Bless for LA C'tis?
 

I really want to use the Tomb Kings that LA C'tis gets as thugs, and I am trying to figure out what the best bless is for them. I am also looking for general tips and tricks that are unique to LA C'tis.

Right now, I'm looking at a W9 S? bless for them, to take advantage of their 0 enc and improve their MR. I took E3 so I can get hammers. Ended up with a sleeping Oracle, W9 E3 S5, O3 S2 H3 D2 L3 M1.

Is this at all viable/decent strategy, or are the Tomb kings just not worth it? What about using the Tomb Priests?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

I forget, do you still get serpent dancers or as I suspect, is that only EA?

Also you may wish to consider Heat or cold on your pretender, to make your opponents problem with encumbrance more pronounced.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

I have Heat 3 already. And no, LA doesn't get serpent dancers. They get serpents and tomb wyrms, both of which can benefit from a W9 bless.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

You could take Earth 4 to give your Sauromancers some reinvig.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Order 3 Luck 3 seems a little counterintuitive, maybe sacrifice some of it for an earth bless? of course i don't know how good luck is for C'tis with heros and all.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Well, strictly speaking it is a little unecessary, but I've grown very fond of what it provides you. I'm not sure what heroes LA C'tis gets, but I can see taking some misfortune.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Order/luck isn't that bad, it has a better payoff early on than order/growth which takes a while to mature.
One could also argue that lucky events are worth more than just the "gold" growth provides. Not that it matters overly, people will choose whatever they like more.

I have had order 3/luck 3 in all my winning games, so it works for me ;).

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

lol well you guys are definitly more well qualified than me, so i bow to your judgements. :)

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Order/Luck is ok, but I'd suggest going O3/L1 or O1/L3 instead of 3 in both, as I don't think 3 in both is too synergistic. The immortal tomb king special hero and the sauromancer special hero with odd paths (can't remember the name of either now, I really would need some coffee...) are just great heroes IMO. Especially the immortal tomb king -> Holy Avenger + Bless and off he goes; if he dies he just comes back a bit more experienced :)

For thugging with Tomb Kings I'd suggest taking S6 to get MR+2. They are nice else, but it would suck to lose them to a horde of H1 priests banishing :P Perhaps something like W9/S6/E4 would be a nice bless LA C'tis.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Always worth remembering that units with native 18 MR (such as the Tomb Kings) can't get the MR benefit from an Astral bless.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

really? why is that? I had no idea

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Not really sure why, but my guess is that it's like that to stop abuse. As a S10 bless would give 22MR before anything else is considered, which could lead to a lot of SC's having 35+MR. That would take some getting through.

Easy enough to test as well. Just create a S4/6/8/10 pretender for any nation with native MR18 units (eg.Ashdod) and turn one into a prophet. You'll see -

Basic MR 18
+1/2/3/4 Bless
Current MR 18.

Would post a screen shot, but sadly don't have access to Dominions in work :(

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Sucks don't it? Work would be much more fun..

So is 18 a fixed limit passed which the bless won't take you, or if you had say 15 MR could you get to 19? Or just those with a native 18 are specifically penalised?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

You just can't get past 18 with the bless.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Tomb Kings have MR 18? I would have been ready to bet my head they have 16... Luckily nobody suggested such a bet...

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Also beware as far as Sacred thugs/SCs go, this is very important- even on a prophet, or using a Shroud, and even when using combat magic that is applied -after- the Bless effect, the Bless effect is factored in LAST, so if you push past 18 through any other means whatsoever, you lose the benefit of the Astral bless.

It's painful, really.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Another problem with this, if you have a MR 16 commander and say 6 astral bless,+2MR since you can go up to 18 with a bless, and put an anti magic amulet, you won't be able to use the bless, it won't have any effect.
So instead of having 16+2+4, it'll be just 16+4 MR.
That's stupid IMO.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

You type slow. <3

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Hm, didn't actually notice this last post of yours...:o

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Going to play LA Ctis soon, anyone willing to post some key aspects about it?

1- recommended bless, yes no? the manual sugegsts LE Ctis is not suited for bless? why is that?
2- Main thugs
3- Key research paths
4- Key units/mages
5- Short, medium, ong term strategies

Any help appreciated!

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Like all versions of C'Tis, their strength is in powerful mages that they can recruit anywhere. City guards and elite warriors are your standard recruitable units, with the occasional sacred serpent thrown in if you don't need to move the army quickly.

The only sacred units LA C'Tis has are sacred serpents and tomb wyrms. Sacred serpents aren't really good enough to be worth investing in a major bless, and tomb wyrms are expensive to reanimate. Your sauromancers are sacred, so they could use a minor earth bless, but don't wear armour, so the earth 9 bless is wasted on them. I'm not sure how the minor death bless interacts with banefire. But not much survives a banefire hit anyways.

Bane lords.

Enchantment 3 for raise skeletons. Evocation 6 for bane fire. Conjuration 5 for bane lords. Construction 6 for equipping them. Alteration 5 for drain life, alteration 6 for darkness, alteration 8 for disintegrate. Enchantment 6 for rigor mortis.

Sauromancers. Lizard kings if you are fighting Ermor in the early game. Sauromancers who cast wither bones later on. You no longer have access to lizard shaman, so you'll want to find a cheap communion slave for your astral sauromancers.

You have the best and most common death 3 mages around. Use them constantly. You don't have any mages that can easily forge the chalice, cast gift of health, or gift of reason, so you might want to plan for that on your pretender if you plan to make it to the tartarian stage of the game.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

However, note that for the cost, CB 1.6 has given the tomb wyrms fear, so they should theoretically be much more effective than before (if you're using CB 1.6 mod.)

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

And what about Tomb Priests and Tomb Kings? I have read somewhere that they are blessable?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Yes they are, but they are quite expensive to base a bless strategy upon. They don't need Earth (0 base enc) nor Astral (good mr). Fire isn't really needed for attack, and you have fire mages so spending points there on your pretender is wasted. Blood isn't very useful as tomb kings are already strong.
So you could use Nature, but I think they're lifeless... but then you need Nature access for your tartarians late-game, and a minor N bless for your sauromancers can reduce afflictions and save some from old age.
Water will only help your blessed units. The good point is it will help enter water, but with only your god to find water gems, I wouldn't iunvest too much there.
Air is meh in terms of bless so I won't discuss it.
As for Death, extra afflictions are good but not overpowering. Getting D9 for death weapons looks useless to me since it's mr negated and those opponents which have low mr you'll kill without death weapons anyway given the strength of the king.

Imho the best bless you can get is E4N4 for your sauromancers, but that's about it. I wouldn't go overboard on magic paths for a bless but look at what I need for other stuff.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Ok, lets assume for the moment that you really wanted to bless tomb kings and tomb wyrms. Blesses that might make sense:

*W9 - the obvious. 0 encumbrance is 0 encumbrance. Despite being obvious, this really isn't that useful because neither of your options are going to win battles by being speedy, at least not early. Probably more relevant once you can throw a flame brand on your tomb king, but if quickness is all you want, W2 on your pretender and forging some boots of haste is probably sufficiently fast to matter. The *defense* of a water bless is nice, but you don't have to go all the way to 9 for that to matter.
*A9 - both of them benefit from the decreased vulnerability to missiles and the LR. CR100 PR100 LR75 leaves you very few holes to fill in terms of elemental protection. Did i mention flame brands?
*E9 - ok, i confess, it does nothing for your Tomb Wyrms. It would be really nice if it did, because 14 vs. 10 protection on them would be a big deal. On your Tomb Kings, however, to whom you can give armor, +4 protection can be huge. A Tomb King with fire plate (easily researched/forgeable) has ~20 protection before E9 blessing. This is probably too marginal to care.

Strangely enough, the best of those is probably the A9. I've been trying A9W9 and have not been impressed with the W9. The real problem is that if you invest too heavily in a bless then you don't have enough early game to expand effectively, because neither tomb wyrms nor tomb kings are readily available early. And Tomb Kings without gear can not expand against most independents - at the very least they want armor, and a helmet would be nice. (Of course, the obvious helmet - horror - requires those D gems that you really want to use summoning more tomb kings).

Note that you probably also want E2+S3+ on your pretender for coins, hammers, and rings.

Expanding against indies is going to be really difficult if you pile on the sloth scale. While you can get by with poison slingers and light infantry against many things, you'll need to resupply every so often, and you absolutely cannot use that set up against HC. For HC you really want your heavily armored troops, which are slow and cap only, and take a *lot* of resources.

So, i'm seeing a pretender who looks something like this:
Dom 5 imprisoned Great Enchantress
A9 (W4?) E3-4 S3+, O3 H3 +good scales otherwise

Manual search early (one d site early on really speeds up tomb kings, and thus tomb wyrm generation). Prophetize your starting priest - he can animate tomb wyrms from turn 2 for you.

Rush Construction. Sadly, your d gems are really overtapped, so no skull mentors (its ok, you have great research), but feel free to pile on the lanterns.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

W9 makes your Wyrms exactly as fast as your Undead Chariots, and they all get even speedier when you do your national Power of the Whatever spell. I tried it SP and it was pretty fun. But it takes a while to start massing the Wyrms.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

I wonder how viable is would be to convert lizard kings to undead via life after death. B-line up to enchantment 7 as fast as you could - desert rangers and poison slingers along with poison ward and skellispam should be able to carry you that far fairly easily with no other research. Once there I could see really piling on the tomb wyrms using lizard kings, leaving your D gems for other uses (tomb chariot reanimators probably). This would also get you haste and if you've taken A on your pretender mass flight which sounds like a pretty nasty combo on 500 tomb chariots, along with power of the reborn king. This also nets you serpents blessing, which is just begging for you to figure out a way to find a couple foul vapors casters to pile on with rigor mortis.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

How would you kill the lizard kings? They are poison resistant and have decent hp iirc so foul vapours might not do it.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

What about an E4 bless so you can stick better armor/shields on them? E4 isn't too expensive, and C'tis could use a pretender with E since they don't naturally get it.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

E4 is useless on 0enc units. Its good for your sacred mages though.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

I don't think it would, as I've cast a lot of foul vapours in a MA C'Tis game, and with 17 hitpoints the lizard kings rarely take significant damage.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

You probably want a pretender with earth anyway, so why not just use earthquake, or maybe rain of stones. The former isn't that much of a research deviation. Alternatively, have the lizard kings scripted to attack and just use poison slingers targeting the enemy frontlines. lastly, soul vortex, once you get it (you want darkness anyway) makes killing off the lizard kings very easy.

Reanimating is a great strategy with LA ctis if you use life after death, but you dont even really need a bless for the wyrms, as they are mostly useful for the fear effect. The tomb chariots are almost better, even without a bless. Throw down Darkness, RM, the national speed boosting spell, maybe haste, and you have quite an impressive army. With 20+ Lizard kings reanimating tomb chariots, you can crank one out every few turns. The MR boosting spell is perfect once undead mastery comes out, and you have the earth magic to cast army of lead where you really need it.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Hmmm, poison or cold are the two typical ways as they don't kill the soulless who respawn. Poison should work if you got something that has a poison cloud (bog beasts, hydras, etc.) as it'll still do enough damage through the poison resistance. I don't see anything terribly easy for C'tis to get, but you could watch for such opportunities. On the cold front, you could use the cold aura from a bunch of banes, but I'm not sure how well that would work in a heat dominion. Might be a job for the pretender, certainly powerful enough strategy to justify it and would only need to be done every few turns. A frost father pretender has a powerful enough cold aura (particularly if you take a couple levels of W and cast breath of winter) to punch right through a heat dominion, and he brings the aforementioned A for mass flight. On the other vector the mother of monsters brings a poison cloud and potentially the heft to put up gift of nature's bounty pretty early since you're b-lining enchantment (she can drop foul vapors to for a trivial cost). Heh, just make sure the lizard kings don't bless themselves if you've got heavy N on your pretender. ;)

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Lammashtas work fine to kill your own commanders. Even if you wouldn't happen to want them get killed...

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Really? Even if you stick armor/shields with encumbrance on them?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

0 enc. units only care about enc. from spellcasting.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

It is nice to be drop the encumbrance from buffing quickly.
With priests, who're only going to pick up a few points if they bless themselves, and maybe Holy Avenger, it's not much of an issue.

OTOH, E4 will help even 0Enc units against fatigue spells & attacks. I'm not sure if it would be enough to matter, since you're likely to get spammed with those, if they're used against you.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

There aren't many fatigue spells that'll punch through FR100 CR100 LR75 PR100, which is what they should trivially have with a little gear and an A9 bless. Its part of the reason i thought A9 sounded good. Popping that up to LR100+ against dedicated lightning use is of course recommended.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Eh, there's still several fatigue-only spells that'll work. 2 reinvigoration isn't very likely to save you from them though. You need some serious reinvig/regen to survive those, and or prot. But having all those resistances is pretty awesome.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Soul Vortex is also good for Life After Death. Lammashtas are kind of dangerous because you really don't want to get your Ankh-holder or Life-after-death caster totally killed or routed.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

This life-after-death stuff doesn't sound very good for early game. How much do you want to invest in a bless you'll barely be able to use before year 3?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

What, the W9 thing? At the start of Winter, year 1, you can have a prophet Black Servant and a Tomb King making Wyrms, and chariots from your free undead H2 guy. Expansion is admittedly not super-easy, if you don't take an awake god. Desert Rangers and H3s can help expand, once you've taken a few provs to get enough gold/resources to hire them.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

You can make the province cold via spells before.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

What's the best way to generate an easily winnable battle that will last long enough for the poison/cold/heat aura to kill your troops? Do you just get your allies to attack a province with a remote spell/chaff?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

ghost riders can work

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Will ghost riders actually last that long against mass produced lizard kings?

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

if you script them to hold for a few turns yes

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

With MA C'tis I just used whatever rampaging randoms happened to stop by: trolls, barbarians, knights. Set some mages to skelly spam, and the skeletons will take forever to kill the indies, but will keep the horde off your mages/priests, while Foul Vapors does its work. As a bonus, you don't have to pay upkeep on those mages after the, either.

It's good to have the Chalice to fix any mutes that you get as a result of afflictions.

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Hmmm, might make a compelling case for taking misfortune scales...

Re: Bless for LA C'tis?
 

Let me be clearer: Would a Tomb King (enc. 0) wearing Black Steel full plate (enc. 2) benefit from an E4 bless, putting it back at encumbrance 0, or would it be at encumbrance 2 despite the bless?