The next Total War: Warhammer 3 update will let your dwarves play high, with greed and depth

Any joke I might make about an update that would allow Total War: Warhammer 3's dawi to play long is too obvious for the selective comedy palette that brings you a bunch of great stuff, like I typed “(penis)” and Overkill's Walking Dead page won't take me out of context, so let's dive right into the details. The strategy game's 5.2 update is on the horizon, and with it comes the first of the “extra bits” the team hinted at back in June. I'm very excited about these. They fall somewhere between the usual patch fare, like stat tweaks and fixes, and the more significant faction makeovers that come with paid DLC. They also focus where Immortal Empires needs them most: depth, rather than breadth. In Dawi's case, quite literally.

You can find a full breakdown of the three title features here . But overall, there are updates for both Chaos and Dwarves, as well as “unusual places” – a sort of detailed set of landmarks that you'll discover as you explore the map. One example given is a Bretonnian sanctuary called the “Grail Knight's Grave”. Initially, owning the settlement gives a small bonus to control and corruption, as well as some holy horse buffs for your garrison. Once control is above 75, any character in the area will be tempted mysterious feature. The blog doesn't explain this feature but I expect it to be related to the cow bucket.

There are a few more trailers shown, but I'm mainly excited about what design director Mitchell Heastie has to say here. He's “a huge fan of world-building content in games” and “always wanted to make the world feel a little more alive – hopefully this is a start to doing more of both,” he says. Again, Immortal Empires is already irresponsibly massive, and filled with more units than any reasonable person could possibly keep track of. It's these lush flourishes that elevate it from a map to a world.

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Next up is a rework of the chaos cults, which have long been maligned for feeling too flat and lifeless to represent hives of corrupt activity. “After all, fantasy is about cults creating corruption, not the other way around,” Heastie says. They’ll no longer spawn in corrupted areas — founding them will now be the job of members of four monotheistic cults, something previously exclusive to Slaanesh. The cult mage is a new campaign-only character who specializes in establishing unique cults that offer more options. You’ll gain access to the mage by upgrading standard chaos cults.

I wasn't initially sold on the idea of ​​doing away with the entire method of spreading cults, but Slaanesh's exponential cult gameplay is really engaging, so I can see this working. The cults themselves also seem much more interactive and diverse. They'll now be a version of the Skaven underground city archetype, with a variety of resource-consuming buildings and a few destructive rituals. For example, Khorne's leader teleport can now be used for all four gods.

And finally, for those long-playing dawi fans, there's a new Dwarven feature called 'the depths'. After spending a bunch of money, you'll be able to expand your settlements into the land, which will give you unique buildings and more slots to play in. There are also some nice little treats to discover as you dig (dig holes), like blocked tunnels and “Some weird stuff you can discover in the depths”. Here's a nifty little thing from the new 'guild foundries' building: “+5% settlement income per turn count”. I've never seen that in the entire game before. So that probably means 500% income by turn 50? Say short again. Come on.

The blog also mentions an update to Cathay's ivory path, but doesn't go into detail just yet. I'm not particularly deep, but the real reward here is knowing that the team has reached a point where they're ready to experiment with these smaller, more flavorful additions in between paid expansions. Heastie describes this as “pushing our own expectations of what new content can be for the game, always keeping an eye on what special ideas we can do next.” There's clearly an incentive to sound passionate about this sort of thing, but it feels genuine to me. If so, I'm glad the team feels like they're in a good place. But fair warning, the dawis are going to be insufferably smug jerks about all of this.

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