Immortal Empires: Race Updates

Any views on the race updates for Immortal Empires?

While I haven't played the Vampire Counts much, I like the sound of the Vampire Counts not relying on free skeletons and magic every time. CA seem to be trying to avoid a situation where a faction does the same thing in every battle, which sounds like a good thing for me - to avoid making battles repetitive. For example, when Heir of Carthage demonstrated his 'bear baiting' tactic with Kislev (sending heroes mounted on bears and war-sleds to draw the enemy's faster units ahead of their main line, so his ranged units could rout them before having to fight the enemy's slower units) he commented that he would use this tactic from now on. Creative Assembly then nerfed war sleds. (I'm not saying that CA were necessarily did this because Heir of Carthage showed that this was Kislev's best option for battles, they might well have noticed themselves that Kislev players were likely to do this in every battle).

The idea of Helman Ghorst offering faction-wide bonuses to zombies sounds like an interesting development, since it's faction-wide rather than just for the Legendary Lord's own army. I get the impression that, at least for some factions in some of the campaign, you're relying on the Legendary Lord's army for attacks because you can't afford to make your other armies as powerful (or because of your Legendary Lord's bonuses and abilities). Playing as Tzarina Katarin, for example, her -50% upkeep on Ice Guards means that I can give her an army of elite units and heroes which can take on anyone, while my other armies tend to have cheap units.

I like most of what I've seen

Especially the rework of Chaos warriors with their ugrade mechanism, which should be moddable according to the Q&A.

This has a lot of potential

Brettonia :
knight errant -> knight of the realm -> questing knight -> Grail Knight -> Grail Guardian
knight errant -> knight of the realm -> Pegasus knight-> Royal Pegasus --> Hippogryh

It woon't work for every race, but here it's an obvious case.

Good point, the upgrade mechanism could work well for other (non-Chaos) factions too.