I apologise for the wall of text, I tried to make it short, but explaining certain mechanics and what exactly I love about total war can’t be said in a few simple words. I hope it isn’t too tough to read through.

Technology design

Technology in warhammer 3 mainly provides boring buffs, yes they are often useful, but still boring. I’d much rather have every single building beyond tier 1 locked behind a technology. 

Meaning if I want to build the tier 2 industry building, I need a technology. If I want to build a specific advanced unit, I first need the technology to unlock the required barrack type.

This could even be taken a bit further, for example technologies could be made to unlock the recruitment of different unit variants. For example the dwarves have miners, but say for example through technology, I can also enable the recruitment of miners with blasting charges. 

Being the same unit recruitable at the same building type, but having an extra, improved variant unlocked through technology. The same would go for spearmen/spearmen(shields) or chaos warriors/chaor warrios(greatweapons) etc. 

This I think would make planning technology a lot more fun. Especially when considering my next suggestion where building advanced units becomes much more useful.

Unit progression design

In the warhammer series currently, you want to maximise income, as that enables you to field the most number of units, maximising the military effectiveness of your empire. This means the need for making advanced or elite units is very low. 

I suggest adding an “army supply” mechanic to future games where for each unit in an army, you have to pay an additional amount.

For example let’s say army supply is +25 gold, that means if I have 10 units in my army, I have to pay 250 additional gold for that army. This would mean I’d prefer to build more expencive units, as that would be more optimal, as they drain relatively less on army supply.

I also hope supply lines returns as a fixed value, say per army upkeep increases by +1000, note that I don’t like it as a scale, as scaling upkeep penalties more significantly punishes expencive units. 

I’d like this as I hate the current army spam meta where players are heavily incentivised to build 20 cheap unit stack armies that reinforce eachother. Drowing in the enemy with their superior numbers.

In fact I hope it becomes harder to make 20 stacks of units in the future of total war, as army stacking in warhammer is a real problem which turns the game into an auto-resolve simulator. 

As the player doesn’t have as much fun with such large battles where flanking and positioning becomes less important or doable, the maps are too small and it becomes too easy to build a wall of units to block flankers.

Economy design

In the warhammer series, there is often only one income building per faction and you only need a single barrack to recruit your units. This means you often have useless empty building slots that you don’t want to build something in.

Please add more buildings that provide something useful in the future. Older games like atilla and rome 2 had this, where you had industry income, farm income even entertainment income. 

I especially loved the food mechanic, being a global resource that always had to remain positive. In addition to the fact that high income buildings gave problems like reducing public order or food. Please add more of this city planning stuff in future games, where powerful buildings also provide negative effects.

Personal side note

Keep up the fantastic work CA devs! I heard times at tough right now at CA. I hope you guys are doing better than we are told. I loved the warhammer series and I have been a long-time fan of the stuff you guys bring out! I hope the next two titles are either warhammer 40 total war or empire 2 total war! 

Oh, and please don’t be too adventurous with your next game like with rome 2 and empire naval warfare and instead stick to your guns. Total war is amazing for the complexity of land combat, sieges and naval battles have a great lack of that same depth. The warhammer series was awesome and I feel like adding a bit of depth to economy planning and applying a new coat of paint of a new universe would make the next game just as amazing as the warhammer series! 

I strongly suggest looking at games like Civilization for fun technology planning designs, not so much to paradox, as they turn their games into boring calculator simulations. Perhaps it might also be fun to look at games like Dota 2 for idea’s on adding depth to battles, as that game features a ton of interesting complex abilities and magic.

I made another post on some suggestions on how I would envision my dream warhammer 40k total war game: https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/forums/4-%E2%81%82-total-war-franchise-general/threads/191-warhammer-40k-galaxy-map-and-how-to-create-total-war-40k-efficiently-and-easy?page=1#post-1275