The Biggest Changes To 'Total War: Warhammer 3' Battle Systems

Significant changes to “Total War: Warhammer” battles are coming together with the third game in the series, introducing a new set of rules and caveats that players must navigate through in order to dominate their enemies in the latest iteration of the game’s grand strategy campaigns and tense online multiplayer matches.

The real-time battles of “Total War: Warhammer 3” will be getting some major alterations according to an interview with battle designer James Martin. All factions will soon be able to use more refined abilities and a new resource system while single-unit entities will have their fighting capabilities tied directly to their health levels.

Unit spells and abilities are getting sweeping QoL changes, according to Martin. Most of the abilities in the game are getting fixed and rebalanced to make the game much healthier overall and prevent single units from decimating entire troop formations.

“It’s a lot of quality of life stuff. We’ve gone over every spell type we’ve got, checking how they work under the hood, making sure they’re doing what people are expecting,” Martin said.

Improvements have also been made to the existing faction resource system to support “Total War: Warhammer 3’s” new Survival Battle mode and the rest of the new factions. Back-end changes were made to the “battle currency” system used by the Dark Elves, Tomb Lords and Greenskins in the previous game; the changes to the battle currency have made it easier to implement to the rest of the factions.

Additionally, modders will have an easier time accessing the battle currency system, giving them more options to include new currency-related features in custom content.

Lastly, single-entity units like lords, generals and great monster units will receive a significant balance change. In “Total War: Warhammer 3,” a new wound system will be implemented to limit the effectiveness of said units, reducing their combat prowess based on their current health. This system was mainly introduced to compensate for the new Chaos armies that have numerous single-entity units like Khorne’s Bloodthirsters.

As an added bonus to the scaling of single-entities, the game is now finally balanced according to unit size; the health of individual soldiers will now scale based on the unit size setting, making the game less punishing for players on low-end machines.