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In general the battlemaps are too "artistic". Huge out of place skeletons, terrain pieces, and random junky that just get in the way visually and physically. That stuff isn't going to be helping the load times either.

I seriously hope a modder can clean up the settlement maps because they are not fun the fight. Its just through your dudes down a meat grinder of an alleyway.

I don't think the settlement maps are too big, quite the opposite actually. They're too small and claustrophobic. And the issue is you can't really just auto-resolve all the settlement battles because the garrisons can get large enough to actually threaten an army with massive losses(only when you are on the receiving end though, enemy armies just steamroll your garrisons). So you're forced to manually fight battles just so your army doesn't get mauled by the garrison.

And just like in TWWH2, the main siege maps are still too small as well. Better, but you're still getting shot to pieces immediately. Where are my Medieval 2 size maps where I can deploy outside of missile range? Because who in their right mind would move their artillery within range of the enemy towers when it massively outranges them?

Another random gripe, is it just me or are there way more areas of inexplicably impassable terrain? It seems like way more frequently (compared to TWW2) I'm unable to move to a location or deploy in a location because it's been made impassable due to some terrain feature that doesn't actually look like it should be impassable.

Verticality-focused (and overly elaborate) maps in games are a level design fad that's gotten out on hand. A lot of recent RPGs have the same the same problem, and shouldn't because pathfinding and cameras can't keep up. (For me, the last year has been one of camera failures in games.)

CAs camera in particular seems to hate vertical edges. Its a 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' problem.

And outside modern traffic control tunnels and bridges in cities, I don't live in a world where vertical layers are a thing. Gently rolling hills, which you can fake quite well on a 2d map (I apparently miss Baldur's Gate). So every time these crazy maps show up, its a hit to verisimilitude.

1.1 And Beyond...

CA wrote:REALM OF CHAOS

The Realm of Chaos has been one of the most prevalent discussion points amongst the community, and we’re using this update to implement several bug fixes and gameplay tweaks that change how it fits into the mechanics of the game. This includes several key changes:

1. The strength of the negative Realm traits has been reduced by roughly ~50%.
2. Daemon Legendary Lords will no longer be burdened by the negative traits of their respective patron god.
3. Traits gained in the Realm of Chaos will now be removed when a Legendary Lord completes the survival battle within that realm.
4. When a player intercepts an AI Lord at the Forge of Souls, their souls will now be lost—forcing them to restart their collection. This should make it easier to disrupt the Souls race.
5. The “Protection” building chain can now be used to prevent rifts from spawning in the province in which they're built.
6. The rewards for gaining Souls have been improved by providing additional bonuses for a limited period of time.

These changes are intended to make the Souls race less urgent and give you the chance to approach the battlefield in different ways. We will, of course, continue to adjust the mechanics in the future, but look forward to seeing how these changes impact your experience as you jump in after 1.1.

They've not addressed the absurd auto-resolve problems (I bring two armies against a 2/3rds full Garrison = Valiant Defeat... what?).

And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.

And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.

Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.

I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics

Autoresolve is the #1 issue. We know Immortal Empires is coming. WH2 was likely their top cash cow and most popular product given the amount of support they provided for it. It would take a monumental collapse for IE to not come into fruition.

Autoresolve being tied to campaign difficulty is going to bleed into that. If it doesn't get addressed beforehand, I have no doubt that it will become a major talking point within days/weeks of IE being released because that, above all, will ruin the campaign.

I don't like the WoM cap and several other things, but AR is by far the worst. I don't see a reason to attempt a campaign over normal unless you're willing to fight every battle manually and that's an obscene grind.

Before I went on my work trip I managed a few hours of the campaign but I just couldn't get through it. I do not have much interest in the campaign, but I am more than happy to wait for the Immortal Empires campaign.

That being said I do like the way things are going in that 1.1 update, looks positive at least.

Voss wrote:

And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.

Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.

I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics

Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?

 Mr Morden wrote:

Voss wrote:

And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.

Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.

I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics

Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'a big deal.'
Its just fairly obvious that they're not going to have a toggle to turn the campaign off when you start the campaign. Do you decide to go to London then not actually go to London? If you don't want to pay the TW3 campaign, you can just exit the game.

While TW1 didn't have separate Mortal Empires map for obvious reasons, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the chaos invasion then (and we were saddled with it in TW2 ME for a long long time). In the Vortex campaign, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the Vortex campaign, nor did they ever add it. Mortal Empires is the open campaign mode for TW2, Immortal Empires will be for this one. There simply isn't any reason to expect them to do this (even aside from the fact that they're too busy fixing stuff to even put together a roadmap for where they're going, let alone disable the core mechanics of the campaign itself)

I think the frustration is that there is no reason for Immortal Empires to be a separate game mode. Yes, the map will be different, but that really shouldn't need to be the case. Just have 1 map.

It really should be as easy as you picking what the victory condition for the campaign will be at the start of the game, like every other Total War Game has ever had. Either you pick Story Campaign, conquest campaign, etc... It would have been an easy inclusion with no extra work required.

I think they're in some sort of trap where they feel like Total War Warhammer has to have some overarching story to appeal to people. Except no, it doesn't. People don't really want to play some narrative campaign. They want to play a generic campaign using factions and units from the Warhammer setting. They really want to play a sandbox campaign like you have in Rome, Shogun, or Medieval Total War, just with Warhammer factions instead of real world historical factions.

Nothing wrong with a narrative railroaded story campaign to free/kill Ursin. But the studio should realize that is not what the bulk of the player base wants. We just want a sandbox total war game with that sweet Warhammer flavor. Which is why Immortal Empires is the most popular campaign, it is the most generic campaign which is what players want. Stop putting some narrative story campaign as the primary focus.

The problem is, they put the 4 chaos realms (pantries? HQs? Doorsteps?) on the map and doing so warped the layout and broke everything else. (including the campaign's FPS).
There really isn't any fixing it, there are too many problems directly related to the assumptions & requirements they put into the base map explicitly for the campaign.


Though I would argue that yes, it does actually need to be the case that IE needs to be a separate map. There just isn't room for everybody.

----
Personally, what I think they should have done (or should do in short order) is made the multiplayer scenarios functional single player campaigns (without the timer). Those are surprisingly well done.

And also import the WH1 and WH2 maps as options, with anyone who doesn't have a starting place on the map in a position to conquer a minor settlement on the edge, much like the Daemon Prince is set up to conquer Doomkeep.

Any or all of those options would get more people playing during the wait for IE.

Grey Templar is right, pretty much no one wants it.
Here, Da Modding Den on Discord, r/totalwar, other places, people are waiting for IE.

Even if you deactivated the campaign features, the current map isn't great IMO. I played Vortex a bit as new races were added in because they ignored the rituals AND the Vortex map was better for Lustria, Naggarond, and the Southlands. It was also a great change of pace from Warhammer 1 because there was an added emphasis on the oceans as well it being a brand new area, relatively speaking.

The "new" portion of WH3's campaign map is...for a lack of a better description, geographically uninteresting. It feels like half the map is the Empire/Norsca and for whatever reason they decided to lock out several older factions that are on it.

Voss wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:

Voss wrote:

And no straight up toggle to turn off the Realms of Chaos campaign.

Well... no. Turning off the campaign in the campaign was never in the cards.

I fully 100% find the campaign annoying and pointless (even worse than the Vortex, which I also disliked), but they weren't ever going to disable the campaign mechanics

Why would making the campaign optional be a big deal?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'a big deal.'
Its just fairly obvious that they're not going to have a toggle to turn the campaign off when you start the campaign. Do you decide to go to London then not actually go to London? If you don't want to pay the TW3 campaign, you can just exit the game.

While TW1 didn't have separate Mortal Empires map for obvious reasons, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the chaos invasion then (and we were saddled with it in TW2 ME for a long long time). In the Vortex campaign, they didn't have a toggle for turning off the Vortex campaign, nor did they ever add it. Mortal Empires is the open campaign mode for TW2, Immortal Empires will be for this one. There simply isn't any reason to expect them to do this (even aside from the fact that they're too busy fixing stuff to even put together a roadmap for where they're going, let alone disable the core mechanics of the campaign itself)

Very false anaology

Firstly you have the prologue campaign to start. Which is very good. Then just allowing you to play in the world or change the frequency of the rifts would be a huge improvement. The map is different to the IE map same as the Vortex map is different to the ME map and you can sandbox in BOTH.

Vortex was fine as you could mostly ignore it if you like and just play in the world. The Chaos Realms do not allow that. Chaos Invasion shows that they can do it. I guess they will just rely on modders as there is one that does that anyway

I like narrative campaings but forcing every replay to make you play the same campaign is very bad for retaining interest.

They also need to fix the Demon Prince LL and replenishment.

It didn't NEED to be different. The Chaos Realms could have been just stuck in a corner where there would otherwise be ocean. Or had them located on a second map you could transition to. Then they could have avoided the distorted map that they currently have. They could have just started with a normal map and then had the chaos floating disks off the edge somewhere, maybe in a top/bottom/left/right orientation. For the normal campaign, just have that be the starting locations for the 4 daemon factions and have a few permanent portals connecting each realm to the physical world, and a faction mechanic where they could open up temporary portals to anywhere every so often.

That would actually be less work because they'd only need to make 1 map and have a simple toggle between campaign types.

The only reason you need the IE and story campaign map to be different is if you arbitrarily choose to make the maps different. It is a decision that just adds a lot of unnecessary work. I'm honestly surprised that they didn't just take the lazy way out and make the maps the same.

Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?

 Grey Templar wrote:
The only reason you need the IE and story campaign map to be different is if you arbitrarily choose to make the maps different. It is a decision that just adds a lot of unnecessary work. I'm honestly surprised that they didn't just take the lazy way out and make the maps the same.

The biggest reason to have them different maps is because TWW3 is a standalone game and they want to focus down on the areas that matter for the races specific to TWW3, so all that extra territory would just be filled with unplayable races and result in the areas the player starts in feeling very small.

I dunno how much work it is for them to create campaign maps, but I totally see the logic of having different campaign maps that let you zoom in on specific regions more.

I'd like to see them have a crack at a spherical map for the mortal empires map, so that the chaos wastes doesn't end up completely massive and/or other parts of the map don't end up squished into a corner.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?

.

They used it in the latest blog

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?

Yes. But they put it in quotes like you did. Like in the developer diary for 1.1 (and beyond):

For those of you looking for details about the combined WARHAMMER map (“Immortal Empires”), the Blood Pack, or any other DLC you’re waiting to see added to the game, I’ll note in advance that we WON’T be covering those subjects in any great depth or detail today.

Presumably it has a dumb internal name, but to the customer base, Immortal Empires is going to stick.

Voss wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Has CA ever actually called it "immortal empires", or is that just something the community has picked up and decided to run with?

Yes. But they put it in quotes like you did. Like in the developer diary for 1.1 (and beyond):

For those of you looking for details about the combined WARHAMMER map (“Immortal Empires”), the Blood Pack, or any other DLC you’re waiting to see added to the game, I’ll note in advance that we WON’T be covering those subjects in any great depth or detail today.

Presumably it has a dumb internal name, but to the customer base, Immortal Empires is going to stick.

To be honest, I thought "Immortal empires" sounded pretty dumb, which is why I wondered if it was a CA name or just something the community came up with "Mortal Empires" sounds dynamic, like empires rising and falling, "Immortal Empires" just sounds like a pun bastardisation because Daemons are immortal and all that jazz.

I think its just a logical continuation from Mortal Empires to Immortal Empires without thinking more deeply about it beyond adding Im to Mortal.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think its just a logical continuation from Mortal Empires to Immortal Empires without thinking more deeply about it beyond adding Im to Mortal.

I probably just overthought it, when I heard it I got 2Fast2Furious vibes from it and figured it was just a pun on Daemons being the focus of game 3 and them being immortal

Well, its both, actually. Partly daemons, partly extending the established name.

Although I think the WH3 maps are generally a downgrade from WH2, I never really noticed this specific issue before, but now I've seen it I don't think I'll be able to unsee it.

I mean if he wants to see little clumps of trees dotted around he can come to Suffolk - or indeed many regions of the UK. It's freaking chock full of little tree clumps that just about survive in a farming landscape.


I guess one line of thinking is that having trees broken up like that gives you room to hide advanced deployment units in more places. Many times you have those units and I found with earlier maps that you never really felt like you could move them far from your army because they'd stand out like a sore thumb - an easy early target.

The same is kind of true when you've got big half the map is a forest. You don't actually want to go into the forest to fight because the army that's in there already has the advantage of shooting at you in advance. So the army outside the forest just sits there and waits and draws the other out. Clumps of trees forces more break up of the battlefield.


I can see logic in that approach. It likely appears odd because there's no big clumps around the edges of the map bordering it and there are the issues of perhaps too many right in the middle.

I'm guessing its less of a "we ran out of time" and rather a style of tactical map design that got rolled out over all maps instead of a selection. And honestly I see that problem in A LOT of more modern RTS games. Starcraft 2 has a VAST number of maps and yet most of the official maps are almost the same core design. A few slight differences here and there, but broadly speaking the same core design elements repeated.



Busy maps and busy campaign map is something I've had an issue with with CA before - esp on the campaign map, but that's not a W3 thing its a modern CA campaign map thing and its been that way since after perhaps Rome 3 or certainly Medieval 2. The campaign maps gained fantastic beauty and detail, but as a result the actual information they held got lost in all the detail. Warhammer games take it to a whole other level - are those griffins flying around the mountain denoting a feature or are they just pretty. I like pretty but I sometimes wish for a simple "this is the information you need" map

Eh. I definitely don't think its a 'bug.' (which the video claims several times)

I rather like it as well. Maps shouldn't be open spaces with nothing going on (and too many of the chaos wastes maps are just that- if you want variety, fight on a different terrain type)

I mean if he wants to see little clumps of trees dotted around he can come to Suffolk - or indeed many regions of the UK. It's freaking chock full of little tree clumps that just about survive in a farming landscape.

Same here. Either clumps or 'outlining' fields. In fact... this entire area is pretty picture perfect for battle maps (not least because there are several actual historic battlefields and multiple 'retired' training areas within about an hour or less)

I think it's more just an issue that they lack variety and feel like a bit of an afterthought. They've just made trees a bunch of pockmarks across the maps. WH2 didn't lack maps that had clumps of trees in the middle, but it also had maps with long strips of trees that you could use to move scouts through, or maps where trees formed corridors, or maps where one side or one corner of the map had more trees.

More thought had gone into the layout and having variety.

The only really egregious trees in WH2 was the maps that were densely covered in them, but there wasn't many of those, I recall one of the Wood Elf maps that was basically fully wooded and one of the Lizardmen maps was half wooded and they weren't great to play on.

Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.

Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.

Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.

Voss wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Yeah Zerk specifcially says some maps should be forested or have features - the issue is that it does just look like they have been sprinked across maps without any real thought.

Right, the thing is... trees do tend to grow without thought. Its a notable trait of plants, that lack of thought.

I think it's pretty uncommon for trees to grow in well ordered circular clumps (or at most, oval shaped clumps) like that.

Overread mentioned Suffolk, but I'm scanning over google maps satellite view and there's clumps of trees that follow what I assume are property boundaries among farms and houses, but they're clearly groomed and even then they don't follow the nice circular patterns that look like someone has a "tree brush" in photoshop and just spotted them around.

That's why I say it's one of those things I probably won't be able to unsee now It's unnatural looking.

Its also such a weird complaint after ~30 years of tabletop warhammer telling me the space between deployment zones _should_ have terrain in it so it isn't just an open scrum on planet bowling ball for cannons and missile troops to dominate.

Again, I don't think the complaint is that simply WH3 has trees in the middle of the battlefield, it's the lack of thought and variety, whereas the WH2 maps look more carefully crafted. Obviously it's not a "bug" (other than the one where the trees weren't showing up in the map preview), but even just the simple thing of laying out a clump of trees so it has a more random looking outline.

You seem to have forgotten that many WH2 maps had obstacles in the middle of the map also, hills, trees, cliffs, statues, choke points, water features. If that's what you think it's about, then I think you just missed the point of the video (and I appreciate maybe the video rambled on a bit too much, the "wood elf" map for example would be one where it's logical to have many inconveniently placed forests... though I still content they should be circular clumps and should form more natural and random patterns).

I have a general criticism of the Warhammer series that might be insane or stupid.

The economic and industrial aspects of grand strategy seem underdeveloped or behind the scenes. You need specific material resources to make weapons, ships, gunpowder, etc, and some of these resources do exist on the map, but they're not tied into the outfitting of troops or building of ships. Population seemingly doesn't matter. A single city can somehow "support" dozens of full-stack armies running amok so long as you have the money to pay for their upkeep. I suppose this isn't fleshed out because it would be inconsistent across the board. Orcs and Ogres rely on scavenging supplies and aren't necessarily beholden to living in cities while the Empire would be. It would end up being another trick to balance.

It still does annoy me somewhat. The current gameplay is built around defeating armies, attacking cities, and maybe killing hero-agents roaming around the map. This ignores the economic element of warfare. The order factions, generally speaking, would suffer an economic collapse before their last city fell.