No, saying I'm not a fan of Legendary isn't a jab at LegendofTotalWar xD I'm down with Legend. But he doesn't play Total War. He breaks Total War. And that's cool and funny in its own way and actually helps fix the game. But I think if you really want to appreciate Total War, Warhammer or Military Strategy. Legendary difficulty and cheesing, isn't the way. If it really bothers you, the Unsubscribe button is up there ^^^
Have you try the CTT overhaul or any other mod with unit caps ? That very much gives you a challenge right away, I have like 400 hours in the game and probably 350 of them on overhauls XD. Great content as always. (Legend is amaizing too)
Thanks for the video ! I tried legendary and yeah it exactly feels like you describe... If I want to have fun while having a good challenge I go Campaign on very hard with battle on normal. I would like to join the multiplayers but I'm too use to put pause in the middle of the fight and my computer have a hard time as well with online battle. Peace out, I will hear you in your future video ,)
I like hard difficulty for both. I wish the A.I was good and I could just play on normal though :/ kinda annoying for every third or fourth battle to see one of my units get killed by battle buffs or enemy to bring another army it shouldn't normally have. :/
Zerk: "The AI cheats" Me looking at 2 army stacks of Bretonia with one village settlment left while I'm raiding and their public order is 100 (+12): Hmmm yeah kinda
Yup. I'm playing a Clan Pestilens game and just went to war with the Dwarf faction to the west. They have one city in the corner of the map and it's defended by three stacks of 20. The city is making like 500g per turn...
@@TheSilentScreamX there's a hidden mechanic the dev's write solely for the A.I , where AI local populace will just volunteer for free and other factions will send volunteer to enroll in their armies, whenever said AI faction is close to being extinct. You can toggle it on and off in the hidden gameplay menu, under the "bullshit we come up with until google let us borrow DeepMind" category.
I brought this game a month ago and I cannot tell you how many times I've googled what actually changes on different difficulty levels only to get very conflicting info, or being told the AI gets free money and other stuff. Glad to actually finally know what exactly numerically is changing so I can pick the difficulty best for me.
Lol, that's like the biggest difference on the campaign map. I can deal with all the rest pretty easily. The only two things that matter to me are the supply lines (which are always a problem) and public order penalty (which sometimes is a problem).
@@SereglothIV now it's kinda weird with how PO was redone. Before, i could always tell if a province was secure, now it's not quite as cut and dry, still works though
I just want a game where the AI doesn't cheat in campaign. They are immune to corruption, unrest, and can spawn defeated legendary lords with high level stacks.
AI Cheats are a bit insane in this game tbh, I get why, the AI isn't that smart and needs the help, but when you can break a faction down to a single minor settlement and they can still field 3 full stacks, your game balance has some issues
@fasdfasd fsdafsd this is a bit of a bland Statement. What exactly do you mean by „smarter“. It’s easy to just through this word into a discussion. But how do you want to improve the AI further? Do you know how complex and hard it is to train a machine? It’s not like CA is Alphabet and has Deepmind in there office. I find the AI quite fine as it is right now and it became more and more refined with the years. It’s doing stupid things, but this are the situations you as a player can get your grip on. Don’t forget, the time were AIs will get unbeatable in almost every game is not that far away
You forgot about two biggest things in the campaign! First, the supply lines increase upkeep per army: - 2% - normal - 7% - hard - 15% - very hard & legendary Second, there's a public order penalty in player's provinces: - 2 - hard - 4 - very hard - 8 - legendary These are the two things that I feel make the biggest difference. Especially the 15% upkeep increase.
@@caelestigladii not all doomstacks are the same and not all races doomstack. You just can not win with right clicking using skaven weapon teams doomstack. You have to consider your army placement, weapon line of sight, delaying, distracting enemy fast units etc. And sieges are a completely different story with that doomstack because of line of sight issues. Also empire,dwarfs, not very late game tomb kings just do not doomstack effectively. And even using sisters of avelorn or way watcher doomstack is not a guaranteed win every time, you can get swarmed fairly quickly if you are not careful.
If someone thought that there isn't that much of a difference between 2% and 15% supply lines, I'd like to remind that it stacks. Let's say every army has a base upkeep of 3000 gold. In that case, fielding 5 such armies would cost roughly 16,2k on normal, 19,7k on hard, 26,2k on very hard and 28,9k on legendary. If that's not enough, let's say you want to have 10 armies. Well, then they would cost 35,8k on normal, 55,1k on hard, 105,5k on very hard and 116k on legendary. So yeah, while having 10 armies it means your soldiers are 3 times more expensive on very hard than on normal. But keep telling people than all they have to do on very hard is point their doomstack towards the enemy, good luck with that. The biggest challenge (in my opinion) of very hard and legendary difficulties is that you can afford much less armies than your enemies and sometimes it can be crippling when you can't be everywhere at once.
Cheese in legendary should be a choice, sadly in the current state of the game it's the only way to do something with this difficulty. There is no fun when a unit of chaos champion litteraly name "chosen" (with magic armor fill with the soul of their victims and a weapon which burn the flesh and the mind) lose against Garry the garlic farmer and his friends who enlisted in the army 2 week ago as spearmens...
Playing regular strat and tactic on legendary works. Half the difficulty comes from the faction choice anyway. Even if you play normally you still get to use the most cheesy, overpowered thing in the game, magic. Chosen will stand as a rock in the river of low to medium infantry, I'd like to see Garry try.
or removing the ability to pause during combat, removing one of the biggest tactical elements to combat as a way to artificially increase difficulty a little more.
@Whiskiz Yo What are you talking about? First of all, pausing is disabled only on Legendary, and disabling pause is the only extra thing Legendary adds on battles. If you want to pause, play on Very hard Second, most RTS games don't allow you to pause, and Total war games don't let you pause on multiplayer. If you want to play multiplayer, playing on Legendary/battle realism on is the best way to practice
@@exantiuse497 actually there is a difference other than pause between leg and vh. You might want to actually double check something before declaring it.
They really need to change how battle difficulty scales. Makes no sense to just buff melee for the AI so much. Get rid of MA/MD buffs and give them something like extra ward save or just %health instead; something that'd apply evenly for all unit types. Missile units are already the most cost-efficient to build army compositions around in the campaign. Having the difficulty level itself further encourage you to go down that route isn't doing anyone any favours
I agree, I think “legendary” difficulty should really be in weighing against the map rather than engagements. Fudging numbers isn’t the right kind of difficulty. Perhaps making it so you can’t see the opposing armies outside of if they’re a full stack or not plus not seeing all their units immediately after deployment.
@@Daemonioros Just play legendary campaign/normal battle difficulty. Best Total War expirience imo. You get to have a challenge you can't reload save you gotta make decisions. You're outnumbered but you're not forced to cheese, use doomstacks or range spam. You're using tactics on both campaign and battle map. And if you use more meele focused armies as Empire for example it's far harder than playing on very hard battle. As you're forced to mirco and think fast using cav and infantry. While on very hard battle using cav or infantry is pointless so you range spam charge in with heros to tank and just blast them with artillery and magic and basically win with no losses or thought. Legendary Campaign/Normal Battle imo is for all that simply the best difficulty. Because you get real challenge while if you max all bars all you do is spam range and cassualy cheese your way through campaign as there's no other way to play it.
Missiles also have the bonus of usually not losing troops in battles, so are ready to go immediately. Add the red skill line which encourages you to pick from 1 or 2 unit types and army variety is punished
This is a reason why I play exclusively on Normal/Normal even though I have over 1500 hours in the game. I would rather have easy campaign than to give AI ridiculous cheats.
Ditto, may also add mods to remove the stacking cost penalties for upkeep with additional stacks since if the AI can gave 3 full stacks on 1 minor settlement I don't see why I should be limited to 3 armies with 4 full provinces, while the AI spawns endless hordes
@@maddlarkin It's up to you. On Normal, supply line is only 2%, so basically nonexistent. I am telling you, I have been playing on Normal/Normal exclusively since WaP and have had a great deal of fun. Lore-wise armies, no cheesing, using different mounts (because you don't need to min-max skill points), no need for lighting strike etc. Try it, it's really fun and relaxing.
@@processing4426 pretty much what I do dude, but the stacking upkeep penalties increase per-stack and apply to each unit, you confederate an AI as the empire and you'll see your entire economy tank as you try and deal with the 3-4 trash stacks it had, but I like large games with tonnes of stacks to manage so I'm deploying the kind of armies you see in lore I just like a lot of stacks it's a personal thing. I keep trying to find a decent chaos invasion increase, but even adding x10, x20 the armies Archaon and pals still don't pose a massive threat, just a far grinder one, even at x20 stacks I don't think I've seen them get further south than Praag But then I'm a big mod proponent, I love more unit variety, annoyance reduction features and increased map selection, I don't care about achievements so why not add a bunch more lore friendly generals etc
I actually prefer Hard/Normal. While I dislike units preforming better/worse than their suppose to, if the AI isn't given an economy boost, then I usually steamroll them after a single major battle. I'd rather have multiple armies to fight.
In the same boat. AI still gets tough if you don't know what you are doing, but at least in battle, you are able to use the whole roster, rather than spamming heroes or missile units.
Supply lines are killing harder difficulty too. I liked the beta on legendary difficulty because I could field more smaller armies and I could use tactics against the AI but with current supply lines I'm forced to just 1 stack army in the beginning. Supply lines should punish stacking high tier units so it's harder to cheese instead of punishing basically everything.
honestly I think it's much more easier to raise lord recruitment/upkeep price instead of adding supply lines. Like, first lord cost 100, second lord cost 200, etc..
There is a mod called Supply Lines Rework by TWilliam you might find interesting, what it does is global upkeep cost is modified by quantity and quality of troops you have recruited, so for example 3 full stacks of basic infantry will have lesser impact on global extra %upkeep for all armies, than 10 monsters
@@adamnowicki1425 A lot of people including me feel like using mods that reduce difficulty set up by CA is like cheating. I am not saying that mod is not raising valid points. But if you hunt achievements it feels sooo wrong when you use anything but vanilla.
@@ScarletEdge Yes, it's cheating if you alter the game's built-in cheating. All mods that make the game more fun or loreful are cheating. The game is intended to be played as doomstack vs doomstack.
@@Tyrentenir As I said: despite bad difficulty implementation in W2, it still feels like cheating when I use mods that alter that difficulty. I am not arguing the fact that these mods actually correct aforementioned bad implementation of difficulty. All I am saying is that getting achievements with these mods is unfair towards people who did not use them. In my opinion CA should disable achievements if game is changed by anything that is not graphics/sound related. There are mods out there that change campaign objectives to such extent you just need to fire up campaign and that's that you get achievement. Player can chose to mod the game, but should not be rewarded for it with achievements, no matter if your mod changes supply lines, changes ai so it's not dead set on you, or if you able to zoom out to decrease your camera micro. I am a person who takes pride from every achievement I did. I play fair and square and I want to feel legit when I brag about it to my other friends. ATM you cannot brag about W2 achievements, because you can simply cheat to get them.
Cheesing is literally the only way to play the VC on VH/Legendary. They rely purely on melee in combat and the melee defence and leadership buff the AI gets cannot be beaten, your Graveguards die against regular swordsmen
cause you know, why make the AI start using tactics like cycle charging when you can just buff stats and call it a day...I hate that kind of difficulty setting
for real, its just about 1000% easier than programming that AI behavior then working out all the unintended behaviors that result from it. I imagine that getting everything to work mostly as intended was hard AF for this game, considering how many asymmetrical factions there are.
@@seekerofalice9787 in older titles that was tied to commander skill. They had a command skill and a zero skill general was likely to yolo charge into you while a ten skill general would pull some shit out of hannibal's playbook. iirc they stopped doing that either when Rome 1 or Empire released.
@@arckmage5218 Indeed, I love to see that the AI avoids dumb strategies(running all in a single tunnel, or ramming their general alone against your frontline like it used to do with Shogun 2) and it's finally a serious threat. The bonus on VH make the campaings feel like an epic struggle rather than an easy stramroll.
the elector counties of the empire go though the supply lines issues especally with you going as riekland and southland the supply lines hit hard and you need at least a minimal of one lord or general minus boris for mittinland franz for riekland gelt for southland and volkmar for sylvania out of all the counties that make up the empire of man which i think there is 13 counties in there that's 9 normal generals you need minimal and on the field with full stack of troops to cover there elected provinces and the upkeep for that is going to be murder. that and you may need etxra generals along with markus and his legendary agents and his ranger/archer heavy or dominat force as well and possibly 5 legenday generals right there you can put in to elector possitions.
Tbh it would be awesome to see Legend's video about legend difficulty (which let's be honest will be complaining about) and start some discussion about legend difficulty in general. Most of the players who play it complain about it and most of the players who do not play it complain about it. Maybe that could trigger sth with CA about changing their policy related to different experiences for one of the most complex game they produced by not adding flat buffs. This is a little bit frustrating that they have so many tools in the box and still using a sledgehammer to nail the picture to the wall. EACH! F###! TIME! My head hurts...
He's unapologetically the Cheese Guy. I'd like to see him play a full Legendary campaign without once wasting ammo or tricking the AI to go to random places in sieges or corner camping or anything like that. Not saying he couldn't do it but playing "normally" doesn't really cut it in Legendary it seems most of the time.
#1 reason I don't play legendary: I just like being able to pause battles. I can deal with permasaves and cheaty AI and all that, but I want to be able to pause. I know it's bad practice if you want to get into multiplayer, but I don't.
for me command units while we are in pause is very fair vs the AI because it can give orders to all army in every way it want and in less than half second
I play very hard campaign and normal battle difficulty. I find it's the right balance of being challenged and out numbered by enemy armies, but allows your units to perform in the lore-friendly way they are intended when you heroically beat off two full enemy stacks with a single stack of your own. This also allows me to make my armies balanced and somewhat fluffy.
CA needs to put some serious effort into the AI in this game if we're ever going to get a new combat difficulty scaling system. They should be smarter and faster. Just giving their units extra buffs is so... ham fisted, one note and so MMO feeling. I've only ever played on Normal. I dont enjoy that false difficulty stuff.
AI is so extremely hard to create, it's astonishing to me that it is even that good compared to a human. Just think about how you focus your thousands of years evolved mind on a task and expect a program to be good at the same thing with extremely limited resources. You have to look at what it does with what it has and not what you want it to have because that's just extremely hard to reach. Not saying it couldn't be improved, just saying it's hard.
I'm just talking about Combat AI. Campaign AI is neither here nor there imo, it simply functions and works as it would in a Civ game or an Endless game. I'm pretty sure almost every 4x game gives its AI cheats on the Campaign Map with higher difficulty settings. Its the Combat AI, that needs work. We can come up with excuses all winter long, but at the end of the day, its only a matter of the CA dev team's leadership designating it as an issue to be worked on. Don't get me wrong here, people want Race DLCs. The community isnt talking about AI inconsistencies. I'm not saying the dev team is being dumb. What i'm saying is, its really strange how I can get a more challenging and responsive AI combatant by playing Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth from 2009, before a Total War game post 2015.. Its like someone on the dev team left the AI's barn door open and they keep working on everything about Warhammers outfit, BESIDES, the open pants zipper. It's just way to easy to completely trounce the AI by punching them in the balls. Again, dont get me wrong, I like cheese as much as the next Legendoftotalwar. But a game of this caliber and simulation NEEDS AI to be more competent than hl2 zombies. I just hope its a center pillar of game 3's reworks.
@BleedRainbows Yes, making good AI is hard, but it can absolutely be done. For example, Age of Empires 2 has incredible AI, it gets zero buffs or cheats on the highest level, it just plays the game really well. Programming competent campaign AI might be trickier because it needs to plan several turns in advance without becoming too predictable so it will probably always need some cheats, but I 100% believe a competent battle AI that don't require cheats could be made
@@darkranger116 Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth is a massively simpler game that TWWH2. I'm not trying to naysay you, you raise a lot of good points about AI having to be a focus, and players caring more about new toys than better AI. That said, its a lot easier to make an AI that plays tic-tac-tow than one that plays chess. Comparing the 2004 LotR:BfME to TWWH2 is a MASSIVE difference in complexity. Instead of having to program "this side fights the other side like this", you now have to account for over a DOZEN races instead of just two, all with vastly different playstyles. Playstyles that can vary vastly even in the same race. There is no real way to deliver the same experience. Maybe if they ONLY worked on say.... Human vs Vampire AI. Great! You have a robust AI combat system comparable. 2 races, easy peasy. Now account for 15 races, with matchups against any of the other 15 (since races can fight themselves). Thats 225 different combat situations you have to account for in your AI code, and thats ONLY for race matchups. Each lord can play very differently as well. Theres 65 different faction leaders, and thats ONLY counting playable ones. Not ones AI controls as well, like Kieslev. Honestly, with all that to account for, its honestly amazing it works at all half the time. To dedicate manpower to create a robust AI that can manage to take all that into account? Phew. It took decades to make a program that could beat someone fairly at chess.
Very hard battle difficulty destroying my immersion goblin spear beating down grail knight wtf. Breaking the lore. Also hard to use cavalry cause of MA,MD up scale. They die to any unit.
VH battle difficulty is garbage. It more or less forces you to rely on missiles, single target units and magic cheese. Melee infantry is only useful for holding the line, even elite units like Stormvermin or White lions can't net more than a couple kills against low tier infantry like Empire swordsmen, and cavaltry is utter garbage for the reason you explained. If you want to cheese, play VH battles, if you want to have fun play Normal
Yup, after playing aoe2 hd where they removed AI cheats for a long time and just getting into total warhammer I cant stand it. I play on normal so its just the minimum amount of modifiers applied but it still kinda taints the experience imo
I would describe de Chaos invasion difficulty differently, like: "How bad do you want Naggarond to get smashed by turn 100". (And I apologize if this sentence doesn't sound to "English"... I sometimes struggle a bit.)
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646 It really depends on the situation. If Naggarond is still fighting in the north (against Khatep or the Sisters usually) then they have armies on site, and will repell the chaos. But in my games, that's rather unusual. Which means that they have no army around the capital, and the whole northern part of their empire get destroyed.
I play normal/normal because that is intended experience by developers, and the balance patch applies based on those difficulty. Also I don't want to feel too stressful and cheated.
I played on Easy for a long time and only started on Normal recently. Since i knew beforehand that these changes would occure, i was well prepared and could catch up with the new challenge. The advantage is, on easy you can experiment much more without getting punished too harshly. And while Normal still allows room for experimentation, it also gives a solid challenge. Basically a good middle ground.
The most important thing is remembering this is a silly and fun game with elves and goblins. It's not a test, it's not work, it's not measuring your IQ or your worth as a human, TWWH is just about having a chill time. If you honestly believe you're achieving anything other than having fun while playing this game you've already lost. You can't really win this game because there is nothing to be won. It's just a game.
istn life just a game, too? Its on hardcoremode ofc but if you take life more seriously than your "funtime" i think you' ve already lost (the more important game).
I mostly agree with you, but I disagree about not truly being able to win. Even if you don’t get anything, you still win, it just doesn’t particularly matter that you did, and it certainly doesn’t matter as much as whether you had fun playing.
Not a lot of skill in cheesing it, I feel LegendofTotalwar might disagree with that and honestly having learned a lot from his videos so would I, yeah he's exploiting the AI and taking advantage of game mechanics but the AI is cheating like hell and if your going to deliberately tie one hand behind your back for fair play, it's going to suck, balanced armies won't work as your units are completely outclassed in melee in higher difficulties not just because of the bonuses, but because the AI will earn more xp for its units sitting in garrison than you will fighting a battle. Cheese away folks, the AI won't hesitate to do it to you
It feels like there's no point in playing though at that point. It breaks both the entire point of simulating strategic battles, as well as being a joke immersively and lore wise. There's no roleplay value, and no authenticity. Adaptive and interesting battles with diverse units are replaced with formulaic spam and repetitive AI baiting. Doesn't matter if that's the only way to win, if it's simply not fun. The real way to win Legendary difficulty, is not playing it in the first place. In terms of achievement, it's comparable to loading up the hardest difficulty on any other game, and putting in cheat codes that you learned from the internet.
@@UnknownSquid let's be honest dude, everyone cheeses to some extent whether they are prepared to admit it or not, if your playing a seige battle and you notice a point not covered by the towers or archers on the wall are you going to ignore it or take advantage of the fact the AI never sallies out a use some missile units to wreck that section of wall defenders. The AI has serious behavioural limitations which have never been addressed, instead, it gets more bonuses heaped on. Me I don't play on Legendary, Normal/Normal for me with a bunch of mods to tweak features or gameplay, Legendary difficulty is a hassle, I've even heard LegendofTotalwar who plays it exclusively say the fun of the game goes down as the difficulty stacks because of how the AI is boasted, so if you really want that endurance test, why make it even worse by fielding unviable armies? Cheese,cause sometimes you just have to
@@UnknownSquid There is some satisfaction in cheesing. It isn't hard but it's a way of overcoming challenge and feeling powerful and winning is usually fun. A lot of singleplayer games let the player find overpowered tactics and some people like the grind even without substance. With that said I don't understand people that want to disect the game and dominate it just to tick a box. I align myself with your point of view, yet you have to play the game as it is, not as you wish it to be (I tried, doesn't work).
@@ataxman1 the melee units arent crap, its the difficulty that makes them crap. So it gives people a skewed perspective on the gameplay. For example Phoenix Guard are actually insanely good melee unit, but in legendary they arent... so people will label them as crap and not use them.
I'm starting to feel like an idiot for playing on legendary/very hard with non doomstack armies. I never heard of/thought about doomstack armies until I started watching total war centric channels this year (been playing since Rome 1). Hell I didn't even know that missile ammunition counted towards unit strength until last month. And I never thought about wasting the enemies ammo by using fast flying units
The fact you were playing without the help of the cheese at such a high difficulty is a testament to your skill as a player. I will admit though that watching Legend of Total War helped me a lot with the game. I'm mainly a vampire count player and learning I could heal my army for almost free and about the power of Necromancers really helped. Went from struggling to dominating battles after learning the strengths of my faction and taking advantage of it. Still not good enough to cheese though, but I am good at anti-cheese in multiplayer.
@@praisekek181 Wasting enemy ammunition using a decoy IS a strategy. One of the popular stories in 3 kingdoms is "Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats“.
@@shuaiyangmao In this instance it's not a strategy, it's cheese. If you went into multi-player, real players wouldn't allow their ranged units to shoot at a lord constantly wasting their ammo while the lord kites. It's cheesing the AI which doesn't understand it's wasting it's ammo.
It would be true to say that missiles are overpowered vs. the AI but the thing about 'cheese' is that CA are well aware of these issues. Artificially fielding an army that is less efficient at doing a particular task to make up for the fact that the game designers have chosen not to counter particular strategies is... roleplaying.
Nothing is as overpowered vs the AI as a hex editor. But people would still say I'm cheating if I loaded up my save file to give myself as much gold as I want. But I guess cheesy players are just roleplayers too.
For all Players that enjoy or want to play legendary difficulty and Very Hard BD but hate the fact they are almost forced to cheese it, may I Introduce to you the Mod SFO:Grimmhammer. This Mod makes even the most useless Units useful and also adds the Option of Unitcaps, faction or army related. On top of that it adds Buildings that enable the Player to keep up with the Cheats the AI gets and not to forget everything costs more Upkeep for both the Player and the AI. I so far finished 6 Legendary Camapigns like this and they were a fun challenge that most of time felt better balanced than Vanilla. Of course there were and always will be moments of just utter bullshit such as Grail Gurdians having Regen, but the Modteam tends to adress such things if most of the community complain.
@Zerkovich I will say this, No such thing as cheesy gameplay : 1) if the game designers buffed up AI controlled melee units to the point it makes human melee units useless then yet left ranged units unaffected - it's not cheesy for the player to use only ranged units, its simply the best way the game can be played. 2) if the game designers decided that sacking a broken town and defeating 1000 soldiers in a tough battle are about as equal in terms of after battle experience gain then sacking the broken town for easy leveling is just smarter to do, it's not cheesy - its the way the game is designed to be played. 3) if towns are not equipped by strong characters or powerful magic wielders, if towns have 'safe' zones next to their walls where their towers can't shoot, if the higher tier units just idle in the town square, if the archers on the wall have less of an angle to shot than the ones who are underneath the wall - then its not cheesy to spawn magic and shoot with the archers till you win - its the way it the creators made it to be. Is it fun playing like that? not for me but its not cheesy and its the most effective way of playing. I also don't enjoy shooting myself in the foot AKA 'role-playing' to force myself into getting diverse armies when in fact there is no reason to purchase a unit such as reiksguard ever in this game(cause it demands a special building which gives no benifts and by the time you get it you can already afford getting demis). Those are just a few examples of what I call a bad design, the junk food of gaming - people by it cause its easy and seems to be good but its not - at least this is my opinion. A good design will be : 1) A cavlary that doesn't charge from the other side of the map while the melee units and ranged units are still miles behind, and even if it goes for an easy kill it should know to fall back. 2) personalities more pronanounced both for campaign AND for battle different generals different tactics different battles and not the same all the time. There is countless ways the game can be fixed and improved - I already wrote more than a few articles about it and there is much more to be said - but to be honest, I expect nothing out of CA and WH3 in terms of actual improvement. All that is gonna come is just more races and larger map no real substance that will improve the core of the game which really needs fixing above all.
You perfectly described my opinion on the game dificulty. I started playing very hard in WH1. With good flanking spells rear charging etc. You can still win against a higher tier army than yours. The problem is the AI always seemed to have another waiting. It led me to cheese strategies. Sit in a corner behind some iron breakers and let the artilery and thunderers handle it, or send out the lord and heroes to blob up the army and wind of death, or whatever other overcast AoE spell. I eventually found myself plowing through legendary with ease. I was however not having fun anymore nor did I find it tactically engaging. I found myself enjoying Very hard campaign and hard/normal battle I can handle the extra map cheats and armies but I didn't find goblins that can outlast me in melee as fun.
What's most frustrating for the VH battle is, the entire matchup systems are just broken. You're not winning fights that you are supposed to, or you are winning them too slow and by the time your elite cav killed their conscripted archers, the rest of your army is gone. The same works the other way around, units that are supposed to hold the line just melt away, units that are supposed to outclass the enemy get beaten, elite units fight to a tie with crap units. It doesn't make sense anymore. The problem with VH and L campaign for me is not really what you've mentioned. I can deal with a lot of full stacks, in fact I feel like it's fun that way, I get to fight more battles, which is what total war is about. The problem is SUPPLY LINES. If you've done the math, you know that the 7% and 15% supply line just breaks the game progression. The wider you spread the WEAKER you become, and there is NO WAY to counter this other than making a strong ally very close to you. But then again in VH and L the AI just rejects every single proposal, and even if you somehow make it work, there's a good chance your ally will just get steam rolled by whichever race was recently updated. So in case I wasn't clear enough, the problem with the supply lines is, for every THREE provinces you get (and build up), you can only afford ONE additional army. And in VH and L, one army can't defend three provinces with all the full stacks running around. The larger your faction gets, the less your new territory adds to your income (in terms of proportion), however any additional army even just a bare lord will add proportionally to your entire army expense. Campaign progression just breaks down. Which is why I always play on fixed upkeep mod. Also just an honorable mention to the public order penalty. There is only so much you can do to increase public order. A minor settlement can only give you +6 public order, so in smaller provinces with high corruption there's basically nothing you can do but get frequent rebellions.
Legendary / Normal has become the sweetspot for me. The limited save options on legendary give much more weight to the choices you make and things that happen. Really enjoy that. Plus I'm perfectly able to get through it with fun thematic armies. Haven't built a doomstack in my life, though I will say Lightning strike is mandatory.
One thing not mentioned in the video is the extra 10% upkeep and army supply lanes upkeep tax on legendary, pushing the player to get a lot of gold and field few cheap armies or one super efficient. In regard to choosing difficulty you really need to know how the faction is gonna play. It's easier to play Ikit on legendary than Grimgor on hard. The factions are not balanced at all and the initial challange doesn't tell the player much. If you don't know how strong the faction you want to play is you are screwed. The chaos difficulty is tricky as well. If you play as faction that doesn't face chaos it actually makes the campaign easier, puting strain on the AI. If you face the invasion it can feel like you are getting ganked by another faction in the middle of a war.
Counterpoint to your suggestion to never play on Easy: I played my first ever Total War campaign on Normal as The Empire in Warhemmer I. I muddled around for a bit, went to war with the Vampires, and was promptly overrun by Beastmen and Goblins burning down my empire while I was away. I hadn't built walls, there was no spare income to raise a new army to defend, and it felt like a total kick in the teeth. After a few turns of fumbling and losing settlements, I restarted on Easy as the Dwarfs. I figured out how to play the Campaign, how to defend the backlines, and just got a feel for the game in general. I'd generally agree that Easy isn't really a difficulty that you'd want to choose to play on, but it is a great tutorial on how Total War Warhammer (and Total War in general) works in both Battle and Campaign.
SFO very hard/normal/unit caps tomb kings system, if u want to have fun/challenge campaign with variety of units.Solution CA needs to put unit caps option ,and if someone wants to spend his campaign running around for 200+ turns with 12 mammoths or archers so be it, his choice .
I just want a difficulty setting where the AI is smarter and more challenging, is that so much to ask? All these cheats are just dumb and irritating. Learn the AI how to flank properly instead of making my souped up Chosen w GW unable to break an army of swordsmen.
This game is not too difficult most of the time even on legendary because of 2 things: missile unit power and ambush stance. The AI literally thinks you've disappeared in ambush stance and it's incredibly overpowered if used correctly.
Agreed, I've been wondering recently if it's worth using a mod that disables Ambush, I ambush ALL the time, it's crazy effective. Not sure I'd be very good if I didn't. :)
The reason it's so powerful is the AI can see all your armies at all times if you aren't in ambush stance. They also don't actually want to fight your armies, so use this knowledge to blow up undefended settlements. Problem is without this cheat they don't act with any caution, so lose their armies too easily
Yeah, but the AI cheats so that if you aren't in ambush stance, they know where you are no matter what. To be fair, if you have the end turns on high speed or just skip enemy movement, they basically disappear when they enter ambush stance too. You can know generally where they are from common sense, but you still have to pay attention.
I've been thinking about the Chaos invasion and how people have come to the conclusion that increasing the difficulty of it, really hasn't made it that more difficult, just more of a slog. They still come at around the same time, you usually have the economy to deal with an army or two at a time, you usually have lightning strike to put it in your favor, and they are still chaos so they suck. But I've been thinking about how to solve this, and I remembered an MMO called Rift, and Oblivion. What if Chaos, when not controlled by the player, worked in a similar way where they open rifts throughout the campaign map from time to time as a sudden encampment to try and establish a beachhead to keep bringing troops through that the other faction must raze to stop the flow. The chaos that do come through try to raze your settlements and establish conduits to keep it open and allow more terrible units to get in, maybe if it gets bad enough they open more portals with enough razing. I'd like to know what everyone thinks of this, gonna go as LegendofTotalWar as well.
Thank you mate. great video. Finally understand what is actually going on when changing that difficulty level...because what i was seeing wasn't making any sense.
The fact that the Ai's personality changes makes so much sense now. For example when playing as throt. On normal or hard you have a non aggression pact with Nagarond which the Ai will never break. However once you turn it to very hard and legendary, even if you have positive relations at 40-60 they will break the non aggression pact and attack you the player.
That is what ruins the higher difficulties for me. Diplomacy is already kind of weird sometimes but on the higher difficulty settings it becomes pretty useless as everyone will just randomly declare war on you just for the sake of it if you even manage to get into any good relations to begin with.
@@squee317 He doesn’t try to diss legend. He just point out that easy cannot carry you too far While legendary forces you to cheese the ai with doom stack and missle units get lot of buffs. Also in his comment he explains his view on the ai difficulty and legend.
You're wrong about easy. Everyone who has never played a total war game should spend two or three hours in easy difficulty, just to get a sense of what's going on and how to take settlements, build structures, level up and recruit. I remember spending hours when I was new to the game, not having any idea what anything did. New players need an environment where they can experiment at that stage of learning. This stage is not about "learning how to be good", but about learning how to play.
I highly suggest Legendary Campaign + Normal Battle difficulty. It's a great combination of slews of armies, but ones you can defeat with balanced/sane army compositions. The upkeep penalty still makes things obnoxious but it's outweighed by the more than double battles (and post battle loot) I experienced on VH/VH for 500 hours. The L/N combination re-invigorated my enjoyment of the game and definitely suggest other folk give it a go for a balance between difficult and fun.
I would actually suggest starting the Campaign on Easy for your first time if you don't normally play Total War or other RTS games. When I started playing Warhammer. I hadn't played a CA game since Rome Total War when I was a kid. I tried going normal/normal for a Mortal Empires campaign and got absolutely crushed by turn 80. It was a slog, and I wasn't really having a good time because I was so busy trying to micromanage and figure everything out. Disheartened, I tried bringing it down to Easy/Normal and just had an blast playing the Greenskins, effectively wiping the map in the green tide. I would be learning things with a reasonably high margin for error. When I had effectively controlled most of the Old World, that's when I decided to go back to normal/normal as Lizardmen and was having an amazing time because I felt like I was now on equal ground with the AI. Every loss was because I made a bad call, and every hard-fought victory felt earned. But that's just my experience, I hope you just have a good time playing a game you enjoy!
Honestly I always play on normal for battle difficulty but very hard on campaign. I do not like battles becoming artificially harder when we could have better AI, with better army compositions.
Could we have a better AI? It took decades to make AIs that could compete with Grandmasters in chess. Programming an AI that could compete with the best military masterminds in the human history is not in the budget of a gaming company.
@@JayvH because the AI is legitimately bad in total war games. Modders have been improving the AI substantially since the beginnings of the series. Look at Darthmod, which was an AI mod first and a Gameplay overhaul second. He removed cheats from the AI where he was able to, and rebalanced the game to improve the AI's behavior. Most notably was with the games with gunpowder focus, for example his changes in Empire practically eliminated a glitch that causes the AI to stack units on themselves, freak out to try and fix it repeatedly - resulting in the AI slowly walking their units, not shooting back, until they eventually walked into player's units if they managed to not route before they made it that far. Darth later gave up on modding Total War games because CA made the same mistakes game after game and he felt fixing their mistakes over and over were tedious. If I recall correctly he also brought up the point that CA keeps making their games faster paced, while his own changes that helped the AI (and were more realistic, which was a secondary goal) slowed the game down. He eventually founded a game company and started making strategy games, Ultimate Admiral and Ultimate General series, and both of them have a lot better AI than CA's Total Wars.
Same, but I'm considering taking the step up to hard battle difficulty. In campaign there's a point, usually around turn 70 - 90, when your faction has hit the power curve and your strategic position is fairly secure. It's the point where the campaign goes from 'struggle for supremacy' to 'maintaining dominance' and it's the same point where I'm less concerned about beating the AI and more interested to see whether the AI can beat me. It's that point in the game where I'm okay with the AI getting some battle buffs because if I'm not worried about winning battles against the AI the game becomes 'watch my armies claim town by town'.
@@JayvH youre misunderstanding.... we dont need grandmaster level AI in a videogame. Theres plenty of games with good/excellent AI in them, doesnt need to be able to compete against the world's elite gamers. Otherwise 99% of the playerbase would never be able to beat it... you have a stupid way of thinking, you either want the best of the best of the best or not at all. Middleground is possible too... dont forget that.
@@bwc153 Thanks I've played Napoleon Total War with the DarthMod. It was a better experience. I also enjoyed his Ultimate General Series. Well at least until Casualties became ridiculous in Gettysburg with a later Patch.
Dang i remember playing vampire counts in very hard battle difficulty, the moment my skeleton frontline starts clashing against empire spear they waver and start to disintegrate after 20 seconds
that’s just skeletons. they do that regardless. only way to use them is go for the no upkeep technology and spam armies of them while using spell casting lords and heroes
Honestly I like Hard for campaign and Normal for battles. The reason being is primarily that I play Skaven and I like to confederate, I noticed that Skaven clans like Pestilens actually survive on Hard. Beyond that I find the buffs to AI actually fun because it forces me to be more methodical about what I hit first.
Tip: If playing Norsca in the Mortal empires campaign- put it on easy. If not the high elves will spawn army, after army, after army, after army, and send forces to the tiny island that contains those three cities they desperately want. They do this in the exact same manner via a boat over, and over, and over again. It’s not fun. I had this constantly every couple of turns and defended the island with one army while another shat on empire. Until one turn magically, without expansion, both high elves and empire sent ships to the island- which i defeated. Only for 10 turns later the elves could suddenly afford to send 6 armies my way Ai needs to be worked on for the third game.
Indeed. Norsca is unplayable so far. How are you supposed to raid if Bretonia and High Elves keep bullying you since early on? Also, Norsca lords were bugged time ago and they didn't have any mounture
@@juanm.q5121 right?! It was fine in WH1 because you were pushing down and everyone else was pushing up. You can defend as you go. Soon as you expand the map you’re now being pushed up from the south and from the west too. Better not piss of the high elves if not you’ll be hit from the north also.
I always hated artificial difficulty. I want true difficulty. I don't even think battle AI is too bad. I would argue their micro is superior to mine, especially when controlling 40 unit armies. If they won't improve the battle AI, they could at least improve the Campaign AI... that seems easy enough. Why isn't that done?
Hey Zerkovich, great video, very informative as always, also loved your CP video. I play on legendary Exclusively but it isn't a "flex" it's just, ever since I first played Diablo on Hardcore I got obsessed with playing on the Hardest difficulty. It's a handicap, but I can't help it, every game now, whether I enjoy it or not i tend towards the hardest, it's like an addiction! That was the only thing, I think you over-simplified the reasons why people play on Legendary, it's not just to flex or brag. Also, Legendary is not that easy, even with 19 Archers. I still lose, a LOT. Thanks again for all the great vids!
Yeah, of course not everyone is playing for the flex. Just from what I see in TW communities and things, it comes across that way. I just think it's a bit of a shame for the spirit of Total War and battlefield warfare, that people would rather bring 19 Archers than win some hearty tough battles.
@@Zerkovich Thanks heaps for your reply. I think it's a shame too, but CA designed the game that way. I just think it would have been better to have made a plea to CA to have another look at how they balance legendary. I kind of felt like you were blaming the community for "not playing properly", probably not how you meant it.
Back in the days when i started TWWH 2. (I only played Shogun before at age 14 and didnt really put thought into difficulty) I thought that difficulty changes how well the AI acts on the campaign map. Not getting more agressive, but idk, not making dumb maneuvers and stuff. xd I mean i want it to be even, i dont want debuffs that dont make sense if the AI get buffs for that, so i stay to normal. If there ever will be difficulty that changes AI's thinking and strategy and stuff, i will maybe try harder modes
This video missed two things. In legendary campaign difficulty you can't manually save the game which greatly reduces your ability to save scum. Secondly battle realism mode is an additional difficulty toggle for battles and in legendary campaigns it is forced on. It would be nice if you could turn these things on in a way that you can't disable for other campaign difficulty levels but at the moment we will just have to settle for mods.
I appreciate this perspective. I like playing on the harder difficulties typically, but i understand why people wouldn't want to do this. I don't like seeing my high tier melee infantry breaking or taking huge damage from Ai trash, but that's the name of the game. I also really like cheese sometimes. I would not want to restrict the game options for people who want to play a fantasy game with monsters and magic. I really dislike it when people call for unit caps and restrictions on your armies and playstyles. You do not have to play with cheese. You can also play factions that don't support doomstacks well or have natural restrictions like tomb kings. I hope they fix the AI before they ever try to restrict the player.
Units caps are actually something I've been curious about them adding for quite a while (mostly thanks to seeing High Elves often spamming their Dragon and Phoenix units...)
Well, you should look into mod SFO Grimhammer then. On turn 3 I think they give you an option between two kinds of unit caps. You can choose between the two, can chose both or chose none if you want to cheese.
I'd like if the AI in Total War games actually used army formations instead of just making two long lines of units. In my own experiences, i never have enough melee units to match the AI's melee lines, so I'm usually forced to play defensive and spam ranged anyway. I also almost never see the AI use artillery in their armies which gives even less reason to play offensive. Just seems like that "harder difficulty" in most modern games now just means "let the AI cheat more" or "make the player weaker" instead of "let the AI be smarter"
The biggest difference between very hard and legendary is that you can not give order while the game is paused and if i remember correctly vision and camera movement is limited to what your troops can see. I find that annoying too. I play on VH/VH for a challenge and with thematic mixed armies.
my problem is the step from very hard to legendary, very hard only delays your snowballing by a couple turns and on legendary you just feel outright cheated which gets frustrating very quickly :/
100% agree. The Chaos Invasion Scale is a great step in the right direction but personally I want to go Legendary campaign with Hard battles without battle realism and at least without the huge menu in my face when pausing. not even asking for commands during pause. Hope they at least give these options in WH3. Would make a real lategame challenge BC as soon as you own 3-4 provinces, you can annihilate nearly everyone on Very hard/hard with experience.
@@cHaMp630 ofc, remember that old dwarf doomstack with master engineers and troll torpedos? This is absolutly terrifying on SFO and as bonus you can add some dwarf engineers (the sort of hand-held mortar/grenade launcher unit)
I agree with a lot of this except for the chaos invasion. having the difficulty settings just mean "more chaos armies at once" is a boring way to increase the difficulty. I think a more interesting mechanic would be if chaos could open portals over razed settlements that would periodically spew forth chaos stacks. This way they could continue to be a threat beyond the initial rush of the invasion and potentially actually make their way beyond the northern half of the map. Chaos invasion means basically nothing atm if you play a faction that starts in the southern regions.
@@OniGanon I could be mistaken but as I understand it now chaos only invades from the chaos wastes and near naggarond. Before this patch they used to spawn in the oceans near lustria as well as northern ulthuan. I completed a short ME campaign as wood elves and only had to deal with one stack in the dark elf region.
You are totally right on the high difficulties , I made each faction in very difficult or legendary for the famous steam trophies ... It made me HATE the game and hate some faction so much but I continued... after done i rediscovered the game in multiplayer and lower difficulty, i can try build i cant try to ally witth certain factions on ,campaign , feels good I only learn to trick the IA abuse ranged abuse Sorcerer and avoid Diplomatic in thoses difficulties
I play with optimized armies (which does include doomstacks for a lot of factions, of course) purely to avoid spending 90% of my playtime in boring siege battles. On Very Hard / Very Hard, battles can be made challenging if you expand fast enough and fight bigger groups of enemy armies. Unless you play Bretonnia, of course, where you can start building hippo doomstacks before turn 30 and the only challenge in the game left is the "complete more grail vows for your lords" minigame.
Basically, higher the level of difficulty more parts of the game are disabled. Legendary disable melee game and leadership game for most player controlled armies. Melee units are just there to hold units on legendary for some time. There is no melee matchups to speak off, unless its something like swordmasters vs goblins. Higher Campaign difficulties disables economy and public order for AI, so it pumps units. So its basically shooting, magic, monsters, doomstacks, characters that rule the game on higher difficulties. And it becomes even more easy then easy difficulty. So basically increasing level of difficulty you just disable parts of the game, and if you stay on normal your level uped general skilled army just roll through everything. There is no good choice really. I tick legendary more now, because it is more engaging, even in current state. Normal is just boring. Hard is not far from normal. P.S. Skavenslaves are one of the best player controlled units on Legendary. Thats something.
I agree with your difficulty sentiments. Legendary boils down to me ambushing outside a garrison for easy victory and doing a bunch of things that just aren't fun to play. Although ai is really limited and I mostly enjoy playing with friends.
Playing on Very Hard Battle Difficulty has really screwed up my sense of the game. Chaos infantry not only cuts through Empire state troops like a hot knife through butter, the chaos infantry take essentially no damage as well as after melee engagements, even against greatswords which are ARMOR-PIERCING. Yes, I know that empire infantry are not supposed to be able to defeat chaos infantry in head-on combat, but its one thing to do no damage but also hold the line. It's a whole other thing to immediately collapse on contact and do no damage as well. Likewise, regardless of who you play, all AI tier 1 spear units outclass your tier 1 spear units (as an example), which really sends the wrong message regarding the true capabilities of your units. I think purposely pitting yourself in unfavorable engagements, instead of putting yourself on VH battle difficulty, can be rewarding. I think I learned the most when I pitted my balanced Empire army against a late-game dwarf army (slayers, hammerers, iron-breakers, and organ guns+the usual missile infantry). I won, after my 8-man great sword unit, my general with less than 10% hp, 3 Demigryph knights, and a half-strength handgunner unit with no ammo barely pounded a 6-man unit of hammerers into submission (this was on VH battle difficulty). I was lucky to have won despite the VH battle difficulty, because otherwise my loss would have given me the wrong message-->that I wasted my time. If I had loss this, there's a good chance that the AI bonuses on VH would have been a significant factor in addition to mistakes I made myself. But the thing is, its hard to identify and learn from mistakes when the VH AI bonuses might make such learning a moot point. Another battle that comes to mind is pitting Empire against high elves. Their ranged units out-range or out-damage your gunners and crossbowmen, so you HAVE to utilize magic (burning head anyone?) and/or artillery as well as calvary micromanagement, while also incorporating Tier 1 shielded units (swordsmen and spearmen) to hopefully endure the magic arrows of sisters of Averlorn, as well as Greatswords to hold out against phoenix guard and Swordmasters of Hoeth as gunners reposition themselves in the flanks.
It's always a difficult quest to make gameplay enjoyable for the player while at the same time have the AI cheat less. It happens in plenty of other games and mods too, across the board. In some ways the AI system is not that developed (yet) to reach certain sophisticated heights where it doesn't need much intervention to become self sustainable to be an actual threat to the player. And even then, there are always ways to counter that and predict how the AI will react. But who knows, maybe with future technology we will be able to have those kind of immersive difficulties without the cheats. Great video, well explained!
One of my biggest "achievements" in this regard is winning a Warhammer 1 campaign as Empire on Legendary while playing "properly" as you mentioned. Was it fun? I honestly have no idea as the only emotion I remember from the ordeal was a feeling of relief that all the absolute bullshit was over. Since then, I never felt the compulsion to touch Legendary again, something that followed me into Warhammer 2 and has persisted.
No, saying I'm not a fan of Legendary isn't a jab at LegendofTotalWar xD I'm down with Legend. But he doesn't play Total War. He breaks Total War. And that's cool and funny in its own way and actually helps fix the game. But I think if you really want to appreciate Total War, Warhammer or Military Strategy. Legendary difficulty and cheesing, isn't the way.
If it really bothers you, the Unsubscribe button is up there ^^^
I appreciate all the perspectives on how to play the game between you, Legend, and grudges. It makes it all more well rounded.
Your both great youtubers! but... let there be warrrrr!!!!! 😄✌🏼
Have you try the CTT overhaul or any other mod with unit caps ? That very much gives you a challenge right away, I have like 400 hours in the game and probably 350 of them on overhauls XD. Great content as always. (Legend is amaizing too)
Amen!
Thanks for the video ! I tried legendary and yeah it exactly feels like you describe... If I want to have fun while having a good challenge I go Campaign on very hard with battle on normal.
I would like to join the multiplayers but I'm too use to put pause in the middle of the fight and my computer have a hard time as well with online battle.
Peace out, I will hear you in your future video ,)
Difficulty increases have been directly correlated to increased cheese production.
and lactose intolerance with loads of salt
I like hard difficulty for both.
I wish the A.I was good and I could just play on normal though :/ kinda annoying for every third or fourth battle to see one of my units get killed by battle buffs or enemy to bring another army it shouldn't normally have. :/
@Hdolf Aitler Wait are you serious?
@@spiffygonzales5899 consider how the AI improved in the past two games I think Warhammer 3 will be great
@@lykuscerebros9480 Depends on the kind of cheese. A lot of common varieties contain little or no lactose.
Zerk: "The AI cheats"
Me looking at 2 army stacks of Bretonia with one village settlment left while I'm raiding and their public order is 100 (+12): Hmmm yeah kinda
“Crying in viking”
You just described the Followers of Nagash campaign.
Yup. I'm playing a Clan Pestilens game and just went to war with the Dwarf faction to the west. They have one city in the corner of the map and it's defended by three stacks of 20. The city is making like 500g per turn...
@@TheSilentScreamX there's a hidden mechanic the dev's write solely for the A.I , where AI local populace will just volunteer for free and other factions will send volunteer to enroll in their armies, whenever said AI faction is close to being extinct. You can toggle it on and off in the hidden gameplay menu, under the "bullshit we come up with until google let us borrow DeepMind" category.
I brought this game a month ago and I cannot tell you how many times I've googled what actually changes on different difficulty levels only to get very conflicting info, or being told the AI gets free money and other stuff. Glad to actually finally know what exactly numerically is changing so I can pick the difficulty best for me.
You forgot that the Upkeep for the player per Lord stacs, on higher difficulty you pay more per Lord/Army...
Unless youre bretonnia
Or a horde
Lol, that's like the biggest difference on the campaign map. I can deal with all the rest pretty easily. The only two things that matter to me are the supply lines (which are always a problem) and public order penalty (which sometimes is a problem).
@@SereglothIV now it's kinda weird with how PO was redone. Before, i could always tell if a province was secure, now it's not quite as cut and dry, still works though
@@johnmcmanus2447 what did change with PO?
AI needs to improve so one day difficulty truly just changes the AI alone.
Hopefully in the 3rd since its being built on a completely different engine.
@@atbht really??
@@atbht where did ya hear about that?
@@atbht im almost 100% sure it's being made on total war 3 engine, same as all the modern games
I miss the shogun 2 AI, it just seemd a lot less cheaty and a lot more fair. Yet it still gave you a better, yet doable challange.
I just want a game where the AI doesn't cheat in campaign. They are immune to corruption, unrest, and can spawn defeated legendary lords with high level stacks.
But this would be super easy, barely an inconvenience.
so just easy mode then?
AI Cheats are a bit insane in this game tbh, I get why, the AI isn't that smart and needs the help, but when you can break a faction down to a single minor settlement and they can still field 3 full stacks, your game balance has some issues
@fasdfasd fsdafsd this is a bit of a bland Statement. What exactly do you mean by „smarter“. It’s easy to just through this word into a discussion. But how do you want to improve the AI further? Do you know how complex and hard it is to train a machine? It’s not like CA is Alphabet and has Deepmind in there office. I find the AI quite fine as it is right now and it became more and more refined with the years. It’s doing stupid things, but this are the situations you as a player can get your grip on. Don’t forget, the time were AIs will get unbeatable in almost every game is not that far away
Well you deserved it since you choose to do higher difficulties anyway. That's just asking for it and then whining about it.
You forgot about two biggest things in the campaign!
First, the supply lines increase upkeep per army:
- 2% - normal
- 7% - hard
- 15% - very hard & legendary
Second, there's a public order penalty in player's provinces:
- 2 - hard
- 4 - very hard
- 8 - legendary
These are the two things that I feel make the biggest difference. Especially the 15% upkeep increase.
He mentioned PO, though. But yes, he didn't cover supply lines. That is a pain, PO isn't too bad for some factions
@@caelestigladii not all doomstacks are the same and not all races doomstack. You just can not win with right clicking using skaven weapon teams doomstack. You have to consider your army placement, weapon line of sight, delaying, distracting enemy fast units etc. And sieges are a completely different story with that doomstack because of line of sight issues. Also empire,dwarfs, not very late game tomb kings just do not doomstack effectively. And even using sisters of avelorn or way watcher doomstack is not a guaranteed win every time, you can get swarmed fairly quickly if you are not careful.
Legendary also has base +10% upkeep for all units
If someone thought that there isn't that much of a difference between 2% and 15% supply lines, I'd like to remind that it stacks. Let's say every army has a base upkeep of 3000 gold. In that case, fielding 5 such armies would cost roughly 16,2k on normal, 19,7k on hard, 26,2k on very hard and 28,9k on legendary. If that's not enough, let's say you want to have 10 armies. Well, then they would cost 35,8k on normal, 55,1k on hard, 105,5k on very hard and 116k on legendary. So yeah, while having 10 armies it means your soldiers are 3 times more expensive on very hard than on normal. But keep telling people than all they have to do on very hard is point their doomstack towards the enemy, good luck with that. The biggest challenge (in my opinion) of very hard and legendary difficulties is that you can afford much less armies than your enemies and sometimes it can be crippling when you can't be everywhere at once.
Z how did the third paragraph answer the first? Help a guy out here..?
Cheese in legendary should be a choice, sadly in the current state of the game it's the only way to do something with this difficulty. There is no fun when a unit of chaos champion litteraly name "chosen" (with magic armor fill with the soul of their victims and a weapon which burn the flesh and the mind) lose against Garry the garlic farmer and his friends who enlisted in the army 2 week ago as spearmens...
Well you deserved it since you choose to do higher difficulties anyway. That's just asking for it.
I have a dream : that one day, chosen boys will be more than meme in legendary
Playing regular strat and tactic on legendary works. Half the difficulty comes from the faction choice anyway. Even if you play normally you still get to use the most cheesy, overpowered thing in the game, magic. Chosen will stand as a rock in the river of low to medium infantry, I'd like to see Garry try.
Dont forget about Melvin, the bread farmer. The farms that grow garlic and bread do a lot more than we know
That is precisely why I play on very hard campaign and normal battle difficulty.
The main thing I don't like is the reduction of attrition. Don't take out a whole mechanic when increasing difficulty.
I couldn't agree more, I have no idea what CA thought there.
or removing the ability to pause during combat, removing one of the biggest tactical elements to combat as a way to artificially increase difficulty a little more.
@Whiskiz Yo What are you talking about? First of all, pausing is disabled only on Legendary, and disabling pause is the only extra thing Legendary adds on battles. If you want to pause, play on Very hard
Second, most RTS games don't allow you to pause, and Total war games don't let you pause on multiplayer. If you want to play multiplayer, playing on Legendary/battle realism on is the best way to practice
@@exantiuse497 actually there is a difference other than pause between leg and vh. You might want to actually double check something before declaring it.
@@whiskizyo2067 I disagree with that. Actually would go so far to say that pausing a lot in battle to issue orders is kinda cheesy.
They really need to change how battle difficulty scales. Makes no sense to just buff melee for the AI so much. Get rid of MA/MD buffs and give them something like extra ward save or just %health instead; something that'd apply evenly for all unit types. Missile units are already the most cost-efficient to build army compositions around in the campaign. Having the difficulty level itself further encourage you to go down that route isn't doing anyone any favours
Exactly. Just don't like seeing my tier2/3 infantry being destroyed by enemy tier 1 infantry just due to melee buffs.
I agree, I think “legendary” difficulty should really be in weighing against the map rather than engagements. Fudging numbers isn’t the right kind of difficulty. Perhaps making it so you can’t see the opposing armies outside of if they’re a full stack or not plus not seeing all their units immediately after deployment.
@@Daemonioros Just play legendary campaign/normal battle difficulty. Best Total War expirience imo. You get to have a challenge you can't reload save you gotta make decisions. You're outnumbered but you're not forced to cheese, use doomstacks or range spam. You're using tactics on both campaign and battle map. And if you use more meele focused armies as Empire for example it's far harder than playing on very hard battle. As you're forced to mirco and think fast using cav and infantry. While on very hard battle using cav or infantry is pointless so you range spam charge in with heros to tank and just blast them with artillery and magic and basically win with no losses or thought. Legendary Campaign/Normal Battle imo is for all that simply the best difficulty. Because you get real challenge while if you max all bars all you do is spam range and cassualy cheese your way through campaign as there's no other way to play it.
AI's movement and battle tactic also need to be improved, so it's battle type is not all the same.
Missiles also have the bonus of usually not losing troops in battles, so are ready to go immediately. Add the red skill line which encourages you to pick from 1 or 2 unit types and army variety is punished
This is a reason why I play exclusively on Normal/Normal even though I have over 1500 hours in the game.
I would rather have easy campaign than to give AI ridiculous cheats.
Ditto, may also add mods to remove the stacking cost penalties for upkeep with additional stacks since if the AI can gave 3 full stacks on 1 minor settlement I don't see why I should be limited to 3 armies with 4 full provinces, while the AI spawns endless hordes
@@maddlarkin It's up to you. On Normal, supply line is only 2%, so basically nonexistent.
I am telling you, I have been playing on Normal/Normal exclusively since WaP and have had a great deal of fun.
Lore-wise armies, no cheesing, using different mounts (because you don't need to min-max skill points), no need for lighting strike etc. Try it, it's really fun and relaxing.
@@processing4426 pretty much what I do dude, but the stacking upkeep penalties increase per-stack and apply to each unit, you confederate an AI as the empire and you'll see your entire economy tank as you try and deal with the 3-4 trash stacks it had, but I like large games with tonnes of stacks to manage so I'm deploying the kind of armies you see in lore
I just like a lot of stacks it's a personal thing. I keep trying to find a decent chaos invasion increase, but even adding x10, x20 the armies Archaon and pals still don't pose a massive threat, just a far grinder one, even at x20 stacks I don't think I've seen them get further south than Praag
But then I'm a big mod proponent, I love more unit variety, annoyance reduction features and increased map selection, I don't care about achievements so why not add a bunch more lore friendly generals etc
I actually prefer Hard/Normal. While I dislike units preforming better/worse than their suppose to, if the AI isn't given an economy boost, then I usually steamroll them after a single major battle. I'd rather have multiple armies to fight.
In the same boat. AI still gets tough if you don't know what you are doing, but at least in battle, you are able to use the whole roster, rather than spamming heroes or missile units.
Every time I think you’ve answered all the questions I have, you come out with another video I didn’t know I needed!
Thank you
Supply lines are killing harder difficulty too. I liked the beta on legendary difficulty because I could field more smaller armies and I could use tactics against the AI but with current supply lines I'm forced to just 1 stack army in the beginning. Supply lines should punish stacking high tier units so it's harder to cheese instead of punishing basically everything.
honestly I think it's much more easier to raise lord recruitment/upkeep price instead of adding supply lines. Like, first lord cost 100, second lord cost 200, etc..
There is a mod called Supply Lines Rework by TWilliam you might find interesting, what it does is global upkeep cost is modified by quantity and quality of troops you have recruited, so for example 3 full stacks of basic infantry will have lesser impact on global extra %upkeep for all armies, than 10 monsters
@@adamnowicki1425 A lot of people including me feel like using mods that reduce difficulty set up by CA is like cheating. I am not saying that mod is not raising valid points. But if you hunt achievements it feels sooo wrong when you use anything but vanilla.
@@ScarletEdge Yes, it's cheating if you alter the game's built-in cheating. All mods that make the game more fun or loreful are cheating. The game is intended to be played as doomstack vs doomstack.
@@Tyrentenir As I said: despite bad difficulty implementation in W2, it still feels like cheating when I use mods that alter that difficulty. I am not arguing the fact that these mods actually correct aforementioned bad implementation of difficulty. All I am saying is that getting achievements with these mods is unfair towards people who did not use them. In my opinion CA should disable achievements if game is changed by anything that is not graphics/sound related. There are mods out there that change campaign objectives to such extent you just need to fire up campaign and that's that you get achievement. Player can chose to mod the game, but should not be rewarded for it with achievements, no matter if your mod changes supply lines, changes ai so it's not dead set on you, or if you able to zoom out to decrease your camera micro. I am a person who takes pride from every achievement I did. I play fair and square and I want to feel legit when I brag about it to my other friends. ATM you cannot brag about W2 achievements, because you can simply cheat to get them.
I'm playing vampire counts right now, on legendary, and let me tell you, my room is overflown with fondue and I'm nearly drowning in it
It's just so satisfying watching wind of death wiping out an army. Gets me every time
Cheesing is literally the only way to play the VC on VH/Legendary. They rely purely on melee in combat and the melee defence and leadership buff the AI gets cannot be beaten, your Graveguards die against regular swordsmen
@@exantiuse497 you just gotta get the skeleton technology so they have no upkeep then skeleton spam with winds of death
Jeff approves
The vampire cheese factory
VH/N masterrace.
How bout legendary/easy? Just kidding, as a noob in WH2 I went for hard/normal.
cause you know, why make the AI start using tactics like cycle charging when you can just buff stats and call it a day...I hate that kind of difficulty setting
for real, its just about 1000% easier than programming that AI behavior then working out all the unintended behaviors that result from it. I imagine that getting everything to work mostly as intended was hard AF for this game, considering how many asymmetrical factions there are.
@@seekerofalice9787 in older titles that was tied to commander skill. They had a command skill and a zero skill general was likely to yolo charge into you while a ten skill general would pull some shit out of hannibal's playbook. iirc they stopped doing that either when Rome 1 or Empire released.
I play VH/VH and the AI cycle charge me plenty. Especially with chariots.
@@arckmage5218 Indeed, I love to see that the AI avoids dumb strategies(running all in a single tunnel, or ramming their general alone against your frontline like it used to do with Shogun 2) and it's finally a serious threat. The bonus on VH make the campaings feel like an epic struggle rather than an easy stramroll.
I've been playing Total War games since Rome I and this breakdown is on the nose.
Well done. Agree 100%.
I think you should have mentioned supply lines, because that is a huge thing at higher difficulties
the elector counties of the empire go though the supply lines issues especally with you going as riekland and southland the supply lines hit hard and you need at least a minimal of one lord or general minus boris for mittinland franz for riekland gelt for southland and volkmar for sylvania out of all the counties that make up the empire of man which i think there is 13 counties in there that's 9 normal generals you need minimal and on the field with full stack of troops to cover there elected provinces and the upkeep for that is going to be murder.
that and you may need etxra generals along with markus and his legendary agents and his ranger/archer heavy or dominat force as well and possibly 5 legenday generals right there you can put in to elector possitions.
Legend is guna see the legendary review and start seething
"because any idiot can spam 19 Archers" lol
I do enjoy Legend's plays, but Zerkovich is 100% right. The Doomstack game takes the fun out of it.
Tbh it would be awesome to see Legend's video about legend difficulty (which let's be honest will be complaining about) and start some discussion about legend difficulty in general.
Most of the players who play it complain about it and most of the players who do not play it complain about it. Maybe that could trigger sth with CA about changing their policy related to different experiences for one of the most complex game they produced by not adding flat buffs. This is a little bit frustrating that they have so many tools in the box and still using a sledgehammer to nail the picture to the wall. EACH! F###! TIME! My head hurts...
@@robdabanks i usually run a doomstsck as my third or fourth army just to accelerate an endless campaign
He's unapologetically the Cheese Guy. I'd like to see him play a full Legendary campaign without once wasting ammo or tricking the AI to go to random places in sieges or corner camping or anything like that. Not saying he couldn't do it but playing "normally" doesn't really cut it in Legendary it seems most of the time.
#1 reason I don't play legendary: I just like being able to pause battles. I can deal with permasaves and cheaty AI and all that, but I want to be able to pause. I know it's bad practice if you want to get into multiplayer, but I don't.
for me command units while we are in pause is very fair vs the AI because it can give orders to all army in every way it want and in less than half second
Very Hard / Normal is the perfect combination.
Fight me.
Probably is, after I'm done with my achievements for very hard, very hard I'm going to play Hard / Normal.
Veryhard/hard
I play very hard campaign and normal battle difficulty. I find it's the right balance of being challenged and out numbered by enemy armies, but allows your units to perform in the lore-friendly way they are intended when you heroically beat off two full enemy stacks with a single stack of your own. This also allows me to make my armies balanced and somewhat fluffy.
CA needs to put some serious effort into the AI in this game if we're ever going to get a new combat difficulty scaling system.
They should be smarter and faster. Just giving their units extra buffs is so... ham fisted, one note and so MMO feeling.
I've only ever played on Normal. I dont enjoy that false difficulty stuff.
AI is so extremely hard to create, it's astonishing to me that it is even that good compared to a human. Just think about how you focus your thousands of years evolved mind on a task and expect a program to be good at the same thing with extremely limited resources. You have to look at what it does with what it has and not what you want it to have because that's just extremely hard to reach. Not saying it couldn't be improved, just saying it's hard.
I'm just talking about Combat AI. Campaign AI is neither here nor there imo, it simply functions and works as it would in a Civ game or an Endless game. I'm pretty sure almost every 4x game gives its AI cheats on the Campaign Map with higher difficulty settings.
Its the Combat AI, that needs work.
We can come up with excuses all winter long, but at the end of the day, its only a matter of the CA dev team's leadership designating it as an issue to be worked on.
Don't get me wrong here, people want Race DLCs. The community isnt talking about AI inconsistencies. I'm not saying the dev team is being dumb.
What i'm saying is, its really strange how I can get a more challenging and responsive AI combatant by playing Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth from 2009, before a Total War game post 2015.. Its like someone on the dev team left the AI's barn door open and they keep working on everything about Warhammers outfit, BESIDES, the open pants zipper. It's just way to easy to completely trounce the AI by punching them in the balls. Again, dont get me wrong, I like cheese as much as the next Legendoftotalwar.
But a game of this caliber and simulation NEEDS AI to be more competent than hl2 zombies.
I just hope its a center pillar of game 3's reworks.
@@darkranger116 Absolutely right. I heard the 3K AI was a bit better so I am hoping they use that as a basis for the next Warhammer.
@BleedRainbows Yes, making good AI is hard, but it can absolutely be done. For example, Age of Empires 2 has incredible AI, it gets zero buffs or cheats on the highest level, it just plays the game really well. Programming competent campaign AI might be trickier because it needs to plan several turns in advance without becoming too predictable so it will probably always need some cheats, but I 100% believe a competent battle AI that don't require cheats could be made
@@darkranger116 Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth is a massively simpler game that TWWH2. I'm not trying to naysay you, you raise a lot of good points about AI having to be a focus, and players caring more about new toys than better AI. That said, its a lot easier to make an AI that plays tic-tac-tow than one that plays chess.
Comparing the 2004 LotR:BfME to TWWH2 is a MASSIVE difference in complexity. Instead of having to program "this side fights the other side like this", you now have to account for over a DOZEN races instead of just two, all with vastly different playstyles. Playstyles that can vary vastly even in the same race.
There is no real way to deliver the same experience. Maybe if they ONLY worked on say.... Human vs Vampire AI. Great! You have a robust AI combat system comparable. 2 races, easy peasy.
Now account for 15 races, with matchups against any of the other 15 (since races can fight themselves). Thats 225 different combat situations you have to account for in your AI code, and thats ONLY for race matchups. Each lord can play very differently as well. Theres 65 different faction leaders, and thats ONLY counting playable ones. Not ones AI controls as well, like Kieslev.
Honestly, with all that to account for, its honestly amazing it works at all half the time. To dedicate manpower to create a robust AI that can manage to take all that into account? Phew. It took decades to make a program that could beat someone fairly at chess.
Got to lov the difficulty curve.
Orc boys stomping great swords
Very hard battle difficulty destroying my immersion goblin spear beating down grail knight wtf. Breaking the lore. Also hard to use cavalry cause of MA,MD up scale. They die to any unit.
ahhh i wondered why cavalry felt so weak, i did not know they were at the mercy of the higher difficulty changes. That explains some things.
VH battle difficulty is garbage. It more or less forces you to rely on missiles, single target units and magic cheese. Melee infantry is only useful for holding the line, even elite units like Stormvermin or White lions can't net more than a couple kills against low tier infantry like Empire swordsmen, and cavaltry is utter garbage for the reason you explained. If you want to cheese, play VH battles, if you want to have fun play Normal
@@exantiuse497 stormvermin elite?
@@leosalonen1564 Was about to say... Stormvermin, even in lore, are elite only in the sense that they're the best of the worst.
@@leosalonen1564 @StormTG Stormvermin at least shouldn't struggle against peasant mobs
bro combat modifiers are not fun!
Yup, after playing aoe2 hd where they removed AI cheats for a long time and just getting into total warhammer I cant stand it. I play on normal so its just the minimum amount of modifiers applied but it still kinda taints the experience imo
I would describe de Chaos invasion difficulty differently, like: "How bad do you want Naggarond to get smashed by turn 100".
(And I apologize if this sentence doesn't sound to "English"... I sometimes struggle a bit.)
Generally the Dark Elves smash the chais invasion.
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646 It really depends on the situation. If Naggarond is still fighting in the north (against Khatep or the Sisters usually) then they have armies on site, and will repell the chaos. But in my games, that's rather unusual. Which means that they have no army around the capital, and the whole northern part of their empire get destroyed.
@@EgenSayak Strange, usually they dominate Ulthuan or their entire continent.
I play normal/normal because that is intended experience by developers, and the balance patch applies based on those difficulty. Also I don't want to feel too stressful and cheated.
I played on Easy for a long time and only started on Normal recently.
Since i knew beforehand that these changes would occure, i was well prepared and could catch up with the new challenge.
The advantage is, on easy you can experiment much more without getting punished too harshly.
And while Normal still allows room for experimentation, it also gives a solid challenge. Basically a good middle ground.
The most important thing is remembering this is a silly and fun game with elves and goblins. It's not a test, it's not work, it's not measuring your IQ or your worth as a human, TWWH is just about having a chill time. If you honestly believe you're achieving anything other than having fun while playing this game you've already lost.
You can't really win this game because there is nothing to be won. It's just a game.
Stop being reasonable. It's internet for god's sake!
my fun is having a challenge, a fair one, but this is just an unfair challenge
istn life just a game, too? Its on hardcoremode ofc but if you take life more seriously than your "funtime" i think you' ve already lost (the more important game).
I mostly agree with you, but I disagree about not truly being able to win. Even if you don’t get anything, you still win, it just doesn’t particularly matter that you did, and it certainly doesn’t matter as much as whether you had fun playing.
I like getting a pile of tyrannosaurus and ramming them into the enemy army while the Godzilla theme plays.
Not a lot of skill in cheesing it, I feel LegendofTotalwar might disagree with that and honestly having learned a lot from his videos so would I, yeah he's exploiting the AI and taking advantage of game mechanics but the AI is cheating like hell and if your going to deliberately tie one hand behind your back for fair play, it's going to suck, balanced armies won't work as your units are completely outclassed in melee in higher difficulties not just because of the bonuses, but because the AI will earn more xp for its units sitting in garrison than you will fighting a battle. Cheese away folks, the AI won't hesitate to do it to you
It feels like there's no point in playing though at that point. It breaks both the entire point of simulating strategic battles, as well as being a joke immersively and lore wise. There's no roleplay value, and no authenticity. Adaptive and interesting battles with diverse units are replaced with formulaic spam and repetitive AI baiting. Doesn't matter if that's the only way to win, if it's simply not fun. The real way to win Legendary difficulty, is not playing it in the first place. In terms of achievement, it's comparable to loading up the hardest difficulty on any other game, and putting in cheat codes that you learned from the internet.
@@UnknownSquid let's be honest dude, everyone cheeses to some extent whether they are prepared to admit it or not, if your playing a seige battle and you notice a point not covered by the towers or archers on the wall are you going to ignore it or take advantage of the fact the AI never sallies out a use some missile units to wreck that section of wall defenders. The AI has serious behavioural limitations which have never been addressed, instead, it gets more bonuses heaped on.
Me I don't play on Legendary, Normal/Normal for me with a bunch of mods to tweak features or gameplay, Legendary difficulty is a hassle, I've even heard LegendofTotalwar who plays it exclusively say the fun of the game goes down as the difficulty stacks because of how the AI is boasted, so if you really want that endurance test, why make it even worse by fielding unviable armies? Cheese,cause sometimes you just have to
@@UnknownSquid There is some satisfaction in cheesing. It isn't hard but it's a way of overcoming challenge and feeling powerful and winning is usually fun. A lot of singleplayer games let the player find overpowered tactics and some people like the grind even without substance. With that said I don't understand people that want to disect the game and dominate it just to tick a box. I align myself with your point of view, yet you have to play the game as it is, not as you wish it to be (I tried, doesn't work).
Yeah I agree. Not our fault melee infantry is bad. Who wants to use crap units
@@ataxman1 the melee units arent crap, its the difficulty that makes them crap. So it gives people a skewed perspective on the gameplay.
For example Phoenix Guard are actually insanely good melee unit, but in legendary they arent... so people will label them as crap and not use them.
I'm starting to feel like an idiot for playing on legendary/very hard with non doomstack armies. I never heard of/thought about doomstack armies until I started watching total war centric channels this year (been playing since Rome 1).
Hell I didn't even know that missile ammunition counted towards unit strength until last month. And I never thought about wasting the enemies ammo by using fast flying units
because your a strategist and this is anti strategy
The fact you were playing without the help of the cheese at such a high difficulty is a testament to your skill as a player.
I will admit though that watching Legend of Total War helped me a lot with the game. I'm mainly a vampire count player and learning I could heal my army for almost free and about the power of Necromancers really helped. Went from struggling to dominating battles after learning the strengths of my faction and taking advantage of it.
Still not good enough to cheese though, but I am good at anti-cheese in multiplayer.
@@praisekek181 Wasting enemy ammunition using a decoy IS a strategy. One of the popular stories in 3 kingdoms is "Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats“.
good, now forget that you saw these videos, you'll get bored pretty quickly if you do those things
@@shuaiyangmao In this instance it's not a strategy, it's cheese. If you went into multi-player, real players wouldn't allow their ranged units to shoot at a lord constantly wasting their ammo while the lord kites. It's cheesing the AI which doesn't understand it's wasting it's ammo.
It would be true to say that missiles are overpowered vs. the AI but the thing about 'cheese' is that CA are well aware of these issues. Artificially fielding an army that is less efficient at doing a particular task to make up for the fact that the game designers have chosen not to counter particular strategies is... roleplaying.
Nothing is as overpowered vs the AI as a hex editor. But people would still say I'm cheating if I loaded up my save file to give myself as much gold as I want. But I guess cheesy players are just roleplayers too.
For all Players that enjoy or want to play legendary difficulty and Very Hard BD but hate the fact they are almost forced to cheese it, may I Introduce to you the Mod SFO:Grimmhammer. This Mod makes even the most useless Units useful and also adds the Option of Unitcaps, faction or army related. On top of that it adds Buildings that enable the Player to keep up with the Cheats the AI gets and not to forget everything costs more Upkeep for both the Player and the AI.
I so far finished 6 Legendary Camapigns like this and they were a fun challenge that most of time felt better balanced than Vanilla. Of course there were and always will be moments of just utter bullshit such as Grail Gurdians having Regen, but the Modteam tends to adress such things if most of the community complain.
@Zerkovich I will say this, No such thing as cheesy gameplay :
1) if the game designers buffed up AI controlled melee units to the point it makes human melee units useless then yet left ranged units unaffected - it's not cheesy for the player to use only ranged units, its simply the best way the game can be played.
2) if the game designers decided that sacking a broken town and defeating 1000 soldiers in a tough battle are about as equal in terms of after battle experience gain then sacking the broken town for easy leveling is just smarter to do, it's not cheesy - its the way the game is designed to be played.
3) if towns are not equipped by strong characters or powerful magic wielders, if towns have 'safe' zones next to their walls where their towers can't shoot, if the higher tier units just idle in the town square, if the archers on the wall have less of an angle to shot than the ones who are underneath the wall - then its not cheesy to spawn magic and shoot with the archers till you win - its the way it the creators made it to be.
Is it fun playing like that? not for me but its not cheesy and its the most effective way of playing. I also don't enjoy shooting myself in the foot AKA 'role-playing' to force myself into getting diverse armies when in fact there is no reason to purchase a unit such as reiksguard ever in this game(cause it demands a special building which gives no benifts and by the time you get it you can already afford getting demis).
Those are just a few examples of what I call a bad design, the junk food of gaming - people by it cause its easy and seems to be good but its not - at least this is my opinion. A good design will be :
1) A cavlary that doesn't charge from the other side of the map while the melee units and ranged units are still miles behind, and even if it goes for an easy kill it should know to fall back.
2) personalities more pronanounced both for campaign AND for battle different generals different tactics different battles and not the same all the time.
There is countless ways the game can be fixed and improved - I already wrote more than a few articles about it and there is much more to be said - but to be honest, I expect nothing out of CA and WH3 in terms of actual improvement. All that is gonna come is just more races and larger map no real substance that will improve the core of the game which really needs fixing above all.
I love it when my pheonix guard struggle to mow through bretonian peasants.
Well Okolii make a whole video about buff peasants defeating high tier units.
Awesome video mate, agree with everything you said.
You perfectly described my opinion on the game dificulty. I started playing very hard in WH1. With good flanking spells rear charging etc. You can still win against a higher tier army than yours. The problem is the AI always seemed to have another waiting. It led me to cheese strategies. Sit in a corner behind some iron breakers and let the artilery and thunderers handle it, or send out the lord and heroes to blob up the army and wind of death, or whatever other overcast AoE spell. I eventually found myself plowing through legendary with ease. I was however not having fun anymore nor did I find it tactically engaging. I found myself enjoying Very hard campaign and hard/normal battle I can handle the extra map cheats and armies but I didn't find goblins that can outlast me in melee as fun.
What's most frustrating for the VH battle is, the entire matchup systems are just broken. You're not winning fights that you are supposed to, or you are winning them too slow and by the time your elite cav killed their conscripted archers, the rest of your army is gone. The same works the other way around, units that are supposed to hold the line just melt away, units that are supposed to outclass the enemy get beaten, elite units fight to a tie with crap units. It doesn't make sense anymore.
The problem with VH and L campaign for me is not really what you've mentioned. I can deal with a lot of full stacks, in fact I feel like it's fun that way, I get to fight more battles, which is what total war is about. The problem is SUPPLY LINES. If you've done the math, you know that the 7% and 15% supply line just breaks the game progression. The wider you spread the WEAKER you become, and there is NO WAY to counter this other than making a strong ally very close to you. But then again in VH and L the AI just rejects every single proposal, and even if you somehow make it work, there's a good chance your ally will just get steam rolled by whichever race was recently updated.
So in case I wasn't clear enough, the problem with the supply lines is, for every THREE provinces you get (and build up), you can only afford ONE additional army. And in VH and L, one army can't defend three provinces with all the full stacks running around. The larger your faction gets, the less your new territory adds to your income (in terms of proportion), however any additional army even just a bare lord will add proportionally to your entire army expense. Campaign progression just breaks down. Which is why I always play on fixed upkeep mod.
Also just an honorable mention to the public order penalty. There is only so much you can do to increase public order. A minor settlement can only give you +6 public order, so in smaller provinces with high corruption there's basically nothing you can do but get frequent rebellions.
Legendary / Normal has become the sweetspot for me. The limited save options on legendary give much more weight to the choices you make and things that happen. Really enjoy that. Plus I'm perfectly able to get through it with fun thematic armies. Haven't built a doomstack in my life, though I will say Lightning strike is mandatory.
What does Legendary Chaos Invasion actually look like?
ruclips.net/video/LZEnxvXgYJQ/видео.html
Zerkovich: You can't mass 1 type of unit and you can't base your army around missile troops! Its not fair!
Ghenghis Khan: Its not supposed to be fair.
One thing not mentioned in the video is the extra 10% upkeep and army supply lanes upkeep tax on legendary, pushing the player to get a lot of gold and field few cheap armies or one super efficient.
In regard to choosing difficulty you really need to know how the faction is gonna play. It's easier to play Ikit on legendary than Grimgor on hard. The factions are not balanced at all and the initial challange doesn't tell the player much. If you don't know how strong the faction you want to play is you are screwed.
The chaos difficulty is tricky as well. If you play as faction that doesn't face chaos it actually makes the campaign easier, puting strain on the AI. If you face the invasion it can feel like you are getting ganked by another faction in the middle of a war.
Counterpoint to your suggestion to never play on Easy: I played my first ever Total War campaign on Normal as The Empire in Warhemmer I. I muddled around for a bit, went to war with the Vampires, and was promptly overrun by Beastmen and Goblins burning down my empire while I was away. I hadn't built walls, there was no spare income to raise a new army to defend, and it felt like a total kick in the teeth. After a few turns of fumbling and losing settlements, I restarted on Easy as the Dwarfs. I figured out how to play the Campaign, how to defend the backlines, and just got a feel for the game in general.
I'd generally agree that Easy isn't really a difficulty that you'd want to choose to play on, but it is a great tutorial on how Total War Warhammer (and Total War in general) works in both Battle and Campaign.
SFO very hard/normal/unit caps tomb kings system, if u want to have fun/challenge campaign with variety of units.Solution CA needs to put unit caps option ,and if someone wants to spend his campaign running around for 200+ turns with 12 mammoths or archers so be it, his choice .
I just want a difficulty setting where the AI is smarter and more challenging, is that so much to ask? All these cheats are just dumb and irritating. Learn the AI how to flank properly instead of making my souped up Chosen w GW unable to break an army of swordsmen.
And no word about the supply lines?
I must admit I don’t play a campaign without the no extra supply line upkeep mod anymore, just feels like such a cheap restriction
This game is not too difficult most of the time even on legendary because of 2 things: missile unit power and ambush stance.
The AI literally thinks you've disappeared in ambush stance and it's incredibly overpowered if used correctly.
Agreed, I've been wondering recently if it's worth using a mod that disables Ambush, I ambush ALL the time, it's crazy effective. Not sure I'd be very good if I didn't. :)
The reason it's so powerful is the AI can see all your armies at all times if you aren't in ambush stance. They also don't actually want to fight your armies, so use this knowledge to blow up undefended settlements.
Problem is without this cheat they don't act with any caution, so lose their armies too easily
Yeah, but the AI cheats so that if you aren't in ambush stance, they know where you are no matter what. To be fair, if you have the end turns on high speed or just skip enemy movement, they basically disappear when they enter ambush stance too. You can know generally where they are from common sense, but you still have to pay attention.
That's why i always wait for SFO, the army cap is awesome
I've been thinking about the Chaos invasion and how people have come to the conclusion that increasing the difficulty of it, really hasn't made it that more difficult, just more of a slog. They still come at around the same time, you usually have the economy to deal with an army or two at a time, you usually have lightning strike to put it in your favor, and they are still chaos so they suck.
But I've been thinking about how to solve this, and I remembered an MMO called Rift, and Oblivion. What if Chaos, when not controlled by the player, worked in a similar way where they open rifts throughout the campaign map from time to time as a sudden encampment to try and establish a beachhead to keep bringing troops through that the other faction must raze to stop the flow. The chaos that do come through try to raze your settlements and establish conduits to keep it open and allow more terrible units to get in, maybe if it gets bad enough they open more portals with enough razing.
I'd like to know what everyone thinks of this, gonna go as LegendofTotalWar as well.
Check out the Gates of Chaos mod; it does just that.
steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1470815758
Thank you mate. great video. Finally understand what is actually going on when changing that difficulty level...because what i was seeing wasn't making any sense.
Cheese for the cheese lord!
exploits for the exploit throne
Very fair criticism on Legendary/Very Hard difficulty, especially with the cheesing.
There are unit caps in the mod SFO Grimhammer II. If you turn them on (its optional, it asks you several turns into your campaign to choose).
Wow I’ve always wondered the differences this is a fantastic video and honest feedback. Thanks!
The fact that the Ai's personality changes makes so much sense now. For example when playing as throt. On normal or hard you have a non aggression pact with Nagarond which the Ai will never break. However once you turn it to very hard and legendary, even if you have positive relations at 40-60 they will break the non aggression pact and attack you the player.
i remember dwarves always declaring war to me even with pact when i play TK at very hard. So annoying.
That is what ruins the higher difficulties for me. Diplomacy is already kind of weird sometimes but on the higher difficulty settings it becomes pretty useless as everyone will just randomly declare war on you just for the sake of it if you even manage to get into any good relations to begin with.
Feels like a diss to Legend of Total War lol
It should, I can’t stand his videos.
@@squee317 sorry, I've been watching him for more than 5 years probably
Maybe a little bit, but he makes sure to state that cheese is the only way of playing on Legendary
That soften the blow for me
@@hinrik6331 Then there’s no reason to play on legendary. Makes zero sense.
@@squee317
He doesn’t try to diss legend.
He just point out that easy cannot carry you too far
While legendary forces you to cheese the ai with doom stack and missle units get lot of buffs.
Also in his comment he explains his view on the ai difficulty and legend.
My settings = VeryHard/Normal/On
Save available, Less Stress, Less Micro in battles and Good challenges
You're wrong about easy. Everyone who has never played a total war game should spend two or three hours in easy difficulty, just to get a sense of what's going on and how to take settlements, build structures, level up and recruit.
I remember spending hours when I was new to the game, not having any idea what anything did. New players need an environment where they can experiment at that stage of learning. This stage is not about "learning how to be good", but about learning how to play.
good comment! Not everyone is adept at video games, let alone the strategy genre...
Aaah, the staunch line of spears school of thought
😂 I was also thinking about this.
I 100% understand his point of view but comparing it to playing on Easy/Easy is a bit unfair 😆
"I'm not like OTHER Legendary Campaign players." - Zerkovich
I used to play very hard - very hard up until my last campaign, changed it to very hard - normal coz I actually want to use melee units for once 😂😂
Yea it's weird how the difficulty only effects melee units but leaves magic and ranged untouched. Kinda forces you into a certin play style.
@@CarlosDiaz-je1bg it really does, makes infantry units redundant
I highly suggest Legendary Campaign + Normal Battle difficulty. It's a great combination of slews of armies, but ones you can defeat with balanced/sane army compositions. The upkeep penalty still makes things obnoxious but it's outweighed by the more than double battles (and post battle loot) I experienced on VH/VH for 500 hours. The L/N combination re-invigorated my enjoyment of the game and definitely suggest other folk give it a go for a balance between difficult and fun.
Wow Zerovich just became a dark elf Lord with massive shade buffs. 😄
I would actually suggest starting the Campaign on Easy for your first time if you don't normally play Total War or other RTS games. When I started playing Warhammer. I hadn't played a CA game since Rome Total War when I was a kid. I tried going normal/normal for a Mortal Empires campaign and got absolutely crushed by turn 80. It was a slog, and I wasn't really having a good time because I was so busy trying to micromanage and figure everything out. Disheartened, I tried bringing it down to Easy/Normal and just had an blast playing the Greenskins, effectively wiping the map in the green tide. I would be learning things with a reasonably high margin for error. When I had effectively controlled most of the Old World, that's when I decided to go back to normal/normal as Lizardmen and was having an amazing time because I felt like I was now on equal ground with the AI. Every loss was because I made a bad call, and every hard-fought victory felt earned. But that's just my experience, I hope you just have a good time playing a game you enjoy!
Honestly I always play on normal for battle difficulty but very hard on campaign. I do not like battles becoming artificially harder when we could have better AI, with better army compositions.
Could we have a better AI? It took decades to make AIs that could compete with Grandmasters in chess. Programming an AI that could compete with the best military masterminds in the human history is not in the budget of a gaming company.
@@JayvH because the AI is legitimately bad in total war games. Modders have been improving the AI substantially since the beginnings of the series. Look at Darthmod, which was an AI mod first and a Gameplay overhaul second. He removed cheats from the AI where he was able to, and rebalanced the game to improve the AI's behavior. Most notably was with the games with gunpowder focus, for example his changes in Empire practically eliminated a glitch that causes the AI to stack units on themselves, freak out to try and fix it repeatedly - resulting in the AI slowly walking their units, not shooting back, until they eventually walked into player's units if they managed to not route before they made it that far.
Darth later gave up on modding Total War games because CA made the same mistakes game after game and he felt fixing their mistakes over and over were tedious. If I recall correctly he also brought up the point that CA keeps making their games faster paced, while his own changes that helped the AI (and were more realistic, which was a secondary goal) slowed the game down. He eventually founded a game company and started making strategy games, Ultimate Admiral and Ultimate General series, and both of them have a lot better AI than CA's Total Wars.
Same, but I'm considering taking the step up to hard battle difficulty. In campaign there's a point, usually around turn 70 - 90, when your faction has hit the power curve and your strategic position is fairly secure. It's the point where the campaign goes from 'struggle for supremacy' to 'maintaining dominance' and it's the same point where I'm less concerned about beating the AI and more interested to see whether the AI can beat me. It's that point in the game where I'm okay with the AI getting some battle buffs because if I'm not worried about winning battles against the AI the game becomes 'watch my armies claim town by town'.
@@JayvH youre misunderstanding.... we dont need grandmaster level AI in a videogame. Theres plenty of games with good/excellent AI in them, doesnt need to be able to compete against the world's elite gamers. Otherwise 99% of the playerbase would never be able to beat it... you have a stupid way of thinking, you either want the best of the best of the best or not at all.
Middleground is possible too... dont forget that.
@@bwc153 Thanks I've played Napoleon Total War with the DarthMod. It was a better experience. I also enjoyed his Ultimate General Series. Well at least until Casualties became ridiculous in Gettysburg with a later Patch.
Excellent video sir please do the same for Troy, no one has yet done it!
"Prey to the Omnissiah", that was a good one.
wrong warhammer tough
Everytime I play a hard campaign, the dark elves become massive superpowers with seemingly unlimited armies around.
Dang i remember playing vampire counts in very hard battle difficulty, the moment my skeleton frontline starts clashing against empire spear they waver and start to disintegrate after 20 seconds
that’s just skeletons. they do that regardless. only way to use them is go for the no upkeep technology and spam armies of them while using spell casting lords and heroes
Honestly I like Hard for campaign and Normal for battles. The reason being is primarily that I play Skaven and I like to confederate, I noticed that Skaven clans like Pestilens actually survive on Hard. Beyond that I find the buffs to AI actually fun because it forces me to be more methodical about what I hit first.
The flesh is weak.
Praise the Machine God, the Omnissiah and the Machine Spirit.
Thanks for the video
Tip:
If playing Norsca in the Mortal empires campaign- put it on easy. If not the high elves will spawn army, after army, after army, after army, and send forces to the tiny island that contains those three cities they desperately want. They do this in the exact same manner via a boat over, and over, and over again. It’s not fun.
I had this constantly every couple of turns and defended the island with one army while another shat on empire. Until one turn magically, without expansion, both high elves and empire sent ships to the island- which i defeated. Only for 10 turns later the elves could suddenly afford to send 6 armies my way
Ai needs to be worked on for the third game.
Indeed. Norsca is unplayable so far. How are you supposed to raid if Bretonia and High Elves keep bullying you since early on? Also, Norsca lords were bugged time ago and they didn't have any mounture
@@juanm.q5121 right?! It was fine in WH1 because you were pushing down and everyone else was pushing up. You can defend as you go.
Soon as you expand the map you’re now being pushed up from the south and from the west too. Better not piss of the high elves if not you’ll be hit from the north also.
That video underlines how good at the game LegenofTotalWar is
Very Hard / Normal is my cup of tea + now Legendary Chaos Invasion if im not playing Clan Moulder or Har Ganeth / Naggarond.
I always hated artificial difficulty. I want true difficulty. I don't even think battle AI is too bad. I would argue their micro is superior to mine, especially when controlling 40 unit armies.
If they won't improve the battle AI, they could at least improve the Campaign AI... that seems easy enough. Why isn't that done?
Hey Zerkovich, great video, very informative as always, also loved your CP video.
I play on legendary Exclusively but it isn't a "flex" it's just, ever since I first played Diablo on Hardcore I got obsessed with playing on the Hardest difficulty. It's a handicap, but I can't help it, every game now, whether I enjoy it or not i tend towards the hardest, it's like an addiction!
That was the only thing, I think you over-simplified the reasons why people play on Legendary, it's not just to flex or brag. Also, Legendary is not that easy, even with 19 Archers. I still lose, a LOT. Thanks again for all the great vids!
Yeah, of course not everyone is playing for the flex. Just from what I see in TW communities and things, it comes across that way. I just think it's a bit of a shame for the spirit of Total War and battlefield warfare, that people would rather bring 19 Archers than win some hearty tough battles.
@@Zerkovich Thanks heaps for your reply. I think it's a shame too, but CA designed the game that way. I just think it would have been better to have made a plea to CA to have another look at how they balance legendary.
I kind of felt like you were blaming the community for "not playing properly", probably not how you meant it.
Back in the days when i started TWWH 2. (I only played Shogun before at age 14 and didnt really put thought into difficulty)
I thought that difficulty changes how well the AI acts on the campaign map. Not getting more agressive, but idk, not making dumb maneuvers and stuff. xd
I mean i want it to be even, i dont want debuffs that dont make sense if the AI get buffs for that, so i stay to normal. If there ever will be difficulty that changes AI's thinking and strategy and stuff, i will maybe try harder modes
This video missed two things. In legendary campaign difficulty you can't manually save the game which greatly reduces your ability to save scum. Secondly battle realism mode is an additional difficulty toggle for battles and in legendary campaigns it is forced on. It would be nice if you could turn these things on in a way that you can't disable for other campaign difficulty levels but at the moment we will just have to settle for mods.
Clear, educated and easy to understand. I dig this kind of content.
I appreciate this perspective. I like playing on the harder difficulties typically, but i understand why people wouldn't want to do this. I don't like seeing my high tier melee infantry breaking or taking huge damage from Ai trash, but that's the name of the game. I also really like cheese sometimes. I would not want to restrict the game options for people who want to play a fantasy game with monsters and magic. I really dislike it when people call for unit caps and restrictions on your armies and playstyles. You do not have to play with cheese. You can also play factions that don't support doomstacks well or have natural restrictions like tomb kings. I hope they fix the AI before they ever try to restrict the player.
Units caps are actually something I've been curious about them adding for quite a while (mostly thanks to seeing High Elves often spamming their Dragon and Phoenix units...)
Well, you should look into mod SFO Grimhammer then. On turn 3 I think they give you an option between two kinds of unit caps. You can choose between the two, can chose both or chose none if you want to cheese.
I'd like if the AI in Total War games actually used army formations instead of just making two long lines of units.
In my own experiences, i never have enough melee units to match the AI's melee lines, so I'm usually forced to play defensive and spam ranged anyway.
I also almost never see the AI use artillery in their armies which gives even less reason to play offensive.
Just seems like that "harder difficulty" in most modern games now just means "let the AI cheat more" or "make the player weaker" instead of "let the AI be smarter"
Ai definately use artillery!
Do you not ever fight the Empire with their 5+ Hellfire Rocket batteries?
The biggest difference between very hard and legendary is that you can not give order while the game is paused and if i remember correctly vision and camera movement is limited to what your troops can see. I find that annoying too. I play on VH/VH for a challenge and with thematic mixed armies.
my problem is the step from very hard to legendary, very hard only delays your snowballing by a couple turns and on legendary you just feel outright cheated which gets frustrating very quickly :/
100% agree. The Chaos Invasion Scale is a great step in the right direction but personally I want to go Legendary campaign with Hard battles without battle realism and at least without the huge menu in my face when pausing. not even asking for commands during pause. Hope they at least give these options in WH3. Would make a real lategame challenge BC as soon as you own 3-4 provinces, you can annihilate nearly everyone on Very hard/hard with experience.
This is the best analysis of the difficulty sections I've seen on YT. You're a good 'un Zerk.
This is why SFO is so popular
True
But can still be cheesed.
@@cHaMp630 ofc, remember that old dwarf doomstack with master engineers and troll torpedos? This is absolutly terrifying on SFO and as bonus you can add some dwarf engineers (the sort of hand-held mortar/grenade launcher unit)
what changes with sfo? Can't get a grasp of it
@@Ravenor99 it would be way too long to explain, i suggest you to watch Great Book of Grudges videos about it
I agree with a lot of this except for the chaos invasion. having the difficulty settings just mean "more chaos armies at once" is a boring way to increase the difficulty. I think a more interesting mechanic would be if chaos could open portals over razed settlements that would periodically spew forth chaos stacks. This way they could continue to be a threat beyond the initial rush of the invasion and potentially actually make their way beyond the northern half of the map. Chaos invasion means basically nothing atm if you play a faction that starts in the southern regions.
Eh? Chaos invasion is a pain in the ass if you start near the cost of Lustria.
Portals over razed settlements sounds like an awesome idea though.
@@OniGanon I could be mistaken but as I understand it now chaos only invades from the chaos wastes and near naggarond. Before this patch they used to spawn in the oceans near lustria as well as northern ulthuan. I completed a short ME campaign as wood elves and only had to deal with one stack in the dark elf region.
You are totally right on the high difficulties , I made each faction in very difficult or legendary for the famous steam trophies ...
It made me HATE the game and hate some faction so much but I continued...
after done i rediscovered the game in multiplayer and lower difficulty, i can try build i cant try to ally witth certain factions on ,campaign , feels good
I only learn to trick the IA abuse ranged abuse Sorcerer and avoid Diplomatic in thoses difficulties
I play with optimized armies (which does include doomstacks for a lot of factions, of course) purely to avoid spending 90% of my playtime in boring siege battles. On Very Hard / Very Hard, battles can be made challenging if you expand fast enough and fight bigger groups of enemy armies. Unless you play Bretonnia, of course, where you can start building hippo doomstacks before turn 30 and the only challenge in the game left is the "complete more grail vows for your lords" minigame.
Basically, higher the level of difficulty more parts of the game are disabled. Legendary disable melee game and leadership game for most player controlled armies. Melee units are just there to hold units on legendary for some time. There is no melee matchups to speak off, unless its something like swordmasters vs goblins. Higher Campaign difficulties disables economy and public order for AI, so it pumps units.
So its basically shooting, magic, monsters, doomstacks, characters that rule the game on higher difficulties. And it becomes even more easy then easy difficulty. So basically increasing level of difficulty you just disable parts of the game, and if you stay on normal your level uped general skilled army just roll through everything.
There is no good choice really. I tick legendary more now, because it is more engaging, even in current state. Normal is just boring. Hard is not far from normal.
P.S. Skavenslaves are one of the best player controlled units on Legendary. Thats something.
What about very hard?
there is no legendary battle difficulty, and you can still have a melee focused army on battle difficulty very hard, hell I do it all the time
I agree with your difficulty sentiments. Legendary boils down to me ambushing outside a garrison for easy victory and doing a bunch of things that just aren't fun to play. Although ai is really limited and I mostly enjoy playing with friends.
Me who struggles with Easy difficulty
Zerk: "Easy is too easy!"
Easy is probably for non strategy game players. even playing on Normal is kinda boring. The AI cant stage a comeback after you defeat their main army.
😅You very new to this?
Playing on Very Hard Battle Difficulty has really screwed up my sense of the game. Chaos infantry not only cuts through Empire state troops like a hot knife through butter, the chaos infantry take essentially no damage as well as after melee engagements, even against greatswords which are ARMOR-PIERCING. Yes, I know that empire infantry are not supposed to be able to defeat chaos infantry in head-on combat, but its one thing to do no damage but also hold the line. It's a whole other thing to immediately collapse on contact and do no damage as well. Likewise, regardless of who you play, all AI tier 1 spear units outclass your tier 1 spear units (as an example), which really sends the wrong message regarding the true capabilities of your units. I think purposely pitting yourself in unfavorable engagements, instead of putting yourself on VH battle difficulty, can be rewarding. I think I learned the most when I pitted my balanced Empire army against a late-game dwarf army (slayers, hammerers, iron-breakers, and organ guns+the usual missile infantry). I won, after my 8-man great sword unit, my general with less than 10% hp, 3 Demigryph knights, and a half-strength handgunner unit with no ammo barely pounded a 6-man unit of hammerers into submission (this was on VH battle difficulty). I was lucky to have won despite the VH battle difficulty, because otherwise my loss would have given me the wrong message-->that I wasted my time. If I had loss this, there's a good chance that the AI bonuses on VH would have been a significant factor in addition to mistakes I made myself. But the thing is, its hard to identify and learn from mistakes when the VH AI bonuses might make such learning a moot point.
Another battle that comes to mind is pitting Empire against high elves. Their ranged units out-range or out-damage your gunners and crossbowmen, so you HAVE to utilize magic (burning head anyone?) and/or artillery as well as calvary micromanagement, while also incorporating Tier 1 shielded units (swordsmen and spearmen) to hopefully endure the magic arrows of sisters of Averlorn, as well as Greatswords to hold out against phoenix guard and Swordmasters of Hoeth as gunners reposition themselves in the flanks.
Really enjoy normal normal for learning the game but I plan on boosting difficulty since I now have the know how to play
It's always a difficult quest to make gameplay enjoyable for the player while at the same time have the AI cheat less.
It happens in plenty of other games and mods too, across the board.
In some ways the AI system is not that developed (yet) to reach certain sophisticated heights where it doesn't need much intervention to become self sustainable to be an actual threat to the player.
And even then, there are always ways to counter that and predict how the AI will react.
But who knows, maybe with future technology we will be able to have those kind of immersive difficulties without the cheats.
Great video, well explained!
One of my biggest "achievements" in this regard is winning a Warhammer 1 campaign as Empire on Legendary while playing "properly" as you mentioned. Was it fun? I honestly have no idea as the only emotion I remember from the ordeal was a feeling of relief that all the absolute bullshit was over. Since then, I never felt the compulsion to touch Legendary again, something that followed me into Warhammer 2 and has persisted.
A returning player to TW.
This is by far the most relevant description I've ever seen for TW difficulty changes