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I always liked the idea of big units of Empire Spears/Helbs/Swordsmen running down the field and slowly churning out win. But was wondering how they actually fared in the game, with out and mounted or flying support? Is it at all competitive or no?

Alone? No. It would be unfair if they could beat armies with just infantry because they have the ability to add lots of other stuff and some armies can't. I.e., if you add in warrior priests and altars you can make huge blocks of junky infantry a decent amount better.

You need to shift power to Heroes/Lords or war machines. But if you don't have a heavy dose of one or the other of those, your S3ish troops simply can't take on a huge swath of enemies. Think about Empire's own heavy cavalry fighting its infantry. The infantry would never hurt it and certainly not at cost. With some really extreme buffs and maybe some extra magic, but you're throwing everything you got just to have a chance.

An all-comers list has to deal with all-comers. Empire can certainly do it, and they can do it being mostly infantry, but they still need some help.

Infantry are the core of Empire armies right now. In the strongest lists you'll see Halberdiers and Greatswords as the key units, and just sometimes maybe a defensive unit of Spearmen.

Everything else exists to buff these units (Warrior Priests and Hurricanum are a great for buffing offensive output, Warrior Priest also adds defensive buff, Captain give leadership buff), or give protection (small units of skirmishing archers as a missile screen, units of cavalry to guard the flanks) or provide other handy roles (cannons to snipe monsters and characters standing by themselves, pegasus captains to plink small supporting units, pistoliers for nuisance value).

Nothing in the Empire army really does all that well unsupported. It's basically the combined arms book, where units are average by themselves, but potentially fantastic with the right support.

sebster wrote:
Nothing in the Empire army really does all that well unsupported. It's basically the combined arms book, where units are average by themselves, but potentially fantastic with the right support.

QFT.
My infantry win my battles, but they CANNOT do it alone. Everything in an empire army has to work together to win, else your T3, 6+ save dudes will die in droves. Compare, a horde of halberds (say, 40) dishes out 31 attacks, usually hitting on 4s, wounding on 3s, so 16 hits, 10 wounds. Simply adding a warrior priest gives hatred, bumping that up to 24 hits, and 16 wounds. Those extra 6 wounds often pay for the priest. Now consider a hurricanum hiding behind them, now you hit on 3s (with reroll), around 27-8 hits. So far all of this is without magic, adding in the priest spells and it just gets ridculous! Best case (with priest spells) I can have 31 attacks, hitting on 3s, wounding on 3s (both with rerolls), magical flaming attacks, and I have a 5++ ward When you hit me. Noone wants to face that.
Its why I take lore of Light and beasts, both very good buffing lores for empire. Shadow works well too, but I prefer making our mediocre troops better, as its harder to make things worse than us...