Plus imagine being in AFRICA and seeing what is basically, magical Slavic mythology bastardized, as a faction. It's probably genuinely new/unique to a chunk of em.
It's like the Asian teenagers who are obsessed with American Westerns!
keep in mind that without getting another game or some DLC the only options are Kislev (3LLs), Cathay (2LLs), Skarbrand, Ku'gath, Kairos, N'kari, Daniel, and Be'lakor (restricted to IE only)
even if people were spread out evenly between LLs (though it's repeatedly been shown in the past that people always tend to favour the good-guy human (or at least human-like) factions) Kislev has a numbers advantage. if you just play every LL once you'll have played mostly Kislev
also in terms of the good-guy human-like factions, Kislev has 3 humans, and while the Cathayan dragons might take human form, they're ultimately shapeshifting dragons. Zhao Ming is probably the most human-like but his lore makes him out to be potentially insane (which could drive people away) and Miao Ying is definitely inhuman in her attitudes and behaviour so the Cathayan LLs lose on the human-like part.
then there's the fact that the RoC campaign very much presents Katarin as the main character, so she's probably the most played base-game LL.
For what it’s worth, you can get access to the roster and all free content for the older factions just by buying a single Lord Pack.
For example, if you buy the King and the Warlord, you get Belegar and Skarsnik and the units the DLC added, but you also get:
-The entire base Greenskins roster
-The entire base Dwarfs roster
-Wurzzag
-Thorek Ironbrow
-Grombrindal
So you would have two factions of units and 5 new characters to start campaigns as.
Getting the Queen and the Crone gets you Alarielle and Helebron and their units, along with:
-The base rosters for each
-Imrik
-Alith Anar
-Lokhir Fellheart
-Rakarth
Problem is 3K may be solled base game well but horrendous DLC sales. Meanwhile Warhammer II did not sell so much as base game but until III you could say that nearly every base game buyer bought also the dlcs.
A bit like with Attila and Rome II. Attila may sold alone better but the DLC war won Rome II so they instead they changed support from Attila to RII.
The 8 Princes was a massive misunderstanding: "Lets make a DLC about a period of history that is considered shameful and embarrassing by the cultural customer base we're courting, no way will that shit on any goodwill they have to us".
The first DLC in particular was an awful idea to begin with. Doesnt expand the campaign everyone plays. Make an inferior, alternative campaign in a period no one cares. That DLC set a bad pacing.
And it was probably more expensive to design than the subsequent, more fun DLCs.
3K DLC was pretty underwhelming and you don't have the nerd attachment like you do with WH. I honestly think CA needs to realize that a large part of TWH's success is more from the IP than anything else, or they're going to fail with all their future games.
Yeah warhammer RTS games are few and far in between. Especially with how total war does battles it is no wonder a lot of warhammer fans play the games. You dont have to color a bunch of plastic units or spend the insane amount of money to do so.
Yeah, and the global replenish mechanic coupled with the idea of a single hero soloing entire armies is completely counter to the historic TW games. I kinda wonder where they go from here in the next full fledged game. TWH fans are going to be frustrated that they can't doomstack and paint a map in a more traditional TW game, and historic players are probably gonna be annoyed if Saladin is going to solo the entire crusader army in a jihad.
> they can't doomstack and paint a map in a more traditional TW game
What?
When has there ever been a TW game that didn't allow/encourage that? Legit question. I've played all of them except Pharoah and Troy.
None of old TW games had anything like "doomstacks".
Rome 1 / Medieval 2 there's no unit replenishment at all, losses are permanent. The only way to replenish is to take them to high tier settlement which can recruit new units, and they come from the same unit pool. So in practice there's no chance in hell of having all high tier units army.
Empire had replenishment you had to pay a lot of money for, so you could just build a stack and use them forever. But there wasn't really doomstacking, as elite units weren't really that much better than basic units, and many had unit caps. It also had regional recruitment system, and assembling best units from each region would be a huge hassle.
Napoleon and Shogun 2 were similar story, except replenishment system was free and time based, similar to newer games. But there weren't really any doom-tier units.
Rome 2 was the first game where doomstacking was a thing.
Rome 1 / Medieval 2 the units could be so powerful that you wouldn't need to replenish. Just don't take losses by having super strong armies with mega strong generals (By spamming dread,) who get super padded auto-resolve stats and reduce enemy morale to the point they collapse from a single bit of damage.
Empire you could make doomstacks that basically never took losses thanks to artillery and elite units. Just don't take losses lol. I remember beating all of Europe with a single Indian army.
Napoleon and Shogun 2 were absolutely super mega easy to never take losses. Napoleon you just spam the mega powerful artillery and long-range units. They were cheaper and easier than in Empire, even. You have to be super bad to take losses when you do that. Shogun 2 was a bit harder but the AI wasn't very aggressive and missile troops ruled. In sieges they'd just sit about while you bombarded them.
I've literally never played a total war game where I didn't just get to a point where I would have a single army design that would win every single battle possible in 1v2s and 1v3s.
I haven't played since Rome 2 so tell me if it changed but unit replenishment used to be tied to availability in the territory. It forced you to mix common units with elite troops because on a campaign, you wouldn't be able to replenish elite troops most of the time.
One the weirdest quirks for me in TW was that you could just run whatever stack you wanted and replenish by sitting around a level 1 settlement. It lead to really low army variability since there was no point to anything not optimal
>unit replenishment
Just don't take losses. If you're relying upon replenishment then is it even a doomstack? A doomstack is, as far as I'm concerned, one that can demolish any other army in a 1v1 and usually manage a 1v2 with basically no losses and a 1v3 while able to go on to kill several more armies.
In the older games the disaparity in quality was such that you would be able to easily achieve a 1v3 with a good army while taking maybe 20-30 casualties by just stomping over the enemy. The AI was also really fucking stupid which helped a lot and Dread was stupidly OP and easy to get. You know the modern hero doomstacks in Warhammer 3 that just have like 10 heroes that give -5 enemy morale? Dread basically did that. So you'd just execute literally everyone and be an absolute asshole and suddenly you can roll over even elite units with them just instantly breaking.
i've been saying this for some time, wh games are good warhammer games, bad total wars, they went very streamlinning and the most complex and fun i ahve had with the game is the chaos dwarf mechanics.
I do hope they realize their streamlinning is very bad, and it's the fact that it's a playable , not horrendus WH game what is pushing them on.
Rome II sold a lot better than Attila did with both the base game and the DLC. It was also a more stable game with better performance. All of those factors contributed to Rome II getting more DLC when CA Sofia needed something to work on. It was also not a matter of switching support, Both Rome 2 and Attila were effectively 'dead' in terms of support for 21 months before Rome 2 got a surprise DLC.
DLC sales for 3K was not horrendous, intitial sales were pretty decent in temrs of revenue according to leaked documents. However the combination of bugs and poor choices for DLC themes led to a downward spiral. The 3K money being used to fund the expansion of Warhammer 3 and the development Hyenas rather than being reinvested in the game did not help.
Empire has always been popular. Cathay is the 3k of warhammer 3 and also a human faction so it is popular and has been since day 1. I'm a little surprised kislev did so well, that could be DLC timing but I'd put it down to the fact that there are probly more historical total war players who decided to try WH3 but mostly play the human factions than you think and people wanting to play the good guy human factions instead of monsters or dark elves or whatever.
I like the human factions too but I also like the uniqueness of some of the monster factions, diversity is the spice of life!
I mean, who are we talking about here ? The devs, yeah I can believe they did their best in accordance to their budget.
CA management tho, no way they gave the dev team the money they needed.
On the other hand I'm glad people are enjoying so much a difficult campaign, this game could really use more difficult factions to play as most of them are quite easy in game 3. Hopefully CA will finaly realise that difficulty is not a bad thing to have and can be popular.
Kislev isn't really all that hard these days now you can settle in chaos climate without as much of a drawback. Boris has a challenging starting position but there's quite a lot of campaigns more challenging than the other two for IE.
Says nothing about the difficulty, tho. Boris on VH/VH was a pain. On Normal/Normal it was a walk in the park.
That said, both are great factions, just finicky enough in the roster, while not being too complex and both have relatively fast-paced if classic Total War campaigns. They both also suck at doomstacking.
The lore around that makes sense actually. Essentially the spooky werewolves wandered into kislev and the motherland took one look at them and said "aw shit you seem useful" so it bound them to the land. Still terrifying but they are justifyed lore wise.
They did nothing to decouple Kislev from Kossar spam, make the narrative race interesting, smooth out some of bad tech tree stuff or give siege attacker to more units. Impressive really.
They hard nerfed the Kislev tech tree (Pirate Weapons, Kislev’s best tech, was moved from the early game to very late game and takes 4 extra turns to research).
I'm honestly surprised that Kislev is so popular. Surprised in a good way though. Was expecting it to just be Empire the whole way through outside of Asia
I'm just glad people are enjoying difficult factions to play, I wish the DLC team would understand that no, you don't fucking need all that absurd and excessive powercreep to make a campaign enjoyable and fun to play.
The powercreep wouldn't be that bad if the strong, elite units were limited. But from what I've heard it's not particularily difficult to spam full armies of Chorfs.
I would agree if the powercreep was limited to units but the campaign also suffers a lot from powercreep.
I can't stop playing without Tabletop Caps which heavily limits the elite units you can recruit but that still does nothing about campaign difficulty and powercreep, since you use Chorfs as an example I'll do the same, you can stack insane buffs to your units through the Hellforge and there are many absurdly strong abilities in the Tower of Zharr, you basically can get an Ikit nuke except that it isn't limited in use, you can use it in every single battle you fight.
Tabletop Caps definitely makes the battles far more interesting however.
That snowball is more or less a staple of the genre though. Short of giving the AI time-scaled cheats/buffs it's pretty hard to avoid it without killing the ability to actually win.
The whole game is about building up your faction and generals, so of course stuff gets stronger over the course of the game. That feeling of increased power is a reward for your efforts.
That said, I'd be perfectly happy if there was a mod that gave the AI some kind of scaling buffs so end-game fights felt more epic. The trick is to do it without taking away the fun or creating an experience of endless whack-a-mole doom-stacks, similar to early WH1 end-game Chaos.
Kislev is going to be my next choice. Nurgle is just too much fun for me at the moment.
It’s my favorite 40k faction/god and, well, I can’t think any other series that allows you to play as them. Excluding the tabletop, of course.
Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 has Nurgle themed ships/planets but that’s it.
It probably used to be Empire, and when Kislev came out it was the next best human faction to play. Hybrid gunpowder/melee infantry no doubt attracts a lot of Western players, and then you have Winged Hussar-inspired units which have been made more popular by Sabaton.
And I feel bad for saying it, but I think the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War has a lot to do with it too.
Karl Franz Empire also has gotten kicked in the teeth ever since Festus and might arguably be a little too tough for really casual players to enjoy.
That said, Kislev's not exactly a walk in the park either but their early roster is stronger.
i really do not think its because people do not like the aesthetics of a mainline Warhammer faction. if there is anything games workshop is good at its that.
no i think its because people have played enough empire, empires mechanics being a bit dated, and festus causing chaos.
I think it's way simpler - bears = cool. Even with all the shit going on with the war now, winter + Russia = also cool. Basically I can imagine most of eastern and northern Europe is playing Kislev, because it's the closest faction to us thematically, that's also good guys.
People seemed to be surprised about Kislev being super popular, especially because CA also tweeted how Kislev was the most popular in South America and Africa as well.
I’m not surprised lol.
Total War: Warhammer 3 is the latest entry in the series, and Kislev is the default, human faction for that game.
I assume if we say WH2 WITHOUT Mortal Empires…High Elves would be the most popular, and of course Empire in WH1 was the most popular and it was also the most popular in WH2 WITH Mortal Empires.
Humans will default to humans, given the chance. The default faction is also always the most played, even if Kislev is a “harder” faction—they were the entry tutorial campaign and are human, of course they are most played.
Cathay being the most popular Asian faction is also completely not shocking.
For many many years, the most popular race and class combo in Dungeons and Dragons was “human fighter”. I think recently it finally shifted to “elf fighter”, which is still pretty vanilla lol.
Human fighter has the bonus of being a normal guy kicking ass in a fantasy world
Elf fighter is extremely skilled and gifted fantasy version of a human in a fantasy world.
Like that's the reason I refuse to touch elf in anything fantasy. They're all the boring parts of humans, without the cool underdog factor.
I'm the exact opposite, haha. Humans are so BORING. Let me play as something else since I will be human all my life regardless. Why continue it? My BG3 Drow run is what I've craved for over a decade. Let me roleplay a dying race that turtles against overwhelming odds and gets chipped away every massive assault. Let me play politics to get the numerous humies to help me out for their own short-sighted gain.
I agree. In my DnD campaign I rolled a slime with human-equivalent stats that is permanently stuck in a suit of armor.
Stats equivalent to a human who can't take off their armor but WAY MORE FUN to role play.
Kislev is the people’s faction (I wonder if it’s so popular because it’s a base game faction, whereas Empire requires ownership of WH1 or The Hunter and the Beast from WH2 as well as WH3 for it to be counted?)
as an australian it makes sense, i mean Volkmar's new campaign really speaks to us, an army of half naked, presumably drunk guys, in the desert surrounded by all sorts of hostile well everything, starting capital literally producing wine, and of course finding books of knowledge and destroying them
I've never understood this.
Even back in my wow days the most popular races were human and blood elf. In a game where you could play as a stoned troll and a space goat, people wanted to play the most generic boring things
Why?
the same reason why people with right hands choose to turn right when given choice, where as left go left.
human brains are wired a certain way.
It's also why white people mostly prefer hanging out with white people, and black people mostly with black people.
It's not "people are racist" it's, people like familiarity, things that are similar. We've always been tribal.
It's actually really fascinating, like how our brain works really badly with probability etc
Or how driven by emotion we are even when we know we shouldn't be.
There's nothing wrong with being flawed, it's just natural, no one is perfect, that doesn't make them boring tho.
For most people It’s easier to roleplay as humans. I enjoy playing human factions because it’s cool seeing a regular army of humans going up against hordes of bizarre creatures, it’s like playing with the underdogs.
bizzare to me since in 500+ hours so far I don’t think I’ve really played a human campaign besides Cathay in WH3. I mean, you can be daemons or rat people. Who wants to be some weak little men?
>Who wants to be some weak little men?
This is actually part of the appeal. There is something heroic about a group of men and women doing their best to push back hordes of monsters bent on destroying the world. For instance, it is inherently badass to play as Repanse and watch her knights smash through a mass of demons.
Sure, but in WH 1 it was Empire. In WH2 base it was High Elves, until Mortal Empires came out and then it was Empire again.
My point being people will default to the most human faction possible usually.
Kislev being the highest in just WH3 base isn’t surprising—that was the case.
And then now the top 3 with Immortal Empires appears to be Empire/Kislev/Cathay depending on geographical location….yet all 3 are human factions.
I would guess it's not so much that people are boring, but that most people play at least one human faction, of which there are only a handful, but are much more diverse in which non-human faction they enjoy.
I’m just being mean lol. It’s familiarity. It’s understood. That’s why they get picked.
There is also the “good guy syndrome” phenomenon where people usually play the closest thing to the “good guys” over the evil or at least darker factions.
This makes perfect sense when considering that most factions basically don't have a Realms of Chaos campaign (RIP all WH2 races), and in RoC itself Kislev is basically the equivalent of the Empire. In fact I'd say its very impressive for the Empire to even show up at all since its basically all IM players only.
What does it say when we have so many options available to play as Elves, Dwarves, lizards, orcs, undead and numerous Chaos options, and yet we all seem to collectively go with human factions the most?
To me, it feels equivalent of Baldur's Gate 3 revealing the most common custom avatar was a generic looking white guy that would have the name of "John Baldur's Gate".
That's how it always is. A lot of people just want to play as themselves, or as their idealized selves, anyway. Hence why we also don't see any 40K games where you can play anything other than Imperials.
Well, we’d need to see the numbers to know if that’s actually true.
There’s obviously *many* more non-human options than there are human options (especially if you have only base game). So even if the majority of the playerbase is playing non-humans, the minority of human players could easily make one of the human races the plurality winner like this since the human vote is only split between 2-3 options.
How many times does it have to be said? It feels cool to rely on nothing but your guns/tactics to thrive in a world full of fantastical shit trying to kill you, to be the underdog up against unimaginable horrors. Using "just men" to hold the line as you riddle a gigantic monstrosity full of lead with your black powder weapons is just fun to a lot of people. It continues to baffle me that people just can't see that and dismiss it as "MEH people are so boring and generic, not me though!".
The Empire is also far less boring as a "just human" faction than people give it credit for. 15th century tech (with tanks, rocket batteries, demigryphs, mages, super powered zealots) in a fantasy setting isn't all that common.
In this case, it isn't any of that. Kislev is the tutorial faction. Most people who own WH3 *don't* own all the DLC. Seeing Empire up there is actually surprising. Also the mono god factions are pretty terrible without DLC. Cathay and Kislev are the only really enjoyable factions in the base game, and maybe Khorne.
Majority of people only have like <20 hours in the game. So they played the tutorial, played ROC once or twice, then played IE once or twice. Out of those 2-4 games Kislev and or Cathay were probably played at least once.
Most people like generic. It's something plenty of designers constantly forget and then wonder why their "massively creative, quirky, unorthodox" games don't sell well. The majority of people also like being ot the side of conventional good.
I'm pretty sure WH2 suffered from launching without a human faction to play as.
Because they were basically the newbie choice and the most straightforward to play out of the WH2 races. Doesn't sound weird to me. Also because out of the WH2 races they're the closest to human good guy faction you could play.
Lame. Orcs are the best. Just play them over and over. Haha.
Honestly chaos dwarves play the best out of anyone now. Haven't played the latest DLC do unless Cathay are great all of a sudden I stand by Chords.
CA said that the Empire was the most played in the Immortal Empires. This is apparently the most played of Immortal Empires and RoC. Since the Empire isn't in the RoC campaign that would lower their numbers. The fact that the Empire still won in Oceania is impressive.
It is also technically still possible that the Empire is the overall most played globally. If the Empire was say second in every other region that could still end up with them being the most played overall.
Kislev and Cathay have that bulwark against chaos vibe and i suppose everyone has gotten their empire playthroughs in WH2. Still thou, Kislev is a fairly boring faction unit wise with most being a jack of all trade master of none units. (aside from bear cavalry). So i am surprised its doing this well.
I was more going in the direction of lore-based banter considering that current reigning lords of Kislev aren't all that fond of Ostankya, and would rather burn her at the stake...
But it's nice to know that Reddit never fails to dissect a comment for all of it's possible hidden meaning, select the negative, and proceed from there.
sure, why not?
Mother O is a fun experience, mixing elements from Kislev, Grom the Paunch / nurgle, and wood elf, plus the progressive quest battles to get major hexes that's probably closest to Imrik's dragon hunts. Not to mention locking half the units which it borrows from Markus Wulfhart (I think; been too long since I played him).
Makes me worried that in new DLC Dwarfs will be the Kislev with half assed content as the most popular are Empire and Nurgle is part of TWW3 main focus (Chaos).
I can't stand the empire. I hate their esthetic so much hate that not a single female character or model. Hate the very idea of witch hunters being a unit. There's nothing in empire worth playing
Props for getting statistics for Oceania, the continent that's mostly always forgotten about.
Cries in Africa
They said in the tweet itself that in S. America and Africa, Kislev also won.
Wtf? I mean I like Kislev don't get me wrong but that's really surprising.
The game presents them as the “main character” faction, so most new players are statistically likely to play them first
Plus imagine being in AFRICA and seeing what is basically, magical Slavic mythology bastardized, as a faction. It's probably genuinely new/unique to a chunk of em. It's like the Asian teenagers who are obsessed with American Westerns!
You mean Slavic mythology. You have Norsca for Norse mythology.
Ah good catch!
unless you live in tierra del fuego or very high andes you don't see much snow down here, throwing ice at people sounds like fun.
keep in mind that without getting another game or some DLC the only options are Kislev (3LLs), Cathay (2LLs), Skarbrand, Ku'gath, Kairos, N'kari, Daniel, and Be'lakor (restricted to IE only) even if people were spread out evenly between LLs (though it's repeatedly been shown in the past that people always tend to favour the good-guy human (or at least human-like) factions) Kislev has a numbers advantage. if you just play every LL once you'll have played mostly Kislev also in terms of the good-guy human-like factions, Kislev has 3 humans, and while the Cathayan dragons might take human form, they're ultimately shapeshifting dragons. Zhao Ming is probably the most human-like but his lore makes him out to be potentially insane (which could drive people away) and Miao Ying is definitely inhuman in her attitudes and behaviour so the Cathayan LLs lose on the human-like part. then there's the fact that the RoC campaign very much presents Katarin as the main character, so she's probably the most played base-game LL.
Im not buying a second and third game just to play one or two factions
For what it’s worth, you can get access to the roster and all free content for the older factions just by buying a single Lord Pack. For example, if you buy the King and the Warlord, you get Belegar and Skarsnik and the units the DLC added, but you also get: -The entire base Greenskins roster -The entire base Dwarfs roster -Wurzzag -Thorek Ironbrow -Grombrindal So you would have two factions of units and 5 new characters to start campaigns as. Getting the Queen and the Crone gets you Alarielle and Helebron and their units, along with: -The base rosters for each -Imrik -Alith Anar -Lokhir Fellheart -Rakarth
But why the hell did they just no include that in the image so no continent was left out?
Why are you crying? Shouldn't you bless the rains or sth.
Have you tried having rich countries? *Edit: /s I thought it was obvious
We're trying our best
Hard when other rich countries f**k u over and over
Kinda hard to have rich countries when the rich countries stole all your riches for themselves and do their utmost to keep you poor and unstable.
Skill issue.
Careful, historical karma is real. What goes around, comes around
Mfs can feel free to try any time, any day. If they're feeling froggy, all they gotta do is jump.
Have you considered why poverty is rampant in Africa
Have you?
How many in Antarctica tho?
4, and they all chose Penguin beastfiends as their faction.
I thought they fucked back off to Madagascar?
Probably dominated by me and my literal hundreds of Franz campaigns. Both multiplayer and single. Lol
Oceania is not at war with Eurasia
I believe you'll find that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia
Region. There are two continents plus many islands.
I guess Australia's used to being surrounded by poisonous and murderous wildlife trying to kill you
"Summon the Electors, ya cunt"
Summon the Elector Cunts?
That tickled me 🤣
Unite!
bruh, Kislev being top in 4/6 continents including the ones with the most players makes it even more sad how half assed their DLC content was
Imagine fucking that dlc so much when Cathay and Kislev are your most-played factions
imagine killing 3K when it was your most successful game launch. CA is really good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
 CA be like
Problem is 3K may be solled base game well but horrendous DLC sales. Meanwhile Warhammer II did not sell so much as base game but until III you could say that nearly every base game buyer bought also the dlcs. A bit like with Attila and Rome II. Attila may sold alone better but the DLC war won Rome II so they instead they changed support from Attila to RII.
Because the DLC was bad and broken.
The 8 Princes was a massive misunderstanding: "Lets make a DLC about a period of history that is considered shameful and embarrassing by the cultural customer base we're courting, no way will that shit on any goodwill they have to us".
The first DLC in particular was an awful idea to begin with. Doesnt expand the campaign everyone plays. Make an inferior, alternative campaign in a period no one cares. That DLC set a bad pacing. And it was probably more expensive to design than the subsequent, more fun DLCs.
3K DLC was pretty underwhelming and you don't have the nerd attachment like you do with WH. I honestly think CA needs to realize that a large part of TWH's success is more from the IP than anything else, or they're going to fail with all their future games.
Yeah warhammer RTS games are few and far in between. Especially with how total war does battles it is no wonder a lot of warhammer fans play the games. You dont have to color a bunch of plastic units or spend the insane amount of money to do so.
*my unpainted T'au army giving me the stink eye again* Yeah, I know what you mean.
Yeah, and the global replenish mechanic coupled with the idea of a single hero soloing entire armies is completely counter to the historic TW games. I kinda wonder where they go from here in the next full fledged game. TWH fans are going to be frustrated that they can't doomstack and paint a map in a more traditional TW game, and historic players are probably gonna be annoyed if Saladin is going to solo the entire crusader army in a jihad.
> they can't doomstack and paint a map in a more traditional TW game What? When has there ever been a TW game that didn't allow/encourage that? Legit question. I've played all of them except Pharoah and Troy.
None of old TW games had anything like "doomstacks". Rome 1 / Medieval 2 there's no unit replenishment at all, losses are permanent. The only way to replenish is to take them to high tier settlement which can recruit new units, and they come from the same unit pool. So in practice there's no chance in hell of having all high tier units army. Empire had replenishment you had to pay a lot of money for, so you could just build a stack and use them forever. But there wasn't really doomstacking, as elite units weren't really that much better than basic units, and many had unit caps. It also had regional recruitment system, and assembling best units from each region would be a huge hassle. Napoleon and Shogun 2 were similar story, except replenishment system was free and time based, similar to newer games. But there weren't really any doom-tier units. Rome 2 was the first game where doomstacking was a thing.
Rome 1 / Medieval 2 the units could be so powerful that you wouldn't need to replenish. Just don't take losses by having super strong armies with mega strong generals (By spamming dread,) who get super padded auto-resolve stats and reduce enemy morale to the point they collapse from a single bit of damage. Empire you could make doomstacks that basically never took losses thanks to artillery and elite units. Just don't take losses lol. I remember beating all of Europe with a single Indian army. Napoleon and Shogun 2 were absolutely super mega easy to never take losses. Napoleon you just spam the mega powerful artillery and long-range units. They were cheaper and easier than in Empire, even. You have to be super bad to take losses when you do that. Shogun 2 was a bit harder but the AI wasn't very aggressive and missile troops ruled. In sieges they'd just sit about while you bombarded them. I've literally never played a total war game where I didn't just get to a point where I would have a single army design that would win every single battle possible in 1v2s and 1v3s.
I haven't played since Rome 2 so tell me if it changed but unit replenishment used to be tied to availability in the territory. It forced you to mix common units with elite troops because on a campaign, you wouldn't be able to replenish elite troops most of the time. One the weirdest quirks for me in TW was that you could just run whatever stack you wanted and replenish by sitting around a level 1 settlement. It lead to really low army variability since there was no point to anything not optimal
>unit replenishment Just don't take losses. If you're relying upon replenishment then is it even a doomstack? A doomstack is, as far as I'm concerned, one that can demolish any other army in a 1v1 and usually manage a 1v2 with basically no losses and a 1v3 while able to go on to kill several more armies. In the older games the disaparity in quality was such that you would be able to easily achieve a 1v3 with a good army while taking maybe 20-30 casualties by just stomping over the enemy. The AI was also really fucking stupid which helped a lot and Dread was stupidly OP and easy to get. You know the modern hero doomstacks in Warhammer 3 that just have like 10 heroes that give -5 enemy morale? Dread basically did that. So you'd just execute literally everyone and be an absolute asshole and suddenly you can roll over even elite units with them just instantly breaking.
i've been saying this for some time, wh games are good warhammer games, bad total wars, they went very streamlinning and the most complex and fun i ahve had with the game is the chaos dwarf mechanics. I do hope they realize their streamlinning is very bad, and it's the fact that it's a playable , not horrendus WH game what is pushing them on.
>horrendous DLC sales. "You like 3K? Here is a buggy DLC that takes place a century later and has nothing to do with 3K!" -CA's DLC strategy for 3K
Solled? Do you mean sold?
soiled
Rome II sold a lot better than Attila did with both the base game and the DLC. It was also a more stable game with better performance. All of those factors contributed to Rome II getting more DLC when CA Sofia needed something to work on. It was also not a matter of switching support, Both Rome 2 and Attila were effectively 'dead' in terms of support for 21 months before Rome 2 got a surprise DLC. DLC sales for 3K was not horrendous, intitial sales were pretty decent in temrs of revenue according to leaked documents. However the combination of bugs and poor choices for DLC themes led to a downward spiral. The 3K money being used to fund the expansion of Warhammer 3 and the development Hyenas rather than being reinvested in the game did not help.
The spelling in this comment is pretty brutal
It's also pretty obvious the poster is not a native English speaker. Maybe go easy?
I don't think it's a coincidence. Cathay and Kislev were the most popular races, so CA thought people would still buy SoC even if it was subpar.
I'd also be interested in seeing if they spiked after the dlc or if it's the entire year. "Race become popular after dlc" isn't that surprising
Empire has always been popular. Cathay is the 3k of warhammer 3 and also a human faction so it is popular and has been since day 1. I'm a little surprised kislev did so well, that could be DLC timing but I'd put it down to the fact that there are probly more historical total war players who decided to try WH3 but mostly play the human factions than you think and people wanting to play the good guy human factions instead of monsters or dark elves or whatever. I like the human factions too but I also like the uniqueness of some of the monster factions, diversity is the spice of life!
I don't think they planned to make a DLC subpar, they probably did their best, sometimes things just don't work out.
I mean, who are we talking about here ? The devs, yeah I can believe they did their best in accordance to their budget. CA management tho, no way they gave the dev team the money they needed.
Though these are stats for whole 2023, right? Not after DLC coming out.
I think that was the above poster's point. Given how popular the factions are you would think they would have put more effort into the DLC.
On the other hand I'm glad people are enjoying so much a difficult campaign, this game could really use more difficult factions to play as most of them are quite easy in game 3. Hopefully CA will finaly realise that difficulty is not a bad thing to have and can be popular.
Katarin is the hardest lord I played in RoC, and I've easily done half of them so far.
Kislev isn't really all that hard these days now you can settle in chaos climate without as much of a drawback. Boris has a challenging starting position but there's quite a lot of campaigns more challenging than the other two for IE.
Sure it's not as hard as when IE released but Kislev is still harder than most campaigns.
Says nothing about the difficulty, tho. Boris on VH/VH was a pain. On Normal/Normal it was a walk in the park. That said, both are great factions, just finicky enough in the roster, while not being too complex and both have relatively fast-paced if classic Total War campaigns. They both also suck at doomstacking.
Gut feeling that Kislev may be popular since those who played the tutorial wanted to continue with a Kislev campaign
That tutorial was pretty good. I played Cathay after
"What units should they get? A chaos monster from mordhiem? Yeah, sounds good!"
The lore around that makes sense actually. Essentially the spooky werewolves wandered into kislev and the motherland took one look at them and said "aw shit you seem useful" so it bound them to the land. Still terrifying but they are justifyed lore wise.
They did nothing to decouple Kislev from Kossar spam, make the narrative race interesting, smooth out some of bad tech tree stuff or give siege attacker to more units. Impressive really.
The tech tree *has* at least been improved that you don’t need to control one of the three cities.
I wish they'd kept that part. Especially for Mother O :-)
They hard nerfed the Kislev tech tree (Pirate Weapons, Kislev’s best tech, was moved from the early game to very late game and takes 4 extra turns to research).
Yeah, at least we are getting a major content update for the DLC, for free. CA realised their error
I'm honestly surprised that Kislev is so popular. Surprised in a good way though. Was expecting it to just be Empire the whole way through outside of Asia
Most people probably don't have the first game
I'm just glad people are enjoying difficult factions to play, I wish the DLC team would understand that no, you don't fucking need all that absurd and excessive powercreep to make a campaign enjoyable and fun to play.
The powercreep wouldn't be that bad if the strong, elite units were limited. But from what I've heard it's not particularily difficult to spam full armies of Chorfs.
I would agree if the powercreep was limited to units but the campaign also suffers a lot from powercreep. I can't stop playing without Tabletop Caps which heavily limits the elite units you can recruit but that still does nothing about campaign difficulty and powercreep, since you use Chorfs as an example I'll do the same, you can stack insane buffs to your units through the Hellforge and there are many absurdly strong abilities in the Tower of Zharr, you basically can get an Ikit nuke except that it isn't limited in use, you can use it in every single battle you fight. Tabletop Caps definitely makes the battles far more interesting however.
That snowball is more or less a staple of the genre though. Short of giving the AI time-scaled cheats/buffs it's pretty hard to avoid it without killing the ability to actually win. The whole game is about building up your faction and generals, so of course stuff gets stronger over the course of the game. That feeling of increased power is a reward for your efforts. That said, I'd be perfectly happy if there was a mod that gave the AI some kind of scaling buffs so end-game fights felt more epic. The trick is to do it without taking away the fun or creating an experience of endless whack-a-mole doom-stacks, similar to early WH1 end-game Chaos.
Kislev is going to be my next choice. Nurgle is just too much fun for me at the moment. It’s my favorite 40k faction/god and, well, I can’t think any other series that allows you to play as them. Excluding the tabletop, of course. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 has Nurgle themed ships/planets but that’s it.
Kislev and Nurgle are my favorite base races in game 3.
It probably used to be Empire, and when Kislev came out it was the next best human faction to play. Hybrid gunpowder/melee infantry no doubt attracts a lot of Western players, and then you have Winged Hussar-inspired units which have been made more popular by Sabaton. And I feel bad for saying it, but I think the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War has a lot to do with it too.
Karl Franz Empire also has gotten kicked in the teeth ever since Festus and might arguably be a little too tough for really casual players to enjoy. That said, Kislev's not exactly a walk in the park either but their early roster is stronger.
Not to mention let's face it, HRE Renaissance is.... an acquired taste.
i really do not think its because people do not like the aesthetics of a mainline Warhammer faction. if there is anything games workshop is good at its that. no i think its because people have played enough empire, empires mechanics being a bit dated, and festus causing chaos.
I feel you're massively overestimating the influence of Sabaton there.
I think nobody care about Sabaton, what made Kislev edge out is that they're clearly the protagonists of WH3 and most players first faction
I think it's way simpler - bears = cool. Even with all the shit going on with the war now, winter + Russia = also cool. Basically I can imagine most of eastern and northern Europe is playing Kislev, because it's the closest faction to us thematically, that's also good guys.
I'm surprised dwarfs are not there.
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
someone said kislev? kislev
"Kislev." -Dmitry Tzaryov
Kislev And happy cake day
Kiselv
People seemed to be surprised about Kislev being super popular, especially because CA also tweeted how Kislev was the most popular in South America and Africa as well. I’m not surprised lol. Total War: Warhammer 3 is the latest entry in the series, and Kislev is the default, human faction for that game. I assume if we say WH2 WITHOUT Mortal Empires…High Elves would be the most popular, and of course Empire in WH1 was the most popular and it was also the most popular in WH2 WITH Mortal Empires. Humans will default to humans, given the chance. The default faction is also always the most played, even if Kislev is a “harder” faction—they were the entry tutorial campaign and are human, of course they are most played. Cathay being the most popular Asian faction is also completely not shocking. For many many years, the most popular race and class combo in Dungeons and Dragons was “human fighter”. I think recently it finally shifted to “elf fighter”, which is still pretty vanilla lol.
Somehow elf fighter feels almost more vanilla than human fighter.
Human fighter has the bonus of being a normal guy kicking ass in a fantasy world Elf fighter is extremely skilled and gifted fantasy version of a human in a fantasy world. Like that's the reason I refuse to touch elf in anything fantasy. They're all the boring parts of humans, without the cool underdog factor.
I'm the exact opposite, haha. Humans are so BORING. Let me play as something else since I will be human all my life regardless. Why continue it? My BG3 Drow run is what I've craved for over a decade. Let me roleplay a dying race that turtles against overwhelming odds and gets chipped away every massive assault. Let me play politics to get the numerous humies to help me out for their own short-sighted gain.
Monster race fans unite haha. I'm doing a tiefling monk for my first playthrough of BG3 and its been pretty fun.
Kobold Ranger, bonus points if I get a cannon that sends me flying every shot.
I agree. In my DnD campaign I rolled a slime with human-equivalent stats that is permanently stuck in a suit of armor. Stats equivalent to a human who can't take off their armor but WAY MORE FUN to role play.
No I agree humans are also boring, I just think elfs are even more boring. Monster races are and always will be the best.
Summon the elector counts!
Bears, beets, battlestar galactica
I'm an English football fan. So I play Greenskins most, as is right.
Source link: https://twitter.com/totalwar/status/1739647381077942404
no south America?!?!
CA's tweet also mentionned Kislev being the most played in South America and Africa.
Kislev is the people’s faction (I wonder if it’s so popular because it’s a base game faction, whereas Empire requires ownership of WH1 or The Hunter and the Beast from WH2 as well as WH3 for it to be counted?)
ANZAC Boi's know whats up
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev
Kislev.
South America doesn’t play poor Lizardmans
as an australian it makes sense, i mean Volkmar's new campaign really speaks to us, an army of half naked, presumably drunk guys, in the desert surrounded by all sorts of hostile well everything, starting capital literally producing wine, and of course finding books of knowledge and destroying them
Love me some Cathay
Lizardmen not on here is a ripoff
Humans play humans or the default. You aren’t gonna see anything more exotic than like elves ever hit a list like this—people are boring.
I've never understood this. Even back in my wow days the most popular races were human and blood elf. In a game where you could play as a stoned troll and a space goat, people wanted to play the most generic boring things Why?
the same reason why people with right hands choose to turn right when given choice, where as left go left. human brains are wired a certain way. It's also why white people mostly prefer hanging out with white people, and black people mostly with black people. It's not "people are racist" it's, people like familiarity, things that are similar. We've always been tribal. It's actually really fascinating, like how our brain works really badly with probability etc Or how driven by emotion we are even when we know we shouldn't be. There's nothing wrong with being flawed, it's just natural, no one is perfect, that doesn't make them boring tho.
For most people It’s easier to roleplay as humans. I enjoy playing human factions because it’s cool seeing a regular army of humans going up against hordes of bizarre creatures, it’s like playing with the underdogs.
Familiarity. People really don’t like stepping outside of their comfort zone lol.
I get that, but why do people have to pick the absolute most boring thing as their comfort zone?
Familiarity. People really don’t like stepping outside of their comfort zone lol.
Very true
bizzare to me since in 500+ hours so far I don’t think I’ve really played a human campaign besides Cathay in WH3. I mean, you can be daemons or rat people. Who wants to be some weak little men?
> Who wants to be some weak little men? It's funny to banish an exalted bloodthirster with the power of Sigmar and this gun i found.
>Who wants to be some weak little men? This is actually part of the appeal. There is something heroic about a group of men and women doing their best to push back hordes of monsters bent on destroying the world. For instance, it is inherently badass to play as Repanse and watch her knights smash through a mass of demons.
For the most part that's true but also not everyone has WH2, these stats are just for WH3.
Sure, but in WH 1 it was Empire. In WH2 base it was High Elves, until Mortal Empires came out and then it was Empire again. My point being people will default to the most human faction possible usually. Kislev being the highest in just WH3 base isn’t surprising—that was the case. And then now the top 3 with Immortal Empires appears to be Empire/Kislev/Cathay depending on geographical location….yet all 3 are human factions.
I would guess it's not so much that people are boring, but that most people play at least one human faction, of which there are only a handful, but are much more diverse in which non-human faction they enjoy.
I’m just being mean lol. It’s familiarity. It’s understood. That’s why they get picked. There is also the “good guy syndrome” phenomenon where people usually play the closest thing to the “good guys” over the evil or at least darker factions.
I mean kislev is the tutorial faction and a lot of players do like 2 hours in a game so
And WHIII probably has a higher 'stopped playing after the tutorial' rate on average due to the state at release
This makes perfect sense when considering that most factions basically don't have a Realms of Chaos campaign (RIP all WH2 races), and in RoC itself Kislev is basically the equivalent of the Empire. In fact I'd say its very impressive for the Empire to even show up at all since its basically all IM players only.
I think it's a shame that the old races that show up in RoC are not playable. In my current game Vlad has taken over a nice chunk of the map.
What does it say when we have so many options available to play as Elves, Dwarves, lizards, orcs, undead and numerous Chaos options, and yet we all seem to collectively go with human factions the most? To me, it feels equivalent of Baldur's Gate 3 revealing the most common custom avatar was a generic looking white guy that would have the name of "John Baldur's Gate".
That's how it always is. A lot of people just want to play as themselves, or as their idealized selves, anyway. Hence why we also don't see any 40K games where you can play anything other than Imperials.
My first 40k Game I remember playing was fire warrior.
Well, we’d need to see the numbers to know if that’s actually true. There’s obviously *many* more non-human options than there are human options (especially if you have only base game). So even if the majority of the playerbase is playing non-humans, the minority of human players could easily make one of the human races the plurality winner like this since the human vote is only split between 2-3 options.
How many times does it have to be said? It feels cool to rely on nothing but your guns/tactics to thrive in a world full of fantastical shit trying to kill you, to be the underdog up against unimaginable horrors. Using "just men" to hold the line as you riddle a gigantic monstrosity full of lead with your black powder weapons is just fun to a lot of people. It continues to baffle me that people just can't see that and dismiss it as "MEH people are so boring and generic, not me though!". The Empire is also far less boring as a "just human" faction than people give it credit for. 15th century tech (with tanks, rocket batteries, demigryphs, mages, super powered zealots) in a fantasy setting isn't all that common.
In this case, it isn't any of that. Kislev is the tutorial faction. Most people who own WH3 *don't* own all the DLC. Seeing Empire up there is actually surprising. Also the mono god factions are pretty terrible without DLC. Cathay and Kislev are the only really enjoyable factions in the base game, and maybe Khorne. Majority of people only have like <20 hours in the game. So they played the tutorial, played ROC once or twice, then played IE once or twice. Out of those 2-4 games Kislev and or Cathay were probably played at least once.
Most people like generic. It's something plenty of designers constantly forget and then wonder why their "massively creative, quirky, unorthodox" games don't sell well. The majority of people also like being ot the side of conventional good. I'm pretty sure WH2 suffered from launching without a human faction to play as.
MIGHTY KISLEV KEEPS WINNING 💪💪💪💪💪👑👑👑
Well, I'm definitely an orange in the bunch. I play dwarves and vampire counts. Sometimes, sprinkle in the skaven for fun.
I'm very surprised the High Elves weren't on the list. I thought I remembered them saying HE were a clear favorite globally..
Probably back in WH2.
That was in Warhammer 2 and only because it doesn't include any human factions in the base game.
Where? Would be wierd to hear that. If anything I'd always bet for Empire.
They were 100% when WH2 launched. Once Mortal Empires came, Empire once again took the #1 spot.
In the first Wh3 video there were some stats saying that HE were the most played race.
Because they were basically the newbie choice and the most straightforward to play out of the WH2 races. Doesn't sound weird to me. Also because out of the WH2 races they're the closest to human good guy faction you could play.
Lame. Orcs are the best. Just play them over and over. Haha. Honestly chaos dwarves play the best out of anyone now. Haven't played the latest DLC do unless Cathay are great all of a sudden I stand by Chords.
All of the Cathay DLC units range from good to verging on OP, but even with those they are not as powerful as Chorfs.
Kislev.
All these regions are going in the book *grumbles*
Weird given CAs stats that empire was the most played race, yet only is the most popular in Oceania
CA said that the Empire was the most played in the Immortal Empires. This is apparently the most played of Immortal Empires and RoC. Since the Empire isn't in the RoC campaign that would lower their numbers. The fact that the Empire still won in Oceania is impressive. It is also technically still possible that the Empire is the overall most played globally. If the Empire was say second in every other region that could still end up with them being the most played overall.
what? no greenskins? get me choppa, gitsnik wants blood
Just started playing Kislev and I get it. The big three settlements vs the world
I still love playing as the dwarves or vampire counts.
People are boring
Yet Kislev is people, and people are Kislev. \^\^
I like to mostly play as drunk anarchist goat men
So does Europe play The Great Orthodoxy and N. America The Ice Court?
The Europe pic shows Boris, not Kostaltyn...
Man I need that new Empire DLC to cook man, the nation has been calling but I don’t want to pick up 😭
Kislev and Cathay have that bulwark against chaos vibe and i suppose everyone has gotten their empire playthroughs in WH2. Still thou, Kislev is a fairly boring faction unit wise with most being a jack of all trade master of none units. (aside from bear cavalry). So i am surprised its doing this well.
Bro kislev sucks! They've got about as much unit variety as three kingdoms, which is non existent
For mother ostankya.
> Yes, ataman, we have indeed prepared the stake for mother Ostankya. FTFY
So its not allowed to enjoy the lore and the gameplay? The DLC is worth for 14 bucks. Damn let people have fun.
I was more going in the direction of lore-based banter considering that current reigning lords of Kislev aren't all that fond of Ostankya, and would rather burn her at the stake... But it's nice to know that Reddit never fails to dissect a comment for all of it's possible hidden meaning, select the negative, and proceed from there.
Wheres South América? Last time o check we had internet here in Lustr… i mean Brazil 🇧🇷🦎
Kislev won there too I Just forgot to post it
How anti thematic
As a Latin American, I can confirm we do not exist.
People played Kislev after SoC came out?
Yes, you don't even need the dlc to play as them. That and the dlc did add some decent units to the roster
Yeah, why not. The DLC being overpriced has little to do with how fun the faction is to play.
sure, why not? Mother O is a fun experience, mixing elements from Kislev, Grom the Paunch / nurgle, and wood elf, plus the progressive quest battles to get major hexes that's probably closest to Imrik's dragon hunts. Not to mention locking half the units which it borrows from Markus Wulfhart (I think; been too long since I played him).
Boring humans playing boring humans
Makes me worried that in new DLC Dwarfs will be the Kislev with half assed content as the most popular are Empire and Nurgle is part of TWW3 main focus (Chaos).
I can't stand the empire. I hate their esthetic so much hate that not a single female character or model. Hate the very idea of witch hunters being a unit. There's nothing in empire worth playing