Because it is on the anvil of pain that the gods forge heroes.
Blighted Empire
It was a hot and humid 1997 when a local hobby shop owner invited my brother and me to check out a Warhammer game night. I was 12 and I was enchanted. Turned out to be quite a thrilling and relaxing hobby, meeting new players, buying new models, painting up armies, pouring over lore and strategies and rules, an experience that lasted well over a decade for me. It was also, however, honestly time-consuming and debilitatingly expensive. A handful of pewter models in ’97 could set you back over a hundred bucks, a lot of money for a kid with a single mom and nothing to do but school and some odd jobs and chores. Running Tyranids in Warhammer 40k and Lizardmen in what we then called Warhammer Fantasy was more than enough hobby for me besides fishing, diving, drawing, gardening, hiking, writing, and gaming. I share all of that to emphasize the sheer relief and cozy familiarity I felt checking out Total War: Warhammer II.
Toys to Life
Not only did Warhammer II remind me of the handful of strategy games I played on the first computer I ever bought, and the family’s cow-print Gateway before that, but it was a massively cheaper effort all around. Even with a handful of DLC purchases for factions I was interested in trying out, Total War: Warhammer II was absolutely and delightedly dwarfed the financial commitment required to play the tabletop Warhammer equivalent.
I could amass huge hosts and battle across detailed terrain all without having to purchase and paint models, customize them for characters that hadn’t been made yet, or carve hills and forts out of cardboard and styrofoam. It brought an entire adolescent world for me to vivid life, and I’m grateful for that. What I underestimated was Warhammer’s already intrinsic complexity and the deluge of information and systems presented to new players of Total War: Warhammer II…
Vortextual Consent
The game is broken down into quests and campaigns. For quests, there are a handful of lore-oriented battles, wars, and skirmishes with special caveats, limitations, and goals for players to suss out. Makes for a neat way to try out new factions, though I didn’t spend a ton of time with the quests.
For campaigns, there’s Vortex and Mortal Empires. Now with Mortal Empires, you have to own both Warhammer II as well as Total War: Warhammer (these goofy names, I can’t even) so I have not touched that bit at all. The Vortex campaign is where I spent the majority of my armed conflict and it is a doozy. I found it so hard that it took me nearly half a dozen attempts to even begin to get anywhere and it was over a dozen attempts before I finally beat it.
Vortex is a capture-the-flag-style-esque campaign for many factions. This involves building up your armies and taking over territories, then completing a certain number of rituals before you can fight the final battle. It’s a race against other Vortex factions in this regard. You’ll need to reach the final battle to take control of the Vortex first, ensuring the swirling ethereal hurricane and its ebbing energies are yours and yours alone. This is much easier said than done, though.
Boomstacks
When you’re finally ready to attempt a ritual to move toward taking control of the Vortex and the ritual begins, you’ll find yourself invaded by some beefy enemy armies that seem to pop up in the worst possible places. Trying to organize and mobilize against these new threats can be tricky if you’ve over-expanded your territory or you’ve depleted your forces from constant battle. I just about got wiped out by the incursions of Chaos in my earliest runs. Those doomstacks are no joke and as you progress down the number of rituals toward the final battle, you’ll be facing beefier and beefier invasions.
Seems to be they’ll appear in unpredictable positions? So you’re best off doing the best you can to spread your forces out and guard the cities casting the rituals. If those cities fall, you’ll fail the ritual and have to start over. Oh and the rituals can take, what? Up to 20 turns by the end of the game?
A Matter of Faction
Total War: Warhammer II presents players with a wealth of armies to choose from, even without the DLC. All told, you can take control of the Empire, Vampire Counts, Greenskins, Dwarfs, Wood Elves, Dark Elves, High Elves, Skaven, Lizardmen, Tomb Kings, Vampire Coast, Bretonnia, and I think that’s not even the full list. Many of those races have different commanding lords representing different factions within those races, each with their own subset of special rules, abilities, and the like.
I sided with the Lizardmen, of course. Lord Mazdamundi represented what I read to be an easy campaign, but even playing on easy, I had a heckuva time with the frog wizard. I next moved my attention to Itza and its white lizard leader, who awesomely started the campaign with Lord Kroak, a mummified amphibian relic-priest and one of my favorite pieces of Lizardmen lore, but found there was simply too much ground to cover. It wasn’t until I got a hold of Kroq-Gar that I really started to make a dent in the campaign past the first ritual.
Kroq-Gar of the Hill People
I chalk this up to a few things. Firstly, practice. Getting the hang of Warhammer II’s detailed turn-based strategy overworld with building construction, recruitment, army and income balancing, skill points and skill trees, rituals, and placement PLUS its real-time tactics battles with different units and characters, magic spells, items and equipment, flanking, assaulting, ranged attacks, deployment, and so on… all of that is a steep hill to climb for a new player. So many systems! So much to manage and micromanage! I get that coming to this game with some Total War series experience would be a boon, but I hadn’t played a game like this in quite a while.
I also think that Kroq-Gar’s starting position was humungous for starting the campaign and sticking with it to victory.
Open the Door, Get on the Floor
Everybody has to start somewhere, but Kroq-Gar gets this nicely isolated spot on the backside of a mountain range on a peninsula where he can’t be easily attacked except by sea or through a single mountain pass. That gave me enough time to start up recruiting a serious force, invest in my extant cities, get on the good side of my neighbors (yes, there’s a diplomacy system because of course there is), and plan my course of action. I eventually took over the peninsula, set off for nearby islands, girded my settlements with defenses, and practically took over the entire south-eastern continent.
By then, I’d had ample time to learn the Lizardmen faction, playing up Kroq-Gar’s penchant for lowering army upkeep (something Lizardmen evidently struggle with). My armies of resolute and impenetrable tanks, while slow-moving and uh not too good with the shooting, were a reliable wall to force an enemy up against. I got so good as Lizardmen, in fact, that I found it hard to grasp playing other factions afterward when I decided to try out Tomb Kings and Wood Elves. The mummies are VERY different from the lizards.
Life Finds A Way
270 or so turns later and I’d dominated the final battle thanks in no small part to fielding an entire army of just ginormous dinosaurs. Brought my own Jurassic doomstack!
Even now, after all that time spent with the Lizardmen, and then with the undead and the Legolases of Warhammer, I still come back for more. It seems a shame to drop a game so quickly that took so long to fully understand. It’s just like the tabletop game in that regard: complex, perhaps needlessly so, and hard to forget if you’ve invested time in it.
Fortunately, Creative Assembly and Sega are launching Total War: Warhammer III soon (February 2022) so I’ll be able to jump right in and get more cold-blooded battles in with my lizard boys.
I would recommend this game BUT with the extreme clarifier that you’ve gotta love the genre a little. I can’t see too many casual players just picking this game up and getting too far with it without doing a little bit of extra study.
PIXEL PERFECT
Recommended
Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage or Mage Cast.
