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.

[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.)

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
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?

The only time I have had a Lord of Night get killed was when, on a lark, I snuck him into the abyssian capital and started assassinating commanders there. I was doing well until I ran across a warlock packing blood slaves and he spammed imps at me till I died (negative dominion had me at 18 hit points lol, like I said...it was just to see how he would do). Even in that case the fiends didn't run and I think I would be hard pressed to purposefully try and get them to run before they either win or flat out die due to their rock solid morale. If I come across an instance where the fiends run I'll let you know what happens to the pretender.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
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.

The scale choices are definitely controversial. I chose heat 3 to see just how bad an economic bind it would put me in and if it could be deal with by gold sites, luck scale occurrences due to Turmoil overdrive, and alchemy from fire gem sites.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
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.

Yes, I can see your point. My idea with the pretender choice was to have him in a province by turn 3 and assassinating all the commanders on average by turn 6 and conquering the province on that same turn. I guess this would be considered slow but I also am building a second army with fiends at the same time I am popping taxes to 200% while using the starting army to kill unrest creating burst income until my total population reaches around 25k at which time I drop tax down to 100%. Growth 3 usually brings it back to original numbers by about turn 35 or so. Around this time I have aquired around the amount of fiends to start taking other provinces I am not currently assassinating in with the Lord of the Night. You are right about the air and death being repeated on the excellent national heroes but they tend to be very irregular to rely on comming and I want to build an air/death gem income asap. My current game in single player is in turn 42 without any sign of a national hero but my pretender did uncover a mirror-wall palace that nets 3 air gems and allows recruitment of a 2 astral, 2 air, and 1 random mage for a good price of 180 and a Bowl of the Lost that allows a death mage to enter to summon Banes as regular troops. I think though that perhaps I could drop off all that blood and put up some fire instead for fire gem searches to help out the economy. I'll look into it.

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

Yes, I choose Turmoil 3 on purpose. Number one, just to see HOW bad it would affect things and if this could not only be overcome but overcome well. Number two, to see how using such as an accelerator combined with luck 3 would off-set the poor initial economy. In the three single player games I have tried this I have met with more success than failure from an economic point of view. For instance, on one game I had labs burn down 3 times but on like the 4th turn I had my gold income permanently increased in my home province by 40 gold. The gains tend to offset not only the bad scales but even, eventually, the bad events. These are from a limited amount of single player games so you have to take it all with a grain of salt. I have just found that with nations that you don't care to mess with the national troops very much a maxed misfortune scale crossed with max luck has yet to be very much of a problem and in fact is very fun. Again, this is single player games not multi-player and very experimental playstyle.

Originally posted by Norfleet:
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.

Yeah everything you said is more than likely true. Having only played single player I would have to say that my choices are definitely not made with multi-player games in mind. I just figured him to be the best assassin in the game out of the box and tried to optimize that within the overall theme of Mictlan which is the nation I started playing first when I got this game and remains my favorite.

Thanks for your observations.

Edited to exchange the word misfortune with Turmoil as it would cause complete confusion if left that way.

[ June 21, 2004, 20:33: Message edited by: Anglachel ]

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by JDScherrey:
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?!?

Well, the assassin is perfectly viable. It's just a little slower. Certain concerns are no longer of importance if you assassinate everyone, as you don't need a full battle tweak to slaughter single people with a few guards.

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?

Well, concerns of battle performance are the same as always: You want to stack as many defensive buffs as you can on your pretender as possible.

However, battle optimization is expensive, and will definitely not be done well with your present set of scales: You're going to have to take a hit. What you probably want: Earth 2(Ironskin, Earthpower+Invuln), Water 2(Quickness+BoW), Air 4(Mirror/Mist - Mirror gets better results with more air), and Death 3(Soul Vortex).

Wedge what you can into this, then spend the dangling points as you will on dominion and scales: I'd suggest a dominion of no less than 6, and you may have to just accept a hit from Luck to Misfortune-2 and not expect to see your national heroes - your pretender fills in the magic holes tolerably anyway.

The Lord of the Night is a particularly sweet chassis by midgame, particularly if you slap him a Wraith/Hell Sword or Thorn. His fatigue rating is quite good also, and you'll get some better starting dominion out of him. The assassination is fun, too. Whack somebody's pretender in a duel. Laugh at him.

However, in your original build, your LotN gave you some small low-level 4-blesses. You may still want to keep that, which is why I didn't immediately rip that apart, but merely pointed out that it wasn't really battle-tweaked....and doing this can be very expensive, so you may not want to. Although what you did looks expensive, too. Plus you took Turmoil. Yeck.

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
However, in your original build, your LotN gave you some small low-level 4-blesses. You may still want to keep that, which is why I didn't immediately rip that apart, but merely pointed out that it wasn't really battle-tweaked....and doing this can be very expensive, so you may not want to. Although what you did looks expensive, too. Plus you took Turmoil. Yeck.

Hrrmmm, are you addressing me or JDSCherrey? He isn't the one that originally put up the pretender chassis and weird scales earlier, I did. Nor did I ask what you would do to tweak it, JDS did. Seems like you have us two confused.

[ June 21, 2004, 20:27: Message edited by: Anglachel ]

[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]

Maybe I did not state my original question well, or maybe I am just slow due to eating lead paint, but can you guys tell me what you would pick and why for the following:
1)Pretender-I choose Fountain of Blood due to the Blood Hunt Bonus and 0 cost-What would you choose and why?
2)Scales: I choose Heat1,Anglachel has a good point with heat2, more points with little penalty-just the type of tip I need! But what of the other scales-please state reasons for choosing your settings.
Fortress:I can also see the advantage in choosing watchtower-Thanks.

MagicPaths:My choices are something like Blood4 or 5, 2 in Water,Astral,Fire,Nature.
This gives me a broad range of spells in all areas that I get starting gems in.

Any more suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks In Advance.
Glock