Re: Your Favorite Paths and Races
 

sea king actually, which is kinda expensive to recruit... making it very hard to gamble your way to 2 linked earth.

Re: Your Favorite Paths and Races
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Okay, Sea King.
Sea King is a gamble to get Earth-2, but about 10 will propably do the trick. And Sea Kings can give you have access to every site-searching spell in the game, including Acashic Record if you want to.

Death, Astral, Air and Blood are not very powerful on a Sea King but they have uses. Blood is nice for Ice Devils if you go for blood, Astral and Death can be easily raised to 3 or even 4, and Death also gives you access to Skull Mentors. 2 Air is not very powerful, but if you get even one booster you will be able to forge more of them.

All the other possibilities are very nice, though.

Earth gives access to Fire Ward, Claymen and Earth boots, and Dwarven Hammer after that. This is the best, I think, if you go Clamming.

Water 5 is not very useful in the beginning, but later with the big battlefield spells and Murdering Winter they will be wonderufl complement to your forces.

With Fire, they can cast all the Acid spells, very nice evocations giving Atlantis the damage that pure water spells lack. Besides, Acid can't be resisted.

Nature gives you acces to Bone Melter, very nice spell in many ways. AOE-instakill, what is not to like?

Re: Your Favorite Paths and Races
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm not sure why someone would want an astral 2 sea king instead of just a standard deep seer.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Death can be easily raised to level 4, astral cannot, since there is only one astral booster available to Atlantis.

Re: Your Favorite Paths and Races
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">(1) If you want astral boosters 3 stral-proficient pretenders are available to Atlantis. And with the Sea Kings covering everything I think astral is an obvious candidate as an alternate magic path for the 2 liches as well. So getting Rings of _____ry shouldn't pose a problem. And of course the Seer pretender can easily pick a bit of earth for Astral Coins too. You just have to ask yourself "do I want easy access to astral boosters or not?" when designing your nation.

(2) With all that hype about clam hoarding, I expect a good part of the Atlantis players will default to an Astral 6+ pretender, and will generate a comfortable astral output when they reach Construction 6. Even without an astral pretender these clams will make it easy to empower a mage to astral-3 in time.

(3) I've not seem him in awhile but I think one of the Atlantian heroes comes with Astral 3.

Re: Your Favorite Paths and Races
 

I'm still waiting for my copy of Dominions 2, but from the first demo, I can predict that I'd like Marignon + Fire. On the other hand, there are new races for Ascension Wars, and I'll look forward to playing Tien'Chi, with their composite bow archers and Red Guard... don't ask me why I want to use Red Guard.

I'm voting Marignon

(BTW, first post!)