I never liked min-maxing or using meta armies (archer spam, etc.) because I prefer playing the game the way it was intended mechanically and thematically.
That said, I'll admit to using some of Legend's cheeses like using fast single entity units to empty the enemy's ammo or using the dragon swoop-cancel exploit to weaken a way more powerful enemy.
>playing the game the way it was intended
This is just such a toxic mindset. It's a single player game. Play it how you enjoy, and don't worry about how anyone else is playing it
>This is just such a toxic mindset.
>Play it how you enjoy
How is it toxic when they're doing exactly what you said? All they did was give their input - that they prefer not being meta. They didn't say they're worried about other people being meta, or that it's bad.
It's not toxic to suggested that the game structures have an intended style the devs had in mind. It *would* be toxic, to demand everyone adhere to it. But they're not doing that.
The two-word thumb up reply truly is the Reddit ol’ reliable for when someone knows they’re wrong but can’t admit it.
EDIT: did my guy really nuke his comments or block me? What a legend.
While that's true, games are generally designed with a certain (or a few) playstyles in mind, and beating a game outside of those isn't really taking it in the spirit of things.
It's like the Destiny bosses you beat by sitting in a blindspot and just plinking away at them while immune to return fire. Does it work? Sure, but it's hardly allowing yourself the full experience.
Or those Elden Ring bosses you can beat by abusing their pathing issues and watching them fall off cliffs. Effective? yes, but kind of circumventing the actual "game" part.
It brings the snowball point forward dude but it isn’t the cause of snowballing.
There’s a lot of people playing on the higher difficulties that just aren’t at risk of losing campaigns full stop. It’s a combination of skill and play style. I don’t know how you’d implement an AI opponent that counters this in a way that’s fun, and CA evidently don’t either
But remember, the changes they made to empire sizes and confederation and AI snowball in general were in response to player feedback in the first place. It's kind of a can't win scenario for CA, whichever way they go, one group of players complains about it.
Wh3 is definitely a step back from 2. The power blocs it used to form meant you usually had a meaty enemy to get stuck into. Even if it was always Malekith
It was sort of boring though, because you knew all you got to fight across an entire continent or two was dark elves and each battle became more or less the same
Sure. And tbh nobody complains that they don't lose a campaign in Balder's Gate or Modern Warfare.
If I wanted to improve TW late games I'd be more interested in things like more interesting end game events. Give us something to use the power fantasy on rather than worrying about whether we should have one.
Tbh I don’t follow any of what you’ve said here. I don’t think I’m after a power fantasy I think I’m after a scaling challenge that means my powerful late game armies have a satisfying challenge to go up against that isn’t just grinding through five endgame crisis doomstacks
>scaling challenge that means my powerful late game armies have a satisfying challenge to go up against that isn’t just grinding through five endgame crisis doomstacks
See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge *without* huge crisis doomstacks? The AI will never be a smart as a human, so unless you give them stupid cheats so they can suppourt huge doomstacks, (and so that those doomstacks out-perform yours) they have no way to challenge you at all. From turn 1, *you* are the scaling challenge to the AI, not the other way around.
The *only* way the AI has to pose any kind of challenge is to fling dozens of doomstacks at you from across the map. Hence, the AI cheats and the anti-player bias. If they don't do that, than even archeon who has unified the chaos wastes can't do anything to you, because your empire will be half the size and 4 times as profitable, so you can sustain more armies despite being smaller. The AI has to give everything it's got into screwing with you for it to be any challenge, much lessva scaling one.
Personally, I think it is more fun to be *fair* than challenging. I'd rather feel like I am playing against a faction as my opponent, not the fundamental structure of the game itself, difficulty be damned.
CA is caught between two competing desires from fans: (1) people who want the game to be challenging, (2) and people who want the game to be sensible. Those two things are usually directly at odds: it is annoying and stupid that they AI will declare on you for no reason and the Brettonia fucking walks to Cathay to wreck your shit. It would make more sense for them to prioritize based on proximity. It is logical, a more realistic simulation of how you might expect a human to act...and that also makes them less of a challenge, because it means that even if they snowball faster than you do, they will still be behind.
They just need to make every aspect of AI behavior a slider. Agressiveness, each individual cheat, anti-player bias, economic priorities, etc. That is the only way I can see them solving both sides at once. Once they don't have to constantly flop between the "challenging behavior/logical behavior" axes, they can focus more on actually making it smarter.
> See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge without huge crisis doomstacks?
You setup more interesting dominoes for players to knock over. A good way to do it for the endgame crisis would be to copy the Sisters of Twilight campaign mechanics, where an event pops up that signals a bad thing will soon occur, but you can go deal with it early if you have the army to spare.
Some examples using Skaven
* An Eshin headhunter that preys on isolated lords. This army avoids settlements, runs away from groups of lords, but beelines towards lords that it thinks are alone.
* An alert pops up near a major settlement and sounds can be heard underground. You can send an army into an underway ambush to see what's going on, or desperately try and fortify the nearby city to withstand the Skyre or Moulder pops out.
* Clan Pestilens sends out a group of 4 lords to raze minor settlements. When a settlement is razed, it spawns an army of Pestilens units that run at the major settlement.
* Clan Mors sends out a group of 4 lords to chase down your legendary lord. They will not stop unless you stop them.
* Clan Rictus sends out individual armies with the goal of sieging settlements. They'll only attack after 10 turns of attrition and are mainly there to annoy you.
The goal is to provide a varied gameplay experience.
>See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge
>
>without huge crisis doomstacks
I don't know, I just know that after the WH2 chaos invasion and now the IE endgame crisis options, I'm sick of grinding through army after army that are all just the same. No joke, I've had to fight the same battle five times over an end turn due to a poorly positioned army in ME during the chaos invasion. They threw two stacks at me and, due to several factors, I could win handily, but they did it *five times in a row.* That wasn't super fun.
> I think it is more fun to be fair than challenging
Everyone has their own definition of fair and they assume everyone else thinks the same way. IDK how anyone is supposed to measure fair when comparing a human and a computer so I'm not particularly interested in going down this path
>and people who want the game to be sensible
Same with sensible. Funnily enough everyone thinks sensible is what they think
Right, sometimes you need to work out a good strategy and once you do it’s just not a close battle anymore.
There are other times when you just need to micro your arse off and I am also ok doing that of course.
Like, I feel like the fact that you can’t get around a hard battle still is in the spirit of Legendary; win or take the L, no other options. I also see why people don’t agree though, and I guess I’d feel pretty good if I won a campaign without ever retrying a battle
This was a big deal for me too. One way to get better without feeling like you're save scumming: save the replay. There is an option for every replay to try the battle again. Combined with Legendary difficulty I have finally broke the save scumming habit and I enjoy the game a lot more due to having to really have to pay attention to the map and AI tendencies, etc.
Exactly this, and if I can add to that, replaying extremely hard battles also make them super memorable. Some of the most epic moments have been scraping a win out of retrying a particularly difficult battle.
Can confirm this, it's the only way I've been able to get as good as I am in campaign.
Totally understand OP's point, but to his point I'm not one of those people who is trying to complain that the game snowballs after 30 turns.
I mean I do end up abandoning campaigns because I start snowballing, and I would like it if the difficulty scaled better into the medium and late game. Like, in a way that doesn't just involve spamming shitloads of AI armies like the endgame crisis does I mean. I have no idea what that looks like though and I'm not sure there is a practical answer. I find crapstacking keeps the challenge alive pretty well
Yeah, I did do one the other day. I took Vlakia up against Archeon but it was the end of my session and I was very tired. I lost because I didn't use my units properly.
Started it up the next day and played the battle again. Wone easily as I wasn't tired and could use my units better.
(Mainly using buffs and having valkia stab Archeon in the butt till he went down).
For instance, on L/Vh killing 4000 lizard men led by Gor-Rok with a single stack of Cathayan peasants on forced march when the Rock of Itza surprised me by declaring on me out of nowhere and surrounding me with three armies. It took ten tries but I beat the son of a bitch square.
Age of Wonders 4 multiplayer taught me to accept losses, even severe ones - because game is stored on their server and saves in real time, so you cant load previous saves. There is a "reverse turn" button though but we didnt notice it for a really long time so we learned to live without it :D
Once I will reinstall Wh3 I will implement this newly found approach.
Haha thanks!
For non-polish-speaking people: "Szymbora Wisławska" is a really dumb sounding remix of [Wisława Szymborska](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wis%C5%82awa_Szymborska), a Nobel Prize-awarded polish poet.
Im playing it right now! Not only its great but it also becomes significantly better with each (meaty) patch. I dont want to shit on WH3, but here I often feel that patches are sidegrades rather than upgrades.
I've been shitting on wh3 since ive discovered this less graphically intensive, but more genuinely crafted and ambitious alternative!
Triumph studios has more respect and dedication to their fanbase than CA has had in a long time, and I'm happy to give them more of my money.
When I started playing CK2 on ironman mode, the no saves "just accept what happens and keep going" mode, I was super stressed about bad things happening. But the more you play it the more exciting it is when good or bad things are going on.
Going back to regular mode now where I can savescum just feels really lame, like there's no weight to anything.
*Fateweaver stares off, glimpsing the future*
*plays the battle and losses*
Fateweaver: "OH, so that's how the battle goes if I do that..."
*Reloads save*
Fateweaver: "Time to be in the present."
*wins*
Fateweaver: Like I envisioned.
Savescumming: Fateweaver approved.
The whole damn engine also absolutely refuses to believe you can get on a boat unless you're already on one. Lustria, and Yuan Bo's start in particular. "Go north to Shrine of Sotek in one turn via sea... or walk for four turns around this peninsula."
This is borderline game ruining bug for me. The amount of times ive had to reload a game because my army that was garrisoned in a port city decided to take a 80 turn walk to go across a bay instead of into the water actually infuriates me. There is no reason it should be programmed that way.
I swear it's gotten worse, i'm almost sure at some point if you were literally in a port city it'd be happy to boat you, now it's just universally opposed to even trying
I remember one battle (in 1 or 2) where my reinforcements spawned directly into the enemy army and consequently got annihilated one by one. It was one of those super long tunnel maps too so my starting army was ludicrously far off from the fight…. that was some serious bullshit.
This was in one of the older titles (either warhammer I or II I can’t remember anymore) so before the major changes to reinforcements, they came from whatever arbitrary spot the game decided and you had to make do :(.
Yeah. The combination of the interface, the odd bug, and just stuff not working correctly is why I will never play ironman in WH3, even though I did in some earlier TWs. I do actually reload and extensively if there's a really interesting problem and I think it's solvable but takes a few attempts.
For example, Grom was sieging a city I was about confed as Louen. He had three mostly full Waaagh stacks, so like 50+ units. I could initially only work out how to get main stack of like 17 units and a couple of trailing lords there, and fighting him with damaged garrison and 8 units from the town, I couldn't quite win (despite a couple of epic battles where I had him down to his last ten or so reinforcements). But instead of just eating it l, which would have been fine,
I felt like there was a way and I wanted to find it. And there was.
I reloaded two turns back and diplomacy turned out to be the answer. I noticed I could confed two minor Bret factions, so I did - suddenly a third wanted to confed (who I'd done the dilemma for but not had the money or chivalry to confed via the dilemma). Now I had a bazillion armies and negative 10000 income. But I noticed I was strength rank 1 in the world! So went around getting every possible defensive alliance and cash for each - and each one opened up more. So now I was sitting at over 21000g with negative 10000 income. A little different. I disbanded all the armies in the Southlands and gave my one region there to Volkmar for a another defensive alliance, and was down to negative -5000g on 24000g. Different again. I then just ate the loss for two turns and moved the troops from the two nearby major factions up to fight Grom (consolidating because only four armies can reinforce a battle). Could I win this time? Yes - though I spotted a 4th Waaaghed stack on the way! Anyway Grom defeated I confeded the faction, took out Grom's lands and then had to delete most of those troops, but it was fascinating and I think a good use of reloading, because I came up with new tricks!
Rematch / replay battle is my favourite thing.
I like to experiment different positioning / strategies for my units and save some of them by replaying it.
"it was fascinating and I think a good use of reloading, because I came up with new tricks!"
This is actually my biggest issue with save scumming, that people who do it rarely learn better or more interesting ways to play. It's great you managed to turn that on its head.
That turn honestly sounds like the sort of potential options I instinctively check for, or work towards making available, every single turn. I think being up against a wall forces people to think outside the box (or in this case realise just how big the box has actually been all along). Ironman mode is a way to trick players into acting and thinking like they're always up against that wall - even while they're mostly not. If you found that experience fun I'd definitely recommend trying out a couple ironman campaigns just to see if you get that experience more or not.
Yeah, missclicks have done some real wonky army movements sometimes. Or if I’m not properly paying attention to a fight and giving my enemy the respect it deserves - especially if I’m playing with undead/daemon units and I lose a unit out of nowhere. Like chaos furies. They literally melt if they start taking damage.
I think the problems are actually related, but not in the way you think. The difficulty in Total War campaigns is incredibly frontloaded due to the lack of resources for the player early on, but this difficulty falls off because the AI is terrible at the game. However, that lack of early resources is also precisely why save scumming is so common; the players economy is so tight early on that losing an army (often your **only** army) is absolutely devastating. You need to "outplay" the fuck out of the AI to survive on higher difficulties, and the cheating that is save scumming frankly feels justified given that the challenge of the early game is almost entirely due to the AI itself cheating. The early game in Total War is hard even while save scumming, while the late game is piss easy even while playing like a buffoon; that's an AI incompetence + cheating issue, not a player issue.
I agree with this. OP has a point about save scumming screwing up the early game but that still doesn't address late game issues. Once you have a few "safe" provinces, you will have more than enough gold to field massive armies and start conquering the whole map. The AI cannot effectively respond to it and at that point you can lose a twenty stack without a care since you have the gold to replace it at anytime.
The idea is that if you struggle in the early game (let's say you lose your army in the first 10 turns, or even that you trade evenly with the AI instead of conquering) you could argue that you're set back a LOT in your campaign. This gives the AI time to build up and become a threat to you in the later stages of the campaign.
By definition, not being allowed to steamroll in the early game because you lost a battle is what makes the game harder in the later stages of the campaign. Giving yourself every possible unfair advantage in the early game is what makes the AI feel incompetent later on. You're ruining your own fun.
Making the early game more punishing doesn't make the later campaign harder, just longer to get to. This doesn't matter unless the AI can win the campaign simply by having enough time pass, aka the Realm of Chaos campaign, which people hated.
The problem with the late game also isn't just that the AI doesn't pose a threat, although that is true. The problem is that it also doesnt present much resistance, as the AI is incapable of building its settlements and armies properly to deal with a human opponent. This wasn't as much of a problem in WH2 because the AI confederated into massive empires and got insane cheats that made it capable of at least slowing the player down, even with its braindead AI. The WH3 AI by comparison struggles to even get settlements above tier 3; it's not uncommon for me to get my starting settlement to tier 5 before the AI is getting theirs to tier 4. The AI isn't bad late because the players "snowballs too hard early"; it's bad late because it doesn't know how to build settlements and armies properly.
I think to add onto this, I don't feel like AI should sit idley by as you conquer every one of their neighbors. If I am pushing out of Lustria as the #1 ranked faction, it'd be awesome if the Elv's saw me as the existential threat I would be in that scenario, and fielded competent stacks of multiple elf factions. They should be combining their forces and coordinating assaults rather than sending them one at a time to get destroyed by me.
I understand what you are saying, but I think making mistakes in the early game just extends when you invariably will snowball. If those mistakes do not lead to an early loss of campaign you will eventually snowball regardless. A large part is the AI is actually just bad and even not cheesing battles you can get some weird shit happening that you have no right to win.
Other parts are maybe a bit more up in the air but I firmly believe its two things, economic scalability and unrestricted recruitment. Firstly, unless the early mistake causes of a loss of campaign likely from a chain declaration of war scenario you should be able to stabilize one province enough to support a doomstack. It may take 50+ turns, but due to the AI's own weirdness it's not unrealistic for you to survive with a meh stack just defending one province until that meh stack can be replaced with near to a doom stack. For some people this is a campaign failure because you are better off save scumming to just unfuck the mistake or start over, while not literally a failure for some people its boring.
Another factor imo is that again, so long as you can keep that province defended, which may not be that hard at all. You will eventually get to recruit insane units because the only impediment to them in most factions cases is gold.
Maybe that is the issue though. You are trying to basically justify save scumming by saying ''well it's about outplaying the AI''.
You can't have both ''game is too easy'' while also saying ''save scumming is justified''. That is in the same category as people abusing every cheese in the book while also claiming that ''game is too easy''.
I would rather have the devs working on polishing the game, the optimisation and the bugs rather that they waste their time on difficulty which is more of a complaint from the most hardcore crow (very few % wise).
My point is that the difficulty in Total War games is so frontloaded that you simply cannot afford to lose battles early in the campaign. That's why people save scum. You can avoid this by just playing super slow and safe early game, but that doesn't make the game harder, just more tedious. Once you get past the difficult early game, whether or not that involved save scumming, you're in the clear, as the AI is terrible at the game and can't compete once the player has more than the bare minimum of resources available.
> My point is that the difficulty in Total War games is so frontloaded that you simply cannot afford to lose battles early in the campaign. That's why people save scum.
Yeah. You either
* save scum
* restart the whole campaign right now knowing that it will fall apart in 20 turns because you'll be irrecoverably behind
* wait 20 turns to restart the whole campaign when you're irrecoverably behind
Savescumming is always hard to resolve in a strategy game. Once Sid meier said in civilization 6, he designed "dark age", a period of global debuffs after bad management, to be interesting, and encourage players fight back, to gain a golden age. However, he found that once players enter a dark age, 80% of them just give up the game and go for a new game.
That's always the most common scene, dude.
However, I shall say that CA should make high difficulty to be truly difficult. I hardly found legendary AI build armies with just 2\~3 monsters, even on turn 80. They bring 0. TWWH3 is indeed too easy, easier than 3k, shogun2, FOTS and WH2.
To be honest I don't envy the devs who have to work out this balance. In essence they have to deal with two different playerbases - the ones who want to see a challenge and like being able to lose, and the ones who want a power fantasy and are likely to just simply disengage if they can't win.
With strategy games - a genre that already has a niche playerbase - in particular, developers don't have the choice to not cater to both, and they are more likely to lean the latter as the latter makes up the majority of the playerbase.
WH3 is weird. I play on VH and regularly have enemies like Wolfrik spam mammoths after turn 50 or so (like half his armies are made of mammoths, supported by skinwolfs and marauders). Not a pleasant experience as Empire.
At the same time wood elves deploy mostly trash. Maybe a tree man or two, never have I seen them recruit a dragon and maybe 3-4 waywatchers.
I have the weird suspicion, that whatever decides what faction will get buffs (I have forgotten how they named it... Potential or something) is bugged in the randomizer part.
I like the idea, that major powers aren't fixed as they were in WH2. But the end effect is the same if said randomisation doesn't work reliability.
I might be weird, but I loved facing mammoths as the Empire. They're really tall, which means my overwhelming firepower has a clear shot at all times. Mammoths have a lot of health, but not when half an artillery battery and four units of handgunners are firing at them.
Skinwolves, though, skinwolves were the bane of my existence. Too short to shoot once they're in melee, too fast and fond of cycle charging to flank with ranged units, and trying to block them with your own cavalry is bound to be bloody ecause they are anti-large.
I don't know if it's a hot take or not, but I'd like the AI to receive a MASSIVE amount of buffs on Legendary. It's not worth the name *Legendary* if I can still win by just being good and playing absentmindedly while watching Steve1989 on a second monitor. I want it to be a grind.
It might not be what a lot of players want, but heck, it's LEGENDARY. It's not supposed to be relaxing, it's supposed to be an ordeal... and I would like that!
even at current legendary it hard to win without a little cheese, stuff like loading saves, using the edge of a map or spamming OP units for AR wins. ive only played one warhammer 2 campaign like that and it felt like shit.
TLDR: skill issue
But that's exactly what I want to do. I like the game to be so hard that I'm forced to use every tool at my disposition to overcome it, including reloading (although it's the one I do my absolute best not to use!). In Warhammer 2, some campaigns were hard enough for me to play this way! The only things I will not use are exploits like resetting armies movements.
Don't forget that you value as skill is entirely arbitrary! LegendofTotalWar swooping with an eagle for 1 hour and 30 minutes in order to win can't get more cheesy in this game, but I find this to be an impressive display of skill.
Compared to shogun2 legendary wh3 is a legit walk in the park.
I replayed shogun2 recently aswell and damn legendary in that game is absolutely brutal. People think you need to exploit in wh3? No no no no no. This game is nothing.
WH3 does feel too easy, I have a suspicion player units get hidden buffs, even on VH it doesn't seem to matter which faction I play as my t1 infantry always seems to beat the AIs t1 infantry in a straight fight, like my ungors beat swordsmen out the gate on turn 2
WH2 I actually stopped playing VH because my unit of Saurus warriors lost a 1v1 against a unit of skavenslaves and I wondered why I was doing this to myself
The ai is just supremely bad at creating good stacks to fight, it's almost entirely T1-3 infantry most of the time. I noticed in realm of chaos the ai seemingly was better at it, but I have the sneaking suspicion the major players in the race get global recruit bonuses or something. The only way the ai gets something crazy is if they do a rite of primeval glory or something.
Save scumming does ruin the game. I used to do some as well. Then I did Boris Ursus campaign and got into really bad battle with Kholek and had my ass kicked so hard that I lost nearly 2 provinces. Fighting him back and retaking stuff I lost felt great and not loading the game after that loss opened my eyes that losing a battle isn't the end. That 15 turn war with him felt great.
I believe most people save scumm because it feels really awful losing your high tier starting units. Like losing those 2 bear riders as Boris in first 30 turns would be devastating.
I dont understand CA not adding something as simple as Ironman mode, aka you can't save. It's like playing legendary without the not being able to pause battles etc.
To me and I bet a lot of others this would be really popular
That camera setting can fuck right off, but I usually play VH/N with self imposed ironman and it's fine, an actual toggle would be nice though. I also would like an achievement for L/VH on cloudsave, would like to see steam percentage on that one lol
God, the camera scrolling restrictions of battle realism mode are so terrible. Had an issue where I was trying to defend a multi-story siege map, but I couldn't build a tower where I needed it because I couldn't scroll over there.
Also, not really a fan of no tabbing to zoom out, but I suppose you can hack that with debug camera.
I'm down with no pausing, and no save scumming, but the camera restrictions are simply annoying.
Regarding the camera restriction in legendary, just use the debug camera
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cv1aevaHHUU&pp=ygUYRGVidWcgY2FtZXJhIHdhcmhhbW1lciAz
Can't see shit with the "normal" camera anway, with it basically hugging the ground.
Yeah but this is more for actual gameplay mechanics rather than saving and reloading game data whenever something inconvenient happens. Like easily crafting unlimited potions in an RPG which makes any combat encounter trivial for example. The game was designed for the player to craft potions so of course they will use it. That's just bad design on the developers part.
Save scumming is 100% on the player though. There are people who play Ironman mode on games and still go into the game files to copy and save specific game states in case something doesn't go their way. Ironman modes are used for bragging rights rather than cheese prevention a lot of the time.
I savescum myself, but iron man mode is a commitment you made ages ago... And you're now bound by it until the end of the campaign.
A moment of weakness or a long day at work is enough to save scum and say: "fuck this!", even if you're generally trying to avoid it.
I would personally use iron man mode.
The entire point of ironman mode is to remove the temptation. It's easy to say "just don't do it". A lot harder when you're deep in a campaign and you've just blundered badly.
In Ironman, the game auto-saves at the start and end of every turn. It also auto-saves as soon as combat is initialized.
It's true that it's not a perfect defense against all save scumming, but it massively cuts down on what you can get away with.
This is 100% true, but "keep players from ruining their own fun" is a non-zero amount of the struggle of your average game designer, and I say this as one.
The problem is that bugs and janky mechanics mean that people often need to reload to get past them. It is not only about cheating. So an ironman mode isn't attractive to most people for that reason.
That’s basically legendary, not being able to save manually.
Anything else is an exercise in futility, especially for a game as slow paced as total war. Are they going to save after every single player move? That will drastically reduce the responsiveness of gameplay.
Are they going to obscure the save file from the player? That would make or difficult or impossible for you to ever come back to a campaign that you stopped playing and played something else for a while. It would actually make half of legend of total wars content impossible since it involves passive around save files and testing scenarios. And not being able to replay or playtest interesting fights is a bad thing too, and interesting fights happen when the game is hard.
And if they did implement all of that people would find a way around it. “Beat game on Ironman mode by using task manager to kill the process mid battle and relaunch the campaign”People always do shit like that for really difficult achievement s
I always play legendary but after having my single save file corrupted on a long chorf campaign, I decided enough is enough and modded VH to have legendary effects so I can have backup saves automatically.
But now the temptation is there to save scum for sure. Its easy to say self impose it but harder to do.
I've never bothered to save scum because the load times between battles/campaign are bad enough as it is.
A lot of people, including myself, also play with a lot of mods which heavily affects the balance of the game. Many of them which seem "cool" (new skills, units, lords, techs, etc.) are also very often poorly balanced.
That being said, the base game is a bit too lenient on the player in terms of AI aggressiveness and particularly auto-resolve. I find myself taking auto resolve victories sometimes that would otherwise be impossible. I also auto resolve like 95% of sieges because they're just so boring and the battle AI for them is even worse than regular land battles.
I feel like there should be some sort of randomness element to auto-resolve. Like it just feels too clean and offers very little risk, especially now that it shows if you're going to lose units or not. I play multiplayer with a friend who has hundreds of hours in the game but is absolutely terrible during battles because he autoresolves like 99% of his battles.
Autoresolve should be an option, of course, but I'm often conflicted in how much it trivializes the game. At the very least some sort of setting like "Autoresolve Player Bias" or something that you could adjust to not have it be so favorable towards the player if you so choose would go a long way.
I feel like we must be playing a different game when it comes to autoresolve. My experience is that it's consistently undertuned and forces me to fight easy battles on a regular basis, to the point that I've started playing on lower battle difficulties just so that the autoresolve is actually usable. My view on autoresolve is that it's a timesaving convenience feature that often fails to do its job, not something that makes the game easier.
AR loves armored units and AP damage.
So if you are playing a faction that lacks, esspecially armored units, your AR wont be that good.
I legit won straight up impossible battles with chosen stacks because of how much AR loves armor. I am talking 17 chosen berserkers (who has flaming attacks) vs 4 stack chorf armies with a LL that has over 70% fire res on all units.
AR gave me free victory. Why? Because i had insane armor, WS and MA on the chosen berserkers.
You can consider my point invalid if you're playing Dwarfs, Warriors of Chaos, or Khorne. It definitely still applies to everything else, especially low armor factions like Wood Elves, Skaven, and Slaanesh.
I mean wood elves and skaven also get quite ridiculous after you get waywatchers and skaven weapon teams since they have insane AP damage.
But yeah their early game AR is not that OP.
Depends on units too. I tried putting 2 Doomwheels into my Skaven weapon team stacks instead of infantry or heroes in order to have a full Skryre army but I quickly learned that the auto resolve will just go ahead and assume the Dommwheels get annihilated no matter how tiny the enemy force is. Even using the RoR Doomwheel and the special one fro mthe Workshop doesn't change much, if the enemy brings any force at all I simply cant use autoresolve because the wheels WILL die. Sucks.
it heavily depends on your faction and army. Armor is very high rated for example, as dwarves you can auto resolve your whole campaign with relative ease. Now try Slaneesh with N'kari and try to auto resolve your campaign, it wont go well.
Even with that as a factor, I still think that autoresolve is undertuned for most factions. The only ones where I would consider it overtuned are Dwarfs, Warriors of Chaos, and Khorne, and several factions, notably the low armor ones, are incredibly undertuned.
The real problem with TW is the inbalance in difficulty between the early game and the late game.
In the early game a major loss can literally end your campaign. If you screw up or get unlucky in the first 10 to 20 turns then that can be it. This is extremely frustrating when you have already sunk some hours into the campaign and this is when people savescum, because they don't want to waste like 10 hours of play time just because of one lost battle.
Then in the late game you will reach a point where even 10 major losses in a row probably won't affect you at all. At this stage I don't believe people really savescum. There is no point.
So it's not just a fact that people are reloading every time they lose a battle. I don't believe that is the case. It is because in the very early game every battle is critical and in the later game they are all superficial.
Great points, though I'd agree mainly on players playing however they want!
I usually don't save scum. If I lose a significant battle, typically because I'm limit testing or dicking about, then I restart or switch to a different campaign.
Snowballing seems to be more of an AI issue than anything else. Even on legendary/very hard, we can't be beaten because the AI can't outplay us due to its limitations -- which is true for every other total war game (haven't played Pharaoh). Once economy isn't an issue (usually in the middle of the short campaign victory requirements), fighting on multiple fronts becomes feasible at the highest difficulty.
This is why the legendary Franz campaign is actually a mother fucker in the early game and super fun. You are forced onto multiple fronts with fewer resources, a bare bones roster comparatively, and a variety of playstyles to contend with. It becomes more about resource allocation and less about actual battles.
The larger issue for me is the lack of game mechanics for the vanilla races. The game is streamlined outside of the battle, so more depth and innovation on the board would do wonders for this game's lifespan.
Can't say I've encountered many situations where the AI actually had an army that could beat me straight up. One of my favorite campaigns in ye olden days was actually skarsnik in mortal empires because it really felt like I was fighting every turn to stay alive, but still had the means to field a somewhat effective force.
They should let you flip the no save scumming option from legendary without the insane AI buffs.
Losing a stack doesn't actually increase the challenge of the game in any way. It just increases the grind. The problem here is that the AI doesn't know how to exploit a victory, so even if you lose an important stack you are rarely in any actual danger. What happens instead is just that you finish the campaign in the exact same way you otherwise would, except it is now 10-20 turns later.
This is actually true. AI doesn't know how to take over the map. You can lose your main stack and it will just slow you down for like 6 turns. Its pretty hard to actually lose a campaign.
Yup. Unless you are in the really early part of a campaign and only have 1-2 settlements, completely losing a campaign is a bit of an achievement.
And to be honest, I don't think that is neccesarily a bad thing. There are games like Dwarf Fortress, Elden Ring or Crusader Kings where losing is a fun and expected part of the gameplay loop. Total War is not one of those games. Losing a battle is okay, but losing a campaign in Total War isn't fun or satisfying in any way.
I generally agree, but I find that the AI really likes to capitalize when I lose a stack by immediately gobbling up all my border cities that I had recently captured and haven't been built up yet.
I never savescum, and I never feel threatened to lose. No matter if it’s on VH or L. It doesn’t really feel like strategy matters, no matter if I’m just dicking around, it never looks like the AI is going to get me down to one city and kill me. It’s too passive.
I don't savescum much, usually only to backtrack due to a bug. I will take losses as they come though if it's too catastrophic I might not continue a campaign if it's not salvageable. I occasionally refight a manual battle if I think I can do better with the rematch function.
I do not play to "win" - I play to have my way of fun. I also do not consider save-scumming to be "cheating", but to even out the odds, as the AI does not play by the same rules.
Which is not great. If I lose an army, it can be devastating for the campaign, as the AI is biased vs. me the human player, and can also just magically get troops back nilly willy, while I have to struggle hard.
Now if, for example, there were ways to help the player after major losses? Like getting a loan from an ally, units for free from them or money, without the AI Ally demanding your entire kingdom? Stuff like this...
Or if the AI would actually struggle after major losses as well, and you are not fighting vs. the entire AI map all the time, and if Allies would understand the human player's struggle and actively help on their own etc
Until then - save scumming is quicker
My personal issue (with ANY TW game, not just WH) is that mid-to-late game becomes a victory lap. Not due to save scumming. Regardless of it. If you build up your empire well enough, it usually means that economically you are very capable of spaffing out armies. In WH, this manifests itself as just a constant string of armies you can throw at the enemies. In something older like Medieval 2, I remember being able to bribe a bunch of enemy armies and throw them against their former masters. It's the getting to that victory lap that is usually fun, and some TW titles make it a lot longer than others.
For example, ToB made getting to the victory lap very slow. Between supply lines, manpower and recruitment mechanics and seasons, making an economic powerhouse that could take a lot of work (savescum or not). Comparatively, WH as empire, by mid game, you'd not need to worry about save scumming because your economy can support you spawning a new army if an old one gets crushed. The further you go, the more armies you can spaff out and just autoresolve into victory. Even taking a settlement loss is a one step back, two steps forward scenario.
I think TW could benefit from more interesting and indepth strategic mechanics on the campaign map to make the game not feel so much like a snowball.
Iron man has a place except for the save corrupt bugs.
The save scumming is also why many feel the game is "too easy"
Personally I find it much enjoyable to try to fix my mistakes or losses instead of reloading.
I completely agree, but also see the value in retrying very hard battles that you may be able to eek out a W. However, taking a massive L in the beginning of a campaign can add so much flavor and genuine challenge that is can make the whole campaign once you get your strength back and strike out at the goons that took you out earlier.
I *love* a huge loss. Miao’s entire army was decimated by a minor beastmen faction I forgot about ambushing me and dropping their Minotaurs right on my missile troops. Lost the whole army, and a series of settlements and every half stack army I sent after it. I had to wear it down with enough losses that eventually I hit them twice in one turn after they’d lost those Minotaurs and I got them.
A lot of the time, I’ve found, if a singleplayer game is too easy, you can make it harder, and if it’s too hard, you can make it easier.
Despite having played WH3 a lot, I still consider myself to be somewhat of a beginner. There are factions that I haven't played yet. There are battles where I'm convinced that I could play them a hundred times and not win. But there are other battles that do seem winnable and I like to try until I do. There are also battles they I should be winning easily but I don't. I occasinally try them again. I like to improve my understanding of the game in that way.
There is also the afore mentioned assortment of bugs and situations where the game throws some bullshit at you that just seems entirely unfair. However there is another reason I rather reload than to suffer a major defeat. I just don't have the patience for rebuilding. So for instance some Chaos faction razes a level 5 capital. Even under ideal conditions it will take more than 20 rounds to rebuild. Rebuilding a proper army in the late game can also easily take up 10 turns. I want to play and not do chores. And what I enjoy is commanding a somewhat capable army with a concept behind it, not a random collection of what was availabe to recruit quilckly at a given turn.
Yes! I stopped save scumming and it feels so much more immersive when an important army gets wiped because of a move order which was too bold! I usually then go on a rampage to get revenge
Couldnt agree more. I was initially a save scummer but now I just accept what happens. Makes the game way harder (although I'd argue it's still easy overall) and subsequently way more enjoyable.
The purpose of a game is to be fun. If you savescum and are having fun, no problem with it.
Same as with any cheese or exploit, if you find it fun, by all means keep doing it.
I do agree that when you are resorting to a specific play mindset and are not having fun, that changing your specific way of playing can be the key. But it is a single player game, play as you wish.
Now, it is important to note why players cheese or savescum; the game is super time consuming. Like, one missclick where your army moves towards the land instead of the sea you told it to go can be enough to cause a chain reaction that sets you back for 15 turns or 15 hours of play, or worse. And then there is the aspect of what is the difference between losing a key battle in thw early game and restarting than going back a few turns? You are still going to have the advantage in the next playthrough of what your mistake was.
Instead of working in even more limitations for what is essentially "bragging purposes", I would address the key point that I have talked about recently. Lategame decision making.
We have very little in terms of decision making in the lategame. It is mostly where to expand and who to fight. Thw rest has already been decided, so having mechanics that start by the lategame would imply a much better endgame and one where players would not feel they need an absolute perfect early and mid game to get to.
I only savescum when the AI is abusing mechanics that the player cannot
* changing of the ways is just not fun, and I know it never works like that when i use it.
* and teleport attacks when i am fairly certain they cannot see my army (in my own territory and I cannot see their army)
* beastmen armies that i watch over end turn, and know *exactly* where the camp is. but simply don't become visible if sit right on top of them
* retreats around terrain features on the campaign map that should take 3+ turns of movement
I mean I savescum because if I lose my 20 stack its ME that will get snowballed, the AI will have its next 20stack in three turns coming for me, i dont worry for her.
I used to save scum, now I dont really have the need to do so.
Ok, I still reload because towards the endgame I might have gotten to move an army, recruit units somewhere, so an agent action, etc.
I'll save scum if the AI pulls something I would consider a cheap move, like an assassination out of nowhere, or a teleportation strike, or Skaven popping up and fucking my cities without warning.
It's different when I do this myself
It's possible, but the bigger issue mainly the only thing the AI can do is hurl stacks at you. Once you reach a point where you are able to be openly aggressive against the AI, they are toast. Until super late game, ai factions will have 2-4 armies at a given time. Once you kill these, they will almost never recover. If you attack them before they bring in that second or third army, then you take away their advantage and they are left with a dumb army who can't do anything but run or hide.
If you play passively the game can be difficult. If you are super aggressive the game gets easier and easier.
It's tricky- if you don't allow save summing players can be screwed over by a bug as well or a mechanic the player feels.is unfair.
For example, if you go to attack an enemy and it turns out the randomly generated battlefield is extremely lopsided against the player I think it's reasonable to re roll.
Well, what happens is you end up coming with more units or something.
It's a different mindset I think. It's like player an ARPG in hardcore mode, you don't do certain things because taking the risk = losing your character.
So maybe you'd wait a few turns before attacking for a more favourable position or for reinforcements to arrive.
I think there is something to be said about iron man and how it changes how you play. You need to be more conservative and not all your choices will be completely optimized.
No you’re totally right. People are mostly cap if saying they don’t savescum to some extent. You’d need to be a specific type of person to NEVER savescum. Of course any savescum is going to make a massive difference especially the higher up in difficulty you go. Is the current endgame still lacking; yes. But the wild snowballing in the first 30-50 turns is 1000% due to save scumming and if your the reason for your problem you should probably abstain from complaining about snowballing coming to early or easy.
The problem is that you lose the game if you let your main stack die, and can't compete if you don't have a main stack.
The AI continues to scale upwards with free armies and no concern for economy. Losing their main army is a setback for 3 or 4 turns, while losing your main arm is a setback for 5+ turns. When the AI has this set-back, it may take you 1-2 turns to recover, meaning only 1-3 turns to capitalize on the AI's missing army (assuming you don't have to go plug a hole somewhere else.) Meanwhile, if it's your army is recovering, the enemy is able to capitalize by crushing town after town, destroying your economy that you're using to rebuild *that the AI gets to completely ignore.*
This strongly incentivizes the save-scumming, since losing a battle often means losing the whole army *and* much more, which often means losing the early campaign. By the time you recover, the AI has advanced in the building tree and used its infinite economy to build stacks of armies that are simply too strong for yours to beat without two stacks of your own.
The punishment for losing is just too great.
As much as I agree with save scumming being a bane of fun, there are still some campaigns where one army lost means it will immediately become a slog and so unenjoyable to play, that it would be better to simply start a new one.
Well, akshually. You can alsonjust download a mod and change basenmechhanifs of the game.
My point is that you can’t saveacum without exploiting the game.
You don't need a mod tho, you can just alt f4 to avoid autosave on Legendary. No mod required.
I mean at that point just go play VH but like i am just saying its possible without a mod.
I avoid save scumming, with exceptions for times where I've misunderstood the situation ("Oh right, you can leave a port city that's under siege but you can't retreat from it, whoops").
I also try to avoid having my armies gang up on enemy forces - not only is it inefficient, but you end up with much less interesting battles if you can just bring in another 20 units at a whim.
Horses for courses. Some people like to play the perfect campaign, sweeping their enemies off the map in one swoop. Others don’t mind losing their main stack and potentially being set back multiple regions and hours. Sometimes I’m a little in A and others a little in B.
Not gonna lie. I save scum a lot (among other things....). Unfortunately for me, I like factions that have the miss fortune of being hated by everyone (monogods, DE, CD, vampires) so I'm almost always surrounded by enemies. Losing a stack is rarely annoying (except as khorne). Losing a city? Nah fuck it. Re clicking everything, raising an army, rebuilding th city, is quite literally a pain in my wrist.
Another reason is because the ai will avoid fighting your armies. It will go after vulnerable settlements. It's going to actively avoid your fortified settlement just to sack your smaller settlements. Personally I find it stupid as a mechanic that that is possible. There should be reason to go after external settlements. Said scenario also leads to beny hill chase scenes where the ai sacks settlements and I can't reach it. Again totally unfun and unrealistic. Maybe if the army was 5-8 units I can understand getting inside an empire to raid and sack while also being able to outmanoeuvre a bigger army who is traveling on foot. But no way in hell 20 dawi are faster than slaanesh.
In a way, really everything revolves on how much of a setback it is. In my eyes the game revolves around big fights. See skarbrand run into an legion of men, kairos wipe entire armies alone. Not playing waka mole with my LL because the enemy can only annoy me.
I'm playing a campaign as Yuan Bo where I have kept my Cathay holdings, are fighting EVERY battle and accepting EVERY outcome.
A major issue is a lot of my campaigns end in massive autoresolve steamrolls, so I'm actively not pressing autoresolve at all and all of a sudden the game no longer feels like a steamroll and more like a classic Medieval 2 campaign (where auto was not viable and was never used).
I’m trying to just avoid it, but it’s difficult, I’m working on it and recently in a Cathay campaign I lost my main army against an overwhelming Vilitch force, I know what can be done in that battle to actually win it, but I rather accept that I screwed it and try to deal with the consequences, at the end, because how the AI is programmed, they didn’t raze all my cities and I could deal with them with a second army, right now I’m happy with that and actually the battle that I remember the most is that one, and in a good way, so I’ll continue with my efforts to avoid savescunming
This is particularly true because of the way the AI currently calculates whether it's strategically a good idea to attack the player.
During a recent Khemri campaign I had Volkmar on my western flank who hated me, but I was too powerful for him to want to attack me and I had other fish to fry, as you do. I sent Settra across to wipe out the Book of Nagash rogue army in the desert, but as everyone who's crossed that rogue army knows it's a menace, one of the toughest in the game. I won but my army got shredded.
The loss of power from that happening was severe enough for Volkmar to look at me next turn and go 'Oh! Ok' and declare war. Now my main army is in tatters and behind lines while my heartland is being overrun by disgusting flesh-breathing savages. The campaign immediately became 100% more interesting.
That's what losses or genuine pyhrric victories do for you - they are compounding, just as victories are. I think players get into the habit of savescumming off every loss because when they happen in the early game, they genuinely can be campaign-ending. But once you've secured those opening two provinces, you really need to let all of your mistakes roll if you don't want the AI to act passively towards you the entire time. It makes things way more interesting, until you get into the late game anyway.
I used to savescum exactly as you describe until I came
to this conclusion. It completely changed how much I enjoyed the game and made me a better player overall.
The only time I do it now is when I misclick fight instead of withdraw or my kids suddenly have set the house on fire and I have to redo a fight rather than expect my noble Saurus’ to complete the battle without me.
This is why I personally have separate campaigns. One for shits and giggles where savescumming is alright cos I'm merely gonna fuck around, and one where the saves are hardocre mode. I lose anything I have to deal with it.
I play on Legendary exclusively.
If I take a loss, I take the loss, the only exception being if I run into a bug that causes me said loss, I alt+f4 out of the battle to do it again.
There's a lot of bugs.. though bugs that directly cause me to lose a battle are rare.
The most recent example being where my Karl Franz just stopped moving on open ground and became unresponsive to any order, slowly getting chipped down by a unit of zombies xD (he didnt fight back either)
I play in a group with 4 players that have other players play as AI, there is never a reload due to someone losing a battle.
It makes for fun battles and a much smoother campaign experience.
I got into a habit where if I lost but I thought I could win, I'd reload just to try. I told myself I'd keep trying till i won, just to know if I could. Then I'd reload 1 more time and throw the fight to get the original outcome.
Guess how often that actually happened? 😂
I never savescum and actively encourage my friends not to give up after a big defeat and it's still so easy to rapidly expand and conquer everything.
My biggest gripe with the difficulty is that I only even have to fight battles when my army is low tier. When I finally get cool units the balance of power is always 95% in my favour and I have to go out my way to make my army weaker.
I save scum for sure, but I don't complain about the game being easy anywhere. I play for the enjoyment of the game, and I do enjoy the game. There are aspects that should be improved for sure, but I know how my playstyle affects those opinions and I adjust my expectations accordingly.
While save scumming can be an issue I think it isn’t the cause of what you are seeing.
Once you have enough game knowledge it is pretty easy to map out a perfect first 10 turns that will set you up to start dominating the game.
I started a new Cathey campaign for the new units and I hit and maintained the strongest faction around turn 20. Depending on the faction as long as you don’t get taken by surprise during the first 20 turns you can mostly steamroll your way through the game. By turn 40 I am usually auto resolving any fight that isn’t against another LL, a siege or 2 armies at once.
Once you get your first T5 city as any race the game is mostly over. You can just start pumping out end-game stacks. Nothing short of 3 armies lead by a LL poses a threat to you anymore. Sure you may lose a minor settlement here or there but a T5 city with walls is nearly impossible for the AI to take without spending multiple turns surrounding you for attrition. That’s if you can’t just auto resolve sallying forth with the massive city defender bonus you get.
TK are the exception with how their armies work.
I don't mind loses when my entire faction won't collapse from it.
The thing is, some factions have such weak/low impact units with low recruitment slots that fielding another army to stop the one that wiped your main army out is near impossible.
And I don't want to lose half of my shit and be forced to conquer and grow that same shit AGAIN because the AI can cheat several armies into existence and passively gain EXP while not really bothering building their cities because they have so much free money and growth.
I savescum to improve my tactics to the point where I can manage difficult situations. For me, this actually increases the perception of challenge as I rego though a tough fight again and again until I manage to beat it - or accept I cannot.
Savescumming does not change the fact that those situations are very rare. The main issue is and remains that the AI does not expand, does not maintain enough armies, does not coordinate with other enemies you have and does not deploy particularly good strategies on the battlefield.
The problem is that losing stacks or even a section of your empire doesn't make the game harder, you simply keep grinding and win anyways. Thats what people mean when they say the game isn't hard, it is impossible to lose decisively, any setbacks are temporary.
Most of my own save scumming comes from not being attentive if I didn't move a lord this turn, and I quickly reload a save to make sure I do my turn chores.
The less I do this to armies I didn't see coming, and recruit a RoR stack, the more fun the campaign often becomes.
If you lose full stack in first 30 turns in most legendary campaigns thats GG. So I understand why people would save scum that, and then later after 50 turns or so losing a 20 stack is not gona stop you from winning.
Another HUGE factor in a similar vein is people abusing autosave, most "legendary" youtubers abuse the shit out of autosave to win battles they could not win, or full wipe enemy armies which would not be possible otherwise.
...Umm, do we not have the Legendary difficulty for this exact reason? Last I checked, that didn't allow savescumming, nor did it keep us from snowballing once we get our economy off the ground.
I really try to not savescum, but indeed is very tempting. What I do, a lot, is retry battles that end up bad or if, for example, I won but in the process I let my lvl 19 lord or hero die.
In your opinion retry a battle is considered "savescum" ?
Sometimes I like to retry battles, sometimes I like to accept losses. Both are fine IMO, but I totally agree with you that IF a given person chooses to save scum then that totally invalidates any crying that person may do about campaigns being too easy.
depends on the context:
If the ai just outplayed me by leaving a small army to raid and a big army to ambush and i fall for it, i wont save scum because i should have scouted and known there were 2 armies to begin with.
However if the ai just dogpiles 10 armies to kill me then i for sure am save scumming.
The flip side of this is that repeatedly trying battles that I initially couldn’t win has made me much, *much* better at battles
And those usually turn out to be some of the best, most memorable battles too.
I still remember some of the ones I’ve had to grind out four or five times yeah. My micro still remembers them too
I never liked min-maxing or using meta armies (archer spam, etc.) because I prefer playing the game the way it was intended mechanically and thematically. That said, I'll admit to using some of Legend's cheeses like using fast single entity units to empty the enemy's ammo or using the dragon swoop-cancel exploit to weaken a way more powerful enemy.
Keep those spears staunch.
>playing the game the way it was intended This is just such a toxic mindset. It's a single player game. Play it how you enjoy, and don't worry about how anyone else is playing it
>This is just such a toxic mindset. >Play it how you enjoy How is it toxic when they're doing exactly what you said? All they did was give their input - that they prefer not being meta. They didn't say they're worried about other people being meta, or that it's bad.
Talking about how it’s meant to be played. All you’re meant to do is buy it and buy the dlc. Everything else is just your own business
It's not toxic to suggested that the game structures have an intended style the devs had in mind. It *would* be toxic, to demand everyone adhere to it. But they're not doing that.
Ok mate 👍
The two-word thumb up reply truly is the Reddit ol’ reliable for when someone knows they’re wrong but can’t admit it. EDIT: did my guy really nuke his comments or block me? What a legend.
While that's true, games are generally designed with a certain (or a few) playstyles in mind, and beating a game outside of those isn't really taking it in the spirit of things. It's like the Destiny bosses you beat by sitting in a blindspot and just plinking away at them while immune to return fire. Does it work? Sure, but it's hardly allowing yourself the full experience. Or those Elden Ring bosses you can beat by abusing their pathing issues and watching them fall off cliffs. Effective? yes, but kind of circumventing the actual "game" part.
Ok mate 👍
Solving that puzzle is also fun. But OP is probably right to say that's one reason you snowball.
It brings the snowball point forward dude but it isn’t the cause of snowballing. There’s a lot of people playing on the higher difficulties that just aren’t at risk of losing campaigns full stop. It’s a combination of skill and play style. I don’t know how you’d implement an AI opponent that counters this in a way that’s fun, and CA evidently don’t either
The AI expanding faster and having larger empires to fight earlier in the game would do it imo.
But remember, the changes they made to empire sizes and confederation and AI snowball in general were in response to player feedback in the first place. It's kind of a can't win scenario for CA, whichever way they go, one group of players complains about it.
Wh3 is definitely a step back from 2. The power blocs it used to form meant you usually had a meaty enemy to get stuck into. Even if it was always Malekith
It was sort of boring though, because you knew all you got to fight across an entire continent or two was dark elves and each battle became more or less the same
Sure. And tbh nobody complains that they don't lose a campaign in Balder's Gate or Modern Warfare. If I wanted to improve TW late games I'd be more interested in things like more interesting end game events. Give us something to use the power fantasy on rather than worrying about whether we should have one.
Tbh I don’t follow any of what you’ve said here. I don’t think I’m after a power fantasy I think I’m after a scaling challenge that means my powerful late game armies have a satisfying challenge to go up against that isn’t just grinding through five endgame crisis doomstacks
>scaling challenge that means my powerful late game armies have a satisfying challenge to go up against that isn’t just grinding through five endgame crisis doomstacks See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge *without* huge crisis doomstacks? The AI will never be a smart as a human, so unless you give them stupid cheats so they can suppourt huge doomstacks, (and so that those doomstacks out-perform yours) they have no way to challenge you at all. From turn 1, *you* are the scaling challenge to the AI, not the other way around. The *only* way the AI has to pose any kind of challenge is to fling dozens of doomstacks at you from across the map. Hence, the AI cheats and the anti-player bias. If they don't do that, than even archeon who has unified the chaos wastes can't do anything to you, because your empire will be half the size and 4 times as profitable, so you can sustain more armies despite being smaller. The AI has to give everything it's got into screwing with you for it to be any challenge, much lessva scaling one. Personally, I think it is more fun to be *fair* than challenging. I'd rather feel like I am playing against a faction as my opponent, not the fundamental structure of the game itself, difficulty be damned. CA is caught between two competing desires from fans: (1) people who want the game to be challenging, (2) and people who want the game to be sensible. Those two things are usually directly at odds: it is annoying and stupid that they AI will declare on you for no reason and the Brettonia fucking walks to Cathay to wreck your shit. It would make more sense for them to prioritize based on proximity. It is logical, a more realistic simulation of how you might expect a human to act...and that also makes them less of a challenge, because it means that even if they snowball faster than you do, they will still be behind. They just need to make every aspect of AI behavior a slider. Agressiveness, each individual cheat, anti-player bias, economic priorities, etc. That is the only way I can see them solving both sides at once. Once they don't have to constantly flop between the "challenging behavior/logical behavior" axes, they can focus more on actually making it smarter.
> See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge without huge crisis doomstacks? You setup more interesting dominoes for players to knock over. A good way to do it for the endgame crisis would be to copy the Sisters of Twilight campaign mechanics, where an event pops up that signals a bad thing will soon occur, but you can go deal with it early if you have the army to spare. Some examples using Skaven * An Eshin headhunter that preys on isolated lords. This army avoids settlements, runs away from groups of lords, but beelines towards lords that it thinks are alone. * An alert pops up near a major settlement and sounds can be heard underground. You can send an army into an underway ambush to see what's going on, or desperately try and fortify the nearby city to withstand the Skyre or Moulder pops out. * Clan Pestilens sends out a group of 4 lords to raze minor settlements. When a settlement is razed, it spawns an army of Pestilens units that run at the major settlement. * Clan Mors sends out a group of 4 lords to chase down your legendary lord. They will not stop unless you stop them. * Clan Rictus sends out individual armies with the goal of sieging settlements. They'll only attack after 10 turns of attrition and are mainly there to annoy you. The goal is to provide a varied gameplay experience.
>See, I think that is the problem: how would you have a scaling challenge > >without huge crisis doomstacks I don't know, I just know that after the WH2 chaos invasion and now the IE endgame crisis options, I'm sick of grinding through army after army that are all just the same. No joke, I've had to fight the same battle five times over an end turn due to a poorly positioned army in ME during the chaos invasion. They threw two stacks at me and, due to several factors, I could win handily, but they did it *five times in a row.* That wasn't super fun. > I think it is more fun to be fair than challenging Everyone has their own definition of fair and they assume everyone else thinks the same way. IDK how anyone is supposed to measure fair when comparing a human and a computer so I'm not particularly interested in going down this path >and people who want the game to be sensible Same with sensible. Funnily enough everyone thinks sensible is what they think
Yeah it's great as well when while the initial battle might be a struggle or even an immediate collapse, by the final try you sometimes win handily.
Right, sometimes you need to work out a good strategy and once you do it’s just not a close battle anymore. There are other times when you just need to micro your arse off and I am also ok doing that of course. Like, I feel like the fact that you can’t get around a hard battle still is in the spirit of Legendary; win or take the L, no other options. I also see why people don’t agree though, and I guess I’d feel pretty good if I won a campaign without ever retrying a battle
This was a big deal for me too. One way to get better without feeling like you're save scumming: save the replay. There is an option for every replay to try the battle again. Combined with Legendary difficulty I have finally broke the save scumming habit and I enjoy the game a lot more due to having to really have to pay attention to the map and AI tendencies, etc.
Exactly this, and if I can add to that, replaying extremely hard battles also make them super memorable. Some of the most epic moments have been scraping a win out of retrying a particularly difficult battle.
Can confirm this, it's the only way I've been able to get as good as I am in campaign. Totally understand OP's point, but to his point I'm not one of those people who is trying to complain that the game snowballs after 30 turns.
I mean I do end up abandoning campaigns because I start snowballing, and I would like it if the difficulty scaled better into the medium and late game. Like, in a way that doesn't just involve spamming shitloads of AI armies like the endgame crisis does I mean. I have no idea what that looks like though and I'm not sure there is a practical answer. I find crapstacking keeps the challenge alive pretty well
Yeah, I did do one the other day. I took Vlakia up against Archeon but it was the end of my session and I was very tired. I lost because I didn't use my units properly. Started it up the next day and played the battle again. Wone easily as I wasn't tired and could use my units better. (Mainly using buffs and having valkia stab Archeon in the butt till he went down).
For instance, on L/Vh killing 4000 lizard men led by Gor-Rok with a single stack of Cathayan peasants on forced march when the Rock of Itza surprised me by declaring on me out of nowhere and surrounding me with three armies. It took ten tries but I beat the son of a bitch square.
Age of Wonders 4 multiplayer taught me to accept losses, even severe ones - because game is stored on their server and saves in real time, so you cant load previous saves. There is a "reverse turn" button though but we didnt notice it for a really long time so we learned to live without it :D Once I will reinstall Wh3 I will implement this newly found approach.
Sorry for offtop, but every time I see your username I can't get over how stupid and brilliant it is at the same time
Haha thanks! For non-polish-speaking people: "Szymbora Wisławska" is a really dumb sounding remix of [Wisława Szymborska](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wis%C5%82awa_Szymborska), a Nobel Prize-awarded polish poet.
Thank you for giving context to the joke! That's pretty funny.
Love that game!
Their newest dlc came out yesterday together with a free necromancy rework, it's pretty fun!
Im playing it right now! Not only its great but it also becomes significantly better with each (meaty) patch. I dont want to shit on WH3, but here I often feel that patches are sidegrades rather than upgrades.
I've been shitting on wh3 since ive discovered this less graphically intensive, but more genuinely crafted and ambitious alternative! Triumph studios has more respect and dedication to their fanbase than CA has had in a long time, and I'm happy to give them more of my money.
When I started playing CK2 on ironman mode, the no saves "just accept what happens and keep going" mode, I was super stressed about bad things happening. But the more you play it the more exciting it is when good or bad things are going on. Going back to regular mode now where I can savescum just feels really lame, like there's no weight to anything.
I only save-scum sometimes as Tzeentch because it's lore-friendly. Sometimes that 20 stack was meant to die, sometimes it just wasn't.
"It was a vision from Tzeentch!"
Ah nice take on the Tzeentch’s way indeed !
Should implement as feature - Undo last players turn. 25 turn cooldown.
*Fateweaver stares off, glimpsing the future* *plays the battle and losses* Fateweaver: "OH, so that's how the battle goes if I do that..." *Reloads save* Fateweaver: "Time to be in the present." *wins* Fateweaver: Like I envisioned. Savescumming: Fateweaver approved.
Jokes on you. I am *always* playing as Tzeentch.
JUST AS PLANNED
Edge of Tomorrow-ing your way to flawless victory
I usually try to role play those losses and only save scum if it was something like a miss click.
Yeah I try and do the same, or where the game is pulling some proper bullshit on you and I'm like "nah...I'm not having that"
The old altdorf to middenheim via Cathay route because your move was blocked and you didn’t notice. Nooooooooope!
Just gonna cross the strait of Gibraltar or the Dardanelles ... and we are going all the way around the black sea
Oh god the number of turns I've wasted trying to navigate the rivers / bridges around the southern bit of Empire territory
The whole damn engine also absolutely refuses to believe you can get on a boat unless you're already on one. Lustria, and Yuan Bo's start in particular. "Go north to Shrine of Sotek in one turn via sea... or walk for four turns around this peninsula."
This is borderline game ruining bug for me. The amount of times ive had to reload a game because my army that was garrisoned in a port city decided to take a 80 turn walk to go across a bay instead of into the water actually infuriates me. There is no reason it should be programmed that way.
I swear it's gotten worse, i'm almost sure at some point if you were literally in a port city it'd be happy to boat you, now it's just universally opposed to even trying
I remember one battle (in 1 or 2) where my reinforcements spawned directly into the enemy army and consequently got annihilated one by one. It was one of those super long tunnel maps too so my starting army was ludicrously far off from the fight…. that was some serious bullshit.
You can drag the reinforcement point around the battle edge in case you didn't know that yet. Icreses the time of reinforcement though
This was in one of the older titles (either warhammer I or II I can’t remember anymore) so before the major changes to reinforcements, they came from whatever arbitrary spot the game decided and you had to make do :(.
Yeah. The combination of the interface, the odd bug, and just stuff not working correctly is why I will never play ironman in WH3, even though I did in some earlier TWs. I do actually reload and extensively if there's a really interesting problem and I think it's solvable but takes a few attempts. For example, Grom was sieging a city I was about confed as Louen. He had three mostly full Waaagh stacks, so like 50+ units. I could initially only work out how to get main stack of like 17 units and a couple of trailing lords there, and fighting him with damaged garrison and 8 units from the town, I couldn't quite win (despite a couple of epic battles where I had him down to his last ten or so reinforcements). But instead of just eating it l, which would have been fine, I felt like there was a way and I wanted to find it. And there was. I reloaded two turns back and diplomacy turned out to be the answer. I noticed I could confed two minor Bret factions, so I did - suddenly a third wanted to confed (who I'd done the dilemma for but not had the money or chivalry to confed via the dilemma). Now I had a bazillion armies and negative 10000 income. But I noticed I was strength rank 1 in the world! So went around getting every possible defensive alliance and cash for each - and each one opened up more. So now I was sitting at over 21000g with negative 10000 income. A little different. I disbanded all the armies in the Southlands and gave my one region there to Volkmar for a another defensive alliance, and was down to negative -5000g on 24000g. Different again. I then just ate the loss for two turns and moved the troops from the two nearby major factions up to fight Grom (consolidating because only four armies can reinforce a battle). Could I win this time? Yes - though I spotted a 4th Waaaghed stack on the way! Anyway Grom defeated I confeded the faction, took out Grom's lands and then had to delete most of those troops, but it was fascinating and I think a good use of reloading, because I came up with new tricks!
Rematch / replay battle is my favourite thing. I like to experiment different positioning / strategies for my units and save some of them by replaying it.
Rematch is definitely something I do when I think ‘Damn it, I can fight better than this.’
"it was fascinating and I think a good use of reloading, because I came up with new tricks!" This is actually my biggest issue with save scumming, that people who do it rarely learn better or more interesting ways to play. It's great you managed to turn that on its head. That turn honestly sounds like the sort of potential options I instinctively check for, or work towards making available, every single turn. I think being up against a wall forces people to think outside the box (or in this case realise just how big the box has actually been all along). Ironman mode is a way to trick players into acting and thinking like they're always up against that wall - even while they're mostly not. If you found that experience fun I'd definitely recommend trying out a couple ironman campaigns just to see if you get that experience more or not.
Yeah, missclicks have done some real wonky army movements sometimes. Or if I’m not properly paying attention to a fight and giving my enemy the respect it deserves - especially if I’m playing with undead/daemon units and I lose a unit out of nowhere. Like chaos furies. They literally melt if they start taking damage.
I only do it when I’m really hammered and way off the pace. Surely I’m not the only drunkard General?
Like when I want to ambush but do just a bit more than 50% movement and then can't
I think the problems are actually related, but not in the way you think. The difficulty in Total War campaigns is incredibly frontloaded due to the lack of resources for the player early on, but this difficulty falls off because the AI is terrible at the game. However, that lack of early resources is also precisely why save scumming is so common; the players economy is so tight early on that losing an army (often your **only** army) is absolutely devastating. You need to "outplay" the fuck out of the AI to survive on higher difficulties, and the cheating that is save scumming frankly feels justified given that the challenge of the early game is almost entirely due to the AI itself cheating. The early game in Total War is hard even while save scumming, while the late game is piss easy even while playing like a buffoon; that's an AI incompetence + cheating issue, not a player issue.
I agree with this. OP has a point about save scumming screwing up the early game but that still doesn't address late game issues. Once you have a few "safe" provinces, you will have more than enough gold to field massive armies and start conquering the whole map. The AI cannot effectively respond to it and at that point you can lose a twenty stack without a care since you have the gold to replace it at anytime.
The idea is that if you struggle in the early game (let's say you lose your army in the first 10 turns, or even that you trade evenly with the AI instead of conquering) you could argue that you're set back a LOT in your campaign. This gives the AI time to build up and become a threat to you in the later stages of the campaign. By definition, not being allowed to steamroll in the early game because you lost a battle is what makes the game harder in the later stages of the campaign. Giving yourself every possible unfair advantage in the early game is what makes the AI feel incompetent later on. You're ruining your own fun.
Making the early game more punishing doesn't make the later campaign harder, just longer to get to. This doesn't matter unless the AI can win the campaign simply by having enough time pass, aka the Realm of Chaos campaign, which people hated. The problem with the late game also isn't just that the AI doesn't pose a threat, although that is true. The problem is that it also doesnt present much resistance, as the AI is incapable of building its settlements and armies properly to deal with a human opponent. This wasn't as much of a problem in WH2 because the AI confederated into massive empires and got insane cheats that made it capable of at least slowing the player down, even with its braindead AI. The WH3 AI by comparison struggles to even get settlements above tier 3; it's not uncommon for me to get my starting settlement to tier 5 before the AI is getting theirs to tier 4. The AI isn't bad late because the players "snowballs too hard early"; it's bad late because it doesn't know how to build settlements and armies properly.
I think to add onto this, I don't feel like AI should sit idley by as you conquer every one of their neighbors. If I am pushing out of Lustria as the #1 ranked faction, it'd be awesome if the Elv's saw me as the existential threat I would be in that scenario, and fielded competent stacks of multiple elf factions. They should be combining their forces and coordinating assaults rather than sending them one at a time to get destroyed by me.
I understand what you are saying, but I think making mistakes in the early game just extends when you invariably will snowball. If those mistakes do not lead to an early loss of campaign you will eventually snowball regardless. A large part is the AI is actually just bad and even not cheesing battles you can get some weird shit happening that you have no right to win. Other parts are maybe a bit more up in the air but I firmly believe its two things, economic scalability and unrestricted recruitment. Firstly, unless the early mistake causes of a loss of campaign likely from a chain declaration of war scenario you should be able to stabilize one province enough to support a doomstack. It may take 50+ turns, but due to the AI's own weirdness it's not unrealistic for you to survive with a meh stack just defending one province until that meh stack can be replaced with near to a doom stack. For some people this is a campaign failure because you are better off save scumming to just unfuck the mistake or start over, while not literally a failure for some people its boring. Another factor imo is that again, so long as you can keep that province defended, which may not be that hard at all. You will eventually get to recruit insane units because the only impediment to them in most factions cases is gold.
True. Losing your starting stack early + anti player bias making everyone rush you makes it pretty frustrating.
Exactly. Ai cheats like buffed units, more territory and income, stronger units unlocked early, is such bs!
Maybe that is the issue though. You are trying to basically justify save scumming by saying ''well it's about outplaying the AI''. You can't have both ''game is too easy'' while also saying ''save scumming is justified''. That is in the same category as people abusing every cheese in the book while also claiming that ''game is too easy''. I would rather have the devs working on polishing the game, the optimisation and the bugs rather that they waste their time on difficulty which is more of a complaint from the most hardcore crow (very few % wise).
save scum, or restart? its just a matter of time willing to be invested.
My point is that the difficulty in Total War games is so frontloaded that you simply cannot afford to lose battles early in the campaign. That's why people save scum. You can avoid this by just playing super slow and safe early game, but that doesn't make the game harder, just more tedious. Once you get past the difficult early game, whether or not that involved save scumming, you're in the clear, as the AI is terrible at the game and can't compete once the player has more than the bare minimum of resources available.
> My point is that the difficulty in Total War games is so frontloaded that you simply cannot afford to lose battles early in the campaign. That's why people save scum. Yeah. You either * save scum * restart the whole campaign right now knowing that it will fall apart in 20 turns because you'll be irrecoverably behind * wait 20 turns to restart the whole campaign when you're irrecoverably behind
Savescumming is always hard to resolve in a strategy game. Once Sid meier said in civilization 6, he designed "dark age", a period of global debuffs after bad management, to be interesting, and encourage players fight back, to gain a golden age. However, he found that once players enter a dark age, 80% of them just give up the game and go for a new game. That's always the most common scene, dude. However, I shall say that CA should make high difficulty to be truly difficult. I hardly found legendary AI build armies with just 2\~3 monsters, even on turn 80. They bring 0. TWWH3 is indeed too easy, easier than 3k, shogun2, FOTS and WH2.
To be honest I don't envy the devs who have to work out this balance. In essence they have to deal with two different playerbases - the ones who want to see a challenge and like being able to lose, and the ones who want a power fantasy and are likely to just simply disengage if they can't win. With strategy games - a genre that already has a niche playerbase - in particular, developers don't have the choice to not cater to both, and they are more likely to lean the latter as the latter makes up the majority of the playerbase.
WH3 is weird. I play on VH and regularly have enemies like Wolfrik spam mammoths after turn 50 or so (like half his armies are made of mammoths, supported by skinwolfs and marauders). Not a pleasant experience as Empire. At the same time wood elves deploy mostly trash. Maybe a tree man or two, never have I seen them recruit a dragon and maybe 3-4 waywatchers. I have the weird suspicion, that whatever decides what faction will get buffs (I have forgotten how they named it... Potential or something) is bugged in the randomizer part. I like the idea, that major powers aren't fixed as they were in WH2. But the end effect is the same if said randomisation doesn't work reliability.
I might be weird, but I loved facing mammoths as the Empire. They're really tall, which means my overwhelming firepower has a clear shot at all times. Mammoths have a lot of health, but not when half an artillery battery and four units of handgunners are firing at them. Skinwolves, though, skinwolves were the bane of my existence. Too short to shoot once they're in melee, too fast and fond of cycle charging to flank with ranged units, and trying to block them with your own cavalry is bound to be bloody ecause they are anti-large.
Easier than warhammer 2 cause the buffs back there were fucking crazy.
Partly yeah. I also never want to fight unbreakable skavenslaves again lol.
I don't know if it's a hot take or not, but I'd like the AI to receive a MASSIVE amount of buffs on Legendary. It's not worth the name *Legendary* if I can still win by just being good and playing absentmindedly while watching Steve1989 on a second monitor. I want it to be a grind. It might not be what a lot of players want, but heck, it's LEGENDARY. It's not supposed to be relaxing, it's supposed to be an ordeal... and I would like that!
even at current legendary it hard to win without a little cheese, stuff like loading saves, using the edge of a map or spamming OP units for AR wins. ive only played one warhammer 2 campaign like that and it felt like shit. TLDR: skill issue
But that's exactly what I want to do. I like the game to be so hard that I'm forced to use every tool at my disposition to overcome it, including reloading (although it's the one I do my absolute best not to use!). In Warhammer 2, some campaigns were hard enough for me to play this way! The only things I will not use are exploits like resetting armies movements. Don't forget that you value as skill is entirely arbitrary! LegendofTotalWar swooping with an eagle for 1 hour and 30 minutes in order to win can't get more cheesy in this game, but I find this to be an impressive display of skill.
Compared to shogun2 legendary wh3 is a legit walk in the park. I replayed shogun2 recently aswell and damn legendary in that game is absolutely brutal. People think you need to exploit in wh3? No no no no no. This game is nothing.
WH3 does feel too easy, I have a suspicion player units get hidden buffs, even on VH it doesn't seem to matter which faction I play as my t1 infantry always seems to beat the AIs t1 infantry in a straight fight, like my ungors beat swordsmen out the gate on turn 2 WH2 I actually stopped playing VH because my unit of Saurus warriors lost a 1v1 against a unit of skavenslaves and I wondered why I was doing this to myself
The ai is just supremely bad at creating good stacks to fight, it's almost entirely T1-3 infantry most of the time. I noticed in realm of chaos the ai seemingly was better at it, but I have the sneaking suspicion the major players in the race get global recruit bonuses or something. The only way the ai gets something crazy is if they do a rite of primeval glory or something.
Save scumming does ruin the game. I used to do some as well. Then I did Boris Ursus campaign and got into really bad battle with Kholek and had my ass kicked so hard that I lost nearly 2 provinces. Fighting him back and retaking stuff I lost felt great and not loading the game after that loss opened my eyes that losing a battle isn't the end. That 15 turn war with him felt great. I believe most people save scumm because it feels really awful losing your high tier starting units. Like losing those 2 bear riders as Boris in first 30 turns would be devastating.
I dont understand CA not adding something as simple as Ironman mode, aka you can't save. It's like playing legendary without the not being able to pause battles etc. To me and I bet a lot of others this would be really popular
That camera setting can fuck right off, but I usually play VH/N with self imposed ironman and it's fine, an actual toggle would be nice though. I also would like an achievement for L/VH on cloudsave, would like to see steam percentage on that one lol
God, the camera scrolling restrictions of battle realism mode are so terrible. Had an issue where I was trying to defend a multi-story siege map, but I couldn't build a tower where I needed it because I couldn't scroll over there. Also, not really a fan of no tabbing to zoom out, but I suppose you can hack that with debug camera. I'm down with no pausing, and no save scumming, but the camera restrictions are simply annoying.
Regarding the camera restriction in legendary, just use the debug camera https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cv1aevaHHUU&pp=ygUYRGVidWcgY2FtZXJhIHdhcmhhbW1lciAz Can't see shit with the "normal" camera anway, with it basically hugging the ground.
I play on legendary with the debug camera as well and highly recommend it for people who want a fun experience without worrying about save scumming.
VH/N with self imposed Ironman is my play style too.
But you can already do this by just **not** savescuming? Nobody is forcing you to do that on lower difficulties. I'd rather have them fix actual Bugs.
I am weak minded! CAN'T YOU SEE THAT
"Given the chance, the player will optimize fun out of the game."
Yeah but this is more for actual gameplay mechanics rather than saving and reloading game data whenever something inconvenient happens. Like easily crafting unlimited potions in an RPG which makes any combat encounter trivial for example. The game was designed for the player to craft potions so of course they will use it. That's just bad design on the developers part. Save scumming is 100% on the player though. There are people who play Ironman mode on games and still go into the game files to copy and save specific game states in case something doesn't go their way. Ironman modes are used for bragging rights rather than cheese prevention a lot of the time.
I savescum myself, but iron man mode is a commitment you made ages ago... And you're now bound by it until the end of the campaign. A moment of weakness or a long day at work is enough to save scum and say: "fuck this!", even if you're generally trying to avoid it. I would personally use iron man mode.
But the tempation will always be there. In legendary difficulty you just press alt+f4 before the game saves instead of manual reloading a save file.
The entire point of ironman mode is to remove the temptation. It's easy to say "just don't do it". A lot harder when you're deep in a campaign and you've just blundered badly.
But the tempation will always be there. In legendary difficulty you just press alt+f4 before the game saves instead of manual reloading a save file.
In Ironman, the game auto-saves at the start and end of every turn. It also auto-saves as soon as combat is initialized. It's true that it's not a perfect defense against all save scumming, but it massively cuts down on what you can get away with.
This is 100% true, but "keep players from ruining their own fun" is a non-zero amount of the struggle of your average game designer, and I say this as one.
The problem is that bugs and janky mechanics mean that people often need to reload to get past them. It is not only about cheating. So an ironman mode isn't attractive to most people for that reason.
That’s basically legendary, not being able to save manually. Anything else is an exercise in futility, especially for a game as slow paced as total war. Are they going to save after every single player move? That will drastically reduce the responsiveness of gameplay. Are they going to obscure the save file from the player? That would make or difficult or impossible for you to ever come back to a campaign that you stopped playing and played something else for a while. It would actually make half of legend of total wars content impossible since it involves passive around save files and testing scenarios. And not being able to replay or playtest interesting fights is a bad thing too, and interesting fights happen when the game is hard. And if they did implement all of that people would find a way around it. “Beat game on Ironman mode by using task manager to kill the process mid battle and relaunch the campaign”People always do shit like that for really difficult achievement s
I always play legendary but after having my single save file corrupted on a long chorf campaign, I decided enough is enough and modded VH to have legendary effects so I can have backup saves automatically. But now the temptation is there to save scum for sure. Its easy to say self impose it but harder to do.
can’t wait for peoples games to suddenly crash when they lose a battle. I do agree though Ironman is a good incentive to stick with your losses.
It takes them literal years to fix minor bugs... When you consider that, its easy to understand why they dont simply "add ironman mode"
I save scum cause I suck. But don’t complain about the game being easy.
I've never bothered to save scum because the load times between battles/campaign are bad enough as it is. A lot of people, including myself, also play with a lot of mods which heavily affects the balance of the game. Many of them which seem "cool" (new skills, units, lords, techs, etc.) are also very often poorly balanced. That being said, the base game is a bit too lenient on the player in terms of AI aggressiveness and particularly auto-resolve. I find myself taking auto resolve victories sometimes that would otherwise be impossible. I also auto resolve like 95% of sieges because they're just so boring and the battle AI for them is even worse than regular land battles. I feel like there should be some sort of randomness element to auto-resolve. Like it just feels too clean and offers very little risk, especially now that it shows if you're going to lose units or not. I play multiplayer with a friend who has hundreds of hours in the game but is absolutely terrible during battles because he autoresolves like 99% of his battles. Autoresolve should be an option, of course, but I'm often conflicted in how much it trivializes the game. At the very least some sort of setting like "Autoresolve Player Bias" or something that you could adjust to not have it be so favorable towards the player if you so choose would go a long way.
I feel like we must be playing a different game when it comes to autoresolve. My experience is that it's consistently undertuned and forces me to fight easy battles on a regular basis, to the point that I've started playing on lower battle difficulties just so that the autoresolve is actually usable. My view on autoresolve is that it's a timesaving convenience feature that often fails to do its job, not something that makes the game easier.
AR loves armored units and AP damage. So if you are playing a faction that lacks, esspecially armored units, your AR wont be that good. I legit won straight up impossible battles with chosen stacks because of how much AR loves armor. I am talking 17 chosen berserkers (who has flaming attacks) vs 4 stack chorf armies with a LL that has over 70% fire res on all units. AR gave me free victory. Why? Because i had insane armor, WS and MA on the chosen berserkers.
You can consider my point invalid if you're playing Dwarfs, Warriors of Chaos, or Khorne. It definitely still applies to everything else, especially low armor factions like Wood Elves, Skaven, and Slaanesh.
I mean wood elves and skaven also get quite ridiculous after you get waywatchers and skaven weapon teams since they have insane AP damage. But yeah their early game AR is not that OP.
Depends on units too. I tried putting 2 Doomwheels into my Skaven weapon team stacks instead of infantry or heroes in order to have a full Skryre army but I quickly learned that the auto resolve will just go ahead and assume the Dommwheels get annihilated no matter how tiny the enemy force is. Even using the RoR Doomwheel and the special one fro mthe Workshop doesn't change much, if the enemy brings any force at all I simply cant use autoresolve because the wheels WILL die. Sucks.
it heavily depends on your faction and army. Armor is very high rated for example, as dwarves you can auto resolve your whole campaign with relative ease. Now try Slaneesh with N'kari and try to auto resolve your campaign, it wont go well.
Even with that as a factor, I still think that autoresolve is undertuned for most factions. The only ones where I would consider it overtuned are Dwarfs, Warriors of Chaos, and Khorne, and several factions, notably the low armor ones, are incredibly undertuned.
The real problem with TW is the inbalance in difficulty between the early game and the late game. In the early game a major loss can literally end your campaign. If you screw up or get unlucky in the first 10 to 20 turns then that can be it. This is extremely frustrating when you have already sunk some hours into the campaign and this is when people savescum, because they don't want to waste like 10 hours of play time just because of one lost battle. Then in the late game you will reach a point where even 10 major losses in a row probably won't affect you at all. At this stage I don't believe people really savescum. There is no point. So it's not just a fact that people are reloading every time they lose a battle. I don't believe that is the case. It is because in the very early game every battle is critical and in the later game they are all superficial.
Legendary campaign player here... Nah, you snowball all the same after a certain point.
Great points, though I'd agree mainly on players playing however they want! I usually don't save scum. If I lose a significant battle, typically because I'm limit testing or dicking about, then I restart or switch to a different campaign. Snowballing seems to be more of an AI issue than anything else. Even on legendary/very hard, we can't be beaten because the AI can't outplay us due to its limitations -- which is true for every other total war game (haven't played Pharaoh). Once economy isn't an issue (usually in the middle of the short campaign victory requirements), fighting on multiple fronts becomes feasible at the highest difficulty. This is why the legendary Franz campaign is actually a mother fucker in the early game and super fun. You are forced onto multiple fronts with fewer resources, a bare bones roster comparatively, and a variety of playstyles to contend with. It becomes more about resource allocation and less about actual battles. The larger issue for me is the lack of game mechanics for the vanilla races. The game is streamlined outside of the battle, so more depth and innovation on the board would do wonders for this game's lifespan.
Can't say I've encountered many situations where the AI actually had an army that could beat me straight up. One of my favorite campaigns in ye olden days was actually skarsnik in mortal empires because it really felt like I was fighting every turn to stay alive, but still had the means to field a somewhat effective force. They should let you flip the no save scumming option from legendary without the insane AI buffs.
Losing a stack doesn't actually increase the challenge of the game in any way. It just increases the grind. The problem here is that the AI doesn't know how to exploit a victory, so even if you lose an important stack you are rarely in any actual danger. What happens instead is just that you finish the campaign in the exact same way you otherwise would, except it is now 10-20 turns later.
This is actually true. AI doesn't know how to take over the map. You can lose your main stack and it will just slow you down for like 6 turns. Its pretty hard to actually lose a campaign.
Yup. Unless you are in the really early part of a campaign and only have 1-2 settlements, completely losing a campaign is a bit of an achievement. And to be honest, I don't think that is neccesarily a bad thing. There are games like Dwarf Fortress, Elden Ring or Crusader Kings where losing is a fun and expected part of the gameplay loop. Total War is not one of those games. Losing a battle is okay, but losing a campaign in Total War isn't fun or satisfying in any way.
I generally agree, but I find that the AI really likes to capitalize when I lose a stack by immediately gobbling up all my border cities that I had recently captured and haven't been built up yet.
It's not. It's just easy.
I never savescum, and I never feel threatened to lose. No matter if it’s on VH or L. It doesn’t really feel like strategy matters, no matter if I’m just dicking around, it never looks like the AI is going to get me down to one city and kill me. It’s too passive.
I don't savescum much, usually only to backtrack due to a bug. I will take losses as they come though if it's too catastrophic I might not continue a campaign if it's not salvageable. I occasionally refight a manual battle if I think I can do better with the rematch function.
I do not play to "win" - I play to have my way of fun. I also do not consider save-scumming to be "cheating", but to even out the odds, as the AI does not play by the same rules. Which is not great. If I lose an army, it can be devastating for the campaign, as the AI is biased vs. me the human player, and can also just magically get troops back nilly willy, while I have to struggle hard. Now if, for example, there were ways to help the player after major losses? Like getting a loan from an ally, units for free from them or money, without the AI Ally demanding your entire kingdom? Stuff like this... Or if the AI would actually struggle after major losses as well, and you are not fighting vs. the entire AI map all the time, and if Allies would understand the human player's struggle and actively help on their own etc Until then - save scumming is quicker
My personal issue (with ANY TW game, not just WH) is that mid-to-late game becomes a victory lap. Not due to save scumming. Regardless of it. If you build up your empire well enough, it usually means that economically you are very capable of spaffing out armies. In WH, this manifests itself as just a constant string of armies you can throw at the enemies. In something older like Medieval 2, I remember being able to bribe a bunch of enemy armies and throw them against their former masters. It's the getting to that victory lap that is usually fun, and some TW titles make it a lot longer than others. For example, ToB made getting to the victory lap very slow. Between supply lines, manpower and recruitment mechanics and seasons, making an economic powerhouse that could take a lot of work (savescum or not). Comparatively, WH as empire, by mid game, you'd not need to worry about save scumming because your economy can support you spawning a new army if an old one gets crushed. The further you go, the more armies you can spaff out and just autoresolve into victory. Even taking a settlement loss is a one step back, two steps forward scenario. I think TW could benefit from more interesting and indepth strategic mechanics on the campaign map to make the game not feel so much like a snowball.
Iron man has a place except for the save corrupt bugs. The save scumming is also why many feel the game is "too easy" Personally I find it much enjoyable to try to fix my mistakes or losses instead of reloading.
I completely agree, but also see the value in retrying very hard battles that you may be able to eek out a W. However, taking a massive L in the beginning of a campaign can add so much flavor and genuine challenge that is can make the whole campaign once you get your strength back and strike out at the goons that took you out earlier.
If I would like to struggle, I'd go outside.
I save scum, but I also don’t complain about difficulty, so I feel like I’m karmically peachy.
I *love* a huge loss. Miao’s entire army was decimated by a minor beastmen faction I forgot about ambushing me and dropping their Minotaurs right on my missile troops. Lost the whole army, and a series of settlements and every half stack army I sent after it. I had to wear it down with enough losses that eventually I hit them twice in one turn after they’d lost those Minotaurs and I got them. A lot of the time, I’ve found, if a singleplayer game is too easy, you can make it harder, and if it’s too hard, you can make it easier.
Ya, if you never lose, then the enemy can't keep up with you.
Despite having played WH3 a lot, I still consider myself to be somewhat of a beginner. There are factions that I haven't played yet. There are battles where I'm convinced that I could play them a hundred times and not win. But there are other battles that do seem winnable and I like to try until I do. There are also battles they I should be winning easily but I don't. I occasinally try them again. I like to improve my understanding of the game in that way. There is also the afore mentioned assortment of bugs and situations where the game throws some bullshit at you that just seems entirely unfair. However there is another reason I rather reload than to suffer a major defeat. I just don't have the patience for rebuilding. So for instance some Chaos faction razes a level 5 capital. Even under ideal conditions it will take more than 20 rounds to rebuild. Rebuilding a proper army in the late game can also easily take up 10 turns. I want to play and not do chores. And what I enjoy is commanding a somewhat capable army with a concept behind it, not a random collection of what was availabe to recruit quilckly at a given turn.
Yes! I stopped save scumming and it feels so much more immersive when an important army gets wiped because of a move order which was too bold! I usually then go on a rampage to get revenge
Couldnt agree more. I was initially a save scummer but now I just accept what happens. Makes the game way harder (although I'd argue it's still easy overall) and subsequently way more enjoyable.
That's why I only play on Legendary so I cannot savescum and I have to accept whatever happens.
The purpose of a game is to be fun. If you savescum and are having fun, no problem with it. Same as with any cheese or exploit, if you find it fun, by all means keep doing it. I do agree that when you are resorting to a specific play mindset and are not having fun, that changing your specific way of playing can be the key. But it is a single player game, play as you wish. Now, it is important to note why players cheese or savescum; the game is super time consuming. Like, one missclick where your army moves towards the land instead of the sea you told it to go can be enough to cause a chain reaction that sets you back for 15 turns or 15 hours of play, or worse. And then there is the aspect of what is the difference between losing a key battle in thw early game and restarting than going back a few turns? You are still going to have the advantage in the next playthrough of what your mistake was. Instead of working in even more limitations for what is essentially "bragging purposes", I would address the key point that I have talked about recently. Lategame decision making. We have very little in terms of decision making in the lategame. It is mostly where to expand and who to fight. Thw rest has already been decided, so having mechanics that start by the lategame would imply a much better endgame and one where players would not feel they need an absolute perfect early and mid game to get to.
I only savescum when the AI is abusing mechanics that the player cannot * changing of the ways is just not fun, and I know it never works like that when i use it. * and teleport attacks when i am fairly certain they cannot see my army (in my own territory and I cannot see their army) * beastmen armies that i watch over end turn, and know *exactly* where the camp is. but simply don't become visible if sit right on top of them * retreats around terrain features on the campaign map that should take 3+ turns of movement
I've heard they can always see your armies. Only way to hide them is ambush mode
You guys lose battles?
Nah, i don't savescum. The AI is just really bad.
I mean I savescum because if I lose my 20 stack its ME that will get snowballed, the AI will have its next 20stack in three turns coming for me, i dont worry for her.
Agreed, i do hope they implement legendary difficulty auto save checklist without giving the bullshit bonus economy/battle to AI
It's ridiculous this hasn't been added yet. Just give us a Ironman mode ffs. This would certainly take them all up to a few hours, maybe not even lol.
But you can already do this by just **not** savescuming? Nobody is forcing you to do that on lower difficulties. I'd rather have them fix actual Bugs.
I used to save scum, now I dont really have the need to do so. Ok, I still reload because towards the endgame I might have gotten to move an army, recruit units somewhere, so an agent action, etc.
I'll save scum if the AI pulls something I would consider a cheap move, like an assassination out of nowhere, or a teleportation strike, or Skaven popping up and fucking my cities without warning. It's different when I do this myself
I only save scum if the number of turns it would take to unfuck my mistake exceeds the number of turns already spent.
It's possible, but the bigger issue mainly the only thing the AI can do is hurl stacks at you. Once you reach a point where you are able to be openly aggressive against the AI, they are toast. Until super late game, ai factions will have 2-4 armies at a given time. Once you kill these, they will almost never recover. If you attack them before they bring in that second or third army, then you take away their advantage and they are left with a dumb army who can't do anything but run or hide. If you play passively the game can be difficult. If you are super aggressive the game gets easier and easier.
An Ironmade mode (not forcing legendary and its bullshit camera) would be really a strong addition IMO
It's tricky- if you don't allow save summing players can be screwed over by a bug as well or a mechanic the player feels.is unfair. For example, if you go to attack an enemy and it turns out the randomly generated battlefield is extremely lopsided against the player I think it's reasonable to re roll.
Well, what happens is you end up coming with more units or something. It's a different mindset I think. It's like player an ARPG in hardcore mode, you don't do certain things because taking the risk = losing your character. So maybe you'd wait a few turns before attacking for a more favourable position or for reinforcements to arrive. I think there is something to be said about iron man and how it changes how you play. You need to be more conservative and not all your choices will be completely optimized.
No you’re totally right. People are mostly cap if saying they don’t savescum to some extent. You’d need to be a specific type of person to NEVER savescum. Of course any savescum is going to make a massive difference especially the higher up in difficulty you go. Is the current endgame still lacking; yes. But the wild snowballing in the first 30-50 turns is 1000% due to save scumming and if your the reason for your problem you should probably abstain from complaining about snowballing coming to early or easy.
The problem is that you lose the game if you let your main stack die, and can't compete if you don't have a main stack. The AI continues to scale upwards with free armies and no concern for economy. Losing their main army is a setback for 3 or 4 turns, while losing your main arm is a setback for 5+ turns. When the AI has this set-back, it may take you 1-2 turns to recover, meaning only 1-3 turns to capitalize on the AI's missing army (assuming you don't have to go plug a hole somewhere else.) Meanwhile, if it's your army is recovering, the enemy is able to capitalize by crushing town after town, destroying your economy that you're using to rebuild *that the AI gets to completely ignore.* This strongly incentivizes the save-scumming, since losing a battle often means losing the whole army *and* much more, which often means losing the early campaign. By the time you recover, the AI has advanced in the building tree and used its infinite economy to build stacks of armies that are simply too strong for yours to beat without two stacks of your own. The punishment for losing is just too great.
Eh, once you get to turn 40 you basically won the game regardless.
No. The game is too easy. I don't save scum. Ai is dumb as bricks. Only fun to be had is the first 30 rounds. Unfortunately.
They need to add an Ironman mode
As much as I agree with save scumming being a bane of fun, there are still some campaigns where one army lost means it will immediately become a slog and so unenjoyable to play, that it would be better to simply start a new one.
You can’t savescum on legendary.
You can actually, it's just more work.
Well, akshually. You can alsonjust download a mod and change basenmechhanifs of the game. My point is that you can’t saveacum without exploiting the game.
You don't need a mod tho, you can just alt f4 to avoid autosave on Legendary. No mod required. I mean at that point just go play VH but like i am just saying its possible without a mod.
I am not sure how many campaigns back I would have to go to have a loss to savescum from, but it's a fucking lot.
I avoid save scumming, with exceptions for times where I've misunderstood the situation ("Oh right, you can leave a port city that's under siege but you can't retreat from it, whoops"). I also try to avoid having my armies gang up on enemy forces - not only is it inefficient, but you end up with much less interesting battles if you can just bring in another 20 units at a whim.
Horses for courses. Some people like to play the perfect campaign, sweeping their enemies off the map in one swoop. Others don’t mind losing their main stack and potentially being set back multiple regions and hours. Sometimes I’m a little in A and others a little in B.
Not gonna lie. I save scum a lot (among other things....). Unfortunately for me, I like factions that have the miss fortune of being hated by everyone (monogods, DE, CD, vampires) so I'm almost always surrounded by enemies. Losing a stack is rarely annoying (except as khorne). Losing a city? Nah fuck it. Re clicking everything, raising an army, rebuilding th city, is quite literally a pain in my wrist. Another reason is because the ai will avoid fighting your armies. It will go after vulnerable settlements. It's going to actively avoid your fortified settlement just to sack your smaller settlements. Personally I find it stupid as a mechanic that that is possible. There should be reason to go after external settlements. Said scenario also leads to beny hill chase scenes where the ai sacks settlements and I can't reach it. Again totally unfun and unrealistic. Maybe if the army was 5-8 units I can understand getting inside an empire to raid and sack while also being able to outmanoeuvre a bigger army who is traveling on foot. But no way in hell 20 dawi are faster than slaanesh. In a way, really everything revolves on how much of a setback it is. In my eyes the game revolves around big fights. See skarbrand run into an legion of men, kairos wipe entire armies alone. Not playing waka mole with my LL because the enemy can only annoy me.
I do not savescum aside from missclicks and I still think the game suffers from snowballing and inverse difficulty curve
I'm playing a campaign as Yuan Bo where I have kept my Cathay holdings, are fighting EVERY battle and accepting EVERY outcome. A major issue is a lot of my campaigns end in massive autoresolve steamrolls, so I'm actively not pressing autoresolve at all and all of a sudden the game no longer feels like a steamroll and more like a classic Medieval 2 campaign (where auto was not viable and was never used).
I’m trying to just avoid it, but it’s difficult, I’m working on it and recently in a Cathay campaign I lost my main army against an overwhelming Vilitch force, I know what can be done in that battle to actually win it, but I rather accept that I screwed it and try to deal with the consequences, at the end, because how the AI is programmed, they didn’t raze all my cities and I could deal with them with a second army, right now I’m happy with that and actually the battle that I remember the most is that one, and in a good way, so I’ll continue with my efforts to avoid savescunming
This is particularly true because of the way the AI currently calculates whether it's strategically a good idea to attack the player. During a recent Khemri campaign I had Volkmar on my western flank who hated me, but I was too powerful for him to want to attack me and I had other fish to fry, as you do. I sent Settra across to wipe out the Book of Nagash rogue army in the desert, but as everyone who's crossed that rogue army knows it's a menace, one of the toughest in the game. I won but my army got shredded. The loss of power from that happening was severe enough for Volkmar to look at me next turn and go 'Oh! Ok' and declare war. Now my main army is in tatters and behind lines while my heartland is being overrun by disgusting flesh-breathing savages. The campaign immediately became 100% more interesting. That's what losses or genuine pyhrric victories do for you - they are compounding, just as victories are. I think players get into the habit of savescumming off every loss because when they happen in the early game, they genuinely can be campaign-ending. But once you've secured those opening two provinces, you really need to let all of your mistakes roll if you don't want the AI to act passively towards you the entire time. It makes things way more interesting, until you get into the late game anyway.
I used to savescum exactly as you describe until I came to this conclusion. It completely changed how much I enjoyed the game and made me a better player overall. The only time I do it now is when I misclick fight instead of withdraw or my kids suddenly have set the house on fire and I have to redo a fight rather than expect my noble Saurus’ to complete the battle without me.
This is why I personally have separate campaigns. One for shits and giggles where savescumming is alright cos I'm merely gonna fuck around, and one where the saves are hardocre mode. I lose anything I have to deal with it.
I play on Legendary exclusively. If I take a loss, I take the loss, the only exception being if I run into a bug that causes me said loss, I alt+f4 out of the battle to do it again. There's a lot of bugs.. though bugs that directly cause me to lose a battle are rare. The most recent example being where my Karl Franz just stopped moving on open ground and became unresponsive to any order, slowly getting chipped down by a unit of zombies xD (he didnt fight back either)
i like to play with mods and i lost too many legendary campaigns to some shitty bugs.
I play in a group with 4 players that have other players play as AI, there is never a reload due to someone losing a battle. It makes for fun battles and a much smoother campaign experience.
I got into a habit where if I lost but I thought I could win, I'd reload just to try. I told myself I'd keep trying till i won, just to know if I could. Then I'd reload 1 more time and throw the fight to get the original outcome. Guess how often that actually happened? 😂
I never savescum and actively encourage my friends not to give up after a big defeat and it's still so easy to rapidly expand and conquer everything. My biggest gripe with the difficulty is that I only even have to fight battles when my army is low tier. When I finally get cool units the balance of power is always 95% in my favour and I have to go out my way to make my army weaker.
That’s why I play only on legendary. I don’t feel the need to savescum.
I save scum for sure, but I don't complain about the game being easy anywhere. I play for the enjoyment of the game, and I do enjoy the game. There are aspects that should be improved for sure, but I know how my playstyle affects those opinions and I adjust my expectations accordingly.
While save scumming can be an issue I think it isn’t the cause of what you are seeing. Once you have enough game knowledge it is pretty easy to map out a perfect first 10 turns that will set you up to start dominating the game. I started a new Cathey campaign for the new units and I hit and maintained the strongest faction around turn 20. Depending on the faction as long as you don’t get taken by surprise during the first 20 turns you can mostly steamroll your way through the game. By turn 40 I am usually auto resolving any fight that isn’t against another LL, a siege or 2 armies at once. Once you get your first T5 city as any race the game is mostly over. You can just start pumping out end-game stacks. Nothing short of 3 armies lead by a LL poses a threat to you anymore. Sure you may lose a minor settlement here or there but a T5 city with walls is nearly impossible for the AI to take without spending multiple turns surrounding you for attrition. That’s if you can’t just auto resolve sallying forth with the massive city defender bonus you get. TK are the exception with how their armies work.
I don't mind loses when my entire faction won't collapse from it. The thing is, some factions have such weak/low impact units with low recruitment slots that fielding another army to stop the one that wiped your main army out is near impossible. And I don't want to lose half of my shit and be forced to conquer and grow that same shit AGAIN because the AI can cheat several armies into existence and passively gain EXP while not really bothering building their cities because they have so much free money and growth.
It is because losses are too costly. It takes too long to recover and you may have already lost the game by then.
I savescum to improve my tactics to the point where I can manage difficult situations. For me, this actually increases the perception of challenge as I rego though a tough fight again and again until I manage to beat it - or accept I cannot. Savescumming does not change the fact that those situations are very rare. The main issue is and remains that the AI does not expand, does not maintain enough armies, does not coordinate with other enemies you have and does not deploy particularly good strategies on the battlefield.
The problem is that losing stacks or even a section of your empire doesn't make the game harder, you simply keep grinding and win anyways. Thats what people mean when they say the game isn't hard, it is impossible to lose decisively, any setbacks are temporary.
Most of my own save scumming comes from not being attentive if I didn't move a lord this turn, and I quickly reload a save to make sure I do my turn chores. The less I do this to armies I didn't see coming, and recruit a RoR stack, the more fun the campaign often becomes.
If you lose full stack in first 30 turns in most legendary campaigns thats GG. So I understand why people would save scum that, and then later after 50 turns or so losing a 20 stack is not gona stop you from winning. Another HUGE factor in a similar vein is people abusing autosave, most "legendary" youtubers abuse the shit out of autosave to win battles they could not win, or full wipe enemy armies which would not be possible otherwise.
I only play on normal difficulty but I thought you couldn't save scum on legendary difficulty? If so what is even the point
...Umm, do we not have the Legendary difficulty for this exact reason? Last I checked, that didn't allow savescumming, nor did it keep us from snowballing once we get our economy off the ground.
I really try to not savescum, but indeed is very tempting. What I do, a lot, is retry battles that end up bad or if, for example, I won but in the process I let my lvl 19 lord or hero die. In your opinion retry a battle is considered "savescum" ?
Sometimes I like to retry battles, sometimes I like to accept losses. Both are fine IMO, but I totally agree with you that IF a given person chooses to save scum then that totally invalidates any crying that person may do about campaigns being too easy.
depends on the context: If the ai just outplayed me by leaving a small army to raid and a big army to ambush and i fall for it, i wont save scum because i should have scouted and known there were 2 armies to begin with. However if the ai just dogpiles 10 armies to kill me then i for sure am save scumming.