LA Atlantis - frozen death from all directions

[Agema]

I'm running a LA Atlantis as well, and this guide has been very handy. I would like to add an extra bit about LA Atlantis in the sea.

I don't generally recommend building lots of castles underwater, for reasons I'll explain later, but some should crop up with site searching, especially with nature. And you can always build one (1000gold) if you really want. Admin is 40, so they'll provide plenty of Res and a reasonable gold boost if in a rich sea province.

Underwater castles provide the following:

Various low-grade basic Atlanteans:

Shieldbearers: Uberchaff. Cheap at 9 gold and 3 res, but unarmoured. The only good news is that the shields can pick up arrows. Atlantean Light Infantry: Chaff. They've got coral cuirasses for some protec, but no shield or helmet, and still only a spear. This means they function as very vulnerable infantry, and can't even deflect arrows. Atlantean Infantry: Just better than chaff. They've got coral cap & hauberk (11 prot.), shield and spear.

If you're throwing gold on any of these, you may as well take the Atlantean infantry, as at least they're likely to live for longer. All of these have 12HP, so they're a bit hardier than your average human, and 11 strength, which still won't get past good armour with only a spear. They've all got average Att, Def, MR and Mor: 10 or very close. Note that at least the coral spears will poison opponents a bit as well, but it's not adding that much.

Sleepless. At 40 gold and 26 res, these size 3 dudes are tanks. They're very similar to War Shamblers in earlier Atlantis, except they have 12 MR - a godsend against Rlyeh. 24HP and 15 protec makes them extremely hard to take down, 14 morale makes them very sturdy, and 15 strength with a 9 damage glaive means if they hit, it'll really hurt. Oh, and they have shields, so less arrow damage. The real downside is that Sleepless are heavily encumbered (8), very slow (1 map, 6 BF), and very expensive.

For the commanders you get the following:

Shambler Chief: An unarmoured shambler who can lead troops. Pretty expensive for what you want it to do at 45 gold, not even worth making a thug. On the other hand, it's faster than the Consort (see below) for stratmove, and you may want to build amphibious commanders in your sea forts because you might not want to be building mages every turn (see below).

Unsleeping Consort: Essentially they're Sleepless with slightly better stats and - haha - they're sacred and H1. That means they can self bless to make handy thugs. It also means they are actually more cost effective than the shambler chiefs in upkeep. MR is still lowish (13), but on the BF with your astral bless it should be a respectable 17. 27HP gives them lastability, although no Fear/Awe/etc perks. If you're a bit wary of sending expensive and rare Angakoks out, these guys will make decent replacements.

Merciful Mother: An H2 priest with about 20HP, and lacking the stats to be a thug. Not much else to say. Might be good to transfer bless work to these off your Angakoks and Tungaliks, but you could happily never buy any.

Forgiving Father: What was that about Atlantis' lack of magical diversity? These are about 20HP, and have W2S1 +100% EFSW. Okay, 1E/F is no great shakes, and they still leave you needing empowerment or boosters to start casting site searching spells and accessing more handy E/F spells. However, they've now got you firmly into astral, so no more need for indies. The downside? 250 gold to buy, and they aren't sacred. You WILL need these guys, but you'll want to leave research work to the far cheaper Tungaliks: with neutral magic scales the recruit cost per res is 20% more, upkeep three times more expensive for Forgiving Fathers. This cost disparity will be exacerbated by positive magic scales. Be wary of astral duels too: cheap S1-S2 mages could have a field day on FFs in terms of relative gold cost, and 250gp per communion slave looks really expensive - you might do better to utilise natural W2-3 instead.

* * *

In summary, getting water castles up is most vital for your magical diversity. However, they are poor research bases due to GP/res cost. The basic infantry are simply not any better than the basic stuff you can build on a land castle. What you most want out of them (Unsleeping, Forgiving Father) will put a massive drain on your treasury. If you build a lot of these and recruit a lot in them, you will not be making best use of your money. None of the underwater units have cold resistance either, so they may fail to synergise with cold tactics that might come naturally to the troops from the land castles, so if you combine troops from land and sea, you will be compromising tactical options available to you. Frustratingly, they also lack amphibious scouts, which are hard to come by.