Today's dev blog talks a bit about the 6.1 update, but especially about the player feedback from the recent campaign AI open beta:
https://community.creative-assembly.com/total-war/total-war-warhammer/blogs/68Regarding the 6.1 update, there were two things of note:
1.) The patch is set to release March 25.
2.) Those playing Mother Ostankya will now have the option of starting in Kislev instead of Naggaroth.
As far as the open beta for the campaign AI is concerned, these appear to be the biggest takeaways:
* Query system changes (to stop the AI treating enemy agents the same way as enemy armies) have been universally good and will go live with Update 6.1. We are confident these changes bring a tangible improvement to the experience.
* Aggression and Faction Potential changes will not be included in Update 6.1. We saw a significant number of you express concerns about second order effects (aka unintended consequences), which we will be addressing before these changes go live. One example of second order effect that worries us is how Faction Potential changes made minor factions significantly easier to defeat for major factions. This in turn caused Elector factions to perish too early and to be ineffective even when brought back.
* We heard from you that anti-player bias is something that you’d like us to spend more time looking at. The team and I agree wholeheartedly, so addressing issues of this nature is going to be a focus for us in BETA 2.
* There are a number of reports around the AI exhibiting suicidal behavior. This type of issue can have a variety of causes and we initially thought only occurs in isolated causes. We will focus on investigating reports of this nature and working on addressing them.
(The devs go on to add that they hope to launch Beta 2 around a week after the 6.1 update drops.)
Overall, I'm cautiously hopeful, though still not expecting too much. I'm especially glad they're looking into both the anti-player bias and the suicidal behavior; both have long frustrated players, and have seen numerous complaints ever since the game launched. (Interestingly/oddly, the AI in Warhammer II never seemed quite as bad in this respect.) I don't expect actual results anytime soon, but "later" is still much better than "never".
