EA Mictlan Setup - Q's from a noob

[Shovah32]

My post(made around 4 hours ago) appears not to have worked so i'll summarise it:

This is one way to play Mictlan, probably most suited to a middle length game because your pretender is imprisoned so blitzing hurts and the death scale will hurt alot in very long games.

Moloch
Dom10
Order3, sloth3, heat 3, death3, misfortune2, drain2
Fire9, Water9, Blood 4
Imprisoned

Nice bless for your sacreds, a standard f9w9 with +2 strength. Your scales are terrible and your gods imprisoned but your sacreds are nasty and when your god gets out he is great.

55 Health
15 Prot
18 Strength
24 Attack
22 Defence
Flying
Fear
Awe
2 Attacks

This is him unequipped and unbuffed in neutral dominion.
He has full slots, can quicken himself(and then his foot slots are free for reinvig ) and can cast fireshield(15ap damage iirc) and phoenix pyre

Your cheap sacreds, even with your terrible scales, should keep you fairly safe from most things(unless your teamed up on) until your god comes out and, hopefully by then you will have fireshield and personal quickness researched and some equipment forged. just as an example: frost brand, lucky coin, dragon helmet(morale boost), robe of shadows/rime hauberk, boots of the messenger, ring of regeneration, another misc item(amulet of resilence/anti magic, cat charm, resistance rings ect) All those items can be forged by your national mages iirc

[Aleph]

I always preface my comments saying I don't play MP. I don't play MP.

I like Turmoil/Sloth/Luck 3 Heat 1 Growth 2 Magic 1 for Mictlan. I think with an Imprisoned Smoking Mirror this lets you have Dominion 5 and a F9 B4 + your choice of 2 other 4's + death 2. I generally take either W4E4 or W4N4. Either way, your blessed troops hit like trucks (magic/flaming/+2 strength/+4 attack) and have good defense. The former is nice if you're thinking of playing around with blood communions or more battlemages. The latter helps your mages ages very gracefully (bring diseased mages into combat to bless/regen them back up to full health) and makes your troops a little more survivable (even Jaguar Warriors will thank you for the affliction avoidance). You can also go W4D4 and hit even harder while saving some points for higher dominion, although that's really not necessary except against pretenders and the like.

I like turmoil/luck for mictlan because I usually end up with most of my provinces with 5000+ population at 0 tax/blood hunting. Provinces with lots of mines (found by luck) are the exception. Under luck, every province gets a chance to provide random boosts to income, even with 0 tax, and I also net heroes/extra gems (which, if nothing else, can be alchemized into astral to empower your moon priests)/extra magic items. Turmoil/Sloth also makes your dominion quite hostile to other, more gold/resource dependent forces even if you can't force a dominion kill.

Growth offsets blood hunting losses and lets you groom provinces for the 5000 pop mark. Magic, as mentioned before, gives you one of the most efficient gold/research conversions in the game.

[Hellboy]

Thanks shovah32, that was quite detailed and helpful. If that's a summary, makes me wonder what the original post was like!

More general questions on Mictlan:

1) While testing I saw a number of jaguar warriors auto-healing afflictions every turn, but I had no healing priest or GoH up, or anything of the like. Do jaguar warriors have (in effect) recuperate? Or is it possible that there was some hidden site I didn't know about?

2) Does anyone recruit sun or eagle warriors? It's odd that they are the ones that are capital only, when they both seem less useful than jaguar warriors.
If you have a few fortress up and recruiting your jaguars, then I can see some value in recruiting eagle warriors (for mage/archer attacks), but otherwise it seems better to stick to jaguars.

[Teraswaerto]

Eagle warriors are deadly. They get to attack first most of the time, can fly to attack archers, and get 2 attacks. Best to recruit as many of them as you can every turn, IMO.

[Shovah32]

I dont know about auto-healing but(and i could be wrong) they may auto-heal when turning back from were-jaguar form.

I dont use sun warriors but i use a combination of jaguar and eagle warriors, the flight from eagle warriors useful for quickly hitting an enemy be they archers, elephants(who go down fairly quick to f9w9b4-6 eagle warriors) or even minor thugs.

[Edi]

Hellboy said:
1) While testing I saw a number of jaguar warriors auto-healing afflictions every turn, but I had no healing priest or GoH up, or anything of the like. Do jaguar warriors have (in effect) recuperate? Or is it possible that there was some hidden site I didn't know about?

No hidden sites and nothing peculiar. This is a feature of the game, if rather obscure and unadvertised. Units with more than one shape have a fairly good chance of healing afflictions when they change shape. This only works for involuntary changes, such as jaguar warriors, skinshifters and Machaka Black Sorcerers and Sorceresses have and is checked at the end of each combat where the unit changed to its secondshape.

It does NOT work if you give a unit the change shape command in the main interface. I am not even sure if it would work the same way for units capable of voluntarily changing shape.

Hellboy said:
2) Does anyone recruit sun or eagle warriors? It's odd that they are the ones that are capital only, when they both seem less useful than jaguar warriors.
If you have a few fortress up and recruiting your jaguars, then I can see some value in recruiting eagle warriors (for mage/archer attacks), but otherwise it seems better to stick to jaguars.

You need to use jaguars first until you get a second fort. After that it's jaguars from the others and eagles from the capital. Using eagles very early on will get most of them massacred when they attack archers, kill commanders and then start tangling with the heavier infantry units.

Edi

[Hellboy]

Edi said:
You need to use jaguars first until you get a second fort. After that it's jaguars from the others and eagles from the capital. Using eagles very early on will get most of them massacred when they attack archers, kill commanders and then start tangling with the heavier infantry units.
Edi

Sounds like good advice - thanks Edi!

[CharonJr]

Personally I love EA Mictlan

The advice above sounds very good to me, but here is my take on Mictlan anyway...

I usually play with a F9W9B4 bless since the added defense and the quickness from the W9 add quite a lot of staying and hitting power to my units. D4 is nice vs. high HP and/or regen units like Niefel Giants with a N9 bless and IIRC it helps with the old age.

I would go for Dom8 (lacking points for more) due to the cheap sacreds.

Mainly this means an imprisoned pretender (cheap/magic heavy) and bad scales, but since your troops are fast and hitting very hard in addition to being hard to hit I don't think that you need an early pretender or a combat pretender for the late game (which is fairly based on magic anyway).

Due to point contraints I usually go for very bad scales:

turmoil 3
sloth 3
heat 3
growths 2-3
luck 2-3
magic drain 2

I like growth for the old mages and in order to get more time out of my bloodhunting provinces.

Due to the drain I tend to go for construction 6 ASAP in order to get boots of youths for my old mages since they are the only means to get decent research. But due to the growth scale (at least when combined with D4) I don't seem to get very many diseased mages till I get to construction 6 anyway.

I waste a lot of blood/research for building those boots, but this might lead to some interesting tactics with a global enchantment later on

And I love my eagle warriors, with a heavy bless like this they tend to kill 1 unit each turn due to their large number of attacks/high damage.

One thing to keep in mind with Mictlan is not to mix your (rather low HP) sacreds with ranged units since you tend to get lots of casualties due to friendly fire.

CharonJr

PS: I tend to recruit some Sun Warriors (despite their poor speed) as frontline troops due to they decent protection. They are often able to stop cav charges and soak up arrows. Their high encumberance usually is no problem since the eagle warriors usually end the fight before enc becomes a real issue.

[Hellboy]

CharonJr said:
Personally I love EA Mictlan

I think I might come to, but I've done enough testing now to see that it is not the easiest nation to master. One question upfront: are you using this setup in MP?

I usually play with a F9W9B4 bless since the added defense and the quickness from the W9 add quite a lot of staying and hitting power to my units. D4 is nice vs. high HP and/or regen units like Niefel Giants with a N9 bless and IIRC it helps with the old age.

I'm slightly confused: you list F9W9B4, but comment on how D4 is nice - is B4 a typo? I'm playing around w/ both B4 and D4 on my test pretenders, and it does seem like both are worthwhile, but I may have to choose between them (its possible to get both, but many you really have to bork up your scales to get there).

So, also on your scales you have two things that surprise me. One is the drain (which I'll post a question on separately), and the second is the turmoil/luck combination. I guess I was thinking of order/misfortune as being the better combo because you're going to want to build lots of units, and lots of forts (complete w/ labs & temples) and lots of labs for your bloodhunting provinces. Are you ok w/ the economic downside of turmoil?

[Hellboy]

A question for either Shovah32 or CharonJr (or anyone else who cares to comment):

I noticed both of you took drain 2. I've done a bit of testing w/ drain2, and I find it very scary. Your Mictlan priests are down to 2rp (as opposed to magic 1, where they're 4rp). I know we're talking about 120 build pts here, but still at 2rp it seemed to take forever to build up a decent research rate.

Now from my limited experience w/ blood nations I think that blood nations don't need to research the full tree as fast as other nations, since blood offers good payoffs all on its own. Still, I tend to go for construction 4, before I start my blood research and construction 6 before I go way high in blood level. And even though you can probably get away w/o pushing broad research as fast as some nations, you will still need get some high levels in non-blood magic for the end game. So, when all is said and done, don't you find drain 2 to be rather a serious handicap for Mictlan?

Now one thing I've done in the past to get around drain 2 is to go for skull mentors and lightless lanterns asap. However, it seems to me that this is rather difficult for Mictlan, since skull mentors look impossible (no death mages), and lightless lanterns take all the way to construction 6 before you can build them.