The Proving Grounds Promise Big Changes For Total War: Warhammer 2
The Proving Ground is a new beta designed to help bring big changes to Total War: Warhammer 2 in record time. Here’s what’s coming to the new beta.
Over the last year, Total War: Warhammer 2 has grown its roster of heroes, villains, legendary lords, and new units expansively. Of course, more and better ways to play mean new and completely surprising ways to break the game, whether you meant to or not. In the face of “an absolute hell-pit abomination” when it comes to balancing the game–and those are Creative Assembly’s exact words–they have decided to roll out an experimental new beta called the Proving Grounds.
This beta is an opportunity to make some extreme changes to the game, adjusting multiple settings at once. This is basically like a public test realm–where they make big changes that may or may not make it into the main game. But it’s a place for them to try out some balance tweaks just to see how it effects play.
And taking a look at what they have planned for their initial release? They are going big on this one. Let’s take a look.
via Creative Assembly
To begin with here are some of the sweeping overall goals, which includes the much needed shorter end of turn steps:
- Experiment with different difficulty settings, including game pace modifications
- Adjust game pace to align with shorter end-turn times
- BUT retain a game pace that allows for frequent activity like recruitment, construction or combat every turn
- Increase impact in recruitment and construction decisions
- Reduce the economy scaling into the later stages of the game
- Add meaningful and stronger money sinks
- Keep campaign AI competitive
- Create an environment to possibly remove supply lines
- Reduce the strength of swift expansion
- Streamline factional differences in economy and more clearly define faction uniqueness
- Return public order to be generally more meaningful
- Return growth to be generally more meaningful
- Push late-game units later into the game naturally for both AI and player
- Aim for more varied playthroughs and different late-game challenges emerging naturally
- Avoid hard restrictions
Tweaking the difficulty on this game in particular is a challenge since you don’t have the immediacy of an FPS match to see how well something is or isn’t working. Here’s a look at how they’re adjusting difficulty:
- Experimental difficulty changes affecting not only challenge but also game speed
- Naming and function change for difficulty levels (please note these are not localised – they will only show up in English game versions)
- Easy difficulty becomes New to Total War
- Normal difficulty becomes Fast: A faster-paced Total War with cheaper recruitment and construction
- Hard difficulty becomes Standard: A slower-paced Total War with more expensive recruitment and construction
- Very Hard difficulty becomes Veteran: A slower-paced Total War with more expensive recruitment and construction and increased AI buffs
- Legendary difficulty remains Legendary: A slower-paced Total War with more expensive recruitment and construction, increased AI buffs, no quick save, and battle realism
- Battle difficulty remains the same (even though the names changed)
- Reduced public order penalties for player at lower difficulty levels
- Reduced public order penalties based on ‘hostile’ corruption at lower difficulty levels
- Adjusted recruitment, construction and other bonuses for AI and player based on difficulty
- Modified starting treasury on lower difficulties
- Increased background income for all major factions (including player) on lower difficulties
- Reduced background income for all minor factions on lower difficulties
- AI Lords get additional experience based on difficulty
There’s a lot more than just this. If you want to get into the nitty gritty of what’s changing, we recommend checking out their official announcement. In the meantime, check out the Proving Grounds beta, which you can grab out of your Steam library through the betas tab under the game’s properties.
Good luck, generals!
