Total War: Warhammer III – How to Counter Lizardmen as Dark Elves

Tips to Counter Lizardmen as Dark Elves

Lizards have two strength:

• Rampage making them immune to moral.
• Armor and defense stats.

Dark Elves have one of the most convinient armor piercing unit in the game:

• Dark Shards / Shades.

They not only pierce armor to a decent degree but they also have a fun volume of fire AND by virute of being ranged circumvent the defense value of lizards.

Shields block them which is kinda annoying but you can circumvent that by shooting in to their flanks / backs with 2-3 units.

Dark Elves also have one destinct weakness, especially in the early game:

• Your front line has a mediocer stying power.
• Ignore everything that isn’t carrying a spear (those usually have higher defense stats aka stay longer)
• Spread heroes across your line to provide leadership boosts. If you have rampage generators for your own troops (like hellebron) use them once morale gets hit.

What you want to do is to corner camp (set up at the edge of your deployment zone, retreat up hill into a corner with archers in the back and a front line spanning map edge to map edge.). This doesn’t always work well against lizards since their high mass units can and will push through your line and eat your archers, so will flyers if you can’t shoot them down, focus fire accordingly, use fast movers to split up / distract the enemy army on approach, but make sure that your fast movers are actually faster than their fastest unit or you will just lose them.

Alternative

Line up the spears with ranged clustered in the center of your formation, prevent flanks by moving reserve spears into charging enemies from the sides and shoot and shoot and shoot… if you see a way to do it move 1-3 archers around the enemy army and shoot their sauruses in the back so the shields stop working.

Lastly

Magic. Check what kind of magic you have, pick the AP spells and use them on clusters of enemies. If you don’t have AP spells try to hit their skinks, they have less armor therefor more damage from non AP spells will go through while contributing to the “enemy losses” statistic which will force a route eventually.

If you can savely do it snipe their lord in order to reduce the enemies strength value even more for faster routes.

Priority should be:

• Single entities / Flyers who can breach your line and tie up your ranged.
• Ranged units and mages.
• Other heroes and lords.