Guide to MA Agartha (In prog) - Pretenders

[mivayan]

llamabeast said:
I don't think the Dwarven Hammer works like you think it does. It doesn't give you access to any items you couldn't forge otherwise. It just makes them cheaper.

Right - only the forge of the ancients spell does that.

[Warhammer]

I actually love the length and depth of this article. It gives us other newbies a look at things to consider which is important for us to understand the nuts and bolts of creating a strategy.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be issuing a retraction soon on the Dwarven Hammer.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I've added a revisions and retraction summary to my first post. Of particular note, I've added a paragraph on the importance of Oracles of the Ancients and preaching to the Mage Priests section.

You'll also bring them along with your armies to preach.

Did I just say you'd have a 400 gold unit preach? Yes. Once you have your national golems up and about, this is perhaps the most important thing they can do, even with a strong pretender dominion. Your level one priest can only raise dominion to 2, 4 if you have a temple there. An Oracle of the Ancients can raise dominion as high as six, eight if there's a temple, and ten if there's a temple and he's a prophet. The base chance of success for a priest is 30%, for an Oracle 90%. Add in a temple and that goes to 120%. These guys make it much easier to take AND HOLD hostile territory, since every point of dominion gives your golems +10% hitpoints.

To do: Comment on manually searching with Earth Readers, Golem Crafters, and Gnome Lore. Also, seasons and ages and how that affects use of Golem Crafters.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

2.5 A review of your military

Your human infantry are well protected, and fear few arrows. But they're quite lackluster when compared to other nations. They are severely limited by resources, and have a low damage potential. They do have a decent (13) defense score, and that helps.

Light Infantry - These are your fast units. They can easily handle independents consisting of archers, militia, [animal] tribe warriors, light infantry. They will suffer a world of hurt against heavy infantry and barbarians. Choose your targets wisely.

Infantry - These are worth the resources, but hard to recruit in quantity. You'll usually throw 10 or 20 in with a whole mess of LI when you need something with a little more staying power. They're outclassed by quite a few national troops, however. They're equivalent to most independent heavy infantries. Don't underestimate them because they don't have 'heavy' in front.

Heavy Infantry - Your shocktroopers. They still have dinky damage, but they'll be your very best bodyguards. With some of your protection spells, they can form a good wall.

Pale One Soldiers - Not worth recruiting for most expansion, they'll be used to take water provinces, and open another war front against other land nations. They'll also be used in siege warfare, or when you're expecting darkness conditions.

Ancient Ones - maddeningly vulnerable to arrows, and coldblooded, they certainly have their drawbacks. Their attack is a little better than the POS, but their greater strength more than compensates for their decreased hit rate. Unless you have equalizers in place, count them out against units with a defense of 13 or more. They'll only hit 18%. Nice combinations include fire bless, Darkness, Arrow Fend, Legions of Steel, and Curse of Stones.

Scouts - Get them when you need scouts, but you'll often have something better to buy. You'll usually be better off recruiting from independents.

Cave Captains - Use them to lead large groups of light infantry and/or speedy independents, they're the closest thing to a rapid response team you have. There's not much reason to choose them over independent commanders, but

Pale One Captains- Use them to lead amphibious assaults.

Ancient Lord - Well worth thugging. They won't kill armies by their lonesome, but an solo Ancient Lord equipped with a 2h Sword of Sharpness, Black Steel Helmet, and Black Steel Full Plate (all trinkets) can take down 8 enemy humanoids before going down. All in one hit each. Properly supported, it is a worthwhile addition to your force. The problem is properly supporting them. They have a move speed of 13- aside from Ancient Ones, you have nothing else as fast. You can put them behind your infantry, but if you do it improperly, they'll just get stuck at the rear doing you no good. If you're deploying these with anything but Ancient Ones, experiment with your formations, watch the battles, and learn what works well before you get into a battle where they are needed.

Acolytes of the Ancients - Near worthless, unless you have the no independents mods. In that case, they're actually worth using because they are the only blesser fast enough to keep pace with your Ancient Ones. If you need preaching in a distant province, they'll get there quicker than your mage-priests.

Earth Reader - They make a decent leader for infantry and heavy infantry. They don't do much with their spells, but they can scale upwards when necessary. Just keep those spare gems on a commander who can't use them. And while their 5 magic leadership doesn't seem like much, five golems can add a surprising amount of oomph to a force. They're also the cheapest option if you expect to be constantly forging equipment. There's a lot of earth equipment available at only 1E. And even with Gnome Lore being available, it can be worth sending out a couple of these early on to search for sites. You'll recruit these for any permanent positions.

Golem Crafters - Compared to other nations, a puny researcher. On the plus side, the cost is reasonable, and he's sacred. On the downside, plagued by old age, you'll be constantly screening the messages for their obituaries and hiring replacements. Early on, you'll be buying a lot of these, and dedicating them to research. They're hardly worthless in combat, but getting to Attentive Statues before year two is so important you won't want to spare them. Once you've got a solid research base, there is quite a bit they'll be doing for you in battle. But if you still have earth gems, keep em at home summoning instead.

Oracle of the Ancients - Don't hire more than one your first year. They don't have the research to make it worthwhile. Later on, they'll become critical for their access to certain summons, ability to lead undead, and the importance of their preaching in taking and holding hostile territory. Their holy magic will be helpful on occasion, too. Early on, they'll take a few converted gems and scry for death sites, forge a dwarven hammer, and any other odd tasks.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

3.0 What is the Golem Cult?
In short, the golem cult is +10% per level of friendly dominion, for your golems. This includes non-national golems such as Claymen and "Golem" golems. It does not cover undead. If I understand the system correctly, it remembers the highest province they stayed in, till getting damaged. It may pay to move new summons through a high dominion area on the way to the front. It WILL pay if you find any fast independents with magic leadership or twiceborn a oracle, since your map move is three, but all your default leaders are stuck at one.

3.1 Conjuration (Undead - death gems)

Awaken Cavern Wight (3 gems, summons one)
Consider it the poor man's Wight, it available at the same time as the regular Wight, but at DE, not DD. It also costs 40% less gems. It loses the Bane Blade, but it gains a higher damage Glaive. It gains more hitpoints, but loses a lot of protection. In general, it is inferior. Still, it is a fairly tough unit for the cost, and that chill affect can come in quite handy. Remember, chill stacks, and every 20/10 points reduces enemy attack/defense. Every 15 increases the chance for critical hits. You might freeze them, also.

Summon Umbral (2 gems, summons one)
A very impressive stealthy, ethereal, life draining unit. Like all ethereal units, it is vulnerable to magical weapons, but with a meaty 68 hitpoints, it isn't going to be threatened by any old banishment prayer. It is a lot harder to mass than shades, being only one to a spell, but you won't have much undead leadership capacity anyways. it's quite strong, has solid attack, morale, and defense, and a pretty good MR of 16.

While they are worth including in a standard force, keep in mind the Rod of the Leper King (1D). This can give any of your units, even the scout, fifty undead leadership. The disease is a downside, but if you managed to summon a Black Servant (2D), you can avoid that problem and have yourself a stealthy raiding force. If you can't do that, they're still worth using. In short, I'd say ambushes.

Sun Tzu's Art of War has some vague, but interesting things to say with regards to this. It's a pretty short read, I highly recommend it.

3.2 Enchantment (Golems - earth gems)

Your golems are the centerpiece of your Agarthan strategy. You can mix things up quite a bit, but you'll use golems or lose. They are magical beings, lifeless, inanimate, mindless, and neverhealing - outside of labs, that is. They have 50 morale, 22 protection, and 0 encumbrance. All that grants certain immunities and advantages, but leads to a few weaknesses you'll have to learn about.

They a nice map move of three, but unfortunately you're limited to map-move 1 magic leaders. If you find a fast independent mage or twiceborn an oracle, that will be a big help.

Quite a few are sacred. I'll cover blesses in a later section. I will briefly mention that earth and nature blesses are just about moot w/regards to golems.

They don't take much damage, but when they do, you'll need to retreat/ferry a few to the nearest lab. However, since they can only be led by a mage, you can build your own. They can carry the bonus hitpoints they get from a friendly dominion into a hostile dominion.

While I've brought up the subject of their leadership, the one greatest threat to your golems is going without. If you have no mages present on the battlefield, your golems instagib. That is, they burst into a horrifying cloud of blood. The total amount of magic leadership doesn't matter, however, as long as there is some there. You'll need to protect your mages and factor in redundancy. Bodyguards will help deal with arrows and flyers, but aren't perfect. Stoneskin helps, but can't be depended on, since DRN is an open-ended roll, and fatigue increases the chances of criticals. Your mages won't die in every combat, they're not at risk, but you'll curse yourself when you forget bodyguards, and two lucky arrows deal ten points of damage to your two stoneskinned golem crafters and slay all your golems. It's almost always better to err on the side of caution when dealing with golem leaders. Failure isn't that common, but it is catastrophic when it occurs.

To repeat, to prevent the catastrophic loss of all your golems, all you typically need is a little protection, a few (human) bodyguards, and a little redundancy. Even imperfect as it is, stoneskin is well worth casting. Oh, and don't bunch your mages up. There will be situations later on where you need to take extraordinary measures, but those will usually be self evident. It's rather convenient that water/earth offers both Resist Fire and Cold Resistance. And with a Dwarven Hammer, certain trinkets only cost 3 gems. Lightning Rod, Ring of Fire/Frost. And if you're desperate, the Lead Shield is always available, but a bit pricy.

Most of your golems are sacred, opening some opportunites, wear no armor (all natural protection, important to know), and have a patrol bonus, helping you to raise money in a pinch.

Attentive Statues (4 gems, summons two)

It's easy to overlook these units with the much more attractive Enliven Sentinels just around the corner, but you're doing yourself a great disservice by doing so. By cutting off your research goal at t3, you allow yourself a lot more flexibility with your early commanders. Even with a dominion of 1, these are a force to be feared. I once had twelve of them take on a Mictlan army of 70, and win. One casualty. One. There were a few gaping chest wounds, but those were inconsequential and an inevitable result of being so grossly outnumbered and unsupported. I admit, it was against the AI, but I was still quite impressed.

Unlike your later nationals, these guys lack sacred, come with Stone Shields (manual is incorrect), and have a defense value of 14. They will still benefit from your dominion, so that helps compensate for their relatively low health. I say relatively, because for humanoid infantry, they've got above average hitpoints, strength, attack, defense, mr. And obscene morale & protection. They'll tear through undead and heavy infantry. Crossbows will hardly bother them. Even with armor piercing, they've got 11 prot. left and a good shield with a high parry value. High strength units may cause problems, but by high strength, I mean giant level, not berserked barbarians.

Enliven Sentinel (4 gems, summons one)
Once you start encountering tougher resistance, you'll switch to these. These and all further units lack shields, or the excellent defense. But, the boost in hitpoints means they'll last longer without repairs, will get less wounds, and benefit more from your dominion. They're size three, so they're still capable of outnumbering a giant or pretender. In addition to the obvious boost from strength, they get an additional damage boost from their Granite Glaive. And they're the highest you can summon without boosters or oracles. That's quite important sometimes. Don't forget to now take advantage of any national blesses you might have, and take them to labs for occasional repair.

Enliven Granite Guard (12 gems, summons one)
These are expensive, requiring 12 earth gems and an 400 gold Oracle of the Ancients (or Earth Boots golem crafter) to summon. What you get is a MEAN UNIT, that you'll definetly want to deploy to any checkpoints or bring to your critical battles. If you have any dom10 provinces, you get a whopping 150 hitpoints, that even the King of Deeper Earth can't beat. Their only fundamental problem is overkill. They can be a waste of gems that way.

Enliven Marble Oracle (45 gems, summons one)
Unfortunately, this commander gets no leadership without artifacts. Fortunately, you can equip this marble nudist with a full range of artifacts. Holy two is on occasion nice, but for real fun, and over 300 hitpoints, prophetize him. As icing on the cake, you'll get the strength bonuses, MR dominion bonus, attack and defense bonus bonus, and a permanent bless.

Special Golem Threats:
Disrepair. Nations with common earth mages. Having all your mages die off and insta-gib your golems. Armor negating spells threaten everyone, but your golem's less so, thanks to bountiful hitpoints. Your greatest threat will probably be generated by other nations with earth magic. Shatter is harmful, but less so once you get 100+ hitpoint Granite Guardians. Earth forging gives nations access to Smasher (e2), which does extra damage to inanimates and undead. IT makes available plenty of armor piercing/negating weapons. Air nations have easy access to the Thunder Whip (A1), with Armor Negating. Etcetera. However, the only thing you really need worry about all the time is any tactics hitting your mages. They are your weakest link.

Odds and ends:
Various units such as Clay Men also get the dominion bonus. If you think any non-national golem deserves a mention, tell me and I'll edit it in here. Other comments, too.

[Valandil]

Juggernauts and astral magic pretenders.

With astral, you can forge robes of shadows, pendants of luck, amulets of antimagic, and summon a juggernaut.

The mobile reliquary has obscene hitpoints and decent combat ability, plus it spreads the vital dominion.