TOTAL WAR: WARHAMMER II
Chris Thursten gets hands-on with the Lizardmen in this month’s cover feature.
I’m happy to be ordering Lizardmen around. The first Total War: Warhammer zoomed in on the Old World’s heartland, which makes sense—you can’t do Warhammer Fantasy properly without Chaos, Dwarfs, Orks, and the Empire. Even so, I’ve been waiting for Creative Assembly to turn the game’s focus to the stranger things that lurk at the fringe of the setting: the stuff that defies Tolkien and, for me, defines Warhammer.
Okay, okay. High Elves are very Tolkien—but let’s talk about dinosaurs riding other dinosaurs.
Lizardmen are serious-minded dinosaur people from space that live in a jungle continent called Lustria. The race and its homeland make up a quarter of WarhammerII’s campaign, which also introduces the High Elves and their toilet seat-shaped home of Ulthuan, the Dark Elves, and the wastelands of Naggaroth, and a mystery fourth faction in the Southlands that Creative Assembly are being coy about. It’s definitely Skaven.
This new map and its inhabitants have been part of the TotalWar: Warhammer plan from the beginning— Creative Assembly’s mission, which will span three games, is to capture every aspect of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle setting in a single sandbox. “There are so many races,” says game director Ian Roxburgh. “We want to do them all, and we can’t do them in one game. We made the decision—before we’d even started on the first one—that we had to do three games. Then we designed what each instalment of the trilogy would be, knowing they’d eventually all come together.”
Total WarhammerII will have a campaign dedicated to this new map and its new factions. Shortly after launch, however, you’ll be able to bolt both games together to play on one gigantic map with every faction released for both games. Even then, I will probably play as Lizardmen.
My first hands-on with WarhammerII takes the form of a battle between Lizardmen and High Elves in a huge jungle temple—a massive staircase, basically, with a floating space pyramid at the top. My objective is to stop the Elves from completing a ritual, which means either wiping them out completely or targeting and killing two chariot-riding wizards. The encounter is a scripted quest battle, which means that certain objectives kick in—and certain parts of my army arrives—at different times.
My first task is to shift some High Elf archers and spearmen off a narrow bridge, and my own force is geared for close combat. My army is led by Kroq-Gar, a swole alligator-man riding a Carnosaur (think: T-Rex). He’s accompanied by two units of Saurus Warriors, a feral Stegadon (ultra triceratops turbo edition), and a Bastiladon (the evolutionary precursor to sound-of-2013 soft rockers Bastille). The tight confines of the bridge favor the High Elves, but I decide to be an optimist.
I stop my forces just outside of bow range and divide
them—dinosaur-men to the left, actual dinosaurs to the right. I give the Stegadon and Bastiladon a charge order, and wait for them to cover half of the distance towards the High Elf line, then send everything else forward. The gambit works: As the Stegadon and Bastiladon plough into the first line of spearmen—and they really do make an impact—the centre of the High Elf force wheels to engage them from the side, exposing their own flank to Kroq-Gar and his mates.
They move in herds
Here’s a fact about Stegadons and Bastiladons: They’re herbivores, or at the very least inspired by herbivores. Carnosaurs? The clue’s in the name.
Kroq-Gar collides with the High Elf flank as a big dinosaur riding a bigger, redder dinosaur might be expected to. The melee on the bridge is going my way decisively, but the archers at the back still have free reign. For now, at least.
In addition to the cooldown-dependent special abilities wielded by heroes, armies in WarhammerII have abilities of their own. These are faction-specific and unlocked by meeting specific criteria on the campaign map. If High Elves properly fortify a new settlement type called a Fortress Gate, for example, they can summon giant eagles to help them when they’re defending. My Lizardmen go one better: They can summon velociraptors from space.
I’ve got three charges of this spell on a long cooldown, but it’s time to use one. I click an area behind the High Elf, archers and a few seconds later a pack of Cold Ones beam in like a Star Trek away team. Unlike a Star Trek away team, they then murder everybody. Clever girls.
It’s here that I encounter another of WarhammerII’s new features, a state called ‘Out of Control’ that all Lizardmen are at risk of to a degree, but feral beasts in particular. It’s essentially reverse routing: Instead of running away, a unit runs amok. You lose precise control, but the enemy still has a very angry dinosaur to deal with. It’s a small thing, but it had an interesting impact on all three of my runs through this battle. During this first attempt, I lost control of my Cold Ones on the bridge. In my second attempt, both my Stegadon and Bastiladon went rogue after the bridge, and charged the bulk of the High Elf army by themselves. This forced me to make a decision: Do I leave them to it while I wait for the rest of my army to catch up, which is what I originally planned to do? Or do I take advantage of their enraged state and charge with them and hope for the best?
After gaining a good, solid foothold, the next step is breaking the High Elf army proper. At this point I’m granted the bulk of my army, including loads more Saurus Warriors, a couple of groups of Skinks (lizards with blowpipes), some Cold One cavalry, and a pair of
A few seconds later a pack of Cold Ones beam in like a Star Trek away team
Bastiladons with mounted Solar Engines—crystals that fire lasers, obviously. The High Elves also have their own reinforcements: Cavalry, elite melee units such as White Lions, and Swordmasters of Hoeth, not to mention a huge, orange Sun Dragon.
I commit the bulk of my Saurus Guard to an uphill charge into the first line of High Elves, and send Kroq-Gar with the Cold One cavalry around the side where they’ll face less resistance. High Elves are extremely potent on defense, particularly when given a chance to protect their flanks. I want to split them up and surround them, rather than get stuck in a war of attrition. Another use of my army ability sees more Cold Ones beam in, but this time I deploy them behind the entire High Elf army, right on the heels of their cavalry. The Cold Ones themselves are doomed, but I’ve caught the horsemen before they can charge. The delay buys me a bit of time, which is useful, because the Sun Dragon has just come down on the back line of my Saurus Warriors.
I had already committed all of my ranged units—the Skinks and Solar Engines—to firing at the dragon, but now I need to deal with it. I redirect Kroq-Gar and his Carnosaur thunders back through the Elven line, through my own troops, and lands a crushing shoulder barge. The Sun Dragon is badly wounded, and begins to take off, but it is blasted out of the sky by the combined fire of the two Bastiladon-mounted Solar Engines. It is an extremely ‘Warhammer’ moment.
Mage quit
The Elven Swordmasters and White Lions are holding their own, however. I’ve succeeded in bogging them
RIGHT: It’s the same engine as the first game, updated with new rendering tech.
We’re not going to push too far into a linear route
down, but they are steadily depleting my stock of Saurus Guard. Kroq-Gar and his Carnosaur send the Elven general to Elf Heaven, but he sends my Bastiladon to Dinosaur Heaven, which is better. It’s at this point that I gain some Terradon riders—Skinks riding pterodactyls that drop rocks on people—which helps, but not enough to secure outright victory. Instead, I go looking for those wizards. They’re wizarding about on chariots at the back—but if I can catch them, I win.
My final batch of teleporting Cold Ones traps one wizard for long enough for me to send a free unit of Saurus Warriors to surround it, but the other is trickier. I extract Kroq-Gar from the tangle again and send him charging around the flank, chasing the fleeing mage across the back line of his own army. Then, I give the Terradon riders a melee charge order, bringing them swooping down on top of the wizard and pinning him into combat. Kroq-Gar’s Carnosaur smashes into him from behind, and the rest is silence. Followed by victorious Saurian bellowing.
The ritual I thwarted demonstrates one of the ways that factions will try to get ahead in the new campaign. At the heart of the map is a vortex of magical energy, which is the objective of all four of WarhammerII’s factions. Each engages with it in a different way—and each wants something else from it—but in a standard campaign, victory is a matter of winning the ‘race’ to the vortex. Previously, victory conditions have been faction-specific and independently pursued. Here, a shared goal is provided in order to spur a more exciting endgame.
“We’ve had, for years with TotalWar, an issue with the endgame being an endless march towards inevitable victory,” Roxburgh says. “Even us, who are big fans of the game, end up starting a new campaign before finishing the previous one. We’ve done various things in our history games over the years—we’ve had civil war mechanics, that sort of thing—but it still boils down to loads of armies and auto-resolved battles. We wanted to keep the game something that is on a knife-edge as much as possible, and that you could lose towards the end. Even in the old games with an endgame mechanic, you only lose by losing your last settlement—and when you own a third of the map, you’re not going to lose! Whereas now you can, because of the race and the need to get there first. This is a real attempt to solve that endgame thing.”
It’s also designed to provide players with new ways to scupper each other’s plans beyond the TotalWar stalwarts of attritional warfare and chance-based subterfuge. Each participant in the race will need to gather specific resources in order to perform the necessary rituals. That might mean dedicating a settlement to the task, or sending out armies to perform missions or raid ancient ruins for treasure. If you’re worried about an enemy’s progress, you can commit forces to thwarting these attempts and secure a long-term advantage for yourself beyond what a skirmish might normally yield in a Total War game. Placing campaign-spanning importance on specific battles will hopefully make players more invested in what happens to their armies, and not just fixated on whether or not they’ve got the numbers to snowball over every settlement in their way.
The AI will seek to thwart your plans, too, but while a last-minute loss is possible, Creative Assembly wants to make sure that a campaign can’t be brought to a premature end without a fight. “You still get a chance to resist being beaten suddenly,” Roxburgh says. “You’ll have a chance to have a fight to save yourself and carry on. It’s not going to be a case of, ‘Oh! You’ve lost.’ There’s plenty of chances for players to interact with it and not lose.”
Development manager Sam Millen stresses that the sandbox nature of a TotalWar campaign is still intact. “If you want to play through this campaign in a more traditional way, expanding out and getting territory, that naturally feeds into the race. We’re not going to push too far into a linear route where people only have one way to win.” Wiping out a faction takes them out of the race, as you’d expect, so a pure military victory is still possible for players who want to pursue one. The promise of this new campaign, however, is of more diverse races engaging with a more reactive strategic layer—a TotalWar game more about tactics than territory.
As our interview comes to a close, I try to draw the identity of that mystery fourth race, obviously Skaven, out of Roxburgh and Millen. They’re not having it.
“We will say that the list of races is yet to be… rat-ified” Roxburgh says, extremely pleased with himself.