I need a fun Legendary campaign

#3846

Hello,

I am looking for an overall fun campaign to be played in Legendary/VH battle. A problem I have is that I never finish my campaigns, because I end up lacking interest in them. So far these are my feedbacks on campaigns I did in L/VH :

-Taurox : way too easy, you are almost invincible.
-Alarielle : fun at the start, then steamroll everyone. Autoresolve machine and unlimited money.
-Setra : I don’t really like tumb kings, probably unit wise. It was fun at the start though, pretty tough.
-Ikit claw : obviously very funny, but lacked interest since your armies become autoresolve machines
-Malekith : I liked this one, well rounded campaign.
-Markus Wulfart (Vortex) : pretty fun, but too tough and not rewarding. You struggle too much for no real purpose.

Overall, I feel like a campaign is fun when it is challenging but rewarding. Feel free to tell what are your main factors of enjoyment, and what Legendary Lord you would suggest me. Thank you.

neverending#5226

Dwarfs, on at least Hard with some sort of campaign difficulty modifier (like a few handicaps to yourself, but light), and this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1221721433

I've heard this mod is interesting too: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2549087863

TheShiroOfDalton

DavidtheDuke said:

Dwarfs, on at least Hard with some sort of campaign difficulty modifier (like a few handicaps to yourself, but light), and this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1221721433

I've heard this mod is interesting too: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2549087863

That mod makes campaigns strictly easier if you don't compensate by pulling the cheese out of the player's bag of tricks as well.

zeekjw

Imrik, mortal empires.

You're surrounded by a lot of enemies, far away from home. It's fun gathering the dragons up, kicking grimgors teeth in, stomping rats,, and any dwarves that look at you funny while you work you work tour way across the mountains and badlands

Fingolfin_the-Golden#2157

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

peabodyestate#9505

Teclis Vortex no confederation of Ulthuan. Bloody difficult but really fun.

Grom Vortex is much easier than everything else other than Taurox but is hugely fun.

Skarsnik is always going to feature.

endurstonehelm#6102

Malus. Lots of interesting personal quests, which are also sometimes difficult.

neverending#5226

ShiroAmakusa75 said:

DavidtheDuke said:

Dwarfs, on at least Hard with some sort of campaign difficulty modifier (like a few handicaps to yourself, but light), and this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1221721433

I've heard this mod is interesting too: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2549087863

That mod makes campaigns strictly easier if you don't compensate by pulling the cheese out of the player's bag of tricks as well.

You mean the last one right? (I haven't tried it yet)

How could *not* cheesing the AI make the campaign easier?

XxXScorpionXxX#2310

Throgg the troll king. Do it.

Hellspawn2

Azoolo said:

Hello,

I am looking for an overall fun campaign to be played in Legendary/VH battle. A problem I have is that I never finish my campaigns, because I end up lacking interest in them. So far these are my feedbacks on campaigns I did in L/VH :

-Taurox : way too easy, you are almost invincible.
-Alarielle : fun at the start, then steamroll everyone. Autoresolve machine and unlimited money.
-Setra : I don’t really like tumb kings, probably unit wise. It was fun at the start though, pretty tough.
-Ikit claw : obviously very funny, but lacked interest since your armies become autoresolve machines
-Malekith : I liked this one, well rounded campaign.
-Markus Wulfart (Vortex) : pretty fun, but too tough and not rewarding. You struggle too much for no real purpose.

Overall, I feel like a campaign is fun when it is challenging but rewarding. Feel free to tell what are your main factors of enjoyment, and what Legendary Lord you would suggest me. Thank you.

The factions and lords that you listed are probably the best this game has to offer for pure enjoyment experience. I would add the Sisters of Twilight. I absolutely hate the wood elves, but found the Sisters campaign to actually be fun. Plus it can be completed pretty quickly.

Bereaver#4201

XxXScorpionXxX said:

Throgg the troll king. Do it.

I did it three times! It has bad pacing, terrible uphill battle against Ordertide, bennyhill with recolonising ruined settlements, and yet something still draws me to play Throgg again and again. I guess I just love his character too much (even though it is butchered in Total War).

Bloodydagger#9716

Malekith

MiniaAr#5798

My preferred campaign is Tehenauin on Vortex and I did it twice on Legendary (and one on VH, one on Hard). I can recommend it, it's a difficult start, the snowballing is really limited and if you play with a thematic army (Red Crested Skinks and Sotek aligned dinos), then you're really not going to curbstomp a lot.

Early game foes are the minor Skaven starting clan, Khalida and usually Lokhir (Tip of Lustria HElves rarely win that fight).
Mid game you'll face wave upon wave of Skyre and Pestilens army (as well as a third minor clan I don't remember the name). Luthor will also try to invide the heart of Lustria and take Itza. You got to save your brethren.

Later on as you'll do the rituals, Teclis who can be allied in the early game will turn on you due to the relationship penalty (except if you chance yourself a lot of those relationship special followers). He usually is in control of the West coast of Lustria, if not more, and has to be dealt with one way or another.
Sometimes Hexoatl dies and you have to revive them. Same thing on the Southlands, Kroq Gar and TTT can be on a difficult situation against Mors. And it's not unusual to have to fight Imrik there, which allows for fighting HE without invading the donught.

Guillermidas#6283

Morathi on Vortex, no confed other DE. Its the campaign i had the most fun, hands down, despite being lizzard player.

Your allies are useful, and actually help you with invade Ulthuan, but struggle enough so that you need to open the invasion by destroying many doomstacks.

I played with no cheesy tactics. Actually, my armies were 8 dreadspears, 6 darkshards and whatever in wanted to fill then. Very lorefriendly.

Morathi did most of the hard work in Ulthuan. 160 bonus charge and spamming overcasted Pit of shadows break lines even to Fenix Guard in hardest setting.

The big deal was my war with Hexoalt. They declared war on me when I was almost done with Ulthuan. Dinos+saurus really fu**ed me hard. I somehow defeated them in a huge battlen 4 armies vs 3 of them, fighting to the last man vs dinos.

The best and hardest battle ive done. Had to tried it 3 times before winning, via autoresolve everyone died except a lord and a sorceress lol.

After that battle, campaign was a cake. Started invading khemri, with my ally Malekith and Hellebron, but ended before.

Slayer_Yannir#8069

Guillermidas said:

I played with no cheesy tactics. Actually, my armies were 8 dreadspears, 6 darkshards and whatever in wanted to fill then. Very lorefriendly.

Morathi did most of the hard work in Ulthuan. 160 bonus charge and spamming overcasted Pit of shadows break lines even to Fenix Guard in hardest setting.

These 2 paragraphs are conflicting. You don't use cheesy tactics but then Morathi does most of the heavy lifting? I'd say that's cheesy.

Slayer_Yannir#8069

I think Morathi and Kroq-Gar ME are some of the most challenging campaigns that still feel strong at the same time. Imrik as well but only if you enter into the campaign without prior knowledge of what to do. Going into that campaign with a plan sucks all the challenge out of it.

GettoGecko#7861

My main factor to enjoy a campaign is if it keeps me engaged over the whole campaign so that I can finish it when I'm at the peek of power.
Sadly none of the last introduced LLs did it for me. For Taurox I had a forth or third of the bar completet when I was theoretically able to spam minotaurs and ghorgons but the army was already so strong that I already lost interesst in doing it. With Oxyotl I had a really good time until I finished the final battle because I went with a solo army single province approach and timing offense and defence while doing all required quests was fun until I realised that to complete the campaign I had to do 5 hard quests but the game never gave me one, I don't know if its because my territory was too small or my battle power too low with just one army, was the army too strong so that the indiviual fights weren't challenging enough the game just don't tell you what you need to know. I started to go for the long campaign goal because it doesn't have the arbitrary "get x of x goal" but instead it has the arbitrary "kill x of x faction goal" so after I painted half of Naggarond I haven't gotten back. The Dwarf was a fun start but he became so strong so fast that I was like "why do I do this again?" after a short amount of unlike the DLC LL I acutally finished the campaign but it wasn't fun to just chase the last piece to build something just to unlock the last battle (which actually was the end of the campaign unlike for Oxyotl).

So currently I'm playing VP again because in my memory their campaign end was reached when you where "done" and you are in full controll of where to go to finish the campaign so I want to see if its still the case. After that I might start a Bretonnia campaign because you could power through their goals within 50+ turns so you can also finish by the time your power peeks and the campaign would become dull and on top of that you have different endings to choose from.

I know where you coming from with the "challenging but rewarding" approach but I think players are too different to give good recommendations. For some playing on L and fighting on VH is a challenge on its own and therefore also rewarding when its successfully done, at least for me that was the case for quite some time, but for others it has become their natural playground so challenge only comes from the start position, race, unique mechanics, quest battles and finish goals. So for me the rewarding aspect really depends on if the campaign goals allow me to finish the campaign when I'm done or if there is busywork on top of it because the designers have a bad understanding of whats possible in the game.


TLDR: try VP and Bretonnia (my personal favorites Noctilus or Aranessa single province single army and the Fey Enchantress)

Crossil

I think a Bretonnia campaign where you kill Reikland early is pretty interesting. The Empire is left a patchwork of disunified states and you're pretty much the bulwark against Chaos.

Although, being located in the very center of the Ordertide's defenses(Ulthuan - Bretonnia - Empire - Karaz Ankor) makes this a pretty safe start.

I think overall the only real way to play order factions nowadays in an interesting ways is to attack other order factions.

Guillermidas#6283

Yannir said:

Guillermidas said:

I played with no cheesy tactics. Actually, my armies were 8 dreadspears, 6 darkshards and whatever in wanted to fill then. Very lorefriendly.

Morathi did most of the hard work in Ulthuan. 160 bonus charge and spamming overcasted Pit of shadows break lines even to Fenix Guard in hardest setting.

These 2 paragraphs are conflicting. You don't use cheesy tactics but then Morathi does most of the heavy lifting? I'd say that's cheesy.

Morathi does most of the dmg regardless I use her as normal lord in the backline or use her in the frontliine. She is just that powerful when lvl25+. Do you suggest I dont use spells with her and not use her in melee? Seems loreful to me, she was a beast in TT, so is in TW xD

Slayer_Yannir#8069

Guillermidas said:

Yannir said:

Guillermidas said:

I played with no cheesy tactics. Actually, my armies were 8 dreadspears, 6 darkshards and whatever in wanted to fill then. Very lorefriendly.

Morathi did most of the hard work in Ulthuan. 160 bonus charge and spamming overcasted Pit of shadows break lines even to Fenix Guard in hardest setting.

These 2 paragraphs are conflicting. You don't use cheesy tactics but then Morathi does most of the heavy lifting? I'd say that's cheesy.

Morathi does most of the dmg regardless I use her as normal lord in the backline or use her in the frontliine. She is just that powerful when lvl25+. Do you suggest I dont use spells with her and not use her in melee? Seems loreful to me, she was a beast in TT, so is in TW xD

Oh I'm not hating. It's still cheesy though.

Masarius#7206

Bretonnia was fun on legendary.

Emrysor

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

For some people their idea of fun is when you are making things harder. Good example is dark souls, demon souls and such. Personally I do not find the higher difficulties more fun.

TheShiroOfDalton

Emrysor said:

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

For some people their idea of fun is when you are making things harder. Good example is dark souls, demon souls and such. Personally I do not find the higher difficulties more fun.

The Soulsborne games aren't liked just because they're difficult. That's a very superficial reading of their success. They're liked because of the worldbuilding, the atmosphere and the fact that they reward you if you take your time and get better at playing them. Once you mastered their systems, you can breeze through them, play on higher loops and even do challenge runs. But the game expects you to work to get to that point and doesn't offer you any shortcuts.

Compared to some older games, the Soulsborne games aren't even all that punishing. In older games you got a flat number or retries and using them up forced you to start the game all over. The Soulsborne games allow you to repeat any problem you encounter an infinite amount of times from fairly placed checkpoints.

I could make campaigns in TW infinitely harder just by modding all income to be restricted to 1% of its vanilla value and giving all my troops a permanent -90% ld penalty. That would make the game way harder, but it wouldn't actually provide a fun gaming experience. No, difficulty is actually a red herring here.

I just want TW to reward you for being good at it and not punish you with boredom.

#3846

Hey guys, I’ve read all your comments very carefully. Indeed, for me at least, fun comes with difficulty. I like games where you struggle and have to either make the good choices or become good at the game to fully enjoy your time.

So far there seems to be a global consensus on Bretonnia and Morathi then some more specific factions.

Funny enough, I have barely never played on Vortex. Only ones I have done so far are Taurox and Markus Wulfart. I will definitely dig more into those quests seem to be pretty fun.

This topic is made to be open, feel free to tell us your favorites LL campaigns on Legendary difficulty !

Guillermidas#6283

I do need games to be hard to keep me interested. My latest example is Shadow of the tomb raider. From steam achievements, it seems on 1.5% players made it. Not that is imposible, by any means.

But I still go a bit further than that. To play the game without alerting or killing enemies (unless it is needed to progress), which makes it much harder AND lorefriendly. every time i get caught, the checkpoint is miles away, reason why noone bothers play it.

In total war, i do make my own rules too, that are lorefriendly too. My armies must use, for the most part, what TT defines as basic units, aka skinks/slaves/peasants/dreadspears…

The problem is, in legendary, it becomes a grind when you get to turn 80 or so, and I usually left the campaigns uncompleated because I completely lose interest. The problem is AI cares not about lore friendly too, and just vomits doomstscacks of avelorn sisters+dragons+fenix guard.

I could best it no problem, but its just not entertaining and fun, so I usually play on Vh/Vh without reloading or pause battles.

The key in a game is. Not only to be hard, but to feel the difficulty is rewarded (personal reward, not “items”) when you accomplish ingame goals, and not feel like a grindy, waste of time. At least in my opinion.

Soulsborne games really manage to do this for me. Tomb raider too. Total war, not so much. But i hope theyd address this somehow in game 3.

#3846

GettoGecko said:

My main factor to enjoy a campaign is if it keeps me engaged over the whole campaign so that I can finish it when I'm at the peek of power.
Sadly none of the last introduced LLs did it for me. For Taurox I had a forth or third of the bar completet when I was theoretically able to spam minotaurs and ghorgons but the army was already so strong that I already lost interesst in doing it. With Oxyotl I had a really good time until I finished the final battle because I went with a solo army single province approach and timing offense and defence while doing all required quests was fun until I realised that to complete the campaign I had to do 5 hard quests but the game never gave me one, I don't know if its because my territory was too small or my battle power too low with just one army, was the army too strong so that the indiviual fights weren't challenging enough the game just don't tell you what you need to know. I started to go for the long campaign goal because it doesn't have the arbitrary "get x of x goal" but instead it has the arbitrary "kill x of x faction goal" so after I painted half of Naggarond I haven't gotten back. The Dwarf was a fun start but he became so strong so fast that I was like "why do I do this again?" after a short amount of unlike the DLC LL I acutally finished the campaign but it wasn't fun to just chase the last piece to build something just to unlock the last battle (which actually was the end of the campaign unlike for Oxyotl).

So currently I'm playing VP again because in my memory their campaign end was reached when you where "done" and you are in full controll of where to go to finish the campaign so I want to see if its still the case. After that I might start a Bretonnia campaign because you could power through their goals within 50+ turns so you can also finish by the time your power peeks and the campaign would become dull and on top of that you have different endings to choose from.

I know where you coming from with the "challenging but rewarding" approach but I think players are too different to give good recommendations. For some playing on L and fighting on VH is a challenge on its own and therefore also rewarding when its successfully done, at least for me that was the case for quite some time, but for others it has become their natural playground so challenge only comes from the start position, race, unique mechanics, quest battles and finish goals. So for me the rewarding aspect really depends on if the campaign goals allow me to finish the campaign when I'm done or if there is busywork on top of it because the designers have a bad understanding of whats possible in the game.


TLDR: try VP and Bretonnia (my personal favorites Noctilus or Aranessa single province single army and the Fey Enchantress)

do you recommend to play Noctilus on ME or Vortex ?

GettoGecko#7861

Azoolo said:

GettoGecko said:

My main factor to enjoy a campaign is if it keeps me engaged over the whole campaign so that I can finish it when I'm at the peek of power.
Sadly none of the last introduced LLs did it for me. For Taurox I had a forth or third of the bar completet when I was theoretically able to spam minotaurs and ghorgons but the army was already so strong that I already lost interesst in doing it. With Oxyotl I had a really good time until I finished the final battle because I went with a solo army single province approach and timing offense and defence while doing all required quests was fun until I realised that to complete the campaign I had to do 5 hard quests but the game never gave me one, I don't know if its because my territory was too small or my battle power too low with just one army, was the army too strong so that the indiviual fights weren't challenging enough the game just don't tell you what you need to know. I started to go for the long campaign goal because it doesn't have the arbitrary "get x of x goal" but instead it has the arbitrary "kill x of x faction goal" so after I painted half of Naggarond I haven't gotten back. The Dwarf was a fun start but he became so strong so fast that I was like "why do I do this again?" after a short amount of unlike the DLC LL I acutally finished the campaign but it wasn't fun to just chase the last piece to build something just to unlock the last battle (which actually was the end of the campaign unlike for Oxyotl).

So currently I'm playing VP again because in my memory their campaign end was reached when you where "done" and you are in full controll of where to go to finish the campaign so I want to see if its still the case. After that I might start a Bretonnia campaign because you could power through their goals within 50+ turns so you can also finish by the time your power peeks and the campaign would become dull and on top of that you have different endings to choose from.

I know where you coming from with the "challenging but rewarding" approach but I think players are too different to give good recommendations. For some playing on L and fighting on VH is a challenge on its own and therefore also rewarding when its successfully done, at least for me that was the case for quite some time, but for others it has become their natural playground so challenge only comes from the start position, race, unique mechanics, quest battles and finish goals. So for me the rewarding aspect really depends on if the campaign goals allow me to finish the campaign when I'm done or if there is busywork on top of it because the designers have a bad understanding of whats possible in the game.


TLDR: try VP and Bretonnia (my personal favorites Noctilus or Aranessa single province single army and the Fey Enchantress)

do you recommend to play Noctilus on ME or Vortex ?

I would say Vortex because if you want to take territories than each continent offers more to do there so that you spin a story around you conqueing a continent or taking out specific factions if you are into the roleplay part of the game. If you want to try the single province single army approach than it doesn't really matter if its Vortex or ME because you won't spend too much time ashore so it doesn't feel bad that the western and southern parts of the map are cut.

I think each map really offers something for VP campaigns as their campaign goals don't force you in any direction or are tied to a specific area so you are free to do whatever you want. You might want to settle old grudges with your Von Carstein family and take over Sylvania as the one true Von Carstein or raid every port as the most vicious pirate in history.

caladbolgftw#3407

Emrysor said:

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

For some people their idea of fun is when you are making things harder. Good example is dark souls, demon souls and such. Personally I do not find the higher difficulties more fun.

Agree. The current TWW difficulty design is tasteless and artificial.

Bereaver#4201

caladbolgftw said:

Emrysor said:

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

For some people their idea of fun is when you are making things harder. Good example is dark souls, demon souls and such. Personally I do not find the higher difficulties more fun.

Agree. The current TWW difficulty design is tasteless and artificial.

I disagree. Legendary is the only difficulty I play and it has been fun for me for more than 2k hours.

Actually, Legendary is not hard at all if you get grasp of it, it just makes you learn the rules of the game better.

The way difficulty increased is of course a bit too crude. You still can effectively use melee infantry and any other available tactic to great effect though.

caladbolgftw#3407

Bereaver said:

caladbolgftw said:

Emrysor said:

Fingolfin_the-Golden said:

None on legendary in my opinion are fun, it skews the game too much, which makes it more boring than easier difficulties.
My main factors for enjoyment are role playing and getting to steamroll, often, but not always mutually exclusive.
I often never finish my campaigns either, unless it’s one of the easy/new conditions.
Turn 180 is about the longest I have ever bothered to play a campaign in all these years, as it’s over by then (not victory conditions but we know we have won already).

For some people their idea of fun is when you are making things harder. Good example is dark souls, demon souls and such. Personally I do not find the higher difficulties more fun.

Agree. The current TWW difficulty design is tasteless and artificial.

I disagree. Legendary is the only difficulty I play and it has been fun for me for more than 2k hours.

Actually, Legendary is not hard at all if you get grasp of it, it just makes you learn the rules of the game better.

The way difficulty increased is of course a bit too crude. You still can effectively use melee infantry and any other available tactic to great effect though.

wrong. It only made late game even more of a chore and made player to adept to its difficulty with lame strategies like corner camping or missile infantry spam, not to mentioned doomstacks.

Is not hard that I care about, but because it took the fun out of total war game, removing its unique historical style unit formations tactics with one unit spamming like starcraft.

#568367

Your melee become trash on Legendary, seeing Spearmen kill Phoenix Guards is kind of jarring.


So this might sound very contradictory and illogical, but...play a zombie/Skaven chaff/peasant Campaign


Seeing your elite infantry get destroyed by chaff might be highly immersion breaking and unfun. But when your entire army are chaff who are sucky by design......it's not so bad anymore. Your peasant suck even more in melee, in some ways that's even more immersive.