On a battle map level this also manifests in a proper feeling of fraternity between cooperating players from turn one which would be excellent.  If I can help co-op Karl Franz out by providing a small contingent of Shielded Lothern Seaguard very early in the campaign, then I am doing my part.  The game we are playing is no longer a single player experience but becomes a shared organically evolving journey. 

Being able to do this easily and quickly also mitigates some of the issues of distance that a large map can create.  Currently if I want to send an actual army from Lothern to Altdorf the travel time alone is in the region of about 10 turns I think.  Being able to add an ambassador and some units into an allied force or have them quickly recruit some of my troops directly into their armies, regardless of distance, means we are playing the game together from the beginning. 

Once again, I feel this could be a huge win to single player campaigns as players would be more likely to seek out alliances or vassals which could provide some useful units.  Currently the route to allied units is long and expensive: alliance/vassalise, build an outpost, upgrade the outpost, earn a large amount of allegiance points and only then recruit.  Make this system quicker for the player to use and everyone will gain some benefit. 

• Variable or Selectable Starting Positions for Some Lords.  

Honestly, the hardest part of any new co-op game is choosing who plays what. I want to be in the same area as the people I’m playing the game with so that I can have an early, noticeable and frequent impact on their campaign.  If my co-op partner just REALLY wants to play as Ogres then I am now limited as to where I can play and who I can play as, with whole races like Norsca, Dark Elves and High Elves being unsuitable due to geography.

Now consider a system that has 1 lord in every race with a player selectable start position on campaign setup.  Teclis is an amazing example for this as in the Warhammer Lore he has canonically been to basically every part of the world, the guy likes a good wander it seems.  If on game setup I could choose to have Teclis start in Lustria or in the Badlands or in Cathay - or anywhere there is an Elven Colony, it would create a series of wildly different campaigns.  For co-op this would allow me to take him to many more locations and set up a reasonable co-op campaign with many more factions than I can currently as a High Elf.

This, once again, is letting players interact with each other earlier and more meaningfully.  My friend playing as Zhao Ming has never had a campaign working closely alongside High Elves from turn 1, but this is what a co-op campaign could provide him with; a new experience he can’t really get currently in a solo campaign.

For a single player campaign this would also be a huge win.  A Teclis campaign starting in Lustria and a Teclis campaign starting in Cathay (or, PLOT TWIST, in Nippon!) are shockingly different proposals.  It provides new challenges and matchups early in some campaigns and can even be something the player uses as a way to challenge themself.  Wulfrik starting in Norsca is fine, but Wulfrik starting in Skeggi?  That sounds hard and potentially complex, but there are many ports in that area so money could be ok.  Norscan campaigns don’t normally get to attack Lizardmen very often and there is maybe a co-op ally up north in Morathi … sounds like a fun challenge to me.

Once again, a system or idea born to help make co-op campaigns better can be done in a way which single player campaigns derive a big win from as well.

I would also like to point out that from a lore perspective, it is remarkable that every race seems to have at least one character in the game who could fill this role as a wandering lord.  There are already two Lords in the game who have the epithet “The Wanderer” so they would fit in nicely into this.

• Make faction or racial mechanics easy to use with co-op players and allies. 

Currently undercities, pirate coves and cults are very hard to reliably use in co-op settings as they need an agent action “against '' a friendly settlement which is blocked in co-op.  You need to rely on unfavourable RNG and it just frankly sucks to have to wait and hope.  

Instead have the option to request establishing these buildings in an ally’s settlement.  Make it a diplomatic request or treaty much like Military Access so that once you have permission you can put your sub settlements anywhere you want.  Have those sub-settlements established under a treaty be protected from being destroyed, they have permission to be there after all.  If I’m playing the Changeling, I would like the people I’m playing with to gain the benefit of the symbiotic cult buildings, these buildings are perfect for the co-op setting so let me use them as frequently and as early as possible!

This would be a great addition for solo players as well by opening up a number of different playstyles to races who use these sub-settlements.  An aggressive faction like Vampire Coast will make a large number of enemies but can also get a few friends as well.  Currently these friends are helpful-ish, but that friendship is a little limited and frankly it is easily discarded, which is very on brand, I get that.  However if I were to gain free cove access to this new friend’s port network via treaty, I am now much more invested in keeping them alive and prosperous.  I might even actively try to keep them alive and maybe give them territory to hold that I don’t want.  My campaign has now been changed and given a new growth option that was less appealing before due to coves being only a result of an aggressive action or a long cooldown agent action.

Again, a system built with co-op in mind, can be crafted to really benefit the single player experience at the same time.  

• Don’t Lock Co-op features Behind an In-Game Currency

This loops into making sharing units easier but this is more of a general concept to consider.  Most prominently this is a shot at allegiance points, why they make life worse in co-op and in general why forcing a currency in-between cooperating players leads to bad experience.

Allegiance points is a system that seems to be designed for simulating working with AI factions, it gets the job done without really setting the world on fire and mostly just kind of does what it’s supposed to do.  You can raise your points total by doing missions for the AI if you want, you can recruit units, direct AI armies, borrow whole army stacks and some lords and tech reduce costs on actions which spend these points.  I’m not going to object to it in the solo setting, it's ok.

In co-op you can use the allegiance points to do … less.  In reality allegiance points in co-op are only used for recruiting allied units through Outposts and that also is fine.  If I don't need to spend allegiance points on setting war coordination targets then that means I get more points to spend on allied units, the best thing about the Outposts, right?

Well no, the problem is you will over the course of a game only get a few allegiance points and no real way of raising that number or the rate you get them.  This leads to a choice paralysis on the part of the player with allegiance points becoming maybe the most rare resource in the game that the player doesn’t want to spend.

Here it is in numbers.

In co-op, you get a background income of (i think) 2 allegiance points per turn.  As far as I know this number does not change, you can not get allegiance points with co-op partners through missions or through providing battle support or helping them in battle by controlling some units.  2 points per turn, that's it.

A fairly average campaign I play lasts in the region of about 75 turns, they can be both more and less but take 75 as a healthy average.  This means that over the course of a campaign I acquire a total of 150 allegiance points.  That is my entire budget for the whole campaign to get allied units.  That also assumes I don’t get to the 100 allegiance points cap and then start wasting any points because I’m not spending.

So about 150 allegiance points for a whole campaign, I know this is going to be my budget from the start of the game.  That means I don’t want to waste these very rare and valuable allegiance points on getting Deadspears or Skinks, in fact I don’t want anything from the lower tiers of units, I’m going to save up stuff until my ally can produce amazing and fun units that I can afford.  That means I am not going to use any allegiance points if I can avoid it for between 40-50 turns!

This whole Outposts feature and sharing units is rendered undesirable to use for up to 50 turns in a campaign which will last around 75 turns. A campaign feature to encourage cooperation and sharing is using allegiance points to condition co-op players to not use that feature for fully two thirds of the game!  That’s insanity!

This whole issue isn't a balance issue or a problem of how many allegiance points you generate per turn or allegiance points cost of allied units.  You could change the point gain rate or cost structure of allied units but still be missing the underlying problem, which is that an in-game currency designed for managing player-to-AI interaction is getting in the way.

In the simplest possible change, if you were to remove the allegiance points system for all player-to-player interactions, all of this oddness goes away.  People playing co-op would be using the Outpost and alliance recruitment more often because it would be desirable to do so.  This in turn alters the trajectory of people’s campaign by running a much more diverse army stacks and creates some fun early interactions between different racial pair-ups.  

By removing the allegiance points costs from player-to-player interaction, it would make a system which people would want to use early and often throughout the entire campaigns and it would do this without impacting solo campaigns in any way.

Player-to-Player interactions probably shouldn’t always be free, but they shouldn’t be locked behind a currency designed to regulate Player-to-AI interactions.

With all of these sorts of changes you, the random person reading this, are probably reading this thinking “some of this seems very unbalanced”.  That is correct random person, you are very clever and I’ve always respected that about you.

Balance in Co-op - It Matters But Not as Much as You Think

When looking at building a new feature into a Total War type game, I can only imagine the hair pulling conversions that must go on in the development office about balance.  Clearly sometimes choices are made where balance is considered, but takes a backseat to another driving factor, like player fun.  

Oxyotl’s factions mechanics are absolutely one of the most fun ones in the game in my opinion, but it would be a horror show if the AI controlled Oxyotl could use those mechanics against the player.  This is the same with Wood Elf forest teleportation or Be’lakor’s chaos gates.  These systems are fun for the player to use but not fun when used on the player, in other words; they are deeply unbalanced.  So those faction mechanics are disabled when under AI control because player experience in these cases is more important than pure balance.  This is fine, a good practice even as it lets the game have some crazy absolutely unbalanced stuff in the game like teleporting across the world map, without it ruining the game. Putting the player experience first means we can have unfair mechanics in the game as long as those systems serve a well defined gameplay purpose.

Apply this same principle to the listed suggestions above.

Each of the suggestions provided make an aspect of co-op play more accessible, more rewarding and more useful to the players at the risk of making the game cumulatively too unbalanced in favour of the players.  That is a reasonable concern, but I would suggest that the above points are all cases where the interest of player experience could comfortably overrule balance concerns for the purpose of making a game mode more user friendly.  

I would also suggest generally that co-op campaigns can never really be well balanced because of the nature of the game mode itself. If you set up co-op a campaign where both players are reasonably new to the game, from the moment those players decide to work together towards a common goal they are destroying any idea of game balance.  Game systems like faction opinion, reliability rating, ruler tolerance and region trading are all irreparably broken or bypassed simply by the campaign being played by two people faithfully working together.

Also I said above in a game with two new players working together it breaks game balance, think how bad it gets when they aren't new players.  A quick glance at my Steam games list shows about 4000 hours in all three Warhammer games and about 600ish hours cumulatively in other Total War games on steam.  Lord knows how many hours I have in Total War games before they were on Steam, I remember playing Shogun 1 against my Business Studies teacher at school so that number not recorded on steam is also pretty high.  This means recorded hours in Total War games for me is in the region of 4600 hours.  That number is soft compared to some of the people I play co-op or head to head with, so when three of us get together and start a new campaign, let me be clear… there was never a chance in hell this campaign was going to be even close to balanced.  When three people with a cumulative 15000 hours of Total War game time decide to work together, that campaign was unbalanced the moment the players clicked to start the game.

There is no way to balance the game around coop and the massive nerds like me who play it.

However I believe this is a gift.

When considering changes to Warhammer 3 or potential future projects, implementing features which benefit co-op players in some way can be less impacted by balance considerations than single player only features.  A system which makes co-op easier or more engaging for the players does not need to be implemented for the AI if it will make the AI worse or frustrating to deal with.  This is the same basic principle of no Worldroot travel for AI Wood Elves and no Lizardman-XCOM for AI Oxyotl. It also means that a system or feature can be altered to behave differently in co-op without affecting the solo player's experience, creating a potential testing ground for new ideas.

So when looking at co-op changes or new features it’s probably tempting to cite balance and not make any changes, which I imagine eventually feels a little stifling for creative types to be told constantly you can do something because of balance.  However, if you are looking at co-op features, balance should not be the major obstruction, co-op is by nature deeply unbalanced and that simply can not ever be changed without removing the features which make it different from single player.

Building or adding co-op features isn’t about asking “should we do this?”, but instead asking “how do we do this?”.  There are fewer restrictions and more creative freedom to try things out.

That’s the gift.

Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

As you have probably guessed from this overly bloated post; I don’t work in the games industry, so I’m not sure if it is taboo to talk about other developer’s games. There are some things which other games do well in co-op and not highlighting those good ideas seems odd.  So I’m going to give three examples of features in other games (and name the game it comes from), briefly say why it benefits co-op gameplay and why it might benefit a Total War game.

I am aware that just straight porting ideas into existing games is a monumentally bad idea, so rather I look at this section as more of a topic of things to consider for future games.  I’m also only going to use ideas which actually exist and are currently in games somewhere rather than dreaming up something nobody has managed to invent or implement yet.  You can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, but those giants need to be real first at least!

• Hot Joining - Hearts of Iron

Hot Joining means players can drop into and out of a game without having to be there at the very start of the game for turn 1.  A new player could potentially join in during an ongoing campaign by selecting an AI controlled faction and take it over.  It also means that if a long running campaign with 4 people has someone who can’t attend one time, that player is able to rejoin later without being locked out of the campaign.  It also means a new player can join in on a game session, play a faction for a few hours and then not need to be there in the future.

All the people I play Total War co-op with are adults with jobs, careers, families and all the associated commitments which come with that.  A co-op campaign is generally a series of evening commitments and real life always has to come first, so on occasion people can’t attend a session or get called away mid game.  Some form of hot join means campaigns don’t need to come to a complete stop when real life happens, it would give players the chance to not feel like their last minute work drama has scuppered the plans of three other people.

I also feel this feature is quite welcoming when someone can just jump into an ongoing game.  Hearts of Iron especially I personally enjoyed doing this as I could just jump in and take control of a minor county and hang out with friends for a few hours playing the same game for a bit, maybe helping them by running as a Chromium supplier for a while (looking at you South Africa!).  My joining didn’t mean a brand new campaign had to be started for me which would then be thrown away once I left.

Hot Joining is a welcoming and surprisingly powerful feature to have for encouraging people into an ongoing game.

• Inverted Colours for Ally Controlled Units - Dawn of War 2

Battles can get a little busy, sometimes it's hard to see at a glance who is controlling which units.  Dawn of War 2 co-op campaign only had 4 active units with maybe about 15 models total under player control most of the time.  One of the simple yet excellent things they did was to swap the primary and secondary colours on any units your ally controlled so you could see who managed what at a glance.

It was a simple but surprisingly effective quality of life feature which just worked.

This is more of a principle to think of rather than a “do exactly this” example.  In co-op you are sharing the battlespace with other people, so successful and rewarding experiences come from fighting the challenge of the game together, not feeling like you are fighting the UI individually.

• Change Faction on Loading a Saved Game - Stellaris

Sometimes, games go really badly and it sucks if you are the guy it goes badly for.  In single player campaigns, you can either carry on or start afresh, easy!  In co-op and head-to-head campaigns it’s a little more complicated because if I have a car wreck of a game, but the 4 other people I am playing with are doing great then what do I do?  I’m not going to insist we restart, that would be 1 person ruining 4 other people’s game which is silly and selfish.  I could carry on, but car wreck campaigns do eventually become just not fun and demoralising to play.  I could leave the campaign but if I do that I am now excluded from playing in that game with my friends for potentially weeks! 

None of these are good options.

On save game loading in Stellaris, one option open to players is to take control of a previously AI-run empire.  This leans into Hot Joining a bit, but it's a feature which keeps people playing the game together.

Taking control of a previously AI run empire in Stellaris is frankly a little traumatic because of how the game difficulty buffs the AI. However, at the very least I am still in the game with my friends being told how terrible I am by people whose opinion I generally value.  It’s still demoralising a bit but at least I’m still part of the game and can quietly plot some form of revenge. 

This also means that people who like to change factions a great deal can still play in a co-op game without feeling locked in.  Each session they can, on game load, potentially pick someone different and carry on in the game rather than feeling like they need to stick it out or leave entirely.

The End … FINALLY!

I have probably written too much, I know that some poor sod who actually reads all this be muttering things like “this guy needs to get out more”, which is true I probably do.  I hope it is clear at least that what I have put here comes from a place of passion.

Even if what I have written here can’t change Warhammer 3, I would hope it at least encourages a new or different way of thinking about co-op features in future projects.  I to my core believe that a good co-op game experience is enriching and life affirming, so making it appealing to more people seems like a win to me.  

Also, you are asking for feedback to be constructive and thoughtful - I hope this qualifies as both.