MA Agartha, or Yet another thread fishing for tips

[alexti]

Evilhomer said:
Just my opinion but i would strongly advice against taking prod 0. Since the latest patch production was made alot better, and you are giving up a very nice +45% production bonus. With production 0 you will be expanding alot slower than with prod 3. I would also advice against taking growth at only 0. In a competitive build it seems like such a bad idea since you are giving up a ton of income due to the exponential way that growth works.

With MA Agartha it's not clear how to convert production into a serious advantage. The problem is that you don't have any troops you'd really like to buy. Heavy infantry has nothing for it except shields and heavy armor - skill-wise it's very mediocre. In the beginning I would rather use light infantry (which is not that light, in fact and also have shields). It costs a bit more gold, but you'll be expanding faster than with HI (even with prod 3). Faster rate of expansion will make up for extra gold spent. Besides, HI has strategic move of 1 vs 2 of LI. This makes expansion with LI is even faster in comparison with HI, because you can avoid wasting time moving (it takes careful planning though to bring replenishments, but luckily there's some synergy in using Golem Crafters heading to search for troop ferrying).

With that Oracle pretender your early expansion will be primarily bound by logistic rather than by lack of troops.

Later on, I can't see planning the game around HI. The core of the army will likely be national summons, backed with Golem Crafters casting something from magma or acid family of spells. HI will likely be just a complementary force. Besides, with easy access to armor buffs for your troops, heavy armors becomes much less important. So production scale is of relatively small benefit to MA Agartha. What are you going to sacrifice to take production scales anyway?

Golem Crafters will be very important mages through the whole game, because of their good choice of battle spells and their high survivability (even in the late game they are quite difficult to destroy due to their ability to forge cold/fire resistence items and armor or cast those protection on the battlefield). The more of them you can have the better - so you don't want to sacrifice income (or to spent it on other things with maintenance). Because of the same mages, you want to have decent research speed, so you don't want to go below Magic 0 (but I think Magic 1 worth it +33% bonus on your primary researcher). For fast initial expansion you need a pretender capable of expansion and Risen Oracle is pretty cheap choice that doesn't require any research and besides gives you easy access to higher level death summons (which will be important for Agartha for several reasons: magic diversification, stealth leaders for umbrals, exploting darkvision, undead priests for fodder summoning).

Growth doesn't really work exponentially, because if you survive long enough to be competitive raiding will quickly negate extra income from growth and effects of the growth early on are rather small. Considering poor mobility of MA Agartha (magical or otherwise), it's crucial to expand (by conquest) rather early which means that you won't be able to benefit from growth at this stage anyway, so the setup should be optimised to make this conquest phase most efficient.

Keeping this in mind, it seems that Luck, Growth and Production are the scales you need least for MA Agartha. I dislike Misfortune 3 from my [bad] experiences with it - I'm not sure if it is statistically justified.

Out of my earlier suggestions for the spare 120 points I lean towards Dom7, E2D4 Oracle and Prod+1 as a better choice (slightly better fear effect, quicker access to death summons and better death searches, slight dominion advantage).