Total War: General discussion.

Also, not to shill my second favorite faction too much, but Alan cavalry are just so damn strong that they can afford to be used as both hammer and anvil.

On the flip side, my hobby of making top-tier cataphract-heavy doomstacks is not cost-effective.

Edited by Ramidel on Mar 4th 2024 at 7:40:36 AM

You'd think with a game named after Attila, his faction would be the generally strongest one, like Rome in R2 right?

But it's actually the Alans and the White Huns

Well, I think some of the DLC factions have some crazy stuff too to leave it up for debate, but "best immediate cavalry in a cavalry-strong game" and "Unit that is up in the running for the most broken unit in the entire series" are pretty strong arguments.

To be fair, the Alans had their entire rooster remade, at the time of release the (Black) Huns were the strongest faction in the game.

Even now I would say that in the campaign the Huns still have the upper hand over the Alans by virtue of their morale penalty against christian factions.

Ah, that I was unaware of, I only played Attila I think a year after they stopped producing DLC for it and made many weep for the performance issues never to be solved.

I still hope that Attila gets some love. If Rome 2 had Empire Divided and Rise of the Republic, I imagine CA could do Reign of the Rashidun for Attila.

Empire Divided and Rise of the Republic were made by CA Sofia to train them into making Total War games in preparation for them developing Troy. It is highly unlikely that Sofia will get downgraded to making DLC again now that they have two full games under their belts.

Both of which underperformed badly, though.

Troy, by all accounts, was a success on Epic (and the Epic deal was undoubtedly extremely beneficial for CA). It's numbers on Steam don't matter because it was released for free six months earlier on a different platform.

Pharaoh is subject to a smear job by Youtubers and wrongful complaints.

They are both high quality games. They also both suffer from Total War Warhammer existing and being three games in one, with all the content and patches that come from having been worked on for seven years.

Edited by Resileafs on Mar 4th 2024 at 4:09:24 AM

Well, sure, but will the suits actually care about any of that, or will they only see the line not going up?

Sofia is more likely to get shut down than downgraded to DLC team. However, as far as I've heard from the team's messages on Discord, CA and Sega still have full belief in them, to the point where Pharaoh is still set to receive a free map update in the future (I'm not sure if the factions that might come with that update will be free as well).

Year 450 AD reached in my Lakhmid campaign, with every condition fulfilled to win the campaign... Except for 70% Zoroastrianism in all my provinces. This is probably, if not the hardest, definitely the most annoying objective, because all I can do now is wait until the wrecked provinces I've settled have recovered enough growth to let me rebuild over the ruins. Unfortunately, ruined buildings count in the growth meter, so I have to wait a pretty long time. So basically, campaign is won now. Just have to wait for it to realize that's the case. The unfortunate thing with Zoroastrianism is that it doesn't convert neighboring provinces, so I have to rely on building directly in each province and having priests to hasten things (or even make it possible to get high enough religious weight because several Roman provinces have wonders that increase paganism in the province by 10, an enormous number).

Luckily for me, I never had to fight Attila. I saw him once I conquered all of Asia Minor as he besiege Constantinople, but he never crossed the Hellespont to invade my territory, prefering to continue his ravages of Europe. When he died of natural causes, I crossed into Greece and began to rebuild the ravages Balkans. Eventually, my arrival provoked the Huns and we had several fights for dominance. I realized then that having my only recruitment center be in my home province made it very hard to replenish killed troops, so every full unit lost in battle was a severe loss. Thankfully, I managed to slowly wipe out the Hunnic stacks, keeping my losses to a minimum. Their armies traveled in swarms of three or four stacks, but by facing them with mostly equal numbers and taking advantage of the casualties the Huns suffered during winter (and autumn and spring, depending on how cold the province was), I gradually wiped each stack out. Their last stand took place in the Alps, where their last three stacks fought two of mine in the middle of winter, using their heavy onagers to cause extreme damage. This hard-fought battle ended in victory for me, and the Huns were no more.

The Lakhmid roster is very specialized on the units they get from their ultimate barracks (which can only be built at 75% global Zoroastrianism or Greek Catholicism) and lacks in variety. Zoroastrians have excellent late-game cavalry, while Christians get very good frontline infantry and anti-cavalry cavalry. Otherwise, they basically have to rely on armored camels and Kurdish archers (who are amazing, having awesome ranged attack power and surprisingly high melee stats as well) to deal the bulk of the damage. Their tier 3 shotel warriors can deal some considerable damage, but they are quite fragile having only 40 armor. The only lancers they get outside of the Zoroastrian barracks are camel lancers, and they are much inferior to most other lancers in the game, meaning you absolutely need a Zoroastrian barracks to make your best damage-dealing units.

By curiosity, I downloaded the Radious mod to see what it could do, and I saw what people meant by breaking the balance of the game. It fills every faction's roster with units of every tier for almost every type. It also changes the buildings to give more of everything while costing less happiness, food and squalor, making it a lot easier to balance province building. I might try it on my next campaign to see if I like it better, we'll see.

Edited by Resileafs on Mar 20th 2024 at 1:36:23 PM

Took a break of Total War for a couple of weeks. I find that the Attila campaigns are so long and grueling, I needed a palate cleanser between finishing my Lakhmid campaign and starting my White Huns campaign.

I'm not entirely sure if it's Radious making the AI stronger or if the base game's AI is good at cornering the player faction, but it's not an easy campaign to start with. You start at war with the Sassanids and all their satrapies, so you have to spend a lot of time facing all their armies charging you down together. I've seen the Sassanids several times send three or even four stacks at me, and because of how lethal combat is, even when I win, I'm left with very depleted stacks who need to recover for a while (replenishment is very slow for the White Huns).

I've tried restarting the campaign a couple of times, see if I can't find the best way to approach the Sassanids. My first attempt failed because I tried to get tributary states for one of the secondary objectives (it doesn't work very well when they tend to betray you pretty quickly since they don't stop hating you). Second attempt failed because my armies got surrounded by Sassanid and satrapy stacks. This third one is going alright for now, I've found that keeping my armies in groups of two stacks is the best way to make a protective approach westward. I'm also trying to reduce the power of the Sassanids by killing off their satrapies first, see if that might choke their power a bit. If I'm lucky, the ERE will eventually try to fight the Sassanids too and split their attention, but I already have a couple of other horde factions doing the same in the Caucasus. Hopefully this gives me a bit of breathing room.

Yeah, Attila is not a Total War you can win at a sprint by picking the right time for a Total Diplomacy finisher like I did in Pharaoh. It's survival strategy and even the short game is 120 turns flat.

I found the White Huns to be pretty easy myself, but maybe that was because I managed to gang up on the smaller northeastern satrapies one by one and just slowly and ahistorically plow a field of ash across the Middle East.

If you wanna try one of the powers with a different playstyle next, maybe go for one of the three empires (Western Rome, Eastern Rome, or Sassanids).

I think I'm getting the hang of it. Patience has been necessary to avoid the biggest Sassanid threats while I worked on getting stronger troops. Also, getting more frontline units since the majority of the Sassanid army was composed of Armenian spears. With tier 2 Xion spears, I've found a plenty strong frontline unit that can easily counter the Sassanid frontline and their early cavalry. I just have to keep a few swords and my elite axemen in reserve to turn the critical areas of the battlefield to my advantage. Something else that helps is that instead of waiting for units to replenish, it's better to fuse the hurt ones together, then train new units to replenish numbers. It's easy to do since your recruitment buildings march with you.

In my most recent battle, I've managed to decisively break the Sassanid's ability to defend themselves by destroying four full stacks with two of mine with minimal losses. Furthermore, I've had two other stacks going around the area the Sassanids were defending, and now free to ravage their heartland. Ctesiphon is within striking range and will most likely be razed in the next few turns.

Now that I'm a bit further into this campaign, I am pretty certain that the Radious AI is just made to be more effective against hordes. The Huns have gotten wrecked and haven't even destroyed any part of Europe. I think they might even be left to a single army hanging out in Crimea. I don't know what happens if the Huns die off before Attila takes control, but assuming they don't just spawn new armies when their last one is wiped out, I think I might see it happen here. The AI is also very quick to return to razed areas. And I think that Radious makes it so that you don't spend half of your army colonizing a destroyed province (either that, or the AI cheats and doesn't lose units). Will eventually need more armies to keep rear areas cleaned up.

For the sake of making money, I think I'm also going to see if it's viable to create a horde of a single general whose only job will be to stay in an isolated part of the map and create economic buildings.

Bah. Trade is for weaklings. Burning and pillaging is how we trade!

Hordes can't even have trade.

I'm approaching the short victory in my White Huns campaign, so I decided to start a new one without Radious to see the difference in playstyle. It's.. Quite considerable.

Radious makes everything a lot... More in this game. You get more income (both from horde buildings and from sacking cities, though that's probably because their own income is increased), you get more growth, you get more research rate, you get more recruitment slots, you get more unit abilities, you get more units outright, you get more everything. And that means that the AI also gets more, which is why they're a lot more efficient at fighting hordes by creating a lot more stacks with their increased income.

In the unmodded campaign, you're already running out of money from the beginning and will run in the negative if you try to fill up your stacks. In Radious, you have enough income to fill up all your starting hordes. Unmodded, you barely get anything from sacking towns and cities, so you don't really get to fill your coffers from waging wars. In Radious, every town sack is enough money to build something new and well-built capitals are wealthy enough to train entire armies when sacked. Unmodded, food is so tight that you're guaranteed to start starving in the first few turns due to rivalry penalties, which gives massive penalties to income (which is, again, super tight at campaign start so you're going to find yourself running in the negative because of that). In Radious, you have enough wiggle room (and the increased building income makes up the loss) to keep a couple of horde armies together without rivalry making you starve. Unmodded, changing stance to settle and build takes 25% of your movement allowance. In Radious, it's free so you can make camp no matter what you did in the turn to build and train.

Overall, I enjoy Radious a lot more. It makes the AI a little too efficient at resettling so it's kind of difficult to actually destroy the world, but I think that just means I need to be better at making more armies to prevent my enemies from settling behind me.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 7th 2024 at 9:07:24 AM

Does the mod do anything to raiding? 'Cause honestly the only Total War where I felt that the raiding stance button was ever worth pressing was in Rome 2 because the upkeep cost reduction scaling with army cost more strongly made it worth occasionally using, or Total Warhammer for the factions that could encamp while raiding (which...really just meant you only happened to be raiding while encamping than ever the opposite).

I ended up finishing my victory conditions for the Huns in Attila by remembering I had to raid enough money and sitting about in raiding stance.

I don't think it does anything, no. Nothing that can't be done better by being encamped anyway. Maybe if the province you're in is very rich it's worth it, but it's hard in Radious to stay in anything but encamped or normal stance because the AI has enough armies that unless you've destroyed them recently, raiding will be a detriment to your fighting abilities since you start battles winded.

You probably do raid more money though, because provinces are richer in the first place.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 7th 2024 at 9:36:18 AM

Reached the short victory on both unmodded and Radious-modded campaigns so that I could properly compare them to one another. With more playtime with both types of campaigns, I'm in a better position to judge which plays better.

The most difficult part of the Radious campaign is that the AI is far too efficient at resettling territory I've destroyed. They will happily send armies into desolate area and retake them behind me, while in the vanilla campaign, the AI doesn't resettle areas that have been razed unless they have lost all their territory and only have wandering armies left. I think that in Radious, I should also be creating new horde armies more often for the sake of facing the increasing number of stacks from the powerful factions around.

The most difficult part of the vanilla campaign is to get a real economy going. Powerful horde armies cannot have their upkeep made up by the buildings in your horde, it costs a lot of growth to create a new horde, it costs a lot of growth to build new things in your horde, it's all very slow. Growth is very slow to increase, so you never really get better at making bigger armies in the first place. And you need a lot of farms to get enough food to build your important buildings, so that lowers how much money you can get even more.

So which one is better as a campaign? Honestly, I'm not sure. Vanilla certainly is a lot less tedious when it comes to destroying enemy factions and gradually razing everything in your path. But it's a lot more tedious when it comes to managing your hordes in the first place. The lower unit variety might be something of an issue too. The AI fields almost always the same thing in vanilla (spears and horses), but in Radious they have access to a much higher variety once they get good barracks, so there's more stuff to fight. Maybe if I focus on creating more armies in Radious instead of using growth to enhance my economy, I'll have a better time and it'll be easier to keep the world destroyed.

Military and cultural victories achieved for my White Huns campaign. In the end, I've decided that I liked the game better without Radious. As much as Radious encourages big battles and strong units on every side, in the end it goes against the game's challenge and spirit by making the Horde factions into non-issues. It's a lot easier for the AI to create large, powerful armies that are better capable of either resettling territory that has been razed or of driving off the factions that are supposed to be dangerous to them. The Huns' infinite armies aren't that scary when even minor factions can match them. Maybe if the game was like Rome 2, it would be a good fit for Radious but as it is, it just removes the game's uniqueness.

It will just be a matter of time to reach the divine victory. I feared at first that Attila's onslaught might wipe out too many factions for me to defeat (I allied with him because war would have been terrible for my long-term prospects), but thankfully there are enough that remain for me to eventually win. Though it will take a while to reach that point, I'll eventually have an easier time of it when I research the technology to become immune to winter attrition (which affects half of the map three seasons out of four starting in 445).

If there is one thing I find really annoying, it's the AI knowing exactly where all my stacks are on the campaign map at all times and being able to send hunting parties to the middle of nowhere to find all my newly-formed hordes that I haven't trained soldiers for yet.

Edited by Resileafs on May 1st 2024 at 3:56:42 PM

Total War: Pharaoh will be releasing the four factions of Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae and Troy, and the "Dynasty system which adds mortality and succession to the faction leaders’ quest to leave behind a legacy" which sounds like a family tree, for free.

So yeah when CA yelled back at us "babe come back I can channnnnngggggggeeeee" they weren't kidding I guess

The "best" part is people who complain about it because they want CA to be bad or else they lose their purpose.

At least you can still count on CA doing course correct when it has to do so.

Just like the Americans.