Bandar Log advice

[K]

Sure. Regular commanders can get blood slaves, just at a very very bad rate (1-20, in my calculation). Scouts are the favored unit since 20 of them is only 400 gold.

There are also some summonable commanders that get Blood on randoms (one of the three Treelords and Lamia Queens).

Btw, you can go E9/N9 with: Order0/Sloth3/Heat3/Growth3/Misfortune2/Magic1 and dom 8 on an Earth Mother. If the scales scare you, then drop the Earth. Nature 9 is the keystone of most good bless strategies for the regen and most importantly the Beserk. It's a little hard to break out of your province with the low production, but once you have the provinces around your capital cleared you are good to go.

[secretperson]

Taking the first province seems to be my biggest problem. Seems like the starting Bandar Log army is pretty much garbage, which is why I was wondering about the SC pretender approach.

How late can I take my first province without worrying too much about being too far behind with Bandar Log?

[secretperson]

Also, how much am I going to hate taking 2 misfortune?

[atul]

K, I'm curious: why Order0 and Growth3 instead of other way around? And I assume that build is imprisoned instead of sleeping?

BL starting army is full of archers. You don't need that many sacreds to hold the line if you choose your first battles carefully. I've managed to attack with first turn's recruits on Sloth1, maybe with Sloth3 you could wait a turn more. Or not.

[K]

atul said:
K, I'm curious: why Order0 and Growth3 instead of other way around? And I assume that build is imprisoned instead of sleeping?

Mmm, yes. Imprisoned, not sleeping.

Growth is a better income for games that last longer than 30 turns. Also, bandar eat a lot of supplies, so the Growth is necessary.

[secretperson]

I just tried out the E9N9 bless and am quite pleased with the results thus far. However, misfortune plain scares me. What about turmoil 3 sloth 3 heat 3 growth 3 luck 1 magic 1 instead?

[K]

The heavy turmoil cuts into income pretty fiercely, and after some experimenting I've found that it tends to eat you up slowly.

I wouldn't be afraid of Misfortune, as long as you avoid Misfortune 3.

[MaxWilson]

K said:
Mmm, yes. Imprisoned, not sleeping.

Growth is a better income for games that last longer than 30 turns. Also, bandar eat a lot of supplies, so the Growth is necessary.

Growth is better for provinces that you hold for 30 turns with your dominion. If you have an aggressive playstyle it may be inferior to Order.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

secretperson said:
Also, how much am I going to hate taking 2 misfortune?

I habitually take Order-3 Misfortune-3 in SP. I doubt you'll hate Misfortune-2 at all if you have more than 30 provinces (bad events don't scale with empire size). It doesn't stop me from getting good events (I got the 1500 gold event in a Misfortune-3 province last night and I commonly get gem events). With Misfortune-2 but no order events will be slightly more frequent but more often good. The key thing is to have PD good enough to beat barbarian attacks (forget about beating the knight attacks, just clean them out later or leave them alone). In some games I suffer about 1 barbarian attack per turn, in others (current one as MA Ashdod) I've had only a couple in 30 turns. I'm not sure why.

-Max

[gowb]

Grab four elephants in the beginning with your starting money, and those should last you forever as long as you protect them correctly. Hold / Attack against cavalry, straight up rush everyone else. This is assuming indie provinces are on 5 as normal, and not buffed up. That's what I did in my current game and I had no problem expanding really quickly. As for pretender, I took an awake rainbow pretender to make sure i could find enough gems to summon awesome stuff and decent scales (luck especially) to make things a bit easier.