Corpse Campaign: Total Warhammer Vampire Counts
Undead undead undead
Total War: Warhammer [official site] is creeping closer to release like a stealth Nosferatu. May 24th is launch day and today we've got latest in a series of campaign videos that show how the different factions will approach the game's strategic layer. This time up, it's the Vampire Counts and their undead minions. I've dabbled in vampiric arithmetic leadership myself and now you can see how an official dev commentary walkthrough compares to my write-up.
Conquering Sylvania, the undead homelands, is more difficult than you might think. The most impressive aspect of the game, from my perspective, lay in the unexpected alliances and wars that emerged, both between my faction and the AI, and between the AI and itself. Undead factions scrapping with one another creates a corpse-cycle, as zombies die and are re-raised until it's unclear precisely how dead, undead, redead, neverdead or omnidead the armies are as each new battle begins.
You can see a little of that at the beginning of the playthrough here. Strange alliances and unusual enemies.
And then there's mention of an army "exuding some kind of tentacular effect" and it's all happy days from there on in. There's a good insight into the long-term objectives in the campaign - which avoid the 'paint the whole map in your colour' victory condition - and how they can change dynamically depending on occurrences around the world.
Recruitment is the most unusual aspect of the undead game though and the explanation of that begins around 3:30. "Benefit from the plentiful dead", says the commentary. Yes. That seems sensible.