EA Mictlan Setup - Q's from a noob

[PvK]

I use Sun Warriors and Eagle Warriors.

Sun Warriors give a decent heavy sacred unit which has different strengths from the Jaguars.

Eagle Warriors' flying ability is useful for various things, and they can be grouped with other flying units (e.g. summoned flying demons without auras) to provide critical mass and fodder for the flying component.

PvK

[Edi]

Hellboy said:
1) While testing I saw a number of jaguar warriors auto-healing afflictions every turn, but I had no healing priest or GoH up, or anything of the like. Do jaguar warriors have (in effect) recuperate? Or is it possible that there was some hidden site I didn't know about?

No hidden sites and nothing peculiar. This is a feature of the game, if rather obscure and unadvertised. Units with more than one shape have a fairly good chance of healing afflictions when they change shape. This only works for involuntary changes, such as jaguar warriors, skinshifters and Machaka Black Sorcerers and Sorceresses have and is checked at the end of each combat where the unit changed to its secondshape.

It does NOT work if you give a unit the change shape command in the main interface. I am not even sure if it would work the same way for units capable of voluntarily changing shape.

Hellboy said:
2) Does anyone recruit sun or eagle warriors? It's odd that they are the ones that are capital only, when they both seem less useful than jaguar warriors.
If you have a few fortress up and recruiting your jaguars, then I can see some value in recruiting eagle warriors (for mage/archer attacks), but otherwise it seems better to stick to jaguars.

You need to use jaguars first until you get a second fort. After that it's jaguars from the others and eagles from the capital. Using eagles very early on will get most of them massacred when they attack archers, kill commanders and then start tangling with the heavier infantry units.

Edi

[Hellboy]

Edi said:
You need to use jaguars first until you get a second fort. After that it's jaguars from the others and eagles from the capital. Using eagles very early on will get most of them massacred when they attack archers, kill commanders and then start tangling with the heavier infantry units.
Edi

Sounds like good advice - thanks Edi!

[CharonJr]

Personally I love EA Mictlan

The advice above sounds very good to me, but here is my take on Mictlan anyway...

I usually play with a F9W9B4 bless since the added defense and the quickness from the W9 add quite a lot of staying and hitting power to my units. D4 is nice vs. high HP and/or regen units like Niefel Giants with a N9 bless and IIRC it helps with the old age.

I would go for Dom8 (lacking points for more) due to the cheap sacreds.

Mainly this means an imprisoned pretender (cheap/magic heavy) and bad scales, but since your troops are fast and hitting very hard in addition to being hard to hit I don't think that you need an early pretender or a combat pretender for the late game (which is fairly based on magic anyway).

Due to point contraints I usually go for very bad scales:

turmoil 3
sloth 3
heat 3
growths 2-3
luck 2-3
magic drain 2

I like growth for the old mages and in order to get more time out of my bloodhunting provinces.

Due to the drain I tend to go for construction 6 ASAP in order to get boots of youths for my old mages since they are the only means to get decent research. But due to the growth scale (at least when combined with D4) I don't seem to get very many diseased mages till I get to construction 6 anyway.

I waste a lot of blood/research for building those boots, but this might lead to some interesting tactics with a global enchantment later on

And I love my eagle warriors, with a heavy bless like this they tend to kill 1 unit each turn due to their large number of attacks/high damage.

One thing to keep in mind with Mictlan is not to mix your (rather low HP) sacreds with ranged units since you tend to get lots of casualties due to friendly fire.

CharonJr

PS: I tend to recruit some Sun Warriors (despite their poor speed) as frontline troops due to they decent protection. They are often able to stop cav charges and soak up arrows. Their high encumberance usually is no problem since the eagle warriors usually end the fight before enc becomes a real issue.

[Hellboy]

CharonJr said:
Personally I love EA Mictlan

I think I might come to, but I've done enough testing now to see that it is not the easiest nation to master. One question upfront: are you using this setup in MP?

I usually play with a F9W9B4 bless since the added defense and the quickness from the W9 add quite a lot of staying and hitting power to my units. D4 is nice vs. high HP and/or regen units like Niefel Giants with a N9 bless and IIRC it helps with the old age.

I'm slightly confused: you list F9W9B4, but comment on how D4 is nice - is B4 a typo? I'm playing around w/ both B4 and D4 on my test pretenders, and it does seem like both are worthwhile, but I may have to choose between them (its possible to get both, but many you really have to bork up your scales to get there).

So, also on your scales you have two things that surprise me. One is the drain (which I'll post a question on separately), and the second is the turmoil/luck combination. I guess I was thinking of order/misfortune as being the better combo because you're going to want to build lots of units, and lots of forts (complete w/ labs & temples) and lots of labs for your bloodhunting provinces. Are you ok w/ the economic downside of turmoil?

[Hellboy]

A question for either Shovah32 or CharonJr (or anyone else who cares to comment):

I noticed both of you took drain 2. I've done a bit of testing w/ drain2, and I find it very scary. Your Mictlan priests are down to 2rp (as opposed to magic 1, where they're 4rp). I know we're talking about 120 build pts here, but still at 2rp it seemed to take forever to build up a decent research rate.

Now from my limited experience w/ blood nations I think that blood nations don't need to research the full tree as fast as other nations, since blood offers good payoffs all on its own. Still, I tend to go for construction 4, before I start my blood research and construction 6 before I go way high in blood level. And even though you can probably get away w/o pushing broad research as fast as some nations, you will still need get some high levels in non-blood magic for the end game. So, when all is said and done, don't you find drain 2 to be rather a serious handicap for Mictlan?

Now one thing I've done in the past to get around drain 2 is to go for skull mentors and lightless lanterns asap. However, it seems to me that this is rather difficult for Mictlan, since skull mentors look impossible (no death mages), and lightless lanterns take all the way to construction 6 before you can build them.

[CharonJr]

Hello,

yes, I use this setup in MP (well, actually in a 1vs1 here atm).

And it depends on the enemies I expect to face if I use a D4 (actually 5 here) bless in addition to B4 (I am doing so vs. Niefelheim atm with a N10E9 bless).

I just took a look at my scales in this game and they are turmoil3, sloth3, heat3, luck2, drain2 with growth at 0 due to the points needed for D4 and Dom8 with a imprisoned Smoking Mirror.

Concenring death you have basically to either hope for an indie mage with it (dark knowledge jsut needs D1) or that you get some death gems by events and/or from non death sites.

You can hope for a hero (D3, B3 IIRC), too. Otherwise you have to wait for your pretender to break free or go for Blood7 (Onaqui) or Conj7 ASAP.

6RP from the High Priests are not that bad, too and losses due to old age have been fairly light for me with this setup (IIRC Death on the pretender lowers the chance to get diseased).

You might get lucky with events and get some sages to help you with research.

And finally EA with its decent number of magic sites has a fairly good chance to have one that lets you recruit death-mages.

But, yes, due to the number of options I listed for getting death mages you can see that I am worried about slow research in the beginning.

Btw, in my current 1vs1 we are at turn 48 and I generate about 500RP each turn, 600 if I were not looking for magic sites/forging items and casting ritual spells each turn. About 12 High priests are bloodhunting here atm for about 80 slaves each turn (with 3 more High Priests getting ready to open up a 5th province soon).

Not that great, but not bad either I think.

CharonJr

PS: I don't tend to build castles, but rather try to conquer them. But in a full MP game without any AIs this will be much harder and I would surely save for a 2nd castle). But since all my units are sacred (low upkeep) and the speed of expansion is fairly fast this is not that hard IMO even with turmoil3.