Total War: Warhammer 2's latest DLC review: Pokemon and China Master

In The May update to Total War: Warhammer 2, a DLC titled "The Warden and The Paunch" was released, featuring a pair of arch-enemies: Essalion the Heartless and Gollum the Pot-bellied King. In the historical context, the departure of Isaareon from the Maelstrom led to the "Waaagh!" led by Gollum. The army ruthlessly swept through Essalion's hometown, and the shaman's old black teeth almost threatened the security of the world.

After Essalion returned home, he repelled the army and cut off Old Black Tooth's head. Since then, Azalion has vowed to defend his homeland from foreign invaders, and Gollum is plotting a revenge that will make the elves pay. While the background has the feel of a fatalistic battle, the actual play experience is really focused on collecting, and that's true for both sides of the old rivalry.

Since in the background, Essalion acts as a watchman and warden, in Total War: Warhammer 2, Essalion's mechanics revolve around this. In the game, the player playing Essalion in the siege of the fortress at the same time, but also need to build a prison - "Essalta Maha".

As the saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day," the same goes for prisons. The construction of the prison requires the consumption of special materials, and there are no more than two ways to obtain materials, the first is to destroy the green town, the second is to capture the green Lord on the battlefield through skills. The first one is easy to say, if the player wants to build the prison quickly, they will need to destroy the town and then build it, which will consume some additional resources, and do so to obtain very few special materials each time, which is not worth the cost.

The second option sounds like a Pokemon go. The actual game experience is that if you want to capture an enemy Lord alive, you need to use a special "lock" skill to imprison the enemy Lord and then kill it, and you can only use it a limited number of times per game. This also requires the player not to use quick combat, as the computer does not help the player capture the enemy Lord during quick combat decisions.

Therefore, the player who plays Essalion can not rely too much on automatic combat, otherwise until you completely eliminate the "big stomach king" Gollum will be difficult to build the prison "Essalta Maha", moreover, the help provided by the prison is diverse. Prison allows you to brainwash enemy overlords so that they can still provide you with vision and financial aid when they return to their home powers.

On the other hand, since Isaacion's main battlefield is in the exotic desert, his high elf forces will not be affected by the maelstrom on the "elf faction", which is to save the player's dessert, then the construction of the prison is the most effective means of Isaacion's defense of the homeland.

The featured units, including Essalion, are also closely related to the construction of the prison. For example, Essalion features the "Fog Walker" army, including five arms from pikemen to wing cavalry, and in Essalion's skills page, there are also enhanced routes for "Fog Walker", if you can't build a prison in time, then players will be difficult to experience the fun of commanding these troops.

For Essalion, the experience in the early stage is OK, because players need to find ways to break the game for themselves in the early stage, so they are bound to do a lot of battles by hand, and in the later stage, they will have to do battles by hand because they need to lock up the relationship between the Lord. For some players who are eager to play more relaxed in the later stage, this mechanism of Essalion is somewhat forced and cumbersome. In fact, it would be better to relax the conditions of capture.

For Essalion's old rival, Gollum, the "big Belly king", his collecting journey is even more joyful. As his name suggests, the players' organization is responsible for taking care of his big belly.

Unlike Essalion, who is not affected by the Maelstrom mechanism after leaving his homeland, even if the opening point is moved to the territory of Batonia, the "Big Belly king" Gollum still does not forget his nature as an orc, and his core mechanism "Crucdron" is related to "Waaagh!" Closely related.

When the "big Belly King" Gollum defeats various types of enemies, he can obtain the corresponding ingredients, and by combining the ingredients, he can cook various types of dishes, which is equivalent to a gain state of the whole picture, and according to the cooking state of the dishes, the "big belly King" Gollum himself will also gain attributes.

The only thing that will limit his pace is that cooking requires waste consumption, and another feature of Orc gameplay, upgrading the army also requires waste consumption, which requires players to use resources properly. But compared to Essalion's forced capture mechanism, the game mechanism of "Big Belly King" Gollum has been much gentler, not to mention the witches will refresh near the stronghold, providing you with random cooking gains.

So how to get cooking materials, how to get a lot of waste, the simplest way is a huge "Waaagh!" Even cooking and waste all at once, and with the expansion of the power map, cooking will become easier and easier, and the game experience will get better and better.

The only pity is that compared to the 13 new classes of Higher Energy Forces, the Orc Forces have only updated 10 classes, and the main problem is that these types of classes are relatively simple, the main two classes are trolls and tanks. Updating the single class means that the player's choice is still a little poor, but compared to the joy of cooking, these problems are not serious.

So in this update, both forces are collecting for fun, one requires players to collect enemy lords to build their own prison, and the other requires players to play as a Chinese master to collect rare ingredients from around the world. What both have in common is that they encourage more frequent, more targeted strategic planning, in other words, they encourage players to wage more frequent wars to consolidate their power and enhance the game experience.

Between the two, Essalion is somewhat forced to fight because of its harsh capture mechanics and low fault tolerance. In addition, the automatic battle can not capture the enemy Lord, which makes the game requires players to do a lot of combat, if you like to do the hand of the player, you can enjoy a lot of fun when playing Essalion, because he captures the reward is still very high, on the one hand to consolidate the local defense, and on the other hand, you can play a new class of arms.

The collection conditions of "big belly King" Gollum are much gentler, as long as they meet the conditions to fight, they can collect ingredients, and they will refresh all kinds of "soup wives" to sell soup, and the overall experience will become smoother and more interesting. However, due to the relaxed collection conditions, the return has become a little low, compared to Essalion's new recruits and the new mechanism, the "big belly King" Gollum is some of the more real attributes, so the final core recording fun still fell back to the most Orc signature "Waaagh!" Medium.

In general, the style of this DLC focuses on collection, which can be seen as a combination of "Pokemon and small masters", but this does not mean that the pace of the game is reduced, but because the emergence of the collection element requires players to launch more frequent battles to further expand their advantages.

If you're eager to collect loot in battle, The Warden and The Paunch is for you, and the new mechanics of both forces are also worth playing.