High Elves Campaign

[cjm81499]

Hello, I have been playing a campaign as the High Elves recently. I think I am at turn 50 or so right now. I have heard many say it was the easiest, and funnest faction, however, I am having a very tough time.

First off, I have only about 1 soldier in each western town (I think I have 7 western towns) and about 5 or 6 units per town in the east, yet I am broke. Last I left off I had about 1k gold, and was losing money. So I am struggling very hard financially. Another thing, from the 3 or 4 towns I have managed to take in the east, I have not been able to train units at any of them and they make very little money, so I have to send them all the way back to the capital to retrain.

Also, the orcs are relentless. I will win a battle with very few troops against like a full stack of orcs, then seemingly they will just have another one close behind.

I am finding it rather tough so far. What do you think of the High Elves campaign?

[Withwnar]

Move your capital to Mithlond if you haven't already. Imladris as capital creates a lot of Corruption in your western regions due to their Distance From Capital: check your Finances scroll.

[Talismanic]

Move your capital to Mithlond if you haven't already. Imladris as capital creates a lot of Corruption in your western regions due to their Distance From Capital: check your Finances scroll.

Check the 'settlement details' tab in your building browser to see how much gold you are losing from corruption, this helps you know if you should move your capital (which you should).


Alternatively, I do not like corruption at all, I think it is a boring artifical barrier to what should be a fun part of the game (having far flung outposts and expansions).

You can easily remove corruption as a factor by editing game files, with next to no real complications to the game.

Go to

MTW2 Total War > Mods > Third_Age_3 > Data > descr_settlement_mechanics > 'edit' > control f (find) 'corruption' > change the value of corruption from what ever it is to something small such as 0.01 (as below)


<factor name="SIF_CORRUPTION"> ;?
<pip_modifier value="0.01"/>





However always make a copy of the original 'descr_settlement_mechanics' and keep it saved just in case.

[DrDragun]

Based on reading your account I have a couple of pieces of advice:

- Marching armies back to retrain costs a lot of time and money, you end up having to maintain twice as many units (upkeep costs a lot!) and it takes the wind out of your offensive sails. Instead, merge wounded units. You can do this by pressing 'm' while an army is highlighted (it will merge all possible units) or by individually dragging their unit cards together. Bring freshly trained regiments forward and merge them with your depleted veterans, so you only have "1-way" marching traffic on the map.

- Speaking of upkeep, don't overstock units that you don't need and definitely don't adopt any generals. Each general costs 500g/turn. Each unit's upkeep costs is usually 1/3 or 1/4 of its recruitment cost. After 3 turns its cost has doubled! Only build up a big force when you are preparing for a conquer or see enemies coming.

- As Withwnar said, classic advice for the High Elves is to move your capital to Mithlond to produce a lot more gold via reduced corruption

- Prioritize economic buildings:
1) Mines
2) Farms
3) Barracks*
4) Roads
5) Markets/Ports
* If barracks unlocks free upkeep for the intended garrison

- Finally, plan your campaign around defensive "choke provinces" so you can focus your army in one place. Try not to have huge borders with your enemy because you pay a lot more maintaining defenses in each. Try to keep only free upkeep units in each garrison (units tinted blue/purple when garrisoned)

[Roma_Victrix]

Based on reading your account I have a couple of pieces of advice:

- Marching armies back to retrain costs a lot of time and money, you end up having to maintain twice as many units (upkeep costs a lot!) and it takes the wind out of your offensive sails. Instead, merge wounded units. You can do this by pressing 'm' while an army is highlighted (it will merge all possible units) or by individually dragging their unit cards together. Bring freshly trained regiments forward and merge them with your depleted veterans, so you only have "1-way" marching traffic on the map.

- Speaking of upkeep, don't overstock units that you don't need and definitely don't adopt any generals. Each general costs 500g/turn. Each unit's upkeep costs is usually 1/3 or 1/4 of its recruitment cost. After 3 turns its cost has doubled! Only build up a big force when you are preparing for a conquer or see enemies coming.

- As Withwnar said, classic advice for the High Elves is to move your capital to Mithlond to produce a lot more gold via reduced corruption

- Prioritize economic buildings:
1) Mines
2) Farms
3) Barracks*
4) Roads
5) Markets/Ports
* If barracks unlocks free upkeep for the intended garrison

- Finally, plan your campaign around defensive "choke provinces" so you can focus your army in one place. Try not to have huge borders with your enemy because you pay a lot more maintaining defenses in each. Try to keep only free upkeep units in each garrison (units tinted blue/purple when garrisoned)

This post should be sung loudly from the highest point at Imladris by a choir of newbile Elven ladies in waiting. You know, the Elven chicks who are only a thousand years old. Oh yeah, gotta get em while they're still young! ...Er...scratch that...they are forever young.

Seriously, though, this is the strategy one must apply to basically just about any TW game, Medieval II and its various mods included. TATW is a more extreme example, seeing how there are a sea of underdeveloped settlements and only a handful of large towns and cities where one can truly build up an economy. The rest is a bunch of piss-poor villages that aren't worth garrisoning. It's best just to "turtle" in the game and wait for enemies or allies to develop such settlements from the ground up, then take them later after they've done all that hard work for you.

[Flinn]

^
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Good post

@ cjm81499: in order to play as the HE you need to be good with small armies before than anything; it's not uncommon that you win battles with less than 20 casualties and in general as you move forward in the campaign you should be able to keep your losses at 5% or less each battle. This is fundamental to reduce training/retraining costs.

As Dragun said, it is mandatory to spend the money on the right spots and to do it at the right moment.
Also, with the Elves it is better to avoid taking rebel villages, because they always take 40-50 turns to turn into a city, and for all the time you have to pay for the garrisoned unit, so it's not really worth the effort (it will take 30-40 turns before you can pay off the garrisoned unit, so for a long while you are actually loosing money there); it is much better to assemble a 1/3 stack and take at least a town or a large town from the enemy (in general I suggest you to go for the best enemy's settlements, such as Moria or Goblin Town for instance).

If you like to turtle (as I suspect), you ought to follow Dragun's advice and try to put yourself in defense on choke positions, because TATW is not the kind of game that will allow you to keep more than 1 full stack (not including the units garrisoned for free) with elves for a long while, so you definitely need to attract your enemies on no more than 2 places (if you can choke them on a bridge you can do mervelous things, heroic victories with 1:8 ratio aren't rare - to be clear here you can repel 8000 orcs with 1000 elves and less than 20% losses on your side).

If you want to know more about economy for turtlers, you can check here

[cjm81499]

Wow, some great advice from all of you. I would not quite say that I turtle, but it is just difficult to be agressive with such little money and troop count. But I will still check out the guide. Moving the captial is a good idea, spending that much on corruption was very frustrating. Also I do not really have much of a choice but to send them to retrain. Otherwise the army is just too small, and will usually fall to the hordes of the orcs. I am spread very thin as it is. Thank you to everyone, I think I will get back to that campaign very soon.

[Joseignacio]

Dragun:

Is it that way? I believe a unit of 120 soldiers costs 10 times as much as a unit of 12. If what you say is true, I should merge my units, because going back to the barracks with some very damaged units, is anti economical, ..., what i do is merge when they are half power or retrain them in available close quarters, and send the very damaged to the usually long distance more sophisticated barracks. I always though the cost of these "7 units-100 soldiers in all" armies was minimal, ¿am I wrong?

Bad part of it is when a marauding enemy army encounters those ragged veterans ...

[Flinn]

my "philosophy" when it comes to retraining

- never retrain 1st tier units unless they have at least two silver chevrons
- only retrain elite units if possible (3rd-4th tier)
- only retrain a unit if it is possible to do so in 5 turns maximum

all the rest it's just a waste of time and money

[DrDragun]

Indeed, consider that Sword Quendi cost 500g for a new unit and 210 per turn to maintain. If you march the unit for 4 turns back to barracks then it will cost you 840g! That much more expensive than the savings of using barracks to retrain.

With that said there are some disadvantages:

-Merging units will destroy armor upgrades if either unit lacks armor upgrades. If both units have armor upgrades then the merged units will keep the armor upgrades
-I believe the experience level of veteran units is the same when merging as retraining but I'm not sure

Like Flinn said, I occaisonally find myself marching elite/rare units for retraining but essentially everything else gets merged unless it will remove armor upgrades.

[Flinn]

-I believe the experience level of veteran units is the same when merging as retraining but I'm not sure

IIRC, when you merge two units with different experience, the final exp is an average of the two (it also depends on number of men, i.e. if you merge 40 men with 6 xp and 10 men with 4 xp most probably you will get 50 men with 6 or at the worst 5 xp).

On the weird side, I also noticed that when you merge a unit with little experience with one with great experience, the one with little exp (which is the one whose men are moved) can actually get an exp increase; for this and other obvious reasons, I always prefer to merge units manually, and always moving less experienced men to replenish more exp units.

[Withwnar]

It's some kind of average, for sure.

On the weird side, I also noticed that when you merge a unit with little experience with one with great experience, the one with little exp (which is the one whose men are moved) can actually get an exp increase

Isn't that just the averaging at work?

[Flinn]

Isn't that just the averaging at work?

no

I'll try to explain with an example:

I have 50 men with 5 XP (out of a unit of 120 let's say), then I manually merge another unit of 90 men with 1 XP with this one (so the 90 are moving to the 50 ok?); according to logic I will get a new unit of 120 men with let's say 3 XP and a remain of 20 men that should still have 1 XP, while in fact most probably they will get one extra XP.

Now the point is: in my logic when I move a unit card into another, I'm reinforcing the second one with the troops of the first one and then the XP averages on the new resulting unit; I'm not actually merging them, because otherwise in the example above I should have had 2 units with 70 men each.

Am I wrong?

[Ngugi]

DrDragun is right in strategy, if not in his reason for it, just for the record.
Got curious because it was not as I knew it. The upkeep do scale.
Example from a unit I just checked on in a campaign: it has 151 soldiers and the upkeep is 130 gold. That is 0,86 gold á soldier. The unit suffer in battle and drops to 111 soldier, the upkeep is now only 95 gold. However hat is also 0,86 gold per soldier in the unit, so the upkeep is porportional.
None the less it's correct that unless for certain special units that you want to retrain because they have experience or armour bonuses, merging is the economical and strategic choice.

The cost to march units home to be retrained, instead of merging them into a unit that can defend or expand the front at maximum unit effieciency, is wastage if alternatives exist.
The cost to retrain them is as a rule best spent on a new unit instead. A new unit, unless the retraining settlement is just at hand, will mean the frontline can be reinforced faster than if the unit have to go home and back again, because the new unit already is at home and only have to go "back" to the front again.

[Veteraan]

Yup, it's averaging. I always try to make sure that the receiving unit is the less experienced one when merging two units. Ideally the more experienced unit should have more soldiers than are needed to get a full stack. After merging this gives you a choice of two interesting possibilities:

Retrain the unit and keep their original (high) stats.

Garrison (2 of) the unit(s) in a settlement where they can be retrained. Especially if it is low in numbers (<20) it is a cheap way to quickly reinforce a settlement when needed as it will take only 1 turn. Especially when playing elves this can be very useful.

[Withwnar]

The best choice for capital can change as your kingdom grows. I made a submod to help find it: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...4#post14453894

[Caliedhe]

Greetings to all.

Well, I've read all your posts and did find useful things I've never guessed before (like moving capital). I only have one thing to add (said on Third thought).

First, yes, the best strategy is to spend every money you get on developing the economy.

Second is... as mentioned already, do NOT accept new generals. They are too expensive to maintain. I use them at first to grab all the rebel settlements I can (the high elven cavalry is the best in the game) but then I have to leave a unit defending the town without free upkeep... :

Third: This is my advice, bring a VERY wounded trooper into the very low town, because they generally only need "something" inside to avoid going into Civil war. And that way you avoid leaving a general or another expensive unit inside.
Most low level villages only need 1-10 troops inside and those 10 guys get paid less then 50g, and you are only getting 80-150g for each village. This way you reduce completely the upkeep on those places, while allowing your bigger stacks into where you want them.

My Last entry would be to actually conquer the world with only Low Quendi units before you let "End Game" Era to come. In End Game I cannot beat Mordor because it has destroyed Gondor, Rohan, Galadrim Elves (etc) and the endless Olog-hai and the Haradrim hordes overwhelm me. Try keep Gondor and Rohan alive by sending money or even aid with troops at least to have a "living wall" of friendly towns between you and your enemy.

-----------------------------------
"One Pling to rule them all!"

[Veteraan]

If memory serves me right, I once read that XP (maybe all stats) are kept for each individual member of a unit. That would explain that sometimes the remainder of a merged unit has more XP than before, or less as I also have seen happening. In which case it is an average, but based on the individuals that are actually merged.

Reinforcing is perhaps a better term than merging indeed. As far as I can tell the unit that receives always is fully present in the result.

[Withwnar]

Oh, you're talking about the leftover soldiers. I see.

[Joseignacio]

So, if (as I though I had seen) the units are paid per soldier, I still think that experienced units are worth to be brought back to cities to reinforce. I'll explain:

- If you merge units half power, but you send weakened ones let's say 4 turns away to reform, let's say with 20 men each, you only pay 4*(20/120) less than 1 turn of payment till they arrive and reform.

- After that you get a full unit and, yes, if that unit is of a tier that could have been recruited in the front, you still have to pay 4 turns to carry it to the front.

-- But if not, anyway you'd have to pay exactly the same to carry a unit of this kind newly produced back in the HQs.
-- And you'd not get the experience.

- Besides, when you take important enemy settlements you usually can get higher tier barracks, and if you inmediately start cultural conversion and you are not able to expand very fast in that front or you decide to push in some other direction , you'll be able to retrain those units in those advanced forts often 10 - 20 turns later.

- Of course, if we are talking about lower tier units, it is interesting to reinforce them even from 40 soldiers (or less) because you can do it easily very close to the Front, not only the barracks are easily built but also the level of culture you need to achieve is lower and sometimes you don't start from 0.

I love highly trained troops, and it's unpayable how they can behave in battle. Many times I save the last 5 or 7 men of a unit in a battle, who have reached the silver or gold braids, just to be able to retrained later, merging them would dilute their experience till it's not noticeable.

By the end of the game I usually have very veteran armies going around the map, they are terrible. And with the dwarfs... oooof. An army with dwarf infantry mostly with gold and silver chevrons, many of them in higher tier units like Dragonslayers, Iron Guard, Axemen of Erebor...