[Fantomen]

Third gear

Somewhere in middle of year two your pretender got a new mission along with one of your death 2 oracles. You guessed it, mentors. You havent used any death gems and should have a death income of 4-10 something. This will let you forge two mentors per turn for a good while. Total cost of 9 gems per turn. If your gems run out your forge who...errr lord keeps forging one per turn for 2 gems. If you have really lucked out in death searching you start with 3 per turn. Now this is where your forge lord starts flirting with the duracell rabbit.

The implications of this is simply going to be huge, and it won´t be a temporary boost either. This is going to give you a progressively increasing research that will catch up with and pass any other nation barring maybe Baalz helheim. Let me just say you may be looking at constr 7 alt 9 by winter year three and you start seeing the proportions, but I´m getting ahead of myself.

After construction 4 you pick up conj 3 for Dark knowledge, voice of apsu, Banes, Rhuax pact and Barathrus pact. Now those are nice summons that cost next to nothing and go well together. The magma children are still pretty niche but later on when we have ench 4 (fire ward) and heavy buffs these will be pure gold. The earth elementals are good right from the start and will now phase out the trogs for most situations. Use those remotes but do it with care, you want to target carefully with Dark knowledge and combine with manual search, every death gem is precious.

At this point you´ll want to start funneling some of your good scale income into high PD all over, I know Agarthas PD isn´t that good but just trust me ok. You´re aiming at 25+ all over. To do this you can stop recruiting your more expensive sacreds in favour of cavern guards. The more cavern guards you mass, the happier you will be later on.

Construction 4 also opens up for some new thugs to flesh out your front ranks. Banes with frost brands and golden shields are cool, and a trog lord with armour and golden shield can be pretty devastating. Also consider fear helmet on trog lords for fear awe combo trampling right through the enemy ranks. Give them some girdles if they get tired, but they are only enc 2 so might not need it. And watch out for that low mr. The very same old brand/gold shield combo works with ancient lords too. If you find indy air mages and get some air gems then give a couple Ancient lords stars of thraldom and mix with your other frontline regulars, who cares about low attack score now?

Cold dominion pushes might start to become a problem now and I see few alternatives other than pushing back. Fortunately you are well suited to do so and shouldn´t be rushing any cold nations yourself at this point of the game. Keep track of it, preach when neccessary and don´t follow any bait into the avalanche and you should be fine.

After Conj 3 you go for Thau 2 or possibly 4. Site searching fire and earth and possibly prison of fire and terror if you feel that you need them to further mitigate your low attack and complement your boulder shocks and tramplers with low morale scores. If you found indy astral mages pick up evo 2 or 4 for site searching and fire cloud, cleansing water and blade wind. But consider that every turn spent above the 2:nd level in these schools will slow you down in the long run, so only if you need it. Might be worth pulling your pretender for a flaming helmet here to let an earth reader cast augury.

Now as soon as possible switch back to construction. From now on avoid using earth and fire gems exept for carefully remote searching those provinces your oracles don´t have time to visit. Pile em up.

Now before you know it we´re hitting the bar for construction 6, time to switch gears again.