People say that the definition of insanity it doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This is precisely me when it comes to strategy games.

I want to want you.

After hearing about all the crazy stories with Crusader Kings 2, I got it on sale and… played all of two hours before uninstalling. Total War: Shogun 2 was a similar situation, which was quite disappointing as I enjoy that setting. Enter Total War: Warhammer.

Verdict? …probably the same.

The first few hours were awful. Then I got hooked after some early victories. Then pissed when the AI started marching armies out of the fog of war and then razing my cities to the ground with zero chance to react. I know, I know, I’m supposed to have expensive hero units roaming about to keep tabs on my borders. But then there’s bullshit like an army moving to a city, killing the defenders and looting the place, moving all the way to a second city, then killing and looting that one, all in one turn. How the shit does that work, temporally? Were they all riding unicorns?

…actually…

Don’t get me started on Hero units, which have to be the most outrageous bullshit I’ve seen. These are units that can run around with impunity and get a 20-30% chance to assassinate your leader, delay your armies, damage some buildings, and all sorts of similar nonsense. Huge army with 20 divisions? It’s fine, park your hero right next to it and get turn after turn of a chance to murder their high-level leader. The other counter-play appears to be deploying heroes of your own to roam about and try to counter-assassinate. But as we learned in Overwatch, heroes never die, they just go AWOL for 5 turns before getting back to their usual shenanigans.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I were not trying to wipe out the last of the Crooked Moon goblin clan. Razed their capital and another city off the map, but the final city was way, way to the South. Every army I send down there ends up headless, as I had neglected to counter-hero the spider-riding goblin spy, who is now level 14. I am currently sending two full armies and three heroes down there to try and get a handle on things, but now I’m nervous that the Emperor himself is going to get whacked before that leg of the campaign is done.

LOOK HOW MUCH FUN I’M HAVING.

As for the combat system itself, I couldn’t tell you much about its improvement or not from prior titles. All I particularly know is that I suck at macromanaging. Micromanaging individual little units? Sure, it’s fine. Directing the calvary around and flanking with the sword troops and moving generals and getting the archers to turn the fuck around what are you even doing ohmygod… not so much. I’m using auto-complete on most battles and things are mostly going well.

So, we’ll see. Maybe I stick with it, maybe I don’t. The game was $12 in a Humble Monthly bundle, so I’m not out much either way.