Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

No, besides some water nations I don't think I ever fought anyone with national access to water. You're right though, Wolven Winter (or fighting in cold provinces in general) is going to really hurt you. I'd claim that if you can get out Grip of Winter, Darkness, or some Curse of Stones, you can at least have an even fight in cold weather, but it won't be nearly so painless if you were fighting in heat-1. I actually did use one more super-secret strategy in the late game; I'll elaborate on that during my lunch break.

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

does it involve casting second sun or spamming heat from hell?

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

It involved staking out a decent position by mid-game, turtling up, and then using remote attack spells (mainly Black Death, Tidal Wave, Volcano) plus Raven Feast. Besides the direct damage to your foe's income and the extra death gems this brings, it lets you manage the diplomatic situation. You can use it to weaken potential threats, incite wars amongst your neighbors, and to help keep the balance of power in your neighbor's wars. You want these conflicts to be as long, drawn out, and costly as possible. A few examples. If you have one neighbor that is strong in water magic, you can drop Tidal Waves on his neighbor in order to incite a war between them. Once they are at war, you can focus your remote attacks on the leader of that war in order keep the scales as evenly balanced as possible. When all of your threatening neighbors are fighting their blood-feuds against their evenly matched neighbors, you can snap up your smaller and weaker neighbors without having to worry about interference. Hopefully, by the time the bloody wars are over, you will have enough of a resource advantage over your neighbors that they will not threaten you. This strat can also be used to help break up any coalition that is forming against you.

This is of course a late game strategy. For Raven Feast, you will need to trade for 2 Air boosters, empower an A1, and then use that A4 caster to make boosters as needed for your other A1s. This is expensive way to get air casters (30 gems for empower, another 30 for boosters), but not much more so than summoning an Air Queen. And while the Raven Feast income isn't game breaking, it helps deflect suspicion from you and onto all the other strong air powers in EA. After all, who would suspect Argatha of having a battery of A4 casters? You also want to avoid using too many Volcanoes, as that would point the finger back at you. For the extra death gem income that you are pulling in, I would recommend the standard tarts or bane lords. I went with WraithLords since they could take advantage of my strong dominion during war and summon ghosts during "peace". The ghosts make nice underwater troops, can reverse the usual Argathan weakness to cold, and can be varied with the underwater fire elementals to provide another surprise. It also seemed very thematic that the dead pop of my enemies would be brought back as ghosts serving in my armies. Unfortunately, this strategy is way too expensive even with CBM, so I would stick with the stand bys. :)

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

I dunno, discouraging people from trying hard to kill you pre-late-game is hard as Agartha. Not only do you have a reputation for being weak, you *are* weak. And have glaring weaknesses on top of your subpar units. You'd need a game full of n00bs to even get that far (and be in any sort of dominating or competitive position).

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

Oh, I am not denying the early game weakness at all. Getting to a competitive position in the mid game definitely requires luck, diplomacy, and a willingness for ruthlessness. I would say that Argatha with a E9N6 bless expands fairly rapidly against independents, but as you say it is at a disadvantage against the other nations.

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

Inciting conflicts between powers and not being discovered while harvesting what remains is generally a good plan for any nation, but what does that have to do with Agartha in particular?

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

By the way, how good is Raven Feast? Last time I saw it mentioned, people said it was not worth using, but it was really a long time ago.

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

It's better than alchemy, but it uses up a mage turn. Also, it upsets reanimators. In this case, it has the added benefit of making it look like your rituals are from an A/D nation.

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

Does anyone else see ravenfeast? I know its not blocked by domes.

Re: EA Agartha - the game's red-headed stepchild (CBM)
 

Not tested in MP but...

In CBM 1.6, with a F4E9N4 sleeping ForgeLord (Order 3, Heat 3, Death 2, Misfortune 2, Magic 1) you can expand on turn 2 by building an ancient lord (who fights) and three ancient ones to accompany your prophet and starting troops, and build a very solid expansion party of eight ancient ones and an oracle, every two turns thereafter (quicker eventually). Your first expansion party is vulnerable to (really) bad luck but after that they shouldn't have to worry about anything but the type of indies that everyone has to be careful of (elephants etc).

Your bless makes your recruit anywhere ancient ones useful and is nice for your thugs. If acquire some decent size two units to mix in with your ancient ones and limit the size disadvantage, and find lizard shamans eventually, things don't seem sooo bad, although ultimately your lack of maneuverability will limit you badly.