MA Agartha, or Yet another thread fishing for tips

[alexti]

Evilhomer said:
I was never suggesting any HI. You get +45% LI with that production bonus as well.

Even with Prod 1, you're already gold bound rather than resource bound if you're buying LI (assuming you're buying Golem crafters every turn and saving gold for your next fort). That LI isn't very good investment and you don't want to buy more of it than necessary for the expansion.

Evilhomer said:
The benefit from growth is exponential in your original lands (as well as the lands you take over), by turn 100 (if you are still in the game by then) it almost doubles your income (1.006^100+0.06=1.88)

Heavy raiding usually starts much earlier than that and all those useful spells depopulate the land rather quickly too, and as Agartha you don't have too many defenses against raiding, so this is not very reliable plan. On another side, conquest usually increases your income by 50%+ in 10-15 turns. You should count on strong players conquering at least 3-4 nations by turn 100, so you need to match that pace if you want to have a chance.

Evilhomer said:
I stated earlier that i would take the points from the heat scale. Yes it gives slightly more fatigue, but it hurts your opponents just as much, or if you are out of your dominion it doesn't matter...And with growth and order+production gold bonus together (they all actually work together with good synergy) you can take the gold loss without much problem.

I am not aware of any synergy between order and production gold bonuses. They give 7% and 2% completely independently. Heat is also independent and gives you -5%. So each heat + production scale decreases your income by 3%. Besides, with the good battle mages, extra fatigue is likely a drawback too.

[Evilhomer]

the synergy im refering to is the gold % bonus (order +production) together with growth (constant % bonus +population increasing every turn). Im not sure if the battle mages of ma agartha is so powerful compared to the other nations, not if you factor in the price. They are not bad either i guess, but i would not rate them in the top 20 (among the 62 available).

There are ways for agartha to deal with raiding even if they are few, one way is to use earth attacks to just kill off the commanders (just get 1 earth bonus on your e3 mages).

[Micah]

Don't forget that your heat scale gets pulled by the seasons. If you have a heat 0 pulling hotter or colder both hurt your income by 5%, if you take heat-1 summer will hurt your income by 5%, which isn't any more than normal, but winter actually helps it by 5% by pulling it to neutral, so you lose less than the theoretical value by taking heat/cold scales.

[alexti]

Micah said:
Don't forget that your heat scale gets pulled by the seasons. If you have a heat 0 pulling hotter or colder both hurt your income by 5%, if you take heat-1 summer will hurt your income by 5%

Wouldn't it pull the scale further by making you lose 10%?

[Micah]

Yes, it would be a total of 10%, but my point was that losing 10% a quarter of the time, 5% half the time and 0% the last quarter of the time is an average of a 5% loss, while a neutral scale will either be hot or cold about half the time, giving you an average of 5% half the time, or 2.5%. So the first point of heat/cold is only really a 2.5% loss, not the full 5 it seems to be. I'm not sure on the exact percentages on the season pulls, so that figure isn't exact by any means, but a 50% chance of a pull seems like a reasonable ballpark estimate. It's a significant amount, although it isn't a HUGE change. Taking a triple scale also kicks in another 'free' percent or two since seasons obviously can't pull you to a 4-point scale, so the only seasonal effect you can get is a beneficial move toward neutral.

[alexti]

Micah said:
Yes, it would be a total of 10%, but my point was that losing 10% a quarter of the time, 5% half the time and 0% the last quarter of the time is an average of a 5% loss, while a neutral scale will either be hot or cold about half the time, giving you an average of 5% half the time, or 2.5%.

Good point. I have tried few experiments and it seems that seasonal effects are rather random. I got average of about 6 out of 36 months when the scale was offset by 1 (Dom 7). Interestingly, that with Dom1, the average was about 9. Is season influence countered by high dominion? Number of experiments weren't large enough to make this observation statistically reliable. It still seems that seasons are not as bad as they initially look - costed only about 1% on average across all my experiments.

This seem to agree with my experiences - wrong scales don't work well if your preferred scale is neutral. Taking heat 2 when your preference is heat 1 is another story. It almost always result in a better income than taking heat 1. The drawback is that Heat 2 loses to Heat 1 in the first few months due to a large proportion of income coming from the capital.

[Micah]

Well, if the seasonal effect is checked before the dominion then the dominion will have a 5% per candle + 10% per scale tip difference to bring it right back, so yes, dom strength could have an effect. I don't know the order they're checked in though. I may have overstated the importance of seasonal effects from the looks of the low number of season pulls you got, but it is something to consider when taking heat scale.

And back to Agartha for a moment: A heat scale is also more attractive than normal because they're cold-blooded, which I don't think has been mentioned yet in the discussion.

[alexti]

Evilhomer said:
Im not sure if the battle mages of ma agartha is so powerful compared to the other nations, not if you factor in the price. They are not bad either i guess, but i would not rate them in the top 20 (among the 62 available).

Not sure how to rate (what criteria?) them, but you certainly need them on the battlefield casting offensive spells. Part of their strength is a nice power curve. They're getting better and better spells along Evo and by Evo-6 they have very good spells. So they can be efficient pretty early, long before you need to seriously worry about opponents anti-mage spells. Another strength is versatility - they can deal with thugs, SCs, heavy or lightly armoured troops. So at that phase of the game they're pretty high in the mage rankings.

Evilhomer said:
There are ways for agartha to deal with raiding even if they are few, one way is to use earth attacks to just kill off the commanders (just get 1 earth bonus on your e3 mages).

Nothing efficient I can think of - Earth attack is a reactionary measure (and it doesn't work versus many kind of raiders) that doesn't prevent income loss. I haven't tried played MA Agartha in MP, but I would think that the late play would have to be based on raiding using disposable regular troops and stealthy umbral squads of various strength while moving randomly some small Golem Crafter backed squads randomly in your territory. Lack of mobility still hurts though. But even if you defend successfully you still lose income due to unrest. And with raiding, poisoning and destructive province spells, it is in general easier to hurt opponent's income than preserve your own. So I'm generally pessimistic about prospects of preserving the income. On a good side, Agartha is in a decent position as far as being destructive is concerned, and it's also can alchemise if needed.