LA Agartha Advice Wanted

[lachniet]

This is how I play Agartha - in single player

Get a rainbow pretender great sage, and research nothing but Conjuring-5. Defend yourself as yuo see fit until you get there. Then send you sage out to find sites and start summoning the crap out of Umbrals. Use them as your front line (with a few meat shields to take the first volley of arrows). Keep summoning them in bulk, if you can build up an army of about 30-40 of them in your front lines you are pretty much unbeatable because they have good MR as well as being ethereal. They also can take on water provinces well if you summon a wraith lord and give him an item for water breathing or something. Banes work well if you are low on gems.

While you are holding your own and taking other people's home sectors, research up gift of reason and start GOR'ing umbrals up the wazoo. Equip them which charcoal shields, marble armor, amulet of MR and amulet of luck, and maybe some handy boots for either flying (nice for hit-n-run) or for quickness or rejuvination. They have a good drain life and generally double their HP to about 128 and stay there during most battles. I have seen a single GOR Umbral thus equipped take out hundreds of enemies, and easily anything but a main force. They'll die quick against a true enemy force with good magic users and so on though. As an aside, they'll take a TON of hits and get lots of crippling ailments pretty quickly. Be prepared to bring them home after 8-10 rounds of fighting and give all of their loot to a new fresh GOR umbral.

Lachniet

[Trumanator]

Are the Iron Corpses worth it? I've been toying with them in SP and find that they are somewhat effective when combined with the Iron Marrionettes spell. They also come 3 for 1 D gem and can be summoned by your lowest level mage. I'm using CBM, I'm not sure how much difference that makes.

[MaxWilson]

If you're using Umbrals, don't forget to have someone cast Iron Warriors on them. You don't even have to GOR them, and now you have a 2-gem wonder that's almost as tough as a naked Wraith Lord.

-Max

[TheMenacer]

I like to go with a Lord of Rebirth with death, earth, and nature all at 4. Low death and earth make nice blesses for your battlemages, and the regen helps your high HP sacreds (as well as patching up diseased mages). Add to that the fact that you've got no native access to nature, which in turn gets you later game access to air (through Fairy Queens), water, and even blood (through Lamia Queens), and you've got yourself a fairly nice setup.

From there, I've had luck with all kinds of scales, but generally you can ignore magic because you'll be recruiting as many necromancers as you can all the time so your research'll be fine without it, and cold 1 is a good idea as plenty of the undead units you're summoning have cold auras. Growth/Death is a tricky decision that I've been puzzling over for a while now. Growth is of course awesome because of the income, lowered affliction rate on your old mages, and all around niceness, but the fact of the matter is that you'll be switching over to summons sooner than most others so it's really your call.

Other than that, either trade or bootstrap your way into blood magic. Blood stones are the most incredible item in the game for Agartha and you can never never never have enough of them. You should be grinding out Tomb Oracles around the same time as you're getting access to mages with blood (you don't have to research the path itself, all those slaves should be going into blood stones) and a couple of tomb oracles with blood stones can drop serious battlefield magic (particularly the "Army of ___" spells) with no micromanagement required.

Another thing to remember is that Tomb Oracles make great thugs in their own right but they're built to help out your armies even moreso, so despite the nice personal buffs that earth and death offer, I recommend keeping them in the back rows. Iron Corpses can soak up damage, but they can't hit anything and have horrifyingly low MR, which sets them back from being a weak unit to being a liability. Skeleton Archers (I think that's the spell, the death/fire one) is absolutely incredible. I don't care how fragile the archers are, it costs five gems to get units with banefire bows and that's just the best thing.

[P3D]

Was playing with LA Agartha, and the lack of gems might be the reason to go for a heavy bless strategy, with everywhere recruitable troops.

The Blindfighters have two main disadvantage: fatigue and damage outlay. This asks for E9B4 bless, and alteration could be neglected for a while. Now you have 24 protection, shrugging of heavy cavalry charges, crossbows (kite shields) even fire evocations with minimal casualties.

It also asks for a turmoil-luck strategy. Especially with the Great Olm multiheroes you might get in CBM (Great Olm or a the immortal Possessed Corpse). And heavy bless will need crap scales somewhere - Turmoil, cold, drain. As your troops are resource-heavy but cheap (so not massed in very big number), this makes a good synergy. E.g.:

Imprisoned druid E9S4N4B4 Dom5 T1P2C2G0L3D2
Imprisoned Titan E9A9 Dom4

Alternative initial expansion is P3 and buy the medium-heavy crossbows. Prot 16 is adequate against most indies.

The slow blindfighters on Hold and Attack are also compatible with your crossbows.

With heavy bless you might go straight for Artifacts, picking lanterns, and Weapons of Sharpness on the way.

While old and fragile, the necromancers are awesome spellcasters. FEDS is arguably one of the best path combinations, and not being cap-only, you should will luck on F3/S2/E4/D4 ones. Very efficient manual site searchers, which is great in the magic-depleted Late era.
You need the pretender to account for your deficiencies though - high S, N and B for blood stones, perhaps A.
Twiceborning them is an option but expensive considering an Oracle cost 30 - do it for the rare randoms.

The main strategic choice is on whatever you want to spending your death gems on.

[Omnirizon]

LA Agartha shouldn't neglect their Tomb Oracle and Umbral Summons. In fact, these two things can be made the keystone to LA Agartha strategy.

Because Tomb Oracles are sacred, and Blindfighters are decent recruitable everywhere sacreds, a bless build is a perfect option for the nation. An E9N4 is a bless that benefits both TOs and BFs. Go first for Const4, then Conj5, then Alt5 (this nets you equipment, the TOs, and buffs for them). Without even having lvl 6 in anything, you have a battlefield dominator. Equip them with FireBrands/DemonWhips/CharcoalShields - DragonHelms - FirePlate/BlackSteelFullPlate - AmuletOfAntimagic & Luck Pendant. That's all stuff you can forge natively with Const4. Blessed and buffed with Invulnerability your TOs will have 30+ prot, 20 MR, regen, and 85 HP; plus be E3D3H3 and able to drop some other surprises on your foes if needed.

Other strategy is possible. That Ench6 Iron Corpse spell looks tempting. I've never tried a strategy using it though. If going for it, then E9B4+ would make sense to get Bloodstones too. The Iron Corpse spell is 4E gems for 17 Iron Corpses (which have 17 prot). At that cost with those stats they are very worthy. With enough Bloodstones and some natural Earth income, 100 Iron Corpses a turn is imaginable. Supplement those with battlemages, some Tomb Oracles, BlindFighters, and GOR'd Umbrals and LA Argatha is Mid-Late Game powerhouse. the mages and Blindfighters are slow, but Tomb Oracles (or other undead leaders) and Umbrals are not.

Also note that LA Agartha is one of the few nations with the ability to summon undead using undead priests. Problem is they have no undead priest except for Tomb Oracles. This might make focusing on Ench even better, to get Life AFter Death (then just find away to kill a bunch of your mage-priests once [but not twice]).

[MaxWilson]

When talking about blessing the Sepulchrals and Tomb Oracles, bear in mind that the game is bugged--blessings don't work for sacred undead unless you apply the blessing hotfix mod from DrPraetorious.

-Max

[TheMenacer]

I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a while back. I might be wrong of course, but blesses seem to work on my undead units.

[chrispedersen]

LA-Agaratha advice: Avoid CBM umbrals go from 5-7.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by TheMenacer

I'm pretty sure that bug was fixed a while back. I might be wrong of course, but blesses seem to work on my undead units.

Okay, never mind then.

-Max