[Fantomen]

First gear

Agartha can have a good early expansion with a bit of luck and if you are careful and thorough with the composition of your armies. There are some different variants to try that all can work pretty good. You won´t have the blazing start that some of the bless rushers have, but it won´t be that bad either. You can try these three variants and see what works best for you:

1: Shield and axe: This is basically a squad of warriors or Ancient ones set to hold and attack and a bunch of troglodytes on the flank set to attack rear or hold attack closest. The plus of using warriors is you don´t need a priest mage to bless. This is good against heavy armour/low damage units like heavy infantry with spears or short swords. With an archer decoy they can handle tribes as well. Not good against cavalry, barbarians or javelins. You can put one of these together on turn one if you don´t recruit a mage.

2: Death from above: The principle is to combine a frontline of cavern guards, Ancient ones or heavy warriors with boulder throwers. You need to practice the placement a bit. We want the boulder throwers to arrive behind your frontline just after it has engaged the enemy. The frontline troops takes the beating while boulders do the damage. This creates a shock effect where many enemy squads will rout after the first rain of boulders. Requires critical mass of about 12 boulder throwers and 20-30 warriors or 12 Ancient ones. The advantage of ancient ones is they have the same AP as armoured boulders so will almost always sync well and both have map move 2, downside is you need more turns recruiting due to sacred cap. Gets much more powerful with an oracle to cast legions of steel and divine blessing but work without it too. This setup handle most indies depending on how big you make it. Surprisingly good against Cavalry.

3: Bonus force: I also tried making a troglodyte lord prophet with blacksteel plate and shield. I put him in the front on divine bless attack rear and a group of boulder throwers running behind, it worked quite well but I don´t like that it takes two mage turns. Still very effective "bonus" expansion squad for the price so might be worth it. Only for low damage indies. Good against javelins.

Usually I make a type 1 squad initially and decide what to make of the second one after looking carefully at the indies.

You have a few important goals during the first year.

First is a decent expansion rate.

Second is starting a secondary fort before turn 7, earlier if possible. To do this look for a forest nearby, that is your cheapest forts. Send your scout there to check the poptype and judge if it can be taken or what kind of squad to build to do so. Remember that you can scry in your capital site if you want to check different forests quickly. Put a temple first if you cannot afford both and crank out some Ancient lords and sacreds until you can get the lab.

Third is to get a fire oracle out site searching and if possible a death oracle too, but second fort is more important. You need just a little bit more fire gems than 1 per turn. If you get to three or four it´s ok for now. Hopefully you also get some death and astral (from those priest levels). Save those pearls for later if you get them.

Fourth is to research construction 2 before your pretender wakes up.