MA Agartha, or Yet another thread fishing for tips

[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.