Total War: Warhammer III

**KSUowls** · 01-24-2022, 11:24 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

I'm not sure how many people follow this franchise on here, but I'm so excited for this game.

The game was originally scheduled for a November release, but it was delayed until February 17, 2022. This seems to be a pretty secure release date at this point.

It will also be available on Xbox Gamepass for PC on launch day. So, if you've ever been curious about this series, this might be a great opportunity to try it out if you already have Gameplass or to just try it out at a discount. You won't have access to any of the first 2 games or their plethora of DLC, but the main TW:WH3 campaign should still offer a great experience.

I would also be surprised if we don't see a sale of some kind on the older content leading up to release. For those who don't know these games, TW:WH1, TW:WH2, and now TW:WH3 all build upon each other. They can all be played individually, but owning all of them grants you access to all of the playable factions and lords.

Over the last week or so there have been a lot of NDA embargoes that have been lifted, with more to come leading up to launch. Content creators have been able to show off some gameplay footage from some of the new factions, and it all looks amazing

Diplomacy has been reworked, taking mechanics from Total War 3 Kingdoms and other Total War games. To me it looks to have the most robust diplomacy offering of any Total War game to date with both quality of life improvements as well as additional mechanics.

City sieges have been completely reworked. Minor settlements are finally interesting. The defenders get to sit in an ungated town with various entries/choke points, and there is even a new system for building defensive structures in battle (you have X number of supply points and can decide to build an arrow tower or maybe a barricade, etc). These new battle maps look really cool.

There seems to be a lot of thought put into each of the 9 new factions (4 Chaos Gods, Chaos Undivided, Ogre Kingdom, Grand Cathay and Kislev.) Which plays well into a new campaign map centered around the Chaos invasion of the mortal realms.

Oh, we also get a new multiplayer co-op campaign with up to 8 players. Players will be able to play their turns simultaneously. Not a lot of info on what this means yet, but I would guess that it's something like there is 1 turn for all players, they can do all their administrative stuff on the campaign map that they want, and then any time a battle is initiated then players will have the opportunity spectate or auto resolve. This is just conjecture, but the reports are that they took into consideration how long a single turn would take if you had 8 players. So, I would expect some forms of efficiency.

Unfortunately the Mortal Empires campaign will not be available until some time after launch, but the new campaign and factions looks like they will keep me plenty entertained until then.

**KSUowls** · 02-18-2022, 08:29 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

This game came out yesterday, and it's a blast.

Some really solid QOL updates and general feature improvements to the diplomacy. Quick Deals from TW 3 Kingdoms is now in the game, which is a huge time saver. You can also gift settlements to your allies, something that was in older Medieval TW games I believe.

Some nice improvements to combat. Warhammer 2 became largely about missile spam on the higher difficulties. I think that ranged units will still end up being the meta, but it's certainly harder to just spam archers at the beginning and win.

The new multiplayer is maybe the best selling point. Aside from general PvP maps, there are 3 multiplayer campaigns. They can be played co-op or competing with your friends, and you can have up to 8 people with you. The best part though is the simultaneous turns that the game now features. All players still participate in battlles, but now all of the campaign map tasks can be done at the same time.

Bugs are unfortunately a big detriment right now. It wouldn't be a Creative Assembly game if it didn't have numerous bugs at launch. It's probably in better shape than Warhammer 2 was when it first released, but the game crashes far too much. I imagine that they will fix most of these soon though.

Overall having a blast. I'm really looking forward to the new Mortal Empires campaign whenever that releases, but I highly recommend the current game for any fans of the Total War or Warhammer series.

**Bullit** · 02-20-2022, 07:07 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

I love this universe. I have played 1 and 2 for hundreds of hours, if not thousands over the years. My CPU crapped out a while ago. Once I can build a new one I will jump back in and then get 3 and whatever dlc is out by then. Until then I will live vicariously through others watching them play. LOL

**canes21** · 02-23-2022, 01:52 AM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

FYI, it is on GamePass.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

**KSUowls** · 08-21-2022, 09:00 AM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

A new DLC is being released on August 23rd, as well as a Free download that introduces the Immortal Empires (IE) campaign.

IE is the culmination of the entire Total War: Warhammer trilolgy, allowing you to play any faction from any game in the trilogy across an expansive map covering the entire land Warhammer Fantasy (basically the entirety of earth), and it is essentially the sequel mode to Warhammer 2's Mortal Empires campaign which allowed the same freedom, but not quite the entire world and missing some of the new races.* The Total War Warhammer 2 Mortal Empires campaign is where I have almost all of my play time in this series.

Super excited for IE. TBH, I soured on Warhammer 3 pretty quickly. The opening stages of the game wer fun, and I enjoyed many of the new mechanics. However, at around turn 40 the mechanics of the base Realm of Chaos (RoC) campaign started to trigger, and that's when you realized that the campaign absolutely sucked. I basically haven't played the game since March, much of the WH community feels the same. There are just some design choices there that go against much of what the Total War series is about, and some designs that punished the player for absolutely no reason. The devs have been addressing these, and so the game is better today than it was at launch, but it still has a ways to go until it's in state that I would consider ever going back to. IE will not have the problems that plagued the RoC camp though. It may have some other problems that need to be addressed based on some content creator videos that I have watched (mostly game tuning), but it does appear to be the Total War experience that I'm looking for.

In a nutshell, IE allows you to take control of any one of the 86 (about half of which are DLC on top of what you get from the 3 base games) Lords that have been released from any of the factions: Humans, High Elves, Dark Elves, Greenskins (ie: orcs), Skaven, Dwarfs, Warriors of Chaos, Vampire Counts, Vampire Coast, Tomb Kings, Beastman, Norsca, Wood Elves, Ogre Kingdom, Kislev, Cathay, and Lizardman (possible I'm forgetting some). It drops you onto a map with the other 85 lords, plus around 200 other minor factions (again the map is huge) to try and conquer the world through conquest and diplomacy.

*You can only play factions that you own. Each of the game in the trilogy has a base set of races, and there are like 20+ DLC factions. I think that you might need to own each of the 3 base games to unlock IE, but not all of the DLC is required.

**Bullit** · 08-22-2022, 12:12 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

My rig blew up a good while ago. This is the game I miss the most. Been playing all of these since launch. So much fun. Maybe by next summer?

I will have so much content to catch up on. LOL

edit: just realized I basically made the same post 6 months ago. LOL Well nothing has changed on my rig build obviously. ooooops

**KSUowls** · 08-22-2022, 03:04 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

PC prices have been coming down so hopefully one day!

**KSUowls** · 08-25-2022, 02:10 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

I'm a little hesitant to give an early review because when I did it for the original release of the game earlier this year, it ended up not being accurate. The original release of WH3 was fun until you got into the Realm of Chaos Campaign mechanics, which I had barely gotten to at that point.

My early impressions of Immortal Empires though is that this is the real release of Total War Warhammer 3. There isn't some silly campaign with anti-fun mechanics. This is just straight up conquer your neighbor Total War on a massive map with tons and tons of playable options.

I've spent some time so far with 2 of the new Chaos lords (Vilitch the Curseling & Valkia the Bloody) the bloody. Both were fun in my limited time with them and I can see myself definitely enjoying a full campaign with either. I've spent most of my time so far with Miao Ying and Cathay. Cathay just has my favorite unit roster, and Miao Ying is just tons of fun to play with. Basically this is everything that is good about Warhammer 3, without the awful chaos campaign.

The main negative that I have so far is AI behavior. The AI is simply too passive right now. They run away from a lot of fair fights in the open field, retreating to their cities, making it so that 90% or more of all battles are currently City/Siege battles. I don't mind the new siege mechanics, but I don't like that every offensive battle takes place in them. There is also just a general lack of aggression on the AI's part, with them tending to keep their armies in their cities.

Separately, it's also annoying that the AI will not attack into one of your cities unless they have overwhelming advantages. Instead they will wait for your garrison to run out of supplies and attrition to take place until they have that overwhelming advantage. It makes defensive city battles almost non existent.

Those negatives can be patched though, and I'm looking forward to seeing the game get balanced. Still a fun time though.

**KSUowls** · 10-21-2022, 08:16 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

New patch dropped a few days ago which fixed one of the biggest complaints (kind of) and seems to have improved some others..

From the original release earlier this year, up to the day before this patch, the vast majority of all battles were minor city settlement attack battles. I emphasize "attack" because the AI would almost never attack into your city unless they had an overwhelming advantage, to the point that it wasn't even worth trying to defend.

This week's patch "fixed" that issue by eliminating most of the minor city settlement siege opportunities period. Now, minor settlements will be a land battle unless the city owner has built the garrison building, and only at that point does it become a minor siege battle. This is not exactly the fix to the above issues that I was hoping for. It was probably the easiest to implement though, and I can confirm that it has improved the feel of campaigns. It's a very similar system to what we had in WH2 except now even at the max tier 3 garrison, it will still be an unwalled city, and that in itself is an improvement over WH2.

AI aggressiveness has also been turned up thankfully. I'm seeing other factions actually go out and conquer their neighbors (though I can't tell yet if it still needs a bit more tuning). Unfortunately this has also resulted in a renewed anti-player bias from the AI which is a little annoying. It isn't as bad as it was in early WH3 lifecycle, but it has reared its ugly head again after they nerfed it into oblivion a couple of months ago.

The total patch notes were quite lengthy. In addition to the above they adjusted parts of every factions roster to try to be a bit more balanced. More or less this was just to tune some of the more overpowered lords and units and buff a few of the extremely weak ones, but every single faction received some kind of attention with it.

**patrickward** · 05-29-2023, 11:01 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

It's amazing! I finally see why so many people have been moaning about this task on Steam and Reddit.

**KSUowls** · 12-14-2023, 12:37 PM

Re: Total War: Warhammer III

This game has been an absolute cluster since release in early 2022, and the last 6 months have or so have been particularly bad with some of the decisions and communication from the comipany.

To summarize the game's history of problems:
-The original campaign was pretty terrible. After experiencing immortal empires for most of Wh2's life, it was just a huge downgrade to be so restricted. Many of the mechanics were also needlessly unfriendly to the playher.
-Immortal Empires campaign took way too long to release, and many of the mechanics that were present in the original WH3 campaign were still there.
-AI was never great in the older WH games, but it has been particularly awful throughout WH3's life.
-Total War games have always been buggy, but the time between fixes in WH3 has been painfully slow.
-DLC price hikes have been insane. Not only has DLC in WH3's life been exceptionally more expensive than its predecessor, but the DLC packs have also offered less content than similar releases. Combine this with the lack of fixes to the core game, and you can imagine the community's response.
-Corporate communication has been viewed as either sweeping criticisms under the rug or outright antagonistic.
-Going beyond the Total War Warhammer franchise, they also recently released Total War Pharoah. Which has universally been seen as Total War lite, at full price.

Total War Warhammer 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I have an unhealthy number of hours played according to Steam, and I love the franchise. I uninstalled WH3 earlier this year after and just wrote it off as something that would be abandoned.

However, Creative Assembly released a statement today that is one of the most thoughtful pieces of communication that I have seen from a game company. The fanbase has been increasingly unhappy for quite some time at this point, and at least by their words they seem to be taking it to heart. We'll see what they actually do, but the message in the link is at least encouraging as someone who loves this franchise.

Not found

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/message-from-total-war-leadership-dec-2023/

edit -
Also, this is a case study in why community feedback, sometimes seen as toxic, is important. There is obviously a line to not cross, like threats, but this is why I always hate to see criticism of fanbases when they push back against something. Although it is rare for a company to apologize and correct course (if people complain but buy the game anyway then it doesn't amount to much), it does occasionally happen.

Total War: Warhammer III

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