Kailasa guide

[Alpine Joe]

Now i'm still pretty inexperienced at this game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I think I have discovered a way to make Kailasa's opening work in CBM.

Kailasa is a strange nation. You've got awesome earth magic, sacreds with no armor and awe, and weak non-sacred recruitables.
Expanding is rough. Do you pay out the *** for a huge blessing on sacreds that arrows chew up? Do you go for an awake pretender and lost any kind of bless for all of your awesome summonable sacred troops and mages? Do you go good scales and try to use monkey troops, bad as they are? No. You have another option. let me explain.

First off here is what you want for a pretender. Take an awake Great sage with 4F4A4W4E4S4N2D (or other mix of similarly rainbowed magic) you can afford this by taking O3S3H3D2L0M1

Start out by having that poor starting army patrol. Turn up taxes as much as you feel comfortable. I usually go with 180, but I don't know a lot about patrolling, there may be a better choice. Set your pretender to research alteration. He will be doing that for a while. Recruit a Yaksha per turn and spend your resources on the armored Bandars. Don't expand yet. What! No expansion until turn 3? What is wrong with you? Don't worry you'll be fine.

As soon as you hit alteration 2 its time to expand. The good thing is you can now use all of those Yakshas you have to do your expansion. With passive awe and good physical stats, all your yakshas need is protection. ironskin/stoneskin handily fills this role and you can cast it at low fatigue. With just a blessing and ironskin, each of your yakshas can solo weak indies. However a pair of them can take most medium strength indies (and elephant provinces). If you get some with astral, have them script a body ethereal, which will hit both members of the pair if you position them on the battlefield correctly (the back corner).
Try this, it works. With the nature regen bless, affliction rates are low enough to be tolerable. You have a lot of extra buffs available, but measure their value against the extra fatigue they cause.

These pairs of yakshas can expand against almost anything. Use several pairs, plus your starting army (augmented with Bandars) to grab 3 provinces per round for the next few turns. You should comfortably have about 12 provinces by the end of year 1, which I believe is a decent rate. Put up an additional fortress for gurus

Meanwhile your pretender has kept researching alteration. All this comes together at the beginning of year 2, when you get invulnerability. Now each of your yakshas can take on almost all indies alone. Send your pretender out to site search, while remaining yakshas and gurus pick up the research slack. When you hit alteration six its time for your first war.

Recruit some of the unarmored bandars and bring 6-8 yakshas and go kick the *** of the guy who thought kailasa was a good target early. Put your yakshas in the front in a clump and script invulnerability-attack. Have your prophet do a divine bless or just clump them together and have a yaksha do it. Meanwhile one remaining yaksha casts ironbane. Your yakshas move to the front, where their low fatigue and 25 protection make them very hard to take down. Meanwhile your Bandars throw sticks and stones all over them. Enemy armor shatters and suddenly all those sticks and stones are hitting really hard. This is a pretty effective army for your first war, but its only a stop-gap. At the end of year 2 you get alteration 7. Now you have fog warriors castable by your pretender, and marble warriors. These two spells+iron bane+hordes of sticks and stones chaff+ super tough yaksha thugs is a combo that is very good. And this is happening at the end of year two, where you are probably still fighting nationals.

Anyway, you have effective expansion and the tools to fight your first war. Now switch and research construction and conjuration and do your standard clam spam+astral summons. You have a pretty good bless for those ghandarvas. Siddhas eventually take over fog warriors duty for big fights.

some other things to remember:

1) You have petrification and the mages to use it. It is one of the best anti-anything big and lonely spells in the game. Paralyzed thugs/scs will get swarmed and taken down by hordes of monkeys. And you get it really early.

2)strength of the giants is pretty good with sticks+stones, so if you have the time to research it, it will pay off.

3) a rainbow pretender means heavy and diversified gem production. Kailasa can get into every school (with rudras), so you should have plenty of use for your gems

4) You will eventually get devasura and you can use him to hunt for slaves and eventually get bloodstones. This pays off late game as you can use earth gems to summon yakshas.


Anyway thats all of my ideas for Kailasa. I'd love to hear some feedback from more experienced players/reasons why this strategy is bad.