Give me good reasons why R'lyeh is a balanced nation.

[Argitoth]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Arent you the one who tried to challenge everyone to beat your perfect strategy. Is this a troll to get challengers?

no more comments on my strategy in this thread please...

Oh. and that Last 1v1 I did I won by a hair.

[ February 03, 2004, 13:34: Message edited by: Argitoth ]

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Argitoth:

quote:

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Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

3) Cast swarm, and interrupt the mindbLasters with dragonflies, forcing them into melee. You can even curse them first, so even dragonfly bites will cause problems...

Damn good idea!

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

These are some pretty simple solutions. The best is probably crossbows, but you seem to have discounted that already.

Crossbows are too expensive and hard to find a high resource province with them, so it's a very rare option.

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Unless you are Ulm, or Marignon, or T'ien Ch'i, or any other nation that has a national crossbowman. Longbows (Man) work too.

I also agree with the dragonfly idea; Harpies or Eagle Warriors can do this too, as can any Caelum melee. More expensive flyers like Valkyries aren't as good at it because they will probably only engage part of the illithid force and then some of them will get mindbLasted.

The main thing you have to remember is that illithids cost 50 gold. Each. That's more than Jotuns. Nearly 50% more than Jotuns in fact. You should be able to outnumber them at least three or four to one with infantry, and you'll need to. (Cavalry don't work as well, because their higher cost means you can't have as many, and sheer numbers count for a lot against mind bLasts.)

[Taqwus]

My main concern with R'lyeh would be scalability. Most of their troops (just about everything but hybrids and star children) can only be recruited either underwater or at certain magical sites (and while there's at least one land-based site that provides Void Summoning, it is/they are rather rare), plus the better ones are magical and require magical leadership.
Protecting territory of decent size on land thus depends on independent units, which may have trouble dealing with the better nationals from other nations e.g. hoplites, Emerald Guard, massed xbows + Flaming Arrows et al. The magical nature of their units also makes them highly vulnerable to non-astral leader-killing tactics, because without mages most of their units will rout or even dissolve, and many indy provinces can't produce mages even with a lab. Risky.
Another bit would be that on high-indy settings, sea expansion is _painful_. It takes a lot of chaff to absorb the initial assault of 100+ tritons long enough for mindbLasting. Getting a second water fortress might take some time.

[Bowlingballhead]

Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

[Argitoth]

I have nothing left to say except these are good points.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Another bit would be that on high-indy settings, sea expansion is _painful_. It takes a lot of chaff to absorb the initial assault of 100+ tritons long enough for mindbLasting. Getting a second water fortress might take some time.

High indy settings force the squids onto land much sooner than they otherwise prefer to. And the best way for the squids to take on large masses of tritons is to use summonable sea trolls. Masses of ichthytids, if you can find them, work passably well too.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Bowlingballhead:
Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

Very true. Which is why a major squid strategy is to aim for rapid conquest of river provinces with their high-income farmlands.

Their least-subtle weaknesses are versus flyers (illithids die quickly when engaged in melee) and arrows (as Zen pointed out long ago in this thread).

[Jasper]

One can also use high MR troops, especially since the the penetration of Mind BLast will probably drop into line once the spell Paralyze is fixed.

[LordArioch]

Actually I like R'yleh more with a high indy. They do have very good assasains. However, in general I don't think they are generally overpowered. MindbLast is MUCH weaker than the Dom 1 mindbLast was, IMO, now that it's not area. Arrows will kill the unarmored illithids, and if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front. As long as your not Ermor or something, just give him lots of pointless targets to mindbLast. Keep in mind each illithid costs almost as much as a vaetti hag, and an army of vaetti hags or any other lvl 1 mage is much more dangerous.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by LordArioch:
if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front.

Another problem with the armored illithids is that they move much slower than the cheaper, unarmored variety. They're not terribly useful because as the lands under your control expand, they cannot keep up with the pace of that expansion. It's by far more efficient to build more of the "cheap" illithids and deal with the fact that you'll lose some to archers.

I handle this by setting my illithids to "fire archers". Tit for tat. I can kill the archers far faster than they can do me serious harm. And if you happen to have a Vastness (and have not given it Gift of Reason yet to make it a SC), it can rip up the archers in no time ...

AIs never seem to build archers in enough quantity to become a major threat. Human players are another matter ...