I've been building a full overhaul for Warhammer III, and it's now out on the Workshop: Old World Ascendant.

It covers every faction in the game, the October DLC included, and it's built from one set of readable rules applied to the base game's own data, so every faction plays to its lore without getting anything for free.

What it changes

• Battles last longer and reward manoeuvre. Units are tougher, melee hit chance and ward saves cap at 75%, morale follows the whole fight, and charges hit harder, so flanks, reserves and timing decide battles instead of the first clash.
• Fewer, dearer armies. Units cost about twice as much to recruit while upkeep stays close to the base game, and there are no supply lines: the gold to raise an army is what limits you.
• Settlements defend themselves. Every defended settlement has a garrison hero, militia from its recruitment buildings and a drilled garrison, and towers grow stronger with the settlement, so a lone raiding stack can't walk into a town.
• Lore for everyone. Two lore skill lines, an ability skill and an army ability for all 111 legendary lords, lore lines for 33 legendary heroes, a research tab of its own for every culture, and two new building chains plus a wonder for every culture.
• Legendary lord mechanics and relics for lords the base game left without one, plus recurring decisions, seasons and confederation rewards.
• Factions with an identity. Every faction is rated with the same 30 points across ten axes, so each strength comes with a weakness.
• A fairer AI that saves for elite units instead of chaff, and diplomacy with memory: vassals for every culture, and betrayal is remembered.
• Optional Mod Configuration Tool settings to loosen or tighten the campaign pace.

For the community, by the community. It's meant as a base other modders can build on: submods, patches, compatibility packs, translations or a whole overhaul of your own on top of it. No permission is needed. The project starts here and will continue in Total War: Warhammer 40,000 when that game releases.

It needs a new campaign and runs on its own (not alongside other overhauls); visual, sound and UI mods should be fine.

Get Old World Ascendant on the Steam Workshop

It's freshly released, so I'd love bug reports and balance feedback: the Workshop page has threads for both in its Discussions tab. Happy to answer questions here.

In honor of spooky month's most DREADFUL and TERRIFYING holiday ever, I ask of you which variety of horrors do you find worst to face concerning Warhammer Fantasy's world?

Undead or Daemon?

From the lore tidbits you get in game, you get the idea that it's a hardy warrior people throwing everything they have north as the bulwark against chaos. The mechanics though seem very focused on this Orthodoxy-Ice Court conflict. It feels like something that would have worked more thematically for the Empire than for Kislev. Do we have time to worry about this when Khorne armies are swarming our cities? I can't help but feel like some mechanic similar to Ulthuan's court may have worked better.

Walach Harkon has an undeniable resemblance to the late great Sam neill.

Same Neill actually passed away two months before this character's in game appearance, which means he was likely resurrected by Vampire magic just in time for the End Times.

Going kill feral cold ones as Walach Harkon in his honour.

Are there any units that at first you couldn’t find any use for, and have since come to respect? I play Kislev way more than any other faction and used to think the Snow Leopard was useless. But holy bear the thing is a chaos lord/hero ASSASSIN. It’s fast, actually has a really good charge animation that can phase it through lighter troops, and it EATS heavy armor large targets for breakfast.

Anyway, curious if anyone else has found good uses for units they initially dismissed.

I like dragons aesthetically and tend to use them or dragon related things often in games. Because of this when I was looking at high elf factions Imirik immediately stood out to me, I was fairly new to the game but loved his design and the idea of an elf/dragon army. I tried him a bunch, looked up guides and everything but could not get far into his campaign. His starting position is extremely rough and there's not much pay off for it.

Eventually I tried Anith anar and fell in love with his play style, he's probably one of my top 3 favorite LL to use currently. I figured I'd just try him out for awhile and learn how to use dragons properly then revisit Imirik. I've now used dragons in multiple runs and I think I'm just not a fan of them in this game. I basically only run them for their breath weapon and at that point I'd rather just use a hero who gets a dragon eventually and has other options. They feel like they're just not particularly good at anything outside of the breath weapon, like I'd rather have other flying units or calvary for flanking/hitting their backline and they kinda just feel downright bad in single target combat. I tried stacking a ton of lord/hero passives and I have the max research benefit but they still feel relatively lackluster. It feels disappointing since they seemed like high elves main end game unit. I genuinely feel like I had a lot more success with the ice dragons from norsca which feels awful since they have plenty of other good endgame units.

I would have loved to have seen a legendary hero that's just a dragon himself or something like that. The unique dragons you can get with Imirik is neat but feels fairly lackluster when throgg can basically do the same thing faster and better.

Am I just missing out on something huge here?

I’m generally a gunpowder and artillery guy but figured I would give the counts a shot with their updates and chose Ghorst for the millions of zombies laughs. I initially was getting absolutely stomped and about gave up on it until I read about….the blob. I thought there was no way that would actually work. Boy oh boy is it hilarious, brain dead, but very very fun and effective. Empire and dwarf artillery can be bothersome but I just toss a few bats after them and that usually takes care of the problem.

Zhatan The Black is my favorite Chorf. He likes trains, he's just like me frfr. But his campaign is super hard for three reasons:

• Grimgor

• His starting position

• His starting strength

Grimgor is the bane of all Chorf lords. He hates you, and is one of the few times I have seen a lord declare war on me instantly. He kills your convoys, your main mechanic as Zhatan, and severely hampers your economy. And it's hard to kill him because Zhatan is the only chorf lord that doesn't start with a Tier 2 settlement. This means it takes until like turn 20 to be able to recruit artillery.

This issue snowballs. You often have to go out of your way to kill Grimgor. Early game skills usually have to go to Ancient Cunning just so you can kill him if he Waaaghs. While you're fighting Grimgor, Cathay snowballs hard. You quickly find your momentum stalled, your armies weak, your economy lacking, surrounded on all sides by angry order factions you just can't beat.

I've played this campaign dozens of times now. I still can't beat it without using mods to level up Zhatan's starting settlement. It just feels sadistic, and IDK what to do cuz I love my angry troll chorf.

How do you escape the bottleneck in Zhatan's campaign?

I've seen posts about how the slash from its attacks are bugged and it generally doesn't perform as expected or how it should. Is it still worth taking when playing as chorfs? I just think it's gonna take a lot of friendly fire from the blunder line and if it's bugged then what's the point?

Second question. How important are daemon smith sorcerers for your army comps?

Can someone help explain the recruitment queues as Vampire Coast? Playing as Luthor and I have both Advanced and Basic military buildings in the province, but for some reason I can only recruit dogs in the "Jungle of Webs" queue? Instead I can only recruit them 1 at a time from the "Vampire Coast" queue.
Am I doing something wrong or is this how they work? I could swear I was able to recruit everything from the province last time I played them 😖

Luthor is not in any stance, but I don't get why I have 6 different queues? (Global, Luthor, Tomb Kings, Vampire Coast, Vampire Counts and Jungle of Web)

The only AoE ability was the spining loon of fanatics night goblin. They did arround 20k dmg with it only because the map was buged and went under the feet of the rats.

Towers did also a good job since the blob was under the fire of one of them. 844 kills for them, but a lot of damage I guess when I see that my gobos got a nice amount of kills. Those rats should have been low hp.

I did have to kite 2 lords with the wolves from my garrison.

Skarsnik was able to kill the reinforcing grey seer in time before he reached my blobline.

The wolves chariots were the MVP here ! that banner of swiftness clutch this battle.

5 435 kills for my army.

L/VH, no tactics enabled, no spell caster.

As someone playing mainly order factions, over the course of Total War Warhammer, i have become a fan of not only that faction but also the lore. Naturally one always wishes for more mechanics to represent the favourite lord or hero better or even the favoured nation.

In my case i would really love a knight mechanic for the empire with the addition of Kurt Helborg, together with Grandmasters or duelist characters that dont instantly get folded like empire captains (Franz needs Ludwig Schwarzhelm) and more interesting skill trees for legendary lords.

I would also love "cheap" legendary lords for Balthasar Gelt in the form of wizard lords for the collages of magic so he has a return besides items, after investing in the different orders (since i feel like the system is very shallow compared to other factions) and in this the addition of wizard lords and potentially ( a man can hope) the addition of Max Schreiber.

Lastly, to bring the empire up to date with warhammer 3, army abilities with prayers should come into play. Currently as Emperor once get a very slight mechanic of balancing the interests of the different elector counts. But overall, you cannot play the campaign of "embracing" Middenland and thus recieving massive amounts of Knights of the White Wolf or bonuses to meele troubes. The State Troops are also not a massive upgrade over regular ones (especially the knight variants). Thus i would love to see this fleshed out to add replayability and certain traits only some provinces provide, making keeping them alive and well a priority and truly granting their form of combat massive buffs (similar to how it would work in the real world, grant a province unlimited money and it prospers - until it feels to strong and starts warring on its neighbours, or you).

Lastly there are lords that are really left out. We have Boris Todbringer as representation of Urlic. But the representation of Sigmar does not really have a Sigmar oriented campaign at all. A believe system similar to the kislev one might work, where the Empire in general can invest in all major gods, such as Taal for Hunters, Ulric for war, Sigmar overall, Shalliah and Mor. We have good representatives for almost all of them, granting them bonuses for investing in their gods. Volkmar for Sigmar (and more army wide buffs and prayers, because buffing flagellants alones is really a poor buff in my opinion), Elsbeth for Morr, Markus Wulfhart for Taal and Toddy for Ulric. And Franz has to balance between each of them, getting no bonuses for devotion for a single one and potentially incapable of easily reaching the highest prayer abilities.

TLDR: I have presented my vision for a final version of the Empire in Total War Warhammer 3. And i am super interested in the final version that YOU might have for Chaos, Elves, Dark Elves, Dwarves etc.

In a real turn out for the WoC fans out there, it would appear that Archaon, who was already pretty busted, is even more busted than ever before.

His campaign has always been my favourite, and I loved bopping around the map sackin’ cities and crackin’ cold ones. Complete his pokedex with the other WoC factions, then go to town on every town on the map. I’ve been playing a big Nagash campaign since the update, and didn’t know what changes had been made to Archaon.

Started up a new campaign as him a couple days ago, went for my usual route of vassalising Tamurkhan on the way to khollekt Kholek, and a prompt I’ve never seen before appears..

“Would you like to confederate this faction?”

Haha, said I, always quick with the repartee, surely they’re mistaken, it just means vassalize like a minor Norscan faction. There’s no way - again, quick with the repartee - that they’d let me take one of the most powerful LLs in the game into my faction.

Wrong.

I check my lord list, and there he is, the big green mouldy bastard in all his glory. My favourite one worm army. No need to wait 4 turns, he’s ready to go, and I got his unique heroes too. It’s now about turn 40. I have Arbaal, N’kari, Festus, Kholek and… the tzeench WoC guy with two heads whose name I can never remember. Some of the most powerful LLs in the game (and Festus) and I haven’t even left the Chaos Wastes yet. Another 20 turns and I should be ready to unleash the end times on the world like never before.

I already loved this campaign, but now I want to carry it to bed upon which I’ve sprinkled rose petals and loads of sex lube, while I whisper sweet nothings in its ear.

Look out Karl Franz, here comes Archaon riding a massive armoured bum dildo of vengeance.

Be cautious Teclis, N’kari is on the way to wear you like a nice summer frock. And you will not be returnable, receipt or no.

Feel safe on Ulthuan Mr. Phoenix King? See if you feel as safe when Kholek is using the Doughnut as a special kind of fleshlight.

The End Times are here.

I'm currently playing a campaign on legendary difficulty as Boris Ursus and got my short campaign vicory a few turns ago.

Short Campaign victory gives you a unique Ataman Lord (your provincional Gouverneur guys) , with the same skill tree as a regular Ataman.

The catch being, that unlike a regular Ataman, this guy can freely walk around the overworld, lead armies, and (in theory) provide all the boosts a regular Ataman is supposed to provide wherever you take him. (Crossing borders makes all the effects he's supposed to provide appear above his head, though I couldn't get a good screenshot of it)

I thought this would be really helpful to reduce recruitment time of elite units while my armies are advancing forward, so I went for the "Drill Instructor" skill.

However, when I try to recruit anything in the province that I had just conquered, recruitment time for Ice-Guard remains at 2 turns as can be seen in the screenshots.

No regular Ataman was present in the province where I tried this, so I figured maybe his skills only trigger when a regular Ataman is present, but they can at least work cumulatively for a massive discount.

In my example testing this, the neighboring province had some construction to do and a regular Ataman was present. So I thought "let's bring my victory reward special Ataman to the neighboring province to see if the skill that reduces construction costs of buildings by 20 percent + construction time by 1 turn is correctly applied when a regular Attaman is present". Construction cost went down a little, but that was likely just his creator trait being applied. Because construction time remained the same and the big discount of -20 wasn't applied properly if my math is correct.

Am I missing something with this guy? Do his unique skills just ... not work?

Because if so, that would be a pretty lame campaign victory reward.

And they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming

Just like the name implied. I've been playing Dwarf almost all the time now and I've been wondering what's the optimal starting move to snowball my economy early on. YT Video about this topic mostly from a year+ so I'm wondering if there's changes or something.

I mostly rush engineering + growth+ irondrakes building for my first three settlements, but I always find myself kinda struggling early on even after conquering mount Gunbad from Skarsnik and making them the money province for my campaign.

like - with covens - potentially giving income, diplomatic relationship buffs, and handmaiden units buffs and caps. and handmaiden heroes cheese for upkeep reduction kinda thing maybe...

I really enjoy a difficult opening 50 turns etc.
Just did Kislev Boris where I got chased out of the frozen wastes and established my self near the empire and made a come back. Who can I try next for a good challenge?

I feel the call of the eightbound!

After a few requests Wraithfire now has a few optional standalone versions. I'll link the workshop page here. Latest versions include flying wraith units with ethereal trails. No glowing eye versions, too. Please let me know thoughts, requests, critiques, etc!
https://steamcommunity.com/id/th3ELDRiTCH1/myworkshopfiles/?appid=1142710

I've seen many Skaven tier 5 settlement rushes in my due time, but nowhere near as fast as Thanquol's turn 4 tier 5 Zhufbar. But that's not even the craziest part, he can do allat on Legendary auto-resolve. It's actually quite insane just how strong having recruitable Warpfire Throwers from turn 1 is. Which are then further boosted in auto-resolve if you get an ambush. Not only that but also being able to snipe provinces across the map with a click of a button.

Not sure if I'd call him the strongest faction, but he's for sure the most laid back one. Down the line he also gains -2 from global recruitment time. So you can recruit a half stack from anywhere in the world as if it were your local region.

A couple of disclaimers: I got this game last month and I've already binged 150h into it. Needless to say that I am really enjoying it. Also, i didnt get to experience the old VC and most of the info i find online is outdated, which is kind of the motivation for making this post as I haven't really seen detailed analyses of current VC.

I SHOULD BE FINISHING MY THESIS BUT HERE I AM WRITING THIS INSTEAD.

TLDR: Does anyone else feel like Vampire Counts LLs (Legendary Lords) fall off a cliff as soon as you spawn a Vampire Lord?

1. All LLs (including confederated ones, with the exception of Mannfred) have lower stats and worse talent trees than VLs.
2. The von Carstein bloodline gives the least incentive to empower it outside of the campaign victory requirement, furthering the stat gap.
3. LLs don't have access to Vampire Lair traits, notably the Corrupted.
4. Vlad does not fly.

Stat scaling

Let's start with some stats. By turn 110 (all level 50, blue+ items and identical good ancillaries on everyone):

For levelling, I give 10 points to the blue line (Restless Dead), then most of The Hunger line and each lord's "unique" traits, 10 points into the red line (Aura of Supremacy) and spread leftovers as needed. I have 4 heroes per army (Necro, Wight King, Lahmian, Shadow/Death Vampire) so I don't need to force spells on my Lords if their trees don't offer them conveniently. The limiting factor is the Winds of Magic anyway, not spell cooldowns.

Items are: Armour of Destiny, Executioner's Axe, Talisman of Preservation, The Other Trickster's Shard, Staff of Damnation. All Legendary Lords wear their unique items.

I understand that by turn 110 you have already won the game and are just victory lapping, but I am using this snapshot to highlight a trend that starts much earlier: All Legendary Lords fall behind the Vampire Lords quite notably. Even better, Vlad isn't even the best von Carstein Lord, let alone the best Lord of his faction. He loses to the generic nameless von Carstein Lord.

This difference only gets worse, because....

Empowerment Incentives

For the von Carsteins specifically, aside from the six empowerment levels needed to get the long campaign victory, you basically won't touch the bloodline for the rest of the game. If you want proper ranged units it's better to vassalize a Skaven and get their flamethrowers or catapults/cannons. Unit ranks are not that important between Vlad's factionwide passive xp gain, and Wight King's training buff, you will get your units to 9 pretty soon if you can keep them (un)alive, or you will lose them anyway and therefore you don't need to worry about levels.

On the other hand you will press multiple times:

• Necrarch: Mostly used in the early game to get some core technologies out of the way fast until you get necromancer capacity to steal knowledge. Wraiths are pretty decent units too, especially early.
• Strigoi: The instant 20% replenishment on every single unit in your faction will pull you out of a lot of shitty situations. Before taking the lord buffs into account, you will be pressing this left and right.
• Blood Dragon: Big lord xp boost for all your lords, and you can never have enough blood knights, they are some of the strongest units in the game.
• Lahmian: Investing in higher level heroes in the mid game (especially considering how magic/hero dependent VCs are) will give you a lot of staying power for the rest of the match, and Lahmian Handmaidens are some of the best infantry in the game.

So unless you brute force the von Carsteins (like a certain someone to make this test more fair), the gap between your LLs and VLs will grown bigger as the game progresses. But we are still not talking about the biggest issue. That would be...

Vampire Lair Traits

In the images below you can see the 12 super-traits you can assign to any vampire lord. Each vampire lair gives you 6 upgrade slots, and you will assign a couple of other mandatory stuff first, leaving you usually with 3-4 for these as you need them. Since I can't seem to find them properly anywhere online, I have compiled them for your viewing pleasure.

Every single VL has access to all of these, and LLs cannot get any of these. I won't go into details but you can create some extremely powerful combinations depending on the lord.

Let's talk about the Corrupted trait. You can ignore the miscast as VLs have so much effective HP that you could be miscasting every time and never feel it by the time you run out of WoM. The leadership buff to the enemy has been negligible with a little bit of setup as well. So that brings us to the positives. In case you aren't aware, this is what Undead Wasteland does:

As you can imagine, having it readily available empire wide, and terraforming all the bad climates around you (of which there are many) into ideal ones, is a huge economic boost. Hell, just the bonus income casually balances out the Master of Death cost for all your armies. There is absolutely no reason to conquer land with a lord that doesn't have the Corrupted trait on them. So before anything else, before stats and flying mounts, all of the LLs are quite suboptimal as soon as your first VL enters the game (which is quite early usually). The alternative to this trait is waiting for settlements to reach tier 4 (guess what bad climates slow down a lot btw) and then build a Deathshroud Spire (bad climates also drastically slow down constructions speed).

What this basically translates to (and the main reason why I am making this very elaborate rant post) is that you are shooting yourself in the foot if you use any of your Legendary or Confederated Lords or the Red Duke to conquer any land. Even if your LLs were up to par stat wise, which they aren't, you would still want to use VLs.

There should be a way for Legendary Lords to gain these traits, otherwise they will always be worse than VLs.

And even after all of that, we need to address the elephant in the room...

Vlad can't fly

I am not necessarily saying Vlad should fly. What I really want to say is that this game should have better unit control and discipline so the player doesn't have to ask a unit to do something 10 times, and the unit still doesn't do it, BUT at this point I feel it's easier to just ask to make Vlad fly /jk.

Genuinely, I don't want CA to make him fly because I do enjoy his niche of grumpy undead dude marching in your face with his own two feet to smash your skull in. With a Banner of Swiftness it's like an angry dad coming home with the belt and a lot of alcohol in his system. What was I talking about? Oh yeah.

The reality of it is that Vlad loses to every VL stat wise and, due to not flying, the uptime he has on enemy Lords and SEMs is far worse than any VL, especially considering how often enemy Lords and SEMs can be isolated in the air from their ground forces, turning them into an easy snack for the VLs. Vanguard Deployment does not help when the enemy Lord hides in the enemy blob, or god forbid... flies. Mannfred by comparison has easy access to magic, a dragon, and better stat scaling apparently.

Here are some examples, all from flying VLs:

• Blood Dragons can access overcast Wind of Death with only 4 points of investing in magic. so you divebomb their lord, who has usually no hope in a 1v1 AND you nuke anyone that comes to help, on top of BDs usually having the most stacked armies due to cavalry buffs and Blood Knights/Hexwraiths being beasts who share the same upgrades in Aura of Supremacy line and all BD cavalry buffs.
• Strigois (on top of having very easy access to spirit leech) get insane stat buffs from the bloodline empowerment that you will naturally press the most out of all in every single playthrough. Have you seen a Strigoi, a lowly, filthy not legendary lord, bitch slap Imrik in 3 hits straight into execution range? I have, it was glorious.
• Lahmians all but instantly execute the enemy lord when they drop below 50% leadership thanks to their Transfix ( -40 MD, Silenced, can't move... FOR 25 SECONDS). If your lord gets transfixed in the air while trying to escape from one of them, they're done for. Lahmian Handmaidens are already some of the best infantry in the game and they become even better with a Lahmian VL and Lahmian Vampire Hero in the army.
• Necrarchs are a sight to behold at high bloodline empowerment. Chain spam overcast purple suns for 5-6 mana, give your units +40% move speed, charge, armor, AP, literally all the stats at no cd and insanely reduced WoM costs, all with the bonuses from Magically Adept before any items. Only reason I don't use them more is because auto-resolve doesn't like them.
• Von Carsteins are... okay. They don't do anything better than the others as far as I can tell, unless you want to make an army of one Lord and 19 bats with zero upkeep.

In conclusion

Vampire Counts legendary lords don't really feel... legendary at the moment. Vampire Lords spawn at higher levels, with better stats, more items and much better traits. At the very least, there should be a way for LLs to interact with Vampire Lairs and have access to these buffs.

So... thanks for reading through all of that. Now that I got this out of my system, I will try to convince myself to go back to my thesis. Let me know what you think!

Elspeth and the ogres have been holding Blackfire pass for many turns but they may be finally buckling.

What very late game anti-skaven Toddy army would you build. Gold is not a problem but I don't build doomstacks.

I am thinking half white wolf melee cavalry, engineer sniper, Volley gun steam tanks, Seneschel, warrior priest, priest of Ulric, melee Empire Captain, bright wizard and a celestial wizard. I find breath spells very effective and they can be spammed. New mages so I won't have vortex spells yet.

I think I need to plan for lots of casualties, hence the priest.

What else? Royal Pegasus knights to attack artillery? Hippogrif anti-large?

Teutogen guard just to protect artillery and tanks?

I have outposts with Bretonnia and Empire and building Kislev one now.

I have never played late game empire, so not familiar with tanks and volley guns etc.

Queek is rank 4, so it is a matter of helping to hold the line rather than invade with my army. I am busy elsewhere in the badlands. Just finished off all the dark elves but some armies many turns away.