I ended up winning a short victory in my first Empire campaign at turn 32. I managed to beat back Grom in a close minor settlement defense battle where I was outnumbered almost 1:3. The new siege tools are quite effective, although you rarely get to fight siege defense. The AI seems to be quite slow to rebuild it’s armies with a lot of the bonuses removed at higher difficulties. Grom didn’t put up any fight after I beat his initial invasion.
It doesn’t seem like the AI can put up any real fight from here, so I’m probably not going to continue the campaign. I’m strength rank 1 with 32 settlements, while the strongest AI factions are around 5-6 settlements. It was fun though, and stabilizing in the beginning was pretty tough.
There’s still quite a lot more jank and bugs than there was in Total War Warhammer 2, but Immortal Empires is at least a fun experience now. I might wait for some patches before I play more, though.
Have you tried any end-game scenarios? CA put them in there precisely for people like you who have an unbeatable army and little left to do but go through the motions.
It’s not as good as a real faction that rivals you but it might add some longevity to your game.
So I pushed Vlad back to his capitol easily enough, but the vamps on home turf can raise new stacks insanely fast, and the capitol has 20 garrison units of its own. Franz got stackwiped on my first attempt, but I’d just started confederating (Hochland and Talabecland so far) so I had some backup armies to send over. I’m keeping Vlad locked down but I haven’t been able to take him out yet.
I’ve allied Louen and Katarin, and I have an army in southern Bretonnia fighting Durthu (who declared on me out of nowhere) and orcs. I’m also raiding the Fay Enchantress’s lands - she’s allied to the Wood Elves, and if I can get her to declare war on me I can take her lands and give them to Louen.
Oh, and Be’Lakor and some Norscans are invading from the North, but Gotrek and Felix are here to take care of that.
Despite getting bogged down in Sylvania the campaign is going smoothly - a bit too smoothly, which is making my alt-itis act up. I hear Mazdamundi calling my name…
I love Vilitch. I just watched Kostaltyn (who ran away with like 8 units after I smashed his army) attack a minor Norscan vassal’s settlement and sack it. My vassal then recruited a single lord, who would undoubtedly lose to Kostaltyn again next turn.
Enter Spawnify. Suddenly that lone lord (plus two marauders he recruited over the end turn) has 3 Chaos Spawn of Tzeentch backing him up as he evicts Kostaltyn from Norsca.
I might have to choose earlier end-game scenario settings for my next campaign. I underestimated how fast you could snowball with the reduced supply line penalties for extra armies. If I continued, I’d spend most of my time fighting against enemies that can’t put up much of a fight anymore. But I’m looking forward to seeing some end-game threats in future campaigns.
I think it’s also likely they’ll do some difficulty setting adjustments and AI behavior adjustments in future patches which will likely help.
My understanding is that at the moment the harder the difficulty setting the smarter the AI plays, avoiding unfavorable fights; which ironically makes the Normal AI a bit overaggressive (leading to a lucky faction becoming very strong) while harder AI is overly cautious and thus makes the game easy. So mods tuning the AI may be a good idea.
Thanks! The PC is actually an off the shelf prebuild that I got about 7 years ago, with a gtx1070 I upgraded to about a year after getting it (when WH1 came out actually). I’m more than happy with it, but it’s not a top of the line gaming machine or anything like that.
Oxyotl is a lord I haven’t actually done a run with before, beyond firing him up to test things (I played a bunch of Taurox, not much Oxyotl). So this is my first exposure to his teleportation mechanic, and DANG, it feels great. I see why people call his campaign XCOM-like, and with the new Daemons and revamped Warriors of Chaos there are lots of opponents to face.
So far I nuked down a few herd stones and Norscan settlements, which was fairly unremarkable, but I also had a really fun mission to kill N’Kari’s army, which was besieging Chrace at the time. I teleported in and managed to wipe his stack before the reinforcing elves could arrive to help.
He and Archaon can confederate the other Warriors of Chaos by capturing their last settlement, and he starts with a portal by Mordheim (ruined city in the Empire) and Southern Chaos Wastes
Apparently in the prior patch difficulty was borked, in that campaign AI got bonuses based on your BATTLE difficulty rather than campaign. Given that I played all my campaigns on VH/N campaign/battle difficulty - that’s a big swing. Soooo I will probably have to restart all my runs to get the desired challenge setting…
So the patch included the Assembly Kit, a powerful modding tool, which means that I’ve been able to mod my game to hell and back. Various mods were still updating, and circumstances haven’t allowed me to play much, so it’s only now that I’ve started a moderately modded (37 or so mods) Archaon campaign, which I’m enjoying so far.
Had an interesting bug this weekend in a multiplayer game; we were playing a two-player campaign, both as Norsca (me as Throgg, he was Wulfrik); He was being attacked on multiple fronts (Sigvald, and for some reason the Alghol decided to sail across the sea to mess with him). Realizing he couldn’t deal with both at the same time, he pulled his armies down from one city to fight off one of his attacks; but during the AI turns, when Sigvald attacked his settlement and won (it was undefended aside from a small garrison)… it removed his 15-unit army that was several provinces away, and stated that the army commander was defeated in battle. We reloaded, and the SAME outcome. We reloaded again; before ending turn, he transferred all of the units that he could from the army that kept being deleted into a second army; during the AI turn, when Sigvald took the settlement, the original army again disappeared, PLUS ALL of the units that were transferred to the second army (but leaving behind the second army commander and the newly-recruited RoR)! I can’t even wrap my head around how that is even possible…
ETA: In case this is unclear, Sigvald was attacking an undefended settlement up on the northern shores of Norsca; the army that kept being “defeated” was on the west end of Norsca, at Troll Fjord.
For those interested it seems that Immortal Empires has dropped for Total War: Warhammer III.
Immortal Empires is the culmination of the entire Total War: WARHAMMER series. Combining the campaign maps, races, and factions from all three games* into a single, epic sandbox campaign.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting this and had kinda forgotten about it. I have not tried this yet but I think my weekend is booked now.
Also:
Of note, I believe this is available and free to any who own Warhammer III. No need to own Warhammer I & II. You still have to buy the DLC though if you want access to a particular race but no need for the base game (except Warhammer III of course).
