Thoughts on EA Abyssia (guide)

[kasnavada]

Reserved, in case of.

[coobe]

i love ea abysia, but i see no way around a e9 cyclops...

perhaps im wrong

[MaxWilson]

Good points. A couple of notes:

"berserk +3 adds +3 to str, attack skill and protection". And to encumbrance, and it subtracts 3 from defense (doesn't matter to Abysia). Note that the +3 to Protection is to base Protection, which combines with armor according to the formula overall Prot = BaseProt + ArmorProt * (1 - BaseProt/40).

Salamanders have AoE 1 which means they work well against high-Def units like Vans (they don't have to roll to hit). I haven't played much with Abysia but when you say Salamanders are fragile, are you using them alone or mixing in a handful with your heavy inf? They ought to be mixed.

Beast trainer's animal awe may be helpful against elephant rushes.

-Max

[Micah]

Yeah, E9 with the Anointed is the hotness. Pun intended.

[Micah]

Berserk doesn't add encumbrance directly from what I've seen, it just causes fatigue. Meaning you tire out from it while just moving. Might work better with quickness though, since it's likely only once/round instead of per action.

[kasnavada]

Ok, that is modified / added.

Salamanders : I used them a bit mixed and they just died alone while the heavy infantry stood. If alone, they just create a breach and die soon after if enemies are left.

They also just cost too much in my opinion.

[Psycho]

The problem with salamanders is that they have 20 fatigue, so they will go out very fast. And those misbreds aren't that useless - they fly and have a potent damage with 15 strength and a battleaxe.

Abysia has strong troops and good pd. They can take indypendants easily with their national troops. Their main problem is magic diversity and BoT.

[kasnavada]

Another idea, death bless from the MA thread.

[Dragar]

I'm no expert, but have played a fair bit of SP abysia in EA and MA this last week, preparing for my first MP game, and here are my thoughts.

I thought an E9 bless would be the way to go and played with it a few times. Yes, its great in the early game, your Burning Ones/Lava Warriors are devastating, but as capital only sacreds they lose relevance as the game progresses. Burning Ones won't number enough and are susceptible to AP attacks - crossbows are very painful for instance.

What you have left in terms of sacreds are mages, and really you need to use your mages in the mid to late game to get anywhere. While the reinvig is handy for them it isn't game-changing, and the protection is virtually worthless - if they are using it you have problems.

I'm trialling Astral now, 10 bless, and minor blesses of earth and blood. Twist Fate is very handy for your melee troops, the MR will presumably be excellent in MP, and I like astral as a school for your pretender, it seems to have one of the best set of Strike from a Distance spells, and is probably easiest to gather a lot of gems for. If you can do that (use your mages to search heavily for astral sites in the early game) Acashic Record becomes an option, helping to cover for your lack of magical diversity and letting you alchemise back into astral.

Given that you only really need fire gems (get plenty natively), astral gems (alchemise from everything else) and blood slaves for your magic, you should in theory be pretty much set.

Between earth, astral and blood you also get a lot of good combination spells to cast in the higher levels.

lastly, hopefully a 10S pretender will be a good mage killer from range in the late game

My one major problem so far is overcoming the very very poor precision of abysian mages (even worse in MA), given the complete lack of nature and air magic. Thankfully you can keep lobbing fireballs at the melee and your troops don't care if they get hit, but an awful lot of spells hit no-one at all.

One last comment - I find rushing for Constr 6 seems to be pretty useful. Lightless Lanterns, with your abundance of fire gems, pretty much double your research in one turn and make the other schools so much easier. Your troops are good enough to get you to this point without needing aggressive magic.

Any major flaws in this please let me know, it is mostly conjecture!