Total War: Warhammer 2's AI creates decent enough armies, we suppose - but they all tend to look pretty similar in terms of composition. Most armies you'll fight in the fantasy strategy game tend to be pretty infantry-focused, even with Total War's built-in randomness. A mod by Steam user Jadawin helps mix things up a bit.
Jadawin's goal was to build all-new templates for each of Total War: Warhammer 2's factions, adding new unit groups and army templates until each faction had 12. Some are good generalist armies, while others focus on melee, cavalry, or ranged units. Unfortunately, Jadawin learned while creating the mod that Total War uses a lot of uncontrollable random elements in army creation - which, ironically enough, creates armies that feel weirdly similar most of the time.
That was the case for Jadawin's new templates initially, too - to their dismay. The first couple builds produced armies that were worse than what the vanilla engine cooked up, and so they had to put in more work - ultimately coming up with a mod that generally makes armies of around the same quality as vanilla, with the occasional group that bumps up into the 'better than vanilla' category.
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The problem with zombies tends to be that there's very little to do with them once you've gotten them up and shambling. That's been the case with Luthor Harkon's forces in Total War: Warhammer 2's Curse of the Vampire Coast for the past couple of years - and someone's decided to make the smelly lads a bit fiercer. Agemouk's Luthor's Revenants mod gives Luthor the ability to upgrade his zombies into more powerful revenants, more or less by giving them all guns.
Luthor's Revenants adds three zombie unit upgrades and two units of revenants to Vampire Coast legendary lord Luthor Harkon. The basic idea is to give Luthor's army roster "a bit more of a spine", as well as some kind of zombie-based mechanic that fits in with Luthor's zombie-infested background lore in the strategy game.
To that end, Agemouk has created three zombie unit upgrade options, taking some inspiration from Wood Elf legendary lord Drycha's upgrade options. All three empower zombies by turning them into scarier revenants. There's Frenzied Madness, which costs 300 gold and gives them exceptional melee abilities; Rum and Thunder (350 gold), a buff to missile stats and ammo; and Steel and Oak (350 gold), which turns the zombies into slower, tougher tanks by filling their bodies with shards of ship's hull timber and boosting all their physical resistances.
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There's been a recent flurry of updates to the Total War: Warhammer 2 Steam database entry, and players are speculating what could be coming in the final Lords pack. We know that the popular Warhammer game is getting one final DLC pack before the team focuses on the recently announced Warhammer III. Plenty want a Beastmen rework, but plenty more just want to poke fun at the whole idea.
For context, it's possible to track deploys and tweaks to individual Steam AppIDs via the SteamDB website. Depending on the game in question, one could - up to a point - glean some information.
For example, a recent change to Total War: Three Kingdoms saw a new DLC app ID added with the codename 'Rosemary', causing much speculation regarding what the new DLC could be. Previous comments from Creative Assembly have hinted at a Northern Tribes expansion and a new start date after the death of Cao Cao, but so far nothing's been confirmed. It is believed that the controversial warlord died of some kind of brain tumour, as he often suffered from headaches and dizziness. Rosemary was often used in traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for such ills.
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Total War: Warhammer 3 looks cool, but one of the interesting features of the original Total Warhammer game was that it had an end-game crisis where multiple hordes of Chaos Warriors would invade the map. Led by Archaon the Everchosen, this late-game event is partly inspired by the infamous 'End Times' storyline that finished off the Warhammer Fantasy tabletop game, though the 'chaos invasion' isn't actually meant to be a direct imitation.
This crisis also features in the 'Mortal Empires' grand campaign mode that owners of both Total Warhammer games can access, although Total War: Warhammer 2's central story arc doesn't feature a similar end-game event. Factions in the second game's campaign either focus on controlling the 'Great Vortex' or have their own self-contained quest line to follow.
Now, though, you can introduce your own big end-game invasions with the help of the recently released Warhammer 2 mod End Game Crises - Beyond the Chaos Invasion. It's currently in beta, but it offers four different crises that can trigger towards the late-game. Its design is inspired by Stellaris - which also features a diverse set of end-game crises - where one is randomly chosen when you start a game.
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