Total War: Medieval 3 - THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING (No building slots, hand place castles, pop estates)

Huge news for Total War Medieval 3 that's going to change the way you look at the Total War franchise for the better. I just got done watching the developer live stream which showcas how the game is going to play out and it looks fantastic. I cannot stress this enough. So, just a preview of what we're going to be getting into here. They're revamping the campaign map. It's going to look like a tilla but much more detailed and finessed in terms of the scope and scale of the minutia there. And then in terms of the mechanics, they go over that we're doing away with the old province system which locked you into preset building slots and building chains. Now it's a more openflowing uh region development system where you have a capital, but then you have all these different organic buildings that you can hand place around, place a castle, place a port where you want it, upgrade that, add perks to it. And then they went over a new revamped system of population, which has estates for your mobility, your urban class, your rural class. They went over wealth and taxation management, which gets away from pure sliders and gets into much more fluid simulations that interact with everything. It is awesome, awesome, awesome. So now let's go into the details of my note-taking. So here is my board again capturing the notes and the screenshots from this developer interview and recapping it. Uh we're going to be going through the intro campaign map region system construction and population and wealth. So starting with the intro here basically what they're saying is they're reinforcing the idea that they are in early pre-production the earliest that they've ever shown a Total War game. So that is great. They're trying to do this transparency with the community. They were very open in the live stream saying do you like this format? Do you not like it? They had a live chat. they were pulling questions from it. They're going to take those, go to the forum, try and answer them live. Very candid, very open style of discussion, which I appreciate it. Next, they say is that um what we're going to be doing today is just showing not playing very early stage. Take this all with a grain of salt. Um but they did say that one of the key things is uh if you were to parallel this with the development of other Total War games like Three Kingdoms, they said at this stage of pre-production, if you were to mirror it with Three Kingdoms, uh they're actually doing a lot more now. And that is thanks to Warcore. the fact that they can more dynamically update the camp campaign map, iterate on things. It's just empowered them already to make a better game and have a better design uh workflow. So, that is good to hear that the foundations being reworked for Total War is allowing them to work much more efficiently. So, that's basically it. Last little caveat that they said is that obviously there's two games in development here, 40k and medieval 3. And they said that yes, these both are going to be using the new war core engine. um and that yes, you know, maybe if you see something being done in Medieval 3 and uh 40k, it means that they're both tied to war core and enabled, so you can do these types of things, but they warned us just because you see something in one game does not mean it'll be there onetoone in the other game. What comes to mind to me is customization of units that's going to be big in 40k where you can do an army painter. My assumption is, well, if you can do an army painter in Warhammer, you can probably do it in Medieval 3. So, they're warning us against drawing those conclusions, but it probably means well, if the option is there, they can probably tap into it in some way. And I assume that war bands in Medieval 3 are going to be much more dynamic, maybe mixed weaponry in the same way that we're seeing that in 40k. So, just a little caveat there to put at the top of the hour. All right, now let's start to get into the meat of it. So, they get into the campaign map. So, they start off showing this concept art, which we've seen before, which is Iberia. They said, "Well, why are you focused on Iberia? " Their answer is that Iberia is a microcosm of the medieval world. A lot of things going on, a rich history here, different cultures kind of fighting over the grounds. Uh, and they said visually it's just very rich. It gets you away from the color palette and the visual style of Northern Europe that typically dominates the view of the medieval world. So, they said this was a great kind of showcase uh and playground for where they're doing their early development because it has all of this richness. Then, finally, they did open up the game uh to show us what Medieval 3 looks like. And I put quotes around this because obviously they say everything you see here is placeholder. The UI, the map, the graphic style, the art. All of this is placeholder and none of it is going to be in the final game. It's just for them to play with ideas. And the reason they have a color palette is just at least to get our brains to take it over, for the developers to get a sense of things. Uh, but they call this very much, you know, their gray block style. So, take this with a huge grain of salt. Uh, anyways, they looked at the campaign map. It looks fantastic from what I can see so far, but again, you can't take much from the visuals. So, what can you take away from this? Well, they had a couple notes. The first is that um it's going to have a Total War Attilla sized land mass. So, I put a map here when they zoomed out within Medieval 3 maps. You can see the map here and then here's Ailla. So, obviously they didn't zoom out all the way on the left. If they're saying it, that means we're going to be going all the way to the borders of India. So, grand scale there. Um, but then the other thing that they said is although the land masses may be roughly equivalent from game to game, they are saying that with this Medieval 3 game and especially the way war works that they're going to have much finer detail when it comes to the territories. So, I want to show you this as an example. So, like I said, we've been looking at Iberia and let's go ahead and crop this real quick uh so we can put it side by side. There you go. So that's north uh

east Iberia and what I've done is on the right is going to be the medieval 3 version of Iberia. So one of the main things I said like I said is um to try and get more detail per region. It may be the same land mass but now they're increasing the resolution. So take a look at these two maps here. Uh and you can see one thing jumps out much more in Aillaa and Rome 2. Cities were much more stylistic. So zooming in on this you can see that Toraco basically takes you know it's stylistic. it takes up a huge amount of territory and that means that it's basically just a couple inches away from its adjoining settlement versus when you look in this early stage map you can see the cities are far smaller in scale. Um again you could say this is just early stage but it does speak to something in the development of the game that they did explicitly state which is they want you to have this better sense of scale and scope between the cities. More uh vastness is a word that they use several times uh to show that the real scale of the environment. So that's awesome. It means that we may be getting the same land mass as Aillaa, but when you zoom in on any particular region, it's much grander. It's much more rich. There's a lot more going on in just Iberia itself. So that is awesome. I mean, I've always wanted this uh gets away from the game gamified stylized version of it and now it means that you have much more um a better sense of your realm. So when armies move around, you know, the exact minutiae of your positioning presumably could work. The placement of your settlements could work. Versus here, you know, you don't really get a sense of the terrain because it's just it's um it's more blocky. The pixel size is so large versus here, much smaller pixel size, much more minutia. So that gets behind the intent of the campaign map. Now we get into the really juicy stuff where the live chat was going wild uh as they started to introduce this. So region system. Uh all right so they zoomed in and showed what is an indicative region. So here you can see borders very much placeholder so don't understand this but uh this is the key thing. So when you look at a region which is the area bounded by this border they said that they're essentially doing away with the old province system. For those unfamiliar the old province system was basically you would click on this. It's part of a um you know a region might be part of a larger province. there's a provincial capital uh but each of these uh regions has a preset number of building slots. So you might have six or a larger region might have eight or whatever and then so you're limited in terms of buildings what you can build and then for each of those buildings each building progresses up a chain and it gets better and better but at a certain point you get to forks and it it's basically limited choice. Uh they said there's pros and cons of this old system. The pro was that it gave you a lot better control over regions, much more distinct character. The con was it was very limiting for the players. So they said they're doing away with this old province system and they're moving more towards a region system. And the way this region system works is I have a quote here. They said uh a single region with an administrative capital and then rural developments within the borders of the region. Lots more stuff going on in that region compared to previous Total War games. So let's show you what that looked like. So at a certain point in the stream, they flicked on the UI. Again, all placeholder, but it gives you a sense of what's going on. So, I'll explain this paraphrasing what they said. So, you have your administrative capital, which is Burgos, but then you start to see these other areas that pop up, different castles, and each of these castles corresponds to the castle down here. And this is where I was like, well, where's the mine? Where's the lumber camp? Where's the farmland? And this is where I grabbed some screenshots. They eventually zoomed in on the campaign map. So, you can see this tiny little thing here. That's actually a lumber camp that's modeled. And so, when you choose to develop a lumber camp, it'll actually show up on your map organically. Um, same thing goes I had another screenshot where there was a quarry that popped up or a town that popped up. So again, this gets to the greater pixel size uh or the smaller more uh finite pixel size or minutia of the pixel size is increased, resolutions increased, sorry. Um yeah, it allows them to do stuff like this where you can have all these sorts of little developments. So uh what are developments? So they said it's similar to Empire uh where these represent important areas that bring you benefits or resources or generate things. So they give examples fishing village, town, university, mine, vineyards, etc. And right now they're playing with the mix of what these could be available to you. So they could be generic like farmland. They could be more rare like a vineyard which is specific to a climate zone or they could be unique. So I'm just thinking maybe notam or other very specific unique iconic things might just appear once or twice. Uh things like that. So you're playing with the different versions. Uh then when it comes to how these look and play, so any one of these kind of regional developments, let's take a lumber mill for instance, it can organically grow over time. So they are playing with the idea of as your general region has more pops or more wealth, these specific areas will organically grow and develop and kind of rank up in level outside of the player doing it, it just organically happens. Um but obviously the player does also have the ability to invest. So they're playing with that. The other thing that they said is, "Well, how many of these can you have? " So, they're breaking away from the preset slots and allowing the player much more

versatility. So, they said that in the region that we were looking at, it's probably a max of around 30 per region. They may vary this by region. It could be higher, it could be lower. They're trying to play with where it is, but already 30 is much more than we've seen in a previous Total War game. Uh, and what this means, the fact that these can be placed uh, you know, up to 30 per region, maybe even more. the fact that they can grow dynamically based on region wealth or how your campaign is playing out. It means that eventually the way that your world develops and grows will change from campaign to campaign. Let's say that Iberia for instance in one campaign is well managed. You'll see a lot of urban sprawl, a lot of level up developments, trade routes that get evolved and all that stuff. It could be very rich versus in another campaign if an army came through and marauded those scars will stunt the growth of the city such that check back in 10 turns later. And these two are very different. and you imagine projecting that out to the end of your campaign, Iberia looks very different. So, I love that from a replayability perspective. [snorts] Uh, then they started to get into more interesting stuff and this is where like the crowd went wild. I went wild when they mentioned this. So, these developments can be handplaced. This is really cool. Uh, they it wasn't clear if it was all developments, but at least some of them. So, they showed for instance there are some buttons down here and I zoomed this up and you can see what the buttons look like. Again, placeholder, but they showed in the playthrough that you could click on a castle. They then selected a region near river and the castle appeared. They then did the same thing for a port. Clicked here, a port appeared. A port was later built down the shoreline. So, that is really cool. Um, a couple nuances to this. They said that in this demo that they were showing, it was, you know, click and it gets built instantaneously. They're saying that they're looking to make it more organic in the future where if you want to build a castle, it'll go through different construction phases that's visually represented on the map. It'll take more resources, more time, etc. So, they want it to be incremental, more realistic in the future. Um, and then in terms of, well, how do you unlock these developments? They say that as your region grows, these new developments become available to you. Um, they also said that there's some interplay when it comes to your overall realm. So, uh, they didn't mention this, but I would imagine how this works is, let's say your overall realm, for instance, has, uh, a foreign war. It now has a lot more money in its piggy bank. Maybe it has reached some level of technological development or whatever. And you want to build a university at a realm level. You might have the ability to choose which of your regions then gets this development that's unique to the realm that then gets split out into the region and you can build it. So, it seems like these are going to be both a mix of region specific mechanics, but then also realm interactions. And already you're seeing we're starting to put some layers in the Total War campaign, something we've never really had before. It's always been very shallow. I'm very excited for this. So, yeah, hand place your stuff, hand place your castles. This to me is very interesting to see how they talk about battle maps and things like that. If you can hand place things, does that mean the battle maps are customized to where you place that castle? If I place a castle by a river, does that actually mean that when I fight that battle, there is a river? That has a huge implication whether or not it matters. Uh that's really cool, but they didn't touch on that. Uh other things they said is like obviously where you place your port, for instance, might matter. So, uh it can impact your trade routes, who you trade with, things like that. Uh and they're still trying to figure out the balance of how do you make regions feel unique and different if the player has this much uh ability to dictate what's going on? How do you make the style still unique? So, they're still trying to work that one out. Uh, next we get into actual construction. So, you know, like we said, no more building slots, but when it comes to these specific uh developments as they pop up, obviously you can see here they're modeling levels. So, one thing we talked about is that the level might be something that develops organically with growth of population or wealth. It might eventually like level up. Maybe there's requirements for pop or wealth to get to the next level. The other thing that they said is that they did kind of like this old system of building chains where it gave player agency for customizing the region, but they're changing this into what they're calling perks for now. It's placeholder, but it's kind of like a perk. And essentially what that is uh is they showed an example where they pulled up a lumber camp. You can see that it has these different slots. And the slots would be something like, oh, for your lumber camp, do you want to add a hunting lodge next to it, which would give you food production? Do you want a glazier which might add urban wealth or do you want a charcoal burner which adds rural wealth and this would take away from regional development. So that's cool the fact that you can add these little perks that you know are tacked on to your developments that give them different boounds and uh things like that. But the other cool thing is again they're sticking to this idea of player agency. Just because you chose one does not come at the exclusion of the others. You could have a lumber camp that has all three of these. They talked about the fantasy of having a big urban metropolis Constantinople that could have everything, all the check marks, all the perks all applied to it. So, they are leaning to the idea that you can have these super cities if that's the way you want to go. Uh, then there were some questions posed. They're going to mull on these and get back to us later, but it was looking at, you know

what limitations you expect and this if you're moving to freedom, what limitations are there going to be in this kind of more free flowing model? Uh, how is policy and technology going to interplay on this? These were uh questions posed by chat. Didn't really get answers, but they'll take this, mulle it over, perhaps give us a blog post in the future. Uh and then we get into the final section, which is going to be population and wealth. Again, this is very exciting. More layers to total war. So, population, you could see this in the corner of the UI, the placeholder UI again. Uh but they're saying that they want it to be deep and interconnected. They gave some examples. Uh they want population to feel real and play real. So for instance, when you muster your troops, the peasants are going to be coming from the fields. If there's migration between regions, it's not just a percentage buff, but it's actually people flowing in the population numbers uh changing. So for instance here, if you see 200,000 peasants, migration comes in, you might get more 10,000 more per turn or something like that. So it's an actual count that you can then do something with those populations. Same thing goes within a region from cities to farms. Uh the other thing you'll notice is that there are different classes of your population. They said for now they're working with three estates. So it's your nobles, your towns folk, and your peasants. Um but these uh estates may change. This is the starting point. Uh same thing goes with numbers. You can see that these are represented very much, you know, your standard pyramid here. Very few nobles, fewer town folk, uh many more uh peasants. So again, numbers aren't final, but it's indicative of where they're looking. And they had a little bit of chat about, well, what do this mean? Obviously, when you go to raise your army, your knights, you know, if you were to fully mobilize, you only get 300 knights versus if you tap into your peasantry, you can in theory have, you know, 200,000 peasants called to arms at a levy. Now, obviously, that's going to take framer farms or whatever, but this is just showing that once they add these mechanics into the game, now Total War actually has nuance, actually has systems that can start to interact with each other. So, I love this foundation uh that you see when Paradox does it, they can unlock a lot more realism. So Total War is hoping to get more in that vein. Um the other thing they said is that when you look at a particular representation of a a person, a pop, um that person has stats about them in the sense that they would have uh what estate do they belong to, what religion do they follow, and what culture are they kind of coming from? Um they didn't say really what that means, but just having those as, you know, metadata tags means that they can interact with different systems. So that's really interesting. Uh then there was stuff about, you know, questions asked. How do you these estates interact with one another? They say they're still working on this, but obviously they said, you know, food production comes from rural populations. Nobles might influence how you autogrow your cities and they might even manage particular regions for you. So more nobles might mean that cities all of a sudden start building up or they level up quicker or maybe you get more vineyards dynamically, things like that. So, I really like this the fact that some of the development of your map is kind of outside of your control. Um, you get a lot more freedom, but then there's a lot more going on dynamically. So, it's the best of both worlds in my mind. Uh, then they went on to wealth and taxation. And they said in the same manner that they're trying to simulate population, they do want to simulate wealth. So, if there's like 200,000 people in one province, there might be uh, you know, 200,000 pieces of gold or pieces of wealth. and that can flow and move between regions and you can see it down here. And then they started to talk about the nuances of what region wealth means. So they said basically that region wealth is going to be sort of your piggy bank. It's the overall wealth, the money that's flowing around in a particular region. Um it gets further broken down by a state. Um and then you can tap into the region's wealth with things like taxes. So uh you can see that here income presumably that means you have you're taxing the overall region wealth and you're extracting from it about 500 income in this case. Uh but they said you know what happens with the rest of that wealth. Well they said that the rest of the wealth is dynamically going to be used up uh your vassels might use it or it might be going into natural development of your population. So presumably what that means is if you know fully tax a region where you take the 10,000 in here presumably what that means is that now the region no longer has free cash to do things and that'll styy growth. They didn't mention that but that's the that's how this could play out when you start to get these more realistic simulations and interactions. Um and then they said that they're trying to make taxation and interactions with wealth more dynamic. It's no longer just a slider. Uh they said they had a senior designer who did research on historical medieval tax systems and they said that they're starting to now incorporate uh different ways of getting uh at your wealth. So they still have traditional tax system which they called systemic wealth which is based on your you know what is percentage of wealth that you're going to tax. But then there's al also other systems other ways to generate wealth. Uh so rent and tribute systems they gave

as an example you know how your region is laid out. If you have a lot of fields and a lot of towns for instance, you might be able to get more rent from the people using those facilities. Uh if you have more castles, for instance, you may be able to better extract tribute from the region. And then next, they got into some interesting stuff, just talking in theory, not really showing, but talking about the interactions of armies and wealth. And this got me really excited because I'm thinking about history, and it really does seem realistic. So for instance, they said when you raise an army and that army goes out into the field, wealth has to be used to pay for the supply chain of the army. This is the first time we really had dynamic supply chains. And take a look at this. They say if that army is defeated by an enemy, they can seize the wealth in the army camp. So someone alluded off, oh, that's more reason to build a castle to secure the supply line. So this has huge implications for me that like the strategic uh way you maneuver your armies, the way you can raid them, interact with them, ambush them, that could get really in-depth and detailed and realistic in the future. So I really like this discussion. Uh they say if an army imp uh disbands, the wealth then returns to the general pool of that region. So lots of really cool stuff there that's hinted at but not quite shown. Um there's a question asked from the community. You know, what systems from past Total Wars do you enjoy? They were saying that there's lots of inspiration, not just from Total War, but other games. Obviously, Paradox here. They didn't mention them by name, but you can just see it. Uh, and then that was kind of it. They fielded some more questions. Didn't really give that many answers. Said that they'll get back to us in blogs and future updates. But yeah, that's basically it. So, this is honestly above and beyond what I was hoping for Medieval 3. The developers were talking how excited they were to finally do Medieval 3 justice. The fact that they now have war core and can do all these complex ways to do the campaign map. Man, this is honestly blowing away everything I thought Total War would be. It is the injection of fresh content that the series have long needed that we all were foroting, thinking that Total War was going down to the dumps and historical is dumps. What they're trying to pull off here and what they're actually showing us is honestly incredible. Uh, and the best thing about this is that they're being open, transparent about it, showing it, and very much soliciting feedback from the community. So, definitely if you have questions or if you have ways that you think systems should play out, go to their forums, go to their live streams, interact with CA. It seems like they're all ears. We can potentially uh steer the ship of Total Wars future. Anyways, that's it for my recap. I hope you guys enjoyed and uh yeah, couldn't be more excited. I'll see you in the next one.