Quote:
Originally Posted by WraithLord
I've read the guide. It's good stuff as expected 
some comments:
- 2nd Fantomen's comment re. Forge lord. Not sure it's worth it. I'd perhaps go for awake high dom SC pretender. I know pyth can expand w/o one but this can super charge their early expansion and with a few key paths that SC can later retire to forge or cast while high dom mitigates heretic's influence.
- What's wrong with hydra only expansion. Say with A9 bless?
- What's wrong with legion only based expansion. Say with monster scales pretender?
- w/o high dom the heretics can be really counter productive. I once played LA Pyth MP and preferred to stay away from them.
- The overall strategy sounds promising but I wonder how the broad spectrum strat. would work out in real MP games where every cent counts. Beside the high competence level required for this specific guide, some guides (like Caelum) just sound good in theory but having trouble delivering in real MP games. I'm not being controversial, I'm frankly curios and would love to hear back in this thread from players who actually gave it a try. |
A Hydra only expansion tends to be very gold intensive. You need about 4 to keep routing from being an issue which is the same amount of gold as a new castle. I played a game awhile ago with a double N/W bless, and indeed the berzerking got rid of the routing problem and the defense plus extra regen allowed single hydra expansion parties. That was fun and a crazy opening, though it stalled out later because of the scales I had to take to afford it. You really need production scales as the game wears on.
Re: Broad spectrum, I take a bit of artistic licence to make things more interesting to read, you're unlikely to be fielding 8 differently set up armies at once. You can, however, shift strategies to take advantage of the specific weaknesses of whoever you're fighting at the time. If you successfully get up several castles up early on (shouldn't be difficult), and steadily recruit a good spectrum of your different cheap mages then there isn't much I suggest that can't be fielded in a couple turns. The trick is you have to have your prep work done ahead of time - you're gonna be sucking air if you are trying to recruit the mages with the randoms you want right when you need them. Have a couple of everything you might want and a variety of boosters sitting in your lab though and by the time your opponent adjusts to fighting under heat from hell you're dropping foul vapors on him from behind skellispam, and by the time his poison immune stuff gets to the front line you're dropping weapons of sharpness and mass protection on your guys who were previously fighting under fire fend and heat from hell, the guys sent to deal with that get a couple heavily buffed sirrush and hydras fighting under wrathful skies. Assuming you've got the research all that can be done with the same 100 troops, a handful of mages and under 100 gems worth of forgings & summonings. Investing in maenads and assassins, vengeance of the dead spam and lamia queens are all powerful side strategies options swhich are not strictly necessary.