Menu
In the lobby of Sega’s offices in Santa Monica, California, I’m watching a massive dinosaur toss ranks of soldiers into the air like clods of dirt. These aren’t just any soldiers, however. These are High Elves, and in the lore of Total War: Warhammer 2, they’re supposedly the most disciplined, most highly-trained warriors around. But compared to a feral stegadon, one of the units in the new Lizardmen faction, they’re simply no match.
Warhammer2 will feature four new races, including the High Elves, Dark Elves and Lizardmen, all drawn from the more than 30 years of lore that has built up around the Warhammer tabletop miniatures game. It will also include an entirely new map which, when combined with the map in the original Total War: Warhammer, will double the size of that game.
Fans who own both titles will be able to play any faction from either game and lead them to victory — or defeat — over a combined world map.
And that’s not the only upgrade coming down the pike.
Yabba dabba doom
The Lizardmen are, in the lore of the Warhammer universe, the oldest living race on the planet. Their faction, therefore, has some very different .. features than the games’ other races.
“If you'd like to sum up the Lizardmen in a couple of words,” said Andy Hall, the series’ lead writer and narrative designer, “we like to think they're dinosaurs riding dinosaurs with Aztec space lasers.”
There are multiple species within the army, including gigantic creatures that look like ankylosaurus or triceratops. Those that were deployed in the demo were feral, meaning that after they’d been engaged in combat, there was a certain point when they would stop responding to commands. But there was little reason to stay their hand, as the High Elf formations broke and ran soon after first contact. Later, other dinosaurs — bastiladon with massive lasers strapped to their backs — would saunter in to mop up the stragglers.
But, not to be outdone, the High Elves eventually called in one of their support units: a fire-breathing red dragon. In the hands-on demo that I played later, the dragon incinerated my melee troops before falling on my army’s leader to do hand-to-hand combat with his mount.
So, when I casually call the battles in Warhammer 2 “epic,” understand that I mean to say that they are the tyrannosaur-grappling-with-a-red-dragon kind of epic.
Best of all, nothing felt cheesy. Units that I had never taken control of before behaved in predictable ways based on their size and armaments. The enemy’s artificial intelligence, especially on the high difficulty, stood its ground and at times took advantage of my mistakes.
In the tradition of all the great games in the Total War series that had come before it, this latest effort from Creative Assembly felt remarkably solid. That’s in part because of the amount of time the team has spent balancing it.
“We've got a really clever system,” explained Al Bickham, Creative Assembly’s development communications manager. “When everyone goes home at night, it takes over their work PCs and uses them for auto-testing. It’s sort of like Folding@Home. It's a distributed system that just grabs spare CPUs and runs the latest build in the background.”
When the team comes back after the weekend, the system has run through turn after turn at super-fast speeds, with multiple AI playing against one another. Dragon ball z budokai tenkaichi 3 free download for windows 7. When they check out the results, the goal is to find surprises.
“We want all factions to have an opportunity,” said lead development manager Sam Millen. “I think what we also look for is that, through multiple campaigns on the same version of the game, it actually plays out differently. We don't want .. the High Elves to always win and always dominate. We want sometimes the High Elves get killed off early. Sometimes they go over to the west and sometimes they go down south. We want variation in the campaign, but also as much balance as we can achieve.”
Molon labe
Warhammer 2 is the continuation of an ambitious plan to faithfully recreate every faction in the eighth edition of the Warhammer tabletop miniatures game. The team at Creative Assembly consider it to be as much an upgrade of the original as it is a sequel.
When it launches later this year, the game will expand the original with new systems and features, and it will also introduce a so-called “combined campaign” mode. In it, players will be able to take the reins of any of the game’s eight factions and march across the entire, combined land mass of the two games.
“You've got Total War: Warhammer, which is the Old World campaign,” explained Bickham. “Then you've got Warhammer 2, which is the New World campaign. And the combined campaign as well. But, when you get Warhammer 3, you'll have its own campaign and a new combined campaign with extra land mass on it as well. So it grows with every single one. The idea is that you can play any race that you own on that combined campaign map.”
Races you do not own will show up as adversaries, and with new mercenary armies being added with Warhammer 2, they’ll be able to pull in units from multiple factions.
“They're all found the deep, dark archives of all of the Games Workshop literature,” said Millen. “As an example, there's one that's led by a goblin beast master. His army is filled with beasts. So there's Squigs from the Greenskin army, there's feral bastiladons from the Lizardmen army, and there's Wolf Riders and Boars and all of these different units from other races.
“That's an army you would never be able to fight against ordinarily, but now you can since they’re mercenaries banded together. So it makes for interesting gameplay.”
We’ll be able to share our own gameplay in video form in the next several weeks. Sega expects to have hands-on demos at this year’s E3. Look for more E3 2017 coverage later this month, kicking off when the first press conferences broadcast live on June 10.
Today, Creative Assembly is unveiling Total War: Warhammer's campaign map. You can see the reveal video above, which details some of the new features and functions. PC Gamer recently had the opportunity to talk to Rich Aldridge, campaign designer for the upcoming fantasy strategy. Read on to learn about each races differences, how quests are integrated into the campaign, and how Boris Todbringer isn't a fan of diplomacy.
PCG: How does the opening for each race play out?
Rich Aldridge: Each race will have the same unique starting point—for example Reikland with the Empire, and the Badlands for the Orcs. It will start small, and will eventually allow you to seize territories and work with or against other neighbouring factions. You don't start as the entirety of that race. You're just one tribe of the Orcs, so you have the opportunity there to seize territories, form alliances and build slowly. Also, in doing so, you get the opportunity to learn the background of the characters as well. You get familiar with who they are, where they come from and what they're aspiring to do. Karl Franz of the Empire is trying to unite all the different Elector Counts together. Thorgrim Grudgebearer is trying to take back all of the Dwarf strongholds.
Some of the quests will start to be drip-fed to you, and you can go off and enjoy those. You can also leave them as well. If you're a more experienced Total War fan and you want to go and do your own thing, you can set those aside and come back at a later date. Eventually, you'll encounter some minor races and the other, larger main races.
PCG: Do you see the quests as a tutorial system, then?
Rich: It's a good way to highlight certain features about the game, and provide epic rewards as well. It's our way to allow these legendary characters to develop over time—becoming the characters that the Warhammer fans know and love. Getting Ghal Maraz should be one of the epic conclusions for Karl Franz.
PCG: Does the different terrain affect each battle?
Rich: There are some elements of that. The Underway, for example. Although it's underground, it allows dwellers of caves to have buffs. Things like night goblins and certain dwarven units like miners. They'll get benefits for being underground in those situations. And then we'll have other areas of the map where maybe you'll be up in the Norscan climes. They're duly kitted out for that, whereas other guys are not going to be. They're going to suffer attrition penalties, which you've become accustomed to.
PCG: The Greenskins are very war focused, is there a different challenge with the other races?
Rich: They're very much like that, and they all have different victory conditions as well. It's not the same goal for all the races. Dwarfs are going to be about righting the wrongs in the Great Book of Grudges. They're looking to do different things to say the Empire, which is all about unifying all of man together and protecting themselves from the invasion of Chaos. Greenskins, again, they don't have to unify. They can go around smacking the hell out of all the different tribes. They're all about fighting, and saying I'm the 'ardest Orc. They're much simpler in that sense, and we've gone a long way to show you that with the simple building trees and things. Whereas, if you were to see the Dwarf ones, they're going to be far deeper and full of more civil-based stuff. So their campaigns will feel quite different from one another.
PCG: Does diplomacy feature at all?
Rich: It's there as a system that you've seen before. Everybody has the opportunity to broker a deal with somebody, but, we'll be honest, certain races don't like one another. If you were to have Vampires and men aligned to one another, you'll have to go a long way down the road to make something like that happen because they've got different goals. It's a possibility, but it would be one where you'd have to shower them with things that they require first. Likewise, you're going to have all of the backstabbing. The Empire's got a lot of that. Boris Todbringer in Middenland despises Karl Franz. He's not going to just lay down his sword and join the fight with him, so they're going to be backstabbing. You're not going to have it all your own way, where you're just steamrolling and acquiring all of those pieces.
Al Bickham: Yeah, diplomacy, as Rich mentioned, is not just between races. It's within the factions.
Rich: Oh yeah, with the Greenskins you might try and essentially form a confederation between the different tribes. Or you might just go, no, I'm hard as nails, and go crush and accumulate them into your forces anyway. You have the different opportunities there to do one or the other.
PCG: With all the heroes and the magical items they equip, how do you manage the power curve and keep things challenging?
Rich: So you can't get everything. You can get some things, so there's that replay factor there. Maybe you went down one path in one playthrough, and then you get to go back and experience something else. The magical items are random drops as well. You've got legendary items, which are given when you complete a quest, and then you've got random ones as well. They're weighted depending on what difficulty level you're playing on as to what you're going to get. And you can share those out among your characters.
In terms of difficulty, you can lose those things as well. People can steal them from you. You've got to be careful—it's not just walk into a battle, 'oh, that didn't work out,' and go back again and again. Sometimes you're going to lose those things and you might not be able to get them back in the case of the generic items. Legendary items are yours to keep, but you might suffer a penalty if you've taken Grimgor into battle and he's been slain. There are times in which you'll be put back into check.
On October 26, Total War: Warhammer 2 is getting a free update that will stitch its campaign map together with the first game. Called Mortal Empires, this grand campaign will include all 35 playable legendary lords and a whopping 117 starting factions from both Total War: Warhammer games in a massive battle royale to see which can reign supreme. Today, Creative Assembly revealed the final layout of the mega-map, including where each faction's legendary lord will spawn.
If you've played Total War: Warhammer, you'll already recognize the layout of the map and how the two are stitched together, with Warhammer 2's factions on the left and Warhammer 1's on the right. From the looks of it, it's easily the biggest campaign map I've seen in a Total War game, but players have noted some big, empty spaces—especially in the south-eastern desert. That's where the rumored Tomb Kings faction will probably spawn assuming guesses over what the new DLC factions coming in Warhammer 2 are correct.
Mortal Empires is due out next week and you'll need to own both Warhammer 1 (and its DLC factions if you want to play as them) and Warhammer 2 on Steam in order to enjoy it. Thankfully you won't have to install Warhammer 1 again.
There are an absurd number of elements at play in Total War: Warhammer 2's campaign,from diplomacy to taxes to properly lining up your units for battlefield advantage and even onto game-changing magic rites.
Simply playing the game, let alone getting close to winning, can be a daunting task for a newbie -- which is why we've put together this Total War: Warhammer 2 Lizardmen faction guide.
Below we cover everything you need to know to exterminate those treacherous warm bloods who just can't ever leave well enough alone and stop mucking about with the forces of Chaos.
The Best Lizardmen Lord for Your Total War: Warhammer 2 Campaign
You have two legendary Lord options right off the bat: Mazdamundi, the spell-casting Slaan, or Kroq-Gar, a saurus oldblood general who is focused on direct melee combat and bonuses to nearby units.
Which Lord is best for your Lizardmen army? It depends on what you want out of your campaign. Kroq-Gar begins at a different point of the map and has a slightly harder starting difficulty in the campaign. On the other hand, Mazdamundi has many advantages for the new player because he allows access to an additional Slaan Mage-Priest and offers reduced Rite costs -- but he's also terrible at diplomacy. His many long range spells more than make up for that, however.
Picking Lord Mazdamundi
The Geomantic Web
No matter which Lord you choose, the big advantage to the Lizardmen is the Geomantic Web that connects cities in your provinces by magical forces. The Web is incredibly useful -- so you should always conquer an area with a Web node whenever you can, and upgrade it like crazy.
The various Alignments on the Web give you drastic bonuses if you pump them up to tier five. To improve the Web to its highest strength, you need to keep nodes connected to cities of equal Geomantic strength and keep up your relationship with neighboring settlements. Don't forget to build Geomantic Markers and Lodestones on cities that aren't connected to the Web as well.
Always make sure there's space in capitals for Geomantic structures and upgrades. If you are regularly adding to and upgrading the Web, you will frequently be flush with gold and bonuses that will keep you one step ahead of the other factions.
Starting the Geomantic Web
Warhammer II Lizardmen Campaign Strategy
It's worthwhile to be fairly aggressive early on during the campaign, taking on the Skaven and Skeggi but ignoring or getting diplomatic with the Empire to the south.
After taking the Monolith of Fallen Gods, its probably time to get a new Lord and start building up a secondary set of armies so you can tackle problems on different areas of the map at the same time.
Either of the Lizardmen legendary lords have access to four powerful rites that are costly but offer big bonuses. The Rite Of Ferocity is the least expensive, and often is also the most helpful because it gives you bonus experience, gold, and recruitment -- so your armies can pump up faster.
On the defense front, the Rite Of Sotek can be incredibly useful, hampering enemies within your province and making ambushes more deadly.
Lizardmen Rites
Be sure to go through the quests in the early game to earn gold and Ancient Plaques, since you'll need those for the rituals. In particular, be sure to rush to the Mirror, Mirror quest so you can build a trove at the quest location and generate a steady stream of Plaques.
Whenever a ritual is being enacted, random forces of Chaos will pop up behind your province lines near cities enacting rituals (or near cities that are undefended). The other factions will also be able to see where you rituals are being enacted and will show up to ruin your day. In other words, don't try to expand while you are doing a ritual, because you need armies to protect your cities during those times.
On the expansion front, you can mostly ignore the frozen regions as places to hole up, since (as you'd expect from a cold blooded people) the Lizardmen will see public order plummet in cold regions. The best spots to conquer and fortify are jungles and deserts, although anything that isn't frozen and snowing can work in your favor.
While adding to your Lizardmen empire, don't forget to take into account the level of upkeep and expense going on with your expensive lizard armies, so build economic buildings and do anything you can to keep the gold flowing in.
On the tech tree, feel free to go where you like, focusing on whichever unit or building type you use most. I've found upgrading the solid mid-level saurus warriors to be an effective strategy, but it is also worthwhile to grab a few upgrades on the tree that help increase public order in your provinces, since corrupting influences will frequently appear.
Lizardmen Tech Tree
Warhammer II Lizardmen Combat Strategy
Before battle while you are still moving around the world map, don't forget that the Lizardmen get the Astromancy stance for armies. While this reduces your mobility, it improves your visibility and lets you ambush easier, in addition to providing vanguard placement in battles.
Besides your powerful Lords, there are essentially two types of Lizardmen to deploy in combat: your slower and harder hitting beasts and saurus warriors, or your cheaper, faster skinks. (Check out our full list of Warhammer: Total War II unit rosters for the full rundown of all the units at your disposal.)
The skinks are good for maneuverability, since they move faster and can redeploy to flank enemies from the side or behind, although in many case you'll want to save your swift mounted units for that strategy. Skinks also break morale and flee regularly, which isn't always a negative, since it lures big melee units away from the main fight.
Choosing the Astromancy stance
If you've got a hidden unit waiting nearby in the trees or just have some ranged units ready to reposition, fleeing skinks can actually turn the tide of battle. When you work up the tech tree, chameleon skinks can be your sneaky, hit and run units to always vex the enemy and take out unprotected units.
Total War Warhammer 2 Rotate Campaign Map
Unlike some of the other factions, sending your saurus units past enemy lines can actually work to your advantage, because they go berserk so easily. Berserk units get big bonuses to combat, but they also don't respond to your commands.
If a squad of saurus warriors goes berserk on the edge of a battle and wastes their time chasing a faster unit of ranged archers, then they are essentially out of the battle. Saurus hilariously trying to chase mounted archers is a sad way to lose a battle. If they are in the thick of combat near a whole bunch of vulnerable melee units, however..
On the opposite side of that, don't be afraid to have your big bruisers flee before they go berserk if things are going badly, so you don't lose highly experienced troops and have to start over with fresh recruits.
Where the Lizardmen trail behind the other factions is in powerful archers, but their later game artillery pieces also happen to be dinosaurs that can more than hold their own in melee, so don't be afraid to put them in harm's way!
After battle, eating the enemies of course is a great way to replenish your forces, but unless you are heavily beaten down and expect another battle soon, you should probably choose the option to sacrifice the survivors instead for all that extra experience.
A horde of skinks popping out of the tree line can spell doom for your enemy
Those are all the basics you need to know to dominate the Total War: Warhammer II Vortex campaign map! Do you have any other effective Lizardmen strategies we didn't list here? Let us know your best Lizardmen tactics in the comments below! And stay tuned for more Total War: Warhammer 2 guides here on GameSkinny.