As much as the Total War series of games from Creative Assembly are some of the most well loved of the grand strategy titles, they do have one common issue: sieges don't tend to work as well as the main battles. In-fact, in some of the Total War games, they've been messes that grind gameplay to a halt and make it worthless trying to overthink them.
That's something that no one wants to happen with Total War: Warhammer, which is why Creative Assembly has taken specific strides to address it. For starters, the sieges are designed to be much faster paced and more dynamic, with less of the more obvious phases of previous titles.
It also wants to make the focus of the battle the walls and fighting within the city, rather than seeing lots of generals rush out of the gates to try and battle where they have more freedom to move around. That means defenders taking better advantage of their walls and attackers struggling to breach them.
However once that has happened, Creative wants the battles to progress quickly, with the tide swinging in the direction of the attackers once the walls are taken.
The AI has had to be rewritten for this, not factoring in the type of unit so much as it does its unit positioning, how that might affect the whole battle and what it could be doing better. If certain units would be better elsewhere, it'll move them instead of doggedly having them take on units where it may have the rock/paper/scissors style advantage.
As PCG points out, it can also take advantage of a new reserves system, which lets it reinforce units as and when they're needed from off of the battlefield, with fresh troops.
"What we do with them is they have a separate objective. Which is just ‘attack enemy.’ They will wait and scan the entry points into the settlement and decide to fly towards one of them when it’s just about reaching its accessibility point. At that point we can get some flying units to dive in, attack the guys on the walls, just as your guys are cresting the ladders - chaos erupts, it’s pretty crazy, it’s fun," said a creative spokesperson.
Total War: Warhammer has had its release date pushed back to May 24 2016.
