EA Oceania - Knight of the deep too good?

[Baalz]

MX said:
Since the professor has gone, I could tell some of my own options without worry...there are many interesting tactics in previous posts, thank you guys to share them. Very valuable and helpful for me. But most of them are built on a high level of research. Your capital may be under siege at turn 12! Ice element is tough but you can not get a comparable amount of them! Knights of the deep are aquatic only but they can sweep the underwater provinces very quickly and give you a perfect early game. Then the snowball effect comes into play...

Yes, in a very early rush situation against good double blessed sacreds you're quite often screwed unless you get very lucky. You're similarly screwed starting next to an agressive Lanka or Vanheim with many nations. Against a double bless rush, early enough that research isn't significant pretty much your only hope is to have an awake SC pretender, which consequently is something that I feel is required for Atlantis/R'yleh. An in-dominion Ancient Kraken, with etherealness, regeneration, and iron skin/iron warriors (all of which are early research and can even be buffed by third party casters depending on what you've got) will easily kill hundreds of knights provided they've got no astral support. This certainly isn't gonna let you conquer Oceana, but if you're clever you should be able to buy some time for your research to kick in.