LA Marignon - The time of the month for sailing

[Baalz]

Seems like LA Marignon is perceived as a middle of the road nation, not too weak but without some of the flashiness of the top tier nations. I think this is a classic case of a lot of the subtlety being overlooked for the obvious straightforward power (which will only take you so far). Played right LA Marignon should absolutely be a terror and a threat to everyone. It seems they get pigeon holed into a blood/fire bucket but they’ve got so much more.

First off, I just have to say how much I’ve fallen in love with units with sailing. It’s amazing how often it comes into play, far more than you might think. Obviously there are going to be some fights with no water anywhere around, but I find almost without fail that every game sailing contributes significantly to at least one won war per game when I have access to it. Being able to raid in a wide range, cut off enemies retreat and quickly bring up reinforcements – this is an amazingly versatile ability that many people overlook. If you happen to be near water when you start, it’s absolutely worthwhile to consider foregoing a couple mages and recruiting admirals to make sure you can keep your initial expansion optimal.

CBM drops the Royal Guards (your cavalry) down to 30 gold/30 res, which I think puts them in the optimal spot for your mainline troops. In fact, they’re a good bargain at this price as they end up with a 19 defense on top of a 14 protection making them great indy clearers. The great thing about going with Royal Guards is you don’t need a large number of them in each squad, so you can utilize those 10 leadership guys you’ve got – the royal navigator in particular is a great way to send out a sailing party without losing a turn recruiting a mage. Your infantry is pretty decent for the price, they probably won’t win many battles against serious opposition but they’re pretty respectable at blocking while your mages do the heavy lifting. Massed up crossbows, of course, have their niche and the obvious wind guide/flaming arrows combo works just as well as you’d expect.

The royal navigator in particular is a mage that I think gets overlooked way too much. Geotic masters are fabulous mages, but players who don’t also leverage the navigators are leaving half their ammo off the battlefield. Geotic masters come into their own as the game goes on, but the navigators are going to give you some serious teeth in your early fighting. What do the royal navigators bring to the table? They’re very mobile cheap-ish communion mages. Sailing, obviously is huge when you can leverage it, but also notice that 33% of them can cloud trapeze, and another 33% can teleport with a cap. Finally, one of the better uses for all those A2 mages is to crank out a steady flow of winged boots, you want to always keep several in your lab so you can move rapidly. Now, there are some obvious uses for this like dropping in some thunderstrike or soul slay communions, but consider how this plays out with the other tools in your arsenal.

Just figure that for any fight you care about you can have 4 fairly expendable communion slaves. All your geotic masters can join the commion via a sabbath and making use of the spell reinvigoration those 4 communion slaves can be ridden pretty hard without too high a mortality rate – you can even double dip as a reverse communion with the slaves (buffed by power of the spheres) dropping thunderstrike while the masters drop even nastier stuff reinvigging the slaves as often as is appropriate. So, with a little bit of effort you’re mixing thunderstrikes and falling fires with freezing mist and fire cloud supported by a nice mix of paralyzes all with very modest research, and leveraging reinvigoration to ignore the usual limits on how many communion masters you should have.

Those small communions also make you effectively immune to all but the toughest undead and demons. You’re going to want to empower a geotic master with an earth pick into astral so you can crank out a few crystal matrixes. This is very useful in letting your communion masters drop the important spells round one without having to cast communion/Sabbath master, but it also lets you stick your high inquisitors into the communions. With just 4 slaves (who are hopefully casting solar rays or lightning bolt or frozen heart to catch the tougher guys) that bad boy is an H5 priest. Stick an eye of the void on him (wind guide helps a lot with this for any big fights) and he is retarded good at sweeping away huge swaths of any undead/demons without SC-level MR. If you haven’t seen this in action, it’s really quite atrocious (for the guy with the undead/demons), and it’s a very low bar to field several of these guys wherever anybody brings the forces of evil out to play. When there’s nothing to banish – well you already slapped a void eye on him so spam away with the seldom used 0 fatigue word of power all day long, or you could always go with the classic smiting. Half a dozen of these guys will very much carry their weight without contributing any fatigue to the communion. There’s worse uses for f/w gems than empowering up and passing rune smashers to them as well, they’ll keep being very effective all game long.

You also don’t want to overlook that the mini-communions get you into substantial earth support. Those lowly E1 geotic masters are now at E4 after summoning earthpower which opens up just about any earth spells you want. Be careful with this though as your slaves won’t have any earth magic so big spells will run up their fatigue quickly. Not really a problem, just make sure to cast reinvigoration with another mage right after if you’re worried. Earth magic really isn’t as big a deal for LA Marignon as it is for some other nations, but a couple standouts include destruction (take down just about anything with your xbows), iron bane & marble warriors.

Iron bane doesn’t make a lot of sense to drop when you’re leveraging those nice royal guards or heavy infantry, and it doesn’t really help your xbows too much. What it does do is make your other arm incredibly nasty as you transition into mid game. LA Marignon makes a lot of sense to leverage soul contracts and lifelong protections, and with a bit of alteration research all that heavy evo I was talking about earlier is only needed for special occasions at this point.

With access to B2-B3 mages off the bat there is no reason to wait for constr-4 to get into the blood game. Once you get to constr-4 and can pass out dowsing rods you’ll want to rotate in diabolists, but get some geotic masters out lickity split and you won’t have too much trouble getting to the point that you’ve got enough blood income to crank out a soul contract every other turn or so – rapidly getting to one every turn. You’ve got just 1 fire income from your cap and a couple pearls you can alchemize but you’ll also want to get a guy out site searching so that doesn’t become the bottleneck. By the time you’re pulling into year two and contemplating your first real fight you should be sitting on enough devils to be your first raiding squad with more steadily piling up.

Those devils have a nice flying strategic movement, but no obvious flying commanders to utilize it for maximum raiding. For this role I rather like a unit that otherwise doesn’t have much use, your national harlequin spell. They’re cheap flying demon commanders, but the obvious objection is they have no leadership. One nice thing about the soul contract is it confers 10 undead/demon leadership, so if you use harlequins to hold your soul contracts you’ve got guys who can drop decent raiders wherever you want them (10 devils is effective against most moderate PD). Lifelong protection gives you another 5 leadership, and 15 devils along with the stream of imps really brings your raiding up to the next level. Now, those soul contracts are quite expensive so you’ll want to be fairly conservative when deploying them like this as you really can’t afford to lose too many, but in the early-ish game where they’re unlikely to get picked off by mind hunts, etc. it’s often safe enough to raid the backfields so long as you’re careful to give your flying commander some place to retreat to if things go sour. As the game progresses you’ll switch to more appropriate commanders, but having a swarm of flying guys doing nothing else but herding your devils where they need to be is a great boon though the whole game even if the battlefield is too dangerous for them. Note: if you can manage to bootstrap in to a little death magic rods of the leper king work fabulously on harlequins as being demons they don’t care about the disease. 5D for the rod, 2B for the harlequin (use one without a soul contract!) and you’ve got yourself a nice disposable flying devil herder with 50 leadership. If you’re swimming in F gems a scepter of authority works decently in the other hand, dropping flame bolts among your fire immune devils/imps and letting the harlequin herd the occasional non-undead that needs it. Also, don’t overlook the tactical advantage of having harlequins set with double lifelong protections. Those imps get very impressive when they hit critical mass, and if you invest in a half dozen double barrel imp guns you’ll put most skellispam to shame on top of the devils they herd in.

As for forging the soul contracts you’ve got two reasonable choices. The first, obviously is to do it with your pretender. For this I like the morloc. Slap a 9 or 10 dominion on him for the awe and you can supercharge your initial expansion while also leaving some nasty blood sacrificing options for later. The other is to empower up, which really isn’t as cost prohibitive as you might think. Take a B3 geotic master and empower twice for 60 + 75 blood slaves, then forge an armor of souls (assuming you stopped at constr-2), which sounds like a lot but is effectively costing you 3 soul contracts. That’s not inconsiderable, but it is doable if you want to do something different with your pretender. Now, there is danger doing this as your freshly empowered mage is old. Fortunately CBM drops rejuvenate down to blood-3 so it’s not too much of a detour if you want to go that route – just plan for winter accordingly and factor in 2 turns casting it (your guys are really old) into your planning.

It sounds like I’m throwing around a lot of blood slaves, and I am. Keep in mind though that I’m talking about slowly and steadily building stuff up with very little research while your early game is focused on more forthright evocations and cavalry. You can quite comfortably fight your first war with no blood magic, and by the time you’ve got 4-5 blood hunting provinces set up you should be able to forge a soul contract and a lifelong protection every turn - they’ll start piling up. Remember, 15 soul contracts is a considerable power plant.

You’ll also want to stick a couple geotic masters on demon knight duty which costs practically no slaves. These guys offer a nice extra angle against stuff that might give pure devils/imps problems like massed archers (don’t, don’t, don’t overlook your navigators! Mist & arrow fend go a long way). They’re also another fire immune unit so leverage that heat from hell on top of your fire evos, and leverage their fear aura with blood rain for particularly tough guys.

At this point, you’re probably about ready to transition into what may be my favorite part of LA Marignon. Fallen Angels. Once you get to this stage you’ll quit cranking out the contracts, and instead funnel most of your slaves into casting reascendance. These fallen angels are pretty scary SCs if you treat them right with phoenix pyre, soul vortex and fame eruption, but where they really shine is leading your now freely spawning devil hoards around. Devils & imps are scary. Devils & Imps under darkness, bloodlust & firestorm are the stuff of nightmares, and each of your fallen angels can cast all of that with no equipment at all. Huh? F3 D3 B3 – but with stock equipment those angels don’t give a crap about horrors (so long as they don’t pass out) so consider summon hell power a goto spell, and those guys look more like F5 D5 B5 for any fight that it matters. Use bloodletting instead of reinvigoration if appropriate and drop some big nastiness. Blood rain, blood letting, flamestorm, darkness, life for a life, infernal prison, you can also drop back to gemless classics like drain life. Summon one (two?) fallen angel(s) per turn, slap some cheap equipment on them if you feel like it and send him out with the 20+ devils that freespawned that turn. Now you can imagine where iron bane fits in here, along with some of the other alteration you’ve got courtesy of your mini-communions from fog warriors to will of the fates. Most anything that can fight with you in the darkness will be vulnerable to getting blasted by your super inquisitors, masses of units (LA Ermor/R’lyeh) get clobbered by firestorm and bloodletting while the SCs tough enough to weather that face life for a life/banish to inferno. The really scary part is you can pull this off in fairly early end game. The higher end spells are certainly welcome, but Blood-7, Alt-7, constr-4, thau-1 gives you swarms of devils fighting under darkness, bloodlust, iron bane, fog warriors supported by leech, incinerate, super-banish, bloodletting and kitted fallen angels fighting under phoenix pyre/soul vortex.