Mojo's EA Abysia Guide

[Mojo the Avenger]

t Micah: Oh you don't do anything with the warlock apprentices. They're just there to hold soul contracts and contribute to your research total while they wait to die from horror attack.

I spent more time on the warlock side of things because it's less intuitive. Annointeds are easy. Slap on a shield and go blow **** up. Not a lot in the way of explanation.

t Illuminated One: I've seen flame eruption come into play a lot when enemy armies close on your cluster of annointeds. They bunch up on your collective bodyguard screen and get flame erupted to death.

[Frozen Lama]

why, why would you ever ever buy warlock apprentices? every time you build one you arn't building a warlock, or better yet an annointed. unless you were short on cash really early on. give the soul contracts to scouts or something.

[Benjamin]

Well this guide is near and dear to my heart because I struggled for a while to try to think of ways to make EA aby work in MP. CBM seems to throw them a number of bones, particularly the death hero and the very much cheaper smoulderghost cast, but I don't think it saves them.

EA has so many tough nations, and particularly lightning evocations and destruction basically make your nationals very cost ineffective. I think I fell out of love with EA aby when I had my ~500 gold army of burning ones and assorted other heavy infantry get rolled by the special indy province that (unbeknown to me initially as you can't tell they're there on the strategic map) has a handful of air mages that cast orb lightning.

Soul contracts seem like a great idea, but they perform much more poorly than in MA. You gloss over too much in my opinion the difficulty involved in getting commanders for them. So if you want a devil that's either blood 5 for horde from hell, or thau 4 for gor and blood 3 for the devil himself, and you need to research construction, and you need to send mages to blood hunt, and aby's research isn't stellar anyway, and you won't have a breakneck expansion to bring in extra cash... Or you can forge banelord rods and give them to demonbreds, and also a shroud to keep the disease from killing him, but then you need a source of death gems.

It's just a very tough slog expanding, and getting a blood economy going with a cap only hunter, and doing a fair bit or research, and having to deal with no undead leadership, and you need to empower to starting forging soul contracts, and you also need to get either a nature or death income or do even more research. And getting earth is pretty tempting to, but that will be yet another thing your pretender really has to do himself.

And finally on the rhuax, he's pretty cool, but firepower is as much a blessing as a curse, and he's 440 gold for something that can't fly and is going to have a very hard time getting elemental resistances, protection over 30, etc. He will fold like a lawn chair to anyone casting a lightning bolt. You could trade for rings of tamed lightning, but that's one more thing to add to the "has to go to extra lengths to deal with" and that list is getting pretty long.

I mean just compare him in capability to the 400 gold eagle king, and he's an embarrassment. Jarls are only 500 gold, as are hinnoms whatever they build, oreids are similar price range, etc. He starts to look like an expensive chump.

tl;dr: it was an interesting read, but even with the cbm boost I think EA aby still is a very brittle nation. I don't play CBM though so maybe I'm not being fair to the smoulderghost boost.

And final trivial point: death does affect ea aby, it's only it's supply effect that does not, but pop death, old age effects and direct income loss were all there last I checked.

[chrispedersen]

In cbm I much prefer expansion using lesser horrors. But it will depend on the ver of cbm.

Addiitonally, you can attack fairly easily with salamanders, so long as there are no archers.

[Trumanator]

Or you can use burning ones. 4 plus priest equals expansion party against 80% of indies.

[Maerlande]

The horror marking on the soul contracts is pretty mild. In MA I prefer to put them on the warlock blood hunters with 2 pearls each. Put 5 devils as bodyguards and script returning. You lose very few if any warlocks.

Looking at EA warlocks again, you need to survive 2 rounds. Go 3 pearls and Power of Spheres, Returning. There's a good chance the warlock will survive.

Another great trick is vampires as bodyguards. As they take horror marks they become the bait for the horrors. This whole setup becomes standard as you put up Astral Corruption or the blood dome. Use only warlocks in the city with the dome and use the same setup.

I've got some games in the 100 turns where I have lost extremely few warlocks holding contracts to horrors. It's SP of course, but that doesn't invalidate the horror management tricks.

I realize in EA you have competition between warlocks and Annointeds for recruitment, but until you have some blood commanders you will need those warlocks recruited to blood hunt.

Lightless lanterns have the horror mark issue as well and it's very mild. You lose very few researchers. Vampires are great for this.

If you really want to plan the whole thing, get some vampires early and use them in some Dom positive fights with call horrors. You should get quite a few horror marked and resurrecting back at the cap.

And it's pretty fine to have wads of devils in your blood hunting provinces. Discourages attacks and raids.

[Mojo the Avenger]

Some good ideas in here. Gonna have to try them.

[chrispedersen]

Lightless lanterns and other things got the horror marking changed. It is now not unusual for a horror to show up in the same year that the lantern was placed.