How are you meant to even get off the ground as Slaanesh in IE

[Hive tyrant JC]

So i tried slaanesh in immortal empires and i have no idea how i am meant to get anywhere considered all the high elves declare war on me especially with the elf from warden and the paunch coming with 2 full stacks of nothing but spear men and archers. I have 2 provinces and can barely have a single army of cheap units. No idea how i am meant to win considering there are no allies i can make or any other enemy that can distract the elves to not have them all charge me within the first few turns.

I read some guides saying "survive the elf attacks and corrupt them" but how exactly am i meant to do that when they all have at least 2 full stacks of better units than me while im stuck with a single army of cheap weak units.

[misternoxxnoxx]

IDK I find Slaanesh very easy to start off with. You can ally with the Dark Elf faction to your left if you feel like it. I attack right first the minor elf and Yvresse. Ambush ALL the time - this is a great way to farm Disciples. I can get up to 1500 in one ambush in ideal circumstances. With that you can summon full stack Disciple Armies... go from there! 🤷‍♀️

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by Hive tyrant JC:

So i tried slaanesh in immortal empires and i have no idea how i am meant to get anywhere considered all the high elves declare war on me especially with the elf from warden and the paunch coming with 2 full stacks of nothing but spear men and archers. I have 2 provinces and can barely have a single army of cheap units. No idea how i am meant to win considering there are no allies i can make or any other enemy that can distract the elves to not have them all charge me within the first few turns.

I read some guides saying "survive the elf attacks and corrupt them" but how exactly am i meant to do that when they all have at least 2 full stacks of better units than me while im stuck with a single army of cheap weak units.

I'd argue that all the elves declaring war on you is a good thing for Slaanesh, allows you to build Seductive Influence with their factions then forcefully vassalize them.

So unlikely other faction you don't need to win the war, You just need to survive until they start calling you their daddy.

[F0X7]

2 armies of cheap units can decimate any one army of tier 3 and under. I beat a modified RoR campaign with them, and I found that setting up ambushes with one army in the woods where you get a ~70% base chance to ambush next to an army out in the open letting them come to you is the most effective. And spamming cults with your heroes is easiest way to either expand territory or vassalize or just to keep your income up. So they are a lot like the vampire coast in that regard.

[AurumHawke]

Archers are near-useless when caught in melee or sent flying, and you have a N'kari that can run through them. There's also a peculiar interaction where routing (including terrified) units instantly die when sent flying by N'kari. Might need the accel/de-accel banner for it, N'kari had over 176 speed when I first noticed it.

Disciple armies spawn with full available movement and each army can summon one every 5 turns, with a 15 turn limit on the province it was done in.
Also use a disciple army as the primary attacker when defeating Alarielle - her defeat trait is terrible.
Lord-only armies are very useful when you need to keep a main army moving - Chaos Warrior lords get a special mention due to Shield, Armor, and starting traits (Scaled Skin).
And you want to reinforce your own armies as often as possible for the diplomacy follower - if a cult spawns in the north you can snag a nice confederation (up to 2 provinces if they have enough army left to race Sigvald at defeating the Khorne faction). South has a province too, but it has no landmarks and isn't near anything worthwhile.

You can force-vassalize the elf factions at their last remaining settlement - they may be near-useless or even a nuisance racing for territory but you get devotees, including a marked (immortal) faction leader, and the army can continue moving.
The orcs will likely accept vassalization in exchange for war with Yvresse, and you can get Tyrion to take one of their regions for you to take back for yourself.

[Kijin Eira]

Walk Nkari up ahead of your charging demonnettes. and start dodging high elf arrows with him from max firing range. then have your demonnettes with high movespeed eat enemy Calvary/lions and charge into archers. when you get his quest weapon he heals in combat so you can cycle charge him in and out and leave battles with full health.

[F0X7]

Originally posted by Kijin Eira:

Walk Nkari up ahead of your charging demonnettes. and start dodging high elf arrows with him from max firing range. then have your demonnettes with high movespeed eat enemy Calvary/lions and charge into archers. when you get his quest weapon he heals in combat so you can cycle charge him in and out and leave battles with full health.

Normally I'd call that lame cheese, but with N'kari that's actually a very lore accurate thing to do LOL

[chickabumpbump]

Originally posted by Kijin Eira:

Walk Nkari up ahead of your charging demonnettes. and start dodging high elf arrows with him from max firing range. then have your demonnettes with high movespeed eat enemy Calvary/lions and charge into archers. when you get his quest weapon he heals in combat so you can cycle charge him in and out and leave battles with full health.

Yawn cheese exploits

[abyssalfury]

Originally posted by chickabumpbump:

Originally posted by Kijin Eira:

Walk Nkari up ahead of your charging demonnettes. and start dodging high elf arrows with him from max firing range. then have your demonnettes with high movespeed eat enemy Calvary/lions and charge into archers. when you get his quest weapon he heals in combat so you can cycle charge him in and out and leave battles with full health.

Yawn cheese exploits

How is 'Dodging' a cheese exploit? Okay, yes you can argue that using Lords to waste enemy ammo is an exploit, but N'kari's whole shtick is 'gotta go fast' and it makes perfect sense for him to use that speed to avoid getting hit instead of just eating arrows.

Anyway....

You need to expand fast with Slaanesh. Fight battles manually, play to Slaanesh's strengths and finish with minimal casualties. This can be tough, but you've got the tools for it. Slaanesh and High Elves are basically counters to each other - you want the early cav building, their basic cav will shred HE archers, it's just a matter of how well you play.
Getting into any kind of slugfest battle is likely to be crippling - you can't replenish/recruit fast enough to keep up momentum.

Saphery and the DE will hold off the HIgh Elves on the west side, but don't think of them as permanent allies. They are there to provide a buffer and then die. Getting them into wars with the HEs is good, making yourself a target of a HE faction that hasn't declared war on you yet is bad.

This gives you time to go east and take the minor factions, then kill Eltharion. Again, this needs to be done quickly and without too many casualties. You want Eltharion dead before Alarielle starts attacking you in the West. I tend to find her more aggressive than Tyrion, so you'll probably need to head back up and deal with her. Once two of the big three HE factions are dead you shouldn't have too many problems, and can afford to slow down a bit.

One thing you might have noticed: No mention of Seduction. Don't bother with it for the doughnut. Kill em all. You want the whole island. It's a safe economic base, once you've got it completely under control you can play the rest of the campaign at your leisure. There'll be plenty of other factions to Seduce. My preference is to send your early Cultists out to any seducable faction that's a) doing well and b) likely to attack you. Once you get them to 100 Seduction you remove the 'racial resistance', which basically means you can sit on them until they attack you, then immediately vassalize them as a defensive measure.

Overall, Slaanesh really does come down to how well you can do in the early battles. If you can win them without taking significant losses, you can stay on the offensive and dominate the early game. But if you trip up and end up on the defensive, it'll be a MUCH harder slog to get through.

[MrSoul]

I’d like to table a motion for the op to edit the thread title to remove the words “the ground”.

[AurumHawke]

Originally posted by abyssalfury:

Originally posted by chickabumpbump:

Yawn cheese exploits

How is 'Dodging' a cheese exploit? Okay, yes you can argue that using Lords to waste enemy ammo is an exploit, but N'kari's whole shtick is 'gotta go fast' and it makes perfect sense for him to use that speed to avoid getting hit instead of just eating arrows.

Did N'kari hear "Waltz around in and through enemy lines and make the Asur eat their own arrows"?

Originally posted by AurumHawke:

There's also a peculiar interaction where routing (including terrified) units instantly die when sent flying by N'kari. Might need the accel/de-accel banner for it, N'kari had over 176 speed when I first noticed it.

Was messing around in Chaos campaign and confirmed a few things more:
N'kari's base speed and accel appear to be sufficient - I was still seeing this happen with as little as 112 speed.
Exalted Keeper of Secrets (an early confed) run differently than N'kari does so they cause knockdown but not launch.
Stronger models, like Chaos Warriors, can survive getting launched once, even twice, but take damage and launching will eventually kill them.
Terror absolutely does count as routing for launch causing damage. Little difficult to capitalize on without the accel banner, but still possible.
Launch damage does not get credited to N'kari but the kills do.

[Hive tyrant JC]

Thanks for the feedback, sorry hadnt replied was busy. Im still not amazing at microing but seems i need to manually do more fights and be aggressive.

[GamerHubert]

Well sending out 1231243 agents to corrupt everything. Even a sucessful replenishing stop is an mark on an enemy. So easy to corrupt everything. My buddy was doing this while he wasnt even on ulthuan. He took 1 city and 1 army to defend it and walked with nkari to bretonia. Round 50 he got whole ulthan as vasal states.