Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires Drycha - Wood Elves Campaign Overview, Guide And Second Thoughts
Hello everyone. In this guide I will cover:
- Victory conditions, faction and climate;
- Starting location;
- Diplomacy and outposts;
- Mechanics of the race and faction;
- Province edicts and army stances;
- Buildings and research;
- Lords and skills;
- Army compositions;
And give you my final notes on the specific faction. Hope you enjoy it.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAR-HQbkZY4
If you prefer to read, here we go:
VICTORY CONDITIONS:
Short victory:
- Maintain control of 5 settlements in Athel Loren;
- Occupy, loot, raze or sack 30 different settlements;
The reward is +3 hero capacity for all heroes, always useful to ensure you can get a good amount of heroes early on without spending too much on buildings.
This is a rather lenghty campaign, since you have to move out a bit of your initial area.
Long victory:
- Achieve the short victory;
- Occupy, loot, raze or sack 70 different settlements;
- Win the Defence of the Oak battle;
- Perform the rite Ritual of Rebirth;
- Perform 8 rituals of Worldroots Healing;
The reward is +10 hero recruit rank, which is great to ensure your heroes are really good still into the lategame.
Drycha leads the Dryads of Dyspathy, and benefits from:
- Diplomatic relations -40 with other Wood Elves;
- Upkeep -10% for Dryad, Tree Kin, and Treeman units;
- Upkeep +10% for all Elf units;
- Starts with 1 Amber
- All elf units have the passive ability Glamoured, reducing combat power and making them expendable.
In essence, these are all focused on making you use different units other than Elf units, without hindering you too much, which is good and thematic.
Climate is excellent, one of the best reasons to play the Wood Elves actually. You can go anywhere as you have no limitations.
STARTING LOCATION:
You start in the Gryphon Wood, a very key location and very difficult to control. You are surrounded by enemies who will declare very soon, so be very wary and endure.
Typical expansion is to control the nearby lands, following the idea of the Wood Elves. Then you have to go into Athel Loren for the short victory objectives. Thus, this is a bit less of a Sandbox driven campaign than other Wood Elves who have more choices.
DIPLOMACY AND OUTPOSTS:
Diplomatically, it is rather complex. Greenskins, Dwarfs, Ogres, Kislev, Vampire Counts, they are all near you and they have quite a lot of aversion towards you.
However, Empire factions only have 10. This makes them a formidable ally possibility which you definitely should embrace. Going on a campaign versus the enemies of the empire might solidify your status as their friend and perhaps give you good status with Bretonnia too.
Typical enemies will be Greenskins, Dwarfs, Chaos, Norsca, Vampire Counts... nearly everyone, really.
Therefore, outposts with Empire and Bretonnia are not out of the way and you should embrace their artillery or cavalry possibilities.
MECHANICS OF THE RACE AND FACTION:
First and most importantly: the trees. Everything is based around these magical forests. You will need to control everything around them in order to heal them, regardless of who is owning those territories.
This implies being at war with multiple foes and sometimes in multiple fronts.
The rituals of Rebirth give you powerful rewards. Choose wisely from the start, and you can steamroll easily. Most of them have diplomacy bonuses with certain factions, steering you as I have said before into different alliances and possibilities.
Deeproots allow you some amazing replay value. You can choose which forests to focus first, and steer your action into those locations. You can teleport between Trees, but there is a cooldown, so plan wisely on who you send.
Amber is tied to technologies, heal a forest, and you can invest in a specific techology, pretty straightforward.
Offices provide mostly specific army or lord benefits, which allows you to have some interesting different army compositions later on. Note these are different from other Wood Elves, so familiarize yourself with them and their army or factionwide bonuses to choose wisely who you assign those offices to.
You are also one of the few factions that can build the Shrine and yield the Sword of Khaine, and it is a very interesting campaign when you decide to do it, and go against everyone.
You can recruit Wild spirits, different units only available to your faction, that can definitely change and spice things up either early or lategame.
Tree based units also have access to Aspects. These are similar to the Scrap mechanic from the Greenskins, so you can use this to change the unit slightly giving it a bit more in a different stat in exchange for a bit less on another, from 3 possible choices.
Finally, Coeddil is a specific legendary hero that you can obtain that is a beast of a caster. Similar to Lord Kroak, put him on any army and he will be crazy good for you.
PROVINCE EDICTS AND ARMY STANCES:
Edicts... you do not have province edicts. You already have quite good bonuses really with the trees and rituals of rebirth.
You can sort of consider the minor settlement buildings a sort of edict based, since they do have province wide bonuses.
Army stances:
Worldroots is similar to other underground stuff, just great as a tactical option;
Encamp costs 50% movement, allows replenishment and global recruitment, as well as immunity to attrition;
Raiding cost 50% movement, and gives immunity to attrition;
Ambush costs 10% movement, has a reduced chance of detection;
Forced march.
Ambush is key here, as it is very good to use it with the Wood Elves and play the faction around that specific idea.
Warhammer 3 Immortal Empires Drycha - Wood Elves Campaign Overview, Guide And Second Thoughts(continuation)
BUILDINGS AND RESEARCH:
Outside of the Trees, you have almost nothing. Some buildings that help you around the provinces, just 2 units that you can unlock recruitment... it is mostly good for fast growth.
Your settlements also have no walls. They have lots of building slots to compensate though.
Gryphon Wood has a specific landmark that gives you forest attrition as a defensive tool, immunity to vampiric attrition, hero recruit rank for Branchwraiths and recruitment option for Wildwood rangers and Malevolent Tree Kin.
Full military changes a bit for Drycha. You do not have access to some of the units of the Wood Elves in exchange for others. Namely, you go into Malevolent Dryads, Treekin and Treeman, with some support. You can always raise those special units to give you extra flexibility.
All your provices will be very powerful; expensive, but profitable.
Infrastructure:
1 - Income, growth and replenishment;
2 - Lots of income;
3 - Income, trade, control and growth (all provinces);
Overall these are good choices, which of course need to be powerful because you can hardly build these.
Research is very good. It gives good campaign bonuses and great units bonuses, in particular with the research that costs Amber, which will give you a lot of thought in terms of which you will want to get before.
LORDS, SKILLS, ARMY COMPOSITION:
Starting with the Blue line, you have +15% replenishment, as they are unique compared to other races. This seems to be overlooked as it was lowered from Warhammer 2 to all but the Wood Elves. You also have upkeep reduction.
Redline appears to have mostly based around Elves or Trees. Good combos exist, and most lords give bonuses to Elf or Tree armies.
You have 4 heroes with the Branchwraith giving replenishment. All 4 of them are very powerful and some provide specific bonuses to some units in your armies, such as Waystalkers giving base missile damage.
Drycha focuses on her tree units but also on her Special ones from the Wild spirits. Combinations using those are therefore in order. Using Feral Bears as anti large cav and the Great hawks as monstrous flyers gives it some flexibility. First army is an early army example, the others more into lategame ideas.
The Ancient Treemen have skills that give a tremendous value to Tree Kin, so of course we are going to field some armies around those. You can have Elf units, which is why I showcase a few here, but you also have bonuses for the new units.
Finally, some sweeper armies and some other combinations for you to try out, including merging Elf and Tree units, which is hard. Notice how the redline skill amount increases (yellow number) the more you try to mix elves and trees.
FINAL NOTES:
Drycha is quite a different campaign from other Wood Elvfs, and further solidifies the notion of how interesting these differences between lords are. Different units, but with similar mechanic and a different starting position give it already a nice feel, and when you add the diplomatic options you have the tools for a great experience even if you already played Wood Elves.
If anything, the playstyle is rather focused around the Tree units and it lacks a bit of variety; you can always go with other Wood Elf Lords if you prefer a standard experience, but Drycha being special is always good in my opinion.
Your army consists of:
1 - Good infantry
2 - Good missiles
3 - Good cavalry
4 - Great monstrous infantry and single entities;
5 - Good flyers
6 - Lacks artillery;
7 - May be micro intensive.
Replenishment is great, specially considering no climate issues.
Let's go then, to fight alongside Drycha and her Malevolent spirits!
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3021517608
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