History YMMV / TotalWarWarhammerII

** 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. The Greenskin and Wood Elf updates inparticular have garnered significant praise for turning their factions from barely playable to rather fun and unique. And the upcoming Beastmen update appears to be on track to provide a significant facelift.

** ''Okoii'' from youtube is known for his Fan trailer videos featuring "19 X" units/heroes/monsters fighting different battles, combined with memes and musical cues.

** 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 a several units like Scourge-runner chariots were TierInducedScrappy. The former catagory of units are often iconic in the game, and the latter are often much more deadly than in the tabletop.

** Present in the campaign in the form of mono-unit 'Doomstacks,' where a player simply recruits armies full of the single strongest unit available, possibly with one or two supporting heroes and a few siege engines (purely to force the AI to come fight you and to allow auto-resolving sieges). Stegadons, Dread Saurians, Necrofex Colossi, Star Dragons, and Sisters of Avelorn are the most commonly doomstacked units, but nearly every faction in Vortex and Mortal Empires alike has one unit they can do this with. While these are generally not the best or most cost-effective armies a faction can field, they make up for it by being powerful enough to win most fights and incredibly simple to use, while by the time you can recruit those units in numbers you can probably afford the massive upkeep.

** Strong single-player armies almost always consist of ranged units and/or mages supported by artillery, with only a handful of melee troops to hold the line and no cavalry whatsoever. Of course armies without decent ranged units and Bretonnia who actually have powerful cavalry can (or might have to) use different tactics. This is [[EnforcedTrope enforced]] on higher difficulties due to the fact that the bonuses the AI gets primarily affect their melee stats while leaving them equally vulnerable to ranged, meaning that player melee troops are horribly inefficient while ranged units are unaffected.

** 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 is generally acknowledged to be to play as another Dark Elf faction and confederate him. After a patch, the full control does not give penalties anymore, but just remaining at full control is an exceedingly difficult thing in itself (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 LuckBasedMission due to not only needing to rely on the RandomNumberGod 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.

** 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.

** 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.
** 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 hyppogriph that boost his stats further and allow him to quickly move around the battlefield. At least in his case the huge hippogriph makes him easier to shoot, and his resistances are lower than Malus's.
** Ungrim ironfist. As a Slayer, he is unbreakeable, 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 Lage units, has good enough stats that he can also easily fight infantry.

** The Wood Elf update's addition of Drycha turned Sylvania into this for the Vampire Counts. Thought 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.

** 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 ''VideoGame/TheEndTimesVermintide'', and Creative Assembly's reply on the matter was that the fans may have [[{{Flanderization}} over-accentuated the Skaven's tendency]] to repeat-reuse synonyms twice for emphasis.

** If you ever have to fight the Dark Elves, you best hoep they didn't confederate Malus Darkblade, because if they do and you have to fight him, you'll have to fight a Lord that has a flat ''40%'' damage resistance baseline, possibly boosted further by any other items he may have, has a sword that gives him Regeneration as logn 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 the one that ''do'' 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 brign 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.

** Ungrim ironfist. As a Slayer, he is unbreakeable, 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 Lage units, has good enough stats that he canalso easily destroy infantry.

* ThatOneBoss: 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.

** 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 ComplacentGamingSyndrome, 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.

** Greenskins in ''Mortal Empires'', before the ''Warden and the Paunch'' DLC updated the faction. They went without an update to their mechanics since the first game, unlike most of their contemporaries, and it showed. They had a disorganized research tree, no rites or rituals, boring and generally weak units, bland lords, and minimal campaign diversity since they all wanted to be in the same place fighting the same enemies. They were also the most prominent victims of PowerCreep because all the factions surrounding their home territory had either received significant tune-ups (Dwarfs, Empire) or were new factions (Skaven, Tomb Kings) with significantly better and more diverse units and mechanics. Largely rectified by the Total Waaagh! update, which scrapped and rebuilt their entire research tree, overhauled their Waaagh! mechanic, added new units to their roster, and generally gave them an all-around patch-up. Even Skarsnik, considered the hardest of all the Greenskin campaigns, is now easier to play with the updates.
** Melee units become this on higher difficulty settings due to the way difficulty scales. As the difficulty level increases the AI units get substantial bonuses to their stats, most of which are melee-oriented, ensuring their melee units always outperform the player's. Ranged units, artillery, and mages ignore almost all the bonuses the enemies get, leading to all-but-enforced ComplacentGamingSyndrome.
*** This hits non-monstrous cavalry the hardest due to cavalry already having below-average stats to make up for their charge bonus. Combined with the fact that cavalry are large models, letting melee infantry surround them and attack them 3-5 on 1 and ranged units shoot them even when they're in melee with infantry, and cavalry become basically useless on higher difficulties - Heavy cavalry will never make up their cost and light cavalry may lose to the ranged units they're supposed to counter.
*** This also hits certain factions hard, particularly the melee and cavalry-dependent Greenskins, Bretonnia, Norsca, and Warriors of Chaos, pushing them even more into doomstacking than other factions due to their options decreasing heavily as the difficulty rises.

** Stormvermin are considered the worst Skaven infantry (and possibly the worst Skaven unit in general) owing to their high cost and underperforming stats for elite infantry. Most of the damage a Skaven army does comes from their ranged units and monsters so melee units are often just speed bumps for the ranged attackers. While Stormvermin are a better class of speed bumps, they're also significantly more expensive than Clanrats or Skavenslaves[[labelnote:*]]You can maintain a Hero, three units of Clanrats, or an entire ''army'' of Skavenslaves for the cost of one Stormvermin unit[[/labelnote]]. Their large unit count and extremely tight formation also make them especially vulnerable to artillery and magic, meaning they're also more likely to die before getting into melee if your enemy has either of those things. Their only upsides are their heavy (for a Skaven) armor and their use of anti-large weapons, but by the time you can afford to recruit them en masse the enemy has reliable access to armor-piercing and you have better anti-large options to recruit, like Ratling Guns. One more thing to note are the Eshin Triads which are that clan's equivalent to Stormvermin: They are cheaper, faster, softer, and less numerous Stormvermin that are one step forward on attack and two steps back on defense, making them more situational and less useful than Stormvermin.
** The Dwarfs (except, to some extent, Karak Kadrin) have become this in Mortal Empires following the Greenskin update, especially Karaz-a-Karak. This is because while they used to have powerful starting units, their enemies becoming more powerful due to buffs means that the Dwarfs have suffered from CantCatchUp, and are easily able to overwhelmed by all the factions that start around them. Karaz-a-Karak in particular has a starting province that is extremely difficult to defend. As a result, Dwarfs are forced into a difficult role of having to play defensively with how many enemies they have, and how little they can counter it, and unless buffed in some way are likely to fall with ease.
*** Two of the three Vampire Counts campaigns suffer the same problem after the Wood Elf update because Drycha now starts in close proximity to Sylvania and begins with a ''massive'' relationship penalty towards them. It's not unusual for her to declare war on them in the first 10 turns and attack with Treemen and Tree Kin, which the Vampire Counts have a very hard time dealing with that early in the game. The Vampires tend to not last long in general due to 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.

** 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 can't actually destroy many factions before the area they destroyed just gets resettled. 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.

** 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 now left them wondering if the debut of the Ogre Kingdoms has been guarateed for ''Warhammer III''.

*** There's a quirk in the game's AI that sometimes allows a major faction that's been beaten down to one or two settlements to confederate a larger, more successful faction, something the player can never do. Thought you just had one settlement left to capture? Now you have ten. Whittle that down, they confederate another faction. Reikland and Couronne are especially notorious for this due to having large numbers of minor factions they can confederate.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: The games soundtrack is considered an improvement to the already great soundtrack of Warhammer 1, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB6DuX1kx_w 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 Franchise/PiratesOfTheCaribbean soundtrack. It was so awesome [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7tJELpDfKU they eventually released it on youtube standalone due to fan demand]].

** 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 tend to be argued against as well since the Vampire Coast already have more than enough melee-focused lords and needed a magic-focused lord).

** 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 are already declaring that ''Total War: Warhammer'''s [[WinBackTheCrowd rousing success compared to previous installments]] has resulted in the planned trilogy becoming a CreatorsPet of sorts. Others feel these fans were overreacting, that the confirmation of a new Total War based in ancient China due for release in Autumn 2018 [[note]]referring to VideoGame/TotalWarThreeKingdoms, which was eventually released in 2019[[/note]] 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 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 MortonsFork. Integrating the two games turned out to be ''vastly'' more complicated than they had anticipated when they announced Mortal Empires. That meant either delaying the release of Mortal Empires, 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 because it didn't work as well as they hoped. In the end they 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 are being 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 are 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 are 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) are lacking either in terms of roster or campaign mechanics. Considering they have released Rome II DLC up until 2018 and how lucrative Total War Warhammer has been, it's not entirely out of possibility. This discussion has become 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[[/note]]) but would get further Lord Packs, which many fans speculate 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[[/note]] 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 [=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.

** 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 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 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 VideoGame/RomeTotalWar, 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' - ItsHardSoItSucks - 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 - ItsEasySoItSucks. These two groups will never agree on anything except that [[MasterOfNone the Beastmen]] desperately need help, which they eventually got. Not without a [[GameBreaker major stat misbalance]] or two, but they aren't the incredibly easy-to-kill joke faction anymore.

** 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.

** Present in the campaign in the form of mono-unit 'Doomstacks,' where a player simply recruits armies full of the single strongest unit available, possibly with one or two supporting heroes and a few siege engines. Stegadons, Dread Saurians, Necrofex Colossi, Star Dragons, and Sisters of Avelorn are the most commonly doomstacked units, but nearly every faction in Vortex and Mortal Empires alike has one unit they can do this with. While these are generally not the best or most cost-effective armies a faction can field they make up for it by being powerful enough to win most fights and incredibly simple to use, while by the time you can recruit those units in numbers you can probably afford the massive upkeep.

** Strong single-player armies almost always consist of ranged units and/or mages supported by artillery, with only a handful of melee troops to hold the line and no cavalry whatsoever. Of course armies without decent ranged units and Bretonnia who actually have powerful cavalry can (or might have to) use different tactics. This is [[EnforcedTrope enforced]] on higher difficulties due to the fact that the bonuses the AI gets primarily effect their melee stats while leaving them equally vulnerable to ranged, meaning that player melee troops are horribly inefficient while ranged units are unaffected.
** 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.

*** 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 Moulder machanic 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.

** 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 verify 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).

** The Sisters of twilight's initial gameplay showcase in the leadup to ''The twisted and the twilight'' release drew massive ire from the fanbase for how barebones their special mechanic looked (being viewed by many as being nothing more than a slightly tweaked High Elves's Invocation of Vaul rite) , especially compared to Throt's. When the DLC launched, the Sisters's specific items were given extremely potent buffs, and the Forge of Daith was reworked in the following months (while some argue that it still is less elaborate/impressive than Throt's Flesh Laboratory, everyone agrees that it is a massive improvement).
** A fair number of fans felt that the Dawi were lagging behind other factions towards the end of Warhammer II's lifecycle. So as part of the same update that reworked the Beastmen, the Dwarfs have received a fair number of changes, most notably to their characters (adding a number of skills) and redesigning runes to function more akin to normal magic (albeit with enough differences to make it very distinct).

** [[CrazyIsCool Luthor Harkon]] and his band of merry Zombie Pirates have ''very'' quickly become a fan favourite.

** 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 [[VideoGame/Pokemon surprised Pikachu]] face.

** 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 makes the Slanns look like really big babies chilling around the battlefield on their floating chairs.

** The Blood Voyage starts out as these and eventually becomes GoddamnedBats 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 is unbreakable.'' You have to kill them to the last man. 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.

*** This helps contribute to the [[FanNickname Dwarfen Tide]] problem in ''Mortal Empires'', since the Dwarfs not only use the old system, but 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 can 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.

** 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 and lords, since they won't fight back if attacked even if they'd handily win. 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. Most veteran players will immediately disable that, only re-enabling it on very specific units.