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

===Campaign Strategies===
Focus on economy in a few good provinces with 4 cities (Hag Graef, Naggarond, Ghrond, Quintex, Har Ganeth, etc) put income, slave pens, and then black roads or special resources on every city/town. Then put all slaves here. Add 3 or 4 Masters to reduce slave decline to zero and you have the strongest, easiest, and fastest to grow economy in the game bar none. Can field near unlimited armies of doom stacks. There you go, you win.

Actually, the most prosperous slave province for the Dark Elves is Yvresse owing to the unique Tower of the Warden building which generates 50 gold per 100 slaves. With a maximum slaveholding capacity of 15500 slaves, combined with the multiplicative effect of slaves on base province income and the ability to stack slave income multipliers through heroes that are essentially unlimited, it surpasses any Druchii province in gold-generating potential. Proving, once again, that Naggarond sucks. This wealth is also why it is viable for certain Dark Elf factions to abandon their starting capitals and conquer Ulthuan instead.- while that may be more profitable technically, it’s irrelevant. Any proper slave strategy give’s effectively unlimited money even in just the dark elf lands. Conquer Ulthuan first or not, either way you won’t need for money with even a little strategy.

Unfortunately they heavily nerfed the Slave system in Immortal Empires, the jury is out still on how good their economy is after the massive nerf, you now have to spend slaves as a global resource on your economic buildings and commandment. Will update as we find out how bad the nerf is but its already clear its going to be dramatically weaker than before. After playing 80 turns I can confirm the economy is still strong as long as you rapidly expand and keep fighting but slaves decline possibly too fast from buildings, and slave pens aren't that useful, all they do is increase capacity and give a tiny 5 slave per turn income, whereas a leveled economy building consumes 40 per turn, so only constant fighting and sacking will be able to keep your slave population up. The public order penalties for slaves are basically gone now. Assassins can now generate 10 slaves per turn by staying in your provinces instead of boosting slave income, but that is a waste of them. In general all the buildings or skills which give slaves per turn are completely useless, they are way too weak to keep up with the cost of buildings, you either have to constantly sack other countries or be continuously conquering territory. Don't Bother with Slave Markets or any building that give slaves per turn, the rate of gain can never keep up with the consumption and increasing slave capacity is useless. Having a large stockpile of slaves is actually more or less pointless, you only need 150 slaves to trigger the bonus income at the end of your turn and you don't get any meaningful bonuses for having lots of slaves. you can have a slave consumption of 1000-2000 per turn and all you need to do is get above 150 remaining after the decline before the end of each turn and there is no downside. So slave markets and any special buildings that increase capacity or give a few slaves per turn should just be skipped, this is bad design by CA but it at least frees up your building slots. overall the Dark Elf income is still extremely strong it just not as strong as before. Unfortunately once your empire gets large enough it will become almost impossible to trigger the bonus income because you can easily end up with -4000-5000 slaves per turn which will be impossible to keep up each turn. Fundamentally as your empire grows amounts of slaves decline per turn increase quickly but your ability to capture slaves remains largely fixed, unless you can simultaneous sack 4-5 provinces a turn (every single turn) it will be impossible to keep up slaves late game, and the slave buildings do nothing to help this. Unfortunately I feel like they failed to playtest the new mechanic adequately as it becomes almost completely useless late game.

As of 3.1 the slave system is... better, but still not really there yet. They removed the slave cap and rebalanced slave gain/bleed. They also added a new 'rush construction' feature where you can spend slaves to instantly complete buildings, which is a strong feature (though it kind of undermines the 'strategic' element of this 'strategy' game.). Slave bleed and gaining slaves from battles has also been rebalanced, and are a bit more palatable, though not perfect. But this system is hampered by bugs/poor design decision. First off, they removed ALL global bonuses for slaves besides the income bonus (and public order penalty) which has itself been nerfed. While you're not exactly poor now, it's definitely more difficult to build up money, and the construction time and other infrastructure bonuses are missed. 

This anon's opinion is that the biggest problem with the current slave system is that... it's boring. Clicking on every settlement you own to enact your diktats is mind-numbing, especially when you have a larger empire. Managing it is still pretty tedious, even with the rebalances, [[FAIL| and, to add insult to injury, the Chaos Dwarfs get the Dark Elf slave system from Warhammer 2 (you know, the one everyone liked) not only copy-and-pasted over, but greatly expanded on with a ton of in-depth complimentary mechanics that are ''fun'' to use.]]

Dark Elves have a fun, strong army with powerful characters, but this overhaul to their mechanics have left them in a quagmire on the campaign map. Don't mistake them as weak, their faction is actually fairly strong, but they are much more boring to play than in Warhammer 2. Either the current slave system needs a MASSIVE upgrade/overhaul, adding tons of different things to spend your slaves on, and a global window to make management less terrible, or they need to rip the entire thing out and come up with a completely new mechanic/ set of mechanics for the Dark Elves. As much as it pains me to admit, neither of these things are particularly likely without a big push from the playerbase, so if you're a Druchii fan, make sure to complain to your local CA representative!