Mortal Empires is a new grand-scale campaign set across the vast combined landmasses of both the Old World and the New World, enabling you to play as all Races from both games and any owned DLC. This content is free for owners of both Total War: WARHAMMER and Total War: WARHAMMER II. Warhammer 2 mini maps in steam screenshots the full mortal empires campaign map is now available. The campaign features over 120 factions spread across 295 settlements over 100 spells 42 legendary lords and over 350 unit. Mortal Empires is a grand-scale downloadable campaign set across a massive new campaign map, free for owners of both Total War: WARHAMMER and Total War: WARHAMMER II. It enables players to embark on new campaigns as any playable Legendary Lord.

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Mortal Empires is a complicated product to review. It marks a first in Total War’s history, and potentially even the steam platform; it’s content for a game that unlocks when you purchase a separate game. Further to that, the amount of content it unlocks increases if you bought DLC for that other game.

So for the uninitiated, of which there seem to have actually been quite a few of you out there, Mortal Empires is a piece of DLC content for Total War: WARHAMMER 2, that is only downloadable if you also happened to own Total War: WARHAMMER 1.

What it adds to the game, is essentially a brand new map that combines the assets from both games in a familiar, all be it a little stretched landscape. Though the consensus in the community when Creative Assembly called it a combined map was that the maps of both games would fit together, this isn’t quite what happened. Instead, portions of the Warhammer 2 map have been clipped off and landmasses have been reshaped and pushed together. In fact its just a whole brand new map. This was revealed 3 weeks after the launch of Warhammer 2.

Now while ultimately the map is huge and the promise of the biggest map ever, pretty much has been delivered upon it is something worth mentioning, and honestly if this was Total War: WORLD, there’s no way they could’ve got away with squishing continents closer and reshaping Africa… like it just doesn’t hold up and I’m surprised they were able to with Games Workshop keeping them in check.

The bulk of the playable content in Mortal Empires, is actually from Total War: WARHAMMER 1. That is to say, the geographical area it includes is fixated primarily on the old world, and the playable races and factions from Warhammer 1 make up the majority of the content.

So, this makes it a very tricky beast to review. If for instance, your fresh to the franchise, and pickup both games, you’ll have 9 playable races to try out and around 23 legendary lords spread around the map.

The more DLC you own, the more races and lords you have to play with, up to a current maximum of 12 playable races and 35 legendary lords. This means that essentially Mortal Empires is a great reward for loyal customers. Those that have bought DLC, now get another campaign to mess around with them in it.

However the mortal empires campaign, if you’re playing as one of the old races is basically a mirror copy to the old game. I mean that’s kind of the point. Your lord or race will start in the same place, their mechanics will be the same, their quests, buildings, units, skills and objectives will largely be the same, there are some slight variations to one or two technologies or events here and there, certainly not something that changes the playthrough that much. The faction you play will behave 95% identical to how they did before. However, the most notable change is now you have the chance of coming across 4 new races in some expanded territories to the south and to the west.

Total War: Warhammer II - Win Conditions Guide (Mortal ...

I want to make a comparison to one of the previous games in the franchise, Medieval 2 Total War. After a certain number of turns you may discover America, and there’s new and interesting factions over there to fight, that play and look different and have different architecture and landscapes. This situation is kind of similar. Whether you discover it or not, you’ll play your campaign the exact same, but if you do go there, you’ll have something new to fight.

Now obviously these races you’ll encounter have a lot more to them than the ones in Medieval 2, but I wanted to drive home the idea that your faction is untouched by this new world. If you sit around and play as the vampire counts, you might never see the new world, just as Egypt may never have saw the new world in Medieval 2. Now of course, you as the player can make it a priority to do that, so the option is there, but that’s more of a self driven design.

So depending on who you choose to start as, you’ll have an increased chance to encounter these races, obviously factions near the south and the west, will reach them faster. And encountering them is the largest new element to this campaign, it’s a race that you should be unfamiliar with fighting, and it could also be a potential new ally. Of course there’s also the chance that these races will come for you eventually which can happen, and skaven in particular have been dotted around the old world so you might run into them faster.

So on the whole, if you played a lot of Warhammer 1, you’re not getting too much new here in terms of your raw campaign experience. If you choose to play as one of the Warhammer 2 races, again, you’re probably already familiar with fighting the old world races, as they were present in the Vortex Campaign.

It’s not to say the amount of familiarity is an overly bad thing, it’s just that… it is familiar. Playing as Belegar, I couldn’t help but think I’ve done this all already, and was forcing myself to try and encounter new races to shake up the gameplay I was used to.

Other conditions outside of that change how the campaign develops. For one, the new climate system, that the community clammered for in Warhammer 1, allows any faction to conquer anywhere and because of it, you’re seeing a much more random and dynamic campaign, where minor factions conquer well out of their usual areas and it makes it a lot more fun to experience and form allies and make enemies. The emergent narrative of Total War is creeping back in. Now the Dwarfs don’t just sit in the mountains all the time, they branch out a bit and it might be a bit weird for the lore but it makes for a much more interesting campaign, encountering races all over the world.

Mortal Empires Map Expansion

Another great aspect is that with Mortal Empires you can now play co-op or head to head with a myriad of different factions and races, and as I always advocate, co-op or head to head, is the best way to play. On-top of that, with Mortal Empires’ release, WH2 now allows multiplayer between WH2 and WH1 races and sub factions, so there’s just more diversity overall in the multiplayer scene.

And I think this is what the draw of Mortal Empires is for a lot of people, the fact that the world is much bigger and now that is has 12 races in it, it’s a lot more random creating a lot more interesting gameplay. Now remember, this is a Total War: WARHAMMER 2 DLC, so you also have the new additions that Total War: WARHAMMER II introduced, as I mentioned, we have the climate system, an improved UI, increased skill cap for lords, increased city sizes, improved trait system, encounters at sea and that’s pretty much it. If you want to hear my thoughts on those mechanics, check my Warhammer 2 review. To be honest the new feature set for this campaign, is basically just slight balance improvements which mods had delivered a lot of before and some quality of life stuff to the UI.

It can sometimes feel as if this was the type of campaign many expected when Total War: WARHAMMER was first announced, one filled with variety and all the races you’d expect from the geography of the area. Athel Loren exists now. Beastmen raids and ambushes occur. Skaven are more than just a rumour. It’s a campaign with a better working trade and resource system. A campaign that let’s you conquer anywhere. And no doubt over time this campaign will fill up even more as DLC is created for Total War: WARHAMMER 2 and DLC from the old game gets patched in.

This is the best way to play Total War: WARHAMMER by far, the only issue is, to get the full experience of this campaign the bill is $195.

It honestly feels like less and less is offered when the initial games come out, and you’ll rely on DLC and updates to make the product worthwhile over time. Some of these updates, the community really wanted, like small increases to lords levels, conquering anywhere, increasing build slots, these have now been placed behind a new full priced game paywall, while the original game is seemingly done and dusted now.

Of course there are sales on steam to help mitigate that cost over time, but there’s just something about a Total War game featuring 4 factions on release that will always seem bare bones to me. People can say the factions are far deeper and diverse than they ever have been, but I feel that any diversity or depth that was added, was removed from other parts of the game, such as campaign mechanics, unit mechanics, sieges, minor settlement battles and a bunch of other things.

I guess the problem is, if you’ve never played Total War Warhammer, getting that awesome experience is super expensive. If you’re a loyal customer and have purchased this DLC already, then this campaign is largely something you’ve played already. Its bigger and better, but only slightly.

So in that regard, I feel like scoring this content is super difficult, so I won’t score it in this review. For me, it’s a bit underwhelming, it’s a lot of what I’ve experienced already, it’s a little anti-climactic because its not as big as they said it was gonna be, it’s end game is currently messed up and some of the updates to the old game haven’t come over yet. For someone new, it’s probably one of the best experiences you can have with Total War, because it’s finally at the stage and perhaps even passed it now of what you’d expect from a strategy fantasy sandbox. I highly recommend trying it out if you haven’t, and wait for a sale for the DLC, it’s been 75% off before, and no doubt Christmas sales will see it drop again.

That’ll be it for my review of Mortal Empires, as I mentioned, the gameplay and mechanics carry over from Total War: WARHAMMER 2, so if you want a further in depth review of those mechanics, check out my review for Warhammer 2 here: https://www.therepublicofplay.com/news/2017/10/total-war-warhammer-2-review

The sheer ambition behind Total War: Warhammer 2’s Mortal Empires campaign makes it seem like something completely implausible, something that someone on a forum would propose as their pie-in-the-sky, dream Warhammer game. Comprising five continents and 35 playable lords from 12 extremely distinct fantasy races, there’s simply nothing in the series’ history that compares with its scope. Yet while it accomplishes everything it says on the tin, it doesn’t always do so with a flourish.

The map itself is a great example of the “Oh man, this is awesome! But…” feeling I often had throughout the campaign. It is truly huge, make no mistake, and adds a lot to the diversity of regions to explore and conquer. Naggaroth is a menacing wasteland that doesn’t just feel like a rehash of Norsca - it’s sterile and oppressive where the home of the marauders is wild and vicious. Lustria’s deep jungles sprawl with creeping wonder, and the sweeping dunes of the Southlands stand as an almost elegant counterpoint to the reeking Badlands they border.

At the same time, it all feels a bit scrunched together. The placement of Ulthuan, the home of the High Elves, is one of my greatest criticisms. It looks like you could practically see its eastern shore with the naked eye from the coasts of Bretonnia, and it’s almost literally touching Naggaroth on the opposite end, which dilutes the feeling of being the secluded seat of a great, maritime empire. The New and Old Worlds in general simply aren’t remote enough from each other. I can understand not wanting to force players to spend dozens of turns sailing, but I think one more modestly-sized sea zone on each side of Ulthuan could have gone a long way to making the distances feel proper without being prohibitively annoying.

The real highlight of the campaign, of course, is all the new combinations of these varied, crazy armies that can come together on the battlefield. Dwarfs vs Skaven is one of the most thematically and mechanically satisfying match-ups. Every time I sent a gaggle of clanrats flying through the air with a mortar barrage, I was reminded how much the longtime Warhammer fan in me was grateful to this game just for existing. Marching an army of dinosaurs into Altdorf as the Lizardmen doesn’t have as much precedent in the lore, but was just as satisfying.

The sheer diversity you encounter fighting your way from region to region has really been taken to a new level. Starting as the Empire, you may be contending with orcs, vampires, Chaos marauders, beastmen, wood elves, and skaven all within the first 50 turns. Anyone with a coastline now must be wary of Dark Elf Black Arks appearing on the horizon. The Badlands, the infamous “Boring Corner” of the Old World map is now a major crossroads for many factions pursuing conquests in many directions - a battle royale that I suspect will only be improved with the upcoming addition of the Tomb Kings to its southern border.

The “but…” here comes from the fact that not all factions are created equal. Part of this is due to the fantastic changes to the core Warhammer 1 races from the Foundation Update not being integrated into Mortal Empires yet - though they will be when Norsca is implemented a bit down the line. Another major factor, though, is that the Warhammer II races have access to the rites mechanic from the Vortex campaign, which I really enjoy, while the Old World races don’t. And based on what Creative Assembly has said so far, it doesn’t sound like they ever will. I find this extremely disappointing and borderline maddening. I’d almost rather have seen none of the races get rites in Mortal Empires than have them selectively available to only a handful, and I hope the dev team will reconsider this decision in the future. I can’t imagine the campaign will ever truly feel complete unless all races have access to the same suite of core features.

The addition of chapter objectives for all races is great - though not all of them seem to take the larger world into account. Beastmen, for instance, have no reason to really venture beyond the Old World to finish their campaign objectives as they’ve remained more or less identical to how they looked in Warhammer 1. Even stranger, the Lizardmen lord Kroq-gar is required to cross the entire width of the map and conquer Lustria for his campaign - a copy-paste of his bud Mazdamundi’s objectives that doesn’t make a lot of sense given where he starts. There are lots of other little head scratch moments here and there that seem to be more a product of oversight and rushed release than design, and I’d like to see them get more love.

On the positive side, the Chaos invasion has been improved to account for the much larger play area and number of factions. Rather than arriving in a single throng under Archaon, the forces of the ruinous powers now comprise a handful of separate factions, each with multiple horde armies to command, which will focus on different parts of the map. I’ve seen them go straight for the heart of Ulthuan or cut across the Sea of Claws to menace Bretonnia right of the bat, so it truly feels like no one is safe when they get on the move.

Mortal Empires is truly an achievement, and has the potential to be an excellent platform for further expansion. Unfortunately, it does feel a bit like an open beta at the moment. It’s a fun beta, but there are enough little things that seem off, missing, or simply lacking polish that it doesn’t really come across as finished. This is offset somewhat by the fact that it’s free to owners of both Warhammer 1 and II, but if you only own one of the above and planned to buy the other just for Mortal Empires, you may want to hold off for a couple of months. Otherwise, by all means, jump in and get your hands (or claws) dirty. There’s a lot to do and see, and I don’t think I’ll have scratched past the surface for a very long time to come.

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