I'm a new player to fantasy and I'm having trouble dealing with high elves. The always strike first rule has left my front rank of saurus' getting destroyed with no fighting back. Any ideas on what I can change in terms of army list or strategy to deal with white lions or swordsmen? In general I'm fielding 3 full units of saurus warriors and one skink/kroxigor unit and one skirmisher unit with a stegadon.
Remember, you have spears on the saurus (or you should do) so even with just the second rank you should cause them some serious pain since they are very very fragile. The best way to deal with WL and SM though is safely at range. Use skink skirmishers to get on their flanks, stop them marching and shoot them with poisoned weapons. They are glass hammers; poor toughness and little armour but if they hit you, they hit really really hard. If you take a Slann, magic should serve you well to blast them as well. The engine's pow will eat them if you take one. Finally, remember that impact hits go before ASF so try to get that stegadon into the flanks. If you can give me more of an indication of what both of you take I might be able to help a bit more. HE armies can be very varied. Some players use lots of magic, while others focus on combat.
having played HE almost exclusively i can say that lizardmen as scary. Terradons can drop rocks on our swordmasters, we cannot get guaranteed breaks from saurus and skinks are just a pain, kill our eagles which we dont like. Stegs hurt because impact hits go first. An odd trick against HE is that you never want to charge them with your saurus. I guess its not that odd, just perhaps counter intuitive. You especially never want to charge spear elves or sword masters. the first looses a lot of its advantages if it charges. And the second will kill your entire front rank so you need the second rank to be able to do something. Magic missiles really hurt HE, so death is not a bad lore. Otherwise use beasts and cast beast cowers as often as possible on princes or on the dragon. Probably not metal because he has low saves, or they will be immune to fire, and death is probably just better overall than fire. Against phoenix guard i would imagine suarus would work well, same as against white lions. Try not to let dragon princes hit your flanks, and a burning alignment or two will kill many... many of them. White lions are going to be somewhat hard to kill from shooting as they have a 3+ save. But they only get a 5+ save from magic missiles. PG are always just a pain to kill, but i would imagine the sheer number of attacks should get through the PGs ward saves.