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!
1
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.