No MA C'tis guides :(

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

If you're planning on using lots of communions it may not be a bad idea to take a light Nature bless so your slaves don't die as easily from fatigue. There's nothing quite as infuriating as having your 5 communion masters raining down destruction on the last fleeing remnants of PD while their 10 slaves die from fatigue. A Nature bless doesn't fix the problem but sometimes is the difference between them dying in a 10 round fight vs. not.

-Max

It's a good point, the Shaman are sacred, so can take advantage of a bless. Why Nature instead of Earth though?

As for communion slaves dying, I've not seen much danger of it with a 1:1 ratio, unless my opponent casts a fatigue inducing BE - or all the masters decide to chain cast Blade Wind or something. Maybe it's just because I try to make sure the communion is large enough that the fatigue costs of each spell are significantly decreased?



My current dilemma is that I am much more of a scales player, but C'tis seems to scream out for an awake SC..... Doing some test runs with a PoD right now - I am finding him remarkably fragile for some reason. I considered trying the Saurolich, but he just not as cost effective.

[vfb]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

It's a good point, the Shaman are sacred, so can take advantage of a bless. Why Nature instead of Earth though?

As for communion slaves dying, I've not seen much danger of it with a 1:1 ratio, unless my opponent casts a fatigue inducing BE - or all the masters decide to chain cast Blade Wind or something. Maybe it's just because I try to make sure the communion is large enough that the fatigue costs of each spell are significantly decreased?



My current dilemma is that I am much more of a scales player, but C'tis seems to scream out for an awake SC..... Doing some test runs with a PoD right now - I am finding him remarkably fragile for some reason. I considered trying the Saurolich, but he just not as cost effective.

This worked pretty well for me in MP:

Prince of Death (Body 383, 45 hits)
Magic: Death 6
Dominion 9
Scales: Order 3 Sloth 1 Heat 3 Death 1 Fortune 3 Magic 1
Awake

You really want high Dom and Order 3 to go with your high-income miasma bonus. I like the gem income from luck 3, and luck 3 scales with itself: more events that are better. You could go luck 0 and more prod or growth. But MA Ctis has more problems than anyone with magic diversity, because of miasma. So the extra random gems from luck are really nice.

Your starting City Guard is great for eating arrows while resource-cheap Slave Warriors do the damage. A Lizard King or two is also good to add for morale and smiting.

With Enchant 1, your starting empoisoner can take territory by himself, just avoid amazons, lizards, and other provinces with bodyguarded commanders.

Turn 2 you can make an enchanted shield (or raw hide) by alchemizing. Enchanted has much better Parry.

You can alternatively wait until Turn 3 and make a Raw Hide shield to save gems, and use your Death gems to make a Black Servant prophet to build up an early lizard souless army. In this case go Conj-1 first and make a skull for your empoisoner -- the skull is safer than casting in any case.

A dom 9 PoD is still pretty good versus tribals and barbarians if you can find them in MA. He'll probably pick up a couple of afflictions, but he can still scare off the indies. And if he dies once, well, you've got a bunch of H3s to call him back, and he'll still have D5 for the extra fear.

And once you've got Enchant-3, you can really start to roll, with Marshmaster skelly spam.