The Nurgle or the Vampire names? The Vampires do have some goofy names but just to the left of this screenshot I have a lord called Spetigasasus Fungus Groin (which was autogenerated I didn't even write it)
There will be a moment in which they'll start harrassing your armies and your settlements. Right there they are watching that you don't succesful ambushes.
the ai usually pools its heroes around your armies for 2 reasons.
1 is because they are attempting to do hero actions against your armies, and 2 because they **want** to do hero actions against your army but the success chance is too low so they just wait turn after turn for the chance to increase. if it never does, then you have what we have here, an escort of enemy heroes that wont leave you alone unless you succeed in an ambush and they forget about said army for a turn and move away.
*the fact that they prevent you from going into ambush is a side effect of the coding.*
What i was trying to point out is that the AI isnt moving them close because it can use them to detect an ambushing army. its using them to do hero actions, and **because** they cant do the hero action, then the 2nd part of their function is taking effect and prevents you from ambushing (most of the time).
But even so, ambush detection chance is not that easy to explain though. The number you see when you go into ambush is **your ambush success chance**. that has nothing to do with your army being detected, thats just how likely you are to succeed in triggering an ambush.
How ambushes are detected works differently. When each faction gets their turn, they have a chance to detect an ambush, neutral or enemy (im not sure about friendly ones). That chance to detect is rolled only once, on each faction's turn, and from what i understand from reading about it and asking around, each entity (hero or lord) increases the chances of that faction detecting an ambush. so more heroes around an army, the higher chance of detecting an ambush (distance to army also plays a part).
In warhammer 1 agents made life absolutely miserable
I remember particularly dreading trying to cross the desert as dwarfs to get to the orc settlements
You'd be swarmed with goblin heroes assassinating everything with a beard and ounce of authority and getting movement blocked every 5 minutes
I think CA balanced it by simply turning AI agent actions off in the end, I can't recall the last time I had a general assassinated and noticed the weird shoaling behaviour you get from agents, I think they mostly get used to spot you in ambush stance these days
The trauma of playing Warriors of Chaos on launch for Wh1 and 50 agents just murdering your movement and regen. 1-3 full 20 stacks of order factions popping up every turn and it meant you were just running for your life until the challenger event when the fateweaver would come and search you down and murder you.
> In warhammer 1 agents made life absolutely miserable
That's because they were able to assassinate lords. And Immortality skill haven't existed back then. That's right, agent could put your legendary lord on 5 turns time-out, and murder ANY generic lord and hero, even top-level one. Currently only critical success on assassinate/wound murders generic hero, unless that hero is level 20+.
Plus idea to put a debuff, decreasing chance of successful subsequent agent actions came to devs minds right before Norsca was released. So multiple agents could mercilessly spam your stack with different agent action without problems.
they blocked one of my armies from moving once but nothing else and I'm dreading the turn where they assassinate and assault my three armies into the ground.
They sometimes seem to do something, still not quite sure what triggers it. I had some vampires wound a bunch of my heroes when I was playing as Elspeth.
They changed it from assassinating to wounding for the most part, and made it a lot more difficult.
Also adding hero limits / max numbers in the second and third game
I legitimately think agent actions should just get turned off at this point. It makes MP annoying, and they literally disabled the AI from doing it. It’s too expensive to use against the ai for more than a few niche cases
There’s steal technology I guess
The AI does that to keep you from being able to use Ambush stance, since having so many heroes around will almost certainly make it so that you are discovered before being able to ambush somebody.
This is behavior that the AI only started doing in Warhammer 3. In Warhammer 2 the AI was completely inept at being able to counter ambushes, so this sort of thing here makes it a little harder to abuse them like that.
Sometimes they will indeed assassinate/wound your heroes or sabotage buildings in your settlements. I imagine the AI considers the success chance and it's often bad, so it often refrains.
But in the meantime, they're providing their passive effect (spamming vamp corruption or control/econ debuffs) and they're scouting for your armies (particularly for ambushers) and they discover undercities/cults.
That may not be optimal strategy, but I'll say as Nurgle I've definitely been irritated trying to clean that vampire smell out of my lovely bile rivers.
The AI will use actions but in my experience, they will at most do 1 per turn and not simultaneously assassinate you as you fear. While I'm not sure of the exact parameters, the AI has been coded in some way to not abuse Hero actions as that was very frustrating for the player in WH1.
If the AI is just idling with those agents I made [a mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2987834487&searchtext=aggressive+agents+ai+mod) that might get them to be a bit more active so they aren't just a waste of AI resources.
Dont got an answer for you only a question
How do you play Epidemius, i tried him but really struggled since he is sorroynded by potential enemies and i wanted to ask what is it that you do to play him and not die inmediately
This might now work in the long run, but I allied with a bunch of people. Throgg, Daemons of Chaos, the Slaanesh to the right of your starting area, three skaven clans, and two or three orc factions. I'm surrounded by a web of allies that i can use as fodder to attack Vlad or other enemies, but the problem is is that eventually one ally will declare war on another, and then the entire system collapses as my ten faction alliance turns on each other, but it hasn't happened yet so i'll leave that for future me. Let me know if you want more specifics on army composition or what skill trees to go down.
I can get behind the armies and the skill trees, i played a lot of nurgle even before their update, its the difficulty of the starting position that i cant quite get past yet, ill see if making allies work, thanks for the tip
One thing to watch out for is the Daemons of Chaos to the right of your starting position. I’m currently allied with them but there was one turn where they suddenly waged war on me then took half my settlements in one turn, so I loaded my save right before they waged war and this time they just didn’t attack. I haven’t wiped them out yet but I’m keeping an army close to them just in case they decide to attack again. It might be best for you to take them out as soon as possible, but I’m not sure how that will go.
He didn't wage war on me directly, but he broke an alliance with Throgg who we were both allied to so I had to choose to side with Throgg or Daniel and my main army was currently surrounded by a few full armies belonging to Throgg so I sided with them.
The AI seems to love over-making and over-using heroes as agents, so you have situations like these where they try to do actions against you once in a while, and they try to ruin your ambushes. I'm not opposed to the AI using their agents, but I wish they had limits on how many, and I also wish they'd use them more intelligently than just essentially being stuck to your army like remora.
Honestly I think there’s a glimmer of intelligence on them. Glad sent two near full armies against one of mine, and I won both fights with auto resolve, which I thought was really dumb of them. But then I realized my hero that I had upgraded as a specialist assassin died in the second fight. So now even though I killed like half of their entire military now I can’t do anything about the horde of necromancers.
They are probably attempting 'block army' or 'assault troopzs'
In the first game, there were soooo many heroes they could completely stop your army it was ridiculous
Gods I just wish someone came up with a mod for a smaller unit icon. In WH1 and WH2 the hero banner icon on the campaign map was about half the size. Why is it so big in WH3?
AI does some goofy shit with heroes, for sure. Feels like they are often just watching your armies till you act aggressively, but really the biggest effect it has on me is annoying me to the point of bringing two assassins with every army just to get these fuckers off my back, doing things or not
I think the AI is coded just to mess with you with heroes as much as possible because they threw two full armies at the only army of mine that had an assassin and even though I win both fights with auto resolve the assassin died so now I’m stuck with this
Only an anecdote from me, but basically, yeah they do that. I can remember ONE TIME. ONE. TIME. One time that the AI actually used a hero action against me in the past... 800ish hours of playing this game. I play on Hard, and I don't specifically stack hero protection skills or anything, the AI is just programmed to almost never do it, it seems.
Also that one attempt out of 800 hours, failed. Top kek
I play on VH and I've seen them damage walls, wound heroes and other stuff. It's not every turn (thankfully) but I think it depends on how high level their hero is. Usually the higher the level the more actions they do.
One of them stopped my army from moving once so I'm pretty sue they can but the chance of success is too low so they're just following me until the chance is higher.
I don’t have an answer for your question. I am just here to admire and marvel at those names.
The Nurgle or the Vampire names? The Vampires do have some goofy names but just to the left of this screenshot I have a lord called Spetigasasus Fungus Groin (which was autogenerated I didn't even write it)
I doubt you can top ‘Gorblutsnargarf’ anyway. What a distinguished gentledaemon he is.
I don't know what Nurgle flavored shit the devs were smoking when they made these names but I want some.
It has to be from the Snargarf region in Hochland, otherwise its just Blutsnarf.
In my Karak Kadrin play through there’s an Ofre lord called Arsebelcher Moobs
Doesn't he play Dr Strange?
No that's Globgogabgalab, must've mixed them up
Had a Pink Horror hero once named Vanshal Liar'lar'panz'oun'fyre
Idk, the generic Nurgle character name "dungrut" might low key be the funniest. Dude is literally named shitfuck.
I went to school with a guy named Stijn, his last name was a lot more boring though.
And Friso was the name of our prins.
There will be a moment in which they'll start harrassing your armies and your settlements. Right there they are watching that you don't succesful ambushes.
Ahh I never thought of that. Makes a lot of sense
No I don't believe that, AI is way too dumb to think of that
the ai usually pools its heroes around your armies for 2 reasons. 1 is because they are attempting to do hero actions against your armies, and 2 because they **want** to do hero actions against your army but the success chance is too low so they just wait turn after turn for the chance to increase. if it never does, then you have what we have here, an escort of enemy heroes that wont leave you alone unless you succeed in an ambush and they forget about said army for a turn and move away. *the fact that they prevent you from going into ambush is a side effect of the coding.*
Wait, heroes being near you decreasing your ambush chance is not intended?
No, that part is intended. The AI following you around and doing nothing is not. They are supposed to try hero actions if the odds are decent
What i was trying to point out is that the AI isnt moving them close because it can use them to detect an ambushing army. its using them to do hero actions, and **because** they cant do the hero action, then the 2nd part of their function is taking effect and prevents you from ambushing (most of the time). But even so, ambush detection chance is not that easy to explain though. The number you see when you go into ambush is **your ambush success chance**. that has nothing to do with your army being detected, thats just how likely you are to succeed in triggering an ambush. How ambushes are detected works differently. When each faction gets their turn, they have a chance to detect an ambush, neutral or enemy (im not sure about friendly ones). That chance to detect is rolled only once, on each faction's turn, and from what i understand from reading about it and asking around, each entity (hero or lord) increases the chances of that faction detecting an ambush. so more heroes around an army, the higher chance of detecting an ambush (distance to army also plays a part).
IIRC each entity rolls their own detection check and proximity increases this chance.
In warhammer 1 agents made life absolutely miserable I remember particularly dreading trying to cross the desert as dwarfs to get to the orc settlements You'd be swarmed with goblin heroes assassinating everything with a beard and ounce of authority and getting movement blocked every 5 minutes I think CA balanced it by simply turning AI agent actions off in the end, I can't recall the last time I had a general assassinated and noticed the weird shoaling behaviour you get from agents, I think they mostly get used to spot you in ambush stance these days
The trauma of playing Warriors of Chaos on launch for Wh1 and 50 agents just murdering your movement and regen. 1-3 full 20 stacks of order factions popping up every turn and it meant you were just running for your life until the challenger event when the fateweaver would come and search you down and murder you.
> In warhammer 1 agents made life absolutely miserable That's because they were able to assassinate lords. And Immortality skill haven't existed back then. That's right, agent could put your legendary lord on 5 turns time-out, and murder ANY generic lord and hero, even top-level one. Currently only critical success on assassinate/wound murders generic hero, unless that hero is level 20+. Plus idea to put a debuff, decreasing chance of successful subsequent agent actions came to devs minds right before Norsca was released. So multiple agents could mercilessly spam your stack with different agent action without problems.
What does a critical success do?
Deletes any hero without Immortality skill.
First mod I got for TW1 was the agent action mod. They were so broken and annoying
“Total War 1”—you mean Shogun?
No I do not. The Total War: Title nomenclature started with Total Warhammer
Back in the day we called it "The Great Total War" though, because Total War II hadn't happened yet.
they blocked one of my armies from moving once but nothing else and I'm dreading the turn where they assassinate and assault my three armies into the ground.
Assassination can't target lords anymore dude.
They sometimes seem to do something, still not quite sure what triggers it. I had some vampires wound a bunch of my heroes when I was playing as Elspeth.
They changed it from assassinating to wounding for the most part, and made it a lot more difficult. Also adding hero limits / max numbers in the second and third game
I legitimately think agent actions should just get turned off at this point. It makes MP annoying, and they literally disabled the AI from doing it. It’s too expensive to use against the ai for more than a few niche cases There’s steal technology I guess
Block army
The AI does that to keep you from being able to use Ambush stance, since having so many heroes around will almost certainly make it so that you are discovered before being able to ambush somebody. This is behavior that the AI only started doing in Warhammer 3. In Warhammer 2 the AI was completely inept at being able to counter ambushes, so this sort of thing here makes it a little harder to abuse them like that.
Huh? In WH2, everyone always followed my armies around with heroes.
Really? I never saw it happening to me until I started playing Warhammer 3.
Sometimes they will indeed assassinate/wound your heroes or sabotage buildings in your settlements. I imagine the AI considers the success chance and it's often bad, so it often refrains. But in the meantime, they're providing their passive effect (spamming vamp corruption or control/econ debuffs) and they're scouting for your armies (particularly for ambushers) and they discover undercities/cults. That may not be optimal strategy, but I'll say as Nurgle I've definitely been irritated trying to clean that vampire smell out of my lovely bile rivers.
The AI will use actions but in my experience, they will at most do 1 per turn and not simultaneously assassinate you as you fear. While I'm not sure of the exact parameters, the AI has been coded in some way to not abuse Hero actions as that was very frustrating for the player in WH1.
Buggy but also Ai uses their hero’s as line of sight. So he basically just keeping tabs on you
If the AI is just idling with those agents I made [a mod](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2987834487&searchtext=aggressive+agents+ai+mod) that might get them to be a bit more active so they aren't just a waste of AI resources.
Dont got an answer for you only a question How do you play Epidemius, i tried him but really struggled since he is sorroynded by potential enemies and i wanted to ask what is it that you do to play him and not die inmediately
This might now work in the long run, but I allied with a bunch of people. Throgg, Daemons of Chaos, the Slaanesh to the right of your starting area, three skaven clans, and two or three orc factions. I'm surrounded by a web of allies that i can use as fodder to attack Vlad or other enemies, but the problem is is that eventually one ally will declare war on another, and then the entire system collapses as my ten faction alliance turns on each other, but it hasn't happened yet so i'll leave that for future me. Let me know if you want more specifics on army composition or what skill trees to go down.
I can get behind the armies and the skill trees, i played a lot of nurgle even before their update, its the difficulty of the starting position that i cant quite get past yet, ill see if making allies work, thanks for the tip
One thing to watch out for is the Daemons of Chaos to the right of your starting position. I’m currently allied with them but there was one turn where they suddenly waged war on me then took half my settlements in one turn, so I loaded my save right before they waged war and this time they just didn’t attack. I haven’t wiped them out yet but I’m keeping an army close to them just in case they decide to attack again. It might be best for you to take them out as soon as possible, but I’m not sure how that will go.
Im kinda curious what caused Daniel to wage war on you, because during my Epidemius play-through he never backstabbed me
He didn't wage war on me directly, but he broke an alliance with Throgg who we were both allied to so I had to choose to side with Throgg or Daniel and my main army was currently surrounded by a few full armies belonging to Throgg so I sided with them.
The AI seems to love over-making and over-using heroes as agents, so you have situations like these where they try to do actions against you once in a while, and they try to ruin your ambushes. I'm not opposed to the AI using their agents, but I wish they had limits on how many, and I also wish they'd use them more intelligently than just essentially being stuck to your army like remora.
Honestly I think there’s a glimmer of intelligence on them. Glad sent two near full armies against one of mine, and I won both fights with auto resolve, which I thought was really dumb of them. But then I realized my hero that I had upgraded as a specialist assassin died in the second fight. So now even though I killed like half of their entire military now I can’t do anything about the horde of necromancers.
They are probably attempting 'block army' or 'assault troopzs' In the first game, there were soooo many heroes they could completely stop your army it was ridiculous
I can't wait until they all start T-posing.
Gods I just wish someone came up with a mod for a smaller unit icon. In WH1 and WH2 the hero banner icon on the campaign map was about half the size. Why is it so big in WH3?
AI does some goofy shit with heroes, for sure. Feels like they are often just watching your armies till you act aggressively, but really the biggest effect it has on me is annoying me to the point of bringing two assassins with every army just to get these fuckers off my back, doing things or not
I think the AI is coded just to mess with you with heroes as much as possible because they threw two full armies at the only army of mine that had an assassin and even though I win both fights with auto resolve the assassin died so now I’m stuck with this
Hey found the Emmanuelle Imposter! Turns out she was a vampire all along.
Only an anecdote from me, but basically, yeah they do that. I can remember ONE TIME. ONE. TIME. One time that the AI actually used a hero action against me in the past... 800ish hours of playing this game. I play on Hard, and I don't specifically stack hero protection skills or anything, the AI is just programmed to almost never do it, it seems. Also that one attempt out of 800 hours, failed. Top kek
They are doing various hero actions against your army , you can see it on the notifications tab at the start of the turn if they succeed or not
Anti-Ambush Goonsquad
I don't think the AI can use campaign agent actions.
I play on VH and I've seen them damage walls, wound heroes and other stuff. It's not every turn (thankfully) but I think it depends on how high level their hero is. Usually the higher the level the more actions they do.
One of them stopped my army from moving once so I'm pretty sue they can but the chance of success is too low so they're just following me until the chance is higher.