This map ancillary might be my favourite thing a Total War Warhammer 3 patch has ever added

To be fair, there are several, far more substantial additions teased in Total War: Warhammer 3 design director Mitchell Heastie’s latest blog on the strategy game’s upcoming Patch 5.3. There’s also some interesting insight regarding design decisions, and the systems CA are hoping to tweak in the future. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but first, I must draw your attention to this magical map. I’m very excited about it. Not so much for what it does on its own – more for what its design philosophy represents and could mean for future additions.

A screenshot of a magic map in the character screen in Total War: Warhammer 3.

Image credit: Creative Assembly

‘Maad’s Map’ is part of a planned ancillary rebalance – ancillaries being the magical items you can equip characters with. The actual rebalance itself (aiming to bring rarity more in line with power, among other things) isn’t coming with this patch, but 5.3 will include 18 new generic items, plus 6 new rare unique, including the map. Using it gives your chosen lord a massive 50% bonus to campaign movement range, but also has a 20% to warp them to a random nearby region at the end of their turn.

What I love about this map is its introduction of an element of dice-rolling, narrative chaos that’s otherwise noticeably absent from both the game and, honestly, contemporary Warhammer tabletop – at least compared to older editions. There are still a few examples – notably the chance for your spellcasters to singe their fingertips on the searing hobs of their own hubris by miscasting powerful spells. But I think this map is right on the money. It’s creative. It’s risky. Most of all, it’s weird! I can absolutely see why you wouldn’t want to use it, but it even existing suggests a willingness on the design team’s part to introduce other, stranger items down the line. Now buff all the Skaven weapons team and give them the opportunity to also miscast, and we’ll be in business.

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Elsewhere in the blog there’s some multiplayer rebalancing, a new unit in Grave Guard with halberds, and a rework for a couple of Ogre Kingdoms mechanics in the lead up to their presence in the next expansion. Namely, more and better Ogre mercenaries you can hire from camps as other factions, and a new bounties system that makes them a bit more consistent.

I also found this part interesting, regarding Control and Corruption:

I don’t have too much information to share just yet on what our plans are with these features, but the complexity of dealing with both of these mechanics is larger than you might think. They are both core game systems that affect every single race in the game, and each faction’s relationship with these systems can be, and often is, unique.

They’re long standing Total War features and I think they suffer from a legacy of being carried from game to game without a real deep dive into what their place in the game actually entails.

I’d like to pick the team’s brains at some point about how many of these legacy systems they feel are actually holding the game back in some way – or at least not contributing to the experience they envision. Either way, I appreciate the insight and transparency here.

There’s still no word on when exactly the next expansion – which features Ogres, Orcs, and Khorne – will arrive, but my money’s on early December. I, for one, look forward to curling up by my roaring space heater with a ‘winter fire 10 hours’ video on the second monitor, cracking open a cold can of Sugar Plum Monster Energy, and punching everything in the Old World to gore and gubbins.

In other, less Orc-y Creative Assembly news, Alien Isolation director Al Hope recently announced that a sequel to Alien Isolation was in the works. What’s the Xenomorph’s charge bonus, Al? How viable is its missile block chance? Tell me!

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