The Great Orthodoxy campaign is hardcore?

[ArchSchizovoker]

This campaign is something else. I'm only playing on hard and it's crazy how this campaign is just nonstop fighting. I don't think I've had more than 5 consecutive turns without at least 3 enemy armies in my lands. It feels from turn 15 I've been under unending assault, I'm on turn 150 and I only have one soul collected so far, I've had my hands full just defending my lands. The entire world other than other humans and dwarves declared war on me, I'm totally surrounded, rats, norscans and demons from the north, demons and ogres from the west, ogres from the south and east. The ogres got crazy powerful somehow and they have like 10 armies wandering the map destroying everything, I've allied with all the remaining empire factions but they suck, they just sit in their base and wait to get killed by the ogres. This is the first campaign I play in warhammer 3, are they all like this?

Another weird thing with this faction was that I've spent the entire game with negative income pretty much, I didn't have a choice because I couldn't defend my lands with just 1-2 armies, I've been keeping them sustained with spoils from won battles and it's "working". When I confederated the ice queen I went from -5k per turn to -30k per turn lol

[jonoliveira12]

Yes it is. But it is also the best campaign and character of Game 3.

[Ginseng]

yeah at times it seems like a bit much

[isador]

Ogre base infantry is really strong, so ogres have no issues steamrolling other factions through autoresolve. Also both Kislev factions are in a really bad spot (which is lore appropriate) basically dividing the savage north/north-east and the civilized south/west.
You may wanna consider starting over. It's not impossible to fight your way out of the position you're currently in, but it'll be hard and take a lot of time. As you already noticed, fighting your way through the Realms of Chaos takes multiple turns at best and you often need your legendary lord protecting your own territory.

If you do decide to start over, there's two approaches I've found that work really well at winning the campaign. One is to bumrush the 4 souls as soon as possible. Give up territory if you have to, as long as you don't go bankrupt before you return from the Realms of Chaos you're good. Once you have all 4 souls you can end the game in 2 turns, or wait a bit to get some replenishment done and then do it.

Second approach is to expand north aggressively early on. Prioritize stabilizing public order and getting growth going in your new territory and make sure even your small settlements have walls. Manually fight EVERYTHING, even if you stand no chance of winning, because autoresolve will make enemy armies lose a lot less troops and that can make the difference between them taking one of your settlements and then dying on the next settlement or starting a chain reaction of taking your settlements one after the other. By expanding north, east and west early on you can dramatically reduce the AI's economy and dramatically increase your own, and the more armies you can maintain the easier it gets to protect your territory, even if you never have enough armies to protect all your flanks. A good place to start is to wipe out the Daemon Prince's faction, not only because he will border you early on but he also likes spreading plagues and those really REALLY suck.

[ArchSchizovoker]

Originally posted by isador:

Ogre base infantry is really strong, so ogres have no issues steamrolling other factions through autoresolve. Also both Kislev factions are in a really bad spot (which is lore appropriate) basically dividing the savage north/north-east and the civilized south/west.
You may wanna consider starting over. It's not impossible to fight your way out of the position you're currently in, but it'll be hard and take a lot of time. As you already noticed, fighting your way through the Realms of Chaos takes multiple turns at best and you often need your legendary lord protecting your own territory.

If you do decide to start over, there's two approaches I've found that work really well at winning the campaign. One is to bumrush the 4 souls as soon as possible. Give up territory if you have to, as long as you don't go bankrupt before you return from the Realms of Chaos you're good. Once you have all 4 souls you can end the game in 2 turns, or wait a bit to get some replenishment done and then do it.

Second approach is to expand north aggressively early on. Prioritize stabilizing public order and getting growth going in your new territory and make sure even your small settlements have walls. Manually fight EVERYTHING, even if you stand no chance of winning, because autoresolve will make enemy armies lose a lot less troops and that can make the difference between them taking one of your settlements and then dying on the next settlement or starting a chain reaction of taking your settlements one after the other. By expanding north, east and west early on you can dramatically reduce the AI's economy and dramatically increase your own, and the more armies you can maintain the easier it gets to protect your territory, even if you never have enough armies to protect all your flanks. A good place to start is to wipe out the Daemon Prince's faction, not only because he will border you early on but he also likes spreading plagues and those really REALLY suck.

I'm in for the long haul. I want to unlock the third guy for Kislev, I'm gonna follow through and try to win. I already kicked nurgle's ass when he tried to claim the bear, my doomstack with konstantyn is basically invincible, but he can't be doing everything everywhere on the map

[Father Ribs]

I probably enjoyed playing Rasputin the most; if you want to have a ridiculously easy campaign by comparison, do Cathay next...at least until Magic Vulture starts playing red light-green light and giving all your territories away.

[leandrombraz]

If you want to play a campaign that is the opposite experience of Kislev, play as Cathay. You're isolated in a well defended region, so once you secure your lands, nothing can threat you again. If you want a more aggressive campaign that is easy because you're the Apex predator conquering everything, play as Khorne.

[Central]

The Great Orthodoxy is indeed one of the harder starts, enemies everywhere and you are not that close to the 3 major kislev cities which you need for tech. for a next playtrough i do advise not making friends with the empire and instead trying to make friends with the ogres. the focus on this RoC campaign is heavily on the new races, with the "older" races (warhammer 1 and 2 races) dying of much quicker. this makes the warhammer 3 races much more reliable allies.

boris ursus (the 3th kislev lord) is a nice one to have, for some reason that i cannot really understand myself he is my favorite of the 3 ll's, but right now his campaign is not all that interesting in my opinion. you do not really participate in the race for the motherland, instead you support one of the other 2 factions and than confederate trough normal means, you are again not really close to any of the 3 major kislev cities needed for tech and there are very few major players around to fight. i think he will become a lot more interesting once the chaos dwarfs are released.

As for Cathay, they do indeed seem to be one of the easier starting factions, as long as the wall holds that is.
i had the wall go down when the ai was still in control of it, took me quite a while to clean up the mess with army after army pouring in from that area.
as cathay you do need to get rid of skaven early and assasinate quite a lot of chaos agents to keep your lands clean of corruption though, unless you fully dedicate the compas to counter corruption.
you still need to fight quite a lot of battles though as the kurgan warbands keep respawning.

[Lady MacBeth]

Kislev has kats. Kat is for fite.

[jonoliveira12]

Originally posted by Ming:

Kislev has kats. Kat is for fite.

Frost Linxes are indeed adorable. I wish they gave Drycha a variant.

Bear Cavalry, Elemmental Bears, and Streltsy are the units that actually win you the campaign, though. If you want to win as Kostaltyn, those are the 3 ones you will make, and the rest will either be phased out, or just be cheap low tier chaff armies to hold positions or bulk you up for AR.

[Salty Nobody]

I'm on my 4th attempt at a Legendary/VH Great Orthodoxy run and I'm having a blast!

This time instead of rushing Hell Pit I rushed Erengrad before Katarin confederated it, which gave me much needed income. However, clearing the garrison at Hell Pit was way harder since it had time to upgrade. Luckily my stack of archer Kossars still managed to take it when their field armies were absent.

Instead of participating in the first roar I continued expanding, capturing Ostland and the gold mine at Wolfenburg. Between Wolfenburg and Erengrad I was making enough money to start fielding more armies for defence, soul race participation, and further expansion.

It is currently turn 89. I am strength rank 1 and hold 29 settlements. I have four decent stacks running around fending off the demons and annexing the rest of Skrag's settlements. I won the influence race and automatically confederated with Katarin in the middle of the second roar, which was very inconvenient because she had a bunch of open portals in my new defenceless territories. She also had a full scale Nurgle invasion at her border. I'm still cleaning up that mess. To top it off Kostaltyn was busy fighting the Ogres when the portals opened and when I claimed the soul it automatically dumped his battered stack right back in front of an angry Skrag.

I currently have a positive income, but if I didn't have 14 trade agreements and a bunch of resources I would be several thousand in the red.

For armies I'm still heavily reliant on Armored Kossars and see no reason to change that, they are cheap and do quite well for themselves with the faction and other buffs. Little Groms, War Bear Riders and Heavy War Sleds round out my builds so that they can keep up with the increasingly formidable AI army comps. I have a lot of Gryphon Legions as well but I'm slowly phasing them out for my newly accessed bear units.

The Little Groms especially are one of the best units I have had the pleasure of using in a Total War game. A fast mobile artillery unit (fast enough to flank and rake an entire engaged battle line even) that is also decent in melee and can still shoot things point blank with manual targeting while in melee. So many dead ogres and large sized chaos units from these guys, it's wonderful!

Anyone else think the Elemental Bears suck? With one early game exception where it hard carried, all the one I started with seems to do is force me to restart battles when it gets itself killed. It plays like a hydra that doesn't regenerate and doesn't have the sense to automatically flee when it is about to die. I am very busy managing everything else, I don't have time to babysit a big ice bear. Next time it falls in battle I'm probably going to just go with it and replace the stupid thing with something else.

[ArchSchizovoker]

Is there a way to check your stats in game? I'd be very interested to know how many times I threw the invaders back in settlement defence battles. I have like 2-3 rebellions per turn and also armies everywhere. This is a definitely a "git gud" campaign, very punishing. I'm about to get my 3rd soul though, so I think victory is within my grasp. I just have to fend off all the invaders while getting the souls with konstantyn, I should be able to win.

I made the mistake of giving Erengrad to Boris once I rescued him, I thought he would become a major force and help me defend my borders but I don't know what he's doing, he's just sitting in his base building armies and ignoring the targets I set him. I'll try to confederate him back.

Originally posted by The Fifth Archon:

I'm on my 4th attempt at a Legendary/VH Great Orthodoxy run and I'm having a blast!

This time instead of rushing Hell Pit I rushed Erengrad before Katarin confederated it, which gave me much needed income. However, clearing the garrison at Hell Pit was way harder since it had time to upgrade. Luckily my stack of archer Kossars still managed to take it when their field armies were absent.

Instead of participating in the first roar I continued expanding, capturing Ostland and the gold mine at Wolfenburg. Between Wolfenburg and Erengrad I was making enough money to start fielding more armies for defence, soul race participation, and further expansion.

It is currently turn 89. I am strength rank 1 and hold 29 settlements. I have four decent stacks running around fending off the demons and annexing the rest of Skrag's settlements. I won the influence race and automatically confederated with Katarin in the middle of the second roar, which was very inconvenient because she had a bunch of open portals in my new defenceless territories. She also had a full scale Nurgle invasion at her border. I'm still cleaning up that mess. To top it off Kostaltyn was busy fighting the Ogres when the portals opened and when I claimed the soul it automatically dumped his battered stack right back in front of an angry Skrag.

I currently have a positive income, but if I didn't have 14 trade agreements and a bunch of resources I would be several thousand in the red.

For armies I'm still heavily reliant on Armored Kossars and see no reason to change that, they are cheap and do quite well for themselves with the faction and other buffs. Little Groms, War Bear Riders and Heavy War Sleds round out my builds so that they can keep up with the increasingly formidable AI army comps. I have a lot of Gryphon Legions as well but I'm slowly phasing them out for my newly accessed bear units.

The Little Groms especially are one of the best units I have had the pleasure of using in a Total War game. A fast mobile artillery unit (fast enough to flank and rake an entire engaged battle line even) that is also decent in melee and can still shoot things point blank with manual targeting while in melee. So many dead ogres and large sized chaos units from these guys, it's wonderful!

Anyone else think the Elemental Bears suck? With one early game exception where it hard carried, all the one I started with seems to do is force me to restart battles when it gets itself killed. It plays like a hydra that doesn't regenerate and doesn't have the sense to automatically flee when it is about to die. I am very busy managing everything else, I don't have time to babysit a big ice bear. Next time it falls in battle I'm probably going to just go with it and replace the stupid thing with something else.

Yeah, the ice bears do suck, kind of. I get a lot more use out of them once I'm able to field 2-3 in the same army with the techs that buff them, but you start with one with Konstantyn and I had it nearly die in the literal first battle I used it, and it died around turn 4-5. The problem is they're huge so they get easily hit by projectiles but they don't have much armor, and they're slow so they're hard to pull out quickly, also their breath attack is amazing but it's pretty hard to use unless the bear is completely out of the fight off to the side.

Actually, compared to warhammer 2, I did notice how fast the large, single units die to ranged fire. It's kind of comical, I see a level 50 skarbrand and I'm happy, I know it'll just fly in on its own then my rows of kossars can just take it out before the fight's even begun.

[leandrombraz]

Originally posted by Char Aznable:

Is there a way to check your stats in game? I'd be very interested to know how many times I threw the invaders back in settlement defence battles. I have like 2-3 rebellions per turn and also armies everywhere. This is a definitely a "git gud" campaign, very punishing. I'm about to get my 3rd soul though, so I think victory is within my grasp. I just have to fend off all the invaders while getting the souls with konstantyn, I should be able to win.

I made the mistake of giving Erengrad to Boris once I rescued him, I thought he would become a major force and help me defend my borders but I don't know what he's doing, he's just sitting in his base building armies and ignoring the targets I set him. I'll try to confederate him back.

Click on your faction icon on the top-left corner, then the last tab (it's called "Summary" IIRC).

[Lady MacBeth]

Originally posted by jonoliveira12:

Originally posted by Ming:

Kislev has kats. Kat is for fite.

Frost Linxes are indeed adorable. I wish they gave Drycha a variant.

Bear Cavalry, Elemmental Bears, and Streltsy are the units that actually win you the campaign, though. If you want to win as Kostaltyn, those are the 3 ones you will make, and the rest will either be phased out, or just be cheap low tier chaff armies to hold positions or bulk you up for AR.

I was making a really old wow reference. Guess I'm showing my age.

https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Alamo

[jonoliveira12]

Originally posted by Ming:

Originally posted by jonoliveira12:

Frost Linxes are indeed adorable. I wish they gave Drycha a variant.

Bear Cavalry, Elemmental Bears, and Streltsy are the units that actually win you the campaign, though. If you want to win as Kostaltyn, those are the 3 ones you will make, and the rest will either be phased out, or just be cheap low tier chaff armies to hold positions or bulk you up for AR.

I was making a really old wow reference. Guess I'm showing my age.

https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Alamo

Never played WoW.

[isador]

In my experience Tzar Guard + Ice Guard make the ideal combo. Tzar Guard are far stronger in melee compared to Armored Cossars, while Ice Guard have those magical projectiles you need to quickly wipe out daemons.