Turns out the reason Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI sometimes played too defensively was a bug that made it overreact to the presence of even a single hero

Creative Assembly has announced that improvements to Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign AI are about to go into testing, with a beta due to kick off on February 13. The changes are all about making the campaign AI more active, and the blog post explaining this highlights a fascinating bug the team discovered: "a fundamental problem with how the Campaign AI detects foreign forces and how it reacts to them."

As Creative Assembly Sofia's principal technical designer Radoslav Borisov explains, the "query system" the AI was using to determine how it reacted was freaking out if even a single hero was milling about in its territory. All those times you sent a scout to keep an eye on someone you thought was about to invade, only for them to immediately turtle? It was your agent's fault the whole time.

Fixing that bug will mean "an AI controlled faction will no longer immediately assume a defensive posture and concentrate forces near/in settlements whenever any hostile agent ventures into their territory." That should also mean the AI will have more resources to spend on acting offensively instead of concentrating them all defending settlements that aren't actually being threatened.

Two other changes to the AI are being tested on the beta. One is a tweak to aggression that'll make factions more suspicious of anyone they haven't met yet, making them more likely to go to war when they finally encounter each other. The other is a series of tweaks to how factions who are "under the shroud" (yet to be encountered, rather than just hidden by fog of war) react to each other. Major factions are getting a boost, making them more likely to survive and thrive rather than getting randomly wiped out by a minor faction before you even cross paths. No more of that thing where you make it to Sylvania and find out the traditional home of the vampires is randomly full of wood elves.

When the beta launches, Creative Assembly will have details on how to join it on the blog. It's planned to run for two weeks, and the developers note that using mods in conjunction with the beta "will lead to unexpected results", so it's probably best to disable Assladders Begone or whatever else you've got installed if you want to take part.