Total War Warhammer 2 Guide

Total War: Warhammer series is based on the Warhammer hobby miniatures game that dates back to 1983.The tabletop game is simple enough. Players gather dozens of miniatures into a singular unit, allowing them to form up in ranks and share statistics in battle. As that unit is wounded, individual miniatures are removed, and the unit as a whole becomes less powerful. Where Warhammer has excelled is in building up lore all around itself, creating a kind of baroque bastion that rivals the towering achievements of the legendary armies portrayed in Tolkien’s own Middle-earth.

Total War: Warhammer 2 features four of that universe’s iconic factions, including the High Elves and the Dark Elves. But the real stars of the show are the Lizardmen, one of Warhammer’s oldest races, and the Skaven, skittering, plague-riddled rat people who are an absolute fan favorite.

The Lizardmen fight like ancient Greeks did, packed tightly into ranks and marching ceremoniously toward their foes. These megafauna set the Lizardmen faction apart and make every one of their battles something spectacular.On the campaign map, the Lizardmen are probably the least interesting of the four: maintaining the sprawling Geomantic Web that powers their highly powerful province edicts forces you to play wide, even while your major objectives contradictingly encourage you to circle the wagons and defend the core of your empire.They can bring in dinosaur-like beasts to use as mounts, shock troops and artillery. Accomplish missions or erect certain buildings, and you can insta-spawn even weirder and more wondrous units from your cities.

The Skaven, on the other hand, take the field like an army of ants. The Skaven are particularly dependent on a specific resource food but come with a nice mixture of really cheap infantry units, perfect for swarming, and high-powered artillery units, poison spreading units and lovable, burly rat ogres.Their low-level units are nothing more than different gradations of meat shield that literally pour out of the ground in front of advancing armies. They’re not quite a horde, but also not quite a settled faction, inhabiting ruins that the enemy can only identify as settlements by sending an army to investigate them. This allows them to hide their most important strategic assets in plain sight, which makes Skaven highly interesting to play, both as and against. They also have a corruption mechanic similar to Vampires and Chaos, with the wrinkle that building it up too high hurts them just as much as their neighbors. 

Your target takes the form of a swirling Vortex comprised of magical energies. As you progress through a pre-made set of special quests, you'll be able to start performing rituals that will, in time, allow you to wrench control of the Vortex from everyone else. But, since all the other races of the world are pushing towards the same end, your progress will be marked along a track with five milestones. Each time you performs one of the five successive rituals, the pace of the entire campaign picks up.You'll research new tactics, weapons, and monsters, and conduct diplomatic consorts with the various races of Warhammer. And, should talks break down and two or more armies meet, you'll be ushered into a tactical view that will task you with micromanaging your troops.Eye of the Vortex, as the single-player mode is called, is among the best a campaign of this type could be. It encourages the right amount of conflict to keep you moving, paces itself well, fits plenty of in-universe lore for diehard fans, and fine tunes about every other facet of its predecessor.

Sometimes the action slows to a halt while heavily armored infantry pound on each other in the middle of the map. Most annoying is the invisible grid system that sits below every map, limiting the options you have for fine control of your troops. But it’s a compromise that’s been present in every iteration of the Total War franchise to date and you simply have to make due with it.Each faction has two leaders to choose from, each with a different starting location on the map. Each one fights very differently in the early game, and each one has a different upgrade path. But to tell what those differences are, you need to go three layers deep in each character’s menu. You need to read a lot and keeping a notebook handy isn’t a bad idea because there is an awful lot of content to keep track of. 

 

This is still a game where hidden units and terrain make all the difference,where a commanding position can help smaller, weaker units fend off a vicious assault. Yet all the same, there’s room for unexpected triumphs, magical attacks and slapstick disaster.Here a misplaced barrage from a bonkers chemical cannon can hit your lines harder than it hits the foe. A ragtag line of Lizardmen javelin-throwers can hold off Skaven shock troops long enough for the cavalry to close. There’s nothing more fun than unleashing the Skaven’s Menace Below attack near unguarded artillery units, watching the little Clanrats erupt from the ground and wreaking havoc, or urging a mass of giant-sized rat ogres into the fray.The Lizardmen, meanwhile, are plain hilarious in battle. On the one side of the field you have your Saurus bezerkers going loco, chasing routing troops on the field while you desperately try to redirect their energies elsewhere. On the other you might have Pteradon riders, colossal regiment-wrecking dinos and a host of other cold-blooded marvels.

This is one game where you need to keep a lot of plates spinning, which is where the option to play the campaign in online co-op, with both players playing the same faction, could make all the difference. This comes along with options for online battles, including a new all-against-all four player option.