Chaos Wood Elves are truly broken.

I've really tried to give the vanilla game the benefit of the doubt, I haven't used any mods beyond those that improve the aesthetics of the game. I have dealt with the agent spam in stride and found ways to counter the AI abusing march stance. I own all the DLC and I've played a grand campaign with every faction as well as both mini campaigns.

However the Wood Elves are beyond broken, I cannot defend them as a gameplay mechanic. They hold your entire campaign hostage, you must appease them or be relentlessly hunted down and destroyed. Anyone foolish enough to attempt to attack them is punished. Your AI allies will not help you, and a peace treaty cannot be had. Durthu laughs at words like corruption and attrition. They care not for amber, one settlement is all they need to field 5 or 6 full armies.

I'm at my wits end with my Brettonia campaign. I just flat out gave up on attempting to fight them on my Beastmen campaign, thank god wiping them out is not an objective for any faction, because it is truly a Herculean task. They just sit in Athel Loren with nothing but the Tree and King's Glade, until you attempt any aggression, suddenly they have all confederated and you have 4 armies on top of you non-stop, there is no way to do a preemptive strike because again, they sit there with 4 armies not moving. Even if you win a single battle they just swarm you immediately afterwards.

I understand that the AI doesn't have to worry about an economy, but with the WE it's just ridiculous, they don't care about amber, fine, but they can just send endless doomstacks at the player even when they have no territory to support it. With other factions it makes some sense, Empire/Dwarves/Vamps/Orks all expand a ton, and when they have 5 armies it usually feels like it makes sense because they have a ton of land. Chaos and Beastmen will have multiple hordes but they tend to be spread out doing different things. The elves have nothing to do, they just sit in their forest and recruit dragons, until an idiot like me thinks "hmm, I would like to have a go at each faction here and there, instead of rushing through my campaign". Their one enemy the Beastmen are constantly being wiped out or they are hidden, and the AI doesn't pursue itself as aggressively as it does the player, which results in the elves just dicking around.

I really don't like the idea of having to suck Orion's Satyr cock every single campaign I play, sometimes I would like to go to war with the elves, and I think wiping them out should be an objective for the Beastmen GC, but in their well known and frequently discussed current state they just ruin the experience. I don't necessarily think that their aggressiveness was the issue, I think their issue is a combination of ignoring the economy and not having anything to do.

So I propose two fixes for them.

1. They need a genuinely challenging foe, either beastmen stacks that specifically attack them, or a faction WAY THE FUCK ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP that they will send expeditions out to specifically kill. Maybe Greenskins or Norscans(and maybe AI Durthu should have a little bit of attrition...)

2. The number of lords the AI can recruit needs to be limited to the number of settlements they control, I'm thinking 1 lords per 2 settlements, and maybe 1 more for the tree.

Hopefully if these things could be changed bored ass elves with unlimited economies won't be sitting in Athel Loren gardening with 6 full stacks plus heroes all in super close fuck-the-player proximity.

End of rant.