Upcoming updates for Total War: Warhammer 3 will address "anti-player bias" and improve the AI’s decision-making to prevent self-destructive behavior.

Back in Total FebWar, the Total War: Warhammer III team penned a desperate missive in entrail fluids, full of scrawled warnings about the changes coming to the strategy game‘s AI. With their last ounce of strength, they rolled out a beta test for the planned tweaks. Now, the results are in, circling in the eerily fallow wake of over 50,000 campaigns, like carrion crows with tangible datasets grasped tight in their beaks. Thanks, death crows!

The new query system worked well, with foes no longer cowering from lone enemy agents as if they were doomstacks. The tweaks to faction aggression and potential were shakier, causing some unintended consequence. As such, the upcoming 6.1 patch won’t include changes to how fighty or flourishing your foes are. “Faction Potential changes made minor factions significantly easier to defeat for major factions,” reads the blog. “This in turn caused Elector factions to perish too early and to be ineffective even when brought back”. Makes sense. Can’t summon the dead, unless you’re one of the several Warhammer factions that can actually do that quite easily.

There were also “a number of reports around the AI exhibiting suicidal behavior”, although the blog doesn’t give details here. I’d be interested to know exactly what this means, since e.g the game’s lack of defensive sieges strikes me as a direct result of the AI being too picky about getting into fights it might lose.

There’s another beta coming soon, anyway. Patch 6.1 is set for release on March 25th, and the beta is planned for a week after that – with “anti-player bias” being a focal point. That’s a much ballyhooed bugbear arisen from the complaint that the AI will occasionally voyage across half the known world to take a dump on your lawn, ignoring other potential conquests or threats in their path. In theory, toning it down should make the campaign experience a lot richer, although I do feel it’s taken on somewhat of a mythical quality over the years as a stand-in for a more diverse range of AI issues, and so might not be the quick fix solution many are hoping for.

Patch 6.1 is slated to be packed with goodies, including reworks for the Kislev faction and Kairos Fateweaver, and a new unit each for Cathay and the Ogre Kingdoms. Newly teased in this blog is the option to have Kislev’s Mother Ostankya return to the motherland – a land hitherto noticeably lacking in mothers.