By all accounts, Total War Warhammer 3‘s latest DLC, Thrones of Decay, and the accompanying update have done wonders for the game: The new lords are exciting, and there’s loads more to do in the combined Immortal Empires campaign, neglected factions have gotten some TLC. However, a new mechanic added as part of the dwarf rework has gone off the rails a bit, and Creative Assembly says it’s working on a fix.
The problem has to do with Total War Warhammer 3‘s new Age of Reckoning system that’s been added for the dwarfs. All dwarf factions now have a cycling 10-turn timer, during which they have to fill up a special “grudge” meter. They can do this by picking fights with enemies, each of which have an assigned grudge value. Do enough fighting to fill the bar up, and your faction will receive certain buffs and bonuses; but fail to sufficiently bloody your axes and you’ll suffer certain penalties.
Here’s the problem: as the strategy game‘s dwarfs expand out and encounter more factions, the requirements for this cycle scale up – and it turns out, they scale way up, faster than even the most blood-crazed dwarven slayers can keep up with. This gets particularly bad when players take on quest battles, which zip armies across the map and can suddenly establish first contact with more factions (with whom the dwarfs immediately become furious).
Creative Assembly says it’s addressing the issues with the Age of Reckoning. According to the patch notes for the latest hotfix, the team is looking at adjusting the way grudge targets are calculated so they’re based on known factions with whom the dwarfs share a border, rather than simply on the number of known factions. That should help curtail the “grudge inflation” that occurs when taking on faraway quests.
The team is also adjusting the effects of the bottom two brackets of the Age of Reckoning meter. “While we don’t want players to always hit the higher rewards each cycle, we also don’t want them to struggle to get out of the negative brackets,” the team says. “By making the second stage (Skruff) act more like a neutral stage rather than a second negative one, it will hopefully alleviate the pressure of needing to clear at least 50% each cycle to simply get out of the red.”
Another move under consideration is expanding the Age of Reckoning cycle from 10 turns to 15, which they say could alleviate the feeling of needing to bounce from one battle to whichever enemy is closest.
The Total War team says it doesn’t want to rush these fixes out, since it’s important to get these right without introducing new problems, but it assures players that it’ll have additional information about progress with the update at some point next week.
Check out our guide to Total War: Warhammer 3 races, and our Total War: Warhammer 3 DLC guide, for more on this game.
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