For the armies, it really depends on the race and how early it is and so on, expanding is kinda the same depends on the situation on the map, generally it's safer to expand towards an "edge", so you don't have to worry about that direction anymore, and then expand into one direction, leaving half armies or full cheap armies to defend some of your lines inside decent garrisons. It's also worth sitting on your ass for 10-20turns sometimes to stabilize, tech up and wall up stuff before you start expanding again.
Currently I started Skaven as Lord Skrolk, wanted a caster right away and he doesn't disapoint, love his spells.
For the first 25-30turns or so, my army was like the starting units(2plaguemonks, 1censor bearer and 1 plagueclaw catapult) and the rest was just slave. I relied entirely on Menace Below(using up max food every big fight) and Vermintide(spell that summons clanrats) to win fights, so it was very low economy but I had to fight manually basically every battle since every fight was in the enemy's favor, even though I won most of them. Being able to summon ~10units of T1 infantry early game easily swings the battle especially since they can be summoned directly on ranged units or behind enemy rank for a rear charge, and Wither which reduces armor by 30 in a large aoe(60 when overcast) lets you actually damage heavily armored units even with slaves and shit. I'm now on turn 50ish or so and I've only now started reworking my whole army, I need like 10more turns to finish buildings and recruiting to have all the high tier units I want and be able to rape everyone(I have lightning strike too).
I have 3 other armies which are 100%slaves, although since 2 of them are led by some melee unit, I plan to embed a hero in each of them for magic. The 3rd one is a plague seer and that fucker is awesome with the Bell mount. I added them as I needed them, 2nd was pretty early like turn 8-10 or so cause I was getting fucked from all sides by lizards and dwarfs and needed to be able to hold 2 fronts, 3rd was like 10turns later and 4th was only made around turn 40 because there was a rebellion and it was faster to make a new army than run someone there.
My general plan for a lategame army is something like this:
- The lord obviously and one caster if the lord isn't a caster himself(not using any magic is a waste especially with how strong magic is now)
- 1 or 2 artillery to get first turn battles when attacking walled settlements and just for damage especially the antilarge ones(I'll stick to 1 plaguemaw catapult, does good morale damage)
- 2cavalry or equivalent(I'm getting 2 doomwheels with my skaven, they're technically more like chariots but that's roughly the same)
- 4ranged units or so(getting 2poison and 2 death globediers)
- And then a mix of melee high tier units, with at least 2 antilarge units(my mix is going to be 4stormvermin with shields for frontline, 4stormvermins with halberds for dino killing and other stuff and 4 censor bearers for killing infantry quickly).
Depending on your lord bonuses though you might want to lean more heavily on other stuff. You can favor ranged units more too if you like them, elves or dwarfs and shit can stack a ton of ranged units instead and decimate shit before it even reaches you. Also stacking monsters can work if you want to really pour everything into one army, like 15tier 5 monsters and some frontline works fine it's just stupid on upkeep in general(but say for example when I played Chaos I had a full dragon ogre army for Kholek cause he has a ton of upkeep reduction so they were actually not worth shit, and that was one of the most broken army I've done).
Mind you my campaign isn't perfect. I didn't build a tier 3 recruitment building early on since all I was using was slaves, until I remembered that I needed them for technology, so I only started unlocking techs at like turn 40, which is super retarded especially since all the skaven tech is linked together so you need to research a ton of early game stuff first. I'm also way behind on the vortex progress because I don't have settlements with increased ressources yet cause I went another way to expand, when I hit the first rank, pretty boy was already 75% towards the 2nd one and burny boy isn't far behind. But that's ok I'll probably catch up soonish once I conquer all of southern lustria, just need to finish some lizardmen, upgrade my armies, then go ravage the west coast where the elves live and that should be all of it.
