Yeah my friend says the same thing, the one I've played like 4 150+ turn coop campaigns with on normal. And what I can say is.....the philosophy still exists at normal too. Yeah, you can get by with a diverse army with plenty of melee....but compared to the person doing "Doom and Crap Stacks", you'll be more inefficient than them. Your armies won't dominate as hard, outclass seemingly better foes as well, recover as fast, a lot of things. And therefore you won't expand as rapidly.
Yeah, you can manage with diversity in your roster at normal, and if you're playing solo, well, you really have no basis for comparison other than the AI, who also usually tends to build diverse (suboptimal...) armies. But playing with someone else who is know pretty versed in TW2 mechanics and unit performance....the difference is still clear even at normal. One is highly performant. The other "gets a long." Like in my current DE campaign I just said fuck it, internet says Darkshards w/e Shields are where it's at, let's go with that. Fuck Corsairs, Shades, Cold One Knights, Hydras, Dragons.....just have over half your army as Darkshards w/ Shields, maybe or hero or two, and some melee you don't really care about, and watch your foes liquefy with every volley of shots.
It's not that you can't make it work, it's just that once you know....you know you're settling for a less efficient game in the name of flavor. Your first playthrough or two, that's probably going to be part of the learning process. But for me, having played about 5 factions, my mindset going in now is "Ok, let's sort out the shit from the things that will actually be doing the work." And even in normal, melee ends up on the bad side of that equation a lot. With the rare exception of some monster melee like Varghulfs, Hell Pit Abominations, things of that caliber. Things that regenerate health
When I first started TW2, I went right to Beastmen. And those are some of the most white knuckle battles I've had, even on normal. Not only because I didn't know enough, not only because Mememen can't compete very well with the DLC and revised factions....but because they're almost all melee until you hit like Tier 3+ where you get can overpriced semi-durable ranged, and Tier 5 where you can get Melee/Artillery hybrids. As soon as I played Skaven and DE and had affordable, mass amounts of ranged it was like....holy shit, ranged is so dominant and results in so many 1-sided fights compared to melee.
It painfully reminds me of when I played Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition table top. I wanted a nice melee fight with my brick of decked out Chaos Warriors that cost 40% of my army points and owned 90% of my <3. Win or lose I just wanted a decent battle. What I got instead was every variety of ranged cheese thrown at me so that most of my units were dead before they'd even gotten engaged.
When he said Wood Elves got hit with an Economy nerf
I really hope he wasn't characterizing their immunity to attrition affecting bankruptcy attrition as an "economy nerf."