I thought that would be it, that having just finished two more campaigns I'd give it a rest until WH3. But I had a bash around Steam and came away uninspired so I decided that my new goal would be to hit 100 WH2 achievements. And looking through them it was clear that I'd only be able to hit that with one race, Dark Elves, if I were to do it in one run. Dark Elves were the second one I played, and the first I completed a campaign with. So it's been several years since I've played them. Decided to go with Malekith in Mortal Empires.

I had not noticed the new option to turn off the Chaos invasion for ME before, so I did that for this run. That's pretty cool.

When I got back in to the game a few weeks ago with the Huntsmarshal's campaign I was bewildered that I could no longer find the map and map options. Took forever to figure out that it is now accessed by holding spacebar. Why did they change this? Not a fan.

The time is nigh! Warhammer 3 is close to dropping. Check out this video of the new map

Looks good DB thanks for posting the news.

No worries Russ, release date is set for February 17. I hope they nail it and don't feel compelled to alter the formula too much.

I'm looking forward to it, and would need to brush up again, but I recall my reaction to the new factions and felt underwhelmed. Of course you can still play the WH1/2 factions in Mortal Empires, but I'm hoping there are a few at least out of the new ones that I take to.

I'm looking forward to the Chaos Dwarves if and when they add them. They're like regular dwarves but with more bonkers vehicles and magic.

I'll say I'm not excited about the factions they've mentioned so far. That said, I ended up enjoying things like the Vampire Counts, Skaven, and Lizardmen much more that I thought I would. Maybe they'll surprise me here as well.

Yes, great point wormfood. When I started playing I had no interest in Skaven or the Vampire Coast factions (which actually came later), and these ended up at the top of my list, with Skaven my favorite of all. I'll buy WH3 for certain, but may wait a little to see what the fan reaction is, and let CA pop out a few fixes.

Warhammer 3 is out. Early word is that the game is good, but the performance is not. Poor optimization is what they're saying.

I watched a couple videos and I'm intrigued by some of the new mechanics. I think I'll wait for a patch, hotfix or two, let CA iron out the wrinkles, and give it a go down the line a bit.

I think Mortal Empires is not integrated yet.

Mortal Empires is not integrated yet.

I get a few stutters on my end with mostly the same settings as in Warhammer 2. I do know people with NVIDIA cards and ultrawide monitors and every load or cutscene the resolutions gets swapped back to 1080.
Several other people have reported crashes in the prologue, which can be skipped anyway.

I only messed around for a couple hours and it seems it could use a few patches. Cavalry does it's charge, then gets stuck much worse than in Warhammer 2 leaving them to get cut down by whatever they attacked. Archers seem to have a weird trajectory and they don't seem to shoot when it looks as though they should.

Good insight, thanks wormfood. Tell us more if you keep playing. Which faction did you start with?

The tutorial has you play as Kislev. I did start a campaign afterwards as the Great Orthodoxy (one of the Kislev factions), but only had time to do a couple turns.


Edit, mostly as a reminder to myself for things I need to double check:
1. Winds of magic seems to work differently. Maybe for other factions. For Kislev it just recharges and having an arcane conduit seems to just make it constantly recharge. There didn't seem to be a total pool it drew from like in WH2.
2. One of the prologue missions had you command a reinforcing army and attack the enemy from behind and take out their guns. Maybe it's a chaos thing, but those guns were fighting in melee moderately well, including firing the guns at close range causing them to flip around and bowl over my infantry.
3. Lore of Ice seemed to be broken. Many of the spells that should slow enemies or damage them didn't seem to work.

As it turns out that "artillery" was more of a zany warmachine, like a giant cannon on a motorbike instead of sitting on an actual gun carriage.

I replayed the battle and tried to snap a video of it:

Multiplayer is a mess. First, every half hour or so somebody gets disconnected and that player cannot rejoin until everyone quits.
Also, they made it so all the players have simultaneous turns, but everytime someone starts a battle a big pop up notifying everyone comes up and locks them out of doing anything else. It's a hassle when everyone is trying to attack something on the same turn.

Kizzzlevvv, that's how they said it whenever you clicked on them. Anti-social bastages, they were.

Thanks for the reports. I'm very interested in the game, but no reason for me not to wait a bit for some seasoning.

Those 'guns' or whatever they are are wicked in CQC!

The concensus seems to be that it is Denuvo that is tanking the performance. CA pulled a fast one really, by leaving it out of the review copies, then jamming it in there for release.

I'm going to wait for a while and see if they relent and remove it.

Warhammer 2 still has it I think, so unlikely, and maybe unrelated to any performance issues. I'm going to give it some times in the oven regardless.

Some other thoughts:
1) some of the default colors when fighting in the snow are a hassle. Normally when you hit space you can see the markers of the path your units are to take and the formation when they get there. That color on the snow blends in way too well and I'm not even color blind.

2) Other arty are also a bit beefy. Many of them are warmachines like I pointed out earlier. In Kislev's case they're pulled by bears that will fight back in close quarters. This means you can still send a sneaky trash unit around the map to hit their arty, but it's gonna get chewed upt and take awhile before it destroys the guns.

3) That lore of ice magic does seem to do something if you stack the same cast for the mobility debuffs. Maybe there's just a calculation error or a decimal in the wrong place somewhere in the code. Playing as the Great Orthodoxy, even after confederating Kislev, having the right research and buildings, I still cannot build frost maidens or ice witches.

4) I have to get out of ME mode, or maybe just wait for that mode to get added. The campaign spawns portals all over the map requiring you to keep armies nearby to squash them or they'll ramp up corruption and spit out chaos armies. Making building tall much better than conquering half the map. Change of pace from WH2 ME, but it's something I have to adjust to. It's a pain for a few more reasons since only your faction leader can enter the portals to complete the main campaign objectives and while they're off doing that, they're not on the campaign map. And there's a time limit to make it to a portal and complete the objectives, so if you're several turns from one of those, or have a plague that restricts movement or

5) The Nurgle faction is weird. You only build the tier one building and after a few turns it'll upgrade automatically to the next tier and so on up to the max, then it goes back down to tier 1. This can make building an army difficult as some units are not always available for recruitment.

6) The campaign map is actually rather large.

7) Provinces have been reworked. Now there's several who's territories are capped at 4 building slots and tier 3. There's more major towns that are their own provinces, but many of them are capped at only 6 slots.

I had been looking forward to WH3, and I'm sure I'll still pick it up. But some things are causing me to hold off. I really dislike the 'idea' of the chaos rifts or whatever they are that spawn enemies in your interior. Maybe I'd like it in practice for some reasons, but in theory this sort of thing is a big pain in the ass.

Thanks for the report wormfood, keep 'em coming please.

Patch just came out today. Looks like it's mostly multiplayer stability fixes, some crash fixes, and fixes related to gen 12 Intel CPUs.

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/tw-warhammer3-patch101/

I can forgive release issues, bugs, unintended or unforseen problems and the like. But what about the campaign? Total War games are campaign-driven. It's what it is all about, right?

I have yet to play (or buy), so my views are being formed by what I am reading. Here's the sort of stuff that is tempering my enthusiasm. I can't speak to the accuracy of these words, or whether this sort of thing applies to all campaign and factions, and anyway ME will be 'traditional' I suppose.

From Steam comments/reviews



I knew when I learned of the Chaos rift mechanic that I would dislike it. But maybe I don't understand it. We dealt with something similar in Vortex, but there you knew when it would occur, since you triggered it yourself by performing a ritual. It was still a pain in the ass, to suddenly have enemy armies magically appear at any point on the compass to penetrate your rear, and no one wants that

I try to avoid gaming the game when I can, but in those instances I would often 'tactically reload' after triggering a ritual, so I could see where the enemy spawns and then I could redeploy my field armies to intercept them and trigger it again, in much better position.

Chaos rifts are not predictable? Is there a warning of some type several turns in advance? It doesn't exist in a vacuum, and maybe not so bad. I mean if I'm rolling in florinducats maybe I can have a few 'home armies' as well as expeditionary forces? From what that guy said, that may not be possible due to limited funds, but this is the sort of thing I cannot say with no time yet in the game.

Word on the street from that last patch is that it broke the save files for most people.
Mine still work, but most of my friends who play it are unable to continue their campaigns.

If you haven't picked it up yet, it's probably best to hold off for another few patches or so.

To try to answer some of Dbond's questions,
There is be a warning a couple turns in advance, but I don't think there's a countdown to when it'll happen exactly.
Everytime it occurs at the same locations, but they're in almost every province (at least in the Kislev starting area).
When they pop up they immediately start tanking corruption and control (this game's version of happiness).
They'll spawn armies, but it takes about 3-4 turns before they start popping out. Although, each one will have an army at it to defend it. You can't just waltz up to it and close it without some kind of fight.
It would be so much easier to manage if the supply lines restrictions weren't so tough.

Biggest issues I have with it are:
1) it's a big pain in the ass and makes things tedious.
2) I wasn't aware they would happen on that extent on that first playthrough and expanded too much, too far and it wrecked my first campaign.
3) on another attempt I confederated a few areas and that also made me get too over extended and the loss of control and the corruption forced more armies to spawn and rebellions.
4) your faction leader can't help you defend if you want to win the campaign, since they have to enter a rift and they'll take most of the time those rifts are around to try and complete the tasks there.

It probably doesn't help that I only played WH2 exclusively in ME campaigns.