My Review & Feedback on BOTET after 150 Turns Completed Reikland Campaign on VH/VH

[Sir Arun]

Hello guys,

First of all let me say a BIG THANK YOU to the entire team that has worked for years on this mod, arguably more extensive and DEFINITELY more fun than the beautiful, but predictable and therefore somewhat boring Third Age Total War mod. You guys on the other hand have done a fantastic job bringing the dark, gritty and action packed WHFB universe to life. It's a giant cluster, full of factions ready to go at each others' throats, just like I imagined battles in the Old World to be.

I remember playing an older version of Call of Warhammer, back then the subtitle was Rage of the Dark Gods, I believe it was in the year 2015. That version did not include the New World, and the Chaos Invasion mechanic was like the mongol/timurid mechanic in that tons of stacks would be spawned after 60 or so turns into the map. That crashed my savegame, ruining my 1st attempt at a Reikland campaign, which was really sad. Hence I decided to give this a 2nd try, and BotET did not cause any savegame crashes for me (learning from my past mistakes I created 30 separate savegames numbered Reikland 1 to Reikland 30, haha, but I didn't need to as all went well).

Nevertheless, the game still has some bugs that need ironing out, hence here are my collected experiences after 100+ hours and 600+ battles:

1) Please for the love of God remove the song "Protectors of the Earth" by Two Steps from Hell. That epic song is fine in a battle, but ON THE CAMPAIGN MAP??? It's an earsore especially when it plays SO OFTEN. I notice you removed several songs that played (at least for Reikland) from the previous Call of Warhammer: Rage of the Dark Gods. One such song I fondly remember is "Legio I Martia" by Triarii. It was over 10 minutes long and really built up to an awesome crescendo. You cant find it on youtube, for some reason that particular song is missing, but you can buy it and it is really worth a re-listen.

Otherwise I really like the overall soundtrack of BOTET, especially all the epic battle music, although some old tracks from Rage of the Dark Gods are missing, such as Triarii's "Victoria", songs from Nox Arcana, Dark Omen soundtrack etc. Please put them back in.

2) The dwarf settlement of Karak Izor is severely bugged. If you double-click it, the game crashes to desktop every 2nd turn. Once every other turn can I click it and build/recruit stuff. And the turn when I can, the settlement tab says "rak Izor" instead of "Karak Izor". No other settlement (and I controled 100 settlements by the end of the campaign) had this problem, so please look into it.

3) The Merchant's Guild has a descriptive text that begins in English and then changes midway to Russian.

4) Sometimes, diplomats are affected by a bug where their unit card turns into a mess of other pictures, sometimes that of a previously selected military unit etc.

5) Several factions do not have proper faction icons. Examples are Ogre Kingdoms, Khorne, Tomb Kings etc. you can notice this on the enemy turn where it is just a Hammer and Anvil symbol. They do have their proper faction symbols on the statistics/graphs screen, though, except for the Ogre Kingdoms who have a small number "1" displayed instead.

6) Are crossbowmen supposed to have LONGER range than Archers? I thought this was weird.

7) Several factions cannot be clicked on the statistics/graphs chart since their icons are too far at the bottom and unresponsive such as Lizardmen or Tomb Kings. This is the place you go to when you want to compare the progress of your faction with another's.

8) In my campaign, most of Estalia, Tilea, Skaven holds and Khemri had a recurring bug where if I tried to besiege a city and wanted to fight on the battlemap, the game crashed when loading the siege. I assume this bug has to do with the settlement type being some kind of exotic/foreign settlement, but tbh in certain provinces in Estalia/Tilea/Southlands, settlement sieges worked fine for me.

9) I understand the concept of disabling the notion of ceasefire with the ruinous powers of Chaos, but even apart from that, diplomats are pretty useless in this game apart from establishing trade agreements and, at best, early alliances. Every time I tried to use the diplomat halfway through the game or late in the game, asking for ceasefires despite being in a massive position of power, trying to buy provinces etc always showed "demanding", even if I tried to pay tens of thousands of gold, sometimes even PER TURN over several turns, they always declined, even if I sent diplomats with 6 or 7 or 8 influence.

10) Religion is pretty much a gimmick. Conversion is ridiculously slow, usually only happening a few percentage points at a time when you upgrade your religious buildings to the next level, but priests themselves don't seem to change a damn thing. And the whole "smack a heretic" is pretty meaningless as the presence of these doesn't seem to spread Chaos worship either.

11) There are no assassins. Only spies. What gives??? Is assassination illegal for good factions? Come on, this is WHFB where throats are slit on a regular basis! Why cant I have assassins? Only spies? Ugh.

12) During night fighting, I love how there are two moons (Mannslieb and Morrslieb) as is true to the lore, and I like how there are several different skyboxes (you can tell because the distance between Mannslieb and Morrslieb seems to change), but I wish you guys used higher resolution moons. They look horrid and small in the skybox.

13) I know this is a 12+ year old game, but graphically speaking, it would be nice to at least use higher resolution textures e.g. for the Empire. The Dwarf strongholds have clean and crisp textures, for example. The Ork settlements could also look at bit more "orky". All I noticed was the black and white square pattern in a few places and thats it.

14) Is it just me, or is Lustria located "too far north"? It is right next to Estalia, and the lower left corner of the campaign map is just pure, featureless, meaningless water. Perhaps Lustria should be pushed further southward to occupy this currently vacant lower left corner of the campaign map, and Naggaroth extended this way to the immediate south of Ulthuan, just as it really is according to the lore?

15) I did not set one foot into the New World because I had no reason to. Dark Elves, Lizardmen and even High Elves stayed in their respective spheres of power and did not try invading the Old World either. Maybe some AI changes should see to it that these factions get more aggressive and there's more action between continents? Or perhaps change a few starting provinces. Allow Lizardmen to occupy Lybaras near the Jungles of the Southlands. Allow Vampire Counts to occupy the Vampire Coast of Lustria. Put some Skaven and Dwarves in the New World, etc.

16) Speaking of Lybaras, I think that city is supposed to be called Lahmia. If you look at the Nehekara map, Lahmia is missing, and should be the northernmost city in the east of the lands of Khemri. Lybaras is actually waay further south. On a side note, Karak Hirn should be pushed a little to the left.

17) Similarly, Tomb Kings were for some reason a cakewalk for me, in fact invading Araby and taking the Spice Coast and the Pirate Coast was some of the most financially good decisions EVER. There's tons of gold to be had in these rich trade provinces, and Tomb Kings barely put up a fight while Ogre Kingdoms were a PITA, a real challenge just like Chaos.

18) Estalia and Tilea need their own factions. Currently, all of them are bandit provinces and easy pickings for Skaven or Brettonia. Right now BOTET is a race to control Estalia/Tilea as these really give your empire that much needed financial AND military boost to conquer the world, as well as being ideal geographic locations with harbors to build stacks and send either north to Norsca or south to the Southlands.

19) Military buildings take ages to build. Seriously. I finished my Empire campaign on VH/VH only using basic infantry, some Reiksguard knights, war altars of sigmar, a few sigmar priests and all the other auxiliary units including troops from Estalia, Tilea, Norsca, and Elven and dwarven districts of Marienburg and Vardanos. That means I didn't use demigryphs, rocket batteries, steam tanks, bright wizards and all the late tier units because those buildings take ages to build, the units take ages to respawn, take several turns to finish recruiting, and cannot be retrained in 99% of other provinces since they dont have the same high level building tree so why bother?

20) Farms are weird. I look at the settlement development screen and most of the time building them doesnt improve anything. It seems the whole "this year's harvest has been bountiful/poor/destroyed" mechanic makes farms meaningless as town growth percentages are regulated and change based on this random harvest mechanism every 10 or so turns? Similarly, I sometimes noticed buildings give population growth bonuses that usually shouldnt, like printing house, brothel, graveyard etc. while buildings that should, like fishing village often didnt.


Your thoughts and further input is of course very much appreciated.

[Dampfkrieger]

Hello Sir Arun,

it seems to me that you are playing version 1.5 beta and got it from either TWC or moddb, am I right? Some guys on Discord (tomdoof, Gojira? ... sry if I am missing people) are still working on the mod and their last update was actually from the beginning of this month!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sk7...7suAsmiEi/view

This download is standalone, you not need anything else! Many of your comments of personal taste are probably not adressed, but some of the bugs certainly are. I know for sure that the Ogre Kingdoms have a proper faction symbol instead of the former "1". I am playing this version of the mod and just added missile unit ranges to the unit card descriptions myself.

Hope this helps.