Making the AI less of a total pushover is of course one of the most important issues to fix. But there are also another issue that plagues the game that need to be adressed as well.

Right now pacing is completely screwed up. You gain a lot of resources very early on, be it money, growth, XP or unit recruitment. Since this game's scaling mechanics are either dysfunctional (PO, corruption, supply lines) or non-existent, this early windfall very quickly removes economy management altogether come midgame because your resource gain increases exponentially. Add mechanics that increase the pacing, like building autoconversion and the various WIN HARDER racial and faction mechanics, and you end up with campaigns that are effectively over somewhere between turn 30-50. That's simply too fast for a TW game. It doesn't help that the AI is hampered by certain design decisions, like the fact that autoresolve always kills the loser no matter the odds, which makes it infinitely harder for the AI to actually build up capable characters and armies. All of these things result in campaigns that get boring fast because you no longer have to give any thought of what and where to spend and just steamroll over weak enemies that can't do anything to you.

Some ways to adress this:

-reduce post battle loot and XP gain considerably, maybe have the current rate be easy-mode only and add increasing negative modifiers for every difficulty above that

-remove building autoconversion, this simply isn't a good mechanic

-fix PO and corruption so they actually matter

-increase growth requirements for settlements or add growth point costs to more building chains

-have AR not always wipe the loser

-add an economy scaling mechanic like Administrative Burden from Troy/Pharao which scales your income gain the further the campaign progresses, ditch Supply Lines entirely

-racial and factional mechanics of the WIN HARDER variety (IE, make you stronger the better you are already doing) need some serious looking at

They should bring back the Proving grounds beta! 

About the post battle loot: From my point of view this should be race specific with Order and Empire builder races (HE, EMP, CAT) getting very little, and Raiding and Chaos races (DE, Orks, WOC) getting a good amount, though maybe tuned down too a little.

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Admiral_Spyre#5113 wrote:

About the post battle loot: From my point of view this should be race specific with Order and Empire builder races (HE, EMP, CAT) getting very little, and Raiding and Chaos races (DE, Orks, WOC) getting a good amount, though maybe tuned down too a little.

No, I disagree. I think post-battle loot needs to come down overall because...armies are usually not carrying around a lot of money by themselves. High post-battle loot should be restricted to the pinatas that are Cathayan/CD caravans.

Post battle loot needs a look at for sure. Races that already get a resources for defeating enemies (such as Greenskins or WoC) don't also need a truckload of gold for each battle won. Same for post-battle replenishment, it's kind of silly to get 15% of the army back just because you ate lunch after fighting. 

PO and corruption could just be brought back to WH2, really. Except for revolt farming of course. 

Growth is a touchy issue IMO. Slow it down too much and it makes campaigns a bit of a drag, unlocking late-game units turn 90-100 is pretty feelsbad when you'll already have a bunch of veteran armies by then. It's too fast now but on top of tuning it down a bit I wouldn't be averse to a more global system, where you accumulate growth (a representation of population) then apply it on a per province basis. You can have one tier 5 settlement fairly early but not all over the shop, because the resource is more finite.

AR fixes should be part of the AI fixes, ye. It mostly affects them after all.

Supply Lines have sucked since WH1 and yet it's still a thing. 

Racial mechanics are probably something they won't take too much a look at, simply because there's too many of them. Nerf some of the absolute worst offenders and bring up the game's base difficulty, that's probably enough. It's OK if some factions are easy mode in comparison to others. 

Do note, I think a lot of the above should be customizable. Someone who wants an easy campaign should be able to toggle on supercharged growth and tons of post-battle loot if they want to. It's just that the option isn't there to, well, not have these things. Sliders are friends, CA. 

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Jastalll#1030 wrote:
Same for post-battle replenishment, it's kind of silly to get 15% of the army back just because you ate lunch after fighting. 

Post-battle replenishment is too inconsistent.  I believe it's affected by both captives (somewhat relative to army size) and by casualty replenishment modifiers for the army, so it's easy for it to explode out of control, but sometimes (in earlygame, before you have casualty replenishment modifiers) it's just a worthless option which does nothing, and that's not great either.

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

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Jastalll#1030 wrote:
AR fixes should be part of the AI fixes, ye. It mostly affects them after all.

AR always wiping the loser in addition to giving a 100% accurate prediction of the outcome  is what often makes it an attractive option for the player so it's not wholly an AI problem. After all, if I can win with no important losses while obliterating all enemies by just pressing one button why should I spend time and effort to potentially spoil an already secure victory?  I think not only should it not always wipe the loser, it also needs to introduce an increasing amount of uncertainty regarding the outcome depending on the forces involved.

100% with you there, so for my own reasons, gone back to TW2 (forget what they are, just I have) and I much prefer Auto resolve in that game, in that it is harsher to the player in that you use it, you can lose more than you would playing manually and there is that notion that auto resolve won't kill the enemy entirely, so by using it, you may have a follow up battle that you have to choose again, which you may likely win again, but take reasonable losses.

I think the surprise of losing a unit is quite a good one, do you risk it, do you play it, knowing the exact outcome is well away from the warhammer side, like Total war, yes stats, i get the appeal and the base of it all, but warhammer, has always been about the unknown risk to reward. A bit of an aside, but I still recall being a kid and balancing up a warp spider move, I could win the game in the allotted turns left. But I could also by warping too far, risk the entire game, lose too many units, and just have everyone in the GW store on my side hate me for that bad decision (I am about 8 years old at this point, those other kids in that store (age range from 20-40) could be real mean)!

Anyway, I feel that type of element existed more in TW2 than TW3, especially around the decision to auto resolve a battle.

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
AR always wiping the loser in addition to giving a 100% accurate prediction of the outcome  is what often makes it an attractive option for the player so it's not wholly an AI problem. After all, if I can win with no important losses while obliterating all enemies by just pressing one button why should I spend time and effort to potentially spoil an already secure victory?  I think not only should it not always wipe the loser, it also needs to introduce an increasing amount of uncertainty regarding the outcome depending on the forces involved.

AR shouldn't always wipe the loser: agreed.  AR should always wipe units which can crumble on the losing side, though, subject to Dead Rise Again/reforging.

Reintroducing uncertainty: strongly disagree.  AR is a quality-of-life tool.  It shouldn't give you a better result than playing a challenging battle, but having to guess at what the description means by "Casualties: Medium" is just as annoying as having to guess how far the enemy can move because they're in camp stance.  I would be more okay with it if it displayed which units were *at risk* of dying and had an element of chance to it as a result - even that would irritate me since I play a lot of multiplayer and playing too many battles there manually isn't considerate of other players' time.

That's also why I'm against having it give worse results in battles which are clearly decided one way or the other - incentivizing players to play out dull, one-sided battles where the outcome is not in question does not improve the play experience.

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Steelclaw#6359 wrote:
Reintroducing uncertainty: strongly disagree.  AR is a quality-of-life tool. 

To skip battles that are not worth playing because of lopsided forces involved. It should definitely not exist to just skip half of the TW gameplay regularly. If you are not good in the real-time portion of the game, you should not be rewarded with an easy out.

As it stands now, you are more often than not outright punished if you play battles yourself and that's of course absolutely terrible game design.

Adding uncertainty and increasing said uncertainty with the scope of the battle would discourage just skipping gameplay. In my opinion large battles with 20000+ funds total involved shouldn't even allow AR-ing them at all.

Why even play TW if you don't like the real-time portion of it? All you have left then is a rather shallow 4X, then you might as well just play PDX games who do that part better.

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

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Steelclaw#6359 wrote:
Reintroducing uncertainty: strongly disagree.  AR is a quality-of-life tool. 

To skip battles that are not worth playing because of lopsided forces involved. It should definitely not exist to just skip half of the TW gameplay regularly. If you are not good in the real-time portion of the game, you should not be rewarded with an easy out.

As it stands now, you are more often than not outright punished if you play battles yourself and that's of course absolutely terrible game design.

Adding uncertainty and increasing said uncertainty with the scope of the battle would discourage just skipping gameplay. In my opinion large battles with 20000+ funds total involved shouldn't even allow AR-ing them at all.

Why even play TW if you don't like the real-time portion of it? All you have left then is a rather shallow 4X, then you might as well just play PDX games who do that part better.

Your proposition would drive me - and a lot of others - away from the game for a very obvious reason: WH3 load times are, for giant part of the playerbase, absolutely terrible, even on SSD. If I would be forced to endure two sets of loading times just to stomp AI on a max speed-up in a very one-sided battle, I would completely uninstall it and never touch again.

Giving unfavorable AR results is ok in games like Heroes of Might and Magic where there are basically no load screens and battles can be done really quick. In WH3 is a big no-no. Though there is an option to satisfy both you and me: CA should embrace customization, including AR results customization. 

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

That's about as terrible an argument as "I've got a family and job, games must be short, dumbed-down slop so I can breeze through them in the five minutes of free time I got every day". By that logic the game should never throw you any curveball at all because that might force you to reload and that can take a while too.

If you have no time at hand, why are you playing a 4X strategy game anyway? Those games are time-intensive no matter what.

The loading times of WH3 aren't any better or worse than the TW average and other than WH3, most TW games mananged to not have stupidly convenient AR, including this game's two predecessors.

Seems like a very solid argument to me.  You're looking at this and seeing "skill issue" when the real problem is people not wanting to wait for load times unless a battle is interesting.  When you've played thousands of hours of the game, 90% of battles vs AI have a very predictable outcome, and you play for the other 10%.

You're not asking for the game to be harder, you're asking for it to be inconvenient.  Nobody here is arguing for AR to be able to win fights that a player can't, or get better results than a player can.  But introducing RNG or making it underperform in clearly decided battles is simply worsening it as a convenience tool.

And "they're not worse than other TW games and it didn't work like this there" is not a defense.  Those are flaws of those other games, not an ideal to be followed.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
To skip battles that are not worth playing because of lopsided forces involved. It should definitely not exist to just skip half of the TW gameplay regularly.

More than half the battles are lopsided if you're decent on campaign map.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
If you are not good in the real-time portion of the game, you should not be rewarded with an easy out.

Literally nobody is arguing with this, as far as I can see.  Everyone agrees those should be played manually, and AR shouldn't be a tool for winning them.  In most cases on decent difficulty it already does this - in some cases it gives such dire results even for a battle which is not particularly hard that the only sensible option is to manual this, and I accept that it's inevitable AR will sometimes misidentify a battle as hard.  I would not accept AR misidentifying a battle as hard and failing to communicate this through the old classic "Casualties: Low, But Oops, Your Full Health T5 Unit Died".

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
Adding uncertainty and increasing said uncertainty with the scope of the battle would discourage just skipping gameplay. In my opinion large battles with 20000+ funds total involved shouldn't even allow AR-ing them at all.

Skipping dull gameplay is not a problem.  As above, the load times are the primary motivator for wanting to skip it - unless a fight is interesting, I do not want to waste minutes on load screens for it.  And no, it makes no sense to say a battle is interesting or difficult just because it is large - I can bring 20k funds to attack one lone goblin, and by your argument, that shouldn't be autoable.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
Why even play TW if you don't like the real-time portion of it? All you have left then is a rather shallow 4X, then you might as well just play PDX games who do that part better.

I like it when it's challenging.  I dislike waiting for loading screens to play through something which requires zero brain engagement from me.  I don't actively hate it, it's just not worth the wait, especially when I'm in multiplayer and making 3-5 other people wait with me.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

I don't see "skill issue", I see, "time management failure issue".

It's also a terrible argument because you can apply it to about any gameplay element and demand it be dumbed down or removed. Hey, turns take long, so just let only the player actually move! The Taurox experience for everyone!

If your idea of gameplay is "sitting on a loading screen", and you don't see that as a waste of time, I genuinely don't know what to say to you.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
I'll ask again, why are you playing TW at all if you so openly hate and despise half of its gameplay loop?

Already answered: use autoresolve to skip the boring battles and loading screens, play the interesting battles.  It's not complicated.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

So AR that doesn't give you easy victories for zero effort is now  a "flaw"?

I refer to my question above.

If the actual battle would be an easy victory?  Yes.

Otherwise?  No.

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:

You have been arguing exactly that. You want AR to relieve you of the need to actually fight battles because you don't want to wait 30 seconds for the battle to load and that only works if AR only feeds you wins.

So you've pretty much confirmed it is nothing but a skill issue and the babble about loading times is just an attempt to obfuscate that.

You are arguing with a figment of your imagination.  I want to skip loading screens for boring, easy battles which I will win anyway.  I have reiterated multiple times that I do not want to skip battles whose outcome is in doubt.  If you continue to argue against an imaginary position, I will have to assume you're just trolling.

In support of my suspicion that you are not arguing in good faith:

TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
I don't see "skill issue", I see, "time management failure issue".

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TainBoCuailinge#8335 wrote:
So you've pretty much confirmed it is nothing but a skill issue

You cannot have it both ways.