I lost the passion to rant after writing that but suffice to say what I felt was that I was playing the main campaign and reached the time when portals start opening up all over and several armies just marched out everywhere over my realm and that made me go "shit" in an unfun way.
But I hadn't lost the feel to play yet so I started over, and read up a little on the mechanics, and then I got to the part I Tzeentch's realm
of the battle of the Impossible fortress. Auto finishing it would give me a Heroic Victory, but I wanted to try to fight it out myself... And that fucking battle. I hated it (hey i feel my rantiness is coming back now
). I eventually gave up, decided to autosolve it instead, reloaded, and found myself back at the pre-battle screen promising me a Heroic Victory. And that just blew the wind out of me.
I mean, I'm not the best TW player, I know that, but I've usually been able to beat the story missions even if it costs me a lot (my main struggle with the games has always been economic and that certainly wasn't an issue in the Cathay Iron Dragon campaign). But Heroic Victory, for me who struggle to get Heroic Victories in TW games anymore since at least before the Warhammer series, it just felt like an insult, like they were patronising me. Ridiculous, I know, but feelings aren't rational.
I looked up tips for the battle afterwards.
Apparently the main advice is to just spawncamp the enemy spawnpoints so they can't use their range.
Yeah, no. I'm not feeling it.
Haven't really played since. Tried an Empire Immortal Campaign to clear my pallete, pondered a Kislev start. It's a shame, because I really liked Cathay and their faction features. Their position is cool, reflecting the Empire's "unite the splintered realm or fall to internal conflict and strife" theme in interesting ways. I liked their troops, even though they felt a bit short on the roster (maybe an consequence of CA having to come up with much of the actualities themselves?).
As for Kislev, they seem to have interesting mechanics too. I'm a bit hesitant about their troop tree though, I'm not a huge fan of hybrid troops, I get unsure on how to use them. Tips are appreciated.
And finally, I need to add about the Empire Immortal campaign. In WH2's Mortal Empires campaign they had, mainly imported from WH1 iirc, a structure of missions to guide you and set you up with some free money and faction resource, especially useful at the start of the campaign. For some reason they decided to not implement this for WH3. As far as I could tell from quickly testing it out, no faction seem to have their starting missions brought over. And since I'm a chronic "I have to get the best start" restarter, I'm feeling like I'm losing out on the good start. Yes, I know, irrational, new map content, new game. But I really can't start a gsme without getting the best start. It's a mental hangup. So I ended up abandoning it, thinking I would be better of playing TW2 if I wanted to play the old factions. And that's my advice on the non-story campaign in general.
Oh, and for some reason they made Immortal Empires Empire be unable to ally or confederate other imperial factions. What's up with that, that's the entire theme of their campaign?