Dark Elves are both goofy. Morathi requires Chaos corruption, but has a hard time with it because she’s the only generator of it. Sort of like Vampire corruption, except her main province wants to decrease corruption. For me to stabilize a province i need probably 3 full time, fully upgraded, public order / chaos corruption generating buildings. Her main province has a building chain that really cuts down the problems factionwide with corruption, but you need to get all the way to City level 5.
Malekith has the reverse problem. He starts out with Skaven in all three of his cities, pushing Skaven corruption, but he has no way of even stopping it until he reaches City level 3, as that’s his first access to Public Order / Uncorrupted buildings. But when i tried Malekith, i went straight from having to knock out rebel Dark Elves to the south to literally 5 doom stack Chaos invasions from the north; i never had a single turn spare to try and attack the Skaven in my starting province. So his main province is constantly trying to rebel as well.
This isn’t such a problem in the main Vortex campaign, which space things out a whole lot more. Malekith and Morathi are squashed into about a 1/3 of the space they occupied in the Vortex campaign. Lothern can cross the sea in about two turns to hit Morathi, for ex., where it probably would take them 5-6 turns in the Vortex campaign.
Yea, the home province rebelling thing is a big downer. If i can push out forever it’s not such a problem. Dark Elves are funky too in that they don’t have out-of-province recruitment, unlike every other faction, so you can’t just push outward forever without circling back home to pick up new stuff. The intent is to use Black Arks as recruitment centers; in practice Black Arks get bee-lined and sunk almost as soon as they’re made. I don’t think i’ve ever had a Black Ark survive 20 turns. I don’t even waste time making them anymore. You need a full-time, full stack escort with your Black Ark - if you can’t afford to keep a full stack in the water with it 24-7, don’t bother.
Are you playing on Very Hard or Legendary? I haven’t had the problem you describe with keeping things together in the start or with keeping black arks alive. I only play on Normal so this might be down to difficulty level differences
For my Morathi start I got Morathi herself a good army of basic DE units really fast. I think 16 or so in her stack, mostly a mix of Dreadspears and Darkshards. Plus of course her oh-so-sweet starting Hydra. With that I was able to unite my province pretty quickly and start a second baby stack with like 5 units in it. The only point of the baby stack was to sit in the capitol and pop out and smack rebellions while they were fresh and small. That solved the unrest problem, but it left me a fairly serious money problem. Of course, as you mentioned, the high elves come calling pretty quick, so I put Morathi on them and beat them back with an ambush or two. Then I took Arnheim and got friendly with Bleak Holds for a secure local border. A trade agreement with Bleak Holds and having Morathi pop across to Ulthuan on a sacking tour fixed most of my money problems. After that it was just sacking and conquering in Ulthuan while I brought additional stacks online and sent them to join the fray.
Are you guys sending a Lord out onto the seas to grab all the treasure boxes? B/C that’s a very solid way to get some cash influx and also finding trading partners.
I had a great time playing as Skaven w/ Queek on the Vortex campaign on normal - first time I had to rely on disrupting opponent rituals because I was playing from behind for most of the game. I managed successfully delay the High Elves 2x and the Lizardmen 1x in order catch up and ultimately take the vortex for Clan Mors :)
Yea, i always play on Very Hard and then drop it down if it doesn’t work. Even on Hard though… it’s still pretty hard!
I think it’s the internal rebellion thing that throws my game off most. Even being surrounded all the time, i usually win 95% of the battles against my main stack. But… i have to keep running home and putting out fires. Morathi has that darn Chaos corruption which gives some pretty mean rebel stacks. I ignored it one game for two turns and they promptly sacked and razed my capital, even with a smallish (6 unit card) stack on top of the base defenders, and even with me manually controlling them.
The AI is really, really good with skirmishers. Always has been. In Rome and Attila that rando stack of AI controlled jav cav or jav infantry always, always has the most kills, whether i win or lose. High Elves are very hard for me to beat with base troops if they have lots of Silver Shields. I mean, flat out hard! They always charge Bleakswords head on, Ellyrian archers outrange Darkshards and can shoot my troops with impunity. Even with Hydra breaths killing 100+ troops a battle… tough stuff. That transition from spears to bleakswords to … next level stuff is pretty darn tricky.
Picked up the Elf DLC. At first I was wary because I read there was too much micro. Also, I hate elves by principle.
I was wrong. It is much more fun than I imagined.
So the campaign starts off very slow. You can only build in your one elven forest city. There’s three others held by other elves who are equally powerful. This means you are very poor and can only afford one stack. You can’t go too far because there’s threats from beastmen chopping down your Tree of Life. However, once you can take a second elf city things really start rolling. You have freedom to kill anyone you want, like in the Bretonnian campaign. For example, I chose to go after the Scandinavian chaos tribes because my lord started with attrition-free ability.
Once you cap an enemy city, you raze it, and then rebuild it. You can often do this on the same turn unlike other factions. This means you get very very rich. I have 500k in the treasury right now.
There’s two Legendary lords you can start with. The first is Orion, a buff blue elf that’s a melee and ranged monster. With him you probably build archer armies. He can tank a bunch of units by himself. Not sure if he’s S tier like the slayer king or Malekith but he’s at least an A. I didn’t play him much.
I played the second lord, tree dude. He is awesome. He can level up both sets of red line skills, melee and ranged (well Orion can as well) However, he is much much tankier. His early armies are dryads (melee guys) and treekin (tree tanks).
Things that are annoying no longer are. You can go anywhere you want. My first army went looting, which funded a second army. I have 8 armies or so currently going all over the place. One in Scandinavia, one by Kislev fighting the second chaos horde, one by the orcs, one by the southern continent, one by… you get the point. They don’t need a second army to help them. I didn’t even bother leveling up lightning strike which I normally consider essential for chaos fighting. Ambush the first, fight off the second, then mop up.
I’ve been mostly playing Vortex campaign as I find the Mortal Empires end-turn times kind of annoying. I do have the mod that speeds up the end-turn camera. Are there any other tips that will speed up the end-turn? I’d love to play some Mortal Empires. Wisefool made me want to try the Wood Elves.
In the UI, top left iirc, you cna set whether the camera will follow indie/allied/neutral/enemy armies and agents, and if so, what camera mode will be applied, e.g. cinematic, strategic etc.
I’m already using the faster end turn camera mod, which resolves the camera issue during end of turn. The issue for me is twofold: 1)the time it takes to process the many factions, especially once the AI gets bigger. I’m playing on Hard strategic level, Easy battles (b/c I’m not good at real time micro-management). And 2) the damnable repeated requests for treaties, even after I’ve rejected them many times. Any help on those two issues?
In regard to that end-turn less-AI-diplomacy mod, it seems to work and it reduces the diplomacy spam by about half IMO. After suffering through diplomacy spam since Rome 2, I’m almost to the point of wanting AI-initiated diplomacy gone completely, but at least a 50% reduction makes it less onerous.
Well, then egos are about to be deflated, turns out there is a slight bug where in battle, the bonuses given are wrong, so in very hard mode, the AI actually gets easy penalties, and reverse…its documented here
This was something I was starting to wonder about, as I was obliterating the enemy, and I found out when I went to see what I could do to make the game harder, oddly enough when I think of it, I remember WH 1 battles to be a lot more tense then the ones I had here…
I usually attributed this to the Lizard being their powerful selves, but seemingly lacking the bonuses the AI gets in combat, the result is skewered heavily towards me, yay.
Hah. Wonder if they’ll get around to fixing this similar bug.
To word that differently, currently the game keeps your 20 WORST troops instead of your 20 BEST troops in the cases where your settlement and building garrisons exceed 20 units. This no longer happens with this fix.
WHY this is happening is because CA does not realize that for the past 2 years their unit priority is BACKWARDS. They list the best units with a “high priority number” but low numbers take precendence over higher numbers.
Not to defend the bug or the fact that the choosing weaker units over stronger ones was probably a simple programming error, but getting a garrison with over 20 units is only even possible in a handful of the “capital” settlements like Altdorf or Drakenhoff, combined with both fully upgraded walls (that most human players never build in capital settlements as they can easily defend against an AI stack without them, and those slots are valuable) and another building that adds a unit or two.
I can completely see how they missed it. Barring using a mod that increases garrison size, I’m honestly shocked that anyone ever noticed. The AI barely attacks capitals as it is because of how powerful their baseline garrisons are.
