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EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
[This guide is written using CBM]
EA Atlantis at first blush feels like a bit of a lumbering beast. Pretty impressive troops for stomping on indies and simple opposition….but almost no sorcery (N/S/D/B). No air magic, so no cloud trapeze. Mediocre to abysmal MR. Underwater movement is always limited to 1, so atrocious maneuverability. They have an impressive recruitable SC chasis in the Basalt King…but the lack of maneuverability means it’ll often take over a year to move the poor expensive guys from your capital to where they’ll do any good. Heaven forbid you get attacked on your other flank! I think the typical way this is played is to lean on the Basalt Kings and Living Pillars, but I think this is too rigid and unmaneuverable. Let’s see how, with a bit of planning, we can stick some wings on this sea turtle and only trot out Basalt King SCs occasionally rather than counting on them to carry every important fight. I think there’s a lot of potential here to unlock if you focus on force multipliers for your very affordable troops. The first thing that strikes me when looking at the troop lineup for EA Atlantis is that they really, really want some strong death magic support. Having cheap, hard hitting troops with 100% darkvision makes dropping darkness about as close to a “win” button as you can get if your opponent doesn’t also have darkvision. With those same troops having 50% cold resistance they make very strong candidates to mix with cold radiating undead – particularly as it’s trivial for you to drop winter ward to bring them up to 100%. Undead are largely amphibious so they fit right in to the roster, often being mindless and with a decent MR thus plugging another gap Atlantis will otherwise struggle with. Let’s channel the spirit of LA Atlantis and see if we can turn EA Atlantis into a death powerhouse. Obviously this is where your pretender comes in. Your troops are pretty darned good, as are your mages if we can overcome their weaknesses so I like leveraging them with some real nice scales so we can get a bunch of them. Let’s look at something like an awake master lich. 4W 4S 4D 4N, Order-3, Sloth-2, Cold-3, Luck-3, Drain-2. The cold scale doesn’t impact underwater income, so these scales will give you a pretty excellent income. Your troops are nice and resource light so the sloth doesn’t really sting, and your mages are big enough that the drain impact to your research is manageable. With that tasty income you should have quite the blistering initial expansion. Use mixed groups of deep ones and atlantean spear men. You’ll take a few losses, but these guys are so cheap and effective when you have critical mass that you’ll be fielding an effective expansion party every turn right from the start. This is something you’ll be leveraging the whole game – you’ve got a very nice punch in your dual attack troops for very few resources. They’ll have a high attrition rate, but you can crank out pretty much as many as you want at a moment’s notice. Your pretender heads right out immediately site searching, so with a little luck you’ll land a kelp fortress or two fairly early which can bring your initial expansion up to the speed of the very fastest nations while the money you save from not paying for your second and third castle largely mitigates your fair attrition rate. Don’t be afraid to gobble up some land provinces as well, you’ve got some fairly archer resistant guys in your lineup to use as archer screens while your naked guys fall on them. Your pretender out site searching is going to (obviously) build up a bit of D/S/W/N income as well as spreading that fabulous dominion around. A fast expansion, above average dominion income and a free fort or two will let you crank out mages faster than average which will keep your early research competitive despite the drain. Let’s consider what magic support we’ll want for our early fighting. The first thing that you’re probably worried about is being in the drink with R’yleh while sporting a stylish 8 MR. Seems like you’d be pretty helpless when the hungry Aboleths show up looking to mind blast you, right? Well, fortunately some well played lightning rods (a strategy, not the item) will have you tearing right through those stinky fish beasts. Much to the frustration of the poor R’yleh player, those mind blasters are going to overwhelmingly target the monsters with the most hitpoints. So what makes a good lighting rod? Ideally it is something with a lot of hitpoints. Something with a decent MR. Something cheap. Something that regenerates would be nice. I’m thinking…something blue. Sea trolls are so effective at negating mind blasters it almost seems unfair. They’ve got 52 hps, regen 6 per turn, have a 14 MR (15 in your drain dominion) and are trivially easy to research, summon and afford before your very first fighting. Just bringing 5 or so of these trolls (1 W gem apiece) along with all your low MR deep ones will keep 40+ giboleths (1600 gold) occupied easily long enough for you to swim over and rip their tentacles off with the rest of your troops. Sure, your trolls will be good and paralyzed, but that won’t stop them from being continually targeted, and they take an incredible amount of mind blasts to kill. You can supplement this with your recruitable lighting rods as well, your blessing turns all your basalt kings, queens, and mothers of the deep into good MR, regenerating, high hitpoint lightning rods. That early conjuration research is also very useful if you find yourself matched up early fighting with Oceana. Sea serpents and kraken make very effective knight of the deep gobblers with a bit of low level alteration support (Body ethereal, luck, quickness) with school of sharks soaking up lance strikes, and numbness & wolven winter making it very hard for smallish groups of knights to chew through the hoards of cheap deep ones your scales let you crank out - bolstered with well buffed monsters. This is all very effective early magic you’ll pick up for a mere level 4 in two different paths. Conjuration and alteration remain your main goto paths for much of the game, there’s a lot of synergy there. As your research continues you’ll be adding the likes of monster fish and asp turtles along with iron warriors and shark attack and some serious nastiness like iron bane and darkness…talk about synergy with your deep ones! Played cleverly you’re quite a beast underwater and competitive with either the other underwater nations from light research to heavy. Assuming you’re not being hard pressed in early fighting though, that extra water income your pretender has been dredging up is going to quickly be channeled into voice of tiamats, which will give you (along with any other water nations) a serious gem income advantage. With any decent sized underwater empire you should fairly rapidly build up a 15+ W income, which brings us to the first leg of your undead domination. With 15 gems per turn you can summon a Kokythiad every other turn – which is half as much as anybody can recruit cap only mages. You can build up a pretty good size group of them before you know it, and those bad boys (er…girls) can summon themselves once you get a bit of construction research done so your pretender just has to prime the pump. Another thing they can do for you is to start hitting the dark knowledge using the gems your pretender has scraped up. By the time you’ve got 3-4 of these ladies plus your pretender doing the site searching you’ll have your entire empire searched before you know it, leaving you with a solid death income…hopefully not that long after you’re hitting construction-4. A couple of hammer forged skull mentors later you’ve boosted yourself up to construction-6 and all that thus far unused fire income you’ve hoarded courtesy of voice of tiamat vomits out into an orgy of lightless lanterns. With the mentors and the lanterns spewing forth now, you’ll never notice that drain dominion. Probably you’ll lean more on the lanterns though, your death gems will have other tasty uses like skull staffs, death mages (mound fiends/liches) and of course dropping darkness all over the place. Depending on what you’re facing you should also consider banes, ghosts and other undead to round out your options. But there is so very, very much more. Your pretender has also summoned a niad or two (they can also summon themselves, so pretender goes on to other stuff), who have used the nature gems he scraped up to hit the haurespex. You should be able to build up a healthy nature income, which will eventually be used to get fairy courts (did someone say flying deep ones under darkness and iron bane?), but for now your pretender can use them for the next leg of your death mastery – llamia queens. Now, the llamia queens give you a couple nice things. First off they give you some more fairly strong death mages. Second, they get you modestly into the blood game. Modestly is fine, that’s all you need. A few of these ladies bloodhunting will get you a modest slave income, then a quick empowering or two later along with a short detour for your powerful research and you’re spitting out a vampire lord every few turns. Yeah! Yet Another Powerful Death mage! Bonus: a very maneuverable death mage who can tack on fun stuff like rush of strength to the darkness, mass flight and iron bane you’re dropping. Those deep ones sounding like a bargain yet with double attacks at 10 gold a pop? As a general rule of thumb a vamp lord blood hunting will roughly gather enough slaves to summon another vamp lord in 10 turns. If you don’t need them urgently on the front line it’s not that hard to build up a nice little handful of them before you know it. You’ll have plenty of S1 mages for site searching. Also, underwater ancient temple magic sites are very common, so if you send a couple priests out searching you should have a very solid astral income without really too much to spend it on initially. I think this is a situation that it makes a lot of sense to dust off a seldom used guy – the ether lord. I know, I know, he is stupid expensive. Most of the time you can’t get nearly enough use out of him to justify the price. Consider him in this context though. Here’s what he brings to the party: Antimagic (!) Gateway (!) Teleport Soul drain (very nice as the super reinvig lets one guy drop a lot of big spells for big fights) Horrors (who in the heck expects that from Atlantis? Great way to start a war between two other players) Vengeance of the Dead (niche, but when it’s the spell you want it’s awesome) And even astral travel. Also, he’s yet another good death mage who can drop darkness, but this one can teleport in to do it – which gives you an enormous amount of strategic flexibility. Your PD has partial darkvision – I’m thinking fun stuff like soul drain, antimagic, darkness, doom, will of the fates is not something your opponent is going to be real happy to see dropping out of the sky to support your PD. The gateway alone makes it worthwhile to spring for one or two of these guys as it will let you route your troops from those water forts to where the fighting is without having to wait a year for them to get there (remember, your land forts can only recruit reef dwellers!). Also, subtract from the price you’re paying whatever you think the value of 15 ether warriors are – they tough little buggers that are far from worthless, particularly with the troop buffing strategies you’re using. That said, you’ll probably only want to pay that retail price once or twice because you will start having some very good uses for those pearls (more on that in a bit). You’ll want to be pretty conservative with the ether lord, they’re expensive to replace. Now, the observant reader will note what we’ve done – we’ve converted water, death, nature, blood *and* astral all into mages strong enough to drop darkness (with boosters/power of the spheres). Do we really need that many death mages? Well…probably no. You don’t really want to dump virtually all your gem income indefinitely into death mages, but the point is you’ll have no problem dropping darkness anytime you want it without having to use the gems you really want to put to some other use. Speaking of, you’ll want to push a considerable amount of your pearls into starshine caps and crystal coins. 25% of your mages of the deep will have S1, each one you bring up to S3 adds *enormously* to your strategic flexibility. Teleport in, drop power of the spheres (or save a turn with a crystal shield), use earth boots/water bracelets, earth power/phoenix power and the following is all dropping out of the sky wherever you want it (research permitting): Iron bane Quickening Weapons of sharpness Army of lead/gold Winter ward/Fire fend Grip of winter/Heat from hell Antimagic Will of the fates Demon cleansing & Solar brilliance (consider who will be giving your darkvision troops trouble) Niefel flames Acid storm Astral tempest Living water/earth/fire Just consider how that looks when you’ve got a dozen guys equipped to jump out of your lab at a moment’s notice. You can send them all to one battle to drop the majority of all those spells at once (!). You can spread them out to several simultaneous battles as just one or two of those spells will usually be a tide turner. Let your death mages lead your troops around dropping darkness with your ICBM astral mages sitting around in the lab waiting for somebody to try something to counter the darkness. But wait! There’s more. Because, obviously you’re not enough of a badass yet. Lets say that despite all those force multipliers your enemies are still somehow managing to chew through your (now) totally awesome deep ones. Let’s leverage another vector I’ve already mentioned but want to drive home: your troops are easily 100% fire *and* cold immune. If Neifel giants are giving you grief, ignore their cold aura…and add heat aura to yourself to see how they like being surrounded as their fatigue skyrockets! Abyisia being a pain? Ignore their heat aura and throw some cold into the mix to let them remember how heavy that armor is. There’s lots of ways to do this, as already mentioned lots of undead has a chill aura. You can drop wolven winter, which on top of directly impacting their encumbrance turns your water elementals into cold radiating ice elementals. You can also very effectively thug out a couple mages of the deep who buff with breath of winter, or stick rhime haubriks on…well, you’ve got lots of good choices there. Turning up the heat is a little bit more difficult, but fire elementals buff very nicely with iron warriors and fire snakes are one of the better uses for fire gems late game. Combine this (of course) with heat from hell/grip of winter and the toughest of opponents will die alone in the dark, shivering and forsaking their pretender. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the above is not quite brutal enough for you. How do we make such pain truly gratuitous? I’m gonna go with….slave matrixes. With a little bit of effort you can drop firestorm on top of your fire immune troops with darkvision fighting under darkness, buff them with army of lead/will of the fates/weapons of sharpness/quickening to poke at the bad guys with magic weapons (basalt spears) while their armor all falls off and they’re passing out from the cold. Still not brutal enough? I suppose if you find an opponent who can live long enough through all that to make it worthwhile you could leverage those fairy queens and add mass regeneration/fog warriors/mass flight and then dump a big old helping of acid storm on top (no such thing as acid resistance, BTW). More you say? Fine…also remember your death mage(s) are powered by some nice cheap bodyguards and a soul vortex so after they put up the darkness they add life after death (yep, more darkvision’ed, cold immune guys to chop through) and are sniping with life drain/disintegrate (you did crank out rune smashers and void eyes, right?) at any SCs who thought they were tough/immune enough to hang. Those theoretical tough guys that are fire and cold immune and also have an absurd MR and are lifeless are being pummeled by petrify. I suppose you could also toss out some life for a lifes with your vamp lords…but good luck finding a target left. But wait! There’s more! Ok, ok, I’m gonna stop pointing out all the ways you can dominate the big battles, lets consider what further flexibility we can weave into our strategy. Earth attacks and Manifestations should be steadily falling out of the sky along with penetration boosted leprosy. Arouse hunger and imprint souls bolster your horrors and ghost riders enough that the unprepared opponent bleeds . You’re steadily cranking out leviathans, wights, ghosts, pale riders, mechanical men, vitriols, niad warriors, llamias, vine ogres and whatever else seems appropriately immune to whatever your opponent was trying to do to take advantage of your MR disadvantage. Given your research goals and income you’ve got a decent shot at getting the Well of Misery and Mother Oak up…to me that smells like Tartarian soup! Your pretender can forge the chalice if you get the chance, or gift of health is also an option. You should also consider leveraging that strong D income into putting up Utterdark or Burden of Time – oh the fun we can have! Maelstorm is another very nice one for you if you see an open slot by the time you can cast it. A couple final thoughts. For general use I love the deep ones, but don’t neglect the rest of your roster as appropriate. Warriors of the deep are fairly archer resistant and share most of the advantages of the deep ones. Reef dwellers have a poison weapon and armor and are cheap enough to be great tossing in front of your lines to soften up the opposition (yep, add poison immunity to the list of stuff your opponents need to scramble to come up with). |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
You mentioned getting some free forts with your pretender..
IIRC, CBM 1.6 made the "Kelp Fortress" site uncommon. You can't count on it anymore. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Ah, didn't realize that. Thanks.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I don't think it did. It was supposed too, but qm forgot about it afaik.
About guide - extremely overenthusiastic, I'd say. Atlantis has no chance to win against R'lyeh or Oceania if they are controlled by competent player. And no matter what you do, your research will be extremely bad. No matter what you do. Drain scales won't help when mages are so expensive. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
CBM 1.6 doesn't make it uncommon IIRC i think Zeldor checked the .dm file when we were discussing warcy a while ago.
that's a little harsh zeldor, but i agree with you in principle. another great guide Baalz, and a much needed one too, but the one aspect i'd like to see more elaboration on, would be the underwater war. i'd say the war with the underwater nations is the main failure of atlantis. i've seen krakens and sea serpents face KotD, and its not pretty. the summons get owned. i know alt is the way to go, but its still not even close to a fair fight. maybe you could add a supplement post purely about how you envision winning the UW war |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
:/ That is not only pretty insulting Zeldor, it's infantile to respond to a detailed strategy guide with lots of specific suggestions by hand waving and a dismissal that its ridiculous. I'll respond to your critique with the same level of support and thought. Nu-uh. Atlantis will totally dominate everyone they ever fight, so there!
@Frozen Lama - I didn't want to repeat the same stuff covered in other places, but you're probably right that I should put some of this into this guide. I'll be posting a addendum shortly. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Fighting Oceana: The primary threat here is going to be the knights of the deep. Without some maneuvering on your part they’ll fairly easily handle everything you can field in the early game. They’ve also got some fairly tough heavy infantry that will be supporting them. The good news is that they’ll usually be investing in a heavy bless, so they’ll be lacking in other areas. They’re unlikely to be able to have the same income you do, and are also unlikely to have an awake pretender. Obviously I’m not going to be able to cover every possible thing you could encounter here, but your advantages in this matchup:
You’ll have many times the troop numbers that Oceana has. You can recruit more than 8 deep ones for the same cost as a single knight of the deep. You have better early combat mages. Oceana basically is limited to water magic. You’ll probably have a significant encumbrance advantage. Water blessings are common, and that heavy infantry has heavy armor. Cold-3 is very common for UW nations, and indeed you’re taking it yourself. You’ll probably have a decent initial research edge as Oceana recruits priests to lead their sacred troops, confident they can lean on them and don’t need as much early research. So, with the early research targets I suggested you’ve got the following in your arsenal early (I’ll assume level 4 alteration and conjuration): Krakens & Sea serpents Body ethereal, quickness, luck Boil, numbness, destruction Summon earthpower/water power School of sharks. Wolven winter Encase in ice Again, what you do is going to vary as you and your opponent try to outmaneuver each other, but it shouldn’t be too hard to see that if you play your cards right you can do a hell of a lot with not many mages and a mess of deep ones. Make sure via wolven winter that you’re fighting in cold-3. Send out schools of sharks to soak up lance attacks. Use boil and numbness to soften up the knights, and then send the buffed monsters as the muscle to take a bite. Sure, knights will run right over krakens if you send them right in, but if you wait until after they’ve plowed through sharks and your PD in very cold water, are getting tagged by numbness, and are just are hitting your fresh deep ones to come on the flank with a couple quickened, ethereal, lucky krakens those sea monsters look a lot scarier. Then see how well that fancy Oceana heavy infantry fares when they’re outnumbered and you start tossing destruction out there. You’ll have iron bane soon enough, but I chose alt-4 as what you’re at now. Speaking of alt-6, you’ve got a pretender who can drop darkness immediately if you’re pressed, without needing to do any conjuration. Under darkness Oceana has almost no chance. Once you b-line to alt-6 I have a hard time coming up with much that Oceana can hope to do under darkness and iron bane…but, obviously I’m wrong because as has so clearly been shown by Zeldor you have no chance to win against Oceana. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Fighting R’yleh:
These guys are not nearly as threatening as they appear. As I suggest, sea trolls almost completely negate their mind blasters. Outside of mind blasters, what to they have going on early? Basically, inferior versions of what you can recruit. Well, in CBM they do have slave trolls, but those guys are gonna go down even easier than Oceana’s knights to numbness, and they can barely hit the broad side of a barn so just trying to chew through sharks in cold water is gonna pass them out. Shamblers? Bah, they’ll get torn to shreds by your warriors of the deep. Lobo guards? Those are deep one appetizers. The rest of their lineup? Basically no better than indies. Their mages? Expensive and pretty much just bring astral and water to the party…so what help is that early on? Body ethereal? You’re wielding magic weapons. Soul slay? I guess that could take out your trolls and leave you open to mind blasting, but at 1 gem apiece you can bring a lot of trolls if you want. I’m sure a clever R’yleh opponent could come up with some stuff to do, but the Atlantis player seems to be in a very strong position by my reckoning. Again, I must clearly be wrong though because you most certainly have no chance at all of winning against R’yleh. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Now i know this may be a little naive, but you can use r'lyeh player underestimation of you to your advantage.
also r'lyeh mind blaster (maybe oceania's knights too, i'm not sure) are aquatic only, so if you are (really) desperate you can retreat on the land provinces to prepare a counter assault. of course you will have no chance against a solid land nation, especially if you have just lost your capital, but the others water nations are worse than you when is time to fight on solid ground. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I've tried playing with atlantis a little bit in SP lately and i would ask:
1) why water on the pretender? i would drop it completely and pick up earth instead. its pretty easy to get high-path water without having it on the pretender whereas earth can be more limiting (and i think has more potential and even a weak earth bless is better then a weak water bless- your basalt kings are still pretty bad-@ss even if their manuerverbility isn't great). EDIT; I forgot the stats on the basalt kings- i forgot they were earth 3 and water 2 (i thought the other way around) 2) i would drop luck to 0 (its not like atlantis has a good hero), and pick up magic to 1. I think others would agree with me on general principle but i would be curious to see why you think luck is so much better then magic scales (at least in this case). So yeah, if you could explain these two decisions for us... |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Well, I like to take luck just to be free of the indy attacks and for the free gold, but yes, EA atlantis has exactly 1 hero, who isn't even a multihero.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
i'm not baalz, but W4 is there for site searching and high level spells.
but i rarely play with EA atlantis, so i'm just guessing |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Water is so you can cast Streams from Hades and Summon Naiad, which get you into Death and Nature respectively.
I think the reasoning behind Drain-2 is partially to try and mitigate your MR problem against R'lyeh. My preference is towards Magic-1, too, if just because I like Coral Priests as my main researchers(mmm, 45 gold/sacred) |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
also... ummm what about dominion strength? Unless i did something wrong, the current build allows for a dominion strength of 5 with 10 points left but if you sell one point of your scales (death 1?) then you can move to dominion strength 7 with 1 point left.
please clarify- i really like atlantis. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Kokythiads and Naiads seem central to this strategy, so water is definately a must to follow this guide. Then there's leviathans and hidden in snow etc.
I'd like to emphasise how much nice spells you have in enchantment that synergises with this way of playing Oceania. Strenght of giants, raise dead, dragon master(for your naiads to spam ice drakes), clay men, fire/winter ward, quagmire, foul vapors, water ward, grip of winter, rigor mortis, relief, life after death, leviathan, serpents blessing(with foul vapors), Warriors of muspel/neifelheim, mass regeneration. I´d make enchantment the third priority next to conjuration and alteration. Also, the deep shambler has three attacks and higher protection, hp and strength than the deep one. Not saying it is a better unit in general but if you are purely looking at damage output/hp per square early on or are facing battlefield wide damage spells it can be better. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
well, Death is the scale i hate. maybe Drain3, even if the -2 to research seems heavy.
you can't touch the other scales too much, you'll need a lot of soldiers(cash, gems and resources) to overwhelm quality. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Yeah, obviously there is a bit of room to tweak several of the specifics to your own personal preferences. You could swap in death-3 and up to magic-1, though that may make R'lyeh more challenging and hit your long term income. Pick your poison.
@Fantomen: No doubt at all that there's some very nice stuff in enchantment, but I don't think I'd hit it before construction unless there was something specific I needed for my situation. Construction gives you skull mentors and lightless lanterns, which then makes the enchantment research a snap. It also gives you skull staffs, and hence darkness & drain life which is a critical target. There's also loads of secondary big benefits available from wave breakers to earth boots and water bracelets. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Oh, also in doing some test for this guide I nabbed two different heroes who were both pretty nice. Both could summon free units, and one was a W/N mage who would be a very nice addition if you nabbed him early and he could help look for kelp fortresses. CBM includes worthy heroes I believe, which is likely where they're from.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I know the W/N mage, but when I looked at the CBM 1.6 DM file he was the only one in the EA atlantis heroes section?
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
The other one was the commander of the living pillars, and could generate them for free.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Oh, QM took him out IIRC. Though the living pillar spawn is pretty useful.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I thought the pillar hero was taken out in 1.6, are you looking at the latest version?
As far as the guide, I have to agree with the critique of it being a little over-optimistic. The suggestion that you can beat focused nations to Mother Oak and Well of Misery seem particularly far-fetched. You have no cap income of either path and have to rely on your pretender to turn up sites. Mother Oak is an early target for N-heavy nations and you're just asking for an overwrite if you try to throw it up, there's no way you can compete against a nation with capital income to cast a level-5 global. Same thing with Well, though you suggest burning gems to mentors on top of being reliant upon a single early site searcher. Maelstrom is a strong global and a much more reasonable one. Also, voice of Tiamat is kind of terrible for Atlantis, as they are capable of searching for everything but A with the basalt kings...is a single mage turn to move around really worth 8 gems and having to wait for conjuration-4 instead of getting your gem income rolling as soon as you grab a king? A income is nice, certainly, but exceedingly rare in the water. If you're smart you dovetail your site searching kings in the direction you want them to go later so you have some more guys stationed closer to the front instead of sitting in your fort, so the time spent moving them around isn't even a sure waste. Likewise, fire gems are really scarce in the water, and you really run the risk of not being able to run the lantern factory you were planning on if you're assuming you'll find a ton of them. That being said I'd probably drop luck to get magic over drain, especially with the coral priests making such an impact on atlantis' research prospects, which you totally trash with drain scales. This can change with trading though, but so many of my games have banned trading recently that I'm starting to think of it as a default. Similarly, I question the ether lords, since an S mage of the deep can do most of what the ether lord can do with some boosters, which are a lot cheaper than an ether lord is to summon. Antimagic especially is a sucker move to use an ether lord for, as it's just asking for your 70-some gem investment to vanish in a puff of magic duel vapor. Much better to risk an S1 motd with a skullcap for those vital battles (antimagic is castable at S2 with an extra gem), or add a coin for teleporting support, still way cheaper than an ether lord (plus if you do duel-die and win the battle you have a decent shot at getting the items back, not so with the chassis.) Anyhow, it was a long guide and there are plenty of great ideas, so I want to make sure that's recognized, but I think there's some room for improvement, or at least elaboration on why my concerns are unfounded. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Really, despite how much I love Luck I really think its not necessary. random tritons are much easier to kill than barbs, you only have one unique hero, and UW militia events are even worse than the above ground ones. Better to stick those points into something else methinks.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Immaculate: W4 permits Streams from Hades with D1, which is a great place to pick up good D mages (without spending D gems).
Baalz: You missed one of the alt gems. Earth Meld absolutely destroys KotD. Combine with boil for some killing while your troops dish out some damage. Obviously lay out some other stuff too, but if you have a couple mages doing nothing but spamming earth meld they're going to pull their weight. Beating Oceania requires leveraging significant mage resources. But it can be done. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Hehe, I figured you'd have some input based on our recent conversations.
Coral priests: Doh! I completely missed that CBM change. I'm of mixed feelings on this one. Yes, that is a serious improvement in the cost per research point, but its also a big drop in the absolute research points so your research is going to be almost half as fast until such a time as the cost disparity translates into extra castles, labs and thence researchers which will take quite some time to catch up...time you're often not going to have with Oceana and R'lyeh breathing down your neck. Even if you double your castles due to cost savings your only making up 1 RP per turn by recruiting 2 of the coral priests vs 1 MotD. Also, using coral priests as your goto research recruitment is going to mean there's a lot less mages of the deep, which means a lot less of the specific random pick that you were wanting right this second at that fort. Coral priests are (mostly) solely research mages, while mages of the deep have a whole lot of combat/forging/summoning potential. I don't disagree magic-1 is a reasonably good choice, though order/luck tends to drop some very nice income events which I find often game changing when playing a nation with very low resource troops. My own preference would be to pick up death-3 if you wanted to go with magic-1. I will say though that part of my leaning towards drain was the near certainty that you'll have to fight R'yleh early on, but +1 MR isn't really that big and you're not gonna win the war in your dominion anyway. My only refutation on several of your points is that they don't match with my anecdotal experience. I've gotten mother oak up using an underwater nation and niads more than once (I can think of 3 different MP games off the top of my head). It's not really a critical thing if you can't get it up, but its an opportunity to look for. Likewise, virtually every time I play an underwater nation I find myself sitting on a pile of fire gems from voice of tiamat. You don't have to have a huge income for it to pile up when you don't have squat to spend it on, and if you're (to pull some numbers out my arse) sitting on 80 fire gems with an income of +8 when you hit construction-6 you can crank out 5 lanterns per turn using hammers for 11 turns adding 275 research points per turn...and these numbers for fire gems are very low from my anecdotal experience assuming you've conquered one of your water neighbors by this point. Even if you don't have hammers to spare on lowly lanterns you can crank out 3 per turn over the same time which is still a significant contribution. Well of Misery also isn't critical, and also isn't out of the question so just watch for the opportunity. If, say, you're in a game with Helheim pulling hard for Tartarians then yeah you're not likely to get it, but its not out of the question that there is nobody pursuing that type of strategy so just watch for it since you've got the capability and it's in your research synergy. Manually site searching with the Basalt Kings is a pretty good suggestion, though the opportunity cost is a bit higher than presented I think. As the cost is double the turns of a 500 gold guy vs a 200 gold guy, so its a factor of 5 on how much gold you're tying up, which is pretty damn significant in the early game. The other way to phrase that is if you've got 2 Basalt Kings out site searching you could instead have one mage of the deep casting voice of tiamat and another one leading 60 deep ones into battle. You have a point that you can heard them in the right direction so all that movement isn't wasted, but its a bit more of a complicated decision than just saving 8 gems. Also, you're probably hitting most of your searches with F1, which may be why you're of the opinion you don't get many fire gems. Finally, though I wouldn't use it to actually justify a strategy, it bugs me to think about that theoretic level 3/4 F/W/E site that's sitting there hidden and mocking me. ;) The etherlord, I'm surprised you're the first to complain on that, I figured that'd be a sticking point off the bat. No doubt he's not your goto guy for anti-magic, but there are certainly times when the risk of a magic duel is very low and you're teleporting him in there for something else, anti-magic is mostly just important if you're dropping soul drain on your 8 MR guys. Which is a good segue into my next point that having a guy who can air drop darkness is a big deal that none of your other guys (aside from your pretender) can manage. Soul drain (infinite reinvig) means this one guy can drop darkness and will of the fates and spam undead mastery or arcane domination or...well, with the right random and boosters even master enslave which is surely not something your opponent was planning to have to counter from Atlantis. If you grant an ether warrior is worth 2 pearls, and you need 21 gems of boosters for a mage of the deep to cover something a naked ether lord can do then the ether lord is only costing 19 gems. Then, of course, there's the things the ether lord can do for you that the MotD cannot. Gateway is huge, as is astral travel. If you use him right you shouldn't have too much trouble getting your money's worth. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
There are no F2+ E4 or W4 sites in the water, so I'm not missing any F sites by searching at F1, so my fire gem opinion is well-enough informed based on my site distribution in games, not failed searches. Good try though ;-) Over a third of BKs come with E3/W3. And I'll reiterate that waiting for conj 4 to search outweighs the ability to use a motd over the kings.
I also haven't examined the discounts on the ether gate spell, what is it down to? If it's 60 or less that makes it competitive, 70 is pushing it though, IMO. MotD + cap/coin/ring can gateway, so that's not a great kicker...add a couple of command items to his hand slots to cover his command limit deficiency and he can gate in a respectable force. While it's true that your ether lord can provide awesome mobile battle pain you're gambling a lot on your opponent not getting a successful duel off. Having your keystone support mage vaporized is a Problem, as darkness drops when he dies and your will of the fates never gets cast. Some spectres with flying boots can fill a similar niche (less awesomely, granted) with a lot less risk, with stealth and flight making up for the teleporting loss. The ether lords and globals are all situationally useful, of course, but I don't think they merit inclusion in the guide without bringing up that caveat, since I think it's going to come up more often than not, and the risks might not be very evident to a newer player. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Oh, and if you're worried about QUICK research gaining 40% more RP off each motd and 25% off each BK is pretty telling as well, in the luck vs magic debate. Death scales are playable, but I don't like them them personally, and I think taking them with an UW nation is especially poor planning since you have a lot of nice hard-to-raid provinces, so keeping the population healthy is even more useful than normal, IMO. Also if you take death and luck you're gonna have to be mighty disciplined to not box yourself into a hole with upkeep after getting a few nice events and cranking out units while your income is shrinking.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
That's about what I figured with Coral Priests. They're nice if you're tight on gold for a few rounds(and I'd rather get 3 coral priests and a King of the Deep than 3 Mages of the Deep), but can't be your main strategy.
You have also finally tempted me to see what wonders Order3 Luck3 can get me. Time to do some tests. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
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Oh, another thing your comment about the command items reminded me of was that a couple of low risk soul vortex drops will run that ether lord's experience stars and command rating right into the stratosphere, you should be able to do something similar with a MotD with some of that nastiness I mention above. Hmmm, do you gain experience for friendly kills? :) |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Only 11 gems cheaper, which turns to 4 if you don't get an S random on that ether lord since he'll need a hat. You also need the booster rings eventually anyhow, so you can probably snag them for a turn for gateway duty without having to forge a whole new one for it. Coming up with another 70 spare pearls on top of breaking the ring barrier is a tall order. Still, I freely admit it could be incredibly situationally useful to pull one up, but again, somewhat...optimistic. =)
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I couldn't get the Sea Trolls approach to work against R'lyeh.
The mindblasters targeted the trolls happily enough, but after a round or two all the trolls were paralyzed and they moved on to destroy my (now closer) regular troops. The mindblasters were scripted to fire closest, not largest, which is what I would expect from a player trying to counter this tactic. It seemed that once the trolls were paralyzed the targeting changed to the next squad. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
i think you have to use HUGE numbers of trolls
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Well, Baalz suggests 5 to keep 40+ mindblasters busy. I tried 4 against 15 or so and got slaughtered. Probably if I'd used 20 it would have worked, but that's quite a few gems, that you need to fuel VoT and a lot of mage time.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
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Well, maybe I was a bit overenthusiastic in implying that sea trolls would win against R’yleh no matter what you did, once one side starts using more advanced tactics you’ve got to do the same with the other side. Let’s see what perhaps a typical very early fight might look like with comparable resources on both sides. I do assume (as suggested) that Atlantis spends a small amount of water gems and conjuration research. R’yleh doesn’t have any real magic support – I’m not interested in playing counter vs counter vs counter vs this deployment vs that deployment, but rather to illustrate that mind blasters can be effectively countered by sea trolls and good tactics.
40 Giboleths – 1600 gold 30 lobo gaurds – 300 gold Aboleth – 200 gold Total 2100 gold Basalt Queen – 160 2 Mages of the deep – 400 150 deep ones – 1500 gold 10 Sea trolls Total 2060 gold Setup: Atlantis – Sea trolls out front all the way forward, flanking groups of deep ones. R’yleh – set all the way back with lobo guards in front. Giboleths scripted to fire closest. Turn one: Atlantis: school of sharks X2, sermon of courage, advances R’yleh: blasts 100% sharks Turn two: Atlantis: school of sharks X2, sermon of courage, advances R’yleh: blasts 100% sharks Turn three: Atlantis: sermon of courage (mages of the deep don’t do anything else productive, assuming no more research), advances R’yleh: blasts 100% sharks (sharks mostly dead now) Turn four: Atlantis – Sea trolls make it into melee, do light damage. Deep ones still advancing R’yleh – blasts the last of the sharks and mostly hits sea trolls. Paralyzes 5 out of the 10 sea trolls…but those guys are already in melee (close). Also happened to paralyze one deep one Turn five: Atlantis – sea trolls don’t do much damage being largely paralyzed. Deep ones close to *almost* melee range but don’t really do anything R’yleh – blasts sea trolls and manages to kill a few of them with lobo guards. A second random deep one is paralyzed Turn six: Atlantis – Lobo guards evaporate in the face of a wave of deep ones R’yleh – blasts some sea trolls (they’re still front and center of the battle lines), but manages to paralyze about 15 deep ones Turn seven: Atlantis – starts chewing on the front line of giboleth R’yleh – targeting exclusively deep ones at this point, paralyzes another 15 or so Turns eight - ten – giboleths are shredded. Final casualties: 2 sea trolls, 23 deep ones vs….haha, not kidding: everything but 2 giboleths and the aboleth. Now, to be sure, R’yleh could try some different moves, Atlantis could try to counter those, and so on, but I think this clearly illustrates my proof of concept. Also, with a bit more research this would have been even more lopsided. Consider if Atlantis had dropped anti-magic & haste (courtesy of their pretender) plus friendly currents. Sure, he could be magic dueled, but he could also teleport in unexpectedly for the pivotal fight, and magic dueling an S4 immortal gets expensive real fast (H3 coral queens can likely push your dominion around, R'yleh doesn't typically have a strong one either) |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Ok, that's more reasonable than "Just bringing 5 or so of these trolls (1 W gem apiece) along with all your low MR deep ones will keep 40+ giboleths (1600 gold) occupied easily long enough for you to swim over and rip their tentacles off with the rest of your troops. Sure, your trolls will be good and paralyzed, but that won’t stop them from being continually targeted, and they take an incredible amount of mind blasts to kill."
School of Sharks seems to be the real key, not the trolls. They let the trolls get close enough to still qualify as closest after getting paralyzed. It sounds like the trolls soaked up about 2 rounds of blasting, so the closing might not even be important. I may have to play around with that scenario without the trolls. Maybe an extra Mage for more sharks instead. In my MP EA Atlantis game, I still haven't had the chance to fight R'lyeh, but my early plan was to rely on Kings & Mages using Iron Will to boost themselves and as many tougher troops as possible. Also bringing in common uw indies with higher mr. Amber Clan tritons are 14 and Triton Knights are 12 IIRC. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Against Rlyeh, you don't need sea trolls, if you're attacked earlier.
You can send in a Basalt King or three with some form of priest. Bless them, and even just a modest N/S bless takes the sting off the torrent of mind blasts. The basalt kings are not really there to do anything but soak up the mind blasts, but they don't half save the rest of your army. Oh, and they cast Iron Will as well (if you're defending at least - chances are you'll get paralysed first when attacking). 40 mind blasts a turn will undoubtedly paralyse and start damaging your 20+ MR basalt kings rapidly, but you'll take pain sufficiently sparingly that even a gentle HP regeneration from N bless makes them unlikely to die. You can give the basalt king amulets of MR, or even - think about it - lead shields. After all, who cares about taking massive fatigue from spellcasting and fighting when your basalt king is there to do neither? |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I tried again using School of Sharks. I think that, not Sea Troll, is the go to spell for fighting mindblasters. Lots of easy to hurt targets, nice and close.
Unless R'lyeh's scripted his blasters to fire large monsters, which would be stupid, I suspect the Kings would have the same problem Sea Trolls have. They get paralyzed then ignored while your troops get decimated. In the early game, I'd probably just use more Mages instead of Kings, depending on what you've got available. More SoS, while any E random mages start by casting Iron Will on themselves and your tougher troops. Kings have 17 MR, 18 with an S blessing, 21 with Amulet or Iron Will, 25 with both. An S blessing isn't worth it, though having S on your pretender is very nice for Atlantis anyway. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Well, "forcing" R'yleh to fire closest isn't as worthless as it might seem. Otherwise, "fire large monsters" (assuming you're using deep ones) will blast your commanders/mages. Trying to fight mind blasters with any of your units who are big enough to shield your mages is a suckers game, you'll be fielding 1/2 to 1/3rd as many troops with either worse MR (!) or worse attack. Sure, you can eventually get Basalt Kings buffed up enough to be pretty resilient, but that's a hell of a lot more expensive in gold, gems and research than popping out some trolls. As far as using them early with no buffing/items...it seems a bit silly to use a 500 gold cap only mage where a 1 gem summon does as good a job.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
True, that's a good point.
I think it depends on stage of the game, though. Early on you're just trying to get enough of your troops close enough to slaughter his. Other than a couple of SoS, your mages aren't going to do much for you. It would hurt to lose them of course. You'll probably be using indy commanders (Triton lords or whatever) to bring your troops in, so they won't be targeted by Fire Large. With more research, keeping your mages active will be more important, but you'll have more gems & spells to work with. I'll try it with Fire Large and see how the results change. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I haven't read the guide yet other than to search for 'Acid Storm', and I see its mentioned. I would emphasize that Acid Storm is an absolutely brutal spell, especially in conjunction with N-blessed BKs. While there may be some counters that smarter guys than me can think of, this combo is utterly devastating to most human nations.
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
very nice and helpful guide Baalz. Atlantis seems like a very fun water nation to play with. I'm a hardcore newbie thus I have a few questions for you:
looking at the pretender choice I wonder why you prefer the Master Lich over say the Arch Mage. Arch Mage with 4D/4S/4N/1W(default, put more if you really need 4, but I still don't see why). also it will let you fit A2 that Atlantis won't have any access to otherwise. so lets drop the 4W and put 2A instead, you should still be ahead in points to improve your scales even more while not losing much, unless you're using the Master Lich for something that the Arch Mage can't do. now, if we do go for 2A our pretender will be able to cast amulet of the fish, which will allow our aquatic pretender(Arch Mage) move onto land. also I saw that there are items that allow your commander to carry non amphibious troops into water, are there items who do the same but for aquatic troops to land? if so than it will allow those aquatic summons to also get over land and wreck some havoc. with your setup(or my proposed setup above) you seem to have a pretty nice minor bless. the only combat(as in non Priest/Mage) units Atlantis seems to have are the Living Pillars, who I read somewhere have the best armor out of all EA troops(correct me if I misread that). they're capital only and very resource intensive, but with so much points you can afford Production3 and you already got Order3+Luck3, so they should be affordable. and I don't mean them as a bless rush but rather more of a mid-late game force, when the additional MR from the Astral Bless will prove more helpful. is there a reason to not immediately go manually site searching with your pretender, to get a quick D, S, N and to some extent A and W economy? can it be better than to spend those early turns researching in the lab with it? that's all that comes to my mind for now, I'm sorry if those points don't make any sense at all, as I said I'm a newbie after all ;) |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
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Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
how can the Master Lich and Arch Mage cost the same when the Master Lich costs 100(base) while the Arc Mage 0(base)? not to mention that each new path(3 or 4 with air) costs 20 for the Master Lich as opposed to 10 of the Arch Mage.
ok than 1A is enough for the amulet, so maybe 1A would be enough after all, or 2 for wider Air access(if needed, not sure). but if there are no items that allow aquatic troops to move onto land than I guess the amulet of the fish isn't that necessary, so it's just Air access that can be added. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Note that namad included the suggested dominion as well. Immortality is also unbelievably good to have on a rainbow since he's much harder to kill. Finally, like he said, the fish ammy is 1W in the most commonly used mod, which most of Baalz' guides are written using.
All that said, there's nothing that says you can't take an archmage of course. Baalz generally encourages player adaptations. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Partly it's the 3D to start, but mostly it's the 3 Dominion. Try it. With your paths (dropping W on the Lich) the Master Lich is 2 pts cheaper at dom 6. Cheaper above that, higher below it.
That's with CBM 1.6. May be different in vanilla. |
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1 water is enough for the amulet in the modded game, not 1 air. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
Doh!
Dom 3 base is worth like er .... 100 points! So Master lich is cheaper than the archmage. |
Re: EA Atlantis - Bad*ss Battletoads
I think it would be worth it to get a little more into how useful Manifest Vitriols are for you. They provide you w/excellent ranged support in exchange for your cheap and plentiful W gems.
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