You're here because you're having trouble so the first question is: Do you have enough Darkshards?

If you answered yes, you are two things. Wrong, and in the right place.

The long and short of the dark elf strategy guide is that darkshards are boarderline overpowered and while the sun is shining, we may as well make some hay.

Expect their AP damage to be drastically reduced in the coming weeks as the five people who actually play multiplayer complain about balance enough to get them nerfed.

Until then, understand this - the solution to every problem you encounter is 'kill it with darkshards'.

The Dark Elf army plays surprisingly defensively. While you certainly CAN go on the offensive with it, its a lot of effort and expense for less effect.

The strategy then, start to finish, is similar to dwarves but a lot more murderous and a lot less durable: Get as many darkshards with shields (so they'll win or at least tie any ranged duels they undertake) as you can fesibly protect, stick a line of meatshields in front of them, put everyone on guard and laugh loudly as the oncoming army melts into so many scattered corpses.

A widely cited complaint about total war is that missile units have no brain. Rather than every man turning slightly to his right when firing, the entire regiment wheels to be almost exactly square with their target (wasting precious shooting time), clips through the spear wall protecting them and gets pulled into a melee where they don't fire and get slaughtered before you can force them to pull back out again.

So that's the first thing to address because proper employment of your Darkshards is key to victory and if you use them wrong you'll wonder what the hell everyone is talking about.

The proper formation of a druchii darkshard battery is NOT a long thin line. It is two ranks, closely positioned behind one another, of units deployed five or six men deep and no fewer.

When setting control groups go back to front so each control group is two darkshards. Four at the most.

Do not go left to right down your firing line. These are not melee troops. When we want to quickly assign a priority target its because we want it dead NOW, not to wait five minutes while the units ineptly reposition as described above.

The result of deploying deep and grouping columns not ranks is that your darkshards will reliably be on target - the 'sweet spot' of everyone being able to put the enemy in their sights is a much larger proportion of their projected fire arc and when they DO have to turn it requires less space and less time to do so.

There's a side benefit too - a smaller front profile means you need fewer melee infantry to hold the line and those you do have can be deployed deeper, thus making it more likely they'll stop a cavalry or chariot charge dead rather than just falling over while it goes crashing into your precious darkshards.

So formed, you can quickly put four regiments of darkshards on anything that comes at you, reducing a terrifying threat to your army to a bleeding, broken, routing joke within seconds.

There is a vulnerability here and i'll address it. This large block of an army makes it hard for artillery to miss. And the AI seems fairly smart about prioritising them. But as we'll discuss further on, artillery is nothing to be frightened of.

As established, darkshards are the real killers of the Druchii army. Their terrifyingly accurate, long range mass volleys of armor-piercing death will slaugher anything that ventures near them.

The key then is to, at all costs, keep them out of melee and firing. If they're free to do their work, the battle is over.

Your choices are surprisingly diverse and its not necessarily a straight line of upgrade.


You begin life with dreadspears. And you'll be stuck with them for quite some time so get familiar. Not...not that familiar. None of them will live to see tomorrow, but that's okay.

These are...competant meatshields. Their melee defense is quite respectable and high Druchii leadership means they'll usually keep fighting until they're almost completely wiped out, which is all we can really ask from them. Charge defense against large means they're better at holding back line-breakers like cavalry and chariots that'd flatten other infantry and the bonus vs large means they might actually annoy these elite units a bit on their way to the grave.

On the downside their armor is poor (30 is nothing to write home about...) and they hit like wet noodles. Still, they're a superior choice to bleakswords for a number of reasons.

First, their job is to hold the line and die so that Darkshards don't. In pursuit of that goal, the higher melee defense is worth far more tha the modest improvement in melee attack. Bleakswords over Dreadspears will not win you a battle, Darkshards safely firing away behind your melee line will.

Second, the thing bleakswords are supposed to do (trade a bit of defense for a bit of attack) is something done better by literally every other melee infantry unit on the dark elf roster, which brings us to...


Corsairs are a bit tricky. Their lack of shields and relatively high movement speed (for infantry) makes them appear like offensive units and to some degree they are, but only in the sense that they are actually capable of killing things under their own power.

A superior statline, better damage and a very respectable 80 armor makes these an obvious improvement over your more basic infantry, except for two things...

First, they have no special tools for dealing with large creatures employed as linebreakers. Their sole task in the battle is to keep the enemy OFF our Darkshards and they'll fall like dominos before a cavalry or chariot charge.

Second, no shield. While their armor is more than compensation in most cases, against fellow Druchii who typically field large number of Darkshards of their own, this is worthless. They might as well wear tissue paper draped off of dental floss.

Speaking of Witch (see what I did there?)...


Witch Elves are an odd duck of a unit and lend themselves more to the high micro playstyle that simply isn't worth the effort as things stand.

Dodge provides flat resistance to physical damage that meets or exceeds about 30 points of armor in almost all cases. The break point is the lack of a shield. A 55% chance to ignore missile damage is substantial. They're expensive, slow to train and more fragile than Corsairs in most situations.

The second factor which disqualifies them from meat-shield duty is their poison. Alongside a tasty debuff is rampage - a new effect CA is very proud of and loves slapping on every unit it can possibly get away with.

There are micro-intensive ways to use rampage - losing control over a unit and having it kited away by a regiment of faster troops while its shot to pieces in the back by darkshards can theoretically neutralise and slaughter some very dangerous enemies.

The problem is that pulling that off exposes the witch elves to being isolated themselves and is difficult to pull off once the enemy has actually engaged. They're too slow to be used effectively as flankers so you can't even pull that nonense on their own darkshard lines and use the rampage effect to keep them from trying to get away.

As with any poison its not a bad idea to get it applied to a scary unit - especially a high morale one that isn't likely to break before doomsday ANYWAY, but they've no place in the line of battle.


Halberdiers on steroids. And Halberdiers were mean to start with. Its hard to dislike Blackguard - their leadership is like iron, which can actually get them into trouble but they will do what you ask of them unfailingly. Their stat line is quite solid, they've got armor out the wazoo so they'll last in the brawl, they have the desirable charge defense and bonus vs large to stop line breaking dead and the armor piercing damage on top is just gravy.

There're two reasons NOT to use Blackguard as your main meatshields. Cost, and the lack of a shield. If those doesn't matter, roll on the blackguard. If they do, consider whether the money is better spent on another lord with more darkshards.

As discussed, armor is pretty much worthless against other Druchii. Darkshards will shred it. To a lesser extent, so is their AP damage. If its got enough armor to matter, shoot it with Darkshards. If it doesn't have armor, shoot it with darkshards anyway. In any situation where massed darkshards are an issue, you're better off with a shield than all the armor that Vaul ever made.

Their superior statline WILL keep them alive a lot longer than dreadspears, and they'll get in a good few kills themselves. Given the high training reqs and upkeep you won't be fielding a lot of these until late in the game anyway, by which time you'll hopefully be done explaining to all the other dark elf factions that you ARE the witch-king they keep threatening you with.


Even better fighters than Blackguard, Executioners vs Blackguard is Bleakswords vs Dreadspears round two. Executioners are unequiviocally better at murdering. Its in the name. Its just that they're STILL not as good at it as darkshards are. Given that we're not lacking in the murder department, they just don't beat out the 'none shall pass' qualities of the Blackguard.

Druchii wouldn't be Druchii without some fun monsters. After all, thats why you're not playing Empire.

These units are almost pure gravy. The bulk of the battle will be won or lost based on whether or not your Darkshards emptied their crossbows into the enemy, or died with 75% of their ammunition unspent.

That is frustrating because the menagerie of other units is quite enjoyable. This is quite good because Darkshards require relatively little minding. Note any priority targets during the 'marching ino range' stage of the battle and ensure they're assigned and then let them do their thing.

Which leaves you free to play with your other toys.


Your first cavalry and your first major disappointment. Dark Riders are just bad. They'll always be bad and they should feel bad about that. They won't though, because they're spiteful Druchii. They're as bad as Darkshards are good.

They're fast, which is nice. But they've got tissue paper armor, a poor stat line, literally no mass so their charge stops dead the instant they detect collision. They will lose every fight they ever get in. Their only conceivable function is to run down routing units and frankly giving up army slots to that job is just not worth it - auto-resolve the follow up attack if you really don't want to spend another 15 running down the rag-tag survivors of the first massacre.

Odds are you'll gun down the routing units with your darkshards before they can escape anyway.


These are substantially better. Everything regular dark riders (with or without shields) can do (which isn't much...) these guys can do better. The ability to put a lot of armor piercing projectiles somewhere on the battlefield very quickly and get them out again is very useful in concept and early on when you have literally no other options for high speed units these can do the job.

Note that while possessing a decent range and AP missile damage, they cannot fire in 360' degrees. That cuts down their kiting abilities substantially and you get a lot less shots out of a regiment of these than you do dark shards but they can be used to peel off high value units and aren't a complete waste of a slot if they're ignored/chased.


A very niche unit. Think of them like fellbats on roids. Vargheists they are not. Tankier than they are killy, they're probably more valuable in seige battles (if they don't get shot out of the sky by dark shards...) than anywhere else as they can get onto the walls and wreck low tier units there. They'll even give mid-tier units like Corsairs a run for their money but are likely to come off the worse end of it.

They could be used to hit up artillery but artillery is neither that scary nor vulnerable enough to strike in melee until its past mattering. Or to chase down irritating units like norse cavalry that out-run everything else that gets close to them while shooting the whole time. But they'll take a lot of damage in the process and do you know what doesn't trigger skirmish retreat and always outranges missile cav?

Darkshards.


Your basic shock cavalry. They're...acceptable. Demigryphs these ain't. They don't even compare that well to reiksguard - cavalry charges are anemic in the current patch and while im sure that'll be one of the first mods out and probably an early patch, they're rather lacking in punch.

But they've got good armor, anti-armor themselves and bonus vs large. Which is nice.

I like to say there're two ways to counter shock cavalry of other armies - the hard way, or the expensive way.

The hard way is to play a game of footsie with your spearmen/black guard, constantly shortening and adjusting your flank and turning darkshards onto it to whittle them down while daring them to impale themselves on your spear points or die in a hail of bolts and indecision.

The expensive way is to throw some cold ones at them and have done with it. The Cold Ones will likely lose - Chaos Knights chew them up and spit them out - but they'll do a hell of a lot of damage on their way down and whatever emerges the other side is a much reduced threat.

Cold Ones rampage at low leadership. This is good for your 'expensive solution to shock cav' because they will keep chewing on their enemies until they're wiped out. And bad for your budget because they will keep chewing on their enemies until they're wiped out.

Given that you aren't lacking for damage tools to apply to the battle line and cavalry isn't anything to write home about in this game so far, they're a fire and forget missile. If they survive the battle, be pleasantly surprised.


Lose bonus vs large (boo!) and gain bonus vs infantry (boo!). You didn't lack means to kill slow moving infantry. Darkshards do that better than they kill anything else (which is saying something!). Cavalry is a nuisance and regular Cold Ones make it so you don't have to worry too much about it. Oh sure the stat line's a bit better, but that won't help where you really need them.


Now we're talking. Welcome to flavour country. War Hydras are just great. Terror inducing, regenerating, fire spitting engines of destruction. They're kinda slow though, they get stuck on terrain (especially trees) a lot and their fire breath will bug out because of some intervening object or detonate uselessly on a half inch rise you didn't notice because your face wasn't mashed into the grass to check the elevation.

But they're lots of fun. Smash them into the battle line and watch the leadership melt. Just make sure you put your troops on guard so they don't get pulled out of position - your Darkshards thank you for the opportunity to shoot their enemies in their unarmored backs.

You won't regret taking one.


Do you like hydras? Do you like microing their very underwhelming breath weapon? Do you enjoy how you can spend five minutes clicking while they do a dance around some imagined obstacle the game engine has decided is a problem? Do you like chasing down a unit you should be able to catch and eat but by the time you finally engage them they've stripped off half your health from shooting, and then you get two bites in before its back to Benny Hill?

Then you'll like dragons! All these problems, amplified!

If they actually engage, they're very good. They'll massacre low tier units and their high armor can be a real problem for an enemy that lacks the means to counter it - knights getting you down? Fly away. AP anti large coming to ruin your fun? Fly away.

They melt before Darkshards though. Big target, easy to hit, AP damage. Dead dragon in under a minute or your money back.

They're a great lord mount. But a terrible unit. Auto-resolve loves them but otherwise leave them at home. Bring a hydra or a high level dreadlord instead.


Do you know whats great about Darkshards? I get a frame-rating destroying torrent of AP bolts that literally blocks out the sun every few seconds at a useful range.

Do you know what Reaper Bolt Throwers do? They take away either the 'torrent' bit or the 'AP bit' and give you some bonus range instead.

They really ought to be better. They're pretty damned accurate, so that's in their favor. They will normally hit what you're aiming at even at extreme range.

Their two modes gives them fiexibility but they both kinda suck. The big bolt is intended for monster hunting - its AP, its got bonus vs large. It fires four of them in a volley. And for what its worth it performs as advertised but do you know whats better than eight volleys of four shots? Darkshards.

The scatter fire is a bit more practical but the damage is aenemic. At best, the Bolt Thrower can snipe out other artillery crews but it has a shorter range than a hell canon and dark riders with crossbows are faster.

The one thing your Darkshards are less than amazing at is killing individual, small heroes. Once they start riding dragons, or sitting on giant portable thrones, or hoverboards, they're no problem. That's a big hitbox and your Darkshards will do you proud.

But before then its less than ideal. Its not that they won't do it - its just that they're better at almost everything else and in the inevitable blob other people's heads keep getting in the bolts' way.

Meanwhile their hero is crashing your your thin, emo line. Since nothing on a Druchii battlefield is more important than keeping the Darkshards firing that cannot stand.

Heroes are your go-to solution for stopping that nonsense before it starts.


Looks great on paper. Look at that damage! Five or six shots and you can snipe that enemy lord right out of the battle!

Sucks in reality. The interval between shots is quite long, the accuracy is not good so its probably a wasted effort and while you're nancing about with your crossbow, THEIR hero is getting stuck in and slaughtering your troops en masse with their aoe Sauron Maces.

Your dreadlord should be with the troops, providing a leadership bolster, and intercepting enemy heroes so they can't waste your melee line. Not flapping about failing to make an impact with their pop gun. He doesn't even buff nearby artillery...


Better. Basic melee lord. Not a lot to write home about. Obviously the first thing you want is to buff your Darkshards so your primary murder unit is every more murdery. Then grab Lightning Strike so you can pull apart clusters of doomstacks as needed (they show up earlier than you'd like thanks to rituals). Put them on a horse as soon as you can because on foot they're good to no-one. And upgrade to a cold one right away to get that sweet, sweet AP damage. Now they're able to KILL other heroes, instead of just being a buffer against them.

Dragons are the next big step up. You may want to delay getting an evil pegasus until level 17 so you can grab the dragon right after. Terror is great and you should have some.


All three lores are good - there're no traps to be had here but some are better than others.

Fire is tried and tested but with few regenerating enemies and no ethereal units to be seen or heard of the lore loses a lot of its buffs. The direct damage stuff is still as solid as it ever was but its the weakest of the three.

Shadow is very nice for prolonging the life of your melee line. Reducing enemy melee attack means less damage taken means more time they can be held at bay and slaughtered by Dark Shards. The big win over Dark in this regard is that the over-channeled version has an area effect which can be very useful in the blob.

Dark however emerges as the clear winner. If you have no STRONG feelings one way or the other, take the Dark Elves' signature lore of magic. You won't be sorry.

Chill Wind is some kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Its hilariously easy to use, especially with the defensive playstyle of the Dark Elves. With a decent range (it also has a minimum range but its not far) you can direct the wind (hold left and drag to turn it) and lay down a column of damage that tears through the engaged enemy and leaves you nicely ordered melee line completely unharmed. And its absurdly cheap with a short cooldown.

Power of Darkness will keep you casting all damn day. It deals some damage to a friendly unit with a reasonable range. Early on I recommend a darkshard in the back rank. They can afford to lose some health - it won't kill any of them - and it keeps you rolling in power long after other wizards are dry.

Soul Stealer is a direct damage spell that heals you. Combine with Power of Darkness to keep yourself alive and swimming in magic if you can't find someone else to suffer the cost for you (what kind of Dark Elf are you?!).

Blade Wind is very acceptable if you can get it off in a big mass of units. It doesn't fling everyone clear of its damage radius like other vortexes have been known to do so it does actually do some damage but the long delay between casting and it beginning, combined with its unpredictable direction makes it too 'dicey' for me for its cost. Id rather use two or three chill winds.

The homing bolt is very 'meh'. It does about as much damage to the things you'd use it on as a single single volley of darkshards. That doesn't seem worth the mana.

The debuff is nice but single unit only. Its a good tool to have, never know when you might need to neuter some chosen or white lions in a pinch. But if you're looking for more control and less blasting use shadow.

Obviously Sorceresses should not be in fights. They have no armor and poor stats. Put them on a horse, and then a pegasus, as soon as you can. Cold ones are too slow - id rather outrun shock cavalry than do a little bit of damage to them before dying.


Death Hags are great choices in the campaign. Improved replenishment will help you treat punishing damage to your melee line as a barely noticable speed bump and she's a deadly melee fighter able to go toe to toe with early lords and rip up regiments. She encourages other units too, freeing up your lord to do other things.

The downside is that she lacks a mount except the cauldron of blood. Foot heroes as we all know are at a distinct disadvantage. The lack of mass means she's stuck in whatever blob she winds up in, she can't catch anyone but other infantry and will be sent flying by even the weediest horse.

The Cauldron of Blood itself is very eh. You're giving up a substantial amount of fighting power for a very large hitbox that doesn't do much. The special ability can put one of your regiments into a roid rage but as discussed our melee units aren't what kill things and losing control of our 'fun stuff' units defeats the point of the object. She can crash through the ranks to get at what she wants now, but she's bad at fighting when she gets there.

If you like chariots, then she is one. Give her the Witches' Brew to help make up for her weakened fighting stats and micro her to your hearts content. Or until you run out of brews.

The main reason to take it is that it inflicts terrord has the mass to crash through ranks. If you're hard up for slots that preclude taking a war hydra as well, or your lord isn't on a dragon yet but still want the hag's passive replenishment bonuses and leadership bubble in your army then stick her on the cauldron and make sure to grab the damage reduction traits to help her survive.


Another 'good on paper, bad in reality' choice. Foot heroes are bad duellists. Can't reach their foe, can't chase their foe, end up flat on their back a lot. The bow should help but its too inaccurate to matter. Two 400 damage shots would be brutal if they actually hit but he fires so slowly, even buffed, and hits so rarely, that you will regret bringing him along.

Amazing in the campaign though. Assault all the things. There's no 'succeeded in a mission so do nothing for two rounds' or 'failed at a mission, they're basically immune now for four ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ turns' so just spam it. Free murder.

Right away send Malekith to reclaim the rest of Naggarond, recruiting darkshards and dreadspears as you go. 6 spears and eight shards is the desired figure, that leaves Malekith, the cold ones, his blackguard and space for a hag when you can get one. Add another dread spear regiment in the mean time.

Take slaves at every opportunity. You'll replace all these units so the XP is meaningless and you can get plenty of money by looting. You need replenishment to keep your armies moving and slaves to bolster your economy and fuel your rituals.

Make friends with Hag Gref to your south and Har Ganeth to the east. They'll like you to start with anyway but give them both a small gifts and establish non-aggression, trade and alliances as quickly as possible as you'll want to confederate them later. They're likely to end up squabbling with other minor factions so their growth will be limited and easy to gobble up.

Right after securing Naggarond province raise another lord and begin filling up his stack with dreadspears and dark shards. 6 spears 8 shards minimum.

Send Malekith to grab the Grand Arena - Har Ganeth may make a play for it to so don't waste time treasure hunting and have it stolen out from underneath you. If they do take it, don't lose sleep. Its annoying but it won't matter in the long run. Then go past Ghrond itself to the northern settlement. Ideally, the large stack in Ghrond will leave the city to try and intercept you but its unlikely. Capture it. Ideally you've now two of the three settlements.

Ghrond likely (still) has a large stack on top of its garrison. Fighting them on their walls is suicide and you can't afford to bring your second army in to help because the Mung and Skaven will savage your unprotected flank.

So instead, lure them out. Move to attack the city and begin seiging. The AI thinks it has a substantial advantage and will sally out to meet you. Kill them, take the city. You may sustain heavy casualties but your darkshards will carry you through and with Ghrond eradicated you can replenish your forces.

While this is going on, press the Skaven to your west with your second army. Take the altar first as its walls will stall any skaven counter-attacks. Again use the seige to lure their stack off the walls if its present. Once taken watch their armies as they like to move between settlements. Quickly snatch up the relatively undefended one and then attack their stack when it moves to try and take back the altar.

That's three complete provinces and the skaven should be eradicated. Build growth chains then craft houses. You don't have enough slaves to justify pens yet.

Public order can suffer, don't worry about controlling it. Rebellions are a good thing right now - its free XP for your generals and money for you.

Walls are pointless. The only time you'll want them is to defend against ritual spawn stacks and they'll roll right over them the turn they attack and raze it anyway. Go for the cash and you'll be well positioned to rebuild.

Raise a new lord. Same mix of units. We're going after the Mung.

Send the recovered Malekith to the Mung Encampment north of Har Ganeth. He's closer anyway. The other two lords will strike the two settlements that're nested closely together just north of your new holdings at the Altar.

Every time, loot and occupy. The corruption is so high you'll be in huge negative public order anyway so lets get it over with. When they spawn let the rebellions build a little bit to bring public order back up and increase the yield of cash and slaves you'll get for destroying them.

With these three taken you only need bear island to eradicate the Mung entirely. Its a moderately long way west so you're going to send the better stacked of your two armies at Ironfrost itself in raid stance (to negate the corruption attrition) west to Bear Island. They'll be begging you for peace. Don't take it.

The worse off of the two will hang around to crush rebellions spawning near Ironfrost, Malekith hangs out in the Mung Encampment to deal with things on that side.

Take Bear Island. Mung eradicated. Four full provinces and secure boarders.

Don't be afraid to use your war coordination with your allies to keep their armies from becoming too strong. Send them after their enemies so that the war's don't go cold with troop build up. Especially an enemy stronger than then. This will lower their relative strength and make them more amenable to confederation which can give an early boost.

Those who refuse to kneel regardless, will die.

Provinces do only one thing. Fuel your war machine. The sinews of war are infinite money and while Cicero was being ironic, its certainly true in Total War.

Provincial planning as the Druchii is pretty straight forward.

You'll be doing most of your troop recruitment in Naggarond province until the mid to late game, simply because its likely to be the best developed region and its centrally located and its entirely acceptable to keep doing it there in the late game too since one of the landmarks adds two recruitment slots on top of what's normally available you can quickly raise quite a force.

The troops we initially prioritise producing are Darkshards and Dreadspears, then Cold One Knights and finally Black Guard.

That means almost every other settlement in every other province is available for doing one thing: making money.

The priority in these settlements is easy. Estates (for growth, allowing the others), craft houses (for money) and slave pens (to boost the craft houses). Once the province is developed the estates can be demolished and replaced with black roads. If there're land marks, you may want to skip the slave pen to accomodate them. In capitals, your choice of building to not have is a bit wider as the tier 4 market is a lot more important.

If you're running into the red financially and you can't easily fight, sack or loot your way out of it again then you may want to build some craft houses before the estates. This will slow down your economic boom, but better to reach it late than never get there because your armies all deserted.

The same rules apply to the provincial capitals, followed by the Altar of Khaine, the Sorceress' Tower and the Dread Citadel chain (note when planning your public order that this chain provides a +3, upgraded to +5 bonus to public order all on its own). The war beast production chain also produces a number of exotic animal cages without the resource being present. Its a very minor economic impact but if you have nothing better to build...

You may want to put torture posts in provinces if you're expanding quickly. A land-grab combined with settlement upgrades might stretch your resources thin and force your armies elsewhere. However its generally better to just be aware of where public order is falling as the experience, loyalty, money and slaves from crushing them is very useful.

Since you can track the rate of decay, and rebellions will spend four turns mustering before they attack, you can plan to bring an army back to a province to crush the rebellion. Its actually beneficial to fatten a rebellion up for a few turns as not only will it increase the yield of slaves, money and experience for destroying them but it will push public order positive by twenty rounds for every turn they muster. This will buy you time to go and do other things before another one spawns.

In any event, torture posts are best constructed in the capital and used to lock down well developed provinces you want to forget about. The top tier building produces +10 public order, which combined with the +5 from the dread citadel chain puts you 9 points clear of the baseline penalty from tax (-4) and eight allowing for a bit of corruption you never seem to be able to completely stamp out. Plenty to accomodate large numbers of slaves.

Four settlement provinces are especially valuable, as the benefits of the slave pens appears to stack. These provinces should always have the maximum number of pens and markets and you should set them to recieve additonal slaves as soon as they're able to exploit them.

In the mid to late game you may have the time and will to being specialising production a bit.

Clar Karond provides a modest experience bonus via the lumber mill chain to local recruitment of our basic troops (dreadspears, darkshards and also bolt throwers and shades if you like that sort of thing).

Hag Gref's landmark provides experience for cold ones, cold ones dreadful edition and their chariots. - the biggest bonus applies IN Hag Gref but a slightly lesser one is faction wide.

Har Ganeth of course yields better executioners (and witch elves, if for some reason you actually want some).

And the Exotic Animal Market in Cragroth Deep (Altar of Ultimate Darkness province) gives harpies, hydras and dragons a small boost.

Bizzarely, if you have the Towers of the Black Guard constructed in Naggarond you actually receive a bigger bonus to recruiting them out of Hotek's Column (The Clawed Coast province) because of the iron mines there granting a +2 on top of the faction wide bonus, however you can recruit them at level 9 from Naggarond anyway so its just trivia.

Whether these are worth the extra turns moving about to collect them all rather than just recruiting in one fell swoop in Naggarond is really up to you. If you're raising several armies at once you could recruit them in different provinces and then exchange regiments to save a bit of time.

Walls are a waste of time. The only time you'll want them is to hold ritual-spawned doom stacks and interventions at bay. This won't happen. They always spawn with seige attackers and the garrison will not be able to stop them. Go for the cash and you'll be better positioned to rebuild anything that gets razed by an unlucky spawning.

In a word - no.

In assessing the value of a unit, we're not interested in what it could theoretically do on paper. Any idiot with eyes can see that shades have a better stat profile than darkshards across the board.

What we're interested in is how efficiently it is performing the task we ask of it.

Shades come at a markedly higher price than darkshards and requires an entire extra building chain which does not provide the much needed dreadspears. And stacks of Blackguard and Shades are even more expensive.

Despite Shades superior stat-line, their primary job is still to shoot things to death. Any situation where they're not firing is sub-optimal. While they possess a markedly better reloading speed (the source of their higher damage output - the actual damage per bolt is exactly the same as darkshards) it is quite a modest improvement in firepower for the cost.

Most of what we're paying for is their mediocre melee abilities. Any situation where shades are using those stats is one we wish to avoid at all costs.

Its important then to establish just what they'll be using them against.

The kinds of units that can circumvent or crash straight through the melee line into our back ranks are elite troops - they're chariots, shock cavalry and flying monsters. All of these units have excellent fighting stats and high armor values.

When this happens you'll want to move a unit of melee troops in to pin down the linebreaking unit and withdraw the shades so they can resume firing - the thing they're best at. This is no different from how you'd employ darkshards. Leaving your shades in combat with units whose entire function on the battlefield is wreak havock in the back line is just a good way to get your very expensive shades killed, and is accomplishing the opponents goal of preventing them from firing.

Whats more, they lack shields and have no better armor than darkshards do. So they come off substantially worse in archery duels than their much cheaper cousins.

So to recap, Shades;

*Are staggeringly more expensive, reducing the number of armies you can field.
*Provide only a modest improvement in their actual battlefield role
*Will not want make use of their enhanced secondary capabilities in any event
*Get chewed up by high elf archers who can't believe you threw your shields away

If you like shades, use them. But are they cost-effective? Dear god no.

Historical medieval warfare, and fans of medieval titles will note, did not have to account for weapons of mass destruction being employed on the battlefield.

Artillery, where it existed at all, was limited to catapults of various design and Rome 2's ahistorical napalm launchers aside, was woefully ineffective at actually killing significant numbers of soldiers.

The development of tools which could kill en-masse radically changed the face of warfare for the entire world, nations which failed to adequately adapt to this suffered terribly at the hands of those who did.

These tools enter Total War: Warhammer in the form of highly efficient artillery and magic.

When Warhammer 2 was limited to the Vortex Campaign, and the best artillery was a plagueclaw catapult there wasn't much to be worried about but with the addition of Mortal Empires the need to counter effective artillery has returned. I was praising the virtues of massed hellstorm rockets for every situation (don't need AP if 80% reduced damage still kills the target...) years ago and its nice to see the rest of the game has finally woken up to it.

Not that i'm bitter or anything...

The effective artillery of the Empire and the Skaven is your main concern. Nobody else really brings enough bang for the buck to be worried about. Hellstorm rockets and mortars (empire and plague) are your main concerns with cannons a close second.

The formation outlined above is a sitting duck for all three - and for any well placed winds (burning heads, blasts of air etc) or vortexes (firestorm and bladewind spring to mind). The AI is fairly bad at using magic but it doesn't have to be good if it gets lucky.

Instead, deploy in a checkerboard pattern with each darkshard unit supported by at least two neighbouring darkshards. Units will be able to get at your precious shootybois but you can turn their friends onto their flanks and shoot them down in short order. Its micro-intensive but modern TW is such a high-APM clickfest you should be used to that by now.

If the army only has one or two such units you can generally get them to waste their ammunition on a high speed unit with high resistance to physical and/or magical damage. Dance it around well clear of your battle line in range and enjoy the fireworks. This is probably the only real use of an evil pegasus. Cold ones are too slow to even try and horses are bit too dicey. Dark Magic's sniping potential is really strong here for wasting an enemy wizard whose disinclined to spam fireballs at you ineffectually.

The alternative is to hide your army in the trees. Can't shoot what they can't see, force them to march into close range. The trees will intercept some missiles though only a few and hopefully you can shoot the enemy dead before they can obliterate you.

Dark Riders with crossbows (absent a god-tier lord on a dragon who can survive the approach) are your best solution to artillery - they're fast enough to get where you need them, their smaller unit size (and therefore fewer shots) than dark shards don't matter against a crew of 12. Draw their defenders away - either with a sacrificial unit or a bolt-thrower and bring in the cavalry. Make sure to run the bastard crews down once you've silenced the guns so they don't rally and return to their equipment mid-battle when you thought you were safe to bunch up again.