Agartha is inspired by fantasy RPG's in general, and an Earth Dawn setting of my brother's imagination, ripe with mummified ancestors entombed in ancient cavern halls, in particular. Old ideas of a race of pale, cave-dwelling humanoids from my ideas of the game “Shepherds of Creation” completed the conglomerate. Think of opulent halls adorned with riches of the deeper earth in which reside ancient bloated oracles with pallid skins ruling their kin with increasing desperation; desperation because their proud race is dying. Agartha is perhaps the most tragic of the nations in Dominions. Surviving oracles cling to memories of a glorious past unable to stop the unavoidable disappearance of their ancient race. I wanted a sense of loss to permeate the nation. - Illwinter

In dark caverns under the Roots of the Earth a strange kind of one-eyed humanoids has evolved. Untouched by the sun, they have become known to humans as the Pale Ones. When humans first met these pale giants, it was in war. With the destruction of the false god of the Pale Ones, an ancient Seal was broken and vast powers of destruction were released. The Pale Ones were almost wiped out of existence and humans could move down into the caverns of Agartha. Here they found fabulous riches and ancient secrets. The humans replaced the Pale Ones and now most of Agartha’s inhabitants are pale-skinned humans with large eyes. Everything left by the Ancient Ones has become subject to worship by the humans. Ancient statues are enchanted and given life by Golem Crafters, priest-mages of the Agarthan Golem Cult. A few surviving Oracles lead the Cult and keep the memories of past ages alive. - Nation Description

MA Agartha is a nation of slowly dying pale ones and their worshipful human servants. As the epithet implies, the humans have a golem cult where they make statues of their pale one masters and enchant them with life. This is reflected in game by the bonus health to golems and national statue spells.

As far as recruitable troops go MA Agartha has solid human troops in a variety of armor weights, tanky defenders of the halls, wet one chaff, troglodyte shock troops, and elite shard guard. The humans are priced reasonably and have good equipment making them resource effective and competent though they do suffer form a lack of hard hitting attacks. Pale ones are mostly poorly statted sacks of HP and siege strength who can't hit the broad side of a barn, though when they do hit they hit hard for their price. The defender of the halls deviates from this trend by having fairly good stats for a respectable 13 gold. Troglodyte slaves are high morale tramplers but suffer from the usual trampler issues of being easy to surround and kill. Shard guard are capital only sacreds who cost quite a bit but are high quality, hitting like trucks and with a good bit of HP and resistance. Ancient ones don't bear mentioning. This is a solid line up, great at holding the line to protect your mages, able to crack forts quickly, and go under water easily but not great at doing damage and suffering from fatigue issues on cold climates.

Mages are a point of pride for MA Agartha, featuring low upkeep researchers with fortune teller earth readers, versatile and strong golem crafters, and finally oracles of the ancients who are cap only and very powerful. Golem crafters can do as their name implies and cast many of your national spells as well as common earth buffs such as legions of steel and strength of giants and it is impossible to have too many of them. Oracles are among the strongest earth mages in the game and all come with a point of death so they can cast Twiceborn with a Skull Staff. Their twiceborn form is a particularly good one with high HP and the ability to reanimate the dead.

MA Agartha's strongest point is their summons. In their capital they can summon outrageously cheap and effective magma children with Rhuax Pact. Magma children benefit immensely from heat scales, hit like trucks, do AoE damage, and die like flies because you can't have everything. They also get a variety of statue summons, the most popular of which being Enliven Sentinel which for a mere 3 gems summons a sacred statue with high protection and a hard hitting granite glaive. Olm Conclave is one of the best uses of water gems in the game and gives mind blasting olm artillery and olm sages skilled in water magic. It is almost cost effective just casting it to use the olm sage as a research booster. Summon Umbrals is a spell which produces high HP, high stat ethereal ancient ones with a life drain attack. Umbrals tend to die easily on their own but when given protection buffs like marble warriors they become very powerful.

MA Agartha has golem dominion. Constructs will have 10% increased hit points in this dominion for each candle present. It will help disciple players as well as enemies should they have any constructs. MA Agartha also has very strong national summons. MA Agartha also gets +1 earth bless points, a welcome gift for a nation who loves so many of the earth blesses.

Special Race Attributes	Military	Magic Access	Priests	Buildings
Statues! Humans: 50% dark vision Pale Ones: Amphibious options Siege Bonuses 100% dark vision Cold blooded	Medium and Heavy Infantry Powerful Defense Siege Bonuses Earth bless points +1	Earth (max 4) Fire (max 1) Water (max 1, 2 with national summon) Death (max 2)	Strong Priests (lvl3)	Standard Forts Can build Underwater Forts

Earth (max 4)
Fire (max 1)
Water (max 1, 2 with national summon)
Death (max 2)

Conjuration

• Summon Penumbrals 11 Conj 3 for 6. (Penumbral×4)
• Awaken Shard Wights 11 Conj 3 for 15. (Shard Wight×5+[1/2 lvl])
• Barathrus Pact 2 Conj 3 for 2, Cap only. (Earth Elemental×1)
• Rhuax Pact 11 Conj 3 for 2, Cap only. (Magma Child×5)
• Olm Conclave 11 Conj 4 for 20, Caves only. (Olm Sage×1, Great Olm×10)
• Summon Umbrals 21 Conj 5 for 8. (Umbral×4)

Enchantment

• Attentive Statues 2 Ench 1 for 4. (Attentive Statue×2)
• Enliven Sentinel 2 Ench 3 for 3. (Sentinel×1)
• Enliven Granite Guard 3 Ench 5 for 12. (Granite Guardian×1)
• Living Mercury 11 Ench 5 for 7. (Living Mercury×1)
• Enliven Marble Oracle 31 Ench 6 for 35. (Marble Oracle×1)
• Hall of Statues 5 Ench 8 for 30. (Sentinel×20 +[4/lvl])

MA Agartha is a nation defined by its national summons. You pick this nation for these toys.

Statues: The best of these are probably the Sentinels, who are sacred but relatively inexpensive (but cost lots of mage turns). In one sense, they are redundant with your Shard Guard: sacred hard-hitting melee troops that can take a hit, but are painfully slow. But they are so *good* at it – their slash/pierce resistance, 22 protection, and enormous HP total in your dominion makes these statues an incredibly solid frontline. Don't overlook their patrol bonus: they can patrol out assassins, seducers, and scouts even in small numbers.

They are vulnerable to thugs with AP/AN weapons (particularly Smasher), along with shock damage if you didn't pick shock resistance in your bless.

Notice that these statues have mapmove 20; they can scoot around the map much better than your other assets if you give them a fast commander (Attendant of the Oracles or an Oracle, particularly with Boots of the Messenger).

Umbrals and Penumbrals: These are the opposite of statues: no protection, but ethereal and with an armor piercing lifedrain attack. These take buffs extremely well, particularly Marble Warriors, Iron Warriors, Strength of Giants, and Quickness. Their massive untyped AP damage will make a mess out of most targets, even ones with prot buffs. They can help you avoid being bottlenecked at castle gates, engage targets without magic weapons, and augment your forces. They are stealthy, but you don't have any stealthy leaders – unless you make one, with Shademail Haubergeon, or find Camazotz indies (who can lead undead because of their death path and are stealthy). Umbrals can be summoned by death-random Oracles or any Oracle with a skullstaff.

Shard Wights: These are undead Pale Ones with a cold aura. Since you generally don't have cold scales, their aura won't do that much. Beyond that, they're slow infantry that wander around and smash things with magic shard glaives. But you already have Shard Guard for that, and these aren't sacred. Umbrals – or Mound Fiends – are usually better uses of death gems.

Olms (Great Olms and Olm Sage from the Olm Conclave): These provide you the unique capability to have mindblasters. Mindblasters will not win you battles by themselves (at least not usually). But they break up formations, force opponents to cast Antimagic, stunlock many solo thugs and SC's, and paralyze frontline troops so your hard-hitting but inaccurate Pale Ones can poke them. Meanwhile, the Olm Sage is your highest national water access at Water 2. Note that they are resistant to poison, so they can closely escort Living Mercuries to buff them without risk. Olm Conclave is an efficient spell; if you consider the Olm Sage to be worth 10 gems (a steal for a 3-path mage), the Olms are one gem apiece – also cheap for what they do.

Note that each squad of mindblasting olms will target the same squad. It is sometimes worth splitting your olms up into multiple squads to have a greater chance of mindblasting a mage (in situations where that's worthwhile).

Magma Children: These are incredibly cheap at 0.4 fire gems apiece. You will make swarms of them. The statresist/sacred meta means that most enemies will field fire resistant sacreds that they can't kill as well, but anything without fire resistance will get shredded. Notably their AoE attacks ignore defense, and their fire shield means they will eradicate swarmbugs and longdead. You likely want to take Heat 3 scales for these. They are vulnerable to archery and evocations, but they murder things so well that they work excellently as the hammer in a hammer-and-anvil formation. Be careful: They will set your non-fire-resistant stuff on fire, and fatigue out anything near them that doesn't have fire resistance. (FR5 is not immune either.) They are good for cleaning up air elementals – if you're okay with them running around in your backline. (This means you have FR on your bless.)

These do 12 fire damage base, which increases to 15 in Heat 3 and 19 with Strength of Giants. They love strength buffs, since their attacks ignore defense – if you can punch through a target's FR and half of their prot, they will very rapidly get shredded.

Barathrus Pact: Make statues instead 95% of the time.

Living Mercury: Let's get one thing straight: this unit is not about the poison cloud. It's about the three Strength 28 armor piercing attacks. These absolutely love buffs – Iron Warriors and Quickness (from Olm Sages) turn them into absolute wrecking balls, and 28 AP damage is enough to pop Mistform and wreck protection thugs. Careful scripting can keep them away from poison-susceptible things – most of the time. They are safe around statues, olm sages, shard wights, and anything with PR10 or more once it is blessed; they are *not* safe around magma children since they'll get set on fire by the heat aura.

Mages do not like to buff them for whatever reason if other targets are available. You have been warned.

Their Protection 0 means that they will take attrition from mundane troops and PD unless prot-buffed. This is fine; they do not exist to kill PD chaff. They exist to ruin the day of thugs and anything that thought it had enough protection to not get smashed.

As an earth nation with good troops, most of your combat magic will go into buffing those troops to make them even stronger. You usually don't kill people with magic; you kill people with grumpy Shard Guard.

You'll want to paint Strength of Giants and Legions of Steel on your stuff as often as you can, adding in Marble Warriors where appropriate once you get it. Obviously Army of Lead (or Gold) is excellent lategame.

Earth Meld and Maws of the Earth are also worth casting against nonflying targets so your troops can chop them up, and Maws is a decent direct damage spell. You have Earthquake for traps.

Quickness and Quickening are excellent buffs and your Olm Sages will spend lots of time casting these. Don't forget Frozen Heart, which all of your Golem Crafters can cast, and is a great way to deal with thugs that forgot their cold resistance.

Darkness is huge, since almost all of your stuff can see in the dark. You will need help from a pretender or heroes to cast it. You'll likely have only a few darkness casters – pretender, valuable indies, heroes – so Twiceborn them.

Rigor Mortis is also brutal, since your statues don't care, your umbrals don't care, and your mages won't die quickly because of Summon Earthpower.

Finally, given that you're a nation of impressively strong but slow infantry, Mass Flight is a gamechanger in some situations.

List and describe any unique national items or discounts in this section, discuss and compare with similar generic items. Also discuss generic items that are useful and accessible for the nation. These may include:

• Thug gear (if the nation has good thugs)
• Research boosters (particularly if the nation needs help researching or is already very good at researching)
• Other items that synergize with the nation (e.g. Dwarven Hammers for MA Ulm)

This is probably the most difficult section to get consensus for. Describe how strong the nation is during expansion, the early, mid and late game, and what makes it strong/weak at each of those points. This should give readers an idea of where the weaknesses of a nation lie (if they have not been shown already) and when to take advantage of a nation's strengths.

List some example expansion strategies here. If a strong bless or pretender is required then leave the specifics for the pretender section.

Basic Nation Analysis - MA Agartha by GeneralConfusionPlays (2019)

Nations
Early Ages	Arcoscephale • Ermor • Ulm • Marverni • Sauromatia • T'ien Ch'i • Machaka • Mictlan • Abysia • Caelum • C'tis • Pangaea • Agartha • Tir na n'Og • Fomoria • Vanheim • Helheim • Niefelheim • Rus • Kailasa • Lanka • Yomi • Hinnom • Ur • Berytos • Xibalba • Mekone • Ubar • Atlantis • R'lyeh • Pelagia • Oceania • Therodos
Middle Ages	Arcoscephale • Ermor • Sceleria • Pythium • Man • Eriu • Ulm • Marignon • Mictlan • T'ien Ch'i • Machaka • Agartha • Abysia • Caelum • C'tis • Pangaea • Asphodel • Vanheim • Jotunheim • Vanarus • Bandar Log • Shinuyama • Ashdod • Uruk • Nazca • Xibalba • Phlegra • Phaeacia • Ind • Na'ba • Atlantis • R'lyeh • Pelagia • Oceania • Ys
Late Ages	Arcoscephale • Pythium • Lemuria • Man • Ulm • Marignon • Mictlan • T'ien Ch'i • Jomon • Agartha • Abysia • Caelum • C'tis • Pangaea • Midgård • Utgård • Bogarus • Patala • Gath • Ragha • Xibalba • Phlegra • Vaettiheim • Atlantis • R'lyeh • Erytheia