LA Agartha

[Born to Coom]

So I'm fairly bad at the game despite having over 100 hours in the game.
Lately I've started to play more LA games to try and familiarize myself with some concepts that in EA just get drowned by the massive amounts of magic you can use as a crutch.

For this I started by playing LA Ulm which I found pretty fun and after you get your blood eco going you can do some really crazy stuff.

Now I'm drawn to LA Agartha, and it just feels meh? Perhaps I'm using them wrong but I feel like LA Agartha can really only skelly spam and almost nothing else.

I end up just spamming Ktonian Reanimator and let them spawn undead in battle.
Is there something I'm missing in their strat?
I usually lack gems( Late Age ) to do some of their crazier spells reliably, what really are the possibilities with this nation?

[Mali Belizec]

LA Agartha is weakest of Agarthas. This nation really shines in MA. In LA they seems rather one dimensional and pale.

[TheMeInTeam]

It's playable, but not regarded as high tier in LA. I used them in a MP game and did okay...did not win, but managed to conquer a bit and the lobby had a lot of good players...several which were better than me. In my case, I did a rainbow statres bless despite that the sacreds have a bad reputation. LA Agartha gets an alchemist pretender option, and I used that to convert fire gems into money with eternal pyre...effectively trading pretender turns for tons of cash once it was up.

The magic being tag sucks, because it makes logistics hard. 10 enc isn't great. On the other hand:

- Blind fighters have 21 prot and a 6 parry shield that adds 19 more when def roll hits a shield. They greatly resist xbow as a result, so you can still add the common LA Agartha tactic of making those w/o compromising your sacred. However, their prot + shield combo is so strong that they also survive hits from giants on shield. These are way better front liners than cave knights...they cost about 1/3 as much and can be blessed to resist things cave knights can't.
- By default, LA Agartha is weak to common sources of AN damage, like foul vapors and shock. Much less so if huge chunk of your front line has it in bless. Similarly, a big part of your mage corps will be sacred, which makes the logistics for surviving in AN damage practical...you just need to cast AoE PR on those and maybe xbows you made, then you're good to go vs foul vapors.
- Enc isn't great for sure, but they tend to keep going long enough when I tested and used in actual game. With resists blocking heat from hell/grip of winter, it will generally be foolish for nations to try to rigor mortis LA Agartha; LA Agartha has national undead summons, death mages that can soul vortex to keep going in rigor, and can put up a ton of elementals if it wants. Rigor can catch LA Agartha off guard...but if it doesn't, it can also result in total wipe for other nation since LA Agartha itself has the magic tools to crush people using rigor.
- Speaking of death, blind fighter are 100% effective in darkness without even buying spirit sight. Against nations that don't similarly see in the dark, the results can be devastating: https://i.imgur.com/yQBMecv.jpg
- Blind fighters are anyfort, and don't cost much gold. Nearly every other nation with a sacred that fits this description makes use of it, despite that all of those sacreds have other tradeoffs which can be exploited before you get tech too. They are effective in expansion, effective in turn 30-40 wars, and are still a very useful frontline unit in late game. Even if you have to play around things like ether gate moon blades and blade wind.

You still want to use your mages effectively. Make skeletons to fill in, cast strength of giants/legions of steel, cast rooting spells on high def stuff like elves, have guys capable of bane fire and/or drain life on advance and spells so it's very hard to thug or SC your army, and later on add the same buffs that benefit any army. Depending on matchup, you might also want to summon a few penumbrals early on and cast quickness, strength, and iron warriors on them as game goes on...they're available a earlier than drain life casters, and 19 AP has a reasonable chance to even get through physmoss SC, because the damage isn't physical (or just do too much on the 25% rolls).

Overall, I don't think they have quite the oomph of a late game blood power, and are rightly not in the top half of LA tier lists, but should perform fine for most of the game and can easily win games that don't fit the "goes into t70+ range vs strong players" description.

[Bumc]

Okay I glossed past the fact that blind fighters are anyfort.
Bless strategy + darkness as a main battle enchantment seems quite viable then.

[Mali Belizec]

There is great youtube series from Sy with LA Agrtha. It is from dom4 but still excellent. Check it out.

[jojeck]

I find the Blindfighters and Blind lords do well with bless giving regeneration, Magic weapons (for Lemuria and other things) and + 2 Re-invigoration. A monolith has those paths (4E, 4S, 7N) and taking it Dormant with 5 Dom gives +3 scales. I take +2 Prod and 1 growth for resources and long term income. Blind fighters and crossbows can expand reasonably well without the Regen part of the bless if you take easy provinces and wait for the pretender to take on thrones and tough targets with regen.

I find Blindlords are great leaders for the Blindfighters and the crossbows giving good formations as well as the leadership needed. Recruiting a Blindlord turn 1 and making him the Prophet makes blessing the main army easy otherwise you have to fiddle around with lower level priests to get all the troops and commanders blessed. Blindlords can also be used as a sort of sacred thug with a bodyguard of blindfighters, they can fight in the front rank and get into the hall of fame for a useful bonus. They are expensive and take a fort turn but do have good stats and great protection and can be equipped with many useful artifacts that affect the battle. LA Argatha can really buff their melee troops with point and area buffs making them much better.

The Cap Mages, make excellent Wight mages and I recommend taking a lake province or coastal province near the capital to drown them conveniently. An underwater lab in the province allows a Bishop Fish to be summoned which is a convenient way to get another H3 commander to cast divine blessing and claiming thrones. The Tomb Oracle is an excellent use of 30 Death gems and can be used as a battle mage, heavy thug or a reanimator. Most other national summons are too expensive especially the earth ones, most E gems are better used making hammers and boots for your mages.

During expansion look out for sites giving nature mages and prioritise those for forts and site search every province for N gems. The pretender can forge a thistle mace for the first N1 mage to continue forging other ones with a hammer, and also a few moonvine bracelets to enable better site searching. An Ivy King can be used to cast Big N spells in battle, although smaller N mages can use a crystal matrix to join a communion. 25% of Cap mages and servant of the oracles have an S path for communions but they can also forge Crystal matrices and Slave matrices to make bigger and more advanced communions.

[Bumc]

Regen on size 2 sacreds always feels iffy, while reinvig is always welcome on heavy infantry ofc.

[jojeck]

Blindfighters have 14 HP which means they get 2 per combat round, and Blindlords have 16 HP. Their 21 protection means they take very little damage from most opponents and 2 HP / round means they last a long time. Blind lords can be given a coral sword and amulet of Giants to make them size 3 and 28 HP which should give them 3 HP per round regen.

The combination of high protection and Regen is potent even for a size 2.

[Eggplant]

You sound like a guy who'd prefer MA Pangea based on your username. But I feel like LA Agartha isn't necessarily a weak nation, it's just a nation that is pain to play, since it's tactics consists of slugging around massive boring and slow stacks of infantry.

[Phobos]

I largely agree with @jojeck's assessment, though my view is in no small part skewed by Dominions Enhanced and Lucid's Thematic gem generator mods (that and mostly playing against AI).

Consider this wall of text a largely disorderly stream of consciousness of mine:

**Notable things lost from MA:**
- capital only sacreds: either hard hitting sacreds Shard guards or Meme-bless rock throwers
- Hordes of easily-buffable and affordable not-fire elementals (Ruax pact ftw).
- recruitable holy 3 not-quite-supercombatants (more serviceable with a mason pretender)
- olms (via Summon Olm Conclave)
- //sacred statues//
- dominion bonus to golem and (possibly) inanimate unit HP in general
- bonus earth bless point
- capital divination magic site
- recruitable fortune tellers (they matter when they matter, sure, but when they do you're glad to have them onboard)
- Easily accessible siege bonuses

Summary: That's... quite a bit, yes.

**What do we get instead?**
- A /VERY/ gem-reliant nation in the Late age - this may pose problems, yes.
- Citadel, which means 1.5 a mage per turn (minus the slow recruit ones) from the get-go. Our other forts can likewise eventually be upgraded to one.
- Units that are good at holding the line but not killing things fast enough for them to be actual combat monsters (without buffs that is).
- No actual recrutable thugs - Blindlord hardly qualifies and cannot even bless himself/the others.
- Cave Knights/Drakes aka size 4 line-holders with an added angry, tough and undisciplined consolation price ontop
- Crossbowmen -> easily massable and buffable in DE with flaming missiles (Construction 1 spell).
No Air buffs for us though.
- Death, lots of death access albeit not enough to reliably pull of death 4 on our slow-to-recruit-capital casters (we're talking 2.5% chance) which is a critical breakpoint for the 2nd most common death booster
- overall wider and, I'd argue, better magic path access, including a number of crosspaths previously not available
- high protection, high encumbrance human sacreds recruitable in any fort - elite by human standards but not exactly killy per se and otherwise still affected by the general trappings of a human-like-chassis (14 HP - cough-cough).
That and magic beings which introduces a logistical snag for bless-reliant strats - Solution: actually take the arcane command bless, this is the sole vanilla/DE nation which actually may need it to function properly.
- recruitable alchemists, others did mention their money-making potential so I won't elaborate much. What's more important for mid/late game perhaps is the fact that you have death/fire crosspath which means that climbing fire access up to lords of elemental fire is, on paper, perfectly doable. Very versatile mages all things considered, each random has its uses, though some are obviously better than the others. Same story for water-climbing into water royalty.
- high(?) research potential thanks to a construction4 research booster that is Homunculous Jar. Very affordable given that earth hammers are a piececake to make and the fact that you WILL want to run magic 3 in order to boost magic site searching in Late age and otherwise rush for Earth Blood Deep well and other earth globals
- access to summonable, somewhat... sort of killy undead chaff for earth gems. Some of which explode, yay I guess? On a more serious note: iron corpses are like the direct oppossite of your national troops as while decently armored (protection in 16/17 range) their attack density is much higher due to going two-weapon fighting.
- access to Tomb Oracles, a very-reasonably-priced and Conjuration 6 learth/death/H3 lite supercombatants

How does it translate into actual gameplay in my case?

I tend to go for dormant... statsticks (rarely titans), which turn Blindfighters via bless into walls of protection (26 with just bless alone) and thus also good recipients for point buffs (quickening/skill of heroes) as far as line infantry is concerned as well as the general purpose aoe stuff (weapons of sharpness/strength of giants/legions of steel ontop)
Their slow combat speed actually allows them to receive more buffs before going out of range.
Sure, this is hardly a super-viable late-game vs players (that and the glaring weakness against poison is a thing).
Our decent magic-access all things considered must first be researched.


Scale wise:
Production, some growth, heat scales (cold is too risky with so many cold power/cold aura nations in LA) despite no national amphibian troops under our disposal, misfortune can be dumped quite extensively, magic seems like a must despite it buffing some Lemurian stuff and otherwise lowering MR

Bless-wise:
- E5 for Fire and Shock resist as we don't want to get fatigued into submission all too easily by Abyssia, nor destroyed by air/fire elementals or suffer much attrition from our own flaming crossbow bolts
- S5 for Magic Weapons(because Lemuria and other etheral things, like elementals, exist) + arcane command to make even the lowliest of priest-mages capable of leading expansion parties,and yes mere S5 is potentially super-risky against actual players because magic duel exists.
- N6 for Barkskin and, generally, nature access because why not turn those n1 indy mages into n2 or n3 even?
- Blood 4 for Blood Surge because we REALLY want that attack and str boost along with a minor if nice reinvig bump. Also blood access.

Protean abomination seems like a decent chassis for such a bless setup if you do mind going Misfortune 2/Turmoil 3 and yes that means that the initial expansion will require more experience than with other nations.
The fact that homunculous jars also grant fortune-teller 5 makes misfortune even more tempting.

I've also got a decent mileage from the Antumbral expander, though it really does need a chestpiece before going after certain provinces (and that is going to take time given that we we get e1/f1/d2 gems from our capitals magic sites). Once again your mileage may vary with this lifedraining, ethereal, size 6 -stealthy- chassis.

Common Gem expenditures:
Earth: earth boosters, chassis of the mountain, dwarven hammers and some thugging gear for Tomb Oracles, Elemental Lords as well as undead Chaff-generation spells and the 'Cave Darkness' spell which acts as a battlefield-wide 'buff' for Agartha and can be cast each combat without issues with the Chassis of the Mountain

Death: <<<Tomb Oracles>>>, Death Boosters, Some ethereal undead, Twiceborning, Liches, Rigor mortis etc and well of misery if you are feeling particularly cheeky (I doubt it would work proper in a multiplier game).
Notice the general lack of expenditure in the chaff department.

Fire: Crosspath items like abovementioned Fire Skull and Homunuculous Jar, Flame Spirits, Elemental Lords and such

Water: thugging gear, buffs, boosters, elemental royalty, going underwater because voice of Tiamat exists (them gems), Elemental Royalty

Astral: Crosspath items, communions, magic-being-specific-buffs (immaterial army and strenghten magic beings). That and general purpose astral spells as we can actually run /some/ communions and grant them decent reinvigoration with our path access. Emphasis on /some/

Mages:
- Keep your alchemists mostly researching with their jars unless needed elsewhere, say for site searching with the 4-path randoms preferably or just extra oomph in a battle
- Use servants of the oracles as your mainline battlemages unless lacking in numbers. Earth 2 easily earth-powers into earth 3 buffs/elemental summons. Death 2 is a lite skelespammer or a death evo blaster, fire crosspath can craft Homunculous jars and do some minor banefire/magma bolt spam - your troops are /slow/ so the likelihood of the first few salvos hitting your stuff is not that high unless dealing with fast-moving armies
- Attentands of the oracles are mostly used in the early game and their 12 research is not terrible in magic 3, later can be used for some minor crafting purposes, preaching and certain mage-turn-inefficient summons.
- Ktonian reanimators are there to get a reliable death 2 in a pinch and a boost to a poor fort's resources. Their free soulless are nearly inconsequential but I guess it is something. Non-sacred.
- Ktonian necromancers are there for the big spells/globals for the most part

[Tzyder]

lots and lot of xbows with flaming arrows, reanimators and some blindfighters