What's the point of the Deep Ones? They seem too hard/risky to use for the payoff

[᲼᲼]

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[Literally deaf]

They can create an abyssal palace (or something) on ocean tiles after they grow strong enough. Your agents with deep one trait can lay low there and heroes cannot attack you.

Other than that, they seem quite weak to me. Getting an enemy hero to wander off into the depths takes way too much effort, and why should I care when a baron/duke does it since they get replaced in 1 turn?

[DopaTrain]

They are for people who like a hard/risky play style.

[The Grand Mugwump]

Originally posted by Literally deaf:

They can create an abyssal palace (or something) on ocean tiles after they grow strong enough. Your agents with deep one trait can lay low there and heroes cannot attack you.

Other than that, they seem quite weak to me. Getting an enemy hero to wander off into the depths takes way too much effort, and why should I care when a baron/duke does it since they get replaced in 1 turn?

It's mainly for the victory points. The abyssal cities also offer a way to spread shadow across bodies of water. Last time I checked, every agent can lay low in abyssal cities unless this was silently changed in a recent path. The best perk is that heroes are unable to target agents who are hiding in an abyssal city.

Deep ones do ok when you get a holy order to focus on them. If you see a lot of cities with ports, it's not a bad idea to try to make them worship the deep ones, which drastically increases their spread and rate of growth.

[crawlers]

Even after using deep ones plus to buff them, I find them underpowered as a tactic (not to mention what they have in vanilla). I am pretty sure other folk in the community see them as underpowered. Even vanilla orcs are in a better shape.

[shde2e]

They're definitely weak compared to other strategies, but I'm fine with it for people who want to experiment instead of doing optimized strategies.

[snarst]

I'm surprised at how much people struggle with them. Getting from the depths was like my 8th achievement. When a deep one cult transforms the settlement into a sanctum, creates a deep one city and turns the ruler into a deep one. There are several things going on but if you want to use them you need focus on them or just ignore them all game.

First when you select cult you want to empower them (probably right after a hero decimates them) and then have an agent or 2 focus on doing human appearance (lowers menace) and conceal deep ones (reduce profile). The main thing is to keep their menace bellow 25 so that a hero won't bother decimating them and keep your agents laying low in between to avoid attracting heros to come kill them. Most cults that you keep empowering and safe should take about 65-90 turns to get to 300%. Once the cult gets to 300% strength the settlement is turned into a sanctum and the population is moved to an abyssal city. The ruler will be turned into a deep one and move towards the city.

Both the sanctum and abyssal city have 100% shadow so they will be passively generating shadow for you however, you'll probably get more score from them multiplying than actually spreading it to other places. The sanctum has a special challenge that causes it to take population from connected settlements that have been infiltrated. This will generate menace so you are unlikely to do this more than twice before an army is sent to smash the temple of statues that is the sanctum. The abyssal city has a population, every time it goes above a number (I can't remember, somewhere between 35-50) it will make a new city in an ocean tile and move 25 population to it. The city itself has a unique challenge that means that heroes cannot hurt your agent. So you can have an agent have an angry mob of heroes and military escorts chasing them, lead them on a chase across the map and then suddenly no one can touch them.

So the ruler of the settlement is now a deep one that you do not control. The first thing they are going to do once they reach the deep once city is go found a cult somewhere else. Then they will either go do it again or start doing either human appearance or conceal deep ones on a cult somewhere on the map. This is where you start building momentum. There will never be less than 2 cults on the map so your deep one helpers will ensure that number only continues to go up. As the number of sanctums increases the number of deep ones who keep founding cults increases so once you have turned about 4 or more settlements into sanctums don't be surprised if you count about 6 or so across the map. Witch covens can help add to this by spreading across the map and then adopting the tenant that founds a deep one cult, suddenly adding half a dozen more to the map.

Now there is one thing I have not mentioned that really helps push them over the finish line. When a cult starts to grow in strength in a settlement you unlock a special challenge that allows you to taint the entire bloodline of the ruler. Depending on how big the family is you can have more than a dozen rulers and heroes who could turn into deep ones at any moment. I'm not 100% sure but I suspect that heroes turned into deep ones are not replaced as they still count as heroes. Slowly gaining a dozen more deep one agents on top of what you already got will both pump up the number of cults and mean that cults you are not empowering have agents babysitting them.

Iaster is the god with the most synergy with deep ones (which thematically makes sense since they are ripped straight from HP lovecraft and Iaster is the god of madness) as he can make insane heroes like things. If you make a hero like deep ones they might choose to leave them alone even if they walk right on top of a cult with plenty of menace. Also cults at high strength generate a little bit of madness which is Iasters thing.

Hope that helps or gives you some idea on how you can make them work. You might want to turn off the time limit the first time you try to make them work.

[{SLURP}Legion]

they are pretty annoying to do just because they take so long to fully convert cities to sanctums even with the conversion speed buff and need a corrupted human hero for the player to start a cult, but the bloodline curse that doesnt require you to anger the mages and the passive shadow spread both make up for it, and once youve got deep one agents spawning, you just really need to keep the speed buffs active and activate the bloodline curse when you can while they start new cults and lower the profile/menace. (also idk if its bad luck or if the game has some weird stat rolling for non-heros but most of the deep one agents i get end up having high might and 1 or 2 on every other stat and being useless at running cults)

[jotwebe]

snarst already gave a good overview, but yeah the bloodline curse thing can be huge if you hit a large family with it. Basically, for Deep Ones to be good, you ideally want:

+ A huge kingdom with huge families
+ lots of big coastal cities with plenty of population

They're not the strongest, but they grow exponentially.