Kailasa guide

[Alpine Joe]

Now i'm still pretty inexperienced at this game, so take all this with a grain of salt, but I think I have discovered a way to make Kailasa's opening work in CBM.

Kailasa is a strange nation. You've got awesome earth magic, sacreds with no armor and awe, and weak non-sacred recruitables.
Expanding is rough. Do you pay out the *** for a huge blessing on sacreds that arrows chew up? Do you go for an awake pretender and lost any kind of bless for all of your awesome summonable sacred troops and mages? Do you go good scales and try to use monkey troops, bad as they are? No. You have another option. let me explain.

First off here is what you want for a pretender. Take an awake Great sage with 4F4A4W4E4S4N2D (or other mix of similarly rainbowed magic) you can afford this by taking O3S3H3D2L0M1

Start out by having that poor starting army patrol. Turn up taxes as much as you feel comfortable. I usually go with 180, but I don't know a lot about patrolling, there may be a better choice. Set your pretender to research alteration. He will be doing that for a while. Recruit a Yaksha per turn and spend your resources on the armored Bandars. Don't expand yet. What! No expansion until turn 3? What is wrong with you? Don't worry you'll be fine.

As soon as you hit alteration 2 its time to expand. The good thing is you can now use all of those Yakshas you have to do your expansion. With passive awe and good physical stats, all your yakshas need is protection. ironskin/stoneskin handily fills this role and you can cast it at low fatigue. With just a blessing and ironskin, each of your yakshas can solo weak indies. However a pair of them can take most medium strength indies (and elephant provinces). If you get some with astral, have them script a body ethereal, which will hit both members of the pair if you position them on the battlefield correctly (the back corner).
Try this, it works. With the nature regen bless, affliction rates are low enough to be tolerable. You have a lot of extra buffs available, but measure their value against the extra fatigue they cause.

These pairs of yakshas can expand against almost anything. Use several pairs, plus your starting army (augmented with Bandars) to grab 3 provinces per round for the next few turns. You should comfortably have about 12 provinces by the end of year 1, which I believe is a decent rate. Put up an additional fortress for gurus

Meanwhile your pretender has kept researching alteration. All this comes together at the beginning of year 2, when you get invulnerability. Now each of your yakshas can take on almost all indies alone. Send your pretender out to site search, while remaining yakshas and gurus pick up the research slack. When you hit alteration six its time for your first war.

Recruit some of the unarmored bandars and bring 6-8 yakshas and go kick the *** of the guy who thought kailasa was a good target early. Put your yakshas in the front in a clump and script invulnerability-attack. Have your prophet do a divine bless or just clump them together and have a yaksha do it. Meanwhile one remaining yaksha casts ironbane. Your yakshas move to the front, where their low fatigue and 25 protection make them very hard to take down. Meanwhile your Bandars throw sticks and stones all over them. Enemy armor shatters and suddenly all those sticks and stones are hitting really hard. This is a pretty effective army for your first war, but its only a stop-gap. At the end of year 2 you get alteration 7. Now you have fog warriors castable by your pretender, and marble warriors. These two spells+iron bane+hordes of sticks and stones chaff+ super tough yaksha thugs is a combo that is very good. And this is happening at the end of year two, where you are probably still fighting nationals.

Anyway, you have effective expansion and the tools to fight your first war. Now switch and research construction and conjuration and do your standard clam spam+astral summons. You have a pretty good bless for those ghandarvas. Siddhas eventually take over fog warriors duty for big fights.

some other things to remember:

1) You have petrification and the mages to use it. It is one of the best anti-anything big and lonely spells in the game. Paralyzed thugs/scs will get swarmed and taken down by hordes of monkeys. And you get it really early.

2)strength of the giants is pretty good with sticks+stones, so if you have the time to research it, it will pay off.

3) a rainbow pretender means heavy and diversified gem production. Kailasa can get into every school (with rudras), so you should have plenty of use for your gems

4) You will eventually get devasura and you can use him to hunt for slaves and eventually get bloodstones. This pays off late game as you can use earth gems to summon yakshas.


Anyway thats all of my ideas for Kailasa. I'd love to hear some feedback from more experienced players/reasons why this strategy is bad.

[Trumanator]

Nice guide. I am kind of wondering though if it wouldn't be perhaps better to concentrate your magic paths more to get a better bless.

[Tolkien]

Anything you can say for the endgame?

And also, what is your stance on clams?

[cleveland]

I'd love to hear some feedback from more experienced players/reasons why this strategy is bad.

It's not bad at all AJ, thanks for posting it.

But not expanding until Turn 6 is concerning. Sure this works just fine against the AI, but in multiplayer, you'll find that everyone is expanding as rapidly and as viciously as possible in all directions.

Of course this depends on map size, but on a (rather standard) 15 province/player map, capitals are only separated by ~2 empty provinces, so by turn 6 you can expect someone to take a capital-adjacent-province. A BIG misstep.

But I can see it working well on a larger map. Though I'd personally prophet-ize my monkey scout and have him Sermon of Courage spam my starting army that's tackling the weakest looking indies. I'd also immediately send out every Astral Yaksha scripted with (Barkskin)(Personal Luck)(hold)(hold)(hold)(Attack Rearmost), which should do equally well against archerless indies.

[KissBlade]

Your biggest flaw in the strategy guide is the slow turn 6 expansion as cleveland mentions. Also, I think most people overestimate Kailasa's sacreds. They're /ok/ but honestly I don't think they're all that great. They're workable with air shield and minor blesses but I'd probably just use their archers and a SC pretender for expansion help.

[Tolkien]

Kailasa's archers are actually pretty good, and are pretty easy to mass. Their main problem is lack of any good melee units (that aren't resource intensive). Their sacred are decent, but the lack of armor or shields on any except their cap-only ones and summons makes it painful for them in the shortbow heavy Early Era.

I think waiting 6 turns is a bit of a stretch. You can go with 4 turns, maybe. But 6 turns is kinda difficult to recover from. You're going to have do make some major expansion to make up the gap.

[statttis]

How about a great sage instead of the enchantress? A great sage with Order 3 Sloth 3 Heat 3 Mis 2 Magic 1 and a bunch of magic can research alt-3 by turn 4. Then you send out your 4 yakshas who can buff up and have minor earth, nature, fire, air blesses. The first 5 turns are slow but after that your expansion ramps up quickly enough that you could be leading in provinces and research.

I faced a similar pretender design for Eriu in a recent game and it turned out pretty well for him. It went so well that he eliminated me before year 2 ended, and I think he's currently one of the top contenders in the game.

I think with a couple tweaks your strategy has some real promise :up:

[Alpine Joe]

Well in response to cleveland:

I don't think barkskin alone is enough protection, even against non-archer indies. You then run too big of a risk of losing Yakshas, which you really can't afford. You could potentially do it with stoneskin at alteration 2 though. I haven't tried it but 15 protection might be enough. That would let you start expanding with yakshas on turn 4, which would be a huge improvement.

Also you can start expanding with the starting army earlier, I probably would if I found weak enough indies next to the capital. I probably over-stated the case in the guide for dramatic effect; I really wanted to emphasize that you can expand with only yakshas. Regardless of when you start expanding, the main point of the guide is that yakshas help augment expansion in the middle of year one in a significant way that kailasa has problems doing in other ways. My experience so far in multiplayer games is that I really don't start brushing up against other nations borders in a big way until turn 11-12, which i think gives you enough of a window to get away with slightly slower expansion in the first few turns, as long as it kicks in strong at 6-7.

[Alpine Joe]

How about a great sage instead of the enchantress? A great sage with Order 3 Sloth 3 Heat 3 Mis 2 Magic 1 and a bunch of magic can research alt-3 by turn 4. Then you send out your 4 yakshas who can buff up and have minor earth, nature, fire, air blesses. The first 5 turns are slow but after that your expansion ramps up quickly enough that you could be leading in provinces and research.

I faced a similar pretender design for Eriu in a recent game and it turned out pretty well for him. It went so well that he eliminated me before year 2 ended, and I think he's currently one of the top contenders in the game.

I think with a couple tweaks your strategy has some real promise :up:

Well I thought about the sage, and i think its a good debate. However the enchantress comes with pearl generation, which I like, and its cheaper to get enough air to cast fog warriors. I could certainly see an argument for the sage though. I will try out the build later tonight and see if it works as well. Also on the agenda: see if yakshas can expand with stoneskin.


Edit: I tried it out with the sage and stoneskin. Stoneskin lets you unleash your first yaksha expansion party on turn 3. You can then expand as quickly as you build yakshas, switching to ironskin on turn 5 and invulnerability on turn 11-12. The sage dramatically improves research. You lose out on pearl generation, and casting fog warriors is a little harder, but I think it is well worth it.

Good idea statttis, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for. Now Kailasa's expansion really is competitive.

[chrispedersen]

Alpine,

First of all, good job.

Second - have you looked at the other guide for kailasa, at all for tricks?

[Hadrian_II]

I would not drop the sacreds, as they make up most of your attack power, also a strong bless will benefit your SCs in the endgame.

With 10 Yavanas and a priest and some markata chaff you can take almost all provinces you like with only loosing the markata you uses as decoys.

Also celestial music is your key to power, as it quickens your sacreds.

Against Arrows you can use ghandarvas first and later arrow fend, so you should not have too much problems.

If you get a strong bless for your sacreds, you will scale very good through the game, your build you propose looses all strengths of kailasa.

[Executor]

You want a bless with Kailasa, don't need a rainbow mage since they have all paths on mages or summons.

They also don't need a SC awake pretender since their sacreds are greats.
Try a bless like S9W8A6. Twist fate for those initial attacks, 40% air shield is enough for everyone except Cealum, and +4 defense from water 8, don't need 9 since they have a national spell for quickness.
Ocacle, imprisoned with order3, sloth3, magic1, miforutne2, heat3, high dominion.

They have great summonable sacreds which are great with a bless.

And Kailasa has great potential for clamming also.

They can expand damn quickly also.
Prophet first turn with 6-7 Yakashas can take any province, knights also, and that's a new expanding party every turn.

Oh yeah, astral is for wish and those astral national summons, and MR +3 is good for sacreds since they are magic beings.

[Radio_Star]

I looked back at Kailasa with CBM a bit ago and wanted to give a Mother of Rivers a try. You give up quite a bit to get her awake, but you can run moderate dominion with decent scales and get an enormous six water gems a turn. Since, in my mind, Kailasa is pretty much a must-clam nation and you don't have any natural starting water income, the leg up that this gets you is tremendous. You can go from forging your first clam somewhere around year three to forging your first clam somewhere around year one. The quickness bless is arguably the best early blessing for your sacreds, as it helps shore up the low prot at close range via defense and also helps vs your real nemesis, short bows, because of the increased closing and killing speeds. Unfortunately, the water blessing is both not as good and redundant in the lategame, so in essence you're trading quality for quantity. On the other hand, you'll have the gem income to spam gandharvas as soon as you hit conj 5 and will also be summoning multiple siddha and rudra each turn once you hit the research given your early start and high water income. On the other other hand you'll miss that MR like a big dog.

For scales, I'm a big fan of ransacking death for design points. Your early armies are going to be small bands of sacreds so the supply penalty doesn't really matter, you don't have any units worrying about old age and you quickly get to where you don't really give a hoot about gold, so the long-term pop loss isn't a factor. That being said, luck offsets the potentially devastating events (during one expansion test, I had half the population in my cap killed on turn 3) from death scales while giving you sporadic bits of cash and, more importantly, gems. All around, I'd be looking at something like 3 death, 3 sloth, 3 heat, magic 1 and luck 2-3, order as high as you can afford with your pretender, around 0-1, and a minimum of 6 dominion.

[Endoperez]

Perhaps Mother of Rivers with Water 4-6/Nature 4? Just enough bless to let your sacreds start your expansion until you get your Yakshas out and conquering? I haven't tested this so I don't know how well it works, but I'd expect that the minor regen bless is pretty much necessary for to keep the Yakshas alive.

[Psycho]

Expanding with Kailasa is a breeze. With just 5 sacreds you can take almost any province. If you take a nice bless, of course. I like the S9W8A6 one. The problem is finding someone to bless your yavanas as your only recruitable priest is 360 gold. So, you should start recruiting indy priests ASAP.

Rainbow seems completely unnecessary, as Kailasa has great magic diversity. You have all paths except blood available at least at level 3 (with the exception of nature which is available at level 2). So, take an imprisoned pretender and a good bless is my advice.

When fighting indy archers, you just take some archers decoys with you (which cost you 5 gold a piece). The small air shield and twist fate should prevent taking much loses. When fighting human opponents, consider taking bandars as archer decoys, in case your opponents scripts his archers with fire largest.

Kailasa recruitable sacreds are top notch for initial expansion and against any nation without good archers and death magic (skelly-spamming). But if you run into Caelum, Ctis or god forbid Sauromatia, you're going to have a very hard time.

I would also start with alteration, but not because of ironskin, but because of body ethereal. Since you will be leading your yavanas with a yogi (to lead them) and an indy priest (to bless them), you might as well use the yogi to cast some body ethereals. With 5 yavanas in the group set to hold and attack and with 3 castings he gets before they run forward, yogi will cover each of them and himself with body ethereal in each battle.

After that go to thau6 for celestial music. It gives you 2 attacks per round and together with water bless pushes yavanas defense over 20.

Of course, with their awe, good stats and earth magic for buffs, yakshas are great thugs. But, why wait for turn 6 or turn 3 to start expanding and not have a good bless, when you can do it from turn 2 while having a good bless. And that good bless comes in handy for all your summonable sacreds as well as any thug or SC who you give a shroud.

[Hadrian_II]

I would propose a N4 bless, as it is really nice with kailasa (you will regen 2 hp per turn) so you can drop air bless, as for expansion the few arrow that hit you will be healed soon. (with S9 twistfate and 20 hp yavanas can survive 3 arrow hits anyway and with 2 points of regeneration even more).

Also W bless does look nice, but you have high base defence and awe, so the def bonus from the bless is not really needed and as soon as you get celestial music you will have a def of 17 and that is plenty. Only Guhyakas will profit from W bless, and they are not used in small groups for expansion but should be around in bigger squads.

I would propose the F9 bless for the nice bang it gives to you.

[licker]

Why not D9? And that way you also have the late game option to leverage death without boosting.

Beyond which you can spam those AoE spells and rack up afflictions on everyone you hit right?

[Hadrian_II]

Why not D9? And that way you also have the late game option to leverage death without boosting.

Beyond which you can spam those AoE spells and rack up afflictions on everyone you hit right?

D9 might work also, but it is normally not too impossible to get into death magic and fire is better for raw offensive.

[Alpine Joe]

See even with the air bless tossed in, you really have huge weaknesses if you go for a big dual or triple bless. You still aren't immune to archers, especially considering that most opponents are going to have 4+ archers for every one of your sacreds and you don't have any air magic early for storm or mist or arrow fend. Sauromatia would absolutely ruin you, as would Tien'chi or any other decent archer nation. And then of course death nations can give you hell with skelli-spam.

Early game fielding expansion parties is a pain. You have to use a capital recruited yogi, and then get an indy priest. Capturing an indy priest province and then getting a temple up and then waiting to produce a few takes a significant number of turns.

True you have access to all paths late game, but i think its better to have a big rush of gems start up in the mid-game, which you can then alchemize into astral pearls if nothing else.

Lastly the biggest emphasis of my strategy is getting a winning combo going early so you don't get trashed in the first couple of wars. Sure you are better late game with a huge dual bless. But I say that with clamming and astral summons you are strong enough late game anyways, especially since you get something of a bless with the sage build as well. The big thing is not getting steam-rolled early. And with a big dual bless build, you will be destroyed by any of the following : High morale troops, massed archers, skelli-spam, early thunderstrike or falling fires. Your lack of early research makes it very hard to react to these tactics.

Finally lets measure up the proposed S9W8A6 bless build against my sage bless of S4A4N4F4W4E4

the big dual bless nets you +3 MR, twist fate, +4 defense, and 40 percent air shield.

Sage build gets you +1 MR, +2 Defense, +2 attack, 2 reinvig (huge for yakshas), 20 percent air shield, 5 percent regen.
Sage bless isn't as good, but its not radically worse. Twist fate is the big difference and it only blocks one attack, the first storm of arrows will get rid of it.

The big difference is that with the sage build, you have fog warriors by the time the dual-bless build's pretender is waking up.

[Alpine Joe]

Alpine,

First of all, good job.

Second - have you looked at the other guide for kailasa, at all for tricks?


Actually my reason for writing this guide was that I wanted to play kailasa but the other guide simply doesn't work. Expanding early is very cumbersome, and your sacreds still have huge weaknesses. If you go imprisoned for a huge dual bless, you have trouble generating enough early research to get things to help you counter all of the sacreds weaknesses. A lot of the stuff late game seems pretty good. I agree that Rudras are very powerful as SC/Anti-Sc, and of course clamming is very important.

The thing is, even without a huge bless, your sacreds are still great troops. YOu can pay out the *** for a fire bless or something to make them better at attacking, but i think regular sacreds attacking something that has had armor destroyed by ironbane will do as much or more damage as fire blessed ones.

And fog warriors/marble warriors is far far better defense than twist fate and some MR and defense.

This build is all about the timeframe you are getting stuff.

[Tifone]

I'm with Hadrian II, playing with Kailasa I think going for F9S9N4 is the best idea: with some regen, way diminished chance of afflictions, one extra life or so, great attack and damage from fire bless (have fun destroying those blessed Jarls!!), and you'll even get the advantage of Celestial Music later (with the benefit of the flaming weapons too). And c'mon, you don't want your sacreds to take arrow fire anyway, you've got armoured gorillas and indies for that!
Also, goes for a far more powerful late game, with Wish, Strands, Nexie, StelFoc, MastEnsl etc. all immediately available to make good use of your pearls income from clams (you've got a recruitable perfect clam-maker you should use a lot - being also a great Sailor's Death spammer - of course the Yaksha is normally better though)

I appreciate AJ's ideas of course and I'm glad he posted them, but I think the sacreds don't benefit very much from many little blesses, and on the other hand Kailasa has imho great recruitable-everywhere researchers that can also be proficient in combat, being able to buff your troops early, and putting up deadly communions later - don't think you need an awake researcher that much.

(I'd also consider Turmoil/Luck for Kailasa, you gain 40 points and with that PD every barbarian attack would lose you a province - you can also use those gems very well)

[Gregstrom]

I'm not so sure about a massive dual bless. Baalz' guide to BL shows how capable the regular monkey units can be, and I don't think Kailasa's sacred troops are good enough to justify so many design points being spent on them.

Saying 'Kailasa has access to all paths anyway, so why take a rainbow' isn't really very helpful. You have to have Conj 8 before you get access to F and D, at which point you have rather a lot of catching up to do. Air comes at Conj 6, which is a little better but still not great.

[Omnirizon]

I stick hard by my A9 bless.

weak N doesn't cut it because A9 is far and away a better defensive measure and costs 392 (for 0 - 9) vs 112 (for 0 - 4) points. You not only get great missile protection, you get SR. SR is invaluable in the Air heavy environment of EA.

Even though your spending more points to get a much better defensive bless, your not having to spend points to buff your offense. Kail's sacreds have good enough offense as is. On top of that, there job really is to be frontliners. With the high MR (both naturally high and further boosted by S9), the high missile protection, the high defense, and the high Awe, your sacreds have many layers of defense. Their primary downfall is berserk/undead (but for what its worth, any N bless is a waste here because you don't have enough armor to reduce damage to the point that you could benefit from the regen when your going to be taking damage anyway). However, high Def does assist them here.

The point is NOT Gandharvas. Forget Gandharvas. Your primary summons are Apsaras. Aside from the no armor, Apsaras have better Defense, lower enc, and better Awe than Gandharvas. They are the perfect unit for filling in the role of Kails sacreds, holding the front line. They can hold out for a long time.

This doesn't mean that you don't want Gandharvas, it simply means that you want high end Evoc, Alt, and Thau more. Forget Conj and Ench. Since you don't have to worry about Gandharvas, and you don't have to worry about Arrow Fend, and your focus isn't on the high end summons, you can shoot straight towards Celestial Music, and then the high end Evoc and Alt.

Your offense comes from a combination of your naturally high offense sacreds (even with no bless, multiple attacks and high strength serve them well) and recruitable everywhere battlemages; also lots of missile units is good here. You're using things like Earth Quake, Blade Wind, Gifts from Heaven, Rust Mist, Destruction, and Iron Bane. Your mages are robust, young, (and beautiful). A little protection (from Invulnerability or maybe armor) and they can sit right on the front line to spam Panic and Destruction while even Markatas rain down death and your Sacreds hold the line.

[Alpine Joe]

I don't understand this. Aren't apsaras more vulnerable to arrows than ghandarvas, due to the lack of armor? I would think you would need arrow fend even more if you focused on apsaras.

And even if you disregard arrows (an air bless costs you something else), asparas are only good frontliners when you are fighting things that awe protects you from. Berserk, high morale, or undead troops are going to be a big problem for unarmored sacreds.

[JimMorrison]

Hmmmm, a lot to chew on.

First, a special note about the strat as posted in this guide - in Single Age, crossbows destroy you.

As to the S9 etc Bless, I don't understand the selling of it as a "great all game Bless". Your entire point in late game is to push into a steady stream of thugs and SCs, no? S9 is pretty much the worst bless for singularly powerful (commander!) units. Twist Fate gains you very little ground with a thug or SC, and you will always be pushing above 18MR if you expect to keep them more than a couple of battles, so you are gaining practically nothing in your late game from an Astral Bless (other than having an S9 caster around).

Compare this to the rainbow Bless, and all of these modifiers actually are useful to a thug or SC, besides the 1MR, which is easily justified as help for your lesser Sacreds, as well as a springboard for forging.

The problem that I'm having with the rainbow strat though, is that gold income is too anemic heading into the mid-game. Sure, if you Clam properly, you have diminishing use for gold in the later game, but in mid-game, you need to push up some castles or your research levels off, and you'll never field those awesome communions at all. Also with a low Dominion score, you need a lot of Temples around, to get anything done. Then just as icing on your "I ain't got no gold" cake, many of the more creative ways of fielding chaff where it's needed, are highly gold dependent, as you certainly aren't mass producing the heavier Bandar with an empty pocketbook and 3Sloth.

All in all, with Alpine Joe's strat, I had 18 provinces come Early Spring of year 2 in my first test, and that was with a couple of embarassing defeats (including the guy that got skewered by a couple crossbow bolts). This is a good start, but even with the tricks outlined in the strat, I felt like I was just begging someone to come take all of my lands away.

I keep coming back to Kailasa because they're just really cool, but every time (and I learn so much more of the game in the interim) I end up feeling like there's no reason Kailasa should ever win in MP unless their neighbors don't realize how easy they should be to kill.

[Alpine Joe]

The problem that I'm having with the rainbow strat though, is that gold income is too anemic heading into the mid-game. Sure, if you Clam properly, you have diminishing use for gold in the later game, but in mid-game, you need to push up some castles or your research levels off, and you'll never field those awesome communions at all. Also with a low Dominion score, you need a lot of Temples around, to get anything done. Then just as icing on your "I ain't got no gold" cake, many of the more creative ways of fielding chaff where it's needed, are highly gold dependent, as you certainly aren't mass producing the heavier Bandar with an empty pocketbook and 3Sloth.




See both the rainbow and dual-bless strats need design points, so you find yourself taking sloth 3 and some death with both, I think. I would have a hard time imagining a build that didn't use 3 sloth, as the heavy armored bandar aren't good enough to justify production scales. Anyway with the rainbow strat i dont think sloth is a problem, since you can just recruit the unarmored bandar or avati and cast marble warriors on them. Every Yaksha you have can cast it, so why not bring one with every army. The unarmored bandar end up with 15 protection, versus 10 on the recruitable armored ones.

As for being anemic on gold....well unless you try to mass the armored bandar as your troops, you are going to have scales bad enough that this is always a problem. I think Kailasa has to transition to clams mid-late game, you don't really have a choice. With a rainbow sight searching at the end of year 1, you can get an impressive gem income going that can hopefully tide you over until your clams pick up. I agree though, this is the biggest weakness of kailasa. At the end of the day, you have to give up something with kailasa, and I would give up a few mid-game fotresses and some bigger communions, rather than get rocked by the first guy to attack me because I am trying to use cost-inefficient bandar warriors against the dual-blessed or glamoured troops of EA.

[JimMorrison]

Well as far as mid-game goes, especially using the Alt heavy strat, I'm not talking about using Bandar - I'm saying they are the alternative to other options that are much more gold intensive.

What I was looking at was more along the lines of massed markata with Army of Lead, and Will of the Fates.

Unfortunately, there will come a time where the only effective deterrent that you have against most nations, is your ability to cast Fog Warriors with your pretender. Most people will either not consider this to be enough, or will (even more likely) not even know you are capable of it, and then attack you. Now your incredibly expensive researcher/rainbow is neither doing research, or doing any site searching for that late game gem income. To top that off, you are reliant almost exclusively on your small Awe strike forces for the rest of your actions, and there are numerous nations in EA that can render than completely obsolete just by getting to Ench 3 for some skellie spam - longdead will completely crush your rainbow blessed sacreds, including your Yaksha who really can't kill fast enough to deal with that kind of pressure.

Honestly I don't think the high bless is going to provide that much more deterrent to most enemies, so believe me, I'm not just criticizing you - I still think that from what I've seen and tried, your build nets the strongest, most reliable expansion that I've seen.

Really, I think that with the rainbow guild, you have to turn yourself into a year 2 rusher. You expand as fast as you can, and the instant you hit Alt7, you take everything you've got and head to the most likely neighboring capital. If you can score a decisive victory there, you can fight the rest of the war on your own terms, and possibly come out of it as one of the leading nations. Unfortunately though, all of the "good" monkeys really benefit from some turtling time, which needs to come after this first blitzkrieg, and your other neighbors probably won't be willing to let you have it. Relying on a single caster to lay down a game-changing battlefield enchant leaves you using a crutch that if you get slowed down enough to not gain another source of strength to replace it - leaves you off balance and ready to get pushed over by someone whose nation is a bit more cohesive in military might.

[Psycho]

Archers are not really that much of a worry, unless you just put all your troops in the middle. You need to organize your troops around the battlefield. Get some indy heavy inf, some bandars, some markatas and put them as arrow catchers. Yavanas with quickness will have 28 action points. They will cover the distance between you and the enemy in no time and cut those archers to pieces.

Yavanas also have two attacks (with quickness that's four) and hit pretty hard. Your enemy will need many skelly-spamming mages to stop a yavana rush. One mage raises 5 skeletons per turn. One yavana kills 3 (one square). One yavana costs 40 gold. How much does a skelly-spamming mage cost?

Nature bless may be good for gandharvas, but you shouldn't be summoning them much anyway. Rely on your castle recruitable troops. Keep you gems for more valuable goals. Yavanas are your focus, not gandharvas or apsaras. Of course, at times some gandharvas will be just what you need, but not all the time.

"You have to have Conj 8 before you get access to F and D, at which point you have rather a lot of catching up to do."
Actually you have to get to conj9 before you get those. But you really want death for tartarians and they are also conj9. And you can go without fire for some time, can't you? Sure flaming arrows can be very useful, but you can't have it all.

An S9 pretender is a big deal in late game. You're not going to empower from S3 to get all the good astral things. You will be crying for astral pearls even without empowering in astral.

Order 3, sloth 3 will leave you with more gold than you need. Everyone you recruit is sacred, so your upkeep will be very low. In fact, the problem with sloth is more in that it can limit your yavana recruitment if you end with low recourse provinces around your capital.

[Hadrian_II]

I keep coming back to Kailasa because they're just really cool, but every time (and I learn so much more of the game in the interim) I end up feeling like there's no reason Kailasa should ever win in MP unless their neighbors don't realize how easy they should be to kill.

I played Kailasa in blitzes and it is very hard to defend against early attacks, but as soon as you get ghandaravas you can kill everything your enemy throws at you.

Also S9 is not only about the bless, but with a S9 pretender, you have also already one unit able to cast wish (important for clammers) and Master enslave is also a very fun spell in lategame.

Kailasa is about to have an army of 80 units of sacreds to walk through everything your enemy throws at you with ease. You need Conj6, Thau6 and as much alt as you can get and you are set for win.

Also who cares when you are weaker early, if you get killed early then you can just start a new game, if you are in lategame and have no punch it sucks much more.

I played at least 4 multiplayer games with kailasa.

In the first i lost an early war against Sauromantia (if you are kailasa sauro is the nation you absolutely do not want to fight.) but in the deciding battle, i misscripted my prophed, so my army was unblessed until turn 6.

In the second game i took an A9F9 bless to defend against arrows and got rushed by Helheim. (flanking helhirdlings killing your commanders first, and then your routing army from behind are a real pain)

In the third i won wars against Sauromatia, crushed abysia and then the game fell apart, as the leading player went away without notice, but i was in a strong second position, and if the game would have been played to the end i would have had won.

In the fourth (the megagame) i was able to fight back an early incursion from hinnom, after that baalz was subbing for me and was able to kill c'tis (not really sure which age) and midgard, but after that kailasa was so worn out, that lanka had an easy dealing with it.

I would say my build might lacking some punch early, but is still easy able to inflict much damage on attacker, so that they will pick easier targets.

[Omnirizon]

I don't understand this. Aren't apsaras more vulnerable to arrows than ghandarvas, due to the lack of armor? I would think you would need arrow fend even more if you focused on apsaras.

And even if you disregard arrows (an air bless costs you something else), asparas are only good frontliners when you are fighting things that awe protects you from. Berserk, high morale, or undead troops are going to be a big problem for unarmored sacreds.

that's the point of taking an A9+ bless. so arrows are not an issue.

undead/berserk are always a problem. high defense helps against undead (berserkers usually have a really high attack).

this all also has the nicety that the same thing that is optimal for your recruits is optimal for the Apsaras.

The whole point is to not be dependent on any particular mid-level spell to be effective. You are free to run for the high Evoc/Alt stuff (and Celestial Music). Either Evoc or Alt is wonderful for you. Kail has great battlemages and lots of chaff for any Alt focused strat.

[Trumanator]

I thought it was very interesting how similar this is to Baalz' EA Caelum guide. The delayed expansion, dependent on a few key spells, and focusing on small parties of powerful awe commanders. It makes for a very interesting and new trend in ways to expand.

[Psycho]

If you like that kind of expansion, you might want to try the Nehekara mod. Their main commanders are immortal and have an equivalent of a fire brand from the start. They can take weaker provinces even without any buffs and can get nice paths for low buffing spells (astral, air and earth).

[Executor]

I really fail to relise how archers are the biggest problem with Kailasa, if you see a big army of archers coming your way, well don't send your sacreds to be massacred, send a diferent type of troops, mix up your troops a bit, send your own archers and put them to fire acrhers.

IMO a big air bless is just wasting design points. Take a small air bless and with their 2 parry buckler they have less than 30% chance to be hit by an arrow, which is still pretty high but how many arhcers would he need to cut down your sacreds before they reach them?


Sauromatia and Cealum are the only nation Kailasa really has to worry about.

[Gregstrom]

"You have to have Conj 8 before you get access to F and D, at which point you have rather a lot of catching up to do."
Actually you have to get to conj9 before you get those. But you really want death for tartarians and they are also conj9.


Err, that was sort of my point. Once you get to Conj 9, you get to summon a D3 caster. Then you get to site search and start bootstrapping up to a D7 caster. That's quite a delay before you get your first Tartarian. And of course you may not have had opportunities to site search before you get Rudras.

I'm not saying that a big double bless is a bad idea, just that the alternatives are valid too. If you're having to use time, tactics and design points to patch up weaknesses in the sacreds so they're decently effective, why not use a different strategy instead?

[Tifone]

I think in the time it takes to get to the D7 caster, Rudras can do very well Greg :)

[Psycho]

Go attack a nation with death magic and take over their death sites. Besides, you have your celestial summons, you don't need the tartarians so badly. They will be a bonus when you get them, but they are not required.

[Omnirizon]

i agree with psycho.

Kail doesn't really need Tartarians. They live and die more by their Celestial Summons. Their choice of strategy influences largely how their early and mid game shape up. Due to the way high level Alt spells work for them and the Conj they have available, all given Kail strats tend to converge later in the game. That's why I don't see the point in complaining that taking a bless to cover up weaknesses in your sacreds is foregoing all of Kail's strengths... Having out-of-the-box power early on that can push into a strong mid-game is better than trying to gear for only your mid-game. I'd rather go into mid-game strong and accelerate straight into late game rather than play catch up. With the right bless (an A9 S9 IMHO), Kail is a rush power. I've beat triple blessed Mictlan toe-to-toe with that bless (me being backed up by tons of archers and destruction-panic spamming mages that didn't have to worry about stray missiles from all their own archers or teh enemies.)

[rdonj]

Kailasa recruitable sacreds are top notch for initial expansion and against any nation without good archers and death magic (skelly-spamming). But if you run into Caelum, Ctis or god forbid Sauromatia, you're going to have a very hard time.

If you take an air/astral bless... caelum is going to be largely neutered against you. I'm not 100% sure if air shield will protect you from the poison effect on arrows as I've not fought this battle, but I'm going to guess not. If your main concerns are these three nations, you then have two very easy blesses you could add to the air/astral to lessen that a lot. N4 or E4. N4 means poison doesn't really hurt you, so now sauromatia's main offensive tools in the early game are shot. Of course, they still have skelly-spam. With E4, your sacreds build no fatigue and can fight endless waves of chaff, at last until you start using celestial music. If you take one of those two, combined with either relief or regeneration your sacreds should be able to deal with most things those three nations throw at you.

[Executor]

But that's like playing paper scissors rock, Neif will kill almost anyone, but Mictlan will crush them, Mictlan can be massacred by Caelum, Cealum will be crushed by Sauromatia and so on...
You can't expect to make your sacreds invulnerable to any form of attack.
Everything has it's counters and so it should, and that's the whole point.

[Psycho]

Kailasa recruitable sacreds are top notch for initial expansion and against any nation without good archers and death magic (skelly-spamming). But if you run into Caelum, Ctis or god forbid Sauromatia, you're going to have a very hard time.

If you take an air/astral bless... caelum is going to be largely neutered against you. I'm not 100% sure if air shield will protect you from the poison effect on arrows as I've not fought this battle, but I'm going to guess not. If your main concerns are these three nations, you then have two very easy blesses you could add to the air/astral to lessen that a lot. N4 or E4. N4 means poison doesn't really hurt you, so now sauromatia's main offensive tools in the early game are shot. Of course, they still have skelly-spam. With E4, your sacreds build no fatigue and can fight endless waves of chaff, at last until you start using celestial music. If you take one of those two, combined with either relief or regeneration your sacreds should be able to deal with most things those three nations throw at you.

Sure, I agree that would be counters to those nations. If you are fighting a duel against Caelum by all means take an A9 bless. Likewise take some air, nature and earth against Sauro. But the point is making a bless that is generally the most usable one. Yavanas' biggest strength is avoiding to get hit with their awe and high defense. So you enhance that strength even more by adding some water and S9 for twist fate. Take a bless to enhance their strengths and not to cover for their weaknesses. If an enemy shows up with an army of archers hit him with something else - your own archers or blade wind spammers or something.

Also, I think people here overvalue archers. The problem with archers is that the person who is fielding them is not the person who is deciding where they will fire. The other person will dictate that with the placement of his troops in the battlefield. If I bring enough archer decoys with my army, your archers will never get to target my yavanas.

[TheDemon]

Sure, anyone with decent sacreds and an A9 bless will crush caelum. I mean, 70%+ resistances to Caelum's two biggest strenghts? I don't really see how that applies any more to Kailasa than any other nation.

Specifically for Kailasa, if you lean on big sacred armies, don't use decoys, and charge into the archer blob head on then you might have trouble against Caelum early. Once you have Ghandharvas, they shrug off arrows pretty well. Once you get Conj 6 (air access), you can beat thunder strike spam with thugs. And that's about all it takes.

I have a strategy similar to but slightly different than the one in the OP. I'm currently testing it in a pretty big multiplayer game (20 players) and was planning on posting a guide when the game is wrapped up and I have had some time playing around with Rudra and whatnot against real players. For the start, I stack up defense and parry on my Yaksha with a W9E6N4 bless and a Black Steel shield. That and a bodyguard and stoneskin takes care of the arrows problem, and stacked def+parry & awe means they almost never get hit. I was up to 22 provs at early spring year 2. The bless isn't just for the Yaksha and Yavana; slight regen really helps your thug and SC chassis later on when you're using mistform every battle.

Undead indeps, skelly-spamming nations, and berserkers are a problem for sure. Quickness helps that problem a little. Other than skelly-spam, you have counters for pretty much everything.

[Omnirizon]

I sense that there is more variance among everyone's favored Kailasa strat than any other nation's set of strats. I propose an all Kail competition to sort this all out. Let's just see who wins that. :D

[statttis]

If I bring enough archer decoys with my army, your archers will never get to target my yavanas.

Problem is, Yavanas have more HP than any other troops Kailasa can buy. Archers set to Fire Large Monsters will target the Yavanas and ignore your decoys. I was in a game with Alpine Joe where he was Kailasa, and he got destroyed by that tactic. Could be why he's not a big fan of the bless troops :)

[Omnirizon]

If I bring enough archer decoys with my army, your archers will never get to target my yavanas.

Problem is, Yavanas have more HP than any other troops Kailasa can buy. Archers set to Fire Large Monsters will target the Yavanas and ignore your decoys. I was in a game with Alpine Joe where he was Kailasa, and he got destroyed by that tactic. Could be why he's not a big fan of the bless troops :)

I wanted to point this out too, but got tired of talking.

also note that others in other threads have pointed out that any player worth their salt can essentially cancel out any amount of decoying if they are willing to invest an equal amount of time and effort into the troop composition logistics and scripting. In short, decoying only works on indies.

all this is why I still find any argument that A9 is a waste to be fallacious. taking some other bless is just hoping that other players are not any good and no one is playing Caeleum or Sauromatia or any archer heavy nation.

You're supposed to design nations to defeat good players, not bad ones. A9 isn't about making it easier to play in earlier game, it is freeing you to make other decisions to have an overall stronger game. Any other bless and your strat is already made for you: decoy through indies, hope to god that you get Ghandharvas, Kinnaras, and Arrow Fend before anybody decides to attack you. If its on hard research (a popular option it seems nowadays) then you can just forget about it.

[rdonj]

I sense that there is more variance among everyone's favored Kailasa strat than any other nation's set of strats. I propose an all Kail competition to sort this all out. Let's just see who wins that. :D

I might be willing to take you up on this if byleswar ends soon as it's promising to. I'd have to play around with kailasa a bit though, it's been quite a while since I've played them.


The main point against a water bless for kailasa is they have the national celesital music spell, which is basically the same thing as a water bless and iirc does not stack with it. It's still viable and would of course be helpful in the early game, but for the most part it's also unnecessary in the early game. And if you get rid of their absolutely incredible weakness to arrows that you really have no other good way of handling the number of ways to counter kailasa's sacreds just plummeted. They're never going to be immune to everything, but with an air blessing they're a lot less vulnerable overall and once you get celestial music going there should be very little you're afraid of with them. Plus they're going to be largely immune to battlefield attack spells at this point, which is a nice bonus.

[Hadrian_II]

I sense that there is more variance among everyone's favored Kailasa strat than any other nation's set of strats. I propose an all Kail competition to sort this all out. Let's just see who wins that. :D

Sounds Fun, but the problem is that the proposed airbless would be of no use against kailasa (as no sane kailasa player will field archers). But i am in if it comes to such a competition.

[Executor]

I'll second that proposal.

[Tifone]

I continue not understanding WHY you should simply send your sacreds to get slaughtered against an archer heavy army. If you want to do so, feel free to sink that gazillion points on the A9 bless and leave them totally vulnerable to the enemies that are able to destroy your sacreds in melee, and yes, there are. Niefel, Mictlan, *heims i.e. will chew you, just like several others. OR - play on your strenghts, give your sacreds melee prowess and if the enemy wants to play the big army with much melee and lotsa archers you can either:
- split your army in groups as little as 6 sacreds and 5 archer decoys and chew all its PD-defended province
- take indie elephants/horse brothers/shamblers/whatever has higher HP than your sacreds and use them as archer decoys while your sacreds destroy their melee troops and your markatas set on fire archers outnumber the enemy ones by what, 3:1? more? ;)

[chrispedersen]

I propose a competition gentlemen. And while I am too busy to play, I will create the mod as part of the national library project, if someone else is willing to create the thread and admin it.

What I suggest is this: Set up a semirandom map, size depending on the number of players involved. I suggest semirandom, because the semi random provinces will provide a greater challenge and thus help determine which of you gentlemen's proposed kailasa build is superior.

All participants create a Kailasa build based on ChrisCBM1.48 (Free plug). Then let the best design win...

[thejeff]

As was mentioned above, that competition won't even address the debate about the air bless. Kailasa isn't an archer heavy nation, unless someone decides to forgo the bless and focus on the monkey archers, which no one is suggesting as a viable strategy.
So it's almost a given that in this contest a non-air bless strategy will prevail.

[chrispedersen]

I don't think its a forgone conclusion that kailasa is not an archer nation. D9AxZx is how I play kailasa, and I usually focus on archers.

So you're saying you don't think anyone will take an archer nation thejeff?

[Omnirizon]

As was mentioned above, that competition won't even address the debate about the air bless. Kailasa isn't an archer heavy nation, unless someone decides to forgo the bless and focus on the monkey archers, which no one is suggesting as a viable strategy.
So it's almost a given that in this contest a non-air bless strategy will prevail.

what?

no. I'd contest that.

Kailasa is, in fact, an archer heavy nation. They have a gradient of four archers. They have the world's cheapest archer. They have one of only two [or maybe three] (in the entire game) sacred archers. They don't have a lot of precision. But they have lots of archers. If a Kailasa didn't take an Air bless, another Kailasa with an Air bless is just about the perfect nation to wipe them out. Not only are they immune to all of Kail's archers, they are free to use all their own (depite low precision) with near impunity.

An Air bless is just as, if not more, salient in an all Kailasa game as in any other game. Otherwise your making your 25 gold recruit which you invested a 500 point bless into easily counterable by a 5 gold markata with no bless.

I actually make monkey archers central to my strategy when I'm using an Air bless. That's part of the beauty with that bless, you can make them a key component. Add to that that you have perfect mages for spamming Destruction and Iron Bane (and with, well what do you know, an A9 bless they can also sit right on the front lines with impunity so their Destruction spells can reach pretty much any target).

[rdonj]

Agreed with Omnirizon 100%. Kailasa's sacreds are 20+ hp buckler wielding swordsmen with 1(!) protection. The vast majority of kailasa's units don't even have a buckler, or any kind of armor worth speaking of. Kailasa is absolutely one of the best targets for enemy archer hordes in the game, so far as I can tell. Markata would even be the superior archers in this case due to the sheer volume of missile fire they can achieve.

Tifone - While it's true that other blesses would be more useful against powerful sacred rush nations, the ones you just mentioned should be completely possible to deal with if you can get a bit of research done before you have to face them down. Which should generally be quite possible, I think.

[pyg]

Endoperez suggested this thread in another and I set out whacking together a mod for a multi-EA Kailasa game letting you sort out your argument. I have something but it needs some more work. Notably I can't figure out how to *add pretenders*. I have:
#selectmonster 499
#restrictedgod 72
#end

and that doesn't seem to be working. If someone can point me out a mod that does this I would be grateful. Also PD was just a guess and may be better that is should be. Fort types are also just a guess. I will correct them when I have more time.

A sample with three players is include here to look. The mod name is "Any Kailasa Early Age". The python script that generates it is included as an example in dmg.zip in this thread (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=42415).

[lch]

pyg, the way modding is done, modding commands overwrite unit attributes. If a unit already has an attribute, a mod will update that attribute. If you have a unit with 10% regen and set it to 20% regen in a mod, then it will have 20% regen, and not two attributes with 10% and 20% regen which would result in 30% regen. You are overwriting the "pretender for nation" attribute three times, so only the last one will stick. If you want the units as pretenders for multiple nations, then you need to make copies of them.

[Psycho]

I'm with Tifone. If you are facing archers why send your sacreds to be slaughtered? Invent a different solution.

It is possible that archers on fire largest will fire yavanas instead of decoy bandars. I haven't tried it. But surely you can find someone or something with more hit points than yavanas to serve as decoys if you really want to use your sacreds against an archer heavy army. Use more yavanas as decoys if nothing else.

I am pretty sure that an army of yavanas with a S9A6 bless will defeat an army of archers of an equal gold cost even with no decoys used. Just split yavanas into several smaller groups.

I don't think that an all-Kailasa competition can show which bless is the best all around. But it would be an interesting game, so I'd like in as well. Probably the fire bless will win.

[P3D]

If any nation can benefit from an A9 bless it is Kailasa, and you also have several pretender choices. Also keep in mind that this would make your blessed troops pretty potent against EA lighting/archers strategies from

- Vanheim
- Fomoria
- Caelum
- Sauromatia
- Tir
- TC
- Arcos

Which means you limit strategy choices for third of your possible opponents pretty heavily.
Throw in two minor blesses from W and one from ESB - keep your everywhere recruitable sacred spearmen in mind.
I won't count on Arrow Fend either given your lack of air mages.

[KissBlade]

I'm with Tifone. If you are facing archers why send your sacreds to be slaughtered? Invent a different solution.

It is possible that archers on fire largest will fire yavanas instead of decoy bandars. I haven't tried it. But surely you can find someone or something with more hit points than yavanas to serve as decoys if you really want to use your sacreds against an archer heavy army. Use more yavanas as decoys if nothing else.


Use more yavanas as decoys..? Perhaps the purpose of decoying to protection your valuable troops is lost on that one ... Also your opponent can just break up his archers into different groups to dodge your decoys anyway. And choosing to simply "avoid" archers, if your neighbor sees you playing Kailasa, what's stopping him from rounding up a group of indie archers and breaking down your door?

[Executor]

"if your neighbor sees you playing Kailasa, what's stopping him from rounding up a group of indie archers and breaking down your door?"

Time is, can you really buy enough indie archers to counter Kailasa so early? You would need a great deal of archers to do so.
When you get to the point where you have several forts with cheap acrhers Kailasa is going to have some magic and other troops to support the yavanas.

What you're saying is impossible. What's to stop me from rounding up a group of indie infantry to stop those archers? Or buying my own archers put to fire archers? Indie archers won't get you anywhere against Kailasa.

If you're playing Sauromatia, sure they'll be a pain in the *** since nations like that are going to use archers anyway but even then there are ways to avoid archers.

An army of yavanas against an army of archers as the same gold cost, yavanas are gonna cut them to shreds, and they are a part of your general strategy unlike archers who you're gonna use in only certain situations but will still cost you twice as much to keep since yavanas are sacred.

And with Kailasa you don't need big armies running around. Several small armies are much more effective and will make it harder for a big group of archers to stop.

[pyg]

I don't mean to be pushy here, but I made a much better version of a multi Kailasa mod. I believe everything is correct except there are some extra pretenders that should not be available. Obviously if you were going to play such a game you would want real names and flags which are easy to do. If someone wants to host a multi Kailasa game I would be glad to help set up/fix/troubleshoot, but I'm not a Kailasa fan and don't want to play. Please PM me if you find something incorrect.

[KissBlade]

"if your neighbor sees you playing Kailasa, what's stopping him from rounding up a group of indie archers and breaking down your door?"

Time is, can you really buy enough indie archers to counter Kailasa so early? You would need a great deal of archers to do so.



Are you joking? Not only are indie archers readily in supply during EA (both massable due to crappier armor in EA and ever present indie "tribes" to mass them with) but they're one of the most effective EA expansion troops. If you're going to "counter archers with archers" then you're following my suggestions that Kailasa is more of an archer nation than sacred or you're going to focus on sacred with crappier bless scales and less cash to get archers because you're using them on sacreds and have crappier scales.

[Executor]

Not really, you can get a strong bless and good scales, well relativly good. Order and magic with a S9W8A6 bless. Heat is a logical option, and sloth also.

All your mages are sacred, so that's less upkeep, your yavanas are sacred and it only takes a handful of them as an expansion party, so believe me when I say this even with turmoil/sloth you'll have enough gold to buy mages and troops. If you take order, well you'll practically be swimming in gold and popin forts all over.
Kailasa has great potencial as a fast expander, if you play it right, almost as good as Mictlan.
AND your archers are just a bit cheaper (9 gold 3 res.) than indie and you can buy then in every fort, and are stealthy.
So you can bring them with your yavanas and when you're facing that BIG archer army they won't even know you have archers also, correct?
It isn't even hard to mass them when needed with the forts you'll quickly build.

[Alpine Joe]

If I bring enough archer decoys with my army, your archers will never get to target my yavanas.

Problem is, Yavanas have more HP than any other troops Kailasa can buy. Archers set to Fire Large Monsters will target the Yavanas and ignore your decoys. I was in a game with Alpine Joe where he was Kailasa, and he got destroyed by that tactic. Could be why he's not a big fan of the bless troops :)

You are very correct :) Targeting large monsters is huge against Kailasa and makes decoys irrelevant except against indies.

[Tifone]

Indie cavalry is also very common though :)

[Wrana]

Won't using Bandar as decoys alleviate the problem of firing at large monsters? Of course, they are more costly - but they can take some arrows and continue their decoying duty next fight, too...

[thejeff]

Bandars are still smaller (less HP) than Yavanas.

[Il Magno]

Yesterday I started to test this nation, the approach I used is

1st turn tax to 200 and recruit a yaksha
2 turn make the yaksha your profet, buy yavanas, and a mage (guru)
3turn start your expansion, the guru could forge a sield for your prophet,

Pretender: I think that a sleeping Nataraja with at least A4,S4,N4, is a good base to start, it has potential for supporting the middle game fighting when fully equipped with gear.

:)

[militarist]

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

[militarist]

You can even use blood rain later when have someone with B3 or just your regular S2B1 mage equipped in Blood+ equipment. Even more synergy.

[Sombre]

Indie cavalry is also very common though :)

They wouldn't work as decoys, imo. HP and size aren't sufficient.

[chrispedersen]

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

Lowering morale also makes repel effective.

[Euarchus]

Can you not equip a buffing yakshah with a hide shield as an archer decoy? It's a bit pricey but surely it would draw fire?

[13lackGu4rd]

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.

this strategy would work a lot better with Bandar Log and Patala as these 2 can actually benefit from the addition of Blood thanks to the Lanka summons they inherited. Kailasa doesn't have much with blood besides these horror spells, and have much better alternatives for the early stage of the game, and better than those of Bandar Log and Patala.

[Calahan]

Just tried them.

Sleeping blood fountain , empowering S2 mages with 1b.
Early expansion with atavi archers/bandar warrior/ cold blasts (I use them much more then bolts or salor's death, if I have good archery or mages)
Later - horrorspam/horrormarks. Didn't use sacred warriors at all at these stages. Without strong bless - I think just forget about them until high level Alt research is a good idea - you can mass them later in all castles, just will have spear version wich is not so bad anyway. Horrors are really funnier and less expected. Btw, horrors, lowering morale + your AWE troops + panic/siege items = a cool synergy.

Blood fountain is needed just for horrors to fill the early-mid period, and has a lot of usage later- you are free to experiment with pretender magic paths - you will have quite a lot of points with sleeping pretender, even with magic +2. So you can still take not bad bless. I'm not a big fan of Air bless, as it looses it's value with time, but still in such situation if you really can't live without sacreds (I can !) it's not a bad idea to use it. If your main weakness is early game, why not to sacrifice some points to minimize your risks here?
Even the minimal usage of fountain - forging and horrors is very nice, and in late game you can build blood economy, which sometimes is a good idea. Especially for a nation which wants peace to get to high alt and gets a chance to live in peace.
Any nation with decent Astral mages can take a Blood Fountain and go down the Horror route by empowering S mages in Blood, but that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. As mostly it just means spending a lot of points, or making concessions, on a compromised build which tries too hard to turn a nation into a type of nation it just isn't.

Although as Blackguard says, it could be an interesting idea for Bandar Log due entirely to the Lanka summons it has access to.

[Gregstrom]

BL wants some Blood - turn it into MA Lanka and you have some real power.

[militarist]

The main strength of Kailasa, is mages, and everything is quite obvius what can be done with them. The second strength is sacreds, which are not easy to use if you are not using strong bless. And if you are using strong bless, it benefits mostly in the early game. Using rainbow also has not much sense because of good access to any magic (not early, but still).
So the idea was to use BF (even with combining with minor bless approach) - just because both rainbow and stong bless are not as obvious as for most of other nations.

Other nations with S, which can extanded by BF also sometimes really would benefit from BF (for example those who have old mages problem - just to make boots is not bad).

The goal why I've started to think about Kailasa - is to find a way to use these sacreds properly, underlining their strengths (and their only unique strength is awe), rather then adding one more direction.

And the fact that this idea fits better for bandar logs, which is maybe true, doesn't stop me from thinking about this unique awe, of this underrespected for EA nation. And try to find a way to play with it.

The question is if something can be done to increase AWE effect by using synergistic spells enough to make an affective strategy if it.

[Maerlande]

The best way to synergize awe is to lower morale. Fear is excellent. But then so is Blood Rain.

Panic and terror are also excellent.

[Maerlande]

B4 bless is not a bad idea. Kailasa sacreds have dual attacks. So that's +2 @ 2 attacks more damage. Good for pounding through armour on the few EA nations that have it. Not maybe godly, but nothing wrong with it.

Kailasa sacreds have great hps, dual attack, awe, fast, good defence. Weaknesses are naked, terrible shield. Some things that make sense are A6 bless, W4 - 6 to boost defence, N4 to reduce afflictions.

For the magi the obvious choices are E4 and D bless. Mix and match.

[militarist]

You can use BF as a rainbow - for example A4F4B4 .. even E4 can be added..will give a superbloodhunter with possibility to cloud trapese/ wind guiding/ flame arrows. 40 points for a new path is not a rainbow price ,but still is much less then many others. I don't know if unit landed by CT takes part in the same battle as the army which enters a province by move.

[Sombre]

Lowering morale also makes repel effective.

It makes it /more/ effective, anyway. As does lower prot on target, higher attack and them having extremely low hp and shorter weapons.

But unless you get all of that going, it doesn't do much.

[Hadrian_II]

The main strength of Kailasa, is mages, and everything is quite obvius what can be done with them. The second strength is sacreds, which are not easy to use if you are not using strong bless. And if you are using strong bless, it benefits mostly in the early game.

Mages? Kailasas mages are nothing special, and they are surely not the main strength of it. Kailasa lives from its sacreds wich have enormous offensive power.

The goal why I've started to think about Kailasa - is to find a way to use these sacreds properly, underlining their strengths (and their only unique strength is awe), rather then adding one more direction.

The unique strength of kailasas sacreds is not that they have awe (which is nice of course), but that you can cast celestial music on them (battlefield wide quickness for all kailasa sacreds) with that spell cast, they can wear every enemy down quickly, and that is what kailasa is about. Also you can summon nice thugs with the kinnaras and later with the rudras you also get artillery mages/SCs.

Fun spells after celestial music are iron bane for offence and arrow fend (for defence, if you did not take an air bless).

The question is if something can be done to increase AWE effect by using synergistic spells enough to make an affective strategy if it.

The target of the game is not to awe your enemies, but to kill them.:D

[Alpine Joe]

You can use BF as a rainbow - for example A4F4B4 .. even E4 can be added..will give a superbloodhunter with possibility to cloud trapese/ wind guiding/ flame arrows. 40 points for a new path is not a rainbow price ,but still is much less then many others. I don't know if unit landed by CT takes part in the same battle as the army which enters a province by move.

The fountain can teleport but cannot cloud trapeze.