LA Marignon Questions

[Legendary League]

I have a couple questions about LA Marignon, for an upcoming (newbie!) game that I'll be hosting. Keep in mind I'll be using the newest CBM, so any advice on how Mary changes from vanilla would be helpful!

First off, I've seen alot of guides recommending either a Baphomet F9S9 bless for flagellants or an awake SC (usually an E4 Cyclops or a Moloch). Since I am leaning towards the second route, wouldn't an A?S4 Virtue be a viable choice (allowing Mary to leverage into Astral and Air, since they already have high blood/fire)? Also in my test runs, and having a Dom10 (expecting to face an Ermor, R'lyeh, and Ulm in game, so sort of mandatory+blood sacrifice) the Virtue clears indies mindlessly (air shield, twist fate, +7 Awe), and can be empowered later in fire to start summoning Seraphs when necessary. I understand the Cyclops SC would give me a reinvig bless to my mages (otoh, I have reinvig through blood), and the Moloch can be used for early soul contracts/lifelong protections, but would a Virtue be an wise tradeoff? Additionally, how worth it is the production scale to Marignon, and how has the recent CBM changes affected the growth scale (mathematically: I know the base bonus has been nerfed and the growth rate increased)?

Also, a quick question about sailing: does it work with move 1 units (and hence make Mary infantry remotely usable), or do you need to be at least move 2 to utilize it?

Thanks!

[Kobal2]

First things first: you don't need an awake SC for expansion: a dozen royal guards backed by 10-20 crossbows clear most any indies. You don't need super high dom even against Ermor and Rlyeh because you have Holy 3 inquisitors to preach them away. And you most certainly don't want a bless for the flagellants because they suck horribly, and would suck horribly even with an all-9 bless if such a thing was even possible. If you want to roll with a bless, tailor it to your wizards and/or the angels - Earth, Nature, Astral for the angels ; Earth, Death for the wizards.

S4 is not good on an god you intend to fight with, because of magic duel. You need S7 to be safe from cheapo S1 mages trying to snipe him dead. You could be happy with S6, because that only gives them 1/36 chances to zap him but... yeah.

Me, I'd consider taking F1D2 on my god, to open up skulls of fire to bring an F3 master to F4 (you can get F4 geotic masters natively, but that's only 1/160 chance unless I botched the math). Also E2 to give the E1 masters boots so they can remotely sitesearch it. Maybe N2B2 for armour of thorns to let B3 masters reach B4 to spam boosters, but then again there an empowerment is not much of a problem.

Here are a couple ideas:

Sleeping crone, F1E4S4N4D1, Dom 6, Order 3 Heat 2 Growth 3 Magic 1. Go Thaum 2 first for auspex/augury and bonds of fire (great spell against many rushes), then Evoc 3 for fireball and arcane search ; then up to you. Either Const 6 for lanterns to make everything else easy if you can turtle quietly, or Alt 4 Ench 5 for wind guided flaming crossbows, or evoc for falling fires/holy pyre/storm+lighting spam, or straight up blood for devils of various shapes and sizes and fallen angels. I wouldn't rush the regular angels, pearls are hard to come by in the LA and it's going to be a while until you can summon one (plus they need buffs anyway)

Another option would be an F4S4B6 sleeping blood fountain, dom 7 O3H2G3Mis1Mag1 (or turmoil 1 luck 3). Go const 2, blood 1, thaum 3 (to teleport your blood fountain around, while bloodhunting the capital for a few turns is no big it's best to send it somewhere that doesn't generate quite so much money ASAP) ; start bloodhunting end of year 1, spam Soul Contracts, lead your hordes of devils with harlequins wielding scepters of authority and raid your nearest neighbour until he cries.

Sailing doesn't work with mapmove 1 units, no - they'd end their move in the water.

[Kobal2]

Oh, and while you probably don't need too much prod (although I suppose you could go hogwild, take an imprisoned god, max the scales and drown the world in crossbow bolts) you *absolutely* need Growth 3 no matter what - you've got old fire mages, they'll get diseased a lot come winter. Plus bloodhunting is much less micro heavy with G3, so there's that too.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Legendary League

Also, a quick question about sailing: does it work with move 1 units (and hence make Mary infantry remotely usable), or do you need to be at least move 2 to utilize it?
Thanks!

Originally Posted by Kobal2

Sailing doesn't work with mapmove 1 units, no - they'd end their move in the water.

1. Fire up a game with LA Marignon
2. Select your starting army
3. Try to make it move to an overseas province. (Mari is guaranteed a coastal start, and has MM 1 units in it's starting army.)

I'm not generally one to complain about people asking stuff rather than testing it out, (In fact, I think this is the first time ever I do so) but if this is too much work to do to learn about a nation you'll be playing in MP... You don't even have to hit end turn to find out.

(Oh, and the answer is, incidentally, that yes, mapmove 1 units benefit from sailing just fine. Sailing, by the way, is absolutely awesome, and can be leveraged to great effect depending on the map you're using. Once again depending on map setup, remember it might be possible to give Boots of Flying to your Goetic Masters/other supporting mages to fly around the sea and meat up with your sailers in the target province(s) to assault with an army of decent strength.)

Now, since I started off by berating people, I suppose I'll have to give some constructive advice as well, I suppose...

I'm not especially fond of taking an awake SC for Mari, since they expand quite well with blockers & crossbows. Also, they have amazing magic diversity, (all paths but nature) but low power in most paths, so you really want to think of a way to get some boosters, so I mostly end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales. (Then again, I allmost allways end up with a cheap rainbow with decent scales, so that might just be me. )

Things to keep in mind when designing your pretender:

* If you do indeed forgo the expansion pretender you probably want some order to make sure expansion goes smooth. The only good way to know for sure what's the minimum you can get away with is testing expansion over and over. With the changes to income from production in the last CBM I'd easily call production more important than order, though taking both is of course even better. (And depends a lot on whether you want luck or not.) If you do take a SC pretender production can be saved upon.
* Old, old mages and being a blood nation are both good reasons to take growth. (And I would almost definitely take it) On the other hand, blood gives you the means to prevent your mages from dying from old age (Boots of Youth) so if you really want to save some points here, you can. (Especially for smaller games.)
* Needed for Boosters: E2 for Earth Boots, S3 for RoW (With the other boosters you can natively forge) and A3 for both A boosters (With RoW) are really important, although E boots can quite easily be traded for. (And once you have one pair you can make your own.) Also nice is N2 to get you up the nature ladder. Anything on top of that is gravy. [I'm not disparaging gravy mind you, I love gravy. But if all you can get is the meat, you still have a nice meal.]
* Most of the deamons you can natively summon are heat immune and/or have heat auras. It's only a minor consideration, but if you move your temprature scale to gain some points, you probably want to do it towards heat. (Allthough wich other nations participate in the game is probably a more important consideration than this.)

And some tricks for during the game

* Royal guard make excellent blockers in early game with very high defense and decent armor. They do lack a lance though, so don't think of them as cavalry, they won't do more damage than any decent non-sacred infantry. Start phasing them out when your opponent brings out the area evocations, as a square of royal guard costs twice as much as one of infantry. (Either your own MM1 pikeneers/halbardiers, or any indep. infantry you scrounge up.)
* Exploit sailing. As said above you can sometimes combine it with other movement modes to really surprise your opponents.
* Royal navigators are really nice. They're cheap, they're mobile, combining sailing and teleportation, (A2 ones cloud trapeze out of the box, S2 ones teleport with cap.) and they can form communions, so you can easily project dangerous power anywhere on the map. (And lightning-based communions can potentially destroy entire armies (depending on their makeup obviously) if you take along (or summon) a blocker or two.
* Fallen angels. They're really nice, and relatively cheap. With the correct research you can cast phoenix pyre, soul vortex, reinvigoration, and be almost impossible to kill by any non-lifeless army. (reinvigoration requires fidgety slave management though) And they fly. (Don't forget to combine with sailing navigators for buffs (etherealness) or mage support (blocking for lightning communion) when it makes sense to do so.

[Shangrila00]

2 things about Marignon:

1) You can get a great deal of diversity without needing your pretender if you are willing to wait a bit to get some gem incomes up, and you are better able to take that than most being a strong blood nation. Fallen Angels are awesome for diversity since they give D3, and the F/D crosspath. Being recruit anywhere, rare randoms like E2, F4, B4, and the E/S crosspath are actually reasonably reliably attainable off Goetic Masters, depending on the size of the map. That leaves nature, and nature is the one path reasonably reliably available off indies, S3 for rings, and A4, and yeah that does point to the Virtue pretender. This feeds into:

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion thanks to a combination of bloodsac and recruit anywhere L3 Inquisitors that also aren't absolutely useless (though still mostly so) when not preaching. It's quite possible for a dom10 Marignon to never need to siege down and assault a fort. Burn down non forted temples with raiding, bloodsac away most candles (as in limited focused bloodsaccing as opposed to the kill the world kind which you are also ideally suited to doing), then use the Inquistors with your armies to preach away any holdout candles.

Consider a sleeping Virtue A4S4. Virtues need a bit of research to be useful anyway, and Marignon can expand quite effectively with crossbowmen and royal guards. With Dom10, you can afford +5 scales, say T1P2H3G3L3M1. As a blood nation, turmoil luck works out better than order, and growth 3 improves sustainability and reduces micro. I don't like going beyond turmoil 1 though, as it opens up a whole bunch of poploss events, and makes money a squeeze in the early game unless you get lucky with events. Taking a temperature extreme to afford production is personal preference, improving early expansion a bit, and letting you mass crossbowmen more easily, and either temperature works about as well. Heat makes devils stronger, gives you a few more fire gem events, and prevents the snow blocking pass and blizzard events. Cold makes frost fiends stronger, gives a few more water gem events, and prevents the lab burning down and raging rebel events, and might get you a very useful W2 ice druid. Yeah, the Virtue is going to die if she goes up against any astral nation, but then she can still be useful as a battle caster with your thunderstrike communions of Royal Navigators, or forge things. Empower her in blood to forge a robe of the magi if you've been having bad luck with randoms.

Going lower dom and a rainbow pretender is also viable of course. Consider a druid. E/N is the best bless for Marignon, since it helps both Goetic Masters and Angels.

Also, on certain maps, holy crap sailing. Marignon can easily make entire armies complete with full communions sailing with Admirals and Royal Navigators. Sadly, you don't have any fire mages with sailing, so no flaming arrows.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Shangrila00

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion

Oh, yeah. Forgot to add that. Dominionwise you're really free to do as you like. If you want to outright win through dominion, or even "merely" kill of opponents, there's probably no one who does it better. On the other hand, with the ability to blood sac, you can easily survive with a really low dominion too. Whatever floats your boat.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Amhazair

Oh, yeah. Forgot to add that. Dominionwise you're really free to do as you like. If you want to outright win through dominion, or even "merely" kill of opponents, there's probably no one who does it better. On the other hand, with the ability to blood sac, you can easily survive with a really low dominion too. Whatever floats your boat.

Mictlan is still better at domkilling, if only because Mictlan is very good at getting truly absurd amounts of blood slaves. Still, Marignon is good at it, and can pair it effectively with a more standard military strategy.

[Kobal2]

Originally Posted by Amazhair

I'm not generally one to complain about people asking stuff rather than testing it out, (In fact, I think this is the first time ever I do so) but if this is too much work to do to learn about a nation you'll be playing in MP... You don't even have to hit end turn to find out.

The *one* time I don't fire up a test game to double check the answer a question

Originally Posted by Knai

Mictlan is still better at domkilling, if only because Mictlan is very good at getting truly absurd amounts of blood slaves. Still, Marignon is good at it, and can pair it effectively with a more standard military strategy.

That was true before the latest CBMs, back when they could still have sanguine dousing rods made and carried by every last 60g priest.

Current day Mictlan is bad at blood hunting, whereas LA Marignon has B3 holy bloodhunters available from any castle for a mere 190g a pop. Also H3 bloodsaccers who count double to remove black candles (although that may only count when preaching and not when saccing, I dunno)

Do the math: a Mictlan priest has 50% chance each turn to net d6+1 slaves. A B3 Geotic master gets d6+3 every turn, guaranteed (unless there's unrest). On average, you need ~3 Mictlan priests to equal the output of a single Geotic Master, and they'll have much more chances to generate unrest. That's 180g and 3 turns of recruitment to the master's 1 turn and 190g. 3 B3 geotics can operate pretty much indefinitely at 0 taxes barring "bad luck" when all 3 get huge amounts of slaves. On any given day, 9 Mictlan Priests in a single province will generate at least 9d6-9 unrest (avg. 22), more if they actually manage to catch slaves.

And of course, while Mictlan priests who generate too much unrest can't do much else but sit on their hands, Geotic Masters can forge useful stuff, summon devils, can Harm or Life for a Life or Infernal Prison any would-be raider...

[Shangrila00]

This is CBM, which I think makes Marignon stronger than Mictlan at blood sac.

1) No jade knives. LA Mictlan can't get above holy 1 outside the capital, and only the King of Rain gets holy 3 and recruiting him means not recruiting the other cap only mages which are also necessary for Mictlan, and using him to bloodsac means not using him for all his other roles. So Mictlan needs to seriously sacrifice to crank out those temple checks. Marignon on the other hand has recruit anywhere H3s which don't really have anything else they need to be doing.

2) No SDRs. Outside the cap, Mictlan only gets B1s, while Goetic Masters are recruit anywhere and 1/4 get B3. That means Marignon can spend money to get more hunters, while Mictlan needs to spend slaves to summon hunters. That's super efficient in the long run thanks to Mictlan's super good summons, but that means less actual blood available. This plus temples that actually work means that a Marignon focused on blood will have more blood to actually do things. Of course, Mari is never as focused on blood as Mictlan, but that's because of its other options, not that it's not capable.

Plus, Marignon needs to sacrifice (ha) less to get dom10. Mictlan has a strong incentive to pump all their points into a massive bless rather than spend on high dominion when their sacreds are recruit anywhere and thus not limited by holy.

[Soyweiser]

Newbie game? Go for the bloodsac tactic. Teach them that a properly executed blood sacrifice tactic is very very dangerous.

If you have sailing, play around with that in a SP game. I played LA Atlantis, and there I learned how immensely powerful it can be. (You can skip one sea province, even if your army is already underwater. As sea provinces tend to have a lot of connections to other provinces (which is something that makes it hard for water nations to keep their dom up) you can really use this to your advantage.

Personally, I would go heavily for blood. You can bloodhunt like crazy, blood is crazy strong. (Gives communions, good summonables, reasonable SC's if you get there first(*), good combat magic). The only problem with blood magic is that you can never ever have enough blood slaves. (NEVER) So you tend to lag research wise, as you need your mages to blood hunt. (A heavy blood nation that leads in research while still being able to wage war has probably already won).

*: Never mind the SC's only get them if you have blood slaves to spare and what to deny them to others. http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Fallen_Angel Get those. f3d3b3 yes please . Rush for those. No upkeep, sacred, can bloodhunt, good stats... Nice .

(Of course, you could ignore me and go for the conjuration summons, also very good, but you probably need to build your pretender around summoning those).

LA marignon is very strong, access to almost all the paths except nature. (Harbringers give air). Blood, good mounted units as blockers, crossbows, sailing for raiding. Scouts.

I think I would go for n4e4 on the pretender (helps with the sacred mages, and late game sacred summons) dom10 and scales. Imprison the pretender for points (One downside, you only get to sitesearch with the pretender for N mage in very late. Rush blood for blood 7 to get access to death magic. Flood the world with blood sac, demons, or just get vampires, as your dominion is going to be everywhere, they are hard to get rid off. And 3 vampire lords can blood sabbath to get to d4 and cast darkness. So you don't even need to risk a 'expensive' skull staff into combat.