MA Abysia: The Burninator Flies Again

[Baalz]

There are several guides already written about MA Abysia, but none really capture my feel for the nation. I’ve heard several people lament Abysia as being weak, inflexible, slow, and easy to counter with poor magic diversity. I think this is because they have obvious blunt force at their disposal which leads people to conclude that’s how you should play them. The problem with this, of course, is that if it’s obvious to you it’s also obvious to your opponent leading to a serious strategic disadvantage. My advice is don’t do that. I find Abysia to be a very versatile and flexible nation with a strong presence through all the stages of the game, you just have to be prepared to plan around their inherent weaknesses.

As I mentioned there are several other guides written, and some fairly obvious things Abysia has going for it. I’m also borrowing some strategies I’ve seen others deploy effectively so take this guide as how I put it all together. I do want to give a special nod to WingedDog though as writing this guide was inspired by me happening to be both playing as and against Abysia in two separate games and he brought a couple new ideas to my attention by applying them to my face. I don’t want to spend time rehashing what everyone already knows – Aby’s got great heavy infantry and straightforward evocations. For me though, this is not what defines the nation, and is mostly a niche application useful to pull out when your opponent demonstrates deployments which need reminding you’ve got that capability. Mostly though, any threat which can even get through your PD is probably not something you want to invest in expensive, slow and non-maneuverable heavy infantry to fight.

Aby’s infantry and fire mages do really shine in the early parts of the game though. I tend to prefer the humanbred for most early applications. They’re tough enough with a tower shield and 9 protection. You can get two of them for the price of Abysian infantry, and they’ve got a map move of 2 with a choice of axe or spear. The map move of two is absolutely critical, it means your armies have average mobility instead of slow. Most significant enemy armies are going to be moving at 2, so you’re at no strategic disadvantage. Abysian infantry are specialists, *not* your goto default troops. Once you make this mental shift Abysia starts feeling a whole lot more flexible. As you’d expect, Abysian light infantry feel pretty heavy by light infantry standards and their fire immunity dovetails perfectly with your very reasonably priced F2 mages who drop fireballs early on and eventually become very cost effective heavy artillery mages with falling fires, prison of fire, incinerate and blindness (who needs astral to take out fire immune SCs?).

Salamanders are an expensive glass cannon, but give you a great way to counter both high defense stuff like water blessed Vans and Shadow Vestials and high protection/hp stuff - 20 AP damage is pretty significant even to giants. Salamanders are both expensive and fragile, so you might want to consider body ethereal/luck buffs on small number of them, and they start looking pretty wicked indeed once you can drop marble warriors on them. Slayers have the unfortunate drawback of most assassins, they compete with mages for recruitment. Still, they are above averagely strong, so they do occasionally have a use.

Rounding out your recruit anywhere options is the Anathemant Dragon who’s nice, but a bit expensive. For most applications you’ll want to stick to the much more affordable Anathemant Salamander, but there are a couple of times it’s very nice to have a Dragon. First off, he’s a H3 priest so he gives you a good early answer to tough, fire immune things (like enemy pretenders). Secondly, the extra level of fire magic does give easier access to a couple nice spells like Flame Storm. Finally, he’s an H3 priest on a nation who can blood sacrifice. Sitting on a temple with a jade dagger this generates 11 temple checks. 11! Just think about it, with 3 of these guys blood sacrificing you’re pushing your dominion at a rate comparable to most end game large empires…and end game you’ve got a lot more than 3. If you take a high dominion score it can be very difficult for neighbors with an average one to stave off dominion death and even if they do they’re going to have your dominion all over their territory with that nice heat-3 push. Where do the daggers come from? Easy enough to empower a N1 indie mage in blood, and well worth it for the jade daggers alone. As long as you did that anyway, might as well keep rain of toads in mind to anonymously stack on top of the income hit you’re already applying with your dom push. As the game progresses raging hearts and volcanic eruption give you some more options on this angle and a good use for your fire gems after you’re saturated with lanterns.

Dominion pushing should be one of Abysia’s core strategies, it’s not hard at all to knock a serious amount out of your neighbor’s incomes. Say you’re changing your neighbor from neutral temperature and Order-3 (a very common scenario), he’s down 27% from the loss of Order and another 15% from the temp shift. He’s also lost the benefit from growth, production & luck if he’s got it along with the hit from any negative scales you took, so it’s not unlikely at all that he’s taking a 50% income hit in the provinces with your scales. This is before you consider how much gold he’s pumping into temples he doesn’t otherwise need to try and keep it from going further. The benefits if you should go to war are large as well, the 2 shift in morale (from +1 to -1) can be quite significant to PD, making it much more economical to raid. This is especially true if you utilize fear…such as, say horrors, scorpion men and demon knights. But I get ahead of myself, the point is to take a high dominion score and plan on aggressively pushing it.

One side note, don’t neglect the advantage of prophetizing a big guy to take advantage of your strong everywhere dominion if you stick regen on him (better if he has it innate). Even a troll king prophet can be pretty wicked early on in a dominion of 10, with 150 hitpoints and regenerating 20+ per turn…or 60+ with a ring of regen and hydra skin armor. Stack it with MR boosters and you can get to be practically unkillable to even most SC counters and a great lightning rod to catch enemy attacks. When you pull the same thing with father illearth or a demon lord that *start* at 150 hitpoints and pop blood vengeance at the beginning of fights….ah, that’s a fun show.

Now your early game is going to be pretty straightforward, but you’re very rapidly going to approach a point where you’re contending against a real opponent and straightforward isn’t going to cut it. Your options need some ramp up time, so you’ve got to start heading for them as soon as the game starts. Fortunately, your very early expansion doesn’t need any critical research done, so I like heading straight for construction. You’ll want to stick sanguine rods on them once you can get them to be sure, but warlocks make wicked bloodhunters with no boost at all. I’m gonna get more into warlocks in a bit, but for now lets just use them from the very beginning to get your blood slaves rolling in well before you get to sanguine rods.

Dragar wrote an Abysian guide centered around soul contracts, and I have to agree that soul contract generated demons are in my mind one of Abysia’s core troops. They are a big part of the reason why I chuckle a bit when people complain that Abysia is slow and inflexible. Just like LA Ulm essentially requires a pretender to summon the vampires who define the nation I feel Abysia requires a pretender who can forge the item which defines much of your early/mid game power. You can eventually have warlocks kitted to forge them, but you really have to start cranking them out by the end of year one and the only way that’s possible is with a pretender.

I’d like to preemptively address an objection which I’m sure will come up. Soul contracts are one of those items that very few people use, they’re so expensive you can summon 22 devils for the cost of each soul contract so they take forever to “pay themselves off”. This is not an entirely unreasonable way to look at it, but I contend that’s not the whole picture. You know why nobody actually does summon devils that way? Because there is another cost there that’s being glossed over, the mage-turns used and from that angle they exponentially pay for themselves. Particularly if you’re talking about cap only mages, how valuable is it to have a mage doing something else? How valuable to have 12 mages doing something else after a year of forgings? How does this comparison sit if the 12 mages are bloodhunting and bringing in more blood slaves than a contract costs? Its impossible to really compare how it “pays itself off” when comparing the apples to oranges of mage turns vs blood slaves, but the other way to look at it is there’s just no way to get a significant number of demons nearly as early any other way because of the limitation of available warlocks. Additionally, it allows you to gain the advantage of flying devils while skipping blood research for a good long while and concentrate on the other urgent stuff you potentially need. With the “alternative” not really being an option the question really is, is it worth it? My own personal opinion is that it’s the lynchpin in transforming early Abysia from a predictable slow force into a dynamic, heavy raiding multi vector threat while also steadily building up to be a significant contribution to end game force as well. Having 50 demons flying out of your capital every other turn at the point you’ve got darkness, army of lead, blood lust and gift of health up is so far from trivial words escape me….and at that point you’re getting them for free while using your blood slaves for the other uses. IMO it transforms the way the nation plays. If you can come up with a more cost effective way to do that in the same time frame I’m all ears.

With B3/4 warlocks blood hunting you should be able to very rapidly generate enough slaves to pop out a soul contract every other turn, and before too long one every turn. Let the devils just build up for a little bit, they’re much better when you have critical mass of about 15 – most PD fighting out of dominion will disintegrate in the first round. Doesn’t take long before you’re able to send out a group of about that many every other turn somewhere in year two.

At this point you’ve got a fair number of very maneuverable flying squads led by a demonbred to back up the straightforward hammer of your heavy infantry and a short trip for the low hanging fruit up whichever tree makes the most sense: evocation (fireball) alteration (Body ethereal, luck) thaum (prison of fire, mind burn, teleport, paralyze) blood (blood lust, hellfire, agony). Depending on how your neighbors are doing you should be able to take your first scalp here, combining a dominion push with heavy flying raiding and the straightforward obvious part of Abysia which is kinda hard to counter at this point (heavy dudes and big flaming explosions).

As I implied above, your research goals are going to vary a good bit depending on what you expect to face, but thaum-2 should be an early target so you can start aggressively fire site searching. Why? Because after you take care of any pressing research you need for the war front you’re gonna be climbing straight up to constr-6 for three critical items, one of which is the lightless lantern. Other than a steady stream of soul contracts every fire gem you can scrape up is gonna go right into lanterns giving you a fairly substantial research push which you’ll need because none of your cap only mages are ever going to do any research. Demonbred are going straight to the fights and warlocks with nothing more pressing to do are bloodhunting. I’ll get to the third critical item in a minute, but the second critical item is boots of youth.

I haven’t spoken much about Warlocks yet, but that’s because they’re one of my favorite mages from any nation and I’ve got a lot to say. You will need to recruit a demonbred every now and then for strategic maneuverability, but every turn you should think long and hard if you’re considering not getting a Warlock. These guys are the heart of your nation and you never nearly have enough. They are, however practically so old they start with disease, and considering how slowly you amass them and how many things you need them for, going through winter without boots of youth is a sphincter clenching prospect. Year one winter isn’t so bad because you just don’t have that many warlocks yet. Year two is pretty painful, no doubt about it. Even if you manage to get to constr-6 you’re gonna have a hard time outfitting all your warlocks while pumping out soul contracts. Console yourself that it’s really a one time thing though, by year three winter you darn well better have boots of youth on every warlock you’ve got. You can take them off when it’s not winter if you want to stick earth boots or whatever on them, though the 2 reinvig is a nice little bonus if you leave them on.

The 3rd critical construction item segues into my discussion of warlocks and is actually not at constr-6, but you pick it up along the way at constr-4. Blood stones baby! The earlier you start pumping these things out the more they’re gonna benefit you. You should average 2-3 warlocks who can forge them per year, so if you start early it’s not that hard to get up to a 100+ E income before you hit the end game with thousands you’ve spent/hoarded by that point. That income makes earthblood deepwell a tempting target as long as you’re there, leading to one of the better gem incomes in the game compounding a strong blood economy.

Your E random warlocks also give you a very nice option for troop diversity. You’ll probably be limited by your existing E for blood stone forging initially (particularly as you’re trying to squeeze out hammers as well), when you are you’ll want to use your E warlocks to summon some demon knights. The low level version of this spell is very mage intensive only summoning one per turn, but it doesn’t take very many to be quite effective. A dozen of these guys make a very capable support squad for your army, and with a few buffs are a force to be reckoned with in their own right due to their fear aura. Finally, your E warlocks give you much stronger E access than they imply with that unsupposing E1. With copious blood stones, they’re all actually at E2. Use that solid E income to spread earth boots around, so they’re actually E3. They’re also astral mages, so after summoning earthpower (E4) they can cast power of the spheres (or forge themselves crystal shields) to make E5. They also can teleport, so as long as you pushed up for an early constr-6 go one more and you’re looking at weapons of sharpness being dropped in any battle you care about, stacked of course with rush of strength eventually….which works very nice indeed on your troops with two handed weapons. You can also do fun stuff like iron bane (works great with devils), gifts from heaven (works great on stuff that *kills* devils), curse of stones (works great if you can manage to dig up any units which radiate fatigue causing heat) and earthquake (works great on a teleporting unit, with say marble armor and a ritual of returning).

Your blood random warlocks have a whopping B4, which means they can crank out B boosters with no empowering and easily cast such classics as hoard from hell, infernal disease, and bloodletting, along with the bigger blood summons from ritual of the five gates to Heliophagus. Ritual of the five gates is particularly nice as it not only gives you more demon knights to supplement what your E warlocks are summoning, it also gives you a handful of lightning and cold artillery…which nobody expects from Abysia and tends to throw the stylishly fire immune SC/thug for a loop. The devil and fiend you get are shipped right out with your regular devil flying squads so you get good use out of everything. Finally, B4 warlocks make one of the best blood hunters in the game. With a couple boosters (forged for other uses but idle this turn) and a sanguine rod these guys can double the income compared to a rod equipped B1 bloodhunter while not generating much more unrest. A very efficient use of your blood hunting provinces.

Astral warlocks give you a host of flexibility. They can teleport with no astral cap, which can be great early on if you need to jump in and smack around some early elephants. With a simple cap though they can really transform that theoretically nice Abysian heavy infantry into very useful troops via gateway. Go on the offense with your fast demons/devils and light infantry, use your demonbred to put up a lab and now those guys who were previously too slow to make it to the fight hold and siege stuff while the demonbred puts up a temple and starts blood sacrificing. With weapons of sharpness easily available Abysian heavy infantry is a potent threat all the way through end game, and their heat aura combined with heat from a strong dominion push and inner furnace tends to make them dominate other elite line troops at anywhere near a fair fight. Astral also gives you a good entry into very effective horror spam. I’ve elaborated on sending horrors in some other guides, I wanted to talk here about calling horrors which all of your warlocks can do well.

Calling horrors takes a bit of finesse. Much like using communions, if you don’t put the proper thought and planning in it has a very high chance of ending in disaster. I want to lead by cautioning against a mistake I’ve seen made time and time again – your mages casting horror mark will very likely target horrors if they’re summoned first! You need to do whatever horror marking you want done before the first horror is summoned. If you want to integrate horrors into your strategy it’s a good idea to sprinkle horror marks around the enemy forces just in general so you can drop first turn horrors when you want to. Have a warlock or two (or better yet some cheap indie mages) spam horror mark from behind the PD in fights you were gonna lose anyway as the enemy advances, just on general principal. Also consider using the accursed shield for thugs (it’s a great shield anyway).

There are a couple effective ways to use horrors in combat assuming your opponent has horror marks sprinkled around his troops. Option one is to drop a horror periodically as a lightning rod for whatever stuff your opponent was gonna be casting at you. That big nasty beast jumping right into the middle of their troops is going to have a very high priority attached to it’s targeting and is tough enough to soak up several hits (depending on what’s being cast obviously). Bonus: if it’s being hit by stuff that’s not precision 100 there’s a good chance of friendly fire damage, and it’s not altogether unlikely that combined with the very strong fear aura some enemy squads will route even in a large army. Option 2 is to summon as many horrors as you can, then bugger the hell out of there with the hope that the cumulative fear effect will route the enemy troops, usually combined with a strategy to take all the retreat routes away. This works very well with blood rain, though you’ve got to obviously use a bit of thought as to when to retreat the caster (think immortals for this role…but I get ahead of myself). This can be an extremely effective tactic for killing otherwise very tough armies. Who cares if those 500 heavy cavalry are buffed with army of gold and fog warriors…they all just retreated to their death with practically no casualties. Option 3 for deploying horrors is one that Abysia is perhaps uniquely suited to – using the horrors then killing them off once they’re done with the enemy. Why? Because horrors have no elemental immunity, so if some of them finish with enemy targets then turn and fly right into your formation of heat radiating Abysian infantry they’ll almost immediately pass out. Placing troops appropriately for this can take a little bit of practice, but the “guard commander” order is an effective way to keep troops clumped together and you’ll want to prep your troops with some sermons of courage. Obviously horrors are a bit of a gamble, but they bring too much potential power for their cost to be ignored.

The three types of warlocks I’ve mentioned so far give you a nice triple play option as well. Doom, then bloodletting, then earthquake, all dropped in on teleports with ritual of returning is a wonderful way to lead off a fight with the rest of your troops arriving in the regular movement phase. Throw in a horror and you’ll probably even manage to get the enemy to burn through the gems he was planning to use on the upcoming fight. Fire warlocks are not as straightforwardly useful as the other three, but they do allow you to turn that triple play into a grand slam (to…uh reverse the metaphor), add infernal prison to the above and you’ll probably be able to hear your opponent howl regardless of how far apart you are in the real world.

Now, unfortunately one if the big limitations Abysia has is that all this wonderfulness is cap only. It starts chafing real fast all the stuff you want to do with your warlocks, combined with the fact you want a few demonbred, combined with the fact that you need gobs of bloodhunters. The whole game you’re going to be making tough decisions about how to allocate your limited warlocks, I find it’s a very good idea to stick labs where your warlocks are bloodhunting so that you can leave most of them bloodhunting while pulling them for lab duty as needed. Can’t emphasize how nice it is to be able to with no notice spam a dozen horror attacks, a handful of disease demons, a few mind hunts and a partridge in a pear tree. Let’s also consider what else we can do to mitigate warlock shortage. With a strong dominion that we’re pushing all over the place I’m thinking immortals, and specifically vampire lords nicely fill in this hole.

They fly and command demons/undead, and can cast blood lust, thus almost completely removing the need to recruit demonbred. Even better, they can drop darkness (with a staff), greatly amplifying the effectiveness of the demons and even the 50% darkvision Abysian infantry. They’re immortal – even into enemy territory if we’re pushing our dominion so strongly. They also give us a strong entry into death magic and another vector to gain solid bloodhunters, and can set up covens of vampires- which are very difficult to counter when you’re geared up to kill off flaming infantry and are perpetually in enemy dominion. All in all, a very solid addition to the Abysian lineup with just a little bit of work.

You can go a couple ways with this (blood fountain is one good choice), but I’m thinking along the lines of a vampire queen with 2F 3D 6B. Mostly cranking out soul contracts at first, creates a couple vamp lords when they’re available then sticks on marble armor, pops soul vortex, phoenix pyre and blood vengeance then goes to town with her life draining attack & soul vortex reinvigorating her when she phoenix pyres - being out a scant 7E (which are flowing like water) if she bites it. She can also do fun stuff like hell power then bone grinding (vampires make great bodyguards vs horrors with the added bonus that they rack up the horror marks so draw the horror attacks. Remember that if you decide to put up Astral Corruption). An altogether unpleasant prospect for your enemy to contemplate throughout the whole game. Squeezing in E2 is an expensive prospect, but it does get you a much easier entry into blood stones and almost eliminate the need to stick any gear on her at all. Also keep in mind having a high dominion stealthy pretender can be exactly what you need to take an early dominion kill – or just push your dominion somewhere you wanted her to attack. In CB you can squeeze in 2F 2E 4D 6B with a dominion of 8 in an awake vamp queen with sloth-1, heat-3, misfortune-2 & magic-1, though you can adjust that to your own taste or go with a blood fountain and pretty good scales.