How To Beat An Enemy Holding The High Ground

🎯 The core idea

You do not have to charge the hill. Do a small amount of damage at range and the defending AI flips into attacker behaviour, walks down, and hands you every advantage it was holding. In Zerkovich's own controlled test that turned 786 casualties into 245.

• free costs nothing, just do it
• cheap risks one unit at most
• setup needs positioning first
• grind costs real battle time
• skip the thing to avoid

Why the high ground is worth this much trouble

Four advantages, all stacking, all in the first minute of the video.

The two damage figures are the ones people quote, and they scale with how much higher you actually are — they are not flat bonuses.

He gives "up to 30%" for both without a source and hedges it again later ("probably giving them that 30% boost"). Treat it as his rule of thumb rather than a confirmed constant.

The attacker–defender rule that makes it all work

This is the mechanic the whole counter-play hangs on, and it is worth understanding before the steps.

Every battle has an attacker and a defender, and the deployment screen labels them. If you attacked on the campaign map, you are the attacker.

What matters is that the AI plays the role, not the position. Zerkovich shows a Kislev army holding a hill with artillery and a mass of missile units against Greenskins with no artillery at all — and on Start Battle they walk down off it. They are the attacker, so they attack, and they give away flank protection, damage and fatigue to do it.

The inverse: a Vampire army with no ranged units at all sits perfectly still against Ogres who will shoot first, because the Vampires are the defender. And that is correct play — the attacker loses when the clock runs out, the defender wins.

So the hard case, and the only one this guide is about, is an AI defender sitting on high ground with missiles and artillery.

Bait them off the hill

The whole method is one sentence: damage them a little at range and they turn into the attacker.

1. Check the role first freeIf the AI is the attacker on that hill, do nothing at all — it is coming to you anyway. Only defenders need baiting. 1:08
2. Magic: one long-range spell is usually enough cheapTwo Brain Bursta casts onto Bladesingers pulled a whole army. A single Purple Sun onto Swordmasters did it too — then the caster retreats immediately. 4:18
3. Artillery: shoot from well out on a flank setupLongest range in the game, so you hit them and they cannot answer — unless they have artillery too, in which case sit off to one side where their guns are not facing and clip the edge of their formation. 5:34
4. Skirmish cavalry: push one unit at their edge cheapIt largely looks after itself. Aim at a lightly armoured unit on the flank of their line; it chases, you shoot it while retreating, and the rest of the army follows it down. 5:53

Those three — magic, artillery, skirmish cavalry — are what he calls the main options. In the Slaanesh-against-Dwarfs example a single skirmish cavalry unit was enough: Slayers chased it, damaging the Slayers convinced the AI it was losing, and the whole Dwarf line advanced.

If you have none of the three

1. A mobile lord or hero, in and out cheapFind an isolated unit, hurt it, leave before the enemy commits. Breath attacks are ideal — a fast burst on one target. 7:12
2. Bait one unit into an ambush setupPull a single enemy unit toward troops hidden in trees. Slower, but it works when nothing else is available. 7:36
3. Sacrifice a single missile unit grindWalk one up to shoot their edge units. You will probably lose it. It still saves the rest of the army a great deal of damage. 7:39

Out-climb them instead

No AI manipulation in this one. It costs time rather than trickery, and it only works when the map gives you somewhere to go.

1. Find their longest artillery range and stay outside it freeIn the demo that is a Plagueclaw Catapult. The whole march happens outside that circle. 9:32
2. Look for ground at their height or above setupEnemies on a hill are very often not on the highest point of the map. Needs a large map with room to move. 9:46
3. March there and accept that it takes minutes grindHis words: "you're going to need some patience." Fast forward and keep clear of the artillery circle the whole way. 9:55
4. Stand still at the top until they are Fresh again freeA minute or two. You climbed a hill to gain a fatigue advantage — do not throw it away by engaging Winded. 10:05

The tooltip in that frame is the proof of why step four exists — the unit has arrived Winded after the climb. Rest first, fight second.

After that it is an ordinary battle with the roles reversed: use whatever choke points the new position gives you, put the missile units where they shoot downhill, front line engages, cavalry flanks.

Entirely map-dependent. He shows a Beastmen-versus-Dwarfs hill where no equal ground exists anywhere, and the method simply does not apply there.

The same battle, twice

Same map, same two armies: an Empire force from Reikland against Clan Mors holding the hill with missiles and artillery. He fights it once head-on as a control, then again properly.

Run 1 — straight up the hill

He wins, and calls it "a pyrrhic victory by all means." By the time the line reached contact, four or five units were down to roughly half health from the climb alone.

Run 2 — with the high ground taken

Player casualties fall by 541 men — a 69% reduction — and survivors nearly double, from 588 to 1129.

The detail worth noticing is on the enemy side: their losses barely moved, 1549 against 1578. The entire benefit landed on the player. Taking the hill did not kill more Skaven, it stopped the Skaven killing you.

He says "and still the 1,500 losses for the Skaven," which rounds both figures. Enemy casualties were actually slightly higher in the tactical run, not identical. Also worth keeping in proportion: this is one trial each, not a controlled experiment.

Roll the line from one flank

The fallback when the map gives you no height and you would rather not bait.

Come in from one side of the enemy army rather than across its whole front. Leave a few units out wide on the far side so their line cannot rotate to face your main body. Then start at one edge and sweep, so only a few of their units fight your entire army at a time.

He is honest that it will not work every time, and that plenty of maps do not allow it.

Sources

Built from Zerkovich, How to beat one of the WORST BATTLE situations! — Total War Tactics, 12 minutes, and the top comments underneath it. Screenshots are frames from that video, including both post-battle casualty panels.

No patch number is stated anywhere in the video, so none of the mechanical claims here are pinned to a specific build. The "damage them a little" threshold is never quantified — commenters report both single-hit triggers and armies absorbing half a roster of magic damage without moving.