MA Argatha - go punch a mountain

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by Jazzepi

I guess great minds think alike?

If you're going to turn your forgelord into something other than just a blood stone ***** (BSB), I would consider dropping the silliness of all those high level paths. Give him S3, F1, E2, B3. Forge boots, a hammer,a crystal coin, a starshine skullcap, then you can push out the next two levels of rings from there. Personally, I don't know where you're going to get all this astral from. With no natural mages, you better hope you find some lizard shamans. Not that you can afford to dump a temple + lab into an empty province with such bad scales

To me, Argatha is a lot like Ulm, but with national mages who don't happen to have a forge bonus. I wouldn't even bother trying to get secondary bloodstone mages up, I would focus exclusively on making the forge lord your sole source of bloodstone forging.

But I think I'll get in on a CBM MA game with Argatha, and see how I do.

Jazzepi

Again, I don't think you should underestimate the benefit of the minor blessings to your holy statues. +2 attack means that awesome damage gets delivered *much* more often. +1 MR helps against the biggest threats you'll have to face through most of the game. +2 strength really adds a significant amount against ultra-heavy opposition, and the 2 reinvig not only helps your mages (significantly) it makes quite a difference in fielding your non-cold immune troops under grip of winter, etc. Those points you're paying for the blessing, not for the forging.

[Baalz]

Originally Posted by archaeolept

the thing is, most of these tactics seem to demand a fair amount of research, and/or gem income for items. however, MA Agartha's problems are not that the mid-game is too difficult for them, but to survive and prosper in the early game; especially w/ having a giant target painted over top.

I'm not sure how having prod 0 for their esteemed mm 1 hvy inf is going to be sufficient to protect them...

I don't know, I think it's easy to mistake a wealth of options for a large amount of requirements. With just moderate ench you're fielding strong enough units to carry you through the early game with no real support. This carries you through the construction phase of your research where you're not really gaining immediately useful stuff, then by the time you're getting into the midgame where you need something more than unsupported statues you start dropping weapons of sharpness & mechanical men, strength of giants was already picked up on the way to getting the sacred statues. At this point your bloodstones are starting to pile up and you can decide what you expect to face in the near future and either go down evocation or alteration, either path giving you a very strong hand without the immediate support of the other. The way I see it, you've got a lot of great stuff but you don't desperately need it all up front...it's just a steady building of your power curve.

I also don't think that you really need to worry too much about fighting a war with your infantry. How early are you realistically going to have to fight in earnest? Maybe if you get heavily rushed you'll loose a couple provinces stalling to get to ench-4, but I can't imagine you'd have to defend your capital before you have had a chance to spend a turn or two dumping the gems you've been site searching for into 20+ sacred statues which will stop almost any rush dead. No doubt, as I mentioned the very early game is by far MA Argatha's weakest time and an aggressive rush is almost certainly a bad thing, but I think there are much softer targets I'd be considering rushing if I was the rusher.

[Dragar]

I think the strategy is fairly sound in terms of building a solid army of golems with earth support, but I'm concerned that the gems and research needed for any diversity will be very difficult to achieve..

It is difficult to build up a decent fire or water income and extremely difficult to gather much astral. Mechanical men are very useful in giving some elemental resistance but they are way down the research tree.

What does agartha do in the mid game against elemental evocations? Especially when on the attack without your dominion giving extra HP, I can imagine sitting in high dominion they might survive, but dom 7 will mean very little if any push past your boundaries, and you are definitely a target for dominion push, without the gold to fight back effectively. An enemy doesn't have to domkill you, just drop it enough for the golems to be weakened, then hit with area effect evocs.

How can it counter flying/stealth raiders?

It really does seem to be a one-trick pony without the path diversity to really change that. Yes having the forge lord makes things a lot cheaper, but when you start talking about equipping a heap of mages.. and to get an earth reader forging bloodstones how much blood do you have to gather using either your pretender or scouts?

I do like the destruction/iron bane with blade storm combo, that is very viable, as is earthquake. Magma eruptions yes. Anything requiring heavy fire/water/astral I don't think is highly feasible until very late game, if you survive that long.

[Baalz]

Nah, I think you're thinking about the dominion bonus the wrong way. A bonus is exactly what it is, your units are straight up good without it and only get better from there. Mechanical men are *merely* as good as what other people can summon when out of your dominion for a length of time - hardly worthless. They certainly don't stop being useful. Your "do not heal" constructs such as your national summons carry that hitpoint bonus until they take the damage, so unless your opponent is piling their own bodies up to wear you down you're really only counting "real" battles, not turns out of dominion. I also think it's a mistake to confuse not being immune with being vulnerable to elemental evocations. Yeah, as I mention lighting is a problem early on as it is with any small concentrated group of units - heck, that's exactly what lighting is best at. Outside of that though....how many falling frosts is it going to take to drop the 22 protection 50 hitpoints guys? How exactly is the fact that they can be brought down by powerful enemy mages with access to the right spells any different than every other unit in the game? I also think you overestimate the hurdle you're facing here. If, as I suggest, you focus tightly on construction research after a brief time in ench, how long is it until you get to constr-7? Varies of course, but outside of rough luck should be by midgame when you're facing any real concentration of enemy evocations. I also don't think its that difficult at all (with this setup) to get the fire and water mages. You're site searching early with 1f 1w h1 mages, so you'll almost certainly line up a couple sites (holy -> astral income) while you're playing with luck-3 in a positive magic scale so gem income events are extremely common. With that in mind, how high is the bar to clear 5f (flame helm), 2S + 2E (crystal shield) for a total of 9 gems to get to F4 with phoenix power? You scarcely need to outfit all your mages like this, just outfitting a couple per year from your pretender will give you all the big fire you want. Water is a bit more expensive, but hardly prohibitive. For one, with your luck 3 scales it's quite likely you'll get a couple of the Great Olm national heroes who will commonly net you W3-4 with no further effort, and also likely you'll net some of those big water gem income events. Outside of that, you just B-lined to const-6, so water braclets are a no branier, a ring of wizardry for 12 pearls is a deal even if you have to alchemize 24 other gems for it, and with another crystal shield you're up to W4 for under 20 gems (assuming you didn't have to alchemize). Again, that's hardly a high bar when you're talking about scraping those gems together over half a year.

True, you're not going to have amazing fire, water or astral incomes, but neither do you have amazing output requirements. Everything you're doing is uber efficient and you scarcely need tons of big fire/water mages, just one for each major army is plenty.

[Trumanator]

Actually your searching for H3, at least initially, since you're overlapping with an Ancient Oracle. Also, I posted in the other thread, but Cave forts/cities have autocast Darkness when they're stormed, so that Agarthan LI can be pretty vicious in defending them, not to mention your statues, Umbrals, or whatever else you have in there.

[Sombre]

Do cave forts actually do that now? I thought it was still broken.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by Baalz

Again, I don't think you should underestimate the benefit of the minor blessings to your holy statues. +2 attack means that awesome damage gets delivered *much* more often. +1 MR helps against the biggest threats you'll have to face through most of the game. +2 strength really adds a significant amount against ultra-heavy opposition, and the 2 reinvig not only helps your mages (significantly) it makes quite a difference in fielding your non-cold immune troops under grip of winter, etc. Those points you're paying for the blessing, not for the forging.

I just don't think it's necessary. It feels too narrow to me. I'd rather have more troops on the field, then less troops that are slightly better. Also, if all your golem crafters have W1, there's no reason to worry about the 2 reinvig off of the bless when you can simply script them to cast cold resistance, and you can forge 3 gem (with hammer) rings of cold resistance for the few oracles you might want to field in a battle. IMO, the statues aren't going to be fatigued a significant amount to even make it worth worrying about. Obvious 0 fatigue is better than 10 fatigue, but the difference isn't by much. The +2 reinvig bless is the only one I would really consider worth while out of all of them since it makes it easier for your mages to spam spells when combined with summon earth power.

To make my point I compared the magic paths you posted above to the ones that I did. To pay for the bless you're advocating it costs 152 more points then the build I pointed out, which is 3.8 ticks on the scale chart (I'm sure you can work 4 ticks out of it total by fiddling with dominion).

At the end of the day I'd rather have better scales, then a minor bless.

Jazzepi

[Agema]

Unless the indies you're looking for are usually plentiful N1, I don't think any major tactic which requires you finding indies (especially without the appropriate path to start with) is really optimal. That said, a trickle of gems will be enough to get forging going with the costs so low.

Agartha has got expensive secondary options accessing astral magic via death summons (Spectres often seem to crop up with S random) or empowerment (alchemising plentiful E gems if necessary) if indies are unavailable.

[Fantomen]

Your initial expansion is going to be using your human infantry, and I’ll tell you right now it’s gonna be slow – probably the slowest in the game if everyone’s at the same skill level. This is the weakest part of Agartha’s game and I didn’t help it by gearing my design choices towards mid/late game power. Still, in sufficient numbers your infantry isn’t *that* bad, and without having sloth scales you can build up critical mass. It works a lot better if you resign yourself to a slow initial expansion and don’t try to send out expansion parties with less than critical mass. Those Agarthan light infantry actually do a pretty decent job against indies so long as they outnumber them.

I agree mostly, but here are some more tricks to make it less painful early on.

Under CBM Legions of steel is construction 1. If you go for that right away and try to send an oracle with some of your expansion parties you can cut your losses a great deal. Divine blessing also gives all your troops +2 morale. You also have strength of giants coming up next to add into the mix before you´re done expanding

Your medium and heavy infantry has kite shields with parry 6 (compared to 4 for LI) Just buying a few of them as arrow catchers isn´t a bad use for leftover resources. They are also slow, your light infantry will run past them into melee and keep them alive longer.

Your sacreds might not be that good but they are dirt cheap(for 40hp sacreds), just 40 gold. They average 15 prot with legions of steel and hit for 27 damage with bless+strength of giants. Mixed with size 2 light infantry they can add some punch and meat against tougher indies. Mixed with Attentive statues they can expand under water.

If you´re attacked really early don´t forget Armor of achilles spammable by your earth readers behind a few attentive statues. Add in some indie archers and you can deal with many elites. There are other low level spells worth looking at as well. Dessication, earth meld, slime, geyser...

Massed archers behind statues and destruction spam is a great and cheap option as well.

Your pretender is capable of the following trick in certain situations: Teleport on top of something, place in the rear, cast Horror mark(or astral geyser)/call horror/call horror/returning. Requires only blood 1, thau 3, 3 slaves and 5 pearls. Only do it if you are out of options and sure what you´re fighting, there are many counters. Still a useful surprise. Can also be used to pick of that odd leftover indie out of range of your troops (take it with a scout).

When you can´t afford oracles, which is quite often, and have some other forts to buy golem crafters, why not turn your capital into a battlefield thug factory? Ancient lords are just 60 gold for 44hp and full slots. Just a golden shield and a frost brand and he´s ready to join the statue front lines. With hammers thats just 9 gems, and you should have lots of hammers. The can also be adapted easily to your enemy. What about 10 of these with fire plates and bells of cleansing sprinkled along your front line against abysia for example?

I wish there was a way to add a n4 bless into this build, that would give us:
*Stronger nature access (like gift of health stacking with dombonus for statues)
*Old diseased mages would heal in battle or use shrouds.
*Dirt cheap nature items.
*Ancient lords more thuggable, less afflictions on oracles and Ancient ones a lot more worthwhile(especially under water against all those poisoned spears)

I´d Consider dom6 turmoil3 cold3 growth2 luck3 magic1 and f4 e4 s2 n4 b4.

[Aezeal]

Sounds nice but I'm wondering if a good bless wouldn't be better. I don't have a proposition yet though..