LA Agartha Advice Wanted

[TheMenacer]

I like to go with a Lord of Rebirth with death, earth, and nature all at 4. Low death and earth make nice blesses for your battlemages, and the regen helps your high HP sacreds (as well as patching up diseased mages). Add to that the fact that you've got no native access to nature, which in turn gets you later game access to air (through Fairy Queens), water, and even blood (through Lamia Queens), and you've got yourself a fairly nice setup.

From there, I've had luck with all kinds of scales, but generally you can ignore magic because you'll be recruiting as many necromancers as you can all the time so your research'll be fine without it, and cold 1 is a good idea as plenty of the undead units you're summoning have cold auras. Growth/Death is a tricky decision that I've been puzzling over for a while now. Growth is of course awesome because of the income, lowered affliction rate on your old mages, and all around niceness, but the fact of the matter is that you'll be switching over to summons sooner than most others so it's really your call.

Other than that, either trade or bootstrap your way into blood magic. Blood stones are the most incredible item in the game for Agartha and you can never never never have enough of them. You should be grinding out Tomb Oracles around the same time as you're getting access to mages with blood (you don't have to research the path itself, all those slaves should be going into blood stones) and a couple of tomb oracles with blood stones can drop serious battlefield magic (particularly the "Army of ___" spells) with no micromanagement required.

Another thing to remember is that Tomb Oracles make great thugs in their own right but they're built to help out your armies even moreso, so despite the nice personal buffs that earth and death offer, I recommend keeping them in the back rows. Iron Corpses can soak up damage, but they can't hit anything and have horrifyingly low MR, which sets them back from being a weak unit to being a liability. Skeleton Archers (I think that's the spell, the death/fire one) is absolutely incredible. I don't care how fragile the archers are, it costs five gems to get units with banefire bows and that's just the best thing.

[Omnirizon]

LA Agartha shouldn't neglect their Tomb Oracle and Umbral Summons. In fact, these two things can be made the keystone to LA Agartha strategy.

Because Tomb Oracles are sacred, and Blindfighters are decent recruitable everywhere sacreds, a bless build is a perfect option for the nation. An E9N4 is a bless that benefits both TOs and BFs. Go first for Const4, then Conj5, then Alt5 (this nets you equipment, the TOs, and buffs for them). Without even having lvl 6 in anything, you have a battlefield dominator. Equip them with FireBrands/DemonWhips/CharcoalShields - DragonHelms - FirePlate/BlackSteelFullPlate - AmuletOfAntimagic & Luck Pendant. That's all stuff you can forge natively with Const4. Blessed and buffed with Invulnerability your TOs will have 30+ prot, 20 MR, regen, and 85 HP; plus be E3D3H3 and able to drop some other surprises on your foes if needed.

Other strategy is possible. That Ench6 Iron Corpse spell looks tempting. I've never tried a strategy using it though. If going for it, then E9B4+ would make sense to get Bloodstones too. The Iron Corpse spell is 4E gems for 17 Iron Corpses (which have 17 prot). At that cost with those stats they are very worthy. With enough Bloodstones and some natural Earth income, 100 Iron Corpses a turn is imaginable. Supplement those with battlemages, some Tomb Oracles, BlindFighters, and GOR'd Umbrals and LA Argatha is Mid-Late Game powerhouse. the mages and Blindfighters are slow, but Tomb Oracles (or other undead leaders) and Umbrals are not.

Also note that LA Agartha is one of the few nations with the ability to summon undead using undead priests. Problem is they have no undead priest except for Tomb Oracles. This might make focusing on Ench even better, to get Life AFter Death (then just find away to kill a bunch of your mage-priests once [but not twice]).

[MaxWilson]

When talking about blessing the Sepulchrals and Tomb Oracles, bear in mind that the game is bugged--blessings don't work for sacred undead unless you apply the blessing hotfix mod from DrPraetorious.

-Max

[TheMenacer]

I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a while back. I might be wrong of course, but blesses seem to work on my undead units.

[chrispedersen]

LA-Agaratha advice: Avoid CBM umbrals go from 5-7.

[TheMenacer]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

LA-Agaratha advice: Avoid CBM umbrals go from 5-7.

On the other hand, CBM makes iron corpses worth the gems because you can just get so damn many of them. You'll still be in real trouble if you run them up against people who can take control of undead units thank to their horrible MR, but at the very least you can get a serious amount of them for relatively little cost.

[Agema]

Originally Posted by TheMenacer

On the other hand, CBM makes iron corpses worth the gems because you can just get so damn many of them. You'll still be in real trouble if you run them up against people who can take control of undead units thank to their horrible MR, but at the very least you can get a serious amount of them for relatively little cost.

Cast Antimagic first turn. It's easy, cheap and effective.

Edit: Oops, maybe not so easy. I thought you could get S2 reasonably comfortably from LA Agartha, but on checking it's actually pretty rare.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Agema

Cast Antimagic first turn. It's easy, cheap and effective.

Edit: Oops, maybe not so easy. I thought you could get S2 reasonably comfortably from LA Agartha, but on checking it's actually pretty rare.

at the cost of 30 gems to empower a single mage to S2, and from there the ability to forge both crystal coins and starshine skullcaps, I would think this tactic is easily in the picture.

There is also an earth spell that raises MR in a small AoE. Though maybe not right for this situation since there are potentially 100's of units.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by TheMenacer

I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a while back. I might be wrong of course, but blesses seem to work on my undead units.

Okay, never mind then.

-Max

[Zeldor]

That reminds me that I should finish my LA Agartha guide. Especially considering how many bad advices are floating here.