Shinuyama – the ants go marching two by two…

[Baalz]

I wanted to correct a widely held misconception about how to play Shinuyama. Seems most everybody masses up a bunch of Dai Bokemono archers and fires from the back row to leverage those nice long bows and impressive melee when the enemy finally closes. Sure, this can be effective enough but it is so inefficient it’s amazing to me how often I see it. Dai Bokemono have a small but important niche, but they should really not be your goto line troops. Let’s see how this nation handles when we get rid of the ridiculous notion that it’s still Yomi with big heavy guys and instead play it like the goblin king with the big guys relegated to special forces. Think ant hill, goblin mobs crawling all over everything are the way to go.

Alright, let’s compare Dai Bokemono to the smaller guys. You get 3.3 of the 9 gold guys for the gold cost of 1 Dai Bokemono. Of course if you’re resource constrained the difference is much more drastic, but let’s just look at gold for the moment. As far as putting arrows in the air 3.3 short bow arrows are incredibly more effective than one long bow, and with a nation that so obviously wants to go to flaming arrows the difference is staggering. On top of this the bakemono archer comes in a modestly armored variant (surprisingly resilient to modest enemy archer fire due to their armor + size) or a stealthy variety. Stealthy archers *rock*…having 80 archers unexpectedly decloak is a serious tide turner when your opponent didn’t realize he needed to deploy archer screens. As far as using Dai Bokemono to fire arrows when you really expect them to end up in melee – this seldom works out well when you don’t have an overwhelming number advantage as a some of your front line archers run up to fight melee and many more fire resulting in a very unfavorable ratio of friendly to hostile in melee at any given point. Yeah it can work…but very rarely when you didn’t have enough troops to win more effectively by other means.

What about melee though? Those Dai Bokemono are tough! I’ve seen them kick arse on several occasions! Yeah, I’m not gonna argue they’re not tough. I will argue they’re not nearly as tough for general use as what should be the goto guy on your roster. That bakemono warrior must have a horrible PR guy because I have never, ever seen anybody really leveraging him (not to say nobody ever has, just that I’ve never seen it and none of the other guides really mention them). Dai Bokemono certainly have their niche, but for general use the bokemono warrior mops the floor with them because of one magic number on their character sheet. That glorious, glorious size one combined with a fairly respectable offense. These are your warrior ants! In the left corner lets put 20 Dai Bakemono. In the right corner we’ll put 66 bakemono warriors in a head to head fight. Now first off I want to point out that this is an even matchup on the gold cost, but those Dai Bokemono cost 500 resources to mass up while the warriors cost almost half that at 330.

I’d like to preface this by saying high hitpoint, high protection targets is exactly the niche you’d want to use Dai Bokemono against so this is a bit of a worst case scenario for the warriors (as in it only gets better from here). Roughly, each block of 2 Dai Bokemono is going to be squared up against a block of 6 warriors. With a nice 13 attack the Dais are gonna hit around 62% of the time and with a walloping amount of damage are generally gonna kill a warrior when the hit lands. The warriors though, also have a good attack and because of the mobbing will hit much more often (the first guy to attack will hit 62% of the time - and it climbs rapidly from there). A very respectable 15 damage with the wakasashi compares to the Dai Bokemono’s 16 protection to mean you’re doing something pretty close to 0 AN damage. Because of the way open ended die rolls getting hit by 3+ hits in this range means there’d a good chance the big guys are going down after a round or two. This is especially true because of the random distribution of how the attacks land – worst/best case scenario is that each Dai Bakemono fight off 3 attacks, but there are gonna be some blocks where 1 guy gets all 6 attacks and goes down fast. This is an important distinction to remember, the chaos of battle is lumpy so the worst case for the warriors is 2 dead out of 6 but just 1 Dai Bokemono going down is a 50% loss for that block…and there’s a chance with those open ended dice that both may drop. This is a big part of the reason being size 1 is such a big deal – the Dai Bokemono just can’t chew through the warriors fast enough before they go down - it doesn't matter if they get 'lucky' and do 50 damage to the warrior they hit but when the warrior gets a lucky die roll it makes a huge difference. Keep swatting those ants, there are always more.

Now, consider fighting somebody with a bit less formidable protection and damage outlay (like, say…most units in the game). The warriors have 11 body protection and 11 hitpoints which means they’ve got a pretty good chance at living through one or two hits from most units. Those little size 1 guys mob all over the place so it’s just fairly hard to hit any individual one multiple times. On the offensive side that 13 attack (which racks up stars pretty quick) mounts up incredibly fast with the mob and you’ll be amazed at how fast they chew up high defense troops, even W blessed ones. Rember what I was saying before, there are gonna be some blocks where 1 of those vans (or whatever) gets attacked by 6 guys with a 13 attack so they start going down before they can finish saying “OH SH-!”.

What really makes the comparison between Dai Bakemono and the warriors night and day though is that you’ll have your first two goto spells easily available by the time you have to do any fighting against real troops. Dai Bakemono wouldn’t mind a strength of giant and legions of steel, but these are massive force multipliers for the warriors - bumping them up into the “several hits to kill” for defense (unless they get hit in the head) and “good chance for a 1 hit kill” on offense with 19 damage. Consider the above matchup when it takes close to twice as many hits to kill the warriors while they’re now hitting for the equivalent of 3 AN damage. They’re so densely packed that a single casting can cover a hundred of them. Number crunching aside just try a mob of these guys along with these early starter spells and you’ll never go back to Dai Bakemono…its really quite impressive. Really though, they’re plenty effective at clearing indies and most PD with no mage support so don’t feel like you need to route all your initial research into troop herders – let them do their thing with indie commanders while you keep your sorcerers at home getting your research engine started.

Your attrition rate will be greatly improved by nabbing some indies with shields to catch arrows. Really massed archers can be a problem for Shinuyama, and without any air mages the obvious solutions aren’t available. What can often work though is just out archering the enemy. Flaming arrows and ‘fire archers’ out of those decloaking stealth bakemono (or the more heavily armored and archer resistant ones) will give your opponent’s archers more pressing concerns that trying to whittle down your warriors. It also makes a lot of sense to take A on your pretender as arrow fend/wind guide brings you up to another level for the big fights, and later on mass flight is all kinds of tasty as a nasty surprise on those warrior mobs.

It’s a great idea to put up a castle or two with no lab/temple and use them to crank out Shuten-doji. They have 80 leadership so having a bunch of them on hand not only makes shuffling your mobs around much easier, but with a life drain attack and fair hp/protection/defense they actually have a pretty good survivability attacking on the front line alongside your warriors. This is great because they have a rather unique aoe fatigue attack that triggers every round (it doesn’t effect friendly troops) which stacks up amazingly fast when you have a bunch of them close together. Think neifel frost aura type fatigue – bad guys pass out in just a round or two as the ants mob over them…not that your warriors generally leave the front line there that long. They’re leaders to of course, so you can stick some cheap items on them to ratchet them up to the next level. Horns of valor are a rarely used item, but here’s a great niche for them as that standard effect overcomes the one real weakness of the warriors – their low morale! If you’ve got the gems to spare forging a cheap shield like a black steel tower adds a good bit to their survivability…you will eventually have enough hammers that you use E gems for other things!

The next obvious choice for those very tasty sorcerers you get is to pound out the evocation research and lay the smack down…but even better IMO is to nab alt-4. Those mobs of warriors and archers were already plenty scary, but once destruction starts dropping around they turn into real terrors. Depending on what you’re facing it may make sense to go straight evo anyway and lay down some rust mists ahead of the artillery fire, but for my money I just love seeing the skies darken with arrows just as the bad guys are trying to cover their privates with both hands. Acid rain is a great upgrade for this, but you need to get to constr-6 for water bracelets first and you don’t want to wait that long to start bringing the hurt.

One of the great things about using warriors and archers as your mainline troops is your resource requirements drop considerably. There’s really no reason to take production scales (though I wouldn’t go sloth so you can mob properly). Despite the fact that your sorcerers are (very!) old they’re also good D mages so you don’t really need to take growth scales as they’ll rarely get diseased from old age – and take forever to die even when they do. Your sorcerers crank out so many RPs that drain-2 is a hardly noticeable drag for the design points it nets you. You also don’t really need a heck of a lot out of your pretender. It’s pretty easy to fit order-3/luck-3 in here and still have some nice options left. In addition to some A on your pretender you’ll want some E – it helps a lot overcoming the atrocious encumbrance that comes from your sorcerers being older than dirt. No need to go crazy with E9, E4 or E6 will get you what you want much cheaper. A celestial general is an obvious choice that nabs you some nice freespawn, but don’t overlook pumping some E onto a phoenix to get a fairly substantial immortal SC, or a Great Sage for a supercharged initial research (you’ve got a huge amount of low hanging fruit to research and this can turn into a very nasty rush). With a very solid expansion and great scales, powerful research (even without your pretender helping) and stupefyingly powerful combat mages with just a little research your early game should be pretty impressive. You’ll want to get a couple sorcerers out site searching and you’ll see your gem income grow pretty quick. Don’t forget to do a bit of N searching as well, you’ll be needing a modest amount of N gems.

Next relatively low hanging fruit is conj-4 for ghost generals. If you’ve done a bit of site searching you should be sitting on a modest D income by the time you get here, and until pretty late in the game I have a hard time justifying putting many D gems into anything but these guys. For 5D you get a guy who’s like a bane…only ethereal with a fear aura. Oh man, this guy is great – ethereal, fear aura, 0 enc, good hp/protection, chill aura, a free bane blade. This guy would be great if he was just a troop, but he’s also a commander! A single one with a golden shield can clear moderate PD (his fear aura does it, so don’t worry about the fact he’s punching people). You can kit them out more heavily for a wide variety of tasks, or just use them out of the box in small groups for considerable muscle when you need something big chopped up – the overlapping fear and chill aura backing a mean bane blade offense means there’s not much that can hit them enough to overcome their etherealness, armor and hitpoints. These guys also give you an absurd amount of undead/demon leadership, which isn’t that huge a deal but does give you some nice flexibility if you’re in a niche that your national summons are called for. Ao-oni have a frost touch that does fatigue damage and can be a nasty surprise against a thug/SC who wasn’t expecting to need cold resistance (stacks great with your general’s cold aura). Aka-oni and Kuro-oni have 50% fire resistance, so throw down fire ward and field them with some fire elementals if you want to do the same thing with heat. Finally, don’t overlook that all those demons have 100% darkvision which can be just what the doctor ordered sometimes with those nice D mages you’ve got. Not a mainline strategy, but just something to have up your sleeve if it’s appropriate.

There’s so many good things to go for its hard to decide what next, but wooden warriors and then iron bane are a solid choice – as I mentioned earlier it takes some work to hit the same warrior twice when there’s 200 of them mobbing around. This also nets you vitriols which are slow to mass up, but a fairly small number can work wonders against some types of enemies. Fire/winter ward will make your guys extremely resistant to many enemy spells once you add in their decent protection, and their sheer numbers will protect against many others. Weapons of sharpness is a neat destination that speaks for itself. After watching your little pigmies carve up all his expensive stuff some opponents may be thinking tramplers will ruin your day. You can pick up bonds of fire real quick in a pinch, and when you make it to prison of fire a few sorcerers can make a fairly arbitrary amount of big fellas feel like Gulliver. Of course, there’s something to be said for just blasting a wall of magma eruptions in their face as well. Decisions, decisions.

Your pretender can summon Dai Tengu which dramatically improve your flexibility. That A support I mentioned is now spread around a good bit more and you’ve got some fair first strike flying support in the units that come along who fire a single AN lightning bolt (which can be considerable when you’ve go 40 of them). As the game progresses you’ll want to steadily crank out eyes of aiming as you get the opportunity for all those nice evo spells you’re gonna be dropping….including the MOAB banefire that 25% of your sorcerers can drop with no boosters. Slap some boots of the messenger and a skull staff with that eye of aiming though, summon earth power along with your E blessing and then pitty the poor SCs who thought they were gonna stomp on some little goblin warriors as the high precision banefire just doesn’t stop pouring out. You’re gonna want to steadily crank out a bunch of dwarven hammers as you can, because you’re gonna have a good home for as many messenger boots and eyes of aiming as you can lay your grubby little goblin hands on.

You do lack astral magic with below average MR mages, which is a difficulty shared by some other nations and the solution is the same – scrape up what you can and use decoys. Watch for lizards, crystal sorceress (they can do your eyes of aiming to!), sages and in a pinch go for specters. This is an undeniable weakness, but you’ve got so much overwhelming strength in other areas you should be able to work around it. If you get lucky and manage to line up E/S guys (specters can get you here, or possibly your pretender) crystal shields open up fun stuff like petrify. You can also make F/W elemental staffs, I find them a bit too expensive for to use for things like petrify – but they will get you up into earth attacks, which you should steadily build up a battery of along with manifestations.

Shinuyama is also one of the few nations that can both cast and leverage acid storm. This is a spell that take a bit of work, but is well worth it because there is no way to have resistance to it, it deals magic AP damage and destroys armor (the armor destruction carries over often across several battles!). The catch, of course, is that it does the same thing to you so this is not something you’re going to be using along with your mobs of warrior ants. This is gonna be something you cast from a well kitted sorcerer while…for example a few crushers keep the enemy tied up. Or, better yet gargoyles so you can use winged boots and great mobility.

I’d love to say that Dai Oni are nice for the end game – but come on, for the price of a Dai Oni you could get 9 ghost generals and even end game the ghost generals are almost always a better deal. Remember, think ant mob here. You’ve got absurdly good anti SC sorcerers, crowd control aplenty, great melee and plenty of thugs/anti-thugs to work together…this is one of the situations you just really don’t need your own SCs. Roll the army ants over your foes in never ending waves and drown them all in a swarm of recruit anywhere stuff that are easily replicable.