Patala Questions
--Large Disclaimer--
I'm new to the game. I've been traipsing around SP and reading the forums before venturing into MP so that I can at least provide a small speed bump to whomsoever first rolls over me.
That being said, I recently started a SP game and was randomly handed Patala. The post in the strategy thread stated that a bless strategy wasn't very effective because nagas, well, blow, but I had been introduced to Gandharvas recently, and decided to make a bless based on them. I went with E9/W9 and rolled boldly onward.
The details of how my little SP game played out are unimportant, but the experience raised several questions for the more experienced players reading this board:
I realize that summons (Gandharvas in this case) become less useful as magic techs up, but is the high innate resist (particularly if coupled with the ready access you have to MR boosting magic from your astral mages) enough to counteract this?
Blessed nagas can afford you early access to the ocean if you're not opposed by a real power, letting you roll up a healthy water gem income for clamming ... leading me to my main question: since you can dwarven hammer/clam out-of-the-box and have access to a huge variety of sacred astral summons, is this a viable MP strategy, assuming you can survive long enough to get a decent income?
Assuming you get a decent clam income going, 35 gems for a 10 move, flying thug who, with a very, very marginal gem outlay for gear, can obliterate any PD/non-primary (i.e., combat magic) army seems .... mildly useful? Am I missing something? A few of these dancing around in someone's backline should be able to comfortably slash their income in half?
Earth is the obvious choice for a first bless since you have all those wonderful little sacred mages to benefit from the reinvig(go go gadget communion!), and water is nice for defense as most of your summons are already very high defense, but maybe fire instead? Astral for the MR/9 astral pretender to cast higher level spells?
Where scales are concerned, money seems nice to afford the hordes of mages you'll want, but maybe it's worth it to trade turmoil/luck for the gem income? After all, the mages are sacred and most of your national troops are sub-par. Sloth is an obvious choice, but the magic scale is tricky: a point here makes for very, very cost-effective sacred researchers, but maybe you benefit more from a drain scale for reasons of self-defense until you can get the clam income to high levels?
Those are pretty much the questions I have on Patala, and any input from more seasoned players (anyone, really) would be greatly appreciated!
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