[Evilhomer]

Response to salamander:

I never knew this. And in fact in the megagame, in which I am MA R'Lyeh, I had a 1 heat index on my home province for some time and it reported a loss of gold and supplies when I checked the scales. Does it still report that as a default, but water is not affected anyway?

The scales show a loss of income, but if you check the income itself it doesn't matter (try setting up a game with cold 3 and another game with no temperature scale and compare the listed province income. Your supplies will take a hit as listed however.

I'd also add that they only have a strat move of 1. This becomes more important as you spread on land as it limits the mobility of your forces.

I will add this, they are simply not a good unit in comparison.

Other good points about these guys. While they have the plate armor of the Illithid soldiers, they retain a strat move of 2. Another nice advantage is that they can lead both normal troops (40) and magical troops (also 40) right out of the gate. Some nations have problems with reconciling magic and normal troops under leaders, so this is a nice plus. R'Lyeh tends to be thick with magic troops, but we also get use of normal ones as well. They also have better morale than our starspawn leaders.

You are right indeed, as I said initially I was a bit to lazy to cover the units in detail, but its a good point.

The 280/1 Starspawns can also get some death by luck of the draw. I have at least 1 Starspawn in my new SP game that has 2 death out of the box. I immediately set him out to search for magic sites. This can add a little death bonus for you early if you get lucky on the draw.

That section was mostly on how to reach high level death without empowering. The kokythos (sp?) has death 3 and you only need w4d1 to summon it, from there you can add skullstaff and skullface and a ring of sorc and voila, you have a tartarian factory.

Pretender choice is one of my favorite decision-making parts of the game. I use a sleeping or imprisoned Void Lurker with heavy magic quite often, but like to experiment with other types as well. In my new SP game I tried an awake Ancient Kraken with a small amount of magic to try to rush some of the nearby water provinces.

Experiment away, most crucial part is to have fun with your build and the game. In a strategic point of view though i really belive the awake pretender is the best choice for rlyeh.

I am very curious as to your bless strategy for R'Lyeh. On the one hand, we only have the 150/1 Starspawns for troops we can build that are sacred. However, everything that comes out of the void gate is also sacred, and some of those things are already effective, even before being blessed.

Could be somewhat funny to atempt. Point remains though Rlyeh cannot mass sacred troops so they are not a good bless nation (in fact they are as crappy as it gets if you are looking for a bless nation).

I'm not sure how useful the hybrid forts (coastal R'Lyeh forts in friendly dominion that make free spawns and allow hybrids to be hired) are to LA R'Lyeh, with your freespawns and all. For MA R'Lyeh, they are fairly decent. The Hybrids you get from these are not stellar, but neither are they actually bad. They have decent morale and are amphibious as well which makes them pretty handy to have. I do not build the hybrids via normal production instead I rely on the free ones to supplement my forces.

You cannot build the starspawns in these forts however, which means they are alot worse than the underwater variant. I only add fortresses above water if its a strategic site i need to protect.