EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads

[Baalz]

[This guide is written using CBM]

EA Atlantis at first blush feels like a bit of a lumbering beast. Pretty impressive troops for stomping on indies and simple opposition….but almost no sorcery (N/S/D/B). No air magic, so no cloud trapeze. Mediocre to abysmal MR. Underwater movement is always limited to 1, so atrocious maneuverability. They have an impressive recruitable SC chasis in the Basalt King…but the lack of maneuverability means it’ll often take over a year to move the poor expensive guys from your capital to where they’ll do any good. Heaven forbid you get attacked on your other flank! I think the typical way this is played is to lean on the Basalt Kings and Living Pillars, but I think this is too rigid and unmaneuverable. Let’s see how, with a bit of planning, we can stick some wings on this sea turtle and only trot out Basalt King SCs occasionally rather than counting on them to carry every important fight. I think there’s a lot of potential here to unlock if you focus on force multipliers for your very affordable troops.

The first thing that strikes me when looking at the troop lineup for EA Atlantis is that they really, really want some strong death magic support. Having cheap, hard hitting troops with 100% darkvision makes dropping darkness about as close to a “win” button as you can get if your opponent doesn’t also have darkvision. With those same troops having 50% cold resistance they make very strong candidates to mix with cold radiating undead – particularly as it’s trivial for you to drop winter ward to bring them up to 100%. Undead are largely amphibious so they fit right in to the roster, often being mindless and with a decent MR thus plugging another gap Atlantis will otherwise struggle with. Let’s channel the spirit of LA Atlantis and see if we can turn EA Atlantis into a death powerhouse.

Obviously this is where your pretender comes in. Your troops are pretty darned good, as are your mages if we can overcome their weaknesses so I like leveraging them with some real nice scales so we can get a bunch of them. Let’s look at something like an awake master lich. 4W 4S 4D 4N, Order-3, Sloth-2, Cold-3, Luck-3, Drain-2. The cold scale doesn’t impact underwater income, so these scales will give you a pretty excellent income. Your troops are nice and resource light so the sloth doesn’t really sting, and your mages are big enough that the drain impact to your research is manageable.

With that tasty income you should have quite the blistering initial expansion. Use mixed groups of deep ones and atlantean spear men. You’ll take a few losses, but these guys are so cheap and effective when you have critical mass that you’ll be fielding an effective expansion party every turn right from the start. This is something you’ll be leveraging the whole game – you’ve got a very nice punch in your dual attack troops for very few resources. They’ll have a high attrition rate, but you can crank out pretty much as many as you want at a moment’s notice. Your pretender heads right out immediately site searching, so with a little luck you’ll land a kelp fortress or two fairly early which can bring your initial expansion up to the speed of the very fastest nations while the money you save from not paying for your second and third castle largely mitigates your fair attrition rate. Don’t be afraid to gobble up some land provinces as well, you’ve got some fairly archer resistant guys in your lineup to use as archer screens while your naked guys fall on them.

Your pretender out site searching is going to (obviously) build up a bit of D/S/W/N income as well as spreading that fabulous dominion around. A fast expansion, above average dominion income and a free fort or two will let you crank out mages faster than average which will keep your early research competitive despite the drain. Let’s consider what magic support we’ll want for our early fighting.

The first thing that you’re probably worried about is being in the drink with R’yleh while sporting a stylish 8 MR. Seems like you’d be pretty helpless when the hungry Aboleths show up looking to mind blast you, right? Well, fortunately some well played lightning rods (a strategy, not the item) will have you tearing right through those stinky fish beasts. Much to the frustration of the poor R’yleh player, those mind blasters are going to overwhelmingly target the monsters with the most hitpoints. So what makes a good lighting rod? Ideally it is something with a lot of hitpoints. Something with a decent MR. Something cheap. Something that regenerates would be nice. I’m thinking…something blue.

Sea trolls are so effective at negating mind blasters it almost seems unfair. They’ve got 52 hps, regen 6 per turn, have a 14 MR (15 in your drain dominion) and are trivially easy to research, summon and afford before your very first fighting. Just bringing 5 or so of these trolls (1 W gem apiece) along with all your low MR deep ones will keep 40+ giboleths (1600 gold) occupied easily long enough for you to swim over and rip their tentacles off with the rest of your troops. Sure, your trolls will be good and paralyzed, but that won’t stop them from being continually targeted, and they take an incredible amount of mind blasts to kill. You can supplement this with your recruitable lighting rods as well, your blessing turns all your basalt kings, queens, and mothers of the deep into good MR, regenerating, high hitpoint lightning rods.

That early conjuration research is also very useful if you find yourself matched up early fighting with Oceana. Sea serpents and kraken make very effective knight of the deep gobblers with a bit of low level alteration support (Body ethereal, luck, quickness) with school of sharks soaking up lance strikes, and numbness & wolven winter making it very hard for smallish groups of knights to chew through the hoards of cheap deep ones your scales let you crank out - bolstered with well buffed monsters. This is all very effective early magic you’ll pick up for a mere level 4 in two different paths. Conjuration and alteration remain your main goto paths for much of the game, there’s a lot of synergy there. As your research continues you’ll be adding the likes of monster fish and asp turtles along with iron warriors and shark attack and some serious nastiness like iron bane and darkness…talk about synergy with your deep ones! Played cleverly you’re quite a beast underwater and competitive with either the other underwater nations from light research to heavy.

Assuming you’re not being hard pressed in early fighting though, that extra water income your pretender has been dredging up is going to quickly be channeled into voice of tiamats, which will give you (along with any other water nations) a serious gem income advantage. With any decent sized underwater empire you should fairly rapidly build up a 15+ W income, which brings us to the first leg of your undead domination. With 15 gems per turn you can summon a Kokythiad every other turn – which is half as much as anybody can recruit cap only mages. You can build up a pretty good size group of them before you know it, and those bad boys (er…girls) can summon themselves once you get a bit of construction research done so your pretender just has to prime the pump.

Another thing they can do for you is to start hitting the dark knowledge using the gems your pretender has scraped up. By the time you’ve got 3-4 of these ladies plus your pretender doing the site searching you’ll have your entire empire searched before you know it, leaving you with a solid death income…hopefully not that long after you’re hitting construction-4. A couple of hammer forged skull mentors later you’ve boosted yourself up to construction-6 and all that thus far unused fire income you’ve hoarded courtesy of voice of tiamat vomits out into an orgy of lightless lanterns. With the mentors and the lanterns spewing forth now, you’ll never notice that drain dominion. Probably you’ll lean more on the lanterns though, your death gems will have other tasty uses like skull staffs, death mages (mound fiends/liches) and of course dropping darkness all over the place. Depending on what you’re facing you should also consider banes, ghosts and other undead to round out your options.

But there is so very, very much more. Your pretender has also summoned a niad or two (they can also summon themselves, so pretender goes on to other stuff), who have used the nature gems he scraped up to hit the haurespex. You should be able to build up a healthy nature income, which will eventually be used to get fairy courts (did someone say flying deep ones under darkness and iron bane?), but for now your pretender can use them for the next leg of your death mastery – llamia queens.

Now, the llamia queens give you a couple nice things. First off they give you some more fairly strong death mages. Second, they get you modestly into the blood game. Modestly is fine, that’s all you need. A few of these ladies bloodhunting will get you a modest slave income, then a quick empowering or two later along with a short detour for your powerful research and you’re spitting out a vampire lord every few turns. Yeah! Yet Another Powerful Death mage! Bonus: a very maneuverable death mage who can tack on fun stuff like rush of strength to the darkness, mass flight and iron bane you’re dropping. Those deep ones sounding like a bargain yet with double attacks at 10 gold a pop? As a general rule of thumb a vamp lord blood hunting will roughly gather enough slaves to summon another vamp lord in 10 turns. If you don’t need them urgently on the front line it’s not that hard to build up a nice little handful of them before you know it.

You’ll have plenty of S1 mages for site searching. Also, underwater ancient temple magic sites are very common, so if you send a couple priests out searching you should have a very solid astral income without really too much to spend it on initially. I think this is a situation that it makes a lot of sense to dust off a seldom used guy – the ether lord.

I know, I know, he is stupid expensive. Most of the time you can’t get nearly enough use out of him to justify the price. Consider him in this context though. Here’s what he brings to the party:

Antimagic (!)
Gateway (!)
Teleport
Soul drain (very nice as the super reinvig lets one guy drop a lot of big spells for big fights)
Horrors (who in the heck expects that from Atlantis? Great way to start a war between two other players)
Vengeance of the Dead (niche, but when it’s the spell you want it’s awesome)
And even astral travel.

Also, he’s yet another good death mage who can drop darkness, but this one can teleport in to do it – which gives you an enormous amount of strategic flexibility. Your PD has partial darkvision – I’m thinking fun stuff like soul drain, antimagic, darkness, doom, will of the fates is not something your opponent is going to be real happy to see dropping out of the sky to support your PD.

The gateway alone makes it worthwhile to spring for one or two of these guys as it will let you route your troops from those water forts to where the fighting is without having to wait a year for them to get there (remember, your land forts can only recruit reef dwellers!). Also, subtract from the price you’re paying whatever you think the value of 15 ether warriors are – they tough little buggers that are far from worthless, particularly with the troop buffing strategies you’re using. That said, you’ll probably only want to pay that retail price once or twice because you will start having some very good uses for those pearls (more on that in a bit). You’ll want to be pretty conservative with the ether lord, they’re expensive to replace.

Now, the observant reader will note what we’ve done – we’ve converted water, death, nature, blood *and* astral all into mages strong enough to drop darkness (with boosters/power of the spheres). Do we really need that many death mages? Well…probably no. You don’t really want to dump virtually all your gem income indefinitely into death mages, but the point is you’ll have no problem dropping darkness anytime you want it without having to use the gems you really want to put to some other use.

Speaking of, you’ll want to push a considerable amount of your pearls into starshine caps and crystal coins. 25% of your mages of the deep will have S1, each one you bring up to S3 adds *enormously* to your strategic flexibility. Teleport in, drop power of the spheres (or save a turn with a crystal shield), use earth boots/water bracelets, earth power/phoenix power and the following is all dropping out of the sky wherever you want it (research permitting):
Iron bane
Quickening
Weapons of sharpness
Army of lead/gold
Winter ward/Fire fend
Grip of winter/Heat from hell
Antimagic
Will of the fates
Demon cleansing & Solar brilliance (consider who will be giving your darkvision troops trouble)
Niefel flames
Acid storm
Astral tempest
Living water/earth/fire

Just consider how that looks when you’ve got a dozen guys equipped to jump out of your lab at a moment’s notice. You can send them all to one battle to drop the majority of all those spells at once (!). You can spread them out to several simultaneous battles as just one or two of those spells will usually be a tide turner. Let your death mages lead your troops around dropping darkness with your ICBM astral mages sitting around in the lab waiting for somebody to try something to counter the darkness.

But wait! There’s more. Because, obviously you’re not enough of a badass yet. Lets say that despite all those force multipliers your enemies are still somehow managing to chew through your (now) totally awesome deep ones. Let’s leverage another vector I’ve already mentioned but want to drive home: your troops are easily 100% fire *and* cold immune. If Neifel giants are giving you grief, ignore their cold aura…and add heat aura to yourself to see how they like being surrounded as their fatigue skyrockets! Abyisia being a pain? Ignore their heat aura and throw some cold into the mix to let them remember how heavy that armor is. There’s lots of ways to do this, as already mentioned lots of undead has a chill aura. You can drop wolven winter, which on top of directly impacting their encumbrance turns your water elementals into cold radiating ice elementals. You can also very effectively thug out a couple mages of the deep who buff with breath of winter, or stick rhime haubriks on…well, you’ve got lots of good choices there. Turning up the heat is a little bit more difficult, but fire elementals buff very nicely with iron warriors and fire snakes are one of the better uses for fire gems late game. Combine this (of course) with heat from hell/grip of winter and the toughest of opponents will die alone in the dark, shivering and forsaking their pretender.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the above is not quite brutal enough for you. How do we make such pain truly gratuitous? I’m gonna go with….slave matrixes. With a little bit of effort you can drop firestorm on top of your fire immune troops with darkvision fighting under darkness, buff them with army of lead/will of the fates/weapons of sharpness/quickening to poke at the bad guys with magic weapons (basalt spears) while their armor all falls off and they’re passing out from the cold. Still not brutal enough? I suppose if you find an opponent who can live long enough through all that to make it worthwhile you could leverage those fairy queens and add mass regeneration/fog warriors/mass flight and then dump a big old helping of acid storm on top (no such thing as acid resistance, BTW). More you say? Fine…also remember your death mage(s) are powered by some nice cheap bodyguards and a soul vortex so after they put up the darkness they add life after death (yep, more darkvision’ed, cold immune guys to chop through) and are sniping with life drain/disintegrate (you did crank out rune smashers and void eyes, right?) at any SCs who thought they were tough/immune enough to hang. Those theoretical tough guys that are fire and cold immune and also have an absurd MR and are lifeless are being pummeled by petrify. I suppose you could also toss out some life for a lifes with your vamp lords…but good luck finding a target left.

But wait! There’s more! Ok, ok, I’m gonna stop pointing out all the ways you can dominate the big battles, lets consider what further flexibility we can weave into our strategy. Earth attacks and Manifestations should be steadily falling out of the sky along with penetration boosted leprosy. Arouse hunger and imprint souls bolster your horrors and ghost riders enough that the unprepared opponent bleeds . You’re steadily cranking out leviathans, wights, ghosts, pale riders, mechanical men, vitriols, niad warriors, llamias, vine ogres and whatever else seems appropriately immune to whatever your opponent was trying to do to take advantage of your MR disadvantage.

Given your research goals and income you’ve got a decent shot at getting the Well of Misery and Mother Oak up…to me that smells like Tartarian soup! Your pretender can forge the chalice if you get the chance, or gift of health is also an option. You should also consider leveraging that strong D income into putting up Utterdark or Burden of Time – oh the fun we can have! Maelstorm is another very nice one for you if you see an open slot by the time you can cast it.

A couple final thoughts.

For general use I love the deep ones, but don’t neglect the rest of your roster as appropriate. Warriors of the deep are fairly archer resistant and share most of the advantages of the deep ones. Reef dwellers have a poison weapon and armor and are cheap enough to be great tossing in front of your lines to soften up the opposition (yep, add poison immunity to the list of stuff your opponents need to scramble to come up with).