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This Total War: Warhammer 2 mod gives the AI more interesting armies

If you're bored with Total Warhammer's infantry-focussed stacks, try this mod by Jadawin

An elf riding on top of a dinosaur is brandishing a sword and wearing dark armour. The dinosaur is roaring menacingly.

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.

Jadawin says the mod now will spin up armies that vary wildly in balance, overall strength, and cost, even within the same faction. They’ve tried to build in a slight preference for higher quality units, but also a way to mix in some of the cheaper troops too.

Subscribe to this and many of the other best Total War: Warhammer 2 mods over on the Steam Workshop. It’s a lot tidier than model painting, at least.