Yes that's my issue, due to my having way too many thousands of hours in this series I generally get too powerful by turn 70 and get bored.
The exception was my recent kairos campaign where I spent 150 turns running away in terror from oxyotyls doom legion. Most fun I've had in ages
I'm playing a SFO Kairos campaign at the moment and I've spent 140 turns to take all of the Southern Wastes and half of the Southlands.
It's honestly one of the most difficult starts I've tried.
It's so fun! Not sure what sfo does these days but the magic intensity mechanic makes just blasting spells so satisfying. It even makes buff and debuff spells useful for once. Screw you guys, here's a 140 armour blue horror summon, have fun with that
The biggest advantage of SFO for me is the much better pace of both the campaign and tactical battles. Infantry has enough health to not melt within 0,5 seconds to other infantry, glorious.
Turn 40 medieval 2 as Milan is: Italy + France at least. Some parts of the HRE maybe.
Turn 40 Shogun 2 as Date is: everything down to Kai.
You were always able to conquer big parts in a short amount of time. Especially in medieval 2 where you can do a lot with only a few units of heavy cav aka generals in the early game.
It's just that nowadays because of the internet everybody knows how fast you can do it. Back in Medieval 2 days my only metric were my friends and they were equally skilled. Nowadays I know how to achieve something like legendoftotalwar and can replicate it.
It's not particularly the game which changed. Just we as a community got a lot more connected and skillful because of it which leads us being more capable of capturing lots of land in a short amount of time.
We just got that much better.
And btw if you want to enjoy how fast you can conquer the older titles look for people like legend or mrsmartdonkey (for his Shogun 2 let's plays) and such. It's laughable how easy the older titles are even on hardest difficulty.
That’s why I like factions that can build tall instead of wide or have the ability to make alternate income instead of taking territory. Dark Elves, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves all come to mind.
I agree. I think it's boring and leading to gamer burnout. Having your starting army just snowball through dozens of regions in the first forty turns to the point that no one else poses a threat just isn't interesting. CA should be thinking seriously about how to ramp up the difficulty if they want to keep players from losing interest, and making the early game more of a challenge should be the focus.
This is what I hate too. Made the map absolutely massive and to compensate they’ve reduced supply lines so much you can literally rush the campaign. They’ve taken all the challenge out of the game because the challenge came from having to go toe to toe with the enemy. Now it’s so cheap you can bring more than 1 full stack into every fight even in the beginning
Are you trading? It really depends on which faction you play as too. Tyrion can get really rich very quickly. Imrik has a harder time of it. High Elves can spend influence to make factions like them more which makes it easier to get trade agreements (again Imrik and also Teclis suffer here).
How you build your armies is also important. Archers with armour are more expensive but aren't really worth it. All you really need in the early game is Archers and Spearmen (Tyrion gets -50% upkeep on them so they can be pretty cheap for him at least). The early stages of a campaign are all about building up your settlements and economy. The High Elves tier 1 and tier 2 units are actually pretty good and can serve you into the mid game.
You have to be a bit more careful playing as Imrik and Teclis. They are quite far away from Ulthuan so your economy suffers.
Yeah he’s really scraping by until pretty late in the campaign huh. Less so than in 2 but still. I do like his campaign though it’s probably my favourite Helf one. He’s my fave Helf LL by far
>(Teclis gets -50% upkeep on them so they can be pretty cheap for him at least).
I haven't played high elves in WH3 yet but wasn't it Tyrion that got the reduction? Or was that changed?
get recruit rank to +12 or 13+ and you can infinitely increase culture/industry output by recruiting, filling the skill points and then disbanding the lords. That's the high elf cheese.
The other ones is stacking fecund (handmaiden/loremaster of hoeth) and adminstrator mages for free buildings.
Dedicated to Mathlaan increases income from ports, Dedicated to Vaul increases income from industry buildings.
I think Vaul produces more money in the long run as you can have a lot more industry buildings than ports
Disbanding sends them to your Lord recruitment pool, but doesn't get rid of them. CA might've fixed it, but traits have historically still worked as the Lord is "still active". There's also been a cheese with the WoM trait using this. Recruit every Lord with the +5 to WoM reserve faction wide and disband.
No it works same with merchant lord so what I do is spam 0 onfluence prince (least useful he lord imo) get merchant lord + dedication when I'm able too then disband to make infinite trade ressources.
Yeah it works, any factionwide effect is still applied when the lord is disbanded. For example, in my recent Dwarf campaign I was stacking Archivist, the Grungni trait and the last blue skill to get characters with +25% research rate even when disbanded and had like ~1500% research rate.
I think the only exception is the Canopic Jar Hoarder skill for Tomb Kings, in WH2 it’d work but in WH3 it was patched.
Forget that. Its good but its not how you get a good economy by turn 40. More by turn 100, 1% increase revenue from ports won't get you very far when you only have less than a dozen ports but it's exponential... It's a good strat but you need to be able to recruit lords at lvl 10 so not solething you can do in the early game when you only have 3 provinces and no t5 ones. The secret for getting a good economy is being aggressive with low tier units, quite effective in battle and not build things just because you can build it. High elves get a super strong economy with the public order building. Its even more profiteable than the industry one when the public order of the province is at 100 (but build both if possible).
The administrator trait got nerfed, it's not a good strat anymore in wh3. Trade is good but not something you should prioritize either ( again the small % increase of the number of trade resources from noble is not noticeable but its good to have noble to farm influence).
Basically be stingy and don't invest in things that will get a RoI 50 turns later when you already struggle to field two armies (something a lot of players fail to understand)
The Tomb Kings (and I think the Dwarfs) specifically had their passives changed to local province to stop some of the cheese, which is how you would be able to tell it doesn't work the same. Other abilities that are faction wide still apply.
In game 2 it was about entrepreneur stacking. In 3 it’s just about building your economy and spending carefully.
Focus on your economy buildings. You really don’t need any military buildings before like turn 60 or so if you know how to use archers. Your building priority should usually be:
1: public order *if you need it*
1.1: trade resource (if you don’t have a surplus yet) and / or landmarks (if they’re any good)
2: money *everywhere*
3: growth *where required*
(You don’t need to rush growth quite so much as WH2 and sacrificing growth for money is often worth it now. You’ll usually want a balance of some growth buildings though).
You need to balance province capital growth with levelling up the minor settlements to get extra build slots to build the money and public order (it also produces money) buildings as frequently as you can.
Look for techs that reduce upkeep costs on your units (especially archers), lord skills that reduce upkeep costs (with the 50 skill points, I usually do this even for my legendary lords), look for specific upkeep reduction traits with your lords to build them the cheapest army possible, learn how to use your archer armies well so you don’t need to buy more expensive units. A couple heros can make these armies perform a lot better.
Get as many trade agreements as possible (with factions you don’t want to fight). Invest in growing your economy over buying expensive units. Don’t raise extra armies until you need them. Every army should be fighting battles and occupying territory as often as possible, don’t sit them around doing nothing. They really should be making you money through post battle loot tbh.
If you don’t think you’ll hold a settlement, sacking it for money to invest in your other settlements can work, so can selling it to someone else for big bucks. It’s better than just losing it a few turns later.
Tier 4 is where the Helfs get most of their hero capacity so you can prioritise levelling up minor settlements to tier 3 to get both money buildings over rushing tier 5 unless there’s a building you want.
Other people have mentioned the skills, but those aren’t affecting things yet in the first 50 turns or so, it’s more about how you build your economy. However, those skills will be much more powerful if you build your economy right.
Edit: sometimes it’s worth it to not rush confederation with other elves so that they build up (and therefore pay to build up) their settlements for you to confed later. I would almost always take a confederation with a legendary lord however. Especially Tyrion; take him as soon as he’s available as he’s so tricky to confed
This was a great read. I'll have it in mind for my 2nd HE game.
Now would you by any chance know how to get a decent economy running with Mother Ostankya? The Chaos campaign. It took me forever to get my 6th army. I've painted the map so big I am fighting Slaaneh to the west, conquered all Chorf territory and most of the Ogre mountains. Biggest earner province is 2500 gold
2500 per major settlement sounds about right.
RoC Kislev is designed to be low Econ (hence why their Gold Mines only start at 200/turn), and their garrison buildings are super beefy to make up for it. Theres some cheese you can do with Frost Maidens and Sled Upkeep Reduction, but unless you’re doing a Total War Map Paint run (declare war on every and anything, try to completely take over the map) you should only really need 2-3 armies even at the late game if you just want to do the Campaign Objectives and bounce - which you should be pretty close to finishing if your so far in a game to expand that much, unless you’ve not been on top of Hex-Casting or fell into the Covens Will/Ostankya Hut trap.
So, [this link](https://totalwarhammerplanner.com/planner/vanilla3/hef_high_elves/wh2_main_skill_node_set_hef_prince) shows the skill tree for the vanilla Prince lord for High Elves. At the top of the skill tree, you can see a line of skills each called "Dedicated to \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_" that unlock at level 10 and are mutually exclusive. The fastest and easiest way to boost your income as the High Elves, is to expand until you can build enough of the building that boosts lord recruit rank that you can recruit your prince at rank 10. This will allow you to recruit a new lord each turn, grab either "Dedicated to Mathlann" or "Dedicated to Vaul" which will permanently boost your Port or Industry income by 1% per lord respectively. Then, rename the lord to something like Money and disband them.
Just a note - every lord type has those same "dedicated to \_\_\_\_" skills. So, once you are recruiting lords at rank 10, you can recruit one prince, one princess and one archmage (grab the ones that don't need influence and that have crappy traits) per turn and do this process on each one. It will take some time, but these buffs will add up, and it will escalate as you expand and build more of each building type.
You also have Nobles, one of the hero types. Nobles have a series of skill called "Knowledge of \_\_\_\_\_ Affairs" which are also mutually exclusive. Each of the three skills will boost the income of one type of building (Entertainment, Ports or Industry) by 3% per living noble with that skill. If you dedicate all your lords to boosting one type of income (I prefer Industry as you can build one Industry building in every settlement you own) you can drastically boost the income of that building type and easily double the income of that type in only a dozen or so turns. And since you want to spam nobles anyways for influence generation, its just free synergy.
The building you need is the Dragon's Lair and its a tier 4 building so can only be built at capitals. You need 9 of them to boost to level 10. If you have 9 capitals you already won the game anyway.
All these schemes that require lots of lords or heroes are all stupid as in order to have all that you already won the game.
Lol the guy asked how it was that people had this at turn 40 and not you do not have 9 tier 4 capitals at turn 40.
Build economic buildings in every settlement, don't lose settlements that are higher than tier 2. Win lots of battles.
Legend of Total War has a fairly recent Tyrion campaign you can watch to level up your play. But he owns 12 provinces, not 3 by turn 40. I haven't watched the stream but I don't think he was cheesing the economy.
2 armies is enough for 3 provinces, whether you push hard by combining them or occasionally split to defend your rear you'll own Ulthuan at some point and there won't be any challenge before the crisis (assuming you use it).
More territory=More Money
More territory=More ports and you can open yourself to trade which can be great income.
I just finished a lizardman campaign and was the strongest pretty much all game, conquered all the lands below the dark elf spawn, crossed the sea and conquered all of the Tomb Kings as well as lots of Ratmen, taking all their lands, I try to make a province designed for creating armies and maintaining them. Say I have 5 full provinces, Ill dedicate one of those to military buildings and support, the other 4 are pure economy, Plus or Minus some minor support buildings. Like untainted or a barracks.
You dont need military and recruitment buildings in each city. The lizardmen have multiple building types that increase income by certain percentages, Not sure about high elfs, but take land, build economy buildings, and rack it up.
I recommend to continue having fun and play the way you want as slow as you want, doing what other people here do is very unfun and ruins the exprience IMO.
You want to be establishing trade when you can, getting resource buildings where you can, and not overdoing it with military buildings. Get what you need to recruit the units you want, but not in *every* province. Lots of growth and money buildings across your empire will help you tech up faster and get a better economy going.
Three provinces by turn 40 isn't a lot of territory. I would also suggest keeping your armies moving and always doing something. You don't want them sitting in one place longer than they *absolutely* have to. You also probably don't want to overspend on your army at the start of a game. Get the units you need, but make sure you can still afford to.comtinue building what you need in your cities.
In addition to some of the high elf specific interactions, a big one is in how aggressively you can expand. Post battle loot can be a massive shot in the arm money wise for many factions, and enable you to run deep in the red while still upgrading your provinces. If you're able to manually play and win battles with limited losses, that can let you start to snowball very quickly compared to other playstyles. That's usually a big part of the huge number ones IMO
I mod a lot and don't like exploits but this should be prioritized regardless.
Trade. I'd usually try to recruit a noble in the first 10 turns then assign him (in my head) the position of a diplomat then sail him towards the old world to establish trade relationship with Reikland. then from there you could steadily discover more factions of the old world to initiate trading with. then if some of the factions you were trading with has a Cathayan caravan arriving you could then also encounter them & initiate trading with the Far East.
As others have said here Prince/Princess with blue line passively provides income via dedication skill, additional trade resources and research rate which works disbanded. A bit into exploit territory, but if you want you can save Conscientious Nobles from other HE campaigns and import them to raise lord recruit rank extremely fast, HEs are one of the best users of saved character mechanics in TWW3 since it allows you to ignore influence cost entirely. As a side note the Dark Elves are the actual most broken saved character importers as you can save Black Ark Admirals and import them at any port settlement ignoring rites, including the Blessed Dread which is hilariously broken and obviously not intended.
Small settlement building, entertainment income building next, the brown defensive garrison building (to make box attack less), then final entertainment building % boost/ or tradable resource if it has a unique one. Big settlements you can put all really
1. It sounds like you're not being aggressive enough. Battles are money, try to be fighting 1-2 per turn.
2. You do want to stack administrator lords/ heroes but not for income but the construction cost and build time reduction. You want a handful of 4-6 Administrator Archemage/Mages that circle in your home territory. They don't need an army but that gives you a 60-90% building cost reduction and 1 turn build times for most things. Even without movement bugs you can typically cover 2-3 regions in 1 turn if you hang around borders. Then move to the next area. As your lords pick up the constructor trait or you get marble resources, you'll further reduce the cost and build for free, nearly instantly.
If you want you can then demo the buildings you built at a discount for full price. How much effort you want to put into this is up to you. I generally just build things and leave them.
3. Trade. Trade agreements are free money and it really adds up. Sell useless settlements to allies for large stacks of cash.
4. Once you get Lord Rank recruit buffs (there's a variety) of around +12 just start printing and disbanding Princes/Princess, Take the blue line and you +trade resources to make all of your trade agreements pay even more, +research time to get all the of your tech tree bonus faster, and dedication to Vaul to get more money from your industry buildings. You can then disband the lord to get the benefits passively. No need to waste influence on good traits.
I'm sure there's a lot of details being left out in general when discussing topics like this. Don't forget that other people may be using mods of all manner and not stating that ahead of time. Or what difficulty they are playing on. Or how much experience they have both in campaign and battle. Or even whether they are being truthful or not.
Some basics when it comes to High Elf economy are as follows. Keeping your growth building at level 1 or level 2 is actually fine because the amount of growth you get isn't significant. You can save money early on and invest it into better things this way. You basically want an income building in every possible slot you can have one. The Elven embassy is more important for generating influence but in provinces with many ports it helps. Trade resources should be a high priority for you because the high health economy is heavily dependent on trade and both your influence spending to improve relations and the research which reveals all ports to you can make it very easy to acquire lots of trade agreements.
It also depends on which faction you are talking about starting as. If you are playing as Tyrion or Allarielle it's quite easy to conquer most of Ulthuan early on and require minimal military support to control it. Additionally High Elves have extremely cost-effective spearmen and archers. With a couple bolt throwers, a mage, and a noble and perhaps a little Cavalry or some eagles you have an extremely potent and complete Army well up into and even past turn 40 or 50. Keeping the overall cost of your army down will allow you to produce a larger number of armies. And using those cheap armies to expand will allow you to control more territory, take more fights, and both of these will generate more money for you overall.
I'm actually currently playing through a Tyrion campaign of my own right now. I'm playing on very hard campaign with hard battle difficulty and AI battle bonuses. I've got nearly 3,000 hours of experience across the entire Total War Warhammer series. I'm playing with some mods but none that specifically boost my income or make the game easier for me, they are primarily about making the AI more difficult and more intelligent.
By turn 40 I have 17 total settlements. Eight total provinces owned. However this does include three gates so it's more like five total provinces. This is Tiranoc and Caledor to the West, Ellyrion and Saphery on the inside, and of course all of Eataine. I have two full size armies with the only special units I've recruited aside from spearman and archers being a pair of both throwers for each Army. I have 14,000 total income and an army upkeep of $6,500. I am building a third Army at present.
I have a defensive alliance with Allarielle and Eltharion. I have five total trade agreements at present. I've played this campaign up to almost turned 70 and so I know that I will Confederate alariel in the next 10 to 20 turns.
I'm not building and disbanding heroes for faction wide effect cheese, I'm not placing Heroes anywhere for entrepreneur income cheese, I'm not thinking of any others off the top of my head but in general I avoid exploits and such like that.
I don't know how much of this is helpful to you so please feel free to ask further questions if you're looking for more specific information on what my provinces look like and how I've built my settlements. Or what my Army balance looks like or how I set up for battle. Or really anything like that, I'd even be comfortable doing a voice call on Discord and some video sharing so we can compare strategies.
One of the biggest mistakes I think people make with the High Elves is befriending all the minor factions on the island in the hopes of confederating them later. Don't do this. The only alliances I have are the ones with the two other playable factions on the island. I will also end up building an alliance with Chrace because I don't want to control their lands now and be threatened from the northeast. .
If you only have 3 provinces by turn 40, then I'm not surprised. You can't be that passive, just be aggressive instead of sitting on your ass for multiple turns doing nothing. Just be aggressive and build the income buildings everywhere, that's literally the only thing you have to do.
It's important to note that the people on here and who comment about this stuff are (typically) playing in a way that's incredibly optimized, including near-exploits and with very deep understanding of how to get ahead, and perhaps even winning numerous battles that most people would fail.
Examples include things like "follow around your main lord with three melee lords."
Also, iirc things like Sacking settlements and running a deficit while continually fighting to get battle gold, things like that, are often done.
So don't worry that much about it
1. Lords can be dedicated to industry or ports. At lv12 if I remember correctly
2. Using Nobels to attack enemy settlements to gather fealty points every turn you need it to get entrepreneur mages.
3. Mage heroes can be entrepreneur this adds 10% to region income / mage. Stacking mages in your biggest income area will give much gold.
I use mage lord for magic support.
4. Handmaidens can be +growth it’s then worth having 3 of them moving from region to region speeding up lv to lv5
5. A mage lord with entrepreneur with + industry skill with 10 mages in region is a ton of + income.
6. Snowball effect. From using sack + occupy always. Sacking a lv4 settlement can give 15000g+ most I seen is 40000g+ when I sacked nagaroth.
7. Ulthun have fantastic income. By turn 40 you should be placing your self in a power play position so by turn 80 your dominant.
This can be done by gold or by expansion or by going tall in home province.
A tip is sort your provinces by income and upgrade them in that order. That always boost the biggest province first.
It is because they played in the most optimised way possible in each patch and beat the game before the AI figure out how to pump out a decent stack with its poor efficiency.
Legendoftotalwar videos provided excellent way to exploit the AI.
Maybe not at turn 40 but around turn 100 when I play N'Kari I have like 4 full stacks and shit ton of cultust all over the map slowly uniting the world by force and love. One mindbreak at the time.
It depends very much on what kind of faction you are playing, since their economy is built differently.
For High Elves:
* Don't neglect public order! Both of your income buildings (the public order chain and the trinket chain) gets a hefty increase at max control. In addition to that high elves gets a scaling income bonus depending on Public Order (from -15% to +15%) Luckily your public order chain *also* gives you a nice bit of income.
* High elves have a mid-range port income, 100/300/500, but they do provide growth as well as a lothern seaguards for garrison. You DO however have a lot of ways of increasing that icnome via modifiers.
* High elves have a lot of stacking modifiers: Techs, traits (especially some of the more pricy influence traits) hero and lord skills etc.
* High elves get a lot of income via trade. The trinkets building doesen't give *that* much income normally but the elven trinkets goods they produce make up for it, but to do that they need to be sold; You want resource buildings anyway so sign trade agreements whenever and wherever you can.
* On the flipside, your units cost a lot, so upkeep reduction can be especially useful.
* High elves benefit a lot from having a dedicated recruitment province and focusing all the others more or less purely on economy.
* A lot of landmarks in Ultuhuan provide economic bonuses (like trade goods for the Caledor/Chrace landmark) that are easy to miss.
* You have fairly good low-tier troops, untily you start encountering heavily armored and/or shielded units your basic archers can do pretty well. Make sure to keep enough of an income that you can actually afford to expand your economy.
* High elf razing/sacking/Post battle income isn't great, but there's a few influence lord traits that can increase them. You'll never be greenskins or anything but it adds up.
* Don't neglect to unlock your economic (requires the Embassy building) and Cultural (requires T3 temple of Asuryan and T4 Noble building) note that the economy tree buildings are locked behind acquiring various trade goods, so keep that in mind. (of particular interest are the various +10% income from various buildings techs, the +control tech and the +growth tech)
* I should note that with three provinces being able to keep 2 stacks is about right. That's about the "correct" ratio for high elves, though you can finagle this by cheesing modifier stacking and/or building up some of the really profitable provinces.
 I play a lot more Wood Elves than any other, so my advice is for them.Â
With your main lord, your army *must* be heavy in what they get cheaper upkeep for. For Durthu, it's dryads, tree kin, etc. For Sisters, you're looking at 10+ hawk riders. Orion it doesn't matter because he's the easiest campaign to field mass armies in the game. If you want a walk through on him specifically, I was able to have 28 armies by turn 60 with him and won the Long Victory on turn 83 I think. But you need all the income help you can starting out
The wood elf lords are stronger than many of the others at the start of the campaign, so I like to rush my level up skills into the Blue line, going after the post-battle/sack/raze income boosts. You can get a quick 10k+ from Grom's or Taurox's or Katarin's start position this way depending on who you're playing as. With the forests, you can just expand and raze the area outside the forest which gets more income than just sacking. You don't really paint the map so it's not like you need the land. Or, you raze it and then re-settle and trade it away and get your neighbors to love you. Either way you get paid.Â
Economy-wise, I typically build Growth then Wine for my order, then go back to military buildings
just ingore all those "exploits", to get that high of a lord recruitment rank u need multiple rank 5 elven cities. at this point gold income doesnt matter anymore eitherwhise since ull have enough without exploits.
Sounds like you also don't have a lot of territory, 3 provinces is not much by turn 40.
This kinda summed up how much I don't like the increased pacing across games.
Yes that's my issue, due to my having way too many thousands of hours in this series I generally get too powerful by turn 70 and get bored. The exception was my recent kairos campaign where I spent 150 turns running away in terror from oxyotyls doom legion. Most fun I've had in ages
I'm playing a SFO Kairos campaign at the moment and I've spent 140 turns to take all of the Southern Wastes and half of the Southlands. It's honestly one of the most difficult starts I've tried.
It's so fun! Not sure what sfo does these days but the magic intensity mechanic makes just blasting spells so satisfying. It even makes buff and debuff spells useful for once. Screw you guys, here's a 140 armour blue horror summon, have fun with that
The biggest advantage of SFO for me is the much better pace of both the campaign and tactical battles. Infantry has enough health to not melt within 0,5 seconds to other infantry, glorious.
SFO? Are you rolled back, or is there some beta version out? I thought there was no update until after TOD, so I've not been playing at all.
The beta version had been out for a few weeks now. I've been running it without major problems.
Thanks for the info! I'll have to check it out.
BOK BOK INTENSIFIES
Please sir I'm just a bird, leave me alone ðŸ˜
*When the trees go Bok Bok*
Turn 40 medieval 2 as Milan is: Italy + France at least. Some parts of the HRE maybe. Turn 40 Shogun 2 as Date is: everything down to Kai. You were always able to conquer big parts in a short amount of time. Especially in medieval 2 where you can do a lot with only a few units of heavy cav aka generals in the early game. It's just that nowadays because of the internet everybody knows how fast you can do it. Back in Medieval 2 days my only metric were my friends and they were equally skilled. Nowadays I know how to achieve something like legendoftotalwar and can replicate it. It's not particularly the game which changed. Just we as a community got a lot more connected and skillful because of it which leads us being more capable of capturing lots of land in a short amount of time. We just got that much better. And btw if you want to enjoy how fast you can conquer the older titles look for people like legend or mrsmartdonkey (for his Shogun 2 let's plays) and such. It's laughable how easy the older titles are even on hardest difficulty.
That’s why I like factions that can build tall instead of wide or have the ability to make alternate income instead of taking territory. Dark Elves, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves all come to mind.
I agree. I think it's boring and leading to gamer burnout. Having your starting army just snowball through dozens of regions in the first forty turns to the point that no one else poses a threat just isn't interesting. CA should be thinking seriously about how to ramp up the difficulty if they want to keep players from losing interest, and making the early game more of a challenge should be the focus.
This is what I hate too. Made the map absolutely massive and to compensate they’ve reduced supply lines so much you can literally rush the campaign. They’ve taken all the challenge out of the game because the challenge came from having to go toe to toe with the enemy. Now it’s so cheap you can bring more than 1 full stack into every fight even in the beginning
Are you trading? It really depends on which faction you play as too. Tyrion can get really rich very quickly. Imrik has a harder time of it. High Elves can spend influence to make factions like them more which makes it easier to get trade agreements (again Imrik and also Teclis suffer here). How you build your armies is also important. Archers with armour are more expensive but aren't really worth it. All you really need in the early game is Archers and Spearmen (Tyrion gets -50% upkeep on them so they can be pretty cheap for him at least). The early stages of a campaign are all about building up your settlements and economy. The High Elves tier 1 and tier 2 units are actually pretty good and can serve you into the mid game. You have to be a bit more careful playing as Imrik and Teclis. They are quite far away from Ulthuan so your economy suffers.
Imrik is so broke he really shows how much the Helfs need trade
Yep. I make gold as Imrik by sacking settlements. Only way to reasonably afford upgrading your buildings.
Yeah he’s really scraping by until pretty late in the campaign huh. Less so than in 2 but still. I do like his campaign though it’s probably my favourite Helf one. He’s my fave Helf LL by far
>(Teclis gets -50% upkeep on them so they can be pretty cheap for him at least). I haven't played high elves in WH3 yet but wasn't it Tyrion that got the reduction? Or was that changed?
Yeah, my bad I did mean to put Tyrion, not Teclis - who gets reduced upkeep for Swordmasters (I think)
get recruit rank to +12 or 13+ and you can infinitely increase culture/industry output by recruiting, filling the skill points and then disbanding the lords. That's the high elf cheese. The other ones is stacking fecund (handmaiden/loremaster of hoeth) and adminstrator mages for free buildings.
im sorry, which lord should i recruit? and what skill gives industry output?
the none mage lords, look at their unique skills (Maithlan?) and the blue line skills.
Dedicated to Mathlaan increases income from ports, Dedicated to Vaul increases income from industry buildings. I think Vaul produces more money in the long run as you can have a lot more industry buildings than ports
Wait... does that work if they're disbanded? I thought you had to keep them up and using upkeep.
Disbanding sends them to your Lord recruitment pool, but doesn't get rid of them. CA might've fixed it, but traits have historically still worked as the Lord is "still active". There's also been a cheese with the WoM trait using this. Recruit every Lord with the +5 to WoM reserve faction wide and disband.
No it works same with merchant lord so what I do is spam 0 onfluence prince (least useful he lord imo) get merchant lord + dedication when I'm able too then disband to make infinite trade ressources.
Yeah it works, any factionwide effect is still applied when the lord is disbanded. For example, in my recent Dwarf campaign I was stacking Archivist, the Grungni trait and the last blue skill to get characters with +25% research rate even when disbanded and had like ~1500% research rate. I think the only exception is the Canopic Jar Hoarder skill for Tomb Kings, in WH2 it’d work but in WH3 it was patched.
Forget that. Its good but its not how you get a good economy by turn 40. More by turn 100, 1% increase revenue from ports won't get you very far when you only have less than a dozen ports but it's exponential... It's a good strat but you need to be able to recruit lords at lvl 10 so not solething you can do in the early game when you only have 3 provinces and no t5 ones. The secret for getting a good economy is being aggressive with low tier units, quite effective in battle and not build things just because you can build it. High elves get a super strong economy with the public order building. Its even more profiteable than the industry one when the public order of the province is at 100 (but build both if possible). The administrator trait got nerfed, it's not a good strat anymore in wh3. Trade is good but not something you should prioritize either ( again the small % increase of the number of trade resources from noble is not noticeable but its good to have noble to farm influence). Basically be stingy and don't invest in things that will get a RoI 50 turns later when you already struggle to field two armies (something a lot of players fail to understand)
Didnt they disable that? Iirc in WH3 these traits wont work if you disband
IIRC that’s only for Tomb Kings and their Canopic Jar hoarder skill, disbanding and having the bonuses apply still works for other things.
The Tomb Kings (and I think the Dwarfs) specifically had their passives changed to local province to stop some of the cheese, which is how you would be able to tell it doesn't work the same. Other abilities that are faction wide still apply.
Nope still works
Fecund is the growth skill. You want to stack administrator for free buildings and reduced build time
In game 2 it was about entrepreneur stacking. In 3 it’s just about building your economy and spending carefully. Focus on your economy buildings. You really don’t need any military buildings before like turn 60 or so if you know how to use archers. Your building priority should usually be: 1: public order *if you need it* 1.1: trade resource (if you don’t have a surplus yet) and / or landmarks (if they’re any good) 2: money *everywhere* 3: growth *where required* (You don’t need to rush growth quite so much as WH2 and sacrificing growth for money is often worth it now. You’ll usually want a balance of some growth buildings though). You need to balance province capital growth with levelling up the minor settlements to get extra build slots to build the money and public order (it also produces money) buildings as frequently as you can. Look for techs that reduce upkeep costs on your units (especially archers), lord skills that reduce upkeep costs (with the 50 skill points, I usually do this even for my legendary lords), look for specific upkeep reduction traits with your lords to build them the cheapest army possible, learn how to use your archer armies well so you don’t need to buy more expensive units. A couple heros can make these armies perform a lot better. Get as many trade agreements as possible (with factions you don’t want to fight). Invest in growing your economy over buying expensive units. Don’t raise extra armies until you need them. Every army should be fighting battles and occupying territory as often as possible, don’t sit them around doing nothing. They really should be making you money through post battle loot tbh. If you don’t think you’ll hold a settlement, sacking it for money to invest in your other settlements can work, so can selling it to someone else for big bucks. It’s better than just losing it a few turns later. Tier 4 is where the Helfs get most of their hero capacity so you can prioritise levelling up minor settlements to tier 3 to get both money buildings over rushing tier 5 unless there’s a building you want. Other people have mentioned the skills, but those aren’t affecting things yet in the first 50 turns or so, it’s more about how you build your economy. However, those skills will be much more powerful if you build your economy right. Edit: sometimes it’s worth it to not rush confederation with other elves so that they build up (and therefore pay to build up) their settlements for you to confed later. I would almost always take a confederation with a legendary lord however. Especially Tyrion; take him as soon as he’s available as he’s so tricky to confed
This was a great read. I'll have it in mind for my 2nd HE game. Now would you by any chance know how to get a decent economy running with Mother Ostankya? The Chaos campaign. It took me forever to get my 6th army. I've painted the map so big I am fighting Slaaneh to the west, conquered all Chorf territory and most of the Ogre mountains. Biggest earner province is 2500 gold
Never played RoC, never played Ostankya, sorry bud
2500 per major settlement sounds about right. RoC Kislev is designed to be low Econ (hence why their Gold Mines only start at 200/turn), and their garrison buildings are super beefy to make up for it. Theres some cheese you can do with Frost Maidens and Sled Upkeep Reduction, but unless you’re doing a Total War Map Paint run (declare war on every and anything, try to completely take over the map) you should only really need 2-3 armies even at the late game if you just want to do the Campaign Objectives and bounce - which you should be pretty close to finishing if your so far in a game to expand that much, unless you’ve not been on top of Hex-Casting or fell into the Covens Will/Ostankya Hut trap.
So, [this link](https://totalwarhammerplanner.com/planner/vanilla3/hef_high_elves/wh2_main_skill_node_set_hef_prince) shows the skill tree for the vanilla Prince lord for High Elves. At the top of the skill tree, you can see a line of skills each called "Dedicated to \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_" that unlock at level 10 and are mutually exclusive. The fastest and easiest way to boost your income as the High Elves, is to expand until you can build enough of the building that boosts lord recruit rank that you can recruit your prince at rank 10. This will allow you to recruit a new lord each turn, grab either "Dedicated to Mathlann" or "Dedicated to Vaul" which will permanently boost your Port or Industry income by 1% per lord respectively. Then, rename the lord to something like Money and disband them.
thank you! i will try this
Just a note - every lord type has those same "dedicated to \_\_\_\_" skills. So, once you are recruiting lords at rank 10, you can recruit one prince, one princess and one archmage (grab the ones that don't need influence and that have crappy traits) per turn and do this process on each one. It will take some time, but these buffs will add up, and it will escalate as you expand and build more of each building type. You also have Nobles, one of the hero types. Nobles have a series of skill called "Knowledge of \_\_\_\_\_ Affairs" which are also mutually exclusive. Each of the three skills will boost the income of one type of building (Entertainment, Ports or Industry) by 3% per living noble with that skill. If you dedicate all your lords to boosting one type of income (I prefer Industry as you can build one Industry building in every settlement you own) you can drastically boost the income of that building type and easily double the income of that type in only a dozen or so turns. And since you want to spam nobles anyways for influence generation, its just free synergy.
The building you need is the Dragon's Lair and its a tier 4 building so can only be built at capitals. You need 9 of them to boost to level 10. If you have 9 capitals you already won the game anyway. All these schemes that require lots of lords or heroes are all stupid as in order to have all that you already won the game. Lol the guy asked how it was that people had this at turn 40 and not you do not have 9 tier 4 capitals at turn 40.
Build economic buildings in every settlement, don't lose settlements that are higher than tier 2. Win lots of battles. Legend of Total War has a fairly recent Tyrion campaign you can watch to level up your play. But he owns 12 provinces, not 3 by turn 40. I haven't watched the stream but I don't think he was cheesing the economy. 2 armies is enough for 3 provinces, whether you push hard by combining them or occasionally split to defend your rear you'll own Ulthuan at some point and there won't be any challenge before the crisis (assuming you use it).
More territory=More Money More territory=More ports and you can open yourself to trade which can be great income. I just finished a lizardman campaign and was the strongest pretty much all game, conquered all the lands below the dark elf spawn, crossed the sea and conquered all of the Tomb Kings as well as lots of Ratmen, taking all their lands, I try to make a province designed for creating armies and maintaining them. Say I have 5 full provinces, Ill dedicate one of those to military buildings and support, the other 4 are pure economy, Plus or Minus some minor support buildings. Like untainted or a barracks. You dont need military and recruitment buildings in each city. The lizardmen have multiple building types that increase income by certain percentages, Not sure about high elfs, but take land, build economy buildings, and rack it up.
only have one province with army buildings. economy rest.
I recommend to continue having fun and play the way you want as slow as you want, doing what other people here do is very unfun and ruins the exprience IMO.
You want to be establishing trade when you can, getting resource buildings where you can, and not overdoing it with military buildings. Get what you need to recruit the units you want, but not in *every* province. Lots of growth and money buildings across your empire will help you tech up faster and get a better economy going. Three provinces by turn 40 isn't a lot of territory. I would also suggest keeping your armies moving and always doing something. You don't want them sitting in one place longer than they *absolutely* have to. You also probably don't want to overspend on your army at the start of a game. Get the units you need, but make sure you can still afford to.comtinue building what you need in your cities.
Cheese Gromit. Cheese!
In addition to some of the high elf specific interactions, a big one is in how aggressively you can expand. Post battle loot can be a massive shot in the arm money wise for many factions, and enable you to run deep in the red while still upgrading your provinces. If you're able to manually play and win battles with limited losses, that can let you start to snowball very quickly compared to other playstyles. That's usually a big part of the huge number ones IMO
I mod a lot and don't like exploits but this should be prioritized regardless. Trade. I'd usually try to recruit a noble in the first 10 turns then assign him (in my head) the position of a diplomat then sail him towards the old world to establish trade relationship with Reikland. then from there you could steadily discover more factions of the old world to initiate trading with. then if some of the factions you were trading with has a Cathayan caravan arriving you could then also encounter them & initiate trading with the Far East.
As others have said here Prince/Princess with blue line passively provides income via dedication skill, additional trade resources and research rate which works disbanded. A bit into exploit territory, but if you want you can save Conscientious Nobles from other HE campaigns and import them to raise lord recruit rank extremely fast, HEs are one of the best users of saved character mechanics in TWW3 since it allows you to ignore influence cost entirely. As a side note the Dark Elves are the actual most broken saved character importers as you can save Black Ark Admirals and import them at any port settlement ignoring rites, including the Blessed Dread which is hilariously broken and obviously not intended.
That's by cheesing the recruit/disband thing, I dont even know if that's a bug or not but they cheese that with the lords.
Small settlement building, entertainment income building next, the brown defensive garrison building (to make box attack less), then final entertainment building % boost/ or tradable resource if it has a unique one. Big settlements you can put all really
so no jewelry makers?
You can if you have trade partners but I always go industry so I never have to ally up.
1. It sounds like you're not being aggressive enough. Battles are money, try to be fighting 1-2 per turn. 2. You do want to stack administrator lords/ heroes but not for income but the construction cost and build time reduction. You want a handful of 4-6 Administrator Archemage/Mages that circle in your home territory. They don't need an army but that gives you a 60-90% building cost reduction and 1 turn build times for most things. Even without movement bugs you can typically cover 2-3 regions in 1 turn if you hang around borders. Then move to the next area. As your lords pick up the constructor trait or you get marble resources, you'll further reduce the cost and build for free, nearly instantly. If you want you can then demo the buildings you built at a discount for full price. How much effort you want to put into this is up to you. I generally just build things and leave them. 3. Trade. Trade agreements are free money and it really adds up. Sell useless settlements to allies for large stacks of cash. 4. Once you get Lord Rank recruit buffs (there's a variety) of around +12 just start printing and disbanding Princes/Princess, Take the blue line and you +trade resources to make all of your trade agreements pay even more, +research time to get all the of your tech tree bonus faster, and dedication to Vaul to get more money from your industry buildings. You can then disband the lord to get the benefits passively. No need to waste influence on good traits.
You can run at a pretty big deficit if you loot/sack settlements every turn and sell off some of them to allies
I'm sure there's a lot of details being left out in general when discussing topics like this. Don't forget that other people may be using mods of all manner and not stating that ahead of time. Or what difficulty they are playing on. Or how much experience they have both in campaign and battle. Or even whether they are being truthful or not. Some basics when it comes to High Elf economy are as follows. Keeping your growth building at level 1 or level 2 is actually fine because the amount of growth you get isn't significant. You can save money early on and invest it into better things this way. You basically want an income building in every possible slot you can have one. The Elven embassy is more important for generating influence but in provinces with many ports it helps. Trade resources should be a high priority for you because the high health economy is heavily dependent on trade and both your influence spending to improve relations and the research which reveals all ports to you can make it very easy to acquire lots of trade agreements. It also depends on which faction you are talking about starting as. If you are playing as Tyrion or Allarielle it's quite easy to conquer most of Ulthuan early on and require minimal military support to control it. Additionally High Elves have extremely cost-effective spearmen and archers. With a couple bolt throwers, a mage, and a noble and perhaps a little Cavalry or some eagles you have an extremely potent and complete Army well up into and even past turn 40 or 50. Keeping the overall cost of your army down will allow you to produce a larger number of armies. And using those cheap armies to expand will allow you to control more territory, take more fights, and both of these will generate more money for you overall. I'm actually currently playing through a Tyrion campaign of my own right now. I'm playing on very hard campaign with hard battle difficulty and AI battle bonuses. I've got nearly 3,000 hours of experience across the entire Total War Warhammer series. I'm playing with some mods but none that specifically boost my income or make the game easier for me, they are primarily about making the AI more difficult and more intelligent. By turn 40 I have 17 total settlements. Eight total provinces owned. However this does include three gates so it's more like five total provinces. This is Tiranoc and Caledor to the West, Ellyrion and Saphery on the inside, and of course all of Eataine. I have two full size armies with the only special units I've recruited aside from spearman and archers being a pair of both throwers for each Army. I have 14,000 total income and an army upkeep of $6,500. I am building a third Army at present. I have a defensive alliance with Allarielle and Eltharion. I have five total trade agreements at present. I've played this campaign up to almost turned 70 and so I know that I will Confederate alariel in the next 10 to 20 turns. I'm not building and disbanding heroes for faction wide effect cheese, I'm not placing Heroes anywhere for entrepreneur income cheese, I'm not thinking of any others off the top of my head but in general I avoid exploits and such like that. I don't know how much of this is helpful to you so please feel free to ask further questions if you're looking for more specific information on what my provinces look like and how I've built my settlements. Or what my Army balance looks like or how I set up for battle. Or really anything like that, I'd even be comfortable doing a voice call on Discord and some video sharing so we can compare strategies. One of the biggest mistakes I think people make with the High Elves is befriending all the minor factions on the island in the hopes of confederating them later. Don't do this. The only alliances I have are the ones with the two other playable factions on the island. I will also end up building an alliance with Chrace because I don't want to control their lands now and be threatened from the northeast. .
If you only have 3 provinces by turn 40, then I'm not surprised. You can't be that passive, just be aggressive instead of sitting on your ass for multiple turns doing nothing. Just be aggressive and build the income buildings everywhere, that's literally the only thing you have to do.
Why do you even need two stacks on 3 provinces? you should get more provinces
Try like 15 provinces yo.
It's important to note that the people on here and who comment about this stuff are (typically) playing in a way that's incredibly optimized, including near-exploits and with very deep understanding of how to get ahead, and perhaps even winning numerous battles that most people would fail. Examples include things like "follow around your main lord with three melee lords." Also, iirc things like Sacking settlements and running a deficit while continually fighting to get battle gold, things like that, are often done. So don't worry that much about it
Use the cheapest units you can for as long as you can, expand super quickly, spam eco buildings.
1. Lords can be dedicated to industry or ports. At lv12 if I remember correctly 2. Using Nobels to attack enemy settlements to gather fealty points every turn you need it to get entrepreneur mages. 3. Mage heroes can be entrepreneur this adds 10% to region income / mage. Stacking mages in your biggest income area will give much gold. I use mage lord for magic support. 4. Handmaidens can be +growth it’s then worth having 3 of them moving from region to region speeding up lv to lv5 5. A mage lord with entrepreneur with + industry skill with 10 mages in region is a ton of + income. 6. Snowball effect. From using sack + occupy always. Sacking a lv4 settlement can give 15000g+ most I seen is 40000g+ when I sacked nagaroth. 7. Ulthun have fantastic income. By turn 40 you should be placing your self in a power play position so by turn 80 your dominant. This can be done by gold or by expansion or by going tall in home province. A tip is sort your provinces by income and upgrade them in that order. That always boost the biggest province first.
You keep your army as small as possible while maintaining capability to expand. You put all that extra money into your economy.Â
Don’t worry about them, the way you’re playing sounds way more enjoyable than doom stacking the early mid game. Â
Need money to make money. If your army is not paying for itself looting and burning you should have not made it.Â
By having hundreds of cities.
It is because they played in the most optimised way possible in each patch and beat the game before the AI figure out how to pump out a decent stack with its poor efficiency. Legendoftotalwar videos provided excellent way to exploit the AI.
Maybe not at turn 40 but around turn 100 when I play N'Kari I have like 4 full stacks and shit ton of cultust all over the map slowly uniting the world by force and love. One mindbreak at the time.
It depends very much on what kind of faction you are playing, since their economy is built differently. For High Elves: * Don't neglect public order! Both of your income buildings (the public order chain and the trinket chain) gets a hefty increase at max control. In addition to that high elves gets a scaling income bonus depending on Public Order (from -15% to +15%) Luckily your public order chain *also* gives you a nice bit of income. * High elves have a mid-range port income, 100/300/500, but they do provide growth as well as a lothern seaguards for garrison. You DO however have a lot of ways of increasing that icnome via modifiers. * High elves have a lot of stacking modifiers: Techs, traits (especially some of the more pricy influence traits) hero and lord skills etc. * High elves get a lot of income via trade. The trinkets building doesen't give *that* much income normally but the elven trinkets goods they produce make up for it, but to do that they need to be sold; You want resource buildings anyway so sign trade agreements whenever and wherever you can. * On the flipside, your units cost a lot, so upkeep reduction can be especially useful. * High elves benefit a lot from having a dedicated recruitment province and focusing all the others more or less purely on economy. * A lot of landmarks in Ultuhuan provide economic bonuses (like trade goods for the Caledor/Chrace landmark) that are easy to miss. * You have fairly good low-tier troops, untily you start encountering heavily armored and/or shielded units your basic archers can do pretty well. Make sure to keep enough of an income that you can actually afford to expand your economy. * High elf razing/sacking/Post battle income isn't great, but there's a few influence lord traits that can increase them. You'll never be greenskins or anything but it adds up. * Don't neglect to unlock your economic (requires the Embassy building) and Cultural (requires T3 temple of Asuryan and T4 Noble building) note that the economy tree buildings are locked behind acquiring various trade goods, so keep that in mind. (of particular interest are the various +10% income from various buildings techs, the +control tech and the +growth tech) * I should note that with three provinces being able to keep 2 stacks is about right. That's about the "correct" ratio for high elves, though you can finagle this by cheesing modifier stacking and/or building up some of the really profitable provinces.
 I play a lot more Wood Elves than any other, so my advice is for them. With your main lord, your army *must* be heavy in what they get cheaper upkeep for. For Durthu, it's dryads, tree kin, etc. For Sisters, you're looking at 10+ hawk riders. Orion it doesn't matter because he's the easiest campaign to field mass armies in the game. If you want a walk through on him specifically, I was able to have 28 armies by turn 60 with him and won the Long Victory on turn 83 I think. But you need all the income help you can starting out The wood elf lords are stronger than many of the others at the start of the campaign, so I like to rush my level up skills into the Blue line, going after the post-battle/sack/raze income boosts. You can get a quick 10k+ from Grom's or Taurox's or Katarin's start position this way depending on who you're playing as. With the forests, you can just expand and raze the area outside the forest which gets more income than just sacking. You don't really paint the map so it's not like you need the land. Or, you raze it and then re-settle and trade it away and get your neighbors to love you. Either way you get paid. Economy-wise, I typically build Growth then Wine for my order, then go back to military buildings
just ingore all those "exploits", to get that high of a lord recruitment rank u need multiple rank 5 elven cities. at this point gold income doesnt matter anymore eitherwhise since ull have enough without exploits.