I wish you had shown the Ostankya battle. I played this on L/VH, I legit cannot win her even after multiple restarts. I had full stack of darkshards with shield, three heroes, 2 melee lords, 1 caster lord and Morathi. It is not even close. I get annihilated by her. I dropped the difficulty to very hard so I can save/load to get a proper battle and still lost. Eventually I was able to auto resolve it from the ambush. Wood elves used to be hard, but the Ostankya is orders of magnitudes harder. There has to be something I don't know. Her archers feel like tier 5 units in strength.

>Good faction mechanics >Good spells and great itens >Public order is easier to control (corruption) >Can keep her lords loyal. >Good starting position with plenty of slaves from skaven and kislevites. Her only weakness is the climate bs which is in dire need of rework.

In our Until campaign, all of ulthuan was united under nkari. Was nuts.

love your stuff costin. my personal favourite is Malus, but Im not as knowledgeable game wise as yourself. still, hes the most fun to play for me. side note , hope youre doing better, keep it up. cheers

Why don't you ditch this format in favor of 20-30 turn guides for different factions? Those are much more valuable than just simply talking about a particular campaign with the lord frozen in turn 1 😢

Our Isabella/ katarin campaign is deadlocked. Something on the Sylvania map is causing it to crash. We are thinking morathi or malus and miao ying in old world.

Is it true tjat the dark elf’s slave mechanic is worse in 3 than in 2?

Not much of a secret though. Best DE starting position, best DE faction effect. Or tied with extra Blarks from Lokhir for effect, but his starting position is terrible in comparison. Imo, best start is to rush Ostankya asap. She becomes too much of a problem if you let her build up hexes. Turns 1-3 to get Morathi's province, peace out or start building 2nd army for minor DE, go get the Bleak coast from Ostankya. This way Ostankya dies before turn 10. Grabbing bleak coast earlier means starting to prepare Ulthuan invasion earlier as well. Sisters of twilight have the province with Vaul's anvil landmark (-10% army upkeep). Unless they somehow manage to lose and not retake any part of whole province to 3rd party (never seen it happen), I will never consider not conquering them as any HE/DE faction. Khatep is the ideal ally - always likes player (due to high power rank), dislikes everyone else around him and has useless home province. The only potential issue could be him grabbing some other territory you want. Mazdamundi is ally by necessity. Hard to please, but not having to waste time on conquering his yellow territories is well worth it.

Its not like soulstealer is the most broken bullshit spell in this game since release

Hard disagree Heilbron is easily one of the strongest lords in the entire game and much stronger than Morathi Here is the pro tip? get a early blood voyage before you kill the orcs don’t declare war on alarielle when the voyage asks you to, this will make it to the voyage attack the orcs instead, now you want to grab the frozen Keep before Sigvard can which will be your main priority the orcs should retreat to their port settlement, which will get instantly killed by your blood voyage this gives you enough troops to take the frozen. Keep neutering Sigvard in the early game and giving you enough strength to confederate the faction to your left before they are exterminated by Valkia , if the voyage is still alive, you should have enough points to tell them to follow your main army via the defend target command. He will then go on attack or ambush valkia this might not work on all difficulties because of rng and how alarielles AI works if this is goes correct you should be storming the donut by turn 40 by turn 80 you have killed all of the elf’s and have complete control over the donut

Morathi isn't even the SECOND strongest Legendary Lord of the Dark elves. Malus and lokhir both easily beat her in terms of faction strength. Malus gets +100 growth for his entire faction from turn 1, as well as one of the strongest Legendary Lords in terms of combat for the entire game. This growth plus the new rush construction option, makes malus one of the fastest growing factions in the entire game. Then you can either choose the dual start to expand really fast, or give up one of them, giving you an extra 20,000 gold at the very first turn. Now he correctly said that Lokhir beats Morathi in the early game, due to sacking bonuses. What Constin doesn't realise is that he also beats her mid and late game too, due to the insane amount of black arks he gets simply by taking major ports. These black arks can go all around the world with sea lanes, and basically sack/occupy the entire world, make a ton of slaves both actively and passively (via the black ark slave building), while costing almost nothing due to their upkeep reductions. They are also amazingly useful for landarmies as both mobile recruitement and giving 4 extra upgradable army abilities and Lokhir even gets a unique black ark with a landmark at the start of the game. Lokhir even gets bonus growth for all these black arks via his unique rite, which also gives +20 campaign movement range to all armies, as well as even more sacking bonuses and a ton of bonuses for lokhirs best unit, corsairs.

Morathi's position has worsened so much with the addition of Ostankya and Yuan Bo. I suppose alternatively you can try to ally Mazda by going up against Yuan Bo and maybe even Markus. But Skeggi is a more reliable ally, and Hexoatl landmark is useful for DE, too. Morathi is in the position where Id either consider a migration campaign to Ghrond, to have Malekith and the other Crone as immidiate allies and help them out. Or do the grueling task of facing Ulthuan early game, whilst as you said, Nkari and Noctilus are still alive. I have played an Ordertide campaign as Malus, I believe he is pretty suited for it. You can kill Daniel a couple times for the trait which gives bonus relations with Kislev. Befriend Boris, then her daughter, then it should be slightly easier with the rest of the Old World. HE will still hate you though... Malekith dragged me into war against them, and had to take Ulthuan. But if you sell Hag Graef, you might never even meet any HE factions for a long, long time, so you should be good. Alternatively you can also go for Cathay's enemies in the Chaos Wastes as Lokhir, and Eshin to the south instead of killing them... although its easier to ally the baddies over there.

morathi is not even close to the strongest ll in the game and malekith is the strongest dark elf ll not her she is not even close to the strongest