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| EA Atlantis - Sea and Stone | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 20 2016, 03:40 AM (2,414 Views) | |
| Sai | Feb 20 2016, 03:40 AM Post #1 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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EA Atlantis Guide This guide is written for Atlantis as played with the /domg/ Balance Mod or its successor summod. While most of its contents will be valid in vanilla Dominions, you will not have access to scaling Quickness and your Living Pillars will be slightly more difficult to produce, which reduces the power of two tools that this guide relies on. National Overview: Pros: Very good mages, cheap and strong deep one infantry that become even better with buffs, fully amphibious lineup, resilient sacreds for expansion Cons: Low magic resistance, exclusively infantry troops, expensive mages, no worthwhile land recruits Atlantis is an underwater nation comprised of adaptable amphibians. This means that unlike Pelagia and R’lyeh who have trouble bringing some of their best troops ashore, Atlantis’s troops are all capable of fighting on land. Because they never stop growing, there are two different kinds of atlantean units - the human sized ones and the giant shamblers. In the early age of Atlantis, there are also two subspecies - deep ones, who more closely resemble deep sea fish and have a vicious bite attack, and the normal frog people that can be found in other eras. Atlantean troops are all infantry. While the four subspecies give some diversity in terms of unit selection, for the most part we can ignore the regular atlantean troops, with the exception of the occasional coral guard if you have enough resources to recruit them. We can expect the Deep Ones to form the core of our armies instead. All of the armed deep ones and shamblers of the deep have spears made out of basalt enchanted by the Basalt Kings. This gives them a magical weapon, which is very useful when dealing with ethereal units, mistform casters, or armies enchanted with fog warriors. With this and their additional bite attack, they are offensively very powerful, but their lack of armor makes them relatively easy to kill as well. The shamblers slightly make up for this with their much higher HP values and higher natural protection, but they are also much more expensive. Our sacred Basalt Pillars, in stark contrast to these naked units, have incredible armor. Commanders, Mages, and Magic Expansion: Mothers of the Deep Large armies: Basalt Queens Earth Meld + Troop Buffs Research Goals: Alt 2, Cons 3, Ench 3, Conj 3, Alt 4, Cons 4, Alt 5 You’ll want to diverge from here based on your opponents, with Evo 5 giving Earthquake and excellent direct damage for Mages of the Deep, Con 5 enabling water elementals, and deeper Alteration granting Green Lions and Marble Warriors. Let’s take a look at their commanders, starting with the big ones. While nominally ruled by the Basalt Queen high priests and the Basalt King mages, the Basalt Kings are obsessed with staring into the dark crystal at the base of their city and leave the administration of the nation to the Queens, who are exceptional leaders as a result in addition to their powerful holy magic. When they can be pulled away from the crystal, they are exceptional mages which craft the magical basalt weapons for their soldiers and the enchanted armor for their sacred elites. Mechanically, these are all very high earth mages, with some water and fire magic as well. Both the kings and the queens are capital only and slow to recruit. Given their very high levels of magic, we’ll want to be producing kings pretty much constantly, with maybe one or two queens to help with leading armies thanks to their exceptional leadership. In games played with thrones of ascension, they can also be helpful for claiming thrones, though this is slightly less important for underwater nations, given that you can also supplement your holy needs with Bishop Fish when you get to the later stages of the game. For basic troop leadership, we will be using either independent commanders from outside of our forts or Mothers of the Deep for early expansion. While they offer 1 less morale than Coral Commanders, they make up for this by being able to cast Sermon of Courage. More importantly, they are capable of blessing our troops, which is essential for expanding with sacreds. For large amies, it can be worth recruiting a Basalt Queen who provides a substantial morale bonus which can be useful in larger fights, casts Divine Blessing and other higher level holy spells, and, because each Queen will be leading a large number of troops, can be equipped with inspiration boosting items to give an even larger morale bonus to your army. Outside of their capital, Atlantis can recruit only one mage - the Mage of the Deep. These guys are excellent combat mages that can serve a variety of roles based on what randoms they get. For direct damage magic, those with a fire random can cast acid based evocation, especially water 3 fire 1 mages, those with a double water random can cast high level falling frost and cleansing water, those with a double earth random can cast Maws of the Earth with gems after improving their earth magic with summon earth power, and those with a double fire random can use phoenix fire to sling evo as a level 3 fire mage. All of them are capable of summoning water elementals when you hit Conjuration 5, with the level 2s needing to either cast Summon Waterpower when fighting underwater or burn an extra gem. This makes them very good at fighting off assassins (at least, those that don’t have two bottles of water), allows you to use a single mage as a raider, and water elementals can pulverize even a heavy thug unless it’s specifically geared to survive four high damage armor piercing attacks, so they can work to counter raiders as well. However, their true power, and that of the Basalt Kings, will come from their ability to buff up troops. An E2 mage of the deep can become an E3 with summon earth power, which lets them cast Strength of Giants, Legions of Steel, and (if you hit the fairly high research required for it) Marble Warriors. Because your deep ones are hitting with six attacks per square including their bite attack, strength of giants is a great offensive buff that pushes them over the edge from merely damaging heavily armored units to killing them in one round. Legions of Steel, meanwhile, is pretty incredible on your high protection sacreds, and similarly pushes them over the edge from occasionally taking damage to simply ignoring enemy attacks. Marble Warriors, while requiring far more research to bring online, is the perfect spell for your unarmored deep ones, and gives them heavy infantry levels of protection to allow them to stay in the fight and deal their impressive damage. This can also be accompanied by Iron Bane, a battlefield wide debuff that makes all iron armor and weapons liable to break. Because all of Atlantis’s armor is immune to rust, given its underwater origins, this is essentially a debuff only for the enemy army that will strip the protection from most heavy infantry and blunt the offense of any army reliant on metal swords and spears. Atlantis’s troops also all have darkvision, with the deep ones that we will expect to rely on having no penalty for fighting in darkness. A Mage of the Deep with fire and astral randoms is capable of casting Phoenix Power for one fire gem and then burning another two fire gems to cast Solar Eclipse, covering the battlefield in darkness and granting the enemy army a penalty to attack and defense, which will make all of your troops hit more easily and avoid more enemy attacks. If you can get ahold of some cheap independent archers or archer mercenaries, you can also cast Flaming Arrows with a double fire random mage of the deep by first casting Phoenix Power and then burning two gems to cast it, giving you more firepower to supplement your already impressive evocation. The mod that we are using adds even more to Atlantis’s arsenal by giving scaling to Quickness. Quickness literally doubles the offensive power of your troops, making them into veritable killing machines. Deep ones with strength of giants and quickness are launching a devastating twelve attacks per square, half of which are high damage piercing and magic weapons, allowing them to destroy even elite enemy units. This will similarly aid your Living Pillars. While their strength is already high enough to enable them to kill many units in a single hit, quickness lets them churn through enemies at twice the rate. While Atlantis is already capable of doing that with Quickening in the unmodded game, Quickness is available much sooner at only Alteration 4, and you have a large number of casters for it which enables you to make up for its lower area of effect. Additionally, the lack of a gem requirement ensures that you will always be able to cast it in battle even if your army is on a protracted campaign or is disrupted by a magic phase battle. With added scaling, Iron Warriors looks useful as well, but is actually difficult to use effectively. Living Pillars have 9 base protection already, so Iron Warriors adds 11 rather than its seemingly impressive 20 to their natural prot. Additionally, they have very high protection from their armor, which means that the additional protection from iron warriors doesn’t fully stack. Deep One Spearmen, meanwhile, tend to be best when used in fairly large numbers, and unlike the AoE 25 marble warriors, legions of steel, and strength of giants, Iron Warriors will hit only a few of them. Furthermore, because Basalt Kings themselves have very high HP and Deep One Spearmen have lower HP density than many of the summons or sacreds you may be using alongside them, the kings will first cast Iron Warriors on themselves, and only buff up those units that happen to be in the area of effect. The spellcasting priority after this seems to favor closer units as well, so the additional Iron Warriors casts will be placed on those at the back of your formation unless you put the Basalt Kings in front of your army - a very dangerous place for them to be, when you’re at the stage of the game when you have Alteration 5 While some of these buffs require a dip into enchantment or construction and the boosting spells required to cast them are found in conjuration, most of these spells are found in Alteration. By requiring only low levels in these other schools, we’ll be able to focus most of our research here in alteration when pursuing this army buff approach. Construction will already be desirable for Legion of Steel, but it will also bring an advantage at Construction 4, when we can produce booster items for our mages. In addition to lowering the fatigue costs of our spells, earth boots and robes of the sea will increase the potency of our scaling spells. Earth boots also enable our mages of the deep with only one level of earth magic to do the same earthpower into buffing magic that our double earth random mages can - and given that we can expect to have a lot more of them, this is a sizable boost to our pool of buff casters. Higher levels of alteration also give us access to Green Lions, one of the best summons in the game. With a ranged, area of effect, armor piercing acid attack, Green Lions are capable of killing just about any kind of unit, and with 34 hit points, very high magic resist, and ethereality they are very resilient as well. The same buffs that we are already applying to our troops will also make them even harder to kill and allow them to destroy enemies with their melee attacks. While only one Green Lion is summoned for each cast of Manifest Vitriol, we can expect to have large numbers of water/fire mages, which enables us to amass a large number of these amazing summons far better than almost any other nation. By the time this research comes online, you should already have a lab on land either captured from an enemy or built to recruit a useful independent mage, but it can also be worth building a lab in a convenient location to let you move a large number of mages over to allow you to summon them en masse. Evocation will also be useful, given how much elemental damage our mages can put out, and Earthquake at Evocation 5 will allow our Basalt Kings to clear out whole armies of longdead, human mages, or similarly vulnerable units, provided we can get enough casts off. If we need to be able to clear out large hordes of vulnerable enemies such as a blob of maenads or reanimated Lankans or large communions of mages, we can rush for evocation instead of Alteration. Evocation also will enable Acid Storm, which has a similar iron corroding effect as Iron Bane with a small amount of damage added on as well. The damage portion will effect our own troops if their protection isn’t high enough, however, so we’ll need to be a bit more careful when using it as opposed to Iron Bane, which we can happily cast on just about any of our armies. So to sum it all up on magic department - our midgame is going to be focused on troop buffs, with potentially additional magic support in the form of raw damage from evocation, both area of effect and battlefield wide, and also possibly summons, with construction containing one of our buffs and the ability to get more and better buffs out of our mages. The very high damage of our troops when buffed gives them power that will last even in the later phases of the game, as it will be extremely difficult to make a super-combatant immune to them and the high base HP of our mages makes them fairly resistant to battlefield clearing spells as well. Basalt Kings in particular also have a very high base protection, making them entirely immune to Rain of Stones. Expansion For expansion, we will be using primarily living pillars. Underwater expansion in EA is actually more difficult than in later eras due to a higher frequency of the tribal tritons, which are actually fairly strong. Amber clan tritons are heavily armored and shark clan tritons have three attacks per triton, giving them a devastating nine attacks per square, most of which also poison any units that they damage with their coral daggers. Fortunately, living pillars are excellent at dealing with these otherwise difficult indies. With very high strength, their basalt spears will punch right through amber armor and with very high protection, they’ll be able to shrug off the vast majority of the shark clan’s attacks. While not at the level of the living pillars in either strength or protection, we can also use coral guard to serve a similar purpose, with a single high damage attack that can deal with high protection enemies and a decent protection value and HP pool to stay alive. Their poison barbs also help with the shark tribe tritons, whose numerous attacks with short weapons ensure that they will poison themselves when they attack. Given the high resource cost of living pillars, however, we probably won’t be using coral guards unless we get another fort up very early due to a lucky site or if there are still independent provinces by the time our first built fort finishes. Bless & Pretender Design One major weakness of living pillars comes up when they just can’t kill the enemy army fast enough. Given their high encumbrance, they can exhaust themselves in combat more quickly than many other units. This will happen even more quickly with Quickness cast on them - given that they’ll be attack twice as quickly, they’ll also be getting exhausted twice as quickly. The defense reduction from fatigue probably won’t be a significant factor, given that they already aren’t going to be dodging many attacks, but it will make them more vulnerable to critical hits, which is just about the only way that they’ll be taking damage from enemies that aren’t already giants. Also, once they fall unconscious, they won’t continue killing the enemy. To make up for this, we will be taking an Earth bless to give them reinvigoration. While it won’t cancel out their encumbrance entirely, it will help make them fight for longer and also make them recover more easily when they do fall unconscious. A second major weakness is that all of our units that aren’t mages or priests have very low magic resistance. We can partially compensate for this by casting Antimagic, but doing so will require us to make a booster for our astral-random mages, who natively only ever get Astral 1. Barring a very lucky land site giving us crystal mages or iron adepts or getting enough pearls to empower one of our mages, we will want our pretender to be able to make them. The ability to boost our astral to 3 also gives us magic phase movement that Atlantis natively lacks. We would be able to both teleport astral mages of the deep, who can use water elementals to clear province defense or kill enemy raiders, and create golems who can be built to be immune to unprepared enemy forces. It is also possible to work around this by trading for astral boosters or empowering an Earth and Astral random Mage of the Deep. Trading is almost always going to be better given the large number of pearls required for empowerment, but it makes you reliant on the goodwill of your opponents for both overcoming a significant national weakness and gaining access to crucial magic phase movement. Awake Kraken: ![]() ![]() One pretender that gives you both of these paths is an awake Ancient Kraken pretender with a minor earth and astral bless. Because it’s aquatic, the Ancient Kraken is an extremely inexpensive chassis, and it comes with both of the magic paths that we need natively. This allows us to take it awake to supplement our expansion while still getting excellent scales. With 215 gold mages as your basic researchers, Atlantis is heavily gated by its income even with full cash scales. Having expensive mages also slightly reduces the value of magic scales, given that magic scales are better the more mages you can get and Atlantis has trouble affording full mage production even when it isn’t amassing its low resource cost (and therefore similarly gold gated) deep one spearmen. As a result, your most important scales are income - Order and Growth. You want to max these regardless of which pretender you use. While troops outside of your capital are available for a low resource cost, production makes using Living Pillars for expansion viable, makes it much easier to amass Deep One Spearmen just as they’re needed, and gives additional gold which Atlantis is always thirsty for. While the Kraken can expand into weaker indy provinces, he actually has trouble with around a third of the provinces I found - shark tribe and amber clan provinces are straight out, but simply having too many armored triton is also an impediment without Awe, which would be an expensive addition that would seriously limit our scales. Later on in the game, if you manage to get blood or trade with a blood nation, you can also turn the kraken into a hilarious assassin. Imprisoned Monolith: ![]() ![]() With an E4S4 bless Living Pillars still suffer a little bit of attrition to the poison damage that is common underwater (something like one loss every two provinces from a 5 pillar expansion party). While this won’t seriously slow down our expansion initially (given that even a handful of living pillars can carve through indies), it will limit the range of an expansion party, since it takes a long time to reinforce living pillars which can only be produced from our capital and underwater indies are usually some combination of unreliable for expansion, expensive, or aquatic. One way to solve this is with an N9 bless. While this pretender loses the astral bless, it can still make astral boosters and it keeps the far more important earth bless. While it does have a weakness to magic duel that adds a vulnerability to an otherwise very hardy chassis, this shouldn’t be a serious concern. Given that it is an imprisoned immobile pretender, we won’t plan on having it fight at all. If our capital is being breached (especially as the only aquatic nation in this game) we probably aren’t going to win anyways. Outside of our capital, we shouldn’t expect to teleport it onto an enemy army unless we already see that their army won’t be able to hurt it and can teleport it out immediately after. As a result, we shouldn’t expect to face Magic Duel unless we’ve already lost or seriously misplayed. Meanwhile, the nature bless provides us with a number of bonuses. First of all, it should outright removing the attrition from our Living Pillars when expanding (well, you’ll maybe lose one or two to the toughest provinces with a very small group, but losses are almost nonexistent. In the actual game, I failed two expansion fights, and in both cases the reason was an HP rout when all of the units I had recruited to bolster the living pillars had died or routed). This both removes the problem of having a range limit to our expansion that requires a time consuming march to overcome and will leave us with additional sacreds when fighting our first war. This would end up proving extremely valuable over the course of the game. Secondly, it makes our sacreds significantly more resilient in battle. Even with their overwhelmingly high levels of protection, they will still take the occasional chip damage from enemy heavy infantry and evocation. Without a nature bless or the ability to cast Regeneration on our troops (which we don’t have nationally and never ended up casting) this will eventually lead to significant losses in larger fights even when only clearing chaff. With the regeneration bless, our living pillars each have thug-tier levels of resilience, to the point that they are all but immune to enemy armies that aren’t able to field armor-negating or fatigue-inflicting magic in response. As a third advantage, the regeneration bless also allows us to make our thugs more resilient, giving us a cheap astral using option to add it to our Basalt Kings when they don’t have a priest with them to bless them and lets us add regeneration to golems, which otherwise have no way of getting access to it. A shroud-wearing golem can be made into a defensive supercombatant, allowing it to last against unprepared armies until the turn limit forces a rout. While this is, of course, possible to counter it requires specific countermeasures (such as a smasher-wielding thug) which our opponents will need to deploy in order to capture the province. Finally, having high nature magic on our pretender enables us to take better advantage of any nature magic indies that we find. While N1 casters are very common in EA, higher level nature mages often require a site to be found to recruit. By first forging a booster for them, we can all but assure that we will have access to the many useful items that can be forged at N2, such as vine shields, rings of regeneration, amulets of reinvigoration, etc. Given that nature magic is actually quite plentiful underwater, with SIX different rarity 0 sites accessible to a level 1 nature mage, we can expect to have at least a reasonable amount of nature income if we spend the resources necessary to search for it. If we find ourselves with especially plentiful nature gem access, we can even work our way up to higher levels of nature magic by forging a treelord’s staff and a moonvine bracelet to give an impressive +3 nature magic, allowing us to summon ivy kings or treelords that subsequently transform to give us any nature magic support we could want for our armies. We can even break into air magic with faery queens, which provide yet another element outside of our national paths. With advantages given in the form of reduced attrition, better armies, better heavy thugs, and significant additional magic diversity in the later stages of the game, it’s a clear improvement over the kraken if you do not need the early edge that a extra provinces early gets for you. However, if you expect competition in the water, such as from Agartha or another underwater nation, being able to get additional provinces more quickly can be crucial, which makes taking the awake expander more beneficial. Awake Earth Snake: ![]() ![]() If you are expecting heavy contention in the water and are willing to eat the cost of empowerment for mid-late game astral magic, it may be worth taking an Awake Earth Snake instead. The snake is simply a far better expander than the Kraken, given its higher protection and recuperation, and it is also capable of going on land without an Amulet of the Fish - an item which relies on a path that you won’t necessarily have access to. By not needing to waste turns moving around provinces that a Kraken can’t defeat and by being able to expand on land as well as water, the earth snake can increase your expansion even further, which gets you faster forts, which leads to faster mages, which leads to faster research, which can lead to winning a war against an opponent that has not yet matched the magic that your Mages of the Deep can bring to the table. The degree to which its expansion is superior to that of the Kraken is very dependent on the water connections of the map, where you spawn, and what indies you encounter, so the tradeoff is hard to quantify. I would suggest taking the snake when you both have competition underwater (without which the Monolith is better) and when you will need to have around a third of your expansion onto land to get an even share of the map. With an awake expander, you should expect to be significantly larger than most other nations given your already strong national expansion, and failing to expand aggressively with your snake will set you behind. For all three of these pretenders, higher levels of production are advisable in vanilla games, where the Living Pillars require additional resources, and on maps that give water provinces fewer water-water connections in case your capital has only two or three connections to give it additional resources. The extra scales can be acquired by taking Drain. As mentioned earlier, Magic scales become less valuable when your mages are very expensive, and you will be able to recruit more Mages of the Deep to make up for their diminished research by having better expansion. |
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| sum1won | Feb 20 2016, 08:03 AM Post #2 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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I'm going to note that while summod does have scaling alt buffs, it does not provide a hat or resource production. |
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| Sai | Feb 20 2016, 08:18 AM Post #3 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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Oh, I thought it reduced the resource cost of Basalt Armor too. I will fix that. Actually, your changelog lists a -2 enc and -5 res cost to Basalt Armor. It's not quite -13, but it is a nice little boost. |
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| sum1won | Feb 23 2016, 02:50 PM Post #4 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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So, I was messing around with Atlantis in SP, and one thing that struck me is the guide omits Atlantis's immense taste for death magic. There are three key spells. Two combat spells, and one summon spell. Streams from Hades Stygian Rain Darkness To break into death, we need a little death magic. Happily, the Atlantean Ghost King is a robust SC chassis that, after equipment, is actually more dangerous than the ubiquitous snake. And it's a rainbow chassis that starts with death magic. Now, ordinarily we'd need lots of death gems to make use of him and produce other casters. Happily, a rainbow chassis can easily be turned into a useful sitesearcher, but this isn't actually necessary. Streams from Hades is where most of our deathcasters will come from. It's a conj 6 spell that lets us use water gems to obtain a D3(w3) caster, assuming we have death/water crosspaths. So a splash of water gets us there. (Or, for those who prefer not to spend points on otherwise redundant paths, sitesearching+empowerment of a W3 mage of the deep). This gets us a W3D3 mage, who, with a skullstaff, can cast two game-changing spells for Atlantis. The first is Darkness. Atlanteans range from darkvison 50 to darkvision 100, but either is enough to flatten a non-darkvision army under cover of darkness. While you already have a sort of access to Solar Eclipse, Darkness is twice as potent. The second is Stygian Rains. Now, this already exists in LA Atlantis guides, but has a special place for EA Atlantis. True, your protection won't get quite as high, and magic weapons are more common in EA, but nobody can field as many magic weapons as EA Atlantis. What this means is that you get the benefits of invulnerability, and your opponents do not. (They'll be more resistant to your bite attacks, but your basalt spears ignore invulnerability.). Moreover, invulnerability has a nice synergy with your elemental resistance - meaning that you're resistant to one of the best ways to bypass your invulernability. The problem with this build is that it effectively removes the potential for a bless. |
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| Ohlmann | Feb 23 2016, 03:26 PM Post #5 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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Honestly, breaking into death is easy enough without a pretender. You only need 50 death gem for either Stream of Hades or Hidden in Foo, who use gems you have aplenty. Stygian skin is effectively not terribly good to me. I vastly prefer the later Marble Warrior, and the high natural prot make it less effective than it look. But, yes, if you don't take a bless, S2D1 is what Atlantis lack to truly shine in term of paths. |
| Worthy Heroes - UW Expanded | |
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| dyslexicfaser | Feb 23 2016, 07:02 PM Post #6 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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So just stockpile 50 D gems with no Death sitesearchers, sure. How hard can it be? |
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| Colonial | Feb 23 2016, 11:28 PM Post #7 |
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Ember Lord
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my first instinct was to reach for E9. would this be at all viable? |
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Check out my Youtube channel of Dom4 lets-plays: https://www.youtube.com/c/Colonial | |
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| Ohlmann | Feb 24 2016, 12:20 AM Post #8 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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E9 is an excellent bless for Living Pillar and Basalt King, but N9 is overall a bit better, and bring a path you don't have.
Honestly, the maximum I paid for that is 3 dwarven hammers. |
| Worthy Heroes - UW Expanded | |
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| Sai | Feb 24 2016, 05:19 AM Post #9 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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So the guide was largely written with a prod-heavy style in mind, using living pillars to expand. If you were to take an awake ghost king, you can't really get full gold scales and the two paths that you're looking for and an E bless. If you want to use unblessed pillars, you can still do it with this guy.![]() You can also take E4 and only D3 at the cost of 2 scales, or just reduce death to D3 and get +1 scale. The ghost king himself can expand once he's given armor, which Atlantis can do pretty early with a bit of luck. Basically, it goes Turn 1: Recruit Mage of the Deep, Turn 2: Forge Armor, Turn 3: Expand. This does rely on getting an E random, though, and you might just not get that. Without armor or Dom9, he dies too easily with his 0 prot to all but the weakest of indies, even though he has fear and a decent HP pool. With armor, he can take on just about anything If you were to take your pretender as a dormant site searcher, you can use something more like this - ![]() This will site search most everything underwater (there are some astral 4 and water 3/4 sites and very few A2 sites, but no Fire above 1 or Nature above 2), give you full D access given its ability to make the otherwise difficult to access D5 booster, and provide the E minor that your living pillars need. That said, it slows down your early game compared to an expander without removing attrition from you expansion parties the way that N9 does. I also feel that site searching with a pretender really backloads the bonus that your god provides. Searching a modest 12 provinces with a dormant god means that your pretender won't even start casting spells to help you win until Turn 36, at which point the game might have already been decided by the advantages provided by a big bless or awake expander. It's also totally possible to expand without living pillars and use a neutral prod or sloth build. This sort of build will naturally open up a lot more points, but you'll have to accept losses with your expanders and pay a lot more attention to what provinces you hit. Shark tribes in particular will pose serious trouble, as they do to most other nations, and you'll want to actually keep a reasonable number of Deep One Spearmen in production near the front since you won't be able to instantly assemble an army the way you can with higher production. |
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| suppenit | Feb 25 2016, 04:56 PM Post #10 |
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*Spicy* Crew
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Minor addition: S1 mage can cast Power of Spheres and then with one gem overspent cast Antimagic. No need for boosters to do it. Also early game and midgame have decent description, what about lategame concepts? Powerful infantry in mid-game is great, but lategame has instant attacks, instant assassinations (Earth Attack? Murdering Winter?), battlewide spells? Grip of Winter, Heat from Hell, Flame Storm could combine nicely with fire- and cold-resistant Atlantis infantry in prolonged fights. Just theorycrafting. |
| aka olli!, bumpjack | |
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| Sai | Feb 26 2016, 02:09 AM Post #11 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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You're right and I should make a note of that. I think that round 1 antimagic can be important to the point where it's worth using a booster as opposed to round 2/3 antimagic (PotS has a 100 fatigue cost), but it's definitely accessible without it. I haven't had a chance to use Atlantis in a proper late game war, so my experience there is limited. In all of the games in which I did have real late game fights with other nations, pretty much every nation's power was augmented heavily by indies and summons for diversity, so it will vary significantly based on what sort of gems you have the most of and what independent mages you find. In my most recent atlantis game, for instance, I had access to the Metal Spires which gave me deeper astral access and air magic without faerie queens that I wouldn't expect Atlantis to get by itself. What I can add to the theorycrafting is that any Atlantean mage with a water gem or two will be nigh-immune to most remote attacks, given that water elementals are fantastic at beating things up 1v1, and that your armies as a whole will be fairly resistant to murdering winter and flames from the sky given their built in fire/frost resistance. That same resistance, as you point out, also makes the battlefield wide effects appealing to exhaust the enemy army. Grip of Winter is easy to access natively, and an F2 mage can put up Heat from Hell as well. Firestorm can also be cast with relative safety, especially if you can put up either Firefend or Warriors of Niefelheim, given that your units will then have 10 FR and should have enough protection to soak up the remaining fire damage. Your Basalt Kings can also put up Army of Gold/Lead to replace Marble Warriors, as can an E2 mage of the deep with earth boots and Summon Earthpower. With an N9 bless, it can be worth investing in golems built to survive the enemy's army which can force them to rout at the turn timer when defending a province. Someone on /domg/ recently proved that the death by turn timer thing kicks in separately for berserk units, after mindless units would normally have melted. This means that a golem equipped with a Flesh Eater can take on any enemy army that can't kill it and force it to rout at the turn timer even when attacking into them. While the exact build will vary based on what elemental magic the enemy army can deploy, you can use something along the lines of Starshine Skullcap, Vine Shield, Flesh Eater, Boots of Stone, Shroud of the Battlesaint, and misc items that counter the expected enemy magic (Ring of Tamed Lightning and Storm Spool stack for shock resistance, so it is possible to even make it nigh-impossible to kill with T strike spam as well). When sitting at the back scripted to cast spells, it will likely remain far enough out of range for enemy evo to miss, if it's in range at all, and your opponent would need to expect the golem to teleport onto them to script their mages to walk forward as an answer to this - a script which can easily backfire and make those valuable mages die when facing a different threat. It should also be possible to make Basalt King SCs, given that they have good self-buff paths. With a large amount of reinvig gear and summon earthpower, you can make a Basalt King designed to explode numerous times with Phoenix Pyre, but given that he'll build up afflictions which will eventually cost him his limbs and spellcasting, this isn't a super robust option compared to a more traditional armoring up + temper flesh build. While they can cast a lot of tailored resist spells which will stack with their items, they will be vulnerable to spammed mind-targeting attacks which can eventually pierce even highly buffed MR, and armies may already be built to spam these kinds of spells given that it's very effective against your deep one armies. Basalt Kings also don't have magic phase movement, so they can't be dropped on unsuspecting armies as easily. |
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| Sai | Feb 26 2016, 02:58 AM Post #12 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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On diversity - If you're able to get ahold of a Skull of Fire through trading or a D/F pretender, you can boost yourself up to F5+ fairly easily with a flame spirit who then makes herself a flame helmet, which subsequently opens up access to Kings of Fire and any F globals you might want. Deeper fire access can be good for elemental spam on land, firestorming your armies (as mentioned earlier), casting Flames from the Sky on enemy mage blobs. For deeper earth access, you already have access to E5 with a Basalt King with earth boots and can get Forge of the Ancients already, but need to either empower, break into blood yourself, or trade for a bloodstone to get that last level higher for EBDW. Forge of the Ancients is pretty great for everyone, and like other E heavy nations, Atlantis would love the ability to spam boots and earth attack which EBDW provides. Having plenty of E gems also enables you to be more aggressive with gem spending during fights, both in making sure that you always have Army of X up and spamming Maws of the Earth, which works UW and can shut down even elite armies. You natively have very deep water access (boosted W6 with a W4 mage of the deep), which makes Maelstrom accessible, but you need either a Queen of Elemental Water, empowerment, or an artifact to get Vengeful Water. It is very easy for Atlantis to spend a ton of water gems on boosters and bottles, so Maelstrom can be fantastic. Vengeful Water, while always pretty decent, won't be quite as overbearing as it may be for other nations, though. Given that many of the builds that I'm suggesting have fairly low native dom, and given that you don't need temples for your out of cap mages, you'll only really be building them to prevent yourself from being dom-killed rather than being in a position to naturally push your dom to high levels. While the near-ubiquitous Worthy Heroes mod adds a hero with some air magic, widespread Air access can really only come through Faerie Queens or indies, given the lack of a lower-tier summonable air mage. The most important thing that air would provide is its unique battlefield buffs, with Wind Guide helping out with your evo spam and Arrowfend helping to make your soldiers resistant to Nether Darts and other single target projectile based evo. Mass Flight can also be great for getting your buffed up infantry hordes on top of the enemy. You would need to be very fortunate to get a large enough air income to get air magic globals online, but if you do, Perpetual Storm shouldn't affect your mobility very much and does not reduce the income of UW provinces. Similarly, Gale Gate will hurt you less since it won't send any hurricanes or storms underwater. If you are taking death on your pretender or get enough of an income and indy mage source to work your way up the tree, your first priority should be getting darkness casters in your armies. A small communion can help with this, though it's likely the case that you'll prefer either a higher base D caster or one that's geared up given the relatively high cost of Atlantis's communion slaves. Once you've added this to your repertoire of buffs, you can look at death's other end game options. A high D pretender will likely also be used for summoning Tartarians, whereas if you instead have a high N pretender but somehow got access to high D magic you can look into developing the infrastructure to make more of your tarts usable (Gift of Health and GoR). If you took the paths required on your pretender, as the archmage I posted earlier did, you can also consider casting Foul Air, given that it doesn't hurt underwater. This isn't a great way to make friends, though. I went over nature magic a bit earlier, but an N9 monolith makes boosting up your mobile nature magic very straightforward. Nature adds even more options to your battlefield buffs, and if you think you can keep your mages safe, you can even add in Growing Fury to make your soldiers berserk. Mother Oak is very widely loved, but if you can get it, you can absolutely use it. Gift of Nature's Bounty does affect UW provinces and can be cast UW (some globals can't), and given that you'll pretty much always be gold locked with recruitment, the boost that it provides would be huge. Blood will be relatively difficult to get into with Atlantis because your relatively secure heartland is underwater and therefore can't be hunted. If you can get into it, you probably won't have access to much more than equipment, but bloodstones are absolutely fantastic, Flesh Eaters give your SCs staying power in turn-limit situations, and you may be able to do some fun stuff with black hearts or hearts of life. High level astral stuff will probably not be on the agenda. It will be very easy to spend astral pearls on boosters and golems, to the point that you probably won't be sitting around with a ton left over. Even if you manage to get an incredible income, you will probably looking to spread the astral magic around for more teleporters and so on rather than delving deeper unless you get a site of some sort to encourage pushing in that direction for your end game. |
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| Ohlmann | Feb 26 2016, 07:58 AM Post #13 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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Naiad require N1, are summoned with W gems, and give N3. That it turn give you the mean for almost all battle magic. You might sadlyhave to deal with using transform on her for more mobility. Do it on land. |
| Worthy Heroes - UW Expanded | |
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| Zonk | Feb 26 2016, 10:12 AM Post #14 |
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Dom 5 Beta Team
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Having semi-recently played Atlantis against mindblaster-focused Agartha, I really found not being able to turn 1 Antimagic an issue, since the Olms had great chances of disabling my unboosted troops. I did get to the point I could forge crystal coins, as the pretender was N9E4S4 monolith - idea was to do some thugging - but by then it was too late. I also tried a fire jelly-centric strategy, but it didn't work as well as hoped as I couldn't afford to boost their protection significantly. Though they did kill a bane thug through fatigue. (Note: this was without the /domg mod) |
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NATION MODS Spoiler: click to toggle OTHER MODSOni Spectral Weapons Zonkmod | |
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| Sai | Feb 27 2016, 01:24 AM Post #15 |
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Trust me, I'm a doctor
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That's a great point, and if you get an N random Amber Clan Mage (which are worth recruiting since they provide more RP/gold than Mages of the Deep even without either of their randoms) you can use them to do the summoning. Depending on your nature stockpile and research level, you can have a naiad hop onto the shore, grab a thistle mace, and then summon an Ivy King, who then can also provide N3 magic support. He won't be able to do Foul Vapors like a transformed Naiad can, but that's probably not a huge priority. |
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