Herald’s Start Positions – Skarbrand in the Empire is a lua script start position mod which moves Skarbrand the Exiled from Deep Gorge on the edge of the Badlands to Black Fire Pass on the southeastern border of the Empire, resulting in more challenging and immersive campaigns in the south of the Empire.
By expanding into Averland, AI Skarbrand becomes a threat that demands the attention of all surrounding factions, while the player can enjoy wrecking the Empire using the mighty forces of Khorne when controlling Skarbrand.
The main changes of this mod are the following:
- Skarbrand starts the campaign in Black Fire Pass, in the vicinity of laxly defended Grenzstadt, at war with Averland.
- Averland has received a new starting force guarding Black Fire Pass (not for long), while Marius Leitdorf’s starting army defending Averheim has been reduced;
- Skarbrand’s starting mission objectives now focus on Averland;
- the minor Skaven faction Clan Gnaw has been introduced into Immortal Empires by owning the entirety of The Barrier Idols province. This facilitates multi-layered expansion of the surrounding Legendary Lords into the Badlands, as the Top Knotz Greenskins now own only the Southern Badlands province;
- Black Venom Greenskins now control Pfeildorf, becoming the sole owners of Solland, thus allowing other factions cleaner expansion into this province;
- Skarbrand is no longer at war with the Top Knotz;
- if neither Elspeth nor Skarbrand are controlled by the player, Elspeth starts at war with Black Venom, and there is a 75% chance that Skarbrand declares war on Elspeth at turn 10 through script. This solution facilitates Elspeth’s expansion path towards Sylvania or her earlier ruin, and the avoidance of the usual border gore in the south of the Empire. Skarbrand and Elspeth otherwise tend to ignore each other when they are both controlled by the AI, so this small script should help with immersion.
If you don’t enjoy having the south of the Empire and its surrounding area be completely covered in red because of other factions, and would like to be able to differentiate between the various region owners on maps, I recommend using Herald’s Faction Map Colours – The Empire alongside this mod.
I also recommend using this mod together with other Herald’s Start Positions mods, and my mods in general, as they are all being developed in conjunction.
Herald’s Start Positions are now also available as a single subscription mod compilation, which will be continually updated with every future HSP mod release and update. This mod will be added to the compilation quite soon.
This mod is fully compatible with Mixu’s Unlocker and Immortal Empires Expanded. It was not developed keeping new faction mods in mind.
Herald’s Start Positions mod series should work with mods like SFO: Grimhammer III, which rebalance different aspects of the game, but generally do not touch the start positions of the factions.
Credits go to Porkenstein and Swissbob for the script framework which I’m using across my start position lua script mods.
News & Updates
You can find the list of all of my upcoming mods in my complete mod collection‘s description.
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