[Amorphous]

Originally Posted by Agema

As a minor point, Atlantis is not the only fully amphibious nation in EA: Agartha also is. Also, I found expanding with War Shamblers extremely easy as EA Atlantis.

Well, apart from troglodytes you are quite right. I rarely find them a problem, though, as they are not that hot under the water to start with and really bad as soon as they are in a cold dominion.

War shamblers are nice, but I have not been able to expand that well with them. It could just be a question of bad scripting on my part, though. I am not that good a player.

I took on 70 mind blasters and a melee screen with about 250 MR-10 units, about 80 War Shamblers, 80 Triton Guards and 80 Atlanteans. I lost my army and barely scratched the melee shield. It would be interesting to see if a few Basalt Kings up front with Iron Will could take the punishment instead and let the army get through. On the other hand, you'd still be in trouble going on the offence, as with MR-17 against enough mind blasters the Basalt Kings will almost certainly be paralysed before they can cast it and very vulnerable. Successive paralyses when you're already paralysed can cause damage as I recall from the rulebook, plus the 1AN MR additional damage, which can add up to plenty of pain.

That AN damage is painful, but I am astounded by that result. I have never encountered anything like it in this matchup.

I experimented a bit after seeing your post, but I just cannot get my head around it.

About the only thing I can think of - apart from using just a couple of Basalt Queens as commanders and have them be killed by mindblasts - is that R'lyeh was using mostly slave troopers as screen and managed to mindblast all the shamblers (fire at big monsters?) - leaving you with decidedly sub-par damage against decent armour, but you should still have been able to make quite a dent in the screen.

What sort of screen was it? And how much of it?

I set up an experiment with similar numbers but with changed troop composition to make it cheaper and a bit more effective (I think, but I welcome critique). I used 40 War Shamblers (5 of them were actually Warriors of the Deep), 40 Triton Guards, 145 Deep Ones (with and without spears) and about 15 Shamblers of the Deep mixed in with the Deep Ones. I used various scripting and placement for the R'lyeh, but the best I managed to do was losing the battle, 26 Giboleths and about half the mêlée screen. Atlantis lost about 75 units, mostly Deep ones and Tritons.

The general idea with this, was to have nice diversions for the mindblasters whatever their scripting and manage to arrive at the screen with units that can hurt them. The tritons high speed (relatively speaking) make them excellent flankers and diversions for mindblasters on fire closest. Deep ones are tempting targets, but there are a lot of them, and they pack quite a punch. Shamblers of different varieties are good damage dealers and quite nice as damage sinks.

I am probably just missing something obvious when it comes to scripting the Giboleths, but I tried with both fire closest and large enemy monsters in different combinations.

There are just too many targets for the mindblasters to be able to paralyse them all and it is too easy for Atlantis to deploy troops (using differences in size, hp and MR) so that large chunks of the army will start killing the screen.

Bear in mind also, those nice, juicy high-HP units are begging to receive special attention from Rlyeh's astral mages: paralyze, soul slay, horror mark, mind blast.

Basalt Kings and Queens are very easy to target, but Mothers and Mages of the Deep are next to impossible to single out. They are neither bigger nor have more hp than ordinary shamblers and they have better MR, which seems to make them less likely to be targeted by the AI.

Things ought to look better for R'lyeh when H2 priests can be used, though.

I am probably doing something wrong, somewhere, but I do not know what it is.

I also see it as something of a problem that the numbers we are talking about here implies that there should be at least some magic researched on both sides and that can of course change things around a bit.