Guide: MA Man - Making the best of a bad deal

[chrispedersen]

Completely disagree. Knights are eye candy and way too hard to mass.

Even if you *do* buy Prod+3 - you're better off buying more longbowmen.

[Grek]

Originally Posted by Agema

Thugs/SCs

You don't have any. Okay, that's a bit harsh. With some boosters to Air, you can get the elemental royalty eventually. Nature will get you Sleepers, although they aren't that big an improvement on your Lord Wardens. Ivy Kings may suffice later on, but beware them having no Helm slot. You do have lots of N3 mages, so you have got the opportunity to Charm enemy thugs and SCs, particularly useful if your opponent has skimped on MR boosters. Not only that, but you've got N3A2, which means potential cloud trapezing charmers, so you could catch some thugs/SCs, although any opponent worth his salt will probably hammer that square with simple assassination spells and you would be saying goodbye to plenty of your charm brigade. Man has a number of national heroes which may turn up at your capital's gates, all of which from my experience have been extremely forgettable.

You have mothers. Take a minor nature bless and a strongish earth bless. The AAN mothers should do Mistform, Barkskin, Resist Lightning, hold, attack, cast spells. With shrouds and a vine shield, they become cloud trapezing thugs who kill people with shockwave. Drop one in every enemy provice the first turn of the war, take the province, stealth off into safety and watch the enemy cry for their mommy.

That bless is also good for your crones, who get larger than normal regen due to their strong nature paths. It will keep them alive and, I think, unafflicted for longer.

[Tolkien]

Hmm, interesting mother strategy. Sounds alot like Eriu or Tir'Na'Nog's Tuatha/Sidhe Lord thuggery.

As for the crones, they will be if you slap on shrouds. They don't start blessed, so it doesn't help.

[Amorphous]

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Completely disagree. Knights are eye candy and way too hard to mass.

Even if you *do* buy Prod+3 - you're better off buying more longbowmen.

If we are talking expansion into independent provinces that is essentially correct - knights are mostly overkill for this. Otherwise not so much.

You do not need to have production 3 to amass a very decent number of knights. Man should build castles practically everywhere and all of them can produce knights.

Also, mostly it is not really a question of massing them. You want a decent number of them, but you certainly want other troops as well.

Longbowmen are very nice but if you rely solely on them for damage any human opponent will squash you with little problem.

In year two you should be able to field at least a couple of armies each turn with, say, 10 knights and 30 longbowmen lead by a mother. This will squash practically any PD and be a lot harder to deal with than the same army with 10 towerguards instead of knights. A very small number of decently armoured shield bearing eliteish infantry will otherwise make the atrition on your armies very high, which means it is a very cheap way for your enemy to slow or stop your advance.

Shields and armour are mundane problems for longbowmen that human opponents will not be late to utilize. A lot of nations can also field relatively cheap mages that can buff the natural protection of their troops - Man is not alone in this.

Man needs another way for their troops to deal damage and knights are good at this. With their two attacks of 18 and 10 damage they have a very decent damage outlay and their good defence, low encumbrance and high morale make them quite resilient.

Originally Posted by Grek

You have mothers. Take a minor nature bless and a strongish earth bless. The AAN mothers should do Mistform, Barkskin, Resist Lightning, hold, attack, cast spells. With shrouds and a vine shield, they become cloud trapezing thugs who kill people with shockwave. Drop one in every enemy provice the first turn of the war, take the province, stealth off into safety and watch the enemy cry for their mommy.

That bless is also good for your crones, who get larger than normal regen due to their strong nature paths. It will keep them alive and, I think, unafflicted for longer.

I toyed around with this some time ago but could not get it to work very reliably. Losing some mothers here and there was not much of a problem, but getting enough astral gems for the shrouds was. If I pursued shrouds in exclusion of anything else done with astral pearls I could usually scrape together enough for a decent amount of them and since it was in SP it worked at least ok, but in MP I cannot imagine anything else than being seen as a giant shooting gallery for mindhunts.

The bless was also expensive enough that I needed the mothers to work very well to make up for my lack in other areas.

Any tips?

[WraithLord]

I don't think taking a strong bless for mothers is good. The idea has merits I admit but it has two glaring drawbacks:
1. As mentioned by Amorphous. MH would annihilate your mothers thus shutting off that strat. I recently finished an MP game playing as MA Man (and Ctis). I lost *so* many mothers to MH that I stopped counting. I mitigated the problem by giving them MR boosters at times and by accompanying them with cheap monks and scouts. Still - the mother's attrition rate was extremely high.

Perhaps E9S9 bless would work but then you compound the 2nd drawback:

2. Strong bless always comes at the expense of something else. In this case it will come on the expanse of magical diversity on pretender and/or good scales. Either of those will cripple Man immensely.

Besides for a non-astral nation you'd have a hell of hard time forging shrouds early enough and fast enough.
Take a moderate bless if any. Strong bless for Man is not advised since you need to cover glaring weaknesses and thus can't afford one.

[Grek]

Mindhunt is the major weakness with using mothers for thugging. You can use AMA, but it does cost more S gems. I tend to find enough, but I could just be getting lucky.

I would do something like Dormant Great Enchantress N4S4E6. You can still get pretty good scales with that. When she wakes up, send her site searching. Forge a booster for a lizard shaman and have it start searching with arcane probing.

Another way to do mother thugs is to skip the bless and go for pure nature items. Boots of the Messenger, AMA and a Regen Ring. It costs more gems total, but it uses mostly nature gems which you should have enough of. Mother Oak may be an option, if you can get alteration researched quick enough.

[Agema]

Mothers have a sufficiently low MR that there's not much justification spending gems giving them more against mind hunt, they'll still be very likely to fail. Fill the provinces they attack with cheap scouts beforehand, they should act as chaff to distract. Without a bless, you're also spending an extra 10N gems (assuming a dwarven hammer, 15 otherwise) on messenger boots and regen, on top of 7 (10) for the vine shield. That's not cheap for such a frail unit, but in general terms, N1A2 Mothers can make it as thugs.

And Lizard Shamans can only site search astral if you find any lizard shamans to recruit. I've played quite enough games where I could barely scrape together certain types of gems, never mind indy mages with the right paths.

[Illuminated One]

If you find lizard shamans forge flying boots and let the shamans fly into the provinces that your crones attack - but only those that your enemy can't see.

[aaminoff]

Mothers as shockwave thugs is a good idea, but it depends on whom you are fighting and when. The critical spells that make a shockwave thug viable - mistform, barkskin, personal regen, constr 2-4 for a vine shield - are considerably lower in research than Mind Hunt and Soul Slay. So there is a window of opportunity for this tactic. In fact, these look a lot like EA Arco's Oreiad thugs, except that they are half the cost and not cap-only. (though the limiting factor will be forging equipment anyway). Or, you might be fighting an opponent with no Astral, in which case no MH to worry about. Like many things, it is a side strategy to pull out when appropriate. Though I would be concerned about the Mothers' lack of a means to fend off handfuls of regular troops: relying on the Vine Shield alone may not be good enough.

[thejeff]

A lot like EA Arco's Oreiad, except more fragile, without Awe and not self blessing. You can try naked Oreiads against indies as soon as you get Shock-wave. Try that with Mothers.

There may be a niche for it, but it's a slim one.

And Personal Regen is not advised, unless you've got a lot more Nature. It's 40 fatigue.