Help! My Elves are getting pasted by orcs!

[darklord1115]

Ok, so although I've been playing FFHII for a while now this is the first time where I've let the orcs survive long enough to build up an empire - big mistake. I'm playing the Ljosalfar and I just didn't have the option of getting to them before they took down the Lanun... and now I'm facing a great big horde of ogres.

Here's the situation: We each have about twenty cities and are facing each other from across a desert of Malakim, with whom we both have open border agreements. They've attacked me three times, and I had to use March of the Trees at one point to throw them back. Now I'm on the offensive. I've got a stack of mixed longbowmen, priests of leaves, champions, druids and fire/air mages roaming in Orc territory, but if I stop to seize cities their three main armies of about thirty ogres/priests of leaves each can catch me and annihilate my poor weak champions. Right now I'm running a guerilla campaign, looting the countryside, taking cities and either burning them down or just setting them to wealth and moving on. I've already burned Braduk the Burning to the ground (it had the prophecy mark building and I wanted to nip that in the bud), and I'm using my druids to stay a step ahead of their stacks. All of my mages are with my main stack, as are all of my druids and high level priests. If that stack goes down I'm toast.

Suggestions?

 

[Goodwill]

If you don't think you can take and hold a city, guerilla tactics work good, but it sounds like you will have to make a few adjustments to gain a clear advantage. I'm guessing that with your priests and nature mana you're able to fortify and keep healed well enough when you need to hunker down? And fire and air would help give you the defensive advantage at least.

Just to make sure it's not overlooked, be sure to take out their roads so they can't jump your army unawares with fast movement. Just the roads in front of you are good enough, to give you time to hit them with maelstrom and fireballs.

That said, you need to mentally split your forces into two groups (but keep them in the same stack). One is defense and stays at full strength whenever possible, and fortified, to defend the position. The other group is offensive, and should have enough movement to attack enemy units and still retreat back to the defensive group at the end of the turn. Do you have any other mages with stuff like haste/regen or even dance of blades? That can really help here. Even if you only have a few dedicated attack units, if they're successful enough, they will whittle down the enemy in time.

For offensive units, you need to add assassins and horsemen. Assassins will work the fastest in whittling down his stacks, when combined with maelstrom and fireball. If you damage the stack enough, there's usually some free assassin kill in there somewhere. Assassins have less movement than horses or chariots though, so you will be limited to using them only on stacks adjacent to you until you get mobility and haste. Even then, their range is limited. Once you unlock the commando promotion though, your assassins will terrorize his borders.

Mounted units are probably more viable in the short term (but be sure to get promotions for your assassins whenever you can). I like to load them up with withdrawal promotions first, especially in enemy territory where they are hard to replace. I add mobility promotions if they're needed.

You can also spam tigers with your priests and put them in the tiles in front of you as sacrifices. This can help slow them down as they approach your stack, and mean easier injured units to take advantage of.

Eventually you may (hopefully) start to notice less forces attacking. If you have hawks or eyeballs you can see how he's doing - you want to get to the point where he has expended his surplus forces, and that'll be the time to consider a counter-attack.

Oh, you have druids? How is entangle working? That should help keep them at bay whenever you don't want to be attacked.

 

[darklord1115]

Good call on the assassins. Entangle is working great, and I've been cutting roads as best I can, but the AI does a pretty good job at repairing roads and spamming new units out of its core cities. Its three big armies that I've seen are only the tip of the iceberg. I have hawks in a bunch of open-border cities along the edge of the orc empire, which lets me keep a pretty good eye on their movements, but they just have too many units for me to tie down all of them at once (they basically had 200+ turns of peace to spam critters out of warrens).

I can't heal my guys fast enough to stick around for a stand-up fight. I don't have enchantment or chaos mana, unfortunately. Also, part of my problem is that it takes seven or eight turns for me to get reinforcements to the front, and the orcs have open borders with our shared neighbor, so they've been intercepting my reinforcements en route.

What I'm thinking about doing is just turning over conquered cities to my allies. If nothing else, it might help to draw them into the war (the orcs are 2nd on the rankings and my buds don't want to take them on... cowards). I'm not sure if this would just set me up for defeat by empowering a bunch of empires I'm going to have to fight at some later point, though.

 

[Humakty]

What difficulty level are you using ? Would help in knowing if guerilla tactics will work against the Clan. More details about game settings (size, kind of map...yada yada)

Anyway :

You're ljos, he is clan => outtech him, should be 'easy' untill immortal diff. (haven't tested vanilla above emperor) Your goal here is to unlock as many national units as you can. The Clan has a very restricted access to NU, so he'll never be able to get as many as you do. Varying with map size, it'll give you a clear advantage/ put you on par (smaller map = bigger advantage). Plus Clan prod bonus is not applied to NUs.

Strategically, your main goal is to deprive him of mithril (why ? Clan is all about melee line, without mithril he looks much less threatening). Razing cities is the most efficient (long term). You can try and do it with iron, but with twenty cities he probably has access to tons of those.

 

[darklord1115]

Immortal

 

[civ-wrecked]

Your situation reminds me of a Civ quote: "Don't ever fight a land war in Asia".

Fighting a long-distance, and therefore expensive, war against against an opponent who can breed faster than you can kill them is never good for your economy.

 

[mcwill123]

That quote is definitely pre-civ

 

[Humakty]

Still I'd recommend to hold untill you unlock NUs. Just take good care to backstab him if he tries to attack someone else !

England showed several times in history how efficient turtling could be !

Ljos are the one getting the gorgeous stuff late game !

 

[tribble]

Still I'd recommend to hold untill you unlock NUs. Just take good care to backstab him if he tries to attack someone else !

England showed several times in history how efficient turtling could be !

Ljos are the one getting the gorgeous stuff late game !

I'm thinking about your acronym, and I got nothing. little help?
What's the Clan's religion? if he's still evil maybe you can get some help from the overcouncil?

 

[BvBPL]

NU= National Units, I believe.

 

[avalonnn]

Which leader are you using? Roaming in enemy territory is easier with the raider trait.

Also, if you have not done so, take advice from the elf on this forum:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=333136

 

[smana]

crush the Malakim. You will gain an advantage so they won't be able to attack them and you will be next to them so you can bring out units from the Malakim. The rest should come easier