00:00www.marcoparet.com
00:10www.marcoparet.com
00:11So as a Warhammer fan
00:12I mean I started playing Warhammer
00:14the RPG back in
00:15the 80s and I've been
00:17painting figures for many
00:20many many years. The
00:21Warhammer OP is very popular
00:23inside the studio and outside
00:25so we've got a lot of people in the studio
00:27who love the game, they know
00:29all about the units, they know what to expect
00:31so the feedback we're getting is really detailed
00:33and they know what tactics they want to use
00:35from the tabletop and whether they work in our
00:37game and if they didn't we had to tweak the balance
00:39What Warhammer adds
00:41is a huge amount more variety
00:44so on the battlefield you get
00:45everything from tiny little goblin guys
00:47all the way up to huge giants
00:49you get weird and wonderful war machines
00:51and the other extra dimension
00:53is magic and it adds the differences
00:55between the different factions, the different races
00:57in Warhammer
00:58And we decided to actually go with that and embrace
01:00that difference between all of the races
01:02so you'll finish a game
01:04playing as the Empire
01:06you'll start a new game as the Vampire Council
01:09and you'll find yourself with a totally different
01:11feature set that you're playing with
01:12and that really influences the way the game plays out
01:17The unit balancing in Total War Games
01:18has always been a pretty big challenge
01:20because there were so many different factors to take into account
01:22now we've added so many different things
01:25we've expanded the game in every possible
01:27direction and dimension
01:29Warhammer for us is really known for crazy units
01:31crazy rules, crazy abilities
01:33obviously for the AI
01:35that causes us a whole new set of problems
01:37that we have to think about
01:38because if the player uses that unit differently
01:41the AI is going to have to use it differently
01:43so we had to teach the AI
01:45well how do I use this unit against this unit
01:47and we've got a system which
01:49we call the BCOP
01:50which is the Battle Combat Outcome Prediction
01:53and what that does is
01:55it actually has to model
01:57our own game
01:58in a kind of slightly cut down way
02:01so it can say
02:01if I've got this unit of spearmen
02:04but they have had this magic cast on them
02:07and they are stood on a hill
02:08how would they fare against this unit of trolls?
02:11it has to go through and it has to try and run
02:13a cut down simulation of our game
02:16to try and work out that
02:17so the AI can sort of say
02:18well is this a good thing for me to be doing
02:20and it would say yes or no
02:21and it can get that answer back
02:23and that's how we kind of solve that problem
02:26when it comes to flying creatures
02:27we had some special challenges obviously
02:29I've never done that in a Total War game before
02:32it felt a bit like flying creatures are cheating
02:35because you can attack any unit anywhere on the battlefield
02:37so one thing we decided on early on is that
02:41when a flying unit does commit to land battle
02:43we want it to be stuck there for a while
02:45we don't want it to charge down, deal damage
02:46and get out again
02:48we want the defender to have a chance to do something against it
02:51what we now say is that
02:53the flying unit can't just take off
02:54you can imagine it like a dragon needs a bit of space
02:56to flap its wings and to take off
02:58so as long as it's in combat it can't do that
03:00which gives the defender the chance
03:02just stay in combat, pin it down
03:04and now suddenly using flying units
03:07it becomes really risky
03:07we had these like comedy problems where
03:10you'd have this huge giant
03:11but every man is targeting this position exactly in his chest
03:14and although there's inaccuracy applied
03:15you basically get these poor giants with like
03:17a thousand arrows all fired into their chest
03:20so there's little things like that
03:22that you just didn't even think about
03:23they're like oh we're going to have to rethink the way that works
03:25so I think the biggest challenge is to get one combat engine
03:28where all of this madness is accounted for
03:32and works without too many special cases
03:34so there's something like 15 army books
03:36the main rule book
03:37there's a massive amount of lore
03:39because all this craziness might just be like
03:41one line in a rule book somewhere
03:43and for us that one line could be weeks or months of work
03:47there's so much there that there's infinite opportunity
03:50to find storytelling opportunities
03:53link that into features within the game
03:55come up with new features and so on
03:57so it's actually been anything but a straight jacket
03:59we'd always wanted right from the start
04:01from the very first Total War game
04:03we'd always wanted to do a fantasy Total War
04:06Warhammer was the obvious match
04:09we talked to Games Workshop over the years
04:12since the beginning of Total War
04:13and eventually we decided to go ahead and pick Warhammer
04:17it's just perfect
04:18we'll see you next time
04:34you
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