Thus, you’re incentivized to get what you can out of a region and then ditch it when the rat poo reaches about waist-high, taking advantage of the Skaven ability to settle an empty ruin and build it immediately into a fully upgraded city by expending their unique Food resource. They also have a corruption mechanic similar to Vampires and Chaos, with the wrinkle that building it up too high hurts them just as much as their neighbors. This allows them to hide their most important strategic assets in plain sight, which makes Skaven highly interesting to play, both as and against. They’re not quite a horde, but also not quite a settled faction, inhabiting ruins that the enemy can only identify as settlements by sending an army to investigate them. “But the centerpiece of the whole operation are the Skaven, and they’re one of the most truly different factions I’ve ever handled in a Total War game. In keeping with that cruel theme, they have a habit of taking slaves after each victory, who can either be put to work to improve your economy or sacrificed to gain bonuses – including the ability to summon floating cities called Black Arks that can move around the seas and recruit units.

They have a focus on wicked, frenzied units that evoke the sinister, un-Disneyfied versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Dark Elves, in stark contrast, become more deadly the more viscera has been spilled. High Elves don’t have much of a stomach for blood, though, and fight the hardest at the beginning of a battle before they’ve started to take casualties and get blood on their expensive cuirasses.

It’s the one area of diplomacy that the Total War series has gotten right lately. That provides a delightfully thematic avenue for the High Elves to start wars without ever firing an arrow. Their campaign mechanics mainly deal with Influence, a currency earned mainly through making choices in court intrigue events that can be spent to bolster or sabotage relations between any two factions.

Watching a unit of High Elf Swordmasters hold a charge is satisfyingly reminiscent of the prelude to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, with flashing swords cutting effortlessly through the varied horrors assailing their line. High Elf armies fill a niche that none of the previous factions really could, with a focus on small, expensive units that each represent the very peak of discipline and martial excellence. “The High Elves and their edgier Dark Elf cousins are about as far from reskins of one another as you can get, despite their shared heritage in the lore.

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