It's finally happened: the Steam Workshop is now open for Total War: Warhammer 2! After weeks of delays due to bugs causing constant crashes with mods, the floodgates have been opened and you can tweak the game till your heart's content!
After less than 48 hours, there are already more than 600 Warhammer 2 mods available at the Steam Workshop, with many of them ported directly from the previous game.
Out of those hundreds of mods uploaded already (with more being added all the time), which ones are the must-haves that should be downloaded ASAP? Go ahead and click that Next button to get started with the 9 best Total War: Warhammer 2 Steam Workshop mods!
Better Camera Mod
A lot of players are going to head straight for the Legendary Lord double skill point mods, the combat tweaks, updated battle standards, or even the diplomacy changing mods.
Not me. No sir, my go-to first mod for anything Total War related will always be the camera. This one changes how the camera rotates and lets you go both higher and lower, giving better vantage points for surveying the battlefield and for getting up close for those killer screenshots.
Double Lord Skill Points
After grabbing that camera update, your next stop in the Warhammer 2 Steam Workshop should absolutely be here for doubling your Lord and Legendary Lord skill points. With two per level instead of one, those Lords will feel more like the battlefield-controlling powerhouses they are supposed to be.
There will almost certainly be a cheat version of this in the future that doesn't apply to enemy Lords as well, but for now its actually a balanced, non-cheating mod since the AI Lords get the boost as well. Be careful when fighting one of those upgraded Lords!
For a little more tweaking of the Lord skill trees, you can also grab the Unlock All Lord Skills mod here, which does exactly what it sounds like and doesn't lock you out of branches of the tree depending on what you picked previously.
Building Progression Icons
Team Radious was all over getting major improvements added to the first game, and they are at it again with Warhammer 2. While constructing new buildings during the Vortex campaign, you might have noticed something a little odd... all the icons stay the same, even after a structure is upgraded.
Kind of an oversight, don't you think? This work-in-progress mod fixes that by tweaking each icon for every upgraded version of a building. At the moment it only covers the High Elf faction, but is currently being expanded to all the Vortex campaign factions. There's also minor tweaks when a different faction controls a province, giving a visual cue as to which one is in control.
Spectator Mode
Auto resolving a battle means you miss all the carnage, but going through yet another fight you know you are going to win can get tiresome as well with all the micro-managing thrown at you by Total War.
That's where Spectator Mode comes in -- letting you turn on the AI during a battle and freely roam the battle to watch wherever the fighting is thickest. The mod also features options for changing what is controlled by AI, letting you still control your Lord for instance, or controlling your armies while the AI handles all reinforcements and summoned units.
While this is a cool mod for getting a better look at the game's combat, be advised that sometimes the AI does dumb things. So you you might end up losing units by accident!
Immersive Battle Banners
The previous game was flooded with updated banner mods, and Total War: Warhammer 2 isn't going to be any different!
Everybody seems to have a different opinion on how the various banners and heraldry should look, with some focused on lore-friendly versions closer to the tabletop miniature game and others just wanting banners that look bad ass on the field of battle.
This is one of the first banner mods to arrive, making each banner more complex and distinct while getting rid of that sort of plastic toy look. Some of these are pretty spectacular, but as with most of these mods there are still tweaks to be made as a few are quite oversaturated and hard to see properly during the campaign.
Crynsos' Faction Unlocker
Pretty soon this one actually won't be needed, since the developer will be bringing in the entire map and all factions from the previous game for the combined Mortal Empires campaign in the near future. For now, however, this sweet little mod lets you play as any faction on the Vortex campaign map.
Keep in mind a few things are a little wonky as some of the faction abilities from the previous game weren't meant to be used with the Vortex mechanics (which is probably why its taking so long for Creative Assembly to make it all fit together).
Overall though, this is a fun way to try out different races before the official Mortal Empires patch arrives.
Darker Grand Campaign
The cinematic cut scenes make the Vortex and its environs look one way, but the actual campaign map seems to look quite a bit different. Sometimes the bright colors and cartoonish effects lead to what this mod's creator describes as a "My Little Pony look."
I'm not sure I'd go that far, but then again this series is supposed to be the epitome of the grimdark style, so adding in a little extra darkness wouldn't hurt. That's exactly what this mod does, changing up the lighting effects across the map to match the cinematic visuals more closely, from deserts to jungles to the Vortex itself.
Brutal Battles
If you aren't a huge fan of the highly regimented, orderly combat that this particular iteration of the Warhammer series utilizes, then Brutal Battles is the mod for you.
Melee becomes a chaotic jumbled mess of bodies, and combat stats are tweaked so cavalry runs down stationary units more effectively, and spells obliterate tightly massed armies.
Sadly, there's no actual combat blood mod yet (how does that get left out of a realistic war game?), but fingers crossed that it arrives soon.
Big Ol' Cheat Mod
We're gonna wrap up this list of Total War: Warhammer 2 mods with an entry for the filthy casuals (bless your hearts, I'm one of you!) who love Warhammer... but can't stand the Total War complexity and difficulty levels.
Here's your standard Vortex campaign cheat mod that increases your tax income, reduces unit upkeep, lowers public unrest, and adds to the unit replenishment rate so you can just enjoy the game rather than trying to figure out how to not constantly lose your empire.
While these covered a lot of ground between visual style and game substance, that's only 9 out of hundreds of mods currently available, with dozens more being added every week!
Let us know what you thought of our Total War: Warhammer 2 Steam Workshop mods roundup, and be sure to recommend some other killer mods we should check out in the comments.
Looking for help to beat this difficult RTS battle simulator without any mods installed? Head over to our full selection of Warhammer 2 faction guides here.
