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The best vehicle for these new features is vengeful branchwraith Drycha’s new Mortal Empires campaign. Altogether, they do add more micromanagement to an already micro-heavy faction, but continue to make the Wood Elves very satisfying to try and master. Bladesingers are terrifyingly efficient anti-infantry, anti-armour blenders, and new hero Ariel is a powerful spellcaster. Zoats are take on large monstrous enemies with healing and armour spells, perfect for screening out and flattening flankers. Great Stag Knights are a monstrous shock cavalry that hit like a truck riding a bigger truck, but tend to melt if you leave them in combat for too long. The new Wood Elves units fill out some real tactical gaps in their roster, too. The new dilemmas also continue the Warden and The Paunch’s trend of having longer segments of great writing to bring campaign events to life. Personally, I love playing tall in Total War, and I love the thematic weight of swiftly crushing anyone who messes with my forests, like some sort of psychotic Lorax, so the faction rework is a real treat.
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These dilemmas and fights are the best part of the Sisters’ campaign, ensuring a steady variety of foes that keeps their tall, defensive playstyle varied and (on higher difficulties) quite challenging. This is achieved by capturing, razing, or allying with surrounding settlements, as well as fighting ambient quest battles that are usually accompanied by a dilemma.
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Wood Elves now claim campaign victory by improving the health of magical forest settlements then performing rituals. They’re a great lord choice, in terms of design and dialogue, and they’re enjoyable to spend time with, but a campaign mechanic that involves upgrading special items feels half-baked. The new Wood Elves campaign, starring the Sisters of Twilight, works well as an introduction to the new faction mechanics, but doesn’t offer much that’s unique to the Sisters themselves. For the Skaven as a whole, adding new speedy flankers and anti-large options makes an already powerful race potentially terrifying in the right hands. The campaign itself, which involves weakening the Wood Elves by destroying key settlements as a timer ticks down for a final battle, feels a little too streamlined, but running a pure Moulder army is still a blast. Much like the previous Skaven lord packs, the new Moulder mechanics provide both power creep and comic relief in equal measure. The Flesh Lab does what the Skaven do best, really, which is offer ways to break the game in consistently entertaining and devious ways. You unlock new mutations by building on top of old, but if you push a unit too far, you end up with horrific creations that rot away from the inside. Some are practical, like reduced upkeep and combat buffs, and some are pure Skaven silliness, like turning your monsters undead or letting them emit huge flesh explosions. The Flesh Laboratory allows you to spend a resource called growth juice – which you earn through winning battles or from sporadic deliveries – on horrific and useful mutations for your army.
#TW WARHAMMER 2 MORTAL EMPIRES CAMPAIGN BUFFS UPGRADE#
This manifests in a handful of new monsters, the monster-buffing packmaster hero, and the ‘Flesh Laboratory’ upgrade system. Thrott is the thiccest of rodents, eternally hungry, and with a penchant for unholy biological experiments. Clan Moulder are the new addition, previously represented by a handful of monstrous units, but now granted their own faction and campaigns, headed up by Lord Thrott the Unclean. The Skaven changes are less dramatic, so before we cover the Wood Elves, let’s make like Londoners in the 17th century, and have a heated conversation about some rats.