The other big one - beyond the wall and enemy wave buildup bar and that big spinny disc - is the Ivory Road, a unique system for trade that Grand Cathay has on top of the usual diplomacy. I'm doing my best to avoid being trite, but: it is a balancing act. All kinds of things can affect this: buildings constructed in settlements are often labelled as one or the other, while research provides bigger nudges in each direction, +4 Yin for instance, but these take longer to bring into effect, by which point that other Yin building might've finished construction and given you one more than you'd accounted for. It's too early to be definitive about this kind of thing - where inspiration and reference stops and caricature begins - but something to keep an eye on approaching launch.Īs far as running the faction goes, the core twist is that you must balance Yin and Yang, gaining some specific bonuses if you're leaning more towards one or the other, or a much wider range of bonuses if you've perfectly balanced the two. The orientalism is an ongoing question for me here, the exaggerated nature of fantasy - of very archetypal dwarves, goblins, orks, and so on - not exactly lending itself to subtlety, and the largely deft hand Creative Assembly showed when working with Chinese culture and fiction with Three Kingdoms might be lacking a little.
Cathay is an almost entirely new faction itself, spun into life here from a mere mention in Fantasy Warhammer lore, of that somewhat orientalist cliché of a mysterious land in the east. CURSE YOU IRON DRAGONNNNN!īack to Cathay though, and let's talk about what's new. In Warhammer 3 it seems to be dialled up a little more, if not in any literal sense of design then as a result of the overarching vibe of this game, the sickly-silly Chaos element - they're five of the eight playable factions - that leaves it full of giant tongues worming out of the ground, the rivers of chunder-green and the beaked, bipedal, neon-pink frog-lords that seem to enjoy waddling about on my land. It's also extremely Total War, and exactly the reason I keep coming back to it, the sandboxy weirdness, when it does flare up in funny ways, is where it stands out amongst its peers and where it derives all its character and charm. Now I have a fully stacked army of my most important ally sitting in the settlement I need to claim, and nothing I can do about it. My tech-loving, ever-turtling RTS senses are tingling and - oh! Zhao Ming, fancy seeing you here, claiming my section of the wall for your own. With that done it's off to claim the ruins of the wall and build it up to near impenetrability.
Mopping up enemies, ensnaring them in ambushes and booting them off my land (there is a "get off my land" option in the diplomacy screen now, by the way - more on that later, as this time I literally booted them off by just outright destroying them). Right now the wall's breached, Chaos everywhere, go deal with that. When the bar fills up, the Chaos goons arrive, assaulting the wall in one of three places in vast numbers, and so early on with that wall already breached it's just about tidying up your land before you secure the gate and get to work on the grander objective (briefly: defeating four Chaos baddies on their own turf, in those horde-like boss battles we tried out a little while back, and then rescuing a god-bear from an ice prison). Watch on YouTube Here's a recent look at the campaign map in action. There's also a bar that fills up over time, which you can slow down with certain strategies (a big disc called the Wu Xing Compass that you can point in different directions, largely based around manipulating the winds of magic system, is one, kind of like how you can set a regional decree to focus on growth or money and whatnot). You start out near a giant wall, the other side of which is full of Chaos enemies and corrupted land and all that horrible stuff - only the wall has been breached. Your main goal as Grand Cathay, in the story-sandbox playpen of the Grand Campaign, is essentially to turtle. The other is her brother, Zhao Ming, the Iron Dragon. I have chosen Miao Ying, the Storm Dragon - a woman who can transform, would you believe it, into a Storm Dragon.
Availability: Out February 17th on PC, Mac, LinuxĪnyway, I am Grand Cathay, where you choose one of two legendary lords as your main character.Developer: Creative Assembly, Feral Interactive.I'm playing as Grand Cathay, one of the eight new factions playable in the game - and yes, there are eight Creative Assembly announced a final surprise faction, Chaos Daemons, during our previous session, which look like frightfully silly fun themselves.
Barely an hour into a good six-hour preview of Total War: Warhammer 3's campaign, and I have been royally gazumped.
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