Recent reviews by Tethos

Quite possibly the worst gaming experience I've ever had. A series of incredibly boring and dull fetch missions literally just running up and down a hill. Dog AI is busted. Trying to stealth kill an enemy? Nope. Dog bites his ankle and alerts the entire town. Now go find these items within a massive area. What's that? Need to get 1/10 flowers more, with no indication of where they are in a huge area covered in bushes in pitch black full of enemies (and you have no way of healing). Screw this.

I want to enjoy this game, however the AI design ruins it. There's a cap of 2 armies when you, the player, are small. AI completely ignores this and will have 4 stacks coming out of a single village.

AI ignores food, I can have spies draining their settlements and leaving them in negatives. They still take no attrition.

AI ignores upkeep. Tiny settlements will eventually "support" multiple elite stacks. While you, the player, will be barely struggling to maintain one stack.

AI cheats. The developers designed it to do this. It's not even hard to see, and turns the game into a grind.
This is because core issues from the sloppy & rushed release were never fixed.

Some mods fix these issues by adding more complexity. Overhauls like Radious & DEI do nothing to fix these issues. The former makes armies basically free, the latter makes the game "realistic" by being so hard it's not fun.

Developers chose to weave this AI cheating through all subsequent Warhammer titles. Great job CA!

Initially ranked negative but the latest DLC's are actually improving role-play, and changing this from a purely stats game to one with potential for story.

The buggiest pile of ♥♥♥♥ I have ever played. The developers gave up on it long long ago. Do not buy.

Lacks many features from Warband. No feasts, claimants, duels, upgradeable villages, random encounters...
Crashes constantly for no reason, modded or unmodded on a clean installation.
AI is terrible and everything is too easy, even on the "hardest" difficulty.
AI cheats and magically creates armies out of thin air until you take their last village.
A complex and potentially good economic system exists but this is not used at all.
City design took up all the design budget, but there is 0 reason to really ever go into them this way.
Generic looter enemies who never serve a challenge beyond the first 30 minutes.
Countless major game-breaking bugs which the developers have never bothered to fix.
Companions are completely generic and have no character.
Every tiny update breaks mods, and modders give up eventually because of this.
Late-game is a grind-fest of fighting constant spam.
Workshops offer little to no income, forcing late-game income to be based on exploiting smithing mechanics.
The campaign is intended to devolve into an pointless endless grind against every faction at the same time.
Friendly fire is auto disabled, so MP is people spamming attacks without any skill.
There have not been any new maps added since release.
Units on sieges and battles consistently glitch through walls/bridges/rocks etc, meaning you can't win.
Factional units are completely ahistorical.
Some units and weapons are extremely unbalanced, such as the Khuzait Khan's Guard with their "glaive".
Vlandia faction has far superior units, weapons, and position to everyone else. This unbalances everything.
In MP this same faction has the three best units of each class. And everyone votes them, so there is no factional diversity.

From my experience the only people who enjoy this game are those who never played Warband beyond a few hundred hours, which is barely enough time to play vanilla, let alone any of the excellent mods such as Pendor, A World of Ice and Fire, Floris, Napoleonic Wars, Viking Conquest etc.

I would not say the mods I have tried save the appalling state of the base-game. Persistent Empires is full of trolls and the map is constantly reset. There are no upgrade mechanics apart from equipment. Sword and Musket has horrible combat mechanics and invisible unit glitches. Calradia expanded is the best vanilla-esque mod but that developer gave up as Tale Worlds keep breaking everything with insignificant patches which add nothing the player-base asks for. Full Invasion is too easy as you can hold out forever with sledgehammers and infinite ammunition siege engines.

Do not buy this game, at least until something decent like Pendor 2 is finished.

Start as a Native North American. Invite some countries to join. Wait till you get the Offensive Federation Wars option after a few years.

Now everyone across North America who is a Totemist is basically your vassal, allowing you to pillage the entire continent, gain infinite development, win every war, and go for an easy very fast WC.

I understand that random events make the game more enjoyable, but to get the perfect hard achievements massive amounts of save scumming are needed. There are events that randomly kill 200,000 of your population, forcing you to have to focus on recovering this rather than beating the current crisis. Then you reload to the same turn and it instead gives an event which puts you many turns ahead in technology, or allows you to purchase a city etc.

I barely scraped by with the brilliant win but had to save scum repeatedly on 25% chance of event success, or hope the famine events didn't hit when I go -0.005 population per turn. The Arab crisis is the absolute worst because if you haven't already had critical success in previous crises, which give permanent army strength, you cannot afford to fight the vanguard. Enjoy a 40% chance of failing the brilliant run per-turn for 20-30 turns. Save scumming is the only way to beat this since there are no rewards for fending off the vanguard random attacks. Beating it should weaken the main army perhaps?

Things that can easily be fixed:

• There are quite a few typos, such as on the last victory screen (English version), and confusing stat toolboxes. "-25 to Huns" if you attack them first. -25 what? Percentage of attack strength?

• There does not seem to be a point at which the affinity of other civilizations towards you will stop declining? Even without any raiding it will fall to 0 (they declare war). This forces you to have to repeatedly pay them off with gifts (waste of envoy), or cycle trading with them (waste of merchant and inefficient because you have to min-max to get the perfect score).

• The strength of the Arab invasion should decline if you buy their cities. This would allow for players to hoard immediately before, then buy them out rather than having to save-scum through it and bribe the army. Starving them should be an option through buying their land. The whole crisis needs reworking.

• There is no explanation for the colony mechanic. Why can you only colonise certain areas? Why do some areas provide orders of magnitude more bonus than others to certain resources? If you fail at setting up the perfect colony you have to reload.

• Losing all your merchants in trading, and your colonies on the formation of Greece/Byzantium should be removed, or have a warning. As far as I'm aware the "Temporary weakening of economy" feature is because the bonuses these colonies provided does not get re-integrated into the main Polis on the unification of Greece.

• There should be a warning at some point that you actually need 2 colonies active to win the game. I spent a long time boosting a single economy, ending with 13 towns out of 14 needed, and failed getting 190 score. It is ironically more effective to not use any colonists before unifying Greece because you need all the ones you can get for the top score (I recommend 3 colonies; money based for Corinth because once you buy cities you have passive income on the other resources anyway).

Would change to positive review if some of the changes were implemented. I like the Studio and the series. It's good to get people interested in history, and the game does have nice artwork and a decent score.

I disagree with the reviews about not enough replayability. I doubt the negative ones who have 3 hours played managed to gain perfect scores, which is the aim for some people. Picking traits before starting really help as it's fun to change your strategy and try to min-max certain strategies.

If you think it's too costly (which to be fair, it is) then buy it on sale or through something like Humble Bundle.

But these cry-babies whining about the diplomacy changes, and the addition of favours..oh god. Here's how to play now.

Find someone who you share mutual enemies with. Ally them. Call them in promising land, and have all the territory marked as essential. Win the war. Whether or not you give them land depends on if you need them for an ally after later on or not, and if you can take them down quite soon yourself.

If you don't intend to use the promise of land then it's a 10 -20 year wait from 1444. This really isn't much of a problem, as big nations have no interest in allying small nations anyway. Most of the negative reviews cry that it takes too long to accrue favours. Well, let your vassals accrue them for you at no cost to your manpower then? There are many workarounds for something that really isn't an issue unless you suck and rely on winning wars by allying everyone around you because you can't do it yourself. Having to earn an allies trust is realistic and stops low-skilled players from allying everyone to exploit their strength before ditching them because they are selfish.

Though I think the only thing this is worth buying for are the Nomad improvements, since diplomacy upgrades really should be base-game instead.

I can't recommend this game in its current state. Although it is fun with friends and on discord, the Public play is completely broken. Out of 10 player games 3+ people will frequently leave on seeing they are not imposter. Many of the imposters I play with do not even know how to sabotage. Many people do either not defend themselves so get ejected, or the crew is filled with players saying "xxx is sus", using no evidence whatsoever and just voting players off here and there because they do not possess the skills to be able to determine whether people are crew by their actions such as visual tasks, and the bar filling on task completion.

Not to mention the script kiddies who auto win or set the vote time so short that they can vote off anyone in a millisecond. And the lag of some players is so awful that they will pop up on your screen out of nowhere and kill you.

This game is a victim of its own success. With so much income it much be generating from popularity there needs to be an account system to stop game abuse and improve the servers. I'm sure it worked fine as a small Indie game but right now toxic players are making it unplayable, for public at least.

Also good luck connecting in Europe. It is constantly bugged and forces you to connect to far away hosts, further increasing the Ping.

Price hike and still riddled with bugs. Random soldiers decide to charge at ridiculous speeds into melee when in ranged mode. There is an annoying loud screechy audio bug a lot of the time. Campaign map is slow to move around on. Better optimised than ETW but still crashes constantly.

The game itself is alright, but a very toxic community lets it down.