abysia strategies

[alexti]

Caseus said:
For me, single player IS the game.

In multiplayer you have to contend with cheaters.

It doesn't seem there are cheaters left since Norfleet quitted.

Caseus said:
You have to contend with people exploiting loopholes in the game system to do things the designers never intended. The actual fun parts of the game -- the huge variety of spells, magic items, and units -- are lost in the intense competitiveness of multiplayer. "You can't do X, that doesn't work in multiplayer!"

No, X works, but only in right circumstances. The fun of MP is to figure out which X will work in the current situation. Concerning the loopholes, there aren't many, and they are not significant, at Last significant ones got patched. But of course in the game of such complexity, no known loopholes doesn't mean that they don't exist.

Caseus said:
I suspect it's far worse than that. I suspect that in multiplayer, your race is merely a chassis for getting out the Big Summons. The incredibly diversity of races and units is virtually meaningless compared to the power of Ice Devils, Air Queens, etc.

Ice Devils, Air Queens etc are not particularly strong in MP. In SP they look strong just because AI doesn't know how to deal with them. Against human players, those ID and AQs will be dying left and right. It's true there's a period in the early game when you can safely raid many nations with ID or AQ, but that period doesn't Last long. After that they become just super-commanders (as opposite to super-combatants) who need a strong army to achieve anything.

The nation still makes a difference until the very end. Mostly due to the mages, national troops still remain useful though. Something has to make numbers in your army. At that stage distinction between most of national troops become minimal, however some nations (R'lyeh, Caelum, C'tis) still have national troops that can play distinctive role on the battlefield.

[Zen]

I'd say any stealth army has usefulness until the end of the game. Though my concept of "End of the Game" might vary from others, but usually until a decisive win or the game becomes to micro to play.

[Edi]

I've always found Abysia relatively easu to play, and have found a couple of good pretenders for them that don't really act as SC but whoi nicely patch their weaknesses. And anybody who complains about not being able to get dwarven hammers with Abysia is just plain incompetent. Get earth warlock, forge bloodstone, equip, forge boots, equip, forge hammer, repeat hammer, start cranking out stuff. Having a pretender with E4 or above is also good, because half of your mages (and all of the artillery ones) are sacred, so they get help from the reinvigo blessing, especially if you can equipe them with reinvigo items. My first MP, Back to the Fray, I'm playing Abysia, and I'm not doing badly at all (relatively speaking), but I've also been lucky.

Edi

Edi