I was kind of dubious when this first came out since I thought it was going to be a low-effort cash grab, but I played the tabletop game long ago and the positive reviews swayed me. I've played about 1.5 of the WH1 dwarven campaigns (one as Thorgrimm and part of another as the White Dwarf) and I'm currently part-way through a WH2 mortal empires campaign as the Slayer King. I've been consistently impressed with the effort CA put into this; the faction-specific mechanics are a little hit-or-miss (I like oathgold, not so high on the book of grudges) but the art and voice-acting are top-notch and in general things happen in a pretty setting-appropriate way (no Empire/Greenskins alliances or the like).
Dwarf-specific comments (since I haven't played any of the inferior races yet)
- The book of grudges is way too proscriptive; you shouldn't be forced into inconvenient agent actions, spilling enemy blood on the battlefield should satisfy any grudge.
- The dwarf AI seems to have serious issues early on (I've heard it rights the ship later). My fellow dwarves seemed hard-pressed from the beginning in both campaigns. In the first game, I found the going pretty easy as a player, once you weathered the initial greenskin tide, you could sweep down the world's edge mountains and have a secure base to strike out into the badlands. In the 2nd game, as the new slayer-centric faction, the greenskin AI could draw forth limitless numbers of black orcs when my impoverished northern holds couldn't produce or support higher-level troops. I had to mount a pretty desperate attack on Black Crag's capitol to shut off the black orc spigot before I got overwhelmed.
- As a dwarf player in the 2nd game, once you sort the Greenskins out, Ordertide is real. The greenskins, skaven and chaos have been wiped out and the forces of good are gearing up to invade the new world (I actually like the latter part, it's like a new adventure)
- The autoresolve is pretty fucky; as a dwarf player, I auto-resolved a skaven ambush by a stack consisting entirely of ratling guns that I figured was hopeless and I won. If I had fought that one, it would have been like Saxon Huscarls trying to swarm WWI machine gunners, total clusterfuck. Many a dwarf met his doom at the hands of clan eschin stacks where every unit had armor-piercing.
- The "regional occupation" system in the first game was a little frustrating because the northern half of the empire (and Kislev) was reduced to wastes that the empire AI was too stupid to recolonize and as I dwarf, there was nothing I could do to help them. However the free-for-all system in the 2nd game is equally stupid without that region trading mod; empire squatting on dwarf holds, dwarven occupation of Sylvania, completely bonkers.
- CA really needs to invest in some mechanisms for endgame difficulty that don't involve pulling stacks out of nowhere. I wasn't a huge fan of "realm divided" or whatever the shogun 2 thing was, but the mongol/hun/viking/chaos invasion where they just pull a bunch of stacks out of their ass is definitely a step down even when it works (didn't work in the 2nd game from what I saw, the Empire handled them admirably on its own).
