Total War Arena Gets New Commander

The illustrious Total War series is making its leap into the free-to-play with Total War Arena, set to release this year on Steam. The game is currently in a closed beta period, and developer Creative Assembly has just released a patch incorporating a bunch of small fixes and a new commander for players to control.

Now beta testers can take to the battle field under the banner of Vercingetorix the Defiant, a Gallic general with a decidedly Lovecraftian name who is best known for uniting tribes of Gaul (in modern-day France and Germany) to fight against Julius Caesar’s legions in the late first-century B.C.E.

But enough of the nerdy history stuff – you want to know what this means for Total War Arena, right? The accompanying patch adds some additional features:

• Caltrops, stakes and other deployables cannot be placed if a unit has recently been attacked in melee, but can be placed if struck by missiles.
• You can now only join matchmaking as a party if all the units in the party are within 2 tiers of each other.
• Migration from SEGA Account to Total War Account is no longer possible.
• Javelins can now use Barrage.
• Barrage for both archers and javelins now have a -50% AP damage modifier attached to them.

…And fixes some known bugs:

• We decided punishing players for having friends was unfair, so accepting a Steam party invite during battle no longer kicks you from battle.
• Fixed a bug where sometimes capturing was being reset when a unit was attacked but not damaged. Now only actual damage resets capture. Units are devastated at the loss of their telepathic powers.
• Fixed a bug where voices were echoing strangely. You could say we caved to feedback. Geddit?
• Fixed a bug where the capture points for watchtowers on Marathon would disappear during the battle, despite it making matches unexpectedly more interesting.
• Fixed a bug where formation outlines were distorted on the tactical map.
• Fixed several bugs related to party matchmaking. [from the Total War Arena dev blog]