Quote:
Originally Posted by Zeldor
Living Pillar has 8! MR. It's elite unit for a nation that needs magic scale [so make it 7]. Elite unit with animal-level MR! Their non-sacred mages cost 250 gold for 6 RP. SCs are much much worse than Niefel giants, can't self-bless and cost as Niefels - 500 gold. H3 guys are 300 gold and cap only, so pretty much unusable. No N for free forts. Almost no S. No D. No B. No clams.
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Looking at it, the above seems unreasonable.
Living Pillars being elite units does not mean that they should be used for everything. Indeed, a situation where someone is spamming MR spells is exactly the situation where you do not want to use them. They are rather cost effective castle defenders and make for decent bodyguards in a pinch, but that is pretty much it.
You are also not being consequent. If Living Pillars are counted as MR 7 units, Mages of the Deep should be counted as 8 RP units.
Although Basalt Kings can be seen as inferior to Niefel Jarls, they are definitely not "much much worse" and, quite frankly, if you need to look at Niefel Jarls to find something more powerful, you are not exactly scraping at the bottom of the barrel.
In light of your comparison with Niefelheim it is also somewhat strange that you lambast their H3 priest for being unusable. I cannot say that I agree, but even apart from that, Niefelheim does not have any H3 and Atlantis has no less access to H2 and H1 than anyone.
So let us look at what EA Atlantis actually has when it comes to what is discussed here.
Speaking of research, their mages are expensive, but not particularly slow. And they have both the path and the gems for lanterns.
Apart from being rather decent SCs after a quite modest investment, Basalt Kings are also very good battle mages. Things like blade wind sort of speaks for itself in the early era, but the kings also have a broad range of troop buffing options and access to the very effective acid line of spells (combine for more fun when some opponent thinks that heavy infantry is good against the former).
The everywhere recruitable Mages of the Deep are no slouches on their own and their astral pick make them very good complements to the Basalt Kings. You do e.g. not need a god to cast antimagic, the mages can do that just fine when needed.
As for diversification into nature, that is easily accomplished. I happen to think that a modest investment in the nature path for the Atlantis god (I really recommend Dagon) is a good idea, but even discounting that, it is easy enough to find any of the numerous tribes with nature mages on land.
The thing about R'lyeh is also widely blown out of proportion in my opinion. I consider Atlantis a more powerful nation than R'lyeh in the early era overall. If we, for just a moment, discount the giboleth and gibodai, R'lyeh troops are just a speed bump for Atlantis. This is actually the case above water, which happens to be one of the major strengths of Atlantis - it is the only fully amphibious nation. R'lyeh needs its mind blasters to keep up. Without magic support, using deep ones aginst R'lyeh is not a particularly good idea - so use your ordinary MR 10 troops and better mobility - but as soon as antimagic or iron will enters the picture that changes.
Just looking at the raw numbers of antimagiced deep ones against giboleths is informative. The mind blasters have 10 shots and about 30% chance of going through MR which will paralyse the deep one for about 5 turns. At any given time a single giboleth is not likely to have paralysed more than two deep ones and you get 4 deep ones for the price of one giboleth. The real advantage of the paralysis is that it will help break the formation of the deep ones and make it easy for the R'lyeh infantry screen to kill them. However, the AI likes to target things with lots of hp. Atlantis can field a number of ordinary shamblers with MR 10 and with antimagic or iron will up, only about every 5th blast will go through. Add luck to make it every 10th hit if you can. These shamblers will draw a lot of the attention from the deep ones and let these wreak havoc on R'lyeh troops.
It is by no means a cake walk and to be safe you probably need to spend a bit more money on your army than R'lyeh, but that is mitigated by the fact that Atlantis does not need to spread its forces as thin. Being able to retreat to and attack from land is a great advantage.