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Warlords of Chaos: A Chaos Campaign Overhaul

A mod designed to improve the Chaos campaign without deviating too much from the TT or the aesthetics and feel of vanilla TW:W.

Highlights:
- Over 60 new skills, many with brand new effects! All lords and heroes have completely new skill trees, themed towards the four Gods of Chaos.
- Complete overhaul of horde development and recruitment, designed to minimise the importance of horde growth and make losing a horde feel much less painful. New tactics – such as using cheap marauder hordes – will be more viable, and the player should feel much freer to take risks.
- Numerous quality of life changes, such as new ways to replenish, easy vassalisation of Norscan AI, new income sources, and changed options for dealing with captured cities.


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WHAT'S IN THE MOD?

LORD SKILLS:
The most substantial part of the mod is the large number of new skills available to lords, mostly divided into four trees, each devoted to one of the Chaos Gods. Chaos Lords, Kholek and Sigvald will have access to all four trees, and Sorcerer Lords will have access to all but Khorne’s.

- Lords pledged to Nurgle are slow but immensely durable. They also provide potent debuffs to enemy armies on both the battle and campaign map; even enabling attrition in areas without chaos corruption. Eventually they can gain regeneration for themselves and grant poison attacks and attrition immunity to their whole army.

- Lords pledged to Khorne can deal terrible damage on the battlefield, at the cost of their own survivability. They grant powerful attack buffs to their followers, especially melee infantry. Those truly devoted to Khorne can give their whole army Frenzy, allowing them to tear through their opponents.

- Lords pledged to Tzeentch offer a range of useful campaign buffs, and can sacrifice their own combat effectiveness to make their troops stronger. At the highest level, they can gain a powerful damage aura and grant their army a ward save.

- Lords pledged to Slaanesh focus on speed and strategy. Their soldiers, especially their cavalry, are fast and agile. This extends to the campaign map, as devotees of Slaanesh get access to the Lightning Strike ability.

While you can mix together skills from the first tier of each chain, going beyond that in any one chain will prevent you from accessing the top-tier skills of the others. So choose carefully! However, if you resist the urge to commit to any one God, you’ll be able to take two powerful Undivided abilities: the first, Bow to None, offers a mixture of potent campaign bonuses. The second, Champion of Chaos Undivided, makes the Lord and all armies in his region immune to horde infighting.

Archaon gets his own skill tree that mixes together abilities from across all four god-based trees. As the Everchosen, Archaon can take skill combinations no other lord can - so if you want to give him frenzy AND regeneration, feel free!

AGENT SKILLS:
Both Sorcerer and Exalted Hero skills have had an overhaul, and are now arranged along the same four-god structures as the lords. These new agent trees are a mixture of pre-existing and new skills.

RECRUITMENT:
Most recruitment is now done via the main settlement building line, with only variant units (GW warriors, halberd chosen, knights with lances etc.) requiring extra buildings. You’ll no longer have to wait for dozens of points of horde growth to slowly accrue to gain access to top–tier units.

However, the armies of Chaos will not follow the weak. Recruiting anything but marauder-tier troops will be slow and expensive until your lord can invest in a new set of skills. Want affordable Dragon Ogres? You’ll want to invest a point in the Bestial Affinity skill, available from level 7 (unless you’re Kholek, of course – he starts with it).

But don’t worry about having to level up new lords from scratch as the campaign goes on – the main line of techs now offers bonuses to Lord recruit level, so your late-game lords will be able to jump into the fight much faster.

BUILDINGS:
Most horde buildings have had their effects completely changed so as to provide new and interesting bonuses:

- Marauder Tree offers horde growth and recruitment slots

- The Magic tree unlocks and empowers Chaos Sorcerers and increases the horde’s magic reserves. The brand-new tier three building, the Dark Portal, will allow a small amount of replenishment anywhere in the world – even when not encamped!

- The Forge tree unlocks variant Warriors and Chosen, and gives boosts to armour and artillery.

- The Weapons tree unlocks Knights with Lances, boosts the army’s melee attack, and reduces upkeep

- As before, the Trophies tree offers income, but now also provides experience to the army.

- The new Raiding Tree offers big bonuses to sack and raze income.

- The Troll’s Larder unlocks armoured trolls, and gives you a handy way to deal with enemy agents...

- The Sacrifical Pit allows hordes to trade growth for income.

REPLENISHMENT:
On top of the new Dark Portal building, Chaos will have two new ways to replenish their forces.

- The new “Raze and Revel” option after capturing a city, which offers 15% replenishment for one turn.

- Your forces will now replenish in areas with over 50% chaos corruption, even when not in encampment stance. So get out there and spread that corruption!(This has the weird side effect of allowing wood elves with the attrition immunity tech or Durthu’s attrition immunity trait to also replenish in corrupted areas, but I thought it was worth it)

DIPLOMACY:
You’ll no longer have to reinvade freshly-awakened Norscan tribes: they’re now desperate to pay tribute to you, and if you offer them vassal status they should accept pretty swiftly, so long as you're still friendly. Varg and Skaeling, however, are unchanged.

INCOME:
Chaos can now receive a small amount of income from vassals, and new buildings offer new streams of income. You'll now be able to support more troops without being stuck in the red.


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Other stuff:

COMPATIBILITY: There is a lot in this mod – by my count it modifies or adds to about forty different tables – meaning a host of potential incompatibilities with other mods. In particular, anything that changes Chaos lords or agents, changes *any* building tree, or affects occupation options has a high potential for conflict.

AI: It WILL effect the Chaos AI. I honestly have no idea how it will handle some of the changes – it could either cripple them or make them obscenely powerful. As a result, I seriously advise that you disable this mod when not playing as Chaos.

SAVE-GAMES: While it will technically work with existing saves, you’ll be unable to recover points invested in old skills. So I’d advise you start from scratch.

BUGS: While the mod is now feature-complete, it will still have plenty of kinks that need ironing out. If you come across any, please let me know via the discussions page and I’ll try to get them fixed.