From a game-play stand point, I got to say I completely disagree with this design. I too had to do a bit of chasing around at the end, those darn Vampire Counts pulled a trick reminiscent of Rome 2 and Attila, I can only guess CA decided a fight to the death in the last province wasn’t as challenging for the human player, so the AI is programmed to bug out and head for the hills when insurmountable odds show up. I enjoyed the units the empire brings to the battlefield, they remind me of FOTS with the arty and line infantry coupled with a dash of MTW2 with the knights, all of which mixes well in a military stack I know exactly what to do with, which is good because I still haven’t remotely sorted magic (which is a good thing because I love having an entire game mechanic still hanging out their to be figured out). I got to say that was gratifying and certainly less work than completely destroying an enemy just for the purposes of removing their agents, haha. Part of the success was finally grooming an agent high enough that they could occasionally actually kill high level enemy agents.

I managed to overcome the agent issue and prevail in the end in my empire campaign.

Total war warhammer fighting chaos