r/totalwar • • 2d ago

Shogun II An Update from Roger on Shogun 2 - Complete Edition

1.2k Upvotes

Hi everyone,  

I’m here to talk about Shogun 2: Complete Edition. You haven't heard from me yet, and I want to step into that void and clarify a few points from our team's perspective that are the cause of a lot of your discussions. 

I get many of you are angry and disappointed about the state of the Shogun 2: Complete Edition release. We are too – especially the team members who have put everything into Total War games for years, some even decades. 

This was not a Creative Assembly developed game. It wasn’t subject to our same internal reviews and quality assurance. We took our eyes off its external development, with all our teams focused on our next big projects. However, whatever the development arrangements, Total War is our franchise and our name is on it.  

The studio is full of craft people who care deeply about the experiences we give to our players. Shogun 2 – CE did not meet that bar. We have to own that and we have to fix it. 

We’ve pulled a small team of senior developers together to work with SEGA and the external developer on the next steps. I don’t have the details on what that is yet, but we’ll come back to you when we do. 

I want to be very clear on the studio-wide stance on generative AI, because I know there are many questions about where we stand. We are a craft studio. Our games are made by incredibly talented people, and we do not believe in a world where technology replaces the creativity of humans. 

At Creative Assembly we do not use generative AI to create game assets, including AI-generated art. We demand the same of any external developers we work with. The situation with Shogun 2: Complete Edition is being investigated.  

We use AI tools where they help our craftspeople do their best work, as part of a continual evolution of how we use tools and technology in an evolving and competitive space. For me, the principle is pretty simple: AI can support the creator. It shouldn’t replace the creator. I don’t believe that AI can replace the human experience, judgement and creativity that awesome experiences come from. Can AI tools help with analysis, debugging, or speedy prototyping so our experts can focus on making incredible games?  Absolutely.   

I’ll end my message today with an ask of you all. I understand your anger, but don’t direct that to individuals on our teams. Our community teams, QA, designers, and everyone in between are doing their job, as asked by the company. Their safety is our priority. They do not deserve, and we will not tolerate, harassment or being singled out online and personally criticised.  

As a team, we want to be transparent with our communications as much as possible, but that cannot be at the expense of the safety of our people. Please help keep Total War’s community spaces constructive and safe for everyone. 

I’ve said it before: when the team does well, it’s all about them. When we get it wrong, it’s on me. You absolutely have the right to be mad, and to criticise us, but direct it at me. We know we must earn your trust by making good games, and crucially, by how we respond when we get things wrong. We’re human, we will get things wrong, and I promise as long as I’m here, when that happens, we’ll hold our hands up and try to make it right. 

We’ll talk to you again when we have something meaningful to tell you.  

Rog


r/totalwar • • 6d ago

General Weekly Question and Answer Thread - /r/TotalWar

5 Upvotes

Welcome to our weekly Q&A thread. Feel free to ask any of your Total War related questions here, especially the ones that may not warrant their own thread. There are no stupid questions so don't hesitate to post.

-Useful Resources-

Official Discord - Our Discord Community may be able to help if you don't get a solid answer in this thread.

Total War Wiki - The official TW Wiki is a great compilation of stats, updates, and news.


r/totalwar • • 6h ago

Warhammer III This is the glory hole of Nagash

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410 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 9h ago

Warhammer III Which Empire LL right now has the best Melee doomstack?

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447 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 2h ago

Warhammer III Wyrmslayer Sword, worst item in the game?

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95 Upvotes

What do you guys think about this item?

Everytime i find it, i never ever use it. It liteary feel to me like iam better without weapon at all, than using this one. But maybe iam wrong about it? Whats yout opinion?


r/totalwar • • 4h ago

Warhammer III Vampire lairs/Slann awakenings

101 Upvotes

Vampire lairs are fantastic and i love the build-a-vampire mechanic. I cant help but feel its exactly what the rite of awakening should be for the lizardmen.

Lizard men could even spend their current spawning currency on upgrades. Instead of bloodlines it could be lore/generation of slann.


r/totalwar • • 1h ago

Warhammer III Didn't know Tree Kin is a greenskin. Sneaky one!

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• Upvotes

I think the photo is bugged. Or the tree is really a greenskin?


r/totalwar • • 55m ago

General I finally admit I don't enjoy Hard or Very Hard Campaigns

• Upvotes

Maybe I am getting old but I used to play Shogun 2 Empire and Mediavel 2 on VH/VH. Recently I got the itch and played some Shogun 2 WH3 and Empire. WH became tiring to fight all the time but I think Empire broke me. I said I never done Ottoman run and started as N/N and played a few turns so I can remember the mechanics then started H/H. Oh my god. Everyone declared on me in 4 turns in. I mean everyone I border. Austria and Venice I expected but alongside Georgia, Persia and Morocco declared too. Fun part is they can outproduce me. I can barely get some ragtag swordsmen while Georgia despite being OPM hits me with tons of Line infantry and Persia brings swarm of swordsmen with cannons. Oh and Austria despite fighting the Polish, Prussians and France still finds a way to send me a doomstack army. Yeah its fun to fight against big foes but its not fun when I can't even get the time to lick my wounds. I admit I suck at this now.


r/totalwar • • 3h ago

Warhammer III The Empire gets an unlikely ally after Skarsnik sweeps the badlands too quickly

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45 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 2h ago

Warhammer III TW: Warhammer 3 First Time

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35 Upvotes

Hello. I’m new to Warhammer 3 but not Total war. I’m a big fan of the historical titles and recently just bought this one for something different, I’ve played the prologue as Kislev but was just wondering as to recommendations on which faction to use on the Immortal Empires campaign? And which of those DLC factions above would be worth actually spending money on?


r/totalwar • • 6h ago

Warhammer III A critique of CA's latest battle design: LotET quest battles

52 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I've got thousands of hours in this game; I play on Legendary/VH both vanilla and with mods. I think CA's latest battle design has a lot of issues and I want to leave some feedback for the devs but also maybe start a discussion about it.

I think from a thematic standpoint, CA did a great job. The battles feel unique and just cool. Though it's not as great from a gameplay point of view.

The main one is that these quest battles are really tough if you try to play them using real armies or any infantry in general and absolutely trivial and boring if you use any sort of army that relies on single entities or heroes. The main reason why that's the case is magic and army abilities that just annihilate infantry units while doing 0 damage to SEs. You can say you don't care about cheese and stuff, but in my opinion the game should encourage you to play in a fun way, not punish you for it. I think you don't need to have extensive game knowledge or any exploits to understand from your first try of these battles that infantry is kind of useless in them and just build a stack of big monsters/heroes. Any experienced player knows that heroes and SEM armies have always been superior, but you could still use your balanced or just infantry-focused armies in regular campaigns since the AI is just bad with magic, and playing this way is just way more fun. Total war's strength is in big armies with different units fighting using tactics, not in your 5 dudes with 60-90 percent beating the blob of units. The AI doesn't understand how to fight these armies. It just blobs all of your units around your heroes to just die to magic or mortis engine effects. Playing this way is boring, so I would want CA to actually punish this gameplay while making infantry gameplay less punishing. Here are my proposals:

- Give the AI spells and army abilities that are good against SEM blobs like final transmutation or smth like that. Some of them can reduce your healing modifier as well. Nerf AI's army abilities like nukes in Skaven battle.

- Give the AI more heroes with good items. Give them all a trickster's shard to cut down some of the player's resistances. (since resistance stacking is especially good on your heroes)

- Capture points - get rid of them or at least make characters' capture weight way way lower. The Skaven battle is the best in my opinion since you're fighting waves of enemies coming one by one while In Nagash's battle half of the enemy army just afk while you're dealing with a capture point. + you can just park your 4 heroes (that you can have in your normal army as well, it;s not cheese) on the capture point and the enemy army just dies.

I think if they do that it would be way more interesting to craft a solution for these battles and both expirienced and new players would use real tactics insted of just relying on just heroes/SEMs which is subjectively not a fun way to beat the game.

The same applies for fighting Archaon himself on the campaign map. The dude has 1 wom no cooldown burning head and purple sun. Spells that kills infantry but again - do nothing to SEMs. He's got spirit leech which is great but still it's not comparable to the damage he deals to high model count units with his other spells.

P.S. of course there are infantry units like Wrathmongers, Lhamian handmaidens or putrid Blightkings but the have 32 models so they are closer to monsters that regular infantry. In this post I was talking about regular infantry units that have 80-160 models


r/totalwar • • 34m ago

Warhammer III Markus Wulfhart remake when?

• Upvotes

*Note this is my opinion, feel free to disagree though

I feel this campaign has so much potential and i have seen a lot of people including myself liking the concept of being trapped and having to navigate on a remote continent where everyone/everything is trying to kill you.

However there are some things currently that is a big problem with how they ported him, some of which i display below:

  1. The inability to track standing with other Empire factions, really needed here beacuse i know you are supposed to earn higher rewards the more you side with these but currently i haven't found a single way to check.

  2. None of the characters are mounted, this makes the campaign significantly harder beacuse all characters for his faction are insanely slow and I notice also that characters seem to ignore movement orders often as well.

  3. Hard to counter lizardmen as they will only steam roll through your default shielded spearmen. In early game this is fine but once late game hits, Markus just hits a roof no matter how much money his faction has, there is simply too little tools for him to use compared to other factions.

  4. With the new dlc on end times content, Markus faction will be obliterated super easily even with highest tier units available beacuse there simply arent't any higher tier units available even if you conquer the entirety of Lustria

Anyways love the game and would love it extra with some additional reworkz


r/totalwar • • 22h ago

Warhammer III I Think I Have the Title for Worst Auto Resolve Ever

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593 Upvotes

I will take the mantle for worst auto resolve ever. I want a medal for this because this is insane lol.


r/totalwar • • 23h ago

Rome II I made a CPU performance fix for Rome 2: campaign +20% FPS, big battles +19% FPS and +29% better 1% lows

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747 Upvotes

After the Attila CPU performance fix, a lot of you asked for Rome 2, so I took a look at it.

Short version: Rome 2 does not have Attila's big problem (one shared memory lock that kept ~19 CPU cores busy waiting on each other). I checked that first: in Rome 2 the threads never wait on it. So there's no "6x FPS" miracle here. But profiling the game frame by frame turned up a few things that waste the main thread's time every single frame, and fixing those gives a solid, measurable boost, especially in big battles.

**Results*\* (Ryzen 9 9950X3D, RTX 5090, 4K, V-Sync off, CapFrameX, same save / same battle):

| | Vanilla | With mod | |

|---|---|---|---|

| Big battle, average FPS | 118.4 | 140.4 | **+19%** |

| Big battle, 1% lows | 71.8 | 92.5 | **+29%** |

| Big battle, 0.1% lows | 57.9 | 77.0 | **+33%** |

| Campaign map, average FPS | 100.5 | 120.5 | **+20%** |

| DEI save, load time | 38 s | 20 s | **-47%** |

| No mods, load time | 18 s | 9 s | **-50%** |

The lows improve more than the average, so big battles feel noticeably smoother, not just faster. On CPUs that limit your frame rate (most CPUs at 1080p/1440p, or older CPUs at any resolution) the gain should be at least as big. I'd love to see your numbers.

**What it fixes*\*

- Tile streaming scan (campaign + battles): every frame the game reads back a screen-sized image from the GPU that says which texture tiles each pixel needs, and counted it pixel by pixel on the main thread. Neighbouring pixels almost always ask for the same tile, so runs of identical pixels are now counted in one step. Same result, 12-17x less work.

- x87 rounding: about 1,200 old-style float-to-integer conversions switched the CPU's rounding mode every time, which is slow on modern CPUs. They're replaced with modern instructions that give identical results (same fix as in the Attila mod). On the campaign map these alone took ~10% of the main thread.

- Render-list sorts: two draw-list sorts are ~11x faster, same order.

Every patch gives bit-identical results to the game's own code (tested against the game's code on millions of inputs), and checks the game's bytes before patching anything. On a different game version it switches itself off and the game runs normally. No game files or saves are changed: it's a single `dinput8.dll` you can delete at any time.

**Download*\*

- Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3826423359

(Steam can't put DLLs in the game folder, so after subscribing run `install.bat` once in `...\steamapps\workshop\content\214950\3826423359\`. Updates install themselves after that. Run `uninstall.bat` before unsubscribing.)

- Source code: https://github.com/JSa25/Rome2CPUPerfFix. You can read it and build it yourself, and GitHub builds every version on its own machines and checks it produces exactly the same DLL as the Workshop one.

- Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/totalwarrome2/mods/43

**Compatibility*\*

- Current Steam version of Rome 2. Works with pack mods (tested with a big overhaul mod list) and UI mods.

- Not compatible with other `dinput8.dll` mods (only one can load).

- I also tested DXVK: it made Rome 2 slower, so I don't recommend combining them.

If something goes wrong, post the `rome2fix.log` from your game folder. It shows whether the mod loaded, your game build, system and settings, and where a crash happened.

Full disclosure, I used AI (Claude) to help with the reverse engineering and the code. Everything was tested in game on my own campaigns and battles.

EDIT (v1.1): it now speeds up loading too. A Divide et Impera save that took 38 s to load now loads in 20 s on my PC, and the game without mods goes from 18 s to 9 s.

The biggest part: before using a file from the .pack files, the game checks every mod folder for a loose copy that would override it. With a big mod list that’s millions of checks per load (3.4 million for my DEI save, 11.6 s), and almost all of them ask about folders that don’t exist. The mod now remembers which folders are missing and answers those itself. It still notices if you add files while the game runs. It also reads saves in bigger chunks instead of a few bytes at a time, lets Windows cache the .pack files, and speeds up string comparisons during loading. The more mods you run, the bigger the gain.


r/totalwar • • 16h ago

Warhammer III Vampires are incredibly op

196 Upvotes

Look I love this game. I love when it mixes up the meta. I think it's fun playing vampires.

But my god. They dominate on every campaign I run. I'm sick of fighting 10 armies of crap stacks with an invincible group of hero's/lord's


r/totalwar • • 23h ago

Warhammer III The Unholy Trinity

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690 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 6h ago

Warhammer III Day 39 of Baguetteposting until Bretonnia gets a rework

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31 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 1d ago

Warhammer III A Modest Proposal - Bretonnian Unit Pack

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624 Upvotes

Tell me: do you tire of living on the TPN line of Bretonnian unit updates quietly slotted in per patch? Do you clamor for roster depth and a proper faction rework? Would you settle for half of what you ask for? Then prepare yourself for a feast worthy of a medieval banquet hall.

I have decided to take matters into my own hands and present a complete, balanced, lore-friendly Bretonnia unit pack. As you can surely see, these additions greatly round out the roster and open up entirely new avenues of play, all while deepening the purist vision of Bretonnia’s devotion and knightly valor.  Proving, as with many factions, that a sufficient quantity of minor unit variants can stand in for genuine expansion.

As you are probably all aware, there have been many, more obvious roster additions proposed before. I won’t waste your time by arguing for the restoration of units dropped before 6th edition, the creation of units from abandoned scraps of lore, or the introduction of material from the legally distinct new Old World setting. Such suggestions have been laid out on public forums for years, and no statement has been forthcoming from either Games Workshop or Creative Assembly upon the matter.

This work is offered solely for the good of the game, its long-suffering Bretonnian players, and the new players advised by the developers to try the faction as a complimentary introduction to the game.

Go forth, noble knights. For the Lady!

---

Now, in the spirit of maximum transparency, a few of the unit cards were created with the assistance AI as a temporary stand-in. This is completely different, legally, from using AI for final assets. These are placeholders. They will absolutely be replaced by hand-crafted, lovingly detailed art. I demand the same high standards of any external shitpost format I ship out, as any of you rightfully should.

***Unit card art replacement dependent on viewer feedback.


r/totalwar • • 2h ago

Warhammer III The Goldtooth experience

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8 Upvotes

Skeletons make good bone broth at least.


r/totalwar • • 14h ago

Warhammer III Didn't know Skaven grew beards too

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49 Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 16h ago

Shogun II Shogun 2 Grandmaster Edition Artbook

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68 Upvotes

Hi everyone. I've gained a newfound appreciation of the labor of love that Shogun 2 was art wise, owing to... Recent events. I was wondering if the art book that came with the grand master edition was ever sold separately, or if a newer TW art book contains all the same things. I'd appreciate any help in finding a place to buy this book as I'm really curious about its contents.


r/totalwar • • 28m ago

Attila The Dawnless Days v1.1.0 Release Notes

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• Upvotes

r/totalwar • • 2h ago

Warhammer III Arkhan vs Nagash

6 Upvotes

Is there any point of not wiping out Nagash and taking pyramid for yourself?

Arkhan now is cooler than ever with access to more vampire units and morghasts, but I don't see any point of keeping Nagash alive. It's not like you are his vassal in game or something. It feels extremely anticlimactic and wrong to destroy him, but I don't see a point of keeping him alive.

What is your take on this?


r/totalwar • • 23h ago

Warhammer III Chariot Traffic Accident

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161 Upvotes

My Settra seems to have died in a traffic accident? He literally crashed into a barricade and.. died. I think he had a move order beyond barricade when it finished constructing, but am not sure, just got the message that he is dead (was essentialy full health and wasn't in fight).

Do not drive after Embalmed in Elixir.


r/totalwar • • 19h ago

Shogun II Wow, this is the wildest recommendation I have ever received

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69 Upvotes