I am still lost how the Empire's mechanic works

[volbound1700]

So I have effectively either confederated or wiped out all of the Empire's factions but I am still at the -10 influence. If I go up to -8, it crashes my economy. How is this supposed to work? Do I just stay at -10 for all of eternity to avoid the -8 issues? There should have been a method to reset it once you were the only Empire Faction left.

[Dreamscape]

You should NEVER let it drop below positive in the first place. Sounds like it's a bug that it's not giving you negative debuffs at such a low number.

[Dreagon]

Originally posted by Dreamscape:

You should NEVER let it drop below positive in the first place. Sounds like it's a bug that it's not giving you negative debuffs at such a low number.

At -10 you are in civil war and lose all the buffs/debuffs related to authority. But yeah, you really shouldn't let your authority get that low. Try to limit it to a -2 or so at worst.

[Gnarl]

Yeah, I've only played one Emp campaign. But the trick seems to be to keep it positive. Maybe by going negative you'll have to have less armies and you will lose territories? Then you can incite rebellions in those territories and help the rebel ai's as best as you can retake the territory, thus bringing old Emp factions back.

Or just start over again?

[Pervy]

Originally posted by volbound1700:

So I have effectively either confederated or wiped out all of the Empire's factions but I am still at the -10 influence. If I go up to -8, it crashes my economy. How is this supposed to work? Do I just stay at -10 for all of eternity to avoid the -8 issues? There should have been a method to reset it once you were the only Empire Faction left.

wiping out sounds bad, its better to be friends so you can confed them.

[volbound1700]

Originally posted by Dreagon:

Originally posted by Dreamscape:

You should NEVER let it drop below positive in the first place. Sounds like it's a bug that it's not giving you negative debuffs at such a low number.

At -10 you are in civil war and lose all the buffs/debuffs related to authority. But yeah, you really shouldn't let your authority get that low. Try to limit it to a -2 or so at worst.

How? Once you start Confederating the other factions, it goes up quickly. What happened was, I had half the Empire land and was losing points due to Confederating so I went ahead and Confederated most of the rest of them and won the Civil War.

How are you supposed to retake the Entire Empire and not get to -10?

[volbound1700]

Originally posted by Gnarl:

Yeah, I've only played one Emp campaign. But the trick seems to be to keep it positive. Maybe by going negative you'll have to have less armies and you will lose territories? Then you can incite rebellions in those territories and help the rebel ai's as best as you can retake the territory, thus bringing old Emp factions back.

Or just start over again?

So I wasn't suppose to take over the entire Empire? That doesn't make sense.

[Brenil]

I've only now begun an Empire campaign since the overhaul and I'm baffled at some of the changes myself.

To me, as dry as the Empire was to play before, at least it was possible to play as a confederated Empire. Now it's just... an RNGfest that is entirely one-sided against the player.

The problems I've seen thus far are:

- You cannot ally with other states or conduct any sort of meaningful diplomacy. Ironically, allies outside of the Empire are more interactive.

- Because of the above, you cannot replenish your armies in other states' territory. This means if you try and maintain the independence of the states, you're constantly at a disadvantage in spending a lot of time in encamp stance just to maintain a campaign.

- The AI can't be assed to help each other out. States either gobble up other states (and therefore setup dilemmas, more on this later), or get chewed up piecemeal by various enemies (so far, undead for me).

- Because of the above, the AI constantly needs help from the player. If you don't provide it, you lose allegiance. If you do, you risk overstretching yourself without knowing it because of... once again, dilemmas.

- The interaction with the rest of the Empire is entirely slanted against the player. Constantly other states are attacked by spawned armies where you have to spend resources (SURPRISE!) to help them, or they get screwed - and - you lose fealty. Meanwhile, other states never do anything to help the player. Due to no alliances, I don't even think if you're attacked outside their cities or next to their armies they'll assist you (need confirmation on this, as it hasn't happened yet).

- The RNG is out of control here. Dilemmas, while initially seeming to be interesting, quickly become annoying and can quickly turn a successful campaign into a downward spiral of disaster with you having extremely little input on how or why this occurs.

- The Imperial Authority system is stupid, especially for Balthazar. A bunch of incompetent Elector Counts are artificially prevented from helping one another, get rolled individually by a horde of undead (this happens often), and the player gets the blame for it. For Balthazar it's particularly nonsensical because if this rolls out of control too quickly, everyone declares war on the Balthazar player, even the damned Emperor!

Perhaps I've missed something, but my playthrough so far has been one annoyance after another and I have wished for all the world I could just make damned alliances with the other Elector Counts. But no, dilemmas a plenty, and forces completely outside of my control are obliterating my economy, like the OP, and it's a constant struggle just to keep my head above water.

I think the old system with the added Elector Count slots and some more flavor would of been far more fun and less of a headache than this current one. Unfortunately, I don't think CA will revisit this overhaul any time soon, so it looks like the only solution is in mods.

[Demon of Razgriz]

Originally posted by volbound1700:

Originally posted by Gnarl:

Yeah, I've only played one Emp campaign. But the trick seems to be to keep it positive. Maybe by going negative you'll have to have less armies and you will lose territories? Then you can incite rebellions in those territories and help the rebel ai's as best as you can retake the territory, thus bringing old Emp factions back.

Or just start over again?

So I wasn't suppose to take over the entire Empire? That doesn't make sense.

Don't do it too fast. The way I did it was I refused confederation attempts until I had 3 influence, so even after confederation, I still had 1 influence. I would then wait to confederate and refuse any confederation offers, (when you refuse, it gives you influence) until I had 3 again, then I would confederate the next group.

[The Cure]

You also need to manipulate wars between two Empire factions, so when the dilemma comes up you can join one side or the other without getting any hit to influence.

[DaBo81]

It is strange that you can't form alliances with the Elector Counts, but if you could just form military alliances with all of them then you could easily win the campaign and you wouldn't need to jump through the hoops of confederating them. I think there's room for improvement with the system but it's OK and the Empire does get a lot of bonuses for each elector count they have so the Empire gets lots of help too.

[DaBo81]

It's very easy to accumulate enough prestige to benefit from all those dilemmas anyway. The battles are sometimes quite tough though. Perhaps some players are trying to keep Wissenland and Middenland? They start with low fealty so It's better IMO to just attack them when they secede.

[volbound1700]

So yeah, I did things totally different than everyone on here. I went to war with the ones that didn't like me and Confederated the ones that did. I was even able to get Balthasar's faction to join me so I got him as well. I probably Confederated around 5 of them, outside forces wiped out 1, and I took out the 3-4 others. The issue was that I was losing influence no matter what I did due to Confederating ones in the past so I basically went ahead and Confederated 3 of them in a row then went to war. As stated, one more would have joined me had I not gone to war as I was already at 10 and had rejected them (I hated to fight them), the other two had one that was halfway to liking me and one that detested me.

Outside of 3 factions, most of them seem to be easy to get to your side.

I don't understand why the game docks you influence for Confederating them. Frankly, if you are adding factions and getting stronger, that should grow your influence with the others. I think the Empire campaign should encourage Confederating and not take any influence away. That would make the most sense and focus your goal on uniting the Empire. I hope EA reads this thread and makes that fix.

I am not sure what version this one is on. It was the second campaign that I ever played. Listening to the open credits, I thought that I was supposed to conquer all of them and unite the Empire. I started realizing halfway into the game that this was more like a Holy Roman Empire structure.

So I am basically playing out the game now as the Empire at -10. I am on turn 90 something now. I have ruled the entire Empire (literally every province) since turn 60, I believe. I don't play TW: Warhammer II a lot because it has such long loading times between saved games and battles. I don't think this computer is powerful enough to run it. I try to actually automate most of my battles because of the long load times.

[DaBo81]

The confederation penalty is to represent the internal power struggles between the counts. I don't know how others play the Reikland campaign but I did it like this:
1) Wissenland and Middenland quickly secede so I declare war on them and capture their provinces.
2) Vamps wipe out some electors so I start fighting them and I return the cities to the original faction - quickly building up authority and fealty, the elector then polices that province and pays to develop it and then I confederate it later. The provinces get lots of vampiric corruption so I let the AI elector handle all that.

[Goatmanpig]

The way it's set up let's you expand to The Wasteland and Wissenland no problem (you'll almost always get an event about civil war with Wissenland), from there it becomes a slight game of chance. If the VC attack Stirland and are successful you can get easy authority that way enabling you to confed with a faction of your choosing. Normally one of the Norscan tribes will attack Nordland as well and if they're successful will raze settlements either letting you build more authority and assuming Middenland hasn't taken the other two provinces you can branch out to them as well for yourself giving you four provinces before turn fifty if you play your cards right if not more.

Unlike most factions it has kinda a guided start because the Empire/Franz is kinda suppose to baby's first campaign, if you break from that guided start it can get hectic.

[volbound1700]

I mean, there is nothing wrong with my current game, I will just try to stay at -10 and rule a united Empire directly ruled by me. In fact, I am expanding it beyond my borders. The people to the north keep going to war with me now that they are united. I had to endure a massive Chaos invasion that forced me to make early peace with vamps. Defeated all of the Chaos armies and rebuilt the razed cities. Made peace with the northern guys (I will call them vikings) and then went at it with the vampires again and drove them into the mountain areas (both factions only have 1 city left each and it is a former dwarven city, I think). The stupid viking faction went to war with me again so I am making peace with vamps and going north to fight them again. This time, there is no chaos armies in the way so I may try to conquer them. Only way to keep peace as they constantly keep declaring war on me (I think this is the third war). It is always at an inconvenient time as well (although this might be the best time yet).