LA Marignon Questions

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Legendary League

Also, a quick question about sailing: does it work with move 1 units (and hence make Mary infantry remotely usable), or do you need to be at least move 2 to utilize it?
Thanks!

Originally Posted by Kobal2

Sailing doesn't work with mapmove 1 units, no - they'd end their move in the water.

1. Fire up a game with LA Marignon
2. Select your starting army
3. Try to make it move to an overseas province. (Mari is guaranteed a coastal start, and has MM 1 units in it's starting army.)

I'm not generally one to complain about people asking stuff rather than testing it out, (In fact, I think this is the first time ever I do so) but if this is too much work to do to learn about a nation you'll be playing in MP... You don't even have to hit end turn to find out.

(Oh, and the answer is, incidentally, that yes, mapmove 1 units benefit from sailing just fine. Sailing, by the way, is absolutely awesome, and can be leveraged to great effect depending on the map you're using. Once again depending on map setup, remember it might be possible to give Boots of Flying to your Goetic Masters/other supporting mages to fly around the sea and meat up with your sailers in the target province(s) to assault with an army of decent strength.)

Now, since I started off by berating people, I suppose I'll have to give some constructive advice as well, I suppose...

I'm not especially fond of taking an awake SC for Mari, since they expand quite well with blockers & crossbows. Also, they have amazing magic diversity, (all paths but nature) but low power in most paths, so you really want to think of a way to get some boosters, so I mostly end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales. (Then again, I allmost allways end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales, so that might just be me. )

Things to keep in mind when designing your pretender:

* If you do indeed forgo the expansion pretender you probably want some order to make sure expansion goes smooth. The only good way to know for sure what's the minimum you can get away with is testing expansion over and over. With the changes to income from production in the last CBM I'd easily call production more important than order, though taking both is of course even better. (And depends a lot on whether you want luck or not.) If you do take a SC pretender production can be saved upon.
* Old, old mages and being a blood nation are both good reasons to take growth. (And I would almost definitely take it) On the other hand, blood gives you the means to prevent your mages from dying from old age (Boots of Youth) so if you really want to save some points here, you can. (Especially for smaller games.)
* Needed for Boosters: E2 for Earth Boots, S3 for RoW (With the other boosters you can natively forge) and A3 for both A boosters (With RoW) are really important, although E boots can quite easily be traded for. (And once you have one pair you can make your own.) Also nice is N2 to get you up the nature ladder. Anything on top of that is gravy. [I'm not disparaging gravy mind you, I love gravy. But if all you can get is the meat, you still have a nice meal.]
* Most of the deamons you can natively summon are heat immune and/or have heat auras. It's only a minor consideration, but if you move your temprature scale to gain some points, you probably want to do it towards heat. (Allthough wich other nations participate in the game is probably a more important consideration than this.)

And some tricks for during the game

* Royal guard make excellent blockers in early game with very high defense and decent armor. They do lack a lance though, so don't think of them as cavalry, they won't do more damage than any decent non-sacred infantry. Start phasing them out when your opponent brings out the area evocations, as a square of royal guard costs twice as much as one of infantry. (Either your own MM1 pikeneers/halbardiers, or any indep. infantry you scrounge up.)
* Exploit sailing. As said above you can sometimes combine it with other movement modes to really surprise your opponents.
* Royal navigators are really nice. They're cheap, they're mobile, combining sailing and teleportation, (A2 ones cloud trapeze out of the box, S2 ones teleport with cap.) and they can form communions, so you can easily project dangerous power anywhere on the map. (And lightning-based communions can potentially destroy entire armies (depending on their makeup obviously) if you take along (or summon) a blocker or two.
* Fallen angels. They're really nice, and relatively cheap. With the correct research you can cast phoenix pyre, soul vortex, reinvigoration, and be almost impossible to kill by any non-lifeless army. (reinvigoration requires fidgety slave management though) And they fly. (Don't forget to combine with sailing navigators for buffs (etherealness) or mage support (blocking for lightning communion) when it makes sense to do so.