For a world of mouldering zombies and wizards, it feels surprisingly real and weighty, to the point itвЂ™ll be difficult to go back to ordinary knights and bowmen after this. Of course, the campaign stuff is meaningless if the battles arenвЂ™t similarly grand. There are also unclaimed settlements in the farthest reaches of the map, enabling the bold, pioneering feeling that comes from colonising distant provinces.

A welcome challenge, and one that gave me the chance to regroup without ever becoming complacent. Just as it was starting to get repetitive I found myself fighting a new type of enemy. In my playthrough I just managed to annihilate the Greenskins as the Chaos forces reached my borders. It might seem limiting at first, but it offers a degree of protection from other factions while giving you a reason to focus on a single enemy.

No single faction can hold every settlement on the map, so expanding in the early stages forces you to fight specific enemies - dwarfs, for example, can only take settlements from orcs (or other dwarfs, but if that happens youвЂ™ve done something seriously wrong). The first part of my conquest was spent fighting Greenskins, gradually reclaiming lost dwarf lands in a grim, attritional war.

Total war warhammer dwarf lords