After playing a couple of games in the Total Ware series I've learned way more from watching the first two videos in lionheart's series. Thanks for the link!
I'm watching him play with Britonnia.
Yeah that's how I learned too, I think I watched a bunch of turns by him and Legendoftotalwar who only plays legendary and cheeses stuff a lot, it's interesting to see how he deals with stuff and can give you some good ideas, although if you cheese to the level he does it can get pretty boring, like how he stacks every single unit in one big blob on the edge of the siege maps and destroy the only tower that can target him while dancing a lord in front to bait shots, and then brings his 12 archer units and just kills everything on the wall as the AI keeps moving units in there to take the other's place.
I'm nearing the end of the vortex campaign on my Skrolk game. Turn 150 or so, High elf are about 10turns from completing the last ritual, I'm going to try a last minute interupt, I know there's some weird last battle shit where I can prevent them from finishing anyway after but trying to do it legit. I thought I was fucked at first but last ritual takes 20turns which gave me time to clear shit and start heading there. My main army took some random settlement off the coast as an advanced outpost, I'm bringing a doom engineer(rite hero, they suicide to destroy walls) and my 2nd army is on the way since I wasn't sure a single one would be enough, for some fucked up reason the garrisons for high elves have like 3dragons and 2phoenixes or whatever, like super bullshit when mine has a couple of rat ogres instead who die in 20secs to any antilarge even low tier shit. I'll probably attack with ~1-2turns left so he can't take it back and fuck him up.
High elf is the real powerhouse, darkelf is a little bitch and is getting interupted by interventions and hexaotl I almost destroyed myself, had a bit of a setback when he came back from dark elf lands with 3 large stacks including mazdamundi, lost 3armies in one turn, but then he got cocky and tried to take back the shit I stole, only that I wall everything so he basically lost all his armies to siege battles and when I hit him back with 2 shit slave armies I pretty much cleared him off the map, he still has a bunch of settlements and a couple of armies running around and I can't take Hexaotl proper with fucking slaves cause the garrison is like 5temple guards and half a dozen of dinos, but I have everything around it.
I do like that the chaos armies spawned by the events seem to have low movement range. So while they spawn right in the middle of your shit, they don't go around super fast, you can make a plan to intercept them easily and shit. Can't say the same about enemy interventions which spawn right in the middle of shit AND attack you on the same turn, almost lost a full new army to that shit, fucking assholes with dragons everywhere. In the end though the bell of doom prevailed, that shit aoe over time aura is nasty.