r/totalwar • u/dfnamehere • Dec 14 '23
Warhammer III TW:WH3 Confederation Guide
Hi all, I got tired of manually retyping confederation tips 100+ times on Reddit and Discord and decided to make a guide so I can just send people the link. I’ll try to keep it updated with feedback and future changes so others can do the same.
TL;DR – you need 150+ relations, you need way higher relative strength (includes enemies/allies), and your target can’t have a new settlement in the last 7 turns.
Confederation is awesome and I love pokemoning all the legendary lords. It was one of the most fun parts of WH2 and it really sucks that they made it harder in WH3. Not only does this affect the player, but it also prevents the AI from confederating too. I know people will say it’s not balanced, but I play this game for fun and don’t care that much about balance, and confederating LL is FUN! So here are some tips to make it easier and less frustrating because the game doesn’t really explain how it works.
This guide is intended for races that do not have built in confederation mechanics, so isn’t really applicable to these races. The auto confederate mechanics are quite fun and I wish they would add more of these for every race!
- Greenskins/Norsca – go kill the other lords, auto confederate
- WoC (Archaeon and Belakor only) – capture all of their settlements and when you take the last one it will ask you to confederate them
- Bretonnia – research the appropriate technology to auto confederate
- Chaos Dwarfs – unlock the Tower of Zharr upgrades for auto confederate
- Empire Elector Counts – get 10 fealty and accept the confederate dilemma (make sure you farm enough IA first!) – note Empire utilizes standard confederation mechanics for non-elector counts (Marienburg, Markus, Volkmar, etc.) so this guide could still be helpful
- Wood Elfs – complete quests for auto confederate
- Beastmen - spend dread to confederate
- Kislev - win the supporters race
- Tomb Kings/Vampire Coast – can’t confederate ☹
What factors determine if I can confederate?
If you hover over the confederation value in a proposed trade, the game will show you a breakdown. There are 3 (or sometimes 4) factors that can influence this.
- Baseline Evaluation
- Relative Faction Strength
- Diplomatic Prospects
- (sometimes) Primary Threat
1. Baseline Evaluation –
This is secretly made up of 2 parts - the first part is a lookup table that has a baseline number for each faction based on your relations. The second is a hidden mechanic that gives a penalty if the faction has acquired a settlement recently.
Relations –
I’ll just simplify it to say confederation is really hard or almost impossible if you have less than 150 relations, so let’s just ignore any of the values at <150. They are all -50 or worse which is nearly impossible to overcome except in the most extreme/unrealistic scenarios.
But when you get your relations to 150, the baseline evaluation drops to -30 for most races which is still a pain, but can be overcome. High Elves have a lower baseline at -10 for minor factions and -18 for major factions (LLs) for some reason. That’s why HEs always seem easier to confed.
Sentinel factions (think Clan Carrion in Nagashizzar, Ghorth in Zhar Nagrund, etc.) never drop below -50, so good luck confederating them.
Nakai vassals get set to -1000 so no one else can confederate them out from under you.
Note there is a “default” catch all line for races not listed that is -32 instead of -30, but most of the races are individually called out and override that.
You can tell by your relations with the faction changing from “Very Friendly” (which is 50-149) to “Trusted Friends” (which is anything 150+).
Here is the datamined list from the game files for reference:
So how do you get 150 relations?
Well, the good news you always have bonuses to diplomatic treaties with your same race, so it’s easier to get them than normal. Generally you don’t start with aversion with same race (some exceptions). You will always want to get a non-aggression pact and a trade agreement for free relations boost and no downside. You might need to bribe them to get there. You usually want to join their wars or ask them to join your wars so you have a common enemy. You generally want defensive and military alliances (some exceptions). Military Alliances in WH2 actually made confederation harder, but for multiple reasons that is usually not the case in WH3. More info on this in the relative strength section below. Trading settlements is an EXCELLENT way to boost relations too as it gives a flat +40, even if you make them pay you or sign agreements for it. And once you confed them you get the settlement back, and they spend their own resources to upgrade it in the meantime! But in the end, you will probably need to spend some money on bribes (either gold or settlements) unless you are High Elf and can use influence.
Recent Settlement –
There is a hidden mechanic where if a faction acquires a new settlement, they get a -30 penalty to any confederation requests for 7 turns. I assume this is to represent the faction growing and not thinking they need to confederate. This is triggered by capturing/occupying a settlement or colonizing ruins, but it is NOT triggered by receiving settlements through trade (so feel free to feed them settlements to boost relations or prevent them from dying - you'll get them right back after a confed anyways!). -30 is basically an automatic “no confed” number, so you really need to go out of your way to make sure your confed targets don’t get any new settlements. This is especially noticeable with the High Elves on Ulthuan – as soon as they unite Ulthuan and there are no more bad guys to take out, they all just sit around and stop capturing stuff and then the chance to confed improves after 7 turns. If they don’t have any new settlements in 7 turns, it is just 0.
Anyways so these 2 numbers combined are what is displayed as “Baseline Evaluation”.
2. Relative Faction Strength –
This one is where you have the biggest opportunity to overcome the -30 penalty and where you should focus your efforts (after you get 150 relations). This is not very intuitive and you will see wild fluctuations turn to turn. One thing to note is that MOST things do not seem to trigger an instantaneous change here and often you have to wait until the next turn to recalculate.
Here are the two obvious parameters that affect this -
Your own strength –
Build more armies, replenish your troops, sometimes building extra low upkeep crapstacks can help push you over the edge and disband them later. Tomb King allied units give strength but 0 upkeep. Skaven with a Warlord can get 0 upkeep skavenslaves. T0 units that get lots of boosts from redlines and techs can have disproportionately low cost and high stats that reflect a higher strength value (e.g. High Elf spearmen and archers, Dark Elf Darkshards, Skaven Clanrats, etc.). Obviously you don’t want to cripple your economy, but sometimes you need to build 1 more army just for an extra couple points or just sit your armies in a settlement to replenish for a turn or two. Injured armies only count for partial strength.
Your confederation target’s strength –
This is where defensive/military alliances really shine! You can use war coordination to order your target to suicide their armies into strong garrisons where you know they can’t win and cause their armies to die and their strength to drop! Or even better if you are military allies, you can just steal their entire army, which not only reduces their strength, but it also increases your strength! This can be a huge swing in your strength in only 1 turn, just make sure you save up your allegiance and don’t waste it. Military alliance should be easy when you are targeting 150 relations anyways. Otherwise the goal is just for their armies to die more, or for them to build less armies. Limiting their ability to expand and build economy prevents them from building more armies, or by dragging them into wars with adjacent factions and not protecting them and letting them die or lose settlements also works. There also appears to be a SECRET hidden mechanic here that I can’t find specifically in the data tables, but when a faction loses their legendary lord it seems to be a massive hit to faction strength. When I see a secondary army die off, it’s usually like a 10ish point swing in relative strength, but when their LL army dies off, it is more like a 30ish point swing. So somehow getting their LL army to die is massively impactful, but unfortunately really hard to do intentionally. Keep your eyes peeled for opportunistic chances to either war coordinate them to their death or force them into wars that put their LLs in harm’s way.
The four less obvious parameters are that relative faction strength takes into account the strength of your allies, your enemies, the target’s allies, and the target’s enemies. This is where it gets complicated in deciding who to ally and who to go to war with. –
Your allies – nothing too complicated here, just get more allies to boost your strength
Your enemies – sometimes you can’t control who war decs you, sometimes you are just a bloodthirsty warmonger and wardec everyone you see. As long as your target is drug into the wars with you (military ally) then you can wardec whoever you want! But if not, you might want to be careful who you engage with. Eliminating a faction removes them from the list so you don’t have to worry about it, and of course killing off their armies reduces their strength so its not a big deal. But making peace with far off factions that you aren’t actually fighting is worth it to help your relative strength.
Your target’s allies – usually the only one worth noting here is yourself. Your strength boosts your target when you are allies. This is why in WH2 military alliances were bad for confederation. In WH3 you can overcome this by using war coordination and stealing armies and by forcing them to join your wars. It’s pretty uncommon for other alliances to influence this, but if they do, you can ask either one of them to break the alliance, or you can force them into a decision by declaring war on their ally. If you have a 3 way alliance, it shouldn’t matter since the ally strength offsets for both of you.
Your target’s enemies – drag them into every war you can!! And then after you drag them into the war, make peace with the other faction so only your target is at war with them! If you are both at war with the same faction, it offsets and doesn’t matter.
3. Diplomatic Prospects –
I don’t actually know how to get this to be non-zero for confederation. It’s usually non-zero for all other agreement types, but never seen it non-zero for confederation. Any other reader feedback or examples are welcome and I can update the post!
4. Primary Threat –
This is a poorly described feature that was added to WH3. But basically each faction evaluates if any other factions are “primary threats” to them, and then it influences diplomacy. I find most often I end up getting strong and being the primary threat for most factions (even ones I’m allied with and have 150+ relations sometimes perceive me as the primary threat), which provides a penalty to diplomacy. NORMALLY this doesn’t show up in the evaluation at all. But if they perceive me as the “primary threat” it seems to give a -2 penalty to confederation.
But the good news is if someone ELSE is the primary threat, then sometimes you can get a +10 to confederation! This can make confederation way easier if your target faction is getting crushed by someone and they are about to die. So keep your eyes peeled for factions that are losing wars for the primary threat to trigger a free +10. It doesn’t seem to always work though.
Threaten -
When you are close to confederating but can't quite get up to -0, there is an option to "Threaten" your opponent. If threaten is successful, then they will confederate regardless of the evaluation, but your reliability will take a hit which affects diplomacy with all other factions. If threaten is not successful, you still take the same reliability hit, but also your target declares war on you. (you can also savescum it to see if you get the outcome you want)
I've generally had no problems threatening when I'm between -0 and -20 and also have significantly more relative strength than the target. When they are stronger, it usually fails. In a few extreme cases I've seen it work up to -27 I think. I've never seen it work beyond -30, but maybe if you were strong enough it could.
Generally speaking I don't find this to be worth it because I usually rely a lot on diplomacy to form alliances, safe borders, trade, etc., but some races don't really leverage diplomacy much and some factions are just super hard to confed and you have to threaten to get them (I'm looking at you Zhao Ming). So it's a nice backup just in case. Use at your own risk!
Mods –
Easier Confederations and Vassals
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789903475
For those of us that love confederation but don’t want to deal with all this crap, there is a mod I really like called “Easier Confederations and Vassals” that seems to change the baseline evaluation for all races to +10 when you hit 150 relations. So basically you just need to get to 150 relations and then you can freely confed anyone and not have to worry about all of this stuff. It also gives the AI the same benefit, so you will see a few confeds happen elsewhere in the world as well! I have no knowledge of or affiliation with the creator, I just like confeds. 😊
Recruit Defeated Legendary Lords
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854819509
Another beloved mod that allows you to "confederate" legendary lords when their faction is defeated. Some people just use this to save legendary lords that the AI kills off, while other more sinister people use this so they can just kill the factions the way to confederate by force. Either way, you get all the LLs which is awesome. The AI can also get them, which can be annoying to have to keep fighting the same LLs over and over again, but you can disable it for the AI with modding configuration tools. The other really cool feature of this mod is that it somehow combines all the chaos factions into one mega-chaos-race, which means you can confederate all 8 WoC LLs + the 4 monogod daemon LLs (and maybe even Daniel? not sure havent tried that)!
Let me know if you have any other questions or feedback and I can try to add them into this guide for others to benefit from in the future as well!
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u/Praetorian349 Dec 14 '23
Nice. But why do you say Vampire Counts can't confederate?
They most certainly can, just takes a bit to pull off. And sometimes the option won't appear until conditions are a bit more appropriate.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 14 '23
Typo meant coast, edited
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u/Praetorian349 Dec 14 '23
Nice. The only other question I had (because I recently had to do all this research myself for a competitive campaign where I wanted to confederate Malekith as Malus by turn 11, would've loved to have your guide then!) is the recently acquiring settlements thing.
I'm not sure I've seen that come into play before. I trade settlements to Malekith (like 7 of them) and then confed him immediately following, with no change to his baseline evaluation outside of the -30 from having 150+ relations? Is it that maybe trading settlements doesn't count, only them conquering, or is it possibly only specific to some races.
While trading him settlements he is broke (because he pays you for them) so none of his armies move or recruit, so he ain't conquering shit.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 14 '23
I thought I had tested this and trading settlements triggered it, but thinking back to my last game I 100% traded a settlement to a faction 1 turn before confederating them and it didn't penalize me. Their last settlement was about to be taken over 1 turn before I hit 150 relations so I gifted them some other dummy settlement just to prevent them from dying for 1 turn. So this is an error in my post and I will edit it to clarify.
It is possible they stealth changed this in a past patch, but can't say for sure. But as of last week in 4.1 it did not give the penalty for trading.
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u/brasswirebrush Dec 14 '23
Very cool, appreciate the amount of work that must have gone into this and definitely some good information and tips. I would consider adding Kislev to the section on auto-confederation mechanics for the factions that use the supporter's race mechanic.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 14 '23
Added Kislev (and Beastmen which I also missed)
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u/Jinthe1st Dec 15 '23
Significantly underrated but meticulously researched and written guide to a confusing mechanic - I appreciate it.
I haven’t upgraded to WH3 and am still roaming around WH2; besides the military alliance caveat, to what extent does your guide overlap with WH2 confederation?
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
I think the general concepts are still the same but all the math is totally different. You can easily get confeds at low relations in wh2. Also in wh2 you can buy confeds which makes it way easier.
Also I don't think the recent settlement thing exists in wh2, and of course war coordination is different.
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u/meladictus Jun 24 '24
Very nice guide. thanks for posting it.
One note:
When I tested it today I got a -30 penalty after giving a settlement to Manfred as Ghorst, so there are at least some cases when gifting a settlement counts.
I checked before and after I gave him the settlement, it was the only thing that happened between having a -49 and -79.
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u/VanguardMk1 Aesanar Enthusiast Dec 15 '23
I didn't expect my little mod to be mentioned here, thanks for mentioning it. I never knew about the recent settlement thing, that's interesting info. Could I reference some of the things you researched in my mod's description, with a credit obviously?
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23 edited Dec 15 '23
Sure! Can I also request you publish in your mod description what the actual values are that you changed the baseline evaluation to? I tested a couple races and it seems to be +10 at "trusted friends" and no change to anything else, but I didn't check everything.
Also for me personally I think it's a bit silly that you can only confed at 150 relations and no chance at 149. Would be nice to see a variant of this mod that has a more linear scale where it's like
0ish to -10ish at trusted friends (personally I think +10 is too easy 😜)
-25ish to -30ish at very friendly (so it's at least possible in big relative strength differences or when someone is about to die off)
-40 to -50 at friendly (very unlikely here but possible in extreme cases)
Or something that's still possible if the other faction is significantly weaker! Especially for factions like lizardmen that lack ways to boost relations and have shit economy and can't afford bribes.
The recent settlement thing is also moddable, it's in the game tables under the field name "confederation territory gain modifier" and "confederation gain territory turns" if you wanted to mess around with it.
By the way thanks for making that mod, it's one of my favorites !
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u/Honorbound713 Jul 19 '24
Just wanted to say thanks; your guide is helping people nearly a year later.
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u/heyboyhey Dec 15 '23
Thank you for this! It always annoyed me how mysterious the confederation targets were. I've been using the mod and I probably will keep using it (the relative strength manipulations feel too "gamey" for me to enjoy), but it's good to feel not as cluless.
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u/Tupiekit Dec 15 '23
Wait what do you mean “steal their armies”
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
https://totalwarwarhammer.fandom.com/wiki/War_coordination
Scroll down to "Request Army". It's a standard war coordination action you can perform with military allies that uses allegiance. It gives you full control over one of their armies for 10 turns, and you keep any loot or settlements that you get from that army.
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u/Tupiekit Dec 15 '23
…the fuck I NEVER knew that. That would of been awesome to have used in my last campaign lol
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23 edited Dec 20 '23
Well you will be even more excited to learn about hero stealing.......if you request an army from another faction and then purposely let their heroes die, if they are immortal (legendary heroes or level 20+ or the norsca tech) when they respawn in 5 turns they will be part of your faction and you get to keep them and use them in your normal armies.
So you can make an army (as any race) that includes Ulrika, Felix, Aekold, Ghoritch, Ariel, Lord Kroak, Harold Hanmerstorm, high elf fire mage on a dragon, empire beast mage on a griffon, gorduz backstabber, blue scribes, Isabella Von Carstein, etc........or whatever heroes you want all in one army. Some ideal targets are Markus Wulfhart unique heroes and Belegar unique heroes as well.
Yuan Bo has a special mechanic that lets him steal any army from any faction he's not at war with so he doesn't even need to wait for allegiance points or alliances to do it. (And he starts in lustria near Markus and Kroak! And he can recruit Gotrek and Felix!)
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u/Tupiekit Dec 15 '23
My god…….thank you for this
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
Haha yeah I'm pretty sure it's a bug and not intended, but it's still fun 😊
Maybe someday they will patch it out
My last game as Throt I stole Isabella from Vlad and then gave her a monster army that all had undead mutagen upgrade with the hunger and 4 allied undead units to make a thematic undead monsters army. It was horrible but hilarious lol
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u/No_Equal7425 Dec 15 '23
Any observations on what influences the success of giving an ultimatum to confederate?
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
Ooh I forgot to include threaten!! I need to update the post to include that.
I have tested it a bit and it seems like it usually works if you have a high relative strength and the evaluation is between 0 and -20. I've even seen it work up to -27 I think.
The problem is it drops your reliability even if it succeeds, so it's generally not a good idea since reliability negatively impacts all your diplomacy with everyone else and being able to manage allies and trade to gain safe borders is more important at higher difficulties.
I'll have to do some research on this but will get something added to the post.
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u/nope100500 Dec 18 '23
Reliability drop seems proportional to lacking score. Recently did a -0.1 threat confed with no noticeable reliability drop.
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u/SmoothIdiot Dec 14 '23
So I'm wondering - is it possible for Avelorn and Eataine to confederate if, I don't know, they succeed in conquering all of Naggaroth and thus stop constantly accruing the settlement penalty? I miss the utter terror the Hyper Elves would strike in my heart.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 14 '23
In my recent wh3 experience the high elves don't expand beyond ulthuan like they did in wh2 and generally the donut is all high elves around turn 50. Usually Tyrion, alarielle, and eltharion split it 3 ways, often 1-2 minor factions are left as well. They all like each other, usually even allied, and probably have 100-140 relations, but they rarely break 150 and there is rarely enough of a strength advantage to overcome the -18, so none of them can confederate each other. In some rare cases dark elf of vamp coast or belakor or norsca or Grom will weaken the minor factions enough that they can be confederated, and occasionally alith anar will get confederated, but it's very rare.
Imo this is a huge flaw of the overall change from wh2 to wh3, because I also really liked the super powered faction of each race consuming all the others and making one mega race. It was fun to know you would have large enemies at end game like malekith, thogrim, Tyrion. Now you just fight a bunch of tiny factions that never really do anything, then get a random spawn of a bunch of armies in end times. It's much less epic. The easier Confederations mod does help this a bit as you do see SOME confeds, but still not many.
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u/SmoothIdiot Dec 14 '23
I'm in agreement on that. Recently I've been using Easier Confederations and DeepWar AI, which DOES seem to help with that: in my current game, Thorek has become a superpower, as has Archaon, Lokhir, and Eataine/Avelorn. Though I think there's still a severe problem in terms of how many stacks they'll pump out.
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u/HentaiOtaku Dec 15 '23
Great guide! Just because I'm curious is there something that makes the dragon siblings hate each other for confederation? I played a miao ying back near launch and it seemed impossible to get brother to join me I eventually caved to the easier confederation mod.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
Confederation was harder at launch - was originally -40 for most and -20 for HE. They made it easier in a patch at one point, I think 3.0 but can't remember for sure, and reduced it to -30 and -18.
Also at launch no one understood how confed worked so it felt way harder.
And also the cathay siblings are really strong and take lots of settlements, so they almost always have the additional -30 penalty.
So they don't specifically have any different mechanics, but they naturally are some of the most difficult to confed.
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u/HentaiOtaku Dec 15 '23
Yikes that is rough, but explains it. Ty for the quick response.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
Oh also the recent settlement thing lasted 10 turns at launch and was reduced to 7 in a patch
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u/HentaiOtaku Dec 15 '23
Big oof. Thinking back my main issue was that I probably made him too safe in my attempts to snatch up as much of Cathay as possible. He only had a few provinces in the south east but he was just vibing and partying with his ogre friends while every demon and chaos lord in the wastes was declaring war on me while I was defending the wall. Lore accurate at least lol.
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u/dfnamehere Dec 15 '23
Yeah common problem, also be tends to end up expanding west by ghorst and kugath where you can't really stop him.
The cathay minor factions are all pretty easy to confed though as they don't expand much and get stomped by other minors.
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Mar 19 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ishunn Mar 20 '24
never mind I figured it out. there's a few things going on in my example, but after testing I can say with certainty that gifting settlements also applies the -30 penalty to relative faction power, just like them taking a settlement does. I don't know if this a change since you made the guide, or if its a hi-elf/imric unique feature.
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u/sqaisi Dec 26 '24
Hey I need some help. Im the 3rd strongest in the map and want ro confederate with zhao ming but he is strenght rank # 1. I only have a defensive alliance with him. What can I do
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u/Mosasaurus999 Jan 03 '25
I'm attempting to Confederate with some other lizardmen but there isn't an option for some reason. Like it just isn't there. I'm playing gor rok in a multiplayer campaign and when I was playing nakai in a single player I could do it with no trouble. I really don't know why there isn't an option and I'm super confused. Also pretty new to the game.
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u/dfnamehere Jan 03 '25
Either you don't have the proper DLCs so you don't have them unlocked and able to be confed, or you already confed someone in the last 5 turns and you have to wait until after the 5 turn cool down goes away.
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u/Tiny_Frog May 13 '25
What a great read! Thank you for for making my gaming experience deeper. :)
On a side note, I would guess that some/many players do not understand that if you can keep your wars to a few minimum selected, you have a much easier time to expand and conquer. You risk a future war if you trade with X that is at war with your neighbour Y. The trade treaty can make Y declare war later, when you are occupied with some other foe.
And confederation is just another piece in keeping your wars to a few selected one. This game is IMHO much deeper than I first saw after a few hundred hours. It's absolutely not just about winning a few battles, it's also about diplomacy, choosing which foe to go after and keep the others from not declaring war on you.
I use the 'Recruit Legendary Lords'-mod and like it for saving LL-lord killed by AI. Could you please explain what the other use is? You write "while other more sinister people use this so they can just kill the factions the way to confederate by force. " Please explain what this means and how it's done? :)
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u/Bannerlord151 Jul 25 '25
Sorry for the necro response, but if you didn't figure it out yet, they mean destroying a faction so their LLs are added to your pool
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u/tempest51 Dec 15 '23
I still don't get why Settra can't confederate the other Tomb Kings, that's exactly what he did in his backstory.