The faction revamp for Kislev in Total War: Warhammer 3 appears highly encouraging, alongside the intriguing addition of Cathay’s grenadiers.

Playing Total War: Warhammer 3‘s Kislev campaign on release was one of the best storified strategy game times I’ve had in years, launch issues be thrice-damned, triple cooked, and three times a lady. But the Slavic bulwark against stinky, angry, tricksy and horny invaders has lost some lustre since. The details in Creative Assembly’s latest blog are still a work in progress, but give a solid idea of how Kislev as a faction are changing in a patch due mid-March.

Creative Assembly said a while back that they’d be tweaking the pricing structure for the Shadows Of Change DLC to bring it in line with the a la carte factions from other recent expansions. The Kislev-Cathay-Tzeentch expansion was beefed up post-release with new units, and now it’s getting some more love: joining Kislev, Now It’s Ursunal are toys for Kairos Fateweaver, and surprise new units for Cathay and the Ogre Kingdoms.

The biggest news here is that they’ve axed the supporter race between Katarin and Assputin completely. You’ll instead “curry favour with the Orthodoxy to improve your common line troops, strengthen your economy and improve your invocations. And support the Ice court in order to improve your elite infantry, spellcasting and hero usage.”

This isn’t a race, but there’ll apparently be consequences (“unrest”) if you focus too much on one side over the other. I’m torn over this. I’m up for regular buffs and army theming all day long, but it sounds like there’s already a single correct way to play baked in to the system, with perhaps just a little leeway to make choices if you don’t want to suffer penalties. I’d say I’d withhold judgement but the judgement has clearly already wriggled out from my grasp and made itself known, in print no less.

Also dead is the ubiquitous province control system, replaced with an updated version of Devotion. “It acts much like Control, but can be spent on local invocations to temporarily boost the local province, or to empower an army temporarily”.

The tech tree is getting an overhaul (“no longer locked behind owning the Kislev capitals”!) as is the Attamans system. They’re getting their own unique skill trees, plus the following:

“Atamans now enable a new feature for settlements, tentatively called “Garrison Sally Attack” where you can command settlements managed by them to engage enemies within a limited distance, as if the settlements themselves were armies. Of course, the capital of the province is lead by the Ataman himself, who takes the field with the garrison during this attack.”

This is exciting because it a) just sounds very useful and b) opens up the possibility of Wood Elf tree settlements being able to uproot themselves and branch batter invaders somewhere down the line.

For fate-weaving failbird Kairos, there’s a whole pick n’ mix lore system:

“The core promise of the fragments of sorcery feature was versatility to build your own composite lore. And the design quickly narrowed in on a true “any combination you want” feature that completely did away with the idea of an ancillary slot, and moved the decision making to its own tab of the character detail panel.”

Do pop over to the blog for some more detailed visuals, but it basically looks like you’ll be able to slot in what spells you want and switch between heads to access more than usual. It’s a touch vague at the moment though.

Finally, there are two new units: grenadiers for Cathay and Gnoblar slingers for the Ogre Kingdoms. The grenadiers are vulnerable but powerful bomb hurlers with a debuff stun grenade, and the slingers look like Skavenslave slingers but less perfect, beautiful, graceful, and valiant.

I do enjoy all the work in progress art for its transparency in revealing that videogames look mostly awful for 95% of their development. I once played a grey box version of a game where all the characters in cutscenes had their faces replaced by real time clips of the actors doing mocap. Deeply disconcerting stuff.