Thoughts on EA Abyssia (guide)

[JimMorrison]

Dragar said:
My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!

In my experiments with Abysia, I found that rushing straight to Falling Fires gave very good results. Since it's AOE, it's a bit less Prec dependent, and a few mages spamming that one a line that 30-40 inf are holding will march through just about anything that early game has to offer.

Securing more territory reliably and quickly allows you to get more castles up sooner, which you can translate directly into increased research - research that has defensive value which Lanterns won't give you.

Granted, Cons is tempting, since you will be wanting to get your blood economy going as soon as you can manage it, but not hitting Evo first means you have a bunch of very expensive priests sitting around, who will spam Fire Flies if they are pressed into combat.....



Astral bless is an interesting thought, did you use an Oracle for it? I'm thinking that would make it on the short list of viable blesses for Abysia, making it E/S/D. Not that a major is needed, but those 3 can be leveraged in a worthwhile manner. Of course, really high Fire or Blood could be alright on a pretender, but the bless isn't going to be doing all that much for you (yay my mages get +4 str!).



Also, Kasnavada, I think it's worth noting that Demonbred is in fact a superior assassin, especially due to flying. It can be very easy to get a couple in the HoF early in the game, and while it is a bit of a gamble, getting lucky on your heroics could make them a fearsome addition to your arsenal throughout the game.

I played a game for fun once where the first thing I did was crank out a few Demonbreds while taking provinces as normal. Then I had them move from province to province in the other direction, assassinating the indie commanders, while a Warlock followed behind, routing the indie army and then site searching. It felt dirty, but oh it was fun.

[Micah]

Dragar - There are no crossbows in EA. You're also doing just fine if your ironskinned, phoenix pyre'd, fire shielded, armored and reinvigorated Anointed of Rhuax is using his (30+) protection value for something useful. The burning ones kicking all sorts of *** at the beginning of the game gets you to the research you need for that.

Any path at 10 is a waste of points, and twist fate doesn't work admirably well with heavily armored troops. You can admittedly do nasty things with an S9 pretender, but that tends to come later in the game, and I'd generally prefer to have a whole bunch of units (anointed) causing havoc than one crazy-strong mage. Especially since earth-based mages are going to be more of a problem than astral for Aby, for the most part (destruction early and army of gold later both ruin your day) so the magic-duel potential of your pretender might go to waste.

That being said, going for maybe a master lich and some diversity with EA aby isn't a terrible idea, but I'd prefer to play to their strengths and try to get enough of an early lead with them to find indies or empower instead of trying to get my pretender to make up for the massive amount of diversity they're lacking.

Also, lanterns are an excellent idea.

[dirtywick]

Thaum 2 for Bonds of Fire I would also make an early priority. It's a really nice spell for holding units in place, and usually for getting mages into the HoF because they rack up kills quickly using it.

[kasnavada]

Hoho, nice additions !

I'm adding them now.

EDIT :

For magic diversity purposes, I try to take a pretender with 4 nature, for those reasons :
- nature -> air (fairy queen).
- nature & air = precision item and spells, which your mages lack completly.
- nature = regeneration. Your sacred do not die from poison if they regenerate, they also tend to take much less afflictions, and also it's a good protection from disease (especially since most of your mages are old).

[chrispedersen]

I can't add a lot on abysia except:
The one person I aw expand very quickly in a mp with abysia did so using salamanders.

when I asked him his trick, he said:
"dont fight archers".

I have no idea about taking death 3 scale - however you might wish to mention that abysia is not fully affected by it.

Doesn't abysia get access to baphomet? If you wanted Astral its a pretty good chasis.

[Dragar]

I took the Astral 10 with a sphinx. Base 3 astral on a cheap chassis means getting to 10 wasn't so difficult. Given that the mind hunt type spells risk killing your own mage I figured it was worth maxing out, and +4 MR is solid

I also run 4 earth and 4 blood. Only the blood bless is wasted on mages (very good on your sacred troops though), and it really opens up a lot of spells for casting by the pretender

Interesting thoughts on the Falling fires, i might start a game with the same pretender and give that a shot

[MaxWilson]

What do you mean about the Mind Hunt spells? Mind Hunt feebleminds you if there's any mage, even an S1, in the territory. Only Magic Duel cares about the relative levels, and since the Sphinx is immobile (IIRC it can't even Teleport) you won't be getting in very many of those because you'll rarely be in combat.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Micah said:
Any path at 10 is a waste of points,

That's true only 99% of the time. I have found that I like E10N6 for Ashdod quite a bit better than E9N6, because the sacreds have exactly 5 encumbrance. I hate having to worry about battle duration, and with 0 net encumbrance instead of 1 a lot of problems go away.

-Max

[chrispedersen]

I can't agree with the statement at all.

As I recall, all the pretenders with the highest natural sorcery rating, get to be something like 'mind master'
and if I remember right (and it wasn't just limited to Dom 2, or was it 1?) the benefits were significant.

Secondly, Awe +3 is significantly better than Awe +0.

Third, niche usefulness for nations such as ashdod mentioned, or agatha - where the sacreds can't hit the broad side of a barn = and +5 makes them 14 - which is a significant boost. Worth the points probably not - but some nations have no use for the points.

[Dragar]

I thought Mind Hunt could target any province - hadn't appreciated how easy it was to get feebleminded though, thanks ofr that. The other one was the Evoc 9 Strands of Arcane power, but that's too high level to base anything on..

Cheers, will drop i back to 9 and think where to spend the points