[Bat/man]

A few comments.

1. Magic scale is very important. You have crap for mages. You need to spend a lot of mage time summoning umbrals at one mage action = 1 summon.

OR one mage action on your summons baracthus, children of rhuax.
OR doing your earth reading.

My point is: you need to max out your mage research on the ones remaining.

2. IIRC, your water oracles are less likely to incur old age, compared to your fire mages. So, I recruit a fair number of these, especially on maps with a fair amount of water.

3. Boulder throwers, Boulder throwers, boulder throwers. Unless you have reason to think you're competing in a cold domain in which case trogs.

4. Take heat 3 domain.
Sure - people can cast wolven winter. Make them cast it. It also helps if you "stunt". Its much better to concede a territory and make them blow WW expecting a battle than it is to lose your forces fighting in WW. You definitely have to pick your battles fighting any of the cold projecting races.

If you have a high dominions score in a province - it is only a few turns for temperature scales to return to normal.

You have H3 mages. The more you can make this races opponents divert resources away from military and into things like dominion - the better off you are.

5. While I agree with all of Calahan's comments about gold - I don't think it really applies to agartha.

Production lets you build out more of your armored boulder throwers.

Death might cause minor supply issues for your opponents.
Your armies don't eat and its a minor advantage but one your need to exploit.

But Calahans comments regarding earth readers vs oracles I completely agree with. I think you *have* to restrict yourself to only 1 or 2 oracles the first year, because the maintenance cost is too damn high.

And I agree with his comment about d3 combined with unluck. You do not want to go past -2/-2.

6. Blight. Earth meld.

There are a lot of approaches to take regarding your pretender.
Some believe that you need an awake pretender to expand, and to project dominion.

However, it is equally possible to start with an awake great sage. Earth meld will allow your troops to actually hit.

But more importantly, a lot of the nations that are inclined to rush you (EA-Niefle) have capitol only troops.

You have the ability to rapidly scale up gem income. Complement that by researching blight very very quickly.

If you start with an awake researcher, e4 n4 s4 are reasonable goals with a small synergy for your sacreds.

7. So what are Large Sized, High hitpoints useless troops good for?

The answer isn't quite nothing. Targeting mechanisms will tend to target your large useless blobs. So long as your effective fighters are smaller / fewer hp the can for the most part continue to mow down enemy troops while your blobs take the hits.

Of course, the only problem is agartha doesn't have any effective troops.

8. As I posted in the other thread - small troops, especially small effective troops are your friends. Two of them in the same square as your size 4 will drastically increase the survivability of your giants. Sure, you lose a few midgets. They're cheap.