Dominions 6 Guide to MA Arcoscephale - my troops are garbage and I keep getting rushed

Issue with Arcoscephale: low damage troops

Arcoscephale is commonly presented as a scales nation as they have strong anywhere recruitable mystic mages and high protection hoplites. One issue with the kit that Arco has is that they do not have elite troops. One could think that their hoplites or heart companions could be elites; they are not. Without buffing both hoplites and the sacreds hit for 14 piercing damage. Although the troops do have formation fighter which allows for more hits per square, the damage is too low to overcome high prtection. Arco does have elephants which can trample and work early, although in dom6 ethereal tramplers got nerfed. Trample also does not hit high protection units that hard. Elephants are also expensive and generally volatile in behaviour. In my experience elephants are not a strong bless counter.

Arco has the added benefit of length 4 spears. This implies decent repelling. Although again, repelling is mostly effective against trash. High morale and defence sacreds can win rolls for repel.

A typical scales nation has good recruitable troops which allows one to fight with their roster. Arco does not have good and consistent recruitable elites and in my experience Arco can be rush bait. An awake monster god is an option but these mainly exists for independent land grabs and do not work against player sacreds early. Also monster pretenders are boring and vanilla in my opinion. Arco does perform well against indies as they have low armor and elephants can be used to cheese the them. Early player contact is a problem for Arco and as Dominions is a war game, one should be prepared to fight others.

Overcoming low damage

Two methods exist to hit hard in the early to mid game: you can use some bless or you could use magic. Buffing magic is a decent option. Although again Arco’s roster hits for a maximum of 14. Buffing strength only gives 14+4 damage. This can work against some sacred stacks. A cheesy strength bless can also be used. I present later a research pretender with a +8 strength bless. This can at times overcome the low damage of your sacreds although the low baseline damage does hurt.

A more constant way of dealing damage is by using magic. Lvl3 evos are a decent way to hit high protection and magic immune troops. You should be spamming mages and well scripted mystic evo spam is effective against most sacreds. Soul slaying with thaum5 is also an option, but this feels slow against high MR units. One goal for impossible to kill units -like regen giants or super tanky units- is to spam gifts from heaven. Rushing evo5 also synergizes when you are moving towards mind hunting.

Pretenders for strategy

Slightly strange pretender for research rushes. If we take the idea that our troops are utter garbage and wish to avoid recruiting them then most gold will go towards mages. Getting forts up takes time and in the early game, losing out on scale income does not matter for mage recruitment. With arco, decent expansion is possible with bad scales. This build will suffer late game, but human communion nations should aim for mid game dominance.

I use the pretender as a researcher early as the goal is to survive and not to greed for site searching.

More conservaive scales researcher. Get forts up early and spam mages with your money. Get a point in death to summon ether warriors.

Rushing research

By turn 15 you should have 3 in alteration for body ethereal and 5 evocation for gifts from heaven and other evocations if you rush them. You can take enchantment to buff strength and resistances. Research timing depends on your neighbours and the general bless info you have scouted.

Keep in mind that point buffing even cardaces is really strong on Arco as most of your troops have formation fighter.