Kailasa guide

[Tifone]

I'm with Hadrian II, playing with Kailasa I think going for F9S9N4 is the best idea: with some regen, way diminished chance of afflictions, one extra life or so, great attack and damage from fire bless (have fun destroying those blessed Jarls!!), and you'll even get the advantage of Celestial Music later (with the benefit of the flaming weapons too). And c'mon, you don't want your sacreds to take arrow fire anyway, you've got armoured gorillas and indies for that!
Also, goes for a far more powerful late game, with Wish, Strands, Nexie, StelFoc, MastEnsl etc. all immediately available to make good use of your pearls income from clams (you've got a recruitable perfect clam-maker you should use a lot - being also a great Sailor's Death spammer - of course the Yaksha is normally better though)

I appreciate AJ's ideas of course and I'm glad he posted them, but I think the sacreds don't benefit very much from many little blesses, and on the other hand Kailasa has imho great recruitable-everywhere researchers that can also be proficient in combat, being able to buff your troops early, and putting up deadly communions later - don't think you need an awake researcher that much.

(I'd also consider Turmoil/Luck for Kailasa, you gain 40 points and with that PD every barbarian attack would lose you a province - you can also use those gems very well)

[Gregstrom]

I'm not so sure about a massive dual bless. Baalz' guide to BL shows how capable the regular monkey units can be, and I don't think Kailasa's sacred troops are good enough to justify so many design points being spent on them.

Saying 'Kailasa has access to all paths anyway, so why take a rainbow' isn't really very helpful. You have to have Conj 8 before you get access to F and D, at which point you have rather a lot of catching up to do. Air comes at Conj 6, which is a little better but still not great.

[Omnirizon]

I stick hard by my A9 bless.

weak N doesn't cut it because A9 is far and away a better defensive measure and costs 392 (for 0 - 9) vs 112 (for 0 - 4) points. You not only get great missile protection, you get SR. SR is invaluable in the Air heavy environment of EA.

Even though your spending more points to get a much better defensive bless, your not having to spend points to buff your offense. Kail's sacreds have good enough offense as is. On top of that, there job really is to be frontliners. With the high MR (both naturally high and further boosted by S9), the high missile protection, the high defense, and the high Awe, your sacreds have many layers of defense. Their primary downfall is berserk/undead (but for what its worth, any N bless is a waste here because you don't have enough armor to reduce damage to the point that you could benefit from the regen when your going to be taking damage anyway). However, high Def does assist them here.

The point is NOT Gandharvas. Forget Gandharvas. Your primary summons are Apsaras. Aside from the no armor, Apsaras have better Defense, lower enc, and better Awe than Gandharvas. They are the perfect unit for filling in the role of Kails sacreds, holding the front line. They can hold out for a long time.

This doesn't mean that you don't want Gandharvas, it simply means that you want high end Evoc, Alt, and Thau more. Forget Conj and Ench. Since you don't have to worry about Gandharvas, and you don't have to worry about Arrow Fend, and your focus isn't on the high end summons, you can shoot straight towards Celestial Music, and then the high end Evoc and Alt.

Your offense comes from a combination of your naturally high offense sacreds (even with no bless, multiple attacks and high strength serve them well) and recruitable everywhere battlemages; also lots of missile units is good here. You're using things like Earth Quake, Blade Wind, Gifts from Heaven, Rust Mist, Destruction, and Iron Bane. Your mages are robust, young, (and beautiful). A little protection (from Invulnerability or maybe armor) and they can sit right on the front line to spam Panic and Destruction while even Markatas rain down death and your Sacreds hold the line.

[Alpine Joe]

I don't understand this. Aren't apsaras more vulnerable to arrows than ghandarvas, due to the lack of armor? I would think you would need arrow fend even more if you focused on apsaras.

And even if you disregard arrows (an air bless costs you something else), asparas are only good frontliners when you are fighting things that awe protects you from. Berserk, high morale, or undead troops are going to be a big problem for unarmored sacreds.

[JimMorrison]

Hmmmm, a lot to chew on.

First, a special note about the strat as posted in this guide - in Single Age, crossbows destroy you.

As to the S9 etc Bless, I don't understand the selling of it as a "great all game Bless". Your entire point in late game is to push into a steady stream of thugs and SCs, no? S9 is pretty much the worst bless for singularly powerful (commander!) units. Twist Fate gains you very little ground with a thug or SC, and you will always be pushing above 18MR if you expect to keep them more than a couple of battles, so you are gaining practically nothing in your late game from an Astral Bless (other than having an S9 caster around).

Compare this to the rainbow Bless, and all of these modifiers actually are useful to a thug or SC, besides the 1MR, which is easily justified as help for your lesser Sacreds, as well as a springboard for forging.

The problem that I'm having with the rainbow strat though, is that gold income is too anemic heading into the mid-game. Sure, if you Clam properly, you have diminishing use for gold in the later game, but in mid-game, you need to push up some castles or your research levels off, and you'll never field those awesome communions at all. Also with a low Dominion score, you need a lot of Temples around, to get anything done. Then just as icing on your "I ain't got no gold" cake, many of the more creative ways of fielding chaff where it's needed, are highly gold dependent, as you certainly aren't mass producing the heavier Bandar with an empty pocketbook and 3Sloth.

All in all, with Alpine Joe's strat, I had 18 provinces come Early Spring of year 2 in my first test, and that was with a couple of embarassing defeats (including the guy that got skewered by a couple crossbow bolts). This is a good start, but even with the tricks outlined in the strat, I felt like I was just begging someone to come take all of my lands away.

I keep coming back to Kailasa because they're just really cool, but every time (and I learn so much more of the game in the interim) I end up feeling like there's no reason Kailasa should ever win in MP unless their neighbors don't realize how easy they should be to kill.

[Alpine Joe]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

The problem that I'm having with the rainbow strat though, is that gold income is too anemic heading into the mid-game. Sure, if you Clam properly, you have diminishing use for gold in the later game, but in mid-game, you need to push up some castles or your research levels off, and you'll never field those awesome communions at all. Also with a low Dominion score, you need a lot of Temples around, to get anything done. Then just as icing on your "I ain't got no gold" cake, many of the more creative ways of fielding chaff where it's needed, are highly gold dependent, as you certainly aren't mass producing the heavier Bandar with an empty pocketbook and 3Sloth.

See both the rainbow and dual-bless strats need design points, so you find yourself taking sloth 3 and some death with both, I think. I would have a hard time imagining a build that didn't use 3 sloth, as the heavy armored bandar aren't good enough to justify production scales. Anyway with the rainbow strat i dont think sloth is a problem, since you can just recruit the unarmored bandar or avati and cast marble warriors on them. Every Yaksha you have can cast it, so why not bring one with every army. The unarmored bandar end up with 15 protection, versus 10 on the recruitable armored ones.

As for being anemic on gold....well unless you try to mass the armored bandar as your troops, you are going to have scales bad enough that this is always a problem. I think Kailasa has to transition to clams mid-late game, you don't really have a choice. With a rainbow sight searching at the end of year 1, you can get an impressive gem income going that can hopefully tide you over until your clams pick up. I agree though, this is the biggest weakness of kailasa. At the end of the day, you have to give up something with kailasa, and I would give up a few mid-game fotresses and some bigger communions, rather than get rocked by the first guy to attack me because I am trying to use cost-inefficient bandar warriors against the dual-blessed or glamoured troops of EA.

[JimMorrison]

Well as far as mid-game goes, especially using the Alt heavy strat, I'm not talking about using Bandar - I'm saying they are the alternative to other options that are much more gold intensive.

What I was looking at was more along the lines of massed markata with Army of Lead, and Will of the Fates.

Unfortunately, there will come a time where the only effective deterrent that you have against most nations, is your ability to cast Fog Warriors with your pretender. Most people will either not consider this to be enough, or will (even more likely) not even know you are capable of it, and then attack you. Now your incredibly expensive researcher/rainbow is neither doing research, or doing any site searching for that late game gem income. To top that off, you are reliant almost exclusively on your small Awe strike forces for the rest of your actions, and there are numerous nations in EA that can render than completely obsolete just by getting to Ench 3 for some skellie spam - longdead will completely crush your rainbow blessed sacreds, including your Yaksha who really can't kill fast enough to deal with that kind of pressure.

Honestly I don't think the high bless is going to provide that much more deterrent to most enemies, so believe me, I'm not just criticizing you - I still think that from what I've seen and tried, your build nets the strongest, most reliable expansion that I've seen.

Really, I think that with the rainbow guild, you have to turn yourself into a year 2 rusher. You expand as fast as you can, and the instant you hit Alt7, you take everything you've got and head to the most likely neighboring capital. If you can score a decisive victory there, you can fight the rest of the war on your own terms, and possibly come out of it as one of the leading nations. Unfortunately though, all of the "good" monkeys really benefit from some turtling time, which needs to come after this first blitzkrieg, and your other neighbors probably won't be willing to let you have it. Relying on a single caster to lay down a game-changing battlefield enchant leaves you using a crutch that if you get slowed down enough to not gain another source of strength to replace it - leaves you off balance and ready to get pushed over by someone whose nation is a bit more cohesive in military might.

[Psycho]

Archers are not really that much of a worry, unless you just put all your troops in the middle. You need to organize your troops around the battlefield. Get some indy heavy inf, some bandars, some markatas and put them as arrow catchers. Yavanas with quickness will have 28 action points. They will cover the distance between you and the enemy in no time and cut those archers to pieces.

Yavanas also have two attacks (with quickness that's four) and hit pretty hard. Your enemy will need many skelly-spamming mages to stop a yavana rush. One mage raises 5 skeletons per turn. One yavana kills 3 (one square). One yavana costs 40 gold. How much does a skelly-spamming mage cost?

Nature bless may be good for gandharvas, but you shouldn't be summoning them much anyway. Rely on your castle recruitable troops. Keep you gems for more valuable goals. Yavanas are your focus, not gandharvas or apsaras. Of course, at times some gandharvas will be just what you need, but not all the time.

"You have to have Conj 8 before you get access to F and D, at which point you have rather a lot of catching up to do."
Actually you have to get to conj9 before you get those. But you really want death for tartarians and they are also conj9. And you can go without fire for some time, can't you? Sure flaming arrows can be very useful, but you can't have it all.

An S9 pretender is a big deal in late game. You're not going to empower from S3 to get all the good astral things. You will be crying for astral pearls even without empowering in astral.

Order 3, sloth 3 will leave you with more gold than you need. Everyone you recruit is sacred, so your upkeep will be very low. In fact, the problem with sloth is more in that it can limit your yavana recruitment if you end with low recourse provinces around your capital.

[Hadrian_II]

Originally Posted by JimMorrison

I keep coming back to Kailasa because they're just really cool, but every time (and I learn so much more of the game in the interim) I end up feeling like there's no reason Kailasa should ever win in MP unless their neighbors don't realize how easy they should be to kill.

I played Kailasa in blitzes and it is very hard to defend against early attacks, but as soon as you get ghandaravas you can kill everything your enemy throws at you.

Also S9 is not only about the bless, but with a S9 pretender, you have also already one unit able to cast wish (important for clammers) and Master enslave is also a very fun spell in lategame.

Kailasa is about to have an army of 80 units of sacreds to walk through everything your enemy throws at you with ease. You need Conj6, Thau6 and as much alt as you can get and you are set for win.

Also who cares when you are weaker early, if you get killed early then you can just start a new game, if you are in lategame and have no punch it sucks much more.

I played at least 4 multiplayer games with kailasa.

In the first i lost an early war against Sauromantia (if you are kailasa sauro is the nation you absolutely do not want to fight.) but in the deciding battle, i misscripted my prophed, so my army was unblessed until turn 6.

In the second game i took an A9F9 bless to defend against arrows and got rushed by Helheim. (flanking helhirdlings killing your commanders first, and then your routing army from behind are a real pain)

In the third i won wars against Sauromatia, crushed abysia and then the game fell apart, as the leading player went away without notice, but i was in a strong second position, and if the game would have been played to the end i would have had won.

In the fourth (the megagame) i was able to fight back an early incursion from hinnom, after that baalz was subbing for me and was able to kill c'tis (not really sure which age) and midgard, but after that kailasa was so worn out, that lanka had an easy dealing with it.

I would say my build might lacking some punch early, but is still easy able to inflict much damage on attacker, so that they will pick easier targets.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

I don't understand this. Aren't apsaras more vulnerable to arrows than ghandarvas, due to the lack of armor? I would think you would need arrow fend even more if you focused on apsaras.

And even if you disregard arrows (an air bless costs you something else), asparas are only good frontliners when you are fighting things that awe protects you from. Berserk, high morale, or undead troops are going to be a big problem for unarmored sacreds.

that's the point of taking an A9+ bless. so arrows are not an issue.

undead/berserk are always a problem. high defense helps against undead (berserkers usually have a really high attack).

this all also has the nicety that the same thing that is optimal for your recruits is optimal for the Apsaras.

The whole point is to not be dependent on any particular mid-level spell to be effective. You are free to run for the high Evoc/Alt stuff (and Celestial Music). Either Evoc or Alt is wonderful for you. Kail has great battlemages and lots of chaff for any Alt focused strat.