View Single Post
  #3  
Old September 20th, 2009, 11:27 PM
Fantomen's Avatar

Fantomen Fantomen is offline
Major
 
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Me a viking
Posts: 1,012
Thanks: 81
Thanked 122 Times in 73 Posts
Fantomen is on a distinguished road
Default Re: Agartha, Pale ones - a study in darkness (CBM)

Second gear

When your pretender wakes it is time to shift into second gear. You should now have 10 -15 provinces, two forts and preferably a third under construction, a pile of earth gems, a trickle of fire and death and a couple of expansion parties still alive.

His first task is to forge hammers. In fact he will forge hammers until we reach construction 4. This should get you 5-7 hammers to play with. The first hammer costs 7 gems and the rest 3 each. Without a forge lord 6 hammers would have cost us 15 + 11x5 = 81 gems = more than we could afford. Now we get them early year 2 for 22 gems. On top of that it means you will never forge anything without one, and this is going to change the way we can play the nation.

In the meantime intensify death searching.

While doing this you´ll also want to flesh out your armies. Each army should now include an oracle, and that oracle should be standing in the middle of you front line dropping legions of steel *before* divine blessing. This is important since you want to avoid hold and attack orders which will cause your boulder throwers to end up in melee, but still need that legions of steel to target correctly. You want to compose that frontline mostly of Cavern guards or Ancient ones depending on your gold supply and need for speed.

A Cavern guard now has 16 protection, 21 hp and deals 23 damage. Thats not bad for a 13 gp unit under production scales, even with a net 8 attack score. Your boulder batteries should swell to 20 - 30 per army at this point.

Now there´s something missing here and what´s missing is some long range artillery. Luckily we have some Ancient lords sitting idle in the basement. Now use those hammers to forge some fire bolas and boots of giant strength. Consider that fire bolas have two attacks each and has range AND damage = strength. So each lord gets two bolas and a pair of boots pushing strenght to 24.

Each lord will fire 4 bolas each turn with a range and damage of 24 and 10 precicion(bolas are +3 prec and soon you´ll see stars racking up). First rounds this will break up the enemy formations when the imprisoned units fall behind and when melee starts the fire bonds will allow your cavern guards to dish out that 23 damage even with their low attack.

Add a couple of these to each army and there will be few units you can´t kill at this stage of the game. Glaives kill high prot/low defence units, boulders ignore defence for high def/low prot units and bolas will strip defence of those rare high prot/high def elites and slow down thugs. And you can always call in your special force of Seal guards if you encounter ethereal units.

Also try smaller forces of 1-2 bola lords, 5-10 Seal guards, an oracle and a couple trogs or trog lords with armour.

Another niche (very niche) tool at constr 2 is trog lords with medallion of vengance. Now this is a true grenade. Let them run before your army trampling their way deep in enemy ranks before blowing up those jaguars or whatever small size super elites rushed you in large numbers. This is expensive use of fort turns and fire gems but it is also very effective and utterly hilarious.

Somewhere in summer or fall year two depending on your situation you reach construction 4, prepare to change gears again.

Last edited by Fantomen; September 20th, 2009 at 11:43 PM..
Reply With Quote
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Fantomen For This Useful Post: