YMMV / Total War: Warhammer II

• Accidental Innuendo: The list of first and last names that randomized Lords for the Vampire Coast factions pull from have so many potential funny combinations that it's debatable if we can even call it accidental. "Dick Half-Mast" anyone?
• Annoying Video Game Helper: The Advisor returns from the first game, and somehow manages to be even more annoying than before. Not only does he have even more tutorials to annoy the player with, he loses all story relevance (which many thought redeemed his character in the first game), and no longer exists in the universe, instead being relegated to the role of the other advisers.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Whilst the final battle is still a treat because of its insane visuals, atmosphere, Nightmare Fuel, and the power trip it is for the player (who gets to wield the sheer power of the Vortex against their enemies), the battle itself is rather easy, despite facing multiple stacks of armies belonging to every other race in the Vortex race. A patch later made it a good deal harder.
  • Following numerous tweaks to the game's auto-resolve system, Mortal Empires' "End Times" event is, if anything, more of an anticlimax than in the first game. When playing as a faction with a start location far away from the spawn points for the Doom Tide (Warriors of Chaos in the north-east, Servants of Chaos in the sea north of Ulthuan and the Puppets of Chaos off the east coast of Lustria) it is not uncommon to see the entire End Times event defeated by AI factions such as Kislev without the player's involvement needed at all. The changes to the Chaos invasion as of the Twisted and the Twilight modify this - They make the Chaos invasion stronger but it all spawns in the north, so if you're not up in Naggarond or Kislev you'll probably never see it before Reikland kills it. Many players, especially those who play non-Order factions, consider the Ordertide^* The Empire, Southern Realms, Bretonnia, Dwarfs, High Elves, and sometimes Lizardmen all tend to form into a gigantic super-alliance once Chaos shows up due to the Shield of Civilization mechanic and will systematically declare war on and wipe out every non-Order faction once Chaos is defeated to be the True Final Boss instead.
• Awesome Art: As in the first game, the dozens of classic character designs, armies, environments, and visual effects are stunning, showing the New World in all of its glory, with◊ stunning◊ detail◊, with special mention to the various in-house Lizardmen redesigns.
• Awesome Ego:
  • Malekith the Witch-King: a proud, arrogant, and highly egotistical Evil Overlord, who thinks everything rightfully belongs to him, and as such is entitled to take anything he desires by force. He's also one of the most popular characters in the game. The fact that he is undeniably powerful enough to back up his boasts, being a veritable One-Man Army when sufficiently leveled up, certainly helps.
  • Settra the Imperishable: an insanely arrogant Übermensch defined by an almighty will and an unswerving ambition to rule all he surveys. From his fearsome magical chariot to his sun god-blessed khopesh-halberd, his wargear is the stuff of legends. Just like in the tabletop, he's wont to say "Settra does not serve!" and "Settra rules!" And on top of all that, in the flavor text, the full list of his titles take more than two hours to quote in their entirety. But he's earned each and every one of them through his own sweat, blood, and toil.
• Awesome Music: The games soundtrack is considered an improvement to the already great soundtrack of Warhammer 1, with the High Elves campaign theme being the standout.
  • The pirate shanty, Tattered Sails, in the Vampire Coast trailer sounds as though it would fit in a Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. It was so awesome they eventually released it on a Youtube standalone video due to fan demand.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Tyrion has received a very mixed reception. Some people love him for being one of the strongest duelists in the game, and someone who is really flawed for an Elven character; others really dislike his abusive personality, and how he seemingly yells and puts down his younger brother, Teclis, all the time when he expresses his concern for the younger races, who Tyrion, at best, seems to be largely unsympathetic towards. There's also a split on people who like, or dislike, the fact Creative Assembly decided to put more emphasis on his extreme blood lust, and how he's the Warhammer character most similar to his portrayal in The End Times so far.
  • Cylostra Direfin of The Vampire Coast. Some people find her to be a rather cool lord, a nice and needed addition to the roster and a sign that CA can be trusted with creating more original characters than simply units. However, about as many fans find her story to be lackluster and that she would have been better off being replaced by some other undead pirate from the lore such as Van Gheist (who in turn tends to be argued against as well since the Vampire Coast already have more than enough melee-focused lords and needed a magic-focused lord).
• Broken Base:
  • After over a week of buildup (tracked by a countdown timer on the Total War website), the reveal that the next game in the franchise would simply be an immediate continuation of the Warhammer trilogy, instead of a new historical title, upset many long-time Total War fans who were hoping for the teased "unexplored time period" to be revealed instead. Many declared that Total War: Warhammer's rousing success compared to previous installments resulted in the planned trilogy becoming a Creator's Pet of sorts. Others felt these fans were overreacting, that the confirmation of a new Total War based in ancient China due for release in Autumn 2018 ^note this is referring to Total War: Three Kingdoms, which was eventually released in 2019 makes concerns about the historical titles being neglected unwarranted and remained excited for CA to cap off the trilogy with the remaining races who have yet to get a look-in.
  • The much-anticipated Mortal Empires campaign initially produced a lot of problems. The mode combines both TWW 1 and 2 into a single map, producing the largest scale campaign ever for Total War and allowing all the factions to interact. In order to accomplish this, the New World sections of the map were significantly reworked and many sections were removed entirely. Some people were okay with this as there was little of importance in these sections while others were angry that these sections were abandoned and that the map was incomplete.
  • The second issue skewered Creative Assembly on the prongs of Morton's Fork right through their chest. Integrating the two games turned out to be vastly more complicated than they had anticipated when they announced Mortal Empires. This meant they either delayed the release of Mortal Empires to give themselves more time to fix these issues, which would draw a lot of anger due to it being so much in demand, or release it in a state that was playable but incomplete and not fully bug-tested, which would anger people just as much because it didn't work as well as they hoped. In the end, Creative Assembly released it a month after launch in an incomplete state with a number of major changes such as the Foundation Update to be released a month after that and the very popular Norsca faction delayed until May of 2018, fully half a year after the release of Mortal Empires. (It turned out that Norsca couldn't be ported into the TWW2 version of the game in its existing state and would have to be rebuilt from scratch.)
    • While these issues were steadily addressed (and the devs explicitly stated they'd prefer to release the campaign early in a flawed-but-functional state and improve it over time based on player feedback, rather than delay it for several months and incur the fanbase's ire,) there were a vocal set of the fanbase who argued it would have been much better to wait... and an even smaller subfaction who outright say the devs ought not to have bothered at all.
  • People became divided over whether they would be willing to accept paying for DLC (something that was an unsaid rule of CA to not do) in order to get every single tabletop unit in the game, considering the first few DLC-exclusive races (Warriors of Chaos, Beastmen, Wood Elves) were initially lacking either in terms of roster or campaign mechanics. Considering they released Rome II DLC up until 2018 and how lucrative Total War Warhammer has been, it was not totally impossible. This discussion became even more relevant ever since CA announced that Total War: Warhammer 2 would not get any more Race Packs (much to the dismay of enthusiasts of Araby and Dogs of War^note Dogs of War still has a chance of appearing in game 3 owing to their nature as mercenaries) but would get further Lord Packs, which many fans speculated might be for the likes of Beastmen, Wood Elves and Warriors of Chaos.
  • The update for the initial release of The Warden & the Paunch DLC and the Black Orc Big Boss FLC was anything but smooth. It started in late May 2020 with general complaints about the Weapon Strength stat being seriously bugged^note essentially any campaign research or lord skills/equipment that increased Weapon Strength would not be added onto a unit's stats which consequently neutered the effectiveness of melee units and rendered certain skills useless for all factions. And as the weeks dragged on, more and more issues were discovered that significantly reduced the quality of enjoyment and even caused the game to crash. CA remained very tight lipped about a fix, causing players to accuse them of not treating the bugs seriously, and others to defend CA that the situation caused by the then-ongoing COVID-19 quarantine was delaying the fix. A "complete" fix was finally ready on July 23, 2020 which turned out not to be the one-size-fits-all solution that everyone was hoping for: several users had their Steam client crash on them from trying to download the update and the progress bar seemed to hang on a random percentage for several hours, all while the updater temporarily took up several gigabytes on the hard drive and slowed the user's computer to a standstill while it rewrote the core archive files. And even afterwards, the game will crash when trying to load an old save or even starting a new campaign. Further exacerbating the crashing issue is that reinstalling the game didn't work for some users, leading to more skepticism about the lack of reliability.
  • Skaven fans felt disappointed that it seemed the developers did not do a good job at researching chitter-speak, the language of the Skaven. Because of this, they felt the Skaven voice acting feels a touch out-of-character for those that have some fluency on proper chitter-speak. Ironically, the game's lead writer was Andy Hall, who was also a writer for The End Times: Vermintide, and Creative Assembly's reply on the matter was that the fans may have over-accentuated the Skaven's tendency to use synonyms of a word twice for emphasis.
  • Some fans of the Vampire Coast questioned Aranessa Saltspite being grouped up with them. For starters, Aranessa is a human captain (with Chaos-afflicted mutations) who leads a living, breathing, normal crew of pirates. Her main enemies are Norscans and, more relevant, the Undead. And there is absolutely no mention in her tabletop lore to support that she ever practiced necromancy or even allowed necromancers or any undead within her crew. So lumping in Aranessa with an enemy faction that she explicitly fights in the tabletop and having her utilize their methods makes no sense whatsoever.
  • Lightning Strike, typically earned in the second tier of every lord's campaign tree, allows them to isolate a single army or settlement when attacking. This means a player can defeat virtually any number of enemy armies, no matter how tightly-clustered, with a single doomstack by just lightning-striking every single battle. Many unsurprisingly feel is overpowered, especially when done by a faction that can replenish after winning a battle since they're likely to leave the battle at full health before going into the next one and can do this until they run out of movement or enemies. Conversely on higher difficulties the massive number of armies and speed of recruitment that the AI gets means that you're basically required to use it to overcome always being outnumbered. Plus it helps stop head-to-head multiplayer from turning into a contest of who can recruit the biggest deathblobs. Plus, of course, getting lightning strike is a decently large investment for your lord, meaning they will be weaker elsewhere as a result of getting it. Of course others wonder why the people who hate it and the people who defend it are fighting since there are far more broken things in the game that nobody complains about. This discussion has raged on since Night Attacks in the original Rome: Total War, but has gotten much more heated in this game than usual due to it being more widely available.
  • There is a marked divide between how people view factions that are weak on the campaign map. Either those factions are underperformers that need to be updated and brought into 'the modern age' - It's Hard, So It Sucks! - or new additions and updates have made many factions too powerful and they need to be nerfed down to the level of the 'weak' factions - It's Easy, So It Sucks!. These two groups will never agree on anything except that the Beastmen desperately needed help, which they eventually got. Not without a major stat misbalance or two of their own, but they aren't the incredibly easy-to-kill joke faction anymore.
• Catharsis Factor: Like the first game, it's pretty awesome, especially to fans of the original tabletop, to harness the power of the Vortex to specifically stop the End Times, therefore preventing Age of Sigmar from happening in the universe.
  • For fans of the Tomb Kings, defeating Arkhan, preventing the return of Nagash and taking his pyramid for yourself. Rather than the Tomb Kings being absorbed in Nagash's army when he starts the End Times, you are ensuring they are the dominant power in the world.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Present in the campaign in the form of "Doomstacks," where a player simply recruits armies consisting mostly or entirely of their single strongest unit - often a powerful monster, like Stegadons, Dread Saurians, Necrofex Colossi, or Dragons. However, regular units like Sisters of Avelorn can also be doomstacked. In adddition to being incredibly powerful, they are also generally incredibly easy to use. One doesn't need to worry about flanking or tactics - just send your monsters forward and they'll mulch the enemy. Anything that is not itself a doomstack will invariably be bulldozed by a doomstack. The only downside is that they are incredibly expensive to recruit and maintain, but by the time the player can recruit them they probably have enough money to afford it anyway.
  • Below the doomstack, the most efficient armies tend to consist mostly or entirely of archers, artillery, and monsters (or other single entities like mages or lords). Melee infantry tends to take heavy casualties regardless of whether they win or lose, and melee cavalry is even worse. This effect only increases at higher difficulties, where the AI gets massive bonuses to their own melee stats but ranged stats are unaffected. The general consensus seems to be to bring only the bare minimum of melee infantry. The only reason to recruit them otherwise is for faction flavor.
    • In multiplayer, skirmish calvary is by far the most popular unit archetype, with most competitive builds featuring at least 4 mounted archers or gunners of some flavor. They pack nearly the same punch as foot archers while moving much faster. They have less ammo to compensate, but skirmish calvary still has charges that are deceptively destructive due to their extreme speed. It's telling that most multiplayer tier lists feature races with decent skirmish cav at the top.
  • Playing as Clan Eshin and building good relations with Mors and Skryre will provide great options for your armies whereas building good relations with Pestilens and Moulder will result in a lackluster unit roster that will leave you so handicapped it's not even funny.
  • When playing as Skaven on the campaign, Exploitative Planning is the only commandment you can use if you intend to take and hold a lot of settlements, as the demand for food will become more and more unsustainable without it. An efficiency-minded player might toggle it to Expansionist Planning for the growth... but all the food from Exploitative Planning will just allow you to to upgrade settlements to the max level anyway.
  • Also for the Skaven, there is not much reason to play any subfaction other than Clan Skryre unless you want to play as a different character in another region that's not Skavenblight (and even then, you could just confederate them as Ikit Claw). The Forbidden Workshop is widely considered one of both the most powerful and complex faction mechanics in the game, which can buff and unlock better versions of Skryre units who are already among the strongest units of the Skaven roster. Ikit Claw boosts these units to the point entire armies of pure ranged Skryre units plus artillery and some Warlock Engineers can very easily wipe out an enemy army before they even have a chance to engage in melee. Clan Skryre is also the only faction with access to the Doomrocket and Doomsphere. This leads the other Skaven factions to be seen as underwhelming in comparison, especially Clan Mors (whose only mechanic is a Public Order penalty for not controlling Karak Eight Peaks) and Clan Rictus (whose only mechanic is a Public Order bonus upon breaking treaties).
    • If they're not playing as Clan Skryre, odds are they're playing as Clan Eshin or Clan Moulder. Clan Eshin is significantly easier than Clan Skryre for a less-experienced player due to not having to worry about Loyalty issues, and their late-game ability to simply delete a powerful faction is incredibly powerful and directly counters the infamous Ordertide. And the Moulder mechanic is pretty interesting to use and can be as broken as Skryre ones, while pitting up against different enemies can be interesting. Skryre/Eshin is seen by many as one of the most powerful co-op pairings possible because of how strong and complementary their faction mechanics are, even if they're far away from each other.
    • The same is true for the Greenskins and Grom the Paunch. Most of the Greenskin factions don't have any unique mechanics at all. Grom's Cauldron is, if anything, even more broken than the Forbidden Workshop since it's highly customizable to your situation, allowing for things like unbreakable Trolls and Giants, -3 turns to all global recruitment, enemy army Leadership penalties, exploding arrows for goblin archers... Not only that, but Grom's Waaagh! in-battle ability is also very powerful (although other Legendary Lords' are as well), and one of the first items he gets lets a caster summon a Rogue Idol once per battle. From a power level perspective, it's hard to argue in favor of playing anyone else.
  • Campaign wise, the most common Lord builds involve focusing the majority of a Lord's skills on the "blue skill tree", aka campaign effects. This usually involves going through the skill tree to reach skills that decrease said Lord's unit upkeep, recruit costs, and other faction skills like increasing their unit HP recovery or their technology. From there, it tends to vary by faction, but many often focus around buffing the army over the Lord itself until later on, though this largely depends on the Lord (ex: Tyrion tends to be focused more on his dueling skills compared to someone like Eltharion who tends to get focused around buffing his troops).
    • On the subject of Eltharion, almost every build with him will follow the above rule of thumb - buffing his blue skills - until he's a high enough level to get one of his unique skills that lets his missile units refill their ammo. This skill is always active, regardless of the battle type, meaning that one of the most fundamental problems with archers (the fact that they run out of arrows and drop in the "balance of power" measurements while it happens) is now solved. Having Eltharion run around with a doomstack of Sisters of Avelorn or his unique Mistwalker units, firing arrows for eternity, can absolutely bend the balance of the game over his knee. It doesn't hurt that using Eltharion's unique campaign mechanic, capturing enemy Lords, is made much easier by having the ability to have up to nineteen units of archers focus them down before the capture's timer runs out.
• Crack Ship: After Surthara Bel-Kec was implemented into the Mortal Empires as a reference to the infamous Surtha Ek, you can bet some people shipped them.
• Crazy Is Cool:
  • The Skaven, as detailed below.
  • Luthor Harkon might as well be undead Jack Sparrow; an insane, cackling Vampire Pirate Captain that gets into all kinds of mischief, but that's precisely why the fandom adores him so much! Really, the entire Vampire Coast, an army of jovial Zombie Pirates, that freely engage in More Dakka and ride cannon-fitted giant crabs into battle, pretty much embody this trope.
• Creator's Pet: In the same vein as the Vampire Counts from the first game, fans are inclined to think the High Elves or the Skaven are this in the second game depending who you ask.
  • The High Elves have nearly everything going for them in campaign, so much so they have their own section in the Game-Breaker page detailing how good they are at basically everything. They've also gotten quite a bit of DLC in the form of two Lord packs (Queen and the Crone, Warden and the Paunch) and two free Lords (Alith Anar, Imrik) alongside a number of powerful units, including the notorious Sisters of Avelorn. Their faction's main drawback, the expense of their units, is handily negated by them having the strongest economy of any faction in the entire game. They also have a number of unique faction mechanics that, while not as powerful or engaging as those of the Skaven, are nonetheless very good.
  • The Skaven are the only faction to get even more DLC love than the High Elves, having three full-blown Lord packs (Prophet and the Warlock, Shadow and the Blade, Twisted and the Twilight) and a free Lord (Tretch), each of which adds a new major faction that has incredibly powerful faction mechanics (except Tretch). Ikit Claw's Forbidden Workshop is the gold standard by which all other mechanics are measured because of how insanely good it is, Deathmaster Snikch gets to ignore one of the Skaven's central drawbacks (Loyalty) while having powerful bonuses of his own in the form of Shady Dealings, and Throt the Unclean has access to the Flesh Vats, allowing for him to customize his units to a degree no other faction can. They also tend to get a lot more promotional cover than the other races, and usually in ways that make them look awesome. Accusations of Skaven favoritism from Creative Assembly are also helped by each Skaven DLC faction being seen as much more powerful and/or better-developed than its counterpart.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Lord Mazdamundi is a Knight Templar of the highest order, quite literally thinking he knows everything and is right about everything. He ultimately wants to commit genocide against the other races, and follows his own twisted code of ethics, and speaks in an impossibly deep voice. He's also a Slaan mage-priest who can tear apart entire formations by ripping open the earth's tectonic plates, flatten everything that survives atop his giant armored Stegadon, Zlaag, and give roaring speeches to his Lizardmen armies. In his own way, he even doubles as Creepy Good. And the fandom loves him.
  • Crossed with Crazy Is Cool, the Skaven. A horde of traitorous ratmen that even the Greenskins think are scum who wield World War One era technology in a fantasy setting, use biological gas weapons, have legions of disgusting Flesh Golems, are all insane and have space technology!
  • The Curse of the Vampire Coasts DLC adds undead pirates to the game.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Rogue Armies tend to have some sort of discernible theme to them. Some might regard a few of them to include a general theme of "Fuck you and die"◊ with armies consisting of very powerful units that will sweep away the unprepared.
    • One point of contention about Rogue Armies isn't the armies themselves; they're fairly manageable. No, what's at issue are the garrisons they get when they capture cities, consisting of large numbers of high-end units from multiple factions; leading to the horrible sight of Chosen, Black Dragons, Varghulfs, Rat Ogres, and Dragon Ogres all in the same army. While they usually just sack or raze, the armies will sometimes occupy instead, and it's not unheard of for them to use the nearly impenetrable defenses and large economy spike to become full-blown factions in of themselves.
    • Among the Rogue Armies, Vashnaar's Conquest is by far the most infamous. Their infantry comes in the form of Chaos Chosen backed by Dark Elf Darkshards, backed by Chaos Knights, Cold One cavalry, unbreakable Hellcannons and Black Dragons. It's not uncommon for Vashnaar to spawn and proceed to carve a large empire for himself, with garrisons filled with elite Chaos and Dark Elf units; at this point, the best course of action is to try and get him on your side before he decides to make you his next target.
  • Also, because the team that worked on II was on a different work stream than the one that completed the Norsca DLC, Surtha Ek's◊ memetic shenanigans returned on release.
  • Armies spawned by the rituals beginning are typically made up of very high units and after the first, a few almost always spawn in the middle of your empire where previously there were no threats. Being made up of high tier units like Hellcannons and Doomwheels led by level 40 lords, even a city with every possible garrison upgrade will be simply burned down by sheer numbers.
  • In Mortal Empires, any of the Chaos host armies (the ones that randomly spawn, not Archaon's crew) count; imagine the ritual armies from the main Vortex campaign turned up to eleven, resulting in multiple full stacks of high-end Chaos units spawning completely without warning and going on a rampage... as early as Turn 40. Worse, thanks to a bug, the Chaos hosts would target the player's faction exclusively, which led to the hilarious-slash-horrifying sight of multiple throngs of Chaos armies spawning all over the Old and New worlds... and immediately ignoring everything to beeline for some small Lizardman or Bretonnian faction in the middle of nowhere.
  • Warplock Jezzails of the Skaven. Insane range? Check. High accuracy? Check. Great armor-piercing damage? Check. Lords, heroes, monsters, heavy infantry and cavalry are all doomed against these guys and they are a massive pain in the ass to fight against if one can't reach them quickly enough. And don't bother trading fire with them without artillery since they have big shields that block most projectiles. And even then, their bullets can reach much of the target artillery crew.
  • For a late-game Mortal Empires player playing a non-Order faction, the Ordertide. Once they form their super-alliance and take care of Archaon they will systematically begin declaring war on every non-Ordertide faction one by one until they're all destroyed, which either locks the non-Order player in an endless war against half the map or locks an Order player into a stalemate where they can't expand because their allies control everything.
    • The first major Ordertide faction is The Empire, represented by Reikland. Reikland fields a lot of armies. A lot of armies. With the huge number of minor factions they can potentially confederate, from Marienburg on the left all the way over to Ostermark on the right, Reikland will trivialize the end-game Chaos invasion with over a dozen full 20-stack armies filled with some of the game's best artillery if they get a few confederations before Archaon shows up. Even if something stops Reikland from confederating the other Elector Counts they often form a web of military alliances that will see them all acting as one anyway, and they'll field even more armies.^What? Each faction gets a base income of 2000 gold. There are 11 elector counts plus Marienburg. If all of them are conquered/confederated by one faction, that faction still only gets 2000 base income. If all of them remain separate they all get that 2000 base income, so they can collectively field an extra 22K upkeep's worth of units. Their major weakness is that they don't recruit new armies especially quickly, so if you can survive the initial blitzkrieg you can start pushing them back. The case of Reikland is even more egregious because, as of the Empire Undivided update, a player-controlled Empire faction cannot make alliance treaties or confederate with other Empire factions outside of dilemmas (and is unable to confederate with Marienburg period), but the AI is clearly not under such restrictions, and will happily confederate with any faction possible just when you think you finally have them cornered, forcing you to start over.
    • The second major Ordertide faction is the High Elves, usually represented by Eataine. The most dangerous of the three if they really get going due to the power of the high elf roster and the Sword of Khaine, it's not unheard of for them to completely wipe out the dark elves and turn the entirety of Ulthuan into a nigh-impervious fortress in the late-game, especially since Underway stance is disabled on Ulthuan. They compensate for this by mostly keeping to themselves after that unless you really piss them off.
    • The third and most infamous member of the Ordertide (but least likely to appear after the Greenskin update) is the Dwarfs, usually represented by Karaz-a-Karak, Bringer of the Dwarfentide. They would almost inevitably form due to the large diplomatic bonuses that the Dwarf factions get with each other, they will never engage in civil war barring odd arrangements of treaties, not only having a strong economy while being the best defensive faction in the game, and their ability to use the Underway means they can outmaneuver other factions and swarm from literally all directions. To top it all off, Dwarf units are heavily favored in Auto Resolve due to their sky-high Leadership, causing them to heavily dominate other AI factions. Getting rid of them once the Dwarfentide forms is incredibly tedious due to their ability to pump out an endless stream of powerful armies, their home terrain being a massive pain to navigate without access to an Underway stance, and their having the best garrisons in the game. Multiple nerfs and new mechanics were introduced specifically targeting this faction's tendency to steamroll everything, and as of the Total Waaagh! update the Dwarfs usually get wiped out by the Greenskins in the early game when the Dwarfs are the weakest. If the Greenskins fail, though...
    • The final member of the Ordertide is Bretonnia, represented by Couronne. Though they're farther away from most non-Order factions than the other Ordertide factions, that actually works to their benefit. Left alone they will slowly expand like purple moss all over the map due to their simple yet powerful economy, strong high-tier units, substantial factionwide bonuses, and the unique Bretonnian faction perk that gives all their tier 3 minor settlements walls without having to build a garrison, which makes them resistant to attack by other AI-controlled factions because of how much value Auto Resolve places on walls. They tend to recruit tons of cavalry, which are much more effective in AI hands than player hands due to the micromanagement needed to use them and they're hard to put down if your faction's anti-large units aren't great. Louen Leoncour himself is one of the most unkillable bastards in the game once he reaches a mid to high level, having insanely high Leadership, immunity to a bunch of things, constant Regeneration, perfect vigor, and a flying mount. They're also in a prime centrally-located position, allowing them to expand potentially anywhere but especially into the lands of Reikland and Lothern should one of those factions suffer an early or unexpected demise. Also, the addition of the Errantry factions gives them a strong foothold in Araby and Khemri as well as three or four more factions to confederate. They're the most militant of the Ordertide factions and the most likely to pull everyone else into wars, which combined with their tendency to spread everywhere means they're usually the biggest pest.
    • Though technically an Ordertide faction, the Lizardmen almost never manage to unify and form a threat the same way the other races do because Lustria is such a mess. Almost. If they do, you can add in their walls of Saurus infantry and Temple Guards to the mix, some of the game's strongest infantry for the cost. And who can forget the dinosaurs?
  • The Blood Voyage starts out as these and eventually becomes Goddamned Bats as the campaign goes on. They only appear when you're playing as Avelorn. They spawn periodically from Har Ganeth, consist of mid to high tier units, and sail directly for your territory at full speed the minute they appear. The first one is especially demonic as it usually includes units far stronger than any faction in the game can recruit at that point, including a war hydra and a black dragon. Further, unlike every other faction in the game, every single unit in the Blood Voyage has perfect vigour. so they will fight at full capacity while yourtroops will tire. Not only that, but they don't cost any faction anything, they simply appear, pulling your troops away from other wars they might be fighting. The only way to stop them from coming is to capture Har Ganeth, which is very far out of your way. The only saving graces are that the Blood Voyage will never replenish units, so they can be whittled down over time, and they don't get any stronger over time, so they eventually become a nuisance rather than a threat.
  • After the Total Waaagh! update brought an end to the Dwarfentide in Mortal Empires their torch has been taken up by Grimgor's 'Ardboys (the Greentide) and Clan Mors (the Vermintide). Starting in similar locations, these two factions will inevitably wind up at war with each other with the winner becoming the True Final Boss of many a campaign that doesn't start near enough to stomp them both before they get out of control. Both factions have access to Underway movement that lets them hop around the mountains and over narrow bodies of water while dodging attrition and both also have access to easily and cheaply-recruited horde armies that they use to overwhelm the other AI factions and will throw at you in endless waves. The heart of their territory is the Badlands, one of the most rage-inducing areas of the game (only behind Norsca and Ulthuan) to operate in without access to the Underway, making rooting them out a chore, and since both factions are inherently belligerent they will declare war on you eventually. Seeing the survivor have 60-80 settlements by the time Archaon is defeated is not unusual.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite having no unique lines, Alastar the White Lion, is extremely popular. It might because he's an Elven Warrior wielding a a massive axe, or the fact he has an entirely unique skill tree, but it seems that a large part of his appeal is how handsome he is.
  • When he was announced Tretch Craventail was met with highly mixed reactions, being a very obscure Skaven character, especially, compared to Fan Favorites such as Thanqoul, and Throt. When he was released, however, his popularity skyrocketed for his unique, and highly fun gameplay (which exemplifies the cowardly Skaven race as a whole) and his badass design.
  • Among the generic lord characters, the female Dark Elf Dreadlord with the Cool Mask and ponytail is by far the most popular and recognizable. Her likeness was even added to Vermintide II as a DLC costume, since the female dreadlord shares a voice actress with Kerillian.
• Even Better Sequel: Upon release, the game was heralded by both critics and fans as a fantastic sequel to an already great game, improving on essentially all aspects of the gameplay, and one of the best in the Total War series.
  • The factions introduced in this game are considered this to the first game's expansion factions. The Warriors of Chaos and Beastmen are widely seen as failures, being Low-Tier Letdown incarnate only saved by some cheesy strategies. The Wood Elves and Bretonnians are seen as a step in the right direction, but also struggle immensely with design flaws (in the case of the Wood Elves and their counter-intuitive Amber mechanic) or a lack of troop variation (with the Bretonnians focus on cavalry), with Norsca being the only faction that made it out unscathed. Contrast this to the High Elves, Dark Elves, Lizardmen and Skaven, all of whom have massively varied rosters, incredible variation in tactics and campaign abilities, and tons of unique flavor given to make them feel distinct. Also relevant are the Tomb Kings, a faithful recreation of one of the tabletop's Ensemble Dark Horse factions, and the introduction of the Vampire Coast, who have been applauded for their creativity as a mostly-original faction from tabletop fluff.
  • The game has also taken pains to apply this to the Game 1 races via "Old World Updates" which are designed to bring those factions up to roughly the same level as the Game 2 races with DLC packs to expand their rosters and new mechanics. In particular, the changes to Greenskins, Wood Elves and especially Beastmen have garnered significant praise for turning their factions from barely-playable to genuinely fun and unique.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • When the first trailer debuted Malekith's design quickly garnered a great deal of appreciation from the fandom. The sentiment only increased with the release of the Dark Elves cinematic trailer, which portrayed him as an nigh unstoppable killing machine with an incredibly intimidating voice to match. When the game released, he got even more fans being portrayed as a highly amoral yet honorable warrior-king, while the game reversed all of his Badass Decay from The End Times.
  • And of course the new evil factions as a whole are just as prone to this as their counterparts from the first game.
  • Just like Norsca before it, the Vampire Coast became the game's epitome of concentrate evil awesomeness, mostly for how awesome their flavor is. A band of zombies pirates, equipped with loads and loads of gun, supported by horrifying abominations of the sea, like primeval giant crabs, Wendigos, Giant Ship Mechs powered by Black Magic, and a host of other horrors from the deep. Not to mention they're led by an Ax-Crazy Vampire Pirate Captain. It's gotten to the point where many tabletop players are begging for an official model line.
• Fandom VIP: Multiple, especially among the 300,000 strong Reddit Total War community. Most of the memes and Fan Nickname come from them, and most of them are based on YouTube
  • Turin from youtube, is often credited for the strength of the game's Tournament Play scene, both being a top player, and colorfully commentating on matches.
  • The Australian Legend of Total War from Youtube, who is known for his amazing single-player exploits, which often rely on Whoring and Cheese Strategy to play as efficiently as possible, making Saving Your Disaster videos based on saves fans send in, amongst other Let's Play content.
  • Okoii from youtube is known for his Fan trailer videos featuring "19 X" or "20 x" units/heroes/monsters fighting different battles, combined with memes and musical cues.
  • r1kko from steam has been celebrated for making alternate unit cards, after the widely perceived drop in quality newer unit cards have had for years. This has led to Creative Assembly going back and re-making unit cards that fans weren't satisfied with.
  • Tariff, from Youtube, a videomaker making highly entertaining silly meme videos.
• Fan Nickname: Many nicknames from the tabletop are kept, but there are other ones:
  • Mazdamundi is known by some as "Toad Hitler" for his explicitly genocidal outlook. Ironically the Skaven, the ancient enemy of the Lizardmen, are intentionally styled after the Nazis. Other nicknames for him include "Floating Pepe" and "Lord Mobility Scooter".
  • Similarly to Mazdamundi, Tehenhauin is known as "Lizard Hitler" for his genocidal hatred for all Skaven and for being able to instigate a race war against them as part of his campaign mechanics. On the flip-side, many also call him "Lizard Moses" due to being a savior of the Skinks who carries around a massive stone tablet while spreading the word of his god.
  • YouTubers often refer to the Tomb King's Blessed Legion of Phakth as the "Blessed Legion of Demonitization" because the name sounds too close to "fucked".
  • "Roomba" for the Tomb Kings' Casket of Souls.
  • "Noctilus Prime" for Count Noctilus' Necrofex Colossus mount.
  • "Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man" for the Mournguls.
  • "Ordertide" for the giant alliance of Order factions ^note Empire, Dwarves, Bretonnia and sometimes High Elves that tend to form by late game. A wordplay on the "Vermintide", it refers to the ironic reversal of the evil factions having to struggle against endless waves of good guys.
  • "Big Henry" for Henri le Massif.
  • "DJ Khatep" for Khatep on his Casket of Souls mount (or just for Khatep in general) as it makes him look like a DJ sitting on a podium and a turntable.
  • "Peclis" for Teclis on his Arcane Phoenix mount. This mount is usually just referred to as "the parrot"; similarly, Alarielle's Great Eagle mount is often called "the pigeon".
  • Ulthuan is colloquially referred to as "the Donut", due to its shape being roughly that of a bagel/donut.
  • "Rango" for Oxyotl since Rango is the only other chameleon character in mainstream popular culture who has many similarities to Oxyotl.
  • Taurox's campaign mechanic isn't exactly what you would call new since it was already tried and proven by Lu Bu in Three Kingdoms, promptly leading to the nickname "Lu Bull".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Gamers from South East Asia, particularly South Korea and China, were formally introduced to Warhammer and the Skaven through Vermintide and they loved it. So naturally they would take a liking to Total War: Warhammer II for featuring the Skaven as a playable race. And those who only ever read about the Lizardmen and bought figures of them really appreciated being able to create and command a Lizardmen army for the first time.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Chameleon Skinks. It's true that they do not deal all that much damage and that their range is quite short compared to most other ranged units, but considering how they have slowing poison in their darts, how they have stealth so they won't be discovered until it is too late, how they run faster than much of the cavalry in the game and how they can run and shoot backwards at the same time, it can become incredibly annoying to try pinning them down. One more important detail is that their high Missile Resistance means that trying to counter them with Archers is just as bad an option, if not worse, as trying to counter them with Cavalry.
  • As a faction, Mung is this for Naggarond in Eye of the Storm, being a Norscan faction at the very northern edge of the map and bordering pretty much the entirety of that end of the Dark Elf territory. The faction itself is not particularly dangerous, but pacifying the region is an almost nightmarish slog as the settlements are spaced far apart compared to every other region in the game, meaning your units are going to be subject to attrition as the entire province is at 100% Chaos Corruption that is extremely difficult to reduce without driving Mung out entirely, which also plays havoc with Public Order. Of course, one could be tempted to just ignore the region until one is ready dedicated all their efforts to it much later in the game... except Mung is an extremely aggressive faction that will try and pick a fight with you as early as possible and has so many diplomatic penalties that any non-aggression pact you form with it will get broken sooner or later. It's actually recommended that, if trying to take the province, to just raze the settlements to the ground so you don't have to deal with the public order until Mung is fully wiped out and you can dedicate all your efforts to it.
  • Menace Below, a Skaven army ability, is designed to invoke this. If there's any Skaven corruption in the region where you fight them you'll find clanrats popping up underneath your archers or artillery and there's nothing you can do about it. Doubly so if you're fighting Clan Mors, who always gets two extra uses of it, meaning it will happen at least twice and as much as five times. Devious players, or an especially competent AI, will combine this with Warp Bomb to near-instantly wipe out a large chunk of an invading enemy army for free.
  • Naggarond is especially hard to eliminate in Mortal Empires after the Shadow and the Blade added Hag Graef as a separate faction. Hag Graef starts out in an alliance with Naggarond despite starting in the opposite corner of the map, which means Naggarond can confederate them at almost any time. A High Elf player looking to properly wipe out Naggarond is going to have to cross the entire world to do so if that happens. Since their agents stick around until killed or the faction is eliminated, they'll be constant thorns until you cross the world to finish off Naggarond.
  • The Scourge of Aquitaine Rogue Army isn't that bad to fight on the field, owing to it fielding exclusively heavy cavalry and being very easy to counter, especially in sieges. The problem? Bretonnian and Vampire Count heavy cavalry is very powerful in autoresolve. If you're unlucky and they manage to take a settlement in a part of the map you have no presence in, they can really start to become a problem that other factions won't have easy answers for due to the AI being forced to take autoresolve results over everything else.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the Chinese Zodiac Calendar, 2020 was the Year of the Rat. And the world fell into the frightening grips of the globally-sweeping COVID-19 Pandemic. Clan Pestilens has made their presence felt.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Clan Skryre. Their Forbidden Workshop mechanic is criticized by many players not just for how good it is but for having no real cost. Skryre gets the resources they need for the Forbidden Workshop just by doing the same things every other faction does and there's no penalty if they don't use it since they'd still be just as good as every other Skaven faction. They're also generally blamed for the Power Creep present in the unique mechanics of nearly every DLC faction that followed, especially other Skaven.
  • Clan Moulder, for the same reasons as Clan Skryre: their unique campaign mechanic comes at no real cost to the player and are incredibly powerful. At least Clan Moulder's Flesh Lab has a chance to cripple a unit if too many augments are applied, but that's not a huge cost compared to the bonus they can get.
  • The Beastmen, following their rework with The Silence and the Fury. even discounting Taurox's "Rampage", every Beastmen faction is incredibly powerful, with good units that can be made much stronger very quickly. So quickly that none of the A.I.s can follow suit and which make them wholly unprepared when a Beastmen player will start destroying their territories before even turn 30. As such, the Beastmen post-rework are generally seen as being too easy to be fun.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The author of this Thread predicted that the Lizardmen would be added in the game with their own unique Campaign. The prediction turn out to be partly right but right nonetheless.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Gotrek and Felix. While loved for their appearance and canon role in the world, their implementation often means they don't live up to it. You only get them for 20 turns, after which they disappear and have to be found again. They also can't gain levels. They do spread out the experience they would have gained but it has a different downside for each of them. Gotrek can't gain abilities, nor can he use items or banners, meaning even a mid-game generic Lord will eventually make a better leader. Felix is incredibly useful, but he's stuck at what is effectively level 0, and since hostile agent actions gain an additional 1% chance of success per level they are above their target this makes him incredibly easy for an enemy agent to wound. Expect that to happen a lot, knocking him out of action for several of those 20 turns.
  • Clan Rictus. Already in the bottom half of Skaven lords due to not having any of the unique mechanics that Skryre, Moulder, and Eshin get, Rictus is also in a worse spot than Mors and Pestilens due to their bonuses applying to less-effective units, a much weaker Legendary Lord, and a significantly worse starting location, especially in Mortal Empires which puts them smack in the middle of the Dark Elf homelands.
  • The Wood Elf update's addition of Drycha turned Sylvania into this for the Vampire Counts. Though the faction already had problems in the forms of universally unfavorable autoresolve odds, a generally weak unit roster, disjointed and scattershot recruitment buildings, most of their units coming at higher recruitment tiers than their equivalents in other factions, and a complete absence of ranged units or artillery, they at least had a chance against their Empire neighbors and could hold on long enough to get the units they needed to thrive. If Drycha decides to attack, though - and she will due to a large relationship penalty and Sylvania's starting province nearly bordering theirs - then the Vampires will find themselves on the wrong end of heavily-armored monstrous units that they have no effective way to defeat at any point in the game let alone at Turn 10 or so. Von Carstein has slightly better odds due to starting with the ability to recruit Vargheists and Vlad himself being a better early duelist, but it's still a close-run thing.
  • Arkhan the Black is considered the worst of the Tomb Kings faction from a campaign angle. Arkhan is a decent Magic Knight with some good spells and the ability to recruit some Vampire Count units to bolster his army, but he also has a poor starting location with a powerful Bretonnia faction in front of him that can easily crush his weak army, and has several gaping holes in his territory that allow other factions to attack from. Not only that, but being the Token Evil Teammate for the Tomb Kings means he naturally will be targeted by other factions, and most of the other Tomb Kings will never even bother to treat with you, and while you get bonuses to diplomacy with the Vampire Coast and Counts (on the Mortal Empires), good luck expecting their aid when you're so far away. Plus, being unaffected by Vampire Corruption isn't really helpful when there are no Vampires nearby to spread it, and the few units from the Vampire Counts he gets are really weak once you get past the first few turns, with Hexwraiths being the only one of note later on, and his campaign goal of getting the Books of Nagash is very hard when all of the books are located in hard to fight to areas such as against Dwarfs. As a result, many see him as the worst faction for the Tomb Kings and hope that he gets buffed, or at least gets more unique units.
  • The Warriors of Chaos. Widely considered to be the worst campaign faction in the game now that the Beastmen aren't filling that spot anymore, they have almost nothing going for them. They're currently the only horde faction in the game that has no mechanism to stop ruin-dwelling, meaning they struggle to wipe out factions for good since that faction can just settle behind them. They're also about as bad as the Vampire Counts at dealing with ranged enemies, having one artillery unit and a smattering of skirmishing cavalry as their only non-melee options but lacking the cheap hordes or powerful magic of the Vampire Counts. On top of all this their elite units are also incredibly slow, giving ranged enemies ample time to shoot them or faster enemies the ability to just avoid them. This was a problem for them in the previous game, but this one made it worse - Of the new factions, all of them, except maybe the Tomb Kings, have readily-available units that can mercilessly abuse Chaos armies and they tend to recruit them in droves. They also get brutally punished by playing on higher difficulty settings, since they have no economy to offset the increased unit upkeep and the 'AI cheats' on higher battle difficulties punish melee-heavy factions like Chaos the most.
  • The Dwarfs, unfortunately for their many fans, are one of the weakest races in the game as of its final update. Their problems are many, require a fair bit of explanation, and extend to both the campaign and to multiplayer, resulting in a faction that is difficult to play, slow to get moving, tedious to gain ground with, and still generally considered boring. It's no surprise that they are one of the most heavily-modded factions in the game on Steam Workshop.
    • Their unit roster is very limited in terms of roles their units fill, lacking monsters and cavalry alike and having 'mold-breaking' units (gyrocopters and slayers) that aren't good enough to build armies around without playing much of a role in a conventional Dwarf army either. This greatly limits the strategies a Dwarf player can effectively employ, giving them a very 'samey' feel on the battlefield and making them notoriously easy to counter in multiplayer if picked first.
    • Their units rely very heavily on Armor to keep them safe, which is easily countered by Armor-Piercing. Units with Armor-Piercing are more common in the second game than they were in the first, making this a bigger problem, and most elite units have Armor-Piercing as standard. Multiplayer opponents who see someone playing Dwarfs are guaranteed to load up on armor-piercing.
    • Dwarfs in the campaign used to be able to rely on their strong-but-expensive low-tier units and powerful garrisons to hold the line for them, but update cycle power creep (particularly the Greenskin update) means their low-tier units aren't worth the extra expense, causing them to underperform in battle.
    • Most Dwarf factions have bad starting locations. Karaz-a-Karak is surrounded by Greenskin factions that are all at war with them and thus extremely vulnerable to being overwhelmed by endless tides of armies in a province that is notoriously hard to defend due to its shape. Karak Kadrin trades fewer immediate wars for fewer expansion opportunities and a front seat to the Chaos invasion while Clan Angrund needs to leave their starting area to move to Karak Eight Peaks, putting them in a similar situation to Karaz-a-Karak. Ironbrow's Expedition is the only one that doesn't suffer much for their start location as long as they kill Clan Mors quickly and don't wind up at war with the Last Defenders.
    • The Dwarfs have the slowest growth of any faction in the game, forcing them to stick with their lower-tier units longer than other factions and meaning those other factions get access to their Dwarf-killing units before the Dwarf military can fully come online. They're also frequently up against two of the fastest-growing races, the Greenskins and the Skaven.
    • Dwarfs also don't get any Winds of Magic whatsoever, instead getting rune magic, which while unlimited in use still has lengthy cooldowns that exceed those of most spells and have effects are generally worse than even the worst lores of magic. This puts Runesmiths in the opposite position of mages - While one mage is powerful and multiple mages see diminishing returns due to all drawing from the same resource, incentivizing you to have only one or two, Runesmiths are almost useless alone but get stronger the more of them you have. Unfortunately this means Runesmiths are of little value until later in the campaign when you can get a lot of them.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Tyrion, due to his aggressive Blood Knight dialogue crossed with an absolutely busted combat skill tree. It helps that the faction he heads was universally agreed to be the strongest in the game at launch, though subsequent DLC power creep has changed that.
  • The Lizardmen, after a year and a half of being a Memetic Loser due to the lack of content, started to have more and more content given to them than anyone else. For example; The Vampire Counts, the Creator's Pet of the first game have five Legendary Lords. The Lizardmen have SEVEN Legendary Lords as of the last DLC lord pack. Unfortunately that content hasn't necessarily been seen as high-quality content by the community, particularly their last Legendary Lord Oxyotl, threatening to pull them right back into Memetic Loser territory.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Despite being the epitome of Evil Is Cool, the fans will always remember that Malekith has been living with (and sleeping with, despite that concept being dropped in 8th edition), his mother for centuries.
  • Tretch Craventail's entire story is how it's better to be lucky than good. Because of that, though, fans like to portray him as an overpromoted clanrat who is barely fit to appear in the same roster as Ikit Claw, Deathmaster Snikch, Queek Headtaker, Lord Skrolk, and Throt the Unclean. Of course, fans like him precisely because of how much of an ordinary loser he is compared to the other, more exceptional Skaven lords.
  • The Beastmen faction as a whole has earned this reputation over time, being the butt of many jokes due to how notoriously neglected they have been and frequently taking a backseat to many other factions in terms of Old World updates. Their overhaul as of Silence and the Fury has moved them out of this in a big way.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Due to the focus of the early marketing on the 'Fallen Gates' quest battle many have begun to joke that the game consists of nothing but this battle, referring to it as Total War: Warhammer 2: The Battle of the Fallen Gates, and similar titles. In addition many have also started to bring up the aforementioned battle in any situation they can think of.
  • After the Dark Elves trailer, many users have been comparing Malekith to Darth Vader (Either outright calling him that or derivative nicknames like Darth Malekith). Mostly due to their similar backgrounds, but what hammered it down was a scene in said trailer mimicking the airlock scene from Rogue One. One user from Youtube even edited the scene to include the music from Rogue One.
    • The parallels were heightened when players actually played as him and found he had a unique voiceline while traveling on winter terrain wherein he complains that he hates snow, which is practically an inverse to Anakin's infamous dislike of sand.
  • The Hype Train goes beep beep!◊ ^Explanation The CA community manager mistakenly said that "beep beep" is the sound of a train, the fanbase instantly turned that into a meme
  • Many comparisons to the Slann and Pepe The Frog have been made.
  • Teclis joined Orion in the Comic-Book Fantasy Casting jokes with people finding he strongly resembled Benedict Cumberbatch.
  • High Elves being killed in the trailers, even their own. ^Note Except for the Skaven trailer, surprisingly.
  • The Dwarfentide: Dwarfs in this game have such an overwhelming advantage (second-best economy, extremely powerful politics that guarantees the various Dwarfen factions will be closely allied and eventually confederate, strong units from low-tier up to high who are ALL favored heavily by autoresolve) that they almost always become a dominant (if not THE dominant) superpower in lategame in Mortal Empires. It's not unheard of for New World players to eventually cross the sea after finally dominating their continent, only to find the Old World completely overrun with the stunty bastards, with maybe one or two Empire or VC holdouts left over.
  • Khemri TV. ^Note Photoshopping Tomb King characters into images taken from a memetic islamic news channel, and replacing some of the people and locations they talk about.
  • A lot of comparisons of the Vampire Coast to a certain movie series have been made...
  • The reveals of the Vampire Coast legendary lords began with a set of black silhouettes, leading many to ask "Who's that Pokémon?
  • The Prophet and The Warlock trailer, due to having a prominent Shout-Out to Predator, coupled with the Lizardmen being jungle fighters, saw a brief resurgence in Vietnam memes.
  • Much like Durthu before him, fans seem to enjoy referring to Tehenhauin as Lizard Hitler, due to the fact that one of the abilities gained through rituals done by Tehenhauin allows him to start a race war between the Lizardmen and the Skaven.
  • The Lustriabowl/Lustria Thunderdome: Lustria, particularly in the Vortex Campaign, is the part of the map most populated by Legendary Lords at a whooping eleven^Note Teclis, Lokhir Fellheart, Skrolk, Ikit Claw, Tehenhauin, Gor-Rok, Nakai, Khalida, Luthor Harkon, Markus Wulfhart, and Thorek Ironbrow which tends to cause a particularly bloody early-game for all involved, leading to jokes in every new Lord Pack about yet another faction joining the Lustriabowl. These jokes often include all the Lords ganging up on Teclis.
  • Staunch line of spears.^Note This one began when a Youtube commenter left a note under a Youtube playthrough angrily criticizing the poster for using an army of Sisters of Avelorn, a popular meta pick, instead of "a staunch line of spears", and consequently insulting both the High Elves' cultural tropes and the effort GW put into making the race for the sake of exploiting the game engine. Mocking this particular rant became fairly popular on Reddit, and eventually got referenced by CA in a Troy ad billed as "featuring a staunch line of spears".
  • Kislev. ^Note Starting with Mortal Empires, most faction leaders will say short voiced lines if you click on them in the diplomacy menu and when you conclude treaties. The voice lines for the leader of Kislev, Dmitry Tzaryov, consists 50% of the word "Kislev" said in a very monotonous voice. Interacting with Kislev means you will hear this line. A lot. The game's subreddit loves making entire comment threads entirely out of the word "Kislev", similarly to "Shepard. Wrex" in the Mass Effect fandom. With the third game's announcement, even CA got in on the joke.
  • It's not unusual to see the Sisters of Twilight portrayed as a pair of talking Eagle Claw bolt throwers (each one having one sister's hair and half-mask) due to their similar attacks.
  • Alarielle the Everchosen. ^Explanation The Averlorn AI has the unusual tendency of giving Alarielle the Everqueen, the supposed Incorruptible Pure Pureness of the setting, the Sword of Khaine and having her go on a rampage with it. The playerbase ran with this.
  • “Ogres, my Lord!” ^Note  Since the addition of the Ogre Mercenaries mechanic, the Advisor will announce the Ogres’ arrival with these three words in every new campaign started by the player. Expect any post related to Ogres to feature this phrase.
• More Popular Spin-Off: The game (along with the first game via Mortal Empire) is far more popular than any historical Total War entry to date. It's telling that even Total War: Three Kingdoms, a mainline (semi-)historical entry with a huge Chinese appeal, fails to beat this game at daily player count.
  • It's also more popular than the tabletop game it's based on.
• Popular with Furries: Although fanart of them have existed beforehand, the game has skyrocketed the popularity of the Lizardmen and the Skaven with the furry fandom. Especially those into the Bara fandom.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The release of the Warden and the Paunch DLC saw a sizeable FreeLC update for the Greenskins. Before the update, the Greenskins were widely lambasted as one of the worst factions in the game, with weak units, a weak mechanic in the Fightiness bar that actively hindered the player using it (Waaagh! armies spawned by it wouldn't listen to the player, often suicidally attacking anyone nearby or not following the player's army), and some decisions regarding their tech tree that were absurd ^note  For instance, some of their units were only accessible after research, which no other faction in the game requires. The result was the Greenskins being shameless victims of Power Creep, neglected as other Old World factions like the Empire and the Vampire Counts got cool new upgrades to keep the pace with the New World factions' Rites, leaving the Greenskins in the dust. The rework did away with numerous old features and completely rebalanced the Greenskins into a terrifying horde army, buffing a number of their units and turning their previously clunky Power Up Let Down Waaagh! mechanic into a powerful tool for sieging and controlling the map by effectively doubling your army size for free while it's on. Couple this with the fact that every single controllable army gets their own Waaagh! sub-army when the Waagh! bar reaches its peak and the Greenskin factions preserve momentum if they succeed at a Waaagh!, and the Orcs have completely morphed from "underpowered horde army" to being the veritable Greentide that they're meant to be.
  • The Twisted and the Twilight elevated the long-neglected Wood Elves from the first game, completely overhauling their faction mechanics to give them a unique and more lore-friendly playstyle that focuses more on diplomacy and defense than on wiping out the entire map. It also got rid of the widely-hated Amber system, added some new units and a new Legendary Hero to balance out the roster, gave them alternative starting locations so they're not all piled up in Athel Loren and have reasons to leave it occasionally, and gave them a way to hold on to far-flung provinces without conquering all the territory in between. This did come with the drawback of removing the factionwide bonuses of Outposts, meaning they have a weaker late-game than before, but most players agree they're significantly more fun and engaging to play.
  • The Silence and the Fury made the same for the long-time memetic loosers Beastmen. With all of their mechanics reworked, herdstones now actually serving as pseudo-settlements and ability to prevent ruin-dwelling unless the herdstone is destroyed and hire troops for free similar to Tomb Kings, Bestmen are now not only the best horde faction but, in the hands of the player, can be stronger than many settled races.
  • From the perspective of the tabletop game, many of the units are this. Some units such as Tomb Kings' sphynxes and empire Demigryphs Knights were hated for not fitting in, and several units like Scourge-runner chariots were a Low-Tier Letdown. The former catagory of units are often iconic in the game, and the latter are often much more deadly than in the tabletop.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In a game of this size, with so many mechanics at play, there's bound to be a lot of things players just hate.
  • Autoresolve is a constant juggling act that never manages to please everybody. While it's routinely tweaked and re balanced to take new updates and patches into account it always seems to favor some units over others, discount the presence or abilities of others, or severely inflate or deflate the value of certain units, meaning it occasionally produces utterly illogical results. Since all AI vs. AI battles are resolved this way it also tends to determine which factions dominate the campaign map and thus which enemies the player winds up fighting the most. It's more generally disliked for not taking magic into account, prioritizing killing off damaged or low-health units, grossly overestimating the value of walls on a settlement, randomly wiping out artillery over everything else, and giving pushover garrisons or weak armies huge numbers of kills they would never get in a manual battle even if the player never touched the controls. It also has an annoying habit of just outright killing entire units, whereas a player might take some hits but won't lose any units entirely.
    • Summoning an Intervention Army to sabotage an enemy faction's ritual is notoriously unreliable because intervention armies behave erratically, sometimes choosing to ignore designated war targets, and can die quickly if they go through a few bad autoresolves or just happen to be unlucky enough to spawn right next to a very powerful army. And because you can only summon one Intervention during a ritual, your investment can vary widely between being long-lasting to completely wasteful.
    • Autoresolve has serious issues with range, speed, and accuracy, often to the point of straight-up ignoring them. This led to a bug where any ranged unit attacked would be considered able to return fire regardless of range difference, resulting in head-scratching victories where the winning army would lose artillery units and nothing else due to 'return fire' from units that shouldn't be able to reach them. This bug was so subtle it escaped notice for three years, only being detected and patched as of the Twisted and the Twilight. A later change made it show what units will get wiped out when doing so, at least ensuring this doesn't happen again.
  • Confederation in this game is notoriously opaque and unreliable compared to the first, making it very difficult for the new factions to bring their racial allies into the fold. This is especially annoying for the Skaven and the Lizardmen, who can find themselves stuck in alliances with minor factions taking up valuable territory, but who refuse to confederate in spite of your relative strength (it's not uncommon to see a weak faction refuse to confederate below Strength Rank 50 in spite of the player being 1), leaving the only option being to break the alliance and take a reputation hit.
    • This used to contribute to the Dwarfen Tide problem in Mortal Empires, since the Dwarfs not only used the old system, but had (and still have) a laundry list of positive relation modifiers and technologies that make confederating far easier (and far more common, in the AI's case) for them. This could even sink entire campaigns if you happen to be at war with a minor Dwarfen faction and they suddenly get confederated, leaving you at war with a mighty juggernaut you can't possibly overcome. While the Dwarfs are no longer as prone to it...
    • When it comes to the AI, only certain major factions are allowed to confederate others. However, if one of these factions has been beaten down to the point one of their race's other factions would confederate them if they could, the major faction will instead confederate that other faction to get a Heroic Second Wind. These 'emergency confederations' can take a faction down to a single besieged city back up to having a dozen settlements and multiple armies.
  • Vampiric Corruption became this with the Aye-Eye! Patch due to how quickly it spreads, particularly in Mortal Empires. Not only do the Vampire Counts spread it, but Heinrich Kemmler was moved to the mountains south of Bretonnia with his own faction (the Barrow Legion), which also spreads corruption, and of course, the then-newly added Vampire Coast also spreads said corruption from their pirate coves thanks to being a hybrid of normal and horde faction. Many players noted that late-game Mortal Empires tends to devolve into the Old World and the coast of Lustria being overrun with Vampiric Corruption, making traversing the areas a hassle as it causes attrition to most other factions. This was eventually addressed in the Doomsayers Update, which remedied the issue by making Vampire Coast factions more prone to razing and sacking as opposed to making huge empires. Vampire Count factions are still just as bad, though, as sharing a border with them means constant corruption-related rebellions due to how much they can push into adjacent provinces. If you ever share a border with a vampire faction you're almost forced to exterminate them just to get the corruption under control.
  • Sieges are also not well liked by at least some fans. While aesthetically each siege map looks different, they all essentially have the same layout. This extends to how all the races approach the siege as well, which is mostly in the same way. This can lead to some ridiculous images like ghost infantry using ladders to scale a wall. Overall this makes every siege battle feel the same.
    • Making it worse, the map geometry, pathfinding, and lines of sight often get extremely weird in siege battles, resulting in a lot of frustration as artillery won't shoot at a tower they have a seemingly-clear line of sight to because the angle isn't perfect, units refuse to attack enemies on top of the gatehouse because they don't have line of sight even though the enemies do, or ranged units are unable to shoot through a knocked-down wall or, more egregiously, an open gate. The reverse is equally frustrating; understand the AI well enough and sieges become trivially easy, but because of the high value Autoresolve places on walls and towers you'll almost always have to fight them manually anyway.
  • How The Eye of the Vortex campaign is structured can be a bit annoying since with most of the factions will eventually have the same end goal of completing the ritual, by capturing ritual sites which sometimes can feel like it forces attention away from a faction's personal quests.
    • The Chaos Armies that spawn as part of the rituals are rather disliked. As soon as you begin a ritual, multiple armies of Chaos and Skaven will just suddenly appear in the middle of your empire, with no way to predict where they're going to spawn unless you savescum. If you don't have any armies nearby, expect to have multiple towns burned to the ground.
  • Nobody likes Skirmish Mode. While it's in place for a good reason, to help a player keep their ranged troops out of melee combat, in practice it's worse than useless for most ranged units. Units in Skirmish Mode will automatically run away from anything that gets close to them, which often causes them to abandon your carefully-planned formation because a single hero got a little too close. Worse, a unit that's retreating because of Skirmish Mode can't be controlled; they'll ignore any movement command given until they're far enough from the threat. They will also only ever run in straight lines directly away from their pursuers, which makes them very likely to corner themselves, break your formation, or get tangled up in an unaffected unit (or worse, your artillery) and stop them from firing. It's doubly bad for ranged units that can handle themselves in melee, like heroes, lords, and hybrid units, since they won't fight back if attacked even if they'd handily win; it also means they won't brace for cavalry charges and will turn to run only to be charged in the back, causing even more damage to them. This ironically means that something designed to ostensibly protect ranged units from being attacked makes them much easier to attack. It's also enabled on all ranged units by default, even foot infantry who won't realistically outrun anything. Most veteran players will immediately disable that, only re-enabling it on very specific units.
  • The Old Ones' puzzles that are found when exploring ruins. The Rubric (guess what symbol is not being repeated) and Cuboid (guess the face of the dice by looking at the others) ones are easy enough to do, the Cypher (guess how many dots of what colors go on the square) ones occasionally have (apparently) multiple correct solutions but only one is accepted as being correct by the game, but they still remain interesting and doable most of the time, but the Dial of the Old Ones is especially disliked, as it involves manipulating two wheels in a way that can't be done ingame and is extremely difficult to do mentally, assuming you even understand you have to turn both of them. Even veteran players and puzzle-masters tend to just look up the answers for these ones.
  • The option to invite another faction to join your war is nigh useless for the player, as it's extremely difficult to convince an AI to agree to them, even if they have a massive negative rating towards the target. Meanwhile, AI factions will gleefully invite one another to Gang Up on the Human, leading to absurd situations such as Norscans inviting Bretonnians, or Greenskins inviting the Empire. This ranges from annoying to extremely dangerous, depending of the faction you are now suddenly at war with. Expect to see that "United Against Us!" window sooner or later in any campaign you play. What's worse, a 'United Against Us!' war does not allow your allies a chance to join in against the new attacker.
    • This mechanic is disliked by some other players for the opposite reason, being a cheese tactic when abused by the player. The fact a war invitation doesn't trigger defensive or military alliances means it can be used to single out targets even if they have a web of powerful allies by simply finding someone they're at war with and asking to join the war. Even a faction that absolutely despises you will rarely turn down a request to attack one of their enemies. This lets a savvy player mostly ignore alliances when they declare war, and is one of the biggest tools a player has when dealing with the post-Archaon Ordertide.
  • The Great Power diplomacy penalty. The larger your empire gets the less everyone (except the Tomb Kings) likes you. This is often just enough to push neutral relations into the negative, which means those factions are much more likely to declare war on you unless you've pre-emptively researched diplomatic technologies that boost relations with that faction (and even then, the highest tiers of the Great Power penalty can overwhelm these bonuses). This penalty also makes it harder to confederate friendly factions, since having them like you enough is a major prerequisite to their being willing to confederate. As with most things in the Diplomacy system, the AI isn't affected by this.
    • Spirit of the Jungle suffers especially from this. They're a Horde faction, already a tough sell for a lot of people, but that's not the problem. The problem is that they are permanent military allies of a vassal faction, Defenders of the Great Plan. The Defenders get none of your diplomacy bonuses and don't share your treaties, which means other factions will constantly declare war on them due to the Great Power Penalty even if they have treaties with you. And since the military alliance is permanent and unbreakable, you will have to fight everyone who declares war on them. This effectively makes diplomacy pointless.
  • Raiding is not considered an attack, which means if you attack an army raiding your territory you are considered the aggressor and incur the penalties of breaking any treaties, as well as pulling in the raiding faction's allies. The AI will sometimes abuse this by asking for a peace treaty then raiding your territory right after you agree to it. Attack them? You're now Unreliable for breaking the peace treaty, making every other faction trust you less. Neutral armies may also raid their way through your territory to avoid attrition.
  • Hag Graef's faction mechanic centered around Malus Darkblade is quite disliked, as going on either side of the possession meter used to give heavy penalties as well as some nice bonuses, but the penalties were so crippling (no replenishment whatsoever for every single one of your armies if you went full possession, all your units suffer a heavy debuff to their melee attack if you go full control) that the best way to play Malus was generally acknowledged to be to play as another Dark Elf faction and confederate him. After a patch, the full control is purely beneficial, but just remaining at full control is a tedious thing in itself needing you to pay increasing amounts of money every turn (and unless you go full posession, Malus's unique battle ability of letting Tz'arkan taking over (which would be a big draw of playing malus in the first place) is unaviable).
  • The Skaven Plague that they can spread through the Pestilens Scheme. Save for killing the special agent before he can actually spread it (which is a Luck-Based Mission due to not only needing to rely on the Random Number God for the assassination to succeed, but that's even assuming you get a Hero to the agent in time AND that you need to spot the agent well in advance in the first place), there is no counter to what will reduce any city garrison and/or army unlucky enough to get it to uselessness in a few turn, and then you will need to wait for the troops to replenish. You cannot end it early, you cannot reduce the damage it does to your troops, and once infected you can only wait for the timer to end to be rid of it and pray that it does not spread to too many of your cities or that the enemy won't take too much advantage of it.
  • A minor one for diplomatically-inclined players is that Trade Agreements and Military Access pacts come with implicit non-aggression pacts since they have the same penalty for breaking them. This not only makes Non-Aggression Pacts strictly inferior (unlike the other two they don't get you anything) but makes it harder for a player to engage in the more ruthless, opportunistic types of diplomacy.
  • Dwarf rune magic was never good, but it was at least very, very spammable, with one or two runesmiths able to constantly use runes to bolster their army and the Rune of Negation offering 44% ward save in an area made it extremely potent. The rework to Rune Magic made several runes a bit better, but significantly reduced its spammability via a global cooldown and nerfed the Rune of Negation to be single-target. General opinion is that the system made runes much less usable without making them significantly better to compensate for that, resulting in a huge nerf to an already-weak system. Rune magic is now widely-considered the worst type of magic in the game.
  • The difficulty setting has a much larger impact on some factions than others. As the difficulty goes up the AI gets bonuses to a large number of combat statistics, most of which relate to their Leadership and their melee ability. This hurts melee infantry and cavalry more than anything else as they're now facing enemies with significant buffs, making these units and especially the factions that rely on them much weaker as the difficulty goes up. The increase in the Supply Lines penalty for having multiple armies likewise hurts factions that have limited economies, restricting them to fewer and fewer armies on higher difficulties. Both of these factors result in enforced Complacent Gaming Syndrome, heavily favoring armies of ranged units, artillery, and mages (which don't care about the melee buffs) or a small number of elite doomstacks (to minimize the Supply Lines penalty) over anything else.
  • Armies get to retreat once per turn if not ambushed or marching, and when retreating they retreat a short distance from their attacker. However, this distance check doesn't consider impassable terrain between the start point and the end point, only that a path exists between them. If an army retreats near a large, thin natural barrier like a river, it's possible for them to 'retreat' by going entirely around it, even if doing so would match or exceed their normal movement allotment, leaving the attacker unable to catch up to them even if they started the turn right next to them. This can make hunting down enemies in river-heavy areas or near the barrier islands off Ulthuan extraordinarily difficult.
• Shocking Moments: The final battle of the Vortex Campaign has a rather impressive premise, with every enemy faction joining forces to fight you in a desperate attempt to keep you from gaining control over the Vortex, with you harnessing its powers to gain rather powerful unique magical spells to unleash upon them, while the Great Horned Rat himself is visible in the skybox, breaching into the Material while taunting you along the way. And if you're playing as the Skaven, he wins!
• Tainted by the Preview: The Sisters of Twilight's "Gift from Lord Daith" mechanic was horribly received after its showcase, due to looking extremely basic (using the exact same "choose one of two choices" dilemma that every single race in the game gets regularly as part of a normal game), effects being apparently underwhelming (getting a rare item or a purple one temporarily) and generally seeming like a worse Invocation of Vaul in every single way despite being supposed to be the Sisters' equivalent to Throt's Flesh Lab, which had a custom interface, many more effects, and player agency. It ended up being fixed between the it's release, and The Silence & The Fury release.
• That One Attack: Warp Lightning is just one the many things that turn sieging Skaven settlements into an annoyance: it is a bombardment spell that has a short cast time and setup before impact (so the AI will be quite accurate when aiming it at your troops), it is cheap (so expect it to be used against you easily four or five times per battle), and it is a base spell, so every garrison's Warlock Engineer will know it (every Skaven settlement will have one leading its garrison, no matter the level). It is armor-piercing and devastating against tightly-packed infantry... which is an inevitablity for sieges while the attacker is trying to take the walls or fight through the gate.
• That One Boss:
  • On the off-chance that you find yourself at war with a major Lizardmen faction, you can fully expect Lord Kroak to be a complete nightmare to deal with as he literally wipes garrisons and hastily-made armies in the blink of an eye. You'll either be caught unprepared and forced to lose several settlements in one-sided battles or be fully ready and commited to fight Lord Kroak with one or two doomstacks.
  • If you ever have to fight the Dark Elves you best hope they didn't confederate Malus Darkblade, because if they do and you have to fight him you'll have to defeat a Lord that has a flat 40% damage resistance baseline, possibly boosted further by any other items he may have, a sword that gives him Regeneration as long as he's in melee, will mulch any infantry you may try to swarm him with, and is a generally small enough target that ranged fire will most likely miss him (and what does hit will deal, at the very most, only three-fifth of its damage). And if he's low on health, he'll transform into T'zarkan, which gives him a whole host of powerful abilities, and most importantly, will bring his health back to full for another round. If faced, it's best recommended that you simply destroy the rest of his army and trigger the army loss morale penalty to make him flee. Since Malus is a Dark Elf he can get the Sword of Khaine without having to steal it, which makes him even harder to kill and Unbreakable to boot. The AI loves sticking him on a mount, which does make him somewhat easier to deal with as he's a much bigger target.
  • Much like Malus, Louen Leoncoeur, a Bretonnian Legendary Lord, has great melee stats, a very good defense and resistances, regeneration (and his doesn't require him to be in melee), and, if faced late in the campaign, will be mounted on a hyppogryph that boosst his stats further and allows him to quickly move around the battlefield. Said hippogryph gives him the ability to choose his fights, meaning you can't bog him down unless you're Dwarfs and he's free to attack your ranged units and artillery. At least in his case the huge hippogryph makes him easier to shoot, and his resistances are lower than Malus's.
  • Ungrim Ironfist. As a Slayer he is unbreakable, meaning that even if you do destroy his entire army he won't flee. As a Dwarf, he's also short and thus more difficult to shoot down, and while he's specialised in fighting Large units he has good enough stats that he can also easily fight infantry. His main vulnerability is his speed; as a Dwarf he's rather slow and can't get a mount and as a Lord he tends to be at the front of the army, making him vulnerable to concentrated missile fire on the approach, but that's about it.
• That One Disadvantage: The Procrastinator negative trait is widely disliked for its Fake Difficulty elements more than its actual drawback. It's gained by leaving a Lord in a settlement with high Public Order for a while, which you might want to do as a defensive measure or with a lord dedicated to administration or recruitment, but only lost by spending an equally large number of turns sitting in enemy territory, which you almost never want to be doing on most factions. Further, it's easily undermined by simply encamping right outside the settlement, meaning once you know it's there and what causes it you just have to take two clicks to avoid ever seeing it again.
• That One Level:
  • Trying to take Ulthuan. Period. Being a completely separate continent you must sail all your forces there, with the east side being full of treacherous rocks that cause attrition and only a scant few places to land. The only way to get at the inner provinces other than fighting through Ulthuan directly is the gates: special provinces occupying choke points with twenty unit garrisons of elite high tier units, which you must fight while holding off the High Elves's actual armies that will inevitably be reinforcing them. For most factions, taking a gate and upgrading it usually results in a moneysink with a comparatively weak garrison. Being populated by just one race, Ulthuan's factions are very likely to either all declare war on the invader very fast, or have confederated into one faction before an invader even gets there. The only ones who can reliably take Ulthuan are the Dark Elves whose Black Arks allow them to reinforce and recruit units as they go. Even then it takes a while for the Arks to expand enough to access their late-tier units, and they are both expensive and vulnerable to attack. The ritual required to recruit one has a 25 turn cooldown as well, so if one is lost it'll be a long time before it can be replaced, and must be grown and rebuilt from scratch. In lore, the battle between the High and Dark Elves over Ulthuan's borders has been going on for literally thousands of years.
  • The 'Statue of Sigmar' battle map was this until it was stealthily reworked. Every player who has ever fought battles in the Empire knew this infamous map, with its giant statue of Sigmar in the middle surrounded by a ring of forest, with all four corners also forested and a road weaving through uneven hills with a few farmhouses. This map was a line of sight nightmare, full of clutter that made advancing in any kind of formation difficult, and all the obstacles were a gigantic middle finger to any faction that relied on ranged units, cavalry, or heavy artillery, especially the Empire factions whose territory it appeared in. It was so widely-hated that there were repeated calls for it to be removed from the game altogether, and CA eventually reworked it with the Total Waaagh! update to make the statue smaller and have more open space in the center so an advancing army isn't completely concealed. It was also an odd case of a map that was transparently designed to give advantage to one specific faction, the Beastmen, while disadvantaging everyone else.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • When the Dark Elf trailer was shown, many praised Malekith's deep gravelly voice for being impressively intimidating and sinister. However, when a quest battle video was shown over a month later many complained over his in-game VA sounding too similar to Balthasar Gelt, and wishing that CA would change it to being more similar to the trailer. As it turns out, Malekith sounds exactly how he did in the trailer on the campaign, pleasing the fanbase, but at the same time, for some reason, the voice actor switches to the "Gelt voice" during Quest Battles, which irkes some.
  • In a similar vein, many have noted that the voice of Queek Headtaker sounded a good deal deeper in the campaign intro than the game itself, though the backlash against this hasn't been anywhere near as intense or widespread as the Malekith example (possibly because he's a rat).
  • The Wood Elves rework was generally well-received, but one aspect of it is loathed by fans of higher difficulty - The economy. With the removal of economy-boosting outposts, the amount of gold Wood Elves have to spend is very, very limited, which means the Supply Lines penalty completely destroys their economy on higher difficulties due to the exponential increase in unit upkeep it causes.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Every DLC being released after the Tomb Kings is getting this, as the Tomb Kings quality and quantity (a particularly prominent criticism of past race packs was that they lacked alot of their monster options, and Tomb King's eventually got all of them) was far better then any expansion before it. Most people would say Queen and the Crone was very decent, but it lacked in many ways compared to the thing that came before it. And even Curse of the Vampire Coast, which was heavily praised and considered a worthy follow up, still had parts negatively received because they were compared to the Tomb Kings. It doesn't help the faction itself has remained a fan favorite race to this day despite being discontinued.
  • When it comes to Lord packs, "The Prophet and the Warlock" set an extremely high standard for what mechanic a faction could have, and every single lord pack since has been compared to it. It doesn't help that, as mentionned above, it was so ridiculously strong that it also set a precedent for DLC factions having supremely strong mechanics, as well as the developper feeling like they couldn't give other Skaven factions something lesser than it, leading to accusations of Creator's Pet for the Skaven.
• Ugly Cute:
  • For many fans, Sneek Scratchett the Skaven Scribe. The little round glasses help.
  • Skinks, like their real-life namesakes, look a lot more like a smaller-kind of lizard than the dinosaur-like appearance of other Lizardmen units, and thereby can be seen as a fair bit cuter than the rest of them. The unit cards for Skink heroes practically look like they're wholesomely happy.
  • The Slanns. In the game their limbs are chubby instead of being lanky like on tabletop, the bulb of their head is toned down, and they also wear funny-looking hats. All of this make the Slanns look like oversized babies chilling around the battlefield on their floating chairs. Also, their unit cards resemble the surprised Pikachu face.
  • The kroxigors are giant walking crocodiles ready to shred any infantry formation to pieces, but isn't their roll of death adorable?
• Unexpected Character:
  • Some were surprised by the inclusion of Arkhan in the Tomb Kings roster as he is usually associated more with Nagash's undead legions, and even the Vampire Counts, more than with the Tomb Kings. To reflect this, Arkhan's faction gets the unique ability to recruit a selection of Vampire Count units into its armies. Of course, Arkhan was a playable character in the latest Tomb Kings army book, and the term Tomb King doesn't solely refer to followers of Settra.
  • Tretch Craventail announcement also led to people shouting, "Who?!". As it turns out, Tretch was actually featured in the 7th edition Skaven rulebook, though fans were still confused Creative Assembly choose Tretch instead of a more popular Skaven character. Others joke that Tretch taking the place of another popular Skaven is truly as Skaven-y as his faction bonuses.
  • Almost nobody was expecting Creative Assembly to turn the Vampire Coast — a sub-faction originating from White Dwarf with no official models whatsoever — into a fully fleshed-out faction of its own.
  • Most of the conversation surrounding the Lizardmen's FLC Legendary Lord was about Nakai The Wanderer or Gor-Rok, as those two seemed like the most obvious choices. Then it was announced that it would be Tiktaq'to. The former two eventually were added to the roster, but still.
  • When discussing about any further Bretonnia Legendary Lords, no one expected Repanse de Lyonesse, by virtue of her having lived centuries before the games' events.
  • The inclusion of Snikch also came as a surprise to many, especially since he had a rule in the tabletop game preventing him from leading an army.
  • There were little to no expectations that the ultra-secretive and reclusive Zoat species would get anything more than mere mentions in the lore or as followers for Lizardmen Heroes. Twisted and the Twilight revealed them as supporting allies of the Wood Elves.
  • While many expected the skink Oxyotl to appear in the games, most thought he'd show up in the third one (as Oxyotl's lore has him wander the Realm of Chaos and fighting Daemons). Very few people expected him to show up in this game, opposing Taurox.
  • Thorek Ironbrow was rather surprising to see as the FLC lord released in accompaniment with the above DLC, by virtue of expecting the FLC to be another Beastman Lord.
  • Fans were wondering if the Ogres would ever appear in the games despite having a rather limited army roster. The appearance of Ogre mercenaries has left them wondering if the debut of the Ogre Kingdoms has been guarateed for Warhammer III...which has turned out to be true.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • A lot of fantasy fans of Total War were getting very upset with the perceived lack of content, and focus on historical games in the franchise the last year or so... and then the Vampire Coast was announced...
  • Lizardmen and Skaven fans were more than a little pissed off that their Lord Pack was delayed for as long as it was, but after the trailer for the Prophet and the Warlock dropped and the subsequent Everchosen Invitational Stream where all their new units were showcased, the community's reaction was quite positive (apart from people disappointed there was no Troglodon or Verminlord). Pre-orders even made it the top twenty seller on Steam, and it has an absolutely massive like to dislike ratio on Youtube. Lizardmen fans were even more ecstatic when Lord Kroak was announced to be coming as a new Hero Unit/campaign mechanic alongside the free Legendary Lord that they had been waiting so long for.

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