High Elf Confederation

[(Steelclaw)]

Am I missing something, or is high elf confederation almost impossible in the current state of the game?

I've played HElves as my main faction since Game 2, so I know it's been rough sometimes in the past, but trying out Empire with Thrones of Decay made me realise that not only do they get scripted confederation (in Karl's case, at least), it's also way easier for them to confederate via diplomacy.

Thinking back on playing other factions from older version of TWH3, they also didn't seem to have it as rough.

As an example, other high elf factions who like me a lot, and are of roughly similar strength to me (mid-100s in relations, can't recall the exact numbers) have -100 to confederate with me. Nagarythe is on the verge of death (2 towns, no armies, surrounded by enemy armies) and over 200 relations with me, and is still at -74 to confederate. Teclis is in similarly dire straits, but doesn't have preexisting diplomacy with me (so roughly neutral), and is also around -100 to confederate.

Compare this to Empire, who seem to hang out in the -10 to -40 range if they're strong and not too friendly, and will easily confederate not only if they're on the verge of being wiped out, but also just if you're friendly and stronger than them (something I've almost never seen high elves do).

I'm not saying I've never managed to confederate as high elves in TWH3, but it feels far harder to do so than as almost any other faction. I've had entire finished campaigns where I never get the opportunity to do so.

(Disclaimer: I'm not talking about general difficulty - power-wise I think High Elves are in a perfectly fine place, and I've loved how they work since TWH2. I'm not trying to make any kind of statement about how easy or hard the game is in general. I'd just like to be able to run multiple legendary lords together sometimes.)

(Disclaimer 2: the ability to mod it out does not fix the problem with the base game, and mods breaking with every update makes them a suboptimal solution to any problem at this stage in the game's life cycle.)

[Talilover]

I think the main issue that makes confederations harder in wh3 is the lack of the ability to tack on ludicrous amounts of gold to the offer to get them to accept, because back in wh2 unless said faction was on the verge of death I was never getting a confed simply by being in their good graces. You mention that they're on the verge of death in your case and still not willing to confed so I dunno, for me they at least cave in once their armies get wiped.

I know you also mention not wanting to use mods, and I'm not trying to hand wave this off as a non issue because of mods, but I'd at least reconsider the recruit defeated lords mod. Been stable as long as I can remember and I'm tired of pretending that doing a desperate race to get to Imrik or jumping through hoops to "revive" a faction is engaging gameplay

[Aleera]

Generally, you should keep a eye out on the AI faction you want to confederate. If they lose their main lord (the one who speaks during diplomacy) they generally are far more open to confederation.

The more settlements they have and the lower on the power scale, the more tempting they are for confederation.

They will also generally be more open for confederation if they're at war with neighbours and with confederation they'd be saved.

Generally at around 10-15 confederation you can try to threaten them to join.

If they're on the verge of death, a single settlement etc, 1 turn from extinction, I've learned the AI almost never accepts confederation and would rather die.

Originally posted by Talilover:

I think the main issue that makes confederations harder in wh3 is the lack of the ability to tack on ludicrous amounts of gold to the offer to get them to accept, because back in wh2 unless said faction was on the verge of death I was never getting a confed simply by being in their good graces. You mention that they're on the verge of death in your case and still not willing to confed so I dunno, for me they at least cave in once their armies get wiped.

The ludicrous amounts of gold still works, except now you don't have to keep testing. The game will tell you exactly how much gold you need to get confederation. It's called the balance offer. If you can't afford it, you can't press the balance offer button.

What made confederations easier in WH1 and WH2 was shield of the old world, or whatever the trait was called. When the Chaos invasion started, as long as Chaos was around you could gobble up almost any faction with ease.

[shoobers]

It takes effort to confederate. Join their wars. Support their armies. Gift them money, hell maybe even sell them a settlement. You'll get them. Helves are basically butter in the players hands in terms of willingness to confederate. It just takes more effort than "Hey dude, if you don't shape I'm gonna bonk you."

[(Steelclaw)]

Originally posted by Talilover:

I think the main issue that makes confederations harder in wh3 is the lack of the ability to tack on ludicrous amounts of gold to the offer to get them to accept, because back in wh2 unless said faction was on the verge of death I was never getting a confed simply by being in their good graces. You mention that they're on the verge of death in your case and still not willing to confed so I dunno, for me they at least cave in once their armies get wiped.

Yeah, my experience back in WH2 was that they would confed when nearly wiped out (this was attainable even if you almost killed them yourself, with the right strategy), but that just doesn't seem to be happening now.

Originally posted by Talilover:

I know you also mention not wanting to use mods, and I'm not trying to hand wave this off as a non issue because of mods, but I'd at least reconsider the recruit defeated lords mod. Been stable as long as I can remember and I'm tired of pretending that doing a desperate race to get to Imrik or jumping through hoops to "revive" a faction is engaging gameplay

I have thought about it, and thank you for the suggestion! The main reason I don't use mods personally is that I play a lot of co-op multiplayer and I don't want to pressure anyone else into sorting out mods, but definitely solid advice for anyone else who's in a similar boat. And yeah, trying to save Imrik/Alith Anar/Teclis was fun when it was new, but I can definitely appreciate the appeal of that mod. :)

Originally posted by Rianne:

Generally, you should keep a eye out on the AI faction you want to confederate. If they lose their main lord (the one who speaks during diplomacy) they generally are far more open to confederation.

The more settlements they have and the lower on the power scale, the more tempting they are for confederation.

They will also generally be more open for confederation if they're at war with neighbours and with confederation they'd be saved.

Generally at around 10-15 confederation you can try to threaten them to join.

If they're on the verge of death, a single settlement etc, 1 turn from extinction, I've learned the AI almost never accepts confederation and would rather die.

This is all excellent general confed advice, and much appreciated (I knew most of it, but not that having a greater number of settlements made them *more* willing to confed at low military strength), but I've been checking diplo every turn, as most of these things happen to a faction, and it doesn't become more willing to confederate. It's not just that they're being difficult because they're on the verge of annihilation (anecdotally, I disagree that factions won't confed at that point; I've seen it happen with both HElves in the distant past and other races more recently).

Originally posted by Rianne:

The ludicrous amounts of gold still works, except now you don't have to keep testing. The game will tell you exactly how much gold you need to get confederation. It's called the balance offer. If you can't afford it, you can't press the balance offer button.

What made confederations easier in WH1 and WH2 was shield of the old world, or whatever the trait was called. When the Chaos invasion started, as long as Chaos was around you could gobble up almost any faction with ease.

In retrospect I'm not surprised the chaos invasion diplo boosts were a major factor, but I don't believe you can bribe for confed in the current version of vanilla WH3? Threaten works fine, but I'm pretty sure putting confed into the offer disables bribery, and vice versa.
(Also, bribery did get nerfed in WH3 - last I checked, regardless of what you're trying to "buy", you can't get more than +15 on your offer's desirability from putting money in. Try it!)

The advice is very much appreciated, but I do still think confederating as HElves is disproportionately hard, and it would be nice to see some rebalancing of the numbers and/or scripted confederation mechanics when they get their update in a SoC/ToD-equivalent DLC.

Originally posted by shoobers:

It takes effort to confederate. Join their wars. Support their armies. Gift them money, hell maybe even sell them a settlement. You'll get them. Helves are basically butter in the players hands in terms of willingness to confederate. It just takes more effort than "Hey dude, if you don't shape I'm gonna bonk you."

Do battle support/monetary gifts/settlement sales actually impact confederation willingness beyond increasing relations? Relations are easy enough to pump up with influence; I've tried that quite a lot and it seems to have very little effect on their willingness.

I've also been assuming that joining their wars will reduce their willingness to confederate (relations increase notwithstanding), since the AI generally considers the player more vulnerable the more wars you're engaged in.

I'm curious what faction you think is hard to confederate with, if you think of HElves as cooperative. There are some factions (Dark Elves, for example) which I've not played much of in a long time, but the numbers and time investment honestly seem way worse on High Elves than any other faction that can confederate at all.

For context that it's not just me, I've played several co-op campaigns featuring high elves, combined with various other Order factions. They've pretty consistently been the slowest to confederate, whether they were being played by me or someone else. In my active two-player campaign, where Bretonnia is entirely confederated except for Repanse, and no High Elf confederation has taken place at all yet (not for lack of trying - influence, treaties, other diplo, etc. have all been done, just no dice).

I do think Bretonnia is a strong contender for easiest Order faction to confederate with, and I don't think High Elves should be able to compete for that, but surely they don't need to be quite as far behind as they are?

[AurumHawke]

Originally posted by (Steelclaw):

Originally posted by Rianne:

Generally, you should keep a eye out on the AI faction you want to confederate. If they lose their main lord (the one who speaks during diplomacy) they generally are far more open to confederation.

The more settlements they have and the lower on the power scale, the more tempting they are for confederation.

They will also generally be more open for confederation if they're at war with neighbours and with confederation they'd be saved.

Generally at around 10-15 confederation you can try to threaten them to join.

If they're on the verge of death, a single settlement etc, 1 turn from extinction, I've learned the AI almost never accepts confederation and would rather die.

This is all excellent general confed advice, and much appreciated (I knew most of it, but not that having a greater number of settlements made them *more* willing to confed at low military strength), but I've been checking diplo every turn, as most of these things happen to a faction, and it doesn't become more willing to confederate. It's not just that they're being difficult because they're on the verge of annihilation (anecdotally, I disagree that factions won't confed at that point; I've seen it happen with both HElves in the distant past and other races more recently).

Having their faction leader wounded is the most significant boost to confederation acceptance I've seen.
The thing when they're down to 1 settlement is they're rebuilding their leader's army and will be wiped out at the same time their leader gets wounded.
Their position is obviously doomed, but hey, their leader's still alive to refuse being rescued.

More settlements gives them more garrison units propping up their military power score.
Haven't seen whether the Diplomatic personality considers their own military score or ignores it like they do the player's.

Otherwise, reportedly, they're less likely to accept confederation if they've just gained or lost a settlement.

[StrangestEcho]

The team that originally made WH3 had some extremely questionable ideas about how to evolve the formula for game 3. They decided that the game would be better if confederations were a rare occurrence, and made it nearly impossible to do at launch without substantial metagaming.

The post launch support team has made many adjustments to the formula, but yeah confederation can still much more challenging than it was in previous games, and the conditions to trigger it a bit finicky.

Ideally you want to:

1: Get to 150 relations
2: Be far ahead in Military Power
3: Drag them into a bunch of wars, so that they feel threatened
4: Prevent them from capturing new territory
5: Get their legendary lord killed

And yeah as other people mentioned, they often refuse to confederate when one turn away from being wiped out. CA needs to change that.

[JODEGAFUN]

High Elf faction get the nice trait diplomatic, just read the discription under the leader trait and you understand why you can not confederate them. This s..t trait means they nearly do not consider power for their diplomatic behavior. So having no power and you are powerlv 1 has not the impact like for other factions.
That is the reason i stop playing HE in WH3, you can not confederate any LL, just kill them and be done.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

HE confederation has always been a bit different.

In game 2, like someone wrote already, you could throw immense amounts of gold at a faction to make it happen. Here, not so much. And it's even worse in game 3, IMO, because some potential targets for confederation get taken out pretty quickly by Slaanesh or other factions that now not only start in the homelands but have potentially bigger allies they can bring in from around the greatly expanded map.

HE went from being a favorite of mine in game 2, to being something I avoid in game 3. Alith Anar and his shadow archers are okay, but the rest, even in their own homeland, have somewhat annoying starts now and aren't a lot of fun for me.

[BIG E.]

Since extreme economy nerfs both to DE and HE its harder to confederate.

You basicly need significantly more power than the faction you are trying to confederate, it means you need more armies and that means you need more gold to pay more upkeep.

Only solution is rapid expansion, you gotta play very agressive and just snowball which is again, hard for HE since their changes because that in itself requires gold.

Originally posted by JODEGAFUN:

High Elf faction get the nice trait diplomatic, just read the discription under the leader trait and you understand why you can not confederate them. This s..t trait means they nearly do not consider power for their diplomatic behavior. So having no power and you are powerlv 1 has not the impact like for other factions.
That is the reason i stop playing HE in WH3, you can not confederate any LL, just kill them and be done.

Nope power 100% matters when it comes to confederation. I just confederated eltharion recently playing as alarielle. I only managed to do it after having significantly more armies/power. And again Tyrion doesn't care regardless of how much i boost the relations because i don't have significant power over him yet, if i play few more hours and spam more armies to get power i can confed Tyrion aswell.

[HAF DoomsDay]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2854819509 I've found this single mod helps immensely.