The only time I've found end-game crisis fun is when I use it early (set it to  activate on 10-20 turns)  and weak, and  use it more as a "campaign theme."  They activate in early or mid game, and set the tone throughout, tougher than they would be in normal play, giving a little more challenge when facing that enemy.

I always play on VH, never Legendary. There is sooooo much you are missing if you never use pause or slow motion, so many tactical opportunities, cool moments, beautiful animations, etc. People that always play in real time are usually zoomed way out and simply not appreciating 50% of what the game has to offer.  Even on Legendary the game is too easy simply because factions don't attack you when they could or should.  You are allowed to leave entire regions of your empire completely undefended.  Playing a "this is total war" campaign has a vastly greater impact on campaign difficulty than VH vs. Legendary.

I play on N/N, and honestly have no desire to try to push into higher difficulties. I used to love hard games, played the original Dark Souls on its release month and became a longtime fan of the series(probably the only "hard" game series i still play), loved Ninja Gaiden, even finished a LASO run in halo with my brother. But as I get older I just appreciate being able to relax for the evening with some irish coffee or a decent bourbon, and vibe to some music or a youtube video on the second monitor while i grow my empire. The last thing i wanna do when i get home from a workday is add more stress and work on top of it lol.
Edit: Also I like building actual well rounded armies and still have them perform well. Nothing worse to me than seeing 3 lords running circles in a field dragging around a full army like a flock of sheep, completely ignoring the 17 (artillery name here) that's turning them into chunky salsa. That's just silly goofy nonsense and i won't have it in my campaigns lmao.

How I play my regular campaign (WH/WH). Confederation of legendary lords is not allowed. I don’t use guides, bugs, glitches, or any exploits. I manually play all battles with casualties higher than medium, plus the battle realism mode . No save-scumming — if I lose, I lose; if I forget something, I forget it, and so on.

While I love the idea of ironman and having one save, if you use mods and a script breaks your save game may break and then you're screwed. I try not to save scum, but I have been in campaigns where something in the game breaks and the only a save from a few turns ago will even load.

One thing I love doing for difficulty is most of the mods you're using in your playthroughs with 2 additions: I really like the Victory Conditions Overhaul mod which adds actual lore goals to most factions, which helps me greatly in feeling like I'm actually playing as the chosen faction (for roleplay reasons, and it also helps me stay in the mindset of going after goals that would fit the lore), and it also gives out great rewards for completing the goals. The only "downside" would be that the rewards might be too great for some factions, but that's why I also use the Dynamic Disasters reloaded (with the English translation mod, so I can understand what's going on). It makes the late-game so hard that the rewards from the VCO mod feel like another thing you have to get to survive the incoming disaster.

My funnest campaign was with Gorbad where I was fighting Kislev at their home territory, and suddenly the chaos invasion disaster armies are at the next region. The disaster started way earlier, but I ignored it since they didn't just attack me, but a lot of other factions (which means no anti-player bias), so I felt like it wasn't my problem....until it suddenly was. I was besieging Katarin in Kislev, both of our armies were hurt and tired, and suddenly we see 3 fullstack armies with full-health units that are better than ours 1 turn away from getting to us. There was an immediate peace treaty and temporary alliance forged (through me gifting her a ruined city I stole from her just a few turns prior) so we could deal with the bigger threat together. Well, we fought the armies together with the city garrison that was slightly hurt from be surrounding the city, and we barely survived and won because I had one of the VCO rewards in my main army there. The dust settled, both of our armies half dead (partly because of me intentionally getting her units more hurt than mine, so that she doesn't want to backstab me later), and suddenly we see 3 more armies the next turn. I had to make a decision whether to leave and go back to my cities to prepare for the attack, or support Kislev which was a barrier to the disaster invasion. Anyway, the next 20-30 turns were all full of decisions like that all across the world map, and it's my funnest and most memorable campaign to date. I really recommend it for a late-game challenge (especially combined with the mods you already use in your other campaigns).

Great work with all the improvements you've made to the channel recently. My favourite Warhammer 3 channel currently. I'd really like to see a campaign played with both of these mods if you ever get to it.

once i saw thru the mirage that was the difficulty system in total war i went to play on normal , gives me much more flexibility in terms of how i play the faction (larping essentialy) and i know that if an enemy unit beats mine its because it flat out better , artificial stat modifiers are just silly and not ˝real˝ difficulty that can only come about with a smarter ai (whatever that may mean)

Beside possible immersion breaks, the battle stat buffs dont help the ai against ranged or spell damage. Especially if you use lightning strike to reset your winds, ammo and one use items. Interestingly, i saw a video showing how the ai can situationally play worse on battle difficulties above normal, so now im trying normal battle difficulty.

My favorite lord N'kari needs fluid house rules to not trivialise the campaign, since both devotee generation and the domination mechanic lack any kind of scaling limitation. Thus the idea is to roleplay a plausible story for each use of the domination mechanic, plus avoid trivialising the threats to both yourself and team Chaos.

Wonderfully explained. Great video. Well done dude.

Slowing down research mod can be done quite easily, I can attach it to game dificulty. Just give me numbers how much you want and I try to do it, when I have some free time.

Personally, I understand the purpose of giving the AI cheats on the campaign map. There's not much to be done for that. But I absolutely HATE giving the AI battlefield cheats. It completely breaks my immersion - exactly as you said about "themes". Skaven chaff should not outfight and outshoot expensive Asur units on an even field.

Good topic of conversation to have.

I like most of your points in regards to campaign difficulty, except for ironman mode, which would be great if the game didnt brick save files so often. It's definitely better to have that personal rule to just not load, but at the same time, I quite like re-fighting a close battle to see if I can do it better the second time around as those close battles are generally what I play the game for. My only other issue with the campaign difficulties is that in vanilla at least, they create a grindy gameplay where the enemy throws hordes of trash against you forever.  A bad player might get overwhelmed, but for a good player who can use lightning strike effectively, all it does it make the game slower and easier, since you can just replenish with post battle options and farm them for money nearly infinitely, especially with the right army composition.

As for battle AI stats, I agree that it just creates non-loreful situations arbitrarily. It wouldnt be so much of an issue if these stats scaled into the lategame to make up for the AI potentially not choosing good skills/techs/army compositions etc.. as it would then balance out against the players hopefully better choices. However you can achieve this with other mods/settings in a much more balanced way imo, such as giving the enemy lords free ranks when recruited so they choose more skill points.

My main issue with this video is that all the difficulty options youve given via mods, none of them make the game more difficult unless theyre applied only to a player, and if theyre applied to bots as well, they give the player a significant advantage. Replenishment for example, the player will choose better skills, put their armies into better situations to replenish more, be able to merge units and re-recruit units more efficiently and effectively etc... and if its something like the SFO menu option replenishment reduction, the player will be able to easily negate the penalty to a large degree, while the AI will often be sitting on close to zero replenishment for a significant time as some factions, tending to break them a little. Additionally, something like campaign movement the player can plan for it ahead of time, but the AI doesnt seem to realise their movement will be different on concurrent turns so they tend to be more defensive and find it harder to plan future actions - in my experience.

For me, the sort of mods that add more of a challenge are mods that help the AI without helping the player. For example turning on caps for the player alone (via mods), while not affecting the AI with caps is a significant change in difficulty as it forces the player to divert more of their buildings into military, which reduces their economy, and will better match the AI's terrible building choices, limiting snowball significantly. Some other examples would be better AI buffs to bring them closer to a players level, such as allowing them to cast more spells which makes up for how badly they use them in Vanilla, giving them free or cheaper building construction so they dont have to spend money on buildings theyre inefficiently creating, ambush defence/success chance etc.. things that help them perform closer in these areas to a competent player.

I have also made a mod to drastically improve battle AI, allowing the AI to use their abilities to effectively, as the AI in vanilla is terrible when actually paid attention to. Using light of battle at the start of a fight on a unit not even in combat yet, or healing a unit that is at its battle healing cap, or even just using bad quality spells over ones it might actually get value out of, such as using a group stalk ability when no enemies are even shooting at them, or a morale ability on a unit that has full morale. Im honestly surprised so few people are talking about how badly the AI uses abilities, as imo its one of the biggest issues with difficulty currently.

Lastly, there's the problem of one side creating a tide, that sweeps the other side away, i.e. an order or chaos tide, especially when the player is on the same team as the winning team, will cause an incredibly boring and easy game, and without significant changes will happen fairly frequently when the player is informed enough to know how to play it (i.e. never ally with anyone as they lose buffs, trade with all factions in that team where possible etc..). Nothing in the base game helps with this from what i can see, as almost every mechanic is set up to snowball, including AI cheats that scale with faction size.

All that being said, I honestly believe most people tend to not give much of a shit about difficulty, outside of being able to say they beat it on legendary for the.. credit? The amount of people i see bragging about how they beat the game on a high difficulty, while using a modlist full of essentially player cheats (recruit defeated legendary lords, additional units/faction mechanics/legendary lords/heroes) seems to confirm this, combined with the fact that most actual difficulty mods are incredibly unpopular on the workshop.

I found a good medium with N/H with A.I modifiers down a few notches, it makes the game not so hard but also not push over easy
i also use a mod that DRASTICALLY lowers anti player bias so i'm not dealing with 3 wars at once

Warhammer II player... I use normal/normal because Naggarond and Grimgor exist which gives me enough campaign difficulty to be fun. I don't like cheese strategies and prefer to nerf myself with immersion and making thematic choices rather than hardcore minmax strategies. I have played on legendary vhard before but while I found it doable it wasn't fun. I had to make certain choices to stay competitive and couldn't sandbox it.

As for battle difficulty, I got tired of skavenslaves turning into chaos warriors, again I would rather challenge myself than give the AI cheats here.

14:39 Theme based? Try crapstacks instead of doomstacks. All armies are nothing but skavenslaves except that of the legendary lord which can use clanrats with shield. This can be done even on Legendary difficulty since every battle has 3 AI controlled reinforcement armies of thousands of skavenslaves that can attack the enemy from behind. Enemy leadership shatters in such a situation and their army is exhausted while yours is fresh

very hard campaign,

hard battle difficulty,

no ai cheat stats.

thats how i do it. a nice amount of armies that can spawn, public order actually needing management, the battle ai will try to atleast avoid my missiles.

Anybody else feels like tier 5 units are offten not impactful, for example rouge idols are meh. I kinda think i should be shiting my pants when i see rouge idols, or dragons in enemy armies but  im more scared of some tier 3 units. I think there should be unbalanced high tier units cause you feel rewarded for reaching high tier and also you get a challenge if the enemy has it. And they could balance it with unit cap like dread saurian

The problem with increasing the public order penalty on legendary difficulty to even higher than -8 is that Kislev has control-based actions you can take in your provinces and armies. They consume 50 control each time and you need +25 to use them at all.

It's not hard to avoid rebellions, but it takes so long to get to the point where you can use those mechanics as Kislev, that the difficulty functionally disables a core faction mechanic until you get to the point in the campaign where you're snowballing so you don't really need them.

Also, I don't mind not pausing but I HATE the camera "realism" from legendary.

I think there should be a toggle for
- Realistic camera
- This is total war (so you don't mess up and miss something)


Also side note: Have missions or something to collect all LL for your race! Not all factions get those mechanics or can easily confederate. Or some LLs die before you can get to them. It's not even about difficulty it's more about collecting cool characters in a fantasy game, unlike historical titles where I don't care much about confederation

VH campaign , battles with no bonuses to AI and it is great.

Personally I think Legendary and Very Hard battle difficulty is the best. However change the battle difficulty so the AI does not receive cheats. No cheats, its just smarter therefore thats what makes it harder.

Why legendary better? Other difficulties make it so you cant lose if you are able to survive to a number of turns therefore is just a grind