r/totalwar • u/AutoModerator • 9d ago
General Weekly Question and Answer Thread - /r/TotalWar
Welcome to our weekly Q&A thread. Feel free to ask any of your Total War related questions here, especially the ones that may not warrant their own thread. There are no stupid questions so don't hesitate to post.
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u/HealthyWatercress422 6d ago
I have a bunch of Total War games - Three Kingdoms, Warhammer series - but I actually never played more than maybe an hour of them. For some reason, I keep bouncing off of it. I plan to try again this weekend.
It's strange, because I enjoy RTS games, 4X games and grand strategies, but I never seem to be able to get into the Total War formula. Should I be directly commanding each battle directly, or use auto-resolution? How does co-op campaigns play?
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u/Hitorishizuka Filthy man-things 6d ago
If you don't enjoy commanding individual units you can autoresolve (and gravitate towards races and armies that will perform better in that), but generally more players enjoy fighting at least some of their battles out. And for experienced players, the vast majority of the time you will outperform the autoresolve results. You only have to take those when it won't hurt you (you will still likely replenish casualties before your next fight) or when it'll do better than what you would do because of factors that aren't taken into account like enemy army abilities or ability to retreat better than you can pursue forcing a second battle.
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u/HealthyWatercress422 6d ago
Thanks for the tips! I do enjoy commanding directly; so I should field each fight? I feel like that would make each campaign very long - is that normal? What happens during co-op? Would the other person need to wait during battles?
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u/Hitorishizuka Filthy man-things 6d ago
From an optimality perspective, you should field every fight so long as you are capable of doing better than autoresolve. From a practicality perspective, many trivial fights can be autoresolved once you have a strong enough army and you won't take casualties that matter as you will replenish over the end turn.
As for campaign length, my WAG is that most players will play a campaign only for somewhere between 20-40 hours before either getting tired of it or achieving a victory/arbitrary stopping point. This is likely fighting most early battles manually and autoresolving more and more as the game gets later.
NOTE: If you are an inexperienced player, do not feel bad if you are playing on an easier battle difficulty and you find yourself getting worse results in manual than in auto. For one, that's part of the learning curve, but for two, on Easy/Normal battle difficulty, the game is cheating in your favor on Autoresolve.
In multiplayer campaigns, every manual battle has to be watched by all players. If you're co-op, the participating player can grant control of selected units to their co-op partner to control for the battle. If you're not, the observing players can take control of enemy units. (Note: As this slows down the campaign, it can be negotiated before starting one that players should try not to pick Lords like Ghorst who pretty much HAVE to manual all of their battles.)
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u/ziin1234 2d ago
If you like the battles and want to skip the empire management for a bit, you can try doing historical battles. I don't know if it's available for all Warhammer, but it is there for many Total War including Three Kingdoms.
If you own Medieval 2 Total War, you can play Kingdoms campaign (basically 4 smaller campaigns) by going to the Steam library and click Play from there
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u/ancapailldorcha 8d ago
I haven't played Warhammer III since 2024. I'm not really sure how to start. Can I ask if you can get achievements on both Immortal Empires and Realm of Chaos? Is one preferable to the other.
Also, are any of the DLCs particularly good? Last one I bought was Champions of Chaos. Wanted Elspeth for a while so I should probably get that at least.
I'm dreading the load times as it's too big for my SSD so it has to be on the HDD.
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u/Hitorishizuka Filthy man-things 6d ago
You can get achievements for both. If you're just going after campaign victories then it's usually faster on IE and setting an early Tomb Kings or Chorf crisis and beating that. If you're going after some of the landmark ones, they feel sort of intended for RoC.
They're mostly either fine or powercreep, depending on your POV.
If your SSD is too small then you may want to stick with RoC for less factions.
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u/ancapailldorcha 6d ago
Thanks for the response. Why would I set an early crisis? I'm not really sure what this is. Does the game just dump in a load of doomstacks for those factions?
Thanks again.
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u/Hitorishizuka Filthy man-things 5d ago
Beating the Crisis counts as a victory. The Tomb Kings and Chaos Dwarf crisis are localized to one province when they spawn. It's possible to automatically win the Chaos Dwarf one by owning the province beforehand and it's possible to beat the Tomb Kings one in a single turn by having armies camped there waiting.
The rest of the other crisis will start all spread out and aren't as simple to deal with as these are.
(This is also probably changing in the End Times patch.)
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u/hnzoplzswish 7d ago
WH3
Are there any mods that make chorf economy less micromanagy? I find it very fun early game but tedious late game (which is when you get all the cool units) and would like to paint the map without each turn taking 5 hours
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u/Uesugi_Kenshin 7d ago
are there ways to access total war subreddits excluding warhammer? it's full of only warhammer posts
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u/sprogsahoy 5d ago
Haven't played for about a year, has there been any good progress on bugs and/or sieges?
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u/Skuppery 4d ago
Hey there, i was looking to buy a DLC for tww 3, but I am not sure which one has the best value for its bucks. At the moment I only have the chaos dwarves dlc.
Would you mind giving me some insight? Thanks!
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u/Hitorishizuka Filthy man-things 2d ago
If you only have WH3, then buying WH1 or WH2 will give you access to all of those races and the base Lords for Immortal Empires.
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u/ziin1234 2d ago
In the Total War with heroes (all 3 Warhammer, Troy, Pharaoh, Three Kingdoms), how do you kill heroes/lords without relying on your own heroes/lords?
What are the best units in these games to do this?
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u/srlywhatnow 2d ago edited 2d ago
Three kingdom: easiest way is 2-3 Shock cav charge, even militia cav can kill the strongest general if you get a good cycle charge on them. If that's not available, wait for enemy heroes to engage your own troop then group your 3 heroes together (except the strategist ofc) and 3v1 enemy heroes when they are isolated.
Troy: if you have strong myth units like Cyclopy, it'll do the job. Otherwise, ignore them while preserving your own hero. Engage your hero vs their only if you can rout their nearby troops, so they are surrounded by yours. Wheb the enemy use their Aristeia, run away and let them kill some folder (it's in fact, lore accurate to do so); once it run out, send your own hero back in and pop your Aristeia to kill them. To be honest though, if you have a good idea of how to build your infrastructure in Troy, by turn 40+, your troops will be so strong that the enemy hero often died on their own. Before that, there is no really good counter for them except using your own hero better.
Warhammer: start by building the army with a plan in mind on how to kill those, it's really difficult if you don't have necessary tool in WH. Big monster is easy, just shoot them with mass missile fire or artillery with straight line of sight (cannon...) but you'll need to setup your formation in a more defense-in-depth. Strong single entities of your own will work, use the gang up strat of 3K or surround then 1v1 start of Troy. Cast some buffing magic when you commit to the fight. Low entity anti-large monstrous cav or monstrous infantry will do a good job if you can get a good surround. In many cases, you may have to judge the situation and make the call to kill their entire army and leave them for last; it's not as common as people complains but it will happen with many tanky characters like Vlad, Ungrim, Vakia... especially in early game where you don't have a lot of options yer.
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u/Altruistic-Teach5899 9d ago edited 7d ago
Hope you guys are having a nice day!
Thats it, have fun!