[MaxWilson]

Here's another update from my learning experiences with Agartha. I usually want to focus on a good lategame, and so in Agartha's case that means taking Astral and Nature on my pretender (which also gives access to Air through Faerie Queens and/or Gift-of-Reason'ed Tartarians). The part I've been having trouble with is my early game expansion, and the most successful early game I've had so far (playing ten turns or so of a game and then quitting) was when I forgot about trying to play them as a bless nation and focused on conventional troops. IIRC my pretender was:

D9S6N4 imprisoned master lich
Order-3
Growth-2
Misfortune-3
Drain-2

Drain-2 doesn't hurt research much because Ktonian necromancers are sacred and high-research. I had plenty of cash in the early game, and since I'm using conventional troops I can use cave captains instead of Ktonian Necromancers (required for large numbers of Blindfighters). Once I'd taken the territory around my capitol I had about 200 resources, which is pretty average. Expansion worked well with 25-30 crossbowmen and 5-6 cave drakes and 1-3 entrance guards as blockers; on indies 9 they were taking out most provinces with 1 or 2 losses each time. This let me build necromancers most turns and research toward (in this case) Conjuration-5 for Umbrals. (There was an ichthyid province nearby, so I knew I could get an underwater leader, and I wanted to expand into the water ASAP. This was Glory of the Gods. Edit: okay, this was dumb of me. I forgot that ichthyids don't have any undead leadership, so I'm about to blow an extra 30 gems for a Tomb Oracle. [Nope, Mound King was cheaper.])

Basically I had to forego an E9 bless and take Drain-2, and got Growth-2 and Heat-0 in exchange relative to my earlier tries. In play this forced me to forego blindfighters for my expansion, which turned out to be not much of a loss. I expect to be in a much stronger position by the time I finally run into the AI nations, and I just may play this game through to completion. My necromancers are slightly weaker than in previous games because of 1.) no E9 bless and 2.) Drain scale, but as long as I make battles short this shouldn't be much of a problem. I was able to afford my favorite D9 bless on my necromancers, which makes me happy.

Hope that's useful to somebody.

-Max