Beginner's Guide to EA Arcoscephale

[WingedDog]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Personally, I feel that Turmoil hurts your opponents more than it hurts you, and it benefits your philsophers.

Umm... Sorry for the correction, but it is sloth benefits your philosophers not turmoil.

[Trumanator]

But what happens if he just methodically advances and besieges your forts, particularly your capital? do you just keep raiding and assasinating? Also, how vulnerable are your mystics if he has a bunch of S mages to magic duel?

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by WingedDog

Umm... Sorry for the correction, but it is sloth benefits your philosophers not turmoil.

Yeah no problem, I went to bed, realized I had made the error, and stayed there anyway.

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Trumanator

But what happens if he just methodically advances and besieges your forts, particularly your capital? do you just keep raiding and assasinating? Also, how vulnerable are your mystics if he has a bunch of S mages to magic duel?

Well, the idea is you converge a bunch of your raiders back to the fort to defend, just before he breaks through the defense.
Or you use mystics to defend.

Remember that you should have a LOT of intelligence if you have a lot of raiding forces. Ideally you should be able to stop him from massing a big force.

A couple of other points:

Ideally you want your raiders fighting in HIS dominion. Yours is death remember?

Most large armies will have map move 1-2. Position your oreos in the path of advancement. Use their seduction ability to seduce there commander. Ideally this will cause either:

A. The fragmentation of their force, if there are multiple commanders or
B. A force of leaderless troops.

Either way, attack the square he is occupying with your wind lords - cut off his retreat squares if you can.

The more troops he uses to guard commanders, the slower his ability to mass useful troops in battle- and it doesn't matter *too* much.

Oreos with evo 3+ researched will usually take any 5 guards + random commander.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Trumanator

But what happens if he just methodically advances and besieges your forts, particularly your capital? do you just keep raiding and assasinating? Also, how vulnerable are your mystics if he has a bunch of S mages to magic duel?

In order for a nation to be a "raiding nation," it has to have some defensive capability for stopping an enemy advance just like you describe. In Arco's case that probably means that when he besieges your fort, 11 mystics, protected by some troops, pop out in a communion (3 masters, 8 slaves) and rain fire, ice, and magma on the besieging army until it dies, then go back to researching. There are probably some Oreiads there doing assassinations, too, and you'll have a better force density because you're closer to production centers than he is. What you want is for him to be forced into counter-raiding (which you're better at) or straight-up attacking (which you have a defensive advantage at). If he can win in a straight-up focused assault, raiding won't work unless you're good enough at it that you can take provinces twice as fast as he can take them back, and use that stranglehold on his economy to produce enough forces that you *can* win a straight-up battle.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Remember that Wind Lords, even heavily-blessed Wind Lords, aren't very gold-efficient troops. In every test I've run, blessed Wind Lords lost out to a gold-equivalent force of regular old heavy infantry. That means you *must* take advantage of your superior mobility to produce a favorable correlation of forces--you're paying a heavy gcost price for mobility (flying) so you might as well use it. If he's got two armies besieging your forts and you have two armies of Wind Lords and mystics, hit ONE army with everything you've got and hit the other with anything you have left on the next turn.

-Max

[chrispedersen]

Exactly correct Max.

One further note: Use a small to medium map. 50-100 is good 110-120 is probably stretching it.

Pi r squared. Dom are linear.

[MaxWilson]

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. "Dom are linear"?

I would think mobility would be even more important on a large map, especially because you can recruit mystics anywhere and Oreiads can Cloud Trapeze to the front lines from anywhere.

-Max

[chrispedersen]

This strategy for Arco relies heavily on Dominion.
Yes, you are pumping dominion - 10 Dom score, awake pretender, prophet etc.

But as the size of the map increases (r2) your dominion is only linear.

Strategies which rely on dominion therefor fare best in small to medium maps.

[JimMorrison]

But that's ignoring the time factor on the equation. If you are built to pump your Dominion, then a larger map = more time = greater disparity between your Dominion spread, and that of your opponents.