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Yeah, I went looking for it. It does tend to be easier if people link things in the first place (or just mention blog, twitter or whatever)

Not sure its 100% the same, though. There was a brief look at the map, and I didn't see Kairos (but it was a pretty quick jump-edit in the video). So the daemon factions might be moved or cut.

Don't agree on a lot of effort, however. Letting the normal campaign play out as is and just having different goals would've been less effort (though also more obnoxious). Khemri & vampirates had their own goals running without issue with the vortex campaign running as normal, rather than taking the time to rip that code out.

Before we explore those juicy details, it’s important to recognize that importing races from Total War: WARHAMMER I and II into Immortal Empires is no simple task; it’s *far* more complex than a simple copy and paste from game to game. WARHAMMER III introduced significant updates to the series—in the form of new mechanics, overhauled game systems, and a host of new foes to face

Paraphrasing:
'Despite having done year after year of total war games, and despite knowing this was a trilogy, we didn't do any future proofing or design planning in TW1. Instead our programmers wrote spaghetti code. We got really caught out with Norsca in the transition from TW1 to 2. But despite that, we did it again in TW2, and unfething everything a second time for TW3 has been a real problem.'

 nels1031 wrote:
Looks like Festus the Leechlord is getting a reveal soon.

They said weekly, or at least over the next 3 weeks. I'd assume previews on the 26th, 2nd and 9th, short lets play the next day or so, then something 'big' for the 16th followed by release on the 23rd.
A teaser pic like the vague pink thing they did with Azazel wouldn't be a surprise, though.

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/tww3-introducing-festus/

Festus!

The trailer is... meh. (too much grunting and scenery chewing)
Good shot of the warshrine, though



Not much to the actual article either.

Long forgetting the Hippocratic Oath he so vehemently preached as a mortal, Festus can be found concocting a variety of horrific potions and unleashing Lore of Nurgle spells, both of which allow him to manipulate the battlefield in insidious ways. While his Healing Elixirs ability replenishes the hit points of his own combatants, the Harbinger of Pestilence ability instead deals damage to enemy combatants. Yet there’s a catch: both act more like toggleable passive abilities that are mutually exclusive to use (meaning that only one of the two can be active at any one time).

FACTION EFFECTS
Vassals gain poison attacks and spread Nurgle’s corruption
Can brew Plagues
Souls +25 when a plague is spread

LORD EFFECTS
Plague duration: +3 turns (local armies)
Battle healing cap: +25% (Lord’s Army)

The radius of the healing/damage passives is a big deal. If its battlefield, cool. If not, he might have trouble as a foot lord (not sure what possible mount he could get, beyond a war shrine, and no idea if they did the work for that)
Rest is pretty blah.

I'm amused that CA thinks the warhammer world has a Hippocrates to base an oath on, but never mind.

Tomorrows video is hopefully more interesting.

Lets play of Festus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kk1IAw5QdQ&t=1s

The start, with him walking the streets of an Empire city is really good. Atmospheric.
Kinda want to play that game, to be honest.

Some nice battlemaps, not much use for the unlocked rifts beyond wandering around the world.

Shows off the warband upgrade mechanics. Some of that is going to hurt. Need rank 5 to upgrade marauders to warriors, then need to rank up again to upgrade to knights. Hope there's decent options later to just recruit better units directly (in sufficient numbers)

Its embarrassing (for the ranting portion of the 'fanbase') that they had to explain this. The idea that everything would be limited to exactly X and Y (in army rosters and mechanics) forever because of the name at the top (warriors of chaos, daemons, monogod) was obviously false.

Customized army options (Drycha and Vampirate Mermaid, for example) already existed!

---
As far as confederation goes, I honestly don't care. I hate it as a mechanic. Its frustrating when enemies do it (and can lead to random outbreaks of peace) and makes the opposition less interesting.

As a player, it feels like cheating. Just an easy button push to gain a swath of territory for free (or something the AI will just refuse to do, which can be frustrating in its own right, when confederation is the central mechanic- like Empire now)

I don't know. Its hard to imagine obsessing that much about faction identity in a property they don't know very well.

Plus it requires thinking that WoC would never get an uplift (unlike pretty much every other faction) and everything Chaos would be DoC from the TW3 launch onwards, despite the fact CA had already stretched the daemon roster with Forge world units (like the Nurgle Toads) and the Exalted versions.


About the only legitimate complaint was that the launch rosters for the Monogod factions were overly thin.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Who exactly was obsessing over it?

I'm guessing people just saw daemons / daemon princes and assumed they'd be for the daemon factions, as that's the way TWW has worked so far.

Visit the total war forums for a bit to see the obsession in action. It has been a complete gakstorm 24/7 for quite a while now. (Partly why I just laugh when people complain about negativity on dakka- visit any video game company's forums for a bit)

I did play WHFB and had totally forgotten that Festus was in WoC instead of DoC, and Azazel, he wasn't even in the last WoC book, wasn't he squatted a couple of decades ago?

He (and other chaos characters) wandered off, yeah. But they did need more LLs to add anyway, and the chaos pool isn't actually very deep, especially when it comes to specific characters dedicated to specific gods. (and two of the major undivided characters are shorn off into the Norscan faction in TW). Valkia and Vilitch were obvious picks from the WoC books, as was Festus. For Slaanesh... who else would you pick?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Given the amount of people I've seen saing "But Khorne only has one LL!"... no, DoC have 5 LLs. People need to stop thinking of the DoC LLs as completely separate factions.

CA treats them as separate factions. If you play one of them, you can't confederate the others like you would be able to if they were the same faction. I believe CA also advertised the game as having 7+1 factions, a number you only get to by assuming they're different factions. CA isn't really bound by the structures outlined in previous WHFB armies books (which sometimes left a bit to be desired anyway).

CA treats them however its convenient (as should be obvious with the way warriors, marauders, forsaken and knights were divvied up between the monogod factions). The leadup to TW3 didn't advertise 7+1 factions, they were pretty quiet about it until campaign start screens starting showing up when their streamer stable started showing the game off. That's when it became clear it was 7 base factions. But again, its a matter of convenience. Prior to 3, they stuck pretty close to armies as they were in army books (with the baffling exception of orcs with spears, and a few FW odds-and-ends here and there, plus Norsca and Vampirates).

But it largely works out better this way. Its certainly more interesting if Archaeon, Sigvald, Kholek N'kari and Azael (etc, etc) all function differently. Even Belakor and Azael as daemons make more sense with easy access to mortals, because getting into the heads of people is kind of the whole deal for both of them. N'kari could have, but that would involve unique 'chaos elf' models more than anything else, because that's where his attention lies (and that would've been a lot of work, plus the balance problems of having a lot of archers in-faction)

I'd mostly forgotten about her.

I wonder if the animation rigging would be more difficult than making her look visually distinct from a D&D Marilith demon.

I might be wrong, but with the way they do cinematics, the model needs to be somewhere in the game engine. So... future release?

Not really sold on the 'twin.' (which iirc is actually Vilitch?) I think its mostly the lighting effects (particularly when its conjuring a spell in hand). But it looks like a cartoon ghost (like Casper) more than something real, made of flesh and blood and attached to the 'body' of the other.

Unlikely. CA has largely avoided everything End Times.
Even some of the better model releases that would've fleshed out a faction.

So, CA's VIlitch 'let's play' (shorter than the first two lords)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9T8Dp5PxaQ

Most interesting thing is probably the generic chaos lord... on Chaos Dragon. (at about 2:00 in the video). And then loses it, of course, on ascending to a daemon prince (which gets to keep magical items, and doesn't get the customizable gifts of the Kevin the Daemon Prince. Expected but... mixed feelings there)

Stats for the DP are at 3:18. Armor's real bad, rest is ok. Skill tree is much more like a traditional lord, rather than the wretched thing Kevin got for his unique faction. Mix of Metal and Tzeentch spells (capping off with infernal gateway and transmutation of lead)

Interesting video, but its more informative about generic lords than Vilitch himself.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The items you get are generally more useful than the various mutations and whatnot Daniel can get, especially the higher level ones.

Oh, definitely. The daemon prince and gifts was/is kind of a mess. I liked it much more in theory than in implementation- it felt at least somewhat thematic, if imperfect. But in terms of game mechanics, it was garbage.

Similarly, I have the feeling that, statwise, you're better off keeping Chaos Lords and turning down daemonhood. And that's a little sad.

I was actually poking at a Nkari campaign a couple weeks ago (hoping to finish it before IE, because I think Nkari's start is pure hell, in the midst of a personal Ordertide. Unsurprisingly lost interest past the midgame. Its just too much un-fun cruft, despite having both Mao Yin and Katarin as vassals, which may actually make it impossible to win, unless the special Slaanesh vassalage can be broken. Also both Greasus and Kugath are hiding somewhere on the map with zero settlements, and I can't be asked to track them down), and for his quest battle, the pile of elven archers and particularly the sisters just shredded everything they touched, and the current Slaanesh roster has the same low armor problem. So going daemon prince with a generic lord may end up just being a loss.

Oooo, start positions. Pretty much finalized until another DLC

Oh, but I hate hers. Why shove her up in the corner? (especially after that quote about her haunting the borders of Kislev?)

Azazel inherits Timmy's spot.... fine.
Festus has free reign over the empire NPC factions.
Vilitch gets the other corner, which is also a little boring.
-----

I still think they screwed up on starting locations a bit. I'm ignoring Greasus, and that general area because Chaos Dwarfs will change that immensely

But some starts are suddenly much harder (Malekith- a lot more serious enemies and fewer allies) or just squashable, especially in the early game (Nkari and Skarsnik).

Others are simply on easy mode- little competition, easy to turtle and build up (Empire, Mazdamundi, Rakarth, even Nakai, Sigvald and Azazel).

The Southland Scrum is an entirely different beast. I do wonder how Fateweaver's AI is set up, as he can just nope out and go build a power base while using 'changing of the ways' to make it even more of a mess.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
Vilitch gets the other corner, which is also a little boring.

With Kairos having flown south for the winter, they need something Tzeentchian over in Cathay.

Sure, Cathay needs some chaos threats. But corner camping with a relatively safe buffer space is very a different experience to being in the thick of things.

It also really limits available enemies. If you want to recreate the chaos invasion of the old world through kislev and the empire, you're way out of place for that.
Its one thing for the factions that are effectively tied to the geography of their countries. But for the ones that aren't, getting stuck in the corners feels like a raw deal. Especially when there isn't any strong lore reason for them to be there.

Valkia apparently swooped down on the Steam team, and the pre-order for the DLC didn't go up.

Her teaser video apparently says the DLC pre-order is live, so they don't want to put it up until that's sorted out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
'tis up.

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/tww3-introducing-valkia/

FACTION EFFECTS

Has access to Bloodletting
Campaign movement range: +20% after winning a battle (all characters)
Souls gained from sacrificing captives: +50%
Vassals gain Frenzy and spread Khorne’s corruption

LORD EFFECTS

Passive ability: The Gaze of Khorne
Campaign movement range +35% after enemy retreats from battle

Daemonshield grants invulnerability, her spear can fire off a line eruption, and Gaze buffs damage around her.

No point trying to run away from her (except maybe on some of the weirder places in the map where fleeing goes further than it should).

A normal sized flying model should be interesting. Hope the hit boxes and animations can cope.


----
Think I may do a chaos champions campaign with her while waiting for a hotfix or two (or even a patch) for IE. I doubt that's going to be in great shape on the 23rd.

 McDougall Designs wrote:
Interesting that they had her take a pounding from those Slanneshi warriors with no climactic payoff.

She does scatter them like ragdolls, and they don't do much beyond annoy her.

Huh. I was poking at the TW3 Steam page in the store (for the DLC) and went back to it in my library, and found an extra DLC poking about (in addition to Ogres). Its simply titled 'Eight' and was added August 18th, 2017. It doesn't link to anything, while clicking on Ogres in the 'Manage my DLC' window links to their store page.

Its a weird date, and scrolling through TW1 and 2 DLC release dates confused me more, since a Lot of DLC release dates for TW2 are a month before TW2 came out (August vs September), even stuff that came out near the end of TW2 like Ogre Mercs.

But, to wrap up this interlude, For TW2, August 18 was the date for the 30th Anniversary regiments. August 19th was.... Blood for the Blood God II.


------
TL;DR Eight is Khorne's number, and Khorne is blood, blood, blood. The Blood pack may finally be sneaking in. Hopefully with sliders.
And its supposed to be around now, according to the Roadmap:
https://www.totalwar.com/blog/twwh3-roadmap-2022/

Yeah. I turned it off in TW2. It stopped looking like blood and just a red paint full-model dip.

Base game won't happen, as there are too many countries where that's a problem that impacts rating (or being able to sell it at all) and sales. Or CA still believes it does (I haven't personally had to deal with it since I picked up Fallout 2 in the UK and all the kids were chopped out and quests were left broken).

But yeah, I'd prefer they stopped dialing it up to 11.


----
Gameplay video is interesting. I do love having the option to short circuit the race and just kill the others. (You could theoretically do that in the base game, but there were so many, so far apart and with back-ups that it was stupidly difficult to pull off).

Stealth change:
Immortality at rank 20 (for non-named characters) comes for free.

Watched some of the let's plays that are going up (for IE, chaos champions are next week). Seems decent, but haven't really looked for problems.

----
Immortal Empires End Game (spoilers) This is big change from WH1 and Mortal Empires.
Basics:

Details:

Here's an interaction I didn't expect

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RECDsxOxz8
About 17:15 in the video.
Cathayan caravans can pick up plagues as they travel through Festus' or other Nurgle territory (and presumably skaven as well, but the odds of that are low). And carry them to regions they enter afterwards. Its interesting since they're on the map, but don't move quite like other units. Annoying to have happen, but its a deeper interaction than I expected.

Couple other things of note when watching this series:
1- the defensive dilemmas where you can send a force to defend a friendly Imperial town... really suck at the moment. It doesn't take into account TW3 reinforcement timer. So you get to sit and watch the AI defenders get butchered, then move your token force on the map and lose. Though oddly, it gives the player control over building towers and defenses. Autoresolve largely wins, though.

2- Defensive AI is still really terrible, to the point of maybe being worse. Every siege battle involves the defenders instantly abandoning the walls (and thus defensive fire from the permanent towers), and milling about taking fire from mortars and whatnot.

Siege Ai can also be terrible, with the Ai just parking units in front of towers and waiting rather than assaulting gates. Its pretty bad.

Watching Turin's Volkmar campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CuRoeSduR8

While his campaign mechanics are new (get books, get bonuses for each book and other bonuses for sealing each book, which may be automatic, so you're just getting bonuses on bonuses). his quests are still the same (back up in the Empire). And he gets sidequests from empire provinces to fight their enemies (all the way back home). Its still a mess.

Though his new buffs make free company ridiculously good (in addition to flagellants)

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
While his campaign mechanics are new (get books, get bonuses for each book and other bonuses for sealing each book, which may be automatic, so you're just getting bonuses on bonuses). his quests are still the same (back up in the Empire). And he gets sidequests from empire provinces to fight their enemies (all the way back home). Its still a mess.

I really thought they'd fix that...

That's alright. I'm watching Janet on Occasion's Karl Franz lets play, and he's had an old (pre-rework) confederation event, had a duplicate Middenland Runefang turn up (after restoring then confederating Boris) and just got a side-quest telling him to create an alliance with Ostland (which is literally impossible since the Empire rework).

There's apparently a lot of little things to fix during the Beta (though new quest battles don't qualify for little things). Heck they're apparently skimping on new quest battles. Belakor gets the Sword of Shadows at level 7. No quest, no real announcement, it just turns up. Hopefully the paid DLC lords will get a bit more love.

I'm sure they won't, given that they're old issues dating back to the Empire rework introduced in the Hunter and the Beast.

Some things might, but legacy bugs from TW2 mechanics don't seem high on their list of issues.
The Empire's settlement defense missions are much worse, because the reinforcement change for TW3 has the player sitting there helpless while watching the AI crap itself for two solid minutes.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Voss wrote:
While his campaign mechanics are new (get books, get bonuses for each book and other bonuses for sealing each book, which may be automatic, so you're just getting bonuses on bonuses). his quests are still the same (back up in the Empire). And he gets sidequests from empire provinces to fight their enemies (all the way back home). Its still a mess.

I really thought they'd fix that...

Coming back to this, apparently what they have done (globally, for everyone) is strip out _all_ the intermediate steps to quest battles. No amassing wealth, sending a character to <region>, sack/raze X cities, defeat Y armies of <faction>, or any of that. At the required level, the quest pops and you can ignore it for as long as you like, travel there or teleport. Simple, done. A lot of the flavor is also gone, but apparently there were lingering bugs from various quest-chains from games 1 & 2, so they purged it with fire.

---
Random other stuff.

Dark elves got a slave rework, and can spend them per region like Slaanesh can spend cultists. They also have a global cap (based on empire size and buildings), and don't passively generate income (except for a couple faction traits and buildings). Ports burn through them like firewood, as do some other buildings, so the usage of slaves is a passive push towards aggression.

Vampire bloodline traits got reworked somewhat. Necrach tree (research, winds of magic cap increase and upkeep reduction) and Von Carsteins first trait (+10% casualty replenishment) are obvious choices for everyone. Raise dead is different in how units accumulate in the pool, but more transparent. Works much like the new Warriors of Chaos recruitment pool, seems much harder to get top end units just lying about.
Ghorst is wildly different. Still wants to run zombie hordes (no one else really does), and gives a lot of buffs. And huge bonuses to healing caps (+500%) for zombies.

Archaon and Kholek get absurd bonuses for vassals. (and remember, dark fortresses are tied to specific norscan tribes, and vassalize the faction if you occupy them. Some seem to overlap, but you can have a cloud of vassals)
Archaon- Per vassal, Archaon gets +10% research rate, +10 diplomatic relations with other chaos factions, and +25 souls per turn (which makes it real easy to slot and upkeep gifts), and he also gets a single extra gift slot to spend souls on. He can start to really fly through the tech tree. (Which is quite different now, and mandatory for a lot of unit upgrades).

Kholek, Per vassal, Kholek himself gets +5% to weapon strength, armor, and unit mass. The sword of khaine is a lot further away, but I don't know that it matters anymore. The passive bonuses make him even more outrageous and unstoppable.

Sigvald doesn't get vassalization bonuses but gets the slaanesh seductive influence trait (so can forcibly vassalize with enough corruption) and can seduce units as well.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I haven't looked super closely at it, but it seemed like Vampire Counts got nerfed. The bloodlines seem less impactful, and taking away the skellie spam (not that I particularly enjoyed skellie spam). Unless they're doing something else to beef them up to compensate?

Lamia seems worse, Dragon is situational (I don't care enough about vampire cav, nor training for vampire units), but the VC bloodline has a great first one (+10 replenishment) and a good control bonus. Necrarch is gold from top to bottom, and Strigoi has its uses (corruption in particular).
Honestly, Necrarch is probably too good, with a huge research bonus, more magic during combat and general upkeep reduction.

---

Chaos champion let's plays are starting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azAUihiIFt8
Azazel, but also:

Blood pack options with...
checkbox for dismemberment
sliders! for blood particle scale and blood stain (on units) scale.

 Olthannon wrote:
Oh damn so they are introducing the vampire bloodlines. Awesome. I used to have a Lahmian army for WFB. Might try that out on release.

What? Those were added quite a while back in TW2. (I don't want to say two years, but I think... about that long- nope, I'm entirely wrong. End of 2018 alongside Lokhir Fellheart. https://www.pcinvasion.com/warhammer-2-lokhir-fellheart-bloodlines-free-update/).
They just changed some of the bonuses around, in addition to tech tree changes and specific lord changes.

Each bloodline gets 3 levels of bonuses and can get 3 special but 'non-legendary' lords with bloodline specific skills.

It says something about the last couple years that I actually feel reassured by the TW team tweeting '5 more days' and confirming the release date.

Far too used to delays at this point.