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Total War: WARHAMMER [Steam, Feral Store] is the latest big Linux port from Feral Interactive. As someone who has only recently become a fan of Warhammer, it was fun to see this game arrive on Linux.

Note: My copy was provided by Feral Interactive.

The multiplayer is sadly only Linux to Linux. It is not cross-platform with Windows. This is a bit of a sore spot, but thankfully the single-player seems to be great. Feral confirmed to me that they are aiming to get Linux vs Mac like Empire and Med II in time for the Mac launch. You can see the reasoning why in Ellie's previous post about CoH2 here on Steam, which gives some small insight.

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Gameplay video
Here’s a preview of a random battle I did, I realise how badly I was doing everything but in my defence this was one of my first battles.
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System requirements
Minimum requirements
3.4GHz Intel Core i3-4130
3.5GHz AMD FX6300 processor
4GB RAM
1GB Nvidia 650ti/2GB AMD R9 270 graphics card* or better.

Recommended requirements
3.4 GHz Intel Core i7-4770 processor
8GB RAM
4GB Nvidia 970/4GB AMD RX 480 graphics card* or better.

*Nvidia cards require 367.28 drivers or newer. AMD cards require Mesa 13.0.1 drivers compiled using LLVM 3.9 or newer. AMD graphics cards are not supported when running SteamOS.

This is another of Feral Interactive's games to fully support Mesa, thanks to the hard work of the Mesa developers.

Benchmarks
All benchmarks done with the built-in benchmarking tool on my test/benchmark PC. Due to the way the benchmark is done in TW, I will only be giving the average FPS.

Specifications: Ubuntu 16.04 64bit, Intel i5 4670K, 16GB DDR3 RAM, Standard Hard Drive, 1920x1080 resolution. Using the Nvidia 367.70 driver.

Note: All setting seem to leave Textures on Ultra (even when on Low). The only preset that uses Anti-aliasing is Ultra, which sets it to FXAA, all others have it turned off.

All benchmarks done using the presets as-is on Linux. I made sure the Windows comparisons had the exact same settings as Linux.

image

Windows vs Linux benchmarks
image
image

Nvidia 980ti Windows vs Linux raw details
Spoiler, click me
Ultra
Windows: 98.6
Linux: 76.4
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 77.48%

High
Windows: 113.9
Linux: 88.7
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 77.88%

Medium
Windows: 148.2
Linux: 109
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 73.55%

Low
Windows: 203
Linux: 150.4
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 74.09%
Nvidia 970 Windows vs Linux raw details
Spoiler, click me
Ultra
Windows: 74.3
Linux: 59.5
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 80.08%

High
Windows:100
Linux: 78.2
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 78.20%

Medium
Windows:115.5
Linux: 88.5
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 76.62%

Low
Windows:135.3
Linux: 111.8
Linux performance compared with Windows 10: 82.63%

Considering that an Nvidia 970 can get practically 60FPS on Ultra settings, I would say the port is pretty well optimised.

The Linux scores are between 73% and 82% of Windows FPS, so pretty standard stuff when it comes to performance loss on OpenGL Linux ports.

I haven’t witnessed any large drops in performance during the campaign map or during larger battles, it’s been a real pleasure to play in terms of performance.

General thoughts
The game seems to be extremely stable, in my many hours of testing I haven’t encountered a single crash. It’s pleasing to see that Feral have kept putting out games that, at least for me, are very stable.

Like with XCOM 2, the Feral Launcher has a built-in Mod Manager, which uses the Steam Workshop. It’s also themed for the game once again:
image

As expected from a Warhammer title, the intro video is very well done and is graphically quite impressive. Would have been nice to have the intro at 60FPS, as the video is locked to 30FPS which does make it seem a bit sluggish. Still, it certainly got me interested in it right away so it did the job.

For those that don’t know, Total War: WARHAMMER is a mix of both a turn-based strategy and real-time strategy. The strategic board of the world is turn-based where you manage your empire, while the battles are intense real-time ordeals.

While there is a simple in-game tutorial when you play as The Empire, you can also access an overview which brings up a Youtube instruction video. I recommend watching it if you’re not familiar with Total War at all or, if like me, it’s been a long time since you last played one. It was very useful just to get a quick idea of what to expect.

Armies are each commanded by a Lord—who can level up, equip special items and banners, and gain skills. Each army can also have powerful hero units, which are interesting, as they can serve two functions: wander alone on the campaign map providing benefits to provinces they are in, or as a powerful unit within an army. Heroes also gain experience points from fighting and performing other actions, which can be used to upgrade them as well. These special units can be very useful in actual battles and they can sway the battle with their power.

It’s all rather familiar to anyone who has played any Total War, Civilization or other grand strategy type games. You will be dealing with research and diplomacy, rebellions and so on..The variety in gameplay comes from all the differences between the in-game factions. For example, Dwarfs will need to keep an eye on their grudges and act accordingly. Whereas the Vampire Counts spread corruption and things like that. It makes each faction a unique experience to play as, which is spices things up across multiple playthroughs.

What I really like about the game that helps me be genuinely interested in it is that it’s not bound by history. We have plenty of historical games, so it feels rather fresh. The variation in the different types of units is fantastic; seeing soldiers run at big lumbering monstrosities while massive artillery fire comes bearing down sure is a sight to see. The battles themselves are certainly brutally beautiful.

What I like about the battle system is that you don’t actually have to command the battles yourself. You can have them auto-resolve and the AI will just do it and present the outcome to you. This is particularly useful if you have an army that will quite obviously stomp all over an enemy easily. It saves you time when you might not want to even bother going directly into the battle yourself.

The battles are immensely fun, especially when you manage to hide entire legions of your troops inside a section of forest to flank your enemy. Using charging horses to break through enemy lines while archers and artillery strike, to thin them out, is glorious.

There is a bit of a controversy surrounding the DLC in the game. I won’t go on about it too long, but I feel the need to point it out. Warhammer as a universe is pretty violent, and this game is largely about destructive battles. To see any blood or gore you need to buy a cheap DLC and enable it. I admit it’s a complex issue due to ratings boards and if it was included by default, or as a free DLC the game would likely have a much higher rating. I don’t agree with it personally, but it is what it is. It’s a really minor feature that doesn’t actually add anything substantial to the gameplay, but I needed to mention it for clarity.

There’s also the fact that one extra playable race costs over a third of the price of the entire game, I’m certainly not a fan of the DLC model here.

Feral Interactive don't control the DLC or pricing though of course, so it's down to the original developer and publisher.

Still, even without the extra DLC on offer, there’s likely tens of hours you could put into it without needing any of it. The Total War games usually have a rather active modding community too, with Total War: WARHAMMER already having over 2,000 mods.

The problem I find is still the same as it is with all Total War games: I am horrific as a tactician when it comes to actually participating in battles. Not even my newly-found enthusiasm for Warhammer helped me learn to not lose all my soldiers repeatedly. Even though I’m really not very good at it, I found it to be the most interesting Total War game I’ve ever played. Likely because it doesn’t have a huge amount of depth to it (so it’s easy to get to grips with) and because it’s rather good-looking.

If you like Total War or Warhammer, this is probably a no-brainer purchase for you. If you’ve not played Total War before, this is probably a fantastic entry to get you into it as it’s quite easy to understand.

You can find Total War: WARHAMMER on Steam and the Feral Store. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Edmene Nov 22, 2016
Thanks for the port, I will probably wait to get the full version of the game, unfortunately the publishers are loving selling a lot of dlc.


Last edited by Edmene on 22 November 2016 at 6:49 pm UTC
Nel Nov 22, 2016
And here I always assumed math was math. I guess it must be differences of precision and how random values are generated.
Take a half glass of Floating Point, add two tablespoons of Precision <---> Performance divergence and a pinch of Rounding Error depending of platform or different libs, shake it up very strongly, you got it.

And we're down to just "Spacious Skies" on the Feral radar. The depth charge one vanished... either because this was it, or because it's another troubled Windows release like Dishonoured 2 that would have made a poor or too much effort Linux port.
I think Depth Charge (Tiktaalik) was this game. It's now free on windows, and Linux/Mac version was on hold for 8 months.
renegat0x0 Nov 22, 2016
So I see the benchmarks were executed on ubuntu. I am not sure if it is a good approach. The games are released on steamos. I do not know if it is hardware or software issue, but I see a big difference when running on mate and on openbox with compton. The latter solution is much closer to steamos. I have nvidia card 950 and am running linux mint 18 mate.
edddeduck_feral Nov 22, 2016
So I see the benchmarks were executed on ubuntu. I am not sure if it is a good approach. The games are released on steamos. I do not know if it is hardware or software issue, but I see a big difference when running on mate and on openbox with compton. The latter solution is much closer to steamos. I have nvidia card 950 and am running linux mint 18 mate.

The games are released on Ubuntu, results on Ubuntu are accurate and are very similar to SteamOS but much easier to use and test. Using an unsupported distro and WM can sometimes cause issues you don't see on supported systems.
Eike Nov 22, 2016
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The games are released on Ubuntu, results on Ubuntu are accurate and are very similar to SteamOS but much easier to use and test. Using an unsupported distro and WM can sometimes cause issues you don't see on supported systems.

I'm expecting that, if no bugs occur, performance on different WMs shouldn't differ much. Do you have experience on this?
edddeduck_feral Nov 22, 2016
The games are released on Ubuntu, results on Ubuntu are accurate and are very similar to SteamOS but much easier to use and test. Using an unsupported distro and WM can sometimes cause issues you don't see on supported systems.

I'm expecting that, if no bugs occur, performance on different WMs shouldn't differ much. Do you have experience on this?

In theory, however many WM's can have a large negative impact on game performance depending on the various settings and features it might use.
lagh Nov 22, 2016
Hehe. I don't even meet the minimum requirements.
That is actually quite sad :(
numasan Nov 22, 2016
In theory, however many WM's can have a large negative impact on game performance depending on the various settings and features it might use.
Really? Looking at these tests with AMD and Intel GPUs, I wouldn't call it a "large" impact, but who am I to argue with Feral:
AMD
Intel
I understand that Feral only wants to officially support one environment, though.

Regarding the MP difference, it really is a bummer. Reading the CoH2 answer, I thought it was an engine specific issue? Will all ports suffer from this? I looked forward to this game, mostly because some of my friends have been pushing and recommended it when it came out (and I like the Warhammer fantasy universe), but now I have to tell them we can't play together, and they wont understand the technical reason :( They most likely have moved on to other games anyway, so in a way the MP issue doesn't matter anymore I guess.

In any case, thanks Feral for working on the port!


Last edited by numasan on 22 November 2016 at 9:15 pm UTC
Liam Dawe Nov 22, 2016
So I see the benchmarks were executed on ubuntu. I am not sure if it is a good approach. The games are released on steamos. I do not know if it is hardware or software issue, but I see a big difference when running on mate and on openbox with compton. The latter solution is much closer to steamos. I have nvidia card 950 and am running linux mint 18 mate.
I test on the most supported and tested distribution when it comes to Linux gaming, as does Phoronix when it comes to his main benchmarks. Penguin Recordings also uses Ubuntu and most others it seems do too. It's the most sane option.
edddeduck_feral Nov 22, 2016
In theory, however many WM's can have a large negative impact on game performance depending on the various settings and features it might use.
Really? Looking at these tests with AMD and Intel GPUs, I wouldn't call it a "large" impact, but who am I to argue with Feral:
AMD
Intel
I understand that Feral only wants to officially support one environment, though.

I would take the results of a single test like the ones above as one single example in a clean environment. It's not that a performance delta always happens (as those tests prove usually the difference is minor) however it *can* happen.

Usually things are fine but then you'll find someone has lost performance and in the end a WM or more usually a WM setting has been isolated as the cause of many weird edge cases. It's more a point of reference about an area that can cause issues not that is always causes issues.

In most cases WMs work just fine but if you have an issue checking your WM is something worthwhile (after you've checked your drivers).

Regarding the MP difference, it really is a bummer. Reading the CoH2 answer, I thought it was an engine specific issue? Will all ports suffer from this? I looked forward to this game, mostly because some of my friends have been pushing and recommended it when it came out (and I like the Warhammer fantasy universe), but now I have to tell them we can't play together, and they wont understand the technical reason :( They most likely have moved on to other games anyway, so in a way the MP issue doesn't matter anymore I guess.

In any case, thanks Feral for working on the port!

We've done loads of games with multiplayer and only a few can't play with Windows due to the reasons we posted on that link. So far these have been games by Relic (DoW2 / CoH2) and Creative Assembly (Total War franchise). We have many other games like the racing games from Codemasters and the XCOM series that support cross platform multiplayer.

I’m surprised that there are math issues for multiplayer. Isn’t there a single server responsible for making sure everybody is in sync, taking important decisions and sending back the new positions and events to all players? In my (limited) experience with multiplayer game development it is a requirement.

The centralised server concept was popular in the late 90s but it has increasingly been replaced by peer to peer based multiplayer which is more robust and removes the overhead of maintaining dedicated server hardware.

There are many reasons for choosing one over the other which you can check out but as with all things multiplayer code and protocols has gotten more complex over time compared to the good old days of hosting a quake server on a headless box in your cupboard. :-(

[edit] Typo fixes


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 22 November 2016 at 10:43 pm UTC
edddeduck_feral Nov 22, 2016
The centralised server concept was popular in the late 90s but it has increasingly been replaced by peer to peer based multiplayer which is more robust and removes the overhead of maintaining dedicated server hardware.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of dedicated servers; even in P2P game clients have to synchronize somehow or you can end up with two players believing they have each killed the other one :). But yes I haven’t followed the state of the art of network game programming recently…

Amusingly that example you used is what can happen when things go wrong.

I recall a couple of matches I played on a game a few years ago during development when that exact scenario would play out. As the games got more out of sync your opponents moves would get worse (as they didn't know what you were doing) and you'd start to win. Sadly same thing happened on both machines and you'd end up both winning and freaking the results code right up.
KimmoKM Nov 23, 2016
It would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.
FredO Nov 23, 2016
It would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.

If you want to try a Creative Assembly first-party port, try TW:Attila. It's been rock solid, but the performance is borderline at best.
KimmoKM Nov 23, 2016
It would have been nice if Creative Assembly did a first-party port but my fears some months ago appear to have been unfounded. The performance is fine.

If you want to try a Creative Assembly first-party port, try TW:Attila. It's been rock solid, but the performance is borderline at best.

It has crap performance on Windows as well (ie. overall it's right in line with most Direct3D->OpenGL ports). Relatively speaking Attila actually performs pretty well on Linux. That was the fear I mentioned, that Feral port would be worse than that.
0aTT Nov 23, 2016
Will "Realm of The Wood Elves" and all other DLCs be ported to Linux in the future?

Should the game be purchased via the feral store to support Feral Interactive directly? Are Linux purchases on Steam really counted? I usually play in Big Picture. I've heard that Valve does not count that.


Last edited by 0aTT on 23 November 2016 at 9:21 am UTC
Cmdr_Iras Nov 23, 2016
Will "Realm of The Wood Elves" and all other DLCs be ported to Linux in the future?

Should the game be purchased via the feral store to support Feral Interactive directly? Are Linux purchases on Steam really counted? I usually play in Big Picture. I've heard that Valve does not count that.

With the exception of the Wood Elves DLC all the others show the SteamOS icon on the steam store, and I fully expect the Wood Elves DLC to be updated shortly.
Crazy Penguin Nov 23, 2016
I now hope Feral will release TW Rome 2, Shogun 2, Napoleon for Linux (and possibly Rome 1, but not essential)
Without cross-platform-support? Thanks, but NO thanks! They should fix the linux and the windows client alike to make it work.
Au contraire, should such things happen I would be saying thanks and thanks. Not everyone is into multiplayer. I'm not, for instance.
Well, not everyone is into playing with dumb cheating AIs. I'm not, for instance! It is far more fun and challenging with other players.

I'm with cRaZy-bisCuiT. Pass! For now I'm gonna spend the estimated ~120€ to buy more new Warhammer stuff from GWS :D.
0aTT Nov 23, 2016
Here is a good video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozhXDhGozqA

Even with a GTX 1070 the Game can't hold the 30 fps line. For me it's a riddle why all claim it would run with 60 fps on a GTX 970. Is there a video to prof this?

I can't believe this after what I know from ATTILA. ATTILA has on my GTX 970 system a similar performance as Warhammer in the above video. And what's really crazy: Whenever the fps rate breaks sharply, the GPU utilization breaks also. This also happens when I play at the lowest level. I have a i7 6700k CPU. With other games I never witnessed such behavior.

There must be a bottle neck somewhere. I love the Total War series and will buy Warhammer anyway. But it's a little bit frustrating to know that the performance will not increase even I update to a GTX 1070.
Eike Nov 23, 2016
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There must be a bottle neck somewhere.

CPU? RAM?
0aTT Nov 23, 2016
There must be a bottle neck somewhere.

CPU? RAM?

My System:
- Intel i7-6700K
- ASUS GTX970
- 2 x 8 GB DDR4-2133
- Xubuntu 16.4
- NVIDIA driver version 375.20

I think it could be the asynchronous compute weakness of nvidia cards. I was wondering why Feral used an AMD card on there TWW live stream.
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