The Only Guide to Nether You Will Ever Need
Contents
Scope of This Guide
This is a guide to rushing Nether on Blitz and Guild Server. Any other form of playing nether is faggotry and probably involves clicking the geld button like a monkey.
Why play Nether?
The strength of Nether lies in it's efficiency in the land range between 2k-6k. Why is Nether so efficient at these land levels? Black Sabbath. After you have broken 6k land with Nether you're on your own as black sabbath's advantage decreases as your land increases. You can think of playing Nether in the same way one might play Zerg on Star Craft: Lots of cheap crappy units that you can use to probe all enemies and find weak spots. If you're not making twice as many attacks as a Nether mage than you normally would as other colors then you're doing something wrong. Generally with a full set of 200 turns you need to be attacking at least 60 of those turns. Thats 30 attacks. If you can run positive mana you can easily get to 50 attacks per run. Sounds absurd? There are three spells that make this possible which will be discussed shortly. First things first...
Two Starting Options
Rush from Turn 121
There are two ways to rush black. Rushing from the gate and rushing after you have Black Sabbath researched. Either way you should have your mage set up with 10k units at 121 turns taken. There are always going to be free lands available that are more efficient to grab than explore for. As a rule of thumb you should only continue rushing in earnest if you have much more land than the rest of the server. Otherwise you should research Black Sabbath ASAP.
Rush directly after Black Sabbath
In general you will have more success starting your first serious run after having Black Sabbath researched. (Unless your name is Gummy or Bale) In order to plow through your ultimate spells you could consider Donating to the Gods in order to get God's Concentration. High Level concentration from the Gods will drastically reduce your Ultimate Spell's research time.
First Attack Run
Overview
As soon as you have Black Sabbath researched and cast you should be grabbing as much land as possible. Two spells that are indispensable in this endeavor are Blaze and Mental Thrash. Blaze is a mini inferno. Early on in a round it can gain quick land. Mental Thrashis a little more expensive but effective vs Eradication mages. You are going to want to make a shit-ton of attacks so these cheap spells can help your crap army actually gain some land.
Grab Grab Grab!!!
As soon as Black Sabbath or your barracks (depending) have provided your mage with 10,000 units you should begin attacking. Most defenders at this point are going to have next to no troops. Open a ranklist and look for the mages that have the most land in your ranklist. After some practice with this you should be able to find the mages with no troops with some ease. As you attack your net power will rise with the troops gained from Black Sabbath and the forts gained from your successful attacks. As mages with no or little troops begin to be difficult to find you can disband your Skeletons and destroy forts.
Build Order
By now you should have 600+ WS. Build nodes first. Just enough to run positive mana income. 250 should be more than enough. Dump the rest into guilds. Research order tips can be found in the Reseaching Guide for Dummies. You want to finish research with 2,000 guilds so keep that in mind while you decide what buildings to use. After your first land run you should generally only hit targets of opportunity. Sitting up top with 3500-4000 land makes it easy to have 2,000 guilds and finish research first. Most of your turns not spent researching should be used converting your army to a more durable solution.
Your First Defense
When done attacking disband your Skeletons. They are useless. Recruit some Imps while building your new land into guilds. Disband Skeletons along the way leaving only a small percentage at the end of your turns. Keep as many Zombies as mana constraints permit. With all of your newly gained land you might want to put a decent defense up. Summon up some wraiths, preferably enough to make them your top stack. With BS up you should be summoning up wraiths as you max out your mana during research. Never let your research turns go to waste in terms of overall production. Recruit a few fake stacks in VERY small numbers. You should always have ten stacks. Fog/Satchel, Fog/Web something along those lines should work well for you on defense. You could always do the Fog/Bottle of Eversmoking as well and run a few Orc stacks. Remember, its not what you stack but how many. All black units other than Lich and Horned Demon suck in their own way. As long as no reds or greens hit you from directly below you, you should be fine. With any luck some of the guys you banged down will counter you from well below and give you free damaged status. Writing ignorant arrows and being a prick in general can help that process.
Finishing Research
-switching up stacks (lich)(ranged ranged ranged)
-change in attacking tactics
-fireball/mentalthrash/gaze(later on)
So You Think You Might Need Some Barriers?
-when to build barrs
-if youre gonna do it do it all the way. (73%>>>>75%) *bugged*
Springer's Final Thoughts
After you gain those lands running a DoS defense its about the gayest thing you could do. Black was meant to be played with kena. You got Lich and a shit ton of ranged units you can use and then you have one of the best power dealing units in the game: Horned Demons. Don't ass out and run dos, try Stun & Candle or Stun/Carpet or attack uber low and use some mercs like a true S1 fag and run foul water/ash or foul water/carpet to power up and defend. If you're not dealing more damage then your lame. Remember DoS can be neutralized simply by a confuse, and then your whole defense goes right down the crapper.
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