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

[Arryn]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by LordArioch:
if your opponent is building armored illithids he wont have the resources to build too much fodder in front.

Another problem with the armored illithids is that they move much slower than the cheaper, unarmored variety. They're not terribly useful because as the lands under your control expand, they cannot keep up with the pace of that expansion. It's by far more efficient to build more of the "cheap" illithids and deal with the fact that you'll lose some to archers.

I handle this by setting my illithids to "fire archers". Tit for tat. I can kill the archers far faster than they can do me serious harm. And if you happen to have a Vastness (and have not given it Gift of Reason yet to make it a SC), it can rip up the archers in no time ...

AIs never seem to build archers in enough quantity to become a major threat. Human players are another matter ...

[LordArioch]

Actually I usually note too much shortbow archer use by the AI. It's his tendancy to aim at the front troops and have militia and other useless units in his army that usually defeats him.

[incognito]

Good points on R'yleh. Let's talk counter-counter strategies for a sec. Strikes me that using staff of storms becomes uniquely valuable vs human players to disable distance attacks. I think there is also a water based spell to prevent fire based magic use, something the illithids rarely use (unless you set your pretender up this way).

Are there other storm creating options besides the SOS? What good (and generally accessible) options are there for shutting down arrows? I like mass protection, but r'yleh seems unlikely to get nature 3 with appropriate numbers of casters to support anything more than a single army or two.

Also, what strategies do people have for the void? I have played multiple games with the R'yleh - most in early stages - and even with luck turned on have only managed to get some lower level stuff. I also have had several attacks on the starspawn (some victories, some deaths). One of my units got up to lvl6 summoning, but had nothing to show for the effort (got killed). Does swapping new starspawn priests in occasionally help? Also, what about starspawn mages? Are they better at summoning?

Thanks for the tips. This point-couter-point discussion highlights the depth of this game.