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Total War: Warhammer 3’s campaign is packed with new and chaotic ideasEight hours with the Ruinous Powers
Eight hours with the Ruinous Powers
The first time I wrote aboutTotal War: Warhammer, Ed Milliband had just lost a general election because of a sandwich. There’s a joke there about him stepping down but the Chaos having remained, but I can’t figure it out. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is this: it’s been almost seven years since then. SEVEN! And I’m still head over heels in love with these games even now. Somehow, impossibly, that seems to be holding true forWarhammer 3as well.
In a recent hands-on event, I was able to play something like eight hours worth of this final game in the trilogy from the comfort of my own spare room. Having not done a “digital preview” before now, this was something of a revelation to me. Wearing my comfortable clothes and with a steady supply of big mugs of tea, I booted up the game, hit ‘New Campaign’ and was greeted with the following screen.
Everything you accomplish on the campaign map from winning battles, to looting settlements, to leveling up your extremely furious Prince, gives you the opportunity to earn favour with at least one of the four gods. And the more they like you, the better the goodies you’ll be able to unlock.
This faction is all about synergy, then. How do different units from different factions compliment one another in battle? What playstyles does that encourage? Is this actually any more fun than just sticking with a single, more intentional roster? And to be honest, I can’t answer any of those questions just yet. I haven’t played any of the other four Chaos factions on their own yet, let alone making sense of this mix and match approach. It seems interesting though!
I do want to mention one other Daemons of Chaos feature that I absolutely loved right off the bat. As well as unlocking different buildings and units, pleasing each of the Chaos gods also gives your Daemon Prince access to a wide variety of new body parts to choose from. These come with all sorts of different traits and abilities to better focus your lord’s playstyle in battle, but it’ll also mean that they’ll start to take on the aesthetic of their preferred god as well. Dedicate your life to Nurgle, for example, and you might find your prince is now sporting a second mouth where his belly button used to be. Big fan of this.
With all that being said, the Daemons of Chaos somewhat paled in comparison to the other faction I was able to muck around with. You’re unlikely to have spotted this one in your local Games Workshop however, as it’s only really referenced in the more obscure, dust-covered tomes of Warhammer Fantasy lore. Having been fleshed out with this very game in mind, the Grand Cathay faction is the result of amore direct collaborationbetween Creative Assembly and Games Workshop, we’re told.
Playing as Mao Ying, the Storm Dragon, I was tasked with defending the GreatBastion, a gigantic wall separating the natural world from the sprawling Chaos Wastes beyond. As the campaign progresses, a bar at the top of your screen shows the current level of Chaos forces massing on the other side and once it’s filled, a great invasion is launched. The Grand Cathay people are then tasked with manning the wall’s four hefty gates and repelling any attack from breaking through.
Thankfully, there was another way to bolster my coffers without taking that particular risk and it’s entirely unique to this faction. It’s also totally brilliant. Grand Cathay has the option to send out caravans to trade with other cities using a system called The Ivory Road.
Each caravan is essentially an army in its own right, although the units it’ll have at its disposal are somewhat pre-decided, at least to begin with. After hiring a Caravan Master and piling them up with supplies, you point them towards some far away city and each turn they’ll move towards it as quickly as possible. If the territory they need to cross is under friendly control, perhaps they’ll arrive unscathed, but to get the biggest payday you’ll likely want to take more of a risk.
And so, while you’re dealing with the latest invasion of the Grand Bastion or trying to expand your territory, your caravan will quietly be pottering its way across the world map in the background. Occasionally you’ll need to take control in order to defend it from attack or decide whether to pay a certain amount of gold to take advantage of a shortcut and escape danger. There’s something really appealing about the fact that you can’t just manually recruit units to these caravans like you might with a typical army and so losing anything in a battle feels especially painful.
In fact, as far as I could tell, the only way to introduce new forces into your caravan is via the Choose Your Own Adventure style events that pop up from time to time. This might see you grabbing a couple of units of crossbowmen, or perhaps some cavalry, but it can also mean recruiting heroes from entirely different factions too.
As a result, I found myself just as invested in the successes and failures of these caravans as I did in my primary force on the campaign map. I think this might be one of my favourite faction-specific systems across the entire trilogy, to be honest. It’s such an intriguing thing to have ticking away in the background in between turns of a more defensive campaign focused more solely on the Great Bastion and its gates.
And sure, just like Nate (RPS in peace) mentioned in hisearlier preview, Warhammer 3’s Survival Mode battles are Total War at perhaps its most arcadey. But they’re also great and a superb change of pace to mark the various milestones you’ll hit across a campaign.
