Yeah, Rus messed up diplomatically. Caelum also timed his invasion too early and is left in a weak position; now his only hope is somehow aligning with Hinnom against Helheim.
EA R'lyeh gets a fair amount of extra power from holding a coastal capital, and having a good awake expander can make taking that early + negotiating to keep it a lot more practical. Wyrm or Earth Snake are both fine. Other than that they have the excellent slave mages that MA R'lyeh also gets, so can push research pretty efficiently and fight with those effectively as well. They get earth/nature on slave mages so the buff game is fine. Abodais can't get out of the water easily but they can cast dark knowledge to build death income (and conjuration for elementals is an obvious goal for underwater nations), and build skull staff for death random to summon mound fiends to cast actual death magic later. Lots of darkvision 50% or 100% in the R'lyeh roster so having a mound fiend to cast darkness along with mass protection or earth buffs later will help a lot in some matchups. Early on if they get coastal fort they can just pile up a ton of amphibious mind blasters and water elementals to cause a lot of problems for even elite units, and mix in some thralls or whatever to trample small chaff. Not enough to make nations cower in fear but something that still commands some respect/threatening as a 2v1 or vulture. Later they can summon some pretty beefy trolls for soul vortex batteries or as better front-line chaff. IMO despite its reputation EA R'lyeh has a much better end game than Atlantis and is only marginally worse early. It has a case for being the strongest/most likely to win water nation in EA and MA, though that's definitely not true in LA. EA Atlantis gets no sorcery w/o pretender help other than the occasional S1 random, and IMO its mage paths + troops are nowhere near compensation for that limitation.
I would agree! Though I think MA is the strongest as the EA has such a big land water divide that unless they are lucky will greatly hamper their ability to take certain actions and affect the land world.
@@callumfinlayson-palmer8393 EA is certainly more limited than MA, but the slave mages alone give them more land flexibility than say EA Atlantis by mid-late game, and EA Pelagia shares its issue of getting mages above water (their surface mages are significantly worse too). I wouldn't underestimate an EA R'lyeh with Wyrm or Earth Serpent that gets a coastal fort or two. Their access to androleths will make their early-mid game armies into a poor man's Agartha...but Agartha has one of the higher win/pick rates in EA! Vs non-astral nations aboleths given a crystal coin can cause a lot of trouble with mind hunt too. That would be a nightmare for Vanheim, and also for nations like Agartha/Fomoria/Machaka/Atlantis/Oceania/Yomi and many others with no native astral.
Kinda wish more people took interesting pretender gods. Far too many slabs of rock and not enough fire breathing gods of war or lightning javelins being hurled at the lowly peasants below. I'm sad we don't get to see one of the most cool parts of the game. Only a single god has been seen actually fighting in battle I think. Maybe ermors triple crone thing as well but that hardly counts as a god imo. Glorified human form mages don't count in my eyes. More spooky snakes and towering titans and less stupid chunks of talking rock. Would be nice to see a stronger reliance on roleplay and interesting god designs rewarded than perfectly min/maxed undead/elemental spam used as chaff in so many armies. It's nice seeing Hinnoms army demolish their opponent but I can only sit and smoulder at their utter lack of offensive thought. They could have brought a portion of that force to a variety of provinces to flush out more enemies or raid or the like. And it seems like they're just not using many scouts at present so I think they're in for a rude awakening when they find out just how much of the globe has been gobbled up by hellheim. Slowly trundling forward with a death ball is understandable. I know singleplayer does encourage this sort of thing as smaller armies are easily eaten up. But I do wish perhaps retreating mechanics were a little more generous. A lot of battles here are just one sided slaughters. So few seem to be interesting back and forth fights to the last man. Battles in general could be far more interesting than a little field where two armies agree to bludgeon each others brains out. Different terrains, better ambush capability, fortifications that aren't just castles being spammed everywhere. More intersting siege combat in general. Proper siege engines. Differently shaped maps. I do understand the issues with changing elevation though, I know with a game like this it could be kinda hard, but I would so love to see hills and ravines being used in battles. Actually being able to pick the site of the battle would be cool. You could have it tied to the commander with the highest leadership of all combined life forms that gets to decide with a choice of some different options. Forward deployments, infiltrated units. There's so much room for this game to improve and evolve. I do hope the next game touches a bit on revamping the battles to be more interesting in some way like that. Anyways ranting over. I enjoy watching multiplayer, it's so much easier than taking time to design a god myself and roll into a game.
The Wyrm pretender chassis is an Amphisbaena.
Woo, hoo! I'm caught up. Now I have to start the next playlist,... Antlia? Whatever that means. :)
But these are lots of fun. Thanks!
And now I'm out of things to watch again, until the next episodes of both these series =(
Yeah, Rus messed up diplomatically. Caelum also timed his invasion too early and is left in a weak position; now his only hope is somehow aligning with Hinnom against Helheim.
EA R'lyeh gets a fair amount of extra power from holding a coastal capital, and having a good awake expander can make taking that early + negotiating to keep it a lot more practical. Wyrm or Earth Snake are both fine. Other than that they have the excellent slave mages that MA R'lyeh also gets, so can push research pretty efficiently and fight with those effectively as well. They get earth/nature on slave mages so the buff game is fine. Abodais can't get out of the water easily but they can cast dark knowledge to build death income (and conjuration for elementals is an obvious goal for underwater nations), and build skull staff for death random to summon mound fiends to cast actual death magic later. Lots of darkvision 50% or 100% in the R'lyeh roster so having a mound fiend to cast darkness along with mass protection or earth buffs later will help a lot in some matchups.
Early on if they get coastal fort they can just pile up a ton of amphibious mind blasters and water elementals to cause a lot of problems for even elite units, and mix in some thralls or whatever to trample small chaff. Not enough to make nations cower in fear but something that still commands some respect/threatening as a 2v1 or vulture. Later they can summon some pretty beefy trolls for soul vortex batteries or as better front-line chaff.
IMO despite its reputation EA R'lyeh has a much better end game than Atlantis and is only marginally worse early. It has a case for being the strongest/most likely to win water nation in EA and MA, though that's definitely not true in LA.
EA Atlantis gets no sorcery w/o pretender help other than the occasional S1 random, and IMO its mage paths + troops are nowhere near compensation for that limitation.
I would agree! Though I think MA is the strongest as the EA has such a big land water divide that unless they are lucky will greatly hamper their ability to take certain actions and affect the land world.
@@callumfinlayson-palmer8393 EA is certainly more limited than MA, but the slave mages alone give them more land flexibility than say EA Atlantis by mid-late game, and EA Pelagia shares its issue of getting mages above water (their surface mages are significantly worse too).
I wouldn't underestimate an EA R'lyeh with Wyrm or Earth Serpent that gets a coastal fort or two. Their access to androleths will make their early-mid game armies into a poor man's Agartha...but Agartha has one of the higher win/pick rates in EA! Vs non-astral nations aboleths given a crystal coin can cause a lot of trouble with mind hunt too. That would be a nightmare for Vanheim, and also for nations like Agartha/Fomoria/Machaka/Atlantis/Oceania/Yomi and many others with no native astral.
can you ask for a short explanation what R´lyehs thoughts were with pretender design and death scales? im quite curious
Kinda wish more people took interesting pretender gods.
Far too many slabs of rock and not enough fire breathing gods of war or lightning javelins being hurled at the lowly peasants below.
I'm sad we don't get to see one of the most cool parts of the game. Only a single god has been seen actually fighting in battle I think. Maybe ermors triple crone thing as well but that hardly counts as a god imo. Glorified human form mages don't count in my eyes.
More spooky snakes and towering titans and less stupid chunks of talking rock.
Would be nice to see a stronger reliance on roleplay and interesting god designs rewarded than perfectly min/maxed undead/elemental spam used as chaff in so many armies.
It's nice seeing Hinnoms army demolish their opponent but I can only sit and smoulder at their utter lack of offensive thought. They could have brought a portion of that force to a variety of provinces to flush out more enemies or raid or the like. And it seems like they're just not using many scouts at present so I think they're in for a rude awakening when they find out just how much of the globe has been gobbled up by hellheim.
Slowly trundling forward with a death ball is understandable. I know singleplayer does encourage this sort of thing as smaller armies are easily eaten up. But I do wish perhaps retreating mechanics were a little more generous.
A lot of battles here are just one sided slaughters. So few seem to be interesting back and forth fights to the last man.
Battles in general could be far more interesting than a little field where two armies agree to bludgeon each others brains out. Different terrains, better ambush capability, fortifications that aren't just castles being spammed everywhere. More intersting siege combat in general. Proper siege engines.
Differently shaped maps.
I do understand the issues with changing elevation though, I know with a game like this it could be kinda hard, but I would so love to see hills and ravines being used in battles.
Actually being able to pick the site of the battle would be cool. You could have it tied to the commander with the highest leadership of all combined life forms that gets to decide with a choice of some different options. Forward deployments, infiltrated units.
There's so much room for this game to improve and evolve. I do hope the next game touches a bit on revamping the battles to be more interesting in some way like that.
Anyways ranting over. I enjoy watching multiplayer, it's so much easier than taking time to design a god myself and roll into a game.