But while these are welcome improvements, until Creative Assembly ports over all the changes from the first Warhammer’s fantastic Foundation update, some of the leaders are a step back from their counterparts in the original game. Playing as one of the Old World factions does feel different, then, with more places to colonise, ruins to explore and tweaks that bring them more in line with the Warhammer 2 factions. In my case, it meant that I was able to settle some of those Dwarven outposts and protect my rotten heartlands, but it also inspires some unexpected conflicts as factions take unusual expansion paths and collide with their new neighbours.

Mortal Empires uses the same rules, and it's had a pretty big impact on how factions develop. When Warhammer 2 introduced the concept of climates, it let any faction put down roots in any settlement, with the caveat that settlements in the wrong climate would be penalised. In the first Warhammer, factions could only colonise specific types of settlements, so these Dwarven towns were ultimately worthless to the Vampire Counts. Dealing with them used to mean razing their settlements, but a razed town can always be colonised by Dwarves again, and until then it would just be left fallow. The moment you turn around to deal with the Empire, those sneaky, stumpy blighters could crawl out of their underground fortresses and tumble down the mountainside to lay siege to Vampire cities. Every piece of DLC, aside from the Norsca faction, can be used in Mortal Empires.Īn early threat to the Vampire Counts are the Dwarven factions milling around the mountains to the east and south. This time, though, I picked one of the DLC leaders: Vlad von Carstein. My very first Total War: Warhammer campaign, back when I first got my hands on it last year, was with the hoity-toity Vampire Counts, so for old times’ sake, I returned to the haunted forests and imposing castles of Sylvania. The cinematics and the tense race for control of the titular Vortex are gone, and it’s a loss, but plenty of other Warhammer 2 improvements have been carried over. Like the first Warhammer campaign, it’s largely a free-for-all with each faction being given specific capitals to conquer and the eventual Chaos invasion to survive.

I love it.Īfter Total War: Warhammer 2’s tighter, objective-driven Vortex campaign, I was hesitant to jump into the more aimless Mortal Empires. It took me an hour of second-guessing and two false starts before I finally settled on a faction and leader. In terms of scale, it’s the series at its most ambitious, and its most daunting. Mortal Empires is Total War’s grandest of grand campaigns: a stunningly huge global war with over 100 factions and 35 leaders duking it out over multiple continents.

Total war warhammer 2 settlements