What, youвЂ™d rather send your own army? Crossing an ocean can take upwards of eight turns, and-even weirder-any naval battles are fought as if the two land armies were facing off against each other, and can only be auto-resolved. Thus it often feels like youвЂ™re in a vacuum, struggling to raise Tablets/Scrolls/whatever faster than an enemy you canвЂ™t even see, and then trusting the AI to throw a wrench into the enemyвЂ™s plans for you. But you donвЂ™t even control the mercenary army you bought, nor the makeup of said army aside from a Weak/Average/Strong dynamic based on how much you paid. Each time a Ritual is started by an enemy faction you can pay to send an вЂњInterventionвЂќ army to opposing cities-a means of getting around your innate isolation. ThatвЂ™s a problem when those same High Elves end up being your closest rivals, in large part because their empireвЂ™s grown unchecked on the other side of the world. Here, you could go the entire Lizardmen campaign without ever encountering the High Elves at all, even though youвЂ™re directly embroiled in this global conflict with them.

In the first game, it often felt like Dwarves could finish out a game and barely interact with the Empire/Humans-but thatвЂ™s because your win conditions had next-to-nothing to do with them! ThereвЂ™s also an odd dynamic that occurs by featuring four different continents, two of which are completely isolated by oceans. It wasnвЂ™t like I could abstain from conquest. But I needed those cities to generate Tablets as fast as my rivals.

Every turn, there were a dozen or more cities demanding attention, asking me to weigh the benefits of another barracks here, another quarry there, and so on. Once youвЂ™re past even 20 or 30 settlements, thatвЂ™s a lot of micromanagement. Some are in an вЂњunsuitableвЂќ climate, which carries various negative effects, but thatвЂ™s it. Every city you control contributes to your total, and by the end of my Lizardmen campaign I owned something like 65 settlements, gained through some combination of military conquest and unifying other Lizardmen factions under my own banner-a necessity, because other Lizardmen factions wonвЂ™t contribute to your own Ancient Tablet goals, even though youвЂ™re all sort of вЂњon the same side.вЂќ No city is off-limits, either.

In Total Warhammer II, generating Tablets/Scrolls/Fragments/Warpstone is mostly a factor of how many cities you own. In all my years of strategy games, watching a T-Rex battle against a horde of plague-spreading rats is a definite highlight. I played through the opening hours of all four factions during this review, but carried the Lizardmen campaign all the way to completion because, come on -itвЂ™s dinosaurs. Rat-men and dinosaurs, though? Fantastic. The same goes for Elves this time around-thatвЂ™s well-trod territory. Dwarves, Humans, Orcs, Vampires-the latter faction was the most interesting, but none are exactly unexplored territory. The first Total Warhammer was a huge departure for Total War, but not much of a departure for video games in general. And the ratlike Skaven? They plan to tear open the void itself.Д«efore I get into what I dislike, IвЂ™d like to praise the factions themselves. The High Elves fear their Dark Elf counterparts will corrupt the Vortex and bring Chaos back to the world-a plan the Dark Elves have indeed put into motion. They seek to protect the Vortex from warmblood interference. The Lizardmen, ancient stewards of the world, are afraid of lesser races derailing the вЂњGreat PlanвЂќ foreseen by their ancestors.

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