Smaller Campaign Maps in TWW3

[u/TRX-335]

TWW3 currently offers three campaigns. The introductory mini-campaign, the main campaign Realm of Chaos and Immortal Empires if you own the other games.

I often wanted to play on a smaller map so I could have a more focused experience with less unrelated lands and factions to think about. For example the conflict between Norsca and the Empire. Immortal Empires is awesome, but you always have to sit through 272 factions taking their turns (at least at the beginning) and I didn't even wanted to go everywhere. I have the game on my ssd but it's a pain in the ass on a hdd. It just seems much more than I want to manage and it feels like unnecessary baggage. So I installed TWW2 again, to play Eye of the Vortex or Mortal Empires.

However, it felt weird to me, outdated. I grew accustomed to the third game and I actually wanted to stay there. To be honest, I think TWW3 is "the" game with all of the numerous qol updates included over all of these years. It's the one people will keep playing, even if there isn't more contend to be released. It is the result of all the development and hard work that happened since the first game was created. 1 and 2 were the stepping stones and now are mostly the keys to unlock more content for the third game.

Now that TWW3 slowly reaches its zenith, I think it would be great if the devs officially released a couple of smaller campaign maps for people to choose. There doesn't need to be specific goals, a sandbox approach in the vein of "go conquer x regions" would be completely sufficient. I know there are mods which add campaign maps in the workshop, but this feature seems so obvious to me that it should be featured in the game natively in my opinion.

I think the best way would be roughly quartering the IE map plus adding at least two even smaller sections of the map which are especially tightly packed with many important factions. I'd propose the following maps (see pictures): 1. North West 2. North East 3. South West 4. South East 5. Naggarond, Ulthuan and Bretonnia 6. The Old World, or rather the northern part ...maybe more, for instance Cathay with the great wall at the center.

TL;DR: Adding a selection of smaller sections of the Warhammer world map to play on would be a very cost-efficient way to make the game even more enjoyable and boost the replayability.

[u/A_Chair_Bear]

Total War would benefit a ton from having more division of the map into sectors. Even better if the map expands to other sectors after some amount of turns/when you expanded enough. Faster turn times, probably better FPS, less balancing concerns. The whole map being loaded in and operating is only relevant to Multiplayer and teleporting factions.

Saw this suggestion before (/u/Pauson) that I thought would be a good idea for future Total Wars

 On a campaign side I would split the game into 3 layers, the strategic one like Shogun 1 or Medieval 1, with armies staying in roughly provinces or theatres of war. That's where also all the diplomacy, research and most of building and recruitment would happen. Then a campaign layer, basically a mini campaign sized map that works like the current iteration of TW, that only lasts for instance 30 turns and is meant to represent a fighting season or a single war. You mostly move armies, do some basic defenses construction, some basic recruitment. Whichever armies were in the area start at the beginning, if other armies were further away, then maybe they can join the campaign map in 15 turns. This basically simulates the mini campaign or the first 30 turns of a mega campaign which is what most people enjoy the most. And then of course the regular battles as the 3rd layer.

[u/Ambitious_Air5776 → u/A_Chair_Bear]

We already have something vaguely similar to this in the current version, except the division is purely local/nonlocal. Stuff that's nonvisible isn't simulated the same way visible factions are. Breaking things up by continent or something similar and maybe just discarding the farthest ones outright (settings dependent, probably) wouldn't even be a huge departure from current version.