Image credit: SegaAny gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.
You can find the full breakdown of the three headline features here. But, broadly, there are updates for both chaos and the dwarves, plus “unusual locations” - a sort of fleshed-out set of landmarks which you’ll discover as you explore the map. One of the examples given is a Bretonnian holy site called “Grail Knight’s Grave”. Initially, owning the settlement gives a small bonus to control and corruption, as well as some holy horse-fanciers for your garrison. When control is over 75, any characters in the region have a chance to gain a tantalising mystery trait. The blog doesn’t reveal this trait, but I hope it’s cow-buchet related.
There are a few more teasers shown off, but I’m mainly enthusiastic about what design director Mitchell Heastie has to say here. He’s “a huge fan of worldbuilding content in games,” and says that he’s “always wanted to make the world feel a bit more alive - this is hopefully a start to doing more for both of those things.” Again, Immortal Empires is already irresponsibly massive and stuffed with more units than any reasonable person can keep track of. It’s these fertile embellishments that elevate it from a map to a world.
Next up is a rework to chaos cults, long maligned for feeling far too flat and lifeless to represent the hives of corrupted activity they’re intended to be. “Ultimately the fantasy is that Cults create the corruption, not the other way around,” says Heastie. They’ll no longer spring up in corrupted areas - it’ll now be the task of cultists belonging to all four monogods to set them up, which was previously just a Slaanesh thing. The cult magus is a new campaign-only character that specialises in setting up unique cults that offer more options. You’ll get access to the magus through upgrading standard chaos cults.
I’m not initially sold on the idea of stripping away an entire method of spreading cults, but Slaanesh’s exponential cult play is really engaging, so I can see this working well. The cults themselves look much more interactive and varied, too. They’ll now be a version of the skaven undercity archetype, with various resource-sapping buildings and a few devastating rituals. Khorne’s leader teleportation is now available to each of the four gods, for example.
And finally, there’s a new Dwarf feature named ‘the deeps’, for dawi fans that want to play tall. After shelling out a pile of cash, you’ll be able to expand your settlements into the earth, giving you unique buildings and more slots to play with. There’s some lovely flavour you’ll discover as you dig(gy diggy hole), too, like blocked tunnels and “some stranger things you can discover in the Deeps.” Here’s a nifty one from the new ‘guild foundries’ building: “+5% settlement income per turn count”. I’ve not seen that one before across the whole game. So that’s 500% income on turn 50, presumably? Say short again. Go on.
The blog also mentions an update to Cathay’s ivory road, although doesn’t go into detail just yet. I’m really into the deeps specifically, but the real prize here is knowing the team have reached a place where they’re ready to start experimenting with these smaller, flavourful additions between paid expansions. Heastie described this as “pushing our own expectations for what new content for the game could be, to always be on the lookout for what special idea we could do next.” There’s obviously an incentive with these things to sound passionate, but this feels genuine to me. If so, I’m chuffed that the team feel they’re in a good spot. Fair warning, though, the dawi are going to be unbearably smug f*ckers about all this.
