Early Arcoscephale - Ephebophilia incarnate

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Executor

Those mage engineers are great for defending castles.
Give then a flying carpet and double their defense bonus, you can also give then Lycantrop amulet for great strength and thus even bigger defense bonus.

I don't think flying works that way,.. and I know strength isn't as useful as numbers for defending forts.

[MaxWilson]

Unless... fort defense/offense strength scales with the square of strength, so if you can find a way to get your strength drained down to -200 or something (I've had units drained to -40 vs. R'lyeh so this shouldn't be impossible), you should be better at fort-wrecking than Scabiel.

IIRC, according to the manual, flying basically just adds a siegebonus (1).

-Max

[Tifone]

"So weak, he shatters city walls with a punch!!"

(bug?)

[Gandalf Parker]

A couple of points from my playing in case they havent been mentioned..

If you only have a few chariots then they can be very effective set far to the flank and told to "Hold and Attack, Rearmost Enemies". And the effectiveness of this can be expanded. Have someone on the far other flank rush to draw the front-line units that direction before the other flank attacks rear.

If you have heavily armored troops sometimes its best to let the enemy run to you. Put your frontline on "Hold and Attack" so they other guys gain the fatigue of a long charge. Dependent on who you are attacking of course.

With Oreiads you can improve their seduction by gaining a spell such as "Charm". People often overlook the seduction spells because they are hard to use on the battlefield. But when an Oreiad misses seduction a charm can often give them the commander anyway (though only for a short while since he isnt delivered but immediately attacks his province instead). And especially if the seducer chose a female to try and seduce. You will still get the "assassin" effect if both seduce and charm fail but I feel this is worth slipping in between the two.

I particularly like the point at the end about the purpose is to survive long enough for research and gem benefits to kick in. Sometimes people feel that Arcos is "weak" because they play them wrong or on games that are too small to make use of Arcos strongest benefits.

[thejeff]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

If you have heavily armored troops sometimes its best to let the enemy run to you. Put your frontline on "Hold and Attack" so they other guys gain the fatigue of a long charge. Dependent on who you are attacking of course

I didn't think movement caused fatigue? Just casting and attacking.
That said it's still often worth "Hold and Attack" to allow more buffing and to bring the enemy front into easy range of your archers and mages while keeping theirs at long range.

[Amorphous]

I have never used the Prince of Death with EA Arcoscephale, but I do see the point of it. Not being able to use the priestesses for healing your pretender is a drawback, but you do get a very decent death access.

I usually do not bother with death on the pretender, but that is more a matter of play style.

The Virtue is great with MA and LA Arcoscephale, but I seldom use it in EA. In this age, Arcoscephale practically begs for at least S3 and preferably more as it already has decent air access that goes to very good with to rings of wizardry and good crafting that becomes absolutely great with the same ring.

As for expansion, I do not see it as a big problem. As mentioned by others, chariots do work pretty well against independents, but you can actually do decent enough with slingers, peltasts and some cardaces under sloth 3. Your starting commander can lead 80 troops, so spending the first turn prophetizing him and buying 20 or so slingers will let you conquer one independent per turn. You need to reinforce now and again, of course, but you need nowhere near the full production capacity of your starting castle for that and independent commanders can move the troops.

As for early rushes, Arcoscephale's solution to that is the same as for most everything else - magic.
It probably has to do with what maps you play, but I find that rushes early enough to take a castle before a dormant pretender shows up very unusual. Especially if you take mage engineers into account.
However that might be, philosophers are very cheap and fast researchers under sloth 3, so materializing a rush before at least two levels of the players favourite school is researched is inordinately hard and requires a lot of luck as well as a very densely populated map. And even then it will not be that much of a rush.

First order of business for Arcoscephale is usually getting up a second castle, so shutting down troop and mage production is not as easy as just finding the capital and siegeing it.

In a very early rush, small and cheap sacreds will not have an easy time to get through the resource cheap troops Arcoscephale can field if necessary and large tough sacreds will not have the numbers to put a dent in the walls. When a small number of mystics and maybe an Oreiad arrives at the scene, things get ugly.

Certainly, dual blessed sacreds are tough opponents, but that goes for practically everyone - including starting pretenders. Arcoscephale's best defence against such things is magic, which is why it needs to research quickly. If it is rushed - which reasonably speaking will not happen till around turn 9 or so - a second castle should be well on the way, if not finished, and the castle walls will hold long enough for the philosophers to research some spells tailored against the attacking force and probably also long enough for the pretender to awaken.

I readily admit that I am not that accomplished in this game, but I think that the spectre of the early rush looms somewhat larger in peoples fears than what its performance in the game warrants.

To siege a capital you have to find it and get enough troops there to kill the defenders without suffering too many losses. This is hard, especially as the defender will see you coming. To manage this during the first half of the first year, you need to start very close to your rush target - no more than maybe two provinces between you - and even then the province type may present a problem.

Realistically speaking a rush will not happen until rather late in year one. And in that case a dormant pretender does become a factor.

From my limited multi-player experiences, the rushes I really have problems with tend to arrive somewhere in early year two. These rushes are hard to stop even with a SC - at least for me.

[chrispedersen]

One of the best use of Hold and attack, when you are set at the rear - is to string out non-homogenous troops.

Ie., if your opponent is fielding troops of 7 and 11 movement, hold and attack from the rear will separate those troops into two distinct groups.

If you are playing small number of units, (which I usually prefer) this helps to prevent your units from being overwelmed by numbers, cutting down on the dfensive penalty of multiple attacks.

[chrispedersen]

Movement doesn't usually cause fatigue, unless you are berserk or flying.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Tifone

"So weak, he shatters city walls with a punch!!"

(bug?)

I don't know if it actually *works* in the game because I've never tried it--it's just that the formula in the manual implies it should work. If anything it's a "design bug," i.e. a flaw in the rules.

For similar weirdness in the real world, read up on the theoretical properties of negative matter. (Not antimatter.)

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

One of the best use of Hold and attack, when you are set at the rear - is to string out non-homogenous troops.

One of my favorite things to do against mage-heavy armies is to set all my mages and troops to the back of the field, with the troops slightly in front and set to Guard Commander on a thuggish unit. The enemy troops on Hold and Attack will eventually reach you but they'll do so piecemeal, and will be quickly gobbled up by your solid mass of troops and mages (and skelly spam, etc.). Unless they're just too tough, of course, but then you would have died anyway. The worst case is that your enemy does the same thing and hits you with long-range spells until you die (or BEs like Rigor Mortis/Fire Storm/Wrathful Skies), so just make sure you've got some long-range spells too.

-Max