At anything above Hard, the stat and resource boosts mean the AI can steamroll you in almost every sea fight. On more straightforward difficulties it can just about be manageable, although since the auto-resolve weights many of their units as barely existing you can forget winning any naval battles as Skaven. That naturally results in more naval clashes, and reveals that pure auto-resolve really isn’t a satisfactory approach for the sequel. Total water coverage is a lot greater than in the first game, and there’s plenty of incentive to voyage across the waves. It also has a few smaller islands dotted around the place. The New World map is effectively four separate continents Naggaroth and Lustria (joined by a narrow landmass), Ulthuan, and the Southlands.

This raises significantly more problems in Total War: Warhammer 2.

If two fleets meet, combat is auto-resolved based on the strength of the forces. The majority of playable factions are land-locked, and only the later releases Bretonnia and (especially) Norsca really have to pay a whole lot of attention to the coasts. The decision was pretty easy to justify too, because the Old World map has a distinct lack of water. Indeed, Rome 2’s oceanic failures may explain why the first Total War: Warhammer dispensed with real-time naval warfare entirely. In theory, Rome 2 had some exciting ideas about reinforcements able to arrive at land conflicts by boat (and more real-time naval battles) but they were so horrendously broken and awkward at launch that the whole experiment was soured.

Empire perhaps came closest to a satisfying set of real-time clashes, emulating line-of-battle and wind-based tactics of the period. Medieval 2 had dedicated naval units that would fight auto-resolve battles. The studio has taken a differing approach to conflicts at sea across the course of the Total War series, with no single variation really standing out as the true answer. There’s a great deal to love about Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer 2, but where naval encounters are concerned the game is currently floundering on the rocks.

Total war warhammer naval battle