Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER

Radious Total War Mod
Malorn 28 Jun, 2016 @ 4:11pm
Impressions and feedback based on a completed Empire Long Campaign (Very Hard)
Very impressive work of modding, it already improved the game greatly, and in such a short time. I do have five points of feedback from my successful empire long campaign.

1. Toward the end of the game there is simply too much money, and too many lords. Combine that with the in detail lord management and I simply stopped tracking of items and retainers on any lord under level 10 (which were about 2/3 of them). Leveling was also a bit tiresome at that point.

It seems balanced in the early game, however. I would recommend adding a more hefty maintenance cost to the later game units you added, they are extremely powerful and would make a good money sink, gotta pay for straight-up upgrades, after all. Given the higher unit density, it might be worth buffing village and city defenses slightly. Is it possible to add a gold cost to buildings, that might also create a nice tradeoff?

2. I concur with others that magic is underwhelming. It looked cool, but the damage spells generally didn't do much to enemies, often not noticeably reducing their health bar for a direct comet hit. I think magic needs a serious boost, since it requires at least one unit slot for a wizard plus levels. Buff and debuff magic seemed quite useful, however, so it's probably just the damage spells.

3. Faction balance is a bit off. The vampires were utter pushovers, and barely expanded in the 100 turns it took me to decide to deal with them. This was on Very Hard difficulty, and I struggled with my fellow empire factions and Dwarven factions quite a bit. One empire faction managed to grow larger than I was for quite some time until chaos happened. I'm not sure what is wrong with vampires, but they were struggling a lot throughout the whole campaign.

Speaking of chaos, it needs a serious buff, or something else needs a nerf. The unit composition choices were quite miserable, even on the ever-chosen. I rushed troops north when he arrived, only to watch him murder himself on a city with only two generals defending it. (He was attacking with four, and we fought outside the city). He only marched out of the wastes with roughly 7 lords, which meant he was doomed since I had something like 23 lords at the time. Equally the earlier chaos incursions barely dented the AI or myself. I think the problem is composition and numbers, but as I said I think late-game lord numbers get a little too high.

Orcs and Dwarves seemed quite balanced. They were still battling back and forth when the game ended. Dwarves were winning this time, but it didn't seem like an uneven contest.

4. Lord progression was very solid, the two points seems like a good change, though perhaps reduce the sudden increase to 3 in the later game. It is a good thing to need to specialize lords, at least preventing them from maxing out every tree. Overall, however, the empire lords worked well. Building balance also seemed solid and interesting, I loved the tavern change, and it was quite well balanced.

5. I love the longer melee, it seems very well balanced and tuned, and is quite enjoyable. Morale is . . . interesting, and I rarely saw units retreating, leadership seemed less important than I would expect it to be. Perhaps lower the leadership on some of the lower tier units? It would be nice to need leadership on my generals, though of course empire tends toward great leadership already. Overall I love the grindy feel of melee, it seems balanced almost perfectly in terms of damage.

::

Thank you for creating a great mod! Speaking as part of a modding team myself (I'm Malorn on the MEIOU and Taxes mod for Europa Universalis 4), I'm amazed at how much content and work your team has produced in such a sort time. If you'd like to follow up or ask me to clarify anything I talked about above, feel free to message me on steam. Regardless, thank for putting such considerable effort into creating such a solid gameplay improvement with this mod.
Last edited by Malorn; 28 Jun, 2016 @ 4:42pm
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Showing 1-8 of 8 comments
Malorn 28 Jun, 2016 @ 6:38pm 
Umm, it may also be worth tweaking occupation_decision_sack_base_loot_income slightly higher, it seemed like looting was always a much poorer choice than razing the place to annoy the enemy.
emcdunna 29 Jun, 2016 @ 8:35am 
Vampire counts are idiots if you don't play with regional occupation removal. They basically only ever attack dwarfs, and since this is radious, that means all they can do is sack those regions endlessly, never expanding and getting stronger. You need this mod for radious to work right

You are correct about magic. Many of us agree but radious likes it the way it is. Try using Molay's magic mod + the radious compatibility patch for it. Makes magic REALLY INTERESTING. Also, if that's not your style, theres a mod which simply increases winds of magic limit to 45, and increases magic reserve. In Radious, if you overcast (double click) the spells then they start to work pretty well (I mean the damage ones, too. Overcast flaming head and you can get 300 kills).

You are also right about chaos. I have yet another sub mod which triples the number of chaos stacks which arrive. It's just the right amount (trust me). It's called the storm of chaos or something like that. Don't remember.

You could also try the "make legendary lords legendary" mod which makes legendary lords actually better than vanilla lords! Who would have thought?

And another mod which helps the AI a lot is the increased replenishment mod. This is needed for chaos, which rarely encamp so usually have completely worn down stacks. :(

Why can't CA fix the horde AI!? Rawrrrr
Malorn 29 Jun, 2016 @ 12:11pm 
Actually, I like regional occupation quite a lot, the issue that is looting and attacking enemies isn't actually a useful thing, thus the suggested fix above.
emcdunna 29 Jun, 2016 @ 1:48pm 
Yeah I like regional occupation too. It works fine for everybody EXCEPT the vampire counts, who are hell-bent on invading the dwarf regions in the northern world's edge mountains.

So I play with regional occ removal just because I want vampires to be able to expand. Radious suggests this approach, as well.

As empire, I don't occupy any regions that aren't supposed to be controlled by the empire anyway, but I do want a strong vamp AI to fight against.
Malorn 29 Jun, 2016 @ 5:11pm 
Sounds like a location problem, and a AI prioritization problem. However, the problem might also be resolved by making looting far more profitable, as I suggested above with occupation_decision_sack_base_loot_income. This means that the vampires might do very well fighting the dwarves, fueling a large economic growth.
emcdunna 30 Jun, 2016 @ 9:26am 
Yeah I actually think it might have to do with the vampires not being able to "see" many empire regions. Only the Moot, Essen, and like one other are super close to sylvania. The next regions in the same province are far away,

MAYBE the AI only goes for cities within their revealment range? And Wurtbad, Nuln, and Beschafen are too far away to literally see and move towards?

I think the AI needs to prioritize capturing an entire province and to prioritize actually capturing regions over sacking things and never expanding
Malorn 1 Jul, 2016 @ 5:20pm 
Actually, I solved the problem with a little diplomacy change. Currently the vampires get along with empire at -15, whereas dwarves are -50 in both directions . . . so yeah, that's why they are targeting the dwarves.
emcdunna 1 Jul, 2016 @ 5:52pm 
Ohhhh so if you make the diplomacy factor much worse for vampires and the empire regions, they will expand that way.

Still though, the AI should be improved so that it tries to go for places where it can actually settle
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