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[tompliss]

Is it just me, or is the dominions IRC (on Gamesurge) currently unavailable ?

[Mindmaker]

The internet really lacks information about Asphodel.
Anyone here got experience with them?

[Karlito]

Ashpodel is basically: cheap temple spam + summoned reanimators = loads of undead. Have a specific question?

[Mindmaker]

General flow of the game.
Do I plant one (or more) carrion centaur in each province for reanimation? Or is it a waste of time and better left to your dominion effect?

Also pretender design. T3S3C3G3L3M3 leaves you with a lot of points, even if you take Dom 10 (which isn't that important with cheap temples).
People recommended me a W9 bless, which while effective doesn't seem that great in the bigger scheme of the game. They are cap only so you won't have big amounts of them. Also sooner or later the whole battlefield will be full of your own chaff, which means they whill be restricted in their mobility and use.
Astral might give you some good boosters, but that would require you to have an acively searching pretender, since you have no native income and they are gem intensive. Also endgame rituals.
I guess I could take an awake Dragon, although I haven't been much of a fan of combat pretenders.

Edit:
Hmm, maybe the Frost Dragon. Just need to take a look which of their paths has the best synergy with Asphodel.

[Frumple]

Re: Carrion centaurs: As soon as you have enough income to summon one per turn, you set a black dryad to monthly summon and never turn it off. Ever. If you make it to later, you'll have more dryads doing the same thing. Freakishly huge stacks of carrion centaurs is how you drown the world in manikins -- they're also just about your best temple builder and trooper shuttler, as well as being a low-end thug all by their lonesome. The dom summon is there, but its production is basically nothing compared to a 20-30 stack of c. centaurs -- asphodel is closer to R'lyeh than Ermor or Lemuria in terms of dom summon, at least from what I've seen*, and they need that centaur support to really make up the numbers. They don't need corpses to awaken manikins, just stick the lot in whatever province is a good staging point and let 'em go.

You start off with centaur(ides -- the short bow ones are marginally more precise, iirc) for the first few provinces, by which point you should have at least one reanimating c.centaur and more archers (and maybe some minotaurs, for trampling) ready to set out with whatever's been dom-summoned and awakened to screen for 'em -- that fairly simple combination of manikin chaff + archers + trampling shock troopers should carry you pretty far. Eventually you start bringing in your battle casters (and other stuff, like the possibility of a hoard of harpies with skeleton amulets) and doing sexy N/D stuff, on top of the whole SC-level carrion lords bouncing around and... whatever the indie situation or your pretender brings to the table. With a minor E bless and N's reinvig kit options, you've got a lot of room for a lot of spell spamming on the battlefield.

I honestly wouldn't aim much for a troop bless, myself -- while they do have a reanimated sacred, it's an archer and fairly rare and the black centaurs are firmly "meh" (the stealthy zerker calvary bit is alright, but they're kinda' expensive, hard to mass, and somewhat flimsy), plus you've got domkill and they eventually become sparse anyway. You do probably want a minor E bless, though -- most of your casters are sacred and capable of self-blessing, plus you'll probably have H3 casters along any major fights regardless. The simple N major/E minor works damn well for 'em, t'be honest -- it makes almost all their casters pretty beefy -- but any thug/SC blesses are going to do you pretty good so long as you've got that minor earth with it.

I probably wouldn't take T3, personally (T2, sure, but T3 brings about the worst events), and maybe not so much temperature, either. You're still going to want to spend a fair amount of gold -- dryads are your best researcher, and you're probably going to want to recruit plenty of pans for path diversity. Default pretender choices would be gorgon or great mother, if you're not after path diversity -- incredibly easy access to E/N globals would be nice, and getting your hands on mother oak and (hopefully) gift of health would be incredible force multipliers for Aspho. Otherwise you want some path diversity. Still at least the E minor, but possibly air for flight boots and some fire to pick up fire brands and awe/fire shield shields? Stuff like that, in any case -- something that can either summon stuff to kit out your commanders or do the forging itself.

... anyway, that's Frumple's $0.02 USD.

*Losing somewhat on the numbers game and lacking amphibious being caveated slightly by having a chance to get some pretty damn killer critters. The fact that they get more-or-less free behemoths is fairly amazing.

[Mindmaker]

Thanks that's very useful.
Apparently corpses in provinces lets you animate humanoid manikins, which are better than the animal critter ones.

Not too much of a fan of the W5 Dragon?
I mean your pretender choices sound good as well, considering a lot of your caster are sacred (shame the Panic Apostates isn't).
Although I'd have to see how much I can do with their low-end spells.

T3 really isn't too bad in conjucntion with L3 and is one of the two most common combinations (O3M1 or T3L3). So I'd like to stick with it. Unless the domkill isn't that bad and you can get enough out of that scale to consider it. But in the long run you won't be recruiting that much national troops, right? Once you're only recruiting commanders it should work.
Dryads are the better researcher, even though their value for money is slightly worse. But I still think you may want to get some Hierophants early for their water and earth picks, so you can sitesearch and to save some money for troops/forts/stuff.

Extreme temp scales will bother other players as much as they will me (unless they prefer them) and the cold scales works well with a lot of the undead summons (even though mixed armies wouldn't work well due to the lack of cold resistance). This goes maily for casters, since the undead will just ignore fatigue.
But I have to play around with design points and pretender chasi some more, so I'll see what I can do.

Fire Brands aren't that important, considering your national mages can craft Water Brands and you have an easier time searching for water sites.

[Frumple]

Apparently corpses in provinces lets you animate humanoid manikins, which are better than the animal critter ones.

Hnn... not really. Humanoid manikins are like your third worst manikin, after harpies and plain... wolves, or something like that. Both of your best manikins (bear, elephant) are animals, as are... well, all of your better ones but maybe the minotaurs, if you assume the centaurs are naturally omitted. The order of quality goes something like harpy->wolf carrion beast->plain manikin (humanoid)->boar carrion beast->satyr manikin (humanoid)->horse carrion beast->mandragora (humanoid?)->minotaur manikin (humanoid?)->bear carrion beast-> elephant carrion beast. And of the upper ranks, the mandragoras in particular are quite rare. You can do a lot worse than an aspho chaff blob made mostly from the better carrion beasts. The humanoid ones do tend to have somewhat better attack/defense scores, but it's fairly marginal and the animal one's greater HP/protection tends to (readily, if you've got access to H4 via prophet or booster) make up any difference on that front.

As for the water bless, I generally... well, personally, I don't really see the point to taking a water bless if you're not going major. Defense isn't a particularly sexy, well, defense stat. If I were going for an expanding pretender, I'd probably nab the gorgon or great white bull -- s'like I said, regardless of anything else you want at least that minor earth bless. Any nation with as many sacred casters as aspho has wants that minor earth bless, heh. Still, if you were going with that dragon, with the intent to bless your black centaurs, you'd probably want to go ahead and get W6 and completely offset the berserk penalty, heh. Though... do remember, if you can nab up at least S1 indies, which isn't terribly unlikely, you can start putting out shrouds for your pans. Good stuff, that, if you've got N/e.

As for the extreme temperatures... well, there's something to be said for that. I'd still almost want to go for heat instead of cold, strictly to deny enemy undead that extra boost (and make using your own in conjunction with your unresistant chaff horde less painful), but particularly if you take the currently incessantly hammered upon minor earth bless, it wouldn't be that terrible for your more prolific battlecasters, as well. I guess it depends mostly on what other nations are in the game with you -- if you can handle going extreme either way, might as well pick the one that's going to cause the most annoyance for the most people.

Incidentally, your main battlefield casters are probably going to be living dryads (hag or otherwise) and panic apostles -- carrion lords and ladies are honestly too expensive to use en masse, so you'll be leaning on your recruitables for on-the-ground force projection. The carrion ladies are actually kinda' total junk (better two centaurs than one lady, >95% of the time) and I would probably never recommend summoning them, honestly, whereas the lords are SC-chassis and heavy battlecasters/mass manikin buffers -- specialists, instead of something you're going to have tons of. And your other casters are all recruit-anywhere, which means if you can mumble up the gold you can have an unholy bucketload of them, especially if you're not spending (much) money on supporting actual troops.

As for the F/E divergence, remember if you can get fire brands (which would be nice strictly to give you diversity, and make it so the enemy can't just casually slip on cold res and ignore your thugs) you can probably manage charcoal and gleaming gold shields as well, and both of those are somewhat deliciously brutal. It's nice to have the option, makes you somewhat harder to counter.

... also I'm totally kinda' rambly, so anyone with better ways of putting any of that are terribly welcome to join in. Ruddy painkillers.

[Mindmaker]

Well I meant that as long as you have corpses, you wouldn't get harpies and doglike manikins. I haven't tested it, it's just what people on Desura claim.

Well the W5 wouldn't be for the bless effect, but for some magic diversity and eventually rituals. It's better than F5, N5 is redundant and the Carrion Dragon with N/D even more so.
May test the Gorgon since Awe3 + Petrification sounds pretty good. Could work as an awake expander.

I guess H3 is better, you're correct.

Edit:
Gorgon dies too easily.
Great Bull is too expensive, due to low starting dom and low earth.

Cyclops with dom 10 and E6 is suprisingly good. Can take on about anything. Won't even accumulate afflictions if you use him wisely. Beat 2 heavy cavalry provinces without afflictions and got his first one on the third one. If you got for weaker ones there shouldn't be a scratch on him by the time you finish expanding.
And he makes for a great midgame SC.

[Karlito]

Gorgon dies too easily.

Yeah, in 4.04 we found that she needs some gear before she's ready to go out stomping indies on her own. It should be something you can put together in the first 5 or 6 turns if you plan for it.

[Delta Foxtrot]

I expanded with a fairly low research A4E4N4 gorgon with just a hide shield (was playing Pan). Granted, that was a disciple game so I had N9 to fall back on. And with air buffs later, she was a beast.
My experience is with pangaea, but asphodel has mostly similar roster. I don't think you really need an expansion pretender (of course it never hurts), centaurs (both warrior and sacred) and basic satyrs are quite good expanders. My gut says you want to aim for midgame power/diversity, rather than sink points on an early expander god.

edit:
of course an expander god supercharges your expansion, and thus midgame power, so there's that.

[Shadowlord]

Leaving them vulnerable to being spammed to death with Vengeance of the Dead, of course.

[Frumple]

... eh, stack up MR kit and it's not really that much of a threat, especially if you're not up against nations that can field a half-dozen or better casters. The biggest problem the gorgon had in the 4.04 game was simply that she didn't stack up enough MR to make the VotD kill take much longer. Other trick might be to slap shademail on 'er, if you can forge it up or barter -- makes it a lot more difficult to figure out where the bugger is.

Regardless, there's a lot of nasty things you can do to a solo SC -- presumably by the time they start showing up, you've already got your money's worth out of the gorgon and either transitioned it into working with armies/other SCs or retired it to lab work (presumably under a dome, if they're bombarding you with VotD) or somethin'.

Just... yeah, if you use a pretender for expansion and you're in a game with VotD capable nations, don't have it cast any globals until you've got a dome or two over the province it's staying in. Gooood way to lose a global, heh. With a gorgon, probably a good idea to use that flight and SC-y nature to flap your way out of range, too. Was actually another reason VotD (astral spam in general) was effective as it was in 4.04, really -- everything was in range of R'lyeh labs, and most of Aspho&co's were in immediate ritual range of the squid's capital. Somewhat of a disadvantageous position to be in, heh.

[Jacob/Lee]

"Send in the army to kill those Eternal Knights," I said, "they can't be too tough," I said.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

_{I need some more combat mages.}

[Rez]

Wot.  Well, flambeaus have 13 x3 on undead/demons + 12 fire and are pretty legit besides.  That certainly would explain a lot of it.

Is there anyway for the promoted knight to Bless them?

[E. Albright]

Their commander is H2, yes.