It's been a while since a Total War game has met the standard of gameplay set by the earlier games. The last game to pass muster was, in my opinion, Shogun 2, and before that, Rome: Total War; Over the years the games have been watered down by limited control over your cities, towns, and settlements. Total War: Warhammer is different. CA very clearly learned from their mistakes. Then they went beyond that by taking a leap of faith with the Warhammer name and trying something almost completely different. And boy does it work.
Right off the bat you go to start your first campaign and the options no longer seem as arbitrary as they did in the past. Now, because of different races instead of different factions, two races will not have any of the same troops. This means that each race, as it stands on the battlefield, plays differently. Sure, you could argue that point for the previous games as well, but not to the same extent. For example, humans are a pretty balance race. They have good ranged units, good melee units, and good cavalry units. On the other hand, you have the vampire counts who's units, especially at the low level, are very disposable but almost never use ranged weapons. The differences for the other races are just as obvious. Whats great is that it doesn't take long to figure out how the factions work on the battlefield.
Along with this comes flying units. When I talk about trying something different and succeeding, that is it. That is what I really noticed. For having not done flying units in the past, CA has managed to make them very usable and effective. I didn't expect the implementation of the new mechanic to be so good. Not only that but the other units descriptions will strait up tell you if it cant attack flying units. This allowed for a very short adjustment period for me to learn how they worked. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be as prevalent as I would like them to be. For the humans, the quickest way to obtain flying units seems to be through leveling your leaders and upgrading them to give them access to flying mounts. Recently the elves were introduced in a dlc and they seem to make more use of flying units. But when your lord gets a flying mount, they are usually pretty cool.
Although mounts are cool, they are not the only upgrade you can get for your lords and heroes. The upgrade screen is easy to read and use. It gives you three branches to work down and each branch has a theme that will be universal across lords. You have combat abilities, leadership abilities, and campaign map abilities and attributes. Combat abilities are exactly what they sound like. They are almost always a spell or something you can have your lord use during a battle. Leadership abilities are sometimes just buffs that affect morale of your troops that are near your lord. Sometimes they are skills you can activate in combat. And the campaign map branch is almost all buffs for your campaign skills. Every lord I have seen has had the first campaign skill that increases movement range on the campaign map by 10%. The first leadership skill is just a morale booster. Abilities depend on the type of lord or hero. Unfortunately you can not obtain all of the skills with a single lord due to the level cap. Because of this, I find myself putting a lot of skill points into the combat spells.
Most lords and heroes have some access to the winds of magic, which is sort of a random generated mana pool, through the use of a spell. Spells come in many varieties but the most abundant seems to be auras and hexes. These usually target something and effect all of the same team units in an area around it. What is really fun are the damaging spells. There are flaming vortices, fireballs, magic missiles, and a bunch of other really cool spells with really cool visuals. It seems like it was added recently, or maybe I didn't notice before, but now you can double up on a spell thereby taking your chances with the winds of magic. So you are basically saying, "I want more damage and I'm willing to risk this spell backfiring." I really like this idea of a high risk reward scenario for this type of thing because even if it fails, it will fail spectacularly.
And all of that is only half of the game. There is still the whole campaign map, in which, you try to conquer as much as you can. The title "Total War" couldn't be any more applicable. The whole game is constant fighting and conquering. In fact, the greenskins receive a penalty if they go too long without fighting. This leads to them roaming the campaign map fighting anything that moves. Then you have warriors of chaos coming from the north who's sole purpose is to raze every city it finds. So for humans its a race against time. You are fighting to unite human races to prepare for your defense against the scourge from the north.
But war isn't the only thing to worry about. You still have to manage an economy and a population. Both of which are different for each race as well. Towns and cities are managed similar to Attila. Instead of the usual, manage each city individually, you now manage a region that contains a city and usually two to three towns. Each city or town has a main building and slots for different types of buildings. When putting your region together you occasionally get stuck the the predicament where you are thinking about how to optimize for everything. Late game you start having to dedicate certain areas of you empire to unit production or income generation. Or you have to decide to do a bit of both which means you have to pick and choose which units you can build from that area. Frankly, it got a little old having to worry about all of that but it seems to be more common with humans and dwarfs than with other races. All in all, the empire management is done pretty well especially when you compare it to the most recent Total War titles.
Now that I have talked it up, there are a few beefs I have with this game. There are different tech trees for each but they all seem kind of like a fire and forget sort of thing. No matter how much I play the game, selecting a tech to research just seems like another button to push and nothing more. I don't think there are any troops or buildings that are unlocked through tech trees. It seems like its all just empire-wide buffs, in which case, just get rid of the technology research system all together. Its a shame really because the tech tree was an important part of the previous games.
Another problem is load times. Oh man. Sometimes they're quick, but sometimes they are not at all. Do you remember the Skyrim console load times on launch? Yeah... its rough. It makes me wonder if I could be out doing the grocery shopping while I wait for a battle to start. I know its kind of nit-picky but I also know I'm not the only one who would rather be playing a game than watching a loading screen. There is some merit though to those loading screens but even taking into account what it has to load, it still takes a while.
Here is the big thing that upsets me about this game. I knew it was coming. The Creative Assembly does it with all of their Total War games... paid dlc. From the start they knew they were going to limit the amount of races in the game and slowly add more through paid content. And that's fine, I understand why they would do that. They are still a business out to make money. But to add a race it costs an unbelievable $20. The funny thing is you are not paying for the race. You are paying to play them. Once the dlc is released they add the race to the campaign map and let you play the races you own. In CA's defense though, they have put out a lot of free additional content to the game. None of it is a new race but there are new playable factions and added lords and units. The question is though, does that justify the $20 price tag on the dlc?
At the end of the day Total War: Warhammer is still a home run for CA. It had a relatively smooth launch and I was, and still am, glad I bought the game. There are some things I think they could have done better. And realistically I have been saying this whole time, this game is good relative to the previous titles. Obviously if you don't like Total War games, this isn't for you. But if you liked Shogun 2 and Rome, Total War: Warhammer is worth a buy.