How to play LA Patala?

[DarkMotron]

I can't seem to find anything on Patala so i have a few questions. They seem to have a good variety of ranged units to spam, but let age archers don't seem very effective (especially considering you don't naturally get access to flaming arrows), and this is with considering your sacred naga's don't wear helmets. Another problem it seems to have is that although your naga's seem pretty decent, none of your commanders have anything near a respectable amount of magic leadership, not even the naga kings! With all this I'm not sure what your focus should be when playing Patala

[Shinuyama]

MP or SP

[DarkMotron]

Originally posted by Shinuyama:

MP or SP

im playing sp currently, but I started playing them looking for a new LA nation to play in MP. Im currently doing fine against the ai in sp, but i feel if i were to go against a player that could actually exploit my weakness's i would fair much worse

[Big Dog]

Not sure what is most competitive to do with them, I imagine some sort of bless cause their mages and sacreds are ok but the rest of their line up is bad. They have good summonable sacreds too. I guess the bander units can be ok with some buffs, it would probably be better to not really bother with them.

You can break into blood with them if your pretender has some blood on it by summoning asrapas and GoR'ing them.

Probably some mage focused bless would be good.

[Shinuyama]

MP: awake god or elephant expansion, or both
recruit the big naga mages
first research alt2 for earth meld + make some bandar (for damage)
second research conj 5
kill your first war enemy with W and E eles
second get to alt 4 mix in some Swarm to distract while eles do the killing
you take heat3
so you get W eles not Ice
meanwhile your expander god or dormant god has B
and is spending any spare turns hunting
Alt 4 also important for Body Ethereal on your W/E eles from tiny monkeys from second/third fort
you recruit the small s1 mage monkeys from everywhere unless you need a different kind
you ignore the naga troops
your basic troop is the Indie crossbowman, ideally the 7 res version but any kind is fine
prioritize xbow provinces in expansion to get access for fortbuilds
then you have real choices
you want kinnara but have nothing for them to cast except wind guide, but you might want wind guide for xbows, so conj is an option
more alt gives creeping doom, marble warriors, both good, fog warriors with monkey communion + kinnara
Thau gives you enslave mind/mind burn communions out of your monkeys
blood gives you Dakini
not for 'blood economy'
for A3 mages that in peacetime slowly produce more a3 mages (by hunting) and your god should have e/b if possible

[jojeck]

Building a decent blood economy with this nation is probably not worth it unless you happen to find a site with recruitable blood mages. Then it might be worth using your pretender to set up a system of turning asrapas into blood hunters. At 20 N gems and 9 blood slaves each for a B1 mage and SDR plus the high level mage turns it is not a good deal and very dependent on having lots of N gems. It's the same problem Bandar Log has with this inefficient method.

[Twogun]

yeah. never understood folks trying to make those monkey nations into B power. that's not their bag.

[Shinuyama]

Not 'b power'
not 'blood economy'
AIR MAGES
Dakini have A 3.

you don't get a lot of them, but putting up fog warriors without a communion (shield or hat) is huge
likewise they fly and you can have all of them at every fight you care about pretty easily for arrow fend, fog warr, mass flight, which is brutal on eg: berserk ironskinned ethereal elephants
you run out of kinnara because pearls are very useful for you for a bunch of things
having B gives your god a job - produce a tiny trickle of air mages to replace kinnaras
the air mages themselves slowly produce a tiny trickle of more air mages
however you only need a few air mages to put up the spells you care about
surprise storm + wrathful out of patala cannot be underestimated
Demon hordes are not your bag
neither is blood battlemagic
you are in it for the a3 on the flying durable mages

Bandar log has decent sacreds and doesn't have an early midgame tool like naga mages
it needs a totally different god, or wants one
patala wants no bless as nagas suck so it can have B and leans far harder on magical tactics (and therefore actually has a lategame)
the B is to give your god stuff to do after expansion instead of sitting around being a useless lump
the dakinis are worth the research points in that scenario, after you have key battlemagic
gets you over the hump when you run out of naga mages and can't keep leaning on them so much

[lord_khaine]

I still think Blood is to big of an investment.
Patala has some really powerful mages.
Its in the early game they are weakest i think.

So they should either get some sort of expander.
Or some sort of bless to enable the naga's to expand.
They can be pretty strong. Try regeneration and stygian skin on a demi-lich

[Chilli-Göttinger]

i know its a bit redundant but wouldnt it be good to make the small apes slaves and give the gorillas task master? so hoarding the little ones could be even cheaper and some of them could be freespawn / captured or passive dominion summoned.

[lord_khaine]

That would kinda go against the entire theme of the nation. That its based on a indian caste system. And not one of the slave taking western / southern ones.

[Shinuyama]

Crappy blesses on crappy units will lead to getting stomped in MP even in noob games
basic troops defeat nagas
blessing patala is a joke, you might as well bless battle vestals, at least they don't pass out after fighting for a few turns
having actually used patala in MP and defeated multiple nations with them, I can tell you for a fact that what I said upthread is the correct course of action with them and very few other things are viable
they are an extremely weak nation that has a multitude of issues and needs to hit certain research goals to even survive much less thrive or have a shot at winning vs any kind of real opposition at all

[lord_khaine]

Thats.. actually not really saying anything. Enough heavily armed troops defeats anything besides a SC. Or i guess hellblessed giants. But thats not relevant. Whats relevant is if your blessed troops can defeat enough troops.

And no its wrong, Patalla dont have any troops who pass out after a few rounds of fighting.

Also, Dom multiplayer being as variable as it is, means you cant actually tell anything as a fact. Only as a matter of oppinion. The only thing you can say as a fact is that it worked in your games, against your opponents.

Dakini's are really powerful units. I wont contest that.
But getting them is a massive investment since they need B4A1 to summon, as well as blood researched up to level 6 on a nation who dont have any native blood mages.

Meanwhile Kinnaras also happens to have air magic. And you already got a ton of monkey's with nothing better to do than acting as communion slaves.

[Shinuyama]

turn 1 mass flight/fw is not the same as communioning into it, and master matrixes ain't free
likewise if your s1 monkey mages have no jobs you are doing it wrong - you need them providing everything from single target removal to mass battlemagic and buffs, not to mention every single rp you can squeeze out of them
naked monkeys are so incredibly less durable than dakini it's not funny - not getting off that fw/mass flight/arrowfend or whatever might be the difference between winning and losing
if you do have the tiny monkeys, guess what dakini can cast that Kinnara can't and which actually wins even lategame battles - wailing winds
at blood 7 (one level higher than dakini) is blood rain, for the 500 hit morale combo


there is still a strong case for dakini even if you had infinite kinnara
but guess what - you don't
you need pearls for boosters, pen boosting, lotns casts, kinnara, siddha and pretender help you sometimes even gandharva
you will spend a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of these on pen boosting and lotns/anti/will casts specifically, because there is little reason not to
patala has a strong hunger for E and W gems for battlemagic, and N gems for summoning more E/W mages as well as more battlemagic, but it is hungriest for pearls, always
it can spend a nigh infinite amount of them and unless you never lose a kinnara and only ever participate in six on one superstomps you will lose kinnara, you will need kinnara, and you will not have enough kinnara

as for 'basic troops defeat them' in reference to naga infantry, that's the baseline competence for sacreds
does the same gold in random player built troops defeat the sacred unit?
if the answer is 'quite often, yes' then those sacreds are often not a good choice
for patala they are suicide
the nation's paths don't fit the nagas at all, they are nowhere near killy enough and they live in the age of the crossbow while wearing crap armour
even without their horrific fatigue issues, they suck
they suck in a significant number of all possible ways

as for 'that's like, your opinion man' well yes, that is my opinion
your opinion is that i'm wrong and you're couching it as that no-one can possibly know how to play a dominions nation in mp
which is incorrect
I can join pretty much any game as patala and play the steps i've outlined above, with variations as necessary if rushed etc and I will do notably better than someone taking a heavy naga bless and building the monkey infantry to do a big monkey infantry and naga horde while using his 'big mages' to cast random spells
someone joining noobs games with good diplo skills can actually win off the back of chakram throwers
people will give him thrones without a fight to 'stop some other guy winning' or whatever and he'll win
he could be using armies of solely militia and still win
but that doesn't make vanara chakram throwers (or militia) a stronger strategy
in the vacuum of not knowing the game context or player skillset, there are still weaker strategies and stronger strategies
and while a skilled expert like ben or heg might do some other strategy and have it work out by finessing past the weak points, the basic awake -> elementals -> indie xbows and mass buffs (E, N, and A) with astral artillery strategy that I outlined plays to patala's strengths and gets it through a troubled early and midgame into a lategame with enough tools to make a go of it.
And yes, that includes dakini
you run the ♥♥♥♥ out of kinnara if you are playing against anyone even slightly trying to actually fight you
And taking blood on your god and spending the RP to get to blood 6 (AFTER your major battlemagic) is not onerous in terms of the benefit of having more A at more fights, which if you are actually a contender to win, you should be having a bunch of
I am not going to give advice for a guy sitting in his 11 province expansion until someone rolls over him in their sleep, that's not a position that people want to be in or that should be advised
any mp strategy should assume a) losses b) a person playing to win, that's basic sportsmanship

[Chilli-Göttinger]

Originally posted by lord_khaine:

That would kinda go against the entire theme of the nation. That its based on a indian caste system. And not one of the slave taking western / southern ones.

then animal handler. caste is not slavery i know thats why i had also named game mechanics like freespawn, or simply rename that slave, capturing and task master mechanics specially for the apes into terms like "calling servants" or such.

another idea, bandar and patala could need thuggee apes? foreign recruit blood sacrificing and blood slaves collecting kali worshipping bandit cultist monkeys like in some famous hollywood movie with some ape based dish.