I personally very much enjoy RoC, just like how I enjoyed Vortex. The base soul race can get boring if you play your 3th lord in a row but the drill of Hashut and the Search for Zanbaijin are both amazing campaigns. If I wanted to just paint the map I would just open up a console, but having an actual goal pushes me forward to see the end.

Personally I like themed campaigns. It gives a goal to work for and gives more Lore and perhaps some nice cutscenes to break up the gameplay. But the Souls race is just annoying. For one, if you aren't ready by turn 30 and are currently in the middle of a big war, or your LL is exhausted and whatnot you loose your chance to enter the realm and waste another 30 turns before the next gate opens up. Secondly aside from Khorne and to some extend Nurgle Realm the other two realms are just outright AWFUL! Tzeentch Portal Labyrinth that you might even not be able to finish on your first try and then Slaanesh where you do nothing else but run from one Portal to the next BUT it takes two turns to get to each portal and there is always a forced rest after you use one. It's just stupidly boring and a waste of time >.< That you can't expand into a vast empire is okay, that isn't the goal of this gamemode anyway. Just gives you something to do while you wait and even if Ogre Territory was prefered climate for Cathay for example I wouldn't be thrilled about it since it only allows minor settlements everywhere. I would've preferred if you had a player agende on when to open the Rifts, that there was a mechanic to expede the process (by turn 60 even average players should've brought the campaign under control and have at least a Tier 4 settlement) So like paying 10k for a Ritual to open the Rift on your terms or emptying your Winds of Magic bar or whatnot but forcing the player to wait 30 turns and only allowing 1 Soul per trip is absolute annoyance. Or at the very least allow to steal the Souls from other Faction leaders that got them already! That would cut the time to beat the game in half. Get a Soul from the Realm, use the Rift to teleport to a Faction Leader, or beat them up while they're in the Realm as well. In that sense I liked the campaign for WoC, Yuan Bo, Changeling, Ostankya and the Chorfs a lot better. It STILL takes quite some time to beat the game (roughly 100+ turns) but it's for the most part on your own term and you're not sitting around for a timer, waiting that you're allowed to progress the story :/

Tbh. I usually prefer RoC for every faction that has it available. The rifts were anoying on the second playthrough before you could simply build a building to prevent them, after that change i really dont mind them at all.

I really like the concept/idea of the themed campaign, but how none of their playtesters figured out that the optimal way to play realms of chaos was to just stay on one, max two provinces and turtle forever, not engaging with any part of the game while your main army just does the souls still baffles me. The by far most optimal way to play the game being the most boring one is not a thing that should happen.

Yesterday I commented about tall vs wide, and I think RoC was a poor attempt to nerf wide even harder. Wide does even less in RoC to achieve the campaign goals than it does in IE, but the biggest problem is that it makes the campaign map irrelevant. Ostensibly all of these things do make it "harder" to go wide, but as you said, it all feels very artificial rather than the game actually being balanced. The penalties for going wide don't feel like a natural extension of the game itself, and there is no real benefit to going wide. The only thing that matters is if your LL and their army can win the souls, so to an extent going wide is penalized even further. An optimal strategy is therefore to pick the best spots to turtle, overworld map choke points, camp with halfstacks to defend and yeet your LL all over the world. Once they get their soul they can use the rifts to go wherever they'd like and pick fights with empires that can't easily threaten back. Penalizing going wide that hard just annoyed 80% or more of TWW players, as it makes a previously good playstyle annoying, and Tall is still just end turn simulator with no decisions to be made so it's not surprising RoC was panned so badly.

personally for me, i like wortex and chaos realms because despite them to be difficult and for the last one "annoying", it's more interesting for me pe[rsonally expirience then just steamroll the AI every time, and i have to get used to and adapt and overcome challenges, for example i really enjoyed inveding chaos wastes playing as kislev because it was very hard even closer to the end of campain because while you were developing slower "losing tempo", someone like scarbrand got actually really very strong and were haveing all armies at least t3+, also you can build one building iun the province to prevent spawn of rifts so they won't really bother you if you didn't want them to in a specific place, also for closing rifts you gain like 5k gold which is espetially earlygame is a good farming strategy and i usually farm them with second weaker army (becaused they have like 5 units in defence there) acrosss the map, so for me i find them enjoyable because they're much more challenging

As khorne i have max campaign movement after killing something. And even with that. It takes 2 turns to get from and to the next settlement. And it makes it almost physically impossible to keep a bloodletting going. I hit turn 30-40ish bear roars. Suddenly i have 6 enemy armies all hostile in my entire provinces and i cannot fight them cuz khorne is a 1 man gig. How. Are we just supposed to have like 6 heroes ready or one per capital to keep them safe from rift openings. How

like with the old world i find myself sometimes enjoying the more limited scope, especially given how samey immortal empires gets after the first 50 turns. skarbrand is the best LL on ROC i think, go visit khorne, take all three weapons, use rift to teleport army to the south of the empire, kill everyone.

yeah... i was in the middle of a realms of chaos Kislev game. By turn 40 or 50, i had all of Kislev confederated essentially but the waiting around repeatedly is frustrating.

Using the rifts to cross the map to be anywhere at any time was my absolute favorite part of the campaign. Especially for Kugath, whose start location was awful imo. Always used the first rifts to find a new start location and go about business from wherever I wanted.

I think a way to work the ritual idea for the portal opening would be a landmark building at tier 4 or 5, in the capitol settlement. Make it cost a few grand to use and only useable by your faction leader, that way the unending hordes arent constantly flowing through it.

The main problem is that Realms of Chaos feels more like a mini-campaign from Game 1 than the Vortex. Perhaps if CA made a large expansion of this map to the south and east, then I would be more interested in playing this game. It's ridiculous that we don't even have the entire Cathay in this campaign. I completed one campaign with Rasputin in Realms of Chaos, and then I didn't play that campaign again. If you finish one campaign, Realms of Chaos doesn't have much to offer you. I would prefer it if CA simply made an option to enable/disable the story mode for Immortal Empires campaign at launch of the game rather than wasting time adding mini-campaign like Realm of Chaos.

I genuinely believe Warhammer 3 could be one of the best games of all time if they cared more about the experiences they were creating and less about the money they were making. They could have went SO MANY different directions with this campaign that what they ended up with baffled me. Why can’t the map BE the realms of chaos themselves? And there is a Slaanesh map, tzeentch map, etc. and you can enter rifts to teleport to the different maps each one having there own special campaign effects/events. And maybe start locations are randomized or the settlements/map features are randomized? And everyone is vying to occupy 4 settlements one on each map and if they occupy it for long enough they “forge the seal” get a trait for their faction leader and once they forge all 4 they fight Belakor. The point is they could have been so creative with this concept man it’s soooo disappointing. And I came up with that after thinking about it for 2 minutes! And I’m just some Joe Schmo. You are telling me people that are PAID to do this for a living can’t come up with something as good or better?!? Come on now… where’s the ambition? The creativity?

I didn't need a 30 minute video to know this......But I also love kicking the dead horse named Realms of Chaos!

I have made a Kugath Legendary RoC, and actually accomplished to the fullest including beating the entire map (let just some chorfs live peacefully). I did that because it was a long time I did not test the souls race and also Kugath to see if he is better in RoC. But yeah, the map is not really that bad but not really that good too. In fact, I have mixed feelings about it. In Kugath's perspective, is far less worse than I remember in the era where Warhammer 3 was launched. Indeed, you are not instantly at war with most of the faction like Kislev, and Valkia serves as a buffer against Kislev's aggression. Katarina has declared war at me at some point of course, but I was able to chill out in the chaos wastes and prepare my forces before her comming. In fact, the surroundings of Kugath 's starting province is really easy to take, but only to be careful against mother ostankya. I particullary rush her before she could be a major pain to my armies. Then, I chill and take the souls of the 4 gods. The domination battle are quite boring I give up on them by auto resolve, but I like going to the Demons's worlds (execpt Tzeentch for obvious reason). They are really thematic and I want more integration of them in IE if possible. The battle against Belak'or was quite fun as I decided to play it regardless my despise for the domination mode. I can say Kugath's situation is far better in RoC than IE, just for the starting position itself. I was able to take a small part of the chaos wastes, do some wars against N'kari and then Invade Kislev and take all the old empire for myself. Then, I face the wall of boredom after having my Belakor in my faction. I take all my demons brothers, but it was not really fun because they were so weak. The map itself is so limited that few factions can really represent a threat. Only Kislev was strong enough, but after they were gone thanks to me, it was just a piece of cake. Even Cathay was not that powerful. I shall maybe declare war on the chorfs to have a better challenges; maybe next time; if only it could be...

You have to have substance to the opinion. Were the rifts a bad idea? Yes, why, not because of the special areas or teleportation but the frequency of army’s coming out. That’s all, otherwise I wish more factions in immortal empire had a way to teleport.

you nailed the issues on the head. the mid game is just full of tedium from climate, rifts, and great bastion style mechanics, with no real threats. pretty spot on about cathay early game challenges except the real challenge is claiming territory and containing the other cathay legendary lords in order to confederate them

what gets me the most is why can't we play as Karl Franz o the von Carsteins on this campaign, makes no sense (aside from the portals obviously, everything is annoying here)

If you want the chaos realm to play like immortal empires then just play immortal empires. The chaos realm isn't as good as the vortex campaign but it still gives us an alternative more narrated experience with a map that isn't a complete clusterfuck. The only issue I have with it is that the chaosrealm battle maps are objectively worse to the older maps.

I think the issue with realms is the time. The game is so slow in comparison to the other maps. The cycles of the rights opening takes forever.

Lol i even forgot that it does exist. I played it once, and even then it was meeeeh at best. I cant understand how they made such good tutorial campaign and such awful main campaign.

I like RoC themed campaign, You need to prepare for it, and that is it.

Why tongggggg