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From making friends to crushing enemies, here are our Total War: Warhammer 3 tips.
Looking for some Total War: Warhammer 3 tips? In a lot of ways this is the most challenging game of the series, since throughout the main campaign you’re expected to invade the daemon realms and throw down the gauntlet to each of the Chaos gods’ four princes, besting them in battle to claim their souls for yourself.
But while you’re absent on your merry excursion through hell, marauding Chaos armies and insidious agents spill into your realm in the hopes of bringing ruin to your faction. So, it’s a delicate balance: to hold onto what you have, but also to expand, and build up your economy and settlements, so the next time you face a daemon prince, you can bring a killer army with you.
In this Total War: Warhammer 3 tips guide, I’ll offer some advice that served me well in the campaign, and a few advantages you can use for yourself to help make it through the daemonic onslaught relatively unscathed.
If you want to find out how the campaign works yourself, you may want to steer clear, as this guide will spoil the main story mode.
Early expansion is an important part of any strategy game, but in Warhammer 3 you have a limited amount of time before the Chaos Rifts appear and start spewing armies and daemonic agents into your provinces. This happens around turn 35-ish, and when it does you have to go on the defensive, especially as your faction leader’s army has to head off to the Chaos Realms to grab themselves a daemon prince soul.
Even after the rifts are closed, the time between them appearing gets shorter and shorter as the campaign continues. The longest period of uninterrupted expansion you get are those first 35 turns, so it’s important to make haste while the sun shines and spread yourself far, before folding back in to deal with the rifts and consolidating. Expansion also helps deter potential invaders. If you defeat the Baersonling as Kislev, for example, you can stop Nurgle and Khorne from establishing a foothold to the north of you.
The same goes for Cathay—take territory to the south in the Mountains of Mourne, and you can check demonic expansion from the Chaos Wastes to the west before they make it into your heartland. Finally, early aggressive expansion lets you deal with internal threats, like Greenskins, Ogres, and Skaven, who might become a hindrance when you’re trying to deal with the rifts.
Since the gate rewards are random, the ancillary may not appear for you, but you can still grab a huge chunk of change or another powerful boon that’ll supercharge your early campaign. It’s also fine to sacrifice a soul, since you have the opportunity to block another opponent if they get all four before you. Though the daemon prince souls will win the campaign, having a strong faction capable of supporting a powerful army, and even continuing to expand when the rifts are open, is arguably moreso: it decides who wins in the more competitive realms like Khorne and Nurgle. Also, if you crush an opponent on the campaign map, it doesn’t matter how many souls they have. 
Your heroes can also be used to quickly assassinate or wound any demonic agents that come through before you close them. Since the rifts always appear in similar places, I recommend training a cadre of heroes, and having them on standby so you can close every rift as soon as it appears, letting you focus on expansion. While AI armies can also close rifts, they aren’t especially vigilant doing it, so if you have an ally you’re planning to confederate and don’t want them to get Chaos-nuked before you do, be a good neighbour and close their rift for them.
Garrisons have always been important in Total War: Warhammer, but in this game where demonic armies can come from pretty much wherever, it’s better to have a strong garrison in every settlement if you don’t want to be fighting old battles, and retaking stuff you’ve already fought for once. These buildings only take one slot in a four slot settlement, so there’s still lots of space for an economy building, and any recruitment you might want.
Like Regiments of Renown in the other games, this gives you a global means of fast recruitment that helps you fill out an army and is also essentially free. Plus you can create some pretty powerful combos. There’s nothing like a Cathay missile army with a frontline of Dwarf infantry. 
Considering Katarin’s 50 percent upkeep reduction for the hybrid archer/melee Ice Guard, and Miao Ying’s 50 percent upkeep reduction for all missile infantry, you can create some incredibly strong yet cheap armies that the Daemons, Ogres, and Chaos factions struggle to answer against most of the time. They’ve both got some very strong artillery in the form of Little Grom and the Fire Rain Rocket, too.
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