izigame.me

This content pack gives you the following:
- Two new playable forms (races).
- A bunch of new animals, with corresponding mounts.
- Two new tomes of magic, themed around fey magic and the sea/storms respectively.
- Most importantly, a new culture.
First off, the two smaller addtions: The forms don't really appeal to me personally, but it's nice to have them as options, and they look great and accomplish the feel they're going for well. I love the addition of the new animal units, as it adds a bit of variety to the different biomes. Having elephants in the deserts and crocodiles in the swamps just makes the world a bit more alive. I am concerned for how all these animals are adding more randomness to certain spells, such as Summon Animal. For now it's not that much more random, but I worry about how unpredictable these spells will be after a few more of these content packs.
Second, the tomes. The Tome of Fey Mists can be acquired early as a T2 tome, and it's all about creating mist that debuffs the enemy with accuracy and vision penalties and buffs your own units with random buffs. It's really strong against ranged units, but sadly the tome is hard-countered by itself: Any faction that picks up the tome can just become feytouched and not only suffer no negative effects from the mists, they themselves will receive random buffs from it now too. Kind of awkward when you're facing an opponent that also took the tome. The T4 Tome of the Stormborne, on the other hand, is quickly becoming one of my favorites. It is fully focused on naval gameplay and coastal cities, granting various income bonuses to coastal cities, a very strong T4 skirmisher that is affected by race transformations, and a strong lightning spell for in combat. The Naga transformation it comes with looks great, makes all transformed races fast and allows them to get in and out of water for free, which perfectly fits in with the rest of the tome. It is a very tightly designed tome with a strong direction, which makes it nearly a must-pick for maps with large amounts of water, but also makes it mostly useless for factions that ignore naval gameplay entirely.
Finally, but probably most importantly, the Primal culture. The Primal culture actually has 7 subcultures to choose from, each corresponding to a primal spirit animal corresponding to an affinity. Choosing such a spirit animal gives your faction one affinity point in the affinity of your choice, its starting terrain, as well as various other bonuses based on terrain and the chosen animal. This makes the Primal culture highly customizable, and the build variety from what I've played around with is huge. It is, in my opinion, the culture that least pidgeonholes itself into a certain theme, and that makes it great for players like me who build their factions primarily for flavor.
All in all a great content pack, I would say I probably recommend this one the most of the 3 DLC currently available.