Lady of Springs

[Fal]

yes it's a strategy covered in Baalz's Eriu guide.

I'm writing a Tir na n'Og guide atm, yes Ri & Sidhe lords are excellent thugs, you only need Construction 4 + some Alternation & Enchantment to make them effective.

I'm not a big fan of double 9 blessing, because the lack of Astral and death makes Tir/Eriu weak in late games, and for Ri earth 9 bless really isn't necessary, earth 6 would be enough, but water 6 bless comes very handy. In fact all you need is to get their defense over 30, protection isn't needed in most cases as you will most likely case mistform. I disagree with Baalz's guide as I think nature is an utterly useless blessing.

They do kill fast, to deal with a large group of enemy, use:

Air Shield (always cast this as mirror image doesn't provide protection against arrows)
Bless
Mistform
Resist lightning
wait
Cast (in all my previous tests, Ri cast shock wave, try it out, you'd be even more impressed).

So standard outfits would be:

Frostbrand
Main Gauche of Parrying (an extra 4 defense)
Horror Helmet (if you have death) or a cheap black steel helmet
Chain Mail of Displacement (3 extra defense) or Rainbow Armor (3 extra reinvigoration)
Amulet of Resilience (5 reinvigoration)
Bracer of protection (protection + defense)

But do bear in mind that Ri/Sidhe lords are very bad when fighting troops with magic weapons (F9/D9 bless, Atlantis, Caelum etc). They aren't overpowered, and they aren't that effective in MP games (especially in later stage) either.

To recap, I'd take W6E6S4D4 for my pretender, Astral and death paths are too important for Tir/Eriu to take double 9 blessing.

[Zenzei]

I found they don't kill fast enough that way. If you want to pursue them as a main strategy, it's more than possible, it's powerful, so I feel I must add it to their arsenal. And they can keep up with the reinvig with +7-10, which is cheap to obtain. The only time to really need to "worry" - hah! - is when one of them gets Heroic Quickness as their ability... which no less than THREE of them actually got, as you can see from the picture above! And this is all very early in the game, as soon as you can research Alteration 3 and Construction 4, it's on! Then of course Enchantment 4 for Cloud Trapeze.

Oh, I don't doubt the ***-kicking capabilities of your thugs.
I'm merely suggesting you might get better overall result if you opted for 80% of the power for 50% of the cost.

Your current lords need at least 25 gems worth of equipment(frostbrand, rainbow armor & vine shield) to be usable in combat. For the same 25 gems you could equip one E9N4 lord with frostbrand+vine shield and two E9N4 lords with frostbrands and use them together as a team, they certainly kill stuff faster than any W9E9N4 lord. Or alternatively they can raid three diffrent provinces simultaneously thus gaining three times more land than single W9E9N4 lord. You even have more money to build sidhe lords with E9N4 because of the better scales. Of course these weaker thugs may die a bit more often but they are so cheap to equip it doesn't really matter.

Before joining these forums I used a lesser version of this tactic Baalz covered in his Eriu guide, with vanjarls and single E9 bless(so no regen or nature buffs) and they only had firebrands for equipment. The games were SP but them jarls worked great.

[JimMorrison]

Except if you are opting out of the armor, you are not freeing up 10 water to use for 2 more frostbrands, but rather 5 air and 5 nature. I am hard pressed to think what you would actually do with those 10 gems to get a better return.

[moderation]

Zenzei said:
When using sidhe lords as thugs, water 9 bless isn't that good because it adds need for more reinvigoration. Try E9N4-6 instead, you will find out that sidhe lords perform equally well with this bless and E9N4-6 is massively cheaper bless to get as well.

Hmm, how much a water 9 bless increase the need for reinvigoration? Does attacking roughly 1.5 times a turn mean you incur 1.5 times more fatigue with quickness?

[MaxWilson]

Yes.