General campaign map tips for Legendary difficulty – with a hint of grated cheese – March 9, 2023 at 08:33AM

Since the release of WH3 I’ve seen a lot of posts here of people having a hard time with legendary difficulty, with the issue being the fact that youre at war with a lot of people early on, or that the AI will focus you more than its other enemies, or the public order issues, etc. I dont know if its because of the overall nerfs to legendary difficulty is what made more players try it out and finding its not that easy.

I’ve made sort of a list of pointers i usually take note of when doing my legendary campaigns. Some of these are only useful early game up to around turn 50, but most of them can be used througout the campaign once you reach a stable point. Sure, there will sometimes be a slip-up where an enemy uses an underway stance to go around or attack from a different direction i was not expecting them from but thats really rare. By all means, im not saying this is what you have to do to win, some of these are there as suggestions, but ive been using these tricks/tips since WH2, they still hold up in WH3 and they have worked for me so far and i hope they can help you too or at least help you understand the reason for why the AI acts the way it acts so you can either try to prevent it or be ready for when it happens.

These tips are for what you should be doing on the campaign map to survive the early game and try to control who, when and where you’re fighting. I’m fairly certain that those who play this game can handle the battles on their own so i wont go into battle tips.

This is aimed more towards new and old players who want to try legendary difficulty for the first time or need some help.

Some of these tips might be a bit too cheesy or gamey for some of you so if youre lactose intolerant, maybe legendairy isnt for you

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1. Dont send heroes to every corner of the map early game – early game is a hectic time, getting declared from all sides, you dont need to discover new factions that get influenced by your actions and then declare war on you because you look particularly weak after a heavily fought battle
2. Dont sign every single treaty as soon as its available to you – unless you’ve decided to be friendly with a faction that has the same alignment as you (chaos, neutral or order) or want to “secure” a front for the time being, postpone signing treaties. Not signing some treaties now can come in handy later on when youre struggling for money or maybe try to use it as a token to get a neutral faction to join your wars
3. Dont use up all your money to upgrade your settlements early game – early game you’re going to have to fight a lot, spend the gold on getting more troops first before investing in a capital settlement and only do so if you have at least a buffer settlement surrounding it
4. Dont recruit anything but the cheapest units early game – quantity over quality early, the skaven are smart-wise
5. Early game keep an eye on who around you is the strongest and try to match and keep close to the same faction strenght as them – lagging behind in ranking will make the neighbourhood bully eye you up for its next conquest, especially if youre already in a few wars
6. Dont force march past your front line unless you know where the enemy has its armies – this is pretty much self explanatory, dont do it.
7. Dont push too much in one direction – overextension will make you collapse if you dont have other armies to cover the “sides” of the spearhead
8. Dont recruit a second army if you dont need one yet – you will eventually need a 2nd army when the newly conquered settlements will revolt and your legendary lord is off to fight a separate important battle, recruit the lord then
9. When planning to take over a region, its best to plan it so you end the full conquest at the capital – conquering (especially loot and occupy) will cause massive negative public order and at -100 rebels will always spawn at the regions capital if you own it. If you dont own it, the rebellion has an equal chance to spawn at any of the small settlements
10. Prepare to be in the red until you’ve secured at least 2 full provinces – this goes back to nr. 3, keep gold reserves for the eventual dip into red when you have to recruit new lords and units to defend against the increasing number of enemies sending armies at you
11. Use the commandments depending on what youre lacking there – when you conquer a settlement in a new region, you have 2 options, either force a rebellion if its close to -100 or try to prevent it from the start by not taxing the region as soon as you capture one of its settlements and with the public order edict (if you have it) and switch it to the increased income one (if you have it) once the region is stable
12. Make use of natural chokepoints – find a natural chokepoint on the map (ex Uzkulak) like mountain passes or the coast and hold there while youre pushing with your other lords on a different front towards your next chokepoint and repeat
13. When fighting someone stronger than you in rating, make use of ambush stance – when going on the offensive, try to find places in the enemy’s lands with high ambush success chance (forests and hills, sometimes even close to impassable mountains) on the map and either wait for them, or inch forward until youre in range to attack their settlement on the next turn if they dont show up
14. When idling an army next to the front line for multiple turns as per nr. 12, try to have it in ambush stance next to a city – this “tricks” the AI into thinking nobody is defending that juicy lvl 1 barely alive garrison settlement they so desperatly crave for (kind of the same as the forced march army next to an ambushing one tactic). If you leave the army in the settlement, they will either never attack, or postpone until they build up enough armies/units to make it an easy battle for them. Doing this next to a settlement helps in case your ambush is foiled and the enemy brings 2 armies, having the garrison there will let you deny them their second army and make it a 20 vs 20 instead of a 26 vs 40
15. Notice which city the AI gets a hard-on for – the AI usually desperately wants a settlement and will always path the same way towards it if no armies are nearby. Find which one it is and use nr. 14 to wipe their armies out.
16. Dont upgrade settlements next to your frontline if you dont have an army nearby – i dont think i have to add anything to this, investing gold in a region that isnt secure is like throwing away money
17. The AI will often attack settlements that are close to them that are building stuff (usually capital buildings or walls) for that sweet gold – there will be times when the AI you’re at war with will never attack a settlement close to them (or at least not target it), but as soon as you start building it up without an army nearby, they get the hardest boner for that settlement, either to prevent the walls from being built or because of the extra gold they get now from that settlement (the 2nd part might not be correct but i remember thats how it worked in wh2 – you get more gold if the sacked settlement had something building/upgrading at the time)
18. Use heroes in your armies – dont pump out heroes/mages and not have them in an army, single entities are more valuable than most of your units, heroes even more so, use them properly. Later in the campaign you can recruit heroes specifically for scouting ahead of your armies which makes it faster to take over regions, but dont do that early game
19. Sign only a few defensive alliances and never with factions that are close to eachother unless they’re already allies themselves – getting dragged in pointless wars early is what kills most runs. Defensive alliances are better at protecting you than a full blown alliance, especially early. If you by chance have to side with one of your defensive allies that declared war on your other defensive ally, always side with the defender to prevent the reliability hit and spiral into getting hated by absolutely everyone
20. Never sign an alliance unless youre able to protect both yourself and your ally (for confederation later) – regular alliances are a trap. They drag you into wars you dont want or are able to fight in and from what i have noticed, it makes your ally function on 1 shared braincell across all its units, forcing you to fight for them if you want to keep them alive. So do this either for confederations (even though you dont really need to) or if you dont care for the ally but can handle its enemies, want to improve relations with them and also want some of its units
21. Try to delay when you’re going to get declared war on by appeasing your future enemy while you get set up – where im from we have a saying “befriend the devil until you cross the bridge”. This is that, join their far away wars, sign deals with them, sell them settlement you dont need for deals, send them gifts if you need to, do what you can to increase their relation towards you until youre strong enough to take them on (eventually they will cancel your deals meaning they intend to declare war on you soon)
22. Hover over an enemy settlement’s public order so you can see if they have armies garrisoned in the region or not, before attacking it – when hovering, there will be a line “military presence +X”. Rule of thumb is, you take X and divide it by the number of settlements in that region that belong to them and you find out roughly (+- 2-3) how many troops they have there. This will not let you pinpoint where in those settlements the army is, just that they have an army in one of them
23. Build walls only in your major settlements – minor settlements are better used for building economic buildings. if you have extra room after that, you can either build walls, build the basic unit recruitment building chain that goes to lvl 3 or the building chains that increase certain hero capacity
24. Dont build buildings that go up only to lvl 3 in capital cities, use the minor settlements for that – while this may seem the same as nr. 23, what im talking about here is the unit buildings that go only to lvl 3. If you have room in your capital after you built everything that goes above lvl 3, then by all means do it, but usually you run out of room
25. Keep in mind that your diplomacy options are pretty limited depending on your factions’s inclination (order, neutral or chaos) – trying to change the ways of nature wont work for long (No Vlad, you cant become the Emperor). Apart from doing a specific strat to help with this, order factions will always hate chaos factions and vice-versa so try to find realistic friends when engaging in diplomacy and use nr. 21 for your future enemies
26. Use the diplomacy screen for info – check diplo screen every turn. Check rankings, check who’s at war with who, how their wars are going, how many settlements they have and if those ruins are really ruins and not skaven (here’s a recent video of Battlesey showing how to do it), see if you can get anyone to join some of your wars to get some relations with them, or use a 3rd party to declare war on someone near you that has an alliance with someone you cant take on at that time (divide and conquer)
27. Use allied missions to see where enemy armies are under fog of war – if you dont accept the missions for certain lords, you can always go to the allied missions screen, zoom in as close to the map as possible and click the magnifying glass to take you exactly where that specific lord is at that time even if you dont see him because of the fog of war
28. Always try to push forward each turn – this one might be a bit counterintuitive to some of the other tips, but what i mean by this is, each turn try to push the frontline you’re currently working on
29. Always try to be the attacker – this is more impactful depending on your army comps, but usually its best for you to be the attacker since this gives you time to set up while the enemy is waiting for your move (having artillery in your army will make the enemy charge at you if they dont have their own, so keep that in mind) and all you have to do in that scenario is either cast a spell at them or send someone to shoot at them a bit for them to “activate” and charge at your position
30. When you’re ready to attack a fairly strong neighbour, go for their armies first – In an ideal situation, before you declare war, open the diplo screen and check the power comparison bar (red and green bar) to get a rough estimate of how many armies they have (if the bar is even, they have roughly the same number of armies as you). After that use nr. 22 to find out where they are roughly. Then attack that settlement with the army inside. Garrisoned armies get wiped out when they retreat (no need to fight a 2nd battle). If you find one army outside and away from a settlement, and its just at the border of your movement range and youre not sure if it will stay and fight because your army is stronger (hovering over the enemy army while having your army selected will show a red/green bar indicating relative strenght – only works if you discovered all the units in the enemy army), dont attack it. Move your army in its zone of control and then declare war, now that army is stuck in your zone of control and can only move away if they attack you, which the AI will never do if it knows it cant win.

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PS: Again, these are some of my personal tips and guidelines for legendary difficulty that have worked and helped me do 9 different map painting campaings in wh2 and close to finishing 2 in wh3. If you have any questions about these or need something explained more, feel free to ask and ill try to answer. Also, if you have your own guidelines, i’d love to hear them out.