LA Pythium

[ComTrav]

Serpent Priests also have a high chance for a death pick, so it seems like expansion into death would be easy; Streams from Hades is probably the best route to a decent-path death mage. Water/Death also lets you get a good chance for Earth with Frozen in Snow.

[B0rsuk]

ComTrav said:
Serpent Priests also have a high chance for a death pick, so it seems like expansion into death would be easy; Streams from Hades is probably the best route to a decent-path death mage. Water/Death also lets you get a good chance for Earth with Frozen in Snow.

Well, Renatus simply starts with D1, and has either 1/3 or 1/4 chance for DD . They're sacred, cheap, and available everywhere. Cost-effective researchers, so you're likely to have many of them.
Renata with WN can cast Mossbody. Sounds like an interesting spell, I'll have to try it.

[Karlem]

Easy question: heretics only lower dominion where they are? I mean, they do not spread it like negative temple checks to other provinces? If that's the case having drain and seems quite interesting....

[Kuritza]

Great infantry and terrifying Hydras, lots of mages incapable of good combat spells. No national summons worth mentioning.
With a booster, your mages can cast foul vapors though - that might compliment Hydras. Otherwise,I believe that Serpent Cult's only hope for the late game is a properly designed God. Perhaps a rainbow mage to improvise with whatever available resources. Early on, it may be capable of a good rush; I am curious whether archers are a good counter to Hydras or not.

P.S.
I tried taking drain and playing a wannabe-Mictlan, it didnt pay. Researchers are bad already, drain makes them terrible. It takes a while to build a second castle, and then it will be a very long time till your heretics 'clear' drain from it, if they do at all. Regrettably, they lower dominion, not wipe scales. I think they may be of some use to suppress enemy dominion as you invade somebody, not your own.

[Jazzepi]

Kuritza said:
Great infantry and terrifying Hydras, lots of mages incapable of good combat spells. No national summons worth mentioning.
With a booster, your mages can cast foul vapors though - that might compliment Hydras. Otherwise,I believe that Serpent Cult's only hope for the late game is a properly designed God. Perhaps a rainbow mage to improvise with whatever available resources. Early on, it may be capable of a good rush; I am curious whether archers are a good counter to Hydras or not.

P.S.
I tried taking drain and playing a wannabe-Mictlan, it didnt pay. Researchers are bad already, drain makes them terrible. It takes a while to build a second castle, and then it will be a very long time till your heretics 'clear' drain from it, if they do at all. Regrettably, they lower dominion, not wipe scales. I think they may be of some use to suppress enemy dominion as you invade somebody, not your own.

You probably can't do this anymore. Even if you eradicate all the scales from a given province I think the way the new scales work, all the provinces around it with your dominion in them would still tilt the scales inside of the "voided" province.

Jazzepi

[Agema]

Jazzepi's right. Scales take a while to fade away. And drain is a disaster for nations that can't build high-research mages outside the capital, as is the case for LA Pythium.

My suggestion is an S/E pretender with at least +2 Productivity, otherwise you'll barely be able to recruit troops except the chaff. Order would be good too. I'm thinking your critical items are Ring of Wizardry, Dwarven Hammer, and crystal doo-dahs (Coins for +1S, Matrices) to help along communions.

Pythium has every type of magic, even blood, and S mages are easy for N, W, A; rarer for D. So that's 5 magic types viable for communion immediately. Nature and Death can be advanced to mid-level easily enough. Everything else is tricky, so I'd think Ring of Wizardry is an absolute must, as then W, E and S can be raised easily (although you'll already have E and S from the pretender.) So all you'll be missing is Fire, Air and Blood from easy increases. I'd be tempted to ignore blood entirely though.

The other thing to do is site search like crazy for massive gem income - you can search for anything to at least level 1.

[Lingchih]

Thanks for all the ideas. I was very impressed by the Hydras as well, and after boosting to 3/3 order/productivity, I was able to build the very nice elite infantry at an acceptable level. I really don't think the Hydras need a bless at all.

Too bad the drain idea won't work. That would have been a great help with the scales.

[Zenzei]

I've been testing the following in SP and it worked nicely for me. Dormant S6E4 Son of the Sun with dominion strength 9. Scales were order3/sloth1/heat1/misfortune1/magic1.

Use starting army boosted with gladiators/retiaruses for initial expansion around your capital, this works really well. At this point you have enough resources to build enough palantines/palantines with javelins even with the sloth scale. If you need more troops/turn, build more forts and you should be doing that anyway because your mages are so cost effective. Serpent acolyte is second only to Mictlan priest and Yogi when it comes to good cost/research ratio. Aim to have 3 castles up and running by fall of the second year.

Buy hydras during the early turns whenever you have the extra 250 available. 5 snakes plus serpent acolyte as a leader takes indies easily. Because additional castles and snakes cost a lot of money you are really going love that order 3.

For site searching mix & match two mages so that you have WNSDH covered between them and send them out to find sites. Of course you should search for FAE gems too but WNSDH are the important gem types you are going to need later on, so they are a priority.

Research alteration 3 first and construction 4 second. After that you want to have at least alteration 5 (bone melter & mother oak), enchantment 7 (guaqmire/foul vapors/relief/serpents blessing/stellar focus etc), construction 6 (path boosters) and thaumaturgy 4 (gift of reason). When your gem income starts to shape up you need to decide whether to go for alteration 9 (seraphs and other wishable goodies) or conjuration 9 (tartarians) in order to have a good late game. It's kind of fun to able to make up your mind during the game because both options are totally available to you. If you go alteration 9, remember to clam spam with those renatas.

Word about pretender. Once awake, he is very capable SC provided you give him some items and script buffs like personal luck, body ethereal and ironskin. He can also forge some seriously important stuff like rings of sorcery/wizardry, crystal coins, dwarven hammers etc. You could go with great enchantress or oracle and get slightly better scales but I like the additional security SC god provides. Sun god is the fun god.

So there you have some tips. I find it very hard to give good well formatted advice because this nation is so tangled, everything affects everything.

[Kuritza]

Man... just tell me, how are you going to cast bone melter without a water bracelet, which is construction 6?