Kailasa guide

[KissBlade]

Originally Posted by Executor

"if your neighbor sees you playing Kailasa, what's stopping him from rounding up a group of indie archers and breaking down your door?"

Time is, can you really buy enough indie archers to counter Kailasa so early? You would need a great deal of archers to do so.

Are you joking? Not only are indie archers readily in supply during EA (both massable due to crappier armor in EA and ever present indie "tribes" to mass them with) but they're one of the most effective EA expansion troops. If you're going to "counter archers with archers" then you're following my suggestions that Kailasa is more of an archer nation than sacred or you're going to focus on sacred with crappier bless scales and less cash to get archers because you're using them on sacreds and have crappier scales.

[Executor]

Not really, you can get a strong bless and good scales, well relativly good. Order and magic with a S9W8A6 bless. Heat is a logical option, and sloth also.

All your mages are sacred, so that's less upkeep, your yavanas are sacred and it only takes a handful of them as an expansion party, so believe me when I say this even with turmoil/sloth you'll have enough gold to buy mages and troops. If you take order, well you'll practically be swimming in gold and popin forts all over.
Kailasa has great potencial as a fast expander, if you play it right, almost as good as Mictlan.
AND your archers are just a bit cheaper (9 gold 3 res.) than indie and you can buy then in every fort, and are stealthy.
So you can bring them with your yavanas and when you're facing that BIG archer army they won't even know you have archers also, correct?
It isn't even hard to mass them when needed with the forts you'll quickly build.

[Tifone]

Indie cavalry is also very common though

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Tifone

Indie cavalry is also very common though

They wouldn't work as decoys, imo. HP and size aren't sufficient.

[Wrana]

Won't using Bandar as decoys alleviate the problem of firing at large monsters? Of course, they are more costly - but they can take some arrows and continue their decoying duty next fight, too...

[thejeff]

Bandars are still smaller (less HP) than Yavanas.

[Il Magno]

Yesterday I started to test this nation, the approach I used is

1st turn tax to 200 and recruit a yaksha
2 turn make the yaksha your profet, buy yavanas, and a mage (guru)
3turn start your expansion, the guru could forge a sield for your prophet,

Pretender: I think that a sleeping Nataraja with at least A4,S4,N4, is a good base to start, it has potential for supporting the middle game fighting when fully equipped with gear.

[militarist]

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by militarist

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

Lowering morale also makes repel effective.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Lowering morale also makes repel effective.

It makes it /more/ effective, anyway. As does lower prot on target, higher attack and them having extremely low hp and shorter weapons.

But unless you get all of that going, it doesn't do much.