LA Marignon Questions

[Shangrila00]

2 things about Marignon:

1) You can get a great deal of diversity without needing your pretender if you are willing to wait a bit to get some gem incomes up, and you are better able to take that than most being a strong blood nation. Fallen Angels are awesome for diversity since they give D3, and the F/D crosspath. Being recruit anywhere, rare randoms like E2, F4, B4, and the E/S crosspath are actually reasonably reliably attainable off Goetic Masters, depending on the size of the map. That leaves nature, and nature is the one path reasonably reliably available off indies, S3 for rings, and A4, and yeah that does point to the Virtue pretender. This feeds into:

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion thanks to a combination of bloodsac and recruit anywhere L3 Inquisitors that also aren't absolutely useless (though still mostly so) when not preaching. It's quite possible for a dom10 Marignon to never need to siege down and assault a fort. Burn down non forted temples with raiding, bloodsac away most candles (as in limited focused bloodsaccing as opposed to the kill the world kind which you are also ideally suited to doing), then use the Inquistors with your armies to preach away any holdout candles.

Consider a sleeping Virtue A4S4. Virtues need a bit of research to be useful anyway, and Marignon can expand quite effectively with crossbowmen and royal guards. With Dom10, you can afford +5 scales, say T1P2H3G3L3M1. As a blood nation, turmoil luck works out better than order, and growth 3 improves sustainability and reduces micro. I don't like going beyond turmoil 1 though, as it opens up a whole bunch of poploss events, and makes money a squeeze in the early game unless you get lucky with events. Taking a temperature extreme to afford production is personal preference, improving early expansion a bit, and letting you mass crossbowmen more easily, and either temperature works about as well. Heat makes devils stronger, gives you a few more fire gem events, and prevents the snow blocking pass and blizzard events. Cold makes frost fiends stronger, gives a few more water gem events, and prevents the lab burning down and raging rebel events, and might get you a very useful W2 ice druid. Yeah, the Virtue is going to die if she goes up against any astral nation, but then she can still be useful as a battle caster with your thunderstrike communions of Royal Navigators, or forge things. Empower her in blood to forge a robe of the magi if you've been having bad luck with randoms.

Going lower dom and a rainbow pretender is also viable of course. Consider a druid. E/N is the best bless for Marignon, since it helps both Goetic Masters and Angels.

Also, on certain maps, holy crap sailing. Marignon can easily make entire armies complete with full communions sailing with Admirals and Royal Navigators. Sadly, you don't have any fire mages with sailing, so no flaming arrows.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion

Oh, yeah. Forgot to add that. Dominionwise you're really free to do as you like. If you want to outright win through dominion, or even "merely" kill of opponents, there's probably no one who does it better. On the other hand, with the ability to blood sac, you can easily survive with a really low dominion too. Whatever floats your boat.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Amhazair

Oh, yeah. Forgot to add that. Dominionwise you're really free to do as you like. If you want to outright win through dominion, or even "merely" kill of opponents, there's probably no one who does it better. On the other hand, with the ability to blood sac, you can easily survive with a really low dominion too. Whatever floats your boat.

Mictlan is still better at domkilling, if only because Mictlan is very good at getting truly absurd amounts of blood slaves. Still, Marignon is good at it, and can pair it effectively with a more standard military strategy.

[Kobal2]

Originally Posted by Amazhair

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.

The *one* time I don't fire up a test game to double check the answer a question

Originally Posted by Knai

Mictlan is still better at domkilling, if only because Mictlan is very good at getting truly absurd amounts of blood slaves. Still, Marignon is good at it, and can pair it effectively with a more standard military strategy.

That was true before the latest CBMs, back when they could still have sanguine dousing rods made and carried by every last 60g priest.

Current day Mictlan is bad at blood hunting, whereas LA Marignon has B3 holy bloodhunters available from any castle for a mere 190g a pop. Also H3 bloodsaccers who count double to remove black candles (although that may only count when preaching and not when saccing, I dunno)

Do the math: a Mictlan priest has 50% chance each turn to net d6+1 slaves. A B3 Geotic master gets d6+3 every turn, guaranteed (unless there's unrest). On average, you need ~3 Mictlan priests to equal the output of a single Geotic Master, and they'll have much more chances to generate unrest. That's 180g and 3 turns of recruitment to the master's 1 turn and 190g. 3 B3 geotics can operate pretty much indefinitely at 0 taxes barring "bad luck" when all 3 get huge amounts of slaves. On any given day, 9 Mictlan Priests in a single province will generate at least 9d6-9 unrest (avg. 22), more if they actually manage to catch slaves.

And of course, while Mictlan priests who generate too much unrest can't do much else but sit on their hands, Geotic Masters can forge useful stuff, summon devils, can Harm or Life for a Life or Infernal Prison any would-be raider...

[Shangrila00]

This is CBM, which I think makes Marignon stronger than Mictlan at blood sac.

1) No jade knives. LA Mictlan can't get above holy 1 outside the capital, and only the King of Rain gets holy 3 and recruiting him means not recruiting the other cap only mages which are also necessary for Mictlan, and using him to bloodsac means not using him for all his other roles. So Mictlan needs to seriously sacrifice to crank out those temple checks. Marignon on the other hand has recruit anywhere H3s which don't really have anything else they need to be doing.

2) No SDRs. Outside the cap, Mictlan only gets B1s, while Goetic Masters are recruit anywhere and 1/4 get B3. That means Marignon can spend money to get more hunters, while Mictlan needs to spend slaves to summon hunters. That's super efficient in the long run thanks to Mictlan's super good summons, but that means less actual blood available. This plus temples that actually work means that a Marignon focused on blood will have more blood to actually do things. Of course, Mari is never as focused on blood as Mictlan, but that's because of its other options, not that it's not capable.

Plus, Marignon needs to sacrifice (ha) less to get dom10. Mictlan has a strong incentive to pump all their points into a massive bless rather than spend on high dominion when their sacreds are recruit anywhere and thus not limited by holy.