RPI - Sam Belsey

[lyric sphinx]

Hey everyone! Welcome back 🙂
So, as always, keep questions to one please and on topic. Sam and the community teach will try to answer what we can. Please vote or react on anything burning questions you'd like answered and we'll do our best to answer them! We'll wrap up at 5pm and keep this open till tomorrow so people can look at any questions/answers they missed 🙂

[spring dirge]

Which faction / race do you enjoy working on the most?

[gray abyss]

Please keep questions relevant to the Q&A, any off-topic posts will be removed.

[proven sedge]

How draining was to QA the chorf train pathing?

[spark patio]

Any news concerning the multiplayer chat? It is a typical question in the group and community. (And of course, THANK YOU for multiplayer campaigns, I did not believe it was even possible!)

[iron cairn]

Multiplayer chat seems to be unsupported as of now because of limits to moderation. However, playing custom games (or matchmade games) on WH3 (and probably other titles too) is made very difficult without any communication.

I know this is probably already internally discussed, but could you give us some insight on how this decision was made and what's in for multiplayer chat in the future? I for one find the ability to chat a greater good than some people abusing the freedom of the system. As of right now, I've stopped playing custom multiplayer precisely because there is no interaction between players.

[plucky jasper]

What modes of multiplayer do you yourself prefer to play and which faction is your favorite to play as?

[bleak bluff]

when will the infinite fireball spam that uses no winds of magic be fixed?

[tame vale]

8 player campaigns are a dream coming true! Thank you so much for it! HOWEVER, anything above 3 players co-op is unplayable at the moment, sadly 😦 Mostly due to Diplomacy. Whenever a player engages in a diplomacy with an AI everyone's screen gets centered to the faction's position, which leads to incredible lag and often even crashes the game 😦

Could you please take a look at it? Do you work on a fix right now? I tried reporting it in the forums, but got redirected to the support tickets. I wrote a support ticket and got redirected to the forums 😄

Cheers!

[brisk mural]

Is the balance regarding factions more focused on MP or SP

[stone lynx]

Hey Sam nice to see a interview on a very interesting and investigative department that is underlooked at times. How are things looking in regards to the issues with the API for the multiplayer as the latest update had some unintended side effects upon it? (I ask as I tend to do multiplayer and I find it interesting as to the potential reasons for what occurred for the issues to arise) Massive respect to all of you in the Q&A team and everyone involved with the development process.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Hay GBoG. I have played them all so many times, enjoy/don't enjoy don't really exist for me any more. I used to hate Dark Elves and now I played them so many times I think I got stockholmed into likening them.

[sweet reef]

Is there any development to further improve 8-player multiplayer campaigns? Or is this the final draft for multiplayer campaigns?

While it is fun to play, there are a few things that could use a change or fix to make it more enjoyable. Such as bugs when 2 players enter diplomacy, maybe overhauls to some systems.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Very. For the people who did it. I mostly made sure they didn't explode multiplayer because of all weird and unique stuff going on with them

[hushed lynx]

I'm loving the chaos dwarfs but is there any chance that the warmachines would checked out? For how deadly they are described to be and how grim it is with the souls of the sacrificed and all that. The deathshriek does terribly low damage to infantry compared to something else spewing lava outright. Or the hellcanon firing shots and missing 80% of them.

[midnight crown]

Hello. Since IM is no longer a beta, are there any plans to make win/win-hard achievements for wh1/wh2 factions? Good to know before I start some new games with them 😛 Thanks 🙂

[manic gyro]

I'm sorry to drag this out of the WH3 thing, but considering you worked on "all games" I feel allowed to ask you :
Even if it's not going to happen, could the 8 player multiplayer campaign of WH3 have been retro-actively ported to older games on the Warframe engine ?
Or did WH3 introduce very specific netcoding aspects that made this possible and not possible in older games (without rewriting everything at the risk of blowing everything up)

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: I got this job by playing a lot of competitive multiplayer. So mostly that.

I don't have a favourite to play, I mostly just randomly roll a faction by what my gut feels. Maybe if I had to put it down for definite it would be Greenskins because the all vanguard rush is never not fun.

[dark jewel]

When can we expect multiplayer chat to return and with what changes?

[deft wind]

I have one question.
Will you be planning to add in more potential units/hero and lord types from other Warhammer sources like you did with the Royal Hippogryph Knights for potential factions or those that never appeared but were planned by GW and FW (especially considering that The Old World is around the corner and some old ideas are resurfacing or coming back from older editions)? Like Sons of Bretonnia and Herrimaults for Brets and Runic Units + crazier engineer units like Thunderbarges and Ancestor Engines for Dwarfs?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This is an incredibly hard question to answer. When giving balancing suggestions to design I try and hold all simultaneous possibilities of use. So beginning campaign player to expert tournament player.

I think what people miss with this question is that units are made in a like white box battle environment that doesn't really consider campaign by battle guys.

Like I just came back from a talk about how articulated train movement ignore certain rules to maximize value when charging by a battle guy....but that guy doesn't have know what effects and how the engines are used in campaign.

That campaign stuff is made by totally different guy who doesn't really play the battles and then can cause that unit to not be super effective as now in our example it competes for unit caps against stronger units in its cap group.

And then again this is not my decision to make I just try and get it as balanced as possible for all the different modes.

TLDR: I'm trying to bridge campaign and battle designers to make it maximally balanced in all situations but this is very difficult.

[kind ermine]

Hi sam, you mentioned that you've been working on balancing and stats changes for old factions and units. You also mentioned that you were the Multiplayer QA Technician and that you mainly play competitive multiplayer. As a mainly Singleplayer person myself, it is concerning if Multiplayer balancing affects stats for units and balancing for the singleplayer experience.

So my question is: Is there any chance of there being a separation between stats for multiplayer and stats for singleplayer? So that in multiplayer the stats are fine-tuned for the MP experience, and in SP they are fine-tuned to SP? If there's no plans for this, is there a particular reason why?

[clear prairie]

Greetings first of all. As we all know Bretonnia was an FLC faction. Throughout the history of TW-WH series generally when we look at the past they haven't gotten any different play mechanic rather than a little update and one FLC with same dynamics as well. We have been seeing the same units with the same play styles since the first game. Do you consider to change this, to change the play style of lords, at least one of them, and then can we expect to see a DLC for the future of Bretonnia to add some flavour into it? Thanks...

[wet vessel]

Hey will there be upcoming buff for brettonian units for example like royal hippogyph knight i think they deserve perfect vigour.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: We have sent more feedback from ourselves and from you guys about the warmachine balance situation.

Just before the build was finalised, deathshrieks and hellcannons menaced the battlefield with pinpoint accuracy and magma cannons were pea shooters which were the saddest unit to use in the game.

Some quick changes to try and get these units all in a fun state may of thrown them a little out of balance at the moment and I'm sure design is going to dial that in.

[scenic edge]

Is it planned for multiplayer campaigns to feature simultaneus battles at some point in the future, instead of being done one at a time?

[main moth]

In the latest patch, Stone Trolls got a slight nerf:

Base Weapon Damage 39 → 40
Armour Piercing Weapon Damage 81 → 80

While I totally understand the rationale behind other minor changes like, say, giving a unit one extra melee defense or two extra leadership, this change in particular has me scratching my head, as I can't imagine it being noticeable even at the highest levels of tournament play.

I've seen some similar, extremely minor unit tweaks before, so I have to ask: why bother? What's the reasoning in making these sorts of alterations?

[brisk totem]

It isn't that uncommon to hear about content that was cut during development for a number of reasons (difficulty or just running out of time), was there anything total war related you wished could have made it or been finished? If it was balancing related what was the major hiccup?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: A: To continue with my explanation above, units are made quite separate than campaign by separate people.

Balancing of units in single player is very dependent on supporting skills, techs etc.

What I am trying to push right now is for balancing to be done via cost - efficacy of cost is the degerminator of multiplayer and this is the lever I'm most trying to get designers to pull to make balancing decisions.

I'm also trying to get more techs and supporting skills for units that are seen us underpowered in single player. We shall see how that goes.

One thing I will mention is that multiplayer community is very good at giving us a list of units that are underperforming or overperforming and also its every easy to see win metrics for what units increase or decrease your chance of winning a battle.

If their are specific units that you feel are in an unbalanced state for campaign we would love to see a consistent consensus of feedback on this, and list what the problems are: Turns to recruit, unsupported by techs, more efficient units on rooster etc. Then I can bug it up and try and get someone to address it.

[gray abyss]

Thanks for your question @clear prairie - could you kindly clarify if your question is related to multiplayer QA? If so could you edit to rephrase your question, and if not can we please keep questions relevant to Sam's role. 🙂

[supple aurora]

Will you finally buff my beloved foot squires for MP? 🥺

[gray abyss]

Hi @wet vessel does your question relate to multiplayer QA at all? If you so could you please edit your original post to make it relevant to Sam's role? Thanks!

[oak rain]

I would like to ask, if there are any plans in multiplayer campaigns to let one person fight his battle and the second one could stay at the map, changing lord's items, ...? (Sometimes it's a bit annoying waiting for your teammate to join only to spectate the battle because he has slow PC. Or just be productive and reorganize your items, while the other is fighting, to save some time) Thanks.

[wraith nacelle]

What is you stance on units that almost never see multiplayer playtime. Like Dark elf Medusas and its variants seem to be one example where is hard to find use for them (either in MP or campaign). Will you pay attention to these kind of units and can we expect to see some changes (another example is Dwarf Bolt throwers)

[whole warren]

Balancing fun and decision making - does this mean re-evaluating the over pricing of higher tier buildings which results in spamming lower tier units always being more effective than building higher tier buildings and units? Or is the long term intent for higher tier armies and buildings to be less effective because they are more fun? I love the chorfs and their mechanics, but sadly it's another case where unit cap costs ramp up so high that it's way more effective to just spam hobgoblin armies than it is to actually build real chaos dwarf units, although the same balance issue has existed with all the other races as well, and spamming spear/archer armies for example is much more effective than upgrading to higher tiers.

[unborn hill]

Are there any factions you think are in a pretty finished state / good spot in particular?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: My understanding of this is very limited but the way the game works is that the campaign map is saved, destroyed, you fight the battle, the output of that battle is loaded into the new campaign and then continued.

I think realistically this would be incredibly difficult and expensive, if not downright impossible to do and if somehow we did manage to do it you would certainly see explosive amounts of desyncs etc.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Tiny adjustments like this are usually fixing small inconsistencies with established guidelines. Battle designers like their stuff to be neat 👌🏽

[supple aurora]

What faction do you consider to be the gold-standard in terms of balancing and mechanics?

[lime sundial]

Do you guys ever test and optimize to reduce input lag ? to improve responsiveness. For example the recent resident evil has extreme 200ms lag no matter the fps making it useless as a mp game.

[green holly]

can u guys fix UI stutters?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Empire for multiplayer battles are the standard. They are the king of the 50% win rate 👑

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: I think campaign wise Greenskins are in a good fun spot with most of their tabletop represented and a robust roster and selection of legendary lords.

I'd like to nerf their income a bit though...

[wheat relic]

For the campaigns of confrontations, (in 4vs4, 1 for all etc ...), will it be possible directly in game or automatically via a mechanism which sees the close movements between the players, modifying the fact that it is no longer simultaneously but turn-by-turn, when moving and/or attacking near or between players, in order to avoid playing at the same time and struggling to position yourself.
Because we can be ambushed while on the move, the army disappear if we make a mistake, etc...
I hope I made myself understood thank you!

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This is something I try to hammer to designers on constantly. For a subset of our community efficiency is king over roleplay and fun. I can tell you when the multiplayer team is running, multiplayer campaigns on future DLC that we are giving feedback and trying to figure out a way to try and reduce spam efficiency being the optimal playstyle.

[placid sphinx]

are there any plans to lower the downtime of multiplayer? Having the "pending action" stop everything you can do is a bit yarring to the pace of a multiplayer game.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This is something I think about a lot. When there is time, I would like to write up a report on all the least used units and see if we can price cut their MP cost to the point they become viable.

Working on improving multiplayer campaign constantly, running test plans, investigating community bugs and testing new changes all come before this on my priority as unfortunate as that is.

When there is enough time.

[unreal nebula]

Why did you add specifically 24 hp for pegasus knights last patch? Does it really matter if one knight has 1 more hp now?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: So whilst developing Total War: WARHAMMER III, there used to be many many more pending action blockers than you see here.

Through careful trial and error and gentle cutting away, we have removed most of the pending action blockers.

The ones that survived through that process are in there because removing them will cause crashes or desyncs eventually.

[desert falcon]

What would you say is the gold standard for having a unit be viable? For instance taking at least one spearman or swordsman is a no brainer for Empire lists, but choosing say a luminark is not always the right call. What levels of niche vs auto pick do you look for depending on the unit?

[placid sphinx]

Is there any LL in particular that you feel has fallen behind the rest and you would like to go back and improve balance wise?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Sorry I missed this one and wanted to go back and answer it!

I'll look into this on Monday. Using diplomacy with a faction in 3 player co-op should not be causing the camera drag.

I will try and reproduce this my end. Can I ask that you doublecheck this happens in Coop mode only? Not head to head or free for all?

And also make sure no players are running any mods are. Number 1 multiplayer issue is usually mods.

Dang. You got me doing my actual job during this QandA 😛

[weary inlet]

Is it easier or harder to add units to a roster that is already in a very good spot? I.E., would balancing new units for a new empire dlc be more or less hard than adding new units to a less balanced roster?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This is entirely arbitrary but if a unit sees play in sub 25% of matchups then it might bare looking into. If a unit is seen in more then 75% of matchups and isn't a core infantry unit then it also might bare looking into.

But this entirely numbers I pulled out of nowhere right now. Sometimes niche units are allowed to be nice because otherwise they could make things kind of unfun by being consistent. If I start seeing bloated corpses in more then 25% of matchups then some wild stuff is going down in the meta and I will be writing up some worried reports.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: It's less about what kind of spot the roster is in and more about how much open space their is to the design space of the faction. Can Dwarfs be balanced if they get skirmish cav, monstrous infantry and aoe healing. No not really.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: If it takes 100 bug reports, I will make Greasus work.

[split hollow]

Can we expect to see more multiplayer maps at any point in the near future? Specifically for domination

[onyx orbit]

Is there a chance, in which head to head campaigns could receive more love? This is such an underrated and unpopular mode with so much fun, but yet so much instability in terms of balance, time it takes to finish the campaign and netcode

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This was years of work from many people to get to a system that works good enough for Total War: WARHAMMER III.

I can't imagine the value proposition on this is anything less than company crashing when I imagine how much time, effort, money and manpower would be needed for such a thing.

Like I think my heart just stopped a beat imaging a world where I would have to test this across all those games....

[clear portal]

Hi Sam! Where do you draw inspiration from when it comes to unit balancing? For example, do you only ever spend your time immersed in the multi-player statistics and the win-rate of specific units, or do you pull out a Warhammer Fantasy Battle Army Book and attempt to better translate unti stats from the tabletop into the game?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: I can tell you that designers looks at the army books and try to figure out ways to better translate those stats to the game. There are many meetings a designer disappears off web cam and comes back holding an army book 😅

I get hold of them once all that hard work is done and criticise it 😛

[fiery sigil]

Hello Sam, in multiplayer campaigns, most of the mechanics are still functional, though some are omitted for seemingly logical reason (Forcibly vassal-ing factions, Snikitchs assassinations) Is there work on trying to bring some of those over into multiplayer campaigns as well? The vassals might be difficult, but that ties more into the fact that there is no way for vassals to rebel currently

[night relic]

Currently we cannot sack Chaos Dwarf cities, nor can we raze them. This let's Chaos Dwarf players trap enemy armies in multi-player campaign when losing a city as they cannot sack and escape or even raze and retreat when attacked. Are there plans to address this? I assume it is an oversight.

[paper beacon]

Hi Sam. I am not the biggest fan of multiplayer (mainly because I don't have friends), but one aspects of the game I have disliked is having my single player experience changed to accommodate multiplayer balance changes. Has there been any talk about having two separate teams? One to balance around single player and the other to balance around multiplayer.

[hushed lynx]

I have another question! Since coop gampaigns are loaded and saved. Is there any possibility to make a single-player game open to coop? Just playing my campaign and inviting someone to take a look at the map and so they can decide to control a faction. Or perhaps the possibility of controlling the same faction and cooperating in a similar way instead of being 2 separate empires

[main moth]

In the most recent patch, Snotling Pump Wagons were changed from 4 to 12 entities, which has completely reinvented their performance on the battlefield. For the better, as far as I've seen.

What goes into a decision to radically alter a unit's functionality like that? Are there any other units you've considered reinventing in such a manner?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: I spend almost half my time running head to head campaigns against myself trying to improve stability. So yes.

For time to finish campaign and in terms of balance I try and drag campaign power levels to approaching a similar power level but designers have different ideas for how easy\hard a campaign should be and that influences head to head to an unavoidable degree.

Time to beat a campaign is a hard one I have been banging my head against- because factions will finish objectives at different speeds as designed for single player and implementing different win conditions for factions in multiplayer leads to... an unpleasant amount of bugs.

It's something I think about and something I work towards daily.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: If a mechanic is missing from multiplayer campaigns, it's usually because it will cause the game to explode in unique and interesting ways when there's more then one player.

[celest hatch]

One mechanic I'd love to see in Multiplayer campaigns is the ability to co-play as a single faction. Basically have 2 or more players play as the same lord, like Karl Franz, and they all share control of the faction on the campaign map. It would be fantastic for making MP campaigns have more brevity and to make stuff like 4v4 campaigns be more viable. Has this been something you've looked into or are aiming to do in the future?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Well it's interesting because I would say that I would currently categorize our game as having two teams, one how balances around multiplayer and the other single player.

I'll say up front doubling the workload on maintaining the database on over a thousand units by duplicating and then slightly changing it would almost certainly cause so many knock on issues that I can't imagine this will be the way forward.

What I can say is that I am committed to getting better conversations between single player and multiplayer teams. Getting removed stats added on as a early tech for example.

[trail finch]

Is it possible to change the "join to war" diplomatic function in multiplayer, as it provides an opportunity to bypass alliances of the players that they have been building for so long?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: This is...worrying. That should not be the case and didn't notice this in any of our pre relese multiplayer campaigns. I'm passing this along to team members to investigate now.

As I will say on every bug report: double check you're running no mods.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: What usually happens is a battle designer comes into a meeting giggling his head off and presents his new mad idea and then we shout him down until it's reasonable.

Battle designer has radical functionally change idea -> Presents it -> his higher ups push back on this till it's somewhat reasonable -> We push back until it's more reasonable -> you guys get it -> We hope we didn't miss something big 😅

[manic gyro]

Going to sneak another question more in line for Sam's role imho (sorry about the heartskip moment 😰 ) :
In Shogun 2 there was a unit clone for MP for every unit, essentially allowing two different balancing angles for some units. Considering WH3 has a lot of variables in the campaign which obviously can change how a unit perform exactly (looking at you Red Tree Skills), were there talks of actually bringing that back ? (which could potentially make it easier to balance the MP stuff but obviously make it very tedious to work through the tables)

[earnest wren]

Any further thoughts on AI artillery dodging? Currently, several artillery pieces that used to be crucial for a faction's early game (like Empire Mortars) are completely neutered by the AI's ability to tap dance around shots. The only way to make use of Empire mortars, for example, is to blob the AI with single entities, or fire into your own engaged troops (which let's be honest - I'd expect the Skaven to do that, not the Empire). It feels gamey and unloreful.

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: My suspicion is no, though I'll look into it and talk to the UI people about it for sure. Wait are you playing with your friends and they are using this mechanic? Can you not house rule this as a banned action?

[dull cloud]

Hi, i have a question, is it possible to keep some "nerfed" stats for units in the form of late game technologies? some OP AP bonus that got tweaked, some speed that got nerfed, or how VC invocation got a unit limit? that would expand on the game in a way that keeps us interested in teching up, and gives the MP community their desired nerfs

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: I would love to get it so that we could use the gift units mechanic in co-op multiplayer battles to allow one player to play the faction and 3 others in battle sub generals...

I can say this has been on no ones radar until right now. I'll hold onto this thought.

I might need like 5 more promotions tiers before this dream can be a reality though.

[red coyote]

Are there some crazy ideas you or other devs wish to implement but there is not enough time or technology for them? If yes, do you think we're gonna see them inside WH3 in the following years?

[uncut prawn]

Is there plans to make some campaigns more difficult ? Nothing wrong having easy and hard campaigns but some races in the game such as Warriors of Chaos or Vampire Counts only have super easy campaigns currently, even in higher difficulty. I think every race in the game should have at least one tough campaign and one easy campaign so everyone can find what they're looking for.

[deft wind]

Gonna use this opportunity to ask another question.
Will there be more Champions of Chaos-style DLCs for other races? Vampire Counts could use something like that to make a Bloodlines DLC that would flesh out the other Vampire Bloodlines. Or Dwarfs getting a lot of units this way as they have in lore that could be of great use to them.

[kind ermine]

CA said they're working on figuring out a chat system for future releases.

Do you have any idea about if there is any progress being made there related to Warhammer 3? Maybe a lobby-chat for people within the same lobby?

[lyric sphinx]

Sam: Some designers have that goal. Other designers have other goals.

Its a goal I support having 😅

[lyric sphinx]

Okay everyone, we're wrapping up today's RPI. Do let me know if there's any other departments you'd like to talk to, happy to get something sorted. Open up a thread and we can discuss 🙂
Will keep this open till noon tomorrow so people can go through any questions and answers 🙂