Magic and monsters will make Total War: Warhammer a strategy game like no other
Every Total War game has reinvented itself, cutting even popular ideas to ensure each one feels unique. Shogun: Total War and Medieval: Total War play completely differently, and so they should: the political machinations and warfare of those cultures were entirely different. Tactics change over time, too. How do you fight Samurai? How can you protect your cannons from Russian Hussars? The launch of Total War: Warhammer introduces further questions: how can I best utilise dwarfen artillery? How do I stop the colossal Arachnarok spider from eating my zombies?
Some Total War fans may have found themselves on the fence about a Warhammer fantasy game joining the ranks of a series rooted entirely in real-world history, but the disconnect from established tactics may be its most appealing change. For the best example, take the Vampire Counts, which I got to play recently: they don’t have any ranged weapons. This poses a problem, as the other races still have plenty of long range ways to make vampires hurt.
It’s not noticeable at first, as I skirmish with other Counts for the title of ‘most undead’ and control of nearby territory, but as soon as I try to push into the Dwarfen mountains to the north or the Empire’s holdings to the south, I’m taken apart by an obscene number of arrows and bullets.
RAISED STAKES
“You don’t have any artillery, you don’t have any missile fire, so you kind of have to rethink,” says Scott Pitkethly, Total War: Warhammer’s lead programmer, when I ask how I’m supposed to keep my Vampires alive. “You have to be a lot more focused on using your magic appropriately to try to manipulate enemies’ morale.”
There in lies another massive change for Total War veterans: Vampires are a magic-based faction. They cast spells from afar that can buff troops, harm enemies or even raise the dead to fight by their side. Every race has their own magic abilities, except the Dwarfs, who make up for the lack with gigantic cannons. These races don’t just have small differences relative to each other, they’re unique, which is only appropriate when you’re dealing with a fictional universe as broad as Warhammer.
Other additions to the series include towering creatures that can scatter entire formations if used correctly, and flying units. For the Vampires, flying units move however they want, swooping in to pick off stragglers or isolating key units. The Vampire’s fellbats can harass opponents: the flappy menaces are ineffectual in a stand up fight, but as a flock can be a great distraction.
“We’ve never had flying creatures before,” Pitkethly says. “How are they going to work? If you’re now dealing in three dimensions, how does that work without confusing the player, how can they still have visibility of what’s going on?” The team makes this work using a column of light, faintly illuminating the flying creatures but leaving the standard green ring on the ground below. Initially a bit jarring, it helps as you frantically order them around.
The big guys, on the other hand, are more like tanks, barrelling through the enemy lines and clearing out swathes of smaller enemies. They seem nearly impervious to harm. “Those big creatures are great,” says Pitkethly, laughing as I recount my many victories with a Varghulf, one of Total War: Warhammer’s monstrous giant bats. “But you can’t leave them undefended. I had to keep my general nearby to be healing him up, because he has quite weak leadership.” He doesn’t look like he’s got weak leadership as he ploughs through enemies, but Pitkethly tells me nearly every one of the game’s big creatures has a weakness.
I watch another journalist end up in a fight to the death between an enemy Vampire general and a Varghulf. After they’d beaten the crap out of each other, the Varghulf won. There’s so much appeal in just the spectacle and the individual character animations of these creatures – but bringing these amazing units to the series challenged Creative Assembly to fit them into the rest of the game.
ONE SIZE FIGHTS ALL
“You can have a dwarf fighting a giant, a giant fighting a giant, a man fighting a bat, whatever,” Pitkethly says. “Because of that we really had to think ‘Well, how’s that gonna work?’, and we had to start being much more reactive in our combat and relying less on trying to sync two people up, because you might be fighting a dwarf, but over here there’s a giant kicking you or something and we actually found that made the combat much more dynamic.”
The undead have plenty of challenges of their own. They’re immune to morale issues but still need leadership as they’re susceptible to crumbling when overwhelmed. Crumbling, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like: when your minions are feeling the pressure the flesh will fall from their bones and they’ll crumble away to nothing.
All this makes undead grudge matches interesting, but you really see the differences when you’re facing off against the other races. Battles have a pleasing asymmetry as you try to use your strengths to protect your weaknesses. This helps you get past late campaign boredom: tired of fighting the Empire? Why not pick a fight with the Greenskins or Dwarfs? The vast differences between each side’s abilities are an exciting translation of what the tabletop game itself offers.
Another big change is the handling of sieges: they’re much more focused now. You’re fighting for one or two flashpoints at a time. You might be scaling the walls or breaching the gate for one stage, then battling your way through the city streets in the next. Emphasising just one or two points of conflict keeps the fight manageable, but also makes it more tense.
The team has paid close attention to the boardgame when making key design decisions. “You can read the rules, and you think, ‘OK, that’s the rules,’” Pitkethly says, “but when you’re actually playing it you realise, ‘Oh, that unit’s really good at doing this. It didn’t really come across just from reading the rules, but I see why that unit’s useful now, because the way my army’s set up I really need something fast to get rid of their artillery. OK, that’s what that unit’s for.’”
He cites the magic system as an example of how they’re reinterpreting the rules. “We’ve kept the idea of the Winds of Magic, which is like a pool of magic, so that you if you’ve built up to the bigger spells that you’ll get later on in the game, we don’t want you to be able to win a battle with them straight off, because there’s then no gameplay there. So there is always a management of that pool of magic. The Winds of Magic have to be balanced so that you’re using those spells at the right time. If you use it, just shoot it off at the beginning, you might not be able to cast it again until the battle was decided, so you need to pick those times.”
STATE OF DECAY
This demo is the first time I’ve been able to spend real time with the overarching campaign map as the Vampire Counts. While some of the changes are immediately familiar, such as Dark Magic being money by just another name, some are more extensive. Vampires need to truly control an area before they move across it. They’ll slowly spread vampiric corruption over it. This corruption will improve public order over your undead cities, while reducing public order in the cities of your enemies.
On top of that, vampiric armies start to suffer attrition as soon as they walk through uncorrupted ground. They do have the ability to raise entire units of the dead to join their armies though, even outside of their own provinces. If there’s been a big battle you’ll be able to swing by and raise more powerful forces. This means after a massive fight, you can recoup some of your losses, but it also means after your enemies throw down you can roll past and profit from their deaths with a few new troops.
Each race will have their own perks and drawbacks on the campaign map, and the entire structure is going to feel pretty different: for a start, you can’t take over the entire world. Humans aren’t big fans of living underground, surprisingly, so while you can sack the cities for financial gain, you can’t actually take them over. This means that even as you move into the late game, you’re watching a few problem corners of your map. You can’t steamroller everything and paint it your colour like you could before, which means you might have to learn a few things about diplomacy.
If this all seems too much, don’t worry. This is probably the most rookie-friendly Total War game yet. The game’s explanation of what each unit is good at and what they should be used for was invaluable as I faced off against other races, or got to grips with my own. Being able to hover over one of the qualities to get a tooltip describing exactly what something means is a great boon for those just starting out. From the battles to the campaign screen, the user interface is clearer than it’s been before, which means you can work things out as you’re playing rather than trying to wrestle your way through.
Balancing so many different parts of the game when the combat features so many different types of beast is a challenge for Creative Assembly. Keeping everything understandable, fair and still open to new players has clearly required enormous effort. After translating elements of the boardgame to Total War: Warhammer, the details are fed into a series of automated systems that crunch the numbers overnight. “These automated systems run hundreds and hundreds of battles and fight all the units against each other,” Pitkethly explains. “And they say, ‘Well, this is how you balanced it, but this is what actually happened.’ Then we’ll look at those kind of troublesome units and we’ll play them in the game and we’ll try and work out, ‘well, why is it doing so much better than the stats would suggest?’”
After some readjustments, the team drops the stats back into the system and they go through the whole process again, until everything comes out correctly. The goal is to create a strategy game that captures the attention not just of fans of Total War or Warhammer, but also gamers who have never tried either before. The spectacle of watching a giant spider tear through dwarfs in a mine is unlike anything the Creative Assembly team have shown us before – and the challenge of combining Total War with such an odd, broad fantasy universe is bringing out the best in them.