Why people don´t finish campaigns and what to do about it

[Lenny]

As we all know, people usually don´t finish campaigns. You play the early game and then you quit. This is actually a big deal because it suggests that the player experience post mid-game is lacking. It´s boring. And you don´t want people to quit your game out of boredom. For the avid fan this is less damaging of course, but people who pick up Warhammer as their first Total War game will get the impression that it´s fine at first and then gets boring after a while, which is very bad for a flagship such as this.

So how to fix it?

The semi-recent growth change (cutting growth rate to 60% across the board) was obviously meant to prolong the average life span of campaigns. However I think this is a big mistake as it is not the rate of progression that is the problem.

The problem is spelled "inverse difficulty". The game is most difficult at the start and becomes easier and easier the farther in you play. You reach the point where you feel that you can´t lose long before you can actually win. All time between those two points needs to be filled with meaningful gameplay, otherwise of course people will skip it.

Another problem is the inflation of resources. As you get more territory, the loss of any one city, unit or army become less and less meaningful. You can recruit, resettle and rebuild quickly. Characters become immortal and respawn in just a few turns.

Contrast that with the growth mechanics from Shogun 2, where a city accumulated wealth every turn over the course of the game, and tax income was a percentage of the city´s wealth. Sacking a city permanently reduced it´s wealth score, which meant that core cities became more and more valuable as the game progressed instead of less. The loss or even just the sacking of one was a blow you needed to recover from.

I dearly hope that there is some kind of plan in the works for creating a traditional mounting difficulty graph for Warhammer 3 and the Mortal Empires map.

It´s what the game needs.

[them4pples]

Originally posted by Lenny:

The problem is spelled "inverse difficulty". The game is most difficult at the start and becomes easier and easier the farther in you play. You reach the point where you feel that you can´t lose long before you can actually win. All time between those two points needs to be filled with meaningful gameplay, otherwise of course people will skip it.

you hit the nail on the head right here man. you become a powerhouse long before a campaign is "over" (per victory conditions). the game just gets boring since you can just auto resolve every battle and steam roll through territory. even upping the difficulty from normal to hard to very hard ends up with you doing the same things.

i feel like that's where CA needs to focus. the early game is like a curated experience almost which makes starting a new LL campaign fun since it's like a puzzle that needs to be solved. they need to bring that to the post mid game, but also make it to where it retains it's replay-ability instead of being too linear.

i dunno, but I really hope they do something about it and make warhammer 3 an amazing experience from start to finish!

[Flickmann]

CA have always struggled to implement a satisfying end game and every attempt they made has absolutely sucked. Realm Divide in Shogun II was awful, and made a mockery of any and all diplomacy you had made until that point. Rome II's civil wars were dreadful, before and after the rework, because they were just a case of whack-a-mole, and after the rework, are easy to avoid. Attila's Huns were just a constant barrage of infuriating ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The Warhammer approach seems to be just to spawn giant armies of doomstacks up your anus and tell you to get on with it; see the Chaos armies, or the ritual/intervention armies. Even the latest Wood Elf campaign features doom stacks spawning right next to you, but at least you can ambush them before they reach full power. By the late game, however, it becomes once again a case of boring whack-a-mole.

The campaign desperately needs some sort of mechanic to limit growth after a while. Some sort of corruption or maintenance cost that the player has to balance with new conquests by building infrastructure or deploying heroes. Until they do this, the campaign will always just be a steady, linear increase in power until you eclipse everyone.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

My campaigns are played on VH or hard usually but I have the opposite problem, it reaches a halt because the odds brcome unbearable and there is usually little more to do unless it's grinding battle after battle. However I play mostly as evil factions so that might explain some problems.

I have a different take on the matter. The campaign becomes harder the longer it goes. Specially if you didn't progress in the optimal form.

The changes to growth hurt the player, not so much the AI, as the AI gets better relationships with other factions, is not bound by the fog of war, can confederate faster because of those relationships and it has bonus resources and growth. So they really don't care.

The other issue is the upper cap on income and the ludicrous supply lines. On other games, tou could boost the income of your cities and turtle if you wanted to, but on this one, the income part is so streamlined that you get 1 income building/settlement and thats it.

Usually a whole province would pay for an army, but given the not-actual-supply-lines mechanic, this ends up not being the case. The more you expand, the more land and directions you need to cover. And this means more armies. However paying for the army to defend a province whilst also developing it is a hard thing to do. Since the developing is so slow and the gains from it are a fixed amount, expansion is usually the best answer to money. Just use othet lands to finance the growth of the core regions and so on.

And finally the more you expand, the more the relationships with othet factions drops. So usually also end joining a war against you.

As the game progresses, trading partners might get desteoyed, so thafs another loss there.

It's kind of a system that doesn't allow for many options and punishes the player for the advancement.

[Soushokudanshi]

I find micromanaging cities gets tedious in larger numbers as well. Having to look around at a couple provinces for upgrades and growth/public order statistics is fine and part of the fun of managing resources, but when I hit 30+ towns it feels like a slog, I spend less time fighting and more time clicking menu buttons so I don't waste potential actions on a turn.

[KOS]

Unfortunately we can't fix nor upgrade humain.

[The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!]

For me it's that by the mid game you are virtually always fighting 80 vs 80 stacks. I HATE this. I hate 20 stacks. It's too much to manage on a battle (even if it's limited to 40 units per side), and even with the pause it's easy to just lose track of units, and where everything is because it becomes such a huge mess. I wish, instead of just altering unit size, we could alter army size. I think 11 units per army (10 + lord) would be ideal. It would significantly reduce the mental fatigue of big battles. After a huge manual battle I usually stop playing, sometimes the campaign altogether. I just don't like that style of play.

I think you're absolutely right about everything you said. The other big problem is the AI is totally brain-dead, and just uses copious, obvious cheats to compete. I've seen 20 stack armies appear out of nowhere, armies move beyond their (supposed) maximum distance, badly damaged armies healed to full. It just totally ruins the experience, and that's not even to get into the egregious cheat the AI gets in battles!

[Moobert]

Originally posted by Flickmann:

CA have always struggled to implement a satisfying end game and every attempt they made has absolutely sucked.

True. I feel this way when I played Rome/Rome 2 and Empire. It reaches a point when either I rush to finish or I just give up.

Originally posted by Flickmann:

The campaign desperately needs some sort of mechanic to limit growth after a while. Some sort of corruption or maintenance cost that the player has to balance with new conquests by building infrastructure or deploying heroes. Until they do this, the campaign will always just be a steady, linear increase in power until you eclipse everyone.

Maybe something like a huge Chaos invasion!!

I am trying to be sarcastic, but yeah.... they need to beef up the chaos event. A lot.

[Doomier Guy]

Does 3K suffer from this issue as well? Does it do anything different to alleviate it?

[Lenny]

Originally posted by The MVP, Mike "The King" Pompeo:

Does 3K suffer from this issue as well? Does it do anything different to alleviate it?

Don´t know. Trying to get into it right now actually to find out.

[Ogami]

I must be in the minority but i finish 90% of my campaigns. Since i got the game last year i played about 10 campaigns ( all on Mortal Empires) and finished 9 of them.
Usually just the "Short Campaign Victory" but did "Long" 2-3 times.

I dont see the point in stopping midway through a campaign? But maybe i am just more patient and i actually love city micro managment in the late game.

Helps of course that i autoresolve 90% of battles anyway and only play a few interesting fights manually. So a campaign rarely takes longer then 10-15 hours or so.

[Noin Trongaz]

Originally posted by The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!:

For me it's that by the mid game you are virtually always fighting 80 vs 80 stacks. I HATE this. I hate 20 stacks. It's too much to manage on a battle (even if it's limited to 40 units per side), and even with the pause it's easy to just lose track of units, and where everything is because it becomes such a huge mess. I wish, instead of just altering unit size, we could alter army size. I think 11 units per army (10 + lord) would be ideal. It would significantly reduce the mental fatigue of big battles. After a huge manual battle I usually stop playing, sometimes the campaign altogether. I just don't like that style of play.

I think you're absolutely right about everything you said. The other big problem is the AI is totally brain-dead, and just uses copious, obvious cheats to compete. I've seen 20 stack armies appear out of nowhere, armies move beyond their (supposed) maximum distance, badly damaged armies healed to full. It just totally ruins the experience, and that's not even to get into the egregious cheat the AI gets in battles!

Actually, for me it's the same.
One thing I would wish is an ability to give some of my army to the AI to manage.
Otherwise, 20+ armies are just too much micro for me.

[Empukris]

This game dont have any civil war, realm divided or corruption mechanic there is no mechanic to prevent player from snowballing. Most factions can spam agents after a few turns and these will increase income exponentially with 0 corruption mechanic. Of course it will snowball, delaying the growth will just increase the number of turns but you will still snowball.

[Lenny]

Originally posted by parent child bowl:

Originally posted by The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!:

For me it's that by the mid game you are virtually always fighting 80 vs 80 stacks. I HATE this. I hate 20 stacks.

I don't enjoy it either. I think they should half army and garrison sizes and increase upkeep by about 50%. The most fun battles are the skirmishes within the first 15 or so rounds. As soon as more than two stacks are involved in a battle it's just meh.

Stack size definately is a problem now that I think about it. Loading a save and seeing the 40 unit battle screen complete with phoenix birds, cavallery, dragons and wizards, I just know that it´s going to be complete pandemonium, again.

Eeeehhh quit to windows.

[AkumulatoR]

I'd rather the game stay as is then invent some stupid mechanics that make it worse. Endgame crisis thing is a meme and never works well.

[ArchAnge1LT]

Originally posted by Flickmann:

CA have always struggled to implement a satisfying end game and every attempt they made has absolutely sucked. .

Because you can't solve it that easily, even if at all. In strategy games you always snowball after certain breakpoints.

If you progressively make end game harder, players will complain about not being rewarded at all for their any effort, even though it would make the endgame better.

If you make game a bit more static like it is now, you get to feel the rewards of the for your efforts, but you 'snowball' over the time and it becomes repetitive overall in the end game.

One could argue there is a middle ground between those 2 approaches, but the first approach is already the 'incremental' middle of the road approach.

One of the ways to partially solve it, i would say, is army cost cap. That way you cant have 20 stack of elite units, but you have to mix and match according the to the cap. If you wanted just elite units your whole army would be smaller than 20.

Ai would also get caps depending on difficulty. At highest difficulties, it could field a better quality army than the player, as it would have a higher cap.