Total War: Warhammer 3 Starter Guide – Top Advice for Budding Commanders!
Let's be perfectly honest here - no Total War: Warhammer 3 starter guide could even hope to cover everything important in what is, effectively, the very grandest of grand strategy games. Featuring three games' worth of content, mastering this game is no mean feat, and a guide on doing so would be approximately 1,000 pages too long for a short blog post on the Internet.
Thankfully, that's not what we're offering today. Instead, we've singled out a few key pieces of advice for budding strategists that are just taking to field with Total War: Warhammer 3.
This guide won't teach you the specific strategy needed to break apart Nurgle's 17th variation of open-field engagement mechanics. It will, however, give you the basics. A short, succinct overview of the stuff you really want to keep in mind as a Total Warhammer newbie. Or, perhaps, a returning veteran!
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Total War: Warhammer 3 Starter Guide
So, as we said, we aim to prep you out with a round of wide-sweeping advice about Total War: Warhammer 3. In true Creative Assembly fashion, the game is downright immense, with more content and mechanical complexity than you could shake a stick at. To that end, we may end up adding a few more sections later on, as we get more acquainted with the game ourselves.
Now, let's get to it!
Early Expansion is Crucial
Unless you're specifically playing as a Chaos commander, then it's always worth keeping in mind that the main new mechanic in Total War: Warhammer 3 are the Chaos Rifts. These extradimensional portals allow Chaos to pour into the regular world, but the kicker is that they don't actually appear right away.
Since you'll need to hunker down once Chaos Rifts begin to pop up, it may be wise to spread as far and wide as you can support before that happens.
Experiment with unit placement, but carefully
We'll keep this simple, because the meta is yet to be established, and this Warhammer 3 starter guide isn't designed to support such discussions, anyway. There's a huge amount of mechanical and mathematical complexity to Warhammer's combat systems. To begin with, remember the KISS principle.
Keep your formations neat and obvious until you get a sense of what's what. Slowly begin to add new features via unique units, and support those by modifying the rest of your "loadout". That's the only way to keep trucking in this game.
Rock, paper, scissors - remember it
Alright, maybe not quite as simple as that, but every regular unit type has its foil in Warhammer 3. Any unit you come across will fall into one of the following categories: Hero/Lord, Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, Large, Flyer, Siege Weapon. Infantry does great against Cavalry, while Cavalry does great against Ranged, while Ranged does great against Infantry. Add elements as needed.
As we said, there's a bit more nuance to the system than that, and Hero units are Mary Sue expies combat-wise, but we'll forgive them that.
Choose a faction and stick with it
As we had discussed beforehand, Total War: Warhammer 3 has got dozens of unique factions to choose from. The sheer variety is downright insane when you add previous games' factions into the mix. To begin with, though, you're going to want to stick with just one.
Since each faction comes with its own mechanics and gameplay features, you need to learn one by heart before jumping onto others.
Use flyers to flank
More so than any previous Total War game, Warhammer 3 makes ample use of flying and hovering combatants. It just so happens that many of them are amazing when it comes to flanking. You can just plop them down behind the enemy lines and attack from behind.
Of course, the enemy can do the same. To that end, keep some defenders around the back of your army, too.
Do not underestimate diplomacy
Though it's easy to think of Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign and sandbox modes as free-for-all slaughter-fests, this isn't necessarily the case. In many cases, it will be to your advantage to keep a few good-standing neighbors around, so be sure to look into trading agreements and, perhaps, even alliances.
Of particular note here is the 'Reliability' rating of your faction. Namely, if you start breaking alliances and attacking everything willy-nilly, other key actors may see you as unreliable and refuse to deal with you in the future.
Fortify as many settlements as possible
Circling back to the topic of Chaos Rifts, these can pop up pretty much anywhere. Faction territory doesn't mean much to timeless, ageless, extradimensional horror-gods, after all. So, leaving your inner strongholds unmanned and without an ample garrison is a bad idea.
Keep some veteran units around specifically to deal with Chaos incursion, should they appear. You need a fast and reactive force that can shut down a Chaos Rift in extremely short order. If they don't, boy are you in for a world of trouble.
Make good use of Hero units
It's a good idea to have an ample supply of Heroes around no matter what, but they're particularly handy in dealing with Chaos Rifts. Namely, a Hero will be able to close down a Rift immediately as long as you pay 1,500 Gold for the privilege of doing so.
This will be particularly important for long-lasting campaigns. Rifts and invading Chaos forces grow more powerful each time that particular Rift closes down, you see. So, dealing with them will become virtually impossible at some point.
Consider attacking when other factions are distracted by Chaos
It's a cheeky, ne'er-do-well move, to be sure, but you may want to consider attacking other factions when they're entangled with Chaos invasions all of their own. Odds are that they're going to send out their most powerful armies to deal with the incursion, giving you a better shot at dismantling their infrastructure in the meantime.
As with most things in this Total War: Warhammer 3 starter guide, however, other factions can do the same to you! So, your mileage may vary.
Outposts - build 'em!
A new feature added with Warhammer 3, Outposts are an essential army growth vector and a must-have, depending on how your military might is structured. Build Outposts in your own or allied settlements, basically, to gain access to units from that settlement's roster.
So, not only can you replenish your troops this way, but you can also fill out some potential weak points or niche use-cases by resorting to other factions' specialists. It's so easy to miss out on the importance of good Outpost positioning, so don't forget about them.
Invest in ranged units to deal with Chaos
Almost all new Chaos armies are immensely powerful in close-quarters combat. A proper meat-grinder, if you will. Dealing with them at range, then, is a stellar way to keep your losses to a minimum, and crank Chaos deaths to the absolute maximum.
Seriously though, invest in powerful ranged troops if you have access to them. It's the single most fool-proof way to duke it out with Chaos without getting clobbered.
Recruit new Legendary Lords whenever possible
The final piece of the puzzle. Legendary Lords will, almost certainly, be your most powerful weapon in active warfare. These powerful Hero-class units don't just confer unique bonuses and come with their own units, but also allow you to build more armies in the first place.
Not every faction has access to all Legendary Lords - of course - but almost all of them have a healthy selection available. If you own DLC for previous Total Warhammer games, for example, you may have access to some of them in the game's super-campaign mode. In any case, you're going to need as many Lords as you can muster, so don't forget to hire them.
The Warhammer 3 Starter Guide is Just the Start of It
While these tips and tricks ought to put you on the road to Total War: Warhammer 3 greatness, there's still an immense depth to this game. You could spend hundreds of hours playing Creative Assembly's magnum opus and still keep finding new stuff, from what we've seen so far.
Now, to be fair, there are some growing pains that the game is going through. Optimization seems to be a point of contention, for one, but we'll have a PC graphics settings and framerate min-maxing guide prepared early next week. Do stay tuned for that!
Do we think that Total Warhammer 3 will make its way onto our list of top 100 PC games, though? Or onto the list of SEGA's finest releases of all time? Yes... and yes. Make no mistake - this is one of the best grand strategy games ever made. We can't wait to see what else Creative Assembly does with it.
If you'd like to read more about the game, we've got a bunch of pre-release content ready to go! Have fun and fret not, as we've got plenty more coverage planned for the future. This really is just the start for Warhammer 3, we reckon.
Let’s be perfectly honest here – no Total War: Warhammer 3 starter guide could even hope to cover everything important in what is, effectively, the very grandest of grand strategy games. Featuring three games’ worth of content, mastering this game is no mean feat, and a guide on doing so would be approximately 1,000 pages too […]
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