Total War: Warhammer 3’s developers are fighting to fix “a catastrophic failure in many of our AI systems”

All is not well in the Warhammer world. All is seldom well in the Warhammer world, of course – get off my lawn, Chaos! – but in this case, all is specifically not well with Total War: Warhammer 3’s non-player campaign factions. Creative Assembly are postponing more details of the delayed Tides of Torment pack while they fix what the strategy game’s lead technical designer modestly calls “a catastrophic failure in many of our AI systems”.

These issues have apparently dogged Twarhammer 3 for weeks – they’ve been “highly visible” since update 6.3 in late August, though the underlying problems pre-date that patch. Creative Assembly have yet to release a hotfix, however. “The issues with Campaign AI are unfortunately complex to resolve,” the developer’s head of community Adam Freeman wrote on Steam yesterday. “We haven’t been able to deliver an immediate fix as we needed to conduct some very thorough investigations into the root causes, but we are working as quickly as the complexity allows.”

So what’s the big deal with the busted campaign AI, then? Briefly, non-player factions aren’t recruiting units properly due to mistaken “assumptions” about resources, which is causing rival empires to seize up like my knees on chilly October mornings. “We have found that the AI was building lists of units to recruit without taking caps into consideration, resulting in recruitment failing to occur and stalling the AI decision making process,” Freeman writes. The issue has apparently been “compounded” by changes to the specialised resources Lizardmen and Tomb Kings need to recruit units.

The post includes a deeper dive from lead technical designer Radoslav Borisov, explaining the effects of the AI failing to keep track of unit caps, while fleshing out some wider problems with the game’s handling of “pooled resources”.

“Should the AI decide that its next task should be to attack a settlement, it’s generating a recruitment action and then expecting an increase in force strength to a level where it feels the settlement garrison that it’s targeted for attack can be defeated,” Borisov writes.

“Without the unit recruitment task’s successful resolution, it holds up the subsequent task and leaves the AI in a paralyzed state. It’s a cascade of failures that result in certain factions failing to complete any aggressive actions whatsoever.”

Borisov goes on to detail a few of the “assumptions” or “beliefs around the current state of the game world” that AI players rely upon to make decisions when recruiting units. “Any mistakes when constructing these assumptions has been found to lead to a catastrophic failure in many of our AI systems,” he notes.

Right now, Total War: Warhammer 3’s AI is having particular difficulty with the aforesaid “pooled resources” – broadly, a flexible type of in-game strategic resource that can be tethered to a “location” such as a region, faction or army. As Borisov goes on, “the AI’s ability to understand, plan and budget pooled resources is not ideal. Lately, AI has not been factoring in pooled resource to its costs properly, leading to incorrect beliefs about what it can and cannot afford, resulting in action failure.”

According to Borisov, the past few weeks of investigation have shown Creative Assembly “that the majority of our internal systems were unprepared for actions that ostensibly could not fail, to fail.” Difficulties with pooled resources have triggered an avalanche of other problems – “the AI couldn’t change stances properly, attacking on the campaign failed, recruitment failed, laying siege failed, and so on”.

Creative Assembly have identified the “leading causes” of these issues, but Borislov says that “it’s very likely there are other cases we are not yet aware of just yet”. There are, he notes, “around 200 different pooled resources in the game and they are used in a large variety of ways”. I have to confess, I’m not 100% clear on the link here between the pooled resource stuff and the unit cap issue, but the overall takeaway appears to be that now is a really great time to invade the Warhammer world, providing you’re a human general capable of counting up spearmen without falling into a trance.

Creative Assembly plan to begin addressing the problem with a hotfix next week. “It entered the first phases of our testing earlier today and is showing positive signs of providing an improved experience to the game,” Freeman comments. The developers had originally planned to make fixes as part of the bulkier update 7.0, but they’ve decided that the issue needs to be addressed now. A glance at that canary in every Steam developer’s coalmine, the user review box, reveals a Mostly Negative consensus over the past 30 days.