Total War: Warhammer 3 – A new feature almost ruined the game for me, but you can prevent that before you even start playing

With Update 9.0, the strategy game has actually improved. But there’s one new endgame event you should definitely disable.

After a long period of discord, Creative Assembly has apparently finally reconciled with the Warhammer 3 community! On September 24, “Lords of the End Times” was released—a DLC pack that many fans consider fantastic, introducing several magnificent new legendary commanders to the game. In my review, I was also hugely impressed by this lineup!

But a few worthwhile DLCs alone aren’t the reason why the Total War: Warhammer 3 fanbase is currently in such high spirits. In addition to Lords of the End Times, the development team also released the massive Update 9.0, which completely revamped the game—even for those who don’t want to spend any money right now.

Fortunately, 9.0 is one of the best updates this massive strategy game has ever received! It brings a ton of new content to the game, which also massively improves the core gameplay experience—especially in the endgame! However, not all the changes are successful. There’s at least one new feature that, in my experience, can actually ruin a game. You can work around this, but you’ll definitely need to make a few adjustments before starting the game.

The End of Time Has Come

Both the DLC and Update 9.0 for Warhammer 3 are all about the legendary End Times. This major event from the tabletop game once led to the complete destruction of the classic Warhammer fantasy world. In the tabletop version, this was used as an opportunity to relaunch the popular game and create a completely new—though highly controversial—fantasy universe with Age of Sigmar.

In Total War, the End Times doesn’t mark the end of support for the strategy game, but it does bring some massive changes. First and foremost are the so-called End Times scenarios. These entirely new challenges are designed to solve a long-standing problem, particularly in Total War: Warhammer. Especially when your faction starts to conquer the entire world like an unstoppable snowball, the game throws another hefty challenge right in your face.

With these scenarios, the endgame of Total War is set to become significantly more challenging and pull you out of the conquest rut that has set in by that point. Three different scenarios were developed for this purpose:

• Invasion of Chaos: Archaon, the Eternal Chosen One, ensures that armies of the united Chaos appear across the world, ravaging every province and reducing cities to rubble and ashes.

• The Great Ritual of Nagash: The Father of Necromancy begins a powerful ritual, joined by numerous undead factions. Little by little, he transforms the world into an undead wasteland.

It all sounds like a blast! And yes, in my opinion, Warhammer 3 desperately needed these end-of-the-world scenarios. Especially since each one stands out significantly from the others in terms of gameplay. Unlike, for example, the earlier endgame crises, where essentially just one large army from another faction was rampaging across the lands.

In the new end-of-the-world scenarios, however, you have to contain the threat in slightly different ways. In the Chaos Invasion, Archaon’s army is practically invincible until I’ve eliminated enough other Chaos forces. With Nagash, I have to specifically defeat his Mortarachen to stop the ritual. The Skaven, on the other hand, require me to defeat rat armies and gather clues as to exactly what their grand plan is.

It’s all very cool, with just one critical exception! The Skaven’s rat horde currently tends to suck the fun out of your game rather than enhance it.

Why the Rat Flood Is Annoying

The Rat Flood was the endgame event that really started to take a toll on me around round 80 during my playthrough with Nagash. At that point, by the way, I was actually still relatively weak, since while Nagash is a very powerful character, his armies gain strength at a relatively slow pace. And perhaps also because I hadn’t played in a while and had to pay the price for a few strategic mistakes in the early game.

So, I was actually pretty vulnerable when the Skaven Flood broke out with an epic cutscene. Looking back now, though, the flood was the best thing that could have happened to me… in the worst possible way. It was good because my faction benefited massively from the event’s current design flaws. But it was also bad because it made the game incredibly easy—and therefore boring. There are three reasons for this:

The Decline of Rivals

During the Rat Plague, certain cities around the world sporadically become Skaven strongholds. In theory, they transform into “rat factories” that endlessly spew out new Skaven armies. These cities include places like Altdorf, Hell’s Pit, Skavenblight, and Torture Gorge.

If you own one of these locations, you’ll simply be kicked out, and the city will instantly be converted into a Skaven settlement. This actually happened to me with Skavenblight, which I had conquered just one round earlier. Incidentally, all other Skaven factions also disappear and instead become part of the Skaven Tide.

The latter played right into my hands, since at that point I was actually waging a rather complicated war against two Skaven factions at once. I still had Ikir Clawhand well under control in the north of my realm, but in the east, Quiek Headhunter had grown into a major regional power and was giving my skeleton warriors a hard time with ratling cannons and death wheels. When the Flood broke out, the Quiek front basically vanished completely, and I was able to easily annex his now-vacant settlements.

Quantity Over Quality

In theory, the sheer mass of coordinated Skaven armies should actually even things out, but in practice, that doesn’t happen. That’s because the Skaven’s massive army hordes consist of absolute trash units. They’re crammed to the brim with Clan Rats or Skaven Slaves. Maybe there are a few Storm Rats or a Rat Ogre mixed in. But the real standouts of any rat army—the Lightning Cannons, Death Wheels, Shredders, Flamethrowers, and Hellbrutes—were completely missing.

This makes it possible to repel even three fully-manned Rat Swarm armies with a single well-equipped force. And that’s exactly what happens all the time. The rat armies don’t stand a chance! Especially since every other faction in the world is fighting them, too. In my game, the Skaven couldn’t gain the upper hand anywhere. They were all wiped out right at the doorstep by endgame armies of every stripe.

So there’s absolutely no question of them being a threat here. They’re a minor, temporary nuisance. Even 200 rounds later, the Skaven Flood still hadn’t been truly defeated in my game. But that was because all their cities had been conquered, and no new armies had spawned near me that I could have defeated to get clues. So the grand finale simply never happened.

The Last Alliance

That alone was already disappointing. But if that had been the end of it, I would have at least filed the Skaven Tide away as a footnote and continued my conquest of the world, hoping to encounter other, powerful opponents. Yet a side effect of the End Times scenario made my life much, much easier from that moment on!

The game assumes that the Skaven flood is so overwhelming that all other factions must band together against it. That’s the moment when even the Orcs and the Empire call a truce. Actually, that’s pretty cool. But when there isn’t a major threat like the Skaven, it just leads to an unusually brotherly Warhammer world.

From that moment on, I was essentially allied with every other faction and could systematically carve up only the lands I wanted to conquer bit by bit. And I was Nagash, the undead god of necromancy. Yet High Elves, Humans, and Dwarves all threw themselves at my feet.

Rarely does conquering the entire world feel so unspectacular.

What you should do to prevent this

My first encounter with the end-of-the-world scenarios was a bit of a letdown. But I also have some good news! You can easily prevent the same thing from happening to you—but only if you haven’t started a new game yet and are still planning to do so.

Before starting the game, you can set exactly which End Times scenarios should occur and when. The options here offer plenty of ways to customize this really cool feature. Here’s my recommendation for you:

Version 1: No Skaven Flood

• Simply disable the Skaven Flood. If all three End Times scenarios are checked, it’s random which one actually triggers. Don’t take the risk of getting the Skaven Flood.

• Leave the Chaos Invasion and the Ritual of Nagash enabled if you want to be surprised by what happens. If you have a favorite (the Chaos Invasion is the best event), just check that one.

Version 2: Early Skaven Flood

• If you’d still like to have the Skaven Flood, use the sliders to set the point in the game when the flood strikes. In the early game, the Skaven Flood can definitely cause problems. You can make sure it triggers sometime between turns 20 and 30 or so.

• If you do this, though, it’s best to turn off the Chaos Invasion and the Ritual of Nagash. You definitely don’t want to deal with those on turn 20.

Version 3: The Full End Times

• You can also set it so that all three scenarios actually occur in the same game. Then you’ll have the full End Times experience, and it wouldn’t be so bad if the Skaven Flood doesn’t hit too hard in between.

• However, I haven’t tested this in practice yet. It’s probably still random which scenario triggers exactly when. And the scenarios definitely don’t occur simultaneously. So you have to resolve one before the next one starts. But since the Skaven Flood can become nearly impossible to handle under certain circumstances, you’d end up in the same situation as I was.
• If you want, you can also activate the crises. These are the endgame threats that were already in the game before Update 9.0. That might help make even the Skaven Flood seem threatening—especially if, for example, Wood Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, or Vampires are sending powerful armies at the same time.
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I suspect Creative Assembly will address the Skaven flood issue again in a future update. After all, I’m clearly not the only one who’s noticed the problem. There are plenty of people online who are annoyed by the lackluster Skaven invasion. Fixes like this can sometimes take a while at CA, but hopefully not too long in this case. It would be a real shame if this flaw were to cast a shadow over an otherwise absolutely magnificent update for too long.