Total War: Warhammer 3 – Nurgle Campaign Mechanics Unveiled!
Grandfather Nurgle’s forces are poised to ooze out across the world, a pustulent with victory and sick new mechanics. Check ’em out!
Now that the Nurgling’s out of the bag regarding your plague-ridden pals who are down to party–the forces and daemons of Nurgle–in Total War: Warhammer 3, it’s time to take a look at Nurgle’s campaign mechanics. They are truly a delight, and will aid Nurgle’s goals of spreading joy and happiness and disease to everyone. So let’s dig right in.
First up we have the Death & Rebirth mechanics, which are a unique way for Nurgle to spread across the campaign map. As Creative Assembly points out, Nurgle doesn’t expand the way a typical fashion would. Instead, you infect settlements with an evolving cycle of life and death (and disease) that embodies Nurgle himself. Nurgle buildings, then, do not upgrade, but they grow, flourish, die, and are reborn.
Each building will evolve to its next phase over a number of turns, eventually withering and starting again from a base state. At each point its effects will be different, and each new evolution will add units to the recruitment pool.
Meaning that you’ll need to juggle the cyclical nature of your settlements carefully, knowing what will wax and wane when will be the key to victory.
Speaking of keys to victory, you’ll also want to know how Nurgle’s armies grow. Instead of recruiting units the typical way,you simply summon Nurgle’s daemons directly to an army, ready to go. They come in at not-quite-full strength, but build up over time (which can be buffed by your technologies and so on), but the pool of daemons you’ll have to recruit from is determined by your buildings, as mentioned above.
Of course, the real draw to Nurgle are the plagues and infections that you’ll brew up to share with everyone. Truly, they are gifts.
At the heart of the Nurgle campaign mechanics is the Plague Cauldron. This allows you to brew up plagues out of unlocked components–bases and symptoms. Negative effects apply to infected enemy forces and settlements, positive ones spread across your own. All plagues help generate your faction resource: Infections, which you’ll spend to help plague the world–either by directly infecting your own settlements, or by building Plague Cultists to help spread the infection to enemy territories.
Here’s a look at the five “starter plagues”
- Pox – decreases cycle time for friendly buildings, increases growth for friendly settlements.
- Buboes – reduces casualty replenishment rate and increases attrition while under siege within enemy settlements.
- Ague – applies attrition to enemy armies and reduces their campaign movement range.
- Rot – instead of giving Infections whenever it is spread, adds a unit of Nurglings to your recruitment pool.
- Palsy – reduces melee attack of enemy armies.
Naturally, you can upgrade them to spread further and farther, so that, at any given time, armies will be plague-ridden all across the world.
Speaking of cultists though, Nurgle has his own Cult mechanics. Like the other Chaos gods, Nurgle has Unholy Manifestations:
- Pestilent Growth
- Unlocked from the start.
- Gives a 20% replenishment rate boost to an army for two turns, while disabling their campaign movement.
- Blessing of Nurgle
- Requires 1000 global Nurgle corruption
- Increases the chance of plagues spreading in the local province by 30% for three turns, but disables campaign movement.
- Exponential Growth
- Requires 2000 global Nurgle corruption
- Increases growth in the local province by 200 and decreases recruitment costs by 20% for target army for three turns.
- Nurgle’s Visitation
- Requires 3000 global Nurgle corruption
- After three turns, gives a random plague to every army and settlement in the same province as target army. Disables campaign movement for the army while it charges.
And Nurgle’s Cultists can create the following buildings in any city where they’ve taken hold:
- Shelter
- Gives 25 infections per turn.
- Refuge
- Gives 40 infections per turn if growth in the region is at 200 or more.
- Hospice
- Gives 40 infections per turn if any Lord is present.
- Colony
- Gives a random plague to the settlement, but destroys the cult.
Finally, let’s take a look at Nurgle’s Tech Tree.
The number seven is important here, being Nurgle’s number. There are pods of seven technologies each which link from one to the other once you have four in any given pod. You can decide where you’ll begin and where you’ll grow. Nurgle Techs can improve all manner of things, from unit growth to unlocking new symptoms, to giving spells to your Great Unclean Ones, even unlocking various army abilities.
All of this is due out on February 17th, 2022!
