Be’lakor’s fast travel mechanic in IE has totally spoiled me. I think more factions should get a way of traveling across the map quickly. – November 19, 2022 at 09:58AM

I’m in the tail end of my Be’lakor IE campaign, which I’ve been playing in co-op. When I picked Be’lakor, I didn’t even know about the mechanic, we just knew that we wanted to do an Archaon/Be’lakor dream team campaign.

I cannot express how convenient the rifts mechanic has made playing this campaign for me. It’s one of Be’lakor’s key strengths, to be able to re-arrange armies wherever you need them, and you can spawn in a new rift every 15 turns. This has to be one of the strongest campaign abilities in the game, and while I don’t think it would be appropriate for every faction to get something of that magnitude, I do think that it has totally changed my IE experience for the better.

The map in Immortal Empires is huge. It can be a huge drag when your LL is far into enemy territory and you have to either change lords or bring them back to retrofit their army with new units that you’ve unlocked as they’ve been conquering, or you have to into encamp and recruit globally, which takes forever anyway. With some kind of fast travel system beyond sea lanes, it could make short work of shuffling armies around and getting new units into the fray quickly.

And there are a million ways you could do this thematically. Maybe Cathay’s fast travel could be tied to trade routes. Lizardmen’s Geomatic Web would be made infinitely useful if it allowed for some fast travel (like the Wood Elves can do). Maybe Skaven and Dwarves’ underways system could be adapted to allow for much further travel on a cooldown. Maybe the monogods could use something similar to Be’lakor, etc

When you get to a map this size you run into the inevitable problem of things taking longer the more and more territory you take. If you spawn new lords on the outside of your territory that’s still being built up, they don’t have access to the best units from your settlements that you’ve been building up. Being able to dip out and get back home quickly to defend or send new lords into the fray quickly is so great.

Sea Lanes do this a little but in my experience still aren’t a great way of implementing fast travel unless you just happen to be at the one specific lane you need.

I’m confident that there is a code to be cracked here that would improve map navigation, just not sure exactly what the best implementation would be. This has added so much to this playthrough, I just can’t believe it.