Cathay Question

[Broken Land]

Is it worth occupying the settlements beyond the Great Wall?

They are uninhabitable (with all the building construction + public order debuffs come with that). But I thought they might act as a buffer to the endless Kurgan Warband?

[Enelith]

No.
Unless you're in for painting.

[Central]

cathays bastion mechanic force spawns enemies there, if you kill them all than they will just respawn, you simply cannot prevent them from spawning in any way.
taking those settlements means getting attacked constantly.
granted you can take down the stacks when they spawn, which means they cause less trouble but you will constantly be playing whack a mole with them,

your bastions can build an upkeep reduction building, those settlements cannot, meaning that stationing a force there is much more expensive than stationing one at the bastion.

it might be completely possible to do it, i never seriously tried holding onto it. i just think that having to fight battles there every turn or even every few turns just to hold an insignificant area is not worth it. there are better directions to expand to. much better to hold at the bastion in my opinion.

if you are going to paint the map than i strongly suggest leaving that part until you conquered everything else.

[kkc495]

Originally posted by N30n_St34m:

Is it worth occupying the settlements beyond the Great Wall?

They are uninhabitable (with all the building construction + public order debuffs come with that). But I thought they might act as a buffer to the endless Kurgan Warband?

Do not try to occupy the Kurgan Warband area, just stay behind the wall and guard it until you are very rich in money than you can think about occupy them. I try it before and end up losing all the Kurgan Warband settlements because the A.I. just generate 10 Kurgan Warband army in some random time to screw you up.

You will just get frustrated and end up abandoning them.

[Broken Land]

OK, doesnt sound like a good idea. Cheers everyone.

[Namhaid]

I wouldn't bother. The hostile climate and high corruption mean you won't be able to develop them properly, and even if you do the spawning armies will mean you'll have to constantly defend them. I did occupy two of the western ones to use as pit stops to attack Tzeentch's faction, they can be useful for that, but I abandon them afterwards. It's much more effective to keep your armies on the gates with the upkeep reduction building.

[Matrias]

Wouldn't take them but i sat 3 armys out there cleansed the corruption and spawn camped 3 spawns to max out my lords fairly quick.

[warbeetle]

I actually occupied them and it makes the great bastion almost obsolete if you do it right(may also depend on your difficulty setting to get this working properly)

In case you want to occupy them you should start with the large settlemant in the upper corner that already has a wall in order to establish buildings that help you lower corruption. Once Corruption drops you will be able to develop(population surplus) all the settlements and add walls to all of them.

The Benefit of this is that you can lower the attack-the-great-bastion counter by 20% for every kurgan stack you kill(the danger level can not be lowerd under +3% each round in any way). Establish small armies in those fortifies cities that are strong enough to sally out and autoresolve the kurgan warbands(thats where difficulty setting might be working against this trick).
If there is no corruption and you get no bastion attack events then the kurgan stacks that spwan will be rather small and weak(I kill them with 4 spearpeasants and 4 archers + General)
Make sure no tzeech Army marches up from the south - the best way to prevent this is to march from north to south from town to town until you occupy the whole 2 provinces that border the bastion. The last settlement in the south is a great city - so you can block of larger stacks there easyly.

Is it worth it?? If you can autoresolve the battles with small cheap units and by that lower the "attack-the great-bastion"-counter you may disband any Army in the great bastion, thus creating some decent money surplus. The provinces themselves will drop not much extra money so you will have no extra benefit if you keep the great bastion occupied with troops.

... and make sure you close any rifts early.

[Ashley]

I don't think so don't the incursions still spawn? If so no thanks.

[Namhaid]

Originally posted by warbeetle:

I actually occupied them and it makes the great bastion almost obsolete if you do it right(may also depend on your difficulty setting to get this working properly)

In case you want to occupy them you should start with the large settlemant in the upper corner that already has a wall in order to establish buildings that help you lower corruption. Once Corruption drops you will be able to develop(population surplus) all the settlements and add walls to all of them.

The Benefit of this is that you can lower the attack-the-great-bastion counter by 20% for every kurgan stack you kill(the danger level can not be lowerd under +3% each round in any way). Establish small armies in those fortifies cities that are strong enough to sally out and autoresolve the kurgan warbands(thats where difficulty setting might be working against this trick).
If there is no corruption and you get no bastion attack events then the kurgan stacks that spwan will be rather small and weak(I kill them with 4 spearpeasants and 4 archers + General)
Make sure no tzeech Army marches up from the south - the best way to prevent this is to march from north to south from town to town until you occupy the whole 2 provinces that border the bastion. The last settlement in the south is a great city - so you can block of larger stacks there easyly.

Is it worth it?? If you can autoresolve the battles with small cheap units and by that lower the "attack-the great-bastion"-counter you may disband any Army in the great bastion, thus creating some decent money surplus. The provinces themselves will drop not much extra money so you will have no extra benefit if you keep the great bastion occupied with troops.

... and make sure you close any rifts early.

It is definetly possible, I think the real question is on whether it's worth it or not. Even if you manage corruption, the climate is going to make building much more expensive and profits much lower, plus it's going to force you to have a constant military force, even if it's not a very big one.

With enough time it will eventually be profitable, but it's going to take a very long time to get there and it's going to be a gold pit until then, gold that you could have used elsewhere.

Instead, if you simply camp one or two armies on the gates and build the upkeep reduction buildings you can have them secure the area and attack any spawned armies at a fraction of the cost (which is also a good way to level them), and expand elsewhere instead.

If you already have all Cathay, going east is preferable imo, as at least there you only get orange climate, and expanding there can be amortized much quicker.

[=(FGR)=Sentinel]

Beyond what everyone else said, the reason why going past the Bastion is a bad idea isn't just the constantly respawning Warbands. The thing to remember about Cathay is their Compass mechanics don't cover regions "in Cathay" as regions owned by Cathay, but regions that make up Cathay at the start. This means that if you push into the mountains to the south or out of the Bastion to the north/west, you're going to hit a situation where you don't benefit from the Compass effect. Since Cathay has the weakest anti-corruption building options in the game this means pushing out into the Chaos Wastes is going to be painful since you'll need either perfect harmony, a mandatory anti-corruption edict in most regions, or at least 1-2 anti-corruption armies/heroes per region in order to start to reduce the corruption by even a little. In order to reduce it by a consistent amount, you'll need at least two of those, if not all three. This gets worse since Tzeentch will likely be spreading corruption from an adjacent province and making the process all the more painful since you need to destroy or take his settlements as well. Even if you do purge all the corruption the Chaos Wastes give constant attrition to all non-Chaos armies in their regions.

This means you have to deal with constantly respawning hostile armies, inhospitable terrain, perpetual attrition, difficult to remove corruption, and no compass benefits. It's simply not worth it unless you want the challenge or have another reason to do so.

[ethorin101]

Cathay has anti-corruption buildings? ARe you guys talking about the -1 anti-Skaven one?

[warbeetle]

Originally posted by =(FGR)=Sentinel:

Beyond what everyone else said, the reason why going past the Bastion is a bad idea isn't just the constantly respawning Warbands. The thing to remember about Cathay is their Compass mechanics don't cover regions "in Cathay" as regions owned by Cathay, but regions that make up Cathay at the start. This means that if you push into the mountains to the south or out of the Bastion to the north/west, you're going to hit a situation where you don't benefit from the Compass effect. Since Cathay has the weakest anti-corruption building options in the game this means pushing out into the Chaos Wastes is going to be painful since you'll need either perfect harmony, a mandatory anti-corruption edict in most regions, or at least 1-2 anti-corruption armies/heroes per region in order to start to reduce the corruption by even a little. In order to reduce it by a consistent amount, you'll need at least two of those, if not all three. This gets worse since Tzeentch will likely be spreading corruption from an adjacent province and making the process all the more painful since you need to destroy or take his settlements as well. Even if you do purge all the corruption the Chaos Wastes give constant attrition to all non-Chaos armies in their regions.

This means you have to deal with constantly respawning hostile armies, inhospitable terrain, perpetual attrition, difficult to remove corruption, and no compass benefits. It's simply not worth it unless you want the challenge or have another reason to do so.

The compass will lower the threat for the great bastion by 2% - thats all benefit you need for those areas if you decide to go there.

[warbeetle]

Originally posted by ethorin101:

Cathay has anti-corruption buildings? ARe you guys talking about the -1 anti-Skaven one?

You´re ricght - Characters will lower corruption - but destroying or occupying the cities will also destroy the chaos buildings that generate chaos corruption - hover over the enemy cities and you will see they generate more than 10+ chaos corruption per turn with their buildings.

[ethorin101]

Originally posted by warbeetle:

Originally posted by ethorin101:

Cathay has anti-corruption buildings? ARe you guys talking about the -1 anti-Skaven one?

You´re ricght - Characters will lower corruption - but destroying or occupying the cities will also destroy the chaos buildings that generate chaos corruption - hover over the enemy cities and you will see they generate more than 10+ chaos corruption per turn with their buildings.

Wait, there's characters with anti corruption baked in?(are you talking about the -1 corruption trait and Fervent Skill?)

Honestly, I leave them alone so I have easy access to ranking up in high corruption areas so I can collect Fu-Hung Monks... so important to be able to get a bunch of those for fighting Slaneesh and managing corruption elsewhere.

[warbeetle]

Originally posted by ethorin101:

Originally posted by warbeetle:

You´re ricght - Characters will lower corruption - but destroying or occupying the cities will also destroy the chaos buildings that generate chaos corruption - hover over the enemy cities and you will see they generate more than 10+ chaos corruption per turn with their buildings.

Wait, there's characters with anti corruption baked in?(are you talking about the -1 corruption trait and Fervent Skill?)

Honestly, I leave them alone so I have easy access to ranking up in high corruption areas so I can collect Fu-Hung Monks... so important to be able to get a bunch of those for fighting Slaneesh and managing corruption elsewhere.

Every Cathay Lord can be upgraded with skillpoints to have +3 control and -3 corruption - that should be enough to start some serious cleansing of chaos. Heroes and lords also gain traits that lower corruption. ... and YES ... some even have -1 corruption "baked in" their starting traits when you recruit them