LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

The title says it all. Advice on expansion, strategy, deployment, pretender design, research priorities, SC building and even how to best use their kick *** battle magic will all be greatly appreciated.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

There sacreds are recruitable at every castle.

There sacreds are blind...could work well with Utterdark...possibly darkness.

Summon as many Umbrals as possible and gift of reason them.

Recruit hordes of crossbows then flaming arrows, although this never impressed me, when I tried it.

You have fire/death magic,research construction straight away, get out as many skull mentors/lightless lanterns as possible. You really should win the research race you know.

I remember having alot of golems teleporting around causing mayhem as well.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Thanks bob, anyone else want to add something?

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

With earth, death, and fire, LA Agartha can get some nice evocation spells.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

I'm hardly in a position to be giving advice, but I'll share a couple of reflections from my SP experience with them recently.

Even though the recruitable-anywhere sacred Blindfighters are tempting, in practice they seem to have trouble doing damage against real armies with their shortswords, perhaps because of their high encumbrance. Strength of Giants and an E9 bless helps, but Magma Eruption and/or skelly spam are the decisive factors when I'm going up against huge armies of EA Ermorian legions. If you do take a nice bless, though, Sepulchrals are not to be overlooked.

Ktonian necromancers are still somewhat frail and tend to die to incidental arrow hits and/or lucky cavalry charges. I ought to include Ironskin in my setups but it's hard to squeeze it into the 5 round limit. Could use Iron Warriors instead and stack multiple necromancers in the same square.

Iron Bane + Cave Knights or Umbrals = nasty. Keep this one well away from Blindfighters.

Umbrals + Iron Warriors are nice, too, but it's not easy to script effectively.

Tomb Oracles are nice SCs, but the lack of immortality is annoying if you happen to get Muted or Feebleminded. Make sure to bring a good helmet.

Overall, Agartha seems pretty strong in Evocation and Alteration, depending upon how your initial gem setup goes. A recent game against a few AIs went really sour when my first 15 provinces yielded only +1 death gems when searched with Dark Knowledge, since I took Death-3 and was really counting on transitioning to summoned troops. With a good gem income I'd probably rate Alteration a little higher because Marble Warriors and Darkness are powerful buffs to Umbrals, and that way you don't need to bring many mages into combat (so they can keep researching). Evocation lets you translate gold into battles won, but risks getting killed by a lucky arrow. Of course Conjuration-3 is a necessity.

-Maximilian

Edit: Also, because mobility is a problem, try to either get Air or Nature (for Faerie Queens) on your pretender or else hire Obscuro and have him forge Wind Boots.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Additional:- If this is your pick for the 62 player mega game I would definatly consider having a strong bless. Recruitable sacreds from every castle is a big advantage.

The big weakness of LA Agartha is slow moving troops, they mostly have 1 strategic move and your sacreds have 5 AP's or something rubbish.

Oh yea those drakeriders are expensive but cool, when the rider dies they become cave drakes. If you can be bothered to micro mix 1 with 2 sacreds for maxium effect.

Your armies consist of a brick wall (sacreds, drakeriders) with a horde of heavy crossbows/battlemages in the rear.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

5 APs is not too bad in some ways, considering that if you Hold and Attack and the enemy does too you'll meet up pretty close to the Agarthan lines, which means your mages can still hit things even with their terrible precision.

It does make it hard to keep your battlemages alive, though.

-Max

P.S. Here's something else you might want to try: Tomb Oracles + Earth Boots + <Summon Earthpower, Earthquake>. Two or three oracles should eliminate most enemy mages, and then the Umbrals or N4-blessed Sepulchrals you presumably brought along can clean up. I forget which tree Earthquake is in but if it's in Alteration-5 then you're extra-happy since you're going there for Darkness anyway. [Nope, it's Evocation-5.]

P.P.S. Don't forget that once the Cave Knight dies, the Cave Drake is free of upkeep.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Thanks alot for the Max, those are very good tips.
The blindfighters i find arent too useful because even with a good bless they arent particularly good. They have very good protection, a decent shield and are blind but thats about all the have going for them. On the other hand they are slow, easy to hit, very fast to tire human troops with little damage potential and a high resource cost. I can see them being used as meat-shields with some sort of earth/nature bless but i dont feel that a bless on them is worth the point cost.
The tomb oracles(as thugs/SCs) and the sepulchralss could make for strong bless units but the sepulchrals arent hard to deal with for most people(with undead being fairly easy to counter) and take a long time to mass where-as the tomb oracles can function nearly aswell without a bless.
I can see an earth bless working well with this nation(sepulchrals are armoured, correct?) as it would help blindfighters, sacred mages, SC oracles and sepulchrals but not sure if its the way to go.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Blindfighters do have a pretty decent MR and more hit points than the average human. In many ways they're about equivalent to Helheim's Hirdmen except for the much higher resource cost and the encumbrance problem--higher protection but lower defense and no glamour. An E9 bless suits them pretty well.

I like to take a high death bless if I'm playing a nation with sacred mages. I'm not sure if it actually helps me all that much since many spells either kill units or leave them untouched, but it does at least give you the potential to be tricky. Try the above-mentioned earthquake trick when you're operating under a death bless; enemy mages will probably die and a fair number of the enemies that get damaged will be afflicted. I'm not sure afflictions are all that crippling to regular troops so who knows if it's worth it objectively, but death is the only bless that enhances a mage's destructiveness and I love battlemages, so there you go. (Plus I like being able to throw D9 Clouds of Death around on my pretender.)

Yes, sepulchrals are armored.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Okay, here's another datapoint. As I said, I'm still learning Agartha, and in my last 2 games (8 Impossible AIs on Glory of the Gods, 7 random and 1 set to my own T'lan Imass mod) I've stalled about 30 turns in. This is curious to me because I thought I had that part of the game figured out, so I went back to my last race (EA C'tis) to compare. I figured LA Agartha would be easier if anything, because the troops have heavier armor and the mages have higher research. However, C'tis really does have low resource costs even for Heavy Infantry (10 gold/15 resource), as well as cheaper forts (LA Agartha's cheapest fort is 1000 gold, and it takes something like 5 months to construct). I think now that I probably wasn't expanding fast enough as Agartha; I should go back and check, but I doubt I had 15 provinces at the end of the first year. Awesome battle magic and national summons are all well and good but it takes a while to get it rolling.

Next time I think I will probably take better scales (I've never taken Death scales before and I think it hurt a lot) and focus more on the early game. Perhaps Prod-3, Order-3, Misfortune-3, Drain-2, Growth-1.

-Maximilian

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Thanks again max. Anyone got any advice on pretender set-up or how to build agarthan SCs with their fairly limited magic(i have some ideas but want to hear others)?

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Here's another update from my learning experiences with Agartha. I usually want to focus on a good lategame, and so in Agartha's case that means taking Astral and Nature on my pretender (which also gives access to Air through Faerie Queens and/or Gift-of-Reason'ed Tartarians). The part I've been having trouble with is my early game expansion, and the most successful early game I've had so far (playing ten turns or so of a game and then quitting) was when I forgot about trying to play them as a bless nation and focused on conventional troops. IIRC my pretender was:

D9S6N4 imprisoned master lich
Order-3
Growth-2
Misfortune-3
Drain-2

Drain-2 doesn't hurt research much because Ktonian necromancers are sacred and high-research. I had plenty of cash in the early game, and since I'm using conventional troops I can use cave captains instead of Ktonian Necromancers (required for large numbers of Blindfighters). Once I'd taken the territory around my capitol I had about 200 resources, which is pretty average. Expansion worked well with 25-30 crossbowmen and 5-6 cave drakes and 1-3 entrance guards as blockers; on indies 9 they were taking out most provinces with 1 or 2 losses each time. This let me build necromancers most turns and research toward (in this case) Conjuration-5 for Umbrals. (There was an ichthyid province nearby, so I knew I could get an underwater leader, and I wanted to expand into the water ASAP. This was Glory of the Gods. Edit: okay, this was dumb of me. I forgot that ichthyids don't have any undead leadership, so I'm about to blow an extra 30 gems for a Tomb Oracle. [Nope, Mound King was cheaper.])

Basically I had to forego an E9 bless and take Drain-2, and got Growth-2 and Heat-0 in exchange relative to my earlier tries. In play this forced me to forego blindfighters for my expansion, which turned out to be not much of a loss. I expect to be in a much stronger position by the time I finally run into the AI nations, and I just may play this game through to completion. My necromancers are slightly weaker than in previous games because of 1.) no E9 bless and 2.) Drain scale, but as long as I make battles short this shouldn't be much of a problem. I was able to afford my favorite D9 bless on my necromancers, which makes me happy.

Hope that's useful to somebody.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Thanks again. Im assuming that the magic gives a nice bless for oracles and sepulchrals(+2 MR, minor regen to avoid afflictions and D9 to handle other tough units/SC's) aswell as the necromancers(MR is always good, sacred shrouds keep diseased necromancers alive and D9 makes them cripple enemies with afflictions). The D9 is probably also used for death globals and kick starting tartarians.


edit: Can anyone give me any advice on what to use for thugs/SCs at various points in the game and how to equip each type?

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

My astral and nature picks were motivated less by blesses than by the desire to have access to Dispel, Wish, Gift of Reason, Faerie Queen, Gift of Health, Ring of Sorcery/Wizardry forging (which I find very useful in jump-starting any number of booster paths), and yes, Tartarians. All late-game stuff, with my scales and battlemages intended to carry me through the mid-game. I might have settled for N3 instead of N4 except for the fact that, yes, regen is a nice bonus on sepulchrals and mages, but N4 also means that I can forge a thistle mace to forge a treelord staff to summon Tarrasques if I want to.

Access to Dispel has become more important to me since LA Ermor dropped Burden of Time on me in one game and it became clear that none of the AIs had any interest in dispelling it. It wasn't crippling given that I had skull mentors, but it just wasn't any fun and I wanted it to go away. LA Agartha has a tiny bit of astral on mages but I'm more comfortable with S5 or S6. (On a master lich Mind Duel vulnerability doesn't matter.)

I'll reiterate that I'm no kind of pro, especially at LA Agartha, but so far this is working for me. I'm leading in income and second in provinces and research and steadily consuming MA Ulm and a neglected corner of indies. I have more money than I know what to do with so I'm just building temples and forts; this is far superior to my previous strategy (D9E9S4N4 master lich, Dom 4, Order-3 Misfortune-3 Death-3 Cold-3 I think on the theory that gems matter more than cash in the late game) which almost got me dominion killed and had me constantly strapped for cash. Not a really huge change in the way I spent pretender points, but now it's not a temptation to buy blindfighters. Cave Knights and crossbowmen are my friends, and Cave Drakes are upkeep-free. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Doesn't hurt that I've gotten lucky in my site-searching, either. +18 death gems per turn, summer of year 3.

-Max

P.S. I haven't used any thugs or I'd speak up; I think I mentioned that I did try a Tomb Oracle with the marble breastplate thing + Charcoal Shield + Fire Brand + Soul Vortex towards the end of one game that I was losing, but it wasn't enough to turn the game around. It's hard to go wrong with Wraith Lords, though, even if it's hard to forge Winged Boots for them.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Would some such as, say a robe of shadows be better than a marble breastplate for an SC who can cast the earth protection spells(stoneskin/ironskin/invunerability)?

Also do you prefer firebrands or shadowbrands?

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

I would say a robe of shadows is always better than a marble breastplate, etheral is always better than protection. Don't foget boots of stone/robe of shadows combo as well.

I like both swords, my favourites are SC's that can have 1 of each and a shield ie...3 arms plus. There should be a spell that can grow body parts... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/stupid.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

If you had to pick one of the swords which would it be? And vrs most regular armies i would probably take the breatplate(assuming the SC didnt have earth magic) over the robe since the robe lets you ignore 75% of regular damage(with magic doing alot of damage to your low prot SC) but high prot, generally 20+, lets you ignore alot more than that vrs most weapons(bows, spears, shortswords ect).

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

I would take the breastplate (or boots of stone) normally, but as you say Tomb Oracles can cast Ironskin. Umbrals are ethereal and still take plenty of damage from regular troops, but a naked Wraith Lord is Prot 22 with Ethereal, which is basically what you'd get from a Robe of Shadows-equipped Tomb Oracle; with Soul Vortex a naked Wraith Lord is essentially immune to most normal units in any quantity. Edit: Don't forget that a Marble Breastplate increases encumbrance and a Robe of Shadows doesn't. [I had a bug once where a Wraith Lord wearing Boots of Stone took huge amounts of fatigue from spellcasting. Don't know if it happens with the Marble Breastplate but it's still +8 spellcasting encumbrance or something.]

So yeah, Robe of Shadows. Of course a Ring of Regen would be nice given their high HP base, and of course a Pendant of Luck. Reinvigoration can be gotten from Summon Earthpower instead of items; perhaps Boots of Quickness, Horror Helmet, and Golden Shield would make a nice combination given the death magic on the oracle and the high parry of the shield. For swords I'm partial to Woundflame if you can get it, and a Shadow Brand if you can't for the area-effect AN damage; but perhaps there's another sword that leverages the oracle's high strength better. I think there's a sword that does area-effect AP or AN damage.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Slightly off topic, but is Bone Armour (built in Vortex) worth it against high MR troops like Helheim? For example if you were to put it on an Ice Devil?

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Probably not, because 1.) their MR is high enough that you will leech only a fraction of the normal HP/fatigue, and 2.) Vanir are expensive enough to be worth killing even one-by-one without crowd control spells. That is to say, Soul Vortex usually doesn't kill all that many chaff so much as it gives you back fatigue, and against Vanir it will kill even fewer. Not worth the low Prot on Bone Armour.

-Max

LA Agartha technique
 

This is how I play Agartha - in single player

Get a rainbow pretender great sage, and research nothing but Conjuring-5. Defend yourself as yuo see fit until you get there. Then send you sage out to find sites and start summoning the crap out of Umbrals. Use them as your front line (with a few meat shields to take the first volley of arrows). Keep summoning them in bulk, if you can build up an army of about 30-40 of them in your front lines you are pretty much unbeatable because they have good MR as well as being ethereal. They also can take on water provinces well if you summon a wraith lord and give him an item for water breathing or something. Banes work well if you are low on gems.

While you are holding your own and taking other people's home sectors, research up gift of reason and start GOR'ing umbrals up the wazoo. Equip them which charcoal shields, marble armor, amulet of MR and amulet of luck, and maybe some handy boots for either flying (nice for hit-n-run) or for quickness or rejuvination. They have a good drain life and generally double their HP to about 128 and stay there during most battles. I have seen a single GOR Umbral thus equipped take out hundreds of enemies, and easily anything but a main force. They'll die quick against a true enemy force with good magic users and so on though. As an aside, they'll take a TON of hits and get lots of crippling ailments pretty quickly. Be prepared to bring them home after 8-10 rounds of fighting and give all of their loot to a new fresh GOR umbral.

Lachniet

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Are the Iron Corpses worth it? I've been toying with them in SP and find that they are somewhat effective when combined with the Iron Marrionettes spell. They also come 3 for 1 D gem and can be summoned by your lowest level mage. I'm using CBM, I'm not sure how much difference that makes.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

If you're using Umbrals, don't forget to have someone cast Iron Warriors on them. You don't even have to GOR them, and now you have a 2-gem wonder that's almost as tough as a naked Wraith Lord.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

I like to go with a Lord of Rebirth with death, earth, and nature all at 4. Low death and earth make nice blesses for your battlemages, and the regen helps your high HP sacreds (as well as patching up diseased mages). Add to that the fact that you've got no native access to nature, which in turn gets you later game access to air (through Fairy Queens), water, and even blood (through Lamia Queens), and you've got yourself a fairly nice setup.

From there, I've had luck with all kinds of scales, but generally you can ignore magic because you'll be recruiting as many necromancers as you can all the time so your research'll be fine without it, and cold 1 is a good idea as plenty of the undead units you're summoning have cold auras. Growth/Death is a tricky decision that I've been puzzling over for a while now. Growth is of course awesome because of the income, lowered affliction rate on your old mages, and all around niceness, but the fact of the matter is that you'll be switching over to summons sooner than most others so it's really your call.

Other than that, either trade or bootstrap your way into blood magic. Blood stones are the most incredible item in the game for Agartha and you can never never never have enough of them. You should be grinding out Tomb Oracles around the same time as you're getting access to mages with blood (you don't have to research the path itself, all those slaves should be going into blood stones) and a couple of tomb oracles with blood stones can drop serious battlefield magic (particularly the "Army of ___" spells) with no micromanagement required.

Another thing to remember is that Tomb Oracles make great thugs in their own right but they're built to help out your armies even moreso, so despite the nice personal buffs that earth and death offer, I recommend keeping them in the back rows. Iron Corpses can soak up damage, but they can't hit anything and have horrifyingly low MR, which sets them back from being a weak unit to being a liability. Skeleton Archers (I think that's the spell, the death/fire one) is absolutely incredible. I don't care how fragile the archers are, it costs five gems to get units with banefire bows and that's just the best thing.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Was playing with LA Agartha, and the lack of gems might be the reason to go for a heavy bless strategy, with everywhere recruitable troops.

The Blindfighters have two main disadvantage: fatigue and damage outlay. This asks for E9B4 bless, and alteration could be neglected for a while. Now you have 24 protection, shrugging of heavy cavalry charges, crossbows (kite shields) even fire evocations with minimal casualties.

It also asks for a turmoil-luck strategy. Especially with the Great Olm multiheroes you might get in CBM (Great Olm or a the immortal Possessed Corpse). And heavy bless will need crap scales somewhere - Turmoil, cold, drain. As your troops are resource-heavy but cheap (so not massed in very big number), this makes a good synergy. E.g.:

Imprisoned druid E9S4N4B4 Dom5 T1P2C2G0L3D2
Imprisoned Titan E9A9 Dom4

Alternative initial expansion is P3 and buy the medium-heavy crossbows. Prot 16 is adequate against most indies.

The slow blindfighters on Hold and Attack are also compatible with your crossbows.

With heavy bless you might go straight for Artifacts, picking lanterns, and Weapons of Sharpness on the way.

While old and fragile, the necromancers are awesome spellcasters. FEDS is arguably one of the best path combinations, and not being cap-only, you should will luck on F3/S2/E4/D4 ones. Very efficient manual site searchers, which is great in the magic-depleted Late era.
You need the pretender to account for your deficiencies though - high S, N and B for blood stones, perhaps A.
Twiceborning them is an option but expensive considering an Oracle cost 30 - do it for the rare randoms.

The main strategic choice is on whatever you want to spending your death gems on.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

LA Agartha shouldn't neglect their Tomb Oracle and Umbral Summons. In fact, these two things can be made the keystone to LA Agartha strategy.

Because Tomb Oracles are sacred, and Blindfighters are decent recruitable everywhere sacreds, a bless build is a perfect option for the nation. An E9N4 is a bless that benefits both TOs and BFs. Go first for Const4, then Conj5, then Alt5 (this nets you equipment, the TOs, and buffs for them). Without even having lvl 6 in anything, you have a battlefield dominator. Equip them with FireBrands/DemonWhips/CharcoalShields - DragonHelms - FirePlate/BlackSteelFullPlate - AmuletOfAntimagic & Luck Pendant. That's all stuff you can forge natively with Const4. Blessed and buffed with Invulnerability your TOs will have 30+ prot, 20 MR, regen, and 85 HP; plus be E3D3H3 and able to drop some other surprises on your foes if needed.

Other strategy is possible. That Ench6 Iron Corpse spell looks tempting. I've never tried a strategy using it though. If going for it, then E9B4+ would make sense to get Bloodstones too. The Iron Corpse spell is 4E gems for 17 Iron Corpses (which have 17 prot). At that cost with those stats they are very worthy. With enough Bloodstones and some natural Earth income, 100 Iron Corpses a turn is imaginable. Supplement those with battlemages, some Tomb Oracles, BlindFighters, and GOR'd Umbrals and LA Argatha is Mid-Late Game powerhouse. the mages and Blindfighters are slow, but Tomb Oracles (or other undead leaders) and Umbrals are not.

Also note that LA Agartha is one of the few nations with the ability to summon undead using undead priests. Problem is they have no undead priest except for Tomb Oracles. This might make focusing on Ench even better, to get Life AFter Death (then just find away to kill a bunch of your mage-priests once [but not twice]).

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

When talking about blessing the Sepulchrals and Tomb Oracles, bear in mind that the game is bugged--blessings don't work for sacred undead unless you apply the blessing hotfix mod from DrPraetorious.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a while back. I might be wrong of course, but blesses seem to work on my undead units.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

LA-Agaratha advice: Avoid CBM umbrals go from 5-7.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Okay, never mind then.

-Max

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

On the other hand, CBM makes iron corpses worth the gems because you can just get so damn many of them. You'll still be in real trouble if you run them up against people who can take control of undead units thank to their horrible MR, but at the very least you can get a serious amount of them for relatively little cost.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

That reminds me that I should finish my LA Agartha guide. Especially considering how many bad advices are floating here.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

Cast Antimagic first turn. It's easy, cheap and effective.

Edit: Oops, maybe not so easy. I thought you could get S2 reasonably comfortably from LA Agartha, but on checking it's actually pretty rare.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

at the cost of 30 gems to empower a single mage to S2, and from there the ability to forge both crystal coins and starshine skullcaps, I would think this tactic is easily in the picture.

There is also an earth spell that raises MR in a small AoE. Though maybe not right for this situation since there are potentially 100's of units.

Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted
 

An amusing alternate build for LA-Agartha.

Seems to me the problem with argatha is rapid expansion.
I happen to like a phoenix.

I look for something like an A2-4 F4 phoenix. However you can profitably mix in blood and/or earth.

Besides blowing up, the phoneix lets you gift of flight either your heavy cav or even more amusing flame corpses.

Phoenix: GoF
Corpses: Attack rear.

They usually spread out quite nicely - and first turn your enemy units are often quite near their mages. Who expect agartha to fly?

Blood on the phoenix give you mixed communion / sabbaths. With Death and blood, you're ok in endgame.

Additionally, some of your hero's are undead. And so make pretty good prophets for reanimation.