My personal (quite extensive) résumé:

[Galumbovic]

Hi @ all

After spending the last days extensively playing Total War Warhammer 3, I would like to present my personal thoughts here in a more or less structured way, to maybe give some orientation to all those who are currently undecided.
I am certainly anything but the typical casual gamer and have already collected over 3000 hours of playtime in Total War Warhammer I + II - you can tell: I love this game. In general: Total War has basically always been my favorite game series, which I have played from the very beginning with Shogun TW. I love the historical games, but the Warhammer series has been a dream come true for me that I've been hoping for since I first played a Total War battle. Of course, my review thus remains a personal and subjective one, yet I think I can give a reasonably profound opinion.

In order to not just write a "wall of text", I would like to structure the review as follows:

- General features / improvements in part 3.
- Graphics
- Campaign mechanics
- Multiplayer
- General or specific weaknesses of the game
- Prospect

Here we go.

General features / improvements in part 3:

In this section I have a lot of positive things to report, but also a little bit of criticism or some potential for improvement to name.
First of all, there are a lot of well thought out and well done improvements to mention (and I definitely forgot a lot of them). For example, it is a real boon to be able to explore possible alliances and treaties via the Quick Deals in Diplomacy. With this, Warhammer 3 saves us many minutes of tedious clicking around every turn. The possibility to warn armies raiding in one's own territory should also be emphasized here and is absolutely successful. The same goes for the war coordination system, which feels much better and makes interaction with allies more meaningful and reliable. What bothers me here, though, is that at the end of each turn the game tells me that I can build outposts in allies' provinces - even if I simply don't want to (e.g. because my ally plays the same race as I do). Also, it's still not really transparent what influence alliances have on the probability of confederating an ally. Here I would just like to see a bit more text explanation (because this can become quite important, depending on whether you strategically plan to confederate with allies).

Basically, I find the idea of implementing units of other factions into your own armies via outposts very good. At first I was a bit worried that it would undermine the unique gameplay of the respective factions, but in its current form you can only hire certain basic units, so this worry didn't prove to be true.

What is really great: The new regulation of reinforcements in battles. Finally, the advantage of attacking with several armies is weakened a little bit, since they now arrive with a time delay. The ability to "shift" their point of arrival is also terrific! Unfortunately, the AI is still completely overwhelmed when you advance two or more armies together on the campaign map, but more on that later.

City sieges are now really more varied, but sometimes still play a bit tough, which is also simply because you have to play too many of them due to bad auto-calculations (see below).

Graphics:

I don't really have much to say here, basically just a small thing: unit details, map design, effects and co look great as usual. Only the colored border / fringe of the units, as soon as you move the cursor over them or select them, seems to me somehow clunkier and washed out compared to part 2. I can't describe it exactly, but I constantly have the feeling that I see less of the detail of the units than I was used to when I selected them.
I can't complain about performance problems, at least. With the exception of crashes when the game is minimized. That's not a drama, but a bit annoying because I don't want to play in windowed mode.

Campaign mechanics:

This is perhaps the point I struggle with the most. Total War has always been a more or less open sandbox experience for me, and the incredibly high replayability value is due precisely to that. The new campaign is again a step backwards in this regard, or rather a bit like "Vortex campaign 2.0". Neither do I find time pressure particularly edifying in a Total War game (aside from the usual pressure to want to be better than the other factions), nor do I appreciate the linear progression. You can easily win the campaign with little territorial expansion if you focus on a strong main army and simply play through the chaos empires one by one. And - as beautiful and atmospheric as they look - I simply get tired of them after the second campaign run at the latest. It's always the same. Whether I play as an Ogre, Cathay, Kislev or Nurgle in the Chaos Realms, the difference is very small. I think that's a real shame, because I would have really liked to be able to play Part 3 as a sandbox conquest game from the beginning. That's what makes Total War, that's what makes it incredibly replayable, and that's what makes for the greatest immersion in a computer game world that I've ever experienced in computer games.

Of course: The (Im)Mortal Empires Combined Map will be released - and I'm eagerly waiting for it. Unfortunately, the fact that so little has been said about it so far makes me fear that it will take much longer than a month until it is released this time. For me, the game is only complete with it.

Multiplayer:

This is where the game's biggest innovation lies, and I can't thank CA enough for it! Simultaneous rounds, 8 players, plus really well thought out solutions that no one has to be bored during battles, for that I give the highest rating. Many, many thanks, CA, this is a masterstroke. The multiplayer is also stable, even if a player suffers to packet loss, there is no immediate desync. Very well done!

General weaknesses of the game:

What I noticed very quickly: the auto-resolve predictions in this part are really way too often way too incomprehensible and bad. This can really annoy you, because too often you have to play battles you don't want to play (because they are obviously won - just not via Auto Battle) and too often you can auto-resolve the battles you would have wanted to play. So truly the worst on both sides. It just sucks when my Cathay Caravans are attacked by obviously weaker opponents, but according to Auto-Resolve I would lose. Worst of all, the battles in the Chaos Realms, which are what the campaign is all about, I could just completely auto-resolve in my first run as Oracles of Tzeentch. My army was neither incredibly strong, let alone a so-called "doom stack" of high-tier units. Yet, the final battle against Nurgles Gardener was simply predicted to be a Heroic Victory for me. Super disappointing. Sure, I can still play it of course, but, hey, the adrenaline level was down in one fell swoop. CA really, really needs to improve here, it doesn't work like that!

Otherwise, A.I. remains a weak point even in battles. I don't want to reiterate long known problems here, but when Kairos Fateweaver attacks my caravan (in my other campaign as Cathay), which is basically hopelessly outnumbered by his army, I expect him to run me down and I can at most do a little damage to him. Instead, I see him stop first with his whole army as the attacker, let his Tier 5 Flamer Chariot fly alone (!) towards my army, and I just knock it out of the sky with my archers. Then Kairos personally flies off. Also alone, the rest of his army stops. And I just thought to myself: oh no, how embarrassing is that? And the great leader of Tzeentch dies in a hail of arrows from the archers and crossbowmen of a generic caravan army. How disillusioning. Then, finally, Kairos sends out the rest of his army, which - badly weakened morally - closely loses in the end. If this is supposed to be Tzeentch's grand plan, then what they say about his plans is probably true: they are unfathomable. Again, CA needs to do something urgently, this is just stupid in this way.

In addition, the problem simply remains: once I have two to three armies, the AI on the map is overwhelmed with the strategy to face my army group. Sometimes I get really excited because there are three armies around a large enemy city and I think to myself "Wow, this is going to be a battle!" and then in the turn before my attack the A.I. pulls two of the three armies completely erratically in random directions away from the city and I can once again autobattle one after the other - without challenge. It was like that in part 1, it was like that in part 2 and unfortunately it is like that again in part 3.

Apart from my criticism of the campaign mechanics (see above), these are essentially the biggest criticisms I have so far.

Outlook:

Warhammer Total War is a dream come true for me and indeed the best Total War ever! Even though I was and am a big fan of the historical titles, the reason is obvious to me: diversity, replayability, graphics, strategic options and especially with regard to the campaign mechanics incredibly successful factions. And the atmosphere is a blast.
But it simply remains unfulfilled as long as there is no combined campaign map, because only with this will it really be able to place itself on the throne on the Olympus of Total War games. To that extent, I'm currently checking all channels daily to see when they'll outline a rough release date. I'm impatient yes, but of course I want it to be good and I hope to enthusiastically play it even in years as I did on Mortal Empires. And for that I have one request: it must somehow (through portals or whatever) become a globe. Anything else would be a shame.

Overall score for Total War Warhammer 3:
8/10
Total War Warhammer I + II + III (when the combined map appears):
10/10

[Juuken]

Postat inițial de Elindos Phar:

I don't think reviewing machine specs is of any relevant use here. There could be separate threads for that. You are basically killing parts of the conversation for a significant % of readers and the ones % you would bring in that conversation could have enjoyed that better in other threads dedicated to that too. I hope at least this subtopic will die off between posts, which it seems to do, but i just wanted to point that out because that's where I want to leave and unsubscribe.

One of the beautiful things about a forum is, that you can have multiple parallel discussions without any issues. Where the group otherwise would have problems when speaking with each other, users here can jump from post to post, ignore some of them, grab them, selectively comment on them and much more. To say someone is killing a forum conversation because he or she is mainly working on one aspect that came up, is like saying, "You're ruining the carnival for everyone, by just enjoying the bumper cars!"

[Elindos Phar & Family]

If I were mentioning that it is because it is extremely usual for whatever 3D game comes out to have these tech talks, people have tech specs varying from x1 to x100, tech problems varying from x1 to x100, people align talks like a dxdiag and even if this may passionate many people like that around (or rather, some people), I totally feel we have not only changed "book", or topic, we have changed group, library, town, or region with that common subject.

It has then become common tech-talk exactly like what we see in 3D games around and dxdiag is not a philosophical thing to discuss.

It's exactly like seeing people compare their lambo instead of discussing mankind's future. In my culture, we don't do that, we keep our owned specs private and it's not polite to discuss "I have that, what do you have", it's the real world and not the game.

It can have its place anywhere (who am I to say what am I saying), but steam forums have a lot of threads dedicated to these already when a new demanding 3D game comes, and I think it's beneficial to separate this out.

So I took a somewhere invasive stance by proposing that, I apologize for it.

But still I do (or did) believe it's very contributive to separate that before it gets more of it. We are already discussing a lot of things TW3-wise here, I felt it was contributive to propose that. I agree, "it does not work like that". It was like an innocent, naive proposal.

To be honest, like you both mention: people can still go wildly about any topic, and maybe it won't come again that much. so I can also forget about it. That's a totally valid point too. But I'll remain watchful ;)

As for comparison for forums, if you tried that in real life: (inserting exchanges about how you compare your graphic card, when we were talking about a lot of things in TW3) you can technically have a separate conversation one to one with someone and discuss machine superpowers as geeks, but you are no longer sharing something to the community as a whole or as contributive, it has then become a selective conversation, and well, technically some people would leave you at that point. In real life, you see it physically with your eyes. In a forum, you just don't hear about as many people, who would "select another table" to discuss stuff, especially if like me comparing graphic cards or tech situation is not the same trip to them.

Which, granted, actually does not happen that much on "steam" forums, because well, we see the first page only :D so people contribute based on first page. (edit: In my next message below, I saw that actually means my point is not something to worry about, as threads should actually get filtered by OP subjects, not by pages ; surprisingly this does not work with hate talk inserting itself, though).

In regular forums it does become the "silent masses that left" and belong to no stat in a forum conversation, which you won't see, won't hear, because you actually filtered some readers not by proposing to select a topic (as I do), but by delving into something else more and will have retained some other readers or topics.

I believe "selecting by discussing something" is a big nice thing. just like avoiding hate talk is a big nice thing, and you are right to remind me that too.

[Elindos Phar & Family]

... aaaand with that wall of text said (= written), we do have a first page already filtering stuff, from Galumbovic initial post, which I think will keep things OK anyway.

Galumbovic you mentioned you did not agree with my point about stats and TW being vague about effects of stats. And mentioned that "intuitive understanding" works, if I may summarize that.

I am all for intuitive gameplay.

Intuitive understanding of stats goes OK with factions with archers, spears, cavalry, which was the usual TW mileage, but goes awful once you have Chaos factions with, like, melee unit 1, melee unit 2, melee unit 3, melee unit 4, all with same traits like "tank and weak damage".

at that point you would like to know what worth has +5 melee, or +10 armor, or to get an overview with a comparison table ingame, to at least know better about your current available roster. Even indie games sometimes have it.

[Marcus Butthurticus]

Postat inițial de garytc78:

nice review thank you!
BUT
i disagree about graphics, its much better than the previous warhammer I and II
and i disagree about the campaign! i love everything about it!

Much better? Optimized to ♥♥♥♥. Low graphics looks worse than the older Total War games. It is odd.

[Juuken]

Postat inițial de Elindos Phar:

...

You seem to understand this as a comparison of who has the better system. It's not. It's A) the question: "What do you mean when you say something is running good or bad" - you can't really discuss something if you're not talking on common ground. And B) "Let's find out what's going on then, by comparing." So, for example, if we see problems on a specific graphics card, we can tell the devs to look into this more closely. Which should speed things up, patch-wise, and everyone profits. Nothing impolite there.

Apart from this, if someone is being serious about giving a review, and opening it up for discussion, this someone should expect criticism. In my eyes, pointing out what could have been done better is very much valid. Furthermore, a discussion is a living, breathing thing. If you expect a discussion to always stick to one point, in this case maybe "good review" or "bad review", you will be disappointed every time, because the question "why", whether it being said out aloud or not, always lingers in the room a discussion takes place in. And with it come selections as well as expansions.

[Elindos Phar & Family]

pointing out what could have been done better is very much valid

I always agree on that.
I always point that out, too.

I did not comment about wanting people not to criticize the review or the game, in a general sense, though I did point something out about a few posts.

Furthermore, a discussion is a living, breathing thing. If you expect a discussion to always stick to one point

Actually, "one point" is clearly reducing what I am aiming at and is painting it like a strawman, as in a strawman fallacy: "Look, this person wants to reduce conversation to 1 point! but conversations are a living thing." This is not what I discussed.

Considering we are getting into about 10-20+ different points in here, I did want to "discuss less one of these points among 20+", which I described as more common, to focus instead on the 20+ others. This was more an optimization, naive argument on my part.

As you discussed conversation semantics previously (such as you / we, which was a fair point though a bit surprising) I wanted to point that out, if you are interested in this, there is always some wisdom to take in my opinion and strawman fallacies abound all the time in conversation and sidetrack things very often.

Anyway we did discuss this subtopic at length, mostly by my own responsibility, I do propose to get back to the game now ;)

[Laughing Man]

Postat inițial de Elindos Phar:

... aaaand with that wall of text said (= written), we do have a first page already filtering stuff, from Galumbovic initial post, which I think will keep things OK anyway.

Galumbovic you mentioned you did not agree with my point about stats and TW being vague about effects of stats. And mentioned that "intuitive understanding" works, if I may summarize that.

I am all for intuitive gameplay.

Intuitive understanding of stats goes OK with factions with archers, spears, cavalry, which was the usual TW mileage, but goes awful once you have Chaos factions with, like, melee unit 1, melee unit 2, melee unit 3, melee unit 4, all with same traits like "tank and weak damage".

at that point you would like to know what worth has +5 melee, or +10 armor, or to get an overview with a comparison table ingame, to at least know better about your current available roster. Even indie games sometimes have it.

At the risk of branching off into another topic ( I don't mind, you seem an interesting person and you explain your position eloquently)
I used to feel a similar way, often being frustrated that X unit with stats 40/35 were being decisively beaten by Y unit with stats 36/32. Things such as armour piercing and what type of roll was being used to decide whether a melee attack might hit or not (magic, fire, regular) came into play.
That wasn't the final line, not even close! Apart from the AI receiving significant buffs at higher difficulty settings, the actual animation of the unit itself seemed to play a massive part. I've seen top tier high damage units basically 'push' a unit around without laying on damage, while a squishy low grade unit like hounds did far more actual DPS.

The only way I could come to terms with such things was to get a feel for my chosen faction, and an intuition from experience which units would perform well/poorly against a given enemy. My gameplay took a huge lift after I factored in circumstances such as buff/debuffs. It's a fair assumption that when you give something extra AP it will perform better, but a unit that already has reasonable AP will see marginal gains, where a unit that is weak against armour but has tight animations and hits often with be greatly improved.

There are so many factors that can affect how things play out such as research levels, leadership, vigor, casters doing their thing, lord perks, terrain etc... it's hard to accurately say unit X will have performance Y vs unit Z. Would be nice to get a bit of clarity or a snippet of lore as to why we should pick what we do, beyond the basic info we get. The descriptions are often rather misleading, especially on higher difficulties.

As you say, for example Khorne and Slaneesh... it's melee, melee or melee with an option for artillery at some point.

[Elindos Phar & Family]

Laughing Man, that's extremely interesting here.

You are right, animation and "contact" seem to be as impactful as in a "beat'm up", where ithe models have to "connect" when the attack animation is active.

I don't exactly know if models have individual health though, because in TW, I noticed in a few games that it was very abstracted, further observation will tell more. I think at this point I should find articles explaining game values further.

[Laughing Man]

I believe the models do have individual health, as some spells can reduce overall health but not kill a single model, where another unit will have more health but also be missing several models.

[Juuken]

Postat inițial de Elindos Phar:

pointing out what could have been done better is very much valid

I always agree on that.
I always point that out, too.

I did not comment about wanting people not to criticize the review or the game, in a general sense, though I did point something out about a few posts.

Furthermore, a discussion is a living, breathing thing. If you expect a discussion to always stick to one point

Actually, "one point" is clearly reducing what I am aiming at and is painting it like a strawman, as in a strawman fallacy: "Look, this person wants to reduce conversation to 1 point! but conversations are a living thing." This is not what I discussed.

Considering we are getting into about 10-20+ different points in here, I did want to "discuss less one of these points among 20+", which I described as more common, to focus instead on the 20+ others. This was more an optimization, naive argument on my part.

As you discussed conversation semantics previously (such as you / we, which was a fair point though a bit surprising) I wanted to point that out, if you are interested in this, there is always some wisdom to take in my opinion and strawman fallacies abound all the time in conversation and sidetrack things very often.

Anyway we did discuss this subtopic at length, mostly by my own responsibility, I do propose to get back to the game now ;)

Wasn't meant as strawman. Though, I understand why it could be read as that. The meaning was more like: It won't go straight, it will always deviate, at least a bit. And there are reasons for it. I'm not suddenly talking about how hard it is to choose a new car to buy or something like that. It's connected to what was written before, thus part of the topic.

Anyways, my main gripe with the game is the rift mechanic and how everything is stacked against the player. I went into the pack file and fiddled around with the script for this. I ended up making it impossible for the AI to end a quest battle, to see if this betters things. Alas, while I have more options, it's still pretty tricky to just make it in time. War of attrition is a ♥♥♥♥♥. Just goes to show, that the whole thing is designed way too harshly.

[Laughing Man]

I have noticed the general pacing of the campaign doesn't suit my slow and steady style.
An outright win isn't entirely necessary for me though, as long as the journey was fun.

For many, it seems this is really just a placeholder for the combined map. Some seem to be really enjoying the campaign, as is ( I am too, but for the learning new factions and general gameplay, rather than for winning outright) Loving the whole Chaos theme, it's like my childhood tabletop memories and CA had babies.

[Elindos Phar & Family]

Yes Laughing Man the game has made me all the more interested in purchasing Codexes and getting into the lore and unit specifics! same goes for W40K.

I never had the chance to play the miniature games, but am always tempted to take some codexes and go modding.

I appreciate that the game was made with such passion.

The AI is too poor for my taste, as usual in TW, but they really went "all in" otherwise in creative content.

@Juuken which difficulty are you playing at?

I am playing Normal/Hard at the moment but I have not much playtime logged to check how it stands.

[Juuken]

I'm always playing on normal/normal, since I don't see why I should give the AI EVEN MORE cheats. I don't want to go down to easy either, because that's where cheats for the player kick in. I don't want that. I want it as even as possible. But in the end that needs mods anyway. I'm also not willing to fight every battle, because I'm more interested in the managment of my empire and stuff. It's only when I see really unreasonable auto resolve that I go in. Yes, I know, I should play out 90% of the battles to minimize my losses, but I just can't bring myself to do that.

[Elindos Phar & Family]

I understand that.

The reason I went with N/H this time is because there is this thing about "improving AI" hinted in this mode. From what players described it's mainly just an optimization of how it targets units, but anything helps. *shrugs*

[Marcus Butthurticus]

Postat inițial de Juuken:

I'm always playing on normal/normal, since I don't see why I should give the AI EVEN MORE cheats. I don't want to go down to easy either, because that's where cheats for the player kick in. I don't want that. I want it as even as possible. But in the end that needs mods anyway. I'm also not willing to fight every battle, because I'm more interested in the managment of my empire and stuff. It's only when I see really unreasonable auto resolve that I go in. Yes, I know, I should play out 90% of the battles to minimize my losses, but I just can't bring myself to do that.

I agree, the difficulty balancing is the worst part since its simply just cheats for the AI.