This game is so poorly designed. The goal is to make the player "feel" like a master strategist by scaling the challenge. It's a mental masturbation simulator.
@@justinlast2lastharder749 There is also the occasional ... holy fuck Tesla stock is down 75% on time highs, take a few loans and buy the stock, wait about 6-7 months and double or triple your loan invest value and pay off the loans to 99%, leave the last 1% so that the loan stays in your record for its live time giving you increase credit score there by making the next time even more profitable ...
Yeah I think the whole 'single entity Unit' thing is rather flawed to put it mildly. Would've preferred it if they'd have done it the way they did it with old Total War games where it would be the General/Commander/Whatever you wish to call them, with their Bodyguard Unit. I mean yeah due to monsterous units being a thing some stuff like Dragonriders or Griffons etc. would've been unavoidable, but I'd say there's a huge difference betwen the two :)
@@MajorCoolD I think they should have gone further and mostly drop the total war mechanics for Warhammer. They just don't fit the fantasy setting. I just wish they had stuck with the old design philosophy for the historical ones instead of making those more like warhammer.
@@Winston-lf7sb I think they are. They gave us a series of games that are two different play versions to each campaign. You can either play against the NPCs or you can play against the AI/Developers. The problem with CA is more their DLC model. Even on steam sales it's outrageous how much it costs to get the "whole game". Warhammer 1 is almost a Decade Old and unless it's on sale it is still at release price. Crazy.
Ya works well.I have had games with so much money friendly factions would ask for some when doing deals even if I could refigure the same agreement with them giving me money.
The worst offenses to me are the fact that A.I. "allies" constantly try to drag you into wars if you have an alliance with them. They can break alliances and suffer no diplomatic penalty, but if we the players do, we get very low reliability. I'm also still irked by how the A.I. is immune to attrition damage practically. What's the point of corruption or plagues if the enemy armies take 1% attrition damage per turn? It's obnoxious.
Yeah economically, strategically and logistically the AI isn't playing the same game. I always thought it'd be fun to fight a larger enemy using raiding armies to bust their economy and cause unrest but that doesn't work because AI gets enough bonuses to completely ignore their public order and economy and still have surplus in both areas.
@@purplefood1 I remember getting cities to rebel in Rome 1 by sending in spies to reduce public order, assassins to damage buildings and, starting in BI, lots of characters of a different religion.
I think in WH2 if an allied AI approaches you with "an offer you can't refuse" just make a counter offer they will definitely refuse. That way you will not sufer any penalties with them.
the dynamic difficulty encourages bad tactical choices and bad player choices. its a huge problem with many games that use it. basically, giving the ai cheats and having an extrmeley simple criteria for ai protocols means bad tactical choices that should end your playthrough actually cause the ai to become worse and make even poorer choices. in short, play well and get punished, play badly and get rewarded. its why i say ca is BAD at strategy games. 😂
Watching Legend play this game is like watching a clown perfectly snake out a clogged drain with a balloon animal. You're certain it can't work and then suddenly it does.
thanks for that player trap explanation. i had a feeling something was working against me in my campaigns and it was the garrison being built up and them sacking all my minor settlements instead
The fundamental thing to understand about the AI is that it will always try and attack your weakest point. Hence it avoiding your armies and strongholds to go on minor settlement murder sprees instead. That's one of the reasons why ambush stance and building ambush chance is so valuable.
This is why I only ever build strong garrisons in either A) choke points the enemy HAS to attack to get through or B) in particular settlements of value I want to deter the enemy from attacking.
@@nonesuch6833 You can not build a weak point then. Just install any garrison mod that give you a garrison unit with every building. Then build a militarry buildings specially on border territory/ settlements fragile to attack to make the garrison able to fight. That actually make settlement menagment harder but at least logical. This game is just design wrong, its full of bullshit because thats the only way devs was able to make it hard. Thats not how you design a game and creative assembly is not a good developer, they exist only because of lack of competition.
The only faction I’ve noticed that doesn’t seem to suffer from this is dwarfs (chorfs are worse since their early game garrisons are just greenskin slave spam) and I’m fairly sure it’s to do with the AR favouring them a lot in general. That’s why most campaigns they barely get touched by other AI races except greenskins or elves with magic and AP, even their minor garrisons get decisive victories against full stacks lol
It's honestly similar to the low difficulty issue. The AI's response to alleged positions of strength is to just amass more strength, and if these positions are just alleged, or hinged on particular unit strengths, then the AI is favored by the interaction. For myself, I find that having two weak armies is almost always better than having one strong army, and it is usually good to, if you can't really deal with the AI in a particular direction, just back off, give them a settlement or two, then build up a second army to send back in with your main. Lord Ambushes are also massively, massively useful, and getting Lords off the ground that actually can swing with weight while alone or nearly alone, besides just being bait is very handy.
Something to note about siege battles as a player. the siege equipment also counts quite heavily in favour for the player. I've had sieges that gave me a decisive defeat turn into a close victory because I waited 1 turn and build a siege tower. I checked to see if the attrition had any effect, by reloading and not building siege equipment. but the auto resolve stayed the same in that case. I think with sieges the auto resolve takes into account how easily your forces would breach the walls. But doesn't seem to realize that ladders are basically just as good (if not better) than siege towers.
Warhammer universe has this. When you start messing with rituals, you usualy ends up with chaos popping in your backyard. So that is positive lore check
This is probably one of your best videos. Everything you did in this video is completely counter intuitive to what you think you should do and it resulted in a much better outcome.
I think one of the bigger traps in TW games is the idea that you want territory. Like, okay, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of benefits to painting the map (and this varies by faction/lord as well), but development takes investment and owning lots of land means having lots of neighbours, and lots of neighbours means lots of enemies, which means lots of wars in all directions. Especially early-game, far-reaching landgrabs can turn your empire into an indefensible money-sink. What I've found to be much more manageable is... selling land to other factions. When I play Elspeth, I only keep like a handful of provinces to myself, and everything else I acquire, I trade to Franz. He makes for a great buffer (hostile factions generally don't wardec you unless your direct borders are relatively close to theirs) and makes a lot of money, so selling land to him is both more beneficial to my diplomatic flexibility, and more instantly profitable than building up settlements for passive income. I like to do the same when I'm playing Vampire Coast. I don't need any cities that aren't ports, and I have absolutely no desire to fight a bunch of irrelevant landlocked people, so I always try to cosy up to the most blobby non-pirate around and trade cities to them whenever I need quick cash.
Yes A massively underrated thing is selling/gifting settlements, and trying to remember to always look for people to offer to join war against, instead of just declaring war. Don't extort them, just take the free diplomacy advantage unless you're in dire need of cash. Maybe this degrades over time, maybe it doesn't, but a fantastic example of this is Khalida's campaign. Just give a settlement to Kroq-Gar or Thorek. Just do it. It takes them off your back for almost ever. Even factions that hate you can usually be squeezed for a bit, and can be swung over to neutral or even friendly pretty easily if you hand over some settlement crumbs. Avoid being at war with two major powers at once if you can help it. "Major power" in this case means "someone I can't mop up within 3 turns". Not 3 turns in theory, but three turns from NOW. If a usually hostile AI faction is near you, and you don't want to deal with them yet, push land into their hands, you'll get more. Look for natural chokes or "enclosed" areas of the world map to claim. Peninsulas, mountain passes, islands, areas with miserable army movement penalties, areas where only one faction shares a border with you. Avoid Military Alliances with anyone that isn't completely enclosed within your territory or otherwise isolated. Employ Defensive Alliances only when you really want some allied recruitment units, or else it's to solidify a similarly inert faction, because whatever facade of power an alliance has stops mattering the moment war is declared, and your stalwart "ally" spends 15 turns planning an attack on an isolated, defenseless minor settlement, or stealing valuable settlements you actually want, and having to play settlement trading with people you already own. Practice this with Warriors of Chaos or Ogres sometime; the average settlement means next to nothing for you, so you really SHOULD be using them to make diplomatic power plays. If you're a faction that can diplomatically vassalize people, this can play into that, too. I've had games with Arkhan where I basically owned the Dwarves in entirety, on the back of regularly handing over random settlements I could barely even use that were wrested from Queek or other Greenskins. If you have partial provinces, or take stuff that's Unpleasant for you, don't even worry about it unless there's like a Gold Mine or unique feature you want, sell it. Hell, a particularly degenerate strategy is take stuff from one minor faction, sell it to another, then take it back. It's like sack cities, except you get paid twice. A side note on the value of settlements, do the brief head math on how long it takes income buildings and upgrades to pay themselves off. Some income buildings or upgrade tiers offer HORRIBLE returns on investment, things like an upgrade getting you 50 gold per turn, but costing a thousand plus for some factions. Leaving unupgraded buildings until you have a windfall of cash is good, and upgrading money buildings that will only become profitable 20+ turns down the line is never a high priority, compared to keeping that money in your pocket to raise an emergency army, or float an income negative couple of turns.
I had a really cool campaign I played with a friend, where we didn’t go after each others factions, but always took control of each others enemy armies. So even though the turn based was the same against the AI, every fight was 100% fresh and intense, because the army is controlled by the other person. Lots of fighting, lots of laughs and cranks the difficulty to 11! I would love to see legend do a campaign like this.
Tww3 is starting to feel less like a strategy/tactics game and more like a scrying session to see what rules the ai plays by and what esoteric decision it's going to take. For example, why does Aranessa insists on forcing Repanse(player) into a goose chase around Araby while ikit claw destroys her settlements in Tilea unopposed ? (Without using any doomrockets because those are reserved for the player only.)
Simple, cuz Ikit isn't the player character so she just thinks "fuck you in particular". I had an Oxyotl campaign where I had a vision mission against Varg. I'm at the very bottom of the world while they are all the way at the top. For the entire remainder of the game, all they did was recruit a 20 stack of garbage and boat it all the way down the entire world to my coastline. They didn't fight anyone else on the way, the elves on ulthuan that they were at war with just completely let them go by unopposed, and while they COULD have simply attacked the empire factions they were at war with (which were all right next to them) they didn't. Why? Cuz they weren't me.
There's an in-game reason why, which is that the AI actively targets the player strategically, and when outmatched in autoresolve will run as far as possible. So it leads to strange contradictions like that. The reason why the game is programmed this way is a result of CA being a dysfunctional developer that has trapped itself into making campaign AIs that aren't really fun to play against. They have more or less kept the battles fun, but have not been able to make the AI competitive, so in compensation they have resorted to making the campaign AI force players into outnumbered battles as often as possible.
@@thelegendarynarwhal2931 Don't bother following this path. I've had two armies that were enemies of eqch other coming at me together just because I was getting close to taking out a major player. So much bs in this game.
Ironically, diplomacy is often a very big trap as well. If we make a non-aggression pact with a faction, all the other factions that dislike them will dislike us further, which might be just enough for them to declare war. If our faction is strong enough, weaker factions will not declare war on us, so we don't need to care much about them. If we get a non-aggression pact with a faction, we are often stuck with a faction that don't like us enough for further diplomacy. Eventually we will want to attack them, meaning that we either wait at least 10 turns to declare war, or break the agreement raising the likelihood of getting attacked by every other faction that dislike us. If the faction likes you, they will not declare war. So no need for non-aggression pacts. If they dislike you, they will break the non-aggression pact if they are stronger than you anyway. If they are weaker than you, they will keep you stuck on the non-aggression pact and maybe a trade agreement but never much more than that. Of course, playing as humans or dwarves, diplomacy is often useful for confederations. But for the vast majority of factions it isn't.
@@flopus7 The moment I realized how broken diplomacy in total warhammer is, is when I finished the main quest of Throgg. It was back in Total Warhammer 2 when norscans couldn't occupy settlements in the mainland. So I had to make sure there was a massive line of armies constantly razing every single settlement in the area and destroying every faction that could be capable of settling on it. I had several dozens of armies in the map due to the 80% upkeep reduction in frost trolls. Everyone had red standing with my faction. But somehow, they were still sending me requests for military alliances. Since I was the enemy of their enemies with a massive army ready to crush them, they were sending requests for military alliances every turn even though I was crushing them.
@@j.f.fisher5318 That's certainly how it's supposed to be interpreted but the fact that even one's staunchest allies turn against you is kinda silly. I use a diplomacy mod that allows one to keep Allies on side that have stood with you for awhile. It's really only possible to cultivate one or two clans in this way and there's no guarantee they'll survive long term. So it's important to keep your strategic goals in mind when developing these relationships. It doesn't always work out, but when it does, it can be really satisfying.
@@righteousham you can keep your allies if you play game of diplomacy correctly. I had successfully turned entire japan against one a.I faction while i had realm divide debuff
Old man in wheelchair bullies several Imperial armies into submission all on his own, while shouting "I already cast Hell Hammer several times and I might've lost track of my winds of magic in all that excitement. So you got to ask yourselves one question: Do ya feel lucky, PUNKS?"
2:58 This sounds like fire arrows in Medieval 2. I think the most well known new player trap. Literally a button you can click to nerf your army and if you dont know better you'll always click it thinking it's a buff. You have to either do testing or have someone tell you that it's not better.
My favourite recent camping was playing the dwarfs. Specifically belegar. I ignored the starting province and took Slavenblight, where I chilled for 30 turns. Only having one settlement became better and better through the deeps mechanic. I followed up slowly expanding into his normal starting province. And after that into athel Loren, building my deeps up evry time. At around turn 60 I sent belegar with a strong army to karak eight peaks and took it. Then I snowballed out of control due to upkeep reduction. That was one of my craziest campains yet. The best thing was the greenskins ignored me the whole time. I was surrounded by Grom and the dude that gives 10% physical resistance for defeating him, but because my armies where small and I used my money on the deeps evry turn they just left me be until I was unstoppable. I stoppen playing the campain later on because All my armes were basically free and I got bored. :)
I think a better example of the noob traps is using ladders to climb walls. The unit is considered running the whole time they climb the ladder, so by the time half of the unit climbs the wall they are tired and have reduced stats as such.
The thing about ladders is that you can confuse the AI into abandoning the walls with a flank overwhelm. Then your real units can walk through the gates.
that's not a player trap because ladders are obviously a measure of last resort that you don't want to use. it would be a player trap if siege towers, which cost time to build, were somehow inferior to ladders, which are free
Once again it's painfully obvious that Legend has thought more deeply about Total War's game design than the people at Creative Assembly who are paid to do so have done.
Naw, the CA folks just respect making war realistic. Not sure about AI bonuses on high difficulty that's just the sausage of games, but the stuff about how dieges work is realistic. Starvation has slways been the primary tool of siege craft. And if the enemy was strong enough to invest a fortress while having enough troops left over to bypass it they absolutely would. The overwhelming majority of military action was raiding villages for supplies. Pitched battles were relatively rare.
@@j.f.fisher5318 factions on the other end of the planet declaring war on you because you are "the player" is the opposite of realistic. Stop using realism as an excuse for shitty game design when it's not even true.
@@j.f.fisher5318 How do they "respect war realistic" if building walls is to the detriment of the defender? Starvation was always a primary tool exactly because walls gave such an insane advantage to the defender that the direct assault is a bad idea. It is the other way around in TWWH, where defending in an assault might be worse than a field battle with the same army. It is the opposite of why it was all about raids and sieges.
@@shishkabob984 There are some terrible uni teachers. Some just recite what's on the lecture slides. Most have been decent at least where I'm studying, but there are teachers whose lectures I will never attend, because it's a waste of time.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the walls themselves being perhaps the biggest player trap in most total war games. I don't mean avoiding defensive walled settlement battles like you mentioned for WH3 but rather manning and defending the walls during defensive sieges in most total war games, going as far back as Medieval 2 or even Rome 1, with Shogun 2 being somewhat of an exception to that rule. That is to say archers simply don't work well while on the walls due to engine limitations so instead of the walls providing your archers a massive bonus they instead provide a penalty that's easy to miss and is very unintuitive. That's why the preferred strategy is to camp the town center area and fight in the streets rather than around the walls.
Legend, i have been watching your videos exclusively to learn, i never ever comented once, i dont ever give likes to any videos. But this is easily your BEST video, exclusicely by explaining this extremely important concept for new and struggling players that no one else seems to show a spotlight in their guides. Please i beg you, add this to the common lexicon of your videos and community. Got my like, my subscribe and my gratitude for this.
I kind of experienced this too with Helman ghorst zombie stack armies. The zombies and magic punch upwards SO hard compared to their cost and balance of power, I've had it where a 10 stack of zombies are constantly challenged by 8-16 stacks of dwarves and empire armies that stand zero chance of winning and I see the AI as just feeding me free money and raise dead options. I don't think the AI consider massive regeneration and mortise engine life drain as very high in the balance of power when in reality they are more useful than tier 5 units. That small stack of zombies with Ghorst buffing them can roam around and suck up all the enemy armies like a vacuum.
This is the real power of the Ghorst doomstack. Sure, it's near unkillable in a 1 on 1 fight like many great doomstacks, but the main benefit is the low ranking the AI gives it. Every single AI army throws itself on the pyre one after the other. The AI never runs away and never gets help from extra armies. It chases you down as fast as possible and dies on contact. The quadruple army that catches your doomstack at half-health is just not a thing that happens to fake chaff armies, but a legion of steam tanks may be unlucky enough to deal with that.
The AI generally only sees Autoresolve value, and Autoresolve cares the most about Leadership, Armor, Missile Strength/Ammo, and health. It cares almost nothing for magic, activated abilities, or auras. It tends to overvalue hybrid infantry and fat sacks of armor and Leadership (Kislev and Dwarves) almost completely ignore speed, the value of armor piercing damage, or resistance (Slaanesh, most Daemons). It barely understands the concept of synergy, except what I suspect to be a blanket autoresolve penalty for ranged units without an "adequate" (whatever that means" spread of frontline troops, which I suspect is part of why hybrid units tend to do so well. It values single entities and characters very highly, because they have big numbers, despite the fact that these numbers are often nowhere near what a unit of infantry is doing. As far as Autoresolve is concerned, an Empire Captain is worth several units of Swordsmen, despite the fact that he probably loses to one or two. A Wizard that can win an entire battle by itself gets a couple little bones thrown to it on account of their magic abilities, but is veeeery interested in that 15 armor, 60 leadership, and 16 melee attack. The game is by no means simulating combat, it's just assigning values to various stats and features and hurling them at eachother. If you've ever seen a Bloated Corpse get like 6 kills, and end a battle on half health in Autoresolve, you have seen what is happening. If you have seen an entirely melee army wipe out units of ranged air units, or skirmish cavalry they have no hope of actually catching, you have seen what is happening. You can see this in factions that generally do poorly in autoresolve, that have units that check some of these boxes. One of the best examples is Skaven Warpfire Throwers. They perform absurdly well in Autoresolve because the game sees a ranged unit with surprisingly high armor and leadership for the role, and positively creams itself when it sees the bizarre way their ranged attack power ends up being calculated, with a similar thing in reverse happening to Ikit if you put him on a mount.
I don't think that "Most" player traps are by design. Regarding the siege thing, the devs probably didn't consider that "autoresolve boost for siege = AI takes siege more seriously = AI brings overwhelming force" and as a result they won't give the player a reasonable, fulfilling showdown. That said there are a good number of intentional player traps in the game - Quest battles in particular are heinous for this. Khalida's quest battle - its a chokepoint battle, where immediately the enemy flanks you with multiple armies. Thorgrim's first quest battle - you can set up within an area in the middle, once you finish deploying you're immediately flanked by armies on both sides. Katarin's Crystal Cloak (?) quest battle....it's literally a Tzeentch ambush. If you bring a conventional army to this fight you'll be cooked alive before you can shout BS. Not to mention that these generally become available when your lord is like what, level 6? You've just taken your first province and you're expected to fight a late game battle with bad instructions? They either want to make quest battles a late-game thing or somebody on the Dev team has a sadistic sense of humour.
I found Alarielles quest battle to be the hardest I ever fought. And it is also quite a trap. Hellcannons on a hill to the left encourages to send your flyers and cavalry there. Norsca army with mammoth to the front encourages you to form a front line with your melee units and to put your ranged units behind. That is challenging and occupies you alot to micro the Hellcannons which are guarded by chosen with Halberds. And then with no notification a reinforcing army of chaos knights comes in from behind and slams into all your ranged units. It is the hardest buttfuck I ever got. Usually quest battles say a short message when reinforcements come but in this case they dont.
@@colonelthyran7755 Crone Hellebron has one of the most bs quest battles as well. You're encouraged to spam witch elves (obviously anti infantry with low armor piercing) in the campaign, but then one of the quest battles throws you in vs a tag team of dark elves with arty on both edges of the map, ranged units and heavy armor halberds; and then the beastmen army has chariots and anti infantry monsters; and it spawns you right in a pincer where you're ALREADY within the enemy's arty range and 10 seconds from getting rushed by the beastmen. You can't even run to either edge of the map without sacrificing half your army. Literally the best way to fight that one is to recruit anything BUT witch elves just for that specific quest battle.
@@ezkiller93I get by that by...never recruiting Witch Elves. I don't like that type of unit. Don't care how good people say they are, ECT. I don't like micro intensive glass cannons that aren't even that good of a cannon.
Thanks for this video. This kind of "player traps" are the kind of thing that really alienates me from TW3. I wanna feel like a part of a bigger world, and this completely ruins it for me.
These are not here intentionally but accidentally, it would be the same as complaining about how the AI always want a decisive victory and not to give you an epic fight. Total War games are not about epic adventures in a world, if you want immersion in campaigns, this franchise is not it.
@@Thedefenses You are a game dev with years of experience and 100's of employees and multiple patches and you can't fix player traps that have already been solved by mods 2/3 of the time? really? Great excuse...
@@Thedefenses i've played total war games for over 20 years, and i can tell you, i fucking hate these player traps, and bullshit. it makes the games into cheese fests. i purposely play with mods that i made myself to emulate the older total war feel. elephant spam in rome II? GONE. defensive lines not being very defensive? how about boosting defence. everyone running all over the damn place and destroying the ability to think tactically real-time, and making flanking useless? fuck that. now you can actually focus on the cav micro, while being confident that your lines will hold just long enough for you to deal with enemy cav if you are skilled enough.
@@MsArchitectschannel If they are not intentional and more a side product of the way the game has been made, there is nothing to fix. In this case the player got fucked due to being in a defensive fight while his army was fucked, that´s not a bug or error you can fix, that´s just what happens when you get yourself into the situation. Player traps are not always due to some design but due to player playing the game in a certain way which causes them to make those traps for themselves.
@@Dejawolfs Never had any of those problems but each to their own. Also, paragraphs my good sir, use them, putting all that into a big block makes reading it cancer.
Building defences/settlement garrisons on areas right next to a future enemy's border right before a big push has been pretty successful for me personally. Because after declaring war you can try draw their armies into your territory and bleed them within your own borders, then once youve wiped the armies move out and conquer the settlements. Same with fortifying bottleneck settlements. I think the only value in upgrading settlement garrisons/defences is in those two instances.
I feel like the benefit of defensive garrisons is literally just the AI's hesitance to attack a settlement, if it's high value enough. IE, building a garrison to preserve your landmark building you wanna hold, or so on.
he could ve also just put slaves into the province to instantly build the garrison building as an alternative. But Legends strat is obviously the better 1
I've never played Attila myself, but I remember Legend saying something that gold mines (or possibly other income buildings) generate money and corruption. The trap is, the increase in corruption is more costly than the increase in money beneficial.
The biggest player trap is defensive/military allies. The game actively tries to screw you over by your allies declaring war on someone next to you that they can't even attack. So it's either declare war on someone you don't want or get bad reliability.
@@LordVader1094 I mean both. If you have defensive allies then enemy factions will declare war on your ally forcing you to join the war. And with military allies they can be attacked and declare war on other factions to screw you over.
That's why I don't alway accept allies. I only accept those that behave and those that I actually need to protect myself. And those aren't the ones that ask you to become allies. I have to buy them with settlements.
The lack of defensive siege battles are my biggest problem with total Warhammer . love a good siege defences , especially in older Total wars. and they just dont happen in this game. atleast not big ones. major problem in my opinion.
About player traps in the Quest Battles. One of the empire lords, don't remember which one, used to have a battle (or maybe even still has) where you would deploy literally on the edge of the map, and then without any warning, the enemy would just get cavalry reinforcements right in your rear. I've never called out bullshit faster than that in my life
Walls are supposed to be a positive force multiplier, and CA has almost completely removed that from TW sieges. Compare that with Medieval 2, where walls are actually incredibly powerful.
I love this game, I really do. Learning so much from you really does help, not hinder my games. I play immersively but I know these few tricks help make the campaign more fun, and less of a slog.
Honestly they should add a mechanic to newer Total Wars where your garrison is a threath in the whole province, because historically that was basically the idea right? There is a huge Fort with a lot of men inside and if we ignore this it will most likely quite literally bite us in the ass so we have to take this before we can keep going.
glad even as bad as I am I can understand how this goes wrong. I never thought of walled fights as a trap in this game, but now I cant see unsee it. thanks legend.
Realm Divide in Shogun 2 will kick you square in the nuts if you're not ready. However, Realm Divide in FotS works in the player's favor if you stick with your allegiance. Half the map will become your "allies" (although they don't ever actually do anything proactively) and the other half will align against you. Or you can choose to be independent if you want to fight the whole map by yourself and without some of your best agents.
I don't know why but I find this the funniest shit ever, just the accent the brutal honesty, and how I've been completly f'd in campaigns since omg, but I had no idea about this stuff, bro I love this thank you for just completly making my day
27:30 I really appreciate your mentioning that even though there is a most efficient way to play, people are still okay to choose their own path while still knowing these systems exist. Too many people in games will act like there is a right and wrong way to play any number of games out there. Cool video explaining how these systems work.
Intuitively I just did some of these things to avoid some player traps. But I never gave it much thought as it was a natural progression. As you explained what they were it was like awareness unlocked and realized how many little things I did over the years in TW games that avoided these “traps”. Crazy.
Thanks for the video Legend, I kinda realised that siege battles are a not the best way to sped your time but your other examples made me understand AI a bit more!
Recently had a series of tough fights as Oxyotl, but thanks to Legend, i had faith in myself and in my troops enough to dismantle and defeat several hectic chaos stacks! Thanks Legend, you're the best!
I can’t wait for the next Terminator movie to star Legend outwitting Skynet by disbanding most of the military and stuffing everyone’s money in his mattress.
I remembered in Shogun 2 the army thing was actually an opposite, you didn't want to look weak. When I lost an army because I lost a battle hard. I would find myself at war with all the neighbours since they saw me as easy target. Edit: Haha, yea... that not what you meant. :D
Thanks to CA that can't design their games I recomend mods that removes or midigate that player traps. i dont played shogun 2 yet but removing that stupid mechanic mod will be the first I instal before my first campaign. In warhammer 3 you need a garrison upgrade that actually can win in a siege - not only on paper in aouto resolve. There is planty mods for it. Need to test and pick up something that fit you. Greater garrison by zorbaz or dynamic garrison with full settlement strength is what I tested I stayed with the later. It help with a defense but harm the attack - AI also have better garrisons - thats fair though.
Funny enough in S2TW Realm Divide is quite liked as reasonable mid-late game challenge. Enemies don't spawn of thin air and you have quite a degree of control of how you approach that problem (with exception of diplomacy). Also within it players would probably win even quicker and thus see even smaller part of technology and infrastructure (as you never fill tech tree in short campaign and waiting before RD is often that big investment time in economy while not fighting). Also defending castles in S2TW not only feels great but is real force multiplayer (I had battles when my full stack defending castle was able to win against 3 stacks of enemies in long and epic battles; that were happening every 3-4 turns).
@@Sanvone Like I said I didn't play shogun 2 so maybe I will find a mod that... modify that mechanic instead of disabling it. I dont know yet. I will interest in it when I start playing or after first unmod campaign. All I know that shogun 2 is preaty good game and worth trying. Thing is total war games eats a lot of time. Specially warhammer 3 when you play on HDD so a lot of other games or tv shows you miss playing another campaign. So It will take my a bit before I start with with new total war game.
@@kapixniecapix3869 I have 1.200 hours in Shogun 2 about 90% in vanilla. There is a charm to figuring out the real intent behind some design decision instead of just cheesing the game in easiest way. S2TW just has that loop of: initial expansion - playing tall - starting final phase of game. Also while you play against everyone, map of Japan is one big string of chokepoints so you avoid cat&mouse gameplay from newere titles. Personally it works out for me and people I tutored into Total Wars in Co-Op campaigns. I encourage trying it at least once after knowing it is coming. I have some good news for you - Shogun 2 has short victory condition that requires you only to have slightly above half of the smaller than wh3 map (it is 25 or 35 provinces IRC). It was the last game where campaigns weren't such a drag (Rome 2 had... basically world conquests no matter which victory condition you picked).
@@kapixniecapix3869 Realm Divide catches you off guard once and the one big issue with this is the fact that EVERYONE turns on you, including your most trusted vassals and allies, who had been your buddy buddy friends for the whole game. Which is not quite how the similar showdown went in the actual history, when it ended up as two major forces with all of their supporting factions decided to get a showdown, not "One clan against the entire island". Other than that, it is a pretty good mechanic, actually. It would be even better, if your vassals and trusted allies would stay with you by default, without mods, leading to a more historical experience. But it is a nice challenge nonetheless. And as Sanvone had said - enemies don't just spawn out of thin air. Which is really nice.
@nemamiah7832 If your allies stayed with you that would have more sense. What legend describe is YOU MUST to not expand and build up and let other factions kill each other to have less enemies to fight. That sounds as stupid as possible leaving only one option to play campaign as every lord. So I would mod that to improve the game in some way. Change or disable. In the other hands to much mods make a game crash at the start so you have to chose wisely. Nevertheless changing this is worth a slot. I just created a mod pack for warhammer 3 that ads tons of overhauls for lot of factions unit packs and new races... but it not work.
Love how Legend just described something I felt but never knew how to put words on. There's something about these concentric, overlapping mechanics that create some kind of Venn Diagram of raw destruction for the player and only the player. These days playing a Total War game is like less like strategy and more like minesweeper, or a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where if you can make all the right choices the difficulty doesn't matter. At least at the harder difficulties. On Medium you can still just strongarm the game with brilliant Real-Time battle skills.
Thinking back on my Skarsnik campaign, he really benefits from TWW3 terrible siege design. Having a limited roster I used skulkers with flasks to climb walls and backdoor objectives while the dwarves focused on my gobbo fodder. Today I had a psuedo-sally via an ambush outside of my minor settlement. I lost but he backed off and I saved a Supreme Sorceress. It felt pretty rude to have my doors kicked in by Valkia and Mung simultaneously on turn 17. Probably because I took Ghrond relatively early. Cheers thanks for the video, a lot to think about and apply to my campaigns.
I want to add tot he 'never starve out' that sometimes besieging is the right move still. An example is a typical skryer army with a lot of ratlings and Jezzails. They are terrible to get into walled settlements, prone to having LoS issues and terrible pathfinding. But on an open field? They are deadly. So, what do I like to do is to besiege while appearing weaker, and bait them into a sally out (either directly, or by sending another small army over), so that I can massacre the garrison. To be fair, there had been bugs where the completly killed garrison units revived fully, but I think they hv fixed that one. Another point is, that siege equipment gives a lot of balance of power. Sieging for 1-2 turns may turn a phyrric autoresolve into a close one without any of your units getting wiped out. Which can be useful for said Skryer army that is a real pain to play in a siege (even though the AI really sucks at defending a siege as well, tbf)
It's also really useful to interrupt recruitment, since the AI retreats to cities so often. If you've trashed a lords army but haven't stackwiped them, they can replace units faster then you can heal. Starting a seige you can't win without starving out the defenses can buy you time to bring up fresh troops and keep a lord pinned.
21:24 "Why not? The AI does it to you, so do it back to them." You are my hero for saying this lol. Really dislike the holier-than-thou attitude of people who say that using tricks the AI also uses means you didn't _actually_ win or anything. But what you said is exactly the way I see it; if the game and AI are allowed to use cheap exploits and cheats to create artificial difficulty, then I'll do the same if possible. Maybe it's petty or whatever, but I'm just sick of devs making things more difficult through use of outright cheats as opposed to letting them make better strategies.
I think that Kahlida of the Tomb kings has a trick start. You can fight the first few fights as normal, but if you then head north and focus on fighting the vampires, Thorik Iron brow gets very hard and will declare war on you at about the same time as the lizards, putting you in a two pronged war. Instead, if you ignore the vampires after getting the first two settlements and go straight for the dwarves while the orcs are still fighting them, you can get rid of him by like turn 10-15. I was actually inspired by Legends Ten turn vampire wipe for Gelt, before they moved him to Cathay, when I tried this. Then you have a really strong start. You have the full mountains and can kill off the orcs really easily, then go focus on getting lamia back, either from the vamps if they still have it, or from the Kroc-gar. Either way, you now have two provinces and only one real threat, Kroc-gar. Sometimes Skarbrand gets involved, but dont be afraid if he declares war on you. That doesnt mean hes gonna come straight away, hes just a khornite. Ultimately, you can have a good three provinces, by the time most starts would only have one full one, or maybe two.
I've recently started playing Alien Isolation for the first time, and I was quite surprised to see that it was developed by CA. I played a bit and noticed that the motion tracker in that game actually attracts the Alien to you, so you should basically never use it and only rely on sound cues. I immediately realised that this is basically a player trap. In a horror game these make sense, as the one tool that should bring comfort actually brings distress; but player traps make no sense in a strategy game like Total War as Legend says. I don't think many people from Alien Isolation actually worked on Total War, but I wonder whether some of the design philosophies seeped through, without them knowing what they are for, especially since Attila, the game with most traps, released a year after Alien Isolation
As you pointed out, I think siege battles are absolutely the best example of this. Walls are useless except for sometimes slowing down armies that don’t have siege equipment. Another example of a player trap in Shogun is how useless a lot of the walls in the upgraded castles are. It is almost never worth it to defend the outer layers at all, while shoving all your unites into the keep yields consistent results.
generally the quest battles feel like a trap. you'll get them at a really early level, they wont tell you exactly what the enemy forces are, and if you do it with an early game/ mid game army you just get stomped.
Very interesting how you point out the importance of balancing your armies so that AI does not perceive you as weak, nor too much of a threat. Amazing!
Yea, something I sort of dislike, but also understand when it comes to basically all strategy games; Defensive strategies are nerfed by how effective they Should be-based on logic and how the real world actually works-in favor of hyper aggressive strategies. Partly, this is due to the nature of games; The main negative of hyper aggressive strategies is that they really only fail when you lose. However, in a game, losing is only a temporary setback. At worst, you start over, and do it again but better. In reality, obviously you've only ever got the one chance. Partly, it's due to the nature of players; Defensive strategies tend to work best over a longer period of time, because investing in defense is almost always a static improvement-walls stay built once built-but offense isn't-soldiers require pay and upkeep regardless of if they're fighting, but in the short term can become unfit if they're not constantly training, or grow old and die in the long term. Players tend to prefer exciting action over more passive gameplay, so defensive strategies are discouraged by game mechanics. Players don't like to use them, and they also don't like playing against them (when they're as effective as they should be).
Total War also has no win conditions for "Sit on your base and make an unassailable wall." Everything, from your starting missions of "Go smack them for 500 quid" to your tech unlocks (what, you going to demolish and rebuild all your buildings so you can fulfill the tech tree requirements?) to even the "unify your starting province" mechanic FORCES you to go on the offensive Other games can have more defensive & attrition-based strategies (eg: AOE2, starving out your unit's expensive gold-costing units; Into the Breach, you often win if you just survive enough turns) but TW is built on expanding, expanding, expanding, expanding
@@Zeldrake Which is more aggravating, because they have an entire diplomacy system-and an entire campaign set dedicated to making use of it-but no diplomatic routes for just "My economy is strong and my walls are unassailable, be my friend"
What a topic :) TW players from my experience fall into defensive mindset of "Muh Thermopylae!" and are not aggresive enough. The question in those games is never - "Will you win?" but "How quickly and easily can you win?" As the other commenter already said - defensive strategies are only there to enable offensive strategies. With removal of population mechanic and more in-depth economy enagment you are not out-macroing anyone so much that you can stay on the defensive and win. "Go big of go home" is the name of snowball games. You don't really need to out-macro AI and you are probably not out-macroing another human opponent (because such players are few and far between). Defensive strategies also don't work in MP FFA - they are just answer to "Rush" strategies but fail miserably against "Bloom" strategies. Even then - aggresive players can expand often elsewhere and now of sudden your enemy has 2 players worth of economy against your 1 worth of. Lastly the problem of defensive strategies is the static nature of it. Once you build fortification you are not moving them. Unlike army that is the main investment of aggresive player. So they are long-term deals (I say it because there are too many people building walls up for 10 turns or shorter). What is bizairre that across years I keep encountering this failure on strategic layer of understanding defense within TW community. While on tactical level everyone and their mum is using hammer&anvil strat, on campaign map few utilize shield&spear strat. So make small holding forces in defensible position (less than 10 units) that will hold 3-4x as many enemies forever then throw 90% of forces to roll other enemy in the meantime. It works best in older TW titles where there was recruitment pool but even in newer titles you are saving time cause you can keep auto-resolving on the offensive instead of having to both manually resolve defense and offense. Fortifications are force multiplayer yet they need only small crews as AI will keep barely enough people to win in it's opinion.
@@Zeldrakeeh Dwarfs now in warhammer 3 can totally do the set on one or two provinces and fight from there with their deeps mechanic which turns even the most worthless settlement into 10k gold a turn.
@@jarlwilliam9932 sure, but if you expand as the dwarves, you can make 100k a turn from 10 settlements. i ended up with 200k a turn at turn 100 as dorfs :P and just pumping out army after army after army...
its like that story of the guy with no army sitting on the wall playing a flute, except the flute can summon a volcano and the guy is secretly riding a mech
Game: sets up a player trap Legend: pulls and Uno reverse card with Astrogoth and sets up an AI trap solo Astrogoth would be so easy to kill with some outriders, or with kislev slow spell and streltsi.
Playing VH/VH, I actually don't mind defensive walled city siege battles. If anything, I've been able to leverage the walls to pull a victory out of a disadvantaged battle. I only man the walls long enough for the ranged to let out a few volleys. Then, I'll pull them back behind my melee units that are standing by behind the walls. I'll wait for the enemy to scale the walls and then use my melee to pin hold them against the wall in blobs, while ranged shoot into the blobs and casters blast them with spells.
The one player trap i learned in my first campaign is that if you accumulate a lot of cash everyone who gets money from raiding and sacking comes for you. Always spend excess gold. Having high income is less of a trap as long as you spend the money.
The approach I typically take for number of armies is to have two armies per frontline. One strong army that can usually handle just about anything, and one to support them in case the enemy brings a bit more to the field or to dissuade attacks on weak positions. I only bring more than that if I am facing more than one or two opponents on a single frontline. I also get myself a couple allies to limit the number of frontlines I have (thus reducing the burden on my economy). So far in my clan mors campaign Skarbrand and Tretch have made for useful blockers to my south and east while I focus my forces mostly north and south.
Legend is like "Ah, here's your problem, you have too much army, too much money and your defenses are too big"
he truly is the Grey Seer of Total War
that's way too accurate lmao
"You have stuff? You like that stuff? Ayo f your stuff" - Legend, allegedly
It is so fucking ironic and that makes it REALLY entertaining😂
This game is so poorly designed.
The goal is to make the player "feel" like a master strategist by scaling the challenge.
It's a mental masturbation simulator.
Came for disaster battle, got a legend coaching session instead
with a little embezzlement tips on the side. Banger vid lol
At this point every battle is a coaching session with legend
There’s never a disaster battle with dawi zharr at the helm
And warhammer money laundering 😂
That Kislev's tax evasion was an icing on the cheesecake.
I applaud any and all successful tax evasion.
@@justinlast2lastharder749 There is also the occasional ... holy fuck Tesla stock is down 75% on time highs, take a few loans and buy the stock, wait about 6-7 months and double or triple your loan invest value and pay off the loans to 99%, leave the last 1% so that the loan stays in your record for its live time giving you increase credit score there by making the next time even more profitable ...
Master Strategist: The enemy is coming, build a mighty fortress
Legend: nope, send one guy to the enemy, do tax fraud und why are we not Skaven ??????
yes yes! no play as filthy no furs!
Yeah I think the whole 'single entity Unit' thing is rather flawed to put it mildly. Would've preferred it if they'd have done it the way they did it with old Total War games where it would be the General/Commander/Whatever you wish to call them, with their Bodyguard Unit. I mean yeah due to monsterous units being a thing some stuff like Dragonriders or Griffons etc. would've been unavoidable, but I'd say there's a huge difference betwen the two :)
@@MajorCoolD I think they should have gone further and mostly drop the total war mechanics for Warhammer. They just don't fit the fantasy setting. I just wish they had stuck with the old design philosophy for the historical ones instead of making those more like warhammer.
@@MajorCoolDSovl does that exactly lol, and would work pretty well imo; if you slam two leader units into each other the leaders duel.
@Wub-rv9xx I love Sovl it's Hella fun
18:35 that is FUCKING hilarious that the AI goes from "ey gimme your money or we'll bonk ya" to "e's poor, let em go"
Tax evasion
literally rewarding the player for bad choices and punishing them for making the right ones.
ca is not a good strategy game producer. thats for sure
doing this every round is so cheesy xD
@@alexma81The best skill to have.
@@Winston-lf7sb I think they are. They gave us a series of games that are two different play versions to each campaign. You can either play against the NPCs or you can play against the AI/Developers. The problem with CA is more their DLC model. Even on steam sales it's outrageous how much it costs to get the "whole game". Warhammer 1 is almost a Decade Old and unless it's on sale it is still at release price. Crazy.
The hiding money thing was my favourite part.
followed by the skaven laugh, so perfect lol.
Ya works well.I have had games with so much money friendly factions would ask for some when doing deals even if I could refigure the same agreement with them giving me money.
The worst offenses to me are the fact that A.I. "allies" constantly try to drag you into wars if you have an alliance with them. They can break alliances and suffer no diplomatic penalty, but if we the players do, we get very low reliability. I'm also still irked by how the A.I. is immune to attrition damage practically. What's the point of corruption or plagues if the enemy armies take 1% attrition damage per turn? It's obnoxious.
And the fact we need to use mods just to fix that nonsense. Bethesda moment.
Yeah economically, strategically and logistically the AI isn't playing the same game. I always thought it'd be fun to fight a larger enemy using raiding armies to bust their economy and cause unrest but that doesn't work because AI gets enough bonuses to completely ignore their public order and economy and still have surplus in both areas.
@@purplefood1 I remember getting cities to rebel in Rome 1 by sending in spies to reduce public order, assassins to damage buildings and, starting in BI, lots of characters of a different religion.
I think in WH2 if an allied AI approaches you with "an offer you can't refuse" just make a counter offer they will definitely refuse. That way you will not sufer any penalties with them.
Welcome to- why I stopped playing strategy games. Can't program an AI that understands the mechanics? No problem! Just let them ignore the mechanics
Legend, I'm sending in an Empire Swordboy doomstack.
Doomedstack
tell da boyz to get rouse up dem allbirddeers and dere pointy stickswords!! humiez is sending in dem swordboyz....
If you could somehow get a 17 stack of carrorburg greatswords…
@@Dusto-qz1hz it was already done
I heard is as Empire soyboy stack, and well that's how they performed in that game.
>be Legend
>delete army
>go bankrupt
>???
>win
the dynamic difficulty encourages bad tactical choices and bad player choices.
its a huge problem with many games that use it.
basically, giving the ai cheats and having an extrmeley simple criteria for ai protocols means bad tactical choices that should end your playthrough actually cause the ai to become worse and make even poorer choices.
in short, play well and get punished, play badly and get rewarded.
its why i say ca is BAD at strategy games. 😂
Truly God of Cheese I mean who could think this stuff up x'D
@@i.k.2485 ca doesnt know how to make strategy games.
they do know how to make money selling the same game 200 times from suckers though
Watching Legend play this game is like watching a clown perfectly snake out a clogged drain with a balloon animal. You're certain it can't work and then suddenly it does.
times and times again this absolute chad proves why there is "Legend" in the start of his name
@@Kas-p4pyou are the reason why legend does his little mocking voice 🤣
@@Kas-p4p This one is actually funny tho. I think people missed the sarcasm.
@@DaleHodgkinswait what, can you send timestamp?
thanks for that player trap explanation. i had a feeling something was working against me in my campaigns and it was the garrison being built up and them sacking all my minor settlements instead
The fundamental thing to understand about the AI is that it will always try and attack your weakest point. Hence it avoiding your armies and strongholds to go on minor settlement murder sprees instead. That's one of the reasons why ambush stance and building ambush chance is so valuable.
This is why I only ever build strong garrisons in either A) choke points the enemy HAS to attack to get through or B) in particular settlements of value I want to deter the enemy from attacking.
@@nonesuch6833 You can not build a weak point then. Just install any garrison mod that give you a garrison unit with every building. Then build a militarry buildings specially on border territory/ settlements fragile to attack to make the garrison able to fight. That actually make settlement menagment harder but at least logical.
This game is just design wrong, its full of bullshit because thats the only way devs was able to make it hard. Thats not how you design a game and creative assembly is not a good developer, they exist only because of lack of competition.
The only faction I’ve noticed that doesn’t seem to suffer from this is dwarfs (chorfs are worse since their early game garrisons are just greenskin slave spam) and I’m fairly sure it’s to do with the AR favouring them a lot in general.
That’s why most campaigns they barely get touched by other AI races except greenskins or elves with magic and AP, even their minor garrisons get decisive victories against full stacks lol
It's honestly similar to the low difficulty issue. The AI's response to alleged positions of strength is to just amass more strength, and if these positions are just alleged, or hinged on particular unit strengths, then the AI is favored by the interaction.
For myself, I find that having two weak armies is almost always better than having one strong army, and it is usually good to, if you can't really deal with the AI in a particular direction, just back off, give them a settlement or two, then build up a second army to send back in with your main.
Lord Ambushes are also massively, massively useful, and getting Lords off the ground that actually can swing with weight while alone or nearly alone, besides just being bait is very handy.
Something to note about siege battles as a player. the siege equipment also counts quite heavily in favour for the player. I've had sieges that gave me a decisive defeat turn into a close victory because I waited 1 turn and build a siege tower. I checked to see if the attrition had any effect, by reloading and not building siege equipment. but the auto resolve stayed the same in that case.
I think with sieges the auto resolve takes into account how easily your forces would breach the walls. But doesn't seem to realize that ladders are basically just as good (if not better) than siege towers.
Good point. I will now make a ton of battering rams now so I can auto-resolve more sieges since they are often boring
I like to build a Tower and A Ram...then use them as Decoys while I send ladders up in a few places.
Please CA remove the ass ladders
Ladders give max level fatigue, don’t they? Also, siege engines act as bullet sponges for the towers/archers.
Warhammer 2, when you're the High Elves and you start the rituals. Chaos and Skaven armies pop up in your backyard.
Warhammer universe has this. When you start messing with rituals, you usualy ends up with chaos popping in your backyard. So that is positive lore check
doing the rituals is another players trap. especially for high elves. just conquer the map. simple as that.
god yes, my first campaign. All my armies where in or heading to lustria. I never played the base vortex campaign again after that.
This is probably one of your best videos. Everything you did in this video is completely counter intuitive to what you think you should do and it resulted in a much better outcome.
You could have done it easier.
Proceeds to delete own army.
Ok, now we can win.
F#@%ING LEGEND.
I think one of the bigger traps in TW games is the idea that you want territory.
Like, okay, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of benefits to painting the map (and this varies by faction/lord as well), but development takes investment and owning lots of land means having lots of neighbours, and lots of neighbours means lots of enemies, which means lots of wars in all directions. Especially early-game, far-reaching landgrabs can turn your empire into an indefensible money-sink.
What I've found to be much more manageable is... selling land to other factions. When I play Elspeth, I only keep like a handful of provinces to myself, and everything else I acquire, I trade to Franz. He makes for a great buffer (hostile factions generally don't wardec you unless your direct borders are relatively close to theirs) and makes a lot of money, so selling land to him is both more beneficial to my diplomatic flexibility, and more instantly profitable than building up settlements for passive income.
I like to do the same when I'm playing Vampire Coast. I don't need any cities that aren't ports, and I have absolutely no desire to fight a bunch of irrelevant landlocked people, so I always try to cosy up to the most blobby non-pirate around and trade cities to them whenever I need quick cash.
And the way that selling a city to someone makes them instant friends for life.
total war real estate manager
Yes
A massively underrated thing is selling/gifting settlements, and trying to remember to always look for people to offer to join war against, instead of just declaring war. Don't extort them, just take the free diplomacy advantage unless you're in dire need of cash.
Maybe this degrades over time, maybe it doesn't, but a fantastic example of this is Khalida's campaign. Just give a settlement to Kroq-Gar or Thorek. Just do it. It takes them off your back for almost ever. Even factions that hate you can usually be squeezed for a bit, and can be swung over to neutral or even friendly pretty easily if you hand over some settlement crumbs.
Avoid being at war with two major powers at once if you can help it. "Major power" in this case means "someone I can't mop up within 3 turns". Not 3 turns in theory, but three turns from NOW. If a usually hostile AI faction is near you, and you don't want to deal with them yet, push land into their hands, you'll get more.
Look for natural chokes or "enclosed" areas of the world map to claim. Peninsulas, mountain passes, islands, areas with miserable army movement penalties, areas where only one faction shares a border with you. Avoid Military Alliances with anyone that isn't completely enclosed within your territory or otherwise isolated. Employ Defensive Alliances only when you really want some allied recruitment units, or else it's to solidify a similarly inert faction, because whatever facade of power an alliance has stops mattering the moment war is declared, and your stalwart "ally" spends 15 turns planning an attack on an isolated, defenseless minor settlement, or stealing valuable settlements you actually want, and having to play settlement trading with people you already own.
Practice this with Warriors of Chaos or Ogres sometime; the average settlement means next to nothing for you, so you really SHOULD be using them to make diplomatic power plays. If you're a faction that can diplomatically vassalize people, this can play into that, too. I've had games with Arkhan where I basically owned the Dwarves in entirety, on the back of regularly handing over random settlements I could barely even use that were wrested from Queek or other Greenskins.
If you have partial provinces, or take stuff that's Unpleasant for you, don't even worry about it unless there's like a Gold Mine or unique feature you want, sell it. Hell, a particularly degenerate strategy is take stuff from one minor faction, sell it to another, then take it back. It's like sack cities, except you get paid twice.
A side note on the value of settlements, do the brief head math on how long it takes income buildings and upgrades to pay themselves off. Some income buildings or upgrade tiers offer HORRIBLE returns on investment, things like an upgrade getting you 50 gold per turn, but costing a thousand plus for some factions. Leaving unupgraded buildings until you have a windfall of cash is good, and upgrading money buildings that will only become profitable 20+ turns down the line is never a high priority, compared to keeping that money in your pocket to raise an emergency army, or float an income negative couple of turns.
Yep, if you want to blob you should always go for a corner and focus on destroying factions, so you can limit somewhat how many enemies you make
I like to try and install no-trouble factions on my borders but diplomacy isn't strong enough to really incentivise such a thing.
I had a really cool campaign I played with a friend, where we didn’t go after each others factions, but always took control of each others enemy armies. So even though the turn based was the same against the AI, every fight was 100% fresh and intense, because the army is controlled by the other person. Lots of fighting, lots of laughs and cranks the difficulty to 11! I would love to see legend do a campaign like this.
Tww3 is starting to feel less like a strategy/tactics game and more like a scrying session to see what rules the ai plays by and what esoteric decision it's going to take. For example, why does Aranessa insists on forcing Repanse(player) into a goose chase around Araby while ikit claw destroys her settlements in Tilea unopposed ? (Without using any doomrockets because those are reserved for the player only.)
You're starting to see the world through Tzeentch eyes.
Simple, cuz Ikit isn't the player character so she just thinks "fuck you in particular". I had an Oxyotl campaign where I had a vision mission against Varg. I'm at the very bottom of the world while they are all the way at the top. For the entire remainder of the game, all they did was recruit a 20 stack of garbage and boat it all the way down the entire world to my coastline. They didn't fight anyone else on the way, the elves on ulthuan that they were at war with just completely let them go by unopposed, and while they COULD have simply attacked the empire factions they were at war with (which were all right next to them) they didn't. Why? Cuz they weren't me.
There's an in-game reason why, which is that the AI actively targets the player strategically, and when outmatched in autoresolve will run as far as possible. So it leads to strange contradictions like that.
The reason why the game is programmed this way is a result of CA being a dysfunctional developer that has trapped itself into making campaign AIs that aren't really fun to play against. They have more or less kept the battles fun, but have not been able to make the AI competitive, so in compensation they have resorted to making the campaign AI force players into outnumbered battles as often as possible.
Well put, thats been a problem of Total Warhammer for a loooooooooong time now and one of my biggest bug bears with the game.
@@thelegendarynarwhal2931 Don't bother following this path. I've had two armies that were enemies of eqch other coming at me together just because I was getting close to taking out a major player. So much bs in this game.
Ironically, diplomacy is often a very big trap as well. If we make a non-aggression pact with a faction, all the other factions that dislike them will dislike us further, which might be just enough for them to declare war. If our faction is strong enough, weaker factions will not declare war on us, so we don't need to care much about them. If we get a non-aggression pact with a faction, we are often stuck with a faction that don't like us enough for further diplomacy. Eventually we will want to attack them, meaning that we either wait at least 10 turns to declare war, or break the agreement raising the likelihood of getting attacked by every other faction that dislike us.
If the faction likes you, they will not declare war. So no need for non-aggression pacts. If they dislike you, they will break the non-aggression pact if they are stronger than you anyway. If they are weaker than you, they will keep you stuck on the non-aggression pact and maybe a trade agreement but never much more than that. Of course, playing as humans or dwarves, diplomacy is often useful for confederations. But for the vast majority of factions it isn't.
Non-aggression can be a helpful warning that you are about to get dog piled if you are at the very beginning where enemies always outnumber you
@@flopus7 Yes. We have to be careful as well, that the races they dislike will dislike us even further due to the pact being created.
@@flopus7 The moment I realized how broken diplomacy in total warhammer is, is when I finished the main quest of Throgg. It was back in Total Warhammer 2 when norscans couldn't occupy settlements in the mainland. So I had to make sure there was a massive line of armies constantly razing every single settlement in the area and destroying every faction that could be capable of settling on it.
I had several dozens of armies in the map due to the 80% upkeep reduction in frost trolls. Everyone had red standing with my faction. But somehow, they were still sending me requests for military alliances. Since I was the enemy of their enemies with a massive army ready to crush them, they were sending requests for military alliances every turn even though I was crushing them.
@@rumplstiltztinkerstein Praise the "Decline Diplomacy" mod
Non-aggression pacts are essential some campaigns to buy you a couple of extra turns before having to deal with someone.
I once heard it said of Realm Divide: it's the moment the AI stops pretending it doesn't hate you.
Yeah. Or the point where an island of rival warlords sees one guy growing fast and sendibly unite against their common threat.
@@j.f.fisher5318 That's certainly how it's supposed to be interpreted but the fact that even one's staunchest allies turn against you is kinda silly.
I use a diplomacy mod that allows one to keep Allies on side that have stood with you for awhile. It's really only possible to cultivate one or two clans in this way and there's no guarantee they'll survive long term. So it's important to keep your strategic goals in mind when developing these relationships.
It doesn't always work out, but when it does, it can be really satisfying.
@@righteoushamwhat mod
@@righteousham you can keep your allies if you play game of diplomacy correctly. I had successfully turned entire japan against one a.I faction while i had realm divide debuff
Real divide made me never touch shogun 2 ever again.
Old man in wheelchair bullies several Imperial armies into submission all on his own, while shouting "I already cast Hell Hammer several times and I might've lost track of my winds of magic in all that excitement. So you got to ask yourselves one question: Do ya feel lucky, PUNKS?"
2:58 This sounds like fire arrows in Medieval 2. I think the most well known new player trap. Literally a button you can click to nerf your army and if you dont know better you'll always click it thinking it's a buff. You have to either do testing or have someone tell you that it's not better.
18:11 jokes on you, my economy is so bad I can't even recruit more armies!
My favourite recent camping was playing the dwarfs. Specifically belegar. I ignored the starting province and took Slavenblight, where I chilled for 30 turns. Only having one settlement became better and better through the deeps mechanic. I followed up slowly expanding into his normal starting province. And after that into athel Loren, building my deeps up evry time. At around turn 60 I sent belegar with a strong army to karak eight peaks and took it. Then I snowballed out of control due to upkeep reduction. That was one of my craziest campains yet. The best thing was the greenskins ignored me the whole time. I was surrounded by Grom and the dude that gives 10% physical resistance for defeating him, but because my armies
where small and I used my money on the deeps evry turn they just left me be until I was unstoppable. I stoppen playing the campain later on because All my armes were basically free and I got bored. :)
Warhammer: Turtle War...
I think a better example of the noob traps is using ladders to climb walls. The unit is considered running the whole time they climb the ladder, so by the time half of the unit climbs the wall they are tired and have reduced stats as such.
Didn't know this. Explains why there is siege equipment and no obvious reason to use it
The thing about ladders is that you can confuse the AI into abandoning the walls with a flank overwhelm. Then your real units can walk through the gates.
that's not a player trap because ladders are obviously a measure of last resort that you don't want to use. it would be a player trap if siege towers, which cost time to build, were somehow inferior to ladders, which are free
Once again it's painfully obvious that Legend has thought more deeply about Total War's game design than the people at Creative Assembly who are paid to do so have done.
Naw, the CA folks just respect making war realistic. Not sure about AI bonuses on high difficulty that's just the sausage of games, but the stuff about how dieges work is realistic. Starvation has slways been the primary tool of siege craft. And if the enemy was strong enough to invest a fortress while having enough troops left over to bypass it they absolutely would. The overwhelming majority of military action was raiding villages for supplies. Pitched battles were relatively rare.
@@j.f.fisher5318 factions on the other end of the planet declaring war on you because you are "the player" is the opposite of realistic. Stop using realism as an excuse for shitty game design when it's not even true.
@@j.f.fisher5318 How do they "respect war realistic" if building walls is to the detriment of the defender? Starvation was always a primary tool exactly because walls gave such an insane advantage to the defender that the direct assault is a bad idea. It is the other way around in TWWH, where defending in an assault might be worse than a field battle with the same army. It is the opposite of why it was all about raids and sieges.
This lecture had my 100% attention, unlike my professor at uni.
Thanks legend
You should pay attention at school bro
Eu?
@@shishkabob984 There are some terrible uni teachers. Some just recite what's on the lecture slides. Most have been decent at least where I'm studying, but there are teachers whose lectures I will never attend, because it's a waste of time.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the walls themselves being perhaps the biggest player trap in most total war games. I don't mean avoiding defensive walled settlement battles like you mentioned for WH3 but rather manning and defending the walls during defensive sieges in most total war games, going as far back as Medieval 2 or even Rome 1, with Shogun 2 being somewhat of an exception to that rule. That is to say archers simply don't work well while on the walls due to engine limitations so instead of the walls providing your archers a massive bonus they instead provide a penalty that's easy to miss and is very unintuitive. That's why the preferred strategy is to camp the town center area and fight in the streets rather than around the walls.
Can you elaborate, or recommend where I can read up on this?
Legend, i have been watching your videos exclusively to learn, i never ever comented once, i dont ever give likes to any videos.
But this is easily your BEST video, exclusicely by explaining this extremely important concept for new and struggling players that no one else seems to show a spotlight in their guides.
Please i beg you, add this to the common lexicon of your videos and community. Got my like, my subscribe and my gratitude for this.
I kind of experienced this too with Helman ghorst zombie stack armies. The zombies and magic punch upwards SO hard compared to their cost and balance of power, I've had it where a 10 stack of zombies are constantly challenged by 8-16 stacks of dwarves and empire armies that stand zero chance of winning and I see the AI as just feeding me free money and raise dead options.
I don't think the AI consider massive regeneration and mortise engine life drain as very high in the balance of power when in reality they are more useful than tier 5 units. That small stack of zombies with Ghorst buffing them can roam around and suck up all the enemy armies like a vacuum.
This is the real power of the Ghorst doomstack. Sure, it's near unkillable in a 1 on 1 fight like many great doomstacks, but the main benefit is the low ranking the AI gives it. Every single AI army throws itself on the pyre one after the other. The AI never runs away and never gets help from extra armies. It chases you down as fast as possible and dies on contact. The quadruple army that catches your doomstack at half-health is just not a thing that happens to fake chaff armies, but a legion of steam tanks may be unlucky enough to deal with that.
The AI generally only sees Autoresolve value, and Autoresolve cares the most about Leadership, Armor, Missile Strength/Ammo, and health. It cares almost nothing for magic, activated abilities, or auras. It tends to overvalue hybrid infantry and fat sacks of armor and Leadership (Kislev and Dwarves) almost completely ignore speed, the value of armor piercing damage, or resistance (Slaanesh, most Daemons). It barely understands the concept of synergy, except what I suspect to be a blanket autoresolve penalty for ranged units without an "adequate" (whatever that means" spread of frontline troops, which I suspect is part of why hybrid units tend to do so well. It values single entities and characters very highly, because they have big numbers, despite the fact that these numbers are often nowhere near what a unit of infantry is doing. As far as Autoresolve is concerned, an Empire Captain is worth several units of Swordsmen, despite the fact that he probably loses to one or two. A Wizard that can win an entire battle by itself gets a couple little bones thrown to it on account of their magic abilities, but is veeeery interested in that 15 armor, 60 leadership, and 16 melee attack.
The game is by no means simulating combat, it's just assigning values to various stats and features and hurling them at eachother. If you've ever seen a Bloated Corpse get like 6 kills, and end a battle on half health in Autoresolve, you have seen what is happening. If you have seen an entirely melee army wipe out units of ranged air units, or skirmish cavalry they have no hope of actually catching, you have seen what is happening.
You can see this in factions that generally do poorly in autoresolve, that have units that check some of these boxes. One of the best examples is Skaven Warpfire Throwers. They perform absurdly well in Autoresolve because the game sees a ranged unit with surprisingly high armor and leadership for the role, and positively creams itself when it sees the bizarre way their ranged attack power ends up being calculated, with a similar thing in reverse happening to Ikit if you put him on a mount.
I don't think that "Most" player traps are by design.
Regarding the siege thing, the devs probably didn't consider that "autoresolve boost for siege = AI takes siege more seriously = AI brings overwhelming force" and as a result they won't give the player a reasonable, fulfilling showdown.
That said there are a good number of intentional player traps in the game - Quest battles in particular are heinous for this.
Khalida's quest battle - its a chokepoint battle, where immediately the enemy flanks you with multiple armies.
Thorgrim's first quest battle - you can set up within an area in the middle, once you finish deploying you're immediately flanked by armies on both sides.
Katarin's Crystal Cloak (?) quest battle....it's literally a Tzeentch ambush. If you bring a conventional army to this fight you'll be cooked alive before you can shout BS.
Not to mention that these generally become available when your lord is like what, level 6? You've just taken your first province and you're expected to fight a late game battle with bad instructions?
They either want to make quest battles a late-game thing or somebody on the Dev team has a sadistic sense of humour.
Whole diplomacy mechanic is one giant trap. You can get in so much trouble if you don't understand it. And game doesn't help you with it :(
isn't that just every quest battle? you just sit there wondering when the bullshit army is gonna come in from nowhere.
I found Alarielles quest battle to be the hardest I ever fought. And it is also quite a trap.
Hellcannons on a hill to the left encourages to send your flyers and cavalry there. Norsca army with mammoth to the front encourages you to form a front line with your melee units and to put your ranged units behind.
That is challenging and occupies you alot to micro the Hellcannons which are guarded by chosen with Halberds.
And then with no notification a reinforcing army of chaos knights comes in from behind and slams into all your ranged units. It is the hardest buttfuck I ever got. Usually quest battles say a short message when reinforcements come but in this case they dont.
@@colonelthyran7755 Crone Hellebron has one of the most bs quest battles as well. You're encouraged to spam witch elves (obviously anti infantry with low armor piercing) in the campaign, but then one of the quest battles throws you in vs a tag team of dark elves with arty on both edges of the map, ranged units and heavy armor halberds; and then the beastmen army has chariots and anti infantry monsters; and it spawns you right in a pincer where you're ALREADY within the enemy's arty range and 10 seconds from getting rushed by the beastmen. You can't even run to either edge of the map without sacrificing half your army. Literally the best way to fight that one is to recruit anything BUT witch elves just for that specific quest battle.
@@ezkiller93I get by that by...never recruiting Witch Elves. I don't like that type of unit. Don't care how good people say they are, ECT. I don't like micro intensive glass cannons that aren't even that good of a cannon.
Thanks for this video. This kind of "player traps" are the kind of thing that really alienates me from TW3. I wanna feel like a part of a bigger world, and this completely ruins it for me.
These are not here intentionally but accidentally, it would be the same as complaining about how the AI always want a decisive victory and not to give you an epic fight.
Total War games are not about epic adventures in a world, if you want immersion in campaigns, this franchise is not it.
@@Thedefenses You are a game dev with years of experience and 100's of employees and multiple patches and you can't fix player traps that have already been solved by mods 2/3 of the time? really? Great excuse...
@@Thedefenses i've played total war games for over 20 years, and i can tell you, i fucking hate these player traps, and bullshit. it makes the games into cheese fests. i purposely play with mods that i made myself to emulate the older total war feel. elephant spam in rome II? GONE. defensive lines not being very defensive? how about boosting defence. everyone running all over the damn place and destroying the ability to think tactically real-time, and making flanking useless? fuck that. now you can actually focus on the cav micro, while being confident that your lines will hold just long enough for you to deal with enemy cav if you are skilled enough.
@@MsArchitectschannel If they are not intentional and more a side product of the way the game has been made, there is nothing to fix.
In this case the player got fucked due to being in a defensive fight while his army was fucked, that´s not a bug or error you can fix, that´s just what happens when you get yourself into the situation.
Player traps are not always due to some design but due to player playing the game in a certain way which causes them to make those traps for themselves.
@@Dejawolfs Never had any of those problems but each to their own.
Also, paragraphs my good sir, use them, putting all that into a big block makes reading it cancer.
Building defences/settlement garrisons on areas right next to a future enemy's border right before a big push has been pretty successful for me personally. Because after declaring war you can try draw their armies into your territory and bleed them within your own borders, then once youve wiped the armies move out and conquer the settlements. Same with fortifying bottleneck settlements. I think the only value in upgrading settlement garrisons/defences is in those two instances.
I feel like the benefit of defensive garrisons is literally just the AI's hesitance to attack a settlement, if it's high value enough. IE, building a garrison to preserve your landmark building you wanna hold, or so on.
he could ve also just put slaves into the province to instantly build the garrison building as an alternative. But Legends strat is obviously the better 1
Very educational video. I've been playing for over a thousand hours and I'm alway learning new stuff.
I would love to watch a whole video on player traps across tw games
90% of TW games, the player trap is melee sword infantry, and diplomacy :P total war games loves archery and artillery.
I've never played Attila myself, but I remember Legend saying something that gold mines (or possibly other income buildings) generate money and corruption. The trap is, the increase in corruption is more costly than the increase in money beneficial.
@@Dejawolfs What about dismounted feudal knights in med 2?
@@JakeBaldwin1 horse archers and cheese, or archers and cheese.
@@Dejawolfs Unless you sit on a hill with heavy infantry and musketeers.
Let the horse archers try to get you then.
I just started playing this game recently, so this was really helpful. Thanks.
In-universe, all his advisors stand there watching him dismiss the army and then YOLO off to solo the enemy.....
I love it when Legend explains the game like this. There was so much I didn't know.
Some of the info can be applied outside of video games as well.
The biggest player trap is defensive/military allies. The game actively tries to screw you over by your allies declaring war on someone next to you that they can't even attack. So it's either declare war on someone you don't want or get bad reliability.
You mean military allies? Cuz defensive allies only calls you in if someone else is attacking them, not if they attack others.
@@LordVader1094 I mean both. If you have defensive allies then enemy factions will declare war on your ally forcing you to join the war.
And with military allies they can be attacked and declare war on other factions to screw you over.
@@HardcoreSalmonDefensive allies can sometimes work, if you have common enemies that will declare on you anyway
Indeed, I've been hosed and gone from max reliability to minimum because of allies. I'm very careful about taking alliances of either kind now.
That's why I don't alway accept allies. I only accept those that behave and those that I actually need to protect myself. And those aren't the ones that ask you to become allies. I have to buy them with settlements.
The lack of defensive siege battles are my biggest problem with total Warhammer . love a good siege defences , especially in older Total wars. and they just dont happen in this game. atleast not big ones. major problem in my opinion.
About player traps in the Quest Battles. One of the empire lords, don't remember which one, used to have a battle (or maybe even still has) where you would deploy literally on the edge of the map, and then without any warning, the enemy would just get cavalry reinforcements right in your rear. I've never called out bullshit faster than that in my life
I thought this was gonna be some bs after 9 minutes of nothing really, but holy shit did it pay off. I love this dude
Walls are supposed to be a positive force multiplier, and CA has almost completely removed that from TW sieges. Compare that with Medieval 2, where walls are actually incredibly powerful.
I love this game, I really do. Learning so much from you really does help, not hinder my games. I play immersively but I know these few tricks help make the campaign more fun, and less of a slog.
this video was worth the time to watch just for that "hide the money" trick lol
Honestly they should add a mechanic to newer Total Wars where your garrison is a threath in the whole province, because historically that was basically the idea right? There is a huge Fort with a lot of men inside and if we ignore this it will most likely quite literally bite us in the ass so we have to take this before we can keep going.
Great little warpstone nuggets of knowledge dropping here. Thanks dude
i'm glad i watch all videos that Legend posts. So many interesting nuggets of info!
glad even as bad as I am I can understand how this goes wrong. I never thought of walled fights as a trap in this game, but now I cant see unsee it. thanks legend.
Realm Divide in Shogun 2 will kick you square in the nuts if you're not ready. However, Realm Divide in FotS works in the player's favor if you stick with your allegiance. Half the map will become your "allies" (although they don't ever actually do anything proactively) and the other half will align against you. Or you can choose to be independent if you want to fight the whole map by yourself and without some of your best agents.
I don't know why but I find this the funniest shit ever,
just the accent the brutal honesty, and how I've been completly f'd in campaigns since omg,
but I had no idea about this stuff, bro I love this thank you for just completly making my day
27:30 I really appreciate your mentioning that even though there is a most efficient way to play, people are still okay to choose their own path while still knowing these systems exist. Too many people in games will act like there is a right and wrong way to play any number of games out there. Cool video explaining how these systems work.
Intuitively I just did some of these things to avoid some player traps. But I never gave it much thought as it was a natural progression. As you explained what they were it was like awareness unlocked and realized how many little things I did over the years in TW games that avoided these “traps”. Crazy.
Thanks for the video Legend, I kinda realised that siege battles are a not the best way to sped your time but your other examples made me understand AI a bit more!
That follow up laughter from Legend is gold @18:38
Recently had a series of tough fights as Oxyotl, but thanks to Legend, i had faith in myself and in my troops enough to dismantle and defeat several hectic chaos stacks! Thanks Legend, you're the best!
I can’t wait for the next Terminator movie to star Legend outwitting Skynet by disbanding most of the military and stuffing everyone’s money in his mattress.
What I wanted: Sandbox fantasy war game. What I got: Scripted AI running across the map, ignoring tens of factions to attack me.
yea its weird when faction on the other side of the map declares war on you and you dont see them for like 30 turns
4:50 Sword boy sent me for some reason hahaha
"Build 0 Armies and 1v100 everyone with your Hero" Thanks Legend! ❤
29:28 "Easy, no problem" *rat laugh*
Never change Legend. Never fkn change.
I learned a lot watching this. Thank you. :)
i think i just got caught in a viewer trap...
I remembered in Shogun 2 the army thing was actually an opposite, you didn't want to look weak. When I lost an army because I lost a battle hard. I would find myself at war with all the neighbours since they saw me as easy target.
Edit: Haha, yea... that not what you meant. :D
Thanks to CA that can't design their games I recomend mods that removes or midigate that player traps. i dont played shogun 2 yet but removing that stupid mechanic mod will be the first I instal before my first campaign. In warhammer 3 you need a garrison upgrade that actually can win in a siege - not only on paper in aouto resolve. There is planty mods for it. Need to test and pick up something that fit you. Greater garrison by zorbaz or dynamic garrison with full settlement strength is what I tested I stayed with the later. It help with a defense but harm the attack - AI also have better garrisons - thats fair though.
Funny enough in S2TW Realm Divide is quite liked as reasonable mid-late game challenge. Enemies don't spawn of thin air and you have quite a degree of control of how you approach that problem (with exception of diplomacy). Also within it players would probably win even quicker and thus see even smaller part of technology and infrastructure (as you never fill tech tree in short campaign and waiting before RD is often that big investment time in economy while not fighting). Also defending castles in S2TW not only feels great but is real force multiplayer (I had battles when my full stack defending castle was able to win against 3 stacks of enemies in long and epic battles; that were happening every 3-4 turns).
@@Sanvone Like I said I didn't play shogun 2 so maybe I will find a mod that... modify that mechanic instead of disabling it. I dont know yet. I will interest in it when I start playing or after first unmod campaign. All I know that shogun 2 is preaty good game and worth trying. Thing is total war games eats a lot of time. Specially warhammer 3 when you play on HDD so a lot of other games or tv shows you miss playing another campaign. So It will take my a bit before I start with with new total war game.
@@kapixniecapix3869 I have 1.200 hours in Shogun 2 about 90% in vanilla. There is a charm to figuring out the real intent behind some design decision instead of just cheesing the game in easiest way. S2TW just has that loop of: initial expansion - playing tall - starting final phase of game. Also while you play against everyone, map of Japan is one big string of chokepoints so you avoid cat&mouse gameplay from newere titles. Personally it works out for me and people I tutored into Total Wars in Co-Op campaigns. I encourage trying it at least once after knowing it is coming.
I have some good news for you - Shogun 2 has short victory condition that requires you only to have slightly above half of the smaller than wh3 map (it is 25 or 35 provinces IRC). It was the last game where campaigns weren't such a drag (Rome 2 had... basically world conquests no matter which victory condition you picked).
@@kapixniecapix3869
Realm Divide catches you off guard once and the one big issue with this is the fact that EVERYONE turns on you, including your most trusted vassals and allies, who had been your buddy buddy friends for the whole game. Which is not quite how the similar showdown went in the actual history, when it ended up as two major forces with all of their supporting factions decided to get a showdown, not "One clan against the entire island".
Other than that, it is a pretty good mechanic, actually. It would be even better, if your vassals and trusted allies would stay with you by default, without mods, leading to a more historical experience. But it is a nice challenge nonetheless. And as Sanvone had said - enemies don't just spawn out of thin air. Which is really nice.
@nemamiah7832 If your allies stayed with you that would have more sense.
What legend describe is YOU MUST to not expand and build up and let other factions kill each other to have less enemies to fight.
That sounds as stupid as possible leaving only one option to play campaign as every lord.
So I would mod that to improve the game in some way. Change or disable.
In the other hands to much mods make a game crash at the start so you have to chose wisely. Nevertheless changing this is worth a slot.
I just created a mod pack for warhammer 3 that ads tons of overhauls for lot of factions unit packs and new races... but it not work.
Love how Legend just described something I felt but never knew how to put words on. There's something about these concentric, overlapping mechanics that create some kind of Venn Diagram of raw destruction for the player and only the player. These days playing a Total War game is like less like strategy and more like minesweeper, or a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where if you can make all the right choices the difficulty doesn't matter. At least at the harder difficulties. On Medium you can still just strongarm the game with brilliant Real-Time battle skills.
Thinking back on my Skarsnik campaign, he really benefits from TWW3 terrible siege design. Having a limited roster I used skulkers with flasks to climb walls and backdoor objectives while the dwarves focused on my gobbo fodder.
Today I had a psuedo-sally via an ambush outside of my minor settlement. I lost but he backed off and I saved a Supreme Sorceress. It felt pretty rude to have my doors kicked in by Valkia and Mung simultaneously on turn 17. Probably because I took Ghrond relatively early.
Cheers thanks for the video, a lot to think about and apply to my campaigns.
I want to add tot he 'never starve out' that sometimes besieging is the right move still.
An example is a typical skryer army with a lot of ratlings and Jezzails. They are terrible to get into walled settlements, prone to having LoS issues and terrible pathfinding. But on an open field? They are deadly.
So, what do I like to do is to besiege while appearing weaker, and bait them into a sally out (either directly, or by sending another small army over), so that I can massacre the garrison. To be fair, there had been bugs where the completly killed garrison units revived fully, but I think they hv fixed that one.
Another point is, that siege equipment gives a lot of balance of power. Sieging for 1-2 turns may turn a phyrric autoresolve into a close one without any of your units getting wiped out. Which can be useful for said Skryer army that is a real pain to play in a siege (even though the AI really sucks at defending a siege as well, tbf)
It's also really useful to interrupt recruitment, since the AI retreats to cities so often. If you've trashed a lords army but haven't stackwiped them, they can replace units faster then you can heal.
Starting a seige you can't win without starving out the defenses can buy you time to bring up fresh troops and keep a lord pinned.
21:24 "Why not? The AI does it to you, so do it back to them." You are my hero for saying this lol. Really dislike the holier-than-thou attitude of people who say that using tricks the AI also uses means you didn't _actually_ win or anything. But what you said is exactly the way I see it; if the game and AI are allowed to use cheap exploits and cheats to create artificial difficulty, then I'll do the same if possible.
Maybe it's petty or whatever, but I'm just sick of devs making things more difficult through use of outright cheats as opposed to letting them make better strategies.
I learn so much about this game from watching you! lol
this is one of your better wh3 videos. really insightful from someone with 1k+ hours in the game
I really like th estrat of solo devastating general taking battles, and support army trailing behind mopping up the settlements
I think that Kahlida of the Tomb kings has a trick start. You can fight the first few fights as normal, but if you then head north and focus on fighting the vampires, Thorik Iron brow gets very hard and will declare war on you at about the same time as the lizards, putting you in a two pronged war. Instead, if you ignore the vampires after getting the first two settlements and go straight for the dwarves while the orcs are still fighting them, you can get rid of him by like turn 10-15. I was actually inspired by Legends Ten turn vampire wipe for Gelt, before they moved him to Cathay, when I tried this.
Then you have a really strong start. You have the full mountains and can kill off the orcs really easily, then go focus on getting lamia back, either from the vamps if they still have it, or from the Kroc-gar. Either way, you now have two provinces and only one real threat, Kroc-gar. Sometimes Skarbrand gets involved, but dont be afraid if he declares war on you. That doesnt mean hes gonna come straight away, hes just a khornite. Ultimately, you can have a good three provinces, by the time most starts would only have one full one, or maybe two.
"My lord, we are out of number!"
"Naaaaa, we are too much number"
I've recently started playing Alien Isolation for the first time, and I was quite surprised to see that it was developed by CA. I played a bit and noticed that the motion tracker in that game actually attracts the Alien to you, so you should basically never use it and only rely on sound cues. I immediately realised that this is basically a player trap. In a horror game these make sense, as the one tool that should bring comfort actually brings distress; but player traps make no sense in a strategy game like Total War as Legend says.
I don't think many people from Alien Isolation actually worked on Total War, but I wonder whether some of the design philosophies seeped through, without them knowing what they are for, especially since Attila, the game with most traps, released a year after Alien Isolation
Legend: Characters that are really small...
Astrogoth: Did you just called me SHORT?
This dude just puts on a clinic every time
totally balanced gameplay with no unintended mechanics whatsoever :D
As you pointed out, I think siege battles are absolutely the best example of this. Walls are useless except for sometimes slowing down armies that don’t have siege equipment. Another example of a player trap in Shogun is how useless a lot of the walls in the upgraded castles are. It is almost never worth it to defend the outer layers at all, while shoving all your unites into the keep yields consistent results.
This is the first video I’ve watched by Legend. You’re so handsome.
Legend of Coaching!
generally the quest battles feel like a trap. you'll get them at a really early level, they wont tell you exactly what the enemy forces are, and if you do it with an early game/ mid game army you just get stomped.
Very interesting how you point out the importance of balancing your armies so that AI does not perceive you as weak, nor too much of a threat.
Amazing!
The player traps on Attila are INSANE, I really enjoyed that game, tho
Yea, something I sort of dislike, but also understand when it comes to basically all strategy games; Defensive strategies are nerfed by how effective they Should be-based on logic and how the real world actually works-in favor of hyper aggressive strategies.
Partly, this is due to the nature of games; The main negative of hyper aggressive strategies is that they really only fail when you lose. However, in a game, losing is only a temporary setback. At worst, you start over, and do it again but better. In reality, obviously you've only ever got the one chance.
Partly, it's due to the nature of players; Defensive strategies tend to work best over a longer period of time, because investing in defense is almost always a static improvement-walls stay built once built-but offense isn't-soldiers require pay and upkeep regardless of if they're fighting, but in the short term can become unfit if they're not constantly training, or grow old and die in the long term. Players tend to prefer exciting action over more passive gameplay, so defensive strategies are discouraged by game mechanics. Players don't like to use them, and they also don't like playing against them (when they're as effective as they should be).
Total War also has no win conditions for "Sit on your base and make an unassailable wall." Everything, from your starting missions of "Go smack them for 500 quid" to your tech unlocks (what, you going to demolish and rebuild all your buildings so you can fulfill the tech tree requirements?) to even the "unify your starting province" mechanic FORCES you to go on the offensive
Other games can have more defensive & attrition-based strategies (eg: AOE2, starving out your unit's expensive gold-costing units; Into the Breach, you often win if you just survive enough turns) but TW is built on expanding, expanding, expanding, expanding
@@Zeldrake Which is more aggravating, because they have an entire diplomacy system-and an entire campaign set dedicated to making use of it-but no diplomatic routes for just "My economy is strong and my walls are unassailable, be my friend"
What a topic :)
TW players from my experience fall into defensive mindset of "Muh Thermopylae!" and are not aggresive enough. The question in those games is never - "Will you win?" but "How quickly and easily can you win?" As the other commenter already said - defensive strategies are only there to enable offensive strategies. With removal of population mechanic and more in-depth economy enagment you are not out-macroing anyone so much that you can stay on the defensive and win. "Go big of go home" is the name of snowball games. You don't really need to out-macro AI and you are probably not out-macroing another human opponent (because such players are few and far between). Defensive strategies also don't work in MP FFA - they are just answer to "Rush" strategies but fail miserably against "Bloom" strategies. Even then - aggresive players can expand often elsewhere and now of sudden your enemy has 2 players worth of economy against your 1 worth of. Lastly the problem of defensive strategies is the static nature of it. Once you build fortification you are not moving them. Unlike army that is the main investment of aggresive player. So they are long-term deals (I say it because there are too many people building walls up for 10 turns or shorter).
What is bizairre that across years I keep encountering this failure on strategic layer of understanding defense within TW community. While on tactical level everyone and their mum is using hammer&anvil strat, on campaign map few utilize shield&spear strat. So make small holding forces in defensible position (less than 10 units) that will hold 3-4x as many enemies forever then throw 90% of forces to roll other enemy in the meantime. It works best in older TW titles where there was recruitment pool but even in newer titles you are saving time cause you can keep auto-resolving on the offensive instead of having to both manually resolve defense and offense. Fortifications are force multiplayer yet they need only small crews as AI will keep barely enough people to win in it's opinion.
@@Zeldrakeeh Dwarfs now in warhammer 3 can totally do the set on one or two provinces and fight from there with their deeps mechanic which turns even the most worthless settlement into 10k gold a turn.
@@jarlwilliam9932 sure, but if you expand as the dwarves, you can make 100k a turn from 10 settlements. i ended up with 200k a turn at turn 100 as dorfs :P and just pumping out army after army after army...
its like that story of the guy with no army sitting on the wall playing a flute, except the flute can summon a volcano and the guy is secretly riding a mech
Game: sets up a player trap
Legend: pulls and Uno reverse card with Astrogoth and sets up an AI trap
solo Astrogoth would be so easy to kill with some outriders, or with kislev slow spell and streltsi.
This is peak Legend.
The realm divide in Shogun 2 absolutely bent me over and f*cked me during my first play through 😂
this was the most unexpected win here. great video
Playing VH/VH, I actually don't mind defensive walled city siege battles. If anything, I've been able to leverage the walls to pull a victory out of a disadvantaged battle. I only man the walls long enough for the ranged to let out a few volleys. Then, I'll pull them back behind my melee units that are standing by behind the walls. I'll wait for the enemy to scale the walls and then use my melee to pin hold them against the wall in blobs, while ranged shoot into the blobs and casters blast them with spells.
The one player trap i learned in my first campaign is that if you accumulate a lot of cash everyone who gets money from raiding and sacking comes for you. Always spend excess gold. Having high income is less of a trap as long as you spend the money.
When the Helms Deep moment traps you in to wanting to stay and fight
Legend of Total Ted Talk... That tip on avoiding being threatened is gold.
The approach I typically take for number of armies is to have two armies per frontline. One strong army that can usually handle just about anything, and one to support them in case the enemy brings a bit more to the field or to dissuade attacks on weak positions. I only bring more than that if I am facing more than one or two opponents on a single frontline. I also get myself a couple allies to limit the number of frontlines I have (thus reducing the burden on my economy). So far in my clan mors campaign Skarbrand and Tretch have made for useful blockers to my south and east while I focus my forces mostly north and south.
Shogun 2's short campaign is a player trap. Realm divide triggers later the longer the campaign is set.
Have a go at Creative Assembly. They are definitely aware of the problem, but that game has spaghetti code.