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Yeah I'm not too proud to admit I've abused cheese tactics on some battles, and it actually gets worse the longer the campaign goes and the ai starts throwing doomstack after doomstack agaisnt you. One of the ugliest ones is having your flying lord kiting their entire army while doing spells, I feel it completely breaks the immersion and turns big battles into more a chore than anything else. I guess I'll start a new one on legendary but without the ridiculous ai stat bonuses but put up a few "rules" for myself, like, if the hero moves, the army moves with him, no kiting or sending him to capture siege points by himself. You know, playing the game the "fair" way, since, again, CA can't be bothered to make a halfway decent battle AI.

At the end of the day, no one is really going to care what how I play a single player campaign lol. Hell, I would even argue that playing on legendary and how it forces you to cheese everything, it probably creates bad habits for if you ever decide to move into multiplayer, I doubt the kiting shit would work agaisnt a living, breathing human being, who can just melt your hero with focus fire or just send every flying unit agaisnt him if he's using a faction with weak ranged.
 
I just finished an IE campaign with Vlad in legendary and I feel like it took like 10 years out of my lifespan. I'm thinking of maybe playing my next campaign on legendary but without all the ridiculous AI battle bonuses. Don't they get some insane shit like 12+ leadership on ALL units?
Would you believe it used to be worse? AI also got ridiculous MA/MD bonuses in TWWH2, which had the knock on effect of making melee units useless if you were playing on VH/Legendary battle difficulty. They toned it down to a more reasonable +5 these days, but yeah, I don't really enjoy AI having these sort of bonuses in actual combat. Especially since I like having thematic armies and potentially non-optimal mixes.
 
Would you believe it used to be worse? AI also got ridiculous MA/MD bonuses in TWWH2, which had the knock on effect of making melee units useless if you were playing on VH/Legendary battle difficulty. They toned it down to a more reasonable +5 these days, but yeah, I don't really enjoy AI having these sort of bonuses in actual combat. Especially since I like having thematic armies and potentially non-optimal mixes.
They get those bonuses in Three Kingdoms, too. Thankfully there's mods that remove the boosts but keep the better AI. And thankfully TWW3 has a slider in the campaign options to adjust that now.
 
Been playing the new DLC since release and its "great". There are some smaller issues, but overall the first good news regarding TW in some time. Finished an Empire and Nurgle campaign, Nurgle is now a fun faction to play. Some smaller issues remain, but will hopefully be addressed at some point. Same with the Empire. Waiting for the Dwarf shit to get adjusted which already is taking too long but whatever. Curious to see the revamped roadmap and how long the game will receive support.

News for Pharaoh sound also good. Hope there will be a Mythos DLC down the road.
 
So rumors going around that CA is working on a Star Wars Total War: https://www.dualshockers.com/total-war-star-wars-reportedly-in-works-at-creative-assembly/

A total of three new Total War games are in development at Creative Assembly, with one of them being an officially licensed Star Wars game, DualShockers has learned.


The last Total War game to be released was last year's Total War: Pharaoh, which was developed by Creative Assembly Sofia and published by Sega for Windows. A MacOS version was also released, but published by Feral Interactive.


While Pharaoh was a much more grounded approach compared to previous entries, such as Total War: Warhammer and Total War: Three Kingdoms, the series is allegedly returning to the fantasy route with a new Star Wars entry.

As of October 2023, Total War: Star Wars was reportedly the second of three new Total War games that are allegedly in the works at Creative Assembly. With new Total War games often released annually (aside from 2021, which was the first year without a mainline Total War game since 2014), it's possible that Creative Assembly is gearing up to release Total War: Star Wars in the next couple of years. But with three new games reportedly in the works, there's no way to know which is the furthest along in development.


Currently, Creative Assembly Sofia is hard at work on a new, large-scale update for Total War: Pharaoh. In a new blog post from the development team earlier this month, Creative Assembly reaffirmed the intention to "increase the size of the campaign map and introduce even more cultures and ways of engaging in glorious strategic conquest."

The studio went on to confirm that a "vast" free update that "significantly reworks the existing campaign mode already available in Pharaoh’s base-game" will be released later this year. "This update will usher in a host of exciting new additions whilst also implementing some familiar content from its Bronze-Age brother, A Total War Saga: TROY," Creative Assembly said.

As the update will be implementing some big changes to the game, Creative Assembly says it will be taking steps to ensure players still have the choice to "experience the original campaign" should they wish to.
 
Been playing the new DLC since release and its "great". There are some smaller issues, but overall the first good news regarding TW in some time. Finished an Empire and Nurgle campaign, Nurgle is now a fun faction to play. Some smaller issues remain, but will hopefully be addressed at some point. Same with the Empire. Waiting for the Dwarf shit to get adjusted which already is taking too long but whatever. Curious to see the revamped roadmap and how long the game will receive support.

News for Pharaoh sound also good. Hope there will be a Mythos DLC down the road.
The wood elves need a rework the same thing with bretonia brittonia charged with Calvary charged with Calvary ignore your infantry because they're completely useless
kislev spam warbear riders
the variant Amos actually a fun idea now if only the vampire coast would get units that didn't suck the fun to play I'll be really cool if we could get naval battles but no we don't need naval battles even though one factions main thing is though a bunch of zombie pirate vampires

so when are we getting the monkey king I demand the monkey king and monkey king units and giant apes throwing **** at people as the ammo
 
At this point, it has to be do or die for CA. They've lost so much money from Hyeenas and made NONE of it back.
Speaking of, it's kind of crazy to think that the first Rome almost bankrupted the company because it was so expensive to make but a lot of the third rate sloppa like Thrones of Britannia or some of the shitty DLC they made was probably very profitable for them, given how little they had to invest into them. Thrones in particular was made by only a dozen people iirc.
 
Finally finished a proper Empire campaign post-rework. All in all, I had fun, and Karl's new abilities were pretty gamechanging in some ways. (Free +1 pop on demand? Yes please.)
 
I'll be honest, I'm now interested in picking up Pharaoh after they announced their huge free content expansion. They are adding pretty much every faction which SHOULD'VE BEEN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! I'll still only get it when it's on 50% off sale because fuck CA, did (almost) the same with Thrones of Britannia (picked it up when it was only 10 bux) which was just a glorified Attila DLC but fuck me do I love the time period, same with Pharaoh (love the Bronze Age).

Also, you just know that all of the shit they're adding now for free was supposed to be like 6 separate kikishly priced DLCs. Thankfully CA has been taking L after L so they have to suck our cocks for at least the immediate future to get some goodwill back, hence why we are eatin' good at the moment.
 
Currently debating on getting one of the Warhammer games during the Steam Summer Sale, any advice?
 
Empire 2 would have been the best.

The only way Total War: World War I makes any sense at all is if they've learned (actually, gone back to) having non-formation units that can shape themselves to fit things like a trench line. And even then, you still have to ask, why? The Great War: Western Front tried, but it also didn't play quite like a Total War game in terms of scope or expectation. People play these things with an emphasis on big field battles.

What are good settings for Total War games? I've shilled some before, but I've come to realize that there's a specific set of features that all Total War settings have in common. They all involve:
A great power scenario...
With a built-in justification for blobbing...
In which some great powers grew massively...
And some were wiped off the map
the Crimean war the Russo Turkish war the scramble for Africa.
The American Civil War
 
I'm currently doing a OvN Dread Lord playthrough. Basically what Arkhan should have been.

An evil necromantic version of the Tomb Kings which lacks constructs but has far superior Greek-style infantry. They've got possibly the best raise dead mechanic in the game, you've got a 40% chance to raise certain monsters/elites into an undead equivalent, incentivising farming but not obliterating the enemy.
It pairs well with the Nagash mod, with special events and challenges if you have both.
Total War Pharaoh is getting a big update on July 25th
Yep, I'll finally install the game I bought months ago.
 
I think that if Medieval 3/reboot gets made (it won't, Creative Assembly clearly does not give a shit and will pimp fantasy games forever) it should include East Asia.

I've argued before that any decent grand strategy game that renders Europe and MENA should have India as well, because it makes a single contiguous region of interacting geopolitical systems that is much more integrated than any of those parts are with East Asia. Later on, East Asia goes into isolation - an era of hermit kingdoms with Ming, sakoku and Korea - that, combined with the difficulty of balancing (much less a problem for Total War's level of realism than for a Paradox game) means it isn't a terrible idea to just leave them off the map. I think Empire 2 should have much more of the world, for example - Siberia, South America, Philippines, South Africa, East Indies, an East Asian trade theater - but it would be best to leave the East Asian realms themselves out as well as the African interior.

But that stops being true when you start talking about the Middle Ages, where China is crucial to the world system AND is actively involved in things. The key: Mongols.

The single biggest event of the era of note is the Mongols. Frankly, it's bizarre that they haven't been the subject of a campaign already. Atilla: Total War basically shilled the Huns like they're Mongols, Medieval represents them but they're unplayable. But every main Total War game has a theme of blobbing in a certain interesting historical scenario and the Mongols are kind of THE story of the Medieval world outside of Europe proper, being that they killed THREE major empires and TWO of the biggest civilizations of the time. They're the king of blob. And the other big story of the times, the Crusades, is kind of odd when it's not really a blob but an international coalition fighting another international coalition to set up a sovereign state...

So I think that it would do very well for the entire Eurasian "World Island" to be portrayed with Turks, Mongols, whatever big Indian civ, China, Japan and whatever worthwhile Indochinese and Indonesian civs + Korea (as DLC fodder if nothing else) on the map. It's not like they aren't popular and interesting (if India isn't interesting for its own sake, mind that they're still using elephant cavalry in this time, which is interesting) to the general public.

What timeframe? I'd say 1066 to 1492-ish. 1066 is simply the perfect Medieval start date, including for this game, with the English-Frankish-Viking conflict and Spaniard-Moorish conflicts set up and the Crusades ready to kick off a short while later.
 
Been playing Attila, as the Ebdanians. This is the first time I've played as a Celtic faction. It's honestly a shame that there's only 3 of them and they're all in the north of Britain and in Ireland (as you'd expect) because the Celt v Celt battles are the most unserious battles in the game. Just look at this.
325610_1.jpg
Why does this happen? Similarly to Slavs I've noticed that pound-for-pound Celtic units are weaker than equivalent units of other barbarian cultures, so they have a gimmick. Slavs have poison which makes it so that you want to delay a melee engagement as much as possible, Celts have the opposite where you want to join the battle as soon as possible due to their above-average charge bonus and the fact that the Celtic culture trait for all 3 factions gives every single one of their units advanced/guerilla deployment. When fighting a Celtic faction the AI always guerilla deploys like this in a straight line so you can perform this humorous deployment where you put your units right up to the enemy's face and back where they stare each other down and do nothing until you click "Start Battle."

Otherwise the campaign isn't too hard, as is the case in, let's be honest, most strategy games Britain and Ireland are noob islands and after beating your Celtic neighbors and kicking out the weak Roman presence in the area, the world is your oyster. Britain itself is poor and shitty but there's nothing stopping you from beelining to modern Spain which has a ton of rich provinces, fertile provinces and/or good resources. You get two unique buildings, a special "raiding" building which is fucking worthless because raiding is a terrible way of making money, and a farming building which gives a good amount of food and money independent of land fertility at the cost of higher squalor build-up, which isn't hard to manage imo, especially when playing as a barbarian faction. You also have a special event chain which gives you a beefed up general at the end of it, similar to the 3 Something Germanic DLC factions that are Alemanni, Burgundians and Langobards, out of which I already played and beat the game with the latter 2 (and also enjoyed, especially Langobards with their Gódansmen).
 
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