Total War: Warhammer 3 might finally be giving its cowardly AI some oomph

I tend to play Total War: Warhammer 3 closer to an RPG than a strategy game. Balance? Leave me alone, for I am immersed in the stinky fantasy of being a sniveling Skaven bin-licker, commanding my slaves to mine useless gold purely because it irritates my dwarfish enemies.

As such, I’m not quite as tuned into the nuances of enemy faction behaviour as a lot of players, despite my ungodly hour count. I do miss fighting against large enemy empires though, something the AI seems more reluctant to pull off these days. Creative Assembly seem to think so, too. A new blog post outlines the changes they’re making to AI, and there’s an experimental beta branch available right now if you want to test them out.

There’s a fair bit of design talk in the blog, so I’ll stick to the helpful “How will this affect you in-game?” explainers they’ve given. They’re looking at three major areas in all: ‘Query System’, ‘Aggression’, and ‘Faction Potential’.

The query system is how the AI detects enemies and potential enemies on the map. So, anyone who isn’t them basically, given that it’s Warhammer. The problem? Campaign AI prioritises defending its settlements when enemy forces are present, and ‘enemy forces’ hitherto included even the lowliest agent character. They’re now making the enemy less likely to cower behind their walls at the merest whiff of a rambling troubadour weaving daisy chains on adjacent farmland. From the blog:

“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.”

They’re also aiming to make the AI better at assessing rival faction’s strength, and more incentivised to declare war on other AI factions. I sort of love how vaguely sinister the word ‘incentivise’ is in this context, since its basically flipping a switch in someone’s head that makes them angrier (which I seem to remember being the actual lore behind a Warhammer 40k character, actually.)

Finally there’s ‘faction potential’, which basically governs how powerful a given faction is likely to grow. If you’ve noticed certain Dark Elves performing absurdly well in every single campaign, it’s likely to do with their high potential. From the blog:

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

• A slight increase of major AI faction strength versus minor AI factions
• Slight increase of faction potential weight in auto resolve calculations
• Lowered the minimum faction potential minor factions can have
• 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
• Small increase of base faction potential for all factions on all difficulty levels”

This should mean that major factions conquer the little guys faster and more often, increasing the chance they’ll survive until late game, and also be less passive overall.

This can obviously change between campaigns, but here’s a quick timelapse by YouTuber MonkeyBot of a campaign in the current beta. The Bloody Hands orcs seem to do a lot better than usual, and the Skaven don’t usually do quite as well in my experience either. Also, the Ordertide has been well and truly krumped.

Will I be jumping in to try these changes any time soon? No. I have work to do and showers to take regularly, both of which will suffer horribly if I’m not careful. You should be careful, too. Good Twarhammer AI can be horrible.