[Baalz]

konming said:
How do you deal with LA R'leyh if you want to go into sea at all?

Sure your troops are amphibious, but they also have low MR. Even with S9 bless, 14 MR (maybe 13 due to magic scale) will not last against mind blasters. Anti-magic both take time to research and only your (most likely) imprisoned god can cast it. You do not get quickness, so while you can kill all the chaff, you just do not do it quickly enough, giving plenty of time for mind blasters. Also your denfense is not high, leaving 16 protection (again E9 bless) as your only saving grace. 16 protection is good enough for R'leyh free spawn, but their slave guardians should have no problem killing them. Even all those coral spears can do enough poison damage.

Needly to say, your commander will go mad pretty quickly in R'leyh domain, and you cannot even forge amulet of antimagic yourself.

Without the water part, I just do not see how they match up against most of the stronger land nations. Maybe I am missing something?

Well, I haven't gone up against a clever player in this matchup yet, but I have tested it out against large masses of mind blasters/chaff and all I can say is go ahead and try it out - 14 MR makes all the difference in the world. Arrsatut's absolutely *destroy* chaff, the front line disintegrates each turn and the small regen goes a long way towards offsetting minor poison damage. In my tests a group of about 50 Arrsatuts killed 200+ groups of chaff blocking 50+ blocks of mind blasters without breaking a sweat - a handful got paralyzed each round but never critical mass. I've yet to see somebody play LA R'yleh without sloth-3, so I'm not too worried about overwhelming amounts of slave guardians (who have an 8 defense and will on average be killed in one hit by Assatuts with a couple experience stars - which they rack up quite fast). Slave guardians also have an 8 moral and are *perfect* targets for the fear spam I mention above if your opponent is fielding any significant numbers of them. Terror/frighten spam + low moral + rapid casualties....I don't see them causing too much trouble.