LA Atlantis, another thread looking for tips

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Yeah, Send Tupilac is questionable. If you're discussing Burden of Time, then as undead, the Tupilac will benefit greatly from Utter Darkness. As the manual mentions in its sample strat, if you've got a death heavy pretender, consider casting your globals Well of Darkness, Utter Darkness, and Burden of Time. The consequences are minimal.

If not, it is questionable. But there are advantages to taking out their lesser commanders. If they can't use the standard independent commanders to ferry around reinforcements, that's to your advantage. If you can take out several low-level priests before an assault, any undead hordes you use will have to worry a lot less about banishment. If they have to use their good priests for h1 banishment, thats good.

I'm not certain how it would turn out, but I suppose I'll have to experiment with this situation.
1). One friendly black servant in an enemy province defended only by pd, set to attack.
2). Two casts of tupilak attempting to kill the commanders the same turn.

I suppose it depends on the order of events, and whether the commanders are replaced immediately, but it would be nice to route the entire pd with one Black Servant.

[Taqwus]

You can't assassinate PD commanders. You can't do anything to them outside of battle with the PD, actually.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

Drat. Thanks for the answer, Taqwus.

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About the underwater recruitables:

Yeah, it kind of seems sucky that there's no recruitable underwater LA Atlantis mages.

But the Consorts are great! 80 gold for: (27HP, thick skin, 12MR, 16 strength, self-blessing) is pretty cheap. I'll stick some winged boots on them to get around the movement problem, probably a frost brand since I've got so many water gems, and whatever other cheap gear I can think of. 12 attack is mediocre, but with a Frost Brand it doesn't matter all that much.

I didn't find a use for the underwater infantry, but the Shield Wielders are great crossbow/arrow chaff.

[Humakty]

I think the Assartut low resource cost mahes them interesting for beginning the game. I had a SP game where I was facing man and I had no problem punching through their lines (mostly used glaives). I almost never use chaff units when I can avoid it, I prefer to use my gold on powerfull units. I think chaff is mostly a weakness, specially the harpoon throwers, which will do almost no damage at range before getting killed rapidly in close combat, closing your army to the deadly 40 % loose.
LA atlantis must rely on damage dealers (glaive people) 'cause you've got no archers at the beginning, and it's pretty hard finding cold immune indeps.

[Sombre]

I entirely agree regarding chaff - because of the way the morale system works chaff is very rarely a good idea.

[SelfishGene]

Assartuts and other cheaper sacred capital units are excellent for continuous early expansion. Many play up the ability of certain nations like Ermor or Pythium to expand from turn one, but at turn 4 a nation with cheap sacred and a good bless like Atlantis can expand continuously with hardly any reinforcement every turn after. (I think the Eagle Warrior and Shadow Vestal are the kings and queens (respectively) of cheap capital-only sacreds.)

The Assartut's big weakness is it's relative lack of armor, but as above, this makes it easier to mass them in numbers. And being cheap they are easy to maintain.

Harpoon throwers have only one selling point and that is they are the only unit that can be quickly massed by Atlantis: everything else is quite expensive in resources. Atlantis' high resource cost is a big weakness after a major defeat, they have a hard time coming back.

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Sombre said:
I entirely agree regarding chaff - because of the way the morale system works chaff is very rarely a good idea.

I've been sticking 10 chaff in the front to catch the first bunch of arrows or an initial cavalry charge. I don't want my resource-heavy units damaged if I can avoid it.

I went with a S4E4 bless on a rainbow pretender. S4 with drain 2 was in case I got Rlyeh on the map, and drain 2 is not so bad with the big mages being R9 and capable of making skulls. I think drain 3 would even have been fine. E4 is mostly for reinvigoration for the mages. SP, so I'm not worried about losing the pretender to a duel.