Warhammer 2 has a lot more going on than the historical Total War games. Untethered by the limits of realism, the door is blown wide open for a much more varied set of mechanics. Each faction’s units, goals, strengths, weaknesses, magic, and technology are incredibly different from each other, but this complexity actually makes this game easier for newcomers to play. With each faction being so specialized and distinct, it’s easier to understand how you should be strategizing. In a game like Shogun, your faction’s unique feature may be strong cavalry, but how much should you play into that? If you try to make a full cavalry army, you’ll either get destroyed by spearmen or run out of money, and finding the middle ground where you can take advantage of your bonuses without going overboard can take multiple campaigns. Compare that to an example from Warhammer, where the Skaven faction is geared towards swarming with cheap units and bombarding with powerful ranged gunners. The balance to strike is obvious, use the disposable units to tie up the enemy as you gun them down. If you have a magic user available, they can destroy anyone who flanks the gunners or turn the tables wherever the front line is breaking. Even if you’ve never played Total War before, this sort of strategizing will come naturally, and you can start having fun without the sort of Youtube tutorials strategy games often rely on. The accessibility combined with the abundance of content makes it easy for me to recommend, but the real question is if I can recommend buying it. There’s a ton of DLC, which is always a major turn-off, but you really don’t need to load up. Paradox games might lock entire game-changing mechanics behind DLC, but that’s not the case here. It’s just factions and faction leaders which you can pick depending on how interesting they seem to you. Personally, I would recommend buying Warhammer 1 and 2 to start, which will give you all the base factions from both games to use in 2’s combined campaign. The DLC factions are mostly based on gimmicks that shake up the standard gameplay, which isn’t a priority when you’re just starting out. Buying it this way also makes it fairly cheap to get into, especially when measured against the hundreds of hours you can get from it. If you’ve ever been interested in Total War, it’s easily worth your time and money.