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By fire be purged!; EAbysia strat
Topic Started: Apr 22 2016, 07:57 PM (2,497 Views)
Itwastuesday
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(This is not a guide.)

I've been trying to formulate an EA Abysia strategy that would work. It seems so straightforward, recruit super infantry, chuck fire evocations from behind them. Then Firestorm! Blood in the midgame! Fail lategame. Well I suppose I'm just one of the latest here who've discovered that none of it works.

Problems I've discovered :
- Expensive everything, plus need temples for mage recruits, who also arent worth the premium
- Low money age plus 9% less potential income
- Wonky with indie recruits, you can micro the best you can but some moron is gonna wander into your indie stack and set them aflame
- Needs indies for siege power, magic diversity and arrows
- Horrible diversity
- Outside of capital research super expensive
- Expensive research targets
- 4 Capital commanders one of which is STR
- An unit you would like to use but have problems leading around
- Low precision mages that are old and start dying
- Pretender selection doesn't allow the blessings you'd want cheaply
- Troops low attack/defense skills and slow too with high enc
- MM1 nation with no good options to deal with that problem
- And other minor problems all around. Rain and fire resistance are the last of my problems.

Meaning the basic strategy of troops and fireballs won't have enough troops and fireballs and those you have won't even hit, and most alternative strategies stumble on one critical flaw or another.

What's even good about EA Abysia, then?

- Burning Ones, tough, berserking, fireshielded super-elite infantry that hit hard and destroy hordes even without a blessing
- Recruitable F4
- Big fire income to go with your big fire skills. Can just find any fire site by walking around, also sometimes spawn them.
- National units nearly immune to fire. Also nearly immune to arrows and most low damage attacks
- Assassins, the cap only being one of the best
- Potential to dompush
- Warlocks/Apprentices decently priced
- Troops have AOE powers
- A few national summons
- Access to the Lich Queen
- Quick, reliable expansion independent of pretender selection.

So what I've formulated :

Rely on Burning One power and the resilient troops, go on a warpath, forget fireballs and go for either Flaming Arrows indie or fire elemental (+ some fire drakes) support as those are levels 4 or 5 research and don't require cracktastic amounts of mages on field to work). Aim to use Heat-From-Hell, and later Firestorm, and even later Pillar of Fire which is when you finally could use massed evocations.

How to deal with other nation and strats early-midgame :

- Pit Burning Ones and heat against Vanheres, Salamanders to burn at elves generally, this is maybe a time when Fireballs could be warranted. When they run around in your lands stealthed, swear a lot.
- The same goes with giants more or less, axe abysians to chop at their knees, maybe prison of fire, incinerate?
- Ignore flaming arrows lol. Though you can't use FA against that yourself because your archers are just going to eat it.
- Destroy any kinds of hordes with Burning Ones and Fire Elementals, ignore Falling Fires IMO.
- Mictlan Jaguar Push can't use Wooden Warriors against you. Flaming Arrows/Fire Elementals?
- Fire Elementals are also size 6 so they can deal with elephants. Dunno what to do with early elephants, bonds/prison of fire? Beastmasters have animal awe but that doesn't stop elephants from running around in your troops.
- Dunno what to do against serious raiding. I think at least build the bigger forts so they don't get immediately captured by everything as they're protecting 900g structures + a bunch of mages already.
- Lol @ skellispam
- Dunno what to do against assassins hitting you from a castle you siege. Go away?

Lategame : Dunno, hopefully a throne win can be achieved before that.

This is a build / reseach targets I've come to :

Lich Queen Dom 6 Dormant F1 E4 D5
O3 P2 H3 D3 L2 M2

- You've on a clock anyways, so might as well take points from death. Blood is a supplementary tool anyway with how weak EA Aby blood mages are. So as you now have death, you want some luck to veer away from crap events and hopefully get good ones, such as D gem events. D blessing can help you keep your diseased mages alive for a while, E blessing is good on everything you have, boosters, all kinds of summons and spells, immortal on a bloodsac nation, love the Lich Queen. Other scales to facilitate early warfare / late gem economy. Unsure if F1 worth a scale when you have so many fire gems.

Research targets :
Evo-1 (something for Asalamanders to cast early game)
Const-2 (imp familiars, fire in jars, armor for anointeds and such)
Conj-5 (neighbouring Fire Elemental targets) / Enc-4 (if a good archer province and neighbouring good FA targets)

Then :
Conj-6 (Flame Spirits, Spectres, Fire Snakes, Troll King) / Const-6 (Lightless Lantern, Boosters)
(Conj more attractive if you got a good D/E income)
Enc-6 (Heat-From-Hell, Eternal Pyre)
Evo-7 (Fire Storm) / Alt-5 (Incinerate, Cold Resistance, Destruction, Buffs)
Evo-8 (Pillar of Fire)/ Conj-8 (Living Fire, Elemental Kings, Earth Attack, Scorponok Man, Well of Misery)
Blood? Whatever. Forge blood stuff.
Alt-6 has blindness, unsure if worth it.

And so on.

Cap rec : Warlock Apprentices for research/some Warlocks for BH. We don't want to chuck fireballs, or even use mages much in combat, so we use the not old, fairly gold efficient Apprentices to research. An Anointed at some point to sitesearch, salamanders to lead and bless burning ones if needed. At some point we want Anointeds for our armies, they have the easiest time to cast anything we want to use and aren't old.

That's all I've got thus far.
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sum1won
Dom 5 Beta Team
Here's what my games have looked like:

Death scales, luck, productivity. Typically an N9+ bless.

Plan: Spam burning ones. Support with indies (archers, mostly, with occasional other units). Use indie mages for research whenever possible. (less necessary in summod).

Rush up conj for fire elementals, then evo for fire storm. Other useful targets include ench 4 (Flaming arrows, heat from hell, inner furnace) and Thau (Prison of Fire, Hearts). Prison of Fire is more helpful in summod, but is a decent debuff that your units ignore. Rage can be situationally useful - devestating against an enemy elephant in the right place. Start a blood economy for blood saccing, at the very least. If in vanilla, lots of lifelong protections may be a decent investment, but boosters may get you into send-lesser-horror territory, which adds a magic-turn dimension to your plans, badly needed. Suicide warlocks can hellpower bomb, if nothing else. In summod, your new national spells merit blood research.

Firestorm is generally unpleasant for the lower-prot enemies you'll face in EA, and is your best bet at breaking the back of enemy deathstacks. Fire elementals are good if you have massed mages, and make good evo decoys.

Tactics: Start with burning ones either in front or way in back to mess with scripts. Sprinkle decoys as appropriate.

Commentary:
Strengths you didn't mention: H3s for an early throne rush.
Blindness is not worth it. If you have a death pretender, darkness is. You see in the dark, and are a reasonably good agartha bully if you can solve the riddle of batharus pact. Same for Lanka and Xibalba before they get blood economies up.
Many enemies will try to destruction/cascades you. Put 5 infantry in front of your army, spread out. Everyone else starts in back and makes fire elementals.
Assassins are semi solvable by putting mages with fire jars there.
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Itwastuesday
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- Vanilla LL Protectionism requires Blood 4 skill tho, which makes the real cost pretty high.
- Heat-From-Hell is Enc-6. If it was 4, I'd consider Abysia a lot better.
- Inner Furnace is Enc-5. I'm not convinced it's ever useful. Though I've not tested it a lot.

Is there a decent way to stop shortbowmen from moving forward into your infantry? Guard Commander?
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Rejakor
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Eh. Your options with the nation are fire, or fire. You want the anointed so you have even less warlocks - and they suck more - than MA Aby. Meaning blood isn't really a worthwhile strategy.

I'd either take a n9 or e9 bless for the burning ones (they hit hard enough already) and hope to fuck fire storm, fire elementals, and incinerate can see me through, or try for a soul contracts god and use as few anointed as possible in order to afford the slaves for more devils.
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Itwastuesday
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Well, yes. Though :
- Berserking BO's don't get anything more from E9 than 8.
- N9 is a perfect blessing for this nation like it is for many others You can have like Dom6 A5N9 +6 scales Criosphinx, who also makes your mages slightly less blind.
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Rejakor
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Why do you care if your mages are blind or not. Unless you're spamming fireball and falling fires. I don't think a prec bless helps. Better fireballs are still.. fireballs.

E8 does not give the prot buff. The prot buff pushes the burning ones to 'unharmable' with neutral fatigue, berserking, and their armour, by a lot more stuff. N9 runs more risk of being nickel and dimed.

A5 also why. At most maybe if you've researched a bad tree and your god is on the field you can do stuff. Can't afford air queens. Can't afford storm staves. No native A to search with.
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Morsigil
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A5 does give access to the flying ship, and you'll likely be taking A2 for pocket ships anyway depending on the map. A5 also saves you from having to spend additional air gems on a winged helmet, but perhaps at even greater cost. I think if you're planning to use the air on the criosphynx you're going to have to luck into enchantresses, sorcs of the desert, or crystal sorcs. A deer tribe random would do, too. They could be one of your go-to research mages, the randoms get you into air and some could join the army for protection before you get lightless lanterns.

It would be a nice tool to have available but requires a bit of luck to work, which is not a great thing to be depending on
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Itwastuesday
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Rejakor,Apr 25 2016
03:34 PM
Why do you care if your mages are blind or not. Unless you're spamming fireball and falling fires. I don't think a prec bless helps. Better fireballs are still.. fireballs.

E8 does not give the prot buff. The prot buff pushes the burning ones to 'unharmable' with neutral fatigue, berserking, and their armour, by a lot more stuff. N9 runs more risk of being nickel and dimed.

A5 also why. At most maybe if you've researched a bad tree and your god is on the field you can do stuff. Can't afford air queens. Can't afford storm staves. No native A to search with.

Yeah, prob. best to go N9A1 for +2 more scales.

Well, they won't have neutral fatigue for any lenght of time because they have a giant enc, two attacks and berserking. The E9 prot bonus makes them take less damage from the attack that would make them berserk, but the difference in prot when they berserk is one.

The obvious advantage of high earth is that you do have some earth already. Also a Monument would have Astral.

I'd rather not trust on luck. I don't even trust to be able to hire a scout all game. Or get any heroes with T3L3 in a 60+ turn game.
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Executor
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Death 3 seems like a pretty damn terrible choice for mages with fire magic and old age. Your mages drop dead like flies in such dominion. Sure, Abysia isn't influenced by the lack of supplies from death scales but it's still a pretty damn terrible trade-off and it's not like you'll be in need of supplies with those resource expensive troops. I guess you can also give booths of youth to everyone but that seems terribly inefficient and wasteful.

I see you're completely ignoring the two main Abysian spells; falling fires and fire cloud, if you're behind on research. Fireballs is something you use when you have a crapton of fire gems and nothing to spend them on so you forge a bunch of Wand of Fire.

And, you're overlooking the best thing about EA Abysia. Why aren't you thugging our Anointed of Rhuax? They can selfbless, have respectable stats which grow to quite impressive in heat. Good HP, can self buff for protection, MR and phoenix pyre and can forge the best thug items in the game; Shields of Gold and Fire Brand.

I don't really understand the Lich Queen pretender either. She brings nothing to the table, neither diversity nor a bless. You either go rainbow to compensate for the complete lack of magic diversity or you take some crazy bless like B9N9 that make your sacreds a powerhouse.

Alternatively, you can try something like a dormant Blood Fountain with a B9F1D5 bless, high dom and good scales. This build has focus on mid-late game with spaming Soul Contracts, Vampire Lords and blood sacing like crazy.

I'd also completely forgo conjuration. It doesn't give you anything you don't already have and once the first fire resistant thing comes your way you're fucked.

And one last thing. DO NOT rely on Burning Ones. They're a means to an end. They will help you expand exceedingly well and they'll help you rush some unlucky neighbor like Ermor or whoever can't counter them immediately.
However, after the early game they are going to lose you the game as they become obsolete pretty fast. You won't be able to mass them even with Resource 3 dominion. Any nation with earth (2) magic is going to be able to completely shit on you by turn 15. No amount of bless will save you from skelly spam. You can't invade cold nations. You can't kill water magic nations. Astral nations can also seriously mess with you and air nation, like Caelum, with outright smack you down.
You still want to be able to produce as many of them as you can, even with no bless, but by no means should you rely on Burning Ones.

The main thing to consider when playing Abysia is that everyone will be looking to kill you once they can counter your nearly one-dimensional, fire dependent nation, so you need to figure out how to transition your nation as to not be so completely fire dependent and surprise your enemy. Pretty much same as for Caelum.
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Ohlmann
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Executor,Apr 25 2016
07:05 PM
And, you're overlooking the best thing about EA Abysia. Why aren't you thugging our Anointed of Rhuax? They can selfbless, have respectable stats which grow to quite impressive in heat. Good HP, can self buff for protection, MR and phoenix pyre and can forge the best thug items in the game; Shields of Gold and Fire Brand.

Honestly, I don't see how "thugging" something that fragile can ever end well. You forget to mention they badly need heat, aren't stealthy, can't teleport, and their stats are closer to a bane than to an awesome thug.

Executor,Apr 25 2016
07:05 PM
  No amount of bless will save you from skelly spam.

Skelespam into a dual wielder with fire shield tend to not produce the expected result. Honestly, it's one of the few thing they do deal with well. Of course, more skeletons can happen, especially if it's C'tis vs Abysia, but it's a lot harder than skelespamming away the generally superior living pillar.
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sum1won
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Quote:
 
Death 3 seems like a pretty damn terrible choice for mages with fire magic and old age. Your mages drop dead like flies in such dominion. Sure, Abysia isn't influenced by the lack of supplies from death scales but it's still a pretty damn terrible trade-off and it's not like you'll be in need of supplies with those resource expensive troops. I guess you can also give booths of youth to everyone but that seems terribly inefficient and wasteful.


I'm not sold on the "dying like flies" thing. First, EA Abysia's Anathement Salamanders don't start with old age, but 1-4 years short. This dramatically reduces the chances of old age being a problem. Likewise, Annointed also don't have old age problems. The two mages that do are Dragons and Warlocks. Dragons are expensive enough to be dubious bargains, and Warlocks are cap only bloodmages, and therefore managable.

Second, the issue of disease, while annoying, may be somewhat overstated. With death 3 scales, I ran a test using 50 old mages (warlocks). I had 6 afflictions from old age, of which 3 were disease. (The others were weakened, lost an eye, and lost an eye).

Quote:
 


I see you're completely ignoring the two main Abysian spells; falling fires and fire cloud, if you're behind on research. Fireballs is something you use when you have a crapton of fire gems and nothing to spend them on so you forge a bunch of Wand of Fire.

And, you're overlooking the best thing about EA Abysia. Why aren't you thugging our Anointed of Rhuax? They can selfbless, have respectable stats which grow to quite impressive in heat. Good HP, can self buff for protection, MR and phoenix pyre and can forge the best thug items in the game; Shields of Gold and Fire Brand.


Not seeing this as the best thing. Their best things are megasacreds, holy3 recruitables, cheap blood mages, and bloodsac, in the order they are important in a game. Annointed are expensive, take two cap turns, and reasonably fragile, even if E1 helps after some otherwise useless alteration research.

Quote:
 


I don't really understand the Lich Queen pretender either. She brings nothing to the table, neither diversity nor a bless. You either go rainbow to compensate for the complete lack of magic diversity or you take some crazy bless like B9N9 that make your sacreds a powerhouse.

Alternatively, you can try something like a dormant Blood Fountain with a B9F1D5 bless, high dom and good scales. This build has focus on mid-late game with spaming Soul Contracts, Vampire Lords and blood sacing like crazy.

I'd also completely forgo conjuration. It doesn't give you anything you don't already have and once the first fire resistant thing comes your way you're fucked.


Disagree on conjuration. Fire elementals are your best option of turning gems into battlefield power. Not everyone has good fire resistance coverage or can afford to bring it. And in heat 3, they blast through fr5 pretty easily in any case. This is not dom3, so instead of cutting damage by half to start, it's cut by about 5/23. Now, the fire shield and heat aura are neutered, but that doesn't mean an 18 damage aoe attack can be ignored.

Quote:
 

And one last thing. DO NOT rely on Burning Ones. They're a means to an end. They will help you expand exceedingly well and they'll help you rush some unlucky neighbor like Ermor or whoever can't counter them immediately.
However, after the early game they are going to lose you the game as they become obsolete pretty fast. You won't be able to mass them even with Resource 3 dominion. Any nation with earth (2) magic is going to be able to completely shit on you by turn 15. No amount of bless will save you from skelly spam. You can't invade cold nations. You can't kill water magic nations. Astral nations can also seriously mess with you and air nation, like Caelum, with outright smack you down.


Disagree. Destruction is very unpleasant, but it's range 20. I've been able to avoid it by the simple expedient of putting heavy infantry in front and having my burning ones start in back. And skellyspam is irrelevant to high-prot fire shielded sacreds. There aren't many astral nations to cause real problems, and cascades is avoidable in a similar fashion to destruction in any case. Water does not present an early challenge to burning ones, though it causes problems for fire magic. Air is an issue, but fire elemental scan serve to decoy thunderstrike reasonably well.
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Executor
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Honestly, I don't see how "thugging" something that fragile can ever end well. You forget to mention they badly need heat, aren't stealthy, can't teleport, and their stats are closer to a bane than to an awesome thug.

Rhuax are hardly *that* fragile. They have much better buff paths then other thuggable national units like Sidhe or Vanjarls, they have more staying power, access to better magic items and need less gems to be turned into thugs. What they comparatively lack is the high mobility, and by mobility I mean stealth, and defense in the in 30s, but they are faaaar from a bad thug choice and much better then banes.
Also I don't get the need heat comment. You're Abysia, you're going to be fighting in heat, if you're not, you're doing something wrong.

Quote:
 
Skelespam into a dual wielder with fire shield tend to not produce the expected result. Honestly, it's one of the few thing they do deal with well. Of course, more skeletons can happen, especially if it's C'tis vs Abysia, but it's a lot harder than skelespamming away the generally superior living pillar. 

Skelly Spam is not used to actually kill Burning Ones. It's used to tie them down and make them irrelevant and they can do that regardless of the fire shield, that part I know, because I've used it in such a manner. Same thing like for Neif Giants. Burning Ones can't cut trough undead, especially raise dead, as fast as they can be summoned by a D powerhouse like C'tis or Sauro. You can run tests if you have doubts but I can already tell you that skelly spam beats Bruning Ones unless you have an E, N bless and often even then if you can keep enough D mages to have the Burning Ones die to the turn limit.
E bless is a saving factor against Skelly Spam but you're unlikely to take E9-10 with Abysia as the protection is only half as good on your sacred troops. B9 is usually better since it can even somewhat counter enemy mages.

Sum1won,
The problem with using fire elementals is that you're playing into that whole one trick pony thing. Also, you're not going to fight fire elementals with just fire resistance. What you're gonna do is make a thug that is immune to them or use troops that are immune to them.
Like I said, early game is where the Burning Ones excel at. Water magic is not going to be an obstacle, until you hit water elementals or wolven winter, or falling frost. Water elementals are going to counter your fire elementals and they are going to completly wreck your Burning Ones.
The problem with positioning your troops is that it often works only once, just like assassins. And also, what makes you think I'm just talking about destruction? Earth elementals wreck Burning Ones too.

Sure, you can make Death 3 work if you're not recruiting many old mages I guess , I just see no reason to take Death/Luck instead of Growth/Misfortune, or Death/Luck/Magic, considering you'll be forging lanterns anyway.
As for your test, here's mine. Bought a Warlock each turn for 50 turns. Turn 51 I had 32 Warcloks still alive in Death 3 with 13 of them having some sort of affliction.

The problem with trying to use "decoys" for fire elementals is this; An air nation is going to avoid your main army and raid the heck out of you since you won't be able to catch them easily, said raiding made all the more easier by not having your powerful Abysian PD anymore. And they can even counter your army by placing a few TS casting mages here and there to snipe your troops off and retreat. Or alternatively they are going to pile up all their powerful mages in one group and zap the hell out of you while keeping away from range of your spells. Fire elementals aren't going to help you against an air nation.

The bottomline with relying on Burning Ones is this;
You'll likely never be able to produce more then 5-6 a turn, and they are only truly powerful in that early phase where you are still cap bound. Once additional forts come into play Burning Ones become considerably less useful as there are so, so, so many easy counters to them from many magic schools that most EA nations will have. Burning Ones simply aren't megasacreds. Jaguars are megasacreds, Lankan sacreds are megasacreds, but Burning Ones are not.

You play Abysia by expanding well by taking almost no casualties and building a new army each turn and then rushing some unfortunate neighbor that can't counter the raw berserk power of your Burning Ones. Then you somehow try to transition your nation away from just fire. If you just focus on your sacreds and burning everything, you're going to lose. It's like playing a F9W9 Mictlan. Your legions of jagaurs can rampage across the map until someone puts a fire resistant Cyclops in your path and obliterates your 300 F9W9 jaguars in one go. You're going to get countered sooner or later and you need to prepare for that and the more you focus just fire magic the easier it will be to kill you.
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Itwastuesday
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Hum.
@ Executor
- D3 is attractive to trash if you use mostly Anointed/Apprentice Warlock from cap, run diseased mages in combat with D bless to postpone their death. Of course it makes you a popkill nation. Also makes you a H3D3 nation to invade, bring your supply bags or suffer. It's probably the wrong choice because you want to use your blood and the low pop EA provinces will deteoriate under reasonable blood hunt levels too fast, and it also makes you want some luck for good death events/less bad death events/some money potential when your pop is dead, which is expensive and runs counter to your order anyway.
- I've tested Falling Fires so many times, and I've only been impressed by it against humongous hordes when I have ~15 casters of it. I've not tried Fire Cloud much, but seems like it doesn't do anything unless the enemy is like markatas.
- Thugs of Rhuax... I dunno, if I want such lightweight thugs why wouldn't I just use Warlords with battle shroud/whatever bless I run? I've never tried Pyre Thug Anointed, as it's so high in research, but I've tried it on Adons and other units, and thought it was garbage. What you (maybe) should do with anointed, at some point, is make them durable and have them cast the very near-range fire spells. Anyway. Sure it's stats and such are good. It's 425 gold, they better be. That's only 20 gold less what a Dai Oni costs in chaos-3.
- I'm giving up on the Lich Queen idea, it was fail.
- Your dormant fountain build is like neutral scales (at dom 8) or +2 (at 5), +1 if you drop the fire and just empower.
- I've a theory that fire resistance doesn't matter to Abysia as much as everything else that can go wrong, and isn't trivial to get on many nations, not even on thugs.

sum1won :
- I have a theory that Burning Ones are easy to stop unless you rely on fireball, flaming arrows or skelespam. I don't see how you circumvent a serious cascades spam for example.

Honestly I'm getting frustrated just trying to figure out anything good about the nation.
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Ohlmann
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Executor,Apr 26 2016
10:39 AM
Skelly Spam is not used to actually kill Burning Ones. It's used to tie them down and make them irrelevant and they can do that regardless of the fire shield, that part I know, because I've used it in such a manner.

You were super lucky or did some absolutely insane skelespam, because I have seen most burning one kill 3 to 5 undead per turn. That's almost a skelspammer per burning one.

We did understand what you used the longdead for BTW. It's just that it work less well than against anything else.

Executor
 

Rhuax are hardly *that* fragile. They have much better buff paths then other thuggable national units like Sidhe or Vanjarls, they have more staying power, access to better magic items and need less gems to be turned into thugs.


Litteraly everything in that quote is wrong.

They are that fragile, base prot 1 and 25 HP
They have bad buffing path, because fire isn't a good buffing path at all and I exchange E1 for A2 any day for buffs.
They don't have staying power. At all. Def 11, encumbrance > 0, base prot 1, low HP.
They don't have access to better magic item. There is nothing Abysia do that vanheim cannot.
They need more gems to be turned into thugs. They need a body armor, not the vanjarls. They may even need a cheap helmet to avoid stupid deaths.

(not to mention that if we talk of thugging cap only mage, the comparison with Basalt King is just cruel all over)
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Executor
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Gold Shield, Girdle, Ironskin, Bless, Phoenix Pyre. That's a 25HP, 20 protection, 25 defense thug in H3 with 0 enc (though some left over fatigue from spell casting), awe, fireshield and heat for 15 gems that has to be killed twice. Yes, he'll get afflictions when he dies and gets reborn but it still gives him some durability.
I agree, he's certainly no Balast King or Neifel Jarl or even Raksha, nor does he have the mobility of Sidhe or Vans to pop onto you and raid out of steah, but kitten Anointed of Rhuax is a respectable thug that doesn't cost much and is pretty much your only thug option without a specific pretender design. I certainly see nothing wrong with using them and I've seen them used quite effectively. And it's not like they're really going to do anything ridiculously better then your other F mages in battle that you have to save them for battle magic only.

Okay, Vanheim is a bad example, I forgot they have Drawfs, but FE are pretty much the best magic crosspaths for thugs and Abysia has access to better items then some other EA nations that use thugs/SC.

Also, I'll take E over A any day of the week. Earth > Air in terms of buffs. A2>E1, granted, but E2>A2 and FE>AB.

Nations like Van or Tir Na Nog kinda rely on those super expensive mages to be used as thugs while Abysia can use Rhuax as an added bonus. They are not a part of your central strategy. You're going to have a powerful bless anyway, no reason not to use them to at least some extent.

As for skellyspam; A burning one will kill up to 2 units a turn with weapons. Fire shield usually takes more then one round to kill a longdead and more then 2 turns to kill souless. There's also going to be some overlap so a Buring One won't kill nearly a skellyspammer per turn. Death mages will also summon a crapton of chaff in the space it takes the Burning Ones to engage, meaning no, they won't be killing them as fast as they come. They'll face off a horde and slowly cut trough them. The only question is can they cut trough them fast enough. If you have no E bless the undead can also kill you due to all the ramped up fatigue and criticals. Also consider battle formations and that in box formations quite a lot of Burning Ones will just wait their turn to come to the front, effectively cutting down the number of Burning Ones your hordes of undead needs to keep busy at a time.

Itwastuesday, Phoenix Pyre is a nice and cheeky spell. I've seen, I think Amhazir maybe?, use suicide squads of cheap flighted phoenix pyre mages to completely destroy an army. It was an extraordinary circumstance of course, but quite a creative use of the spell.
Dom 5 mod nation:
Confluence - a compilation of 18 mod nations
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