Immortal Empires: First Impressions

I just completed my first Immortal Empires campaign so before jumping into my next I thought I’d take a break and share my thoughts. After spending several minutes staring at the race select screen almost overwhelmed by the variety and quantity of content on offer, I decided to keep it simple and go back to the very start and play an Empire campaign as Karl Franz.

The Empire is marked as a good ‘starting’ race to play but, having to contend with what feels like endless waves of greenskins, vampires, beastmen and chaos is anything but easy. It’s a real slog, and uniting the Empire as a whole has never felt more difficult. I completed the ‘short’ campaign victory fairly quickly, but I didn’t complete the ‘long’ objectives until turn 120.

To be fair, I probably could have done it quicker if I hadn’t waited so long to confederate the other Empire factions who I spent a lot of time protecting early in the campaign. I took my time and when I finally did unite all of the regions and secure my borders, it felt like a genuine and satisfying achievement.

But this post isn’t really about the Empire campaign, but about the Immortal Empires campaign as a whole. And right now, it’s difficult to judge as a whole because of the sheer quantity of content included within. Even within the Empire ‘race’ there are multiple factions, a couple of which start very far from the homeland and likely experience very different campaigns as a result.

That’s the real strength of Immortal Empires – the quantity and variety of content. The quality is important too, of course – and I’m pleased to say that the overall level of quality is high. For a ‘beta’ release, Immortal Empires has been remarkably solid with no crashes or obvious bugs in my time of play.

I obviously can’t vouch for every race / faction and I’m sure there’s some inconsistency in the quality because some have received more recent overhauls than others. Immortal Empires is still very much a work in progress. But as starts go, this is a pretty solid one. Turn times were around 20-30 seconds on turn 1 with over 270 factions, and still around 20-30 seconds on turn 120 with 98 or so.

Performance was fine, despite the massive map – but I prefer to lock the FPS at 30 because it doesn’t heat up my GPU so hard and frankly, whilst I know we all have a different tolerance to such things, the difference between playing at 30FPS or 60FPS in TW is pretty negligible to me. I’m also playing on what is now a 9 year old system, so I’d rather lock it at 30 and keep everything else cranked up on Ultra.

I don’t know if I’m sold on the ‘end game’ scenarios yet – in my Empire campaign, once I’d hit my Long Victory, the Wood Elf scenario triggered and dozens of angry Wood Elf armies began attacking everything in sight. It felt appropriate in my campaign given I was already at war with the tetchy bastards, but did the game select that scenario because of their proximity and my diplomatic status, or was it a totally random choice that just so happened to feel appropriate?

Ultimately though, I couldn’t really be bothered to deal with it. I felt like my campaign was done at that point and I was ready to move on. The good thing though is that the end game stuff is fully customisable – when it triggers, what scenarios can trigger or even if you want it to trigger at all. I can’t exactly complain about that.

I do still feel – like I did when Warhammer 3 first released – that the campaign side of the game is a step back compared to Three Kingdoms, but there’s nothing really to be done about that. All of this content needs to connect together so the campaign, as a whole, hasn’t really evolved since Warhammer 1. This is still a campaign that feels like it exists purely to facilitate the battles and as a result, it just isn’t that interesting to engage with as you progress (and oh god, the hero spam is still f**king horrible).

You reach a point quite early on when you’re just pumping out full stacks and marching from one settlement to the next and you’re not really paying much attention to the campaign side of the game at all. But Warhammer has always focused more on the spectacular battles with a ridiculous number of units and magic and monsters.

But yeah, I still can’t shake that feeling that I miss the campaign of 3K where every turn in the campaign felt important. In Warhammer, I’m often just spamming turns to get to the next big fight and I’m ignoring a lot of the empire management because it’s just not that important or engaging.

However, the big BIG advantage that Immortal Empires has over 3K is the variety it offers. Every faction in 3K plays pretty much the same – similar units, similar terrain, similar enemies and similar mechanics. But in IE I can finish one campaign and immediately jump into another in an entirely different part of the map, with new terrain, entirely new units, new campaign mechanics and new enemies to fight. Immortal Empires is a campaign you can easily sink hundreds of hours into and never play the same faction – or even race – twice.

Overall, this is a solid start for Immortal Empires. There are clearly some things that still need to be tweaked such as how minor settlement battles work in terms of frequency and mechanics, but CA have said they’re planning to address that in a future update so I guess we’ll wait and see. In the meantime though, there’s plenty here to keep everyone busy for a very long time to come.