Creative Assembly's long-term adjustment to Total War: Warhammer 3 is still underway, and its determination is as slow but firm as a dwarf army.In March this year, the developer completely remade the game's criticized Kisliff faction, making these human forces riding polar bears more interesting to play.Now, the official has released a new patch to adjust the magic item system in another area in the game that needs to be deeply reconstructed.

Total War: Warhammer 3 allows factions and military leaders to equip magic props called "Auxiliary Items", which are similar to RPG jewelry to provide multiple attribute bonuses.According to the patch notes, the system has been completely refactored from the bottom layer, aiming to make it more concise, unified and balanced.“The effect and rarity of approximately 600 auxiliary items (including all normal, rare and epic qualities) has been adjusted to match our new balance paradigm.”

Regarding why this change was made, the studio explained in detail in the developer log last week, and deeply analyzed its huge magic jewelry system.In essence, Creative Assembly has greatly expanded the number of items in the three Total War: Warhammer series and its various DLCs, but no appropriate balance adjustments were made when adding new items.

“Although each iteration was in good faith, these updates never shared the same balance framework,” wrote senior game designer William Hackstein, “over the years, this has clearly led to a significant imbalance between different types of items.”

Such problems include item strength and rarity that CA solves through a complex-sounding “cost/budget matrix” that more accurately judges item rarity based on hidden attributes called “uniqueness”.Hackstein said this involved “a large amount of paper and pen calculations” and admitted that the process was not “gorgeous”, but the end result was a system that could more clearly show the differences in intensity of items of different rarity while also balancing the rarity threshold overall.

This massive rework is not the only goal of the patch.It also expands the diversity of magic item effects, reduces the number of items to "reduce the UI burden", and customizes items based on the player's current collection and gameplay, which means it's harder to exhaust all the possibilities of the system in a single play.

In addition to the magic item system, this update adds two new units: the Chaos Dwarf's Goblin's Grottorius, and the threatening Blood Knight - a vampire cavalry that is anti-infantry.The game storage size has been reduced by 27% (quite considerable in the case of new content), and the loading speed has also increased by 5% to 42%.

Finally, AI, the most stubborn "leprechaun" in the Total War series, also received some additional customization options.Players can now switch to the "AI Strength and Threat Assessment" function, which will cover the difficulty of the selected campaign and allow AI to dynamically evaluate opponent threats; "Minor Faction Potential" allows small factions to make better campaign decisions.

There will be more updates in Warhammer 3 soon, with its Tides of Torment DLC expected to be released later this summer.