Total War: Warhammer II’s The Prophet and The Warlock DLC is out now alongside the free Doomsayer update. Among the many tweaks and reworks in that patch is the under-empire mechanic, which I thoroughly enjoy, but which enables you to do some truly dastardly things when paired with Ikit Claw, one of the DLC’s new Legendary Lords.
Such escapades gave the developers at Creative Assembly some of their favourite stories from making the DLC. One nasty new tactic is to unleash an upgradeable army of ratmen from beneath an enemy city, taking it by surprise – and battle designer Gary Deans managed to use this vanguard to carve out a new, verminous realm in the heart of the Empire.
“I was playing as Ikit Claw in Mortal Empires, so I was in Skavenblight, and I sent my Warlock Engineer north,” Deans says. “I got to Nuln, established a war camp, and took what was a ragtag bunch of isolated Skaven and managed to carve out a small empire within that region. I felt like I was paratroopers dropped into enemy territory, because I had no support – you can’t replenish, and can’t recruit for a decent chunk of time after you’ve spawned this army. You really are on your own. But I managed to survive this insertion, against all the odds – I was taking settlements when outnumbered two-to-one, and stuff like that. It was one of those moments in the game that I’ll never forget.”
Any Skaven Lord can build a war camp and use it to spawn an under-city army, but Ikit Claw has a unique trick – he can build a Doomsphere. This device, his lifelong obsession, is the Warhammer equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and if detonated successfully, it can reduce a tier-five city to a ruin.
Any good? Here’s our The Prophet and The Warlock DLC review
“One of the QA guys was testing some stuff out – the Doomspheres – and he’d spread a massive under-empire throughout the Southlands,” Heastie tells us. “I said to him, ‘I wonder what would happen if you put a Doomsphere in every single under-empire region in the Southlands and detonated them all at once?’ So half an hour went by, and he sent me a little video. All you see is just a massive, green explosion, and these other massive explosions, just destroying essentially a whole continent. And that’s when I was like: ‘yes. We’ve done it.'”
You can see Heastie’s story in the video above. If you fancy getting in on the Chaos, the DLC is on Steam here for the reasonable price of $8.99 (£6.99). Head to the Total War blog for Doomsayer update patch notes, including details of the under-empire, Bretonnia’s Mortal Empires rework, Lord Kroak, and rebalances and bug fixes galore.