LA Agartha Advice Wanted

[Shovah32]

The title says it all. Advice on expansion, strategy, deployment, pretender design, research priorities, SC building and even how to best use their kick *** battle magic will all be greatly appreciated.

[Meglobob]

There sacreds are recruitable at every castle.

There sacreds are blind...could work well with Utterdark...possibly darkness.

Summon as many Umbrals as possible and gift of reason them.

Recruit hordes of crossbows then flaming arrows, although this never impressed me, when I tried it.

You have fire/death magic,research construction straight away, get out as many skull mentors/lightless lanterns as possible. You really should win the research race you know.

I remember having alot of golems teleporting around causing mayhem as well.

[Shovah32]

Thanks bob, anyone else want to add something?

[RamsHead]

With earth, death, and fire, LA Agartha can get some nice evocation spells.

[MaxWilson]

I'm hardly in a position to be giving advice, but I'll share a couple of reflections from my SP experience with them recently.

Even though the recruitable-anywhere sacred Blindfighters are tempting, in practice they seem to have trouble doing damage against real armies with their shortswords, perhaps because of their high encumbrance. Strength of Giants and an E9 bless helps, but Magma Eruption and/or skelly spam are the decisive factors when I'm going up against huge armies of EA Ermorian legions. If you do take a nice bless, though, Sepulchrals are not to be overlooked.

Ktonian necromancers are still somewhat frail and tend to die to incidental arrow hits and/or lucky cavalry charges. I ought to include Ironskin in my setups but it's hard to squeeze it into the 5 round limit. Could use Iron Warriors instead and stack multiple necromancers in the same square.

Iron Bane + Cave Knights or Umbrals = nasty. Keep this one well away from Blindfighters.

Umbrals + Iron Warriors are nice, too, but it's not easy to script effectively.

Tomb Oracles are nice SCs, but the lack of immortality is annoying if you happen to get Muted or Feebleminded. Make sure to bring a good helmet.

Overall, Agartha seems pretty strong in Evocation and Alteration, depending upon how your initial gem setup goes. A recent game against a few AIs went really sour when my first 15 provinces yielded only +1 death gems when searched with Dark Knowledge, since I took Death-3 and was really counting on transitioning to summoned troops. With a good gem income I'd probably rate Alteration a little higher because Marble Warriors and Darkness are powerful buffs to Umbrals, and that way you don't need to bring many mages into combat (so they can keep researching). Evocation lets you translate gold into battles won, but risks getting killed by a lucky arrow. Of course Conjuration-3 is a necessity.

-Maximilian

Edit: Also, because mobility is a problem, try to either get Air or Nature (for Faerie Queens) on your pretender or else hire Obscuro and have him forge Wind Boots.

[Meglobob]

Additional:- If this is your pick for the 62 player mega game I would definatly consider having a strong bless. Recruitable sacreds from every castle is a big advantage.

The big weakness of LA Agartha is slow moving troops, they mostly have 1 strategic move and your sacreds have 5 AP's or something rubbish.

Oh yea those drakeriders are expensive but cool, when the rider dies they become cave drakes. If you can be bothered to micro mix 1 with 2 sacreds for maxium effect.

Your armies consist of a brick wall (sacreds, drakeriders) with a horde of heavy crossbows/battlemages in the rear.

[MaxWilson]

5 APs is not too bad in some ways, considering that if you Hold and Attack and the enemy does too you'll meet up pretty close to the Agarthan lines, which means your mages can still hit things even with their terrible precision.

It does make it hard to keep your battlemages alive, though.

-Max

P.S. Here's something else you might want to try: Tomb Oracles + Earth Boots + <Summon Earthpower, Earthquake>. Two or three oracles should eliminate most enemy mages, and then the Umbrals or N4-blessed Sepulchrals you presumably brought along can clean up. I forget which tree Earthquake is in but if it's in Alteration-5 then you're extra-happy since you're going there for Darkness anyway. [Nope, it's Evocation-5.]

P.P.S. Don't forget that once the Cave Knight dies, the Cave Drake is free of upkeep.

[Shovah32]

Thanks alot for the Max, those are very good tips.
The blindfighters i find arent too useful because even with a good bless they arent particularly good. They have very good protection, a decent shield and are blind but thats about all the have going for them. On the other hand they are slow, easy to hit, very fast to tire human troops with little damage potential and a high resource cost. I can see them being used as meat-shields with some sort of earth/nature bless but i dont feel that a bless on them is worth the point cost.
The tomb oracles(as thugs/SCs) and the sepulchralss could make for strong bless units but the sepulchrals arent hard to deal with for most people(with undead being fairly easy to counter) and take a long time to mass where-as the tomb oracles can function nearly aswell without a bless.
I can see an earth bless working well with this nation(sepulchrals are armoured, correct?) as it would help blindfighters, sacred mages, SC oracles and sepulchrals but not sure if its the way to go.

[MaxWilson]

Blindfighters do have a pretty decent MR and more hit points than the average human. In many ways they're about equivalent to Helheim's Hirdmen except for the much higher resource cost and the encumbrance problem--higher protection but lower defense and no glamour. An E9 bless suits them pretty well.

I like to take a high death bless if I'm playing a nation with sacred mages. I'm not sure if it actually helps me all that much since many spells either kill units or leave them untouched, but it does at least give you the potential to be tricky. Try the above-mentioned earthquake trick when you're operating under a death bless; enemy mages will probably die and a fair number of the enemies that get damaged will be afflicted. I'm not sure afflictions are all that crippling to regular troops so who knows if it's worth it objectively, but death is the only bless that enhances a mage's destructiveness and I love battlemages, so there you go. (Plus I like being able to throw D9 Clouds of Death around on my pretender.)

Yes, sepulchrals are armored.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Okay, here's another datapoint. As I said, I'm still learning Agartha, and in my last 2 games (8 Impossible AIs on Glory of the Gods, 7 random and 1 set to my own T'lan Imass mod) I've stalled about 30 turns in. This is curious to me because I thought I had that part of the game figured out, so I went back to my last race (EA C'tis) to compare. I figured LA Agartha would be easier if anything, because the troops have heavier armor and the mages have higher research. However, C'tis really does have low resource costs even for Heavy Infantry (10 gold/15 resource), as well as cheaper forts (LA Agartha's cheapest fort is 1000 gold, and it takes something like 5 months to construct). I think now that I probably wasn't expanding fast enough as Agartha; I should go back and check, but I doubt I had 15 provinces at the end of the first year. Awesome battle magic and national summons are all well and good but it takes a while to get it rolling.

Next time I think I will probably take better scales (I've never taken Death scales before and I think it hurt a lot) and focus more on the early game. Perhaps Prod-3, Order-3, Misfortune-3, Drain-2, Growth-1.

-Maximilian