WARHAMMER 3 And The Lords Of The End Times

The last four years of Total War WARHAMMER 3 have been busy, with some huge DLC releases, some small and a number of free-LC updates everyone who owns one of the WARHAMMER games got free of charge.  Lords of the End Times incorporates all that into one huge DLC, three almost as impressive DLCs and a free Legendary Lord for everyone.  There are some fairly major game mechanic changes to the Vampire Counts, two of their Lores get updates thanks to Neferata’s arrival.

Creative Assembly is trying to get more people interested in the game, as according to the PR if you pick up the Nagash DLC you will get the entire Immortal Empires map and campaign, albeit with very limited choice in which civilizations you can play.  At $12 CDN that’s a small price to pay to try the game out and see if you want to expand your roster.  The first hit is almost free, as it were.

It’s Getting Crowded In The House

The start of an Immortal Empires game now has at least 309 separate factions; I suspect some had already been wiped out by the time I could get a screenshot.  That makes starting positions interesting and so now you get a much larger flyby when starting a campaign to give you a better lay of the land and some hints on who is going to object to your presence.  This is helpful for new players or ones who haven’t played in a while.  There are, if you spend enough money, two dozen factions with well over 100 Legendary Heroes to chose from so you have no shortage of things to try out.

CA did figure out that even with this much choice, in general your short or long campaign is often simply taking enough provinces to get a win.  There are some races that give you a little more interesting options as well as side quests.  They’ve also created a number of extra resource types unique to certain races you can gather and generally either spend them for a big but short lived bonus or a small but permanent one.  It helps a bit if those bonuses match your play style but in many cases they aren’t a major source of interest in your WARHAMMER 3 campaign.

To try to ameliorate this Lords of the End Times overhauls the Short Campaign victories for every single faction.  They now target more specific territories and require you to improve certain things within your Empire, as opposed to being almost exclusively the gaining of more territory.   If you hit all the goals of a Short Campaign your Lord will get a unique benefit to help you go on to a Long or Supremacy victory if you so desire.  That may help with anyone suffering WARHAMMER fatigue.

Lastly, the optional old End Game crisis mechanic has been moved up to the mid-game, which I didn’t quite have time to trigger before posting.  As before, if you are playing one of the races involved in a crisis then that crisis will never occur.

Free-LC Vampire Counts Rework And Neferata’s Web of Power

The update everyone gets applies to the Vampire Counts and incudes Neferata, the first Vampire, who is hanging out near the Chaos Dwarfs.  The Vampire Lords now depend solely on Raise Dead for their troops, no more hiring them from a city, those buildings now grant you the ability to raise a corpse of a different variety.  This means you are going to need to ensure you have a fresh supply of corpses at all times, either through slaughter or via buildings in your cities which generate some every turn.

It’s not just that simple however, higher tier units want blood, as do Blood Decrees, a variety of tech research options to build certain buildings and the  build your own Vampire mechanic.  There are buildings which process corpses into blood and you can hope to get some as a reward for certain quests.  As you explore you may spot a city bearing a new icon, that of a Vampire lair.  Once you take control of that city you can create your own Vampire Lord from any of the five Bloodlines and spend extra blood to improve them before they awaken.  Once awakened they function and upgrade as a normal Lord, you can’t use the lair to upgrade them after they’ve hatched.  The lairs are also a one shot deal, only one one Vampire can be made in each lair.

Neferata Has Been Around A Lot Longer Than Most

Neferata, literally the first Vampire, does things a bit differently than your average von Carstein.  She has a number of Handmaids you reanimate as you finish certain tasks and can upgrade via a special tech tree available only to her and not the rest of the WARHAMMER 3 bloodsuckers.  They will be familiar to Skaven players, oddly enough, as they exist for one purpose only, to create secret covens in your neighbours cities.  They function similarly to Undercities, with a concealment rating and a variety of buildings you can erect to make your life easier or your enemy’s worse.  Unique to the Handmaids is the ability to reclaim them for a second use thanks to a specific building you can make in a coven, they aren’t only single use.

Neferata also has a mechanic called the Web of Power that lets you spend her unique resource, Manipulation, to gain a variety of benefits and do awful things to those that draw your ire.  Unfortunately they are likely to know it was you and so you will strain your relations with them if you choose to scheme against them.  If you own WARHAMMER 3 you can check out the other unique features she brings as everyone gets Neferata for free.

Thanquol, The Grey Seer and Favourite of The Horned Rat

As he will tell you himself, Thanquol is the best Skaven around and once he gets Boneripper, his enormous Rat-Ogre mount there are not many who will argue with him.   His armies hit harder than other Skaven thanks to his Stormfiends, which come in both melee and missile varieties and do immense amounts of damage.  The Warp-Doom Magma cannon is also something to behold.  That’s always fun but not Thanquol’s favourite past time.

Plans Within Masterplans

Thanquol isn’t content with regular Skaven scheming, he has an even better plan or three with the help of a specific type of hero.  The Great-Smart plan can be used to summon a new Verminlord, convince the Horned Rat to take a violent dislike to a specific city or instantly sprout an Undercity in a targeted city.  Fairly similar to what a certain original Skaven unit does, but he gets them too!  The Steal-Take plan lets you rob another city of money and food, perhaps even a magic item if you are good enough.

The Kill-Stab plan is absolutely hilarious.  It lets you invisibly build up and then spawn an army outside of an enemy city, the size of which depends on your plan.  You can use them in tandem with a major army to absorb losses and give you a better shot at victory of course, but it’s far more fun to picture the look on an opponent massing at your border as one of the cities far behind their borders gets completely devastated.   You could also just plant an Undercity or take the city over, though Skaven left on their own often don’t do well.

The plans are a separate mini-game, where you can balance the risk of being caught before the scheme reaches fruition versus improving the army you spawn, the amount of goodies you steal or how much you want to punish a neighbour.  The schemes take a minimum of several turns to complete, the longer they go the better the results, unless you get caught.

You need to unlock the various upgrades via warpstone, with each of the improved schemes having several levels you can unlock if you want.  The schemes are part of your goals to win the Short Victory, as WARHAMMER 3 does try to make those more interesting than they have been.

Boris Todbringer Wants You To Know It’s Middenland Not Land of the Middens!

Todbringer is buds with the wolf-god Ulric and really doesn’t like Beastmen, especially not Khazrak One-Eye.  He has all the problems of the Empire to deal with plus, since his lands include Drakwald forest, Beastmen incursions to deal with.  This mechanic is somewhat similar to what happens to the Wood Elves, when people come tromping into their forests and need to be taught a lesson.  Thankfully you do get an indication of how close one is to launching and a hint at how powerful it might be.  Once the Beastmen come to visit you have a few turns to get there and deal with them before they become a major pain.

To deal with them Boris prefers to go toe to toe over cavalry charges, with many of his foot units being anti-infantry and anti-armour as well as being harder to take out than your average Empire foot soldier.  That’s not to say he doesn’t respect cavalry, just that he only takes the best of the best such as the Knights Panther.

The Temple Of Ulric Throws Parties

In order to help Boris survive against Beastmen and the other enemies of the Empire you have a unique resource, gained by defeating enemy armies, which you spend to create and upgrade six Sanctuaries at the Temple of Ulric.  Thankfully you don’t actually construct them in cities, so they don’t take up a building space nor can they be taken away from you once built.  As you improve them you unlock army bonuses and higher tier troops.  You will also have to fulfill a variety of prerequisites to grow your Sanctuaries’ power.

Life isn’t all doom and gloom in the Middenlands, you also throw a party every 10 turns.  They cost but do give you temporary bonuses depending on who you invite.

The Glottkin Are The Most Disgusting Ménage à Trois Going

Otto and Ethrac Glott ride their brother Ghurkm who is now an immense spawn of Nurgle in a mix of might and magic not many Legendary Lords can match.  They are huge though, so no hiding from enemy missile units in a melee swarm.  They’re rather similar to the other Nurgle Lords, though the Flayerkin are interestingly cheap damage dealing troops and the while the Chaos Siege Giant isn’t much better than your average Chaos Giant, which is bad enough as it is, they also look great and don’t really believe in walls.

You can build and recruit Chaos units, and empower them like Norsca and Warriors of Chaos can, as well as recruiting Nurgle units.  The Nurgle units come from Gardens of Nurgle and once you’ve planted and upgraded a few you will end up with far more demonic units then either of those factions, if you so desire.

The Gardens of Nurgle are planted when you take over a city, either fully replacing a smaller provincial city or mostly overtaking a province capital.  Planting in a capital will allow you to build some of the original buildings as well as Nurgle specific ones.  These gardens can also provide Blessings to boost you or literally plague your enemies.

The amount of gardens you can plant is controlled by yet another unique racial currency, and you will need to plant them in specific places to win a Short Victory.  Fun to play if you want a bit more flexibility than either another Nurgle or Chaos Lord offers.

Nagash, Supreme Lord Of The Undead And The End

The coming of Nagash was once a terrifying end game crisis, but now you can be that nightmare scenario.  You start small and will need to subjugate Mortarchs, aka the Vampire Confederation mechanic but with more benefits, build a Necropolis or ten, gather your books and empower the Black Pyramid.  When you build a Necropolis you turn that province into a Land of the Dead which feeds you your unique resource that you need to raise units.  There is no hard limit on the number of Necropolis you can erect, however you will face penalties if you exceed the soft limit.  That limit is increased by taking more land and devastating it in your own special way.

Nagash Is Not A Picky Necrophiliac

The theme of most of the new WARHAMMER 3 lords is flexibility, offering you a lot of ways to personalize your armies and the benefits you chose to apply to your civilization.  None more so than Nagash who can raise any type of undead that strikes his fancy.  If you can’t decide if you want to play with the firepower of the Vampire Coast armies, the tanks of the Tomb Kings or the endless hordes of the Vampire Counts then don’t!

Nagash starts with the Lore of Undeath, but as you collect his nine books you will get access to spells from other Lores.  Even more entertaining, they come with army buffs and generally automatically trigger in combat based on certain circumstances.

Nagash can field them all, every single undead unit you might want can be combined into the horrific undead melange of your choice.  It’s not just the units either, every type of Lord or Hero is ready to serve you.  This makes Nagash a very amusing choice even if you’ve played WARHAMMER 3 repeatedly.  It also gives anyone who wants to take advantage of the fact this unlocks the Immortal Empire for a very low price a taste of two different DLCs as a bonus.

The Black Pyramid Will Make You Flip Your Lid … Even If It Hasn’t Flipped Itself Yet

The inside of the Black Pyramid of Nagash is something no one has beheld until now and it is something else.  If you are unimpressed by the small bonuses which Creative Assembly have been giving out to every new race in the last few DLCs you aren’t going to like this thing one bit.  On the other hand if you like these small bonuses and enjoy figuring out synergies between them to act as force multipliers then this is going to make you more excited than Jack Skellington at Christmas.

The inside is huge and comprised of almost innumerable buffs for you to empower.  They all need empowered sigils, which you get for being a good undead demigod on his way to godhood.  The buffs offer advantages to your troops, the available Winds of Magic during battles to making Nagash himself stronger and a variety of other things.  There are so many you’re not likely to unlock them all in a single playthrough and they branch off at certain levels so you can try out your own favourites instead of choosing from a limited number of options.

Of all the new DLC, Nagash is undoubtedly the most interesting addition and the way he works in WARHAMMER 3 shouldn’t disappoint his fans.  His campaign will start slow but once you start gathering power you will be able to build an army to your specific desires and buff them exactly how you want.  That’s also a good way to be introduced to Total War WARHAMMER for the first time.

With Total War WARHAMMER 40K on the horizon it is impressive that Creative Assembly have been growing this game for just over a decade now.  They are apparently not done yet either; no specific promises but hints that they will continue work on WARHAMMER.  There are around 100 individual DLCs for the three games, from single heroes with their own unique campaigns to sweeping updates like Lords of the End Times.  A rather expensive habit to get into, but one which should continue to keep you occupied.