Total War: Arena, Creative Assembly’s surprisingly engaging free-to-play RTS, is now one step closer to completion with patch 12.4. The beta update adds a new map, visual improvements, some gameplay tweaks and a bunch of bug fixes to boot.
It’s live now.
Alpis Graia is the new map, a transalpine pass surrounded by imposing mountains and covered in thick forest. Great place for an ambush, then!
Take a look at the spotlight for a rundown of the map’s most important features.
Other maps have also seen a dramatic visual transformation. Here’s a before and after shot of Marathon:
As for the rest, take a gander below at the full patch notes.
Gameplay improvements
- Forging UI improvement: If equipment 1A is replaced with equipment 1B, then “equipment 1B” becomes the default header and equipment 1A is listed as a variant to be crafted.
- Proper voice-over for Arminius, both for commander orders and mechanical feedback.
- More Barbarian unit voice-over sounds added to the game.
- Premium units are now clearly distinct in the unit tree to avoid confusion.
- We now have the ability to give out promotional codes that can be used by multiple people.
- Female premium units now have female unit models.
- Regional matchmaking queues for Europe and North America. The matchmaking servers will switch to the region with the most players in it, and if there are enough players in both regions, the matchmaking is split. We’re still fine-tuning this mechanism.
Bugfixes
- Various crash fixes.
- Various matchmaking bugfixes, particularly related to parties.
- Various voice-over bugfixes and improvements.
- Some cliff ledges on the Germania map no longer cause death when lining up.
- Pike units now stay in the same formation they were in when pikes are raised.
- Reward panel’s additional income no longer shows earning an additional 100 Gold that wasn’t in fact there.
- Fixed text clipping on Bodkin Javelins tooltip.
- Selecting and then deselecting a unit in the army panel was causing its silver cost to become unclickable, which is now fixed.
- Added unique cursors for deployables.
- When the “Play” button in the front-end is greyed out, a tooltip now informs you why that is.
- If a user leaves a battle, players can now get that user’s context menu when clicking on his name. This means that you can now chat with them or add them to your friends list after they’ve left.
- Consumables should now correctly replenish after battle, when “replenish automatically” is turned on.
- Marathon had a few incorrect no-go areas in the swamps that have been fixed.
- Units were able to clip through some terrain on Salernum, which has now been fixed.
- The pond in the south east of Thermopylae is no longer a no-go area.
- Killing your own units with intoxicate no longer causes a crash.
- Clicking the focus fire hotkey when playing an onager will no longer cause a crash.
- You’re no longer able to spam-click Gold purchases.
- Raiders impostor model now correctly shows a horse.
- Levy Tribesmen no longer disappear when viewed at a distance on some graphics settings.
- Warband units no longer dramatically change shape & colour when viewed at a distance on some graphics settings.
- Proven Warrior units now correctly show a shield when viewed from a distance.
- Snow ground type now has a correct tooltip.