Best Setups For Mictlan

[Glock30]

I am having great difficulty in winning against AI in Difficult or better settting with Mictlan.
I am a decent player but cannot seem to make this Nation flourish.
Any suggestions out there form you hardened veterans would be appreciated.
1)Pretender Choice?
2)Scales/Dominion
3)Fortress Type?
4)Magic Choices?

Any other in-game tips would be greatly appreciated.
Glock

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Glock30:
I am having great difficulty in winning against AI in Difficult or better setting with Mictlan.
I am a decent player but cannot seem to make this Nation flourish.
Any suggestions out their form you hardened veterans would be appreciated.
1)Pretender Choice?
2)Scales/Dominion
3)Fortress Type?
4)Magic Choices?

Any other in-game tips would be greatly appreciated.
Glock

I have been having fun with the following settings as asked by you.
1)Lord of Night: Air 4, Earth 4, Death 4, and Blood 5
2)Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Heat 3, Growth 3 Luck 3, Magic 3
3)I use the normal starting fortress because it is cheap and quick to build so I can protect blood hunters and sacrificers.
4)By this do you mean choices on the pretender or research strategies?

Any questions about my choices please ask and I will elaborate on them or you can try it out and see for yourself if it fits your style. It is geared for never using national troops and generating income from rich provinces and converting gems to money as needed. Lord of Night is chosen to sneak nearest high population province by second turn and start assassinating commanders. I then use scouts on retreat to attack the province twice; once to see how many commanders exactly I need to assassinate and then second to take over the province on the Last assassination attempt since the attempt will take place before normal combat. Assassinations are slow going so any cutting on time corners is essential. I then do a search with the Lord and move on the next province and repeat. While this is going on I will alternate researching and summoning fiends till I have about 9-12 and start taking other independent provinces with them lead by my prophet high priest who can do fire searches for more money producing fire gem sites. Any other questions then let me know.

[Norfleet]

[quote]Originally posted by Anglachel:

Originally posted by Glock30:
[qb] I have been having fun with the following settings as asked by you.
1)Lord of Night: Air 4, Earth 4, Death 4, and Blood 5

Solid plan. The Lord of the Night is a good pretender, and he's an assassin....although his Fiends of Darkness may cause him to rout, like other accompanying towed rabble. At least fiends of Darkness are very MEAN towed guards. Oddly, I've never seen them rout the pretender in my usage of the LotN. Perhaps it has to do with that interesting bit about how if they all die, your pretender doesn't rout....fiends don't break, they always die....let me know what you find, okay?

2)Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Heat 3, Growth 3 Luck 3, Magic 3

Mictlan only favors heat-1, and you'll suffer an economic hit for the excessive heat-3. I personally would go with heat-2, myself, due to the instability of temperature: Having a scale one-off hurts less than it appears.

Luck gives your very nice national heroes, which do a good job filling in missing magics, but your pretender has already covered the known Mictlan Earth/Air/Death holes. However, they're a little suboptimal for pure battle performance. You lose out on Quickness and Breath of Winter by lacking water-2, and BoW can clear out those pesky indies fast.

However: Turmoil BAD! That's going to absolutely MAUL your economy, reducing your ability to churn out priests like they're on sale.

3)I use the normal starting fortress because it is cheap and quick to build so I can protect blood hunters and sacrificers.

I love the watchtower, too. Gotta protect those blood hunters, temples, magic sites, vulnerable exposed provinces. Bloody pesky raiders.

Lord of Night is chosen to sneak nearest high population province by second turn and start assassinating commanders. I then use scouts on retreat to attack the province twice; once to see how many commanders exactly I need to assassinate and then second to take over the province on the Last assassination attempt since the attempt will take place before normal combat. Assassinations are slow going so any cutting on time corners is essential.

Assassination is very slow going. Although there's basically nothing in the way of an indy commander that can possibly stand up to the freaking Lord of the Night, this is definitely a horribly slow way of expanding.

While certainly acceptable in SP, this is probably a little too slow for competitive multiplayer. The Lord of the Night's fatigue is relatively modest, so in lightly populated provinces, with the magic paths you chose, you may be able to clear them out just by buffing Mirror/Mist/Ironskin/Attack Rear. Your paths aren't quite optimized for battle performance, though.

[Glock30]

I was using something like this:
I am going by memory so bear with me if it doesn't add up quite right.

Pretender:Fountain of Blood
Magic:Blood 5/Air2/Death2/Earth2
Scales:Heat+1/Growth+1/Order+1/Productivity+2/Magic0
Fortress:Castle
Dominion: 5

Something like that.

[djtool]

I'm not the great expert but I prefer to go with a rainbow pretender in order to find a helpful site or at least provide some gem income to suplement your base income. Maybe a pretender with more girth if your indie's are high, focusing magic in fire/earth/ast for finding those sites.

definately have to have order 3. You only got the capital to provide you with your priests and you have to put one out as often as possible

[ June 21, 2004, 13:48: Message edited by: djtool ]

[JDScherrey]

Norfleet,

I noticed that you pick apart the assassin and then stated that there is a better setup for the Lord of Night. Now the question is - What is the better setup?!?

You stately very clearly how you would set the rest of it up and gave reasons why. Basically, what are the optimized paths for battle performance when using Lord of Night?

-Christopher

(Just a fellow blood god trying to sac his way to the top or I love micromanagement 101.)