The latest update for Total War: Warhammer 3 brings it up to version 1.2 and adds seven Regiments of Renown. These are elite mercenary units who were mostly included with paid DLC in previous games but are now being parceled into updates for free. It's a significant patch in terms of rebalancing and improvements as well, with a lot of changes that should make players happy.
For instance: AI aggressiveness has been increased, so enemies will be more likely to lay siege to your settlements. On the other side of the coin, when you're besieging them they'll no longer redeploy towers you've destroyed. There have also been a bunch of upgrades to tech trees, and some improvements to unit responsiveness in battle—the delay on ranged units turning to face their targets has been reduced, for example.
Highlights from the more specific changes include Slaanesh now being able to dominate playable factions, letting you bring, say, Kislev or Cathay into the fold. What's more, Slaanesh's allies won't be able to declare war on factions the Lord of Excess has vassalized. I enjoyed getting up to diplomacy shenanigans when I played Slaanesh, and this should make even more elaborate hijinx possible.
If, like me, you let your lords and heroes wander around on foot because you don't want to waste a skill point on giving them a mount, you'll be pleased to note mounts are now unlocked free as you level up. Giants and chariots have been buffed, making them more tempting choices, and the bug that prevented artillery crew from going back to their war machines after being attacked has been fixed. All good stuff.
One bit of bad news is that animation problems with monsters and larger characters dueling each other—which sometimes result in a lot of back-and-forth shuffling rather than actual combat—haven't been completely dealt with, though they remain a priority. As Creative Assembly's lead community manager Evan Teicheira said on Reddit, "While some work on single-entity combat was completed, most of it was not public-facing enough to include in the notes. So, sadly, not enough of the 'fix' made it into 1.2 to consider it complete."
Check out the full patch notes for more information. Update 1.3 is on the roadmap for the July–September period, and in the same window we'll finally get the Immortal Empires DLC and be able to combine all three games into the ultimate free time-consuming black hole.
