[Squirrelloid]

EA Agartha is perhaps the worst nation in the EA. They have virtually no units worth buying, really expensive top tier mages, and desperate need for an awake pretender. On top of that, most of their units actually worth using are sacred, and thus could benefit from a bless. Its enough to drive you crazy.

Lets talk about the units worth using first:

Units:
Troglodytes - they're good for indie clearing, and can even have use vs. other players armies. But they're also really expensive, and need to be massed to be effective.

Seal Guard - Ok, i'm not going to claim they're good. But they're durable and blessable. Its something.

Ancient One - worse than the Seal Guard, but easier to mass (ha ha) and you can sub some of these for Seal Guards in a pinch.

Commanders:
Ancient Lord - you'd never waste capitol time building one, but its a great thug chassis, and blessable to boot.

Earth Reader - decent research chassis (for you. You are EA Agartha after all). Also, not capitol only.

Oracles - Sacred, E3-5, at least thug quality. These guys are rather amazing, if you can equip them properly. They have some serious issues. (1) Like all agarthan units, they can't hit the broad side of a barn. (2) No starting equipment except a big club. Seriously? Seriously. (3) Old age. (4) 5 encumbrance base. Yes, with no equipment. Seriously.

So, virtually every above-named unit is sacred, so we need to talk about a bless. That most of our good commanders are sacred mages, and all of our units have encumbrance problems, immediately suggests an Earth bless. And with our abundant access to earth gems and magic, E9 sounds like a really good idea (bracer stacking is a good thing!)

Then we notice that our attack skill sucks. On everyone. So a fire bless is probably in order.

Now, you'll remember I said we need an awake pretender, so E9Fx is probably all she wrote for a bless. We'd love to swing Nature as well, but its really not in the cards.

Pretender:
You may have noticed the total lack of equipment on the Oracles. We're going to get around that by forging like mad in year one. Fortunately, we get 4e/trn from our capitol. More fortunately, the Forge Lord is available, and has E + F natively, which is perfect.

Awake Forge Lord, E9F4

Scales:
Despite the high gold cost of the Oracles, we're going to take crappy scales overall.

Order 3 - we need gold. Actually, we need to mitigate our other scale choices.
Sloth 3 - Troglodytes require 1 resource. Oracles require 1 resource. We're not going to build that many seal guards per turn.
Heat 3 - we're cold-blooded, and want to push away any cold dominion as fast as possible. Also, we need the points.
Death 3 - yeah, we have old mages. Sucks to be them. We need the points, and we don't need to eat.
Luck 3 - We need the windfall income, and we need the gems, and any other events that happen are just gravy. Also, we have *amazing* national heroes, including the multi-hero Great Olm. Luck 3 is not optional - EA Agartha requires it.
Magic 1 - makes the earth readers (slightly) better than pocket calculators.

However much dominion you can afford at this point. Should be +1 to 4.

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Ok, that already looks pretty nasty. What the hell are we going to do with this mess. Well it gets worse.

(1) Hope you start with many adjacent provinces. Less than 4 and you'll probably start thinking about setting AI immediately.
(2) Hope you start with an adjacent high-income province, it'll help.
(3) Hope you start with an adjacent high resource province or two - it'll help.
(4) Hope the indies around you aren't too strong.

EA Agartha has so much against it that a really bad starting situation and the game might as well be over for you.

Turn 1: Set Forge Lord to research, and set research to Construction. Patrol with starting army, and start scouting. Set taxes to 150.

Buy 8 troglodytes. Hit end turn.

(5) Hope your patrollers actually manage to keep unrest at 0. Your patrolling ability is rather variable, and while most of the time you'll do it, sometimes you'll totally fail at patrolling entirely. That's probably a game over, barring some help from Luck to save your bacon. Setting taxes lower won't help - even at 120% your patrollers will fail utterly, and you need that income now.

Turn 2: Set taxes back to normal. Give starting commander the troglodytes. Attack somewhere with all those units, preferably a high income province. However, while this army will utterly destroy some indies, it'll also get totally hosed by others. You're depending on these guys to get ~5 provinces before they bite it, so try to minimize casualties.

Forge Lord keeps researching. Buy an Oracle (death). If you need to, alchemize a fire gem or two into cash. If by some miracle you have extra cash (say a luck event), spring of a Seal Guard if you can.

Turn 3-5: Research to constr 2, keep expanding with army. You want to expand away from your capitol if possible. Buy oracles (water) when able, earth readers when not.

Why water oracles - they have better defense and otherwise at least equal stats to their rivals. We're also looking for E4 and no old age, which may take a few buys. (We'll take Old Age over E3 if necessary for SC roles).

The moment you get Constr 2, switch to conjuration research. Have the Forge Lord make a hammer. This should happen about turn 5.

The turn you make a hammer you also need to make a bracer of protection at full cost. It sucks, but tempo matters. Use the Earth Reader as a forge-monkey.

The following turn you'll pass the new hammer to the forge monkey, and make fire plate with the forge lord and another bracers with the monkey.

Its turn 7 and we're finally ready to party with our SC. Give an E4 non-old Oracle (water) both bracers and the fire plate. The fire plate keeps him from caring about the heat from our dominion, and it plus the bracers will let you count the E9 +4 protection 3x. Checking your army of seal guards, you'll have 4-6 at this point, take 4-5 of them with him. Set the seal guards and the oracle at the back, have the guards hold and attack, and the oracle divine bless (his aim sucks with bless, and the fatigue cost is identical, so...), and Legion of Steel, then hold one turn and attack. They'll take most indies with little problem.

Our trog+starting army has probably near-burned itself out or run out of indies it can handle - that's ok, it did its job.

You're also going to pass your hammer back to the forge lord and make another hammer for 3e. Sweet. Each new hammer should go to someone for forging, and start pumping out bracers and fire plate (after your third hammer).

Once your forge lord makes a 3rd hammer you're going to be putting out gear for an SC every 1-2 turns, assuming you have suitable oracle chasses.

As your death gems permit, use your one death oracle to make fear helms. (And otherwise consider splashing black steel helms onto your oracle SCs, as they have no helmet!) You may have noticed that even with the fire bless your attack skill is not much to speak of - fortunately Star of Heroes is a cheap earth forging that gives +6 to attack rating! We'll take it.

You should also shortly be up to ~3 Seal Guards/turn, so every 2nd turn 5-6 seal guards + oracle should be plausible. If you can't get enough Seal Guards, supplement with Ancient Ones.

Whenever conj 3 finishes, those oracles should go Divine Bless, Summon Earthpower, Legion of Steel - more reinvig and less fatigue from LoSteel will help with staying power and avoiding wounds. Your next research priority is probably Thaum 2.

Put up a 2nd fortress in a forest province towards the end of the year if at all possible. You'll want to get someone there to build a lab/temple to make earth readers.

At some point in year one you'll probably get a hero. Research may be the best use to put him to early, but they may be rather useful SCs or battle-casters later.

Post-Year One:
So year 1 is over and you have an anemic province total of maybe 15 if you're lucky. But you also have a lot of gear, strong SCs, and can likely defend what you have. Every single one of your oracles is also great at manual searching for E and H sites, plus some minor splash site searching. Consider prophetizing an E4 for H4 and manually searching asap.

Research Priorities post-opening:
Conjuration - your national summons range from decent to great - Umbrals are awesome, but far down. Summon Earth Power is castable by virtually every mage you'll ever send into combat, and you need the reinvigoration. You also have enough death to get access to some toys here. Note that Umbrals are moved to Conj 7 in CBM, which is a major nerf here.

Construction - Your commanders win battle by carrying the right equipment.

Enchantment - skelly spam for death oracles, army buffs, and eventually Earth Bloodwell Deep.

Alteration - Quicken Self may warrant a detour, as well as lots of earth buffs.

Thaum - level 2 for remote searching.

You can pass on basically everything else. Evocation especially, because your mages can't hit anything.