Dark Elf Campaign vs High Elf Campaign

[[6-4] Kek~]

Dark Elves seem to be vastly stronger than high elves on the campaign. I did a lokhir campaign just recently on very hard/very hard and achieved long victory after around 90 turns and maintained strength rank of 1 for the majority of the session. I had pretty much 0 struggles the entire campaign. I believe I lost 2 battles for the entire campaign.

However, I am not even halfway through this Eltharion campaign and I am starting to struggle quite a bit. I gave up the badlands and focused on defeating Nkari and securing Ulthaun, and I have just recently returned to the badlands. Things are running smoothly in the badlands. Unfortunately, Malekith and Crone are coming down from the north and giving me a really hard time. I am barely winning fights and only with severe casualties.

My question is.. why are dark elves exponentially stronger than high elves? Are they not supposed to be mirror images of one another? More specifically, why are shades so much stronger than sisters of avelorn? Don't get me wrong, sisters of avelorn are REALLY good.. but I feel like shades are far far superior. Not to mention, shades come from a t2 and t3 building while SoA come from T4. DE single entities also seem stronger than HE single entities, too. Whether it's the monsters or the lords/heroes.

I dunno, just felt like ranting a little bit about the state of the campaign.

[Who trains thy hands for war?]

only dabbled in the dragon helf but they have a balanced traditional army with dragons and magic at high tiers in place of gunpowder and rockets

i did a somewhat gimmicky bolt thrower / sea guard / shock cavalry army and it was pretty easy with decent pew pew, and it would be not far off from a more tryhard optimized army

helves also have decent horse archers, such as they are in this game, and they can send the enemy in circles while you shoot at them

Helves are real shooty. More so than delves who shoot and melee, which is why i like delves more

note that lokhir can easily support multiple high tech armies while running in the score towards victory if leaning into his campaign mechanic

[Who trains thy hands for war?]

Originally posted by Who trains thy hands for war?:

note that lokhir can easily support multiple high tech armies while running in the score towards victory if leaning into his campaign mechanic

By this I mean in comparison to other campaigns, which is why Lokhir can be so easy; as you know you can sit there chilling on your Black Ark cruise ships and dump cheap high tier marines onto shore backed up by naval bombardment whenever so wished

A bit like recapitulating the Sino Japanese War, and interestingly the mid and lower tier Delf troop strengths are somewhat like Imjin War era Japanese when they attempted invading the Ming, but I digress

For higher tier Helf fights I suggest Dragon / flyer dive + mass ranged; aforementioned horse archers can also delay short ranged enemies significantly while you shoot

Delves are also very vulnerable to shock cavalry as they dont have great mid tier anti large, despite their great low tier spearmen and high tier cavalry

Very Hard campaigns tend to bottle you up in steady methodical expansion which makes attempted campaigns across the world tedious; as Eltharion you are now fighting a land war in Asia while simultaneously defending your homeland instead of gunboat diplomacy

[[6-4] Kek~]

Thanks for the information. I typically like to rely heavily on ranged units and magic.. I'll have to add some dragons/fliers and maybe some shock cav or chariots.

Edit: I am so dumb. I forgot Knights of Tor Gaval exist. That quite literally solves the entire problem I am having, I think. Though they may take a lot of missile damage.

[Zoey]

Even without player influence over the events I have noticed that High Elves tend to get eradicated off of Ulthuan and quite fast. Easily 9/10 games this occurs typically with the Dark Elves controlling most of it. With Chaos and Vampire Coast also having a small piece.

The location just is terrible for them Securing Ulthuan as a player is just a long chore and for the AI it rarely occurs. So even beyond unit quality WH3 is just brutal to them. Whenever the AI is playing as them they don't even feel like a major faction to me because of it.

[Mr Robert House]

Lokhir is probably the easiest dark elf faction, eltharion is powerful, and his faction mechanic is nice but the incredibly cheap black arks are insane.

[[6-4] Kek~]

Originally posted by Zoey:

Even without player influence over the events I have noticed that High Elves tend to get eradicated off of Ulthuan and quite fast. Easily 9/10 games this occurs typically with the Dark Elves controlling most of it. With Chaos and Vampire Coast also having a small piece.

The location just is terrible for them Securing Ulthuan as a player is just a long chore and for the AI it rarely occurs. So even beyond unit quality WH3 is just brutal to them. Whenever the AI is playing as them they don't even feel like a major faction to me because of it.

Agreed. I have managed to keep control of Ulthuan isolated to myself, Avelorn, Eataine, and a couple of minor high elf factions. Eataine has just finished an offensive against Morathi and taken her off the map, and I have just finished imprisoning Crone, but losing the majority of the army I used to do so. Malekith just died to Avelorn, but has plenty of armies coming up to mop up the injured armies. I am trying my best to use war coordination to my advantage.

Honestly it's not that bad, I am just trying to figure out a good army composition for specifically fighting dark elves, or just in general for the high elves. I like my arrow spam, so I went with majority sisters of avelorn, but if you are outnumbered, they get swamped quickly. As mentioned above, I am going to try adding some knights of tor gaval into my sister stacks and see if that helps alleviate the pressure by eliminating shades, bolt throwers, dueling flyers, etc.

[[6-4] Kek~]

Originally posted by Mr Robert House:

Lokhir is probably the easiest dark elf faction, eltharion is powerful, and his faction mechanic is nice but the incredibly cheap black arks are insane.

Agreed. It was just a bit of a culture shock going from a brainless campaign with 0 effort to this high elf campaign. Especially since High Elves are one of my least played factions, where -as dark elves I know quite well.

[Kalvix]

With Eltharion you are definitely meant to keep the Badlands, as it can lead to a rough start of the campaign, but after that it becomes much easier as your side of Ulthuan is safe after the orcs are dead so you just need to send armies to help your allies, and when you spread to the dwarfs and help them you have a good footing in the Badlands.

That said I've done a short victory play through on all HE and DE lords recently and DE were definitely easier purely because I skipped the 1st tier stuff and got armies full of shades, their range, vanguard deployment, stealth, and ability to melee when they get caught made them so so good, much better compared to anything comparable the HEs get access to that early. The Lordern Sea Guard are the closest the HEs get but they never felt like they carried their weight as much.

Honestly I feel like stealth is huge as it means even people with a longer range won't get to take advantage of it, and you'll always get a volley or 2 off before they even react to you making the return volley weaker.

[CrUsHeR]

Dark Elves got an overhaul at some point, High Elves did not.

I think it was around the time of the Chaos Dwarf DLC? Basically the DE economy buildings are the strongest now as long as you have slaves, and as long as you fight battles each turn you have an abundance of slaves. And then you still can pump out more money by selling slaves for 1500g per province each turn.

High Elves instead only lost the ability to get vision through trade deals, which was moved to Yuan Bo as his faction mechanic. Some of the other WH3 changes really destroyed them, like Nagarythe is basically neutered with their skirmishers no longer dealing notable damage whilst moving.

[StrangestEcho]

High Elves are expected to get their major WH3 update alongside the next DLC.

That said, High Elves are still a very strong race when you know how to play them. Access to life magic is a big advantage over DE and their flying units are better even before factoring in healing. You do have to be very careful when fighting Shades as they can nuke your Single Entities if you aren't paying attention.

There's basically nothing else in the game that can beat a Star Dragon doomstack with life magic support.

[My Own Treacherous Hand]

I think the Delves' real advantage over the Helves is that they have better lower tier units. Spearmen/Rangers/Reavers vs. Dreadspears/Bleakswords/Dark Riders is a wash, but Darkshards beat archers and the Delves have a ton of versatility at tier 2 while the High Elves have a lot of mediocre units there.

[Apollyon]

You're off base with this. You start off comparing one of the easiest campaigns in the game and the easiest Dark Elf campaign by far (Lokhir Fellheart) with the second hardest High Elf campaign (Eltharion) and pretending that it's indicative of the power comparison for the two races. It's not.

As someone who mains both races, I can tell you that High Elves are the more powerful of the two, primarily because Ulthuan is an excellent power base and the only challenging parts of a campaign are the first 20-30 turns. Therefore, once High Elves deal with their initial enemies, they're basically set to win their campaigns. The only outlier to this is Imrik, who admittedly has a hard time being so isolated from Ulthuan, but even he can potentially (and with some luck) manage to confederate Caledor before they get wiped by Noctilus.

At any rate, both races will be getting a rework in the next DLC and I look forward to seeing how their new mechanics will elevate them in power.

[BIG E.]

Their campaign power are very close to each other.

Difference is HE needs good settlements to have infinite economy. DE just needs to fight to have infinite economy.

HE requires slightly better settlement building knowledge than DE.

And DE requires better army and character management than HE.

I'd say if starting positions out of the topic DE is slightly more harder simply because army and character management is slightly more complicated than building good buildings.

If you factor in the starting positions, lokhir is easiest DE campaign between all. Malekith has the hardest starting position.

I find all HE factions within the donut pretty easy because donut is super easy position to play. Eltharion has the exception that he starts in the badlands and you need to disband him to get him back to the donut.

Within DE and HE only campaign comparable to Malekiths starting position is Imrik. Actually Imrik could be harder because Malekith at least has Hellebron next to him and can do some tricks for quick confederation. Imrik is all alone.

But again if i remember correctly Imrik has an event that allows him to get a settlement from the donut, so yeah idk. I never really played Imrik campaigns for too long.

[Rudel]

Go Arielle or Tyrion for the cheesy High Elf campaign. Superb roster, strong Lords, strong heroes, great economy, safe continent of Ulthuan.

[Sarumoon]

Well, every campaign is totally random.

Just start again, it will be totally different.