Really the new clans for the skaven are the most interesting to me IMO. Also, the addition of the Brass Legion allows Chaos to have some sort of initial danger to the Empire as it is in the lore. We don't have to wait until Chaos invades. It has made the Grand Campaign much more interesting and it is becoming similiar to how the warhammer mod for medieval total war is with the many sub-factions that exist on the map. And that is great!

Playing a Bregonne campaign right now. They have an absolutely murderous start, but if played successfully adds the Brettonian style of play to the Western edge of the map, which is an absolute plus. Plus I love their color scheme. Excellent work with them.

I played for all the factions except "Bregonne" and I can say that the chaos in the whirlwind is definitely not bad, both in terms of balance and its starting position. Erengrad
, which is positioned to weaken Kislev, does not weaken him in any way (in my case, according to the same scenario, they were always united in alliances in the early game). Skaven clans certainly lack strong features like the Morse clan. about the southerners, I can say that they are extremely hindering the bots from developing. for example, in no one of my games did the pirates of the Sartoza have been able to defeat the lyuchinni even to the coming of chaos.
the brass legion, in turn, is made just great

Started a playthrough as Brass Legion to provide feedback as requested.
Off the top, I gotta ask - How would chaos invasion work under 'default' settings if I dont conquer anything beyond the keep? Would it count settlements razed / sacked instead?
Should I opt for any option specifically if playing them?

From my point of view, Erengrad is a bit too strong, causing Kislev to be often destroyed by other factions in the first few rounds and even without chaos invasion. There is another situation where the two of them formed an alliance at the beginning and then they were too strong.

@aeON
Yes, that is basically how it is intended, to provide many interesting starting positions and a great variety of enemies to fight to various parts of the world which is based on the lore to make it all feel more lively.


@Carnage753
That definitely sounds how it is intended, a very hard and very different start for Bretonnia.


@Пажилой павук
Sounds like I will have to add some limitations to Erengrad and Kislev then to keep them more hostile to each other when not played by humans.

The Southern Realms are definitely meant to make conquering that area harder due to having to face many different, although weaker enemies concentrated in a small area, so I'm not surprised that the AI is having difficulties with that. But that also means that the Pirates stay where they belong and the AI factions survive to provide a variety of enemies to fight, so that is good.


@Nikolai B.
Then you would eventually hit the vanilla settings fallback of the first wave spawning at turn 150 and Archaon at turn 200, so it's identical to the 4th choice.


@MOON
I definitely don't want them to form an alliance so I will have to deal with that, though making them equally strong is quite hard as there are always many different factors which are hard to account for.

Brill new factions crynsos five star work as normal 🤚😁

I thought Bregonne was a good addition, definitely a nice change of pace. I think the southern realm factions being independent seems to work ok from what I've seen. Erengard and Kislev seem to hang on which seems reasonable. I don't think I've seen any of those Skaven factions do much.

Well the Skaven are mainly meant to be nuisances which are challenging to kill off and interesting new starting positions when you play them.

Simply put my position is these factions, along with factions like Kraka Drak, add much-needed flavour to the game. When played they add new and interesting conflicts for the player to overcome, and when played against they vary the enemies you play against nicely.

However, my biggest gripe with the campaign (outside of the wider concerns of the lack of much-needed functionality and balance issues) is that a lot of places feel very one-note. You will have large areas populated mostly by one or two races split into a large number of factions. Whilst this IS lore appropriate, it does remove a lot of the variety from the game.

The best example is Naggarond, which until the addition of Alith Anar really only had Skaven, Dark Elves, and Tomb Kings. Compare this with the south-east corner of the map where you have Tomb Kings, Lizardmen, Vampires, Dwarves, Skaven, Wood Elves, Bretonians, Sudenberg, etc.

So if you are going to add new factions and/or improve on what already exists, I would personally appreciate a lot more variety, not just in enemies to fight, but in interesting places from which to start playing. Just... not Beastmen. There are enough Beastmen.

Regardless, thank you for your hard work on making this mod (which reasonably speaking should have been part of the actual release game but oh hey CA decided not to add the functionality... #bitter) and I am always glad to have it.

When selecting the faction, is there a way of showing where they appear on the map or is this something Crynsos would have to add ?

@Questionable Ferret
Well that is the nature of the world, similar factions simply tend to clumb together to be located in the same area, that's how it is in our world as it is in Warhammer. Although my newly added factions should have increased the variety in even these locations a fair bit.

What "lack of much-needed functionality and balance issues" are you talking about exactly?


@munkian
That is something that is not normally possible, but it can be pretty much hacked into the game and that is what I aim to do fairly soon. Like in this example...[c10.patreonusercontent.com]

I see that you added Egrimm van Horstmann as the faction leader for the new chaos faction, "The Cabal," which starts in northern Naggaroth. It was quite a shame to see he was just some plain generic Chaos Sorcerer Lord with regular skills. Perhaps you can add some more interesting skills and features for him, such as combining the lores of Fire magic and Dark magic, and perhaps even Arzinpal's Black Horror in his skill tree. It would make sense after all, since he is one of the most powerful sorcerer's of Tzeentch and would be well versed in a mulitude of magical lores.

I tend to play in high difficulties, and something I noticed is that the small skaven factions tend to linger and survive all the way to the late game, with difficult to assail fortresses. Sieging them early on can be troubling due to the fact they can ambush your sieging army before you're even done with siege equipment, with their army and garrison both. Meaning you have to kill them with one or two powerful armies able to hit the gates without siege equipment. I never saw them expand too much either.

I'm indifferent to how that goes aside from when I start neighboring them, their corruption starts spreading out and solving it can be a nuisance.

I appreciate the diverse positions if I want to play skaven or just want to kill them, the only problem(?) I see is that they end up just existing in their corners, rarely ever managing to expand, but also are rarely killed off.

As an aside, the spread out mini factions are really cool, and would be nice to see more of them, even better if you could give them and other existing minor factions their own faction/lord bonuses.

Erengrad is fine. Allthough its always alllied with Kislev by the time i discover them.
Lizards in Albion are fine, but all they do is sit there and occasinally raze a norscan port
Brass Keep is stupidly OP, everything north of Altdorf is burned and Skaven-fected by the turn 60. Every time.
Skaven are fine. Very annoying, but thats their job description.
Now, split TEB and Brets are not fine. Especially if you are playing one of them. Noctilus, Aranessa or Skavenblight rats can easily destroy the whole factions of TEB by a single siege, using their op starting units.