Five Campaign Habits That Sink Your Warhammer 3 Run

🎯 The core idea

Three lines have to keep moving in the right direction across a campaign: income up, army strength up, active wars down. Every one of Zerkovich's five mistakes is a way one of those lines quietly flattens while the map still looks fine.

Nothing here is a build order. It is the set of habits that decide whether turn 60 finds you funding three armies or explaining to yourself why the Skaven have five.

• free costs nothing, just a habit
• cheap small gold or a skill point
• setup needs a few turns of planning
• grind pays off slowly, over the whole campaign
• skip the thing to stop doing

Money: your income has to rise every turn

The whole section rests on one shape — the line Zerkovich draws himself. Income on one axis, turn number on the other, and the line never goes flat. Not because gold is fun, but because gold is armies and armies are territory.

1. Put an income building in almost every settlement freeNot a rule of thumb — a default. Minor settlements exist to pay for major ones. 0:46
2. Growth buildings first, then swap them for income at tier 3 setupGet the provincial capital to tier three on growth, then tear the growth buildings out and replace them with income. 1:08
3. Do not buy a military building for units you cannot field skipHis worked example: Slayers at 225 each, and two of them eat about a third of his income. The building unlocks nothing he can pay for. 1:31
4. Upgrade income and trade buildings before anything else cheapMoney into more money, until you have money to burn. Then you can afford opinions. 1:53

The tooltip is worth reading properly, because he never says these numbers out loud. A dwarf Gem Mine here shows 300 income before modifiers, 315 after, thirty sacks of gemstones, and — easy to miss — recruitment cost down 25% and recruit rank up one. Income buildings are frequently not only income buildings.

That is the decision surface for the rule above: the province panel on one side, and the competing military building's tooltip on the other, offering −30% recruitment cost and +2 recruit rank. Tempting, and wrong, if you cannot yet pay for what it unlocks.

Which technologies are actually worth it

1. Do not take a tech because "income" is in the name skipThe dwarf tech for gems and obsidian is worth nothing if your provinces have neither. 2:36
2. Take the small percentage techs anyway grindIndividually tiny, and that is the point — they compound over eighty turns. 2:59
3. Spend lord and hero points on upkeep and income cheapQuartermaster on Karl Franz is −10% upkeep. A wizard hero's Boost Income is +6%. 3:20

If your faction cannot trade

Greenskins, and anyone else nobody will sign with, make money by fighting. Battle income, plus the post-battle option to demand tribute — he calls it "a couple of grand" a time. Skill points into raiding, looting and sacking, and the ones for whichever of those you never do get skipped. He reports a two hundred thousand gold treasury built almost entirely that way.

One last money habit, and it is a defensive one: keep a reserve, and do not recruit all your Regiments of Renown. When a settlement is about to fall you want to drop a lord in it and fill him instantly with the ones you saved.

He says "cost 225" for the Slayers and "about seven grand" for a stack of Temple Guard without saying whether he means recruitment or upkeep. The arithmetic in both cases only works as per-turn upkeep, but he never states it.

Army: strength has to compound too

The same logic as income, applied to soldiers. An army that is the same strength on turn 70 as it was on turn 20 is an army that has been overtaken, because the AI's income scaled even if yours did not.

Four independent sources stack on the same units, which is why a maintained army snowballs and a neglected one does not.

1. Keep units alive so they gain rank freeRank 9 in the shown tooltip is Leadership +10, Melee Attack +9, Melee Defence +8. Losing that unit resets the investment to zero. 7:20
2. Spend the red line on the unit groups you actually field cheapNot the groups you plan to field. The ones in the army right now. 7:24
3. Use the legendary lord's unique unit buffs cheapHeinrich Kemmler gives regeneration to ghost units, plus devastating flanker and bonus versus infantry. 7:46
4. Layer tech and campaign mechanic buffs onto the same units grindRank, red line, lord unique and tech all stack. Buffing one part of a combined-arms army is fine — you do not have to buff everything. 8:08
5. Reset the lord's skills when the army composition changes freeGoing from balanced to ranged-and-artillery heavy means the old red line points are buffing units that left. 8:51

One strong army or three weaker ones

He prices it out rather than asserting it:

The answer is conditional, and on two things. Higher difficulty means the AI has more money, therefore more armies, therefore more armies is probably better for you too. And the enemy's own doctrine matters: against Skaven, who will field five cheap stacks against your one, take three lesser armies; against High Elves, who bring fewer and more expensive ones, one or two strong armies is fine.

Wars: aim to be in exactly one

The claim that carries this whole section is that you choose most of your wars, and the target is roughly one at a time. The rest is method.

Read the neighbourhood before you commit

1. Sort your neighbours into likely friends and likely enemies freeA loose guide, not a law — he stresses that Ogres and Tomb Kings sit in the middle and that you should trust nobody entirely. 11:27
2. Confirm the read in the diplomacy attitudes column freeThe Known Factions table shows strength rank, settlements, treaties and attitude side by side. That is your threat board. 12:54
3. Kill the bordering enemy before the distant one setupHis own failure case: from Reikland he went north for Festus first, and Kemmler — bordering, sitting on three stacks — declared and took two or three settlements while he was away. 14:02

Saying no, and saying yes on purpose

An ally asking you to join their war costs nothing to refuse. He is explicit: "there's not really any consequence." The offer of 500 gold from a faction down to its last settlement is not payment for a war, it is bait.

The inverse is also a tool. When you have no major enemy, joining a friend's war is the cheapest way to buy a relationship — though be more careful about wars against major factions with legendary lords than against minors.

1. Check who the other party is at war with before accepting anything freeThis is the single most repeated instruction in the section. The faction talking to you is very often not the only faction affected. 20:01
2. Attack your intended ally's enemies setupHitting Skull Crag produced a +12 "military actions against them" modifier with Yvresse and opened up non-aggression and trade. 17:25
3. Do not trespass without military access skipIt stacks negative modifiers quietly and can end in a war declaration you did not plan. 18:11
4. Build alliances in order: trade, non-aggression, access, defensive, military grindLet each one mature before asking for the next. Confederation only works within your own race. 16:39

Ending a war you no longer want

Take a settlement — theirs, or a third party's — and trade it back for peace. Playing Grimgor he got peace and forty-four thousand gold out of Zhao Ming that way. Gifting settlements also works purely as a favour engine when you want a defensive alliance.

To speed a war up, provoke. To delay one, stop provoking and send small gifts.

The good-guy versus bad-guy chart around 11:25 is partly a joke — several commenters point out he quietly slides High Elves and Bretonnia onto the villains' side. Do not use it as a reference table.

Scouting: two tricks to see through fog

This is the section with the highest ratio of useful-to-obvious, and the two tricks in it came from a community member called Sir Buster rather than from Zerkovich himself.

The demonstration of what happens without scouting is brutal: a Tamurkhan army walks toward a "free" settlement, meets three stacks, fails an ambush, fails to outrun two of them, and is written off. The same information twenty seconds earlier would have meant an ambush set at the edge of the enemy's movement range, with a retreat still available.

1. Give every army its own scout hero cheapRunning ahead, not with the stack. If you have no spare hero, pull one out of the army temporarily and put it back after. 23:43
2. Zoom fully out and look for the banner above a settlement freeA little castle icon with a banner over it means an army is stationed there — and it renders through fog of war. 26:16
3. Read Military presence in a settlement's Control Details freeThe number is the region total divided by the number of settlements, rounded down, and it shows identically on every settlement in that region — including empty ones. 27:22
4. Set the ambush at the edge of their movement range setupIf it fails you can still leave. Falling back onto your own settlement to fight alongside the garrison is the other good answer. 24:05

The military presence maths, and where it breaks

He works it through on screen. Dawn's Landing shows 11. There are three settlements in the region. Eleven times three is 33 units estimated.

The scout then finds 15 in one and 20 in the other, so 35 actual — because 35 divided by 3 is 11.667 and the game rounds down. The estimate is a floor, not a figure.

Ranged: bring fewer than you think

The mistake is not liking missile units. It is bringing more of them than you can physically protect, which against a rush faction means they break your front, hit your missiles head-on and flank around the back at the same time.

1. Cap yourself at three to five missile or artillery units freeLearn to protect that many first. Then, and only then, add a sixth and a seventh. 30:00
2. Buy the protection with spears and cavalry setupSpears hold the line and the flanks, cavalry does hammer and anvil, and the missiles get long enough to spend all their ammunition. 31:31
3. Stop trusting the auto-resolve number skipMissile-heavy armies get better auto-resolve odds because auto-resolve assumes every unit spends all its ammo. In a fought battle they will not. 29:16

The arithmetic he lands on is the memorable part. Six units firing half their ammunition is three units firing all of it — except that it costs three more army slots for the same damage.

Two exceptions he names himself: an army of Shades, whose armour-piercing missiles make missile-heavy work, and the general problem of shielded spearmen, who block most of what you send at them from the front.

Sources

Built from Zerkovich, 5 reasons you SUCK at Campaign in Warhammer 3, 32 minutes, and the top comments underneath it. Screenshots are frames from that video.

Timestamps are accurate to a few seconds. Where the video shows a number the narration does not say — tooltip values especially — this guide uses the on-screen figure and says so. Two cost comparisons in the money section are ambiguous between recruitment and upkeep in the original; both readings are flagged where they appear.