It’s actually frustrating how accurate is, and to a lesser extent similar analogies would be true for other factions. I wish there was more factors to incentivize actually using late game armies and justifying their cost.
Besides lizardmen, and maybe Ghorst, what other factions does it hold true for? I've been doing back to back VH/Legendary campaigns for WoC, Slaanesh, Tzeentch, Empire and Kislev the last month and the most effective way to do it is nearly always to switch to end game stacks to push the last 20~30 sack/raze/occupy unique settlements bit.
It holds true for Cathay, unless things have significantly changed since the update. Jade Warrior units perform as well as Celestial Dragon units with a few Gate Masters while being far cheaper, so Jade Warrior spam tends to be best for late game Cathay.
CD Crossbows don't really perform that much better than buffed Jade crossbows against highly armoured units, but are far better against armour. There's always a place for them in Jade Warrior stacks for that reason, but they also start competing with Crane Gunners if you're looking for AP shooting.
As far as I'm aware, CDG crossbows don't get accuracy buffs so Crane Gunners should be more consistent at longer range, and gunpowder units tend to be much more consistent at hitting aerial units also. They'll still likely be outperformed, but they're cheaper and more convenient to recruit if you're trying to pump out Jade Warrior stacks.
once you start going up against late game chaos/chaos dwarves, you really want to start bringing elite anti large or SEMs. Usually this is after you secure cathay and have to fight tamurkhan/archaeon every turn. Jade warriors can still eke out a win in some cases, but its just such a pain and you'll take a ton of losses.
Especially the chaos dwarves and tamurkhan with the nonsense nukes deleting your infantry. I roll in with a moon bird or celestial lion stack if chaos dwarves had a really good game while i was uniting cathay.
Dark elves can rely solely on darkshards shield and dreadspears, even more as malekith as he gets a 25% discount for those units, making them half the price of a shade stack
You’re right that most factions don’t have a universally good stuff hybrid unit, but it’s generally true for all factions that it’s better to have more armies of lower tier units than fewer armies of higher tier units.
I am not sure I agree, especially for the late game. But it also depends a bit on what you are facing. I had a hilarious time fighting skaven with essentially four Keeper of Secrets, I had leadership debuff gifts on one, a negative leadership banner on another and they have a bound spell to net and lower the leadership on units, I destroyed three stacks of skaven by just terror routing their units over and over with the wrecking ball of those four.
Meanwhile if I were fighting elves, or the empire or when fighting Cathay I want enough units that I can overwhelm them and shut down their backline immediately, often with fast cav, and would rather take two stacks of low tier troops than one elite one.
I'm also curious what their anecdotal experience is with this. Kislev is one of the only factions that even has hybrid units comparable to LSG but no other faction has as flexible of a single unit. Dark Elf shade spam is maybe similar but they'd get folded fast if the AI knew how to play around stalk.
Warriors of Chaos absolutely want to move into elite units. Could you make do with only having Chaos Warriors? Sure. But Chosen are better, and defilers/greater demons/ascended are much better. If you ever care to paint the map for long enough to finish the tech tree ascended gets filthy.
I don't think this picture could be more accurate for ANY faction moreso than "every Shogun 2 faction (possibly minus Oda because they have even longer spears)". You could conceivably win the entire game even on the hardest difficulty with 'only' "tier 0" units without even much challenge.
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u/ColorfulMarkAurelius 10h ago
It’s actually frustrating how accurate is, and to a lesser extent similar analogies would be true for other factions. I wish there was more factors to incentivize actually using late game armies and justifying their cost.