Kailasa guide

[Alpine Joe]

Now i'm still pretty inexperienced at this game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I think I have discovered a way to make Kailasa's opening work in CBM.

Kailasa is a strange nation. You've got awesome earth magic, sacreds with no armor and awe, and weak non-sacred recruitables.
Expanding is rough. Do you pay out the *** for a huge blessing on sacreds that arrows chew up? Do you go for an awake pretender and lost any kind of bless for all of your awesome summonable sacred troops and mages? Do you go good scales and try to use monkey troops, bad as they are? No. You have another option. let me explain.

First off here is what you want for a pretender. Take an awake Great sage with 4F4A4W4E4S4N2D (or other mix of similarly rainbowed magic) you can afford this by taking O3S3H3D2L0M1

Start out by having that poor starting army patrol. Turn up taxes as much as you feel comfortable. I usually go with 180, but I don't know a lot about patrolling, there may be a better choice. Set your pretender to research alteration. He will be doing that for a while. Recruit a Yaksha per turn and spend your resources on the armored Bandars. Don't expand yet. What! No expansion until turn 3? What is wrong with you? Don't worry you'll be fine.

As soon as you hit alteration 2 its time to expand. The good thing is you can now use all of those Yakshas you have to do your expansion. With passive awe and good physical stats, all your yakshas need is protection. ironskin/stoneskin handily fills this role and you can cast it at low fatigue. With just a blessing and ironskin, each of your yakshas can solo weak indies. However a pair of them can take most medium strength indies (and elephant provinces). If you get some with astral, have them script a body ethereal, which will hit both members of the pair if you position them on the battlefield correctly (the back corner).
Try this, it works. With the nature regen bless, affliction rates are low enough to be tolerable. You have a lot of extra buffs available, but measure their value against the extra fatigue they cause.

These pairs of yakshas can expand against almost anything. Use several pairs, plus your starting army (augmented with Bandars) to grab 3 provinces per round for the next few turns. You should comfortably have about 12 provinces by the end of year 1, which I believe is a decent rate. Put up an additional fortress for gurus

Meanwhile your pretender has kept researching alteration. All this comes together at the beginning of year 2, when you get invulnerability. Now each of your yakshas can take on almost all indies alone. Send your pretender out to site search, while remaining yakshas and gurus pick up the research slack. When you hit alteration six its time for your first war.

Recruit some of the unarmored bandars and bring 6-8 yakshas and go kick the *** of the guy who thought kailasa was a good target early. Put your yakshas in the front in a clump and script invulnerability-attack. Have your prophet do a divine bless or just clump them together and have a yaksha do it. Meanwhile one remaining yaksha casts ironbane. Your yakshas move to the front, where their low fatigue and 25 protection make them very hard to take down. Meanwhile your Bandars throw sticks and stones all over them. Enemy armor shatters and suddenly all those sticks and stones are hitting really hard. This is a pretty effective army for your first war, but its only a stop-gap. At the end of year 2 you get alteration 7. Now you have fog warriors castable by your pretender, and marble warriors. These two spells+iron bane+hordes of sticks and stones chaff+ super tough yaksha thugs is a combo that is very good. And this is happening at the end of year two, where you are probably still fighting nationals.

Anyway, you have effective expansion and the tools to fight your first war. Now switch and research construction and conjuration and do your standard clam spam+astral summons. You have a pretty good bless for those ghandarvas. Siddhas eventually take over fog warriors duty for big fights.

some other things to remember:

1) You have petrification and the mages to use it. It is one of the best anti-anything big and lonely spells in the game. Paralyzed thugs/scs will get swarmed and taken down by hordes of monkeys. And you get it really early.

2)strength of the giants is pretty good with sticks+stones, so if you have the time to research it, it will pay off.

3) a rainbow pretender means heavy and diversified gem production. Kailasa can get into every school (with rudras), so you should have plenty of use for your gems

4) You will eventually get devasura and you can use him to hunt for slaves and eventually get bloodstones. This pays off late game as you can use earth gems to summon yakshas.


Anyway thats all of my ideas for Kailasa. I'd love to hear some feedback from more experienced players/reasons why this strategy is bad.

[Trumanator]

Nice guide. I am kind of wondering though if it wouldn't be perhaps better to concentrate your magic paths more to get a better bless.

[Tolkien]

Anything you can say for the endgame?

And also, what is your stance on clams?

[cleveland]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

I'd love to hear some feedback from more experienced players/reasons why this strategy is bad.

It's not bad at all AJ, thanks for posting it.

But not expanding until Turn 6 is concerning. Sure this works just fine against the AI, but in multiplayer, you'll find that everyone is expanding as rapidly and as viciously as possible in all directions.

Of course this depends on map size, but on a (rather standard) 15 province/player map, capitals are only separated by ~2 empty provinces, so by turn 6 you can expect someone to take a capital-adjacent-province. A BIG misstep.

But I can see it working well on a larger map. Though I'd personally prophet-ize my monkey scout and have him Sermon of Courage spam my starting army that's tackling the weakest looking indies. I'd also immediately send out every Astral Yaksha scripted with (Barkskin)(Personal Luck)(hold)(hold)(hold)(Attack Rearmost), which should do equally well against archerless indies.

[KissBlade]

Your biggest flaw in the strategy guide is the slow turn 6 expansion as cleveland mentions. Also, I think most people overestimate Kailasa's sacreds. They're /ok/ but honestly I don't think they're all that great. They're workable with air shield and minor blesses but I'd probably just use their archers and a SC pretender for expansion help.

[Tolkien]

Kailasa's archers are actually pretty good, and are pretty easy to mass. Their main problem is lack of any good melee units (that aren't resource intensive). Their sacred are decent, but the lack of armor or shields on any except their cap-only ones and summons makes it painful for them in the shortbow heavy Early Era.

I think waiting 6 turns is a bit of a stretch. You can go with 4 turns, maybe. But 6 turns is kinda difficult to recover from. You're going to have do make some major expansion to make up the gap.

[statttis]

How about a great sage instead of the enchantress? A great sage with Order 3 Sloth 3 Heat 3 Mis 2 Magic 1 and a bunch of magic can research alt-3 by turn 4. Then you send out your 4 yakshas who can buff up and have minor earth, nature, fire, air blesses. The first 5 turns are slow but after that your expansion ramps up quickly enough that you could be leading in provinces and research.

I faced a similar pretender design for Eriu in a recent game and it turned out pretty well for him. It went so well that he eliminated me before year 2 ended, and I think he's currently one of the top contenders in the game.

I think with a couple tweaks your strategy has some real promise

[Alpine Joe]

Well in response to cleveland:

I don't think barkskin alone is enough protection, even against non-archer indies. You then run too big of a risk of losing Yakshas, which you really can't afford. You could potentially do it with stoneskin at alteration 2 though. I haven't tried it but 15 protection might be enough. That would let you start expanding with yakshas on turn 4, which would be a huge improvement.

Also you can start expanding with the starting army earlier, I probably would if I found weak enough indies next to the capital. I probably over-stated the case in the guide for dramatic effect; I really wanted to emphasize that you can expand with only yakshas. Regardless of when you start expanding, the main point of the guide is that yakshas help augment expansion in the middle of year one in a significant way that kailasa has problems doing in other ways. My experience so far in multiplayer games is that I really don't start brushing up against other nations borders in a big way until turn 11-12, which i think gives you enough of a window to get away with slightly slower expansion in the first few turns, as long as it kicks in strong at 6-7.

[Alpine Joe]

Originally Posted by statttis

How about a great sage instead of the enchantress? A great sage with Order 3 Sloth 3 Heat 3 Mis 2 Magic 1 and a bunch of magic can research alt-3 by turn 4. Then you send out your 4 yakshas who can buff up and have minor earth, nature, fire, air blesses. The first 5 turns are slow but after that your expansion ramps up quickly enough that you could be leading in provinces and research.

I faced a similar pretender design for Eriu in a recent game and it turned out pretty well for him. It went so well that he eliminated me before year 2 ended, and I think he's currently one of the top contenders in the game.

I think with a couple tweaks your strategy has some real promise

Well I thought about the sage, and i think its a good debate. However the enchantress comes with pearl generation, which I like, and its cheaper to get enough air to cast fog warriors. I could certainly see an argument for the sage though. I will try out the build later tonight and see if it works as well. Also on the agenda: see if yakshas can expand with stoneskin.


Edit: I tried it out with the sage and stoneskin. Stoneskin lets you unleash your first yaksha expansion party on turn 3. You can then expand as quickly as you build yakshas, switching to ironskin on turn 5 and invulnerability on turn 11-12. The sage dramatically improves research. You lose out on pearl generation, and casting fog warriors is a little harder, but I think it is well worth it.

Good idea statttis, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. Now Kailasa's expansion really is competitive.

[chrispedersen]

Alpine,

First of all, good job.

Second - have you looked at the other guide for kailasa, at all for tricks?