Quality-of-life updates in Total War: WARHAMMER III’s battles and beyond
Total War: WARHAMMER III
Welcome back to TotalWar.com – today we’ll be detailing a batch of quality of life changes we’re making across the game in WARHAMMER III. Nothing that will blow the doors off your expectations or experience, but will be noticeable across any number of games, from health bars to formations. The video below also has some visual examples of what we’re talking about here, and you can read more about some of the changes coming to WARHAMMER III in our Battle Types blog from a few months ago.
Battle
- Yes, we added a Flying Toggle that allows you to tell units to take off or land.
- Some flying units, such as the Sky Lantern, cannot land.
- Hotkeys
- We’ve added idle unit hotkeys allowing you to quickly locate units not currently participating in combat or reacting to a movement order. You can cycle between them or select all.
- Special abilities now have their own hotkeys.
- Guard mode, Skirmish mode, and Fire-at-will now have hotkeys. The latter two use a new “other unit behaviour slot” hotkey.
- Formations
- Three Kingdoms formation support allows you to drag a selection of units into a simple formation with a single motion, placing melee units ahead of ranged units.
- When using the set formation feature, it now generates much more usable formations for quickly sorting your army.
- In standard campaign field battles, an army’s formation at the end of the deployment phase will be snapshotted and used as the default in that army’s next battle.
- Healing and fatigue
- Healing is now applied as a percentage of max health per second, rather than a flat value.
- Healing can now be stunted by inflicting any amount of fire damage to the target, massively slowing all healing effects for several seconds.
- Fatigue modifying abilities now take place over time instead of all at once, allowing an ability to slowly drain vigour from an enemy or restore it all at once. This is immediately obvious with the common Foe Seeker ability on melee heroes and lords.
- Bracing
- New charge reflection for long weapon units (halberds, spearmen), allowing them to inflict extra damage when attacking units that are charging them.
- Units that are braced now show a status icon in battles, allowing you to quickly tell which units are safe to take a charge.
- Spells
- Added an option to automatically take the game into slow motion while you aim an ability or spell.
- Magic resistance has been reworked into spell resistance, which only applies versus actual spells. This means that magic attacks are no longer often a hindrance.
- New thorns spell effect, including a rework to the Lore of Life spell Shield of Thorns.
- Healing spells can now heal and resurrect (when they have that capability) ‘complex’ units – such as those on chariots and artillery piececs – where in WARHAMMER II they could only affect ‘simple’ units – such as units of infantry – or cavalry.
UI
- Health bars
- Introduction of lazy health bars – these react to incoming damage by highlighting the new value and draining to it over time, helping highlight sudden large bursts of damage (this does not change how the damage is actually applied).
- Unit health bars in the battle space now have ticks denoting the 75/50/25% health thresholds, making it easier to eyeball when a unit is about to activate health dependent abilities. Particularly useful with the Wounds ability now shared by all single-entities.
- Stats and unit panels
- You can now see the entity mass stat in the entity size tooltip.
- Abilities, Attributes and Resistances can now be expanded into a more readable list in the unit info panel
- 3 tier unit system is now visible on the unit info panel, allowing quick eyeballing of relative unit quality.
- Custom battles
- Subfactions have been removed from custom battles/quick battles and replaced by having you pick your race and then selecting your colour profile from a selection of notable factions within a race.
- Custom battle maps can now be searched and filtered. You can also tag favourite maps to be moved to the top of the list.
- You can now change your unit size setting in the custom battle lobby, instead of having to globally set it in your options.
- Improved army preset saving, with filtering, searching and being able to view only specific races/battle types.
- We’ve added a new unit browser as a sister page to the spell browser, allowing you to peruse the full rosters at any point.
- As you’ve seen in some of our posts, there’s also been a general overhaul of the UI for the various menus, from new games to campaign and custom battles, info screens and profiles.
Hopefully there’s a thing or two in there you can see yourself using on a regular basis. We know these aren’t the flashiest changes in the game, but we didn’t want them to get lost alongside new factions, lords, units, and wider system changes like sieges and diplomacy. We’ll see you tomorrow for something a bit… meatier.
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