Welcome to our Total War Warhammer 3 Guide Part 6. We will discuss army stances today. These are very important for moving around the campaign map, but there are some things you need to know about each stance, which we will cover now.

Checkout our series of beginners guides here:

Be aware that we will only cover the default stances. Any faction-specific stances I will cover in the guide for that faction.

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Intro

The basic stances are as follows:

Default stance
March
Encamp
Ambush
Channeling

Default Stance

The default stance is the one you use when you are not using another stance and should be the one you are generally using most of the time unless you have a reason for being in another.

One thing that separates this stance from the others is if you are in this stance. If you get attacked, you can retreat from the battle, which you can’t do if you are in a march stance and have moved to the total distance (the only reason you would ever be in a march stance for).

Another advantage of the default stance over the march stance is that your units will be tired in the march stance, so if that army must fight, it will be at a severe disadvantage if it’s in for a tough fight.

So that’s why the default stance should be your stance most of the time.

March Stance

The march stance gives you a significant boost in movement range with the disadvantage of your troops starting the battle tired. There are some excellent reasons to get into the march stance, some of which are:

Rushing to reinforce a settlement
Moving into one of your settlements to boost your army casualty replenishment rate
Moving into range to support another army attacking an enemy lord or settlement

Now you might have noticed that I said rushing to reinforce, and the reason I said that is because you are unable to attack any enemy armies or settlements while in a march stance, but you can strengthen another army or settlement even while in a march stance

Be aware that if an army stays in march stance for a few turns, the lord will get the trait Taskmaster improving movement range.

Encamp Stance

The encamp stance players use for doing two things, recruiting units and enabling casualty replenishment even in enemy territory.

Now be aware that in this stance, movement is disabled for most factions. Now there are two types of recruitment. Local and Global also apply when you are in a settlement.

Now local recruitment is faster and cheaper than global recruitment. Still, the disadvantage of local recruitment is that players can only use it to recruit available troops from the recruitment buildings in the province you find yourself.

Now global recruitment allows players to recruit units available to your army from all the settlement buildings they own, not just ones in the local province.

The disadvantage of global recruitment is that it’s twice as expensive to recruit those units and typically takes double the time.

The other thing to note about recruitment is that you only have a certain number of slots available in both the local and global pools.

So, if you only have three local recruitment slots and it would take three turns to recruit those units, you must wait until your army finishes recruiting them before you can start recruiting three more.

The slots for local and global recruitment are separate so that you can do both local and global recruitment simultaneously. You may do this because you want to get units into your army faster than the time it would take to do that using just local recruitment.

So if you’re in your province capital, you may do global recruitment for those cheaper units and use the local recruitment for your more expensive units.

Be aware that the upkeep of units is the same irrespective of whether players recruit units globally or locally. It’s just the recruitment cost that changes.

There are also some unit stat buffs to being in encamp stance, but you use these stances for recruiting and casualty replenishment. Also, your army is immune to attrition while in encamp stance.

Ambush Stance

Now we come to my favorite stance, which is the ultimate equalizer, and that is the ambush stance. The ambush stance is used to ambush enemy armies and has some interesting mechanics.

First, the type of terrain you are in affects your chance of being able to enter into an ambush stance. If you mouse over the campaign map, it will mention the ambush success chance and your base percentage rate of being able to enter an ambush.

The second crucial thing about this stance is that it disables your ability to move and requires 25% movement remaining to get into an ambush stance. Also, enemies can’t see your army on the map while in an ambush stance.

You might think that being unable to move is a significant disadvantage, but when used properly, this can destroy the AI.

One big way to use this stance is when dealing with an enemy faction that is more powerful than you and they have multiple armies or one mighty army.

An ambush stance works by hiding your army from the enemy; if the enemy army moves in range of your ambushing army, you will be able to ambush them.

Ambushing the enemy has a few advantages. If you’re dealing with an enemy faction that likes to use lots of missile units or you’re playing as a rush faction yourself by ambushing an enemy, you will give them almost no time to shoot your forces before they engage.

It also allows you to pick your matchups before the battle starts, and lastly, chances are that if an enemy lord is about to get ambushed, they won’t be able to get their reinforcements into play, but you will be able to use your reinforcements in the area.

Ambushing enemy lords have turned unwinnable wars with a faction more potent than me into winnable ones, as it can turn battles that would have auto-resolved into decisive defeats into decisive victories.

This factors into the concentration of force rule, which is applying force to the enemy’s decisive point, which in this case would be the most potent army they have.

Bringing your army and settlement garrison to bear against the enemy’s most potent army may allow you to take out their most significant threat while gaining a lot of loot in the process and thus weakening that faction and enabling you to expand rapidly.

Be aware that the AI also uses this ambush stance, so if an enemy lord suddenly disappears, they may very well be ambushing.

Channeling

The last stance is the channeling stance available to all lords that are spellcasters or have a hero spellcaster in the army (so everyone but dwarfs).

This stance requires your lord to give up 25% of your movement amount to get into this stance. After the first turn, this stance reduces your total movement range by only 10% for some benefits.

The benefits are excellent, so if you have an army with a spell caster, for the most part, there is no disadvantage to staying in the channeling stance.

It increases your winds of magic power reserve by +15 and your army replenishment rate.

For more information on Magic, see Total War Warhammer 3 Guide on Magic

Conclusion

This was our Total War Warhammer 3 guide for army stances. Next, we will be discussing Part 7, which is our guide to heroes.

Total War Warhammer 3 Guide to Army Stances