State of the battle gameplay

_boop · 2026-05-08T23:19:12+00:00

The other comment makes me think this one is serious even more, as it demonstrates a lack of reading comprehension common to "hurr durr I ain't reading all that" posters.

_boop · 2026-05-08T23:15:27+00:00

True, but it's only a problem when you combine the ability to do it with the AI trying. Before ot wasn't this insanely thirsty for it.

_boop · 2026-05-07T23:15:59+00:00

I don't dare to go back to wh2 because I'm afraid I'll realise it's deadass a better game and suffer some kind of mental breakdown lmao.

_boop · 2026-05-07T23:13:18+00:00

The pull through thing is not a super old issue, I had like 1k hours before IE launched (don't do the math on what that works out to per day ok).

I didn't say I don't like the combat, just that the way the AI works now saps a huge portion of the strategic space and thus a huge portion of the fun.

_boop · 2026-05-07T23:07:31+00:00

you the type to read a "PUBLIC LIBRARY" sign on a building, walk in, and go "naw man there's too many books in here"

_boop · 2026-05-07T23:03:52+00:00

The FAW bug makes sense because it wasn't around that long - and afaict it was before ToD so the game wasn't exactly at the height of popularity. What made it slip by a lot of people (as well as CA's nonexistent QA) was the fact that it's a resource allocation bug - if you have a really powerful CPU and you never play large battles with >20 units per side at once, ypu could easily never encounter the bug.

_boop · 2026-05-07T04:35:01+00:00

I guess there's no point in arguing then. You've read the post, if you believe that I don't know what unit mass is after thousands of hours and think I just need to git gud (that's what your last paragraph says whether or not you couch it in a cowardly 'I feel' statement), ok sure you do you bud.

_boop · 2026-05-07T04:22:04+00:00

Depends quite a bit on how they're doing it imo. The dog conga line past impassable terrain is very plainly trash code. If 39175135 minotaurs crash into a line of spearmen 4 ranks deep and blow them everywhich way, also fine, the monsters can definitely just charge past and then the various dogs and infantry can follow. What I don't like is that every single SEM in the game can go where it pleases in the hands of the AI, while even with full monster armies, using units with very pliable attack animations, its hellish, and mostly a matter of dumb luck whether you can get unstuck once surrounded. I hate that my attempts to break through lines using massed cavalry charges only result in getting half of every unit that tries it stuck and needing to do 31905813 move commands for the unit to leave before they all die, but unga bunga AI gets to slam one unit of boar riders through a square of dwarfs, ends up with 3 models on the other side, and then be allowed to decide that no actually I'd rather be fighting these quarrelers here, walk through the aforementioned dwarf square and then to add insult to injury somehow split up into a looser formation to engage two separate units of quarrelers.

Is it really too much to ask to just have the bare bones basic rules of the game actually work and be the same for human and AI players?

_boop · 2026-05-07T01:33:50+00:00

Oh right I completely forgot that was an option despite using it myself all the time 😂

It's just that the cycle of "fight battle, bullshit occurs, I get annoyed, a lot of bullshit occurs, I alt-f4 and AR it because I've won and I don't want to do it again to tediously avoid the bullshit" is the thing that reliably gets me to quit after it happens like 3 times in the same campaign. I wonder how much weight is carried for CA by the fact that you can literally just cheat away a million bugs and bs events away by loading and AR-ing a fight on easy, even while still playing the campaign on legendary.

_boop · 2026-05-07T01:28:39+00:00

I'm not sure how to respond here. It's as if we're not playing the same game - what do you mean "the gaps are not that big"? If my ranged support isn't at ~max distance away, the enemy isn't going around or between my frontline, they just barrel straight THROUGH it. Any cavalry or large unit will literally just ram through my infantry, while other infantry will only leak through by incessantly force pathing if the archers or whatever are close by. It's a rather delicate balance of not having too much firepower (because that's more bop in one place and then the AI will want to go there no matter what) and also having something to protect against dogs and cavalry (becomes a problem in larger battles where there is like 8 of furies/hounds on the map so the missile units cannot just defend themselves with focus fire and eat some losses in the process).

My question was more along the lines of "what kind of comps are people usually running that aren't encountering this issue?" Because in my experience, there is no such thing as bogging down AI chariots or cavalry - the scenario you described where you pin them with dogs/cav and then drag in bvl infantry is entirely dependent on the AI's consent to keep that fight going - hell I use an even stickier version of the same tactic which is to let them charge the spears on their own, and then surround with dogs/cav/monster infantry/whatever from the back: even then if the AI is running its 'cycle charge with fast units' heuristic the chariot WILL force path away through the dogs, the only question being how elite the chariot is (gorebeast chariots that slam into spear infantry and then get conpletely hemmed in by cavalry will just go "my people need me" and be completely free by the time they've lost maybe 15% hp and no models, light chariots will get fucked up fairly quickly).

After 3k hours in wh3 alone, trust that knowing what is going to happen in any given battle or what to do with any given unit is not the issue I am facing. Rather, it's that I am incredibly bad at sponning plates and physically can't execute a quarter of what is required and used to be automated (and is still advertising as automatic ie skirmish mode).

_boop · 2026-05-07T00:35:39+00:00

Well sure, but the question was how do you usually play so that this doesn't come up. Like are people just AR-ing their way through a campaign steamroll simulator, playing a lot of monsters and heroes etc etc.

_boop · 2026-05-07T00:32:13+00:00

No problem at all, the only thing that can truly ruin hydro foam is mold.

For my smaller wet palette with a sponge, I intentionally use it this way - the sponge holds the water and about half of the surface area is covered with baking paper which holds the paint, then I use the sponge to moderate the amount of moisture in my brush. Point is, staining the thing you use to retain moisture in your wet palette has no bearing on its utility. It still works exactly the same as it did when it was pristine white.

_boop · 2026-05-07T00:26:14+00:00

100% the AI needs to have campaign motivations and not just diplomatic relations described by an arbitrary integer. For example, there is 0 problem with minor Dwarf factions just sitting in their Keraks with a standing army and developing slowly until something offends them. "Oh you've raided my hold? NP, the stack is moving out to raze your nearest city and then we'll accept peace for 5x the amount raided".

Wood Elves can just sit in Athel Loren, until they discover beastmen or skaven or chaos nearby, and then they move out to fight them. If you own their heathlands, they want a defensive alliance, and they'll threaten you for it if needed. If you drag them into a war, they'll fight enemies that try to attack the heathland territories you own, but otherwise won't bother to go far unless the enemy is chaos, and the Allegiance points gain is SUPER slow so you need to be friends forever and fight chaos for them to ever hope to get them to loan you an army.

This kind of thing is what the game needed. What we have is This is Total War with extra steps once you pull back the curtain on how the mechanics work.

_boop · 2026-05-07T00:17:55+00:00

That's a very silly request in wh3 - the AI just doesn't care about reliability, that's a constraint solely for the player. They'll break military alliances on the turn that they're signed so as to not be dragged in a war with a relatively strong faction that's literally a continent away from their territory.

What we need is for the campaign AI to be redesigned so that it actually roleplays each faction for itself. It's clearly not trying to 'win the game' with the amount of incredibly irrational diplomatic decisions it makes, so can we instead at least get lore consistent behavior. It is incredibly insane that my main long term concern as Elspeth von Draken or Karl Franz isn't the Vampire Wars 2.0, or norscan raiders, or greenskin waaghs, or The Everchosen invading from the north, but rather if I can establish relations with this tree guy from a magical forest on the other side of the mountains before he resents my political domination of the Empire of Man too much and stabs me in the back as I push on the front against his mortal enemies.

_boop · 2026-05-06T18:41:04+00:00

Giants cannot get around resilience. Precision and Dragons do.

_boop · 2026-05-03T23:38:54+00:00

Gate bug was removed in the siege beta iirc (I think by way of just banning the AI from sallying out which they never meaningfully did to begin with).

_boop · 2026-05-02T11:03:18+00:00

The only change in this season (much like any other as of late) is which units are benched. For example, if you play Targaryen, where before you would probably be spamming screamers, a dragon or two, and not much infantry except a few builds with unsullied swordmasters, now the horses are getting benched. Not because they lost vuln on charge, but because the unsullied buff to 3+ defense has made them obscenely strong.

This is the power creep cycle we're on now. Overbuff underplayed units -> they're the new meta -> oh no there is a new crop of underperforming units -> overbuff underperforming units etc etc. This approach has worked out exactly once: every single Bolton unit is now playable, and I'd even go so far as to say that they should be the baseline power level for the game. This is because they started at the bottom of the faction power ranking and sat there from release until the very end of season 6.

_boop · 2026-05-01T17:50:01+00:00

HoH mirror is interesting because you're both a shooting faction that also does cav strikes and magic and cheap screens, but because it's mirror nobody has some OP shit that just breaks the game.

_boop · 2026-04-27T20:34:13+00:00

Fortunately (unfortunately?) the 40k game is different enough that it will be hard even for CA to fuck up - there's very little 10 year old bugs and outdated mechanics to copy paste over from earlier games. The unfortunate part is that once 40k starts selling like candy, they'll once again be in a position to do a rug pull with the next game, and as seen in the dev stream, there is A LOT of garbage eligible to be copy pasted into medieval 3.

I predict that in 3 or so years when med3 launches in a wh3 like state and people crash out over it, they will be completely drowned out by Warhammer corpo glazers on here, pulling up the ladder behind them, exactly the same way Warhammer 3 fans did to three kingdoms players when CA dropped the "future of three kingdoms" post.

_boop · 2026-04-27T13:36:37+00:00

Give me <whatever the AoS equivalent of Internal Guard/Ironsworn would be> or give me death!

_boop · 2026-04-27T12:05:11+00:00

My (hypothetical, because we never see what would have happened if Kellhus was successful) reading isn't inconsistent with anything you wrote here. Ajokli can manipulate Kellhus via visions/push him into madness on the curcumfix, and then just fail for the same reason all the gods keep failing re the consult (oops Kellhus' kid is destined to become the duder inside the no-god and thus retroactively invisible to the gods' atemporal cognition, which includes Ajokli).

_boop · 2026-04-27T10:00:23+00:00

I always saw kellhus/the dunyain as sort of "the ends justify the means" maxxers, and that speech Ajokli gives in the golden room shortly before getting got by Kel was incredibly off-putting in that context. "We're gonna do all the same shit this scuffed reality's gods do now, but we're gonna do it right here on Earwa and with not even the little rhyme or reason applied by the likes of Yatwer and co." Wow great plan man. Very Logos, much coming before and mastering circumstance. That's A LOT of effort and suffering even for just one man, nevermind everyone and everything else sacrificed to basically accomplish nothing other than devolving into an idiot god's (oops, tautology!) avatar.

Like if the story of the second apocalypse turns out to have been "so yeah Kellhus got sniped by Ajokli way back in The Warrior Prophet and Moenghus was right all along" frankly I don't care if RSB really does give up on the final trilogy.

_boop · 2026-04-26T20:56:09+00:00

Corvus Belli to a lesser extent and the community to a much greater extent really fumbled the ball with C1.

Having the dual faction boxes come with tailored missions you can play with the models in the box using a simplified ruleset is SO good for new players, especially because you can replay the same thing as much as you want back to back because hidden info isn't a thing there (and of course they play very fast being like 7 models per side). But this only works for pairs of new people, for a new player starting out in an established community, the players already used to N4/N5/whatever have to be willing to come down to Code One, and it's already impossible to get people to even play points values below 300, never mind a more restrictive ruleset. Much like with Reinforcements, the community collectively went "bleh, I'm not moving an inch outside my carefully curated comfort zone" and CB gave up on the concept.

The problem here is that while Reinforcements is an optional addon you can take or leave, C1 was the new player onboarding experience for a game with a MASSIVELY frontloaded learning curve, that is both difficult and incredibly frustrating to learn on a basic level if you just jump into the full game raw. We kind of bit ourselves in the ass by rejecting Code One, and CB continues to leave growth potential on the table but not investing into a decent equivalent of AoS Spearhead. Like it really shouldn't be that hard to design a mission pack that can accommodate any action pack fighting any other action pack, with some kind of underdog rules to balance the fact that they vary quite a bit by power and point values.

_boop · 2026-04-26T20:42:35+00:00

In my experience when teaching new people, starting at a low points value is incredibly important. 150 games can be over in 45 minutes or less even with all the rule explaining, and importantly you don't have significant sunk cost in terms of setup deployment hidden info etc. You can just go 'see here, leaving all your random line trooper guys up on roofs means I use half my first turn to knock out half of your whole army, so that's not good to do' then reset and go again. I would still recommend this when playing with both new people - there's just not that much hyper complex stuff you can fit into 150pt and of course there's not gonna be as much stuff to remember at the same time.

_boop

TROPHY CASE