0. 2 Description 3 Credits
Download 5.74 Mb.
|
| -> You have lots of different troop types and access to stealth armys.
Longbowmen are good against barbarians and other indys, but can't handle units with shields on their own. You can produce knights in every castle and sacred elite knights (with magic weapons) in your capital. Knights cost gold and resources, so take good scales (order, and no sloth).
Study the possible spells those units can cast (like the infantry buffs in the previous posting) and make battle plans. Heavy patrolling will detect even bards, so produce masses of bards and send them toward your foes before the war. use creative tactics like cloud-trapezing crones with rings of the serpent and cast foul vapor. -> Well, I don't think that A4 is as important as you describe. Definitely it is but I find building the whole strategy around it a bit lacking. MA Man can expand rather quickly using longbowmen so they don't really need an awake sc. I would suggest the following build: Earth mother N4E4, dormant, Dom 6 Order 3
Prod 1 Growth 2
Misfortune 2 Magic 3
Earth mother may not be very great as it is, but it can be a very potent fighter when you give her winged shoes and enough reinvigoration and casting invulnerability at alt5 (which is your first main goal due to wind guide and mother oak). Your second goal will be gift of health and foul vapors at Ench5. Both these goals (including thau2 and const4) can easily be reached with magic 3, rich dominion and rather fast castle building or researching with tribal shamans. Bless effects are perfect to keep you sacred old mages alive (when a crone becomes diseased, just use her as a battlemage) and for extra reinvigoration in battle (in addition to soothing songs for which tribal shamans are perfect). Wardens, IMO, are not worth using heavily due to strategic movement 1. They may be completely useless if you start in the corner - bringing them to front will take ages (you may use faery trod, but I'm not sure it is worth doing). You have perfect archers and very good cavalry. If you expand quickly and keep that advantage, I'm sure, you'll be able to find the way into air boosters (either being lucky to have A4 crone or using trade). Btw, with such build and being lucky to find some nature sites, it is definitely possible to have mother oak and gift of health active at the end of year 2. -> I played a 4-player game as MA Man once, and won with Fog Warriors being my super-weapon. It takes some serious researching, but once you have it your knights are ridiculously tough (almost unkillable by mundane things, and have at least two lives even against spells). So I think keeping that in mind as a target is a good idea. Also on Alteration you get Mother Oak, which is always handy. Actually I've just remembered the other main part of my strategy, which came in before Fog Warriors, was mass-producing Vine Ogres. Man can do that very well, and they're good value (with the vine circlet thing). -> Their temples cost 200g & they have stealthy preachers. An alternate, albeit difficult strategy (I tried unsuccessfully to pull this off in MP, but I was a total newb then) is to fight a Dominion war. Offense: Take a domstrength10 pretender, spam temples & cheap forts, crank out monks to stealth-preach in enemy lands. Defense: Crank out max longbows each turn. Garrison them @ high concentration on the boarders, supported by substantial PD (i.e. 20+). When attacked, the protection/berserker-buffed PD form the offensive line, while the longbows chew up the defenders (defense gets first shot, afterall). Rely on wind guided longbows through the midgame, then fog-warrior-ed kinghts. -> Arrow Fend really negates all your longbowmen. I have tested it in that game Long distance run with Man should be Gift of Health [to have mages alive], Charm [the only really useful spell your crones can cast] and Dark Skies. Dark Skies could work great with that dominion spreading. Btu remember - we played on higher gold than normal, so it was easy to spam temples. I guess the one that took Man over you didn't make enough knights and his mages were well... dead due to old age, so he couldn't field many of them. -> I thought I was right about my general impression of crones almost never getting A4, so I went ahead and checked. Crones have these starting paths (A2N3) They random once for (AWEN +1 100%) and (AWEN +1 10%) I believe you can do 1/4th times 1/10th times 1/4th to get the amount of crones that will have A4. %0.625 That percentage means that if you build 200 crones, 1.25 of them will have A4. So, yes, you really, really need A4 on your pretender. You can't rely on such a small percentage of you crones having A4. -> Yes, it is hard to get. That's why I said about being lucky. I don't rely on this, certainly. However, I think that air booster can be got when you really need it. Either from trade (Vanheim, Eriu and Caelum have A4 quite often) or from that rare crone, or at least you may empower for 60 gems. I consider this being quite real in the long run. Anyway, I think that having fast expansion, good combat pretender and very useful bless is more important than being sure you have A4 for air boosters, staff of storms and whatever else you need. -> I like the idea of taking a cyclops, however you will be able to take neither growth or prod, nor magic. Your mages will get diseased too often, you won't be able to expand really fast due to lack of units and you will never win the research race. Yes, each of these can be thought of as "minor disadvantage", but put together they form a major one, I think. What do you get in return? A very good combat pretender, maybe an SC and access to air boosters. Not a good trade, as for me. However, teleportable combat mage casting Rain of Stones can be really fine if not aiming for E9 bless for sacreds (which could be very good sacreds if they had faster feet. Actually it seems strange to me that they are so slow). Titan E4A4 seems a better choice to me.
Magic: Air 4 Earth 4 Dominion 6 Scales: Order 3 Productivity 2 Growth 2 Misfortune 2 Magic 1 Dormant
If you've researched Construction, Forge Dwarven Hammer (E3, constr 4), and with it Starshine Skullcap, Crystal Coin, Earth Boots (for total +2 Astral, +1 Earth), then Rings of Wizardry and/or Sorcery for your mages. The latter two are quite expensive, being Astral 5 and 6 items IIRC, so if you can cast Forge of the Ancients. It might let your other mages to forge new stuff as well, so check them out as well. EDIT: Oh, and she must be the Great Enchantress, who also GENERATES gems. One of the best rainbow mages there. Now, if you had used a bit more points into getting her, say, F1D2 you could make Flaming Skull and Skull Staff for +1F+1D, add in Ring of Wizardry for total of F3D4, which allows for Skullface, for further +1 to either... And there's Flame Helmet waiting you at Fire 4, if you get Forge of the Ancients up... /EDIT
Water is a bit hard to use. I guess you could summon Sea Kings, conquer the seas and start spamming Falling Frost. It scales very nicely with levels in Water, so forge them both Water boosters if you can afford it (Water Bracelet, W1, Constr 6; Robe of Sea, Constr 2, W3). As for fire... perhaps just Elixirs of Life? That'd let you try all kinds of crazy stuff with your pretender without losing magic on her, and as it stops aging it can also help your Nornas. -> The easiest AND most powerful tactic is to get a Fire mage and cast Flaming Arrows. Combined with your Longbowman, this is a devastating combo. Make Fever Fetishes and pass them around scouts so that your forward armies always have fire gems to cast the spell. If you haven't gotten Fire mages, you'll need to make one. Empower a young guy(since Fire magic ages casters) and make items like Flaming Skulls. Make sure to script Phoenix Power, and don't forget that with an extra gem you can cast a spell one level higher. -> You can trade for fire gems in MP. Luck and Magic scales will help you get random fire gems too. I'd say empower a indy-magic-site Witch if you've got one, or an Enchantress. You should be able to find those sites if they exist by the time you get 53F. You want at least N1, that's the most critical. E1 is also nice because then you can make Fire Brands and Charcoal Shields later. W is nice to make Rune Smashers. 53F lets you make a N1F1 mage, who then can just make as many fever fetishes as possible. Man has problems with Astral too, and if you take astral on your god, a Shroud will keep your fever fetish units alive forever (and your old crones too). Don't bother site searching F initially, just concentrate on the fever fetishes. -> 8.23.2 LA Man 8.23.2.1 LA Man - Death and Taxes Article Author: AreaOfEffect Forward: ---
While reading your Dominions handbook, you might come across the description of Man, Towers of Chelms. Under the strengths and weaknesses section you'll note that they have no weaknesses. This is untrue. Do they have weakness? Yes. Yet that is true of any nation. The question is what is Man's strength and how can it be used to compensate for their weakness. Let's address the strengths of Man first. 8.23.2.1.1 The First Strength of Man: Money --- Man is good at making gold. Almost any faction can take great scales and have a respectable and reliable flow of money, but Man does it better then any other late-age faction I know of. This is a good thing as they will need lots of money to exploit their next strength. How can Man make lots of money? Well, for starters, you need the right scales. Order 3 is the no brainer. Growth 3 is also required and anything less will be below optimal. Production, believe it or not, is an option left up to you. While we are on the subject of scales, tolerance to drain is a national advantage of Man's mages and can be used to help pay for the 240 point investment. Taking some misfortune is also not out of the realm of reason. We'll talk more about pretenders later, all you really need to know now is Order 3 and Growth 3 is optimal. Yet, as I said, it is more then just a matter of scales. The missing piece is the judge. It may not seem like a particularly stellar commander, but it is the most cost efficient patrolling unit in the late age. It's only rivals in my opinion is the Eunuch and Eye of the Lord, both units of the middle age only. At the low cost of 50 gold the unit can single handedly patrol as if it were 21 units. This is enough to tax all of your provinces at 120% while quelling all unrest with only one commander in each province. Only really high populations, like your capitol, might need some additional assistance. Now, both overtaxing and patrolling kill population, that doesn't mean that doing so lacks sustainability. It just so happens that overtaxing to 120% while maintaining 0 unrest kills off almost exactly the same percentage of population gained from growth 3. For all provinces above roughly 7,000 population, the loss will be around 10 people. That is the least amount of population you could ever lose. Even your capitol, with over 30,000 should only lose 10 pop per turn. Population in the 7,000 and below range should lose nothing at all. The loses are virtually negligible when all told. The gain is that you just converted the population growth from growth scales, which is only part of the scales benefit, into three additional ranks of order scales. Further more, the benefit from taxing like so is compounded by the benefits of order. Unless my math is wrong, you will make roughly 151% income from order 3, growth 3, and 120% taxes. In addition you still have increased supplies and you've mitigated some of the disease chance on your old age commanders. There will be a small amount of management as you need to hirer judges, deploy them to provinces, and manually control the tax rates. However, the management is no where near as bad as blood hunting or managing fever fetishes in my opinion. Learning to use the nation overview by pressing F1 will make the task even less bothersome. Provinces recently conquered are best to set to 100% immediately. They will have unrest, but there should be a judge on the way to punish the unruly subjects. If it is any consolation, 100% taxes will still allow unrest to drop 1 point per turn and won't kill population. Finally, an investment in a lot of judges in the early game will keep your upkeep down and your treasury stocked. Now, this isn't without a draw back. The largest hit will be to your early game research. Deploying judges away from your capitol will mean that your not making researchers who stay home and study spell books. The first year will see little in the way of magical advancement, unless you use your god to compensate for this. Now, some judges will have magic paths, but even still I prefer to deploy them as the benefit of doing so will eventually pay off. Money in-of-itself is useful but, as the AI proves over an over again, it will not win you the game. You still need to use that money in a way that benefits Man most, which leads me to the second strength of Man. 8.23.2.1.2 The Second Strength of Man: Forts --- If you want to play Man, you have to get use to the idea that you're playing a faction who lives and breaths the stink of castle walls. Building forts for Man is not like building forts for any other nation. Other nations build forts to build more units, protect choke points, and to secure important magic sites. For Man, building forts is a matter of terraforming the landscape in order to give them a strategic advantage. While other factions are given forest survival and wasteland survive, Man was given the supreme advantage over provinces with a castle. While other factions must choose which castles to save and which ones to sacrifice to invading armies, Man can choose to save them all while pressing an assault into enemy territory. This ability of Man is almost exclusively the responsibility of one versatile commander. The magister. For 70 gold you get a stealthy unit who, for the purposes of sieging and being sieged, counts as 16 units. To top it off, the unit can also be a caster with skill in air, earth, and astral. Being Man's most cost effective researcher, there is virtually no struggle between choosing research or maintaining your castle superiority. Oh, and I here they double as spies too. Trust me, being a spy is their least useful ability, which should say a lot. Their ability to sneak is basic at best, yet a basic ability to sneak still allows the unit to travel in and out of castles that are under siege. One of the big concerns of Man is that they have few measures to counter a sacred rush. Even a well planned armored elephant rush can succeed against them, spite their ranged fire power. The normal answer to this is to use an awake SC god. Yet, why are early rushes so effective? They are effective because once the enemy has your capitol and has crushed your main forces, their is virtually nothing you can recruit that will help you dislodge them. This is most true in the late age given the quality of the indies. Building additional forts as early as possible will slow these rushes and give you options. Slowing the pace of a rush is always to your advantage as it allows you to continue to buy national units, progress your research, and gain time to change the diplomatic landscape. Yet, how fast can Man build castles? Both in test games and in real multi-player games, I have averaged 3 new castles in the first year with 3 new castles on the way. That's around 6,000 gold in castles, all while recruiting expansion armies, PD, and several indy commanders. My first castle is always started on turn 4. That includes games where I didn't expand on the first turn and didn't use an awake SC pretender. As long as you know how to expand with Man's troops, their is no need for an awake god. If you do use an awake god, then you can expect to see even better growth by spreading your good dominion faster and by taking more provinces in initial expansion. Tips about expansion can be found further in the reading. An additional bonus to creating forts in mass is that it feeds back into Man's first Strength, money. Provinces gain a percentage of additional income based on the administration of the fort that occupies the territory. The increase in percentage is exactly half the administration. Administration also increases the amount of resources you can pull in from neighboring provinces. However, you cannot pull in resources from a neighboring province which you don't own or provinces with their own fort. Clearly it becomes helpful to know which provinces give you optimal administration. For Man, the highest administration comes from Fortified Cities (50 admin), which can only be made on farmland provinces. Though the 1200 gold cost of a fortified city, plus the 5 turn building time deters me from choosing farmlands some of the time. Instead I prefer Citadels (40 admin, 1000 gold, 4 turn build time) to fortified cities, which Man can build as their 'default'. As long as it isn't a forest, mountain, swamp, or farmland, Man will build a citadel. This includes border mountains and wastelands. The citadel also has a higher defense then a city. It's only weakness in is food supply, which Man doesn't need a lot of if they plan to defend their walls with magisters. Avoid forests if you can as they net only 20 admin for the same price, time, and defense as a citadel. Mountains are really good for holding a province indefiniately as the fort it produces has an amazing 700 defense but an even poorer admin of 15. Swamps are the only place where you can build a 800 gold and 3 turn build time fort and aren't bad places to stack an adjacent castle as they steal no resources away from surrounding areas and are likely not to have many resources of their own. It's just a fast way to produce more commanders and hold a line. Money and Forts, those are the strengths of Man. Now let's see how this can help them overcome their weakness. 8.23.2.1.3 The First Weakness of Man: Province Defense --- Man has very poor province defense. Reading the book you'll see that you get 1xSpearmen and 2xMillitia for the first 20 points. This isn't entirely accurate. Man actually gets 1xSpearmen, 1xMillitia, and 1xSlinger. That's still bad, even worse if your enemy uses any sort of fear effects. The first 20 PD of any nation establishes the basics of whether their PD is good or not. Though in some cases the PD above that might make up for the loss. Mictlan, for example, gets sacred jaguar warriors at 20 and above. This is not the case with Man. Man's PD at 20 and beyond is longbowmen and tower guards. Now Man's PD is likely bugged as the tower guards are leftovers from the middle age era. They don't have crossbows and use regular shields as opposed to kite shields. Some factions, like Abysia, get mages to back up their PD. In Man's case, they might get a mage, though more often then not they just get a frail unarmored commander. This PD doesn't impress me at all. The one thing about the strengths of Man is that you don't need your PD as much when you have a fort defending the province. By the end of the game, PD gets rolled over so easily that it doesn't matter anyhow. Forts on the other hand forces the enemy to always fight for the province in a way that forces them to take time. This is true at any stage of the game. Also, if you don't like enemy scouts in your lands, 10 PD and a patrolling judge is much better then 20 PD at finding scouts. If you want to support your PD with more reliable magic, you can choose to send a judge with magic levels rather then a plain judge. It may not improve your chances in normal situations, but scripting Dust to Dust (Thuamaturgy 1) on a judge with death magic will stop black servants from being cheap raiders and might even put some real hurt on an enemy's PoD/Bane Lord. 8.23.2.1.4 The Second Weakness of Man: The Research Curve --- As mentioned before, the only real problem with deploying judges early in the game is that your early game research doesn't go anywhere. At the same time, I would argue that if Man doesn't take the hit early in the game, they will be far behind the research curve by the mid and late game. The magister is a quality buy with just the castle bonus and stealth alone, yet, as an added benefit they are also your most cost effective researchers. The problem is that the level of research they grant may not be enough to keep up with other nations. It is not a matter of money. Clearly Man should be swimming in money. It is a matter of keeping pace. The problem is that the magister averages below 3 research points a turn. Your chances are 1:16 for 5 research, 5:16 for 4, 7:16 for 3, and 3:16 for no research at all. That places the average research at 2.875 points per magister. Now most other factions have their own cost effective researchers. Atlantis, C'tis, Argatha, and Caelum, just to name a few, all have sacred commanders with 4 points of research. If those factions build two additional forts, they can average 12 points of research a round. If Man wants to beat that curve, they need to be making five magisters a round. The only way to do that is to build twice as many forts as the enemy, or to use precious gems to construct research items. Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
|