支持中国的正义声音是国际社会主旋律（钟声）

Total War: Warhammer 3 is Creative Assembly’s ultimate TW game. Now, you might not agree with the sentiment, and I wouldn’t entirely either (Shogun 2 remains my all-time favorite), but it’s true. It’s the most popular, most well-known, and gets the most attention from the studio.

This always made its many flaws stand out harshly and be significantly more annoying whenever they’re encountered. The biggest one of all has always been the sieges, or the lack thereof, with ladders spawning out of units’ backsides, rendering walls obsolete, and turning every siege battle into a real-life war of attrition where the first one to get bored loses.

Now, years after the fact, Creative Assembly is stepping up its game and reworking the sieges alongside the community after somewhat ironing out most of the game’s other drawbacks. And hell, I’ll go on a limb to say it’s the last piece in a master puzzle which, alongside fantastic community mods, could put Warhammer 3 on top as my number one Total War game.

A** ladders be gone

The focal point of this new siege system is the abject lack of the aforementioned backside ladders. No longer will random units go up to super thick walls and spawn ladders out of thin air, rendering any sort of fortification completely useless. What’s more, the magic ladders also took away from the vibes, turning sieges more into just regular battles with extra steps rather than their own thing.

In the new system, available currently through the siege beta, you’ll actually have to build ladders for sieges, which are manned in the same way as siege towers or battering rams that we’ve had in the game for so long. While there are caveats to how the siege ladders function, i.e., they’re not their own unit like the towers and depend on the infantry moving them, they’re still a very, very welcome addition on the siege battlefield.

They add tremendous layers to every single altercation, make launching sieges an expensive ordeal, and give the defenders (and especially their walls) an actual chance to defend themselves. You have to really utilize your siege equipment to tackle enemy fortifications, which are now not just another obstacle to surmount, but a proper barrier standing between yourself and that new territory.

The addition of ladders as a piece of equipment genuinely gives more reasons to equip your sieging army with the other siege units as well, such as the towers and battering rams, given that walls need to be penetrated somehow. Relying on just the ladders before was the better choice since they could spawn out of nowhere at incredible numbers, but your ladder units can now easily be killed, forcing you to sometimes pivot to other siege means, whether you like it or not.

It’s remarkable how one single change can so thoroughly affect sieges and how CA, despite its experience with awesome siege mechanics in Thrones of Britannia and Attila, still had a horrible system in place for Warhammer 3. But, thankfully, it’s on its way out.

No more campaign siege camping

CA didn’t just change siege battles. Campaign sieges are getting some much-needed attention, as well. Instead of approaching a settlement and engaging in a siege, thereby starting an arbitrary move counter ticking down until everyone in it is dead, CA implemented a dose of realism. Now, you can still encircle a settlement, but it won’t tick down equally per turn, with the settlement having to slowly burn through its supplies before beginning to deteriorate.

This completely destroys cheesy settlement sieges and auto-resolves since it takes a lot longer for any given town to reach attrition levels. Alongside AI improvements, it also means you cannot bait the AI into attacking you outside the settlement with attrition-ridden troops, giving you an easy auto-resolve win, which you should’ve spent sieging properly.

Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news after listing out so many good things about this siege rework, so I won’t get into the FLAWS. There’s been enough of that around already.

If, however, CA manages to patch everything up and implement a siege rework without the drawbacks which’ve been extensively documented by the rest of the community, Warhammer 3 will finally become the game it’s meant to be.

Then we can add a hundred mods and have the best Total War experience out there.