Mictlan Pretenders ideas request

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Cainehill said:
No blood expert here, but I'd suggest another nation and option for SC killing: Any Vanheim theme with Valkyries is an option for a nice bless effect. F9W4 for instance - they may not get as many attacks as your eagle warriors, but with a mirror image and high defense they're fairly sweet. Another option with them is death blessings, allowing them to rout archers and whatnot - again, the mirror image helps keep them alive long enough for the fear to take effect.

The problem is Mirror Image or a Water blessing doesn't help Valks to survive lethal auras like Breath of Winter or Soul Vortex, or even a big Fire Shield, and it's likely many high-end SCs you'll meet will use at least one of these. Fire-9 Valks may have a high attack rating, but their damage rating is still low compared to Eagle Warriors, and it may not be enough vs hyper-prot SCs with gobs of hitpoints for them to get the edge here. EWs have twice as many attacks, and if they can get a STR bonus on at least 2 of them on top of that (I believe the STR bless bonus doesn't apply the the extra 'holy' fire attacks - maybe I'm wrong), then all the better. Vicious' idea here is to kill these SCs ___FAST___, before they, or their auras, kill a significant number of your flying sacred troops.

Plus, EWs are considerably cheaper than Valks - 4 times less, so what's not to like?

[Alneyan]

Nagot Gick Fel said:
No worries mate, you'll have to try really hard before raising my temperature - and anyway, I think in that case if someone has to apologize, it's me and nobody else.

Wouldn't your avatar be at a very high temperature? Ah, that doesn't qualify?

Slightly more on topic, would the Fiends of Darkness be helpful for early defence? Their flying might be helpful to bring down these SCs depending on their buffs to survive in melee; or is the current trend on strong combattants, with little magic support? I have some embarrassing memories of a Virtue being taken down by a handful of Fiends, as she wasn't that strong without her handy spells, so my view is probably quite biased.

[Zen]

If you are asking for the pain of playing Mictlan, my first bit of advice would be to play with reasonable VP's or a time limit. The biggest killer of Mictlan is it's own micromanagement, or more appropriately the need to use resources to circumvent some of that micromanagment. Creating Control Groups, making sure you have labs, etc, waste precious resources in order to stomach the icky micro.

Other than that. I have been very, very successful with my Mictlan games as long as I adhere to the rule of Sacreds.

Unless you plan on having some sort of silver-tongued diplomacy with pure and pristine, totally-honest and forthright neighbors, you are going to have to fight in the early game, if not for territory, for Dominion. The easiest way to spread your dominion is to kill other temples, gods and prophets .

Regardless of Scale Choices and Pretender Designs my first 3 armys in the first 10 turns look like this:

First Army: Starting Troops, +2-4 Feathered Warriors, As many Javelin Warriors as you can reasonably afford.

Second Army: Slaves from Initial Tribal King, 10-15 Eagle Warriors

Third Army: 10-15 Fiends of Darkness.

Using these armies either seperately (3 different armies) or combining a pair to take on different types of indies is the key to making the Mictlan Early game work. After the early game, you only need to worry about getting up 4-5 Blood Province Production centers. I almost always capitalize on the Magic 2 + Mictlan Priest spam, rush to Ice Devils and take a Pretender that can summon Ice Devils, worrying about equipping them later. I also tend to put at the very least 3 Air on my Pretender in such circumstances in order to forge what I need, when I need it. If I don't choose to put Air on my pretender I choose Astral, my second line of research is not Construction but Conjuration and I get a Harbinger.

All the time I have for now, but If I have time later I will offer a few more tendancies.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

The Panther said:
Taking a death scale means that you are relying on expanding into your neighbor's territory who took growth. This is not a very pleasing strategy to me.

Uh-oh... expanding into your neighbor territory, not a pleasing strategy to you? I guess everyone wants to be your neighbor in multiplayer games!

Just kidding, there are a lot of solid arguments in your post. Although I've never played long enough games for a death scale to really hurt me. And it should be noted that Mictlan has no real need to push its dominion, beyond what is needed to avoid extinction thru lack of it. Morale is not an issue to demons fighting in adverse dominion. This may not be true if you're playing with GEs like Gift of Health or themes like Water Cult, of course.

Actually, playing a low-dominion strategy with Mictlan might be an incentive to go with Order-0, maybe pick a Fortified City to somewhat make up for the income loss in the capital, and sacrifice just what you need to stabilize your dominion here? Since you won't reap the benefits of an orderly scale in most of your empire, you might as well want to save some design points. Maybe pick Luck instead, since the number of events doesn't scale up with the size of your empire beyond a threshold? Not having spending gold on fortresses and too many slaves in sacrifices, that should be appealing enough. Building temples as needed in captured or special site forteresses (taking advantage of the winged demons' high ability to siege and storm). Etc. Not sure it's worth it, but maybe someone will give this idea a try? This will definitely require a very agressive mindset, though.

[The Panther]

This was some interesting points in your post, Nagot.

I guess the reason I was so intensely focused on dominion spread in my only MP Mictlan game was that I started right next to a 10 dominion Ermor, who proceeded to spread death and decay into every single border province I owned. I went through heroic efforts to keep the ugly dominion spread from going past one row of border provinces. Perhaps if I had been luckier on my starting location, I could have done things differently. Or if I had been strong enough to take him out at the start. But I didn't because of my poor scales due to taking the VQ. And she is a horrible pretender against mindless Ermor troops who do not rout.

In fact, I still think that my biggest error in that game was spending far too many design points on the VQ before the game even started. Had I known I would start next to Ermor, I might have tried a fire 9 red dragon instead.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Alneyan said:
Wouldn't your avatar be at a very high temperature? Ah, that doesn't qualify?

Ahem, do you really think firing a flamethrower at a nuclear bLast will raise its temperature significantly?

Slightly more on topic, would the Fiends of Darkness be helpful for early defence? Their flying might be helpful to bring down these SCs depending on their buffs to survive in melee;

Fiends are great for many things:

(1) their claws are magic weapons, thus they're better than Devils vs ethereal targets.

(2) they're highly stealthy, thus hardly spotted even in mid-sized Groups, thus great raiders - give a Spectre flying boots and a dozen of Fiends, and give your enemies headaches.

(3) for the same reason, they're (with Hordes from Hell) the best tool in Mictlan's arsenal to capture fortresses - it's hard to reinforce one that seemed safe at some point, and gets besieged by 2 or 3 scores of Fiends the turn after.

or is the current trend on strong combattants, with little magic support?

Depends on how you define 'little'. Titan-sized pretenders with 2-4 levels in 2-3 magic paths - that's what you can expect from me, usually (not always), like it's always been.

I have some embarrassing memories of a Virtue being taken down by a handful of Fiends, as she wasn't that strong without her handy spells, so my view is probably quite biased.

Virtues are awesome early againts indeps. They're quite terrible at dealing with demons, undead, or berserk troops.

[Turin]

fire 9 red dragon with zens mod seems to be quite awesome. with enchantment 1 he can take every indie province solo on indie strength 9. And you can even afford order3 magic 3 growth 3 dom 6 with the usual sloth/misfortune/heat scales.

Only problem is that you don´t get good sitesearching, but since you focus on blood anyway, that´s not a big deal.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

The Panther said:
I guess the reason I was so intensely focused on dominion spread in my only MP Mictlan game was that I started right next to a 10 dominion Ermor,

Ah, damn, as bad a start as one can get, then. Hopefully it won't happen everytime you play Mictlan.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Zen said:
I almost always capitalize on the Magic 2 + Mictlan Priest spam, rush to Ice Devils and take a Pretender that can summon Ice Devils, worrying about equipping them later.

Or a pretender who can forge a Robe of the Sea (contruction 2). May look expensive at 20 gems, but if Blue Dragons are your style, it's still cheaper than giving blood magic to your pretender.

[archaeolept]

the problem there is that mictlan can only count on 1 water/turn, unless he's willing to alchemize his also limited astral income. might as well rush construction 6

Actually, one of the things I most like about Mictlan is how many variants on strategy they have. I don't personally rush for the ID/AD and instead count on mere mass of blood (after going quickly to const 4 for SDRs) to guarantee me a good selection of the blood summons. (especially under zen's mod, which ups the price and lvl of the ID, and improves the heliophagii).

As to taking blood on my pretender, I'd have to say I don't tend to do that. blood is by far the cheapest to empower, and spending so many design points on Blood 6 seems a waste, even though the bless effect is quite nice for the micts. blood 4 I could see, though for a Moloch I'd really rather have A4 to make up for Mictlan's prime elemental deficiency and to give a very strong boost to the Moloch's indy-fighting abilities.

And I don't usually go for early game fiends, as it takes so many of my capital only mages to summon sufficient numbers. However, fiends are great, and it really is a viable alternative; certainly, if I were not to take a blessing strat, I would summon them.

As to not taking death, ehh, this has been argued before. Even death-3 has never really bothered me (other than by making my large armies starve)