Guide: MA Aby CBM Strategy

[vfb]

To get S gem income I alchemized fire into pearls and cast Arcane Probing once I got Evo-2 (which I researched right after Blood-1).

I think maybe Dragar and thejeff are right though, searching the capitol neighbors first and making some early hammers make a lot of sense.

[WraithLord]

I really like your guide. Esp. about the awake sage.
In vanilla though I found MA Aby to be very weak: Luck scale may or may not work, your income is hurting and shrinking (due to death) and you must forge const 6. items in order to be able to research competitively. Then you need to forge a const. 4. for your mages not to die of old age. And you need to empower a D mage to summon your infantry. Too many shackles on MA Abysia. I wonder whether its an oversight of IW in the transition form dom-II to III.

[Sombre]

If you empower an abysian mage to cast spectral infantry in vanilla, you deserve to lose.

[WraithLord]

couldn't agree more

This spell is meant as torment to MA Aby, so close yet still out of reach.

[Sombre]

It's like forbidden fruit. Only when you do finally bite in it's full of offal.

[thejeff]

Well, I'd probably take a pretender who has at least one Fire and Death for access to Flaming Skulls.

I might use him to churn out some Spectral Infantry when he didn't have anything more pressing to do.

[Sombre]

Seriously? That spell is /awful/. You might as well be throwing your gems away.

[thejeff]

I may have only tried in CBM. It seemed decent there, though I still wouldn't empower for it.

That much worse in vanilla, I take it?

[Sombre]

It's much better in cbm, yeah. 5/5 vanilla, I think it's 5/1 in cbm or something.

[vfb]

Empowering early (around turn 10 I think), at turn 60 I'll have paid 1D1F for each group of 5 smoulderghosts. It's still pretty expensive for a Prot-0 unit with an MR-resistable weapon, but they do have a lot of situational uses, and map move 3.