[General Tacticus]

Originally posted by aldin:
I need y'all to check my logic on this to see if I've made some glaring error. So far everything I've encountered in my first test game says things are okay. I was looking at the costs of bless-effect troops and I couldn't get over the idea that Mictlan has a lot of inexpensive, solid bless units. I knew I wanted a double 9; Fire to boost standard attacks to excellent ones and Water to boost average defenses to good ones and pick up quickness to boot.

So far you reasoning is rock solid.

The way the numbers are working out is weird though:

-Pretender as researcher = Drain 3; 17 RP/turn is nothing to sneeze at, and the +1.5 MR is nice too.
-Rock bottom resource costs = Sloth 3; It's a minor gold hit but the production just isn't needed.
-Preferred scale = Heat 1; Just for the bonus points.

You will feel that Drain 3 later, believe me. It means your cheapest mages (mictlan priest) only has 1 research. You have no really cost effective researcher. Better pray you find a library, or you'll never keep up.

That's 280 FREE (mostly) points! And just for grins and giggles the cheapest F9W9 pretender available to Mictlan is the Moloch. The Eagle Warriors FLY when blessed. The Jaguar Warriors turn into were-Jags when hit, and the Sun Warriors are tough HI units BEFORE you tack on the bless effects. Add to that the fact that all the commanders are sacred and you've got some tough early armies.

The eagle warriors fly, but are weak, although your blessing helps them nicely. Both they and the werejaguars stay very vulnerable to missile fire, even blessed. The wereform of the werejaguar is a little stronger than the basic form, but not much. The Sun warriors were barely into medium infantry before the blessings. Of course, your blessings do make them much stronger...

My experience so far is that I can crank out fourteen Jaguar Warriors and a couple of banner bearers while I build a H3 commander and prophet him to H4. Combined with the starting units, this sweeps the "easy" str.7 independants adjacent to the castle while I crank out 7 Sun Warriors/turn. By the time the easy stuff is cleared a fair-sized sacred army is available.

So bring me back down to earth - I know I read a lot about how weak Mictlan is, but so far my experience is that they build a big, fast, good early army with lots of research and many excellent units.

As has already being mentioned, you won't get more than those 7 sun warriors a turn - and your other units are desperately weak. Pray for amazon territory ! (they have sacred troops)
You need some summons to keep your armies up, but you will have trouble keeping up in research.
You NEED to perform blood sacrifices to spread your dominion, so you have to setup a blood economy, which is very expensive (but brings its rewards later).
Oh, and your province defense sucks big time.

Still, Mictlan is very good for a blessing oriented game. So look for those amazons, keep cranking up the sun warriors, and start thinking about getting other decent troops (indies, summons) for the middle game. Here are a few challenge :
- how will you defeat an army with 60 longbowmen and 40 heavy infantry (15+ prot).
- how will you deal with big tramplers ? defense won't help...
- how will you deal with heavy losses ?
- how will you deal with hostile magic ?
- when your enemies are ready to cast, say, Burden of Time, will you be able to dispel it ?

You can do it. But it's not easy