Third Age Total War High Elves
Welcome to!A subreddit for all of those who love the Total War series. I'm playing Third Age Total War mod for Medieval 2 and the campaign is kicking my ass! I started as the high elves and it's been damn near impossible to keep my coffers full! I even make sure there's a general at each city and upgrade my farms and markets and have trade with every faction bordering me.Damn near impossible for me to keep an army in the field too, I've been battling the orcs of the misty mountain and I've been REAL careful with how I fight them. Always putting archers on top of mountains, making sure I have the advantage, etc. Etc.I'm almost to turn 100 and still don't have any upgraded units because I haven't had any money to upgrade my damn cities! Now I'm fighting awesome upgraded orcs and trolls with the beginning troops for my faction.
I tried playing on silvan elf's and I had the same problem. I'm playing on Hard Difficulty and Very Hard battle difficulty.How the hell do you beat this campaign or maintain a healthy economy to maintain yourself and upgrade your buildings?!
I'm pretty good at Total War games but this game is kicking my ass, I could really use some advice. Third Age total war basically assumes you can pull incredible victories against impossible odds over and over.
If you are running high elves, you should be able to kill a full stack of orcs with a half stack of your starting militia with nearly no casualties.The linchpin of this is your general units, which should be in the field, not sitting around in towns. They will get a bunch of traits like corrupt, degenerate, and drunkard. (maybe not alchoholic if they are elves, I forget.) Until your cities have high level buildings to prevent that, so get your generals out there fighting. One unit of high elf general cavalry can nearly kill a stack of orcs on their own.Next, and this is high elf specific, move your capital on turn 1. Imladris is great an all, but expanding is really tough, and even if you do most of the territory around it is garbage. The grey havens are the center of your economy. Then you can expand north towards Angmar, and south along the coast.Lastly, I want to mention, elves have a population problem.
You NEED a historians guild to get the population growth to upgrade to stone walls, and you can only get 1 headquarters, so choose wisely (not Imladris, that place already has max walls) The only other option is a max chivalry character (hello Glorfindel!) who I think can put a city over the top. You will never be able to recruit that many high end units anyway, but you might want a forward base closer to the action eventually.Good luck! Now go hunt some orcs!. Yeah I was destroying the enemy pretty easily until I started to expand into the misty mountains. Now I'm facing heavy armor archers, heavy halberds and trolls.I have about 3 or 4 general units travelling with my main army since I literally haven't been able to recruit any cavalry.
My generals that are managing my towns are actually maintaining pretty decent traits besides my one using the Palantini (sp?) He's going a bit mad, haha.Yeah I'm starting to realize that capturing cities in the misty mountains is hard to control. But if I don't do that then the Orcs just keep sending massive hoards towards Imaldris and my surrounding villages. I'm not familiar with the map in TATW so I don't know where I should expand to.I guess I just need to know if the game is actually beatable without downloading some sub mods or modifying some.strat files. It's just constantly feeling like an unbeatable uphill battle, and it's becoming no fun since my army is being decimated and I can't build or recruit anything. It's totally beatable. I've won campaigns as high elves, wood elves, dwarves, gondor, easterlings and harad.
I didn't play on very hard, but people on youtube and the forums have, and those campaigns are beatable too.knowing the map was a big part of it. Your first target is not ootmm, they are too spread out and some of their settlements are worthless. (goblin town and moria are good) Your first targets for expansion are lunlaith, which is north mithlond, and lond something or other south of harlond, on the coast. The coastal city is yours for the taking, nobody else is going for it for a long time. Lunlaith you have to grab before the dwarves get it. There is another small settlement north east of that that you might grab before bree gets it.
Third Age Total War High Elves Units
That puts you in striking range of angmar from that direction.Move your capital, expand in the west, and you will have enough money for a small garrison for Imladris, and enough troops to challenge angmar in the field. You want to capture Cairn Dum before Angmar gets trolls, because you will probably not have the high end elf infantry to deal with them. Everyone has money because the computer cheats. All cpu controlled factions get at least 5000 gold ( or whatever it's called) per round if I remember right.Also defending for too long in this game will end up in you losing. At least that's what I feel like. The enemy doesn't care if he loses full stack after full stack attacking your cities. If you defeat a large army you have to take advantage out of it ( attack a city), even if it would mean heavy casulties.
An army that accomplishes nothing is just wasted money.Edit: I don't know about the elves but I also found that, when I played it was best to mass units and conquer rather than upgrade buildings at the start. Buildings are so expensive it makes more sense to produce quantity over quality.
Good generals are key, too. Just finished a campaign as Gondor and haven't yet had a chance to play with the high elves, but my advise should be transferable.1) diplomats. Send these to all the good factions and the evil ones you will not be directly in contact with. Trade agreement with them all (esp Gondor and harad as yiu can trade via sea). Also every 5 turns you should be able to sell these factions map information for a reasonable amount of gold (over 100 or so turns, this really adds up)2) 'raid' not conquer. The third age is designed to make blitzing enemies very hard to do - holding freshly captured territory can be difficult and expensive, so here's what I do. Basically, have a single offensive army, largely composed of regenerating general units all pooled together.
Send them into enemy territory (in my case harad) and conquer their undefended towns and massacre their armies (building up high dread, which helps a tonne in breaking orcs). Then sack them for a large sum of gold. Then demolish all buildings, netting you loads more gold. Then finally, use your aforementioned diplomats to sell the conquered region to either an ally or even back to your enemy, and then move on to conquer the next. If you sell to an enemy or just let them reconquer it, they'll have a fairly useless city which produces much more inferior troops and they'll spend their time and money rebuilding it - at which point when you feel strong enough to expand, you can nab it again.
If you give it to an ally, because of the way the Ai works they will often rapidly produce armies to defend the territory, impeding your enemies counter attack. In this way I created a defensive ring of rohan territories in mid harad, letting me conquer the rich costal cities safe from counter attack whilst my raiding army earned me 10-20k per harad settlement sacked. All the money you earn from this can be fed back into your economy!.
Yeah I've been using the Diplomat strategy. It's actually strange. Sometimes I'll try and sell my map info for like 500 gold, and the enemy will refuse my offer and randomly offer me like a thousand gold for free, and of course I'll accept. Even with this strategy I'm still losing tons of money.Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong then?
I figured if I conqueror new territory that obviously means more taxes and me able to become more powerful. Like the other factions.
I mean, Eriador (sp?) Is like three times my faction size already. How is the AI expanding so easily.- grrrr. I've only just recently started playing TATW and I have a campaign with Isengard going relatively well. I'm at war with just Rohan atm. Isengards units have quite a decent upkeep cost so i utilized the use of forts and built buildings to have more free upkeep slots.