[grunting of the troops and Throt's ferocious growling] Well, it’s that time again! A new “Warhammer 2” DLC is on the way, and I was given early access to it. However, this time, things will be a little more complicated. Because last time the DLC reworked and focused on the Greenskins – a “Warhammer 1” faction (along with the Elves, kind of). But this time, we have the Skaven, who are now on their third Lord pack, and the rival and big rework is focused around the Wood Elves, which are a DLC faction for “Warhammer 1”. It was easy before: if you own “Warhammer 1”, you can go back and play the new stuff on the big map. But now we have a chart to look at. This is the official chart, and it’s bad – it’s unnecessarily unclear (and this won’t be the last time I talk about bad clarity). So here’s my professional MS Paint update. You don’t need to own the DLC for the free Hero character – that’s for everybody. There’s also another free Hero character, which is “free” with an asterisk, because… Alright, you know what? Forget the chart. Let me talk about what’s new and scale up from there. Just keep in mind that I have been given no patch notes, so I could be off or miss some things, but I’m trying my best over here. Okay, quality of life stuff. Some old bugs are fixed, some old ones are still around, and lighting remains a coin flip. The good news is things appear to be more stable this time around. When I was playing “The Grim and The Grom”, the campaign was blatantly breaking in front of me (which I told people about), and that turned out to be a sign of a lot more being broken. There was nothing to that level in any of the new campaigns. It could be the extra time this DLC took was QAing stuff, but I don’t know. Whatever the reason, it’s nice to see, and it’ll probably be touched up a bit more on release day. However, I do still have a personal Book of Grudges. THROT: (snarls) “Eat-eat!” Easy fight, easy life, and… [jolly yodeling] [jolly yodeling]
Wut? [jolly yodeling]
WUT?! [jolly yodeling]
How far is he gonna go?! They added trackable damage, to see how truly effective units are in combat. You can finally abandon settlements you don’t want. This will make confederations more manageable, and it brings us one step closer to region trading. Speaking of regions: Mortal Empires has some new ones. A part of the Darklands have been added, giving a brand new vertical passageway. There is a few more factions to encounter, and some hints for things to come. Also, if you play as Tretch from Clan Rictus, you have an undercity out in the Crookback Mountain, meaning, you can now take down… the other Clan Rictus… It’s better than nothing. They gave him nice faction bonuses, too. Oh, right, the Chaos invasion can be tweaked or turned off! Another good addition! As for battle shakeup, wizards are no longer afraid to nuke themselves. There’s no minimum cast range anymore, so you can just drop a meteor on yourself, if you want. There’ve also been changes to unit mass, which I don’t have exact numbers for, but infantry can tar pit monsters better. And foot Lords won’t be shanked to Knockdown City every day. Now, the most concerning change is how ranged weapons now work in trees. Currently, when a missile is fired, it can phase through anything for about 1.5 seconds. The idea is that this will be at the edge of the tree line. I get the concept: in real life, a soldier won’t fire his weapon directly into a tree from that close. Well, unless they’re a stupid, smelly rat… My concern is that some projectiles fire way faster than others. You know, compare a jezzail round to something like an arrow. Additionally, it seems like that there should be factions that are given more leeway – say, like the Wood Elves. Also, weapons that should not have it at all, like artillery. For a brief, terrifying time, the artillery had this ability, but it looks like they iterated that out. At least, I sure hope they did… Hiding in the woods already gave you some extra protection against ranged. This change will increase that advantage more, and I do see it as a positive. Emphasis on terrain nuances is a good direction to go in, because “Total War” has been there before. I’m still waiting on weather effects to make a proper comeback. The thing is, this change being on artillery, would mean that counter-artillery would be screwed. You can’t just blow up the trees and destroy their cover. Yet… Because that would be cool, actually. It is possible it was a bug or an oversight, but if that was a design decision, then I don’t know what the thought process was. The way difficulty buffs the AI in melee already pushes the meta very far towards range. Something like shield effectiveness going up would make sense to me. Seeing early players fire cannons through tree trunks really worries me. Okay, onto more fun stuff… Everybody gets the Skaven Chieftain as a free Hero. He’s a fun addition – he buffs units around him, but when he takes too much damage, he starts buffing himself instead. Very Skaven. It’s official that all the rat Heroes do not fit in one window anymore. They’re doing fine, so enough of rats for now. Instead, let’s get into the Wood Elf rework. It’s a dramatic one, so buckle up. See, before, the Wood Elves thrived by being aggressive expansionists, which is the exact opposite of what they should have been doing – sitting in their trees and getting mad at trespassers. They also had units, buildings and lots of technology restricted by an Amber resource. This has been completely overhauled. Amber is rare, and good for technology only. And they’re powerful tech, so you do spend them carefully. As expected from Wood Elves, your main objective is to heal a big tree. In the DLC it’s the Witchwood, in Mortal Empires it’s still the Oak of Ages. The health bar is its own separate thing – it’s not tied to a settlement level, like it was before. This goes for all the magical forest settlements. There are a lot more of those now, so I’ll try to make it less confusing. Some people have heated, emotional arguments over whether or not “Huckleberry Finn” is a high fantasy setting, because Jim has a magic hairball in it. I don’t wanna be there. None of you should be there. So here it goes. So, from here on out, the special campaign-winning tree is called the Big Tree. The settlements that help, but not the main objective, will be called Fancy Trees. The Witchwood in the DLC is a Big Tree, but in the Mortal Empires, the Oak of Ages is bigger, so, using basic Big Tree logic, we now know the Oak is the Big Tree, and the Witchwood is demoted to Fancy Tree. This has been a long year… Anyway, healing any Tree takes time. Naturally, the Big Tree just takes longer. You can create a building to heal it, but it’ll be slow. Also, the settlement recruitment buildings don’t need growth, but the rest of them do. It’s similar to a horde, but the buildings are powerful – they just take a long time to grow. The most ideal way to grow and heal your forest is by being a Jason Voorhees park ranger. The settlements around your Trees are called Heathlands – they support and help your Tree, but only after being pacified. So, controlled by you or ally, or burnt to the ground. If you do control it, you can make an outpost building like before, but it will mainly affect adjacent provinces. So you can help grow your main Tree through structures, remove corruption, etc. So, for every turn one of them is pacified, it adds one health to the Tree’s bar. But some neighbors will really hate seeing that. This makes policing the area around your Tree a constant goal. The more a forest heals – the more bonuses it unlocks, but there are additional challenges along the way. The more a Tree is healed – the more the health will decline per turn. Control more of the park to stay above it! Sometimes, regional enemies will spawn to invade a forest. Except, unlike the stupid Vortex ones, there’s a timer, and you can see where they’re coming from, and ambush their army before it’s at full strength. So they shake things up, but you have preparation time. The element stays as extra park ranger engagement, instead of being annoying. On top of that, you have region-specific forest dilemmas. They’ll also drag your health down by 1, unless you make a choice. Sometimes, they’re internal, but most of the time, they revolve around dealing with your neighbors. These can have significant diplomatic effects, and can lead to unlikely alliances. In one, I could help Dark Elves kill their escaping Greenskin slaves, or help the Greenskins in a much harder battle. So I helped the green guys, killed their ex-masters, and one named… Sporctacus…? Okay, that’s fun! Well, he waged guerilla warfare against the Dark Elves for the rest of the campaign. How about teaming up with pirates to get some artillery support for a while? I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them yet, but they’re fun, and they add a lot of replayability. Now, when you fully heal a Tree, you have to initiate a ritual, and then protect it for ten turns, which… you know, a lot of invasions pop up then. But if you complete it, you get a whole bunch of rewards, including Amber. You can then build a unique structure there, if you want to, and more health goes towards the Big Tree. So, managing Fancy Trees sounds fun, but they’re just so far away. Well, starting off, you can teleport one army between the trees every ten turns, but this can get lower. Taking a faraway Tree just means deep-striking some Elves, angry trees and whatever else directly on top of it. Or maybe you’re just travelling for an event to help heal the Tree. Remember: the health is separate from the settlement. Your Tree settlement can be burnt to the ground, but the health will stay. Not like before, where it just meant that you had wasted a whole lot of turns. This is an outstanding system. Because, now, instead of an aggressive faction, the Wood Elves play tall. At the same time, the teleporting and all the events mean they don’t have the usual drawbacks of playing tall in a strategy game. You’re not forced to fight the same enemy in the same area over and over again. Hop across the world, tell strange new creatures to get the hell off your lawn. When the Big Tree final ritual is ready, you fight off a few armies, then a final battle, and then you’re good to go. You could quit with the win, or conquer the world, since you have good rewards for it. Even minor features from before are made more impactful, like the offices. They’re different for each Lord. Like, in the case of Orion, they make his Wild Hunt event actually matter a little more. It’s a fantastic overhaul. I enjoyed playing them in battle before, but the campaign was a mess. Not anymore. Now when Boss Nass calls up to talk shit, you can teleport right into his stupid Tree. Say that to my face, and not on the Web! I can say they’re good now. And this comes from a place of not really caring or even liking the Wood Elves. With that in mind, I was surprised to see that they added a choice for people just like me. DRYCHA: “Boleno m’sii vlass’naa gephemus rae!” DRYCHA: “Terumgentru, s-suka!” 🤬 DRYCHA: (hisses) This is Drycha. She has some pretty good ideas. While Durthu was unhappy with the Elves, Drycha is actively out to murder them. She can only get some of their units, and they’re under an effect called Glamour. They’re basically magically brainwashed, and are thinking they’re serving their queen, and not a deranged tree spirit. Their combat skills are weaker, but now all Elves are expendable. Perfect! To make up for this, Drycha can recruit forest spirits – stuff like manticores or spiders or wolves. Anything that goes with the theme “nature is very angry”. Angry about Elves. [rekt] Her tech tree is altered, focusing on trees and forest spirits, and all of her tree units have frenzy and are pure evil, with a very nice color scheme to match that. Because every tree spirit is malevolent, including the Lords and Heroes. The regulars can be upgraded with aspects, which is just the Greenskins’ scrap system, but it’s nice. Durthu gets it too. However, Drycha’s angriest tree is Coeddil. He’s a Legendary Hero, a Tree Elder, like Durthu, and you release him through a quest battle. You break way stones in it, and breaking any object is pretty unusual for a quest battle. Once you smash enough Elves, he is a powerful asset. He buffs trees, like you’d expect, but also has a mix of Lore of Beasts and Dark Magic, which is definitely different. His stats and abilities are absolutely properly unique. That said, while I love his color scheme, I do find the model disappointing. I guess, knowing his backstory, I would have liked something more ancient and twisted, instead of just a tree-man. And how come it’s not an ancient tree-man at that? Oh well… I also noticed a lot of little things that other races could benefit from in the future. For example, Drycha could get a different post-battle options, specifically for fighting Wood Elves. Having stuff like this for rival races would be great. She has an upgradeable spell to summon Dryads (eventually becomes like a Menace From Below kind of thing). But before that, she has a skill to stop summons from degrading. I know Kemmler had that for Krell, but wow, that should definitely be spread around more! The patch and DLC have a lot of new ideas for skills and we do need those. As it is, going full battle or full campaign on a Hero will max it out well before the level cap is met. God help us if they raise it… There are still some little things that stick out to me. You know, Imrik has an actual horn-blowing animation and sound, but then Orion is… [sound of invisible horn] [sound of visible horn] Hmm… But, before transitioning into the DLC, there is also a Glade Captain Hero. They have cool mount-based skills and are anti-large. If you have any Wood Elf content, you get them. If you own “Realm of the Wood Elves”, you have everything I just talked about. Drycha is not with the new DLC. So with her campaign being so different and interesting, the Sisters step it up by- Oh, Jesus Christ… You know, that’s enough Wood Elves for now – let’s go to Skaven for a bit. (*whack*) “Oh, my shoulder!” NARRATOR: “Throt, master mutator of Clan Moulder. How he yearns to be free of his unnatural, undying hunger.” NARRATOR: “Ariel’s pulped remains would be a certain remedy.” So, Throt the Unclean is out to devour the Wood Elf queen, because he thinks that her flesh will cure his insatiable hunger. Alright, I’m in! Throt is one of the higher-ups of Clan Moulder. Their specialty is mutation and other unethical experiments. They mainly do this to their own clan, but sometimes they’ll go on a snatching trip. The Wood Elves and their forest friends are no exception, so they certainly hate Skaven. [hissing and screams] [*badonk*] "RAWR!" So this campaign is just about their newest conflict. They’ll keep happening. In Vortex, Throt is out to stop the queen’s ritual. He starts off invading Naggarond, so he can get into the Witchwood. You can kinda see him back there. This is a timed campaign. You need to take down special Wood Elf settlements to weaken queen Ariel and then defeat her in the final battle. With each destroyed, the timer’s extended, and you CAN fight her after taking down 3. At the same time, electing to destroy more will weaken her further. Whether it’s reducing ward save, her units or her special effects – it’ll tell you. It’s a better time mechanic than the Grom invasion last time around, but I don’t have too much to say on it. It’s… fine. The final battle’s fun – it has some back and forth dialogues, some twists, and an objective that’s not just “kill the enemy army”. It does have charm, but nothing really worth spoiling to talk about. I guess it indicates that “3” could have better quest battles? As for his general campaign mechanics, they’re a very different story. When his armies win in combat, they earn a new resource, called Growth Juice. It can also be earned from a few other things, like creating buildings, and it’s all tracked in a handy meter up there. That’s the growth vat. When it fills, you can dump it, or let it keep going. Whenever you do, you’ll get some units, and more powerful ones will come if you wait. Once the Moulder mice are all flushed away, they’re ready to recruit. They could be brought to the front lines instantly in their own special recruitment tab. So, similar to the Raise Dead mechanic, with extra steps. Dumping the vats also gives you a new resource called Mutagen. This is where things get interesting. In his Laboratory, Throt can spend this to mutate individual units. There is a tab for both, infantry and monsters. By applying the lower tier mutations, you’ll eventually unlock the higher tier ones. You can’t stack the same upgrade on the same unit, so you have to experiment. THROT: “If not work, me eat thing!” You can turn units into glass cannons, create cloaking Hell-Pit Abominations. Hell, turn it undead, too! Why not? It’s easy and it’s fun. Take a living thing’s life and click “I’m feeling lucky!” on it! Dump Costco portions of chromosomes right into their DNA! Things can get out of hand, but some units are lucky. The more – the better, right? There is some RNG here. See, the more you mutate a unit, the more likely something will go wrong if you mutate it again. From there, it gets a little bit unstable. At basic instability, they’ll get hurt down to about 75% health, but that’s the price you pay when you want something to shoot warp lightning out of its skin. Of course, if a unit becomes unstable, you can recycle it for Growth Juice. So there’s an opportunity to get a tiny rebate back on your investment. OR keep mutating it. They get more unstable, but they’re good at fighting when they’re alive. Eventually, this will reach a silly critical mass. You are now silly for not recycling the unit. But if you bring it to a fight… [*whomp*] It was never supposed to live long… You dump out more monsters and you keep experimenting. There is always a new kind of mutant super soldier to aim for and cook up. In fact, the Lab itself can be upgraded after dumping the vats a few times. What if the slaves in the vat dumps all had random augmentations, but you can’t recycle them anymore? Well, say hello to the super slaves! Some even come bundled with the instability cancer! Free shipping! This is a great, engaging mechanic. It’s always on your mind when you play. I was sad, but understood why Skaven artillery couldn’t just malfunction and explode, like the tabletop. But augmenting a monster army with a chance of them degenerating or exploding is very in that spirit. It’s a blast to mess with, because there is some crazy stuff in this Lab. It makes me wish that Ikit Lab had something more like that. Right now, it’s the “press button to win” faction, and it will likely stay that way. That said, Clan Moulder is very melee-focused. Combine that with the new Chieftain, and Engineer should really be a range boy now. Oh yeah, and two different specimen collector skills, but… well, that’s weird… His Mortal Empires start is even more fun, so, really, I have nothing bad to say about the campaign mechanics here. So how about the new units? The main theme is fast-moving monsters, and it’s nothing too crazy. Wolf-rats have the same fast flanking role as war dogs, but they have some armor piercing or some poison. Brood Horrors are also quick as hell, but they can stay in the fight longer and dish out more damage. If that wasn’t enough, they’re also a mount option for several characters. That alone means I’ll be seeing them around a lot when I play Skaven. They’re good, but a rat casting on top of them is even better. The mutant Rat Ogres are infantry-munchers, but I didn’t end up using them all that much. Their armor piercing could be good, but, with mutations, I usually found other units to use. And they’re not THE Rat Ogre. [intense infantry-munching] Ghoritch is a Legenday Hero, and he earns that title. He looks like he’s escaped out of a 40K game, and he brings a whole lot of buffs to himself or his army. His defense maybe a little weak, but he is an infantry-lawn-mower. He has the brain of a Norscan Berserker shoved into a Rat Ogre. I was worried they’d make him a big, dumb, slobbering monster, when he shouldn’t be (like poor old Throgg), but no, he has great lines! GHORITCH: “I serve vermin. I revere Khorne.” So Ghoritch steals the show, but there’s still a little more. Throt himself is a joy of a character, and an excellent monster-murderer. His anti-large can go sky-high, because he’s basically bloat max bear mode. That will happen if you spend all day wrangling Homunculi down in Hell-Pit. He also summons Rat Ogres, so goodbye backline. THROT: (snarls) “Eat flesh! Get in my gut-gut!” (manic growling) THROT: “Nugh, sorry-sorry… Am SO HUNGRY.” The Pack Master Hero is, essentially, a mini-Throt. He helps the good monsters and beats up the bad ones. He has some locked off skill options and summons Wolf-rats wherever he wants. It’s not a huge roster shakeup or anything. It makes a melee monster army viable, instead of just handicapping yourself. So, all is well and good, except for one thing – readability. Aka “the unit cards”. This is something I would have brought up in the last video for “The Warden and The Paunch”. Except, they were still updating art assets when I was playing it during the early build. This is the final Blacktooth. This is what he looked like before. So when I saw these cards with the low resolution and the negative space up at the top, I thought “Oh, these HAVE TO be placeholder”. Especially since some like the Idol and Ranger looked fine. I legitimately thought they were a tweaked screenshot (like in a model viewer or something) they put a filter over. But no, that’s how things are now. The muted space and negative color’s already a bad idea, but now let’s put banners, the augmentation levels, the filter for instability on top of it, and I can’t tell what they are anymore. Unless I mouse over it, which kind of defeats the point. Can you guess which one of these is a DLC unit? It really shouldn’t be that way. Also, the front-facing perspective most of these have is just bizarre. Look how pronounced the weapons are in the regular cards. This guy in the middle here – that’s a spear unit with a shield. Here’s the unit, so you know I’m not making it up. Why would you profile a spear unit from the front, where the spear is short and down, and it doesn’t look like a spear anymore? The card right next to it is doing so much better. Also, intensifying colors or motion or images in the background of the cards indicated a higher quality unit, typically. The lightning bolt Dwarf in the middle is likely more of a threat than the one on the left in a similar pose, but without the intense background. Having a void conveys just that – nothing. Here’s the Chaos Hound and Poison Chaos Hound. Let’s compare them to the new Wolf-rats. The bottom of the card is where icons would pop up. Why are they so far down there? And their profile is similar to the Brood Horror. In fact, it’s almost identical. I’m not speaking as, like, a “Total War” snob – I’ve played a lot of games – and I’m saying “This is bad”. There’s already a mod someone made before release, which is SO much better. I can immediately tell Wolf-rats have a war dog role because of their pose, everything’s readable – it’s great. I’m not sure why such a dramatic downgrade happened, but these are important. I’m not sure it’s a time or money issue or what, but it is not something to skimp on. So I really hope those get fixed. Because I think their function is broken, and I think that because they were hard to read in a fight. Even with groups, I had to mouse over near every time. But enough of rats and mice – let’s go back to the Wood Elves. NAESTRA: “The Weave here is dangerously out of balance.” ARAHAN: “Yet there is much prey. Glorious!” NAESTRA: “This is no game, sister! We must prepare for Ariel’s arrival.” In both, Vortex and Mortal Empires, the Sisters have the goal of growing the Big Tree, then winning a final battle. I… talked about that already. Yeah, oh, I… talked about most of this part earlier… Okay, so let’s go right for their special mechanic. The Sisters themselves are a neat Lord choice – two characters, both sharing a mount. In battle, they’re essentially a giant flying Eagle Claw. So they’re strong, can change their target focus type and are incredibly mobile. After a quest, you can unlock their dragon mount and summon the mount you’re not using in combat. So summon dragon or summon bird. The whole faction’s focus is on buffing flying units, including giving Hawk Riders the Volley of Kurnous. Some Heroes get an Arrow of Kurnous ability. This is a cruise missile. Even when I wasn’t using the new roster, it is a different playstyle. I’d rarely use flying units when I did play Wood Elves, so this was different. As for the campaign ability… oh boy… The Sisters have the Forge of Daith. To sum it up: grandpa gives them four magical items. After winning a battle, and between two turns, the item can be upgraded. Either a good permanent buff, or a powerful temporary buff (then it reverts back to the first form). Every 10 turns, he’ll offer you a new item choice. You can choose the type of item, but you won’t know what it is. Additionally, a skill can improve the timing of all of this by a little bit. You upgrade powerful items, get more, upgrade them again, get more… And eventually, you’ll perfect an item. You don’t actually choose what to upgrade – a blind man decides for you. So, perfecting the item you like might be where things change. Because, the next time the item is picked, the options become “buff it for a while and start completely over” or “do nothing”. I actually moused over that, because I thought it could be vigor or something, but no, it’s just the legs icon, because… you’re leaving. I started to realize: the more items I got – the less chance I had to actually upgrade something I was interested in. Because #1 Uncle decides for me. So if I had an item I didn’t want to reset (like casualty replenishment), it would keep coming up again and again, and I’d just click “leave”. With the turn timer so short, this means this will constantly be happening. He’ll eventually start running out of stuff, but then he’ll just offer a quick army buff and that’s it. Which is fine – it’s better than nothing. There are some cool items for the battles, but in campaign, it starts bouncing between annoying and frustrating. There are two main reasons for this. The first is the interface. To start off with, High Elf players will recognize this screen. It’s basically the Invocation of Vaul rite. Except for the worse… The Invocation of Vaul lets you mouse over, and tells you what you get. Hiding it gives you no expectations. If you say “I want my Lord to do more damage”, picking a weapon won’t necessarily do that. A talisman could give you weapon strength – a weapon could just bound a spell on you. Unique items, by their nature in the game, don’t have any consistency, which is fine. The most you can pick from this is which Lord has an empty slot to fill. The choice keeps popping up, and the chances of it offering something you want get less and less as the game goes on. Events are already a blur in the late game, and this does not help at all. Using the dilemma event interface for this was a bad idea. So, why isn’t there a proper Forge menu? Imagine if the Flesh Lab kept popping up at you, telling you to mutate something? It’s difficult to visualize. Let’s reverse that. Imagine the Forge item layout being kind of similar to the Laboratory. The mutant part up here. It’d be bigger, of course – there are already more kinds of Daith weapons right now – but you could see an upgrade tree (maybe side-grades, or the stuff that takes you back to the beginning). Have the Forge visits be more spaced apart, to make it more special, instead of every other turn if you’re fighting. Maybe have some RNG, like “tell Daith to do whatever, but you could come back sooner”. Maybe have set bonuses, or the twins can equip an extra item or two, because they’re two characters. It’s a solid idea on paper, but, like other DLCs and the Lord packs that suffer this kind of problem, it’s an iteration or two away from being good. Remember when Ikit Claw got his Lab and nuclear weapons? Campaign-only units? Tehenhauin got a sacrificial pyramid that could have had exclusive units. Instead, he got Regiments of Renown that other lizards can recruit normally, so it effectively gimped him. It would have been nice if they came back later to give him unique units, but they didn’t. Instead, Ikit’s Lab got even more stuff. So, at this point, I think the Skaven are actually cursed. They were horrible at release, but things have really swung in their favor now. The Wood Elf rework is fantastic, but the Forge by itself is not good. And it’s frustrating, because it’s not too far away from being good. Flesh it out a tiny bit more, and add a proper way to interact with it. If that were the case, I would call the pack balanced. But, this against the Lab, I don’t think so. The effects are powerful, but engaging with it isn’t interesting. Okay, new roster stuff. The Wood Elf units are more specialized than the Skaven ones, but they open up some interesting options. You have the Blade Singers, which are chaff-munchers. They have armor piercing, but also an ability that lets them do more base damage by lowering it. So they can easily click between that to adapt. The Zoats and their Fushigi Balls are magic lizards. They’re anti-large, but they can hold their own in combat with just about anything. Their bound healing and defense spells also means they’re a great support unit. So, careful use of them can turn some engagements around. The Stag Knights are a downright majestic charger. Their speed and charge bonus gives them insane impact. They can’t stay in a fight long, and, like most shock cavalry, should be constantly maneuvering and cycle-charging, but these guys might be the best at cycle-charging now. Out of all the new units, these were second only to Ghoritch in terms of fun factor. There is a new Lord, in a form of a Spell-weaver. It’s a nice option for people who want a cheaper caster Lord, who’s also not a tree-man. On the Legendary Hero front, we have Queen Ariel. I don’t know what her lore is, but… she is the queen. She’s not the casting terror that Kroak is, but she’s up there. She has tons of spells right from the get go, and can wipe out formations with ease. A bit of a magic nuker, but also a healer. Overall, I think the Wood Elves got more interesting units, as far as playstyle goes. The Skaven stuff is useful, but not as diverse as all of this. So they got a slightly better deal here, but the Forge is still out there. And that’s it. As far as recommendations go, this is tricky. “Realm of the Wood Elves” is pretty damn good now. If you already own this, you’re probably in for a good time. Throt’s additions are great. If you’re a Skaven player, I’d say go for it, if you haven’t already. But if you only have “Warhammer 2”, and only want Wood Elves, I don’t think it’s worth it. You won’t get nearly the amount of content that Mortal Empires has. Growing one Big Tree with only three Fancy Trees just isn’t as diverse. For Mortal Empires, you can teleport, so their start position doesn’t matter. You’d get it only for the new units and to confederate new cool characters. Yet, I’ve always seen Wood Elves as angry trees and dickish archers. The roster already felt pretty damn complete before. So they’re fun additions, but, if you only have “Warhammer 1” and “2”, just get the old Wood Elves pack. And there is yet another DLC on the way, and hopefully, it’s the last one. Frankly, I’m too tired to bull-rush into speculating, because this was very short notice. So, come back next time for an atmospheric shooter. Well, sort of… So that was a hand grenade into the schedule, but things will be back on track again soon. Questions! Coyote updates. Look, sometimes, I run into them getting the mail or parking late at night, but I don’t know where they live exactly. They just appear by a cliff every few weeks, so I don’t know what they’re up to. Paul N: “What game do you come to for a quick fix?” Well, it would usually be this one, but right now, I’d rather not look at it for a while. “Risk of Rain 2” has been a recent one though. That’s a good game. I still wish “1” had gotten proper multiplayer support. Joshua Mettlach (Shadow): “Is there a game you wish you could play again, but you can’t?” Yeah, it was called “Battleswarm: Field of Honor”. It was an FPS vs RTS game where the FPS players were Space Marines, and the RTS players were giant bugs. There were a lot of loadouts and different strategies, and it was a lot of fun. The problem is, it was a Korean game, with a very Korean payment system. You rented out items and weapons, and eventually, the game died, and got shut down forever. I have yet to play anything like it since, where FPS players are fighting RTS players, so I… don’t know, maybe there’s something there. Then again, those hybrid genres never do super well, so we’ll see. Oh, right, the biggest bug! If you capture Pigbarter as the Empire, they gave me an in-game follower. This was really nice of them, but you can’t actually equip it, because it’s bugged out. AHHH!
Summary of the review:
- Unit card art is very bad, enough so that he equates it to placeholder art
- Skaven units make a monster army viable, Throt's mechanics are fun
- Likes the Wood Elf Rework quite a lot.
- Finds Daith's Forge to be underwhelming and even finds interacting with it to be frustrating and annoying over the course of the campaign. Some item effects are powerful though.
- Ultimately can't recommend Twisted & The Twilight if you just want the WE stuff. Recommends buying Realm of the Wood Elves instead.
It's a shame that the forge is lackluster, since the Sisters themselves look like a really unique lord in battle.
he really doesn't seem to like unit card portraits
He makes a very good point about the fact that the instability mechanic should be applies to clan Skryre's workshop.
the thing about the Forge of Daith thing is that it just...s eems kinda pointless to ever pick the temporary buff? As in, it doesen'ts eem worth it when you can just get the permanent one.
Getting magic items and upgrading them isn't the greatest mechanic, but it seems functional enough, but the entire "get another 5% boost but it breaks after 5 turns" seems incredibly lacklustre. If they wanted me to ever pick a temporary boost compared to a permanent boost it has to be much more significant.
So this confirms what everyone already knew. Forge of Daith is a boring, uninspiring and unoriginal mechanic. How can anyone even consider it to be even remotely on par with Throt?
Reviewing the rework first, then the Skaven, and finally the Sisters and the forge really hammered home how lackluster it is. His line around 10:30 “if you own Realm of the Wood Elves you have everything I just talked about. Drycha is not with the new DLC, so with her campaign being so different and interesting the Sisters step it up by Oh Jesus Christ!” perfectly encapsulates my feelings on this DLC.
It's baffling how bland and uninspired Daiths Forge is.
No chance that CA didn't notice the mechanic imbalance while producing this.
I like the Mandalore reviews. He never did a good job of breaking down what content does what but I guess for those who were interested could have gone back and looked at the chart.
I find it hard to disagree with him on basically anything but one thing I would say is that the unit card effect for a Skaven unit that is degenerating is too much. It reduces readability for even the well made cards. Should be a symbol above the card like rampage or something.