Total War: Rome 2's Desert Kingdoms expansion is set to arrive tomorrow, bringing with it four new playable factions to mess around with: Meroe (Kingdom of Kush), Saba, Nabatea and Masaesyli. Each of the factions will be getting new units, building chains, technology trees, as well as individual traits that should go a long way towards fleshing out some of Rome 2's least interesting provinces.

Besides all of the paid content, the Desert Kingdom expansion will also arrive alongside a sizable free update. The highlights include the ability for female characters to occupy social/political roles and even lead armies as generals, Spices as a brand new resource with a major bonus to trade income, an easy to access button that allows you to merge units, and perhaps most importantly of all, the option to set your units into Guard Mode, thus preventing them from chasing enemies and breaking your formations!

Given the size of the patch there is a high chance some of your mods will either not function or cause game-breaking issues, which is why the Desert Kingdoms update will also bring with it a handy new Mod Filter tool that lets you disable the problematic ones until they eventually get updated. A relatively minor quality of life change, but one that I imagine is going to save Creative Assembly's support team a whole lot of time!

You can read more about all of these changes and bug fixes by heading over to the official website. If you're just interested in the Desert Kingdoms expansion, however, you should visit Steam instead as Creative Assembly has done a good job outlining all of the major features and additions.

And finally, here's one of the recent developer-guided gameplay previews, just to help you get a better idea of what the Desert Kingdoms expansion is all about. Enjoy!