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| Enchantment: Finally, we get enchantment. There¿s nothing horribly urgent here, but you can find several useful spells along the way. Research when you feel like it. At lvl3 you get strength of giants (as you might remember punching through heavy armour is your hoplites main weakness, so this spell helps you out) Skellespam is here too, though unless you find an interesting site, you¿re unlikely to find enough 2D mages to achieve critical mass. At lvl 4 antimagic is vital against astral nations. Further down the line you find the various domes and elemental resistances, mass regeneration and relief for end game nature goodness, and various attainable gem globals. Heat from hell (lvl6) works great with demon armies, and at lvl 8 lichcraft opens the way for high level death magic.
4. Magical diversity Somewhat oddly for an otherwise magically weak nation, Arga Dis is quite capable of achieving a good magical diversity, and with some efforts is able to reach high levels in all paths but water, even without pretender help. This obviously doesn¿t mean you¿ll have a cadre of high level mages chain casting all high-level spells in all battles, but if you do need to be able to cast one specific spell, chances are you can achieve it with some time & investment. Of course, pretender design might be able to help you out, and in some cases trading for boosters will ease your task, but this can¿t always be achieved. In this analysis I will discount 10% randoms, since they¿re just too unreliable to count on. For the same reason I will not take into account uniques, (items or summons) except those you¿re likely to get, namely the blood ones. So, how do we achieve all this? Astral: Not the easiest, but not unimportant to your magical diversity due to the rings, so I¿ll look at this one first. Getting an S2 Augur isn¿t hard, and he can forge you an astral skullcap. About 1/8 of your augurs will have S3. If you¿re unlucky and don¿t get one of those, at least one of the Arch Devils also has S3. Equip him with a starshine skullcap and a crystal coin and you have S5 [Okay, I admit it. This is where I cheat. You don¿t have a native way to forge crystal coins. Trading for one shouldn¿t be too hard though. Alternatively you might put at least one point of astral and earth on your pretender. If you don¿t put astral & earth on your pretender, and for some reason you don¿t manage to trade for one, there are a number of independent mages (most of them from astral sites I believe) with the ES combo. Failing all of the above spectres (Conj6) have a 1/8 chance of having ES. They are really expensive though if all you need them for is crystal coins. Better to trade for one. If nothing works out, well, that¿s it then, you¿re stuck at S4 (short of empowerment) Forget rings of sorcery and wizardry then, and everything that follows requiring one of those. You can still get some decent magical diversity without those two items, mind you, but if it¿s at all possible, try to reach them. They¿re so worth it.] With S5 you can forge a ring of sorcery, and equipping that one you get the ring of wizardry. S6 is as far as you get without artefacts (well, in the very late game you can develop a robe of the Magi for S7, but that will definitely take a while. ) Blood: Well, this is easy obviously. Your Gilgans have an easy B4, and occasional B5. Forge a blood thorn, brazen vessel, and armour of souls (and ring of sorcery or the black book of secrets artefact if you don¿t manage to recruit a B5 Gilgan) and you¿ve got B8 without pushing too hard. Enough for all your needs. Fire: With 2F from your misbreds and the easily forgeable skull face (const6) you get a relatively early 3F (4 in battle with phoenix power) For higher levels you¿ll have to wait for Arch Devils (Blood 7) (unless you get very lucky with a F3 Augur. Don¿t count on that though) Arch devils will give you F4 and thus F6 with flame helmet and skull of fire. (or F7 in combat) Earth: 2E from your misbreds. Earth boots and blood stones will give you 4E (5 in combat) At Conj 6 you can summon troll king¿s court to give you 3E mages. (5 with boosters) Adding a ring of wizardry or (cheaper) the artefact pebble skin suit (which you¿re quite likely to get, given the magic paths of the other MA nations.) boosts your troll up to 6E. Enough to cast all spells and forge all items in the game. Death: Death is an easy path to reach ever higher levels in for any nation, so the same goes for Arga Dis. D2 from your misbreds gives you a skull staff. Depending on your research and available gems from there you have three easy ways to reach the D5 needed to summon liches. (Ench8) At least one of the Heliophagi (Blood8) has D3 Give him a skull staff to forge a skull face, equip it, et voilà, D5. The same can be achieved by summoning a mound fiend (Conj7) Alternatively, you can skip out the middle summon by giving your D2 misborn a ring of sorcery, which together with the skull staff allows you to forge a skull face, bringing you to D5. Liches are D4. Equip them with skull staff, skull face and ring of sorcery for D7 (and Tartarians.) D8 with ring of wizardry. Nature: About ¼ of your augurs will have N2. Forge a thistle mace for N3. Over half of your N2 mages should also have S. Give them a thistle mace and forge a moonvine bracelet. (If you don¿t get any N2S1 augurs you¿ll have to wait until you manage to forge a ring of sorcery, then forge the moonvine bracelet with an S1N1 augur) That will take you to N4. With a ring of sorcery you reach N5 and faerie court/tree lord¿s staff/tree lords, and from there any level of nature you need. If you lack astral pearls and can¿t manage to forge a ring of sorcery you can reach N5 with the help of an ivy king. (conj7) Air: This will take a while to develop. You need N5 and Conj8 to summon a faerie court, giving you A3. Give the faerie queen a ring of wizardry and she can forge winged helmet and bag of the winds, giving you A5, and the ability to cast most of the best air spells in combat (A6 if you keep the ring of wizardry) Unless you find indy air mages you won¿t have any serious air income by this time though, and the air boosters are expensive, so don¿t expect to have many of these flying around. Keep your eyes open for the illusionist mercenary mage, he can help you out with site searching and/or forge a few key items early on. Water: Your best bet for some basic water magic is to find enchantresses. (who can then forge a water bracelet, and from there can site search and forge most of the basic useful items. If you don¿t luck out with enchantresses water gets harder. While spectres and Lamia queens (both conj6) do have potential W randoms, developing water from scratch if you don¿t find any enchantresses really takes a lot of time, effort and resources. If you do decide to go for it, both have 7/16 chance of at least W1 and 1/16 of W2. I wouldn¿t try too hard to get water really going though. W2 is plenty for your needs. (Site searching, boots of quickness) Blood empowerment: Of course, empowerment is always an option to improve your magic diversity. It is however very expensive, and very often not worth it. Empowerment in blood is an exception though, simply because you¿ll have so much more blood slaves than you have other gems. There are useful cross-path spells in all paths, though some more so than others. Nature/blood will give you jade daggers, blood vines and cross breeding. Water/blood gives you ice devils (and frost fiends) Air/blood will allow for storm demons and robe of the magi (boosting all your paths one higher) Astral/blood will allow the horror spells and empowering an S3 mage twice will (with full boosters) even allow you to cast the dreaded arcane corruption. None of these is a must-have tactic, but they¿re all options at your disposal. 5. Blood hunting Blood is the major strength of Arga Dis, so you¿ll want to start collecting blood slaves as soon as possible. Recruit heimgrots, have them forge themselves their own sanguine dousing rods, and park 2 of them in each province between 4700¿ish and 6500 population. (except those with gold-producing sites) Set taxes on 0 (or on 20 if you can stand the micro of checking the unrest levels. A tax rate of 20 will work fine most of the time, but occasionally unrest will get really high, and you¿ll have to drop it back to 0 until the population calmed down) and watch the slaves flow in. Alternatively you can reduce unrest through heavy patrolling, but this will eat through your population at a horrible rate, and is most suited for aggressive play (bless-rush?) on small maps. Use scouts (or indy commanders if you can¿t find enough scouts) to transfer the slaves from the blood hunting province to the nearest lab. Later on you will want more and more blood hunters, and will start using ever more highly populated provinces for blood hunting. You will be able to bring in just about as much blood slaves as you want, the only problem is that the more you hunt for blood, the lower your income will be. (due to lowered taxes) Worse, since you¿ll start using ever bigger provinces to blood hunt, and thus loose more and more tax income, each slave will be a bit more expensive than the last one. On the bright side, most of your blood summons do not require upkeep (The Augurs do though), so the more you blood hunt, the bigger the portion of your armies will consist of demons, the less upkeep you¿ll pay, the more you can afford to blood hunt. Etcetera.
6. Odds and Ends I¿ve grouped some miscellaneous info pertinent to the nation into this chapter. Don¿t expect anything too coherent. (The incoherence might be worsened by the fact that it is now 4 o¿clock in the morning, but I¿ll reread it with a fresh head before posting. ) * My assessment is that while Arga Dis is strong enough early on to achieve strong expansion and to make them an unappetizing early target, they¿re still vulnerable to early trample rushers, and possibly some aggressive bless rushers too. There¿s also a small window after the moment your opponents are likely to attain their first really useful battle spells (say skellyspam for C¿tis for example, or thunderstrike for Caelum) in which you¿re likely to suffer in a war against an opponent of roughly your own size, as you lack the ability to spam spells of the same efficiency) As said before though, research in construction and blood will make you potentially very powerful in mid game, and the powerful blood spells can easily carry you all the way through end game. You also have the ability to achieve good magical diversity with a certain amount of effort, so there really aren¿t many late game strategies you can¿t employ, though time and gem restraints will of course prevent you from doing everything at once. * As with other blood nations, you¿ll loose a substantial part of your income to blood hunting. This means that you should always pay special attention to the upkeep costs of everything you do. Try to refrain from hiring bigger garrisons than you absolutely need, and use blood summons to supplement regular recruitment if you¿re suddenly threatened on a new front. Try to resist the temptation to use up all the money from large lucky gold events immediately, and carefully consider what you want to accomplish with it in the next several turns. Shave every penny twice before spending it, because the less gold you spend, the more blood slaves you¿ll be able to rake in. Of course, Arga Dis has some really high-quality units, and the Gilgans aren¿t exactly cheap either, so you¿ll have to find your balance. * Like most nations consisting of elite infantry, Arga Dis is very vulnerable to tramplers (rushers or otherwise) Even size 3 minotaurs hurt badly. Too worsen matters you¿re not very powerful magically speaking, so several counters are hard to attain. I have yet to face massed elephants myself, with any nation, (though I did face Minotaurs in my current Arga Dis game) so I will refrain from giving specific advice on how to counter them here. You can find a thread on how to deal with tramplers linked in the strategy index. They¿ll have the first-hand experience I lack. * General wisdom is that it¿s quite useless to recruit heavy armour units when fighting really high damage units such as giants, as they¿ll just smash through the armour without noticing it anyway. While this is good advice, it doesn¿t apply to Arga Dis. Since their hoplites have so low armour giants will actually smash through the armour and the shield in the case of a shield hit. (25 protection combined) Recruit Myrmidons (or Achilleans) instead. They have the same defence (actually one more without counting the parry) and a combined armour + shield protection of 30 has a better chance of stopping at least most of the blow. * Horde from hell is not only an excellent remote summon capable of taking out all but the strongest PD (I¿m afraid of using it against Pythium in my current game, but then they have arguably the strongest PD in the game) but you also retain the units to cause further mayhem. 25 imps and a flying commander might not be enough to conquer the world; it¿s not something to sneeze at either. Combine the surviving imps with devils, harpies and possibly some blackwing riders for extra punch for some serious raiding ability. Both Arch Devils and Heliophagi can also fly if you want a heavy hitter along. (Or you can use them on their own of course) * Your PD is on the low side of average, consisting of one hoplite and one helgrot per point. Above 20 you also get an extra myrmidon/point of PD. It does bring some fresh bodies into the field, but don¿t expect it to accomplish anything extraordinary. * Blood stones are great. They are a path booster and a gem-producing item at the same time. Build them whenever you can. * None of your priests will be able to preach. Preaching is for sissies. If Gilgans want to expand the faith of the true god, they sacrifice a couple of virgin girls. The ability to push dominion through blood sacrifice is always useful, though you lack the predilection for horrible scales of Mictlan, or the weird temperature preferences of Abysia and the Heims to make a dominion push into enemy territory extra harmful. * The Gilgans are your only national priests. You can probably find some indy priests to fill your basic blood sacrifice and blessing needs, but H2 priests are harder to come by. Unfortunately, Gilgans are quite expensive at 420g, and it¿s a waste to use them for Sermons of courage. This kinda makes it hard to follow my advice to keep Sermon of courage active on your oathsworn sacreds, if you use them. Which is a pity, because at their price they would be well worth taking a minor bless for, and to be used extensively, if you would be able to keep them all sermon of couraged. 7. Pretender Design 7a. Scale preferences
7b. Blessings While Arga Dis doesn¿t categorize as a strong bless nation, they do have several sacred units which can benefit from some more or less modest amount of blessing. The oathsworn, misbreds, Gilgans, and Augurs are all sacred. Earth: The most universally useful bless. Minor earth reinvigorates all your sacred mages and helps them cast longer. While encumberance isn¿t the greatest weakness of the oathsworn, and an earth bless isn¿t their first choice, a little reinvigoration doesn¿t hurt them either. Major Earth is very useful for SC Gilgans. It also raises oathsworn protection from 8 to 12, which still is very mediocre. Major earth is more useful for units which already have high protection, but if you take the bless for the Gilgans anyway, the oathsworn get some benefit from it. Taking even one major bless certainly isn¿t a given with Arga Dis, but if you do take one, earth seems the way to go. Nature: Another one for the Gilgans. N4 will provide them with 3pts of regeneration/turn, and seriously cut down on afflictions. N8 will take this to 9pts, and (prohibitively expensive) N10 even to 12. The oathsworn will also benefit from the affliction reduction from this bless, and gain a little bit of survivability. The very fragile misbreds and augurs don¿t gain any real benefit from this bless. The N9 berserk is quite useful for the Gilgans, adding to their already impressive Berserking ability. It¿s a mixed blessing for the oathsworn, counteracting their big weakness of low morale, and increasing their offensive power, but at the same time reducing their main survival attribute, their defence. It is suicidal for augurs and misbreds though, who have no chance at all of surviving the headlong charge towards the enemy provoked by any pinprick they might be subjected too. Astral: Not too bad. S4 or 6 will raise the lowish Gilgan MR to a more respectable 17 or 18 (S8 does not improve on this though, MR can not be raised above 18 through a bless) and more MR for anyone else is always useful. Misbreds and augurs both benefit quite a lot from twist fate at S9, but this is definitely not worth taking the bless for imo. Gilgans nor oathsworn are the type of units who benefit that much from it. Fire: F4 will raise Oathsworn attack to a very respectable 14. With two attacks each they will stand a decent chance at hitting anything but the very highest defence units. (W9 Vans start to get tricky) F9 will raise their attack to 16 and give them flaming attacks. Not bad at all. The Gilgans don¿t especially need extra attack that badly, but an extra point of attack is an extra point of attack. It can help make the difference against high-defence SC¿s. Water: Again a bless the oathsworn will benefit from the most. Raising their already decent defence skill increases their survivability. W4 will give them a respectable 16 defence. W9 means defence 18 and 50% quickness. Not that horrible, but if you insist on taking a major bless specifically for your oathsworn I¿d go for the F9. Once they go berserk Gilgan defence is so abysmal they will get hit anyway, W bless or no, so the minor bless doesn¿t do that much for them. Quickness is as useful for them as it is for any other SC though. (And maybe more so for Arga Dis than for other nations, since they have no easy access to water magic for quickness items) Death: The affliction chance increase is actually quite nice for your Gilgans casting blood battle spells. There are quite a few blood spells that target large areas, doing little damage in that area. Bloodletting being the best of the lot. Increasing the affliction chance of these spells can help leave your opposition a useless mess, even if you don¿t kill them The other sacred mages can obviously benefit from this as well. I see no incentive to go for a major bless here. Blood: Meh. Minor blood will increase the strength of your oathsworn, which is nice, given the lack of punch mentioned earlier. A nice bonus if you¿ll be getting blood anyway for another reason. But why would you ¿take blood anyway¿ on your pretenders if you have Gilgans? Air: Bleh. Air shield might help increase misbred and augur survivability on arrow-strewn battlefields, but to actually take an air bless for that reason? I don¿t think so. 7c. Dominion Having a high dominion will help you push dominion through blood sacrifice if you¿re so inclined. On the other hand, the ability to blood sacrifice can also help you get away with lower dominion. You can¿t preach though, so it might be best to avoid the really low dominion you might get away with with other sacrificing nations. Dominion 9 or 10 will obviously help out SC builds through awe. 7d. Putting it all together: Pretender Types: * Rainbow pretender: Though I generally like this kind of pretender I don¿t feel Arga Dis needs a rainbow, as they are capable of developing a very decent magical diversity on their own. If you still do take a rainbow, make sure you have the ES you need to forge crystal coins. Consider taking 2E to make sure you can forge earth boots, and then dwarven hammers, or maybe even 3E to forge your first hammer before reaching const4 and thus save quite a few gems along the way. Air and Water are your weakest paths, and thus a minimum of two each will help out site-searching. Consider 3+ S to facilitate ring forging (or possibly even 5S to allow arcane nexus with boosters) Also consider minor blessings. Oathsworn benefit most from 4F4W, Gilgans from 4E4N, though 4S ain¿t bad either. Your other mages like 4E. You obviously can¿t fit all of the above into the same build without sacrificing something else. Example 1: F2A2W2E2S3N2B1 awake lore master with turmoil 3, production 1, death 1, luck 3, magic 1, dom 6. (Or prod 0, death 0) 2 Picks in almost all paths to allow early site searching. S3 to ease up the forging of rings of sorcery/wizardry. No death magic to save a few points, because you have easy access to death, and death offers little extra in synergy with the other paths. Basic dominion of 6. (Dominion 5 can give you an extra scale, or death magic, if you feel like it) Blood because you have 10 points left over with nowhere else to go, and with the boosters your Gilgans can forge this will get you started on all the cross-path spells your Gilgans don¿t have access to. You reach your first blood SC chassis (ice devils) one level sooner this way, and they¿re cheaper than arch devils too. Production 1 to insure early expansion goes well. (I¿d say this is a well-balanced rainbow. I still don¿t like rainbow pretenders for Arga Dis though) Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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