I’ve also put this on hold until the new campaign. Really liked the game, except the chaos portal mechanic.
Are legendary lords more powerful in WH3? Seems like they are one unit doomstacks.
I have some regrets about buying the game. I’ll probably wait 6-12 months to see how much they can improve it by patches and Immortal Empires before I try it again.
I don’t enjoy the campaign mechanics a lot, but it’s a lot of the little things about battle optimization that bother me the most. Previous games have had some weird pathing and issues with unit responsiveness, but this game is a lot worse than I remember Total War Warhammer II ever being. Units will stop attacking or shooting for no apparent reason. Pathing is a complete mess in the city and minor settlement battles. Units will sometimes do weird repositioning dances, and there’s a dozen more weird things I never saw in the previous game at this magnitude. There were always some weird bugs like the gate bug, but nothing to this extent.
I think Immortal Empires will improve the campaign mechanics as long as they don’t screw it up badly, but I fear some of the other issues may be much harder to fix.
It seems you are not alone:
CA did respond to many of the complaints and gave some indicstion of future plans on the steam forums in response to an omnibus thread in a way I found promising. Kinda long so I won’t quote it, just link the thread. They do mention rethinking some aspects of the rifts.
I should add that I have played as ogres, legion of chaos, and kislev and am having fun, but I did toss my first campaign because I ignored the rifts for 2 cycles (or to be honest took the first slaanesh reward like a noob once, then was too busy to go the secons time) and fell too far behind.
I also have had very limited gaming time so maybe I just haven’t gotten tired of it yet.
I think it is understandable there will be some hiccups and balancing at the start. I can’t ever remember a CA game being close to ideal at release (some were worse then others…a LOT worse).
They really need to link it to Immortal Empires and get Steam Workshop support. That will help a lot (IMO).
I have had zero performance issues, but the RoC campaign is just TEDIOUS, once you have completed it one time. Zero replayability.
Protip: Do NOT use Cathay’s “formation attack”. It is worse than not using it (despite it presumably meant to be better).
Hm…I don’t regret, per se, buying the game…I kind of regret getting it as soon as it launched. I should have waited for the full campaign and mod support (especially the Radius mod, which is my go-to). I kind of had the same reaction to TWHII, to be honest…I didn’t really enjoy the Vortex campaign, and really didn’t start to get into the game until they put in the full version (I do think they allowed mod support from the get go, as well as had Steam mod support even initially, but I might be misremembering).
I think once the full game comes out, and they have community mod support it will be a good game. The multi-player alone has made a lot of good progress from the TWHII game, and some of the features seem to streamline play quite a bit and take some of the annoying stuff out. It’s just that, as with the last game, the early campaign…well, sucks. And they really need the community mod support to round out and allow customization of the game.
For those interested some mods are popping up for WH3 and some seem pretty good (minor settlements become land battles seems really nice):
That’s kind of how I feel about it also. I’m a long-time Total War fan/player (both Medievals, both Romes, Thrones of Brittania, Napoleon), but hadn’t played either of the Warhammer versions.
I’ve never been a huge campaign fan; it’s just a grueling micromanagement simulator for the most part. Battles have always been what I enjoy.
But so far, the TW:Warhammer 3 only has a handful of playable factions. I don’t necessarily want to play Kislev, Grand Cathay or Chaos.
And strangely, the battles seem less controllable and more chaotic than they used to. I mean, I’ve played a LOT of Total War games over the last couple of decades, and this is the only one that feels quite so chaotic. I don’t know if it’s the graphics, or if it’s the mechanics, or if it’s something to do with the fantasy milieu, but I seem to be having a hard time managing my battles in this one.
The lack of unit responsiveness is killer for me in enjoying the battles, and it feels like units require a lot more babysitting. I see a lot more weirdness like units not doing anything, forming conga lines when moving to another place, or getting spread out all over without a clear reason. Good thing is that the devs have admitted this is an issue and are working on fixing things.
The sad thing is that TW3 is plagued by issues that were already fixed during DLC and patch development of TW2. The new factions are nice, but it feels like the game has taken 10 steps forward, 20 steps back compared to TW2. It’s going to take a lot of patches just to get the game to a level of playability that TW2 is in now.
There’s a roadmap available now if you’re interested: Total War: WARHAMMER III 2022 Roadmap - Total War
At least it seems like the DLC team that did a lot of great work on TW2 is now responsible for TW3 development, though I don’t envy their job of having to fix the mistakes of the main team. I originally said it would probably take 6-12 months before I was interested in the game again, and it looks like it’s going to be closer to 12. I’ve barely touched TW3 in the past 6 weeks, but thankfully there’s a lot of other great games like Elden Ring out. I’m confident the game will eventually be in a great state as long as CA doesn’t pull the plug on development.
That’s what’s getting me too… in all the others (FWIW, I played “Empire” as well), your units were generally controllable, but TW3 seems considerably less so. Which is probably more realistic in a lot of ways, but it’s a lot less fun.
From what I have seen about the latest patch is this is better than it was and they are still trying to improve it.
With Immortal Empires dropping today (or tomorrow…not clear on that) I have a question:
Do I need Warhammer 1, 2 and 3 installed to be able to access all the factions and lords or will WH3 know I have the others and everyone will be there in the game?
As an aside, very much looking forward to Immortal Empires. The scope of it all is a little overwhelming.
I think I found the answer. If you own DLC in previous games they will show up in Immortal Empires but you must own those products in the other games. You do not need to have the previous games installed, just have them in your library and WHIII will be able to tell (not sure how but that’s what they say).
You don’t need them installed, just need to own them all on the same platform (steam, epic, or gamepass).
All DLC will be available to play against, but you can only play as those factions whose DLC you own.
Make sure you have all of the freeLC added to your accounts, including those available only through the Total War website! (https://dashboard.totalwar.com)
ETA: Just for some additional info, be prepared for a huge patch. This will basically be three fairly large game installations combined in one. Also, after the installation, if you want to save some hard drive space, you can delete the localization files for the non-english languages and cut out many gigabytes of data. Unfortunately, the current setup (installation of even languages that aren’t your own) is apparently due to some requirements of the Microsoft Gamepass availability, and the unified game build environment is making it worse on us…
Wait, has that always been the case? All those years playing Mortal Empires and I had WH1 installed on my PC for nothing?
Correct, I figured that out a couple years into WH2.
Anyways we are like two hours from the release and I am beyond excited (although I won’t get to actually play until later tonight).
There are so many factions I’m psyched to play that I have no idea how I will decide.