MA Agartha, or Yet another thread fishing for tips

[atul]

mivayan said:You could try a Risen Oracle, Dom9, E2D4. Order 3, prod0, heat2, growth1, missfortune2, magic1.

Actually this is quite close to what I was gravitating towards, um, yesterday. Immortality is for wimps, but in this game I'm already scared how well I'm doing so I might take a shot at it. The risen oracle seems to be a good a deal compared to other immortals, having high hp, all slots and good starting dominion.

It's nice to have such an active group, especially since the megagame appears to have spawn requests for help like rain spawns mushrooms.

[alexti]

mivayan said:
You could try a Risen Oracle, Dom9, E2D4. Order 3, prod0, heat2, growth1, missfortune2, magic1.

With dom9 it can beat many indies, and with care it'll never get permanently hurt (immortal). Enc0 to wear heavy armor... not sure if it's worth forging early on. Just be *really* carefull about staying in friendly dominion.

I think Dom9 is too expensive. I would go with the following baseline:
Awaken Risen Oracle, Dom6, E1D2. Order 3, prod 0, heat 0, growth 0, misfortune 2, magic 1.

This leaves extra 120 points too spend. From here you can either add 3 scales or 1 scale and Dom7 E2D4.

Baseline by itself is enough to fill the main objectives - you can forge heavy plate armor and use Oracle to expand. Fear will be enough to route indies, and it will be tough enough to survive, it will probably get few afflictions, but being immortal it's not a big problem (especially considering that they won't affect its fighting capacities much :>) For more safety you can forge helmet as well. You can also benefit from the nearby oceans with this setup as Risen Oracle will be able to expand there right away and sea is harder to raid for most of nations.

Magic+1 should be enough to make research with earth
readers efficient, I'm afraid of misfortune 3, as it seems much more likely to lead to disaster than misfortune 2.

Later, Oracle's D2 will be enough to branch out into death magic. With F1W1E2 mages you should probably research Evo-1 for Geyser (while buying those mages), which should be enough to deter rushers - even for uber-blessed nations fighting you is likely to be too costly and risky. E2D4 Oracle would be even better for that due to affliction chances, so I'd probably go for production scale, D7 and E2D4, but some combination of Prod and Growth scales looks good too.

I think your main problem will be what to make your winning plan. At some stage you'll need to conquer your neighbours, and your best weapons are probably your national summons. With some of them being sacred it my be a good option to get some blesses on the oracle. You could get some 4-bless by sacrificing a scale. Or you can make Oracle dormant with 3 4-blesses, but it will cripple your expansion (though you would still probably be save from rushers due to Geyser). Though I'd probably opt for more conventional plan with awake Oracle, fast expansion (and following quick build of second fort) - your troops might not be that good in the future, but with extra gold and gems from expansion, extra number of troops, summons and mages you can field will probably overcome weaker blesses.

[Evilhomer]

Just my opinion but i would strongly advice against taking prod 0. Since the latest patch production was made alot better, and you are giving up a very nice +45% production bonus. With production 0 you will be expanding alot slower than with prod 3. I would also advice against taking growth at only 0. In a competitive build it seems like such a bad idea since you are giving up a ton of income due to the exponential way that growth works.

[atul]

Evilhomer said: I would also advice against taking growth at only 0. In a competitive build it seems like such a bad idea since you are giving up a ton of income due to the exponential way that growth works.

Strange thing I noticed of growth. It's about the only scale that scales so that the move from 2 to 3 is about as beneficial as move from say 0 to 1. For instance, prod 0 to 1 yields 15% relative benefit, whereas prod 2 to 3 yields only 11,5% benefit. With growth the relative benefit stays relatively same.

OTOH, growth only helps if you live long...

[alexti]

Evilhomer said:
Just my opinion but i would strongly advice against taking prod 0. Since the latest patch production was made alot better, and you are giving up a very nice +45% production bonus. With production 0 you will be expanding alot slower than with prod 3. I would also advice against taking growth at only 0. In a competitive build it seems like such a bad idea since you are giving up a ton of income due to the exponential way that growth works.

With MA Agartha it's not clear how to convert production into a serious advantage. The problem is that you don't have any troops you'd really like to buy. Heavy infantry has nothing for it except shields and heavy armor - skill-wise it's very mediocre. In the beginning I would rather use light infantry (which is not that light, in fact and also have shields). It costs a bit more gold, but you'll be expanding faster than with HI (even with prod 3). Faster rate of expansion will make up for extra gold spent. Besides, HI has strategic move of 1 vs 2 of LI. This makes expansion with LI is even faster in comparison with HI, because you can avoid wasting time moving (it takes careful planning though to bring replenishments, but luckily there's some synergy in using Golem Crafters heading to search for troop ferrying).

With that Oracle pretender your early expansion will be primarily bound by logistic rather than by lack of troops.

Later on, I can't see planning the game around HI. The core of the army will likely be national summons, backed with Golem Crafters casting something from magma or acid family of spells. HI will likely be just a complementary force. Besides, with easy access to armor buffs for your troops, heavy armors becomes much less important. So production scale is of relatively small benefit to MA Agartha. What are you going to sacrifice to take production scales anyway?

Golem Crafters will be very important mages through the whole game, because of their good choice of battle spells and their high survivability (even in the late game they are quite difficult to destroy due to their ability to forge cold/fire resistence items and armor or cast those protection on the battlefield). The more of them you can have the better - so you don't want to sacrifice income (or to spent it on other things with maintenance). Because of the same mages, you want to have decent research speed, so you don't want to go below Magic 0 (but I think Magic 1 worth it +33% bonus on your primary researcher). For fast initial expansion you need a pretender capable of expansion and Risen Oracle is pretty cheap choice that doesn't require any research and besides gives you easy access to higher level death summons (which will be important for Agartha for several reasons: magic diversification, stealth leaders for umbrals, exploting darkvision, undead priests for fodder summoning).

Growth doesn't really work exponentially, because if you survive long enough to be competitive raiding will quickly negate extra income from growth and effects of the growth early on are rather small. Considering poor mobility of MA Agartha (magical or otherwise), it's crucial to expand (by conquest) rather early which means that you won't be able to benefit from growth at this stage anyway, so the setup should be optimised to make this conquest phase most efficient.

Keeping this in mind, it seems that Luck, Growth and Production are the scales you need least for MA Agartha. I dislike Misfortune 3 from my [bad] experiences with it - I'm not sure if it is statistically justified.

Out of my earlier suggestions for the spare 120 points I lean towards Dom7, E2D4 Oracle and Prod+1 as a better choice (slightly better fear effect, quicker access to death summons and better death searches, slight dominion advantage).

[atul]

Alexti, the guy who did beat me up in almost every dominions 2 MP game I played. *g* Thanks for the tips, especially the geyser. Or, thanks for making me more certain of the route I'm currently on, the design along with the plan has about formed.

I'd like to thank everyone who has been participating in this thread, you have been most helpful. Pretender sent, now off to actually learn to play...

[Evilhomer]

good luck atul

[alexti]

atul said:
Alexti, the guy who did beat me up in almost every dominions 2 MP game I played.

Sorry about that

Good luck in your game!

[Evilhomer]

I was never suggesting any HI. You get +45% LI with that production bonus as well. The benefit from growth is exponential in your original lands (as well as the lands you take over), by turn 100 (if you are still in the game by then) it almost doubles your income (1.006^100+0.06=1.88), in effect giving alot more mages/fortresses. Of course you have to survive more than 20 turns for the growth to start to kick in, but in the build you should plan ahead since you are not building with the intent of loosing the game usually. Growth will help with that old age problem as well.

I stated earlier that i would take the points from the heat scale. Yes it gives slightly more fatigue, but it hurts your opponents just as much, or if you are out of your dominion it doesn't matter...And with growth and order+production gold bonus together (they all actually work together with good synergy) you can take the gold loss without much problem. Magic atleast +1 is a given, and i agree with taking points from luck scale (mis 2, maybe 3 i think).

Of course there is many ways to play dominions, and we all have different ideas how to play.