Really struggling with Elspeth on full map

[The Coal Man]

I'm a long time legendary player since warhammer 1, and I'm really running into issues trying to play Elspeth. I'm on my second attempt and both Kislev and the border princes seem to get wiped out every game, to be replaced by the disciples of the maw and various chaos hordes.

The dwarves fold extremely early and bretonnia falls 10 turns later to orc hordes.

I've bartered lands back to the empire for big profits to fund my war against sylvania, and even beaten them to a pulp. But there are just no friends left on the continent and the empire economy is so bad I can barely fund 2 mediocre armies.

I've got all the cash I can from irrelevant wars for cathay and sold cities I was about to lose to the empire for 9000+ gold, but no matter what I do there does seem to be a way to win all these wars I have to fight. Is there anyone out there who has some advice for a legendary nuln campaign? This has been worse than even old school skarsnik.

Edit: I've been hesitant confederating other empire factions, but I've absorbed all but the empire at turn 50. Most of the gained land I've sold to the empire to support multiple armies. The skaven and chaos have ran through all kislev factions and the south is dominated by orcs and ogres. It truly feels like I am the only order faction on the continent. Karl Franz is being beaten down and close to death at this point. The wood elves are alive and friendly but do almost nothing and can't even chase down roaming orc warbands, and any dwarf still alive is among the weakest factions by rank..

[c0hKaine]

you need to create power vacuums for your allies to capitalize on. im actually playing her also and i just got rid of fetus. i gave soland (early on) a bunch of territory from an early vlad attack and used my teleportation sparingly. i also created a garden of morr in a defensive location and an offensive one early with the -%upkeep building built from the garden in my starting province.

so far the only threat is barrow legion and vlad with the beastmen/goblins getting cleaned up. my strategy was to make war on threats before they had a chance to prepare.

also i was playing SFO legendary/vh.

[Ashley]

Once you get Vlad out of the way which really isn't hard it's generally smooth sailing when I play the start

Usually after taking him out I beat down Drycha and Azhag to help maintain the north for Kislev.

[The Coal Man]

How do you get rid of vlad early? My first game I tried rushing him early but he had 2-3 stacks of skeles that my 1-2 low cost armies couldnt compete with. He is a nasty fighter and Elspeth and her engineer couldnt dent him at all, and her mob clear isnt great either. I tried waiting until Elspeth hit 16 and got a dragon and I was beating him down fairly well but all other order forces were folding hard and down to 3-4 cities each.

[StrangestEcho]

Originally posted by The Coal Man:

How do you get rid of vlad early? My first game I tried rushing him early but he had 2-3 stacks of skeles that my 1-2 low cost armies couldnt compete with. He is a nasty fighter and Elspeth and her engineer couldnt dent him at all, and her mob clear isnt great either. I tried waiting until Elspeth hit 16 and got a dragon and I was beating him down fairly well but all other order forces were folding hard and down to 3-4 cities each.

You should be able to kill Vlad himself quite easily with a combination of spirit leech and your engineer. Especially after the nerf. The key is to prevent him from getting to your frontline where he will start to regen in melee and will be harder to shoot. Lure the fast units into attacking your army early and then start aggressively kiting Vlad.

You generally want to declare war when Vlad is out of position so that you can take out his armies one at a time. Once his higher tier units are dead you should be able to take on 2 of his armies with 1-1.5 stacks of your own units.

It sounds like you are not aggressive enough. Vampire counts should be dead within the first 15 turns. From there you need to triage based on how well the other factions are doing. Franz will hold the line for a while in the North, so generally you want to take out Wurzagg next to save Ungrim. You'll want to try and get a non-aggression pact with the ogres and trees if possible. Take advantage of the Gardens to Teleport your main stack around.

[The Coal Man]

Targeting Vlad was the answer. I went for Festus the second time because he slaughtered karl in the first game, but he builds up slow and vlad was chipping away at everyone in his area. I was able to get him down pretty quickly and it kept kislev alive longer and gave me some good income from castle templehoff. Now I can respond to chaos attacks on other empire factions and take the 1 1/2 provinces back from Festus.

[Ashley]

I go for the vampires then Greenskins next to you first and from there get rid of the changling on the way to Vlad. He does almost nothing but still good to get rid of him early.

[CrUsHeR]

Did you try that funky all-pistolier "doomstack" rush?

Just take a Master Engineer lord, 18 or so pistoliers, upgrade them in the workshop.
They are like Gutter Runners but on horses. Can also add an Engineer hero to level him up.
If you still run out of ammo, you can just withdraw and attack again and again.

VC can do very very little against this. So if you take one or two of these stacks, rush Vlad, intercept his armies trying to sneak around, with Elspeth doing the sieges against their cities - the whole vampire threat can be ended very early on.