Strategy for Agartha Early Age

[Micah]

Badger: I just played a game as EA Agartha, so I've got a pretty good feel for them. I went with the forge lord initially myself. Your general idea is good, although I'd tweak it a bit. I think the growth scale is a poor choice, as you lose out on one of Agartha's main advantages: no supply use for most troops. Taking triple death makes invading your dominion a pain in the rear for most nations, and redistributing the 200 design points from that scale to order (which then allows the points in luck to go to productivity, if you wish) will easily offset the income from the population death unless you're playing a pretty long game. Plus you get the money up front, which still might make it worth it. Drain is a solid choice for exactly the reason you mentioned, and a bless strat is essential for Agartha. You contradict yourself on cold/heat, but heat is the way to go, since your units are cold blooded and it helps out the magma children, as you said. Heat/cold also hits supplies, synergizing nicely with 3 death.

From my experience playing last time I'd probably try the following pretender for my next game:



Frost father, imprisoned, dominion 5.
Water 9, Fire 6, nature 4, astral and air 1.

If I'm right, quickness will provide a -2 defense penalty on the 2nd attack, making it easily better than the extra few points in fire. It will also vastly up your chances against tramplers because of the defense. Mammoths were my bane in my last game, the only way I could deal with them was massed flame oracles casting magma eruption. Flaming weapons don't stack up to the water bless because the seal guards can already provide magical weapons, and the high str of agarthans makes the extra few damage much weaker than an extra attack. Nature provides regeneration, cutting down on deaths and afflictions. Air comes with the chassis, and astral is a good choice since it's only 10 points, and not available nationally.

Order 3, Prod 3, Heat 3, Death 3, luck 0, Drain 2.

I already discussed the reason for the scales above. A tweak down to order or production to up dominion might be prudent in a shorter game because of holy troop limits, but in a longer game building temples with the extra income is probably a better choice.

As far as general strategy, I didn't play with the summons much, but magma eruption is a great spell, and all of your flame oracles can cast it, many at half fatigue. Crank out some earth boots for the losers with only a 3 earth skill and you shouldn't need the reinvigoration from earth bless, they'll get off a good 4-5 casts of it in a battle with the first 100 fatigue, which should put a nice dent in the opposition. You also have the advantage of half upkeep on all of your units save the trogs (which are great if you need troops right away, or for times when you can't get a blesser over to a province, or as a flanking force). All of your other non-sacred troops are useless. Your PD is good for absorbing damage, but that's about it, don't expect them to win battles on their own (ever). Anyhow, probably way too much info. Hope it helps.

-Kyle

[HoneyBadger]

I can see Death being a valid choice. Not really a contradiction on Heat/Cold, what I meant was I could have gone with Cold3 over Heat3, but Heat seemed the better of the two. Just confusing on my part. Let's see what I can manage with Death 3...Ok, I really want to keep the Forge Lord-even imprisoned, he's still really useful for Agartha. It'd be nice if their were more than one Pretender with forging bonus, by the way, even though I like the Forge Lord. With Death 3 I've also modified my Prod to Sloth 1, luck to 1 and Drain to 3. My new magic becomes: F6, W9, E9, and N4. Dom becomes 5. That gives me extremely tough Seal Guards who can also dish out loads of damage. Crap scales though, but not completely pathetic. By the way, it may be tough to mass Seal Guards, but it's nowhere near as tough as massing Atlantian Living Pillars. Every time you get an extra 50 gold, just put a Seal Guard in the quewe, sooner or later you'll have a decent force.

[HoneyBadger]

I'm not sure why they decided to put the Ancient Lords in charge-they are identical to Seal Guards except with worse equipment. I think I may mod Agartha just a bit.

[hako]

My brief opinion is bless strats suck - they should be much harder to implement. They are extremally powerfull, impossible to counter at the begining, very hard to play against, even in later game. Good option would be - until God dormant/imprisoned no bonuses for blessed units, that should balance that strategy little bit.

[HoneyBadger]

I like bless strategies just fine in concept, but I don't have too much of a problem about them not working until your god wakes up. I do feel very confined by the limited choice of 8 total blesses. I think it's a fair tradeoff that if we have to wait until our Pretender wakes up that their be quite a few new things-not unbalanced or more powerful, mind you-just new and different-our blessed troops can do. I'm currently working on some ideas and I'll be sending ideas for new magic paths plus blesses for those paths, into Illwinter, but I'll probably write up a thread for them first, so people can argue about them.

[HoneyBadger]

One important consideration-as of now, Oracles can quickly become old. You may be better off using your cash on Earth Readers if you plan on researching with them. Also, if you can afford to equip them, they make a fine fighting force-they're all priests so undead will melt before them, and they all have atleast some magic. Add a heavy combat bless, armor and weapons, and you've got a superlative fighting force. I do think Agartha is a tiny bit weak, though. Two changes I plan to make are increasing Oracle max age, either increasing the size of Ancient-level Agarthans or adding/modifying in some size 6 Agarthans, allowing earth readers and oracles to have a small chance of preventing bad things from happening while increasing their price, and possibly adding Beholder units and maybe another type of "monstrous" unit-these changes are a little overpowering, but I plan on tweaking other nations as well.

[Shovah32]

Oracles can indeed make powerful combatants, they can all self bless, cast summon earthpower(reinvig), cast prot buffs and fire/water oracles can cast fire shield/quickness. They also have full slots and nice stats.

[Epaminondas]

HoneyBadger said:
I like bless strategies just fine in concept, but I don't have too much of a problem about them not working until your god wakes up. I do feel very confined by the limited choice of 8 total blesses. I think it's a fair tradeoff that if we have to wait until our Pretender wakes up that their be quite a few new things-not unbalanced or more powerful, mind you-just new and different-our blessed troops can do. I'm currently working on some ideas and I'll be sending ideas for new magic paths plus blesses for those paths, into Illwinter, but I'll probably write up a thread for them first, so people can argue about them.

Limited? As is, I only primarily use 3 blesses: Water, Fire, and Nature. It seems that we have a lot of bless paths that people do not ordinarily take.

[HoneyBadger]

Which means they're even more limited. I use earth bless a lot though, and occasionally astral. blood and death I only use in certain cases or if they're inevitable-like if I want to use blood magic, a death curse strategy, or I'm playing EA Kailasa and I want the afflictions. I probably use astral the least, because twist fate isn't hard to get, but then additional MR is better for MP games than SP.

[Shovah32]

Fire, water, earth and astral are the only paths i tend to use at level 9(very rarely and almost exclusively with pan ive used nature 9) and often use nature at lvl4-6, i also sometimes use astral 4-6 for mr and blood 4-6(generally only on a moloch when i have the points)