Tips for playing Archaon?

[HerrDave]

Blood for the mud Tod, and that aside - how do you best utilize Archaon or Chaos in general?

- What are the best unit-types to roll around the Northlands and Empire with?
- Should I build Archaon as a red, blue, or yellow general?
- Should I recruit additional lords, or just roll with a single doom-stack?
- Should I subjugate or destroy the Northmen?
- What units should I try to avoid putting in my army?
- What pitfalls can I expect in a Chaos Campaign?

Thanks for reading :)

[Tricks]

Just a few tips off the top of my head (I only play normal/normal so take them with a grain of salt):

- Demolish the marauder recruitment building ASAP and build the chaos warrior recruitment building. Early in the game just recruit a lot of chaos warriors, they are some of the strongest infantry in the game at their tier, and Archaon can recruit them cheaply

- Recruit another army as soon as you can afford to, as the sooner you recruit them, the more time they will have building up horde growth. Make sure to keep them close to Archaon though, so they don't get killed off before they can grow. You can transfer some chaos warriors to the new army to get them started.

- Don't bother with any units from the marauder recruitment building. They just aren't worth it--every new building type you add to your horde significantly increases the population cost to build additional buildings, making inefficient building chains like the marauder chain a painful mistake

- Also, units recruited from the marauder building will suffer infighting attrition when you have two armies traveling together (regardless of whether both armies have marauder units), and you want to keep your armies together until they're strong enough to stand on their own. Remember that if you have a lone army that gets jumped by several enemy armies, it can cost you the campaign as you lose if you have no armies left.

- The units I always prioritize are: chaos warriors/chosen, hellcannons, dragon ogres, chaos knights. Trolls aren't terrible but they just aren't worth wasting a building slot. Same goes for chaos giants. Forsaken have been crap every time I've tried to use them and chaos spawn are just meh. You really don't need them when you have dragon ogres. Chariots aren't bad either and you're getting them as a bonus when you're going for the hellcannon recruit building.

- You want to keep razing as quickly as you can to build up income and population. Once you've horded enough excess income you can safely go far into the negative income per turn while having plenty of time to keep gaining more faster than you lose it.

- When razing cities, pay close attention to how much income you get before choosing the horde growth reward. You will always get the same amount of horde growth no matter what tier the city is, but high tier cities will give you a huge amount of income if you choose that option. This makes it useful to raze even settlements that were just colonized--you can still get the same amount of horde growth from razing them again even if they are worth nothing in terms of income.

- Personally I always rush the horde growth skill in the blue line. You want as much horde growth as you can get as soon as you can.

- I find that subjugating the tribes is worthless as they make for unreliable allies, but others will probably disagree. I prefer attacking the empire right away myself. Conquering all of norsca takes some time unless they've already confederated.

[kekkuli]

My best tip would be to wait for game 3 when they will probably make chaos a lot more fun than it currently is.

[Free Luigi M.]

Warriors of Chaos is such a trash, incomplete and half-assed faction under every single aspect that it really is masochism playing them instead of any of the other factions.

[Oblivious]

Originally posted by Tricks:

- The units I always prioritize are: chaos warriors/chosen, hellcannons, dragon ogres, chaos knights. Trolls aren't terrible but they just aren't worth wasting a building slot. Same goes for chaos giants. Forsaken have been crap every time I've tried to use them and chaos spawn are just meh. You really don't need them when you have dragon ogres. Chariots aren't bad either and you're getting them as a bonus when you're going for the hellcannon recruit building.

Mainly this.
I would recommend fighting Norsca and not invading the Empire until you have a elite stack, maybe even 2. On harder difficulties it's normal to see Kislev have 3 full stacks by turn 10, and Franz will show up with a few himself since he has nothing better to do.

You don't have to conquer norsca, just get some gold and and buidings. When you're in Empire territory it's not easy to stop and recruit new units because the AI will come at you full force while you're recruiting.

Personally i do vassalize whatever norsca tribe i fight. They tend to vassalize the other tribes themselves so you don't have to fight them all. It also slows or stops Bretonnia from conquering Norsca and being a bigger issue later.