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The Thread of Many Questions
Topic Started: Sep 2 2013, 05:52 AM (51,372 Views)
Itwastuesday
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*Spicy* Crew
So around double what I've been using.

That cuts so deep in your research though. How do you balance that? 50/50? Research a target (like say Five Gates Ritual) first and then upscale the blood economy at the cost of research?
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Ica
Tartarian
I'm not an expert but I've found that Mictlan can have a decent research even with a heavy blood economy. Your mages are inexpensive and you won't really need gold for units once you have a strong blood economy, so you can afford to recruit (and of course summon) more mages per turn than many other nations.

Also you can scale your blood economy up as you start reaching more of your important research goals. At some point research becomes less important than being able to summon more crap the next turn.
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KoboldLord
*Spicy* Crew
Itwastuesday,Apr 29 2016
11:01 AM
So around double what I've been using.

That cuts so deep in your research though. How do you balance that? 50/50? Research a target (like say Five Gates Ritual) first and then upscale the blood economy at the cost of research?

Two Mictlan priests cost 130 gold and will get about 12~15 slaves per turn in EA. If used for research instead, they would yield 14rp base, adjusted for your magic scales if you have them. 14rp is roughly five imp familiars, which are very cheap to research at construction 2 and yield 3rp per turn each, at a cost of 5 slaves apiece. After two turns of blood hunting, these imp familiars have paid for the research forever of the two blood hunters that were gathering the resources for them and any further slaves gathered are pure profit.

Once you're past the early game, however, you probably have even better ways to ramp up research. Massing huge quantities of cheap recruit-anywhere mages that will never go into battle works to a point, but eventually you're going to run low on gold regardless of whether you have a few mages blood hunting.

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Rejakor
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Leech.

Mictlan Priests are amazing battlemages. A big reason why the nation is good.
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Ohlmann
Dom 5 Beta Team
Well, they can cast Sabbat slave. I never cared for leech, one of the most overhyped spell out there.
Worthy Heroes - UW Expanded
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KoboldLord
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Rejakor,Apr 29 2016
06:25 PM
Leech.

Mictlan Priests are amazing battlemages. A big reason why the nation is good.

I can't really recommend waiting for research to complete on blood 7 before setting up blood-hunting squads as a blood-primary nation. The context of the question was spending those early fort-turns on research vs. blood economy, and both of those things normally need to get done long before level 7 in anything is a good idea.
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Itwastuesday
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Thanks. I think I'll have to test this to see how this all maps out. Would anybody share a turn file of a turn~30 EA Mictlan for me to inspect?
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Morsigil
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Maerlande has a whole series on Mictlan from an EA game he won in the early days of Dom 4:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXa4...g0C4t1Zvgzo0vRm
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Itwastuesday
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I should chck some late turns of that then.

I've run into another problem. How do you place mages spamming elementals? Especially large fire elementals that set your troops on fire. Side by side, troops on the sides set to wank? Is it truly random where the mage casts the elemental, amazing to watch 2 fire elemetals herp behind a row of mages?
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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KoboldLord
*Spicy* Crew
Itwastuesday,May 4 2016
07:28 AM
I should chck some late turns of that then.

I've run into another problem. How do you place mages spamming elementals? Especially large fire elementals that set your troops on fire. Side by side, troops on the sides set to wank? Is it truly random where the mage casts the elemental, amazing to watch 2 fire elemetals herp behind a row of mages?

The usual setup is to blob up your mages. Mages usually go on the flanks, packed into as few tiles as possible. Preferably back a bit so they don't get shot at by enemy archers and mages, but there is of course going to be an element of risk just fielding a bunch of mages in the first place. Chaff troops go in the middle on hold and attack or on guard commander so the elementals can catch up and get ahead. If some or all of the chaff dies in the process, well, that's what they're for.

Elementals scatter randomly into open tiles around the caster, so you want to pack your mages three to a tile and leave an open tile above and below them so the elementals can get around. Elementals completely fill a tile all by themselves, so even a single stray unit will completely wall them. If you feel you need more than three elementals on the top and three at the bottom, extend your blob of mages backward, away from the enemy, rather than extending them toward the center where your chaff might end up getting in the way. Also be aware that if you drop multiple blobs of chaff in the same spot on the tactical map when setting up orders, the combined blob of chaff will end up extending well beyond where the squares mark, possibly blocking your elementals again.
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Rejakor
*Spicy* Crew
spamming elementals (A mini guide):

Elementals are either like a single surge, or a river. Depends on your paths. Notably Earth Elementals trample, water elementals hit super hard, and fire elementals hit a square and have a fire shield to hurt lightly armoured chaff attacking them. So you want to place things differently with different types.

Earth Elementals want to be placed (and scripts timed) for maximum initial shock, just like elephants. A 'straggling line' of units to channel the earth elementals up an extreme flank can be worthwhile when you have casters that can cast a lot of earth elementals but not all at the same time. Alternatively, a small number of earth elementals can be used as shock weapons and seeded through a front line, or sent up the centre, purely as distractions - they'll move into enemy formations, disorder them, clump them, and halt them for quite a while.

Water Elementals are probably the most tricky to use. They hit super hard but unless underwater don't have any real defensive abilities, meaning they are best used against hard targets like giants, SCs. Making sure your water elementals engage the tough units and not the weaker ones is important. If you don't have a viable target for that, but water elementals are still a thing you want to deploy, they need buffs. You're entering a battle of attrition with the enemy via your crush attacks, so you need to use a line formation or something to contain the elementals, drop buffs on them (earth ones), and then wait for the line to die before the buffed elementals go into play. Like all 'attrition' plans it is a tough one and requires your mages have Guard Commander units to not get ganked by stray cavalry. Alternatively, fog warriors well-timed to coincide with the elementals being on the field will also do the trick. Water Elementals can be used buffless, but you're relying on having quite a lot of them compared to the normal ratios of elementals:enemy infantry. The smaller water elementals tend to be a bit useless, so only the first few forms really 'count'.

Fire Elementals are fire elementals - you send them in, ideally ahead of or out of the way of other troops. This means a specific flank, up the centre with your own units on the extreme flank and ideally hold and attacking. It's worth noting that like many of the other elementals, the best use of fire is en-masse. With their fire shield and fire attack, they can destroy/rout enough things quickly enough that they don't get cut through, or mess up the enemy formations quite badly, while spewing heat all over everything near their targets for good measure. They deprecate quite badly against things fire resistant or heavily armoured. But against other targets, the ideal use is emptying labs and dropping ten metric tons of fire all over the enemy. It's expensive, and you need a good target, but it will ruin that target entirely.

Air Elementals are like flying, better, earth elementals. Except that means that when summoned they rush off into the enemy's endzone and die, instead of waiting for more casts, which means often the ideal use-case is a bunch of cheap a2 mages with 2 air gems each (or stormpower and 1 gem), 1 air elemental each, all on the same turn. But, there is a trick to this. Enemies engaged with your troops are far more vulnerable to air elementals than enemies clumped in their endzone. Holding the air elemental casts until turn 4, or 5, of the battle can make quite a big difference in how they hit. It's also why air elementals work well with flying troops - your troops can get 'stuck in' at the same time as the air elementals, who will merrily trample away while the enemy struggles to kill off your flyers.

Ice Elementals are like earth elementals, but better. They're a big reason for Water nations to take Cold scales. They do all the things earth elementals do, but need less coddling to do them.
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Itwastuesday
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Thanks, this is very useful. I wish I had thought of late summoning A-elementals in my Man game, maybe I wouldn't be in the garbage position I am in now had I won some battles.
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Itwastuesday
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Is it possible to get a high astral wight mage out of a slave androdai?
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Itwastuesday
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I remember hearing that mindless units are immune to Horrors. Is this true to any extent? How about Astral Corruption, say, could a Golem still lolteleport around as much as it likes?

About AC, are the spells still successful even if the mages get attacked?
Eagles may soar high, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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Grigio87
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Itwastuesday,Jun 16 2016
11:53 AM
I remember hearing that mindless units are immune to Horrors. Is this true to any extent? How about Astral Corruption, say, could a Golem still lolteleport around as much as it likes?

About AC, are the spells still successful even if the mages get attacked?

I don't know about mindless and AC, but I have teleported some Golems (3-4) under AC and I never seen horror assassinations against them (but teleport is cheap).

Under Astral Corruption the horrors strike only after the ritual/forging, therefore you can lose the caster/forger but not the ritual spell or the magic item.

All my stuff: Moddb, my Dom5 italian forum: Dominions forum Italia
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