High Elven Campaign Summary and Tips

[Æsir]

Hi, Folks!

Yesterday I got victory in a nice Elven campaign and decided to share the summary and maybe some useful tips for players not so experienced.

First of all, some house-rules:
- Difficulty: very hard / vary hard;
- No cheats and no tactics that feels like cheating (for example, starving Balrog);
- No trade agreements and peace with evil factions;
- No war with good factions;
- No diplomatic abuse (for example, cancelation of regular tribute);
- Loading no further as previous turn;
- Campaign should go as lore-ish as possible.

So the phase A of the general plan was to capture all neighboring rebel settlements, the territories of Isengard and Misty Mountains, to use their mines for funding the military strong enough for further expansion into Mordor. To be honest, this was the most difficult part of the campaign. After easily taking the rebel settlements at the shore, I found myself at war with Isengard and at the same time with both orcish factions. Being short on both – money and recruitment pools, there was no real alternative but blitzkrieg.

I decided to go with Isengard first. Quickly taking settlement after settlement I got to the point where Saruman decided to concentrate his forces and hold the ground. The culmination of Isengard’s operation was at Duneard, where just in time 3 small Elven blizing armies united to form a full stack and defeated Saruman’s forces (also killing him) and the scripted subsequent monster-stack. Rohan managed to kill the new faction leader of Isengard and the White Hand collapsed. Usually I don’t like that factions are eliminated this way but as Saruman was dead already I didn’t mind and quickly took Isengard fortress itself and also Fangorn. At this point Glorfindel got the One Ring in Isengard.

Meanwhile at Imladris a small Elven garrison was pushing back the incoming Orcs from mountains but luckily there were no full stacks and they all got defeated at the river crossings fairly easy. As Isengard was done, my main forces headed north accompanied by fresh reinforcements shipped from Mithlond and Lindons. Eregion became the new capital of Elven realm. (Because of its good location between production and mining centers and also because of its history.) The main force arrived there just in time to eliminate 2 orcish full-stacks. At this point Ents sent reinforcements that became nice addition for Elven army marching to Moria. After some meat-grinder type action Balrogs fell and Moria was taken.

At his point money should not be problem anymore but recruitment pools are still low. (And honestly will stay low till the very end of the campaign.) Main force headed further north, got reinforcements from Imladris and one after another took the Mountain Fort and Goblin-town. After destroying a wandering Orcish stack or two, Orcs of the MM was done.

Meanwhile the spies showed that Eriador is doing unbelievably well, have taken Coldfell, Orcish Outpost and are pushing further into the territories of Gundaband orcs. Dwarves also were doing well, so I decided not to interfere with their efforts. (And it was good decision because eventually they allied and together destroyed the orcs, leaving me to have more focus on the East). Garrison of Imladris took Hoarwell, Allimir was exchanged for Orcish Outpost, and the new Elven Empire was founded.

Phase B was mainly building up – mines, culture buildings, farms, etc. Also depleted troops were retrained to keep chevrons. At his phase it is wise to help your allies – Silvans and Rohirim to take back their settlements if they got lost some. (At this point Elves were allied to all good factions.) In this case Silvans was OK, and Rohan had lost only single settlement to Mordor which I took and gave back to them.

At some point I got 2 solid full-stacks ready for action – now it wasgood time to go for Dol Guldur. Dol Guldur is forest settlement and may become one of your powerhouses. With 2 stacks you just take it and kill the population. (Yes, it’s against lore for Elves to kill the population, but it’s impossible to handle 30k orcs, so no real choices here.) Dol Guldur had the catapult maker, nice! Just need to wait while culture increases. (It’s not wise to go to Mordor without catapult or two.)

Now it was time for build up for Dol Guldur, while reinforcements from all over the realm were heading towards the fortress. (Tip - take some of your generals who are logistics expert and give him speed ancillaries, like map, drillmaster, lembas, etc. Effects are cumulative and that will make him good for sending troops from one corner of the world to another.) While waiting for the reinforcements, Elves took fortress south of Dol Guldur and gave it to Dale. (Besides, Dale was also doing very good job and Rhun was almost gone by this time.)

Phase C – to the Mordor! To be honest, the final phase was pretty straight-forward. Four generals in charge of four Elven armies accompanied by catapults, Ents, Beoring auxilia and Ring-bearer (i.e. Glorfindel) headed to the Black Gate. First fell Dead Marches and this settlement was given to Rohan. Then fell Black Gate and other inner settlements of Mordor, even Barad-Dur. Several full-stacks of Mordor was eliminated while keeping own casualties pretty low.

Eventually the One Ring was destroyed but that did not killed Sauron (is that normal?) and Gondor got invasion into freshly acquired Minas Ithil and lost it to Harad. Meanwhile Mordor was eliminated completely and Elves were victorious.

Here is the final map with arrows showing Elven advance:


Some final thoughts:
- The most challenging and interesting part of the campaign was the first third of it.
- I didn’t have real chance to use late (gold plated) or AOR Elven units (Lindon and Mithlond ones). Campaign was over before I managed to send them into battle due to low recruitment pools and long supply lines. Only horse archers of Imladris have seen some real action in Mordor.
- It seems impossible at all to get the large smiths guild at Eregion to have the smiths of Eregion unit. I did constant destruction and rebuilding of armor building, still didn’t managed to get enough guild points.
- It was weird when Sauron faction wasn’t eliminated with the destruction of the One Ring and the invasions continued.
- It seems to me that it would be very hard to invade Mordor without cash-flow from mines in Misty Mountains.

Some final tips:
- It’s not worth it to recruit Elven cavalry units, they are very expensive, hard to retrain and Elven BG are more then enough to do the job. With exception of Imladris horse archers of course, just because it’s unique AOR unit.
- It’s not worth it to allow third generation family members to reproduce. Remember, Generals cost 1k per turn, and 12 of them were totally enough. Besides with number like that it is possible to micromanage ancillaries and best suitable positions for each of them.

Here is family tree:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So, what are your thoughts and experiences?

PS Happy Easter to anyone!

[Bloodly]

I did constant destruction and rebuilding of armor building, still didn’t managed to get enough guild points.

There's either a typo, or something so busted that they felt the need to disable it. Check this out, from export_desc_guilds:

;------------------------------------------
Guild gwaith_i_mirdain_guild
building guild_gwaith_i_mirdain_guild
levels 1000000 250

I would adjust it down to a saner level.

[Infidel144]

The 1000000 is for the first level, which is already built. It should have no effect (unless the Ruins were destroyed).

[Steward Denethor II]

It's a weird system. There are 2 Mordor factions, the Dark Lord of Mordor and Mordor. Mordor is just a regular faction and the faction you fought and destroyed, while the Dark Lord of Mordor is the equivalent of the Pope from the vanilla game. The Dark Lord faction is hidden and you can never reach or destroy it. It gives evil factions missions from Sauron and calls invasions. I don't know why the game is designed like this. I believe it's even possible for Mordor to lose favor with the Dark Lord by attacking other evil factions, to the point that Sauron calls an invasion on Mordor!

[Ngugi]

There're a couple of rational reasons, call it a best of imperfect alternatives
One is that since Sauron isn't intended to have a physichal body before he get the Ring, it would work poorly to have him as a general ingame for Mordor before that event occurs.
Another critical one is if he would die, of age or due to battle. Was Mordor the papal state another character from the faction would end up as new FL/pope, to call the Invasions, aka become the Dark Lord. By having the papal state separate the pope-Sauorn can die and be replaced by a new "Sauron" (with same portrait and name) while to the players everything seems still normal, at most with some odd message passing by.
Furthermore it allows custom control over when Invasions might start to occur, which would not be the case did Mordor start as the papal states. And so on.

[Maenor]

Freaking impressive man! I'm assuming it was Vanilla due to the Eregion Smiths

Unless you somehow manage to start spamming those smiths in very-early game it i's literally impossible without abusing the game's console system.

Thanks to @Withwnar (I still have no freakin idea how tagging works in this forum, if anyone knows please share haha) i learned that after a certain turn (25 to be specific) you lose a point.

So thanks to the Elves low reproduction and population rates in the Third Age of that world, getting some smiths going prior to 25 is pretty hard, and once you manage to have a stable economy Isengard tends to start playing their cards and bye bye the smiths.

I personally just changed the system entirely, successfully playing HE is a pretty hard thing to do without cheats and the diplomacy system doesn't help at all. You say you tried to stay lore-friendly when doing warfare decisions, but getting the damn Silvan Elves to share their stupid map information is just retarderly difficult. Plus, in my experience, (Since i also go for lore-friendly stuff) the Dwarves tends to ALWAYS get in troubles with the Silvan and since getting an Alliance with my cousins is top-priority i always end up taking Thorin's Halls due to some aggressive movement from the Dwarves haha

Anyway, pretty cool post! Its very informative and helpful(Not to mention rare) to see the process of a clean High Elves campaign! Specially with such detail!

Kudos to you!

EDIT: Here is the original post by Withwnar btw i still don't know if that after 25 is hardcoded or just a TATW thing tho

[♔atthias♔]

Freaking impressive man! I'm assuming it was Vanilla due to the Eregion Smiths

Unless you somehow manage to start spamming those smiths in very-early game it i's literally impossible without abusing the game's console system.

Thanks to @Withwnar (I still have no freakin idea how tagging works in this forum, if anyone knows please share haha) i learned that after a certain turn (25 to be specific) you lose a point.

So thanks to the Elves low reproduction and population rates in the Third Age of that world, getting some smiths going prior to 25 is pretty hard, and once you manage to have a stable economy Isengard tends to start playing their cards and bye bye the smiths.

I personally just changed the system entirely, successfully playing HE is a pretty hard thing to do without cheats and the diplomacy system doesn't help at all. You say you tried to stay lore-friendly when doing warfare decisions, but getting the damn Silvan Elves to share their stupid map information is just retarderly difficult. Plus, in my experience, (Since i also go for lore-friendly stuff) the Dwarves tends to ALWAYS get in troubles with the Silvan and since getting an Alliance with my cousins is top-priority i always end up taking Thorin's Halls due to some aggressive movement from the Dwarves haha

Anyway, pretty cool post! Its very informative and helpful(Not to mention rare) to see the process of a clean High Elves campaign! Specially with such detail!

Kudos to you!

EDIT: Here is the original post by Withwnar btw i still don't know if that after 25 is hardcoded or just a TATW thing tho

you cannot tag people on this forum sorry

[joerock22]

Nice post, interesting and well-written (with a nice map too!). Thanks for sharing.

[Patronus86]

This AAR serves as a good example of what I love about the elven factions in TATW: they have the best armies, but it takes time and a lot of money and planning to build up and reinforce those armies.

The delayed recruitment penalty for the elves was a nice touch, both lore-wise and to help make the game more challenging.

I played a very similar campaign with the Silvan elves:
- consolidated my kingdom
- took out neighboring evil factions (Misty Mountain, Isengard)
- reinforced/aided my good neighbors
- built up my economy and military infrastructure
- send 3-4 full stacks of elite troops to attack Mordor: first recaptured most of Gondor's eastern cities (Osgiliath, Cair Andros) and cut-off Mordor's expansion westward (Gondor was pretty much gone by this point, so these cities were turned into Elven settlements) and then launched attacks into Mordor's heartland via Minas Morgul. That last final push was tough fighting, even more so because I had to have reinforcements carefully timed and placed in order to replenish my casualties (which were inevitable when facing the trolls).

With Mordor dead, I had to take deal with a healthy stream of Harad stacks (many with Oliphants) coming from the south, but most of the other evil factions were dying or dead by this point, and I could have considered campaign finished lore-wise. For my own entertainment, I built/fortified my southern border, using the Anduin River as an natural barrier for my new 'Gondorian' holdings and then sent a 2-3 fleets each carrying full elite stacks to bypass Harad's main armies and attack its southern cities (Inchon style) to attack and raze most of their infrastructure. Lots of money gained, lots of dread incurred....Harad's warfighting machine was pretty much gutted.

There is no quick campaign with the elves, but when you finally get momentum, their armies are a sight to behold.

[Vifarc]

campaign with the Silvan elves:
- consolidated my kingdom
- took out neighboring evil factions (Misty Mountain, Isengard)
- reinforced/aided my good neighbors
- built up my economy and military infrastructure
- send 3-4 full stacks of elite troops to attack Mordor: first recaptured most of Gondor's eastern cities, and cut-off Mordor's expansion westward

Yeah, I think it's more difficult when silvans are divided, for Lorien being without controling Thranduil, like in DaC submod.

[Maenor]

This AAR serves as a good example of what I love about the elven factions in TATW: they have the best armies, but it takes time and a lot of money and planning to build up and reinforce those armies.

The delayed recruitment penalty for the elves was a nice touch, both lore-wise and to help make the game more challenging.

I played a very similar campaign with the Silvan elves:
- consolidated my kingdom
- took out neighboring evil factions (Misty Mountain, Isengard)
- reinforced/aided my good neighbors
- built up my economy and military infrastructure
- send 3-4 full stacks of elite troops to attack Mordor: first recaptured most of Gondor's eastern cities (Osgiliath, Cair Andros) and cut-off Mordor's expansion westward (Gondor was pretty much gone by this point, so these cities were turned into Elven settlements) and then launched attacks into Mordor's heartland via Minas Morgul. That last final push was tough fighting, even more so because I had to have reinforcements carefully timed and placed in order to replenish my casualties (which were inevitable when facing the trolls).

With Mordor dead, I had to take deal with a healthy stream of Harad stacks (many with Oliphants) coming from the south, but most of the other evil factions were dying or dead by this point, and I could have considered campaign finished lore-wise. For my own entertainment, I built/fortified my southern border, using the Anduin River as an natural barrier for my new 'Gondorian' holdings and then sent a 2-3 fleets each carrying full elite stacks to bypass Harad's main armies and attack its southern cities (Inchon style) to attack and raze most of their infrastructure. Lots of money gained, lots of dread incurred....Harad's warfighting machine was pretty much gutted.

There is no quick campaign with the elves, but when you finally get momentum, their armies are a sight to behold.

IMO what goes to a favor to the Silvan Elves is the variety of Units in comparison to the High Elves while still retaining the Quality >> Quantity play stile

They have stakes, Axemen, AP, much more accessible Horse Archers, Elite Units and more importantly constant presence of Shielded Spearmen that with the H.E. you can't get until the Barracks event since for whatever reason they decided to keep the only starting spears on Lindon

The problem for them goes to the danger of having 2 constant fronts and up to 4 fronts if the AI goes

You have Mordor to the south, Rhun to the east always manages to overrun Dale and the Dwarves during late game, the Orcs of the Misty mountains to the West and the plausible inclusion of either Gundabad or even the Dwarves to the north. In my experiences the Dwarves and the Silvan Elves are quite easily divided in Vanilla 3.2

The one and only thing that bothers me about the Elven roster and the Unit Design of Vanilla 3.2 is that they have no properly efficient way of dealing with Harad and its Oliphants, unless they stay still (Which doesn't happen if you like to avoid abusing the AI's tendency to stay still while you bomb them with missiles/artillery) they just in obliterate all of your OP units

Gondor gets the awesome Pelargir Marines and they are the perfect anti-Oliphant unit

Plus it doesn't help the fact that Harad is clearly unbalanced AF and the amount of Oliphants the AI can get and spam is just way to much for the little counter measures that other factions aside from Gondor or Rohan can take. Oliphants should have been this Ultimate OP unit that you would see once or twice during really important battles, not each freakin turn while Harad is desperate to retake some random city.

[Patronus86]

IMO what goes to a favor to the Silvan Elves is the variety of Units in comparison to the High Elves while still retaining the Quality >> Quantity play stile

They have stakes, Axemen, AP, much more accessible Horse Archers, Elite Units and more importantly constant presence of Shielded Spearmen that with the H.E. you can't get until the Barracks event since for whatever reason they decided to keep the only starting spears on Lindon

The problem for them goes to the danger of having 2 constant fronts and up to 4 fronts if the AI goes [IMG]file:///C:/Users/kevin/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]

You have Mordor to the south, Rhun to the east always manages to overrun Dale and the Dwarves during late game, the Orcs of the Misty mountains to the West and the plausible inclusion of either Gundabad or even the Dwarves to the north. In my experiences the Dwarves and the Silvan Elves are quite easily divided in Vanilla 3.2

The one and only thing that bothers me about the Elven roster and the Unit Design of Vanilla 3.2 is that they have no properly efficient way of dealing with Harad and its Oliphants, unless they stay still (Which doesn't happen if you like to avoid abusing the AI's tendency to stay still while you bomb them with missiles/artillery) they just [IMG]file:///C:/Users/kevin/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]in obliterate all of your OP units

Gondor gets the awesome Pelargir Marines and they are the perfect anti-Oliphant unit

Plus it doesn't help the fact that Harad is clearly unbalanced AF and the amount of Oliphants the AI can get and spam is just way to much for the little counter measures that other factions aside from Gondor or Rohan can take. Oliphants should have been this Ultimate OP unit that you would see once or twice during really important battles, not each freakin turn while Harad is desperate to retake some random city.

The Silvan’s do have somewhat of a roster advantage over the High Elves in the early game, though by the late game, the advantage switches back to the High Elves who have pretty much everything the Silvan’s do (with slightly better stats) as well as certain units the Silvan’s can’t match (dedicated heavy cavalry, Eregion Smith’s). The Silvan early-game roster and location lends itself well to quick and decisive campaigns (relatively speaking), while the High Elves need a bit more planning and development before they’re ready to start kicking butt.

Haven’t noticed a tendency for war between the Dwarves and Silvan’s, though I do wish that Vanilla TATW had a mechanism for locking in alliances between the good factions (I think DAC or MOS had a sub-mod which did just that).

Dale often does require help fairly quickly in the fight against the Rhun stacks; the Dwarves usually hold their own quite well. I find that really incentivizes the Silvan player to quickly get out of his/her woodland realm and help the other good factions.

As for Oliphants, I never had much of a problem with them as the Silvan’s. Yes, they can be a real pain and require good army composition and tactics, but they’re certainly not impossible to defeat (so long as the AI isn’t cheating with extra unit buff’s on the harder difficultly settings). I usually had two methods for defeating Harad’s Oliphant stacks:

1. Have a meatshield unit in loose formation (something expendable like light elven archer or silvan spearman) receive the brunt of the Oliphant attack. Once the Oliphants have charged and are focused on the meatshield, I’d have a AP unit (Beornings in the earlier versions, but the recently-added Woodland Warriors also work well) counter-charge the Oliphants. Your meatshield unit will often be decimated, and the AP unit will take heavy casualties, but the Oliphants would almost always fall and/or rout before they posed any serious threat to the rest of my army.
2. Have a meatshield unit receive the Oliphant charge (same method as above) and then have artillery (ballista’s were usually the best option) take down the Oliphants one-by-one. The Oliphants usually went down quite quickly. Meatshield unit will again normally be decimated, both by Oliphants and friendly artillery fire.

The key with Oliphants, similar to Olog Hai trolls, is to just accept that some of your units will be decimated. Make sure those units are ones that you can afford to lose and have your more valuable units ready to deal with the armored threat or the rest of the enemy army.

The Oliphant stacks can be tiresome after a while, but, honestly, Harad wouldn’t be much of a challenge without them. Keep in mind too that defeating the Oliphant stacks one-by-one is not an effective way to win a campaign against Harad. Playing as any of the good factions, you will inevitably have to fight those dreaded armies on the battlefield, but the way to truly defeat Harad is to raid and destroy their heartland cities. I’ve found that when dealing with Harad in the late game, I usually have the money and infrastructure to build several high-tier armies, ship them on fleets into Harad’s southern coast, raid and destroy the majority of Harad’s southern cities and retreat before the AI has any chance to respond in force. Harad’s stream of stacks dries up after those types of raids. The end goal for most of these campaigns is to destroy the enemy’s heartland. If you’re only focused on fighting AI’s stacks, you’ll find yourself playing a never-ending game of wack-a-mole.