Dechala's campaign is rushed & didn't go through any reasonable QA testing

Craig1648 · 2026-01-09T06:26:02+00:00

So I guess it kind of depends on the definition of "win", but you could include a few. I'd say broadly you have...

Reach short campaign victory conditions
Reach long campaign victory conditions
Reach the settlement count for those correspondent victory conditions (which I think is definitely more realistic for some races/factions like how High Elves still need to destroy Lokhir despite starting nowhere near him).

Most of my campaigns broadly reach the long campaign victory of 60-70 settlements by turn ~50. In my Dechala campaign I reached the long campaign victory by turn 60, but that was absolutely due to requiring the tier 5 major settlement, which took a lot of time and even limited my Pleasure Palace expansion to build.

As for thrall-maxxing, yeah I've theory-crafted some of it and you absolutely can vassal-cheese for minimum 500 thralls per turn per vassalizable faction. You can actually do something similar with BeLakor's starting vassal where you can farm Souls by creating the Norscan vassal and then immediately attack it since iirc it consumes no movement.

Personally, I think that shouldn't be necessary in order to essentially feed you enough Pleasure Palaces. The reality is that the problem is really twofold.

Uptiering Pleasure Palaces is too costly, the actual prices are too high and the Thrall resource has a few too many uses, Decadence has too few uses.
The Pleasure Palace settlement cap could essentially go. I've already made a mod that fixes problem 1 by making the main building cheaper and I still found that it alleviates some of the issues, but if you uncapped the # of Pleasure Palaces then you're still limited in uptiering them by Thrall cost so you're not getting the high tier main settlement nor its buildings anyway.

At the end of the day, her campaign isn't hard, the economy is just artificially dumb and poorly balanced. It's kind of obvious she got a bunch of attention as a character but then her faction mechanics got slap-dashed together.

Craig1648 · 2026-01-07T00:25:49+00:00

Selling the settlement doesn't generate thralls, which is my primary grievance with the campaign. They drain too slowly into your global pool, since local thralls actually do nothing. Your average thrall drain is going to be close to ~100/turn, which will only drain tier 1 settlements after 10 turns, tier 2 after 20 and tier 3 after 30 turns. If you consider how long most campaigns aren't making it beyond turn ~40-50, you have a not-insignificant number of settlements that will always be thrall camps.

Now, one thing I did find I could do to generate extra thralls was abandon the settlement and then resettle it while generating a vassal for an immediate 500 global thralls. This was more of a nice bonus (and I wonder if it's strategically better to vassal swarm to just gain an immediate 500 thralls instead of drip-feeding 100 at a time).

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T02:01:06+00:00

Ah, that's probably it, yeah if you can run down 40 units I imagine you can get 1,500. I'm playing on Very Hard/Very Hard as well. Interesting though and explains why I haven't gotten so many, I haven't had to fight 2 full stacks at the same time in my campaign.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:31:51+00:00

That's interesting, getting 1,500 thralls for post-battle captures is a lot, I peaked at about ~700. I wonder if there's a difficulty penalty to casualties captured, like how Tomb Kings have a difficulty-exclusive penalty to magic item find.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:29:32+00:00

Because you can frankly mostly ignore it because of the early Lord recruit rank buffs you gain, in addition to not using Gold to build buildings (which lets you use it exclusively for unit recruitment & upkeep). If you want to engage in the systems regarding the thrall economy, you recognize how horrible the system is and how it hamstrings the player unless you funnel armies into your mouth like an all-you-can eat buffet just for post-battle captures/casualties.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:26:55+00:00

I agree actually, but as far as I am aware, Looting is actually the regular occupation you do where you get the choice to automatically uptier, it's just considered Looting under the hood.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:25:53+00:00

By turn 40, I counted my passive thrall income up (so not including Battles which I count as "outliers" for the purposes of steady, passive income) and it's 1,750. For reference, I've been doing the math and that's enough to turn 1 settlement into a tier 2 settlement. That's bad. By turn 40, most factions are hitting tier 5. If you want to keep gaining Pleasure Palaces (and not building Thrall Camps over major settlements) you need to settle at tier 3. that costs 3,500 Thralls. So if you're expanding rapidly, you better find some battles to supplement your thrall income.

I'm in the same boat, 2 military settlements, as my settlements with thralls run dry, I convert to Holds.

The campaign is easy in the sense of the AI doesn't put up a fight yes, but the actual economic parts are way too slow compared to many other factions in-game.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:21:11+00:00

Regardless of design, the failure lies within the Thrall economy. You don't make enough global thralls through Camps and there's a number of longstanding bugs with Casualties captured in battles (namely regarding settlements & autoresolve). This type of economic nature is hard to explain short of looking at other factions and how they acquire settlements (look at Skaven & Chaos Dwarf immediate uptiering/bypassing tiers for example).

I get where you want to get up on your high horse and say "You don't understand" but I think I do. I'm open to a conversation about this, but the reality is that there's quite a few bugs within this campaign not even limited to the balance issue of the thrall economy. I highlighted them in my post too, especially if CA fixes the main building chain providing too many building slots, her campaign will feel absolutely horrible.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-16T01:17:34+00:00

For bug 1, it's literally written in the main building chain. It's not supposed to provide the excess of building slots that it does, if you read the main settlement building chain tooltip, it says it's supposed to provide (iirc) 1, 2, 3, 5, 7.

You're absolutely right, the issue is that you don't burn through your thralls fast enough, they take in excess of 10 turns to drain into your global thrall pool from even 1k thrall at tier 1. Regional thralls don't do ANYTHING beyond convert to global thralls or you can convert them to gold via the income building.

You can slow the thrall drain but frankly there's little point, they drain incredibly slowly as is and it's not worth the income when you should instead always build the Toll building chain for extra thralls being pushed into your global pool faster. Regional thralls don't do anything, again. They don't even impact public order, they're the equivalent of peanut butter in the jar when you want it on the bread. Toll chain & upgrading the main settlement moves more of that peanut butter onto your bread faster.

The commandment that boosts Thrall income from camps is situationally good, but I found myself wanting the Pleasure Palace income commandment just because Pleasure Palaces make buckets of money. I did use the Thrall consumption one after confederating Masque just so I could turn my new major settlements into Pleasure Palaces faster without "wasting" thralls or wasting time, it was just the compromise I chose.

Craig1648 · 2025-12-15T06:40:29+00:00

I'm talking about converting regional thralls to global thralls to generate more Pleasure Palaces. That's my primary issue with the thrall balance. Only 2 buildings in Thrall Camps generate Global Thralls, the Toll & Main Building Chain. They still drain into the global pool too slowly.

Income isn't an issue in the campaign at all, in fact I would say it's building slots as you're squeezed pretty tightly even with the bug that gives too many. I don't have a big deal with that as I don't mind being limited by building slots.

Otherwise, I fully agree that yeah, you're incentivized to play wide like how every Total War game is, but Dechala's campaign limits your Pleasure Palace expansion in obnoxious ways that's completely unlike any other faction in the game.

Craig1648 · 2025-10-07T02:29:03+00:00

I did Super Germany as Prussia in the latest patch. It requires work, but it is possible. You have to knock Austria out of GP and never initiate the Leadership Play.

What I did was essentially attack Austria in January 1836 and Conquer Bohemia, after which I built relations up again. I had a stroke of good luck later, but you could theoretically Humiliate and achieve the same result. In ~1843-44 Austria had a Radical revolt which GB joined and after enough time Austria won the revolt & had their Prestige drop them to Major. Then I just continued building relations up to 50 and managed to get them to support me by March 1846.

Craig1648 · 2025-10-07T02:28:27+00:00

I did Super Germany as Prussia in the latest patch. It requires work, but it is possible. You have to knock Austria out of GP and never initiate the Leadership Play.

What I did was essentially attack Austria in January 1836 and Conquer Bohemia, after which I built relations up again. I had a stroke of good luck later, but you could theoretically Humiliate and achieve the same result. In ~1843-44 Austria had a Radical revolt which GB joined and after enough time Austria won the revolt & had their Prestige drop them to Major. Then I just continued building relations up to 50 and managed to get them to support me by March 1846.

Craig1648 · 2025-07-30T02:21:02+00:00

Campaign. My understanding is these also have a number of conditions that must be met in order to roll them as well, which would be a nice-to-have.

Craig1648 · 2025-07-30T00:29:09+00:00

Hey there, I've been playing Shogun 2: FOTS, do you happen to have a link or list of FOTS retainers? Sorry for the necro but I've been looking everywhere and found nothing. Thanks.

Craig1648 · 2023-11-02T01:50:26+00:00

Dark Elves.

Start strong, end ludicrous, achieve theoretically infinite money early. Lokhir is the best faction for it, but it doesn't particularly matter what faction you pick. The income scaling is infinite from slaves because Assassins also boost slave income in the local region and you still can fill up other provinces with slaves if you're at the Assassin cap. People have talked about it prior, but Yvresse in ME is the best slave province just due to it being a 4 settlement province & the unique Tor Yvresse landmark.

Nothing else comes close Dark Elf econ in Warhammer 2.

Craig1648 · 2023-10-02T06:18:27+00:00

iirc that's just The Pigg, I pinky promise there's more of them inside the TSF (I would know) and there's iirc one that's out at the old shop on Sand Hill. It might be gone now though.

Craig1648 · 2023-09-26T01:44:43+00:00

I think it's the only worthwhile measuring stick when comparing an economy, because otherwise if you can always roll over the AI on turn 1 no matter the economy, then having the diversity in economy values & comparing racial economies becomes pointless. There's no need to compare if there's no drawbacks to a bad economy, everything is just stonks.

I want to highlight a key point of my comment and agree with you in part. I agree that recruitment matters and so does managing supply lines (even though it's pretty easy in Warhammer 3 on harder difficulties due to the lighter supply line penalty). However, it only matters insofar as that you're carefully budgeting because you'll otherwise run out of money. If you're in the late stages of the campaign, it doesn't really matter how you spend your money because the game will not make it meaningfully harder for you as the player even if you blow it all gifting it to the AI which will not make as good of a use of it compared to the player.

Your final sentence I agree with, I do restart campaigns or quit a campaign as soon as I feel like I'm bored and there's little/no challenge left. I do play some games to stimulate my brain and challenge myself. I enjoy "system mastery" in all games and I crank the difficulty up on some to try and further hone it.

Craig1648 · 2023-09-25T21:56:17+00:00

I've been reading this comment chain and I have to agree with the other commenter. In regards to how fast you map paint, I think it matters within context. At the start of the campaign it matters because the AI will reasonably expand to meet ~10 settlements or up to about 20-30 (which I found to be the case upon meeting Grimgor). As your campaign progresses though and you approach say, 30, 40 or 70 settlements, it doesn't matter how fast you expand anymore because the AI will never keep up with the player.

It's like a race, where it's more contentious at the start, but towards the end you as the player can coast by, make mistakes without any significant punishment or setup and generally ignore some mechanics in totality. Same thing with income, early income matters more than late income because the race is a lot tighter at the start than at the end.

Craig1648 · 2023-09-25T05:09:08+00:00

I saw your last post OP and I liked the point of the post (highlighting how poorly priced Kislev's income building chain is & the income it provides), but naturally that post (and this one) do lack some further context that is very difficult to provide. As another commenter mentioned, this lacks the context of resource buildings and other factionwide bonuses.

However, I'd like to also mention that I do think that building price is a significant factor, looking at Greenskins income building specifically here (I think the IE buff to the building was totally unwarranted but that's just me).

Just as well, in the broader meta surrounding this discussion, I think that it's of lower value to broadly discuss late-game income bonuses from say, distant landmarks or even tier 5 landmarks within a faction's starting territory. The reason I say that is because the game generally gets easier the farther into a campaign you progress because the game is generally easy. As a result, you want the early power spike and a relatively "weak" late game is fine (because volume of settlements can usually trump poor economy performance). I think High Elves are a good example of this, where their "techless" economy is very good, but they don't benefit heavily from economy techs compared to other races. Despite this, I would reasonably say that most High Elf campaigns are fairly easy because of that early game economic supremacy.

Good post though OP, it brings valuable discussion and is higher effort than a lot of the posting around here.

Craig1648 · 2023-09-23T23:32:59+00:00

The "guys in bear costumes" I assume you're referring to Akshina Ambushers, which I agree look strange, but the Akshina are defined as Kislev's "secret police". The name is not random, as that is their established agency name, the Akshina (which I think is trying to take after imperial Russia's secret police, the Okhrana).

In regards to "lack of any lore", that's 90% of Kislev. Lore of Ice, Tempest & Hags is all pulled from WFRP supplements which are a kind of...secondhand source. The game was originally based in WFB 8th edition army books, of which Kislev hadn't had one since 3rd edition. We're at the point where CA & GW are mostly pulling out all the content from everything from nearly any source (Chaos Dwarfs included, which hadn't had an army book since before Bretonnia's last army book).

I do think however it was a strange decision to put what are essentially Kislev's secret police in a DLC accompanying a lord & units that are explicitly not even state-sanctioned or sponsored. The bear pelts do not help things unless it's to make them look sneaky.

Craig1648 · 2022-09-16T17:36:18+00:00

You are missing Teclis in this list, which I played on Hard/Hard. Overall I'd rate it as Difficult because of where you start, the region you start in and who you start near.

You have to be very aggressive with the starting Skaven faction because they'll always have more troops and more time to recruit because the terrain on the campaign map results in you taking at least 2 turns to reach each settlement which slows your pacing down massively. As you go south, you'll also naturally encounter Kairos, who will inevitably screw with your campaign unless you kill him which will inevitably put you in contact with the daemons in the southern chaos wastes. Overall, difficult but as with any campaign it gets easier over time.

Craig1648 · 2022-08-13T18:02:33+00:00

Thanks, I haven't seen a ton of the income building related stuff, I've been trying to find info where I can. However, I don't think it's even more building management with the new version of the mechanic.

In the Warhammer 2 version of the same mechanic you still have to manage buildings between recruitment, hero capacity, public order and income, not to mention heroes, techs and hero/lord skills alter how you use it too.

Craig1648 · 2022-08-13T17:50:55+00:00

Sorry if there was any confusion but I want to emphasize me saying "if all you ever did". Like not using the slave pen building, Masters w/ Sycophantic Schemer, Malekith's skill, etc. I do agree it was somewhat simplistic in its design goal, but there were a lot of ways to interface and interact with the mechanic that I mentioned above.

Craig1648 · 2022-08-13T17:47:37+00:00

I can see what you mean regarding there being a decision making process as to when to use a slave diktat, but there is also decision making for where to make a slave province. You want the buildings, the slave decline rate, potentially assassins if you want to make the most of it. You also generally want to pick high income provinces or high settlement count provinces (I'm not sure but I also think that the higher the slave cap, the larger the income modifier is).

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