R\'yleh? - edited
 

Anyone got any good ideas? I think I like the R'yleh concept the best, but I'm having trouble putting together a victory strategy. Please pick your brain for any tips you might have! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

[ January 12, 2004, 03:54: Message edited by: Tex Pete ]

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As far as battle strategies go using a combination of illithids (I prefer the cheaper ones that are less resource intensive and only use mind bLasts) and shambler thralls and/or lobo guards seems to work wonders on most armies. Just be sure to protect the illithids with other (preferably mindless) units.

If you plan on using the void gate frequently then be sure to use Starspawn priests to do the summonings. Since they sometimes get attacked (by both the monsters they may summon and an occassional horror) you may want to arm them with a few items, or better yet set their battle orders to retreat, though I'm not sure if you can retreat from a botched void gate summoning. A magically strong pretender might be in order as well, since most if not all of the void gate summons I've seen are sacred troops. I'd also recommend periodically assigning a different priest to void gate duty. That way if one goes insane or dies from an attack you'll have another priest with a decent summoning skill.

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Choose a Wyrm to use to expand early (immune to poison, high hp, regenerates and most of the indeps in the sea are tritons) without magic and pick primarily scales.

You can get an early foothold on the land using Illithids, get and take a few provinces on land while your wyrm beats down the seas.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">There's several different pretender designs I use for R'Yleh, but every one of them involves order 34, luck 3, and at least magic 2. Sloth 3 is workable, as your Illithids are gold limited, not resource limited. I take luck 3, as I believe that it helps with the void gate summons, and because R'Yleh's national heroes are extremely powerful mages.

Your armies require lots of fodder at the front to give your mindflayers time to paralyze as many troops as possible, this requires a combination of both lobo guards and other warriors to get the most out of the leadership abilities of your Illithid Lords.

For my pretender, I've tried many things, from an Astral 6, water 3 void lord, to an astral 4 void lurker, to a wyrm with no magic at all. Starspawn mages are very powerful and ave 2 random picks, which gives you access to a great deal of spells.

To start I usually recruit a starspawn priest, and as many illithids as I can in the first turn. On the next turn, I place the Illithids as far back as possible, with the cannon fodder as far forward as possible. This makes the tritons go for the infantry first. Your infantry will take losses from the poison, but they are easily replaced. I also tend to send my pretender out to either help with the attacks if a Wyrm, or to cast mind burn from the back row if an astral mage.

You can quickly take most weaker independents under water, and then move onto land, where you can probably move your fodder back towards the back to decrease the accuracy of enemy archers and give more time for paralyzing to happen.

From there just see how the battle goes and try to keep your enemies from pushing out your dominion.

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Order 34?!

I must have missed that option. That really makes Order imbalanced http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif

If you are new to R'lyeh do a few tests before you go throat deep into it. And remember on land you will more than likely be using a mix of normal and your R'lyeh forces, so look for things that work well with land units and combine them

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Get Water-9, Order-3, Luck-3, Magic>=2
Research Alt-2(3), Con-4(6), Thau-5
Script them 'Quickness' as first spell. Your mages now double their actions.
Get your Starspawn Mages 'Shrouded (at Con-2). This provides them w/ additional Quickness(50) and def +4.
At Con-4 forge them boots of quickness...
At Con-6 forge them Spell Focus each and a Banner of Northern Star.
At Thau-5 script them to 'Quickness, Soul slayx4'.
Wreak some serious havoc.

And script one mage to cast 'Light of the Nortern Star' to get that +1 Astral...

Oh, at some point make them reinvigoration items. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Oh, and DO protect them and don't let them near mindless hordes.

- Humer

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thanks everyone, I'm going to try these ideas out. I've been having some trouble the flying tritons but hopefully moving my leaders back will protect them. I'll let you know.

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Actually; a better option that doesn't fatigue (unless you like carrying gems, or scripting it) is a Banner of the Northern Star, that provides the +1 Astral to astral Users effect. Also you might play with other spells than Soul Slay. Which while nice, a few paralyzes, star fires, stellar cascades are all very nice.

In dealing with tritons, just mass your units around your leaders (leave them in a massive stack on top of them). Illithids are poor choices to use for fighting tritons since they are costly and cannot use their mind bLast to full effect. Try using a bunch of lobos or alternatively the trampling shamblers.

[ January 12, 2004, 08:06: Message edited by: Zen ]

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On extreme indy strength e.g. 9, try your hand at land before water. 90+ tritons can really, really chew up an undersea army quickly. Star Children can help a lot with indies; set way back, on 'fire'. You'll lose some to bodyguards or strong mages, especially if you try against non-indies, but they're cheap and can be produced on land at coastal castles.
I'd also make a fairly high dominion strength a priority, but it may be less important if you push onto land quickly and build numerous temples.
Astral/water gets you spell foci, starshine helmets, water bracelets (cheap +1 water; 2 water gets you astral clams), some nifty stuff all in all. Astral is powerful; precision attack spells, teleport, gateway, interesting remote summons...
A nature-3 mage will help a lot (nature 2 + thistle mace or moonvine bracelet, say), because that allows Cauldrons of Broth and illithids eat a lot. Nature 5, and cast Gift of Health, which will heal your feebleminded (Void Gate failure) starspawn priests. Also, your most powerful void summons, a Vastness, could benefit from a Gift of Reason because you have no commanders which can match its extreme mobility.
Remember that mind bLast always hits even in storms, or when it's dark, or even when you're blind! It's very long-range too; stay back, use Storms to shut down most flyers and hamper archery if possible, use your free hybrid troops to block and buy time if need be.

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As a point of interest, one of the developers states that the higher your summoning skill, the better the summons you get. As such, rotating your unit in the void gate may make sure you have two units with some skill, but you will miss out on the chance of getting the really big summons. Check out the “Stop the Insanity” thread for more on summons.

Another tactic with your armies is to put everyone as far back as possible with the infantry on hold and attack. This increases the number of mind bLasts hitting the enemy before you have to grapple with them. I particularly like defeating an invasion force with this race, as the paralyzing effect ensures that most attackers are killed, rather than running away to fight another day.

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I just finished a game with Ry'leh and meant to post a comprehensive thread about the race; looks like someone beat me to it, so I'll just toss out some ideas here (I'm definately a newbie compared to most the regulars here, but I'm working on it).

Not really knowing how to play Ry'leh, I took bad scales: Order 3, Growth 1, Misfortune 2 and Drain 1. My pretender was a Void Lurker (the big mushroom) with 9 Astral, 4 Water and 4 Air.

If I were doing it again, I would make very different choices. Order 3 was important because Ry'leh's troops are very gold heavy, and order increases gold (i think). Growth was also useful because those damn squid sure eat a lot. Misfortune 2 was an awful idea because it meant I lost at least 7 priests to insanity or horrors lurking in the void gate; I imagine with higher luck I would have fared better. Drain 1 wasn't a huge penalty but research suffered, as Ry'leh's researchers are expensive and there are plenty of other things you'll want to use them for.

As for battlefield tactics, the Illithid mind bLast is definately the weapon of choice whenever possible. A group of about 5-8 squids at the back set on "Fire largest" (or whatever) will decimate most independents and, more importantly, just about any small force. Mind bLast also makes an EXCELLENT pretender killer, as it effectively removes them from battle but still lets you kill them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif . The cheap in resources squids are usually adequate unless you are facing fast or flying troops, in which case the armed squids are the only ones with a chance of surviving in melee. Unfortunately, the downside to all this awesomeness is cost, both up front and in upkeep.

The slave troopers are fairly worthless as anything but cannon fodder. I experimented with each different level, even the insanely expensive Version decked out in meteorite armor. I'd recommend just getting the cheapest: the others performed better, but not 20 resources a piece better. These aren't elite troops, they are cannon fodder, so treat them like it!

The lobo troopers are even cheaper, but they require magical leadership. One major problem I had with Ry'leh is the fairly low leadership values of it's commanders. This is especially apparent because a large number of Ry'leh's troops are magical and require magical commanders. Yet magical commanders can often not lead much in the way of normal troops, and vice-versa, which can cause some major problems. The Traitor commander was unused in my game, save as a garrison to patrol the capitol province.

The crab hybrids are quite cost effective (even for their high cost) for underwater combat; unfortunately they can't leave the water. The shambler thralls are fairly similar in pounding power, and additionally, can both trample and leave the water, which I thought made them a better choice in general. The only caveat to consider is that thralls require magical leadership, whereas the crabs don't. They cost the same, so its really a situational thing.

As for the leaders, I stuck mainly to the Starspawn mages, with an occasional SS priest thrown in. The mages are awesome leaders and awesome mages, with quite a variety of magic. If you recruit enough you should be able to access decent spells within every sphere of magic, and if you have some gems lying around, empowering some in the rarer schools is a highly profitable venture. I found earth and death to compliment their inherent astral and water power well. I never really did anything with nature, though it certainly would have been useful (for the supply items if nothing).

I'm still learning what spells are useful and which aren't, so I can only offer vague suggestions in that regard. Water gets some good summons, and astral + a few of something else pulls down some good ones too, so I focused pretty heavy on conjuration. Obviously got the prereqs for body ethereal, personal luck, etc, because with such powerful ethereal mages, it would be silly not to. Hit constrution pretty hard too, as I like to outfit my commanders with lots of toys. Good spells on the battlefield were quickness, soul slay and star fires. Summons I made a lot of use of were fall bears, water trolls, ETHER GATE (cast that one a lot) and in the end game a bunch of abominations just because they are rad.

Finally, I didn't start using indepedent provinces to supplement my squid army until very late in the game, hence almost my entire army throughout the game had been produced in my capitol. In retrospect, this was silly, as just a few squads of archers or heavy inf/calv provide a fairly cheap and effective supplement to your mind-bLasting army. Additionally, independent troops may have better movement than your squid, which were rather slow in my experience.

Hopefully this will spark some debate or at least offer a few ideas into playing Ry'leh. I certainly enjoyed the nation and will be playing them again (after I've tried the rest! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif )

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">You bet!

Starspawn mages can come with nature-2, but it's extremely rare (1/64 chance). So with all these Tritons around - not even speaking of Atlantis - your first attempt at Communion will probably be to get Poison Ward. 2 Starchilds and a mage or priest with nature-1 is all you need, add additional mages/priests if you need more coverage, and use cheap decoys (loboes) to buy the time to cast Communion Master first.

Note R'lyeh relies a lot on mind-domination spells, which are resistable. You can use Spell Foci and/or Rune Smashers to crack the target's MR, but increasing the magic level of your mages via communion is another way to achieve the same result. Using both approaches at the same time often yield great rewards.

Try Master Enslave someday, with 16 communion slaves, a natural astral-5 Starspawn and all the +astral gear you can get (Starshine Skullcap, Crystal Shield, Banner of the Northern Star, and either Crytal Coin or, better, Ring of Sorcery). Add a Rune Smasher and a Spell Focus. Give 9 astral pearls to your Enslaver. And tell us what you think (If I'm not mistaken, that's +7 magic penetration, or +8 if you use the Ring of Sorcery).

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The Shroud is Con 4, not 2. And unless I'm very much mistaken, Starspawn have no feet to wear boots (besides which they are Con 6, not 4) ...

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I'm afraid that they have feet. They are not intended to, but some or all of them do, unless the nofeet function made it into the 2.06 patch. Expect the feet to disappear in the next patch.

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'm playing 2.06, and neither my priests nor my mages have feet.

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I have never tried this, so any input would be appreciated. The basic mage for this race is 80 gp, which is pretty cheap, and they get one astral point.

Is buying lots of these and setting up communion slave/master teams a viable option? If it spreads the exhaustion cost and boosts the masters level, does this allow some pretty powerful battlefield spells to be cast, over and over in the same battle?

Any played with this? Does it make sense for this race?

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<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">They also make excellent researchers in a magic 2 dominion.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Next to Pythium, R'Lyeh has some of the most cost effective communion slaves available, and this does allow for the communion masters to cast some pretty powerful spells. You probably want to script a cold resistance into one of the masters however, as one of your masters is bound to cast breath of winter, and as it also is cast on every other mage in the communion this can end up with you having a bunch of dead mages very quickly.

Any played with this? Does it make sense for this race? [/QB][/quote]

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Same here. Starspawns have no feet. Guess the no-feet flag made it into the patch.

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Not quite. The Stargazer hero still has feet=)