I've seen a wide range of opinion on how to approach Ind even from good players, it's an interesting nation. I'm inclined to agree they're probably best as scales.
I'm starting to lean towards taking Eriu out for a spin, but I need a lot more practice with them. Also considering Machaka.
The big thing with LA is that magic paths are much lower, forcing a greater reliance on breaking into new paths, forging, and pretender paths. These are all things that TheMeInTeam showed he is pretty good at last game. LA also has tougher indies which makes expansion more difficult. On the flip side, provinces are better so income and blood slaves are higher.
Heh, towards the end of the game I had the 3 elemental queens, a faerie queen, and had one of the fire kings up after everyone went AI in final turns before claiming throne. I made too many dwarven hammers unfortunately, otherwise I could have pushed up earth and had all of earth blood deep well, maelstrom, well of misery, mother oak, and vengeful water going (other than EBDW I did get all the others). I think everyone else took more base dominion candles than me though, I could keep dominion in my own provinces but pushing it was pretty slow.
LA is also the most communion/sabbath heavy age. I thought blood slaves scale with site search probability and thus that offset the higher pop of LA somewhat? Still, LA has a several high end blood nations and several more that start with reasonable access. MA has the least emphasis on blood, and it's true that includes Mictlan. Mictlan has pretty nice native path access though. Breaking into death is easy for them, so it's really just earth and blood missing.
The Germans haven't won any world wars, still no reason to trust them with Panzers!
Yeah, fighting Agartha's troops/summons is a pain even w/o path diversity from them. It performs kind of badly in LA, but in EA and MA it's a top 5 pick and winrate nation. Huge prot + good damage doesn't have a lot of bad matchups, especially not with earth buffs and national summons that just ignore morale, multiple elements, and throw around a damage type Agartha doesn't otherwise have much. I needed multiple level 7 branches to deal with that stuff.
Still, I'd rather see Agartha again than someone using Ermor, Sceleria, or Pangaea at a high level in MA.
