LA Xibalba – By Cybertron2
What is the draw to this nation over other nations (mechanically)
LA Xibalba has the best blood economy in LA, solid sacreds to ward off early wars, and is one of the few LA nations that can happily take a demilich. It also summons up raiders/siege chaff incredibly quickly and has foreign-rec nature mages. Magic weapons on the sacreds essentially ‘negates’ the common alt3 rush seen in LA. You can elf players. LA Xibalba has a few fancy strats to turbo expansion in caves. You can lay claim to water tiles.
What are your ‘anchors’ in troops
The Wo-Moluch is a very strong sacred for LA and essentially is the one reason Xibalba doesn’t necessarily get immediately eaten.
Otherwise, you can raid light PD with your cave/forest rec units (the one with the sword is considerably better than the spear).
The rest of your troops are fairly bad and generally should be avoided.
What are your workhorse mages
The Ah-Itz is the main workhorse mage of LA Xibalba, having 3 paths at 165G. Air and earth variants can sitesearch, blood variants can blood hunt, and death variants are good for raiding/skelespam. Later on, the cap only Bacab can be twiceborned and put in some lifting as a thug / evocation spam
Are your sacreds worth building around.
Yes. LA Xibalba gets the full roster of Xibalba summons and should be abusing them. Jaguars, Sacred Scorpions both come in at conj3 and are very strong tools, and deeper in blood research you get Ozelotyls and Onaqui which are very good national blood summons. Perhaps more importantly however – you need the Wo-Moloch’s to be scary to stop people rushing you early.
What are your core research targets
Conjuration 3 for jaguars and scorpions, Evocation 2 for web, Evocation 4 for dragons breath, Evocation 5 for shadow blast and Falling Frost, Enchantment 2 for Longdead Horsemen, Enchantment 4 for twiceborn and raise dead, blood 1 for sabbaths. After these, there’s quite a lot of options, the skelespam route, when to make the full blood pivot, when to go up const for dowsing rods. But those are the core techs.
Typically what sort of pretender does the nation want? Why
Generally you would go for some kind of imprisoned rainbow. Assuming a cave cap circle, Xibalba has a lot of tricks to keep up in expansion – and you really do want the Wo-Moluchs to be monsters (also the bless will mean your summons also benefit). I like a demilich at +2 scales (sloth 1 order 2). This allows 7 Dominion, 19BP, and a lategame demilich. You can fit a bit more bless on the Camazots, but you lose the power of the lategame demilich.
What are your expansion troops/formations
What magic do you want for early wars
I quite like running down evocation after ench 2 – you get assorted knick-knacks with things like shadow bolt – web and the like. Most of your magic in a pitched battle is less than amazing until ench4+ so its difficult to justify the skelespam options – it depends a lot if you highroll a lot of D2 mages or lowroll very few of them.
What are your biggest weaknesses.
You only start with a tier2 fort (so its both a rush target and only has 2 CP)
Beyond your sacreds, your basic infantry is garbage.
Your nation is a rush magnet due to its scaling.
Some nations are very resistant to Zot raiding.
Earlygame your magic paths are somewhat awkward.
In broad-brush terms – what is your midgame and lategame plan
Midgame: Get to a reasonable size and transition into a mage based army midgame with lots of research. Use the sacreds as a deterrent for players to attack you.
Lategame: at some point there should be a hard pivot to blood, and at that point you start scaling out of control. But essentially – it’s not worth doing the pivot until you can rapidly research up B6 to B8 so it comes later than many expect – you’re better off taking combat techs along your main paths until the hard pivot (maybe lightly dipping into blood but that’s all).
What are some ‘national traps’ players are likely to fall into (mistakes)
It’s very tempting to pivot into blood early – but Xibalba needs so much research its usually a mistake. Also – trying to take a war without sacreds is a bit futile – your raiders should more or less be moving in time with your main army – not randomly pipping tiles. Otherwise – Xib has to accept its relatively weak earlygame that’s anchored by its sacreds – and shouldn’t get overly cute with its mage/zot tools. Your bread and butter survival tool in the early-midgame is the sacred.
Otherwise – camazots are mostly a trap early – with magic scales Ah-Itz research much faster and are a better workhorse mage. The cap should rarely pick them over bacabs, so the times you actually want them are limited. If you consider it this way – a raiding party could be 2 Camazots or 4 ah-itz in a communion. The latter is going to be significantly stronger.
People often overrate the unarmored bats. They are good for siege chaff and raiding undefended provinces. They will die in droves and HP rout your armies if you try and achieve too much with them. They're very useful but they're more of a niche raider/unit than an all purpose answer. Their strength often varies with the quality of the national PD commander of your opponent - high hp/armor = bad.
What are some important national ‘tricks’
You can recruit up siege chaffs from caves at a incredible pace. Similarly – if you need raiders, you can recruit from every cave system at once so its not hard to commit a lot of gold very quickly to the warfront.
If you use a longdead horseman commander (ench2), you can ferry troops further underground than otherwise, since the mapmove penalty is lower if the fliers are landlocked (Thanks Arco)
Your cap-only mage in its twiceborned form has sailing.
You often have a bunch of leftover vanilla commanders at the end of expansion. Set 5 fliers to guard commander on them, then do holdX5 attack rear, and you’ll ‘bypass’ a lot of troops and have a 5 turn window to buff the squad. Very nasty for mage sniping.
Stealthed units can sit on thrones to not be patrolled out. It’s a good ‘holding point’ just before a war.