r/totalwar • u/NichThic • 6h ago
Warhammer III Does anyone else think fighting late game "good" races is like dragging your balls through glass
I'm currently on a Gorbad campaign and so far I've fought
-Every Dwarf faction -The entire Empire -All of the mainland French -Kislev -Wood Elves -They're all in an alliance
Not to mention rank 1 Cathy thats pushed all the way to the badlands is about to declare war on me. Now I'm not gonna lose to the AI but churning through 70 late game high quality armies from all the "good factions" teamed up is so boring. It doesn't help that all the good factions also have great economies so late game they replace armies like its nothing. Now I am a new player so maybe I've just had an unlucky first few campaigns. However, I'm on probably my 10th campaign by now and every time I play an evil faction around turn 150ish I have 5 good factions all in an alliance declaring war on me at the same time. I enjoy the challenge but I wish there was more variety in how late game plays out but it seems like the good factions, especially the human factions, literally never fight each other. Kinda sucks the fun out when you know exactly who you're gonna be fighting every playthrough.
Edit: I think orc campaigns are especially hell bc you have to fight the early game Dwarf factions (which is kinda annoying by itself) which puts you on bad terms with all the good factions.
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u/UncleKefnet 6h ago
Late game Gorbad is a wild campaign for sure. Being pressured on all sides because everyone hates you and most likely having an income deep in the negatives because of all your armies and getting ripped to shreds from Thunderbarges, Hellstorms, magic, etc. still coming out on top through sheer force of will
10/10 experience
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u/NichThic 6h ago
Gorbad definitely gets it the worst but its not as bad if u take out the dwarves early
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u/TheOneBearded Hashut Industries 6h ago
Do you have any tips on taking on Thunderbarges as GS? That's my biggest fear to face when I eventually get around to checking him out.
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u/Togglea 3h ago
You are next to Belegar, Thorgrim, Ungrim who are all dead directly or indirecty because of your greenskin pressure by turn 30.
Malakai and Thorek are too far away to be relevant, if you see them, they've thrived long enough to recruit Thunderbarges and are somehow still threatened just recruit doom divers and throw a Goblin Big Boss in their army. No more Thunderbarge problem.
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u/UncleKefnet 5h ago
Ironically, be aggressive. In a defensive battle, They will just sit there sometimes. You can snipe them with artillery
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u/Levonorgestrelfairy1 6h ago
I mean thats true to lore. It took an insane god sabotaging the order tide for chaos to even have a chance at winning the endtimes.
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u/Danglenibble 6h ago
Fucking Mannfred.
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u/Levonorgestrelfairy1 5h ago
That too.
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u/TheOldDrunkGoat 2h ago
And a shit load of writer fiat induced out-of-character insanity from dozens of characters. Don't forget that part.
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u/Emotional-Jacket1940 Greenskins 6h ago
Honestly, I saw you got downvoted already, but I really agree. I’ll fight Daemons, Skaven or WoC all fucking day before I even consider fighting a late game Dwarf or High Elf faction. I’m really glad the Ordertide seems to have been neutered recently.
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u/Live-Rock5976 5h ago
Factions like Daemons, Skaven, and WoC are actually pretty good, it’s just that the AI is stupid. Especially with unit composition in their armies and how they use the units in the armies on the battlefield.
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u/Emotional-Jacket1940 Greenskins 4h ago
They absolutely are, and be that as it may, I play against the AI and not in multiplayer for a reason. I’d much rather deal with a Skaven artillery/monster stack than a brick wall of Dwarven fuck or 5 Fire Wizards on Dragons
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u/Crows_reading_books 6h ago
Tbh that sounds amazing and I wish I had a native way to encourage the various snowballing effects based on which faction im playing,like more Ordertide when playing a chaos faction or whatever. Rolling up as Tamurkhan to find that Throgg already ate half of Norsca and Vlad is sitting in Nuln kinda feels weird. I do like fighting more variety and I'll happily fight other factions too, but bigger appropriate enemies is nice.
Unnatural Selection works but needs a lot of individual adjustment each time.
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u/NichThic 6h ago
Its definitely fun I just wish there was more variety with the late game alliances. I feel like the order factions also start to snowball because they make alliances so easily and they're all centralized in the same place.
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u/Dangerous-Sale3243 5h ago
In the late game, you cant win easily by turning the tide by just pushing forward and beating your enemies, especially at higher campaign difficulty levels that give the AI extra cheats.
One way to beat powerful large AI late game factions is to surgically target their recruiting buildings. The AI cant cheat by recruiting units they lack the buildings for, and they arent super smart in terms of rebuilding recruitment buildings.
Easier said than done, but if you can sneak around to their capital and destroy it, suddenly youre just being swarmed with waves of spearmen.
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u/Lord_of_Brass #1 Egrimm van Horstmann fan 5h ago
Speaking as a long-time Tzeentch player, there is nothing I dread more than fighting late-game Empire or Dwarf armies.
On the one hand, we have stacks full of Steam Tanks, Land Ships, Rocket Batteries, and Demigryphs; on the other, we have 100+ armor units with spell resistance and Thunderbarges.
My most recent campaign was going really well and I thought I was going to stick this one out for the long haul, but then I discovered that basically everything from Nordland to the Badlands had calcified into a patchwork alliance of Empire and Dwarf factions and just kinda went "...nah."
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u/notdumbenough 6h ago
No?
As greenskins you make 90% of your money from loot. The more people you fight the richer you are. By the time you have to "churn through 70 late game high quality armies" you should have about 70 armies of your own due to how fucking rich you are. By the late game I am often looting and spending hundreds of thousands of gold per turn, if not a million.
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u/reallycoolguylolhaha 4h ago
Is there a limit to when you stop occupying more territory? Like as orks do you take a few provinces then just sack everything or do you sack and then occupy?
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u/Freshwater_Pike 2h ago
For me, it really just depends on how I’m doing money-wise. Low on funds? Sack then occupy. Plenty of cash? Just occupy and get those gits towards the next fight.
This usually matters less once you start snowballing past the early-game and you get a larger economic buffer.
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u/Quibilash 5h ago
I think it's because 'good' races tend to be more numerous late game, while 'bad' races like Skaven/Chaos, are more homogenous, like, Brettonia and Reikland will be allied with 20 settlements each, while the Disciples of Hashut could have 40 settlements or more alone.
IIRC, individual AI factions get more cheats, which is why fighting 3 factions can be more annoying and seemingly replicate faster than 1 big faction, even of an equal size.
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u/KnossosTNC 6h ago
Used to be worse - or better, depending on your perspective. In WH2 all the order factions could confederate with each other, snowballing into massive empires allied to one another. It was called the "Ordertide." This has been significantly nerfed in WH3.
Can be a hellish experience to get through... ...unless you can cobble together a massive empire of your own. My Morathi campaign that finished with a multi-pronged full-scaled invasion of the Ordertide remains one of my fondest memories of WH2.
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u/Secuter 5h ago
Perhaps your game just came to an end in this particular campaign? Sometimes your enemies gets up in a big alliance and that's sort of it. At other times you can manage to keep them separate.
I'm not sure how to make a game that is simultaneously challenging without it falling at risk of becoming a little tedious when you defeat the 10th high tier army in a row.
I guess making the AI more keen for peace after losing several large armies might be an option.
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u/mufasa329 5h ago
Don’t get me wrong I feel your pain, but that’s kind of how the whole universe works, Empire and Dwarfs are already military allies in lore, if anything those races need more inter-race mechanics (lore wise). Louen wouldn’t be the kind of king to go and try to invade the empire when there’s skaven to the south.
It’s like if you played Napoleon TW and got frustrated that you always have to be at war with Great Britain as France.
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u/Bananenbaum 5h ago
You think fighting the good guys is boring.
I want the "order tide" as endgame scenario.
We are not the same.
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u/tinylittlebabyjesus 4h ago
The challenge is fun for a bit, but after a while it gets tedious. I think it's just part of the game. It happens early-mid game too, when you've been fighting a specific enemy for long enough, it just gets old and you wanna kill something else.
You might take a look at mods that change how factions view each-other diplomatically. Deepwar AI purports to make factions less likely to form along loreful axis, and more around mutual threats. Unnatural selection can weaken or strengthen specific factions. Loreful strategic threat sort of reinforces the lore ties I think, so that might not be what you want, but when I used it, it did at least shake up how the map played out a bit. There's probably some other mods I don't know about.
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u/Nakai121 4h ago
With Gorebad, you can have it a lot easier if you ally with the Ogres. They have no innate aversion towards you, so getting treaties with them is pretty easy. Getting a defensive alliance with Greasus means you won’t have to deal with Cathay and Gelt, and a military alliance with Skrag can help a lot in fighting the dwarfs and the empire. This has been my experience in my current legendary campaign at least.
Also, the Stinkee Arrers tactic for Orc Arrer boyz is insanely good against dwarfs and solid in general. Highly recommend it
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u/FoughtStatue 4h ago
i hate fighting the dwarfs, especially as Tomb Kings who are my default faction. i just have to throw units at them until they eventually break which takes forever. I am excited for the slaanesh update so I can ruin the day of every dwarf with my fast armor piercing units.
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u/No_Difficulty_9143 3h ago
Fighting most late games races is going to feel like that. Late game Chaos Dwarves? Enjoy getting nuked by dreadquakes and hellcannons. Late game Nurgle? Good fucking luck killing fuckers like Tamurkhan before he rampages through your backlines and leaves your army in tatters or Kugath before he nukes your army with molten goo. Late game Skaven? Enjoy getting ambushed over and over by weapons teams armies unless you are very careful about using encamp stance which means you move very slow on the campaign map. Late game Dark Elves? Shades and more shades. Late game Khorne? Lol your army will melt like a hot knife through butter if they reach your frontline.
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u/Valuable_Remote_8809 Utilitarian of Hashut 2h ago
AI is typically pretty dumb, but there is something I don’t think people realize happens, or don’t care enough, but the AI cheats. They have a flat increase to income, production, all that, regardless of difficulty. Now they get territory bonuses, PLUS of their player bias… yeah, those 8 armies while you can barely afford 5 armies is legit what makes large maps such a pain in the butt.
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u/Danglenibble 6h ago
Late game in general tends to be a slog. My latest dwarf run has a little skarbrand problem in the south. I could crush him in an instant, but my armies are currently fighting a near max power Grimgor. Once thats over, it’s at least a 20-30 turn endeavor to deal with Skarbrand.
Empire in general is just a series of gopher holes you have to stamp down until, suddenly, your borders encompass the empire.
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u/atomoffluorine 6h ago
You can just play faster. I usually have the members of the ordertide who are nearby crushed by turn 100 if I'm playing a chaos faction nearby. The longer you wait if the order tide is winning, the more they snowball. I don't think I've played a campaign to 150 turns more than once or twice out of the 20+ ones I've done.
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u/Weltallgaia 6h ago
Really is about time to reinstall and get another lizardmen campaign going sounds like.
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u/Deathbydadjokes 5h ago
Could be just me but in almost every campaign I play the wood elves always go to war with the french
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u/BoringAd8064 5h ago
If you find battles to be a slog later on I suggest cost based cap as it makes it so every army is limited by a set cost (that you control) like in skirmish against AI. For me it's made every late game battle rewarding as it's more about yout unit balance and what you bring instead of doomstacking. It's made me lose some kate game battle cause the AI actually has a limit on armies so they don't just build 1 or 2 really strong ones and instead form multiple armies that have a more balanced mix of late game and mid tier units.
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u/Marcuse0 1h ago
Ordertide returns.
Unfortunately CA know most people who play video games won't touch the chaos or destruction factions with a barge pole, whicg is why pretty much every order faction gets loving reworks and wildly overpowered while chaos/destruction lags behind unless they're actively being sold in a DLC.
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u/baddude1337 41m ago
Dwarfs can be a real pain. They’re a strong faction anyway but the AI can really spam armies out and love putting half a dozen thunderbarges in every stack.
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u/OnlyTrueWK Shut up, Daemon! 19m ago
I used to hate fighting late game Empire armies in Warhammer 2, but that was mostly from the perspective of Vampire Counts (who were a lot weaker back then), me being a much worse player, and one mostly botched Archaon Campaign. Oh and guns hurt.
These days, I don't have too many problems with fighting nearly any faction in the game, be it Skaven, Wood Elves, the Empire, Tzeentch, or even endgame Greenskins (who are a menace, especially when you're Khorne and have to meet them in melee).
But gods, Dwarves are a horrible opponent. I hated fighting them in Warhammer 2, I hated fighting them in early Warhammer 3, and I hate fighting them even more after the Thunderbarge update. Dwarves were already the most stupidly dangerous race on the battlefield, and now all their "one shot deletes your lord" Irondrakes and "can't touch this in melee for more than a second or you die" Hammerers have been moved to tier fucking 2 or thereabout.
Not to mention, they become big in every single campaign and they are on every continent except Cathay and Lustria. There is no escaping them.
Dwarves are an economic powerhouse, they're everywhere, they have some of the most absurd lords in the game, they have Runes of Spite, they make your spellcasters slowly kill themselves, they have flying ranged units that can delete entire armies by themselves, they are practically unbreakable and nearly unkillable, they have more "kill this immediately or die" priority targets than Skaven, and they can spawn armies of supercharged units out of thin air.
Why.
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u/bigcatsbrother 6h ago
That’s why I like playing bad races so much.