Sums up most of my Nagash Campaigns so far + the artillery units

Even if you survive, how do you as a mortal swordman deal with all the infected vomit, guts and other bodily fluids that hit you during the battle?

Does the Emperor just burn every army after a battle with Nurgle and raise a new one?! We know that's what the Bretonnians would do to their peasant armies!

Is basically anything but an undead army doomed as soon as it sets out, with the leader just hoping they kill the other army first? As a leader, even if your soldiers aren't all covered in boils and vomiting and shitting themselves after the fight, do you trust them to NOT ultimately be corrupted by Nurgle thanks to just a little slime getting on them? If they come to you cured, do you serve them up to the Witch Hunters ASAP? So much as a lingering cough. also the Witch Hunters!

The other chaos gods can corrupt your troops too but wouldn't everyone who touched a single Nurgulite be lost? It seems like a losing war of attrition.

What does the lore say? Your head canon? Mine says the Emperor sends the minimum number of his worst troops up against Nurgle since the survivors must be cleansed with fire! Those men are doomed. DOOOOMED!!!

M2EX is amazing!

This has to one of my favorite total war moments of all time!

I run Total War on my potato pc and it apparently created a new faction.

I know we know already, but I made a graphic detail -why- the Strigoi Bloodline is better than the Strigoi Ghoul King.

this keeps getting worse and worse 😫🤦

For someone playing on a potato laptop, I can really see the difference in loading time and end of turn delay. I used to play maybe 35-50 turns MAX per campaign because the loading were unbearable, but I can actually play the game without getting sick of it now. Instead of a 50-50 split on loading vs playing, I get closer to 25-75 now.

Kudos for the changes here, and I hope I'm not crazy and imagining things. Thanks CA?

Hey folks,

It’s been a week, as I’m sure you’re aware.

This week’s recap will be considerably shorter than usual as a lot of our time has been spent parsing through community discussion and feedback, but alas I swore to never let anything stand in the way of my This Week in Total War!

Shogun 2 Complete Edition

Of course, Shogun 2 Complete Edition has been a big topic of conversation this week after its initial release on Tuesday. Yesterday, SEGA and CA shared the following message in response to player feedback:

This is all we can communicate on this topic for now, but as soon as there is more news we will share it with you all through our community platforms.

Patch 9.0.4 for Warhammer III

On Thursday afternoon we rolled out Patch 9.0.4 for WH3. This release was primarily focussed on implementing a number of bug fixes and adjustments related to Nagash’s campaign, alongside some other bits and pieces. Check out the Release Notes for the full list of everything included.

We’re already working on 9.0.5 which we’re aiming to release within the next few weeks. Alongside a variety of bug fixes and adjustments across the game, we’re also focusing on bringing some improvements to Victory Conditions with the goal of making them more relevant and impactful. The team will still be keeping an eye on your bug reports and feedback in the meantime.

And that’s all for this week! Told you it’d be a short one. Hope you all have a fantastic weekend! 

— Steve

I feel like the AI controversy, although important, and now the Legend of Total War news are overshadowing another issue with Shogun 2. The new Complete Edition is abandoning Steam Workshop in favor of Mod.io.

Modders have spent years creating some incredible content for Shogun 2, and I hate to see all that work left behind because Creative Assembly decided to switch platforms.

I really think the community should be pushing Creative Assembly to still use Mod . io AND use Steam Workshop. There's already an established community with years of mods available, and I don't see why we should have to start over. Hopefully, with all the attention CA is getting right now, we can put some pressure on them to reverse this decision too.

Edit - I'm not really against mod io, I just don't see the reason why they have to have one and not the other.

I will be very happy, if every legendary chaos lord in endgame would have thematic high tier army for him.

Example: tamurkhan toad dragons rot knights plauge ogres, kairos and many lords of change, throgg with every troll in game, and some big monsters, dehekala with champions of slannesh and pleasureseekers etc.

I think u get the idea, and these armies with LL should be stronger than generic ones.

So I built an Agentic Army for Total War.

This project started from a simple TW annoyance: micromanagement. I got annoyed how in big battles if I lost focus on every unit, stupid stuff happened - like my artillery getting rolled up even though I have a cavalry unit sitting right next to them specifically to defend.

I figured let's give the cavalry unit an agent that understands its job. And that worked out pretty well.

Then I thought it would be even cooler if we could simulate an actual army.

This is where it gets a bit out of hand.

I ended up putting together what amounts to a simulation of a modern tactical operations center based on my old days in actual Army TOCs. Agents command each unit, task organized into battalions and a brigade

Side note: This is for Napoleon TW because that's what I've been into lately. I tried to build it in a way that it should be able to be ported to the other Total War titles pretty reasonably, too. I also bet there are some interesting directions to go to make it more accurate to the game era but would take some thinking and work on the mechanics: simulating messengers or flag communications, fog of war, etc.

There are a few big things that we've done so far.

I wanted persistent, learning commanders. So we generated initial units and commanders and created a feedback loop. After each battle an after action review is done where the commanders identify lessons that then get loaded into their next battle.

I built with the intent of my commanding the top level unit. My goal was less having AI fight for me and more getting into the actual role of a commander on the battlefield. I issue a commander's intent plus concept of the operation that codex turns into an operations order. That gets issued to the battalion commanders that then issue orders to their company commanders (I'm calling each individual unit a company since numbers in game are closer to historical and modern companies).

Throughout the fight, the agents maintain situational awareness of the battlefield, communicate, control their units, and adapt. It's taken a bunch of iterations to figure out how to do that and it's still not perfect. But It's been a super interesting challenge figuring out 1) how to translate visual battle information to llm context and 2) getting the agents to delegate or take initiative, adapt and work off of intent (how the actual military works) rather than trying to script everything out.

For this run, I decided to have codex play as brigade commander and just observe. Partially to see what would happen and partially as prep for the next stage where I play division commander.

The agents fought an equal enemy on expert and won! What's even more interesting is that there were some pretty cool moments where the agents adapted within the intent, coordinated, and exploited opportunities throughout - things regular AI or stock LLM's would never do. While it still did some pretty dumb things occasionally, it has made a ton of progress and is starting to feel almost like the real deal.

Anyway, just wanted to share my progress and feel out if people want to see more. I put together a little demo/battle synopsis of the headquarters interface, battle, and review. If there's enough interest I can share more on the battle itself, how I did it, where I'm at with it, learnings, etc. etc.

On the actual battle footage, I controlled the camera. You can see the green cursor highlight from Codex using the "computer use" skill as well. We both controlled the play/pause buttons. I paused and occasionally highlighted units when I wanted to make sure I understood what was going on. It also auto-pauses if any of the agents hit a compaction on their context. Almost all of the agent unit control is through the direct interface except in this one the general rally that codex did through the ui because that hasn't been implemented yet.

AI Disclosure: I don't know if this counts as AI generated but I did have Codex generate the video from the battle recording and retained data (with edits).

Though his miscast chance is 105% from having the Chalice of Malfleur, I've tested repeatedly and none of his overcasts inflict any damage on himself. Not sure why. Has effectively infinite winds of magic and no recharge time on his spells, also adds 100% miscast chance to all enemy casters.

Back in July I posted a save editor I wrote for Warhammer 3, mostly because the old SaveParser never got WH3 support. It has grown a lot since, so here's where it stands. Still free, no install, works with singleplayer and co-op/multiplayer saves.

The feature that started it all: my friend and I kept losing co-op campaigns whenever one of us couldn't play anymore. The editor takes a multiplayer save, you pick which player to keep, and it writes a normal singleplayer save. Your faction stays yours, the others are handed to the actual campaign AI, the map stays exactly as it was. Works from either player's copy and with saves from older patches.

New since the last post (v1.3):

• An Armies tab that shows every army, convoy and garrison as unit cards with the game's own art. Heal, set rank, duplicate or remove units with a click, or select a bunch at once.
• Adding units to an army. Pick any unit your faction (or anyone in the world) already fields and it lands in the roster at full strength and whatever rank you choose. This one took some reverse engineering of the game to get the campaign AI to accept the new units, but it now survives battles, turns and AI attacks.
• Faction flags and lord portraits everywhere, pulled straight from the game packs.
• A repair tool for saves that hang at end of turn after a conversion done with an older version.

The rest is still there: treasuries for any faction, character rank / XP / skill points (recruitment pool included), unit strength and experience, diplomacy (war, peace, alliances, treaties), save renaming, the mod list with Workshop links, and a raw save tree for the brave. Everything is verified in game on 8.1 through 9.0.3.

Where to get it:

• GitHub releases page ,or
• Nexus Mods.

^{The full source code is in the repo now, so if you'd rather not run a random exe you can build it yourself in a few commands.}

Usual caveats:

• The exe isn't signed, so SmartScreen will grumble on first run.
• Back up your saves before editing. It's a hobby project, so if something breaks, tell me here or open an issue on GitHub.

Next on the list: adding units straight from the game database (ones nobody on the map has yet), and editing the player roster of a multiplayer save, so a friend can drop out of a co-op campaign and come back later, or join a running one. If you've been in that situation, I'd like to hear how you handled it.

Since my game is in Czech, it takes those names into the app. Yours will be in your game's language.

Most the unit lines are very thematic but a lot of them are a bit ridiculous.

When out of movement Skulltaker says 'Slow and steady gets the skulls'.

Its very chill for a crazed blood demon.

What are some other ridiculous unit lines?

I just started a campaign as Itza and noticed there's a new category between the province capital and landmark called "Geomantic Buildings" that shows the original three buildings.

They are also still there between the infrastructure at their regular old place. I tried without mods active and it's still there, also asked a colleague of the Wiki to check without mods and he concluded the same, there's a new category of geomantic buildings and now the buildings are shown double in the building browser.

Could this be part of the Geomantic Web rework that has been accidentally pushed with Update 9.0 or one of its hotfixes?