Ah, the Pale Ones. They eat rocks, they're walking sacks of HP that (supposedly) can't hit anything, they animate rocks, their magic is mostly … rocks. Their lore is that they tried to conquer the surface world in EA, underestimated their opponents, broke the Seal in desperation, still lost, and got forced back underground.

So they took up with some humans, developed a fondness for carving rocks into funny shapes that walk around, found a new god, and are back to give it another go. This time, they hope, it'll be different.

MA Agartha is probably the best of the Agarthas. They have a reputation for having hard-as-nails statues but being slow and clumsy, with low mobility and few tricks.

All these things are true. Agartha is an infantry nation at its core. But there's much more to Agartha than high-protection statues.

Playing Agartha as a one-dimensional nation ("We've got high protection slow melee troops, come at us bro"!) is a recipe for disaster, since people can and will counter these. But your toolbox goes a lot deeper than prot-tank statues. Relying too much on any one of your tools will result in opponents bringing a counter to that tool; using them in combination prevents opponents from fielding specialized counters, letting the raw power of your infantry

• Nearly unmatched "infantry slugfest" ability
• Highly durable and resistant to magic with the right bless/composition
• Diverse threat vectors that all demand responses make their forces hard to prepare for
• Efficient and diverse national troop summons let you turn gems into midgame power very well
• Strong ability to win pitched battles
• Exceptional siege ability

• Poor default access to mobility tools (fast movement, stealth, magic-phase attacks)
• Extremely limited magic diversity (national E4 D2 W2 F1) means you will need to find critical path access from indies/god
• Weak-ish research

Used poorly, they can be outmaneuvered, countered, and cut to pieces; used well, they can leverage the surprising versatility of their summons and magic to force advantageous fights, use the mobility tools and tricky plays they *do* have as force multipliers, compensate for their low mobility with tools that let them endure and kill, and win wars through efficiency, adaptability, and raw power.