Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero

Ulrika Magdova, wielding two silver blades — (Image credit: Sega)

Creative Assembly has announced that improvements to Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI are about to go into testing, with a beta due to kick off on February 13. The changes are all about making the campaign AI more active, and the blog post explaining this highlights a fascinating bug the team discovered: "a fundamental problem with how the Campaign AI detects foreign forces and how it reacts to them."

As Creative Assembly Sofia's principal technical designer Radoslav Borisov explains, the "query system" the AI was using to determine how it reacted was freaking out if even a single hero was milling about in its territory. All those times you sent a scout to keep an eye on someone you thought was about to invade, only for them to immediately turtle? It was your agent's fault the whole time.

Two other changes to the AI are being tested on the beta. One is a tweak to aggression that'll make factions more suspicious of anyone they haven't met yet, making them more likely to go to war when they finally encounter each other. The other is a series of tweaks to how factions who are "under the shroud" (yet to be encountered, rather than just hidden by fog of war) react to each other. Major factions are getting a boost, making them more likely to survive and thrive rather than getting randomly wiped out by a minor faction before you even cross paths. No more of that thing where you make it to Sylvania and find out the traditional home of the vampires is randomly full of wood elves.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.