How to EXPAND your empire! - Warhammer 3 Beginner's Guide

We'll be going through how to intelligently and safely expand your empire, kingdom, territory whatever you wanna call it, in Total War: Warhammer 3!

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good guide. heres some extra tips for anyone who is a beginner:

in the early game you only have a few build slots available, so if you can get away with it in battle, do not make any recruitment buildings (unless there's a game changer unit e.g cathay cannons) and just go for money and growth. this will help you get out of the early game mud easier

you can check if a province has any armies stationed in a province by looking at control. if the province has a bonus "military presence" buff it means there is units inside one of the settlements. the amount of units inside will be public order bonus/number of settlements in province, so if ai has 2 settlements in a province and has 7 military presence control bonus, one of the settlements has an army of 14 units inside. if it has one settlement, that settlement would have 7 units inside

blitzkrieg is the most effective way to take out a troublesome faction. the ai is inefficient with armies; it raids, sieges down settlements longer than it needs to and recruits multiple turn units all the time. this means that your armies can take their settlements much faster than the ai can do to you. if an ai sends an army into some non-essential heartland, e.g gerslev, and you don't have the resources to both kill it and take their settlements, ignore the army, finish off the ai settlements and circle back around. chances are they wont even take a settlement

be efficient with your turns. why? because the ai can and will always come back just as strong if you do not pressure them to death. do not do anything that will add extra turns to your conquest time unless you absolutely have to. this includes multi turn recruiting (e.g global recruitment) with a functional army, trying for an ambush when not necessary (like in the vid but lets not talk about that lol), making an encampment for replenishment when you could just attack, etc

plan out your army movements; zigzagging to different settlements adds turns to the conquest time, which means ai armies have longer to recruit, and you end up fighting harder battles. beelining for essential settlements is sometimes fine, for example black crag for orcs in wh2, but usually the ai will be fine without their capital settlement

control can be tricky on higher levels. revolts can derail your armies giving the ai vital time to strike back, so best to avoid them. you can turn off taxes in the side with the checkbox to add 4 control to that province. adding control companions to spare heroes and putting them in troublesome provinces can give it a lifeline. buildings and heroes that remove bad corruption faster is a huge help for public order. if your army is about to leave an imminently revolting province it is best to cause the revolt on the next turn by raiding, or looting the final settlement so that the army can deal with the revolt next turn and keep going. generally, keeping provinces under control will speed up conquest

expand in one direction. this is sometimes hard to do but if you can choose, expand in the direction with the best loot (e.g gold), and secure every other side of you with alliances (temporary or permenant), and chokepoints with strong garrisons. this helps against army zigzagging, which in extreme cases can have you losing more settlements than your gaining.

eat whoever is worth eating. even if they want to be friendly, if they are sitting on some valuable stuff like a goldmine or easy and rich settlements, take that stuff and leave with no regrets

confederation is better than conquest if you can do it, because it means you can focus on other fronts militarily while adding extra settlements diplomatically

alliances with potential confederation options is a bad idea as the ai will add your strength to theirs when deciding if they should confederate. secure friendship with trade, non aggression pacts and military access then eat them

in mid/late game, having 10 of a recruitment building reduces the global recruitment duration by 1 turn. build a bunch of recruitment buildings in spare build slots in minor settlements, and get some more global recruit buildings to get 1 turn nesquick insta armies! great for plugging holes and maintaining momentum in far off campaigns

chaos rifts are the worst. you can stop them from spawning in a province by building the torch building in the brown garrison section.

experience gained is based off of 2 things; how hard was the battle in autoresolve and how much damage value the main lord did. you can check damage value after the battle by hovering over their kills. this system favours caster lords, but even with fighter lords, letting them kill the expensive squishy units will net you tons of experience. if its an easy battle sometimes just let the lord solo it, if they're good enough. it also means supporting armies will ge tthe same experience that the first lord got, so you can have low level trashy lords leech off the chad max level greater demon as he solos 4 armies

big settlements in red territory will not be useful to you, so sack them of all its worth before occupying it, though keep in mind sack and occupy reduces a settlement by 2 levels, but looting and occupying reduces it by one (its only one level contrary to what some commentors say).

in battles, a unit will be wiped out if its army wins but it has lost 95% (i think) of its entities. if an army loses however, that unit will die at around 80% losses. so cycle out any units that go below 1/4 hp, and only run down enough of a unit to kill it, e.g with a 100 man squad getting them below 20 will wipe them out.

a loss can be a win. if a troublesome army has some squishy units and you are going to lose the battle no matter what (and this will always happen in a campaign), if you want you can fight the battle manually and snipe the squishy stuff to make the next battles easier. this is super effective with chaos furies, flamers, artillery pieces (excluding the sky junk), flesh hounds, snow leapords and if you have enough missiles, giants and unarmoured greater demons. if your confident with your damage output, aim for the raid boss units like stonehorns, exalted bloodthirsters, bear cavalry etc

putting a naked lord just into attacking range of an ai army will cause it to target the lord. retreat with the lord every time its attacked and you can send doomstack armies on a wild goose chase while you deal with its settlements

situations will arise when armies are stationed outside the settlement. attack the settlement if the enemy is weaker than you, otherwise the lord will run away and make it tricky to catch it. if the ai THINKS its stronger than your forces, attack the army outside the sttlement drawing the garrison out and murdering them

ill maybe add some more stuff to this if i remember any useful tips that apply to all types of total war players, in the mean time thank you for listening to my ted talk

EDIT: im starting to stream some warhammer content so if you need any help with campaigns just hop on there and ill help you through anything your struggling with. also watching legendoftotalwar, lionheart, mercythemad, and dameoffensive is a good way to learn new tricks

[ArctikToast]

"If it makes any moves down north" - Zerkovich

[andycarr]

Another scouting aid you didn’t mention was checking the enemy settlement public order tooltip - even if you don’t have visibility, you can still see if they are getting a Military Presence modifier and if so, how much, giving an indication of the size of any garrisoned army.

[Glenmoto]

I did enjoy that, and it has helped me quite a bit. Not only am I struggling to remember my ‘rock, paper, scissors’ unit match ups, but I find myself running back and forth a lot to defend my provinces. Inevitably losing some to try and wipe out bigger armies. Thanks!

[UnreasonableOpinions]

Loot and Occupy does come with a much more significant cost than public order; it downgrades the captured settlement by an entire level - on top of the automatic downgrade you get for taking in the first place. This can be no problem; if you only want to hold onto the city temporarily as a staging post for your armies, even level 1 is fine. For high-growth factions it can be fine to drop a small town to level 1 instead of level 2; it doesn't cost too much or take that long to upgrade later, especially if you've got full-level towns elsewhere. For high-level cities and especially low-growth factions, it's an awful idea - the difference between level 3 and 4 can be a dozen or more turns just to get the growth then 4-6 more turns to actually build it up, plus whatever buildings you lose for loss of slots.

For minor settlements, if your faction has a level 2 garrison then dropping from level 2 to 1 is a huge problem - you have now taken the town from 3-4 turns to being self-defending against junk armies and rebellions, to 7-10 and much more gold. The sooner you can leave your garrisons to defend themselves, the better for your frontline forces.

[edgarorube]

I love how supportive content creators are towards eachother in this community.

[danieldoughty]

Cheesy tip that I found in my second Katarin play through, with the Vanaheimlings being a quest faction intended to be wiped out quickly, they do pretty much nothing if you leave them be. Instead of attacking them first, go after Praag first and loop around with the Vanaheimlings town being the last that you take. Their quest army won't move or grow, and their second army only grows to about a half stack, by doing this you have a "safe" eastern border until you feel like completing the province.

[Trashloot]

I love those videos which teach general concepts because they are applicable to all of your playthroughs and i feel like they help me the most in understanding the game.

[isthianlyon]

Required movement remaining is actually done by points, not percentage as the game suggests. Look at your movement bar and long as the number is at or above (game will sometimes round down and fail to display so staying at least 1 point above is advisable) the required number for the stance you'll be allowed to use it.

[kiiper]

In my experience looting and occupying is awful, costs just as much sometimes more to repair the buildings in the town than you make

[marcomurci]

Wow what a nice team of youtubers!! Well done CA!!

[RebelCannonClub]

Loot and settle can be useful if u need a temp outpost to regen in enemy territory u can’t stay permanently inside of.

[JohnSmith-zfyk]

pro-pro tip since it wasn't mentioned in the video: Make sure you've got a bit of extra movement for ambush stance or adopt the stance then move. For reasons unknown to me, there's some rando variable(either terrain or campaign movement modifiers not displaying the number correctly) to taking a stance that if you're at 25-27% movement, you still won't be able to activate ambush stance.

Make sure that number is closer to 28-30% if you're going to go into ambush after movement. Personally I'd advise just going into ambush before movement. It doesn't actually cost you anything since the 25% movement cost gets refunded if for whatever reason you change your mind.

Also go hard at the AI in an ambush. At least for the first little bit they prioritize escaping, not fighting. Who would say no to free damage? IT'S FREE DAMAGE!

[The_Bacon_Dragon]

6:25 If they have two armies though and head out to fight you, can't they easily win that fight? Even though you ambushed the other army it looks like they've mostly healed up and would be joined by the settlement garrison on the field.

[XxTheMedicxX]

I have to keep coming back to your videos cuz these games have soooo much

[startledhamster]

Don't even need to watch the video, here is the real tutorial TLDR.

1. Start the game
2. End first turn - someone declares war on you
3. End second turn - more people declare war on you
4. After third turn, you are in war with everyone around you. So you either need to kill them or lose the game.

By the time you finish killing everyone who declared war on you, you'll be 50 turns deep, have a huge empire and then finally, you'll be able to declare a war by yourself just to tear them apart with your mighty armies. Since obviously, by this time you'll be the strongest one on the whole map

[rob]

Believe it or not its easier to hide an army in a whole bunch of trees rather than out in an open field...LOL great one

[RicoHenriques]

Love ur channel Zerc but this video was basically a guide on how to get the first province with Kislev. Yes you mention Scouting, and um.. looking to see if there are banners around.. but as a "guide" you should really have these concepts broken down into a list maybe, of important strategies for empire expansion.. such as 1 - Scouting, 2 - Aim for whole provinces, 3 - Exploit opportunities 4 dont over-reach etc.

[blaat]

I'd recommend just going east and consolidate the province like the game wants you too. The first settlement battle against the Kislev faction can be a bit hard but the rest of them are just garrison battles. Yn your way you will meet a weak ogre faction which you can destroy for easy xp and money. After that move to Praag with as much archers as possible. Lure their army out with a second lord and Katarina in ambush stance. You don't have to starve them out at all. Just position your army on the south west side because there are no towers there that can hit you. Shoot easy targets like Kossars with your archers and use magic. Don't shoot the Tzar guard from the front because they have shields. You don't even need to enter the city to win.

[CharalamposKoundourakis]

Sylvania seems always the best choise for me to take first or second.