Baalz' guides

[Tolkien]

Does that work?

[Trumanator]

Jomon would be nice. Fits the MO quite well too.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Since your nation guides for blood nations tend to be the funniest to read (I don't know why - it is probably genetic or you just happen to be a very, very, strange person), here's a suggestion that you add Lanka to your list depite the existence of several guides dealing with the basics.

[13lackGu4rd]

seeing how much you love the more complex nations(Sauromatia, Arco, etc) and seeing your MA Tien Chi guide, I wonder if an EA guide for them will be similar enough to not require too much time or fundamentally different. same question goes for EA Abysia, seeing your nice MA Abysia guide.

2 other nations(not super nations) that I wonder what you will be able to make of are C'tis and Yomi, both EA.

[Trumanator]

EA Aby isn't that complex. You kick *** for the first ~20 turns, then realize that your magic paths suck.

[13lackGu4rd]

Originally Posted by Trumanator

EA Aby isn't that complex. You kick *** for the first ~20 turns, then realize that your magic paths suck.

yes, that's a very helpful answer...

now, Baalz mentioned plenty of nice things to do with MA Abysia, my question was very simple: is EA Abysia very different from MA Abysia or not. same question went for Tien Chi.

[Trumanator]

EA Aby is arguably extremely different from MA. Your Warlocks are much better, your sacreds much worse, and you don't have recruitable thugs anymore. EA TC is pretty similar to MA, with the addition of excellent sacreds and slightly different mages.

[thejeff]

Just to be clear, because I read it wrong the first time:
MA Warlocks are much better, MA sacreds much worse, and MA doesn't have recruitable thugs.

[Trumanator]

yes

[Baalz]

5 minute guide
EA Aby: Easy to kick butt early for a strong start. Focus on warlocks out of your cap with only an occasional Anointed as the warlocks get you diversity and the anointed keep piling more eggs into the same basket. B2 warlocks can blood hunt fine with no rod. Skip construction at first – fireball is a great early spell, not hard to press a tough rush while your opponent can’t deal with the fire/heat. Need to take a rainbow pretender, which will get you a diverse gem income, and the mages to use them. After some quick evo hit the blood research so you shouldn’t have much problem nabbing most of then ice devils and arch devils, then vamp lords. This will give you fairly strong W, S & D mages to use the income your pretender primed. With any luck you can also snag father illearth adding a good E mage. Try to resist using the unique guys as SCs, you need them in the lab. By the time you usually have to start worrying about guys with strong counters to your fire evo and infantry you should be able to have some vamps & demons. Vamps work well with a blood sac dom push, a couple guys casting ritual of the 5 gates (blood empowers are easy enough once you’ve got 15+ warlocks blood hunting) will give you cold and lightning artillery. Leverage those vamp lords to make sure you’ve got a good D income and the nice death summons. Death & blood should be very strong by late game with at least S1 warlocks so you’ve got no excuse to complain that people are countering your fire. Use your rainbow pretender to forge crystal matrixes to stick on whatever indies are useful, with warlock/vamp lord slaves. The trick is to always be working to diversify and come up with different stuff to use than exactly what your opponent expects Aby to do, but the nice thing is brute force should carry you far enough to have some other options. Look for good indies to plop up castles on, people don't really expect Aby to bring heavy cav or archers to the party. Particularly nice is stealthy stuff like atavi archers to completely catch your opponent with his pants down (and come on...do I even have to mention flaming arrows?)

EA TC I’m actually planning on writing more of a real guide for when I get around to it.