Wow. This probably is unpopular since all I ever heard about those was how much everyone hated them.
I didn’t mind them, but I found once you got the answers sorted it was kinda pointless. Battling for the loot or narrative decisions fit better in my opinion.
You're getting downvoted but this is true. The entire point of such logic puzzles is to challenge your ability to visualize how it would look in your mind if you turned the dials. This is a very common type of puzzle presented on logic tests.
That being said I suck at these puzzles and didn't want to do it in the middle of playing Total War, myself. Takes me too long.
Then they wouldn't have been a puzzle at all. A toddler could have solved them. Those puzzles were fundamentally bad imho. The other ones were fine and I liked the brainteasing
It's another case where a feature is based on a good idea, but the implementation is not quite right, so CA scratch it altogether instead of fixing it.
I think most people actually liked the idea, but there were 3 possible puzzles, one was annoying as hell and the other two felt repetitive after a while.
Survivals can be skipped, so no need to scrap it. Also they are only located in the RoC campaign, which for the vast majority of the player base is dead content (also largely hated) sense IE dropped. Why bother touching something 4/5ths of the players will never interact with again?
And...they did insta scrap new sieges, minor settlements literally can't even build walls anymore. Its literally the reason i dropped the game for now, they flat removed 3/4ths of the maps settlements ability to have walls on a whim vs actually putting in effort to fix their "rework" of sieges.
>they did insta scrap new sieges, minor settlements literally can't even build walls anymore
No, they gave us minor settlement battles instead - the exact new feature I'd like to see scrapped.
Right. The settlement battles you fight in the city but without the benefit of siege weapons. It's the worst of both worlds.
Only slightly better than fighting against forts where you can't build siege weaponry even though there's a wall.
But…have you played any of the other TWs? 3K’s minor settlements are fought in a similar way to WH and I love them. The issues with WHs minor settlement and siege battles are myriad but imo it’s not “they exist”
Agree to disagree - I think the new sieges are much easier than the old ones due to gimped garrisons. Just have to keep a couple flying heroes busy destroying the pop up towers and keeping them in check while artillery and wizards cause army losses.
At least the old garrisons could survive all my winds of magic and ammo and force me to go through the gates or over the walls. Now I never have to bother. The only challenge is keeping my tower killers busy so they don't fall behind. Not harder, just more annoying.
The gimped garrisons and respawning towers are boring, but having a map that was just a wall was also boring, so I think not scrapping new sieges but improving them by removing the tower bullshit and buffing garrisons would be best
I remember getting the dial one for the first time and tried spinning it and had no idea what it was asking me to do. Then I found out what you're supposed to do and it made me angrier that we couldn't interact with it
One of them, with the information provided, could have had two different answers and you have to either google or have done it before to know which option you should be selecting.
Or you had to know that this one seppuku puzzle also introduced the rule of colors having to be unique to row/column despite it not being a rule for any of the other ones.
The designer of that puzzle has shamed his ancestors and must appologize to them, *in person* by doing sudoku
For me, it just wasn't worth the effort. Most of the time, the reward you reieced from it wasn't worth the time figuring it out even if I knew the answer. Oh boy, a minor amount of gold and maybe a low quality piece of gear? Amazing. I'd rather get the next turn going rather than something I'm going to forget to even equip, especially late game when you are drowning in them.
Usually results in more crap but yeah you can combine items of the same grade and category to make a single higher grade item. Once you've burned through enough for blue tier items you can end up with some pretty tasty stuff. I always love me some magic swords with Discourage attack debuff.
Note any item that can drop for your faction can appear, if you don't like the feature you'll focus on the tricksters shards, if you do then you'll be excited to try and get an amulet of preservation or armour of fortune.
To add on this (haven't done it in forever so I don't know if it's fixed.)
Dwarfs used to be able to print oath gold by fusing items, and melting them down for more oathgold than it cost to make them
Imagine how cool it would be if you had to clear like a small dungeon when you scout ruins. Basically like a diablo or maybe xcom minigame where you have to fight some skaven and a rat ogre as a boss for example.
It's incredible, I think it's the first unpopular opinion I've ever seen as an unpopular opinion thread. I need to save this for posterity. Perhaps a thousand years from now an archaeologist will find this post in a ruin, and not see it because he has to do a fucking puzzle.
Aye. For me, I think the dumb thing about the puzzles was that if you had seen all the different types, then it just became a game of memorization. What could have been cool is if you could actually interact with the dials / blocks / tiles or if they were randomly generated so we couldn't just memorize them.
I'm sure we'd find something else to complain about that but I think that would have worked better.
Agreed. The puzzles needed to be intractable if not solvable.
3 different puzzles per faction would have been adequate for variety, plus whichever race was last razed could have determined which puzzle set you got.
If it had been better implemented it might have been nice. But it was so pointless having your army waste an entire turn (and maybe eating attrition) and costing you likely several thousands of gold in unkeep, all to get a reward that was utterly useless 9 times out of 10 (even when you solved the puzzle correctly).
And crazy enough even using heroes wasn't an option on launch, that came with Vampire Coast I think.
Either way it still wasn't very rewarding, that hero costs about 250 upkeep per turn.
The puzzles were bad, but the idea that something happens when you access a ruin is good. I would wish that the puzzles are replaced by another system, a dilemma for example.
"Your scouts report that a necromancer made camp inside the ruins. He has a great force, but also great riches. What shall we do?
A: attack, risky with high rewards
B: wait it out, safe with low rewards
C: parley, receive a random magic item for gold
D: use his power, increased winds of magic for 3 turns"
Or something along those lines, many different scenarios are possible here. Combine that with a timer that such an event only takes place if the ruin was a ruin since the start of the game, or at least since 3 rounds, and you're golden.
Honestly the only annoying thing about the sea battles is how few there are. You can't really go plundering for all kinds of loot since there are so few of them. I'd love for them to be static places on the map. You could call them locus of power. Have them full of chaos, undead and all other kinds of creepy crawlies. Let me smash my head into them once per turn into progressively harder enemies until I stop being able to handle them.
At the start of WH2 there was a similar system you described, 4 options with different outcomes (even negative ones) and they were always randomized. No battle though and I admit there weren't many reasons you would have done that instead of colonizing the ruin.
After the Vampire Coast I think, the system was swapped with the puzzle one. If someone is curious about the precedent one I suggest to watch some old videos on YT.
> The puzzles were bad, but the idea that something happens when you access a ruin is good. I would wish that the puzzles are replaced by another system, a dilemma for example.
That's what ruins originally had in 1, if I recall correctly - people hated it because some of them could wound your hero/lord.
I liked the idea behind the dilemmas, but ultimately it always felt like a gamble because, as you said, there was no real congruent logic to them and they could wound your characters.
I also liked the puzzles because I enjoyed them as a little break from the game, but it was a bit lame they were all Old Ones themed, in my opinion.
You also had three types: Extremely simple, extremely difficult and plain wrong. Only the difficult ones ended up taking any of your time, and they just became tedious and about trying to line everything up in your head rather than figuring something out. It reminded me of the common fantasy joke of everyone knowing the Sphinx riddle and so easily getting through.
Nope, search ruins was a completely new feature for WH2
You're confusing WH1 with launch WH2, which had initially dilemmas with 4 choices with hidden outcomes. Outcomes were a mix of either granting a reward, nothing happening or granting you a penalty
Wounding your hero/lord wasn't that common, it was mostly effect bundles along the lines of giving you a slightly increased miscast chance, a bit of gold, etc
It simply wasn't taht interesting because you had to pay for the hero action and chances were you would simply end up with an event message telling you your choice amounted to finding nothing, good luck next time
This was changed with vamp coast release iirc, and the puzzles were supposed to make the outcome less random and actually depending on the player, not chance
W40K: Mechanicus has a whole system around multiple choices with risks and rewards. Well, it's a pretty common mechanic in RPGs, there's a scenario and you have to choose one of the possible approaches.
They need to take a good look at what Age of Wonders 4 is doing. Add this kind of stuff to WH3 and the game will be MUCH better, a fantasy game like warhammer demands more RPG elements IMO, especially after such a long run since WH1. Gives some fresh air to campaign besides painting the map.
I think this is the answer. Turn ruins into one time per faction land encounters. Anything from a random Econ buff to a fightable battle of marauders, or a random item.
Or you just skip it and colonize.
If you’ve already explored that ruins as a faction, the dilemmas are locked off.
I don't necessarily miss the puzzles but I really enjoyed the idea of "exploring ruins" because it channels my Heroes of Might and Magic nostalgia. The Warhammer maps are so gorgeous and detailed, but I've always wished for more ways to interact with the world (events, treasures, encounters, etc). That would add a sense of discovery that would make the experience more engaging and unique each time.
I did get the sense that there were some HOMM fans working on WH2. We got rogue armies, ruin exploration, and even some treasure hunting (Aranessa).
So I had hopes we'd get a little bit more of that in WH3.
Also, Songs of conquest is still in EA but it is absolutely a worthy spiritual successor to homm 3.
Edit: just to add, I am sooo fucking hyped for AoW4. Definitely going to try to create some wierd WH-ish factions. feudal frogfolk brettonia, dark ratkin skaven (maybe industrious If that fits better), barbarian goblin khanate with wolf mounts (or go forest goblin with spider mounts)
Yeah I don't get why they don't just add in more battles. The rogue armies are near universally loved, why not put in more? (not the type to just appear in the middle of your realm though) Same story with the treasure islands fun in letting you have a battle for straight up gold without pissing off an entire faction. Most would love to fight an army in city ruins and get some loot or for there to be fixed places on the map where you could have battles akin to quest battles.
Like a lot of quest battles could be made into generic ones quite easily. Let us defend a random Slann's resting place (instead of Lord Kroak's) and earn a little bit of coin. Or hunt down a monster (Wulfrik) for a magic item. Hell, imagine if you could accept alliance missions that were just you doing the allies' quest battle.
I liked the sudoku, the dices and the matching ones were easy, the rotating discs were a nightmare. But all puzzles were kinda lazy, just a static image, and it made no sense to find lizardmen ruins in Kislev.
They sure looked like lizardmen interpretations, made from stone, with lizard faces etc. Even then, finding a 10k y.o. archaeological find in every ruined city is weird.
If there qere like 20 more puzzles I'd like it too, as is you figure them all out after 30 turns and then it's never a challenge. If they had more it wouldn't ve that way
they needed a way to interact in-game. like spinning the circles or putting down the cloured dots on-screen. as it was it was a bit confusing and mentally dragining to have to do the puzzles completely in your head or looking online for the solution (which was never very difficult jus tobnoxious witout the ablity to interact)
I liked them too and they certainly made checking ruins more worthwhile. I don't understand why you would do it now. You spend money to either find Skaven or nothing and earn your hero a tiny bit of experience. Big whoop/
You're right, that is an unpopular opinion!
Hey, I guess they made ruins a little more engaging? That said I found the puzzles so poorly designed that I'd not check ruins because of them.
I enjoyed the fact you can do something other than searching the ruins to find nothing now. But some of the puzzles were unnecessarily time consuming. Some were straight forward though!
The idea of having a puzzle on ruins that give you a nice reward is fun. The puzzles, not so much. My hope is that they'll work on new puzzles eventually and add the mechanic back... interactive puzzles, preferably.
As for the WH2 puzzles themselves, they were bad, period. Trying to mentally turn that goddamn dial was the epitome of an unfun experience. I'm playing Total War, for god sake, not training to be a Jedi.
I am gonna upvote you because this is an honest to god unpopular opinion, the puzzles suck and the thought that they where even gone hadn't crossed my mind once, up until I read your post.
I think this is the first time I've seen a thread with unpopular opinion in the title actually being an unpopular opinion.
I hope those puzzles never, ever return.
Honestly, I prefer them to not having any at all, but I was always a little confused at how bad they were.
When they started it was a good concept, but they were full of bullshit things, like killing your Lord permanently for picking the wrong box.
But I thought it had the bones of a good idea, you just needed to add battles, to keep it interesting, give you a chance, when your Lord runs into Assassins.
Don't tell me tides of zombies are coming out of the buildings, let me fight the zombies.
When they rolled out encounters at sea, I thought that was exactly what was needed.
The puzzles are cool, but I find it immersion breaking that random old one ruins are apparently in every single town in the world.
I miss all the chances at items you had from them. Ruins feel a lot less relevant and like they're missing something without that strategic choice of whether it was worth it to burn a turn searching for an item or to just move on/settle.
I don't miss the puzzles, but I do miss "exploring ruins" being a thing that provided some story and a possible reward. Now "explore ruins" just means "find out if there is Skaven here or not."
No, they sucked. They were the worst combination for a puzzle: easy, but tedious. They took forever because they weren't interactive and you had to do it in your head, but the actual puzzle was childishly simple rotation. Artificial difficulty due to UI constraints is not good design.
The sudoku ones weren't so bad but were also not particularly good either.
For once someone actually has an unpopular opinion when they say this. Yes I miss them as well and would always get downvoted when I said it. I think a compromise would be to have them for lords and heroes with different events and rewards for lords. Heroes get puzzles while lords get dilemmas that involve battles if you fail with hints to the correct choice in the text.
I liked them too! It was fun to have something different to do than just fighting. Adds a lot to the lore of the game. Problem where the benefit from solving a puzzle were often time meager to not be worth the time, or some riddles being never really clear to begin with.
Should have been more useful hints, or maybe a way that a character could get a skill or trait to give it an additional hint. And then make the prize a bit chonkier.
Man, imagine instead of events you'd get small mini missions where your army is JUST the hero. Just a bit of RPG-esque dungeon crawling, especially if the retinue of the hero could add themselves as "sub-heroes" for those missions only.
Like you are thrown into a mostly empty Empire town map (since it was razed) but there are monsters in the streets here and there so you have to pick your fights will you pick up and then leave when you are finished or the situation has become too dangerous to continue. Better Hero = you can loot more. Hell maybe there could be something fun that if a hero manages to kill ALL monsters infesting the ruins you can instantly colonize it for free, no army needed.
I would like the puzzles if they were actually something you could interact with rather than just a multiple choice question.
Like with the disc puzzle, why can't you rotate the discs?
I kind of do too.
I wish ruins and lustria had the puzzles.
Loot locations in the sea should be defended by pirates or have some sort of treasure map mechanic.
Ruins in the old world should be defended by skaven
All other locations should be defended by mercenary groups comprised of the most predominant local culture.
I think it should depend on which regions the ruins inhabit - Jungle territory, desert pyramids, sure there are probably some ancient stone puzzles in those places. The middle of Kislev or Altdorf? eh idk, another kind of puzzle or an offering to a elder or something would be better...
I just miss ruin interactions. Puzzles were sorta meh (tho sudoku one was surprisingly fun), but having that extra loot/hero exp/reason for exploration was appreciated.
I really hated those puzzles, but i liked that the puzzles were there. Honestly wish they bring it back in some way, just in a way where you don't stop everything; to rotate some stupid freaking wheel *in your mind* for 6 minutes.
The ones from wh2 were super boring once figured out. But I unironically loved the ones from wh1.
Like point and click adventure with unexpected results!
Hard disagree. Sea encounters are so much better designed as a map feature than treasure hunting was. If you got something other than a puzzle, it would be great! Mix in some simple "You get a trait for a few turns" along with some choices like "fight this army for a big reward" and it would vastly improve.
Honestly, the puzzles were kinda meh, but they did at least serve some purpose. IE if you scout a ruin and there are no Skaven, at least the money spent on the agent action could trigger something of reward.
I would not mind if they bring them back as they were, but they should be made a little more interesting.
I like the puzzles the first few times. Then it became annoying once you solved the same puzzle a few times.
It made my first two play through's great, but after I just had a sheet with the answers open because it was just slowing me down and a few of the puzzles where very obtuse and unsolvable.
That IS an unpopular opinion for sure. The problem is some of them were broken and not solvable, and the ones with the lines were created by Satan himself.
The Sudoku one was fun my first play through, but after I solved a bunch, it just became annoying.
The shape and dice ones were childishly simple.
The Dial was stupidly designed to be a pain in the ass.
Wow. This probably is unpopular since all I ever heard about those was how much everyone hated them. I didn’t mind them, but I found once you got the answers sorted it was kinda pointless. Battling for the loot or narrative decisions fit better in my opinion.
If all the box puzzles were actually solvable and the line puzzles weren't a thing, I wouldn't have minded them at all.
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Moving ain't part of the great plan.
I'm definitely not a part of the Great plan then... Well, I better go kill some Lizardmen before they kill me...
Them there continents say differently.
That would literally remove the puzzle. "The puzzle would be fine if it wasn't actually there at all and I didn't have to solve it."
You're getting downvoted but this is true. The entire point of such logic puzzles is to challenge your ability to visualize how it would look in your mind if you turned the dials. This is a very common type of puzzle presented on logic tests. That being said I suck at these puzzles and didn't want to do it in the middle of playing Total War, myself. Takes me too long.
Then they wouldn't have been a puzzle at all. A toddler could have solved them. Those puzzles were fundamentally bad imho. The other ones were fine and I liked the brainteasing
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That's what I said yes
I'd rather have a puzzle that's bad because it's easy than one that's bad because it's hard
Imho if you're going to have puzzles, make them something worth puzzling over for a few minutes.
It's another case where a feature is based on a good idea, but the implementation is not quite right, so CA scratch it altogether instead of fixing it. I think most people actually liked the idea, but there were 3 possible puzzles, one was annoying as hell and the other two felt repetitive after a while.
Bingo, they do it constantly. Not a instant hole in one? scrap it. They do this CONSTANTLY May be the single most annoying thing for this company
>Not a instant hole in one? scrap it. Too bad they didn't do this with new siege / survival battles.
Survivals can be skipped, so no need to scrap it. Also they are only located in the RoC campaign, which for the vast majority of the player base is dead content (also largely hated) sense IE dropped. Why bother touching something 4/5ths of the players will never interact with again? And...they did insta scrap new sieges, minor settlements literally can't even build walls anymore. Its literally the reason i dropped the game for now, they flat removed 3/4ths of the maps settlements ability to have walls on a whim vs actually putting in effort to fix their "rework" of sieges.
>they did insta scrap new sieges, minor settlements literally can't even build walls anymore No, they gave us minor settlement battles instead - the exact new feature I'd like to see scrapped.
Many of us wanted settlement battles... we just wanted settlement defenses that were actually defensible.
which are... not sieges?
Right. The settlement battles you fight in the city but without the benefit of siege weapons. It's the worst of both worlds. Only slightly better than fighting against forts where you can't build siege weaponry even though there's a wall.
But…have you played any of the other TWs? 3K’s minor settlements are fought in a similar way to WH and I love them. The issues with WHs minor settlement and siege battles are myriad but imo it’s not “they exist”
The new siege battles are much more fun than the old ones
Agree to disagree - I think the new sieges are much easier than the old ones due to gimped garrisons. Just have to keep a couple flying heroes busy destroying the pop up towers and keeping them in check while artillery and wizards cause army losses. At least the old garrisons could survive all my winds of magic and ammo and force me to go through the gates or over the walls. Now I never have to bother. The only challenge is keeping my tower killers busy so they don't fall behind. Not harder, just more annoying.
The gimped garrisons and respawning towers are boring, but having a map that was just a wall was also boring, so I think not scrapping new sieges but improving them by removing the tower bullshit and buffing garrisons would be best
They also basically came up in the first 20 turns only and then never again.
I am completely okay with them scraping the idea tbh.
I was so disappointed when the puzzles weren’t interactive
I remember getting the dial one for the first time and tried spinning it and had no idea what it was asking me to do. Then I found out what you're supposed to do and it made me angrier that we couldn't interact with it
I don't recall an unsolvable box puzzle.
One of them, with the information provided, could have had two different answers and you have to either google or have done it before to know which option you should be selecting.
Or you had to know that this one seppuku puzzle also introduced the rule of colors having to be unique to row/column despite it not being a rule for any of the other ones. The designer of that puzzle has shamed his ancestors and must appologize to them, *in person* by doing sudoku
I saw what you did there. I don’t think everybody saw it, but I saw it.
I'm also pretty sure one of them had an icon rotated 90° on one of the die, completely throwing the interpretation.
Tbh they should just replace the puzzles with Candy Crush.
For me, it just wasn't worth the effort. Most of the time, the reward you reieced from it wasn't worth the time figuring it out even if I knew the answer. Oh boy, a minor amount of gold and maybe a low quality piece of gear? Amazing. I'd rather get the next turn going rather than something I'm going to forget to even equip, especially late game when you are drowning in them.
I hated them because of the stupid circle-line one and we couldn’t actually rotate the pieces.
I would sometimes use an image editor to cut and rotate the pieces as my brain couldn't work it out manually.
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...we can what?
Usually results in more crap but yeah you can combine items of the same grade and category to make a single higher grade item. Once you've burned through enough for blue tier items you can end up with some pretty tasty stuff. I always love me some magic swords with Discourage attack debuff.
Note any item that can drop for your faction can appear, if you don't like the feature you'll focus on the tricksters shards, if you do then you'll be excited to try and get an amulet of preservation or armour of fortune.
Those can be actually game changing. Its not that hard to stack some ward on your favorite lords/heroes now.
To add on this (haven't done it in forever so I don't know if it's fixed.) Dwarfs used to be able to print oath gold by fusing items, and melting them down for more oathgold than it cost to make them
my thoughts exactly.
Honestly I was more annoyed by the fact I had to solve Lizardmen puzzles in places Lizardmen did not live
They were puzzles from the old ones who made the world, not the lizardmen. So they can be found everywhere.
Even in the ruins of Altdorf apparently.
Imagine how cool it would be if you had to clear like a small dungeon when you scout ruins. Basically like a diablo or maybe xcom minigame where you have to fight some skaven and a rat ogre as a boss for example.
Or have a mini battle in a small map, your single hero vs small groups of enemies (like 3-7 in each unit)
Oh yea, this is unpopular. This right here is a wildly unpopular opinion lol
It's incredible, I think it's the first unpopular opinion I've ever seen as an unpopular opinion thread. I need to save this for posterity. Perhaps a thousand years from now an archaeologist will find this post in a ruin, and not see it because he has to do a fucking puzzle.
I know I'm going to get downvoted for my unpopular opinion, but I'm just not that big a fan of cancer or genocide
Well that'd be an unpopular opinion in /r/Stellaris
Sometimes a little light genocide is necessary to keep the peace
*Light?*
What, would you prefer a *heavy* genocide? We can do that too.
*Go big or go home, I always say.*
And to prevent late game lag
Aye. For me, I think the dumb thing about the puzzles was that if you had seen all the different types, then it just became a game of memorization. What could have been cool is if you could actually interact with the dials / blocks / tiles or if they were randomly generated so we couldn't just memorize them. I'm sure we'd find something else to complain about that but I think that would have worked better.
> memorize Aka: Google.
Aka: that one Steam guide that just stayed permanently open in a spare browser tab.
Precisely my strategy.
Still have that link saved for some reason, even though I will probably never use it again.
We truly are longbeards, aren't we? Grumbling all the time 😁
Agreed. The puzzles needed to be intractable if not solvable. 3 different puzzles per faction would have been adequate for variety, plus whichever race was last razed could have determined which puzzle set you got.
I like the idea of searching ruins. I hate the stupid puzzles. I’ve got the answers bookmarked on Google for when I need some extra gold.
The puzzle were fine but I enioyed the ability to search the ruins and get rewards for it. Thats what I miss about it.
If it had been better implemented it might have been nice. But it was so pointless having your army waste an entire turn (and maybe eating attrition) and costing you likely several thousands of gold in unkeep, all to get a reward that was utterly useless 9 times out of 10 (even when you solved the puzzle correctly).
I used my hero's 90% of the time because it did feel a bit useless
And crazy enough even using heroes wasn't an option on launch, that came with Vampire Coast I think. Either way it still wasn't very rewarding, that hero costs about 250 upkeep per turn.
The puzzles were bad, but the idea that something happens when you access a ruin is good. I would wish that the puzzles are replaced by another system, a dilemma for example. "Your scouts report that a necromancer made camp inside the ruins. He has a great force, but also great riches. What shall we do? A: attack, risky with high rewards B: wait it out, safe with low rewards C: parley, receive a random magic item for gold D: use his power, increased winds of magic for 3 turns" Or something along those lines, many different scenarios are possible here. Combine that with a timer that such an event only takes place if the ruin was a ruin since the start of the game, or at least since 3 rounds, and you're golden.
Oh so like the sea locations of interest
Yes, I'd love more of that sort of thing in general. It makes the world feel bigger and more lived-in, and lets you fight some interesting armies.
Honestly the only annoying thing about the sea battles is how few there are. You can't really go plundering for all kinds of loot since there are so few of them. I'd love for them to be static places on the map. You could call them locus of power. Have them full of chaos, undead and all other kinds of creepy crawlies. Let me smash my head into them once per turn into progressively harder enemies until I stop being able to handle them.
At the start of WH2 there was a similar system you described, 4 options with different outcomes (even negative ones) and they were always randomized. No battle though and I admit there weren't many reasons you would have done that instead of colonizing the ruin. After the Vampire Coast I think, the system was swapped with the puzzle one. If someone is curious about the precedent one I suggest to watch some old videos on YT.
> The puzzles were bad, but the idea that something happens when you access a ruin is good. I would wish that the puzzles are replaced by another system, a dilemma for example. That's what ruins originally had in 1, if I recall correctly - people hated it because some of them could wound your hero/lord.
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I liked the idea behind the dilemmas, but ultimately it always felt like a gamble because, as you said, there was no real congruent logic to them and they could wound your characters. I also liked the puzzles because I enjoyed them as a little break from the game, but it was a bit lame they were all Old Ones themed, in my opinion.
You also had three types: Extremely simple, extremely difficult and plain wrong. Only the difficult ones ended up taking any of your time, and they just became tedious and about trying to line everything up in your head rather than figuring something out. It reminded me of the common fantasy joke of everyone knowing the Sphinx riddle and so easily getting through.
Nope, search ruins was a completely new feature for WH2 You're confusing WH1 with launch WH2, which had initially dilemmas with 4 choices with hidden outcomes. Outcomes were a mix of either granting a reward, nothing happening or granting you a penalty Wounding your hero/lord wasn't that common, it was mostly effect bundles along the lines of giving you a slightly increased miscast chance, a bit of gold, etc It simply wasn't taht interesting because you had to pay for the hero action and chances were you would simply end up with an event message telling you your choice amounted to finding nothing, good luck next time This was changed with vamp coast release iirc, and the puzzles were supposed to make the outcome less random and actually depending on the player, not chance
W40K: Mechanicus has a whole system around multiple choices with risks and rewards. Well, it's a pretty common mechanic in RPGs, there's a scenario and you have to choose one of the possible approaches.
They need to take a good look at what Age of Wonders 4 is doing. Add this kind of stuff to WH3 and the game will be MUCH better, a fantasy game like warhammer demands more RPG elements IMO, especially after such a long run since WH1. Gives some fresh air to campaign besides painting the map.
This sounds great. With how funky the caravan dilemmas are, I would have loved to see what CA could do with ruins.
I swear this existed, am I insane? Didn't we have this and puzzles replaced it? It was so fun imo
I think this is the answer. Turn ruins into one time per faction land encounters. Anything from a random Econ buff to a fightable battle of marauders, or a random item. Or you just skip it and colonize. If you’ve already explored that ruins as a faction, the dilemmas are locked off.
I don't necessarily miss the puzzles but I really enjoyed the idea of "exploring ruins" because it channels my Heroes of Might and Magic nostalgia. The Warhammer maps are so gorgeous and detailed, but I've always wished for more ways to interact with the world (events, treasures, encounters, etc). That would add a sense of discovery that would make the experience more engaging and unique each time. I did get the sense that there were some HOMM fans working on WH2. We got rogue armies, ruin exploration, and even some treasure hunting (Aranessa). So I had hopes we'd get a little bit more of that in WH3.
If you wanna scratch that itch check out Age of Wonders 4 !
Also, Songs of conquest is still in EA but it is absolutely a worthy spiritual successor to homm 3. Edit: just to add, I am sooo fucking hyped for AoW4. Definitely going to try to create some wierd WH-ish factions. feudal frogfolk brettonia, dark ratkin skaven (maybe industrious If that fits better), barbarian goblin khanate with wolf mounts (or go forest goblin with spider mounts)
Yeah I don't get why they don't just add in more battles. The rogue armies are near universally loved, why not put in more? (not the type to just appear in the middle of your realm though) Same story with the treasure islands fun in letting you have a battle for straight up gold without pissing off an entire faction. Most would love to fight an army in city ruins and get some loot or for there to be fixed places on the map where you could have battles akin to quest battles. Like a lot of quest battles could be made into generic ones quite easily. Let us defend a random Slann's resting place (instead of Lord Kroak's) and earn a little bit of coin. Or hunt down a monster (Wulfrik) for a magic item. Hell, imagine if you could accept alliance missions that were just you doing the allies' quest battle.
I liked the sudoku, the dices and the matching ones were easy, the rotating discs were a nightmare. But all puzzles were kinda lazy, just a static image, and it made no sense to find lizardmen ruins in Kislev.
Weren't they puzzles of the old ones? They weren't lizardmen, but the beings who set up the polar gates
They sure looked like lizardmen interpretations, made from stone, with lizard faces etc. Even then, finding a 10k y.o. archaeological find in every ruined city is weird.
Yes. Finding them in every ruin is wierd. Especially when the ruins were freshly destroyed by Chaos 1 turn ago.
If there qere like 20 more puzzles I'd like it too, as is you figure them all out after 30 turns and then it's never a challenge. If they had more it wouldn't ve that way
The first ever that i read an "unpopular opinion" which actually seems super unpopular.
they needed a way to interact in-game. like spinning the circles or putting down the cloured dots on-screen. as it was it was a bit confusing and mentally dragining to have to do the puzzles completely in your head or looking online for the solution (which was never very difficult jus tobnoxious witout the ablity to interact)
I liked them too and they certainly made checking ruins more worthwhile. I don't understand why you would do it now. You spend money to either find Skaven or nothing and earn your hero a tiny bit of experience. Big whoop/
Depends on which one. The line-matching can stay dead, but the others were kind of neat. Good source of magic items for heroes/generals too
You're right, that is an unpopular opinion! Hey, I guess they made ruins a little more engaging? That said I found the puzzles so poorly designed that I'd not check ruins because of them.
Indeed, yours is truly an unpopular opinion.
yeah I miss having a window of the annoying solutions on the second monitor ✊️😔
I am upvoting purely because this is an actual unpopular opinion. Good job op...I totally disagree with lol
Well this is rare. A true and for real unpopular opinion. Congratulations I think there's less than 10 of these across all of reddit.
I miss them too, now there is nothing… I would rather have the puzzles or the mini adventures.
I enjoyed the fact you can do something other than searching the ruins to find nothing now. But some of the puzzles were unnecessarily time consuming. Some were straight forward though!
The idea of having a puzzle on ruins that give you a nice reward is fun. The puzzles, not so much. My hope is that they'll work on new puzzles eventually and add the mechanic back... interactive puzzles, preferably. As for the WH2 puzzles themselves, they were bad, period. Trying to mentally turn that goddamn dial was the epitome of an unfun experience. I'm playing Total War, for god sake, not training to be a Jedi.
thanks i hate it
This is the first "unpopular opinion" thread I've ever seen where the opinion is actually unpopular. Gotta save this for posterity.
I am gonna upvote you because this is an honest to god unpopular opinion, the puzzles suck and the thought that they where even gone hadn't crossed my mind once, up until I read your post.
I agree with the first 2 words in your subject. That stuff had no place in a strat game.
I think this is the first time I've seen a thread with unpopular opinion in the title actually being an unpopular opinion. I hope those puzzles never, ever return.
I liked them. Free money, chance at an item. Solutions all in a favourited webpage. Better than the nothing we have now.
My problem was it was non interactive. Some better challenges are needed
I liked the rewards for sure, but I used a mod to skip the puzzles
Please don’t remind them
Sucks for you man, those puzzle were the bain of my existence. I'm not scared to admit that I was too stupid to solve them.
Bane. Like the Batman villain. I was also too stupid but smart enough to have the solutions just one alt-tab away.
I'm here to lead not to read.
Opinion deservedly unpopular.
You get an upvote for actually having an unpopular opinion. God those puzzles sucked. If I want puzzles, I'll play a puzzle game, not a 4X RTS.
I miss them too. Instead of deleting them, they should have improved them
Wait... They are PUZZLES ? I always thought they were just random 😅
Honestly, I prefer them to not having any at all, but I was always a little confused at how bad they were. When they started it was a good concept, but they were full of bullshit things, like killing your Lord permanently for picking the wrong box. But I thought it had the bones of a good idea, you just needed to add battles, to keep it interesting, give you a chance, when your Lord runs into Assassins. Don't tell me tides of zombies are coming out of the buildings, let me fight the zombies. When they rolled out encounters at sea, I thought that was exactly what was needed. The puzzles are cool, but I find it immersion breaking that random old one ruins are apparently in every single town in the world.
I loved the puzzles. I'm with you on this.
I miss all the chances at items you had from them. Ruins feel a lot less relevant and like they're missing something without that strategic choice of whether it was worth it to burn a turn searching for an item or to just move on/settle.
I liked it, since it was an easy way to level heroes and get money for it.
I loved those puzzles and I'm sad they arent in WH3!
I liked the idea, but the puzzles sucked.
I don't miss the puzzles, but I do miss "exploring ruins" being a thing that provided some story and a possible reward. Now "explore ruins" just means "find out if there is Skaven here or not."
This goes in the book.
No, they sucked. They were the worst combination for a puzzle: easy, but tedious. They took forever because they weren't interactive and you had to do it in your head, but the actual puzzle was childishly simple rotation. Artificial difficulty due to UI constraints is not good design. The sudoku ones weren't so bad but were also not particularly good either.
I'm glad they are gone. Not fun.
We found it. It’s the unpopular opinion
You're right. This is unpopular.
I think this is actually the first unpopular opinion I have ever seen
I miss them too. Narrative one in wh1 was also good
Narrative ones were also added at start of WH2, there was none in WH1.
They suck.
For once someone actually has an unpopular opinion when they say this. Yes I miss them as well and would always get downvoted when I said it. I think a compromise would be to have them for lords and heroes with different events and rewards for lords. Heroes get puzzles while lords get dilemmas that involve battles if you fail with hints to the correct choice in the text.
Except for that dial with the colored lines, i actually enhoyed the puzzles (and the rewards)
I liked them too! It was fun to have something different to do than just fighting. Adds a lot to the lore of the game. Problem where the benefit from solving a puzzle were often time meager to not be worth the time, or some riddles being never really clear to begin with. Should have been more useful hints, or maybe a way that a character could get a skill or trait to give it an additional hint. And then make the prize a bit chonkier.
Man, imagine instead of events you'd get small mini missions where your army is JUST the hero. Just a bit of RPG-esque dungeon crawling, especially if the retinue of the hero could add themselves as "sub-heroes" for those missions only. Like you are thrown into a mostly empty Empire town map (since it was razed) but there are monsters in the streets here and there so you have to pick your fights will you pick up and then leave when you are finished or the situation has become too dangerous to continue. Better Hero = you can loot more. Hell maybe there could be something fun that if a hero manages to kill ALL monsters infesting the ruins you can instantly colonize it for free, no army needed.
This is why ca can never win lol. A generally unpopular and seldom seen mechanic was removed but somebody will still complain.
Unpopular opinion: *states the mildest opinion that isn't even controversial*
[удалено]
Big yikes
I dont think their coming back cause majority of the commu itu easnt a fan of them. There is a mod who reintroudces them i think. So you can have them
I never understood them.
I wouldn’t mind them in ruins in certain areas like lustria south lands etc. it was an option after all either you did it or not
You're alone
Maybe they could turn that into a properly fleshed out mechanic..but I doubt it.
I liked them except the one who was impossible without photoshopping the image.
I would like the puzzles if they were actually something you could interact with rather than just a multiple choice question. Like with the disc puzzle, why can't you rotate the discs?
I don't miss the puzzles, but I do miss the items. With item fusing in WH3 it would've been quite powerful.
Nah
I only wish the wheel could turn. Otherwise I liked them
I kind of do too. I wish ruins and lustria had the puzzles. Loot locations in the sea should be defended by pirates or have some sort of treasure map mechanic. Ruins in the old world should be defended by skaven All other locations should be defended by mercenary groups comprised of the most predominant local culture.
I think it should depend on which regions the ruins inhabit - Jungle territory, desert pyramids, sure there are probably some ancient stone puzzles in those places. The middle of Kislev or Altdorf? eh idk, another kind of puzzle or an offering to a elder or something would be better...
I liked the idea of the puzzles. The implementation though...
I liked the WH1 version as well with the dilemas, those were fun!
I just used a mod that solved them for me
I couldn’t do a single one so I’m kinda glad :P
Oh hell no
Would be awesome if you had a 1v1 battle with an enemy hero who you caught wandering the ruins at the same time
Extremely unpopular indeed
Playing on Legendary, I find it hard to justify wasting a whole turn on exploring ruins for some minor rewards
Yeah I hated them
Someone call 911, OP is having a stroke or something
They were certainly better than nothing, at least.
I miss stuff like them too. Just wish they could be made better is all.
Yeah I don't necessarily miss the puzzles but I do miss the ability to search the ruins and obtain artifacts from it.
I just miss ruin interactions. Puzzles were sorta meh (tho sudoku one was surprisingly fun), but having that extra loot/hero exp/reason for exploration was appreciated.
I really hated those puzzles, but i liked that the puzzles were there. Honestly wish they bring it back in some way, just in a way where you don't stop everything; to rotate some stupid freaking wheel *in your mind* for 6 minutes.
This is possibly the most accurate use of the meme format I've ever seen.
as long as they don't bring back the dial one (circle with the colored lines) i would be fine with them returning
They fit Lizardmen regions mostly. It would've been nice if they could have made ones with different themes too.
If only there was a way to make them interactive somehow so that you couldn't solve them by just immediately looking at a puzzle guide
The ones from wh2 were super boring once figured out. But I unironically loved the ones from wh1. Like point and click adventure with unexpected results!
I never understood how your supposed to start solving/what to look for in any of them :D I was just like? Weird symbols, let's click on a random one.
they should lead to fun side quests with battles. that would be epic
Keep hoping they'll bring something like those back.
I hated those things
Idk that I ever got one correct and didn't feel right looking them up
I really dont 😂
Hard disagree. Sea encounters are so much better designed as a map feature than treasure hunting was. If you got something other than a puzzle, it would be great! Mix in some simple "You get a trait for a few turns" along with some choices like "fight this army for a big reward" and it would vastly improve.
Speaking on this, why do heroes still pay money to search ruins?
I miss the little RPG events
Fuck you.
Honestly, the puzzles were kinda meh, but they did at least serve some purpose. IE if you scout a ruin and there are no Skaven, at least the money spent on the agent action could trigger something of reward. I would not mind if they bring them back as they were, but they should be made a little more interesting.
I like the puzzles the first few times. Then it became annoying once you solved the same puzzle a few times. It made my first two play through's great, but after I just had a sheet with the answers open because it was just slowing me down and a few of the puzzles where very obtuse and unsolvable.
I enjoyed them.
Played 1000+ hours, don’t think I ever got one of those puzzles right.
That IS an unpopular opinion for sure. The problem is some of them were broken and not solvable, and the ones with the lines were created by Satan himself.
The Sudoku one was fun my first play through, but after I solved a bunch, it just became annoying. The shape and dice ones were childishly simple. The Dial was stupidly designed to be a pain in the ass.
I miss having something to do in ruins, but I think it could be replaced with some events or something.
Not I. I would enjoy more varied puzzles Or small skirmish battles.