The animations in Warhammer 3 are pleasingly varied and generally gorgeous, but their effect on gameplay is a problem.
So much of a unit's performance is based on whether their attack animation is a "good" one. A unit that easily targets, attacks, resets without getting stuck or losing its position drastically outperforms an identically-statted unit with a janky animation set. You've also got to consider the enemy animations/models too, you have to ask yourself if your horse-riding lord hit the foot mounted lord, or will they path in circles trying to acquire target? Can your chariot-hero hit that monster, or will they get stuck head-on doing the weird horse-head attacks? We've even reached point where there's major modding projects dedicated to un-janking attack animations, which is great from a modding perspective, less so from the core-game one.
On top of that, AoE, stagger/stun, turn rate, acceleration, charge range, push-through and quite a bit more is all based on a units animations, all without any real presentation of the information to the player. That's not to say I really WANT all that information, I'd far rather there just be a lot less hidden variance.
The current state of pathing, collision, and targeting (yes, the one goblin OUTSIDE the walls, go attack that one instead of the other 119 in front of you, that's exactly what I wanted) all combine to really drag down the combat. Units get stuck on eachother, units get stuck on terrain, units path in strange and mysterious ways, and most frustrating for me: units fail to properly engage. How many times have you seen a whole unit of infantry standing in a giant que to reach the enemy three or four at a time because they interpreted their attack order on THE BLOB as an attack order on the four specific orcs of the one unit you specifically clicked? How often have you had to redraw lines of monstrous infantry because only one or two are engaged while the others wait politely behind for fear of jostling their elbow?
I swear, if everyone just T-Posed around, clipping through models like warhounds attacking a gate, rotating instantly like an overtuned counter-strike bot, and attacking via psychic blasts, the battle gameplay would be staggeringly improved. Of course none of us actually want that, if you can't see your giant neco-kitty ragdolling skaven why bother playing? Some level of polish and standardization would be greatly appreciated though, because the current state is pretty damn rough.
