Amurites Strategies

[Sephi]

Since I am modding the FFH AI, I thought it is a good idea to ask the experts here again. So my questions are

1. When do you cast the Amurites Worldspell?
2. What Religion do you prefere when playing Amurites?
3. What influence do the leader traits have on your Amurite strategy?

any other hints about Amurites are ofcourse also welcome

 

[Korias]

Arcane Lacuna is a late game spell- you really want it to be cast when you know there are a ton of Mana nodes and right after you've built a large number of Adepts. That's the real benefit- easily prepping Adepts into Mages with Fire II.

I prefer RoK with the Amurites- its early, provides strong economics so I can focus on the Magic Path, and lets me keep my Science Slider high. Later, I'll either switch to the Council of Esus to grab Nox Noctis so my mages are ready on homeland defense, or Empyrean to get Chalid and Dies Diei and see where all the hidden units are.

With Dain, I leverage Philosophical into a mass GS Bulbing fest and build the Crown, Great Library, and Catacombs in the same city. If I'm playing as Valledia, I really focus on building a large, diverse army, usually with multiple Great Commanders attached to my units thanks to multiple Command Posts.

The Key with Amurites is their magical power. Beeline Sorcery and leverage the power it gives you. Fireballs, Summons, Maelstroms... these are good things that make pushing hammers into weak Adepts worthwhile. Death Mana is a great thing to have as Skeletons are the first summon, and followed by that would be Enchantment Mana for Enchanted Blade promotions. Body is also good for Haste and Regeneration.

Dont forget to leverage the Metamagic Mana you get- the ability to Dispel and switch nodes early on is a huge benefit pre-sorcery.

 

[readercolin]

For the worldspell, I rarely use it. Maybe if I face like the sheim or the balsferas, and they're actually summoning things (aka, not likely) or I have a bunch of mana nodes and some casters who could use the xp (again, rarely happens).

For religion, my favorite religion is OO for one reason - hemah. With OO, I get 2 archmage hero's, bringing my total number of channeling 3 casters (after govornnan teaches the others) up to 18. On top of that, it gives you stygan guards who are excelent for overseas attacks - rather than worrying about ships, you can get some firebows with water 2, stygan guards with water walking, and then your mage army with all your artillery. If I cant get OO (or am playing orbis, where it would turn me to evil), I would probably go with either RoK or Empyrian (again, probably wouldn't choose empy in orbis as it turns to good). RoK to help pay for upgrading all those mages, Empyrian for chalid (another powerful channeling 3 caster, plus very powerful extra spell for the high priests).

As for the influence that the leader traits have, there are some pretty big ones.

Generally when playing as Valledia (organized, arcane), i tend to focus a bit more on the other aspects of the amurites - the firebows, the everyone can cast haste/whatever other spells I have with the mages functioning more as support. Much of it revolves around running theocracy/apprenticeship/conquest + getting form of the titan and building command posts everywhere. The whole goal is to start with as much XP as possible for my firebows and such so that the firebow can grab stoneskin+drill 1-2 for attacking, or fireball+stoneskin+water walking for mobile offense, or fireball+stoneskin+regeneration as a kind of medic, or stoneskin+hope+fire arrows or something else city boosting as garrison troops.

Playing as Dain, I tend to focus more on the mages. Running aristocracy/agrarianism, and caste system (apprenticeship till I get caste system), I focus on running as many scientists as possible, with the goal being to get them and pop my way up the arcane line as fast as possible. I tend not to actually research the arcane line if I can help it, preferring to go for the priest line to unlock them faster while I bulb my way through the mage line. The big exception is sorcery, which I prioritize getting. Once I have sorcery, then I can spam wizards who come out with plenty of xp due to the cave of the ancestors. I then use wizards for boosting my cities, and for my offensive stack, while having somewhat weaker units defending my cities and my wizards (swordsmen, archers - if following OO I'll defend with stygan guard). Here I focus on wizards and the summoners alot more than when playing as Valledia, but focus significantly less on the support units like the firebows.

Lastly, for Mana Nodes, I prioritize getting an earth node because stoneskin is VERY helpful for keeping mages alive, and allows firebows to do something useful. I also try to get an enchantment node for at least long enough to get a few wizards with enchant, for buffing melee units and archers. Further Mana nodes will vary according to which leader I'm playing as.

With Valledia, I tend to focus more on specific nodes to buff my casters, and it tends to build off either fire mana (which the palace provides) or the mana from whichever religion I'm following, or if I have a mana providing UF. So if I start near the mirror of heaven, I'll tend to buff sun, and go empyrian. Or if I go OO I'll tend to buff water. If I'm unable to get the holy building, I'll generally fall back to buffing fire or death.

Playing as Dain, much of my power lies with getting wizards asap. So I'll try to get 1 of each mana node, though I may focus a little on one or another node if I need something. If I have enough nodes to make it worthwhile, I'll occassionally even go through an adept building spree with as many different mana nodes as possible to maximize starting xp, then wait to upgrade them until I focus on a few different mana types to give them free spells while my cities build something else. I'll always try to focus on a few mana types when upgrading to archmages or building hemah. Govornan, I'll tend to try to pair up nodes to allow him to teach as many lvl 1 spells as possible. Once he has as many level 1 spells as I find useful, then I'll send him down to teir 3 of whatever path I'm buffing (if I have enough nodes, then metamagic, if I don't then I'll go down fire, death, or sun).

Hope this helps. Sadly, as powerful as they can be when used well, it does require a good bit of micromanagement, and even then has trouble matching other civs unique effects. The only time when they really shine is once they have at a minimum 4 mana nodes. Once they start getting more than that, then they can start really rolling along. However mana nodes are generally rare enough that that is near impossible to get.

-Colin

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

not an amurite expert by any mean, so just my 2 cents:

I'm pretty sure the cave of ancestors gives +1xp for every kind of UNIQUE mana, which means that having 2 water nodes will give them +1xp while having one water and one earth will give 2xp. so since the AI is not very good at heavy micromanagement I think they should always go for diverse mana nodes and get as many as possible.

for the worldspell, the best use seems to be waiting until you have lots of casters and lots of nodes for a good buff, and then waiting for a time when you're fighting with someone who's using magic effectively against you. then those 20 turns of no spellcasting are really, really gonna hurt them.

 

[Tasunke]

usually best religions for the Amurites are ROK and FOL, I prefer FOL myself. Its pretty good at skyrocketing a civ, specially in conjunction with Guardian of Nature civic, and Dains Philosophy.
As a FOL Dain you can Easily get 10 great people by turn 150. Most of them sages.

I would suspect ROK works better with Valledia, just because they work together to overcome the maintanence of large empires.

As a FOL Dain, I would advise gathering economy primo, while then beelining for Firebows. Alternatively you could go for Rangers/Firebows or Beastmasters/ Firebows if your GreatSages and FOL economy net you enough tech.

Its certainly possible to go down the sorcery tech with the Amurites, but not at all necessary. Arcane Lacuna is used best against humans, or AI actually using summons or AOE spells, to make a quick conquest. Since you wont being using that many mages (except enchant II to power your firebows) ... better to go Ironworking before sorcery to get the +2 from iron rather than the +1 from flaming arrows.

 

[popejubal]

I've had very good experience with a generic economic development start just like every other civ, moving to Aristo-grarian fed cities to research to Sorcery. One Great Sage building an Academy in the Great Library city leaves any extra Great Sages to pop Arcane Lore the instant I research Sorcery.

Once that happens, I manage my nodes to get two of anything I can find and build Govannon. A little more node management to let Govannon get level I in Earth, Death, Body and Mind and then I start pumping up my units across the empire. Once that happens, I do one more round of node shuffling and build the Tower of Divination to grab Strength of Will.

Voila, Archmages just 20-30 turns after Sorcery. And I play on Epic speed.

 

[Sephi]

thanks, this is all gold

 

[readercolin]

Few questions for you tasanuke.

First - why do you find FoL to be good? Is it the extra food and production (plus the GoN for happies), and then running a specialist heavy economy for research and gold?

Second - 10 GP by turn 150, is that on quick or normal? I can see 10 GP on quick if you really work at it... but I don't see any way to pull that off on normal.

And then a general question to anyone. With great sages, I've always found that they will pop more magic techs that you don't have (divination, etc.) Do you have to have all of those before you can pop arcane lore? Or will it automatically choose arcane lore once you have sorcery researched?

-Colin

 

[travathian]

In my last game I had Elementalism&Divination and Sorcery.

Great Sages provided the following in order: Arcane Lore, Alteration, Pass thru Ether, Necro, Str of Will, Sanitation.

If I load a save 3 turns earlier from when I didn't have Div, it goes in the exact same order only Divination is bulbed right after Necro.

 

[cypher132]

This thread is relevant to my interests.

When I play Dain, I tend to go very magic-heavy. Get to the fire II along with bronze/iron working. Siege with mages, attack with axemen/champions, and expand my empire. Convert a node to enchantment and another to life for the bonus. If the empire starts getting too big to handle, I'll make a law node or two to ease some of the pressure.

Valledia, I tend to go straight for firebows for a slow, steady, and well-defended expansion. Then use champions and fire II mages to attack and expand. As you can tell, I like to play as Dain a lot more.

 

[Onionsoilder]

I generally go RoK. The extra gold helps fund both expansion and research, and their priests only cast Shield of Faith once, then they're done; by training them with Govannon, Stonewardens essentially become mages in and of themselves.

 

[Goodwill]

Sorry I'm pretty new. If I understood that right about mana node shuffling and such....you only need a mana node to buy a promotion, you don't need access to the mana to cast the corresponding spell AFTER you learned it?

So for instance, if I just wanted mind for my research, I could build a mind node, an adept for every city with mind 1, and let them sit there. Then I can dispel the node and make a different one and still have mind 1 running?

And let's say I got an earth node to get earth 1 and maybe 2 on a few units. After dispelling the node, can I still cast those spells with those units? Summoned units too? They may have no affinity but still.

 

[readercolin]

that is correct. As long as you have level 1 of that spell, you can cast it as much as you want, and get higher levels of that spell tree. The only thing that is later affected is the affinity (example, the specter - level 2 death summons - has strength 3 +1 death mana affinity. So when the barbarians get specters, they are strength 3, not 4+ because they don't have a capital and therefore can't get death mana). The other thing is that you can't then later give that ability to newly created adepts, or adepts/mages/archmages that just had a new promotion available.

-Colin

 

[Goodwill]

Does everyone typically go for metamagic then first, to make a dispel mage so they can grab up a bunch of the mana nodes to make some buffers for the civ?

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

you don't need that, you got metamagic straight from your palace

 

[JFSebastian]

You can use the free Great Bard from Drama to bulb a chunk off of Sorcery if you avoid the prerequisites for Sanitation and Astronomy. You'll need to research a few minor techs first.

Exploration, Fishing, Agriculture, Calendar, Animal Husbandry, Education, Writing, Mysticism, Philosophy, Festivals, Drama

And of course one of the prerequisites for Sorcery.

If for some reason you get a Great Bard before Drama, you could avoid Calendar to remove Festivals and Drama from that list, but Calendar is, more often than not, far too important to avoid. It wouldn't be tooooo wasteful to use a Great Bard to bulb Drama for another Great Bard considering the cost of Drama.

The nice thing about Drama is that you can pop your new city borders with a 10-20% culture slider instead of building Monuments. This isn't quite as hurtful to your early science if you've already started to focus on sages for science production. Can also be useful if you are short on happy resources.

 

[Goodwill]

you don't need that, you got metamagic straight from your palace

I mean the question is for all civs in general, not just for the Amurites.

 

[Tasunke]

To answer your question, many magic strats start with the Metamagic buildup, although note that this is a very buider heavy route. For more direct approaches, you will see not much more than fire, earth, and death, if not simply all death mana.

(well some go for air, but I dont anymore after Maelstrom was nerfed like three times)
although also, air used to be the only mana you would ever need XD (when shadow came out)

I think it was the only time I ever played hippus with mages .... hrrrm.
5 or so air mages, a couple tough rangers, and then a steady supply of horsearchers ... back in the good ole days

 

[FlyingSwan]

Recently got the Tower of Mastery trophy with the amurites as Dain.I ran a republic/pacifism/arete/agrarism-this with Dains 100% Philosopical got me alot of GP,but i found you need RoK to support this economy(and for arete).I also researched OO,with these two religious buildings(built by your GP)you get earth and water mana,as you start with fire you only need 1 mana node for air.Then your on your way with the tower of elements.As long as you have 4 raw mana nodes in your lands you just use metamagic to change them for the other towers.Good choke points with forts and archers built asap are essential to defend your lands around your mana nodes so you can be left in relative peace to build the other towers.

 

[Nor'easter]

Thread necro, I know, and I don't know if Sephi's still interested in feedback on this, but I just played a game as the Amurites and found that Empyrean works well for them as a state religion.

I don't care so much about shrines and temples, since you can build those without adopting the state religion. And there's no guarantee you'll get the religious hero(es) even if you adopt the state religion. So I focus on units, buildings, and (depending on the religion) civics. Seems to me you want a state religion that either accentuates your civ's existing advantages or compensates for some weakness.

The Amurites have better-than-normal units in the Arcane line (Cave of Ancestors, Potency), Archery (Firebows), and Recon (Chanters aren't super-powerful, but they have an ability that normal Assassins don't, making them slightly better). Empyrean allows the Amurites to strengthen their Melee line (Radiant Guards upgraded to Champions) and Mounted line (Rathas). This strengthens them pretty much across the board, it seems to me.

Anyway, just a thought. I had a good experience with the Empyrean Amurites.