Interventions, and how to improve them

**mahu** · October 08, 2017, 06:43 AM

Ok, so I'm pretty sure many players have noticed that intervention armies are pretty much... well,

. The ability to prevent enemy rituals is something good, but spawning full armies at random is nonsense - and not only that, it's just lazy design. Now, I'm able to understand Chaos armies appearing out of nowhere - their gods can just send their minions through the warp portals or something. But for other factions it's just weird, and - most importantly - useless and annoying. Here's why:
1. Intervention armies are random. Which means that sometimes you can pay 10k gold and send a mediocre army into the middle of enemy territory where it won't stand a chance. Other times, you can pay the same 10k and get a force that will just rip everything to shreds - in my campaign as Clan Pestilens, High Elves decided to stop my first ritual with an intervention army with 8 Star Dragons. Eight. Star. Dragons. And some ballistas and Dragon Princes, units they couldn't produce at the time. But here's the funniest thing - even though that army could just tear me to shreds, it still failed to stop the ritual, which leads us to...
2. Intervention armies don't do their job - in my 3 campaigns so far, I have never seen an intervention army to actually stop the ritual, because - 90% of the time - they just don't even try. Every time someone spawns an intervention, it just marches off into the distance to raze some random settlements, which is annoying for both sides. The side that paid for intervention is annoyed, because they just spent 10k on an army to perform an important task, not lay siege to a fishing village in the middle of nowhere. And for the defender, it's annoying because it means every single settlement is vulnerable to a

, random attack from nowhere (your safe heartlands basically turn into border provinces almost instantly) - and losing fully upgraded minor settlement can be painful.

So, we estabilished that intervention armies are done poorly, let's now think how to improve them, preferably with in-game mechanics.
1. Make every consecutive ritual take 5 or 10 more turns. It's important for the next idea.
2. Instead of spawning a random army, allow us to send our own. We already can teleport armies into quest battles, so why not do it there? Every time a ritual begins, armies of other factions could receive a new stance - Intervention Portal (or Intervention Tunnels for Skaven). An army would spend two or three turns in this stance, unable to move, but unnafected by attrition and upkeep - basically, it would imply preparations that need to be made before an entire army (or armies) is transported across the world. After set number of turns - let's say 3 - player or AI could teleport this army into regions (not provinces) where the ritual is taking place. Mechanically, it could work like, say, infinite range underway - you just click on enemy region and there you are.
3. Ok, so we're in the enemy region, but we still need to incentivize actually going for the ritual site, instead of just randomly burning local towns. Think of crusade/jihad mechanics from Medieval 2, where your soldiers deserted if you weren't going straight for your target. So here's this - every region where ritual is taking place (Hexoatl, for instance) could be given a flag, say "Ritual Region", for the duration. And in these regions, intervention armies would receive various bonuses - no upkeep, no attrition, better morale etc. However, should they leave this Ritual Region, they would immidiately suffer penalties - severely lowered morale and high attrition, to indicate that your men are not happy that you teleported them across the world and then decided to

around, ignoring the looming threat.
4. So we now have an army that is focused on it's goal - stopping the ritual. If they die, they die. If they win, they can stay in the region and make sure it's not recaptured. And once ritual timer runs out, they would automatically teleport to your closest region, or your capital, or their starting point, regardless if they were succesful or not. You could also send them back before that.

That, I think, would make interventions more focused, and - most importantly - more engaging for the player. It would also enhance strategic layer - do I send my troops on an intervention and, possibly, leave my borders undefended? Do I send only a fraction of my armies and risk them being overwhelmed far away from home? Do I recall my armies in case of war, and risk my enemy retaking the ritual site? More decisions, more fun for the player.

Now, I don't think this could be modded in (then again, TW games have amazing modding community, so who knows), so I hope the devs will read that (they won't and I just wasted 10 minutes writing an essay nobody will care about, yay)

TL;DR - Stop with randomly appearing armies (except for chaos) and let me send my own troops to stop the rituals.

If you have your own opinions or ideas, feel free to share them. That way, CA will ignore all of us, instead of just me.

**LestaT** · October 08, 2017, 07:56 AM

I only care about other factions rituals by their 3rd one which by that time I use my allies together with intervention armies.

By 5th one then only I sed out my own forces because by that time I usually at war with said faction.

The timing is just nice as it is.

Expecting only the intervention armies is simply not a good tactical or strategical decisions anyway.

**craziii** · October 08, 2017, 09:32 AM

mahu, you are focusing on the wrong aspect of it. it is by game design that you race by collecting the fragments. you can send you own armies, but it takes forever to get to a site. the ritual race by design is to for you to expand in you race's climate. I hate this by the way. limiting where I can expand. but this limited expansion theme seems to be a thing for warhammer series. warhammer 2 campaign map is 3 continents + a huge island. where as the first one was just a single continent. the easiest one to get to is the high elf one. ships can move pretty fast. dark elf one is the hardest, would probably take you 30 turns to get to it if not more as you will have to fight AI army stacks. teleporting your own army across continent? I personally thinks it makes it too easy for the player to gain a foothold deep into other main fantion's territory.

**Ichon** · October 08, 2017, 12:18 PM

You can march to Naggarond ritual sites but you have to start about 10 turns ahead of when you think they are about to start the final ritual which takes 20 turns to complete. 30 turns to cross half the map or a bit more is possible- I've done it twice as Skaven and as High Elves to reach other races ritual sites. A turn or 2 before you arrive call in the intervention army and it will usually distract defending armies- taking Mazdamundi's ritual down with a single stack worked with lightning strike + intervention army.

**daelin4** · October 08, 2017, 05:29 PM

I prefer if you can make your own armies the intervention armies, just use the Crusader mechanic in MTW2: designated army gets a boost n several things like movement speed and upkeep discount, and in turn they have to get their arses to all three ritual sites of the target faction. You can designated up to three armies at any time, whether all three are against one faction, one per faction, etc.

Now you might think "but they are too far away". Exactly, that's part of the point. If you want to intervene, you have to get to that city and coordinate.
I kind of accept the teleport element, but I prefer if there was some sort of distance your armies had to march as part of intervention. Can you imagine every chase scene in movies where characters don't even have to cross any distance? Moving stuff around and planning on it is a major element of Total War games in particular, and any strategy game in general.

I also sort of think the ritual time be increased and the effects staggered throughout its duration. Right now if you start a ritual, three full stacks will spawn on the map- I would prefer if one stack spawned every few "sub-stage" of the ritual portion; this gives a sense of crescendo of conflict and difficulty tempo following the ritual progression. As it is right now, I can blitz all three armies (or they just mope around the map) and the pacing and tension of the ritual is stalled or nonexistent- in my current HE campaign the Skaven stack just bummed around for like 50 turns until I finally bothered to destroy it- by then it had suffered so much attrition it couldn't attack anything.
Ritual time increased also allows intervention to be successful when deployed from your own armies into far away territory. Yes you have to travel far away and yes you have to fight through other factions to get to them first, but isn't that the point of such an expedition? Sometimes the target cities are within reach anyways, and sometimes you are expanding in that direction anyhow.
Even the existing Intervention mechanic can be tweaked to support this feature, whereby they spawn as a allied tag-along army to your intervention force. This is the same as Orc Waagh! armies sure, but it does give you some help along the way. Beastmen utilize the same mechanic under a different name, so if it's double dipping, it's already been double dipped.

As for OP's suggestions, I think there are a few problems: if a ritual region has no upkeep the player and AI can (un)intentionally game the system by parking armies here for economic boost due to no upkeep, and wait until last minute to intervene, or not intervene at all and save money.

There is however another fact that, by design, the Vortex ritual thing isn't even a fundamental part of the campaign. It isn't a big deal that the AI completes the rituals, you don't suffer any consequences except the feeling that you're behind. But really, there is no penalty for them progressing- if anything YOU get penalized for staying ahead since it effectively gives you Realm Divide penalties...and the AI probably doesn't get them, either, so they get no uphill battle.

Overall I must say I find the Vortex Ritual mechanic very tacked onto the map and thus considerably irrelevant to overall game design. From the start of my playing I felt that other factions doing the Ritual meant nothing to me and something I can ignore. Intervention armies therefore also felt like a tack-on to a tack-on: a kind of "whatever" mechanic to try to give the player some way to disrupt their progress. Kind of like the homework that a student clearly spent the last hour writing down, you can tell the quality isn't there.

In short, Rituals don't offer a real sense of competition, and therefore I've no urgency to spend money on an army that's AI controlled.

**LestaT** · October 08, 2017, 06:58 PM

One thing about intervention armies is that it automatically declare wars on the faction you send them to.

I would love a bit roleplay where while you can send armies, the faction on the recieving end kinda don't know who send them. Or maybe aome roke dice after few turns where the faction discoveres that you send them in the end which then only war will be declared.

In my current Kroq Gar campaign, I did not send intervention forces against Lothern for the first 3 as yhey are my trade partners and only sending against Skaven and DE since they are already my enemies.