LA Utgard guide

[Dragar]

One last note on delaying construction - utgard has no earth, and thugging out a heap of jarls and skratti without hammers is very expensive. Waiting a while gives a better chance of acquiring hammers, either through trade or pretender if using an earth bless. Even getting 2 or 3 of them makes a big difference. If you research construction straight away you will find your natural gem income doesn't go very far at all, having no hammers and having neglected site searching.

[Viajero]

Thanks again for the advice. I will try defering construction then. When you mention aquiring hammers by trade, I take you mean via an eventual Empowerment or relevant path increase items made with earth gems?

Also you mentioned amphibious units to expand on indy water provinces. What type of army you assembled there for that? numbers and unit / leader types?

Regards,

[Dragar]

by trading i just meant trading for hammers directly, if yuo really suck at earth it can be the easiest way

The water provinces I just used some aquatic troops available as indies from a conquered province. They wouldn't do against a water nation, but get a bunch together and you can take out most indy water provinces

[Endoperez]

In case you aren't familiar with CBM, it's short for Conceptual Balance Mod. It changes pretender, scale and spell balance. While starting to use it requires quite a bit of relearning, and makes manual much less useful, you can only use scale and/or pretender parts. They make the game more fun.

[Viajero]

You mean the Hammer of the Mountains? or maybe the Gate Cleaver?

[Revolution]

Originally Posted by Viajero

You mean the Hammer of the Mountains? or maybe the Gate Cleaver?

dwarven hammers, used in forging for a 25% cost discount.

[Viajero]

Thanks for all your advice. I have tried tio apply it in my current test solo game and these are some of the findings:

1- N9W9 bless with a Son of Ferne imprisoned pretender
2- Woodmen with regeneration and Quicken as bless are a very effective grinding machine as long as I protect them from focused dammage
3- At turn 30 or thereabouts have finsihed researching for gem search spells plus Alteration 3 and turned now into Construction but it ll be a while until I reach level 4 or 5 in it.
4- Have not been able to use thugs so far as not equiped yet, so my army is heavily (almost solely) relaying on woodmen. Have expanded to around 20 provinces and have just built my 3rd castle.

Is there anything that can be done to accelerate thugging? or is this pace expected?

[Dragar]

I am surprised at your research rate - I'm in a game atm turn 21 have all the site searching plus alt almost to level 4... And until last turn I've only been recruiting mages in the capital. Your expansion rate looks a bit slow too

What scales do you have?

[Viajero]

AFG at the moment but similar to the ones proposed a bit further up.

Otherwise I have not been recruiting just mages from day 1, I had to recruit several other leaders for expansion, a few died so had to replace, also 2 mages constantly casting ritual searches etc. that probably can epxlain the discrepancy?

[Dragar]

yeah perhaps. Ritual searches wouldn't, but if you have recruited a few extra leaders could make the difference

If you aren't already, use indy commanders for ferrying troops, keep your jarls just for the fighting/blessing