Total War: Warhammer 3 Overhauls Campaign AI to Enhance Gameplay Experience

Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero

Creative Assembly has announced that improvements to Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI are about to go into testing, with a beta due to kick off on February 13. The changes are all about making the campaign AI more active, and the blog post explaining this highlights a fascinating bug the team discovered: "a fundamental problem with how the Campaign AI detects foreign forces and how it reacts to them." As Creative Assembly Sofia's principal technical designer Radoslav Borisov explains, the "query system" the AI was using to determine how it reacted was freaking out if even a single hero was milling about in its territory. All those times you sent a scout to keep an eye on someone you thought was about to invade, only for them to immediately turtle? It was your agent's fault the whole time. Fixing that bug will mean "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." That should also mean the AI will have more resources to spend on acting offensively instead of concentrating them all defending settlements that aren't actually being threatened. Two other changes to the AI are being tested on the beta. One is a tweak to aggression that'll make factions more suspicious of anyone they haven't met yet, making them more likely to go to war when they finally encounter each other. The other is a series of tweaks to how factions who are "under the shroud" (yet to be encountered, rather than just hidden by fog of war) react to each other. Major factions are getting a boost, making them more likely to survive and thrive rather than getting randomly wiped out by a minor faction before you even cross paths. No more of that thing where you make it to Sylvania and find out the traditional home of the vampires is randomly full of wood elves. When the beta launches, Creative Assembly will have details on how to join it on the blog. It's planned to run for two weeks, and the developers note that using mods in conjunction with the beta "will lead to unexpected results", so it's probably best to disable Assladders Begone or whatever else you've got installed if you want to take part.

Total War: Warhammer III is overhauling its campaign AI

Total War: Warhammer III is undergoing a massive change. From today, a new beta will begin that'll allow players to collect feedback for and have a look at some upcoming major alterations to the game's AI. As outlined in a post on Creative Assembly's site and explained by principal technical designer Radoslav Borisov, the AI changes will focus on three key areas. The Query System, which tweaks how AI responds to enemy agents, Aggression, which adds more nuance to the AI's aggressiveness, and Faction Potential, which focuses on AI to AI interactions in parts of the map you've not explored. For Query, this will result in the AI not always running home and defending settlements when enemy forces are nearby, instead using other tactics to be less predictable. For Aggression, CA wants to improve how the AI assesses the strength of another faction, and will incentivise more warring between AI factions. Finally, in Faction Potential, Creative Assembly has made five tweaks, including: Increasing major AI faction strength versus minor AI factions, increasing faction potential's weight in auto resolve calculations, lowering the minimum faction potential minor factions can have, increasing the maximum faction bonus for AI in areas you've not explored, and increasing faction potential based on your difficulty level. The first beta runs from now until the 26th of February, and another beta test is planned for Spring.