[Amorphous]

Is there anyone besides me who likes to send out a reasonably kitted out Ancient Lord as early as possible?

With a 2h Sword of Sharpness, Black Steel Helmet and Plate he cannot take provinces on his own, but he does make expanding a lot safer and lessens the need for troops. He also does not care one bit about heavy armour or shields as he does 33AP with an attack of 13 when blessed.



Concerning adding nature to the Forge Lord, I think it more reasonable to just add N2. It takes care of all your crafting and summoning needs as a Thistle Mace in combination with the two rings get you to N5 without trouble and you can craft a cheap mace to make some independent mage take care of the site searching. It costs 66 points which you reasonably can pay for by one point of dominion and a scale (production perhaps?).

A nature bless seems far too costly, but if you are adamant, how about taking Drain 2? If I am not mistaken, the bless only helps your living sacreds, so it seems doable to delay the acquisition of statues a bit. You might then consider taking Heat instead of Cold, though.



As someone asked about non-CBM dominions, I hope that it is not out of bounds to add a few things about it.

I was inspired by the other thread about MA Agartha, so I was actually toying around with the nation and had settled on a Forge Lord for cheap Blood Stones as well and was trying something similar to what Baalz does here - though not as well, I readily admit - when his guide came up.

A lot of it can be used in vanilla, but I could not make astral work that well. It is very hard to acquire enough pearls to produce a reasonable amount of RoW; I needed to alchemize like crazy and that quite simply did not seem worth it. The difference in cost is huge between vanilla and CBM. What did work was skipping astral altogether on the pretender and instead add W2. It is cheaper, which is rather important as the Forge Lord is more expensive outside of CBM, and instead of RoW the pretender can produce Elemental Staffs. Getting the gems for them is easier and they work just as well for your Golemcrafters. Getting into astral - and to a lesser degree death - is very much harder, of course, but Golemcrafters with staffs can pick up the slack until you have gathered enough pearls to empower a mage in a worst case scenario.