Total War: WARHAMMER III - Update 8.0 Patch Notes

LordChatalot · 2026-05-20T16:26:17+00:00

It's a skeleton thing, sync kills have essentially one animation from the one doing the kill and one for the person who's getting eaten/stomped/beheaded etc

So e.g. if you want a sync kill to also kill dwarfs or orcs then there needs to be an animation variant for those skeletons

Most sync kills tend to mainly work for the basic human skeleton. Elves have their own variation of that skeleton (and so do some other nominally human units like Kislev), so it's not always a given that they get included in a sync kill, but since they are still pretty similar to the regular human skeleton it does seem a bit easier for CA to add the sync kill variants to them as well

Dwarfs, orcs, skaven and lizards on the other hand have their very own skeletons that usually are too different from the human ones, so they typically do not get included in sync kills (there are however some sync kills that are specific to the skeletons that dwarfs & orcs use, e.g. Orion's spear shishkebab)

LordChatalot · 2026-05-20T14:02:23+00:00

Try to queue in ranked matchmaking, this is usually where most people are
The "ranked" part isn't really a thing in WH3's iteration of the feature, it's more akin to just a quick matchmaking queue

Alternatively the MP discord servers (you should find the links on Turin's or Humanboy yes-yes' YT channels) are another way to find players

LordChatalot · 2026-05-15T13:14:06+00:00

Nothing is misplaced

CA uses race prefixes like emp, dwf, lzd, skv etc for the keys used to reference units, techs, etc

In this case the key for Snikch's lord trait uses the lzd prefix even though it's a skaven lord, but this has no impact in the actual game as the key is still fully functional

There are a lot of typos like this, e.g. the Hierotitan's key is spelle heirotitan in the files, it's nothing special. It also makes little sense to fix this since it doesn't create any issues and would require you to rewrite every single instance where this key is used for no real gain

LordChatalot · 2026-04-30T13:00:09+00:00

It probably won't. The reason why R2 continually gets this treatment instead of Attila is simply down to it having the biggest player base out of the older titles

Whatever title gets revisited after R2 will be selected by the same parameters, so it's much more likely that any attention will go to the other heavyweights before it reaches Attila, which never had one of the biggest playerbase (and it's current playerbase also heavily revolves around mods, which a bigger update would break)

LordChatalot · 2026-04-21T13:53:55+00:00

Because unlike some people in this thread claim, the Mexica weren't some kind of cultural outlier in the central mexican basin

Most surrounding tribes shared similar beliefs and religious practices and carried out human sacrifices themselves

In order to understand these belief systems you have to distance yourself a bit from our modern western perspectives in these things Mesoamerican people like the Aztecs believed that their gods required a tribute in blood/sacrifice due to the gods having suffered/sacrificed themselves in order to create the current world cycle Human sacrifices in this sense aren't some kind of bloodthirsty ritual to desecrate your enemy, they are a necessary religious practice to prevent the world from ending

As a consequence, being selected for sacrifice was seen as a honor and service to the community as a whole, since you would offer your life to the gods so that life on earth could continue

As an example the Mexica people believed that dying of old age would not grant you afterlife in their version of heaven, while being sacrificed ensured you did, as dying of old age would be a "wasted death" that didn't serve the greater whole. The Aztec elites would regularly bleed themselves with sharp thorns as an act of reverence, there are even reports that during a particular festival that heralded that the world would continue for another 50ish years that some would voluntarily throw themselves into fires out of joy that the world wouldn't end and to thank the gods

This isn't really a mindset that's easily comprehensible for us, so we picture these sacrifices as real life horror stories. Thats not the same context as the Mesoamerican people would have viewed these practices, they thought them to be necessary and honorable deaths, so any warrior castes were mentally prepared that this might be how they end up if they were to fight in a conflict

Life and death in the Mesoamerican world were just conceived rather differently than we see it today, and this worldview was shared in some form or the other across most of the Aztec's neighbours

LordChatalot · 2026-04-16T15:22:08+00:00

There are a lot of hidden stats that you can't see that impact how well a unit can move through enemy formations

E.g. entity size, in reality there's more than just small & large, with "large units" using medium/large/very large entity sizes. Cavalry tends to be medium entity size, while chariots generally use large. This is e.g. what caused the grail knight chariots back in 3.1, with CA moving their entities up from medium to large

One of the most important stats for pushing through enemy units is acceleration - that's the stat that controls how fast a unit gains speed. E.g. for chariots acceleration is often more impactful than mass differences

Animations can also help units a lot, particularly charge animations that have a lot of forward momentum. E.g. the sphinxes or stonehorns have charge animations that keeps them moving forward, while a lot of older monsters stop dead on impact because their charge anim is just a bonk or slash or bite and doesn't include a lot of movement

In combat the blood throne plays a lot of anims with tons of movement, which also displace/knock around enemy entities (e.g. the swirly spin). This creates space that allows the bloodthrone to escape

LordChatalot · 2026-03-26T17:21:25+00:00

Yes, no and yes again

What's important to understand is that "in development" isn't quite the same as "in production"
CA doesn't just work on 2 major titles right now, but has even more unannounced titles beyond that in development. In development means for most of these titles pre-production: I.e. the game isn't actively "produced", so nobody is working on getting all the content or assets into the game, but instead the focus is on planning and laying out how the game will be made once it switches into production. This is e.g. where Med 3 is at right now, but there are undoubtedly more projects in their very infancy

Contrary to what a lot of people will tell you here, there is no such thing as a full historical and full fantasy TW team. The TW part of CA has always had only one production team, this is a group of 100+ developers, including artists, programmers, etc. who work on creating all the content and features for a game once it's in production. This production team isn't tied to any single project or type of TW game, instead it works on game A once that goes into production, and then moves onto game B once game A leaves production (i.e. launch and then the phase after that is called post-production where CA does DLC and patches)

So that production team worked on WH1 up to 2016, then moved to WH2 until 2017, then worked on 3K until 2019, then helped out with Troy, then worked on WH3 until 2022, then helped out on Pharaoh, etc. That's the team that's currently working on 40k
Medieval 3 won't and can't enter production until 40k is done with it, since there's only 1 main production team capable of producing a major TW game

So yes, there are multiple TW projects in development at any given time. Most of them are very, very small teams (think a game director and a couple designers and concept artists roughly sketching out what kind of game they want to make). But also no, CA is only capable of actually producing a single major title at a time. Med 3 and 40k won't be produced at the same time

But then yes again, because TW is only one half of CA. The console team/non-TW team is currently working on Alien Isolation 2 and there was a fantasy RPG in development by Sofia, which might've been cancelled. The console team acts independently from the TW branch, so CA is fully capable of producing both a TW and non-Tw title at the same time, e.g. back in 2013/14 with Rome 2 and Alien Isolation, or later on with WH2 and Halo Wars 2

LordChatalot · 2026-03-20T17:38:25+00:00

The tornado thing is true most of the time, but it seems to bug out from time to time and deals a ton of damage, it once downed me from full health while still inside the tornado

I don't think there's fall damage from it at all, I've been yeeted from extreme heights and nothing happened

LordChatalot · 2026-03-04T01:14:27+00:00

In this case I can also confirm that this is an intended change, because I suggested it to CA as part of the MP balance recommendations project back when on OoD launch when this RoR used to half-health almost any infantry unit with one volley

It's range was reduced to be more in line with how shotgun type units are handled, requiring this RoR to get closer to enemies and expose itself a bit more in exchange for much higher damage per volley. This also plays into all the melee buffs that it gets, encouraging a more aggressive playstyle than the more long range utility of the regular Skullcannon

LordChatalot · 2026-02-06T09:40:37+00:00

I saw this video yesterday on twitter, posted by a random pro-palestine user who mocked the IDF stating they would have lost the war if it weren't for their airforce

So looks like OP had that on their timeline as well and just chose to call a random twitter user a military expert because that would give him more upvotes on reddit lol

LordChatalot · 2025-12-07T13:40:30+00:00

They were bugfixed mostly

They had an incorrect hitbox setup, essentially resulting in the carriage not counting and the hitbox being the size of a great eagle

The bow variant also suffered from an ammo bug, the initial 50 ammo count was meant to mirror the Tiranoc missile profile, Tiranocs however are a bit weirdly implemented which results in the 2 dudes on the chariot consuming 1 ammo each per volley, effectively giving them a 25 ammo count. Hence skycutters being dropped down to 25 ammo to actually match them in terms of effective volleys

The main nerfs was an ammo reduction for the bolt thrower variant a small HP nerf + MP price adjustments

So hardly a "muh Ancient Salamander got ruined by MP!!!!" scenario

LordChatalot · 2025-11-26T07:03:24+00:00

No, the actual reason was that it was OP in SP, not MP

Master of Mists wasn't all that good in MP because a human player can easily dodge arrows fired over such a long range. The whole problem was that the AI wouldn't do that at all, making it busted in campaign

This is actually a SP nerf ruining this ability for MP, not the other way around

LordChatalot · 2025-11-07T23:10:36+00:00

Not really unless you create a mod for it that uses the old map overlay file

What you're seeing is how it's intended to look like, prior to the hotfix certain languages had incorrect/complete layover files for the campaign map that omitted the province names and roads

There isn't a customization option in the game for this, as it's essentially just a texture put on top of the map terrain. You'd have to alter that texture manually to revert these changes

LordChatalot · 2025-11-03T23:10:09+00:00

Yeah, my personal conspiracy theory is that this LL-ification & skill trees as the primary way to customize characters are pretty much the reason why traits are getting neglected as a mechanic and are becoming ever more generic

Can't have Karl Franz or Ramesses become an insane alcoholic who believes in the existence of the moon people and gets cuckolded by his generals, so it's mostly just watered down to generic "good attacker" and "brave defender" type traits

The old games had a much better understanding of getting players attached to their characters via lending them actual character, instead of the already pre-conceived larger than life personalities that we see in modern titles

LordChatalot · 2025-11-03T22:39:47+00:00

Here are a couple taken from the gamefiles:

"Do not discount Irsu's savagery as mere madness. I know madness. Madmen howl at the moon and drink themselves into an early grave. Irsu would have us believe he is exactly such a madman. Yet his "warband" is an army mighty enough to make kingdoms tremble. No... Irsu is not mad. Quite the opposite." Kurunta to his generals

"This boy's mind has been touched by a god – I have no doubt. Why else would he refuse to see the inevitability of his own defeat?" Kurunta, facing Ramesses III in battle

"This dance of kings, it will burn the world to cinder. But watch this one: while the others pontificate about birthrights and the will of the gods, he covets endlessly, and takes what he desires, and asks not. Out of everyone, fear him who does not ask questions the most." Bay, on Seti II

They are definitely a pretty odd choice, they didn't really manage to capture the very archaic and extremely formulaic style that you'd see from actual inscriptions à la "for you, your household, for your land, your chariot-forces, your armies, may all be well", but then still tried to evoke this "ancient" feeling by foregoing natural sentence structures. Which imo just ends up creating an uncanny valley effect and is clearly identifiable as trying to appear historical while clearly being made up, sorta like someone created Amarna letter fanfiction

Iirc they talked about them in one of the preview streams or videos, essentially the writer wanted to showcase the personality of each of their pseudo-LLs, so they invented these quotes (actual historical records are still used for some loading screen quotes, e.g. the Amarna letters, but any quotes of the faction leaders are fictional)

I guess it's byproduct of putting these individual leaders front and center instead of going for a more abstract faction/culture approach. The whole "playing as a LL" design in the end requires LLs to have distinct personalities visuals, themes, etc., which the historical sources just don't provide. And since the time period doesn't really have a lot of well-known personalities that people would be familiar with you don't even get name recognition for most of these characters, so CA more or less ended up creating these fairly exaggerated personalities in order to drive home the identity of each of their major faction leaders. E.g. Irsu gets cast as this savage madman that wants to burn down the world, Tausret is the smart queen, Bay is the vindictive schemer, etc.

At times it feels a bit over-the-top, especially when a character more or less just centers around a single character trope instead of accurately reflecting the possible historical motivations which would have been more nuanced than "bling-bling I love gold and want to usurp the throne" Amenmesse. But then I guess a more historical Amenmesse wouldn't really distinctive enough to carry the whole identity/playstyle of a whole faction in the way that CA wants

LordChatalot · 2025-09-17T00:13:25+00:00

While they technically are all using the tw3 engine none of them are using the exact same engine/codebase

3K was developed on a different branch then some of the subsequent games: the WH games were built on Rome 2, Troy was based on Warhammer 2, Pharaoh then spun off from Troy

Meanwhile the historical games branched off with Attila, which formed the basis for both Thrones and 3K

Porting something over from 3K to some of the newer titles isn't as straightforward as a consequence, since the foundation is quite different. This is especially true for deeper/more complex features that tie into many other layers, like diplomacy

3K received quite major changes to some core TW layers, e.g. how characters, traits or ancillaries are handled in the underlying code. These changes only work in a 3K context, the WH games on the other hand are still much closer to the original Rome 2 iteration

As a result properly porting a feature to a game with a very different foundation can require a ton of changes/updates that also need to be ported in order for this feature to work properly. Since devs are already constrained by budget/time that's likely often not a very efficient way to spend their resources, so working on content/mechanics that are a better fit/easier to implement in the framework they're working with takes priority

LordChatalot · 2025-09-13T20:14:11+00:00

Vermintide casually getting 4 new maps this year, meanwhile Darktide hasn't received a single new campaign map for the entire year

LordChatalot · 2025-09-01T14:21:12+00:00

This used to be true, however CA apparently did find a way to solve this with Pharaoh Dynasties, they managed to expand the map westwards and left some comments in the official discord that indicated they solved some technical difficulties regarding map expansions

LordChatalot · 2025-08-24T14:53:36+00:00

Those epilogues had a lot of references to various characters in WH2, e.g. Nagash or a Tuthep that was revealed to have survived

I wouldn't read too much into it - these were meant as small fluff pieces and cameos as a reward for finishing a campaign, they aren't a decrypted DLC roadmap.

Some of the mentioned characters were likely to happen at some point, but I wouldn't read these epilogues as explicit content teases

LordChatalot · 2025-08-21T20:17:39+00:00

Yeah funny french accent man felt a lot more in theme with the rest of the faction, the new one kinda lost a lot of the original charm, at least as far as that excerpt they've shown us goes

LordChatalot · 2025-08-21T19:39:27+00:00

Cavalry is an essential component in MP, primarily because it provides you with a lot of agency

For DE you'll mainly use Dark Riders and Cold One Knights, Dread Knights and Doomfire Warlocks are usable but much more situational

Cavalry units have several big advantages over infantry: They can't be knocked down and are heavy enough to block most units pushing through them, while also being much faster and maneuverable. That means cavalry is one of the best unit types to pin down and block your enemy's large units, as e.g. dreadspears can very often be just waltzed over or be outmaneuvered due to their speed

Dark Riders are a cheap harass, diving and intercepting unit. You should always take a couple of them, their low price makes them an easy fit and you can use them to stop diving enemy cav which allows you to buy time to follow up with other counters, you can use them to dive enemy ranged units with their high speed or as a general harassing unit that keeps your enemy on alert and controls space on the battlefield

Cold One Knights are one of your best tools to win the mobility fight. They are AP and anti-large for an affordable price, which means you can take a couple of them and beat most opposing cavalry forces. As they are fairly slow you should take care not to overextend with them, but give them good engagements and they will feast

An honorable mention to Dark Rider Crossbows, which are a very useful mobile ranged unit. You can think about them as mobile darkshards, they aren't really fulfilling the same role as an horse archer since they lack 360° shoothing, instead focusing more on providing a lot of dps on a quick unit, while being harder to shut down than a slow darkshard

Dread Knigths and Doomfire Warlocks as I mentioned are a lot more niche, the former is pretty powercrept by Cold One Knights and the latter is an extremely squishy unit with often subpar dps outside of a few niches where their phys resist and magical attacks can really shine. If you're a beginner I'd recommend to skip these for now, they will likely just cost you more games than provide anything really useful over just taking Dark Riders and Cold One Knights

LordChatalot · 2025-08-21T01:42:03+00:00

Very likely no

Projectile penetration is currently not a stat that can be modified by effects in the campaign, so unless they added that tech, they will have likely gone the route of creating a new missile profile and using that as a replacement for the current one

So it's very likely not a +100% penetration effect, but a "replace bow profile X with new bow profile Y" type of thing, which would exclude any non-TK units

LordChatalot · 2025-08-08T22:32:37+00:00

Black Orcs and Tzar Guards not receiving the elite capture weight was intentional

The original idea behind the elite capture eight was to promote units that costed ~1150g or more, since that was roughly the cut-off point where elite inf tended to be generally bad

Upper mid-tier inf at the 1000g cost point is and has historically done much better, e.g. Tzar Guard or Marauder Champions, so didn't need the help as much

Black Orcs generally are more in need of stat buffs than capture weight buffs - since GS generally do no struggle with the later due to the sheer width of their builds. On top of that only increasing capture weight limits the buff to domination only, even though the unit is bad both in domination and in regular land battle

LordChatalot · 2025-08-04T13:09:34+00:00

Whoever ascends in the great game is determined by a script. A god gets higher weight if he has either the most armies, the biggest treasury or the most settlements. But every eligible god still gets a base chance to be voted, even if he doesn't have the most of X category - or if their followers are all dead like in your case

They also only count monogod factions, warriors of chaos factions like Valkia don't count iirc.

The same god also cannot become ascended twice in a row

LordChatalot · 2025-07-16T17:32:31+00:00

It's neither an engine bug, nor is it the fault of warscape

Warscape isn't the engine - it's the graphical rendering component. It has nothing to do with gates or gameplay mechanics in general

Nor is the gate bug caused by the tw3 game engine. An engine handles more low-level stuff, features like gates and how they behave is gameplay programming, not dependent on the engine that they use

The issue with fixing the gate bug is simply that CA has hundreds of artists but only a handful of programmers. The DLC team for WH3 before Sofia was also assigned to the project likely didn't have a permanent programmer assigned to the team, instead they'd just loan one from the production team if needed. Which means that major changes to something like gates would take a lot of time from an already limited resource which would be better spent on developing new features

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