The FAQ confirms them.
I’ve enjoyed Total War games since Shogun, and loved them to bits. I think the only ones I haven’t really had any interest in, was the Napeleon one, and now Troy. It just didn’t grab me at all.
It has to be said though, that I don’t think I’ve ever actually won a Total War game (Rome 1 aside) - ever. This is because I play them as historical simulation rpgs, and not as number crunches, so I mainly play them like I figured they would do things themselves, instead of gaming the systems.
The Warhammer setting though is perfect for the series, and while I LOVE Rome, both 1 and 2, I also cannot get enough of the Total War Warhammer. I really, really dont think their business model is anything to feel as “blatant padding” or “cash grabbing” - thats just nonsense. I think its disrespectful to the developers, and I think it sets a tone that really should not be there.
There is more than enough content in the normal releases, and the DLC is cheap enough that its not a cash grab in any way. This is well done, well researched and well put together stuff, that absolutely needs to be paid for.
I don’t think Steam and its incessant sales has this business any good in the long run. Every time a developer tries to get money for their work, they are “Cash grabbbing” or “Lazy” and I really dislike that.
CA has a history of making great games, make each game iterations of the previous one, and has proven quite a few times by now, that they are not afraid of trying out new things and avenues for their games, instead of just releasing the same thing in new packages over and over.
Anyways - I will be there, day one, as I have in every CA game since Total War: Rome.
I’m still praying for Total War: Warhammer 40K! The Emperor protects.
I do fear TW3 will push my system over the edge. TW2 works fine, but with developers able to target much higher minimum systems now… eep!
Same deal for me. Troy and Napoleon just didn’t do it for me. I’m not sure why.
Napoleon had some of the best cut scenes though (I didn’t play much of it either, I was more of an Ottoman player in Empire).
Haha, yes, it is clearly a mirror. I don’t know what about the framing of it confused me before.
For Napoleon and Empire, problems aside, the spectacle they produced from armies exchanging musket and cannon fire was excellent with the smoke drifting over the battlefield and the bombastic soundscape. If you have a decent sound system connected to your PC with a subwoofer turn the bass up and begin cannon volleys. All Total Wars are about spectacle but the addition of gunpowder really elevates the real-time battles. I remember my wife yelling at me to use headphones at the time.
Where in the FAQ? I didn’t see them anywhere in there.
Must’ve been some other statement from CA.
We know they’re coming at some point though. Some people are thinking CD will be the pre-order, but really Dogs of War seems more likely since their home areas are on the WH2 map, whereas Chaos Dwarfs aren’t even on the map yet. Also shoving 4+ factions of mostly human mercenary companies into the Dark Lands seems really unlikely and weird, so Dogs coming with WH3 doesn’t make sense (since your DLC has to work in TWW3 as a stand alone). There is no way they can expand the ME map enough to shove 4 Chaos Dwarfs in there that I can think of and having them randomly all over the world seems really, really odd. Maybe one is out on some mission, but all 4?
Warhammer lore is so over the top goofy that you have to love it. It makes no attempt to be taken too seriously, yet it manages to capture a lot of drama and some good story telling. I’m re-reading the Felix and Gotrex stories by William King, and they’re a hoot. The depictions of the Skaven for instance stop just a millimeter shy of tipping over the edge into self-parody, and thus perfectly capture the rat-men. It’s all ludicrous, and predictable, but somehow it manages to be very entertaining.
I like the lore more than 40k, really, though I’ve read perhaps even more stuff from that setting. The retro-future Gothic stuff in 40k gets kind of old pretty fast, though some of the stuff, like Dan Abnett’s work, holds up well.
On a superficial level in he lore of 40k is pretty cool, but dig down into the founding lore and it’s basically Batman and Spider-Man punching each other. Grand interstellar politics is bickering and arguing over who killed who, somebody got mad, somebody stormed out of a room, ect. It fails pretty badly at sweeping sci-fi, but in the end that’s because almost all the fiction ever written by GW is basically a cartoon plot meant to sell toys. Being thus, they have no problem retconning anything and everything when a new line of minis comes a’knocking.
I enjoyed 40k most when all I knew about it I learned from the Dawn of War RTS games.
About TW WH3’s map – it’s not clear to me that a bigger map necessarily leads to a better game though.
“In campaign map terms, it’s big… roughly twice the size of Warhammer 2’s Eye of the Vortex map,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “And it needs to be, as this is the part of the Warhammer world that gives way to the Realms of Chaos, which take up a significant area in their own right. But I suppose more than anything, you can apply the term ‘unprecedented scale’ to our ambition for the game. We’re aiming to conclude the trilogy in a big way—from the narrative, to the playable races, to the wealth of new features, which we’ll come to in good time.”
Much agreed. I have been recently in the mood to re-visit a lot of the Black Library titles and some of them can be a lot of fun. I dip into the 40K and Age of Sigmar books, but my real passion is the novels from The Old World so it is nice that they have been bundling and re-releasing some of the better stories under the ‘Warhammer Chronicles’ series. Some nice popcorn fantasy with just the right touch of absurdity.
I have been eyeing some of the more recent Warhammer Horror too.
I’m a big fan of the Gotrek and Felix books too. I think they also provide a good introduction to Warhammer Fantasy as well, as taken as a whole they provide a tour of all the different regions in the Warhammer Fantasy world.
If anyone prefers Audiobooks, Black Library is slowly releasing them in Audio format.
I would say the main thing for anyone starting the series is, the first book is really just a collection of short stories and isn’t really indicative of the series as a whole. I think the books get stronger and stronger through maybe the first six or so (mostly the William King books), and the following five under Nathan Long are generally very solid. I’ve heard they drop off after that, but I haven’t read past 2010 Zombieslayer, when they took a break and then changed authors again. I heard there’s a big switch in continuity with a lot of time passing in world before the next book and a change in tone (they also stopped using the slayer titles, which may be indicative of that change in tone), so I never bothered reading Road of Skulls and beyond.
I tried some of the Gotrek Age of Sigmar books, but I really miss Felix and am just not that into Age of Sigmar as a setting.
Any thoughts on Josh Reynolds Gotrek and Felix books? Are they worth going back and reading?
Gaunts Ghosts are some of the best series of books I’ve ever read. Its not high litterature, but its damn fun and entertaining and extremely well written, and the action is so good! Also, the characters are amazing.
Its Warhammer 40K, but really, really good.
The number one change I want for TWW3 is to have the campaign map be a 3D globe. It would fix the distorted cramped continents and weird non-linear movement distances. I don’t expect this to happen. Other things include proper local lighting and weather rendering that’s not dependent on the camera position, off-map fog-of-war that isn’t a horrible repeating texture, and of course better sieges.
My biggest issue with the campaigns is that playing them well often prevents you from having interesting battles, since it’s better to always fight with an advantage, avoid risks with your best armies, spend fewer turns reinforcing, and auto-resolve stacks of chaff units. Close and tough fights are much more fun, but they penalize you heavily. I would rather be able to enjoy a series of balanced fights and bother less with empire growth and unit production.
I do play with the “control large army” option because I think the game is balanced around it, but effectively controlling 40 units at once when the reinforcements show up requires a lot of pausing and always feels like a chore. I’m tempted to try using backup armies of nothing but cavalry or monsters or ranged skirmishers to speed things up. I know there are AI assistant mods too.
I kind of miss the original Shogun:TW boardgame style map that was less of an involved 4X. All the management time to spend turns recruiting and reinforcing and marching around feel like a waste because there isn’t a good logistics layer and armies in contact can only fight or flee instead of having a more nuanced setup for engagements. I would enjoy a simpler mode that’s a progressive gauntlet of enemy armies with various reinforcements & upgrades to pick from between battles, something more rewarding than skirmish but not as heavy as the campaigns. The Avatar Conquest multiplayer from Shogun 2 could also be revisited.
Ultimately, I do really love the battles. I have 300 hours in the TWW games so far and will probably pre-order #3 closer to release.
Thanks for the mention, I will definitely take a look at them! I’ve heard of Gaunt’s Ghosts before, but haven’t read any of the series yet. I do need to read a bit more in the 40K universe since I am less well versed in that compared to Old World. I will grab the first one to put near the top of the to-be-read pile.
Agreed. This is pretty much the only thing I wish they’d bring back from the older ones. (I never played the original Shogun, but Medieval 1 had the same boardgame map, and IIRC it was in Rome 1 that they changed from the province-based movement to the armies-with-paths movement.)
Correct. The AI knew how to use the Medieval map but was hopeless in Rome and for many titles after that.