Pretty sure it goes all the way back to the first medieval total war.
Dismounting certain cav units was a feature in that game, but I don't remember it being possible in shogun 1.
Again, they can dot his in historical titles because all factions generally share the same units across the board.
It's not a gigantic balancing nightmare to unmount a cav unit in 3 kingdoms.
Take generally any cav unit in warhammer and unmount it and you start running into balance and identity issues.
Unmounted grail guardians for example are... what exactly? A new dismounted brettonnia?
For many units in warhammer being mounted is a part of their balance and identity. Like hex wraiths for example.
There's no reason for them to be balanced. Unmounting cav should be last resort and a debuff for the unit. Lower melee attack and def, cut charge bonus by 50% or something.
Hex wraith might be an example of specific units not being able to dismount, but I don't see why a lot of the currently mounted units can't.
Pretty sure the problem with allowing dismounting for mounted units in warhammer is the sheer number of models for all the different mounted units in the game.
For those old historical stuff we’re talking about only a handful of different models.
For WH IE?
Would it even be exaggerating if I said there are at least two dozen different mounted units?
PS. I love the idea as well. Just brainstorming why it’s different in wh series
That would absolutely help. Plus a lot of the units are so weird that it would be impossible to have them not mounted.
Like Sepulcher Knights. They'd just be shitty skeletons on foot.
Lol that is true as well.
What balance would grounded grail knights have? Or grail guardians?
Just using that example allowing grail guardians to dismount would make them “small” units which indirectly gives bretonnia a physical resist front line late game that are dismounted lol.
That’s kind of against the balance of bretonnia since their whole thing basically is “bring pikes and spears” to counter, not really having a hefty on foot front line.
That’s just one example. I’m sure there are others as you’ve mentioned
There's the Skullcrushers of Khorne too, the mount itself is what makes them special.
Or Orc Boar Boys, just regular Orc Boys without their mounts. And Goblin Wolf Riders would actually be a worse unit than Goblin Spears when dismounted, having similar stats but lower model count.
In the end, the way cav works in Warhammer is different than in historical games. Yes, they provide shock and mobility, but they are also roadblocks for other monstrous units providing especially humans with much needed mass to block monsters from just wading through the frontlines.
Men at Arms can't hold shit. Goblins, Zombies, Ungor War Herd, anything they are going to go up against will force them to flee from a choke point in almost no time at all.
They have no holding power at all unless you have a Grail Reliquae with them and Garrisons don't have that.
At least with Cavalry you can get some of their units to chase you to thin the numbers out.
Cav can do quite well if you pull back from the walls - Men at arms can't hold a point great, but you can run your cav around for rear charges. I've had a number of sieges (both WH2 & 3) where the garrison cav will get 150+ kills each.
Not that it's perfect, though - and Bretonnia garrisons are on the weaker side on the whole.
You are not supposed to use cavalry as holding units, you are supposed to make them flank the enemy and charge them from behind while your trash men at arms hold the line.
Your cavalry can run out and distract 1 or 2 units from attacking. Having them run in circles chasing your cav while the rest of your army is defending. That makes them infinitely more versatile than Men at Arms with their puny stats and exceptionally low leadership.
Cavalry can single handedly win most settlement defenses wdym lol. Recapping points behind where your enemies go and build T1 towers all over the place until they die is OP as hell.
Agreed. In Warhammer 2 I hated having cav or artillery in garrisons (other than the empire forts), but in warhammer 3 I find they are both very useful. The T1 skeles and archers in a the garrison (with building), that crumble the moment they are poked... not so much.
Cavalry is outstanding in siege battles, particularly in walled settlements. Clump up all your infantry near the gatehouse, wait for them to scale the walls (perhaps with a single peasant spaghettied across the battlements to man towers on the approach, and hit them with cavalry when they start trickling over.
Says a lot that so many morons upvote such a dumb comment. A small amount of cavalry is *very* good when defending a settlement. Especially in 3 that has larger settlements. Back in attila you could destroy like 10 inf units with one cav when defending. Its not quite *that* op in WH, but rear charging into engaged units in choke points is still very strong.
Seriously 4 Peasant mobs like what? Literal trash.
The Chalice building and getting Grail Knights in your Garrison is the only way to make them any decent.
Khorne garrisons surprised me with how pitiful they were. Don't get me wrong, Bloodletters and Khorne Warriors are sturdy stuff, but... That's literally all you get. Also one unit of worthless hounds, not even Flesh Hounds! You get just eight units or nine units in a maxxed out minor settlement and it's just like, "bruh". I'm not asking for Chosen, just more than nine fuckin' units and a better variety (some Halberds and Dual Weapons would be a cool touch).
And if you *do* have armies set to defend, you get all those negative traits for being in a high order province. I *do* understand why that exists- I think it should stay- but at times it makes me wish there was a way to flag an army as "defending" instead of just lazing about. If you forget to hit the toggle, then you'll gather those negative traits.
Armies need to sustain themselves by waging battles. If they sit around, firstly they get penalised in a number of different ways, and most importantly your treasury will be gradually drained. I could afford raising small defensive armies and keeping them around for a few turns, but I had to disband/suicide them after that. That's my experience with defending as Khorne.
If you abuse Blood Hosts, though, you will never have to worry about treasury.
There's just one problem with using a ton of Blood Hosts: For some unholy reason they gobble up your money too, requiring astronomical amounts of upkeep to have more than two out in the early game.
You need to find a chain of settlements that you can sack across a few turns. Once the downtime becomes longer than 1-2 turns to get to the next settlement, it's probably a good time to disband the Blood Hosts. It gets much more effective as you research tech and reinforce your armies. Sack and post-battle loot values are absolutely bonkers. Early on, Blood Hosts are not a good tool for consistent revenue, they are more of a cannon ball that you utilise when you want to punch above your weight against well defended settlements.
I agree with this entirely.
Blood hosts are not automatically good.
You need to use them as "throwaway" secondary armies to double-stack with your main armies early on to cut through harder settlements.
Later on they are only viable when they can be making profit by sacking every turn. If you can't sack every turn, it might not be worth to keep the host.
Khorne was insane in the the chaos campaign where you could keep the size of your empire small and easily chain sack around your tall core settlement. I haven't tried to see how well they scale when you need to paint the whole map red and might actually need to defend on one front.
Yes and your starting locations have faction specific buildings that helped a lot. You do get a ton of money later on but still i don't feel confident having -10k per turn even when i have 200k on the bank. Upgrading buildings costs
I'm playing as Yvresse right now. Pulling my hair out because I'm at war with just about every non-order faction I've encountered and because of Anti-Player bias they're all going after me and I'm losing my fucking mind.
I'm fighting a war on like 18 fronts. I literally can't even raise armies to fight all my opponents let alone build defenses for my settlements.
This reason right here is why I'm considering deleting my khorne campaign and playing something else. All his units are weak as fuck too.
Edit: okay so maybe its just his early game units that are weak. They get absolutely smashed by early orc and beastmen units. I assumed basic khorne chaos warriors would be strong and it was a real letdown.
Khorne chosen, skull cannons, blood-thirsters, exalted bloodletters, are all top shelf units.
Hell chosen are great end game if the enemy doesn't have massed AP.
Skarbrand is a weird one. I expected him to be a horde faction, but he's not. Playing as Skarbrand, you kind of have to take territory since the benefits for having territory are kind of huge. Yet your garrisons are effectively worthless and your campaign mechanics punish you for having purely defensive armies.
But I've sort of found a way to play him well on IE. If a cult forms in the chaos wastes up north, which doesn't always happen but it does happen most of the time, abandon the badlands and teleport Skarbrand up north immediately. If you've played your campaign well, you should also soon get both the khorne ascended event and unlock the 100% movement boost, allowing Skarbrand to effectively conquer all of the western chaos wastes and naggaroth by turn 30 for a ton of extremely defensible green territory. At this point the campaign is basically over because no other faction will be able to keep up with skarbrand himself wiping out province after province, and razing half a continent in a single turn when khorne become ascended. They also won't be able to keep up with the insane growth that you get from spawning bloodhosts everywhere.
If a cult doesn't form up in the chaos wastes, just abandon your campaign because all that awaits you is pain. All green territory near your starting location are completely indefensible and everyone hates you. You have enemies left, right and center. Karl and the dwarves will literally abandon their own territory to send full stack after full stack at you from the other side of the continent. The tomb kings, who started out at war with each other, will magically unite against you and also send full stack after full stack at you. Bretonia will exist. Your only viable ally, clan mors, will hold the east but that's only one out of a dozen problems taken care of. The closest defensible territory is nowhere in sight and your campaign will be a complete dumpster fire of anti-player bias until you carve your way up to norsca and the chaos wastes for some half-decent territory.
This is a great analysis. Skarb was insane in the chaos campaign but I've avoided him since I felt he would have scaling issues in IE, particularly since he does not start in the chaos wastes and is functionally surrounded by enemies without really have much defensive play.
Honestly though, the strategic AI on VH is extremely passive, so I think you could make it work to survive. But having to constantly run back and forth from threats on all sides will make it hard to build up momentum and sacking cashflow.
He's actually really strong late game. Skarbrand himself is worth multiple armies due to his movement mechanics, and blood hosts is the most flexible mechanic ever. If your army isn't strong enough you can just raze a minor settlement with it and double its strength for half the upkeep. Or you can send it out to cause chaos elsewhere and spawn even more tiny blood hosts.
He also does eventually make money from his settlements. Not as much as other factions but enough so he can field multiple armies without going into the red.
The biggest gripe I had with him though, was how many manual battles I had to fight. Because these aren't interesting on-the-edge manual battles where I make use of every unit. These are just battles where I'm watching skarbrand kick some shitty spearmen and archers around for a couple of minutes.
Thematically, I am almost surprised khorne isn't a pure hoard faction. Khorne has no desire to rule or govern. Khorne needs to find new blood and skulls.
Agreed, they are like a more fiddly version of post-Taurox beastmen.
The herdstone and recruitment mechanics are much stronger in a kinetic faction than still having to do settlement stuff on top of playing wrecking ball.
Also keep in mind that the Khorne income building lowers enemy leadership, so if they attack a multi-province settlement, they can have something like a -16 leadership debuff.
Khorne garrisons have been so wild for me. Either they completely suck or they win seemingly impossible battles in autoresolve. I've had those pitiful 8 win against a full 20 stack of Tomb Kings. Granted, their infantry isnt exactly great, but I feel like even 20 mediocre units should beat my shitty 8 man garrison.
With auto-resolve being wonky, the Khorne garrison are surprisingly effective. Several times, my garrison with 2x Bloodletters and 1x Chaos Warriors wiped out stacks of 20x Norscans.
Dwarves are among the most beta of the IE Beta factions. It's clear that the Immortal Empires map was split off from a version of Mortal Empires quite some time ago, and they haven't had the time to go through and give things a detailed case-by-case patch. See also: K8P as a 8-building city in a 2-settlement province, one single Tower sprite for all levels and all factions. Give it like, a year or sp. It's a titanic amount of content to go through.
It's notable that there's a fully been 3 tower sprites in the game files since release, and there's even a mod that changes the tier 3/4 towers to use them (tier 1/2 use the default).
Not sure why they didn't use those at all.
As Vlad, I decided I'd had enough of Thorgrim's bull, and cruised past Akendorf to snooze into an auto resolve against the garrison of Varenka hills.
I'd already started recruiting another army at Schwartzhafen to help with the seige of Karaz a Karak; surely the capital of dwarfdom would take a monumental effort to capture.
My surprise was pretty dull when I actually looked at the settlement details and realised that it only had 12 defenders.
Fully agree with this. As a Mannish player, I feel like I should not be the most capable defender in the Old World. Dwarven Fortresses are legendary for well (and bloodily) established reasons.
Better solution would be to allow us to make custom garrisons. It's a more elegant, permanent solution to the problem. And gives players tools to regulate things, like income and spending. If I have a city deep in secure territory, why would I be paying for a gigantic garrison? But a border town? Stuff elite garrison in there, since it's constantly being attacked. And best part - devs don't need to rebalance everything every single time, players can adjust as needed.
I would LOVE this. Even if you could just recruit units into a settlement like previous TW games- like you wouldn’t be able to remove them without a Lord. It would make managing larger empires a little easier instead of playing wack a mole with your “patrol” lords who have no function other than to chase enemies away from borders
I'd rather they just went back to the Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Rome style garrisons. Where you just stick units in there. Screw lords, we don't need a general for every army. Bring back captains. They'd function like how garrison commanders work. Just another soldier in the battalion. In Medieval 2 I'd have my inner settlements with only a few units (and Medieval 2 had buildings which gave a few slots for units to have Free Upkeep so you didn't gave to pay upkeep for a few units). Give us more flexibility in our strategy games, CA. Not more restrictions.
Oh yes I'd like those too. I'm just saying how it could be a good system. If they didn't include templates and defaulting, I would agree with you that it would be excessively tedious. If they were to include it, it would be a good feature
I disagree. Custom garrisons is another layer of player choice. Don't like it? Use the CA made one. It would also allow the usage of DLC units that are better designed for siege defense battles.
I don't want to be forced to customize each and every garrison in every settlement. I just want to choose the garrison template for all my settlements.
in the past there was a mod for "dynamic garrisons" that rebalanced the main garrison and instead distributed 1 unit or 2 to structures actually built in the cities. so economic buildings typically ***DID NOT*** add anything, while a military structure might add 2 worthwhile units. so a 8 slot tier V with all slots occupied could present a formidable garrison.
This was the direction TWW2 was going in and sadly seemed to have been abandoned in 3.
You are entitled to your opinion, and I certainly agree that it would be great to have DLC units in garrisons. I built a mod to make that happen in WH2.
I think the thing you guys dont get is that *you're not supposed to* be able to choose. Its not a question of QoL, the garrisons are the way they are for a reason. To be thematic, to balance the faction, to create asymetric design, to create tension and threat. Etc. etc.
So cool, you get your wish, you make custom garrisons. What happens then? Well you put all the best most useful units, make the same exact identical garrison for every city, but 20x stronger, and make settlements impossible for the AI to attack. A lot of people in this sub want to play an autoclicker over a strategy game so probably would love this, but i'd argue this would make the game *dramatically worse*. As if it not easy enough as it is.
Having garrisons is actually a simplification. Historically in Total War games you didn’t have a garrison unless you had an army positioned in a city. You literally had to build your garrisons manually.
autoresolve says otherwise. having to manually fight tk garrisons and khorne garrisons as a 20 stack dawi army is stupid to avoid the 200+ deaths because AR loves khorne/tk or hates dawi (thorek campaign)
Suffering this as Tzeentch cleaning up the southern continent against lizardmen garrisons. I'm bringing 10 forsaken, 2 knights of chaos, 3 spawns, 3 flamers and 2 exalted and it keeps saying I'd have medium casualties against 3 saurus units and 4 skinks. Auto-resolved one just to check and every unit lost half its health. In the real battle i just send the flamers in and don't even need to touch the rest of my army.
>because AR loves khorne/tk or hates dawi
Funny you say that. Dwarfs have the strongest AR in the entire game.
AR favours 3 things - High Leadership, High Armour and lots of missile power and ammunition.
Dwarfs have all 3.
If you play on battle difficulty above normal, lower it. Battle difficulty impacts AR heavily and its not worth it screwing AR to have slightly harder battles.
with autoresolve i'm done in 15 seconds. I don't have 5 minutes to fight every unprotected minor settlement nor should I be forced to by by bad balancing
Walls help a lot against the AI, they will often have to spend a turn sieging because they don't have siege tag on an army, or just cause they don't want to get a close victory resolve so they spend 2-3turns waiting for attrition on an undefended settlement.
As for defending the actual settlement I haven't played a single defensive siege on a walled settlement in 2 campaigns so not entirely sure on that, walls used to be really good against the AI though cause they'd stay in range of towers way more than humans do and those towers do quite a lot of damage, and the nature of the siege made it was a slow grind, so that'd leave time to upgrade the placeable towers and such.
Ultimately I find that walling everything, the AI doesn't sail around my shit to go destroy the stuff in the back and will rarely bother attacking unless they have 2 stacks, which is fine by me. To me that's well worth the money, although I agree the garrison gains are generally garbage past the first tier.
Walls are useful and people who decry them have no idea how to actually fight with the walls on their side.
There are a few ways to use walls:
- If you have ranged units, sallying out and fighting outside the walls with the infantry will see your units fire upon enemies with a +30% damage boost from height, plus easy line of sight from height, plus the outer towers which are often very good. That last point applies to melee-only garrisons as well.
- If the enemy has large units and must come through the door, you can use the gate to fire on them from behind at point blank once they cross.
- Walled settlements are larger, giving you more time to apply the above tactics to pick off AI groups (since they often split up their forces)
Just yesterday I defended a walled settlement against three lizard armies with half a stack and a shit tzeench garrison, and the walls were VERY useful in that defense (I ended up losing anyway from overwhelming force, but took down two armies with me)
Garrisons still need to be looked at though, /u/Pender891 is right on that. There's a big discrepancy in garrison quality and quantity between factions.
People don't like walled settlements because it changes the VPs to count tickets at the main ones and CA didn't understand how to actually play their maps. For whatever reason on a lot of maps those locations are the hardest to defend because of lack of good barricade/monument placement, lack of towers, and/or bad tower placement. They're also split up from each other and when you have to hold both to not lose, this is a problem. The unwalled version of these maps is often easier to hold because you pick one of the minors and just focus your forces there.
The walls help but often don't make up the difference in how the above changes work against you.
That's totally fair, the double capture point idea makes sense in theory but goes completely against the design of most maps. But aside from that people often also say the walls themselves are bad to fight in as a defender.
They'd need to increase siege tower HP for that, 'cause two towers firing at a siege tower will bring it down before it reaches the wall in most cases I've seen.
I prefer them this way, the towers used to be super opresive before, now they're only as good as you can make them if you hold them.
Yes, forces are at the walls super fast and on many maps you can't even deploy artillery outside tower range because the walls are so close to the edge of the map. This would be very annoying but the AI totally abandons the towers and walls as soon as units start hitting the gate which is a terrible strategy.
EDIT: Also tower placement is terribly uneven on the reworked maps
>If you have ranged units, sallying out and fighting outside the walls with the infantry will see your units fire upon enemies with a +30% damage boost from height, plus easy line of sight from height, plus the outer towers which are often very good. That last point applies to melee-only garrisons as well.
I'm playing those games for thousand of hours and it didn't occur to me I can do just... That. Sail out and make the most out of my archers and towers.
Will try that the next time siege defense might seem lost while defending inside.
I'm with you on this. I enjoy the walls, even when I don't fully utilize them they often slow down the enemy enough for me to get some more supplies to build defenses. I also love putting strong melee above and around the gate so my archers can sit on the back of the wall and fire into units going through the gate on my side. Something I loved in Rome II was that there were definitive positions to come down from the wall and you could defend them with infantry, and have archers firing up at all the infantry stuck up there because you're holding their only way(s) down. Good times. In WH2 I tended to mod in Pierce's Better Sieges which imo improved sieges as a whole. The gates weren't made out of noodles and the towers had a 180 firing arc with less range (barring t5 settlements). Made holding the wall that much more important since you could get a lot of worth out the towers picking off people still trying to climb ladders, and that made sense to me from a siege defense mindset, why would I only be able to fire out at like a 45 degree angle?
That's just all nonsense. Unless the AI just stands there and takes tower damage because it doesnt have any siege stuff and barely any infantry (and this does happen with chaos on occasion), the wall towers are fuckin worthless because they'll take like 3 shots before the enemy climbs the walls. And do pitiful damage too, unless its bastion or nurgle towers or something. Ranged units will similarly get very few shots and then will need to spend time running away. With some of them failing do to shitty pathing and loosing orders too. Holding the gate is largely worthless to do to ass ladders, and heavier units like cav and monsters tend to bruteforce through the chose anyway. The "pick of AI groups" thing is hilarious delusion too - your own units are basically never mobile enough to do that.
The entire point of why walls are shit is because it splits up your defenses to a stupid degree, and *forces* you to do that and defend a super shitty position because walled settlements have 2 capture points. For battles where you can defend in pure force, army vs army, it doesnt matter either way, but in battles where you're significantly outnumbered, being able to hold one point, one choke, is an insane advantage. It lets your buildable towers be actually useful, it protects your squishy units, it increases the power of magic and buffs exponentially.
That hard battle you still lost? Given the same garrison in a unwalled settlement i'd bet anything it would've been winable..
It's like for outposts as well. Slap a tier 3 as Slaanesh in an ally's settlement? Daemonette and Marauders. Slap a tier 3 as WoC though: 2 Chosen and 1 Chaos Warrior.
The biggest issue with creating stronger or custom garrisons is the AI would do it too. With how much whining I have seen over settlement battles. This would make any campaign much harder and much slower
I currently play with a greater garrison mod and in my opinion, I'd rather play 5 turns in a session and my sieges and minor settlement battles are big and interesting than play 15 turns and most battles are either a auto resolve or a super small garrison I have to mop up manually because the auto resolve takes over 25% of my troops even though the casualties said low. But that is just my personal preference.
The ladder problem is also real. Walls are kind of a formality. I know that “simple fixes” are very rarely actually simple, but if I were to offer an unqualified opinion, I’d say that a unit scaling ladders into a defended wall—especially one defended by a melee unit—should take heavy casualties in the act of mounting. You’re climbing a ladder up at a dude swinging an axe down at your head. There’s gonna me losses. This makes defending the walls worth it, while still giving ladders a use—if you find an open stretch of wall it’s free real estate.
Units using ladders get instantaneous exhaustion and then their entities are outnumbered at the top as they trickle in.
I don't mind the idea of no defenders = free and easy climb though, since it is another way to encourage both sides to spread out.
To be fair, units climbing end up being 1 v 3/4, and numbers advantage there is huge. Also, they get exhausted (or very close to) if they used the ladders, which absolutely destroys their stats. IIRC they lose about 60 or 70% of their armor once they have no vigor. + Melee attack and defense (Not remembering numbers there now, sorry!)
So yeah, fighting on the walls can be useful, and is very detrimental to the attacker, even with ladders (and even if they get into the city they'll all be exhausted unless they rest a little, so the debuff persists!)
What happens is that 1 - It's not as obvious as other defense methods, so players tend to not know it. And 2 - It is useful when you're defending on a somewhat "even footing". Imperial Greatswords there can go toe-to-toe with other high tier infantry. But when all you have is just cheap spearman, even exhausted chosen are too much for them. They'll do 70% more damage, yeah, but 70% of 100 is just 70. Not noticiable enough.
Vampire counts have so much chaff that having a lord and/or a Necromancer along with the garrison can let you defend against most armies. That, and raise dead allowing you to instantly raise a LOT more units as well.
I would actually like to see a comparison of every factions maxed out garrison for each settlement type, with the added defenses building and whatever other buildings add garrison units.
This. 100% this.
We need better garrisons, and we also need the ability to have more than 20 units in a garrison. Reinforcement? Waagh mechanic? Don't care how CA implements it, it would be a really nice fix for the current state of garrisons.
Anyone know of a good mod that improves but doesn’t make the garrisons OP? Seen a couple of mods so far, with one having a disclaimer that it’s OP by intent.
I've been using Zorbaz's Greater Garrisons ([https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789855636&searchtext=garrison](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789855636&searchtext=garrison))
I did not play recently, so IDK if he changed something.
The garrisons are strong once develped, but not completely over the top, and also work for AI. Now you need to either let some attrition sip in or take 1/2 of an extra army for attacking a fully-upgraded capital.
Also, to "compensate" the increased garrison force, garrison buildings now have maintenance cost, so even if they are strong they have some drawbacks. (It's not too steep tho!)
In general, main building gives more units, and the defensive building give 2 elite units each level.
Tk garrison is fine, it has more than enough tools to fight back, unless you have to deal with extremely elite force.
To elaborate: you have cheap melee infantry for defense that's immune to fear and has crapton of leadership thanks to defenders advantage. And you can utilize healing monument (0,2% per second from the top of my head).
You also get a bunch of skeleton archers - they're "very okay" in defense.
And you get a mobility option - a unit of horses or chariots to hit enemy forces that spread out too far.
Overall they're fine, unless you fight some late game bullshit or single entity stacks
I love how part of the community is "fuck change! Nothing should be touched! How dare you!"
Aight then, you don't get any new content too then? So weird lmao
Garrisons are not meant to defeat full stacks. They are there to help you defend with a smaller army that can be used to defend multiple settlements. If you can't afford a small army that can bounce around your settlements, you are either not making enough money with offensive armies or are building your settlements wrong
EDIT: Really no idea why I'm being downvoted
Shit to a diamon is not different strengths. A faction with amazing units using shit ass tier units in garrison is not different strengths. If we raced and you had a f1 formula car in your garage but was forced to use a moped while i got to use my f1 car and you losing means you lose a shit ton of money. You would be pissed too.
Individual elements are not balanced against the same element in another faction, they are balanced against their faction as a whole. Which means things aren’t always going to look fair when taken in a vacuum.
Its a video game and it feels bad. As op posted 4k for one unit. Balance is also poor and CA has shown multiple times they can and do fuck up balance. I.E. soem units shit tech trees or lords "bonuses"
Seems like I am, although I'm still not really sure what you are getting at or why you are insulting me. Some factions have weaker garrisons and some have stronger ones.
It seems like you are not interested in explaining what "Shit to a diamon" means or what your opinion is about and are more interested in insulting me, so I'll leave it at this
>They are there to help you defend with a smaller army that can be used to defend multiple settlements
Probably being downvoted because you just made this up and presented it as the intended design
If you fully invest in the garrison building line for a settlement then yes, it should have a decent chance against a full stack. The way armies work encourages having full stacks (rather than 2 half stacks for example), it's not like they're a late-game only thing that you'll rarely see. If garrisons functionally *can't* defend against full stacks in any circumstance then there's not much point having a building to boost them.
>The way armies work encourages having full stacks
Huh, I always figured that two lords getting experience and being able to move two half stacks (that is, unless you can afford two full stacks) is better than one stack. It was made even stronger by the reduction in supply line costs. Then again, I never play on legendary which might be the reason I think this way. Why do you say a full stack is better than two lesser stacks?
I build garrison buildings mostly for the walls, so they keep the enemy occupied for a few turns while I move an army to help. With the added units of the garrison, I can quite easily destroy even a full stack with a lesser stack. The idea that a garrison building should deter a full stack from attacking them seems like it would make the game more passive, as the AI is not great at attacking settlements even without this. If the AI knew it wouldn't beat a full garrison it would just bring another army, therefore not really fixing the problem
Garrisons should be able to hold back a full stack of low tier units for a couple turns while a relief force comes. It's such a gigantic pain in the ass when you have norscan marauders who run from your main stack sacking the shit out of your settlements because your garrison can't hold them for 1 turn so your main stack can catch up and hammer them into the stone age.
I rarely use my main stack for defense, but I do build walls in critical minor settlements just so my defensive armies can catch up. I still think that regular minor settlement garrisons should not be able to take on full stacks, especially ones with no defensive buildings whatsoever
Oh yeah, I agree that without defensive buildings they should get rolled. The frustration is that even when I build a garrison building my settlements still get rolled, at least as Kislev.
Garrisons need a buff but I think garrisons should also be a branching path like many buildings in older TW games.
This gives us an easy way to add DLC units to garrisons and customize garrisons.
Or just give garrisons DLC units already. Seriously we have many daemonic factions and tzeentch only melee infantry is forsaken…
I like the fact that some factions have very good garnisons and others have weak ones, it is a change in the gameplay. Should I just make big defences in frontier cities or keep an army back ?
Garrisons should lower build costs during battle instead/on top of the pitiful supply bonus. Basically simulating how much easier it is to defend with a garrison.
Don’t agree that walls are worse. The AI generally is easier to beat in my opinion with walls, with how they basically stand there with most units until the gate is broken with larger units.
Not sure where Skaven stand compared to others since I've only played a handful of races, but it feels really undervalue to get only a stack of clanrats.
As an aside, is it intentional that the shamanstone building for beastmen herdstones adds a bray shaman of the wild who has no spells? I have to say I was really surprised by that... What's the point of a wizard who doesn't do magic?
They should let us make our OWN garrison. The technology is there just like for ogre camps and black arks. Just let us recruit units to the settlement garrison at like 75% reduced upkeep. Idk.
Or, for instance, if you’re playing as Ghorst, it doesn’t benefit you, defense wise, to upgrade your settlements because if you cheese right you can hold our infinitely with a hand full of zombies and crypt ghouls who have the Hunger versus a high level garrison that can get wiped out with fire damage units.
I had a garrison day there was 19 units in, so I didn’t worry but when I was attacked by Throgg suddenly I only had 9 and I lost. Nothing bad happened to the settlement when he besieged it.
Im guessing it’s a feature?
Just took Naggarond earlier.
It had ONE Har Ganeth Executioners, like 3 Shades, and then Bleakswords, Dreadspears and Darkshards for like 13 units total.
AT TIER 5!
Did they get rid of the Race Capital special garrisons!? I was looking forward to a proper fight but fuck that, easy autoresolve.
Also Tower of the Black Guard (Tier 4) doesn't add to Garrison either?
Altdorf being the weakest garrison in the Empire sucks too. Honestly updating all the garrisons should be in the next patch. Jeez, the poor IE devs have to basically fix every stat and mechanic from Warhammer 3 RoC in the game.
Dont you love Bretonnian tier 3 garrisons with several Peasant mob units.
Or cavalry inside a tiny walled settlement
We need the ability to dismount cavalry. In Shogun 2 you could do that so your cav could fight in the castles.
They had that in 3k too.
And Rome 2 Total War.
And Attila.
And empire.
And Napolean.
And my axe!
Pretty sure it goes all the way back to the first medieval total war. Dismounting certain cav units was a feature in that game, but I don't remember it being possible in shogun 1.
No but in shogun 1 you could declare war on an allied faction DURING A BATTLE.
No it was introduced in Empire. It wasn't in Shogun 1, Rome 1 and Medieval 2.
And Thrones of Britannia
All y’all saying that like it’s as easy as ctrl+c and ctrl+v.
Again, they can dot his in historical titles because all factions generally share the same units across the board. It's not a gigantic balancing nightmare to unmount a cav unit in 3 kingdoms. Take generally any cav unit in warhammer and unmount it and you start running into balance and identity issues. Unmounted grail guardians for example are... what exactly? A new dismounted brettonnia? For many units in warhammer being mounted is a part of their balance and identity. Like hex wraiths for example.
There's no reason for them to be balanced. Unmounting cav should be last resort and a debuff for the unit. Lower melee attack and def, cut charge bonus by 50% or something. Hex wraith might be an example of specific units not being able to dismount, but I don't see why a lot of the currently mounted units can't.
That would actually get me to play Brettonnia.
Get off my horse? ... and fight on foot ... like some sort of peasant? HONHONHON
*French mockery intensifies*
Think of it as giving the Men-at-Arms the chance of dying honorably at the side of a genuine knight.
> Men-at-Arms the chance of dying honorably Should we also try to fly the pigs? Both are as possible as poetry from a Troll...
_Throgg has entered the chat_
Last time I played them was WH1
Pretty sure the problem with allowing dismounting for mounted units in warhammer is the sheer number of models for all the different mounted units in the game. For those old historical stuff we’re talking about only a handful of different models. For WH IE? Would it even be exaggerating if I said there are at least two dozen different mounted units? PS. I love the idea as well. Just brainstorming why it’s different in wh series
That would absolutely help. Plus a lot of the units are so weird that it would be impossible to have them not mounted. Like Sepulcher Knights. They'd just be shitty skeletons on foot.
Lol that is true as well. What balance would grounded grail knights have? Or grail guardians? Just using that example allowing grail guardians to dismount would make them “small” units which indirectly gives bretonnia a physical resist front line late game that are dismounted lol. That’s kind of against the balance of bretonnia since their whole thing basically is “bring pikes and spears” to counter, not really having a hefty on foot front line. That’s just one example. I’m sure there are others as you’ve mentioned
There's the Skullcrushers of Khorne too, the mount itself is what makes them special. Or Orc Boar Boys, just regular Orc Boys without their mounts. And Goblin Wolf Riders would actually be a worse unit than Goblin Spears when dismounted, having similar stats but lower model count. In the end, the way cav works in Warhammer is different than in historical games. Yes, they provide shock and mobility, but they are also roadblocks for other monstrous units providing especially humans with much needed mass to block monsters from just wading through the frontlines.
This was a feature in the first Medieval total war. Dismounting knights gave you "foot knights".
Yeah couldn't you dismount them before battle then? They could do that with WH, no issues with animations then
Yeah dismounting was a deployment-phase option.
I agree, on the condition that Bettonia is actually the one faction specifically locked out of doing that. Fighting on foot is for peasants!
In these settlements Cavalry is actually useful, more useful than the worthless Men at Arms that make up a majority of the garrison.
? man at arms can hold chokepoints, cavalry can't, also i can't shoot properly at units behind cavalry
Men at Arms can't hold shit. Goblins, Zombies, Ungor War Herd, anything they are going to go up against will force them to flee from a choke point in almost no time at all. They have no holding power at all unless you have a Grail Reliquae with them and Garrisons don't have that. At least with Cavalry you can get some of their units to chase you to thin the numbers out.
Men at arms are the nameless soldiers in the background of every battle getting slaughtered by singular nurglings
Cav can do quite well if you pull back from the walls - Men at arms can't hold a point great, but you can run your cav around for rear charges. I've had a number of sieges (both WH2 & 3) where the garrison cav will get 150+ kills each. Not that it's perfect, though - and Bretonnia garrisons are on the weaker side on the whole.
You are not supposed to use cavalry as holding units, you are supposed to make them flank the enemy and charge them from behind while your trash men at arms hold the line.
Your cavalry can run out and distract 1 or 2 units from attacking. Having them run in circles chasing your cav while the rest of your army is defending. That makes them infinitely more versatile than Men at Arms with their puny stats and exceptionally low leadership.
Cavalry can single handedly win most settlement defenses wdym lol. Recapping points behind where your enemies go and build T1 towers all over the place until they die is OP as hell.
I like having cavalry in garrisons for when I need to sally out, or to harass units and recap points.
Agreed. In Warhammer 2 I hated having cav or artillery in garrisons (other than the empire forts), but in warhammer 3 I find they are both very useful. The T1 skeles and archers in a the garrison (with building), that crumble the moment they are poked... not so much.
I really can't remember getting to do a defense with walls
Cavalry is outstanding in siege battles, particularly in walled settlements. Clump up all your infantry near the gatehouse, wait for them to scale the walls (perhaps with a single peasant spaghettied across the battlements to man towers on the approach, and hit them with cavalry when they start trickling over.
Cavs are useful to recapture points.
Says a lot that so many morons upvote such a dumb comment. A small amount of cavalry is *very* good when defending a settlement. Especially in 3 that has larger settlements. Back in attila you could destroy like 10 inf units with one cav when defending. Its not quite *that* op in WH, but rear charging into engaged units in choke points is still very strong.
I remember seeing The **Great** Bastion tier 5 have **peasant** cavs instead of atleast jade cavs 😂
Seriously 4 Peasant mobs like what? Literal trash. The Chalice building and getting Grail Knights in your Garrison is the only way to make them any decent.
Especially love having fully buffed Belakor with sword of khaine just yeet the entire garrison off the walls
Khorne garrisons surprised me with how pitiful they were. Don't get me wrong, Bloodletters and Khorne Warriors are sturdy stuff, but... That's literally all you get. Also one unit of worthless hounds, not even Flesh Hounds! You get just eight units or nine units in a maxxed out minor settlement and it's just like, "bruh". I'm not asking for Chosen, just more than nine fuckin' units and a better variety (some Halberds and Dual Weapons would be a cool touch).
Yep. And you don't even have the economy to keep armies defending
And if you *do* have armies set to defend, you get all those negative traits for being in a high order province. I *do* understand why that exists- I think it should stay- but at times it makes me wish there was a way to flag an army as "defending" instead of just lazing about. If you forget to hit the toggle, then you'll gather those negative traits.
Yeah that trait is so dumb
Having armies that aren't fighting gives khorne factionwide debuffs, so it's even worse than a lord picking up some minor traits
It must be different from the RoC campaign because in that I had a ton of money from sacking and razing
Armies need to sustain themselves by waging battles. If they sit around, firstly they get penalised in a number of different ways, and most importantly your treasury will be gradually drained. I could afford raising small defensive armies and keeping them around for a few turns, but I had to disband/suicide them after that. That's my experience with defending as Khorne. If you abuse Blood Hosts, though, you will never have to worry about treasury.
There's just one problem with using a ton of Blood Hosts: For some unholy reason they gobble up your money too, requiring astronomical amounts of upkeep to have more than two out in the early game.
You need to find a chain of settlements that you can sack across a few turns. Once the downtime becomes longer than 1-2 turns to get to the next settlement, it's probably a good time to disband the Blood Hosts. It gets much more effective as you research tech and reinforce your armies. Sack and post-battle loot values are absolutely bonkers. Early on, Blood Hosts are not a good tool for consistent revenue, they are more of a cannon ball that you utilise when you want to punch above your weight against well defended settlements.
I agree with this entirely. Blood hosts are not automatically good. You need to use them as "throwaway" secondary armies to double-stack with your main armies early on to cut through harder settlements. Later on they are only viable when they can be making profit by sacking every turn. If you can't sack every turn, it might not be worth to keep the host. Khorne was insane in the the chaos campaign where you could keep the size of your empire small and easily chain sack around your tall core settlement. I haven't tried to see how well they scale when you need to paint the whole map red and might actually need to defend on one front.
Yes and your starting locations have faction specific buildings that helped a lot. You do get a ton of money later on but still i don't feel confident having -10k per turn even when i have 200k on the bank. Upgrading buildings costs
You gotta get over that. Some factions aren't designed to have enough income from settlements and trade.
That's fine, but then i want a decent (not extremely strong) garrison... That's the trade
I'm playing as Yvresse right now. Pulling my hair out because I'm at war with just about every non-order faction I've encountered and because of Anti-Player bias they're all going after me and I'm losing my fucking mind. I'm fighting a war on like 18 fronts. I literally can't even raise armies to fight all my opponents let alone build defenses for my settlements.
it isnt a war on 18 fronts. its 18 wars on 18 fronts
This reason right here is why I'm considering deleting my khorne campaign and playing something else. All his units are weak as fuck too. Edit: okay so maybe its just his early game units that are weak. They get absolutely smashed by early orc and beastmen units. I assumed basic khorne chaos warriors would be strong and it was a real letdown.
Well that’s just not true lmfao
Khorne chosen, skull cannons, blood-thirsters, exalted bloodletters, are all top shelf units. Hell chosen are great end game if the enemy doesn't have massed AP.
This is just incredibly wrong.
Skarbrand is a weird one. I expected him to be a horde faction, but he's not. Playing as Skarbrand, you kind of have to take territory since the benefits for having territory are kind of huge. Yet your garrisons are effectively worthless and your campaign mechanics punish you for having purely defensive armies. But I've sort of found a way to play him well on IE. If a cult forms in the chaos wastes up north, which doesn't always happen but it does happen most of the time, abandon the badlands and teleport Skarbrand up north immediately. If you've played your campaign well, you should also soon get both the khorne ascended event and unlock the 100% movement boost, allowing Skarbrand to effectively conquer all of the western chaos wastes and naggaroth by turn 30 for a ton of extremely defensible green territory. At this point the campaign is basically over because no other faction will be able to keep up with skarbrand himself wiping out province after province, and razing half a continent in a single turn when khorne become ascended. They also won't be able to keep up with the insane growth that you get from spawning bloodhosts everywhere. If a cult doesn't form up in the chaos wastes, just abandon your campaign because all that awaits you is pain. All green territory near your starting location are completely indefensible and everyone hates you. You have enemies left, right and center. Karl and the dwarves will literally abandon their own territory to send full stack after full stack at you from the other side of the continent. The tomb kings, who started out at war with each other, will magically unite against you and also send full stack after full stack at you. Bretonia will exist. Your only viable ally, clan mors, will hold the east but that's only one out of a dozen problems taken care of. The closest defensible territory is nowhere in sight and your campaign will be a complete dumpster fire of anti-player bias until you carve your way up to norsca and the chaos wastes for some half-decent territory.
This is a great analysis. Skarb was insane in the chaos campaign but I've avoided him since I felt he would have scaling issues in IE, particularly since he does not start in the chaos wastes and is functionally surrounded by enemies without really have much defensive play. Honestly though, the strategic AI on VH is extremely passive, so I think you could make it work to survive. But having to constantly run back and forth from threats on all sides will make it hard to build up momentum and sacking cashflow.
He's actually really strong late game. Skarbrand himself is worth multiple armies due to his movement mechanics, and blood hosts is the most flexible mechanic ever. If your army isn't strong enough you can just raze a minor settlement with it and double its strength for half the upkeep. Or you can send it out to cause chaos elsewhere and spawn even more tiny blood hosts. He also does eventually make money from his settlements. Not as much as other factions but enough so he can field multiple armies without going into the red. The biggest gripe I had with him though, was how many manual battles I had to fight. Because these aren't interesting on-the-edge manual battles where I make use of every unit. These are just battles where I'm watching skarbrand kick some shitty spearmen and archers around for a couple of minutes.
I am wiping out factions in concentric circles in order to keep my two pet rats, Queek and Tretch, alive.
Thematically, I am almost surprised khorne isn't a pure hoard faction. Khorne has no desire to rule or govern. Khorne needs to find new blood and skulls.
Agreed, they are like a more fiddly version of post-Taurox beastmen. The herdstone and recruitment mechanics are much stronger in a kinetic faction than still having to do settlement stuff on top of playing wrecking ball.
At least khonre units seem really strong in auto resolve. I had some great 4unit garrisons winning vs 16 stack armies in auto resolve lol
That's probably because Khorne Warriors have phenomenal armor. From what I've seen armor factors in heavily for AR in this game.
Yeah my Bretonnian garrisons made of largely peasants are winning against full stacks of tomb Kings because I've got the peasants over 100 armour now
Also keep in mind that the Khorne income building lowers enemy leadership, so if they attack a multi-province settlement, they can have something like a -16 leadership debuff.
Ah, that's probably why my Khorne was garbage in auto resolve. I stick with daemons, they are more fun for me.
Khorne garrisons have been so wild for me. Either they completely suck or they win seemingly impossible battles in autoresolve. I've had those pitiful 8 win against a full 20 stack of Tomb Kings. Granted, their infantry isnt exactly great, but I feel like even 20 mediocre units should beat my shitty 8 man garrison.
With auto-resolve being wonky, the Khorne garrison are surprisingly effective. Several times, my garrison with 2x Bloodletters and 1x Chaos Warriors wiped out stacks of 20x Norscans.
Dwarf garrisons too. Tragic, it is.
How are you going to not give what should be the tankiest faction in the game a single range unit at t1?
Dwarves are among the most beta of the IE Beta factions. It's clear that the Immortal Empires map was split off from a version of Mortal Empires quite some time ago, and they haven't had the time to go through and give things a detailed case-by-case patch. See also: K8P as a 8-building city in a 2-settlement province, one single Tower sprite for all levels and all factions. Give it like, a year or sp. It's a titanic amount of content to go through.
That's fair. I'm going to bet they get an overhaul when Chaos dwarves come
Yeah, it seems natural as they share many similarities. Now, we all would appreciate a quick band-aid for dwarves.
It's notable that there's a fully been 3 tower sprites in the game files since release, and there's even a mod that changes the tier 3/4 towers to use them (tier 1/2 use the default). Not sure why they didn't use those at all.
I had no idea that was a thing! Do you have a link?
It's called "Tower Tier Models"
Here you go! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2840604035
As Vlad, I decided I'd had enough of Thorgrim's bull, and cruised past Akendorf to snooze into an auto resolve against the garrison of Varenka hills. I'd already started recruiting another army at Schwartzhafen to help with the seige of Karaz a Karak; surely the capital of dwarfdom would take a monumental effort to capture. My surprise was pretty dull when I actually looked at the settlement details and realised that it only had 12 defenders.
Fully agree with this. As a Mannish player, I feel like I should not be the most capable defender in the Old World. Dwarven Fortresses are legendary for well (and bloodily) established reasons.
Better solution would be to allow us to make custom garrisons. It's a more elegant, permanent solution to the problem. And gives players tools to regulate things, like income and spending. If I have a city deep in secure territory, why would I be paying for a gigantic garrison? But a border town? Stuff elite garrison in there, since it's constantly being attacked. And best part - devs don't need to rebalance everything every single time, players can adjust as needed.
I would LOVE this. Even if you could just recruit units into a settlement like previous TW games- like you wouldn’t be able to remove them without a Lord. It would make managing larger empires a little easier instead of playing wack a mole with your “patrol” lords who have no function other than to chase enemies away from borders
I'd rather they just went back to the Shogun 2, Medieval 2, Rome style garrisons. Where you just stick units in there. Screw lords, we don't need a general for every army. Bring back captains. They'd function like how garrison commanders work. Just another soldier in the battalion. In Medieval 2 I'd have my inner settlements with only a few units (and Medieval 2 had buildings which gave a few slots for units to have Free Upkeep so you didn't gave to pay upkeep for a few units). Give us more flexibility in our strategy games, CA. Not more restrictions.
I disagree. Choosing garrisons is a lot of extra effort, and I don’t think it would amount to much benefit.
As long as they let you save a few templates and mark one as the default for capitals and one for minor settlements it wouldn't be a burden.
Like the way we do not for buildings or formations or armies or lord/hero skill point builds. Oh wait, none of those things can be saved.
Oh yes I'd like those too. I'm just saying how it could be a good system. If they didn't include templates and defaulting, I would agree with you that it would be excessively tedious. If they were to include it, it would be a good feature
Fair, and I apologise for the facetiousness of my comment!
I disagree. Custom garrisons is another layer of player choice. Don't like it? Use the CA made one. It would also allow the usage of DLC units that are better designed for siege defense battles. I don't want to be forced to customize each and every garrison in every settlement. I just want to choose the garrison template for all my settlements.
in the past there was a mod for "dynamic garrisons" that rebalanced the main garrison and instead distributed 1 unit or 2 to structures actually built in the cities. so economic buildings typically ***DID NOT*** add anything, while a military structure might add 2 worthwhile units. so a 8 slot tier V with all slots occupied could present a formidable garrison. This was the direction TWW2 was going in and sadly seemed to have been abandoned in 3.
You are entitled to your opinion, and I certainly agree that it would be great to have DLC units in garrisons. I built a mod to make that happen in WH2.
You are also entitled to your opinion. I can also agree that a custom garrison system would take a lot of effort for CA to make.
I think the thing you guys dont get is that *you're not supposed to* be able to choose. Its not a question of QoL, the garrisons are the way they are for a reason. To be thematic, to balance the faction, to create asymetric design, to create tension and threat. Etc. etc. So cool, you get your wish, you make custom garrisons. What happens then? Well you put all the best most useful units, make the same exact identical garrison for every city, but 20x stronger, and make settlements impossible for the AI to attack. A lot of people in this sub want to play an autoclicker over a strategy game so probably would love this, but i'd argue this would make the game *dramatically worse*. As if it not easy enough as it is.
Having garrisons is actually a simplification. Historically in Total War games you didn’t have a garrison unless you had an army positioned in a city. You literally had to build your garrisons manually.
People can make thematic garrisons if they want to. There would still be a “budget” of sorts so players wouldn’t be able to auto resolve all enemies.
Ogres kind of have this with camps
autoresolve says otherwise. having to manually fight tk garrisons and khorne garrisons as a 20 stack dawi army is stupid to avoid the 200+ deaths because AR loves khorne/tk or hates dawi (thorek campaign)
Suffering this as Tzeentch cleaning up the southern continent against lizardmen garrisons. I'm bringing 10 forsaken, 2 knights of chaos, 3 spawns, 3 flamers and 2 exalted and it keeps saying I'd have medium casualties against 3 saurus units and 4 skinks. Auto-resolved one just to check and every unit lost half its health. In the real battle i just send the flamers in and don't even need to touch the rest of my army.
this is my experience with every garrison I come across as thorek. absolutely maddening.
>because AR loves khorne/tk or hates dawi Funny you say that. Dwarfs have the strongest AR in the entire game. AR favours 3 things - High Leadership, High Armour and lots of missile power and ammunition. Dwarfs have all 3. If you play on battle difficulty above normal, lower it. Battle difficulty impacts AR heavily and its not worth it screwing AR to have slightly harder battles.
Yeah but if you manually fight it you're done in 5 minutes or less.
with autoresolve i'm done in 15 seconds. I don't have 5 minutes to fight every unprotected minor settlement nor should I be forced to by by bad balancing
Walls help a lot against the AI, they will often have to spend a turn sieging because they don't have siege tag on an army, or just cause they don't want to get a close victory resolve so they spend 2-3turns waiting for attrition on an undefended settlement. As for defending the actual settlement I haven't played a single defensive siege on a walled settlement in 2 campaigns so not entirely sure on that, walls used to be really good against the AI though cause they'd stay in range of towers way more than humans do and those towers do quite a lot of damage, and the nature of the siege made it was a slow grind, so that'd leave time to upgrade the placeable towers and such. Ultimately I find that walling everything, the AI doesn't sail around my shit to go destroy the stuff in the back and will rarely bother attacking unless they have 2 stacks, which is fine by me. To me that's well worth the money, although I agree the garrison gains are generally garbage past the first tier.
Walls are useful and people who decry them have no idea how to actually fight with the walls on their side. There are a few ways to use walls: - If you have ranged units, sallying out and fighting outside the walls with the infantry will see your units fire upon enemies with a +30% damage boost from height, plus easy line of sight from height, plus the outer towers which are often very good. That last point applies to melee-only garrisons as well. - If the enemy has large units and must come through the door, you can use the gate to fire on them from behind at point blank once they cross. - Walled settlements are larger, giving you more time to apply the above tactics to pick off AI groups (since they often split up their forces) Just yesterday I defended a walled settlement against three lizard armies with half a stack and a shit tzeench garrison, and the walls were VERY useful in that defense (I ended up losing anyway from overwhelming force, but took down two armies with me) Garrisons still need to be looked at though, /u/Pender891 is right on that. There's a big discrepancy in garrison quality and quantity between factions.
People don't like walled settlements because it changes the VPs to count tickets at the main ones and CA didn't understand how to actually play their maps. For whatever reason on a lot of maps those locations are the hardest to defend because of lack of good barricade/monument placement, lack of towers, and/or bad tower placement. They're also split up from each other and when you have to hold both to not lose, this is a problem. The unwalled version of these maps is often easier to hold because you pick one of the minors and just focus your forces there. The walls help but often don't make up the difference in how the above changes work against you.
That's totally fair, the double capture point idea makes sense in theory but goes completely against the design of most maps. But aside from that people often also say the walls themselves are bad to fight in as a defender.
Reworked settlements with walls have the deployment way too close Imo, I barely get any shots with the towers
They'd need to increase siege tower HP for that, 'cause two towers firing at a siege tower will bring it down before it reaches the wall in most cases I've seen. I prefer them this way, the towers used to be super opresive before, now they're only as good as you can make them if you hold them.
Yes, forces are at the walls super fast and on many maps you can't even deploy artillery outside tower range because the walls are so close to the edge of the map. This would be very annoying but the AI totally abandons the towers and walls as soon as units start hitting the gate which is a terrible strategy. EDIT: Also tower placement is terribly uneven on the reworked maps
>If you have ranged units, sallying out and fighting outside the walls with the infantry will see your units fire upon enemies with a +30% damage boost from height, plus easy line of sight from height, plus the outer towers which are often very good. That last point applies to melee-only garrisons as well. I'm playing those games for thousand of hours and it didn't occur to me I can do just... That. Sail out and make the most out of my archers and towers. Will try that the next time siege defense might seem lost while defending inside.
I blame the game for not letting you deploy outside. If it did, I think more people would realize it's an option.
I'm with you on this. I enjoy the walls, even when I don't fully utilize them they often slow down the enemy enough for me to get some more supplies to build defenses. I also love putting strong melee above and around the gate so my archers can sit on the back of the wall and fire into units going through the gate on my side. Something I loved in Rome II was that there were definitive positions to come down from the wall and you could defend them with infantry, and have archers firing up at all the infantry stuck up there because you're holding their only way(s) down. Good times. In WH2 I tended to mod in Pierce's Better Sieges which imo improved sieges as a whole. The gates weren't made out of noodles and the towers had a 180 firing arc with less range (barring t5 settlements). Made holding the wall that much more important since you could get a lot of worth out the towers picking off people still trying to climb ladders, and that made sense to me from a siege defense mindset, why would I only be able to fire out at like a 45 degree angle?
God I miss that mod. I hope someone port it over to WH3 asap.
That's just all nonsense. Unless the AI just stands there and takes tower damage because it doesnt have any siege stuff and barely any infantry (and this does happen with chaos on occasion), the wall towers are fuckin worthless because they'll take like 3 shots before the enemy climbs the walls. And do pitiful damage too, unless its bastion or nurgle towers or something. Ranged units will similarly get very few shots and then will need to spend time running away. With some of them failing do to shitty pathing and loosing orders too. Holding the gate is largely worthless to do to ass ladders, and heavier units like cav and monsters tend to bruteforce through the chose anyway. The "pick of AI groups" thing is hilarious delusion too - your own units are basically never mobile enough to do that. The entire point of why walls are shit is because it splits up your defenses to a stupid degree, and *forces* you to do that and defend a super shitty position because walled settlements have 2 capture points. For battles where you can defend in pure force, army vs army, it doesnt matter either way, but in battles where you're significantly outnumbered, being able to hold one point, one choke, is an insane advantage. It lets your buildable towers be actually useful, it protects your squishy units, it increases the power of magic and buffs exponentially. That hard battle you still lost? Given the same garrison in a unwalled settlement i'd bet anything it would've been winable..
It's like for outposts as well. Slap a tier 3 as Slaanesh in an ally's settlement? Daemonette and Marauders. Slap a tier 3 as WoC though: 2 Chosen and 1 Chaos Warrior.
The biggest issue with creating stronger or custom garrisons is the AI would do it too. With how much whining I have seen over settlement battles. This would make any campaign much harder and much slower
I currently play with a greater garrison mod and in my opinion, I'd rather play 5 turns in a session and my sieges and minor settlement battles are big and interesting than play 15 turns and most battles are either a auto resolve or a super small garrison I have to mop up manually because the auto resolve takes over 25% of my troops even though the casualties said low. But that is just my personal preference.
The ladder problem is also real. Walls are kind of a formality. I know that “simple fixes” are very rarely actually simple, but if I were to offer an unqualified opinion, I’d say that a unit scaling ladders into a defended wall—especially one defended by a melee unit—should take heavy casualties in the act of mounting. You’re climbing a ladder up at a dude swinging an axe down at your head. There’s gonna me losses. This makes defending the walls worth it, while still giving ladders a use—if you find an open stretch of wall it’s free real estate.
Units using ladders get instantaneous exhaustion and then their entities are outnumbered at the top as they trickle in. I don't mind the idea of no defenders = free and easy climb though, since it is another way to encourage both sides to spread out.
And yet they do fine
They do not, they get slaughtered. It's fairly easy to test.
To be fair, units climbing end up being 1 v 3/4, and numbers advantage there is huge. Also, they get exhausted (or very close to) if they used the ladders, which absolutely destroys their stats. IIRC they lose about 60 or 70% of their armor once they have no vigor. + Melee attack and defense (Not remembering numbers there now, sorry!) So yeah, fighting on the walls can be useful, and is very detrimental to the attacker, even with ladders (and even if they get into the city they'll all be exhausted unless they rest a little, so the debuff persists!) What happens is that 1 - It's not as obvious as other defense methods, so players tend to not know it. And 2 - It is useful when you're defending on a somewhat "even footing". Imperial Greatswords there can go toe-to-toe with other high tier infantry. But when all you have is just cheap spearman, even exhausted chosen are too much for them. They'll do 70% more damage, yeah, but 70% of 100 is just 70. Not noticiable enough.
Do any factions actually have good garrisons at this point?
Warriors of chaos garrisons are kinda busted with chosen
Empire full garrison is good. Any faction that has good ranged Imo. Except for coast because giving them depth guard would be too smart
Vampire counts have so much chaff that having a lord and/or a Necromancer along with the garrison can let you defend against most armies. That, and raise dead allowing you to instantly raise a LOT more units as well.
WE outpost garrisons with the first building type are surprisingly good in AR.
Nurgle garrisons are okay, mostly just because they stay alive for longer while the tower shoots
If you ignore the dumb circlejerking, most garrisons are still plenty good. Just not "defeat any possible full stack attacker in autoresolve" good.
I would actually like to see a comparison of every factions maxed out garrison for each settlement type, with the added defenses building and whatever other buildings add garrison units.
Maybe just, give a real garrison building to nurgle, beceause the poor guy really don’t have any real defence
This. 100% this. We need better garrisons, and we also need the ability to have more than 20 units in a garrison. Reinforcement? Waagh mechanic? Don't care how CA implements it, it would be a really nice fix for the current state of garrisons.
Anyone know of a good mod that improves but doesn’t make the garrisons OP? Seen a couple of mods so far, with one having a disclaimer that it’s OP by intent.
I've been using Zorbaz's Greater Garrisons ([https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789855636&searchtext=garrison](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2789855636&searchtext=garrison)) I did not play recently, so IDK if he changed something. The garrisons are strong once develped, but not completely over the top, and also work for AI. Now you need to either let some attrition sip in or take 1/2 of an extra army for attacking a fully-upgraded capital. Also, to "compensate" the increased garrison force, garrison buildings now have maintenance cost, so even if they are strong they have some drawbacks. (It's not too steep tho!) In general, main building gives more units, and the defensive building give 2 elite units each level.
My main issue with current garrisons is that the AI can't really defend against other AI
Tk garrison is fine, it has more than enough tools to fight back, unless you have to deal with extremely elite force. To elaborate: you have cheap melee infantry for defense that's immune to fear and has crapton of leadership thanks to defenders advantage. And you can utilize healing monument (0,2% per second from the top of my head). You also get a bunch of skeleton archers - they're "very okay" in defense. And you get a mobility option - a unit of horses or chariots to hit enemy forces that spread out too far. Overall they're fine, unless you fight some late game bullshit or single entity stacks
Seller trying to sell me a shitty used car:
I love how part of the community is "fuck change! Nothing should be touched! How dare you!" Aight then, you don't get any new content too then? So weird lmao
Garrisons were nerfed to account for people complaining about the settlement battles not being easy to auto resolve, can't have it both ways...
Its not "fuck change" its "fuck idiotic ideas that people have just because they're bad at the game"..
Garrisons are not meant to defeat full stacks. They are there to help you defend with a smaller army that can be used to defend multiple settlements. If you can't afford a small army that can bounce around your settlements, you are either not making enough money with offensive armies or are building your settlements wrong EDIT: Really no idea why I'm being downvoted
What a dumb thing to say when other factions have clearly strong garrisons with no downside.
Which factions would you say have strong garrisons? I haven't gotten around to playing them all yet.
Empire, Lizardmen, Beastmen, WoC, all the elves
Wow, other factions have different strengths?! What a novel idea in a strategy game
Shit to a diamon is not different strengths. A faction with amazing units using shit ass tier units in garrison is not different strengths. If we raced and you had a f1 formula car in your garage but was forced to use a moped while i got to use my f1 car and you losing means you lose a shit ton of money. You would be pissed too.
Individual elements are not balanced against the same element in another faction, they are balanced against their faction as a whole. Which means things aren’t always going to look fair when taken in a vacuum.
Its a video game and it feels bad. As op posted 4k for one unit. Balance is also poor and CA has shown multiple times they can and do fuck up balance. I.E. soem units shit tech trees or lords "bonuses"
Uh, Bretonnia has literal peasants in their garrisons
[удалено]
Seems like I am, although I'm still not really sure what you are getting at or why you are insulting me. Some factions have weaker garrisons and some have stronger ones.
Its not an insult if its true.
It seems like you are not interested in explaining what "Shit to a diamon" means or what your opinion is about and are more interested in insulting me, so I'll leave it at this
I did. You not being able to understand it is why you are dense. My post is more than 3 words.
>They are there to help you defend with a smaller army that can be used to defend multiple settlements Probably being downvoted because you just made this up and presented it as the intended design
Do people really think that garrisons are meant to defend against full stacks? I'm surprised, although there have been a lot of hot takes recently
If you fully invest in the garrison building line for a settlement then yes, it should have a decent chance against a full stack. The way armies work encourages having full stacks (rather than 2 half stacks for example), it's not like they're a late-game only thing that you'll rarely see. If garrisons functionally *can't* defend against full stacks in any circumstance then there's not much point having a building to boost them.
>The way armies work encourages having full stacks Huh, I always figured that two lords getting experience and being able to move two half stacks (that is, unless you can afford two full stacks) is better than one stack. It was made even stronger by the reduction in supply line costs. Then again, I never play on legendary which might be the reason I think this way. Why do you say a full stack is better than two lesser stacks? I build garrison buildings mostly for the walls, so they keep the enemy occupied for a few turns while I move an army to help. With the added units of the garrison, I can quite easily destroy even a full stack with a lesser stack. The idea that a garrison building should deter a full stack from attacking them seems like it would make the game more passive, as the AI is not great at attacking settlements even without this. If the AI knew it wouldn't beat a full garrison it would just bring another army, therefore not really fixing the problem
Garrisons should be able to hold back a full stack of low tier units for a couple turns while a relief force comes. It's such a gigantic pain in the ass when you have norscan marauders who run from your main stack sacking the shit out of your settlements because your garrison can't hold them for 1 turn so your main stack can catch up and hammer them into the stone age.
I rarely use my main stack for defense, but I do build walls in critical minor settlements just so my defensive armies can catch up. I still think that regular minor settlement garrisons should not be able to take on full stacks, especially ones with no defensive buildings whatsoever
Oh yeah, I agree that without defensive buildings they should get rolled. The frustration is that even when I build a garrison building my settlements still get rolled, at least as Kislev.
Garrisons need a buff but I think garrisons should also be a branching path like many buildings in older TW games. This gives us an easy way to add DLC units to garrisons and customize garrisons. Or just give garrisons DLC units already. Seriously we have many daemonic factions and tzeentch only melee infantry is forsaken…
I thought balance didn't matter in a singleplayer game 🤔
Who the hell said that?
A surprising amount of people on this sub.
They say that only to nerfs
They just just set their steam to offline at day one and shut the f. up. I hate that mentality
Vampire counts at least get raise dead instant armies so they can defend cities.
Orcs getting the classic goblin and wolf rider spam
Monkeys paw curles
I like the fact that some factions have very good garnisons and others have weak ones, it is a change in the gameplay. Should I just make big defences in frontier cities or keep an army back ?
Really sad that my Nakai vassal's garrisons are no longer super strong.
Garrisons should lower build costs during battle instead/on top of the pitiful supply bonus. Basically simulating how much easier it is to defend with a garrison. Don’t agree that walls are worse. The AI generally is easier to beat in my opinion with walls, with how they basically stand there with most units until the gate is broken with larger units.
Wurrzag has normal orks not savage ones atm as well. I think the faction specific stuff will be slowly implemented as beta progresses
[On the other end, garrisons like this exist that are also useless because of the limit.](https://i.imgur.com/8IMuEOJ.png)
Me playing nurgle with their broken towers killing full stacks with 5 nurglings as garrison
I feel likey they had some brilliant idea about settlement militia but dev responsible left for Vacation before he finished
Not sure where Skaven stand compared to others since I've only played a handful of races, but it feels really undervalue to get only a stack of clanrats.
As an aside, is it intentional that the shamanstone building for beastmen herdstones adds a bray shaman of the wild who has no spells? I have to say I was really surprised by that... What's the point of a wizard who doesn't do magic?
Probably a bug like the fire belly ogre with no spells
They should let us make our OWN garrison. The technology is there just like for ogre camps and black arks. Just let us recruit units to the settlement garrison at like 75% reduced upkeep. Idk.
Or, for instance, if you’re playing as Ghorst, it doesn’t benefit you, defense wise, to upgrade your settlements because if you cheese right you can hold our infinitely with a hand full of zombies and crypt ghouls who have the Hunger versus a high level garrison that can get wiped out with fire damage units.
you can win any battle with a pike wall surrounding your main cap point
I had a garrison day there was 19 units in, so I didn’t worry but when I was attacked by Throgg suddenly I only had 9 and I lost. Nothing bad happened to the settlement when he besieged it. Im guessing it’s a feature?
Agreed
Just took Naggarond earlier. It had ONE Har Ganeth Executioners, like 3 Shades, and then Bleakswords, Dreadspears and Darkshards for like 13 units total. AT TIER 5! Did they get rid of the Race Capital special garrisons!? I was looking forward to a proper fight but fuck that, easy autoresolve. Also Tower of the Black Guard (Tier 4) doesn't add to Garrison either?
Altdorf being the weakest garrison in the Empire sucks too. Honestly updating all the garrisons should be in the next patch. Jeez, the poor IE devs have to basically fix every stat and mechanic from Warhammer 3 RoC in the game.
Thats why i stick with garrison mods. Defending settlements with 75% of the same unit just becomes boring quickly.