Total War: Warhammer 3 – Khorne’s Campaign Mechanics Are On A Rampage
Come and take a look at Khorne’s campaign mechanics to learn how you’ll get blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!
Khorne is the Chaos god of war, honour, courage, rage, strength, and hate. Most especially hate, rage, and war. And skulls. Khorne loves skulls, he loves taking ’em, sitting on ’em, making blood pour out of ’em, drinking blood out of ’em despite how impractical it is. It’s just a bloody skully good time with Khorne, which makes that one of the more popular factions in the highly-anticipated Total War: Warhammer 3.
Today we’re taking a look at Khorne’s campaign mechanics from Creative Assembly, and as you might imagine they involve a lot of blood and skulls. Especially skulls. They are Khorne’s favorite body part, and they also form a currency for the faction–an easily generated currency, since battle, sieges, post-battle decisions, dilemmas, buildings, and enemy armies doing battle, and pretty much everything in the game generates skulls or skull piles.
These skulls can be used for a number of things. First and foremost, you can pile them on the Skull Throne, raising it ever higher. As you do, you’ll gain massive buffs to empower your whole faction as you raise the Skull Throne up on high
You also have to spend skulls to occupy a settlement–otherwise you want to sack or raze, but you’ll want buildings because they’ll give you all sorts of things (including more skulls).
However, it’s a tough choice because when you overrun a garrison you can do a number of things. You can spend skulls to occupy it, generate Skulls for the Skull Throne by killing everyone and generating a thousand or so skulls. Or you can pick Blood for the Blood God to replenish your forces and create a new Blood Host army with no upkeep costs. There’s a cap on how many Blood Host armies you can have, but these are basically free recruits who can raze settlements and keep doing things.
Khorne is all about maintaining that momentum. The more you fight, the better you’ll fight, the cheaper you’ll fight–so you gotta keep driving on all the way to victory. And helping you along the way are some of Khorne’s own special Unholy Manifestations. Like Tzeentch, Khorne can wield his influence on reality, scything through it like an axe through blood and skulls. He has a number of options:
- Eternal War
- Unlocked from the start.
- Spawns a small Khornate army to attack your own army (triggering bloodletting, giving you skulls, favour, and XP from the battle.)
- Call of Battle
- Requires 1000 global Khorne corruption.
- Gives an army +50% campaign movement range.
- Slaughter Incarnate
- Requires 2000 global Khorne corruption.
- Doubles an army’s skull gains from battle for several turns.
- Khorne’s Glare
- Requires 3000 global Khorne corruption.
- Disables a friendly army’s movement for several turns. At the end it razes the local settlement automatically and gives a massive number of skulls.
Khorne also has access to a number of Blood Cult buildings:
- Hideout
- Generates a steady supply of skulls per turn.
- Fighting Pit
- Gives bonus skulls with every battle fought in the province.
- Lodge
- Generates a large supply of skulls per turn if a lord of any faction is present.
- Arena
- Destroys the cult upon completion but teleports your faction leader (and their army) to the settlement. Dunno what they would possibly do to an enemy city once they get there, it is a mystery.
And though Khorne hates many things, he doesn’t, in fact, hate the tech tree. Take a look.
There are eight techs in each of eight different pillars–you’ll move from pillar to pillar by investing in the right techs. Skulls are a big part of how you unlock new techs, though one costs a diplomatic penalty. Speaking of Khorne and diplomacy…
One element worth noting is that the mortal peoples of the world are… not fans of their daemonic invaders from the North. War is automatically declared between any daemonic faction and any non-daemonic faction it meets, with a couple of exceptions. Skaven are just mad/scheming enough to consider alliances, while Norscans, Beastmen, and the Warriors of Chaos are, of course, mortal servants. Slaanesh… well, we’ll get to them when we get to them, but what mortal can resist the God of Pleasure (and pain)?
But if you’re playing Khore odds are good you’re just looking for a fight anyway.
Get out there and get those skulls!
