Give me good reasons why R'lyeh is a balanced nation.

Taqwus · #1 February 3rd, 2004, 07:42 PM

My main concern with R'lyeh would be scalability. Most of their troops (just about everything but hybrids and star children) can only be recruited either underwater or at certain magical sites (and while there's at least one land-based site that provides Void Summoning, it is/they are rather rare), plus the better ones are magical and require magical leadership.
Protecting territory of decent size on land thus depends on independent units, which may have trouble dealing with the better nationals from other nations e.g. hoplites, Emerald Guard, massed xbows + Flaming Arrows et al. The magical nature of their units also makes them highly vulnerable to non-astral leader-killing tactics, because without mages most of their units will rout or even dissolve, and many indy provinces can't produce mages even with a lab. Risky.
Another bit would be that on high-indy settings, sea expansion is _painful_. It takes a lot of chaff to absorb the initial assault of 100+ tritons long enough for mindbLasting. Getting a second water fortress might take some time.

Bowlingballhead · #2 February 3rd, 2004, 08:29 PM

Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

Argitoth · #3 February 3rd, 2004, 08:40 PM

I have nothing left to say except these are good points.

Arryn · #4 February 3rd, 2004, 10:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Taqwus:
Another bit would be that on high-indy settings, sea expansion is _painful_. It takes a lot of chaff to absorb the initial assault of 100+ tritons long enough for mindbLasting. Getting a second water fortress might take some time.

High indy settings force the squids onto land much sooner than they otherwise prefer to. And the best way for the squids to take on large masses of tritons is to use summonable sea trolls. Masses of ichthytids, if you can find them, work passably well too.

Arryn · #5 February 3rd, 2004, 10:16 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bowlingballhead:
Actually, I think Rl'yeh's biggest weakness is more subtle. Illithids have a huge upkeep cost. This is far more devastating than their initial purchase cost. You just can't maintain a very large army of them, and the more you buy, the less you're able to buy in the future. They're a gigantic money-sink.

Very true. Which is why a major squid strategy is to aim for rapid conquest of river provinces with their high-income farmlands.

Their least-subtle weaknesses are versus flyers (illithids die quickly when engaged in melee) and arrows (as Zen pointed out long ago in this thread).

Jasper · #6 February 4th, 2004, 01:25 AM

One can also use high MR troops, especially since the the penetration of Mind BLast will probably drop into line once the spell Paralyze is fixed.

LordArioch · #7 February 4th, 2004, 02:18 AM

Actually I like R'yleh more with a high indy. They do have very good assasains. However, in general I don't think they are generally overpowered. MindbLast is MUCH weaker than the Dom 1 mindbLast was, IMO, now that it's not area. Arrows will kill the unarmored illithids, and if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front. As long as your not Ermor or something, just give him lots of pointless targets to mindbLast. Keep in mind each illithid costs almost as much as a vaetti hag, and an army of vaetti hags or any other lvl 1 mage is much more dangerous.