Your thoughts on increasing army costs?

[24601]

I've got 350 hours in this game now and can't put into words how many times I've been frustrated by the arbitrary cost multiplier of having additional armies. Lose 2,000 gold per turn purely because you've recruited a second or third Lord!? I understand it's normally easy enough to win a campaign even with this disadvantage, even on Very Hard, but when you have a reasonably large empire with multiple fronts and can barely fund three decent armies and are being flooded by stacks from minor factions, walls and garrisons only go so far.

In my current campaign, Last Defenders, I've not even bothered recruiting Temple Guard or Horned Ones in any of my armies. I'd love to because they're awesome units, but my full enjoyment of the rich flavour of this game is being hampered. I simply can't afford to recruit anything non-essential on any fun scale if I want four whole armies to guard my 20-odd settlements -.-

This cost multiplier has never existed in any previous Total War game and we managed fine with them, right?

[LORDxLUBU]

Use mods, dont get frustrated. Life is already hard enough.

[Sins]

It feels necessary in some respects, but I do wonder if there might be a better middle ground where baseline unit upkeep goes up by some amount and armies no longer stack a multiplier.

♥♥♥♥ if I know what that number should be exactly, but it might be kinda nice to not be able to jump to a 20 stack army right from the beginning of the game.

[ArchAnge1LT]

I think this mechanic is a necessary evil for the game. It prevents army spamming. Like if it wasnt in the game at the moment, you can easily do 2 full armies early game, and just steam roll everything. I mean you sort of can do something similar, but this mechanic still slows down that to a degree.

[24601]

I like the Tomb Kings mechanic where one building equals 2 Ushabti or whatever. One tier 3 Skink building allows you to recruit 2 Kroxigor etc.

[Warhunter]

there is a mod to remove/reduce the supply lines penalty. but yes i agree it is by far one of the worst mechanics in my opinion. it turns the game into whack a mole due to your limited army size. penalizes factions that use alot of cannon fodder troops. and forces almost every settlement to get the wall upgrade just so you can have time to send your limited forces at

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Originally posted by 24601:

snip

At first I just modded out supply lines, then I got to making mods and traded supply lines for administrative costs. Honestly, works a lot better than what CA did. No more armies costing 10k+ per turn while the AI fields them all for free, and both AI and player are prevented from simply covering the planet in random Lords.

[Erikkustrife]

Damn I was hoping you wanted them more expensive since on legendary the games been kinda easy recently.

[Cacomistle]

I like the corruption mechanic in other total war games a lot better. It can lead to some weird stuff where taking a city decreases your income late game, but you can raze cities in this game which makes it a lot less of an issue than 3k or shogun 2. And cities always eventually increase your income if you build them up.

I think the issue with that in this game though would be that there wouldn't be a lot of difficulty. Like, if you play late game brettonia for example its so ridiculously easy. Its like impossible to lose. Because the only way the ai is really a threat is when they just attack where you're not, and you can't afford to have even a weak army defending cause of the upkeep mechanic.

Generally if you can recruit even a stack of t1, that's enough with a garrison to take down high tier stacks. And in this game, you can make your doomstacks literally unstoppable, because you get armies that don't even take damage in 1v2 situtions vs doomstacks, and replenish 50% hp in 1 turn just in case they do.

And I guess that's why they do the additional upkeep. Because otherwise, you create 2 doomstacks, go kill all your enemies, and just recruit a bunch of lower tier stacks to defend everything else. At least for me, horde factions, Brettonia, and Wood Elves are stupidly easy past turn 20 or so because of this (first 2 cause no additional upkeep obviously, and wood elves because losing their territory barely sets you back at all so long as you don't lose their main settlements).

I'd still rather see some sort of corruption mechanic or the like, or maybe on legendary enemies start getting recruitment bonuses later in the game. Like for example, every 10 turns ai recruits their lords and units at 1 rank higher, so the late game doomstacks you're fighting are actually doomstacks instead of some maybe rank 4-5 lord with some rank 3 phoenix guard that die in 3 seconds to your 200 damage thunderers. Also making ranged unit stacking not so ridiculous.

[Chaoslink]

I honestly miss how it was in old TW games like medieval 2, where you didn’t need a lord and could move individual units around with the risk that they might rebel. It was interesting to fight battles with just 3-4 units on each side. Paying for your garrison sucked but it was interesting.

[Babarigo]

For me it's a terrible mechanic who encourages the player to build doom stacks with ligthning strike which ends with having a stack that destroys every enemy armies one by one without suffering barely any losses.

[Chaoslink]

Originally posted by Babarigo:

For me it's a terrible mechanic who encourages the player to build doom stacks with ligthning strike which ends with having a stack that destroys every enemy armies one by one without suffering barely any losses.

Exactly. You can’t have a bunch of cheap armies, you have to have high tier armies to get the most out of them. This creates doomstacks that just overpower the enemy armies and snowball out of control. I can understand that it promotes less chaos with tons of small forces running about, but in doing so it also makes most battles night and day victories where the loser often won’t make a comeback. Lowers the immersiveness for a more gamey experience.

[Overread]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Originally posted by Babarigo:

For me it's a terrible mechanic who encourages the player to build doom stacks with ligthning strike which ends with having a stack that destroys every enemy armies one by one without suffering barely any losses.

Exactly. You can’t have a bunch of cheap armies, you have to have high tier armies to get the most out of them. This creates doomstacks that just overpower the enemy armies and snowball out of control. I can understand that it promotes less chaos with tons of small forces running about, but in doing so it also makes most battles night and day victories where the loser often won’t make a comeback. Lowers the immersiveness for a more gamey experience.

To be fair the Doomstack is a problem for most turnbased strategy games (TW being turnbased at the strategic screen).

Sometimes its doom stacks with high level high power units; other times its about putting your whole army in one place. It's plagued the whole genre for a very long time now. The other issue is that if only one player or AI uses it then you've all got to use the tactic or lose.

Sword in the Stars 1 suffers terribly from it; Stellaris (heck they had to throw in lanes just to get the doom stacks to meet each other); TW; Knights of Honour etc....

Sword in the Stars 2 tried to limit it by capping your fleets then capping fleets per system and capping how much fleets could have; they also tried making combat a multi-turn affair rather than over in one turn so that retreating and whittling down attacsk were valid; however they borked the game so hard at launch and with so much drama it never recovered (and considering their team hasn't done a big game since I don't think Kerberos has really survived the experience well either).


In general if nothing stops you then putting all your eggs into one basket works out about the best. I figure one issue with stopping it is that it might actually reqiure an empire screen that's FAR FAR more complex. However adding more depth and complexity does not always improve the game experience - make it too complicated and the fun (for many) gets lost.

[OwlRaider]

I agree that this mechanic can be problematic, for some factions. However Last Defenders certainly aren't 1 of them. Thinking more along the lines of Skaven, Greenskins, etc, you know the overwhelm with numbers factions. These factions should prefer to spam armies of trash rather than a handful of elite stacks. Lizardmen on the other hand are the exact opposite, they want their few elite dino heavy armies stomping on thousands of Skavens or whatever.

You also have to keep the campaign objectives in mind. In the Vortex campaign you really don't need to expand all that much to win the campaign so you can stay relatively small(say just Ulthuan as Tyrion/Alarielle) if you prefer and still be able to easily win the campaign. So you can limit the amount of armies you need to defend your territory and be able to cover all your bases. In Mortal Empires(or Vortex going for conquest rather than Vortex victory) as long as you're expanding towards corners you should be able to limit your borders with your enemies thus again reducing the need for a ton of armies just to defend your lands.

Remember Warhammer 2, more than any other Total War game, is all about quality over quantity. It's also about slow and steady expansion rather than a conquest rush Medieval 2 style. Expand slowly, build up your economy and when you're ready go on a conquest spree. Provinces grow faster under AI control than yours anyway so you're not even losing all that much. Also the single most important resource in this game is lord xp, especially your starting legendary lord, so just leveling him up to 40 ASAP is a tremendous boost towards victory regardless of how much land you actually conquer in the early stages.

[Cacomistle]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

Originally posted by Babarigo:

For me it's a terrible mechanic who encourages the player to build doom stacks with ligthning strike which ends with having a stack that destroys every enemy armies one by one without suffering barely any losses.

Exactly. You can’t have a bunch of cheap armies, you have to have high tier armies to get the most out of them. This creates doomstacks that just overpower the enemy armies and snowball out of control. I can understand that it promotes less chaos with tons of small forces running about, but in doing so it also makes most battles night and day victories where the loser often won’t make a comeback. Lowers the immersiveness for a more gamey experience.

I mean whether it even prevents chaos depends on the player. In shogun and 3k for example, I'd just leave small forces in areas where I thought I might get attacked while a couple main stacks pushed out. I still might have 4-5 stacks actually out on the map doing something. Same thing when I play Brettonia. I have some small peasant armies sitting in my territory prepping for an attack while a few main armies push out.

I actually find more chaos with the current upkeep system. Because I know I cannot afford enough armies to actually defend my territory. Which means a couple things.

When my enemy attacks, I have to go run an army over to defend against them. I can't just have one there already, its too expensive. I get a lot of situations where the ai has like a stack of 10 units where they haven't finished recruiting, a damaged stack, or a weak 20 stack that move past my army (since obviously they can't fight). My solution to this is to recruit temporary stacks. I'll save up my regiments of renown, and recruit them all at once to defeat an enemy army, and maybe recruit a few regular units, then disband that army after the fight. This is way more micromanagement than being able to just have like 5 units sitting there already and recruting 2-3 more to kill their army with the help of a garrison. And my main army ends up being ridiculous overkill, where I've got like star dragons and stuff taking an empty city that the ai abandoned when it saw my obviously overwhelming force coming.

And the other issue, since I don't have enough stacks to defend all my territory, the only option for defending myself is to kill my opponent fast. So, I feel the need to keep all my stacks active. Because if I don't go attack somebody, they will attack me, and I'll end up having to chase around a bunch of armies trying to attack my undefended cities. The only way to prevent the ai from backcapping you is to attack first. If you're at their capital when their army arrives at your minor settlement, you can recruit a temporary force to defend yourself with the income you get from their capital, and you know they won't be attacking with anything else.

So to me at least, it feels a lot more hectic. In three kingdoms for example, I just take like 2 stacks in a couple directions, keep them together, and have them take territory while I have like 1/3rd stacks sitting in defensive cities. When I push forward, I just move the defensive stacks up. I'm micromanaging 2-4 armies late game instead of like 4-6 in this game, because I can afford to have weak armies just defending territory. And with the corruption mechanic, not expanding is sometimes more cost effective.

Basically, this game heavily punishes inactivity. And that's not the case in the games that use the corruption mechanic. So it ends up more hectic just because especially late game you're incentivized to just go take territory as fast as possible and crush your enemies asap. Especially with how powerful experience is, armies that havent seen battle are like actually half as effective (unless you can recruit lords and units at high level).

I feel like this game ends up with this chaotic scrambling to kill a bunch of stacks trying to backcap me (cause the ai doesn't deal with additional upkeep), and killing my enemies before they get a chance to send more stacks while my regiments are on cooldown. And I don't really even get to use regiments of renown, because otherwise every time the ai moves a stack towards an unwalled settlement or brings some artillery vs a minor settlement I just accept that I lose it. Or even worse, play a defensive siege, my personal least favorite type of battle in the game. To be honest that's part of the issue, I don't build many walls cause I'd rather lose a settlement than play a defensive siege, whereas I don't hate them in the other games for some reason so I'm willing to take a 6 stack and a garrison and win a siege battle with them.

[Gamefever]

I've played an enormous amount of hours in the game...I find that the upkeep is an issue for some Races/Lords and not others.
It does become a problem for Empire which is a shame as you really need a few good armies but can mostly only field spearmen and archers with maybe a 3 total mortars across 4 armies for a long time.

Playing as the Vampire Lords right now, upkeep really isnt an issue, I can easily keep Vlad and Isabella in strong units...I can put down Strigue with their special unit type because of easy upkeep skill points...Same with other types of Vampire Lords, can field cavalry armies....I can place near infinate amount of Skeleton armies down for real cheap as well.

Dwarfs....At some point with a Dwarf economy, I can field about 5 to 7 armies with my choice of mixed but expensive units without real issue...So upkeep is not a problem for them.

High Elves is a mixed bag, and it depends heavily on the starting Lord...But for the most part HE's can play a lot of armies if they play Lords with upkeep reduction...And still maybe field some neat armies.

Dark Elves, not really a huge issue as these guys have access to upkeep reduction in a perk and also in Dark Lord perk.

For the most part....I really think its the Empire that has a real issue with fielding enough interesting units....

I dont play enough Lizard Men but I know they have access to upkeep reduction as well in some form.