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| I¿d like now to talk about another of my scale choices. Cold-3 seems a bit surprising at first given the cold blooded nature of some of your troops. But remember, we¿re not using those troops! What we¿re using is our summons who are encumbrance 0 and tough as hell. One of the angles we¿re going to leverage is fatiguing out our enemies, and in addition to the simple fact that our constructs don¿t care that they¿re fighting in cold-3 nor take supplies we¿re going to be using several things with cold auras. As far as your mages go, we¿re going to be using your oracle of the ancient¿s very sparingly, and it¿s extremely cheap to stick a frost brand on any of them going into combat. Your golem crafters are going to be casting breath of winter (sense a theme yet?) so they don¿t care. You can also go with cold resistance if you don¿t want the cold aura because of other friendlies around. I wouldn¿t take the cold-3 scale just for this angle, but it¿s got great synergy as we¿re scraping the bottom of the barrel for the design points we need to get those paths on a sleeping forge lord while really needing to take a growth scale because of all our old mages.
One thing you want to pay special consideration with for MA Agartha is to avoid being a one trick pony, which is a tempting prospect at the point in the game that your opponent starts throwing kitchen sinks at those cheap juggernauts chewing tirelessly through their troops. The previous paragraph gives you a clue as to my first suggestion for a switchup, consider this cheap and early combo. One oracle of the ancients and a couple golem crafters with ten or so cavern wights. Golem crafters are equipped with frost brands, shields of beaten gold, and any cheap armor. Buff cycle includes support mages casting enough iron warriors to cover the wights (bonus: buffs the golem crafters to without needing the extra fatigue for a self buff), blessing, earthpower, invulnerability and breath of winter for the crafters while the oracle is buffing strength of giants, legions of steel, etc. The freezing effect stacks to nasty proportions as your enemy tries to chip away at these awesomely tough units. As your research/magic ability progresses you¿ll probably want to switch to regular wights who can be summoned by a revenant with a skull staff and are useful in small enough squads (especially buffed like this!) to make sense to summon one at a time. Umbrals also make wonderful additions to this strategy, though you¿ll have to be clever with your scripting to avoid them charging too far ahead of the slower infantry. Umbrals, with their hitpoints and life draining attack are quite fearsome buffed with iron warriors and the supporting cold auras are icing on the cake. You can also mix mechanical men in for further filling of these cold based squads. This brings us to another thing which might not be obvious, your national ability which buffs golem¿s hitpoints affects all constructs in the game, not just your national summons. This has several delicious implications, but probably my favorite is mechanical men. Why? Because while your sacred constructs are your big stone fist, mechanical men are your big metallic middle finger to foil most of the things your opponent scraped up to combat the other juggernauts you¿ve been fielding. Lighting? Middle finger. Frozen heart/incinerate? Middle finger. Dust to dust? Middle finger. There¿s precious few spells which do squat to these fabulous troopers, and they¿ll obviously be buffed with strength of giants and weapons of sharpness so who the heck wants to engage them in melee when their hitpoints are doubled? Use them as bodyguards (buffed, of course) for those golem crafter¿s wearing something like: frost brand, golden shield, fire helm/chestplate, ring of tamed lighting (haha, your frostbrand also benefits from that weapons of sharpness you cast for the mechanical men!). Solo golem crafter thugs are a bit dicey, but fortunately there¿s no reason at all to use them like that and with any of their several good choices for uber-tough bodyguards these guys are plenty nasty and immune to almost everything. Light thuggin¿ is actually a side note for these awesomely cost efficient golem crafter though. As you¿ve no doubt noticed from some of the things I¿ve mentioned so far, we¿re obviously going to focus on construction research fairly early. This is very important for your golem crafters, because without any boosters you¿re going to struggle to see them as much more than solid earth mages. Once you start leveraging the wonderful world of boosters though your golem crafters go from ¿nice¿ to ¿top of the line¿. Now, of course, is when I gush over my choice of a forge lord pretender and explain why I think he¿s an even better choice than the more flashy risen oracle. Your forge lord, obviously, is intended to crank out blood stones at first. With a dwarven hammer he can pop out a bloodstone for 2E + 3 slaves. This is fabulous, because not only do you obviously not have any national blood hunters, I think I mentioned how urgently you need to start cranking out earth summons early on. With your forge lord doing the forging though there¿s never a contention between blood stones and summons, the stones pay for themselves in two turns! Also, with such a low blood slave requirement it¿s perfectly possible to have the forge lord himself bloodhunt then forge several bloodstones from that one turn¿s bloodhunting. Obviously as you get established it¿s a better idea to have some scouts provide the bloodslaves as your pretender has so many other things you want him to do, but this can be a powerful jumpstart as you¿re hitting that critical beginning of the second year and everything starts happening at once. As the game goes on and you reach a more stable income in earth and slaves leverage your forgelord to forge super cheap blood boosters and pass off the bloodstone forging to another mage so we can put the forgelord to other uses. Initially though, just consider how much of a boost it is to go from a (purely theoretical) 10 E income to a 20 E income in the first year. Considering the leverage you get on E gems, that right there practically justifies the forge lord you¿ve doubled the amount of troops you¿re fielding. I suggest using earth readers for your secondary bloodstone forgers stick one of those blood stones on them, two blood boosters and a blood empower and you don¿t have to worry about sticking boots of youth on them to protect your empowering investment (they¿re not old). This is actually another point I wanted to briefly mention earth readers are *fabulously* cost efficient support mages once you start swimming in bloodstones. Why use a 200 gold golem crafter for those staple buffs (blessing, legions of steel, strength of giants, iron warriors, etc.) when a 90 gold (holy!) earth reader will do? Your upkeep will thank you if you add these guys to your mix, and heck, you need somebody to hold your bloodstones anyway, right? Remember, one of the sacrifices I made in this build is a significantly below average income so you¿ll need to be very mindful of your upkeep costs. Thankfully, most of your troops are upkeep free summons and all your national mages are holy (and everything except the oracle is cheap) so you¿ve got a lot working in your favor. So, what other things are we going to use our forgelord for now that we¿ve got apprentices handling the bloodstones? One of the first obvious things is fire helms. These boosters are usually too expensive to make it to general line mage use, but your forge lord can pop them out for 5f with a hammer. That extra level of fire pops your golem crafters up to phoenix power, so it really opens up a lot of fire options. Also, I have to be honest, there¿s one item in particular which I had in mind for this forge lord a crystal shield (for 2e + 2s!). You¿ve got several flame helms, lots of water bracelets, are swimming in blood stones and a rack full of crystal shields¿I think maybe you¿re starting to see the potential of the golem crafters? Now in addition to this realize that forge lord can pop out a ring of wizardry for 12 pearls. So, it¿s not really all that difficult to get several (flame helm + phoenix power + crystal shield + ring of wizardry) 5F (bracelet + robe + shield + ring) 5W guys¿.or ¿merely¿ level 4 without even splurging the 12 pearls on the ring. In actuality you¿re probably not going to put the fire and water boosters on the same guy most of the time, but the point is you¿ve got no problem whatsoever having a powerful fire and/or water mage for any battle you care to. One consequence of this is that grip of winter is an obvious goto spell. This spell works wonderfully with your sacred statues even though they¿re not cold resistant because they¿ve got that reinvig from your blessing and aren¿t accumulating fatigue from combat. They¿ll gain a little bit of fatigue, but the effect on your enemy will be much more drastic, and obviously this works like peas and carrots with your cold aura troops. This is particularly true when you add rigormortis to the mix. Skull staff + ring of sorcery + 2 D gems on a simple revenant. This should also be a standard goto spell, your mages have enough reinvig to be plenty resistant. What¿s this? Oh, we¿ve also got easy access to rune smashers, S1 indie mages are usually not too much of a problem to round up for void eyes and we¿ve got tons of powerful earth mages and earth boosters so let¿s spam curse of stones from a couple mages and see what happens. One word amusing. Oh, well a couple more words I guess the enemy can¿t even run away when they start routing so you¿re looking at probably close to 100% casualties. One thing to be mindful of - be careful not to get in a situation where you can¿t kill all the enemy before the turn limit expires or your mindless statues will all die. Not generally a problem though with the damage outlay you¿ve got. Now, just as your opponent thinks he¿s got a handle on this, switch this up to use heat from hell and summon some fire elementals to bolster your mechanical men to¿you guessed it, give the big middle finger to those cold immune troops/SCs who thought they were going to give you a problem. Don¿t try to cast both heat from hell and grip of winter though, they cancel each other out! Another spell you¿re going to add to the regular mix is quickness. You¿ll be cranking out the water bracelets, and having 2 or 3 crafters spamming quickness while others drop weapons of sharpness & strength of giants and there is absolutely *nothing* which is going to want to engage your 0 encumbrance guys in melee. Problem is, they probably don¿t have a choice. Quickening is an obvious upgrade for the end of the game, but certainly don¿t neglect the much earlier quickness, with the smaller size squads you¿ll be using, 3 golem crafters can cover a lot of ground. Plus, of course, they then switch to other nasty stuff to rain down for the rest of the fight after the buff cycle. With all the love I¿ve been giving to alteration, don¿t for a second forget that your golem crafters are top shelf direct damage dealers. Not really much reason to put any boosters other than a blood stone on them for this, from blade wind to magma eruption these guys are supercharged from your E bless and summon earthpower to keep going like the energizer bunny. In some situations though you might want to switch up to the fire and water evocations, particularly when you¿re leaning on your mechanical men (no friendly fire). Also don¿t neglect the obvious vector earthquakes. High hitpoint, high protection units and ubiquitous strong earth mages, this spells is great for everything from snatching those enemy mages from the back row to exploding that undead hoard who thought to counter your uber-fatigue strategy with sheer numbers. Now, here¿s another bit of nastiness from your bag of tricks- clockwork horrors. These are some underappreciated units in my mind, and even better with double hitpoints. They¿re size 1 with two attacks apiece, which means each block of them attacks 12 times but you can hit 6 of them with an aoe-1 spell, so quickness comes right to mind. Try this recipe on for size: Take a couple dozen clockwork horrors. Use your pretender to create a golem (who make even more excellent heavy raiders than usual because of your dominion). Nab one of the ubiquitous N1 indie mages who¿s got a ring of sorcery (8 pearls from your pretender) and a thistle mace. Finally mix in half a dozen golem crafters with water bracelets. Most golem crafters cast quickness, nature mage drops a haste, while one golem crafter casts strength of giants and the last one casts¿.iron bane. Each square of clockwork horrors will charge straight across the battlefield in one turn and attack 24 times dealing 16 damage each attack to the now naked opposition. If you¿re facing guys with magic armor (SC/thugs) swap out iron bane for weapons of sharpness. The golem, what¿s he for? Hold, hold, hold, hold, vortex of returning. Vortex of returning + clockwork horrors is a fabulous combo. Golems actually fill a number of important rolls for MA Argatha. Battle fortune is an easily accessible doubling of your already retardedly tough guys staying power (perfect for smaller squads), and with your reliance on mindless units why not stack an astral tempest to the rest of the nasty battlefield enchantments you¿re dropping? Antimagic is a great buff when your opponent gets annoyed at your immunity to everything else. Finally, with a cap, coin and ring you¿re up to a versatile S5 adding astral travel (use leadership boosters) to the threat vector your opponent must fear (consider those clockwork horrors dropping out of the clear blue sky¿.). Astral travel actually bears special consideration as it allows you to enter critical fights straight from your strongest dominion, and thus highest hitpoints. Gateway gives you much earlier flexibility to jump around and recharge your lifeless constructs into your strong dominion. Just because you don¿t have any national mages who can summon them, don¿t forget this is the *golem* cult! As I mentioned, you can leverage into nature pretty easily. N1 -> ring of sorcery -> haurespex (yeah luck-3 to prime the pump) -> ring of sorcery -> ring of wizardry -> ivy kings, fairy queens, etc. D1 -> dark knowledge -> ring of sorcery -> skull staff -> mound fiends, etc. So, you should have a good income and strong mages in water, fire, nature, death, astral and retarded strong earth power. Fairy queens can get you a touch of air, and you¿ll ignore blood other than pumping every slave you scrape up into bloodstones. Now, as you round into the late game you are going to have some good uses for your oracles. Ever had 10 earth attacks dropped on you ever turn indefinitely? This is arguably the best assassination spell in the game with not a whole lot you can do to counter it other than swarms of decoy commanders. Crumble and wizard¿s tower along with a very strong earth income will let you dictate castle control. Petrify is good. A whole lot of petrify is great. Marble oracles are good in an obvious way. You¿ll use them, I don¿t have anything particularly interesting to point out about them. Likewise, darkness is almost too obvious to mention, but don¿t forget about it. 8.12.3 LA Agartha 8.12.3.1
There sacreds are recruitable at every castle. There sacreds are blind...could work well with Utterdark...possibly darkness. Summon as many Umbrals as possible and gift of reason them. Recruit hordes of crossbows then flaming arrows, although this never impressed me, when I tried it. You have fire/death magic,research construction straight away, get out as many skull mentors/lightless lanterns as possible. You really should win the research race you know. I remember having alot of golems teleporting around causing mayhem as well. -> Even though the recruitable-anywhere sacred Blindfighters are tempting, in practice they seem to have trouble doing damage against real armies with their shortswords, perhaps because of their high encumbrance. Strength of Giants and an E9 bless helps, but Magma Eruption and/or skelly spam are the decisive factors when I'm going up against huge armies of EA Ermorian legions. If you do take a nice bless, though, Sepulchrals are not to be overlooked. Ktonian necromancers are still somewhat frail and tend to die to incidental arrow hits and/or lucky cavalry charges. I ought to include Ironskin in my setups but it's hard to squeeze it into the 5 round limit. Could use Iron Warriors instead and stack multiple necromancers in the same square. Iron Bane + Cave Knights or Umbrals = nasty. Keep this one well away from Blindfighters. Umbrals + Iron Warriors are nice, too, but it's not easy to script effectively. Tomb Oracles are nice SCs, but the lack of immortality is annoying if you happen to get Muted or Feebleminded. Make sure to bring a good helmet. Overall, Agartha seems pretty strong in Evocation and Alteration, depending upon how your initial gem setup goes. A recent game against a few AIs went really sour when my first 15 provinces yielded only +1 death gems when searched with Dark Knowledge, since I took Death-3 and was really counting on transitioning to summoned troops. With a good gem income I'd probably rate Alteration a little higher because Marble Warriors and Darkness are powerful buffs to Umbrals, and that way you don't need to bring many mages into combat (so they can keep researching). Evocation lets you translate gold into battles won, but risks getting killed by a lucky arrow. Of course Conjuration-3 is a necessity. ->
While you are holding your own and taking other people's home sectors, research up gift of reason and start GOR'ing umbrals up the wazoo. Equip them which charcoal shields, marble armor, amulet of MR and amulet of luck, and maybe some handy boots for either flying (nice for hit-n-run) or for quickness or rejuvination. They have a good drain life and generally double their HP to about 128 and stay there during most battles. I have seen a single GOR Umbral thus equipped take out hundreds of enemies, and easily anything but a main force. They'll die quick against a true enemy force with good magic users and so on though. As an aside, they'll take a TON of hits and get lots of crippling ailments pretty quickly. Be prepared to bring them home after 8-10 rounds of fighting and give all of their loot to a new fresh GOR umbral. 8.12 Arcoscephale 8.12.1 EA Arcoscephale 8.12.1.1 Early guide 8.12.1.1.1 Original thread Early Age Arcoscephale is an interesting nation with a lot of different options, and thankfully it's easier to play than to spell. It has access to high levels in most magic paths except death and blood through it¿s national mages and forging items, multiple stealthy commanders, healing afflictions, scrying (which gives you scout reports in friendly dominion), and the tools necessary to go for a dominion kill. But, with so many options, it can be difficult to decide which is important and end up failing at them all. Suggested Pretender Design Cyclops, Dormant F4 E5
Dominion Strength: 7 Order: 2 Productivity:1 Growth:2 Drain:2 This makes a decent pretender SC with high stats and all slots available. With Earth 5 his protection starts at 25 which is nothing to sneeze at, and gets an improved attack skill. The blessing on the sacred troops isn¿t too bad for a few reasons I¿ll get into when I mention them. All considered, it¿s a decent pretender. Ghost King, Awake D6
I use this pretender for a specialized purpose: the Dominion Kill. In high dominion, the Ghost King generates ghosts, both of which are stealthy and amphibious and being awake helps generate more ghosts earlier. Death magic also has a lot of stealthy and amphibious summons and having an abundance of magic gems to alchemize will help you search for death sites remotely. Alternatively you could lower order or your dominion strength or magic paths to raise growth. It¿s a specialized and difficult strategy though, but worth mentioning for diversities sake. National Units Slinger-The slinger is not a very good unit. They¿re the only real ranged unit available to Arco and are marginally effective against unarmored/light armor troops, however they are outclassed by most indy archers and thus should be completely replaced early in the game. Peltast-I like the Peltast. It doesn¿t have much armor to speak of which is pretty standard for light infantry, but can throw javelins before engaging in melee. They¿re cheap and pretty effective against light infantry. Cardaces-Cardaces aren¿t bad either. They are slightly more armored than the Peltast at the expense of being able to use ranged attacks. They last a little longer but get chewed up quickly by heavier armies. Myrmidon-The Myrmidon is probably the best infantry available to Arco. They¿re heavily armored at 17 protection and can hold off all but the most powerful troops, like giants, and can absorb arrow fire well. They¿re costly at 28 resources, so if you¿re going with the suggested Ghost King don¿t plan on making too many of these. Chariot Archer-I haven¿t found much, if any, use for Chariot Archers. They¿re very expensive in both gold and resources when compared to most other archers. You could maybe use them fire and flee and have a large chance of getting your army away intact, but at the cost of making an army to do that with these guys that¿s going to put a real hurt on an enemy, you could have raised an actual army that has a chance at conquering the province. Chariot-These are pretty good cavalry, another staple of my armies using Arco. They have good stats and trample, so they make short work of human sized and smaller enemies, especially when the army has routed and is fleeing. Just make sure to use hold and attack and put them a distance away or they¿re likely to charge the front lines and take heavy losses before they break and flee. Icarid-I don¿t like Icarids at all. They can fly, which is nice, but their stats are bad and frequently, even on hold and attack rear, they fly in and get slaughtered, even by archers, and rout and retreat. Plus their map movement is only 2 so that¿s even limiting their raiding ability. They¿re not worth the even moderate cost. Wind Rider-Wind Riders are excellent. For starters they fly and have a map movement of 3 so they¿re not hard to get to where you need them without using gems. They have great stats, including both 17 in protection and defense skill, so they¿re survivors. Plus, they¿re sacred so they can be blessed to even higher stats and effects. They¿re an excellent addition to the army, but very expensive and cost a point of holy each so hard to mass in high numbers early in the game. Commanders Scout-Total waste of money. You get a superior effect with slightly more expensive Skeptics and the unique Scry property makes any effect from scouts irrelevant. Myrmidon Champion-The Myrmidon Champion is a good commander. They¿re pretty tough and have a leadership value of 80 which lets them field large numbers of troops, and they have all the slots available for magic items if you choose to give them any. Chariot Commander-This unit isn¿t so good. It¿s more expensive than the Myrmidon Champion and has a lower leadership rating and fewer slots. However, their map movement is 3, so if you plan on fielding a more mobile army made up of quicker troops, this is an alternative, however you¿ll probably find a better, cheaper indy commander that can produce a similar effect. Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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