Total War: Warhammer

Thing is it's not just counters, there's "tiers" of units too. Antilarge tier1 will only do well when it's like 4vs1 against monstrous tier4 large units. On the other hand, tier 3+ antilarge infantry should do fine even solo or with minimal help. For example chosen with halberds will buttfuck most monsters, cause they're a very high tier units with crazy good stats AND antilarge. But antilarge is just more damage against large(and sometimes also defense against charge), if the unit has shit melee attack, having more damage when they can't hit for shit doesn't do much, and if they have low armor/melee defense, they're going to get wrecked especially since most large units have large aoe hitting several models at once and leveraging their high damage per hit better+disrupting ranks so they take less damage.

That said if you want to take down spiders quickly as dwarfs, while slayers are nice to try to hold the line against them, you can just throw some ironbreakers or even just warriors/miner fodders to bog the spiders down, and then fire at it with cannons/bolt throwers/organ gun. Armor piercing artillery does stupid damage to large units like this because they basically don't miss if the unit isn't moving(even if it is moving half the time), and they do huge chunks of armor piercing damage so even against strong defensive units like steam tanks, you'll fuck them up real good. I like Canons especially because they can be used pretty efficiently against infantry too, while Bolt Thrower are quite a bit weaker against infantry imo. Organ gun kinda depends. Canons are also the cheapest iirc(other than grudge throwers) so you can easily field 2 even in side armies, they'll take care of towers and doors during siege and kill everything that's too large to hide in the mass of units like monsters and lords on flying mounts and shit, as long as you bog them down in melee with your basic infantry.

Try to wait for the chaos armies to split to attack them, or just have more/better stack than them.

The other way is to build a really strong elite army and give the lord lightning strike. Then just fuck their armies one by one, lightning strike prevents reinforcements so as long as you can beat 2 or 3 of his armies in a row without passing your turn, then you'll be fine. If you have healing spells(elves/undead mostly, I think empire too has lore of life now?) you can just use the time after winning a battle but before all the enemy units run out of the map to spend as many winds of magic as you can just spamming overcast heals with all your army stacked up. Can get like 15-20% heal overall if you do it early enough and you have enough winds left.

You can just have some safety stacks close, lightning strike say 1 or 2 armies, then force marche the safety stack close to your army so if he attacks, he's vastly outnumbered(forced march penalty and your wounded stack, but if you kill 2 of his armies it should be np even in these conditions).

I've never really had issues with Chaos in any of my games, generally if I lose it's early game(like first 20-30turns or so), after that it's just raise the economy and pump strong units into 2-3 strong armies, make half stacks to defend the edge of my empire and just roll around destroying/capturing everything. When chaos spawn, stop whatever I was doing and just regroup where they're likely to end up and fuck them up.

Yeah just wasn't sure since I haven't played empire in forever but I remember them getting life during wood elf release or whatever, so can use Lifebloom.

That said even without healing post fight cheese, you can generally fight 2 or 3 stacks in a row if you have a really high tier army even against the chaos stacks. The super expensive lightning strike army strat is very potent in the first game as long as you keep track of where your enemies are and consolidate your defenses, since you generally only have 1 or 2 actual armies and a bunch of filler shit to man settlements defenses. Won't be as good in TW:W2 due to sheer size of the map I think. Also I seem to remember some lightning strike changes.

Anyway I never had many issues with Chaos, even on my very first total war playthrough, I beat chaos with mostly graveguards+blackguards. I just had like 7stacks of them at Kislev, it was a huge clusterfuck, I think I lost the first battle but raised dead to replenish after all the deaths and then killed their weakened armies. And that was with pretty low tier units, Graveguards are like T2 infantry, blackguards are great but I didn't have that many, I had all the skeletal tech and lord trees and shit though I was all in on them bony fuckers. It was mostly just zerging them down with a lot of shit and using a lot of heals and summoning shit behind them. In retrospect that was a really poor campaign, I was like "meh not gonna buy buildings that generate gold, takes like 12turns to pay for themselves fuck that". Then 100+turns later I was still there trying to kill fucking dwarfs, would have been so much money. I'll replay Undead at some point, probably in the grand campaign. This time though I'll fucking go elite shit everywhere. I'll have at least 6 blood knights in there for sure and a bunch of the big vargheists shit.

In my Dwarf playthrough, I defeated 2 chaos armies with only the garrison of one of my settlements. That shit was super retarded. These idiots split up and took turns attacking that one main settlement on the mountains on the right side like right before Kislev areas, Archaon lost his army without even breaking the door, the AI is so fucking bad in siege battles. The other 2 armies got destroyed by the empire somewhere where I couldn't see, and that was how we "valiantly" triumphed. A handful random shmucks with beards in a castle stopped the tides of Chaos.