Editing Total War Warhammer/Tactics/High Elves (section)

===General===

High Elves have an image of being one of the easiest races to play in campaign. While yes, Due to their powerful lords and strong economies they tend to lean a bit more on the easy side, that doesn't mean you will never come across any difficulty while playing them in Vortex or Mortal Empires. In this section we will go over the general tips about how to handle a High Elf campaign, followed in more depth by the specific subfactions themselves and how they differ from each other. Let's go over the generic traits all High Elves have first:

'''Influence''': Probably the most important mechanic the High Elves have, and the one that connects back to all of their other ones, is '''Influence'''. The Elves are political animals and as such need some kind of leverage or favors in order to make headway in anything they want to do. Influence is a special currency you get for completing missions, building certain buildings, doing hero actions and through random events on the campaign map. This offers you two major ways to spend it, one being stronger lords and the other being Intrigue at the Court. The first way revolves on how you recruit lords and heroes, as each one has a certain amount of influence you have to spend in order to recruit them. Lords and Heroes that cost 0 influence have shitty traits that hurt your campaign, ones that cost a relatively low amount have more standard traits, while the most expensive have straight up OP ones. For instance, there's a 60 influence trait for Archmages called Incendiary, which gives a +100% weapon strength, +100 charge bonus and flaming attacks. This may sounds pointless on a mage character you want to keep out of melee until you realize she can ride a fucking dragon at some point. This can get you some ungoldy powerful lords if you build up influence.

The other thing you use Influence for is '''Intrigue at Court''', which further reflects the political nature of the Elves. With this, you can improve or destroy relations between any two factions on the campaign map that you know. It's similar to what the Empire has, only while they can only do it between two Imperial factions, you can do it between anyone. This means you can puppeteer the map in anyway you like. Want to declare war on a faction but they are allies with someone you have a Non Aggression Pact with? Pump some influence and now they hate eachother. Want to confederate that one stubborn faction on Ulthuan? Keep spending Influence and you'll win them over eventually. You can manipulate diplomacy to start wars and alliances between whoever you want. 90% of the time you'll be using this to get other High Elves to confederate with you easier.
*The best time to ask for a Confederation is after your target has suffered a military defeat. If you see them lose two armies in the same battle, they are more likely to agree to Confederate.
**You can also confederate with High Elves by dealing with their most dangerous threat, which is now visible to you in the diplomacy screen. By winning victories against the faction that's currently curbstomping them, you can win enough goodwill for them to confederate with their armies intact.
*Since Influence is so important, here's an easy tip to get a ton of it:
**Recruit a Noble. Don't worry if he has a bad trait, he'll never be used in combat.
**Send him to a city that's owned by a faction you won't be friendly with anyway, like Dark Elves or Norsca
**Keep spamming the '''Secure Influence''' option, it will give you 1 influence every turn for 5 turns.
**Level up Secure Influence every chance you get, you get an extra point for every level up, and rinse and repeat.
**If you keep doing this you will be drowning in influence.
*In addition, im Immortal Empires, there is now a general alliance mechanic that lets you recruit units from factions you have a defensive/military alliance with, which is good for <s>[[AWESOME|bringing fucking Dinosaurs to tear shit up]]</s> souping with allies to shore up weaknesses, and quickly recruit units in exchamge for "allegiance." Basically, the more you help them out, the more benefits you get. That being said, you also can't just use positive opinion gained from Intrigue at the Court to spam pacts and alliances, because if you spend too much time ignoring your ally and not fighting their biggest threat, they'll break the alliance and withdraw their forces from your stacks

'''Research''': Their tech tree is kind of stupid. The research is locked by different stages and you need to construct different buildings in order to get access to all of them. This means building things you'd rather not in order to finish the research tree. You even need to get all tradeable resources in order to completely finish the tree. Just complete what you need to complete and you'll get through it fine.

'''Buildings''' you'll want in every major city:
*'''Amphitheater''': Your public order building, just make it to make sure rebels don't spring up anywhere. It's also makes money and isn't too bad at it on top of that.
*'''Tower of Mages''': Gets you more Mages and Loremasters, along with more research rate and access to more stages of research.
*'''Blessed Grove''': Gets you more Handmaidens and Sisters of Avelorn. A fun agent and one of your best units.
*'''Dragon Keep''': The Dragons are nice, but you really want this for the +1 Lord Recruit rank. Being able to get lv20 lords from the start instead of leveling them up there is so nice.
*'''Elven Court''': More Nobles, which means more Influence. What more do you want.

'''Units''': Basic Archers and Spearmen are ridiculously effective, and wil be able to handle most of what the game throws at you until pretty far in the game. If you don't know what to put in your armies, four Spearmen, five-six Archers and two Bolt Throwers are a pretty good base that you never can go wrong with.
*Silverin Guard cost more gold and upkeep, but will hold the line for much, much longer. If you can afford them, take them, but they're useless unsupported and won't kill anything much faster than regular Spearmen.
*Great eagles are also some very good early-tier units that are helpful in emergency stacks. Just a couple can tear up artillery or interrupt cavalry charges, while still being disposable.