Don’t know if anyone is really interested in this thread, but thought I’d give my impressions of the combined campaign. I decided to play the Empire since they are one of my favorite factions. For anyone using the Radious mods, they work fine and the old units from the original game and mod are in there. Also, there are several of the GCCM city and environment mods out as well, and they all seem to be working fine for me.
Anyway, beginning the game I thought that I’d probably not really see many of the new factions as the Empire since none of them are in the old world to start. I assumed it would only be in the late game I’d see maybe the new High Elves or Skaven, and that mainly I’d be fighting where I normally fight. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The combined campaign coupled with the fact that you can basically capture any city now (there are penalties for capturing cities that aren’t environmentally suited to your race, but you can still do it) have a dramatic change on the game. Usually, as the Empire I try and consolidate the other Empire realms into my empire then expand north and east into the Vampire realims. That’s how the game started this time, but maybe 20 turns in the High Elves attacked into Britonia, and in a very short time they were pushing against my southern fronteer…hard. Then the Dark Elves who I didn’t expect to see at all were attacking me in the North Western part of my empire. The Vampires, given free reign since I had to stop my offensive, pushed up north all the way into the Norsca territories, capturing most of them. It was, in short, a wild freewheeling game as I haven’t seen. Totally epic in scale but very, very difficult. The old rules and methods don’t work as well when, say, the Dwarves, who are allies, push into Vampire territory and capture it for themselves, or when Skaven and Lizardmen push up from beyond the old far southern boundaries into the Orc areas, taking everything they can. As the Empire, sort of caught in the middle between all of these powers, it was like walking a knife edge trying to fend off the High Elves and Dark Elves, keep the Dwarves in check by taking strategic Vampire territories before they could yet not over-committing to a fight there when troops were needed on other fronts and fending off Skaven and occasional Lizardmen forays while having to keep an eye on Beastmen rampages. Oh…and then the Chaos invasion on top of all of this.
As we speculated, this combined campaign is going to be something that will take a long, long time to play through (assuming you don’t simply get overwhelmed and wiped out early). I’m at turn 215 right now and basically, I’ve managed to capture all of the former Empire territories from all the Empire factions, push into Britonia and capture a good chunk of the uplands and push into the North Eastern territories and capture some of the key cities up there. And that’s about it. Usually, by this time in the game, it’s time for the victory lap, where I’m basically just driving my vastly superior forces through what’s left of the enemy on the road to a territory victory. In this game, I’m nowhere near being able to do that. I’ve finally managed to put the High Elves on the continent down, only to have a major Skaven force further south rise up and start seriously pushing me. I’ve driven off the Dark Elves but the Lizardmen are pushing up from the Orc lands and starting to get close to my borders as well (really the Dwarves problem so far but soon it will be mine).
Final thoughts. Turns take a long time, and there is an annoying ‘feature’ where you have to hit fast forward every time to get the turns to speed up, otherwise you’ll see the AI make every move (if you like that then there is also a pause feature to pause the AI to see what they are doing). The sides seem well balanced, but some of the new races and units throw off my own tactics and stack composition. It’s hard to defend against, say, a High Elf army where half the stack is dragons and high-level birds. As usual, the wood elves wend down early (they need to do something about the AI…the wood elves just aren’t viable unless a human is playing them). Other of the old races are surprising, with Dwarves spreading into Human areas and Vampires into Norsca. The capture anywhere aspect is definitely going to take some getting used to (unless you used to mod that let you do this before, which I didn’t).
(I’m kinda hoping for a Moussillon FreeLC down the line, but there are already mods for that. Also Boris Todbringer as the Hillary to Karl Franz’ Trump, that would be cool).
I agree, they need to balance this, though I don’t have a real problem with races expanding into different areas…it’s a change from the first games more predictable trajectory. I might try that mod you mentioned though to see if it balances things a bit more.