Hints/advice for Arcosephale

[Slish]

I know this nation is not considered the strongest.

But I would love to get some hints/advice what are the strongest strategies to play with this nation? What's a good pretender for this? What are the known strategies?

Would love to hear it, helps me with the brainstorming :)

EDIT: sorry forgot to mention which age, I prefer EA or MA

[boozermonkey]

What age?

EA Arco is actually quite good if played properly.
MA Arco is also very good. Better than good, actually.
LA Arco is debatably mediocre, but not bad.

[dyslexicfaser]

All Arcos have access to one of the best mages in the game if you can figure out communions, the Mystic. Particularly if you find an indie province with Astral mages; Sages, Lizard Shamans, Amazons, Alchemists, etc. to serve as a cheap communion slave.
They also have Formation Fighter units which got a boost in Dom5; instead of minor bonuses, you can now fit more Formation Fighters into the same square. That's bad if that square eats a Thunderstrike, but it's excellent if they're actually hitting the enemy army.

EA Arco also has Wind Riders which now crush on expansion thanks to some battlefield changes to Dom5. The Oriead is a little tough to work with (extremely expensive because of it's +6 Awe), but they do give you strong Nature and Air magic which no other Arco has access to, and plenty of Engineers end up with Air 2 or Earth 2 which you can do a lot with.

MA Arco also has an excellent mind hunter mage, the Astrologer. Together with the Priestess which heals afflictions, he can mind hunt with impunity in a way that no other nation really can. This is entirely aside from doing something like kitting out an Astrologer, throwing him into a huge (8 slave) communion and Master Enslaving a quarter of the enemy army.

Arco isn't very exciting, but there's plenty you can do with it.

[boozermonkey]

EA Arco is one of the stronger nations in that age actually. One thing Dyslexicfaser didn't mention was Philosophers. With Sloth scales they are the research hogs for the nation allowing you to use your every one of your mages for combat. This alone makes Arco insanely strong in the early and mid game, and provides one heck of an advantage in late game as well. None of the other nations in EA can do this.

All ages Arco get Priestesses. These are very powerful healers that heal afflictions racked up by your armies in combat, your mages, and most importantly, your pretender. These healers, combined with an Awake SC pretender are another one of Arco's tremendous strengths. All other nations that take awake SC pretenders eventually have to retire them or lose them in battle. Not so Arco. You can still lose it in combat, but you wont have to worry about afflictions and early retirement.

Arco mages. In the EA you get Engineers with strong paths and Architect. This is yet another tremendous strength for an EA nation. Architect alone opens stronger forts to the nation which none of the others get. Air paths open Owl Quils to stick on your Philosophers further strengthening your research game.

Orieds are arguably the strongest air/nature mages in the whole game. They can summon Vine Ogres, Thunderstrike, some can also cast Storm, further strengthening your Thunderstrike/Lightining bolt spamming Engineers.

[Fleshbits]

My current game is this nation.
What Ive learned this game:

1) Communion is bugged. Don't bother.
2) Oreiads are neato, but the seduce fails to often to use them that way, use the nature side for buffs, site searching, or using the air side for thunderstrikes and site searching.
3) Oreiads can make some neat items.
4) The race wants to focus astral, but with communion bugged, there isn't much there. You can mind hunt, but it doesnt seem to succeed often for me.
5) I ended up summoning Ether Lords and they are earning nthier weight in gems 100 fold.
6) You can teleport your astral mages
7) You can go behind the lines with a flying commander and a bunch of lying units and let the enemy play whack-a-mole with you while you decimate his front line
8) Skeptics are wonderful for getting rid of enemy dominion on your borders
9) Noone can really thug well
11) Priests heal battle afflictions, bring one always.
12) I didn't care for going bless. I need income for all them mages.
13) I suck at this game

[boozermonkey]

Originally posted by Fleshbits:

My current game is this nation.
What Ive learned this game:

1) Communion is bugged. Don't bother.
2) Oreiads are neato, but the seduce fails to often to use them that way, use the nature side for buffs, site searching, or using the air side for thunderstrikes and site searching.
3) Oreiads can make some neat items.
4) The race wants to focus astral, but with communion bugged, there isn't much there. You can mind hunt, but it doesnt seem to succeed often for me.
5) I ended up summoning Ether Lords and they are earning nthier weight in gems 100 fold.
6) You can teleport your astral mages
7) You can go behind the lines with a flying commander and a bunch of lying units and let the enemy play whack-a-mole with you while you decimate his front line
8) Skeptics are wonderful for getting rid of enemy dominion on your borders
9) Noone can really thug well
11) Priests heal battle afflictions, bring one always.
12) I didn't care for going bless. I need income for all them mages.
13) I suck at this game

I haven't noticed that communions are not working. I will do some testing.

EA Arco was never really a bless nation. You can go that route, but a heavy bless is wasted here IMO. You are best going with an awake SC and scales.

[Fleshbits]

Originally posted by boozermonkey:

I haven't noticed that communions are not working. I will do some testing.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/722060/discussions/0/1621724915817547432/

[Scuffles]

Communions work fine on script, it's just that your Communion masters have a nasty habit of casting Communion slave once they're off script.

EA Arco has plenty of tools but I think they go best with good scales and a minor bless for wind riders. A little bit of +defence and reinvigoration makes them into good raiders and shock troops with great mobility. They're still cap only and pretty expensive though, so I don't think you'd want to go too much higher on your bless.

Your line troops are decent enough and low resource in Cardaces and Peltasts but you can't expect them to go about winning fights by themselves. The low resources needed to recruit these guys means you can stand a point or two of sloth if necessary, which makes Philosophers into very efficient researchers out of your capital if you want to go that way. This does take away your chariot option for the most part, though I haven't really tried them too much.

Myrmidons are solid heavy infantry but slow your armies down. They seem to have pretty high encumbrance too.

Oreiads are great, but they're slow to recruit and expensive. They can seduce and have nature magic so they make decent enough assassins against human mages if they fail to steal them - casting swarm will eat most peoples. That's a gimmick though, so don't really expect too much out of it. The real use for these ladies is high nature (they can get you up to N5 with a thistle mace) and high air battle magic by plugging into a communion via a master matrix.

Your midgame is all about mystics. Any army that you have is going to want to have a bunch of these guys tagging along. Lots of them can throw evocations by themselves, but their real power comes from the diverse communion options. Enough of them can do basically anything in fire / earth / water / astral.

So what do you need from your god? First off, you want good scales to pay for millions of mystics.

You don't really need an expander - if you went with prod scales then you can expand with troops, chariots and wind riders. A couple of turns worth of wind riders will beat most any indies by picking off their commanders (hold and attack rear) even with a light bless or no bless, so you're not needing incarnate blesses of any sort.

In my opinion EA Arco's god needs to help them overcome late game weaknesses. You don't get to high magic paths with your mages. Aside from Oreiads being able to get you to N5 (and you're not going to be winning any Mother Oak duels in early age most of the time I don't think?) you tend to top out at 3 or 4 in all your other rather diverse paths.

That means you probably want your pretender to get you over that hump, either by forging boosters or directly summoning your fire kings or earth kings or something. I think it's handy to be able to make a staff of elemental mastery. That one booster can get you higher up any of the elemental paths (I think it even gets you A4 from a lucky A3 Oreiad who can then forge your other air boosters)

Maybe an imprisoned rainbow with good scales and something like F4 / W4 / E4? I haven't played around with the options enough to work out the exact details.

[Telos]

EA Arcos chariots are also worth a mention. They have good protection and defense, and are great on attack-rear orders, very often picking up cheap wins by decapitating enemy leadership (thanks mostly to attack-rear being brokenly good in Dom5). They might seem expensive for cavalry, but against most enemies their trample attack gives you two 16-damage armor-piercing defense-ignoring AoE-1 attacks per round, which is much better than pretty much any cavalry gives you, so they're well worth the price. They're more akin to elephants than cavalry, really, but are cheaper, more survivable against many threats, don't have horrible MR and morale issues, and aren't an automatic lightning rod for mage targeting. Chariots are also excellent targets for small-AoE buffs, like body ethereal, iron warriors, and quickness, which mystics can easily cast.

Icarids are also worth mentioning. They have pretty good stats for flying men, and most importantly can pack themselves 3-per-square, which is much better in melee than Caelum's 2-per-square. It's pretty easy to buff them with strength of giants to increase their alpha strike killing power. They're great for decapitating leaders, raiding behind enemy lines, and popping open and storming forts. You don't want them in every battle, but they really help to diversify Arcos' threats, and to force your enemy to spread their forces around in preparation for flyers, which will then be to your advantage in all the battles you opt not to bring flyers to. Pegasi work similarly, fly further, and are better in melee, but unless you have good bless effects, they won't do much better against enemy mages than icarids will, so I usually opt to get more swords and siege-points per gold, rather than splurging on pegasi.

The pegasi commanders are useful though, as with light gear, they can be decently survivable and you can script them to jump back in rounds 3,4, or 5 of combat, which can evade some anti-flyer troop positionings. If you give them flying body-guards (you can even bring extras with ring of warning), that's another way to drop more flyers on enemy backlines later than they may be prepared for it. You can do this with icarid commanders too, but they're a bit fragile to be worth investing gear.

[dyslexicfaser]

Haven't tried chariots in Dom5, but in Dom4 I don't consider them worth the price of not taking Sloth for philosophers.

Size 3 tramplers are pretty easy to work around, particularly in EA where there are lots of giants and elves and size 3+ types. And 45g 29r is expensive for a 10hp unit. They hold up pretty well against troops, but then so do Myrmidons if you're into that, and for a third the gold cost.

[Telos]

Chariots are size-4, not size-3, so they trample over the size-3 stuff you mentioned. You're right that they don't trample size-4 giants, but size-4 giants are already susceptible to swarms of infantry, and Cardaces and/or Myrmidons pack even more densely together to swamp giants' defenses even faster, and icarids are a real threat to giant commanders, so Arcos has plenty of good answers to giants.

The main point of chariots is to kill things, especially things in the enemy's back row. Typically they only need to tank a few hits before the battle is over. You're right that myrmidons tank hits about as well, but they don't kill things nearly so quickly. For 45 gold (and a ton more resources), you can have 3 myrmidon swords swinging for 15 damage each per round, or one chariot doing two 16-damage attacks per round that are armor-piercing and AoE 1. Damage-wise the chariots are much better, plus they're fast enough to get to battles quickly on the map, and to have their targets on the battlefield be juicy high-value ones, not just the front-line grunts that Myrmidons have to target. It may also be worth noting that Myrmidons have crippling encumbrance, so if you count on Myrmidons to kill stuff in any battle larger than an expansion skirmish, you'll often end up disappointed, watching them struggling even to stay awake, much less actually hit things with their swords. Instead, you'll typically want some Myrmidons to stop the enemy from advancing, and something else to actually kill things with, where that something else might be chariots, mages, or flaming slingers.

You're right that chariots don't work well with philosophers (which require sloth scales to be effective researchers), though chariots do fit better than myrmidons do. I don't like giving up access to capital mages and most of the interesting units on my roster (myrmidons, chariots, icarids, even healthy numbers of cardaces) just to get slightly cheaper researchers who are useless in a fight, especially in a nation that already has access to research-boosted mystics, so doesn't *need* to handicap itself to get highly competitive research.

[sum1won]

Tip: Just like elephants, chariots benefit from buffs like body ethereal.