All is not well in The Old World. There are tides of torment in Total War Warhammer 3, and I’m not talking about the upcoming DLC. You just have to look at the game’s recent Steam reviews, which are 79% negative, with 2,500 people leaving big red thumbs in the last 30 days.
The reason for this wave of unhappy players is a bug with the game’s AI, which seems to have broken the lizardmen factions, affecting beastmen and tomb kings too. These factions have been essentially neutered from the start of a campaign. They don’t recruit new units and don’t seem to move their initial armies – not taking out starting enemies or undefended settlements they could choose to attack.
This inevitably leads to them getting gobbled up by other Total War Warhammer 3 factions – the ones that aren’t hampered in this way. While it doesn’t make the game totally unplayable, it inevitably leads to unbalanced and repetitive campaigns, with the factions that can feed on the inactive AI obviously at a huge advantage.
This problem seems to have been around for months, but became much more visible on August 27, with the release of Patch 6.3. Attention was drawn to it by Youtubers like LegendofTotalWar, whose recent video outlining the issue received 240k views.
Creative Assembly acknowledged the issue in patch 6.3.1 back on September 9, but more recently made a post explaining the issue more fully and promising a hotfix by next week.
According to the developers, the problem has something to do with unit caps, with factions not reading their unit caps correctly, failing to recruit units, and idling as a result.
With the new Tide of Torment DLC expected for a late October release, CA will undoubtedly want to have the issue taken care of before it can interfere with the launch.