Best Setups For Mictlan

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by JDScherrey:
I noticed that you pick apart the assassin and then stated that there is a better setup for the Lord of Night. Now the question is - What is the better setup?!?

Well, the assassin is perfectly viable. It's just a little slower. Certain concerns are no longer of importance if you assassinate everyone, as you don't need a full battle tweak to slaughter single people with a few guards.

You stately very clearly how you would set the rest of it up and gave reasons why. Basically, what are the optimized paths for battle performance when using Lord of Night?

Well, concerns of battle performance are the same as always: You want to stack as many defensive buffs as you can on your pretender as possible.

However, battle optimization is expensive, and will definitely not be done well with your present set of scales: You're going to have to take a hit. What you probably want: Earth 2(Ironskin, Earthpower+Invuln), Water 2(Quickness+BoW), Air 4(Mirror/Mist - Mirror gets better results with more air), and Death 3(Soul Vortex).

Wedge what you can into this, then spend the dangling points as you will on dominion and scales: I'd suggest a dominion of no less than 6, and you may have to just accept a hit from Luck to Misfortune-2 and not expect to see your national heroes - your pretender fills in the magic holes tolerably anyway.

The Lord of the Night is a particularly sweet chassis by midgame, particularly if you slap him a Wraith/Hell Sword or Thorn. His fatigue rating is quite good also, and you'll get some better starting dominion out of him. The assassination is fun, too. Whack somebody's pretender in a duel. Laugh at him.

However, in your original build, your LotN gave you some small low-level 4-blesses. You may still want to keep that, which is why I didn't immediately rip that apart, but merely pointed out that it wasn't really battle-tweaked....and doing this can be very expensive, so you may not want to. Although what you did looks expensive, too. Plus you took Turmoil. Yeck.

[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
However, in your original build, your LotN gave you some small low-level 4-blesses. You may still want to keep that, which is why I didn't immediately rip that apart, but merely pointed out that it wasn't really battle-tweaked....and doing this can be very expensive, so you may not want to. Although what you did looks expensive, too. Plus you took Turmoil. Yeck.

Hrrmmm, are you addressing me or JDSCherrey? He isn't the one that originally put up the pretender chassis and weird scales earlier, I did. Nor did I ask what you would do to tweak it, JDS did. Seems like you have us two confused.

[ June 21, 2004, 20:27: Message edited by: Anglachel ]

[Glock30]

Maybe I did not state my original question well, or maybe I am just slow due to eating lead paint, but can you guys tell me what you would pick and why for the following:
1)Pretender-I choose Fountain of Blood due to the Blood Hunt Bonus and 0 cost-What would you choose and why?
2)Scales: I choose Heat1,Anglachel has a good point with heat2, more points with little penalty-just the type of tip I need! But what of the other scales-please state reasons for choosing your settings.
Fortress:I can also see the advantage in choosing watchtower-Thanks.

MagicPaths:My choices are something like Blood4 or 5, 2 in Water,Astral,Fire,Nature.
This gives me a broad range of spells in all areas that I get starting gems in.

Any more suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thanks In Advance.
Glock

[JDScherrey]

Norfeet,

I was considering the setup again with the Lord of Night pretender you suggested. If you take a watch tower, I can set up taking

3 Sloth
2 Heat
2 Growth or 2 Luck (I've seen the arguements do you really need growth at all...does it help.)
3 Magic

Or would you suggest other scales.

Christopher

[JDScherrey]

Norfeet,

I was considering the setup again with the Lord of Night pretender you suggested. If you take a watch tower, I can set up taking

3 Sloth
2 Heat
2 Growth or 2 Luck (I've seen the arguements do you really need growth at all...does it help.)
3 Magic

Or would you suggest other scales.

Christopher

[Norfleet]

You forgot Order. Order-3 can generally be considered mandatory for most living nations, and Mictlan is not an exception.

[Anglachel]

1)Pretender-I choose Fountain of Blood due to the Blood Hunt Bonus and 0 cost-What would you choose and why?

Lord of Night or Smoking Mirror. The reason for Lord of Night is because he is the best assassin in the game and if you commit to using him in the early game as such then you will slowly but 99.99% surely take even the most insanely defended independent provinces. He also has decent stats for fighting and can be used as an Super Combatant if you take the right magic paths with him but this will require a big expenditure of points on top of the 150 initial buy in which means, except for dominion, you would be better off with using a Vampire Queen if all you want is a Super Combatant.

I would use the Smoking Mirror for having a rainbow style mage because the initial cost of buying is 20 less than a Ghost King, has 1 in fire, death and blood off the bat, and the same 20 point cost for extra paths that the Ghost King has. He also can shape shift into a jaguar, which I think is cool.

I wouldn't use the fountain of blood personally because it feels too limited for my play style. Being immobile is just to big a pain for what little you get.

2)Scales: I choose Heat1,Anglachel has a good point with heat2, more points with little penalty-just the type of tip I need! But what of the other scales-please state reasons for choosing your settings.

Actually it was Norfleet that suggested a heat 2 scale. I am all for heat 3 because in my experience (single player) it doesn't pull down on my economy all that much and also temperature tends to not remain rock solid across all provinces you have dominion in but you will have to decide whether it is worth the extra points to dip all the way to heat 3 v/s heat 2. I think it is but most people probably won't agree.

I have already gone over my reasoning for choosing Turmoil 3. It is not an optimal choice in almost every case. In single player games I have yet to find myself crippled by it but I like to play on large maps, which are more forgiving. I only do it to see what will happen and how it interacts with luck 3 as an accelerator to make up for the 30% income loss by lucky events that produce income to offset or even overcome this. So far my findings have been favorable but far from conclusive until I run many, many games using this extreme approach.

I like Growth 3 because it not only helps alleviate blood hunt loss and unrest management loss but works basically like an income accelerator that rewards province expansion and investment in keeping what you grab that is synergistic with castling strategy for protecting blood hunters and temples. The more provinces you have and keep, the more income generated above and beyond the 6% flat rate increase you get initially.

Magic 3 is kind of a no-brainer. If I am relying on magic to raise my armies then I better be getting my research done and done fast. I don't know if this setting is synergistic with Luck 3 on getting favorable results that would help a summoning strategy.

Sloth 3 for my strategy is almost as big a no-brainer. Since mages don't require big production and I can only buy one per castle/temple/lab setup up then I would find it rather impossible to use up production even on the weakest setting (sloth 3) in the worst production province imaginable. No matter what I do I will ALWAYS take sloth 3 for Mictlan given my playing-style preference for them.

I take Luck 3 because if I didn't do that to offset and work with Turmoil 3 then I would end up one sorry S.O.B. I like being experimental but taking Turmoil 3 without Luck 3 is just plain suicidal.

As far as conventional scales settings that are all about being maximally optimal and NOT experimental I would always take Order 3, sloth 3, misfortune 3, heat 2, and either some growth or at the very least NO death setting.

MagicPaths:My choices are something like Blood4 or 5, 2 in Water,Astral,Fire,Nature.
This gives me a broad range of spells in all areas that I get starting gems in

Conventional wisdom would say that you should take around 3-4 in magic paths that your national mages don't cover which for Mictlan would be death, air, and earth. You don't have to do this but it is conventional wisdom because it is optimal use of points. In other words, if you can buy a national mage that can cover a path of magic then why use points to get it on your pretender? However, you decide that you really want to fashion say, fever fetishes, for the fire gem income or something and since this requires a combination of paths (nature AND fire) that your national mages have but not in that combination then you could get both those paths on your Pretender so you can make that magic item. Additionally, if you want to make a Super Combatant pretender then specific magic paths are going to be manditory. Experiment with paths and have fun because tweaking out a pretender and seeing how it does is one of the most fun things you can do in Dominions 2.

Hope this helps some.