Sauramatia Strategy tips

[Dectilon]

vfb said:
Don't forget Sauromatia can blood sacrifice. You can blood hunt with a N1B1 Warrior Sorceress who has a Sanguine Rod. Witch Kings are a bit expensive to just use for blood hunting. And best of all, N1B1s can make Jade Daggers too. I like to have an indy priest with a Jade Dagger blood sacrificing on every temple I build.

Also, Enaries are "Fortune Tellers" (only 5% each though). While luck is fun to play with, I prefer Order-3, Misfortune-2 for Sauromatia, and use Enaries as my primary mage. 10 researching in each castle of yours will cut down on bad events in the castle provinces, and just a few can immediately take back any neighbor province that get by hit barbarian events. You can even try Order-3, Misfortune-2, Death-2, high dominion, and push the misfortune and death out into your neighbors with your blood sacrifices.

It's a good way to spread dominion, but it doesn't help with the actual fighting very much, does it? And the fortune telling strategy sounds risky. I mean, if I use high fortune scales I usually get like 200 extra gold each turn from events (if you average it out). If I lost 200 each turn instead I wouldn't be able to get any Enaries ~~ And if I did get them I couldn't afford an army. Either way, it sounds like it would screw you over way too much early on.

[Shovah32]

Order 3 Misfortune 2 is pretty standard. It tends to get you more gold early on when you aren't getting 3 events/turn, and more again during the late game when you've expanded to the point that your 3/turn aren't as important.

Of course, Order/luck is always fun too. Although I am usually more of an order person myself.

[K]

Sauromatia has a number of unique tactics available to it.

Here they are:

1. Poison Cloud spamming w/Hydra. Undead created by Raise dead and Raise Skeletons and Hydras are all immune to poison, and Hydras produce poison clouds and you get Nature mages who can cast Poison Cloud. Spam undead so that they mass around hydras and let the enemy army hot your front line of mixed hydras undead. Hydras kill anything close to them and the poison clouds will surrounds them, and the undead will take hits so that your expensive hydras won't get killed. The Poison from Androphage archers also won't hurt these troops.

2. Leeching Darkness and Raise dead/Skeletons can jam a castle entrance better than anything in the game.

3. ASAP make an undead/demon commander into your prophet, as a Sauromatian H3 can Reanimate Longdead Horsemen, a nearly unique ability that produces dramatically better reanimated undead.

4. Witch Kings seem designed to spam Drain Life.

5. You get one of the only real province defenses in the game (it can withstand a real army if you invest in it).

6. Dominion kill with blood sacrifice.

7. You are really good at communions, since you can combine Sabbaths and Astral Communions.

8. Keep standard units in your army to keep yoour armies from routing.

9. You get really good EA archers in addition to the wicked Androphage Archers.

10. You seem naturally designed to summon Dark Vines.

More later....

[Dectilon]

Cool... like... I thought Dark Vines sucked... Shows what I know : /

[sector24]

Dark Vines aren't that strong offensively. But they make an excellent wall to hold the enemy back while you pound them with arrows and poison.

[Lingchih]

Dark Vines. Hmmm. I guess if you could actually spam a bunch of them, yeah. But they really are pretty horrible. In a recent test game with MA Ermor, I ran into a rash of them in Indy Provinces. I think I hit like 4 indies that had the bloodhenge druids, with their 3-4 dark vines. My tiny force of Shadow Vestals killed them in every case in 1-2 rounds.

If you had twenty of them... then yes, that might make a good wall. Or, if you just want a defensive wall, it might be cheaper to just summon Vine Ogres. Dunno. They look really cool though.

[Olive]

Tried this long time ago (just when dom 3 was out), but I remember I had good results (vs AI) mixing dark vines and hydras (3-4 vines with 1 hydra iirc).