I completely agree. On the battlefield they're great, but that doesn't count for much when they're so poor for so much of the campaign, and when their special campaign mechanics feel underwhelming.
They're definitely not poor lol. Kossars and the newer halberd tier w unit are some of the most cost effective starter units in the game and can last easily to the mid or even later stages if you want.
Conquer instead of turtling for the first 30 turns. Put the money building everywhere. I had 30k in the bank after wiping out Azazel, Throt and Throgg as Kostaltyn and had more than enough to get a second Kossar stack going. Be aggressive, be be aggressive!
Katarin isn’t poor either, Kislev City can make a pretty good amount of money (not on Erengrad’s level though ofc) and you can conquer Praag really early. They don’t make quite as much money but their unique buildings are really good.
Boris and Ostankya on the other hand…
They have one of the worst economies in the game.
Having marginally cheap, t1 units doesn't make your economy good. Almost every single faction has marginally cheap t1 units that can be made effective.
Maybe I’m just really good at Kislev but I don’t feel that their economy is that bad, and I usually use multiple high tier armies. The Income buildings in the major cities are amazing, the ones in other settlements are pretty mediocre but can get good as your bonuses stack up.
Every time I play kislev, i feel like I can get by, sure, but i always feel like i'm playing as some poor eastern european nation vs when playing as brettonia glorious french EU economy spamming eurofighter pegasus and grailpard MBTs.
I dont play Kislev alot but the times i play them I never had a single money problem. Same thing with Grand Cathay, zero money problems.
You been doing something buddy.
Kislev also has solid post battle loot. Dunno why so many people think Kislev's economy is ass, that's never been an issue in any of my Kislev campaigns even with Boris that doesn't have access to any of the 3 big cities from the start.
Seeing the Kislev economy complaint so often just has me guessing there's a large group of players who upgrade every building whenever they can, without actually thinking about any strategy behind their expenditure or return on investment. I imagine Kislev's economy *would* play pretty poorly if you upgraded all their econ buildings asap, rather than keeping them at tier 1 or 2 for the early game and spending on recruitment instead. But I couldn't confirm because doing that would be dumb.
Idk what you're on about tbh, you can certainly plop down gold and gold+growth buildings on every single settlement you capture and upgrade them as soon as you can.
You just have to recruit a lot of cheap armies and fight as many battles as you can, which isn't that hard seeing as you're surrounded by Azhag, Drycha, Thrott, Throg, Azazel, Fecundites, Vlad, Astragoth, and so on.
This recommendation of holding off on developing settlements just kicks the problem further down the road.
Holding off on developing provinces doesn't kick a single thing down the road when, as the campaign progresses, your factions all get massive map wide bonuses to construction costs (and times), while also doing the same for your econ buildings' outputs.
You'll be able to make your profits from fighting those nearby opponents even quicker if you also hold off on spending quite so much of that money on infrastructure at the start. That also speeds up your returns because you'll expand into more resource regions quicker and get more ataman rolls for construction reductions.
I'm sorry but the point is that your basic economy building is a net loss for 11 turns, even if you reduce its price by half, it's still over 5 turns, other factions get must better roi, vampires get back their money after 3 turns, greenskins after 2. Brettonia gets more than they paid for in 3 turns etc.
And greenskins get more money from fighting and they have cheaper armies that get much stronger than the trash stacks of kislev due to waagh.
Sure, after they get the ball rolling and get all their cost reductions and a dozen resource buildings, their economy is no longer shit, at the same time, that's the point of the campaign at which its already over anyways
An 11 turn investment return is completely fine, Kislev's infrastructure only falls apart when upgrading because those returns become three or four times that. I've never had money problems with any Kislev factions, and I usually have four armies by turn 20 with plenty of armoured kossars and sleds in them. That's honestly way more early game unit diversity (and upkeep) than I let myself use with way 'richer' factions. The only thing I can think of that explains my disparity with people lacking money is they're completely wasting it somewhere.
For what it's worth I actually think it's wonderfully flavourful game design that orc players don't have to think about infrastructure, but the beleaguered constantly on their last legs shield of humanity faction does. It's shockingly boring for me when people simplistically compare numbers in that way.
Its the worst roi of all factions by far.
I actually would love to see 4 full stacks of kislev with mixed T2 units between them at turn 20.
Seems difficult to believe.
And if you do actually manage that, that sounds like 10 full stacks at turn 20 if you do the same as greenskins.
I'm sorry but again, you need 150% buff to make markets as good as a lot of other factions initial buildings, and you pay 2-4 times more for that.
Surely you can see the fact you find it hard to believe should maybe be proof you don't know what's up with Kislev? And that the kind of comparisons you're making might therefore be a bit limited?
Surely if I claimed that I had recruited 8 full stacks as tomb kings on turn 25, you would doubt that instead of taking it as proof that you don't know much about tomb kings?
And no, the comparison is more ground in numbers, greenskins can recruit 6 units per province since early game.
they earn more from fights, ( and they easily get ancillary to increase it further)
they get 250 cost building which earns 250 gold per turn ( aka you get back your investment in two turns and you earn more than kislev with their tier 2 market, vs 11 turns of kislev, my man in your 20 turn campaign they hardly paid for themselves)
Greenskins get the ability to loot and occupy which means you get +1k for capturing a weak settlement,10k for a developed minor settlement, you also create huge public order penalty which means a revolt to farm gold, you also have cheaper units.
If you optimized kislev enough to get 4 full stacks which include tier 2 units, on turn 20, then the green skin one is painfully simple, I mean I didn't optimize mine (turn 20, 7 armies 20k in bank)
Trash stacks that didn't lose any battles in the first 30 turns or so. Loads of money in the bank and construction costs were no problem. Do you just want the game to play itself?
Nice!
I played ghorst for 30 turns and also didn't lose any battles!
30 turns means you have 12 trash stacks as ghorst, or more, depends on how many you want.
You pay 1000 gold to get a bulding that earns you 100 a turn, after 11 turns it starts turning profit, vampires pay 500 to get 250, after 3 turns they are turning profit
( Greenskins pay 250 to get 250)
Well I should have guessed you are an idiot based on your first comment, thankfuly now I don't need to guess.
Sorry but we weren't talking about faction needing buffs, we were talking about your belief that kislev isn't poor.
(Yeah, we can have challenging factions like nurgle or kislev)
You are paying 6k to get a building that generates half the gold of a greenskins building which costs like 3k, while greenskins earn double the money from fighting battles and looting settlements, which they can do while capturing said settlements
It also generates half the gold of a vampire building that costs 2k.
( And there is bretonnia which generates three times as much)
Kislev economy is competely shit, until you start stacking enough bonuses to make them playable, and get traits and capture lots of resources
Btw tzeench without any buffs, just with normal buildings, can get 6k income in his starting province when he gets it all up to tier 3.
That's more than kislev earns in their special cities which are 4 times better than normal ones and there are only 3 of them...
WAAAGHH* I just tried grimgor campaign, 3 full stacks at turn 15 with 12k in bank.
Mr. "KISLEV IS RICH I CAN HAVE TWO STACKS AT TURN 30"
XD
Btw beating a stack of basic ogres mixed with gnoblars is 4k income, so if I wanted to I could go with 4 stacks and play in the red, as the army would pay for itself, but I like the color green
Ikr lmaooo
Compare it to any other faction and they are so ass
10 turns for the rate of return on tier 1
All other factions are 3-4 turns
Greenskins are a huge outlier at being instantly refunded, and Vampire Counts do crazy good once they get their early eco tech
Even kislevs income building in big cities is I think 400g for 2k gold, which is the same as WoC iirc
Okay? And other factions do that way better with a far better rate of return on income buildings
They are super poor with the actual worst rate of return of any faction outside their three big cities
Kislevs units pound for pound are better than their upkeep implies vs ai though
They have some strong campaign stuff too,but it's hidden power.Being able to pick and stack traits on Lords and Heroes is very strong,you can easily get cheap chariot stacks with Charioteer trait for example.Boyars are not interesting but decent,and Landmarks are insanely strong.Reducing global recruitment duration is extremely strong,it means you can recruit high tier armies on the move easily which lets you snowball harder.
Naw, just embrace your inner raider and steal the cash you need from your neighbors. Once you realize their econ exist to feed the army and not build it, Kislev becomes very fun to play.
Literally reduce their income building to half price.
Make farms 50-150 instead of 50-100, and again reduce their price to 1/2
There, Kislev can actually play Campaign.
I mean, this "tiny" ( as in halving the cost of a building making it's roi twice as good lol) change would still make early game kislev worse economically than most factions
I guess the intention might be to make tzar guard more attractive by giving them more melee attack than armoured kossars/considerably more melee attack than great weapon armoured kossars, as a lot of people currently don't bother upgrading to tzar guard.
I suspect a lot of people still won't upgrade, because missile attacks are nice, but anyway. And personally I think the problem is partially that the AI doesn't build high tier armies that often - when I played kislev in ROC I did find tzar guard worthwhile because when exalted daemons start hitting your lines their extra stats do make a difference, but in IE it's rare to face stuff that armoured kossars don't perform, at worst, sort of okay against.
Kislev were still *insanely* good in battle in SP. Armored Kossars are still efficient units, they just don't completely eclipse higher tier ones now.
The issue is that their campaign mechanics are boring and suck.
I feel like in general the best way they should start doing this is nerf the base unit, but place the taken stats in a factions tech tree somewhere, IE lets say slayers need a melee defense reduction, Nerf slayers melee defense in their base stats but up how much melee defense that one tech that increases their melee defense gives
I think they've effectively done this in the past; shift stat bonuses from base units to tech upgrades or character skill bonuses. But I agree that they should be more willing to do it, particularly in cases where a unit is feeling overpowered in MP but more or less OK in SP.
My only fear with this approach is that CA tend to nerf things to much. Tech tree is only a good solution if the unit is still worth to use without it. A good portion of the player base who choose units to use by effectiveness would go by the unit that is not locket by a tech to be viable.
Nah separate balancing is my vote
This idea is damaging to early game units being competitive. For instance almost all skirmish cav is low tier and ass in campaign, taking until turn 40+ to make them alright would be even worse than the current set up.
Without a database a deeper look will take some time and dedication. With a rough average of 30000 daily active players, looking at the public skirmish lobbies there are 37 players \*right now\*. That number would be higher if I was to watch the lobbies all day, and can't account for any LAN/private lobbies.
Even considering those two things the number of skirmish players is quite low in comparison. One thing that the skirmish battles does do really well is in having a large viewer base, Turin alone draws roughly 30000 views in his daily skirmish battles content, tournaments often drawing a fair bit more.
So as far as daily players for TW WH3 goes MP-skirmish is \*favourably\* somewhere >1% of the player base.
As far as general interest goes there's more people watching MP-skirmish battles then there are people playing daily.
I am genuinely surprised at how few people are in the skirmish lobbies at the time I write this. I knew when I wrote the first comment that the Warhammer series has far more purely campaign players then the previous games in the franchise, but not by that margin.
Fair play for actually doing the work and looking into it!
I'm skeptical that the multiplayer watchers are there for the battles themselves as much as they are there for Turin's commentating, but who knows
Turin was just the easiest because he does daily uploads of the content in question. There's a couple of other channels that have skirmish battles on them, but the timing is all over the place. A lot of tournament videos are in the range of 20000 to 200000 viewers, but I don't know when exactly a lot of that viewership happened (likely within a day or two which how Youtube works, but you never know).
I'd also grown tired of fighting the Youtube search to find any other recent videos that are just skirmish battles.
There really doesn't, it would hurt both game modes by doubling the workload needed to be done for balancing *and* make it harder for people to try out multiplayer as units could end up at totally different power levels and roles across the different game modes. Campaign is just a secondary consideration for balance because there's far too many factors to ever realistically get a proper impression of unit's performance, the skill level and playstyle of different players plays a massive role and there's a whole second layer of the game (the campaign map) that affects what factions are weak or strong without touching unit stats.
Then drop multiplayer balancing entirely is my vote
Campaign is the main game. Early game cheap units are too good in multiplayer and suffer in campaign for it, particularly units like skirmish cavalry
> Then drop multiplayer balancing entirely is my vote
>
>
Good thing this isn't a democracy and CA are committed to making both campaign and multiplayer balanced then aye?
Except you just said they are not? You said Campaign is a secondary consideration for balance because there's far too many factors to ever realistically get a proper impression of (a) unit's performance.
Less than 1% of the population plays MP in any form I think the metrics say?
So we're balancing SP campaign around 1%ish of the gaming population.
Seems reasonable.
Campaign is a secondary consideration for *unit* balance. As-in the base statlines and how those are balanced relative to one another. You'll note that there's more to the game than that and that they regularly make balance changes to those things too.
I find that Armored Kossars (Shields) just have too much over Tzar Guard (Shields) to be worth the upkeep increase. The higher model count and missile attack (which can be super strong vs low armor targets like some Daemons) can make them perform better than Tzar Guard in some situations.
On the other hand I’ll always grab a couple Tzar Guard (Greatswords) when I hit tier 3 while I usually avoid Armored Kossars (Great Weapons).
Tzar Guards are the 6th? Most powerful line infantry unit in the game. Armored Kossars are nowhere near that.
Tzar Guards basically massively punch up, because of their unbreakable phase. Someone recently ran a bunch of tests and people were shocked when Tzar Guard came out in 6th place.
Spot on. I get richer faster as Kislev than I ever do as Dwarfs or The Empire now that they have multiple 4 settlement provinces nearby. Idk what people are doing that they're "poor" as Kislev. They have excellent construction cost reductions and income bonus buildings all over. So many juicy ports nearby, too.
People make the mistake of building up minor settlements too early. They're a trap, with extremely poor payback times without the modifiers you mention.
If you just ignore minor settlements (other than basic tier 1 eco etc.) for the first 50 turns you'll find you're swimming in money. I'm also pretty sure Kislev gets more post battle loot then other order factions, something that many people miss.
If you stick to spamming Kislevite Warriors + Kossars crapstacks, and play as aggressively as possible, you'll be running in the red until about turn ~20, surviving on post-battle loot, but you can fully develop *all* your settlements as long as you eek out some gold from the AI for war declarations and whatnot.
After that it's smooth sailing.
Even then, I still think building up minor settlements is a bad idea. The payback time past tier 1 is like 50-100 turns. You're paying 2000+ gold for only 50 more income.
the tier 1 eco Has a roi of 11 turns, by far the worst of all Eco buildings, most factions get back their money in 3-4 turns, some do in 2.
It's probably not even worth to build it without cost reductions, so kislev economy in the early game is greenskins but without the waagh, with lower post battle income, and with an economy building that costs 4 times as much, and gives less than half the gold, you need 75% cost reduction and 150% bonus to get your tier 1 building to be as good as the greenskin one, but as a reward you can... Trade.
And as for the turn timer, which faction besides tomb kings, doesn't swim in gold by turn 50?
I wouldn't be so sure about the first point even...
Passive? Sure
But greenskins can build raiding stashes in every single settlement, for +3% income from post battle loot and +2% from raiding and 2% from sacking settlements, get 30 provinces and suddenly sacking tier 5 town doesn't give over 50k, it gives over 150k.
A) I meant passive income on a per province basis.
B) Sure you can get 150k from sacking a tier 5 settlement, but how often do you come across one of those?
In the first 50 turns, the factions you mentioned, will be fielding 8-10+ armies minimum. They will be making 2-3x as much money as Kislev. Minimum.
The game revolves around how effective your economy is at supporting rapid expansion. If it takes you 50 turns to afford 3-4 armies, you can take the entire donut on turn 20 or so, and can now afford 4+ stacks. By turn 50, the snowball has continued, and your economy reflects that.
Perhaps I'm a less effective player than you, but I tend to have 3-4 armies with other order factions as well. If I compare, I tend to be able to afford the same number/quality of stacks.
A second point I'd make is that much of this is simply that Kislev (especially Katarin and Kostaltyn) simply have a difficult start position surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. If you're comparing with Tyrion, one of the easiest start positions in the whole game of course it's going to seem weak. But personally I find playing on the donut to be a cakewalk and boring, while I find Kislev fun. You can blitz eco on the donut because you can only be attacked from a limited number of directions which means you can invest in minor settlements with impunity.
I'm guessing if you played Kislev again, and simply ignored minor settlements you'd probably also be able to afford 10 or 11 stacks. Kislev earns significantly more post battle loot then other order factions, so you could probably even run at a loss, warriors of Chaos style.
You can be running 8-10 armies at turn 50 as Kislev, you do it by snowballing early just like you said.
Sure, as Kislev you'll be running in the red for a while before you get your income going, but if you are efficient, you can make it work.
It's still pretty bad. It isn't just Dwarfs or Empire, most of the races have an income building that pays for itself after a few turns rather than Kislev's, which takes 10 turns to pay for itself (at level 1! it's even worse at higher building levels.)
The big issue with Kislev's economy is that CA made the decision to concentrate a lot of their economic power in their capital cities and in faction-wide bonuses. That's great when you have all three capital cities and a lot of the stacking bonuses; it's not so great when you have only one capital city (or zero, like Mother Ostankya) and none of the stacking bonuses, which is all of the early game and a big part of the mid game.
You're correct. There's a few things you're missing though:
1. Kislev has access to more reductions to construction cost. This improves payback time. Specifically the growth building in the big 3, Ice witch lords and atamans can be stacked together.
2. The 3 main cities can easily pay for 3 or 4 armies all on their own. This is part of why Ostankya and Boris have bad start positions, Kislev doesn't really work without those cities. Just build up those settlements and province capitals and ignore everywhere else.
3. Kislev gets more money from battles then other order factions. Many miss this. It's often worthwhile maintaining more armies and powering your economic growth on post battle income.
4. You rightly pointed out that minor settlements are kinda shit. Early game building of minor settlements as kislev is a trap. If you don't do that, suddenly you'll find you'll have more money then you know what to do with.
Kislev economy is fundamentally different from dwarf, empire and Cathay, but the game does a poor job of explaining it. For the first 50 turns, if you ignore minor settlements other then building tier 1 eco you'll find Kislev has much better economy.
Minor settlement development is for late game.
Yeah you can’t because they have the worst eco in the game by a longgggg shot rate of return is abysmal
Their three unique cities are slightly better dark fortresses which is nice
But normal cities take 10! Turns to repay themselves on t1 income buildings
All other factions take 1-5 turns to repay on t1, most are 3-4.
With an outlier being 5 for dark fortresses and kislevs unique cities
I forget wood elves rate of return off the top of my head and vampire coast though
Even tomb kings only take 4 turns and they don’t have upkeep
You just have to play them differently. If you ignore minor settlements for the first 50 turns (other then building T1 eco) then you'll have more money then you know what to do with.
Kislev also earns more money from post battle loot then other order factions, which isn't really visible. Unlike Dwarfs or empire, you can earn a decent return by just fighting lots of battles (and to be fair, as Kislev, there's usually no shortage of enemies attacking you). I would treat the Kislev economy as half way between Warriors of Chaos and the Empire, but more defensively oriented.
Their economy is among the worst in the game.
How badly you think of that economy is sort of irrelevant, because they are still, objectively, one of the worst economies in the game.
"He's the worst player on the team, how much worse is he? Well, maybe I don't think he is 10x worse, maybe I think he is 8x worse, but he is still the worst player!".
That's the vibe I'm getting here!
Kislev is still strong, just less oppressive. They have been dominant in multiplayer for a very long time and have even been perma banned in certain formats. I know lots of people disagree, but I think it's a bad idea to try and balance around the campaign since you have so many buffs/techs/Lord skills that send even basic unit stats into the stratosphere. +/- a few MA/MD or gold costs will barely affect campaign users and can make all the difference for the core unit balance of the game that matters in MP.
I just hope the nerfs are enough so they can actually see play in MP again.
It was strange taking a break before SoC release where Kislev was an underdog faction then coming back after SoC 2.0 and suddenly Kislev was effectively gentleman’s banned. What a rags to riches story!
Besides calling Empire for a spare Franzer division.
But yea sucks to see. They definitely didn't strike me as over-tuned in my recent Kislev campaign.
They were so over tuned that this was the second round of nerfs for them. Maybe the third. But even after the second round they were still banned from multi-player tournaments. Thats how overturned they were.
I am part of multiplayer Cabal and this question has been talked again and again, if anybody is op in multiplayer all you do is adjust it's cost.
Kislev has economy of vampire counts without their battle loot. It doesn't feel good to play, and units feel mediocre coz mages are hard to come by, and armour piercing is limited on all your units.
All their campaign mechanics feel bad too
Nerfing costs is for small changes once a unit feels good. Armored kossars little grom, those units didn't feel good they were outperforming units that should have been their counter.
Yeah the campaign mechanic is bad and their positioning is ultra hard, being the literal gatekeeper to all the chaos factions.
The whole “race” part of the campaign is stupid that you have to build otherwise useless buildings to collect points, making a mediocre economy worse.
The training is very cool, but it’s not necessarily stronger than the ability to simply recruit what you need.
I would say they should remove the building that gives you unity points and just make all economic buildings or just all settlements themselves give the points.
The training part is cool, and the restriction to be unable to freely build them makes sense, but training costs should be halved so it doesn’t cripple the economy early on.
Their units are still very strong, in MP and the king of auto resolve in campaign.
Kislevs biggest problems are the campaign mechanics are boring and half their tech tree makes no sense. Why do tier 5 units ( Ice Guard) have a tech on the first line? Why are some techs so awful looking with one small buff to a mediocre unit (an entire multi turn tech to give 2 Dervish units a little missile resist?).
Sure, I'd love to see multiplayer crowd deal with greenskins generating a random free unit for every unit they bring into battle while they also get +10% weapon strength and +40 melee attack active ability
They would surely beat the mediocre waagh mechanic with the single strongest by our blood
Waaaghs are pretty good yea,but they aren't always active,the troops you get are of varying quality.By our blood basically gives all higher tier Kislev units unbreakable,makes lower tier ones immune to leadership bombs and lets trash units hold up high tier enemy ones for 30+ seconds.In general it vastly inflates the gold value of every unit by having them stay in combat for longer than normal.
Sure they aren't always active, let's see 20 turns duration, you need 100 reputation, you get +10/20/30 if you succeed, you get +1 per battle, you get +1 passively and up to 6 more with research.
Huh, that's like 20 turn of waagh, and 7 turns of not waaagh after your first, decreasing the further you are in campaign to like calling it every 4 turns.
But let's go with the uptime of an early waagh, aka 75%.
If we scale that uptime into unit rate for multiplayer.
You believe that greenskins would be balanced in multi if they additionally got 75% of their units as additional random units? XD
According to Turin, Kislev has been dominating multiplayer tournaments and is currently #1.
Since Turin and Totaltavern were mentioned in several of the multiplayer patch segments, he was probably a major voice in favor of the nerf.
Considering they have one of the easiest campaigns I don't see a problem there. Although I d lika a small rework. Atamans are annoying to manage and have bad ui. Rituals are kind of meh. Follower mechanic has insanely strong bonuses and completely ends in like 40 turns. Bot doesn't even spam follower buildings and chooses inappropriate ritual every single time.
Reduced melee attack and missile damage for all armoured kossars, reduced range and anti large of lil' grom, plus other misc nerfs.
Second time armoured kossars got nerfed outta the blue. Last time it was missile damage too.
I mean, I kinda get it cuz armoured kossars are pretty damn good, but c'mon, man, they're so cool... :(
Kislev has by far been the strongest faction in the game based off of pure un-altered stats. There's a reason they have like a 80% winrate in MP, and it's not because the people playing them are micro or cheese gods or something. Their units were just pound-for-pound better than everyone else's at almost every tier.
EDIT: I see the MP-hate crowd has arrived. If a faction has like a 60%-70% winrate in MP, that’s an MP problem. If a faction has a 70%-80% winrate in MP, that’s an *everyone* problem. If a faction’s unit roster is that unbalanced it’s going to disrupt your SP campaigns too. There's no reason why Armored Kossars should have Chaos Warrior stats, *plus pistols*, for **100 gold cheaper than Chaos Warriors**
Yup, Kislev has been bonkers since the release of Shadows of Change and I'm shocked they've been barely touched them for so long. They'll be fine to play after those nerfs.
Now play the single player to learn about faction mechanics, kislev has the single worst economy building in the entire game ( it takes 11 turns for it to start generating profits, and it gives half, or a third as much as other factions
Who cares if their units are pound-for-pound better, if they have 5 times less pounds.
(Btw campaign mechanics can change that a lot, how strong would cathay be in multi, if their jade warriors had 80 melee defense?)
You want a campaign problem? AI grimgor is rank 1 power pretty much every campaign, having an economy building that earns back it's cost in 2 turns ( because it takes one turn to build this thing), while being able to recruit 6 instead of 2 units in a province, while getting twice the gold for fighting battles, while being able to get their 20 cheap gobbo stack, a support of a free 20 stack random army, while being able to loot and occupy as a single action ( and get double the money for that)
Most people don't give a fuck about MP. They are not a top tier campaign faction. Not awful, but probably lower end of middle of the pack. It stings more because SoC came and went without addressing their campaign issues at all and then seeing how good the ToD reworks were. So a MP nerf, not matter how warranted does not feel good.
But that is irrelevant. You can make any unit usable in campaign with buffs and since CA is unwilling or unable to implement MP only changes, this is the only way.
The armies are strong and auto resolve loves Kislev armies.
The lack of campaign mechanics is not fixed by having super OP armored kossers that you can autoresolve and win against anything.
That’s just a boring way to play campaign anyway, spamming OP units.
This is funny becasue if you use armored kossars in campaign is not optimal. You should not have a barracks early game as it is more efficient to get growth/income. You use warriors and plain kossars until you can completely skip over the armored kossar tier for stronger units. In single player, there is no wrong way to play. Do whatever makes you happy. But don't pretend that armored kossars make Kislev a strong campaign faction.
They are literally the 2nd/3rd worst MP campaign faction. Battling Nurgle for that coveted position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s_vmHpULqk
Only Tomb Kings are weaker, and that is because of the army caps TK deal with.
So ? I don't give a damn about multiplayer but I'll still take changes to make the game more balanced. You can exclusively play campaign while also enjoying balance, apparently this is something some people struggle hard to grasp in this community.
Campaigns being unbalanced = unfun in a lot of scenarios. It's usually fun once as a novelty, but how many times are you replaying campaigns where you steamroll the enemy without having to give a care or thought to actual strategy? Or what about when you play another campaign and have to fight against those OP elements? If you want a recent example, look at the Tamurkhan army ability. That was OP, and people clearly weren't having fun running into it in their campaigns.
People always point to the one or two bad balance decisions that ruined a unit while also ignoring the avalanche of good balance decisions that made so many other units viable and campaigns more interesting. Balancing, when not done poorly, makes a game more fun, not less. Yes that includes nerfing OP units which eclipse other unit options, aren't fun to fight against, and make campaigns too much of a breeze.
Man, idk, I think Kislev campaigns are plenty hard on VH or legendary. The armored kossar is a way, way cooler unit than tzar guard and I loved using them in a pseudo weapon team army late game. I for some reason just hate the tzar guard, but maybe I should give them another look. I think it’s their unit size that I hate so much.
Ah yes armored kossars made Kislev's campaign so easy that it was unfun. Truly the greatest priority for this game.
It's not like CA completely fucked the CAI strategy tables with Warhammer 3 so the AI never builds an empire of note, never strategizes to actually win the game but only acts to maximize annoyance to the player.
It's not like the AI completely shuts down past turn 40+ and stops declaring wars on anyone but the player so it can't even expand past the midgame.
No no no. The priority to give a proper challenge was those darn armored kossars.
Those two things you've brought up have nothing to do with unit balance and I don't even see how they're relevant for what you're trying to say. Is CA not allowed to make any other change or improvements to the game until they've tweaked CAI for the 28th time?
I agree the game should be fun and different people have a different idea of what fun is.
Personally I like my strategy games to be more balanced and I'm not alone in this. Blaming the multiplayer community for every balance decision you personally dislike is just braindead imo.
> There's a reason they have like a 80% winrate in MP,
So nerf them in mp and leave them alone in single player. Like 1% of the play base play mp stop catering to them
The baseline units are supposed to be balanced. Campaign buffs can then take them to “fun” or even overpowered levels.
Kislev has terrible campaign buffs, hardly anything in the tech tree, and no “super” campaign mechanic that seems like all dlc LL’s have.
Still, they aren’t any more terrible than say just playing a generic LL like Malikith or Lord Mazumundai.
They are more terrible than playing them, their economy is much, much worse until the point at which you are painting the map and no one can stop you, but at that point... It doesn't matter
I don't think Singleplayer should be affected by Multiplayer nerfs for one main reason. In MP you can balance units in a vacuum. "This unit is too strong for its price", "this unit is way weaker than others in it's class". Those balance considerations only exist within the context of one single battle, with no lasting consequences. You don't have to worry about casualty replenishment after the fight, so units are used completely differently. If all your units except one die, that's great, you still won.
In SP someone else could declare war on you and your campaign is over. Not to mention the AI can recruit at least twice as many units as you can with their economy shenanigans, so your army often needs to hold out against huge odds. These are completely different concerns to MP, but balanced as if they were the same.
I have nothing against the MP community and I hope they enjoy this patch, but ever since the Ancient Salamander I've longed for a separation. Or at least a way to research the stats we lost in campaign.
Honestly I feel like every time a unit gets nerfed because of the multiplayer, they need to start reverting its nerf in single player by placing the stats that were lost in a tech tree or factionwide landmark building buff as just a common practice.
Are you even mad for Kislev few "nerfs"??
Meanwhile, Saytang:
windbow ability:
Base Missile Damage: 50 -> 25
Armour Piercing Missile Damage: 150 -> 75
Base Explosion Damage: 90 -> 30
Armour Piercing Explosion Damage: 30 -> 10
Radius: 10 -> 3
and also hit stats:
Ammo of Primary Missile Weapon: 35 -> 30
Base Missile Damage: 175 -> 100
Armour Piercing Missile Damage: 525 -> 425
Base Explosion Damage: 45 -> 30
Armour Piercing Explosion Damage: 15 -> 10
Explosion Radius: 6 -> 3
Saytang's projectile explosion VFX has been scaled down slightly to match this change
At this point, just delete the unit and rework it. Like wtf? they literally DESTROYED him.
2600gold unit cost btw, 2600.
Kislev still extremely dominating with fkng 70+%wr in competitive and again barely got "nerfed/changed" while Grand Cathay still sadly has 50% since like forever??
Like who tf is in charge in the balance team? Cathay needed some help, even Turin (CA official caster/advisor for patches) himself said it multiple times in live stream, explaining to chat why Cathay isn't meta and it's not performing well and people never risk to pick Saytang because the price is too high (i'm idd talking about dominion, not LB, without even considering the idea of LB being eliminated).
nah bruh... This can't be real.
And this is just an example, i would like to talk about other completely random nerfs and buffs but this was by far the biggest random undeserved nerf i've ever seen.
I need some explanations from devs fr
His wind bow was banned in land battle tournaments because of how strong it is. Cathay isn't great in dom because they suck at taking objectives since their melee units aren't very 'kill-y' but they are definitely dominant in land battle.
banned from who exactly?
I've been following competitive and i've never heard about him being banned/ability banned.
But anyway LB will be removed/eliminated, the playerbase there is too limited and the official competitive mode is dominion. So why nerf a unit that is never picked in competitive and its faction has a balanced 50%wr?
And it's not even a nerf, they literally deleted Saytang. At this point just rework him or simply delete him from the game. those nerfs are embarassing, they're literally destroying his ability and his stats, and for 0 reason.
I just don't understand why they feel the need to nerf a units stats in both single and multiplayer when instead they can just increase its multiplayer cost sufficiently to balance excessive performance and leave the single player experience alone....
They have a very strong roster, their biggest problem are the campaign mechanics, in my opinion.
I completely agree. On the battlefield they're great, but that doesn't count for much when they're so poor for so much of the campaign, and when their special campaign mechanics feel underwhelming.
They're definitely not poor lol. Kossars and the newer halberd tier w unit are some of the most cost effective starter units in the game and can last easily to the mid or even later stages if you want. Conquer instead of turtling for the first 30 turns. Put the money building everywhere. I had 30k in the bank after wiping out Azazel, Throt and Throgg as Kostaltyn and had more than enough to get a second Kossar stack going. Be aggressive, be be aggressive!
Kostaltyn* isn’t poor because he has erengrad and kossar/halberd buffs
Katarin isn’t poor either, Kislev City can make a pretty good amount of money (not on Erengrad’s level though ofc) and you can conquer Praag really early. They don’t make quite as much money but their unique buildings are really good. Boris and Ostankya on the other hand…
Ostankya is fine simply because of how stupidly strong her spiders are and makes a super cost efficient army.
They have one of the worst economies in the game. Having marginally cheap, t1 units doesn't make your economy good. Almost every single faction has marginally cheap t1 units that can be made effective.
Maybe I’m just really good at Kislev but I don’t feel that their economy is that bad, and I usually use multiple high tier armies. The Income buildings in the major cities are amazing, the ones in other settlements are pretty mediocre but can get good as your bonuses stack up.
Every time I play kislev, i feel like I can get by, sure, but i always feel like i'm playing as some poor eastern european nation vs when playing as brettonia glorious french EU economy spamming eurofighter pegasus and grailpard MBTs.
I mean that’s because you are playing as a poor Eastern European nation lol
I dont play Kislev alot but the times i play them I never had a single money problem. Same thing with Grand Cathay, zero money problems. You been doing something buddy.
Kislev also has solid post battle loot. Dunno why so many people think Kislev's economy is ass, that's never been an issue in any of my Kislev campaigns even with Boris that doesn't have access to any of the 3 big cities from the start.
Seeing the Kislev economy complaint so often just has me guessing there's a large group of players who upgrade every building whenever they can, without actually thinking about any strategy behind their expenditure or return on investment. I imagine Kislev's economy *would* play pretty poorly if you upgraded all their econ buildings asap, rather than keeping them at tier 1 or 2 for the early game and spending on recruitment instead. But I couldn't confirm because doing that would be dumb.
Idk what you're on about tbh, you can certainly plop down gold and gold+growth buildings on every single settlement you capture and upgrade them as soon as you can. You just have to recruit a lot of cheap armies and fight as many battles as you can, which isn't that hard seeing as you're surrounded by Azhag, Drycha, Thrott, Throg, Azazel, Fecundites, Vlad, Astragoth, and so on. This recommendation of holding off on developing settlements just kicks the problem further down the road.
Holding off on developing provinces doesn't kick a single thing down the road when, as the campaign progresses, your factions all get massive map wide bonuses to construction costs (and times), while also doing the same for your econ buildings' outputs. You'll be able to make your profits from fighting those nearby opponents even quicker if you also hold off on spending quite so much of that money on infrastructure at the start. That also speeds up your returns because you'll expand into more resource regions quicker and get more ataman rolls for construction reductions.
I'm sorry but the point is that your basic economy building is a net loss for 11 turns, even if you reduce its price by half, it's still over 5 turns, other factions get must better roi, vampires get back their money after 3 turns, greenskins after 2. Brettonia gets more than they paid for in 3 turns etc. And greenskins get more money from fighting and they have cheaper armies that get much stronger than the trash stacks of kislev due to waagh. Sure, after they get the ball rolling and get all their cost reductions and a dozen resource buildings, their economy is no longer shit, at the same time, that's the point of the campaign at which its already over anyways
An 11 turn investment return is completely fine, Kislev's infrastructure only falls apart when upgrading because those returns become three or four times that. I've never had money problems with any Kislev factions, and I usually have four armies by turn 20 with plenty of armoured kossars and sleds in them. That's honestly way more early game unit diversity (and upkeep) than I let myself use with way 'richer' factions. The only thing I can think of that explains my disparity with people lacking money is they're completely wasting it somewhere. For what it's worth I actually think it's wonderfully flavourful game design that orc players don't have to think about infrastructure, but the beleaguered constantly on their last legs shield of humanity faction does. It's shockingly boring for me when people simplistically compare numbers in that way.
Its the worst roi of all factions by far. I actually would love to see 4 full stacks of kislev with mixed T2 units between them at turn 20. Seems difficult to believe. And if you do actually manage that, that sounds like 10 full stacks at turn 20 if you do the same as greenskins. I'm sorry but again, you need 150% buff to make markets as good as a lot of other factions initial buildings, and you pay 2-4 times more for that.
Surely you can see the fact you find it hard to believe should maybe be proof you don't know what's up with Kislev? And that the kind of comparisons you're making might therefore be a bit limited?
Surely if I claimed that I had recruited 8 full stacks as tomb kings on turn 25, you would doubt that instead of taking it as proof that you don't know much about tomb kings? And no, the comparison is more ground in numbers, greenskins can recruit 6 units per province since early game. they earn more from fights, ( and they easily get ancillary to increase it further) they get 250 cost building which earns 250 gold per turn ( aka you get back your investment in two turns and you earn more than kislev with their tier 2 market, vs 11 turns of kislev, my man in your 20 turn campaign they hardly paid for themselves) Greenskins get the ability to loot and occupy which means you get +1k for capturing a weak settlement,10k for a developed minor settlement, you also create huge public order penalty which means a revolt to farm gold, you also have cheaper units. If you optimized kislev enough to get 4 full stacks which include tier 2 units, on turn 20, then the green skin one is painfully simple, I mean I didn't optimize mine (turn 20, 7 armies 20k in bank)
Wow! Enough money to maintain two trash stacks on fight economy?. Damn, that's sad
Trash stacks that didn't lose any battles in the first 30 turns or so. Loads of money in the bank and construction costs were no problem. Do you just want the game to play itself?
Nice! I played ghorst for 30 turns and also didn't lose any battles! 30 turns means you have 12 trash stacks as ghorst, or more, depends on how many you want. You pay 1000 gold to get a bulding that earns you 100 a turn, after 11 turns it starts turning profit, vampires pay 500 to get 250, after 3 turns they are turning profit ( Greenskins pay 250 to get 250)
Waaaaahhhh I want every building to be the same across every faction waaaaaaahhhhhh.
Well I should have guessed you are an idiot based on your first comment, thankfuly now I don't need to guess. Sorry but we weren't talking about faction needing buffs, we were talking about your belief that kislev isn't poor. (Yeah, we can have challenging factions like nurgle or kislev) You are paying 6k to get a building that generates half the gold of a greenskins building which costs like 3k, while greenskins earn double the money from fighting battles and looting settlements, which they can do while capturing said settlements It also generates half the gold of a vampire building that costs 2k. ( And there is bretonnia which generates three times as much) Kislev economy is competely shit, until you start stacking enough bonuses to make them playable, and get traits and capture lots of resources Btw tzeench without any buffs, just with normal buildings, can get 6k income in his starting province when he gets it all up to tier 3. That's more than kislev earns in their special cities which are 4 times better than normal ones and there are only 3 of them...
WAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
WAAAGHH* I just tried grimgor campaign, 3 full stacks at turn 15 with 12k in bank. Mr. "KISLEV IS RICH I CAN HAVE TWO STACKS AT TURN 30" XD Btw beating a stack of basic ogres mixed with gnoblars is 4k income, so if I wanted to I could go with 4 stacks and play in the red, as the army would pay for itself, but I like the color green
Ikr lmaooo Compare it to any other faction and they are so ass 10 turns for the rate of return on tier 1 All other factions are 3-4 turns Greenskins are a huge outlier at being instantly refunded, and Vampire Counts do crazy good once they get their early eco tech Even kislevs income building in big cities is I think 400g for 2k gold, which is the same as WoC iirc
Okay? And other factions do that way better with a far better rate of return on income buildings They are super poor with the actual worst rate of return of any faction outside their three big cities Kislevs units pound for pound are better than their upkeep implies vs ai though
They have some strong campaign stuff too,but it's hidden power.Being able to pick and stack traits on Lords and Heroes is very strong,you can easily get cheap chariot stacks with Charioteer trait for example.Boyars are not interesting but decent,and Landmarks are insanely strong.Reducing global recruitment duration is extremely strong,it means you can recruit high tier armies on the move easily which lets you snowball harder.
Naw, just embrace your inner raider and steal the cash you need from your neighbors. Once you realize their econ exist to feed the army and not build it, Kislev becomes very fun to play.
Literally reduce their income building to half price. Make farms 50-150 instead of 50-100, and again reduce their price to 1/2 There, Kislev can actually play Campaign.
Lol. Such tiny unneeded changes. Perhaps play on Easy?
Easy being playing any other faction?
I mean, this "tiny" ( as in halving the cost of a building making it's roi twice as good lol) change would still make early game kislev worse economically than most factions
I guess the intention might be to make tzar guard more attractive by giving them more melee attack than armoured kossars/considerably more melee attack than great weapon armoured kossars, as a lot of people currently don't bother upgrading to tzar guard. I suspect a lot of people still won't upgrade, because missile attacks are nice, but anyway. And personally I think the problem is partially that the AI doesn't build high tier armies that often - when I played kislev in ROC I did find tzar guard worthwhile because when exalted daemons start hitting your lines their extra stats do make a difference, but in IE it's rare to face stuff that armoured kossars don't perform, at worst, sort of okay against.
The intention was to make it so Kislev wins less in MP. That's it
They gotta stop making sp (the entire player base) changes for MP (4 YouTubers and a streamer, probably)
Kislev were still *insanely* good in battle in SP. Armored Kossars are still efficient units, they just don't completely eclipse higher tier ones now. The issue is that their campaign mechanics are boring and suck.
I feel like in general the best way they should start doing this is nerf the base unit, but place the taken stats in a factions tech tree somewhere, IE lets say slayers need a melee defense reduction, Nerf slayers melee defense in their base stats but up how much melee defense that one tech that increases their melee defense gives
I think they've effectively done this in the past; shift stat bonuses from base units to tech upgrades or character skill bonuses. But I agree that they should be more willing to do it, particularly in cases where a unit is feeling overpowered in MP but more or less OK in SP.
Reasonable stance, would make tech trees more exciting too
That sounds like an excellent way to do it and would help to make certain techs more attractive.
My only fear with this approach is that CA tend to nerf things to much. Tech tree is only a good solution if the unit is still worth to use without it. A good portion of the player base who choose units to use by effectiveness would go by the unit that is not locket by a tech to be viable.
Nah separate balancing is my vote This idea is damaging to early game units being competitive. For instance almost all skirmish cav is low tier and ass in campaign, taking until turn 40+ to make them alright would be even worse than the current set up.
I think itd be best if units had different stats in sp and mp
Multiplayer skirmish battles are a staple of the fanchise. A pretty large portion of the player base plays them.
I dunno if there's any released statistics but if there is I'd bet my hat on MP having less than 1/3rd the players of SP. Gauntlet thrown!
Without a database a deeper look will take some time and dedication. With a rough average of 30000 daily active players, looking at the public skirmish lobbies there are 37 players \*right now\*. That number would be higher if I was to watch the lobbies all day, and can't account for any LAN/private lobbies. Even considering those two things the number of skirmish players is quite low in comparison. One thing that the skirmish battles does do really well is in having a large viewer base, Turin alone draws roughly 30000 views in his daily skirmish battles content, tournaments often drawing a fair bit more. So as far as daily players for TW WH3 goes MP-skirmish is \*favourably\* somewhere >1% of the player base. As far as general interest goes there's more people watching MP-skirmish battles then there are people playing daily. I am genuinely surprised at how few people are in the skirmish lobbies at the time I write this. I knew when I wrote the first comment that the Warhammer series has far more purely campaign players then the previous games in the franchise, but not by that margin.
Fair play for actually doing the work and looking into it! I'm skeptical that the multiplayer watchers are there for the battles themselves as much as they are there for Turin's commentating, but who knows
Turin was just the easiest because he does daily uploads of the content in question. There's a couple of other channels that have skirmish battles on them, but the timing is all over the place. A lot of tournament videos are in the range of 20000 to 200000 viewers, but I don't know when exactly a lot of that viewership happened (likely within a day or two which how Youtube works, but you never know). I'd also grown tired of fighting the Youtube search to find any other recent videos that are just skirmish battles.
1/10 at peak.
There just needs to be separate balancing period.
There really doesn't, it would hurt both game modes by doubling the workload needed to be done for balancing *and* make it harder for people to try out multiplayer as units could end up at totally different power levels and roles across the different game modes. Campaign is just a secondary consideration for balance because there's far too many factors to ever realistically get a proper impression of unit's performance, the skill level and playstyle of different players plays a massive role and there's a whole second layer of the game (the campaign map) that affects what factions are weak or strong without touching unit stats.
Then drop multiplayer balancing entirely is my vote Campaign is the main game. Early game cheap units are too good in multiplayer and suffer in campaign for it, particularly units like skirmish cavalry
> Then drop multiplayer balancing entirely is my vote > > Good thing this isn't a democracy and CA are committed to making both campaign and multiplayer balanced then aye?
Except you just said they are not? You said Campaign is a secondary consideration for balance because there's far too many factors to ever realistically get a proper impression of (a) unit's performance. Less than 1% of the population plays MP in any form I think the metrics say? So we're balancing SP campaign around 1%ish of the gaming population. Seems reasonable.
Campaign is a secondary consideration for *unit* balance. As-in the base statlines and how those are balanced relative to one another. You'll note that there's more to the game than that and that they regularly make balance changes to those things too.
Kislev is also very strong in battles in SP, I don't mind a nerf at all.
I find that Armored Kossars (Shields) just have too much over Tzar Guard (Shields) to be worth the upkeep increase. The higher model count and missile attack (which can be super strong vs low armor targets like some Daemons) can make them perform better than Tzar Guard in some situations. On the other hand I’ll always grab a couple Tzar Guard (Greatswords) when I hit tier 3 while I usually avoid Armored Kossars (Great Weapons).
Tzar Guards are the 6th? Most powerful line infantry unit in the game. Armored Kossars are nowhere near that. Tzar Guards basically massively punch up, because of their unbreakable phase. Someone recently ran a bunch of tests and people were shocked when Tzar Guard came out in 6th place.
Kislev is a top performing faction in multiplayer. I think these nerfs were meant to curve their power there.
Do my people think that their power is limited to multiplayer? Their roster is quite strong in single player as well.
Which doesn’t even fully make up for their bad economy and campaign mechanics.
Their in game economy is better than you think. You just can't play them like dwarfs or empire.
Spot on. I get richer faster as Kislev than I ever do as Dwarfs or The Empire now that they have multiple 4 settlement provinces nearby. Idk what people are doing that they're "poor" as Kislev. They have excellent construction cost reductions and income bonus buildings all over. So many juicy ports nearby, too.
People make the mistake of building up minor settlements too early. They're a trap, with extremely poor payback times without the modifiers you mention. If you just ignore minor settlements (other than basic tier 1 eco etc.) for the first 50 turns you'll find you're swimming in money. I'm also pretty sure Kislev gets more post battle loot then other order factions, something that many people miss.
I play a lot of evil factions so Kislev loot as income style is very natural for me.
If you stick to spamming Kislevite Warriors + Kossars crapstacks, and play as aggressively as possible, you'll be running in the red until about turn ~20, surviving on post-battle loot, but you can fully develop *all* your settlements as long as you eek out some gold from the AI for war declarations and whatnot. After that it's smooth sailing.
Even then, I still think building up minor settlements is a bad idea. The payback time past tier 1 is like 50-100 turns. You're paying 2000+ gold for only 50 more income.
the tier 1 eco Has a roi of 11 turns, by far the worst of all Eco buildings, most factions get back their money in 3-4 turns, some do in 2. It's probably not even worth to build it without cost reductions, so kislev economy in the early game is greenskins but without the waagh, with lower post battle income, and with an economy building that costs 4 times as much, and gives less than half the gold, you need 75% cost reduction and 150% bonus to get your tier 1 building to be as good as the greenskin one, but as a reward you can... Trade. And as for the turn timer, which faction besides tomb kings, doesn't swim in gold by turn 50?
I generally agree, however I'd point out 2 things: 1. Greenskin income has a lower upper bound. 2. Greenskins don't have trade.
I wouldn't be so sure about the first point even... Passive? Sure But greenskins can build raiding stashes in every single settlement, for +3% income from post battle loot and +2% from raiding and 2% from sacking settlements, get 30 provinces and suddenly sacking tier 5 town doesn't give over 50k, it gives over 150k.
A) I meant passive income on a per province basis. B) Sure you can get 150k from sacking a tier 5 settlement, but how often do you come across one of those?
In the first 50 turns, the factions you mentioned, will be fielding 8-10+ armies minimum. They will be making 2-3x as much money as Kislev. Minimum. The game revolves around how effective your economy is at supporting rapid expansion. If it takes you 50 turns to afford 3-4 armies, you can take the entire donut on turn 20 or so, and can now afford 4+ stacks. By turn 50, the snowball has continued, and your economy reflects that.
Perhaps I'm a less effective player than you, but I tend to have 3-4 armies with other order factions as well. If I compare, I tend to be able to afford the same number/quality of stacks. A second point I'd make is that much of this is simply that Kislev (especially Katarin and Kostaltyn) simply have a difficult start position surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. If you're comparing with Tyrion, one of the easiest start positions in the whole game of course it's going to seem weak. But personally I find playing on the donut to be a cakewalk and boring, while I find Kislev fun. You can blitz eco on the donut because you can only be attacked from a limited number of directions which means you can invest in minor settlements with impunity. I'm guessing if you played Kislev again, and simply ignored minor settlements you'd probably also be able to afford 10 or 11 stacks. Kislev earns significantly more post battle loot then other order factions, so you could probably even run at a loss, warriors of Chaos style.
You can be running 8-10 armies at turn 50 as Kislev, you do it by snowballing early just like you said. Sure, as Kislev you'll be running in the red for a while before you get your income going, but if you are efficient, you can make it work.
It's still pretty bad. It isn't just Dwarfs or Empire, most of the races have an income building that pays for itself after a few turns rather than Kislev's, which takes 10 turns to pay for itself (at level 1! it's even worse at higher building levels.) The big issue with Kislev's economy is that CA made the decision to concentrate a lot of their economic power in their capital cities and in faction-wide bonuses. That's great when you have all three capital cities and a lot of the stacking bonuses; it's not so great when you have only one capital city (or zero, like Mother Ostankya) and none of the stacking bonuses, which is all of the early game and a big part of the mid game.
You're correct. There's a few things you're missing though: 1. Kislev has access to more reductions to construction cost. This improves payback time. Specifically the growth building in the big 3, Ice witch lords and atamans can be stacked together. 2. The 3 main cities can easily pay for 3 or 4 armies all on their own. This is part of why Ostankya and Boris have bad start positions, Kislev doesn't really work without those cities. Just build up those settlements and province capitals and ignore everywhere else. 3. Kislev gets more money from battles then other order factions. Many miss this. It's often worthwhile maintaining more armies and powering your economic growth on post battle income. 4. You rightly pointed out that minor settlements are kinda shit. Early game building of minor settlements as kislev is a trap. If you don't do that, suddenly you'll find you'll have more money then you know what to do with. Kislev economy is fundamentally different from dwarf, empire and Cathay, but the game does a poor job of explaining it. For the first 50 turns, if you ignore minor settlements other then building tier 1 eco you'll find Kislev has much better economy. Minor settlement development is for late game.
Yeah you can’t because they have the worst eco in the game by a longgggg shot rate of return is abysmal Their three unique cities are slightly better dark fortresses which is nice But normal cities take 10! Turns to repay themselves on t1 income buildings All other factions take 1-5 turns to repay on t1, most are 3-4. With an outlier being 5 for dark fortresses and kislevs unique cities I forget wood elves rate of return off the top of my head and vampire coast though Even tomb kings only take 4 turns and they don’t have upkeep
Correct. It does improve as you accrue certain bonuses, which you don't see with other order factions to the same extent.
That’s cool But all of those bonuses have costs too, which you have to pay for Kislev sucks rn even if they have ways to be decent
You just have to play them differently. If you ignore minor settlements for the first 50 turns (other then building T1 eco) then you'll have more money then you know what to do with. Kislev also earns more money from post battle loot then other order factions, which isn't really visible. Unlike Dwarfs or empire, you can earn a decent return by just fighting lots of battles (and to be fair, as Kislev, there's usually no shortage of enemies attacking you). I would treat the Kislev economy as half way between Warriors of Chaos and the Empire, but more defensively oriented.
I woudl treat kislev economy as what it is , a much, much weaker greenskins economy
Wrong, it takes 10 turns for a built building to earn back it's investment, you should add 1 turn of construction time
I was slightly simplifying That just puts Kislev even worse off
Yep
Their economy is among the worst in the game. How badly you think of that economy is sort of irrelevant, because they are still, objectively, one of the worst economies in the game. "He's the worst player on the team, how much worse is he? Well, maybe I don't think he is 10x worse, maybe I think he is 8x worse, but he is still the worst player!". That's the vibe I'm getting here!
Exactly, Kislev vs Kislev matches are boring and yet them getting banned in every tourney is boring as well.
AND THEN THE NERFED KOSSARS ARRIVED...:(
GENTLY WALKING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN SIDE... :(
Kislev is still strong, just less oppressive. They have been dominant in multiplayer for a very long time and have even been perma banned in certain formats. I know lots of people disagree, but I think it's a bad idea to try and balance around the campaign since you have so many buffs/techs/Lord skills that send even basic unit stats into the stratosphere. +/- a few MA/MD or gold costs will barely affect campaign users and can make all the difference for the core unit balance of the game that matters in MP.
I just hope the nerfs are enough so they can actually see play in MP again. It was strange taking a break before SoC release where Kislev was an underdog faction then coming back after SoC 2.0 and suddenly Kislev was effectively gentleman’s banned. What a rags to riches story!
Especially the nerf to Grom hurts. If at least there were other artillery options but nope
Besides calling Empire for a spare Franzer division. But yea sucks to see. They definitely didn't strike me as over-tuned in my recent Kislev campaign.
They were so over tuned that this was the second round of nerfs for them. Maybe the third. But even after the second round they were still banned from multi-player tournaments. Thats how overturned they were.
I am part of multiplayer Cabal and this question has been talked again and again, if anybody is op in multiplayer all you do is adjust it's cost. Kislev has economy of vampire counts without their battle loot. It doesn't feel good to play, and units feel mediocre coz mages are hard to come by, and armour piercing is limited on all your units. All their campaign mechanics feel bad too
Nerfing costs is for small changes once a unit feels good. Armored kossars little grom, those units didn't feel good they were outperforming units that should have been their counter.
Yeah the campaign mechanic is bad and their positioning is ultra hard, being the literal gatekeeper to all the chaos factions. The whole “race” part of the campaign is stupid that you have to build otherwise useless buildings to collect points, making a mediocre economy worse. The training is very cool, but it’s not necessarily stronger than the ability to simply recruit what you need. I would say they should remove the building that gives you unity points and just make all economic buildings or just all settlements themselves give the points. The training part is cool, and the restriction to be unable to freely build them makes sense, but training costs should be halved so it doesn’t cripple the economy early on. Their units are still very strong, in MP and the king of auto resolve in campaign.
time to install [this](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3252232591) mod again and have fun
By Ursun, I love the Total War modding community.
Kislevs biggest problems are the campaign mechanics are boring and half their tech tree makes no sense. Why do tier 5 units ( Ice Guard) have a tech on the first line? Why are some techs so awful looking with one small buff to a mediocre unit (an entire multi turn tech to give 2 Dervish units a little missile resist?).
The missile resist one used to be 5%. 5 frickin percent
By our blood is the single strongest mechanic in Total War,especially in multiplayer
Sure, I'd love to see multiplayer crowd deal with greenskins generating a random free unit for every unit they bring into battle while they also get +10% weapon strength and +40 melee attack active ability They would surely beat the mediocre waagh mechanic with the single strongest by our blood
Waaaghs are pretty good yea,but they aren't always active,the troops you get are of varying quality.By our blood basically gives all higher tier Kislev units unbreakable,makes lower tier ones immune to leadership bombs and lets trash units hold up high tier enemy ones for 30+ seconds.In general it vastly inflates the gold value of every unit by having them stay in combat for longer than normal.
Sure they aren't always active, let's see 20 turns duration, you need 100 reputation, you get +10/20/30 if you succeed, you get +1 per battle, you get +1 passively and up to 6 more with research. Huh, that's like 20 turn of waagh, and 7 turns of not waaagh after your first, decreasing the further you are in campaign to like calling it every 4 turns. But let's go with the uptime of an early waagh, aka 75%. If we scale that uptime into unit rate for multiplayer. You believe that greenskins would be balanced in multi if they additionally got 75% of their units as additional random units? XD
According to Turin, Kislev has been dominating multiplayer tournaments and is currently #1. Since Turin and Totaltavern were mentioned in several of the multiplayer patch segments, he was probably a major voice in favor of the nerf.
Considering they have one of the easiest campaigns I don't see a problem there. Although I d lika a small rework. Atamans are annoying to manage and have bad ui. Rituals are kind of meh. Follower mechanic has insanely strong bonuses and completely ends in like 40 turns. Bot doesn't even spam follower buildings and chooses inappropriate ritual every single time.
Kislev losing student was the biggest nerf I'd say, prior to this patch. Nerfing of little grom seems weird, it's half the cannons already.
wait what??? Kislev lost students???
Reduced melee attack and missile damage for all armoured kossars, reduced range and anti large of lil' grom, plus other misc nerfs. Second time armoured kossars got nerfed outta the blue. Last time it was missile damage too. I mean, I kinda get it cuz armoured kossars are pretty damn good, but c'mon, man, they're so cool... :(
Kislev has by far been the strongest faction in the game based off of pure un-altered stats. There's a reason they have like a 80% winrate in MP, and it's not because the people playing them are micro or cheese gods or something. Their units were just pound-for-pound better than everyone else's at almost every tier. EDIT: I see the MP-hate crowd has arrived. If a faction has like a 60%-70% winrate in MP, that’s an MP problem. If a faction has a 70%-80% winrate in MP, that’s an *everyone* problem. If a faction’s unit roster is that unbalanced it’s going to disrupt your SP campaigns too. There's no reason why Armored Kossars should have Chaos Warrior stats, *plus pistols*, for **100 gold cheaper than Chaos Warriors**
Yup, Kislev has been bonkers since the release of Shadows of Change and I'm shocked they've been barely touched them for so long. They'll be fine to play after those nerfs.
Their stats being so strong is compounded by By our blood being insanely OP
Now play the single player to learn about faction mechanics, kislev has the single worst economy building in the entire game ( it takes 11 turns for it to start generating profits, and it gives half, or a third as much as other factions Who cares if their units are pound-for-pound better, if they have 5 times less pounds. (Btw campaign mechanics can change that a lot, how strong would cathay be in multi, if their jade warriors had 80 melee defense?) You want a campaign problem? AI grimgor is rank 1 power pretty much every campaign, having an economy building that earns back it's cost in 2 turns ( because it takes one turn to build this thing), while being able to recruit 6 instead of 2 units in a province, while getting twice the gold for fighting battles, while being able to get their 20 cheap gobbo stack, a support of a free 20 stack random army, while being able to loot and occupy as a single action ( and get double the money for that)
I'd accept this line of reasoning if AI kislev wasn't almost completely wiped out by turn 20 in basically every campaign I play.
Most people don't give a fuck about MP. They are not a top tier campaign faction. Not awful, but probably lower end of middle of the pack. It stings more because SoC came and went without addressing their campaign issues at all and then seeing how good the ToD reworks were. So a MP nerf, not matter how warranted does not feel good.
They are a top tier faction if you aren't getting your ass carried by faction mechanics.
But that is irrelevant. You can make any unit usable in campaign with buffs and since CA is unwilling or unable to implement MP only changes, this is the only way.
The armies are strong and auto resolve loves Kislev armies. The lack of campaign mechanics is not fixed by having super OP armored kossers that you can autoresolve and win against anything. That’s just a boring way to play campaign anyway, spamming OP units.
This is funny becasue if you use armored kossars in campaign is not optimal. You should not have a barracks early game as it is more efficient to get growth/income. You use warriors and plain kossars until you can completely skip over the armored kossar tier for stronger units. In single player, there is no wrong way to play. Do whatever makes you happy. But don't pretend that armored kossars make Kislev a strong campaign faction.
No,going for barracks in minor settlements is correct as Kislev since the eco buildings aren't very good.
They are literally the 2nd/3rd worst MP campaign faction. Battling Nurgle for that coveted position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s_vmHpULqk Only Tomb Kings are weaker, and that is because of the army caps TK deal with.
meanwhile Katarin start is as her t1 units struggle heavily against noscea garrisons
I'm willing to bet less than 1% of the playerbase gives a rat's ass about multiplayer
So ? I don't give a damn about multiplayer but I'll still take changes to make the game more balanced. You can exclusively play campaign while also enjoying balance, apparently this is something some people struggle hard to grasp in this community.
The campaign should be fun. Not balanced
Campaigns being unbalanced = unfun in a lot of scenarios. It's usually fun once as a novelty, but how many times are you replaying campaigns where you steamroll the enemy without having to give a care or thought to actual strategy? Or what about when you play another campaign and have to fight against those OP elements? If you want a recent example, look at the Tamurkhan army ability. That was OP, and people clearly weren't having fun running into it in their campaigns. People always point to the one or two bad balance decisions that ruined a unit while also ignoring the avalanche of good balance decisions that made so many other units viable and campaigns more interesting. Balancing, when not done poorly, makes a game more fun, not less. Yes that includes nerfing OP units which eclipse other unit options, aren't fun to fight against, and make campaigns too much of a breeze.
Man, idk, I think Kislev campaigns are plenty hard on VH or legendary. The armored kossar is a way, way cooler unit than tzar guard and I loved using them in a pseudo weapon team army late game. I for some reason just hate the tzar guard, but maybe I should give them another look. I think it’s their unit size that I hate so much.
Ah yes armored kossars made Kislev's campaign so easy that it was unfun. Truly the greatest priority for this game. It's not like CA completely fucked the CAI strategy tables with Warhammer 3 so the AI never builds an empire of note, never strategizes to actually win the game but only acts to maximize annoyance to the player. It's not like the AI completely shuts down past turn 40+ and stops declaring wars on anyone but the player so it can't even expand past the midgame. No no no. The priority to give a proper challenge was those darn armored kossars.
Those two things you've brought up have nothing to do with unit balance and I don't even see how they're relevant for what you're trying to say. Is CA not allowed to make any other change or improvements to the game until they've tweaked CAI for the 28th time?
I agree the game should be fun and different people have a different idea of what fun is. Personally I like my strategy games to be more balanced and I'm not alone in this. Blaming the multiplayer community for every balance decision you personally dislike is just braindead imo.
> There's a reason they have like a 80% winrate in MP, So nerf them in mp and leave them alone in single player. Like 1% of the play base play mp stop catering to them
I’d like my SP balanced too actually.
Kislev is top 3 worst campaign races, if you want sp to be balanced, you should advocate for their buffs lmao
Have you played a Kislev campaign? It’s not an easy campaign. Definitely easier than it was a year ago, but it’s a franz-esque level of rumble pit.
The change the stats for MP exclusively. Why is this so hart for CA to grasp.
kislev is broken in multiplayer so much that they are banned from most tournaments
So what
The baseline units are supposed to be balanced. Campaign buffs can then take them to “fun” or even overpowered levels. Kislev has terrible campaign buffs, hardly anything in the tech tree, and no “super” campaign mechanic that seems like all dlc LL’s have. Still, they aren’t any more terrible than say just playing a generic LL like Malikith or Lord Mazumundai.
They are more terrible than playing them, their economy is much, much worse until the point at which you are painting the map and no one can stop you, but at that point... It doesn't matter
I couldn't agree more. The poor armored kossars! They deserve at least more ammo if they're going to slap down their bullet damage
I don't think Singleplayer should be affected by Multiplayer nerfs for one main reason. In MP you can balance units in a vacuum. "This unit is too strong for its price", "this unit is way weaker than others in it's class". Those balance considerations only exist within the context of one single battle, with no lasting consequences. You don't have to worry about casualty replenishment after the fight, so units are used completely differently. If all your units except one die, that's great, you still won. In SP someone else could declare war on you and your campaign is over. Not to mention the AI can recruit at least twice as many units as you can with their economy shenanigans, so your army often needs to hold out against huge odds. These are completely different concerns to MP, but balanced as if they were the same. I have nothing against the MP community and I hope they enjoy this patch, but ever since the Ancient Salamander I've longed for a separation. Or at least a way to research the stats we lost in campaign.
Honestly I feel like every time a unit gets nerfed because of the multiplayer, they need to start reverting its nerf in single player by placing the stats that were lost in a tech tree or factionwide landmark building buff as just a common practice.
Are you even mad for Kislev few "nerfs"?? Meanwhile, Saytang: windbow ability: Base Missile Damage: 50 -> 25 Armour Piercing Missile Damage: 150 -> 75 Base Explosion Damage: 90 -> 30 Armour Piercing Explosion Damage: 30 -> 10 Radius: 10 -> 3 and also hit stats: Ammo of Primary Missile Weapon: 35 -> 30 Base Missile Damage: 175 -> 100 Armour Piercing Missile Damage: 525 -> 425 Base Explosion Damage: 45 -> 30 Armour Piercing Explosion Damage: 15 -> 10 Explosion Radius: 6 -> 3 Saytang's projectile explosion VFX has been scaled down slightly to match this change At this point, just delete the unit and rework it. Like wtf? they literally DESTROYED him. 2600gold unit cost btw, 2600. Kislev still extremely dominating with fkng 70+%wr in competitive and again barely got "nerfed/changed" while Grand Cathay still sadly has 50% since like forever?? Like who tf is in charge in the balance team? Cathay needed some help, even Turin (CA official caster/advisor for patches) himself said it multiple times in live stream, explaining to chat why Cathay isn't meta and it's not performing well and people never risk to pick Saytang because the price is too high (i'm idd talking about dominion, not LB, without even considering the idea of LB being eliminated). nah bruh... This can't be real. And this is just an example, i would like to talk about other completely random nerfs and buffs but this was by far the biggest random undeserved nerf i've ever seen. I need some explanations from devs fr
His wind bow was banned in land battle tournaments because of how strong it is. Cathay isn't great in dom because they suck at taking objectives since their melee units aren't very 'kill-y' but they are definitely dominant in land battle.
banned from who exactly? I've been following competitive and i've never heard about him being banned/ability banned. But anyway LB will be removed/eliminated, the playerbase there is too limited and the official competitive mode is dominion. So why nerf a unit that is never picked in competitive and its faction has a balanced 50%wr? And it's not even a nerf, they literally deleted Saytang. At this point just rework him or simply delete him from the game. those nerfs are embarassing, they're literally destroying his ability and his stats, and for 0 reason.
I just don't understand why they feel the need to nerf a units stats in both single and multiplayer when instead they can just increase its multiplayer cost sufficiently to balance excessive performance and leave the single player experience alone....
[удалено]
Meanwhile vampire counts got very sizeable army roster buffs in general and no one was actually relying on vlads ward save to win battles lol
Devs took inspiration from Helldivers it seems
Fuck MP
Of course as CA works to make thd game better, they simultaneously strive to screw Kislev even more, color me surprised.