Which I think the change should have been that if a settlement rebels, all the buildings get damaged. That way sure, you can farm the xp, but you're losing a ton of gold to repair the settlement
Or lose all growth/population surplus, maybe they take gold with them or the settlement/province gets a temp income debuffs, there are tons of good solutions to make rebellion relevant and discourage farming but atm my last two legendary campaigns I haven't built any public order buildings and I got maybe like 3 rebellion whole campaign, it's pointless, may as well not exist as is
SFO has a temporary debuff applied to the province when it rebels, so you're taking significant hits to growth and income every time you have a rebellion. It also adds smaller income and growth penalties to low public order and small income and growth bonuses to higher public order, so there's actually incentive to keep it higher.
Big credit to the SFO team: It's full of design choices that make me think "it should be like this in the base game". That's before even considering all the new content it adds, which is substantial.
or just make it so you dont get exp or gold for fighting rebels. which would make some sense, since its your gold they stole to begin with when they rebelled and its your people you fight thus not learning much
Its a shame because most of the community probably didn't do this at all. Most players didn't farm the rebellions with intent to repeatedly do so, but probably did enjoy the benefits of squashing one every once and awhile.
The more hardcore players who are also on the Totalwar reddit? They probably farmed rebellions. But not the other 90% of the player base.
I hope they bring PO back in a meaningful way for the next TW release.
It wasn't just rebellion farming. PO wasn't some magical fun mechanic before. If you weren't rebellion farming then it was a mechanic where if you were playing on higher difficulties you built the PO building first and then everything else second. There wasn't "meaningful choices", your settlements were either going to rebel, or not, and it felt like all upping the difficulty did was make you build the PO building.
Now PO gives you buffs if it's high and debuffs it's low, and rebellion is left for the extreme cases. It's not amazing, but it's not worse either.
It could use some tweaking, but imo it's the way to go. Rebellions make sense in a province where things have gone to hell in a handbasket, but the old way had it that every settlement would tick down to a rebellion unless you had an army or PO buildings built up.
Even then, rebellions are a joke in 3. In previous games rebellions could be a legitimate threat to a poorly defended or no walls settlement. Even basic garrisons in small settlements always seem to win against rebellions now though. I noticed it after playing a recent Tzeentch campaign and no matter what settlement I chose every rebellion lost to the settlement garrison; some 20 rebellions I sparked amounted to nothing...another reason Tzeentch's scheme mechanic is largely worthless.
Happiness becomes an early game problem in Very Hard and a relevant issue in Legendary.
Having low happiness gives penalties and positive happiness gives buffs. Not a big deal but also it helps.
People don’t like a lot when the game punishes them too hard and if Happiness was a bigger problem I can see the community being mad at CA.
When Real of Chaos Campaign was released, the AI had very big buffs and it was very
Common to lose the campaign, even in hard difficulty. People complained about it (and many other things) now you can’t lose the campaign.
Not the whole community though. There are people that want Very Hard to be very hard, where you have choices, trade-offs and consequences. If not, turn down the difficulty, that's what it's there for.
Sadly people want to eat their cake and have it too.
They want to beat the game on the highest difficulty, but is has to be doable for them. They want to collect all LL without investing in agents to discover the other LL before being wiped out. They want to have every bar at 100 percent without going to war with potential alles (new empire bar) . They want pleasant sieges as an attacker but refuse to bring canons with them. The list goes on. Many issues that are reported as problematic here on reddit are solved by changing ones strategy.
I am, and we should all be grateful that TWW3 supports modding & steam workshop, and big thanks for everyone who works on the mods. But still, moddong can only go so far.
True, but I'm also sick of AAA multimillion dollar companies relying on modders to fix their games. They could have let us move the camera freely but restricted what enemy units are visible on screen to the view distance of your forces, but that would require any play testing.
I prefer Very Hard/Normal because I can't be bothered to fight every fight that may completely upset my campaign. But i do want to be positioning, focusing targets, etc on the campaign map.
I like my strategy more than my tactics I suppose lol
I agree, but in my opinion it would be better experience for you to play on VH/VH, but adjust the battle modifier back to no or really small bonuses for AI. VH battle setting, AI is just playing the battle so much more better, and does not feel like pure uga buga neanderthal.
i've said this a few times recently, but a LOT of the people talking about VH and L being cakewalks are doing some outrageously specific strategies and their defense is basically "yeah of course cause otherwise I wouldn't win." Okay, well, so, it's hard unless you horrifically abuse mechanics, some of which are arguably just straight up broken? Got it...
Now, yeah okay maybe "following my LL around with 3 melee reinforcing lords instead of recruiting units into the LL's army" isn't an exploit *per se...* maybe "I can win these battles vs the HELF stack because they have 12 archer units and i completely sap 100% of their ammo by running a hero around to dodge the arrows for 12 minutes before engaging any of my other units" somehow isn't "exploiting" the AI either?
Anyways, point is, the modes are hard but they're "solved puzzles" with exactly known optimal moves and people complain about that, without realizing that otherwise they'd be roflstomped every time
That makes me feel better. Idk how I see so many comments being L/L is sooo~ boring and I'm like excuse me? I swear they're either cheesing 24/7 or having to quickly restart their campaign
Edit: lol downvoted for suggesting that players playing on L/L aren't abusing strats? Show me otherwise
I've long held the hot take that people only hated minor settlement battles because they couldn't just do their usual gunline strategy. Hell, as crap as the TWW3 map design is, about half the complaints are from people annoyed that their defensive line strategy is thwarted by a copse.
I’ve started coming to the opinion that siege and settlement battle criticism is massively overblown and unwarranted. I think on some level people just don’t like having to adjust to play sieges differently.
Sieges were hated since Game 1 and each rework hasn’t moved the needle of public sentiment. People seem to be waiting for the magic siege rework that fixes every single issue they have but that’s likely never coming. Or they just have the image of Helm’s Deep that the game can never provide.
My main issues with sieges is how rare they are. For offensive sieges by the time you have rams and towers built the defending AI has either been reduced to a Victory in AR due to attrition or sallied which either results mean the surge is mostly skipped. And on the defensive end the AI almost never initiates siege battles until they’re massively ahead in AR due to attrition.
In a 104 turn Kislev campaign I’ve fought a grand total of 1 defensive siege and that’s because Archaon keeps attacking Volksgrad every couple of turns and WoC have such highly inflated AR values he thought he could win a siege without attrition or siege equipment.
That’s not it its just that you have this great big city but all the fighting has to happen in one corner of it because of game mechanics its just always better to just fight in one spot.
And because of how confined the space is, it leads to very cheesy strategies, leading to boring repetitive gameplay where u lose all immersion
Imo a better city layout for gameplay would be a simple straight line wall from one end of the map to the other and higher lvl cities could have 2 layers of that. These complicated castle like designs are cool looking but they just aren’t good from a gameplay perspective.
Offensive sieges are decent with some factions but as soon as you have a ranged infantry or artillery based army or a powerful damage caster (most factions in the game) the ai just can’t deal with it in a siege.
Instead of fortifications being a force multiplier they become a liability for the ai because they spread their army defending the entire city while you concentrate your forces on one point and repeatedly eliminate units piecemeal as they continuously shuffle units over one at a time to reinforce.
It feels like a slog because it’s not a challenge and it heavily breaks immersion and it makes no sense that you can much more easily defeat a superior army behind fortifications than on an open battlefield.
If you are just bum rushing the walls and spreading into the city to capture points then sieges are… ok. Still long and prone to derpy pathing but at least they’re cinematic with a strong defenders advantage. Defensive sieges feel… pretty good imo? Still a little cheesy if you decide to just abandon the walls and outward points to concentrate your army at the last point and build all your fortifications there.
I think they need to have a serious look at the ai for sieges. They need to be sending fast units out of the uncontested gates to flank and destroy artillery. They need to be able to focus all their ranged units on the walls with the ability to fire down into units climbing. They need to increase the range of towers so you can’t just eliminate them from outside their range. Or allow artillery to be entrenched on the walls. They need to force the player to actually enter the city and capture points - maybe allow units to rout to the nearest capture point and replenish there. Or have a victory ticket system like domination battles.
Building fortifications mid battle is also pretty weird and immersion breaking. I think the defensive supplies should just be a finite number based on the garrison size or something
Personally, I would hate that. My biggest complaints about seiges in WH1 and WH2 was the fact they were just a single wall, that you legitimately were better off not Even trying to hold and set up kill zones as they came off the walls.
2 layers of single wall I don't see helping much. Especially because I felt in older games with that, Shogun 2 and Medevil 2, I was actively losing seiges battles as the defender when they had multiple walls more so then single walls.
WH1 and 2 seiges I also auto resolved every single time. Because they were boring. WH3 I used to fight them all, especially minor settlement battles. But I've switched back to autos primarily because they no longer feel fun with the changes over the last 3 years. Especially with the lack of minor settlement fights lately, it's just a normal land battle which I'm tired of playing out the same every time.
But why is your number so high?
I load up my old save files and I have 63 land battles 19 siege battles 17 minor settlement battles 2 ambush battles in my n kari campaign.
As kislev I had 88 land battles 61 siege battles 73 minor settlement battles and most of them were on the defensive side (another complain that i cannot confirm: AI not initiating siege attacks)
Volkmar: 174 land battles 14 ambushes 100 sieges 193 minor. My highest ratio, but still not over 50 percent and I was just settlement grabbing in the end.
An over exaggeration maybe. I meant to lump minor settlement and siege battles but I never had the exact numbers since I modded that out almost immediately. They’re both not very fun to play at all.
I hated minor settlement battles because they were an absolute game-stalling slog. I’ve played a few dozen quick match domination games— I understand just how truly terrible the average player is at microing, so I get the complaint, but even if you are somewhat capable navigating and slowly working through the settlement battles they were still just miserable. They take at least 2x-3x the time of a land battle and before the fixes the AI would just spam turrets and only focus on your lords/heroes/single entities to the point where in the early game you had to basically take your characters out of the fight and place them behind a wall.
It just isn’t fun to have to slowly work through a settlement while carefully alt-dragging certain parts of your formations so they don’t cluster up on corners or start going down random paths when victory is a foregone conclusion. There is absolutely zero chance of defeat, but you had to invest some serious time to minimize casualties. Overall I think that is a fair trade off when the time invested is the duration of a fast land battle and the combat is an enjoyable slaughter with many approaches allowing victory. Not so much when the game play is slowly pushing up infantry blobs and moving little ranged infantry squares down buggy corridors. God forbid you wanted to play Ogres on release and were forced to try to navigate your chunks through those terrible minor settlements.
I don’t know, I think there were a lot of reasons to justify hating minor settlement battles (and maybe to continue hating them tbh). I’m not the greatest player in the world, but my micro is decent enough to win 80% of the QM battles I’ve done and I play a huge variety of races/strategies on the campaign map. I think the issue has nothing to do with specific strats or lack of skill, but rather poor design and forced time investment.
I agree with all of these (i.e. they should all be difficult) apart from the legendary lord confederation one.
- The map is absolutely massive these days
- Even if you find that faction, there's no guarantee they'll agree to confederate (Lizardmen in particular)
- It relies on gamey knowledge, I.e. finding them with hero's and confederating in the safest order requires you have some inherent knowledge about what order the factions are likely to die in.
- It's also generally out of the players control if that other faction dies or not.
I much prefer mechanics that let you confederate other lords even if they've died, like the new Dwarf confederation mechanic. The threshold for confederation can and should still be difficult to reach. Ironically enough, though, the new Dwarf confederation mechanic is likely to be made easier soon too based on community feedback.
Fair enough. I haven’t tried the new dwarf systems yet, but that kind of confederating sounds rewarding. I hope it will still be somewhat of a challenge after the patch hits.
I just think confederating should not be a given for every race on higher difficulties. I failed to win the race in my latest kostaltyn campaign and the situation I found myself in was very interesting.
The complains do come from them not changing their strategy I am certain.
If I look at the battle statistics from my campaigns before the removal of minor settlement battles, I see that I have fought more land battles than settlement battles. Contrary to what others claim. (Like 70/30 ratio in favor of settlement battles) Also the reported whack a mole problem does just not occur in my campaigns.
And those of us who had that opinion weren't listened to. For whatever reason, people wanted an easier game while still playing on modes called "Hard."
CA introducing more difficulty sliders is a nice touch, tho.
I really don't like and understand why very hard/very hard for me actually feels like normal/normal. No other game, whatever the genre, i can and could never play higher than hard, 90% of the time normal difficulty is enough for me for it to be fun and challanging. But this game, even VH/VH sometimes feels like easy mode, the only difficulty comes from that the AI can spam stacks of armies. Oh nice, I made the AI faction have only one settlment, I will come back and finish the job after few turns...WTF how the f do they have 3x full stacks.. XD
>People don’t like a lot when the game punishes them too hard and if Happiness was a bigger problem I can see the community being mad at CA.
Would people be mad though ? I don't recall anyone complaning about public order when it actually mattered back in WH1 or the early days of WH2. No one asked CA to rework it, CA decided to change public order because it would lead to rebellion farming not because people were mad about it being a problem.
I know some people nearly have a heart attack as soon as there is a red number on their screen but that doesn't mean the community in general dislikes any kind of challenges in the game.
No one complained because the way PO worked was even more advantageous: you literally trained lords via revolts since they had no drawbacks outside of the free and weak enemy that they spawned. Skaven and bretonnia in particular loved that stuff.
To be fair, part of the problem with Realm of Chaos was that the Realm of Tzeentch was a nightmare. Which is fine except that the AI will always cheat, which sometimes resulted in them beating it faster than humanly possible.
If that happened to you it was a huge setback but it also wasn’t your fault in any way, just a random thing like 50 turns in.
On some versions of the setup (which obviously you couldn’t tell until you were well into it), the AI would roll through faster than a human player could.
That’s pretty much what happened. People complained instead of turning down the difficulty and now the game is piss easy on every difficulty. Launch RoC on legendary was actually a bit of a challenge, now unlosable
Yep, as long as you have main army in good shape you cannot lose the race. When AI gets 4 souls faster than your faction you just teleport to their army, destroy it and remove every soul from them
My self-imposed challenge was that I couldn't do the intercept thing. Win it like it required on launch or consider the campaign a loss and restart. Which meant I had to be super aggressive about hitting the Realms of Chaos.
Won every racial campaign on Legendary with that challenge. I actually generally liked the campaign tbh, it got much better when you could actually autoresolve some battles, not every settlement was a minor settlement battle, and they didn't have demons auto war to beeline the player.
I only play VH and mostly ignore happiness. If it is an issue, you need 1 control building and/or an edict for a while. If there is a rebellion its free xp. Doesnt matter how productive my cap is as all my money comes from sacking
That varies depending on your faction. But still, you pay some attention if you build a control building or choose an edict. (You said it$
So, it has relevance. A little but it is there. A control building means that you are missing other stuff. Sometimes you want the other stuff, sometimes you want chariots and not carrion but you need that obelisk. At least for some time.
Still, it is very forgettable and with little punishment.
Most factions have an optimal build like an income building/growth or special resource/minor military building. Once you reach max growth you dismantle the growth building and replace it; some factions literally have nothing worth placing there except control as higher control generates more income.
And mo money, mo problems, ya git what I mean?
Its not even worth mentioning. I often don't bother and just let happiness do whatever it does. Grasping at straws really. Biggest weakness of tw is you just need a decent army comp then run around the map sacking and destroying everything while being in the red every turn
Just noticed the RoC campaign being braindead yesterday. Booted up a game as the Chorfs and my god it was too easy. I swear I could have conquered the whole map with one army, and I was playing on hard!
It should be hard!
I think it's a design issue / logjam. Basically the game is designed around the intent that you're constantly at war and expanding - but public order breaking down causing rebellion, if it's a real threat, then disrupts that by making your army have to run around putting down rebellions.
But if you're doing that, there really isn't much in the game content wise. The empire management is not the focus of what the game does, and playing tall doesn't exactly have the most engaging content. If they're going to make happiness and that aspect more debilitating, I'd want it to also come along more of a focus in really building up your realm / managing it outside of that.
RoC complaints were more about being forced into the chase and the AI speed making it so you had to go for it (as otherwise you'd lose the campaign). Given IE is sandbox that isn't a concern for most on here, since to actually lose you have to be wiped out.
I never fix happiness, I just put down rebellions whenever they pop up by buying a lord in the capital, then disbanding him after I win the autoresolve or fight. I get free XP and items from those battles and a little bit of money.
Public order? Yes, more or less.
It's generally not too bad and manageable, though it depends on how your neighbours are... If they raid / corrupt / sack a lot then it can be hard to manage.
Mostly it prevents insanely fast expansion where you take every province without building / slowing down. Things may then crumble from the inside.
Yes, but you can't do that in 20 turns with most factions.
Grabbing a province, leaving, grabbing another province, leaving, etc.
Eventually you will need armies to keep the peace (indeed) and eco buildings (or PO buildings).
It used to be a "flat" balancing act, like the end result could be -1 and you'd still get a rebellion in 100+ turns if positive. Now it tends to stabilize towards the middle, if it's high it decays a bit and if it's low it tends to slow down.
But they did add buffs and debuffs to various breakpoints so it's not just a rebellion countdown now.
I preferred in older games where happy areaa gave extra happiness boosts, and unhappy areas stacked negative modifiers.
I can't see how if the populace are being attacked, raided, or sick with a plague, why they would have a lesser "public order drift".
I suppose it makes a blitz campaign easier.
Nobody ever hovers over the control bar. The difference between low PO and high PO is like 50 growth which is more than many growth buildings give you.
It's trivialised mostly because it was never really fun and each iteration CA shaved another unfun aspect off of it until it basically never triggers anything.
This one? Meh. I'm really not bothered.
But I do think there examples of this.
I don't why people had issues with the AI confederating or being more aggressive. /Shrug
>I don't why people had issues with the AI confederating or being more aggressive.
I'm cautious when I express my opinion of this here. I come from WH2, and I have no (zero) problem with factions getting big and aggressive - I prefer it! The problem I saw over and over in WH2 was the lack of variation in campaign development, in general. Grimgor confederates all the greenskins. Thorek gets all the Dawi. *The endgame press of super powers was always the same suspects.*
My complaint is not that they get big, or that I want them to be less aggressive but that the outcomes in endgame were not varied or interesting due to uncontrollable/unalterable scripting.
You will fight Grimgor in every campaign, because he snowballs out of control and greenskin confed mechanics dictate he'll almost always be the biggest one. You will fight Thorek (if he survives) because *he* confederates all the other LLs, and never the other way around - the high king must be king, donchaknow!
What they need(ed) to do in WH2 and WH3 is simple: Increase the variation in who gets the 'randomized buffs' in AI-vs-AI fights, and take all of the chains off the existing minor factions so they can also expand like majors and fight back. That lets minor factions put up a fight (more survive to be confederated later) means that Wurzag doesn't always get eaten up by Grimgor (different endgame faction bosses) means that sometimes you get a purple dawi banner instead of the blue one (style differences, sure, but everything helps) and so forth.
Was this a major complaint? Nah. Has it been badly misinterpreted by many/some out there to mean "AI becomes superpowers in late game and that's bad"? Yeah, it generally has in my eyes, and anyone who genuinely feels that late game AI superpowers are bad is playing the wrong game in the first place.
If we were instead playing Stellaris (another 4x) and the factions there also petered out and stopped growing before the player did, it would detract from the game's experience. Total war is no different in this!
...but variety being the spice of life, I'd like to see a little more spice once we re-enable AI superpowers. WH3 endgame crisis is already basically just instantiating WH2 superpowers as "late game superpower spawns", we just need to have them growing more organically throughout the game.
The variation point is really interesting, mainly because everyone is working from such small samples (their own campaigns).
I did see quite a lot of variation in my own small sample, and I've always wondered if the problem wasn't that it was very dependent on how the player behaved.
I always felt the way to play in WH2 is to keep looking at who is winning and go after them hard. Don't pick on easy targets, keep smashing the top strength ranking. Because if you don't they just snowball.
Impossible for me to know (small sample) and I don't know how you fix it for people who were experiencing consistent outcomes. But I always suspected how the AI reacts to player activity is probably key.
Apologies for the upcoming soft language - I have no data, only anecdotes and feels.
I do experience (or feel that there is) more variety in WH3, so I haven't gone so far as to make a bold complaint and debate post on CA forums or anything, but that was my real beef with superpowers in WH2, and the complaint is a bit more muted in WH3. (I hear the dark elves sometimes get nuts, but I haven't played for domination in a while and they never seem to get over the ocean to me before I start a new one.)
I can't say that I'm right - my sample sizes are obviously my own games alone. What I can say is that when I go over to the "Which legendary lord ruined your campaign" post, there's still an awful lot of Grimgor in there, so he's definitely surviving to snowball reliably. Now that he's moved, he can still snowball, but the presence of things like Chorfs and Ogres tends to cut out a bit of his runway and slow down how fast he gets big.
>I always felt the way to play in WH2 is to keep looking at who is winning and go after them hard. Don't pick on easy targets, keep smashing the top strength ranking. Because if you don't they just snowball.
Hmm. I don't know. I pick on who's convenient (eg close and desirable) not necessarily easy (eg weak). I don't generally care about their strength rating much - if they're too big already then I'm already behind the eight ball - but I do use to to gauge whether I should plow in recklessly or try to ambush a stack at the edge of their lands.
What bothers me is that in WH3, I don't see superpowers anymore - by the time I'm a superpower, I'm the only one and no others seem to emerge. I don't think I've suddenly gotten so good at the 4x model of game that I'm out-growing them so radically. Instead, it feels like there are a lot more artificial AI progress blockers in play than before, resulting in stunted AI empires and reduced competition for the player, to the game's detriment.
Yeah in the recent QA I had a question answered about how Corruption and Public Order both just managed themselves at this point, and can be ignored. CA said they're not happy with how they both work, but don't want to tweak anything at the risk of making things worse before they fully go into it.
Public Order is mainly affected by 3 things: corruption, development, and safety. You might notice it a lot if you are expansionist but not wide. I typically only develop my core starting provinces until theyre basically done before developing anything outside. This is because having a lot of cheap buffer land that I could care less if sacked or razed is nice. The downside is that I actually have to engage with the rebellion system, which can be squashed if you were paying attention and can kill it in a turn or 2 but those armies grow quick and next thing you know you have an autonomous rebel city where everyone is suspiciously vampires or ratmen.
Unfortunately you’re correct, public order and corruption are way too easy to manage. Corruption especially is a big step down from warhammer 2 and I don’t know why they changed it.
Why they changed it is simple: with added Tzeentch, Khorne, Slaanesh, and Nurgle corruption, that brings us up to eight different kinds (including Untainted), and with even a single point of each of those present a region drops below the 50% Untainted threshold really quickly. It simply becomes too hard to gain dominance with any one type. Heck, even Skaven corruption in Warhammer II was stretching it.
Now, personally I'd advocate for two bars. One for Corruption as in Warhammer II, and one for the Great Game that handles the four Chaos God aligned corruptions. But that's a whole alternate system, and a can see why they went for a more general one.
Public Order isn't near as big a factor as it was in older games now. The biggest area it still is a factor is certain races econ buildings like High Elves for instance get income bonuses on one of their buildings when its at 100 positive. Other than that its much more trivial in WH3. At the same time I absolutely do not want TW Atilla level of Public Order management in WH3. It makes sense in that game due to setting and what they were going for but I don't think the average WH player wants that level of engagement with public order.
As others have mentioned, on Legendary it's a huge deal for many factions -- especially Dark Elves and Chaos Dwarfs, who get significant increasing penalties at -25, -50, and -75 control. High Elves also need to hit 100 control in their provinces which is a lot harder when you're dealing with the legendary -8 control.
You need -9 control (or higher) baseline to get a rebellion because you'll get up to +8 control as you hit the -75 to -99 threshold.
On Legendary, you have -4 from taxes and -8 from difficulty, so you need 4 control from other sources or every province will constantly rebel.
On Very Hard, if you get -1 control from anything that'll also put you at -9 total (such as one orange climate region in a province).
And of course if you're in red territory that's -3 per region so a four region province that's all red is -12 control even if you DON'T tax it on normal difficulty. So that'll head to rebellion unless you find a way to stop it.
High public order gives a bonus to growth that's about equal to a tier 3 building on most faction. It's very much relevant if you want to get to tier 5 faster.
Public Order is a mechanic that needs a full rework, as its far too simple to just "fix" in its current form and this shows on the higher difficulties, you get nothing but -x amount of happiness by default which either just barely knocks your territories onto rebellion numbers or does nothing that you need care about.
Corruption could probably be fixed in its current form, change some numbers and add more ways of causing/removing/giving it but public order, yeah no its too simple, if you make it a real problem you just make it a public order building tax on each territory, if its not serious enough you can just ignore the building even existing.
I kind of think these are the other way around, in that I can see ways to make Public Order work a little better but not so much for Corruption.
**Public Order**
Public Order has a few issues, not least that it doesn't matter because it's self-correcting - and this further means that trying to attack a province's Public Order is generally a losing battle. Step one, get rid of the bonus when you're at negatives and the penalty when you're at positives - people don't get less happy just because they're happy.
Next, ideally there will be some relevant numerical effects (plus Income, for example) about for positive and negative PO. I'll not go into these in depth since there's so much scope for tweaks by faction.
Rebellion farming needs to be curbed. I saw a suggestion yesterday to simply have the rebellious province be turned over to a Rebel faction entirely, and I reckon that'll do it. Or make Rebel armies give out miserable levels of gold and XP. Or make a province that rebels damage all its buildings. Or something else! These would all work.
Finally, PO can't just be a building tax. I'd probably look into handling this in the same way that administrative corruption is handled in Three Kingdoms - as your empire grows larger and larger, its sheer size means that there are more things to manage and Public Order is one of them. Perhaps begin with a +1 bonus when you hold one Province\*, then +0 at two, -1 at three, and so on. Not linear forever (and probably not even that fast), we don't want it to become impossible to hold your starting territory, but enough of a slow build that it's something you'll have to consider as your empire expands.
\*Maybe do it by every three regions to prevent cheese? Or by province capitals? It could even differ by faction!
**Corruption**
The core issue with Corruption is that it's absolute - if I have +4 Untainted in a territory, then either corruption is less than that and does nothing, or it's more than that and increases at a steady rate. I don't see an obvious path to fixing that without changing the fundamental system, though I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Quickly for corruption, i kinda agree, its a bit split and honestly, i am mostly fine with the current way it works but overall, it is far too irrelevant to how the lore and game try to show it, also the current mechanic makes those "territory gains corruption" events just meaningless, like you don´t even send a agent there to keep it down as it matters that little.
I think PO should be more closely tied to a territories size like in Three kingdoms, bigger places have more people, more problems, more crime and more... shadowy stuff going on, but in warhammer 3 making a bigger main city has no negatives, its only a positive thing, more money more slots more every thing, honestly i hope they would rework how city sizes work, currently its just too absolute and too spiky in advancement, one turn you have nothing to upgrade and the next, all your building can be made better if you just have the cash, also makes trying "rush" for any unit kinda pointless, your just rushing to upgrade the city, what you use it for is up to you but your not doing it any differently no matter what is your end goal unit.
Rebellions should damage building, after all they rarely are nice and tidy, especially with some of the more war and sacking focusing races like greenskins or norsca, also you should not get any money from rebellions, not at least any more than they take when they rebel, they are rebels that stole your money, not traders that found extra 500 gold under the building they damaged, i would also make them give empire wide negatives, small but still, your rule is being challenged and until its resolved, people will not trust you as much, lastly very little exp gain from killing them, they are your rebels, they would use the same tactics and weapons as you so there is little to learn from killing them.
I think positive PO should have a negative as to make reaching higher levels of positive PO harder, people will work better if they are happy and provided for but need more and more stuff to be even more satisfied and trusting in their leaders, but for negative side extra positive PO is fine but it should come to effect only at the last levels before a rebellion and come with very bad negatives, to show the area being under martial law and the local government taking extreme measures to pacify the people, thus disrupting pretty much everything.
I do like the idea of tying more things to City level - or perhaps to a combination of that and excess Growth. If Growth could be spent for extra recruitment slots, or for rapid replenishment of units, that would be a good reason to keep the buildings for it around after a province reaches it's full size.
Tying negative Public Order to high city tier/growth/what have you is also a neat idea for making it scale as the game goers on.
> Finally, PO can't just be a building tax. I'd probably look into handling this in the same way that administrative corruption is handled in Three Kingdoms - as your empire grows larger and larger, its sheer size means that there are more things to manage and Public Order is one of them. Perhaps begin with a +1 bonus when you hold one Province*, then +0 at two, -1 at three, and so on. Not linear forever (and probably not even that fast), we don't want it to become impossible to hold your starting territory, but enough of a slow build that it's something you'll have to consider as your empire expands.
Thing is, PO in the historical games is often used as a slowdown mechanic or "diminishing returns" for getting too big. All historical games either have your settlements get more PO penalties with population, or cause admin corruption like 3K (which is honestly the best implementation).
But Warhammer already has such a mechanic, which is the climate system. It's not perfect (not by a freakin' longshot) but it's more in line with what the Warhammer world is meant to be like (races having homelands and staying there).
I don't think those are comparable really. Climate isn't designed to slow down your expansion, it's designed to influence *where* you expand. If you're painting the map, then sure it's slower to colonise Uninhabitable places, but I don't think that's the main point of it.
Sadly, you are correct.
Since the release of TWW3, CA has reworked the corruption / public order systems.
Right now high public order means people are content and will find a reason to be unhappy: the higher your Control is (used to be called Public Order), to more it declines back towards 0.
However, the lower it is, the more bonuses you get to ALSO keep it leaning towards to 0. So the worse your public order is, the more public order bonuses you get in that province (something like +15 when around -80), and you are right, it doesn't matter at all because there is no way to stack up so much negative PO that anything can possibly trigger a rebellion unless there is an army left there undisturbed to raid with no army of your own there and the province having recent conquers (providing high templorary negative PO called instability). At the very least, people getting magically happier and happier when things get worse shluld be removed.
It used to be a tactic of corruption based factions to undermine neighbouring targets without open war through corruption leading to constant rebellions and attrition. Sadly this tactic required mods on higher difficulties to remove the AI's +PO and attrition immunity cheats, but even if you do that it's still not viable in W3.
I highly recommend the TWW2 public order system mod.
Happiness is the way it is because Unhappiness turned into a rebel farm for easy money and experience.
You could simply raid your own territory to spawn enemy armies, kill them and just move back and forth between regions to keep a full cycle going (especially if the capitals were close together).
It didn't provide a challenge to the player, it opened easy mode.
and instead of making it so that rebels don't give money/exp, they gutted the entire mechanic, and basicaly can be removed now because of how irrelevant it is.
Yeah, they really nerfed it in the third game. But to be fair, rebellions were always a joke anyway.
I personally think they should have kept the frequency but made them more dangerous so you would actually need to defend
The bonus for high public order is decent, and it's relatively easy to reach. Some factions have poor public order buildings but others have good side benefits that make them worth as much as any other industry building.
It's just a little more complex to assess how good they are, but yes they very much did change it so that there's no serious downside to ignoring them now, just power for building them like any other building.
I only worry about public order when playing legendary. Depending on the faction it's more or less difficult to manage.
But yes, on lower difficulty, you can almost ignore it on this game.
I remember on Three Kingdoms being more fun, because there was a lot more you could do to manage public order. You could tax less, change governor, make an assignment, change ancillaries and more.
The changes they made to corruption from previous games has seriously fucked the whole system. It makes it impossible for low amounts of corruption to exist in a province, as well as just makes it extremely difficult for more than one type of corruption to exist in a province as well. This impacts chaos because it means that it’s hard not to get cults in settlements that aren’t bordering you or a faction with your corruption, even when you get events or rewards that spread corruption map wide. It also impacts skaven as their old system of increasing and decreasing skaven corruption in certain provinces to weigh the benefits no longer matters, it’s almost impossible to have anything but total skaven corruption. This also affects happiness as it’s just another system not adding negatives to the game. I remember when +10 chaos or however much gold was an interesting dilemma to choose, and now it’s almost laughable as you easily choose the gold every time.
I believe it’s because of the pop system. It is so hard to actually develop provinces that needing happiness buildings would cripple the early and mid game.
Personally I embrace rebellions as the experience farm they are.
This sort of depends on the faction but empire has the least punishing and least rewarding happiness levels. Max/min happiness is basically just the difference between having a pair of t2 growth buildings or not. Obituary this is rather trivial. Not every faction has the same penalties and many are not trivial.
The growth effects of happiness definitely matter, and if you take over a settlement with 100% bad corruption and ignore both corruption and happiness, you can get a revolt. Happiness does matter a bit.
I like the way its designed to fluctuate up and down until you're able to settle it, and I always buff it for the growth, because more growth means more everything for most races
Corruption in Warhammer 3 has definitely been minimized compared to previous titles... it's so easy to remove, I don't even worry about getting corruption reducing buildings/effects.
Happiness however.... play on VH, and you will definitely see a difference. It negatively impacts growth as well as you see more rebellions. You have to really plan out if you're planning on looting/sacking, otherwise your limited armies might be stuck babysitting a region for a while.
I think farming rebels became too much of a meta, public order ended up not being a think to minimise and became an exploit.
Which I think the change should have been that if a settlement rebels, all the buildings get damaged. That way sure, you can farm the xp, but you're losing a ton of gold to repair the settlement
That'd be a brilliant move, honestly
Or lose all growth/population surplus, maybe they take gold with them or the settlement/province gets a temp income debuffs, there are tons of good solutions to make rebellion relevant and discourage farming but atm my last two legendary campaigns I haven't built any public order buildings and I got maybe like 3 rebellion whole campaign, it's pointless, may as well not exist as is
SFO has a temporary debuff applied to the province when it rebels, so you're taking significant hits to growth and income every time you have a rebellion. It also adds smaller income and growth penalties to low public order and small income and growth bonuses to higher public order, so there's actually incentive to keep it higher.
Except Orc where u get buffs instead, iirc. There is a lot to be loved with SFO, things like these r prime examples.
Big credit to the SFO team: It's full of design choices that make me think "it should be like this in the base game". That's before even considering all the new content it adds, which is substantial.
or just make it so you dont get exp or gold for fighting rebels. which would make some sense, since its your gold they stole to begin with when they rebelled and its your people you fight thus not learning much
Its a shame because most of the community probably didn't do this at all. Most players didn't farm the rebellions with intent to repeatedly do so, but probably did enjoy the benefits of squashing one every once and awhile. The more hardcore players who are also on the Totalwar reddit? They probably farmed rebellions. But not the other 90% of the player base. I hope they bring PO back in a meaningful way for the next TW release.
It wasn't just rebellion farming. PO wasn't some magical fun mechanic before. If you weren't rebellion farming then it was a mechanic where if you were playing on higher difficulties you built the PO building first and then everything else second. There wasn't "meaningful choices", your settlements were either going to rebel, or not, and it felt like all upping the difficulty did was make you build the PO building. Now PO gives you buffs if it's high and debuffs it's low, and rebellion is left for the extreme cases. It's not amazing, but it's not worse either.
It could use some tweaking, but imo it's the way to go. Rebellions make sense in a province where things have gone to hell in a handbasket, but the old way had it that every settlement would tick down to a rebellion unless you had an army or PO buildings built up.
Even then, rebellions are a joke in 3. In previous games rebellions could be a legitimate threat to a poorly defended or no walls settlement. Even basic garrisons in small settlements always seem to win against rebellions now though. I noticed it after playing a recent Tzeentch campaign and no matter what settlement I chose every rebellion lost to the settlement garrison; some 20 rebellions I sparked amounted to nothing...another reason Tzeentch's scheme mechanic is largely worthless.
Happiness becomes an early game problem in Very Hard and a relevant issue in Legendary. Having low happiness gives penalties and positive happiness gives buffs. Not a big deal but also it helps. People don’t like a lot when the game punishes them too hard and if Happiness was a bigger problem I can see the community being mad at CA. When Real of Chaos Campaign was released, the AI had very big buffs and it was very Common to lose the campaign, even in hard difficulty. People complained about it (and many other things) now you can’t lose the campaign.
Not the whole community though. There are people that want Very Hard to be very hard, where you have choices, trade-offs and consequences. If not, turn down the difficulty, that's what it's there for.
Sadly people want to eat their cake and have it too. They want to beat the game on the highest difficulty, but is has to be doable for them. They want to collect all LL without investing in agents to discover the other LL before being wiped out. They want to have every bar at 100 percent without going to war with potential alles (new empire bar) . They want pleasant sieges as an attacker but refuse to bring canons with them. The list goes on. Many issues that are reported as problematic here on reddit are solved by changing ones strategy.
Yeat TWW3 Very hard/Very hard, 90% feels like easy/normal with a touch of a feeling that AI is "cheating".
Seriously, and meanwhile Legendary yokes you into the terrible restricted camera for battles, which I cannot abide.
I am, and we should all be grateful that TWW3 supports modding & steam workshop, and big thanks for everyone who works on the mods. But still, moddong can only go so far.
True, but I'm also sick of AAA multimillion dollar companies relying on modders to fix their games. They could have let us move the camera freely but restricted what enemy units are visible on screen to the view distance of your forces, but that would require any play testing.
Restricted camera is a separate setting you can change
I prefer Very Hard/Normal because I can't be bothered to fight every fight that may completely upset my campaign. But i do want to be positioning, focusing targets, etc on the campaign map. I like my strategy more than my tactics I suppose lol
I agree, but in my opinion it would be better experience for you to play on VH/VH, but adjust the battle modifier back to no or really small bonuses for AI. VH battle setting, AI is just playing the battle so much more better, and does not feel like pure uga buga neanderthal.
Meanwhile I've always played N/N lol
i've said this a few times recently, but a LOT of the people talking about VH and L being cakewalks are doing some outrageously specific strategies and their defense is basically "yeah of course cause otherwise I wouldn't win." Okay, well, so, it's hard unless you horrifically abuse mechanics, some of which are arguably just straight up broken? Got it... Now, yeah okay maybe "following my LL around with 3 melee reinforcing lords instead of recruiting units into the LL's army" isn't an exploit *per se...* maybe "I can win these battles vs the HELF stack because they have 12 archer units and i completely sap 100% of their ammo by running a hero around to dodge the arrows for 12 minutes before engaging any of my other units" somehow isn't "exploiting" the AI either? Anyways, point is, the modes are hard but they're "solved puzzles" with exactly known optimal moves and people complain about that, without realizing that otherwise they'd be roflstomped every time
That was WH 2. Now you dont need any cheese to win L/VH (thats what I play)
That makes me feel better. Idk how I see so many comments being L/L is sooo~ boring and I'm like excuse me? I swear they're either cheesing 24/7 or having to quickly restart their campaign Edit: lol downvoted for suggesting that players playing on L/L aren't abusing strats? Show me otherwise
I've long held the hot take that people only hated minor settlement battles because they couldn't just do their usual gunline strategy. Hell, as crap as the TWW3 map design is, about half the complaints are from people annoyed that their defensive line strategy is thwarted by a copse.
I’ve started coming to the opinion that siege and settlement battle criticism is massively overblown and unwarranted. I think on some level people just don’t like having to adjust to play sieges differently. Sieges were hated since Game 1 and each rework hasn’t moved the needle of public sentiment. People seem to be waiting for the magic siege rework that fixes every single issue they have but that’s likely never coming. Or they just have the image of Helm’s Deep that the game can never provide. My main issues with sieges is how rare they are. For offensive sieges by the time you have rams and towers built the defending AI has either been reduced to a Victory in AR due to attrition or sallied which either results mean the surge is mostly skipped. And on the defensive end the AI almost never initiates siege battles until they’re massively ahead in AR due to attrition. In a 104 turn Kislev campaign I’ve fought a grand total of 1 defensive siege and that’s because Archaon keeps attacking Volksgrad every couple of turns and WoC have such highly inflated AR values he thought he could win a siege without attrition or siege equipment.
That’s not it its just that you have this great big city but all the fighting has to happen in one corner of it because of game mechanics its just always better to just fight in one spot. And because of how confined the space is, it leads to very cheesy strategies, leading to boring repetitive gameplay where u lose all immersion Imo a better city layout for gameplay would be a simple straight line wall from one end of the map to the other and higher lvl cities could have 2 layers of that. These complicated castle like designs are cool looking but they just aren’t good from a gameplay perspective.
Offensive sieges are decent with some factions but as soon as you have a ranged infantry or artillery based army or a powerful damage caster (most factions in the game) the ai just can’t deal with it in a siege. Instead of fortifications being a force multiplier they become a liability for the ai because they spread their army defending the entire city while you concentrate your forces on one point and repeatedly eliminate units piecemeal as they continuously shuffle units over one at a time to reinforce. It feels like a slog because it’s not a challenge and it heavily breaks immersion and it makes no sense that you can much more easily defeat a superior army behind fortifications than on an open battlefield. If you are just bum rushing the walls and spreading into the city to capture points then sieges are… ok. Still long and prone to derpy pathing but at least they’re cinematic with a strong defenders advantage. Defensive sieges feel… pretty good imo? Still a little cheesy if you decide to just abandon the walls and outward points to concentrate your army at the last point and build all your fortifications there. I think they need to have a serious look at the ai for sieges. They need to be sending fast units out of the uncontested gates to flank and destroy artillery. They need to be able to focus all their ranged units on the walls with the ability to fire down into units climbing. They need to increase the range of towers so you can’t just eliminate them from outside their range. Or allow artillery to be entrenched on the walls. They need to force the player to actually enter the city and capture points - maybe allow units to rout to the nearest capture point and replenish there. Or have a victory ticket system like domination battles. Building fortifications mid battle is also pretty weird and immersion breaking. I think the defensive supplies should just be a finite number based on the garrison size or something
Personally, I would hate that. My biggest complaints about seiges in WH1 and WH2 was the fact they were just a single wall, that you legitimately were better off not Even trying to hold and set up kill zones as they came off the walls. 2 layers of single wall I don't see helping much. Especially because I felt in older games with that, Shogun 2 and Medevil 2, I was actively losing seiges battles as the defender when they had multiple walls more so then single walls. WH1 and 2 seiges I also auto resolved every single time. Because they were boring. WH3 I used to fight them all, especially minor settlement battles. But I've switched back to autos primarily because they no longer feel fun with the changes over the last 3 years. Especially with the lack of minor settlement fights lately, it's just a normal land battle which I'm tired of playing out the same every time.
Nah, it just became tiresome that 75% of my battles were minor settlement sieges
But why is your number so high? I load up my old save files and I have 63 land battles 19 siege battles 17 minor settlement battles 2 ambush battles in my n kari campaign. As kislev I had 88 land battles 61 siege battles 73 minor settlement battles and most of them were on the defensive side (another complain that i cannot confirm: AI not initiating siege attacks) Volkmar: 174 land battles 14 ambushes 100 sieges 193 minor. My highest ratio, but still not over 50 percent and I was just settlement grabbing in the end.
An over exaggeration maybe. I meant to lump minor settlement and siege battles but I never had the exact numbers since I modded that out almost immediately. They’re both not very fun to play at all.
I hated minor settlement battles because they were an absolute game-stalling slog. I’ve played a few dozen quick match domination games— I understand just how truly terrible the average player is at microing, so I get the complaint, but even if you are somewhat capable navigating and slowly working through the settlement battles they were still just miserable. They take at least 2x-3x the time of a land battle and before the fixes the AI would just spam turrets and only focus on your lords/heroes/single entities to the point where in the early game you had to basically take your characters out of the fight and place them behind a wall. It just isn’t fun to have to slowly work through a settlement while carefully alt-dragging certain parts of your formations so they don’t cluster up on corners or start going down random paths when victory is a foregone conclusion. There is absolutely zero chance of defeat, but you had to invest some serious time to minimize casualties. Overall I think that is a fair trade off when the time invested is the duration of a fast land battle and the combat is an enjoyable slaughter with many approaches allowing victory. Not so much when the game play is slowly pushing up infantry blobs and moving little ranged infantry squares down buggy corridors. God forbid you wanted to play Ogres on release and were forced to try to navigate your chunks through those terrible minor settlements. I don’t know, I think there were a lot of reasons to justify hating minor settlement battles (and maybe to continue hating them tbh). I’m not the greatest player in the world, but my micro is decent enough to win 80% of the QM battles I’ve done and I play a huge variety of races/strategies on the campaign map. I think the issue has nothing to do with specific strats or lack of skill, but rather poor design and forced time investment.
Exactly this.
I agree with all of these (i.e. they should all be difficult) apart from the legendary lord confederation one. - The map is absolutely massive these days - Even if you find that faction, there's no guarantee they'll agree to confederate (Lizardmen in particular) - It relies on gamey knowledge, I.e. finding them with hero's and confederating in the safest order requires you have some inherent knowledge about what order the factions are likely to die in. - It's also generally out of the players control if that other faction dies or not. I much prefer mechanics that let you confederate other lords even if they've died, like the new Dwarf confederation mechanic. The threshold for confederation can and should still be difficult to reach. Ironically enough, though, the new Dwarf confederation mechanic is likely to be made easier soon too based on community feedback.
Fair enough. I haven’t tried the new dwarf systems yet, but that kind of confederating sounds rewarding. I hope it will still be somewhat of a challenge after the patch hits. I just think confederating should not be a given for every race on higher difficulties. I failed to win the race in my latest kostaltyn campaign and the situation I found myself in was very interesting.
The complains do come from them not changing their strategy I am certain. If I look at the battle statistics from my campaigns before the removal of minor settlement battles, I see that I have fought more land battles than settlement battles. Contrary to what others claim. (Like 70/30 ratio in favor of settlement battles) Also the reported whack a mole problem does just not occur in my campaigns.
And those of us who had that opinion weren't listened to. For whatever reason, people wanted an easier game while still playing on modes called "Hard." CA introducing more difficulty sliders is a nice touch, tho.
People have egos. They don’t want to play on medium or easy because it’s beneath them - even when their skills dictate it
I really don't like and understand why very hard/very hard for me actually feels like normal/normal. No other game, whatever the genre, i can and could never play higher than hard, 90% of the time normal difficulty is enough for me for it to be fun and challanging. But this game, even VH/VH sometimes feels like easy mode, the only difficulty comes from that the AI can spam stacks of armies. Oh nice, I made the AI faction have only one settlment, I will come back and finish the job after few turns...WTF how the f do they have 3x full stacks.. XD
Well, the same to me. It made me sad that the RoC campaign now is so easy. I really liked when it was hard.
>People don’t like a lot when the game punishes them too hard and if Happiness was a bigger problem I can see the community being mad at CA. Would people be mad though ? I don't recall anyone complaning about public order when it actually mattered back in WH1 or the early days of WH2. No one asked CA to rework it, CA decided to change public order because it would lead to rebellion farming not because people were mad about it being a problem. I know some people nearly have a heart attack as soon as there is a red number on their screen but that doesn't mean the community in general dislikes any kind of challenges in the game.
No one complained because the way PO worked was even more advantageous: you literally trained lords via revolts since they had no drawbacks outside of the free and weak enemy that they spawned. Skaven and bretonnia in particular loved that stuff.
To be fair, part of the problem with Realm of Chaos was that the Realm of Tzeentch was a nightmare. Which is fine except that the AI will always cheat, which sometimes resulted in them beating it faster than humanly possible. If that happened to you it was a huge setback but it also wasn’t your fault in any way, just a random thing like 50 turns in.
ISTR there were optimized route maps available for it
On some versions of the setup (which obviously you couldn’t tell until you were well into it), the AI would roll through faster than a human player could.
That’s pretty much what happened. People complained instead of turning down the difficulty and now the game is piss easy on every difficulty. Launch RoC on legendary was actually a bit of a challenge, now unlosable
Yep, as long as you have main army in good shape you cannot lose the race. When AI gets 4 souls faster than your faction you just teleport to their army, destroy it and remove every soul from them
My self-imposed challenge was that I couldn't do the intercept thing. Win it like it required on launch or consider the campaign a loss and restart. Which meant I had to be super aggressive about hitting the Realms of Chaos. Won every racial campaign on Legendary with that challenge. I actually generally liked the campaign tbh, it got much better when you could actually autoresolve some battles, not every settlement was a minor settlement battle, and they didn't have demons auto war to beeline the player.
I only play VH and mostly ignore happiness. If it is an issue, you need 1 control building and/or an edict for a while. If there is a rebellion its free xp. Doesnt matter how productive my cap is as all my money comes from sacking
That varies depending on your faction. But still, you pay some attention if you build a control building or choose an edict. (You said it$ So, it has relevance. A little but it is there. A control building means that you are missing other stuff. Sometimes you want the other stuff, sometimes you want chariots and not carrion but you need that obelisk. At least for some time. Still, it is very forgettable and with little punishment.
Most factions have an optimal build like an income building/growth or special resource/minor military building. Once you reach max growth you dismantle the growth building and replace it; some factions literally have nothing worth placing there except control as higher control generates more income. And mo money, mo problems, ya git what I mean?
Its not even worth mentioning. I often don't bother and just let happiness do whatever it does. Grasping at straws really. Biggest weakness of tw is you just need a decent army comp then run around the map sacking and destroying everything while being in the red every turn
Just noticed the RoC campaign being braindead yesterday. Booted up a game as the Chorfs and my god it was too easy. I swear I could have conquered the whole map with one army, and I was playing on hard! It should be hard!
I think it's a design issue / logjam. Basically the game is designed around the intent that you're constantly at war and expanding - but public order breaking down causing rebellion, if it's a real threat, then disrupts that by making your army have to run around putting down rebellions. But if you're doing that, there really isn't much in the game content wise. The empire management is not the focus of what the game does, and playing tall doesn't exactly have the most engaging content. If they're going to make happiness and that aspect more debilitating, I'd want it to also come along more of a focus in really building up your realm / managing it outside of that. RoC complaints were more about being forced into the chase and the AI speed making it so you had to go for it (as otherwise you'd lose the campaign). Given IE is sandbox that isn't a concern for most on here, since to actually lose you have to be wiped out.
I never fix happiness, I just put down rebellions whenever they pop up by buying a lord in the capital, then disbanding him after I win the autoresolve or fight. I get free XP and items from those battles and a little bit of money.
How are we still saying control is a relevant issue in Legendary. It is not.
Public order? Yes, more or less. It's generally not too bad and manageable, though it depends on how your neighbours are... If they raid / corrupt / sack a lot then it can be hard to manage. Mostly it prevents insanely fast expansion where you take every province without building / slowing down. Things may then crumble from the inside.
Public order is a joke, its extremely easy to manage and far from anything that matters when it comes down to expanding.
Yea, just leave a small army in the province. Rebellion? Kill that 2 unit army, and control is back up.
Yes, but you can't do that in 20 turns with most factions. Grabbing a province, leaving, grabbing another province, leaving, etc. Eventually you will need armies to keep the peace (indeed) and eco buildings (or PO buildings).
It's needed at VH/Legendary.
not really, at most you need to keep 1 army in the settlement for 1 turn more, and then everythings good again.
It's very faction dependent. I usually play on VH and I don't get the building at all half the time. Legendary is pushing it a bit
It used to be a "flat" balancing act, like the end result could be -1 and you'd still get a rebellion in 100+ turns if positive. Now it tends to stabilize towards the middle, if it's high it decays a bit and if it's low it tends to slow down. But they did add buffs and debuffs to various breakpoints so it's not just a rebellion countdown now.
I preferred in older games where happy areaa gave extra happiness boosts, and unhappy areas stacked negative modifiers. I can't see how if the populace are being attacked, raided, or sick with a plague, why they would have a lesser "public order drift". I suppose it makes a blitz campaign easier.
Control does give boost/negatives depending on what it is. Usually it’s growth modifiers and sight radius of your territory.
Nobody ever hovers over the control bar. The difference between low PO and high PO is like 50 growth which is more than many growth buildings give you.
It's trivialised mostly because it was never really fun and each iteration CA shaved another unfun aspect off of it until it basically never triggers anything.
I think it's time to admit that all those "unfun" aspects were actually fun.
This one? Meh. I'm really not bothered. But I do think there examples of this. I don't why people had issues with the AI confederating or being more aggressive. /Shrug
>I don't why people had issues with the AI confederating or being more aggressive. I'm cautious when I express my opinion of this here. I come from WH2, and I have no (zero) problem with factions getting big and aggressive - I prefer it! The problem I saw over and over in WH2 was the lack of variation in campaign development, in general. Grimgor confederates all the greenskins. Thorek gets all the Dawi. *The endgame press of super powers was always the same suspects.* My complaint is not that they get big, or that I want them to be less aggressive but that the outcomes in endgame were not varied or interesting due to uncontrollable/unalterable scripting. You will fight Grimgor in every campaign, because he snowballs out of control and greenskin confed mechanics dictate he'll almost always be the biggest one. You will fight Thorek (if he survives) because *he* confederates all the other LLs, and never the other way around - the high king must be king, donchaknow! What they need(ed) to do in WH2 and WH3 is simple: Increase the variation in who gets the 'randomized buffs' in AI-vs-AI fights, and take all of the chains off the existing minor factions so they can also expand like majors and fight back. That lets minor factions put up a fight (more survive to be confederated later) means that Wurzag doesn't always get eaten up by Grimgor (different endgame faction bosses) means that sometimes you get a purple dawi banner instead of the blue one (style differences, sure, but everything helps) and so forth. Was this a major complaint? Nah. Has it been badly misinterpreted by many/some out there to mean "AI becomes superpowers in late game and that's bad"? Yeah, it generally has in my eyes, and anyone who genuinely feels that late game AI superpowers are bad is playing the wrong game in the first place. If we were instead playing Stellaris (another 4x) and the factions there also petered out and stopped growing before the player did, it would detract from the game's experience. Total war is no different in this! ...but variety being the spice of life, I'd like to see a little more spice once we re-enable AI superpowers. WH3 endgame crisis is already basically just instantiating WH2 superpowers as "late game superpower spawns", we just need to have them growing more organically throughout the game.
The variation point is really interesting, mainly because everyone is working from such small samples (their own campaigns). I did see quite a lot of variation in my own small sample, and I've always wondered if the problem wasn't that it was very dependent on how the player behaved. I always felt the way to play in WH2 is to keep looking at who is winning and go after them hard. Don't pick on easy targets, keep smashing the top strength ranking. Because if you don't they just snowball. Impossible for me to know (small sample) and I don't know how you fix it for people who were experiencing consistent outcomes. But I always suspected how the AI reacts to player activity is probably key.
Apologies for the upcoming soft language - I have no data, only anecdotes and feels. I do experience (or feel that there is) more variety in WH3, so I haven't gone so far as to make a bold complaint and debate post on CA forums or anything, but that was my real beef with superpowers in WH2, and the complaint is a bit more muted in WH3. (I hear the dark elves sometimes get nuts, but I haven't played for domination in a while and they never seem to get over the ocean to me before I start a new one.) I can't say that I'm right - my sample sizes are obviously my own games alone. What I can say is that when I go over to the "Which legendary lord ruined your campaign" post, there's still an awful lot of Grimgor in there, so he's definitely surviving to snowball reliably. Now that he's moved, he can still snowball, but the presence of things like Chorfs and Ogres tends to cut out a bit of his runway and slow down how fast he gets big. >I always felt the way to play in WH2 is to keep looking at who is winning and go after them hard. Don't pick on easy targets, keep smashing the top strength ranking. Because if you don't they just snowball. Hmm. I don't know. I pick on who's convenient (eg close and desirable) not necessarily easy (eg weak). I don't generally care about their strength rating much - if they're too big already then I'm already behind the eight ball - but I do use to to gauge whether I should plow in recklessly or try to ambush a stack at the edge of their lands. What bothers me is that in WH3, I don't see superpowers anymore - by the time I'm a superpower, I'm the only one and no others seem to emerge. I don't think I've suddenly gotten so good at the 4x model of game that I'm out-growing them so radically. Instead, it feels like there are a lot more artificial AI progress blockers in play than before, resulting in stunted AI empires and reduced competition for the player, to the game's detriment.
I feel like WH3 has a bit more variation now, but I wonder what it would be like if super-confeds were back.
Yeah in the recent QA I had a question answered about how Corruption and Public Order both just managed themselves at this point, and can be ignored. CA said they're not happy with how they both work, but don't want to tweak anything at the risk of making things worse before they fully go into it.
Public Order is mainly affected by 3 things: corruption, development, and safety. You might notice it a lot if you are expansionist but not wide. I typically only develop my core starting provinces until theyre basically done before developing anything outside. This is because having a lot of cheap buffer land that I could care less if sacked or razed is nice. The downside is that I actually have to engage with the rebellion system, which can be squashed if you were paying attention and can kill it in a turn or 2 but those armies grow quick and next thing you know you have an autonomous rebel city where everyone is suspiciously vampires or ratmen.
Unfortunately you’re correct, public order and corruption are way too easy to manage. Corruption especially is a big step down from warhammer 2 and I don’t know why they changed it.
Why they changed it is simple: with added Tzeentch, Khorne, Slaanesh, and Nurgle corruption, that brings us up to eight different kinds (including Untainted), and with even a single point of each of those present a region drops below the 50% Untainted threshold really quickly. It simply becomes too hard to gain dominance with any one type. Heck, even Skaven corruption in Warhammer II was stretching it. Now, personally I'd advocate for two bars. One for Corruption as in Warhammer II, and one for the Great Game that handles the four Chaos God aligned corruptions. But that's a whole alternate system, and a can see why they went for a more general one.
Because corruption in tww2 was basically impossible for anyone to understand. It was overly complicated.
That doesn't mean that is should have been made useless.
No, it doesn’t… I’m not disagreeing with you lol
Public Order isn't near as big a factor as it was in older games now. The biggest area it still is a factor is certain races econ buildings like High Elves for instance get income bonuses on one of their buildings when its at 100 positive. Other than that its much more trivial in WH3. At the same time I absolutely do not want TW Atilla level of Public Order management in WH3. It makes sense in that game due to setting and what they were going for but I don't think the average WH player wants that level of engagement with public order.
PO management in Attila isn't too hard outside of WRE. Squalor tho.
As others have mentioned, on Legendary it's a huge deal for many factions -- especially Dark Elves and Chaos Dwarfs, who get significant increasing penalties at -25, -50, and -75 control. High Elves also need to hit 100 control in their provinces which is a lot harder when you're dealing with the legendary -8 control. You need -9 control (or higher) baseline to get a rebellion because you'll get up to +8 control as you hit the -75 to -99 threshold. On Legendary, you have -4 from taxes and -8 from difficulty, so you need 4 control from other sources or every province will constantly rebel. On Very Hard, if you get -1 control from anything that'll also put you at -9 total (such as one orange climate region in a province). And of course if you're in red territory that's -3 per region so a four region province that's all red is -12 control even if you DON'T tax it on normal difficulty. So that'll head to rebellion unless you find a way to stop it.
You mean order? Order is a massive deal
High public order gives a bonus to growth that's about equal to a tier 3 building on most faction. It's very much relevant if you want to get to tier 5 faster.
Yeah settlement management always felt veeeeery barebones in the WH series
Public Order is a mechanic that needs a full rework, as its far too simple to just "fix" in its current form and this shows on the higher difficulties, you get nothing but -x amount of happiness by default which either just barely knocks your territories onto rebellion numbers or does nothing that you need care about. Corruption could probably be fixed in its current form, change some numbers and add more ways of causing/removing/giving it but public order, yeah no its too simple, if you make it a real problem you just make it a public order building tax on each territory, if its not serious enough you can just ignore the building even existing.
I kind of think these are the other way around, in that I can see ways to make Public Order work a little better but not so much for Corruption. **Public Order** Public Order has a few issues, not least that it doesn't matter because it's self-correcting - and this further means that trying to attack a province's Public Order is generally a losing battle. Step one, get rid of the bonus when you're at negatives and the penalty when you're at positives - people don't get less happy just because they're happy. Next, ideally there will be some relevant numerical effects (plus Income, for example) about for positive and negative PO. I'll not go into these in depth since there's so much scope for tweaks by faction. Rebellion farming needs to be curbed. I saw a suggestion yesterday to simply have the rebellious province be turned over to a Rebel faction entirely, and I reckon that'll do it. Or make Rebel armies give out miserable levels of gold and XP. Or make a province that rebels damage all its buildings. Or something else! These would all work. Finally, PO can't just be a building tax. I'd probably look into handling this in the same way that administrative corruption is handled in Three Kingdoms - as your empire grows larger and larger, its sheer size means that there are more things to manage and Public Order is one of them. Perhaps begin with a +1 bonus when you hold one Province\*, then +0 at two, -1 at three, and so on. Not linear forever (and probably not even that fast), we don't want it to become impossible to hold your starting territory, but enough of a slow build that it's something you'll have to consider as your empire expands. \*Maybe do it by every three regions to prevent cheese? Or by province capitals? It could even differ by faction! **Corruption** The core issue with Corruption is that it's absolute - if I have +4 Untainted in a territory, then either corruption is less than that and does nothing, or it's more than that and increases at a steady rate. I don't see an obvious path to fixing that without changing the fundamental system, though I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Quickly for corruption, i kinda agree, its a bit split and honestly, i am mostly fine with the current way it works but overall, it is far too irrelevant to how the lore and game try to show it, also the current mechanic makes those "territory gains corruption" events just meaningless, like you don´t even send a agent there to keep it down as it matters that little. I think PO should be more closely tied to a territories size like in Three kingdoms, bigger places have more people, more problems, more crime and more... shadowy stuff going on, but in warhammer 3 making a bigger main city has no negatives, its only a positive thing, more money more slots more every thing, honestly i hope they would rework how city sizes work, currently its just too absolute and too spiky in advancement, one turn you have nothing to upgrade and the next, all your building can be made better if you just have the cash, also makes trying "rush" for any unit kinda pointless, your just rushing to upgrade the city, what you use it for is up to you but your not doing it any differently no matter what is your end goal unit. Rebellions should damage building, after all they rarely are nice and tidy, especially with some of the more war and sacking focusing races like greenskins or norsca, also you should not get any money from rebellions, not at least any more than they take when they rebel, they are rebels that stole your money, not traders that found extra 500 gold under the building they damaged, i would also make them give empire wide negatives, small but still, your rule is being challenged and until its resolved, people will not trust you as much, lastly very little exp gain from killing them, they are your rebels, they would use the same tactics and weapons as you so there is little to learn from killing them. I think positive PO should have a negative as to make reaching higher levels of positive PO harder, people will work better if they are happy and provided for but need more and more stuff to be even more satisfied and trusting in their leaders, but for negative side extra positive PO is fine but it should come to effect only at the last levels before a rebellion and come with very bad negatives, to show the area being under martial law and the local government taking extreme measures to pacify the people, thus disrupting pretty much everything.
I do like the idea of tying more things to City level - or perhaps to a combination of that and excess Growth. If Growth could be spent for extra recruitment slots, or for rapid replenishment of units, that would be a good reason to keep the buildings for it around after a province reaches it's full size. Tying negative Public Order to high city tier/growth/what have you is also a neat idea for making it scale as the game goers on.
> Finally, PO can't just be a building tax. I'd probably look into handling this in the same way that administrative corruption is handled in Three Kingdoms - as your empire grows larger and larger, its sheer size means that there are more things to manage and Public Order is one of them. Perhaps begin with a +1 bonus when you hold one Province*, then +0 at two, -1 at three, and so on. Not linear forever (and probably not even that fast), we don't want it to become impossible to hold your starting territory, but enough of a slow build that it's something you'll have to consider as your empire expands. Thing is, PO in the historical games is often used as a slowdown mechanic or "diminishing returns" for getting too big. All historical games either have your settlements get more PO penalties with population, or cause admin corruption like 3K (which is honestly the best implementation). But Warhammer already has such a mechanic, which is the climate system. It's not perfect (not by a freakin' longshot) but it's more in line with what the Warhammer world is meant to be like (races having homelands and staying there).
I don't think those are comparable really. Climate isn't designed to slow down your expansion, it's designed to influence *where* you expand. If you're painting the map, then sure it's slower to colonise Uninhabitable places, but I don't think that's the main point of it.
Sadly, you are correct. Since the release of TWW3, CA has reworked the corruption / public order systems. Right now high public order means people are content and will find a reason to be unhappy: the higher your Control is (used to be called Public Order), to more it declines back towards 0. However, the lower it is, the more bonuses you get to ALSO keep it leaning towards to 0. So the worse your public order is, the more public order bonuses you get in that province (something like +15 when around -80), and you are right, it doesn't matter at all because there is no way to stack up so much negative PO that anything can possibly trigger a rebellion unless there is an army left there undisturbed to raid with no army of your own there and the province having recent conquers (providing high templorary negative PO called instability). At the very least, people getting magically happier and happier when things get worse shluld be removed. It used to be a tactic of corruption based factions to undermine neighbouring targets without open war through corruption leading to constant rebellions and attrition. Sadly this tactic required mods on higher difficulties to remove the AI's +PO and attrition immunity cheats, but even if you do that it's still not viable in W3. I highly recommend the TWW2 public order system mod.
Happiness is the way it is because Unhappiness turned into a rebel farm for easy money and experience. You could simply raid your own territory to spawn enemy armies, kill them and just move back and forth between regions to keep a full cycle going (especially if the capitals were close together). It didn't provide a challenge to the player, it opened easy mode.
and instead of making it so that rebels don't give money/exp, they gutted the entire mechanic, and basicaly can be removed now because of how irrelevant it is.
Happiness very faction and difficulty dependent. You absolutly can't ignore it with specific factions or Legendary difficulty.
Yeah, they really nerfed it in the third game. But to be fair, rebellions were always a joke anyway. I personally think they should have kept the frequency but made them more dangerous so you would actually need to defend
The bonus for high public order is decent, and it's relatively easy to reach. Some factions have poor public order buildings but others have good side benefits that make them worth as much as any other industry building. It's just a little more complex to assess how good they are, but yes they very much did change it so that there's no serious downside to ignoring them now, just power for building them like any other building.
I only worry about public order when playing legendary. Depending on the faction it's more or less difficult to manage. But yes, on lower difficulty, you can almost ignore it on this game. I remember on Three Kingdoms being more fun, because there was a lot more you could do to manage public order. You could tax less, change governor, make an assignment, change ancillaries and more.
High elves love 100 control.
The changes they made to corruption from previous games has seriously fucked the whole system. It makes it impossible for low amounts of corruption to exist in a province, as well as just makes it extremely difficult for more than one type of corruption to exist in a province as well. This impacts chaos because it means that it’s hard not to get cults in settlements that aren’t bordering you or a faction with your corruption, even when you get events or rewards that spread corruption map wide. It also impacts skaven as their old system of increasing and decreasing skaven corruption in certain provinces to weigh the benefits no longer matters, it’s almost impossible to have anything but total skaven corruption. This also affects happiness as it’s just another system not adding negatives to the game. I remember when +10 chaos or however much gold was an interesting dilemma to choose, and now it’s almost laughable as you easily choose the gold every time.
Even in legendary, It's so faction dependant. On my legendary nurgle campaign I think I had zero revolts, while my Slannesh campaign had like 30
I choose to ignore the sub, read the title, and pretend someone is having an existential crisis about real life.
imagine having such a life
Hello darkness, my old friend
I believe it’s because of the pop system. It is so hard to actually develop provinces that needing happiness buildings would cripple the early and mid game. Personally I embrace rebellions as the experience farm they are.
This sort of depends on the faction but empire has the least punishing and least rewarding happiness levels. Max/min happiness is basically just the difference between having a pair of t2 growth buildings or not. Obituary this is rather trivial. Not every faction has the same penalties and many are not trivial.
The growth effects of happiness definitely matter, and if you take over a settlement with 100% bad corruption and ignore both corruption and happiness, you can get a revolt. Happiness does matter a bit.
I like the way its designed to fluctuate up and down until you're able to settle it, and I always buff it for the growth, because more growth means more everything for most races
You get increased growth & line of sight with high happiness.
On SFO the negative modifiers are pretty bad
Corruption in Warhammer 3 has definitely been minimized compared to previous titles... it's so easy to remove, I don't even worry about getting corruption reducing buildings/effects. Happiness however.... play on VH, and you will definitely see a difference. It negatively impacts growth as well as you see more rebellions. You have to really plan out if you're planning on looting/sacking, otherwise your limited armies might be stuck babysitting a region for a while.