Total War: WARHAMMER III - Patch 5.3 Dev Blog

Hello everyone, Mitch here, Design Director on Total War: Warhammer III, back with another dev blog - this time for patch 5.3!

Having now seen your reaction to patch 5.2 I can say it’s been really wonderful; it was inspiring to see all of your reactions to the new content, reworks and fixes and in particular your excitement for the future of the game. Speaking of the future, we’re already well underway with patch 5.3 and so I’ll walk you through the changes and additions coming as part of our next patch, before that touching on the topic of game balance as well as taking the chance to acknowledge some of the feedback we’ve seen following 5.2 and our recent Dev Chat video where among other things we asked for more of your thoughts.

Your Feedback

We've asked a few times and in a few places for more of your feedback because it helps us shape what we do and I think we owe it to you where possible to highlight where this impacts us and what decisions we actually make because of your feedback. I called out in the Dev Chat video a few things that are "on the list". These are high priority items that we've seen a lot of feedback on, or feel quite strongly about ourselves. It's important to note that that list wasn't exhaustive, just illustrative, of some of the things we'd like to tackle. Something else we noted in the video was that not everything you ask for is going to be possible in the patches, with the notable example being new characters - these take a huge amount of time and effort and a much greater portion of the team's involvement to create compared to anything else we do, that's why you'll find new lords and characters in our DLC's and also released for free alongside them - just as you will for our next release! Creating them as part of the DLC allows us the lead time we need to do all of the work to model and animate them, bring in the voice actors, etc. It's just not feasible for patches and that's why we wanted to set your expectations with this for our interim updates.

Moving back to the topic of your feedback, one of the major points we see consistently is game balance. This topic is multi-faceted and can really apply to most aspects of the game, but in particular I want to let you know we have heard your feedback loud and clear on both the Control (Public Order) and the Corruption systems, and we agree with you. When such core systems aren't performing like we want them to it can understandably have a big impact on the challenge the game provides (another topic we do hear your feedback on), and so both these items are high priority for us to tackle going forward - albeit not in Patch 5.3.

I don't have too much information to share just yet on what our plans are with these features, but the complexity of dealing with both of these mechanics is larger than you might think. They are both core game systems that affect every single race in the game, and each faction's relationship with these systems can be, and often is, unique. So it’s not enough for us to just say "Control is too easy a system to manage" and that we’ll increase all negative sources, for example - that might improve one faction's situation and make the system more challenging, but may ruin another’s. Each race, and in some cases specific factions, needs to be considered in how they currently interact with these systems and then balanced accordingly; for one faction that might mean too many positive sources from their technology tree, for others it may mean their building tree provides too many bonuses, and so on. So without going in to too much detail, I want us to be thorough and take a really deep look at both of these systems. They're long standing Total War features and I think they suffer from a legacy of being carried from game to game without a real deep dive into what their place in the game actually entails. I could (and probably will) write further Dev Blogs on these topics closer to when we begin to make progress, as they can certainly fill up an entire blog with just me generating some initial design thoughts, let alone a detailed overview. So in summary, there is a lot of work required to tackle these issues across the whole game. It’s a challenge we’re up for and I want to thank you for your feedback in asking us to make these a high priority, so stay tuned for more on that in future patches.

Just one last thing on the topic of game balance before we dive into the Patch 5.3 changes, I want to mention quickly the ancillary rebalance I have talked about in our previous developer video. We intended for this to be a part of Patch 5.3, but it now won't be. I know that may be disappointing to hear but in the interest of transparency we wanted to let you know not only what we are releasing for you, but also the work we're doing that doesn't make the cut, so you can better understand our priorities and that we are working towards things that may not always be visible. This is a normal part of game development, it's very common and many pieces of work we start won't make the final cut for a number of reasons. One of our designers Will has written in more detail below about what we've tried so far with the ancillary system and where we might take it going forward. Ordinarily you don't always see the work we do that doesn't make the release, but particularly where it pertains to elements of your feedback that we're actively asking for I think it's really important to let you know what work is ongoing towards addressing your points. This is an example of us hearing your feedback on things like balance and game challenge, before making moves to address it (at least in one smaller area). However the ancillary rebalance just hasn't hit our quality threshold where we're happy to release it yet, so stay tuned for more on it in future.

Patch 5.3

I’ll share with you now a look at our next patch. The first thing you’ll notice below is that we’ve made changes and additions to two core Ogre Kingdom’s features. As you’ll likely be aware we have Ogre Kingdom’s content coming in our next DLC. So with that in mind we wanted to take the chance now to improve certain aspects of the race ready for when more content arrives. As I mentioned we'll talk briefly about what we've been doing with the ancillary system, and that we're adding in some new interesting items. On top of all that we’ll be continuing our work on improving battle maps in our second tree cluster update, we’ve also got a fairly big balance update to battle coming, and last but not least we've heard you really enjoyed the new units in Patch 5.2, so we’ve added another one - and this time for Vampire Counts.

Ogre Kingdoms – Mercenary Recruitment Rework

The way the mercenary system works for Ogres in WH3 as opposed to WH2 came with certain improvements, however also missed the mark in a number of ways and we saw a lot of feedback asking for certain aspects of how it worked in WH2 to return, but with the additional UI/UX improvements WH3 brought. As such we’ve made a number of changes and additions to how Ogre mercenary recruitment now works:

• Increased the Ogre mercenary unit cap per army to 3 from 1
• Ogre mercenary pools now replenish at a rate of 1 unit every 5 turns
• The quality of mercenary units available now depends on the tier of the Ogre camp
• More mercenary units are now available from Ogre camps, including:
  • Ogre Bulls
  • Ogre Bulls (Dual Weapons)
  • Maneaters (Ogre Pistols)
  • Mournfang Cavalry
  • Ogre Giant
    

Ogre Kingdoms – Bounties

We’ll be taking the theme of “Mercenary Contracts” and doing much more with it in the DLC, as such we’ve renamed the existing Contracts feature to “Bounties” ready for when that happens. Along with that we’ve made a number of changes and improvements:

• We’ve added a new more thematic UI, as seen below!
• We’ve changed the 10 turn generation into a rolling objective "Bounty" system
  • The feature was previously only available every 10 turns which wasn’t very interactive, instead we’ve now made it so that Bounties are more of an interest more consistently
• All objectives are now available continually, instead of only being able to select a single one
  • The gameplay for Bounties is now more opportunistic in nature and you don’t have to accept a single mission but instead can tackle any and all Bounties at your leisure
    

Ancillary System Rebalance & New Items

"Originally, as part of this patch, we wanted to release our first cycle of re-balanced ancillaries alongside a selection of brand new ancillaries to round out the item pools. We approached this idea from a systemic angle, defining new backend tools to help us start the long process of cracking away at the balance of the hundreds of ancillaries found across the game. With our goal being to set sustainable practices that allow us to simultaneously work through our backlog as well as assist in balancing upcoming content.

We built this primarily around a power budgeting matrix, where we spent an item's budget (derived from how rare it is) on effects to ensure that an item always had a value consummate with its rarity. Alongside this, we added modifiers that allow us to deliberately create outliers following specific design restrictions. This allowed us to track down items that were far more or less rare than expected, and massage them into more appropriate brackets. Alongside adjusting the effects of the items, we had the goal of bringing in some of the new tech the game has seen since its inception (Barrier as a defensive stat? Yes please!).

The first part of this re-balance was planned to be released as part of Patch 5.3, but when we presented it to our internal feedback channels, the message we got back was loud and clear. We hadn't hit the mark. We take that kind of feedback seriously, so we've made the decision to delay this content while we take that feedback and interrogate our approach.

Here are some of the key things we found in the feedback.

• The difference between a high value common and a low value uncommon could be far too slim
  • In that system, an item valued at 29 uniqueness (highest value common) and 30 uniqueness (lowest value uncommon) was only a single point. We're interrogating leaving larger "air gaps" in the values we assign to rarities, to ensure that each jump in quality is a notable increase in power.
• The value of specific effects was out of proportion with what they perceived as valuable.
  • We've got a list of effects to re-review on this topic.
• Some effects don't feel good standing alone (spell resistance)
  • We're finding effects like these some "partners" in other effects to help make more universally useful items.
• There are certain items that were considered iconic (partially due to having very powerful effects) that were brought too low by the balance adjustments.
  • We're interrogating how high we're willing to go within our existing categories and considering the potential impact of a new tier of rarity.
    

That doesn't mean we're leaving you empty handed however.

Patch 5.3 will still contain 18 new generic ancillaries, which drop only for relevant factions. To help you outfit your gun-toters, bow-slingers and blowpipe-blasters with improvements to their ranged performance. Additionally, we're introducing the concept of randomly dropped unique ancillaries, which are extra rare and come with particularly zesty effects such as a map that grants massively increased campaign movement at the cost of a small chance to get lost and warp to nearby random regions - in total 6 new unique items will be coming in 5.3 alongside the generic ancillaries."

- Will

Battle Map Tree Cluster Update (Continued)

As you will have seen in patch 5.2 we’ve started the initiative to update the trees in certain battle maps making them look more natural and offering better tactical options, or removing them entirely where they were not needed. We’re continuing this effort into 5.3 and have made a number of changes to an additional 46 battle maps, and as we’ve mentioned previously this will be an ongoing improvement to our maps.

Battle Balance Update

We're making a number of changes to battle balance, so now a word from our battle designer Ben on what to expect:

"In patch 5.3 we're shifting the multiplayer meta slightly by introducing some small (and not so small) changes to just about every faction in the game. These tweaks aim to correct outlying units in various rosters and bring them back in-line with what both we and the community expect to see. Beyond this, our aim is to keep the experience feeling fresh by shifting the faction meta around slightly.

Special thanks to CatholicAlcoholic and the rest of the team who puts together the community sourced balance thread, as it's a brilliant way for us to temperature check the meta of the battle side of the game alongside our own balance tests, feedback, opinions and metrics. Also special thanks to our affiliated content creators for putting out videos and sending in feedback that highlight where our battle balance could be improved.

Some highlights include:

• Several changes to Nakai's innate attributes and army effects in campaign (Vanguard Deployment, Woodsman, Terror)
• A small rework to the Black Coach's abilities (the now intensify based on how many nearby enemies have been killed)
• Additional effects for the spell "Glean Magic" (Spell Mastery on self, Silence for the enemy)
• Buffs to the Skullcannon and Blood Shrine to make them more credible threats
• A rework to the Wildwood Rangers' "Guardians of the Wildwood" ability
• Nerfs to Kislev, specifically some gentle MP cost increases and a reduction to the War Sleds' collision power
• Daemonic locus abilities have been increased to 55m range to work better on Ultra unit size
• Small rework on how the Ark of Sotek deals it's damage
• More leadership for Ghost-type units
• More large units feature collision attacks (Tomb Scorpion, K'daii Destroyer, Toad Dragon and more)
• Even more buffs for the Chariot of the Gods.
  

As ever, if you have any feedback regarding battle balance, be sure to hit up our forum. We are always lurking and reading.

- Ben"

New Unit - Grave Guard (Halberds)

We know everyone really enjoyed when we added the new Orcs & Goblins units with weapon variants in patch 5.2 and adding small new additions like that is something we’d like to continue doing where possible. As such we’ve now added a new unit for Vampire Counts, the Grave Guard with Halberds! Ready to shore up the undead against the relentless onslaught of cavalry, dragons and everything in-between (and at a much more reasonable price point than those haughty Blood Knights).

​

​

​

That's all from me today, once again thanks for reading and please do continue providing us with your feedback. We're looking forward to when you can get your hands on Patch 5.3 which is coming this October.

Cheers,

Mitch