Best way to supply Basium with experienced angels

[doktarr]

I wanted to go into this a little more detail on this topic so I decided to break if off of akatosh's spiritual trait thread.

If you have summoned the Mercurians and want to build up Basium's strength, you want to give him lots of angels that start with high experience. This means generating lots of high-experience figures with either Runes, Empyrean, or Order religion, which can be used in battle.

I see a few basic options:

• Radiant Guards -> Champions: This is the only way to generate a steady stream of metal-using troops that have a good religion. If you don't have any wonders that let you easily create high XP units, this is probably the most efficient way to give Basium a ton of angels by producing them in lots of cities. Choosing civics to add starting XP is nice here. (Theocracy+Apprenticeship+Conquest+Form of the Titan+Command Posts can get you 10 XP starts for figures.)
  
  
• Altar/Deis Dei city + Crusader/Paramanders: Lots of free XP trumps Iron Weapons, given that the Angels get to use the XP, too. Of course, only one city can get these bonuses, but if it's a strong production city (and it might be with all those high-hammer priests) and you just pump troops nonstop in that city, it can be a significant portion of your army.
  
  If you have cash to burn and are far along the tech tree, you can go nuts with Priors promoted to Paladins. This gives you spirit guide on a powerful fighting unit, allowing you to plow that experience back into other units when the Paladin goes down.
  
  
• Rathas + Ride of the Nine Kings: Similar to Crusaders/Paramanders coming out of the Altar city. Promote to knights if you have money to burn.

Civ-Specific strategies:

• Mercurians: If you switch to play the Mercurians, then religion no longer matters. It's all about efficiently producing high-XP units. Basically, you can pursue the Radiant Guard->Champion approach while just producing Champions (or Horse Archers, or whatever) directly.
  
  Alternatively, if Basium is neutral, and you have slave trade and an Asylum, you can buy slaves, upgrade them (cheaply) to Lunatics, load them on a ship, and dump them in enemy territory during a war. You won't have a lot of XP with angels generated this way, but it gives you lots of raw numbers with no hammers expended. (Credit to akatosh for this idea.)
  
  
• Calabim: Your Radiant Guard -> Vampires can feast their way to high XP. This pushes you strongly towards Empyrean if you summon Basium with the Calabim.
  
  
• Sidar: This whole strategy fits really well with the general strategy of maximizing XP that the Sidar pursue. Every unit either becomes an Angel or a Shade. It's win-win.
  
  
• Elohim: Reliquary allows you to get Spirit Guard on everything, not just Prior-Paladins, thus accelerating the process.

These strategies don't really apply to civs in a permanent alliance with the Infernals. The living unit promotion paths available to the guaranteed-evil-religion units aren't conducive to unit spamming. I suppose you could pump nightwatches if you really wanted to, but it's not all that efficient. The only option you really have is to try to get all three evil religions in every city. A living unit built in a city with all three evil religions has a 38.6% chance of following one of the three.

However, you don't really care about XP when you're trying to create manes, so you can spam cannonfodder if you want. A CoE/AV/OO Clan city could spam warriors from warrens, and send the religious ones off to their deaths to make manes while the no-religion ones were promoted and kept. Hyborem himself can just spam any living unit; the Slave->Lunatic path suggested above for Basium applies here, although without Ingenuity it's not as appealing.

 

[Qgqqqqq]

Don't units automatically get a religion if ones present in their building city?

 

[doktarr]

Don't units automatically get a religion if ones present in their building city?

No, it's a random chance unless it's a religious unit. Here is a thread that talks about it. It's a 15% chance of each religion in the city, checked serially. If you have three religions present, then there's a 38.6% chance that a non-religious unit will end up with one of them.

 

[BobCW]

The "best" way to get high exp angels is to play on a high difficulty level (where the AI gets bonus exp), and fight wars with anyone worshiping a "good" faith. If you feel really silly, you can feed summons to powerful potential angels before you finish them off (this also works well for getting a few promotions on elephants you intend to capture and upgrade). Otherwise, just kill away and trust in the AI to generally have several 30-plus exp units wandering around, just waiting to pop angels.

 

[Calavente]

+1BobCW.

my second one was Rathas + Ride of the nine kings + whatever civic and boni for xp.

third : massprod of spiritual/potency priests ... (possibly with warrens), but you might have to wait a bit so they gain enough xp, but with enough civic/altar + border raids they can quickly get to lvl 4-6. you wiat a bit, but once you get a critical size, it becomes 1/ turn that can be suicided

 

[doktarr]

The "best" way to get high exp angels is to play on a high difficulty level (where the AI gets bonus exp), and fight wars with anyone worshiping a "good" faith. If you feel really silly, you can feed summons to powerful potential angels before you finish them off (this also works well for getting a few promotions on elephants you intend to capture and upgrade). Otherwise, just kill away and trust in the AI to generally have several 30-plus exp units wandering around, just waiting to pop angels.

Well, yeah. I was trying for an approach that's independent of difficulty and opponents, but if you have a good-religion opponent to tackle, that helps a lot.

my second one was Rathas + Ride of the nine kings + whatever civic and boni for xp.

Oooh, I totally missed that option. The only problem is that Rathas are... not so good for their cost. But if you have Ride of the Nine Kings, you have warhorses, so you could upgrade those Rathas to Knights. You're paying 180 and 125 instead of 240 for your knights, but you're guaranteed to get religion instead of just having, at best, a 39% chance. That's not such a bad deal. You can only have four knights on the field at a time, but you could stock up Rathas in a a forward position and upgrade as slots open up. Mobility 2 knights will catch up to the action pretty quickly.

: massprod of spiritual/potency priests ... (possibly with warrens), but you might have to wait a bit so they gain enough xp, but with enough civic/altar + border raids they can quickly get to lvl 4-6. you wiat a bit, but once you get a critical size, it becomes 1/ turn that can be suicided

This seems sort of wasteful... If you can do that, you're probably just messing around and could win much easier ways.

I suppose you could upgrade to Paladins before you send them off to war - that allows those priests to do some damage instead of being sacrificed for relatively little gain, although it's expensive and late-game only.

 

[BobCW]

Alright. If you want a strategy which will work best independent of all external factors, just build a bunch of Crusaders and go kill stuff with them. Don't focus so much on starting exp, you'll easily amass much more by using a group of a dozen or so Crusaders (or Paramanders) to kill whatever AI stacks you can weaken first using the typical collateral options. You don't actually need very many high-exp units to turn into angels, considering that regular angels are really blah units, and you're unlikely to have more than a dozen national unit angels before you win. Spending thousands of beakers and hundreds of hammers just so you can get like +12 starting exp on Ratha (which are more useful than regular angels) is silly.


To be honest, you don't even need very much exp at all for your national angels, just enough to be able to upgrade them. All the Mercurian national units are more than capable of earning plenty of exp on their own in short order. If you want a super-uber Valkyrie or something just power-level a good-religion hero and kill him off.

 

[akatosh]

Angels themselves aren't that good in the late game, why is it important for Basium to have high-xp angels rather than hordes of them generally? (eg suiciding disciples as cannon fodder)

Otherwise, this is an exercise similar to maximizing XP for Sidar. You could use Empyrean disciple with Altar/Dies Diei/Desert Shrine + standard civic/Titan/Command post bosts-->Radiant Guard-->Champion. Assuming you had all boosters, this would give you 28 xp starting Disciples which would upgrade into Champions. Costs 60 hammers + 125 or 130 gold.

It seems like Order with Spirit Guide confessors or Confessor-->paladins if you want good units, and Empyrean with the priest XP boosters and horse XP boosters are your best bets. The only thing RoK offers that the other two don't is brew house boosted Soldiers of Kilmorph.

 

[Calavente]

true,
if you have so much altars levels, you are absolutly right.

regarding rathas, for the "hammer" conversion-rate... who cares, at this point you can have 1-turn rathas, at least in the HE city in which you'll have built the RoNK.
In my book, if you want promoted angels, 180hammers instead of ?90?100? is the price for:
- 26 xp instead of 10.
- 3base move instead of 1
- getting mobility 1&2 instead of mobility 1
- getting 3 withdraw promotions. (total 5 promos as you are lvl6 out of the blue instead of level 4)

those rathas will get to the front much more quickly than 2-3mvt radiant guards, and then you can quickly try to send them to their death as "ratha-pults".
then either
-they retreat : +1xp
-they win at low odds +5-10xp
-they die ==> xp'ed angels (at least 26) .
and in any case they softened the enemy.

and if you are elohim, you can even give them "spirit guide" and then .. half (or third) of those 26+ xp get transmitted to their ratha friends upon their death. nice no ?

so yes, radiant-turned-champs would be more hammer-efficient, but you'll get more mileage out of the rathas, and more xp


-so rathas in RoNK -HE city (can any mounted unit upgrade to ratha? (for lower hammer cost?)
-disciple->radiant->champ in Altar city
-others : mass prod of radiant / priests to suicide lots of "low-xp" units and get mass angels

 

[doktarr]

I don't believe Ecclesiastics promote to Radiant Guards, do they? It's been a little while since I've run Empyrean and I had no reason to go on that path at that time. I know Zealots can cross over to the melee line as Stygian Guards, but I thought that was the only such route. If they can, then that path easily dominates the Crusader/Paramander options.

If they can't, though, that means the best Empyrean options are:

- Rathas (promoted to Knights if you have the money) in the RotNK city
- Ecclesiastics/Vicars/Paladins in the Altar city (depending on whether you are cash or hammer poor)
- Radiant Guards in other cities, promoted to Champions as cash allows

 

[Calavente]

@doktarr.
you are surely right. maybe you cannot upgrade to ratha. I can't remember either.

 

[doktarr]

I re-wrote the Ride of the Nine Kings section to account for Rathas. I also added a new section for the Mercurians to incorporate akatosh's Slave->Lunatic idea. Since Basium has Ingenuity, it seems like a nice fit for him.