Editing Total War Warhammer/Tactics/Empire (section)

===Campaign Strategies===
General overall Empire strategy: In Campaign, the crucial thing with the Empire is having the right army composition. Usually, you gotta have the lord and 1-3 heroes, 2-4 cavalry/chariot units, 2-4 artillery units, no more than 4-6 missile infantry units, and the rest (around a third of your army) MUST be hand-to-hand infantry units. Do NOT go overboard with artillery and missile units, always have, at the very least, 6-8 melee infantry units, and use your general and melee heroes to hold back the enemy. Get this into your head: your melee infantry is your worst weakness, but it's also your backbone. Without them, all your shiny and deathly artillery will fail miserably. Your infantry is mediocre at best: low armor and hp make them die to a breeze, with bad strength they don't kill shit, and most of all, their low morale will make them run pretty soon. The combination of all these factors makes them very unreliable. More, more unreliable than you think when you begin the battle.

First of all, you need numbers: without that, you'll lose, 100% guaranteed. Even if you win a battle with only five swordsmen units and get cocky, in the next battle you'll find they're only at half strength (Empire infantry gets decimated in each battle, even victorious ones) and you'll get your ass handed to yourself. Get Halberdiers asap, their defensive nature makes them perfect for an Empire gunline (which most of the time your army will be). You also need to place them right (spears/halberdiers in the flanks to protect against cavalry, no weak points in the battle line, no exposed flanks), and you need to support the right heroes with "Hold the line" and priests with battle prayers evenly distributed in the line, cavalry in the flanks prepared to intervene when necessary, mages to buff the line/debuff the enemy. Without a reliable wall of steel in front of them, your missiles and artillery won't have enough time to do their thing, and if the enemy gets to them, not only will they stop firing, they will suffer great (perhaps irreparable) casualties, the nearby units will get demoralized, and you'll have to dedicate a lot of resources to contain the breach, weakening the rest of your line. Do NOT let your battle line get breached!

When you progress in the game, you won't have to rely so much on the h2h infantry battle line. Your griffon/horsey general/captain/priest, with all their buffs, can contain whole units by themselves, your mages can use their flying mounts to position their spells where they are truly devastating, your high-end artillery can work miracles, and demi-gryph knights can operate independently. And yet, do not delude yourself: without a good battle line, all will be for naught. Greatswords are good but not truly great (heh), do not think they are Ironbreakers or you'll pay for it. As always, even if I repeat myself, never leave home without around a third of your army being melee infantry!

About mages, remember, with Empire the name of the game is buff/debuffs. Your little guys truly need them, do not use missile and offensive magic unless you have a lot of magic reserves and will get a lot of advantage when doing it. Later in the game, when you have a good mage with lots of magic reserves, some vortexes, either moving or immobile, and things like Comet of Cassandora can be outright devastating when the massed enemy is being contained by your battle line and you cast them right in the middle of them. But even then, only do it AFTER you have buffed/debuffed the right units and have the battle more or less under control.

About pistoliers/outriders, they only shine when you have many of them, and can shoot a unit while it's occupated pursuing your other units. This is especially true with outriders, who can't move and shoot. Lonely units won't do much, but having said that, even if they only manage to get one enemy infantry unit away from the main battle when the action takes place, they have justified their cost.

About empire knights and all their variants, remember that even with all their armor they die fast in prolonged combat, or get whittled down by the enemy fire. Never let them get too far from your battle line, where their slowness (for cavalry) can make them get surrounded and destroyed by the enemy. Their primary use is to support your infantry, not to chase enemy missiles away (although they can and should do that sometimes, of course).

To sum it all up, never forget that, in this game, Empire is the closest thing to managing a real-life army: one moment of overconfidence and many lives will be lost!