Meanwhile, the High Elves' income maxxing became more difficult/interesting as you can no longer rely on the Entrepreneur mages and instead have to focus more on trade.
https://youtu.be/aMcMgmTSj5U
Honestly that strategy for income is shit, it takes an absurd amount of provinces to start getting trade overpowered at 5% per building. If you control all of ulthuan and more you're going to have huge income as anyone. I will point out that Dwarves have a +5% tradable resources on every province from a commandment (which also gives +15 growth so you're always using it because dwarves always need growth), their +public order building that you have to spam everywhere has dwarven beer as a resource, and their trade building gives +2%/+5% tradable resources and +2%/+5% income from trade factionwide at tier 2/4, meaning your average 3-size province gives +14% tradable resources and +9% income from trade, which equates to +24% more income per 3 settlement province and is way better than this high elf building. And no one is going on about how dwarves have overpowered income. His income is good because he's playing lmao easymode tyrion along with supply lines being nerfed, nothing more.
The point of the high elf and dark elf cheese (and skaven cheese, though they just break province growth rules rather than income rules) was that you could do it even on Very Hard/Legendary difficulty to skyrocket your strength and break out of the "I only have 1/2 provinces and can't expand because hard enemies keep sending a full stack at me every 5 turns and I also have rebel problems every few turns" rut that hard starts get in, like Teclis or Morathi. Also lots of races can do the recruit lord->unlock +5% global income bonus->disband lord, including dark elf, and its a strictly superior strategy since you effectively have infinite income over time with it.
I'm wondering how all the dark elf slave-affecting stuff will be changed. For example all your lords could get Slaver followers that gave +15% casualties captured and +5% income from all slave pens and slave markets. Stacking those made dark elves even more insane. Lokhir's special Black Ark could give +30% casualties captured. If slaves have no real use to stack then a lot of stuff for Dark Elves becomes useless. -5% construction cost and -10% construction time, even if it wasn't the highest tier in the dark elf video I linked, makes slaves seem completely fucking useless. I mean shit most buildings don't take more than 5 turns and I don't know any that take 10 turns so -10% construction time is effectively useless unless stacked with something else. If slaves don't give money then they need to give something like +global growth or a SUBSTANTIAL -construction cost benefit, like -50% not -5%.
Honestly Dark Elves are probably still fine though just because Black Arks + virtually no supply lines penalty = endless stacks of units at -90% upkeep able to endlessly sack every coastal settlement at +100% or more sack strength. They might in fact have the strongest economy in the game still thanks to this, and if you get lucky on a name of power they can have
-110% upkeep on specific units like Dragons or War Hydras which is lols. Getting like 30-60k cash late game every few turns per black ark is pretty ridiculous. It was overshadowed by the easy mode slave cheese but if you got a good start with Dark Elves as someone like Lokhir (rushing Tyrion in Ulthuan from turn 1 was mad overpowered) you could happily sack all the other continents for mad loot before you were able to rank a settlement up to tier 4 for the slave building that gives -50% slave decline rate, or got the -15% slave decline rate tech.
EDIT: Also both Dark elves and High elves are going to be even more overpowered running Shades/Sisters of Avelorn. Melee being much better in WH3 means these top-tier ranged units that are also mid-tier melee units should be practically top-tier melee once you've got your red line + rank 9 on them. At least assuming they aren't nerfed, seems lots of units are being changed.
