Total War: Warhammer 2 - Cinematic Map Analysis (Vampire Coast, Tilea, Norscan!)

Hey what's up guys it's Oakley and CA put out just today a first look at the campaign map so it's going to be flying around taking a look at things so we're going to be watching it and then going over and trying to pause at various instances definitely go ahead and check out the original video for this awesome voiceover and for the highest quality that you can get it's going to be a little bit downrated when we look at it here but they start in Ulthuan and now we get to see the vortex in action it looked beautiful I got to see this when I went to meet up with CA and it looks fabulous so Ulthuan here has this ring of mountains that kind of protects the interior and on the outside there's actually going to be the fortress gates at various positions and those are I think there's like just three or four of them ways to get in and each of those fortress gates controls access so we can put this on pause so you can see that fortress gates to the bottom CA explained a little bit of the mechanics here basically no army can cross through this I don't believe there's an underway passage or anything you can't cross into the inner circle until you claim that tile and that tile acts like a city but then also gives you different bonuses and garrisons I believe for occupying that gate the gate itself will actually also I think you can invest in rituals and it'll give you special unlocks so that when you go into battle here you actually have special I believe army abilities or you get the ability to raise like a dragon or something when you're defending so these are very important points so you can see here if you were to attack this position there's just a couple of gates and there's also just one point of access by sea so Ulthuan here is very bottled up that being said I do imagine that there may be a way to kind of sprout up on the inside presumably Skaven can I don't know quite how the mechanics would work but knowing how good Skaven is at tunneling places there may be an opportunity for some force to bust into the center of this ring if you tech up enough maybe if you mess with the vortex enough maybe a higher unlock is going to be an ability to bust into this inner circle but anyways that's a bit of speculation this place is going to be pretty easy to defend but it looks like there's a bunch of different kind of factions in the center so different sub factions from the high elves here and presumably you're going to be squabbling because one of the things I'm worried about is obviously you know if you spawn on Ulthuan you're going to be very very well protected as a player and so that's why I believe they have various factions here so as the high elves you're not going to start with full control of the island you have to make sure that you're kind of playing off of the other factions here and that you find a way to politically gain control so I assume that's going to be much of the early action here and then I what I assume also is there's going to be some compromising factor to this whole area perhaps in order to challenge you early game there'll be an army rogue army or something that appears inside like in the forest or something or maybe a big fleet that tries to bust through the front I assume there's going to be something for combat that's going to threaten you here anyways we get to see a big while there's fortress gates on the side this is almost the equivalent of a fortress gate navally with a city here defending the little choke point and then you can see fleets coming by and this is the first time we really see an emphasis on fleets before you could see them kind of moving around in the previous uh warhammer title but now we get to see them in their full glory and they look awesome especially with the accents given by the various factions I'm going to be flying around and now you can see the inside of Ulthuan a couple of the different princes and princesses and mages that you can recruit in Ulthuan and they talk about how the elves have to expend political capital that you accumulate and they have to expend it in order to recruit lords the more political capital you gain the more higher tier lords you can recruit so this is mostly information that we've known before but it's nice to put it in context and now we can see some of the approaching fleets this looks like it's going to be some sort of human race with the horse there I'm not quite sure who that corresponds to it may be raiders from the north or it might also be Estellian Talaia although Estellian Talaia we do see them I believe later in this video so this uh doesn't really seem like them I believe these is uh Skellige or some of the other uh Norscan factions but anyways like I was talking about this is the threat that would beset you if you're on Ulthuan I assume naval raiders earlier in the in the game so this seems to kind of confirm it and then as we move forward here you can see more of the elven factions so it looks like the elves are really going to be split up between a lot of little minor factions on Ulthuan itself that could um perhaps in your squabbling not allow you to have a centralized defense against the enemy if you had full control it'd be easy to beat back raiders but the elves split up as they are here may it may cause some issues so that's kind of interesting and then over here on the right we don't quite see the best of views but two more armies that have a foothold on Ulthuan I believe those are high elves but again it may be an early game factions that's there to cause issues and then here's one of the major gates to get in so yeah these are going to be pretty hard to bust through and there are some of the new battle tiles that CA was talking about you also have the brony fleet over here wrapping it up with their flag so that's kind of cool and now we're going to get to fly over and see a bit of the rest of the the new world and actually this is this is kind of an important moment so a lot of the new campaign map is going to be split up by oceans warhammer one you could get a lot of places on land warhammer two the ocean is going to be very important and so to make this interesting what CA has done is they've added a lot of little features to the ocean so one of them is going to be these storms these are big roving things that can deal damage to your fleets they'll move around a bit randomly and pop up and you can I guess choose to go through them but sustain damage or go the long way around so yeah that's one of the features they've added and I can't remember or if they confirmed it or didn't but a lot of the features that CA is adding kind of the minor campaign things these are going to be put back oh and there I believe you can see a dwarven ship but a lot of the features that they're putting into this campaign map are going to be retroactively fitted into warhammer one so one of the main things that I believe they're doing is going to be what you see here so anytime you see something on the map that's kind of sparkling that usually means you can interact with it so in this case this is a shipwreck and so this is kind of like the same thing as what they said with the the city ruins so shipwrecks and city ruins are essentially things that you can go and they're kind of like little mini quests or they're kind of like little loot boxes is a better way to say it so on the campaign map your army or your fleet will go and you'll interact with it and what can happen is you might run into it and you might unlock you know a whole bunch of booty a lot of money on the downside what you could find is an army might pop out of it so these are kind of little random loot drop that could have positive or negative effects on the campaign map to keep it interesting I do remember asking CA in the interview whether or not these would be retroactively posted in warhammer one and I think they did the only caveat to that is I don't know if they said that in the context of it being just a standalone warhammer one or if it's in the combined map so I'll have to double check on that another thing here also as you can see kind of the reefs along the shore these are also things that are treacherous to fleet so let's say this is a pretty promising beach landing it looks like if you're going to try and cross this terrain you may suffer some form of naval attrition for standing in these reefs so that's a little thing of note and now we get to see another one of the factions along the coast line so vampires along the coast yep vampire coast confirmed so these this is a very interesting faction here it's basically a lot of the people who came to the new world seeking riches and booty a lot of them were destroyed in shipwrecks and went down in the sea and an original colony of vampires kind of swooped up all those those dead and have started to form their own vampire coast here so these guys are going to feed off of the battles between enemies and it's cool to see that they even have a fleet and so I'm really interested to see if they put some unique mechanics into this vampire coast force it's going to be an interesting feature and yeah look at this vampiric corruption spreading across the old world or sorry the new world it looks very cool and all these minor factions are going to add flavor and it's going to be the minor factions that are going to keep much of the familiarity of the old world and bring it to the new one because a lot of those factions have come over you'll also in this flyover be seeing like I said Estella and Talea but then you'll also be seeing some of the greenskins and other familiar units like that again take a look around the map you can see a lot of these sparkling locations those are cities the loot boxes again that you can go and you can plunder or alternatively if you choose not to plunder I believe you can just settle the city and not choose to engage in that plundering expedition we can see some of the lizardmen armies spread all around now they're going to take us a little bit closer to the city or the ruin here so perhaps as an expedition as Estella and Talea maybe you just want to roam around collect all the booty and then get back to your little coastal town and build up a force and so yeah I love how those little trinkets on the campaign map are going to be very interactive next we get to see a rogue army here so this is led by a treeman the way the rogue armies work is they're essentially armies that are amalgamations of a bunch of different factions they're kind of going to be themed around certain things so for instance they keep mentioning one of them which is kind of a beast master where there's a general who is very good at controlling beasts and his entire army is composed of beasts from various different armies squigs feral dinosaurs all sorts of things crammed into one army and so these if you don't deal with them are going to rank up in strength and get more and more of a threat and I believe when I ask CA these armies actually can become emergent factions so if this army gets so powerful that it starts to threaten your local city and it attacks it if it takes over your city that city becomes kind of its own faction and I was kind of questioning well if you have an army that's composed of a bunch of different factions what faction emerges and I think I'm remembering it correctly feel free to correct me if you if you know but I believe CA had said that whoever the leader is so if the leader is a goblin or a greenskin or something then the emergent faction is going to be a greenskin again I'll try and look that information up and correct it in the comments below so yeah that's an interesting thing about the rogue armies I'm very glad they're bringing these up they're going to be very interesting components they're going to be a little weird when it comes to like lore wise but definitely add flavor to things and around here we can see I believe those are some high elven forces and now we get to see Tirion on turtle island over here and you can see his forces again some shiny features around him so this is an interesting start position I don't know if this is exactly where he starts because I don't see very many settlements so you have very different start positions with very different consequences of your deployment so here you're all alone on an island compare this to the starting position of Teclis on Ulthuan and you saw how many settlements how many armies were all the way around there super buttoned up whereas here you're out in the wild so that's really different dynamics of the campaign from the get-go and it's going to make these factions play very differently which is very cool so yeah I love that they're embracing the different start positions but again like I said they're gonna have to do something I mean this guy here is exposed out in the wilds it's gonna be tough you'd imagine back in Ulthuan they're gonna have to have some sort of comparable threat so my idea would be internal politics is gonna be a big problem that you have to deal with perhaps you have less resources than Tirion here to start off with and additionally I assume there's going to be early game raiders on Ulthuan that you have to deal with and perhaps different crises and events and another thing also is perhaps on Ulthuan you're more isolated from different things that you have to go do like you know there's this whole ritual stage that you have to progress and unlock I assume from Ulthuan you're far removed from that so it takes a little bit longer to ramp up whereas if you go for Tirion you're gonna be right in the thick of it probably with easy access to some of those ritual stage unlocks moving around we get to see what are the neighbors of the high elves here and this is where you start to see oh sorry on the left you could have seen a green skin fortification didn't really seem like there was an army but they have scattered camps throughout the forest and then now we get to see one of the temple cities of the wizardment looks freaking beautiful and you can see it's powered up here so this means that it's connected to the geomantic web the geomantic web CA has stated connects various cities so you can see them on the campaign map and what happens is you have to connect cities with geomantic webs to power them up so it's kind of like how the province system works where once you get all the cities in a in a province then boom you're ranked up and you can unlock certain abilities in this case the way it works is you kind of you measure a city's strength by its connections and the geomantic web if one city has one connection then it can build certain tier buildings if you have two connections you get to unlock more buildings three four five and etc the downside is um i believe if you have multiple cities connected so if you have a hub and you have a network let's say your main city has five connections but the cities it's connected to have just one connection they're all connected to the main one i believe the net effect on all of them is they result they resume they i'm sorry revert to the lowest uh interconnection limit so i believe if you have a hub that's five with a bunch of others that are one they're all going to share in the one hub so you want to make sure that they're connected so that the least connected city kind of gets bolstered up and that'll power up your whole network again a lot of this i'll have to check but that was my impression from before again feel free to correct me so that's it for the lizardman city we're going to fly around and see a lot more of the landscape i do have to say it is freaking beautiful as always and here's another one of these green skin cities a lizardman uh skink moving around and then now we get to see uh again just a very big difference waterfalls all sorts of stuff it kind of reminds me of the uh the woodland well the woodland realm where they tried to differentiate it with a lot of different areas of the woods that were kind of more wintry more summery more fall um so it seems like in lustria they're going to be doing a lot of differentiation here also take a look on the right hand side as we're flying but i'm going to pause this this looks like something of an empire captain the banner here i'm not super familiar with the lion here i believe kind of seems like spanish influence i'm not quite sure what this is so but i mean put your money on this being a stallion or talea um so yeah there you go they are confirmed and then we see mazda moons they do announce that he is in a bit of a stance here that allows him to have better um he gazes into the future or whatever and is able to kind of improve the visibility range of his army i assume it's going to detect um any forces that are stealthing or do things of that nature so yeah unique stances for mazda mundi they haven't really announced exactly what the details of what he's doing is here but um i believe part of it may help um tied to the lore of when every time the old ones are kind of meditating or sorry not the old ones uh every time the uh slan priests are meditating like this they can communicate with one another so i wonder how that's going to um work and obviously you know when they're meditating in the lore they could combine mental powers to move mountains i'm not quite sure they're going to go that far but uh maybe this allow you to interconnect armies or do something of that nature maybe have better recruitment or technology research um and then we fly around so we see more of these cities up close the cities that you can either plunder or build up and then we see croc gar not too far from mazda mundi and then he's going to turn about and he's going to face the fallen gates here and these are going to be the ones that you saw in that e3 gameplay demo um so yeah that's it we've completed our fly through again um very um conspicuous in their um not being here is going to be the skaven didn't see anything of them and then also we didn't see anything of the dark elves didn't get to see naggaroth so yeah we're gonna have to wait for that second fly through where i assume we're gonna be seeing those two other factions so yeah stay tuned for that that's about it for this video um so yeah definitely check out ca's main video where you can see most of the information they posted in high def and all that so that's it hope you guys enjoyed stay tuned for more and see you on the next one peace out