Demo Guide to Kailasa

[Endoperez]

The armoured or unarmoured ones? The different eras of the monkey people have great Hold&Attack units.

[dirtywick]

In EA the archers are all unarmored.

[Endoperez]

Good point.

While the Yavana Archers are weaker in melee than the armored Yavanas, some blessed like W9 Def and Quickness affect both. Even if that isn't optimal use of Kailasa's sacreds, I've had a fun time trying.

[dirtywick]

I like Kailasa. There's a lot of room to play around with it. It reminds me of Machaka from Dom 2, which was my favorite nation to use for a long time

[Saxon]

There has got to be a way to get the archers going. After all, what can we do otherwise? I agree, the sacreds are less than ideal, the protection is rough. My pretender has air 4, so I get that blessing that sheilds them from 20% of arrows, but that only helps the archers. Their infantry is nothing special, which is why I am trying to get the swarms of archers up and running.

I must say, the swarm of archers does make a real mess of the other nations with low protection, it is those damn people with metal sheilds...

[Nerfix]

Kailasa's sacreds have Awe and semihigh defence though, IIRC.

[Saxon]

That is a nice list of “slow ‘em down and wear them down” spells, I shall see what I can do. If you have a reasonable number of infantry, even heavy infantry from random provinces, their screening job is a lot easier if only half the enemy hits at once and half their armour is gone.

You say other nations are better at an archer based strat. Who did you have in mind? Also, given the tilt towards archers with the monkeys, I was wondering if you saw another way forward with them that did not use a lot of archers? Were you thinking lots of summons in the mid and late game? I am playing with ideas on this nation right now and welcome everyone’s thoughts!

[dirtywick]

What I meant was the Flaming Arrows/Wind Guide strat, but none of them are available in the demo (I think). Man is always a good choice for an archer nation as they can cast Wind Guide, and Machaka can mass cheap archers and they have fire picks so Flaming Arrows is easy to cast and has a good effect. An archer strat is viable with Kailasa, you just have to play it differently or build a pretender for it.

And the Bandar Swordsmen isn't a bad heavy infantry, you might find better but odds are it'll be a while before you can recruit anything better in mass.

[Endoperez]

W9 bless gives Yavana Archers 1.5 longbow attacks with their higher precision compared to 3.5 attacks of Atavi, or almost 2 bandar. It mightn't be cost-effective, but I used them for Hold&Attack. Awe and high defense worked well enough until my enemy recruited insane amounts of Archers, and then I lost.
The lesser Death effect, increased amounts of afflictions, works with ranged weapons. That might work too, but Kailasa's access to various Astral spells and Petrification can deal with most SCs; they don't really need the minor boost Death would provide.

Kailasa has access to very good sacred units in the Gandharva of Conjuration 5. They are expensive, but have wonderful protection, especially for EA.

[PDF]

I'm still experimenting on how to make Kaisala EA sacred "usable" : with 1 (!!) prot it's not that obvious, plus the fact that the archers don't benefit from the Fire blessing (it only affects melee weapons...).

So currently the only idea I have is to have F9-blessed Yavanas made survivable by Protection (from Guru), Body Eth (Yogi), then Iron Warriors (Yaksha).
Not very effective, nor very fast, and difficult to properly succeed as you rely on AoE1 buffs ...
And even then they can be easily slaughtered by any sustained archer fire ...

As for Yavanas archers they are just overpriced longbowmen with very good precision but no armor, I think I'd rather field 4 Atavis Archers vs 1 Yavana for the same cost.
As Kaisala has no easy access to Wind Guide and more importantly to Flaming Arrows I don't think you can rely on archer strategies.

Do I miss stg ?