EA Oceania on land

[Micah]

Just go for standard late-game SCs...Tartarians, aboms, and the water queens. Conjuration 8 and 9, essentially. You should have a clam factory up and running to supply gems for summons. Use indies or mermen for gate-bashing. You'll lack mage support on the land which sucks, but those SCs are pretty tough without any help.

[Methel]

clams take a lot of time to pay for themselves, especially since i have no astral out of the box. The mermages are just about made for making clams though

[Taqwus]

Methel said:
clams take a lot of time to pay for themselves, especially since i have no astral out of the box. The mermages are just about made for making clams though

Once upon a time, clams only took a W2 mage with 10 water gems to make, no nature. The Nature cost was added with a mod from the developers that also included a new nation: Oceania. So I doubt it's entirely coincidental.

[Methel]

yeah I know, but oceania has no clear use for the pearls, dont get me wrong. I can just alchemize them into something,. but it seems kindof a waste to make clams just for that.

[Micah]

You have no midgame because you can't use your mages on land, just accept it and skip straight from early game (getting the seas) to late game (clams and huge summons). You need astral magic late game, so if you don't have astral mages your first 50 clammed pearls get to go the empowerment.

And yes, they take a while to pay themselves back, but outside of the queens most of the stuff you can get with water gems isn't that impressive, and it's only 3 nature gems per clam with a hammer.

Or, you could burn a few hundred of them on sea king's courts, those little naid warrior things and winter wolves, take a few provinces on the land, and then get smacked back into the ocean once whoever you're attacking actually bothers to get together a force to take out your army of chaff. That's an investment that will never pay off. Be smart, build clams.

[Methel]

Point taken, thanks

[Micah]

Oh, one more bit of advice: grab a few nice-looking land provinces from indies if you can at the beginning of the game...while your land troops aren't much threat it's a safe bet that your land-neighbors will leave you a few provinces to ensure that they don't have to deal with being raided. Just a good way to leverage a bit more territory. Don't go crazy topside though, the more land you have the more worthwhile it becomes to attack you, since the reward goes up while the threat of retaliation remains relatively flat.