 75 then 100 and they get progressively more difficult. It would be more interesting imo.
The way to play is neither minmaxing nor speedruns, I totally agree. If you can only have fun whilst feeling like a robot, you might as well be a goldfarmer in World of Warcraft and get some dough out of it.
Exactly. If you think the only way to play the game is to constantly expand and capture as much territory as possible using min/maxed stacks... you will ALWAYS snowball, and every game will play the same. Just. Dont. Do. That. Why not role play so your aim is to field a high tier army with an earth shaker and kadaai destroyer... that will force you to build tall instead of wide. A slower and longer campaign, maybe, but I find it more fun.
Exactly!
That's the only way I can enjoy the game. Putting in mods that natively make the game more difficult and limiting myself through the lens of roleplay.
The problem is when you get into the habit of that and you jump into multiplayer and get curb stomped😂
The thing I normally do is build themed armies like for example I name a Skaven walock master mad max and make a doom wheel and doom flayer army
While I agree and I have done that since warhammerTW1. In conclusion you are just adding "suffering time". Crisis modes are also that, which in the end even the AI don't use them properly.
Turn 60 is early mid game for a scrub like me.
Fr
The issue, as I see others say, is the utterly garbage AI. This is painfully obvious in how CA treats difficulty. Higher difficult level should equate to a smarter, more strategic AI. Instead, it just involves giving the artificial statistics buffs while it retains the same low intelligence.
Thus, the early game is hard because the AI has significant advantages. As you progress, you narrow that advantage because a.) The development chain is quite short and b.) The AI is constantly confused and nonsensical, even on Legendary. I've seen on Legendary where the AI, at Turn 46, still has T2 barracks everywhere, sometimes twice in one region.
If the AI was truly unleashed the player would never be able to win. Creating the illusion of difficulty while taking the skill of the human player is the ultimate test of patience and trial by error. In most cases this pursuit never ends. What you ask for cannot be achieved. If so then why does Starcraft 2 continue to tweak the formula? You need to realize that you will never beat an AI because of our own limitations. So the alternative is to buff the computer so that it's stupidity can be overcome to create an illusion of difficulty. The system is not perfect. But the answer you seek is perfection itself. Name a strategy game for me that genuinely unleashes the potential of the AI by increasing its skill and not by decreasing the damage you deal or can sustain or resources available? Even shooters like Call of Duty do not increase the intelligence of the AI. They may be more aggressive and increase attack speed but they are not smarter. They just overwhelm the human reflex. Take a game like Alien Isolation. Even the difficulties here are an illusion. The alien is not smarter. The alien has a larger detection range. The alien has more spawn points to choose from. The player has debuffs to the amount of damage they can receive and the cost of resource. There is no increase of difficulty. The entire foundation of what you ask has time and time again used a variation of this same formula. So what is the answer?
@raginasiangaming910@@justinfrazier9555 good discussion. I think very deadly procedurally generated events happening more often (as opposed to just one endgame crisis) would be the solution for Immortal Empires. And really, the AI could be smarter on Legendary without being megamind -- in OP's example, the AI should rush T3 barracks on Legendary, as a rule.
Is part of the answer that it's really hard to make a good AI? Because there are so many little decisions and cost-benefit analyses that go into each turn, that must be part of an overall plan or strategy, and it's just hard for a computer to be good at that?
I've always assumed that's the case, I could definitely be wrong though.
@@justinfrazier9555 You're mistaking real-time reactions with decision-making. AI today (or at least, the kind of AI that can run on a person's PC) is vastly inferior to humans when it comes to strategy, because they are vastly inferior to people when it comes to pattern recognition and subjective value judgments (Think the skaven start strategy of razing your only settlement to rebuild it at a higher rank and taking the food penalties just to get higher tier units that much earlier. It's something that makes absolutely no sense 99% of the time, and pretty much no AI that doesn't run on a supercomputer would ever come up with it) Even the types of AI that beat chess grandmasters are usually brute-forcing it by having nearly every possible move at any given moment programmed into them, and a game like Total War is an order of magnitude more complex.
That said, there are a couple of factions that currently tend to collapse fairly quickly because the AI is (probably) intentionally made to play sub-obtimally to a degree that can be detremental to the game as a whole. Skarbrand and Tarus aren't nearly aggressive enough for their mechanics (I don't think I've even see Tarus do anything beyond build his first headstone and camp it until one of the nearby LL comes along and wipes him out.) And I'm almost positive N'Kar, Fateweaver and every other Slanneshi and Tzeentch LL are vastly limited if not outright forbidden from using their more subversive faction mechanics, and not just against the player. For example, N'kar is set up to vassalize one of the HE factions within a dozen turns without doing much more than sit and wait, yet AI N'kar never takes the opportunity to do so. Thos makes sense from a player frustration standpoint, but even if N'kar is forbidden from vassalizing you and *maybe* those allied to you, then should still be able to vassalize pretty much any other minor faction that has the unfortunate pleasure of interacting with them, and Fateweaver should be able to stay alive by having non-AI fight each other or yoinking settlements and so on. Also Skarbrand should probably a boost to growth when he isn't player controlled so his settlements aren't behind everyone else's because he's constantly at minimum bloodletting.
@@justinfrazier9555all that yapping yet I won't read all dat😂😂 just give me option to turn smarter Ai or not. Its not that complicated
Similar to Cathay harmony mechanics, the lategame problem seems, at least in part, to be another symptom people complaining in echo chambers without considering the consequences. In this case, there was a big push midway through TWW2 to make confederations harder, both for the player and the AI, because people apparently liked seeing a lot of different colours on the map. Problem is 1) some races are supposed to unite when the chips are down and more importantly 2) with the exception of some lords like Grimgor that are in a position to become very powerful on their own (and Grimgor benefits from the "beat enemy greenskin faction leader to confederate them" mechanic), confederation was a large part of HOW the AI could get big enough to realistically rival a growing player empire. If the Empire or High Elves or Dark Elves are still a set of single-province polities bickering among themselves when the player rocks up with ten stacks, of course they're not going to be able to put up a credible fight!
One of the arguments I remember being put forward for keeping the polities small is that with a large polity you tend to have a few turns of decisive battles followed by several turns of mop-up, but the problem with that argument is that if the AI polities remain small and divided, from fairly early in the campaign you're likely to be in the mopup phase from the moment you declare war because nobody can stand up to you.
I think some variety in confederations would be nice as opposed to just Malekith, Tyrion etc. at least. I remember those arguments too.
Yeah, I think when there's a confederation between AIs involving a racial leader (Tyrion, Malekith, Thorgrim, etc), it's always the racial leader's faction that becomes the head of the confederation, even if they were on their last legs before the confederation. Could be more interesting if it paid more attention to relative strengths before the confederation so you had the potential to be going up against a different set of faction bonuses. In a situation where, say, a large Morathi empire confederates a one-province Malekith, for example, one can presume that while Malekith is still the figurehead, this situation represents a Druchii empire where Morathi's influence has grown such that it's her faction effects that now define that empire, regardless of who's nominally in charge.
This is a very good observation.
I mean, with most factions, once the player gets to turn 30, its completely over. You have 7+ provinces and no AI can make a decision which even comes close to threatening you. The only threat at that point is a multi-front war and lets be honest, it will only ever be a set back.
Transitioning stages of the game is one of the biggest standout features that makes Stellaris as good as it is. To me it has a clear distinction between the early game where you're still exploring the galaxy and building up your first couple planets, which then transitions into a distinctly unique mid game where most of the galaxy is explored and now politics and wars over border disputes becomes more important and then a transition into the late game when galaxy spanning crisis invade and shake up the power dynamic in the galaxy. Throw in the middle of all that some gameplay transforming features that occur through with things like the L-Gates, Ascension paths, and Fallen Empires just to name a few. These things serve to make early, mid, and end game feel like distinctly unique experiences that constantly shake up the power dynamics. TW games the end game is basically just more of what the rest of the game was, 'now we're just going to have everyone send countless doom stacks at you' is about as advanced as the end game gets. Which is just tedious, not fun.
I would play stellaris but I can't stand the late game lag, I wonder whether paradox could rerelease the game with an upgraded engine to fix it
@@YeetThyBaby if you have a decent PC the lategame lag isn´t that bad, it´s memed up but is quite good now, not a hidnerence
As someone that has 2500+ hours in Stellaris on Steam I do not recommend any strategy game where the player can dictate control over individual battles have a system anything close to Stellaris. Paradox has the exact same issue CA has when it comes to AI difficulty. Instead of changing the method the AI fights or the level of strategy implied the difficulty simply grants them ever increasing bonuses to their empire. It does not give them better decision making. They still make terrible decisions when building their slots and planets and ship loadouts and fleet composition. A smart player who knows how to use the ship editor will always beat the AI who will use the default "use best build" setting. The only difference is now the AI can overcome the wasted resources because the base boosts to their empire overcome any terrible decision they made. An AI with a single system and 1 planet without being pacifist can pump out a full naval capacity fleet within 3 game years. Set up observer mode and see for yourself. Stellaris is one of the most blatant examples of lack of difficulty factors that you can use. It is the lazy approach of buffing the computer at the expense of the player in order to create the illusion of strategy. The AI is just sending out 5 science ships when you have a leader cap of 3 scientists until you get ascension perks. All of their military fleets and planets will have leaders providing buffs meanwhile you can only afford to staff one leader per entire sector. Because the negative debuff you get over the capacity cannot even hinder the AI. If you got to the end game on anything higher than normal you cheated or used mods especially if you have all of the DLC at this point. Otherwise you played medium or smaller.
@@justinfrazier9555 AI "cheating" on high difficulty levels is a thing in nearly every strategy game that's ever been made. Age of Empires, Warcraft, StarCraft, Civilization, Command and Conquer, etc. etc. etc. High difficulty AI cheating has been a thing for over 3 decades at this point. That is not even close to being exclusively a CA or Paradox issue. It also has little to do with the point I was even making.
The biggest problem with the late game (IMO) is the fact that all those great and badass units you finally get to recruit you don't really use in battle, for the most part you will meet armies which are either:
A) so much below your power level that it's not really worth fighting the battles in real time
B) entrenched in level4 and 5 keeps, where it's simply a hassle to fight them, and the auto-resolve is simply a sanity saving button.
Maybe my problem is that I simply suck at the tactical part of the game....
never reached late game, always restart with a new faction... im sick
I also have restartitis. It's especially bad with rpg type games, I've literally still not gotten out of act 1 in baldurs gate 3
This is why I almost only play head to head multiplayer campaign, it force you to use every tool at disposition to win because sooner or later you will clash with another player empire
Glad you have friends that play the game but this dont work for majority of players
Old world has made me enjoy late game a decent bit more. Having multiple factions growing quite large creates the fun dynamic that I feel the other warhammer total war games don't really have. Which you have multiple large factions, making alliance, having joint wars. It just makes the campaign feel more interesting and gives you a bit more freedom to tackle the campaign how you want.
IE I feel like once you start a campaign you get given 1-3 routes (because the map feels very chokepoint like) that your armies march down, crushing everything in your path, from turn 1 to turn 100.
This sounds really good just curious what about The Old World makes factions grow bigger? The examples of Ukthuan / Empire staying divided forever in base game - what's different in TOW?
The old world campaigns have been very fun. Things are a little more spread out and you can't settlement hop nearly as easy.
Menuing is my least favorite part of the end game. Every turn I spend about 80% of it levelling characters, upgrading settlements, clicking through textboxes, declining the same diplomacy offer I’ve seen the past 60 turns… it takes so long that I end up getting really frustrated. It genuinely takes about 5 minutes for every one minute of campaign progress.
As someone who's been playing TW3 for only about a week, I've felt the problem of not being able to access the high-tier units until it doesn't really matter anymore. But I also feel like I'm playing a different game than you, because by turn 60 on average I have nowhere near the amount of territory you do!
I agree with most of your points but i think one thing with the map that would help with the snowball for alot of factions is the way the factions around the edges of the map can ignore entire directions in terms of caring about defence, take cathay for example, Once you secure the homeland you essentially only have 1 front compared to say the Empire where you have enemies on all sides even if you secure the majority of it and yeah you have friendly factions around ofc but they might have died by then etc. its a minor thing that slow things down abit and not a huge factor but when you are playing a faction with few friends around you really notice the diff.
This. I played skaven with my friend and at turn 80 half the map want us dead. We had to unite and get in non aggression with the other skavens to survive somehow.
Now i play a single campaign as dward around turn 50 and just came out of a death grap after i was fighting with 4 civ in the same time alone.
I slow myself down. I only recruit generals and agents with the "ideal" traits and I try not to blitz the AI. I like early game, every decision feels important, I stay there as long as I can and then usually start a new game when I feel like I cannot lose.
Wouldn't simply reducing the range of movement of all armies in all factions in a way that settlement hopping becomes impossible improve the current state of Immortal Empires? It would be a very easy way to make sure the settlements are far away from one another, without having to increase the overall size of the world
Agreed. I've had multiple occasions where I've steam-rolled through Empire territories because most settlements were 1-2 turns apart from each other.
Maybe add a brief 25%-50% movement debuff after settling in a new city? Maybe some form of "fatigue" attrition?
But... but... but then the game would be slow; and we would have to face attritions! 😭 The "tightening" of the map came exactly as a result of players' complains esp. in TWW1, about "boring turns"; or frustrating difficulty, bcs they had to deal with attrition mechanics. The latter is especially great example of compounding issues, i.e. how CA has dug the hole it is now by itself. (a) you dumb down your game to attract more players, who will then complain about some punishing mechanisms, (b) you add several different attritions in various parts of the world for fluff reasons, but forget to include mitigations for all of them or make it impossible to ignore it, (c) you create so many races that are imbalanced, some of which will have major weaknesses in how they mitigate (or remedy) attrition (f.e. bcs of their low replen rate), (d) you devise cheats since you can't program a good AI, so then the attrition ends up affecting only the players, (e) your game encourages fast expansion, so the existing army mechanics (like "camp stances") that prevent attrition end up harming you. So, to cut this gordian knot - you make most settlements in 1t range, thus preventing the players from having to get frustrated about the attrition. Congrats
@@SleepyMatt-zzz Oh, I love this idea! This would decelerate expansion without affecting the usual movement range!
I think having a movement range debuff to traverse enemy territory would be a nice idea too. After all, marching on unfriendly land is harder to do. Even more if it's corrupted.
This way defenders get a strategic advantage to repel attackers from their territory, and it'll be easier to deal with those pesky raiders that are so annyoing.
@@Johann_Gambolputty_of_Ulm Indeed. Sounds like the imbeciles at the marketing department who never played the game call all the shots in CA. That's why they focus so much on balancing the damn multiplayer battles who nobody gives a f*ck about.
But on the single player, where 90% of players play the freaking game, every damn issue is met with a half-ass easy-fix from CA to fill the hole instead of actually solving the freaking issue.
My hopes for Warhammer 3 to finally get in a stage enjoyable to play are fading with each new lame patch and screwed overpriced DLC. ¬¬
@@thaliatherasdotter9175 I'm less inclined to blame the marketing guys; perhaps I'm fine to cut the some slack after this abomination of 2023, where they had to "sell" a lot of crappy products and pretend genuine enthusiasm for several bonkers decisions of CA top brass 😅 For me it is just one aspect of an overall failure of leadership and lack of guidance. To me TWWH overall development over the past few years seems super erratic, thrashing itself between polar extremes. Sometimes, like you've correctly pointed out, they appear to invest disproportionate amount of resources in fine-tuning the MP experience - even though CA itself has never expressed their major interest in turning TW series into some e-sport opportunity. They have knee-jerk reactions to meta-narratives on their forums, sometimes addressing problems voiced by casual gamers; and sometimes following the recommendations of hardcore gamers, who are much more focused on developing their cheese strategies to win IE campaigns by turn 40, than on just a pleasant gaming experience. And yet sometimes they simply ignore certain pleas altogether ("make melee infantry great again" comes to mind).
As a result, I don't think there is a single audience / group of customers, who is satisfied by the current state of this game. So, we end up with frustrated noises from all the angles -> devs and leadership keeps panicking even more -> they apply another band-aid solution that solves one aspect of a given issue only perfunctorily -> rinse and repeat.
Of course, I am only skimming the surface, with a plethora other problems affecting the current state of affairs; the spaghetti code, dated technical guts, underfunding of the development team, just to name a few. Still, IMHO they are secondary to the aforementioned lack of vision for the future of this game in particular and of the series as a whole. That's why I ain't exactly excited about this whole "we're sorry, merry christmas" letter from CA's C-suite; and why my hopes for TWW3 are long gone. Don't wanna put yours down, I really hope that I'll be proven wrong and we will get more pleasant hours out of TWW3! But for now I'm happy to sink my hours into BG3, Rogue Trader or CK3.
My biggest issue is with the "hard cap" on expansion the AI seems to have. Like you said, you can beat the vast mayority of threats with a basic ass tier 2 army with some ror's or tier 3-4 unit sprinkled in. I love to build up late game stacks of the best units that race has to offer and see them in action. But without an endgame crisis to throw several armies at you at once the whole experience feels like swatting flies with cannonballs and you have to spend some much time to do so.
Unit caps (in armies, like tabletop caps) and removal of the red line will fix the late game. but to many fools can't see that is the reason game get's boring and stale.
would even argue that the max replentischment of armies should be 20 % with 10% being the minimum. this will slow down the braindead settlement hopping without consequenses
Meh on replenishment, you'd just force people to fight more manual battles in such a way as to minimize casualties.
Caps could work, but caps on what? basic units? Because it's not elite units causing issues.
Look at how the tabletop caps mod works. works with 3 tiers basic elite and legendary and you get different rankings on units. best balancing mod out there@@Costin_Gaming
This is not it, and all of this can be achieved easily with mods. The real issue is more fundamental.
I love the mod that allows you to subjugate with any race combined with better vassals mod. I played as Noctilus (L/VH) and I give most settlements to my vassals through the mod.
Every grand strategy ever gets boring after the snowball starts, everybody knows that
I think you’re getting into something that I’ve thought a lot about. I have 1000’s of hours on twh2 & 3 and what I’ve noticed the most compared to other tw games is that the combat system is so different. If you even optimize your troops just the average amount you’re going to be pretty much able to get through most battles if you do it manually. Obviously this depends on the player, but if you’ve played campaign for that long you know how easy it is to crush most opponents in the late game. While if you compare it to a game like Napoleon or Fall of the Samurai where black powder is king, even the most basic conscripts can do decent damage to most elite line infantry it evens the playing field. Obviously those games were limited by their battle ai and their horrible use of artillery. But when you even consider like fall of the samurai’s campaign the campaign ai was brutal and you had to be super cunning and efficient to get ahead, I have never found myself using agents and other campaign mechanics more than in shogun. While in twwh I really only use agents for combat and the occasional scouting. I think the thing that does it though is there’s not a need for deep tactical thinking at higher levels. I mean there’s infinite videos on yt about how trash stacks of hobgoblins, boosted to their max, can take out most late game armies. What the point of making a tactically and economically balanced army when I can just get 19 dragons to kill everything in sight and then a life wizard heals them? Like what are empire spearmen and crossbow men supposed to do against a mammoth stack? It’s ridiculous and I love it so much, but it’s a different planet from some of their other titles. This is not to say that Napoleon and shogun 2 are better games, I just wish CA would learn from past games and continuously improve, adapt, and build on the past instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ever couple of years.
I think CA could just attempt to stretch out the existing map without even needing to add more regions.
They should add anti blobbing mechanics like they have in EU4. More objectives (I loved the vortex campaign). Universal mechanics. One of the biggest disappointments with 3 for me is how it is just the same game as 2 but slightly worse in some arbitrary ways. They need to fix the game honestly and can't rely on each dlc character having a new mechanic that will keep you interested for a week.
While I see your point, I also see the heart of the problem.
Firstly, is a problem I don't encounter until like turn 150-200. When I play any faction, I have two things that I do: I like to theme armies, and I like to play with my cool toys. Much like the tabletop, it's cool once or twice to win with a super meta list, but it loses its fun very quickly. If you are building nothing but the most efficient armies and playing in a way that is "meta" you are going to get bored very quickly. If you play to win on turn 62 you're denying yourself the joy of 4 dreadquake trains railing 4 incoming armies apart and watching viscera fly, and where this game excels and becomes fun is interesting battles. 30 crapstacks of goblin archers and laborers will never give you interesting battles. Play with your cool toys, Warhammer campaigns are a journey not a destination. I can't stand the sight of my early game units and deliberately try to use them as little as absolutely possible.
My first CD campaign I hit turn 100, just crippled a massively overpowered Grimgor, and then the damn Dwarfs endgame event triggered and it was calamitous. So much fun.
the reward after the early sturggle is sandbox, you can roleplay, pain everything to your color, test some scenarios, test armies idk..
One thing ive noticed is that allot of campaign mechanics simply "run out" after awhile. Like after you unlock tier 3 allegiance to the gods in a norsca, campaign, thats basically it. You can't unlock any of the other tier 3 god characters without restarting. This is true for demons of chaos, and for blood kisses too. There is a point where a mechanic just "dies". I don't know what to do about this, but i definitely wish that the AI would go back to confederating because people used to whine that the end game was nearly impossible thanks to the order tide, and frankly id rather have that then i would this balkanization piece meal garbage
Long post. Excuse my french, but if 65 turns is lategame for most people, then Im not sure what to call turn 200 or 300 even. This is a big map, a big world. So is Old World mod. I get it, you play on legendary. I play on anywhere between normal and very hard. So turn 60 is like turn 100-120 for you. Still. Legendary cheats can go frick themselves, so can crisises from where I stand.
I get it. You have option for lategame armies, got short victory, conquered your immidiate foes. My question is, so what? Whats the point of playing if you never confed all LL in a race? Not have some lategame armies clashing? Not see foes you would never be able to reach in 30-50 turns? Does nobody sees challenge in doing any of these anymore?
Are people just so sped up that they wanna speedrun a strategy game, like they do every other kind of game? And their own lives as well while theyre at it? This sounds like a massive societal problem for me. And only partially a Total War problem.
You have issues with giant blobs of factions not forming anymore? Try tackling the Tyrion-Alarielle-Eltharion trio on Ulthuan. Try taking on Kislev+Bret+Empire+very likely some Dwarfs Old World Ordertide. Try being hated in a region like Imrik or Festus, and facing threats from all sides constantly. Try conquering the Chaos Wastes as any non-Chaos faction. More factions combined have MORE CHEATS. People are still not getting this 2 years into the bloody game. And they dont really have a 'heartland' which is left just empty and up for grabs like giant blobs of Ordertide factions from Wh2. Wanna conquer Ulthuan? Good luck, there will be 3-4 armies constantly in your way. Wanna conquer the Empire? Looky there, its Gelt coming with 2 stacks, Belegar with 1, Wood Elves with 2, Louen with 3, Kislev with 2 all at the same time.
I personally cannot imagine anything MORE boring than playing the same goddamn 50 turns for every campaign, facing the same enemies every time, conquering the same challenges. The fun begins when you obtained short victory and are largely free to tackle other factions. When you dont have lame, boring, samey units anymore in every solitary army. When your mages can actually cast spells, and your characters get access to powerful mounts and items.
I realize Im a minority. I wish I was not. People crying about how bad the Empire is never seen the Empire AI with 80 freakin settlements spamming artillery out of their behinds constantly. They havent seen Vlad being gone from the map in less than 10 turns, even though he owned like 5 provinces beforehand. They havent seen Volkmar clearing the entire Badlands and Southlands, or Yuan Bo+Markus+Alberic ruling over Lustria. The endgame, the true endgame, is ALWAYS bloody Ordertide, with baddies stuck on the fringes of the world. Thats what makes endgame actually boring. With exceptions of places where there are no Order factions, like Darklands where Grimgor can wreck everyone because Waaagh goes Brrrr..
Empire AI is gonna be so freakin turbo after the next DLC, I dont even want to imagine. So will Dwarfs, we gonna get the big blue blob back, Im betting on it right now. And Im gonna hate playing that campaign 'meta' as long as it will last. It will likely be forever, since autoresolve loves Empire and Dwarfs most. Lots of armor, lots of ammo.
Or just play SFO. It slows down the game. Youre gonna need to spend more turns to achieve the same thing. Less growth, less cheese, longer, slightly more meaningful battles. Doesnt fix everything, but its better than vanilla in just about every single solitary way.
I will grant you lategame management can get tedious as you have a huge empire. Guess what? You can also sell your settlements if you hate management so much. You dont have to recruit full hero capacity. You dont have to play fully efficiently like Legend of TW, otherwise youre just creating more tedium for yourself. I agree with inverting the inverted cheats though. Some factions are just unfun to start off with, not in small part due to how borked early game is for other AI factions starting near them. *cough Grimgor * cough Gor-rok *cough Ostankya*.
I'm doing a Chorf campaign right now and this is exactly correct. Even rushing to get death quake mortars, ive already built doomstacks of other armies and don't need the higher tier units
I agree with a lot of this, i've put a lot of thought into it myself
my ideas for fixing it would be:
-More automated processes like automatic skill allocation templates, and automatic settlement templates so that you can just tell a city to start developing towards a certain blueprint (idk, money buildings+walls+control for example)
-Ability to form something thats like a vassal, where you seed control to a lord. maybe even LLs could control a 'vassal' (Think of it like a state or province in a country), that vassall could get the bonuses of that lord, and you could reassume control at any point.
-optional toggle box to allow mechanics from vortex and roc on IE campaign, just for extra content
-more quest battles, maybe some for confederation.. imagine you're playing karl franz and you can get the option to do a quest battle to confed volkmar
more late game super states like in wh2, the enemies often became horrifying endless factories of armies.
Yeah in stellaris I never liked having a big empire. I'd always develop up groups of planets and then give to allies or turn them into vassals.
Shogun 2 did it best with the realm divide mechanic imo. Everyone gangs up on you if you become Shogun or too big and it was possible to track progress towards this point rather than the random anti player bias in the newer titles.
In my opinion turn 62 shouldn't even be endgame yet, however some factions/Lords are so powerful compared to others that they just steamroll everything when the player controls them.
They should give more buildings that will give -x global recruitment time and/or +x global recruitment capacity.
Makes you feel invested with top tier armies more.
There`s too man issues. Supply lines were a really good idea for long term campaigns.
You can play a HE campaign just with spears and bows. You might need an occasional spear thrower for sieges, but besides all you do is get a wizard, build up the income building in the settlement and move on.
The only race you really use the higher tier units is VC, because they have that instant recruitment.
There´s also no challenge - you loose one of these armies? Nevermind, 2 or 3 turns you have recruited a new one. But you never loose one of these armies, unless some stupid game mechanic happens. Like ambush or Mother Ostankia using all buffs and debuffs. It`s rather annoying than a real challenge.
I think implement unit caps on both player and the ai, not necessarily the same unit caps but make it to where every 1 province you own as the player allows for 5-10 units to be fielded (amount of units could be difficulty dependent) This way on Legendary difficulty per say, you would have to own the entirety of 3-4 provinces in order to field one full stack and the ai could either have the same limit on normal difficulty or maybe double the limit on legendary. This would mean in theory way less full stacks to snowball the map with, also way less full stacks for the ai to mindlessly throw at you. It would force you to be way more strategic with your armies and also incentivize recruiting top tier units as you only have precious few slots. If you get declared war on multiple fronts you would have to prioritize 1-2 large armies or 3-4 smaller armies to work with. You would also have to prioritize certain areas of your empire while possibly sacrificing other areas. If 2-3 ai's decided to team up against the player it could put the player in very difficult spot. Essentially force the player to do more with less and put an end to endless low tier unit spam. Also it would make bigger empires much more dangerous and tiny 1 province empires much less so and more likely to vassalize, confederate or otherwise engage in favorable diplomacy. Maybe go the route of medieval 2 and give certain major factions semi-superpower status/potential from the start of the game while others start out much smaller and have to play catch up.
Just makes it even easier when you get ahead.
Well late game was always a moop up in every Total War game. AI is not programmed to deal with you when you are at your height. I must say tho, as someone who very rarely auto resolve battle (only auto resolve when I outnumber AI so much that going in would be a waste of time) end game AI could still be challenging. For example, I played as clan Eshin and I was in a very good relationship with Lokhir Fellheart so much so that we kinda grown our factions together. I gave him entire eastern part of Cathay as I focused on pushing west. I was somewhere around Khemri when I started dealing with Tomb Kings crisis and Lokhir simply started war with me. He was so powerful and had arcs in every Cathayan river bank I just had to give up on entire region as I was ending the TK crisis. Started building army separate army in ogre mountains to keep him in Cathay but at this point he became endgame crisis himself. Had a lot of fun with that campaign as I was attacked all around and had to wait great number of turns to use Eshin contract for second time and stop him by assassinating him. But I agree sometimes AI is stupid and you get easy campaign on your hands.
I think it can be somewhat challenging if you build far less armies than you could. I generally have about 8 armies when I could afford 20 so it takes long when I could steamroll.
Two ideas for options players could take to make sure the challenge persists to the endgame:
Firsr, AI armies start with a handful of "free" mid to late tier units (based on campaign difficulty and/or current turn) when raised for the first time, so that they can at least have some threatening units even when they have no idea how to manage their buildings for a decent army comp. Would also help a few of the factions that start in "challenging locations" (particuarly Boris and N'kar) last long enough to be contacted by factions that would consider allying with and/or confederating with them.
-The ability to have multiple crisis armies during the course of the campaign with ever-increasing difficulty, instead of happening all at once. Stellaris has regularly added new "mid-game crises" with its DLCs to shake things up before the actual endgame start, and I think the IE as it currently stands could benefit from that.
On top of that, most of the factions need anything from tweaks to major overhauls to their mechanics to keep them engaging throughout for the 100+ turns the game seems to expect you to play. Empire, High Elves, Dwarfs, Norsca, Lizardmen and Skaven are the biggest offenders, beyond a couple of LL with very unique mechanics of their own. Hopefully as they go through their planned DLCs CA will revise each of the factions they are adding LLs to.
That's quite funny because this is why I quickly stoppe TW3, there is no consequence past turn 50 at the very best
In my Reikland Campaign on Med 2 CoW Mod, turn 100 means I can actually start expanding where I want to, and enemies scale with your expansion, this is a far better experience imo
Med2 always best (modded)
I completely agree that the late game in Total War games is needlessly made boring by certain design choices that seem to be part of the TW design template that CA refuses to innovate on. I say needlessly because I recognise that some amount of late game churn is unavoidable with this style of game, where eventually the player will have oodles of armies and huge continents to manage against fewer and fewer enemies.
Essentially, it takes forever to get cities to grow to the highest tier, which is typically a requirement for the highest tier buildings needed to unlock the most elite units. This means that you'll usually only be able to recruit these units in the heartland of your vast empire, when your armies will be out in the boonies. I think that introducing a mechanic whereby you can upgrade existing units to higher tier units is probably the most elegant way to give the player access to elite units where they are needed on the map without a bunch of extra busywork, but any number of alternative solutions exist.
As it stands the meat of the game is over by the time you have access to the juiciest units, AND THEN you still have to put in a bunch of extra effort to upgrade your armies when you could have ended the campaign with trash mobs and be on to the next one.
My method of enduring an interesting late game is being bad enough at the game that it takes me until late game to get even the short campaign victory!
There needs to be a lot more internal problems popping up when you get too big. Rebellions; unrest; random events that intervene once you reach certain levels; and so on
There also needs to be a limit on the higher tier units, and increasing the capacity of those needs to come at an economic cost (for example if High Elves gets 2 or 4 Phoenix Guard regiments per recruitment building, so you need to get high-level settlements to get more, and the could have been an alternate building at that level which would be a more economic boon)
- This would also make those who forego elite units able to recruit more armies of lower-level troops (not ideal but multiple armies can drown the enemies in bodies)
The only way late game would wok in Warhammer is for the AI to confederate and start attacking the player.All small factions should be absorbed into large hostile empires.That could prolong the end game i think.
One problem with confederations, which was not as big in warhammer 2, is that ca moved all the lords around the map for no reason, so you would end up with splinter empires which wont do well for ai.
Total War definitely have problem with late game/difficulty scaling... However, looking at it through the lens of experienced player who is playing on very hard/legendary difficulty is just wrong. Take a look at achievements on Steam -how many people finished campaings on very hard/legendary difficulty? It's just small part of playerbase. For majority of people difficulty is perfectly fine - and what's most important its modifiable.
When it comes to TW the problem is that people optimize fun out of the game. "I finished campaings and I didn't even used X or Y" - Okay, why is that exactly? Who is forcing you to use most optimized options or ways to win? I don't think the problem is the game itself but players. It reminds me of RPG's where people hoard potions/other items and then complain that they finished the game without using them.
Very few people even complete campaigns on any difficulty in Warhammer 3 even once. There's a reason for that: It's a tedious grind.
I usually get bored but not with bretonia. I've playied two campaigns with more that 200 turns and i've always had fun (and i could continue the socond one; i've decided to move one with something different because there are some factioons i've never playied). I find the way to give me objectives and i build my own lore
I appreciate this video. The two biggest flaws of TWW are the AI and the lack of late game. The AI is just crap and they have to purely let the AI cheat to make it harder, and they don't even do that well for example making melee units useless. The AI is embarrassingly bad such that a single Modder can make better AI than the entire company. The lack of late game is the worst part. I tend to quit most campaigns between turn 50 and 100 because I can't foresee any scenario where I could lose. I quit for the same reason chess players quit when one player who is already behind blunders their queen there is just no point in playing it out. Empire management becomes tedious leveling up 40+ skill points, managing 50+ cities, meanwhile I never get to use the most fun units as even my starting capital is only T4 and most of my armies are too far away to recruit and global recruitment is unnecessarily expensive and slow. Why ever stop 6 turns to recruit a unit when I can just bring an extra trash army along and not waste time (in the very rare case i need it). The result is that the majority of the game is played out with early game units which often aren't as fun.
It's really sad because these flaws could be easily improved but for some reason they don't.
If the map can't get bigger reducing the army movement would do the same thing as spreading settlements out.
I choose not to confederate to keep my faction smaller and building tall / focused.
I agree that the first 20 turn are the best and feel important and more focused on survival
I actually miss the chaos invasion 🙄 Warhammer 3 is still most disappointing in terms of the siege but the game is disappointing in terms of by the time you get the shiny you have already won 🙄 the best late game is the original Rome though the model of the Mongol's in Medieval 2 would also be a massive improvement
Same here! Why there is no chaos crisis I have no idea
I thought the realm divide mechanic in FotS wasn't too bad but I can see why people would consider it arbitary.
If you are beating the game on Very Hard/Very Hard, I think you’ve played enough to deserve a bit of boredom. My first few playthroughs stomped me. The fun comes in playing a new faction every time using the new strategies and ideas the last one taught me. I even have the late game crises turned off because my actual battle skills are not up to the task yet. 😂 Maybe I’m a noob, but the game feels wayy better than my first Rome 2 campaign as I was getting into this weeks ago. My Rome 2 campaign had 0 difficulty, I unknowingly picked the OP Cornelia and literally had every settlement before turn 200 or slightly earlier.
I play SFO Exclusively and have done so since WH1. It's jsut so much better, and slower. You're waaay more limited in what you can do, afford and at Turn 60 you're probably at three to four provinces with two full stacks. Only a handful of factions are able to have their capital at Tier V by then. Units behave in the way you expect them to, so cavalry play is viable for factions other than Bretonnia, too.
I'm in a Dwarf Campaign at turn 150, and I own all of the 'Dwarf mountains' from Kislev to Oreon's Camp. Most major factions are still on the map, and many are not to be trifled with. Now, as Dwarfs at turn 60, you can safely say that your starting province *cannot* be taken, but as, say; Tzarina Katarin? You'll still be struggling to keep the area surrounding Kislev consolodated.
Now, admittedly, I could have been way more powerful, but I set different goals for myself. So; 'Katarin and Leoncour must survive'
This is why I like overhaul mods. SFO feels like its a harder struggle to hit thew snowball in most cases and it has an mcm to tweak stuff, and caps force me to use mixed armies.
In Troy the more armies you had the more penalty you suffered cost wise. I hated it so much. Mostly because the AI didn't suffer it
I am not sure any part of Immortal Empires really works for me. I got it because I wanted to play a relaxing Total War campaign with one of my favorite Warhammer factions (Karl Franz & co) at low difficulty and just have fun shoring up the Empire and repulsing Chaos Invasions or whatever.. But it turns out that isn't really possible; this is a game you've got to "game" from the start, exploiting the AI's dumbness and auto-resolve system, take down the rebels in the first 4 turns to get to the next crisis, run around putting out fires until et cetera. Still succeeded (turned up the difficulty level, in fact) but it isn't all that fun and kind of feels like work. And if I want a gaming challenge I'll usually play miniature games against people face to face instead (Warmachine MkIV is a lot of fun these days), not beat up my computer.
Battles can be kind of fun, though. Mostly PVP. It's very nostalgic for an old Warhammer Fantasy fan.
But perhaps this is what Total War games have turned into these days? I haven't really played much TW since TW: Empires.
There was a time in mortal Empires that you got some super power AI. The Dwarves at one time did that. The game ended up being a very grindy stream of AI army's you had to defeat. It was Challenging but got old. I really think the fix to the late game problem is going to be developing something like CHAT GPT to play a random number of major factions. This would give players a consistent challenge in the late game that can be adjusted.
Vanilla Total War has always been “meh”. Get a suite of campaign mods that alter difficulty and challenge in interesting ways, or add new mechanics altogether. Jadawin’s campaign mods are a great start. For a truly unique and challenging campaign I then customise them for the campaign I want to have, whether that’s adding more randomness, having a specific enemy faction I want to grow into a massive empire and become my nemesis, etc. mods can fix most of these issues.
TWW2 with all its cheats was actually better late game. Especially for evil factions against oredertide. And you was using more elite armies and less of them, and losing this army was a disaster. In TWW3 i can loose 3 stacks late game and doesnt give a fuck
Another way to handle this is to basically have one random faction declare war on you every 10-15 turns so by turn 150 you’re basically fighting everyone. The issue is this would be so punative for some factions like Dawaii. I was playing around 250 and a faction came back and respawns up to 4 undead armies every turn so it’s just a boring grind. I think the game should mostly focus up to turn 200 or lose so there’s an actual timer (a unique event for each faction) which can be checked or not.
Why not make it so you *can* recruit tier 5 units out of the gate, but they take ~10 turns and the number of turns needed to recruit diminishes with each tier of your region's settlement building? That would allow for more meaningful decision making and more flavorful armies. For the end game, every single bit of campaign economic management should have a reasonably good option to automate allowing focus on conquering. And to also help with end game, the stupid "paint the map your color" objective should just be done away with. And there are some good existing mods that vastly improve the 'end game' objectives in flavorful ways for each faction and ensure your campaign should finish up before turn 100. This game *can* be fixed with mods, I just wish there was one all encompassing 'end-game-fixer-upper- mod that transforms the underlying campaign experience.
Why not just a cap early on? So you can only have say 1 dragon for first 10 turns or so.
I've always wanted to see some late game instances like quest battles, but with actual locations you need to march your armies to fight an army or monster that would take armies that aren't as effecient towards army vs army battles. Like fighting some unreal dragon or spell caster who can summon crazy beasts. Would take a different kind of army. Diplomacy should also work better like Civilization. If your land grabbing like crazy your allies should start looking at you differently and the left over races would band together to stop the land grabbing.
you have to play head to head with a friend to get to the point where you want to have a fun late game. I like to play as opposing factions that make sense.
Like there is lot of fun to be had as malakith and any high elf faction
Hi. I'm not sure what you did with the audio, but I'ts painful to hear. Even when I turn it down, it still has some wired effect. As to what you said in the video, I see what you mean, but I am also puzzled with some of the arguments. The economy aspect in the Warhammer TW series is a bit dumbed down from what it was in other entries. Also, you don't like managing your heroes? It's a part of the game - getting experience and better gear. Now, when it comes to the economy, the Chaos Dwarfs have probably the most complex one in the game. So, maybe play something else, if it's to much for you? Also, if you didn't get to turn 120+, you didn't see how things get harder, because you need more and more workers and you need to conquer more land and faster. Also, other strategy games have a similar difficulty structure - as you progress, get more land, technologies, resources, manpower etc. , the smaller the later chalenge is.
You're only ever going to use Tier 4 and 5 units if you play a multiplayer campaign against someone else. I hardly ever see a faction build up enough and actually recruit high end units. On top of it even IF you have the buildings unlocked you'll never recruit those units because by that time you're either
A) Far away from the province where you could recruit them, so you'd need to wait 4 turns on global recruit. Or
B) Recruit the Army from scratch in the Province, but that army will take 10+ turns to even get where it would be useful.
And yeah the frontheavy difficulty is in like 80% of every game imaginable. Probably most noticable in Tactic/Strategy games with RP elements. You start out weak and super squishy, but as the game progresses you amass gear, levels and skills to beef you up and even if the game throws harder and harder stuff at you, your personal growth more often than not outpaces whatever the game sends to deal with you.
There are very, very few games where have an increase in difficulty throughout the game and tbh rightfully so. Most games are designed in a way that rewards you for beefing up. The game wants you to feel more powerful at the end of the game, than you where at the start. There are only 2 other alternatives to it.
1) The game is linear, as you gain new powers the game increases at the same pace. If that happens, you might as well have no progression at all. Like an RPG where you need 5 hits to beat an enemy at the start of the game and still 5 hits at the end of it.
2) You must struggle to even keep up with the enemies you face. They get stronger and stronger and you need to pull all registers to keep up with them, maybe not even be ABLE to keep up. That might be a desirable game experience once in a while, but the majority of players would feel frustrated about that, that despite all their efforts they'll always fight a loosing war.
So as for TW WH3 to improve into the late game there need to be some changes to the A.I. For one, the A.I. should actually recruit higher Tier units and not just spam RoR units. I don't know if the A.I. gets recruitment duration decrease on higher Difficulty or not, but that might help them out (I do know they have more Slots at least)
The other thing is that late game A.I. has no "ambition" The factions are hard coded that they want to conquer a certain territory and then after that they just stop. You said often that Grand Cathay becomes a powerhouse in most campaigns, but have you ever seen them expanding noticably outside of their Home Territory? At some point the A.I. just becomes "content" and stops doing things. They're not even recruiting more armies even if they don't expand any more the A.I. could just use all left over income to have some more armies, or replace existing ones with higher Tier units, but that never happens and would be my suggestion to actually improve the gaming experience.
I mean the general consensus for decades now at least from my experience is that snowballing is an issue pretty much every if not everu strategy, especially turn based strategy game has. Civ, humankind, all the paradox games like ck3, eu4, etc... great video but at the end of the day this seems to be a generally understood issue in the gaming community for literally decades now. Hopefully eventually game companies start catching on and start specifically designing their games to counter this issue. Off the top of my head i remember tww2 having a steeper supply line penalty and the consensus in the tww community was that tww2 was much harder and more fun as a result.
Majority of the time i just play for about 50 turns and then i get to a point where i'm happy with my objective and i'm bored, so I stop and go agane. The few i've played for longer are ones like the Wood Elves coz you're porting around the forests and you've got so much on the go you can be winning in 4 forests but losing in 2, etc.
This is why I put on all end game scenariors at once and try to survive or hopefully thrive with what I have built so far.
I always hated how I am forced to play with shit troops half of the game cos of ridiculous economy and by the time I get the troops I want there is no reason to continue cos you are just ending turns and the Ai is just running from you.
Also a big gripe is like you said being forced to rush the AI, it's gamey as fuck and there is no choice there, you either rush the Ai and gobble up territory until its dead or your lose. SFO mod made some tweaks there and as Vampire counts a viable strategy was to sack the shit out of the Empire and build up your cities without gobbling up everything as fast as you can. It was different and it felt pretty good.
Yeah it’s not a shogun 2 but something seems off here, on what difficulty you’re playing? Cause 62 rounds and done seems pretty easy, I’m not much off a chaos dwarfs player but usually on legendary difficulty it’s not that easy to get your campaign done
Look at what legend of total war does in 60 turns :)
Like always, the Snowball effect is killing late games in Strategy games. Strategy Games only have difficulty coming from the AI. If the AI is too powerful, you will lose and its no fun. If the AI is too weak, you will have no challenge and its no fun.
Fun comes from challenge. So if the AI can't give us a good challenge, not too high, and not too low, we have to find a way to give players a fair challenge, one that adapt with the game and the player.
And for that, we need Internal conflicts. Internal factions to the one of the player, that may help the player, or have different agendas and will be against him.
We need nobles, priest, patricians and so on that crack the player faction from the inside. And the same for the AI.
Good idea. Stellaris has scaling difficulty and it works pretty well.
I think that giving the AI more settlements that are partially built up and an extra army at the start of the campaign would help them survive and expand better.
Both the player and the AI could either absorb or ally their minor neighbors in the early game which would then impact the mid and late game when the main factions are expected to start fighting.
Better defended settlements would also slow settlement hopping since both the player and the AI would have to spend more time recuperating.
You'd just push the inverted curve further though. I think the AI starting softer on cheats and getting more later on would help, especially confederation ones.
I've always enjoyed the late game the most in Total War and Warhammer III gives me some of the most late game fun I've had in the franchise. Empire is the only one that I might enjoy more. The early game is almost more of a chore that I have to go through to set up a fun late-game experience. Basically, everything you've listed as a reason the late game is bad are things that I actively enjoy about the late game. The issue isn't necessarily an issue of game design, but different people wanting different things out of their experience.
my experiences are i get instantly fricked over or i dominate
Costin doing The Works with this kind of video at this time in the community.
CA needs to think about what really needs fixing in the game rather than focusing indefinitely on selling content.
Playing as Norsca on VH/L is still quite the challenge, javelins go brrrr
Maybe we need Realm Divide back. Sometimes even the early game is super easy. Like with Mannfred.
I hated realm divide in Shogun 2. It always felt like you were being punished for playing the game. In one turn your income, public order go into the toilet and every faction declares war, it stops being fun and becomes an exercise in frustration.
Endgame has always been a problem as CA cannot do much except break immersion with a huge anti player bias and ai cheats. The game is arguably more fun before such mechanics kick in.
i win campaigns in very hard both battle and game, always before being able to recuit anything tier 5 sometimes tier 4.... i agree, when im able to recruit Khadai destroyer or a dragon , means already won long ago
Almost every game with any sort of player progression is going to be hardest early on and easiest later on. Like look at Fire Emblem games, or Elder Scrolls, Baldurs Gate, Legend of Zelda, whatever. I can't think of any that have the early game easier than the later game other than games with no player progression really. Even games with really difficult final bosses I can think of like Hollow Knight are extremely easy in the mid to late game before the very end because of the open nature of the game and bosses not taking into account all the tools the player could have access to. Only the final boss requires you to use all your tools to avoid taking damage.
what is in your opinion the best total war? and which total war u play most?
Warhammer 3. Shogun 2 2nd, Medieval 2 3rd.
Honorable mention to Troy: Great mechanics on campaign, really bad battles.
Most I've played is tied between Med 2 and Warhammer 3. I know I sunk thousands into Med 2, dunno for sure how much though.
dudes in turn 60 talks about endgame
100% bullshit video. I have many late campaigns where I had massively unbeatable armies and I was still struggling from attacks by a super aggressive AI. Play Imrik, you have bad starting position, you want to save the rest of the high elves but you have them on the other side of the world. By the time you are strong enough to break through the enemy territory, it already late game and you achieved nothing yet because you were under constant heavy pressure.
My biggest issue with late game is the AI relaying always on alliances, it's always the same races that gets strong, Elfs, Humans, Dwarfs, because they confederate or be allies too easily. demon races always gets destroyed by the AI super early because the play alone, i wish CA to do something to help these races as AI to be stronger at the start, maybe getting less wars against the races with allies, I aways play as Norsca and i've never seen Skarbrand, N'Kari, Taurox or Nakai, even rushing to then to get an alliance, they are always dead, even Azazel that start just at my side tends to die before i reach him, another problem is AI army recruitment, even with the cheating theirs armies are so bad that you always win the battles if you play, and constructions, as Norsca i confederate i a lot and always have to redising the cities, and i don't think these thing are difficult to resolve, already we have mods for these.
Late game not working in TWW3 is just a symptom of the same problem with TWW3...same reason why players feel bored after 25 - 35 turns, why there is zero unit variety in campaigns because everyone uses the same two or three units in every army, why there are so many useless bonuses and so on. Also it is the reason why the community begs for dlc but gets bored after 1 month and claims that the game has nothing to offer even though on paper it is a game that features thousands of unique units, magic, lords and an insane number of uniqure races. And yet the game feels stale.
The reason is that campaign experience is crucial to enjoying battles. If it wasnt, everyone would just play custom battles. Bad campaign design can turn a total war game into a autoresolve slugfest and this what happens withTWW3. This game has zero campaign mechanics. None. You only need money and to keep public order up (both easily achievable) and nothing else matters. As for the "unique mechanices", not every lord has them, and most of them are gimmicks.
This major problem is what causes literally every other problem in this game. If only money, public order and unit stats matter in the game, then the devs dont have options to reward the player. There are thousands of lord traits, skills, techs, faction effects, banners etc that give the same things...upkeep reduction, melee buffs yada yada. How many times can you stack replenishment and upkeep cost from techs, effects skills until you end up swimming in money and your armies are OP statwise and replenish in one turn? It is really easy to reach that point because other than money, you dont really need anything else in this game. But it is not like there is an alternative because the campaign mechanics/ design is barebones.
Logistics, religion cults, population, faction politics, food, interesting city building etc...none of these exist. So the game is just boring. I wont even get to diplomacy, AI , the incredibly small maps, insane OP stuff or other things.
Most people play a few turns like 30-40 and get bored and spam the forums for a new dlc in the hopes that the game will magically become fresh or great or be fixed with next dlc. This is due to marketing, sunken cost fallacy and the inability to accept that a great fantasy total war potential was wasted.
beating a dead horse
Oh thats easy the problem is like every other total war game it just turns into a steamroll that quickly ramps up the campaign is over with your tier 1 and 2 units making up the bulk of your forces making it pointless to even build up a new army or incorporate any high tier units because its over whats the point other than painting the map facing usually very weak or out of the way empires which is boring.
Now that you say it I havent used a K'daii destroyer yet. Only done like 3 campaigns but ya you get so strong so fast
If you want to keep late game fresh, you need to give players and their factions more ways to skin a cat before they get bored.
Personally I don't care. I play to have fun. I don't care about optimizing my gameplay. I mainly roleplay my campaigns. Do I lose often? Well, yes. Did I have fun losing? Absolutely. Playing and just optimizing your gameplay around cheesing the AI or only making "uber"-armies sounds so incredibly boring, and I would probably just be annoyed and frustrated the entire campaign. I'd rather enjoy my time playing it. But yes. The campaign has issues.
A game should be designed so that the best way to play is also the most fun way to play it. Total War certainly does not do that.
Well from what I see, they sacrificed NPC aggression for easier difficulty. I guarantee you, the moment that difficulty comes back, (if it ever does,) from WH2, where the AI get combat, growth, recruit hax and spam armies at you, the game will get TOUGH on hard mode or higher. But that would honestly make the daemon factions so weak on higher difficulties they'd be unplayable, save for Khornate armies that are already good troops.
This is why I play skaven and take like 5 territories across the map
Maybe the game is not balanced around people with 5000hours played?
Data from CA no less shows the vast majority of people stop at around turns 60-80 or before.
@@Costin_Gaming oof, that is so sad. Is it known why? The game being too easy might not be the only factor. There are a lot of races to try, a lot of other games to try, boredom, being wiped by the AI, etc.
The Game doesn't work well because the AI has unlimited funds so in a way you can get terrible situation of fighting someone only to be boggled down by the 5 plus doom stacks, doom stacks you can't achieve normally, its also a problem where the strategy of conquest are very limited to a single tactic that is "Burn their settlements", there is no "bully them into financial ruin"
I disagree. In Total War Warhammer 2 you had the Dwarves, the Elves and the Empire to look up for a challenge. Sometimes they had 60+ settlements and a cr*pload of armies, attacking you left, right, and center. Some of my fondest memory of TWWh2 were taking Ulthuan ot the World's Edge Mountains turn 100 or so. This does not happen in the third installment of the game...
Well that's because AI cheated more there: It had stronger benefits, easier confederations and a lot of free XP.
Worst thing is managing items, I cant even do it on my legendary lord then how about on 10 OTHERS?.. Then you have faction that create items like dwarfs with their stupid runes what a great mechanic now you have minibuffs to manage for every unit GOD!!!
Just play heaad to head campaign and you will enjoy it.
warhammer2 had a similar problem. it was improved through mods but you would expect that CA should be able to fix something like this in their third iteration. It just seems like they dont care and thats why i still didnt buy wh3 even whilst having over 1.5k hours in wh2.
the main issue is, depending on the faction, there is no cap on units , once i get a big enough economy to just pay fill my ranks with elite units and bulldoze everything, i get bored instantly
I am probably not understanding or you are poorly explaining but the things you praise about Old World seem to do the same things you criticized SFO for doing. You said SFO was bad because it incentivizes building tall and longer campaigns but you say Old World is better than vanilla because it forces you to play longer campaigns and build up settlements slowly? You said vanilla 3 was better than SFO and 2 because it was fast paced and you build lots of armies but here say that is bad? You criticized SFO for just having you press end turn over and over but sounds like in Old World you just click to travel and then hit end turn 3, 4, or even 5 turns for your army to get to the next settlement.
The sheer amount of time it takes to scroll across your empire is a slog