The day begins with a small presentation of news and an explanation of what will be playable for this discovery session. The great announcement of the day is the addition of the eighth faction, the demons of chaos (or daemon prince).

• Cathay
• DEMONS OF CHAOS
• Other contributions

Past this appearance, we are left a free neighborhood to discover the beginning of these two campaigns, the other factions are not accessible.

Cathay

I started my day with Cathay, being much more attracted to them at first. Two sub-factions are available, but I start with Mao Ying, the Dragon of Storms. Past the intro which immediately puts us in the atmosphere, we start, as usual, with our little troop with first easy missions, given by the eternal narrator who seeks in this opus to free Ursa, the God-bears. Seeking allies to get there, he turns to Cathay to achieve it. But the dragons, proud and proud, are hardly interested in liberating a god that they do not even consider as their equal. In addition, evil is necessary for equilibrium. Nevertheless, free Ursa could allow them to find their sister (if I understood correctly, it goes quickly) who is locked in the desolation of the north, which, for them, breaks the harmony of the universe.

Because yes, the leaders we embody Cathay are dragons. And they are very interesting to play. These can stay in human form, to motivate and inspire the surrounding troops, enjoy their magic or… turn into mythical beast and devastate the battlefield. This mix of raw power is very interesting to play.

So we start as usual by eliminating a small enemy unit and take a strong place as a milestone, before you actually start in the countryside.

What characterizes Cathay is his gameplay in relation to the Yin and the Yang, the clear and the dark, inseparable from each other. Each unit, each hero, affects the points of Yin and Yang and the goal is to reach harmony, the perfect balance between the two.

As a result, Cathay’s gameplay is very special because you really have to anticipate the evolution of your game, because if you imbalance the forces too much, you risk having more and more important penalty you strongly handicap the game. If you arrive at harmony, on the contrary, you will have a multitude of bonuses:

• Huge diplomacy bonus with other Cathay factions
• 20% reductions for the construction of all your buildings.
• 40% accelerated growth
• Building revenues increasing by 25%
• An increased authority
• A reduced corruption of 5 on all your provinces
• And the ability to invoke ancestral warriors, valid on all your armies, anywhere on the battlefield

It’s really not negligible. But it’s hard to maintain. Each contribution (or almost) tipping the scale on one side or the other.

The country card is quite original too: a large wall (genre grand wall of China) protects the Cathay land from desolation to the west. Several doors defend it. Beyond that, troops from the gods of chaos, ogres and orcs swarming in the area, tempting, at times, to take the assault wall to pass beyond. The responsibility for protecting a door is not obvious. It acts as a province composed of a single city, which must be kept, which at times can block our army in a fairly restricted area of ​​the map. Because other threats exist on the other side (rebels, or even chaos incursions that took advantage of a breach elsewhere).

There is also the great compass, one can orientate from time to time, which makes it possible to give advantages of different natures according to the orientation given to it.

All that put to end, it’s Cathay!

DEMONS OF CHAOS

After this discovery of the Grand Cathay, the turn of the demons of the chaos to be explored.

The particularity of this freshly unveiled faction is that it prays universal chaos. She is adept for all the gods of chaos and not from a particular God that are Spanish, Teeth, Burgle or Horne.

You take the orders of a demon prince, which you can name as you want, who thought to be Ursa’s executioner. The narrator tells him that it is nothing and is ready to help him take possession of the power of it in exchange for a drop of the blood of the god-bears, allowing our Prince demon not to ‘Sit your will on the Nordic Lands of the Old World, but to extend his power to the entire continent.

The gameplay of this faction is much simpler to take in hand that describes above.

As a private prince of universal chaos, you can pray any God, make them offerings, establish constructions in their names. All of this allows you to store points in each of these chaos factions: universal, Horne, Burgle, Spanish or Teeth.

In this faction, you do not have a technological tree itself: you have these 5 divinities that unlock things by level, if you reach the number of points necessary.

Easy so. You can either specialize, or touch everything.

These bearings allow you not only to unlock units, which you can recruit at any time in your provinces for little that you have the associated buildings, if necessary (not always the case), but also… to completely modify the capacities of your Prince-Demon. Indeed, it does not really have a skill tree. This is terribly limited. But it is because on the side, you can completely piper your champion: head, torso, wings, left arm, arm, legs, tail, manual weapon, hand non-dominant or weapon with two hands, everything is customizable (and visible at stake).

Depending on your orientation, your champion can have multiple visual aspects, but also the skills that go with it. Burgle wings can give you harmful will have enemy troops, advantages, etc. It works like magic objects, if you want, but for many more locations.

It’s quite entertaining to see how much our demon can change in appearance and gameplay. You can make a monster of magic or a bloody killer with a body to body. To your good pleasure.

The playground of the countryside is north, but is terribly open to travel. We are not in the management of a horde, as in addition, but we are clearly nomadic than for other factions. Traveling in hostile earth being much less restrictive when we pray the universal chaos.

So much for my return on these two factions.

Other contributions

In addition to all that, Total War Warhammer 3 opens up other improvements in the license, particularly with regard to diplomacy.

The function to balance an agreement for example, is terribly practical. When you launch a proposal to a neighboring country and that you see that it may refuse (with a slightly negative or other value), rather than attempting and seeing a refusal come back, you can balance the agreement, offsetting Your initial offer to be certain that the agreement is accepted, in general with gold ringing and stumbling.

In addition, if you went with another faction, you have the possibility to establish savant posts in its territory, allowing you to recruit troops in its countries (but not especially of your faction; from his, if I saw well. We had only 50 game turns, not easy to see this function that is a function that is used when the game goes well).

You can also ask more or less politely has an enemy troupe from leaving if they come into your territory, without any diplomatic repercussions.

Or, depending on your power level, you can simply threaten your neighbors to get what you want, via diplomacy.

And finally, other multiplayer modes have also been announced, but without having been able to touch it, I will not start in a presentation on it, if it is not told that it would be possible to play 4.

In short, Total War Warhammer 3 is in the vein of previous opus. I’m curious to see how all this will get married, as I can not wait to see how it was going to spin on tw2.

See you next month for that!