Newbie guide to SCs?

[Kel]

For your first game with SC's I would suggest not using arcoscephale, as it is one of the weakest races for supporting SC's.

This is true in the early game. In the mid/end game, Arco's variety of magic, ability to craft about anything, being able to site search efficiently (including death), and their astral income gives them a wider variety of SCs than most nations. So it depends on which SCs you are looking at. If you want to see the biggest variety of SCs available in the end game (and experiment with them), Arco is still a good choice, imo.

It also is not hard to get into death magic. I avoid empowering since it is so inefficient but a ring of sorcery, otoh, is always a goal for me, as Arco, in the mid game. From there, its skull staff, skull face and there you have a 4 death caster, assuming you don't find indies that are better.

Blood, otoh, is pretty unlikely, without a good indie mage. Arco's variety of gem income will often let you trade for a few blood slave items (blood thorn, for example, a better fit on Nat than a wraith sword, imo (though a higher const level)) though, honestly, it's hard to get too many since every blood user has their eyes on the ID's or contracts

- Kel

[LintMan]

Here's an alternate SC you can use for Arco:

Ghost King
Air 3
Water 2
Earth 3
Death 3

This leaves you 230 points to spend on scales, dominion (base 3), castle, and perhaps even some extra magic skills as you'd like.

Those magic paths allow you to cast:
Quickness
Ironskin (and later Invulnerability)
Breath of Winter
Mistform
Mirror Image (or perhaps Soul Vortex later)

The Ghost King has some nice built-in advantages over some other SC pretenders:
- he's undead, so he gets: 100% cold/poison res, disease immunity, and best of all: 0 encumberance, so fatigue worries.
- ethereal
- cause fear +6
- chill effect

As soon as you can research 3-4 of the above spells, he's good to go out whopping indeps, but as you are able to research and forge them. you can give him some nice booster items:
- Charcoal Shield (gives flame shield)
- Sword of Quickness (2 attacks/rd)
- Horror Helm (boost fear to insane levels)
- Jade armor (gives auto Quickness)
or
- Rime Hauberk (gives auto Breath of Winter)
- Flying Boots
- Pendant of Luck
- Anti-Magic Amulet

There's plenty of other armor choices you can pick besides those two. I mention those two because they provide effects you're casting spells for, so if you get the item, then you can script a different spell for another sort of boost, such as Air Shield if you're dealing with a lot of massed missile units.

As a side thing to mention: since you're planning to play SP for a while and said you don't want to worry about having your pretender with weak astral getting duelled, you can download the Magic Duel Mod from illwinter's site, which boosts MD's cost to 1 gem/100 fatigue, so you'll almost never see Magic Duel used after that.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Blitz:
I would however, be interested to find out what your Nataraja looks like. AAAEEEDDD?

5A, 2W, 2E, 4D, is my current build.

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by LintMan:
Here's an alternate SC you can use for Arco:

Ghost King
Air 3
Water 2
Earth 3
Death 3

This is a solid, although not monstrous, SC. However, the GK don't really play that well with Arco, as you sacrifice your access to the Priestess healing by being undead: In the new Versions, priestesses cannot heal undeads.

[Blitz]

5A, 2W, 2E, 4D, is my current build

Whoah lot of points. Why all the air magic?

[Norfleet]

More Mirrors. Air Queen Summoning platform. Among many other useful things.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

You should give a look to this classic: The Ten Whammies in Dominions

It was written for Dominions:PPP, but most of it remains valid for Dominions 2. The first 'whammy' deals with Supercombattants.