Warhammer Total War - A strategy game Mashup

This game is obviously set in the Warhammer universe. It is like a cross between Civilization and Age Of Empires as far as gameplay.

At first I thought it was more of an RTS when I bought it, and almost refunded on STEAM when I first started it up. If you are wanting an RTS like Starcraft, or Command and Conquer, This Ain't It - Dawn Of War was the game I played back in the day, that I was thinking of when I bought this. I shoulda paid better attention. Didnt really do much but the tutorial battle and maybe start a campaign before I went to refund and it said over 2 hours playtime already. So I said f-it and decided to try playing through a campaign. I'm glad I gave it a chance, It's not so bad!

I spent the next 3 days on my computer non-stop playing it. The campaign is essentially just one big map you have to complete the campaign objectives on. Sort of like Civilization games in this regard, where you start with a base and level up different buildings and technologies to help your economy and armies. Without the grid based movement though, and where you move your armies via lords, and camp the lords at cities to build up its army, sort of like Heroes of Might and Magic games, if you have played those.

Strangely addicting, maybe it's more of a goal to achieve than a super fun game for me though, not my favorite, but I was up playing it right away every morning, if that makes sense, couldn't pull myself away hardly until I beat the grand campaign. Tried very hard mode at first and restarted about 70 turns in and played it on hard mode instead.

I bought all 3 of the games on sale and I feel like I already got my money's worth on playing just the first one. Though in a sort of weird way, as I'm not positive I will play it much more. I might skip 2 and just go to 3 and play that campaign and see the evolution of the game (if any) from 1 to 3.

The RTS or SEMI-RTS part of this game happens with the battles. You move around lords with armies and can engage other lords and city defenses in battle.

These battles can be auto-resolved, completing instantly and giving you the results, or you can manually fight the battles, which is much more difficult than I was expecting. Though I played quite a bit before I realized you could pause, or slow down, or fast forward the battle timing, enabling you to get a better grip on whats going on, as keeping track of your whole army and where your units are running off to gets to be a bit of a pain in the ass. It's a bit frustrating, and hard to get the hang of, but also super rewarding feeling when you win a battle.

Terrain, unit types strengths and weakness' , and Lords/Heroes abilities and passives are what determine the strategies or tactics you use. Before a battle starts you have as much time as you want to place your army and individual units how you desire, (you can change the direction it faces as well by clicking and dragging in circles, though its a bit janky)

You have an area in which you can place your army, its rather large giving you options depending on the terrain, how to set up. Some fights you will be the aggressor and many fights you will want to play more defensively, like holding a hill and raining fire down on them before they get to you.

If the controls and overall mechanics of the battles were better,. it would be incredibly awesome. But it's so janky and weird to get the hang of it's a bit more frustrating than fun for me. Skill issue a bit, mostly a Jank issue. IE: Camera movement, and zooming in and out. Units running all over the place, either running away or giving chase to units running away. The combination of not being able to zoom out far enough to see everything and units "routing" or giving chase, makes it so I quite often wonder why im doing poorly in the battle just to realize after that I had full strength units off in the distance where they weren't doing anything helpful. They really coulda done better with the camera control. That alone caused me to autoresolve most battles, I was getting too torn up manually fighting them, though I did start performing better when I found the SLOW MODE button. I'm guessing 2 and 3 are less janky, but maybe not.

Some missions give you battles that you have to complete manually, and they have different circumstances, like an ambush, or waves of units etc. This is rather challenging and a good bit of fun, aside from the general battle jank. Missions are quests in the campaign to get gold or items etc. and can be skipped. So you don't have to risk your army on a difficult fight.

Primarily you expand your economy and domain via Conquering, or Diplomacy. The diplomacy system is pretty well done, you can make friends or enemies, or enemies out of friends etc. I fixated heavily on diplomacy to carry me through Hard Mode. Opting to make alliances with everyone possible and send them after my enemies, or be a buffer between me and invading forces. Let everyone else fight each other while expanding my influence subjugating the immediate surroundings etc. A lot to think about when planning and executing your turns, pretty easy to run into disaster as well. I wouldn't have won the campaign on hard mode without save scumming a shitload, so that I didn't make game losing mistakes, which I made lots of, as a beginner.

Due to how engaged I was playing through the campaign, with all the decision making and army mobilization - I'm pretty hopeful for trying out 2 and 3, or maybe just 3. Im really hoping they fixed the Jank in the battles, so that I can enjoy that part of the game more. Will probaby update this according to what I discover when I get around to trying it. Im guessing there are improvements and it might be better worth your time and money to just skip 1 and 2, and only buy 3, and then extras for playing different races if you absolutely love the game.

If you like the CIV games, or Hero's of Might and Magic, or Age of Empires, this might be up your alley. Pretty safe to say it's a mashup of those game types. A little of each.

*UPDATE* - I tried playing 3, and I kinda want a refund. In the tutorial campaign, pieces of the map were missing on the battlefield, units underneath the map, not visible, and it crashed after I completed the first tutorial battle, forcing me to do it again. Not a great intro experience, and from reading, seems like these aren't isolated problems and people run mods just to fix the numerous problems with the game. If getting the first one, I would think twice about buying them all in a bundle.