All the stats about the map size, number of settlements and regions in Total War Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires compared to its predecessor are just numbers. They are not adequate preparation for getting your hands on them. After all the time in the previous version of this multi-game mashup, I notice a kind of suggestion that after a few seconds of scrolling, I’ll be in the middle of the map. Instead, I am baffled to discover that I am barely a quarter of an age. Keep going.
I time. At the lowest zoom level and starting in the far northwest corner, I press S and D to scroll to the bottom right corner. It took me 44 seconds to get to the end of the map and another 13 seconds of scrolling to the right to get to the far southeast. Almost a whole minute. It must be experienced to be fully understood.
My first campaign as Valkia the Blood begins in the northwest of the world and will unfold east across the entire Arctic Circle as I pummel my rivals. Valkia is one of four new Legendary Lords in the Champions of Chaos DLC coming to support the forgotten faction of the Warriors of Chaos with a major mechanic overhaul. As before, looting is essential to their economy, which is why they’re still a boost-based faction – stop fighting and you risk stalling. But almost everything else about them has changed.
Chaos Warriors compete to curry favor with their dark gods, and depending on this, you can spend Unit Experience ranks to upgrade units to the next equivalent level: Marauders can become Chaos Warriors, which can become Ascended. It’s the primary means by which you access the deadliest units, and it’s another triumph of Creative Assembly’s creative yet gameplay-rich faction design. While you have to stay aggressive, you also have to protect your mutant troops and get them out alive across the field, with no reckless auto-resolves on higher difficulty levels. As designer Mitch Histy said in our recent Immortal Empires factions chat, it’s a delightful piece of fledgling history to rage the world with a level nine chosen army when you remember that they started out as marauding scum. I think that’s what parents feel when they see their children finish school.
This need to build an army over time also increases your susceptibility to threats; On lower difficulty levels, more traditional factions can create a pile of slain dragons in just a few turns to respond to a surprise attack on their border, and while new warriors can still raise large armies quickly, they’ll still be packed with troops. base. .
Since the days of the Tomb Kings, with their radical “look mom, no unit cost” economy, it seems CA has taken another part of Total War’s complex blast engine and beefed it up to become the driving force behind every new set. up to the faction This time it’s an XP drive; it is as valuable as Favor (the Chaos name for gold, its primary currency), and therefore there are many ways to increase its accumulation rate, such as character skills, character buildings, colonies, technologies, and much more.
Warriors valid the secondary currency is souls, which can be spent on gear and later to hold Gifts of Chaos. The most powerful gifts require you to spend a certain amount of souls in total to unlock them, so you’ll want to equip the most expensive gifts to increase your cost per turn. As a Valkia, I can equip the normal gifts of Chaos, as well as special gifts from Khorne, her patron god, which include the only way to access demonic units like the Bloodthirsters.
It’s just the most obvious way that each Warriors sub-faction takes on its own flavor. While all Warriors of Chaos are driven to aggression by the need to loot and gain unit experience, Valkia, as champion of Khorne, is even bloodier: she receives a bleed marker that at high levels increases unit experience. the troops, spreads corruption, and grants Khorne authority that helps replenish troops, which is essential to keeping your armies in fighting shape. She’s not exactly Skarbrand, but it’s still very important to keep your foot on the gas when playing her, as I find out when I find myself between Sigvald, Malekith, and Kylostra.
At first, I flitted between the three enemy lords, watching as Sigvald fled to the east and Malekith clung to me from the west, and vice versa. Unable to lead them into battle, my treasure dries up, Valkia’s bloodlust dries up, and my territory crumbles as they finally come for me right away. It would be interesting to try to recover, but I really want to progress for the pleasure of these experiences, so I’m just saving the dregs. Finally, I agree to pursue Siegwald to the east. Malekith captures a few cities, but his attention is divided between Grombrindal and my Mung vassal tribe. Meanwhile, Valkia makes her way through Sigvald’s territory, bringing back enough loot to raise a second army behind the lines, his high bleed keeping his own troops resupply and rising through the ranks quickly.
Technically, you can capture any settlement, but most of them will be of little use. Aside from specifically marked Dark Fortresses, Chaos Warriors do not earn any income from settlements, only an option to go up and down a level; this can be useful depending on the situation, but it’s not worth sticking with in the long run. Class. Dark dungeons are a prize, but not for the same reasons as other factions: they won’t help you get around the promotion-based army build described above. Instead, they improve your specific experience, corruption, and vassal-focused playstyle, with a notable build chain that increases vassal income in neighboring provinces.
You will have many vassals if you do everything right. Most of the Chaos Wastes regions are marked as belonging to certain Norse tribes, and if you capture the respective stronghold, you will automatically make them vassals. Since non-fortress settlements are so useless to you, it makes sense to gift them to your vassals. As a result, for most of my campaign in Valkia, I found myself charting a bloody streak across the Arctic, taking out pretenders like Sigvalt and Archaon and pacifying their vassals by taking their strongholds. According to lore, that is exactly what the Defenders of Chaos must do: compete with each other to become the only true unifier of the warring followers of the Dark Gods, before crashing down on the rest of the world in an unstoppable wave.
I’ve done several other Immortal Empires campaigns to try and get a sense of the variety of experiences on offer. I liked Valkia so much that I decided to try Archaon. As the only true Uniter of Chaos in the lore, he brings a pan-chaos twist to the Warriors playstyle, with the ability to advance units in variants of all four Chaos Gods, as well as Indivisibles and many other giveaway locations. . make offerings to the four gods. Combined with Archaon’s starting position across the Arctic, that difference is enough to make me want to finish another warrior game with him, something I couldn’t always say about other lords of the same faction.
To be honest, I get that feeling everywhere I look when navigating the Immortal Empires factions menu. I want to dive into the maelstrom of the Southland Thunderdome, but who do I choose? Manfred? Skarbrand? Wurrzag? I want to test out four former Legendary Lords who in the free update will be splitting from their main faction to get their own starting positions, and thanks to the community teasing, Gorst is still the one I want to try. the first. And then Alberic’s trip to Lustria gave me a new excuse, just when he needed it, to start a new campaign with my beloved Bretonnia.
By simply combining the 15 main races from the tabletop game with a complete recreation of the Warhammer world, Immortal Empires has already fulfilled the exciting but distant dream promised when the Total Warhammer Trilogy was announced. But it went beyond what I dared hope at the time, with more obscure races like the Vampire Coast, races like the Cathay that I never thought would develop, and some leaders to each races, many of which alter the experience to the point where a full game is guaranteed.
Yeah, it took a while after launch, and since it’s still in beta, there are some performance issues Creative Assembly wants to address: my game starts to shake after a long session, there are quite a few skipped textures. , and these problems get worse if I try to increase the level of detail. If your machine isn’t very powerful or you can’t ignore these things, I don’t know if I recommend buying older games to activate Immortal Empires until it’s a bit more refined.
However, the gaming experience on offer here can only be overwhelming. These are just impressions that deliberately focus on one of the new factions, but most of the races on this huge and tempting menu have been tweaked recently enough to be worth a try and are different enough from one another to call your attention. attention. That means there are several hundred hours to chew on, and they’re all remarkably different. But if you haven’t sold it yet, take your time: even after CA removed the “beta” tag, we’ll still be closer to the start of the third game than the end, with a few more years of DLC to come. of us
With that in mind, it’s hard to find the right superlative for the scale of this project. Only the longest, most action-packed Paradox games can offer a comparison. Don’t rush if you’re not convinced yet, but I can safely say that all strategy fans should do this for themselves to check it out at some point in the future.
Source : PC Gamesn
