Theorycrafting: Clan of Embers/OO flesh golem strategy

[Lurue]

Basic concept:

Get Hemah and have him learn Body III so that he can cast Flesh Golem for you. After this, tech up to Theology so that you can start upgrading OO priests into Speakers. Once you have the speakers, you can summon krakens and add them to the Flesh Golem until it has a base of 17 strength (the strength of krakens); then you start adding units to it, like upgraded goblins or a cultist to give it water-walking and mobility I. Once you have a couple of ridiculously powerful Flesh Golems, you can send them out with a few cultists (for healing and the tsunami spell) and absolutely roll over any coastal town in the game, and probably any landlocked town as well.

Why Clan of Embers?

* Spiritual trait means that you will obtain Speakers sooner. Having stronger priests in general is also a boon because you can add those extra improvements to your flesh golems, or just send the priests along to assist your Flesh Golem army. Spiritual also allows you to obtain Mobility I, which will be useful for both your golems and your priests.

* Starting with Body Mana means that you don't need to research Alteration in order to train Hemah in Body magic. Instead, you can go straight for Necromancy in order to obtain Chaos Mana so that you can start casting Mutate on your piles of goblins (see below).

* Goblins are extremely fast to produce (they cost 15 hammers; even warriors cost 25) and therefore are excellent vessels for obtaining improvements and transferring them to Flesh Golems. Additionally, the warrens building essentially halves the cost of producing goblins. In a town with a high experience bonus and warrens, you could very quickly obtain just about every low level promotion for use on your Flesh Golems.

* Barbarian trait mean that you can go very light on your defense earlier in the game since the swarms of barbarians warriors will not bother you.

Why Octopus Overlords?

* Hemah can obtain Body III as early as any other unit in the game.

* Cultists can give water-walking and mobility I promotions to your Flesh Golems, making even the sea unsafe for your enemies.

* Speakers can summon a limitless supply of Krakens for you to add to your golems, raising them to a base level of 17 strength. This is a very good base to apply improvements to.

Potential Weaknesses of this strategy:

* Both Hemah and Speakers come relatively late in the game. You need both Theology and Arcane Lore before you can really start doing anything exceptional.

* Barbarian trait means slower research.


Tell me what you think folks

[heisenberg]

I believe there are better candidates for your golem strategy than the Clan.
As you mentioned earlier, barbarian trait does slow you down a bit, and the going heavily into arcane isn't, imo, Clan's strong suit.

Do remember that you need Arcane Lore for Hemah.

Without the Arcane trait, you'd find that to even get Mages to make Sorcery worthwhile, you'd need to either spam lots of Adepts early to sit them around for quite a bit of turns, or you'd need to proactively farm XP with them.
With the Barbarian trait, unless you declared war on the Barbs, you are only left with killing other player's units for XP for you adepts--so no easy goblin XP farming for them. And lets not suggest going into Strength of Will for the Clan.
In my personal experience, all I used for the clan in the arcane line were just plain adepts for haste, blaze, treetop defence--aka the hide in forests within rival territory, treetop defence, blaze up and hide in the eventual flaming tiles w/o much fear of counterattacks.

So... for the same strategy of essentially grafting Krakens into flesh golems, there are numerous other civs that could perform this job better.
One of the fastest civs/leaders to Arcane Lore would be the Lanun/Hannah.
Her tech rate is one of the fastest amongst the civs/leaders as long as she gets a decent stretch of coast.
The lack of spiritual should never be an issue in getting cultists to level 6.
Their Tsunami is so powerful that you could simply send your Cultists exploring and casting Tsunami each turn to find sea creatures to murder.
By the time you tech up to Theology you definitely should at least have one level 6 Cultist ready to be upgraded.
Mana shouldn't be an issue either, since you have to reach Arcane Lore anyway for Hemah. But iirc the Lanun starts with Chaos, so there's your mutation problem solved.

On the whole, Flesh Golems are strong, but it takes really a lot of time to start producing decent ones.
With your strategy, you would require both Theology and Arcane Lore--both pretty deep into the Spiritual and Arcane lines respectively.
In fact, for the fastest Archmage+Speakers, you could also consider the Elohim, since they pick up Corlindale at Fanaticism, also down the Spiritual line, saving you a lot of time from hitting Arcane Lore.

[Demus]

sounds like a fun strat, fleshgolems + OO, but tbh, once you've hit speakers and an archmage, haven't you won already? speakers + stygians will do the same thing, but 3x as early.