Thoughts on EA Abyssia (guide)

[JimMorrison]

Dragar said:
My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!

In my experiments with Abysia, I found that rushing straight to Falling Fires gave very good results. Since it's AOE, it's a bit less Prec dependent, and a few mages spamming that one a line that 30-40 inf are holding will march through just about anything that early game has to offer.

Securing more territory reliably and quickly allows you to get more castles up sooner, which you can translate directly into increased research - research that has defensive value which Lanterns won't give you.

Granted, Cons is tempting, since you will be wanting to get your blood economy going as soon as you can manage it, but not hitting Evo first means you have a bunch of very expensive priests sitting around, who will spam Fire Flies if they are pressed into combat.....



Astral bless is an interesting thought, did you use an Oracle for it? I'm thinking that would make it on the short list of viable blesses for Abysia, making it E/S/D. Not that a major is needed, but those 3 can be leveraged in a worthwhile manner. Of course, really high Fire or Blood could be alright on a pretender, but the bless isn't going to be doing all that much for you (yay my mages get +4 str!).



Also, Kasnavada, I think it's worth noting that Demonbred is in fact a superior assassin, especially due to flying. It can be very easy to get a couple in the HoF early in the game, and while it is a bit of a gamble, getting lucky on your heroics could make them a fearsome addition to your arsenal throughout the game.

I played a game for fun once where the first thing I did was crank out a few Demonbreds while taking provinces as normal. Then I had them move from province to province in the other direction, assassinating the indie commanders, while a Warlock followed behind, routing the indie army and then site searching. It felt dirty, but oh it was fun.