EA Abysia - Looking for advice, and bread

[Jazzepi]

Does anyone have any hints or tips for playing EA Abysia? I'm a little befuddled in how to play them, and what a good pretender strategy is. I feel like their troops are so resource intensive that you have to take order 3 production 3 misfortune 2.

Once you've got your scales set like that you don't have any room for growth (also, you can't take death because of the old age problem) and I don't feel like you can play with drain either considering how weak their research base is.

So no matter what I do I end up with scales like this

Order 3
Production 3
Heat 3
Growth 0
Misfortune 2
Magic 1

Then I can't figure out what sort of pretender I want x.x

Any help would be much appreciated.

Jazzepi

[llamabeast]

One time when I played MP with them I took death 3 and just didn't build any of the old mages. With magic 3 as well it was fine.

[Jazzepi]

I'm a little wary of taking D3 mainly because of the horrible random events I'm told it unlocks.

Jazzepi

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

The following post is not based on any relevant experience, just extrapolations. Test it in SP before going MP.

Someone provided an interesting bit of advice for me on Shinuyama. The assassins are quite different, but there may be some relevance. (For me it was Mujinas with Skull Talisman, but Slayers are better equipped - no death magic available, though).

Your slayers are fairly inexpensive, and your fire gem income high. You may consider sending Slayers out to assassinate independent commanders. On average you'll face two commanders. Once those are dead, just send in a small force. The entire enemy force will route. I'm not certain what I'd do with the fire gems, maybe fire pearls or drakes?

You've got a 2 fire sacred mage for 130 gold. The research is a somewhat of an issue, but if I'm correctly remember +6 fire gem income, you can afford to spam some fire elementals to help with expansion.

So, one thing I would try in the beginning turns is recruiting the cheapest mages, and spending most of my gold on Salamanders (area attack 1, AP!) or Misbred. Assuming a 400 income base, 80 R...

I'd recruit two infantry, an Anathemant Salamander, and one Salamander taking up about 60 resources and 230 gold. I'd spend the rest on Misbred. They may be chaff without armor, but 6 prot isn't bad for EA, and it'll help prevent wastage of your infantry.

[Sandman]

Why not just take production without order?

Early Abysia has a fantastic starting army and with prod-3 you can build up more troops quickly. There's no real need for special expansion strategies.

The Slayers are very nice; but not only as assassins. With a scepter of authority they can lead misbreds on raiding missions, and their mobility makes them a nice chassis for lifelong protections. A prophet Slayer can reanimate undead.

Consider taking magic-3 for the research, opening up your fire magic options. Instead of just spamming fire evocations, you can pull off tricky stuff like Raging Hearts and Blindness.

[Jazzepi]

I tried these scales out and felt that they were okay.

Order 3
Production 3
Heat 3
Death 3
Misfortune 2
Magic 3

I was able to get a nice sleeping rainbow mage pretender, and a dominion score of 6. It feels like Abysia is pretty weak in the early game, and then their power immediately spikes when they get access to falling fires about mid game. With the sleeping, a great sage, I felt like I'd have good access to research, and eventually higher level stuff.

Also, there's really only one old guy I think you'd ever want to recruit, the dragon, but in retrospect you don't really need him. The only nice thing is his F3 gives him easy access to falling fires out of the box, but the lower level F2 guys can just cast Phoenix Power, and then start the spammage. Also, the pretender I cobbled together could make those skulls of fire, and the really expensive F4 guy can forge the -3 reinvigoration +1 fire skulls.

I had another question, can someone help me distinguish exactly how you're suppose to use the different types of infantry?

Last time I played these guys all I did was build the big shield flail ones and that worked terribly The 28 resources ones, but now that I'm taking a closer look at the units, I started to build a few big shield axe guys, who have a longer reach and better defense, and some of the shieldless axe guys who do a ton of damage. Any advice on how these units should be used/placed on the battlefield would be great. And does anyone else like the salamanders? I have off and on good luck with them.

Jazzepi

[OmikronWarrior]

It's been a while since I've messed around with Abysia in SP (and never in MP), but I remember a few things. Bascially, Abysia has expensive troops that gold for gold probably won't stand up to the troops of other nations on their own. Also, their demons meaning additional weaknesses (though their MR seemed to be high enough that Banishment wasn't a great worry). Regardless, to make them work they need to be supported by mages, and what Abysia has in mages is powerful fire mages. And guess what? All your line troops are immune to fire in EA. The obvious strategy is going to be put troops in the middle to occupy the armies and use your mages to cast the hardest hitting fire evocations available to them. Plus, your line troops have very high protection meaning they can last a while in a fight. Also, if my memory serves, Abysia has a purchasable Fire-4 mage. One more thing, don't forget you can alchemize your fire gems for money.

Let me boot up the game to see if I can recommend a Pretender strategy.

Edit: OK, I found Order-3, Production-3, Growth-0, Misfortune-2, Heat-3 (this one is obvious and should always be done no matter what your pretender strategy), and Magic-1 with a Solar Disc Pretender with Fire-8 and Dominion-7 (to help spread the heat). Your best path for researcher will be Evocation with Second Sun as the ultimate goal. Early Enchantment gives you little, but starting with level 5 you get Inner Furnace and later on Eternal Pyre. Obviously you should get some Construction to build items that increase fire magic.

Alternate strategy found in manual: Take an Imprisoned Scorpian with 9-fire and 9-earth and build as many of your sacred units as you can (which won't be that many). Bless, and use them along side fire mages. I'm leery about this strategy being viable in the long term (as the sacreds are capitol only and it involves taking some scale hits), but it may be worthwhile.

[Micah]

Umm, EA Abysia's normal troops are pretty fantastic in a standup fight, they have phenomenal protection for EA, and xbows aren't available. Their sacreds are also pretty crazy with an earth-9 bless, which synergizes nicely with your sacred mages as well for the reinvig. You can pull off an E9 imprisioned cyclops with 7 dominion and Order 3 prod 3, heat 3, growth 1, misfortune 2, magic 3 (or shuffle the magic and growth scales around if you want) This will make your sacreds nigh-invulnerable to most enemies, your mages get 4 points of reinvigoration and you have a pretty good SC chassis/earth forger for later. Play hard early game and hope to get enough of an advantage to live long enough to fix your horrid magic diversity, which is going to suck even if you take a rainbow pretender (just less so). Get a shaman recruitment center up as soon as possible and pump out a few N site searchers. Find an enchantress site and your game starts looking very promising.

The other option would be to rainbow out to help their magic diversity if you're in a big game that'll last a while, but this option is pretty slow to develop into any sort of real options. If you go this route make sure to take decent levels of death and astral, I'd say to take take blood too and focus on getting the blood economy going so you can summon up a few devils ASAP to give you a counter to the fire-immune thugs/SCs that will inevitably show up. I'd say to work on blood even without a high-blood pretender, since it's the easiest path to empower, and you need as much diversity as you can get. Getting a B1 anointed or an F1 Warlock will make it pretty easy to path up for Arch Devil summons, and they're pretty sweet.

And second sun sucks, don't cast it, especially since post-fire storm evocation isn't worthwhile. Pillar is janky, especially since any large single targets are going to have fire immunity at that point anyhow...Flame storm and Fires from the Sky can be useful, but aren't worth slogging through level 8 and 9 research for until much later on.

[earcaraxe]

Originally Posted by Sandman

A prophet Slayer can reanimate undead.

really? why? nor demon nor undead.

[ologm]

I don't really bother with the troops with shields. Abysian troops have enough protection that arrows are not going to matter much, so I'd much rather have less encumbrance and higher damage than shields.

Misbreds are not demons even though they require undead leadership, which is rather annoying. As the only good early game way to lead them is with a rod of the leper king. They do make a good raiding force or archer killers with their heat aura.

Your burning ones are great, try to recruit a lot.

The charizards can be usefull if you are dealing with ethereal troops, else I wouldn't bother with them.

I would really try to expand in the early game alchemysing gems for troops and mercenaries.

Because your troops are so slow I try to rely on castles and province defense to stop raiding.

I spend the first few turns churning out slayers. Three slayers can take out a indy province a turn and make for a nasty surprise for enemy players.

Try to press your early game advantage. Most nations won't be capable of dealing with your troops backed up by some mages with fireballs.

Start bloodhunting early, you can only build blood hunters from your capital so you'll build up blood slow.

Trade for some earth boots to cast gnome lore.

You have a rather nice blood 4 hero so you might consider luck 3 which will also help with gold and magic diversity.

EA Abysia is really one dimensional. Try to diversify. Find indy mages, hire indy mercenary mages, empower if you need to.

Try to avoid researching thematurgy 3 as you get rage and all your mages will go crazy casting rage at a 26 mr non-fire immune lone sc while incenerate is also available.

Blind in alteration is one of your few ways for your fire mages of dealing with fire immune sc's.