The Cooldown

Somewhere in Nordland's forests, atop a rocky outcrop shaped like a crude arrowhead, a grey wolf howls at the sky. Countless hours in Total Warhammer 3, and it's my first time seeing her. I like to think she's saying goodbye to the moon. 

She borks in lunatic prestalgia among dozens of bespoke dioramic sites dotted around the Empire of Man's territories. A mill here. A sports arena there. Cartographic peans to the industry and culture of the thousands of conscripts I'll gift dented cuirasses and spears over the length of my campaign, before marching them off to melt under gouts of sour-green warpfire loosed by cackling rats. In Nordland's port settlements - Dietershafen, Salzenmund - I picture dockworkers hauling and cursing, forced to pull double shifts after half the crew were ground to imitation crab meat by mammoth-riding raiders. Click the ports, and four building chains bear the heroic task of abstracting every non-military facet of the Empire's culture - farms, taverns, tailors, roads.

I don't bring these up to call the simulation gaunt. It's precisely the breadth and richness of Total Warhammer's adaption that invites me to dream of more, I think. The maddening brilliance of grand designs is how they plant seeds for endless grander fantasies. Why shouldn't a game world with this much on offer also contain everything, actually?  Why can't I zoom in an extra layer - visit the taverns, hang with the soldiers I'm recruiting? Where are the complex strings of branching story events that let me hunt Skaven in Altdorf's sewers? Lazy devs, please fix (my washing machine, my brain, my life).  

Instead, I'm thinking about the wolf and the granaries and the docks because it's taken me facing the end of the world - courtesy of three new apocalyptic end-game scenarios that devastate the planet's surface - to finally stop and smell the roses.

This is Warhammer, of course, where even the roses reek. Just outside my capital city of Middenheim, there's a patch of swampland I've never noticed before. It's so small that it's difficult to move an army any amount and still remain inside of it. In the rare circumstance that Middenheim is ever under siege by two armies at once from this one specific angle, the attrition from the swamp might be enough to slightly weaken the reinforcing force in the one or two turns it takes to build battering rams. It is, in other words, meaningless. Unless…