[Dom4] Advice for LA Mictlan

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koz
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[Dom4] Advice for LA Mictlan

Post by koz »

I've been trying to branch out with new nations and doing new things, and decided to give LA Mictlan a spin. Needless to say, I've had absolutely no luck with these guys. My sacreds seem to drop rather fast to javelins of all things, and my mages confuse the hell out of me. LA Mictlan also seems really capital-dependent, since the only thing you get outside of it are your turkey mages and your Blood 1 dorks. I'm not even sure how you're meant to expand with them.

Am I totally missing something here? What should I be doing to get good performance out of this nation? Any and all advice is appreciated - pretender builds, good units, mid and lategame strategies... just anything, really.
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Korwin
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Post by Korwin »

Jaguar Warriors are really good. They have on weakness: Ranged Weapons.
So you want need Arrow catchers (computer will allways target the nearest unit), with shields.

The Blood 1 dorks are cheap researchers and blood hunters.

Good blesses for your sacreds: Fire, Water, Nature
Not so shure about the new Dead and the interaction with the second form of the Jaguars.
I'm in an game where I have an N9B9 Bless (with that Stone Head Pretender), seems viable so far.
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Post by name_here »

What does the new death bless do, anyway?

Traditionally, you want F9 on your jaguars because they get lots of weak attacks in their second form, so adding AP is really good. Nature is pretty solid because second form has a bunch of hit points, and blood also boosts multiple weak attacks.

LA also has the Altantian Successor State sacreds, who have reasonable armor and pretty terrifying glaives (LA Atlantis has essentially a reskin of the unit, and with D9 they go through armored giants with shocking ease), but they're also pretty resource-intensive and you need to scrabble for points to get a bless and enough gold and dominion to mass sacreds, so not being able to dump productivity scales strikes me as a dubious idea. If you do plan on using them, Earth and Water aren't a bad plan, since they already hit like trucks and have enough armor they'll be pretty sturdy once blessed. In Dom3, IIRC Earth 9 didn't carry over to second-shape jaguars, but that might have been changed.

The non-sacreds are trash, but they're cheap trash. They catch arrows and block lance charges. You can also spend priest-king turns to obtain free trash. Also, while slingers aren't terribly good there are some cases where simply having a ranged attack is valuable. The big one, Glamour, is pretty much gone in LA but there are still masses of chaff to clear away.
Last edited by name_here on Tue Sep 17, 2013 4:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Shatner »

First off, LA Mictlan is about Jaguar Warriors in the early game, Jaguar Warriors + Chaff + Bloodsplosions in the mid-game, and Jaguar Warriors + Demon Armies in the late game. Yeah, Jaguar Warriors are really damn good and you will light your dominion on fire if you have to give those sacreds a good bless.

With a giant stone head you can quite easily have an N9B9 bless. That's great because it does a couple of crucial things for your Jaguar Warriors (and other sacreds, but we'll focus on the Jaguars for now), but mainly it lets us get paid twice. ALOT:
1) +4 Strength. Jaguar Warriors use a two-handed sword-club until they die, then they turn into a werejaguar and have 3 attacks. Club-swords + strength bonus = dead elite enemies. Multiple attacks + strength bonus = dead everything.
2) Extra HP and Regeneration. Extra HP gets applied twice for a Jaguar Warrior: once as a warrior and again as a werejaguar. Regeneration keeps your maniacs alive and largely affliction-free. Even though JWs wear almost no armor, the majority of them will survive through sheer number of hitpoints; it is hard to stab a square full of regenerating non-giants to death because attacks tend to get spread out across the group.
3) Blood Vengeance. With B9, every attack against a JW has a chance of also hurting the attacker (the effect can be resisted, and a MR-10 guy has a 50-50 chance of resisting it). This means your JWs are harming the enemy while they are attacking AND while they are defending. Due to point #2, hacking a group of 15+ JWs to death is a losing proposition no matter what.


Here's how you expand as LA Mictlan. In every fort, every turn recruit the max # of JWs, and recruit 5 of the blue, map move-2 warriors who have a spear, a sling, and a shield. Once you have 20+ JWs and 10+ warriors, give them to an H2 or H3 commander. The warriors are put in loose line formation, given the command "Fire and Maintain Distance: Closest", and moved forward. If your commander is an H2, he is scripted to cast Bless x5 and your JWs are kept in square formation around him scripted to "Hold and Attack: Closest". If the commander is an H3, he is scripted to cast Divine Blessing, Whatever x4 (Smite or Sermon of Courage are always nice) and the JWs are in a line formation scripted to "Attack: Closest".

The AI shoots at your warriors, who mostly ignore it because they're spread out and have shields. As the enemy's front line gets closer they fall back and hurl stuff from their slings. If those slings actually hurt anything, that's a bonus; they're mainly there to distract enemy archers. The JWs charge through the gaps between the warriors and proceed to slaughter EVERYTHING. This will work against just about any indie force. Stick some slaves or resource-2 warriors in the front with "hold and attack: Cavalry" to eat lance strikes if you're facing down lots of cavalry.

Build a fort everywhere you can. Every fort = more Jaguar Warriors and more Mictlan Priests. Also, every five temples you have increase the number of JWs you can recruit in EVERY fort. Turkey mages site search then research (and they can pull some flying communion shenanigans later on when needed). Mictlan Priests blood hunt, research, act as sabbath slaves, and forge/summon B1 stuff (mostly sanguine dousing rods and beast bats). In your capital, recruit a single S2B2 and F2B2 for the paths, W2B1 Atlantians when you want to save money (they're your most efficient cap-only researcher and blood sacrificer), and N2B2s to lead your armies of Jaguar Warriors. I only recruit one or two of the big, slow-to-recruit Atlantian W3B3H3s because they are super expensive and each one is two N2B2s you didn't recruit.

For scales, you want Sloth-3, and almost certainly more heat for the points. Death scales are acceptable because your armies tend to be small numbers of elites, and most of your commanders are not old (if you really need to, you can forge Boots of Youth for your Sun and Moon priests). You probably want Order for both the money and the unrest reduction (which helps your blood hunting efficiency). Since you'll have lots of little B1 priests doing the majority of your researching, magic scales are nice, but not required.

Recruit tribal chiefs (or whatever they're called) to ferry troops around through forests (most indie commanders lack forest survival), and to spawn slaves. Slaves are useful as chaff AND they are very efficient at sieging. 100+ slaves = 100+ strength 9, non-mindless troops that cost next-to-nothing in upkeep. They will hold up walls or tear down walls quite well. Now, they'll suck big time if there is actual combat, but they shouldn't be used in combat outside of a thin layer of chaff. They simply keep your walls up long enough for your Jaguar Warriors to arrive and do all the real fighting.

Beast Bats and Jaguar Fiends are both sacred (and flying) so they can be useful with your blessing as well. It may be a while before you have a flying priest commander who can go raiding with them, but just having them hold and attack rear can throw the enemy mages/archers into chaos. Also, beast bats are stealthy so the enemy might be scripted to deal with JWs and get blind-sided by your additional, flying sacreds.

You can do all sorts of other stuff with other blesses; N9B9 is just a good, cheap baseline. Fire, water, death, or even air (air shield JWs are a bitch to deal with) can all be swapped in for different effects.
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Orion
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Post by Orion »

In most cases I would imagine the turkeys are better slaves than the mictlan priests, and since they fly they should be on hand when needed.
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Post by Shatner »

It depends. As Mictlan I've found my countryside littered with Mictlan Priests, so I usually had plenty of bodies present when I needed to hastily assemble a communion/sabbath response team.

More than anything else, I just find the Priests to be so darn expendable. 4 priests as sabbath slaves led by 3+ masters spamming nasty stuff makes for a cheap but effective bit of magical artillery. If you care about the sabbath slaves, you have a master scripted to cast Reinvigorate every so often. If not, well they might survive depending on your bless, and if they don't they're common as dirt anyway.


Quick Question:
The text for Dom4 shapeshifter says that if the form with lower hitpoints is killed, it'll shapeshift to the form with more hitpoints. In the past it's always been a firstform-to-secondform transition, and the secondform for turkey mages is the turkey. Does this actually work as written in Dom4?
In other words, if a turkey mage in turkey form is hit for lethal damage, does it shapeshift into human form? Conversely, does a turkey mage in human form die when they receive lethal damage, or do they shapeshift into turkey form?

I haven't had a chance to test this...
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Post by Korwin »

Not a real test, but I had an diseased turkey flying around.
He died/got into the man shape and I could not change him back to turkey shape. Two months later he was gone.
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Post by Username17 »

Korwin wrote:Not a real test, but I had an diseased turkey flying around.
He died/got into the man shape and I could not change him back to turkey shape. Two months later he was gone.
Same thing happened to me with a Diseased Skratti. He turned into a Werewolf and couldn't turn back. Of course, he regenerates in Werewolf form, so once I put him into a battle he healed up. Then I could transform him again.

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