The obvious jumping-in point for most will be the Empire, which offers familiar unit types (swords, spears, crossbows, cavalry) and a generalist approach to tech and trade. If an army’s fightiness reaches a certain threshold, a WAAAGH! begins, and they’ll be joined by an AI-controlled ally battle group for the purposes of increased beatin’ an’ killin’. Beyond having unique sets of units to build armies from, the races all have defining gameplay mechanics shaped by Warhammer lore that drive their goals and methods.įor example, Greenskins – the blanket term for orcs and goblins – live for combat, represented by something Total War: Warhammer calls “fightiness.” Raise a Greenskin army’s fightiness by winning battles or by entering the “raidin’ camp” stance. Each race – the human Empire, the mountain-dwelling Dwarfs, the reclusive and evil Vampire Counts, and the warlike Greenskins – is a completely different experience, demanding its own distinct playstyle and strategies. Total War: Warhammer isn’t a reskin of Rome 2 or Attila – the game mechanics have been completely reworked to accommodate not only fantasy battle units, but also the fundamental differences between the races that make up the Warhammer Fantasy universe.

They said their QA feedback has indicated that Normal is still a bit too punishing, so they are making some balancing changes that will be ready at the time of release.Īlso, I was not able to experiment with the playable Chaos faction, which is offered as a pre-order and week-one purchase bonus, by press time.

It’s not clear that the crash was a driver issue, but it did resolve when I temporarily dropped my graphics preset to Medium.įurther, my impressions are based on playing on Easy difficulty, per advice from Creative Assembly. Total War games are optimized for AMD architectures, though, and Nvidia is usually prompt about releasing game-ready drivers for their graphics cards by release dates.

I was able to play on Ultra settings without much trouble, apart from a repeating crash in the opening battle of the Empire campaign. I played a pre-release version of the game on a PC with an i7-4790, 16 GB RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 970 GPU.

Total war warhammer waaagh