
Grom and Eltharion will also show up in campaigns even if you don't own them. If you don't fancy splashing out on The Warden & The Paunch, you'll still be able to check out all the Greenskin changes in Mortal Empires, which you'll have if you own Warhammer 2 and its predecessor. I might have to start another Mortal Empires campaign, which should keep me going through the summer.


Warhammer has become the source of Creative Assembly's most unusual faction designs, and as much as I'm eager to find out what's going on with the sequel, the ongoing experiments in Warhammer 2 are keeping me pretty content. It turns them into this huge, terrifying green tide that can just tear through lands, raiding, scavenging and getting spikier. The changes also really captures the character of the Greenskin factions. There's more to keep track of, but it's worth the extra control you get over the WAAAGH! and your troops' development. But what else would I be doing with orcs? I never found myself short of the stuff, though my big armies and bigger appetite did mean I had expenses that could only be maintained by lots and lots of fighting. All Greenskin factions can use scrap in the Mortal Empires campaign, but Grom has an additional use for it: funding his cooking experiments. A few items in the tech tree can be unlocked outright with scrap, too. When you've got enough scrap for an upgrade, you can pick between two of them, but you'll need to have unlocked the tech first. It's a new resource that handy troops can use to upgrade their gear. Winning battles and sieges also fills your pockets with scrap. I reserve the right to change my mind when I'm on the receiving end. It's probably a bit overpowered, maybe more than a bit, but I can't find it in myself to care.

It lasts for a set number of turns, so you can keep stomping around the map with your greatly inflated army. If you manage to capture or raze the enemy capital, you'll get a reward based on who you were fighting, but the WAAAGH! doesn't need to end there. The new orcs don't all arrive at once, so it takes a few turns for them to finish mustering, but by the end you've just doubled the number of units directly under your control.
