LA Marignon Questions
 

I have a couple questions about LA Marignon, for an upcoming (newbie!) game that I'll be hosting. Keep in mind I'll be using the newest CBM, so any advice on how Mary changes from vanilla would be helpful!

First off, I've seen alot of guides recommending either a Baphomet F9S9 bless for flagellants or an awake SC (usually an E4 Cyclops or a Moloch). Since I am leaning towards the second route, wouldn't an A?S4 Virtue be a viable choice (allowing Mary to leverage into Astral and Air, since they already have high blood/fire)? Also in my test runs, and having a Dom10 (expecting to face an Ermor, R'lyeh, and Ulm in game, so sort of mandatory+blood sacrifice) the Virtue clears indies mindlessly (air shield, twist fate, +7 Awe), and can be empowered later in fire to start summoning Seraphs when necessary. I understand the Cyclops SC would give me a reinvig bless to my mages (otoh, I have reinvig through blood), and the Moloch can be used for early soul contracts/lifelong protections, but would a Virtue be an wise tradeoff? Additionally, how worth it is the production scale to Marignon, and how has the recent CBM changes affected the growth scale (mathematically: I know the base bonus has been nerfed and the growth rate increased)?

Also, a quick question about sailing: does it work with move 1 units (and hence make Mary infantry remotely usable), or do you need to be at least move 2 to utilize it?

Thanks!

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

First things first: you don't need an awake SC for expansion: a dozen royal guards backed by 10-20 crossbows clear most any indies. You don't need super high dom even against Ermor and Rlyeh because you have Holy 3 inquisitors to preach them away. And you most certainly don't want a bless for the flagellants because they suck horribly, and would suck horribly even with an all-9 bless if such a thing was even possible. If you want to roll with a bless, tailor it to your wizards and/or the angels - Earth, Nature, Astral for the angels ; Earth, Death for the wizards.

S4 is not good on an god you intend to fight with, because of magic duel. You need S7 to be safe from cheapo S1 mages trying to snipe him dead. You could be happy with S6, because that only gives them 1/36 chances to zap him but... yeah.

Me, I'd consider taking F1D2 on my god, to open up skulls of fire to bring an F3 master to F4 (you can get F4 geotic masters natively, but that's only 1/160 chance unless I botched the math). Also E2 to give the E1 masters boots so they can remotely sitesearch it. Maybe N2B2 for armour of thorns to let B3 masters reach B4 to spam boosters, but then again there an empowerment is not much of a problem.

Here are a couple ideas:

Sleeping crone, F1E4S4N4D1, Dom 6, Order 3 Heat 2 Growth 3 Magic 1. Go Thaum 2 first for auspex/augury and bonds of fire (great spell against many rushes), then Evoc 3 for fireball and arcane search ; then up to you. Either Const 6 for lanterns to make everything else easy if you can turtle quietly, or Alt 4 Ench 5 for wind guided flaming crossbows, or evoc for falling fires/holy pyre/storm+lighting spam, or straight up blood for devils of various shapes and sizes and fallen angels. I wouldn't rush the regular angels, pearls are hard to come by in the LA and it's going to be a while until you can summon one (plus they need buffs anyway)

Another option would be an F4S4B6 sleeping blood fountain, dom 7 O3H2G3Mis1Mag1 (or turmoil 1 luck 3). Go const 2, blood 1, thaum 3 (to teleport your blood fountain around, while bloodhunting the capital for a few turns is no big it's best to send it somewhere that doesn't generate quite so much money ASAP) ; start bloodhunting end of year 1, spam Soul Contracts, lead your hordes of devils with harlequins wielding scepters of authority and raid your nearest neighbour until he cries.

Sailing doesn't work with mapmove 1 units, no - they'd end their move in the water.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Oh, and while you probably don't need too much prod (although I suppose you could go hogwild, take an imprisoned god, max the scales and drown the world in crossbow bolts) you *absolutely* need Growth 3 no matter what - you've got old fire mages, they'll get diseased a lot come winter. Plus bloodhunting is much less micro heavy with G3, so there's that too.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

1. Fire up a game with LA Marignon
2. Select your starting army
3. Try to make it move to an overseas province. (Mari is guaranteed a coastal start, and has MM 1 units in it's starting army.)

I'm not generally one to complain about people asking stuff rather than testing it out, (In fact, I think this is the first time ever I do so) but if this is too much work to do to learn about a nation you'll be playing in MP... You don't even have to hit end turn to find out. :re:

(Oh, and the answer is, incidentally, that yes, mapmove 1 units benefit from sailing just fine. Sailing, by the way, is absolutely awesome, and can be leveraged to great effect depending on the map you're using. Once again depending on map setup, remember it might be possible to give Boots of Flying to your Goetic Masters/other supporting mages to fly around the sea and meat up with your sailers in the target province(s) to assault with an army of decent strength.)

Now, since I started off by berating people, I suppose I'll have to give some constructive advice as well, I suppose...

I'm not especially fond of taking an awake SC for Mari, since they expand quite well with blockers & crossbows. Also, they have amazing magic diversity, (all paths but nature) but low power in most paths, so you really want to think of a way to get some boosters, so I mostly end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales. (Then again, I allmost allways end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales, so that might just be me. :angel)

Things to keep in mind when designing your pretender:

* If you do indeed forgo the expansion pretender you probably want some order to make sure expansion goes smooth. The only good way to know for sure what's the minimum you can get away with is testing expansion over and over. With the changes to income from production in the last CBM I'd easily call production more important than order, though taking both is of course even better. (And depends a lot on whether you want luck or not.) If you do take a SC pretender production can be saved upon.
* Old, old mages and being a blood nation are both good reasons to take growth. (And I would almost definitely take it) On the other hand, blood gives you the means to prevent your mages from dying from old age (Boots of Youth) so if you really want to save some points here, you can. (Especially for smaller games.)
* Needed for Boosters: E2 for Earth Boots, S3 for RoW (With the other boosters you can natively forge) and A3 for both A boosters (With RoW) are really important, although E boots can quite easily be traded for. (And once you have one pair you can make your own.) Also nice is N2 to get you up the nature ladder. Anything on top of that is gravy. [I'm not disparaging gravy mind you, I love gravy. But if all you can get is the meat, you still have a nice meal.]
* Most of the deamons you can natively summon are heat immune and/or have heat auras. It's only a minor consideration, but if you move your temprature scale to gain some points, you probably want to do it towards heat. (Allthough wich other nations participate in the game is probably a more important consideration than this.)

And some tricks for during the game

* Royal guard make excellent blockers in early game with very high defense and decent armor. They do lack a lance though, so don't think of them as cavalry, they won't do more damage than any decent non-sacred infantry. Start phasing them out when your opponent brings out the area evocations, as a square of royal guard costs twice as much as one of infantry. (Either your own MM1 pikeneers/halbardiers, or any indep. infantry you scrounge up.)
* Exploit sailing. As said above you can sometimes combine it with other movement modes to really surprise your opponents.
* Royal navigators are really nice. They're cheap, they're mobile, combining sailing and teleportation, (A2 ones cloud trapeze out of the box, S2 ones teleport with cap.) and they can form communions, so you can easily project dangerous power anywhere on the map. (And lightning-based communions can potentially destroy entire armies (depending on their makeup obviously) if you take along (or summon) a blocker or two.
* Fallen angels. They're really nice, and relatively cheap. With the correct research you can cast phoenix pyre, soul vortex, reinvigoration, and be almost impossible to kill by any non-lifeless army. (reinvigoration requires fidgety slave management though) And they fly. (Don't forget to combine with sailing navigators for buffs (etherealness) or mage support (blocking for lightning communion) when it makes sense to do so.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

2 things about Marignon:

1) You can get a great deal of diversity without needing your pretender if you are willing to wait a bit to get some gem incomes up, and you are better able to take that than most being a strong blood nation. Fallen Angels are awesome for diversity since they give D3, and the F/D crosspath. Being recruit anywhere, rare randoms like E2, F4, B4, and the E/S crosspath are actually reasonably reliably attainable off Goetic Masters, depending on the size of the map. That leaves nature, and nature is the one path reasonably reliably available off indies, S3 for rings, and A4, and yeah that does point to the Virtue pretender. This feeds into:

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion thanks to a combination of bloodsac and recruit anywhere L3 Inquisitors that also aren't absolutely useless (though still mostly so) when not preaching. It's quite possible for a dom10 Marignon to never need to siege down and assault a fort. Burn down non forted temples with raiding, bloodsac away most candles (as in limited focused bloodsaccing as opposed to the kill the world kind which you are also ideally suited to doing), then use the Inquistors with your armies to preach away any holdout candles.

Consider a sleeping Virtue A4S4. Virtues need a bit of research to be useful anyway, and Marignon can expand quite effectively with crossbowmen and royal guards. With Dom10, you can afford +5 scales, say T1P2H3G3L3M1. As a blood nation, turmoil luck works out better than order, and growth 3 improves sustainability and reduces micro. I don't like going beyond turmoil 1 though, as it opens up a whole bunch of poploss events, and makes money a squeeze in the early game unless you get lucky with events. Taking a temperature extreme to afford production is personal preference, improving early expansion a bit, and letting you mass crossbowmen more easily, and either temperature works about as well. Heat makes devils stronger, gives you a few more fire gem events, and prevents the snow blocking pass and blizzard events. Cold makes frost fiends stronger, gives a few more water gem events, and prevents the lab burning down and raging rebel events, and might get you a very useful W2 ice druid. Yeah, the Virtue is going to die if she goes up against any astral nation, but then she can still be useful as a battle caster with your thunderstrike communions of Royal Navigators, or forge things. Empower her in blood to forge a robe of the magi if you've been having bad luck with randoms.

Going lower dom and a rainbow pretender is also viable of course. Consider a druid. E/N is the best bless for Marignon, since it helps both Goetic Masters and Angels.

Also, on certain maps, holy crap sailing. Marignon can easily make entire armies complete with full communions sailing with Admirals and Royal Navigators. Sadly, you don't have any fire mages with sailing, so no flaming arrows.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Oh, yeah. Forgot to add that. Dominionwise you're really free to do as you like. If you want to outright win through dominion, or even "merely" kill of opponents, there's probably no one who does it better. On the other hand, with the ability to blood sac, you can easily survive with a really low dominion too. Whatever floats your boat.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Mictlan is still better at domkilling, if only because Mictlan is very good at getting truly absurd amounts of blood slaves. Still, Marignon is good at it, and can pair it effectively with a more standard military strategy.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

The *one* time I don't fire up a test game to double check the answer a question :(

That was true before the latest CBMs, back when they could still have sanguine dousing rods made and carried by every last 60g priest.

Current day Mictlan is bad at blood hunting, whereas LA Marignon has B3 holy bloodhunters available from any castle for a mere 190g a pop. Also H3 bloodsaccers who count double to remove black candles (although that may only count when preaching and not when saccing, I dunno)

Do the math: a Mictlan priest has 50% chance each turn to net d6+1 slaves. A B3 Geotic master gets d6+3 every turn, guaranteed (unless there's unrest). On average, you need ~3 Mictlan priests to equal the output of a single Geotic Master, and they'll have much more chances to generate unrest. That's 180g and 3 turns of recruitment to the master's 1 turn and 190g. 3 B3 geotics can operate pretty much indefinitely at 0 taxes barring "bad luck" when all 3 get huge amounts of slaves. On any given day, 9 Mictlan Priests in a single province will generate at least 9d6-9 unrest (avg. 22), more if they actually manage to catch slaves.

And of course, while Mictlan priests who generate too much unrest can't do much else but sit on their hands, Geotic Masters can forge useful stuff, summon devils, can Harm or Life for a Life or Infernal Prison any would-be raider...

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

This is CBM, which I think makes Marignon stronger than Mictlan at blood sac.

1) No jade knives. LA Mictlan can't get above holy 1 outside the capital, and only the King of Rain gets holy 3 and recruiting him means not recruiting the other cap only mages which are also necessary for Mictlan, and using him to bloodsac means not using him for all his other roles. So Mictlan needs to seriously sacrifice:happy: to crank out those temple checks. Marignon on the other hand has recruit anywhere H3s which don't really have anything else they need to be doing.

2) No SDRs. Outside the cap, Mictlan only gets B1s, while Goetic Masters are recruit anywhere and 1/4 get B3. That means Marignon can spend money to get more hunters, while Mictlan needs to spend slaves to summon hunters. That's super efficient in the long run thanks to Mictlan's super good summons, but that means less actual blood available. This plus temples that actually work means that a Marignon focused on blood will have more blood to actually do things. Of course, Mari is never as focused on blood as Mictlan, but that's because of its other options, not that it's not capable.

Plus, Marignon needs to sacrifice (ha) less to get dom10. Mictlan has a strong incentive to pump all their points into a massive bless rather than spend on high dominion when their sacreds are recruit anywhere and thus not limited by holy.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Newbie game? Go for the bloodsac tactic. Teach them that a properly executed blood sacrifice tactic is very very dangerous.

If you have sailing, play around with that in a SP game. I played LA Atlantis, and there I learned how immensely powerful it can be. (You can skip one sea province, even if your army is already underwater. As sea provinces tend to have a lot of connections to other provinces (which is something that makes it hard for water nations to keep their dom up) you can really use this to your advantage.

Personally, I would go heavily for blood. You can bloodhunt like crazy, blood is crazy strong. (Gives communions, good summonables, reasonable SC's if you get there first(*), good combat magic). The only problem with blood magic is that you can never ever have enough blood slaves. (NEVER) So you tend to lag research wise, as you need your mages to blood hunt. (A heavy blood nation that leads in research while still being able to wage war has probably already won).

*: Never mind the SC's only get them if you have blood slaves to spare and what to deny them to others. http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Fallen_Angel Get those. f3d3b3 yes please :D. Rush for those. No upkeep, sacred, can bloodhunt, good stats... Nice :D.

(Of course, you could ignore me and go for the conjuration summons, also very good, but you probably need to build your pretender around summoning those).

LA marignon is very strong, access to almost all the paths except nature. (Harbringers give air). Blood, good mounted units as blockers, crossbows, sailing for raiding. Scouts.

I think I would go for n4e4 on the pretender (helps with the sacred mages, and late game sacred summons) dom10 and scales. Imprison the pretender for points (One downside, you only get to sitesearch with the pretender for N mage in very late. Rush blood for blood 7 to get access to death magic. Flood the world with blood sac, demons, or just get vampires, as your dominion is going to be everywhere, they are hard to get rid off. And 3 vampire lords can blood sabbath to get to d4 and cast darkness. So you don't even need to risk a 'expensive' skull staff into combat.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

It's really unfortunate that Marignon doesn't get that one female titan chasis with E/N. What chasis are you using? It's really hard to get E/N blesses and also dom10 at a reasonable price. There's the Lady of Love pretender with N2 and W, and you can imprison her for a W4E4N4 bless, dom10 and +4 scales. It's also 0 points remaining, which is satisfying, but the scales are kind of bad for a nation that won't get much use out of the bless before late game, and it's painful not being able to get the astral rings. You can't forge the elemental staves either, so no rings means even summoning Harbingers won't get you to Robes of the Magi. Having either ring or robe lets you get to the other, but not having either... I guess you could summon all the Arch Devils to get the one with S3, but that's a lot of slaves for rather mediocre units for Mari who already has all the fire they want, and there's no guarantee you would be first to them anyway.

And the bless is hard to use even late game. Fallen angels with that bless are bonafide SCs but they can't self bless. You could team it up with a Harbinger, but you can't guarantee having the pearls to pair Fallen Angels with Harbingers.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Cool thing about Marignon: they have easy access to both feathers and lightless lanterns, and can even swing by skull mentors should they really wanna. And since those Fallen Angels are gonna want some gear anyway...

Not just scouts: spies. And assassins.
OK, so assassins are something of a waste of time, but a surprise spy onslaught coupled with Rain of Toads spam can really mess someone up, particularly other blood nations. Finding spies at 200 unrest is non-trivial if you can't mindhunt them (which Mictlan, Jotun, Midgard, Abysia and Ulm will have a hard time doing).
More evil yet, Marignon can also send Dream Horrors on top of all that if they get lucky and score an S2 Geotic for some added insult: good on you, you found the spies ! Now you get to eat blood vengeanc'd astral claws !

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Kobal2, I meant spies, sorry about that :D. Never really use that much research boosters myself, so that is why I disregarded that.

Blessing your SC's isn't that hard, you have recruit everywhere h2 units. Just boots of flying. Blessing, smite script. And hope they survive.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Thanks for all the responses! I've definitely got alot more to think about, espcially with pretender design. Most of the guides I read were recommending an awake expander SC, so that's the path I though I'd need to go down. Normally I'd go with an imprisoned rainbow with good scales (or an imprisoned SC with insane scales). So I'm definitely going to have to rethink that.

Also, I've been reading that feathers have been buffed. How good are they now? Mathwise, they seem poor choices for research compared to lanterns and mentors.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

They give reinvigoration or encumbrance reduction or something like that.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

They give -2 Encumbrance at half the cost of the armor that does the same. So there are niche uses of pushing something down to encumbrance 0. I like forging a few to get a little bonus research early, but mainly to give a few mages with crystal shields the equivalent of 4 points of reinvigoration. This can be useful if you have good sacreds, but only have holy 2 mage priests, like EA Tien Chi. Not so much an issue with Marignon, but I can see some fun with prophetizing a high inquisitor, and giving it a crystal shield plus owl quill for endless H5 banishment against say Ermor at construction 2.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

They are indeed worse than lanterns on an RP per gem basis... but they come much earlier (they're research 0 in CBM), so the actual number of RPs you can milk out of one Owl Quill compared to one Lightless Lantern over the course of the game is comparable (to a point), and you can't really put a price on getting crucial research online earlier. Think of it like overtaxation: over an infinity of turns it's very wasteful, but in practice money NOW is much more valuable than money tomorrow (because with money NOW you can build an army to seize even more income). Same goes for RP.

They also have been buffed to reduce the encumbrance of the carrier, which can actually be better than providing reinvigoration for SCing purposes (e.g. on Quickened people) so when you're done using them for the RPs you can always stick them on something nasty.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

I see, so you use can spend some gems for some early research and transition them as some cheap reinvigoration? Interesting.

I've been hearing conflicting opinions on Order/Production and Luck/Misfortune. Is there a reason for me to got Luck/Turmoil? In general, I find that more gold=more mages/castles/potential units=more of everything. I understand that Luck helps with getting national heroes, and by also providing a source of gem income, but is it that significant? And the initial gold boost helps hypercharge expansion, which is always a plus.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Luck/turmoil is a popular option for nations who blood hunt a lot and early. You dont get any gold from provinces that are being hunted anyhow. Still, most people that does luck builds tend to take order 1/luck 3 if they can afford it as the order help you get better events. Namely gold and fort events.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Thing is though, you only get 3/4 events a turn. Luck determines the proportion that will be good or bad, while scales other than luck determine what kind of good and bad events you get, but can't get you any more. Assuming luck 3, taking order 1 means your good events will tend to be money related, but that means fewer gem events compared to turmoil 1. Getting a thousand gold event letting you pop down an extra fort, or just straight up getting a fortified city by event in year 1 can be pretty huge, but money events stop being useful later on and you'd prefer the gem events.

Marignon is pretty cheap to run, enough so that I think it can do without the order 1.

Magic is another scale that plays interestingly with luck. At magic 3 (some of the events are at magic 2, but nobody would take that) you can get a bunch of mages in events that can significantly increase your diversity, as well as a lot of magic item events. That's really random though, sometimes you get a staff of elemental mastery, other times you get an amulet of the fish...as a land nation. This is pretty much unimportant for Marignon because of your superb existing diversity. As another nation though, turmoil/magic/growth can get you a bloodhenge druid. You'll only get it maybe 1/2 your games with those scales, but getting it early and breaking into blood can be pretty huge.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Actually, I'd say money events never cease being awesome for blood nations, as they let you fort up your blood hunting provinces to protect them from raids. Sure, you can also do that with Three Red Seconds, but that costs you a lot whereas free gold is free gratis.

If you're going the bloodsac domkill route, then one more fort+temple never goes amiss.

It also lets you put up labs in provinces blood hunted by good mages (like geotics, fallen angels, vamp lords...) so they can cast or forge in a hurry if need be, shift to research on turns they get bad rolls and have to let unrest die down, or just regain some sanity re: slave shuffling micro.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Oh sure, but the question isn't whether or not you can use 400 free gold, you always can, but whether you'd rather have 400 free gold or 5 free death gems. And once my initial round of fort building is done, I would typically say the death gems.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Well the thing is, blood nations never have enough slaves (even when they're pulling 400+ a turn) and they're especially vulnerable to jokers teleporting in to say hi.

Regular nations can always use one more fort of course, but there's a point where they're already maxxed out on mage recruitment per turn, at which point additional forts become token defence which is not really needed as such : they won't die out even if they lose a 5+ gem province or two (or ten) for one turn, then take them back the turn after.
The same disruption really messes up blood nations however - either their hunters get killed, or they just flee but won't be able to hunt the turn they move back in, and even assuming the raiders are dealt with they'll have left a heap of unrest behind which further delays blood hunting.

Basically, in the late game a raid is a mere one turn's income disruption for a regular nation ; but at least 2, more likely 3 turns' for a blood nation. Which is why fortifications are even more appreciated than usual.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Well, I'll point out that Mari's Goetic Masters can natively cast Hellfire, Leech, Life for a Life, and Infernal Prison, with the last 2 admittedly a lot of research with limited reward seeing as how Mari has little reason to summon anything other than Fallen Angels. If you know how the enemy is going to raid, there's very little your blood hunters can't stop short of a full sized army except maybe Earthquake/Rain of Stones by a lifeless caster. (I can't think of any, are there?) Oddly enough, the removal of SDRs has signicantly weakened raiding on bloodhunters, since no longer are most hunters defenseless B1s carrying SDRs.

It probably ends up a matter of preference though, fortifying your own territory vs. using extra gems for more offensive punch.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Keep in mind that against some nations, the Royal guards are
less useful. Against Gath they are useless. If you had the misfortune to meet them early, rush Blood research to get Blood Boil.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

After Blood nations reach blood 9 teleporting raiders die like flies. The banishment spells and life for a life take care of most of them. The research window where you can actually tele raid blood nations is very small. And small groups of hidden troops can also get killed by imp spam.

And if you lack the blood levels to go for the higher level ones, enough sabbath slaves give you higher levels. Blood is super strong as a magical path.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

With a nation with strong recruit-everywhere mages (And Mari certainly qualifies on that front) I'd take the gold any day of the week and thrice on fridays. The problem isn't that gems aren't nice, but that most of the gem events tend to give so damn few of them. Seems half the time I get 3 gems or so which, frankly, doesn't get me too hot in my pants. (I haven't done any testing on this mind you, just casual observation, does anyone actually have solid numbers?)

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Yea, gold events are only ever bad if you hate your recruitable mages.

And as for the gem events, they vary quite a bit in potency. Some events like broken mirror, or cursed by a witch, will only give you one 1d6 gems. Open ended rolls just like any other dice in this game. So you could theoretically get an infinite amount of gems from a single event. 2d6 events are probably the most common though and there are at least four 4d6 events.

I did some counting earlier and apparently watergems are the most common type to get from events as two out of four 4d6 events are water and they also have several other good events. I once got 90+ watergems from my turmoil/Luck dominion by turn 30. I was playing LA Agartha. I did not have even a single watermage.
Death is also very common if you have death scales. Least common are blood followed by air.


And a last point about order VS luck. Luck is best if you have a small empire or high dominion as it relies on you having your luck scales in every province. Order is better for nations with weak dominion as your capitol benefits disproportionally.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

It's not as if every gold event gives you a thousand, plenty just give you a pitiful 100 or 150 gold, which isn't exactly exciting either. And the really huge gold event, the one that gives 3000 plus a magic item plus fire gems isn't order dependent, so you'll actually get fewer with order. Mari's mages are middle of the road in terms of power, their most notable feature is cost effectiveness. Mari simply doesn't need event gold to recruit all the mages it wants, especially once its armies start shifting to demons.

And for that matter, all this is assuming you are even able to get an empire large enough to max out events per turn with order 1. Most maps you won't get that big before winning.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

You dont need an awake SC at all. Specially if you play CBM 1.92 instead of vanilla, Royal Knights are cheaper now and can wipe indies easily.

I'll go with some rainbow pretender able to build items you might need. Air 4 allow for Air Boosters. S2E2 allow for cristal coins, as well as earth boots boosters. A4E4 allow for staffs of elemental mastery. And so on.

Another possible option is to take a Forger god, with a discount to forge. A f2b4 can cheapely get a few blood boosters and become a Soul Contract factory, building one per turn (even cheaper with a forging hammer), so you can create a huge amount of devils in the long run.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Soul Contracts are one of the few items that don't get discounted by forging bonuses or dwarven hammers. Which makes sense, since you're not actually using the slaves to build them, but as payment for a deal with some demon lord of some description.

Lifelong Protection works the same way.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Oh. Kinda silly that you can use the hammer in other blood items but not in this one

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Well, Armor of souls is still forged, but soul contract is written.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Quick question: what exactly is heroic damage?

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Where did you see that?

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Figured I might as well look for all of LA Mari's heroes. Angelique has it on her light lance. Don't think it's an anti-undead effect, since that's written on it already under damage. Also haven't been able to google anything relating to it.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Check the dm file for CBM. It does an extra 15 strength not counted ap damage that doubles against larger foes. Which means Angelique is a pretty serious anti-thug with her default weapon. Too bad she's size 3 though. At least I assume she's counted as size 3, I'm not sure about how cavalry gets counted.

If she hits a size 4 undead, she'll do 48 regular damage followed by 30 ap.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

I get the hammer bonus to forge a carpet, a bag of wine, a pill or an elixir. So I still think it's stupid to make an exception only with contracts.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

None of those constitute a deal with the lords of hell. I'm okay with forging discounts working for any kind of item where the item itself is where the power comes from, but not for one where the power is not in the item itself, but in the deal it represents.

Or alternatively: Thou shalt not haggle with the devil.

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Man, now I wish we had giants this game! (neither a Gath or a Utgard, hrmph)

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Keep her around - might come handy when tartarians start showing. :)

Re: LA Marignon Questions
 

Until then...FREE 80 LDR COMMANDER/STANDARD, woot!

:happy: