EA Abysia - Looking for advice, and bread

[Micah]

Umm, EA Abysia's normal troops are pretty fantastic in a standup fight, they have phenomenal protection for EA, and xbows aren't available. Their sacreds are also pretty crazy with an earth-9 bless, which synergizes nicely with your sacred mages as well for the reinvig. You can pull off an E9 imprisioned cyclops with 7 dominion and Order 3 prod 3, heat 3, growth 1, misfortune 2, magic 3 (or shuffle the magic and growth scales around if you want) This will make your sacreds nigh-invulnerable to most enemies, your mages get 4 points of reinvigoration and you have a pretty good SC chassis/earth forger for later. Play hard early game and hope to get enough of an advantage to live long enough to fix your horrid magic diversity, which is going to suck even if you take a rainbow pretender (just less so). Get a shaman recruitment center up as soon as possible and pump out a few N site searchers. Find an enchantress site and your game starts looking very promising.

The other option would be to rainbow out to help their magic diversity if you're in a big game that'll last a while, but this option is pretty slow to develop into any sort of real options. If you go this route make sure to take decent levels of death and astral, I'd say to take take blood too and focus on getting the blood economy going so you can summon up a few devils ASAP to give you a counter to the fire-immune thugs/SCs that will inevitably show up. I'd say to work on blood even without a high-blood pretender, since it's the easiest path to empower, and you need as much diversity as you can get. Getting a B1 anointed or an F1 Warlock will make it pretty easy to path up for Arch Devil summons, and they're pretty sweet.

And second sun sucks, don't cast it, especially since post-fire storm evocation isn't worthwhile. Pillar is janky, especially since any large single targets are going to have fire immunity at that point anyhow...Flame storm and Fires from the Sky can be useful, but aren't worth slogging through level 8 and 9 research for until much later on.

[Jazzepi]

I would heavily disagree that flame storm isn't worth it.

Jazzepi

[Micah]

It's an effective spell, but I don't think dropping another 2800 RP into Abysia's one trick pony right off the bat is usually going to be the way to go. Evocation is going to be one of their primary research paths, and I think you're generally going to be better served by branching out after you hit level 7 instead of keeping with the narrow focus. Fire storm is already doing a pretty good job incinerating the battlefield's lightly armored troops (especially the enemy mages way in the back) and falling fires does the same thing as flame storm does, just with a much smaller AoE, which will let you take out any heavily armored units that make it through the BE.

The problem is that by the time you hit level 9 research (especially with Abysia's subpar researchers and having to slow down for blood) anything fighting you is likely going to be doing most of the heavy lifting with FR troops. I suppose a Anointed could be used quite effectively against a raiding force with Flame Storm and some PD, but that seems like a large investment of cap-only mage time and research to serve as a raiding counter. Is that what you had in mind for it Jazz?

[Jazzepi]

I'm sorry, no I thought you were talking about Fire Storm!

This same issue comes up with Magic The Gathering. Every red burn spell in the world is like "Lava <something>" or "Fire <something>".

So I just got confused x.x Sorry about that. Sandman beat my *** in Midway with Fire Storm in one game.

Jazzepi

[OmikronWarrior]

Oh yeah, EA's troops are better then other nation counterparts, I wasn't trying to claim otherwise. Problem is they are 20 gold(I think) and 26 resources at least. That translates to being outnumbered, a lot. Plus, they're still demons which means they are weak to certain spells.

[Jazzepi]

Abysia's troops aren't demons. They have the Misbred troop which is a flying demon, but that's the only one, and they aren't a staple force. Generally just used to raid as mentioned by Sandman.

Jazzepi

[KissBlade]

Micah pretty much got the idea on what's ideal for Abysia ea. I use the same scales except I take no growth and one misfortune only. Magic diversification was largely ignored by me, aside from the straying into construction for lanterns and dousing rods, I pump the majority into evocation for falling fires and fires from afar, and then go into pure blood. My early game consists of sacreds backed by heavy troops to eventually having indies take other indie provinces while my main army bulks up with summons and cap troops. You cannot play passive with EA Abysia for long, once you can get a comfortable blood economy going you have to go for the throat of a neighbor.

Also I should point out, if you can get the research fast enough for it, e9 blessed ethereal burning ones can take out almost any standard army early on.