Cereal_theif wrote:
Before the shadow Lord is involved Harad bows mush up your elves for baby food.
Your logic is flawed. Reasons are: Nobody plays 80 points, you're not accounting for the model limit, distances, the metagame and other variables. You cannot make a balanced claim based upon just the numbers which you have given (and I'm not sure how you're accounting all that...). Let me elaborate:
In a 500pts game model limit is 50. High Elves can use this:
Captain for 80pts with a bow and random other stuff
14 Elves with Heavy Armour, bow and spear
14 Elves with Heavy Armour and Shield
14 Elves with just spears
That army has 43 models and 15 bows. Your maximum is 50 models and 16 basic bows with 2 chieftains with bows. Given that your guys are dying about twice as often as the Elves, you should be decimated if you don't have the Shadow Lord - and that's based only on shooting, now bear in mind that even if the bowfight becomes equal and you both get to combat at similar numbers, the elves have superior fight value and are killing you on 5+ while you're killing their front line on 6s. Also, your chieftains are having troubles killing elves in combat, while the likelyhood is that the elf captain is ripping through 2 of your guys per turn. Now if you had taken SL, all this could be avoided, yet you would still be losing in combat, although not so greatly because you would have advantage before the combat begins.
If it comes to wood elves, the armylist can be
Legolas Elven Cloak
15 Wood Elves with Bows (10 with spears too)
15 Wood Elves with Throwing Weapons
15 Wood Elves with Spears
Again at this points level they have 18 long ranged shots, exactly the same as you and you only outnumber them by 4. The bowfire killing rate of woodelf vs haradrim is almost the same (the elf kills 0.22 per shot, while the haradrim kills 0.16, but given poison it goes up to around 0.22 too). Considering that you are killing each other at the same rate, then once throwing weapons get involved, it really comes down to who wins the heroic move, if the elves do, then your corsairs are dying. If the corsairs do then elves are dying. After that, the combat capabilities are as follows: 2v2 (most common fights) elves win 61% of the time, kill 56% of the wins, meaning they win + kill in 34% of all combats. The corsairs/haradrim win 39% of the time, but kill 75% from that, which gives an average of 29%, meaning that a F5 D3 model is more effective in combat than a F>5 D4/5 model.
I'm not gonna go into 700pts because there's a ton more variables in those games and the top armies usually go and include (Harad) Golden King, Suladan, Shadow Lord etc, and Good armies (not only elves) get Saruman/Gandalf and/or Twins, but just wanted you to understand why your logic is flawed and why Harad has to have SL to be able to beat high elves and often will need SL to beat wood elves.
There is a reason why there were 6 Wood Elf armies in the top 10 at the 2010 UKGT and why there were 7 wood/high/galadhrim Elf armies in the top 10 at the 2011 UKGT, and at the same time funnily enough almost every evil army in the top 10 over the past 2 years has used the Shadow Lord, and yet that wasn't enough to stop so many elves finishing so high.
Oh and I play Harad and I never actually used Elves, but I played against them countless times, just bringing some facts to the discussion
