2011

Does anyone play the tabletop game? Can you have mixed armies there? I’m trying to understand what the army is in this video that appears to have skinks and dwarfs:

2012

Age of Sigmar blew up the world and made it so there are like only two factions or something.

2013

Yea, the Total War Warhammer games are based on Warhammer Fantasy, which was the precursor series to Age of Sigmar which is its own deal.

2014

So one of my dumbass allies declared war on the most powerful lizardman faction, and now that the dark elves are gone I thought I’d help out. So I sail in next to my tomb king allies (!!), raze a couple desert cities (aside: do y’all keep cities in inhospitable climates?), win a huge four army battle, and things are good. Now an army that is 100% dinosaur (about half t-rex, half stegasaurus, iirc) shows up. What am I supposed to do about that?

2015
  1. Use a fort if you can win with fortifications.
  2. If above not work, run away and hide with ambush
  3. If you hit march you may be able to outrun?
2016

If I knew what faction you were playing I could give you more specific advice. But against dinosaurs specifically and Lizardmen in general, you need a bunch of armor piercing damage. They have a mountain of HP and really good armor, making their EHP against non-AP damage painfully high.

The easiest way to handle them is to muck them up with the factional polearm infantry equivalent and blast them down with some kind of handgunner equivalent. If you’ve got a few medium-mass defensive units like Treekin or Trolls or Promethean Crabs to add some mass to your line, even better. The only type of artillery that does anything to dinosaurs are the cannon equivalents. Stuff like Mortars are virtually useless in this instance and more likely to harm your own troops than do any real damage to a Stegadon or Carnosaur.

Remember that Stegadons are anti-infantry and Carnosaurs are anti-large. So in a perfect world you run your halberds into the carnosaurs and your crabs into the stegadons, for example. Carnosaurs are actually pretty mediocre against infantry with good MD. The only other advice I can give without knowing the faction is that you are going to be terror bombed hard by that stack, so immune to psychology is pretty strong in these fights.

2017

Good suggestions. No forts in enemy territory, so I’ll probably retreat and try to get a 2:1 army advantage in the battle somehow. Ambush might work.

High elves. (Doh! I forget that y’all can’t read my mind.)

Thanks! I don’t quite have enough Phoenix Guard, which handily took down a dinosaur last fight, so hopefully Sea Guard and White Lions will do ok. A few Avelorn Sisters would probably do decent damage but I’m afraid they’ll end up in melee due to the number of dinos. The dragon knights are anti-infantry, so no help there (maybe I can lead them on some chases) but I do have a couple dragons. And a bolt thrower.

Inspired by some PartyElite videos I might try making the lines really thin to minimize charge effects. What do you think about that?

I’ll also see how autoresolve does (I’m not above some save scumming since this is a pretty BS army imo)… though I’m already in need of replenishment so I’m not optimistic.

I did ok against the pirate undead mech monster army a while ago, but it was painful. The real answer here is probably to just bring in all my other armies to help out.

2018

It’s changed in recent months but when Mortal Empires was originally released playing as Morathi was God Bless America hard, because the High Elves and Lizardfolk would both inevitably declare war at around the same time, and the thing you needed to kill the lizards, giant blobs of crossbows, would collapse easily when attacked by mass stacks of Silver Helms and High Elf chariots, and you couldn’t really tech up to a higher level of troops fast enough - nor really support them economically either.

The secret was to get Morathi’s dark magic vortex ability up, blob up the lizards, and spam it. I once had something like 800 kills on Morathi alone thanks to that.

A dirty little secret of all the campaigns is to just use a second or third stack of trash troops and autoresolve. This is however great for factions like Tomb Kings or Rats, but isn’t really viable for factions like the Dark Elves who lack a really cheap trash unit.

White Lions are trash if used incorrectly. They’re one of the best/worst units in the game that way. The only use for them (imo) is mixed up with spears, or as flankers to troops being held by Spearmen. Because they lack formation they’re hopeless against charges and it causes a lot of weirdness with their effectiveness in line fights. Use them like fancy prancy barbarian axes like the historic games, and they’ll do ok.

I also dislike both Phoenix Guard and Black Guard of Naggarond - they always underperform against my expectations. Only keep them around if you’re sure they’re going to be up against Large Units. I hear a lot online about people using them against infantry but this is bollocks. Use Swordmasters / Executioners against infantry. Even in seiges, against literally cavalry that are literally blobbing up in a gate, Phoenix Guard only get a couple dozen kills.

But like i said above, if facing against Lizards, i’d just end up with a giant blob of Sea Guard and a few flankers/AP/whatever. Bolt seige things, cav things, swordy things for flanking. You really can’t go wrong with a giant blob of properly supported Sea Guard as your front line.

2019

So I went ahead and fought the battle. It was my two armies (well-mixed composition) against the one with 8 carnosaurs, 8 stegadons, and a couple characters and fliers, and a second that was only maybe 1/2 dinos, with a whole bunch of fliers and a couple ground-pounders.

The initial disposition was… interesting. I was hoping to bait the dinos to me with some ranged units and then sandwich them with my reinforcements, then turn on their reinforcements (standard tactics, I guess). Unfortunately I put my main army too far back up the hill, and almost had the reverse happen to me. Fortunately, they split their main stack and sent some dinos and flyers at my main stack and the rest, together with the reinforcements, at my second stack (which was already weakened from previous fights).

At this point I’m feeling pretty pessimistic, especially because most of my dragons were at half health (from previous battles). I rushed down my main stack and meet their dinos with Phoenix Guard, White Lions, and dragon breath (as well as some Sisters and Sea Guard ranged support).

The second stack had the 2 bolt thrower batteries, which focused on one dinosaur after another, as the Phoenix Guard got overwhelmed by multiple dinos and the Sea Guard (and archers, sadly) struggled with a dino charge each. The cavalry ran around trying to get some charges in where possible, and the chariots tried to find the skirmishers and infantry in the enemy reinforcements. I flubbed the cavalry management a bit (let them get charged) and was too indecisive with the dragons.

Meanwhile the Guard and Lions of the main army were making good on their dinos. I foolishly let a sun dragon chase their flyers a bit, but I don’t think she was too injured by their flaming (ranged) attack; once I put the archers on them, they ran away quick enough. I mobbed their toad mage (not the main general, alas) with a pair of dragons and some dragon princes; that worked well to shut down their magic support.

At this point I’d handily won the upper engagement and was about to lose the lower. The dragons and cavalry from the upper battle rushed their general and a dino it two that was hanging back. The last of my troops from the lower battle left the field (some by my command, some not). Just as my main forces made it in range of their remaining (combined) army, they gave up the fight and fled, and I chased a couple units down.

In the end I lost four units completely (from the lower army)–a bolt thrower, a silver helms, a Sea Guard and those poor archers–and I further combined two Sea Guards. The rest of that army was at 20% health, while the upper army fared considerably better (but still took some hits, to be sure). They lost a bit over half of each army, but I was in no condition to pursue the remnants into the castle they retreated to.

Where I did well:
I mostly managed to bring the right units into contact with their dinos. A couple Net of Amyntok casts we’re pretty clutch.
Where I did poorly:
I need to get better at managing cavalry and chariots.
Where I got lucky:
The AI divided their forces poorly, and didn’t cycle-charge with their dinos. I managed to pull a dragon out at 5% health.

I was very pleased with the performance of my Phoenix Guard and White Lions, but really I underestimated both my dragons and my low-tier troops.

(This was on normal battle difficulty.)

2020

Glad you were able to defeat them, Nets and Timewarp are the two Light spells that are helpful against those dino stacks.

It also sounds like you are learning that +replenishment % is easily one of the best campaign stats you can get (along with +campaign movement %). I haven’t played High Elves in a bit because they will be in the next DLC, but I recall they have a lot of access to +replenishment in their lord’s Blue tree and Handmaiden’s give some as well. There’s something nice about winning a siege and next turn even your most decimated units are back to full strength.

2021

High Elves have tons of + replenishment. The Handmaids give a little, there’s some in the blue line (which I rarely bother with), and their bread and butter Noble hero heals like a cleric.

2022

I’m super duper regretting not having nobles in either of these stacks. I was somewhat underwhelmed by their battle performance and I liked the spells of the loremasters, so I went with them instead (plus mages). And none of the nobles I do have are specced for replenishment. I knew it would be great to have but I thought I could get by… oh well. I have a fully upgraded Sartosa nearby turning out level 9 nobles, but I burned my last two on full assassinate builds to try to get rid of these stupid heroes that keep assaulting my units. Grrrrr…

2023

Are you supposed to do something with the sites of previous battles on the campaign map?

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2024

Only vamps. Higher dead = more raise dead recruitment pool.

Otherwise just trophies of your crushing victories (they are victories of course) or interesting notifications of AI history

2025

Nobles are the best, you pretty much have to devote a slot to them. I tend to use them as my infantry leaders. Stick them in with the Spearmen/Phoenix Guard and it frees up your general to just ride their dragon off and cause backline mayhem.

2026

Elite halberdiers aren’t there to rack up kills, their role in elite armies is exactly the same as spearmen in base armies. They hold back the enemy infantry while the archers rack up kills. Phoenix Guardsmen will last like twice as long as Swordmasters in a nasty melee and that’s why I value them.

2027

So what mount do you give them? And how would you contrast them to loremasters?

2028

Loremasters have a pretty decent spell set, and you can use one instead of a mage if that’s your jam, I generally consider them a bit inferior to the pure mages. They really aren’t competing for a army slot with Nobles.

I’d say the best elf stack has your Lord, a caster if your lord isn’t a caster, and a noble. Teclis is probably the lord i’d be most inclined to take a Loremaster with. Teclis has a ton of WoM to use and the Loremaster gives you spirit leech which sort of shores up on Teclis’ lack of ways to deal with powerful single target enemies. Though a 2nd noble is still probably better than a loremaster imo for Teclis’ stack.

From there you can do whatever cheese you want. Something like Teclis + Noblex2 + 17 star dragons is unbeatable by the AI unless you really screw the pooch and get attacked by 6 Chaos doomstacks.

Edited to add: I don’t really recommend playing with that doomstack for long, it is pretty uninteresting. I personally use a unit cap mod most of the time to curb my tendency to take the route of least resistance.

2029

Agreed. Especially if the leader is stocked with skills.

2030

No mount, since I don’t want them outrunning the infantry.

Loremasters are actually better fighters slightly, but I generally don’t use them at all. Don’t need to expend an army slot on an expensive half-ass caster hero. Especially one with a passive train-the-army skill. I feel that an army that wants XP can just go fight for it!

I agree with @MisterMourning. One general, one noble (for +replenishment), one caster is the default. for a High Elf army.