It's pretty cool, you can now create an army so instead of impressing another village to take it over you can choose to capture it with your army. Impressing is still possible but you will do it by building an impressive city so that other towns and settlements will migrate to your city. Impressing = good, taking over with an army = evil.

The creature has become much smarter aswell, you can use him in different roles like gatherer, soldier etc.. but you can also still give him free will and just teach him stuff sort of like you did in B&W 1 (pet him when he does something you like, smack him when he does something you dont like).