The campaign AI has been behaving differently than the developers intended.
The team behind the global strategy Total War: Warhammer 3 published a new developer diary describing the issues they encountered while working on the game’s artificial intelligence.
They explained that, to allocate and spend resources effectively, the AI depends heavily on a set of beliefs about the current state of the game world.
The developers offered several examples of these assumptions:
- The cheapest unit that can be recruited anywhere within the faction.
- The strongest unit that can be recruited anywhere.
- The most cost-efficient unit (best price-to-strength ratio).
- The estimated number of turns required to reach the recruitment location for the strongest/cheapest unit.
The team discovered that any mistakes in forming these “assumptions” can cause “catastrophic failures across many of our AI systems.”
For example, if the AI believes a unit is free and delivers a meaningful power increase, it will not allocate resources to recruit troops — erroneously assuming it can outfit its armies with powerful units at no cost, which then triggers a “cascade of failures.”
Recent weeks of investigation showed that many internal systems in Total War: Warhammer 3 were “not resilient to failures in actions that ostensibly should not be able to fail.” That cascading effect produced a variety of issues: the AI failed to reposition correctly, campaign attacks failed, recruitment failed, sieges failed, and so on.
The developers have already identified and corrected the primary causes of these failures, but work is ongoing. Consequently, they decided to delay releasing materials about the Tides of Torment DLC — fixing the game is the priority.
Source: iXBT.games