Guide: Agartha, Pale ones - a study in darkness (CBM)

[Illuminated One]

Hmm, yeah, I'm always sceptic about guides that rely on specific gems since I've had both good luck and bad luck. Still, death gems seem to be the most reliable and you don't need that much.
I'd be more worried about the requirement to get the battle setup right, since when fighting a human player you will always have to adapt without full information. I.e. a nation with a single strong unit is better than one that can get a good mixed force imo because less can go wrong - and noone says that the mixed force nation is more flexible (compare Agartha with Sauro, Poison Archers will ruin you and Sauro can on top of that use the cavalry, sacreds, hydras, and it's not that Agartha has the better magic).
With which I don't mean to say that the guide is bad, I find it very good.

[Squirrelloid]

See, i've had terrible luck with death gems on occasion. Like Redwich where i've searched 20-30 or more provinces and have a death gem income of 5/trn. And at least one of those is from a captured capitol.

[chrispedersen]

I seem to be the worst site picker for site searching there is.
I know the site distributions, I know the boni.

And still with a 45% chance, I'm 0-37 in one game....

[Sombre]

Yeah sometimes I can run search spells over my entire empire and not have recouped the cost like 20 turns later.

[Fantomen]

Well in one of my test games I only had a death income of 2, and I still pulled it off. I got to construction 7 in early summer year 3 rather than early spring but thats no big deal.

The forge lord can make a skull per turn for 2 death gems. Starting so early thats enough to give you a very progressive research graph. Whatever death gems you have beyond that is an extra boost. Say you you start forging mentors summer year 2 and only found one death 1 site during year one. Thats will still let you make an extra skull the first 2-4 turns. So this guide is much less reliant on luck with site searching than baalz helheim guide for example, and I found that strategy to be pretty reliable.

After that you really only *need* to scrape up enough death for a few skull staffs. Then you can swap out skullfaces for rings of sorcery to get to that cruical death 4 on a couple oracles.

Frankly I have a hard time seeing how to play EA Agartha competively for long without darkness, and in terms of death gem economy you´d be spending a LOT more gems AND time to get there without the forge lord.

Regarding you reliance on mixed troops that Illuminated One mentions. Well, thats true that one uber unit would technically be better. Thing is: you don´t have one.

None of your units are very strong on their own without a very strong blessing. And even with a strong blessing you cannot compete long with just the sacreds, you need stellar research to be competitive. So you have to deal with what you have, and the truth is your units are best suited to work together taking different roles on the battlefield. This can be a weakness, it can also be a strength. You can adapt your tactics to different foes without really having to rebuild your armies. A weakness is of course that if your "hull" breaks then you are left very vulnerable. Another is that your best frontliners are mapmove 1, so your fast armies won´t be as tough in long battles. etc etc...

I think that strategically Agartha is well suited for "deep strikes". Build a solid homeland defence. Focus on a few big strong armies. Then go straight for the capital fort. You can take forts faster than any other nation, exploit this to the max as it is one of your big strengths.

[pyg]

Nice guide! Just a couple of notes... The minor Death bless combined with the low precision of the artillery really racks up the afflictions on those close to and behind the front line. I started with 5 troglodytes in one expansion army and after a short while noticed that three of them were either limping or crippled. Kind of funny actually... Anyway my solution was to either not care too much or delay/don't bless during indy expansion.

Also, I think a GoRed Umbral is quite a nice thug. Not as nice as a Golem, but cheaper and easier to access even without Nature on your pretender due to the prevalence of indy Nature sites and mages. Like others have noted, I too have found Astral to be a little hard to come by in some games. Playing Argatha quite similar to your guide has never left me short on Death gems though. I think your guide could say more about Umbrals. They are pretty amazing IMHO.

Originally Posted by vfb

The Forge Lord can only forge one thing a month, and if he's doing that, he's not doing all the other wonderful things pretenders can do. So, I don't think it's too much.

I don't know, I usually choose a pretender to do mostly one thing or a couple of things and I would pick the Forge Lord to do mostly forging and occasionally ritual magic.

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by pyg

Nice guide! Just a couple of notes... The minor Death bless combined with the low precision of the artillery really racks up the afflictions on those close to and behind the front line. I started with 5 troglodytes in one expansion army and after a short while noticed that three of them were either limping or crippled. Kind of funny actually... Anyway my solution was to either not care too much or delay/don't bless during indy expansion.

Oh,yeah I guess I should have been more clear about this. Generally do NOT put troglodytes directly in front of boulder throwers, these are quite separate tactics. The exeption is when you are thugging out a trog lord or when buying troggs to flesh out a force for a single cruical fight. If you have big enough frontline and trog on the sides on attack rear you can keep the trogs away from the boulders for a while, but there is always a big risk the trogs will run into the line of fire so...A better alternative to combine with boulders are Barathrus pact (earth elementals) as they have regeneration.

I think that if you use trogs you better not care if they die, grenades...

Also, I think a GoRed Umbral is quite a nice thug. Not as nice as a Golem, but cheaper and easier to access even without Nature on your pretender due to the prevalence of indy Nature sites and mages. Like others have noted, I too have found Astral to be a little hard to come by in some games. Playing Argatha quite similar to your guide has never left me short on Death gems though. I think your guide could say more about Umbrals. They are pretty amazing IMHO.

I might do a follow up talking about late mid game and end game. This guide so far only outlines your power curve until winter year three or so, which is early mid game as I see it. I need to play some more endgames with Agartha to be sure of myself here but I have some ideas...

I also like GOR:ed Umbrals. If you let a indy shaman/druid borrow one of those rings of sorcery your pretender forged you can build up some nature power until mid/late year four and start pumping them out.

But umbrals come into play much earlier than than I think. If you go by my strategy you will/can have marble warriors+umbrals by winter year 3, which is a pretty awesone addition to your armies. Especially if you add curse of stones, iron bane and darkness to that.

I suppose there is a whole lot more you can do with umbrals but I haven´t tested them enough so others can probably give better advice on that. I´m thinking some kind of stealthy raiding squads. But I´d like to try stuff myself in MP before recommending them in a guide so I´ll be back on that.

Right now I´m testing to go Enchantment instead of alteration after construction 7. Dropping deep well then make a statue/hidden in sand factory. I think this is a good alternative if you´re not in war. Hidden in sand gives you nice mages and dust warriors who are very good in combination with fire evocations, and you have perfect mages for magma eruption. Statues works well with boulder throwers. Riches from beneath isn´t too bad in CBM either, and lets you pump out those cavern guards like no tomorrow.

[chrispedersen]

GoR on an umbral is one of the reasons I *really* like N4-N5 on your pretender.

Whats not to like about an ethereal, stealthy, 68 hp undead SC chassis with drain life?

[Fantomen]

It is very easy to get n4 if you have a s4 forge lord. All you need to do is let a indy shaman borrow a ring to forge a thistle mace, then lend him the other ring as well and you got n4 for GOR.

I agree Umbrals are great, I just don´t think you´ll have many more with a n5 pretender. It´s more a matter of getting there fast. No reason not to have Umbrals AND golems *plus* your soul vortexing SC oracles.

[chrispedersen]

Trog lords don't have heads, btw.