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--- stacks-on-stacks-a-guide-to-ind-by-baalz [2021/04/08 14:29]
joste [Fear Stacks]
+++ stacks-on-stacks-a-guide-to-ind-by-baalz [2021/12/21 15:40] (current)
joste [Tower of Power]
@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ====Ind, what not to do====
-{{nations:ma:ind:bishop_vicomte.png?nolink}} Your priests can freespawn troops.  They’re free in that you didn’t pay for them up front, but they cause unrest and have an upkeep cost that will quickly swamp you in exchange for very uninspiring troops.  Don’t sink your gold into garbage troops - they’re not free if they have upkeep!
+<WRAP column 28px>{{nations:ma:ind:bishop_vicomte.png?nolink}}</WRAP> Your priests can freespawn troops.  They’re free in that you didn’t pay for them up front, but they cause unrest and have an upkeep cost that will quickly swamp you in exchange for very uninspiring troops.  Don’t sink your gold into garbage troops - they’re not free if they have upkeep!
-{{nations:ma:ind:great_huntress.png
+<WRAP column 36px>{{nations:ma:ind:great_huntress.png?nolink }}</WRAP> You can recruit ??Great Huntress?? that freespawn lions!  They don’t cause unrest or have upkeep!  That’s true, they just take so long to mass up that by the time you get a horde of them going they’re pretty easy to deal with.  Opportunity cost very roughly is 1 Huntress = 1 Abbot Sage you could have recruited.  Look at it this way, each lion you get could have been about 9 research points, so think about that when you chuck 100 lions (900 research points) into a woodchucker because they’re “free”. Remember - opportunity cost.
-?nolink}} You can recruit ??Great Huntress?? that freespawn lions!  They don’t cause unrest or have upkeep!  That’s true, they just take so long to mass up that by the time you get a horde of them going they’re pretty easy to deal with.  Opportunity cost very roughly is 1 Huntress = 1 Abbot Sage you could have recruited.  Look at it this way, each lion you get could have been about 9 research points, so think about that when you chuck 100 lions (900 research points) into a woodchucker because they’re “free”. Remember - opportunity cost.
 Ind’s forts produce different recruits from each terrain type - tailor your strategy to whatever you’re facing!  Well...I guess kinda?  The truth is that most of the stuff in all the different castles ends up in the really big bucket of Dominions units that are not competitive.  In this bucket, I’d put everything in the Piconye (mountain) castle, the lady (plains) castle, as well as the giant (wasteland) troops.  It’s not that these forts are worthless, and if you conquer or otherwise find yourself in possession of a fort with them while hard-pressed then by all means go ahead and use them - it’s just that in most cases you’ll do better to put your resources in a different bucket.
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 ====Magus ‘crootin====
-{{:nations:ma:ind:abbot_magus.png?nolink}} {{:nations:ma:ind:abbot_magus_supreme.png?nolink}}
+<WRAP column 28px>{{:nations:ma:ind:abbot_magus.png?nolink}} {{:nations:ma:ind:abbot_magus_supreme.png?nolink}}</WRAP>
-Ind is unique in that everything in its cap is cap only.  This means you’ve really got to make the most out of your very nice cap stuff - there’s no expanding into extra forts to get more of it.  One of the big implications of this is you really can’t just recruit your “best” cap only mage and do the secondary stuff elsewhere, you’ve only ever got one cap and you’ve got to use your cap turns cleverly to get everything you need.  You definitely want as many of your top-shelf ??Abbot Magus Supreme??s as you can get, but you can recruit ??Abbot Maguse??s twice as fast - and they can do many of the same things.  As a general rule of thumb, any time you are using a Supreme to do something that a smaller Magus could do (forging, casting, research, etc.) you’re playing suboptimally. The Supremes can do some lab work out of reach of the smaller guys, but really the reason you want them is because they can all teleport and layeth the smackdown on the battlefield in support of your armies.  They are, ahem, supremely good on the battlefield, and we’ll get more into that below but definitely don’t neglect to get a healthy mix of the smaller Maguses as they’re way more efficient. Plopping out a 16 research Magus each turn along with an awake pretender who starts our researching gives you a pretty brisk initial research, then start easing into your top shelf guys.
+Ind is unique in that everything in its cap is cap only. This means you’ve really got to make the most out of your very nice cap stuff - there’s no expanding into extra forts to get more of it.  One of the big implications of this is you really can’t just recruit your “best” cap only mage and do the secondary stuff elsewhere, you’ve only ever got one cap and you’ve got to use your cap turns cleverly to get everything you need.  You definitely want as many of your top-shelf ??Abbot Magus Supreme??s as you can get, but you can recruit ??Abbot Maguse??s twice as fast - and they can do many of the same things.
+As a general rule of thumb, any time you are using a Supreme to do something that a smaller Magus could do (forging, casting, research, etc.) you’re playing suboptimally. The Supremes can do some lab work out of reach of the smaller guys, but really the reason you want them is because they can all teleport and layeth the smackdown on the battlefield in support of your armies.  They are, ahem, supremely good on the battlefield, and we’ll get more into that below but definitely don’t neglect to get a healthy mix of the smaller Maguses as they’re way more efficient. Plopping out a 16 research Magus each turn along with an awake pretender who starts our researching gives you a pretty brisk initial research, then start easing into your top shelf guys.
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 Note, Ind can only prophetize {{path>H3}} (or above) priests. Your first inclination is probably going to be to spend your first 2 turns recruiting a Primate king so you can prophetize him.  Don’t do that.  The primary reason that you want a prophet early is usually to drop divine blessing on your expansion parties - but one pretty big national advantage Ind has is that all their sacred troops autobless themselves.  That’s right, you don’t even need a priest present to lead your sacreds!  Use your starting Bishop General to lead your first expansion party out, then send indie commanders back to lead the rest of them - no need to spend your capital’s turns recruiting anything but mages.
-Next thing to notice is that there are {{path>H3}} {{nations:ma:ind:viceroy_primate.png?nolink}} ??Viceroy Primate??s recruitable outside of forts with just a temple.  Get up a second temple up fairly fast and pop out a {{path>H3}} from outside your cap to prophetize to {{path>H4}}.  He’ll take 4 turns to recruit and most of the first game year will be over before you get your first prophet, but there’s really no rush since all your blessing is covered.  At that point slowly (every 4 turns) crank out {{path>H3}} priests wherever you’ve got a temple up outside a fort.  {{path>H3}} priests are one of those things that amplify in power the more you have, so stack 'em up. On top of the usual ways to use {{path>H3}}, Ind’s guys also reduce unrest.  Ending up with a stack of several of them in a province will counteract the unrest caused by bloodhunting, can call back your pretender instantly if that becomes necessary, and slapping void eyes on them will give you a really brutal battery of both wide-area banishments and smites.  It’s pretty amusing watching several penetration-boosted guys spamming smite at medium MR guys that thought they were tough elites or an overly aggressive enemy pretender. Squish!
+<WRAP column 28px>{{nations:ma:ind:viceroy_primate.png?nolink}}</WRAP>Next thing to notice is that there are {{path>H3}} ??Viceroy Primate??s recruitable outside of forts with just a temple.  Get up a second temple up fairly fast and pop out a {{path>H3}} from outside your cap to prophetize to {{path>H4}}.  He’ll take 4 turns to recruit and most of the first game year will be over before you get your first prophet, but there’s really no rush since all your blessing is covered.  At that point slowly (every 4 turns) crank out {{path>H3}} priests wherever you’ve got a temple up outside a fort.  {{path>H3}} priests are one of those things that amplify in power the more you have, so stack 'em up. On top of the usual ways to use {{path>H3}}, Ind’s guys also reduce unrest.  Ending up with a stack of several of them in a province will counteract the unrest caused by bloodhunting, can call back your pretender instantly if that becomes necessary, and slapping void eyes on them will give you a really brutal battery of both wide-area banishments and smites.  It’s pretty amusing watching several penetration-boosted guys spamming smite at medium MR guys that thought they were tough elites or an overly aggressive enemy pretender. Squish!
 ====Pretender/sacreds====
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 ====Constructing Artillery Stacks====
-Some particularly fun stacks of stuff open up as your research progresses. Use your pretender to forge a Fire booster - a ??Flame Helm??, ??Staff of Elemental Master?? or ??Skull of Fire?? should be possible depending on the paths you picked, or worst case save up {{gems>50D}} and empower a Magus Supreme to get a flame skull.  Forge a ??Water Bracelet??, and now a water random Supreme can crank out as many ??Rune Smasher??s as you have gems for without bothering your pretender anymore.  Probably not too much of a surprise, but while we have great use for penetration boosters throughout the game at this point we’re going to set up a mind hunt battery.  Stacking an astral cap, rune smasher, ??Void Eye??, and a ??Spell Foci?? is a Tower of Power that’s a staple for a reason, but Ind can stack higher.  The risk of course with ??Mind Hunt??ing is that if you do it aggressively your enemies are gonna start sprinkling astral mages around with bait, and then you’ve got a feebleminded expensive, slow to recruit cap-only mage with a permanent void eye.  One powerful combo if you can swing it is adding the ??The Chalice?? artifact to that tower of power, but that requires researching all the way up to [[construction]]-8, you then have to hope nobody else has already grabbed it.  Luckily there’s no need for that!
+Some particularly fun stacks of stuff open up as your research progresses. Use your pretender to forge a Fire booster - a ??Flame Helmet??, ??Staff of Elemental Mastery?? or ??Skull of Fire?? should be possible depending on the paths you picked, or worst case save up {{gems>50D}} and empower a Magus Supreme to get a ??Skull of Fire??.  Forge a ??Water Bracelet??, and now a water random Supreme can crank out as many ??Rune Smasher??s as you have gems for without bothering your pretender anymore.  Probably not too much of a surprise, but while we have great use for penetration boosters throughout the game at this point we’re going to set up a mind hunt battery.  Stacking an astral cap, rune smasher, ??Eye of the Void??, and a ??Spell Focus?? is a **Tower of Power** that’s a staple for a reason, but Ind can stack higher.  The risk of course with ??Mind Hunt??ing is that if you do it aggressively your enemies are gonna start sprinkling astral mages around with bait, and then you’ve got a feebleminded expensive, slow to recruit cap-only mage with a permanent void eye.  One powerful combo if you can swing it is adding the ??The Chalice?? artifact to that tower of power, but that requires researching all the way up to [[construction]]-8, you then have to hope nobody else has already grabbed it.  Luckily there’s no need for that!
 ??Arel?? is powerful healers, and you’ve got reliable access to them way easier than trying for the Chalice. Several +5 penetration mind hunters that can operate aggressively without much fear of sneaky astral mages are really brutal against any nation that is not fielding tons of astral mages. Certainly, you can snipe thugs, but don’t overlook opportunities to fire several mind hunts at enemy armies as they’re moving to important engagements - if you’re lucky only half the army will move as an important low MR commander’s mind melts.
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 Let's keep stacking though.  ??Armor of Twisting Thorns?? are great and fairly cheap for what they get you - they boost two paths on your Bitch Mothers.  Stick them on B and N random Mothers for different reasons.  The reason you want them on the B random ones is that B4 opens up Hoard from Hell, which is very nice to be able to spam out with several casters.  Imps can clear the light PD that people generally keep all around, and if they’re not in a position to respond quickly and effectively this will stack up very fast because the imp squads hang around after the fight.  If you save up your blood economy for a few turns before an offensive and can do something like spam 3 ??Horde from Hell??s a turn for a few turns what happens is.  3 provinces fall the first turn.  Turn 2 it 6 because you have 3 flying imp squads plus 3 more you summon.  Turn 3 it's 9.  This is contingent on your imps winning with few losses, but that’s pretty viable if you’re hitting the 1-6 PD that tends to be the default most people put up in random provinces.
-That's a pretty brutal artillery Tower of Power, but let’s keep stacking.  You’ve got some great raid game here, but sometimes you really just need to shut down that enemy cap or important fort.  If you’ve not power-spammed ??Rain of Toads?? you’re in for a treat.  You should be able to hit an enemy cap with 6 castings all at once, spike the unrest to 200, and disease some premium mages before he can get a dome up.  Let's stack it even higher.  Those N random Bitch Mothers with thorn armor can cast ??Locust Swarms?? - which is not the sort of thing you want to dump N gems in indiscriminately, but it does apply an additional -50% income to the province targeted as well as some additional unrest so it can be a worthwhile consideration for the first couple turns as you’re spiking up all your imps. Aggressive raiding while axing your opponent’s cap income by 80% can realistically leave them with 0 gold to respond with - which is why you can find yourself with 9 flocks of imps flying around conquering province after province.
+That's a pretty brutal artillery Tower of Power, but let’s keep stacking.  You’ve got some great raid game here, but sometimes you really just need to shut down that enemy cap or important fort.  If you’ve not power-spammed ??Rain of Toads?? you’re in for a treat.  You should be able to hit an enemy cap with 6 castings all at once, spike the unrest to 200, and disease some premium mages before he can get a dome up.  Let's stack it even higher.  Those N random Bitch Mothers with thorn armor can cast ??Locust Swarms?? - which is not the sort of thing you want to dump {{gems>N}} gems in indiscriminately, but it does apply an additional -50% income to the province targeted as well as some additional unrest so it can be a worthwhile consideration for the first couple turns as you’re spiking up all your imps. Aggressive raiding while axing your opponent’s cap income by 80% can realistically leave them with 0 gold to respond with - which is why you can find yourself with 9 flocks of imps flying around conquering province after province.
 ====Fear Stacks====
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 A thing that's important to remember is that morale is checked at a squad level, and each squad will make a maximum of one morale check per turn.  Doesn’t matter how many fear things you stack, it all comes down to one roll per turn.  This is why specifically ??Panic?? spam is less effective than it seems like it might be.  It’s a wide area and causes a morale check but it doesn’t lower morale very much so even if you spam it a dozen times this just comes down to an entirely healthy squad making one easily passed morale check.  So, how do we make this more effective?
-What Panic is effective at is making sure those morale checks happen, so if we make them easier to fail while consistently forcing them, then they will fail eventually.  We can do that by lowering the enemy morale, and by doing damage to them. Obviously, if we can do enough damage to them then we’ll just win outright, but in closer fights, the important bit is that there’s roughly a -1 to each morale check for each 20-ish percent they’re down in their hitpoints.  Remember that we’re talking about squad-level here, not individual, which is why wide-area low-ish damage (like poison or ??Fire Cloud??s) are disproportionately effective to stack with fear compared to their outright killing power.  Generally speaking a guy at half his hitpoints (afflictions aside) is 100% effective on the battlefield - but a squad at half its hit points that would otherwise be totally effective at tearing through your backline is gonna have a lot more trouble with that ??Panic?? tagging them every turn. When you’re inevitably facing stuff that’s [[poison resistant]] you can rotate in some other spells to get those damage ticks - from ??Astral Fires?? to ??Magma Eruption??, and even ??Acid Rain?? which is AP with no possible resistance.  Remember, you don’t need to have the raw damage effectiveness of some of the more usual goto spells - wounding enemies is the bar here.
+What Panic is effective at is making sure those morale checks happen, so if we make them easier to fail while consistently forcing them, then they will fail eventually.  We can do that by lowering the enemy morale, and by doing damage to them. Obviously, if we can do enough damage to them then we’ll just win outright, but in closer fights, the important bit is that there’s roughly a -1 to each morale check for each 20-ish percent they’re down in their hitpoints.  Remember that we’re talking about squad-level here, not individual, which is why wide-area low-ish damage (like poison or ??Fire Cloud??s) are disproportionately effective to stack with fear compared to their outright killing power.  Generally speaking a guy at half his hitpoints (afflictions aside) is 100% effective on the battlefield - but a squad at half its hit points that would otherwise be totally effective at tearing through your backline is gonna have a lot more trouble with that ??Panic?? tagging them every turn. When you’re inevitably facing stuff that’s [[poison resistance]] you can rotate in some other spells to get those damage ticks - from ??Astral Fires?? to ??Magma Eruption??, and even ??Acid Rain?? which is AP with no possible resistance.  Remember, you don’t need to have the raw damage effectiveness of some of the more usual goto spells - wounding enemies is the bar here.
 Laying out a ton of damage isn’t really a fear strategy though, and Ind generally isn’t going to be dropping a bunch of evocations so how can we lower morale when we can’t deal out tons of damage?   Well, you certainly want to keep an eye out for targets of opportunity - pay attention when your opponent is fielding guys with average morale, or marching a hungry army through low population areas (starving) - invading armies often don’t know they’re about to chase you into a low population province until they’re there.  There are also some premium things that work really well but are hard to research/cast like ??Blood Rain?? & ??Dark Skies??, but there are some tools more reliably available early. Contrasting to Panic spells that cause “greater fear” do a much better job of lowering morale - though you do need to be careful about friendly fire.  Conveniently Bitch Mothers have two great options - and stacking on top of that they can also self-buff ??Eagle Eyes??.  Agony and Terror are your meat and potatoes way to lower enemy morale.
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 ====Tower of Power====
-We’ve laid out many layers to this Tower of Power, but lets stack them all up at once and see how high we get.  Starting out with good sacreds and a solid bless your initial expansion is quick and easy.  Your initial strength is bolstered by ubiquitous, reasonably cheap H3 priests which dominate any undead and chain smite any early thugs or aggressive pretenders.  Your sacreds make easy work of line troops, and are outnumbering enemy elites by 3:1.  Now your angels hit the field, bringing unparalleled mobility and aggressive early raiding before most nations have any answers.  The effectiveness of your sacreds just keeps scaling up as early magic support has them tearing through even enemy heavy units, with Mist and Solar Eclipses effectively hampering enemy mages from bringing them down.  Now your Bitch Mothers join the fray and your quick ramp up blood economy has heavy imp spam showing up out of nowhere in unpredictable places.  Enemies are trying to climb through poison clouds while fighting imps and skeletons as armor piercing xbow bolts rain down idescriminately.  Then the Terror, Panic and Agony starts making few enemy types able to even try the gauntlet before hearing their mom calling them.  Any opponent trying the obvious tactic of fielding undead immune to poison and fear is quickly reminded that you’ve got batteries of H3 priests now.  Anyone trying the other obvious thing of flying over all that straight to the back is faced with the foundation this Tower of Power was built on - sacred heavy infantry that would be the elite front line for many nations, but is just loitering in the back here.  Then the strategic artillery barrage starts.  Any commander not covered by an astral mage or expensive MR boosters quickly melts, and that deadly rain of hostile minds you can just expect to happen every turn until the game ends. Gold income evaporates as toads and locusts clog all the wells, and Hell joins the assault as a kind of absurd amount of demon lead imps appear out of nowhere supplementing the heavier hitting angels zooming all over the place. Heavy support mages are teleporting around dropping an ever shifting array of buffs - somehow alternating between Heat from Hell and Grip of Winter whenever it seemed possible to make it through all the chaff and poison clouds. Every couple turns another fully formed army with scores of heavy sacreds Gateways out, and now holy shit they’re all high attack armor piercing magic weapons with luck.
+We’ve laid out many layers to this Tower of Power, but lets stack them all up at once and see how high we get.  Starting out with good sacreds and a solid bless your initial expansion is quick and easy.  Your initial strength is bolstered by ubiquitous, reasonably cheap {{path>H3}} priests which dominate any undead and chain smite any early thugs or aggressive pretenders.  Your sacreds make easy work of line troops and are outnumbering enemy elites by 3:1.  Now your angels hit the field, bringing unparalleled mobility and aggressive early raiding before most nations have any answers.  The effectiveness of your sacreds just keeps scaling up as early magic support has them tearing through even enemy heavy units, with Mist and ??Solar Eclipse??s effectively hampering enemy mages from bringing them down.  Now your Bitch Mothers join the fray and your quick ramp-up blood economy has heavy imp spam showing up out of nowhere in unpredictable places.  Enemies are trying to climb through poison clouds while fighting imps and skeletons as armor-piercing xbow bolts rain down indiscriminately.  Then the Terror, ??Panic??, and ??Agony?? starts making few enemy types able to even try the gauntlet before hearing their mom calling them.  Any opponent trying the obvious tactic of fielding undead immune to poison and fear is quickly reminded that you’ve got batteries of {{path>H3}} priests now.  Anyone trying the other obvious thing of flying over all that straight to the back is faced with the foundation this Tower of Power was built on - sacred heavy infantry that would be the elite front line for many nations but is just loitering in the back here.  Then the strategic artillery barrage starts.  Any commander not covered by an astral mage or expensive MR boosters quickly melts, and that deadly rain of hostile minds you can just expect to happen every turn until the game ends. Gold income evaporates as toads and locusts clog all the wells, and Hell joins the assault as a kind of absurd amount of demon lead imps appear out of nowhere supplementing the heavier hitting angels zooming all over the place. Heavy support mages are teleporting around dropping an ever-shifting array of buffs - somehow alternating between ??Heat from Hell?? and ??Grip of Winter?? whenever it seemed possible to make it through all the chaff and poison clouds. Every couple turns into another fully formed army with scores of heavy sacreds ??Gateway??s out, and now holy shit they’re all high attack armor piercing magic weapons with luck.
-That, my friend is a Tower of Power that reaches up to heaven.  Surely the Pantokrator would smash it down if he were still around.  Since he’s not, we’ll just have to see about filling that throne.
+That, my friend, is a Tower of Power that reaches up to heaven.  Surely the Pantokrator would smash it down if he were still around.  Since he’s not, we’ll just have to see about filling that throne.
-{{tag>Guides}}
+{{tag>Guides ind}}

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