Total War Warhammer 3 Skaven Guide to Income and Food

Welcome to part two of my beginner’s guide to the Total War Warhammer 3 Skaven faction. If you haven’t already read part 1, you can find the link here: Beginners Guide to Skaven Part 1

If you are a beginner to the Total War Warhammer series, you should check out our series of beginner guides here: Total Warhammer 3 Guide for Beginners.

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Making Money: Warhammer 3 Skaven

Next in our Total War Warhammer 3 Skaven Guide we discuss making money and the unique difficulties and strengths of the Skaven in this area.

This is where the Skaven struggle in that they are vastly different from the other factions. Most other factions that are not horde factions increase their income by levelling up their settlements and their income-producing buildings, thus increasing their income and thus allowing them to build bigger and more powerful armies.

The Skaven are pretty different in that they don’t have any primary income-producing building, but all their buildings (including their unit-producing buildings) produce between 60 and 100 gold the big problem with the Skaven is that when you level up a building, they only produce 10 more gold in most cases per level.

This is vastly different from other factions, where levelling up income-producing buildings will make them improve their income by at least 100 gold and in some cases more per level. The only exception is the special buildings specific to a settlement. Use them as they are unbelievably valuable. You should always check the building browser when planning to build to see what’s available for each settlement.

What this means is that you will most likely be red lining on income at the beginning of the game which isn’t as bad as you think as Skaven units are pretty cheap but still in the early to mid-game you will only be relying on your settlement buildings to contribute to the upkeep and thus won’t be having money to level up your building early on so focus on defensive buildings first if you can.

So, where does the Skaven make their big money to upgrade their building and pay for those fancy units if that’s the case? One is occupying settlements, and the other is defeating armies (with the Under Empire mechanic a good if unreliable third).

The Skaven can loot and occupy any settlements at the same time they take it which means occupying settlements makes you a significant amount of money and gets you food also do not forget about the auto levelling mechanic with food for settlements if you have the excess food to use it.

The only disadvantage is that if you do not spend any food to upgrade the settlement upon occupation it starts at level one irrespective of what level it was when you conquered it which is different to the other faction’s occupy ability but you cannot have everything.

Also, something unique to Warhammer 3 is the caravan. If you ever see one of those and the Cathayan caravan the faction is from is nowhere near you or not a threat, you should attack them, as I recently got 30000 gold from one of those.

Food Management: Warhammer 3 Skaven

First, we are going to cover the fact that armies and settlements have a food cost per turn. Each settlement costs one food in upkeep and each army costs food in upkeep and we also have Skaven corruption.

Now Skaven corruption is an interesting mechanic in that as it increases it decreases your control in a settlement but also you get more uses of the menace below activity for settlements the higher their Skaven corruption which means it will be harder to dislodge you from that settlement.

For the most part, the negative to control is not a problem as if you have lots of food you get lots more control so it counterbalances it so, for the most part, I found it not a problem but if you have a random settlement, not part of a province you might want to trade those into another faction for points and money.

Also, keep an eye out for settlements with pastures or exotic animals, as those will be able to build food-producing buildings that can generate a lot of food.

Also, build walls everywhere and make sure you have garrison building on all your settlement including your capital those are the priority as if you lose those early settlements the setback will be devastating.

Now one of the big problems you will encounter if you expand too quickly is you will run out of food. I encountered this with my Clan Rictus campaign so you need to understand where your sources of food are going to come from.

They came from attacking armies and winning and they also come from attacking settlements but as mentioned before settlements with pastures, exotic animals or certain special settlement-specific buildings can produce food per turn which is very important for your expansion.

Make sure that before expanding everywhere, you can support your growing empire, so getting buildings that produce food each turn is very important. The other way of getting food is via the Under Empire mechanic.

Using warlock engineers including one generated by the rite “The Scheme of Doom” can allow you to create under empires on settlements owned by an enemy faction. You can also do this by attacking the settlement with a lords army and winning the fight.

Now the Under Empire mechanic is unique to the Skaven and needs some explanation. So basically when you create an Under Empire in another factions settlement you can build up to 4 different types of building irrespective of the settlement type in the Under Empire for that settlement. There are lots to choose from but each of the buildings will have some kind of cost such as requiring food or good per turn to maintain.

Now you might think this is great but there is a catch and that is what’s called discoverability, what that means is that as you build more under empire buildings, for the most part, your discoverability will go up and if it reaches a certain level, your under empire in that settlement is discovered and will be destroyed.

So when you invest in under empires, you also have a priority to protect them otherwise you will lose your investment. The unusual thing is that these under-empires cannot be built in your settlements and most of your settlements cannot build food-producing buildings. Hence, you depend on the under-empire mechanic to generate food and battle to produce food.

This also becomes annoying because if you have an under empire in a particular enemy settlement producing food each turn and you take it over, that building will disappear once you take that settlement over.

So this sort of forces the Skaven to play aggressively in a weird way because on the other hand, you need to protect settlements like the first settlement you start with so if you lose powerful units you can recruit more and you need to attack armies and settlements to get gold and food and you need to manage your food usage.

The Skaven in theory can expand quite aggressively as long as they manage their food. So in practice what this means is you should be expanding your Under Empire far and wide. Most of the good factions will declare war on you but focus on the ones near you to fight and build under empires in the ones generating food further away from you so that you be getting from those for quite a while while you focus on attacking your enemies near you.

If there are no good armies near you maybe try to be buddies with the other evil factions first so that the good factions don’t solely concentrate on you and attack the weak spots in the enemy’s armies and settlements hopefully while they are preoccupied fighting another evil faction.

Conclusion to Warhammer 3 Skaven Guide

The Skaven are more complex to manage than other factions’ empires, but they also can do things that other factions can’t do so while it takes a while to understand them it is worth it.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of the Beginners Guide to Skaven for Total War Warhammer 3, as I have more to discuss with the Skaven. Thanks for reading my blog.

You can also purchase the game from steam using the affiliate link here: https://sovrn.co/7ti8in8

Total War Warhammer 3 Skaven Guide to Income and Food

Making Money: Warhammer 3 Skaven

Food Management: Warhammer 3 Skaven

Conclusion to Warhammer 3 Skaven Guide

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