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

===Campaign Strategies===
First things first; you're playing the long game from turn 1. Expect to spend many consecutive turns hunkered down in the woods, actually waiting for trees to grow. The most important thing to any Wood Elf faction you play as is the Oak of Ages. Whichever subfaction you decide to play as, bar Drycha, will start their campaign with the Oak itself under their direct control. Empowering the Oak is an expensive and time consuming process that often requires the growth of outlying Awakened Woods to help rejuvenate it. Doing so, however, will issue quests from the other disparate Wood Elf factions that, upon completion, automatically and immediately confederate with your main faction. Drycha, the racist that she is, will only confederate with Durthu and has little choice but to claim Athel Loren and the Oak of Ages by force.

In general, you're going to want to pick an Awakened Forest to focus on first. Most Awakened Woods outside Athel Loren are already occupied by some minor faction and they'll need to be kicked out before you can get to work returning them to full bloom. To do so, you'll want, if not need all adjacent regions to the forest to actively be helping grow the woods. This will only occur under three conditions; A) You've turned the settlement in the region into a Wood Elf Outpost, B) You've driven any occupying force out of the settlement and razed it to the ground or C), you're in an active alliance with the region's owner. If these settlements are owned by a hostile power, they'll actively harm your efforts to grow the forest. This can give you a bit of flexibility in how you go about healing the Awakened Woods, as outside the regions immediately adjacent to said woods, you genuinely have little incentive to conquer the lands beyond them. As these woods begin to fully bloom, they'll provide constant, active benefits both to Athel Loren's growth rate and to your faction's performance on the campaign. Each Awakened Wood will also provide diplomatic bonuses to a particular faction (usually one that spawns close to the woods in question) and will typically provide some sort of attrition immunity to help in your travels. Depending on how you go about things, Wood Elves can become one of the most diplomatic factions in the game.

*'''Drycha'''
Drycha's main focus, outside the shared Athel Loren goal every Wood Elf faction has, is to return Coeddil to the mortal world and punish the filthy flesh bags squatting in her home. The only other Wood Elf faction in the game that she can get along with is Durthu; everyone else needs to be wiped out. Due to her... particular stance on the eponymous Wood Elves, she has to place units comprised of such meat under a glamour. While this lulls them into thinking they're fighting for Ariel, it also reduces their combat effectiveness. To compensate, her Forest Spirit units come in the form of upgraded "Malevolent" versions, all with Frenzy as a perk. Between that and her/Durthu's shared Forest Spirit specialization upgrade mechanic, you're ''heavily'' encouraged to form a Forest Spirit-focused build for most of your armies.

====Immortal Empires====
As above, so below. The campaign for the Wood Elves is essentially unchanged from how you would play them in Mortal Empires, with a few minor improvements.

Alliances are now much easier to form with other races and bring tangible benefits. If you choose to play passively, allies will build outposts wherever they can and strengthen your garrisons. If you want to cover the world in trees, getting access to units like phoenixes from the High Elves or Ratling Guns from the Skaven will give you some new tactical options. Most Elf units, but particularly hydras, phoenixes, and chariots synergize well with your armies.

The Jungles of Chi-An are a new magic forest on the borders of Khuresh that greatly reduces the upkeep cost of tree spirits. You should rush confederating that one first as all wood elf factions, which thankfully is pretty easy; all you need to do is conquer one settlement of any Cathay faction. And speaking of confederation, it is now possible to confederate Drycha as other wood elf factions. If you're lucky, she'll have an army of malevolent tree spirits and not just a flock of hawks and bats.

The new diplomacy system still allows you to beg money off the AI, but you won't get as much for asking as you did in Mortal Empires; 500 to 1000 seems normal for factions that really like you. Instead, you'll be making most of your money and experience off forest encounters or siege battles against capital regions. Thankfully for your treasury, the reduction to upkeep costs mean Wood Elves can always field more armies relative to their limited territory than other factions, allowing you to overpower anyone foolish enough to threaten the hearthlands and forests themselves. If you're feeling particularly gutsy, trigger the ultimate endgame crisis/crises early in the campaign so you can farm the AI's armies for huge amounts of gold and XP.

Also of note is that, due to the nerf to AI aggression, expanding to all or most of the magical forests can be done fairly safely. You will rarely see the AI assault any of the Wood Elf territories en masse, allowing you to use the Deeproots or treasury savings to meet potential threats across most of the map. Combined with the confederation quests for the magical forests, the Wood Elf economy can be established very quickly and you'll be able to raise multiple armies before turn 50. The more armies you have, the greater the chance that Forest Spirit ancillaries will drop. These are some of the most powerful ancillaries in the game, as they impose a -5 leadership effect on enemy armies in the same province as the character they are equipped to. By stacking that effect on multiple lords or heroes you can destroy enemy armies through morale loss alone.

[[Category:Total Warhammer]] {{Total War Warhammer Tactics}}