MA Abysia: The Burninator Flies Again

[chrispedersen]

The fact that the feasibility has *often* been questioned supports my contention, wouldn't you say?

Certainly you can say have no desire to do as I suggested.
That doesn't make the suggestion 'silly'.

Frankly, your guide says 'push dominion', blood hunt, construct items -win.

That is a bit fuzzy, and gives no clear path to critique either the strategy, or the strength of the nation compared to others. When do you expect to push dominion. When do you expect to have finished your second contract.. your third. How will you propel research and blood hunting at the same time?

For example: I find a general goal for year 1, for an average nation to be 15 territories.

Would you expect MA-Abysia to hit that? Why is or isn't that a relevent number.

[vfb]

15 is easy for MA Aby, you've got a great starting army which can take one territory per year without losses against most indies. Just add a few humanbred on turn 1 to start. I'm sure you can manage to hire an army to take an additional 4 provinces in the first year.

[Raiel]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

The fact that the feasibility has *often* been questioned supports my contention, wouldn't you say?

If you start with the assumption that those contesting feasibility are as knowledgable/skilled/insightful as the author of the guides, then yes. I'm too new to MP to be qualified to make a judgement on this.

Interesting guide, Baalz. Thanks for posting it.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by vfb

15 is easy for MA Aby, you've got a great starting army which can take one territory per year without losses against most indies. Just add a few humanbred on turn 1 to start. I'm sure you can manage to hire an army to take an additional 4 provinces in the first year.

I agree, vfb. I'm just trying to suggest that milestones /specifics would make the various guides more useful.

For example - Baalz made a good guide for marverni; a good one for LA Atlantis.

Each guide helps you get the most out of each nation - but there are no ways to objectively compare the nations (or the validity of the strategies).

For example - saying that you can take 4 territories with your start aby. army. And recruit a second army, by turn 4, 3rd army turn 8, and take a total of 15 territories by the end of year one is MUCH more useful than saying "you have a strong starting army able to take out indies no problem".

[Dragar]

As an aside, something I've learnt is not to rely too heavily on the devils. They rock as raiders, as surprise armies and as part of your army, but know they're coming and a storm knocks you dead. Storm and rain are abysia's killers really

I played with my similar strat in Beyond recently, had a poor start but was having fun in a 1 on 1 with pangeaa. The game leader pythium decided to attack me, and i quickly started shedding provinces. A devil army managed to annihilate an army of 3 SCs, inlcuding his pretender, and nabbed a heap of artifacts.

After that though I kept meeting storm everywhere, and they got chewed up - devils work by flying in large numbers to hit with 2 attacks, coupled with blood lust and ideally blood rain. Anything else they are too vulnerable with

Btw Baalz, I have to challenge your view of bottom-half research - in my experience when pursuing the blood heavily early abysia are bottom of the pile research altogether.

Note that their starting troops are decent for indie expansion, but recruiting more is slow and cavalry/elephants chew you up, so I generally find it hard to exceed moderate expansion. I have seen others do it though so it's something i need to get better at, it makes a huge difference if you can be size competitive and be able to pull ina lot of blood while still having cash to get your research going

[vfb]

Hey! Pythium is not the game leader, it's Machaka, I'm telling you the truth. He's got uncountable numbers of demiliches and tartarians! That's what my scouts report anyway.

I saw some of those fights in Beyond and they were very entertaining. I do remember a few blasts of Shimmering Fields and Niefel Flames absolutely decimating some massive Abysian devil armies. Did you try any Fire Storms to kill those communions you were up against?

[Dragar]

I forget specifically, I was certainly using fire storm when i could - by the stage of my devils getting decimated i was fairly chewed up, earlier on my armies of devils + infantry + fire evocs did very well against Pangaean hordes.

Fire storm generally isn't effective quickly enough to save that situation though, the devils get chewed up very fast late game with storm. If I still had a decent earth caster with my army at the time i should have tried some earthquaking, i forget exactly when my father illearth died

[vfb]

Thanks for the info. By the way, Father Illearth is alive and well and serving in the Pythium army, along with at least one Arch Devil, it looks like.

[ano]

Abysia definitely needs Magic 3 and even with that its research isn't stellar. But at least your salamanders will be decent researchers for the cost. Also, indy shamen should be used heavily.
Also, though in general I agree with Chris (concerning Baalz' guides) I don't think that expansion rate is an important question here. If you have good or at least decent troops and know how to expand effectively, you will do it and it is a topic for another guide. If a nation has totally crappy troops then the nation guide should suggest good ways to overcome this or ways to use those troops more effectively and that's all, probably.

[vfb]

I've done well with MA Aby a Sage pretender rushing to const-6, with drain-2, depending on lanterns for research. So I totally disagree about needing Magic-3. I agree that indy shamans work just fine (once you give them a lantern).