Total War: Warhammer III – Helpful Tips on How to Play Cathay

Here to share some helpful tips on how to play Cathay. I finished a Cathay Miao Ying Campaign and noticed quite a few helpful tricks along the way.

Introduction

Note: Credit goes to kw142

This guide is mainly for Miao Ying, Northern Provinces, although a lot of the tips apply to Grand Cathay in general. Suggestions are based on my experience; there may be more optimal approaches I have not discovered. Feel free to add more suggestions or ask questions in the comment section.

Cathay has a strong defensive play style. The strategic location of their home settlements is quite safe if you can manage the Great Bastion–which is not hard due to how strong the Great Bastion garrison is, and there are many bonuses you can get for it from research, buildings, and character skills. Once you manage the Great Bastion, you can pretty much fight a one-front war as you fight down south against the Ogres.

Harmony is a bit tricky to manage at first, but there are many hidden tricks to make it easy. I’ll go through many helpful tricks I found. You want to always stay in perfect harmony for huge faction-wide bonuses.

I personally also believe Cathay could be your first faction to play for campaign because of how safe its location is and how straightforward its units are. The downside is harmony management would require some extra planing, which hopefully this guide can help you.

Territorial Expansion and Early Tips

Overall, territorial expansion for Cathay is straightforward since the majority of the time you can fight on one-front. General rule of thumb: Stabilize Cathay and the Great Bastion first, then expand in one direction down south against the Ogres. Or if you want to just play defensive, after stabilizing Cathay and the Great Bastion, just defend settlements, catch souls, and win the campaign; Cathay can play super defensive and win that way.

Where and How to Expand as Miao Yin Early on

• First take care of the rebels in the Cathay Region, take all their settlements in the first 10 turns or so. The more settlements you hold, the more income you can have late game, and the more armies you can sustain. Your starting army should be strong enough to storm through the rebel army and early settlements. Recruit at the end of each turn to make your army bigger and stronger.

• While you are taking care of the rebels, keep an eye out for the Tzeentch army at Terracotta Graveyard. They should not be able to attack and take your settlements early on, but to be safe, I recruited a second army with a few peasant units at the nearest settlement, just in case if they decide to attack.
• After taking all the rebel settlements, turn your main army back and take the Terracotta Graveyard, the Tzeentch settlement. At this point you should be safe inside the Great Bastion since there are no enemy faction adjacent to you.

• Prepare to take back the Snake gate next. Use a small army with few week units to capture the gate since when you settle into a deserted settlement, your army spends a good number of your units’ soldiers to settle down. If you use your main big army, it will instantly drain a lot of your soldiers and weaken you temporarily before you main army replenish. I always capture deserted settlement with a small army if possible. Have your main army nearby, just in case if the Chaos/Norsca warbands outside the gate decide to attack you when you are settling down.

Mid to Late Game Tips

I suggest you do not expand west past the Great Bastion into the Chaos lands, at least not early or mid game, for the following reasons:

• The chaos lands are completed corrupted with Chaos corruptions. Moving your army through these lands make you take heavy attrition damage. You army will likely be weakened by a lot before you even reach a settlement to attack.
• The corruption also affect your settlement growth. You have negative settlement growth in heavily corrupted regions, plus huge public order penalty. Therefore, it is very hard to hold a settlement in the Chaos region, close to impossible to upgrade these settlements within 20 or even 30 turns.
• These region usually have unsuitable climates as well, meaning increased building time, higher recruitment time, and lowered replenishment rate.
• Kurgan Warbands army are also scripted to spawn west of the Great Bastion. They will attack your settlement right away if they spawn next to it. In other words, everything may be fine when you ended the turn, but the next turn 3 full stack army may spawn next to your settlement and besiege it.

If you do decide to expand west into the chaos land, here are some helpful tips:

• When traveling through these lands, I suggest you march one turn and encamp the next turn, alternating between them to mitigate attrition damage.

• When you decide to raze a chaos land settlement because it is too hard to hold, I suggest you do the following instead: Sack > Occupy > Abandon Settlement. These three steps can be done in one turn. This way, you get the max amount of money from sacking settlement while preventing your lord from taking attrition damage since at the end of the turn, your lord is technically garrisoning a settlement–which is being abandoned.

• Use your allies to help you expand into chaos land when you can’t hold settlements. When one of your chaos land settlement is about to get razed by chaos army, trade your settlement to your ally who is not at war with chaos army. You can ally one of the Ogre faction and give the settlement to them. This way, the settlement will not get razed and the region’s chaos corruption will continuously drop because a non-chaos faction is holding it.

• You don’t have to expand out of Cathay. You can just hold the Great Bastion and Cathay, and focus on catching souls–finishing the campaign.
• Expand down into the ogre mountains is the best option. These settlements are easier to govern and hold than chaos land in the west. And because of the terrain, you can hold choke points to safely push out in one direction, with no threat attacking your back while you are expanding.
• After you unify the ogre mountains, go further south and control the bottom right corner of the map. For the lizard men on the island, I just allied with them; you don’t have to push onto their island, and they won’t come out and attack anybody.

• After you control the east side of the map, you should probably already gotten all 4 souls and finished the campaign at this point, since you are likely more than 150 turns in. Otherwise, you can just hold and finish the campaign by catching souls or continue expanding westward if you prefer. Kislev, dwarfs, and Empires are easy to ally, while green skins, vampires, daemons, you should fight.

The Great Bastion Attacks

The Northern Provinces, Miao Yin’s faction, has this unique campaign mechanic where you need to hold the Great Bastion–“The Great Wall”–against endless tides of Chaos/Norsca faction. At first it feels intimidating, later it just feels like stacks of army suiciding into your walls like moth into fire. Plenty of memes going around about Cathay and Kurgan Warbands XD.

There is a threat gauge at the top of your UI:

Every turn the gauge goes up passively, you can conduct research, issue edicts, and construct special buildings to lower the threat level. Once the gauge is full, Kurgan Warbands are scripted to spawn stack of armies right outside of your wall. Even when the gauge is not full, small armies of Kurgan Warbands still spawn randomly and will look to siege your wall. Killing all Kurgan Warbands spawned on the map will lower the gauge by quite a bit.

Tips on Dealing with Bastion Attacks

• The gates of the Great Bastion have strong garrison, a single stack of Chaos/Norsca army usually cannot take it down. As long as you are upgrading the gates as the game progresses, you don’t need to worry about Kurgan Warbands siege when the gauge is not full.
• When the gauge becomes full, you will receive a message about the Great Bastion attack begins. Then you have to make sure you have strong armies manning the walls. Wherever multiple stacks of armies spawned, make sure you have at least one strong army holding the respective gate. You should have time to move your army between gates since it usually takes a few turns for them to siege the gates.
• The gates have some super beneficial special buildings. One building reduces upkeep of local armies; at max level, the upkeep reduction is 65%. If you combine with lord skills and researches, the upkeep reduction can get above 80%. I suggest you just leave some strong armies on the gates. I kept full stacks of top tier units on those gates and had very low upkeep reduction. And you will become no.1 power in diplomacy so fast because of this.

• Besides the upkeep reduction building, I built the growth and replenishment building, for fast recovery after sieges. You can also build a defense building for more supplies or a hiring building for top tier units. Also, tier 4 gates can hire Terracottas, they are super strong, terrifies enemies, and unbreakable.
• Don’t bother going out and sweeping the Kurgan Warbands, they will just keep spawning. I just let the gauge fill and defend the sieges when I have to. They are usually decisive victories for you anyway, but the Kurgan Warbands still mindlessly crash into your wall.

Diplomacy Tips

Grand Cathay can have many allies and trade partners. There are many confederation opportunities as well. You should always be looking for an opportunity to conduct beneficial diplomacy deals.

General Tips

• Keep your reliability very high at all times. This makes diplomacy much easier for you; other factions are more likely to sign treaties with you. To keep high reliability:
• Do not do any aggressive actions against a faction which you have a treaty(any treaty) with. (Aggressive actions include: raiding, attacking, trespassing, threatening in diplomacy, agent/hero actions)
• Do not betray your allies. (Enter war with your military alliance when they attack; enter war with your defensive alliance when they get attacked. If both attack and defender are your allies, join the defender.)
• Do not break a treaty shortly after you signed it (10 turns).
• Cancel all treaties and wait for a while (10 turns) before you conduct any aggressive actions with a faction you have treaties with.
• After each confederation there is a cool-down (5 turns) before you can confederate again, and during this period you have diplomacy penalty with other Cathay factions.
• Before confederation, make sure you have strong economy and can hold extra territories. Confederation can sink your income badly due to new armies, agents upkeep. When this happens, consider whether you need the new army, the location of the new army, disband as necessary.
• Do not sign defensive alliance and military alliance mindlessly. Aggressive factions may bring you into unwanted wars very quickly, while factions adjacent to many hostile factions may bring unwanted war to you when they get declared war.
• Do not sign any treaties with factions your know you are likely going to war with.
• Give small money gifts to raise friendship with other factions.
• When a deal is close to being struck (small negative number), you can add payments to fulfill it.

• Build allied outpost if you economy allows. No need to upgrade it unless if you are rich

Miao Ying Diplomacy Tips

• Befriend your fellow Cathay people. You can confederate with every Cathay faction at some point with ease, except for your brother’s faction, the Western Provinces. Sign non-aggression pact, defensive alliance as soon as possible with all of them.
• Choose to befriend some ogre factions. The ogre faction closest to you is a good option; it is likely fighting other ogres. Choose a ogre faction that is fighting other ogre factions if you want to take over ogre mountains. Ogre allies are useful to help you defend ogre mountains and fight against other ogre factions when you expand.
• Cathay has buildings increase trade income; sign any trade agreement you can (except not with factions you are going to fight against, chaos, daemons, vampires, some ogres, green-skins) even if you have to pay some money for it. A trade agreement with greater than -1 success chance is usually worth pursuing with payments.
• For further factions, befriend Kislev, Empires, and Dwarfs. You don’t need to sign alliances if you don’t want. Trade and non-aggression pacts are good to have with them.
• For settlements you captured that you do not want to hold or cannot hold, give them to your allies. If your settlement is about to be razed by enemy, you can give it to your ally who is not at war with the enemy. This prevents the settlement getting razed and helps your ally. Ogre ally is a good candidate to have chaos land settlements.

Harmony Managament

Harmony is a unique mechanic for Cathay faction. You have to manage Yin, Yan energy to make sure they are balanced. You gain massive bonuses faction-wide if harmony is achieved–balanced Yin and Yan. There are some penalties if you don’t have harmony–imbalanced Yin and Yan. The greater the unbalance, the more the penalty. Your goal is to always maintain perfect harmony.

Yin Yan Energy Changes

• Each lord have either 3 Yin or 3 Yan contribution, whereas each agent/hero have 1 Yin or 1 Yan contribution.
• Each green infrastructure building for Cathay also contributes either 1 Yin or 1 Yan energy.
• Random events throughout the game will give you 6 Yin, 6 Yan, or 0 energy depending on your choice.
• Each Cathay research gives you either 0, 1, or 3 Yin/Yan energy.

Tips on Harmony Management

• Build infrastructure only when you know you can keep harmony:
• Building infrastructure in pairs is a good practice. One Yin building and one Yan building built at the same time.
• Leave building slots empty if building infrastructure right now will disrupt harmony. This also gives option to help balance harmony if you harmony is somehow disrupted.
• Build uneven Yin-Yan buildings but balance energy through other means like hiring agents/heroes or research.
• Hire, replace, dismiss lords or agents/heroes to rebalance harmony:
• Build many agents/heroes recruitment buildings. Mid to late game, just hire/dismiss extra agents/heroes whenever you need to balance for harmony.
• A lord counts as 3 Yin or 3 Yan energy. When a random events show up, and you want to choose an option that gives 6 Yin or Yan energy, replace a lord of that particular energy type with the opposite type. For example, if you chose +6 Yan even option, replace a Yan lord with a Yin lord would keep harmony.

• Beware of when a research with energy is finishing and plan accordingly.
• If a research is finishing next turn, prepare for it by building one or three opposite energy building, hire/dismiss extra lords or heroes.
• If building infrastructure, make sure the building is finishing the next turn. Unsuitable climate can increase building times.

Handling Chaos Rifts

Even though Cathay is relatively safe after stabilizing the Great Bastion, and you can fight a one-front war down south, the chaos rifts can jeopardize the situation. In the Forge of Souls campaign, Ursurm roars periodically in pain. A few turns after he roars, chaos rifts will start opening across the map.

These chaos rifts are what you use to travel to the realm of chaos to claim demon prince souls. At the same time they bring horrible corruptions to nearby regions and chaos agents, armies can come through the portal to wreak havoc. Because these portals open up everywhere on the map, chaos army can get inside the Great Bastion through these portals. One needs to take care of them as soon as possible.

Tips on dealing with Chaos Rifts

• Close these rifts as soon as possible with agents/heroes or armies.
• These rifts brings a lot of chaos corruption fast. Your army will soon take attrition damage in nearby regions and your settlements nearby will start experience huge public order, growth penalty.
• Chaos agents, armies will start coming through these rift portals, wreaking havoc on nearby settlements.
• Leave a portal for your legendary to go into the realm of chaos and claim demon prince souls.
• You can have your legendary lord teleport between portals. You can use this to your advantage ; teleport your lord back to your capital for defense, or teleport into enemy territory for offense.
• The location of the portal you used to send your lord into the chaos realm, is the location where the lord will come out of, so make sure your lord does not come out into danger by teleporting first back to your territory before going into the realm of chaos.
• You can have an agent/heroes or lord close the portal right after your legendary lord goes in to the realm of chaos. That way, you lord still went in and the portal no longer spreads corruptions.

• Spread out extra agents/heroes across your settlements to close the rifts.
• Agents/heroes can close rifts for 1500 gold. Closing the rift this way do not require you to fight chaos army. Closing a rift with an army will require you to fight a chaos army, which grows in strength depending on the number of times rifts have opened before.
• Agents/heroes also have more movement range than a typical army.
• Rifts locations are always the same for a single campaign. Meaning you can prepare for new rifts from the second wave onward based on where the appeared last time.

Caravans

Caravan trading is a unique mechanic for Cathay faction. A caravan army bring cargo you buy to a far-away settlement and trade the cargo for a lot of money. The further the settlements, the longer it takes, and the more rewards it gives. It is a good way to generate additional income. The max amount of active caravan is just one, so you should always have a caravan army traveling.

Tips for Caravan Trading

The caravan armies do not have upkeep cost, so you can recruit multiple as backups if you want.

Need at least two caravan. When a caravan reaches the destination, it has to return before it can go for another trade; during this time, if there is another caravan, you can dispatch it right away.

Recommend short trade if the gold gain per turn is similar for long and short trades. You gain a magic item after every successful caravan trade. Short trades means frequent trades and many magic items.

Various events happen randomly as the caravan travels:

Army attack events:

• Ogre asking you to feed one of your unit as food for them, or they attack. Look at the strength of the ogre army strength and your army’s strength before deciding. In general, fight them if you can, but you don’t want to fight if your army is weaker or if your army just fought previously and units have suffered medium or heavy losses already. Feeding one of your unit to the ogre is beneficial if so.
• Enemy ask you to give them cargo, or they attack. Same suggestion as ogre feeding, fight if your army is stronger and have healthy status, otherwise give some cargo away.
• Ambush attack. This type of attack is heavily favored for your enemy; you are likely to suffer heavy losses or even lose the army entirely. There is a caravan lord skill lowering the chance of ambush, but I don’t recommend taking that skill as a priority.
• Army attack opportunity where you can choose to fight or not, fighting them gives you a permanent buff to your army or lord. Always fight these if you can, since the reward traits given are usually very helpful for battles.

Blessing/Unit addition event advice:

• Third-party hero wants to tag along in your caravan. Always accept them. I have not seen any downsides from accepting them, and you gain a hero unit in your caravan army, which is a great addition.
• Found lost allies. Usually gives you two options of different unit options–three peasant unit or two advanced units. I usually take the advanced units, unless if my caravan is missing frontline melee, then I would prioritize peasant spears over jade crossbows.
• Rare blessing event. Two permanent buff options available–one makes your caravan able to carry a lot more cargo and cargo sells for more, the other gives strong fighting traits to all units and three top-tier dragon guard halberd units. I usually choose the fighting buff and dragon guards since this makes your caravan super safe, and you caravan has to make to the destination first before making any money at all.

Shortcut/Reroute event advice:

• Shortcut for paying some money to local guide. Take these shortcuts if you can they are usually cheap and can potentially avoid you a fight.
• Reroute option to avoid danger, adding an extra turn to your travel. I recommend taking reroute to avoid fights if possible, but if you are willing to take the battle risk for faster payouts, you can choose the other option.

Wu Xin Compass

The Wu Xin Compass is another special Cathay mechanic. Faction wide buff can be gained through setting the direction of the compass. There are 4 directions each with different bonus when direction is set to them. There are three energy gauge for three of the directions, which increases when the direction is set to the corresponding one. Depending on the level of the gauges, passive bonuses are also activated. These gauge automatically depletes overtime if not have the direction set. There is a cool-down for changing direction.

Tips for Wu Xin Compass

• You don’t have to change the compass direction every time it is available.
  • Changing directions help keeping the gauges up for multiple passive bonuses, but not all of the passive bonuses are very useful all the time.
  • For the majority of the campaign, I just left the direction towards growth (Celestial Lake), which in my opinion is the best, giving you 15% income bonus when direction is set that way.
  • Leaving the option of changing direction open is beneficial. Sometimes, you might get into a situation you want another direction’s bonus. If you recently changed the direction, you will not be able to change to that compass direction due to cool-down.
• Growth and income boost (Celestial Lake) is always a good direction to default to.
• Change to enemy leadership reduction, corruption reduction (Warpstone Desert) direction when enemies are invading your settlements and you need extra help defending.
• The other two directions, Great Bastion and Dragon Emperor’s Wrath are very situational and less useful in my opinion.

Other Miscellaneous Tips

• Cathay crossbows are very powerful and can out-range, shoot down enemies afar, they are the main damage output of Cathay’s army. Hold down enemies with melee units and shoot with your crossbows. Protect them from Calvary and flying units with spears/halberds.
• Lore of Heaven (astromancers) and Lore of Metal (alchemists) both have strong AOE spells. Use them on groups of enemies to do huge damage.
• Attrition reduction, casualty replenishment and untainted are good skills to take for lords if you are planning on expanding westward, because of how bad chaos corruption is outside of Cathay and if you don’t close chaos rifts in time, chaos corruption can be a problem in Cathay regions as well.
• For quest battles, note you can heal, buff, restock, and even replenish winds of magic reserve using supply points. The icon is at the bottom right of the UI and options change depending on the unit you select.