silvan elves: the best tailored/hamstrung faction?

[eugenioso]

they are literally hand made and tailored to be a shooty army to the extreme. first of all, their bodyguards are archers and awesome ones at that, so thats one. they have the silvan spearmen as basic infantry and they still wreak havoc on enemy late tier units. not to mention that if the enemy brings any cavalry to play and fight the spearmen kill them, but their bodyguards are awesome infantry as well.

while all the other factions in the game are pretty well balanced on their capabilities, the silvans have been made with the exclusive focus of being a shooty army and nothing else. there is no other road to be taken by them. even the high elves have the choice of making a melee focused army, but not the silvans. they also get the best archers in the game, the silvan heavy archers, well armored and can fight melee to boot.

for example, gondor can produce any sort of army that it wants. it doesnt have to be full infantry armies, but it can choose to do so. rohan can choose to produce a foot army (in fact i always have a foot army and a mounted army as rohan) and do a decent job at it. eriador, rhun, high elves, harad, mordor, dale... they all have the possibility of going down different roads when it comes to building armies. even the goddanged dwarves get some ranged units mid/late game as well as their siege weapons of course. but the silvans have been made to be a one trick pony. you simply cant ignore the silvan's ranged units to make war.

there is nothing i wanted to do with this thread, i just felt like pointing it out.

[Dangor]

Hado i philinn

[Barsoom]

you simply cant ignore the silvan's ranged units to make war.

Of course you can. It won't be a very strong army but then, some of the options for other factions you've named also clearly suck. SE infantry is expensive and takes a long time to recruit but they're better than most orc and human infantry. While SE cavalry isn't much good in melee they will still hit morale hard when charging into the back of an enemy unit that's already being hacked to pieces by your infantry.

Edit: If your point is that SE has the least versatile army, take another look at the Dwarves. No cavalry except mercenaries is worse than SE missile cavalry in suboptimal role. Very few, late and expensive archers also doesn't compare well, SE at least has the ability to recruit spearmen and forest wardens from the beginning. I'm sure people have a lot of fun with Dwarves, but their options are clearly more limited.