While smaller hotfixes for Total War: Warhammer 3 followed its release, more significant changes have been saved for its first major update. That update is now live, bringing the final game in Creative Assembly's spectacle-strategy trilogy up to version 1.1.0. As well as fixes for bugs like the Alt-Tab crash, it includes some pretty big changes to the campaign mechanics.
Warhammer 3's Realm of Chaos campaign has been divisive, with many players finding the regular intrusion of Chaos rifts an unwelcome distraction, and the penalties for entering them too harsh. They've now been toned down, with the negative traits inflicted when you enter the Realm of Chaos halved, and instead of persisting until your lord chills out in a protected settlement for a while they're now lifted as soon as you finish the rift's survival battle. Daemonic lords also no longer suffer negative traits for entering their own god's realm.
What's more, after you win the survival battle you'll now receive 10 turns of increased income, growth, and control across all provinces, as well as either decreased corruption or an increase to your own faction's particular flavor of corruption if you're playing Chaos. If you want to reduce the number of rifts that open, building upgrades in the Protection chain—which used to increase the chance of your lord losing negative traits—now prevents rifts from appearing in a province.
- Total War: Warhammer 3's next patch will overhaul its Kislev faction, which Creative Assembly has 'identified as the most in need of a deep review and rethink'
- 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
On the bug-fixing side, an issue with supply lines (the escalating cost for having multiple armies wasn't being removed if an army was disbanded rather than destroyed) has been fixed. So has a bug that prevented one of Slaanesh's tech upgrades, Gift of Slaanesh, from working if you also researched Everlasting Gift, and an autoresolve issue "where attacking an enemy Army in a settlement resulted in better outcomes than when an enemy Army attacked the player."
Unit responsiveness has been improved as well, though Creative Assembly notes there's still work to be done here, "including the responsiveness of airborne units transitioning to the ground, how units disengage from combat, and knockdown behavior." Kislev's heavy infantry units have had their acceleration boosted as well, which should make them feel less sluggish, and Nurgle's plaguebearers have received a speed buff.
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The underperforming Daemons of Chaos faction have been buffed in a variety of ways, while the overperforming Ogre Kingdoms have had some nerfs to the damage dealt by ironblasters and gorgers, with the size of gorger units reduced from 16 to 12. Cathay armies benefit from an increase to the range of their harmony effect, and boosts to their flying units, the sky junks and sky lanterns. Khorne remains unchanged bar a tweak to the Dog Fighting tech (which now gives Flesh Hounds the Strider attribute as well as adding to their charge bonus), and Slaanesh is staying as-is until "after we've reviewed the live impact and player feedback based on those other changes."
Last of all, the Steam Workshop for Total War: Warhammer 3 is here and over 600 mods have already appeared. Some of them are updated versions of mods from the first two games, like the venerable Better Camera Mod, while others are new, like Toggle Chaos Realms, which gives those who aren't interested in the narrative campaign's mechanics an option to turn them off and play a more straightforward paint-the-map campaign of world domination.
