Overview
A thematic guide to ruling the world as crazy-strong demons!
Intro
This guide is meant to provide beginner and advanced players with enough information to succeed as Lanka. The guide will focus mainly on singleplayer games, and as such we will consider how appropriate various tactics are for Lanka’s theme, not just what makes us win the fastest. That’s not to say this is a bad strategy – it’s extremely effective when used properly. Early on, I will discuss ways to use Lanka in multiplayer more competitively, and talk mostly about singleplayer from there.
Lanka is a nation of Kailasa’s monkeys enslaved by demon ogres. They are stronger and tougher than men, and they enjoy feasting on human flesh. As Lanka, we are shamelessly evil, and, like the Sith, we will draw our power from the Dark Side. We’ll be using our expensive but extremely powerful demons, screened by the reanimated bodies of our dead monkey slaves, with some (for now) living monkeys on the side. As our demons cut everything in front of them to pieces, they’ll be protected by a powerful blessing from our god, so we can expect to lose almost no troops (demons, anyway) for much of the early game. As we move into the mid-game, our army will grow with Lanka’s unique and powerful summoned demons. And by the mid- to late-game, lesser gods will blot out the sun, and we will fight our enemies in total darkness.
There are certainly other ways to play Lanka than the one described above, and they will be mentioned when appropriate. But in my experience this is one of the strongest strategies for Lanka, and the most fun to play.
Pretender Design
Our Pretender design will change how we play the rest of the game – and especially so for Lanka, as we’re going with a pretty powerful bless strategy.
There’s some room for flexibility in our design, but I highly recommend taking at least 2 Turmoil (preferably 3), and a Dominion of at least 7. Our demons all have Chaos Power of at least 1, so Turmoil helps them a lot. For each point of Turmoil (or 15 of unrest) in a province, they will get more strength, attack skill, defense skill, and action point – very helpful. The most powerful demons will get twice the benefit. There is, unfortunately, a downside to this ability. Each point of Order will weaken them by the same amount. We shouldn’t take Order, and we want a high dominion to beat enemy dominions with Order, which are common in multiplayer. In singleplayer the AI seems to choose Order or Turmoil randomly, so to be safe we’ll take high dominion. If we can fight in our dominion most of the time, our troops will be golden.
Lanka’s sacred troops are extremely important to its overall strategy. ALL of its unique summoned troops and commanders are sacred, as are a decent portion of its recruitable units. Therefore we’ll take a double bless strategy: I’ve chosen Earth 9 Nature 9 as I think it works best for Lanka.
In-Depth Blessing Explanation, skip unless you’re interested: Our demons hit so hard that there’s little use in a bless like Fire. The Nature bless gives them 8 more health, and 10% health regeneration, so most of our demons will get at least 4 health back per turn. On top of that we put the Earth bless, which gives them Reinvigoration 4, so they recover 4 fatigue per turn. Most of our demons have 4 encumbrance or less, so they’ll never get tired in battle. Otherwise, every 10 fatigue they accumulate gives -1 defense, and every 20 fatigue, -1 attack, which makes long fights unnecessarily hard. And the major Earth bless gives them +5 natural protection (in practice + 4, because increasing natural prot. decreases armor prot). While the major Earth bless isn’t always a great choice, it helps our demons significantly because they’re now well-armored. Combined with regeneration they become just about unkillable against regular troops. Another potential bless is D9 instead of E9. With Undying 10, our sacreds will often regenerate back to positive health as they chase routing enemies, so you essentially give them 10 more HP…for almost 50 HP per demon. This would also let you cast Utterdark in the late-game, where almost everything but your demons will take a huge stat penalty for fighting in the dark. However, I think E9 works better than D9 on your troops (and we’ll have some darkness anyway), so I’m taking it to maximize demon survivability. You will need to take Imprisoned and a few negative scales to pay for the blesses, but it’s worth it.
Because Lanka’s sacreds are mostly demons, human players will start to Banish them pretty quickly. While they’re not easily killed, if he holds the line with a lot of chaff, enough priests will start to slowly eat into your (expensive) demons. One possible counter is a Blood 9 instead of Earth 9 bless. However, I think a better option is to get a minor Astral 4 bless for the +1 MR, which as the Monolith you can take for 48 points. Paying for this by only taking Magic 1 will get rid of Magic 2’s -1 MR effect in your dominion as well, resulting in most of your demons’ chance to pass the MR check improving from 46% to 62%: a 35% decrease in hits paired with regeneration for much less damage. It also opens up astral options that Lanka otherwise can’t get, and lets you forge more MR items if your thugs are being aggressively countered by kitted out groups of priests. I would strongly consider the S4 Monolith for a multiplayer game, though in singleplayer it shouldn’t matter much. In the mid-late-game we have the potential to cast Storm, making Banish much less accurate, and equip our SCs and thugs with the MR +5 Armor of Souls.
An easy counter to Banish is to use some of Lanka’s plentiful undead to screen our demons. All in all, anything less than 5 or more priests usually won’t kill demons, as they have decent magic resistance and gobs of health. Later we can cast Mass Flight to bring our demons straight to their priests, and have a word with them face-to-face.
I formerly recommended Heat 3 because it would affect other nations more than us, but from testing it seems that our troops get the same encumbrance penalty from Heat 3 as everyone else’s. For this reason, it may be best to avoid it, as our sacreds will otherwise gain no fatigue. I took Sloth 2 because we’re already handicapped by gold from the Turmoil scale, and our demons are so expensive that we usually won’t be recruiting a massive number of them. I also chose Growth 1 to keep provinces from slowly dying when we blood hunt, and Luck 1 to take the edge off Turmoil’s bad events. Magic 2 is pretty important so that we can research at a good clip with our cheap sacred Raktapatas, but Luck and Growth can be fiddled with at your pleasure.
Troops, and the Main Game
Now we’ve made a Pretender who’ll give us very nice sacred troops, albeit expensive ones. The mainstay of our army at first will be Palankashas: armored tiger-ape demons! Usually with Sloth 2 you’ll be able to recruit 4 of them your first turn, but sometimes just 3. Prophet our commander and wait until turn 3 when we have 6-8. Send them out with the starting army and watch them tear up everything they run into without any losses. If you want, you can actually send 3 or 4 out on turn 2: they still kill almost everything except throne defenders. Be a little careful using a group of just 3 or 4 against troops like barbarians or heavy cavalry, or we may lose one or two. But we can easily send out 3 or 4 on turn 2 then come back to our home province and grab a few more on turn 4. Edit: Turn 2 expansion may be a better idea, because then we’ll be able to recruit a few more tiger-demons over the next few turns. By then most adjacent territories should have at least Turmoil 1, which will give us a little extra help. Now we’ll use Palankasha Expansion Groups (PEGs) of 8-10 Palankashas, led by a prophet or priest and optional screens. These are the staple of your early to mid-game forces, and are nearly unstoppable in Turmoil. Play around with your army setup a bit: I have my Palankashas ‘hold and attack’, positioned a few clicks behind the middle of the screen. A few barbarians or something similar getting a few first attacks in on your closest one is just about the only way to lose troops to indies, screens help too.
We need to get income fast for our PEGs. Build a second fort ASAP, money permitting. Actually, Lanka is well-poised to rush a nearby player’s fort instead – if you find an enemy dominion quickly, scout around for the fort. One PEG is enough to beat the PD unless they have 2-3 Order scales, and you may want to bring another to actually take it. If they do have Order, get a group of Kala-Mukhas instead, supplemented with a PEG unless they’re urgently needed to attack his other troops. Keep pumping out PEGs (or KEGs) every one or two turns. They’re expensive, so it helps to not recruit any commanders the first few turns other than the Kala-Mukha priests to lead them. Forsaking early research gives us more dough, so more forts and more guys. Once we have a comfortable (600-800ish) net income, we’ll look to build more temples and start recruiting Raktapatas in our forts. With Magic 2, they’re 9 research for 80 gold, and have half upkeep because they’re sacred. We don’t need to research a ton as we’re focusing on Blood Magic.
Unless we have unlucky commander deaths, we should be able to expand quickly and comfortably. If Banishment or high Order is a problem against an opponent, recruit Kala-Mukha Warriors from the nearest castle-they’re still sacred, but unlike your demons they don’t have Chaos Power, and can’t be Banished. Palankashas are better in general because they have Chaos Power and more health, but your Kala-Mukhas aren’t capital-only, so you’ll probably use both, and in longer and larger games they’ll take over the Palankasha’s job. I don’t like to move away from demons (even to half-demons) but we’ll remedy that soon enough. Pretty much the only useful monkey recruits are our Markatas. They’re good screens for the occasional elephant PD, as well as more common hard-hitters. It’s worth noting that our priests have quite bad leadership, so when lots of fodder is necessary we’ll recruit Bandar commanders from a fort or just Atavi Chieftains from a forest.
In the early-game, we should recruit a few Kala-Mukha commanders for blood hunting, but most won’t have B2. That’s alright, they’re great for one of Lanka’s hidden benefits – reanimation! Your priests can use the action ‘Reanimate’ to bring various kinds of warriors back from the dead. They’re not very good, but they’re cheap and will draw priests’ Banishment if you stick them in front. Leave a Kala-Mukha reanimating Longdeads in each fort (Soulless only appear if there are corpses in the province) and you’ll have plenty of fodder to protect your demons from their only real weakness. The other Kala-Mukhas should be used to lead more PEGs. Meanwhile, site-search with 1-3 Yoginis for some extra Nature gems.
Blood Summons, Then the World
Once you get to level 4 of Blood Magic you can recruit Rakshasa Warriors: a nice addition to the ranks. Asrapas at Blood 3 are okay, but these guys have 1 more MR than your Palankashas, 18 protection with the bless, and 2 more damage (although no shields), for NO upkeep. You can recruit 5-10 per turn with 3+ blood hunting Kala-Mukhas even without Dowsing Rods, because Lanka gets a bonus to blood hunting in Turmoil. At this point in the game you should get one or two Raksharajas: your best recruitable commander, and a pretty decent mage. Use him to help command your large demon armies where it would take a lot of Kala-Mukhas to do the same (but not too large or he won’t be able to bless them all). At first though, he might be most useful for Air site-searching, especially if he has A3. As our armies grow, watch their supply consumption. Now that we have Blood Magic 4, get Construction 4 so that our Raktapatas can forge Dowsing Rods for the Kala-Mukhas and our Yogini can forge Endless Bags of Wine to keep the troops from starving. Most of your demons consume at least 4 supplies, and wastelands will often have fewer than 100 supplies. Give the Bags of Wine to your commanders and multiple PEGs will be fine. Although our demons won’t get diseased and die, the Kala-Mukha warriors and priests will. If you’re leading with a Raksharaja, you only have to worry about the -4 morale hit, which probably doesn’t matter since you won’t be losing many troops.
After we’ve reached Blood 4 and Const. 4, aim for Blood 6, when we can summon Dakinis. These demonesses have Air 3, Blood 3, and Death 1, so make capable blood hunters, air mages, and thugs. They’re also sacred, can bless themselves, and have a version of Blood Vengeance where the enemy takes the damage instead of them (if he fails his MR roll, like normal BV). Without equipping any gear, you can put them in your bigger armies, research a little Evocation, and lay down some air magic. With a Ring of Tamed Lightning they can cast Mistform and spam Shockwave on poor unsuspecting PD. Do be careful if they’re going into close combat in enemy dominions, because they also have Chaos Power. For 50 blood slaves they’re a tad pricey, but you can afford a few if you’ve been hunting for a while. Use them or Raksharajas to search for air sites as much as possible, then if you want, they’re one of the only ways for a nation to get the Robe of the Magi at Construction 6 (+1 to all magic paths). You’ll have to empower the Dakini once in both Air and Blood, and after that you can forge boosters. For later summons we’ll need to empower one in Blood anyway, and empowering in Air lets them forge the Storm Staff or cast Mass Flight for our medium and large armies, which take away a lot of priests’ power over us. With Construction 6 our empowered and boosted Dakini can also forge the Armor of Souls (+5 MR), and our D2 Raksharajas can make Skull Mentors with our extra Death gems (+18 Research).
Our late-game summons bring Lanka from powerhouse to nearly unstoppable. Sandhyabalas are a notable mention…only 3 demons instead of the 5 Rakshasa Warriors, but significantly better, they’re great bodyguards for our generals and give thugs much more breathing room. At Blood 8, in the late-game, we get two ridiculous summons: the Mandeha and the Danavas. The Mandeha, at 133 blood slaves, is our reward for spending so much time on blood magic – an enormous Demon-God whose hatred of the sun turns every battle completely dark. Luckily, your demons are just about the only ones who can see in the dark, other than undead. He’s a great Super Combatant, and D3A3B2 mage with Fear 8. In Turmoil, his Chaos Power 2 and Dark Power 3 give him +9 strength, attack and defense skill, coupled with the -6 attack and defense penalty for any troops without Darkvision (everything but demons, undead, and cave dwellers). In Order 3 he’s a less invincible but still strong +3 relative to non-darkvision troops in comparison to all of their regular stats. Forge a horror helm, give him a small demon posse and watch the enemy’s troops grope around in the dark before getting massacred and fleeing in terror. He’s also Holy 3, so you have another commander with Divine Blessing. His main weakness is fire – find an F1 indy mage somewhere and forge him a ring or a dragon helmet. The cherry on top is the Danava summon, which brings 3 fairly cheap 4-armed demigods who can be Gift of Reason-ed into their own extremely capable Supercombatants. They’re Lanka’s other Chaos Power 2 demon, so try to use them in Turmoil, where their apocalyptic destruction will leave other nations curled into the fetal position.
The bad guys get all the cool stuff.