Angry Lobster posted:

I'm starting to think that minor settlement battles and sieges were designed this way on purpose just to mess with ranged armies.

Doomykins posted:

Huh. I camped out my Cathay campaign before calling it as a lost and Skarbrand was in there within 4 turns of getting his last soul. Were you beating your enemies up on the campaign map too?

Angry Lobster posted:

I'm starting to think that minor settlement battles and sieges were designed this way on purpose just to mess with ranged armies.

Kanos posted:

If they are, they failed pretty miserably, because having ranged units is a titanic advantage in them. Ranged units can usually arc fire over walls to support adjacent lanes and if you can take any sort of open space town square you can line your dudes up and focus fire just fine. Ranged units are also the easiest way to permanently shut down the towers everyone hates until you can take the objective controlling them. It's slightly more obnoxious doing the classic "select all range and click a unit to delete it" in city streets but you're still pumping a huge amount of DPS so it doesn't really matter.

I guess it's a nerf to 100% ranged armies with no melee units but three of the ranged-haver factions rely heavily on hybrid melee/ranged units, and the only faction with pure dedicated ranged units(Cathay) gets huge stat bonuses for sprinkling in some melee, so....

Insurrectionist posted:

I got to turn 70 with Ogres on my campaign and I just kind of petered out so here is my lengthy and unasked for review of playing this faction. The Realm of Chaos stuff didn't engage me, but honestly I just completely ignored it and it mostly didn't matter since obviously I was nowhere near the lose condition that early on. And I could autoresolve the invading demon armies attacking my T3 settlement garrisons, though that might change with later spawns.

The biggest issue for me was 100% battles. I just did not have fun with them at all. The primary culprit was settlement battles. They were just all chores. In my 70 turns I fought 26 battles, not counting autoresolves. One of those was a field battle, because my ally was in range to attack an army I was pursuing and I got to join in. It was ok but we completely outnumbered and outgunned the opponent so combined with the reinforcement timer, all I could really do was send my units towards the battle-lines and basically instantly win once they got there.

Of the remaining 25 battles, 4 were walled settlement sieges. Three of these were boring. I completely outnumbered and outgunned the settlement garrison, but because of towers (on walls and inside) I took probably 60% casualties and ended with Pyrrhic victories, as my Ogres bumbled about running into each-other constantly and loving up pathfinding. Ogres have bonkers casualty replenishment so this would usually only mean a single turn spent sitting around before moving on, but making sure none of my units got wiped out was definitely tedious. The last one had a bit more of a defensive force and was therefore ludicrously hard. The fact that Ogres have no useful artillery for this before T5 makes it tougher - the scrap throwers are fine at killing units but utter garbage vs towers.

Another 4 were defensive settlement battles. Two of those were an enemy 20 stack against a basic settlement garrison, not actually worth fighting but it was early on and I didn't have a feel for how much I could defend against. The other two were kinda fun!

17 of my 26 battles were me attacking minor settlements. Some were easy. Some were hard. Maybe two were any kind of fun. All involved absolute pathfinding shitshows, constant guesswork about whether my units could shoot at the supply towers (often, moving them around to the other side of the tower did the trick!). I was really excited for minor settlement fights for this game - while I didn't play Troy much, I had a fair amount of fun with them in that game. I kinda hate them now. I would hate them less if they were 10% of my battles instead of 80%.

At no point in the campaign was I able to initiate a field battle. I know about the baiting lord + ambush trick, but it feels cheap and given I need armies to defend multiple parts of my empire and I play on VH with no 5k initial buffer, I wasn't able to justify the extra lord + supply lines cost for most of this time either. Also, Greasus has a poo poo ambush success chance in general, and keeps getting followed by agents that I cannot assassinate - I have tried like 10 times with 45 - 60% success chance and never succeeded, didn't have this kinda trouble with it in the last game.

I dunno, the experience just sucked. The last 15 turns I mostly just autoresolved poo poo. I spent 4 turns sieging a city so I could autoresolve it instead of fight it even though it only had the garrison in there, and I kinda realized that is the opposite of what the game should be about. I'll just play Elden Ring and wait for updates and/or IE.

E: This was on VH/Normal, I usually played TWW2 on the same or VH/H. I didn't really have any issues with the campaign part besides finding the Realm of Chaos unengaging, it was suitably challenging and reasonably fun.

Ravenfood posted:

I generally like the idea of the more focused campaigns as contrasted with the ME style sandbox and am glad there will be both. On the other hand, holy hell Tzeentch's realm feels like rear end. The way your movement just stops every time you portal is maddening and about the only way I can see doing this is to find the route to the proper teleporter (and I'll be honest, I'm struggling to see those icons sometimes) and then just go back to the beginning and save scum it. It honestly wouldn't be bad if you could move faster.

On the other hand I suppose it guarantees every LL will get the campaigner trait.

Njashi9 posted:

Finished a normal campaign as Katarina. The final battle was a long, painful slog. It had a horrifying moment where the bar stopped progressing at like 3% because there were some "required" monster left that had decided to gently caress off somewhere on the map rather than charge the line with the rest, thought for a second that I had to restart the whole loving thing.

I do appreciate though the little reward you get in the post game, if only for the flavor. Speaking of, how do you unlock the third legendary lord for Kieslev?

Broken Cog posted:

I feel the Slaneesh rewards are a bit too much. I don't think they should nerf them though, but maybe give them some slightly more severe downsides to go with.

Hunt11 posted:

Then no one will ever take them.

Hunt11 posted:

Then no one will ever take them.

Azran posted:

The consequence for taking Slaneesh's bribes is that you won't get a soul that cycle and the AI will.

Sinteres posted:

I think the idea is to make it an actual trade off with consequences, like deals with the devil generally are in fiction, instead of just holy poo poo what a great deal. Yeah, you won't get a soul if you take it, but people are going in even when they don't want souls just to grab goodies, or claiming them even after being beaten to the soul by the AI, because there's no significant consequence.

Sinteres posted:

I think the idea is to make it an actual trade off with consequences, like deals with the devil generally are in fiction, instead of just holy poo poo what a great deal. Yeah, you won't get a soul if you take it, but people are going in even when they don't want souls just to grab goodies, or claiming them even after being beaten to the soul by the AI, because there's no significant consequence.

Koramei posted:

Is there a way to unlock the camera lock during battles? I turn it off in every total war game but can't seem to find the option in this one.

Prop Wash posted:

No significant consequence except for falling at least 15-20 turns behind in a race that ends the campaign if you lose?

“But that’s not a real consequence because it doesn’t affect me right here and now” -everyone who’s ever taken a deal with the devil, probably

Ra Ra Rasputin posted:

Sinteres posted:

What's with people only reading half of a post before they respond to it?