Total War Warhammer 2 Review

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Good old Mandy doing good reviews

👍︎︎ 258 👤︎︎ u/forge_rhys 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

Sseth has been taking his meds again

👍︎︎ 225 👤︎︎ u/whitehand2107 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

That was an excellent review; I'm totally with him on the lack of the sea-shanty for the vampire coast, that was a huge missed opportunity...

👍︎︎ 414 👤︎︎ u/spaghettischolar 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

How much work went into this?! There are whole animations just for a joke.

👍︎︎ 207 👤︎︎ u/igncom1 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

"You have Egyptians, but they're undead. You have Aztecs, but they're lizards. You have the French, but they're very honorable."

Haha, this going to be a great review I can tell from the start.

👍︎︎ 201 👤︎︎ u/GreyKnightPaladin 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

1 hour and 20 minutes

My slop is delivered, my snout descends.

👍︎︎ 447 👤︎︎ u/Herac1es 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

I'm glad he highlighted all the lighting and textures issues with Warhammer 1 content. All too often these strange inexcusable downgrades the second game introduced, like the performance, get lost amongst the other praise.

👍︎︎ 101 👤︎︎ u/Mingeblaster 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

Despite it being hour and twenty minutes I feels like it still doesnt cover enough of game 2. But still a great video.

👍︎︎ 180 👤︎︎ u/StellarStar1 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies

I appreciate him talking about a bunch of largely forgotten issues, like the washed out lighting and the broken ssao casting weird auras arround models.

Also, yes please, more bombast music. I don't need my music to be mood pieces, I want a tune I can actually hum.

👍︎︎ 225 👤︎︎ u/OrkfaellerX 📅︎︎ May 02 2020 🗫︎ replies
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KARL FRANZ: “You are not welcome in my court, yet here you are. Friend or foe? We will see...” KARL FRANZ: “Summon the elector counts!” [sounds of massive battle and triumphant music] Hey, this is pretty fun! Is this the greatest Warhammer fantasy game ever made? Yeah! At least, I think so. Does it have problems and things that put people off? Of course it does. This is a huge game, so I’ll be talking about it a while today. I’m gonna preface this by saying that I’m not gonna get too deep into hyper-balancing. One, because it would take forever, and two, I’m just not attuned to the balance that well. So, if you wanna know, like, what unit needs +2 melee attack, I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, there are other channels that do that, and they do a great job at it. I’m just not that smart, so when it comes to that, I’m gonna cover things that stick out the most to me. So, with that, some of you may be wondering, how come I’m not talking about the first game? Why am I starting at “2”? Well, if you own both games, our campaign maps get combined into one mega-campaign called Mortal Empires in the second game. You can play as the old factions with updates, DLC carries over – it’s all very nice. I view “Warhammer 2” as an excellent expansion pack. “2” does have its own standalone campaign, and… we’ll get to that… So I AM gonna talk about the first game. In “2”. Rather than trying to brutally section things out, like I usually do, this time I’m just gonna go through the game, faction by faction, and point out stuff as I come along to it. Actually, I probably should do some kind of overview first… “Total War: Warhammer 2”. Also known as “Total Warhammer 2”. Calling it this way will irritate brand managers, but save my brain in the long run. The “Total War” franchise is well established. It’s been going 20 years now, with no signs of stopping. There have been a lot of great games, with hiccups here and there. The AI can be silly and easily exploitable, some things don’t work how they should, the entire release of “Rome 2”. Just… all of it… Still, overall, a pretty good streak. Most of the games have long-running communities, including modding. The most powerful and handsome of them – the "Medieval Total War 2" community – made a mod for Warhammer fantasy. Call of Warhammer is still updated today. Warhammer fantasy and Total War were a perfect match. So what is Warhammer fantasy? Is it like 40K? Well, most people are miserable, and there are Orcs, so… That’s about it, really. Yeah, there are a few other parallels, but it’s a very different setting. While 40K is an enormous, horrific blob of a sci-fi universe, fantasy isn’t. It’s a single not-Earth planet, with a donut, which makes everything much more digestible. The factions are based off real cultures, but ultimately fantastical and fictional. You have Egyptians, but they’re undead, you have Aztecs, but they’re lizards, you have the French, but they’re very honorable. There are still some outliers to this rule. The donut-dwelling High Elves are based off fictional Atlantian lore. At least I hope it’s fictional… Dark Elves live in the northwestern hemisphere. They have a history of slavery, and dominate their neighbors through giant floating fortresses. So, pretty out there stuff. The current Mortal Empires map is about 2/3 of the Warhammer world. You’re free to sail the globe, find strange new cultures, then obliterate them for being awful. There are two layers to this game. The first is the overworld campaign map, which plays very similarly to other 4X titles. You recruit units, build up your cities, research technology, and do other things that might be specific to each faction (or even sub-faction). Yeah, how you play can change dramatically based on the leader you pick. Many of these were added for free, or just massively tweaked, but there are a lot of DLC ones as well. And of course, all the leaders and characters have massive RPG skill trees and special items and followers and quests and… ooph… I am getting ahead of myself. So, on its own, the campaign map is a very intricate 4X game. Battles even have an auto-resolve function, so, technically, you could beat a campaign without ever touching the RTS part. I don’t know why you would do that, but… you can… Do you really wanna miss the gator death roll? [sounds of hectic battle] You miss out when you just hit auto-resolve. [*dunk*] Anyway, the battles are the real heart of the game. If you’re used to more traditional RTS games, the “Total War” franchise is very different. Rather than only controlling individual units or small squads, you control entire regiments. There are still individual units, and sometimes small squads, but for the most part you’re moving big blobs of people. At least, sometimes people, if you want to get technical. That may sound difficult, but it’s actually pretty simple. The unit formation controls individually, so, really, those more traditional RTS games could be a lot harder to control. Instead of having to micro a bunch of cavalry units, you can just click their unit and move them all at once. There are many handy ways to command your army, but you may have to dig into the controls to find some more useful ones. There are many factors to take into account in positioning troops. Moving archers behind enemies stuck in combat means you can fire right into the back of them. I mean, that’s obvious. But if you’re firing from the front, and they have shields, they can deflect your shots. And most archers don’t want to be caught in melee. Cavalry is really good at smashing through enemy formations. They might even go flying Team Rocket style. However, some units may have spears or other factors which makes charging into them from the front a bad idea. How thick you make their formation could also mean less of a chance of breaking through. So you can try going around them, or maybe softening them up with artillery or magic or archers. This is just one example. The battlefield itself has a lot to consider. Hills can block units with line of sight, they make units moving up them tire up and slower, and they help ranged weapons out. Because, sure, arrows can fire in arcs, but guns can’t. So your guns can die without firing, or you can get the high ground. Once again, this is just one example. Some terrain can slow your army, the woods can hide your army, the woods can BE your army – you get the idea, I’m not gonna go through all of it. There are many fields of battle, and many tactics to consider. Where the fight is is based on where the armies meet on the campaign map. And that’s it. There’s much more – those are just the essentials to know going forward. Now, before I talk about the factions, I want to talk about the presentation in general. It’s incredible. The battles are a sight to behold, but I want to start with the campaign map. A big advantage “Total Warhammer” has in this department over other 4X games is that the map is hand-crafted. Even though I’ve spent hundreds of hours staring at it, there are still new things I notice on the campaign map. There’s such richness and variety in all the locations. It honestly blows my mind that the campaign map is this detailed, since they could have gotten away with making it more abstract. And this is all being done on a gigantic scale. For two different campaign maps. This is a genre that’s so mechanics-focused that it’s usually seen as okay not to go this hard in the visuals. But they did. Boy, did they… It might seem strange to fixate on – it’s not “Crysis” or anything – it’s just crazy for this kind of game. This is the top tier right now. Then you have the actual battle maps. I mean… are you kidding me? This is… insanity. The sheer scale and level of detail for an RTS map is just unbelievable. You can strain your eyes looking at the backgrounds and still be picking up all kinds of things. This is a Warhammer title, and the stupidly big scale is still here. Once again, they probably could have gotten away with less. Okay, example. So you look at, like, a city map. You can put yourself to on-foot scale and just take a look around. Not only are large objects high quality, but they extended this to the smallest of scale. For God’s sake, the city has a hole in it, and you can, like, look down and see there’s more buildings down there, and it keeps extending! It’s not even playable, it’s just there! I’m not complaining, this is amazing, but… is everyone there okay? Is everyone sleeping enough? I hope so, but… I don’t think so. This is wonderful. So, to no surprise, of course, the units look incredible too. I’d just be repeating a lot of what I just said, so I’m gonna save some of these for faction-by-faction. For now, I’ll just say I’ve played some recent FPS and action games that had characters that didn’t look this good. I do wanna give attention to the animation. If you miss the “Dawn of War” synchronized kills, you’re right at home. Some of these animations were made by the developers on their own time. Having them to make more would be good. The more, the better. COMMENTATOR 1: "-slithering like the snake he is..." COMMENTATOR 2: "Watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out!" COMMENTATOR 1: "OHH! KO!" All that said, I do see some issues. A lot of visual improvements were made between the games. There’s new lighting and fog effects, the UI is a lot better, but there is one big step down the UI department. “Warhammer 1” has an elegant faction selector. It all fits in one screen. Pick your faction, and then pick your leader. It’s simple and effective. Which makes me wonder why “Warhammer 2” has this, like, quasi-fighting-game screen. It’s not a huge deal, and re-working something like this actually takes a lot longer than most people would think, but I hope they fix it up for game three. I have no real issues with the art direction of the game. So, if you’re hoping that I’ll be mad that a model doesn’t look just like the tabletop or something, well, you won’t get that here, but that’s what Total War Center is for. My big issues are technical ones. The new lighting is good, but it came with some problems. “Warhammer 2” has an option for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion. Put simply, Ambient Occlusion determines which objects block light and make shadow. This generally makes lighting in a game look more realistic, and you have a nicer image. Little shadows here and there add a lot of depth. This technique works in most of the maps, but not all of them. For whatever reason, a lot of desert and snow maps will give units a strange shimmer around them. Sometimes white, and sometimes black. Not all the maps are like this – only some, but when it happens, it’s very noticeable. Which leads into the other issue. The new world of “Warhammer 2” is a bright and sunny place, and the old world of “Warhammer 1” was very grey. The new world lighting looks great on the new maps and new characters, but something happened to some of the old ones. Here’s Settra from “Warhammer 2”. He’s looking good. Here’s the best von Carstein vampire in the first game. Also a handsome man. Now let’s put him in “Warhammer 2”, and… oh shit… The lighting is horrible on him, and it looks like his texture was whacked down too. If this is a bug, it’s a pretty bad one. It’s not just Vlad, there is a bunch of “Warhammer 1” characters this happened to. I’ve seen other people complain about the lighting, with others saying it’s just different, but I don’t think so. Something is wrong here. The general went from “Marshall the men” to “Marshall my methamphetamines”. A lot of the maps have the same issue. Here’s “Warhammer 2”, and here’s back in “Warhammer 1”. You take the old moody lighting, and put it through the new system, and now it looks washed out and awful. Let’s look at a quest battle Vlad has in game one. It’s quite clearly night – dark and atmospheric. A warpstone meteor glistens in the valley. Now let’s look at the exact same map in “Warhammer 2”. It’s early morning, I think, or… maybe, evening? Oh, man, what happened? It is quite literally a night and day difference. Some things are technically better, but it looks a lot worse. I can only guess that something went wrong in the conversion between game one and game two stuff. Maybe there wasn’t enough time to properly pass all the maps off. It’s not that “2’s” engine isn’t capable of moody lighting. For example, you have some underground maps that look exceptional. Then you play one that looks broken with the effects in the wrong layers. Let’s go back to the Chaos map. “Warhammer 1”. “Warhammer 1” converted into “2”. Brand new “Warhammer 2” map. Yeah, I think “2” can do atmosphere just fine. There are maps and characters that need help, it’s simple as that. My worry is that game three will get another new lighting system, and then everyone gets to go through it the second time. So I do hope it gets fixed eventually. Before… eugh… Okay, let’s talk about sound. [rumbling of hooves] [roaring of the infantry approaching] [booming impacts of projectiles] COMMANDER: "Stand fa-ast!" [roaring of the infantry swelling] [guttural reptilian grumbling and roaring] [deep roaring, sounding like old tree branches creaking and grinding against each other] [*thwomp*] [mechanical clanking and rattling] [sounds of hectic battle and sparce gunfire] Visuals rightly get a lot of praise, but this is some exceptional sound work too! There are a lot of layers of soldiers yelling, weapons striking each other, weapons bouncing off armor, and, of course, all the effort that goes into bringing strange creatures to life. Though, once again, like “Dawn of War”, the voice acting and direction is perfect for a Warhammer game. KARL FRANZ: “Orcs come before me! Be careful what you say, beast, or my Reiksmarshal will have your tongue!” QUEEK: “Khht! Any who attempt to outkill me-me will pay! Wrrownn! Get them! (psychotic giggling) Get them now, now!!” KROQ-GAR: “Urkchak kotah! Ueaugh! Zugarloch!” KEMMLER: “My lords von Carstein, how may thy humble liche serve you this night?” CYLOSTRA: “O-OH! I have been robbed! My chance to perform for the Phoenix King STOLEN!” CYLOSTRA: “But I WILL have my audience! My star is in the ascendant, and the world shall hear me sing again!” SETTRA: “Undead king!” Yeah, it’s very over the top, but a lot of fun. The huge variety of characters and units gives you a really solid variety throughout the whole game. Out of everything, I think I find the music to be one of more weak aspects. It’s not BAD, and it gets a lot better in “Warhammer 2”, but there are some missed opportunities. Let’s listen to some “Warhammer 2” campaign music. [fitting, but subdued tune] [fitting, but subdued tune] MALEKITH: “Malekith, King of Naggaroth.” [fitting, but subdued tune] [fitting, but subdued tune, again] [wuddayaknow, it's a fitting, but subdued tune] SETTRA: “Settra does not serve!” [rat-Mongolian throat singing] [rat-Mongolian throat singing] QUEEK: “Run, phools!” [rat-Mongolian throat singing] The soundtrack has rat-Mongolian throat singing. Like, how could I be complaining? Well, “2” has much more of a variety. “Warhammer 1” factions can share a lot of music, and it gets really repetitive. The Dwarf faction shares all their music with the Empire, except for a single pre-battle theme. What really makes it stick out to me is that there is music made for the trailers that isn’t in the game. Let’s look at some skirmish music. [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] COMMANDER: “Form a ring of steel!” [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] COMMANDER: “Shields up!” [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] COMMANDER: “Form a ring of steel!” [what if I told you that it's fitting, but subdued?] It’s good, but every faction uses it, like the vampires here. Now let’s look at the vampire trailer-exclusive music. [epic chorus, accompanied by orchestra and march-like drum beats] We don’t get THAT in game? Oh man, is there a way to still license it for the game? Okay, maybe they are just a little dramatic. How about Greenskins? [alright, you know the... score (*ba-dum-tss*)] It sounds very similar to the other music. Maybe their trailer music sounds simila- [energetic chorus, with clanking of metal mixed into the music] Yeah, “Warhammer 1” has a lot of promotional faction music that just isn’t in the game. It makes the lack of variety sting more, knowing that there’s more out there, and it’s really good. You might think “Warhammer 2” is free of this, due to all the improvements, but it does have one painful example. Music for a pirate faction. [painfully fitting, but subdued example] Now what if I told you they have a shanty? [Tattered Sails Shanty] (it's bold and dynamic) [Tattered Sails Shanty] ♪ Hail the mighty ♪ ♪ He's arising from the deep ♪ This is goddamn heartbreaking. It makes sense for campaign music not to be overly bombastic. I’m glad “Warhammer 2” pushed the music further and added a variety of instruments, like pan flutes, but it still feels like some people somewhere are being held back. Maybe the music can’t be too distracting from the battle sounds, or the dynamic music wouldn’t work well with it? Whatever the case, the current music compliments the gameplay well, but if someone said to drum out a battle theme or something, I don’t know if I could. At the same time, I could easily recount tracks from a game like “Rome: Total War”. ♪ Dun-tada-dun-tada-dada-dada-dun, tada-dun, tada-dun… ♪ So, overall, a really strong presentation, but there’s room for improvement. Okay, time to talk about factions. Starting with the Empire. SOMEONE: “Die, Orcs!” [rumbling sound of charging army] [*ka-bloosh*] The Empire is the main human faction in the setting. It’s also the most familiar for those who have played the historical “Total War” games. A lot of humans in fantasy settings will be vaguely British medieval. The Empire isn’t that. In fact, it’s well past the middle ages at this point. They’re roughly around an early Renaissance period. They’ve been there so long that they have tanks now. Not many tanks though, because the Empire is a little inefficient. Because, unfortunately, they’re based off the collection of tollbooth castles called The Holy Roman Empire. Essentially, a kingdom of cats that needed herding all the time. And wow, it is not better here at all. The Emperor of them all is Karl Franz – master warrior, master politician and general humanitarian. They’re a good faction for new players (and anyone, really). Their power comes from how versatile their playstyle can be. Do you like guns and artillery? Check. Maybe you’re more of a cavalry person? Well, they have many knights and outriders in plenty of flavors. Including gluten-free options, if you don’t like horses. They have 8 different kinds of magic to play around with. To access magic, you need to recruit special Heroes and Lords that have spellcasting. Magic can be absurdly effective, and turn a surefire loss into a victory. It’s only limited by a magic power pool you get in the beginning of a battle, though there are ways to increase that. The Empire has 7 different wizards to recruit, including a Legendary Lord who controls metal. Don’t you worry, we’ll get to him… If you like traditional sword-and-board with archers, there’s plenty of that too. The Empire has something for everybody in battle. By using them, you can find a playstyle you really like, and then align with a faction that specializes in that. Or just enjoy all the varied builds you can make with an Imperial army. Now, being a bunch of human beings, they’re all not ready to go fight to the death. As you may have seen before, they’ll run away if they take too much damage, or if they get too afraid of the enemy. You can assume that for every faction, unless I say otherwise. Mortal creatures enjoy living… I think… So, maintaining unit cohesion, keeping flanks secure and keeping your army somewhat alive is good for them not leaving the field. Something terrible happening in a battle can lead to a mass rout. You can lose even if you still outnumber and outpower the enemy. A commanding Lord dying can completely crush the morale of their army. Some factions are much more sensitive to this than others, but the Empire is in the danger zone. Their Lords and Heroes are good, but they’re not the tankiest things on the planet. They could be in trouble if left alone. Now, the faction-leading Legendary Lords are usually gonna be okay, but you should still wanna keep an eye on them. You can benefit from having Heroes in your army, so that, even if the Lord dies, they can keep morale up. Now, on the campaign map, you’re not just managing your own state, but the greater Empire itself. Squabbling and all, you need to be corralling them. Heroes can help here too, since they don’t have to be put into an army – instead, they can act as an agent on the campaign map. They can find treasure, help boost the local economy and stability, scout around or make sure other agents have an accident. There’s all kinds of other things Heroes can do, but you get the idea. It’s important to note, that Lords and Heroes are different. A Lord leads an army. That’s it. He can’t target people for campaign actions, like a Hero can. Both characters gain XP through actions, and can unlock skills that make them more effective. Heroes can make themselves more powerful in battle, or more powerful doing campaign map actions. Lords can buff up just about everything else, including the entire faction. They can also become more personally powerful in combat. Heroes can act as agents, but Lords are always Lords on the battlefield. Got it. I know I’ve digressed a bit, I just don’t want anyone getting too lost at this point. The Empire plays like most 4X games. You keep your territories happy (or at least in line) and you create new buildings to unlock new troops. Along the way, you research new technology. These are more buffs to the faction, rather than gating off units. A technology will do something like increase unit speed, or give stronger armor to your knights. There is nothing like a cannon locked off by a technology. You need to wait for city populations to grow, spend money to level them up, and then spend money to build new buildings. Because cities have limited building slots, if you want new units and more money, you need to take more of them. Sometimes, in siege battles. No… No, not yet… So, as the Emperor, you need to deal with internal squabbles, like rebels. The neighboring states have their own issues. As the Emperor, you might need to help them out with money or sending armies. You may have to pick a side to support when they start squabbling with each other. Sometimes, the Merchants’ Guild is paying people off illegally. We can’t have that. By being a good leader, you earn a special Prestige resource, which balances out with your Imperial Authority. Without enough Prestige, you can’t stop disasters, like a civil war. The less the counts respect you, the more likely this is to happen. Which means wasting manpower fighting a civil war, instead of actual monsters trying to eat you. So you need to be a shrewd Emperor, and somehow keep everybody together. By using Prestige to preemptively improve relations, disasters might not happen at all. Earning enough trust can eventually mean controlling their lands directly through confederacy. Then you can assign one of your Good Boys to office and get all kinds of cool rewards, like bonuses, special Hero items, and best of all, regional units, based on the territory you now own. It’s pretty neat, going from uniformity to a colorful United Empire army. Very uplifting. Now let’s talk about the DLC. [*ba-boom*] When I’ve talked to people who are interested in “Total Warhammer”, but haven’t bought it, usually they say “Yeah, I wanna get into it, but there’s so much DLC… across two separate games…” This is understandable. Nobody likes being nickeled and dimed. I do think there is some misconception in this case. I guess, the simplest way I can put it is: “This isn’t a Paradox game.” I really enjoyed the game “Stellaris”, but if you don’t buy every piece of DLC, it can feel like you’re falling behind. Even the themed expansion, like, “Oh, this is for Federation players” usually has a lot of other stuff packed into it that benefits any kind of player. Between this and “Crusader Kings” and the “Civ” series and many other games, I think this is what people expect. “Total Warhammer” DLC is a la carte. It will add new factions, sub-factions and units. I’ve never seen them paywall off a big quality of life improvement or feature. Except one, which we’ll get to, so please, don’t type fast at me. If you don’t like the sound of Wood Elves, you don’t have to buy their DLC. They’re still in the game for everyone, so at least you have a new enemy to fight. If you tried something like Dark Elves, and didn’t like them, well, you don’t have to buy their unit packs. Once again, you’ll still have new enemies to fight now. The Empire is a good example of how things have gotten better. They have, both, the very first DLC for the game – “The Grim and the Grave” – and also one of the newest, “The Hunter and the Beast”. So let’s see what the first one added for the Empire. There are three new units: two militia types and one anti-undead knight. There is a new type of Lord, some reskinned Regiment of Renown units and a new Legendary Lord. He starts in the same spot as Franz, it’s mostly the same. The other half of the DLC adds stuff to the Vampire Counts, so I’ll hold off on that. I mean, it’s “okay” if you like Empire. So, let’s look at the new DLC. You have a completely separate campaign starting across the world. You have a modified tech tree, and even your buildings are restricted, because you’re a colonial expedition. You get advanced units through an imperial supply system. More military success means more supplies, but also angrier natives, and supplies can also depend on who are you getting favor from back home. You quest for four different Heroes to join the hunt, and they’ll get different stats, depending on story choices you make. And then you get your three new units. Two new kinds of militia archers and terrible gun wagons. Both these DLCs were the same price, but here’s what the patch that came with “The Hunter and the Beast” added for free. You got the entire Prestige system. All the elector counts stuff and balancing out the whole Empire – that’s all new. They added all the reskinned regional units. They re-worked the actual campaign map for the Empire states. A bunch of new cities were added, and a new type of location, called an Imperial Fort, which can hold down the mountains pretty alright. They also added a few other battle maps. They took Gelt, who was an alternate start, like Volkmar, except free, and gave him his own faction south of the Empire. Which means balancing that out and bringing the voice actor back in to do diplomacy lines. GELT: “Friendship is more valuable than gold. Or so they tell me…” Let me tell you about Gelt. He doesn’t look like an “E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy” character for no reason. He’s a wizard of metal, who can turn anything into gold, and he fucking loves it. You’re rich AND magic – who wouldn’t want to be Gelt? WITCH HUNTER: “For Heldenhammer!” GELT: “I am SUPREME!” That patch added free stuff for other factions as well. Seems pretty substantial for “free”. If you REALLY wanna compare, boot up “Total Warhammer 1”. You could put a Lord in an office for a bonus, and that’s it. Your neighbors are neighbors, no politicking. It was THAT big of a free overhaul. Owning the first game is the price to entry, but you can see why I’m not ranting about the DLC. Of course, if you want to see and play as every little thing, then, yeah, you’re screwed. I guess, you could be thankful you’re not paying for tabletop? I don’t know – you know your price points. However, the blood DLC is what really irritates me. Yeah, it is only $3, and yeah, they did add some events onto the campaign, so it’s not just a graphical effect. But it’s hard to imagine playing this game without it. I heard that, supposedly, they do this so the base game gets a lower age rating, but how this pan out for game three? There might be Chaos daemons and all kinds of other horrors showing up. The idea of paying to, essentially, un-censor a game, really doesn’t sit right with me. Could you imagine a movie doing that? I don’t mean two different rated edits of the same movie. This would be a clerk going “Yeah, the PG13 version is $15, but if you want the full R rated one, that’s gonna be $19.” I hope we don’t bring the blood tax back. So, no, I’m not gonna defend that. I find it incredibly silly. As far as factions go, I wouldn’t call any piece of DLC essential for them, except for one, which I’ll talk about later. Really, one of my bigger DLC issues is that units can be integrated into the campaign better. For the Empire DLC, cheap archers and militia units would be perfect for a city garrison. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t have much of a reason to recruit these units past the mid game. So they could at least show up again for some minor town defense. Make the Empire proud! Speaking of that, I need to wrap up the Empire and move on. I think they’re in a great place, so I don’t have much to complain about. I mean, I do wish I could reach Pigbarter faster. For whatever reason, it’s now my personal Jerusalem. I could win with a multi-ocean Empire, but I’ll be unhappy if I don’t have it. I guess, their tech tree is still kind of dry, and there’s room for more down there. I’m not gonna mention missing units for factions, unless it’s dire, because… yeah… everyone wants new stuff. C’mahn, Creative Assembly, just add a land ship! Just do that! It only took me, like, 2 days to build one in "Minecraft". I had time, you know, because I forgot my forum password. MANNFRED: “All those that oppose me will die!” MANNFRED: “And rise again, as my puppets…” Maybe in the trailer, but not this review, because we’re playing as Vlad. With the weird lighting, his head kinda looks like the sun anyhow… The Vampire Counts mainly reside in the rogue imperial state called Sylvania. Like the name Transylvania, without the first part. Many counts were banned from the courts for arguing over it. And in the campaign, they’re the direct rivals of the Empire. They’re always causing trouble in the eastern border with swarms of undead. Vampires are a master of necromancy. They do everything J. K. Rowling said you’re not allowed to do with magic. But who cares what that crazy lady says? Wave your magic wand, say “Abra cadaver!” and suddenly all kinds of friends are coming over. They don’t have nearly as many magic schools as the Empire, but they make up for it by having one of the best ones in the game. Summon the undead behind your enemy! Resurrect your friends from death again! Treat life and death like a game of jenga! Sure, it falls over eventually, but you can put the pieces back together into… something. The Vampire army is very different than the Empire. They have no artillery. Actually, they have no ranged weapons at all in their main roster. Instead, they have terrifying creatures of the night to close the gap. Ranged weapons won’t be too effective against a being that’s playing footsy with the material plain. And speaking of planes: a lot of their stuff flies. You can shoot some down, but can you shoot all of them down? [heavy impacts of massive beasts crashing into huddled infantry] The Counts are a bit of a swarm faction. A lot of their roster is incredibly effective, and also cheap to produce. Of course, like any faction, they do have their expensive high-tier units. More than enough vampires and monsters to fill out an October Party City. But their true horror comes when they’re fully backed up by a horde of the undead. Zombies are slow, and horrible warriors, but they are good at absorbing shots meant for better monsters, or for tying down and tiring out more dangerous enemies. Naturally, nearly every unit in the roster can cause Fear or Terror (which actually are two different things). Fear makes enemy less confident in fighting. Terror can make them run back for a bit. So, with the right setup, you can spook your way to victory. Look at these floating wraiths – you can bet they cause Terror. Do you think the walls of your city can stop a ghost? Wuttafuk?! (sigh) Not yet… Not yet, it’s too early. Just… let it go… So yeah, in battle, they play like an angry, biting river. And on the campaign map, they’re just as horrifying. Besides normal unit recruiting, they can flat out raise the dead. When two factions fight, they leave a lot of dead behind, and you can exploit that. The bigger the pile of dead on the battle sight, the more complicated creatures you can summon. Yeah, it can be pricey, but it’s instant, and you can do it anywhere. No special buildings, no waiting on turns – Instant Ramen Undead. You can use powerful technologies to compliment this. They have a pretty good tech tree. But then you find the unlock for free skeleton and zombie upkeep, so once they’re made, they’re no drain on the economy. Just have two or three undead hordes follow the main army around. That’s a lot of skeletons to throw into the fire. But don’t worry, they’re just undead. I love that they animated the skeletons marching in perfect unison. It goes the extra mile to show they’re just corpses being puppeted. So the good news is, they’re not afraid of anything – they’ll never run away. The bad is that magic holds them together. So, instead of running away when they’re in trouble, they’ll just start disintegrating. They get weaker until they crumble into dust, so you need to give them special attention, for your unit not to vanish completely. Their Lords are also absurdly powerful, but they’re also the ones holding the army together. If they go down, the whole army can soon follow. So what stops them from steamrolling the map? The power of Vampiric Corruption. This represents concentrated Halloween vibe. Enemy armies take Attrition from it – it represents undead attacking them in their territory non-stop. So it gives their territory a natural layer of defense. At the same time, Vampire armies hate being away from it – they’re completely out of their element. Other factions can get rebels from too much corruption. You get them if you don’t have enough. So you use agents and buildings to slowly spread your corruption out – ideally, striking, when the region will be secure. All Vampire Lords are hurt from it. Well, mostly all… "Ohh, here goes!" [Kenan and Kel theme playing] ♪ Everybody out there go run and tell ♪ ♪ Your homeboys and homegirls it’s time for- ♪ Kemmler and Krell. Kemmler is not a vampire, but he’s a damn good necromancer. His army doesn’t care about corruption. He’s too old to give a shit anymore. In some footage I got for other factions you could see Kemmler just vacationing around. He’s on a world tour, and he’s not alone. KEMMLER: “Best not displease me. Krell would not like that.” Krell is a manservant/Stand that can be summoned into the game at any time by Kemmler. He’s a strong boy, able to be summoned behind enemy lines and just wreak havoc. They’re so intertwined that Little K has an entire skill tree just for buffing Big K. Sometimes, I wish that Krell was a proper Hero, but keeping them together like this is pretty fun. Now, that we’re on the necromancers, that does lead into my big issue with the Vampire Counts. To spice things up for “Warhammer 2”, they got five new Lord types. You don’t just recruit them, they must be awoken. They are ridiculously strong – some of the best in the game. A Strigoi Lord can seriously buff ghouls, so you give him a ghoul army. A von Carstein Lord can unlock limited amounts of ranged Sylvanian troops. It is a rogue Empire state, after all. So now you could have guns AND the undead. You get the idea: these special Lords, with their bonuses, are excellent for making themed armies. It’s not the Lords or their powers that I have issue with – it’s what they’ve left behind. Game one had 3 Lords: a generic vampire, a necromancer, and later, Strigoi in “The Grim and the Grave” DLC. Now here’s the strange part: those are all still in the game. We have special rituals to awaken immortal vampires, but all of these are still here. We have two kinds of Strigoi, and one is just better. If we have the special bloodlines, why have generic vampire Lord? But even they’re not the real victim – it’s the necromancer. Not the necromancer Hero – he’s a great help to a vampire Lord. Because vampire Lords have all their powers and they’re great in a stand up fight. Even while awaiting the mega-vampires, you can just recruit a lesser vampire. They will style all over a necromancer any day. [vampire lords are laughing scornfully, while necromancer is wheezing powerlessly] Look at him! He needs help. Somebody, help him. [vampire lords are laughing scornfully, while necromancer is wheezing powerlessly] Get rid of the redundant lesser vampires. Have the unlockable vampire Lords and some buffed necromancer Lords. That’s it. Unleash the full power of the Bone Zone. Anyway, is there any cool Vampire politicking to do? Well… no. Now is a good time to talk about diplomacy in general. Diplomacy is missing a lot that was in previous “Total War” games, and just things that make sense in general. Let’s say an ally has a random city in the middle of your territory. So you go “Ah-h!” and open up a conversation to buy or trade something for it. Except, you can’t. Let’s say you go to war with someone, make peace, and then they put an army in your land in a raiding stance, to steal money from your territory. If you attack, you get the reliability penalty. Many races have natural affinities and enemies. Dwarfs and humans are bros, Dwarfs don’t like Orcs – you get it. So, sometimes, you may wonder, how did humans get convinced by Orcs to attack your Dwarfs on turn 11? Why are Lizardmen, who despise Chaos, teaming up with Beastmen, who worship it? Humans and Skaven against Chaos on turn 7? I’ve just begun the game. The faction who lives in Mordor to spite Dark Elves is now working with them… You’ll see so many baffling things, and so quickly. Diplomacy is effective for making a trade deal, making a friend, or starting or ending a war. Your own war, because you can’t have someone make peace with an ally. Then again, your ally keeps declaring war on your vassal, because they don’t recognize it as being part of you. In war, coordination in general is just a very vague suggestion. It’s rare to have a coordinated battle with an ally, and if you do, it will typically be a siege. The diplomacy is bare bones, and even then, it’s not functioning well. You might say, “It’s “Total War”, not “Total Talk”, so who cares?”, but the context around the battles helps make them exciting and memorable. So when you have nonsense happening, combined with limited options for dealing with your neighbors, it makes things dull and kind of confusing. So while a big diplomacy rework would be wonderful, I don’t think it will happen in this game. It might get fixed up a bit at least, but who knows… Right, back to the von Carsteins and Bellcovians. You know my issues, but overall, they’re in a really good place. They only have one DLC, which is the other half of “The Grim and the Grave”. They get a few useful and beautifully modelled support units, the generic Strigoi Lords, which are now redundant, and of course the Regiments of Renown. Not to mention a brand new Legendary Lord. GHORST: “Dark magic is mine to command.” Now, he is, um… um… [*donk*] [flips pages and hums confusedly] Wow, look at the funny little Dwarf! Let’s, eh… let’s just move on. Remember: in Warhammer, they’re called “Dwarfs”, not “dwarves”. You need to remember that, because I won’t. I’ll be honest, my memory of Dwarf lore is a little bit rusty, so bear with me. Every race has preferred climates. Dwarfs don’t like temperate cities, like humans and vampires. Instead, they live in the mountains, because… they… eat rocks. So, if you’ve seen dwarves in other fantasy settings, these guys will be familiar to you. They like digging, and they like genociding goblins. They have all kinds of nifty tools to accomplish this. Dwarfs are the master craftsmen of artillery. [artillery salvo] They have more kinds than anyone else in the game, getting an extra piece, if you get “The King and the Warlord” DLC. With enough artillery, it’s very possible that the enemy will die before ever reaching your lines. If they do, there’s still a lot of trouble. They may be vertically challenged, but they are thicc. Even their basic warriors have lots of armor to crunch through, and they’re pretty scary in the early game. It doesn’t stop in the mid- and endgame. Dwarfs are the ultimate line-holders. However, where another faction can move cavalry behind the lines and strike from the rear, Dwarfs don’t have that option. They don’t have proper cavalry. At all. They have crazed, half-naked Dwarfs who are always trying to die in battle. Sadly, they’re not THAT quick, and they don’t have the same charge impact, so they still have a hard life. They do have gyrocopters, which can go into melee (and it looks very silly), but… same situation. They’re much better staying in the air to shoot or carpet-bomb their enemies. They’re mostly content to pepper their enemies with artillery and let the bad guys come to them. Now, this is where they diverge from traditional fantasy dwarves: they are spiteful little fuckers. “Tying screaming goblins to their catapult ammunition” spiteful. Having joke events with the same “Don’t forgive them” option. The society that just, at large, exists to get revenge. They don’t use magic, due to it being “weird Elf stuff”, and instead use their own workaround. The King is always carrying a giant Book of Grudges. The entire campaign is beating the shit out of people who irritated you. Everything is about vengeance, and they have a huge tech tree to work on while carrying it out. Your armies can use special underways to move across the mountains quickly. If you wrong them, they’ll catch you. There’s not much to say beyond that. They are a very straightforward and blunt race, as they should be. They are master builders and craftsmen, so they have some of the most difficult siege maps in the game to- Oh, right, this is, eh… No, they’re just like the other sieges. Okay, I delayed long enough. It’s time to talk about the worst battles in the game. No big surprise: it’s the siege maps. What makes them so notoriously awful? Why does everyone hate these gorgeous maps? Well, I’ll tell you. When the layout of some random castle is the exact same layout as the Capital of the Empire, something’s very wrong. All sieges are near-identical. The factions will change, the layouts will slightly change, but it all feels horribly familiar. All the wonderful asymmetry the game has dies right at these gates. Here are the big issues. When you siege a city, you can build rams and siege towers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a crafty Dwarf or the forces of Chaos, or a race that builds nuclear weapons. Towers and rams, towers and rams! When quarantine ends, they’ll find me on the floor, and that will be scrawled all over the walls. (whispering) Towers and rams, towers and rams…! But you don’t actually need those. Heroes, monsters and cavalry can smash down the gate too. And they’ll be better at it, because they’ll make it to the gate way before slow-ass ram does. Siege towers are useful, but also very slow. All infantry units automatically carry ladders on them (even if it’s silly, like we saw before). They are slower to climb, and units get tired doing it, but it’s not that big of a penalty. So, a tower is nice to have, but your entire army can scale the walls right from the get go. There are sections of the walls that control towers, and these automatically fire on the attackers. They have basically unlimited range. This is because the attacker’s army could have artillery in it. If the defenders don’t have something to counter it, then the artillery could easily smash down the walls without them doing a thing. These towers can be upgraded on the campaign map as well. They can be juiced enough to destroy the siege towers. Then the whole unit dies, because they’re so slow. So, if you’re attacking, it’s mindless. You smash all your Big Boys into the gate, so they don’t get hurt by the towers. Swarm in the whole army, in fact – it doesn’t matter. This is generalizing, but it’s what you wanna do 95% of the time. Defending can be better, but not by much. You can send cavalry or other troops outside the wall to fight the enemy while the defenses pepper them. This can be incredibly powerful, especially when the AI overcommits sending units to chase them. So, even if you do venture outside the walls, it will still be similar whenever you do it. So, why have mega-towers? Why not have, say, artillery you could put on the wall? Well, they did show that… In a trailer. [*excited trailer noises*] So, uh… why don’t we have that? Wait, are they crossing a bridge, too? Like a drawbridge? Come to think of it, the artillery was shooting from multiple elevations as well. There’s only one layer of walls, and always on the same plane – this would never happen. If you want artillery to work, you find a little hill behind the wall and you pray that that works. Many artillery pieces are prone to hitting your own people anyway. Even maps that have good elevation, like the new imperial fort, have it all the way in the back. You can’t be countering enemy artillery three zip codes away. Trailer sieges have a lot. There is a big city layout and armies are crossing a bridge. You can see that this is a pretty huge city layout. The roads are wide, to accommodate big formations. This is for a Vampire trailer, not an Empire one. For whatever reason, a bunch of trailers showed them. An Orc trailer shows a city that has layers of walls. It’s very elaborate and, ironically – fantasy. Because most of the cities are just a short grid with a single control point. They’re beautiful maps, but a very unimaginative layout. I actually don’t mind only defending one side of a city – there’s just barely anything behind it. Now, there was a reason given: a simpler layout will help the AI to behave more intelligently. The sieges in general can be more polished. Sadly, I’m not seeing the level of polish I was hoping for. Gates can open up to let enemy soldiers retreat into your city. Then they get their strength back and attack you from behind. Well, really, enemies retreating into your city is a constant thing. Using the magic that you’re allowed to use on walls and gates is a coin toss at best. Awful to target, and you’re lucky if it doesn’t break completely. And, of course, most times I see the AI have a nervous breakdown, it’s during a siege. There’s a constant sense of all the defenses having an invisible box around them (which most things in games do, but you don’t wanna think about that). There’s a constant feeling of jank interacting with it. And if everything worked perfectly, it would still be very dry. You might think I’m a moron for thinking the trailer would represent the game, but I feel justified in that. “Empire: Total War” had wall-mounted artillery, and that was in 2009. If you’ve played “Rome 2”, there are gigantic city layouts. There are bridges, lots of choke points, so seeing that stuff in the trailer didn’t seem crazy to me. Look, here’s walls with different elevation levels, here’s a giant cliff in the wall, to put artillery on. I’m not chasing a pipe dream – it’s something I’d played in the same series. And yes, these weren’t perfect, and still had their own level of jank. It’s just the Warhammer games have the worst of all of it. This is compounded by another issue that I was gonna bring up later. Sometimes, the auto-resolve is horribly wrong, and especially for certain races. That’s right, this is a racist bar! Here I’m Skaven, I have guns and artillery, and I ambushed Wood Elves. The racist bar goes, “Ye ded, kid, ye not good enough!” So you go “Fine!”, and you play it, and you easily win. Then it happens again. “You people will never make it out he’h!” So then you fight, and you easily win, and only take two dozen losses. And that was only because I wisely fired mortar shells into my own formation. Then comes The Moment. The moment you get sieged and they attack immediately. Oh no… If I wanna win this game, I’m gonna have to play… so many siege battles… They won’t be fun or challenging – you just have to endure them. So, while some races are predisposed to victory, others are not. This can sometimes mean manually doing fights, which are just kind of silly. It’s the constant repetitive sieges on the same map where true misery begins. Oh God… Oh… God… This is the worst part of the game. Luckily, not all cities have walls, so it’s not completely constant. And they could be great, if they had the same kind of asymmetry the other battles have. Maybe Vampire Counts could have zombie traps outside the walls? Maybe ghost units can just go through buildings? How about spiders being able to quickly scale walls? What if huge monsters can break them down and not bother with the gate? One DLC did add a wall-breaking unit – it’s not too crazy. It’s not too hard to find ideas, but those are infinitely easier said than done. Supposedly, “Warhammer 3” will get a big siege rework. All I can say is I’m praying. Right, the Dwarves…! I mean, Dwarfs! Anything else there? Well, in “2” they did get a new resource to craft items with. These can enhance your Lords and Heroes, making them more powerful in battle. If you like the naked screaming Dwarfs, there’s a sub-faction that specializes in them. You can play as The White Dwarf, instead of King Grudge, but he should be across the map, really. He has beef over there. “The King and the Warlord” DLC gives you Belegar, three new units, and, of course, the Regiments of Renown. Belegar has an interesting campaign. He’s accompanied by the ancestral spirits of (you guessed it) vengeance, to retake his ancestral home, being penalized until he does so. It’s a journey of suffering, and it can be pretty tough. When you do take your home of Karak Eight Peaks back, you may be confused. How come it’s not my new Capital? Well, that’s just more “Total Warhammer” diplomacy magic. You have to wait for your original home to die before that happens. They’re not my favorite faction – they’re just not my playstyle. But I don’t have big issues with them, they’re in a good place. If I had to reach, I’d say that I wish The Book mattered more for diplomacy. You know… Let’s say a rich man and his best friend pulled, say, some kind of scam on them. GELT: "Wall of metal!" You know… Let’s say a rich man and his best friend pulled, say, some kind of scam on them. You know… Let’s say a rich man and his best friend pulled, say, some kind of scam on them. Or illegally entered their land – I don’t know, something that makes them angry and gets you an entry in The Book. It could be fun, haggling back and forth on grudge reparations, instead of getting an axe in the head. I’m just throwing it out there. I’m sorry, I just got sidetracked thinking about sieges. It’s not like they’re torture – you can still have a great moment. "Grail Knights!" Come on, get ‘im, get ‘im, get ‘im, get- O-oh, yeah, he’s dead! Holy shit… I’m not gonna talk about the Greenskins for long. They’re getting an update in about… eh, 10-15 minutes, so I don’t wanna waste my time on it. Why date the video more than I have to? I like Warhammer Orcs, and I enjoy all the flavor this game gives them. Having a political commandment just be “brag about da Boss” is great. They nail everything about the presentation of the Orcs, but the rest is just a complete mess. Their roster is weak, and they struggle throughout the whole game. Armies have to keep up their flightiness, or else they'll start losing units. Raiding and fighting keeps it up, but it will go down. Merging units and armies lowers it, ransoming prisoners for money lowers it, but slaughtering them or eating it doesn’t raise it? If you get it high enough, you get a “Waaagh!” It’s a bad AI army that follows the main one around. So you control it with the same diplomacy tools you have for regular allies. Those have always… been… You know how I said races don’t have units locked behind technology? Orcs are the only exception. The ORKS rely on technology. It’s really this bad. Orc tribal warfare can be fun, but fighting the Dwarfs is pure suffering. They are your main rivals, and it will be a long time before you can properly crunch through their armor. And it’s still not that good. You never get the sense of being a rolling green tide, and it does need a lot of work. Their magic is pretty fun. I like Wurrzag, Da Great Green Prophet. Look at him! How can you not like him? But all the Orcs in the world can’t get me dancing right now. Because I think of Grimgor. Poor Grimgor… You know what character development for an Orc is? Getting bigger. He’s not nearly big and scary enough. Nothing is nearly as mean and green as it should be. This extends to the DLC. “King and the Warlord” added Skarsnik, and he’s like a Goblin Sun Tzu. SKARSNIK: “I gots me proddah!” He’s also racing for Karak Eight Peaks, like Belegar the Dwarf. His new units and sub-faction is all about Goblins. Obviously, they’re a lot weaker than the big Orcs. Under Skarsnik’s leadership, they become much more powerful. Doubly so when they start eating all their weird mushrooms. They still can’t go toe to toe with most races, so you need to be especially tactical with them, using stealth to your advantage. In battle, they are a lot of fun. I find them stimulating to play, compared to the other Greenskins. Having to constantly maneuver and flank and sneak around, because they lose a stand up fight gives you a lot to do. And there’s nothing like one of their masterplans coming all together. So his battles can be exceptional. His campaign in the first game was popular for a reason. So what’s the issue now? Put simply, his neighbors have outgrown him. All of his neighbors have been buffed up, and Skarsnik’s campaign was already pretty hard. Now I’d say he’s the hardest campaign in the game. At least top 3, for sure. You have to intensively play weaker armies, and you’re still gimped by the lack of campaign mechanics the Geenskins have. So we’ll see what happens to him. Because I’d like to play Greenskins, just not these ones. I do like the Doom Diver catapult. I might like it too much, but, really, can you blame me? You can manually steer this thing. I used to be really good at it when I was playing a lot of “1”. I was the Hellcannon world champion back then. Now look at me… Can’t even hit dead center. Gork or Mork? Hmm… LEONCOEUR: “Not one step further, stranger! You do not walk my lands without my blessing – which you don’t-!” Bretonnia is a DLC faction added free for game one. So, though they came later, I’ll start with them for DLC factions. They are the Empire’s western neighbor. They’re based off Arthurian legend, and aggressively French. CHILFROY: “The laws of chivalry demand I hear you…” Bretonnia is all about knights and cavalry. They don’t use gunpowder on land – it’s seen as dishonorable. They’d rather charge head-first into the biggest monster they can see for the sake of honor and chivalry. This works a lot more than you’d think. You know how Space Marines in 40K are the product of science making the ultimate warrior? Well, that’s what their Grail Knights are, but with the power of the Holy Spirit. So you can show off your colorful heraldry in a world-wide fashion show. It’s mandatory and high-velocity. Their cavalry is king, but they do have a support roster. These are the masses of dirty peasantry. If they die, then good job, mission accomplished. I could have been wrong about the Empire – this might be the closest faction to a historical one. At the very least, you have the option to balance out their army and play them that way. The knight steamroller is waiting, but you might not get that until later. Basic peasants are absurdly cheap, and they have no upkeep. They do affect the Peasant Economy. That’s a real term – it’s not like the one I made up for “Pathologic”. You need to balance your provinces between farming and industrial economies. For either, you need peasants to work the land. If you break capacity, the economy suffers, because Gregory can’t toil the fields if he’s fighting Chaos raiders. So they are cheap, but you still need to be careful. Knights are recruited like normal, but take a long time to obtain and are expensive to upkeep. In Bretonnia, a single horse will be eating better than a village. So the Lords can take knightly actions to reduce these drawbacks: taking special vows and going on quests to accomplish them. This can range from overseeing construction projects to crusading in a strange land. It’s not just Lords, as Heroes can take these vows as well, with their own separate means of accomplishing them. Your entire society is dedicated to the code of chivalry. The nobles have unquestionable rule, the peasants have been long broken into loyalty. Like North Korea or Resetera. There is never a Bretonnian rebellion, only incursions by evil creatures. Knowing all of this, it should be no surprise our campaign goal revolves around chivalry. They have an actual meter for it. You need to fill it out to win. You gain it through honorable actions, like building churches, purging evil and winning battles. It’s also possible to lose chivalry. Using Saracen tactics, like setting up an ambush, purging lands of honorable factions and constructing buildings that support sex work. Not in this kingdom! The more honorable you are, the more bonuses you unlock. It could be a small morale buff, and eventually can mean summoning the Green Knight. If Grail Knights are Space Marines, he’s like a Chapter Master. He can serve as an absolute wrecking ball on an army. When the meter is filled up, you go on a final erranty battle to win the campaign. One final strike against an ultimate evil of your choosing. You can still paint the map afterwards, if you want, but it has a solid conclusion. There are three Lords to play in Bretonnia, each with their own specializations. But if you’re tired of fighting necromancers and neck-romancers, “Warhammer 2” has a new leader for everyone – the Lady Repanse, along with her paladin bodyguard Henri le Massif (which is French for “Big Hank”). You’re on crusade in Warhammer North Africa, and have new challenges, like managing desert water supplies. You have a modified crusader tech tree to help with the mission, and there’s a lot to purge down here. They are great, well-themed faction, and they’re free. Honestly, with the exception of Greenskins, everything has been solid so far. I really just told you about Bretonnia, rather than critique it, because it works perfectly. Well, these good times are about to change, ‘cause we’re getting into the “Warhammer 1” DLC factions. Buckle up. 😒 ARCHAON: “You catch me in a moment of less rage, creature – I may spare your soul…” NARRATOR: “The Warriors of Chaos…” Yeah, the Warriors of Chaos – the infamous Day 1 DLC. It was horrible at launch, but it had years of updates. Now, they’re still an awful chore to play in singleplayer. To speak on the gameplay technically, the Warriors of Chaos are really fucked up. Chaos is a horde army, so they have no cities. Instead, they create their buildings right on the army. It’s a pretty good idea. Appropriate. So here are the layers of why it doesn’t work. To get a high-tier city takes a long time. You have to protect it, spend money on buildings and grow the population out if you want high-tier units. You spend your population points upgrading the main city building. This will unlock the others in the same tier. All Chaos buildings require population points to spend. The more buildings you have, the more new ones will cost, so making a diverse army from one horde will take longer and longer. On the opposite end, you can break it. You start out with the building to recruit Marauders. This is the Marauder chain building. Let’s look at Marauders, scientifically. Okay, take a look, here’s a Marauder. Notice the near complete lack of armor. Buffed, his morale is a number he thinks is funny. His attack is okay, but his defense is awful. It’s like he doesn’t even have the will to live. In the game “Vermintide”, you massacre them by the dozens, without thinking about it. So let’s look at a unit from another building. So, forget the Depressing Marauder, it’s time for the Chaos Warrior. Notice the thick cursed armor he can never remove. He doesn’t understand the concept of retreating. He fights hard and strong in melee, to get the attention of his dark gods. In “Vermintide”, these are the evil refrigerators. So how long until you unleash their power? Well, you instantly delete the terrible Marauder building, and then build the Chaos Warrior building next turn. So you can get these boys on Turn 4. Now what if I told you that building can quickly unlock even deadlier infantry? Don’t get me started on Chosen… They’re not even the regular enemies in “Vermintide”. They’re boss battles, and you get a formation of them. Oh, so it’s a steamroll faction! No. This is what you HAVE TO do. Everyone wants you dead, including Norscan tribes. Your whole objective is to burn the world down. Each tribe you defeat can be awakened into a vassal, but you know how diplomacy goes… So don’t be surprised when other tribes start confederating your vassals. Expect to burn the world alone, which is hard when everyone hates you. You need to constantly raid and sack cities, because that’s your main income. Advancing through the tech tree costs a lot of money, and many are immediately useless. With how progression works, your armies will usually be stacks of the same units, instead of experimenting. It’s not worth all the pop and money to get one building for a Chaos Giant. Or this thing. They’re a fun faction to play in battle – it’s just they get repetitive really easily. They have some exceptional units in the roster, but once you get them, you won’t stray too far away. You’ve got bills to pay. And a world to burn. But wait, if you burn cities down, what stops factions from re-colonizing it? Chaos Corruption. It’s like Vampire Corruption, but even edgier. Hey, but don’t we need characters and buildings to spread corruption? Yes. And aren’t there also ways to combat it? Yes. So doesn’t that mean factions will easily just resettle the things you burnt do- YEP! Welcome, my friends! Welcome to the Merry-go-round from hell! I played a whole Kholek campaign, and I wanted to get funny footage of him with the Sword of Khaine, and he can’t pick it up. I tried so many saves to get the sword, and I can’t do it. I, heh… I wasted my time…! I wasted my time playing Chaos again…! AAAAHHHH!!! 👺 I don’t recommend this DLC. I would just drop this and move on, but… there’s more. Do you know why they were Day 1 DLC? They were originally envisioned as a non-playable end-game crisis faction. But they had enough time to add some more units and make them playable. So they’re still a proper army, and also the end-game. Ironic, because playable Chaos end-game is nothing. You are winner! Conglaturation! DECHALA: “Enter then! Are you after a drink, a fistfight, or both?” A drink. Now, here’s a problem with Chaos… (aside, snickering) “Problem with Chaos…” 😂 Okay, I’m sorry. I need to get my brain together. Okay, the issue is: they destroy the world of Man and everything good. You know, that’s… fine. That’s what they should do. You don’t get the sense of it being a war though. You don’t take and hold land – they burn stuff an move on. And all the game factions will quickly resettle it. I played so many games where someone else would wipe out Chaos. They don’t have nearly enough armies to threaten the world. Some factions that might align with them, like Skaven, don’t even jump in. The Norscan tribes seem to hang back too. It’s more like just dealing with some annoying raiders for a little bit. Assuming they actually make it to you. They need to be established more as a global threat. So how do you do that? Well, maybe they can take certain cities as a Chaos fort? A base of operations to stage out of. There are cities in the game right now that were Chaos strongholds in the lore. Maybe them? What if Corruption caused cults to appear in the underbelly of your city? So Chaos could have vassal underlings spawn all over the world. They desperately need something to establish warfronts. You don’t get territorial push and pull, like you do with other factions. Sometimes they burn your stuff down, sometimes you kill them, and they respawn in the north. Repeat until Archaon is dead. Near everyone teams up to fight them – they have no chance. It’s less of the End Times and more “Civ V” Barbarians. To mention “Stellaris” again, they also have end-game factions that appear. They’re all horrific monsters, but, to some extent, they take and hold territory. So until the ruins they make are spawning daemons, or they have something to hold the land, this problem will continue. Most importantly of all, the horses for their knights are too small. What are these? Donkeys of Khorne? Okay, next race… Beastmen are another Chaos-aligned horde faction. The Wood Elves are really two separate factions. The regular elves, and then the tree spirits that- Agh-h-h… Beastmen… The goat bastard child of the tabletop game isn’t doing much better here. They play very differently than Warriors of Chaos on the battlefield – more focused on hit-and-run than heavy infantry. They only share a few units with the Warriors, but they don’t have many units to spare. A lot of their troops are variants, or just redundant. These wild pigs are pretty strong, but the only units really worth mentioning are the Cygors and the Minotaurs. Making big, dumb Minotaur stacks makes their campaign kind of tolerable, but they don’t have a Doombull Lord to lead them. They’re missing a bunch of their tabletop units, and it really shows. When they attack on the campaign map, they always have a chance to ambush their enemy. The ambushes happen on these gorgeous unique maps. They’re seriously impressive-looking, and it really compliments the faction. They also have occasional moon events to choose from. The good parts are over. All the problems the Warriors have are even worse here. You don’t have the few concessions the Warriors had, like the main building causing upkeep reduction. And with less units, the horde building problem is even worse. They can use an underway-like movement, like the Orcs and Dwarfs have, and it… horribly lags my game out. Okay, lag. Movement off, no lag. Turn it back, and we’re back. Did I mention they have the Orc flightiness mechanic as well? I don’t know what to say. I’d develop an alcohol problem too… The Bestmen were the very first faction-DLC made, and they feel it. They feel forgotten. They were mediocre on release, but now – the worst faction in the game by far. The same Chaos merry-go-round, but now goats scream at you. Because it was a hard time after Aslan left. If you’re really unsure, their DLC is double the price of the Warriors of Chaos. Don’t get this right now. You will regret it. If you do have it, don’t play it without a mod. Something like Cataph’s Closer to Tabletop Overhaul, or SFO. Oh, right, if you see a mod that has this image on it, stay far, far away. I am over the Beastmen. Now, back to Wood Elves, I should disclose that I have a bias against Wood Elves. It started a long time ago, it has nothing to do with this game. [*wistful silt strider noises*] FARGOTH: “How do you do?” FARGOTH: “How do you do?” Go away. Wood Elves are weirdo isolationists. They just wanna sit in the forest of Athel Loren and protect their trees. They have two leaders – the first being Mel Gibson. The Elves themselves are terrifying archers. Some of the strongest in the game. Trust me, they’ve kited me to death plenty of times before. A lot of them can fire in any direction. While moving. They are microintensive army, and extremely deadly in the right hands. Funnily enough, in the lore, they are a rival to Beastmen. But in “Total Warhammer”, Beastmen are free XP for them. Their affinity with nature means they have all kinds of animal allies. Their most powerful make up for some of their melee shortcomings – the tree spirits of Athel Loren. Lead by Durthu. Known better as Tree Hitler. You know how in the “Lord of the Rings”, Treebeard is sad about the woods, and it takes a lot of convincing to move him to violence? Essentially, Durthu is “What if Treebead went crazy?” You better not be in his woods. The Tree Hitler moniker comes, because he’ll spend a long time just quietly sitting in the forest. Then, one day, he starts talking shit. Then he launches an all-out Branchkrieg on France- I mean, Bretonnia. He hates them so much that he’ll ally with Chaos to make this happen. His Wood Elf relationship is shaky, so both sub-factions have a harder time getting the more advanced units of the other one. They also have special offices, which they won’t let the other race into. So both leaders have some variation in their campaign. They have some strangeness here and there, but, overall, they are a good faction. The strangest part of them are their objectives. Final victory comes from growing a Tree and winning a battle. Yeah, those are Wood Elves alright… So you need to protect the Tree – Beastmen are always trying to burn it down. However, you grow the Tree with a special resource called Amber. Amber is also used to unlock some technologies, and for recruiting the other boys’ big units. An alliance can get you 1, and then you get the rest by conquering and occupying cities in a massive empire. Uh? Can I just do a smash-and-grab? They can occupy anywhere comfortably, but not the big city – they can just make a single building outpost. These are so poorly defended that you might actually miss sieges. So you have an isolationist group that needs to make a massive empire to win their game. Even worse, when you lose settlements, you could go into Amber deficiency. And getting a single high-tier unit could cost an entire city occupation. It is… so strange. Yeah, they could use a rework. A new start position could be nice, or maybe a way to teleport to the big trees around the world. But their campaign isn’t complete misery. That’s now the scale I’m operating on. They have incredible-looking units, with some really strong sound design. And it’s a good faction roster – nothing feels like it’s blatantly missing or out of place. Usually I might recommend it, but for this, I’ll give it a “maybe”. I need to talk ahead a bit. There is a “Warhammer 2” DLC called “The Queen and the Crone”. The High Elves get a new Hero and powerful new units. Once again, some of the best archers in the game. It also adds Queen Alarielle as a Legendary Lord. She’s like a cross between the Polly Pocket and Michael Myers. Her sub-faction is all about protecting the Big Donut, and guess what – she has access to all the tree units the Wood Elves have. In beautiful Minas Tirith White no less. So you get a faction very similar to the Wood Elves, without weird campaign. It adds stuff for the Dark Elves as well, and it’s half the cost of the Wood Elf DLC. If I learned anything from Durthu, it’s to be efficient. I’m gonna stick with the “maybe” verdict. Besides, everyone calls you a traitor non-stop. ORION: “A traitor stands before me. Speak, traitor.” So it’s time for the last “Warhammer 1” race. They’re a tribal Chaos faction, but… this time they’re fun. Seriously. [*happy mammoth noises*] Finally, things are looking up. Norsca has several mechanics and a great “End Turn” sound. [wardrums and manly, manly chanting] These aren’t weak Warrior Marauders, these are Norscan Marauders. Really, the same thing in the lore, but in the game it’s different. When the big Chaos army isn’t out to burn the world, the Norscan tribes fight each other and hunt monsters. They’ve also gotten good at taming them. Your army can use all kinds of strange creatures. Every so often, you might have someone turn into a werewolf. That’s no big deal in Norsca. They’ll probably dress you up in new armor they made – hell, they might give you a promotion! One of the two Legendary Lords is Throgg the Troll King. His entire specialty is buffing up Trolls and other monsters. So the hierarchy in the north is pretty damn bizarre. The economy still relies on raiding, but you can build the cities up in Norsca. They just don’t bother with building walls. So no sieges, either. Outside of Norsca, they can only capture seaport cities, and make them an outpost. Except for faction capitals – they take those too. And when they do, a special technology unlocks. Your whole tree is geared towards helping you raid people across the world. Your army wanders and raids, but it’s not aimless. When you burn a city down, you can dedicate the sacrifice to a god. Their ruins are a lot more metal than the ones the Warriors have. There is a blood waterfall, souls are flying out of it – this is how you make an impression. Like in the real world, the more you sacrifice for a dark god, the more blessings they give you. Like powerful unique units, or a plague that will destroy the wor- Maybe not that one. It’s the key to victory, and cities aren’t the only way. You can embark on special monster hunt quest battles around the world. Yeah, these are boss fights! And I find a lot of them enjoyable, just because it’s so different. Not all of them though. This Wyrm can go to hell. Besides evil god points, you get all kinds of rewards for doing these. Special trophy items to equip, Regiments of Renown, the list goes on. And then they go and style on Warriors of Chaos even more. There’s no tribe awakening garbage. If you defeat an enemy tribe’s leader in combat, their tribe can join yours. You’re the Big Boy now. It’s very… Orkey. So tribal warfare feels more like uniting the people, rather than herding cats. You’re doing what the Warriors of Chaos are supposed to do. When the enemy brings monsters, become the superior hunter. Then they’ll respect you. [*unhappy mammoth noises*] ADVISER: “Double rations! Great!” To top it off, instead of nothing at the end, there’s a reward. Help the Warriors of Chaos destroy the world and get big bonuses, or rival them, and get huge bonuses if you win. Sure beats not having anything. They’re only $10, and they’re a great time. It’s not often you can say that. I do think they are a little weird on the battle side. I don’t know if I’m still not used to them, or something is still off about their roster. You can never go wrong with Satanic Horton, but the other monsters seem like they could need some help. Throgg especially. I think he needs braver Trolls. As for mechanics, I wish that god favor scaled to a city. Because that is a lot of money to turn down. But not as reach as Gelt. GELT: “Balthasar Gelt!” So we made it – we got through every “Warhammer 1” faction, and can finally talk about “Warhammer 2”. Only an hour in. This might be where an ad or a sponsor break would go, but we don’t have time for that. We have to keep moving. That, and I did approach a company, but they declined. Something about the integration – I don’t know, it’s business stuff. You know – whatever. Your loss. Now, besides all the new factions, “Warhammer 2” came with a brand new standalone map. It also featured a story campaign for each faction, compared to the sandbox nature of “1”. It did sound very promising. Well, it turned out all the factions had to do the exact same thing. Collect enough resources to begin a ritual, endure an attack by Chaos, and possibly other competing factions, and repeat. You then unlock a final battle to win the game. The grand race for the Vortex. The map itself is superb. Especially now, since you can have proper battles on islands in the ocean. Having the auto-resolve non-stop in the sea before made it a nightmare. But those days are long gone. What I find mediocre is the entire ritual thing. Before you begin one, the game chooses three of your cities to be ritual sites. These can change, so you can’t delay turns to plan around it. The forces of Chaos will then spawn near them. Sometimes, the forces of Chaos spawn directly on top of them. They’re an actual step away. So you can’t extend out too far – you need to protect your stuff. It will be sieged by Chaos. Again. And again. And again. Oh, they brought Skaven and Norsca this time! And again. You already know what the problem there is, we don’t have to go back to that. For extra fun, the races can pay money to drop a death stack directly on top of an enemy city. More sieges are coming right up! I find it terribly restricting to the gameplay, and not in the good way. Build walls in every city – there’s no telling which one can be a ritual site. The cutscene art and dialogue is great, but the story is barren. There’s a fun twist to it, and that’s about it. The tragedy is the map has no sandbox mode. You could ignore it, but it’s always looming over you, waiting to return. The Vortex map is very squished down in Mortal Empires. What was once roomy for DJ Khatep is now smooshed down. There’s some factions I just like playing on the Vortex map more, but the Vortex is there, tempting me with rituals every turn. You will see me bounce between the new maps, but I won’t talk about the rituals or the race. We’re just gonna pretend they’re not there. So, let’s get through “Warhammer 2” and talk about Elves. 8-BIT BRODY: “Hah-hah, that’s right, Mandy! I often think about what’s going through the minds of my little Elves.” 8-BIT BRODY: “What sort of dreams and goals and aspirations they have? What sort of future they hope to achieve through their actions?” 8-BIT BRODY: “Do they have fears and worries like I do?” 8-BIT BRODY: “And then I remember: of course not! ‘Cause my Elves are sweet little Fungus Bois that crave only the Green Tide.” I really need to finish this. Have you heard of the High Elves? They mainly reside in the Donut of Ulthuan. And like any big donut, there’s gonna be a cop there. High Elves are the nosy races of order. Even a nice gesture, like opening up a trade agreement, is just a way of spying on your land. They can obtain a special resource through events, called Influence. They use it to recruit Heroes, and also meddle diplomatically. You can see where the Empire update got its base from, I don’t need to re-cover all that. Who do I dance with? Oh, God, no… Being world police means needing military to back it, and boy, they have it… Their roster is absurdly good – it’s actually hard to go wrong with them. A lot of their units scale really well. Lothern Sea Guard are some of the best early game units. They’re archers and spearmen, and they get shields pretty quickly. The frontline can shish-kebab the bad men, while the backline fires arrows. There’s a reason that city garrisons are stuffed with them. Combine technology and Lord skills, and they can get into the late-game. They’ll just have problems crunching through armor, but High Elves have plenty of solutions for that. They have incredible swordfighters, which I believe can 1v1 any other melee infantry and win. Then you have all the dragons. It’s hard to think of a real problem I faced playing as them. I guess being sheer outranged, but that doesn’t happen often. I’d lean towards saying they have too many entities per unit. I honestly couldn’t tell you what to do. Their troops are expensive, but once they get going, they’re not stopping. Okay, time for some more greater context. All “Warhammer 2” factions have new abilities. These are called rites. They’re unlocked in many ways and can be extremely powerful. As an example, High Elves have Vaul’s Anvil. It buffs you faction for a few turns, and gives you a new ability in a siege – the power to zap an attacking tower into oblivion, where all the other High Elves are. Sub-factions may get dramatically different rites. Insurgent Lord Alith Anar really hates Dark Elves. He moved on their lawn just to fight them. So he gets a rite for an instant murder assassin. That helps with all those murdering missions. This is on top of other things to make the sub-factions unique. It’s just a fun bonus. No one’s running in Alith Anar’s lobby, but how about Teclis down in Lustria? Oh, well, he’s pretty busy right now. We can check back later… So let’s move past the High Elves to their Dark Elf counterparts. How do I sum up their differences without 10 minutes of lore? Alright, I got it! How do High Elves sound, compared to Dark Elves? HBOMBERELF: “The Asur are the brightest and most noble beings of this world.” HBOMBERELF: “While some may live out their wretched lives in squalor, our people will gloriously march forward to lead this world!” HBOMBERELF: “Truly, our spirits shine brightest!” ELLF TZEENTACH: “The Druchii will enslave all inferior races within our sight!” ELLF TZEENTACH: “We will make laborers and breeding stock of the vile rats and lizards who dare exist near our hemisphere.” ELLF TZEENTACH: “We will retake the Donut from the false Elves with the cruelest slaughter, and any survivors will surely be glazed.” Okay, you’re caught up. Dark Elves are pure evil. You might say Chaos is worse, but at least they’re serving some kind of god and want power. Dark Elves are sadistic. They’ll be cruel because “Why not?” They still have some similarities to High Elves, but not many. They have many things for pure wild offence, compared to the careful defense and strategy of the High Elves. Why ride horses, when you could ride a dinosaur? They’ve dragged up all kinds of monsters. They don’t have all the super dragons anymore, so they take what they can get. The king Malekith sets the example for edginess. He had a rough life. He was destined for greatness, but in a grab for power, he accidentally got himself all burnt up and put in that suit. Don’t feel too bad though, he’s still a very powerful dark magic user. Wait a minute… Is he edgier Anakin? ANAKITH: “I hate snow!” They’re a lot to take in, but I can’t really blame them. I’d probably end up that way too, living next to something called The Altar of Ultimate Darkness. Their empire is messier to manage. Their Lords have loyalty meters that can bounce around, so it’s important to keep an eye on your own ranks, before an army takes off and goes rogue. On the civic side, Dark Elf industry is powered by slave labor. You always need more. Whether it’s war prisoners or people you snatch up on a raid, you need to keep them flowing back to the homeland. Still, you need to keep at level. Too many slaves, and not enough precautions, means a rebellion. Not enough slaves means an economic downturn. So you can manage where more and less slaves will go. Speaking of which, remember the rites? [MARV SCREAM] Well, the crafty Druchii sacrifice slaves for theirs. One of their most powerful gives them a Black Ark. It’s a gigantic mobile warship. You can build and recruit on it like a horde army, but it also has a sphere of influence for reinforcing your own troops and bombarding the enemy. You can upgrade all kinds of things on it, including the guns – it’s the ultimate backup army. Attackers will find them an unpleasant place to be, though not as unpleasant as I would like. It’s so big this might fall under siege battles, so I’ll stop talking about it. If you really like Black Arks, you could play as Lokhir Fellheart who doesn’t need a rite to get them. His rites benefit corsairs and sea monsters. No time to build Arks when you’re trying to be the king of the sea. You can get a big slave palace and even a dragon mount. JOSEPH MAELSTROM: ““Total War” is a franchise that should really be called “Fraction War” or “Almost War”,” JOSEPH MAELSTROM: “due to the sheer amount of management mechanics it contains.” Oh, fuck me… JOSEPH MAELSTROM: ““Total Annihilation” is more worthy of the “Total War” namesake, as you just shoot each other-” [narration becomes distant, barely audible] JOSEPH MAELSTROM: ““Total Annihilation” is more worthy of the “Total War” namesake, as you just shoot each other-” Dark Elves are pretty slick. They’re on par with the High Elves for what they can do on the field. As for the DLCs, plan on getting them more for the units, rather than the campaign Lords. One summons an AI army to attack the Donut, and we know how those go. The other is struggling with daemonic possession, which is a great idea. There are a lot of fun touches to add flavor. TZ’ARKAN: “Do not restrain me!” 👿 MALUS: “How much more must I endure?!” 😭 But outside the battle aspect, which is admittedly fantastic, it’s just horribly tedious to manage. I don’t even want Pigbarter. He does completely ignore the Vortex campaign. It seems a lot of new leaders do. For some reason… So, for a faction of evil raiders, they have a lot going on. High Elves are a good faction for new player, but Dark Elves aren’t too far behind. And now we are completely done with elves. Oh, wait, I need to check Teclis. [sounds of savage massacre] Lizardmen are a Chaos-hating force of order. Obviously, they have lizards, dinosaurs and lizards on top of dinosaurs. Their society is led by the powerful magic Slann. Coming at their enemies live once again through the power of a Geomantic Web. Only one – Mazdamundi – gets a Legendary Lord slot. The others need to be awakened through rites. But he’s fine with that, he’s happy – he’s on his Jurassic mobility scooter. You can use traditional tactics in fights, but a big dumb dino-ball is also perfectly viable. When you picture how an army of dinosaurs would fight, this is pretty much it. The Lizardmen themselves (not the dinosaurs) are very well disciplined. They were created to be biological Chaos-eating robots, and they do their job well. Now, it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be, but I have an issue with something called Rampage. It means your unit goes nuts, and you can’t do anything about it, unless you have a Lord or a Hero with an ability nearby to shut it down. Until the Lord starts rampaging. What I don’t like is that Rampage is triggered by the enemy doing damage to a unit. Rampage is inflicted upon you. It’s an interpretation of Predatory Fighter from the tabletop, and it would be your own fault. It meant your units were winning combat, but out of position. Calming support units are too far away, so they just can’t help themselves, as they chase retreating enemy. I don’t have Lizardmen tabletop pieces to show how it works, but let me try to demonstrate. [screams and sounds of wild debauchery] [*RAWR*] TOWN GUARD 1: “Fucking Lizardmen!” TOWN GUARD 2: “Run away!” [screams and sounds of wild debauchery] [T-Rex roar] [sounds of wild debauchery] [smack] [sounds of wild debauchery] [*clink-clink*] [*clink-clink-clink-clink*] [derisive laughter] [sounds of wild debauchery] [terrified whimpering] SKINK: "Mya!" [surprised grunt] [meaty stab and a tortured scream] [relaxed, peaceful tune playing] [skink purring] SKINK: "Nyon!" Yeah, see, the Skinks should just be near it, and I’ve proven that now. Abilities cool down, someone being there does not. Give an AOE benefit to unit cohesion, don’t make me chase down a dinosaur to click it – they’re really quick. Still, for a big dumb lizard army, they’re fine for what they are. Their mechanics in the main campaign are pretty boring. There are plenty of buildings to buff adjacent regions across all factions, so making a building to buff that to reinforce a commandment seems like the same thing, just with a few more steps. You get random missions to spawn blessed units, which are very similar to Regiments of Renown. Not many interesting mechanics in the overworld. So how about DLC? Well, like the Dark Elves, I think you’re mainly getting them for their units this time around. You’ve got your power fist gators, your ripperdactyls and the biggest unit in the game so far. They all are really solid additions. You have fast moving and utility options, instead of just another big, dumb dino. You get THE big, dumb dino. As for the Lords, Lizard Moses can be a challenging campaign, if you don’t get the ball rolling. He sacrifices enemies to get buffs, but they’re not that good. The units of Regiments of Renown you would unlock anyways in the normal campaign. The final giant spell you get is really disappointing. Especially considering what a Skaven counterpart gets. Nakai is a horde army, and I should have stopped there. You don’t take cities for yourself – you give them to a vassal to babysit. You build different temples to unlock different rewards, and it’s also not worth it. I endured his entire campaign to tell you that. Just don’t do it – it’s a bad idea. Even I don’t know why I did it. I think I’m off… Lizards are a bit of a reptile-brain faction, but they’re fun in battle. So our final main faction is the Skaven. A magical playerbase that can ruin a thousand Warhammer discussions. They are THE swarm faction. They can absolutely bury you in rats. However, they’re not the danger – it’s all the weapons the rats are holding you down for. Cheap, barely equipped slaves, combined with energy weapons. How does that happen? Well, you can speculate, just don’t talk about it inside the Empire. [dramatic music] So, how do the Skaven work? How do giant rats even function? Well, in battle, it’s really as simple as I said before: rats to hold down, then rats to shoot. So, with numbers and advanced weapons, how have they not taken over the world already? Because more than anything, they fight each other. The rats are a cowardly, despicable race, and their constant power struggles keep them in check. There are many clans, working on all kinds of projects. One is dedicated to creating disgusting mutants and monsters, another works on all the strange guns and warpstone weapons, and another one carries out high stakes assassination and espionage. The first one – Clan Moulder – isn’t in the game. The second two are as DLC, and I think the first one – “The Prophet and the Warlock” – is essential. Without it, you don’t get iconic weapons, like Ratling Guns, which are a rapid-fire weapon team of absolute death and destruction. You don’t get sniper Jezzails or other kinds of strange technology. Before the DLC, they felt similar to the Beastmen, where they were incomplete. Yeah, they had the “swarm” part down – you could spam swarms of rats on people – yet they still had too few hammers to compliment the anvils, which the DLC added plenty of. Skaven did get some cool stuff for free, like an Undercity mechanic, letting you tunnel under your enemies’ cities and establish whatever you want. As long as you’re sneaky about it. It still doesn’t sit right with me. The units that were cut felt too substantial. Especially compared to, like, Globadiers… A DLC is what I see as the “Skaven experience”. You get a workshop that lets you research all kinds of insane unit upgrades. You unlock special units which are completely separate from Regiments of Renown. I mean, for Christ’s sake, you get nuclear weapons! [*WZA-BOOSH*] That is substantial. You get nukes on the overworld. Goodbye forever, Wood Elves – nothing will be growing there again. There is even an irradiated Tree model. The developers knew what would happen. Weapons the second DLC adds end up in the first DLC’s workshop. To me, that says it all. My issues with the other Skaven Lords are completely overshadowed by how much the DLC blows them out of the water. Anime rat spy faction is one thing. Ikit Claw just feels way too much like the baseline for Skaven. The two final DLC factions are great and well worth it. The Tomb Kings are true neutral undead, who have completely free units. This is balanced out by their buildings being horribly expensive. Same for technology. It takes really long time, and some stuff costs money. The buildings give advanced units more capacity, so, if you want a bigger army, you need to take more territory, but once the Tomb Kings get steamrolling, there’s nothing quite like it. Their on-foot skeletons are okay, but the real star are their dangerous constructs. They’re gorgeously animated, and just really exciting to use. They have an item crafting center, which the Dwarfs would get eventually. The Tomb Kings were a big experiment, and a successful one. There are lots of playstyles to try, and everything reinforces that you’re more digging up an empire, rather than making a new one. What is in the black pyramid? We might already know. [*bzoop*] [*psoosh*] Now it’s just the Vampire Coast. I’m covering them close together, because I don’t have a ton of issues, they have the same positives, but they also have similar weaknesses. Where Norsca dipped a toe into what a faction could be, Vampire Coast put the whole damn leg in. Their roster pulls from all kinds of various lore sources to make a complete army. Though, where Tomb Kings was bold in the campaign map, the Vampire Coast bought everything on sale. Lord loyalty like Skaven and Dark Elves, raising the dead from the regular Vampire Counts, ship building like Black Arks, but they could just move like a horde anyway. They threw in every tech tree reward, included offices, because why not. Boy Seaman. They contributed two new mechanics. The most significant being establishing Pirate Coves. This would go on to be a Skaven Undercity, but, while that has a counter, this does not. It probably should. Having a slow ranged faction with little melee sounds odd, but it worked out. It reused a lot, but what was new was so good that it didn’t seem to matter. Gorgeous models with lots of attention to detail, like some of their crab shells being mammoth skulls. Kings and Coast both have very different Lords, with four different starting positions. Both have a hybrid army that doesn’t go as far as it should. They both took a chance and they succeeded. What’s important is that a new racial standard has been set. I doubt we’re getting a Beastmen situation ever again. There are all kinds of general issues I jotted down, but in reality, it’s more of a wait-and-see for “Warhammer 3”. I don’t know if the Great Unification will come, bringing espionage and diplomacy and all these aspects that DLCs poked at into one unified system. I doubt it will go that far, but you never know. This series makes a lot of money, just not as much as Gelt. GELT: “Heading out!” There is a lot of potential in the multiplayer as well. They did make improvements so you don’t get kited by Korea’s finest as often, and it’s a good step. I do wish that co-op turns could be simultaneous, like in the “Civ” games, but I don’t know if that’s possible. It’s still fun, even if there is a lot of waiting. SPICYCHICKENGOD: “Oh no…” SPICYCHICKENGOD: “Oh no!” MANDALORE: “Ehh…” SPICYCHICKENGOD: “Ohh…” MANDALORE: “Are there a lot?” SPICYCHICKENGOD: “That isn’t good… I can’t tell how many…” SPICYCHICKENGOD: “Oh-hoh-hoh-ho… F- F- Fuck!” It’s a game I can recommend. Pick and choose the parts you want. I might follow up with in-depth DLC videos, if people want that. For now, just stay safe. Maybe play some “Total Warhammer 2”… and get sieged by Chaos. Fix horse. I wanna give another huge thanks to everyone who helped me out with this. I know it wasn’t crazy long, but I’m not used to that kind of thing. I know it’s not a masterpiece, but, to everyone who helped me out, whether you’re on Patreon or an artist: sincerely, thank you for helping me! I know there was a lot to cover, so I’m hoping I didn’t bore anybody too bad. I do have some questions to answer. Doyes: “Will [you] get around to the “Mass Effect” games, or is it too depressing?” For a long time that was just “no”, and there are a bunch of other games I want to cover in the meanwhile, so if I do, it will be long ways off, but I’m getting more open to it. Especially some of the mods they have for “3”. Coleton Harvey: “Best and worst thing about the quarantine so far?” The best is I rarely drive now. I think that driving was irritating the injury I got last year, because it was healing, but I’d still get some pain, but it seems to be doing a lot better now. If this hadn’t happened, I don’t know if I would have had that opportunity. My biggest worry is not that I’ll get infected, but that I’ll infect somebody else. I’ve had some strange incidents with viruses in high school, and throughout my childhood, really. Things that should have killed me did not, and with my seasonal allergies being around this time, I don’t know if it’s something terrible, or if it’s just the usual. So the uncertainty. Stephen Blane: “Have you seen the “Astartes” series on YouTube? It’s made by only one guy.” Yeah, his work is EXCEPTIONAL. There was an official animated Space Marine movie. I think it was called, um… Was it, like, “Ultramarine”? It was something like that. And it looks not even, like, HALF… not even a bit as good as “Astartes”. Christ, this was a big video! I’d… I shouldn’t do this again until like “The Droods” or something like that. At least that’s easy to record. I actually didn’t think of the end of the video joke. Oh, I know! Remove the dial puzzle! Please!
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Channel: MandaloreGaming
Views: 4,631,389
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: warhammer, total war, total war warhammer, total war warhammer 2, total war warhammer 2 review, total warhammer, total warhammer 2, total warhammer 2 review, warhammer 2, warhammer 2 gameplay, warhammer total war, warhammer total war 2 gameplay, total war 2, mandalore, mandaloregaming, mandalore gaming, mandalore warhammer, total war 2 warhammer, warhammer gameplay, total war warhammer pc, total war warhammer 3, warhammer fantasy, total war warhammer gameplay, warhammer 3
Id: WA_iXKhoujA
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 80min 7sec (4807 seconds)
Published: Sat May 02 2020
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