Agartha, from my under-the-works demo guide

[Nerfix]

Sindai said:
I've picked Agartha for my very first serious demo game. Water 9 bless is pretty sexy. The only really annoying thing is that the Oracles choose to cast Flying Shards instead of Smite and hit my Ancient Ones more often than the enemy.

Yeah, it's rather stupid behaviour from them. =/

[FrankTrollman]

"However the Troglodyte Lord is only useful against enemies that are of his size or larger since he Tramples"

I'm going to have to disagree here. The troglodyte's weapons are only useful against creatures his own size (or for repelling), so why worry about his weapon at all?

The Troglodyte is there to trample, and he's really good at it. Slip on some heavy armor, a decent shield, and a defensive weapon (either a long weapon or a defensive weapon like faithful or a main gauche) and he can be very durable in combat. Put on boots of quickness or long strides and he can stomp on a lot of smaller enemies.

Those Troglodyte Lords are great anti-army thugs. Outfitting them for anti-hero work isn't even desirable, since so many enemy heroes are size 3. A properly armored Troglodyte lord can rack up dozens of kills and live to tell the tale. For a small outlay in gems, that's totally worth it.

-Frank

[Nerfix]

I see your point. I will have to try this out.

I can see him being good as an emerengy anti-hero commander though since he has higher native Attack value than the Ancient Lord and otherwise rather similiar stats.

No doubt he can also be good against armies.

EDIT: What sort of fatigue he gets from the armor?

[Nerfix]

The pretender/scale stuff. Sorry for the formating but I am a bit too tired to fix it...

Scale and Pretender Design:

When designing your Pretender God for Agartha you must think whether you want to purse a Bless strategy or not. Agartha can be played with a very
minor Bless Effect but can benefit from more powerful blessings.

Agartha has some tolerance towards Death scale because the vast majority of their units don't eat supplies. Death scale however leaves you with some
less Gold income and makes you more vulnerable to certain bad events and makes your units suffer more from old age. Taking Order to counter the bad
events and gold loss is a good idea if you go the Death Path

Taking some Order And Productivity can be a good decision as Agarthans can be expensive and resource intensive to build.

Magic scale can help you to boost your research, but it's usefulnes is somewhat situational. Playing with an Awake pretender means you can research
from the start while Dormant and Imprisoned pretenders won't be contributing to research for a while.

Noteworthy pretenders for Agartha are:

- The Dragons. Affordable, especially if you don't pursue a strong bless and you can have them to be Awake, have an OK dominion and economic scales
without resorting to the Death-3 path
- The Titan. You can get a low level Air and Earth blessing and decent scales and Dominion without going the Death-3 path or one of the Awakening
options. You can use either way to get more points if you want to.
- Cyclops. He is the easiest way to Earth-9 blessing if you want to pursue it.
- The Ageless Olm. A route for Water/Earth bless and he doesn't cost much in points.
- The Forge Lord. He offers a route for Fire/Earth bless and gets a forge bonus on top of it.
- The Risen Oracle. A terrific combat support pretender.
- Great Mother. She looks unappealing but offers a path to Earth/Nature bless.

[Morkilus]

Nerfix said:
- Great Mother. She looks unappealing but offers a path to Earth/Nature bless.

Heresy! She is a fertility (i.e. sex) goddess! For shame.

[Nerfix]

Maybe the Agarthans think she is hott.

[DominionsFan]

Here is my comment: excellent guide Nerfix.

[Boron]

Nerfix said:
- The Risen Oracle. A terrific combat support pretender.

The risen oracle is not a terrific combat support pretender, but a terrific SC god .

Otherwise very nice guides Nerfix .

Oh about the deathscale: Imho you should only take death in short games (blitzes), but in long games the income loss is too big usually.

[Boron]

Nerfix said:
Cons of Agartha
- Weakness to missile attacks
- Pale Ones are bigger than humans and be ganged by smaller units
- Pale Ones are coldblooded and suffer from Cold scale
- Only one eye - Vision's Foe, Eye Shield or just plain unlucky Lost One Eye affliction makes an Agarthan unit essentially useless
- Poor Precision, Attack and Defence skill

These weaknesses are imho extremely evil.

Especially the low attack and defense rating, and all the other minor weaknesses like big size, cold blooded etc. make this main problem even bigger.

I almost think that it would be best to simply mainly use troglodytes for expansion (+ your pretender if you took an expansion pretender) and later the cavern guards are somewhat attractive.

Once you have money you should start massing seal guards, even if you took no bless, because their weapon is magical, so they can at least potentially kill enemy SCs .

But the earlygame is definitely tough for Argatha. If you can survive a bit then your oracles can do some nice battlemagic though, like magma eruption, petrify and blade wind.

The rhuax pact magma children are very nice imho, so are the umbrals.

But all in all imho Argatha is one of the weaker early era nations and extremely difficult to play.

[moodgiesanta]

I just finished an Agartha game and after several games of getting killed with other countries, this game instead I obliterated the enemies. The main reason is the Troglodyte. Massed Troglodyte attacks pretty much kill anything size 2 and under. They are also very easy to build en masse even in low resource provinces late game when you have tons of money.

Another *huge* advantage is the amphibiousness and the ability to build underwater but that's been mentioned.