Total War: WARHAMMER III Improving AI in Campaign

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Hey Folks,

At the tail end of last year, you saw us run a few of our Hotfixes out for Total War: WARHAMMER III via the Beta function on Steam. This was invaluable for our teams as we readied some necessary game updates during the rollout of Omens of Destruction, and helped us catch some last minute feedback from you. and ensure that our updates were on point. Whilst we haven’t needed to pull on that lever quite so much since we got back into the swing of things in 2025, it has encouraged us to think about even more ways that we can involve you in some of our more complex game changes, and work closer with you all to bring more improvements to the game.

Tomorrow (February 13th) we will launch a new public Beta Branch for Total War: WARHAMMER III via Steam. This Beta will allow you to experience and provide feedback on the latest improvements to our Campaign AI, where your insights and experiences will help us refine and enhance the game. To understand what changes we’re making, you’ll read about all of the science of these changes from Principal Technical Designer Radoslav Borisov down below, and if you check back on this post tomorrow, you’ll find detailed instructions on how to access the Beta at the bottom of this post. 

We’ll run this Beta for around two weeks initially, bringing it to a close around February the 26th. It’ll be running on a modified version of the live game that you’re already playing today, so this Beta won’t be used to test any additional upcoming changes to the wider game, and we’ll be encouraging folks to start fresh Campaigns for this test in order to check best on how our changes are performing.

We've opened a new sub-forum over on the Total War Forums to gather your feedback on the Campaign AI fixes and improvements that we’re looking to make, alongside a survey that will run throughout the Beta that will invite you to share your feedback directly with us. We’ll also post that survey link in the news feed of the Beta version of the game itself for easy access.

At the conclusion of this first Beta, we’ll comb through all of your feedback, pour over the data our side, and come back to you to talk more about where we’ll be looking to make more improvements. If all goes well, we’re planning a second round of testing with an updated Beta sometime later in the Spring. Please keep in mind that this is our goal, and to expect direct comms from us if this timeframe has to shift. Campaign AI improvement is a big, and complex topic, and our goal is to break it down into smaller pieces and address them with player feedback front of mind so we can deliver improvements that you want in a sustainable way.

To those who do look to get involved, thank you in advance for your participation in this Beta! Check back on this post tomorrow for all of the key links and info, and with that, I'll hand over to Rado.

- Adam Freeman, Head of Community

Campaign AI Improvements

Hello there, I’m Radoslav Borisov, Principal Technical Designer at CA Sofia. I want to address an issue you all have been vocal about - idle Campaign AI. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear and your concerns about idle AI behaviour are well founded. The team has been working on resolving this and are preparing to roll out a new Beta branch for Total War: WARHAMMER III to test some new AI fixes and improvements. Everyone has different preferences and styles when it comes to playing the game, so assessing the impact of these changes is something we cannot do without your evaluations and responses.

Here are the 3 topics through which we are addressing idle AI behaviours with this Beta:

1. Query System = Tweaks to how the AI responds to enemy agents

2. Aggression = Tweaks to AI aggression to add more nuance

3. Faction Potential = Tweaks to Faction Potential, with a focus on AI to AI interactions under the shroud. When we refer to ‘the shroud’ here we are talking about the part of the campaign map you are yet to explore, which is different from fog of war which covers parts of the map you have explored but have no line of sight in.

This blog will be updated with instructions on how to access the new Beta branch tomorrow so you can experience these improvements. We appreciate your patience and detailed reports, which will helped us pinpoint and address the issues. Keep the feedback coming by positing your thoughts in our sub forum area, as we strive to continuously make the game experience better.

And now some more details on the issues we encountered and how we resolved them.

1. Query System

During investigation of what’s causing many cases of idleness we discovered a fundamental problem with how the Campaign AI detects foreign forces and how it reacts to them. There are two different mechanisms to detect foreign threats - a simple query system, and an influence map that shows the extent of every force’s range and strength of interaction with assets on the map.

The problem we discovered, and subsequently fixed for this Beta Branch, had to do with the query system. Inside the Campaign AI exists a separation between assets that move, and those that do not. Movable assets include agents, armies, and navies. Several of the queries that the Campaign AI uses to decide if it should use it’s available forces for tasks, such as actively defending threatened territory, were incorrectly reacting to the presence of agents. In practice the Campaign AI was prioritizing tasks of the “defend settlements when enemy forces are present” type when any hostile agent was present. To prevent similar issues in the future we double-checked all queries function as expected, made sure all queries check mobile asset types, and improved testing processes to account for similar fundamental assumptions being wrong.

How will this affect you in-game? It means an AI controlled faction will no longer immediately assume a defensive posture and concentrate forces near/in settlements whenever any hostile agent ventures into their territory. This should enable AI factions to use resources that previously went to the defensive response for other purposes, e.g. raiding enemy territories, concentrating forces to break through defended positions.

2. Aggression

Over the course of reading and investigating community feedback, the team decided we need to revisit how some of the Campaign AI’s top level strategic decisions are made. We identified the component for ‘Desired Attitudes’ as a good starting point. The Desired Attitudes component basically tells the Campaign AI how aggressive it should be towards rival factions, an oversimplified way of thinking about it is the AI thinking; “do I want to be friends with X, or do I want to fight X”. Our goals here are to promote more conflict between AI factions and to improve the AI’s decision making when it comes to Desired Attitudes.

We’re testing AI Aggression fixes in two areas for this Beta:

1. Desired Attitudes decision making improvement - we’ve tweaked how the AI assesses the strength of a rival faction, measures how close their armies are, and thus how much of a threat they pose.

2. Negative Multipliers for unknown factions (e.g. factions the AI is neither at war with, nor aware of through alliances, other diplomatic interactions etc.) - we've tweaked these to make the Desired Attitudes for unknown factions trend negatively, incentivizing more warring between AI factions. 

How will this affect you in-game? It means the AI will be more nuanced when choosing how aggressive to be towards known factions instead of the ‘befriend, ignore or fight’ behaviour it currently exhibits. This should add some shades of grey and lead to more varied interactions between you and your AI neighbours. On the other hand AI factions across the map will be more belligerent towards each other from the start, which should help make campaigns more dynamic and varied for you across multiple playthroughs.

3. Faction Potential

A cornerstone of the Campaign AI’s behaviour is the Faction Potential system. Every faction in the game gets assigned a numeric potential value, which has an impact on many other systems in the game. Said potential value varies between campaigns and difficulty levels and is incredibly important to how the AI performs. I will not go into details on the exact way faction potential works today, but its something we could spotlight in the future. One part of faction potential is how AI factions interact with each other when under the shroud - our goals here are to promote more interactions between AI factions, and to allow major factions more opportunity to organically grow and become stronger.

We’ve made five tweaks to Faction Potential for this Beta:

1. A slight increase of major AI faction strength versus minor AI factions

2. Slight increase of faction potential weight in auto resolve calculations 

3. Lowered the minimum faction potential minor factions can have

4. Moderately increased the maximum faction potential bonus for AI factions under the shroud - this allows higher potential factions to defeat and conquer lower potential factions faster 

5. Small increase of base faction potential for all factions on all difficulty levels

How will this affect you in-game? Major factions will conquer minor factions faster and survive longer, decreasing the chance that they will be knocked out in the early game and therefore resulting in more diplomatic interactions and battles with them for you during your playthrough. It will also increase AI faction interactions across the board, further building on the tweaks to Idle AI and Aggression above, to reduce passive AI behaviours in general.

- Radoslav Borisov, Principal Technical Designer

Please keep in mind that if you're reporting issues you encounter while playing on this Beta branch that aren't related to Campaign AI, please use the 6.0.4 version, and please note that the use of mods with this Beta can and will lead to unexpected results. Thanks for reading, come back tomorrow when we will update this blog with links and instructions on how to access the Beta and how to submit your feedback.

How to download the Beta branch 

​If you would like to opt-in to this Beta branch and try these changes today, here's how you can do it:

1. Open your Steam client and go to your Library.
   
2. Right-click on Total War: WARHAMMER III and select 'Properties'.
3. Navigate to the 'Betas' tab.
4. In the drop-down menu, select the option ‘public beta - Campaign AI Beta'
5. Steam will then download the necessary files and begin the patching process to install the Beta.

The download is relatively small, but Steam will need to patch around 25GB of game data in order to install the Hotfix. This can take some time depending on your hard drive speeds.

How to submit your feedback

If you would like to complete the feedback survey once you've played the Beta, here's how you can do it:

1. Follow this link

2. Complete the survey and submit your feedback

If you would like to discuss your experience of playing the Beta with us and other players, here's how you can do it:

1. Follow this link to the Campaign AI Beta Sub forum

2. Post in it

Thank you in advance for your feedback and for discussing your experiences with the Campaign AI Beta!