What makes a great strategy game truly engaging? Is it stunning visuals? Epic dinosaur warriors? Or perhaps the fundamental ability for your AI opponents to recruit new units and pose a genuine challenge? While impressive graphics and formidable Saurians are always welcome additions (and yes, dinosaurs truly do enhance any game!), the latter point—the AI’s capacity to build armies—is absolutely crucial for maintaining any level of difficulty.
Unfortunately, Total War: Warhammer 3 is currently grappling with a severe problem: an unexpected glitch, rooted in older code, is preventing AI generals, particularly those of the Lizardmen and Tomb Kings factions, from recruiting units into their armies. This means their forces are effectively paralyzed.
The root of this issue lies in how the AI handles unit caps. It simply doesn’t account for them when deciding which unit to recruit next. When an army attempts to recruit a unit it cannot acquire due to these caps, the system hits a wall, leaving the AI unable to perform any aggressive actions whatsoever. This leaves player-controlled factions facing little to no opposition from these affected AI armies.
This isn’t an isolated incident. The underlying codebase for Total War: Warhammer 3 is quite old, possibly a decade in the making, and has been handled by various teams within developer Creative Assembly over time. This complex history often leads to unforeseen errors with significant updates, transforming the usually exciting anticipation of a new patch into a frustrating ordeal for players.
Public sentiment reflects this frustration. The game generally enjoys ‘mostly positive’ feedback on Steam, but this rating has recently plummeted to ‘mostly negative’ over the past month, with a mere 25% of recent reviews expressing positive sentiment. What makes this worse is that the latest patch, which crippled the Tomb Kings and Lizardmen AI, was released as a beta first. Players identified and reported these very problems to Creative Assembly during the beta phase, yet the issues remained unaddressed in the full release, still breaking the AI.
Thankfully, a recent statement from Creative Assembly suggests they are actively working to resolve the issue. Radoslav Borisov, the game’s lead technical designer, provided a detailed explanation of the problems in a blog post, assuring players that a hotfix is currently in development. However, his remarks also hinted that deeper, more complex issues might still lurk within the game’s intricate, aging code, suggesting that future challenges might not be easily avoided.
Adding to the news, Adam Freeman, Total War’s head of community, announced that updates on the highly anticipated Tides of Torment DLC would “take a back seat until we’ve resolved this issue.” Given that this DLC was originally scheduled for summer and has already faced delays, it now seems unlikely to meet its planned October release, and its arrival this year at all remains uncertain.
For Norsca players, and indeed anyone growing weary of these persistent bugs, there are numerous other fantastic Warhammer games to enjoy while waiting for Tides of Torment. If the setting isn’t your primary concern, exploring other top war games might also offer a welcome diversion.
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