I am joined by Will, and I am also joined through the magic of magic, Vasil and Radoslav from our Sofia studio in Bulgaria.

So let's do a quick introduction.

Will, let's start with you.

If you just tell us who you are, what you do, and some things you've worked on.

Right-o.

I'm William, William Hogstad, and I'm a Warhammer 3 DLC designer.

I've worked at the company for five, six years roughly, working on mostly mainline DLC for Warhammer 3.

Recently, my focus has been primarily on our patching efforts, the interim content, the .x patches, 5.3, 5.2, 6.1, which is hopefully in your hands by now, and making those extra bits of content to tide you over while you wait for our more major releases.

Awesome, thank you Will.

And now I'll throw over to Sofia.

Vasil, how about you?

Hey, so my name is Vasil, and I've been working as a lead DLC designer over Warhammer DLC projects.

And I've been with CA for a while now, for a few years back, and I'm very excited to join the Warhammer team.

Thank you, and Rado, how about you?

Yes, hello, my name is Radoslav, I'm a principal tech designer working on Total War.

I've recently joined the DLC team after finishing up with Total War Feral, and now I'm working with various people on both patching efforts and DLC efforts.

Great, thank you guys, and thank you for joining us today.

But for now, I'm going to send you back into the ether.

Impressive.

It worked!

Oh no, they're still there!

We'll come back to you in a little bit, we're just going to chat with Will about the patches.

So, patch 6.1 has just recently dropped for Warhammer 3, bringing with it some refreshes for Kislev, Tzeentch, and Grand Café, as well as some new units, because everybody loves free stuff.

And the usual bug fixes and tweaks to the core game that always come with these patches.

So what's your approach to these patches at the moment?

So how are you figuring out what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and how you're going to do it?

So right now, kind of the core of our strategy is something new to chew on.

A new extra gubbin attached to something that already exists to give you a little bit more to play with.

And how we arrive at what to do is primarily something that we figure out through the help of the PX team, that's the player experience team, whose job it is to go through all those conversations everywhere out there and distill that down into something digestible for us in design to eat and go, we think we can solve this problem that lots of people are having.

Or, we see that a lot of people are happy about this and want to see more of it, or unhappy about this thing and want to see it improved.

And those help inform us in a very qualitative way.

We can't just always go in our guts, we need some hard data, and PX are the perfect team for providing that to us.

Awesome.

So the things that have come in the past, in 5.1, 5.2, etc., as well as 6.1, has that all come through from the PX team?

Has that all been based on the feedback that they've gathered for you?

Or do you often find things out in the wild world yourselves?

There's a couple of things.

We take things to PX as well, because we're all people and we see things, we read about our own game.

I mean, you can't prevent yourself from going on your own forums at some point.

And when we see something that really jumps out to us, we like to sneakily go to PX and go, hey, do you have any more info on this?

Because I might have an idea.

And some of the things have come from our side of the pond as well, on that front.

I think, for example, the deeps was very much a Mitch-led, this was something he was excited about, this was something he really wanted to do.

But of course, we funnel it through the appropriate channels anyway.

There's a process to everything.

Awesome.

Looking forward, now that 6.1 is out there, is there anything you guys have already got planned for 6.2?

Or anything else that you're looking at for future?

So, at the moment, of course, seeing as this is being recorded before the release of 6.1, it's a little bit early to say exactly what we're doing in 6.2.

We're still in the ideation phase on that.

I can talk some broad strokes, though.

Up until this point, we've been thinking a lot about what little extra gubbins can we add for you.

But for 6.2, what we'd like to do is take that focus and bring it down to what core game system can we do some improvements for.

And some examples of what we think about when we say that is things like, can we improve the situation around ancillaries for everyone?

This was something that we originally wanted to do in 5.3, but we weren't happy enough with the results to put that out there yet.

Some other things that are hot topics, especially because this is something that the PX team have been telling us about, is people are talking a lot about control, people are talking a lot about corruption, and there's a lot of strong opinions on that.

And that is something that we are considering right now.

I think the way I'm going to frame this is it is too early for us to say exactly how we'll approach it, because it's a very volatile space.

It's a big core system shared with all the factions in the game.

And we have a lot of ideas.

We know, for example, that when we moved to Warhammer 3, we changed corruption entirely from the system where it was a percentage division inside the province to having this more tabulated, you have a set specific discrete number that can go to 100.

And we did that originally because we had this consistent complaint of people really don't like it when they can't remove all the corruption in the province.

They really like to wipe the slate clean, have no corruption.

But now we have a different problem where a little bit of corruption can really snowball to zero or to 100 very easily.

And that's a topic where we're having a lot of discussions on this, whether how do we solve this?

Do we want to solve this?

And that's why I think it's a bit too early to give specifics, but these are the kinds of topics we're talking about right now.

And I don't think we can put anything out there until we're quite happy with it, because it's such a core system.

So we're going to have to be really sure about this one.

Yeah, I think that's fair enough.

No, that's a good approach.

I don't know where you'll obviously be in your thought process for this, but maybe this will prompt people to give us a bit more feedback on that specific topic and maybe we'll get some valuable stuff out of it from there.

So we'll have to wait and see.

People may recognise your name from the 6.1 dev blog that went out just before 6.1.

So obviously you did a lot of work on that, including the fantastic unit card placeholders, which was artistic...

I can't think of the word, Will.

It's a crime.

It was artistic crimes.

Crime, I think, is the word you're looking for.

Fair enough.

I'm very disappointed that they didn't make it into the patch.

That aside, are there any kind of highlights from 6.1 or things that you particularly are proud of that you'd want to talk about?

I think, yeah.

So when we were concepting a lot of the work for 6.1, there was definitely one feature, I think, above all else, that kind of really got the mental juices flowing.

It was when we were talking about how do we do Atamans?

And Atamans, of course, are these provincial governors, and so they're meant to emphasise the power of interior Kislev.

And as we went through a lot of different variations on what can an Ataman do, we came to this idea of what if an Ataman lets you take a settlement, left-click it, and then right-click an enemy army nearby and have the settlement attack the army?

And this idea of having a settlement attack an army instead of an army attack a settlement, which is the usual Total War flow, just immediately everyone who was talking about this eyes up.

That's an interesting idea.

That's fun.

And the moment we knew we had that, we couldn't stop chasing that dream, essentially.

And it's a big technical challenge to achieve, but it was simply too interesting for us to let it go once we caught on to that idea.

Thanks, Will.

That's really awesome.

From one round of big changes with the refreshes from 6.1 and the future in 6.2 to another side that we're actually working on, which is campaign AI changes.

Now, we've just recently run a beta on Steam, which has actually just finished.

We're looking at the feedback now.

We have another one that's going to be coming up in the near future.

And this has been headed up by Rado in Sofia.

So I'm just going to bring him back.

I didn't even have to click my fingers.

I'm that good.

But yes, Radoslav here has been heading up the project for this campaign AI beta.

We've just finished one of the rounds of the beta and are looking at the feedback at the moment and we do have another round coming in the near future.

So if you missed out on the first one, don't fret.

There will be another opportunity to try out some of these changes.

So Rado, for those who haven't actually seen much about this campaign AI beta yet, what is this initiative?

What's the kind of top level of what you are looking to do here?

So the main goal of the beta this time around is to present the community with our latest efforts in addressing some of the more prevalent feedback around the campaign AI.

Most of the changes are centered around the AS passivity and since the AI is a very fundamental part of the game and it feeds into a lot of different things like game difficulty and so on we decided to approach it a bit more cautiously and we decided to go with the beta branch to not suddenly introduce this massive of a change to all users.

Awesome.

Yeah, that's good.

A really good way to let the players have their say I suppose in this process.

Are there any highlights or any particular things within that beta that you want to call out that you're particularly excited about or proud of?

So the highlight change of this beta has to do with the campaign AI's ability to recognize when it's being threatened by foreign forces.

We discovered a rather fundamental issue with the way AI just looks at the world and we found out that one of the other fundamental assumptions of the AI around when it's being invaded and when hostile forces are present in its territory was just kind of wrong and the AI was finding itself in situations where it thought it was being assaulted by enemy forces when in reality all that was happening was foreign agents were just making incursions into the AI's territory which caused it to fall into this rather defensive posture and it started prioritizing, consolidating its forces making sure all its settlements are garrisoned and this really robbed it of opportunities to be aggressive and do other things in the game so resolving this issue has been a real standout for us.

Awesome.

Can people expect quite a big difference in how things play out as a result of this beta?

Generally the overall AI's behavior isn't that different.

This tackles a particular set of circumstances where the AI really just completely focuses on defense but the frequency of this behavior can vary wildly between campaigns so I expect that in certain playthroughs players will notice a very big difference and in other playthroughs the difference might not be so large.

This is something that we've struggled with a lot in the past when it comes to working with the AI is there's such a huge variance in events depending on what the player is doing depending on what the hundreds of other factions are doing and the AI's decision-making is very complex and layered so it's easy to, or rather it's difficult to find high-level trends quickly without lots and lots of games being played and that's one of the great roles of something like the beta is letting us get lots of information distilled down into a real player experience.

Awesome, that's really good to get that insight into it really.

So for the people at home who may or may not have already been on the last beta and are hoping to get in on the next beta what can the players do to help support you guys in this initiative?

Frankly the best way anyone in the community can help us out is just tell us your honest feelings this is the most important thing for us.

We understand that there might be further issues there are many many many different combinations of difficulty levels and legendary lores that you can play so no feedback is worth more or less just being open and honest with how you feel about the game is the best thing for us because it really allows us to understand how you feel, understand what really bothers you what can we improve, that's the biggest focus for us.

Brilliant, perfect, thank you.

Thanks Raddo for all that insight into that.

So yep, like we said there will be another beta starting soon if you did miss out on the first round so don't fret, just keep an eye out for more information on that in the near future.

Now let's move on to another topic of discussion which I'm sure a lot of you are going to be very excited to hear about which of course is what's next for Total War Warhammer 3 DLC.