Frankly that would make the game pretty dull and there would be a lot less variation between playable races. It’s certainly worth saying while we’re on the subject, that when we talk about ‘balancing’, it’s natural to assume that means that all things are being made equal and ‘fair’. We feel we’ve struck a good balance in our choice. It could be that particular areas felt ‘contested’ enough already, or that a major faction needed a little more pressure or support in the early game to deliver the right level of challenge or selection of options. Certainly, some of the more recent discussions have centred around adding more factions than we originally intended as we found the map and playthrough tests supported it. There are a wealth of design reasons for including a particular minor faction over another, and any one or more combination could come into play. Some are too important to the history of the world to miss out, while others may not be as important, but may be more notorious, or interesting in other ways some are little more than a footnote. Open any Army Book and you can disappear down a rabbit-hole of minor tribes and clans. When it came to choosing which non-playable factions to include for each race, it was really a balance of factors. Or you may make a friend for life in the struggle against a common threat. Affront may be taken and allegiances may shift. A weakened faction in your network of pals may be set upon by another ally looking to exploit the situation, and you may be called upon to make a difficult choice between them. When you’ve achieved a delicate diplomatic balance between a number of local factions and a tribe such as the Skull Takerz tears into your collective back-yard with a couple of doom-stacks, things can change rapidly. They don’t dwell in towns – eschewing even the comfortably Orc-y surroundings of their Greenskin cousins – and simply rove the world in bands looking for stuff to smash up.

Your carefully-woven web of apparent diplomatic stability can be quite upset by the arrival of a third party. Dealing with other factions of your own kind is part of the picture for each of the four core races, and brings both challenge and opportunity, fist-bump moments, and turns of terror where you realise someone has an agenda you didn’t know about.Īs you might expect, not all non-playable factions are alike, and that can be especially true when you meet factions outside of the usual same-race distinction.

At which point you’ll turn to diplomacy by other means, as they say. Confederation is the ultimate diplomatic solution to controlling territory, but you need to be super-buddies with a minor faction to achieve this, and some of the Elector Counts just aren’t your-way-inclined. So your first order of business will be to figure out which of the non-playable Elector Counts is friendly towards you, and which aren’t. Start a campaign as the Empire and one of your main victory conditions is to control a specific set of regions, through ownership, alliance or vassalage. So we built many minor factions for each race, gave them personalities of their own, and while the playables are the stars of the show, this supporting cast, whether noble, capricious or downright bloodthirsty, brings a lot of texture and colour to your campaign. Take the Dwarfs – there are a bunch of factions in the lore such as Karak Norn, Karak Hirn and even the lost clan of Kraka Drak, surrounded by chaotic marauder tribes way up in the wilds of Norsca. In short, we found ourselves being pretty choosy about which races we would concentrate on making playable. It was almost like working on a bunch of historical eras simultaneously. In the early stages of planning Total War: Warhammer it became pretty clear to us that to best reflect the diversity and variety that each race brings to the tabletop game, we’d have to design unique campaign and battle mechanics, styles of play, and ultimately flavour. About minor factions in Total War: WARHAMMER

Rome 2 total war minor faction