DOLZero's Devil Guide

Written by DOLZero, edited by Ninarx

There are 4 main phases that you will go through every time you run Devils:

• Preparation
• Counter Attacking
• Recovery
• Aftermath

Preparation

We will start with the prep.

Here is a list of things you should have before casting CoS:

Requirements

• At least 10 Books of Prophecy, this is vital. You can't pillage people or geld with the Devil Prince, so this is your best bet for recovering pop. I like to make sure I have enough to get 10 successful uses, and it never hurts to run more.

• 1,500,000 mana in your reserve. Your going to need 1,000,000 to cast CoS, 200,000 to recast Black Sabbath (it will go bye bye when your pop hits 0), mana for your defense assignment and enough mana for making an attack run. Having more won't hurt either, but generally I like to have it somewhere around there.

• Mana Crystals are always a good thing to have on hand and may be needed if you misjudge your mana income and expenses. You can never have too many in my opinion.

Additional Information

Population: The number of Devils you get is based on your pop. So if you cast when you are already low on pop, you wont get much out of it. It can help if you use Wine of the Three Whips before hand, to boost up your pop. You lose it so fast that it's not really necessary, but definately wouldn't hurt. You might get an extra attack out of it, so give it a try sometime.

• you can actually fail casting CoS if you dont have enough pop. The Devil Prince will "Ignore" you, and you will still lose the mana and turns.

Units: You need to have an army, and not one that's total crap. Even if you wipe out their topstack, you can still lose more power then they do. Don't worry if you oversummon pop suckers either. You will zero your pop, so a pop spiral won't really matter at this point.

Turns: Make sure that you will have full turns in 24 hours or less. Server: Leave about 35-40 turns left, Blitz will have full turns in less then 17 hours, so you can zero out on that server. You will want to leave some turns if you plan on making your Devils run right after casting.

Bait: Sometimes it helps to generate more counters (like you need any more with black) if you set yourself up to look a little fat, or undersummoned. Not necessary in most situations, but still worth considering.

Counter Attacking

You got all that ready? Good. Now it's time to cast Contract of the Soul. There are two ways of going about counters, either run devils right away, or wait until the end of your 24 hours.

Devil Strat One

Some people like to make their counters right away, and then sit with minimal pop until your devils expire. This is good for 2 things:

• You can donate your geld stash to the Black Market, in hopes to get overbid after you make your run (thus not losing most of your gold).

• And you can counter people who already hit you, and aren't expecting devils.

I don't like to do this for one reason: If you run 6-8 turns of CoS, you will run your pop almost to zero, thus not getting very many devils for defense afterwards.

Devil Strat Two

You can cast CoS and wait until the devils are at the end of their life (I usually run about 23 hours later on Guild, max turns on Blitz) and then counter the people that have randomed or attacked you while you had devils at full strength.

You can still bid on the market to save your geld, but I don't know if you want to run a turn with devils without attacking. That's up to you (I usually don't).

Recovery

Made your counters, killed some heroes, at zero pop, now its time to start the recovery.

I'm sure you have some enemies (hopefully some with low bars) that you can leach pop off of with your Books of Prophecy. If not, go scouting for Non-Description mages that probably won't ever be able to do anything about it. Now you don't need to get 10 successfully, but that will definately get you in a good position to start using your pop as a resource again.

Black Sabbath takes 666 pop, and reduces your pop income. Once you have enough pop (i think its around 100,000) it's time to recast it. That recovery should take about 20 turns, give or take 5.

Aftermath

When your pop is back on track, black sabbath can start helping you with the mana situation. Now to deal with the aftermath (the hard part).

The Devil Prince has a negative impact on your mana (the equivelant of Black Sabbath having a positive effect) and he sticks around for 3 days. How is a black going to survive for 3 days with the bonus from BS being neutralized?

Here is a couple strats I've used:

Mono-Zombies with flight as defense assignment. Not very costly and 500,000+ units is pretty easy to manage. The only opponents you'll need to worry about are reds with all fliers, or greens with big Treants that either get Carpet of Flying or Call Hurricane through your barriers, or when you fail Flight. There are othere stacks that can break this, but those are the most consistant ones.

All fliers, Djinni top, followed up with combinations of Wraith, Vamps, Chims, Wyvern or Sylph (maybe even recruit some Gargoyles). Pegs or Sprites for fodder. It's hard to deal enough damage to this stack, and you can really dish it out.

I'm sure there are more strats you could use. The best way to find them is to play without using Black Sabbath for a while and find something that works for you.

~DOLZero

Seraph's Devils Guide