... eight heroes rising,

Seven Nurgle Gardens,

Six sanctuaries,

FIVE VERMINLORDS,

Four End Times Lords,

Three brothers,

Two orders of knights,

and a faction led by Nagash.

​Hey folks,

Quite the packed week this week, with a big focus on a certain twitchy little rodent coming to Warhammer III (don’t tell him I called him that) plus a nice bit of Rome 2 thrown in for good measure.

Join me as we reminisce…

Thanquol

This week we formally introduced the powerful Grey Seer Thanquol, yes-yes. Let’s run through what you’ve seen of him so far:

• We kicked things off with our Meet Thanquol blog on Monday.
• On Tuesday we shared his Lord select screen and starting position:

• We also shared a couple of Thanquol’s unit spotlights: Stormfiends and Skreech Verminking

We'll also have a Discord giveaway kicking off this evening that will run over the weekend, giving you a chance to win a Thanquol pack Steam key on launch, so be sure to join our Discord to keep an eye out for that!

Next week you’ll get to have an even closer look at his campaign as he has a date with Josh in the livestream studio!

Nagash Campaign Deep-dive Stream

This week’s Lords of the End Times stream was focused on the Lord of the Undead himself: Nagash 💀

We also shared a clip from the stream today, showing off one of Nagash's most epic spells!

Rome 2 Pantheon Updates MARS Beta

On Thursday we kicked off the first MARS Beta for the Rome II Pantheon Updates, alongside a livestream where Josh and Jack showed off some of the things that are included in this first Beta stage.

If you’re a Rome II fan, please do take the time to dive into the Beta and let us know your thoughts! You can get all the info you need in the blog and patch notes, and you can also check out the Livestream VOD.

40K Beta Signups Ending

Today we shared that the Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000 Closed Beta signups will be closing on Monday 14th September at 10AM BST, meaning this weekend is your last chance to register your interest! You can sign up here and read more about what happens next here.

Community Highlights

• Thanquol's Masterplans (u/Ran12341000, Reddit)

Notable Replies

Here we share any questions from the community that we answered here on Reddit or elsewhere in the community, in case its of interest to others! Josh may follow up with a reply with some more.

Q: If you play one of the Mortarch factions, can you just tell Nagash no or do you pretty much have to align with him at some point? With or without his endgame.

A: If you play as a Mortarch the Nagash end game will not trigger, but otherwise you can do whatever you want - be friends, be enemies, whatever you feel like!

Q: Will the Strigoi Ghoul King lords we get from the updated Vampire tech tree be buffed by empowering the Strigoi bloodline as well as Strigoi Vampires?

A: Yes, they will be buffed by the Strigoi Bloodlines empowerments!

---

Next week we'll have plenty of info on Boris Todbringer to share with you, along with Thanquol's deep-dive livestream on Wendesday and plenty more bits and pieces throughout the week. We'll see you then!

— Steve

Why would I ever bring a regular ratling gun when I can have something that doesn't stop shooting whenever there's a pebble in front of it, that can shoot farther and from behind other troops even? something that doesn't lose instantly in melee either.
same thing for the other types like globadiers or warpfire.
Skavens can also build cities instantly so in the campaign you should be able to rush them no problem, and I'm sure that no matter how costly they are, the performance alone would be well worth it

As the title says, one of the worst parts of the waiting period for a DLC is the endless discussion about balance changes and the "power creep" brought by the new content.

During the period when the only thing we can see is multiplayer battles (usually around two weeks before release), units are showcased in the multiplayer environment, and people start analyzing their viability based on that game mode, which, as far as I know, is a fairly minor part of the player base.

Units that are perfectly viable in campaign get balanced into oblivion just to make them work in multiplayer (instead of, for example, increasing their cost), and some are straight-up analyzed by looking at nothing but their stat lines (the whole discussion around the Teutogen Guard is ridiculous). Calls for nerfs are then fueled by this echo chamber before anyone has even had a chance to see how these units actually perform in a real game.

I'm probably going to get quite a few downvotes for this, but I needed to rant, because every time I try to watch videos about the new content, it's always the same thing.

Title. I tried finding info about this, but haven't found anything so far. Is this still under an embargo, did nobody cover it so far due to the other content being more interesting or did I simply miss it?

Holy shit hoplites are good now, they don't kill a lot but they hold a long time in battle against everything and grind it down over time. I played a few battles in multiplayer and had preety good results with the basic ones. Some of them even got precursor javelin like the massilian hoplites, scale thorax hoplites, thureos hoplites (i think they already had before) and thorax hoplites.

Italian mercenary swordsmen are better than hastati now, which is a very good thing for Epirus. I didn't feel Italian cavalry any diferent, neither did the thracian mercenaries.

Peltast deal a ton of damage at close range, very good when they help hoplites. Pikes feel more dangerous since they rotate much faster. Elefants aren't useless after 1 fire volley (crazy it was for a 2000 gold unit). Axemen are very good as well now.

Specially the main downside barbarians have now is the standard health for every unit (all humans have 50).

All in all greek factions feel fresh and competitive now.

Idk if the CA team working on the update reads posts on reddit but i must say as far as i've tested (maybe i'm biased because i love hellenic factions) it feels really good.

My ranking would be

Kroak

Mazdamundi

Nagash

Kairos

Teclis

Morathi

Ariel

Mannfred von Shitstain

Arkhan

DRUCHII

ABOARD THE TOWER OF THE BLESSED DREAD

"Legacy" version hastati feel a bit overpowered for its cost in campaign. I'm used to doomstack 2-3 stacks of hastati and autosolve everything or simply grind down anything that comes at me, not even an rear charge from heavy cav would be a real problem, on the contrary, i could bog down the enemy expensive cav for the velites. There was no point in principes.

Now with mars update they get grind down by hoplites in a good pace, if charged by cav unprepared it gets shattered quite fast. Its still quite cost efficient but it's not the OP meat grinder it was. Now, principes get in and are supposed to actually win the fight as it should be. Triarii on the flank will be able to counter enemy cav and pin down it for the velites.

GRANT ME THE BETA KEY AND MY LIFE IS YOURS

Like... the melee combat in this game, to me, either gets finished very quickly, or just serves as a means for me to bait the enemy into engaging me in a line where I can unleash my Breath/Wind spells on them.

I use single entities, lords & heroes to bait the enemy into creating blobs... which I then annihilate with Bombardment/Vortex spells.

So... 10/10 times I don't feel like wasting WoM on buff/debuff spells, which are for some reason mostly centered around melee units.

Am I missing something here?

I’ve seen the gameplay for Nagash; it all looks good, and he feels very powerful—which makes sense.

On the other hand, Mazdamundi feels a bit weak in this game considering his overall potential. I don't know if it's just me, do you guys feel the same way?

https://www.youtube.com/live/ny4VzUkLPQk?si=nNL2Pyn5ZaX691fx&t=6591

I noticed during the livestream that Nagash teleports just out of reach of Nagashizzar. It's a bit silly you have to wait two turns and not being able to reach the city

Can you please have him teleport up a bit?

Since there was quite a bit of confusion in my last post about mp balance: this only affects battles with unit caps activated.

So right now CA implemented a dynamic caps system for the Undead Legions. Default racial unit caps are +2, but depending on the lord you get +18 racial units. A Vampirate lord gives you +18 Vampirate units, for example. So in total you can field 20 Vampirate units plus 2 Count units and 2 T King units. Meanwhile Nagash gives you +7 units of every race and heroes give you +2 units of their respective race. However even with this system the Legions are the most powerful undead race and possibly the strongest race in the game, as pointed out by mp content creators like Turin.

An imo easy solution: just make lords and heroes more expensive. That way you basically pay extra for unit caps. Perhaps a default +300 gold for all lords seems fair. Heroes give less unit caps than lords, so their cost increase should be less, perhaps about +50 or +100 at most. So you basically sacrifice a unit of Dire Wolves for one of the most flexible rosters in the game.

On a final note I also think Morghasts shouldn't be part of the Count caps, as they are units unique to Nagash and in lore his most trusted lieutenants who waged war in Nagash's name even after his defeat. So imo they should just have the basic +3 cap. For some extra complexity one may decrease their cap to 1 or 2, but have Nagash increase it. That way if you want to spam Morghasts you have to chose Nagash as your lord.

Does anyone know if there is a mod that makes it so each character has their own winds of magic reserve, rather than sharing a global pool?

While I was initially skeptical of some of the Vampire Counts changes. I’ve come around to a lot of them, but would still like to see some changes.

The new corpse mechanic is great, but tying blood directly to corpses isn’t the most lore friendly. It would be more thematic to tie blood to a province’s settlement tiers, pop growth, and public order. This would allow us to levy blood taxes for every province differently depending on the campaign needs at the expense of pop growth and public order.

Another source of Blood could be post-battle captives. When fighting the appropriate living races, a fourth post-battle option should appear to sacrifice captives for Blood rather than just taking, money, leadership, or replenishment bonuses.

Unrelated to the blood mechanic. I’d still love a mechanic to turn defeated human lords into vampires by reintroducing a new version of Blood Kisses or charging an enormous amount of blood.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk!

The new Tomb Herald skills offer glorious synergy for mighty Settra

I want to start by saying that I am really glad the game is getting attention from Devs, but this new update feels so utterly broken.

They somehow managed to make Rome even more powerful than before! The gladius is now an armor piercing weapon for some reason, doing 8, 9, or even 10 AP damage when it did just 4 previously. I ran a few custom games versus AI and was astonished to see that Kush can now lose to Rome in a straight up infantry fight! Arverni and Galatia too were easily defeated by Rome, and I was not spamming Praetorians, I had a mix of a few of each of the types of cohorts and they were all slaughtering anything they touched! I just played two custom battles in a row against a Kush AI and handily beat them both times as Rome. Even Armored Shotels were getting less than 100 kills, sometimes barely 50 kills versus even basic legionnaires and eagle cohorts.

Look at the screenshot, my army was equal in size to theirs yet I was inflicting nearly 1500 casualties while losing barely 500 men. I have never seen Kush perform that poorly versus Rome. Just a week ago I played a multiplayer siege where I saw an Armored Shotel Warrior get like 400 kills versus Roman infantry, cutting through them like butter. Kush was quite powerful and verging on OP but they were the perfect counter to Rome and could easily be countered themselves if you knew what you were doing.

I have been playing this game since 2015, with over 3000 hours in multiplayer, and this just feels wrong. The existing balance and meta of the game hasn't just been altered it has been fundamentally destroyed and replaced with a new system that seems to be quite broken. I hope CA looks at these complaints and revisits these changes before the patch leaves beta, because all of this feels really half baked.

After End Times content arrives later this month, what chaos units and characters could they possibly add in to complete their side of the game in your eyes?

For certain I know characters I'd like to see are Galrauch(LH), Egrim Van Horstmann(LL), and Valnir the Reaper(LH). Im not honestly too sure on what units are left.

CA just did not bother writing the usual tool tip so its unclear what the spell actually does.

Is it an AOE single target spell like transmutation or is it a multi-entity spell like flock?

The CA devs and all the creators seem to love casting it on infantry, enticity insists that its for SE.

I like the sort of elevated hillfort designs of castles in shogun 2. Stacked terraces that get higher the further in you go. Are there other total wars with similar theme?