N00b Needs Help Against Yithril

First of all, quality beats quantity when it comes to units. The AI will always produce more armies than the typical player, but they will also be of a lower quality: AIs don't always train their units in Fortresses and don't focus on training the better custom units when they are available.

Yithril is one of the most aggressive default factions though, so it's pretty normal that it has a decent army early in the game. Some tips on fighting it:

- Make custom units: defenders with a high defense and high health as meatshields + ranged staff users with extra elemental damage and extra initiative. Yithril has no ranged attacks (apart from spells or ranged attacks from heroes), so you can just retreat to the back of the tactical map and spam your ranged attack while your melee units are on defense (you can even use Guarded Strike if the enemy finally closes in). Preferably with a good commander hero.

- You can debuff the enemy armies before engaging them. Freeze or Tremor can also hold them in place for a while and give you some extra time to prepare. Tornado is even better, but you usually don't have that in the early game.

- Always focus on the highest threat. (Jugg)

What Phillybear says: even one powerful army can wipe out all those Yithril stacks. Give it all your best troops (units and/or champs) and make sure it can take out 2 armies per turn. Give it Tireless March to increase it's speed. If Yithril has so many armies it threatens to overwhelm you, just create 'buffer units': cheap troops, like Scouts, to soak up hits and slow down their armies.

Soon enough, you should be able to take the fight to him. Be merciless. Conquering cities is usually easier than it may seem.

Apart from the military stuff, if you got overwhelmed, you might want to look around on this forum on tips on how to improve your economy and general gameplay: Did you spam Pioneers? Used all Essence slots? Lowered taxes at the start of the game? Did you trade with the AI? etc.

Please note: the power rating isn't very accurate. If you are at the bottom, however, the AI will attack you. And yeah, sometimes you will be unlucky and discover you are surrounded by barren lands, for example. But that's the fun of the LH: every game is different.

Unfortunately I seem to be getting overwhelmed in terms of both quality and quality. I am not spamming pioneers. Should I be? 

I tend to be a builder and defensive type player in 4x games which is why the Ironeers appealed to me. Are there any race-specific tips/oddities I might be missing?

I'm really enjoying the game but I can't remember having so much trouble with a particular faction in other similar games in the past. 

Yup.  Send out your early heroes and/or scouts to find as many reasonable sites to build cities and outputs ASAP, wait for your first city to hit level 2, then let loose the pioneer cannon.

Both quality and quality? Man, your troops must be really terrible...ok, lame, sorry

Unfortunately, as Gilden vs Yithril you are basically battling your evil twin. Both factions are designed to build large armies and conquer the world with raw might. No magic, no diplomacy, no gallivanting with heroes. You can field heavily armored, high HP troops, while Yithril can support many troops and rush you. This is the most straightforward matchup there is. If you are losing it, you might want to try some easier matchups first.

In my experience, the hardest thing about Yithril is their armor. If you beat that - you win.

So, what can you do?

1. Staff troops.

2. Ordinary troops with fire/cold damage trinkets. It is quite costly in terms of crystals, though.

3. High essence fortress with heart of fire will probably solve all the problems.

4. Experienced mage. It can be ordinary damage dealer (you allways can have at least fireball with research). Or summoner, in that case you will need air elemental (or fire one, if you got that far).

And everything written previously will help, of course.

Just get some more experience with the game.

Maybe try a different race, it might suit you better.

I wouldn't list Gilden as one of the best default races, personally, so handicapping yourself could have to do with it.

I would say to make a custom race.  Pick traits that sound like something you think goes along with how you want to play.

I would say to avoid Ironeer blood if you do, tactical spells are really good, especially against Yithril.  Slow and Shrink both reduce their damage a lot.  Hasting yourself works wonders too.

Hmmm thanks guys. I can already see some things I was doing wrong. Apparently not expanding fast enough for one thing. I also usually take the Mage path with my sovereign with a race that is evidently not well suited for it (Defender or commander might be better?). I am building too many buildings and not enough units. 

Thinking about it more I don't think I'm getting overwhelmed in terms of unit quality. Yithril is just sending more cheap units at me than I can defend against. I have not been designing my own units either. And I think I built all of about 1 Mage unit - it didn't seem to do that much damage so I kept building shielded tanky guys. Next go round I will also focus more on civic and military tech and less on magic research than I have been. 

I may try another race but I really like the Ironeer flavor. 

You kinda shoot yourself in the foot trying to play Ironeer as a magic heavy race.  They are totally not built for it.

You would do better just picking Capitar race and the rest of the stuff the same as what Ironeer gets standard.

Guard Strike is really good, but not good enough to make up for Ironeer blood.

You might want to think about using Quendar blood also.  Quendar lets you train slave units which are quite a bit worse than regular units, but they have 0 upkeep so you can put 9 of them in each city.  That makes your cities much harder to conquer.

If you don't know what snaking is, look it up.

One other suggestion on the tactical map.  Unless your troops start so close that you must engage in melee immediately, fall back with your melee (meat shield) troops between your ranged troops and your enemy.  Remember, troops can both move and fire, so continually move them as far away from the enemy, every turn, so that when the meat shields die, you have the maximum number of turns to rage attack the closing enemy troops before they are in melee range of your ranged troops. Play to the terrain features of the tac map.  Is there a bottleneck where you can prevent some of the enemy troops from flanking your meat shields, or force them to go the long way around (buys time).  With your ranged troops concentrating fire on the meat shield bottleneck, you might even inflict significant losses while minimizing your own.  Stratetic map; depending upon the heros you recruit, a healer can come in  handy to keep units HP up.  Also, there is nothing wrong with sending your stack to attack weak monsters, etc. - as the training surviving troops up their HP as well. 

I wanna make sure, are you aware of blacksmithing tech? It basically unlocks everything you will need to survive until late game. Boar spears, iron golems, etc.  If yithril sends their heavily armored oppressors something, has 80ish def everytime it standby, you can safely ignore it until you're about to engage it.

And I think Yithril tend to rush through the military tree until they have their third weapon like pikes and plate armor.

I've won plenty of battles where they thrown plate heavy army against me when I still only have boar spears + leather armor and won. Very doable because of Life magic's heals.

One of my favorite things to do to Yithril on a city map is to put 1 or 2 really strong units guarding a choke point and have 1 or 2 heros sit there and both slow and shrink their whole front lines.  While I am doing that, I can have some ranged guys attack their front line units and kill them off down to 1 physical body (down from 6 or whatever).

Then I can just sit there and defend the whole combat while I have a couple units fire over their heads and kill all the enemy units off.

The Yithril will do basically 0 damage the rest of the combat while I slowly grind out the win.

If you have a unit with First Aid you don't even have to spend that much in mana costs after the first few turns.

I have won a lot of times that way when I was ridiculously overmatched by the Ythril units and they would have slaughtered me in any other situation.

Clever tactics.

Expansion is everything.

You can never build too many buildings. You don't need a lot of units, just better ones. Personally, I never build any units except in emergencies (random events usually) to hold off a monster.

Elemental damage ignores defense, so if Yithril's troops wear a lot of armor, your Mages will still do the same damage. Besides, they are ranged, so you can pull tricks like Raiddinn describes. Shielded tanky guys are very good, as you can build them for cheap and they are even tankier than armored units from other factions. However, to use their shields to full extent, you should not attack with them, except for Guarded Strike. Otherwise, they will lose their Defense bonus. So you will need some other troops that deal damage.

If you like a Mage and the Magic techs, I would strongly suggest another race. Mages are more powerful than the other classes, except for Ironeer Mages Try playing as Pariden or Altar or create a custom faction and take some strong traits: Altar or Mancer race; Enchanters and Master Scouts.

One trick I've learned facing a Ythril attack on my cities:

On city tactical maps with single tile choke points - just sit still!  Don't advance towards the enemy at all.  When I do this the Ythril units, unable to flank me, just sit still and pass their turns as well, allowing me to plink away from range one unit at a time.  It can be vary tedious passing through many units to get to your few ranged units, but I have successfully done this with just one or two units of city archers hitting for only 1-2 points per turn.

I have a suggestion. Considering the splash damage caused by juggernaut attacks, try to draw their main melee units which most of times contain a juggernaut, towards an expendable lone unit. Juggernaut will harm his own troops almost as much as it does to your unit but positioning that unit is crucial for this strategy.