Alzorath's Nether Guide

Introduction

Continuing the guide theme set forth by my red and blue guides, I've decided to get to work on a guide for my native color - Nether (black). I've played black since way back in the Mari Archmage days, and have usually tried to work to make the game more balanced for black mages in general (also to push for black to be made a solid color - not a gimmick with Devils, and now DoS). I haven't reached my goals in their entirety, but black is still an okay color even with its little quirks. This guide is intended for the beginner to intermediate players, I will not cover advanced or esoteric strategies here.

About Nether (Black), it is the color of "The Ends Justify The Means", in other words, power at a cost. This is seen through their massive amounts of undisbandable population eaters, their spells such as Black Sabbath, Contract of the Soul, Blood Ritual, Black Death, and Touch of Necromancy. Black is in concept, supposed to be the second most destructive color, right behind red, although as of late it has taken a much more defensive overall, making it's offense more on the 'mixxed' side much like white. Nether, despite being geared more and more for defense still does have some powerhouses in the offense department, the top 2 of these being Wraith and Horned Demons. Nether, with all of this, makes it a not so newbie friendly color. Population crash is one of the hardest things for players, especially new ones, to overcome becuase population income is based on itself - unlike geld and mana - and black is the most prone to experience population crash (followed by red and blue). I would recommend putting off black until you've tried at least playing red or blue for a reset to adjust you to some population upkeep.

The Basics

In this section, we'll discuss the 3 key aspects of beginning your life after research as a mage of any color: Gaining Land, Keeping Land, and Understanding what the Metagame is. Black tends to only truly shine after around 4k land as of the time this guide is written, so you'll be fighting tooth and nail to get there.

Gaining Land

Gaining land is the first thing every color should do after research, with most colors it's as simple as choosing your main stack, your fodder, attacking a lot, and then defending the night - with black it can get a bit more complicated since all of your good on-color hunting units are undisbandable. Therefore a black must consider both offense and defense with their first runs. The basic setups a black will tend to use are either: DurableHitter+DeepFodder or HeavyHitter+DeepFodder, a black CAN use DurableHitter+DurableFodder or DurableFodder+DurableHitter, but I find them less effective - although I will still cover them. And there is even 1 more strategy - using non-black units, I will cover that as well. Regardless of what strategy you run - you should ALWAYS run Black Sabbath and Shroud of Darkness as black whenever possible (and when you start using non-black units, you'll want concentration too, concentration is a good spell for any color you'll be using off-color units with).

DurableHitter+DeepFodder: Basically you want your strong durable hitter to be followed by as many small stacks of other units as possible, black really only has 2 on-color options for this down low: Vampire or Lich. Lich will usually work better against any target you will find, because Vampires are just subpar this low in the ranks because they simply don't deal out enough damage for the power. With Liches top, you will want to try and find RD reds, UR blacks, or Nix Greens - and you're lucky, all 3 of these use fairly similar spell/item assignments. Against RD or Nix, you want to use Double Time + Head of Medusa on attacks, you'll be relying on the Head of Medusa to tip a moderate hit into a heavy hit winning you the battle, Double Time helps by boosting your Lich Accuracy should it hit them. Against UR you can use Sleep OR Double Time, alongside the Head of Medusa again, for the same effect (although Lich do much better against UR than almost any other of the choices, it still helps to do more damage). For fodder you'll usually want to have stuff like Zombies and Skeletons (since they come for free from Black Sabbath and are disbandable), and throw in some shadows, lizmen, dryads, wisps, DEM, and/or Soul Speakers. If you can get ranged, get ranged, otherwise just get a slew of small units.

DurableHitter+DurableFodder/DurableFodder+DurableHitter: This relies on a similar strategy to the above, except you'll usually just run heavy zombie and maybe heavy skeleton below the Lich, rather than stack deep - personally I prefer deeper fodder with each stack representing a decent segment of my numbers (you'll be losing your fodder fast as black, regardless). Same targets as the previous method. the DurableFodder over DurableHitter method is basically putting zombies over your liches to absorb the blows.

With any of the above durable methods - you will be disbanding the fodder, and switching to a mono-stack of your durablehitter and assigning the appropriate spell/item - in my case I like using Lich - so I'd assign Feet of Hermes (or Lovesick) with Satchel of Mist if I have it available. If you find yourself unable to capture land with any of the methods mentioned here, you may wish to try mono-Lich exploring (which is basically this without the attacks).

Heavy Hitter+Deep Fodder: In this, you'll be looking to your heavier units - Horned Demons and Wraiths are the most common, but in certain situations you can use Unholy Reavers (although I rather not to). Both HD and Wraiths have the nice effect of working both as fodder and hitter in a way (you'll have a decent number of them), and then you just throw junk behind them to shore up the numbers. Both of these (HD/Wraith) are mainly used for hunting Whites and Blues, personally I find Wraiths to work better due to the high frequency of mono-AA and mono-Djinni blues around (with black sabbath wraiths tend to eat both of these alive). Disadvantage of these is defense, you'll have to be offensive on defense to keep your land, or rely on entering damaged VERY quickly, for the offensive defense ditch your fodder, for quick damaged, don't bother unless you feel safer without it.
--- Dealing an offensive defense with Wraiths/HD: Sleep+Candle of Sleeping, Sleep+Ash, Sleep+Bubble Wine, or Double Time with any of those items (honestly I prefer bubble wine - because Ashes and Candles are too expensive to use so low).
--- Quick Damaged with Wraiths/HD: Cast Battle Chant (red enchantment), use Battle Lust (black), and just pray. If you're lucky you'll outdamage and still enter Damaged in 1-2 attacks, if you're unlucky you'll find someone who has a bad stack that kills minimal units of yours while not losing many of their own *Vamps may do this for example*. Just keep trucking if you lose land though, with this stack you should be gaining land fast enough to make up for any losses (if you win 20 out of 30 solid attacks, you'll more than make up for losing 2 hits overnight).
--- HD specific: You can use FLIGHT with HD to make them dangerous on defense, you don't need ash unless you're expecting a slow or web to come after you.
UR are more like liches in that you disband everything and turtle up for defense (Feet of Hermes + Satchel works here as well). UR can't do offensive defense as well because they're ground.

Off-Color Hitting: Black is in a unique position in that it has some good units to use on either side of it - on the blue side there's Djinni and Medusa, and on the Red side there's Efreeti, Chimeras, and Salamanders - at least as far as disbandables go. Some blacks will use these on their attack runs because they're much more flexible than on-color units, for this strategy I recommend you skim through the gaining land sections of my Red or Blue Guides. You will summon these units slower than their original colors, but with the proper preparation you can use these fairly well.

Defending Land

I covered this pretty much in the gaining land section, because it is so much tied to the offense of black early on due to the undisbandables. So instead of repeat that stuff again, I would like to comment on defense using the off-color strategy mentioned at the end of the previous section. Obviously your choices for spells are completely different than that of a red or blue mage - in fact, you have options from both colors. On the offensive end you have Stun, Giant Strength, and Flameblade from red, and from blue you have Lovesick, Feet of Hermes, Sleep, and Flight.

If you used efreeti, I would recommend Lovesick (defensive, use with satchel) or Giant Strength (offensive, use with bubble wine or candle), sleep is an alternative to Giant strength. (Sleep and Giant Strength Recommended - they have a lower failure rate than lovesick)

If you used Chimera, Feet of Hermes would boost defense, but honestly chimera aren't that durable, so you may want to go with Foul Water, Flameblade, or Sleep, and a solid item (I like bubble wine down low). (Sleep and Foul Water Recommended, due to lower failure rate)

If you used Djinni, I would likely push towards Feet of Hermes for its low failure rate, and Satchel of mist or Bubble Wine. This would help them survive fairly well.

Obviously, I can't account for as many possible stacks as you could have, especially when accounting for off-color, but really, if you read closely and understand the basic concepts - you should be able to muster a defense for whatever method you ended up choosing.

The Metagame

The metagame is very weird for black, honestly it can stack and adapt to hit ANY unit in the game much like blue, that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Some ways of hitting with it requires you to summon stuff that's a bit more inefficient than you would sometimes like. Read the descriptions below, and test ALL the units you possibly can - you will find some do amazingly well, in amazingly WIERD situations. Very few units are useless to a black, but most don't have anything but a specialized use for black with the exception of some staple units.

Unit Advice

Work in progress, next update should be mostly/completely finished. (basically saving it so I can take a break)