The SIlvan Elves (and some notes on generals)

Recently I've been bored with my "Let's Play"s (sorry viewers :( I will be back to them soon I hope!).
Thus, I started a Silvan Elves campaign. As usual, the difficulty is on Very Hard Very Hard, and all the options are turned on except for: Corsair invasions, earlier invasions, Sauron's counterattack, immortal Nazgul, immortal heroes, and Mordor's call.

My discussions on generals here apply to the generals of all factions. I'll make a generals post after this one, but until then, trawling through this will yield good information on generals.

At first, I was kicking butt. I felt like a superpower - Mordor quickly disabused me of this notion. There is a reason most factions have a might of "supreme" and you do not. You CANNOT carry the map like you can as Gondor or one of the other mega-powers. You are tough, very tough, stack for stack but you start with no big cities and your units are EXPENSIVE. You absolutely must buy the stables in Thranduil's Halls on the first turn - they take like 10 turns to regenerate, and 3 turns to build (after you build the stables you must wait 15 turns to build your first unit of Silvan Horsearchers). These are the only cavalry you will have for most of the deciding stages of the game (they determine, with the settings I play on, whether or not you will have allies to fight Mordor with). You MUST get them. After you get that, follow my guide on building up an economy while aggressively expanding to get as much territory as possible. The territories inside of Mirkwood and Beorn's Halls are good to get - Mordor will get Roshgobel (or however it is spelled) long before you can. You will have to train soldiers for this, although it will slow your economic growth. Make sure all your tax rates are on low - you desperately need more population. ***Do not settle for bad governors as husbands.*** Accept adoptions, but husbands will keep appearing. Generals are cheap, a dime a dozen, easy to level up - Bureaucrats are rare and are very difficult to level up unless they start with some of the traits for them. Only accept husbands with good governor stats. High obedience helps you get good governor traits even more than loyalty - husbands MUST have higher obedience than 4. Don't let your generals stagnate, either. Every 5 or so turns, move them out of the city a few squares then put them back in. This helps them feel appreciated, and you will NEED this. It is also very easy due to your low number of generals. Remember, continuing the battle once all the enemy is routing will get you traits like "winning first" while not chasing routers and not continuing the battle will get you traits like "noble in battle." Because you're always going to be seriously outnumbered, you need generals with high Honor to prevent your men from routing in bat situations - while you know each elf is worth 5 or 6 orcs, and that holding the line when in trouble means victory with big casualties, your men don't. If your general doesn't have enough Honor, they may rout and cost you the battle.

As an elven faction, it is critical that you fight defensive battles as much as possible. Make the enemy come to your hail of arrows. Now, the high ground. fighting enemies who are downslope from you gives your men a combat bonus.  Because you don't really have men to spare and you will be fighting mainly defensive battles, you must get your infantry on the slope. Near the bottom of the slope. This is so that the enemy unit will largely extend out from your men without going very far down as well. Your archers, well upslope from your infantry, can now shoot in a straight line down at the enemy, resulting in devastating accuracy and damage. Also, being up on a hill results in greater range and damage. Sadly, on very hard very hard even Orc Band can sometimes take 5 or 6 arrows, but your men carry enough arrows to handle this usually. The hill will help reduce this.

Now, elves are primarily archer forces, although your Mirkwood Swordsmen are slightly better than Mordor's Uruks soldier for soldier, though unit for unit and being specialized for different situations means a unit of Uruks is about the equal to your unit of Mirkwood Swordsmen (as an example of your tier 2 units being as good as Mordor's top tier aside from trolls and stuff). The Mirkwood Stalkers are worse than your spear-man unit (whatever it is called, I'm typing this in school) and the Stalkers are more expensive, so don't build them anymore once you've got some forces around (once you have about 1.5 stack total troops).  Due to the toughness of your units, a line 3 soldiers thick is the perfect holding line. In battle, select all your melee troops and have them form a line 3 men thick. Then line up all your archers behind this line. Try to make it two men thisck - you will probably need multiple layers. the front layer should be your worst archers, the back your Mirkwood Archer Guard and your generals. Don't put your front men on guard mode, though you must take your archers off of skirmish. In guard mode, your men are hesitant about moving to engage the enemy and so men in a unit won't actively move to help their buddies in the same unit who are fighting. Elves don't have men to spare for this bullshit - leave guard mode off.

Orc factions (especially Mordor) love catapults. Being that you're an archer-based faction who loves fighting defensive battles (another reason you can't carry the game in the same way as you do as Gondor - your faction is designed to drive Mordor out of Dol Guldur and then camp in Mirkwood), catapults are going to wreck you unless you deal with them swiftly. They have more range than most of your archers and have enough units that taking them out with archers is a long process. These catapults will wreck your Mirkwood Archer Guard that you should have been jealously protecting from damage. Remember what I said about the Horse Archers? If you didn't get them, you're gonna have a bad time. If you did (well done), hold the alt key to make them use their alternate weapon (swords) and charge them int the catapult men from behind. They will ditch their catapults and draw swords. Hammer them until they are all dead. Now, for all of you fools who didn't get the cavalry, here is what you must do. Take two units of Swordsmen and flank VERY wide with them, one to each side of then enemy formation. Attempt to get at least one to hit the catapult crews - this is likely a suicide mission, but you may be able to save the unit (by a dozen soldiers or so) if you act fast once you've defeated their main force. Your Swordsmen are so tough that if you keep them hooked on the catapult crews you should finish them off, though by the time you hit them they'll have gotten off a volley or two.

Evil faction archers are garbage, absolute trash. However, each unit has like 252 men, and the OOTMM have hordes of skirmishers. You will take large casualties through sheer number of projectiles. Hammer the archers with yours before theirs have a chance to get in range and spread out. The skirmishers have slightly better missile damage than the snaga archers and a slightly better hit chance as well. Smash the skirmishers with your archers, but remember to shift archer focus to approaching infantry when they start to approach. The AI archers and skirmishers are on skirmish mode 99.9% of the time. A good way to mess up their lines and temporarily push the ranged units back into the melee units to increase the number of your arrows that find a target is to run some cavalry in front of their lines, abusing the skirmish mode to make their ranged units fall back for a few moments.

The Lorien Elves are your biggest ally in the north against the OOTMM and Mordor. As tempting as it may be, they cannot afford you getting a truce with the OOTMM, although you may be able to get a temporary truce with Mordor (though this will really hurt Gondor and Rohan). Take the OOTMM's territories from the north down, as hitting in the middle will force your men to sit and defend the settlements, which will grind your advance to a halt. Watch out for irritating Giant Spider rebel armies in Mirkwood. These are usually led by generals with good ambush stats - you'll need a fair number of spies anyway, so make a bunch of spies and have them scout the paths before you send an army through. setting up watchtowers is very helpful as well.

Watch out for Trolls and Mumakil. They will mess you up unless you shred them with arrows before they reach your lines.
I think the Mirkwood Stalkers have a bonus against armor. Keep that in mind - if they do, send  them against Mordor.

I'll continue this as my campaign continues.
-Sapoman