R'lyeh Strategies

[Karacan]

Smoking is hazardous to your train of thought. *ahem*

That said, I believe there's a relation between Summoning and Luck. I appear to get a higher success rate at a higher Luck dominion, but since I usually always take luck 2 or 3 (because me likes), I might be subjectively biased.

I also like and use Shambler Thralls. They're quite good as a secondary attack force. Place your fodder to the front, and your Shamblers a few spaces behind with attack closest. The fodder takes the pain, the Shambler dish out. This is great against both tritons and barbarians.
Just keep them away from evil archers.

That's not to say I know anything about playing R'lyeh, but they were the first race I won Dom II against impossible AI with, completely without constructing anything.

[Yossar]

Crab hybrids seems to work the best for absorbing the initial triton attack, especially if you've taken sloth and can't afford many meteorite guards. Good protection and hps. Lobo guards would work but you'd have to keep replacing them.

[tinkthank]

Mind me asking another question?

When do you folks head for land? I am always tempted to do this very very early, because I feel
- if I do it later the free indy land may be gone and it is too crowded to get a foothold
- I can start getting freebie fodder from those coastal castles early
- gem sites are better on land (?)

But I feel I do this too soon too, because
- I always get licked on land

What do you people think?

Thanks much

[JaydedOne]

I prefer to go to land in the midgame at the earliest, unless there's a small patch/peninsula that's largely surrounded by water and can thereby be easily protected by a fortress. Aside from Atlantis or possibly Ermor, there's no competition for water resources early in the game and you should therefore snatch them up as quickly as possible and mine them thoroughly with Voice of Tiamat/Akashic Record (depending on your preferences in research.)

The advantages of land (hybrid spawning, greater variety in magic sites) aren't overwhelming initially and the biggest problem I find with them is that, due to R'lyeh's generally slow speed, it's difficult to send reinforcements to land provinces given that your best units are recruitable only in water. I prefer to bide my time, build forts near the coastal provinces that I want to start my aggression outwards at, and even let my opponents conquer indy provinces first, as they'll often move their forces elsewhere, leaving only PD behind. PD, in most cases, is easier to crush than indies on a high setting. This way you have solid reinforcements coming from the water directly next to your landing point. After that, you might consider consolidating your land presence with a quick fort+lab build, as nobody loves to see squids on shore. The lab will be a huge plus as you'll now have Gateway potential to speed up reinforcements to land AND you'll now have access to all the land-only summons you've hopefully been hoarding gems for.

[tinkthank]

Thanks very much.

You mention something that I also have a question about: Tiamat/Acashic.

I have never used these spells. It just seems I never have the gems for them, I use them for forging and whatnot. Are they worth it? I tend to send my Mage starspawns out searching with the pretender. How viable / stupid is that?
I should say: I have NEVER used a gem-search-spell, ever, with any race, because I usually search. (I play quite a bit of Tien S&A, which has natural searchers.) Is this newbie-ness from me?
thanks very much

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by tinkthank:
I have never used these spells. It just seems I never have the gems for them, I use them for forging and whatnot.

Voice of Tiamat is very cheap, and very useful, since it gives you all elemental sites in a province.

I should say: I have NEVER used a gem-search-spell, ever, with any race, because I usually search. (I play quite a bit of Tien S&A, which has natural searchers.) Is this newbie-ness from me?

Given standard game settings, your mages can search about twice as effectively by using the searching spells as by moving to a province, then searching.

[tinkthank]

OK. I guess I tended to search with the mages who had a lot of different paths, and those "auspex"-type spells which only find 1 type of gem seemed like a waste: I would need to cast that 4x or so to find all of those of one type. And by the time I have enough gems for Acashic, I already needed to search everywhere (the prerequisite for getting the gems to cast it in the first place).
But Tiamat I suppose is different....
thanks much