EA Oceania PSA: How to not lose on turn 1.

[Slobby]

I imagine/assume you guys are discussing EA Oceania with CBM 1.6 in mind.

Imo EA Oceania is one of those nations crippled by the unique gem gens, since they just cry out for clam and fetish factories...I was thinking of doing a guide for them (vanilla) called fire and ice, but I'm lazy.

The general idea is how to get onto dry land, and imo for EA O it's all about evocation spells...falling frost spam + falling fires spam + ice strike spam (late game replace with niefel flames + flamestorm). Your troops aren't that great and tricky to mass (the high prot ones anyways)/buff, you've got to kill your enemy before they get a chance to kill you. With 3 different damage dealing spells...well chances are your opponent will have to work pretty hard (and might not be able) to adequately protect against all 3.

The pretender chassis I was playing around with was a sleeping arch mage,
O3P3C1
F3W2E3S5D2 dom4

-not too concerned with dom4 since you'll have a crazy amount of money to buy forts and temples (spam them hard). If I recall I came to the conclusion that the best way to maximize the production scales was to have a fortress in every water province I had (long term goal) seeing how the administration for the UW forts is so sucky.
-F3W2 so I can boost up to staff of elements
-E3 for hammers
-S5 to boost up to S9 and then drop my pretender around (with amulet of fish+ritual of returning) for master enslave. Or just drop him around for fire storm, etc.
-D2 combined with F to get skulls of fire, combined with W to get the kokythiad, also to find those D sites under the seas so I can get leviathans, and the rest of the good D stuff
-Also when looking for thugs, I went sea king court and then GOR'd the sea trolls, and just left the sea king to generate W gems to pay back the summon (slow payback I know )

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

The thing is, you need the N bless and get the D for free with the the pretender chassis, so it's not as expensive as you think. Why is the N bless so crucial? In my testing, the KotD's expansion parties sometimes ran into horrible casualies because of poison. You can't avoid those few lucky 1-3 point damage hits form coral weapons. If you don't have N bless, a few of those lucky hits will kill them. A high N will also allow access to some nifty globals if the opportunity presents iself.


How did you avoid losses of expansions squads due to coral weapon hits? Alhought this is somewhat luck based I admit. If you just get shamblers as independents, you don't need to wory about this.

With any S4 god, you can boost an N2 to N5, which is all you need for globals. Sure, with N on your god, you will have access earlier because you don't need to make a RoW and RoS.

Indy breakdown from my game (indies at 5):
Mermen x 2
Shambler x 2 (One of these I took w/o any KotD)
Abmer Clan x 1
Ichtyid x 2
Triton Trooper x 3
Triton x 5
Trolls/Kraken x 1

My initial army usually accompanied my KotD. My 2nd and 3rd KotD groups were supplemented with indy tritons. The triton/soldier groups are right at the back on Hold-attack. Just in front of them are the KotD on Hold-attack. This lets you fight the faster indies in the indy army first, then the next bunch when they catch up. The KotD will engage first and take the majority of attacks, then your Tritons catch up and do a ton of damage, without facing many attacks before the indies rout.

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

Eh. I just like to cover my bases. I'd hate to lose because I couldn't beat the 25%(for mermages)/33% (Kings) for E random in say ~10 turns. Also note that you won't be building a mage out of your cap each turn, since you need Bishop Fishes too. So it's more like 6 chances at geting that E random before it's sort of too late. IMHO, you need to move fast with Oceania. If start diversifying on turn 40, it's just too late.

Agreed. I was lucky and got E income out of a W site. I've only got 3 Bishops, and 2 were recruited from my 2nd fort (a free one).

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

If you hit nice indy mages (like Lizard Shaman), yeah, build a fort. I don't see much point in recruiting 1N shamans.

With an M1 scale, 110 gold (sacred) for 4.4RP is a good enough deal for me. N1 is not totally useless in battle.

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

Lance is just for one hit. Brand gives them much better def and damage output for just 3 water gems. IMHO it's very smalll investment for big gain.

You're probably right here. Plus with C3 scales you might need to avoid the fatigue. I'll have to try it out and see how they do.

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

Kings are cap only and don't ge access to teleport spells. Combine this with the low movement in UW provs and you rarely have them in the places you need them to be. If you have a good tactical mind, you can start moving them 3 turns before the action starts, but that's not something that everyone has. It would be good to spread them around to each of your forts, but that costs research turns.

Yeah, and you can't Cloud Trapeze out of the water anyway. I'd better start moving some into position now!

[thejeff]

Don't forget that some of those indy shamans have useful randoms.
Wolf has 10% D and Deer has 10% A. 10% doesn't sound like much, but if you're building a lab and temple you'll be making quite a few anyway. The others are less useful since they've got 10% chance of 4 randoms, so you're less likely to get the one you need.

If you don't have D on nationals, 1D is useful for site searching and forging even if you've put it on your pretender. AN is less useful for Oceania, since you'll have it already, but for many nations it's nice access to Rainbow armor.

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by vfb

My initial army usually accompanied my KotD. My 2nd and 3rd KotD groups were supplemented with indy tritons. The triton/soldier groups are right at the back on Hold-attack. Just in front of them are the KotD on Hold-attack. This lets you fight the faster indies in the indy army first, then the next bunch when they catch up. The KotD will engage first and take the majority of attacks, then your Tritons catch up and do a ton of damage, without facing many attacks before the indies rout.

Hmm. Intresting. I often send out the starting army alone (since it's very very good for a starting army) and build up my KotD force so that I can have 6 KotD's in the expansion party I send out in the third turn.

Clever stuff on using the indy tritons too, I'lll have to try that sometime.

So I'll probably have to state that the N bless can be dropped, but I just like he regen for Kings and Princes (Llamia Queens are also very good).

Originally Posted by vfb

Agreed. I was lucky and got E income out of a W site. I've only got 3 Bishops, and 2 were recruited from my 2nd fort (a free one).

So we agree that awake E god is the way to go?

Originally Posted by vfb

With an M1 scale, 110 gold (sacred) for 4.4RP is a good enough deal for me. N1 is not totally useless in battle.

Fair enough.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

So we agree that awake E god is the way to go?

Exactly! Before you take a dormant god, you've got to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well, do you?

More seriously, I have a lot more fun if I can take a few risks with my build, so I can buy luck-3 scales. I enjoy a Misfortune-scale game every now and then, but lucky events really turn my crank. It's just a personal preference.

[Slobby]

Now I recall something wrong with the arch mage build I presented earlier, and that's that it takes too long to materialize, ie. for it to awaken and get things going!

Changing it slightly to an awake arch mage, F2W1E3S4D2 O3P2C3Ma1 dom4 (you can also take misfortune 1 and then go W2 dom5, or misfortune 2 to get dom6 + more magic or go to Ma3).

In year one I grabbed 19 UW provinces, and built two forts (I didn't find any), my expansion parties (3) at the end of year 1 consisted in total of 15 KothD, 26 O. Soldiers, 25 O. Tritons.

For expanding I put the O. Soldiers (~10) in the middle and dropped them back slightly H&A closest. The commander way back holdx5 stay behind troops, the O. tritons (~10-15) up a bit and at the very back H&A closest, and the KotD (~5) down a bit and at the very back H&A closest.

At the end of the first year my starting army + 4 KotD was still kicking and never got reinforcements.

Of course it was on an open map without any competition in the water, but even if there was water competition you can easily switch to making turtle/wave warriors and start pushing on land once the water territories are taken. Or for that matter you could attack the other UW player.

In terms of research I got to con4 and had a rp/turn of 104.

[KissBlade]

dom 4 is very dangerous for a water nation since dom spread from land to coast happens very often.

[Slobby]

Originally Posted by KissBlade

dom 4 is very dangerous for a water nation since dom spread from land to coast happens very often.

True, but then again, when I play EA O I'm looking at making many forts and in the many forts go temples, and then I have bishop fish to preach...