I’ve been playing around a lot with the monkey nations lately, particularly Kailasa, and wanted to put some thoughts to paper about it. At first glance you really don’t seem to have much going for you, but a little forethought and planning can let you build a pretty decent little nation.
1) Overview
1a. Weaknesses
Let’s not kid ourselves. Kailasa has a lot of weaknesses, particularly among your national troops. Markata are only really good for being the flimsiest of chaff. The low morale and protection of atavi infantry render them useless on the frontline. Atavi archers are pretty astonishingly average but require a solid front; something you don’t have since your only real tank unit is very high resource and massing them would require points in production which you’ll never take. Your bandar troops perform competently at first, but can’t contend with real armies. Finally, your sacred troops are excellent in melee but they will suffer heavily to archer fire before they can close and continue to take friendly fire afterwards.
Kailasa’s sacred troops warrant a little more scrutiny. You have two capitol-only troops, one armed with a bow, the other with falchion and buckler, and a recruit-anywhere version armed with a spear. The bow-armed option can be readily dismissed as not engaging in melee ignores awe, which is arguably the best thing about all three sacred troops. They’re moderately expensive at 35-40 gold and outside of a buckler on the capitol-only variant, they wear no armor and have no natural protection. The final nail in the coffin of your sacred troops is your access to priests. Your only national priests are capitol-only and, since they’re also your top shelf mages, monstrously expensive. Oh yeah, and you’ll need magic leadership for them. Needless to say, employing your sacreds on the field can be somewhat cumbersome.
Finally, your PD is somewhat on the poor side.
1b. Strengths
Kailasa’s largest strength is clearly their magic. All your mages are sacred. Yogis can make for brutally cost-effective (if not time-effective) researchers with strong magic scales and that little 1s can be very flexible. Early on, they serve to provide ready access to ethereal buffs, and through reverse communions at first and/or light of the north star later, can spam mind burn/soul slay or duel, and have obvious utility as communion slaves for your other mages with astral picks, (i.e. virtually every path you have access to) giving you a great deal of flexibility on the battlefield with an easily massed research unit. Gurus start 2s1n, giving you instant access to curse, but only have 1 map move. They’re nearly as cost-effective as Yogis as researchers, but the lower map move makes them far less practical for battlefield use. The primary utility of gurus is that they’re more time-efficient researchers than yogis and can summon gandharvas out of the box. Yakshini are 3w1n 110%wesn whose sole purpose in life is clams and site searching for clams. There is a little battlefield utility in them, particularly those with an astral pick who can lead communions, but since you have to choose each turn between a yakshini and a yaksha … let’s talk about yaksha.
Statwise, both yakshini and yaksha are comparable to your sacreds; low protection, decent HP and awe. They both also have a very respectable 17 inherent magic resist. Yaksha come as 3e1n 110%wesn casters, giving each and every one of them access to blade wind, strength of giants, legions of steel (if you actually manage to recruit some troops with armor) as well as the obvious earth self buffs and in the late stages of the game, can toss around destruction, marble warriors, army of lead/gold, and petrify. As a special and ironic note, iron bane/destruction don’t worry you so much since you probably don’t have troops with armor anyway. Yakshas with an astral pick are particularly useful. Since your hierarchy of mages is communion ready, there’s the obvious niche of communion master yakshas raining enormous blade winds or spamming thugs with petrify, but they also can make thug/SCs sad by popping eagle eye and raining gifts from heaven until they get lucky. Furthermore, they can also make you a crystal coin and a crystal matrix. Useful as Yakshini are, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not popping out a yaksha a turn from your capitol.
You also have some amazing national summons. They’ll be discussed in greater detail later, but for now note that they are all astral, dovetailing nicely with your inherent ability to clam.
Your sacreds, while one of your weaknesses are also one of your strengths. Your recruitable sacreds, while having glaring weaknesses, also carry significant power. As mentioned above, they have reasonably high HP, but they also have some of the highest non-cav tactical movement and with 15 strength and 2 attacks, they can do a lot of damage very quickly. And c’mon, let’s face it… no armor means no encumbrance! Woohoo for fatigueless units!
2) Scales/Pretender
Certain scales are addressed easily enough; a heat 2 preference makes heat 3 a must and sloth 3 is the only viable option. You’ll also want to take at least magic 1 to help research. From here, scales will be determined by pretender choice. A rainbow mage is likely a poor choice, as you’ve got excellent access to most paths on your national mages/summons. An awake SC will compensate for your poor initial army, but you’ll be behind people expanding with awake SCs as well as national armies that can actually kill things. An imprisoned bless is possible, but requires some pretty atrocious scales. The main focus of the rest of this guide will be on imprisoned bless, but some of the guide will also apply to SC starts. On to your bless!
It may seem somewhat insane to build a bless with Kailasa, given the issues with actually –blessing- your sacreds, leading them across the map and their tendency to die when hit by any projectile larger than, say, small hail, and this insanity only becomes more pronounced when you say the words ‘air bless’, but an argument can be made.
The nature of the bless is pretty self evident. With decent starting defense and awe, w9 makes your sacreds amazingly difficult to take down in melee. As much of what is excellent about your nation is astral, (summons, clam-ability) it also follows that you take a strong astral pretender, giving you a magic resist boost that will be invaluable later on, a high astral caster for late game, and twist fate to further help your sacreds. Finally, you’ve got to take an air bless. Fielding sacreds without it is an exercise in futility.
This effectively brings us back to scales. We’ll need to ransack almost everything in order to pay for that bless and enough dominion to recruit sacreds in any reasonable number. The most obvious choice is an imprisoned oracle:
Astral 9, Water 9, Air 6
Order 3
Sloth 3
Heat 3
Death 1
Misfortune 3
Magic 1
Dominion 8
There are some flaws in this build, however. Paired with misfortune, even a minor death scale opens some ugly plague events which can quickly reduce population and income. The lack of random gems from events can also seriously slow down expanding your gem income. This is particularly lethal for a Kailasa pursuing a clam strategy, as starting your clam economy as soon as possible is your top priority. Let’s examine an alternate orace build:
Astral 9, Water 9, Air 6
Turmoil 3
Sloth 3
Heat 3
Death 3
Luck 3
Magic 3
Dominion 8
We’ve given up a ton of income in this build, but we’ve made significant gains. Foremost, these scales pretty much guarantee that you’ll be able to site search for water as soon as you hit conj3, making a smooth transition into a clam economy. You also further boost the effectiveness of your researchers, particularly yogis. While it’s not a certainty, the possibility of cash-giving events, in both 1 time and permanent forms increases remarkably. The question, really, is do you have enough money?
Profit is gross income minus expenditures. These scales eat heavily into your gross income, but you expenditures, your upkeep, will be exceedingly low. Magic 3 allows you to build a solid research base on yogis for small initial expenditures and practically non-existent upkeep. At 80 gold a piece and sacred while delivering 5 research, you won’t need to spend much to keep pace in the research race. In terms of what you’ll spend on troops, 35-40 gold and sacred is also easy on the bottom line. Finally, you won’t need many troops, as those that you do recruit are actually very, very lethal.
3) Strategy
The vehicle is built, so let’s put rubber to the road and see how this baby runs. First thing up is early expansion. The starting army is useless except as chaff, so start by recruiting a yaksha and a yavana. Next turn, prophetize the yaksha and round out the recruit queue with yavana. Turn 3, fluff up your sacred with some chaff and start marching. While typing the guide, I fired up a quick map and marched those 6 sacreds with 10 markata chaff across 16 provinces before I got tired of clicking end turn. You’ll want to save all your money for troops the first few turns, forming parties of 8-10 yavana lead by a yaksha (set to bless, bless, attack, troops set to hold and attack). Each of those groups is capable of going through almost any indie province you can find. Certain archer-heavy indies can inflict losses and there’s the ever present chance of bad luck killing the commander, but for the most part you can expand at will.
Essentially all early rush builds rely on melee, playing into the strength of your own sacreds. Awe will be less useful versus most of these builds (small note: elephants versus awe is tremendously amusing) but you should still be able to inflict enough damage to convince your opponent that you’re more trouble than it’s worth. Heck, you might even win. Leverage your easy access to curse/horror mark to persuade SCs that you’re still not worth it. Early/mid will be the most tenuous time for you, as everyone will be aware that you’re planning to clam it up. Play defensively and employ the flexibility granted by your effectiveness in small groups and, with some research, the excellent combat magic options available to your yaksha-lead armies.
In the final analysis, your sacreds are shock troops. Their high move when blessed, air shield, twist fate and HP will allow them to reach enemy ranks and start dishing out massive damage before succumbing to massed missile fire. Even your shieldless guhyaka will take, on average, 5 volleys of accurate missile fire to bring down. That leaves you 2-3 rounds of 4 attacks on 15 strength, and it further assumes you do nothing to prevent the archers from targeting them directly.
You’ll want to research conj3 for site searching, then cons2 for hammers as fast as possible. From there, evo2 and thau2 to complete your spell-based site searching, then back to the conjuration line until 7, pausing only to pick up other niche spells as circumstances demand. Your goal at this point is to open up siddhas and gandharvas.
Gandharvas deserve a short paragraph of their own here. With awe, high protection (-very- high for early age) 2 attacks, high strength and decent defense/attack, they’re monsters in their own right. With the bless described, they become thug-quality combatants limited only by fatigue. By the time something manages to score a hit through the bless-boosted defense and awe, the odds of it actually hurting their 16/18 prot are pretty slim. Combine this with the MR boost from the bless, and even small groups of them can inflict massive damage on opposing troops.
Siddhas are 2a3s3h mages and they are truly everywhere you want to be. One of the cornerstones of your late-game flexibility, this mobile divine bless factory can reach pretty much any place on the map, either with teleport/cloud trap (depending on your gem situation) or simply by virtue of the big ol’ honking 14 map move. This allows you to (finally!) have easy access to divine bless and allows all the yaksha you’ve been so busy churning out to relax fully into the combat magic role they fill so very well. As the game continues and the pearls begin to roll in, s3 will be your primary astral mage (outside of your pretender) and will take over the responsibility of summoning more siddha and Rudra (oh, Rudra). Given the buffing potential of their paths, awe and bless, they can also be kitted out to perform hit-and-run raids deep into enemy turf. As astral mages with decent leadership, they’re also ideal for gateway/astral travel to further expand your mobility. All in all, these are some of your more flexible units, and a steal at only 35 pearls.
Now that we’ve brought up Rudra, let’s talk a little about all of the beautiful things this unit can do. Rudra are, without a shadow of a doubt, the single most lethal unit in your arsenal. 55 pearls gets you Well above average stats in all categories, notably 32 HP, 18 base MR and 4 flying mapmove. It also gets you 3d3a3f and you can do some evil, evil things with those paths. In an army support role, they can toss up a storm to further protect your sacreds, can be given a crystal matrix to add high end fire evocations to a communion, throw flaming arrows and wind guide on a hastily recruited pack of markata to give an enemy army a nasty surprise, but where they really shine is smashing ill-prepared opposing armies. Give one a skull staff, a lead shield and an amulet of antimagic, script it to bless, soul vortex, phoenix pyre and attack. When the enemy does get lucky and manages to take you out, poof! AoE damage and soul vortex will suck the fatigue from pyre back down in short order. Worse case scenario, they don’t kill you and you wail on them until they rout. If you really feel like it, you can give it a fire/frost/shadow brand, but it’s not really necessary. Even the amount of MR boost is negotiable, depending on the composition of the enemy army. Once it finally picks up a career-ending affliction like mute, you can either heal it up if you’ve secured the means, put it on army support duty as detailed above, move it to forge detail or any other number of useful little chores. Rudra also represent your primary SC killer. If you’re getting raided by SCs, fit a Rudra with a shroud, give it a luck booster and script attack, hand of deathx4. Alternatively, kit the same but with 4 dusk daggers and just set it to attack. 10 attacks per round to chew through defense and armor negating damage should drop just about anything in short order.
Your biggest issue will be evocation-happy armies plodding through your turf. While you’re clearly more mobile, eventually you’ll have to take them down. With an s3 base mage and hordes of expendable yogis to fuel a communion, master enslave is a possibility. I’ve also experimented with kitting a couple yaksha with astral picks with shrouds, starshine caps and coins, ritual of returning them up, scripting earthquake, then teleporting them onto large armies. Twist fate soaks the earthquake hit initially and subsequent quakes trigger ritual, popping you back home. This is reasonably effective at killing low-hp mages and has the added benefit of doing no small amount of damage to the opposing army. It’s somewhat gem-intensive to set up, though you should have a very respectable gem income by the time this tactic becomes necessary.
Any input on other possible counters to mage-heavy armies would be greatly appreciated.
4) Conclusions
Excellent summons, tactical and strategic flexibility both map-wise and magic-wise make for a monster power curve into the late game. If you can fight like a demon early on and keep the predators off your back, you can easily grow into the biggest, meanest boy on the block. The question is how to make it that far with such poor national troops.
Thoughts on Kailasa
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