I Thought I Was Bored Of Boring Old Elves, But Total War: Warhammer...

Tides of Torment revived my interest in a moist faction.

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.

But Aislinn? Even as someone who used to play a high elf army in tabletop Warhammer, I struggled to remember the elven naval general. And why add a naval character to a game that doesn't even have ship battles? Get in a scrap at sea and you just end up on one of the island maps, everyone disembarking to line up and fight just like they would on land. A weak fit, surely.

I should have remembered how much fun I had with the Vampire Coast expansion for Total War: Warhammer 2. Turns out, the naval elf campaign's my favorite part of Tides of Torment.

Early in a Total War campaign, when I've only got a couple of provinces to look after, I'm happy to micromanage them. Once I've really started painting the map I can't be bothered. It's just accountancy from that point. Aislinn seems to feel the same way, because while he can maintain a handful of colonies, most of the settlements he takes become outposts. Instead of assuming full control of them, you choose one of the other high elven lords to gift them to, earning some diplomatic favor but making the management their problem.

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 Loremast

Source: PC Gamer