MA Agartha, or Yet another thread fishing for tips

[alexti]

Micah said:
Don't forget that your heat scale gets pulled by the seasons. If you have a heat 0 pulling hotter or colder both hurt your income by 5%, if you take heat-1 summer will hurt your income by 5%

Wouldn't it pull the scale further by making you lose 10%?

[Micah]

Yes, it would be a total of 10%, but my point was that losing 10% a quarter of the time, 5% half the time and 0% the last quarter of the time is an average of a 5% loss, while a neutral scale will either be hot or cold about half the time, giving you an average of 5% half the time, or 2.5%. So the first point of heat/cold is only really a 2.5% loss, not the full 5 it seems to be. I'm not sure on the exact percentages on the season pulls, so that figure isn't exact by any means, but a 50% chance of a pull seems like a reasonable ballpark estimate. It's a significant amount, although it isn't a HUGE change. Taking a triple scale also kicks in another 'free' percent or two since seasons obviously can't pull you to a 4-point scale, so the only seasonal effect you can get is a beneficial move toward neutral.

[alexti]

Micah said:
Yes, it would be a total of 10%, but my point was that losing 10% a quarter of the time, 5% half the time and 0% the last quarter of the time is an average of a 5% loss, while a neutral scale will either be hot or cold about half the time, giving you an average of 5% half the time, or 2.5%.

Good point. I have tried few experiments and it seems that seasonal effects are rather random. I got average of about 6 out of 36 months when the scale was offset by 1 (Dom 7). Interestingly, that with Dom1, the average was about 9. Is season influence countered by high dominion? Number of experiments weren't large enough to make this observation statistically reliable. It still seems that seasons are not as bad as they initially look - costed only about 1% on average across all my experiments.

This seem to agree with my experiences - wrong scales don't work well if your preferred scale is neutral. Taking heat 2 when your preference is heat 1 is another story. It almost always result in a better income than taking heat 1. The drawback is that Heat 2 loses to Heat 1 in the first few months due to a large proportion of income coming from the capital.

[Micah]

Well, if the seasonal effect is checked before the dominion then the dominion will have a 5% per candle + 10% per scale tip difference to bring it right back, so yes, dom strength could have an effect. I don't know the order they're checked in though. I may have overstated the importance of seasonal effects from the looks of the low number of season pulls you got, but it is something to consider when taking heat scale.

And back to Agartha for a moment: A heat scale is also more attractive than normal because they're cold-blooded, which I don't think has been mentioned yet in the discussion.

[alexti]

What I've often seen in the test is the heat scale appearing in the summer (ot cold scale in the winter) and then disappearing the next month (still in the summer). And I think (can't recall for sure) that in low dominion test, the scale stayed for longer period more often. Perhaps the scale is getting pulled off the balance with a certain probability and in the next round it's getting pulled back by dominion?

Only pale ones are cold blooded, and I'm not sure that anything but Oracles of Ancient are worth recruiting (unless you're waging underwater war, but in the water temperature scales don't affect fatigue AFAIK). I don't like pale one's poor att/def skills (they are even worse than their human troops).

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I'm prepping for a mp game, I'm trying to choose between Agartha and Shinuyama. I was curious how the never healing affect combines with a regeneration bless. Any idea? I suppose I must test this...

And how does a reinvigoration bless combine with all your sacred mages?

Edit: In hindsight, sentinels are lifeless, contrary to the manual, so no regen...

[MaxWilson]

As one would expect, a reinvigoration bless is significant in long battles (reinvigoration 4 almost doubles your fatigue recovery) and less decisive than more mages in short battles. It's a bit of a bother to get everybody blessed, though, especially if you spread your mages out.

-Max

[atul]

Agarthan mages have earth and summon earth power gives reinvigoration 4 as an extra bonus, so I'd think reinvigoration bless isn't that important. Does it stack, on the other hand? 50 turns of Magma Bolts!

Bless on MA Agartha overall isn't probably that big a deal since their recruitable sacred troops are capital-only and actually going up the Enchantment route (sacred statues) isn't that fast a strategy. By the time you're ench4 thau2 (for gems and decent statues) you could nearly have researched conj3 for earth power and gone either alt2 for earth meld or evocation tree, thus making the earth readers a power to be reckoned with. Taking mages to battle or putting them into summoning spree both prevent them from researching, anyway.

Edit: Max, on the other hand, MA Agartha has holy3 mages, so one casting of battlefield-wide blessing isn't that big a hassle. But, what I wrote previously still applies, somewhat.