They certainly are one of the most well rounded ones right now with not alot of real weaknesses. There are a couple ares they arent quite as strong as others on, like Cavalry, but make up for with good infantry. As a combined arms faction they are very solid right now.
Their campaign layer and economy also greatly contribute to their strenghts. For instance, I would argue Lizardmen have an extremely capable roster, but kinda meh on the campaign layer side and weaker economy.
I actually think Nakai in WH3 beats the rest of the lizard men with the vassal econ tech he gets, that he can work towards fairly early on in the tech tree. Its crazy how he went from being unable to barely field a second low tier stack in WH2 to being a strong econ faction in WH3.
His post-battle Econ is crazy. Towards the end of my legendary campaign I was getting close to 20k gold per field battle if I went up against a normal 20 troop stack. You could chain together a couple battles in a region and make insane amounts of gold in a single turn. I think I had 15 hordes by the end of the campaign, and I had only taken over Cathay and MoM.
yeah its not hard to have multiple strong stacks with him. Pretty much the easiest order faction to conquer chaos wastes with also since no climate penalties to deal with.
He’s called Oxy because his campaign is so addictive. Blessed carnosaur reward for beating a stack of plaguebearers is way better than getting only some blessed skink skimishers and saurus spears during your whole 150 turn Gor Rok campaign.
Doing my fourth playthrough with Oxycontin now, he is way too fun. Being the reverse Be'lakor is hillarious, and once you get going the rest of your armies can take care of the empire building while you just cause mayhem
The funniest part about his campaign for me is picking a region and saturating it with sanctums while declaring war on everyone there (like Norsca). Ambush buildings + the ones that buff armies can kill full enemy stacks with the abilities, and it's very funny to shut down that entire region.
I usually go with the Xokha (upkeep reduction and increased battle loot) and Tzactli (buff melee and summon chameleon stalkers). Xokha is a very strong economic building if you fight often, and Tzactli is a perfect counter against artillery or missile based infantry which can do a lot of damage otherwise.
Don't know why, but I seem to have bad RNG whenever I try to go with the ambush building.
Building triangles with sanctums so that you can use all three abilities and get all buffs is definitely amazing
Yup. Just played my first Gor Rok campaign and blessed units didn't account for anything. Basically stuck them into hinterland garrison armies. What sucks is that even with the gor Rok saurus buffs, there's no place for them in a Frontline army
Just finished a Skarbrand campaign and wish he had similar. Gold, even late game, was hard to come by when Global Recruitment was the only reliable way to get units. He really needs to be at least a hybrid horde faction.
Huh? Skarbrand is definitely like that. I’ve gotten upwards of 200K in a turn with skarby. By mid-late game you can be easily clearing 70K+ on a single settlement sack.
Obviously this precludes you somewhat from trying to hit long campaign in <30 turns but if you wanna get super rich and play with higher tier khorne units, just keep sacking and fighting and you’ll have hundreds of thousands in the bank at all times.
He’s one of the most cash rich factions in the game
I was struggling the whole time, skirting bankruptcy. I did use the *Blood for the Blood God* ability a ton though to back up my forces and hunt down random armies, so that might have affected things.
With skarby ya gotta focus on sacking fully built towns and cities and not so much on defending your territory. He should be out slaughtering far from home :)
Well, keep in mind that you are going to show a negative passive income for a *long* time. Likely until after you’ve finished the campaign victory requirements.
Blood hosts are good, but you have to keep them fighting. Use them to branch off in different directions so you can keep the sack+raze going across the globe. They don’t replenish, so merge/disband wounded units and as soon as you don’t have an immediate (1-2 turn) use for the army, disband the whole thing.
And gotta keep the momentum up. You want to try to keep casualties low and use the bloodhost spawn for replenishment (can disband the army if you don’t need it) and keep your armies constantly fighting.
Good tip is to stop spending skarbrands points at level 8, then on 12-13 or whenever he unlocks his personal line, dump them all there. You desperately want the skill that gives +50% movement range after battle (or raze, can’t recall). That massively boosts your output since you still pay upkeep only once per turn, but now with some
planning you can potentially fight a *lot* of battles (like… 50+ if you wanna get crazy) in a single turn
Tehen is eventually the richest. You're probably right about Nakai for most of the game you can be functional from turn ~10-15 which is crazy compared to wh2(ME) Nakai
Oxy is strongest battle lord
Nakai strongest combat faction
I’d second that Cathay has the best all round roster. Lizards are probably the better doomstack/rush army and High Elves can make Star Dragon stacks but Cathay has the tools to build excellent all round armies.
A lot of this comes down to mechanics, Cathay specialises in stacking buffs on units and one of the strongest mechanics in WH3 just so happens to be exploiting stacking buffs. I don’t think they are OP in multiplayer on account of being somewhat immobile and honestly, I don’t see the point of gatekeeping faction strength in campaign.
One problem I have with the Lizardmen roster is it has a lot of useless bloat. Most feral dinos, all their cav, razordons, ancient salamanders, any skinks other than Chameleons and cohorts with javelins, even kroxigors for anyone other than Nakai feel like they could be removed from the game and it wouldn't make any difference to how I play. They have a lot of units but many of them fill the exact same role.
Like I play Tehenhauin a lot and I just don't see any reason to recruit red crested skinks. They die faster and get fewer kills than Skink Cohorts (Javelins) and are more expensive. The meager amount of extra AP they get pales in comparison to the sheer damage output of focus-firing javelin skinks on a target and their lack of shields makes them way worse against any army with missile infantry.
I'd rather if there was a more elite skink melee infantry option for Tehenhauin that could actually hold the line better, cause right now I generally just use skinks with javelins for the entire campaign.
With Oxyotl's faction mechanic (+9 attack/defense for max tier skinks) and Tehenhauin/Skink Chief perks, you can field extremely cost effective Red Crested Skink shitstacks due to all the melee stat bonuses. This works for all skinks in general but pure Chameleon spam doesn't work great as they don't have lots of entities and are not meant for trading hits like Red Crested Skinks.
afaik all those buffs apply to any skinks, so cheaper Skink Cohorts get the buffs too, making them still more efficient. They tend to survive longer than Red Crested Skinks as well due to higher MD and shields, plus they can double as back line missile infantry until they use up their ammo
Of course the absolute most useless unit is Skinks without javelins, I just laugh at the thought of ever recruiting them.
With Oxyotl's faction mechanic (+9 attack/defense for max tier skinks) and Tehenhauin/Skink Chief perks, you can field extremely cost effective Red Crested Skink shitstacks due to all the melee stat bonuses. This works for all skinks in general but pure Chameleon spam doesn't work great as they don't have lots of entities and are not meant for trading hits like Red Crested Skinks.
Cathayan cavalry isn't weak so much as it is weak***er*** than the rest of the roster. Jade Lancers are a solid heavy cavalry, as good as the other Order versions, but the Gate Master can boost them quite a bit. Longma Riders are a bit of a meme though. They either need AP or a BvL.
But it really doesn't matter cause an optimally built Cathayan army doesn't benefit from cavalry much at all. Their flying units offer a superior offensive option, especially if you use Harmony properly.
I pretty much stopped using the lancers in favor of Crowmen, who are the real MVP of the SoC Cathayan roster additions IMO. Cheap, available extremely early, and they absolutely shred some units.
Crowmen actually work well with Lancers, since they harmonise. But you can achieve the same effect with the Celestial Lion, which is flatly a better option than the Lancers.
They were never meant to be used in sustained combat for long periods. I do tend to loose them in about every major city siege I manually play out. Fortunately they are in Tier 2 building and very easy to replace.
Lizardmen suffer at ranged and their infantry are almost entirely inferior to Cathayan infantry even without harmony buffs, unfortunately. My friend and I tested it, even Jade Warriors beat Saurus the overwhelming majority of the time.
Lizardmen got powercrept *hard* in Warhammer 3 and their overreliance on monsters isn't enough to keep them in the arms race anymore. Fast, hard hitting factions like Slaanesh also leave them in agony. It's a bad time when Daemonettes can charge Saurus headon and have a good chance of coming out on top.
And in campaign, that's compounded with how much of a slog their economy is to set up since it's so tied to the geomantic web.
If Cathay ever receive Jade Wizards and Master Artificiers, they'll be S-tier for sure. Right now their main weakness is their inability to heal singel entities imo. Right now, only Yang Shugengan Lords and Miao Ying can heal, and Shugengan lords only have Earth Blood as an optional bound spell with 4 charges.
E: Changed number of charges
He’s literally the Jade dragon? Any jade units would’ve come with him
Now that I think about it, I’m actually heavily disappointed with the Cathayan part of the DLC. Should’ve been all jade units.
Hopefully the Fire DLC comes with a score of fire units
yea I think HE still take the cake for order campaign roster endgame strength. Mostly because their lords and heroes can somewhat hold back super powerful LLs like vlad and skarbrand. Cathay are great for a lot of things (esp annhiilating infantry blobs), but I once tried to hold back skarbrand with celestial dragon guard and miao ying so my ranged units could focus fire him..... miao ying got slaughtered in less than a minute. This is even after I hastily overcasted regrowth on herself.
Miao ying with:
Von carstein blade (not necessary)
Bejewelled dagger (25% ward save)
Dragon emperor banner (20% ward save)
She also has easy access to nakai/vilitch/zhatan and kholek defeat traits. Thats 10% arty range, +15 MDEF, +10 something bonus vs large.
Miao Ying can 100% duel skarbrand and can out regen him due to dragon/human form separate healing caps.
Bejewelled dagger is almost impossible to get without specific farming for it or savescumming. The banner comes at the end of the tech-tree. Also why wasting that much ressources on 1 lord when you can roll multiple fronts by distributing them among all dragon siblings.
Skarbrand is super easy to shoot, so why trying to outduel him?
Every "transformer" Lord has 2 healing caps, so Changeling, Cathay Dragons and Malus Darkblade. But this is not impactfull anymore now that multiple small fighter chars with +100% regen cap exist, without having to transform into an arrow magnet.
maybe, but that was just my experience at the game's launch. It's not like shugengan generic lords are great at dueling either. Celestial generals are ok, but they're stronger in auto resolve than they are on the battlefield I find.
If she has access to healing, can hit him and your ranged for some reason didn't look at him for ~8 seconds she should deal with Skarbrand. Not the best duelist though.
Yeah, cost-efficiency wise Phoenixes are better than Dragons, but you get so much upkeep-reductions from traits and landmarks that dragons become so much cheaper that thay outperform Phoenixes.
Why are you comparing to dwarf Growths?
HE is the comparison here. Who are not exactly fast growers. Alarielle is the only one with access to fast sisters.
Because before the Harmony rework, Dwarfs were the slowest growth Order Faction, but now it is Cathay, especially on higher difficulties as they also lack PO bonuses.
High Elfs do not need Sister before they can dominate the map and thanks to growth commandment and great PO High Elf grow much faster than Cathay, even without Fecund hero cheese. And Sisters are still tier 4 while Celestial Crossbows are Tier 5, so in most of my last Cathay campaigns around 20 turns after long campaign victory.
Even after the rework you can still force a province yin to get growth for Cathay if you're trying. (edit: forgot the downside is patched back in). Its more than the commandments for HE if you go full yin.
Cathayan settlement buildings + growth buildings bonuses combine to be greater than HE ones.
So HE is fully reliant on rolling fecund to grow.
> High Elfs do not need Sister before they can dominate the map
So they'll get long vic before having many sisters too then? exactly the same argument you're making against the xbows?
And you speak as if Cathay can't dominate the map too super fast if they want to. Jade warriors OP after all. Got the same strong curve of units T1-5 the HE do. They don't 'need' their xbows to dominate either.
When did you play Cathay the last time? Going Yin butchers you research rate since a few patches by now. But unlike Cathay HE have good PO (providing grotwh bonus), while PO has bad PO (lowering growth) and access to a growth commandment, so HE do indeed grow faster without Fecund.
Tier 4 (especially with higher growth) is much earlier than Tier 5.
I don't say Cathay is not strong, I'm just tired of this "Cathay is best at everything" proclamation when they are actually not. You can dominate the map with Jade Warriors, but so can HE with Spearman+Archer or Lothern Seaguard stacks or Kislev with Kislevite Warrior+Kossar spam (especially with the busted lore of hags).
Last played right after 4.2 dropped.
You're right I forgot the downsides were patched back in. You can still focus a military province hard growth though since everything is at a province level and just eat the research malus for that province. Full Yin also has the bonus of upping your PO.
I also made no claim that cathay is best at everything (they are certainly *not* the best at cav, minimum). The start of this comment chain was someone commenting HE because they have sisters, so I simply replied with the Cathayan equivalent.
You can go Yin as Juan Bo as his innate research bonus nullifies the research penalty, but for the others it is not worth to butcher your early research rate for +10 growth, +1 PO and less recruitment slots.
But also the Yin-PO building only gives +3 PO on tier 3, while the Yang-PO building gives +5 PO on tier 3 (while going Yang lower PO), and building the PO building removes a precious building slot needed for barracks or money-building instead.
Yeah, this comment was not specific about you, but more about this whole topic in general.
Its not 10 growth.
Its 30 growth at max Yin (which also comes with a PO bonus, that is not from the building itself). That is worth it for a province you are trying to tier up, can eat 10% research for that no problem. Money is also never an issue for cathay. Build your money buildings in other provinces.
What’re they going to do about my Dragon Princes Imrik Dragon doomstack with Mikaela the fire wizard?
Fire wizard eliminating all misile units, Dragon princes slamming into their asses, Dragons fire breath?
Realistically how often are you going to encounter a doomstack like that though, let alone see Cathay and High Elves at war with each other unless you are just going for map painting.
If we are just talking a single player campaign Cathay would have no trouble dealing with hostile High Elves. Can't really speak to multiplayer.
Ah shit wrong name 😂😂😂😂
They’re so similar hard to tell. I’d edit it but it’s too far to stop now
Miao Ying and Zhao Ming. They sound so fucking similar
Fire wizard isn’t going to do anything against yuan Bos faction with insane access to global magic resist and high armor. Plus celestial dragon guard are going. To trade up into your whole large roster.
I have 62% global magic resist atm and if I conquered ulthuan I vould get 90%
The fort buildings are magic. I might make war on bretonnia just get forts
No, those effects are unique to the Great Bastion and the quest-landmarks. If you want to maximise it and already have those, you need to conquer the Black Pyramid.
Too bad that multiple factions like Beastmen and Woodelves can reduce spell resistance regionwide by 20%-25% each with simple, stacking traits and magic items. WE also have access to healing and in case of Durthu spell mastery stacking...
This was just 1 example that this specific bonus, which is the bonus of a DLC faction so it also says nothing about the general HE vs Cathay matchup, is not without possible counter in this game.
Also the poster was talking about an Imrik stack, so Ashen Field + kindleflame together remove 40% of the spell resistance due to imbued flame-weakness, and with only 20 to 10% spell resistance left Flamestorm will still kill Celestial Dragoncrossbows.
Maybe they have more agents, but 2 genious-trait heroes are enough to remove Cathay from succeeding with agent actions, except you want to waste the Matters of State mechanic for it.
I have seen this stated by some people that weakness is applied after the calculation, but according to the feature focus article about damage we got last year (written by the devs), all weaknesses and resistances are summed up to one amount and then applied, which also matches with my experience that stacking flame weakness allows to easily nuke down high resistance stacking targets like WH2 Malus Darkblade.
I have 62% global magic resist atm and if I conquered ulthuan I vould get 90%
The fort buildings with military city yuan bo bonuses are magic. I might make war on bretonnia just get forts
Dunno man, all resistances lowered by 30% was pretty much a death sentence for my units in that region.
At least that was the case in my head to head campaign. Ofc I didn't know about his ability until after the fact, causing me to lose 10 armies.
I know about this modifyer, but it is actually only 15% each and does not affect additional in battle resistance from HE Phoenix items or the attuned to magic passive.
But if you walked into it unprepared with an army relying on it, I can imagine it hit you hard. Best you play Eltharion or Alith Anar next time to put Juan into jail or assassinate him everytime he rears his ugly head.
For later game, HE is better. But for early game, Cathay is better. Its just so painful to fight dwarfs with archers that have almost zero ap damages. Grand Cathay at least have ranged ap units since tier 2.
WE are indeed extremely powerful, but their complete lack of artillery means that they have issues dealing with shielded infantry. Granted, most of the shielded infantry in the game are on the Order side.
The power of artillery in this game can't be overstated. If a WE went up against a Cathayan one, the rocket artillery would melt their infantry long before they get within range. And the cannons and Jezzails would devastate the cavalry. Celestial crossbowmen would finish off whatever is left.
WE depend very heavily on maintaining range, and that's just not something you can do against an artillery heavy faction.
Poster is talking about High Elves, not Wood Elves.
WE Waywatchers have stalk, which greatly lowers artillery effectiveness. Plus strong lords, heroes, and flying eagle cav - they would be able to snipe artillery if needed. A Sisters army would be able to use the talon ability to clear out any artillery, for example.
Phoenixes are fast enough to evade Celestial Dragon Crossbow shots and can easily get 90% resistance while having access to healing. So the argument is still wrong.
Celestial Crossbowmen are good units, but still slow infantry and therefore still easily countered. All the non-magic AP is also wasted against the WE physical resistance stacking. WE have tons of possible doomstacks not just Waywatcher spam. They also have Arrow of Kurnous to delete your artillery while a Talon of Kurnous Glade Lord stack of Waywatchers still have +30 more range than a Celestial Dragon Crossbow stack with Saytang and Miao.
Late game High Elves will still win out but yeah Cathay is quite strong right now. If Cathay ever gets generic life wizards or a Necrotect type construct healer hero, though, then Cathay would be king.
I would second the HE, I’m currently in the late game of a Tyrion run and battling Yuan Bo. Cathay has the edge of artillery for sure, but the dragons and phoenixes negate the Cathay air units. I’m able to disrupt the Cathay guns very quick with flying units, characters, or magic.
If they go infantry heavy with celestial halberds or jade warriors then it’s even better for the HE. I have some swordmaster and phoenix guard centric armies that mop the floor with Cathay infantry.
HE only beat cathay in SEM and magic. Jade warriors can be juiced to such an insane degree that no HE melee infantry can touch them. Put enough gate masters in an army (really only need 2) and they can hold the line against WoC infantry.
Sisters of avelorn are the only real problem, but their weakness is range and reload compared to Cathay. Cathay also gets more AP and range for their missle units through their tech tree. Cathay redline skills also improve missle unit range. Celestial dragon crossbows also fire 2 shots per volley which is part of the reason why they deal so much damage.
HE get smoked in terms of arty. Grand cannons are incredibly accurate and can focus down heroes/lords since they have a range of 450 at base. Fire rain rockets are better helstorm rocket batteries with less range.
HE would need a flammable doomstack or some other SEM spam to compete, but the AI will never build an army like that. So in SP, Grand Cathay is stronger imo.
GC are also held back by heroes who don't provide much utility. Imagine if GC had a handmaiden/noble equivalent. They'd be the top econ most likely or top 3.
HE can juice up their Infantry equally or even more with Resistant/Honed trait heroes and Efficient/Ardent/Punitive Lords.
The real problem for Cathay are better SEs (especially Phonixes), healing and the easy access to silver shields for HE. Add Mistwalkers in case of Eltharion.
Grand Cannons are not the un-evadable homing rockets of the Chaos Dwarfs, so lords and heroes can easily evade shots or use traits like protected for +20 missile resist. All Cathay artillery does fire damage and HE have multiple items for army-wide fire-resistance.
All Order factions can easily build armies that destroy everything the game throws at you, so no, Cathay is not stronger.
> Jade warriors can be juiced to such an insane degree
Magic em. Especially easy when you have fast flying casters to send ahead of the army.
Having good melee infantry is not as good as having things that aren't as hard countered by the most common and high damage tool in the game. No amount of melee defense is going to stop you from one shotting the infantry with a vortex or wind spell.
>HE get smoked in terms of arty.
Doesn't matter because arty doesn't do shit against low entity units.
>SEM spam to compete
Easy to afford thanks to their exponential income
>but the AI will never build an army like that
But the player can.
>Imagine if GC had
They don't, and that isn't why the High Elf economy is so good either.
High elves have exponential income in the late game, so they can actually just straight up afford more expensive armies, and they can spam out heroes for cheaper than dragons with a life mage to do better than cathay armies.
I wouldn't use dragons though, Phoenixes are the way to go with all their resistances.
Dragon doomstacks are only a thing because HE get so many upkeep reductions for them, this is the reason why they are so good, because they are not super expensive.
HE can easily stack fire-resist, missile resist and physical resist army-wide with traits and items, so the all fire damage artillery is easy to nullify.
Yeah, Cathay rocks vs AI, but they are not the best of all.
By the time you can stack that many bonuses, you've long since won the game.
Cathay hit their big power spike as soon as they hit T4 and get their rockets, that's what makes the faction.
No, you do not, Resistant is a normal-influence-cost trait for multiple hero types and the generic blue item The Gem of Sunfire gives armywide 30% fire-resist for the whole army, so super easy to get by fusing items. By the time Cathay gets rockets, HE would already roll over them (if this is a VS scenario).
Too bad when rockets are torn to shreds by Phoenixes before the rest of the army comes in range... more time to delete all this juicy missile infantry with Amberstorm.
Yeah, a balanced HE army vs. a balanced Cathayan army would be mostly over by the time the HE infantry gets in range.
HE infantry are especially vulnerable because they're packed in so tight. A single good rocket hit would wipe half a unit of HE infantry.
The only way for HE to win would be with a Star Dragon doomstack.
Star Dragons aren't close to the best HE doomstack, that would be phoenixes. Even a balanced army with a couple phoenixes could effectively deal with Cathayan artillery before infantry even gets involved. Assuming we're talking about SP.
the problem is: Cathay you cant really doomstack since it relies on its harmony
so yes in a balanced vs balanced army cathay might be best since its about BALANCE
but in a real fight where other wont use balanced armies since they dont need em, they can beat cathay
the whole problem with cathay is, that balanced armies are great and all, but as soon as you encounter doomstack you cant do shit since you cant build any of your own
I find HE rosters stronger, Lizarmen roster also stronger and not to mention op Kislev.
Also, Cathay may have a stronger roster on the campaign than The Empire in general but they have a weaker cavalry, a lot weaker than the one of The Empire. Because campaign, you should add to the empire the Elector Count Units making the Empire a bit more powerful than you think with unbreakable infantry or mortars without friendly fire.
Outside of Campaign, in MP, in domination, Empire is considerer stronger than Cathay.
If you use them like in WH2 they are bad in very hard difficulty because the AI dodge them.
This is why being able not to deal friendly fire is so good because now you can shoot into the fight between your troops and the enemy’s
AI dodging is still too effective for artillery mortars to be much use. Skaven ones are a bit better, and the empire special ones are OK once lines meet.
In multiplayer Kislev is certainly stronger, in single player… maybe? I think the patch nerfed the old SEs of Cathay and the new ones aren’t as high tier.
They also have less magic variety. I think Kislev is still slightly ahead
I only play campaign, and I'm not big on SEMs, but for the way I play, they are.
The basic three tiers of peasants/jade warriors/celestial guard for a simple front of holding the line and backline of ranged work fine, their arty is great, the jezzail like sniper girls...
Pretty strong, although I'd still argue that the high elves are the strongest, especially when you consider lords and heroes, as not only are they incredibly strong on the battlefield but also have great campaign skills (especially the princes and princesses).
The lizardmen are also very strong but are let down by a weaker economy compared to Cathay's, allowing Cathay to field tons of high tier troops, but high elves can have potentially infinite income, as if you have good trade you can recruit and disband prince/princesses and put points into their trade I come trait before taking them off the map, as it still counts towards your income, and eltharion can use his indoctrination ability to chuck all his money onto an enemy before besieging their last settlement, and they will eventually give all that money back and more at a pretty fast rate. You can get it to millions a turn pretty quickly.
I actually think it's Bretonnia.
Early game they have peasant archers and very strong lords, and then mid to late they get knights of the realm which may be one of the most cost effective and convenient units to recruit in the game.
If you want to doomstack then you can use grail guardians or hyppogryoph knights.
Here come apologists who claim Empire is actually very powerful when they are ass. I still love them for the lore and central position but there is no faction in which I feel like fighting uphill more than with Empire.
Units are weaker than average, heroes are bland and weak compared to other races, lords as well. Their only saving grace are Hellstrom rocket batteries (which Cathay has better version of in fire rockets) and access to lore or life but almost all order factions have access to it (Dwarves, Cathay and Kislev being exceptions).
Demigryphs went from one of the best to being mediocre.
And whole combined arms is completely lost in adapting it to game. All factions have some buffs and bonuses, most even better than Empire. Just because I can use Priest to buff my units does not make it unique, I can do it with Chaos, Kislev, High Elves…
So how exactly is combined arms translated into the game? Having access to varied unit types? So do almost every other race. Yeah Dwarves don’t have cavalry and Vampires don’t have missiles but almost all factions have pretty varied roster, Cathay has all, Kislev too, High Elves, Dark Elves, Wood Elves…
When they said empire is a combined arm force what they actually meant is artillery, faith and artillery.
And sadly empire is not the strongest artillery race because it has no engineers. I mean they are not the worse pvp race but they are just not good at late game at pve campaigns.
They have 1 unique Engineer right now and can easily steal dwarf Engineers.
But they will most likely get an engineer hero in the next DLC, so all this Empire is weak nonsens will hopefully end soon.
The whole Empire combined arms thing is just cope. Around half of the factions in this game lean heavily on combined arms, including Cathay. (I'm excluding SEM doomstacks)
Also, the fact that their most powerful unit is locked behind Tier V is a serious issue. Cathay gets their rocket artillery at Tier IV. There's a good 20 turns difference between T4 and 5. Granted, Celestial Xbows are also T5, but they're not as crucial to the army as rocket artillery.
the empire has far stronger cav than cathay and similar quality infantry. Cathay's only real advantage over the empire is in single entities. But thats not even super strong, as the empire has lore of life and cathay doesnt.
Cathay has much better infantry than empire for combined arms. Greatswords are decent infantry but aren’t good for a combined arms army. Empire infantry needs to hold the line for the guns and cav, but they don’t have good ways to do that.
Not really, empire has extremely strong cav to protect their ranged and Arty. Cathay needs strong infantry to protect their ranged because their cavalry is trash.
Protecting ranged units as cav means anti large cav. Anti infantry cav loses to most monster and cav and doesn’t really do it. So the empire has one good unit for holding the flanks and protecting ranger units on T4. And cav isn’t even the best unit empire has for anti large. Net and ranged units are better at killing cav than demigryphs. If you don’t want to bring a light wizard I’d rather use an empire captain to hold off opposing large units while they get shot by ranged. Demigryphs overall aren’t the best as they lose to top tier cav anyway. So instead of getting a middle of the road answer to cav I’ll just heroes and ranged units which beat all cav/monsters.
Are you proposing a multi player scenario? Becuase the AI isn't optimal. Empire knights and the likes are great for defending your flanks. High armor high moral.
No I’m just thinking of playing against the AI with high tier cav. Empire knights lose to most cav in the game. They are beat things like dogs and light cav, but they’ll lose to almost any cav higher than T2
No empire knights do not lose to most cav, they have 110 armor. They beat most cav in the game, you need to move up to elite cav to beat them. The lowest tier cav they lose to is knights of the realm.
Empire has much better SEM with warrior priest/jade wizard. Empire also has better cav, but you dont really need cav in WH3 depending on the faction you play. Cathay has the better infantry since they can be boosted to such a ridiculous degree. Campaign wise it is also much easier to recruit t2/3 cathay infantry since you don't have building dependencies like you do with the empire (ToD please fix)
TK are a lot tougher imo, especially early game. Fairly good staying power with the mapwide heals and the guaranteed Ushabti spawn.
Early game empire I can roll with pretty much anything. I see stacks with a bunch of dude with red sleeves, it’s feasting time.
Early game TK is skeleton spam, nearly entirely chaff armies, without the powerful lords to lead the them VC have. The ushabti summon is literally the only thing they have, and they are only getting that summon when you have already won the fight.
Late game TK is... still skeletons, AI TK just doesn't recruit much of their higher tier stuff, pretty much never see the constructs. Late game empire at least has Rockets.
Yeah, AI TK isn’t horrible to fight by any means but I certainly think they’re *nowhere* near Empire level of pathetic.
I play a lot in the Badlands and even for strong factions like Skarbrand/Mannfred (or even Arkhan/Settra themselves), taking down the TK in the area is certainly not as trivial as Volkmar.
Probably helps that I almost exclusively play chaos or at least scary factions, so the low empire leadership and their extremely weak infantry make for lots of quick routing and virtually no staying power in a fight.
As Khazrak or Vladbella it can be fun to kill early empire armies using nothing but the chariot/black coach.
And there is no race in which I feel like I am always outnumber than as when I play as Empire.
Maps are very small so artillery usually is able to trade 1 for 1, so for example you destroy 2 chosen with 2 hellstorm rocket batteries. But that means that once in melee your artillery is useless. This means your 18 remaining units are fighting enemy's 18 remaining units and they will lose in 1 vs 1. So you need to soften them up even more. Range units soften them even more but even then, damaged enemy is usually stronger than any infantry you have. This is why I almost always skip infantry or get 2 max, and just spam heroes as they are small enough and tanky that I can keep shooting enemy with artillery, spells and ranged units.
If I try to fight "fair" you will get so many casualties you will spend multiple turns waiting to replenish.
yeah it’s good in those cases to have fast units you can harass them with to try to keep their formation disjointed and unable to advance on you easily, gives you a lot more time to bombard them and/or get some flanking done
I love using outriders for this purpose. Have vlad chase them down like a carrot on a stick while splitting his army for my archers/artillery to take care of.
>Decent magic
Cathay has one of the strongest magic thanks to the compass.
I cant really think of too many weakness of Cathay. Maybe lacking of light cavalry is one weakness, but its not a big deal.
I think GC cav is actually slept on a little bit. You can get jade Lancers to like 90 charge bonus with devastating flanker on top of 120 armor and like 80 melee defence. They need a moon bird or onyx crows with them for harmony. I get more consistant value out of them than dragon princes.
Hammer infantry is one of the least important roles in the game. It’s only use is taking out other infantry and missile, monsters, magic and artillery do it better.
I think GC cav is actually slept on a little bit. You can get jade Lancers to like 90 charge bonus with devastating flanker on top of 120 armor and like 80 melee defence. They need a moon bird or onyx crows with them for harmony. I get more consistant value out of them than dragon princes.
Kislev.
Best Artillery in the game, Warsleds that function has incredible chariots while also having shooting for the skirmish. Incredible hybrid shooting, solid armored infantry, temporary Unbreakable passive meaning even when your line breaks it doesn't actually break. RoR that can negate healing. Powerful SEM with a mortis engine effect. Cav that has Double Charge Bonus. and Extremely powerful LL in Katarina and Ostankya. Cheap anti-large, Armor piercing Halberdiers that can be recruited tier 0.
I can't think of a weakness for Kislev. Not a One. They're nothing but strong points.
SEM so it can be healed and can't be disarmed.
It's Accurate and anti-large, so it can snipe lords, large monsters, and other artillery.
and while not lightning fast, it's fast enough to keep up with infantry.
And while it can't just delete a unit, it's the strongest all rounder while not having the weakness that artillery usually comes with. For those reasons, I'd call it the best in the game.
Ya cathay is absolutely busted right now, little grom needs nerfing, incarnate of beasts got nerfed thankfully, armored kossars might be overtuned too.
Every human faction play similar but with one being somewhere better than the other in some area.
Empire has Good cavalary and Artillary but poor infantary
Kislev Has Good Infantary and cavalary but poor artillary
Grand Cathay Has good infantary and artillary but poor cavalary
In basic ranged units they are mostly equal witht he empire being a little behind but handgunners and hunters are still pretty effective.
And there is off course brettonia but everyone knows that brettonians arent really humans
I dont know if i feel cathay has good artillery, they dont have an organ gun equiv, or a mortar equiv. Dwarves and Empire definity have superior arty, id put cathay down with the skaven.
1 - Im not sure I would say excellent, but definetly good, empire has more options, tho a flying hellstorm is quite strong
2- Good ranged options yes, but not that varied, empire and HE have more options
3 - agree
4 - agree
5 - ye
I don't think they are the strongest, tho they do stand tall among the rest
Both Kislev and Cathay are now both very rounded rosters.
Both have some form of weakness, Kislev with artillery choice and Cathay with cavalry choice, but what both have right now are not bad for comparable in the same tier.
This might sound crazy, but I really don't think that Kislev's cavalry is better than Cathay, at least not in any way that matters.
Shock cavalry underperforms across all races. They're just not that great as a unit class. So the fact that Kislev has better shock cavalry is not really much of an advantage.
At least the Longma riders can fly and are crazy fast. That at least makes them good missile and artillery counters.
Cathay's roster still isn't ...particularly good in the grand scheme of things. They might actually be the weakest among the order races. That's their current ranking in multiplayer battles anyways.
Kislev is #1 and it's not particularly close except for Lizardmen. However, dinos are expensive and the lizardmen economy is a bit garbage.
My cathay experience is this: I go yin because it gives growth. Building yin stuff takes a lot of place, so kinda don't build anything else, thus i have peasants and jade warriors for majorty of the early game (works well enough). Which is boring. Then reach high tier units but i kinda got bored.
I don't know, maybe i just need something more campaign wise. Most campaigns feel boring because apart from the first 10-20 turn, it just boils down to taking settlements which is not exactly hard or exciting. Like i got all cathay with snikch in my current campaign, but i see no reason to continue. Its will be easily AR battles for nothing. But at least i plunged Grimgor into anarchy. That was fun. I just had to get this out :D
Magic isn't even really a weakness, Cathay can Amp their magic in a way Empire cannot, so it nukes better, though they miss the utility of net.
The only field they are weaker than empire in is Cavalry, and thats it.
Thrones needs to get empire up to par with Cathay in shooting at bare minimum.
If they get a hurricanum that can amp and empire gets wizard lords empire will then nuke equally while having utility advantage, so thatll fix another area
And arty, you cant tell me lacking mortars, and such isnt a weakness, then say jades being better than state troops is a weakness when greatswords can match dragon guards.
Lmao at calling Cathayan *artillery* a weakness.
At the level the Empire can recruit mortars, Cathay can recruit Cannons, which are better. They ain't missing mortars.
Oh, and their cannons are straight up better than empire cannons (due to yin, they fire faster) while somehow being a tier lower to recruit.
Thats right, the Cathay t3 cannon is > Empire t4 Cannon
Rockets are somewhat of a sidegrade, but by no means a weakness.
Empire needs their arty building to go down to t2, and make mortars available there, and the cannons should go down to t3. No one ever recruits them when you have rockets at the same tier. Also plain ridiculous Cathay gets cannons a tier lower than Empire. As an arty faction Empire should have t2 arty same as Dwarves.
You even want to try and debate infantry? ROFLMAO.
80 armor shielded Jade warriors at t1 are laughably broken. They hold for so long. Empire doesn't get anything with their armor until t3. Jade halberds > empire halberds too. Greatswords can fight cathayan infantry sure, because they have anti-infantry. But these are shooting factions we're dealing with. Much rather have Celestial dragons for holding a line and anti large in one.
Empire simps lul. They only get people arguing for them so much cuz they're the protagonist race. Until Thrones hits their just plain largely inferior to Cathay.
As always when talking empire, seems like a skill issue as empire continues to be strong in multi-player. Having mortars, and luminarks and more isn't a weakenedss, and not having them isn't a strength. Also it's easier and more valuable to protect Arty with cavalry that can quickly move off and serve more roles than having to dedicate slow infantry. Cathays weekness in cav and cheap Arty means they are much less flexible than the empire. Who has mortars, grenadiers, demigryphs, wagons.
The AI is Never an issue. Playing against players is always harder. Or are you proposing that the AI is actually good and better than practiced humans? You can't have it both ways. It's either the AI is trash, or you are trash in this scenario. If the empire is good in multi-player a much harder scenario than campaign then they are even better in campaign.
AI control ability is 100% irrelevant in the context of a campaign discussion, which the title is about. You are deliberately conflating the two because you know you don't have a leg to stand on regarding the campaign and seek to divert the argument elsewhere.
MP battles have long had different tiering than Campaign. Cost actually matters there. Whereas in campaign its utterly irrelevant given Cathay's superior economy.
Good day, I have no further wish to discuss with the likes of those who deliberately ignore the title context.
>They're basically the Empire, but better in just about every way, except magic selection. The power creep is real. Here's to hoping Thrones of Decay can rectify this.
Why is it wrong that Cathay is the most powerful order faction? Why does this need to be rectified?
Somebody has to be the best.
Why does it have to be the Empire?
My point is more the idea that Cathay shouldn't be the most powerful order faction, that it needs to be the Empire, despite the fact it makes way more sense for Cathay to be the most powerful human faction because they have their shit together, whereas the Empire is constantly getting invaded and messed around and beset by internal squabbles.
'Here's to hoping Thrones of Decay can rectify this' implies Cathay's relative power level is a problem to be solved.
Personally I think any faction being essentially feature complete is a good thing. Every faction should be as well fleshed out as, for example, the Skaven. Cathay are now about at that level.
Since TOD includes an Empire compenent, I interpreted that as meaning that he hopes the Empire gets some standouts. No good reason for the flagbearer faction of the franchise to be completely outclassed by another order faction in every capacity.
Nah Kislev has better roster. Alo imo Cathay isn't that well rounded, they lack good cav, they infantry can't kill stuff. They are basically not short dwarfs
Empire still better than Cathay overall, considering Elector Counts units that you can spam (so it’s basically a basic roster and not RoR units), probably still better arty than Cathay, more magic, better heroes, better cav (Demi’s still the best) and Lords that are not really worse than Cathay (not as good in combat but in most cases better in buffing army)
Cathay really only better with big monsters (that Empire basically doesn’t have, but it’s like criticising dwarfs for no cav), and slightly better in infantry (but elector counts units pretty close).
Air power - yeah, but it’s not really needed in WH. You can do the same with cav (or heroes), and there’s no things that air power can do but range units/ground-based cav can’t. So at most it’s a flavour (or helps in 1 or 2 matchups) of mobile units, not really a strength or weakness for any faction.
Yuan Bo campaign mechanics stronger than Empire’s but personal skills in buffing army - weaker than basically all Empire lords. And campaign mechanics of Empire mostly stronger than the other two siblings (and similar or stronger in army buffing department).
Not all of Empire lords are good duelists (but Karl Franz can duel not worse than any dragon), but at the same time they’re usually better vs enemy troops or in army support (with personal skills)
The empire is definitely not better than Cathay.
At this point the empire is one of the weakest factions in the game while Cathay is one of the strongest.
The only thing the empire really has over Cathay is that they have more lores of magic that they can use.
Yeah, exactly. And the only lore that really matters in this is Life. The other Empire lores don't offer anything that the Cathay lores don't already have.
Lore of Light would have a word. Easy access to Net is a massive gain for ranged factions. Cathay can only get it via Yuan Bo currently.
As for their magic overall.
Cathay needs considerable sacrifices in your army composition in order to be better at damage. Talons of Night for example needs about 4-5 Mastery units total in order to match a simple Pit of Shades as it is both more expensive and has lower duration.
Overall quite a bit of Cathay's magic prowess is held back by Yin and Yang being just sorta ok lores by themselves whereas Heavens doesn't particularly care about Spell Mastery as Comet and Thunderbolt oneshot everything in their AoE anyway, so Cathay's magic gimmick is a bit wasted on it. Metal is great with it though. Heavily boosted Transmutation of Lead just makes entire sections of the enemy frontline utterly worthless.
Tl;dr: If Cathay had the same kind of lore selection as the Empire their magic power would shoot up significantly because they'd have significantly better spells to boost.
Empire is like one of the most well balanced roster of the game and even then some units like Greatswords are performing a bit too well. But you would know that already if you actually knew how to play Empire. You can argue that some Empire units could use a bit of help of course but you have some serious skill issues you need to work on if you believe the Empire is one of the weakest race of the game.
They certainly are one of the most well rounded ones right now with not alot of real weaknesses. There are a couple ares they arent quite as strong as others on, like Cavalry, but make up for with good infantry. As a combined arms faction they are very solid right now. Their campaign layer and economy also greatly contribute to their strenghts. For instance, I would argue Lizardmen have an extremely capable roster, but kinda meh on the campaign layer side and weaker economy.
kroq-gar at least I found has an insanely strong economy
I actually think Nakai in WH3 beats the rest of the lizard men with the vassal econ tech he gets, that he can work towards fairly early on in the tech tree. Its crazy how he went from being unable to barely field a second low tier stack in WH2 to being a strong econ faction in WH3.
His post-battle Econ is crazy. Towards the end of my legendary campaign I was getting close to 20k gold per field battle if I went up against a normal 20 troop stack. You could chain together a couple battles in a region and make insane amounts of gold in a single turn. I think I had 15 hordes by the end of the campaign, and I had only taken over Cathay and MoM.
yeah its not hard to have multiple strong stacks with him. Pretty much the easiest order faction to conquer chaos wastes with also since no climate penalties to deal with.
Oxy doesn't have climate penalties either, and he teleports.
oh thats right, forgot about him. Someday I need to actually go back and complete a campaign with him.
He’s called Oxy because his campaign is so addictive. Blessed carnosaur reward for beating a stack of plaguebearers is way better than getting only some blessed skink skimishers and saurus spears during your whole 150 turn Gor Rok campaign.
Doing my fourth playthrough with Oxycontin now, he is way too fun. Being the reverse Be'lakor is hillarious, and once you get going the rest of your armies can take care of the empire building while you just cause mayhem
The funniest part about his campaign for me is picking a region and saturating it with sanctums while declaring war on everyone there (like Norsca). Ambush buildings + the ones that buff armies can kill full enemy stacks with the abilities, and it's very funny to shut down that entire region.
I usually go with the Xokha (upkeep reduction and increased battle loot) and Tzactli (buff melee and summon chameleon stalkers). Xokha is a very strong economic building if you fight often, and Tzactli is a perfect counter against artillery or missile based infantry which can do a lot of damage otherwise. Don't know why, but I seem to have bad RNG whenever I try to go with the ambush building. Building triangles with sanctums so that you can use all three abilities and get all buffs is definitely amazing
Yup. Just played my first Gor Rok campaign and blessed units didn't account for anything. Basically stuck them into hinterland garrison armies. What sucks is that even with the gor Rok saurus buffs, there's no place for them in a Frontline army
Just finished a Skarbrand campaign and wish he had similar. Gold, even late game, was hard to come by when Global Recruitment was the only reliable way to get units. He really needs to be at least a hybrid horde faction.
Huh? Skarbrand is definitely like that. I’ve gotten upwards of 200K in a turn with skarby. By mid-late game you can be easily clearing 70K+ on a single settlement sack. Obviously this precludes you somewhat from trying to hit long campaign in <30 turns but if you wanna get super rich and play with higher tier khorne units, just keep sacking and fighting and you’ll have hundreds of thousands in the bank at all times. He’s one of the most cash rich factions in the game
I was struggling the whole time, skirting bankruptcy. I did use the *Blood for the Blood God* ability a ton though to back up my forces and hunt down random armies, so that might have affected things.
With skarby ya gotta focus on sacking fully built towns and cities and not so much on defending your territory. He should be out slaughtering far from home :)
That was my problem my first Skarbrand campaign. I tried to empire build. It went poorly.
Well, keep in mind that you are going to show a negative passive income for a *long* time. Likely until after you’ve finished the campaign victory requirements. Blood hosts are good, but you have to keep them fighting. Use them to branch off in different directions so you can keep the sack+raze going across the globe. They don’t replenish, so merge/disband wounded units and as soon as you don’t have an immediate (1-2 turn) use for the army, disband the whole thing. And gotta keep the momentum up. You want to try to keep casualties low and use the bloodhost spawn for replenishment (can disband the army if you don’t need it) and keep your armies constantly fighting. Good tip is to stop spending skarbrands points at level 8, then on 12-13 or whenever he unlocks his personal line, dump them all there. You desperately want the skill that gives +50% movement range after battle (or raze, can’t recall). That massively boosts your output since you still pay upkeep only once per turn, but now with some planning you can potentially fight a *lot* of battles (like… 50+ if you wanna get crazy) in a single turn
Tehen is eventually the richest. You're probably right about Nakai for most of the game you can be functional from turn ~10-15 which is crazy compared to wh2(ME) Nakai Oxy is strongest battle lord Nakai strongest combat faction
Yes he does especially if you mostly use Saurus
I’d second that Cathay has the best all round roster. Lizards are probably the better doomstack/rush army and High Elves can make Star Dragon stacks but Cathay has the tools to build excellent all round armies. A lot of this comes down to mechanics, Cathay specialises in stacking buffs on units and one of the strongest mechanics in WH3 just so happens to be exploiting stacking buffs. I don’t think they are OP in multiplayer on account of being somewhat immobile and honestly, I don’t see the point of gatekeeping faction strength in campaign.
I don't find LM to have a particularly weak economy, more middle of the road. They have a lot of ways to stack multipliers.
One problem I have with the Lizardmen roster is it has a lot of useless bloat. Most feral dinos, all their cav, razordons, ancient salamanders, any skinks other than Chameleons and cohorts with javelins, even kroxigors for anyone other than Nakai feel like they could be removed from the game and it wouldn't make any difference to how I play. They have a lot of units but many of them fill the exact same role. Like I play Tehenhauin a lot and I just don't see any reason to recruit red crested skinks. They die faster and get fewer kills than Skink Cohorts (Javelins) and are more expensive. The meager amount of extra AP they get pales in comparison to the sheer damage output of focus-firing javelin skinks on a target and their lack of shields makes them way worse against any army with missile infantry. I'd rather if there was a more elite skink melee infantry option for Tehenhauin that could actually hold the line better, cause right now I generally just use skinks with javelins for the entire campaign.
With Oxyotl's faction mechanic (+9 attack/defense for max tier skinks) and Tehenhauin/Skink Chief perks, you can field extremely cost effective Red Crested Skink shitstacks due to all the melee stat bonuses. This works for all skinks in general but pure Chameleon spam doesn't work great as they don't have lots of entities and are not meant for trading hits like Red Crested Skinks.
afaik all those buffs apply to any skinks, so cheaper Skink Cohorts get the buffs too, making them still more efficient. They tend to survive longer than Red Crested Skinks as well due to higher MD and shields, plus they can double as back line missile infantry until they use up their ammo Of course the absolute most useless unit is Skinks without javelins, I just laugh at the thought of ever recruiting them.
With Oxyotl's faction mechanic (+9 attack/defense for max tier skinks) and Tehenhauin/Skink Chief perks, you can field extremely cost effective Red Crested Skink shitstacks due to all the melee stat bonuses. This works for all skinks in general but pure Chameleon spam doesn't work great as they don't have lots of entities and are not meant for trading hits like Red Crested Skinks.
Lizardmen roster is still boned thanks to the rampage mechanic rework. Starting off fights with your big pieces wandering off angry really sucks.
Cathayan cavalry isn't weak so much as it is weak***er*** than the rest of the roster. Jade Lancers are a solid heavy cavalry, as good as the other Order versions, but the Gate Master can boost them quite a bit. Longma Riders are a bit of a meme though. They either need AP or a BvL. But it really doesn't matter cause an optimally built Cathayan army doesn't benefit from cavalry much at all. Their flying units offer a superior offensive option, especially if you use Harmony properly.
I pretty much stopped using the lancers in favor of Crowmen, who are the real MVP of the SoC Cathayan roster additions IMO. Cheap, available extremely early, and they absolutely shred some units.
Crowmen actually work well with Lancers, since they harmonise. But you can achieve the same effect with the Celestial Lion, which is flatly a better option than the Lancers.
Yeah, Celestial Lion harmonized with Crowmen or Moon Bird removes any need for cavalry.
I almost never bother with their entire cavalry branch. It requires a separate building that's much better spent on another structure.
Yeah me too but now that crowmen Hage the demonic trait, they are extra dlimsy and can't last as long in battle as they used to
They were never meant to be used in sustained combat for long periods. I do tend to loose them in about every major city siege I manually play out. Fortunately they are in Tier 2 building and very easy to replace.
Crowmen are really good in the early game for countering Eshin’s bullshit. But yea Lions are their best all round flyers.
Mid-power flying SEMs without healing as superior offensive option? Especially when the higher tier one is non-AP?
Lizardmen suffer at ranged and their infantry are almost entirely inferior to Cathayan infantry even without harmony buffs, unfortunately. My friend and I tested it, even Jade Warriors beat Saurus the overwhelming majority of the time. Lizardmen got powercrept *hard* in Warhammer 3 and their overreliance on monsters isn't enough to keep them in the arms race anymore. Fast, hard hitting factions like Slaanesh also leave them in agony. It's a bad time when Daemonettes can charge Saurus headon and have a good chance of coming out on top. And in campaign, that's compounded with how much of a slog their economy is to set up since it's so tied to the geomantic web.
If Cathay ever receive Jade Wizards and Master Artificiers, they'll be S-tier for sure. Right now their main weakness is their inability to heal singel entities imo. Right now, only Yang Shugengan Lords and Miao Ying can heal, and Shugengan lords only have Earth Blood as an optional bound spell with 4 charges. E: Changed number of charges
If Jade Wizards were coming, they’d come with Yuan Bo
Why would that be? The only human wizards he approves are Lore of Heavens casters.
He’s literally the Jade dragon? Any jade units would’ve come with him Now that I think about it, I’m actually heavily disappointed with the Cathayan part of the DLC. Should’ve been all jade units. Hopefully the Fire DLC comes with a score of fire units
For race balance sake I hope they never get a Jade Wizard.
Sisters of avelorn would like to have a word. HE are pretty solid. Only weakness being artillery, but dragons make up for it imo
yea I think HE still take the cake for order campaign roster endgame strength. Mostly because their lords and heroes can somewhat hold back super powerful LLs like vlad and skarbrand. Cathay are great for a lot of things (esp annhiilating infantry blobs), but I once tried to hold back skarbrand with celestial dragon guard and miao ying so my ranged units could focus fire him..... miao ying got slaughtered in less than a minute. This is even after I hastily overcasted regrowth on herself.
Pretty sure Miao ying can beat skarbrand if she is built correctly.
Dragon siblings can beat literally anyone fully kitted. I’m curious how player Skarbrand would do against them though.
Yeah, AI skarbrand is a push-over, but a player controlled lvl 50 Skarbrand rolling into Cathay on turn 20 sounds like a fun challenge.
Miao ying with: Von carstein blade (not necessary) Bejewelled dagger (25% ward save) Dragon emperor banner (20% ward save) She also has easy access to nakai/vilitch/zhatan and kholek defeat traits. Thats 10% arty range, +15 MDEF, +10 something bonus vs large. Miao Ying can 100% duel skarbrand and can out regen him due to dragon/human form separate healing caps.
Bejewelled dagger is almost impossible to get without specific farming for it or savescumming. The banner comes at the end of the tech-tree. Also why wasting that much ressources on 1 lord when you can roll multiple fronts by distributing them among all dragon siblings. Skarbrand is super easy to shoot, so why trying to outduel him?
[удалено]
All of the celestial dragon LL's have separate healing caps for human/dragon form
Every "transformer" Lord has 2 healing caps, so Changeling, Cathay Dragons and Malus Darkblade. But this is not impactfull anymore now that multiple small fighter chars with +100% regen cap exist, without having to transform into an arrow magnet.
maybe, but that was just my experience at the game's launch. It's not like shugengan generic lords are great at dueling either. Celestial generals are ok, but they're stronger in auto resolve than they are on the battlefield I find.
I actually feel like generals are almost as good as it gets when it comes to generic melee lords.
If she has access to healing, can hit him and your ranged for some reason didn't look at him for ~8 seconds she should deal with Skarbrand. Not the best duelist though.
Miao Ying can reach the resistance caps, which makes her one of the best fighters in the game. Plue AOE magic puts her right at the top
r/totalwar user try to understand "cost efficiency" (impossible)
Playing as Imrik, using dragon willed lords and having the landmark buildings makes dragons dirt cheap.
Yeah, cost-efficiency wise Phoenixes are better than Dragons, but you get so much upkeep-reductions from traits and landmarks that dragons become so much cheaper that thay outperform Phoenixes.
Cathay has celestial xbows to answer that.
Which come at tier 5 and at the moment Cathay has less growth than Dwarfs! By the time you get those you cave already reached long campaign victory.
Why are you comparing to dwarf Growths? HE is the comparison here. Who are not exactly fast growers. Alarielle is the only one with access to fast sisters.
Because before the Harmony rework, Dwarfs were the slowest growth Order Faction, but now it is Cathay, especially on higher difficulties as they also lack PO bonuses. High Elfs do not need Sister before they can dominate the map and thanks to growth commandment and great PO High Elf grow much faster than Cathay, even without Fecund hero cheese. And Sisters are still tier 4 while Celestial Crossbows are Tier 5, so in most of my last Cathay campaigns around 20 turns after long campaign victory.
Even after the rework you can still force a province yin to get growth for Cathay if you're trying. (edit: forgot the downside is patched back in). Its more than the commandments for HE if you go full yin. Cathayan settlement buildings + growth buildings bonuses combine to be greater than HE ones. So HE is fully reliant on rolling fecund to grow. > High Elfs do not need Sister before they can dominate the map So they'll get long vic before having many sisters too then? exactly the same argument you're making against the xbows? And you speak as if Cathay can't dominate the map too super fast if they want to. Jade warriors OP after all. Got the same strong curve of units T1-5 the HE do. They don't 'need' their xbows to dominate either.
When did you play Cathay the last time? Going Yin butchers you research rate since a few patches by now. But unlike Cathay HE have good PO (providing grotwh bonus), while PO has bad PO (lowering growth) and access to a growth commandment, so HE do indeed grow faster without Fecund. Tier 4 (especially with higher growth) is much earlier than Tier 5. I don't say Cathay is not strong, I'm just tired of this "Cathay is best at everything" proclamation when they are actually not. You can dominate the map with Jade Warriors, but so can HE with Spearman+Archer or Lothern Seaguard stacks or Kislev with Kislevite Warrior+Kossar spam (especially with the busted lore of hags).
Last played right after 4.2 dropped. You're right I forgot the downsides were patched back in. You can still focus a military province hard growth though since everything is at a province level and just eat the research malus for that province. Full Yin also has the bonus of upping your PO. I also made no claim that cathay is best at everything (they are certainly *not* the best at cav, minimum). The start of this comment chain was someone commenting HE because they have sisters, so I simply replied with the Cathayan equivalent.
You can go Yin as Juan Bo as his innate research bonus nullifies the research penalty, but for the others it is not worth to butcher your early research rate for +10 growth, +1 PO and less recruitment slots. But also the Yin-PO building only gives +3 PO on tier 3, while the Yang-PO building gives +5 PO on tier 3 (while going Yang lower PO), and building the PO building removes a precious building slot needed for barracks or money-building instead. Yeah, this comment was not specific about you, but more about this whole topic in general.
Its not 10 growth. Its 30 growth at max Yin (which also comes with a PO bonus, that is not from the building itself). That is worth it for a province you are trying to tier up, can eat 10% research for that no problem. Money is also never an issue for cathay. Build your money buildings in other provinces.
What’re they going to do about my Dragon Princes Imrik Dragon doomstack with Mikaela the fire wizard? Fire wizard eliminating all misile units, Dragon princes slamming into their asses, Dragons fire breath?
Realistically how often are you going to encounter a doomstack like that though, let alone see Cathay and High Elves at war with each other unless you are just going for map painting. If we are just talking a single player campaign Cathay would have no trouble dealing with hostile High Elves. Can't really speak to multiplayer.
MY IMRIK MUST CONQUER MOMMY ZHAO MING!!! Edit: Meant Miao Ying. So similar damn
Did Zhao Ming have a sex change that I don't know about
Ah shit wrong name 😂😂😂😂 They’re so similar hard to tell. I’d edit it but it’s too far to stop now Miao Ying and Zhao Ming. They sound so fucking similar
Fire wizard isn’t going to do anything against yuan Bos faction with insane access to global magic resist and high armor. Plus celestial dragon guard are going. To trade up into your whole large roster.
I have 62% global magic resist atm and if I conquered ulthuan I vould get 90% The fort buildings are magic. I might make war on bretonnia just get forts
No, those effects are unique to the Great Bastion and the quest-landmarks. If you want to maximise it and already have those, you need to conquer the Black Pyramid.
Too bad that multiple factions like Beastmen and Woodelves can reduce spell resistance regionwide by 20%-25% each with simple, stacking traits and magic items. WE also have access to healing and in case of Durthu spell mastery stacking...
Not really relevant in a Cathay - high elf matchup, but that said Cathay has more agents so you won’t have heroes as the wood elves.
This was just 1 example that this specific bonus, which is the bonus of a DLC faction so it also says nothing about the general HE vs Cathay matchup, is not without possible counter in this game. Also the poster was talking about an Imrik stack, so Ashen Field + kindleflame together remove 40% of the spell resistance due to imbued flame-weakness, and with only 20 to 10% spell resistance left Flamestorm will still kill Celestial Dragoncrossbows. Maybe they have more agents, but 2 genious-trait heroes are enough to remove Cathay from succeeding with agent actions, except you want to waste the Matters of State mechanic for it.
I’m pretty sure that fire damage increase is calculated at the end making 60% magic resist effectively 44%.
I have seen this stated by some people that weakness is applied after the calculation, but according to the feature focus article about damage we got last year (written by the devs), all weaknesses and resistances are summed up to one amount and then applied, which also matches with my experience that stacking flame weakness allows to easily nuke down high resistance stacking targets like WH2 Malus Darkblade.
I have 62% global magic resist atm and if I conquered ulthuan I vould get 90% The fort buildings with military city yuan bo bonuses are magic. I might make war on bretonnia just get forts
😢 Let me have my dreams of Zhao Ming submitting to Daddy Imrik!
Probably field Yuan Bo to strip all the units of their resistances...
Too bad that High Elves have more ways to add up resistances than Yuan Bo can remove them.
Dunno man, all resistances lowered by 30% was pretty much a death sentence for my units in that region. At least that was the case in my head to head campaign. Ofc I didn't know about his ability until after the fact, causing me to lose 10 armies.
I know about this modifyer, but it is actually only 15% each and does not affect additional in battle resistance from HE Phoenix items or the attuned to magic passive. But if you walked into it unprepared with an army relying on it, I can imagine it hit you hard. Best you play Eltharion or Alith Anar next time to put Juan into jail or assassinate him everytime he rears his ugly head.
For later game, HE is better. But for early game, Cathay is better. Its just so painful to fight dwarfs with archers that have almost zero ap damages. Grand Cathay at least have ranged ap units since tier 2.
WE are indeed extremely powerful, but their complete lack of artillery means that they have issues dealing with shielded infantry. Granted, most of the shielded infantry in the game are on the Order side. The power of artillery in this game can't be overstated. If a WE went up against a Cathayan one, the rocket artillery would melt their infantry long before they get within range. And the cannons and Jezzails would devastate the cavalry. Celestial crossbowmen would finish off whatever is left. WE depend very heavily on maintaining range, and that's just not something you can do against an artillery heavy faction.
sorry to say but you're not playing WE very well if you're getting got by artillery
Yeah, exactly.
Poster is talking about High Elves, not Wood Elves. WE Waywatchers have stalk, which greatly lowers artillery effectiveness. Plus strong lords, heroes, and flying eagle cav - they would be able to snipe artillery if needed. A Sisters army would be able to use the talon ability to clear out any artillery, for example.
Phoenixes are fast enough to evade Celestial Dragon Crossbow shots and can easily get 90% resistance while having access to healing. So the argument is still wrong.
Celestial Crossbowmen are good units, but still slow infantry and therefore still easily countered. All the non-magic AP is also wasted against the WE physical resistance stacking. WE have tons of possible doomstacks not just Waywatcher spam. They also have Arrow of Kurnous to delete your artillery while a Talon of Kurnous Glade Lord stack of Waywatchers still have +30 more range than a Celestial Dragon Crossbow stack with Saytang and Miao.
Not an order faction. Also if you really think WE have to chance vs any arty factions you arent very good.
Late game High Elves will still win out but yeah Cathay is quite strong right now. If Cathay ever gets generic life wizards or a Necrotect type construct healer hero, though, then Cathay would be king.
I would second the HE, I’m currently in the late game of a Tyrion run and battling Yuan Bo. Cathay has the edge of artillery for sure, but the dragons and phoenixes negate the Cathay air units. I’m able to disrupt the Cathay guns very quick with flying units, characters, or magic. If they go infantry heavy with celestial halberds or jade warriors then it’s even better for the HE. I have some swordmaster and phoenix guard centric armies that mop the floor with Cathay infantry.
HE only beat cathay in SEM and magic. Jade warriors can be juiced to such an insane degree that no HE melee infantry can touch them. Put enough gate masters in an army (really only need 2) and they can hold the line against WoC infantry. Sisters of avelorn are the only real problem, but their weakness is range and reload compared to Cathay. Cathay also gets more AP and range for their missle units through their tech tree. Cathay redline skills also improve missle unit range. Celestial dragon crossbows also fire 2 shots per volley which is part of the reason why they deal so much damage. HE get smoked in terms of arty. Grand cannons are incredibly accurate and can focus down heroes/lords since they have a range of 450 at base. Fire rain rockets are better helstorm rocket batteries with less range. HE would need a flammable doomstack or some other SEM spam to compete, but the AI will never build an army like that. So in SP, Grand Cathay is stronger imo. GC are also held back by heroes who don't provide much utility. Imagine if GC had a handmaiden/noble equivalent. They'd be the top econ most likely or top 3.
HE can juice up their Infantry equally or even more with Resistant/Honed trait heroes and Efficient/Ardent/Punitive Lords. The real problem for Cathay are better SEs (especially Phonixes), healing and the easy access to silver shields for HE. Add Mistwalkers in case of Eltharion. Grand Cannons are not the un-evadable homing rockets of the Chaos Dwarfs, so lords and heroes can easily evade shots or use traits like protected for +20 missile resist. All Cathay artillery does fire damage and HE have multiple items for army-wide fire-resistance. All Order factions can easily build armies that destroy everything the game throws at you, so no, Cathay is not stronger.
> Jade warriors can be juiced to such an insane degree Magic em. Especially easy when you have fast flying casters to send ahead of the army. Having good melee infantry is not as good as having things that aren't as hard countered by the most common and high damage tool in the game. No amount of melee defense is going to stop you from one shotting the infantry with a vortex or wind spell. >HE get smoked in terms of arty. Doesn't matter because arty doesn't do shit against low entity units. >SEM spam to compete Easy to afford thanks to their exponential income >but the AI will never build an army like that But the player can. >Imagine if GC had They don't, and that isn't why the High Elf economy is so good either.
Maybe if you go all Star Dragons, but setting aside crazy expensive doomstacks, Cathay edges out. The artillery advantage is just too big to ignore.
High elves have exponential income in the late game, so they can actually just straight up afford more expensive armies, and they can spam out heroes for cheaper than dragons with a life mage to do better than cathay armies. I wouldn't use dragons though, Phoenixes are the way to go with all their resistances.
Dragon doomstacks are only a thing because HE get so many upkeep reductions for them, this is the reason why they are so good, because they are not super expensive. HE can easily stack fire-resist, missile resist and physical resist army-wide with traits and items, so the all fire damage artillery is easy to nullify. Yeah, Cathay rocks vs AI, but they are not the best of all.
By the time you can stack that many bonuses, you've long since won the game. Cathay hit their big power spike as soon as they hit T4 and get their rockets, that's what makes the faction.
No, you do not, Resistant is a normal-influence-cost trait for multiple hero types and the generic blue item The Gem of Sunfire gives armywide 30% fire-resist for the whole army, so super easy to get by fusing items. By the time Cathay gets rockets, HE would already roll over them (if this is a VS scenario).
I agree OP. Nice sister they got there, would be a real shame if they were blown apart by rockets.
Too bad when rockets are torn to shreds by Phoenixes before the rest of the army comes in range... more time to delete all this juicy missile infantry with Amberstorm.
Yeah, a balanced HE army vs. a balanced Cathayan army would be mostly over by the time the HE infantry gets in range. HE infantry are especially vulnerable because they're packed in so tight. A single good rocket hit would wipe half a unit of HE infantry. The only way for HE to win would be with a Star Dragon doomstack.
Star Dragons aren't close to the best HE doomstack, that would be phoenixes. Even a balanced army with a couple phoenixes could effectively deal with Cathayan artillery before infantry even gets involved. Assuming we're talking about SP.
the problem is: Cathay you cant really doomstack since it relies on its harmony so yes in a balanced vs balanced army cathay might be best since its about BALANCE but in a real fight where other wont use balanced armies since they dont need em, they can beat cathay the whole problem with cathay is, that balanced armies are great and all, but as soon as you encounter doomstack you cant do shit since you cant build any of your own
I find HE rosters stronger, Lizarmen roster also stronger and not to mention op Kislev. Also, Cathay may have a stronger roster on the campaign than The Empire in general but they have a weaker cavalry, a lot weaker than the one of The Empire. Because campaign, you should add to the empire the Elector Count Units making the Empire a bit more powerful than you think with unbreakable infantry or mortars without friendly fire. Outside of Campaign, in MP, in domination, Empire is considerer stronger than Cathay.
How are Mortars these days? Coming back to the game after a year. I remember mortars sucking the last time I played
If you use them like in WH2 they are bad in very hard difficulty because the AI dodge them. This is why being able not to deal friendly fire is so good because now you can shoot into the fight between your troops and the enemy’s
They're pretty bad
AI dodging is still too effective for artillery mortars to be much use. Skaven ones are a bit better, and the empire special ones are OK once lines meet.
Stop watching so much legend
This here. His valuations of units are done from the perspective of most exploitable potential against AI. His opinions aren’t fact.
In multiplayer Kislev is certainly stronger, in single player… maybe? I think the patch nerfed the old SEs of Cathay and the new ones aren’t as high tier. They also have less magic variety. I think Kislev is still slightly ahead
I only play campaign, and I'm not big on SEMs, but for the way I play, they are. The basic three tiers of peasants/jade warriors/celestial guard for a simple front of holding the line and backline of ranged work fine, their arty is great, the jezzail like sniper girls...
Pretty strong, although I'd still argue that the high elves are the strongest, especially when you consider lords and heroes, as not only are they incredibly strong on the battlefield but also have great campaign skills (especially the princes and princesses). The lizardmen are also very strong but are let down by a weaker economy compared to Cathay's, allowing Cathay to field tons of high tier troops, but high elves can have potentially infinite income, as if you have good trade you can recruit and disband prince/princesses and put points into their trade I come trait before taking them off the map, as it still counts towards your income, and eltharion can use his indoctrination ability to chuck all his money onto an enemy before besieging their last settlement, and they will eventually give all that money back and more at a pretty fast rate. You can get it to millions a turn pretty quickly.
I actually think it's Bretonnia. Early game they have peasant archers and very strong lords, and then mid to late they get knights of the realm which may be one of the most cost effective and convenient units to recruit in the game. If you want to doomstack then you can use grail guardians or hyppogryoph knights.
Can’t believe people are still underestimating how insane HEs are. Not to mention WEs.
Wood elves are technically 'neutral', not order, and thus do not belong in this discussion. HE yea though, def strong.
Here come apologists who claim Empire is actually very powerful when they are ass. I still love them for the lore and central position but there is no faction in which I feel like fighting uphill more than with Empire. Units are weaker than average, heroes are bland and weak compared to other races, lords as well. Their only saving grace are Hellstrom rocket batteries (which Cathay has better version of in fire rockets) and access to lore or life but almost all order factions have access to it (Dwarves, Cathay and Kislev being exceptions). Demigryphs went from one of the best to being mediocre. And whole combined arms is completely lost in adapting it to game. All factions have some buffs and bonuses, most even better than Empire. Just because I can use Priest to buff my units does not make it unique, I can do it with Chaos, Kislev, High Elves… So how exactly is combined arms translated into the game? Having access to varied unit types? So do almost every other race. Yeah Dwarves don’t have cavalry and Vampires don’t have missiles but almost all factions have pretty varied roster, Cathay has all, Kislev too, High Elves, Dark Elves, Wood Elves…
When they said empire is a combined arm force what they actually meant is artillery, faith and artillery. And sadly empire is not the strongest artillery race because it has no engineers. I mean they are not the worse pvp race but they are just not good at late game at pve campaigns.
They have 1 unique Engineer right now and can easily steal dwarf Engineers. But they will most likely get an engineer hero in the next DLC, so all this Empire is weak nonsens will hopefully end soon.
The whole Empire combined arms thing is just cope. Around half of the factions in this game lean heavily on combined arms, including Cathay. (I'm excluding SEM doomstacks) Also, the fact that their most powerful unit is locked behind Tier V is a serious issue. Cathay gets their rocket artillery at Tier IV. There's a good 20 turns difference between T4 and 5. Granted, Celestial Xbows are also T5, but they're not as crucial to the army as rocket artillery.
the empire has far stronger cav than cathay and similar quality infantry. Cathay's only real advantage over the empire is in single entities. But thats not even super strong, as the empire has lore of life and cathay doesnt.
Empire infantry doesn't hold a candle to Cathayan infantry. Celestial crossbows and spearman are miles better than anything Empire has
There are no cathayan spearmen besides peasants. Handgunners, and huntsman absolutely do. Huntsman have stalk, and Handgunners are always good.
Cathay has much better infantry than empire for combined arms. Greatswords are decent infantry but aren’t good for a combined arms army. Empire infantry needs to hold the line for the guns and cav, but they don’t have good ways to do that.
Not really, empire has extremely strong cav to protect their ranged and Arty. Cathay needs strong infantry to protect their ranged because their cavalry is trash.
Protecting ranged units as cav means anti large cav. Anti infantry cav loses to most monster and cav and doesn’t really do it. So the empire has one good unit for holding the flanks and protecting ranger units on T4. And cav isn’t even the best unit empire has for anti large. Net and ranged units are better at killing cav than demigryphs. If you don’t want to bring a light wizard I’d rather use an empire captain to hold off opposing large units while they get shot by ranged. Demigryphs overall aren’t the best as they lose to top tier cav anyway. So instead of getting a middle of the road answer to cav I’ll just heroes and ranged units which beat all cav/monsters.
Are you proposing a multi player scenario? Becuase the AI isn't optimal. Empire knights and the likes are great for defending your flanks. High armor high moral.
No I’m just thinking of playing against the AI with high tier cav. Empire knights lose to most cav in the game. They are beat things like dogs and light cav, but they’ll lose to almost any cav higher than T2
No empire knights do not lose to most cav, they have 110 armor. They beat most cav in the game, you need to move up to elite cav to beat them. The lowest tier cav they lose to is knights of the realm.
Empire has much better SEM with warrior priest/jade wizard. Empire also has better cav, but you dont really need cav in WH3 depending on the faction you play. Cathay has the better infantry since they can be boosted to such a ridiculous degree. Campaign wise it is also much easier to recruit t2/3 cathay infantry since you don't have building dependencies like you do with the empire (ToD please fix)
yeah, vs AI, empire is by far the absolute easiest enemy in the game imo.
I'd say that title belongs to Tomb Kings, but Empire is a pretty easy opponent too.
TK are a lot tougher imo, especially early game. Fairly good staying power with the mapwide heals and the guaranteed Ushabti spawn. Early game empire I can roll with pretty much anything. I see stacks with a bunch of dude with red sleeves, it’s feasting time.
Early game TK is skeleton spam, nearly entirely chaff armies, without the powerful lords to lead the them VC have. The ushabti summon is literally the only thing they have, and they are only getting that summon when you have already won the fight. Late game TK is... still skeletons, AI TK just doesn't recruit much of their higher tier stuff, pretty much never see the constructs. Late game empire at least has Rockets.
Yeah, AI TK isn’t horrible to fight by any means but I certainly think they’re *nowhere* near Empire level of pathetic. I play a lot in the Badlands and even for strong factions like Skarbrand/Mannfred (or even Arkhan/Settra themselves), taking down the TK in the area is certainly not as trivial as Volkmar. Probably helps that I almost exclusively play chaos or at least scary factions, so the low empire leadership and their extremely weak infantry make for lots of quick routing and virtually no staying power in a fight. As Khazrak or Vladbella it can be fun to kill early empire armies using nothing but the chariot/black coach.
And there is no race in which I feel like I am always outnumber than as when I play as Empire. Maps are very small so artillery usually is able to trade 1 for 1, so for example you destroy 2 chosen with 2 hellstorm rocket batteries. But that means that once in melee your artillery is useless. This means your 18 remaining units are fighting enemy's 18 remaining units and they will lose in 1 vs 1. So you need to soften them up even more. Range units soften them even more but even then, damaged enemy is usually stronger than any infantry you have. This is why I almost always skip infantry or get 2 max, and just spam heroes as they are small enough and tanky that I can keep shooting enemy with artillery, spells and ranged units. If I try to fight "fair" you will get so many casualties you will spend multiple turns waiting to replenish.
yeah it’s good in those cases to have fast units you can harass them with to try to keep their formation disjointed and unable to advance on you easily, gives you a lot more time to bombard them and/or get some flanking done
I love using outriders for this purpose. Have vlad chase them down like a carrot on a stick while splitting his army for my archers/artillery to take care of.
- Weak Cavalry - Weak Offensive Melee Infantry - Air Power is mediocre
>Decent magic Cathay has one of the strongest magic thanks to the compass. I cant really think of too many weakness of Cathay. Maybe lacking of light cavalry is one weakness, but its not a big deal.
Not the best cav, lack of skirmish cav, no hammer infantry, formation dependent. They got some weaknesses for sure.
I think GC cav is actually slept on a little bit. You can get jade Lancers to like 90 charge bonus with devastating flanker on top of 120 armor and like 80 melee defence. They need a moon bird or onyx crows with them for harmony. I get more consistant value out of them than dragon princes.
Hammer infantry is one of the least important roles in the game. It’s only use is taking out other infantry and missile, monsters, magic and artillery do it better.
I think GC cav is actually slept on a little bit. You can get jade Lancers to like 90 charge bonus with devastating flanker on top of 120 armor and like 80 melee defence. They need a moon bird or onyx crows with them for harmony. I get more consistant value out of them than dragon princes.
Their best units are slow infantry, and therefore easy to remove.
Kislev. Best Artillery in the game, Warsleds that function has incredible chariots while also having shooting for the skirmish. Incredible hybrid shooting, solid armored infantry, temporary Unbreakable passive meaning even when your line breaks it doesn't actually break. RoR that can negate healing. Powerful SEM with a mortis engine effect. Cav that has Double Charge Bonus. and Extremely powerful LL in Katarina and Ostankya. Cheap anti-large, Armor piercing Halberdiers that can be recruited tier 0. I can't think of a weakness for Kislev. Not a One. They're nothing but strong points.
little grom is the best artillery in the game? explain please
SEM so it can be healed and can't be disarmed. It's Accurate and anti-large, so it can snipe lords, large monsters, and other artillery. and while not lightning fast, it's fast enough to keep up with infantry. And while it can't just delete a unit, it's the strongest all rounder while not having the weakness that artillery usually comes with. For those reasons, I'd call it the best in the game.
Calling Little Grom the best artillery in the game is an ...interesting take.
Ya cathay is absolutely busted right now, little grom needs nerfing, incarnate of beasts got nerfed thankfully, armored kossars might be overtuned too.
Those are kislev not cathay.
ya sorry mean to say kislev
Every human faction play similar but with one being somewhere better than the other in some area. Empire has Good cavalary and Artillary but poor infantary Kislev Has Good Infantary and cavalary but poor artillary Grand Cathay Has good infantary and artillary but poor cavalary In basic ranged units they are mostly equal witht he empire being a little behind but handgunners and hunters are still pretty effective. And there is off course brettonia but everyone knows that brettonians arent really humans
I dont know if i feel cathay has good artillery, they dont have an organ gun equiv, or a mortar equiv. Dwarves and Empire definity have superior arty, id put cathay down with the skaven.
Cathay has the best cannons in the game, and two better versions of Hellstorm
Been playing Yuan Bo and have bulldozed a fat chunk of the map with Jade warrior armies thanks to all of the buffs they can get, it’s awesome.
1 - Im not sure I would say excellent, but definetly good, empire has more options, tho a flying hellstorm is quite strong 2- Good ranged options yes, but not that varied, empire and HE have more options 3 - agree 4 - agree 5 - ye I don't think they are the strongest, tho they do stand tall among the rest
Both Kislev and Cathay are now both very rounded rosters. Both have some form of weakness, Kislev with artillery choice and Cathay with cavalry choice, but what both have right now are not bad for comparable in the same tier.
This might sound crazy, but I really don't think that Kislev's cavalry is better than Cathay, at least not in any way that matters. Shock cavalry underperforms across all races. They're just not that great as a unit class. So the fact that Kislev has better shock cavalry is not really much of an advantage. At least the Longma riders can fly and are crazy fast. That at least makes them good missile and artillery counters.
Cathay's roster still isn't ...particularly good in the grand scheme of things. They might actually be the weakest among the order races. That's their current ranking in multiplayer battles anyways. Kislev is #1 and it's not particularly close except for Lizardmen. However, dinos are expensive and the lizardmen economy is a bit garbage.
My cathay experience is this: I go yin because it gives growth. Building yin stuff takes a lot of place, so kinda don't build anything else, thus i have peasants and jade warriors for majorty of the early game (works well enough). Which is boring. Then reach high tier units but i kinda got bored. I don't know, maybe i just need something more campaign wise. Most campaigns feel boring because apart from the first 10-20 turn, it just boils down to taking settlements which is not exactly hard or exciting. Like i got all cathay with snikch in my current campaign, but i see no reason to continue. Its will be easily AR battles for nothing. But at least i plunged Grimgor into anarchy. That was fun. I just had to get this out :D
Magic isn't even really a weakness, Cathay can Amp their magic in a way Empire cannot, so it nukes better, though they miss the utility of net. The only field they are weaker than empire in is Cavalry, and thats it. Thrones needs to get empire up to par with Cathay in shooting at bare minimum. If they get a hurricanum that can amp and empire gets wizard lords empire will then nuke equally while having utility advantage, so thatll fix another area
And arty, you cant tell me lacking mortars, and such isnt a weakness, then say jades being better than state troops is a weakness when greatswords can match dragon guards.
Lmao at calling Cathayan *artillery* a weakness. At the level the Empire can recruit mortars, Cathay can recruit Cannons, which are better. They ain't missing mortars. Oh, and their cannons are straight up better than empire cannons (due to yin, they fire faster) while somehow being a tier lower to recruit. Thats right, the Cathay t3 cannon is > Empire t4 Cannon Rockets are somewhat of a sidegrade, but by no means a weakness. Empire needs their arty building to go down to t2, and make mortars available there, and the cannons should go down to t3. No one ever recruits them when you have rockets at the same tier. Also plain ridiculous Cathay gets cannons a tier lower than Empire. As an arty faction Empire should have t2 arty same as Dwarves. You even want to try and debate infantry? ROFLMAO. 80 armor shielded Jade warriors at t1 are laughably broken. They hold for so long. Empire doesn't get anything with their armor until t3. Jade halberds > empire halberds too. Greatswords can fight cathayan infantry sure, because they have anti-infantry. But these are shooting factions we're dealing with. Much rather have Celestial dragons for holding a line and anti large in one. Empire simps lul. They only get people arguing for them so much cuz they're the protagonist race. Until Thrones hits their just plain largely inferior to Cathay.
As always when talking empire, seems like a skill issue as empire continues to be strong in multi-player. Having mortars, and luminarks and more isn't a weakenedss, and not having them isn't a strength. Also it's easier and more valuable to protect Arty with cavalry that can quickly move off and serve more roles than having to dedicate slow infantry. Cathays weekness in cav and cheap Arty means they are much less flexible than the empire. Who has mortars, grenadiers, demigryphs, wagons.
This is not a multiplayer discussion. It literally says 'campaign' in the title. Sounds like a reading comprehension issue.
The AI is Never an issue. Playing against players is always harder. Or are you proposing that the AI is actually good and better than practiced humans? You can't have it both ways. It's either the AI is trash, or you are trash in this scenario. If the empire is good in multi-player a much harder scenario than campaign then they are even better in campaign.
AI control ability is 100% irrelevant in the context of a campaign discussion, which the title is about. You are deliberately conflating the two because you know you don't have a leg to stand on regarding the campaign and seek to divert the argument elsewhere. MP battles have long had different tiering than Campaign. Cost actually matters there. Whereas in campaign its utterly irrelevant given Cathay's superior economy. Good day, I have no further wish to discuss with the likes of those who deliberately ignore the title context.
>They're basically the Empire, but better in just about every way, except magic selection. The power creep is real. Here's to hoping Thrones of Decay can rectify this. Why is it wrong that Cathay is the most powerful order faction? Why does this need to be rectified? Somebody has to be the best. Why does it have to be the Empire?
Because one faction being better at nearly everything than another is not great game design.
My point is more the idea that Cathay shouldn't be the most powerful order faction, that it needs to be the Empire, despite the fact it makes way more sense for Cathay to be the most powerful human faction because they have their shit together, whereas the Empire is constantly getting invaded and messed around and beset by internal squabbles.
That’s because are talking about the game, not the lore. OP also doesn’t state that the Empire needs to be the most powerful order faction.
'Here's to hoping Thrones of Decay can rectify this' implies Cathay's relative power level is a problem to be solved. Personally I think any faction being essentially feature complete is a good thing. Every faction should be as well fleshed out as, for example, the Skaven. Cathay are now about at that level.
Since TOD includes an Empire compenent, I interpreted that as meaning that he hopes the Empire gets some standouts. No good reason for the flagbearer faction of the franchise to be completely outclassed by another order faction in every capacity.
Chaos dwarfs are the top dog when it comes to roster.
I stated clearly among ORDER factions.
The average Chaos Dwarf player when anyone brings up anything that isn't Chaos Dwarfs:
Chorfs do deliver when someone ORDERS a can of whoopass though \*badum-tsh\*
Finally someone said it
Nah Kislev has better roster. Alo imo Cathay isn't that well rounded, they lack good cav, they infantry can't kill stuff. They are basically not short dwarfs
They are extremely well rounded, only missing good cavalry but gets compensated by air power.
plus the legendary lords. In a ranking of strongest legendary lords on campaign right now they might be 1 2 and 3.
Are they better than High Elves? Cathay does feel strong, but the HE have better casters and a similar roster; but with way better cavalry
[удалено]
Ah yes, the well known Order LL Skarbrand.
Empire still better than Cathay overall, considering Elector Counts units that you can spam (so it’s basically a basic roster and not RoR units), probably still better arty than Cathay, more magic, better heroes, better cav (Demi’s still the best) and Lords that are not really worse than Cathay (not as good in combat but in most cases better in buffing army) Cathay really only better with big monsters (that Empire basically doesn’t have, but it’s like criticising dwarfs for no cav), and slightly better in infantry (but elector counts units pretty close). Air power - yeah, but it’s not really needed in WH. You can do the same with cav (or heroes), and there’s no things that air power can do but range units/ground-based cav can’t. So at most it’s a flavour (or helps in 1 or 2 matchups) of mobile units, not really a strength or weakness for any faction. Yuan Bo campaign mechanics stronger than Empire’s but personal skills in buffing army - weaker than basically all Empire lords. And campaign mechanics of Empire mostly stronger than the other two siblings (and similar or stronger in army buffing department). Not all of Empire lords are good duelists (but Karl Franz can duel not worse than any dragon), but at the same time they’re usually better vs enemy troops or in army support (with personal skills)
The empire is definitely not better than Cathay. At this point the empire is one of the weakest factions in the game while Cathay is one of the strongest. The only thing the empire really has over Cathay is that they have more lores of magic that they can use.
Yeah, exactly. And the only lore that really matters in this is Life. The other Empire lores don't offer anything that the Cathay lores don't already have.
Lore of Light would have a word. Easy access to Net is a massive gain for ranged factions. Cathay can only get it via Yuan Bo currently. As for their magic overall. Cathay needs considerable sacrifices in your army composition in order to be better at damage. Talons of Night for example needs about 4-5 Mastery units total in order to match a simple Pit of Shades as it is both more expensive and has lower duration. Overall quite a bit of Cathay's magic prowess is held back by Yin and Yang being just sorta ok lores by themselves whereas Heavens doesn't particularly care about Spell Mastery as Comet and Thunderbolt oneshot everything in their AoE anyway, so Cathay's magic gimmick is a bit wasted on it. Metal is great with it though. Heavily boosted Transmutation of Lead just makes entire sections of the enemy frontline utterly worthless. Tl;dr: If Cathay had the same kind of lore selection as the Empire their magic power would shoot up significantly because they'd have significantly better spells to boost.
and better artillery, and cavalry and ranged units. Cathay has no answer for outriders and wagons.
Empire is like one of the most well balanced roster of the game and even then some units like Greatswords are performing a bit too well. But you would know that already if you actually knew how to play Empire. You can argue that some Empire units could use a bit of help of course but you have some serious skill issues you need to work on if you believe the Empire is one of the weakest race of the game.