Strategy games always toe the line between being a little too much for first-time players, and not having enough depth for veterans. The most recent title from Creative Assembly, Total War: Warhammer III, is a defining game in the history of the series. You can read our review here. The final game in the Warhammer trilogy is also one of the most accessible titles to date!
With a wonderful tutorial campaign, helpful tooltips, and help pages to explain any menu you open, even a fresh newcomer to strategy gaming can be quickly engrossed in the world of Chaos and the battles found within. Here are the top 5 tips for starting your first Warhammer III campaign.
1) Listen To Your Advisor
The advisor is a longstanding tradition in Total War, giving tips and thematic commentary for many previous games. In Warhammer III, he is the guide for you to find and take the 4 daemon souls you need to fight the final battle and win the campaign. While sometimes he can be a bit redundant, if you are a first-time player then definitely pay attention to what he tells you and the missions he gives you. As you begin to gain a firmer grasp of the fundamentals, many players decide to turn down the frequency of his interruptions by using the advisor settings in the game settings or next to his portrait. He is an invaluable asset for starting and has some interesting things to say and missions to do. His missions will also provide you with many different things, which leads us to the next tip.
2) Do Missions
Missions are tasks given to the player by the advisor or events, with varied goals and rewards. Early campaign missions such as ‘Recruit 2 units’ or ‘Fight Rebel Army’ may not be the most glamorous of goals, but they still provide rewards such as heroes, items, units, and money. Make sure to keep track of any new missions with the objective menu, and be sure to finish as many as you can. However, don’t let the missions distract you from your overall goal. Instead let them guide you to a stronger empire, powerful armies, and a much higher chance for overall victory.
3) Mix Unit Production And Income/Growth
Getting a little more in-depth with this tip, but it is crucial to the success of your campaign. Beginner players are easily distracted by the promise of more powerful and cool units and will rush to build upgraded unit production buildings in their first few turns. However, this will leave you out to dry when you are growing slowly and cannot afford to pay for those shiny new units you can make. With your first city and the first few settlements you capture, make sure to have a good variety of buildings to take advantage of increased growth and income.
Put simply, growth is required for extra population, which you use to upgrade the main building in cities and settlements. As you upgrade those buildings, you will unlock construction slots to make new buildings as well as the ability to upgrade your present buildings to the tier of the main building. Income is the amount of your faction’s currency that you receive per turn and is instrumental to fielding powerful and upgraded armies. Some buildings will increase a specific type of income by a percentage, so be sure to look through the different buildings you can build using the building browser. Having a strong blend of growth, income, and unit production buildings will enable you to keep your momentum going as you capture more territories and build new armies.
4) Learn Your Faction’s Mechanics
Each of the 8 playable factions has its own mechanics and taking the first turn to understand your specific faction will keep you from unexpected issues later in the campaign. You’ll find these menus on the top of the screen as well as on the bottom right of the UI, and each one of them will have a help menu to help explain. If you are curious about the faction mechanics, don’t be afraid to read through the help pages on the other factions, or start up a new campaign with each one! It’s not like you’ll be penalized for playing one turn with them before you quit and start again.
5) Don’t Take It Too Seriously
Total War games can be hard, and Warhammer III is one of the hardest. Even as a veteran player of the series (almost 1000+ hours across 13 games), I still have a hard time playing this game on normal. You will probably lose your first campaign, but don’t be disheartened! Try a different faction, change the way you were playing the same faction, or turn down the difficulty and apply what you learned from your first playthrough. Find what worked and what didn’t, look at the strategies you used in the real-time battles and on the campaign map, and don’t be afraid to change it up. Each failure is only a stepping stone to success, and this game could have you failing a lot. Remember, you don’t even need to finish a campaign if it has become unenjoyable. Just start a new game and never go back to the old one! I’ve probably started 8 campaigns already and only gotten close to finishing one, but I’m still having a blast
Bonus Tip: Play The Prologue Campaign
While the Realms of Chaos campaign that headlines Total War: Warhammer III is a hectic blast, the Prologue/Tutorial campaign is still really enjoyable and explains all the basics of Total War in a guided format. If this is your first Total War game, this should be your first stop. Even longtime fans can still get a lot out of this prologue, as its story builds directly into the ‘real’ campaign and it helps introduce specific changes that come with Warhammer III.
What do you think of our list? Any tips you would include? Leave a comment below and let us know!
Total War: Warhammer III is available on PC for Steam, the Epic Games Store, and PC Game Pass
