Total War: WARHAMMER III: Beginner’s Guide – Tips for New Players

by Yannis Vatis / Articles, Total War, Warhammer / 02 Feb 2024

The next installment in the Total War series takes you to the epic battlefields of the Warhammer franchise once again. Total War: Warhammer III combines large-scale tactical warfare with expansive lore and iconic narratives to form a gaming experience of epic proportions. Most experienced Total War players will undoubtedly be diving in and having a blast. However, if you’re a Warhammer fan who’s never played a TW game before, you might struggle to get to grips with the game and its intricacies.

Let’s fix that. Here are five of the best beginner tips and tricks for Total War: Warhammer III.

Don’t Skip the Prologue

As obvious as this tip might seem, it bears emphasizing because the Prologue is effectively the game’s tutorial. Total War games have a lot of mechanics and subtle elements. How well you learn them can easily make or break the experience for you. That’s why you shouldn’t skip the Prologue.

Apart from giving you some backstory into the lore, this opening campaign gives you the rundown of all the critical controls and features you need to control your armies effectively. From movement to attack commands, almost everything is covered. As boring as it may seem, getting to know how Total War: Warhammer III controls is vital.

Choose the Right Starting Campaign

After completing the Prologue, you can start playing through the game’s rich campaign. Each part has you controlling and experiencing the story of one particular faction. Right off the bat, the game recommends you to play two of these as your starter campaigns, Kislev and Daemons of Chaos.

While they’re both fine choices for a beginner to Total War, there’s an even better option. Picking Grand Cathay and playing Zhao Ming the Iron Dragon will give you a much easier experience because of the way you’re positioned at the start. The Grand Cathay have several features that give them an extra economic boost, and the Iron Dragon himself has a few allies. Combine these with campaign and combat settings at Normal, and you’ll have a much easier time learning the ropes than the recommended starters. Alternatively, you can go with Daemons of Chaos which also have a relatively easy start but not quite the advantages the Cathay have.

Get Used to Tactical View

The battlefield can look quite chaotic when using the standard camera angle. Even if you have yourself perfectly aligned, you can’t possibly get a view of the landscape. That makes it easy for enemy units to flank before you even realize what’s happening. This is why Tactical View is a godsend.

By tapping Tab on your keyboard, the camera will move to a top-down perspective, granting you the best bird’s eye view of both armies. It’s essential to make copious use of this view, even when you’re moving in for a sure kill. Not only can you see flanks before they even reach you, but also you can identify opportunities for exit strategies when things get too overwhelming.

Fan Out Your Army

There’s a reason generals throughout history kept their armies spread in a wide area; they wanted to avoid making them easy targets. This axiom also holds true for Total War: Warhammer III. Piling all of your units up into one big mass will only help steamroll one part of your enemy’s forces. The downside, though, is you’ll easily lose a lot of critical units to their ranged attacks.

Spread your forces out, preferably in groups that make sense with each other. Apart from making defense more effortless, you also give several groups more opportunities to flank the enemy.

Flank Hard, Flank Often

Speaking of flanking, that’s an important tactic to have up your sleeve. Attacking your opponent’s armies from the side is an effective way to reduce their numbers and give you an advantage. It becomes even more advantageous when the flank contains ways to conceal your armies or grant them vantage points.

Setting up flaking maneuvres in Total War is simple. Just hold Shift and drag with your right mouse button to form that pathing your troops need to follow. Mastering this offensive tactic will get you very far in this game.

Yannis Vatis

Yannis is a veteran gamer with over 30 years of experience playing a wide spectrum of video games. When not writing about games, he's playing them, and if he's not playing them, then he's definitely thinking about them.
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