Anyone have a good beginner guide to link to for this one. Never played any of the Total War series.
I'm playing the Eye of the Vortex as Elves.
Is it like Civ where I'm meant to start out by grabbing a few of these cities then build them up? Or constantly expand?
General advice:
- if you can play Mortal Empires, the Eye of the Vortex mid/endgame aren't very balanced or fun. If you do go for the Vortex option, remember that you don't have to do the rituals, even if another faction completes 95% of them, there are still mechanics which let you block them from winning until you can. Don't let it pressure you.
- as a starter, play with High Elves - Tyrion, he makes archers / spearmen cheaper, and those are some of the most cost efficient and well-rounded units in the game. Get his army to full stack asap
- focus on getting trade agreements, ignore everything else. Having any kind of non-trade agreement with a faction will worsen your reputation with some other factions, and you only want to get into wars which you pick. On your first 10 turns, you want to check every turn if you can make a trade agreement with anyone (open the diplomacy window, sort them by possible trade, you'll quickly see which factions you have an option with). This will generate a ton of income for high elves.
- you want your minor settlements to have growth buildings. This will increase the speed at which you can max your settlements, so you'll have more income / stronger defense / more building options. Once the settlements are all at max level, you can destroy the growth buildings. You also want to build walls in every settlement. You don't have to worry about defending Lothern at the start, it has a very large (14?) unit garrison at the start of the game, which should be safe until at least turn 20-30.
- picking the +growth provincial setting is the best pretty much all of the time
How to start on Mortal Empires:
T1: move north to the border of your province, recruit 2 spearmen & 1 archer
T2: take Tower of lysean, recruit 2 archers, 1 spearmen
T3: move east to the edge of Tower of lysean, recruit archers / spearmen
You want to take Angerial (think it should be done on T4 or 5) asap, after that you run Tyrion down to the dark-elf settlement south, while recruiting a lord with some troops in Angerial. This newly recruited lord needs to rush to the Shrine of Asuryan and colonize it as fast as you can.
If you aren't fast enough, Shrine will be taken by another high elf faction, so you can't really conquer it and will have to wait a long time before getting it.
Some high elf faction will declare war on you in the coming 10 turns, but it should be no problem to crush them after taking this start.
