Thoughts on EA Abyssia (guide)

[Micah]

Berserk doesn't add encumbrance directly from what I've seen, it just causes fatigue. Meaning you tire out from it while just moving. Might work better with quickness though, since it's likely only once/round instead of per action.

[kasnavada]

Ok, that is modified / added.

Salamanders : I used them a bit mixed and they just died alone while the heavy infantry stood. If alone, they just create a breach and die soon after if enemies are left.

They also just cost too much in my opinion.

[Psycho]

The problem with salamanders is that they have 20 fatigue, so they will go out very fast. And those misbreds aren't that useless - they fly and have a potent damage with 15 strength and a battleaxe.

Abysia has strong troops and good pd. They can take indypendants easily with their national troops. Their main problem is magic diversity and BoT.

[kasnavada]

Another idea, death bless from the MA thread.

[Dragar]

I'm no expert, but have played a fair bit of SP abysia in EA and MA this last week, preparing for my first MP game, and here are my thoughts.

I thought an E9 bless would be the way to go and played with it a few times. Yes, its great in the early game, your Burning Ones/Lava Warriors are devastating, but as capital only sacreds they lose relevance as the game progresses. Burning Ones won't number enough and are susceptible to AP attacks - crossbows are very painful for instance.

What you have left in terms of sacreds are mages, and really you need to use your mages in the mid to late game to get anywhere. While the reinvig is handy for them it isn't game-changing, and the protection is virtually worthless - if they are using it you have problems.

I'm trialling Astral now, 10 bless, and minor blesses of earth and blood. Twist Fate is very handy for your melee troops, the MR will presumably be excellent in MP, and I like astral as a school for your pretender, it seems to have one of the best set of Strike from a Distance spells, and is probably easiest to gather a lot of gems for. If you can do that (use your mages to search heavily for astral sites in the early game) Acashic Record becomes an option, helping to cover for your lack of magical diversity and letting you alchemise back into astral.

Given that you only really need fire gems (get plenty natively), astral gems (alchemise from everything else) and blood slaves for your magic, you should in theory be pretty much set.

Between earth, astral and blood you also get a lot of good combination spells to cast in the higher levels.

lastly, hopefully a 10S pretender will be a good mage killer from range in the late game

My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!

[JimMorrison]

Dragar said:
My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!

In my experiments with Abysia, I found that rushing straight to Falling Fires gave very good results. Since it's AOE, it's a bit less Prec dependent, and a few mages spamming that one a line that 30-40 inf are holding will march through just about anything that early game has to offer.

Securing more territory reliably and quickly allows you to get more castles up sooner, which you can translate directly into increased research - research that has defensive value which Lanterns won't give you.

Granted, Cons is tempting, since you will be wanting to get your blood economy going as soon as you can manage it, but not hitting Evo first means you have a bunch of very expensive priests sitting around, who will spam Fire Flies if they are pressed into combat.....



Astral bless is an interesting thought, did you use an Oracle for it? I'm thinking that would make it on the short list of viable blesses for Abysia, making it E/S/D. Not that a major is needed, but those 3 can be leveraged in a worthwhile manner. Of course, really high Fire or Blood could be alright on a pretender, but the bless isn't going to be doing all that much for you (yay my mages get +4 str!).



Also, Kasnavada, I think it's worth noting that Demonbred is in fact a superior assassin, especially due to flying. It can be very easy to get a couple in the HoF early in the game, and while it is a bit of a gamble, getting lucky on your heroics could make them a fearsome addition to your arsenal throughout the game.

I played a game for fun once where the first thing I did was crank out a few Demonbreds while taking provinces as normal. Then I had them move from province to province in the other direction, assassinating the indie commanders, while a Warlock followed behind, routing the indie army and then site searching. It felt dirty, but oh it was fun.

[Micah]

Dragar - There are no crossbows in EA. You're also doing just fine if your ironskinned, phoenix pyre'd, fire shielded, armored and reinvigorated Anointed of Rhuax is using his (30+) protection value for something useful. The burning ones kicking all sorts of *** at the beginning of the game gets you to the research you need for that.

Any path at 10 is a waste of points, and twist fate doesn't work admirably well with heavily armored troops. You can admittedly do nasty things with an S9 pretender, but that tends to come later in the game, and I'd generally prefer to have a whole bunch of units (anointed) causing havoc than one crazy-strong mage. Especially since earth-based mages are going to be more of a problem than astral for Aby, for the most part (destruction early and army of gold later both ruin your day) so the magic-duel potential of your pretender might go to waste.

That being said, going for maybe a master lich and some diversity with EA aby isn't a terrible idea, but I'd prefer to play to their strengths and try to get enough of an early lead with them to find indies or empower instead of trying to get my pretender to make up for the massive amount of diversity they're lacking.

Also, lanterns are an excellent idea.

[dirtywick]

Thaum 2 for Bonds of Fire I would also make an early priority. It's a really nice spell for holding units in place, and usually for getting mages into the HoF because they rack up kills quickly using it.

[kasnavada]

Hoho, nice additions !

I'm adding them now.

EDIT :

For magic diversity purposes, I try to take a pretender with 4 nature, for those reasons :
- nature -> air (fairy queen).
- nature & air = precision item and spells, which your mages lack completly.
- nature = regeneration. Your sacred do not die from poison if they regenerate, they also tend to take much less afflictions, and also it's a good protection from disease (especially since most of your mages are old).

[MaxWilson]

Micah said:
Any path at 10 is a waste of points,

That's true only 99% of the time. I have found that I like E10N6 for Ashdod quite a bit better than E9N6, because the sacreds have exactly 5 encumbrance. I hate having to worry about battle duration, and with 0 net encumbrance instead of 1 a lot of problems go away.

-Max