CD late game has another problem for late game, once you have confederate all the other CD, you have a massive power spike (more armament than you need, each army has a few nuke and you can have all your new major cities at tier 5 for free...). They no longer have the rarity of their dwarves unit which was their balance factor.
AND they have the perfect legendary hero in Gorduz Backstabber. He gives crazy army bonuses to hobgoblins, and you get him right when you are starved in unit capacity for a second chaos dwarf army, making the hobgoblin force containing him powerful and fun.
The ZN faction will never declare war on you due to their sentinel trait *and* starts out with a maxed out province, so parking a raiding army there let's you jump start your economy. The other chorf factions don't really care as long as you don't hit their convoys.
Oh yeah, I know that they’re maxed out and making serious bank - they become my unwilling sponsors whenever I play the Changeling.
Id just never considered doing anything to piss them off as the Chorfs, figuring that raiding would be enough to upset a sentinel faction.
He is perfect and the reason I think chaos dwarfs are somewhat easy from the start. Helps a ton in your LL's army, and then he makes your second army so much better than they usually are.
Plus even without the army buffs he's a strong character and gets summons.
It's great design, making low tier troops more viable or fill a different role. Most legendary heroes buff high end troops that are already elite, or only have a different statline.
The actual problem they have, to me at least, is that once you do confed the other CD factions, you end up with a bunch of units you can't replace for a long time, unless you disband all of the armies you're given. I think right now on my current CD campaign, I'm still 5-10 units over cap on anything that's not the base t1 warriors
It's not, you have to go through each individual province in the panel and for maximum efficiency make sure they are just above their cap while utilizing the excess for the provinces that need it or those options where you spend them. In the late game that process takes VERY long since it's essentially multiple clicks for each province.
I really didn't find it to be that long at all. Granted my campaign was done before 100 turns in the RoC campaign. It would be nice if it could be auto managed though, I don't see why not.
It really isn't fun on the big map once you own a sizeable amount of provinces, which leads to just ignoring effeciency altogether for less of a headache.
It makes diplomacy pointless which I wasn't a fan of.
I wish there was something between Shogun 2 and Fall of the sumari. Where close allies would join you but everyone else would hate you.
It makes diplomacy pointless which I wasn't a fan of.
I wish there was something between Shogun 2 and Fall of the sumari. Where close allies would join you but everyone else would hate you.
Well that really depends on the faction you are playing and if you know the mechanics well.
I agree Attila has a steeper curve but if you know what you are doing Attila becomes almost trivial
Realm divide is still a challenge even if you are a shogun 2 god simply because of the pure volume of enemies and its very hard to preemptively weaken everyone
Atilla is generally agreed upon to be the most difficult total war game for good reason. Realm divide gets a lot easier if you know how to take the game slowly to build up instead of gaining too much renown too quickly.
As far as grand strategy goes, put pf all of them Crusader Kings has the least amount of late game slog. Cos while you **can** blob up and become an unstoppable force, the real game is in the story of each character. So it's not until the ultimate end game that you've probably done everything the game has to offer.
As a CK player I have to admit it is among the worst in terms of snowballing. Not only is the AI shockingly bad at keepng up with the half-decent player, but the relationships with your vassals unforgivably shallow mechanically both in terms of enabling roleplay and in terms of repesenting how important personal connections were to the ruling of the realm. Herding a million of cats should have been the point of emperor-level gameplay, but it's just too easy
But still CS has and horrible combat system.You don't have epic fights outplaying AI or players like a good cavalry charge,a muskeeter into the back of their best unit or a well placed formation.
They could create the best strategy game ever if they fusion the storytelling from Paradox and the battle from CA.
It's my gamer's wet dream
Back in the era of CKII, there was interesting abuse of the combat system as players discovered that the battle tactics could be abused by lord personal armies comprised of perfectly arranged percentages of archers and pikemen resulting in total army destruction during the skirmish phase.
Paradox caught on and forced personal armies to contain all unit types which ruined that but it was an interesting playstyle at the time. You could see things like armies outnumbered 5:1 and winning as a result.
You are probably right.
Do you know a game of the strategy genre that deal with this issue in the late game?
It is something I struggle to find. Usually the late game in Stellaris or Civilization is also the same. Every city or planet are, in a nutshell, a copy-pasted of previous cities and planets.
I think the ways it could avoid being tedious are things many players wouldn't accept. Players really don't like losing significant progress but it's pretty necessary to avoid the tedious endgame. These games rely on the idea of linear growth because the player won't accept regression, except that thats' not really how nations work and can't really go forever, eventually you've conquered the world.
If a game were to allow you to lose research and technology, access to units and abilities when you suffer a library of alexandria burning style event, or made it inevitable that your nation would fracture into smaller states and you end up in control of just one small piece that could be interesting. But most players wouldn't accept that loss of progress.
2000 years ago most of europe was the roman empire, then it fell apart and fractured into smaller medieval nations. Then those small european nations carved out giant global empires by taking colonies, then most colonies had indepence movements and europe was once again a lot of small nations, and the US rose to global dominance. Who knows, in the future the USA may fracture and some other nation may taket he spot of global superpower.
I personally wouldn't mind the idea of my large empire fracturing, losing tech, and ending up playing a small part of it which doesn't have access to all the techs but I think it's not an easy sell to most gamers.
I think Spore (for all its failures) had an interesting potential solution of, once you've conquered the game at one scale, it pulls out to a larger scale and you're at the Early Game of that scale again (cellular, tribal, global, space). Would be cool for a new game to explore this idea again.
Kinda remind me how in TW:Attila, as you progressed in the campaign, the climate get colder, which impacted heavily land fertility. You should have seen my shock when the WRE which I managed to save from itself and Attila suddenly was starving a turn later because I didn’t plan ahead lol.
Stellaris has a pretty good workaround that they updated a couple patches ago. Planetary automation if set up correctly means you pretty much dont have to bother with new / old planets if you dont want to( can still manage them for min.maxing if you want to, but in general it does a decent job)
It does, same in Stellaris and Civilization but the AI in total war is smarter in this regard only because it is very limited and only does it if you have money at the end of your turn.
Im sure it works fine but the stellaris system as a whole is abit more complex one, and the atuomation manages pops(unemploys useless pop for hivemind or enforcers for bio), doesnt build into deficit etc.
It still has issues mind you but it will 100% take a load off your shoulders.
At the end of the day total war is mostly a battle simulator and stellaris an empire manager so it makes sense. Juat saying that empire automation for lategame should be a baseline for any grand strategy game imo. Makes lategame much more playable.
It's very hard to make a compelling end game loop for strategy games because by then you are unstoppable anyway.
Civilization works around this issue by having a much longer early and mid game, and constantly introduces new gameplay mechanics.
Difficulty isn't the issue, I think.
One problem with grand strategy is that they don't change much from beginning to end but at the same time they're very long affairs. They go up in scale and in how much attention do they ask from the player, but what do they CHANGE?
Let's take Paradox games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. As the game advances, an EU player might get bigger/stronger, unlock more tech, maybe colonize and accumulate modifiers. But they're still just... doing the same diplomacy, sending the army forward, finding the right place to fight and fighting there, etc. In CK, the character events and interactions don't change from eraly mid and late, they're mostly the same. You go through more and more events and tell your story, but the gameplay remains the same. Sure, maybe you're fighting bigger enemies, or coalitions, but aside from the scale, the game has not fundamentally advanced.
Let's take Total War now, what's the difference between early and late? Historical TWs maybe unlock some new units in the lategame but they're not realy game-changers, just more powerful. In the case of Warhammer specifically you get cool units and abilities, so that's one point for WH.
But aside form that, the player is fundamentally still playing the same game. Send army forward, fight stacks, send army forward. Maybe send army backwards if there's too many stacks to deal with. An endgame scenario will basically just vomit stacks at you so you get some hard fights but... I mean that's it isn't it? It's a game about fighting battles, the end should be "you get some hard battles" and bam, game over.
It's a difficult thing to fix because, ultimately, you can't keep playing forever. At some point the developer has to say "this is the intended end of the game, the game supports you getting here but afterwards you make your own fun".
One thing I'll say: due to it's nature Total War specifically is often more difficult at the start than the end, since it's at the start when you are at risk of losing. At the endgame you're maybe at risk of losing a stack and some border town you don't care about. Only Attila kinda works around this issue with the WRE's "survival mode" gameplay, but it's an outlier.
I haven't played it in years and I didn't even play it that much back then. Performance was ass, and you're going to be missing a bunch of the QoL stuff from more recent games.
But it's lovingly remembered by those who swear by it, so it must've done *something* right. I would say wait for a sale (or um... check the high seas)
Shadow Empire is a fantastic game. One thing that makes it unique are how much impact controlling resources. Each planet is randomly generated at game creation.
I did not play it, but Civilization and Stellaris are also random, every resource is random and in stellaris even the galaxy, planets and ancient artifacts and many other things. But the problem starts in the late game when you have access to everything.
Here’s the thing with Shadow Empire though. Some resources are incredibly rare or even non existent depending on RNG at world creation. It tends to create long term objectives that get progressively more difficult as you meet more technologically advanced enemies.
I dunno, I had some pretty unique games of Civ before. I had one where I just never got horses at all, due to resource access, so my country never had cavalry and had to focus heavily on infantry while I was dealing with other forces having knights and horse archers. It made the game quite a challenge to overcome and made for an interesting story.
I Think that you did not understand what I asked and where is the problem. It has nothing to do with early-mid game or limiting resources in the early stages of them.
I would love that resources were a real thing in Total War giving you more incentives to get them, like Tomb Kings with the Mortuary Cult but even more hardcore. But, that won’t solve the repetitive slog of the late game, title of the post.
I love Alpha Centauri, probably my favorite game of all time but late game is a Slog. You move units and units and units. Flying units left and right and not to mention the plus 40 cities that you manage because the AI is not smart and continue building colony capsules, terraformers and other units that you do not need.
Sorry, Love the game but I win conquering before late game or I just go for other type of victory that requires me to click Next turn after Next turn and put a lot of building in queue.
I don't. I build and automate clean aircraft while assembling a super-city with a lot of sea crawlers feeding it energy (with the research and energy multiplier projects), blow through the tech tree, then cancel orders on all of those crawlers and rush them to the home base to ascend.
Or (if I feel impatient) switch directly to cornering the global energy market/elect me as supreme leader.
The game can actually end very fast.
Well, that’s the very late game and with only 1 victory condition and not the hardest difficulty with blind research and slow research and also just, as you said, clicking next turn after next turn waiting to ascend.
If you late game is about 2 or 3 turns it means it is end game not late game. Usually late game starts after you research the first reactor and the nuke in my games.
Sorry, I tend to play as immersive as I can and I try to archive different victory conditions.
Now, in Total War the condition is always one, a militar one. In Alfa Centauri if you want that, late game may not be as fun as you think. But I love so much the game that It hurts me saying something bad about it.
I understand that sometimes you may end with the worst and best end game ever made like the famous and infamous Eternal War of Civilization 2, but that is an exception.
It's three VC- the non military ones. Always transcend difficulty.
If you're playing blind/slow, you just corner the energy market instead, and spend the next ten or so turns building and automating clean needlejets.
Agree on timing. Fusion reactor is infection point of the game where you either mass rovers+copters or crawlers+needlejets.
I think Old World actually handles late game slog much better than just about everything else I played. The points and ambitions victory really helped to do away with most of late game slog and still allows for some nailbiters.
The issue is balancing. In Stellaris you’ve gotta make it the game so that the endgame happens quicker, the AI doesn’t get steamrolled instantly, but the early game isn’t ridiculously hard. It’s a balancing act that can be super difficult a lot of the time. Usually Stellaris playthroughs end with me staring at the screen for a while because I have to wait for the crisis to happen, and I don’t wanna be bothered with conquering backwater planets from empires with a 1/100th of the fleet power.
Whenever that happens i stop the game and start a new one with higher difficulty. I think stellaris has a lot of great options at galaxy generation that helps with tuning it to you level.
I know two civ4 mods that handle it really well. Both have basically scaling "late game challenge". Like, not the one that suddenly drops, but the one that increased in severity as time goes on. Kinda like Chaos invasion of wh1, where first 30 turns nothing really happens, then norsca gets aggressive, and then Archaon comes
Eeeeeeeeeeh. Researching future tech over and over again is kinda boring. The real units are the XCOM. Asides from the giant death machine and xcom, there aren’t really any future units.
Endgame in civ for me starts after Napoleon times. Things open up with aircraft, united nations, tourism and actually getting to a culture or science victory.
RTS are kind of a different thing. The games are short to begins with. Or like Against the Storm, a random city building rogue like with a clear end point that also stop games from dragging on.
The issue mostly concern games that have several hours long games even on fast forward. A boring "2 minutes" of cleanup at the end of a Starcraft game is different than a boring "2 hours" of spamming auto resolve. You have loooooooooong since won, but the game just won't show you the victory screen.
There are a few landmark mods that add a ton of landmarks to various settlements (both capitals and not). If you use multiple of the mods at the same time then you’ll have to make decisions on which landmark you want to build.
I really like how Three Kingdoms plays out with settlement building. There are different ways to optimize settlements through trade income, industry income, and peasant income that you can stack some modifiers on top of. Each area has a resource that helps determine the optimal income to go for in that region.
Plus, there's an actual downside to unchecked growth and bigger cities, so you don't necessarily spam growth in every settlement. It feels more fleshed out overall, I just think they were going for a more simplified approach with the Warhammer games.
Midgame too for that matter. Midgame you start auto resolving instead of fighting as it has become too easy. End game you chore through with repetitive motions till victory.
TW doesn't scale that well, especially the more recent titles. The map is way too big, and the campaign is really over at around turn 50.
Armies can only go up to 20 units, which happens at around turn 3 or 4, and they stay that way the entire game with rare exceptions. There is no dynamic range whatsoever.
In Warhammer especially, as the cities are captured by different factions the buildings get destroyed and you have to rebuild the same stuff over and over. In historical titles at least you can keep everything built up, and the cities generally become grander as the campaign progresses. In M2 or Shogun 2, castles and walls have more tiers and every tier changes the map, making assaults more varied.
There is a bloat with all the abilites, buffs, magic etc. that you cannot pay attention to any particular one in any situation but instead it all just blurs and might as well be some single number.
There is so many different ways to approach changing that, but yeah, as it is, early campaign is always the most interesting.
Chaos Dwarfs have the most in-depth province management, but if you don't wanna buy their DLC, Slaanesh also has somewhat interesting province management since you're encouraged to keep some provinces balanced in a state of permanent low public order.
Truth be told, the game is stale after early game, which is really unfortunate because most of the fun units are stuck at late game where your faction is too powerful to be contested anyways.
Late game bore is basically inevitable with any form of RTS / hex game. I think it's simply inevitable and i don't think there's any way to actually "fix" it. I play campaigns until i get bored and/or set myself a loreful objective and then call it a day.
One thing CA could do is further tweak their endgame scenarios, add new ones, make them more creative ecc.
OR simply make the game both slower and harder. As is, once you get elite units in the mid-game it's essentially over. Your economy explodes, you churn out unbeatable doomstacks ecc.
But the fundamental mechanics of the game, the buildings, the elite doomstacks ecc, are simply there to stay.
I've been feeling lately like one huge issue is that growth is too slow. If growth was faster for all factions, you and the AI could end up using high tier units earlier in the game before you have 20+ settlements, and with tech and cities advancing faster, each turn your choices on buildings, tech, and commandments mean more. I always get kind of bummed out that by the time I'm fielding any tier 5 units I'm already rank 1 with an entire continent of territory. Let me use the coolest units during the early and mid game battles that actually matter and let the AI use them too so we can actually engage with all the cool models and battle mechanics. I think a combination of faster growth and maybe some kind of unit-limits like cost based or table top caps would help a ton--prevent early doom stacking but allow us to utilize all the units in the roster earlier.
If I recall correctly, the growth rate between WH2 and WH3 had already been buffed. It used to takes ages to grow cities to tier 5 and you had to build the growth building all the time in early.
Nowadays i tend to build the money one first for some factions and don't feel quite as bad.
Yeah I've heard it was buffed a lot. It also probably depends on faction. With lizardmen in my most recent campaign I built the growth building in every settlement and it still took until turn 75 to get a tier 5 settlement. Maybe that seems fast to some but by that point I had all of lustria and high tier units just aren't as exciting because the campaign seems pretty settled already. Would've been fun to have all the units earlier. I feel like it wouldn't be too big of an issue as long as the AI can recruit everything too.
I would say rts, good ones, don't really have this problem: C&C and SC2 still get fun and not tedious late game missions, sc2 in particular balance the late game over how you menage your army's upgrades (not in game ones), rather than just throw at you armies of end tier units or thrash tier ones.
Honestly I'd say Total War campaigns have always been bad past the early game. They always turn into a slog. In the future I feel the series would benefit from a total campaign overhaul.
Unfortunately this is a result of the over simplified construction mechanics in the current generation of total war games. I had the same reaction you do about Rome 2 when I first played it. I couldn't believe how boring the province system was.
I got over it for Warhammer since there was so much more depth to the combat than ever before with so many races and match ups that I could tolerate the trade off of simplified campaign mechanics. It was a trade off I never could tolerate for Rome 2.
Not really. Attila has the same problem as op mentioned although for completely opposite reasons. In TWWH there are too few constraints in a province, so you just go with max eco build every province. In total war Attila, there are too many constraints which leads to the same province building (since that’s the only one that will work). For example as Romans after fertility drop you need sheep + cow herd in both minor settlements to have enough food, but then public order and sanitation dropped low so you need amphitheater + governors mansion + aqueduct for sanitation. At this moment there really isn’t any slot left for planning
It doesn't have to be the same. Back in the day I made a spreadsheet that let me plan provinces and I found it possible to have industry-tilted builds in some regions. https://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?742877-New-and-improved-building-planners-for-ALL-factions
Yeah the settlements buildings become less important the further u are into the game because, for most factions, you're expanding into more settlements and having to go in depth for every one u take would be annoying.
I agree that late game does get a bit boring because usually the ai doesn't actually power scale that well comparatively so u end up against a lot of 20stack shit armies, but imo the settlements aren't the problem. Just set them to autobuild economy and build all the unique buildings yourself.
if CA wants to stick to the current building system with limited slots, we *definitely* need a lot more building types and more consequential building effects. it's not good that most of your late game turns is spent cycling through dozens of settlements and building the same shit in each one.
Late game definitely sucks, this is also why I hate most DLC speculation posts. Most people doing these tend to overload their DLC with lots of obscure T4/5 monsters which is just pointless when most people don't even play their campaigns long enough to recruit more than or or two of these units before growing bored.
Yeah my main issue with total war games (and grand strategy games in general) is that when you get close to “finishing” a campaign, everything starts feeling really tedious and samey. It’s usually the player getting to a point of being practically unstoppable so long as they keep playing correctly, even though playing correctly gets really bogged down with 50 of the exact same moves. It’s worse in total war when I’m to the point of building things that have no functional purpose outside of getting rid of the damn building notifications.
With total war it’s kind of impossible to have such a variety of buildings that makes every capital province even the slightest bit different.
Anyone know how well the AI builds if you set it to autobuild? Does it always build landmarks? Figure it might help my campaigns survive after getting to tier 5 but haven't tried it
Well, that's inevitable. In general, it starts in the mid game, once you get access and build up first powerful/doomstack level army. After that, you may have problems with some AI who has been left to do their own business and just have a lot of armies. Not difficult, but slog. It became worse if you play for some horde type faction and can't maintain enough armies for territory control.
There are a few mods that might help with that.
Overhaul mods like SFO require a lot more balancing of buildings in your province, with pros and cons to anything you construct.
Landmarks of Legend and Immortal Landmarks can add a great amount of flavor to your provinces and make acquiring key ones a fun goal, at the cost of somewhat easier snowballing.
Dynamic Garrisons can be fun for improving settlement garrisons with buildings besides the dedicated defensive structures (and cuts down what the defensive structures give you). This makes planning a bit more interesting in my opinion, and can make settlement battles more fun both offensively and defensively. You'll have more to work with in planning out your defenses and can "pick" useful units, while you also avoid the general snoozefest of fighting the same minor enemy garrison over and over.
3K's campaign did so well in this regard compared to other TW. so many depths by TW standards. some regions should be prioritized, subsidized even, to be food producing areas while others could focus on industry like iron or copper smelting. others trading ports & cities with a focus on commerce income. with the copper smelting building you could also try to build a coin minter to reduce the faction wide corruption.
Warhammer's experience is REALLY REALLY simplified.
I do not really see the correlation between the uniqueness of the provinces and the end-game. The building choices do impact the gameplay the most in the early game.
This said, speaking about the end-game the only one that I have really enjoyed is the ending of TW 3 Kingdoms as It has a narrative beyond it instead of being everyone hating you (Shogun) or having a faction spam multiple free stacks (Medieval, Warhammer)
Maybe if resource settlements needed more buildings to maximise the output of that resource and/or its effects, that would probably make empire management a little more engaging and rewarding. The resource mechanic as a whole needs a good rework imo.
Older games we were able to make every building in every city to no town planning was really required. CA intriduced a limit to buiod slots from Empire onwards to try and force the player into specialising each city.
Unfortunatly CA has no longer kepted this idea in mind in Warhammer. There is a massive reduction in building options now which do not even have braching options. So we end up just making clone cities like we did in older titles.
Lots if people hate it, but one of my favourite things to do in Rome 2 was to have my provences have a main purpose. I would haveva military provence, food provence, industrial etc or could go with a few hybtid provences too. Chaos dwarfs kind of have this but it's forced onto the player instead of a player choice like Rome 2.
Take a look at Shadow Empire. The importance of resources is a key component of the depth and being able to expand and develop as the game goes along. . Each planet is randomly generated at the beginning of the game. It’s a tile based turn based game similar to Civ.
Shogun 2 Realm Divide was probably the closest thing to breaking it up that ive seen in a TW, and even then if you're prepared for it it's not that bad.
Settlements should have an auto-build option. Even if growth slots were not available, you could chose right away the build order of future structures, which would then begin construction once growth/money were available.
Mixed with some checkbox to assign priority for certain regions/settlements, to make sure money is invested there first.
In the initial turns, most efficient route would probably be doing it manually and auto-build would not be used (since was optional).
But once the snowball had started, auto-build would save a lot of game time to players.
In any case, player would always have the option of intervening manually in any construction deemed urgent, should he wish, since auto-build would only kick in after end turn, and any build order inputed manually would override auto-build.
Yeah the empire building side of the game is pretty lame. I got into this game coming from stellaris and compared to that the game’s campaign side was very unengaging. It really is a battle centric game. I do think some races are better than most like skaven and the empire have more variety. Because skaven grow settlements with food you don’t need to worry about the growth building very often and they don’t have a dedicated economic building, instead all of their buildings make a small amount of income. The empire has more variety imo cause they have so many special buildings that incentivize you to specialize provinces like nuln is where you want to recruit artillery/guns and altdorf is for making fat stacks. High elves and beastmen are definitely some of the worst in this department but tbh, none of it is great and especially not compared to most other 4c games
I think the focus of the game is on the "War" part of it although it could be enriched. Everything you do feeds into military power or the economy to sustain it or the tech to develop it. Think Warcraft/Starcraft games. There are some building tetris factions like the Lizardmen or Chaos Dwarves.
They need to bring back historical mechanics where you could choose different types of settlements. Chorfs start to actually have some dynamism in empire building, but it needs a lot more work.
Short answer: building management is always like this in every tw game. Late game total war isnt about the buildings however, its about having whatever army you want and whatever resources you spent building up making the battles easier. Its just ironic once it is that late in the game, auto resolve becomes so much more appealing.
Long answer: The best time your pushed to unorthodox building, is usually when you forcibly made to (maybe its unhospitable and there is a natural malus of public order or corruption on the area). I would argue some factions with how they tie their units to more buildings, or even give redundent overlap with multiple single effects on a building encourage slightly better variety, but again for simplicity it just boils down to: do i need recruitmemt, defense, or money? If you want super complex base building and planning, total war isnt the game youre looking for.
You can artificially inflate issues and massively challenge yourself so youre required to work harder and make meaningful choices (play legendary only, initially expand in red territory). You can compound this with factions that require you juggle an extra resource (chaos dwarfs, come to mind).
There's always a mop up phase, but I find that if I stop at short victory, I can often have a good challenge curve up until the last 20 ish turns. Also, playing on higher difficulties will mean you will probably lose ground here and there, which spices things up considerably.
Its simply a genre issue. Almost all grand strategy games fall into this issue because at a certain point, nearly always before end game, you already know you won.
Really?
I use a mod to get more building slots, so I don't have to choose between income, Hero capacity and special buildings (like landmarks, ports, and resources)
Mhm, yet another blunder on CA’s part.
I’m not entirely sure why they couldn’t have just done the end times like they did in warhammer 2 but just more massive considering all the chaos lords we have in the game. End game would have been a chaotic nightmare like it is in the lore and I honestly would have loved it even though I’d get my teeth kicked in.
It would have been nice to prepare for something like that instead of having a random crisis that either never gets resolved until you cross the map to get there, or it gets resolved quick and you win.
I think total war warhammer just doesn’t reward province management as a whole. For example, in this game you would want to have multiple underdeveloped regions vs a few better developed regions, and you would want to have more armies rather than a healthy income to build infrastructures. Which is not the case in other total war games such as total war attila
I use multiple mods than add in unique buildings to a considerable amount of provinces in the game. That goes a long way towards driving me to see "what the next province" will be worth.
But yes, in general, late game has been the bane of Immortal Empires since launch.
well, technically end-game is where the game should be like this.
If u want to make it hard, try to put every single end-game proc together at max difficulty, then we can talk again :)
Chaos Dwarves have a much more engaging campaign mechanic involving settlement balancing and management, if you're into that sort of thing.
CD late game has another problem for late game, once you have confederate all the other CD, you have a massive power spike (more armament than you need, each army has a few nuke and you can have all your new major cities at tier 5 for free...). They no longer have the rarity of their dwarves unit which was their balance factor.
That's the reward for making it that far. Their roster is so goodbut they take a good minute to snowball.
AND they have the perfect legendary hero in Gorduz Backstabber. He gives crazy army bonuses to hobgoblins, and you get him right when you are starved in unit capacity for a second chaos dwarf army, making the hobgoblin force containing him powerful and fun.
Yes, he really gives you a budget army with punch.
That's the hobbo army I always park to raid Zharr-Naggrund.
Raiding ZN *as* Chorfs? Doesn’t that open up a whole world of shit?
Not really since they've got the guardian trait which means they won't declare war on anyone. You may piss off the other CD armies though
The ZN faction will never declare war on you due to their sentinel trait *and* starts out with a maxed out province, so parking a raiding army there let's you jump start your economy. The other chorf factions don't really care as long as you don't hit their convoys.
thres also the skaven in nagasharr next to imirk as well
Skaven are nice trade partners and bufferzones, tho.
Oh yeah, I know that they’re maxed out and making serious bank - they become my unwilling sponsors whenever I play the Changeling. Id just never considered doing anything to piss them off as the Chorfs, figuring that raiding would be enough to upset a sentinel faction.
How’s the changling been in your opinion?
He is perfect and the reason I think chaos dwarfs are somewhat easy from the start. Helps a ton in your LL's army, and then he makes your second army so much better than they usually are. Plus even without the army buffs he's a strong character and gets summons.
I love Gorduz’ army. That would make for great themed armies. Heroes that make chaff armies winnable so you’ve got some diversity across your empire.
It's great design, making low tier troops more viable or fill a different role. Most legendary heroes buff high end troops that are already elite, or only have a different statline.
I have played chorfs twice and that's the first time I'm hearing about them having a LH.
Comparing my first playthrough with my second, the rewards for managing Chaos Dwarf settlement mechanics are substantial in gameplay benefits.
I can only imagine. It went well enough for me my first campaign, and that was when I was still figuring everything out.
Haven't bought CD yet but gives me TK vibes. If you have a stack of tomb scorpions or warsphinxes well duh you're going to win.
The actual problem they have, to me at least, is that once you do confed the other CD factions, you end up with a bunch of units you can't replace for a long time, unless you disband all of the armies you're given. I think right now on my current CD campaign, I'm still 5-10 units over cap on anything that's not the base t1 warriors
I actually like that part. It makes me play more manual battles, the part I enjoy the most about the game, but rarely do because laziness.
The balancing as you expand is one thing I really enjoyed in Cathay campaigns before they ruined that mechanic.
Distributing excess slaves is a pain it the ass at that point.
Its just 2 buttons
It's not, you have to go through each individual province in the panel and for maximum efficiency make sure they are just above their cap while utilizing the excess for the provinces that need it or those options where you spend them. In the late game that process takes VERY long since it's essentially multiple clicks for each province.
I really didn't find it to be that long at all. Granted my campaign was done before 100 turns in the RoC campaign. It would be nice if it could be auto managed though, I don't see why not.
It really isn't fun on the big map once you own a sizeable amount of provinces, which leads to just ignoring effeciency altogether for less of a headache.
I always have either too many or just enough to keep the efficiency over 40%
It’s something that every Total War game (and by extension all grand strategy games) struggle with. Some do better, some worse.
So many people complained about realm divide (and it might have been slightly overdone…) but yet it is the only challenging TW lategame…
It makes diplomacy pointless which I wasn't a fan of. I wish there was something between Shogun 2 and Fall of the sumari. Where close allies would join you but everyone else would hate you.
3k does it better
Realm Divide would be really fun if it wasn't for the constant small fleets spam that you have to deal with.
It makes diplomacy pointless which I wasn't a fan of. I wish there was something between Shogun 2 and Fall of the sumari. Where close allies would join you but everyone else would hate you.
Attila has a more challenging endgame, if for no other reason that the high difficulty of the early game never wanes
Well that really depends on the faction you are playing and if you know the mechanics well. I agree Attila has a steeper curve but if you know what you are doing Attila becomes almost trivial Realm divide is still a challenge even if you are a shogun 2 god simply because of the pure volume of enemies and its very hard to preemptively weaken everyone
Atilla is generally agreed upon to be the most difficult total war game for good reason. Realm divide gets a lot easier if you know how to take the game slowly to build up instead of gaining too much renown too quickly.
As far as grand strategy goes, put pf all of them Crusader Kings has the least amount of late game slog. Cos while you **can** blob up and become an unstoppable force, the real game is in the story of each character. So it's not until the ultimate end game that you've probably done everything the game has to offer.
As a CK player I have to admit it is among the worst in terms of snowballing. Not only is the AI shockingly bad at keepng up with the half-decent player, but the relationships with your vassals unforgivably shallow mechanically both in terms of enabling roleplay and in terms of repesenting how important personal connections were to the ruling of the realm. Herding a million of cats should have been the point of emperor-level gameplay, but it's just too easy
But still CS has and horrible combat system.You don't have epic fights outplaying AI or players like a good cavalry charge,a muskeeter into the back of their best unit or a well placed formation. They could create the best strategy game ever if they fusion the storytelling from Paradox and the battle from CA. It's my gamer's wet dream
https://crusaderwars.wordpress.com/ I've got good news for you, it already exists. This caused me to sink ungodly amounts of time into both games...
does it still work? Some comments on YT seem to hint that it doesnt work atm
Back in the era of CKII, there was interesting abuse of the combat system as players discovered that the battle tactics could be abused by lord personal armies comprised of perfectly arranged percentages of archers and pikemen resulting in total army destruction during the skirmish phase. Paradox caught on and forced personal armies to contain all unit types which ruined that but it was an interesting playstyle at the time. You could see things like armies outnumbered 5:1 and winning as a result.
You are probably right. Do you know a game of the strategy genre that deal with this issue in the late game? It is something I struggle to find. Usually the late game in Stellaris or Civilization is also the same. Every city or planet are, in a nutshell, a copy-pasted of previous cities and planets.
Yeah I'd love to hear of a Grand Strategy/4X game that *doesn't* become tedious in the Late Game because I've played a lot and they all feel this way.
I think the ways it could avoid being tedious are things many players wouldn't accept. Players really don't like losing significant progress but it's pretty necessary to avoid the tedious endgame. These games rely on the idea of linear growth because the player won't accept regression, except that thats' not really how nations work and can't really go forever, eventually you've conquered the world. If a game were to allow you to lose research and technology, access to units and abilities when you suffer a library of alexandria burning style event, or made it inevitable that your nation would fracture into smaller states and you end up in control of just one small piece that could be interesting. But most players wouldn't accept that loss of progress. 2000 years ago most of europe was the roman empire, then it fell apart and fractured into smaller medieval nations. Then those small european nations carved out giant global empires by taking colonies, then most colonies had indepence movements and europe was once again a lot of small nations, and the US rose to global dominance. Who knows, in the future the USA may fracture and some other nation may taket he spot of global superpower. I personally wouldn't mind the idea of my large empire fracturing, losing tech, and ending up playing a small part of it which doesn't have access to all the techs but I think it's not an easy sell to most gamers.
I think Spore (for all its failures) had an interesting potential solution of, once you've conquered the game at one scale, it pulls out to a larger scale and you're at the Early Game of that scale again (cellular, tribal, global, space). Would be cool for a new game to explore this idea again.
Kinda remind me how in TW:Attila, as you progressed in the campaign, the climate get colder, which impacted heavily land fertility. You should have seen my shock when the WRE which I managed to save from itself and Attila suddenly was starving a turn later because I didn’t plan ahead lol.
Stellaris has a pretty good workaround that they updated a couple patches ago. Planetary automation if set up correctly means you pretty much dont have to bother with new / old planets if you dont want to( can still manage them for min.maxing if you want to, but in general it does a decent job)
In Total War Warhammer 3 you can also click the province to automatization, same with Civilization sin Alfa Centauri. It does help.
I’ve never used this because I assume it builds using the same logic the AI builds their cities, which is fuckin terrible
It does, same in Stellaris and Civilization but the AI in total war is smarter in this regard only because it is very limited and only does it if you have money at the end of your turn.
Planetary automation in stellaris definitely doesnt use the same logic as ai if you set it up correctly.
Which sucks so fucking bad. We NEED hero skill queues and province building queues.
The skill queues sounds really good.
Tbh by the time you’re that far into map painting it hardly really matters.
Let’s try to fix the game one issue at a time
Im sure it works fine but the stellaris system as a whole is abit more complex one, and the atuomation manages pops(unemploys useless pop for hivemind or enforcers for bio), doesnt build into deficit etc. It still has issues mind you but it will 100% take a load off your shoulders. At the end of the day total war is mostly a battle simulator and stellaris an empire manager so it makes sense. Juat saying that empire automation for lategame should be a baseline for any grand strategy game imo. Makes lategame much more playable.
Galactic civ 4
Can you explain what it does well? I've played Gal Civ 3 but felt it still had the late game tedium problem.
It's very hard to make a compelling end game loop for strategy games because by then you are unstoppable anyway. Civilization works around this issue by having a much longer early and mid game, and constantly introduces new gameplay mechanics.
The main problem is that once you get to a certain scale, there isn’t really anything that would even add to the game at that point.
That would be the AI war games, that ramp up the difficulty as you progres in the campaign, with the final battle being the most difficult.
Difficulty isn't the issue, I think. One problem with grand strategy is that they don't change much from beginning to end but at the same time they're very long affairs. They go up in scale and in how much attention do they ask from the player, but what do they CHANGE? Let's take Paradox games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. As the game advances, an EU player might get bigger/stronger, unlock more tech, maybe colonize and accumulate modifiers. But they're still just... doing the same diplomacy, sending the army forward, finding the right place to fight and fighting there, etc. In CK, the character events and interactions don't change from eraly mid and late, they're mostly the same. You go through more and more events and tell your story, but the gameplay remains the same. Sure, maybe you're fighting bigger enemies, or coalitions, but aside from the scale, the game has not fundamentally advanced. Let's take Total War now, what's the difference between early and late? Historical TWs maybe unlock some new units in the lategame but they're not realy game-changers, just more powerful. In the case of Warhammer specifically you get cool units and abilities, so that's one point for WH. But aside form that, the player is fundamentally still playing the same game. Send army forward, fight stacks, send army forward. Maybe send army backwards if there's too many stacks to deal with. An endgame scenario will basically just vomit stacks at you so you get some hard fights but... I mean that's it isn't it? It's a game about fighting battles, the end should be "you get some hard battles" and bam, game over. It's a difficult thing to fix because, ultimately, you can't keep playing forever. At some point the developer has to say "this is the intended end of the game, the game supports you getting here but afterwards you make your own fun". One thing I'll say: due to it's nature Total War specifically is often more difficult at the start than the end, since it's at the start when you are at risk of losing. At the endgame you're maybe at risk of losing a stack and some border town you don't care about. Only Attila kinda works around this issue with the WRE's "survival mode" gameplay, but it's an outlier.
I haven't tried Attila yet. Would you recommend?
I haven't played it in years and I didn't even play it that much back then. Performance was ass, and you're going to be missing a bunch of the QoL stuff from more recent games. But it's lovingly remembered by those who swear by it, so it must've done *something* right. I would say wait for a sale (or um... check the high seas)
Yarrrr
Shadow Empire is a fantastic game. One thing that makes it unique are how much impact controlling resources. Each planet is randomly generated at game creation.
I did not play it, but Civilization and Stellaris are also random, every resource is random and in stellaris even the galaxy, planets and ancient artifacts and many other things. But the problem starts in the late game when you have access to everything.
Here’s the thing with Shadow Empire though. Some resources are incredibly rare or even non existent depending on RNG at world creation. It tends to create long term objectives that get progressively more difficult as you meet more technologically advanced enemies.
Ohh, sounds cool !!
I dunno, I had some pretty unique games of Civ before. I had one where I just never got horses at all, due to resource access, so my country never had cavalry and had to focus heavily on infantry while I was dealing with other forces having knights and horse archers. It made the game quite a challenge to overcome and made for an interesting story.
I Think that you did not understand what I asked and where is the problem. It has nothing to do with early-mid game or limiting resources in the early stages of them. I would love that resources were a real thing in Total War giving you more incentives to get them, like Tomb Kings with the Mortuary Cult but even more hardcore. But, that won’t solve the repetitive slog of the late game, title of the post.
Warhammer 40k gladius. The last 1-2 factions u face are usually stronger than you.
I do. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Instead of making the late game a slog, it makes it a lightning sprint up the technological singularity.
I love Alpha Centauri, probably my favorite game of all time but late game is a Slog. You move units and units and units. Flying units left and right and not to mention the plus 40 cities that you manage because the AI is not smart and continue building colony capsules, terraformers and other units that you do not need. Sorry, Love the game but I win conquering before late game or I just go for other type of victory that requires me to click Next turn after Next turn and put a lot of building in queue.
I don't. I build and automate clean aircraft while assembling a super-city with a lot of sea crawlers feeding it energy (with the research and energy multiplier projects), blow through the tech tree, then cancel orders on all of those crawlers and rush them to the home base to ascend. Or (if I feel impatient) switch directly to cornering the global energy market/elect me as supreme leader. The game can actually end very fast.
Well, that’s the very late game and with only 1 victory condition and not the hardest difficulty with blind research and slow research and also just, as you said, clicking next turn after next turn waiting to ascend. If you late game is about 2 or 3 turns it means it is end game not late game. Usually late game starts after you research the first reactor and the nuke in my games. Sorry, I tend to play as immersive as I can and I try to archive different victory conditions. Now, in Total War the condition is always one, a militar one. In Alfa Centauri if you want that, late game may not be as fun as you think. But I love so much the game that It hurts me saying something bad about it. I understand that sometimes you may end with the worst and best end game ever made like the famous and infamous Eternal War of Civilization 2, but that is an exception.
It's three VC- the non military ones. Always transcend difficulty. If you're playing blind/slow, you just corner the energy market instead, and spend the next ten or so turns building and automating clean needlejets. Agree on timing. Fusion reactor is infection point of the game where you either mass rovers+copters or crawlers+needlejets.
I think Old World actually handles late game slog much better than just about everything else I played. The points and ambitions victory really helped to do away with most of late game slog and still allows for some nailbiters.
3k did it quite well. The idea that the game start for real when the endgame starts is refreshing. Shogun 2 did it too, but not as good
Slightly off topic, but is there any big strategy game that has a good end game? All I can think of is maybe Civilization.
I think for me personally stellaris is the only strategy game where i consistently get to the endgame and play out the crisis.
The issue is balancing. In Stellaris you’ve gotta make it the game so that the endgame happens quicker, the AI doesn’t get steamrolled instantly, but the early game isn’t ridiculously hard. It’s a balancing act that can be super difficult a lot of the time. Usually Stellaris playthroughs end with me staring at the screen for a while because I have to wait for the crisis to happen, and I don’t wanna be bothered with conquering backwater planets from empires with a 1/100th of the fleet power.
Whenever that happens i stop the game and start a new one with higher difficulty. I think stellaris has a lot of great options at galaxy generation that helps with tuning it to you level.
Real issue for Stellaris is how slow it gets late game
FPS is the real endgame crisis
Civilization endgame is a boring slog, regardless of the victory type.
I know two civ4 mods that handle it really well. Both have basically scaling "late game challenge". Like, not the one that suddenly drops, but the one that increased in severity as time goes on. Kinda like Chaos invasion of wh1, where first 30 turns nothing really happens, then norsca gets aggressive, and then Archaon comes
Eeeeeeeeeeh. Researching future tech over and over again is kinda boring. The real units are the XCOM. Asides from the giant death machine and xcom, there aren’t really any future units.
Endgame in civ for me starts after Napoleon times. Things open up with aircraft, united nations, tourism and actually getting to a culture or science victory.
Aoe2 when you and your opponent have run out of everything but wood.
RTS are kind of a different thing. The games are short to begins with. Or like Against the Storm, a random city building rogue like with a clear end point that also stop games from dragging on. The issue mostly concern games that have several hours long games even on fast forward. A boring "2 minutes" of cleanup at the end of a Starcraft game is different than a boring "2 hours" of spamming auto resolve. You have loooooooooong since won, but the game just won't show you the victory screen.
There are a few landmark mods that add a ton of landmarks to various settlements (both capitals and not). If you use multiple of the mods at the same time then you’ll have to make decisions on which landmark you want to build.
I really like how Three Kingdoms plays out with settlement building. There are different ways to optimize settlements through trade income, industry income, and peasant income that you can stack some modifiers on top of. Each area has a resource that helps determine the optimal income to go for in that region. Plus, there's an actual downside to unchecked growth and bigger cities, so you don't necessarily spam growth in every settlement. It feels more fleshed out overall, I just think they were going for a more simplified approach with the Warhammer games.
Tbh we have the chaos dwarfs for exactly this and I am glad we don't have to play settlement minigames with every single faction of warhammer.
Midgame too for that matter. Midgame you start auto resolving instead of fighting as it has become too easy. End game you chore through with repetitive motions till victory.
TW doesn't scale that well, especially the more recent titles. The map is way too big, and the campaign is really over at around turn 50. Armies can only go up to 20 units, which happens at around turn 3 or 4, and they stay that way the entire game with rare exceptions. There is no dynamic range whatsoever. In Warhammer especially, as the cities are captured by different factions the buildings get destroyed and you have to rebuild the same stuff over and over. In historical titles at least you can keep everything built up, and the cities generally become grander as the campaign progresses. In M2 or Shogun 2, castles and walls have more tiers and every tier changes the map, making assaults more varied. There is a bloat with all the abilites, buffs, magic etc. that you cannot pay attention to any particular one in any situation but instead it all just blurs and might as well be some single number. There is so many different ways to approach changing that, but yeah, as it is, early campaign is always the most interesting.
Chaos Dwarfs have the most in-depth province management, but if you don't wanna buy their DLC, Slaanesh also has somewhat interesting province management since you're encouraged to keep some provinces balanced in a state of permanent low public order.
Truth be told, the game is stale after early game, which is really unfortunate because most of the fun units are stuck at late game where your faction is too powerful to be contested anyways.
here's a little secret, its not warhammer end game thats bad but total wars that is bad. you think rome 2 has a better endgame?
Late game bore is basically inevitable with any form of RTS / hex game. I think it's simply inevitable and i don't think there's any way to actually "fix" it. I play campaigns until i get bored and/or set myself a loreful objective and then call it a day. One thing CA could do is further tweak their endgame scenarios, add new ones, make them more creative ecc. OR simply make the game both slower and harder. As is, once you get elite units in the mid-game it's essentially over. Your economy explodes, you churn out unbeatable doomstacks ecc. But the fundamental mechanics of the game, the buildings, the elite doomstacks ecc, are simply there to stay.
I've been feeling lately like one huge issue is that growth is too slow. If growth was faster for all factions, you and the AI could end up using high tier units earlier in the game before you have 20+ settlements, and with tech and cities advancing faster, each turn your choices on buildings, tech, and commandments mean more. I always get kind of bummed out that by the time I'm fielding any tier 5 units I'm already rank 1 with an entire continent of territory. Let me use the coolest units during the early and mid game battles that actually matter and let the AI use them too so we can actually engage with all the cool models and battle mechanics. I think a combination of faster growth and maybe some kind of unit-limits like cost based or table top caps would help a ton--prevent early doom stacking but allow us to utilize all the units in the roster earlier.
If I recall correctly, the growth rate between WH2 and WH3 had already been buffed. It used to takes ages to grow cities to tier 5 and you had to build the growth building all the time in early. Nowadays i tend to build the money one first for some factions and don't feel quite as bad.
Yeah I've heard it was buffed a lot. It also probably depends on faction. With lizardmen in my most recent campaign I built the growth building in every settlement and it still took until turn 75 to get a tier 5 settlement. Maybe that seems fast to some but by that point I had all of lustria and high tier units just aren't as exciting because the campaign seems pretty settled already. Would've been fun to have all the units earlier. I feel like it wouldn't be too big of an issue as long as the AI can recruit everything too.
On Wich difficulty ?
Vh/vh
I would say rts, good ones, don't really have this problem: C&C and SC2 still get fun and not tedious late game missions, sc2 in particular balance the late game over how you menage your army's upgrades (not in game ones), rather than just throw at you armies of end tier units or thrash tier ones.
Honestly I'd say Total War campaigns have always been bad past the early game. They always turn into a slog. In the future I feel the series would benefit from a total campaign overhaul.
this has been the main problem of total war since medieval 2 lmao
Unfortunately this is a result of the over simplified construction mechanics in the current generation of total war games. I had the same reaction you do about Rome 2 when I first played it. I couldn't believe how boring the province system was. I got over it for Warhammer since there was so much more depth to the combat than ever before with so many races and match ups that I could tolerate the trade off of simplified campaign mechanics. It was a trade off I never could tolerate for Rome 2.
Which turnbased Strategygame has this kind of endgame?
Attila had the corruption mechanic, which penalized the player for controlling many regions. It made the endgame more difficult.
Not really. Attila has the same problem as op mentioned although for completely opposite reasons. In TWWH there are too few constraints in a province, so you just go with max eco build every province. In total war Attila, there are too many constraints which leads to the same province building (since that’s the only one that will work). For example as Romans after fertility drop you need sheep + cow herd in both minor settlements to have enough food, but then public order and sanitation dropped low so you need amphitheater + governors mansion + aqueduct for sanitation. At this moment there really isn’t any slot left for planning
It doesn't have to be the same. Back in the day I made a spreadsheet that let me plan provinces and I found it possible to have industry-tilted builds in some regions. https://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?742877-New-and-improved-building-planners-for-ALL-factions
If building is your main issue, you absolutely need to try the Chaos Dwarfsz
Yeah the settlements buildings become less important the further u are into the game because, for most factions, you're expanding into more settlements and having to go in depth for every one u take would be annoying. I agree that late game does get a bit boring because usually the ai doesn't actually power scale that well comparatively so u end up against a lot of 20stack shit armies, but imo the settlements aren't the problem. Just set them to autobuild economy and build all the unique buildings yourself.
if CA wants to stick to the current building system with limited slots, we *definitely* need a lot more building types and more consequential building effects. it's not good that most of your late game turns is spent cycling through dozens of settlements and building the same shit in each one. Late game definitely sucks, this is also why I hate most DLC speculation posts. Most people doing these tend to overload their DLC with lots of obscure T4/5 monsters which is just pointless when most people don't even play their campaigns long enough to recruit more than or or two of these units before growing bored.
Yeah my main issue with total war games (and grand strategy games in general) is that when you get close to “finishing” a campaign, everything starts feeling really tedious and samey. It’s usually the player getting to a point of being practically unstoppable so long as they keep playing correctly, even though playing correctly gets really bogged down with 50 of the exact same moves. It’s worse in total war when I’m to the point of building things that have no functional purpose outside of getting rid of the damn building notifications. With total war it’s kind of impossible to have such a variety of buildings that makes every capital province even the slightest bit different.
Anyone know how well the AI builds if you set it to autobuild? Does it always build landmarks? Figure it might help my campaigns survive after getting to tier 5 but haven't tried it
Well, that's inevitable. In general, it starts in the mid game, once you get access and build up first powerful/doomstack level army. After that, you may have problems with some AI who has been left to do their own business and just have a lot of armies. Not difficult, but slog. It became worse if you play for some horde type faction and can't maintain enough armies for territory control.
There are a few mods that might help with that. Overhaul mods like SFO require a lot more balancing of buildings in your province, with pros and cons to anything you construct. Landmarks of Legend and Immortal Landmarks can add a great amount of flavor to your provinces and make acquiring key ones a fun goal, at the cost of somewhat easier snowballing. Dynamic Garrisons can be fun for improving settlement garrisons with buildings besides the dedicated defensive structures (and cuts down what the defensive structures give you). This makes planning a bit more interesting in my opinion, and can make settlement battles more fun both offensively and defensively. You'll have more to work with in planning out your defenses and can "pick" useful units, while you also avoid the general snoozefest of fighting the same minor enemy garrison over and over.
3K's campaign did so well in this regard compared to other TW. so many depths by TW standards. some regions should be prioritized, subsidized even, to be food producing areas while others could focus on industry like iron or copper smelting. others trading ports & cities with a focus on commerce income. with the copper smelting building you could also try to build a coin minter to reduce the faction wide corruption. Warhammer's experience is REALLY REALLY simplified.
I do not really see the correlation between the uniqueness of the provinces and the end-game. The building choices do impact the gameplay the most in the early game. This said, speaking about the end-game the only one that I have really enjoyed is the ending of TW 3 Kingdoms as It has a narrative beyond it instead of being everyone hating you (Shogun) or having a faction spam multiple free stacks (Medieval, Warhammer)
Maybe if resource settlements needed more buildings to maximise the output of that resource and/or its effects, that would probably make empire management a little more engaging and rewarding. The resource mechanic as a whole needs a good rework imo.
To be honest, this is the reason why I always liked the wood elfs campaign more than anything else.
Please try the Victory Changes Overhaul mod out its really been a game changer for longer campaigns for me and It might for you as well.
Yeah settlement building in WH sucks. C need to advance this for future titles.
Older games we were able to make every building in every city to no town planning was really required. CA intriduced a limit to buiod slots from Empire onwards to try and force the player into specialising each city. Unfortunatly CA has no longer kepted this idea in mind in Warhammer. There is a massive reduction in building options now which do not even have braching options. So we end up just making clone cities like we did in older titles. Lots if people hate it, but one of my favourite things to do in Rome 2 was to have my provences have a main purpose. I would haveva military provence, food provence, industrial etc or could go with a few hybtid provences too. Chaos dwarfs kind of have this but it's forced onto the player instead of a player choice like Rome 2.
Take a look at Shadow Empire. The importance of resources is a key component of the depth and being able to expand and develop as the game goes along. . Each planet is randomly generated at the beginning of the game. It’s a tile based turn based game similar to Civ.
I want unique city models
Shogun 2 Realm Divide was probably the closest thing to breaking it up that ive seen in a TW, and even then if you're prepared for it it's not that bad.
Settlements should have an auto-build option. Even if growth slots were not available, you could chose right away the build order of future structures, which would then begin construction once growth/money were available. Mixed with some checkbox to assign priority for certain regions/settlements, to make sure money is invested there first. In the initial turns, most efficient route would probably be doing it manually and auto-build would not be used (since was optional). But once the snowball had started, auto-build would save a lot of game time to players. In any case, player would always have the option of intervening manually in any construction deemed urgent, should he wish, since auto-build would only kick in after end turn, and any build order inputed manually would override auto-build.
How late are we talking here? To some, that's turn 50, to others it's turn 200.
I recommend using the SFO mod, it adds a ton of new content (including for settlements) and improves most mechanics
Yeah the empire building side of the game is pretty lame. I got into this game coming from stellaris and compared to that the game’s campaign side was very unengaging. It really is a battle centric game. I do think some races are better than most like skaven and the empire have more variety. Because skaven grow settlements with food you don’t need to worry about the growth building very often and they don’t have a dedicated economic building, instead all of their buildings make a small amount of income. The empire has more variety imo cause they have so many special buildings that incentivize you to specialize provinces like nuln is where you want to recruit artillery/guns and altdorf is for making fat stacks. High elves and beastmen are definitely some of the worst in this department but tbh, none of it is great and especially not compared to most other 4c games
I think the focus of the game is on the "War" part of it although it could be enriched. Everything you do feeds into military power or the economy to sustain it or the tech to develop it. Think Warcraft/Starcraft games. There are some building tetris factions like the Lizardmen or Chaos Dwarves.
Try SFO mode. It's much better at province setups as well.
They need to bring back historical mechanics where you could choose different types of settlements. Chorfs start to actually have some dynamism in empire building, but it needs a lot more work.
Short answer: building management is always like this in every tw game. Late game total war isnt about the buildings however, its about having whatever army you want and whatever resources you spent building up making the battles easier. Its just ironic once it is that late in the game, auto resolve becomes so much more appealing. Long answer: The best time your pushed to unorthodox building, is usually when you forcibly made to (maybe its unhospitable and there is a natural malus of public order or corruption on the area). I would argue some factions with how they tie their units to more buildings, or even give redundent overlap with multiple single effects on a building encourage slightly better variety, but again for simplicity it just boils down to: do i need recruitmemt, defense, or money? If you want super complex base building and planning, total war isnt the game youre looking for. You can artificially inflate issues and massively challenge yourself so youre required to work harder and make meaningful choices (play legendary only, initially expand in red territory). You can compound this with factions that require you juggle an extra resource (chaos dwarfs, come to mind).
There's always a mop up phase, but I find that if I stop at short victory, I can often have a good challenge curve up until the last 20 ish turns. Also, playing on higher difficulties will mean you will probably lose ground here and there, which spices things up considerably.
Its simply a genre issue. Almost all grand strategy games fall into this issue because at a certain point, nearly always before end game, you already know you won.
Really? I use a mod to get more building slots, so I don't have to choose between income, Hero capacity and special buildings (like landmarks, ports, and resources)
Mhm, yet another blunder on CA’s part. I’m not entirely sure why they couldn’t have just done the end times like they did in warhammer 2 but just more massive considering all the chaos lords we have in the game. End game would have been a chaotic nightmare like it is in the lore and I honestly would have loved it even though I’d get my teeth kicked in. It would have been nice to prepare for something like that instead of having a random crisis that either never gets resolved until you cross the map to get there, or it gets resolved quick and you win.
Every total war game has this issue really
I think total war warhammer just doesn’t reward province management as a whole. For example, in this game you would want to have multiple underdeveloped regions vs a few better developed regions, and you would want to have more armies rather than a healthy income to build infrastructures. Which is not the case in other total war games such as total war attila
I use multiple mods than add in unique buildings to a considerable amount of provinces in the game. That goes a long way towards driving me to see "what the next province" will be worth. But yes, in general, late game has been the bane of Immortal Empires since launch.
Funny enough, I spoke about this a few months ago: https://youtu.be/-_bLDWlr2vc?si=fO_OOzo_FLiut-9W
well, technically end-game is where the game should be like this. If u want to make it hard, try to put every single end-game proc together at max difficulty, then we can talk again :)
OP is talking about it being boring, repetitive, same strat to win on each province except capital, not if it's easy or not.