Guide: LA R'lyeh or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dreamlands

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by thejeff

Wow, I'd forgotten how lousy the early game with R'lyeh is. And those scales make it even worse. 6 provinces is better than I did.

With those scales my biggest question is how could you afford a Mage a turn? I made do with Priest and maybe an illithid.

Am I doing something wrong for expansion? There's no point in mage support without anything researched and besides you're trying for a research lead so you don't want to pull mages away from that. Do you just wait for critical mass of the freespawn chaff & Void summons?

What about an expansion pretender? You really don't need a lot of magic on him to diversify.

Ok, here's what I did in the archmage game from page 2 of the thread:

First turn: Buy: Starspawn Mage, 2 crab hybrids, 2 slave atlantians, 2 resource 13 atlantians (i had the resources...), 1 lobo.

Second turn: Buy: Starspawn Priest; Military: capture province

Third turn: Buy: nothing; Military: capture province; Pretender: move

Fourth turn: Buy: Starspawn Mage; Military: capture province; Pretender: Search

Fifth turn: Buy: Starspawn Mage; Military: Die against independents (commander escaped, i thought i could squeeze out a marginal victory but the independents increased their military by a factor of 2 before the attack, and i was too far away to resupply easily); Pretender: Move

I had a decent set of gold events at least one of turns 4-5 (can't remember) (5-600 total gold)

Sixth turn: Buy: Starspawn Mage; Military: Summon Sea Serpent x2, move commander; Pretender: Search (Fortress!)

Seventh turn: Buy:Starspawn Mage; Military: Summon Sea Serpent x2, pick up freespawn and move commander home; Pretender: Build Lab

Note also at this time that i'd seen another 500+ gold in events and had 3 provinces with 6+ dominion (and therefore full luck scales) due to the pretender dominion spread. My prophet was in the last province searching i believe.

Eigth turn: Buy: 2x Starspawn Mage; Military: pick up capitol freespawn/4x sea serpent, capture province; Pretender: Move

I also saw the 3k gold event here.

Ninth turn: repeat 8th except pretender searches, I also see a 1k gold event.

So i ramp out the mages by getting a second fortress early, and getting my luck scales spread fast enough i get good luck-based income.

I also think buying no one was a mistake in turn 3 - i should probably buy a priest... but maybe not.

Also, every mage was put on research for year 1 from the moment i bought them, with the exception of casting Sea Serpents. The aboleth hero showed up by month 6.

I finished year 1 with ~4k unspent gold as well, because i wasn't interested in buying anything but mages.

Edit: 'Commander' is starting Illithid lord, might be off by a turn on some of that.