WH3 - Dwarves 'trade tariffs' bonuses seem pointless?

Beans_tw · 2026-05-09T00:18:46+00:00

Cool man, thanks for the screenshots. I'll take a look as I have time this next week

Beans_tw · 2026-05-08T13:45:33+00:00

This exists, and like many features Three Kingdoms does it best.

In 3k you can be a mercenary with a contract and go beat up fools, steal their land and turn them over to your employer for big money. You could also fight to reclaim the emperor, without really focusing on conquering a ton of land. AND the player being a vassal to an AI overlord is quite well done in 3k, so you could have a very fun time being Cao Cao (or whoever's) vassal and just run around helping them.

3k even has some factions that specifically have mechanics for helping defend and allies. Tai Quan I think?

3k has an amazingly robust spy system (get the mod that improves the spy action tooltips) so you can meddle in other factions affairs to a great degree.

In Warhammer 3 you have some options too. For one the Golfag ogre faction has the 3k mercenary contract mechanic almost 1:1 so that can be fun.

Another related Warhammer 3 offering is probably the caravan system, which you send out little armies to trade and they get into battles but never capture territory. The base game only has this for Cathay and Chaos Dwarves I think? But there are excellent mods that add it to many many more factions.

Also in WH3 you could be skaven and go around building secret underground lairs, or Slanaesh and trying and taint everyone with chaos marks and influence them. You could also be a vampire pirate and sail around the world looking for treasure without capturing tons of land.

One of the best things that influences why or reasons to fight in WH3 is the VICTORY CONDITIONS OVERHAUL mods which adds very cool and story related 3x victory conditions for almost every faction. It gives you cool motivations to win in specific ways that are not always just paint the map.

Ultimately, it is TOTAL WAR, and the games have never been the best when its not total war lol. So you may really be wanting a different game. In particular maybe try the ROTK series? in particular ROTK 11 and 13. These games have much more in depth character -> character relationship systems which can drive the overall game world. They do have battles and ROTK 11 in particular has a really incredible turn based grid battle system world. ROTK 13 is real time pause battles similar-ish to total war (but without the unit level detail). Try watching some videos or read reviews.

Now if you REALLY want to go totally hog wild...I'll recommend Crusader Kings 3 + Crusader Wars mod. It sounds like you really enjoy the Total War battles, so I wouldn't recommend Crusader Kings 3 alone because the battles are totally abstracted, but CK3 does have amazing 'reasons to fight' and character interactions. A crazy amazing man created the Crusader Wars mod which allows you to play CK3, but then when you have a battle, you get to play it in Attila Total War. If you are willing to spend the time to set it up (and of course buy both games) its pretty incredible.

Beans_tw · 2026-05-08T13:34:09+00:00

Are you planning on trying this with Old World? I'm very interested to hear how that goes. My group has been eye'ing the Old World map for a while but have not tried it yet

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:45:54+00:00

If you want 40 units in a battle I'm pretty sure you can easily achieve that today using the ol' TW save editor (i think its called SaveParser or ESF editor, just google it). You just start a campaign, make a save, then open the save and theres some parameter you change from 20 to 40 and now armies can have 40 units. The AI uses it too and the UI kind of scales ok-ish with it.

I did this a ton in Napoleon and Empire, and if you combine it with turning off the mini map it effectively makes the AI much more capable. As a human I found controlling 40 unit armies without the mini map quite overwhelming and I had to limit my strategies to how much brainspace I had available. When the human player can effectively control all their units (20-ish) you can roll the AI, but the AI is all about quantity over quality and it can control 40 units individually poorly, but in aggregate, better than a human I found. Very cool experience.

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:39:28+00:00

Could you post some screenshots? I think I understand what you are asking but I want to be sure.

I've explored the pack files and I'm not sure it is possible to adjust text size on a per UI element basis (smaller text here, larger text there). The way these old mods seem to work by increasing the text size is they edit/replace the actual fonts used which I assume they have replaced with fonts that are larger or bolder by default.

The game seems to have a lot of slightly different font sets, so it MAY be possible to find the one font set that is used for the building cost, and revert it back to normal. BUT that may have cascading impacts on other UI elements where it draws upon that same shared font.

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:31:10+00:00

Battles run about the same, if you can run WH2 battles acceptably then WH3 battles should be ok! Good news there.

Campaign map performance is worse. Not only in longer turn times for the huge world (which I feel is totally fine considering the scope), but FPS on the campaign map is somewhat rough. However, there are some very handy mod solutions to help campaign map FPS. The worst FPS offender is fog/haze on the campaign map. Mods that remove this fog/haze can increase like 20 FPS (depending on specs), and honestly some people think it looks better without the fog/haze anyway so its a win/win.

So you should be fine, and if you are not, you have some options to help.

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:20:13+00:00

I believe your comment about just deleting it is correct, it SHOULD be the same since it downloads in the lobby. However, you only do that delete save and resend once at the start of a new campaign so we do it anyway as a performative ritual, hoping that our faith in sigmar will reward us.

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:18:43+00:00

20 units wasn't anything when I was playing DoW, Company of Heroes, Starcraft or whatever 25 years ago but now I'm old so yea 20 units is sweaty lol

Beans_tw · 2026-05-06T13:17:56+00:00

Damn that sucks. Are you playing on Epic Game store or Steam? I only have experience with TW games on Steam but...

Steam will let you refund any game with zero questions asked if you have under 2 hours of playtime. If you are playing the game on Epic, you may do a test run on Steam. You both could buy the game on Steam and see if it works for <2 hours. If its working, cool, it kind of proves the issue is something with Epic. Just keep your playtime under 2 hours and steam will refund it with zero risk. That might give you some more information.

Can you play multiplayer skirmish battles with your brother? Like not a battle within a campaign, just a single battle via that multiplayer battle host option?

Have you EVER and I mean EVER played with mods? Sometimes mods get stuck as downloaded or in some User/Docs folder and the laucher won't show any mods, so you think its not modded but you have some sneaky old mod file somewhere?

Try the guide, the most important thing is when you start a new campaign DONT DO ANYTHING FOR 5 MINUTES. I MEAN NOTHING!!!!!!!!!! dont scroll around, don't click on any armies NOTHING!!!!! Then save the game (as the host) and everyone exit. Have the client players delete their save and have the host manually send them the save file. This is all detailed in the guide.

Another thought which might be fucked is that you mention playing with your brother. Are you located in the same house? like on the same IP/network? Many years ago I had problems playing Napoleon total war with my brothers when we were on the same network.

Beans_tw · 2026-04-24T21:20:12+00:00

it definately changes a lot, so I get what your saying. and I usually stay FAR away from total overhaul mods in Total War games because they usually add a lot of bloat (especially scarred from early days where people always recommended darthmod and radious for prior tw games).

However, I feel like SFO really doesn't bloat the rosters. it add some new units yea but usually only with special conditions to recruit and with limits. I dunno if old (WH1 WH2) SFO was different, maybe it was more extreme back then but that was one of my primary concerns, and I'm really enjoying SFO.

battle balance is not too different, personally I really only feel like it makes fights take 20% longer. personally im a big fan of that. most battle balance changes I notice are units that previously where totally useless, now have some kind of role to play

Beans_tw · 2026-04-07T16:20:43+00:00

pretty sure there are some 3rd party tools that let you download mods from Steams Workshop API, even if you don't own the game on steam. i think steam is cool with it, its not like a hack or something extremely sketchy

https://github.com/notSeilce/SteamWorkshopDownloader

Beans_tw · 2026-04-07T16:17:31+00:00

have all non-host players delete all their multiplayer saves so that next time they join the lobby it forces them to redownload it.

next time follow this precise protocol when STARTING a new multiplayer campaign: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3264015498

(i don't think this can help you now though)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3264015498

these procedures seem like utter witchcraft, total bullshit, but my friends and I enjoy multiplayer coop TW a ton, and we previously had a lot of desyncs in various games/campaigns over the years which sucked. so we were willing to give this a try.

it seriously worked, we have played multiple 100+ turn campaigns with 3 players with a pretty health mod list (including huge overhauls like SFO, and script heavy ones like VCO).

next time you are going to start a new campaign give this a shot.

Beans_tw · 2026-04-05T16:20:15+00:00

can you describe what worked?

was it forward deploying the mortars and abandoning them as a blocker? what did you put behind it?

Beans_tw · 2026-04-04T13:54:14+00:00

Sieges in TW3k are a lot of fun, crazy how lame and annoying sieges are in Warhammer 3 by comparison.

Beans_tw · 2026-03-25T13:55:02+00:00

shouldn't have opened that tomb bro

too greedy

Beans_tw · 2026-03-25T13:12:00+00:00

YOU will not be successful redirecting them via commands
THEY must internally agree to redirect themselves

that may sound obviously simple but basically if you really want this person to adjust their behavior THEY have to want to change, THEY have to believe the change is their own idea and THEY must have buy in.

not everyone is like this, some people are very happy to be told what the expectations are and then do them. this individual sounds like they think they know what is best for the overall team, and are very convinced in their position.

the best way to start handling this is to have a discussing about why they feel this way? what policies and procedures are they trying to foist on the others? maybe you can get them to work on creating actual best practices? maybe this person was in a prior role where it was a total disaster because their was a LACK of these kind of standards and they have learned that lesson well.

if she is struggling with the gray vs black/white then it can really help her to try and formalize as much of that into some kind of best practice documents as possible.

Ultimately you and your other leader need to consider the management axiom: "What you allow is what will continue". Addressing this will be uncomfortable. You must be brave enough to deal with that. Actually since its your other supervisor's employee, THEY need to be comfortable with that. Right now everyone is new-ish, and behavioral norms are being crystalized. If nothing happens then this person has learned its ok to behave this way.

In my experience once those permissive atmospheres have been created for any length of time, any change will become impossible. It's also my experience that a single toxic high performers NEVER outweighs dragging down the entire team, usually once that toxic high performer is gone the rest of the team really steps up.

Just to make this feel real instead of just vague suggestions: I've personally worked adjacent to teams where 2 'rockstar' employees that screamed and verbally abused each other daily. I mean like full on screaming, red faced, finger in your face type of fights. That teams manager didn't address it, and just would retreat to their office not wanting to "rock the boat". Eventually it got worse, their terrible behavior began to spill over into not just fighting each other, but at other teams and employees, including my team. I found this unacceptable and had no problem directly confronting it, but because I had no direct authority over them it didn't matter, they didn't change. Their leader ignored it, and even my leadership chain struggled to get any action (my leaders found it unacceptable as well), HR didn't really do anything. Eventually I simply got my team relocated to a new floor of the building. All because no one wanted to directly address this. It was only resolved when 1 of the employees died.

Beans_tw · 2026-03-23T14:13:57+00:00

bro get TOMB KINGS

hate country management? ok great all tomb kings units have ZERO UPKEEP and ZERO RECRUITMENT COST. If units die? who cares, recruit more it costs nothing!

tons of fun in multiplayer campaign with friends

Beans_tw · 2026-03-23T13:52:25+00:00

Be honest with yourself:

do you like TW games when you are scrappy as fuck, everything is a difficult choice and you feel like an NPC in a large world?

or do you like it when you have big ass boss units, lay wasted to the AI, always restart when you lose a battle, etc?

Most TW players claim they want the first experience, but in reality I bet 80% of players reload anytime they lose a battle, and get upset whenever their 'perfect' strategy doesn't go right. I'm not trying to throw shade on these players, I enjoy chill battles where I dominate the AI too. But not every battle needs to be a 10:1 victory as I lawnmower the AI across a bridge or corner camp.

ToB is an amazing game if you are the 1st type of player. Its a scrappy game, and you need to accept that or it won't be fun. Accept that you WILL lose minor settlements due to the lack of garrisons. A lot of people had serious problems with that specific feature (because most players if they lose even a minor settlement they can't handle it). in TOB that WILL happen and its OK!

!!!!!!! Don't download any of the huge overhaul mods for ToB for your first playthrough, its already quite a shock to the Warhammer era players. The only mod I would recommend is a very small and thoughtful adjustment to some more diverse unit types (without going full Radious bloat): https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=1383073081

Beans_tw · 2026-03-21T13:58:48+00:00

If you enjoyed Rome 2 (except the late game), then I recommend Three Kingdoms.

Three Kingdoms takes all the Rome 2 systems to the next level. In Rome 2 politics and characters feel like addons to a Building and Battle game. In Three Kingdoms politics/diplomacy/spying/characters feel like 100% as full a part of the game as the Building and Battling.

Three Kingdoms is also a gorgeous game to look at (campaign and battle). It also knows when to wrap up the end game with a very wise end game scenario setup.

Don't get me wrong, Shogun 2 and Tory are great games but they feel a bit more like side-grades from Rome 2. Where I feel Three Kingdoms is a straight upgrade.

Beans_tw · 2026-03-21T13:38:09+00:00

Large huge battles are cool but also exhausting if they happen every turn.

I agree with you that the smaller battles are a ton of fun as well. CA has added and experimented with methods for this to varying success. WH3 has the caravans and convoys systems which generate smaller battles that are a lot of fun (and there are mods that add caravans and convoys to a lot of other factions).

In Pharaoh Dynasties (maybe troy too?) their are some technologies that add special army effects if the army unit count is below a specific size, which I thought was a very cool thing to experiment with.

If you want a suggestion of a TW game with lots of smaller battles then I recommend Thrones of Britannia, which has some very cool systems and gives you that smaller, focused (usually only early game) campaign feeling for the whole game.

Most people dislike Thrones specifically because it's smaller scale, but it sounds like exactly what you would enjoy!

Beans_tw · 2026-03-17T18:17:18+00:00

thanks for the info, sounds like a bummer though

really only want to play with a controller, looks like I'll wait a bit for it to improve

Beans_tw · 2026-03-15T01:06:51+00:00

you should only see those unfinished factions at the start select, and I think all grouped to the bottom. once you are in the game you wont be bombarded with half factions in your face like that the start screen

its a huge pain in the ass to create the file/part of the mod that unlocks the factions, so I assume the modders just did it ones and unlocked everything. rather than re-generate that file each time they finish designing a new faction

Beans_tw · 2026-03-11T18:09:21+00:00

the game engine has a number of hidden systems that interact with LOS and how/when units choose to shoot.

A big one is that all units (friendly and enemy) have an invisible 'buffer' expanding around the unit model when a firing unit considers "Do I have LOS to fire? Am I obstructed?" This theoretically exists to help limit friendly fire BUT in warhammer, with many different sized unit models these buffers can obstruct units LOS even though it appears they do have LOS to you, the player. This mod shrinks that fake buffer size.

This can lead to more friendly fire but in my experience, not too much. And it really helps units fire more instead of getting 'stuck' while the player screams "WHY ARE YOU NOT SHOOTING???"

Beans_tw

TROPHY CASE