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CA's Total War: The Celtic-Han-Lizardmen alliance that never was


Corvinus85

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8 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah the prologue was actually quite good if annoying as a veteran player.

Ive tried out most of the campaigns so far and I don’t yet love the game. 
 

I’ve found the minor settlement battles  a bit slow and tedious, and I just grind through them because they require so much micro 

I'm still glad they brought back the minor settlements just because it at least improves immersion. It was always ridiculous to fight in an open field.

But I do have to change my ways about fighting siege battles. It's more about capturing those strategic points instead of hunting down enemy units. It does seem the AI is smart enough to retreat when it's clear it is about to be overwhelmed.

I'm doing a Grand Cathay campaign with Zhao Ming. I don't particularly like the starting location. But I like the Ivory Road mechanic and the Harmony mechanic certainly forces you to pay attention to how you develop your faction.

I'm also liking the added mechanics when you have allies. One of the best improvements, though, is the character UI screen where you can so much more easily flip between characters and figure out what to give them. And being able to get rid of useless items is godsend.

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A couple of YouTube streamers were worried that there would be too many settlement battles and I’m feeling they might be true. I don’t mind the odd settlement battles but if I can’t get anyone to leave a city it means it’s all I ever do. Trying a Kislev campaign and it’s really quite annoying because I’m not set up for these things.

The quality of life improvements like quick deals and allies is brilliant though 

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I quite enjoy the settlement battles. Struggled a bit initially but I think i have gotten used to it now. I used to split up my force and try to capture multiple points but i kept taking too much losses. I found it easier to just focus on one area and just kill their armies, specially with the archers able to take out the towers pretty easily. The choke points favor me more than it does the AI, specially with Kislev's missile heavy roster. I usually distract them with a couple of sneaky takeover from the back using my leopard and cav unit, just to get them to split up a bit. But otherwise i use the choke points to hold the line and rain down hell on them.

Settlement defenses are a bit more interesting as well, specially with towers. But it can be quite map dependant. Still trying to get used to the different towers. Not sure if its better to have more towers or one strong tower. But it does allow a more tactical battle.

The AI seems to dodge magic a lot more now, which makes things really tricky. Timing has become crucial, really need the units engaged so they don't dodge and waste winds. As usual, tend to use my lords and heroes as bait.

Started with Kislev, my rival is gaining a shit ton of supporters, way quicker than me. I kind of regret not building more supporter buildings. I went my normal route of growth and money, but with some provinces not having any major settlements, it was a bit of a waste. Portals are opening now and i just met all the chaos faction in my attempt to wipe out the norsca. Hopefully they won't send everything at me....

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The Steam reviews keep bringing up the performance/stability of the DRM as a major drawback, have any of you encountered issues with that? I'm not buying this game just yet anyway, but if the DRM is that bad I might sit it out entirely.

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31 minutes ago, kungtotte said:

The Steam reviews keep bringing up the performance/stability of the DRM as a major drawback, have any of you encountered issues with that? I'm not buying this game just yet anyway, but if the DRM is that bad I might sit it out entirely.

I've experienced two crashes in the same battle where I was reinforcing an ally so I auto-resolved the 3rd time. The FPS seems to be low at times.

I'm not sure how you would know the DRM is at fault.

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50 minutes ago, kungtotte said:

The Steam reviews keep bringing up the performance/stability of the DRM as a major drawback, have any of you encountered issues with that? I'm not buying this game just yet anyway, but if the DRM is that bad I might sit it out entirely.

My FPS is generally pretty good. I find load times for battles and the game itself to be a lot longer than WH2. I’m hoping that improves. 
 

On Settlement battles, yeah I’ve found generally I have to keep everyone together because other wise the micro gets out of hand. That kind of defeats the purpose of 360 maps unfortunately. 

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49 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm not sure how you would know the DRM is at fault.

I don't either, but on the front page of reviews of Steam literally every single negative review mentioned the issues with DRM. There was apparently also a case of the review copies being sent out without DRM, so youtubers etc. didn't have a chance to comment on it until it appeared in the release version. Again that's according to the reviews.

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Wow, steam reviews are hammering it hard. I don't think its THAT bad. The price point is definitely annoying and it does suffer from being compared to the super polished WH2. But 62% is super harsh. 

The alt+tab closing the game bug i've experienced once and sometimes the game won't let me change resolution to windowed 4k (full screen works fine). I've found that changing to 1080p windowed mode allows me to then change to 4k windowed mode, so no major dramas. I haven't found anything gamebreaking, but if you get annoyed at little stuff, you probably should wait. My biggest gripes are really UI related and the pathfinding/command bugs where the units just stop attacking or constantly forming up etc (but usually fine if you micromanage your movement commands and reform units etc).

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I think the only annoying graphical part I found is that the banners tend to get blurry when I'm zoomed out. I've no idea why. But they look fine when zoomed in. It makes it hard to distinguish units as a result. It's the same on the campaign map, too.

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Welp, I think I'm going to lose my Yao Ming campaign. I'm behind most on collecting the Daemon Souls. I didn't realize there was a competition at first and wasn't really ready for the first round of rift openings. Then during the second round of rifts I spend the whole time wandering the Realm of Tzeentch like an idiot and Katarin apparently beat me to it. The Prince Daemon and N'kari each have collected 2 souls. Still a ways to go, but I doubt I'll get there. I have no intention of conquering the whole map.

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On 2/20/2022 at 7:39 PM, The Winged Shadow said:

Wow, steam reviews are hammering it hard. I don't think its THAT bad. The price point is definitely annoying and it does suffer from being compared to the super polished WH2. But 62% is super harsh. 

Certainly some of the reviews are due to bugs and optimization issues, but my understanding is that the reason it's so lowly rated is from Chinese gamers review bombing it. Apparently there was some sort of drama with the Chinese streamers that got early access "spoiling" too much of the game, and this is retaliation for it. It all sounds very petty and dumb, but that's the internet.

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My Yao Ming campaign is hanging on by a thread in terms of the race for the Daemon souls. Perfectly fine everywhere else. Defending the Bastion is easy. I think I broke the record for the number of auto-resolve battles in a single campaign. Sooo many battles.

Katarin beat me to it again, taking the soul of a Daemon prince of Nurgle right in front of me. Luckily, as I got kicked out of the realms of Chaos, the rifts were still open so I went in Slaanesh's realm and completed it during the period when the rifts were closed. Good thing that your army can remain there even when the rifts are closed. Now all the factions are tied, 2 a piece for the souls. I'm liking the campaign story.

Prior to this, I had used the rifts to teleport to where the Legion of Chaos was on the map and I destroyed them because they were ahead in the race. So long assholes!

I don't really know why CA decided to distort the map this way. It's not like you walk into the realms of Chaos simply going north, and the rifts allow you to teleport anywhere. It just made everything weirder.

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14 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I don't really know why CA decided to distort the map this way. It's not like you walk into the realms of Chaos simply going north, and the rifts allow you to teleport anywhere. It just made everything weirder.

Is this supposed to simulate warp travel from 40k, just afoot?

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1 hour ago, Toth said:

Is this supposed to simulate warp travel from 40k, just afoot?

Not familiar with 40k to properly answer the question. The Chaos rifts allows you faction leader, and only the faction leader, to either enter one of the realms of Chaos or teleport to another rift on the map. Other generals can only close a rift which triggers a battle with a Daemon army. Considering that the preceding games allowed you to shamelessly teleport for a quest battle this at least makes it a little more immersive. I just wondered why bother with orienting the map differently.

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I mean, the shape of the map is clearly more realistic this way. Just why they thought realism was a priority in a Warhammer game, and one that involves the player assaulting the Realm of Chaos itself is anyone's guess.

Maybe the new Mortal Empires map will actually be the whole Warhammerworld, turning the map into an actual globe.:P

 

So far I've done the tutorial campaign, which was very good for a tutorial, played around a bit with all the factions (as is to be expected they're a pretty diverse bunch) and pushed about halfway through Kislev and Cathay campaigns.

Overall I'm liking the game, but it runs markedly worse than WH2 did on the campaign map (battles don't seem to be affected), and I think the Chaos incursion/counterattack mechanics are worse than the Vortex Race in WH2. They encourage turtling even more than the Vortex Rituals did because they force you to send your strongest army off on a fetch quest while demons invade your territories.

Still, if the support for the game is as good as for WH2 (and if the WH3 Mortal Empires is actually playable given the performance issues...) this game will keep me entertained for several years.

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2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

Not familiar with 40k to properly answer the question. The Chaos rifts allows you faction leader, and only the faction leader, to either enter one of the realms of Chaos or teleport to another rift on the map. Other generals can only close a rift which triggers a battle with a Daemon army. Considering that the preceding games allowed you to shamelessly teleport for a quest battle this at least makes it a little more immersive. I just wondered why bother with orienting the map differently.

In 40k the Warp is pretty much exactly the same as in Warhammer Fantasy right down to the Chaos Gods residing in there (though arguably it seems significantly more dangerous in 40k). But as a Sci-Fi setting, the go-to FTL drive works on the basis of entering the Warp and making use of its wonky physics to skip vast distances in real space. Individual soldiers can also make use of teleporters that launch you through the Warp for split seconds in order to instantly arrive at your destination, even though it is a harrowing experience for just about anyone who uses it.

So I was wondering whether CA picked that up and made the Warhammer Fantasy people use the Warp similarly as a shortcut to other countries in the real world, with the sole difference of having to traverse it afoot. And it sounds very much like they did.

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Struggle street on my Kislev campaign. I am getting bombarded by enemy heroes spreading corruption. One province has like 7-8 enemy heroes just sitting there being annoying. I got 3-4 heroes on full time assassination job and still can't keep up with them! Pretty much forced to build untainted buildings now. It took me a while to realise that high corruption affects growth (like -250!) and that one of my key settlement wasn't growing for like 30 turns......

The northern dwarves got wiped out so i am now having to defend the northern border. The empire got wrecked by Ogres (altdorf is minor settlement, wtf?) and is hassling my south border. I auto confederated my rival and now my western border is getting wrecked by Norsca and Chaos. On top of that, the portals opened up for the third time and i am still on 0 souls while my rivals have 2 each. So i jumped into Khorne's realm and trying to get atleast one, so i have one less army to defend my borders. I ended up hiring a bunch of heroes to close the rifts asap and now i am broke.

Many regrets! I wish i saved the dwarves by giving them the norscan settlments or at the very least just leave Norscan settlements alone. Instead i wanted those gems so didn't help them much.....

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I think I might be done with Warhammer 3 till Mortal Empires comes out.

It's really not very fun.

I thought the whole narrative campaign might be cool, but in reality it's a bit of a tedious mess and it requires you to play in a certain way. I spent a lot of my time with my main Lord fighting in rifts, while a bunch of stuff goes on back at home, where I'm having to wack a mole rifts and agents. The game really dissuades you from expanding very far a because it becomes too much to manage. 

Then the worst part is, I almost never have any fun battles. 70% of my battles seem to be settlement ones, with the same maps over and over. And they are so slow and grindy and not fun. Plus I can almost never auto resolve them without massive losses, so I have to fight them. It makes me not want to go and play.

I think I'm going to go back to the my Warhammer 2 campaign and finish that off. Sad really, I was so looking forward to this game but I don't enjoy it. I love that there are lots of races on release, but most of their rosters are tiny, some factions don't seem to really seem to play very well (Nurgle is a real issue) . So I'm just going to leave it for a while until I find out it's gotten better.

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Yeah, the replayability factor is not so great other than maybe just wanting to explore how each faction plays and various parts of the map. The map is pretty big.

I've reached the end of my Yao Ming campaign. The big battle. I saved my game and attempted it today before going to work. I thought to myself that having an hour time before having to leave was plenty to go thru the battle and enjoy the end game cinematics. The Chaos gods laughed at me. What an overly long, exhausting battle. I had to quit before the final stage. I am not a fan of this glorified tower defense mode. This is rapid clicking, almost no tactical decisions.

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11 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Yeah, the replayability factor is not so great other than maybe just wanting to explore how each faction plays and various parts of the map. The map is pretty big.

The map feels huge, but I seem to be mostly ignoring the map because I have to pay attention to all the rift stuff. Feels a shame. Maybe if I played as someone like the Ogres it would be different. 

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