The looming excitement that might be TW warhammer III

That was a neat conversion.

 

Saw this thread popin' up on the recents sometime ago and hestitated about posting about it
I had high hopes for TWWII and overall, it didn't disappoint. It seemed every iteration has to have one DLC that completely disgusts me (Norsca for TWWI and Vampire Coast for TWWII). TWWIII however, is an utter disappointment for me. Neukislev and neuCathay aside, the gameplay has major problem that, to this day (or, yesterday when I stumbled back on r/totalwar, anyway). Range weapons remain bugged, Empire continues to suck, campaign map AI favors Chaos Tide that made Empire play all about saving anything not Lustria and Ulthuan (and Cathay is safe on account it being huge on a continent of almost no enemies except Chaos to the north (and the Great Bastion takes forever for AI Chaos to break)
I lost interest with after the Chaos Dwarf DLC. Frankly at this point, just wait til the game is dead and buy it off a bundle or GOG if CA goes bankrupt from their HYENAS and Pharoah fiascos

 

Well, Total War is a franchise by the British video game developer Creative Assembly, based in Horsham. They made their mark by releasing Shogun: Total War in 2000. It was a 4X game, meaning you get to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Or, you usually start with a city/faction/settler/whatevers and building a starting point, usually a city, and began collecting resources to grow your initial city, develope infrasructures like buildings for more recruitment or unlocking new technologies, and then expand, usually by taking over other cities. The most common end-goal is destroying opposing factions by taking over/wiping out their last cities.

Total War is unique in the 4X genre in that whilst the explore, expand, and exploit parts are done in turn-based manner, like other 4X games (Civilisation, Heroes of Might and Magic, Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Stellaris, etc.), the exterminate part is done in real-time, like a real-time strategy/tactics game, where you deploy your units within your deployment zone before starting the battle, then move them into positions, order units to charge, shoot, flee etc. while your opponent does the same at the same time.

So, based on that description, you may see already a little bit of synchronicity the format has with the tabletop game -- not exactly the same, of course, but there are a good number of common grounds that made quite a few thing it's a natural fit -- multiple mods of Warhammer had been made for Total War games (in particular Total War: Medieval II).

Like I wrote before, the first TWW to me was pretty good, as a start. The game started with the Empire, The Dwarfs, the Vampire Counts, and the Greenskins. It was a drastic change of format though, for veterans of Total War franchise, not just because it was the first TW game set in a fantasy universe, but also because mechanically, it has become very streamlined and simplified. City-building became slot-based and divided into "major" and "minor" settlements i.e. Altdorf is the only major settlement in Reikland that can ever have 6 slots, all 3 other settlements can only ever be minor settlements, and even when fully developed, they can have only 4 building slots. Armies can not longer be lead by a "captain" (a non-character model that is embedded in a unit, akin to a unit champion, which was possible prior to this point and could take act independently on the world map like a general, just without the bonus a fully-blown general brings). Neither can a hero character lead an army, thus limiting a lot of manuevouring possibilities the old TW games had. Trade had become automated in that older games, trade agreements can have terms and conditions, even specifying what produces can be traded with what -- TWW merely checks if the two factions have cities that produce a trade good that's not in the other and how the trade income is calculated is also non-intuitive.

I also have personal gripes with how they handled the generals -- or Lords as they are called in-game. At release, what CA considered "Melee" lords will almost always out perform a "Hybrid" lord. A max level KF can comfortably beat a max level Mannfred von Cartstein, for example, because KF has to have higher melee stats than Mannfred because Mannfred is also a spellcaster. On one hand, yes, it seems like a balancing decision; on the other hand, the Empire roster is not balanced unit-to-unit but rather roster-to-roster, and the VC certainly had a lot of weaknesses the Empire can exploit without making their lords shit (all VC lords are hybrids, btw). Also Lord and Heroes are not designed as individuals but rather as a whole unit, meaning they have the hit point of an entire block of infantrymen, the damage output of hundreds when a single model in a regiment had 10s of damage - for example, KF can solo 2 entire unit of empire swordsmen at level 1 at the start of the game.

Still, I wrote it was a good start as TWW was announced as a side-project, not something to take over their "historical" series, so I assumed all the streamlining was an effort to push the game out of the door without going through the same development cycle like their, then, mainstream titles. I could play as Karl Franz, starting in Altdorf, raising state troops and defend the realm against Greenskins from the Grey and Black Mountains. I could make deals with the other Elector Counts to reform alliances, tr to balance different province's interests and hold the Empire together as oppose to letting it slip into a civil war. I have Sylvania to cleanse of the Vampiric filth and could help my Dwarf ally Thorgrim and Ungrim, and must prepare to face the NPC faction the Chaos Warriors invasion at the end game. It was fun, it somehow felt like I was actually playing a game set the a WHFB universe.

Also the game is set at a nebulous time, likel 2512 IC after KF is coronated, where the game takes liberty and has the Elector Counts throw a temper tantrum. The Empire has to reestablish the Emperor's authority across the land just as the End Time looms. For the Dwarfs it was at a time Thorgrim began to try and restore Karaz Ankor, and Mannfred just returned to Sylvania. Greenskins be just, eh, greenskinin' -- you could start with either Grimgor or Azhag tho. There were tons of DLCs, a to my shame, I own every one of them -- up until Chaos Dwarfs for TWWIII, of course.

By the end of TWW's life cycle, we could play as the Empire, Dwarfs, Greenskins, Vampire Counts, WoC, Beastmen, Wood Elves, Bretonnia, and Norsca.

TWWII was good too, it started with the Lizardmen, HE, DE, and Skaven. The map got expanded, from the Old World to the New World -- Naggarund, Lustria, Ulthuan, and the Southlands (Northern Waste also got a little bit northerner, IIRC). Each faction has their unique mechanics (tho mostly existing mechanics from TWW or even earlier TW games mashed together), but they were good. It's also go an ungodly amount of DLCs, and at the end we could play as the original 4 plus the Tomb Kings and the Vampire Coast. More and more characters were also added in the "Lord Pack" DLCs, where you get 2 "legendary lords" and a handful of new units (sometimes just unit champions made into a whole unit, sadly) for a premium.

The problem, IMO, was TWWIII. So just a refresher -- those who own TWW and TWWII can now play all 15 races on the large world map. Like, I have even lost count of the number of "legendary lords" and "legendary heroes" -- the unique named characters we can use in the tabletop game, 8E and previous editions. So you can imagine that there isn't much left for TWWIII to add. And those in Horsham got a bright idea -- a brilliantly wonder, awesome idea -- how about we have EA write a whole Cathay roster, and change the Kislev roster so it's all about Bears, and we split the DoC into 4 5 factions? And can say: "look, you get 7 factions for this new Total War Warhammer game! And what's thiiiiiis? If you pre-order, you also get the Ogre Kingdom!"

Receptions was mixed, though people remained optimistic. Then the game was released without the big global map promised -- so we could only play on the limited map and only with the very fast-paced, linear grand campaign. I can safely say that, despite the passage of time, most folks still refuse to replay the campaign on principal.

Then there's the bugs -- the TWW games have always been known to have bugs, hell ,TW games in general has been known to have bugs. But it really showed since then. The shooting bug have all but made archers/black powder units useless. Large units like the Ogres used to get bodied by swordsmen because of attack animation issues. The building-slot problem I mentioned earlier? They refuse to change it despite multiple mods increasing the slots to 10+, before ultimately giving in and gave certain major settlements more slots. They've been slowly making new additional mechanics the community already made in mods (like "legendary heroes" and "recruit defeated lords") -- people play TWW to have a massive brawl, not a story campaign, and the released stats tells as much.

Also I hate that they made Cathay bascially just Empire+Bretonnia but better. Like no joke, they have the artillery of the Empire (their version of the Helstorm and Helblaster), and their version of the peasants and pegasus knights ("Longma", or Dragon-Horse). I'd rather they had leaned into one or the other and give them more than just the visual identity, like if they had really shit infantry (they don't, they have good heavy infantry too) but have something else to make up for it. As it stands, Cathay just felt like they wanted it to be the "starter faction" of TWWIII and gave it everything. Oh and they have their own Jezzail weapons team too.

Problem for CA is, TWW was such a success, that they could not help but make their "historical" games in the same way. The three kingdoms started with only one mode a play now known as the "Romance mode", meaning their generals and heroes are basically one-man armies, like in TWW. Three kingdoms did well on release but will soon be forgotten due to poor DLC plans. However, it also alienated their old-school fans. This will be felt with the last "historical" game - Pharoh, released last year and already under 100 player-in game. And now that there one big live-service game HYENA died on arrival, they have pretty much only TWWIII to milk -- and TWWIII

Sorry if this is rather ranty -- I really had hoped CA would expand the complexity of the game, even to the point we could customize our lords to be "our dudes", giving them different weapon loadouts (Empire General and Captains still have only the shield and sword option). All they did was adding variety of units, even when I didn't think it was warranted, to be as wide as an ocean, but the depth of a puddle.

 

TWWIII is fine. Honestly, all three are fine, they're pretty similar.
The biggest problem TWW III has is that it's simply the third entry. It has basicly the same flaws TWW I had, but after 3 games the novelty of playing a fantasy TW, and not being limited to "realistic" historical stuff simply is no longer enough to hide the flaws.

The chaos doom-tide has been a problem in all 3 games.
The simplified city management has been a problem basicly since rome II introduced the province system; though TWW definitly made it worse.
The combat engine has been wonky since Rome II with units blobbing and ranged flipflopping between bugged or OP.
Casters heroes have always sucked as actual units, god knows why they didn't just give them ranged attacks so they feel more natural and useful.
Diplomacy has always been a mess in these games.
Hero units being a single guy, and not simply a general + bodyguard has always been weird.
The balance is all over the place, especially in the campaign, due to how assymetrical factions are. Especially frustrating if say you first spend a while fighting a faction focused on heavy infantry, then the next faction you fight shows up with an monster focused army and you don't have any good anti-large units yet so you're just getting crushed.

O, and at this point there's simply too many factions to keep them unique. So you get problems like Cathey feeling like a better empire/Bretonnia.

It also has created the problem that historical titles look a bit boring in comparison. Pharaoh especially suffers from this.We've just had 3 games where you have magic and monsters and wildly different factions. Then in Pharaoh we're limited to some guys with pointy sticks, and maybe a single horse. It's rather jarring, and contributed to Pharaohs underwhelming performance.

 

Disagree. They could have done by adding an unit attachment system like Mark of Chaos or DoWI, they have not. And now they have to deal with the two-tier balancing they got where lord-sniping spells has do hundreds of damage while AOE spells has to do at most a bit over 100 because small models have less 100 hit points. Just have the attached unit take the hit from the attached character instead, and have characters automatically move to attack each other if two opposing units with attached characters are engaged.

There's not just past mechanics can be weird -- it's the lack of effort to even try to make it work. It's like saying because AI has been shit since Rome II we shouldn't expect any better; well, that's how you the current AI

 

Like I said, heroes/generals should just come with a unit of bodyguards instead of being 1 superpowered guy.

However, casters like Gelt have the additional flaw that they are stuck with ranged unit stats, sometimes even worse, but don't get a basic ranged attacks. Which results in the rather awkward situation where they only really do something once every 20-30 seconds when their spells are ready because their stats are too terrible to risk them going into the melee.

The problem is that the TWW games where always intended to build upon the same, shared, framework. TWW II && III shouldn't really be viewed as a standalone sequel games, they're kind of just very big DLC/expansion for TWW I. Essentially they just made 1 really big game over the past 8 years, not 3 seperate games. And that limits their ability to fix major problems. Fixing fundamental flaws in the core framework isn't really an option with that kind of approach.

In hindsight, might not have been the best way to make a game in this manner

 

Nah, the range stats are fine on pure casters, that's what they are designed to be, squishy in combat but their power comes from their ability to cast spells. The problem is the way the magic is implemented. Generally low impact except for a handful of spells especially on ultra unit size
The last thing I want to see in any Warhammer game is to have wizards & mages come with a default, non-magic-costing range attack.

 

I'm in the same boat. I've never played it since it is not available on console. I just like to occasionally watch YouTube TW Warhammer match replays.

That said, TW Warhammer III gave us Chaos Dwarfs... and Chaos Dwarfs are awesome! And as we all know...

 

The issue is that by giving them ranged stats, but no ranged attack, they're kind of useless 99% of the time. Since it takes 20-30 seconds to recast any spell. Which is a very long time to just be standing around doing nothing. They need to be given something vaguely useful to do in between those spellcasts. And while you could just give them more frequent spellcasts, that has the significant downside of being a very micro-heavy solution. A basic ranged attack would be one of the simpler solutions.

But yes, there is also a larger problem with magic as a whole, with the impact of individual spellcasts varying far too much.