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Voss wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.

Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.

Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.

Look - thats not the point fo the video or the reply i made.

As we both said some maps should have some trees, some have lots, some have none - just copy repeatedly posting the same round clumps onto the maps just makes it look lazy, especially since they did it much better in older games.

It seems some people aren't getting what that video is about.

Go back to the start where there's the comparison between game 2 and game 3 maps. The game 2 maps have tons of trees - some maps have vast forests covering half their surface area. The game 3 maps look like someone finished the map, then got the "tree" tool, and randomly splotched a few dots of trees around the map.

trexmeyer wrote:
I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.

The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.

It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.

Yeah, when they started having specific resources in their games I thought they might eventually move to needing specific resources to create certain units, but they've never done that. Closest was Shogun 2 where it could give you discounts or buffs to units created in a Provence.

Honestly, I think if they moved to making certain units require certain resources it could make campaigns more interesting. It would actually incentivize trade for starters beyond just more money.

Make units require certain resources to create/reinforce. Have resources get stockpiled so you can save up if war cuts you off from your supply. Sadly, they've been dumbing down the economy aspects of TW games for a long time now. I know why they do it. Its to make the game accessible for the dumb dumbs who don't like having to deal with economy and just want to mash armies against each other. But I wish at least they would make it an optional thing.


Ideally, they would implement this to make resources actually matter. Make all factions have something similar to the Meat mechanic from ogres representing food and supplies for a specific army. It would regenerate when in friendly territory and in supply lines based on the supplies available.

Speaking of Meat. I really feel like it is more of a hindrance than anything in its current form. The bonuses for having a prebattle feast are kinda small. The drain for a large army is huge, winning battles gives very little, and you still have to pay gold upkeep. IMO, ogres shouldn't pay any gold upkeep, they should exclusively use meat as upkeep. Gold should only be for building construction, and maybe have an option to buy meat with gold.

trexmeyer wrote:
I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.

The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.

It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.

I can appreciate your point, but I guess it's where you draw the line for simplification in a game that is still heavily focused on battles and military might over all else. In WH2 Bretonnians had their "Peasant Economy", but you could basically still pull armies out of your backside.

It would be interesting to think what such a system would look like in Warhammer, because as you say there'd be inconsistencies between races. Some races can pull troops seemingly from nowhere (like Orcs), others I imagine can mobilise their entire population to battle, others are more like traditional humans.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

trexmeyer wrote:
I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.

The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.

It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.

I can appreciate your point, but I guess it's where you draw the line for simplification in a game that is still heavily focused on battles and military might over all else. In WH2 Bretonnians had their "Peasant Economy", but you could basically still pull armies out of your backside.

It would be interesting to think what such a system would look like in Warhammer, because as you say there'd be inconsistencies between races. Some races can pull troops seemingly from nowhere (like Orcs), others I imagine can mobilise their entire population to battle, others are more like traditional humans.

There are some minor elements that try to portray this but it would be a very diffiicult thing to make work.

Take Vampires, my fav faction - they pay for things with "Dark Magic" but it works just like gold and you can trade with it....their economy would need to be multilayered based around the blood tax for the vampires, the need for other resources to trade with other races, and also the base food and resources to maintain the living population that serve and feed the vampires, then you would need a corpse/necromantic energy economy to raise and maintain. I am not sure the reward is there for CA to do all of this for the various factions, cool as it would be.

Total War does currently provide a variety of things for differnt people.

* You can play it as a boardgame - auto resolving the battles.
* You can play it as a vague background to the battles
* You can do a mixture of both and enjoy the camapign elements.

trexmeyer wrote:
I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.

The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.

It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.

total war last had innovation and depth on the campaign map with Empire and Napoleon, in which trade, population played direct part into what was available where and when.
Attila had the last siege innovations.

Put bluntly CA hasn't innovated and made the game "better more indepth" since NTW, since Attillas campaign was mostly a sidegrade from the horrific BS that is an was the province system and even then there have been some serious issues going on there.
More to the point, WHTW has been an even bigger downgrade with the removal of formations, like spearwalls, shieldwalls, etc. one of the things that allowed the empire to actually stand a chance was its proffesional armies afterall that fought in formations.
its actually kinda shamefull how WHFB spears actually worked like Spear regiments, whilest in WHTW thanks to the engine switch they blob wierdly.

FFS we don't even have fire by rank, / pleton fire and or loading animations for crossbows and muskets or cannons.

I've tried, I've honestly tried to play it some and it's just so bad compared to Warhammer 2.

Even if you remove the campaign and it's just a sandbox.

- Autoresolve is completely busted. It's worse then I recall it ever being in WH2 and I'm 99% sure I won a campaign as every faction (or at least reach the end term simulator part of it). There's nothing like valiant defeat being a decisive victory even when you don't min/max your performance in battle. Seriously...it was a tier 2/3 stack of Ogres /w a level 30 Slaughtermaster and 8x Leadbelchers against 12 t2/t3 Nurgle Units and I had to fight it just to get the victory.

- Singleplayer "fun" got nerfed. Traits are all weaker. Magic is considerably weaker than the 100 Winds cap suggested because all spells are about 25% or so more expensive. Why? Why nerf stuff that people can just mod out? It's not as if mods impacted Steam Achievements in WH2. If they don't in WH3 then IDK what the point is...It feels like someone from CA watched Legend cheese content for 50-100 hours straight and took it personally.

- The UI is markedly worse and generic across the board. There's already a mod out that fixes the post siege options and seriously, how hard is it to make 40-50 different graphics? Especially when you can reuse half of them for the Demon factions.

- The world map is cartoonish. It feels more like WoW: Total War than Warhammer. I know someone will say this is nitpicky, but seriously, what was wrong with Warhammer 2's graphics? I swear developers change gak just to change gak.

- The world map is...boring. I think a big part of the issue is that a good chunk of it has zero basis in pre-existing lore so "new" landmarks and areas lack background meaning for people that were fans of WHFB before TW:WH.

- The siege rework is lacking and minor settlement battles aren't fun. I don't know who thought either were good ideas. I'm not a fan of either.

TLDR:
What I personally wanted was essentially a glorified expansion pack that added new landmasses and factions.
What I got was an overdeveloped game that went in the wrong direction.

Out of all the game series I've played, this reminds me most of the dramatic shift from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm in terms of what the hell were the developers thinking.

trexmeyer wrote:
TLDR:
What I personally wanted was essentially a glorified expansion pack that added new landmasses and factions.
What I got was an overdeveloped game that went in the wrong direction.

I agree with pretty much all your points and could add a whole heap more, but yeah, this sums it up pretty well. TWW3 could have changed absolutely nothing and just been a big old expansion pack and I would have been totally happy with the game.

Some minor things could have been changed, and I have some wish list items I would liked to have seen implemented. But really they could have just taken TWW2 as it stood and I would have been happy. TWW2 is already my most played single player game on Steam, and even before Mortal Empires came out I had played more Vortex than I've played Chaos Realms in TWW3.

The minor settlement battles are a real kick in the balls because they are one of the most frequently played battle types, and they turned it into a glorified tower defence game with annoyingly small choke points. But yeah, autoresolve, the UI, both the world map and individual battle maps, the pathfinding seems to have gotten worse and AI decision making when you give them an order seems worse.

If you held a gun to my head and told me I had to play another 40 hours of a total war game, I would be booting up TWW2, not TWW3.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

trexmeyer wrote:
- The world map is cartoonish. It feels more like WoW: Total War than Warhammer. I know someone will say this is nitpicky, but seriously, what was wrong with Warhammer 2's graphics? I swear developers change gak just to change gak.

This was brought up by someone at some point, but yeah, they took out some of the grimness and made it more cartoony. I've heard it suggested that it was for performance reasons as there's more "SFX" on the campaign map, but it feels like a downgrade.

Patch notes for 1.1 -

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/tw-warhammer3-update110/?fbclid=IwAR20i_hFtkAhUt34BIP8efstCZB1rrqqlQh_9EgHNRcNGJf8iTdKDB-4cD8

Lots of big fixes and changes in there. One of the most notable for the campaign is that beating an opponent attempting to win the campaign will cause that particular opponent to lose all of their souls.

Huh. Knew about most of this (especially the dumb way they didn't fix problems with the chaos realm traits, just made it matter less and winning means you win more)

But didn't expect them to actually improve the daemon prince. He might not absolutely suck now.

I knew Pendulum was overpowered, but those numbers are bonkers. I don't mean the new numbers are bad, but the sheer magnitude of the change makes it bizarre that they missed it. Especially with so many of the early-access streamers/youtubers yelling about it before release.

Very annoyed that the 'fix' for gorgers was to gut their unit size.


----
Still gonna wait before picking this back up.

And I'm regretting letting the patch download. What the frell? downloading, updating & verifying took a good 20+ minutes, then it re-installed the whole 101.5 GB of the game!

Voss wrote:
Especially with so many of the early-access streamers/youtubers yelling about it before release.

You can put that down next to a lot of the problems with the game.

Voss wrote:


And I'm regretting letting the patch download. What the frell? downloading, updating & verifying took a good 20+ minutes, then it re-installed the whole 101.5 GB of the game!

IDK why CA's patches are so bad. Worst I've ever dealt with.

Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.

These days it's just not that big of a deal, many people have fast internet and many people use large SSDs and can wait the few minutes it takes to update. From start to finish the patch only took 12 minutes for me. I imagine their logic is something like "Why waste a programmer's time when people can just wait a few minutes longer", maybe that's a bad way of thinking but I reckon that's their reasoning.

I wonder if they bundled some of the large files (textures, meshes) with some of the core code to make it harder for people to screw around with the files, looking at how the files are laid out most of the size of the game is held in a handful of "packs", audio packs, model packs, movie packs, terrain packs, etc. So maybe grouping the files like that forces Steam to take a slow update path.

But the bigger issue is that the load times once in game seem excessively long, cutting that down somehow would be more valuable (remove Denuvo?).

Going out on a limb and would argue, that yes, loadtime reduction via removal of denuvo, would be awesome and speed up the loadtimes massively..

 Grey Templar wrote:
Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.

Elden Ring and Overwatch patch dramatically faster for me.

Edit:

Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?

 Grey Templar wrote:
Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.

It isn't just CA, no. Pretty much any game using Unity and small studios like Owlcat for Kingmaker and Wrath are pretty poor patch experiences.
But... of the fairly major developers (and one with a very big publisher), CA is among the worst. Both in their approach to patches and how much each patch has to overhaul.

trexmeyer wrote:Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?

Yeah. Like 40k, daemons got chopped out of their original books and turned into a separate army book (and was one of the more OP factions for parts of 7th, though not as bad as vampire counts). And it was wholly daemons.
The 'daemon' armies here are not representative of anything that was ever on the table for WFB, especially the later years (which most other factions in 1&2 are based on). For that it was either monogod or mix and match to your taste. The DP actually does a better job of reflecting the chaos daemons army book, though his unlocks keep that under too much control, imo.

They're basically the AoS armies, except any model or unit that was released since the release of AoS is missing. Because they promised they absolutely would not to do AoS stuff. Honestly in this case, that's a bad plan, because its making the armies anemic, and much of what was released for daemons in AoS fits the old world the old world perfectly fine, and the armies as a whole would operate better than. As is, they are compensating with stray standard chaos warrior units (frickin' forsaken) and marauders but with mutated right arms, and it doesn't work very well.

trexmeyer wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Its not just CA. Everybody's patches are garbage nowadays. Sloppy coding which causes files to be larger than necessary and nobody ever goes back and cleans it up.

Elden Ring and Overwatch patch dramatically faster for me.

Edit:

Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?

Yes on occassion

Rifts opened in various areas of the world - some in Lustria where the Slann had to deal with them and some in places like the Southlands. There were vast daemon armies when the wings of magic blew strongly - for instance when the Warp gates blew, when the Daemons ravaged Ulthuan, when the Daemons destroyed most of the older Slann, when N'kari was freed.

Lots of lore examples in all eras.

If you marched your army into the Chaos Wastes you'd certainly encounter full demonic armies on the march. Demonic armies marching out of the Wastes also happened from time to time; normally following a powerful warlord and mage as they'd cut a swathe through the lands.

Which would easily mean armies that both had humans and chaos demons and demons striking out on their own without humans nearby.

trexmeyer wrote:

Question. How prevalent were Chaos Demons in the WHFB lore? Were there ever actually 100% Demon armies running around?

They could happen. Rifts could be opened by cults. Sometimes a particular daemon prince gets a wild hair and decides to walk south. Ogre tribes on the northern slopes of the mountains of mourn often face hordes of daemon incursions, one tribe even made a yearly feast out of it. The Great Wall of Cathay was specifically built to stop daemon incursions.

They were certainly rare by all other metrics. Civilized areas mostly had to worry about beastmen, which are everywhere, who might just sometimes have a daemon or two.

Don't forget this is the same setting where, at one point in history, the existence of Skaven is widely suppressed even after they rose up and tried to take over Nuln. Even though there are records that Skaven have risen up over the generations previously in massive swarms (and been beaten back).

Demons are rare, but at the same time many events connected to them are likely hidden from the population at large. Plus rather like there are whole areas of the 40K Imperium that never see war, or only hear of it in terms of sending away troops and such - the same is true of the Old World. There will be regions where even Beastmen are more like boogy men in tall tales told around the fireside.

I must admit I find the campaign pretty dull. The chaos realms are immensely visually impressive. But as others have stated “overdeveloped” is probably the best term to describe it. I really liked the campaign in TWW 1. You just mess about untill a huge endgame threat comes. I feel like that would be so fitting for TWW 3 as well. Just have all chaos gods spawn armies in the north that marches south into various factions. Hold on as best you can. Beat it and fulfill some region specific condition to beat the campaign. It’s not all I wanted but I would have found it more enjoyable then this. Now I must sit around for so many turns being nigh untouchable waiting for the rifts to show up. Then I can press the skip button on the big final battle in my chosen realm. It just feels like a tedious mid-late game to me, involving to much waiting. I’m not really preparing for something that will challenge my faction. I’m sending one army to do one thing over and over while the rest of the faction twiddles it’s thumbs. I mean the TWW 1 campaign had problems but it was generally considered better then the Vortex of TWW 2. Why would you double down on the vortex mechanics for TTW 3?

So is anyone playing this game still?
I did prologue and then the initial campaign with cathay but I didn't even finish it. The rifts just killed it for me.

I then wanted to start as khorne and just lost all interest.
I havent picked up wither of the WH games since this dropped. Elden ring is just too good.

90% of the player base dropped off.

CA ignored all the feedback from testers and content creators, and then released a game that no one wanted. Worse, they doubled down to the point of being self-destructively stubborn with it. Even the latest patch is little more than a temporary solution, with the "bonuses" they've added just being lazy copypastas of the stuff you got in the Vortex campaign.

People wanted Mortal Empires 2: Cathayan Boogaloo, not a worse Vortex campaign. Is it any wonder that, within a day of the mod workshop going live, the second most popular mod was the "Turn off the damned Chaos Realms campaign already!" mod.

If the player base doesn't return when the new Mortal Empires comes out, I fear TWW3 is going to be taken out behind the shed and 3 Kingdom'd.

I hesitantly re-installed last night. Going to give it a go this weekend with a heavy dose of mods, but I feel I'll be disappointed once again.

We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3. That said I figure many haven't jumped off the boat; but likely moved back to Warhammer 2 so its not a total disaster. It does reflect that CA have missed the mark and need to address that.

Heck Warhammer 2 had the whole issue with Norsca and such around its launch and they fixed that and Warhammer 2 went on to be and remain their strongest playerbase game for a LONG time

I haven't been playing the new game as I've been dumping all of my time into FF11. But I've noticed something that caught me by surprise. I've two brothers who didn't buy the new game, but since its release have started playing a *lot* of the second game in multi-player with each other.

I'm waiting for Immortal Empires. Then I'll play the heck out of it for sure.

The only reason I'm not playing is I need a PC upgrade to actually play it how I want it to look.

 Overread wrote:
We always knew that the new Mortal Empires would come later; it did so for Warhammer 2 and it stands to reason it would come later for Warhammer 3.

And? That doesn't excuse the Chaos Realms campaign or the anti-fun changes that they made to the game. Or the other questionable choices (red on red on red UI!). Or the fact that they ignored all the feedback from everyone in their partner program.