I had a similar experience lately with the wood elves. Also selling dryads to the Oak of Ages did not help a lot with Harmony.

Currently I'm playing Empire where the vampires conquered half of Wissenland early, so I thought the wood elves would fare better because they were not the focus. But no, the Blood Dragons also own a third of Athel Loren, and I'm just shortly before clan level 2. Poor elves.

Asrai dont have walls, thats just fact. On the campaign map they keep the "town defense" bonus when under siege and its a simulation so there's nothing different there, when its a player fought battle then yeah, but thats also why its a 1 entrance battle, and future maps will be more intricate.

And their defense is their archers, which are the best in the game currently.

As for how the campaign goes, thats random, in my bretonnian PT they rolled over most of bretonnia before anyone even made a dent in their forces.

And yes even if you make your own kingdom, the world tree is still connected to those settlements.

Hmm, small mercies I suppose. Still feels a bit funky to have player success tied to a faction so thoroughly, I'll probably just avoid playing them personally tbh.

Originally posted by bfel001:

Hmm, small mercies I suppose. Still feels a bit funky to have player success tied to a faction so thoroughly, I'll probably just avoid playing them personally tbh.

player kingdoms are not a focus nor priority, core factions are

Thinking it over the biggest problem with it is just that you can be screwed over by something entirely out of your control well before you have a hope of being able to even contribute meaningfully to fixing it. I would say the biggest general contribution to player power is getting high tier magic, and once harmony is negative an elf mage stops being an elf mage. So to get your magic back you have to scramble to get enough units to contribute, which the asrai start severely gimped in party size.

The most constructive suggestion I have ATM would be to just limit the negative harmony ticks to towns and castles. Getting -5 from every random village attached to them is too much imo

The mechanics around Harmony does seem like it can be a bit too punishing for something you often have little control over. Maybe a higher base gain for the player could eleviate some of the issues?

Also could Amber Spear have a rework? right now it seems to be worse then just firing a bow in every way (low damage while harder to aim and less distance). It also doesn't help that it doesn't look impressive.
I'd rather see it have higher cost but be a straight line of massive piercing damage.

Originally posted by Drachnon:

The mechanics around Harmony does seem like it can be a bit too punishing for something you often have little control over. Maybe a higher base gain for the player could eleviate some of the issues?

Also could Amber Spear have a rework? right now it seems to be worse then just firing a bow in every way (low damage while harder to aim and less distance). It also doesn't help that it doesn't look impressive.
I'd rather see it have higher cost but be a straight line of massive piercing damage.

entry spells should never deal "massive damage" of any kind, thats solely for master spells, currently some other spells seem to be doing too much damage at tiers they shouldn't be doing it at.

It should probably still do more then a bow does. The first bow and arrows I found did more damage then the spell which despite having double spellcraft vs bow skill (not actually sure what the damage calculation is but I assume spellcraft is involved).
Add to that worse reload/cooldown, less ammo/WoM, not refilling with each battle and take away WoM from spells that would have much more impact on a battle.

Originally posted by Drachnon:

It should probably still do more then a bow does. The first bow and arrows I found did more damage then the spell which despite having double spellcraft vs bow skill (not actually sure what the damage calculation is but I assume spellcraft is involved).
Add to that worse reload/cooldown, less ammo/WoM, not refilling with each battle and take away WoM from spells that would have much more impact on a battle.

spellcraft does not increase your damage, except the few perks that specifically tell you

I had the same thing, where the Asrai where basically completely and utterly overwhelmed by the Undead before I reached Clan 2. It took a very long many hours dragging their sorry asses kicking and screaming out of remission until we made some headway.

For the most part, I think the Asrai work well and are very fun to play.

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I don't really like the harmony mechanic very much, as it is basically a minigame of spot-hunting beastmen with some spellslingers, and conjuring trees at the post-battle screen, hoarding as many as possible, then hightailing it back to the oak and sending them back to nature just to buy as many bonuses as possible immediately.

You do this because it's extremely unlikely for it to ever be higher than 0 otherwise. Especially with upkeep cost of trees, that cripples you.

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The other thing I noted, which was amusing because I saw the comment above, is that they have the best archers in the game—but they cap out in tier very early. In comparison, the Eonir have Tier 7(?) archers a stones throw away.

I felt a bit "Oh..." when I saw that. The Asrai have no elite archers either. Their elites are riders, or bezerkers. Made me double take, since I mostly picked out the elves because I wanted a storm of arrows.

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Finally, on the note of sieges having no walls...

I think it's cute, but it's rather terrible in practice. It's better to autoplay out sieges because you're screwed when you're outnumbered.

You could probably fix this by having "roots" or something act as walls, or by default starting all of the Asrai toops in trees and having it be a winding ivy vine up the trees to "siege" an Asrai village.

No walls is fine, but "bridge-defence" could use some improvements.

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Still, I disagree that they're ass. They're a lot of fun, and I think the dev team has done a good job. They're definitely one of the harder factions due to a number of factors, but that doesn't mean they're ass.