Give me good reasons why R'lyeh is a balanced nation.

[Bowlingballhead]

Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

[Argitoth]

I have nothing left to say except these are good points.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Another bit would be that on high-indy settings, sea expansion is _painful_. It takes a lot of chaff to absorb the initial assault of 100+ tritons long enough for mindbLasting. Getting a second water fortress might take some time.

High indy settings force the squids onto land much sooner than they otherwise prefer to. And the best way for the squids to take on large masses of tritons is to use summonable sea trolls. Masses of ichthytids, if you can find them, work passably well too.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Bowlingballhead:
Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

Very true. Which is why a major squid strategy is to aim for rapid conquest of river provinces with their high-income farmlands.

Their least-subtle weaknesses are versus flyers (illithids die quickly when engaged in melee) and arrows (as Zen pointed out long ago in this thread).

[Jasper]

One can also use high MR troops, especially since the the penetration of Mind BLast will probably drop into line once the spell Paralyze is fixed.

[LordArioch]

Actually I like R'yleh more with a high indy. They do have very good assasains. However, in general I don't think they are generally overpowered. MindbLast is MUCH weaker than the Dom 1 mindbLast was, IMO, now that it's not area. Arrows will kill the unarmored illithids, and if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front. As long as your not Ermor or something, just give him lots of pointless targets to mindbLast. Keep in mind each illithid costs almost as much as a vaetti hag, and an army of vaetti hags or any other lvl 1 mage is much more dangerous.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by LordArioch:
if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front.

Another problem with the armored illithids is that they move much slower than the cheaper, unarmored variety. They're not terribly useful because as the lands under your control expand, they cannot keep up with the pace of that expansion. It's by far more efficient to build more of the "cheap" illithids and deal with the fact that you'll lose some to archers.

I handle this by setting my illithids to "fire archers". Tit for tat. I can kill the archers far faster than they can do me serious harm. And if you happen to have a Vastness (and have not given it Gift of Reason yet to make it a SC), it can rip up the archers in no time ...

AIs never seem to build archers in enough quantity to become a major threat. Human players are another matter ...