A bunch of newbie questions about MA Phlegra

[pepe le moko]

I have got a couple of questions about MA Phlegra. I am obviously not very experienced and I played other easier factions before but wanted to give Phlegra a try because I like their lore and I thought it wouldn't be a bad race to learn a bit more about thugging with Tyrants and the forge bonus.

So I park a couple of Tyrants in a trash province and have them raise slaves every turn but I am wondering what happens when unrest reaches 100? I know you can't recruit when you reach this level but can you still round up helots?

Also what is the best way to do it and deal with unrest? Do you need to move to a different province from time to time? Do you need to patrol the province and crank up PD there or just let it become a hell hole and not worry about it?

Finally, what about Cyclops? Are they even worth it in the early game? I know they are hard hitting but I find they die a lot and it feels as if they need to be led by a trophimos for the morale bonus, trophimos that I struggle to add to my recruitment queue because I try to recruit a Tyrant and mages every turn. Maybe that's wrong? I feel I'd be better off just recruiting Gigantes and helots in the beginning.

[Hanz Bloodletter]

Honestly, I'm a noob too, but if the unrest won't fix itself via province defense, then I send a patrol over. Not too many troops, but just enough. I've successfully went from 80 unrest to 0 with a commander, and five troops body guarding him.

[Eldritch Gentleman]

I think unrest may give diminishing returns on slaving, but I'm not sureo n that.

Patrolling is the only way to reduce unrest efficiently- you will lose population, but PD will only marginally help with your unrest issues.

The Cyclops are not really worth it early game. Late game, when you can cast something like marble warriors on them to compensate for their lack of armour, they become better, but the only reason to take them is if you have a very high-prot unit (Such as an enemy pretender) to kill, and you don't have to worry much about MR.

[KG]

Loggy reverse-engineered the Slaver trait and a description of how it works is in the wiki:

https://illwiki.com/dom5/slaver

[pepe le moko]

Okay I see you can fail to capture slaves when unrest gets too high. Phlegra has some interesting logistic challenges.

It feels like there are several ways to do it that I can see :

-set a province for capture that you patrol and/or switch from time to time then have each expansion parties stop in that province to gather helots
-same as above but have an indie commander ferry the helots back to the capital
-or have each Tyrant spend 1-2 turns capturing to supplement the troops you recruit and then go conquer stuff

I can't quite tell which one is better :o

[Dacen]

Hi, the throwing cyclops are utter trash, but mixing melee cyclops with helotes or the hoplon humans is quite effective for early game. After that, meh.
For unrest, patrolling work just fine. Your slaves cost very little upkeep, you can afford it. But anyway i don't think you want to use a lot of tyrants to do slave hunting. In the early game rush one tyrant to hunt and get off expansion parties faster is good, but as soon as you hit some global battle spells and construction 4, you probably want the tyrants on the battlefield most of the time, or forging, rituals.

The nation have little reason to take a bless, you probably will play full scale, thus with order 3 unrest is not a pb as long as you don't mass slave hunt. The full scale will give you absurd amount of gold and ressources so you can directly recruit a lot of troups even after recruiting mages and building stuff
I only played them once in a MP and i found that most of the time it is best to recruit the better human slaves (with hoplon) rather than slave hunting for helotes. Slave hunt was done, but mainly for archers (some provinces will give archers helotes) which are good against lot of nations (you can mass them, and do wind guide and flaming arrows) or replenish armies with cheap helotes if needed.

[pepe le moko]

Thanks this is helpful, especially the part about how you can capture archers slaves. I didn't know you could.

I have changed my mind about melee cyclops: they hit harder than gigantes and cost a lot less and almost no resources so you can recruit tons in the beginning.

[Imperialus]

MA Phlegra is probably my favourite nation in the game. I've played them... quite a bit in Multiplayer so my advice will mostly be coming from that perspective.

To answer your specific questions first:
1) Once you hit 100 unrest your Tyrants can't capture slaves.
2) Use your helots to patrol down unrest. If you have full order scales two Commanders with 80 Helots each should keep the unrest down and be able to support 3-4 tyrants without too much trouble. If you find unrest getting to high then just put a bunch of helots under the Tyrant's command and have him patrol for a turn or two. Conj 2 for Pack of Wolves also makes for effective patrol chaff. Once you get up in Enchantment then you can cast Carrion Reanimation out of the corpses that your patrolling generates to spit out a whole bunch of soulless to do your patrolling too.

I strongly disagree with nearly everything Dacen said, other than his suggestion to ignore a bless.

Using a mix of helot warriors and cyclopes hurlers I can regularly do 20+province expansions by turn 12. The key is to finesse your scripting to the point that they chuck their rocks right after the helots bog down the enemy in melee.

Recruiting units is for chumps. Seriously. I don't think I recruited a single unit after like turn 15. Tyrants on the other hand are the absolute core of your national identity. If a turn ever passes that you are not recruiting a Tyrant in your capitol you better have a darn good reason. Every single one of them has a use. I'll come back to that later though.

The real trap in MA Phlegra is the Oppressors (and to a lesser extent Shackled Mages). Unless you are really, really good with communions you should try and avoid them as much as possible. Use Sages instead. Their research value is insane and they can do a lot of your battlefield buffing too.

The E2 sages can do all your E3 needs until quite late in the game, and really E3 is all you need to turn your Helots into pretty respectable goons with Strength of Giants, Legions of Steel and Earth Meld.

The W2 sages can fluff your tyrants with Quickness and Wave Warriors

The A2 ones can cloud trapeze... I managed to successfully one turn alpha strike Pan with like 20 A2 Sages spamming air elementals. Knocked him right off balance.

The F2 ones are kinda useless outside of research. You'll have lots of Fire Gems so they can spam out Fire Elementals in a pinch.

Communions should be used sparingly and only to put up very specific spells like Fog Warriors, or Mass Regen after which your communion master can plink away with a bow to prevent your slaves and their grab-bag of crosspaths from having their brains melt out of their skulls.

As for Tyrants... Whew boy. This will be a long one.
D2 tyrants can soul vortex with an extra gem. Add Phoenix Pyre into the mix later on and they are army killers. Horror Helm, weapon of choice, Shield of Gleaming Gold, Boots of Quickness, Armour of Knights (or elemental armour) and a Antimagic Amulet or two make them very, very hard to kill. You can also do silly things like rope them into a communion, cast soul vortex, give your communion slaves lamia bodyguards and turbocommunion with frigging Phlegra (though a Revenant with a death stick and extra gem can also do this), especially if you rope a Shepard Shaman into the mix for Personal Regen and Larger. It's actually kinda funny.

Late game I find them very useful as extremely heavy duty raiders since there are enough SC killers on a battlefield to negate their usefulness. I give them 5 Lamia bodyguards and just let them solo pretty much any PD they come across. If you have been recruiting them every single turn like I said then you will have enough to just overwhelm his ability to counter raid. Your opponent can kill them, but he needs to commit quite a bit to the endeavour while your main army's knocks down his forts with relative impunity.

A1 Tyrants can cast flight and mess up an enemy backline. Give them a wraithblade for fatigue regen. Stacking a bunch of death boosters on them lets you do silly things like cast Wailing Winds and Winds of Death which is not something folks normally expect from Phlegra. Flight followed by several castings of earthquake will also make life interesting.

Fire and Earth randoms are mostly slavers, but a fire random will let you drop Flaming Arrows no problem, (which can be a horrifying prospect when 300 helots are set to fire closest with their Javelins) while the Earth randoms can do all the big earth buffs up to and including Weapons of Sharpness.

Don't overlook your Shamans. You won't need many of them, but you definitely want Nature items like Whips of Command and Bags of Wine. Their ability to freespawn muflon can be good for siege chaff and keeping your hordes of helots from starving as well, just don't use them in combat.

The Cyclops is a great forger but you only need a couple. Starting in around year 2 or so I'd recruit them until you get a water random. Give him the bracelet, the robe and a fire hat and he can forge staffs of elemental mastery. If you can swing it, it's also totally worthwhile to empower him in blood because there are some amazing blood items.

Anyhow, I'm off to bed. I can share more detailed thoughts on pretender design if you want, tomorrow but the Coles Notes is that you want Blood, Nature and Death on your pretender. Mother of Monsters is a great chassis for this.

[pepe le moko]

Thanks a lot, this is more than I expected. Very detailed and thorough answer, much appreciated. It is going to take a little while to digest it all but this is perfect.

Do you have any pointers about the choice between melee cyclops and gigantes? Right now I recruit cyclops in the beginning when resources are scarce then add gigantes to the mix later that I use as makeshift cavalry to do attack rear but I don't know if that's the best use of them.

[Imperialus]

Originally posted by pepe le moko:

Thanks a lot, this is more than I expected. Very detailed and thorough answer, much appreciated. It is going to take a little while to digest it all but this is perfect.

Do you have any pointers about the choice between melee cyclops and gigantes? Right now I recruit cyclops in the beginning when resources are scarce then add gigantes to the mix later that I use as makeshift cavalry to do attack rear but I don't know if that's the best use of them.

Gigantes can be valuable as anti elites. They will pound the snot out of other giant units. I've used them to great effect against Uruk and Jotunheim. They can be helpful against heavy armour nations like Ulm but even the Gigantes still have pretty crap armour, no hats and no shield which means they will get worn down by high attack density and even archers can be surprisingly effective at killing them. I tend to avoid both after the first war honestly. The hidden trap with the gigantes is the unrest they cause since that is already such a big problem for Phlegra to solve. They also both have the glutton tag, which is a pain to deal with once your armies start getting big. Hurlers make decent siege chaff, but honestly 400 helots also make decent siege chaff.

[Imperialus]

For a god my personal pick is an awake Mother of Monsters. She begins with Death Nature and Blood but pays for it by having no starting gear. Phlegra really wants path access, particularly into sorcery since your Tyrants, Sages and Cyclops have the elemental paths covered. MoM lets you get 3 of the 4, and personally I'm fine with leaving Astral off the table since unless the nation itself has reliable astral access it can be tough to utilize in my experience. Plus a lot of thones will get you some astral mages.

I like taking her awake. She is a pretty reasonable 'snooze button' expander if you can get personal regen cast and give her a cheap piece of armour like a blacksteel breastplate. Realistically this means you are looking at Turn 3 before she rolls out since you'll need to recruit a tyrant for the earth paths to forge, but just get her to research up to Ench 2 in the interm. If Ench 2 is out of reach then get Alt 1 for Barkskin and Skeletal body and she should still do fine against most indies until you get Ench 2. Basically she'll just stand there and punch them while her poison cloud does the killing. Just watch out for barbs and heavy cav.

As a baseline I would start with something like this:

For magic paths you want D4 and N4. This lets you make Skull Faces and Tree Lord Staffs which means that you hit D5 and N6, which means all the death and nature stuff is open. You want to be able to boost them into higher levels because you will have lots of D and N gems if you use your Tyrants and Shamans to site search, but without a Pretender to boost them up higher you are kinda stuck at D3 and N2 which is a sad place to be stuck.

After that get Dom 4, Order 3, Sloth 3, Heat 1 and Growth 3. Order and Growth are the scales you really care about. Order keeps the unrest under control, and Growth lets you not worry so much about killing population due to patrolling. Sloth is a total dump scale. Your forts will only ever be recruiting mages, and as long as you have the resources to make Tyrants then you have armies. Magic is helpful if you are relying on Shackled Mages, but like I said in my first post, you probably want to be massing Sages not Shackled Mages. You also have access to Quills, Lightless Lanterns, and Skull Mentors so you are spoiled for choice when it comes to research boosters. Luck is luck. Always nice to have but the community is pretty split on its usefulness though I would take it over magic personally. You can dump a bit more into heat if you feel like it. Heat 3 isn't too terrible and that could net you Luck 2 so it's a tradeoff to consider.

This leaves you with 32 points to play with. 32 points isn't enough to do much with as far as scales go, but you could take an extra point or two of heat for a bit of luck. I would suggest getting her up to Blood 3. Then she can bloodhunt reasonably well and get a bit of a blood economy going. It's pretty easy for Phlegra to break into blood in a modest way by the midgame way by casting Summon Kers and then casting Gift of Reason on them. You are unlikely to be doing big blood, but there are some really nice blood items for your tyrants, especially if you empower a Cyclops. Other idea would be to spend 32 points to go to D5 which gets you Stygian Flesh on your bless to help her expand a bit. Otherwise you could just stack undying and resilliant in case you come across Amazons or something.

A greedier idea would be to take her dormant. That would net you 3 extra scales and enough points left over to get Dom 5 and all three magic paths at 4.

[pepe le moko]

Excellent, thanks for sharing these hints.

[Dacen]

@Song of Roland Since i only have done one MP with them as said (which i won though) i of course agree there are other options, no doubt better options, but the stuff i suggested worked fine for me, i guess there is more than one way to play the nation ?
The main point for me to not just rely on helotes and to get hoplon guys over many turns (i think this is the main point you disagree with ?) is 1. They are slaves, they are cheap, you can afford it and it's insignificant upkeep wise 2. The hoplon guys have more protection (even if both have shields, 13 body armor instead of 8 is no joke), and really it makes a lot of differences in many battles before the big defensive buffs, especially considering how prompt slaves are to flee when taking damages. They have no javelin though. Then, when gold stack up and you already have 15 forts and full mage recruitment, why not spend some good gold on a more reliable frontline which could save your ass in an early mid game war ? it of course means to not trash scales on pretender for it to work.
Other than that, i would be more nuanced for opressors and shackled mages. I also think than sages are priority most of the time. But having some forts recruiting shackled mages and have some oppressors here and there seems good. Autocommunion mean big battlefield spells one turn earlier than using sages. It's unique to the nation, huge, and can be decisive at times.

@pepe le moko
Since it's look like you are interested in advices aside from what you asked in your first post, and since topic has not yet been discussed, beware the morale of your armies. Slaves have REALLY low morale, and your big army can quickly fall apart after the initial shock, even whith defensive battlefield buffs, even if they had easily won if they stayed put. I had really bad experiences mid game against a rainbow marignon, the knights were too much for the helotes to handle and could go in very fast. I trust it is the same with other nations having powerful and fast (so not always time for units to full buff before shock) sacreds.
To workaround it, other than putting taskmasters as leaders (tyrants if i remember well have the best stat for that), investing in the helmet of heroes (+2 inspi) and whip of command (+3 taskmaster -2 inspi) help. And you do it all natively.
If you play multiplayer, you will get destroyed by bloodrain + wailing winds if you have nothing else than huge slave armies with battlefield buffs and no moral buff. It don't matter how well you buff them if they flee in the end.

[Imperialus]

One of the beautiful things about Dominions is that it is so complex there is no meta. Also, want to make clear that I'm not at all trying to god complex my theorycrafting. It's more I'm just in the process of wrapping up a game one way or another here with a big lategame war against an extremely powerful Ind who has been my longest standing ally. Doing a bit of a debrief for myself as much as anything while I try to puzzle my way through the extreme lategame. Thinking about things I feel went very well for me and why. I mean at this point the game is all about the summons and the nutty late game stuff anyhow. Vampires lords and ashen angels vs Ruax casting firestorm, that sort of stuff. I mean I have an Ivy King in every army just for Mass Regeneration and Growing Fury and close to 3000 Helots just eating supplies.

My main issue with the Helot soldiers is less about the gold cost, and more that if you are going to recruit them at all, you can no longer afford to take sloth in your scales. They are 17 resources each, which isn't cheap. I just took a quick look at the game I'm in right now where I dumped 3 into sloth and I can only recruit 11 out of my cap/turn, I have Marigion as well which is a higher level fort, and happens to have a mountain province and two forests in the cap circle can only recruit 12.

By relying on helot warriors for your armies though a Tyrant will normally produce about 15 warriors/turn for the cost of his upkeep plus some patrol chaff.

Sure if I hadn't taken sloth 3 I'd be able to recruit a respectable number, but really, then the question becomes, are Helot Soldiers worth 120 (or more) design points? I mean that's Awake vs. Dormant. Is a Prot 13 Moral 7 unit really worth going neutral on scales? I mean I can still comfortably recruit 3 gigantes out of my cap should I feel so inspired even with full sloth... I suppose you could make the argument for indies but who takes production in the hopes of finding good independents?

Moral is a problem that Phlegra just struggles with in a very real way. Doesn't matter which troops you are fielding. I mean I suppose if you were to spend every turn slowly recruiting Gigante Warriors you could probably handle it but then Skelly Spam would just counter their terrible attack density. My wailing winds solution if I end up needing to deal with it in the midgame is a whole buttload of Earth Sages wearing Dragon Helmets for the moral boost spamming Sow Dragons Teeth. If you can get into blood (which isn't that hard if you have access to Gift of Reason for Kers) then Vampires are a good counter to Wailing Winds too. Once the game reaches that point though the Helots are basically siege chaff and really shouldn't be doing much fighting in major battles anyhow.

I still think Oppressors are a pointless recruit. Shackled Mages aren't, but you need to build the communions very specifically to use them. If I want a communion I generally prefer to use Sages with an Oppressors Headband. Sure it's 15 Earth gems to craft, but say you want to get up Fog Warriors... A1 vs A2 is the difference between needing 8 slaves vs 16. Also recruiting as many Sages as is humanly possible means you will get more Earth randoms, and Earth random Sages are your absolute lifeblood in the midgame since they are the only thing that will prevent your helots from melting.

Air is really the only school I could see myself using an Oppressor to communion up in anyhow. Your Fire Random Tyrants can do all the big Fire stuff just by casting Phoenix Power. Earth Randoms can do anything you want if you are willing to invest in some gear for them... I mean Earth Boots will get your E randoms up to Earth 5 after Summon Earth Power. Water... I guess the only thing you might want to boost up would be if you needed to cast Demon Cleansing. Maybe grip of winter if you are fighting someone coldblooded, but even then I'd just give a Sage a ring and burn an extra gem on the casting.

As for the sorcery schools, there is value in getting Nature up there via a Shaman with a headband for Wooden Warriors and to deal with foul vapours and the like. Big death spells can be helpful as well, and sometimes roping a Tyrant in will let you do some cool crosspath stuff like Winds of Death yourself but you can get there via boosters as well.

Blood and Astral get into communions naturally so you could use the Shackled Mages for that too.

Also, you're right, potent sacreds like Knights of the Chalice can really really mess up your Helots. My personal solution when I needed to deal with hellblessed White Centaurs earlier on in this game was a strung out line of Helots to absorb the charge backed up by cyclops and Earth Sages casting Maws of the Earth... And lots and lots of moral boosters on your Tyrants. You do not, under any circumstances want them getting seduced.