Every character is somebody's favorite. You make fun of the least interesting dude in a superhero team and you find out there's a whole community on the internet who read every comic he's ever been in. So I hesitate to point out that I thought Creative Assembly was employing a scraping tool somewhere near the southern half of a barrel when they announced Total War: Warhammer 3's Tides of Torment would include Aislinn the Sea Lord alongside two much more interesting legendary lords.
I'm happy to see Dechala, the Denied One, who has been part of tabletop Warhammer for multiple editions and is both visually distinct and has an unusual place in the lore—it's rare for Warhammer's elves to be visibly mutated by Chaos, and yet here's an elf with six arms and a snake body. Which is fun. There's also Sayl the Faithless, a Norscan (sort of) sorcerer introduced in the popular Tamurkhan campaign book, the book that previously gave us the legendary lords Elspeth and Tamurkhan the Maggot Lord himself. Adding Sayl rounds out that trio nicely.
This is ideal for someone who has hundreds of hours in these games. I wouldn't want my first campaign to play like this, but it's ideal for my mumbleteenth. I give a chunk of former dark elf land to Nagarythe, the northern high elves most suited to the climate, while giving Lustria to the southern Loremasters. I hand entirely random slices of the world to Alarielle the Everqueen, because it seems right, and giving more settlements to specific lords earns me more rewards when I consult them for aid.
Consulting the leaders is one of Aislinn's unique campaign mechanics, but he's got a bunch of others. Patronage lets me spend influence points to give my lords positions at court, earning bonuses. The patronage of Saphery, the most magical corner of the elven kingdoms, reduces spell cooldowns and adds to your Winds of Magic reserve, for instance. Eventually these relationships let me confederate whoever's land I have patronage over. Outposts earn domination points that can be spent on various buffs and technology unlocks, and the same outposts also give elven trade points, which are an additional cost for some buildings and technologies.
I haven't even mentioned dragonship supplies, another resource I need to upgrade the dragonships each of my admirals commands. They function as floating settlements I can recruit from while away from the handful of colonies I bother to maintain. There are so many currencies to keep track of that for half the campaign I basically forgot about influence, the mechanic common to every high elf legendary lord that lets you change how other legendary lords feel about each other.
It's a level of complexity common to Total War: Warhammer 3's DLC, which all seems to assume you're not just familiar with the basic mechanics but also sick of them to the point you'll ignore them in favor of engaging with the new stuff instead. Fortunately, that's exactly where I'm at: in need of novelty and shiny levers to pull.
While I was fully engaged with the new campaign systems, I defaulted to a lot of the standard units and playstyle in battles—though the new skycutters, which let you mount a flying bolt thrower on a chariot pulled by giant birds, are a fun addition because you don't have to worry about holding the high ground with your artillery when it's in the sky by default. Aislinn's ship company units were less useful, a melee unit in an army that's all about ranged, and I fell back on my old favorite, the Lothern Sea Guard, a hybrid unit that's good at everything.
On the battlefield I played Aislinn much the same as I played other high elves like Eltharion or Tyrion, shooting to soften up enemies until they charged in to be finished off on my spears. Only now I had some oceanids—water elementals with goofy animal faces—to flank with.
Sayl the Faithless and his Dolgan army actually did make me engage with battles a little differently. Not because of the bearmen, a mid-tier melee unit that fits between marauders and berserkers, but because of their legendary hero, Beorg Bearstruck—a killing machine whose attacks give enemies the Rattled effect, lowering their stats, and whose charge bonus can have its duration doubled.
Sayl also gets some melee horsemen at last and the dread maw, a monstrous sandworm that burrows beneath the ground where it can't be attacked then bursts up to chomp and spit toxin. Fun as that sounds, the amount of micro it took to get value out of the dread maw was more than I was willing to put in.
If ranged units sat still long enough for me to get a dread maw beneath them it could pay off, but I often forgot to activate its abilities as they came off cooldown and keep it moving. It ended up suffering because I was too busy casting spells with the Curs'd Ettin Runecaller, a two-headed giant with great animations for its squabbling halves, and with Sayl himself, whose mutant companion is a spell rather than a summon and has to be cast repeatedly to get value out of him. With a sorcerer as its legendary lord and shaman-sorcerers as a new generic one, the Dolgans are a magic-heavy force, and that makes for battles where you have to be constantly on the ball to get the most out of them.
Sayl's campaign is all about magic too, giving you the choice when you conquer a settlement to either keep it or dedicate it as a Chaos Altar. Each of those progresses a bar that unlocks manipulations, powerful effects that start at giving visibility over all a faction's armies and regions, and climax with the ability to force someone into declaring war on all their allies, excluding you. The cost of these manipulations is drawing the attention of the gods, which might lead to plagues breaking out or armies being spawned to hunt you. Even with that risk they're super powerful abilities, but the real cost is having to constantly expand the number of altars you raise, which pushed me into betraying my allies and declaring incautious wars to expand.
By contrast, Dechala's campaign felt closer to the vanilla experience. Her new units are mostly focused on speed, which was always Slaanesh's thing, with the exception of the Devotees of Slaanesh—generic-looking dark elves you can outfit with crossbows. She has thralls to keep track of, a little like the dark elf slave mechanic, and decadence points to earn at pleasure palaces and spend on tributes.
It all feels a bit copy-pasted from other faction mechanics, though I may just be tired of Slaanesh. Where the high elves are a faction I haven't played since the second game, and the Norscans I only played in the original, Slaanesh is one the Warhammer 3 factions I've spent the most time with. It feels thematic that I'm jaded by all the stuff the decadence-themed army is offering, but the other two have kept up the novelty in a way that's impressive given the nearly four years Total War: Warhammer 3 has now been around.
Don't just take my word for it, though. Sean Martin's been playing Tides of Torment too, and he had a better time with Sayl than I did, and a worse one with Aislinn. His take should be live now, and Tides of Torment will be available tomorrow.
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