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* A dormant pretender saves you a *lot* of points, but as EA Arco with sloth you have trouble expanding early; almost certainly isn't worth it.
8.12.1.2 Early Arcoscephale - Ephebophilia incarnate Article Author: Juffos This was written for vanilla game, no CBM or other mods. Early Arcoscephale is one of the bit harder nations to play. They have no exceptional national troops, mages have to be communioned in order to become really useful (communions can be quite tricky for some people, check the guide by baalz) and they are rush bait. They also have some exceptional strengths, such as huge early research by philosophers, mages who are sharing the title of best communion mages with Pythium's theurgs (who suffer from old age and worse magic versatility), priestesses with healer 100, oreiads with seduce and sceptics who can be used for the underhanded dominion kill. Mediocre national troops force one to take an awake or dormant pretender for aiding in expansion and defending against rushes. I used a dormant Prince of Death, astral5 death5 dominion strength 9, scales were order3, sloth3, growth3, misfortune2 and magic1. Dormancy gives points for improved scales and also some time for philosophers to research necessary early selfbuffs, such as personal luck and body ethereal. Combined with awe+0 from dom9 which gets a huge boost from the innate fear aura of Prince, he is almost invulnerable against ordinary troops. Some early construction0 forgings such as blacksteel armor are also useful for him because of his undead form, which does not take any encumbrance from armor. Later in game he can buff himself with astral shield, resist magic and soul vortex which is the ultimate antichaff-spell. Note that priestesses cannot heal his afflictions because he is undead. Do not use wind riders for bless. They cost too much and suck. After all independents have been taken, he can fly from province to province to look for death sites, because you have no other access to death except your pretender, unless you are lucky and find some magic site or independent province which can supply you with death mages. Do not use him against astral nations, because he will get magic dueled or horror marked into oblivion. Death mages will dust to dust him. In the late game his paths give you access to high astral and high death, the winning magic paths of late game. With order and growth, you should have enough gold to build additional cheap castles in forests or mountains fast. Arcoscephale also has laboratories which cost only 250 gold, making castle spam even better. A factory for massing mystics costs only 1050 gold for you, making research extremely easy. Tartarian spam is perfectly applicable for this nation, with the Prince summoning the well of misery and some demilichs with lichcraft and an oreiad with nature random and thistle mace casts mother oak for nature gems to burn in gift of reasoning the tartarians and the gift of health for curing their afflictions. You have no death income in capital so trade for gems or be lucky in site searching with the Prince. Wishing and arcane nexus also are available because of astral5, just equip the Prince with starshine skullcap, crystal coin and ring of sorcery. You must be the first one to reach construction8 in order to wish with the Prince without empowering him in astral (dimensional rod, the ring of sorcery also can be replaced with the tome of higher power (mage engineer with astral random with ring of wizardry) in order to spare pearls). If you succeed to be the first one, do also snatch the death artifact which increases one's death magic by 3. It actually isn't hard to imagine Early Arcoscephale reach construction8 first due to their insane research machine. In midgame vine ogre spam can work with battlefield wide nature buffs such as mass protection and mass regeneration. Mystics are awesome. They can deter an elephant rush with conjuration3 and thaumaturgy4. Just put up a reverse communion in which a master casts the power of spheres which makes all your slaves +2 astral, perfect for paralyze spam. This can also be used against thugs and supercombatants. They can reach a huge variety of spells which to use in battle with communion, reverse or not, such as fireball, fire cloud, ice strike, falling frost, blade wind, magma eruption, acid spells, gifts from heaven, soul slay and astral fires. Oreiads with air random can support with thunder strike. All those spells are conveniently in the evocation tree. Your mystics with both water and earth random can also cast rust mist which is outright cruel against big men in strong armour. Myrmidons are perfect for keeping the enemy still while your mages do the damage. Dwarven hammers are forgeable by mystics with two earth randoms and earth boots. Oreiads with earth random can be used as cloud trapezing stonerainers, script them with summon earthpower and rain of stones, add ironskin if you care for your mages. This can be extremely devastating if you equip them with sacred shrouds, giving them +150% affliction chance because of your death5 Prince. They can also be thugged up if you need to cut a crucial retreat path during a combat. They have awe+5 so province defence is almost helpless against them. Cloud trapeze, buff with mistform, mirror image, air shield (awe doesn't help against missile attacks!), iron skin and strength of gaia and give them a brand and some cheap shield, maybe also a pendant of luck. Some reinvigoration equipment will help with the fatigue, such as boots of messenger and/or girdle of strength. After the strike they can go into hiding and sneak either back or for extra raiding. You have access to the remote site search spells of every path but death (which is covered by your pretender) and blood. This gives you a huge influx of gems that can be used for summoning elemental royalty or be alchemised for additional pearls. For air queens, equip an air random oreiad with ring of wizardry and forge an air booster (or equip her with the tome of high power if you managed to get it). For fire kings, empower a fire2 mystic once in fire and give him the ring of wizardry and then forge the burning helmet. You could also empower your pretender twice in fire and then with ring of wizardry and flame skull summon the king of banefires who then proceeds to summon the fire kings. For earth kings, earth2 mystic with tome of gaia (earth random oreiad with earth boots), earth boots and ring of wizardry. I also mentioned sceptics in the beginning. If you are the sneaky type, you can try to score a dominion kill with them. For additional power, forge stone idols with your e2s1 mystics with earth boots or e1s2 mystics with starshine skullcaps. However, recruiting sceptics can hurt your mage recruitment too much not to be affordable. The seduce ability of oreiads doensn't trigger often enough to be actually worth attempting, but it can be used for assassinating important mages or commanders. Apply standard thug equipment and buffs here. The point of this nation is to survive early game so they get their research and gem income going, so they can shine in the later phases of the game. Comments: Don't forget to try to seduce blood vine mages if you find any, there are 5 per province usually, so you should be able to get at least one. Also, if you've got a Ring of Wizardry then have an A3 Oreiad make a staff of storms. You can bring it along for both better thunderstriking and lightning, and also cast Fog Warriors with 4 gems, after summon storm power. 8.12.1.3 EA Arco - uncle moneybags Article Author: Baalz 8.12.1.3.1 Original Guide [This guide is based on CBM] EA Arco, the golden era. This isn¿t your Arco of later eras with regimented phalanxes and rows of communion mages, this is the time of Hercules. Think heroes and legendary monsters and mage-engineers forging wings that should not fly too close to the sun, the gods taking personal interest in the affairs of men - now you¿re getting into the right mindset for this nation. Now, this wasn¿t just a flavorful introduction, it¿s very important that you get into a different mindset for EA Arco than you would for it¿s later two eras as it plays strikingly different. EA Arco is a land of making mutually exclusive choices, you¿re going to have to decide which Arco you¿re going to play at the point you¿re making your pretender. This guide explores one particular angle, but there are few nations with so clearly marked different paths, you certainly could be effective going a different angle. That said, I¿ll go ahead and tell you that I¿m going to mostly ignore 3 reasonably effective units because they don¿t fit this angle. The Myrmidon, chariot, and Icarid can all be pretty good units if you treat them right, the problem being that they¿re fairly resource intensive. The philosopher unit has a unique attribute that it gets +1 research point for each level of sloth. That¿s great, research bonus for gaining design points! The catch is that the real cost of taking sloth scales is effectively deciding not to use these three units in a serious way. I¿ll be talking about them in more detail in a bit, realize how much more you could get out of them if you took production scales. I, however, am choosing the philosopher he¿s just too tempting when packaged with the 240 design points for swinging from production-3 to sloth-3. With a magic-1, sloth-3 scale those 50 gold philosophers are spitting out a jaw dropping 9 research points. Now, the beginner might look at that and think the 9 was the important number. It¿s not, the important number is 50. That 50 means we can have extremely competitive research while spending almost no gold. Let¿s take this idea and run with it. Since we¿re taking sloth-3 scales lets see what we can accomplish recruiting almost nothing in the first year. The first leg of this plan is to have a pretender who can come out of the gate fearsomely on turn 1. This means with no research or items, somebody who can keep on clearing indies at a steady pace. Additionally, as we¿re going to be running light on troops we really want somebody whose power will scale up as the game goes on so he doesn¿t loose all usefulness once real armies start showing up. Now, there¿s a couple different pretender chassis that fit this bill, but most of them also require having a dominion score high enough to give them awe. Rather than trying to sacrifice my scales for a dominion score I don¿t really otherwise want, I¿m gonna pick the great white bull. Now, the bull doesn¿t need awe, but he does really need some earth magic. Taking the great white bull I can afford 4E 4N, a dominion of 5 and Order-3, Sloth-3, cold-1, death-1, luck-3, and magic-1. The earth component is critical for a couple of reasons. Right off the bat it gives him +4 protection, bringing his berserk protection up to 16. Against spear wielding humans the difference between a 12 protection and 16 is *huge* it¿s going to reduce the amount of damage you take by an order of magnitude. A 12 protection is kind of iffy for initial expansion, 16 you¿ve got no problem against most of the stuff you¿ll see in inides. Stay away from barbarians, lizards, wolf tribe & heavy cavalry and you¿ve really got nothing to worry about with all those hitpoints. Now, the initial troops you start out with are not great, but they¿re actually not completely worthless once you lay a sermon of courage on them. Turn one recruit as many slingers as your resources allow and prophetize your initial champion and between your javelins and slings you should be able to take out a couple of the low protection, shieldless indies. You¿ll take some casualties each fight, but that¿s ok you only need to take 2 provinces, if you can take 3 with these troops consider it a solid success. If your luck bums out and you lose to your first indie that¿s not great, but not the end of the world either because your raging bull is unstoppably stomping around (unstoppable referring only to light/medium indies at this point!). While these two squads spend the first few turn expanding you¿re making (practically free) philosophers and (not so free) Wind Riders. Wind Riders are pretty expensive, but you won¿t have any problem affording as many as your resources allow as this will only be 5-8 or so in the first 3 turns. That¿s ok, that¿s all you want. Whenever your initial (non-pretender) expansion party grinds down to a useless nub bring your prophet back to collect the wind riders. If you got unlucky and your prophet bought the farm, recruit a Wind Lord instead. This handful of wind riders with the modest blessing you¿ve got is *bad **** for clearing indies, other than exceptionally strong indies they can clear everything. Meanwhile those philosophers have made it to alt-2 and your bull god is now throwing down a stoneskin (and shortly ironskin) which bumps him up to the level that he can also take out almost any indies. B-line both these expansion squads over to the nearest farmlands, there¿s a very good chance you can grab the closest ones before your neighbors. After you¿ve sent out those wind riders you¿re going to only be recruiting philosophers. At 50 gold a pop, you¿re essentially not spending any money while your research blazes on at the head of the pack. Your 2 expansion parties are both plenty strong enough to snatch the high population indies, and your scales are retarded good and being spread to everything you conquer by either your god or your prophet. You should have enough money to start construction on your second castle by turn 6 or so, and roughly enough to put a new one up every turn after that. Your income, in fact should be so good that very shortly you¿re able to continue putting a castle up per turn while you start doing other things. Now, I wanted to talk for a minute about castle site selection. Most of the time in dominions you want to take the cheapest castles you can so that you can get as many of them as possible so you can get as many mages as possible. True, that¿s an important part of why we¿re doing this, but it¿s not the only goal. These forts are an investment. Many people overlook the income bonus from forts, which can be quite significant over the long term. A fort increases the income of a province by the percentage of it¿s administration value divided by two. Let¿s say you put up a forest ramparts with an administration value of 10 in some woods with a population of 5000 and an income of 50. That fort would then generate 2.5 gold per turn. Lets say you put a fortified city with an administration of 50 on a nice farmland with a 20000 population and an income of 200, that fort would generate 50 gold per turn. So, not counting the time value of having a fort up sooner the fortified city (which cost 400 gold more) pays for itself in 8 turns at which point it¿s generating a profit for the rest of the game. This sort of investment can make a significant difference if you¿re putting a fort up early in year one, it¿s not unlikely that gold gain will be thousands per fort over the course of the game on the nice provinces. This gain is even greater with good scales. Most of the time you can¿t afford that extra 400 gold in year one, but the philosophers allow us to do it while maintaining our research pace. We¿ve got gold and no super urgent need to grow our research, so lets make some investments. Targeting the highest population provinces first (and gold/gem mines, arenas, etc!) your forts start sprouting like mushrooms. Since you¿re not recruiting troops and the upkeep for your philosophers is negligible you¿re going to fairly quickly get to the point that you can put up a castle per turn and still pile up the gold. At this point (should be inside of year one) you¿re done recruiting philosophers. Whenever you begin to lament the waste of not using your philosophers look at all those castles you have and the money you can¿t figure out how to spend fast enough and remember it¿s not a waste, that investment is paying fat dividends the rest of the game. Why do we start ignoring the philosophers who have treated us so well? Because the centerpiece of EA Arco is also cap only, you¿re going to only recruit Oreiads from now on. It¿s really a shame, EA Arco has several very nice units which are cap only, but they never see the light of day because they¿re totally eclipsed by the Oreiad. Your first couple Oreids are going to head out site searching. Oh, and did you notice yet that Arco¿s labs only cost 250 gold? Put labs in all those castles sprouting up and start cranking out the mystics. You will have a *lot* of mystics (this is where the majority of that fat income you generated is going to go all game), so you¿ll have plenty which are 2e, 2w, or 2f, and of course they¿re all at least 1S so you¿ve got a powerful battery of site searchers you¿ll be leveraging. Meanwhile, your Oreaids are doing solid job manually searching N and A with a trickle of W & E thrown in. You should have a very strong gem income to match your strong research and strong gold income. Those philosophers are going to make short work of the early research. Your Bull God was most of the way towards being invincible with just iron skin, but once you add in earthpower and personal regeneration he¿s going to have no problem splattering anything short of a real army or a SC counter. Your philosophers will have no trouble clearing this bar inside of year one and well ahead of any fighting with other players. For big fights you¿ll want to add in some support mages to buff him. I know what some of you were thinking ¿The Great Bull? Come on, he¿s useless after clearing the indies, he can¿t be effectively used against a real army like I would with a kitted out titan!¿. Well, to that I say bull. Summon earthpower gives him all the reinvig he needs, fatigue from trampling varies a lot but you¿ll be perpetually low fatigue. Throwing invulnerability down will bring him to a nice round 30 protection while berserking. In a solid dominon he¿ll have over 300 hitpoints, and having laid down personal regeneration will be essentially unkillable by the method of poking him with sharp things. Having self-buffed iron will and hanging an amulet of antimagic off one horn he¿s got an in-dominion MR close to 30. With support mages laying down luck, body ethereal, quickness, haste, gift of flight he turns into something I guarantee will cause nightmares in your enemies (note, you¿ve just quadrupled his movement which gives him a devastating attack but also causes him to get ahead of his reinvigoration. Skip that part for huge armies where you expect a long fight. Trust me though, not much will last long enough for it to matter). You¿ve still got a free misc slot so stick a ring of tamed lighting or whatever seems appropriate given your opposition on his tail and tell me again how he can¿t be effective against real armies. I also wanted to point out that a variation of this same trick is quite effective using chariots. Given your sloth scale chariots are your goto unit when you need to recruit something outside of your capital, and as long as you¿re using them make sure to double their effectiveness by dropping haste. As the game progresses tossing in mass flight and quickening is devastatingly effective as a side strategy (as in where your opponent is not dropping storm or fielding chariot counters like anything size 4 or higher). Because they¿re fairly easily countered you¿re not going to want to lean on them too heavily, but trotted out every now and then they can be a devastating surprise. As long as we¿re on the subject of flying troops lets look at the Icarids. These guys have the potential to be everything Caelum wishes its infantry was. They¿re size 2 along with a reasonable weapon and strength. The strength of flying units (aside from strategic movement flexibility) is the ability to swarm which is greatly improved by being size 2 vs size 3. Toss on a strength of giants (and later weapons of sharpness & quickening) along with mass protection and these guys start looking a lot like something your opponent would rather not have jumping into his flank. You¿ll probably be disappointed with them if you try and use them without mage support or against very stout opposition, but that¿s ok, this is another side strategy you¿ll just use when it seems like a good idea. Rounding out your air force are the wind riders. As your castle building frenzy levels off you¿ll want to steadily recruit these guys. You¿ll never have enough of them to be central to your strategy, but they are awesome heavy raiders and will contribute greatly to the threat vector your opponent has to worry about. Your first inclination is probably to recruit wind lords to lead them. That would be a good idea if it didn¿t mean you had to do without an Oreiad that turn. Instead, send them out in groups of 10 with a priestess with flying boots and a thistle mace. Not only can she bless them, she also can lay down wooden warriors then spam panic. Best of all, she makes sure you get an Oreiad every single turn. So, I keep going on and on about the Oreiad, I guess it¿s time for me to illustrate why she inspires me to poetry. She may be my favorite cap only mage. Why? Because she¿s great at *everything*, an amazingly good thug with no equipment and a full fledged SC with equipment you can probably find wedged in the crease of your couch. She¿s got awe, and a powerful one. Powerful enough that even high morale troops will shy off more often than not. She¿s stoneskin, which with any armor you stick on her, anything which does hit her will bounce off more often than not. She¿s got mistform so those few hits which do cause damage will only cause one point, and she¿s got powerful nature magic so her regeneration is about half her hitpoints. Add this all up and it means she needs to get hit more than 5 times per round over many rounds to bring her down. Not many units can do that. Now, if you get rushed into very early fighting (that for some reason your Bull God can¿t handle) you can use a priest to bless them to gain the regen and reinvig you need. In most circumstances though I¿d suggest just forging her a shroud of the battlesaint, your protection is plenty enough with your buffs and you get the regen without casting the very fatigue expensive personal regeneration. You¿ve got all those mystics arcane probing, you shouldn¿t have any trouble at all popping out a sacred shroud every turn to match the one Oreiad you get. But I haven¿t told you the best part yet no need to forge a shield or weapon. Try this script on for size mistform, stoneskin, resist lightning, cast spells. What spell is she going to cast? Shockwave of course. Now you¿ll do plenty enough damage to blast PD around with just this, but with a little more reinvig you become truly unstoppable. Fortunately, 25% of your Orieads can cast summon earthpower, and the rest just need an earth gem, or for just 3 gems you can forge boots of the messenger with a hammer. Oh, also no worries if she runs into somebody lighting immune, the spellcasting AI will automatically switch to something like freezing touch or fists of iron. But wait, there¿s more! Add ¿resist elements¿ there and it gives you 50% resistance to everything. This means 100% resistance is as easy as slapping on a dragon helm & frost brand (you¿re already scripting resist lighting). You can toss in resist poison if it seems like it¿ll help. So, once you¿ve forged 4 hammers, every turn you¿re using 3w 3f 3s 3n and have a chick who¿s immune to everything, and blasts a huge chunk out of the enemy front lines every other turn while never running up fatigue. You know what¿s even better than that? Using three of them together. Watching the enemy try to swarm around this one block of three invincible chicks to have 3 shockwaves blasting out is just an awesome site to behold. For not many more gems you can stick amulets of MR & luck on your lovely ladies so they¿re good for all weather. If you¿re facing tough astral spam, slap on rainbow armor and rotate in iron will to the buff mix (you¿ll also need some extra reinvig and to cast person regen), you¿ve no worries from that angle. They also get you into the water very early for the price of a ring of water breathing. Download 5.74 Mb. Share with your friends:
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