Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

That's right. I'd forgotten about Jomon's new underwater units.

They're not guaranteed to start by the coast and lack an easy way into the water, though.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Yeah. That recruitable dragon mage is good motivation though.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

In CBM cast Sea of Ice. By the time he can react you should have almost all of the water provinces.

I still have to disagree - you should be able to get at least one mage to S9 for rituals with artifacts(*), and combat S9 is not really a problem.

Considering that the void lurker has no slots to take skullcaps (so RoS is a necessary booster) or mr penetrating equipment it should be only worth it if you plan to cast multiple wishes each turn - and if it's that the 100 pearls you gain at best are weighting a lot less.

(*) And I'd say trying to claim those is exactly what you should do.
With your powerful research and skull mentors it's possible and since you can't get any uniques (well, water queens, but then after securing the waters you are the only one that can get them, so no worries right?) there's no need to rush other schools. Pick up the death artifacts on the way, and then let the most badass SC/army rush your 600 chaff army backed up by the ankh and mist warriors while your gargoyles fly in to cut off retreat routes. Death through turn limit.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Well, that was also with a total lack of resources devoted to early expansion as well. One turn of buying units for expansion. You can do much better and still stick pretty much to what I was advocating by buying regular units for 3-4 turns. I basically decided to sit down and play a game where i bought just mages all game. You'll note I said the MA/LA guide was an ok place to start for early expansion, I just wanted to see how a pure mage set-up fared, for theoretical purposes.

(1) Crazy amount of research in year 1 without the pretender doing most of it.
(2) Plenty of gem income, even with few provinces.
(3) Had a clam forger (W3 empowered to N1) and an earth forger (empowered to E3) mage by the end of year 2. (Almost didn't have the second one. Odds of getting an E2 are actually ~1/15 because of the 10% chance at an extra +1 WESD, but that still means you could look at a lot of mages before getting one).
(4) About 6k gold from Lucky 3 over the course of the first year alone. Now, that includes a 3k event, which you don't expect to see, but i'm guessing your first year expectation with lucky is >4k gold from events even with a half-dozen territories. That's rather... substantial.

Basically, my LA R'lyeh build could afford not to expand very fast. While I haven't tried this in MP, I imagine this is useful if people are going to get disturbed should you make a push for land provinces. (You want to secure water faster than that, but you probably don't want to snag ~20ish provinces advocated for indie expansion rate since that will necessitate a large land holding that might provoke a war before you're really ready for one).

Edit
And to my advantage, I already had the research and the mages for combat support by the middle of year 2. (3 W1E1S3D1 mages with crystal shields). Evoc 5 by the middle of year 2 for Gift of the Heavens was both rather early and quite devastating for my move to land. So a 'pure' mage build is looking at being slow out of the gates, but rapidly catching up when its mages come online early. Since you'll also have ramped up the freespawn production by then with increasing dominion in many of your territories, its also far easier to find the chaffe to field for those mages.

More Edit
Ok, maybe i'll try a remote site searching version of the same to see how my gem totals compare at year 1 and year 2 end, and how my research compares. Also, how my dominion spread compares, since a mobile pretender will spread dominion more widely (which helps with generating those freespawn).

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Ok, new game, I'm going to try a couple of your suggestions:

(1) 8 starting mindflayers. Its more investment in initial expansion than I made, which means its not actually going to be a good measure vs. what I did, so i'll probably have to play another game where i invest 400 in slave troops or something.
(2) Remote searching. I wasn't attacking spending gems for remote searching, I just thought it was funny you were against spending on sea serpents when you were spending so much more on remote searching.

I'm still not sold on the void lurker though. Only two slots...

I'm going with a vaguely rainbow master Lich:
F1A3E4S4D5B4 Lk3 Mg3 all other bad scales Dom8

I took the S mostly so i could teleport with my pretender, still not sure how worthwhile this is when every other mage i have will be able to do so.

I want A because Perpetual Storm is actually a reasonably decent global for you since it will help protect *all* your troops from arrow fire on land, not to mention arrow fend, etc... and A3 gives you enough Air you can build the boosters after a RoW or Staff of Elements. (Bags of Air are good anyway because of the free air elemental - for mage teleport into PD squads).

F1 will allow him to cast magma eruption.

B4 is a +2 strength minor blessing for your void summons, and ability to forge Robes of the Magi when you can get some blood slaves. Also, I didn't feel i needed substantial fire or any water with remote searching, and nature wasn't high priority if he wasn't site searching either, so it was either Blood or be deeper in something else. Maybe deeper in something else was the right call, but Robes of the Magi are nice, and there are some other blood-crafts that are useful. Basically, its blood for forging.

The one thing this isn't going to do is find the free fortresses underwater, which is annoying.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

S is nice on your pretender because you can script it for returning when you are out site-searching.

Why don't you get rid of the B4 and take N4 instead? You get regen for your sacreds, regen on anyone you give a shroud to, and you get to find those forts. You won't find any blood sites underwater in any case.

You can wish for blood slaves to get into blood. With luck-3 you'll get Cthugul the Stargazer by the time you want to wish, and he's S5 with 3 misc slots (and a head, of course :)).

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

End of Year 1 Synopsis:

Gem Income: Significantly lower (Tiamat just coming online at the start of year 2)
Income: Significantly lower (not province related - see below)
Provinces: About the same (8 instead of 6, but weaker independents overall - ichthyids instead of shamblers and tritons is a big difference)
Research: About the same (Conj 3 1/2 / Evoc 2 / Thaum 1 not in that order)
Fortresses: Significantly lower (1)
Temples: Significantly more (3) - but i needed them to start boosting dominion (did not need in other set up).
Laboratories: No new labs (vs. 1 in the other set up).
Commanders: Significantly fewer mages (no second recruitment center)

Lets talk about a big difference between a mobile pretender and a static pretender - dominion spread. Most of my provinces had 5+ dominion in the other set up because the pretender visited all of them and got 2 turns of dominion spread checks in each one.

Why is that so important for this set up? Because you really need to spread those luck scales. I saw substantially fewer events than in the other game, and substantially less cash and gems from events because I didn't have the luck scales in most of my provinces. A mere 1k gold and two death gem events for a whole year.

About those 8 illithid troops:
They didn't help the army expand for longer. 3 provinces and they needed to be resupplied with troops (chaffe screen entirely gone). Indeed, one could probably say that I took more provinces because this map made resupply easier. In fact, I think they took *more* losses than my initial expansion squad from the other game while taking those first 3 provinces against *weaker* opposition, with only the illithids surviving. (Other game's expansion squad was initial troops + 2 crab troops, 2 atlantian slave troops, 2 13 resource atlantian troops, 1 lobo - 120 gold worth of troops because i also started with a mage).

In virtually all ways this start was worse by a substantial amount.

(oh, for what its worth, starspawn priests are research 6 in Mg3, while starspawn mages are research 10 or 11 (1/10)).

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Wow, I'd forgotten how lousy the early game with R'lyeh is. And those scales make it even worse. 6 provinces is better than I did.

With those scales my biggest question is how could you afford a Mage a turn? I made do with Priest and maybe an illithid.

Am I doing something wrong for expansion? There's no point in mage support without anything researched and besides you're trying for a research lead so you don't want to pull mages away from that. Do you just wait for critical mass of the freespawn chaff & Void summons?

What about an expansion pretender? You really don't need a lot of magic on him to diversify.

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Because i'm not (aggressively) manual site searching, remember? ;) I suppose N would let me cast Haruspex at least. Eh, the first year is already sufficiently worse that I'm not sure it matters.

And S might be nice, but its also a liability when someone decides to pimp a mage and go mage dueling for you. Not having S makes you immune to mage duel, and when every other mage you ever build will have S...

Re: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands
 

Illithids are suck, crabs are rawk. (troop-wise, the starspawn mages are also rawk)