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Which bits are you having most trouble with?
Have turn based campaigns and a pause button for battles. Take time you need to learn the basics, and never be afraid of save scrubbing, even if it’s just to redo an army move that ended up going poorly.
Oh and save often lol
You’ll get it in time, these aren’t most convoluted games ever but like been playing them over two decades and was really only after first that I started to “git gud” myself, tho I rarely look for guides etc, just like learning through my own trial and error. One could prob pick them up much faster using guides etc but, eh, where’s fun in that I say.
Familiarity with the units will come with experience; like autoresolve might say you have a pyrrhic victory against a chaos horde filled with chosen and then you fight it on the field and get absolutely massacred, (because chosen are savage.) Some units really overperform on the field and chosen are one of them- but their weakness is speed. They slow af, so if you fight that on the field with a bunch of Eshin or Oxyotl skirmishers you can easily outpace them while shooting them the whole time. Same for black orcs, strong but slow.
Terrain stuff can be huge, too. Uphill, downhill, woods, water, etc. Like if you're fighting large units or lots of cavalry: fight in the woods and they'll get something like an 80% debuff to their attack. Or maybe you're using aquatic or large units and there's a shallow lake or a river or w/e: try and get the enemy to engage you in the water. Small units will be at a disadvantage while large units will remain unaffected.
Even just for fighting stuff like archer heavy armies, the woods can be your friend. Firing out of the forest should work normally/well enough, but for the enemy firing into the forest: a lot of those shots will get blocked.
And think of the entire enemy army as their morale, look around those grey bars as you fight and kill the fullest. Generally the morale of melee units is worth more than the missiles/minor flyers, so when you wipe the melee (and their leaders) out the rest will crumble. Artillery are also big morale points and good to get rid of asap, so usually worth sacrificing a unit of flyers or dogs to make sure they never get to fire.
Anyways, that's my coffee finished. GL!
Unless my army is objectively better, I don't really know how to handles the battles. Where to position the units, what units to mix and match and what not.
I don't know how to really expand and where, what buildings to build and in what order and sieges especially are a nightmare for me.
Well TW 101: build growth first. Don't overexpand. Don't let any settlements get sacked, play the defense game until your home province is secure, (this used to mean make walls everywhere asap, but CA took them out for minor settlements when misunderstanding feedback.) When you play defensive like this you can keep your military costs low (cuz you don't have to defend 2 huge provinces,) and develop fast. Can also make plenty of gold off of invaders- use ambush a lot. Can't stress that enough- become familiar with the workings of ambushing and TW life gets a lot easier.
For the battle stuff an easy learning experience is steam tanks (or heroes before you get the tanks) and a good line of rifles, like 5 units of them. You put the heroes/tanks out front in the firing range of the rifles, spaced not too far apart, so that the enemy won't just run past them in the gaps. Have the bulk of your melee to the sides and a bit forward. Enemy goes for your heroes/tanks, the rifles shoot them like fish in a barrel as they cluster up, easy peasy. Add a life mage to keep the tanks healthy and you're laughin.
That's just one way you could do things. Like with Slaanesh (all fast melee) it's better to swarm the enemy- holding off the charge until you've fully surrounded them. Then when you do charge everything just gets deleted. You can deal with missiles by having N'kari just run around because he's basically a big spicy Burter, can dodge arrows with ease.
Diplomacy: be selective, make sure to check who an AI hates/likes before you make any deals with them. Try and form groups of very like minded empires and eventually you'll be like an order/chaostide. Just hold off on actually allying factions that are struggling as it will cripple them financially (removes some AI cheats.)
https://www.youtube.com/@Zerkovich
If you want to learn about exploits and cheese, Legend of Total War is all about that stuff. He's well regarded by some.
In the end, the important thing is to have fun. I recommend considering the game making a dynamic 'story', and like all good stories, it's not about winning all the time. Either that or save scum like a bas... person of uncertain parentage.
The Empire really sucks in battle until you understand their unit mechanics. I have honestly never seen empire infantry do much of anything useful besides acting as a speed bump. If you want something dead you need to rely on the infantry as a speed bump and something else as the tool for inflicting losses. I will try to list out what has worked for me with the empire.
1. Flank the enemy that is caught on your infantry with cavalry, or more infantry if you have to. I wouldn't recommend this beyond a supplemental tool. Also with things like cavalry you want them constantly charging, pulling out, and charging again. Treat them like a ping pong ball if you can. This is because they have a charge bonus. That charge bonus increases some of their stats by that charge bonus amount, but only when they charge into something (I can explain more if you'd like). I wouldn't recommend cycle charging with your infantry, unless an enemy is about to break and you want a bit of shock value. Disengaging is likely going to expose the infantry to a fair number of losses for a meager charge bonus. Flanking is important because units have way worse defense from the rear/side, and it inflicts leadership penalties. Also watch out for some units like spear men, they have a trait that nullifies the charge bonus. If you charge them, do it in the rear.
2. Use some artillery to soften up the enemy. Your best bet here are the mortars, and the hellstorms. You can use them to chew up enemies on their approach and force them to come to you. It works best on bunched up numerous units so target them if you can. Also two things to note. First turn on guard mode. It keeps them from pursuing enemies. If you don't they will walk into your front line. The second thing, and this really mainly goes for mortars, hold alt and right click on the ground. This tells your artillery to target that point. The circle shows the likely area the shots will land in. With mortars this is really good for destroying massed blobs engaged in your front line. Don't try this with the hellstorms it will probably nuke your own army.
3. The empire needs its ranged units, and this will be the hardest part to get right. The crossbows will work, but the handgunners are awesome. You will need to restructure your front line to leave gaps for the handgunners to fire through. The crossbows will fire over but don't do nearly as much damage as a well optimized formation of handgunners. You also will want to turn on guard mode, and also turn of skirmish mode. Ideally you want to do a sort of checkerboard formation vs a solid front line. Then you charge your infantry into approaching enemies when they get too close. This allows your rifles to constantly fire and really do a lot of damage. Once you get comfortable with doing it the empire can melt a lot of things before they get close. I wont try to explain formations for the empire, so I found a video on YouTube that does it better than I could. Also late game try replacing two hand gunners with volley guns. You wont be disappointed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6-CuXWIWOI
https://youtu.be/pCHwQwtqPco
Handgunners are vastly superior, but it requires setting them up properly to ensure they have line-of-sight. Either checker-board formation, or having them elevated (on a hill) above your melee troops, so they can fire over them.
They're one of the most important units for Empire, and there's a lot of YouTube vids on how to use them effectively.
Another little snippet of wisdom is to have a Warrior-Priest embedded into your armies for the +Replenishment (which is invaluable for recovering losses quickly after a difficult battle).
Have you tried Greenskins? I think they are much more forgiving to learn with and the Waaagh! Mechanic can bail you out now and then.
When I first started I learned the most from watching YouTube videos and playing a lot of custom battles. With custom battles I was able to figure out what units worked best and how to use them a heck of a lot faster than building them during a campaign game and then figuring out i had a crap army composition.
They don't have the most going on campaign wise or be a bit over tuned so people tend to get bored of most of them. but you get really good infantry as a blunt instrument, skinks give you some experience with skirmishing and the importance of status effects, dinos are totally viable and teach how to use single entities, and they have a bit of casting but its not something you absolutely need to find success.
And even if you mess up, they've got good enough stat lines you won't lose because you forgot your infantry line on one side for 20 seconds and oh now the entire line is routing or you misbalanced an army and just have too much/not enough melee. They have really solid base stats across the board and ridiculous leadership out of the gate.
They do have weak cav IIRC and their only artillery is also on huge dinos but otherwise I find them to be a good introductory faction. Both of those things tend to be a bit higher skill requirement just in micro and minding friendly fire. Good tools once you have them, but I'd focus on the very basics of infantry management, working with lords and heroes, and how single entities work before getting into more micro-intensive strategies.
Especially with Lustria being safer you get a lot more discretion in where you fight as opposed to the empire which has about five different fires to put out from turn three. They also have pretty clear cut allies and enemies from the get go whereas I found empire to have a lot of making temporary non-aggression if possible with people you were going to have to fight but didn't want to yet and the High Elf isle just in general awful to actually get anything done on since *everywhere* is so defensible.
My other big piece of advice is manual everything at first, you might do worse than the autoresolve for a while, but you will eventually do better than it even on battles where it thinks you win just fine and that makes your opening stronger, especially in weak replenishment factions. Plus you very much do not want your first time actually figuring out how your units work on the field to be a 20 vs 40 close defeat on an army you can't afford to lose. Even the early ones where its just starting army vs the army of 5 or 6 units will teach you a bit about how you are supposed to play the faction and what the various units actually do in practical terms.
I'd also recommend manualing a couple battles when you make a new army with a notably different composition or introduce a few units you haven't used before in an existing army. For Lizards that might be when you throw a few pterodactyls into the mix and want to experiment with how flying units work.
When you get comfortable in battle and get an eye for how many casualties auto-resolve will do vs how many you'd take yourself, that's when I'd say you should start using auto more. Especially since even at a middling skill level you can also get one step better than the auto gives, e.g. close defeat to Pyrrhic victory, Pyrrhic victory to close victory. Even in defeat you might learn you can take out some key units like a piece of artillery or manage to wound a hero even in decisive defeats so your next fight will be easier instead of AR where they get 15% damage on everything and heal up in one turn.