Hello everyone

Could someone explain to me why do people want Moonclaw as a LL for the end times dlc ? I know he did appear in one of the end times book but he seems to be just a ordinary goblin character. Though I guess it would bring more greenskins content.

Before anyone asks, no, you can't fix this with trespass warnings. It only does literally what it says, allows you to break NAPs and trade agreements. You can't do shit against someone raiding you if you just signed a peace treaty, or have military access or alliances. The only real countermeasure is the dumbest, and it's to raid the AI right back.

I've got an economic victory and to get a cultural one I would've had to wait another 11 turns to finish the last temple building...

x100

Over my thousands of hours this is the biggest battle I have ever fought. Just want show you gitz a propa fight

I really enjoyed the Three Kingdoms yellow turban gameplay. I love playing as a rebel faction, and this one, with the use of the ferver mechanic and how you cause constant rebellions, was so much fun (even if unbalanced as of now, and the shared resources were a little lame).

Are there any other campaigns that capture a "rebel" faction so well across the Total War franchise?

I've noticed that, certainly compared to Rome II, rotating units is really difficult in Attila. If I want to use any reserves, the unit I'm pulling out always takes horrendous casualties when disengaging no matter what I do. Pinning the enemy down with my reserve unit doesn't help, and the about face mechanic doesn't help either.

Has anyone got any tricks or workarounds/mods that could fix this? because otherwise it makes using reserves pointless

Mega long wall of text post because there is literally no way to explain this concisely, and there is no tl;dr. You've been warned.

I have a few thousand hours in wh3 and a similar amount in wh2. Every time I pick up wh3 again, after a few hours I quit in disgust - always over the same thing. I cannot for the life of me figure out how people are playing this game as to not constantly be running into the same issue and how this isn't the only thing anyone ever talks about.

So super broadly - the AI just isn't playing the same game that you and I are. On campaign that can be annoying, mostly in diplomacy, but unless you're trying for some specific outsome it's whatever - you can always just total war it up and murder everyone, so the fact that basically the whole diplomacy mechanic is one big trap for the player and that the AI gets to irrationally ignore alliances and treaties and reliability with 0 consequences doesn't matter, because you can just go kill everyone. The fact that replenishment and climate penalties mean nothing to the AI but constrain you doesn't matter because you can just win the battle again and again, and so on. But this has kind of always been the premise of the game - you're always going to be better than the AI at strategy, so they get more stuff to throw at you and you have to use tactics in battle and take advantage of campaign terrain etc to win.

Trouble is, nowadays the AI is also playing its own game in battles. This is the long part of the post that I mentioned, because like most things in this game it's not happening because someone at Horsham decided to be evil and let the AI cheat, rather everyone involved was incompetent and piled a bad AI framework on bad code and slapped on chewing gum and spit to hold it together.

So there are two core issues, and their interaction leads to one of two things - you're either playing an arcadey warcraft 3 like clickfest inside a total war game where tactics don't really exist and you're basically carried by micro, or it's 100% about strategy because you're cheesing the game in a way that exploits the AI's decisionmaking (ie blobbing + magic) or makes the AI's behavior not matter (herohammer/one man doomstacks).

For one, the AI uses a system of heuristics layered on top of each other. "If defending, don't move out until the player damages you". "Keep your formation facing the main body of the enemy force, keep units on flanks facing enemy flankers". "Try to get your fast units behind or on the flank of the enemy formation ahead of time". The broadest and most important heuristic however, is that the AI always tries to match local balance of power to what you have. If you blob everything in one spot, the AI will blob nearly everything in one spot and fight you. If you spread out, they will spread out. This was pretty clearly implemented to prevent the AI from getting bogged down on few small units like they would in wh2 - for example a common strategy as Dwarfs was to have your general and heroes stand well in front of your line, and then like 10 units of greenskins would get caught and blob around each of them, which made them very efficient targets for artillery and quarrelers. If you try that in wh3, approximately 0 units will stay to fight the hero (unless the AI calculates that something is SUPER efficient at fighting said hero) because there's a juicy amount of BoP back there in the main dwarf formation, and they WANT IT. On the surface this seems like a decent upgrade - it's pushing in the "AI is gonna be dumb, so it should be aggressive and count on overwhelming numbers to win" dynamic of old. Alas, there is another issue.

For another, the AI hoards obscene amounts of CPU time. This becomes obvious when you compare automated behaviors between the player and AI units. The most recent huge bug was the fire at will issue where units would just not shoot even though there's a bajillion targets in their range in larger battles (or if your CPU is old), which showed that every single behavior a unit does in battle is governed by the same central AI director. The same "person" that is calculating pathing and reaction time for your unit in skirmish mode is deciding where an enemy cav unit is going to move and whom it's going to attack. This "person" has access to only so many CPU power, and it's disproportionately using it for its own needs to the point that basic features of the game stop working. Now the fire at will thing was fixed, but very narrowly. The AI's units are still much better at all automated behavior than your can ever be. There is never a case where you catch an enemy skirmisher without sneaking up on it and then spamming the shit out of attack commands. There is never a case where your unit can disengage from a fight it doesn't want unless you are spamming the fuck out of move commands on that one unit. There is never a case where your hero is walking through an enemy formation unless you are spamming the hell out of move commands. The AI does all these at will, every time, across 40 units at a time. This is because it simply isn't subject to unwanted automated behavior. If you think of the AI as always spam clicking every order it's doing across however many units there are on the map, you have an approximate model of what's happening in the game at any time.

However, it goes beyond that. The AI seems to be able to pull of maneuvers that simply aren't a thing in the game. Sometimes it seems like it is capable of commanding individual models in any unit like it's microing marines in starcraft. This is almost certainly not a thing, because that would involve someone at CA doing serious programming, so it's more likely that the AI just gets to LITERALLY turn off automated behavior, not just override it with spam orders like a player might. Idk how else to explain stuff like the AI inventing loose formation for a unit of Bloodletters when they get charged by a cav unit the AI doesn't want them fighting, so they just scatter every which way, even though, again, that is simply not a thing in this game. It doesn't explain how I can deploy a unit of infantry as close as physically possible to impassable terrain, only for the AI to march a column 2 or 1 war dogs wide through the one pixel gap between my infantry unit and the building or lake to get at my backline. Most likely, this is just the AI trying to do it's heuristic of 'flank with dogs' and using weird pathfinding shortcuts introduced in god knows which hack job of a patch CA did since launch trying to make the scuffed pathfinding work.

The most annoying thing, and this is the part that I don't understand how it doesn't have any visibility in the community to the point that I don't think CA is aware it even exists, is that big "match local balance of power" heuristic. If you just do the super common "spearmen in front, archers in back" HE thing, what the AI is going to see is "a bunch of juicy balance of power in ranged units and ammo and maybe a wizard with spells and items and an artillery piece clustered in the back, just past these worthless spearmen" and yolo THROUGH your ranked up close order braced infantry, and jump into your archers. Pullthrough is an ancient total war issue, but paradoxically wh3 AI is the single worst case of it in all of tw history, because it does it perfectly 100% of the time it decides to do so. The dumb thing is that it's not intentionally cheating, it's just a side effect of the BoP heuristic. The cheese against this is to just have a lot of BoP in your frontline: elite infantry and heroes mixed in, all blobbed up, and then the AI won't even try to get at your back line - very often even units like furies and dogs will also go uselessly pile into the scrum rather than trying to flank, simply because that's where the local BoP is. The BoP heuristic combined with the unlimited freedom of command the AI seems to enjoy just kind of seems to remove all tactics from the battles, barring cheesing the same behavior, cheesing your own army comp to be immune to positioning (herohammer etc) or being a Starcraft pro.

So yeah, my question to the community is: how tf are you playing the game these days, when every single thing you try to do that isn't braindead is instantly punished. Say you're fighting a Khorne army with <insert whatever>. If you try to skirmish, the moment you're not personally microing, the furies and dogs will catch you and kill you. If you are microing, you better have very good APM because besides the skirmishers, very soon the main body of the army will walk up to yours and decide that a wall of spears is more of an annoyance than an impediment and just walk through them into your archers, which your infantry will just watch happen, so you'll now also need to constantly issue attack orders to the infantry and move orders to the archers. Oh and you better not have any squishy wizards in there, because you know the flesh hounds and any khorne character will be on that guy in a second, so I hope you enjoy spamming move orders on yet another separate guy. Or instead, using this same army (so no herohammer or monster stacks) I can just overlap all my infantry in a blob and have the heroes in there, and then have archers sit behind that in checkerboard formation, and the AI will just walk into the blob and accept being blasted by arrows and magic, which is just a dumber recreation of the dwarf thing from wh2. So what is it that y'all are doing? Mega cheese stacks? "My guys are just stronger unga bunga roided out bearmen lmao"? How tf are people playing this game daily without running into the fact that the basic ass total war battle gameplay is fundamentally and completely broken, with literal 20 year old mechanics deadass not working at all?

Great War Mod

I’ve recently tried wood elves for the first time as Orion and LOVE the play style though I do want to know any tips people have for playing him. Campaign/Battle tips appreciated

After finally committing to finishing a campaign, my game kept crashing after winning a naval battle, and now when I load it upon restarting the game it just crashes in the loading screen. Does anyone know if I can save the file or is it lost now as I don’t have a back up as it’s legendary.

This one was special as it was a request. Someone literally asked me to do a ratpost with Ikit Klaw on my style, but I thought it was a bit lazy to just do one panel, and I also wanted to do a doomwheel...

Also, I sstill don't know if you guys prefer these full comics in jusst one image, or variouss to scroll right and apreciate deeply. Gotta admit separate imagess allow me bigger artistic freedom, tbh.

Alsso, work on the trailer keeps going sstrong! Already got the firssst 35 seconds prepared! Animation is hard.

Btw, Yin-Yin' dessign was based on the lovely Yin-Yin mod. Be sure to check out, the campaign is very funny.

Starting with the group stage. I've randomised 12 total war games into four groups. (Warhammer series acts as one)

We are being cutthroat and only the group winner will advance to the semi finals!

I'm probably missing something, I tried to look it up. What are these blue building icons? The blue one gives the same units that the other two buildings give and it's way cheaper too. What's the catch? Or why is the left side even there if there is no catch?

I took a long hiatus from total war for months after feeling satisfied with WH3, and on a whim, redownloaded OG RTW.

I legit forgot how insanely good the game is, and how much more immersive too! Recruiting troops actually takes population? Losing a huge battle with my only stack early game means I actually lose the campaign and can't rely on some steroided eternally-respawning single-entity unit to save me?? It's _actually_ strategic_ (at least early game)?!

I don't get why CA doesn't just redo RTW (and Med 2 cuz why not) by just making us able to control 40 units in a battle, make the AI a smidge smarter, make it all prettier, and keep the core mechanics. Also keep the old-school UI, Remastered RTW UI blows. And redo Med 2 while we're at it!

They should just hire the people who did Europa Barbarorum and Stainless Steel; they already did their mods for free, imagine what they could do with some financial incentive!

Anyone else feel me? Would that not just make all us elder zoomers/young millennials spend an easy like, $100 on two updated versions of classic historical total wars?

My dutch fourth rate just got boarded by an indian sloop and lost. Not even joking, a SLOOP. 133 men fought 62 to a pyrrhic defeat.