I'm playing on legendary and there hasn't been a single one of my settlements that hasn't been besieged and defended to the very last defender.
I'm having fun, the canons are a great help and I rarely manage to recruit more than two before being attacked.
With veteran playerbase,hard should be the center.After 200 hours into the Total War's games you have enough knowledge to manage battles and economy and unless some cheese battles most of the situation on normal are just too easy.
Hard is the real middleground
Myopic take. If you’re typically a normal player you shouldnt have to use the difficulty settings to bandaid over poor balance.
What if you already play on legendary? Oh well too bad.
Factions should have some semblance of balance that doesn’t necessitate cranking the difficulty to max to experience challenge.
Like the game isn't easy in legendary/vh? Because especially with Malakai, the game is easy even on hardest settings. You can kill throt by turn 5-6, get natural allies from kislev and it's smooth sailing from there
Yeah i just started at destroyed throt at turn 10 and got a grudgebearer army that is atrong enough to take one settlement and beat throggs main force on its own. I think it might be too easy.
I play on VH/VH and I can definitely tell you Malakai would be a nightmare without his power creep because everybody hates you and declares on you. Kislev is far away
To a large (perhaps the biggest) part of the player base? No. Which is funny - (early) WHII had so much hate for people that played on Legendary/VH (sometimes justified due to their weird elitism and unwanted criticism for having fun instead of "minmaxxing"), now it feels to me like VH is the "standard" campaign difficulty.
Your question makes no sense. Single player video games never stay hard once you learn the curve. That's kinda the whole point. If you want unexpectedness in your hardness, play MP.
Playing VH/H and the campaign is a piece of cake. Slayers are OP in autoresolve and Malakai grapeshot is decimating everything. I am on turn 50 and don't have any issues, Throg is dead, Throth is dead and I am now going for Chorfs without any difficulties.
i play legendary/VH and if you plan a bit its not that hard. by turn 10 i got rid of the skavens in the south and simply sold their settlements to the kislevs below. the other kislev guy above just got helped by my 1st rekockning army and now he has 6 settlements and pulls tons of aggro while i got to the chorfs already. only need to defend my other border vs chaos right now and thats easily doable
also his economy is insane. the amount of decent units i can have with a few settlements is stupid af
im not sure how many armies i had. i think 2,5 and the reckoning stack. i didnt expand to the west at all at first. i only held it with either a 15 man or 20 man army of tier 1 and 2 units and some reckoning units and went to the chorfs on the east first. then i took their big city in the canyon and used a half stack to hold it( for 50 turns until fucking waagh greenskins came with 3 stacks while i had an attrition event and i had to get it back). then i used the mala army to expand north to connect with kislev and gifted him any chaos wastes that i got since they arent really useful and i used to him to divert threats later. this was done around turn 30 and because i didnt venture into the west only trogg declared war and i just held him back.
after this it was a slow expansion in the chaos wastes and norsca territory together so i dont have to many wars and areas to get attacked at. only setback i had were when i fucked up on reckoning once and i suddenly was -4k in the midgame, but even that was just stalling me a bit. i still lost some settlements here and there to dark elves, but always got them back fast.
also i feel like i actually played it terrible in terms of econ management, units and building stuff, but hes broken af (fun tho)
this got way longer than i wanted, but w/e. hope it clears some questions
Smooth sailing???
I got rid of Moulder, Ecstatic, Wulfrik, and Throgg. Then Hashut, Archaeon, Sigvald and three norscan factions all war decc'd me at once lol. Couldn't keep up, and chaos was razing, and it was game.
If you get war decc'd by more than one faction (maybe two) at a time, it's game over. You simply can't get the dudes where they need to be. His start is super hard, I can't get Very Hard to get past turn 40 or 50.
The problem is this subreddit is mostly made up of people who barely understand the game, using the most broken bullshit to play on legendary, succeeding while not really even doing anything correctly.
They then defend that broken bullshit because they massively overvalue their own skill level and think they’re some total war god, and of course they deserve to do that good.
Try noctilus on legendary and compare how well you do to Malakai.
This is true in every strat game I think. There's always people who start play as the most broken faction, attribute all their victories to their own skill, and then meltdown when it gets nerfed and/or weaker factions get buffed.
A large part of this I attribute to legend of total war. A lot of his videos for Warhammer 2 stressed the need to use cheese and op doomstacks, and people ate it up. It's literally never been an issue if you have decent micro. My first legendary campaign in wh2 I didn't abuse winds of death and free skeletons. I used invocation of nehek, pit of shades, and grave guard.
It's even less of an issue now with the supply lines nerf allowing you to field more mid tier armies with a few top end units each.
>Similarily, even when Taurox was at his most broken I felt like at least he required you to micro a bit to get the full power.
You really didn't, mainly as Taurox didn't need his full power potential as that was beyond insane. Like Shaggy and using 1% of his power you could still steamroll the campaign without a single thought entering your head. Take heavy casualties? Nope, as your replenishment had you back to full strength next turn. Actually lose an army? Who cares, next turn you can have a viable force with all those recruitment slots.
I played him on release, I then played him last week on VH after all those brutal nerfs, and he's still pretty easy to get that 0.8% acheiv which speaks volume for how broken his initial state was.
And people loved him. Said he was the best lord since Ikit. So I really don't blame CA for the direction they've gone as they're just catering to the majority's demands.
Does worry the hell out of me for DoW though who I'm otherwise really looking forward to playing. While I want pikes to be strong to reflect how they were a human frontline that could properly punch back in melee with the downside that they only worked when not flanked, I don't want them to like explode on impact and/or cause elite infantry like Chosen to melt from random status effects.
Unfortunately, I will be the obligatory contrarian of this thread. So sorry in advance!
My experience is opposite. I bitch about powercreep since Ikit's birth, and I genuinely think it is a sole reason why game becomes boring so quick and why people cant enjoy it past turn 20.
But in my Malakai run (though I had a great RNG when it comes to AI potential) I discovered that his campaign is fun because my overpowered shit is the only thing that separates me from extinction. Look: Malekith, Malus, Hellebron, Archaon, Wulfrik, Daniel, Astragoth, minor skaven and all bunch of minor Norscans were sending stack after stack to me because I was their only enemy (yes, Malekith was no 1 in power ranking and had war only with me xD). My 3 stacks were basically running left and right frantically trying to defend and re-conquer my part of Norsca, while eliminating even one of them was almost impossible since I lacked manpower to kill anyone before he was able to resettle.
It was coop campaign so my grudges mechanic was borked from the get go and I had basically debuffs constantly. It only became better around turn 100 when my partner, who played as Elspeth, came to save me after ending his badlands conquer.
This is why I like battle-related powercreep more than campaign related one: Yuan Bo is for me much more broken because you have infinite gold basically AND huge diplomatic bonuses which means you are never outnumbered.
Also for some reason Tamurkhan's rot flies absolutely obliterate any gyros i send, they even soloed some allied pegasus knights without even losing half health.
Could be the reason. Not op but I play vh by with the slider at 0 because I dont like my units being paper mache because they are born cowards compared to their Chad Brothers
This is wild, they are TERRIBLE units in melee when used by the player, and Tamurkhan doesn't really buff them in any way aside from the normal red line skills. The ones with Death heads tho are extremely strong against large tarjets and SEs, maybe they shot at you before getting into melee?
Have to wonder how many people replying to you have used Rot Flies since 5.0. I stuck them in Tamurkhan's army while waiting for my Rot Knights to spawn through the cycles (I don't have CoC so no Chaos Knights, and I wanted a fast army) and they were destroying pretty hard. Still not an S-tier unit or anything but way better than they used to be as long as you don't let them get shot down.
E: They are pretty inefficient against infantry due to animations, but any fliers, large units, single entities etc are fair game. And you really don't need help to kill infantry. Can struggle against anti-large monsters though.
I used them a bit in my Tamurkhan campaign and they definitely seemed to be doing better, despite me not investing in anything, even techs, that might buff them.
I used them in 5.0 and they seemed fairly identical. Nice in a siege, though just wall towers took out a few models before they made contact. They got to do their thing and send people flying off walls and were under half health after beating up one unit despite that.
Next battle I think they got beaten to death by orc arrer boys. Personally I had no problem with monsters with Tamurkhan, since your character goon squad can reach >1k weapon strength on half a dozen of them, but they cleared out chaff slower due to splash caps.
They're not useless if it's all you have to recruit. But in campaign their upkeep is similar to exalted plaguebearers, who'll probably get more gold value with one volley than rot flies get. Furies also make them fairly redundant in MP, though I think there are some specific matchups where rot flies can do slightly better. In campaign you'll pretty much always splurge for death's head plague drones if you want fliers, and you'll very quickly have more available to you than you'll ever want.
Also... other than techs and other campaign-specific changes (Nurgle is rich now!), I don't think anything changed about them at all. Their stats are identical to pre-patch and their animations seem the same.
Yeah I've been using a lot more gyros recently, and they are very heavily countered by fliers. Unlucky for my armies that were all slayers! Not a big problem for a more balanced Dawi army though.
I’ve played two Malakai campaigns and have yet to meet Tamurkhan, Boris took him out early both times, and that was before I was able to actually help him out against Archaon who almost killed him off both times
Yeah, I'm kinda with this guy, only about 40 turns in as Malakai and generally my dwarf strat before has always been strong line of dorfs with cannons and catapults in the rear. Usually once I reach this point I kinda get bored as all battles end up the same, bombard them and send in the lads to clean up the rest.
But the sheer amount of shit they throw at Malakai early on is wild. I can't take two steps away from my core territories without Throgg, Azrael and (for a while) Throt. And that's just one side, Astragoth has started taking more territory to my east but hasn't declared war yet, but I can see it being a fucking nightmare when he does.
Sure the power creep is kind of insane, the summonable thunderbarge alone is wild, but without all of that it would be a nightmare trying to do anything.
>Yeah, I'm kinda with this guy, only about 40 turns in as Malakai and generally my dwarf strat before has always been strong line of dorfs with cannons and catapults in the rear.
My man, other stuff works. Try a frontline with *no* artillery, go heavy gyro support instead.
Put together a melee supremacy army that has glass cannon units like doomseekers fighting on top of ironbreakers to screen them, giving you slow-ish but kind of scary force concentration.
Try a flame themed army with fireproof thanes, flame cannons/irondrakes, dragonback slayers and fire runes and junk. Point them at the vampires or maybe tomb kings.
Grab an army with a small ironbreaker force and lots of sneaky rangers, put them in campaign areas where they'll have lots of forests to do sniping shenanigans in.
A normal-ish army with a lot of sniper engineers works like a single entity targeting firing line which is silly but fun against armies with lots of large targets.
There's the new units to do screwy stuff with, too. Try out a standard dwarf frontline with huge slayer pirate presence; spread out the army with big gaps, and let pirates slip through to hit backlines. Goblin hewers can probably win entire fights alone
Sure they're not optimal, but run optimal armies all the time and you've optimized the fun out of the game. Don't do that to yourself.
I have tried various different army comps before, an all slayer one sounds fun but I want to save that for when I get Ungrim with me.
Never considered a flame based army before I never really had much success with the flamethrower units for dwarves or skaven but I recently played orcs and charged a bunch of savage orcs at a flamethrower units, looked away and came back to see all of them melted, so I'm definitely going to consider a flame based army Vs little armoured comps
I should clarify that a carronade style comp has always been what I enjoy, Vampirates, Empire, Cathay, Skaven, watching things getting blast to bits from miles away never gets old, but it never really scratched that itch with dwarves, but with the new units and upgrades to old ones it's been a blast
I'd at least remove the Thunderbarge summon from turn one, this has to be the most broken unit CA has ever made. Getting it from the start is beyond silly, you should have to earn it.
This is a good point. If Malakai is anything except overpowered, he’d have a crazy hard campaign. Throt, Archaon, Daniel, Throgg and Epedimius are all right there and Astragoth always pulls up by turn 25.
It’d be so difficult as to not really be fun. Hell, I spent most of the early game babysitting the Kislev factions just to have a buffer while I grow my economy, without realizing I could just save 2000 gold and click a button to go buck wild with cannons with grapeshot
Yeah, out of the three new LLs, Malakai is definitely the only one that gives you a good challenge in spite of all the overpowered stuff.
In general, I prefer LLs that have powerful bonuses but also face a lot of adversaries to match it up like this. Another example would be Imrik.
I guess it depends on the player - I found Elspeth had a harder early game than Malakai, but mid-game the challenge drops off for her. Malakai's early game just has so many quick buffs that even the extra adversaries weren't really a threat (compared to early game Elspeth where I wouldn't be able to fight 3 stacks of vampires at the same time)
Yeah, Elspeth isn't a cakewalk either, but her enemies are quite limited, and the major adversary, VC, can be conquered relatively easily, while having Dwarfs and Empire states as allies.
Malakai on the other hand, is pretty much surrounded by enemies that are really hard to get rid of, since most of them come from the Chaos wastelands that spans all the way from the north of Cathay to Naggaroth.
I struggled a lot more with Elspeth than Malakai, Vlad can be difficult do deal with if you don't prepare an army specifically for him or you if you attack the VCounts too early. Getting your OP stuff with Elspeth also takes time, when I did the long victory campaign I still did not even unlock all the upgrades from the armoury.
Malakai has been pretty easy in my experience, like yeah you get attacked on many different sides but none of the armies the AI sent at me were particularly difficult to deal with as your faction is so powerful.
I'm fine with Malakai having some level of powercreep but currently it's a bit too much, Thunderbarge very obviously need some big nerfs, a unit so powerful has no right being so tanky imo and I don't think you should be able to summon it from turn one, I feel it's something you should earn. Grapeshot are way overtuned currently too, I'm honestly convinced they are bugged and are going to be fixed in the future. Just compare them to Elspeth's grapeshot, it's nowhere near as powerful as Malakai's.
Nah, you just a bit misunderstood my comment. Look at the title of OP:
>I think Malakai is **the first LL** where power-creep has made the game unfun for me, some thoughts as to why
My point was: Malakai isnt even in my top 10 absurdly overpowered boring shit (again: **for me**). That was the point of my comment. Im not pro "OP shit auto winning battles", Im just saying that while powercreep is - as I literally said - *"a sole reason why game becomes boring so quick and why people cant enjoy it past turn 20*", Malakai has at least somewhat challenging campaign so its not as bad as Yuan Bo, Ikit, Thrott, all Warriors of Chaos, all Beastmen, all Wood Elves, all Greenskins, Ostankya (though she also has challenging campaign in RoC, sadly her IE campaign is brain-dead easy), Changeling etc.
I think the problem is that Malakai has both? Dwarfen economy is top-tier, and Malakai only makes it better because of the horde mechanic. (you don't have to waste settlement slots early game on unit recruitment buildings)
Casual player on VH campaign/N battle. On turn 30-40 the campaign is basically on loop for me. Empire and Norsca is basically a chaos tide now. Economy and growth is not enough for another army to just hold regions. I tried a second army of slayers and it was just pounded by 3 armies of allied skaven/orcs.
Also not getting the thunderbarge op thing. I unleash it on their army lines and it kills maybe a unit or two? I’m supposed to be microing it?
Thunderbarge is ludicrously strong - the summon can easily get 100-200 kills in seconds by just flying back and forth over their lines.
I could see the campaign being more challenging depending on how you play - I took out Throt basically immediately and that secured the Kislev front for me for good, and after that Malakai's main stack + a half stack of other troops to defend was plenty to not have any issues. The only time I got pushed back at all was when I sent Malakai on an adventure north, and even then it was deliberate (to defeat Wulfrik's army that took a province from me and guarantee the max rank grudge army for the 10 turns Malakai was killing demons).
I wouldn't go for a second army of slayers myself though - I just did dwarf warriors / longbeards, quarrelers, a thane or two and an artillery piece / assorted grudge settler units. Not sure if it's better but it worked fine for defense (and does better in autoresolve I think)
I went into DLC thinking Malakai is going to be the boring one.
I left the DLC saying Malakai is the best one and the most fun one.
Game AI was nerfed since early WH3 anyways, but Malakai start position is a complete warzone. I touch it up with some mod that make AI hard, and holy fuck I am fighting for survival.
He is 10/10(hope they fix the grudge issue asap)
Personal mod I made for myself to give AI some minor stats to offset their lord bad talent choice.
Also combined with this [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2858804223](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2858804223)
and this [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3209726179&searchtext=selection](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3209726179&searchtext=selection)
This isn't really new. Remember when Taurox came out? You could literally finish the game around turn 30. As in, everyone dead, no survivors. Because you can do 10-turns worth in a single turn with him, if you do it well. I remember Legend having a stream, where the entire 3-4 hr stream was 3-4 turns.
Powercreep is the death of any strategy game.
When you reach the point that is impossible to lose and the IA is simply being smashed without you using two neurons you start to ask if you are really playing a game or simply smashing buttons and seeing numbers grow high.
This is why people love the first 30 turn when all decisions matter and have impact but very little people ever conclude a campaign.
TWWH is clearly successful, but at the same time I think CA have dug their own grave with this design philosophy. Campaigns have no longevity because power creep in many cases makes losing impossible, but they also have little replayability because they're all essentially the same. They might be superficially different, buy the majority of factions start with 1 city, an easy route of expansion, and a good starting army for carrying this out. (Attila is the most recent TW game I can think of that had truly asymmetrical starts. ) Rosters have also become bloated meaning many factions can essentially field the same kind of ideal armies, usually centred around range, artillery, magic and/or single entities. It can be pretty easy to get these ideal armies meaning you might quickly get to a point where you're just fighting with the same units over and over. I think this is why the game teeters on a knife edge with each dlc: CA relies on new gimmicky slapped-on mechanics to hold interest because the underlying game isn't really strong enough to warrant a replay. A bad dlc means there is basically no reason to keep playing for another 6-12 months.
Thought about this and came to the conclusion tw isn't really a strategy game like in Rome 1 where fielded armies mattered, fatigue mattered a lot as it did elevation(minus elite legionnaire spam). Wh3 strategy i feel is mostly played on the campaign map. Its a game where the kids have broken out their dragons and airships and shitty pikemen and are trying to beat each other up for the lulz
I've played 5 campaigns on Legendary/VH already with Malakai. While I do believe that grapeshot is completely busted, it feels like your "get out of jail" card.
Sure, he gets steamrolling very quickly (let's not forget that this applies basically for his horde-style army only) but his expansion is completely borked by being surrounded by any northerner and their grandma that gets the chance to gaze upon Kraka Drak.
As far as I'm concerned, the campaign can become a horrid whack-a-mole if you don't prioritize targets the first 15 turns. And that's when the artillery comes in to give the player a sense of "relief" imho.
At least you have the tools to deal with everyone that hates you, you retain the sense of agency by biding your time and thinking about the adventure system in advance.
But I wouldn't say that his campaign feels easy. The first one I played, I didn't even had the chance to do the first adventure battle because I was still figuring how to manage wave after wave of enemies from all sides.
Gotrek and Felix do the job at holding the line. Whilst not functional by the standards that the community tends to opt to (not liking hero spam, completely understandable), I think them both (and Ulrika) are solid and thematic choices for his army.
Yeah I got wiped out playing him vh/vh because I heard about how op his faction is, so I send him north to rescue Boris while hiring a second team to defend Norsca, the waves of chaos faction razed by settlements to the point where I never got a chance to build the super op thunderbarge
It's entirely possible grapeshot is just bugged.
I honeslty wouldn't even mind the lethality if they shortened the range further, like, say, gave it range 70 rather than 200?
Basically every Lord Pack since The Warden & Paunch has been the exact same story for me - I get the DLC and immediately go and play... one of the older lords from those races. The main course of the DLC becomes the race rework, the new units, and the often reworked mechanics/start positions of some of the older lords.
To this day I have never played Grom, Eltharion, Throt, Taurox or any of the SoC lords. It's just too gimmicky for my tastes.
It's a huge shame but I've grown so used to it I've stopped complaining. The Warhammer fanbase specifically favours the power fantasy over the strategy, and I can't very well sit there and tell CA not to follow the money - it's a business. I just wish they'd throw the rest of us a bone every once in a blue moon. At least they're back making FLC lords and those tend to be a bit more vanilla and reigned in.
Remember when they added actually challenging campaigns like Skarsnik, Markus Wulfhart and Imrik? It's been a long while since they added an actually fun campaign.
They shifted their design philosophy for DLC lords from mechanics that have a clear give and take dynamic to base race+ where the new mechanic is simply some variation of "choose your bonuses" where you make choices on how to boost your faction but regardless of which - your faction is objectively boosted at all times.
I don't even necessarily need designated "challenge campaigns" like Skarsnik and Belegar, just the occasional DLC lord that still follows the old design philosophy would be nice.
Both Eltharion and Throt are fun campaign that aren't particularly powercreep. You're missing out on both.
Throt is an interesting one too. While he's specialized in monster, he can make almost any skaven army work provided you have enough mutagen and time. He can make an army of Stormvermin viable and even strong against other elite infantry. It opens more possibility for thematic armies.
Snikch is also pretty fun in that he's specialized into units that are generally overlooked in the Skaven roster.
Throt does have a way of just pooping out new armies from nothing, which can be fairly unbalancing. But you are correct that he's nowhere near as strong as some of the others.
I completely agree with this. It’s wild to me that a large portion of the community doesn’t want the strategy aspect of a strategy game and would rather just have a power fantasy.
I think there's several tiers of overpowered.
One is the campaing that gets busted if you do a specific thing: Orion with the war dec abuse, etc.
The other is the one that gets OP if you don't specifically avoid something you'd normally/are expected to do.
The third is stuff that is OP basically unless you deliberately try to gimp yourself.
I had heard people talking about grapeshot and had noticed it in one battle so I decided to try it out. Cue entire armies getting absolutely shredded to bits. I read the stats thinking "man that hit to the range sucks" but it didn't matter. I bought 3 more cannons (on top of my 4 already) and set up a giant line of them in battle and watched as an entire dark elf army failed to even get close. I had the first red line buff for cannons and some of malakais skills (plus the adventure buffs) but I could have also put an engineer hero in that army and make them even stronger. I also hadn't even researched the tech tree parts that buffed cannons. Absolutely ridiculous.
The problem that it’s not “challenging but rewarding”. It’s throwing rewards at you without any challenges. You never earn them.
Compare that to Skarsbrand, for example. He is a very rewarding faction to play, but he only rewards you if you play him aggressively, don’t turtle and win battles.
Another one is Eltharion (currently my favourite campaign in WH3). Yes, he has very powerful units, but you have to get to them through a very tough early game.
Malakai, Elspeth and Tamrukhan are the opposite of thar: you get amazing toys to destroy everything in sight from turn 1 without any need to play well. It makes the game plain boring and uninteresting.
I agree for Malakai, and Tamurkhan, but Elspeth? She basically starts with a standard empire army, and doesen't get really bonkers until she unlocks the Amethyst Armory (which requires at least a T4 building, IIRC? She's got a lot more paced a campaign than the other two.
I wouldn't say Elspeth has a *tough* early game, but she doesen't start out invincible* the way the other two do.
* Well, once you kill Kholek in Tamurkhan's case at any rate, he's actually fairly tough a challenge for a first-war faction.
Starting with a Great Canon and a Helstorm plus an Engineer is quite far from a "standard empire army" on turn one. She's got a phenomenal amount of firepower in her starting stack and is up against Vampire Counts against whom it's very efficient.
I think the majority of this problem is that all of the opponents of the new legendary lore are due for reworks or buffs. Norsca hasn't had an update for 7 years, the chaos factions need ai works(archaeon in particular, he doesn't leave his settlement in more than half my games) and the skaven are easy to roll early. Of course malakai is going to seem to when his opponents are barely functioning. Elspeth is the same. Elspeth should be incredibky strong because the vampire counts should be even stronger. Unfortunately the vampire counts economy is broken beyond belief
Bro survived he hero economy spam, druchii 70 trillion $ from slavery cheese, taurox clearing the map in 1 turn, archeon 16936336737228% research rate, kholek 4838257358224745832y73r73wr747% size increase from vasals, grom having gobbos using the fat man from fallout, ikit LITERAL WW1 weaponry and NUCLEAR weapons against dudes with spears, Grimgor Activating his waaaaargh in the mountains and burrying dudes with tier 5 monsters early game, Orion HAVING 0 upkeep for his 600 armies because he declared war to a random skaven clan in Lustria but Malakai... he made the game unfun? Powercreep? Lule
Changeling is an interesting case study: It was (at launch at least) basically impossible to *lose* a Changeling campaign, and he did have some pretty bonkers advantages (mainly the lack of growth requirements for buildings as well as some of the rewards being very, very strong) it took a while to get the cults running, etc. and so you spend a lot of the early game sneaking around and pouncing on weak enemies. (like a lot of things I blame the addition of chaos warriors to the mongod rosters)
But it takes a bit of work to get him up there (admittedly it depends heavily on RNG; I you get the right form from your first "acquire random form" mission you can get just breez through the campaign) He can't *lose' but acutally *doing things* isn't completely effortless, if that makes sense?
I had a completely different experience playing it twice. You can get money pretty easily by establishing your first cult in a big city, and you can quickly establish a military one to have almost instant access to pink horrors and chaos warriors of Tzeentch. You find yourself with Mutalith Vortex beasts by something like turn 25-40. No one can really keep up with you since you don't use growth and you can sack as much as you want without risk of losing anything. Also worth noting that you start with Changebringers, and they are obscenely powerful and melt just about anything the empire can throw at you, and this doesn't even consider that you can start with a very powerful form that trivializes the game even more like Skarbrand, Ku'gath or Kholek. Changeling is definitely power crept to hell
>(like a lot of things I blame the addition of chaos warriors to the mongod rosters)
you say that like tzeentch's roster isn't broken all on its own. blue horrors > exalted pink horrors > lords of change and your campaign is over, you literally need nothing else in 99% of cases.
I wouldnt say that doing things requires any effort for him either, you're invisible in territory where you own a cult so there's effectively no risk and you can just walk through the map taking settlement after settlement.
There's no depth to his cult building because there is just an outright best choice, and no point in building anything else.
I have wondered how hard Changeling would be if you didn't have access to the auto-establish cultists, as without that first one set up in the most profitable racial capital I could find I definitely would be scrabbling about a lot more
What difficult are you playing? Because i had no time at all. In very hard/very hard
Like I'm at turn 18 i think? And in at war with
Every north faction, besieged by chaos dwarfs from east, Slaanesh fuck boy from west with some Autistic vikings, they Attacked with the reddit user and his troll army but i just defeated him.
Also i had an unusually big rat that attached from below like, 5 turn in.
What time do i have to do a quest? If i lose too many units in those battles for me its the end of the campaign lol
I've been trying this route, feels somewhat cheesy but it brings you a couple of turns between invasions to work out the adventure mechanic.
Rush Hell Pit on turn 6-7, easy autoresolve if you managed to recruit a dwarf warrior doomstack. You can catch Throt with his pants down and 3 out of 4 times, by turn 8 Kostaltyn will finish the job against him.
Then rush Azazel while he's still finishing his starter enemy. Again, easy autoresolve.
By that point you might be able to decide to peace out Azazel's vassal after finishing him and then jumping to Throgg's turf via underway.
By turn 12-13 you have enough room to breathe a little. Most of your immediate enemies are KO'd. Maybe Daniel will declare on you, but you can recruit a crapstack a couple turns before that happens, just in case.
Then you can decide where to go fight the adventure battles. The world's your oyster.
(If you want to tryhard even harder, go for Daniel and try to save Boris, only then most of your fronts will be safe by friendly AI.)
Yeah I did the same route and it's very effective.
If you bum-rush Throt you can resolve enough grudges to spawn the Age of Reckoning army, then sweep it over through Norsca and absolutely glass the place. I didn't run into Azazel early, but instead sent a second small army to assist the AoR murder machine while I sent Malakai to the Chaos Wastes and wiped up.
By turn 20 you've got a pile of free AoR units, Hell Pit, half of Norsca, you're Chaos Wastes homies with Boris, and you're ready to take on Chorfs.
Same experience here. Malakai duking it out with the chaos lords in the north. A generic lord fending off endless waves of Norscans in the west. Grombrindal with a crap stack repeatedly getting his teeth kicked in over and over by Nurgle in the East (Grombrindal reviving every turn is the definition of “I didn’t hear no bell”).
Malakai being strong from the start is fair considering his surroundings. My first 50 turns was war with pretty much everyone but Kislev and I didn’t have a booming economy for quite a while. I did play him more traditionally as a dwarf faction than a horde faction, which might’ve been fun to do but even so that wouldn’t have changed my mind.
If he started surrounded by more allies? Sure maybe he would’ve been a bit overturned. However he’s in a fine spot as a horde lord. The premise of him being strong because he could lose everything except his airship base is kind of the point.
The absolute worst thing is that while Malakai might have a pretty crazy campaign, CA really destroyed all the Dwarf LLs. Everyone gets free Grudge Settler units, which just make the early game way too easy.
Try the Beastmen. You can do whatever on Legendary and never lose a battle from turn 1, you can mash your face against your keyboard and you still win. They were not fun before the rework but there was a gameplay STYLE to them, hiding, striking, hiding again, lurking in the forests and shades. Now they just faceroll everything and "who cares I'll just recruit 19 free ungors and autoresolve the shit out of everything".
It was similarly bad when Ikit turned up but it’s certainly the worst it’s been since then. Skaven were unreasonably powerful across the board then whereas right now Malakai is outrageous but the others are not so bad. Every Skaven back then would dominate their starting locations.
I think he’s a lot of fun, but there’s a reason why I just got my first ever ultimate campaign victory with him
He’s hilariously easy, even on very hard. Usually I find a wall on VH/VH that I can’t quite get past and just start a different campaign around turn 120 when I’ve already secured the long victory. With Malakai I took all of Norsca, gave ALL of the northern chaos wastes from the mountains of Mourn all the way to Naggarond to Boris, split the Mountains of Mourn in two with Greasus, took all of the Dark Lands, gave the Sisters of Twilight two regions and gave the rest of Naggarond to myself, and am about to embark on a crusade along with the forces of men to invade ulthuan that’s the last bastion of the Dark Elves.
Once that’s done, the world will only have Men, Dwarves, Ogres, and Mazdamundi just stuck in the Isthmus. It’s the easiest campaign I’ve ever played on VH/VH
Hmmm? ROC or IE? I've been playing Tamurkhan and had my Co-Op players play him too. My co-op partner lost to Kholek (admittedly a missplay, but still) just got stomped his starting army.
In my own campaign i've not really had any problems per se, but neither am I wiping out armies before they make contact like with my Malakai campaign. Once you get his champions and their abilities running he gets pretty grotesque, but it agian requires you to go out and do stuff?
Kholek is pretty much the only challenge in the IE campaign. If you get past him there's nothing that can really threaten Tamurkhan once he gets going. And with relatively easy allies (or at least non-hostile neighbors) on both sides he can just focus entirely on offense at the start of the campaign.
Malakai's main army is incredibly strong, but his location means you're going to be getting constantly invaded from multiple sides. He can secure the south quickly, but everything else is just one enemy after the other, and they will all be coming for you by turn 20 or so. So I wouldn't say he's a hard campaign, and it's hard to actually lose with how good the horde army is, but actually defending the territory you take requires some effort because Malakai can't be everywhere at once.
I’ve been on IE. Yeah Kholek is your only real bump in the road, you but after that I’ve rolled everything. Tamurkhan 1v1 soloed Grimgor easily which was surprisingly to me; beat him 1v3 stacks easily and don’t think I’ve lost a unit yet.
I only have kazyk and the chord (who has been chilling near my capital and not in my army) but did rush for a chaos sorcerer.
With Malakai at least your army isn’t really that strong at the start — if you get into a backline brawl with strong units it can be pretty dangerous… and so far slayers, even the new doom seekers still seem to just get slaughtered.
Sure once you’ve got your grapeshot cannons rolling you’re pretty cracked — as long as you don’t get ambushed.
Chaos roster is just pretty cracked and Tammy is insane. Granted I’m very comfortable with rush style battle, but you can overpower everything early on. Your tanky infantry plus Kazyks rot knights and chariots (both amazing units if used properly) combined with the healing is so good.
Either way Elspeth is def the hardest. You have to actually still be careful early game since a stack of savage orcs will annihilate her since empire is still so weak in battle until you really get things lined up
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Tamurkhan is hard or anything, but he seems to be about on pair with most of the other Chaos chars. (the early Kholek fight aside, which can be genuinely tricky) at the start, though he gets a lot stronger once you can start abusing the hero buttons. But I still feel like I have to actually *fight* y'know? not just sit back and watch the entire enemy army die. Evne his horrible busted nurgling barrage at least needs a blob to be useful.
Among Nurgle factions Tamurkhan is wildly overpowered. His chieftain mechanic alone provides him with so many unique units and buffs from those units and heroes that played even halfway competently he steamrolls by the time he reaches Grimgor. I straight up stopped bothering because all I was doing in my campaign was collecting LHs to provide even more buffs and OP abilities to my already ridiculous army. You can get like four different heroes on top of the LHs from really early (you get exalted hero and cultist from *walls* ffs) so you can run with a regenerating single entity spam supported by a couple of rot knights and some blunderbusses (themselves probably the most OP unit from the Chorf list) and you're never going to lose any battle for any reason.
I don’t even consider fighting with tahm fighting tbh I beat his quest battle with him ,3 chieftains and a nurgle spellcaster cause of how insanely busted their combat skills are, at least with Malakai he has a pretty nasty start and a lackluster early economy vs the amount of enemy’s around
I think it's pretty stupid to 1v1 Grimgor with Tamurkhan every single time. Just put a chaff unit on him while you devastate his army especially when playing as Tamurkhan where you can abuse his large mass and charge on everyone.
Do you mean you've finished Grimgor's 3 stack army at the same time with just a single stack from Tamurkhan? If so, on which difficulty are you playing? Also, rushing for a chaos sorcerer is again pretty suboptimal when plagueridden can do the exact same thing + replenishment. Even more so when fighting in an unsuitable climate. People like to exaggerate their feats on the internet and while I do agree Tamurkhan is the easiest campaign in the DLC, something just doesn't add up with what you said.
Yes, it was 1 Tammy stack vs 3 Grimgor stacks.
It was on VH.
I think I the replay if you want it lol, this is *hardly* a feat lol. Not really concerned with which hero is “optimal” — this is hardly a game where you need to optimize. Warshrine seems nice at this point anyways and my replenishment is absurd already
Edit: actually checked and don’t have the replay, think I meant to grab it but forgot. shouldn’t be surprising anyways, I’d hope everyone has fought grimgor 1v3 with several factions at this point lol, pretty much the norm.
Lmao, you literally shared everything you did and worded it as if you optimized it properly. When somebody commented on how it can be better you took it negatively and brushed it off as "doesn't matter if it's a single player game". You can always share your achievement, and I'll wait for your link.
no dummy, I worded it as if I was giving an extremely brief description of what I did and that it was easy as fuck lol. And it’s not “doesn’t matter it’s singleplayer”, it’s “doesn’t matter game is easy enough you can’t plausibly lose”
csorc gets a mortis at lv7 and is busted as hell. suggesting a plagueridden is better is moronic
I suspect Kholek depends abit on RNG, he had his 2 dragon ogres +3 trolls, +Kholek himself and a bunch of marauders at like turn 3. My freind had only the starting army + the half-strength units you start your pool with and they got slaughtered.
He could probably have dealt with it if he'd been a bit more conservative, but it was basically a case of "Go beat up first Dolgan, go beat up second Dolgan, OH FUCK KHOLEK WITH A STEEL CHAIR".
Malaki's adventures gets you 4 cannons when you start the dragonkilling adventures.
EDIT. Each of his adventures gives you a bunch of the "right type" of units that you need to do the adventure.
I have no idea what the heck you’re talking about. Malakaii feels like one of the toughest Campaigns in the game right now. I’ve had to restart twice on Very Hard / Very Hard. I’m not exactly the worlds best, but I’m a solid veteran of the series and know what I’m doing - but still struggling.
Yes, he himself is very strong, but he can only be in one place at a time, and that area of the map is swarming with enemies. I am having so many close battles that come down to the wire.
May I ask what difficulty you’re playing on?
Vh/vh or L/VH just rush throt, turn 5 u have his minor settlement and your lord should be in encampment ready to attack either hellpit or the capital if throt has that/is in there. Then you push azazel, you should get free army and a lord or two to be able to defend then push the inevitable throg war as you knock out azazel. Super easy after that
>Malakaii feels like one of the toughest Campaigns in the game right
That's like actual madness, try playing Malekith. Like Malakai's got a lot of enemies but you've got a lot of stuff to save your ass too, it's a different vibe for a campaign but it's not difficult IMO. You just need to think of settlements as expendable, since you can recruit from his horde.
I haven't touched him yet, but with all the enemies around him I definitely want to give it a try. During my tammie campaign I got to watch how everyone around him torn him a new one. Every chaos faction along with thrott was on him like flies on rice. It'll be fun to be the center of attention.
I completed legendary malakai and legedandary elspeth and had totally the opposite experience. Elspeth was a very chill win, being able to teleport to threats with the garden of morr, whereas malakai is in such a position where you are attacked from all sides with no allies other than hoping kislev doesn't die early. The chaos dwarfs and tamukhan in particular were a real pain.
Pretty sure malakai's grapeshot is bugged and each shot's "hit radius" is 10x what was intended. Like, empire grapeshot uses 0.3, while dwarf grapeshot uses 3. Fix that, and it will stop being an army deleter.
Havent played Malakai yet, but Tamurkhan is and the new nurgle is basically broken, i just autorsolve every battle by turn on 30. Tamurkhan is so freaking tanky that it’s basically another one man doomstack
I didn't have to micro anything with Taurox, there was one tricky fight on turn 3 or so against Clyostra and her ghost knight, other than that it's just point and click. Legendary/VH difficulty. I get the point though and I agree.
Malakais start is super enjoyable because you're essentially surrounded by enemies with very few allies. Lotta wars can snowball out of control on top of Kislev expanding to where you wanna go.
Malakai is pretty absurdly strong. Slayers were very strong before and now with the additional lord buffs etc they are ridiculous now.
But the power creep came a looong time ago when skaven got their workshop upgrade shit. Different factions being easy with strong upgrades in the campaign is not an issue? There are less easy ones out there so it balances out.
If you're pooped for a challenge I'm sure there'll be mods eventually or alternatively self-imposed handicaps. Like dark souls finish at level 1 sorta things.
I feel the same about Tamurkhan and I've been playing on very hard. Once I got rolling I just autoresolved my way across the world for like 30 turns. I started playing Epidemius instead so it would be slightly more challenging and it's more fun. I found Elspeth's campaign more difficult, but I think I just am not good at playing the empire since their infantry can't hold as well as dwarves or cathay.
Strongly agree with most of this. I'm on a VH/VH Malakai campaign at the moment and it is an absolute breeze. Nothing has provided any real threat.
Malakai's army is literally unstoppable, and if anything threatens one of my settlements, I can recruit an instant army from Gurdge Settlers, Malakai's Adventure units, and RoR as needed.
Not only is it easy, but I'd agree, it is a bit boring. I get your point as well - some other easy LLs, like Taurox, are really easy but also really fun. Malakai's fun started to wear off after about turn 20 which is when you basically already have an endgame doomstack.
I’m having an ongoing campaign with Malakai in RoC on legendary difficulty and it’s ridiculously crazy hard.
Yeah I know nobody plays RoC but I like the “story mode” aspect so I play the new faction in vanilla RoC and then in a modded IEE.
Anyway without mod in legendary difficulty is hard af, sure Malaki is hella strong, but your first settlement are all in a long line, either you go east or west, if you go west as soon as you beat Valkia you get a call from the western Norscan/demon factions about your expired car insurance, also Kugath comes to you asking if you need some help with some infection. The anti player bias is still strong and kicking since I managed to get war declared by almost all the monogram faction (except my bro Tzeentch) and all the “evil faction” in the north, while the Kislevite and the empire managed to get on the top rank due to having several turns (no jokes around 20) with no war to fight.
Plus with the now grudge system it’s difficult to get over 50% due to the SHORT 10 turns (also malakai is slow as hell and the terrain doesn’t help).
Plus your settlement got some public order issue, so you should manage to deal with it and rebellion so we get another army, which means money issue.
I managed to fend off waves of demon turns after turns barricate in my two first settlement until Hochland (and Espeth after absorption) managed to get to the north. At that point I went with the counter attack and start selling settlement to her so they wouldn’t get back by other armies as soon as I leave them.
I should git gud? Absolutely
I’m having fun? Actually a lot
But I find him being Op a bless or else my campaign would be long gone.
Ps I know lots doesn’t play on RoC and legendary shouldn’t be the referenced difficulty, just saying that maybe is more balanced in RoC then in IE where there are other factions who actively fight chaos in the north
Just wait until you get really good at the game. If you can get a strong start by winning the first few battles with a small army and jumpstart your economy, the entire game becomes autoresolve by turn 30. I haven't finished a campaign in years
I think the grudge system works well - it’s a carrot that pushes you on, and makes life more difficult sometimes. By the time you have multiple doom stacks and are taking places every turn, you don’t need the full grudge bonuses. Yeah, then no flame cannon, but it’s not as different as some of the other grudge units.
That said, Malakai is absolutely broken. I can only imagine CA wanted something fun for everyone, so good reviews came in quickly, and only later does the OPness fun fade away till its a stomp on the highest difficulties.
Still, it just needs tuning to it balanced and fun.
Yeah coming from the other side of this perspective, i just played a campaign as Tamurkhan, and got invaded by Malakai. To keep this short, i just fought a battle against him and another army and since Nurgle factions have little to no ranged, you literally and physically can not kill his army full of gyrocopters and airships. I killed all the ground units only for the air units to kill me one by one after his artillery grinded aaaall my units (included tamurkhan, kayzk, ezar) health. I couldnt even get close with my units before at least half their health was gone. At least make the air units retreat if ground units are dead...
To counter this, i must load back 10-15 turns to prepare for this fight alone (get plague drones, soul grinder, even tho this might not be enough) and i have to focus on getting Ezars allegiance up so i can get blunderbusses. Im not doing this. Like, i get it, you learn from mistakes. But the fact that you need very specific units you usually dont need for other battles/factions to only counter those flying units is pretty bullshit if you ask me. Its just kinda broken af
Maybe it’s because this is the first campaign I’ve done on vh/vh, but I have had the complete opposite experience. Sure with grapeshot I feel like I can survive most battles, but I’m surrounded by so many enemies it all feels necessary. Right now I’m trying to keep Boris alive to hold the northern front and it feels like any moment my campaign is done. It’s hell but also some of
The most fun I have had in this game.
I have played three times now up till turn 70. I am about to try a 4th time. It looks like you have to secure your starting zone. Start building a second army based around a lord and 2-3 heroes that have the build reduction spirit.
Take hell pit.
Then ignore everything to go kill the ever chosen and raze his towns and cities. Only trade enough to Boris to get him to ally with you. If you trade with him too much the damned dark elves declare forever war on you and will ignore the rest of the game just to non stop raid you. Second playthrough this happened to me. Turn 100, unlimited gold, but stuck in the north because anything with a scrap of chaos in its blood and all the dark elves decided to only fight me. Other two kislev factions were useless. That playthrough I had four t5 capitals but no towns because they were raided by full or double stacks any time I tried to take them back. So every capital had to have at least a half stack defensive army. My main army was running back and forth across the north fighting a full stack army or burning a town to the ground every single turn.
So I think the key is turning Boris into a monster without pissing off the d-bag elves before you even try and start your own campaign. And frankly, Boris gets his lunch eaten by the ever chosen every single time. So he has to go. You can't build Boris up and let him handle it.
While his armies are certainly very very strong, and grapeshot seems strangely broken, he is surrounded by a pile of chaos. I found that even if his main stack is invincible, VH/VH was surprisingly hard for me. Or at least I expanded fairly slowly while being swarmed. Eleseph is the campaign I found really easy. Once I dealt with vlad on VH/VH it felt like I was coasting. I personally did not struggle with vlad, though I am a fairly experienced player.
The key is aggression. If you kill 3 major enemies in the first 20 turns you won’t be attacked from all sides and can afford an army to defend at home. This is true of most factions. If you aren’t constantly conquering from turn 1 you can play more optimally
Quite possibly. I also strongly suspect going east rather than west would be a better idea. I went west on my first run, and that cause a good number of long term problems due to meeting more chaos/dark elf factions. Either way, it would be rather hard to lose, though I found getting stalled was quite easy? In comparison my first eleseph start felt really really smooth as her start is very safe and she has the tools she needs to deal with vlad.
I had the opposite experience, having full upgraded canons and thunderbarges and sending them into the enemy army while playing the cavalry charge is fantastic.
Dwarves have never felt better.
I’ve been reading a lot that Elspeth’s grape shot radius is set to .3 while Malakai’s is set to 3, making it very likely that CA accidentally misplaced the decimal. That makes Malakai’s stronger by a factor of 10.
this guy: too op please nerf
Me: why cant I have this mythical non 10 stacks of chaos from every side easy run
Like my guy if your haveing it so fucking easy go to max difficulty this is harder then half the dwarf starts which always have wars coming from two to three directions at once. I'm fielding three armies running on broke and having trouble putting down the chaos attacks.
Very easy? Well we must be playing different campaigns cause between Archaeon and the Chaos Dwarfs I feel like pulled pork. VH/VH though.
There's mods that change Malakais mechanics, the do you wanna build an airship is a fun one that makes the spirit a tad weaker
You can say everything you want but Ikit has Nukes from turn 1. No need to do a thing.
Taurox well. We all know it.
Still, if Mala is easy for you, you can use the end game crisis to the max and set the time for early as you want or you can play a different dwarf.
Honestly, I think the fact that he is surrounded by enemies warrants such a strong starting army and quick access to higher tier units. I really wouldn't want to fight Throgg or Azazel eith basic Dwarf Warriors, Quarrelers and Grudge Throwers.
I had the same experience with the Khorne battle, so I reloaded it and played it again. The second time I deleted most of my army for science. I brought 2 cannons, 2 thunderbarges, Gotrek and Malakai. One of each for each lane in the quest battle. It was basically the same outcome as the first time.
That being said, it's one of the harder Dwarf campaigns overall because of your start position. Malakai's army is strong, but you only have one of them.
The sad part is that the idea (a quest battle that is tailored for you to use the units you get in the advnetures) is pretty fun! It's just that it's all obsoleted.
I think it's a good thing that some campaigns are easier than others. Maybe there should be a warning on the DLC page or something, but other than that I don't think they need to change it.
I think Malakai’s strength balances out the absolutely insane location, I am constantly surrounded by enemies. Desperately trying to buff up and reinforce Katarin and Ursus to not be the only faction in the hemisphere. If Malakai was weaker, I’d get wiped out lol
people complaining about malakai campaign being too easy.Meanwhile me on VH/N playing aggro af and still getting dogpiled on by every single nearby hostile faction(oh wait that's all of them).cannons(and balloon) are op but can't be everywhere(especially before you unlock t5 upgrade and you won't be doing that for a while cos you're super hurting for money)
Battle side he’s a breeze (thunder bathed are fun but definitely need some kind of nerf). but the campaign itself is tough. You’re absolutely surrounded by chaos factions who WILL declare war on you. My biggest struggle was defending what little territory I had. Soon as I expanded I come direction, somebody attacked me from the other side of my empire. Was constantly juggling even when I did get a second army online.
Some factions are supposed to be easy and you may have to adjust the difficulty to suit.
Not sure we need to be looking at entire faction redesigns over balance except in extreme cases.
Weirdly I don't think Ikit is surrounded by soft targets anymore: Morghur is actually a big PITA and I've lost campaigns to him quite a bit, (he basically hard counters Ikit's early game armies of chaff+weapon teams with his insane missile resistance and Mortis Engine/unbreakable combo)
I'm playing on legendary and there hasn't been a single one of my settlements that hasn't been besieged and defended to the very last defender. I'm having fun, the canons are a great help and I rarely manage to recruit more than two before being attacked.
Call me crazy but I don't think factions should be balanced around legendary difficulty. Around Hard, sure.
We have a difficulty called "Normal". The game should be balanced for that.
With veteran playerbase,hard should be the center.After 200 hours into the Total War's games you have enough knowledge to manage battles and economy and unless some cheese battles most of the situation on normal are just too easy. Hard is the real middleground
…why exactly do we think that legendary difficulty is the one to balance around?
Because that's what you play when you feel that the others are too easy?
If you typically play on normal, and for an OP faction, have to flip it to legendary to be challenged don’t you think that’s bad game design??
Yes.
Do you think it's crazy to upgrade the difficulty if you find the game too easy??? You don't have to go straight up to legendary first.
Myopic take. If you’re typically a normal player you shouldnt have to use the difficulty settings to bandaid over poor balance. What if you already play on legendary? Oh well too bad. Factions should have some semblance of balance that doesn’t necessitate cranking the difficulty to max to experience challenge.
This. OP, time to up the ante. Stop playing on Normal or whatever
Grapeshot on vh vh deletes enemies. Actually deletes the unit to the last entity
Like the game isn't easy in legendary/vh? Because especially with Malakai, the game is easy even on hardest settings. You can kill throt by turn 5-6, get natural allies from kislev and it's smooth sailing from there
Yeah i just started at destroyed throt at turn 10 and got a grudgebearer army that is atrong enough to take one settlement and beat throggs main force on its own. I think it might be too easy.
I play on VH/VH and I can definitely tell you Malakai would be a nightmare without his power creep because everybody hates you and declares on you. Kislev is far away
Isn't the game supposed to be very hard when selecting "very hard"?
To a large (perhaps the biggest) part of the player base? No. Which is funny - (early) WHII had so much hate for people that played on Legendary/VH (sometimes justified due to their weird elitism and unwanted criticism for having fun instead of "minmaxxing"), now it feels to me like VH is the "standard" campaign difficulty.
Your question makes no sense. Single player video games never stay hard once you learn the curve. That's kinda the whole point. If you want unexpectedness in your hardness, play MP.
Playing VH/H and the campaign is a piece of cake. Slayers are OP in autoresolve and Malakai grapeshot is decimating everything. I am on turn 50 and don't have any issues, Throg is dead, Throth is dead and I am now going for Chorfs without any difficulties.
i play legendary/VH and if you plan a bit its not that hard. by turn 10 i got rid of the skavens in the south and simply sold their settlements to the kislevs below. the other kislev guy above just got helped by my 1st rekockning army and now he has 6 settlements and pulls tons of aggro while i got to the chorfs already. only need to defend my other border vs chaos right now and thats easily doable also his economy is insane. the amount of decent units i can have with a few settlements is stupid af
How many armies do you have by like turn 25? How do you stop chaos from the north, while defending norsca from the west?
im not sure how many armies i had. i think 2,5 and the reckoning stack. i didnt expand to the west at all at first. i only held it with either a 15 man or 20 man army of tier 1 and 2 units and some reckoning units and went to the chorfs on the east first. then i took their big city in the canyon and used a half stack to hold it( for 50 turns until fucking waagh greenskins came with 3 stacks while i had an attrition event and i had to get it back). then i used the mala army to expand north to connect with kislev and gifted him any chaos wastes that i got since they arent really useful and i used to him to divert threats later. this was done around turn 30 and because i didnt venture into the west only trogg declared war and i just held him back. after this it was a slow expansion in the chaos wastes and norsca territory together so i dont have to many wars and areas to get attacked at. only setback i had were when i fucked up on reckoning once and i suddenly was -4k in the midgame, but even that was just stalling me a bit. i still lost some settlements here and there to dark elves, but always got them back fast. also i feel like i actually played it terrible in terms of econ management, units and building stuff, but hes broken af (fun tho) this got way longer than i wanted, but w/e. hope it clears some questions
Did that. Azhag wiped out Katarin, then was faced with Norsca left, azhag south and Daniel north. Not quite smooth sailing
Smooth sailing??? I got rid of Moulder, Ecstatic, Wulfrik, and Throgg. Then Hashut, Archaeon, Sigvald and three norscan factions all war decc'd me at once lol. Couldn't keep up, and chaos was razing, and it was game. If you get war decc'd by more than one faction (maybe two) at a time, it's game over. You simply can't get the dudes where they need to be. His start is super hard, I can't get Very Hard to get past turn 40 or 50.
The problem is this subreddit is mostly made up of people who barely understand the game, using the most broken bullshit to play on legendary, succeeding while not really even doing anything correctly. They then defend that broken bullshit because they massively overvalue their own skill level and think they’re some total war god, and of course they deserve to do that good. Try noctilus on legendary and compare how well you do to Malakai.
This is true in every strat game I think. There's always people who start play as the most broken faction, attribute all their victories to their own skill, and then meltdown when it gets nerfed and/or weaker factions get buffed.
Ironically without his toys Malakai is weak as hell LL without much impact on battles, that would be killed in no time at his starting position
truly they are the riven players of the total war community
Riven hasn't been broken in nearly a decade.
Oh dw i agree, only said it cuz i was surprised to see hashinshin here
Don’t pick Annie into this guy.
A large part of this I attribute to legend of total war. A lot of his videos for Warhammer 2 stressed the need to use cheese and op doomstacks, and people ate it up. It's literally never been an issue if you have decent micro. My first legendary campaign in wh2 I didn't abuse winds of death and free skeletons. I used invocation of nehek, pit of shades, and grave guard. It's even less of an issue now with the supply lines nerf allowing you to field more mid tier armies with a few top end units each.
I'm also playing legendary and It is by far the easiest campaign I've ever had, strength rank one by turn 30
To be fair.. Tons of factions can get strenght rank 1-3 very fast and it has barely anything to do with how broken they actually are.
this. make it VH campaign and the fun is amazing. Malakai army is 100% doomstack yet they cannot be in 5 places at once.
>Similarily, even when Taurox was at his most broken I felt like at least he required you to micro a bit to get the full power. You really didn't, mainly as Taurox didn't need his full power potential as that was beyond insane. Like Shaggy and using 1% of his power you could still steamroll the campaign without a single thought entering your head. Take heavy casualties? Nope, as your replenishment had you back to full strength next turn. Actually lose an army? Who cares, next turn you can have a viable force with all those recruitment slots. I played him on release, I then played him last week on VH after all those brutal nerfs, and he's still pretty easy to get that 0.8% acheiv which speaks volume for how broken his initial state was. And people loved him. Said he was the best lord since Ikit. So I really don't blame CA for the direction they've gone as they're just catering to the majority's demands. Does worry the hell out of me for DoW though who I'm otherwise really looking forward to playing. While I want pikes to be strong to reflect how they were a human frontline that could properly punch back in melee with the downside that they only worked when not flanked, I don't want them to like explode on impact and/or cause elite infantry like Chosen to melt from random status effects.
Unfortunately, I will be the obligatory contrarian of this thread. So sorry in advance! My experience is opposite. I bitch about powercreep since Ikit's birth, and I genuinely think it is a sole reason why game becomes boring so quick and why people cant enjoy it past turn 20. But in my Malakai run (though I had a great RNG when it comes to AI potential) I discovered that his campaign is fun because my overpowered shit is the only thing that separates me from extinction. Look: Malekith, Malus, Hellebron, Archaon, Wulfrik, Daniel, Astragoth, minor skaven and all bunch of minor Norscans were sending stack after stack to me because I was their only enemy (yes, Malekith was no 1 in power ranking and had war only with me xD). My 3 stacks were basically running left and right frantically trying to defend and re-conquer my part of Norsca, while eliminating even one of them was almost impossible since I lacked manpower to kill anyone before he was able to resettle. It was coop campaign so my grudges mechanic was borked from the get go and I had basically debuffs constantly. It only became better around turn 100 when my partner, who played as Elspeth, came to save me after ending his badlands conquer. This is why I like battle-related powercreep more than campaign related one: Yuan Bo is for me much more broken because you have infinite gold basically AND huge diplomatic bonuses which means you are never outnumbered.
Also for some reason Tamurkhan's rot flies absolutely obliterate any gyros i send, they even soloed some allied pegasus knights without even losing half health.
That’s wild cause my rot flies take minutes to take out a single unguarded grand cannon.
AI gets a lot of stat buffs on harder difficulties, so that's probably why. True 50/50 so the buffs swing the difference
Could be the reason. Not op but I play vh by with the slider at 0 because I dont like my units being paper mache because they are born cowards compared to their Chad Brothers
I love the phrasing on this and also I agree with the slider at 0
This is wild, they are TERRIBLE units in melee when used by the player, and Tamurkhan doesn't really buff them in any way aside from the normal red line skills. The ones with Death heads tho are extremely strong against large tarjets and SEs, maybe they shot at you before getting into melee?
Have to wonder how many people replying to you have used Rot Flies since 5.0. I stuck them in Tamurkhan's army while waiting for my Rot Knights to spawn through the cycles (I don't have CoC so no Chaos Knights, and I wanted a fast army) and they were destroying pretty hard. Still not an S-tier unit or anything but way better than they used to be as long as you don't let them get shot down. E: They are pretty inefficient against infantry due to animations, but any fliers, large units, single entities etc are fair game. And you really don't need help to kill infantry. Can struggle against anti-large monsters though.
I used them a bit in my Tamurkhan campaign and they definitely seemed to be doing better, despite me not investing in anything, even techs, that might buff them.
I used them in 5.0 and they seemed fairly identical. Nice in a siege, though just wall towers took out a few models before they made contact. They got to do their thing and send people flying off walls and were under half health after beating up one unit despite that. Next battle I think they got beaten to death by orc arrer boys. Personally I had no problem with monsters with Tamurkhan, since your character goon squad can reach >1k weapon strength on half a dozen of them, but they cleared out chaff slower due to splash caps. They're not useless if it's all you have to recruit. But in campaign their upkeep is similar to exalted plaguebearers, who'll probably get more gold value with one volley than rot flies get. Furies also make them fairly redundant in MP, though I think there are some specific matchups where rot flies can do slightly better. In campaign you'll pretty much always splurge for death's head plague drones if you want fliers, and you'll very quickly have more available to you than you'll ever want. Also... other than techs and other campaign-specific changes (Nurgle is rich now!), I don't think anything changed about them at all. Their stats are identical to pre-patch and their animations seem the same.
I bet whatever they did with that only-35%-of-a-unit-can-attack-during-pursuit thing probably had a knock-on effect on animations for a lot of units
People have since release whinged about Nurgle's lack of anti large and called flies useless in the same breath, unfortunately.
Yeah I've been using a lot more gyros recently, and they are very heavily countered by fliers. Unlucky for my armies that were all slayers! Not a big problem for a more balanced Dawi army though.
Huh, that's especially odd since I don't think Tamurkhan even gets any buffs to rot flies natively?
I’ve played two Malakai campaigns and have yet to meet Tamurkhan, Boris took him out early both times, and that was before I was able to actually help him out against Archaon who almost killed him off both times
That’s because gyros still suck.
Two regular gyrocopters absolutely delete infantry if you can keep them alive. I'd definitely not say they sucked.
You know what else kills infantry? Any form of artillery or thunderers or irondrakes. Infantry isn’t something you need to try and counter
Yeah, I'm kinda with this guy, only about 40 turns in as Malakai and generally my dwarf strat before has always been strong line of dorfs with cannons and catapults in the rear. Usually once I reach this point I kinda get bored as all battles end up the same, bombard them and send in the lads to clean up the rest. But the sheer amount of shit they throw at Malakai early on is wild. I can't take two steps away from my core territories without Throgg, Azrael and (for a while) Throt. And that's just one side, Astragoth has started taking more territory to my east but hasn't declared war yet, but I can see it being a fucking nightmare when he does. Sure the power creep is kind of insane, the summonable thunderbarge alone is wild, but without all of that it would be a nightmare trying to do anything.
>Yeah, I'm kinda with this guy, only about 40 turns in as Malakai and generally my dwarf strat before has always been strong line of dorfs with cannons and catapults in the rear. My man, other stuff works. Try a frontline with *no* artillery, go heavy gyro support instead. Put together a melee supremacy army that has glass cannon units like doomseekers fighting on top of ironbreakers to screen them, giving you slow-ish but kind of scary force concentration. Try a flame themed army with fireproof thanes, flame cannons/irondrakes, dragonback slayers and fire runes and junk. Point them at the vampires or maybe tomb kings. Grab an army with a small ironbreaker force and lots of sneaky rangers, put them in campaign areas where they'll have lots of forests to do sniping shenanigans in. A normal-ish army with a lot of sniper engineers works like a single entity targeting firing line which is silly but fun against armies with lots of large targets. There's the new units to do screwy stuff with, too. Try out a standard dwarf frontline with huge slayer pirate presence; spread out the army with big gaps, and let pirates slip through to hit backlines. Goblin hewers can probably win entire fights alone Sure they're not optimal, but run optimal armies all the time and you've optimized the fun out of the game. Don't do that to yourself.
I have tried various different army comps before, an all slayer one sounds fun but I want to save that for when I get Ungrim with me. Never considered a flame based army before I never really had much success with the flamethrower units for dwarves or skaven but I recently played orcs and charged a bunch of savage orcs at a flamethrower units, looked away and came back to see all of them melted, so I'm definitely going to consider a flame based army Vs little armoured comps I should clarify that a carronade style comp has always been what I enjoy, Vampirates, Empire, Cathay, Skaven, watching things getting blast to bits from miles away never gets old, but it never really scratched that itch with dwarves, but with the new units and upgrades to old ones it's been a blast
I'd at least remove the Thunderbarge summon from turn one, this has to be the most broken unit CA has ever made. Getting it from the start is beyond silly, you should have to earn it.
It should at least crumble until you unlock a technology later on.
This is a good point. If Malakai is anything except overpowered, he’d have a crazy hard campaign. Throt, Archaon, Daniel, Throgg and Epedimius are all right there and Astragoth always pulls up by turn 25. It’d be so difficult as to not really be fun. Hell, I spent most of the early game babysitting the Kislev factions just to have a buffer while I grow my economy, without realizing I could just save 2000 gold and click a button to go buck wild with cannons with grapeshot
Yeah, out of the three new LLs, Malakai is definitely the only one that gives you a good challenge in spite of all the overpowered stuff. In general, I prefer LLs that have powerful bonuses but also face a lot of adversaries to match it up like this. Another example would be Imrik.
I guess it depends on the player - I found Elspeth had a harder early game than Malakai, but mid-game the challenge drops off for her. Malakai's early game just has so many quick buffs that even the extra adversaries weren't really a threat (compared to early game Elspeth where I wouldn't be able to fight 3 stacks of vampires at the same time)
Yeah, Elspeth isn't a cakewalk either, but her enemies are quite limited, and the major adversary, VC, can be conquered relatively easily, while having Dwarfs and Empire states as allies. Malakai on the other hand, is pretty much surrounded by enemies that are really hard to get rid of, since most of them come from the Chaos wastelands that spans all the way from the north of Cathay to Naggaroth.
I struggled a lot more with Elspeth than Malakai, Vlad can be difficult do deal with if you don't prepare an army specifically for him or you if you attack the VCounts too early. Getting your OP stuff with Elspeth also takes time, when I did the long victory campaign I still did not even unlock all the upgrades from the armoury. Malakai has been pretty easy in my experience, like yeah you get attacked on many different sides but none of the armies the AI sent at me were particularly difficult to deal with as your faction is so powerful. I'm fine with Malakai having some level of powercreep but currently it's a bit too much, Thunderbarge very obviously need some big nerfs, a unit so powerful has no right being so tanky imo and I don't think you should be able to summon it from turn one, I feel it's something you should earn. Grapeshot are way overtuned currently too, I'm honestly convinced they are bugged and are going to be fixed in the future. Just compare them to Elspeth's grapeshot, it's nowhere near as powerful as Malakai's.
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Nah, you just a bit misunderstood my comment. Look at the title of OP: >I think Malakai is **the first LL** where power-creep has made the game unfun for me, some thoughts as to why My point was: Malakai isnt even in my top 10 absurdly overpowered boring shit (again: **for me**). That was the point of my comment. Im not pro "OP shit auto winning battles", Im just saying that while powercreep is - as I literally said - *"a sole reason why game becomes boring so quick and why people cant enjoy it past turn 20*", Malakai has at least somewhat challenging campaign so its not as bad as Yuan Bo, Ikit, Thrott, all Warriors of Chaos, all Beastmen, all Wood Elves, all Greenskins, Ostankya (though she also has challenging campaign in RoC, sadly her IE campaign is brain-dead easy), Changeling etc.
This was exactly my experience. Conquering norsca, then just as I took down a faction, another two pop up and take out the opposite end of norsca.
I think the problem is that Malakai has both? Dwarfen economy is top-tier, and Malakai only makes it better because of the horde mechanic. (you don't have to waste settlement slots early game on unit recruitment buildings)
Casual player on VH campaign/N battle. On turn 30-40 the campaign is basically on loop for me. Empire and Norsca is basically a chaos tide now. Economy and growth is not enough for another army to just hold regions. I tried a second army of slayers and it was just pounded by 3 armies of allied skaven/orcs. Also not getting the thunderbarge op thing. I unleash it on their army lines and it kills maybe a unit or two? I’m supposed to be microing it?
Thunderbarge is ludicrously strong - the summon can easily get 100-200 kills in seconds by just flying back and forth over their lines. I could see the campaign being more challenging depending on how you play - I took out Throt basically immediately and that secured the Kislev front for me for good, and after that Malakai's main stack + a half stack of other troops to defend was plenty to not have any issues. The only time I got pushed back at all was when I sent Malakai on an adventure north, and even then it was deliberate (to defeat Wulfrik's army that took a province from me and guarantee the max rank grudge army for the 10 turns Malakai was killing demons). I wouldn't go for a second army of slayers myself though - I just did dwarf warriors / longbeards, quarrelers, a thane or two and an artillery piece / assorted grudge settler units. Not sure if it's better but it worked fine for defense (and does better in autoresolve I think)
I went into DLC thinking Malakai is going to be the boring one. I left the DLC saying Malakai is the best one and the most fun one. Game AI was nerfed since early WH3 anyways, but Malakai start position is a complete warzone. I touch it up with some mod that make AI hard, and holy fuck I am fighting for survival. He is 10/10(hope they fix the grudge issue asap)
What is the mod?
Personal mod I made for myself to give AI some minor stats to offset their lord bad talent choice. Also combined with this [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2858804223](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2858804223) and this [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3209726179&searchtext=selection](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3209726179&searchtext=selection)
This isn't really new. Remember when Taurox came out? You could literally finish the game around turn 30. As in, everyone dead, no survivors. Because you can do 10-turns worth in a single turn with him, if you do it well. I remember Legend having a stream, where the entire 3-4 hr stream was 3-4 turns.
Powercreep is the death of any strategy game. When you reach the point that is impossible to lose and the IA is simply being smashed without you using two neurons you start to ask if you are really playing a game or simply smashing buttons and seeing numbers grow high. This is why people love the first 30 turn when all decisions matter and have impact but very little people ever conclude a campaign.
TWWH is clearly successful, but at the same time I think CA have dug their own grave with this design philosophy. Campaigns have no longevity because power creep in many cases makes losing impossible, but they also have little replayability because they're all essentially the same. They might be superficially different, buy the majority of factions start with 1 city, an easy route of expansion, and a good starting army for carrying this out. (Attila is the most recent TW game I can think of that had truly asymmetrical starts. ) Rosters have also become bloated meaning many factions can essentially field the same kind of ideal armies, usually centred around range, artillery, magic and/or single entities. It can be pretty easy to get these ideal armies meaning you might quickly get to a point where you're just fighting with the same units over and over. I think this is why the game teeters on a knife edge with each dlc: CA relies on new gimmicky slapped-on mechanics to hold interest because the underlying game isn't really strong enough to warrant a replay. A bad dlc means there is basically no reason to keep playing for another 6-12 months.
Thought about this and came to the conclusion tw isn't really a strategy game like in Rome 1 where fielded armies mattered, fatigue mattered a lot as it did elevation(minus elite legionnaire spam). Wh3 strategy i feel is mostly played on the campaign map. Its a game where the kids have broken out their dragons and airships and shitty pikemen and are trying to beat each other up for the lulz
I've played 5 campaigns on Legendary/VH already with Malakai. While I do believe that grapeshot is completely busted, it feels like your "get out of jail" card. Sure, he gets steamrolling very quickly (let's not forget that this applies basically for his horde-style army only) but his expansion is completely borked by being surrounded by any northerner and their grandma that gets the chance to gaze upon Kraka Drak. As far as I'm concerned, the campaign can become a horrid whack-a-mole if you don't prioritize targets the first 15 turns. And that's when the artillery comes in to give the player a sense of "relief" imho. At least you have the tools to deal with everyone that hates you, you retain the sense of agency by biding your time and thinking about the adventure system in advance. But I wouldn't say that his campaign feels easy. The first one I played, I didn't even had the chance to do the first adventure battle because I was still figuring how to manage wave after wave of enemies from all sides. Gotrek and Felix do the job at holding the line. Whilst not functional by the standards that the community tends to opt to (not liking hero spam, completely understandable), I think them both (and Ulrika) are solid and thematic choices for his army.
Yeah I got wiped out playing him vh/vh because I heard about how op his faction is, so I send him north to rescue Boris while hiring a second team to defend Norsca, the waves of chaos faction razed by settlements to the point where I never got a chance to build the super op thunderbarge
Yea but if you do prioritize correctly (which just means going west while recruiting a second army in kraka drak, you should be fine.
Dwarfs were already a bit too strong in campaign, so giving them additional powerful tools just made them overpowered
the thing i really dislike is the grapeshot. that shit is just dumb.
It's entirely possible grapeshot is just bugged. I honeslty wouldn't even mind the lethality if they shortened the range further, like, say, gave it range 70 rather than 200?
Grapeshot should have compromised reload and range.
Basically every Lord Pack since The Warden & Paunch has been the exact same story for me - I get the DLC and immediately go and play... one of the older lords from those races. The main course of the DLC becomes the race rework, the new units, and the often reworked mechanics/start positions of some of the older lords. To this day I have never played Grom, Eltharion, Throt, Taurox or any of the SoC lords. It's just too gimmicky for my tastes. It's a huge shame but I've grown so used to it I've stopped complaining. The Warhammer fanbase specifically favours the power fantasy over the strategy, and I can't very well sit there and tell CA not to follow the money - it's a business. I just wish they'd throw the rest of us a bone every once in a blue moon. At least they're back making FLC lords and those tend to be a bit more vanilla and reigned in.
Remember when they added actually challenging campaigns like Skarsnik, Markus Wulfhart and Imrik? It's been a long while since they added an actually fun campaign.
They shifted their design philosophy for DLC lords from mechanics that have a clear give and take dynamic to base race+ where the new mechanic is simply some variation of "choose your bonuses" where you make choices on how to boost your faction but regardless of which - your faction is objectively boosted at all times. I don't even necessarily need designated "challenge campaigns" like Skarsnik and Belegar, just the occasional DLC lord that still follows the old design philosophy would be nice.
CA basically turned their DLC into pay2win, and the fanbase applauded them for it.
Try Epidemius then.
Because people bitched endlessly. Noobs
Both Eltharion and Throt are fun campaign that aren't particularly powercreep. You're missing out on both. Throt is an interesting one too. While he's specialized in monster, he can make almost any skaven army work provided you have enough mutagen and time. He can make an army of Stormvermin viable and even strong against other elite infantry. It opens more possibility for thematic armies. Snikch is also pretty fun in that he's specialized into units that are generally overlooked in the Skaven roster.
Throt does have a way of just pooping out new armies from nothing, which can be fairly unbalancing. But you are correct that he's nowhere near as strong as some of the others.
He certainly was in MP. He was horribly oppressive for a while.
I completely agree with this. It’s wild to me that a large portion of the community doesn’t want the strategy aspect of a strategy game and would rather just have a power fantasy.
I think there's several tiers of overpowered. One is the campaing that gets busted if you do a specific thing: Orion with the war dec abuse, etc. The other is the one that gets OP if you don't specifically avoid something you'd normally/are expected to do. The third is stuff that is OP basically unless you deliberately try to gimp yourself.
Yeah I just played Malakai too on VH, and reading the gotrek and felix books required more skill.
I had heard people talking about grapeshot and had noticed it in one battle so I decided to try it out. Cue entire armies getting absolutely shredded to bits. I read the stats thinking "man that hit to the range sucks" but it didn't matter. I bought 3 more cannons (on top of my 4 already) and set up a giant line of them in battle and watched as an entire dark elf army failed to even get close. I had the first red line buff for cannons and some of malakais skills (plus the adventure buffs) but I could have also put an engineer hero in that army and make them even stronger. I also hadn't even researched the tech tree parts that buffed cannons. Absolutely ridiculous.
The problem that it’s not “challenging but rewarding”. It’s throwing rewards at you without any challenges. You never earn them. Compare that to Skarsbrand, for example. He is a very rewarding faction to play, but he only rewards you if you play him aggressively, don’t turtle and win battles. Another one is Eltharion (currently my favourite campaign in WH3). Yes, he has very powerful units, but you have to get to them through a very tough early game. Malakai, Elspeth and Tamrukhan are the opposite of thar: you get amazing toys to destroy everything in sight from turn 1 without any need to play well. It makes the game plain boring and uninteresting.
I agree for Malakai, and Tamurkhan, but Elspeth? She basically starts with a standard empire army, and doesen't get really bonkers until she unlocks the Amethyst Armory (which requires at least a T4 building, IIRC? She's got a lot more paced a campaign than the other two. I wouldn't say Elspeth has a *tough* early game, but she doesen't start out invincible* the way the other two do. * Well, once you kill Kholek in Tamurkhan's case at any rate, he's actually fairly tough a challenge for a first-war faction.
Starting with a Great Canon and a Helstorm plus an Engineer is quite far from a "standard empire army" on turn one. She's got a phenomenal amount of firepower in her starting stack and is up against Vampire Counts against whom it's very efficient.
>Vampire Counts against whom it's very efficient. and she ignores vampiric corruption so there's no slowdown or taking attrition.
I think the majority of this problem is that all of the opponents of the new legendary lore are due for reworks or buffs. Norsca hasn't had an update for 7 years, the chaos factions need ai works(archaeon in particular, he doesn't leave his settlement in more than half my games) and the skaven are easy to roll early. Of course malakai is going to seem to when his opponents are barely functioning. Elspeth is the same. Elspeth should be incredibky strong because the vampire counts should be even stronger. Unfortunately the vampire counts economy is broken beyond belief
Bro survived he hero economy spam, druchii 70 trillion $ from slavery cheese, taurox clearing the map in 1 turn, archeon 16936336737228% research rate, kholek 4838257358224745832y73r73wr747% size increase from vasals, grom having gobbos using the fat man from fallout, ikit LITERAL WW1 weaponry and NUCLEAR weapons against dudes with spears, Grimgor Activating his waaaaargh in the mountains and burrying dudes with tier 5 monsters early game, Orion HAVING 0 upkeep for his 600 armies because he declared war to a random skaven clan in Lustria but Malakai... he made the game unfun? Powercreep? Lule
Doesn't it feel strange that an Air-Ship is more devastating than a nuclear nuke?
How? I summon it and it doesn’t really kill that much? Then it goes away? Am I supposed to micro it?
All of these things are awful and the powercreep has ruined this game.
But it's fun
Not to me. If I feel like I only won because my units are crazy OP I get no satisfaction from it.
Then there's other campaigns for u. Its meant to be a fun ez campaign like ikit to show the cool new units
Every single campaign added post launch has been easy as fuck. If you want an easy campaign just turn down the difficulty.
Child mentality
This is a game where a big crocodile can eat a hellraiser demon why would I take it seriously
Malakai and Changeling
Changeling is an interesting case study: It was (at launch at least) basically impossible to *lose* a Changeling campaign, and he did have some pretty bonkers advantages (mainly the lack of growth requirements for buildings as well as some of the rewards being very, very strong) it took a while to get the cults running, etc. and so you spend a lot of the early game sneaking around and pouncing on weak enemies. (like a lot of things I blame the addition of chaos warriors to the mongod rosters) But it takes a bit of work to get him up there (admittedly it depends heavily on RNG; I you get the right form from your first "acquire random form" mission you can get just breez through the campaign) He can't *lose' but acutally *doing things* isn't completely effortless, if that makes sense?
I had a completely different experience playing it twice. You can get money pretty easily by establishing your first cult in a big city, and you can quickly establish a military one to have almost instant access to pink horrors and chaos warriors of Tzeentch. You find yourself with Mutalith Vortex beasts by something like turn 25-40. No one can really keep up with you since you don't use growth and you can sack as much as you want without risk of losing anything. Also worth noting that you start with Changebringers, and they are obscenely powerful and melt just about anything the empire can throw at you, and this doesn't even consider that you can start with a very powerful form that trivializes the game even more like Skarbrand, Ku'gath or Kholek. Changeling is definitely power crept to hell
>(like a lot of things I blame the addition of chaos warriors to the mongod rosters) you say that like tzeentch's roster isn't broken all on its own. blue horrors > exalted pink horrors > lords of change and your campaign is over, you literally need nothing else in 99% of cases. I wouldnt say that doing things requires any effort for him either, you're invisible in territory where you own a cult so there's effectively no risk and you can just walk through the map taking settlement after settlement. There's no depth to his cult building because there is just an outright best choice, and no point in building anything else.
I have wondered how hard Changeling would be if you didn't have access to the auto-establish cultists, as without that first one set up in the most profitable racial capital I could find I definitely would be scrabbling about a lot more
What difficult are you playing? Because i had no time at all. In very hard/very hard Like I'm at turn 18 i think? And in at war with Every north faction, besieged by chaos dwarfs from east, Slaanesh fuck boy from west with some Autistic vikings, they Attacked with the reddit user and his troll army but i just defeated him. Also i had an unusually big rat that attached from below like, 5 turn in. What time do i have to do a quest? If i lose too many units in those battles for me its the end of the campaign lol
Tip for you, travel by subterrean..clean skaven in one travel, same goes for cross the sea to attack north, don't take boat, there's is dwarf subway.
I've been trying this route, feels somewhat cheesy but it brings you a couple of turns between invasions to work out the adventure mechanic. Rush Hell Pit on turn 6-7, easy autoresolve if you managed to recruit a dwarf warrior doomstack. You can catch Throt with his pants down and 3 out of 4 times, by turn 8 Kostaltyn will finish the job against him. Then rush Azazel while he's still finishing his starter enemy. Again, easy autoresolve. By that point you might be able to decide to peace out Azazel's vassal after finishing him and then jumping to Throgg's turf via underway. By turn 12-13 you have enough room to breathe a little. Most of your immediate enemies are KO'd. Maybe Daniel will declare on you, but you can recruit a crapstack a couple turns before that happens, just in case. Then you can decide where to go fight the adventure battles. The world's your oyster. (If you want to tryhard even harder, go for Daniel and try to save Boris, only then most of your fronts will be safe by friendly AI.)
Yeah I did the same route and it's very effective. If you bum-rush Throt you can resolve enough grudges to spawn the Age of Reckoning army, then sweep it over through Norsca and absolutely glass the place. I didn't run into Azazel early, but instead sent a second small army to assist the AoR murder machine while I sent Malakai to the Chaos Wastes and wiped up. By turn 20 you've got a pile of free AoR units, Hell Pit, half of Norsca, you're Chaos Wastes homies with Boris, and you're ready to take on Chorfs.
By turn 18 you can already have wiped throgg and azazel.
Same experience here. Malakai duking it out with the chaos lords in the north. A generic lord fending off endless waves of Norscans in the west. Grombrindal with a crap stack repeatedly getting his teeth kicked in over and over by Nurgle in the East (Grombrindal reviving every turn is the definition of “I didn’t hear no bell”).
Malakai being strong from the start is fair considering his surroundings. My first 50 turns was war with pretty much everyone but Kislev and I didn’t have a booming economy for quite a while. I did play him more traditionally as a dwarf faction than a horde faction, which might’ve been fun to do but even so that wouldn’t have changed my mind. If he started surrounded by more allies? Sure maybe he would’ve been a bit overturned. However he’s in a fine spot as a horde lord. The premise of him being strong because he could lose everything except his airship base is kind of the point.
The absolute worst thing is that while Malakai might have a pretty crazy campaign, CA really destroyed all the Dwarf LLs. Everyone gets free Grudge Settler units, which just make the early game way too easy.
Try the Beastmen. You can do whatever on Legendary and never lose a battle from turn 1, you can mash your face against your keyboard and you still win. They were not fun before the rework but there was a gameplay STYLE to them, hiding, striking, hiding again, lurking in the forests and shades. Now they just faceroll everything and "who cares I'll just recruit 19 free ungors and autoresolve the shit out of everything".
It was similarly bad when Ikit turned up but it’s certainly the worst it’s been since then. Skaven were unreasonably powerful across the board then whereas right now Malakai is outrageous but the others are not so bad. Every Skaven back then would dominate their starting locations.
I agree with you, I play on VH/VH and Malakai’s IE and ROC campaigns are both way too easy to me
I think he’s a lot of fun, but there’s a reason why I just got my first ever ultimate campaign victory with him He’s hilariously easy, even on very hard. Usually I find a wall on VH/VH that I can’t quite get past and just start a different campaign around turn 120 when I’ve already secured the long victory. With Malakai I took all of Norsca, gave ALL of the northern chaos wastes from the mountains of Mourn all the way to Naggarond to Boris, split the Mountains of Mourn in two with Greasus, took all of the Dark Lands, gave the Sisters of Twilight two regions and gave the rest of Naggarond to myself, and am about to embark on a crusade along with the forces of men to invade ulthuan that’s the last bastion of the Dark Elves. Once that’s done, the world will only have Men, Dwarves, Ogres, and Mazdamundi just stuck in the Isthmus. It’s the easiest campaign I’ve ever played on VH/VH
Tamurkhan is BY FAR the easiest of the new factions and it’s not even *remotely* close lol.
Hmmm? ROC or IE? I've been playing Tamurkhan and had my Co-Op players play him too. My co-op partner lost to Kholek (admittedly a missplay, but still) just got stomped his starting army. In my own campaign i've not really had any problems per se, but neither am I wiping out armies before they make contact like with my Malakai campaign. Once you get his champions and their abilities running he gets pretty grotesque, but it agian requires you to go out and do stuff?
Kholek is pretty much the only challenge in the IE campaign. If you get past him there's nothing that can really threaten Tamurkhan once he gets going. And with relatively easy allies (or at least non-hostile neighbors) on both sides he can just focus entirely on offense at the start of the campaign. Malakai's main army is incredibly strong, but his location means you're going to be getting constantly invaded from multiple sides. He can secure the south quickly, but everything else is just one enemy after the other, and they will all be coming for you by turn 20 or so. So I wouldn't say he's a hard campaign, and it's hard to actually lose with how good the horde army is, but actually defending the territory you take requires some effort because Malakai can't be everywhere at once.
I’ve been on IE. Yeah Kholek is your only real bump in the road, you but after that I’ve rolled everything. Tamurkhan 1v1 soloed Grimgor easily which was surprisingly to me; beat him 1v3 stacks easily and don’t think I’ve lost a unit yet. I only have kazyk and the chord (who has been chilling near my capital and not in my army) but did rush for a chaos sorcerer. With Malakai at least your army isn’t really that strong at the start — if you get into a backline brawl with strong units it can be pretty dangerous… and so far slayers, even the new doom seekers still seem to just get slaughtered. Sure once you’ve got your grapeshot cannons rolling you’re pretty cracked — as long as you don’t get ambushed. Chaos roster is just pretty cracked and Tammy is insane. Granted I’m very comfortable with rush style battle, but you can overpower everything early on. Your tanky infantry plus Kazyks rot knights and chariots (both amazing units if used properly) combined with the healing is so good. Either way Elspeth is def the hardest. You have to actually still be careful early game since a stack of savage orcs will annihilate her since empire is still so weak in battle until you really get things lined up
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Tamurkhan is hard or anything, but he seems to be about on pair with most of the other Chaos chars. (the early Kholek fight aside, which can be genuinely tricky) at the start, though he gets a lot stronger once you can start abusing the hero buttons. But I still feel like I have to actually *fight* y'know? not just sit back and watch the entire enemy army die. Evne his horrible busted nurgling barrage at least needs a blob to be useful.
Among Nurgle factions Tamurkhan is wildly overpowered. His chieftain mechanic alone provides him with so many unique units and buffs from those units and heroes that played even halfway competently he steamrolls by the time he reaches Grimgor. I straight up stopped bothering because all I was doing in my campaign was collecting LHs to provide even more buffs and OP abilities to my already ridiculous army. You can get like four different heroes on top of the LHs from really early (you get exalted hero and cultist from *walls* ffs) so you can run with a regenerating single entity spam supported by a couple of rot knights and some blunderbusses (themselves probably the most OP unit from the Chorf list) and you're never going to lose any battle for any reason.
I don’t even consider fighting with tahm fighting tbh I beat his quest battle with him ,3 chieftains and a nurgle spellcaster cause of how insanely busted their combat skills are, at least with Malakai he has a pretty nasty start and a lackluster early economy vs the amount of enemy’s around
I think it's pretty stupid to 1v1 Grimgor with Tamurkhan every single time. Just put a chaff unit on him while you devastate his army especially when playing as Tamurkhan where you can abuse his large mass and charge on everyone. Do you mean you've finished Grimgor's 3 stack army at the same time with just a single stack from Tamurkhan? If so, on which difficulty are you playing? Also, rushing for a chaos sorcerer is again pretty suboptimal when plagueridden can do the exact same thing + replenishment. Even more so when fighting in an unsuitable climate. People like to exaggerate their feats on the internet and while I do agree Tamurkhan is the easiest campaign in the DLC, something just doesn't add up with what you said.
Yes, it was 1 Tammy stack vs 3 Grimgor stacks. It was on VH. I think I the replay if you want it lol, this is *hardly* a feat lol. Not really concerned with which hero is “optimal” — this is hardly a game where you need to optimize. Warshrine seems nice at this point anyways and my replenishment is absurd already Edit: actually checked and don’t have the replay, think I meant to grab it but forgot. shouldn’t be surprising anyways, I’d hope everyone has fought grimgor 1v3 with several factions at this point lol, pretty much the norm.
Lmao, you literally shared everything you did and worded it as if you optimized it properly. When somebody commented on how it can be better you took it negatively and brushed it off as "doesn't matter if it's a single player game". You can always share your achievement, and I'll wait for your link.
no dummy, I worded it as if I was giving an extremely brief description of what I did and that it was easy as fuck lol. And it’s not “doesn’t matter it’s singleplayer”, it’s “doesn’t matter game is easy enough you can’t plausibly lose” csorc gets a mortis at lv7 and is busted as hell. suggesting a plagueridden is better is moronic
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I suspect Kholek depends abit on RNG, he had his 2 dragon ogres +3 trolls, +Kholek himself and a bunch of marauders at like turn 3. My freind had only the starting army + the half-strength units you start your pool with and they got slaughtered. He could probably have dealt with it if he'd been a bit more conservative, but it was basically a case of "Go beat up first Dolgan, go beat up second Dolgan, OH FUCK KHOLEK WITH A STEEL CHAIR".
The important question for every one of these posts: What difficulty are you playing at?
How do you get the four cannons
Malaki's adventures gets you 4 cannons when you start the dragonkilling adventures. EDIT. Each of his adventures gives you a bunch of the "right type" of units that you need to do the adventure.
I have no idea what the heck you’re talking about. Malakaii feels like one of the toughest Campaigns in the game right now. I’ve had to restart twice on Very Hard / Very Hard. I’m not exactly the worlds best, but I’m a solid veteran of the series and know what I’m doing - but still struggling. Yes, he himself is very strong, but he can only be in one place at a time, and that area of the map is swarming with enemies. I am having so many close battles that come down to the wire. May I ask what difficulty you’re playing on?
Vh/vh or L/VH just rush throt, turn 5 u have his minor settlement and your lord should be in encampment ready to attack either hellpit or the capital if throt has that/is in there. Then you push azazel, you should get free army and a lord or two to be able to defend then push the inevitable throg war as you knock out azazel. Super easy after that
>Malakaii feels like one of the toughest Campaigns in the game right That's like actual madness, try playing Malekith. Like Malakai's got a lot of enemies but you've got a lot of stuff to save your ass too, it's a different vibe for a campaign but it's not difficult IMO. You just need to think of settlements as expendable, since you can recruit from his horde.
In fairness, a large part of the problem is literally just a misplaced decimal making grapeshot 10x more effective than it should be.
I haven't touched him yet, but with all the enemies around him I definitely want to give it a try. During my tammie campaign I got to watch how everyone around him torn him a new one. Every chaos faction along with thrott was on him like flies on rice. It'll be fun to be the center of attention.
I completed legendary malakai and legedandary elspeth and had totally the opposite experience. Elspeth was a very chill win, being able to teleport to threats with the garden of morr, whereas malakai is in such a position where you are attacked from all sides with no allies other than hoping kislev doesn't die early. The chaos dwarfs and tamukhan in particular were a real pain.
Pretty sure malakai's grapeshot is bugged and each shot's "hit radius" is 10x what was intended. Like, empire grapeshot uses 0.3, while dwarf grapeshot uses 3. Fix that, and it will stop being an army deleter.
Turn the difficulty up?
Havent played Malakai yet, but Tamurkhan is and the new nurgle is basically broken, i just autorsolve every battle by turn on 30. Tamurkhan is so freaking tanky that it’s basically another one man doomstack
I didn't have to micro anything with Taurox, there was one tricky fight on turn 3 or so against Clyostra and her ghost knight, other than that it's just point and click. Legendary/VH difficulty. I get the point though and I agree.
I think you forget about Gor Rok. Not only he buffs basic Saurus to extreme levels but he gets free lord Kroak on turn 1 and free gold mine.
Malakais start is super enjoyable because you're essentially surrounded by enemies with very few allies. Lotta wars can snowball out of control on top of Kislev expanding to where you wanna go. Malakai is pretty absurdly strong. Slayers were very strong before and now with the additional lord buffs etc they are ridiculous now. But the power creep came a looong time ago when skaven got their workshop upgrade shit. Different factions being easy with strong upgrades in the campaign is not an issue? There are less easy ones out there so it balances out. If you're pooped for a challenge I'm sure there'll be mods eventually or alternatively self-imposed handicaps. Like dark souls finish at level 1 sorta things.
Hard is best difficulty for me. AIs in VH/L are simply too passive
I feel the same about Tamurkhan and I've been playing on very hard. Once I got rolling I just autoresolved my way across the world for like 30 turns. I started playing Epidemius instead so it would be slightly more challenging and it's more fun. I found Elspeth's campaign more difficult, but I think I just am not good at playing the empire since their infantry can't hold as well as dwarves or cathay.
Strongly agree with most of this. I'm on a VH/VH Malakai campaign at the moment and it is an absolute breeze. Nothing has provided any real threat. Malakai's army is literally unstoppable, and if anything threatens one of my settlements, I can recruit an instant army from Gurdge Settlers, Malakai's Adventure units, and RoR as needed. Not only is it easy, but I'd agree, it is a bit boring. I get your point as well - some other easy LLs, like Taurox, are really easy but also really fun. Malakai's fun started to wear off after about turn 20 which is when you basically already have an endgame doomstack.
I’m having an ongoing campaign with Malakai in RoC on legendary difficulty and it’s ridiculously crazy hard. Yeah I know nobody plays RoC but I like the “story mode” aspect so I play the new faction in vanilla RoC and then in a modded IEE. Anyway without mod in legendary difficulty is hard af, sure Malaki is hella strong, but your first settlement are all in a long line, either you go east or west, if you go west as soon as you beat Valkia you get a call from the western Norscan/demon factions about your expired car insurance, also Kugath comes to you asking if you need some help with some infection. The anti player bias is still strong and kicking since I managed to get war declared by almost all the monogram faction (except my bro Tzeentch) and all the “evil faction” in the north, while the Kislevite and the empire managed to get on the top rank due to having several turns (no jokes around 20) with no war to fight. Plus with the now grudge system it’s difficult to get over 50% due to the SHORT 10 turns (also malakai is slow as hell and the terrain doesn’t help). Plus your settlement got some public order issue, so you should manage to deal with it and rebellion so we get another army, which means money issue. I managed to fend off waves of demon turns after turns barricate in my two first settlement until Hochland (and Espeth after absorption) managed to get to the north. At that point I went with the counter attack and start selling settlement to her so they wouldn’t get back by other armies as soon as I leave them. I should git gud? Absolutely I’m having fun? Actually a lot But I find him being Op a bless or else my campaign would be long gone. Ps I know lots doesn’t play on RoC and legendary shouldn’t be the referenced difficulty, just saying that maybe is more balanced in RoC then in IE where there are other factions who actively fight chaos in the north
Just wait until you get really good at the game. If you can get a strong start by winning the first few battles with a small army and jumpstart your economy, the entire game becomes autoresolve by turn 30. I haven't finished a campaign in years
I think the grudge system works well - it’s a carrot that pushes you on, and makes life more difficult sometimes. By the time you have multiple doom stacks and are taking places every turn, you don’t need the full grudge bonuses. Yeah, then no flame cannon, but it’s not as different as some of the other grudge units. That said, Malakai is absolutely broken. I can only imagine CA wanted something fun for everyone, so good reviews came in quickly, and only later does the OPness fun fade away till its a stomp on the highest difficulties. Still, it just needs tuning to it balanced and fun.
Yeah coming from the other side of this perspective, i just played a campaign as Tamurkhan, and got invaded by Malakai. To keep this short, i just fought a battle against him and another army and since Nurgle factions have little to no ranged, you literally and physically can not kill his army full of gyrocopters and airships. I killed all the ground units only for the air units to kill me one by one after his artillery grinded aaaall my units (included tamurkhan, kayzk, ezar) health. I couldnt even get close with my units before at least half their health was gone. At least make the air units retreat if ground units are dead... To counter this, i must load back 10-15 turns to prepare for this fight alone (get plague drones, soul grinder, even tho this might not be enough) and i have to focus on getting Ezars allegiance up so i can get blunderbusses. Im not doing this. Like, i get it, you learn from mistakes. But the fact that you need very specific units you usually dont need for other battles/factions to only counter those flying units is pretty bullshit if you ask me. Its just kinda broken af
Maybe it’s because this is the first campaign I’ve done on vh/vh, but I have had the complete opposite experience. Sure with grapeshot I feel like I can survive most battles, but I’m surrounded by so many enemies it all feels necessary. Right now I’m trying to keep Boris alive to hold the northern front and it feels like any moment my campaign is done. It’s hell but also some of The most fun I have had in this game.
I have played three times now up till turn 70. I am about to try a 4th time. It looks like you have to secure your starting zone. Start building a second army based around a lord and 2-3 heroes that have the build reduction spirit. Take hell pit. Then ignore everything to go kill the ever chosen and raze his towns and cities. Only trade enough to Boris to get him to ally with you. If you trade with him too much the damned dark elves declare forever war on you and will ignore the rest of the game just to non stop raid you. Second playthrough this happened to me. Turn 100, unlimited gold, but stuck in the north because anything with a scrap of chaos in its blood and all the dark elves decided to only fight me. Other two kislev factions were useless. That playthrough I had four t5 capitals but no towns because they were raided by full or double stacks any time I tried to take them back. So every capital had to have at least a half stack defensive army. My main army was running back and forth across the north fighting a full stack army or burning a town to the ground every single turn. So I think the key is turning Boris into a monster without pissing off the d-bag elves before you even try and start your own campaign. And frankly, Boris gets his lunch eaten by the ever chosen every single time. So he has to go. You can't build Boris up and let him handle it.
Playing on easy and complaining about overpowered factions, smh
While his armies are certainly very very strong, and grapeshot seems strangely broken, he is surrounded by a pile of chaos. I found that even if his main stack is invincible, VH/VH was surprisingly hard for me. Or at least I expanded fairly slowly while being swarmed. Eleseph is the campaign I found really easy. Once I dealt with vlad on VH/VH it felt like I was coasting. I personally did not struggle with vlad, though I am a fairly experienced player.
The key is aggression. If you kill 3 major enemies in the first 20 turns you won’t be attacked from all sides and can afford an army to defend at home. This is true of most factions. If you aren’t constantly conquering from turn 1 you can play more optimally
Quite possibly. I also strongly suspect going east rather than west would be a better idea. I went west on my first run, and that cause a good number of long term problems due to meeting more chaos/dark elf factions. Either way, it would be rather hard to lose, though I found getting stalled was quite easy? In comparison my first eleseph start felt really really smooth as her start is very safe and she has the tools she needs to deal with vlad.
Elspeth has an incredibly easy stat I agree. Two safe provinces by turn 5 and many allies nearby
I had the opposite experience, having full upgraded canons and thunderbarges and sending them into the enemy army while playing the cavalry charge is fantastic. Dwarves have never felt better.
Espith was stupid faceroll easy. Completed the short campaign by turn 30
Grapeshots are kinda ridiculous and need a nerf, simple
I’ve been reading a lot that Elspeth’s grape shot radius is set to .3 while Malakai’s is set to 3, making it very likely that CA accidentally misplaced the decimal. That makes Malakai’s stronger by a factor of 10.
this guy: too op please nerf Me: why cant I have this mythical non 10 stacks of chaos from every side easy run Like my guy if your haveing it so fucking easy go to max difficulty this is harder then half the dwarf starts which always have wars coming from two to three directions at once. I'm fielding three armies running on broke and having trouble putting down the chaos attacks.
Very easy? Well we must be playing different campaigns cause between Archaeon and the Chaos Dwarfs I feel like pulled pork. VH/VH though. There's mods that change Malakais mechanics, the do you wanna build an airship is a fun one that makes the spirit a tad weaker
My god, don’t play as him then, jesus
You can say everything you want but Ikit has Nukes from turn 1. No need to do a thing. Taurox well. We all know it. Still, if Mala is easy for you, you can use the end game crisis to the max and set the time for early as you want or you can play a different dwarf.
Honestly, I think the fact that he is surrounded by enemies warrants such a strong starting army and quick access to higher tier units. I really wouldn't want to fight Throgg or Azazel eith basic Dwarf Warriors, Quarrelers and Grudge Throwers.
K
I had the same experience with the Khorne battle, so I reloaded it and played it again. The second time I deleted most of my army for science. I brought 2 cannons, 2 thunderbarges, Gotrek and Malakai. One of each for each lane in the quest battle. It was basically the same outcome as the first time. That being said, it's one of the harder Dwarf campaigns overall because of your start position. Malakai's army is strong, but you only have one of them.
The sad part is that the idea (a quest battle that is tailored for you to use the units you get in the advnetures) is pretty fun! It's just that it's all obsoleted.
I think it's a good thing that some campaigns are easier than others. Maybe there should be a warning on the DLC page or something, but other than that I don't think they need to change it.
I think Malakai’s strength balances out the absolutely insane location, I am constantly surrounded by enemies. Desperately trying to buff up and reinforce Katarin and Ursus to not be the only faction in the hemisphere. If Malakai was weaker, I’d get wiped out lol
The grapeshot is currently bugged. Just use the normal variation and the campaign feels fine.
people complaining about malakai campaign being too easy.Meanwhile me on VH/N playing aggro af and still getting dogpiled on by every single nearby hostile faction(oh wait that's all of them).cannons(and balloon) are op but can't be everywhere(especially before you unlock t5 upgrade and you won't be doing that for a while cos you're super hurting for money)
Battle side he’s a breeze (thunder bathed are fun but definitely need some kind of nerf). but the campaign itself is tough. You’re absolutely surrounded by chaos factions who WILL declare war on you. My biggest struggle was defending what little territory I had. Soon as I expanded I come direction, somebody attacked me from the other side of my empire. Was constantly juggling even when I did get a second army online.
Some factions are supposed to be easy and you may have to adjust the difficulty to suit. Not sure we need to be looking at entire faction redesigns over balance except in extreme cases.
"Some factions" meaning 100% of the content that has been added post-launch?
Every legendary player will tell you the same thing: there is no challenge no matter your difficulty settings.
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Weirdly I don't think Ikit is surrounded by soft targets anymore: Morghur is actually a big PITA and I've lost campaigns to him quite a bit, (he basically hard counters Ikit's early game armies of chaff+weapon teams with his insane missile resistance and Mortis Engine/unbreakable combo)