3 GRAVE GUARD, 1 GRAVE GUARD WITH GREAT WEAPONS, 2 FELL BATS, 2 DIRE WOLVES, A CORPSE CART, 8 ZOMBIES AND THE GARRISON CAUSE FUCK YOU

So, we all love the total war formula (turn based campaign map + RTS battles), but we also all agree CA does some pretty unabashed cash grabs and doesn’t often play test their designs, resulting in crappy gameplay. My question is, what other companies could provide them meaningful competition? Are any likely to do so in the near future?

For example Archaon’s melee animations are incredibly beautiful and cool, but mounted form is always more beneficial.I’m not saying mounted form is bad, but sometimes just wants to see something different.

I remember that in older Total War games, we could dismount soldiers from their horses in battlefield :D

Anyways what im saying is it would make sense for their combat stats to be better when they are unmounted. Like unmounted gives more melee attack and defence while mounted gives more charge bonus and move speed idk.

Nagash is a one man army that already can become one of the strongest things in the game, but there is a simple trick you can use to catapult him from regular broken to super broken. Their are two main brakes on Nagash's campaign, money and souls. His economy can be a slow ball to get rolling, and his income buildings are subpar. So here is a neat move you can do to quickly remove both of these brakes:

4 City Provinces = 100% free upkeep.

Your minor settlements can all make a defensive building that grants 25% upkeep reduction. Necropolis dont get these buildings, dont build a necropolis in this Provence. By keeping 4 minor settlements, you can stack all 4 defense buildings and get free upkeep. Now you can stack 40-60 units in this province for effectively free. No invading army can touch you, no rebellion matters, no waaagh matters, you have 60 mid tier units sitting in reserve.

You start next to a province just like this, so you can start doing this by around turn 8-12.

If youre paying no upkeep, all your money can be invested in souls buildings and rewards. You can hyperfocus on maximum souls and still make huge amounts of money quickly. If you need to pull out a few armies, run a few turns in the red and usually make back that money in battle rewards.

As you expand, use 2 & 3 size provinces for recruiting buildings and infrastructure. Use these larger "free army" provinces like little baskets to store your giant stockpiles of free troops. Very easy to dominate.

Hi everyone!

I'm very excited to be announcing that our Everchosen Invitational tournament is making a return for 2026!

All the details on our competitors can be found here!

Who do you think will be crowned champion?

I was playing Skarsnik in the Old World mod, highly recommend, but I was thinking about the idea of creating a proper green tide like in the End Times with Grimgor assault on Cathay, the Darklands, and the Mountains of Mourn. I think that the Greenskins Waaagh mechanic actually has an easy way of becoming this sort of End Times level threat like Nagash where over time, they just start stacking these bonuses given through their Waaagh trophies and become an actual threat to the entire world as they spread across the planet. Perhaps this could be a Grimgor only mechanic? Idk. What do you think?

Also, as I said, the bonuses would have to be nerfed of course cuz you could quite quickly get like 60% weapon strength if you targeted the right people. lol

It’s also just silly thinking that they get this trophy from their waaagh and then just toss it away when they get a new one. Lmao

You should be able to slowly withdraw backwards whilst facing/defending yourself from the front.

That is all.

Nothing like a good chokepoint to turn into a killzone, because the enemy is too fat to climb the walls.

It would had been more fun, if the AI suddenly didn't started acting stupid, forming a line outside the gate, and making enter only one enemy unit once at a time, instead of trying to overwhelm me.

Playing as Glottkin and I tried to devote my lvl 50 Melee (starting?) Hero via Path to Glory and reset his skill points, but he lost all progress and got reduced to lvl 1 instead.

I have all the perks that reduces Path to Glory costs/ lvl reduction and since I'm around midgame I already devoted quite some Lords/ Heroes, but reducing lvl to 1 is a new one.

I made CPU performance mods for Attila and Rome 2. This is my first time trying it on Warhammer 3 and since I don't really play Warhammer as much as the historical one, I thought the community could help. I don’t know yet if it’ll work, but I want to give it a shot. First I need to know where the game struggles for you.

If you’ve got a minute, post:

• CPU, GPU, RAM
• resolution and unit size
• where it’s bad: end turn time, campaign map stutter, battles, loading
• roughly what turn your campaign is on, and if you use big mods
• how long your end turns take

A late-game save where end turns are really slow would help a lot. Upload it anywhere and link it, along with your mod list if the save needs mods.

No promises on what I can fix, but anything I find goes into a free mod.

Heads up: I use AI (Claude) to help write the code. All testing is done by me in game.

Edit: Thanks for all the replies. After a lot of profiling, WH3 runs way better under the hood than Attila or Rome 2 did, there’s no big single fix like those games had. Best result so far is ~13% faster end turns, not really worth a mod on its own. Putting it on hold for now. If someone has a really bad late-game save where end turns take forever, I might take another look with that. Sorry to the folks hoping for more.

I'm considering Throt as my next Old World campaign and wondering how much of a factor is Loyalty, since WH2 mechanics tend to get depreciated in WH3.

Is it still relevant? Does campaign difficulty impact Loyalty gain/loss? How do you manage it?

Feels like a super uneccessary building chain these days with the power creep..

Thoughts?

First, I'm not asking for Elspeth specially. She is a one-women doomstack by herself, so whatever you give her she will be doing fine. And she got extra Amethyst units, so her stack will be different from the generic lords.

Since we're limited to 5 Amethyst units per army (except for Elspeth), what's your favorite Amethyst variant?

The Landships and Outriders are great, but I feel like they fit more a mixed composition with melee units. So the choice is between Helstorm and Ironsides. I feel like the Amethyst Helstorm is a straight upgrade, while Amethyst Ironsides are a sidegrade mostly for better melee.

Then, in your lategame stacks do you use Hochland Long Rifles and Helblaster Volley Guns?

The Empire have so many options for ranged units, that I don't really see why pick these units over Ironsides, Tanks and Helstorms.
For killing infantries, Helstorms are the best option. And monstrous infantries / single entities / cavs that survive the Helstorms fire will die to Ironsides, while the Tanks can hold the line and do great damages, and are really good in siege.

I can see an use for Great Cannons, between Monstrous Impact, Grapeshot, they are good against SI and Monstrous Infantry, and they are good to breach walls in siege.
But I really fail to see any reasons to pick Helblaster and Hochland Long Rifles over other things. I know that Hochland Long Rifles are like Jezzails, but I don't really see the value when you have access to Lore of Light so you can Net any threat in your Ironsides killzone, and Cannons / Helblaster outperform them to kill big things at range, because they ignore shields.

Am I missing something? Any reasons to pick these units in lategame?

It just hit me that I really hope they build some kind of Nemesis-system for 40k (yes, I know it's patented by Warner, but hopefully they're not dumb enough to start a large scale patent war in the games industry).

Anyways, it fits the setting. You as a player should be able to get your own personal enemy (or multiple), the same way Yarick is to Ghazghkull (or vice versa).

E.g.

When you defeat an enemy lord for the first time, there is a chance that they did not actually die (plot armor!) but are instead tagged as your lord's Nemesis.

The effect of Nemesis is that there is a chance that they show up in any system even if you're fighting another faction.

Make a reverse defeat trait, i.e. every time they get defeated they get a bonus trait based on what kind of Lord you're playing.

If you play multiple characters, a Nemesis for character A can show up for character B (though not as a Nemesis for B, initially, they're just gathering their strengths in some systems and you accidentally run into them). If you defeat them they now get a trait based on B's Lord type, and can potentially become a Nemesis for B as well.

If there is a Galactic News ticker system, then events "off screen" that happens to your Nemesis would show up there, e.g. "Your Nemesis sacked a hive in System X, their army grows in size"

Just had to tell someone.

Source: https://youtu.be/AniRten3v_s?is=ibicn8R3GrtKPVwz

After Aislinn and Neferata, the list jumps to from 2 to 5 in case of Khorne - the 3 factions are not different enough to warrant a separate post let alone a full campaign playthrough with all 3, the time investment is just not worth it for me.

Race: Khorne

Time played: Skulltaker (IE ~130 turns), Skarbrand (RoC abandoned after 40 turns), Aarbal: 10 turns, abandoned.

Difficulty: Hard / Hard

Khorne a race

In case of Khorne, the race mechanics themselves seem to be far more important than the individual mechanics of the 3 legendary lords. Going in all I knew is they are all about battles, and nothing else matters. That turned out to be true to the point literally nothing mattered in my campaign, which I now abandon as the game froze during AI turn at turn 129 and I can't be bothered to continue. Sadly, this could be a summary of a devastating review of a race that outright breaks the game to the point where it is irredeemable, yet tolerated due to the sheer scale of playable content in Total War Warhammer 3. If Khorne would be 1 faction out of 4 in it's current state (as opposed to the much more challanging 1.0 version), no sane developer team would ignore it's glaring issues.

Even as someone who was just exploring Khorne, I arrived to a point extremely early (before turn 20) where my legendary lord was simply unkillable and could solo entire armies, of any kind. Skulltaker is of course known to be OP, but I avoided using any of his skull cape upgrades that affect his combat stats, I didn't even get his legendary item from his quest: simply using common items and his skill tree, by turn 20 he was unkillable. To this point, there was fun in the campaign: battles were hard earned victories due to AI cheating and poor economy forcing me into battles where I was always outnumbered, and income from battles or underdeveloped settlementes were not particularly good either, which made the Lustriabowl into a fun survival puzzle, that felt like a cat and mouse back and forth. A game, that ceases to exist with your power growing over time for free: technology.

You can ignore almost the entire tech tree. The unit upgrades are worthless, but all of them are required within a unit category (monsters, infantry etc.) for the final tech node within that category for a -15% upkeep, which is the only one from this page you want. What's important is the Pillars of Khorne page, where you "should" rush for the Bloodhost upgrades.

Bloodhosts, the game breakers

For those who never played Khorne, let's look at what Bloodhosts are. Whenever you win a settlement battle, you can occupy it, sack it, raze it, or summon a Bloodhost. A bloodhost is a prebuilt, always the same army that has some limitations:

• It cannot trade units to other armies
• It has 0 upkeep
• It cannot Replenish
• After X number of immunity turns, it starts to desintegrate via Attrition damage and dies off on it's own slowly.

If you ever played Pandemic, the board game, you might be familiar with the virus outbreak mechanic: too much bad stuff piled up explodes into lots of small bad stuff to other nearby locations, and this can cascade as the domino effect can repeat this process should the critical number of bad stuff be reached on any affected location.

This is how Khorne is played, except you are the bad stuff, and your main army with your legendary lord is the constantly-on-top-power-level critical mass that keeps starting new dominos. You destroy a city, summon a Bloodhost. Your LL goes west, your Bloodhost goes east: both destroy another settlement, and both summon another Bloodhost - yes, Bloodhosts can summon Bloodhosts too, even though it is somewhat balanced by making each Bloodhost summoned by another Bloodhost, weaker than the previous one.

But none of that applies to your regular lords or legendary lords, and there are numerous tech nodes that add more and more units to ALL Bloodhosts when they are summoned. Passively. For free.

A safety net too strong means there is no risk in the attraction

If you combine the shared mechanic of all Khorne lords repeatedly replenishing their movement points after ANY battle, it is easy to envision an explosively spreading pandemic - pan means all - around the world, that is only momentarily slowed down by oceans if you know the puzzle's path that allows you to burn through 50 or a 100+ settlements within a single turn.

In a turn based game. Meaning there is no counterplay to this. Personally, I knew no such path so my early game and learning curve were very slow, because I did not know I'm supposed to rush Bloodhost related technology, I did not want to enter too many wars at a time, I did not want to lose my colonised settlements, so I was slower, more methodical, explored how to combine reducing upkeep costs from buildings, commandments, tech so I can have an affordable defending army.... and it took me 80 turns to put 1+1 together and realize I was shooting myself in the foot constantly by not being a brainless trainwreck, biting and mauling anything and everything I can touch. That none of this matters, the game doesn't care, doesn't reward you for any of that. Just keep the blood flowing.

Very Khorne? Yes.

Very boring one and done campaign experience? Also yes.

You can pull off moves like, attack an army, autoresolve, get a Phyrric Victory, half your army died. But you have Daemons Reforge resurrect your units with very low health. So you go to the universal Khorne feature "Skull Throne", throw in some skulls (a resource you get for battles), and your legendary lord's units are instantly healed, to max. No, not replenished, that would mean they heal when your NEXT turn starts, giving the AI a fighting chance against your templolary weakened army. No, instantly healed, to max. And because you fought a battle, you can move again, attack again. Can't reach the next army? No problem, attack something else, your movement is replenished again. Can't reach anything? No problem, press a button, throw in like 4000 skulls from your 80.000+, army movement replenished to maximum. I say throw in skulls but there is no real cost, you don't use it for anything else other than this, and you'll have 10x as much as you'll ever need after turn 20 if you play extremely slowly and badly like I did. It's nonsense level of failsafe, stupidproof campaign where no matter what you do, there are numerous situational "but instead, I won" buttons spread across the screen.

If not for listening to political podcasts, I never would have reached turn 100 out of sheer boredom.

U'Zhul the Skulltaker

A variation of all the above who gets the ability to teleport to any VISIBLE lord, keep your full movement points, and attack it. On a 10 turn cooldown, which can be reduced to 5. If disbelief did not kill your desire to keep playing knowing how NOTHING matters in Khorne campaigns, he has a panic button to teleport to the other side of the continent and kill any lord with undefeatable by nature 1 man army LL and 19 audience (cough) units watching. Then of course replenish movement and do this to the other 6 invading armies, with Lightning Strike.

Bad points to CA for not using his proper name just because someone thought it doesn't sound nice enough. Karl Franz sounds like a tax office worker too, let's remove his name and just call him "The Emperor"? Justice for U'Zhul, write his name on the character!

Skarbrand the Exiled

We arrived the point where the most broken legendary lord in the whole franchise at the time, is now considered the most timid, least overpowered choice within the Khorne faction I recommend the most for having a challenge. Absurd as it is, this is how far above the other 2 are on the balance scale. While Skarbrand offers no extra features like the other 2 lords, the moment you truly realize those features serve as "I win" buttons in case the very, very small required strategy goes wrong, Skarbrand's campaign has less of a safety net that would instantly turn the misfortune into an advantage.

Aarbal the Undefeated

Aarbal is an interesting beast. Like all the monogod factions, Khorne too suffers from a brutally overbloated unit roster if you have Champions of Chaos, but the interesting part is that Aarbal is FLC (free DLC) and all his buffs focus on mortal units - that he doesn't have access to unless you buy Champions of Chaos. So that's a big shady move from CA. Personally I was more interested in the daemonic side of monogod factions and leave mortals for Warriors of Chaos, but gave a shot to Aarbal just to make sure I can write this review from firsthand experience. The theme of playing as chaos and descending from the northern wastes works the best here simply because no other Khorne LL starts anywhere near the northern chaos wastes (but Aarbal, who should be in Khuresh, does, and stole Ostankya's loreful start area). There are 2 main things about Aarbal:

1. the game warns you to NEVER, EVER LOSE a battle with this lord (lorewise, Khorne would turn him into a chaos spawn), only others. But of course CA were too cowardly with even the 3rd and free LL to introduce... I don't know, stakes or threat to any Khorne campaign, so that never happens: you are given a dilemma: your campaign immediately ends, OR your name changes to Aarbal the Defeated and you get a laughable, ignorable debuff he is too overpowered to even notice.

2: Unlike Skulltaker, he can teleport to battles not on visible lords on a global scale, but prebuilt mission battles all across the world, on a global scale. This is actually very attractive if you are looking for a proper campaign end instead of endless, mindless destruction until Long Victory popups up: there is a sense of progression towards a well defined end goal the other 2 lacks, and that's very, very important for me to not question "what am I doing with my life" and alt+f4. I still did, because I was sick of Khorne already due to Skulltaker, but I wish I played Aarbal instead.

Recommended for

• If your 10+ years journey and thousands of hours in this game entered it's twilight phase - that is my perspective - and want to try something extremely different, play this.
• If you are really into a billion autoresolves per turn
• If you don't care to build anything
• If you don't care to defend your settlements outside 1 or 2 major recruitment ones.
• If you are a type of player who has fun with timefreeze + godmode cheats in other games and just want to break the game on all possible max difficulties.

Recommended against:

• If you like Total War games in general: bothering to build anything, defend anything, read anything. Seriously, I didn't read any of the tech tree after turn 10, or the buildings after turn 20, never considered what to build, after turn 50 didn't even bother to build anything, I just turned off the notification for it, automated all hero skill ups, all lord level ups, I didn't bother to learn the difference between different lords and heroes, none of it matters and you'll still succeed. I destroyed half the world before I could recruit anything tier 4. Once I lost 15 settlements in a turn, couldn't be bothered. Nothing matters, and if you hate placebo effects, you'll hate Khorne.
• Khorne highlights a game-wide issue of too many battles, too high settlement density and enlarges the problem further.
• The novelty wears off really fast once you realize how you are supposed to play, making all Khorne campaigns boring - perhaps Aarbal least of all, because of his predetermined mission battles marking a satisfying end to his campaign instead of overstaying it's welcome.
• Players who abhorr factions that play nothing alike in the hands of the AI and the player. Khorne by design cannot be played by the AI, because the player would lose 50 settlements in a turn, destroyed by a single army, the forums would be set on fire.

So far, Khorne gets the worst campaign experience award from me.

(EDIT: Added a comment as part of OP):

My issue is with the curve. You describe snowballing as an exponential curve on a graph, which it is. Horizontal dimension is time, vertical is power. On the same graph I consider all 3 Khorne factions following this curve for about 0.1 second (time) and then it becomes a 90 degree, vertical line. It breaks the graph and becomes unfathomable, and when it moves on the horizontal dimension (time) another 0.1s, it's already so far high up on the power level (vertical dimension), the AI has no chance, because even with normal snowballing that level of power would be achieved much, much later. From the AI's point of view, which means considering the entire game around the player, Khorne's snowballing is not an exponential growth, it is time travel to 50 turns later, except the world didn't get to do that.

This is the best I can describe time freeze from the AI's point of view, that is doing enough actions worth a half campaign in 1 turn as Khorne. There are ways to balance that with little adjustments, CA just didn't do it because they said this is fun according to us. I respectfully disagree.

The Complete Edition came out on October 13 and Sega pulled it within days. The art looks like it went through an AI upscaler and nobody checked the result. That is the real problem. No one looked before it shipped.

I make a Dai Viet faction submod for Morning Sun 3.3. Until now I only used AI (Claude) to edit unit tables. After CA's release, I wanted to see if it could help with models if I checked every step. So last week I tried.

- It builds the lower detail versions (LODs) from my models and keeps the rigging and UVs.

- It builds new high detail pieces and colours them from my earlier work.

- It rebuilt my unit list from the pack files and wrote the unit files.

- It works on copies. Nothing goes live until I check it in game.

It got things wrong too. I caught each one before it reached the game. AI did the slow, repeated work. I decided what shipped.

So shame on you for blaming it all on AI and your affiliate company when you still stamped your logo on that. I had known Jack Lusted from when he was working for Rome 2 at twcenter, and I already felt he's not that passionate about the game. And it shown.

A project I was working on, to try and interview as many of the game devs of ME2 that I could track down, to hear them talk about their individual contributions to the game, share some memories and reflect on its success.

I don't have the DLC to know him that indepth - sadly cannot afford it in the foreseeable future - but I do read reddit a lot, and the general consensus is kill him early before he gets strong, before he gets books, before he levels up.

So that is what I try to do playing Mannfred, and Nagash properly kills both him and my entire army along without his health going down, and we are talking about turn 5.

Just... how am I supposed to beat that when I have no archers to focus fire?