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Old May 11th, 2007, 06:00 PM

MaxWilson MaxWilson is offline
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Default Re: LA Agartha Advice Wanted

I'm hardly in a position to be giving advice, but I'll share a couple of reflections from my SP experience with them recently.

Even though the recruitable-anywhere sacred Blindfighters are tempting, in practice they seem to have trouble doing damage against real armies with their shortswords, perhaps because of their high encumbrance. Strength of Giants and an E9 bless helps, but Magma Eruption and/or skelly spam are the decisive factors when I'm going up against huge armies of EA Ermorian legions. If you do take a nice bless, though, Sepulchrals are not to be overlooked.

Ktonian necromancers are still somewhat frail and tend to die to incidental arrow hits and/or lucky cavalry charges. I ought to include Ironskin in my setups but it's hard to squeeze it into the 5 round limit. Could use Iron Warriors instead and stack multiple necromancers in the same square.

Iron Bane + Cave Knights or Umbrals = nasty. Keep this one well away from Blindfighters.

Umbrals + Iron Warriors are nice, too, but it's not easy to script effectively.

Tomb Oracles are nice SCs, but the lack of immortality is annoying if you happen to get Muted or Feebleminded. Make sure to bring a good helmet.

Overall, Agartha seems pretty strong in Evocation and Alteration, depending upon how your initial gem setup goes. A recent game against a few AIs went really sour when my first 15 provinces yielded only +1 death gems when searched with Dark Knowledge, since I took Death-3 and was really counting on transitioning to summoned troops. With a good gem income I'd probably rate Alteration a little higher because Marble Warriors and Darkness are powerful buffs to Umbrals, and that way you don't need to bring many mages into combat (so they can keep researching). Evocation lets you translate gold into battles won, but risks getting killed by a lucky arrow. Of course Conjuration-3 is a necessity.

-Maximilian

Edit: Also, because mobility is a problem, try to either get Air or Nature (for Faerie Queens) on your pretender or else hire Obscuro and have him forge Wind Boots.
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