As the Empire is still around 200 odd years after the game takes place this can be considered the non-canon campaign. The campaign centers around Thorgar's attempts to rally the forces of Chaos after their defeat, ascend to daemonhood and, ultimately, finish what Kul started. Later levels have you control the Skaven as well. In the Chaos campaign you play as Thorgar the Blooded One, a Chaos Champion who fought alongside the warlord Asavar Kul (also known as the fourth 'Everchosen') in the Great War. It should be noted that this game takes place one year after the Great War Against Chaos, which means Magnus the Pious is the emperor instead of Karl Franz. The expansion, Battlemarch, made the Greenskins into a fully fledged faction, along with adding the Dark Elves as an entirely new one. The Vampire Counts also make an appearance, though only as an AI faction in a handful of campaign missions. The Dwarfs and Greenskins also appear in a limited capacity, with extremely small rosters and merely serving as mercenary units for the main factions. The original game featured The Empire, High Elves, Warriors of Chaos and Skaven as playable factions. You can also compare it to Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, but in glorious, bloom-spewing 3D. While superficially it resembles Total War, it's much more like King Arthur: A Roleplaying Wargame or MechCommander, but with a great Warhammer Fantasy skin.
In the RTS portion you control a mix of unit squads and individual heroes, and enemies will randomly drop equipment and items you can pick up to customize your troops, like magic standards to improve your soldiers or potions of various effects.
If you want to paint your Empire troops in the colors of Mariendorf, you can do so much like Dawn of War, which had come out just two years prior, Mark of Chaos featured a fairly in-depth army customizer for that real tabletop wargaming experience. At each point, you may recruit new units, equip your Lords with various magical items, equipment, and skills, and customize and maintain your army. The overworld, such as it is, consists of a 3D-rendered map of the northern reaches of the Empire, with mission destinations, campsites, and ruins scattered along different points of the storypath. Multiplayer is limited to skirmish battle options, so don't expect something on the scale of a Total War game.īoth campaigns feature branching mission options at certain points in the story, but are otherwise linear. You control an army of units selected from the overworld map, form them up in formations, manage their morale, and use your generals to- fuck it, it's a Total War game! However, as was common in strategy games of the time, rather than having a large and wide-ranging open world map to conquer, the campaigns locked you into a set of not-quite linear missions to advance the story of their Empire and Chaos champions. Like Total War: Warhammer, or any Total War game, there is no resource management or base building in the real-time portion of the game.