[Update #2]: Immortal Empires has now been unleashed alongside Total War: Warhammer 3's biggest update ever!

[Update]: The latest preview offers a close-up look at the Immortal Empires campaign map and some of the new Legendary Lord positions.

As a part of the August 23rd update, Total War: Warhammer 3 will receive a staggering amount of new content. Not only will it include the Immortal Empires combined campaign map that spans the entire Warhammer world, but also the very first Champions of Chaos Lord Pack, along with a whole bunch of faction reworks and tweaks.

While the full list of changes has not been announced just yet, Creative Assembly has taken this opportunity to reveal their plans for four of the races: Lizardmen, Vampire Counts, Dark Elves and Norsca. You can read the whole developer update over at the Total War website, but for now here's a brief rundown of what you can expect to see:

Lizardmen are still scheduled to get a proper rework down the line, but for now you can look forward to a variety of improvements to their legendary lords. Tehenhauin will unlock Regiments of Renown units by levelling up instead of having to waste sacrifices on them, Kroq’gar will focus on creating a squad of elite Saurus characters with major buffs for Old-Bloods and Scar-Veterans, while Gor’rok will go all-out on defense by giving his Saurus a barrier as well as immunity to hostile weapon effects like poison.

Lord Kroak will also be getting a bit of an overhaul in order to gel better with the new magic system, which includes powerful effects like barrier, increased Winds of Magic capacity and even an extra 50% range for his spells! Nakai will benefit from a variety of balance changes aimed at boosting his economy, which combined with the reworked diplomacy AI in Warhammer 3, should hopefully make his campaign a lot less tedious. Oxyotl, surprisingly enough, will get an assortment of new missions to hunt the forces of Chaos, along with a stricter time limit to make sure things don't become too easy on harder difficulty settings.

Vampire Counts will be losing the free skeletons crutch that was propping the faction up throughout Warhammer 2, and will instead get across-the-board buffs and balance changes to their units, tech trees, skill trees and even their lords. Recruitment buildings are also getting reshuffled, so getting higher tier units will be a lot easier than before.

Just to help spice everything up, Mannfred Von Carstein will be moving to the Soutlands in search of the unholy Books of Nagash, which will give him a drastically different campaign than the other Vampire Counts. Meanwhile Helman Ghorst and his endless ranks of zombies will head east, once again providing the Vampire Counts with a fresh new batch of enemies to spam Wind of Death on.

Dark Elves don't really need a lot of help, so their changes are fairly humble. Slaves will be transformed into a faction-wide resource that can be spent at numerous buildings to generate income or invested in “Slave Diktats” to buff specific provinces. Morathi will fully embrace Slaaneshi corruption and will be able to even recruit Daemonettes, while Malus’ new possession ability will allow him to more frequently use Tz’arkan without crippling his empire. And Rakarth, keeping with his usual theme, will be getting a whole bunch of new beasts to tame like Sabretusks and Feral Bears!

Norsca will be going through a bit of an overhaul, though much like the Lizardmen, this is not going to be their big rework. In terms of gameplay mechanics, the biggest change is the transition to regular occupation rules which means that Norsca will have full access to all of their buildings regardless of where they are in the world.

They will also be able to exploit all rare resources for local and global bonuses, which should provide them with a much more stable economy. The rewards for dedicating yourself to one of the four Chaos gods will be getting reworked and rebalanced, with the aim being to make each one a valid and powerful option. Add to this new rewards for razing major Order cities, and the Norsca campaign should be a lot more enjoyable than in Warhammer 2.

Once all of this goes live, or Creative Assembly releases the next big batch of juicy information, I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, I'll leave you with the recent gameplay preview for Slaanesh's contribution to the Champions of Chaos DLC - Azazel: