Arcoscophile

[JaydedOne]

I love reading Posts like these. Keep coming with them.

I would like to point out one minor note. Arcoscephale is not as synergetic with a no-magic wyrm as any other nation, just because it's Heal Troops ability is more useful on Pretenders you can't call back easily (unlike a no Magic Wyrm).

Though to each their own, it's always nice to be able to Heal any/everything.

[ May 06, 2004, 22:04: Message edited by: Zen ]

[Blitz]

Arcoscephale is not as synergetic with a no-magic wyrm as any other nation, just because it's Heal Troops ability is more useful on Pretenders you can't call back easily

I'm not sure the logic here, maybe you can elaborate. Dead wurm = oh well. He loses nothing but priest time when recalled. How is that different than a dead wurm for say... emor (yeah right).

Originally posted by Blitz:

quote:

---

Arcoscephale is not as synergetic with a no-magic wyrm as any other nation, just because it's Heal Troops ability is more useful on Pretenders you can't call back easily

I'm not sure the logic here, maybe you can elaborate. Dead wurm = oh well. He loses nothing but priest time when recalled. How is that different than a dead wurm for say... emor (yeah right).

---

The ease of use of Healing and ridding a Pretender of Afflictions is usually associated with Pretenders you want to live (worry about dying because they lose paths, get crippled, etc).

With such easy access to the ability to heal afflictions it is less important that you heal them as it is throw your No Magic Wyrm at something, if he dies, pray him back. It takes 40 Prayer points, or 10 Indy Priests 2 Turns to call him back. Whereas if you use a Priestess to Heal, it could be 2-5 turns to heal all the afflictions, have to have a Priestess nearby to sit and heal, and your Pretender is sitting around (not much good researching and forging with no magic) while waiting to be patched up.

Any other nation had a no magic wyrm, they'd just kill him off and call him back good as new ready to kill some more heathens. It's actually not a very painful process. Whereas with Arco, you can load up say a Nataraja with 3 or 4 magic paths, or a Titan etc and know that if he gets beat down some you can heal him and not lose his paths.

[Blitz]

Any other nation had a no magic wyrm, they'd just kill him off and call him back good as new ready to kill some more heathens. It's actually not a very painful process. Whereas with Arco, you can load up say a Nataraja with 3 or 4 magic paths, or a Titan etc and know that if he gets beat down some you can heal him and not lose his paths.

Maybe you just never lose your gods (or stick to the VQ), when a god is called back with "call god" he often still has 3-4 afflictions, especially if he's a big regenerator that's gonna take some shots like a Wurm. Although the regeneration reduces affliction chance, It's not at all uncommon to see a wurm revived with more than one affliction. Arcoscophile can deal with these before or after death.

Combining no magic with affliction removal means a wurm can be used almost as indiscriminately as a VQ by an arcoscophile player, provided he is willing to pay the cost in priest time.

Compared with the alternatives this is either a far superior (rainbow mage, mortal SC), or patheticly inferior (munchkin VQ) way to pay for the death of your Avatar.

[LintMan]

Great post, Blitz. I'm playing an Arco game right now myself and have some questions/comments.

1) What is the independent difficulty level you have in mind here? Does a no (or low)-magic wyrm stand up well against level 7-9 indies? How about your elephant/hypaspist army?

2) You avoid the routing trampler problem by grouping your elephants in with your hyps: The elephants don't hurt the overall morale too much by doing that? Also - if your elephants are lumped in with your main melee units, don't you end up with lots of situations where your elephants end up standing around in the middle of a mass of your own units, while your very front row of units does most of the work?

3) I don't think you mention chariots at all - do you think they're not worth it? As I see it, they're smaller (size 5 = less damage) and more easily killed, but they're also far cheaper (30 vs 100, I think), and have 1 extra morale over the elephant.

4) I'd prefer to use tramplers in a flanking role, where they can race ahead and devastate the enemy. But of course, then I get the morale/routing problems. I've seen a recommendation to group a few heart companions with the tramplers to help keep their morale up. I tried this and it helped a little, but not really enough. Can you group elephants with stuff like mindless 50-morale vine men/ogres to get a much bigger morale benefit?

5) You seem to prefer hypaspists over hoplites. To me, the hypaspists seem to cost more and have less armor and a shorter weapon than hoplites. The only benefit is they are faster - is that worth it?

6) You also slightly mention Cardaces, but not Peltasts. I like putting a big group of Peltasts on "fire closest" behind a wall of hoplites, which seems to work fairly well. I haven't seen much use for Cardaces, though.

7) I like your staff of storms/no missile unit army plan. Slingers are stinky. I'm guessing, though, it must make the attrition rate for your melee-ers a good bit higher, since they'll have to do most of the killing.

8) I love the priestesses, but I sometimes find it frustrating that the tend to start casting wimpy 1-nature buffs once their scripts run out, rather than, say, "sermon of courage" or banishment. For my priestess-prophet, it's even more annoying when they're casting Protection on some slingers instead of casting Fanaticism! Do you find yourself sometimes wishing Arco had a Holy-3 non-mage as well, like I do?

9) I also think the lack of a cheaper Holy-2 priest is a bit of a gap for Arco. The high cost of a priestess (110 vs say 50 for a H-2 priest), makes me tend to have less of them in my armies, making me more vulnerable to undead. Indie priests are easy to find, but I often don't think to recruit them.

10) Another Arco weakness is death magic. It takes some effort (and a lot of death gems) to bootstrap your way up to be able to cast the higher-level death summons.

11) While priestesses might be more efficient researchers, cost-wise, I would never recruit them expressly for that purpose. I'd much rather spend the extra 70 gold for a roll of the dice on a mystic. I can never have enough level 2 and 3 elemental path mystics for site searching and item forging, and of course they also research when not doing those things. And for pure research, I rely on sages once I can find some.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by LintMan:
2) You avoid the routing trampler problem by grouping your elephants in with your hyps: The elephants don't hurt the overall morale too much by doing that? Also - if your elephants are lumped in with your main melee units, don't you end up with lots of situations where your elephants end up standing around in the middle of a mass of your own units, while your very front row of units does most of the work?

The entire point of this exercise is to bolster the morale of the elephants. The effect this has on the hypaspists is completely irrelevant, since you only care about the elephants: They're the ones doing damage.