Best way to play C'tis Miasma?

[Zooko]

Empoisoners equipped Skull Talisman are excellent against independents -- probably greater than 95% success rate at assassinations, and you can start churning them out with no research whatsoever.

Later, when you have higher levels of spells available, you can power them up with empowering items to make them a good threat against other nations.

Here's my idea (but keep in mind that I don't play the normal "Free For All" multi-player style -- I play only multiplayer, but I play only styles in which there is Proper Incentive For War, such as 1 team vs. 1 team or Pentagram).

Oracle, 10 Dominion (oh yes, 10)
+3 Order, +3 Sloth, +2 Heat, +3 Growth, standard luck/misfortune, +3 Magic
Mountain Fortress (oh yes, the Mountain Fortress)
spend the rest of the points on whatever magic you will use to forge items for your Empoisoners

Start with several Empoisoners, making the first one your Prophet. Each one forges a Skull Talisman for himself and then sets about assassinating. (Keep notes about how many leaders you've assassinated from each province.)

Then hire the best researcher you can each turn, and research Construction and Enchantment, so that your Empoisoners, equipped with Death-boosting items, can cast bigger "summon undead" spells during assassinations.

Don't spend any money on troops. Don't spend money on temples unless you've started building a Mountain Fortress in that province. You need a second Mountain Fortress as soon as possible.

Improvise. Have fun.

Thanks to Panther for teaching me some of the flaws of the design that preceded this one... ;-)

[Zen]

Actually an Empoisoner with Enchantment 1, is as good as one with a Skull Talisman, I have found. Usually indeps are killed just as you fatigue out.

Although this could be because I tend to try to horde Death gems and don't like equipping units with Skull Talismans unless they are non-caster assassins.

[Zooko]

In my experience Empoisoners casting Summon Skeleton only win about 80% of the time. That's not a high enough win ration to make it doable as an expansion strategy. The Skull Talisman really makes a noticeable difference, and I think part of it might be the free skeleton at the beginning, so that the assassination victim has more than one opponent at a time for most of the battle...

I admit that this is a highly questionable expansion strategy anyway. Even if your assassins win 100% of their battles, it still takes four or five Empoisoner-turns to take a province (3 or 4 to assassinate all leaders and one to attack). So at best, you can't gain more than one province per turn from turn 8 through 16 or so, and two provinces per turn after that, and so on.

I'm toying with the idea that one way to optimize this is to sneak right through the low-income provinces and head straight for the high income provinces first...

[Zooko]

Hm... I wonder if my experience was due to heavy drain scale tiring my Empoisoners out faster or something. I've just done a bit of playtesting, and Empoisoners casting Summon Skeleton/Summon Dead have done fine, except for when the faced a mounted commander. In that case the two Skull Talismans being worn by the prophet Empoisoner saved the day.

Well, if after all they are effective without Skull Talismans, then this strategy is just a little bit more doable...

[Jurri]

You should probably use a scout or a regular commander to do the actual conquering - no sense to waste an expensive assassin turn! Also, it's a good idea to make a fake attack with the selfsame scout even before bringing the assassinators to the province to see just how many and what type the commanders are, again to save the time of the lizards.

In my experience an empoisoner wins most anything but knight commanders with the animate skeleton. Sometimes a priest has heavy infantry guards and they get lucky, or a mounted commander might avoid a limping skeleton and attack the lizard instead, but generally it's a risk worth taking, in my opinion.