A new post on the Total War blog provides some details about an upcoming feature planned for Total War: Warhammer II’s Mortal Empires campaign map: Forts. They’re a new kind of settlement that are located on the mountain passes and other strategic locations around the Empire’s territory, and they’re coming with their own unique siege maps.
If you’ve played Total War: Warhammer II, you may have noticed that the siege battles can sometimes feel a bit one-note. You assault (or defend) the walls, and once that’s sorted out, it’s basically a process of mopping up whoever’s left inside. The new fort maps aim to change this formula up a bit.
“[W]e feel that we should add more emphasis to the areas inside the fort as well as the wall itself, so we’re making a concerted effort to give each new map multiple tiers and areas of engagement beyond the initial battle for the walls to make everything a little more interesting and to properly utilise the space,” writes Creative Assembly community manager James High.
Since the forts were built by the Empire, they take full advantage of the Empire’s strong guns and cavalry. There are several layers of fortifications to place gunlines atop, and the defending player will be able to fall back to several positions if their initial defences are breached.
Stairways form chokepoints and killboxes in key areas, and anyone attacking a fort is in for some tough fighting.
The blog explains Creative Assembly’s approach to map-making and it’s an interesting read. So far, we’ve only seen a couple still images of forts, but Creative Assembly says it’ll be showing them off “in action” sometime next week.
The forts are part of the free update to Total War: Warhammer II that will arrive alongside the Hunter and the Beast DLC that’s coming out September 11.